Book Review: Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular by Franziska Plümmer

Abstract

use state censorship as a selling point on the Western market, and the global entertainment industry capitalizes on the Tiananmen censorship. Chen, however, eschews this crude interpretation and correctly points out that this political-economic critique is reductionist and may play into the hands of the Chinese government. Instead, he deeply reads the narrative structures and cinematic details of the two films and presents a convincing interpretation. The stories in the two films demonstrate a ‘post-revolution-romance’ line of narrative. The state’s crackdown on the movement not only crushed the revolutionary fervour, which was represented in the main characters’ encounters with the Tiananmen movement, but also destroyed the collective bonds and cultural beliefs of this generation. Money and sex cannot save this generation from this doom. In Summer Palace, for example, the prevalent sex scenes in the post-Tiananmen part of the story should not be read as a commercialized use of the ‘sex-and-politics’ trope but as a way to demonstrate the disconnection between the personal and the political and, probably more tragically, devastation of the personal, which was represented in depression, confusion, and suicide. Chapter 4, however, presents a difficult case for admiring readers like me, who would be hard-pressed to figure out how Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City and Hu Fayun’s online novel about SARS are about the memory of the Tiananmen incident. Moreover, some overstatements in the introduction chapter do not dovetail with the subtle analysis in the substantive chapters. For example, ‘Yet my book precisely defies this expectation [cultural products about Tiananmen are marginal and politically sensitive] because censorship entails the mainstream, systemic, constituent, and publicly expressed.’ (p. 13) A careful reader of the book would question the extent to which the very few books and films about Tiananmen are ‘mainstream’ and ‘publicly expressed’. The book discusses only a handful of such cultural products, including two propaganda pieces made by the state, which are also no longer circulated. Only one of them, Ruined City, which, ironically, is not about the Tiananmen incident, was actually a mainstream bestseller. Other than Ruined City, most Chinese citizens in China – particularly those outside intellectual circles – have probably never watched or read any of the books and films. In other words, the book’s emphasis on the productive aspect of censorship should be put in perspective, given that the scale of such generative memory production is rather minimal compared to the overall marginalization of the memory of Tiananmen. Overall, Made in Censorship is an insightful correction of the simplistic view of the Tiananmen memory. It is also one of the rare academic books that is also enjoyable to read. I recommend it to scholars as well as general readers.