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Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai

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Anyone who has spent any time in Shanghai knows that it is a city dripping with sex, from its "Wh*re of the Orient" label filtered down to the frolicking bra ads in the subway, the come-hither looks of Maoming Lu bar girls, and the ubiquitous revealing, form-fitting fashions. Yet for all of Shanghai's sexuality, it is decidedly unsensual due to the determined twinge of commercial opportunity that sours every interaction.

In Shanghai, money is sexy and sex is financial, a phenomenon that dominates James Farrer's intriguingly accurate but densely academic study of the city's recent sexual revolution. The characters and scenarios presented in Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai will be entertainingly familiar to residents of Shanghai or any other major Chinese city. Observers who have paid more than passing attention to sex in the city will be gratified for this rigorous quantification of the subject, but they will also probably be frustrated at the dense and distracting academic dialectic attempts to fit Shanghai into some postmodern deconstructive box.

Farrer combs comprehensively through all strata of Shanghai society, from the "Low Corner" blue-collars and marginalized unemployed to the downtown "little white collars" to the middle-aged "old cabbage leaves." These different classes and generations are dissected along with their respective mating rituals and the venues in which they are executed. There is a heavier focus on young white collar women, understandable given the author's perspective as an American married to one of them and his readership's likely greater exposure to and interest (prurient or otherwise) that group.

Opening Up is a compelling read for its descriptions and dissections, presented in a fondly familiar tone, but its pace slows when it switches into dense, formal "sexuality studies" mode. The dense dialectical discourses of Foucault have little off-campus appeal. Farrer has an annoying fondness for the concept of irony, finding it improbably under every leaf and stone of Shanghai's sexual dialogue. He even describes the novel Shanghai Baby, straitforwardly self-important to the point of farce, as ironic, while the only thing ironic about it is the seriousness with which Western readers treat it.

As such, Opening Up is best read in piecemeal. Start with the last chapter, "Play: Dance and Sex," a hilarious catalogue of Shanghai's various night spots and their respective sexual mores. Then jump to chapter three, "Characters: Big and Small" for an itemization of archetypes and stereotypes, lest you confuse your "KTV misses," "fishing girls" and "golden birds". Chapters four to eight are loosely grouped case studies that make for good leisurely perusing, and the densely theoretical introduction and first two chapters require either skimming or intensive plowing.

With its detailed documentation of Shanghai's sexual and romantic practices, narratives, expectations and limitations, much of which holds true for the rest of urban China, Opening Up is an interesting read for anyone interested in modern China and an indispensable blueprint for foreigners wishing to date Chinese.

As an anthropologist of Asia, I found this book sensitively written with the sort of rich detail that only comes from years of systematic field work, in this case, exclusively in Shanghai. The data is exhaustive and the facts well documented. (Although the footnote style makes references excruciatingly difficult to follow).

The book is also a pleasure to read. Rather than the usual heavy-handed dose of cultural theory with thin ethnographic data, we plunge into an amusing and readable narrative that is a tour through contemporary Shanghai's cultural scene, into poor neighborhoods, flashy discotheques and even back in time to the early 1980s (though arguably not back far enough to when Shanghai was really interesting -- the 1930`s and 40`s)

As a scholar I also found the introduction to the book particularly helpful. It is employs an innovative take on Kenneth Burke`s theory of rhetoric to analyze how popular representations and practices of sexuality are transformed in a complex changing social and economic context of Shanghai.

Farrer is able to bring to life the dynamics and contradictions -- sexual, social and economic -- that these young people face. This is very unusual in academic writing of any kind. I was struck by the way that he saw narratives of sexual play as important devices in the marking out of new moral terrains as the once-secure Chinese political and social landscapes fade away. I also thought the use of rhetoric theory pointed to new and refreshing approaches to the question of agency within the sociology of culture: Farrer clearly shows the struggle that young people in China are facing and how they deploy in innovative ways cultural forms from a wide range of global contexts to bear upon the immediate situation. I personally would have liked to see some more historical tracing of some of these discourses, but that would have been another study.

Read the book itself to find out. It is facinating material and makes a theoretical contribution to the scholarly literature.

I lived in Shanghai as a Chinese-speaking "expat" during most of the time Farrer conducted his research. This book accurately captures how the Chinese and westerners I knew talked about themselves and others during this period. He notably gives equal time to voices from the people of Shanghai that most foreigners never get to know, people who aren't represented in the glossy prosperity featured in international news magazines.

The academic jargon in the introductory chapter and interspersed throughout is distracting for readers unfamiliar with that literature, but in general Farrer wears his theory lightly, making it easy to understand or skip past.

Wei Hui's controversial novel Shanghai Baby should entertain those looking for a fictional treatment of many of the same issues.

Journalist Pam Yatsko's book New Shanghai also touches on these issues as well as the larger political, economic, and social trends over the same period.

I lived in Shanghai as a Chinese-speaking "expat" during most of the time Farrer conducted his research. This book accurately captures how the Chinese and westerners I knew talked about themselves and others during this period. He notably gives equal time to voices from the people of Shanghai that most foreigners never get to know, people who aren't represented in the glossy prosperity featured in international news magazines.

The academic jargon in the introductory chapter and interspersed throughout is distracting for readers unfamiliar with that literature, but in general Farrer wears his theory lightly, making it easy to understand or skip past.

In the late 1960s, when I began my study of Chinese society as a graduate student in anthropology at Cornell, sex was assumed (how else could all those Chinese reproduce themselves) but not analyzed. Travelers tales from predecessors doing fieldwork in Hong Kong or Taiwan prepared us for the existence of rampant prostitution as a fact of Chinese life, but the closest we came to talking about sex as a personal, emotional issue for the Chinese people who became our informants was Arthur Wolf's use of reports of chilliness between Chinese grooms and adopted brides raised as their sisters to argue for Westermarck's thesis that incest taboos reflect the natural aversion to sexual relations of men and women raised as siblings.
Also, in those years, anthropology, too, was focused on what James Farrer calls "the earnest claims of most sociology." The prototypical subjects of our studies were peasants (more rarely shopkeepers or traders) who seemed obsessed with real estate and ancestor worship--or, it was said of the Peoples Republic, socialist ideals. Playful Chinese had no place in the tomes produced by serious social scientists.
Opening the pages of Farrer's _Opening Up: Youth, Sex, Culture, and Market Reform in Shanghai_ is, then, like nothing so much as falling through Alice's looking glass. Here in the tales of the "big moneys," "little country sisters," "white-collar misses," "playboys" wounded in love and women who see themselves as "seeking refuge" or as "romantic survivors," we find Chinese who are not only playful; their play is, like the Balinese cockfight made famous by Clifford Geertz, deep play that illuminates the stresses and strains of coming of age and defining a self in a Chinese city leading the way in the shift from enforced socialist equality to growing inequalities as winners and losers sort themselves out in post-Deng China's market economy. Anyone interested in China today and in how the market-driven logic of globalization and consumerism plays out in the intimate lives of young Chinese should definitely read this book.
Another reason to read the book is to follow the struggles of a scholar who is trying to avoid both the Scylla of grand narratives like those that this reviewer so glibly evokes in the previous paragraph and the Charybis of atheoretical reporting. Farrer is a self-proclaimed qualitative sociologist. The "qualitative" in this label signals not only opposition to the number-crunching characteristic of sociology's quantitative mainstream, but also a commitment to exploring how society takes shape in the intimate (here literally intimate) details of social interaction and, thus, a principled opposition to allowing the stories told by individual human agents to disappear into sweeping theoretical generalizations. As, however, a "sociologist" (the second term remains very much alive), he cannot simply tell the stories. He must find some theoretical framework in which to analyze and present them. The framework he chooses combines elements from the work of two notable literary theorists, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye.
From Burke Farrer borrows three goals: a grammar, a rhetoric, and a dialectic. The elements in the grammar are the most fully spelled out: "an ethnographic account of conventional purposes, socially coded places, socially understood character types, accepted means of action, and conventional acts." Burke's "dramatistic pentad" of scenes, actor, agency, purposes and acts is used to give shape to this account. The rhetoric is less firmly coded, dealing as it does with how individuals manipulate the elements in the pentad to communicate to themselves and to others the significance of their behavior. The dialectic, which aims to account for changes in grammar and rhetoric over time, is where Northrop Frye comes in. Frye's cycle of reactionary comedy, revolutionary tragedy, and ironic commentary provides the terms in which Farrer understands the shifts in private, public and mass media talk about sexual relations that have followed the end of the Maoist experiments and the "opening up" of China to market forces and new ways of conceiving sexual relations in terms of "feelings" and "money," with traditional social duties dropped out of the equation.
What more could we hope for? _Opening Up_ is filled with ethnographic material found nowhere else. Evoking literary theory as an escape from mechanical social "forces" and away to open a space for individual voices is a well-established gesture in interpretive anthropology. Why, then, do I feel discontent?
Partly, it is the discovery of a powerful idea buried on page 260. When Farrer writes, in passing, "that instead of seeing cultural and moral change as a process of rebellion and rupture with traditional ideas (the basic idea of a 'sexual revolution'), what cultural change usually entails is an appropriation of traditional moral terms in which the behavioral referents of these terms are nudged in new directions, while the terms themselves retain their force for legitimation, justification, and explanation," I hear echoes of a point more forcefully argued in the late, great Joseph Levenson's _Confucian China and Its Modern Fate_. When Farrer continues that, "the central terms that survive in any living normative discourse are those that have acquired strong emotional and moral resonance but with sufficient ambiguity to allow this semantic 'nudging' in new directions," I want to see the point more fully argued and developed.
Partly, too, it is how Farrer introduces and uses his sources, both the theorists like Burke and Frye and Chinese individuals whose stories he tells. Both, I feel, appear and disappear too conveniently. Why, for example, were Burke and Frye chosen as models of rhetorical analysis, when recent anthropological literature is filled with new work on the poetics and rhetoric of everyday life? I think, for example, of two recent Victor Turner Prize winnders, Robert Desjarlais' _Shelter Blues_and Carol Mattingly's _Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots_. I want to hear more about the Chinese whose words we hear in fragmented or highly edited form. Their comments are vivid but (perhaps I am just being cynical) a bit too apt to the theoretical points they are used to illustrate. I notice the practice of placing a Romanized Chinese term in parentheses following an English translation as though the translation were unproblematic-see, for example, "feelings (ganqing)." I contrast this way of handling local terminology with, for instance, Jennifer Robertson's sensitive analysis of sexual terminology in _Takarazuka_.
Still, a book that can raise such questions is a very interesting book, indeed. Buy it, read it, respond to it. Let the discussion begin.

How does one get through verbiage such as the following?

"This [the above paragraph] approach to sexual cultural works within a tradition of social construction and symbolic interaction that explains variations in sexual culture in terms of cultural vocabularies, social organization, and social interaction. My approach is agnostic to the popular claims of evolutionary psychology that sexual drives are biologically programmed for mate selection." (page 7)

Mr. Farrer's book could have been easily shortened to one hundred pages had he eliminated the obtuse, sociological jargon. The book's main attraction is the combination of "China" and "sex" in the title. Adding "market reform" didn't hurt.

I have no problem with this book if it were listed as "pop culture." What makes this book questionable is Mr. Farrer's attempt to portray his bar hopping observations as a scholarly work.

Chinese terms in pin yin are sprinkled throughout the book. Yet these terms are simple Chinese words used in everyday conversation. They have no special bearing on the material except to impress the non-Chinese speaker.

There is no analysis of Chinese sexual mores prior to 1949. Mr. Farrer shows an embarrassing ignorance of Chinese sexual sophistication in spite of listing a bibliography of 252 references.

He makes no comparison of the effects fascism/communism and democracy have on the sexual behavior of a society.

Had he studied Spain, Taiwan, and South Korea as they changed from their conservative authoritarian government, he would have noted similar characteristics with Shanghai society.

Mr. Farrer's book gives a superficial description of a country and people who are going through a great social and economic change. However, his methodology of visiting bars, nighclubs, and dance halls to understand this change is ludicrous.

In 1979, I worked in Shanghai, China for two years. I returned ten years ago to live in Beijing. I have seen China before and during its dramatic change. I have also witnessed the social effects of these changes, namely, in the sexual area.

Many of the observations Mr. Farrer makes are well known to Westerners who have resided in China. Mr. Farrer's fascination with his topic is like the young boy who just "discovered" sex.

The reader may find the description of Shanghai's night life and the characters in the book interesting but, I am sure their eyes will glaze over as they read Mr. Farrer's sociological analysis.

This is a fantastic ethnography that breathes life into the stuffy literature on youth sexuality. The fact that it was done in China makes it even more interesting and impressive. Paying respect to the critiques of post-modernists, Farrer nicely places himself within the ethnography as a participant in the field of interaction. Furthermore his view of his data as "stories" through which participants are not revealing the reality of their lives but rather positioning themselves in social space and understanding contemporary China, is a brilliant move that is both fascinating and gets beyond many of the problems of validity in ethnography. Finally, Farrer took his scholarly analysis one step beyond most sociological work insofar as he drove the concepts into the structure of the book and the analysis. They receded into the background, resulting in jargon-free prose that is accessible to non-specialists and students as well as professional sociologists. This is one of those rare books that I will be able to assign to my undergraduates and enjoy myself. I wish more sociologists would produce this type of scholarship.

Writing a review of an academic book on the city you are living in yourself is a bit tricky. The wealth of familiar gossip, anecdotes that could have happened in my life makes Farrer's book in the first place a feast of recognition.
I'm only part of a small part of his book on the opening up of Shanghai, the part of the middle class. But equally enjoyable - and a never before told story - is that about the changes in the working class areas in Shanghai. Most researchers and journalists rather limit themselves to the easy to make stories on the accessible middle class.
Is it the most thorough account of Shanghai's opening up I have seen and a nice mirror of China's opening up in so many other places. An account of a revolution taking place, where 25 percent of the world population has to set benchmarks for themselves: how to deal with their own lives?
It is a tough read for non-academics, even though the subject is juicy enough. But the enthusiastic way the stories are being told, makes the book also interesting for a non-academic Shanghai girl like me.

Maybe it is a strange focus for a book of social studies, not just describing how people talk about themselves, but how they talk about each other. In the end, I think this is the most interesting part of the book, what it tells us about the gossip of Shanghai people. As a person who grew up in Shanghai and left eight years ago, I am drawn to all stories of Shanghai out of nostalgia and curiousity for my old home. So I bought this book in the university book store. What I found is an unusual type of story, written by a foreign, well American, man about sex in Shanghai. Some things he writes are so familiar to me I laughed out loud. Others are not what I remember of Shanghai. I like best the stories these people tell about their friends. I remembered some of the stories in my street, and it made me laugh.

This book is a useful and informative guide to changes in sexuality and youth culture in China. As a Canadian who spent the last two years in Shanghai, I found the book true to experience, although a few details didn't jibe with my own experience... Farrer seems to be a gifted interviewer, talking to a far wider range of people than the usual foreigner comes into contact with. He is also writing about a time earlier than my own more recent experience, which might explain the more conservative views in this book. His descriptions of the nightlife in the mid-1990s are witty and fascinating... I would recommend that the average reader skip the lengthy scholarly introduction, which seems aimed at the cultural studies crowd rather than the general reader.