Transnational China Project Update

Transnational China Project Expands Research on Changes in Asian Cultures

The Transnational China Project (TCP) is expanding its pioneering research into the ways modern media are shaping Chinese and other Asian cultures. The TCP recently hosted an international workshop exploring the many complex relationships between religious pilgrimage, consumerism and popular culture in East Asia. Its scholars have also traveled abroad to set up organizational ties to universities in China and England in order to study advertising's role in creating new local, national and transnational identities among China's urban populations.

The Transnational China Project is directed by Steven Lewis, senior researcher at the Baker Institute; Benjamin Lee, Rice professor of anthropology; and Richard Smith, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and professor of history at Rice

Religious pilgrimage may yet become a powerful form of economic, political and social association in East Asia. That conclusion emerged from discussions at an international research workshop, "Religious Pilgrimage, Consumerism and Popular Culture in East Asia," hosted by the TCP at the Baker Institute on February 14, 2004. Religious pilgrimage is increasingly influential economically and socially in both real and cyber tourism among Tibetans and non-Asians, according to Rice religious studies scholar Alejandro Chaoul. It has also become a quiet form of protest - with secret "nocturnal pilgrimages" or circumambulations around holy sites in Lhasa by Tibetan officials -- as seen in the research of Columbia University scholar Robbie Barnett.

The easing of travel restrictions among Asian countries has also created pathways for transnational networks of priests, followers and religious organizations. The work of Jing Li of the University of Pennsylvania shows how local government officials and priests of the Dai people in Banna in China's southwest Yunnan Province have worked together to develop a local tourism industry that draws both young Han urbanites from China's cities and visitors from Southeast Asia. UC-Santa Barbara's Mayfair Yang reveals the strategic role television corporations played in establishing pilgrimage ties between "daughter" Matsu Temples in Taiwan and the rebuilt "mother temple" of Matsu in Mainland China's Fujian Province.

But despite the shared religious histories and philosophies of Buddhism and Confucianism among Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, obstacles to transnational religious pilgrimage in East Asia remain. According to the research of Emanuel Pastreich of the University of Illinois - Champaign/Urbana, a powerful rhetoric of nationalism supporting state control over organized religion is shared by these countries. So-called popular religions or "New Religions" are often the target of both state control and privately-owned popular media. Perhaps for this reason, as the research of Steven Lewis of the TCP suggests, the public spaces of many East Asian cities often contain few advertisements for religious organizations and religious pilgrimage, leaving them filled with predominantly consumption-oriented commercial messages.

Religious pilgrimage is also an activity shaped by distinctly national economic and social factors, and the inheritance of unique national cultural historical practices. As the work of Ian Reader of Lancaster University shows, pilgrimage is a significant economic and social activity in Japan, and Japanese frequently travel around Japan and overseas for leisure. But few Japanese engage in transnational religious pilgrimage, preferring instead to follow local pilgrimage routes and religious customs. The work of Sarah Thal, a Rice University historian, reveals the power of history and continuity in religious practice in Japan. She examines the complex and negotiated ways that Japanese temples continue to use their own inherited symbols of spirituality - including protective amulets and the visual portrayals of such spirits as Tengu - to attract pilgrims and tourists in an era of popular media-driven consumption.

TCP researchers, Rice historians and religious studies scholars, and this network of experts from Europe and Asia plan to jointly explore these themes at future workshops and conferences. TCP scholars are also gathering new research partners to explore the role of advertising in shaping new identities in Chinese urban populations.

As China continues to develop a market economy and open up to the global economy, advertisers are making appeals to middle-class lifestyles. What are the values expressed in these appeals? Some lifestyle advertisements tell Chinese to think of themselves as citizens of great cosmopolitan cities, such as Shanghai or Beijing. Others ask consumers to identify with the Chinese nation. Still others appeal to a distinctly unbounded, transnational Chinese middle class. Are these advertisements affecting the way the Chinese identify with each other?

Rice University's Transnational China Project (TCP), with support from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York, is using a combination of surveys of advertising campaigns in Asia's urban spaces and surveys of Chinese consumers to explore the impact of consumerism on this aspect of Chinese culture.

Preliminary results reveal that corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and governments are all targeting young, predominantly female urbanites in Chinese cities, asking them to think of themselves as members of an emerging, transnational Chinese middle class. These results were presented by TCP researchers Lewis and Smith at two international academic conferences. At the international conference, "East Asian Cities?New Cultural & Ideological Formations" in Shanghai in December 2003, TCP scholars discussed comparative research projects with Professor Wang Xiaoming, director of the new Center for Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, and faculty from the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and the Center for Transcultural Studies in Chicago. And at the conference, "Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture," in February 2004 they developed research ties to scholars based at the new Center for Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture at the University of Westminster in London. Both of these meetings allow the Transnational China Project to gather yet more resources to examine the role of popular media in shaping changes in contemporary Chinese culture.

The Transnational China Project examines how the circulation of people, ideas, values, and technologies among Chinese societies affects contemporary Chinese culture. Reports, transcripts, audio files, and extensive image archives from workshops and public lectures can be found on the project's bilingual website, http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~tnchina.

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