Shanghai Journal

This past weekend our friends Paul and Stephanie organized a trip to the Zhoushan islands off the Zhejiang coast (see this nice map).  I’d been there several times in the late ‘90s and have great memories of these early trips.  We used to go regularly by overnight boat from dock No. 16 to the island of Zhujiajian where we stayed in a local farmer’s home close to two long beaches on the southeastern part of the island.  And last fall I took my students to the Buddhist island of Putuoshan, which they all loved.

This time we traveled in style.  On Friday night we caught a 30-minute flight from Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport to the airport on Zhujiajian.  Stephanie booked the Phoenix Island Resort Hotel on the southern side of the big island of Shenjiamen, a five-star hotel located about an hour’s journey by taxi from the airport, including a ferry ride over to the small island where the hotel was located.  The ride over gave us the chance to see the rapid development of the island, which is being built up Shanghai-style with endless rows of identical apartment buildings.  There was even a MacDonalds and a KFC in the biggest town, as well as quite a few supermarkets and department stores.  On either side of the highway running across the island were several industrial parks and many factories, but otherwise the mountainous green island is still beautiful.

It had been cloudy or raining steadily for nearly a month and we were expecting some more of the same, but lo and behold, the skies cleared for the weekend and we could even see stars!  The hotel was impressive and the quality of the rooms and service were high.  There was a nice southern view overlooking the islands, but other than drinking wine and playing cards on the balconies outside our rooms, there wasn’t much to do there, so the following day we took a cab to the beaches of Zhujiajian, which is connected to Shenjiamen by a long bridge.  At first we went to the southernmost beach, which was nearly empty of people.  It was extremely windy on the beach, but we enjoyed the sand and surf anyhow.  

Paul and Stephanie’s son Nathaniel, who is the same age as Sarah, had a great time playing ball with his dad, while Sarah enjoyed digging in the sand.  I took her into the water for a brief spell.  She was scared of the big waves, but she enjoyed playing about in the shallow end of the surf.  This is maybe the closest we can get to the kind of life we enjoyed in Sydney.  

On Sunday, after heading back to Zhujiajian, we caught an early 20-minute ferry ride over to Putuoshan, a sacred Buddhist island whose temples go back about 1000 years. The island and the temples are dedicated to the Boddhisatva Guanyin, known as the “goddess of mercy.”  On the southern tip of the island is an impressively large golden statue of Guanyin looking out over the ocean, which we visited the following morning.  

We toured the Puji Temple, the biggest and most famous of the island’s temples, hiring a tour guide to take us around to the various prayer stations in the temple.  This temple is very specialized.  There are places for children to pray for their parents’ health, for students to pray for good grades, and for working people to pray for successful careers.  Sarah really got into the praying ritual and ended up bai-bai’ing at every station.

But my favorite temple on Putuoshan is the Fayu “law rain” Temple located at the base of the mountain on the northern part of the island.  The stonework, ancient trees, and inclination of this temple against the mountainside make it very unique.  After visiting this temple, you can climb the mountain to visit another temple on the island’s highest peak, but with two 3-year old children and a 65-year old grandma we decided not to do the climb.  Not to mention that it was extremely hot and humid and we were all pretty exhausted by that time.

After visiting the Fayu Temple, we walked down to the coastline and hung out on the “thousand steps beach” (qian bu sha) for a while before heading back to the Putuoshan Hotel.  After dinner, Paul and Stephanie and Nathaniel caught the plane back to Shanghai, but we stayed on til morning.  The Putuoshan hotel was not nearly as nice as the Phoenix Island hotel.  The beds were hard and the rugs were old and stained.  But I had an extremely deep sleep nonetheless.  The following afternoon we took a hydroplane boat back to the city—a four hour trip divided into a 2.5 hour boat ride and 1.5 hour bus ride to the base of Nanpu Bridge. 

Anybody who lives in Shanghai or visits for a while is well advised to take the trip down to these islands.  I’ve also uploaded some more photos from our trip.

Above:  My mother Liz Field and a heritage plaque on Wuding Xi Lu, proving that this was once Kinnear Road. 

This morning we were surprised to find blue skies instead of the usual rain.  My mother and I took advantage of the weather and headed out for a walk.  Our mission was to find the former address of an acquaintance of hers in the Boston area.  Her friend, a 70-something year old man named Rolf Wetzell, grew up in Shanghai.  He left in the late 1940s on the eve of the revolution, and never returned.  He wanted my mother to find his old house, which he said was located at lane 189 on Kinnear Road. 

Through a google search, I determined that Kinnear Road is now Wuding Road, so we headed there.  We started off on the wrong end of the road, but were rewarded with lunch at Mediterraneo, a posh Italian eatery housed in an old mansion built in the 1920s.  After that we walked outside again and were floored by the oppressive heat and humidity--summer has definitely arrived.  As we walked down the street, I shot this photo of an old man teaching his grandson how to get rid of those pesky Nationalists.

We took a cab to the other end of Wuding Road on the corner of Taixing Road, where we found the address.  Well, not quite.  The numbers jumped from 181 to 203, but we figured that the original address was in that block.  It turns out that the lanehouses at that location were all being demolished to make way, one assumes, for a new apartment or office complex.  My mother and I trudged through the rubble of bricks and bric-a-brac searching for her friend's house number 49, but couldn't pinpoint it.  But I did shoot a whole bunch of photos of the neighborhood in mid-demolition, backgrounded by soaring apartment buildings in all directions. 

I suppose we'll have to wait and see if Rolf recognizes the remnants of his boyhood neighborhood.  The apocalyptic scene reminded me of some of Greg Girard's photos contrasting the old destroyed homes against the backdrop of the high-rises of the '90s and '00s, although this was in midday and he usually photographs at night in order to see both the exteriors and the lit-up interiors.  I've posted more of them in my Streets of Shanghai Gallery.

 Above:  One of Greg Girard's many intriguing photos of "old Shanghai" as it disappears from the contemporary urban landscape

As usual, too many events have been piling up in my life and I find myself cramming to post them.  The past two weeks were rather awful both weather- and healthwise.  First, I caught a cold that morphed into a nasty energy-sucking flu complete with a bad case of diarrhea.  At the same time, my back went out on me and for several days I languished on the floor of our new apt, unable to stand or sit properly.  My wife blames this all on too many late nights, and she may have a point.  Nightlife/music research always carries its share of health hazards. 

To top it off, we're smack in the middle of plum rain season.  For the past three weeks, the sun has disappeared and it's been clammy, foggy, and rainy. Only yesterday did the sun finally emerge, giving us a glorious if unseasonably cool day.  But today the sun is hiding once again.  I look out from my 18th floor Zhabei apt window, looking south over Zhabei Park, which since 6:30 am has erupted with the sounds of Chinese folk and pop music and old folks doing their renditions of revolutionary tunes from the Mao era on tinny loudspeakers, and see a forest of concrete buildings enshrouded in fog. Suddenly, another burst of rain explodes from the heavens and only the dim silhouettes of the cityscape can be perceived.

Speaking of the Shanghai cityscape, yesterday I took my mother (who is here for a two-week visit) and Mency to see a documentary film showing at the Glamour Bar on the Bund.  The film, directed and edited by my NYU-in-Shanghai colleague Eric Ransdell, focuses on photographer Greg Girard's effort to capture the changing urban landscape through his project, which led to a book Phantom Shanghai and an international exhibition.  Last year I interviewed Greg for ShanghaiJournal.  I've been an admirer of his work for years, but only yesterday was I able to see him in action as he made his way into the city's neighborhoods and into the private homes of Shanghai's residents to archive a disappearing world.

Ostensibly, a photographer makes for a rather poor subject of a film documentary.  Where is the drama?  Where is the action?  Isn't it only a guy lugging a tripod and camera around and shooting scenes?  Why not make a film about a filmmaker and turn the camera on itself? 

But seriously, despite the lack of high drama, this was a beautiful and accurate depiction both of Greg’s work and of the people and city he was trying to preserve.  The drama, where it exists, comes in the form of Greg’s interactions with Shanghai folks.  First, how does he gain permission to get into enclosed neighborhoods and homes and shoot people’s private lives?  We see several scenes where he’s clearly not welcome, but persists anyhow in his efforts to document fading neighborhoods, and somehow gains the trust and respect of the people he's shooting.

The key is his lovely assistant Emily, a local Shanghainese gal who serves as his interpreter and helps get him through closed doors.  It’s inside the homes of residents that the film really shines.  We not only get voyeuristic glimpses of private lives (though nothing really revealing), but we see Greg interacting with the sensitivity of a seasoned journalist, asking them questions about their lives and their personal histories. 

Once inside people’s homes, a whole private world opens up to the photographer—family stories are told, and private photo books opened to show the inquisitive foreigner.  If there’s any dramatic impact of the film, it’s in scenes such as that where an 88 year old Shanghainese man tells Greg about his life of privilege in the pre-Liberation city, showing him a photograph of the man as a 20 year old fresh from a private ball held in his honor by his family, with over a hundred guests in attendance.  We then see the man dancing in a contemporary Shanghai ballroom with middle-aged women, who are delighted to discover that this man pushing 90 can still foxtrot and rumba with the best of them.  Unfortunately the story ends there, as do the other vignettes that are presented in the film.  But we get the general picture:  this is a city teaming and pulsing with life and with personal stories that are all archived in the physical environment, which is being rapidly torn up to make way for the new city of the future.  As the physical environment is destroyed and recreated, we feel the pangs of loss but we also get a sense of anticipation for a better future.  

After the film was over, I asked the director how he structured it.  This is a pressing concern for me given that I’m now in the phase of scripting and structuring my own doco film on the Chinese rock scene.  Unlike Eric, who edited the film himself, I’m working with my friend Jud Willmont who has offered his production studio and his excellent assistant editor Cai Cong to finish the film.  Having shot and edited my own homemade films in the past, I was curious to find out how Eric went about it.  Judging from his response (and from the content of the film), it was a bit hit or miss, but he seems to have structured it around the storyline of Greg’s “pushing into” the hidden corners of the city, and around his relationship with his assistant Emily.  I found myself wanting to learn more about the girl—how much she was paid, how often she worked with him, and whether their relationship extended beyond professional assistance (were they friends, or more?) as I’m sure others who watched the film did as well.  The one big “teaser” that the film offers is Emily’s family.  We are told towards the beginning of the film that Emily’s mother refuses to let Greg into her home to photograph.  He persists in asking to be let in, but to no avail.  Finally, at the end of the film, she has relented.  The last scene shows him walking into the apartment, and in his narration, which Greg himself scripted, he ends by saying “I don’t know why anyone lets me in.”  We don’t actually get to see the apartment, but I suppose this was a clever way to wrap up the film.

Those who wish to learn more about this film, which has been aired on TV in some European countries and is being distributed by a French company, can go to Eric’s company website.  Personally I give the film two thumbs up and look forward to showing it to my students in the future.

In an effort to cash in on the Olympics, a flurry of books has been published recently on the topic of Beijing. These include several histories of the city, such as Geremie Barme's _The Forbidden City_ and Lillian Li et al, Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City as well as books by Stephen Haw and Jasper Becker, all of which have come out in the past year or so. It seems that everyone is rushing to the publisher to get their Beijing book out before the Olympics hit in an effort to boost sales. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does have the potential pitfall of creating a bunch of hastily written thinkpieces.

I haven’t read any of these books so I’m not qualified to say whether or not this is true of those authors I’ve listed above. However, while perusing the shelves of Garden Books in Shanghai, I did recently bump into Michael Dutton’s book, Beijing Time, which also fits into this category of ‘get the damn thing out in time for the big games’. Published by Harvard in 2008, _Beijing Time _ is a study of the contemporary city with references to both its imperial and Maoist legacy. The book waxes philosophical in places--the title should be a dead giveaway--about what photographer Greg Girard has called the “hard flow of time” through the city. Girard was talking about Shanghai, but the term is equally applicable to the national capital, which has seen many great upheavals over the ages, not least of which are the upcoming Olympics.

I first visited Beijing in 1988, when the city and country were just emerging from the revolutionary days of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. There was only one KFC, bicycles were everywhere, and cars almost non-existent. I lived in Beijing in 1996, when the city’s hedonistic side was beginning to come out, and Sanlitunr was beginning to earn its reputation. I lived there again in 2007, as the city rushed to finish its vast infrastructural preparations for August 8 ‘08, and cars and their exhaust pipes were now literally choking the ring roads. While not an expert in the city’s history, I have taught courses on the subject, and I do feel that my experience in Beijing, some of which has been recorded on this blogsite, qualifies me to make some personal judgments about Dutton’s take on the city.

First, let me tell you about the good things about this book and why you should read it. It’s very engaging and thought-provoking. Dutton is obviously writing for a broad audience, though he does make liberal assumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, and passing references to historical and contemporary Chinese society abound. China experts will find themselves on familiar ground. Those without a background in Chinese history, society, and culture may be lost in places, but probably will be curious to learn more. Dutton’s writing style is full of sardonic wit. He’s not afraid to poke fun at just about anybody and anything, from Mao’s bloated body “rotting” in his mausoleum, to the “con artists” at Panjiayuan or 798 who make a living by exploiting foreigners’ endless fascination with Maoist revolutionary kitsch.

Overall the book does a good job of providing the reader with a feel for the “hard flow of time” through the national capital. We learn how and why the “Ten Great Building Projects” were undertaken in record time during the 1950s, and how Mao succeeded in pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes by completely rebuilding Tiananmen Gate where his portrait famously rests without anyone but the workers who did the job in the know. How thousands of workers kept this secret from the Chinese people for 30 years is anyone’s guess, but Dutton chalks it up to revolutionary fervor and the peoples’ undying love for their fearless helmsman.

In one of the best parts of the book, Dutton takes us on a tour of an old Hutong neighborhood to talk about one of his favorite subjects—local neighborhood security. Dutton was one of the first researchers from abroad to dig deep into this sensitive topic of local policing. Last year one of my Dartmouth student groups researched the topic of policing in Beijing and found that it was extremely difficult to get any information about the subject, and that the local police were unwilling to provide much if any assistance, so even today this is no mean feat.

The rest of the book covers themes of waste and recycling. Dutton takes the reader to Bajiacun, a recycling center where the waste of contemporary capitalist society is continually put to other uses by a team of indigent migrants working round the clock sorting through vast stinking piles of rubbish. He then does the same for Panjiayuan, the famous antique market in the southern part of town, where flashlight-wielding connoisseurs poke through piles of detritus to find nuggets of gold. Most of the things for sale there are fake antiques and Maoist kitsch, but occasionally a real antique is mixed into the pile without the seller knowing, or so goes the urban myth. People will also spend countless hours sifting through discarded books and letters to find precious artifacts, such as rare photographs or letters by famous authors. The power of both of these recycling centers to connect imperial-revolutionary past to capitalist-commercial present and their metaphorical meaning for the city itself are not lost on Dutton, who makes numerous references to Walter Benjamin and his theory of the ragpicker.

Another form of recycling comes in the way of the dakou or “sawgash” CD. In the ‘90s, these reject CDs from the West began pouring into the city and country by the thousands. Selling them on the black market was a great way to make money, and inadvertently introduced Beijingers to music they never would have encountered otherwise. I recall how jazz musicians in Beijing in the mid-90s learned a lot of their music by collecting dakou CDs of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and so forth. The same was true for other styles of music, including rock. Today the dakous are still around if you look hard, but most people prefer to download music from the internet.

Finally, Dutton takes us to 798, once a munitions factory on the eastern edge of town, now a set of galleries featuring the latest Chinese contemporary art. Again, the theme of recycling is apparent here. First there is the re-use of the space, which had fallen into neglect after the Mao years, and eventually found a new purpose as a showcase for art. Second we have the recycling of Maoist iconography into a form of commercial capitalism through the work of Chinese artists. This has been going on since the ‘80s when artists first learned to cut and paste Mao icons onto incongruous backgrounds. The recipe is simple: take a Mao, add a Coke, Pepsi, KFC, or MacDonalds sign in the background, and voila, avant-garde art! Nobody takes this stuff seriously anymore, but it can still be found all over Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere.

Here is one place where I find that the research of Dutton and his Chinese assistants falls short, or as the Chinese like to say, you dai jia qiang. To be sure, 798 is no longer the progressive art studio complex that it was a few years ago; it has upscaled into a posh gallery district with plenty of Western-style cafes and restaurants. But there is a lot more to the scene there than Maoist kitsch, and one can still find representative examples of some of the best art in China and abroad if one knows where to search. The Long March Art Gallery, Contemporary China, and many other galleries do a wonderful job of presenting great Chinese art, most of which has nothing to do with Maoist kitschography. So in this sense I believe that the book mis-represents the art world of 798, and of contemporary China.

I have similar reservations about other parts of the book. In his effort to criticize the capitalist development of the city, Dutton overlooks some of the positive aspects of commercialization. In his chapter on Jiaodaokou, he decries the “disneyfication” of some of the old hutong neighborhoods, mentioning that of Nanluoguxiang, which in recent times has sprouted a number of boutique stores, cafes, and bars out of the original homes. Fair enough, but one should also keep in mind that this sort of commercialization is one of the only ways that these neighborhoods can be preserved. As is made clear in the book and everyone who knows Beijing already understands well, the hutong neighborhoods, which more than any other feature of the city defined everyday life for centuries, are being relentlessly destroyed (chai) to make way for the new high-rises and department stores. If made commercially viable, some of these neighborhoods might be preserved into the unknown future, and that can’t be too bad a thing.

I also found the section on dakou CDs and the punk rock scene very superficial. The dakou phenom is definitely worth mentioning in a paragraph or so, but spending a few pages on it seemed overkill to me, especially since dakou have lost their cache since around 2000 when China discovered mp3s. Dutton spends some time talking about Cui Jian, but mislabels him as a “punk rocker.” Disappointingly, he doesn’t mention any other Beijing band by name. What about Brain Failure, the New Pants, re-TROS, SUBS, or any other of the numerous great bands that have emerged since the late ‘90s?

In his zeal for recycled products (aka dakou), Dutton takes us into the student enclave of Wudaokou, but his description of this area is thoroughly disappointing. I kept expecting to see D22 or Propaganda crop up in the analysis, but it seems the author and his research assistants have no interest in checking out any of the bars and clubs that they so callously dismiss as part of the hipster commercialization of the city, although we are treated to a nauseating round of karaoke in a section that could describe any city or town in East Asia in the past two decades. Moreover, the book claims that Houhai is the big hip nightlife district of the city. Nothing could be further from the truth. Houhai may fool the tourists, but any clubber in the city knows that Chaoyang West Gate and Sanlitunr are the places to be.

This gets back to my original critique, which is that too many people are pumping out fast products in an effort to cash in on the Olympics.  I’m sure we’ll see a similar thing happen with the Shanghai Expo in 2010.  Clearly this book had a deadline and the author rushed to meet it.  Deeper analyses of many of the phenomena covered so cursorily in this book can be found in other books, such as Wu Hung’s masterful and wonderfully candid study of Beijing, which is referenced in Dutton’s book, or Madeleine Yue Dong’s treatment of the theme of recycling in her book on Republican Beijing. There are also plenty of studies on Beijing’s art world, and many good studies of the rock and punk scene though surprisingly little after the 1990s, which may help explain my criticism of Dutton's treatment of this scene.

That said, this book was obviously never meant to be an original work of scholarship, but rather a broad, thoughtful, and approachable sketch of the city for a wide readership. In that respect I think it succeeds, and the author should be commended for getting it out in time for the big games.

 James Farrer is a sociologist at Sophia University in Tokyo.  Author of the book _Opening Up:  Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai_ (Chicago, 2002) he specializes in the study of modern and contemporary sexuality in China and Japan.  For several years, James and I have been collaborating on various projects surrounding nightlife cultures in Shanghai and Tokyo (see my previous blogs on Dr. Sex Life and on our special nightlife issue).  I've been meaning to post an interview with him about his various research projects for a while now.  Finally got round to it.  Here are my questions to James and his responses:

 
Andy: You have made an academic career out of the study of sexuality in China.  How did you first become interested in the topic?
 
James:  I first wrote about sexuality before I even travelled to China, and that was in the US in the context of running an undergraduate student magazine called The Phoenix at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The first sexual subject I focused on then was on gays and lesbians on campus, and the sexual politics of organizing a gay and lesbian association at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Another topic I covered then was interracial dating on campus, which surprisingly was still contraversial for many students then. Twenty years later, I remain committed to both issues: the rights of sexual minorities and the rights of people to form intimate relationships across national and ethnic boundaries. So in some ways I am just continuing to study issues I started out studying in the context of the American South, where I grew up, carrying these concerns to East Asia where they are suprisingly relevant. These include issues of sexual morality and sexual rights, and racial boundaries and sexual rights.
 
Another source of my academic interest in sexuality, also lies before my first experiences in China, and this was a year travelling through Asia before arriving in Taiwan in 1988. In some fairly long stays in predominantly Islamic, countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Bangladesh, I had many conversations with men in which sexual issues came up. I began to see that sexual freedom lies at the very heart of the very ambivalent imagination of the West in these countries. Sexuality thus seems to be a core issue in the cultural wars, not just in the US, but perhaps globally. That being said, my experiences in China, definitely added another focus to my interests, and that is the relationship of sexuality to human rights and personal freedoms, especially for women. When I first arrived in Taiwan, a year after graduating from UNC I saw that young women were breaking free of patriachal restrictions on premarital sexual activity for women. This was a very difficult process in Taiwan, but one I immediately recognized as important. In Shanghai in the 1990s, I think I happened upon a society undergoing one of the most momentous and swift "sexual revolutions" in history, as many types of sexual minorities claimed personal space and sexual freedoms. It was the right place and right time to write about these issues.

Andy:  In your first book _Opening Up_, based on research done in the 1990s, you describe the transformation of attitudes and practices relating to sexuality in contemporary Shanghai.  How have these attitudes and practices continued to change since you published the book?
 
James:  I think that when I wrote the book I was worried about exaggerating the scope of these changes. Now, I think the book probably doesn't do enough to suggest the scope of the changes in sexual culture that I was seeing. Some of the individual cases that I saw as rather extreme back then strike me as rather mainstream now. As Pan Suiming's research shows, Chinese young people really have experienced a sexual revolution in the past 10 years. I think Opening Up is perhaps best read as an ethnographic documentation of that sexual revolution in its early phases. The biggest change since I finished the book is the rise of the internet. This has led to a flourishing of sexual subcultures in China, and the vast increase in the scope of the "sexual public sphere," also enlarging the scope of the kinds of sexual politics that are possible in China.
 

Andy: Your upcoming book project is a study of foreigners in Shanghai.  What's your main thesis and why did you decide to focus on this topic?

James:  My interest in foreigners in Shanghai comes out of my own experience as a westerner living in Shanghai and then in Tokyo. Perhaps in some ways, my interest also relates to my experience of race relations in the American South growing up in that region. My study has been conducted over the past five years and I would say that it is largely completed except for the writing up.  In doing the research I have interviewed over 200 individuals in depth about the experiences of living in Shanghai. Most of my interviewees are long-term foreign residents in the city, with some living in the city as long as 20 years. I examine their ties to the larger Chinese community and the influences they collectively have on the development of Shanghai's cultural geography. I am still working on the book, so my theses may change, but at this point I would emphasize, first, that Shanghai has become an immigrant destination with a large community of long-term foreign settlers, and, two, the development of Shanghai as a global city is shaped very much by the presence and activities of this multinational foreign community.


Andy:  Relating to my question above, how has the presence of foreigners in China affected Chinese attitudes and practices relating to sexuality?
 
James:  It is difficult to quantify, but I believe that foreigners have become a significant element of the changing sexual geography of Shanghai. This is especially evident in the development of Shanghai's nightlife scenes in which sexual interactions with foreign residents and travellers are fairly common. Foreigners used to represent a special kind of sexual liberation or "openness" that Chinese couldn't normally enjoy. Increasingly, I think that they represent just another "sexual flavor" for urban sexual adventurers who already are enjoying a great deal of sexual freedom with other Chinese.

Andy: You've focused mostly on large urban areas (Shanghai, Tokyo) in your research and writing.  Do urban sexual cultures differ from rural ones or are these transformations more broadly occurring across the urban-rural divide?
 
James:  There is an urban-rural divide, but it is probably more a division of social class than simple geography. Men with money in China have the largest numbers of sexual partners, and this is because of the growth of the commercial sex sector throughout the country. This is by no means limited to urban areas, since there are many brothels in rural China. Sexual subcultures like the gay scenes, and the kind of "urban playgirl" scenes common among white-collar women in Beijing or Shanghai, probably remain limited to urban areas, but with the rise of the internet, this divide may be decreasing. Rural gays and adventurous singles in small towns and cities now have access to much the same information that an urban person might have. Even then, a rural gay man is likely to want to immigrate to a city where he can enjoy a community of like-minded people. Sex, after all, remains primarily an activity that people want to engage in a real, rather than purely virtual way. So cities will always remain centers for the enjoyment and expression of alternative sexualities.

Andy: How do attitudes and practices surrounding sexuality differ in China and Japan?  Are there any big differences or are they very similar?
 
James:  Sexual cultures in China and Japan have a very different history. Throughout the period from the Tang dynasty to the end of the Qing, the Chinese state increasingly regulated and restricted sexuality along Confucian lines. By the mid-18th century virtually any penetrative sexual intercourse other than sex with a wife or concubine was illegal. Premarital chastity was a very strong expectation for women. In Japan in contrast, premarital sex was fairly common, including practices of trial-marriage and premarital "night visits." Divorce and remarriage were very common, so that a bride's virginity was not a particularly important expectation for men or for women. With modernization, Japan's legal and social regulations became stricter, but Japan never seems to have bought into the cult of virginity to the extent that Chinese did. Even now, these differences can be noted. Chinese young people still are much more concerned about virginity than are Japanese young people. On the other hand, it seems that Japanese and Chinese urban youth live increasingly parallel lifestyles, with increasingly similar aspirations and institutionalized  life stages. Thus most people begin dating younger, and marry later, leaving a long period of young adulthood for sexual and relationship experimentation. As a university teacher, it's more and more difficult to seee large differences between students from China, Japan, Europe or the US.

Andy:  Speaking of China and Japan, you've published some articles recently concerning Sino-Japanese relations.  Do you think that China and Japan can reconcile their issues relating to the violent history of the first half of the 20th century?  Or are these countries destined to continue to come into conflict in the future over their interpretations of the past?

James: I think recent moves by the Chinese and Japanese governments have put bilateral state-to-state relations on a much stronger and more stable footing.  Beneath this political level, there are also very strong bilateral economic, social and cultural exchanges. Japan, in particular, is an important destination for Chinese students. I hope that both countries can increase these educational, cultural and person-to-person exchanges. I would like to seem more short-term exchanges at the university level, in particular, because they will have a long-term impact on changing minds and getting past the feelings of emnity and mistrust that still exist.
 

Andy:  You and I have both studied and written about nightlife and we've collaborated on research projects and now a book.  We've also gone clubbing together in Shanghai and Tokyo.  In your opinion, which is the better party town? How do the nightlife scenes in these cities differ? How are they similar?
 
James:  For a person new to both Shanghai definitely is more exciting, because it is such an open city. You never get turned down at the door of a Shanghai club, and you usually don't easily feel "too old" or too "foreign" for a given scene. Even if you feel a bit out of place, you generally can find a way of having a good time. Relative to other big cities, like New York or London, Shanghai is not a snobby city, even though many of the Hong Kong club entrepreneurs would like to bring more of that metropolitan snobbery into the scene (with VIP rooms, etc).  Tokyo is more interesting in a purely intellectual and cultural sense. Nighlife is much more specialized or balkanized in Tokyo. There are thousands of tiny nightlife venues, each it's own little world.  Most are clearly defined by subcultural taste, music, age and even nationality. A novice clubber can get to know Shanghai in a year or two, but no one would ever be able to penetrate all the varied and secretive little scenes in Tokyo. On the other hand, it also means you never can get bored with Tokyo's intimate and querky nightlife, and at this point it intrigues me more than the Shanghai scene.