Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) Read Online Free PDF Page A

society.” Over the course of a lifetime, it becomes harder to maintain a forward-moving life-building project when one’s embodied value is constantly being negated. The body is, therefore, not just an “accumulation strategy” (Harvey 2000) in neoliberal economies, but it is also that which absorbs the contradictions of global capitalism through a mounting debt of stress, a slow attrition of life that Lauren Berlant (2007) refers to as “slow death.” But it also offers the possibility for projects of self-appreciation outside the circuit of commodity value (Feher 2009).
    Making New Spaces, Making New People
    All of the chapters in this volume focus on new kinds of spaces, institutional structures, pedagogies, discourses, and practices engineered to produce new kinds of people. In Chapter One , Hai Ren explores the emergence of the new middle class, which has acquired the status of being an anticipatory sign of China’s emergence as a leading economic power. However, this project is haunted by the specter of social inequality, which has become weightier as the chasm between the haves and have-nots of China’s new economy continues to widen. Ren explores the concrete social space of Beijing’s ethnic theme park as both a technology and a theater of middle-class self-making by detailing the visitors’ complex negotiations of the park as an engineered space designed to produce certain effects. He examines the complexity of these negotiations on witnessing the theft of an umbrella from a souvenir stand under the cover of middle-class respectability as an example of the risk taking that underlies many a middle-class economic success story.
    Hence, Ren proposes the “risk subject” as an analytical fulcrum to open up the question of the root causes of inequality in China today that underlie the new models of success in an entrepreneurial culture. In this respect, the risk subject is one who is able to calculate the costs and benefits of breaking the rules rather than abiding them. The subject who is willing to embrace risk as opportunity can be counterposed to another kind of risk subject, the so-called weaker groups (
ruoshi qunti
) who are rendered vulnerable by these very same transformations. Their structural disadvantage—as rural, impoverished, uneducated—is transformed into a problem of subjective lack of awareness of how to take advantage of the opportunities offered them.
    In Chapter Two , Ching-wen Hsu offers another example of producing new kinds of people by producing new kinds of spaces in the project to update the New Kujiang shopping area in Taiwan’s southern port city of Kaohsiung. This project exemplifies the problem of postindustrial development: How does one transform a prior history as a place of production into a storied place of consumption? New Kujiang participates in the imagineering of Taiwan’s passage to a postindustrial economy through developing the power of the attractions of place. In the case of Taiwan, the off-shoring of industrial jobs has necessitated a revisioning of what development can mean. Taiwan, as one of the East Asian Tigers, was a poster child of state-led developmentalism. However, development, which was once conceived of as the ultimate goal of modernizing states, turns out to be something that, once achieved, is not forever. In the global competition for capital investment, redevelopment becomes not only a reengineering of the built environment but also of the kind of person to inhabit these new spaces, that is, a highly educated, high-earning, consumer citizen. Moreover, this new kind of person is one who is self-enterprising and able to recognize the new, more flexible terms of the labor contract as opportunity rather than risk. The hip-hop artist encountered by Hsu in New Kujiang sees in dance an alternative career track similar to those devised by the youth identified as
freeter
in postrecessionary Japan who seek careers in the creative professions in reaction