China Social Policy

On the 2 May 2005 in a series of special news reports coinciding with International Labour Day, Focus Point (jiaodian fangtan), China Central Television’s (CCTV) premier investigative news programme, examined the emergence of several new professions. The professions under the spotlight were psychology, social work, and landscape design. The theme that unifies these three professions, still largely restricted to urban areas, is the changing nexus of government and community in contemporary China. Not only has rapid development dramatically changed the physical environment, and thus creating a space for urban landscape engineering, but the fabric and nature of social life has also undergone seismic shifts as the old system of the ‘work unit’ (danwei) gradually dissolves. In the fast paced and intensely competitive world of modern consumer capitalism, psychology and social work have also found their niches.

"In China’s propaganda system, street slogans and billboards have been (and still are) a major way for dominant discourse to reach its audience, especially in those places where television or the Internet are lacking. The preparation of the Olympic Games, Hu’s “Harmonious Society” (和谐社会) and “Eight Glories and Eight Shames” (八荣八耻) campaigns were therefore (and some of them still are) displayed all over the streets of Chinese cities, along with commercial billboards or advertisements, forming a visually “noisy” spectacle. But this visual cacophony is schizophrenic because it allows the existence, for instance, in the very same public space, of advertisements for diamonds and jewellery next to ideological propaganda billboards that condemn luxury. This schizophrenia of Beijing’s street billboards in the pre-olympic era (2006) reveals the ideological paradox of the dominant discourse in contemporary China: the problematic co-existence of consumer society on the one hand, and of “Harmonious Society” on the other hand, all together in the same social space.
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, through a study of the different discourses displayed in the street (political slogans and commercial advertisements), the existence in China of two main discourses, one coming from political power (Hu’s “Harmonious Society”, where tolerance, sacrifice for the community and abnegation are required from everyone), and the other one coming from economic power (consumer society, where individual material fulfilment, wealth and luxury are shown as standards to reach). The intent of this paper is to demonstrate why the simultaneous existence of these two discourses is not in fact a paradox, for it is actually useful to the development of contemporary Chinese society: it publicizes two discourses that maintain and guarantee the production of goods on the one hand, the consumption of goods on the other hand, and therefore social peace. This work studies photos of posters and billboards taken in Beijing in 2006, a few months after the beginning of the “Eight Glories and Eight Shames” campaign."