Going out in Public in Contemporary China: Exposure, Surveillance, Secrecy

Speakers

Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford

Isabelle Thireau, Professor of Sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Roundtable participants:
Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese language and literature at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University

Carwyn Morris, Assistant Professor of Digital China at Leiden University

Lisa Richaud, Research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies

 

The Lectures

Presenting recent scholarship on public culture in the People’s Republic of China, this workshop attends to various experiences and modes of exposure in contexts where the constraints posed to publicness, even in its minimal form of ‘faceless’ anonymity, are thrown into sharp relief. Juxtaposing stories of ordinary senior citizens, activists, and artists, the speakers will take different perspectives to shed light on scopic (and auditory) regimes in urban China. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork or careful visual analysis, they show how the production of such regimes can hardly be reduced to the action of the state alone, as Chinese citizens anticipate, evade, represent, or contest state surveillance and censorship.

Sketching from Life? Surveillance, Facial Recognition Technologies, and Art Photography in China
Margaret Hillenbrand

Unspeakable, Unsaid, Unseen: Intermediary publics in Tianjin
Isabelle Thireau

Roundtable: Clandestine Publicness, (In)Consequential Disclosure?

This roundtable brings five China scholars in conversation around public secrecy in contemporary China, and how it shapes the ways in which ordinary Chinese citizens inquire into, and expose ‘sensitive’ (mingan) social realities – from predicaments in the affective present to contested historical events.

As the Party-state retains discursive power, be it through the interpretation or silencing of events, how can we track the circulation and forms of the ‘sensitive’? And what do such spaces and representational practices tell us about the experience of ‘going out in public’ in contemporary China? How do people manage the lines between revelation, exposure, or contestation, with what kind of expectations toward the consequentiality of disclosure?

From engagements with family photographs to unofficial poetry, or from everyday small talk to digital activism and the circulation of images online, the participants will discuss how seemingly inconsequential practices contribute to the formation of publics and vernacular epistemologies. These, paradoxically, are at once generative and disruptive of the atmospheres of public secrecy resulting from both state-led dynamics and everyday routines. How might the very forms through which ‘unknown knowns’ circulate inflect the referentiality of the signified?

At the heart of these discussions is an attempt to refine the language which best describes the specific modes of performativity exerted through clandestine public gestures, while asking how forms of dissemination unfolding under-the-radar might reshape our concept of publicness.

 

Programme

13:15-13:30	Welcome and registration
	Opening remarks by Lisa Richaud
13:30-14:15	Margaret Hillenbrand
	Sketching from Life? Surveillance, Facial Recognition Technologies, and Art Photography in China
	Q&A
14:15-15:00	Isabelle Thireau
	Unspeakable, Unsaid, Unseen: Intermediary publics in Tianjin
	Q&A
15:00-15:30	Coffee break
15:30-17:00	Roundtable: Clandestine Publicness,
	(In)Consequential Disclosure? Participants: Maghiel van Crevel, Margaret Hillenbrand, Carwyn Morris, Lisa Richaud, Isabelle Thireau

 

Registration

Everyone is welcome, the workshop is in-person and free of charge, but we kindly ask you to register via the web form on this page.

 

Lecture abstracts and speakers’ bio’s

Sketching from Life? Surveillance, Facial Recognition Technologies, and Art Photography in China
Margaret Hillenbrand

This paper explores the relationship between facial recognition technology and contemporary Chinese visual culture. Its point of departure is a recent biometric algorithm developed by a team of computer scientists based in China, a program capable of generating highly plausible photographic headshots from rough-and-ready freehand sketches of the human face. The ethical pitfalls of a machine learning tool such as this – which has clear utility for law enforcement – are many and deep. The paper maps out this terrain, highlighting the fraught relationship between composite photography and criminology.

My core focus, though, is the close but often hidden relationship between facial recognition technologies and art-making. To explore this submerged linkage, the paper turns to the work of the Chinese photographer Zhang Wei, an artist who has worked extensively with composite images. Zhang’s work holds up an uncanny mirror to the use of such images within the AI realm, and his oeuvre and the algorithm together illuminate the generative interface between surveillance of the face and experimental art photography. Ultimately, these parallels are worthy of attention because they show that many facial recognition technologies are brazen forms of visual media. They are interventions in the domain of policing and control which borrow outrageously from pictorial traditions of portraiture, old and new. This recourse to art, the disdained domain of subjectivity, within the supposedly scientific and impartial field of facial algorithms shakes the latter’s foundational myth: namely, that our identity is genomically predetermined in ways which only the most objective methods can disclose.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, especially cultures of protest and secrecy. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2023).

Unspeakable, Unsaid, Unseen: Intermediary publics in Tianjin
Isabelle Thireau

From 2011 until 2014, the author observed different types of “intermediary publics” in the northern city of Tianjin:  the public gathering held since 1991 at 7pm on Victory Square (勝利廣場) to accomplish physical exercises; Christian assemblies held in the largest church of Tianjin (山西路堂) as in a private apartment; the activities developed by the Team of Volunteers for the Protection of Tianjin Architectural Heritage (天津市建築遺產保護志願著團隊).

The analysis of these contrasting public gatherings reveals the diversity of the potential threats, identified by the participants, to the success of the gathering or the effectiveness of their action. It shows how, as a consequence, these participants prevent given spheres of knowledge or topics to burst into the situation they are embedded in but also how they partition such situation at large and redistribute the relationships between secrecy and invisibility versus disclosure and visibility.

Isabelle Thireau is Professor of Sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Affiliated with the Center for Studies on Modern and Contemporary China (CECMC – CCJ), her interests include the sociology of norms, sense of justice and intermediary publics in China with fieldworks in Guangdong, Anhui, Beijing and Tianjin. Her most recent books are Les Ruses de la démocratie. Protester en Chine contemporaine (with Hua Linshan, Seuil, 2010) ; De proche en proche. Ethnographie des formes d’association en Chine contemporaine (Peter Lang, 2013) ; Des lieux en commun. Une ethnographie des rassemblements publics en Chine, (Éditions des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2020).

Maghiel van Crevel is a Sinologist who works at the interface of literary studies, anthropology, and translation studies at Leiden University. His research focuses on poetry in the People’s Republic of China and draws extensively on ethnographic fieldwork.

Carwyn Morris is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Digital China at Leiden University. Carwyn is a human geographer interested in how digitality impacts the production of territory, modes of resistance, forms of mobility, privacy and secrecy, and the development of wanghong (internet famous) spaces.

Lisa Richaud is currently Research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), where she is preparing a monograph tentatively entitled Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Socialist Performance Culture in Beijing’s Public Parks. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in urban China, her latest publications explore the sociality of public spaces, affective experiences of urban precarity, and the afterlives of Maoist public culture. She is also guest editor of “The Political Work of Negative Affects: A View from Post-Reform China,” a special section of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2021).