Gladys Pak Lei Chong

My current project is to turn my recently defended doctoral dissertation "China Rejuvenated?: Governmentality, Subjectivity, and Normativity. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games," into a monograph. This study positions the Beijing Olympics in the context of the Chinese state’s continuous and ceaseless efforts in managing its population and in claiming its superlative achievement, just like the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s or, more recently, the manned space program, the celebration of thethirtieth anniversary of the reform and opening policy, the celebration of thesixtiethanniversary of the PRC, and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, which it claimed to have the highest number of visitors in Expo history. The monograph is unique in its empirical richness and in its interdisciplinary approach as it builds on extensive fieldwork related to the Beijing Olympics between 2007 and 2010 (including 99 interviews with taxi drivers, 24 interviews with Olympic volunteers, 450 hours TV recordings, ample media materials including photos of posters, banners, maps, guidebooks, advertisements, Olympic promotion materials found on internet and photos taken by the author). Yet, the central issues it seeks to address, explore, tackle and problematize are not limited to this mega-event.

In this project, I develop the Foucaultian concept of productive power through examining the ways in which the Chinese government tried to mobilize the population to embrace its Olympic project through deploying various sets of strategies and tactics. I argue that the multifaceted strategies, tactics, and discourses deployed by the Chinese authorities sustain an order of things and values in such a way that drive individuals to commit themselves actively to the goals of the party-state. The book examines how these processes of subjectification are achieved. In other words, it studies the processes under which individuals become self-directed subjects of their own and whereby they internalize state-defined norms/ideals in their belief to embrace the nation’s dream. The ultimate target of these mobilization strategies and tactics is the whole Chinese population; yet, specific strategies had also been deployed on particular groups. The book unfolds this by zooming in onto five specific groups of the population in Beijing: athletes, volunteers, taxi drivers, the Beijing citizens and the larger Chinese population that place-making projects targeted at, and lastly, the Hong Kong population.

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