July 7th?
Issue 20
Author: Ni-Kun Sister
Links:/question/60542929/answer/180769272
Source: Zhihu
Copyright. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization, and for non-commercial reprints, please cite the source.
A "turf war" over a basketball court at Wangcheng Park in Luoyang, Henan Province, has sparked the Internet. The cause is the netizen "brother basketball 008" public video: in the basketball court to play a few young men and square dancing uncles and mothers had an altercation, and then upgraded to a physical conflict. In the video, a few uncles pushed and held down a basketball boy, one of the uncles in red took the lead and punched the boy.
After the video went viral on the Internet, netizens lashed out at the uncles almost unanimously, with claims of "disrespect for the elderly" and "bad guys getting old" running rampant. The park's management has temporarily closed the basketball court, and there has been no clear ruling on how the space will be allocated.
From 2013 to 2014, I spent most of the year conducting field research on square dancing. The study site also happened to be in a non-provincial capital city in Henan province. At that time, disputes due to square dancing had already occurred from time to time, the more prominent of which was the problem of noise nuisance. And after the Luoyang Basketball Court land dispute incident, many netizens have said that there are similar incidents with square dances seizing space in basketball courts in many places. How do people generally resolve these conflicts? What is the essential reason behind so many space conflicts? Why do square dances continue to create hotspots on the Internet? These questions relate to our "modernized" use of space, and to how we understand the very different historical experiences of different generations up and down the line.
What does the "modernized" use of space obscure?
Caroline Chen, an environmental planner at the University of California, Berkeley, came to Beijing in 2007 to study the culture of square dancing. She summarized five conditions that square dancers look for in an ideal venue: first, a floor that is not easily slippery; second, lighting for dancing at night; third, protection from the sun; fourth, a space that can accommodate 30 to 60 people; and, fifth, a distance from residential or office areas to ensure that it does not affect nearby people who do not dance and do not like the sound.
In reality, however, there are actually very few urban open spaces that can fulfill all of these conditions at the same time. "occupying" street gardens and parking lots near neighborhoods. According to Caroline Chen's research, in Beijing around the time of the Olympics, some of the women who danced under the overpasses voluntarily did not use gongs or hairpins to accompany their music because they were too loud, and they did not go to parks, which were relatively less crowded because they were full of sick people who needed to rest and relax. The team Caroline Chen studied finally chose to dance under an overpass in the middle of downtown.
The other side of the spatial issue is that the needs of citizens for activities like square dancing are often overlooked in urban planning. A designer involved in the design of city squares told me that he was once involved in the design of a small square in a first-tier city. Their team's design thinking is "human-centered", assessing people's needs before designing. During their preliminary research, they observed that there were already many people dancing in the space to be remodeled, but there were no seats for the dancers or the audience to rest. Therefore, their final design took these needs into account. However, when the proposal was made, the design needed a different set of words, such as something that sounded more lofty and in line with Chinese cultural characteristics - such as the circle of heaven, the unity of mankind, and so on. It is clear that the recreational needs of the public seem to have been "difficult" in the planning of urban space.
Today, there is clearly a shortage of sports venues to meet the demand for square dancing, let alone exclusive square dancing venues. This is the reality of the background and the premise that we see the big men and women began to "occupy" the basketball court or badminton court such public **** sports land.
In some recent studies, urban researchers and anthropologists have also generally argued that it is actually the expansion of private space following modernization and urbanization that is eroding the public **** space available to the elderly. In contemporary Chinese cities, the expansion of mega-supermarkets and private real estate is a major cause of the squeeze on public **** space. Economist Lu Zhoulai once pointed out that developers, in order to maximize the density of land use, provide little separation between private homes and public **** space.
In the clash at Luoyang's Wangcheng Park, the basketball boys could have justifiably commented that they wanted to jump in the square. But the problem is that it's hard to find suitable venues for square dancing in our cities -- it just doesn't seem right to dance anywhere. Even if these grandmothers and grandfathers go to the square to dance, they are still considered to be "occupying" the square, rather than using it appropriately. The function of our squares is not one-dimensional, and it is not exclusively for square dancing. What kind of space can be turned into a place for square dancing for the benefit of grandparents? This is still up in the air. In contrast, the spatial attributes of basketball courts are very clear. This has to do with the fact that China's urban design follows the design model of developed Western countries, where soccer fields as well as basketball and tennis courts are considered as sports venues, but few and none have been specifically designed for square dancing.
Sociologists and anthropologists believe that the concepts of "space" and "place" are different because "space" is physical, while "place" is physical. "Place" has social and cultural attributes. When "space" is given a sense of meaning and value through its use by some people, it becomes a "place". The controversy over the use of space for square dancing is actually a dispute over what kind of "place" these "spaces" should be turned into, and for whom they should be used, and involves the judgment of high or low value. People's perceptions of the use of space are consistent with society's perceptions of class, age, and gender, among other factors. In people's subconscious mind, the city should be young, energetic, or quiet and orderly, and the public **** space, which represents the image of the city, should also be modern, internationally compatible, and tasteful.
We do not seem to recognize square dancing as "worthy" of an exclusive site at the socio-cultural level. Perhaps this is because the sport is not "internationalized", "modernized" or "classy" enough? In the comments of this event, many people said, "If you are good at basketball, you can still get into the NBA and the Olympics, but what can you do if you are good at square dancing, so let's give it to the young people." This is an everyday use of the logic of "modernity" in the allocation of space.
Behind the square dance debate: the unresolved intergenerational struggle
In traditional Chinese society, the elderly were once considered privileged, and young people were expected to defer to their authority. Back in the 1990s, Susan Brownell, an American anthropologist (and accomplished athlete) who studied disco performances in Beijing, found that in the sport, older disco dancers were allowed to break a number of behavioral and dress taboos, such as wearing brightly colored clothing and tight pants, which were the product of Confucian traditions, unlike the younger women who young women who have to follow these taboos. By having different attitudes towards the commonplace, the older women actually achieve the suppression of the younger women, who are sacrificed. Much of the public ****controversy against disco in the 1990s also centered precisely around the fact that it challenged traditional morals and norms (Brownell 1995).
There has also been a lot of criticism of the older generation on the internet, for example, psychologist Wu Zhihong's commentary on the issue emphasized that traditional Chinese culture "favors" the elderly over the young, referring to traditional society as a "son killing culture". He mentioned that traditional society is a "culture of killing children", young people are sacrificed, the elderly win. He also criticized many elderly people in China for not understanding boundaries and equality, while the side of the elderly in the square dance dispute in Luoyang was blackmailing them for being old.
But the rapid changes in Chinese society have begun to touch and challenge this tradition of "honoring the old and loving the young". Within the family, the new logic of intergenerational exchange is also deconstructing the authority of the old in traditional Chinese culture. Within the family, filial piety is actually on the decline, as is family care for the elderly as a system. Yan Yunxiang, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, after investigating the village of Xiandiao in Heilongjiang province, argues that the traditional sense of "unconditional filial piety" has been replaced by a new logic of "intergenerational exchange". This has been accompanied by a growing disrespect for the elderly. In the public sphere, young people are now taking control of the discourse, thanks to the better use of media and technology. In several controversial incidents about square dancing, whether it was a few years ago when dancers were pelted with feces in Wuhan or this time when a fight broke out over territory in Luoyang, the Internet has been almost lopsided in its attacks and crusades against the elderly side.
The square dance's topicality lies in the fact that it constantly reflects the latest battle in China's intergenerational struggle, which has to do with different generations' different understandings of social history. How many people are commenting on the issue, rather than spouting off and quoting social events such as the old man touching the porcelain and being blackmailed by the old man?
The bankruptcy of "senior citizen privilege" is accelerating as never before. And it's interesting to note that it's been linked to criticism of square dancing. What's intriguing is that the image of this group as "uncivilized," "selfish" and "backward" is rationalized by the association of square dancing with the Cultural Revolution.
It is important to understand that behind square dancing is a public display of body culture, and its essence is also the production of a visual image that "rationalizes the body". Square dancing is a mixture of traditional Confucian culture, the body culture of the collectivist period, and the logic of the market period. Through dance, people's social and physical experiences are refined and displayed.
Onlookers and commentators associate square dancing with the Cultural Revolution. Square dancing, as it has developed to this day, is inextricably linked to rice-planting performances before and after the founding of the country, the collective square dances that followed, and even disco and disco jitterbug performances in the 1980s and 1990s. At the end of the 1990s, disco-dancing seniors were called the "**** and country generation" because they were born in the '30s and '40s; what about today's square-dancing crowd? They are considered the "Cultural Revolution Generation". To a greater or lesser extent, they have internalized the behaviors of that era, while young and middle-aged people in current society are more influenced by the post-reform and opening-up culture - emphasizing the importance of the right to personal space. This kind of experience due to different, and the different understanding of the public **** space behavior, in fact, have its own rationality, but the middle-aged and elderly generation is easily deducted on the "Cultural Revolution generation", "bad people become old" hat.
Square dancing is a form of dancing that is associated with a past that people don't want to face, and it's a form of dancing that is associated with a past that people don't want to face, and it's a form of dancing that people don't want to face. Therefore, square dancing has always been regarded as unattractive and not representative of a modernized country. Many young people have said that the amazons should return to their private space and should not show their faces in public ****ing occasions. In comments on the Luoyang basketball court incident, young netizens even badgered them to "go to the public ****ing toilet or cemetery to dance".
Because of my research, I have a lot of square-dancing friends on WeChat. After the incident, a few of them commented, "It's not easy for young people nowadays, I'll give it to them." Hopefully, this Luoyang incident is just an extreme case. In the video, the old man in red hit the young man, of course, is not right, but before hitting the young man in the end, whether the young man was rude? Whether or not he also acted aggressively, these are not shown in the video. Is it really unimportant? Or have we selectively blocked it out? For example, Zeng Yu Li's article published in the Surfing Marketplace of Ideas mentions that the disappearance of this information may be precisely because "middle-aged and older people are absent from the Internet, and it is no surprise that they are losing the battle in online public opinion."
The square dance is topical because it continues to reflect the latest changes in China's generational struggle. The "modern" generation represented by young people is becoming more and more dominant, while older people and the history they represent are increasingly forgotten and seen as "backward". One after another, the Internet carnival behind the square dance hotspot has continuously portrayed square dance grandmothers and grandfathers as the other, as "old people gone bad", and many of them have easily demonstrated their ego and brushed off their sense of superiority. But moncler outlet online where exactly do they go to dance? That's the right question, and it's still unanswered.