Stanford University Press Blog

The Social Ramifications of Retail

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics fast approaching, international eyes will be on China and its burgeoning economy more than ever. Some estimate the number of foreign visitors to China at over a million this July, which will most likely generate handsome tourism dollars from lodging, food, and retail shopping. According to an article by Josh Adams in Asia Times, Olympic preparation has seen "Chinese consumers acquiring a taste for Western-style superstores and exclusive, big-name brands" as developers construct more large malls to accommodate the influx of foreign shoppers expected this summer. But China’s economic boom is intensifying more than just retail space. Class differences and income disparities could also be on the rise.

Adams says, "While Prada boutiques and Tissot displays are seemingly de rigueur for many Chinese malls looking to display their stylish credentials, focusing on the wealthy elite may have effectively alienated them from the country's massed ranks of aspiring middle-income families."
   
Social difference in the retail world is an issue that Amy Hanser tackles in her book Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (2008). Hanser, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, utilizes her personal experience working as a salesclerk in various retail stores in the city of Harbin to support this unique exploration of inequality in China.
   
With the goal of understanding how economic and social transformations reshape social relations in urban China, Hanser studies how different retail sites (among them a state-owned department store with working-class clientele, a high-end private department store, and a low-end clothing bazaar) represent various social strands within Harbin society. Hanser details how interactions between salesclerks and shoppers in these retail environments play out ideas of social difference, inequality, and entitlement.
   
Will Beijing's growth in luxury stores (and there are more on the way) exacerbate unequal relations between salesclerks and customers? According to Adams' article, these new mega malls may not survive long enough to make that impact. "10% or 20% of China's malls will realize their true profit potential…these places are just too big and too pricey…As the market becomes increasingly saturated the underperformers will naturally find themselves squeezed out."

Ailing Suharto Draws Attention to Indonesia

With former Indonesian President Suharto in unstable condition after suffering multiple organ failure earlier this month, many wonder if he will pass away without penalization for the war atrocities and financial corruption that ran rampant during his rule of Indonesia from 1967-1998. Some speculate that foreign nations—particularly the U.S.—are hesitant to bring him to justice to avoid tense international relations.

The origins of that hesitation may be found in Bradley R. Simpson’s Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968  (forthcoming March 2008), the first comprehensive history of Indonesia-U.S. relations. Simpson examines how and why the U.S. supported the military regime of General Suharto, a crucial juncture in modern Indonesian history that shaped the country's trajectory and is now reflected in the nation's current tenuous transition into democracy.

Other Stanford University Press titles dig further into modern Indonesian history. Edward Aspinall's Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (2005) chronicles the struggles and success of everyday citizens fighting authoritarianism while M. C. Ricklefs's A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200, Third Edition (2002) looks at the nation's history with a broader perspective.

The fight to control the internet in China

Yahoo agreed yesterday to settle the lawsuit brought against it by a Chinese dissident, Shi Tao, for giving the Chinese government about him that led directly to his imprisonment and torture.  The lawsuit has become a media nightmare for Yahoo, from congressional hearings to a corporate apology to congress to being berated by Congressman Lantos for conducting “inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst.”

 

Technological Empowerment by Yongnian Zheng, a new book from Stanford University Press, examines the ways in which the internet has both facilitated and repressed political dissidence in China. Zheng sees the internet as providing not a medium to bring about a rapid revolution, but a forum that is already encouraging gradual progress toward a more open society, as a facilitator both of communication and of international commerce. While these changes gradually develop, however, individuals like Shi Tao will continue to be jailed for sending emails, and the Chinese government will continue to ask American corporations to help it police its citizens.

From 1984 to 2008

A year before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China’s preparations are already well underway. Earlier this month, a celebration marked the one-year countdown to the Games, and already Beijing has undertaken massive reconstruction efforts, tested the environmental effects of decreasing car traffic within the city, and banned spitting.

While these efforts, and the economic boom accompanying them, will produce comforts and amenities for Olympic athletes and visitors, Stanford University Press author Ross Terrill argues in an August 22, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed that all of this spring cleaning has a sinister side as well: “banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other “troublemakers” who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.”

Terrill compares the Beijing being build for the Olympics to the impossible promises Mao made, such as “mak[ing] the sun and moon change places,” promises he explored in Mao, A Biography. He urges us not to become too complacent about accepting the façade being built, less we forget the “Orwellian impulse to remake the truth” that lies behind it.

Japan vs. Iraq: What we did differently?

Going into the war in Iraq, President Bush invoked the American occupation of Japan after World War II, an occupation that transformed a feudal society into a democratic nation:

America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit -- for their sake, and our own. (September 7, 2003)

Now, historian Takeshi Matsuda presents a vivid description of the American occupation of Japan in Soft Power and its Perils (2007). He explains why the Japanese consented to the changes the American occupation brought, while we have seen the Iraqis become increasingly hostile to an American presence in their country.

One of the primary differences, in his view, is that the United States approached Japan with a genuine interest to understand Japanese culture and to create mutual understanding between the two nations. Matsuda argues that, while the American occupation was certainly geared toward a certain level of cultural imperialism, the US also prepared huge reserve of knowledge about how Japanese and American cultures would interact well before the occupation began:

“In contrast to the current situation in Iraq, the U.S occupation of Japan was a democratic experiment supported by American soft power, as well as hard power…U.S. preparation for the occupation of Japan began immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that is, four years before the actual occupation of the country.” In addition, “intergovernmental agencies in Washington also spent a great deal of effort defining the general objectives of the occupation of Japan and formulating programs need to meet the specific objectives of the United States.”

Matsuda argues for the importance of academics in shaping the perceptions of both countries of one another. Following World War II, there was an explosion of Japanese Studies in the US and American Studies in Japan, the latter often heavily subsidized by the US. According to Matsuda, this facilitated understanding between the two cultures, such that “U.S.-Japan cultural relations flourished and became full blown in later years in ways that few people would have ever dreamed.”