Shanghai Fever: Speculation and spectatorship in the “hot noise” of postsocialist China

Abstract

In China, re’nao or ‘hot noise’ is the experience of being immersed within an active crowd. Traditionally it is associated with festivals, markets, and temples. The participatory and embodied nature of re’nao puts it at odds with the gaze of the alienated, individual spectator, and indeed re’nao has been described by scholars in terms that directly oppose it to the structure of modern spectatorship. How can the medium of film be used to represent or evoke re’nao? Might re’ nao-­related works offer a ground for a critical or historical response to the advent of modern spectatorship? This paper examines the interplay between re’nao and spectatorship as it is dramatized by the mainland Chinese film, Shanghai Fever (股疯, 1994). The film documents the widespread speculation mania that followed the economic reforms and reinstitution of stock trading during the early 1990s, a pivotal moment in the development of postsocialism in China as state and society embraced the unfettered pursuit of private wealth. Serving as a key work of the economic imagination of its day, Shanghai Fever also represents a transformation in the regime of visuality thanks in part to its remediation of a new mass medium: the market ‘itself,’ as manifested in the system of stock price display screens ubiquitously installed across Shanghai and accompanied by the emergence of the new figure of the speculator-spectator. The co-arrival of finance capitalism along with an intensified form of spectatorship in everyday urban life is complicated by the de-stabilizing potential of re’nao, as the immersive social experience of heat and noise expose the irrationalities of the market and its alienating affects. I situate Shanghai Fever within a long tradition relating re’nao to the performativity of marketplaces to reveal the film’s deep ambivalence towards postsocialism. Moving beyond a thematic reading of re’nao’s role in the speculation mania of the early 1990s, I argue that film, by evoking re’nao in order to commodify it as entertainment, subverts the very structure of spectatorship upon which cinema depends. ‘Hot noise’ ultimately proves to be both a powerful form of cinematic attraction and anti-cinematic in its dispensation.

Keywords:

• Spectatorship
• postsocialism
• Shanghai
• speculation
• abstraction
• re’nao

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One attempt to do so is Paize Keulemans’s inspiring analysis of late imperial popular fiction, which takes the novel’s construction of re’nao to be an ‘acoustic spectacle’ in its own right. By ‘spectacle’ he generally means the novel’s capacity to attract an audience (as a hawker might at a stall), though he does directly oppose visuality to the multisensory effect of re’nao amongst the selling points of popular novelistic and lyrical descriptions of a marketplace (2014, 20–21, 28–29, and especially chapter 3).

2 Lau’s character in the film is something of a reprise: he plays a similar role in the Hong Kong television drama exploring corruption and intrigue in the British colonial city, The Greed of Man 大时代.

3 The two companies are Xiaoxiang Film Studio潇湘电影制片厂 and Movie Impact Ltd 藝能电影公司, respectively. Laikwan Pang (2010) considers Shanghai Fever as part of Hong Kong cinema’s decline during the same period, which she partly ascribes to big-budget co-productions between Hong Kong and Chinese companies aimed at mainland market. She also notes that Shanghai Fever was one of the earliest examples of a Chinese film featuring multiple dialects. It is worth adding that not only does the film bring together dialects, but multiple versions of the film were released in mainland China, one mainly in Shanghainese and another in Mandarin dub. Both are accessible on YouTube.

4 ‘Despite the peculiarities of the postsocialist condition, the basic process characterizing Chinese culture and society since the early 1990s—marketization, differentiation, individualization, pluralization—are consistent with a transformation from a unified social system, in which the political, the economic, and the cultural are all intimately intertwined, to a market society in which the economic differentiates itself and in turn drives differentiation and pluralization of many other aspects of society and culture’ (McGrath 2008, 9).

5 Originally titled simply ‘Stock Exchange’ 证券交易所, the piece was later renamed as a ‘sketch’ 交易所速写 and included in a contemporary collection of Mao Dun’s essays, Impressions, Associations, Memories 印象、感想、回忆 (1939). Below, I quote from the original publication, which is unpaginated.

6 German media theorist Joseph Vogl sketches how financial capitalism is itself a sort of ‘becoming-media’ deriving from the 1970s when ‘political decisions, business operations, theoretical implications, mathematical models, and information technologies started to combine into a media system that began to work in the 1980s’ and its implications for understanding modern media and its relationship to time (2012, 73–74). A more comprehensive account of financial media in post-reform China awaits further research. Here my concern is primarily how these historic media are documented and remediated by the film (which is itself part of the becoming-media of the market).

7 On media saturation under Mao, see Andrew Jones’s (2014, 43–60) description of the diffusion of Mao Zedong Thought over a landscape that included phonographs, radio, PA systems, big character posters, and the ‘little red book’ of Mao quotations.

8 The related understanding of ‘noise’ in engineering and information science is also well summarized by Matthew Jordan (2021).

9 The transition from mass political movement to market trend follows the general interpretation of China’s thriving economic sphere of the 1990s as a sublimation of popular political energy following the failure of the democracy movement in 1989. In a representative essay on the politics of mass culture, Dai Jinhua (2002) demonstrates this shift through a reading of the changing meaning of guangchang 广场 from a symbolically charged political space (as in Tian’anmen) to a commercial space (such as a mall or promenade).

10 Another conspicuous absence in the film’s version of the market is the presence of the state, which in China has had—and still enjoys—primacy over market trends.

11 Indeed, Laurence Coderre (2021) has recently made a strong case for continuity across periods through her investigation of how the commodity form spans both, first in the form of the ‘newborn socialist thing’ and again as the fetishized object of capitalism.

12 As Gamble records the reflections of one of her speculator informants, ‘It is necessary to hear the ‘talk of the masses’ to pick up on the renqi … the share market is affected by a ‘climate created by everybody’ and … even factors such as the weather can affect it’ (1997, 189).

13 This process of replacement was, Lam emphasizes, long and nonlinear. In a stunning reading, he identifies Lu Xun’s 1922 ‘Preface’ to Call to Arms as the final moment of transition from dreamscape to theatricality. In the most famous episode within the text, a dreaming Lu Xun suddenly finds himself awakened and in front of an ‘iron house’ in which others (formerly his co-dreamers) sleep on. He is, in other words, now in the position of the spectator: outside of and in front of the dream (Lam 2018, 230–241). It is significant, I think, that this final throe of dreamscape coincides with the rise of the scopic medium of film, which has been observed to simulate the visuality and subjectivity of dreams.

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Anatoly Detwyler

Anatoly Detwyler is an Assistant Professor of Modern China Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research primarily focuses on information cultures and comparative new media in modern and contemporary China.