STREETLIFE CHINA
By MICHAEL DUTTON
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 320 pages, $ 54.95 (hardcover), $19.95 (paperback)

Jean Ash

In Streetlife China, Michael Dutton shows how social outsiders are trying to find their niche in modern Chinese society and how the urban social order in China created them and is now trying to deal with them. The book is a compilation of translated writings from a wide variety of Chinese academic, government, and newspaper sources. These are grouped in chapters with titles such as "Daily Life in the Work Unit" and "Changing Landscapes, Changing Mentalities," each headed by an introduction by Dutton, who teaches political science at the University of Melbourne.
The book starts with an examination of the consumerism now rampant in China, which extends even to the selling and buying of Mao paraphernalia. Dutton shows how such commercialism has fundamentally altered the public's perception of the Chairman. He devotes a lengthy section to the badges bearing Mao's image that appeared during the Cultural Revolution and are now the hottest craze going. Amusing are interviews with collectors such as 62-year-old Wang Anting, whose "Very Small Museum" in Chengdu features more than 57,000 Mao badges of 17,000 different designs. However, Dutton says, more than consumerism and the recent economic shift from managed to market economy, it is the creation of desire that must be recognized to fully understand China today. In Dutton's words, "It is because desire . . . knows no home, that the market consumes government just as it does the consumer."

The book also explores why Chinese and Western definitions of human rights differ. Dutton cites the television image beamed worldwide in 1989 that forever changed Western perception of China: the man stopping the line of tanks as the Tiananmen Square incident was reaching its climax. "Everything the West had ever abhorred about the Chinese Communist state," says Dutton, "was now summarised in this single image." The crux of the disagreement over human rights is that Western religious tradition stresses an "intense relationship between humans and God" while the "Confucian notion of benevolence is about collective responsibilities, not individual rights." The book's examination of balance and harmony offers an excellent summary of Chinese philosophy.
Getting to the heart of his subject, Dutton examines the Communist-imposed work unit and household registration systems and shows how the mangliu (people who "float" into the cities from the countryside) and liumang (hooligans) don't fit into those systems. Among the most interesting passages are his interviews with two such outsiders. Lu Naihong left farm work in Henan to seek a better life in Beijing. After working in construction, he found his niche as a fruit-and-vegetable peddler and earned enough money to bring his wife and three daughters to the capital. One benefit of his floating status, Lu says, is being able to avoid the fines imposed for exceeding the restricted family size. Another mangliu, Li Ninlong, left home at age sixteen to find work in Beijing as a nanny. She enjoys her new independence and doesn't want to return to her village.
Streetlife China has some flaws. While it is billed as a "contemporary look" at everyday life, its bibliography of ninety-five books, monographs, and articles includes only twelve published after 1993. More timely sources would better reflect the rapid changes that China is undergoing. Furthermore, Dutton has little to say about those Chinese who have "jumped into the sea" of entrepreneurship in the 1990s. He also fails to fully examine the struggles of urbanites to buy their own apartment and pay their own medical bills and their child's tuition as the "iron rice bowl" once provided by the work unit rusts away. Missing, too, is any reference to the massive unemployment generated by the retrenchment or bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises; those thrown out of work comprise a wholly new type of mangliu. On the other hand, the book's illustrations are plentiful and excellent, one particularly interesting example being an acupuncture chart showing Chairman Mao's body with points designated "American imperialism," "Landlord class," and "Study Lei Feng," to give but a few examples.
The pieces included in Streetlife China offer much information not readily available to non-Chinese speakers, and Dutton's introductions are helpful, although the general reader is likely to be put off by his frequent use of social science jargon.

Jean Ash, a former U.S. broadcast journalist who worked for China's broadcast media for two years, is now a freelance writer and escorts tours to China.