Although bottom-up political action has a long history within China, only recently has a grassroots movement—one driven by local and often marginalized interests rather than by or within traditional structures of power—cohered around the concept of legal rights. Just as the masses learned to “reinterpret their suffering in terms of class rather than of fate” during the Mao years, they are now learning to cast their grievances in the language of individual rights (Yan 2008: 5). And despite the highly publicized activism around political freedoms in recent years, the enactment of rights and claims in China occurs most often within the realm of the market, where individuals best understand their rights as consumers rather than citizens, or as “consumer-citizens” (Hooper 2005).
While on a flight to Kunming from Beijing in mid-June, I witnessed an expression of this consumer-citizen mentality. Not long after the attendants closed the doors, the pilot announced that we would be delayed. As the plane idled on the runway, a young woman from Beijing (identifiable by her accent) who was sitting in front of me requested a blanket but was told that there were none left. A few minutes later, two passengers a few rows behind me requested blankets from another flight attendant, who nodded and headed to the front of the plane to retrieve them. Overhearing the exchange, the woman in front of me also asked this second attendant for a blanket. This attendant acknowledged her request and continued to the front of the plane. A few moments later, the attendant returned with only two blankets, and gave them to the two women a few rows behind me. She apologized to the woman in front of me, saying that the other two asked first. The woman in front of mean then unleashed a torrent of abuse, launching into a five-minute tirade about her entitlements. Heatedly, she yelled that she had bought a ticket just like the others, which entitles her to the same rights as the others. As a customer, how was she inferior to the others? What right did the attendants have to treat her this way? She had been told there were no more blankets, and yet there were indeed more blankets. She insisted that she had been lied to, that it was a matter of principle. The attendant responded by kneeling to the passenger’s eye level, and accepting her verbal abuse, maintaining a “customer is always right” attitude. She said that she understood, and that she was very sorry. This went on for several more minutes, with the customer refusing to be placated, and the attendant maintaining her apologetic stance. The attendant finally walked away. Another attendant arrived quickly to offer bottled water and a hot towel (and mistakenly gave them to me). Another more senior attendant approached to offer her apologies, while the passenger repeated her earlier complaints. Later, she received her meal tray before anyone else is served.
This incident stood out to me for a couple of reasons. First, it seemed unusual that the attendants were so apologetic—having flown on primarily U.S.-based airlines for the last few years, I had grown used to the (at best) off-handed or (at worst) outright rude treatment from flight attendants. Furthermore, in China, businesses are more likely to insist that they are right and that you, the customer, are wrong, no matter what the circumstances. (Just a few days before, my friend had been yelled at by a restaurant owner because she asked for her money back when her meal failed to show up at our table, even after everyone else was finished eating.) Thus this version of customer service seemed jarringly out of place, even if the company was one of the more reputable domestic airlines in China. And although this type of exchange has long been commonplace in U.S., in China, it really stood out. Second, the customer’s use of the language of entitlement and rights demonstrated the everyday use of these concepts by common people. Both her use of these terms, and the attendants’ acceptance of the validity of her claims, resulted in compensatory action in the form of verbal apologies and preferential treatment for the remainder of the flight.
This embodiment of consumer-citizenship by the passenger reveals some of the interplay between the state and the market, and how the “individual” can now be understood in post-Mao China. In her writing about the sartorial landscape of early revolutionary China, Tina Mai Chen explains that “[o]fficial policies produced the citizen-as-consumer (discursively and materialistically) as a legitimate subject of national history” (2001: 150-51). The socialist state mobilized both production and consumption in the name of patriotism. Today, one performs one’s duty as a citizen when one is a good consumer. And part of being a good consumer means being vigilant against sub-par goods, inadequate services, and corrupt businesspeople. Consumer rights consciousness is now widespread, not just on the part of consumers demanding their rights, but also as an expectation of service for businesses. A supermarket near my apartment in Beijing displayed a poster by each checkout station, requesting that customers “check shopping articles before leaving the cashier, in order to protect your rights [quanyi; literally ‘rights and benefits’].” Thus, unlike the political activists who end up in the headlines, most people in China “are basically asserting rights not vis a vis the state, …but vis a vis the market, with the endorsement and encouragement of the state” (Hooper 2005: 2). Scholars have further posited that citizens’ rights accrued “primarily as socio-economic benefits of China’s [economic] reform agenda” (Keane 2001: 1). Given this causal relationship, it seems that rights are more commonly understood to be tools for defending oneself in the marketplace, rather than as weapons to be used against the state.
Protecting your rights at the supermarket
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Chen, Tina Mai. 2001. “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-formation in Mao’s China.” Fashion Theory 5(2): 143-172.
Hooper, Beverley. 2005. “The Consumer Citizen in Contemporary China.” Working Paper No. 12, Center for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden.
Keane, Michael. 2001. ‘Redefining Chinese Citizenship’, Economy and Society 30, 1: 1-17.
Yan, Hairong. 2008. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press.