SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Instead of directly confronting the Beijing Olympics, this paper is interested in the broader theatrical conjuncture in which the drama of ‘Olympics’ is put on stage. This conjuncture is tentatively named ‘sociality of losing’. Moving across a story that apparently presents the familiar significance of descendants for the Chinese mind, this essay starts by reading beyond the common anthropological assumption regarding Chinese kinship and proposes that the intimate in the Chinese family is directly linked to this emergent form of capitalist sociality. In order to specify the various forms of this particular kind of sociality, the essay then draws in another story, which enjoyed wide circulation before and during the Beijing Olympics and demonstrates the position of the corporeal body in relation to this sociality. Having demonstrated some of the different forms this sociality of losing has taken, this essay moves on in the second section to an investigation of forms of sovereign power in contemporary China in order to study the ways the Chinese sovereignty, instead of being the producer of this sense of losing, is equally subject to the same paradoxical situation produced by it. In the last section of the essay, I expand my previous investigation of the Chinese sovereignty and move on to a brief study of the emerging changes in the diplomatic strategies of China: the obsessive concern with state security and separatism has prompted the Chinese state to start more formally interfering in the domestic affairs of neighbouring countries and transforming its previously passive diplomatic strategy to a more aggressive one. The sociality of losing and the anxious rush thereby produced therefore goes together with a transformation of the forms of Chinese sovereignty and governance. We may catch a glimpse of the rising Chinese empire by way of this sociality of losing.