The policies of economic growth and modernization in the 1980s made it possible to blur certain stratifications and to put an official end to "class struggle". Economic growth demands a certain amount of privatization, free enterprise and an opening to foreign investment. These developments have had as a corollary the erosion of various traditional class markers, the rapid weakening of the work unit as a management and identity structure, and the emergence of a new urban middle class with new values.
Although the "Mao-style" class struggle is no longer the order of the day, another form of struggle is nevertheless taking place on the blurred frontiers of social relations; it is the struggle to obtain a symbolic and material capital which is entirely new on the Chinese market. This struggle is embodied in the jungle of the worlds of business and work but also on the periphery of production activities, on the waste ground of play and leisure which then become symbols of success. [50]
The reduction of the working week by a half day (down to five and a half!) on the 1st of March 1994, and then by another half day on the 1st of May 1995 (the five day week) produced an increase in free time and a mini revolution in leisure habits. The diversification, westernization and computerization of activities offered to the Chinese since the 1980s have really created a "leisure market", allowing the individual to relax "à la carte", but also to make his leisure activity a "symbol of success" and a "status marker" (to use Roger Sue's expressions once again). Therein lies another of the functions of play, which is fundamental in contemporary urban China.
Play activities are full of meaning. But many of them, because of their novelty in the cultural landscape, are not easily classifiable on the scale of "symbolic capital" (billiards, electronic games, disco, golf, etc.). Using the example of photography, Bourdieu has explained how the appropriation of a cultural practice by several different classes is also possible, according to the different meanings conferred on such activities by their practitioners. [51] In the Chinese context, the clientele of various games is itself in the process of being redefined in terms of status, in a society where the social scales and hierarchies are out of focus, and a number of games and new forms of leisure are in the process of being assigned status, if not legitimacy.
Weiqi, as we have seen, is synonymous with beauty, dignity, intelligence, harmony and Chineseness. But the representatives of the elite are not longer its only players, and the game is becoming the vehicle for two kinds of experience: there is the inner pleasure and the communion with tradition of the weiqi professionals, which obviously remains the primary factor in the durability of the game. But we are also witnessing the use of the game as an expression of the symbolic aspirations of new players.
We have observed and filmed, in the annex of the National Weiqi Institute which is set aside for non-professionals, the intense activity of the players at amateur level, who nonetheless have the privilege of gaining access to this temple of weiqi. Their admission to this place is due, according to Liang Weitang, partly to their talent, but above all because of their connections. The existence of these premises, however, bears witness to the "democratization" of weiqi , just as the televised lessons which are now broadcast allow one to think that it acquiring a more popular character. Of course, weiqi remains a game for "intellectuals"; but urban schoolchildren are more and more frequently being taught its rudiments, in private classes under parental pressure. Moreover, we have observed a striking number of private traders playing weiqi in front of their stalls, between sales, despite the fact that the game demands sustained concentration.
The merchant class still suffers from ostracism to some extent, as it has all during history [52]; weiqi remains the expression of the possession of "cultural capital", as golf is the expression of the possession of substantial "economic capital", the former therefore also attracts this rising middle class in search of respectability. Did not Kraus tell us, on the subject of the lute, that other symbol of a noble China:
"Many wealthy Chinese who could not play the 'qin' would hang one on the wall as a badge of status, not unlike later bourgeois displays of elegant but unplayed pianos ".[53]
We should not, therefore, worry too much, as do many Chinese analysts of the new trends in leisure, that these leisure activities are becoming impoverished, that traditions are disappearing, and that pleasures are becoming commercialized. Weiqi, as the calm ambassador of a nonetheless vibrant China, in a double process of democratization and refinement, seems to us likely to go on holding sway for a long time...
50. Roger Sue, " Contribution à une sociologie historique du loisir "("Contribution to a historical sociology of leisure"), in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. XCI, 1991, p. 284. Back to text
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Un art moyen (An Average Art), Paris, Editions de minuit, 1965. Back to text
52. Etienne Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste-Recherches sur l'économie et la société de la Chine traditionnelle (The Celestial Bureaucracy Research On The Economy and Society of Traditional China), Paris, Gallimard, 1968, p. 301. Back to text
53. Richard C. Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China: Middle Class Ambitions and the Struggle Over Western Music, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 20. Back to text
