Mediated Action and Sexual Risk: Discourses of AIDS and Sexuality in the Peoples Republic of China Rodney Hale

Jones After nearly twenty years of studying the social aspects of HIV transmission and sexual risk behavior, researchers are still unable to answer with much confidence the most fundamental question about AIDS education: what is the relationship between the way HIV/AIDS is constructed in public discourse and the actions people take in their day-to-day lives which either increase or decreases their vulnerability. One reason for this is that most approaches to the issue have concentrated exclusively either on broad social and cultural aspects of the epidemic or on the knowledge, attitudes and behavior of individuals. This dissertation aims to develop a method for examining HIV risk behavior using the theory of Mediated Discourse Analysis. It focuses not just on the ways HIV is socially constructed, nor just on the role of individual cognition in risk behavior, but on the actions people take around the topic of AIDS through appropriating from the various cultural tools made available to them in the socio-cultural context and adapting them to fit particular social situations and particular goals. This theory is developed though an examination of HIV/AIDS discourse in China. The data consists of a corpus of public discourse on HIV/AIDS including newspaper and magazine articles, AIDS education materials produced by government departments and non-governmental organizations, commercial discourse such as advertisements, packages of products like condoms and anti-viral sprays and ointments, and transcripts from radio call-in programs about AIDS and sex, along with field notes from participant observation in two communities of men who have sex with men (MSM), one in Beijing and the other in the southern city of Fuzhou. Mediated Discourse Analysis, it is argued, through its mixing of tools from sociocultural practice theory, educational psychology, Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis and the Ethnography of Communication, can help us to understand how social practices and social identities become technologized around the issue of AIDS, and how individuals within communities appropriate these technologized practices and identities to take action in everyday life. In the context of the sexual transmission of HIV in China, especially among emergent communities of men who have sex with men, Mediated Discourse Analysis reveals how the negotiation of sexual encounters is influenced by practices and identities invented by the dominant Discourses in society, particularly what I refer to as the Discourse of Civilization, with its cultural categories of stability, knowledge, civility, and quality (). At the same time, it shows how individuals and groups which are marginalized by these Discourses find ways to subvert the technologies of control imposed on them, imagining themselves as legitimate cultural citizens and opening up spaces for both collective social action and individual sexual action in ways which, in some respects, amplify their ability to protect themselves against HIV and, in other respects, constrain it.

Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter One AIDS and the Question of Culture

AIDS inscribes itself upon each culture in a different way. Each culture constructs its own particular kind of AIDS as well as its own answers to the disease. (Daniel 1993, quoted in Altman 1995: 104)

1.1 Culture and AIDS

In his book Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality and Culture (1994), Timothy Murphy relates a surprising experience he had when teaching a course on AIDS and Ethics at Beijing Medical University. During a classroom activity in which his Chinese students role-played a committee of hospital administrators formulating a policy for health care workers diagnosed with HIV, Murphy found that the opinions they put forth sounded remarkably familiar. As I listened to the Chinese students, he marvels, I was struck time and time again by their raising of many of the issues that surfaced as concerns during (our own) committee meetings; many of the same recommendations were advanced and many of the same criticisms of those proposals emerged (120). Later in the same course, however, Murphys beliefs about how similar the Chinese are to us are shaken when his students uniformly identify kissing as a route of HIV transmission. My effort to correct the impression that kissing could cause HIV infection was met with skepticism, he recalls.
I even told one physician from a rural province that I myself had kissed people with HIV. Why would you kiss someone with AIDS? he asked, shocked, shaking his head as much in warning as disbelief. I responded that by every account with which I was familiar, kissing had not been demonstrated as a means of HIV infection. Against his exposure to ideas about the transmission of HIV, its links with immorality, 1

and its lethal nature, I dont know that he was convinced. The expectation that HIV is highly communicable may be a cultural perception difficult to extinguish. (123-4, emphasis mine)

My reason for beginning with this example is the way Murphy so naturally frames his experiences with Chinese medical students in terms of culture: his initial surprise that people from such a different culture could hold the same beliefs and values as Americans when it came to such a sensitive issue as HIV infection in health care settings, and his subsequent readiness, when they were found to hold different (i.e. wrong) beliefs and attitudes to attribute them to cultural perceptions. I raise the point not as a criticism of Murphy, but simply as an observation of a reaction which seems typical of academics and lay-people alike when they encounter the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors surrounding HIV/AIDS of groups different from their own. Beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that are just like ours are natural, and those that are different, particularly those that are radically so, must certainly have something to do with culture. Very few people today would argue about the importance of culture in understanding how individuals and societies deal with diseases in general (Ahmand ed. 1993, Donovan 1984, Kelleher and Hiller eds. 1996, Leslie 1980, Phillips and Rathwell eds. 1986) and HIV/AIDS in particular (ten Brummelhuis and Herdt eds.1995, Dearing 1992, Douglas & Calvez, 1990, Feldman ed. 1990, Farmer 1990, Jones 1996a, 1996b, Patton 1990, Treichler 1992b, Watney 1989). Over the years a whole host of aspects of the epidemic from sexual scripts to political speeches have come to be examined under the banner of culture. It has been seen as a factor in vulnerability, as something that can create barriers to HIV prevention (see for example Gomez and Martin 1994), and as something that health educators and policy planners must be sensitive about (see for example Michal-Johnson and Bowen 1992). At the same time, it has also been seen as something to be encouraged, something that can facilitate HIV prevention (see for
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example van Gorder 1995, Watney 1990), as something some groups (for example Western gay men) have and other groups (like IV drug users) do not (Gatter 1993). Some see culture as something that has been transformed by the virus (see for example Herdt 1992), and others (for example Patton 1990, Plummer 1988, Teichler 1992, Erni 1994) see it as the thing that constructed the virus in the first place. While some say attention to culture can help us to better understand the dynamics of HIV transmission, others have claimed that HIV itself, bringing together and embodying as it does fundamental conceptions and taboos regarding the relationship of the individual to society (Weeks 1985), provides a unique window through which the sociological, psychological and discursive workings of a society can be observed (Bateson 1998, Gillman 1988a, b, 1995). A glance through the table of contents of Douglas Feldmans Culture and AIDS (Feldman ed. 1990) reveals culture defined as history (McCombie 1990), ritual (Quam 1990), risk behavior (Feldman 1990), metaphor (Taylor 1990), politics (Farmer 1990), work (Day 1990), race and gender (Worth 1990), language (Leap 1990), newspaper reporting (Nardi 1990), psychology (Lang 1990) and economics (Niehaus 1990). While all of these approaches are illuminating, one cannot help but wonder just where it is we must look to understand the impact of culture on HIV transmission and prevention: just what is it we need to be so sensitive about? 1 Popular portrayals of AIDS and political polemics about it have also made ample use of the notion of culture. In these the effect of culture on HIV transmission seems to depend chiefly on whether or not the culture we are talking about is our own or someone elses. Our

This emphasis on culture, however, is not without its dissenters. There are, for example, those who fear that a focus on culture, particularly when used as an explanation of why particular groups continue to practice risky behavior, has impeded efforts to prevent the spread of the virus and to educate the public about the potential impact of the epidemic on the entire society (Schiller et. al 1994:1337). Others like Bolton (1995) see calls for cultural 3

culture is usually seen as protecting us against infection. Their culture is more often seen as the very reason they get infected in the first place, the underlying theme of all of their risk behaviors. The social construction of HIV/AIDS along cultural, racial and geopolitical lines in political and media discourses has been well documented in both the West (see for example Farmer 1990, Patton 1990, Treichler 1992b, Watney 1989) and the East (see for example Dearing 1992, Jones 1996a, 1996b). The emphasis on culture which pervades both social research and everyday talk about HIV has in part been a reaction to the methodological individualism (Mill 1875, Wertsch 1994, 1995a) that has characterized many HIV research and prevention efforts since the beginning of the epidemic, emanating from a biomedical establishment which tends to reify culture in behaviorist terms (Gatter 1995). In health promotion, the most influential version of this perspective has been the Health Belief Model (Becker ed.1974, Janz and Becker 1984), which understands behavior change as a result of decisions made by individuals based on their beliefs regarding their personal susceptibility to infection, the severity of the threat, the values or benefits associated with avoiding the threat, and the personal and social variables that make behavior change difficult.2 In this approach, culture is seen as extraneous, only important insofar as it operates as a source of knowledge, a stimulus for the formation of beliefs, or an obstacle to behavior change. The domination of this model in HIV research and prevention is seen most clearly in the abundance of knowledge/attitude/ behavior (KAB) surveys which have been conducted, exercises which treat knowledge as something an individual either does or does not possess and behavior as a

sensitivity as problematic, especially when they involve tolerating repressive cultural practices against socially marginalized groups like women and gay men. 2 In actual practice, these variables have not demonstrated a high level of predictive power (Herek and Glunt 1995, Kirscht and Joseph 1989, McCusker et al. 1989). 4

matter of individual choice, downplaying both the importance of the social, political and ideological environment in which learning and behavior occur (Fishbein and Middlestadt 1989, Wellings 1994) and the structural differences between scientific knowledge and the informal, everyday, often irrational ways real people work together to understand the world in real situations (Jones 1997c). Other approaches, like Ajzen and Fishbeins (1980) Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein and Middlestadt 1989), while attempting to more fully take into account cultural norms and the effects communication might have on risk behavior, still see it essentially in terms of a highly rational decision making process which takes place in the mind of the individual. Even theories which focus more on the social realities surrounding risk behavior, like Banduras (1990) Social Learning Theory, which emphasizes the importance of targeted skills-building efforts within particular social, economic and cultural contexts, still fail to adequately portray the complexity of these contexts and to take into account their overlapping and dialogic nature (Mannheim and Tedlock 1995). This preoccupation with individual behavior and cognition also pervades research on sexual behavior, which often reduces things like sexual identity and into sets of observable behaviors. Many studies of sexual behavior and HIV risk, as Clatts (1995: 247) notes, do not go much beyond the focus of who puts what part of their anatomy into what part of a partners anatomy, with or without a condom and on how many occasions, information that has proven to be largely irrelevant to understanding either the nature of sexual relations or how to foster sexual risk-reduction. In the past ten years, however, approaches to AIDS prevention and research which take the individual as their unit of analysis have been roundly criticized (see for example Bloor et al.1992, Brown et al. 1991, Guizzardi et al. 1997, Kendall 1995, Morris et al. 1995, Jones,

Candlin and Yu 2000, Jones, Yu and Candlin 2000, Rofes 1998, Rosenbrock 1995, Wright 1998), and more and more researchers are calling for:
a shift away from an obsession with individual knowledge or attitude scores on questionnaires towards the elucidation of meanings, powers, liabilities and constraints, from simple concepts of illness avoidance towards an acknowledgement of the importance of social representations, and from crude frequencies towards the dynamic processes involved in creating and maintaining identities. (Woodcock and Stenner 1992: 171)

Research into sexual and health related behavior that trades in the individual as a unit of analysis in favor of notions like culture, social identities and social representations, as well as the macro-theories of health communication (Lapinski and Witte 1998) that have developed from it, like the social marketing approach (Kotler and Roberto 1989) and the community empowerment approach (Hess and Stark eds. 1995, Israel et. al 1994), however, are not without their own problems. First of all, many such studies and approaches postulate the existence of cultures or communities as bounded entities, things that people live inside of, rather like districts in a city, and these bounded entities too easily become repositories for theories about cultural constructions or social representations that are portrayed as equally bounded and stable, ignoring the ways cultures and meanings blend and interact with one another and the ways individuals pick and choose among cultures and meanings when taking action. HIV has as little respect for the conceptual borders we construct through the notions of culture and community as it has for the political borders we erect around our nations. Furthermore, in many of these approaches the actions of individuals are explained through their affiliation with a single culture (or sub-culture), ignoring or conveniently bracketing the influence of other cultural groups to which they might belong. No individual

participates in a single culture alone, but instead in a multitude of cultures: national cultures, generational cultures, professional cultures and cultures of gender and sexuality, each providing its own set of cultural products from which to choose (Choi et al. 1995, Sarangi 1995, Scollon and Scollon 1995). The ability of any given individual to protect him or herself against HIV depends not so much on the culture they belong to, but on how they juggle the multiple and sometimes contradictory resources (narratives, ideologies, norms of interaction and semiotic systems) available to them in the multiple cultures and communities in which they participate, and how they use these resources strategically to build situated identity (Erickson in press) in specific situations. Finally, in their enthusiasm to counter the narrowness of methodological individualism, approaches that focus on culture run the risk of emphasiz(ing) sweeping societal responses to risk without taking heed of the individuals who generate those responses (Joffe 1999: 12). These individuals are not slavishly bound to the constraints of their cultures, but rather, as de Certeau (1984) claims, creative consumers who do not just absorb cultural products, but do things with them. When individual agency is reintroduced into socio-cultural theory, we find ourselves faced with a vision of culture which is more like an activity than a thing, something performed rather than possessed (Geertz 1973, Sarangi 1995, Schneider 1976, Street 1993, Turner 1974). The goal of research, given this vision, is to define neither cultures nor individual consciousness, but to focus on the point where the two meet in the social actions people perform in their everyday lives. Perhaps the biggest problem with the notion of culture as it is used in HIV research is that it can mean so many different things to so many different people, both in how they

conceptualize it and in what they want to do with it. In a recent issue of American Anthropologist, Rodseth (1998: 55), observes that:
Culture has been described as an organism, a spirit, a superstructure, a collective consciousness, a tapestry, a system and a text. Yet all of these models have been roundly criticized and some anthropologists have threatened to abandon the concept of culture all together.

While the multiple interpretations of culture that have informed social research on AIDS over the last two decades have given us a rich and varied picture of the complexity of HIV risk behavior, the picture is fragmentary. Each piece of the puzzle does not always relate to and inform the others, and sometimes perspectives seem to be so at odds with one another as to be mutually exclusive. Understandably, the perspective from which we approach the problem of culture tends to be limited to the narrow concerns of whatever field in which we happen to be working, be it politics, language, economics or sexual behavior. While understanding the diversity of ingredients that go into making up what we think of as culture is of utmost importance, treating these ingredients as separate and discrete blinds us to the ways they interact and change as they come together in particular historical moments. HIV is a complex social phenomenon, one which seldom presents itself in neat disciplinary slices (Wertsch 1998). This thesis does not call for an abandonment of the concept of culture in AIDS research and prevention, nor does it seek to belittle the significant contributions to AIDS prevention made by the insightful and practical work of social scientists of both the individualist and sociocultural schools over the past twenty years. It does, however, aim to show that an approach which crosses disciplinary boundaries, one which bridges the gap between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism and endeavors to bring together the social and the subjective elements of human experience (Joffe 1999: 70), will lead to a clearer picture of why people engage in risky practices and what AIDS prevention workers can do to help them

alter those practices. Culture, writes Link and his colleagues (Link et al 1989: 3), has both an objective and a subjective dimensionand the goal of our research should be to capture some sense of the dialectical interplay between these objective and subjective dimensions. The approach I will advance with which to capture this interplay and assess its effect on HIV transmission and prevention is one based on the study of discourse. Unlike many theories of discourse, however, which focus primarily on the texts and meanings that are exchanged by members of a particular community or society, my approach emphasizes the actions and the social identities that are made possible when individuals appropriate multiple texts and multiple meanings into their everyday lives. Through this perspective, cultural constructions of health are not as neat and simple as the theories of articulate experts sometimes make them seem, but rather, constantly changing and historically contingent processes of bricolage (Erickson in press, Hebdige 1979, Whyte 1986) in which individuals select from available meanings and identities to construct responses to particular circumstances. In this approach the important question is not how culture affects HIV transmission, prevention and care, but what people do with their culture(s) when they take action around HIV/AIDS and the extent to which this interplay between culture and what is done with it serves to either facilitate or limit practices such as safer sex and compassionate care for people living with HIV.

1.2 Discourse and AIDS

Central to most socio-cultural approaches to AIDS has been the assertion that AIDS itself is socially constructed through discourse. AIDS, wrote Treichler in the late 80s, is not just a viral epidemic, but an epidemic of discourse, or, as she put it, an epidemic of signification. Until we understand (it) as both a material reality and a linguistic reality, she claimed (1988a: 40), a duality inherent in all linguistic entities but extraordinarily exaggerated and potentially

deadly in the case of AIDS we cannot begin to read the story of this illness accurately or formulate intelligent interventions. AIDS is exemplary among contemporary catastrophes, adds Kostenbaum (1990: 163), in demanding that we examine the disaster itself as a consequence of words. Such claims are far from surprising since AIDS is quite possibly the most talked about medical phenomenon in human history, generating untold reams of health education materials, volumes of scientific and academic research, hours of television and radio commentary and thousands of electronic texts on the Internet. The number of books, essays, pamphlets and articles, Yingling (1997: 37) observes:
the kinds of information, issues and events that occur are so overwhelming in sheer number as to defeat any attempt at comprehensive incorporation by one person; the ever-increasing number of written responses to the history of representation of the disease make it impossible to survey recent literature much less to comprehend the totality of discourse about HIV.

The difficulty of assessing claims about the importance of discourse in understanding the social aspects of HIV transmission, of course, lies in the fact that scholars from different disciplines may define discourse, and its attendant concepts like text and communication, in rather different ways. Academic studies on the discourse of HIV/AIDS can be broadly categorized into two basic types: those that have concentrated on representations of the disease in public discourse and those that have concentrated on how the topic of HIV/AIDS is managed in situated talk. 1.2.1 AIDS in Public Discourse By public discourse I mean texts, spoken, written or multi-modal (Kress 1985, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, Kress ed. 2001), whose audiences are plural rather than singular and whose authors are often institutional or representative of institutions, texts disseminated through print,
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broadcast and electronic media which not only send particular messages about AIDS that are taken up by hearers, readers and viewers, but also provide the discursive environment within which people or groups think and act in relation to the epidemic. Since the tools of public discourse, the means to its production as well as access to its products, are unequally distributed in every society, studies of the public discourse surrounding HIV often focus on issues of power and ideology, ways that representations of the disease and those with it reflect and reinforce broader political agendas which legitimate certain kinds of people and social practices and marginalize others. The meanings of diseases, writes Alcorn (1988: 72), are generated within specific socio-historical contexts. As such, they often reflect the nature of power relations within these settings, be they between the citizens and the state, between nations, between classes or between sexes. By far the most famous treatment of the construction of AIDS in public discourse is Sontags (1988, 1991) AIDS and Its Metaphors. Building on her earlier Illness as Metaphor (1977), Sontag claims that in every age particular diseases become charged with meaning by being metaphorically associated with other spheres of human existence like war, morality, and sexuality. Comparisons of AIDS with the plague, for example, not only invest the syndrome with an air of menace but also join to it past associations of plagues with foreignness and retribution for sins against nature or society, and military metaphors reinforce the image of HIV as a foreign invader and justify aggressive medical and political approaches to the problem. AIDS, like tuberculosis and cancer before it, Sontag argues, has itself become a metaphor for what society at this particular time most fears. Her approach has attracted much interest, and other scholars have applied it to areas as diverse as newspaper reporting (Alcorn 1988, Clatts and Mutchler 1989, Ross 1989), biomedical discourse (Taylor 1990, Treichler 1988a, b), public

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health discourse (Brandt 1998b), and doctors accounts of AIDS patients (Norton et al. 1990), showing how, embedded in the ways we speak of AIDS, are powerful, culturally determined presuppositions about social practices and social identities. To say someone has AIDS, as Clatts and Mutchler (1989: 198) put it,
is to say much more than that person is experiencing the progressive exposure of fragile vital organs to the ravages of common infections. It is to say that he or she is a certain type of person, socially and morally definedthe metaphoric predication of AIDS opens a door to the dark musty cellar of cultural associations of the profane, the defiled, the denied, the unshown, the forbidden, the feared.

While Sontag and others interested in metaphor have successfully argued that certain persistent metaphors of AIDS dominate public discourse in different societies and that the metaphorical construction of the syndrome has had material impact on the way people assess their own vulnerability to HIV and treat those living with it, their approach lends itself to generalization. The mobilization of metaphor in situated social contexts is complex, and while some metaphors might be dominant, they may not always mean the same things. The plague metaphor, for example, as Fairclough (1992a: 197-8) points out, is actually ideologically contradictory: no one is immune from plagues, or AIDS, yet this universality puts at risk the ideologically important construction of AIDS as a disease of the other. Different genres of public discourse might be inclined towards different metaphors, and in situated social interaction metaphors can change as they are appropriated into different situations. Furthermore, despite the privileging (Wertsch 1991) of certain metaphors which advance dominant ideologies, there also exists a host of other also pervasive metaphorical/ideological perspectives which challenge these dominant metaphors: AIDS as a government plot, for example, or AIDS as a message from your higher self.

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What is most problematic about Sontags approach is her conclusion that the distorting nature of metaphor makes it an enemy, that metaphor (rather than those who employ it) constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, our humanity (1991: 178-9) and that the healthiest way of being illis one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking (1991: 3). The problems with this conclusion are first, that given the significance of death and disease and the mystery associated with them, it is unlikely that humans could (or should) abandon metaphor as a tool for talking about them, and second, that even the positivist alternatives to talking about illness which Sontag proposes are themselves deeply steeped in metaphor; biomedical discourse is hardly a neutral way of talking about disease (see below). Other approaches to public discourse of HIV have made similar claims regarding the power of words to fix people with HIV and those vulnerable to it into moral categories. In the field of communications studies, scholars such as Colby and Cook (1992), Albert (1986), Bosher (1992), Lupton (1994) and Dearing (1992) have shown, through traditional methods like content analysis and agenda setting theory how media news coverage of AIDS constructs both the players in the crisis and patterns of public response and conspires to set up discursive boundaries (Jones 1996a) separating the moral from the immoral, the normal from the abnormal and the innocent from the guilty. While most studies of the construction of AIDS in the media have limited themselves to the analysis of texts, some have endeavored to better understand how these texts are used. Fabj and Sobnosky (1993), for example, focus less on content and more on discourse practices (Fairclough 1992a) in their examination of the communication strategies of activist groups such as ACT UP, showing how the success texts have in being read (or heard) depends not just on

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what they say, but also on how different forms of discourse (mass demonstrations, information) and different social languages (the language of the street, the language of the clinic) are appropriated and mixed. Still others have concentrated on the process through which scientific and media texts about AIDS are created in the first place, Reeves (1996), for instance, exploring the rhetorical choices made by doctors and researchers in the preparation of scientific articles, and Tulloch (1992) analyzing how the content of televised AIDS education is the result of negotiations among various production cultures, whose perspectives on AIDS may be very different from one another and from the audience cultures they are trying to reach. A focus on the discursive construction of AIDS in public discourse has similarly influenced the work of medical sociologists (Conrad 1987, 1990, Pollak et al.1992, Gabe ed. 1995) especially those from the social constructionist and postmodernist schools (see for example Barbour and Huby eds. 1998), who have explored, for example, how discourse about AIDS transforms behaviors or conditions with structural, economic or cultural origins into weaknesses or flaws of individuals or groups (thus justifying intervention by more powerful individuals or groups) (Levinson 1998) and how discourse regulates the deployment of the sexual body through the creation of particular social identities and roles (Crawford 1994). Such studies raise a number of important issues relevant to our search for a way to understand the link between culture and individual behavior, most important being the notion that people and institutions use discourse about HIV to advance particular material, social or political goals. There is also the idea that the symbols, slogans, concepts and categories (Bosher 1992) used in public discourse about AIDS are instrumental in determining not just how people think about the disease and perceive those at risk, but also how they think about themselves.

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1.2.2 AIDS and Cultural Studies By far the most prolific analysts of the discourse of HIV and AIDS and its relationship to issues of power, ideology and social identity belong to the field of cultural studies. Influenced by the work of Hall (1973, 1988) and Foucault (1973, 1977, 1980, 1984), cultural critics promote a theory of discourse which regards it as the production of knowledge which serves the disciplinary apparatus of the society (Alcorn 1988, Foucault 1969, 1973, 1977, 1980). Central to this theory of discourse is the concept of intertextuality, the idea that the crucial function of discursive practices is that they determine how and under what circumstances various texts can be appropriated and combined, and that knowledge and power are primarily products of the inter-relationships between texts within discursive practices and the inter-relationships among the discursive formations which they constitute. Any given statement or object of knowledge, therefore, can only really be understood in relation to the network of other statements and objects of knowledge within which it exists; as Foucault (1969: 99) puts it:
There is no free, neutral, independent statement. A statement always belongs to a series or a whole, plays a role among other statements, is part of a network of statementsThere is no statement that does not presuppose others, that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles. If one can speak of a statement as such, it is because a sentence or proposition figures at a definite point, with a specific position, in an enunciative network that extends beyond it.

In the area of HIV/AIDS this approach is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Paula Triechler (1988a, b, 1992a, b), Simon Watney (1988, 1989, 1990, 1993), and Cindy Patton (1990). Treichlers main area of focus is biomedical discourse, the seemingly neutral language which, along with journalistic discourse, acts as societys gatekeeper for knowledge about AIDS.

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The language of medicine, she claims, while purporting to describe the natural world, puts forth a series of unitary identities and essentialist biological and social categories which reinforce conceptual and ideological divisions (us vs. them) in a way which amounts to a kind of semantic imperialism (1988: 197). Cindy Patton, in her influential Inventing AIDS (1990), similarly seeks to reveal how discourse constructs and reinforces systems of power which both inhibit and enable communities to organize around AIDS and determine who is allowed to speak and what is kept from view (1990: 2). Like Treichler, she draws our attention to the values implicit in biomedical discourse, showing how it rests on the same metaphors of self/other, origin/return that structure the myths and stereotypes which make visible institutional patterns of stigmatization and discrimination (5). She also focuses on how discourse on AIDS creates and maintains social identities like expert, volunteer and victim, regulating how people with AIDS are to be regarded, and how they are to regard themselves. Simon Watney (1988, 1989, 1990, 1993) is also concerned with the disciplinary character of knowledge produced about AIDS, particularly as it serves dominant ideologies like nationalism and heterosexual family values. He adds, however, to the Foucaultian model of Treichler and Patton a psychoanalytic dimension, seeing media representations of AIDS and deviance as reflections of psychic formations and underlying operations of the unconscious prevalent in the society. What is at stake here, he writes (1988: 74), is the capacity of particular ideological configurations to activate deep psychic anxieties that run far beneath the tangible divisions of the social formation. From this perspective, the discursive construction of AIDS is a kind of psycho-social drama in which dangerous identities embody societys fears of death, contamination, unregulated sexuality and the cultural Other.

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Exploring the theoretical terrain staked out by these three, a host of other cultural critics have also taken up the question of how social constructions of AIDS are supposed to work to guide our view of material reality (see for example Gover 1990, Waldby 1996, Weeks 1985, 1991, Yingling 1997). Some, like Redman (1991: 22) expand on psychoanalytic theories of identity, claiming that representations of HIV play on fundamentally unstable relationships between self and Other, a simultaneous fear and desire, not unlike images in horror films. Similarly, Williamson (1989), in his analysis of HIV and the psychic formations organized around it, argues that cultural representations of HIV embody a psychic split so that HIV is at once full of meaning and meaningless. Still others have focused on AIDS as a site contestation between competing discourses (Lee 1992) within societies. Plummer (1988), for instance, sees AIDS as lodged within a contradictory discourse (24), made up of two contrasting rhetorical models: a medical model (which focuses on the body as the sight of control and takes a scientific, clinical view of AIDS) and a moral (stigma) model (which focuses on behavior and proposes social practices to combat it), and Erni (1994), in his study of medical and media discourses on curing AIDS, sees them as transforming the body into an object of social control through the careful manipulation of a series of contradictory discourses: possibility/ impossibility, curability/incurability, and knowledge/ignorance. What particularly distinguishes this group of scholars is their view of scholarship itself as an essentially political project whose aim is to disrupt and renegotiate the powerful cultural narrative surrounding AIDS (Treichler 1988a: 66). To accomplish this, writes Treichler (1988a: 68), we need an epidemiology of signification, a comprehensive mapping and analysis of these multiple meanings to form the basis for an official definition that will in turn constitute the

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policies, rules, regulations and practices that will govern our behaviour for some time to comewhat AIDS signifies must be democratically determined. The perspective taken by scholars of cultural studies has much to offer in helping us understand the reach and the workings of public discourse of HIV and AIDS. It reminds us of the essential polyvocality (Uspensky 1973) of discourse about AIDS, how the topic, in Treichlers (1988a: 42) words, forms a nexus where multiple meanings, stories and discourses intersect and overlap, reinforce and subvert one another. It also reminds us that these different stories and discourses exist in dialogic and sometimes oppositional relationships. Medical meanings compete with moral meanings (Goldstein 1991, Lupton 1994, Plummer 1988), epidemiology and immunology compete with virology (Oppenheimer 1988), and civil liberties discourses compete with public health discourses (Murphy 1994). Even within discourses, scholars of this school have noted the tensions generated by competing voices and discursive dichotomies like self/other, homosexual/heterosexual, love/death, first world/third world (Treichler 1988a), knowledge/ignorance (Erni 1994, Watney 1988, Treichler 1988a), possibility/impossibility (Erni 1994), and meaning/meaninglessness (Williamson 1989). Where this perspective is less than satisfying, however, is in moving us towards a systematic method to explore the way discourse and social practice fit together and how power and ideology work on the level of the individual reading a safer sex pamphlet, watching a television documentary or preparing for sex with his or her partner. This limitation is partly the result of a general lack of close textual analysis in studies of this kind in favor of a method which distills themes or patterns of discourse from selected texts, short examples of which are sometimes provided to support complex social analysis. Indeed it seems, at times, that the analysis of texts is seen as secondary to theorizing. It is not possible to know in terms of

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linguistic features of texts exactly how to interpret many of Foucaults theoretical principles, writes Lemke (1995a: 29), and while he sketches the general principles, there are no specific examples to show us actually how to analyze the relations of specific texts. Without the tools to understand exactly how power relations and ideologies are constructed and manipulated in discourse on the nuts and bolts level of text and in the contingencies of situated interaction, such approaches are in many ways cut off from the very mechanisms of social change to which they aspire (Fairclough 1992c). Consequently, as Crewe (1997: 967) observes, many papers dealing with the social construction of HIV and AIDS are, on the whole, reflections rather than critical analysis of how social meanings are mediated and constructed in society. Another problem with the cultural studies approach to the discourse of HIV/AIDS is its construction of the self as simply the sum of the multiple and sometimes contradictory positionings and subjectivities provided by discourses (Joffe 1999) rather than as an agentive force in itself, leading to what Erickson (in press: 2) calls a top-down kind of determinism which leaves too little room for possibilities of interruption of hegemony within social interaction. In fact, in many descriptions of the social construction of AIDS from this perspective, the consumers of social constructions are often all but invisible, reduced to passive victims of the technologies of control inflicted upon them by the powers that be. As cultural scholars deconstruct social representations of AIDS, writes Reeves (1996: 131), they tend to construct participants in this discourseas unconscious and unable to resist its ideological power over them.3 To determine whether or not a particular type of discursive event does

One notable exception is the work of Heaphy (1996) who explores the discursive strategies of resistance people with HIV use in their everyday lives to contest dominant social constructions of the disease and the structures of power/knowledge which underpin them. 19

ideological work, Wodak (1996: 18) reminds us, it is not enough to analyze textsone also needs to consider how texts are interpreted and received and what social effects texts have. Because of this insufficient attention to the ways texts are actually used and interpreted by readers, cultural scholars risk being unable to deliver the practical solutions to the very epidemic of signification they have declared, and unable to provide those affected with the discursive skills necessary to expand their participation in effective prevention and care. In so much of the current writing on HIV and AIDS, says Crewe (1997: 969), we are presented with a descriptive narrative which is used as a critique of a dominant way of thinkingalluding to a different way of seeing and inventing but without taking us further along the way of operating, without showing how it is possible to be freed. Having examined how public discourses on AIDS have constructed the disease to serve particular ideologies and social interests, it is then necessary to understand the social context of meaning through which such messages are mediated (967 emphasis mine). This focus on production at the expense of examining the effects of these products on real people in real situations is not limited to cultural studies, but dominates almost all social constructionist approaches to HIV.4 According to de Certeau (1984: 31), the problem with many analyses of cultural representations is that they fail to ask what to him are the most important questions:
once the images broadcast by televisionhave been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images The thousands of people who buy a health magazine, the customers in a supermarket, the practitioners of urban space, the consumers of newspaper stories and legendswhat do they make of what they absorb, receive, and pay for? What do they do with it?

There are, however, areas in social constructionist thought which do provide both the theoretical and analytical tools for dealing with such issues (see for example McNamee and Gergen eds.1999). 20

Without asking these questions it is ultimately impossible to gauge the ideological affects of public discourse. Fully understanding the effect of public discourse about AIDS in situated social practice, therefore, requires that we trace the constraints and affordances imposed not just by what Foucault calls orders of discourse, but also those involved in the circumstances within which these orders of discourse are invoked, what Goffman (1983) calls the interaction order. 1.2.3 AIDS in Situated Talk Another avenue to understanding the relationship between discourse and the epidemic in the West has been the analysis of talk about AIDS within interaction orders created by contexts such as interviews, group discussions, counseling sessions, sexual negotiations and medical consultations. The issue of how people formulate their response to AIDS in social interaction has been taken up by many of the same disciplines discussed above: sociology, social psychology, and, to a rather lesser extent, cultural studies. It is linguists and communications scholars, however, who have made the most substantial contribution to understanding how individuals construct their relationship with AIDS in talk. Communications studies has strong record of applied research in the area of AIDS talk, with work on issues like how group dynamics influence communication about AIDS in educational settings to the negotiation of risk between sexual partners (see for example Cline et al. 1990, Myers et al. 1992). Norton (1990) enumerates the areas in which the tools of communications studies have provided insights into how talk about AIDS affects how people act in relation to the virus and treat those affected with it, among which are the dilemma of disclosure for HIV positive and potentially HIV positive individuals and HIV related discrimination (see for example LePoire et al. 1997), the negotiation of condom use (see for example Edgar et al. 1992, Metts and Fitzpartrick 1992) and the development of rhetorically

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appropriate interventions for vulnerable populations (see for example Bowen and MichalJohnson 1990). Like work in communications studies on the construction of HIV in public discourse, however, most of these studies analyze the way people talk about AIDS by distilling from their conversations various themes, topics or perspectives, rather than focusing on the way these themes, topics and perspectives are structured on the textual level. Linguists like Leap (1990, 1995, 1996), Candlin and his colleagues (Candlin, et al. 1998, Moore et al. 1998, in press, Plum et al. 1998) and myself (Jones 1996b, 1997b) have also examined ways in which talk about AIDS in situated social contact can affect what people do about it. Linguists, however, tend to take a rather more systematic and delicate approach to this question, searching for clues in the semantic, grammatical and textual tools people employ and grounding their analysis in the notion of linguistic choice (Halliday 1973). Leap, for example, beginning with the assumption that all discussions of AIDS are rule-governed speech events, analyzes textual features like reference, lexical choice and pronoun usage in HIV counseling sessions in an attempt to describe a profile of expectable language use. What speakers understand about the pandemic and its effects on their lives, he writes, helps them to choose features of grammar and discourse which are relevant to the message they want to convey in such settings (1995: 228). Leaps analysis, while capturing what must be the essential principle of any linguistic approach to HIV/AIDS discourse, the search for systems of meaning making and how they are used, fails to give sufficient attention to the dialogic nature of AIDS talk, the fact that AIDS talk is always about talking to someone, and that the relationship between speakers is as important as, and inseparable from, speakers relationship to the virus. Candlin and his colleagues (Candlin, et al.1998, Moore, et al. 1998, in press, Plum et al. 1998) employ a rather

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more useful approach in their study of doctor patient communication in HIV clinics, taking the view that in such encounters doctors and patients use various linguistics strategies to collaboratively construct agendas and identities as experts. Such strategies involve the mobilization of certain distinct lexical choices, metaphorical expressions and collocations, patterns of pronoun usage and deixis, interactional features such as of turn taking structures and feedback, and the interdiscursive borrowing of generic structures and ideological perspectives as participants negotiate the intersection of the professional institutional world of the doctor and the everyday life world of the patient (Candlin et al. 1998: 4). The tools of conversation analysis (Sacks 1992, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974, Schegloff 1968) have also been particularly useful in understanding the ongoing negotiation of identities that constitutes AIDS talk. Silverman and Perakyla (Perakyla 1995, Silverman 1994a, 1994b, 1997, Silverman and Perakyla 1990) for example, in their analysis of AIDS counseling across cultures show how AIDS talk in such settings is cooperatively managed, with things like pauses, hedges, and the structure of turn taking acting to mark delicate or problematic moments or concepts. Such marking, they claim, serves to control the imputation and assumption of social identities by interlocutors. The above approaches almost without exception focus on AIDS Talk in institutional settings. Much of the important talk about AIDS, however, happens outside of clinics and counseling rooms. Some scholars have journeyed to less formal settings such as beats for men who have sex with men and commercial sex establishments, adopting techniques from anthropology like participant observation and group interviews. In Asia, for instance, Storer (1996, 1999) uses an approach involving in-depth interviews and group discussions to study the talk between Thai male sex workers and their clients regarding the negotiation of safer sex

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practices and the discursive resolution of disputes. Sex workers ability to negotiate safe sex freely, he observes, is constrained by power relations and a protocol of service which involves the use of a second language (usually English) and which operates among a set of competing but interdependent discourses. The strength of much of the work on AIDS talk from a discourse analytical perspective is not just its commitment to the close analysis of real data, but also its view of meaning as something negotiated in social interaction rather than fixed and unitary, two features that bring us closer to building a methodological tool kit to explore how public discourse and situated talk interact in the context of AIDS prevention. Like work on public discourse, however, analysis of situated talk can only give us half the answer. When people talk about AIDS they are not just themselves talking, but are animating (Goffman 1981) a multitude of other voices that they have heard or read and manipulating the various systems of meaning associated with these voices. Most explorations of AIDS talk do not provide satisfactory explanations of the complex, mutually constituting, and historical-political relationships among language use and social practice (Knobel 1999). As Layder (1993: 103) writes, while:
Macro phenomena make no sense unless they are related to the social activities of individuals who reproduce them over timemicro-phenomena cannot be fully understood by exclusive reference to the internal dynamics, so to speak, they have to be seen to be conditioned by circumstances inherited from the past.

What is needed, then, is research that works across the macro-micro division (Layder 1993: 102), providing a way to properly situate local talk about AIDS into the wider discursive environment, to trace the voices in situated talk to their sources in larger social voices or what we will be calling Discourses (Gee 1996, 1999).

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1.2.4 Integrating Texts and Talk More and more, researchers into the social aspects of AIDS, frustrated by the limitations of traditional methods in capturing the complexity and fluidity of risk behavior, are embracing more interdisciplinary ways of examining the connection between individual consciousness and cultural models from sexual script theory (Guizzardi et al. 1997, Simon and Gagnon 1984) to Joffes (1999) blending of Social Representation Theory with psychoanalysis. Such perspectives typically combine the study of media texts with more ethnographic observations of the ways individuals actually use these tools in everyday situations. As Joffe (1999: 105) writes:
A key solution to the problem that the cultural assumptions which influence individual thinking are not always found in the private knowledge of individuals is to triangulate (Flick, 1992). This involves exploring knowledge from various angles, in structures outside of individual minds such as the mass media or medical journals, as well as in interviews with lay people. The aim is not to validate the findings from one realm against that of another. Rather, the goal is to observe the transformations that occur when knowledge circulates between the different realms.

Some of the most interesting attempts to link public discourse and situated social talk have come not from the fields of linguistics or communication studies but from the field of social psychology. Among the most engaging of these efforts is Joffes (1999) exploration of the social construction of risk, which combines Moscovicis (1984) theory of social representations with Kleinian psychoanalysis (Klein 1952). Joffe takes as her staring point the contention that perceptions of risk are not the product of individual minds but rather the result of the unceasing babble, the permanent dialogue that people have with each other, and that the mass media have with lay people (101). To unscramble this unceasing babble, she uses a methodology which combines an analysis of medical and journalistic texts about AIDS with in-depth interviews with subjects in South Africa and the United Kingdom. The primary mechanisms

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through which knowledge about HIV is circulated between the realm of public discourse and that of situated talk, she argues, are what Moscovici (1984) calls social representations, the images, theories and beliefs that grow up within communities as a result of their interaction with the larger society. The main purpose of all such representations, according to Moscovici (24) is to make the unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar.5 Through an analysis of the linkages between the representations of HIV in biomedical and media discourse and the responses of her interviewees, Joffe concludes that social representations of AIDS are basically defensive mechanisms with which people endeavor to control the anxiety which danger brings by creating Others who bear the burden of risk. One of the most interesting observations she makes is that this othering of AIDS through the construction and manipulation of social representations seems to operate in the same way across cultures, her subjects from South Africa using the same kinds of strategies to portray themselves as not as risk as her European subjects. In my own work as well I have made use of the theory of social representations to explore the attitudes and beliefs about AIDS that circulate in communities of men who have sex with men in China. In Jones (1997c), analyzing some of the same interview data that will be presented in later chapters, I observe how my informants anchored information about HIV risk to representations of cultural identity (Chineseness) and local or urban identity, representations of love and commitment, and representations of quality () or character in order to project risk onto other kinds of people (foreigners, drug users, prostitutes, people from the

Moscovivi (1984) claims that this goal is accomplished through three interrelated processes: transformation, in which the concepts of experts are transformed into lay theories, assimilation, in which these concepts are saturated with the core values and ideologies of the group and absorbed into already existing theories, and anchoring, in which unfamiliar concepts, events and people are molded in a way that links them to familiar concepts, events and people.

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countryside or other cities, and promiscuous people) and portray themselves as immune from the threat of infection. Perhaps what is most useful about Social Representation Theory is that it reminds us of the differences between rational scientific knowledge and the ways people understand the world in real situations. As Moscovoci (1984: 187) writes, while scientific knowledge attempts to construct a map of the forces, objects and events unaffected by our desires and consciousness, social representation stimulates and shapes our collective consciousness, explaining things and events so as to be accessible to each of us and relevant to our immediate concerns. There are, however, a number of problems associated with approaches which focus on social representations, one of which is that they fail to adequately articulate the ways the groups within which social representations circulate are structured and operate. Joffe writes:
each individual enters a world of existing representations, a world in which certain groups have already been represented as respectable and others as degenerate. Representations which circulate in a particular group, prior to an individuals entry into it, influence who and what the individual chooses as the representative of the bad other, onto whom anxiety-provoking feelings can be projected. (81)

Implicit in this view is a rather simplistic view of group membership which conveniently ignores that fact that individuals are always multiply-membered in many communities and that this membership is always to some degree peripheral (Lave and Wenger 1991). Individuals, therefore, always have access to multiple social representations of risk from which to pick and choose in response to particular situations and needs, including the social representations (or invented identities see below) other groups have formed about them. Secondly, although Joffe portrays her approach as socio-cultural, she ultimately ends up leading us back to the individual mind. The explanation that she gives for what we will be calling the technologization of practice (the ways social practices and social identities become

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conventionalized) situates it in psychological rather than social processes. In fact, social representations never exist full-fledged in the minds of individuals, but instead are always only partially integrated into what Bourdieu (1977) calls the habitus, always indeterminate and always subject to transformation through interaction with other individuals. The most important limitation of Social Representation Theory or other similar approaches which attempt to link local attitudes and practices to larger social structures like Simon and Gagnons (1984) theory of sexual scripts and Deven and Merediths (1997) theory of cultural contact, is that using social representations, sexual scripts, or any other reified structure as a unit of analysis ultimately leaves us analyzing ideas and concepts rather than how these ideas and concepts are actually realized in social action. This limitation is particularly apparent in the rather narrow view both Moscovoci and Joffe take of the uses of social representations, Moscovoci seeing them as mechanisms with which groups create for themselves familiar versions of reality, and Joffe seeing representations of risk exclusively in terms of selfprotection, reflecting the individuals defense of the self against unwelcome emotions (99). This view of the uses of representations ignores the multitude of other actions people take with them in their everyday lives. It also ignores the fact that that the action of responding to risk is never taken in isolation, but is always integrated into a complex nexus of actions with multiple and sometimes contradictory goals and in which multiple and sometimes contradictory social representations might be appropriated. In contrast, the approach I will be suggesting focuses neither on individual psychological processes nor on the representations of HIV made available by the groups or cultures that individuals participate in, but rather on the ways macro and micro phenomena are inextricably bound together through the medium of social activity. (Layder 1993: 103 emphasis mine).

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1.3 Discourse, Action and AIDS Prevention

Useful as all the approaches to HIV/AIDS discourse discussed above are in illuminating the power relationships and subject positions made available in public discourse and the strategies people use in situated talk about AIDS, they still fail to satisfactorily answer the most fundamental question that faces AIDS prevention workers: What is the relationship between what is said, written, broadcast and taught about HIV in a particular society and the way people conduct their everyday lives in relation to the virus? They do, however, point to some important principles that can guide us towards answering this question. The first is the notion that all discourse about AIDS is fundamentally intertextual, or, to use Bakhtins (1981) term, heteroglossic, that it draws on a multitude of sometimes contradictory voices. The second is that the ways individuals and institutions appropriate these voices is fundamental to the process of constructing social practices and social identities around HIV and AIDS. Third is the observation that when these voices are appropriated, they are rarely adopted wholesale by individuals, but that they are altered and adapted as a consequence of peoples interaction within the communities of which they are a part. Finally, there is the notion that AIDS is a site of linguistic contestation at which individuals and institutions strategically mobilize particular textual tools to advance their own agendas, agendas which may or may not have anything to do with AIDS prevention. The main limitation of many of the approaches discussed above, however, is that they tend to focus on texts (whether they be written or spoken) at the expense of attention to the actions these texts are being used to carry out. Successfully accounting for the interplay of text, social interaction, ideology and identity in peoples behavior around HIV, I suggest, requires a model which draws upon the insights of these scholars of AIDS discourse, but conceives of

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culture and discourse in a rather different way, a model which sees culture as a matter of contingent processes and performative evocations (Rofel 1999: 457) and discourse as a matter of social actions, not systems of representation of thought or values. (Scollon 2000: chapter 1: 4, emphasis mine). The model I shall suggest as a means for bridging the gap between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism, and between a focus on public discourse and situated interaction in HIV social research, takes as its starting point a movement in American psychology influenced by the writings of Soviet theorists Lev Vygotsky (1987) and Mikhail Bahktin (1981, 1986). James Wertsch and his colleagues (Penuel and Wertsch 1995, Wertsch 1991, Wertsch, del Rio and Alvarez eds. 1995) call this perspective the sociocultural approach to mind, while others (Bruner 1990, Cole 1990) refer to it as cultural psychology. It takes as its unit of analysis, not people, either individually or collectively, nor the texts people use to think and interact, but action, more specifically mediated action, what people do when they use these resources. A sociocultural approach to mind sees all action as mediated through cultural tools: objects, technologies, practices, identities, social institutions, communities, and, most importantly, language. Culture, in this view, is essentially a series of actions people take either individually or together through their use of the various mediational means which are at their disposal. It exists neither solely in the collection of tools available nor in the individuals and groups who use these tools, but in the tension between the mediational means as provided in the sociocultural setting and the unique contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions (Wertsch 1994: 205). Chief among these mediational means for Wertsch and his colleagues are what he calls voices, the words, phrases, narratives and ways of speaking (Gumperz and Hymes 1986) that

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we borrow from the socio-cultural environment to interact with others and construct our accounts of these interactions. For Wertsch, nearly all actions are mediated through voices, even apparently silent actions, as even private thought involves language (Vygotsky 1987) and private behavior prior social learning. Wertsch derives the concept of voices from the work of the Soviet literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986). According to Bahktin, we never speak in a voice that is purely our own. Instead, we borrow and ventriloquate the voices of others, we rent meaning and then give it back to the community according to the protocols it establishes (Clark and Holquist 1984). Every utterance is heteroglossic, in that it may contain many different voices at once, and dialogic, as each voice exists in response to, in dialogue with other voices. For Bakhtin, voices come in primarily two varieties, which he calls social languages and speech genres. Speech genres are the particular forms communication takes in various typical circumstances. They direct participants both into particular relationships with their interlocutors and into particular interpretations of what is said. According to Bahktin (1986: 87):
a speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical form [a type] of utterance; as such the genre also includes a certain typical kind of expression that inheres in it. In the genre the word acquires a particular typical expression. Genres correspond to typical situations of speech communication, typical themes, and consequently, also to particular contacts between meanings of words and actual concrete reality under certain typical circumstances.

Whereas speech genres are tools with which people construct activities, social languages are tools with which they construct identities. Bakhtin (1981: 262) defines them quite broadly as:
social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical voices of the day.

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Thus, rather than defining voices in terms of ideas or concepts, Bakhtin defines them in terms of the social practices and social identities which they make possible, and this notion of how discourse, social practice and social identity come together in mediated actions is central to the approach I will be developing. The kinds of voices we choose to rent and the ways we combine them always to some degree operate show who we are and what we are doing, and so, in a sense, just as the words we use are always borrowed from others, so too are our social beings (identities) and social doings (practices). While every word we speak, every practice we perform, and every identity we claim is always half someone elses (Bakhtin 1981: 293), these words, practices and identities are also half our own. When we borrow them, we change them, populating them with our own semantic and expressive intentions, speaking them in our own accent. What is important for the speaker about a linguistic form, writes Voloshinov (1986), is not that it is a stable and always self equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign. Thus, not only is the way we take action transformed by the tools we use, but these tools themselves are transformed by the actions they are appropriated to perform. Of course, not all voices in the socio-cultural environment are available to everybody, and some are more easily adapted to the speakers agenda than others. As Bakhtin (1981: 293-4) writes:
not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speakers intentions; it is populatedoverpopulatedwith the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to ones own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. 32

It is its focus on this interplay between the intentions of others embedded in the voices we borrow and our own intentions with which we populate these voices, on the intersection of individual agency and the resources of culture, that makes mediated action theory so useful for examining risk behavior. Rather than only exploring how access to various cultural tools like condoms, safer sex slogans, forms of sexual negotiation, knowledge, and love either limit or expand peoples abilities to take certain actions, it looks also at the multitude of tactics articulated in the details of everyday life (de Certeau 1984: xiv) with which people mix and adapt these tools to fit particular situations and purposes. When we search for culture in the name of HIV/AIDS prevention with this perspective, what we are likely to find is a constantly changing dialogue of voices and the sociocultural knowledge and patterns they carry (Wertsch 1994) strategized in multiple ways in different kinds of circumstances. The condoms, media reports, health-promotion pamphlets, personal narratives, political speeches, medical interactions, sexual scripts, societal prohibitions, identities, places, social relationships, communication technologies and other tools that go to make up the cultural toolkit that individuals have at their disposal for taking action against HIV are not deterministic of their response. Instead, individuals selectively appropriate from among these tools to create responses to particular life moments. While limited in their response by the variety and kinds of tools available, the effect of these tools in either constraining or amplifying participation in HIV/AIDS prevention depends crucially on how participants appropriate them and strategize their use. Tools intended for HIV prevention might be appropriated in ways which actually limit participation, whereas tools one might expect to limit participation might be appropriated in ways that that amplify it.

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While the framework provided by Wertsch and his colleagues gives us a way to conceptualize the link between public discourse and private action, there are a number of issues that it leaves unaddressed. The first is how exactly voices and the strategies people use when appropriating them are to be detected and systematically analyzed what linguistic features signal a speech genre and a social language and how are they woven together to form texts? Without a coherent theory of discourse, the complex ways and forms in which voices are mixed and the effects these sometimes-subtle conjunctures have on action cannot be clearly articulated. The second gap in mediated action theory is its focus on the two poles of the individual social agent and the socio-cultural context with relatively less attention to the structures that negotiate between them, the institutions, organizations, groups both large and small, formal and informal, enduring and ephemeral through which cultural tools are made available to social agents and in which they learn how to use them. Understanding how these institutions and groups come into existence and change over time is essential to determining not just the tools people have available to them but the reasons they use them the way they do. Thirdly, mediated action theory leaves unaddressed the issue of the ontogenesis of cultural tools, how they come into existence in the first place and how they come to be available to certain social actors and not to others. Related to this is a general bracketing of the issues of power and ideology. Approaching social action from a psychological perspective, Wertsch understandably steers away from such issues, preferring to describe particular voices as privileged rather than dominant and focusing more on the strategies with which people appropriate them than the ideological control they exert. Strategies of appropriation, however, cannot be fully studied without also examining technologies of control, and the potential for a particular tool to limit or amplify action cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the

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nature and structure of the toolkit from which it was borrowed, who is in charge of that toolkit and what their ideological agenda is. Finally, and most importantly, mediated action theory has yet to clearly articulate the relationship among voices, social identity and social practice as them come together in mediated actions. Part of the reason for this, as Scollon (2000) points out, is the theorys lack of distinction between social actions and social practices, actions which are no longer just instances of individuals appropriating cultural tools but have themselves become cultural tools that can be appropriated into a wide variety of situations. In order to address these limitations in mediated action theory and make it of more practical use in tasks like assessing the vulnerability of particular individuals or groups to HIV and designing successful health communication strategies, it must be integrated with a more systematic theory of discourse, one which not only provides tools for the close analysis of texts, but also embraces Wertschs focus on the actions that texts make possible, a theory which sees discourse itself as a kind of action. 1.3.1 Discourse as Action The conceptualization of discourse as action is not new to linguists and discourse analysts. For years people who work with texts have been broadening their attention beyond the structures of texts and the meanings that lie within them to the uses to which texts are put in social situations, away from what is supposedly occurring inside of speakers heads to what is happening between speakers and against the background of voices and that make up the discursive landscape. The roots of this view of language are perhaps best traced back to the work of Wittgenstein (1972), who sees language as a series of games through which people construct

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what he calls forms of life, particular ways of being in relation to others and their surroundings. For Wittgenstein, speaking or writing is always a creative performance, determined on the one hand by the rules of the particular language game being played, and on the other by the unique strategies of individual players in particular situations. It is their relationship to particular circumstances of their use, their capacity as moves in a game, that give words and linguistic forms their meaning. Like Wertsch, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of the toolkit to illustrate the relationship between words and the way they are used. He writes (1972: 6e):
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws The function of words is as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.) Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly

In his classic The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau further builds upon Wittgensteins metaphor of the game, seeing the art of speaking as one of the ways of operating through which social agents utilize the resources of their culture for their own purposes. Modes of analysis that focus on the production of texts and discourses, he warns, are in danger of ignoring the creative process involved in their consumption, a process which is deviousdispersedinsinuat(ing) itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order (xii-xiii). The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement), he writes, tells us nothing about what it is for its users. We must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the image (or text) and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization (xiii).

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In linguistics, the study of language in use has been taken up in such diverse projects as systemic functional grammar (Halliday 1973, 1978), the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1986, Hymes 1986), conversation analysis (Heritage 1989, Jefferson 1989, Sacks 1984, Schegloff 1968), critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 1989, 1992a, b, c, 1995, Fairclough and Wodak 1997) and interactional sociolinguistics (Davies and Harr 1990, Schiffrin 1987, Tannen 1980, 1993, 1994, van Langenhove and Harr 1999). Halliday, departing from previous paradigms in grammar which saw language systems as autonomous and independent of language use, insists that language is as it is because of its function in the social structure (1973: 65) and calls for the development of a sociological linguistics, what Bakhtin calls translinguistics (Clark and Holquist 1984), a discipline which will allow us to understand how language behavior is related to social practice. The basis of Hallidays functional view of language is the notion of choice, the view that speaking and writing always involves people in a complex series of choices among the kinds of meanings possible within the various systems available. He defines language (1973: 72) as meaning potential: that is, as sets of options or alternatives in meaning that are available in the different strata of a language system phonology, grammar, and semantics. Understanding what and how people mean, therefore, depends on understanding what meanings are accessible to speakers, how options are systemically related to one another, and the particular context in which these choices are made. It requires seeing language on two levels, a macro-sociological level in which language serves to transmit the social structure, the values, the systems of knowledge, all the deepest and most pervasive patterns of the culture, (1973: 45), and a micro-sociological level in which meanings are seen as specific to particular contexts and situations.

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Gumperz and Hymes (1986) call the study of language in use the ethnography of communication, a method which, like other ethnographies, seeks to provide a description of how members of a particular community are expected to perform in order to be considered competent members. For them, communicative competence involves not just mastery of the linguistic system, but the ability to use language in conjunction with social practices and social identities in ways which others in our community will recognize to perform a myriad of social activities such as engaging in small talk, making transactions, joking, arguing, teasing, and warning. In this model, grammar is just part of a larger matrix of meanings, values, beliefs, practices and understandings of social relationships, a larger grammar that Scollon and Scollon (1995), building on Hymess (1986) SPEAKING model, call the grammar of context. Communicative competence is not a linguistic universal; it is specific to particular communities and grows out of the social practices of those communities. It is also learned within communities through participating in communication, observing how others respond to us, anticipating others responses, and incorporating generalities into our own repertoire of actions and meanings (Mead 1934, Gumperz 1982). Ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts of various schools (Atkinson and Heritage 1984, Garfinkel 1967, Heritage 1989, Sacks 1984, Sacks, Shegloff, and Jefferson 1974, Schegloff 1968, ten Have 1999) have also sought to understand how social actors construct the doings and beings of everyday life though language with an approach which concerns itself more with the micro-politics and procedural rules of the language game rather than larger systems, cultures or communities. According to ten Have (1999: 6) conversation analysis reconceives the problem of social order as a practical problem of social action. Rather than

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structures, functions, or distributions reduced to conceptual schemes or numerical tables, the focus of the analysis is the procedural study of common-sense activities. Similarly, interactional sociolinguists (Davies and Harr 1990, Schiffrin 1987, Tannen 1980, 1993, 1994, van Langenhove and Harr 1999) have examined the ways people manage their identities and activities in the course of interaction making use of the expressive equipment (Goffman 1959) provided by their culture. The primary concern of interactional sociolinguistics, as Scollon (2000: chapter 6: 3) puts it, is how social actors who are acting in real time are able strategize their own actions within a negotiative process with other social actors to achieve their desired social meanings, including their identities, footings, alignments with others and their positionings of themselves and others. Particularly relevant to the theory I will be developing below is the work of Tannen (1980, 1993, 1994, Tannen and Wallet 1983), who has demonstrated that individuals from different groups (like Greeks and Americans, men and women) bring to interactions different primary frameworks (or schema) with which to interpret what is going on as well as different ways of employing the interactive frames that are used to manage the ongoing course of interaction. Also important is Harrs notion of storylines (Davies and Harr 1990, van Langenhove and Harr 1999), the histories that speakers use to position themselves in relation to their interlocutors and to the larger society. Finally, also of special relevance is recent work by Erickson (in press), who conceptualizes social interaction as a kind of bricolage during which interlocutors patch together various tools from their cultures identities, histories, and ways of speaking and interacting making novel use of pre-existing forms to accomplish uniquely local functions (11). Perhaps the most ambitious attempt in linguistics to explicate the link between discourse and social practice is represented by the field of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki

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and Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 1989, 1992a, b, c, 1995, Fairclough and Wodak 1997, van Dijk 1990a, b, 1993, 1995). Whereas conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics focus on the micro-dynamics of face-to face interaction, CDA seeks to fit texts and face to face interaction into a larger theory of social practice, politics and power. According to Fairclough (1992a), the project of CDA is to explore how discourse is implicated in social practice by examining the ways texts simultaneously represent reality, enact social relations of power and establish social identities. Discourse is seen as joint action (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, see also Shotter 1993), which draws upon conventions that naturalize particular forms of knowledge and ideologies. Particularly important in CDA is its focus on the hybridity characteristic of all social uses of discourse and its analysis of how, through conjunctures (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 38) of text types and ways of speaking, speakers and writers perform strategic acts of domination and resistance. Finally, the notion that discourse is a kind of social action lies at the center of what has come to be called new literacy studies (Barton and Hamilton 1998, Gee 1996, 1999, Heath 1983, Knobel 1999, Scollon and Scollon 1981, Street 1984), a movement in linguistics and education which views literacy not as an individuals mastery of a particular body of knowledge or set of cognitive skills, but as their ability to portray themselves as particular kinds of people (Gee 1999) and claim membership in particular communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). Like critical discourse analysis, this approach aims to trace literacy practices back to their origins in the systems of power relations and social practices in society, which Fairclough calls orders of discourse and Gee (1996, 1999) refers to as Discourses with a capital D. At the same time, they also seek to understand how these larger social structures are drawn upon and contested when people appropriate texts into specific situations, what Heath (1983) calls literacy events.

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While all of the approaches above share the belief that understanding discourse requires understanding it as a kind of social action, they differ considerably in what they focus on, whether it be the micro-politics of situated social encounters or the macro-politics of knowledges, ideologies and capital D Discourses. In many respects, in fact, the proponents of these approaches position themselves in opposition to one another, conversation analysts, for example, disapproving of what they see as critical discourse analysts preoccupation with ideology at the expense of attending to the mechanics of social interaction, and critical discourse analysts criticizing conversation analysis as too narrow and not sufficiently socially engaged (Billig 1999, Wetherell 1998, Schegloff 1999). One attempt to accommodate the insights and methods of these varying approaches and to integrate them with the principles of mediated action theory is what Scollon and his colleagues (Jones 1998c, 1999, Jones et al. 1997, Scollon 1998a, 2000 Scollon et al. 1998, S. Scollon 2000) call mediated discourse analysis. It is an approach to the analysis of discourse which favors neither the micro nor the macro but instead trains its sights on the place where these two dimensions meet in the actions people take as they appropriate tools from orders of discourse into interaction orders. In a sense, mediated discourse analysis is itself a kind of bricolage, which attempts to weave together the storylines of different research traditions. Scollon (2000) calls it a nexus of practice at which the perspectives of mediated action theory, athropological linguistics and the ethnography of communication, critical discourse analysis and the social practice theory of Bourediu (1977) meet. From mediated action theory it derives its overall framework: a commitment to the study of actions rather than just the texts that are used to carry them out. From interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis it borrows tools with which to

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observe how social actions are negotiated in the micro-dynamics of real-time interaction. From anthropological linguistics and the ethnography of communication it borrows a concern for the ways discourse and actions are linked to create particular meanings in particular communities. And from critical discourse analysis it takes the position that all social actions are historically linked to larger systems of power and ideology and that the meaning of discourse practices and social practices lies in linkages among them. It also appropriates from critical discourse analysis CDAs own appropriation of the tools of systemic functional grammar and its techniques in applying them to reveal these linkages among discourse practices, social practices and social identities. Mediated discourse analysis is not simply a mixture or combination of these various lines of research, but a strategic borrowing in which tools from these different traditions change as they interact with one another and with the data at hand. Scollon (2000: chapter 6: 7) writes:
Mediated discourse as a theoretical framework mirrors the social world that it hopes to analyze. That is, mediated discourse takes on an identity not though the production of boundaries nor through the mediation and communication between groups; it has taken on an identity through the linkages overall that are made through concrete actions and projects over time... we should not see this nexus of practice as a set of objectivized or structural relationships among different schools. On the contrary, these relationships exist only in and through concrete intersections of these practices in specific research projects.

1.3.2 Practices, Discourses and Communities Perhaps the most significant contribution mediated discourse analysis brings to the study of social action, and the most relevant to discussions of HIV risk behavior, is the recognition that actions are only interpretable through reference to the groups within which they are performed and the practices of which they are part. Drawing on the social practice theory of Bourdieu (1977), Scollon (2000) turns the focus of mediated action theory towards the ways mediated

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actions reflect social structures that have been integrated into the individuals habitus. Any instance of concrete, real-time social action, he claims is simultaneously the production and reproduction of the structures of the social world and, therefore, must be conceptualized in a way that takes the sociocultural histories of our habitus and of our mediational means into account (chapter 1: 7). Mediated action, then, is not simply action, but the expression of social practice. Scollon writes: mediated action is the moment at which social practice is, in fact, practice (people doing things) and not an abstraction or reificationmediation is the means by which agents incorporate social practiceinto their activities (Scollon 1998a: 8). Thus, mediated actions do not just bring cultural tools from the larger socio-cultural environment into interaction they also bring ideas about how those tools should be used and how actions should be linked with one another to form events, relationships and identities. Scollon refers to this materialization and codification of practice embedded in mediational means as the technologization of practice. Such technologized practices, he writes, come to exert pressure upon social practice which leads to rigidity, objectivization, and standardization (2000: chapter 1: 12). Thus, as Bakhtin already suggests in his categories of speech genre and social language, when we appropriate tools, we also appropriate historical, cultural and social practices, and along with them, in fact, inseparable from them, historical, cultural and social identities. Crucially related these practices and identities are the groups through which cultural tools are made available to people and within which they learn how to use them to perform recognizable and sanctioned practices and to enact recognizable and sanctioned identities. For Scollon (1998a), every mediated action has embodied in it a particular set of identity claims and imputations with which people construct themselves as social actors by enacting participation in

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various communities of practice. Communities of practice, a term originating in the educational theories of Lave and Wenger (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998), are groups of tool users who take action together. According to Lave and Wenger, learning to use cultural tools to perform social practices is not just a matter of internalizing skills or knowledge but of moving from more peripheral to fuller participation in communities of individuals who use these tools and perform these practices. Lave and Wenger define communities of practice as people doing things together and prefer to focus on participation rather than membership, limiting their observations to geographically bounded communities. Their marriage of the notions of participation and social identity, however, makes communities of practice always more than that. As social practices among people begin to be recognized, to be spoken of, taught, criticized and sanctioned, then issues of membership become inevitable, they grow in the minds of participants and what was once just a group of people acting together imagines itself into a different kind of community, one which does not depend on geographical proximity. Wertsch, (1998b), inspired by Anderson (1991), calls these communities imagined communities. Imagined communities do not just create identities for their members; they also, in fact must also, invent other communities which are not them (Penuel and Wertsch 1995). Over time, these invented and imagined communities themselves become cultural tools that people can carry into other groups and other social contexts. When people appropriate cultural tools and use them in particular ways, they are, in effect, positioning themselves within and in relation to these various invented and imagined communities, sometimes on a very broad cultural level, like Chinese, sometimes on the institutional or professional level, and sometimes on the level of smaller social groupings. When we speak, says Gee,

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we are actually manipulating hundreds of variables at the same time, and signaling, in many subtle ways, identification with a number of different social networks to which (we) belongEach social group or social network defines a different identity that speakers signal in their language. (1996: 93)

The concepts of practice and community are particularly relevant to the study of HIV risk behavior. Understanding how the practices of communities their sexual practices, drug taking practices, health seeking practices, etc. affect their vulnerability to infection is the overriding concern of most research into the social aspects of AIDS. Issues regarding the ways actions or series of actions become practices in communities, the ways these communities standardize and police practices, the ways these practices are learned and used as emblems of membership in particular communities, and the way communities become communities in the first place are at the center of debates around HIV risk behavior and prevention. This is especially true of sexual and drug taking practices and the communities that develop around them, but also holds true for political practices, law enforcement practices, educational practices, and practices around healthcare and health-seeking behavior and the communities that they give rise to. The study of practices within communities is where the study of the intramental (what people know or think about HIV and its prevention), and the intermental (what people do with one another to either facilitate or prevent HIV transmission) meet. One of the most important points in relation to AIDS prevention in Lave and Wengers conception of communities of practice is their definition of learning, which shifts the focus from the individual as learner to learning as participation in the social world, and from the concept of cognitive process to the more encompassing view of social practice (Lave and Wenger 1991: 43). Because learning how to use cultural tools always involves some degree of participation in a community of tool-users, the tools which one uses and how one uses them are as much a matter of social identity as they are utility. Learning is seen not so much as acquiring a body of

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knowledge but as acquiring an identity as a participant in a particular community of practice. The process of learning, then, and the process of participation in communities of practice are inseparable; as we learn, our relationship to the communities we participate in changes, and it is the opportunities for different forms of participation in different communities that empower individuals to learn (see chapter seven). Since people never participate in just one community at a time, however, they must deploy and combine tools in different ways at different moments to enact different social identities. The demands of enacting these different social selves, and the complexities of managing all of the different intertexts involved, can be particularly problematic when it comes to HIV prevention, where an individual might be simultaneously a participant in communities with radically different norms regarding what preventing HIV transmission means and how one ought to go about doing it. When we consider the function of communities in AIDS prevention, equally important as their role in learning is their ability to technologize tools and practices. One of the great success stories of AIDS prevention is the way gay communities in New York and San Francisco were able in the late eighties and early nineties to turn condom use into a community practice (Watney 1990).6 Today one of the great concerns of prevention workers is how forgoing condom use (or barebacking) is being technologized by communities of practice in these same and other North American urban centers (Gumbel 1999, Signorile 1999). When groups of people acting together attain access to the means of producing their own cultural tools predicated on a collective identity, their ability to affect their own vulnerability to HIV infection changes

a process of technoligization whose beginning predates even the discovery of HIV with the publication in 1983 of the underground safer sex handbook How to Have Sex in and Epidemic (Callen 1983). 46

drastically, as does their relationship to the tools for AIDS prevention available from other communities. To understand the effects of community organization on vulnerability we must consider what it is that creates and maintains these communities in the first place, how conjunctures or nexus of linked people, tools and practices become constructed in practice and in discourses about that practice as structures, communities no longer organized around practice so much as around definitions, boundaries, membership, inclusion and exclusion (Scollon 2000: chapter 6: 4). In AIDS research, Watney (1993) claims that the groups that deserve particular attention are emergent communities, groups that during the course of the epidemic (and sometimes because of it) have gone from loose groupings of people with similar sexual or drug taking practices to gradually more cohesive communities that are beginning to take collective action against AIDS and social oppression. Understanding how communities work, how they grow or wither, how members either nurture or dominate one another depends on understanding how communities get to be communities in the first place, how they go from loose collections of individuals who share common tools to groups who have formed with these tools and the actions they perform with them common practices and common identities. Similarly, understanding how practices grow to exert pressure over the actions of members of a community, and how individuals and communities can be helped to change or strengthen those practices, requires that we understand how practices get to be practices, how they become technologized and integrated into the habitus through social interaction. Understanding the connection among communities, practices, cultural tools and learning is where mediated discourse analysis can be of particular service. It allows us, through an analysis of the technologization of practice to understand how communities imagine

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themselves and appropriate or contest the identities that others have invented for them, and, through a focus on situated social action, to examine how communities and practices are appropriated into social interaction in a complex series of identity claims and imputations through which people position (Davies and Harr 1990, van Langenhove and Harr 1999) themselves and frame (Goffman 1974, Tannen 1980, 1993) what they are doing. In this perspective, the solidity of communities as bounded entities which pervades most social science research is continually problematized through a focus upon change, negotiation, differences in participant statuses, and claims, imputations, legitimations and contestations of identity (Scollon 1998a: 13). Seen within a framework of communities and the social practices and identities through which they are defined, AIDS prevention is no longer a simple matter of delivering information and skills (cultural tools) to individuals or vulnerable groups. It is instead a matter of focusing attention on relationships among learning, participation, identity and action as ongoing positionings carried through mediated actions in discourse (Scollon 1998a: 14). Finally, and most importantly, through its appropriation of tools from linguistics, mediated discourse analysis gives us ways to hear the voices that Wertsch and Bakhtin speak of, and to, through the systematic analysis of texts based on the principle of linguistic choice, explicate the relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity. From Hallidays functional approach to grammar it takes tools with which to observe how texts contribute to the technologization of social practices and social identities through their ideational and interpersonal functions. From Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguists it takes tools with which to trace the ongoing series of identity claims and imputations that people perform as they appropriate these texts and other cultural tools into their interaction, and from

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Critical Discourse Analysis it takes a way to link these actions of technologization and appropriation to larger structures of social organization which I, after Gee (1996, 1999), will be calling Discourses (with a capital D).7 Discourses are the cultural toolkits from which the tools of social interaction are appropriated and from which they take their meaning. Gee defines them as the recurrent and systematic ways of talking, listeningacting, interacting, believing, valuing and using tools and objects, in particular settings, at particular times, so as to display and recognize a particular social identity (1996: 128). What Discourses represent are not just collections of ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being (Hasan 1996), but collections of relationships among discursive tools, social practices and social identities. Ultimately, social actions involve complex dialogues not just among social actors and cultural tools but also among the Discourses of which these tools are a part and the institutions and groups which produce and reproduce these Discourses. The individual is not just a social actor appropriating various cultural tools, but the meeting point of many, sometimes conflicting, socially and historically defined Discourses (Gee 1996: 132). The goal of mediated discourse analysis, then, is to explain how discourse (with a small d) creates, reproduces and transforms Discourses, and how Discourses create, reproduce and transform discourse, that is, how cultural tools, mediated actions and social actors become social practices and social identities and how these technologized identities and practices are in turn taken up strategically by individuals to invent situated identities and take specific actions. An approach to HIV/AIDS discourse based on these principles involves asking about any situation three sets of interrelated questions: questions about mediational means, the cultural

Gee distinguishes capital D Discourse from small d discourse (language in use), and defines discourse analysis as the study of Discourses in discourse (1999). 49

tools (including ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being) (Hasan 1996), that people have available to them to take actions, questions about the actions that they typically take with these cultural tools, and questions about the social actors themselves and how, through these cultural tools and social actions they are embedded into a social world made up of communities. The questions that must be asked about mediational means are as follows: What kinds of cultural tools, both physical and psychological do people in different communities and different
situations have available to them to take action around HIV/AIDS, and what potential do these tools have to either limit or amplify their ability to protect themselves against infection or help others protect themselves?

Where do these cultural tools come from? How do material and psychological objects (a condom, a phrase of
language, a place, a way of doing something) become cultural tools that are made available for appropriation by communities of practice, and how do the toolkits (Discourses) that they are part of determine what actions can be taken with them and by whom, when and how by regulating the relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity?

How does the potential for cultural tools to amplify participation in HIV prevention change as they travel
through various mediational chains (Kristeva 1991, Scollon 1998a), accumulating the history of their use by particular communities and contact with other cultural tools through discursive flows in interaction?

The second set of questions involves the actions people use these tools to perform: How do people use various configurations of mediational means to strategically frame the situations they find
themselves in and enact particular social identities by claiming and imputing participation in communities of practice?

How do the multiple purposes of any action affect what cultural tools actors choose to appropriate and what
tools they choose to mix with them, and what kinds of strategies and tactics do individuals and communities use when they appropriate tools to perform multiple and overlapping actions involving multiple and sometimes conflicting goals?

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 How do particular sets of linked actions become stable and recognizable practices within communities, how do
these practices come to exert pressures for conformity within those communities, and how do individuals navigate among various and sometimes contradictory forces of standardization?

Finally, the questions we will be asking about social actors include: What is the relationship between tools and the strategies people use to appropriate them and the communities
of practice they participate in? How are social acts of appropriation used to claim or impute identity in different situations, and how do social agents modify these acts of appropriation to reconcile the different demands of the different communities in which they participate?

How do communities of practice, groups of people defined by proximity and collective action, become
imagined communities, groups which transcend proximity and are defined by common practices and Discourses? What is the relationship between community and AIDS prevention? What communities are being produced, what persons are being identified and what participant statuses are being enacted when people take action around HIV, and how are identities and communities themselves used as tools which can either limit or amplify peoples ability to avoid infection?

What these questions mean to us methodologically is that neither the study of individual behavior nor the study of culture alone can lead to an understanding of why people do or do not engage in risk behavior. This understanding requires an approach which employs new and innovative methods of data collection and analysis which focus both on the individual mind and the social context in which it operates, an ethnographic approach that allows analysis of changing social practices in conjunction with the changing discursive environment made up of the texts of public discourse (S. Scollon 2000). In such an approach, analysis always involves a continual back and forth movement among various levels of discourse (texts, interactants, situations, settings, institutions, societies and histories), which are intertextually connected in concentric circles (Wodak 1996: 21-23). Like the process described by Joffe (1999) above, the goal of this back and forth movement is not to validate what we find in public discourse against

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data from face to face interaction or visa versa, but to observe the transformations that occur as cultural tools circulate between the domain of public discourse and the demands of situated interaction.

1.4 What is to Come

For reasons which I will make clearer in the next chapter, the context in which I have chosen to illustrate the conceptualization of culture, discourse and their relationship to HIV transmission and prevention which I sketched out above is the Peoples Republic of China. This thesis, however, does not pretend to be a thorough ethnography of AIDS discourse in China. Indeed, given the size of the country and the complexity of the issue, such a task would be impossible. Instead, what I hope to do is to use China as a testing ground for my approach, applying it in particular to HIV risk and sexual interaction within Chinas emerging communities of men who have sex with men. The data I will be analyzing was collected over a four-year period from 1996 to 2000. It consists of several corpora of public discourse such as AIDS prevention pamphlets, newspaper articles, Internet web pages, government documents, and transcripts of radio-call in programs as well as a collection of artifacts such as VCDs, condom packages, sexual aids and anti-viral sprays and ointments (See Appendix 1). In addition to this sampling of public discourse, the data also includes transcripts of interviews with public health officials, academics, AIDS prevention workers, foreign experts, doctors and nurses, people living with HIV, proprietors of private STD clinics, shopkeepers and taxi drivers, along with field notes from a total of eleven months of participant observation in two communities of men who have sex with men, one in Beijing and one in Fuzhou, conducted intermittently over a four year period.

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The two communities in which I conducted fieldwork have important similarities and differences regarding the kinds of cultural tools available to them and the kinds of social practices that these tools make possible. Beijing, the capital in the north, with a population of over 12.5 million and 285 confirmed cases of HIV infection as of 1998 (Xin 2000), is the larger of the two cities and more culturally diverse, offering to MSM a wider range of smaller communities of practice within which to participate, a wider range of voices through which to enact this participation, and a wider range of activities and places like parks, discos and bars, at which to gather. MSM in Beijing have grouped themselves not only into communities with social purposes, but into also communities, though still few in number, with political purposes in the form of organizations which sponsor seminars and distribute information about homosexuality and AIDS (Aizhi Action 1998-2001, Tsang 2000). Fuzhou, in the southeastern province of Fujian, has a population of only 1.3 million. The number of reported cases of infection there is steadily rising (with more than 100 confirmed cases in the province as of 1998) (Provincial AIDS Surveillance Center 2000) along with an epidemic of syphilis (UNAIDS 2000) driven in part by a thriving sex industry patronized heavily by business travelers from Taiwan. Fuzhou is more provincial and more conservative than Beijing, offering MSM a much more limited set of both activities and identities. Venues for interaction are fewer, and efforts in community organization beyond purely social goals are practically non-existent. The ethnographic investigation of these two communities was accomplished using a variety of strategies. In both communities relationships were established with a small group of primary informants who accompanied me to various venues (parks, bathhouse, bars, discos and karaoke lounges) and introduced me to other participants in their community or participants in other communities. My own role in these visits to various sites of engagement (Scollon 1997a)

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involved both observation and participation. Through observation I was able to watch patterns unfold in participants use of cultural tools and discover both their generalizations about their own communities and their individual perspectives on their communities and other communities. Through participation I was able to gain an understanding of the differences involved in participating in these communities and participating in the communities of men who have sex with men with which I myself normally associate. Included in the field notes are transcripts or summaries of twenty-three formal interviews with both my primary informants and others to whom I had been introduced during these visits. These interviews focused both on more general issues about AIDS prevention in MSM communities as well as other communities of practice in which the interviewees participated (communities of migrants, commercial sex workers, hotel workers, police offices, just to name a few) and on the meaning and social significance of various incidences or utterances I had observed in public venues. These corpora of written texts, field notes and transcripts were converted into electronic form and analyzed for recurrent themes, topics and linguistic features using the framework based on mediated discourse analysis which I introduced above and will elaborate on in the coming chapters. The analysis was performed with the aid of a software package for qualitative data analysis called Winmax , which allows the analyst to create different categories into which bits of data are classified and to alter those categories as the data demands through the constant comparative method associated with grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990). This method enabled me to search for patterns of voice appropriation both within and across discourse types and come to hypotheses about the Discourses from which these voices come in a way that is empirically valid, grounded in the actual texts and talk of the participants. In addition, samples of

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whole texts or speech events were selected for closer analysis on the basis or theories arrived at through creating and revising these categories. As I mentioned above, an analysis of HIV discourse based on the principles of mediated discourse analysis requires that the analyst move back and forth between the analysis of the texts of public discourse and slices of actual interaction in everyday life, attempting to trace the mediational chains which join them. In the chapters that follow I will use the general strategy of beginning with the analysis of official discourse (such as government documents, officially sanctioned health promotion materials and reports in the state-run media), moving to an examination of texts from more unofficial sources (mostly from popular media and commercial discourse), and ending with an analysis of situated social talk, what Heath (1983) calls literacy events, moments when individuals interact with cultural tools to formulate responses to HIV in specific contexts. At times I will take somewhat of a corpus-based approach (Stubbs 1996), making observations based on, for example, computer generated searches for particular linguistic structures in my corpora. As much as possible, however, I will focus on the close analysis of individual texts and interactions in order to capture the dynamics of voice appropriation and the complex and overlapping claims and imputations of identity realized through it.8 In the next chapter I will describe the epidemiological and discursive situation in China around HIV and further problematize the notion of culture as it has been used in discussions

When quoting from these texts and transcripts of interaction I will provide the original Chinese original (hanzi) with an English translation. Unless otherwise specified, these translations were done by myself with occasional assistance from English speaking Chinese informants where I was unsure of the meanings or connotations of particular words or phrases. All of the analysis was conducted on the original Chinese texts. In the translations provided I attempt as much as possible to conform to the original meaning and sense of what was said or written, though exact correspondence is never possible, and at times I have sacrificed elegance where I believed faithfully rendering the literal and metaphorical meanings expressed were more important. 55

about HIV transmission and prevention there. I will also begin to sketch out the broad outlines of the competing Discourses that dominate public life in contemporary China and explore how they interact in discourse about HIV. In chapter three I will elaborate further on some of the key terms and concepts in mediated discourse analysis and explain in more detail the ways tools from linguistics can help us to detect the voices people appropriate when they construct texts of public discourse and when they draw on these texts in situated social interaction. In particular I will focus on the strategies the producers of public discourse use when they appropriate cultural tools to invent social identities and technologize social practices around AIDS, as well as the tactics employed by individuals in social interaction to either reproduce or contest these identities and practices and to imagine for themselves new ways of doing and new ways of being. Chapter four begins a more detailed analysis of my data. This chapter focuses on narrative histories as cultural tools in AIDS prevention, examining how, authors of official histories invent communities by appropriating discursive boundaries from larger narratives of national identity (Ahonen 1997, Wertsch 1997) and positioning particular people and particular practices either within them or outside of them. I will then consider how individuals implicated in the invention of at-risk communities in AIDS histories appropriate these same boundaries in discussing their own versions of the history of AIDS, and by so doing, claim for themselves socially legitimate identities both in relation to the virus and in relation to the official voices that speak of it. Chapter five and six take as their focus the practice of AIDS education. In chapter five a corpus of fifty health education pamphlets from all over China are analyzed for the ways they technologize practices and identities through verbal and graphic representations which form

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strategic links among social actors, tools and mediated actions, and how, in doing so, they contribute to the technologization of the practice of AIDS education itself. In chapter six I look at how this technologized practice is appropriated by participants in two kinds of social interaction (or sites of engagement) a radio call-in program about AIDS and the distribution of safer-sex materials to gay men in parks to claim and impute social identities, and how, in the midst of these identity claims and imputations, notions of risk and safety are negotiated. The invention and imagination of gay (or tongzhi) identities is the subject of chapter seven. Here mainstream political, academic and popular constructions of homosexuality are compared to the ways the men who have sex with men whom I encountered in my participant observation position themselves in relation to the larger culture and make use of the various voices about HIV and AIDS prevention that are available to them to assess their own vulnerability to infection and make decisions about sexual partners and sexual practices. Chapter eight brings together the observations from the previous chapters in the formulation of a model for HIV related social research and prevention work informed by the principles of mediated discourse analysis. The assessment of vulnerability and competencies in AIDS prevention, I will argue, must take into account both the constraints and affordances embedded in the cultural tools available to a community to take action around AIDS as well as the ongoing technologization and contestation of these cultural tools and the ongoing negotiation of the boundaries that separate the various communities that make up society. Suggestions will be made as to how research and prevention efforts can be improved by a focus on the tensions between these tools themselves and their appropriation in the service of the multiple goals involved in social (and sexual) interaction.

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I am aware that the voices that I borrow to construct this argument act to situate me and my readers within a very particular community of practice: that of sociolinguists, especially those interested in discourse analysis and mediated communication. I hope, however, that the socio-cultural approach I am advancing will prove relevant to social scientists in other fields interested in AIDS prevention such as anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, students of communication and cultural studies, historians and sinologists, as well as scholars outside the social sciences in areas like epidemiology and medicine. More importantly, I hope what I have to say is both accessible and useful for those actually involved in working directly with various communities both in China and in other cultural contexts to try to slow the spread of HIV and care for those affected: NGO staff and volunteers, public health workers, social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, members of vulnerable communities and people living with HIV/AIDS. This, of course, is the final and most important test for any model of research into the social and cultural aspects of HIV, that it not only helps us to understand people and the ways they act and interact, but that it helps us to slow the spread of HIV and care for those already infected.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Two AIDS, Culture and Discourse in China

HIV We need to say no to HIV, because we are Chinese. Beijing Evening News () December 4, 1998

Fig 2.1

The China/Hong Kong Meeting on AIDS (Beijing, May 24-26, 1997), held on the eve of the transition from British to Chinese sovereignty over the territory, had as its theme the relationship between AIDS prevention and Chinese culture, and the cover of the program booklet distributed to delegates provides a striking visual expression of the way organizers conceived of this relationship: an aerial photograph of the Great Wall with the words: Our joined hands a wall to protect against AIDS! (Fig. 2.1) Delegates needed only turn to the back cover of the program booklet, however, to get a completely different picture of culture and its relationship to HIV/AIDS: an advertisement for Glaxo Wellcome with a photo of three Caucasian scientists peering at a complex molecular model and the words: Investing in our future. (Fig. 1.2) Nothing perhaps contrasts more starkly with the image of the two-thousand year old wall, with all its connotations of isolationism, traditionalism and xenophobia, than the epitome of globalization, a modern multinational corporation, speaking the international languages

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of technology and capitalism, and creating an us that includes both the Western doctors and the Chinese readers.

Fig.2.2

The front cover conceives of culture along racial/ethnic lines, Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese using their common cultural heritage to fend off a foreign invader. The back cover defines it along economic lines, culture as global discourses for managing goods and technologies. A delegate at this meeting might, in the spirit of its theme, have asked him or herself which side of the brochure counted as Chinese culture in relation to AIDS prevention just one, both or neither? At the 4th Annual Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (Manila, October 2428, 1997) held in the same year, I attended a special symposium on AIDS Prevention in Chinese Communities convened to provide ethnic Chinese delegates from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Southeast Asia and various Western countries a chance to share their experiences from the perspective of their common cultural heritage. At one point in the meeting a delegate from Hong Kong reacted very strongly to a poster designed by an Australian AIDS organization catering to the needs of Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups in Sydney which portrayed two Asian men kissing. This kind of poster could not be used in Hong Kong, she declared, since Chinese are very conservative and oppose homosexuality. The Australian delegates insistence that he too was Chinese precipitated a rancorous debate on what Chineseness was. Ironically, the most conservative positions in this debate (opposing sexually explicit educational materials) were staked out by the delegates from Hong Kong, who repeatedly invoked the high moral standards of the Chinese people, while delegates from Mainland China for the most part championed more open discussion of sexuality and more vigorous promotion of condoms.

2.1 AIDS and Chinese Culture

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Although there is still no widespread AIDS epidemic in China, epidemiologists and public health officials both within the country and outside are in almost unanimous agreement that the potential for a large-scale problem exists (China is on the verge 1998, Cowley 1996, Gil 1994, Qiu 1996a, b, 1998, China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997, UNAIDS 1998a, b). By the end of 1999, 16,669 cases of HIV infection (with 647 confirmed cases of AIDS) had been reported by the Ministry of Health, but experts estimate that the actual number might be as higher than 500,000 and predict that it could reach as high as ten million by the year 2010 (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997, Millions of Chinese 1999, UNAIDS 1998 a, b, UNAIDS China 2000). What is particularly alarming is the growth of the rate of infection in recent years (see Fig. 2.3), with only 502 new cases of HIV reported in 1994 as opposed to 4447 in 1999. In the beginning of the epidemic transmission was chiefly isolated to IV drug users, recipients of blood and blood products (Rosenthal 2000b)1 and their partners.

The spread of HIV through blood donations in rural areas (in which donors blood is mixed with that of other donors, the plasma removed, and the blood returned to the donors) is shaping up to be a major route of transmission in China and a major test of the governments willingness to confront the issue. In some villages in Henan Province up to 60% of the residents are thought to be infected (Sui 2001).

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Fig. 2.3 (UNAIDS China 2000)

Today, however, the fastest growing route of transmission is sexual contact, accounting for nearly a fifth of the total reported cases. According the Zhang Konglai (1996: 3), head of the China AIDS Network, unless forceful measures are implementedsexual contactswill soon eclipse intravenous drug use as the predominant mode of HIV transmission. It is the sexual transmission of HIV in China that will be my focus in this thesis. I do not, however, wish to ignore other routes of transmission and their role in the cultural construction of AIDS. Mediated Discourse Analysis, I will argue, gives us a way to consider the public discourse of sex and AIDS and the private negotiation of safer (or unsafer) sex without ignoring these other routes and the discourse surrounding them (particularly discourse involving themes of unregulated movement and the quality of the population). It does this by seeing all discourse and action around HIV as essentially interconnected, as drawing from common storehouses of cultural tools, which intermingle and affect one another.

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In few places has the notion of culture been invoked in discussions about HIV vulnerability and prevention with such enthusiasm as it has in China (Diktter 1997, Gil 1991, 1994, Jones 1997c, 1998a, b, c, 1999). Yet, as the examples above amply illustrate, what people both inside and outside the country mean when they speak of Chinese culture and what they do with the concept when they appropriate it can vary considerably. Chinese culture, depending on the context of its use, can mean anything from traditional Confucian values to totalitarian modes of thought control, and it has been appropriated both to argue that China will not experience the kind of devastation that HIV has brought to other countries, including some of its neighbors (See for example AIDS: Will it spread in China? 1987, Zhu 1990, 1997c), and to support the contention that the epidemic in China is likely to reach alarming proportions (see for example Qiu 1996a, b, 1998, Slack 1992). It is precisely this preoccupation with culture, and the multiplicity of meanings that adhere to it, that makes China such an ideal site at which to test the model of culture based on discourse and social action sketched out in the last chapter. 2.1.1 AIDS Prevention with Chinese Characteristics Until recently, most official discourse about HIV in China tended to portray the disease as the result of Western imperialism and held up traditional Chinese culture and morality as the nations bulwark against the epidemic (Dikotter 1997, Gil 1991). In 1987, for example, the English language Beijing Review reported Public Health Minister Chen Min Zhangs argument that the chances that AIDS would spread in China were slim since homosexuality and casual sexual relations arecontrary to Chinese

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morality (AIDS: Will it spread in China? 1987: 7). Ten years later, in a speech at the 1997 China/Hong Kong Meeting on AIDS, one delegate claimed:
Chinese cultural tradition has an excellent moral perspective when it comes to sex. Although this perspective has already felt the impact of the corrupt Western lifestyle of sexual freedom, most people still maintain traditional morality and moral integrity. Traditional sexual morality is the great source of hygiene and the best preventative measure. (Zhu 1997c)

Although such remarks might, to many Western observers, seem nave and xenophobic, they actually mirror the response of most nations in the early stages of the epidemic in which politicians, the press and ordinary people conspire to erect a discursive cordone sanitarie (Jones 1996a) around the nation, situating AIDS outside of its boarders (in Haiti, Africa, the West) or in the bodies and practices of social outsiders (drug addicts, homosexuals) (Farmer 1990, Murphy 1994, Patton 1990, Treichler 1992b, Watney 1989). This is not just true of AIDS. Medical historians (Brandt 1987, 1988a, b, Gilman 1985, 1988a, b, 1995) have pointed out that throughout history nations have responded to epidemics from the plague to cholera as invasions from the outside against which the countrys borders must be secured. This attitude is perhaps most clearly reflected, as Sontag (1991) and others (see for example Ross 1989) have pointed out, in the metaphors used to talk about AIDS (see last chapter). In China, as has been observed in Western contexts, AIDS is often described using metaphors of warfare. HIV is compared to an invading ( ) enemy ( ) which has landed () on Chinas shores (Ceng and Ren 1997: 61) , and is advancing () into her territory (Li Xiang 1998), and AIDS prevention is portrayed

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as meeting an approaching enemy () and waging battle () (Fang 1995a: 15, Challenge AIDS to battle 1998). In 1998, the UN theme for World AIDS Day, Force for change: World AIDS Campaign with Young People, was rendered in Chinese as Youth: Fresh troops in the battle against AIDS ( ), and the cover of a pamphlet from the All China Patriotic Public Health Campaign Committee () and the National Health Education Institute ( ) (nd) (Fig. 2.4) depicts HIV as a Hiroshima bomb.2

Fig. 2.4

Further examples of warfare metaphors can be seen in calls for citizens to raise a shield against AIDS ( ") (Ceng and Ren 1997), reference to medical workers as the first line of defense against the epidemic (") (Ceng and Ren 1997), to education as the only weapon () (Fang 1995a, Jiang and Peng 1991, Shan 1995) with which to fight the spread of HIV, and to the virus within the infected body as a time bomb () which will sooner or later explode () (Fang 1995a, Ru 1998). Stribbe (1996) points out that, while normally the Discourse of contemporary Western medicine (CWM) tends to represent illness as an invasion and curing illness as a battle, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) usually portrays illness as a product of imbalance and curing illness as redressing imbalance. What is interesting about the way AIDS has been treated in traditional Chinese medical texts, he observes, is the way metaphors of war normally absent from such texts are appropriated from Western medicine.

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Metaphors of war help to construct AIDS as a threat not just to the individual but also to the country, justifying a mass mobilization in which everyone must join in ( ) to conquer () it, just as in Maoist times other foreign threats made it necessary to make every citizen a soldier () (Li 1995). Along with the language of war, descriptions of AIDS in China are also sometimes couched in metaphors of domestic political struggle (). Just as in earlier revolutionary times when citizens were asked to struggle against counterrevolutionary elements, today they are asked to join the struggle against AIDS () (Yang and Fang 1994: ii, All China Patriotic nd). This struggle sometimes appropriates the rhetoric of past struggles, calling on people not just to struggle against the virus, but also to wage a struggle against every kind of ugly and evil phenomena in society () (Chinese Encyclopedia of Sexology Editorial Committee 1998: 219). At the same time, AIDS itself is sometimes used as a metaphor for the invasion of incorrect political ideas from the West. In official discourse of the late eighties and early nineties, for example AIDS was appropriated by officials as an emblem for bourgeois liberalization and peaceful evolution by exploiting the phonological similarity between aizibing () (AIDS) and aizibing () (the disease of loving capitalism, ai = love, zi = zibenzhuyi, capitalism). A 1989 article in the Economic Daily () characterizes it as a sickness that makes people believe that if something is called capitalism, everything will be good; that commodities from foreign countries are good; that white skin is smarter than yellow skin; and that individualism that ignores

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national interest should be called freedom and human rights (quoted in Schell 1995: 182, see also Barm 1999: 32). This metaphor not only brings to the notion of Western capitalism and democracy the characteristics of a fatal disease, but also constructs the fatal disease (AIDS) as fundamentally tied to the ideas and practices of bourgeois liberalization and Westernization.3 While more recent official statements in China have considerably toned down such rhetoric, an emphasis on HIV as an alien invader and Chinese culture as a prophylactic against infection persists in most HIV related health education materials. An educational pamphlet for students from the mid-nineties, for example, informs its readers that: Our races excellent tradition of sexual civilization can help young people avoid the calamity of AIDS ( ) (China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation et al. 1998a), and the governments Principles of Propaganda and Education for the Prevention of AIDS and STDs ( ) (China Ministry of Health et al. 1998a) describes Chinese culture as one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of the nations AIDS educators, advising AIDS workers to:
:

In political discourse in China, disease has long been used as a metaphor for subversive ideas. Mao, in his 1956 speech On the Ten Major Relationships, for example, described the goal of thought work as curing the sickness to save the patient () (Li 1995:24), and, in a 1983 article in the Peoples Daily () introducing the term spiritual pollution (), Western ideas are compared to malevolent bacteria: With the implementation of the open policy, permeation by bourgeois ideology is unavoidableLooking at the situation since the opening up policy has been implemented, there are two kinds of bourgeois bacteria attacking us. The first type includes all low class, obscene, and disgusting things, such as picture albums, books, videotapes, and films advertising pornography and murder. These are deadly poisons. They have an extremely corrosive effect on the minds and lives of the masses, particularly of the young people. The other type of bourgeois bacteria appears in academic, theoretical, or artistic form. Some of them are mixed with subjects that are truly scientific and have real value; thus, it is hard for us to differentiate (quoted in Li 1995:203).

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Maintain and carry forward the beautiful traditional morality of the Chinese race: scrupulously upholding moral integrity, preserving virginity, being faithful to ones spouse, (and) a husband and wife growing old together. (8)

One of the most frequently cited concepts in official texts about AIDS in China is the notion of guoqing (), (national conditions), a concept which is repeatedly used by officials and health educators to argue that China must develop its own unique ways to prevent AIDS rather than blindly adopting methods like condom promotion and needle exchange used in other countries, that she must develop, if you will, AIDS prevention with Chinese characteristics. In the book Beware of AIDS: For the Survival of the Chinese Nation ( ) for example, Ma Bing (1993: 45) argues:
; HIV Our country is a socialist country with a large population, and we must act according to our national conditions and maintain an attitude of responsibility for the people by implementing preventative measures which fit the actual situation... Some countries regard promiscuity as legal and promote the use of condoms or provide commercial sex workers with physical examinations; some countries, in order to prevent transmission through IV drug use, go so far as to supply clean injection equipment to addicts. All of these methods are illegal in our country; providing prostitutes and drug addicts with safety measures does not conform to our countrys national conditions [guoqing].

Similarly, Zhu Qi (1997a) uses the notion of guoqing () to attack foreign funding bodies for not giving money to programs that do not meet their (foreign) specifications, portraying the denial of AIDS funding as new kind of foreign aggression:

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 ? In China the pressure to promote condoms carries the authority of powerful international organizations. Whoever wants to get funding and support must accept the promotion of condoms...Why don't these international organizations respect and study the traditional culture and conditions of the countries [guoqing] to which they are providing aid?

Implicit in this idea of national conditions is the notion of cultural or racial uniqueness, and arguments using it are often accompanied by other arguments attributing HIVs relatively late arrival in China to such things as the supposed biological differences of the Chinese (portrayed as possessing, for example, a more robust immune system) (Diktter 1997) and the superiority of Chinese culture (with its strong family system and advanced sense of sexual morality ) (see for example Chinese Encyclopedia of Sex Editorial Committee 1998, Zhu 1990, 1997c). Not all domestic invocations of Chinese culture in discussions of HIV, however, have portrayed it so positively. Many more recent constructions, in fact, attribute the spread of the virus more to internal factors poverty, ignorance, superstition and a lack of quality () in the populace than to foreign influence or invasion (see for example Zhang et al 1999). A typical example can be seen in the following assessment, originally published in Health World magazine () in 1996 (Chen 1996: 6-7):
;. Looking at the present domestic situation, there exist the following risk factors regarding the spread of AIDS. The first is that the dense population and large mobile population provide opportunities for AIDS to spread The second is that the masses lack knowledge about how to

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prevent AIDS and the proper consciousness of how to protect themselves The third is the increased prevalence of prostitution and visiting prostitutes, and with it the increased prevalence of sexually transmitted diseasesThe fourth is that the number of drug users continues to riseThe fifth is that medical technology in China is still relatively weak in such areas as medical hygiene and the screening of blood donors.

In his book AIDS, Sex and Ethics (1997), Qiu Renzong, argues that not only does Chinese culture not provide the kind of protection against AIDS that official voices say it does, but also that it lacks an ethical framework within which successful AIDS prevention and treatment can be implemented, and Zhang Beichuan, author of Homosexual Love in China () (1994), appropriating a phrase from the governments own Tenth Five-year Plan (), blames discriminatory attitudes towards gays and lesbians in China on the nations relative cultural backwardness ( ) (Zhang 1996, 1998a).4 The most important point that can be made about the various invocations of Chinese culture cited above is not what they can tell us about whether Chinese cultural practices or government policies either increase or decrease the nations vulnerability to HIV, but rather what they can tell us about what individuals and institutions do with the idea of culture when they take action around AIDS, how it can be appropriated for such diverse purposes as combating bourgeois liberalization, arguing for easier funding requirements and championing the rights of homosexuals.
4

In many ways the contradictory assessments of the role of Chinese culture in the spread of AIDS among officials and social scientists is part and parcel of a larger debate about Chinese culture, dubbed culture fever () (Barm 1999:4, Wang 1996), that has been going on in China since the mid-eighties and reached its peak in 1989 (just as the HIV epidemic was beginning to take off) with the broadcast of the controversial polemic television series River Elegy (), a program which portrayed Chinas poverty and technological backwardness as a result of its inward-looking orientation and xenophobia (Barm 1999, Link 1992).

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2.1.2 The View from the West In Western studies of AIDS in China, Chinese culture is almost universally constructed as a barrier to effective AIDS prevention and sometimes even as an engine for its spread. Many of these studies depend heavily on social psychological generalizations about the Chinese, which emphasize such cultural traits as family loyalty, collectivism, a concern with matters of face and a reticence when it comes to the topic of sex (see for example Slack 1992, Walsh-Childers et al. 1997). Often attention to these cultural traits of Chineseness, many of which have themselves been questioned or qualified by linguists, anthropologists, and social psychologists (see for example Lau and Kwan 1988, Lin 1987, Liu 1996, Scollon and Scollon 1991), sometimes lead researchers to construct stereotypes of the Chinese which distract from the complex and quickly changing nature of Chinese culture today. Other Western scholars have focused more on the political culture of China, seeking to uncover ways in which the state has employed the epidemic to increase its control over peoples private lives or how totalitarianism or rampant corruption are abetting the spread of the virus. Like many of the approaches discussed in the last chapter, these studies typically focus on discourse as an instrument of power, attempting to draw connections between official discourses on AIDS and attempts by the state to maintain control over the increasingly private domain of sexual behavior. In many such studies, however, this attention to issues of power and hegemony has, in the context of China, left Western scholars open to the danger of falling prey to simplistic constructions of Chinese totalitarianism and Oriental despotism (Wang 1996: 9) generated by institutions and the media in their own countries at the expense of rigorous observation of

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particular, situated social practices. Consequently, the socialist rhetoric and moral exhortations are taken at face value, with scholars neglecting to take into account the multiple, sometimes subversive uses such rhetoric has acquired in post-Mao China (Aganost 1994, 1997, Barm 1994, 1999, Dutton 1998, Jones 1998c, Wang 1996). The Western scholar who has spoken most directly about the social conditions surrounding HIV in China is Gil (1991, 1994, Gil et al. 1996), who, using an ethnographic approach similar to that taken in this thesis, compares the constructions of sex in official discourses on AIDS with those in interviews with ordinary people, including commercial sex workers and men who have sex with men, noting what he calls a mismatch between the way the government talks about sex and AIDS and the way real people do, with official publications portraying it in moralistic and nationalistic terms and individuals seeing it as a matter of privacy, freedom and pleasure. He does not, however, attempt to explain if and how these two constructions interact, other than to conclude that such a mismatch inevitably works against effective AIDS prevention. While not focusing specifically on HIV, there is also an important body of work on representations of sexuality and gender in China that has occasionally taken up the issue of AIDS. Perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of this type has been Diktters (1995, 1997). Basing his analysis on medical, educational and popular materials about sex from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, Diktter insists that in order to understand current notions of sex and sexuality (including current responses to AIDS) in the Peoples Republic, it is necessary to place them within the historical context of larger discourses about sex, gender, race and biomedicine which have developed in the country since the early Republican period when science replaced

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Confucian cosmology as the foundation of social order. Instead of seeing modern constructions of sex, however, as simply appropriations of Western biomedical and social scientific categories, Diktter shows how discourses from abroad have been mixed with indigenous cultural constructions, particularly those addressing issues of race and Chinas place in the world order, and adapted to serve particular political and social agendas.5 Although he deals with AIDS only briefly, Diktter comes to some strong conclusions regarding current government efforts to control the spread of the epidemic, broadly condemning them as little more than politically motivated attempts to regulate sexual practices and social roles of the populace. He writes:
Medical literature and official publications do not attempt to provide useful information that can assist individuals in protecting their own lives, but instead manipulate disease as an object of fear in order to instill a conservative message of sexual restraint. Cultural representations of disease and contamination are deployed by medical discourse to criminalize sex that takes place outside the marital context. Strict sexual morality is seen as the only means to stop the spread of STDsThe regulation of sexuality in the name of the nation, rather than the control of disease for the sake of individual health has been the ultimate objective of legal sanctions, social controls and medical norms. (79-80)

In his study of sexology and Chinese culture, Ruan (1991) similarly touches on the relationship between AIDS and attempts by the government to regulate sexual practices and discourse, particularly prostitution and pornography, and makes similar judgments about the relationship between AIDS control and the political agenda of the

Responses to syphilis during the Republican period, for example, which portrayed it as a result of uncontrolled foreign sexuality and a cause of racial decline reflected and reinforced fears of foreign aggression, colonialism and economic domination (1995:130).

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government. In his discussion of the recent anti-prostitution campaigns that form a major part of the governments anti-AIDS effort, he writes:
The latest politically motivated crackdown on prostitution, coupled with the parallel increase in censorshipsuggests that public health concerns, however valid, are not the primary basis of antiprostitution policies (84)

Like Diktter and Ruan, Evans (1995a, b) claims that the primary aim of public discourses on sex in China has been the regulation of the body in support of a project of social control (7). Unlike others, however, Evans is more sensitive to the recent diversity in discourses on sex and the convergence between different materials, registers and representations. This new proliferation and mixing of discourses in her eyes, however, has not so much encouraged new voices and opinions, as it has worked to reinforce key aspects of what is still a dominant discourse(15). Similarly, Western journalistic accounts of AIDS in China have depicted nearly every aspect of the epidemic from the reporting of rates of transmission to the treatment of people with HIV through the terministic screen (Burke 1966) of human rights discourse (Dutton 1998). This perspective has resulted in journalistic accounts which focus on discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS (Rosenthal 1999, 2000b), inadequacies and corruption in the medical system (Cowley 1996, Fang, B. 1998), poverty and prostitution (Prostitutes spread AIDS in China 1996), legal limitations to the advertising of condoms (China bans 1999, Kaplan 2000), government inaction (Rosenthal 2000a), and the sexual prudishness of officials (Mufson 1996). Among the claims made by Western journalists are that the government is intentionally attempting to

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hide the extent of the epidemic from the people (Massonnet 2000, Watanabe 1998)6, that homosexuality is illegal (it is not) (China arrests 2000), and that condom promotion is prohibited (China bans advertisements 1999, China marks World AIDS day 1999). Perhaps the biggest irony that confronts writers and critics who seek to link the spread of AIDS in China to the actions of a repressive regime is that, as in the former Soviet Union where the collapse of Communismhas greatly increased vulnerability to HIV (Altman 1995: 99), HIV transmission in China has more to do with freedom than with totalitarianism, particularly the freedom to move about the country, which the Chinese are doing at the rate of over 40 million people day (Dutton 1998), the freedom to make and spend money on a vast new range of material and cultural products (including commercial sex), and, increasingly, the freedom to manage ones sexual affairs away from the prying eyes of the state. What are sometimes portrayed as human rights abuses around the provision of HIV-related education and care usually have little to do with democracy and freedom, and more to do with economics and the new subaltern classes lately created by the very liberalizing policies so applauded by the West (Dutton 1998). The problem with most of the criticisms of AIDS prevention strategies in China from Western social scientists, cultural critics and journalists is that they often make the mistake of regarding official constructions as unitary and monologic, failing to adequately address both the dynamic and fluid nature of public discourse in general in

A claim called into question by the mass of newspaper articles I collected from Chinas official press which, far from downplaying the seriousness of the epidemic, often use rather alarmist language to discuss it.

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China since the beginning of the period of economic reform and the capacity of citizens to strategically appropriate official voices for decidedly unofficial purposes. When everyday citizens in China fashion their language to fit official views, writes Link (1992: 221), they do so not because they are caving in to intimidation, as a Westerner might imagine. They are playing words in a game that, although defensive in its essence, can be played aggressively. A big part of this game is what the Hungarian writer Mikls Haraszi (1987) refers to as communication between the lines, a way of speaking, writing reading and listening which, though more critical in earlier revolutionary times, has persisted through the reform era (Gu 1996). More recently, in fact, as economic changes have transformed Chinese life, the space between the lines has, so to speak, become significantly wider and the range of meanings that can be expressed there considerably more diverse. Commenting on the problematic nature of prevalent Western academic interpretations of Chinese governmental discourses on sexuality and measures to control prostitution, which see the repressive mobilization of discourses of tradition and morality as an attempt by the government to secure social stability and maintain political power, Jeffreys (1997: 49-50) writes:
To understand the Chinese response to the problem of prostitution it is necessary to examine, instead, the particular kinds of strategies that have enabled individual bodies and behaviors to be organised within the social formation, and also to allow for the resistances that such strategies inevitably encounter and evoke Indeed, the common tendency of Western commentators to focus on the moral basis of social control policies in China tends to result in an elision of the very pragmatic and localised considerations that have informed both the nature and outcome of interventionary strategiesresult(ing) in a generalised form of argument, with a consequent lack of attention to questions of specificity.

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A good example of the dangers of assessing the ideological force of official government proclamations on issues like prostitution, pornography and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases without investigating how such proclamations are actually read by members of the public in particular political contexts can be see in Ruans (1991) assessment of the anti-pornography campaign which followed the suppression of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square as an attempt to use laws against pornography as a cover for the suppression of personal and political freedom (105). Chinas leadership used the campaign, he insists, not only as a means of asserting control of the communications media and engendering hostility against forces for liberalization, but also to quell pro-democracy sentiment (104). Journalist and fiction writer Zha Jianying (1995), however, basing her work on indepth interviews with Chinese intellectuals and artists in the early nineties, offers a very different interpretation of the campaign, one which frames it as a strategic move by the new reformist Propaganda chief, Li Ruihuan, to defuse a volatile political climate. After the June Fourth crackdown, she writes,
the hard-liners purge of the dissidents had a real edge, infused with the sort of deadly potency that official campaigns hadn't had for yearsIn this atmosphere, Li Ruihuans vehement campaign speeches about the urgency of battling the yellow tide broke the political tension in Beijing like no other comic relief...for all its high moral tone and deadpan seriousness, politically seasoned people around the country could hardly suppress their chuckling at Li's rambunctious campaign. It was almost like watching a mock parade: the frills were there, the noise level high, but it was a theater of double entendre, and everybody who understood the game played along. (29) For a time at least, it looked as if politics had taken cover under sexone might even say, liberty had ducked behind pornography. (146)

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My purpose here is not to judge which of these two interpretations of the antipornography campaign of 1989 is true, but rather to suggest that that both may have been the case, and that whether the campaign worked to limit or expand political freedom depends not on the fact of the campaign itself, but on the way it was appropriated by Ministry heads, by local leaders and law enforcement officers, by intellectuals, by the general public, and even by pornographers themselves (to raise their prices perhaps). Despite the tendency of many Western scholars to produce simplified, generalized accounts of discourse in China, there is a growing tradition of work which suggests ways to understand what is happening there more generally, and in terms of social practices around HIV, through closer attention to the strategic actions that take place within specific circumstances and communities of practice. A number of scholars, for example, have directed their attention away from the technologies of control imposed by the authoritarian state and towards the various tactics with which ordinary people creatively appropriate voices from official discourses to resist these technologies of control and open up new discursive spaces and the possibilities of new social identities (Davies 2000). Anagnost (1994a, b, 1997), for example, has focused on the creative deployment of oppositional modes of practice, the subversive readings of texts, and the various modes of imposture which poach on existing structures of power (1997: 55) that pervade media discourse, political texts, and the language of everyday life. The most pressing question one must ask when examining official discourse in China today and the reproduction of that discourse in the everyday talk of citizens, she claims, is not so much how one voice dominates or subverts another as who these voices belong to to begin with; who is speaking here? (Anagnost 1997). What we call the state, she writes

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(1994: 259), and what we theorize as society, as somehow beyond, outside or separate from the state, become problematic when we refocus our inquiry upon the speaking subject. The question which Anagnost raises: Who is speaking here, is precisely that which Mediated Discourse Analysis takes as its starting point (Scollon 1998, Scollon et al.1999), that is, what voices are being appropriated for what purposes and how these acts of ventriloquation (Bakhtin 1986) of public voices into private life affect the actions people are able to take and the identities they are able to assume. Still others have considered the role the strategic appropriation of official voices into everyday life has in the emergence of new forms of social organization and communal tactics of resistance. As far back as the early eighties, Madsens (1984) work on morality and power in a Chinese village showed how close attention to one particular community can reveal the varied and creative ways people in groups make use of the voices available to them from society to craft their own unique responses to social and political conditions.7 What Madsen calls moral communities, Rubie Watson (1993a, b), calls communities of memory, groups which share and interact through various symbolic media which bear the inscriptions of their past use. In her study of how student protesters in 1989 appropriated the memories inscribed in the symbolic media of public mourning and how, through their actions, other symbolic media, such as the official monuments in Tiananmen Square, have subsequently become inscribed with the illicit memories of the June Fourth movement, Watson shows how symbols and dominant discourses of the state can be appropriated and used to build communities of
7

Moral decisions in the Chen village where he did his fieldwork, Madsen found, followed neither traditional Confucian values nor modern Marxist (or Maoist) ones, but that instead villagers appropriated aspects of different parts of their culture strategically, creating new patterns of meaning which were often richly ambiguous, multivocal, and multilayered (1993:193) and open to subversion.

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opposition. Far from a monologic discursive environment dominated by the state, Watson observes on the one hand, the dramatic, orchestrated construction of state socialism, and on the other, its equally dramatic, seemingly unorchestrated, happeninglike transformation the dynamic tension between structure and action, society and countersociety, determinancy and indeterminancy (1993a: 4). Similarly, Dutton (1998), in his examination of the discourse of streetlife in China, has explored how the new subaltern classes, particularly those relegated by official voices to the category of liumang () (hooligan), like illegal migrant workers and men who have sex with men, have been appropriating the very tools the State uses to control them to outwit or outmaneuver poverty or authority (14) (see chapter 4). Such work demonstrates the importance, when seeking to understand the effect that ideologies embedded in dominant discourses have on real people, of taking into account the specific circumstances of their use by individuals and communities through an approach grounded in localized social practice, that is, as Jeffreys (1997: 49) puts it, individual bodies and behaviors organized within particular social formations. Understanding in any useful way how Chinese culture affects HIV transmission, then, requires that we see Chinese culture not as a static object to describe, but as a multitude of overlapping narratives and positions, a complex and unevenly distributed warehouse of cultural tools available among multiple and ever changing communities of varying sizes and statuses within the society, each appropriating from among these resources to perform very different kinds of practices in response to very different sets of social and material circumstances. It requires that we take into account the multiple and contradictory ways people of different social groups and in different circumstances

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negotiate meanings of Chineseness and tradition from their varying perspectives, genres and locations (Hodge and Louie 1998: 149), that we, as Rofel (1999) puts it, examine the discursive effects of Chinese culture as an object of knowledge(and) the way people live out these imagined invocations of culture (456 emphasis mine).

2.2 AIDS, Sex and the New Discursive Marketplace

Most observers of the HIV epidemic in China acknowledge that much of what is driving it is a result of the profound economic and social changes that have come as a result of the Partys program of reforms which began in the early eighties, including a massive increase in internal migration, an influx of Western ideas and cultural products, an increased separation of the spheres of politics and private life and rapidly changing attitudes of the populace towards sex and interpersonal relationships. One need only to visit any Chinese city and notice the hundreds of advertisements for private clinics specializing in the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases posted around the streets to realize how both sexual and economic behavior have radically changed since the days of Mao. Along with (and in some ways inseparable from) the economic revolution brought on by the program of reforms, China is in the midst of a sexual revolution (Wehrfritz 1996, Zha 1995). According to a recent study of 6,500 young people, aged between 14 and 28, more than half thought pre-marital sex to be acceptable and a third believed extramarital sex to be a natural outcome of love (Chinas youth 1999). Similarly, in a survey of college students, 34.25% of females and 45.3% of males agreed with the statement: I would excuse my spouse if he or she had sex with another person, if the spouse really loves me (Pan 1996a). Chinas sexual revolution has even penetrated 81

the ranks of the Peoples Liberation Army. According to a survey conducted by the Peoples Liberation Arm Daily, only about half of the 637 officers and soldiers surveyed disapproved of extramarital sex (Wu 2000).8 These changing attitudes are also reflected in changes in the language people use to talk about sex. According to Zhang and his colleagues (1999: 584), the word for adultery, which bears an obvious colour of condemnation has been substituted by more neutral expressions including extramarital sex, and extramarital love (see also Pan 1996a). Furthermore, like many other domains in contemporary Chinese life, sex has become increasingly commodified. Not only is commercial sex available nearly everywhere, but so are hundreds of potions, pills, ointments, and implements with which to practice it, sold in the over 2000 officially licensed sex shops in Chinas urban centers (Chinas youth 1999). Despite the intermittent anti-vice campaigns called Sweep Away the Yellow () campaigns (during which the purveyors of pornography and commercial sex usually lie low, only to emerge again when the campaign dies out), Chinas cultural marketplace is flooded with erotic representations and sexual opportunities. As one of my informants put it when I referred to the Sweep Away the Yellow campaigns: What sweep yellow? The more they sweep the more yellow there is ( ) (Fuzhou 97/5). 9

In reporting the results of the survey, the paper attributed the results to the influence of rotten Western ideas. The article stated: The results of the survey show Western rotten ideas on marriage and love are challenging the correct views on marriage and love, casting great (negative) influence on officers and soldiers of our troops (Wu 2000). 9 Even sweep yellow campaigns have become to some degree commercial exercises. One of my informants who is a police officer in Fuzhou told me that he and his colleagues receive a stipend for each prostitute they arrest, and that sex workers and police officers sometimes cooperate in this regard, sex workers taking turns offering themselves up for arrest to promote better relations with authorities. Other authorities as well see the economic benefits of sex work: in several cities sex workers who are employed in bars and nightclubs pay taxes on what they have earned (Forney 1998) and, according to Zha (1995:158)

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Among the best selling of these new sexual products is sexual knowledge ( ) itself in the form of commercial radio programs, books, marriage counseling, and videos on how to have better sex. One of the major impacts of the Dengist reforms on sexual life in China has been the rise of sexology () as a legitimate academic discipline (Chinese Encyclopedia of Sexology Editorial Committee 1998, Liu ed. 1993, Ma 1998), leading to increased attention to sex education (Evans 1995b, Zhuan ed.1999, Sun and Jin 1995) and the rehabilitation of a number of previously demonized practices like masturbation (Evans 1995b) and divorce (Zha 1995). Sexology has not only flourished in the academy, but also in the marketplace with sexual knowledge marketed not just as a means to such goals as contraception, the prevention of STDs and HIV and the achievement of a harmonious family life, but as a necessary accessory for the up-todate, civilized urban man and woman to lead a modern and scientific life. Academic studies in sexology find their way into commercial bookstores bearing lurid covers and catchy titles like Doctor Ma Talks Sexology () (Ma 1998) along with other less academic volumes giving advice about the best sexual positions or how to talk romance (). In sex shops (referred to as sexual hygiene centers ) proprietors wear white doctors coats and the products they sell like vibrators, aphrodisiacs and potions for sexual potency claim on their packages to be the result of the latest scientific studies. Figure 7.1 below shows the faade of one such shop in Beijing which sports a sign bearing the slogan: Advance towards Sexology ().

some southern Chinese city officials say a red-light district is always good for the local economy because it provides a soft environment that attracts investment.

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Fig. 8.1 (Beijing 96/8)

It is in the context of this increasing privatization and comodification of sex in China that discourse about HIV/AIDS is produced and consumed. Had AIDS hit China twenty years ago, it doubtless would have been addressed through strictly organized hierarchical systems of information dissemination and social control with decisions emanating from central bureaucracies and executed through work units () in the cities and agricultural collectives () in the countryside. Today, however, as the degree to which the central Government is able to exercise control over local authorities, especially in matters relating to economics, is changing (Friedman 1995), and as the number of workers in state run industries is shrinking, the traditional channels through which health care and education have been delivered are becoming increasing limited in their reach and the degree of respect which they command, while newer (unofficial, primarily commercial) channels are rapidly increasing in influence (Gu 1999). Unlike in the past, when official agencies exerted almost complete control over discourses about health and sex, Chinese today get their information about AIDS, from a wide variety of sources which include not just the official voices of state run media and government health authorities, but also advertisements for health and sex related products, advice bureaus for newlyweds, radio call-in programs (see chapter six), 84

intellectual discussions in salons, publications of NGOs with varying relationships with the government (see for example Aizhi Action 1998, 1999, Comrades Hotline 1999), internet web pages and discussion groups (see for example Sir China 2000),10 popular books about sexual hygiene, pornographic magazines and videos, and a host of other mediational means which have only surfaced in China in the past ten years. This explosion of alternative forms of discourse, often containing contradictory messages, has, according to Evans (1995b) not only expanded the reach and status of discourses about sex, but has also created a representational terrain far more complex than in the past. While a Chinese version of what Plummer (1988) calls the moral model of AIDS discourse still features heavily in many official constructions of AIDS, it is by no means the only, nor always the dominant construction. Alongside it can be found a multitude of other voices: the voice of biomedicine, the voice of what Scollon (1997b) calls Dengist Utilitarianism, and the voices of the marketplace which emphasize pleasure and individual choice. Even moral discourses themselves are not as simple as some critics make them out to be, sometimes drawing on Confucian or neo-Confucian values, sometimes evoking the principles of scientific socialism, and sometimes resembling more the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West. In China Responds to AIDS (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997), the Ministry of Healths official 1997 statement on the state of the epidemic, for example, voices of traditional Chinese values are mixed with a kind of global ethical voice which one might call UNAIDS-speak, a
10

According to official data, 12% of China 225 million Internet users have logged on to medical and drug Web pages. In fact, so prevalent are Internet web pages about health related topics, including what are know as on-line clinics where doctors render diagnosis without even seeing the patient, that the government recently issued stricter regulations to control such content citing the spread of alarming and bogus information about AIDS and other diseases (Chan 2000)

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mixture of Western individualism, globalization, biomedical ethics and human rights discourses in a genre that more resembles a promotional pamphlet than a government report. At the same time, unofficial and oppositional approaches to AIDS and sex often make more use of moral or revolutionary forms of discourse than their government sponsored counterparts. Friends Exchange (), a newsletter for men who have sex with men featuring personal ads and AIDS prevention information, for example, features political slogans and revolutionary rhetoric (see chapter seven), and products like condoms and potions to prevent HIV transmission or maintain erections sometimes feature on their packages moral or patriotic sayings taken directly from government propaganda campaigns (see chapter three). Some of them also display a their packages the seal of approval of such bodies as the Ministry of Health, the Peoples Liberation Army (Forney 1999, Scandrett 1995) and the Chinese Association for the Prevention of STDs and AIDS () (Liu Yu 1998a). Perhaps the most subversive effect the commercialization of sex in China has had is not to undermine the tenets of socialist sexual morality but rather to poach many of its cultural tools into its own discourse.11 This poaching of cultural tools, however, works both ways. Faced with an increasingly eroticized marketplace, official party publications are themselves becoming increasingly racy, using, for example, photos of women in erotic poses on their covers in an attempt to get peoples attention (Evans 1997). Official AIDS and STD prevention
11

Another example of the appropriation of official voices into commerce can be seen in a story in the Far East Economic Review about Zhao Rongde, producer of Healthy Happy Oil, a potion which promises both to increase sexual pleasure and to kill the AIDS virus, which reports that the entrepreneur considers his enterprise a matter of duty and himself a patriotic do gooder, helping protect fellow Chinese from the viral pandemic (Forney 1999).

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efforts as well are increasingly making use of tools from commercial marketing and advertising to sell AIDS knowledge (see chapter five), and more and more the lines between commercial promotion of products and public promotion of health are being blurred. Materials like the publications of (government sponsored) NGOs and program booklets distributed at government AIDS Prevention Exhibitions and conferences often contain advertisements for commercial products like and hygienic toilet seat covers (All China Venereal Disease and Leprosy Control Center et al. 1996), and a number of AIDS prevention activities get their funding from foreign commercial concerns like Durex as well as from local companies.12 Along with this increasing mixture of voices from different domains in both official and unofficial discourse about HIV, and to some extent driven by the AIDS crisis itself, is the reluctant recognition by health authorities (and the less than reluctant recognition by the marketplace) of heretofore invisible groups like commercial sex workers, IV drug users and homosexuals, and spirited debates both within government and academic circles and in the popular press about the extent to which the existence of such groups should be legitimized. Among the most conspicuous of these emergent communities (and the ones I will be most concerned with in this thesis) are those composed of men who have sex with men (MSM). Although homosexual behavior has never been illegal in China, in the past, political pressures which equated nearly every form of social deviance with hooliganism, the lack of a cultural basis for the imagination of identity around sexual

12

The most aggressive promotion of condoms in the country comes from condom manufacturers themselves and social marketing companies like DKT International (DKT International 1997, China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997).

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practices (Chow 1997), and the absence of the economic conditions that fueled the establishment of gay communities in urban centers in the West (DEmilio 1993), opportunities for the formation of community ties among MSM were severely limited. Today, however, with the changing economic conditions and the introduction of new technologies of communication, this situation is rapidly changing. Every Chinese city I visited in the last four years boasts at least one commercial venue (bar, disco, or karaoke lounge) catering to men who have sex with men, many of which advertise quite openly, and the explosion of heterosexual commercial sex has been accompanied by a similar explosion in homosexual commercial sex, both in the form of independent money boys who search for clients in parks and public toilets and in institutionalized forms such as host bars and massage parlors. The Internet is awash with web pages and chat rooms offering Chinese MSM the chance to avail themselves of news and information from both within China and outside, to express their opinions and experiences and to seek other like-minded men for friendship and sexual encounters (Langfitt 2000, Guangzhou Comrade 2000, Gay China 1997, Reddust 2000), and in several cities, MSM are exploring ways, sometimes with the sanction of government officials, of taking collective action to improve the lot of MSM and promote nondiscrimination and AIDS prevention (Aizhi action 1999, Comrades Hotline 1999, Zhang 1998a). Although public debate about homosexuality is still very circumscribed and popular views still project (it) as a sickness or a perversion (Evans 1997: 384), the increased attention the issue is attracting in popular and academic publications (see for example Fang 1995b, Li 1998, Zhang 1994, 1996) as well as in official discourses is unprecedented.

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It would be a mistake, however, to view the emergence of homosexual identity in China through the perspective of Western gay liberation Discourse. First of all, the forms of discrimination faced by MSM in China are very different from those in the West, mostly taking the form of pressures to conform to Confucian roles within the family rather than the widespread physical violence against gay men and legal prohibitions against sodomy seen in places like the United States. Second, because of differing cultural and political circumstances, the strategies used by these emerging communities in China are often quite unlike the individualistic identity politics (Sampson 1993) pursued by Western gay activists. As in many other countries, the organization of AIDS discourse around communities and issues not previously legitimized by the government has to some extent disrupted existing political structures and discourses of power (Altman 1993). As I shall argue in subsequent chapters, however, the forms these challenges to mainstream ideologies take, and the uses to which the emergent identities they engender are put, can sometimes be very different from those one might witness in the West. This emergence of new forms of identity and new forms of social organization has not been restricted to MSM and other subaltern groups. The economic reform program has created a whole host of new types of leisure and private spaces which have enabled people from all strata to accumulate private caches of social capital' (Bourdieu 1991, Davis 2000: 13, Wang 1995) and made it possible for them to, to varying degrees, eschew traditional identities and go lifestyle shopping (Barm 1998: 272) in the increasingly free and open life-chance markets (Farrer 2000: 245). Attempting to come to terms with this negotiation in which citizens position themselves in various ambiguous and overlapping fields of participation with the state and other (sometimes subversive)

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imagined communities in the context of a rapidly changing discursive marketplace is essential to understanding how AIDS prevention messages are produced and consumed both in the public area and in the privacy afforded by the new spaces that these emergent communities have opened up (Wang 1995).

2.3 Competing Discourses

These changes in the ways sex is talked about and acted upon in China and the ways sexual identity is constructed are part and parcel of larger social changes occurring in the country which some scholars see as evidencing a general redefinition of the relationship between the individual and the state (Brook and Frolic eds. 1997, Chamberlain 1993, Evans 1995b, Goodman and Hooper eds. 1994, Madsen 1993, White et. al 1996), or what one might call a shifting in the relationship among discourse, social practices and social identity. According to Evans (1997: 80), since the 1980s the boundaries between public and private havebeen redrawn, necessitating a new approach to government propaganda in which the balance between public and private fluctuates depending on the party-states valuation of the specific theme addressed (98). The relatively monologic character of discourse from the recent past has given way to a situation where different voices intertwine and compete. Gu (1996), in his examination of discursive practices in post-Mao China from political speeches to commercial advertising, describes two of these competing voices which he calls the Discourse of Revolution and the Discourse of Reform.13 The

13

Although Gu uses a small d in labeling these Discourses, his working definition of discourse, the way people interpret things and interact under the influence of a particular ideology, is not far from my conceptualization borrowed from Gee. While Gu focus on discourses more as ways of talking, conceptualizing them as capital D Discourses can widen our perspective to seeing them also as ways of performing recognized social practices and recognized social identities.

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Discourse of Revolution, he says, embodies a militant, offensive political project of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It enforces social relationships of collectivism, conformity and self-denial and operates chiefly through coercion. Although this discourse was once the dominant discourse in socialist China, today it must compete with other voices in a more open ideological marketplace. The Discourse of Reform, on the other hand, which grew out of the policies of Deng Xiaoping, embodies a more defensive and corrective political project emphasizing economizing over politicizing, allows for a more individualistic and self- assertive approach to relationships between citizens and society, and operates more through persuasion. What distinguishes these two voices most, however, is a fundamentally different conceptualization of the relationship between discourse, social practice and social identity. Whereas the Discourse of Revolution is characterized by an attempt to change the world to fit discourse (e.g. Put politics in command), the Discourse of Reform attempts to fit discourse to the world (e.g. Seek truth from facts). Despite their differences, these two ways of talking about the world and enacting social and political identities do share some important features, the most important being that they both call on citizens to undergo a fundamental transformation in consciousness (/), through which people come the recognize themselves as new kinds of social beings (Anagnost 1997). In the Discourse of Revolution this involves a process of study and struggle through which one becomes aware of the role, responsibility, basic interests and historical mission of the proletarian class (Li 1995: 195). In the Discourse of Reform it involves embracing a scientific view of life and devoting ones whole being to the task

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of modernization, as Deng put it, pursu(ing) construction heart and soul (1993: 9, quoted in Gu 1996: 9). In the political area, these two competing discourses (Lee 1992) can be seen in what Gu calls the constant discursive tugs of war between leftists and rightists. These tugs of war, though, are not confined to the chambers of power, but can be seen in almost every corner of Chinese discursive life from advertising practices to health promotion. In AIDS education a reflection of these two Discourses can be seen in the moral education approach to AIDS prevention, characteristic of many of the examples given above, which seeks to change the way people behave in accordance with socialist values and the laws and regulations of the state, and a health education or medical approach, which seeks to mold AIDS prevention efforts to actual social conditions (no matter how much these conditions contradict the official reality of the Party). In prevention efforts the interaction of these two approaches is evident in debates regarding whether or not harm reduction measures (like the provision of condoms to sex workers and clean needles to IV drug users) should be pursued (see below). In the wider political arena, these two approaches surface as tools in the struggle for dominance within the Party between more conservative elements and more reformist elements. AIDS, in this regard, is in many ways the perfect device with which to wage political warfare, encapsulating all of the major conflicts between the opposing camps: the question of public versus private behavior and the relationships between the individual and the state, the question of how far opening to the outside world should go, and the question of capitalism and the social ills which can accompany it. The most important thing about these contrasting models, however, is that (like the Discourses of Revolution and Reform

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from which they are derived), whether they are found in political speeches or AIDS prevention texts, one seldom appears without its dialogic partner. In the revolutionary/moral model of AIDS prevention, HIV transmission is viewed in the framework of a polarized view of the world (evil/good, foreign/Chinese, bourgeois/proletariat, unsafe/safe). HIV is constructed as a foreign enemy, a result of the invasion of sexual freedom (), drug addiction and commercialization from the West. Consistent with the militant/offensive political style of the Discourse of Revolution, this model aims to prevent transmission chiefly through coercion: the staging of high profile campaigns to, for example, battle the seven evils ()14 (Gil 1991) and the implementation of severely worded regulations with names like Strongly Cracking Down on Prostitution, Whoring, Drug Abuse and Strengthening the Management of Public Social Order (He 1990).15 Along with legal solutions, this approach also emphasizes moral education and adherence to traditional values regarding sex (though what is constructed as traditional is often ambiguous). While this (essentially atheist) voice rarely portrays HIV as punishment from God, as the Western Religious Right has, it is, nonetheless,

14

pornography, gambling, prostitution, kidnapping, the sale of women and children, preying on peoples superstitions, and drug trafficking 15 In fact, more than anything else, AIDS prevention in China has been characterized by an aggressive legal response. In January 1988, thirty-three Regulations Regarding the Monitoring and Control of HIV/AIDS were issued by the Ministry of Public Health (He 1990), and in February 1989 the Law Preventing Infectious Diseases of the Peoples Republic of China was passed by the National Peoples Congress, which, among other things, requires that foreigners staying in China for more than one year bear proof of negative HIV antibody status, provides for criminal prosecution of those who, knowingly infected, pass on the virus to others, and furnishes provinces with the right to restrict the movement of HIV positive individuals (He 1990, Gil 1991). In 1999, however, these regulations were revised to increase the protection for people with HIV against discrimination and the violation of confidentiality (Regulations Protect HIV Carriers 1999).

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depicted as the consequence of evil (), degenerate () and even unpatriotic behavior and associations, the inevitable result of bourgeoisie liberalization. The dilemma the Party faces, however, in appropriating this voice to combat AIDS is that the commercialism and bourgeois values that it condemns are the very values upon which the states program of economic reform and rapid modernization depend, and the state itself has taken a major role in promoting the very culture of desire that this model blames for bringing chaos and disease into the country. The second problem with this construction is that it fits uneasily onto everyday reality in China in which drug addiction flourishes despite government crackdowns and commercial sex is widely available even in state or People Liberation Army run hotels, nightclubs and resorts. Finally, this approach risks inviting criticism from foreign AIDS experts and international organizations, many of whom AIDS prevention efforts in China depend on for funding. The reformist/medical model of AIDS prevention, on the other hand, shifts its emphasis away from moral arguments and towards economic and scientific arguments, portraying AIDS as a threat to the program of economic reforms and the consumer comforts that come with it and judging prevention strategies based more on their effectiveness than their political correctness. Rather than crime and foreign values, the greatest barriers to AIDS prevention are seen to be ignorance and the relative backwardness of Chinas health system.16

16

To find a scapegoat in Western culture and ignore all these internal factors, cautions Qiu Renzong (1996a), for example, is not only misleading but harmful to the effective prevention of further spread of HIV/AIDS.

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Finally, this model trades in the focus on AIDS prevention as a collective responsibility (a patriotic duty) for an individualistic approach to prevention which focuses on vulnerability, choice and individual rights. If we cannot safeguard individual rights, claims Qiu (1996a), there will be no guarantee to protect public health. Like the revolutionary/moral approach, there are also significant obstacles to this approach gaining dominance, mainly because in the eyes of many officials it directly threatens the power of the state and it often too blatantly highlights the contradictions between the reality portrayed in official discourse and the reality of citizens actual lives. While these two approaches seem on the surface incompatible, as we saw above, and as I will demonstrate throughout this thesis, they are often appropriated in ways that make their relationship seem more complimentary than contradictory, revolutionary voices sometimes appropriated for reformist goals, and reformist voices for revolutionary ones. The 1993 report of the State Council Research Group (quoted in China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997: 40), for example, calls the AIDS pandemic an obstacle to the development of material and spiritual civilization, an enemy of reform and opening (sic) door policy and an invisible peril towards the social security and progress, a definition which promotes the economizing perspective of the reformist/medical approach (indeed which constructs the aim of AIDS prevention as protecting the reformist agenda) and yet uses the rhetoric of the revolutionary approach (AIDS as an enemy and an invisible threat). Another example of revolutionary and reformist voices coexisting in the same text is the official Handbook of AIDS/STD Propaganda and Education ( ) (China Ministry of Health et al. 1998a), which accommodates them by

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appropriating the temporal boundary between the present, and the immediate threat AIDS poses to the nations material well- being, and a utopian future when the states vision of law, order and morality can be realized. Reformist voices in the excerpt call for opening to the outside world and seeking truth from facts. Revolutionary voices assert Chinas cultural and political uniqueness and affirm that the ultimate purpose of AIDS education is to teach people how to be morally upright, law-abiding socialist citizens.
The permanent cure is to promote education according to the legal system and morality, and the temporary cure is to draw on the successful experiences of other countries, such as promoting the use of condoms to prevent disease and encouraging unreformed drug addicts not to share needles. Therefore, by seeking truth from facts, and understanding both the long-term solution and the immediate urgency of prevention, we must strive for a strategy which conforms to our nation's conditions and is in line with existing policy. (12)

On the level of practical use, then, what matters most about these competing discourses is not their ideology, but their instrumentality in a situation where the revolutionary aim to change the world to fit discourse clearly cannot work, and the reformist aim to change discourse to fit the world is politically untenable. In part what makes the reconciliation of these two voices possible, not just in AIDS prevention discourse but in a great many spheres of Chinese public life, is the mediation of a third Discourse which borrows tools from both the Discourses of Revolution and Reform but mobilizes them in very different ways. This new discourse of means (Gu 1996), which brings into harmony the voices of economizing and politicizing, and, in the case of AIDS prevention, harm reduction and moralizing, is

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called by Anagnost (1997) the Discourse of Civilization, a mixture of patriotism traditionalism and consumerism which calls for the development of a new kind of consciousness, one not based on class struggle or commitment to material progress, but based instead on the notions of civility () and quality (). The Discourse of Civilization is a hybrid of speech genres and social languages which According to Anagnost (1994: 274) covers a wide range of discourses and practices: birth control, child rearing, sanitation, education, technology, law, eugenics, etc. Although its roots extend in several directions Neo-Confucian ethics, the eugenics movement of the early Republican period (Diktter 1998) and the Patriotic Public Health Campaigns () of the fifties its official inception came with the Campaign to Build Spiritual Civilization (), initiated in the early eighties, a movement which stresses ethics, hygiene, scientific education, and raising the cultural level () of the people.17 One difference between this campaign and earlier more revolutionary ones, as Barm (1999) points out, is that it has appropriated commercial forms of discourse, propaganda taking the form of neon signs, TV variety shows and other politicotainment events, giving to the Campaign to Build Spiritual Civilization a decidedly material dimension. At the same time, this Discourse surfaces in the commercial world with products from clothing to sex aids advertised based on their association with modernity, hygiene, character and knowledge.

17

On September 28, 1986 at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Twelfth CPC Central Committee the Resolution on the Guiding Principles for Building a Socialist Society with Spiritual Civilization was promulgated. In it Spiritual Civilization is seen as an integral part of socialist modernization and the campaigns purpose is to help people to become well-educated and self-disciplined socialist citizens with lofty ideals and moral integrity, and to raise the ideological and ethical standards of the whole nation as well as its educational and scientific levels. (Li 1995:203)

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One way the Discourse of Civilization is able to accommodate both revolutionary and reformist voices is by dividing civilization itself into two types: material civilization (), the affluence and level of technological advancement of a culture, and spiritual civilization (), the cultures ethical standards. Rather than a Platonic dualism, however, the material and spiritual in this Discourse are constructed in a complementary relationship: Material culture is the foundation of spiritual culture, and spiritual culture give(s) impetus to progress in material culture and will ensure that material culture is going in the right direction (Li 1995: 238). One of the major binary oppositions separating the civilized from the uncivilized in this Discourse is that between stability () and chaos (), a distinction which on the one hand echoes deep-seated cultural values from traditional cosmology in which chaos in the society, chaos in the cosmos (in the form of floods or epidemics of disease), and chaos in the individual (in the form of illness or moral degradation) are all interrelated, each one a reflection of the others (Li 1993). It also echoes the more recent reformist distinction between Dengs policy of bringing order out of chaos () and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (Gu 1996, Li 1995, Link 1992). The distinction between order and chaos was also drawn between the state and the students and workers who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, and after June forth the Party touted the slogan: Stability Overrides Everything () (Li 1995: 465). Anagnost (1994: 275) claims that narrative(s) of despair which invoke the fear of luan (chaos) (and) expresses concerns about stability and social control are the current regimes main strategies to produce the willed consent for an authoritarian state.

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In AIDS prevention discourse, chaos () is constructed both as the cause of the epidemics spread, through, for example the social disorder caused by the floating population () (see chapter four) or promiscuity, referred to as sexual chaos (), and as the ultimate result of HIV infection on the infected, their family and society as a whole. Another important cultural category in this Discourse as it surfaces both in official and unofficial domains, is that of that of quality (), both as it applies to the cultural level of the population as a whole and to the character of the individual. The concept of quality (), in one sense summarizes the complete ideological perspective of this Discourse just as Red and Expert summarize the preoccupations of the Discourses of Revolution and Reform. In it are brought together notions of modernity, knowledge, hygiene, politeness, urbanity, wealth and taste. It is a term which Rofel claims indicates a broad-ranging semiotic politics in China. It arises in discussions about population control and desired kinds of children, about capitalism and the kind of Chinese subject who is capable of making wealth, as a way to constitute proper bourgeois subjects and to mark the divisions between urban and rural (Rofel 1999: 466). A preoccupation with the quality of the people is found not just in public discourse in China but saturates the language of everyday life. Anagnost (1994: 260-1) writes that the invocation of population quality ():
is not limited to official discourse. It underlies oppositional discourse, as well as pervading popular consciousness. In this circulation of meaning, the pronouncements of the state, where they are most vague and tentative, are elaborated in great detail in popular speech and practice as well as in mass media and scholarly discussion. The power of this discourse to articulate an historical

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accounting for the continuing failure of China as a nation to come to its own, to assume its rightful place among the developed nations of the late twentieth century, suggests that it has displaced the discourse of class to become a new currency of exchange in the politics of perception and experience of the last ten years one that easily traverses the boundary between state and society.

One domain in which the voices of the Discourse of Civilization are particularly resonant is that of public health, in which medical work is seen as part of the effort to build the country culturally and public health workers are encouraged to foster an ethic based on promoting good manners, courtesy, hygiene, good public orderand encouraging excellence in mentality, language and behaviour (Peoples Publishing House 1986: 13-14). This ethic is in some ways quite different from the Lei Feng morality 18 of earlier times emphasizing personal sacrifice and blind devotion, one in which civility, politeness, professionalism and personal development count for more than revolutionary fervor. This ethic also surfaces in domains (and professions) not sanctioned by the state, a story in the Harbin Daily () (STD patients and STD doctors 1998), for example, quoting a sex worker interviewed in an STD clinic as saying that she was there to get a check-up in order to observe professional morality ( ).19 As I shall show throughout this thesis the Discourse of Civilization provides the primary system through which HIV/AIDS is constructed in official discourse, generating
18

One of the major campaigns of the 1960s was one in which citizens we urged to learn from Lei Feng, a semi-mythical soldier who was known for his unwavering willingness to sacrifice himself for the people and the Party. The spirit of doing good deeds and serving the people whole-heartedly was known as Lei Feng spirit () (Li 1995:228). 19 One survey among women sex workers (Liu 1992, cited in Pan 1996b) found that about one third considered their activities to be legal and a high percentage believed their services not only benefited themselves but also their clients and played an active role in reducing the occurrence of sexual offences and maintaining order in society.

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portrayals of HIV vulnerability as a consequence of ignorance, backwardness, and lack of quality () among the people, and AIDS prevention as a matter of promoting civilized, sophisticated behavior (whether that means being faithful to ones wife or properly using a high quality condom see below). It also, however, finds its way into everyday talk about sex and AIDS, used a major tool in sexual decision-making and assessments of risk (potential partners often being labeled safe or risky based on their perceived level of civilization and quality). In order to illustrate the power of this Discourse to shape the ways people talk about and act around AIDS in China, I will examine below a debate that took place in Chinas press in 1998 when authorities in Guangzhou ordered advertisements for condoms to be removed from city busses. Although the debate around this issue pitted the revolutionary/moral model of AIDS prevention against the reformist/medical model, what is interesting about it is that parties advocating the moral approach rarely talked about morality, and those who advocated a medical approach rarely talked about public health. Rather, both sides framed their arguments within the cultural categories of the Discourse of Civilization.

2.4 Condoms and Commercialism

As we shall see in later chapters, condoms have an ambiguous place in AIDS prevention discourse in China both in the public discourse of health promotion pamphlets, in which instructions for condom use are often presented side by side with warnings regarding their effectiveness and moral exhortations for monogamy or celibacy (see chapter five), and in private discourse of sexual negotiations, where they can be used to claim or impute identities of safety or risk depending on the situation and the 101

relationship between partners (see chapter seven). On the official level, while the Ministry of Health has advocated the aggressive promotion of condoms to prevent AIDS and other STDs, the debate as to whether and how much condoms (as opposed to more moral solutions) should be promoted (for disease prevention)20 and the effect such promotion might have on social order still continues in official circles. Often the efforts of the Ministry of Health to implement its policy of condom promotion are stymied by other Ministries (like the Ministry of Public Security), particularly when it involves special populations () (like female sex workers, men who have sex with men, and migrant workers). The debate regarding condoms in China is not just limited to matters of policy or prevention programs but even extends to arguments about what condoms should be called. Most official discourse adopts the standard Mainland usage biyuntao () (lit. avoid pregnancy sheath) which invokes the Discourse of family planning ( ) and emphasizes the use of condoms for contraception and population control, but others (particularly in journalistic and commercial discourse and the language of everyday life) are increasingly using the terms anquantao () (lit. safety sheath) and baoxiantao () (lit. insurance sheath), belonging more typically to the Discourse of public health and more characteristic of official usage in Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively. Each of these words is, in effect, a miniature instruction manual on how to use the object it signifies. Along with these instructions come ideological positions, which mirror the competing models of AIDS prevention outlined above. With
20

Condoms, of course, have long been promoted in the context of family planning, with the state providing free condoms to married couples, though not to single people. In fact, up until a few years ago, the possession of a condom by a single woman might have been used by Public Security officers as evidence of either bourgeois decadence or sex work.

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them as well come the accents of the three different political and cultural environments from which these words come: Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. In a National Health Education Institute () pamphlet for gay men, for example, readers are warned: You cannot regard a condom (biyuntao) as a condom (anquantao) or a condom (baoxiantao) () (China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation et al.1995b). The implication of the statement, of course, is that condoms should not be regarded as safe or as a kind of insurance against infection. It is achieved through arranging not just the words but also the Discourses they give voice to in an oppositional relationship, the condoms role in family planning portrayed as somehow precluding it taking a role in public health.21 Despite this debate, condoms are widely available commercially, sold at drugstores, department stores, sex shops, street stalls and, in some cities, vending machines.22 The commercial marketing of condoms in China, however, has at times met with interference from the state. One of the most highly publicized cases occurred in November of 1998 when the Guangzhou Provincial Industrial Bureau ordered the Junwen Company (), sole distributor of the British made condom Jissbon (), to remove a series of advertisements bearing the slogan: Use condoms, Prevent AIDS () from the sides of city busses in accordance with the Rules Regarding the Prohibition of the Publication and

21

Of course the most significant (and ironic) thing about this statement in the context of a pamphlet for gays is that by limiting the role of the condom to its contraceptive function the authors render it irrelevant in sex between men. 22 China is, in fact, one of the worlds largest producers of condoms, manufacturing more than one billion per year, of which 85% are distributed free of charge by family planning centers, while about 15% are sold in pharmacies and department stores. (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997:13)

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Broadcasting of Products Related to Sexual Life (

).
The removal of the Jissbon condom ads from the sides of Guangzhou busses, particularly ironic as it came just a few weeks before World AIDS Day, generated a lively debate in the national press regarding whether or not condom advertising should be permitted by law, with most media commentators and many officials coming out strongly in favor of it. The international press also made much of the incident and foreign and international AIDS organizations expressed their concern (China bans condom advertisement 1999, China marks World AIDS Day 1999). An example of this debate can be seen in an article published concurrently in the Western Capital Daily (

) and the China Youth Daily () entitled Condom Advertisement Runs Up

Against a Red Light () (Liu Yu 1998a). The article is based on interviews with several of the main players in the controversy including the vice-division head of the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Industry and Commerce Advertising Administration Division, Cao Chengjiu () and General Manager of the company responsible for the ads, Zhan Hongshui (), as well as a number of other experts and officials like Wang Zhiqiang (), Director of the Municipal Family Planning Center of Shenzhen, the relatively liberal Special Economic Zone just south of Guangzhou, and Huang Gongshan (), Assistant General Manager of the Shenzhen based condom manufacturer Source of Life Health Products Company ( ). Immediately following this article in the Western Capital News is another, which

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is based on roving reporter interviews with members of the general public (Liu Yiu 1998b). As in the example above, much of this debate turns on what condoms are to be called and what kind of instruction manual and ideological position are to be attached to them. Unlike the example above, however, in this case the term anquantao (safetysheath) is appropriated more by those opposed to condom promotion than those in favor of it. The Ministry of Industrys Directive 210 (284) (China Ministry of Industry 1998), for example, states:
Condoms (safety sheath) (condoms) (prevent pregnancy sheath) are products related to sexual life. Advertising them should be dealt with in accordance with the National Ministry of Industrys administrative office Rules Regarding the Prohibition of the Publication and Broadcasting of Products Related to Sexual Life

It is in part through being labeled anquantao () (safety sheath) (a label which is nevertheless flagged with scare quotes followed by the proper term biyuntao in parentheses) that condoms come to be products related to sexual life (rather than products relating to population control). Also in contrast to the example above, those favoring the promotion of condoms appropriate the discourse of family planning. Condoms are an important resource in family planning, ( ) says one of the interviewees:

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promoting the proper use of condoms is respecting and safeguarding women. Condoms and sex tools are two different concepts. Condoms are medical instruments. You can't equate them with those sex tools, masturbation implements. Or else the concept is not clear.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the arguments from both sides in this article is how little the threat of AIDS figures into them, even though the ad itself consisted of what is essentially an AIDS prevention message. Rather both sides primarily frame their arguments in terms of things like modernity, civility, culture (or the national conditions ),knowledge and the quality of the population () . Shenzhen Municipal Industrial Bureaus Li Xioaliang offers the argument, for example, that the peoples knowledge of sexology is not yet sufficiently developed for condom advertisements to be accepted:
The extent of sex education in foreign countries and China is not the same. The knowledge of sexology of young people in some foreign countries is much greater than people of the same age in China.' Li Xiaoling thinks, 'Media like newspapers and television have a great influence on children. At the current level of sex education in our country, a great amount of promotion is not good.'

On the pro-condom side, Wang Zhiqiang of the Shenzhen City Family Planning Services Center argues:
96 If you say that condoms are products related to sexual life, then Id say they are products for population control and raising the quality of the population.

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Condom advertising is constructed not just as a way of improving the quality of the people, but also as a way of proving it, a matter of national pride. Wang continues:
? If this kind of new thing is not supported, it shows that our race is too fragile, our leaders are too fragile. How can they think that just because Jissbon advertises that China will sink into chaos?

As important as the quality of the people () in the Discourse this article articulates is the quality of the product (). It is noted, for example, in defense of the advertisements that Jissbon condoms had passed the tests of the National Family Planning Product Quality Center ( ) and had been awarded the distinction of recommended product () by the Chinese Association for the Prevention of STDs and AIDS ( ). The way product quality is constructed, though, is never totally separate from the notion of the quality of the people. What joins these two types of quality is the concept of brand consciousness, a concept which is championed by medical workers and entrepreneurs alike. Wang Zhiqiang, director of the Shenzhen City Family Planning Services Center, for example, is quoted as saying:
'There are famous brands of cars and watches, but have you heard of famous brands of condoms?'Condoms should be able to advertise!' Director Wang said, 'because if you don't let condoms advertise, then famous brands of Chinese condoms will not develop, which will give rise to sham products in the condom market.

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Like the class consciousness of the Discourse of Revolution, brand consciousness is constructed not just as a way of thinking, but as a way of being and a way of displaying social identity as a civilized, knowledgeable and modern citizen. It is not just a tool of the individual consumer, but a civic duty, which can sweep the marketplace of corrupt merchandise and promote both commercial morality and the nations economic prosperity. In its statement at the end of the article, Junwen Company calls for a change of consciousness among the leaders in the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, one which it observes, using the tactic of playing two enemies off each other, that the Ministry of Public Security has already achieved:
The attitude of the Ministry of Public Security has changed. We hope the Sate Administration for Industry and Commerce changes their idea and understanding of condoms.

In the man on the street interviews that appear after the article, citizens also give voice to the Discourse of Civilization, appropriating the dual concepts of quality () and quality () along with the voices of science and morality to construct a consumerist ethic in which the real moral question is not whether or not condom companies advertise but whether or not they do so in a tasteful way:
Doctor Yang, Doctor Cao: It should be allowed, but it shouldn't be commercialized, but should be for the public good, natural. What kind of condom advertisement can you accept? A visitor: Healthy, scientific, not low-class and obscene.

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Several visitors: None of us have even seen a condom advertisement, so it's hard to judge. But this kind of advertisement shouldn't pursue sensory stimulation or make people disgusted.

What is significant about the Discourse of Civilization and the various cultural categories, social practices and social identities that it makes possible is that it can accommodate two contradictory points of view, both the view that spiritual civilization must guide the development of material civilization, as is the position of those opposing condom advertising, and the view that material advancement can raise the spiritual level of the population, as is the argument of those advocating condom advertisements. In this case the two civilizations are mediated through the concept of quality, the quality of the people (), manifested in a scientific and discerning attitude towards life naturally gives rise to quality () products, and the promotion of quality products advances the spiritual quality () of the people. Regarding the advertisement of condoms in China, the debate continues. While Jissbon condom ads never reappeared on the busses of Guangzhou, sex shops in the city and elsewhere continued to fill their windows with eye-catching displays of condoms. A year after this incident, also around World AIDS Day, a similar case occurred, this time regarding the banning of a television ad for AIDS prevention produced not by a commercial concern but by a government department (China bans advertisement 1999, China bans condom 1999). A few months later, however, condom machines appeared in residential areas, college campuses, subway stations and public toilets in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, placed there by the State Family Planning Commission (Zhu 1999). These machines, also sporting colorful posters promoting condom use, came after a successful pilot project with such machines a year earlier,

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launched by the Shenzhen Family Planning Center right after Jissbon condom ads were removed from Guangzhou busses. It should be clear from the above that the issue of the prohibition of condom advertising in China is not as simple as it might at first seem. We are not in the position to observe the ins and outs of the palace game into which things like the removal of advertisements for condoms from city busses and the ritualistic sweep yellow campaigns are appropriated. Enough can be gleaned from the media, however, to surmise that these tools are sometimes as important for reformers as they are for conservatives, and that often the voices of knowledge, morality, quality and spiritual civilization are appropriated for very different purposes. One thing for certain is that rather than suppressing public discourse about condoms, prohibitions on advertising them have had the effect of opening up a lively public debate that promises to continue well into the future. What this example also shows is power of the Discourse of Civilization as a repository of cultural tools in contemporary China to accommodate multiple ideological positions and advance multiple sets of social practices and social identities. Attempts to identify this Discourse as belonging exclusively to the state or to popular discourse would be to misunderstand its broad articulation with a wide array of interests and concerns in post-Mao China, says Anagnost (1994: 278),
all of which produce different meanings and different political registrations for what appears discursively as the same language. Once again, in mapping this circuit of meaning, we must ask who is the speaking subject. In the context of post-Mao China, this question is further complicated by the proliferation of local identities, all of whom may be speaking the same language but producing meanings of their own.

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The degree to which a particular set of cultural tools or Discourse either constrains or amplifies peoples ability to take action to avoid HIV, whether on the level of advertising condoms, or on the level of buying them for personal use, depends not just on the boundaries set up by that Discourse, but also the ways the boundaries are appropriated and sometimes redrawn in particular situations. Understanding the effect such Discourse have on real life issues like the transmission and prevention of HIV, then, requires that they be viewed not just as the basis for technologies of social control, but also as the raw materials for tactics of social resistance. It is this process of appropriating and adapting voices from different Discourses both within and among communities of practice, not the Discourses themselves, which create the conditions in which individuals are either empowered or limited in AIDS prevention. In the next chapter I will suggest ways in which tools from linguistics can help us more firmly ground these technologies of control and tactics of resistance in the concrete features of texts and the interactions within which people appropriate them.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter 3 Cultural Tools and Cultural Toolkits

Those who are skilled in executing a Strategy Do not return again and again to levy taxes or to transport provisions. They bring what is useful from the organization And let their opponents show them the way to provisions. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Wing 1988: 37)

At the first China-Hong Kong Meeting on AIDS in Beijing in 1997, Peng Peiyun, the former head of the State Councils Expert Committee on AIDS, put an end to what was becoming an increasingly rancorous debate between delegates who advocated condom promotion and those who advocated programs encouraging abstinence and monogamy by declaring: black cat, white cat, as long as it can prevent AIDS, its a good cat. The delegates chuckled and the meeting proceeded smoothly to the next speaker. A year later over 200 Chinese men who have sex with men from all over the world, including Mainland China met on an island in Hong Kong for the Second Annual Chinese Comrades Conference. At the session on Mainland Comrade Strategies, delegates talked about how the movement could best be packaged in China in order to avoid attracting the ire of the government. Attendees from the Mainland in particular insisted that gay rights in China were not a matter of human rights, but a matter of education and increasing the knowledge of the masses. Theirs, they said, was a cultural movement, not a political one, one which would emphasize social work, promoting social harmony and public health. One delegate noted that the threat of AIDS would surely help the government understand how important this kind of social work was. At the end of the three-day congress a statement was released to the press proclaiming Western strategies of confrontation and coming out to be inappropriate for Chinese gays and lesbians, who instead needed to develop their own indigenous path towards liberation based on traditional Chinese social and family values. Both of the examples above involve the appropriation of what might be termed official voices (Penuel and Wertsch in press, Scollon 1998c, Wertsch 1997, Wertsch and OConnor 1994, Wertsch and Rozin in press) into interactions related in some way to AIDS prevention. In the first case, what is known as Black Cat- White Cat Theory ( ), an emblem of Dengist Utilitarianism (Scollon 1997b), is appropriated into the discourse of health promotion. The second example involves a more complex mixing 111

of several official voices, the voice of Chinese tradition with its focus on social harmony, family values and cultural uniqueness, the voice of health promotion, the voice of patriotism (and xenophobia), and the voice of what we called in the last chapter, the Discourse of Civilization (Anagnost 1994, 1997, Dutton 1998), with its emphasis on raising the quality of the people () through scientific knowledge and healthy cultural enrichment Theories of discourse like those reviewed in chapter one would have no trouble detecting these voices and tracing them to their institutional roots, nor would they be short of theories about how these voices operate on the ideological level as technologies of discipline which colonize or vampirize different spheres of life, organizing the social space in a way advantageous to some social groups and disadvantageous to others (Foucault 1969, 1973, 1977). An approach which focuses not just on discourse but on the micro-dynamics of its use in situated social actions might yield some similar observations about the power relationships between the users of these voices and their institutional and ideological sources. It would also, however, be in the position to tell another story, the story of that which happens beneath technology and disturbs its operation (de Certeau 1984: 200), a story that cannot be found in the voices themselves but must be discovered in the tactics speakers employ in appropriating them and the actions these appropriations make possible. It is, according to de Certeau (1984: 54), the story of how agents,
navigate among the rules, play with all the possibilities offered by traditions, make use of one tradition rather than another, compensate for one by means of another

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Taking advantage of the flexible surface which covers up the hard core, [and] creating their own relevance within this networksliding from one function to another, short circuiting economic, social and symbolic divisions.

A perspective focusing not just on the production of cultural products but also on their consumption would, for instance, in the case of our first example, be far less interested in how the voice of the Party has colonized the realm of AIDS prevention than in what the speaker actually accomplishes by appropriating this voice, putting an end to a seemingly irreconcilable and potentially embarrassing conflict in a way which explicitly aligns her with neither side, but, at the same time signals support for the pragmatic over the ideological. It would also observe the ironic distance at which both the speaker and the listeners hold this voice, taking obvious pleasure in twisting it to serve a purpose different from that for which it was originally intended. In the second example, attention would be shifted from the limitations official voices place on the ways gay and lesbian identities can be articulated to the ways these voices are appropriated to promote a cause which, in the past, they were mobilized against. It would note how in other texts at other times Chinese culture has been used to deny the existence of homosexuality and the voices of science and civilization used to label men who have sex with men perverts () and hooligans (), and how, by appropriating these voices, users manage to accommodate the unconventional within the discursive space of conventional values. It might also note how AIDS prevention here, rather than being the focus of the interaction, is appropriated as a means to other goals, social acceptance and non-interference by the state. Finally, it might point out that since that meeting in 1998, this strategy has been largely successful, with the government showing an increased willingness to support and fund AIDS and STD prevention 113

programs for men who have sex with men, programs which not only promote public health but also legitimize gay identity and strengthen networks for social organization.

3.1 Mediated Action and Sexual Risk

In chapter one I proposed that the principles of mediated discourse analysis can provide a useful framework for examining how cultural texts about AIDS affect peoples perceptions of the disease and their behaviors surrounding it. An approach focusing on mediated action, which sees both psychological processes and social interaction as functions of the various cultural tools available in the society and the creative ways individuals take them up, I argued, allows us to better deal with the problematic notion of culture and avoid the dangers of stereotyping and binarism (Scollon and Scollon 1995) that often accompany it. Rather than treating culture as an analytical object, it is seen as a collection of actions taken with tools, each with its own history, social placement and institutional consequences (Wertsch 1991, Scollon 1998a), and each continually changing as individuals and groups within the society appropriate them and modify them to suit their own purposes. The main project of mediated discourse analysis, then, is to understand how, through appropriating and mixing cultural tools, human beings invent their culture in real time, manipulating the relationship among discourse, social practices and social identity. From this perspective discourse and practice around AIDS can be seen to occur through a complex series of actions of appropriation in the form of mediational chains (Scollon 1998a). Public discourse about AIDS borrows and combines a wide range of voices to form constructions of the disease that link it to particular social practices and particular social identities. In turn, Individuals and groups, both those implicated in these 114

constructions and those exonerated, borrow and combine these tools and the Discourses that they invoke in new ways which may or may not conform to the expectations of the authors of the original constructions. Whether or not a cultural tool borrowed into any given situation makes the participants more vulnerable to HIV infection or less depends both on the tool and what the people involved do with it, and every time a tool is appropriated and mixed with another tool, its potential to either limit or expand participation in AIDS prevention changes. While traditional approaches to AIDS regard knowledge, beliefs and attitudes as things that individuals possess, in our model, knowledges, belief systems and evaluative stances are not things internal to the individual, but things he or she borrows strategically from the larger society and uses to achieve particular goals within particular communities of practice. The kinds of knowledge, beliefs and attitudes available to people are always multiple as they participate in multiple communities of practice, each with its own degrees of access to different cultural toolkits, and each with its own characteristic patterns of using these tools. A toolkit approach, says Wertsch (1991: 94) allows group and contextual differences in mediated action to be understood in terms of the array of mediational means to which people have access and the patterns of choice they manifest in selecting a particular means for a particular occasion. Understanding the heteroglossic nature of discourse around AIDS and the networks of intertextual links that it creates is essential for evaluating the effects different voices have on the ability of individuals and communities to protect themselves from HIV. It is also essential for understanding how people invent and imagine communities through the strategic mixing of symbols, stories, identity labels and social practices made

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available by their society. According to Kamberelis and Scott (1992: 359), intertextuality provides the link between micro and macro; particular intertextual links implicate and are implicated in particular social formations and political ideologies (emphasis mine). While helping us uncover the operation of ideology in discourse, the study of intertextuality and intertextual chains also helps to uncover the cracks in that operation, those places where speakers and writers slip through these intertextual chains and create new linkages that contest the ideologies and identities of the Discourses from which these voices are borrowed. Before going on to apply this framework to the texts I have collected and the conversations I was privy to, it is first necessary to clarify the key terms I will be using. They are:
Mediational Means: the physical and psychological objects which mediate between the agent and his or her social world. All mediational means embody a set of constrains and affordances, thus making some actions possible and others not.

Mediated Actions: the actions people take with the mediational means made available to them by their social environment. Mediated actions rarely take place in isolation, but are rather linked to other actions and their storylines; they are also rarely simple in their motivation, often having multiple and contradictory goals. Mediated actions are always shaped by the constraints and affordances of the mediational means that are used to carry them out.

Cultural Tools: a class of mediational means which, through being integrated into the homologous habitus (Bourdieu 1977) of a community of users, take on a certain symbolic social functions, indexing particular ideological positions, patterns of social relationships and community alignments. Cultural tools can be technical tools (like condoms and HIV antibody tests), or psychological tools, the three we shall be primarily concerned with here being discourse practices (or ways of saying), social practices (ways of doing) and social identities (ways of being) (Hasan 1996).

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Communities: the groupings, both physical and symbolic, with which agents align themselves when they appropriate cultural tools. The most basic grouping we will consider is the community of practice, people who do things together (Lave and Wenger 1991). Through collective participation over time, however, communities, and the identities that have grown within them, themselves become tools (imagined and invented communities) that can be combined with other ways of saying and ways of doing in contexts outside of the original community.

Discourses: the cultural toolkits from which members of society (with varying degrees of access) appropriate their ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being; Discourses are ideological complexes of discourse practices, social practice and social identities which are arranged in systematic relationships with one another to support the goals and worldviews of particular communities or institutions.

Voices: the ways Discourses are manifested in situated social action through the appropriation and mixing of ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being. A voice is not in itself a cultural tool, but instead that which is heard when particular cultural tools are appropriated into particular circumstances.

Sites of Engagement: moments of social engagement in which a window is opened through which participants can appropriate particular cultural tools (Scollon 1997a); a site of engagement includes both the setting of an interaction and the various practices and sets of procedural rules which adhere to that setting.

The way these concepts interact depends on two related processes continually taking place both on the level of communities or institutions and in the micro-dynamics of sites of engagement. The first I will, after Scollon (2000), call technologization. It is the process through which mediational means, actions and identities come to take on special meaning in a community or institution through being brought into relationships with other tools and practices within Discourses. Technologization is the way

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communities build tools for themselves and build themselves as tools. It is the way they imagine (Anderson 1991) themselves into existence and maintain themselves, continually introducing new cultural tools and new practices to meet changing social circumstances. The process of technologization is never entirely original; it is instead chiefly performed either through cobbling together parts of existing tools in new ways or by poaching tools from other communities and other Discourses. Technologization gives rise to standardization (Scollon 2000), wherein cultural tools discourse practices, social practices and identities which have been technologized within Discourses come to exert pressure on participants in a community so that not only does their use come to signal membership, but their failure to be used or their misuse comes under social disapproval, sometimes even resulting in exile from the community. The second process involves the strategic mobilization of technologized tools in specific moments of communication, a process I will be referring to using the Chinese character ji () (stratagems). Ji are calculated ways of mixing cultural tools so that speakers or writers are able to overcome the constraints embodied in them in ways that, for the powerful, shape the game to allow them to retain their privileged position, and, for the less powerful allow them to exploit the cracks in the game, creating new possibilities for social action and new ways of being in the world (Wittgenstein 1972). Ji are not necessarily grand strategies of dissidence or domination articulated through large scale campaigns, demonstrations or other public acts of resistance or control. Instead they are most often part of the tiny, everyday ways of operating (de Certeau 1984) in which the tension between the mediational means provided by the society and

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the unique uses of these means in actual life gives rise to a constant and calculated redrawing of the discursive topography.

3.2 Cultural Tools and Cultural Toolkits

Thus far I have been using the terms mediational means, cultural tools, and voices rather interchangeably. There are, however, important distinctions to be made among these three terms. I will be calling a mediational means anything through which agents take action with their environment. Wertsch (1998) divides mediational means into two types, technical tools, consisting of material objects like a pole-vaulters pole, a typewriter keyboard or a microphone, and what Vygotsky (1981: 137) calls psychological tools: language; various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings; (and) all sorts of conventional signs. Wertsch goes on to insist, however, that all mediational means, whether technological or psychological, are essentially material. Symbolic tools like languages find material expression in written texts and the acoustic signals of spoken language. For Wertsch (1998: 31), recognizing the external, material properties of mediational means has important implications for understanding how internal processes come into existence and operate. Such internal processes, he writes,
can be thought of as skills in using particular mediational means. The development of such skills requires acting with, and reacting to, the material properties oftools. Without such materiality, there would be nothing to act with or react to, and the emergence of socioculturally situated skills could not occur.

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Along with materiality, I would also add that all mediational means are essentially psychological or semiotic, that is, they exist simultaneously in the world and in the mind or, to use Bourdieus (1977) term, the habitus of the user. Just as psychological tools are made material through texts, utterances, practices and identities, material tools are transformed into psychological representations which combine in the users habitus with other psychological tools, resulting in fundamental changes to both the user (in terms, for example, of the skills Wertsch refers to above) and to the tools themselves, investing them with meaning and significance beyond that which they had before being appropriated into the habitus. Scollon (2000 chapter 4: 6) sees the material and psychological dimension of mediational means as having a dialectical relationship. He writes:
There is a dialectic between the external (material) aspects of the mediational means as an object in the world and the internal (psychological) structures of the person as one who has (or is) a habitus for using the mediational means. This dialectic ranges from nearly totally external, objective existence in the case of the novice user of the mediational means to nearly totally internal, psychological existence in the case of the expert.

In other words, the ability of a mediational means to mediate between users and their world is determined not by the material properties of the mediational means alone, but also by the psychological manifestation of the mediational means within the habitus of the user and the way it interacts with those of other mediational means that are concurrently available in that habitus. This brings us to the second important point Wertsch makes about mediational means: that they bring along with them what he calls constraints and affordances: they alter the scope of the agents ability to take certain actions and enact certain social

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identities, amplifying the possibility of some actions and identities and limiting the possibility of others. This amplifying and limiting nature of mediational means applies not just to the actions that they are used to take, but also to the other mediational means that can be employed along with them. Even when particular actions are afforded by mediational means, within these affordances themselves lie limitations. Scollon (2000 chapter 4: 6) writes:
The mediational means never fits the action exactly. Only some of the characteristics may be called upon in any specific action. Thus a mediational means affords some actions, but this lack of exact fit to concrete actions means the mediational means also limits and focuses that action. Thus the mediational means is transformative of actions that are taken by both doing and saying more and less than is intended by the users.

At the same time, however, it is this very lack of fit between mediational means and the actions that they are used to take that results in the altering of mediational means to fit the contingencies of particular circumstances and goals. The constraints and affordances embodied in mediational means are not entirely deterministic of what users can do with them. Mediational means are by their very nature multifunctional and polysemic, open to appropriation into a wide range of actions outside of their normative uses in combination with other mediational means they might not normally be associated with (Scollon 2000). Thus, limitations imposed by tools can often be overcome through strategically mixing them with other tools that offer different configurations of constraints and affordances, playing the constraints and affordances of some tools off of the constraints and affordances of others in a complex balancing act which de Certeau (1984: 54) compares to students manipulating their grade point average, balancing a

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high grade in an easy course with a low grade in a difficult course. It is this process of calculation which, as I will argue below, forms the basis of ji () (stratagems). The third important characteristic of mediational means is that they carry with them the histories of their past use, not just by current users, but by other users as well, linking them to larger sociocultural and sociopolitical storylines (Davies and Harr 1990, Gee 1999, van Langenhove and Harr 1999) and embedding users within the power and authority structures of their societies. It is through this accumulation of history that mediational means become associated with particular people, places, practices and other mediational means within the homologous habitus (Bourdieu 1977) of groups, thus being transformed into what we will be calling cultural tools. In a sense, a cultural tool is a mediational means with a story to tell. It is a psychological or technical tool that has been integrated into a systematic relationship with other tools to become part of what Gee (1996, 1999; Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996) calls Discourses, Foucault (1969, 1973, 1977, 1984) and Fairclough (1992) call orders of discourse, and Scollon and Scollon (1995) call discourse systems, cultural toolkits which grow out of and support the interests of specific communities of practice or social institutions. It is through their integration into Discourses that cultural tools come to contain, embedded within their patterns of constraints and affordances, the ideologies of particular institutions and communities of practice and the accents of those who have utilized and popularized them (politicians, poets, enemies and friends), and their appropriation and use in specific situations acts to invoke or give voice to these ideologies and accents. Wertsch, borrowing from Bakhtin, uses the term voices to describe cultural tools that are semiotic in nature (primarily verbal-ideological voices, what Kamberelis and

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Scott (1992: 368) call packet(s) of discourse replete with an ideology.) This use of the term voices is, however, in some ways unfortunate since it seems to privilege discursive tools over other kinds of tools: technical tools, social practices and social identities which, when appropriated can equally well give voice to Discourses. It also locates voices within cultural tools themselves rather than seeing them as contingent on how, when, where and by whom these tools are used and how they are mixed with other tools. While, as a linguist, the primary cultural tools I will be concerned with are, like Wertsch and Bakhtin, discursive tools or ways of saying including speech genres and social languages as well as visual semiotic systems (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) my interest in them is mainly in terms of how they interact with and affect two other kinds of cultural tools, namely social practices or, linked collections of actions and tools that come to be regarded as recognizable ways of doing (Gee 1996) in a community, and social identities and roles, recognized ways of being that people appropriate by claiming and imputing membership in various communities or institutions. Instead of using the term voices to refer to cultural tools themselves, I will be using it to refer to the relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity that is invoked when a particular cultural tool or combination of tools is appropriated into a particular set of social circumstances (site of engagement). In this sense, then, it might be better to speak of voicings as dynamic occurrences rather than voices as solid, reified things. This distinction is an important one because the appropriation of the same tool in different circumstances or in combination with different tools can actually give voice to different Discourses and be mobilized in the service of very different ideologies, as we saw in the example in the last chapter. Even in Baktins use of the term voices to mean

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social languages, ways of saying employed by certain kinds of people, and speech genres, ways of saying employed in certain situations, the inseparability of discourse, social practice and social identity is implicit. It also points to one of the main aims of mediated discourse analysis: to explicate the relationship among saying, doing and being in texts and social interaction, to understand how discourse is mediated through social practices and identities, and how social practices and identities are mediated through discourse (Scollon 2000). Thus, what Gee calls Discourses, the cultural toolkits from which we appropriate these tools, are not just collections of cultural tools, but chiefly collections of relationships among tools of saying, doing and being. Gee (1999:13) describes Discourses as:
Different ways in which we humans integrate language with non-language 'stuff', such as different ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols, tools, and objects in the right places and at the right times so as to enact and recognize different identities and activities (Gee 1999: 13).

Similarly, Kamberelis and Scott (1992) define them as socially and culturally informed systems of possibilities of knowing, being and acting (361). Through their invocation or voicing in the appropriation and mixing of cultural tools, Discourses create social positions (perspectives) from which people are invited (summoned) to speak, listen, act, read and write, think, feel, believe and value in certain characteristic, historically recognizable ways (Gee1996: 128). When we write or speak, however, we rarely ever give voice to only one Discourse. Rather, as a matter of course, we combine voices with other voices, fitting scraps of language from one Discourse into the social practices of another, injecting the 124

self of one social world into a different one, playing voices off of one another in complex and sometimes subtle ways. Hartman (1992: 297) summarizes the Bakhtinian position on voices when he writes:
Rather than possessing an inherent, hidden, inner, center, presence or voice utterances echo through and across texts with bidirectional traces and alternative leitmotifs threading through any given text. The view of the text that emerges is that of a centro, a space where various discourses, motifs and images are situated together into a patchwork intertext that resembles a collage/montage of others voices.

Through the strategic mixing of voices from different Discourses, speakers and writers construct in their texts and utterances Conversations among the different communities and institutions that go to make up the society in which they live. Just as Gee (1999) makes the distinction between small d discourse, the use of language (and other semiotic systems) in particular situations, and capital d Discourses, the systems of meaning (doing and being) potential which govern these instances of language use, he also makes the distinction between small c conversations, the interactions we have with one another through the deployment of texts (either spoken or written), and capital C Conversations, the (historic) conversations between and among Discourses, not just among individual people (Gee 1999: 34) which we give voice to when we appropriate and mix textual tools in situated (small c) conversations. The form these Conversations take depends, on the one hand, on the relationship among the Discourses invoked and the communities and institutions out of which they have grown, and, on the other hand, on the relationships which we forge among voices when we appropriate them into our situated social interaction. In the last chapter, for example, we noted how the long running Conversation between the Discourses of

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Revolution and, Reform, and the intervention into this Conversation of a new voices, that of the Discourse of Civilization, affects the way people in China construct their conversations about such issues as the advertisement of condoms. At the same time we saw how the creative ways people bring this capital C Conversation into their small c conversations also has the effect of altering and blurring the boundaries among these Discourses and altering the Conversation among them in fundamental ways. Understanding the conversations people have about AIDS, therefore, requires taking into account these larger socio-historical Conversations, and understanding these larger Conversations and the nature of the Discourses that engage in them requires that we attend to the real time negotiation of meaning and identity which constitutes situated conversations. Although Conversations derive their themes and motifs from Discourses and the ideologies they promote, they ultimately find their expression only in concrete texts and utterances; they are negotiated in and through texts (and utterances) in concrete situations of social exchange (Kamberelis and Scott 1992: 361). Among the potential difficulties in operationalizing concepts like of cultural tools, voices and Discourses is what Scollon (2000) calls the ambiguity of scope of these terms. As units of analysis their boundaries are not easy to fix. A cultural tool, for example, can be as small as a silicon chip or a single computer, or as large and complex as the system of linked computers known as the World Wide Web. In the case of semiotic tools, it can be as small as a single word (or even a single phoneme) or as large as the official history of the Soviet Union (Wertsch 1997, 1998, Wertsch and Rozin in press). Similarly, social practices can be as small as the practice of handing (Scollon 2000), as for example one person handing another an AIDS prevention pamphlet in a city park (see

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chapter six) or as large and complex as the practice of AIDS prevention and control ( ). Complicating the process of identifying cultural tools for the analyst is the fact that what might count as a cultural tool in one community may not be recognizable as one in another. The practices of looking or standing in a particular way which might be highly technologized into the Discourse of fishing () (cruising) by Chinese men who have sex with men might at the same time be utterly incomprehensible to nonfishing passersby. It is, in fact, the exclusivity of certain cultural tools to particular communities or institutions that helps make possible both the exercise of power by the powerful, and the subversion of that power by the less powerful. The only test, then, for whether or not a particular mediational means, be it psychological or technical, large or small, simple or complex, can be regarded as a cultural tool, depends finally on whether its users regard it as so, whether or not it has been objectified to the extent to which users can refer to it and can recognize it as linked in specific ways to particular practices and participatory roles within a community. Similarly, when particular cultural tools are appropriated into situations and mixed with other cultural tools, how do we know what Discourses are being invoked, what voices are being articulated and heard by participants? Given that voices can be articulated in discourse in so many varied and subtle ways, sometimes stretching over large segments of texts or interactions, other times finding expression in the choice of a single word, positioned in different oppositional or complimentary Conversations with one another, presented as belonging to the speakers or writers who borrow them, or taken up in order to be contested, sometimes even being disguised as or speaking 127

through other voices or being present though their omission, it is often difficult for the analyst to know where to begin in attempting to answer the very question which mediated discourse analysis takes as its starting point: Whose voice is this? (Scollon 1998a, Scollon et al. 1998). Again, this is an issue in which the theoretical agenda of the researcher must take a back seat to the lived experiences of the people he or she is studying. As Scollon (1997c) notes, understanding whose voice is being ventriloquated in the thicket of intertextual and interdiscursive borrowings that go to make up texts and utterances is an area where readings of the analyst become questionable. What is often more important than what discourse conventions are borrowed from, he observes, is what discourses the participants take them as coming from (1), and that can only be determined through an analysis of the actions people undertake through the appropriation of voices in their day to day interactions in communities of practice. Finally, as with cultural tools and voices, the boundaries separating Discourses and the criteria with which they can be identified are similarly ambiguous (Scollon 1997d). Although some Discourses seem to come with convenient labels attached to them like Western Democracy or Scientific Socialism, most do not. Most are tacitly embedded in the texts and social practices of communities in ways that are so taken for granted that they are difficult to label, or simply labeled common sense. Even for those systems that we might intuitively posit like the Discourse of Biomedicine or the Discourse of Traditional Confucian Values, it is often hard to state in exact detail the ideologies and power relationships these Discourses promote and how they promote them.

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Furthermore, Discourses, are, by definition, always historically located and constantly in flux as they carry out Conversations with other Discourses in the conversations of everyday life. They do not arise full fledged out of thin air, nor are they unilaterally formulated by particular individuals or communities of practice. Rather, they are negotiated through the intertextual and interdiscursive cross-pollination among the various communities of practice that takes place when people interact in social situations. In describing the ever changing, emergent nature of Discourses (which they refer to as orders of discourse), Candlin and Maley (1997: 204 ) note that Discourses are, by their very nature, unstable,
consisting of internally heterogeneous discursive practices whose boundaries are in fluxthis intertextuality becomes integrated into the complex discourses of such institutions as productive interdiscursivity. In such a way, not only are novel (inter)texts constructed, but novel (inter) discourses arise, representing new and as yet not fully stable orders of discourse.

Thus, from the point of view of the analyst, Discourses are always tentative and provisional constructs. In a sense they do not exist anywhere outside the mind of the analyst. What exists in the real world is only a constantly changing chorus of voices. Making these constructs useful tools for understanding the complex circulation of goods, ideas and practices in a society, especially when it is a society of which the analyst is not a member, demands an approach which moves back and forth between an analysis of the ways tools are used in particular social situations and the patterns of tool use that grow up over time in communities and institutions. What we call Discourses are ultimately inventions of the analysis pieced together through an analysis of the relationships among discourse, social practices and social identities in actual texts and interactions. Thus, they must be constantly interrogated and revised. 129

This is an important point to remember as we go on to explicate the various Discourses implicated in interaction around HIV and sex in China, particularly those which I introduced in the last chapter. Throughout this thesis I will be appropriating labels from other scholars like official and unofficial Discourses (Wertsch 1997, 1998), the Discourses of Revolution and Reform (Gu 1996), the Discourse of Civilization (Anagnost 1994, 1997), the Discourses of Dengist Utilitarianism and Neo-Confucianism (Scollon 1997b), the Discourses of Commercialism and Advertising (Barm 1999, Davies 2000), the Discourse of Human Rights (Chow 1997, Eenam and Hagland 1997), the Discourse of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Stribbe 1996), and the Discourses of the Subaltern (including the Discourse of the Liumang [] or Hooligan) (Dutton 1998). When I use these terms, however, I use them provisionally, with the awareness that what I am describing is patterns of relationships among ways of saying, ways of doing, and ways of being which I have pieced together through the analysis of material available to me, patterns which are continually evolving and interacting with other patterns. To describe a Discourse, then, is, in a very real sense, simply to describe a moment of history in the life of a society.

3.3 Hearing Voices

The weakness of many of the past studies which have utilized the concept of voices the studies by Wertsch and his colleagues on the ways people in America and the former Soviet Union mix official and unofficial voices in their accounts of the history of their nations, for example (Tulviste 1994, Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Penuel and Wertsch 1998, Wertsch and OConnor 1994, Wertsch and Rozin in press) is precisely that they fail to deal adequately with these issues, that they often lack a suitably 130

systematic model through which to hear voices and unravel the intertextual chains in texts and utterances (Fairclough 1992). Rather these studies tend to describe voices in rather impressionistic terms, based on things like themes, topics, registers and ideological perspectives instead of concrete structural features of texts. Recently there have been some attempts to describe voice appropriation in more systematic terms, Scollon and his colleagues (Scollon, 1998a, b, c, Scollon et al.1998), for example, using Faircloughs (1992a) notion of discourse representation. On the whole, however, these contributions have not gone far enough. Even Bakhtin, while presenting us with such an eloquent description of voices and their effect on discourse, still never provided us with a concrete and systematic method of hearing what he calls speech genres and social languages. A complete account of what people are doing when they borrow and mix the voices of others must, as Lemke (1995b: 85) says, take into account, the relations among lexicogrammatical, textual and intertextual resources for meaning within a community (Lemke 1995b: 85). As I mentioned in the first chapter, mediated discourse analysis deals with such issues by appropriating tools from various traditions of linguistic analysis into a framework that focuses on social action. Critical discourse analysis provides it with a way to detect intertextual borrowing in texts and utterances through an analysis of the lexico-grammatical and textual resources of the language, as well as a way to understand, also through these resources, how discourse practices contribute to the technoligization of cultural tools. Interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis provide tools with which to address issues concerning the moment-by-moment construction of activities and

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identities that people perform by appropriating these technologized tools (often in ways which pervert or subvert the technologization). As parts of larger systems of meaning, cultural tools carry with them rules or conventions governing their use and their relationship to other cultural tools. These sets of rules and conventions affect not just the circumstances in which different voices can be taken up and the kinds of speakers and writers to whom they are available, but also how they are invoked on the level of lexico-grammatical realization. The appropriation of particular tools acts to make certain structural features in a text possible and preclude others. Therefore, the mixing of voices always involves to some extent the mixing of systems, not just the mixing of different ideological perspectives, but also the mixing of different sets of rules and conventions of discourse practice. Understanding voice appropriation and intertextual borrowing, then, requires understanding what Fairclough (1992) calls discourse representation, the ways voices are articulated through the resources made available in the language (or other semiotic system) being used. Fairclough (1992a) divides intertextuality into two types: manifest intertextuality, the appropriation of the actual words of actual others, and constitutive intertextuality, the borrowing of conventional types and forms of discourse (what Bakhtin calls speech genres and social languages). Manifest Intertextuality is the much more straightforward and easily detected of the two. According to Fairclough (1992a), there are broadly two ways we can appropriate the words of others: either by placing boundaries around them, signaling through textual features like quotation marks and verbs of reporting that this voice is not our own, or by taking them up in ways that blur to various degrees and in various ways the boundaries

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between the borrowed voice and our own voice, like presupposition, negation, metadiscourse and irony. Scollon (1998b, c), in his analysis of textual features signaling intertextuality in academic discourse, journalism and advertising, borrows from Faircloughs typology and adds to it features like assertion, identification and self identification, metaphors and generative metaphors, fixed phrases, and naming. The ways speakers and writers manipulate the boundaries between their own words and the words of others conveys their attitude towards the voices they appropriate, and their relationship with other voices that are borrowed in the same text. They also, as Scollon points out, allow people to finely calibrate the claims and imputations of identity embodied in these acts of appropriation and adjust the level of participation they project for themselves in the particular communities and institutions that these borrowings signal. Constitutive intertextuality or interdiscursivity is more difficult to detect. It refers to the often rather subtle configuration of discourse conventions that go into the making of a text, discourse conventions which act to make possible various social practices and social identities. Fairclough mentions a number of features through which interdiscursivity can be observed in texts including genre, referring not just to text types but also conventions of production and consumption, activity type, the various structured sequences of actions that make up social interaction, mode, including not just whether the texts is spoken, written or multi-modal but also its rhetorical mode (whether or not it is, for example, argumentative, descriptive or expository), style, characterized by the tenor of the text, the way it shows the relationship between participants, and discourse, particular ways of constructing subject matter in terms of content, ideational meaning, and topic. Examples from my data which we have mentioned so far or will examine in

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subsequent chapters include such things as the appropriation of the generic features of health promotion discourse into commercial advertisements, the appropriation of the voice of epidemiology into casual talk between men who have sex with men, and the appropriation of the voice of science into moral tracts. Sometimes, however, as we shall see, these borrowings are manifested on the level of lexico-grammar in ways much less obvious than those listed above, through, for example, the choice of one particular lexical item over another or the relationships between lexical items set up through manipulating the languages system of transitivity. They can also be realized through features like modality and modulation through which authors set up certain relationships between themselves and their words and themselves and their readers or interlocutors. 3.3.1 Ideational Resources for Voicing One way that voices are articulated through the lexico-grammatical resources of the language is in the particular version of reality that they construct, a version of reality which contains particular things, persons and practices arranged in particular relationships with one another. Halliday calls this the ideational function of language (Halliday 1973, 1978). Perhaps the most obvious ways that we hear voices is in the words people use. Most people, for example, identify the voice of the doctor through the jargon associated with his or her profession. These words combine with certain grammatical conventions to make up a social language that we might call doctors talk, and also operate to signal moves in various speech genres like the medical consultation. Choices of particular words or patterns of related words, joined together in ideologically significant ways by such devices as synonymy, hyponymy and antonymy 134

(Fairclough 1989), carry with them systems of categorization (Lee 1992), systems of inclusion and exclusion (Gee 1996) that divide reality up in a particular way, divide human action into namable practices and processes, and divide humans into namable types and nameable communities and institutions. The mobilization and words, in fact, is at the heart of the technologization of social practices and the invention of social communities. As Edwards (1991: 527) puts it,
It would not be possible to establish the existence of named objects, bodily actions and signicancies in the physical world, or in behavior, prior to the construction of such naming practices, since it is essentially through and for those practices that the categories are brought into existence.

Some might argue that in the Chinese context this issue of naming takes on an added dimension coming from the Confucian concept of the rectification of names ( ), the idea that proper behavior has its basis in the proper labeling of oneself, others and objects and activities in ones world, and of behaving in accordance with the social rules and social roles embodied in these labels. Naming in Chinese culture, says Blum (1997: 359), reveals a view of the Chinese person as thoroughly embedded in a world of speakers and hearers whose relationships to each other and the world are constituted through speaking certain terms, and where sound, object and name are in some important sense combined (358). We have already seen some evidence of this in the last chapter in the sentence: You cannot regard a condom as a condom or a condom ( ) (NHEI 1995b). Significantly, this sentence does not tell people what to do or not do, but rather how to label the cultural tools in their social word. AIDS prevention in this example (and many others we will see) is chiefly a matter of giving things their proper 135

names which is seen to naturally result in proper social practices and proper social identities. In discourse about HIV/AIDS, one of the best examples of the power of the name to invoke a particular relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity is in the naming of the syndrome itself and the virus which causes it. The most striking characteristic of the Chinese word for AIDS is that it is a phonetic transliteration of the English acronym (pronounced aizibing), bearing little resemblance lexically or phonetically to the full scientific name in Chinese: huode mianyi quexian zonghe zheng (). Often, in fact, it is simply written using the Roman characters (AIDS) as in the title of the book Everybody Talk about AIDS ( AIDS) (China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control and Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention eds. 1996), or referred to in speech by pronouncing the English letters A-I-D-S one by one. Its status in the lexicon as an English loan word helps to strengthen its place in official constructions and in the popular imagination as a foreign import, not naturally part of the Chinese language or Chinese culture. It is also important to note that the character used to represent the first sound in aizibing in Mainland Chinese usage (=Chinese mugwort; end stop) is different from that used by Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and Overseas Chinese (=love). The reasons for this difference and how the decision was made are unclear, though Zhang (1997) suggests that the Hong Kong/Taiwan version may have been seen by authorities as too literary, and the Mainland Chinese version chosen because of its more scientific connotations. Another possibility is that the association of AIDS with love is seen as inconsistent with the construction of risk and safety in official discourse about AIDS, the set of practices 136

and identities labeled true love () being portrayed as a protection against infection and sex without love () depicted as one of the main routes of infection. The third significant aspect of the word aizibing () lies in the last character: bing (), meaning disease, integrating into the name the common misperception that AIDS itself is a disease rather than a syndrome, a combination a medical conditions caused by a weakened immune system. Grover (1990: 145) suggests that the consequences of this shift from syndrome to diseasehighlights the communicability of AIDS, giving rise to such phrases as catching AIDS, rendered in Chinese as de aizibing (). Related to this is the common characterization of HIV as the AIDS virus. Although the term HIV has slowly but surely made its way into the media and everyday conversation in the West, it is hardly ever used in popular (or even medical) discourse in China, either as an English acronym or as the rather unwieldy Chinese full version (renlei mianyi quexian bingdu ). Rather, the favored construction is aizibingdu () or AIDS virus. The use of this term effectively erases the important distinction between those infected with HIV, who may not be experiencing any manifestations of illness whatsoever, and those who have developed the combination of symptoms known as AIDS. As for those infected, the favored Chinese words are AIDS infected person (), AIDS carrier (), AIDS sufferer () and AIDS patient (). The Western term person living with HIV or AIDS (commonly used as an acronym: PWA, PHA, or PLWHA) is almost inconceivable in Chinese, and the term HIV positive person, though

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possible (), is extremely rare. Such fine distinctions in language may seem to some to be inconsequential, but they have commanded considerable attention from Western cultural critics, activists and people living with HIV or AIDS themselves (Callen 1990, Crimp 1988), many of whom consider terms like AIDS suffer and AIDS patient to be dis-empowering and discriminatory, especially when they are used to describe HIV positive people who are not suffering from AIDS at all. Unraveling such distinctions also helps to show how the choice of a single word embodies a whole set of relationships among people, practices and the virus itself. Another important way words give voice to Discourses and contribute to the technoligization of social practices and identities is though the patterns of relationships they hold with other words and phrases in the grammar of a text, what Halliday calls transitivity, particularly relationships among different kinds of participants (agent, patient, carrier, attribute, etc.), different processes (material, relational, mental, etc.), and different circumstances. One example of this I will discuss at length in chapter five is the way Chinese AIDS prevention pamphlets tend to favor material (action) processes when talking about what the virus does but shift to relational and mental processes when talking about what readers should do to avoid it, constructing a version of AIDS prevention in which action against AIDS is constructed primarily as a kind of mental/relational action much like the concept of consciousness embedded in the official Discourses in China which I alluded to in the last chapter. Another important aspect of transitivity is the flexibility of grammar to allow users to turn processes into participants (or practices into identities) through nominalization. As Hodge and Louie (1998: 84) describe it (84): This transformation

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takes a process involving actions and verbs, and turns it into a noun, a thing. In this form it loses many of its features as an action or process, and instead is fitted into a relational model where it becomes subordinated to processes of classification and judgment. Different kinds of social languages and speech genres tend to exploit this resource in different ways with different effects. Halliday and Martin (1993) and Lemke (1990, 1995a) have observed, for example, that the tendency of scientific discourse to treat phenomena as nouns and join them in mostly relational processes creates a world where complex actions and activities are seen as things that can be classified and divided into parts. This aspect of language is particularly important in the invention of risk groups in HIV/AIDS discourse through the creation of labels that turn social practices into people. As I will show in chapters four and five, this is primarily accomplished in Chinese through the addition of suffixes like zhe and renyuan to what are normally thought of as processes or attributes,1 or through the use of the possessive particle de which sets up a relationship between attribute and possessor in which the possessor is defined by the attribute (Hodge and Louie 1998). What gets counted as a practice and what gets counted as a social identity is integral to the way the spread of HIV is talked about and acted on. Certain identities are almost exclusive to official discourse (like the categories of un-rehabilitated people - and the special population ), whereas others like prostitute (

Even tongxinglianzhe (), the word for homosexual preferred by most official discourse in China, as I will discuss in chapter seven, is a rather recent nominalization carrying with it the voice of a Western essentialist view of homosexuality and transforming what had in he past been considered an activity (along the lines of gambling or keeping a concubine) (Hinsch 1992, Pan and Aggleton 1996) into an identity.

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) (and all of the various other labels used for sex workers in China2 ) , are conspicuously absent in official discourse which persists in labeling prostitution as an activity with the expression prostitution and visiting prostitutes () (lit. sell licentiousness visit prostitutes) rather than an identity (the existence of which would be incompatible with the official construction of a socialist society). These processes of categorization and selection in which practices and people are technologized into the official construction of AIDS are also sites at which the discursive contestation among different communities and different ideologies can be observed. In China, in fact, much of the discourse around HIV is concerned with debating how HIV and sex should be talked about. An article in the journal Sexology ( ) (Zhu 1997b: 33), for example, explains why the particular relationships between social practices and social identities invoked in the words sex worker, sexual partner and sexual liberation are contrary to the ideology of Chinese sexual civilization ( ).
"""""" """"
2

There are a variety of different kinds of sex workers in China, all going by different names, and social and legal consequences of sex work often depend on the name which it is given. There are, for example, escort girls (), who are paid by the hour to accompany men in dance halls, karaoke lounges and restaurants, call girls (ding-dang xioajie) (), who work out of hotels and solicit business by calling male guests in their rooms (usually shortly after they have checked in), beauty parlor girls (), who sell sex in establishments ostensibly for hair-dressing and massage, street-walkers (), who usually solicit clients at the gates of hotels or cinemas, and girls of the work shed () who specialize in selling sex to migrant laborers. All of these categories are regarded as involving different degrees of illegality both by authorities and the women themselves, and some, like what are referred to as short time concubines (), and baopo () who are hired as companions for men during business trips, hardly ever experience police interference (Pan 1996b, Qiu 1996b, Shan 1995). Male sex workers (or ducks) () also come in a variety of types ranging from men who work out of nightclubs and karaoke lounges and serve women, masseurs in saunas and public bathhouses, and money boys () who solicit sex in parks, toilets and other venues frequented by MSM. Many men who receive money for sex and those who facilitate these arrangements do not consider their activity to be sex work at all, but rather the activities of receiving gifts and introducing friends () (see chapter seven).

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"" """" Words like sex worker,sexual partner, sexual liberation make the excellent sexual civilization of the Chinese race tremble. They should not be accepted by Chinese society. If the widespread use of words like sex worker, sexual partner, and sexual liberation is permitted, it will necessarily produce a negative psychosocial effect, to the point that it will cause a storm of sexual freedom. If the criminals and law-breakers, prostitutes and people who introduce clients and engage in prostitution are called 'commercial workers' or 'sex workers', it implies that prostitution is accepted by society as a commercial activity, a legitimate profession, rather than an ugly and evil phenomena that violates social morals. This directly contradicts the country's law and the building of spiritual civilization.

This contestation of naming practices that technologize social practices and identities also occurs within communities which are invented by these practices. Often this is done by strategically poaching other labels for themselves from other Discourses. An example of this I will discuss in chapter seven is the appropriation of the label tongzhi () (comrade) by men who have sex with men, an intertextual borrowing which gives voice to multiple Discourses, linking the Chinese men who have sex who use it not just to the nation and its revolutionary history, but also to communities of men who have sex with men in Hong Kong and Taiwan where the usage originated. Another important way words act to construct HIV and the people and practices associated with it already so eloquently described in English by Sontag (1998, 1991) and others (Alcorn 1988, Brandt 1998b, Clatts and Mutchler 1989, Ross 1989, Taylor 1990, Treichler 1988a, b) is through metaphor. The primary effect of metaphors, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is to unite two different domains of experience which are not 141

naturally associated (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), causing the knowledge, feelings and sets of expectations governing one domain to be transferred to the other. Reference to AIDS as the plague of the twentieth century () or as a super cancer ( ), or, as discussed in the last chapter, a kind of enemy against which war must be waged (), for example, construct AIDS through sets of expectations about plagues (their rapid spread and capacity to devastate entire regions or nations, their association with national boundaries and quarantine), cancer (its incurability and the images it conjures up of the invasion of a healthy body by a malignant growth), and war (its separation of people into enemies and allies and its calls for mass mobilization). The book 88 Questions about the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS ( 88 ) (Yang and Fang 1994), for example, says of AIDS:
This kind of plague of the century just needs to step foot through the door of the country and within a few years it spreads. Many countries are like this. (67)

In explaining the term super cancer () the same authors states:

, , The psychological terror produced by it far exceeds the fear of cancer because (AIDS) has no boundaries of age, gender, district or profession, etc. (66)

In the construction of AIDS in this book, the metaphors of plague and cancer work together, both of them implicating AIDS in the violation of boundaries (see next chapter). As a plague the virus violates the boundary of the nation. As a cancer it violates geographical boundaries, as well as economic boundaries and the important 142

social boundaries of gender, age and profession. Similarly, when a National Health Education pamphlet on AIDS for long distance truck drivers compares preventing AIDS and STDs to obeying traffic regulations (China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation et al. 1995c), or a pamphlet from the Department of Disease Control and the Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention compares doctors and scientists to detectives and the infected body to the scene of a crime (China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control and Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention nd) (see chapter five, Fig. 5.45), the Discourse of traffic control and the Discourse of crime control affect the way the Discourse of AIDS control is technologized, making salient notions like the importance of obeying rules and boundaries and criminality of those at risk or infected. Our interest in metaphors, however, is slightly different from that of Sontag, who credits metaphor with distorting our perception of AIDS and diseases in general. From the perspective taken in this thesis, metaphor is no more or less distorting than any other tool which mediates between human beings and the world they live in. Reality is always filtered through some mediational means, whether it be a microscope or a metaphor, and all mediational means have the potential to either limit or expand participation in particular social actions. In the words of Brandt (1988b: 418), rather than decrying the metaphorization of disease, it seems more appropriate to analyze the process by which disease is given meaning (emphasis mine). 3.3.2 Interpersonal Resources for Voicing Discourses are also given voice in discourse through the languages set of interpersonal resources for meaning. Whereas ideational tools work to technologize 143

practices and invent communities through presenting various representations of the social world (made up of particular kinds of participants joined together in particular kinds of processes), interpersonal tools articulate voices through the collections of discourse identities that texts make available and the kinds of social relationships these identities make possible. Through choices of mode, for example, speakers and writers designate to readers and hearers particular roles in the discourse (that of questioner or answerer) which, in combination with other tools, often invoke larger social identities (that of teacher and student, for example) and the social practices associated with these identities. As Halliday (1994: 68) puts it:
In the act of speaking, the speaker adopts for himself a particular speech role, and in so doing assigns to the listener a complementary role which he wishes him to adopt in his turn. For example, in asking a question, a speaker is taking the role of seeker of information and requiring the listener to take on the role of the supplier of information.

In chapters six and seven I will be looking at how the discourse identities set up by the question and answer format in such genres as health promotion pamphlets and radio call-in programs work to construct the practice of AIDS prevention and control as a kind of didactic activity, as well as how the recipients of AIDS prevention messages themselves manipulate discourse identities to challenge the social identities which are assigned to them. In terms of AIDS prevention, interpersonal resources for meaning are particularly important in the construction of risk, through the grammatical realization of different degrees of possibility and probability (modality), and safety, through the grammatical realization of obligation (modulation). They are also important in the degree of solidarity 144

or social distance they establish between speakers/writers and hearers/readers, which affect whether hearers or readers are invited to take their place as one of them (the atrisk) or one of us (the safe). Finally interpersonal voices can be realized in the relationships speakers or writers create between themselves and the voices that they have borrowed. Goffman (1974, 1981) argues that speakers and writers project themselves in different capacities in relation to the words they utter or write, as either the principal, the person whose position is established by the words, the author the one who puts the position into words, or the animator, the one who gives voice to the words of the author. News readers and writers of academic articles, for example, are more restricted in the production roles they can take up in relation to the words of others, lest they be accused of bias or plagiarism. Individuals in casual conversations, on the other hand, are freer to claim ownership of others words by taking the role of principal, or to distance themselves from those words by highlighting their role as animator. In chapter six I will examine how, in a radio callin program about AIDS, hosts, callers and experts position themselves in relation to the voices they ventriloquate in order to claim and impute particular social identities, signal their competence in particular social practices, and advance a particular version of AIDS transmission and prevention. 3.3.3 Rhetorical Devices Certain rhetorical devices characteristic of discourse in China like fixed four character expressions called chengyu (), political slogans and what I will be referring to as tifa (), also act as important tools for the ventriloquation of voices. These devices, however, cannot really be categorized as solely ideational or solely interpersonal,

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for the way they work is by simultaneously exploiting the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of language, allowing speakers/writers to signal what version of reality they are constructing, what kind of person they are being and what kinds of discursive action they are participating in all at the same time. Two of the most prominent types of rhetorical devices in Chinese are chengyu ( ) (fixed expressions, usually four characters long, often derived from historical or moral stories) and political slogans. Political slogans have been particularly prominent features of health promotion discourse in China since the 1949 revolution (Horn 1969, Sidel and Sidel 1982) and continue to play an important role today in AIDS prevention discourse, where their use invokes earlier more revolutionary identities and practices. Chengyu on the other hand, generally point back to pre-revolutionary traditional values and Confucian social roles and act to construct for their users a kind of ethnic or cultural identity. Both, however, as Hodge and Louie (1998: 103) point out, simultaneously embody two different face systems, one hierarchal, the fixed expression (or the one who utters it) carrying the voice of authority (embodying things like patriotism, common sense or the received wisdom of the ages), and one encouraging solidarity, the user saying to the hearer or reader in effect, you are one of us. Among the most important kinds of rhetorical devices we will be observing in HIV/AIDS discourse in China, however, are not quite as fixed (or technologized) as slogans and chengyu, but nevertheless often take predictable forms in particular circumstances. I will be referring to these as tifa (), the Chinese for ways of saying. Like chengyu and political slogans, tifa involve set ways of expressing ideas and social relationships. They are characteristic ways of phrasing that grow to be associated with 146

particular kinds of speech performance, especially those in the sphere of politics, whether it be the politics of the Party-state or the personal politics of guanxixue (), the strategic cultivation of social relationships. According to Link (1992: 9), The assumption in Chinese culture that speech is to be evaluated as action or performanceentails more, at least, than in the modern West that the manner of expression is important. Beyond a fitting thing to say, there is often a set... way to say it. Tifa can most easily be seen in the highly politicized use of language that characterized the Cultural Revolution () (1966-76). At that time, writes Link,
Mao Zedong was known as the great [weida] Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai as the beloved [jing'ai] Premier Zhou...To mismatch modifier and name in these cases would have seemed at best a stupid mistake and at worst sarcasm that smacked of seditionNot only word selection but also word order must be fitting. The great, glorious, correct Communist Party cannot be the correct, glorious, great Party or the glorious, great, correct Party without deflating the impression of greatness, glory, and correctness.

Even in todays climate of economic and political reform, the wide use of tifa in political discourse persists, though they are now more likely to be about things like making money or maintaining social hygiene than about the greatness of the Party or its leaders. Neither are tifa limited to political or official discourse. They are also appear in advertising and commercial discourse, biomedical and health promotion discourse, the discourse of romance, and even subaltern communities like liumang () (hooligans) and homosexuals tend to develop their own set ways of talking about certain topics, as when gay men refer to sexual activity as wanr () (play), seeking sexual partners as daoyu () (fishing), and meeting places as factories () and companies (). 147

The function of tifa, as with slogans and chengyu, is simultaneously to create a certain version of reality, to claim and impute identity, and to signal what kind of text is being constructed. During the Cultural Revolution, for example, reference to the great Chairman Mao, was almost never used just to communicate the fact of Chairman Maos greatness, but to communicate that the speaker was a certain kind of person engaging in a certain kind of activity. The discourse around AIDS in China also makes ample use of tifa. The definition of AIDS, for instance, tends to take, in my data, a fairly fixed form which seldom varies across texts and text types. It is typically described as it is in the Ministry of Healths official publication Essentials of AIDS Knowledge for Prevention Propaganda and Education () (China Ministry of Health et al.1998c: 5), as a kind of highly fatal communicable disease for which there is still no effective cure. (), a phase which varies little whether it is found in a government health promotion pamphlet, an advertisement for a spray to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, or a web page for gay men. What is important about this tifa as an ideological tool has to do as much with what is not included in it as what is. The definition emphasizes the incurability, fatalness and communicability of AIDS (rather than other features such as the fact that it is caused by HIV, the fact that it is transmitted through contact with blood and blood products, or the fact that presently, at least in industrialized countries, it is treatable). The tendency of

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tifa is to freeze complex phenomena into fixed, limited ideational constructs, making them ideal tools for the transmission of ideology.3 Throughout this thesis I will be observing how tifa are appropriated in action around HIV to claim and impute identity, and how often the practice of AIDS prevention is constructed not just as a matter of mastering a particular set of skills or body of knowledge, but also of mastering a particular way of talking. As in ancient times moral education was accomplished through requiring children to memorize classical texts based on the assumption that the proper use of language could cultivate moral character (Link 1992: 8), health promotion today is often achieved through presenting citizens with packaged sets of facts or slogans whose form is almost as important as their content. Tifa, chengyu and political slogans emanate from privileged Discourses from which they derive their power as technologies (Foucault 1977) of control. At the same time, however, they seem particularly susceptible to either being used almost purely instrumentally, or to being poached into other Discourses, twisted, parodied, manipulated and turned against the very ideologies they are meant to support. The key to this subversion often lies in appropriating rhetorical devices in such a way that the ideational and interpersonal meanings expressed stand in ironic contrast to each other. In fact, playing with the set expressions of the state or of tradition seems to be among the most pervasive forms of resistance (and entertainment) in China and is a chief

Tifa are almost always evaluative expressing either baoysi () (a good meaning) or bianyisi ( ) (a bad meaning) (Barme 1999), as in the bao expressions sexual morality () and monogamy () and the bian expressions prostitution and whoremongering (), and messing around with homosexuality (). Sometimes tifa come in two parts which contrast bao and bian, as in although AIDS is incurable, it can be prevented ().

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characteristic of almost all subaltern Discourses those of tongzhi (gay men) (see chapter seven) and liumang () (hooligans).4 In my data these subversions often take the form of turning the language of the Party-state to the service of the celebration of sex, as in the transformation of the expression fanrongchangsheng () (thriving and prosperous), an expression frequently used in the Denglist Discourse of Reform into fangrongchangsheng () (the thriving of prostitution), and the appropriation of the revolutionary song Without the Communist Party There Would be No New China ( ) into this popular ditty ():
Without the Community Party there would be no New China; Without a New China, there would be no sex life; Without a sex life, how could I live?

3.4 Voices and Strategic Action

Having suggested some ways lexico-grammatical and textual resources can be used to articulate voices, it remains necessary to consider what effects the appropriation of these voices have on social interaction and on material reality, to explain what people do with voices. Understanding the kinds of situated practices and situated identities that voice appropriation makes possible is where tools from conversation analysis and

Ample examples of the twisting of tifa can be found in the literary works of Wang Shuo, who fancies himself as one of the main technologizers of liumang Discourse.

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interactional sociolinguistics inform our approach through their attention to the ongoing construction of the self and the situation in interaction. Mediated actions are rarely simple; they typically have simultaneous multiple goals (Wertsch 1998) and almost always occur concurrently with other mediated actions, either in a linked or unlinked fashion (Scollon 2000). In fact, the meaning of an action is crucially dependent on the other actions that are taken simultaneously or in temporal proximity to it. Therefore, actions are always by nature inferential and contingent on other actions (Scollon 2000). Interactions are even more complex, linked as they are to other interactions in the personal storylines of the participants and larger Conversations among institutions and communities. In order to come to terms with this inferential and contingent nature of voice appropriation, we must understand something about the circumstances into which cultural tools are appropriated and how these circumstances constrain or amplify the kinds of tools that can be appropriated and how. Scollon (1997, 1998) calls these circumstances sites of engagement, which he defines as the window(s) opened through the intersection of social practices in which participants may appropriate a text for mediated action (11). In some ways they are similar to what Heath (1983), and after her, Barton and Hamilton (1998), call literacy events, moments where cultural tools, competencies in using these tools and the goals in the service of which they are used all come together. Sites of engagement partly come ready-made in the physical constraints and affordances of the setting, the kinds of practices that are conventionally associated with it, and the kinds of procedural rules that are conventionally associated with these practices.

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They are also partly constructed by participants through their appropriation of different configurations of cultural tools. The way individuals contribute to the construction of sites of engagement is through framing the practices that they are doing in regard to the constraints and affordance provided by the setting and positioning themselves as certain kinds of social actors with various claims regarding their legitimacy in taking up certain practices and of inhabiting the setting to begin with. According to Scollon (1998: 6), all social interaction entails the same fundamental concerns for establishing the basis of interaction establishing the relationships and positioning among the participantsand framing events. Sites of engagement, then, are constructed from two sets of boundariesthe physical and discursive boundaries that come built-in to the sites, and the physical and discursive boundaries which participants draw though invoking voices in strategic ways. Framing is the process of defining a situation or a moment in interaction through discourse. Bateson (1972), one of the first to make use of the idea of framing, sees frames as psychological constructs that help people to understand the nature and purpose of communication, much like a picture frame delimits and constrains its contents.5 In many instances, Bateson (1972: 186-7) writes, the frame is consciously recognized and even represented in vocabulary (play, movie, interview, job, language, etc.). In other cases, there may be no explicit verbal reference to the frame, and the subject may have no consciousness of it. Goffman (1974), on the other hand, offers a more dynamic view of frames, describing how interactants skillfully shift, break and laminate fames upon one another. Frames, for him, are not so much the stable mental structures through

In this way, they are similar to what others have called scripts (Shank and Ableson, 1977), schema (Rumelhart, 1975), structures of expectations (Ross, 1975) and cultural models (Gee 1996).

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which we interpret and judge the world but the alignments people bring to each other in human interaction through which they constantly define and redefine what they are doing. The work of Tannen (1980, 1993, Tannen and Wallat 1983) combines both of these senses of the term, the first of which she calls primary frameworks (or interpretive frames) and the second which she calls interactive frames. Both types of frame are relevant to the discursive construction of practice. Primary frameworks are psychological representations of practices in the homologous habitus of the group. They specify the people, places, tools and sequence of actions within a practice along with inevitably providing an ideological evaluation of the practice (and the people who perform it) based on the groups relationship to the Discourse of which the practice is a part. Interactive frames construct smaller practices and help to manage the way these smaller practices are linked together to form larger ones, as the practice of having sex might contain linked practices like kissing or using a condom. How this practice is performed depends both on the primary framework through which it is approached whether, for example, it is seen as making love or getting laid as well as how the interactive frames that organize it are signaled and linked together within a particular site of engagement. Both of these kinds of frame are created in part through the appropriation of cultural tools. When three accompanying girls () in nightclubs and karaoke bars in China interact with customers, for example, there is a negotiation of frames which include accompanying the patrons to drink, accompanying them to chat, accompanying them to sing or dance and, depending on the course of the negotiation, moving on to the fourth accompanying. The primary framework for the interaction is

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signaled by social languages appropriated by the client and the hostess, and different speech genres like welcoming, introducing, singing karaoke, linked in a particular way. The interactive frames as well, how the drinking turns to dancing and the dancing turns to commercial sex work, for example, are managed by participants taking up certain social languages and generic forms of interaction like casual conversation (), flirting or teasing (), and showing off or talking big (). This framing acts to help participants interpret the words and actions of their interlocutors and formulate their next move. They also put constraints on what can be done and said and how it can be interpreted. Finally, particularly important in this example is that these highly conventionalized frames allow participants to implicitly engage in the negotiation of a commercial sexual transaction while explicitly doing something else. As Goffman has pointed out, the frames we signal are often overlapping and interested, and this lamination is one of the key ways people maintain interactional control and undermine constraints embodied in situations. The second way voices are used to accomplish strategic action within sites of engagement is by means of positioning. Positioning is basically the act of claiming an identity (or identities) for oneself and imputing an identity (or identities) on others both on the local level of the particular interaction as part of a history of ongoing interactions involving the same participants, and on the social level in terms of the various communities of practice in which interactants participate. Scollon (1998, 2000) has suggested that the essence of mediated action is the construction of the social actor, the construction of the self as a certain kind of person. He writes (2000: chapter 1: 5):

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As social action is based in habitus and habitus is the aggregation of history in concrete, sociocultural circumstances, any action which is taken reproduces (and claims, imputes, contests, and recontextualizes) the identities of prior social actions as well as negotiates new positions among the participants within this nexus of practice.

Harr and his colleagues (Davies and Harr 1990, van Langenhove and Harr 1999) claim not just that actions position people, but that positions are what crucially determine the meanings of social actions. The social meaning of what has been said, write Davies and Harr (1990: para. 5), depend(s) upon the positioning of interlocutors which is itself a product of the social force a conversational action is taken to have. There is in Harrs model, however, along with position and social action (or the illocutionary force of the speech act), a third ingredient that goes into making up the positioning triad. This third ingredient is referred to as storylines, the histories of both the people who are interacting and the cultural tools that they are using. Positioning, write Davies and Harr,
is the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines. By giving people parts in a story, whether it be explicit or implicit, a speaker makes available a subject position which the other speaker in the normal course of events would take up. (1990: para. 18)

Storylines exist on several interdependent planes: there is the storyline of the immediate conversation constructed by participants as they go along, the storyline of their relationship with one another of which the immediate conversation is merely an episode, and cultural storylines (Carbaugh 1999), what Gee (1996) refers to as metanarratives, stories about the way people in a culture should act and the way certain paradigmatic events (like, for example, various kinds of sexual encounters) should unfold. Regarding these cultural storylines, van Langenhove and Harr (1999: 18) write, neither 155

storylines nor positions are freely constructed; conversations always reflect narrative forms already existing in the culture, which are part of the repertoire of competent members. In other words, positioning involves both positioning interlocutors within small c conversations, as well as positioning them within larger Conversations (Gee 1999) taking place among the communities to which they align themselves and among the cultural toolkits or Discourses associated with these communities. On the first plane we construct what have been called discourse identities (Antaki and Widdencombe eds. 1998, Scollon 1998a) participant roles with certain discursive rights and responsibilities and certain allowed speech functions like speaker/listener, story-teller/recipient, and questioner/answerer. On the second two planes we construct social identities, positions that are defined by the ongoing relationship we have with others and with the institutions and communities of practice that make up our society. As with framing, positioning is largely accomplished through the invocation of voices through the appropriation of discursive tools like speech genres and social languages, which index various storylines and signal our place in them. To return to our hostess bar, the client might position himself as a rich businessman through the use of certain social languages, along with his dress and a conspicuous way of carrying his mobile telephone, and perform this and other positions through speech genres like calling his stock broker or giving gifts, each speech genre both acting as an episode in the ongoing storyline of the interaction between him and the hostess as well as indexing larger cultural storylines. At the same time, his position as a paying customer gives him

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certain rights to position the woman who is serving him in various ways (both figuratively and literally). Like frames, positions embody certain constraints. Cultural storylines, for example, determine what kinds of social identities and discourse identities are available. Carbaugh (1999: 148) writes:
As the self becomes positioned in discourse, it runs rather uneasily into other positions that are institutionally constrained and/or historically grounded. These positions are identified variously as social roles, the society, history, or this country. Specific examples include husband or wife or any such term that implicates duties to another, or worker and soldier or any such term that implicates institutional (stereotypical) constraints on ones actions.

At the same time, however, just as framing is multiple, overlapping, dynamic and strategic, so is positioning. In any social interaction we are likely to take up not just one but several positions simultaneously, playing them off against one another and shifting positions as contingencies demand. And, as with the flexible and overlapping nature of frames, the multiple and shifting nature of the positions we take in interaction allows us to position ourselves in strategically ambiguous ways, balancing the constraints and affordences implicit in one position with the constraints and affordences implicit in others. One example of this in public discourse around HIV in China is the way writers of government health promotion pamphlets manipulate language to position themselves in ways that satisfy both the demands of the officials who favor a moral model of AIDS prevention and the demands of other officials who call for effective and scientific solutions. In writing these pamphlets, authors (sometimes individually and sometimes in groups) invoke various voices to position themselves as participants in various communities of practice: the community of health promoters, the community of

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government bureaucrats, different academic or scientific communities, and the various ideological factions within their work units (). These different communities often have competing goals, and so positioning themselves in one community may constrain the use of voices which can be used to claim identity in other communities. At the same time that these writers are creating identities for themselves, they are also positioning their readers as characters in particular cultural storylines involving such things as love and romance, morality, patriotism and national or cultural identity. Like self-positioning, this other-positioning is carried out through the appropriation of various speech genres (for example question/answer sequences, political slogans and traditional didactic poems) and social languages (the language of biomedicine, for instance, or the language of everyday life). Also, like self-positioning, other-positioning is almost always multiple, setting up for readers a series of alternate reading positions (Kress 1985) and exerting control through engaging the reader in the act of choosing among them or reconciling them (Jones 1997a) (see chapter 5). When individuals read the pamphlet, they interpret the voices according to the intertextual conventions of their own communities, which, like the communities participated in by the writer, have multiple and sometimes competing demands. Just as texts are polyvocal, so are hearers and readers; how we read or listen to something depends on the multiple norms of interpretation from the multiple communities of practice we participate in and how we choose to mobilize them. The tension between the demands of the positions created by the voices in the pamphlet and the demands of the positions readers enact in particular sites of engagement into which these texts are appropriated (see chapter six) results in these voices being altered in fundamental ways.

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Perhaps the most famous Chinese advocate of positing theory was Sun Tzu () (4th century BC). In his Art of War () he declares, victory is a matter of masterful positioning () (Wing trans. 1988: 68). Sun Tzu reminds us that positioning others, which he refers to as Directing () (Wing 1988), as well as positioning the self, plays a major role in both strategies of control and tactics of resistance. As Wing writes,
Sun Tzu believed that the ideal strategy during conflict is to move opponents here and there, until they are perfectly positioned to their own disadvantage. This strategy, which he called Directing, is the art of compelling the opponent to react to whatever information is presented. It is a skill that is used by leaders who are gifted with creative, insightful minds. (66)

From the point of view of van Langenhove and Harr (1999) , this strategy is not limited to gifted leaders, but is part of everyday interaction. They write:
Positions may emerge naturally out of the conversational and social context. But sometimes an initial seizure of the dominant role in a conversation will force the other speakers into speaking positions they would not have occupied voluntarily, so to say. Initial positionings can be challenged and the speakers sometimes thereby repositioned. One can position oneself as a commentator upon the positions, social acts and storylines generated in one conversation by creating a higher order conversation in which the conversation commented upon is merely a topic. Since actors may conceive their positions differently it is not unusual for the very same words and actions to be bearers of more than one conversation. (18)

Another important point Sun Tzu makes about positioning, which will be relevant to the discussion below, is that the way it is used is highly dependent on whether or not one is operating within ones own territory or the territory of the opponent, from a position of power or from a position of weakness. Therefore, positioning and framing are ultimately inseparable. The situations that we create and the doings that we signal through our appropriation of particular cultural 159

tools often have positions built into them, and the ability of the interactants to enact and challenge those positions is always a matter of the contingencies of the frame. Finally, when one positions oneself, it is never merely in relation to ones interlocutor, but also in relation to larger Discourses or trends in the world (Wing 1988: 54). Successful positioning is, to a large degree a matter or harnessing the momentum of these larger trends (or storylines) to ones own advantage. In my discussion of what voices do I have focused both on the way they constrain certain kinds of actions and identities and enable others by framing the interaction as a certain type of happening and positioning the interactants as certain kinds of people. We have also noted how the flexible, multiple and dynamic nature of framing and positioning in interaction allows people to manipulate them strategically, mixing different frames and positions by mixing speech genres and social languages. All interaction involves some degree of hybridity of different voices and practices (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999), and it is through this hybridity that cultural tools are made to fit the contingencies of the occasion. Sometimes these conjunctures of different voices and practices are used to create or maintain technologies of control (Fairclough 1995). Sometimes, on the other hand, they are used to actively subvert, circumvent, or resist technologies of control, opening up for users new possibilities for framing and new social positions to take up. It is the strategic use of these conjunctures and the frames and positions that they create to which I will now turn.

3.5 Ji ( )
In her book National Pastimes: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China (1997), Ann Anagnost relates the story of Zhang Longquan, a young Shanghai 160

man who, in 1979, built up a vast network of friends and influence through which he amassed a large store of gifts, obligations and special favors by impersonating the son of a famous army officer. After his plot was uncovered and he was arrested by authorities, Zhangs story became the subject of a play called If Only I Were Real () which drew packed houses in Shanghai before it was finally banned. In popular discussion of this young mans exploits, Writes Anagnost (1997: 65), he was much admired for skillful use of ji () (stratagem). The concept of ji, she goes on to explain, pertains to a whole literature of cunning intelligence from the historical and literary past. As a corpus of practices, it composes a situational ethics that not only counsels how to act but also how to interpret the actions of others. The character itself consists of the radical to speak () along with the number ten (), representing calculation. According to Anagnost (1997: 65), it is closely related to zhi () whose semantic field covers knowledge, intelligence, skill, cleverness, or cunning. The rules of ji are catalogued in a number of Chinese classics, in particular the Thirty-six Stratagems (), which draws extensively on tales from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (), SunTzus Art of War (), the Yi Ching (Book of Changes) () and Laozis The Way of Power ( ) (Gao 1991). I will be using the term ji to mean the mutually implicated play of language and practice (Anagnost 1997: 57) through which social actors either respond to challenges to their power or resist the technologies of social control embodied in the cultural tools they have available to them. Through ji, social actors are able to overcome constraints imposed on them by their social environment, be it the immediate environment of the site

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of engagement or the larger environment of Discourses and communities, by constructing new linkages between tools, practices and social identities. De Certeau (1984) in his version of the art of strategy, which focuses on the practices of everyday life, makes the important distinction between stratagems which go into the construction of technologies of control and those which work to undermine them. He calls these two kinds of stratagems: strategies and tactics, a distinction based primarily on the relative social power of actors and whether or not they are operating in their own spaces or the spaces of others. A strategy is a stratagem undertaken by actors operating from positions of power and occupying their own territory (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution). It postulates a place, writes de Certeau, that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed (35). A tactic, on the other hand, is calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. The space of a tactic, writes de Certeau is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power it is a maneuver within the enemys field of vision, and within enemy territory (36-37). The essence of strategies and tactics is intertextuality. They are accomplished through what both de Certeau (1984) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) call conjunctures, the strategic mixing of voices from different Discourses in ways which alter, distort or invert the patterns of constraints and affordances for framing and positioning embodied in these voices. They are, to again quote de Certeau (1984: 39), manipulations of language relative to occasions and are intended to seduce, captivate, or

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invert the linguistic position(s) of the interactants, typically involving such rhetorical moves as metaphorizations, transfers and constant passages from one genre to another (54), and the juxtaposing of diverse elements in order to suddenly produce a flash (37), which, in the case of tactics, opens up cracks in the technologies of control (27) and, in the case of strategies, seals the cracks opened up by subversive elements. Strategies are employed by actors who claim participation in communities that have themselves been highly technologized (such as institutions of education, health care and governance), and are often used to mask the operations of power individuals undertake in the name of these communities. Tactics, conversely, operate from a position outside of established Discourses. They are the products of individuals and emergent communities which poach upon technologies of control to organize new conjunctures. Just as strategies often work to mask the exercise of power, tactics often serve to mask resistance to it. The way government AIDS prevention pamphlets appropriate the language of patriotism (see chapter five), for example, might be seen as a strategy in which elements of sexual health are technologized into the Discourse of nationalism. An act of appropriation from the same Discourse by the owner of a sex shop in Beijing in the form of a national flag displayed outside the premises to help deflect criticism from authorities (Fig. 3.1), on the other hand, can be regarded as a tactic.

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Fig. 3.1

The picture above, as well as the story of the Shanghai imposter illustrates what we might call the paradox of ji: the fact that it is technoligization itself that tactics of resistance exploit and depend upon. Zhangs ability to affect his imposture is dependent upon the ventriloquization of the gift as a language constitutive of identity (Anagnost 1997: 48); his ploy is based upon the very technology that it undermines. Thus, strategies of technoligization and tactics of resistance exist in a reciprocal relationship, and the appropriation of cultural tools is always both reproductive and transformative, always involving a dialectic of colonization and appropriation (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 45). Insights into the ways strategies and tactics operate can be gleaned from the many classical Chinese texts cataloging various skillful military and political maneuvers. In such texts, strategies and tactics work in primarily three ways: by borrowing the resources of ones enemy, by the manipulation of illusion and reality, and by creating confusion. We will call these three dimensions of stratagems respectively appropriation, imposture, and mixing. . Appropriation is the basis of all stratagems. Nearly every Eastern system of combat from aikido to go (Chinese chess) incorporates the idea of turning the strengths of 164

ones opponent against him or her.6 It is exemplified in the third of the Thirty-six Stratagems, killing with a borrowed knife () (Gao 1991: 32-36) and in Sun Tzus statement:
clever leaders endeavor to use their opponent's food. One container of the opponent's food Is the same as twenty containers of their own; And one unit of fodder Is the same as twenty units of their own. (Wing 1988: 36-7)

The second way strategies and tactics operate is through imposture, the manipulation of appearance and reality, epitomized in the saying reminiscent of the Shanghai imposter, putting Zhangs hat on Lis head () (Anagnost 1997). Whereas appropriation is borrowing the tools of others, imposture is borrowing their identities. According to Anagnost, imposture works through the power of mimesis, the seizing upon the appearance of things to appropriate their power. This operation often involves jia (), what Anagnost translates as fictive borrowing, through which illusion is achieved by appropriating the clothes (and voices) of the enemy. Chew (1995), in her analysis of interview interaction in an educational institution, captures the essence of appropriation and imposture in her description of what she calls aikido politics. Central to this brand of interactional politics, she says, is the process of membershipping or riding on the back of power (202). She writes:

Gao (1991) suggests that this technique finds its earliest expression in the ancient Book of Changes () in hexagram 41, which, turned one way, signifies a decrease or loss, but turned upside down means increase or gain.

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In essence, membershipping (an aikido technique) is a means of harmonizing and blending with a greater force. It is a subtle and gentle device of obtaining power though cooperation rather than confrontation it concentrates on bringing the power under control by blending with it. (206)

The third aspect of ji, mixing, is also closely related to the other two. Mixing or creating strategic conjunctures of cultural tools results in the undermining and blurring of the boundaries that separate Discourses, the transgress(ing) of the symbolic order and the limits they set (de Certeau 1984: 54) by juxtaposing different and sometimes conflicting voices, concealing one voice within another, playing one voice off against another, or manipulating the tension between voices (Wertsch 1998 100-105). At its core is what Sun Tzu calls the Tao of Paradox (), and what Wertsch (1998) calls the strategic resolution of seemingly incompatible voices. It sometimes involves skillfully taking advantage of the conflict between two powerful Discourses, exemplified in such stratagems as besieging the kingdom of Wei to save the kingdom of Zhou () (Gao 1991: 27-31) and befriending a distant state to attack a neighbor () (Gao 1991: 133-7). It sometimes involves diversionary tactics like making a feint to the east while attacking the west () (6), and it sometimes involves disguising ones true intentions in the discursive garb of legitimacy or, camouflaging transgressions so that they become acceptable, taken as legitimate since they respect the distinctions established by language even as they undermine them (de Certeau 1984: 54) (or, as it is expressed in the Thirty-six Stratagems. Concealing a dagger in a smile () Gao 1991: 69-71). It may even involve acts of appropriation which appear to be self-defeating, summed up in expressions like inflict injury on oneself to win the enemys trust ( ) (Gu 1991: 186-9) and sacrifice the plum tree for the peach tree () (72-6). 166

One final and important way that strategies and tactics can operate is through silence, avoidance or inaction, through what is not said or not done, perhaps best illustrated in the last of the Thirty-six Stratagems: run away (). The actions social actors choose not to perform are often just as important as those they choose to perform. Inaction can be a form of passive resistance, a way to avoid unnecessary confrontation, or a way to preserve ones cultural resources for use in more advantageous situations. Ding and Liu (1998), for example, refer to this strategy as used by tongzhi (gay men and lesbians) in Taiwan in their work and family relationships as reticent poetics (), and, on a more pedestrian note, one of my informants in Fuzhou noted that this was his stratagem of choice when confronted with technologies of control in the form of police interference in public cruising areas or fishing ponds ():
If the police want to catch me what would I do? Id use the thirty-sixth stratagem: run away. (Fuzhou 1998-9)

It should be remembered that these operations are seldom applied in isolation. They are almost always mixed. As any good general knows, a strategem is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of framing the situation and positioning oneself and ones opponents in ways that are conducive to ones goals. It should also be remembered that goals are almost always multiple, so ground gained through the exercise one stratagem might also involve ground lost in respect to other goals. Like the practices they technologize or undermine, ji also have their own built in sets of constraints and affordances. In HIV/AIDS discourse, for example, a tool intended for prevention like a slogan associating AIDS with casual sex may be strategized by a couple as a reason for not 167

using condoms since the sex between them is not casual. The strategy of forgoing condoms may be quite successful in allowing the interactants to position themselves as loyal and trusting partners and frame their relationship as monogamous and secure, but it would, at the same time, constrain their ability to avoid HIV infection. Similarly, stratagems used for goals other than HIV prevention, those for avoiding arrest during sex in public places, for example, might also constrain the employment of stratagems of safer sex. In order to illustrate more clearly the workings of stratagems and their consequence on public discourse about HIV in China, I would like to consider two texts. The first is an article from the state run newspaper Health Counseling News () entitled Scrupulously Observing Sexual Morality is the Miracle Cure for AIDS ( ) (Li Chuanjun 1996) (see appendix 3a). The second is a label from a commercially available AIDS viral prevention and cure fluid ( ),which purports to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (see appendix 3b). The primary stratagem used by the author of the article Scrupulously Observing Sexual Morality is the Miracle Cure for AIDS is to portray an essentially moral approach to AIDS prevention as scientific and rational. To achieve this he appropriates and mixes tools from a number of Discourses to frame the topics that he introduces and position himself and his readers in relation to these topics. The article begins by framing AIDS as a global rather than a local problem, situating its origin (or discovery) in America. It is a problem which must be addressed not just because of its seriousness and the widespread concern it has generated, but also 168

because it provides an illustration of cultural relativism, a lesson on perspective exemplified in the classical expression: the benevolent see benevolence, the wise see wisdom ( ) (ln. 4). Thus, from the very beginning, the article contrasts the technological wisdom of the American scientists who discovered AIDS with the traditional wisdom of Chinese culture, which can extract from this discovery the proper message. The expression also helps position the author himself as objective, somehow beyond the constraints of perspective, benevolent enough to consider the perspectives of others and wise enough to distinguish a truth that goes beyond perspective. In challenging the point of view that condoms can prevent AIDS, the author does not, at first, produce a moral argument, but rather a medical one, appropriating statistics regarding the effectiveness of condoms in family planning and providing a detailed description of how HIV can invade the body through the small wounds that occur when any part of the body is rubbed (lns. 9-10). The appropriation of the language of family planning has the additional effect of framing condom use as a contraceptive activity: condoms are consistently referred to as contraception sheaths () (rather than safety sheaths ) and depicted as inappropriate for use in the prevention of HIV transmission since the AIDS virus is much smaller than a sperm (ln. 9). This objective scientific language is mixed as well with the emotionally charged metaphor of AIDS as a super cancer () and the comparison of condom use to gambling (ln. 11), one of the seven evils linked in official discourses with liumang (hooligan) identity and associated with addiction, the breakdown of the family and the squandering of wealth. Finally, the language of cultural uniqueness or guoqing () 169

(the conditions of the country) is appropriated to portray the West as a place where considerations of privacy override considerations of public health, resulting in a situation in which the lack of a foundation of social order renders technological solutions the only alternative. Solutions adopted by other (corrupt) countries and cultures are portrayed as at best inappropriate and at worst perilous in the uniquely moral context of China. In cautioning readers not to blindly follow the example of the West, the author positions them and himself as culturally superior and frames the rejection of condom promotion as a means of standing up against foreign influences and demonstrating a kind of national pride. In the next section Western science is again introduced to highlight its limitations. A highly technical account of the organic make-up of HIV is used as an explanation of why no effective treatment or vaccine has yet been developed. In a sense, the passage plays upon the binary opposition of possibility/impossibility that Ernie (1994) observed in Western biomedical discourses on curing AIDS in the late eighties and early nineties. Biomedicine simultaneously makes HIV knowable and unknowable. What Western science has proven is that science alone cannot solve the problem. (It is also important to note that this passage conveniently avoids reference to the dramatic advances in HIV treatment announced at the World AIDS Conference in Vancouver just a few weeks before its publication.) The last section of the article finally presents the solution to the problem in the form of a moral imperative (scrupulously observing sexual morality). This moral imperative, however, is dressed in the guise of a biomedical solution, a magic bullet

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(Brandt 1987) (the miracle cure for AIDS). The article even goes on to define morality in precise, positivistic terms, as the natural result of material progress:
27 28

The core of socialist sexual morality is that sexual relationships should be based on true love and monogamy. The rising standards of material wealth and spiritual civilization will induce a rise in standards of sexual morality. (lns. 28-29) The effect of this mixing of voices is, among other things a medicalization of morality and a moralization of medicine. Rather than two distinct Discourses, each carrying its own value system, the precepts of socialist morality are presented as scientific and grafted onto the Discourse of biomedicine. Thus the author is able to mask traditional technologies of control with the language of science and modernity. Whereas the above text illustrates the use of strategies, the mixing and manipulation of voices by agents operating within their own territory and seeking to fortify the boarders of that territory against a foreign threat (the practice of condom promotion), the second text (text b), a label from a spray which promises to prevent HIV transmission, exemplifies the use of tactics. The product itself is a testament to the new commercialism in China in which social problems are often more likely to be addressed on a practical level through products rather than policies, and the new sexuality in which an increase in casual sex and multiple sex partners as well as the widespread patronage of commercial sex workers has opened up a market niche for products promising to prevent AIDS. At the same time, however, products (both technological and cultural) which are seen to facilitate this emergent Discourse of sexual freedom () are restricted. Pornography is policed 171

through regular (though intermittent) attempts to sweep away the yellow (), and the advertisement of sexual tools () is prohibited by law (see last chapter). And so rather than borrowing tools from the Discourse of sexual revolution which the product, by its very nature, promotes, it instead borrows the knives of traditional Chinese morals, nationalism, public health and both Western and Chinese medicine. The text begins by mixing the language of epidemiology (statistics on the spread of the virus from the mouths of experts) with the emotionally charged metaphor of AIDS as a plague (lns. 2-3), framing the disease as both a medical and a moral problem. It then offers a solution to the problem in the form of slogans: Preserve Moral Integrity and Strengthen Preventive Measures () (ln. 4), which echo verbatim the words of state public health education materials (see chapter five). In lines 4-6, the researchers at Tongji Medical University are presented not as searching for an alternative solution to these political slogans, but as following their advice to strengthen preventive measures by putting all their effort () into developing the product. Chinese cultural identity is appropriated as a way to reconcile traditional moral values and a product which need only be used in their absence. The product is legitimated by its origin in the treasure house of Chinese medicine ().7 Thus cultural identity mediates between opposing models of prevention, one favoring morality and the other favoring technology, allowing them to coexist in the same text. These operations of appropriating the voices of biomedicine, the state and tradition and mixing them in a particular way transforms the constraints these voices
7

echoing the words of Mao Zedong himself who in 1958 declared, Chinese medicine is a great treasure house! We must make all efforts to uncover it and raise its standards! (Unschuld 1985:251).

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impose on the marketing of such a product into marketing ploys. The practice of marketing is framed as a public service, contributing to raising the health standards of the masses and the scientific standards of Traditional Chinese Medicine, thus positioning the makers of the product as patriotic and selfless and those who buy it as morally responsible and knowledgeable. * In this chapter I have outlined how tools from linguistics can help us to detect voices in texts and utterances and understand how they affect one another. I have also begun to suggest ways in which discourse about HIV/AIDS plays a role in creating the social practices and social identities (invented communities) that are associated with it, as well as in the contestation of these practices and identities and the imagination of alternate forms of community. In the next chapter I will further take up the question of imagining and inventing, observing how AIDS histories are appropriated in official discourses in the service of the imagination of the nation and the invention of communities of risk outside of its borders, as well as how these same histories are appropriated by these very communities of risk to claim for themselves safe identities and reclaim a place for themselves within the borders of the nation.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Four History, Action and AIDS Prevention

What people do together is a kind of local activity that is also the making of history. (Erickson in press: 26)

To commemorate World AIDS Day in 1998, the Beijing Evening News () along with the Beijing Municipal Hygiene Department, the Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention, the Beijing Epidemic Prevention Center, and the Beijing Institute for STD Prevention and Treatment sponsored the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest () (Beijing Municipal Hygiene Department et al. 1998) (Appendix 4a) consisting of a series of multiple choice questions through which contestants could demonstrate their knowledge of AIDS. Of the twenty two questions on the contest form, however, only two explicitly involve the transmission of HIV, and only two touch on prevention, topics which for most people would count as central to AIDS knowledge. The remaining eighteen questions deal with the historical spread of AIDS in China as a whole and in Beijing in particular: three questions asking about the number of reported or estimated cases of HIV infection, eleven asking about what kinds of people have been infected, with particular attention to famous firsts (the first case of AIDS in China, the first cases among STD patients and IV drug users, the first Beijing resident to be infected), and four asking about the policies and programs of various government bodies and (government sponsored) nongovernmental organizations. Even the questions concerning transmission and prevention
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present these issues in the context of the nation, the city of Beijing or particular social groups (which routes of transmission have been detected in Beijing, for example, and what the nations policy for AIDS prevention should be) rather than in the context of individual behavior. The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest is essentially a history test, constructing AIDS knowledge not as a body of scientific facts, but as a body of historical narratives, the nations cumulative experience of the epidemic, through which citizens are to understand HIV transmission in the context of its relationship to various cultural, national and regional identities. All actions around AIDS in all cultures, whether on the level of a government department implementing a particular policy or set of regulations, or on the level of an individuals sexual practices, are at least indirectly mediated through histories of the epidemic. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the virus apart from its histories, the stories that surround it, which we see on television, read about in the newspaper or hear from friends or experts. These might be stories from official sources, from more popular genres like magazines and TV movies, or the urban myths about AIDS that are transmitted by word of mouth.1 What is important about all of these kinds of histories is that they can never be treated as totally separate; urban myths and official histories are often constructed from the same kinds of cultural tools, and end up drawing the same boundaries. At the same time these tales and the boundaries that they draw can be appropriated by a variety of different people (government officials, men who have sex with men, commercial concerns and sex workers) to take a variety of actions around HIV, some of which amplify participation in AIDS prevention and some of which limit it.
1

One example of this kind of narrative is a story that was circulating around southern China in the summer of 2000 to the effect that a certain rich mans ernai () (concubine) was so angry at society after 176

Histories help people to make sense of AIDS, to create an integrated whole out of the set of persons, actions and events (Wertsch 1997: 11) that constitute what we individually or collectively know about HIV and the syndrome that it causes. In this chapter I will examine the relationship among history, knowledge and AIDS prevention by focusing on the how people appropriate national narratives of AIDS into different kinds of social contexts for different kinds of purposes.

4.1 AIDS and History

Historians and sociologists examining the phenomenon of AIDS (Berridge and Strong eds. 1993, Brandt 1987, 1988a, Fee and Fox eds. 1988, 1992, Grmek 1990) have long pointed out the importance of official histories and the lessons they are called upon to teach in the construction of the social meaning of AIDS and the formulation of public policy around it. Communication scholars and psychologists, meanwhile, have explored the effect of the appropriation of popular and journalistic narratives and urban myths about AIDS from public discourse on peoples assessment of individual risk and attitudes towards those either infected or vulnerable to infection (Kitzinger 1993, 1994, Pittam and Gallois 1996). An approach using the principles of Mediated Discourse Analysis attempts to understand the relationship among knowledge, history and AIDS prevention both on the level of larger social meanings and on the level of individual appropriation. It is, however, concerned less with the meanings diseases take on as it is with what people do with these meanings, less with the intramental affect of narratives of AIDS on risk behavior and more on the intermental effect, how myths and stories function as tools in social interaction around AIDS.
discovering they were HIV positive that she injected dozens of watermelons with his (or her) blood, a tale 177

Histories of AIDS can be regarded on one hand as cultural tools in their own right which are appropriated into particular activities in order to perform particular actions alongside the myriad other cultural tools involved in the activity. The degree to which histories limit or expand participation in particular actions depends a great deal on the dialogue between history and the other cultural tools with which it is appropriated. On the other hand, histories can themselves be seen as configurations of various cultural tools borrowed from a vast pool of cultural resources, tools such as maps, dates, statistics, metaphors, social stereotypes, political slogans, popular sayings, different speech genres and social languages. In my corpus, AIDS histories are found in a wide range of different kinds of texts, from educational pamphlets to radio call-in programs, and take on a variety of forms from straightforward, unembellished timelines to richly evocative narratives I will focus in particular in this chapter on three such incidences, comparing how similar historical facts and narratives can be called upon to perform different kinds of actions. The first example I will discuss is the AIDS is Right Beside Us Knowledge Contest introduced above (see Appendix 2a), which reflects the kinds of themes and language seen in official government narratives of AIDS. The second is a dramatic rendering of Chinas first AIDS case which appears in the popular book AIDS Closes in on China () (Fang 1995) (see Appendix 2b), an example of a more popular, journalistic approach to history. Lastly I will examine a conversation about AIDS prevention I had with one of my tongzhi () (gay) informants in Fuzhou (see Appendix 3c) in which he draws upon many of the facts and stories seen in the first two

which caused watermelon sales in the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen to plunge (Tang 2000). 178

texts to imagine his own identity and position himself and those like him within the boundaries established by official histories. One of my main concerns will be the relationship among the production of AIDS histories, their consumption, and the social construction of AIDS knowledge. As we will see below, in all of these examples, AIDS knowledge is portrayed not so much as biomedical knowledge but as narrative knowledge, knowledge of the nations stories surrounding AIDS, which are appropriated strategically in carrying out actions as diverse as the government justifying a particular policy and an individual explaining to a doctor why he wants to take an HIV antibody test. Looking at histories is a particularly apropos starting point for an approach which seeks to come to terms with the heteroglossic nature of texts about AIDS. While here we will be dealing in particular with configurations of cultural tools conforming to what we usually think of as narrative histories, in a sense, every act of appropriating every cultural tool is an appropriation of histories in the form of the stories these tools tell of their past use, the baggage they have accumulated over time. Intertextuality, writes Kristeva (1980: 39) is the insertion of history into a text and of this text into history.

4.2 Official and Unofficial Histories

Much of the work in sociocultural practice studies has been concerned with the ways individuals appropriate official histories in constructing their accounts of the significant events in their nations narrative (Jones et al. 1997, Penuel and Wertsch 1998, Scollon 1998b, Tulviste 1994, Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Wertsch and Rozin 1998). In most of these studies, particularly those carried out in former Soviet states, analysts have noted clear differences between official histories, those which appear in such places as
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school textbooks and support the ideology of the ruling class, and unofficial histories, histories learned at home and through word of mouth within what Watson (1993) calls communities of memory, histories which often exist in opposition to the official history. Scollon and his colleagues (Jones et al. 1997, Scollon 1998b), in their study of transitional Hong Kong, noted multiple dominant Discourses at work in creating official histories including political, journalistic and commercial Discourses, and thus multiple sources on which individuals could draw in their construction of unofficial histories. In most of these studies however, while much is made of the ways individuals mix official and unofficial voices, there is a tendency to establish rather clear lines of distinction between these voices and to portray them as almost inevitably in opposition to each other, as counter-texts (Wertsch 1997). This may be in part a function of the contexts in which these studies were carried out, mostly societies undergoing significant social transformation involving clear and dramatic breaks with old regimes (post-Soviet Russia, for example, or transitional Hong Kong). In contemporary China, however, in which the past has been simultaneously and selectively repudiated and embraced in what Zha (1995: 10) calls the half-baked, sheepish, defensive, cynical, masked, stealthy, and often comic atmosphere in which reform zigzags ahead, drawing clear distinctions as to what counts as an official history and an unofficial one is often difficult. The recent explosion in publication and electronic media and the proliferation of new avenues for public discourse, according to Evans (1997: 16) makes the issue of the relationship between dominant discourse and its subjects more complex...Texts published under official auspices often suggest themes and perspectives that subvert the notion of an identifiable official discourse. As a result, there

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is no easy way of defining what actually constitutes the official discourse (see also Anagnost 1997). I would like to suggest that these difficulties in operationalizing the notions of official and unofficial histories is not a unique aspect of China, but occur in almost any cultural setting, and derive more from limitations in our current ways of looking at discourse and Discourses rather than the, albeit special, nature of the current discursive revolution taking place in the Peoples Republic. Many of these limitations result from where we are looking when we are looking for ideology in texts like histories. Does ideology exist in texts, in the people who make them, in the people who use them, or, as I will argue, in their use? Histories in public discourse, most obviously in such forms as government approved school textbooks, political speeches, national anthems and the legislated celebration of significant dates, but also in such genres as childrens books and TV soap operas (Rofel 1995), almost always give voice to what we might call Discourses of State Control (Gus Discourse of Revolution and Discourse of Reform being two versions of such Discourses). In the service of these Discourses, histories are meant to show that we are better than them, that the present regime is superior to the past one, and that loyalty to the state will bring future prosperity. In discourse about HIV/AIDS, histories in almost all cultures invoke these Discourses of State Control through portraying HIV as an invasion from outside the countrys borders, describing the heroic fight of the countrys doctors, scientists or public officials against it, and portraying loyalty to cultural values and obeying the states laws as the nations best protection against the virus (Dearing 1992, Diktter 1995, Farmer 1990, Patton 1990, Treichler 1992b). This is

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not to say that AIDS histories in all cultures give voice to Discourses of State Control in the same ways, to the same purposes or with the same effects. Different nations, and different communities of practice within those nations, have different conventions for constructing and responding to histories, and different ways of using them for different purposes. Histories, then, cannot be fully understood without taking into account the meaning that history itself has for a particular society and the various communities of practice within it and the theories governing its use. In China, not just because of its present socialist system, but also because of notions about the uses of history from its imperial past, this relationship between history and state control is rather more explicit than in the West. The writing of history has traditionally been the sole province of government officials, and its purpose has traditionally been defining and justifying the present regime against the backdrop of past ones (and foreign ones) and providing lessons for both the leaders and the led. For nearly two thousand years, Chinas governments have been preoccupied with meticulously compiling records of the past, and meticulously modifying the records of previous regimes to suit the purposes of the current one (Jenner 1992). Consistent with this didactic role, histories in China have a tendency to provide overt connections between past events and the contemporary situation, to not only structure memories about the old society, but to define identities in the present one (Link 1992). Added to this traditional didactic view of history is a special regard for history within the framework of scientific socialism. The Communist Party, writes Jenner (1992: 154) has always been particularly conscious of itself as having a mission defined by history history as a supra-human force. For the socialist state, history is not just a

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useful tool, but a necessary one through which current policies are constructed as not just desirable but inevitable. Because of the explicitly ideological character of history in China and other socialist states, it is easy for an outsider to assume that consumers of histories in these states are inevitably misinformed about the past. What such a perspective fails to take into account is the way not just the histories themselves but the idea of history held by citizens affects how history is read and used. When history is overtly technologized by the state (to the point where it is unabashedly and regularly revised to conform to changes in leadership or policy), its character as a cultural tool changes, and along with it the ways people are likely to appropriate it. Studies in other socialist states have suggested that as such states move from more controlled economies to more market orientated ones, formerly prevailing official representations of history, though still appropriated by the state, begin to lose their ideological force. In such situations it becomes more likely for consumers of these histories to appropriate them with what Ahonen (1997) calls a double consciousness, a kind of attitude which allows them to know the history by heart, but not take it to heart (see also Zinchenko 1985). Consumers of history in such circumstances do not always expect from them reliable chronicles of past events but rather indications of the appropriate line to be taken in public discourse. The constructedness of history is taken as given, more than is the case in most democratic societies in which state histories continue to wear the cloak of objectivity an objectivity which is seen to distinguish free societies from totalitarian ones.2

A good illustration of this point can be found in a series of studies done by Wertsch and his colleagues (Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Wertsch and OConnor 1994, Wertsch and Rozin in press) which compare the appropriation of official versions of national histories by people in both the United States and the former Soviet Union in which they found that Americans, much more than subjects from previously totalitarian 183

Thus the key to understanding how histories transmit ideology lies not just in explicating what they say, but also in understanding how they are used, how they function in social interaction. Rather than drawing a clear line of demarcation between official and unofficial histories, it is more useful to talk about official and unofficial uses of histories as they move through various mediational chains from official uses in things like government publications to unofficial uses in everyday life.

4.3 Storylines of Revolution and Reform

Narrative histories are used to perform a wide variety of functions for those who produce them and for those who appropriate them. These functions include the construction of a certain kind of world, a certain view of reality and common sense, the establishment of various positions for speakers/writers and hearers/listeners both in the immediate interaction and in the larger socio-cultural context, and the formation of intertextual links among discourse practices, social practices and social identities. These versions of reality, preferred relationships, and intertextual links in turn act to either limit or amplify readers and listeners ability to use these texts to carry out particular actions within the real communities of practice of which they are part. According to Wertsch and his colleagues (Tulviste and Wertsch 1994, Wertsch 1997, Wertsch and Rozin in press) histories serve at least three basic functions for the nation-state. The first is what they call a cognitive function, the creation of the nation itself as an entity existing in space, in time and in relation to the individuals and groups which make it up. The second two are creating among consumers of histories a feeling of belonging to the nation-state, and inspiring loyalty to the state and its policies.
regimes, were likely to uncritically appropriate official versions of history into their own accounts of their 184

It is the first function, the action of drawing the boundaries of the nation, which lies beneath all other actions undertaken through the production and appropriation of histories. Whether they are used to inspire preventative measures by portraying the gravity of the threat of HIV or to justify some AIDS related government policy, all official uses of AIDS histories have as their prerequisite the imagination of the nation, an exercise to which each of the various voices that might be invoked, the voices of science and public health, the voice of education, the voice of journalism, the voices of the Party and of tradition, lend their contribution. AIDS and the narratives surrounding it contribute to a larger process of imagining the nation in much the same way Billig (1995) observes weather reports and other artifacts and activities not overtly nationalistic nevertheless reinforce the idea of nationhood.

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.1

Among the most important cultural tools used to establish these boundaries are maps. Figures 4. 1 and 4.2 are two examples of how maps are appropriated to tell the story of AIDS in China. The first is from China Responds to AIDS (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997) and represents the extent of infection in each province by the
nations past. 185

depth of color given to that province. The second is from a Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine Pamphlet called Super Plague () (nd) and depicts HIV as a forest fire rolling in over the Western border and threatening to engulf the nation. Both of the maps not only work to construct HIV as something that exists either inside of or outside of political borders, something that is transmitted not from person to person, but from country to country or province to province, but also to reconstruct the nation itself, appropriating AIDS to emphasize already existent boundaries. The difference between the two maps is the kinds of stories they tell. In the first map, AIDS is constructed as an internal phenomenon, an attribute of particular regions inside the country the darker provinces and autonomous regions (in particular Xinjiang in the northwest and Yunnan in the southwest, both primarily inhabited by national minorities) are like stains upon the face of the nation. The second portrays AIDS as a dynamic phenomenon, a destructive force invading the nation from the West. Each of these storylines contributes to constructing not just a particular version of HIV and its spread, but also a particular national identity for China, the first essentially reformist and technocratic, the second more consistent with constructions of epidemic diseases in the Discourse of Revolution. These two storylines represent, however, not so much two different ideologies as two different ways of using boundaries to turn the nation and the virus into cultural tools with which to take strategic action. Whether one, the other, neither, or (as is most often the case) both of these storylines are appropriated at any particular time depends as much on the contingencies of the situation into which they are appropriated as it does on the actual ideological beliefs of those who do the appropriating. Thus, perhaps the most important fact to take into consideration in

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analyzing the two maps above is that the first one was produced primarily for external consumption in a report published with UNAIDS, one of the main purposes of which is to attract funding from international organizations, and the second map was produced for internal consumption in a health promotion pamphlet (along with other threatening images like fig. 5.17 in chapter five), the main aim of which appears to be to frighten readers into avoiding risky behavior. Histories of plagues (and their eradication) from cholera to sexually transmitted diseases have long been a staple in public health discourse in China, particularly during the Patriotic Public Health Campaigns () of the Maoist era (Ma 1993, Horn 1969, Sidel and Sidel 1982). Such stories inevitably trace the source of disease to foreign aggression or corruption and portray the Party as the savior of the race. These revolutionary public health histories still retain a high degree of currency today in official discourse on AIDS. In fact, any official use of the history of AIDS in China today inevitably speaks dialogically to these pre-histories and must seek somehow to reconcile past success and present danger. A typical example of such a history can be seen in the Introduction to Zhang Gengqins Handbook for the Prevention and Treatment of Sexually Transmitted Diseases () (Zhang 1997: III):
; ... 1964 . In old China, due to a long period of foreign aggression and feudalism, as well as its oppression and domination by bureaucratic capitalists, the masses lived in dire poverty, epidemics ran

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rampant, and sexually transmitted diseases were widespread to the point where they had devastated the peoples physical and mental health and threatened future generations and the prosperity of the Chinese race. After the establishment of the new China, the Party and Government, showing great concern for the people's health, completely closed all the brothels, outlawed prostitution and thoroughly destroyed the evil prostitution system. As a result the most important source of the transmission of STDs was eradicated at the rootAfter a struggle of over ten years, finally in 1964, the goal of essentially ridding the whole county of sexually transmitted diseases was realized, bringing international attention and admiration.

One of the problems in appropriating such a storyline in discussions of HIV/AIDS is that the current epidemic of STDs and rapid spread of HIV in China in many ways negate its central premise. One way in which this dilemma can be solved and this prehistory can be made compatible with the current reality of a growing STD and HIV epidemic is to tell the story in reverse, to bring back upon the stage the previous causes of epidemics, causes emanating from outside the physical boundaries of the nation and the ideological boundaries of the Party. Zhang does just that:
80 With the coming of the 80s, along with our countrys opening to the outside world and the development of the tourism industry, people from inside and outside frequently moved about. Some people were influenced by corrupt bourgeois capitalist ideas, resulting in the long ago stamped out evil phenomenon of prostitution once again being dredged up. This brought about a rapid increase in STD patients and an epidemic, which is growing in scope day by day.

Such a move simply constructs the return of STDs as the return of foreign aggression. Another example of this move can be seen in a government propaganda film on STDs which was recently released as a commercial venture in a set of disks entitled

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Unlocking the Mysteries of Sex () (Guangdong Fuguang Entertainment Co. Ltd. nd). The film begins with a visual tour of the main episodes of the revolutionary history cited above, beginning with the threat of the extinction of the race in the days before liberation (Fig. 4.3), showing how the Party saved the people from the brink of extinction (Fig. 4.4), and ending with the new threat, images of foreigners crossing the border (Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.3

Fig 4.4

Fig 4.5

One way such histories work to inspire loyalty is through the invention of threats to the imagined nation or race, as when AIDS is portrayed using metaphors from warfare (see chapter two) or when, as above the extinction of the race is invoked. In the book 88 Questions about the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS, for example, Yang and Fang (1994: 74) warn, the spread of AIDS is becoming a serious social problem, it has a real influence on whether the nation prospers or the race becomes extinct ( ). This alarmist attitude is also taken up in the title of a 1993 collection of policy speeches and papers about AIDS entitled Beware of AIDS for the Survival of the Chinese Nation ( ) (China State Council Experts Committee 1993) 3
3

This preoccupation with the extinction of the race is not unique to the socialist period. Both Unschuld 189

This invocation of the extinction of the race constructs AIDS prevention as a patriotic duty and sex as a public rather than a private matter. A pamphlet for students from the National Health Education Institute (), for example, uses the following passage to explain why Sexual behavior is not purely a private matter ():
The most important reason for the spread of AIDS and STDs in the world is sexual freedom. When AIDS threatens a nation, the survival of its people and its development, is sexual behavior still purely a private matter? (China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation et al. 1995a)

Increasingly, though, reality is at odds with this construction. Not only do most people now clearly regard sex as a private matter, but appealing to peoples patriotic duty has done little, it seems, to stem the tide of the sexual revolution in China or to slow the growth of the commercial sex industry and the commercialization of sexual pleasure in general. Appropriating the tools of revolutionary public health histories into the discourse of AIDS prevention might serve as a useful political tool for conservative or hard-line cadres searching for reasons to slow down economic and political reform. Many official uses of AIDS histories I have examined, however, do not use this approach (or at least do not exclusively use this approach). While they continue to emphasize the role of the state in protecting the people from the ravages of the epidemic, they often studiously avoid linking it to political policies or imbuing it with ideological significance, for to do so would be to call into question the very policies being promoted by strong reformist
(1985) and Diktter (1995, 1998) point out that such warnings were common in the early Republican period as well, used to advance such projects as eugenics, population control. 190

elements in the Party. Instead the languages of epidemiology and demography are appropriated to portray the spread of AIDS in China as growing out of a collection of abstract risk factors, described in voices more clinical than political. Rather than being linked to foreign ideas or an internal ideological crisis, these factors are often portrayed as agentless occurrences with no apparent social cause, and when causes are attributed, they tend to be linked to economic or social development (the quality of the healthcare system, for example, or the level of education among the people). An example of this more reformist brand of AIDS history can be see in the chairman of the China AIDS Network, Zhang Kong Lais, plenary address at the First Hong Kong AIDS Conference in 1996:
multiple factors facilitating the spread of HIV are emerging, making China more susceptible to this devastating disease. Data gathered from both the government and NGOs have revealed that attitudes towards sexuality among Chinese have become more and more open and liberalProstitution, although illegal, together with sexually transmitted diseases, are on the rapid riseFurthermore, the situation is complicated by the massive migrating population (8 to 10 million) within the country with most people being unemployed, sexually active, and quite likely to have casual sexAnother risk factor is that there is an enlarging population of drug abusers in China with more and more people beginning to adopt intravenous drug injection. On the other hand the vast majority of Chinese lack basic knowledge about HIV/AIDS and still show great ignorance about how to prevent HIV infection. (Zhang 1996: 3)

Whereas revolutionary public health histories emphasize the uniqueness of China and the origin of epidemics as outside the countrys borders, reformist AIDS histories focus more on internal factors contributing to the spread of HIV and the similarities between China and other countries. AIDS is presented not as a threat to the Chinese race, but as a threat to the human race, mankinds common enemy ()
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(Fang 1995: 15). The HIV/ AIDS problem is complex, and huge, and has no respect for national boundaries, states China Responds to AIDS, the governments 1997 assessment and needs report (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997: 5), and so it is in the worlds interests as well as Chinas to address it quickly and effectively. The way the HIV crisis should be addressed in such approaches is not by closing Chinas doors to keep the virus out, but by opening them wider to let in foreign expertise and aid. Whereas revolutionary public health histories tell the story of the victory of discourse over the world (patriotism and ideological purity defeating disease), reformist public health histories construct AIDS prevention as a response to changing material circumstances, making discourse fit the world (Gu 1996). In such histories, the primary temporal boundary is not the utopian distinction between Old China, devastated by sexually transmitted diseases, and New China, free of them, but a golden age distinction (Scollon and Scollon 1995) between the China without AIDS of the past and the China with AIDS of the present and foreseeable future, marked conspicuously by the year 1985 when the first AIDS case (a foreigner) was discovered in the country. This shift in temporal perspectives involves a certain risk for the state, forcing it to admit that things are getting worse rather than better. The way this shifting of perspectives is made palatable is through the appropriation of different cultural tools with which to draw temporal boundaries. Whereas in older histories, the advance and decline of epidemics was seen in the context of political events (particularly the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949) and administrative measures (legislation, mass campaigns), in reformist histories the spread of AIDS is told through the appropriation of

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epidemiological milestones, years in which the virus entered particular geographical regions or social groups, or stages of the epidemic.4 These two approaches to the story of AIDS in China, arising out of two contrasting perspectives on the nations identity, should not, however, as I mentioned above, be seen as totally separate, but rather as developing in constant dialogue with each other. Those who dredge up revolutionary pre-histories of the eradication of STDs and warn of a return to the bad old days before liberation speak in response to reformist policies, and reformists portray their revisionist histories as a way to set right () the mistaken concepts of the past which saw AIDS as a foreign disease. Li and Ma (1997: 14), for example, write in the International STD and AIDS News ():
The danger of AIDS continuing to spread in our country is a result of the fact that the knowledge of the citizens still has yet to be aroused. Many people are not clear about AIDS, and there is a universal lack of AIDS prevention knowledge and the assumption that AIDS is a disease of foreigners that is very far away from us.

None of the three examples I will be examining below appropriates either of these storylines alone, but rather they borrow boundaries from both of them and use these boundaries in strategic ways. One of the ways they are able to do this, I will argue, is by superimposing upon the spatial, temporal and social boundaries of these older Discourses a new set of boundaries, ones which define people, places and events in terms of

Many of these histories divide the epidemics spread in China up into three distinct periods, the first between 1985-1988, marked by a small number of imported cases, the second between 1989 and 1993 when infection was more or less limited to IV drug users in the southwestern province of Yunnan, and the third stage, which began in 1994 when the epidemic began taking off in costal cities and other rural areas 193

stability (), civility (), and quality (), the primary cultural categories of the Discourse of Civilization. As we saw in the last two chapters, these boundaries can be used either to undermine revolutionary boundaries (portraying them as ideology run amok), or to undermine the boundaries between the individual and the state, the public and the private, the ideological and the practical, that reformist policies have given rise to. The themes of the Discourse of Civilization, knowledge, civility, quality and stability, as Anagnost (1994: 279) notes, traverse many boundaries: the boundary between state and society, between the party and masses, between a Chinese self and its significant others, between past and present. Perhaps the most important boundary introduced by this Discourse is the geographical boundary between the city and the countryside, and the corresponding social boundaries between those who are urban residents and the growing number of nomadic rural dwellers who flood into the cities in search of work. This boundary between the city and the countryside is not absent from earlier public health histories, but it is constructed in a very different way. In histories, like Ma Weigangs (1993) Prohibiting Prostitution, Prohibiting Drugs (), for example, STDs are portrayed as entering the country via its port cities through the practice of prostitution. Cities are the epicenters of infection and moral degradation which threaten to spread disease into the countryside, and the battle against STDs is one waged on the cities by the forces of ideological purity represented by the peasants. Now, however, it is the countryside which is the source of infection and the cities which are endangered by an

like Sichuan, increasingly spread through sexual transmission (see for example China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997, Zheng 2000). 194

invasion from within the nation in the form of ignorant and low quality migrants.5 The central character of AIDS histories which appropriate boundaries from the Discourse of Civilization is the floater (), and vulnerability to HIV is to a large degree seen as a consequence of this floating. China Responds to AIDS (China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997) defines the floating population in terms of its elusiveness and ability to escape the reach of the states technologies of control, as well as its quality () or lack thereof, manifested in low levels of knowledge and education (cultural level) ():
In addition, the mere fact that they are mobile has as a direct corollary that they are difficult to reach and easily escape efforts at education and health promotion. Since they are also generally poorly educated and sometimes not fluent in the languages or dialects of the regions they have migrated to, raising their awareness of HIV/ AIDS becomes even more challenging. (18)

Dutton (1998) notes that the floating population tends to be divided into the worthy and the unworthy floater, the former being short-term workers whose papers are in order, while the later are suspicious characters, without homes or status (78). This later category is normally referred to with the term mangliu () to flow blindly, a term which is both semantically and phonetically related to the term liumang ( ) hooligan. This group, Dutton (78) writes:
are always in danger of being defined liumang or hoodlums, as the expression used to describe them mangliu seems to suggest. Mangliu is a compound word formed through a

As Anganost (1994:260-1) writes: The subaltern subject, defined in terms of peasantness and poverty, is no longer constructed as a potentially progressive force in history, but as the source of Chinas backwardness, in need of eugenic management and a wide array of orthopractic measures. The party continues to imagine itself as the supplement necessary to liberate the masses, but in terms radically different from the harnessing of a revolutionary forceThe party constructs itself as a pedagogical force intent on raising the quality of the people (tigao renmin suzhi), inciting their productivity, their desire for commodities, and their attainment of new standards for civil behaviour. 195

reversal of the character order that makes up the term hoodlum and the replacement of the character mang meaning common people with the mang of blindness... this idea of flowing or floating, as opposed to being sedentary or stablehasregistered as a crucial marker of social division in ChinaClearly this pejorative use of the term liu to flow when applied to people, is flagging the fact that there is more invested in the household register than the utilitarian benefits derived from the planned socialist system would lead us to believe.

This association of movement with hooliganism provides the link between identities predicated simply on the crossing of geographical boundaries and those based on the violation of moral or behavioral boundaries which are more traditionally associated with the term liumang () homosexuals (), prostitutes () and drug users ().6 The official definition of liumang () in the Regulations for Managing the Special Population ( ) of the Ministry of Public Security includes this sense of movement, aimlessness, and its inevitable threat to public order, counting among those who are to be considered liumang, whoever roams from place to place, without work, without being enrolled in an academic institution, and without a home to return to (Yu 1987: 90, trans. Dutton 1998). The label liumang is also associated with sexual deviance, not only promiscuity and commercial sex, but most particularly homosexuality (up until recently gays were generally detained for violating laws against hooliganism) (Dutton 1998, Hinsch 1992, Pan and Aggleton 1996, Ruan 1991, see chapter seven). In the presentation of risk groups in many AIDS histories, this merging of social and geographical transgression is manifested in such characters as women from the

The term liumang () is historically associated with the crossing geographical boundaries, liu meaning to flow or to drop and mang which currently means common people, but in traditional times meant to leave or be forced to leave ones land (Dutton 1998:62) According to Chen (1998:63) the original meaning of the term was closer to liumin (drifter or moving person) or youmin (vagrant). 196

countryside flooding into the cities to become prostitutes and drug addicted peasants selling their HIV infected blood to hospitals in the cities. Virtually all of these identities are constructed as not just at risk for HIV infection (if not already infected), but more importantly, as at risk for spreading HIV as a consequence of their movement. One of the main ways the invention of such identities is achieved linguistically in Chinese is with the suffixes zhe () as in AIDS infected person () floating person () promiscuous person () (lit. sex chaos person) and -renyuan () as in migrant worker (), and hotel worker (). A search for the suffixs -zhe () and renyuan () in my corpus of official government documents, health promotion pamphlets and articles from newspapers and magazines (see Appendix 4d) yielded a pattern of identities invented around the phenomenon of AIDS in China which are nearly all somehow predicated upon the crossing of boundaries. Some of them are based on movement across geographical boundaries such as mobile people (), people returning from visiting relatives (), and people from other provinces and cities (). Others are based on the violations of the boundaries of physical normality or social propriety such as AIDS patients(), HIV carriers (HIV ),homosexuals (), blood sellers (), drug addicts (), prostitutes (), promiscuous people (), and people who have difficulty marrying (). The suffix zhe () contributes to the technologization of risk groups by
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transforming attributes and social practices into identities, not unlike the addition of an er to the end of a verb like write or bake in English. Most traditional social identities in China, however, do not invoke social practices or attributes, but rather social relationships (within the family or work unit), and so are not marked with this suffix. Renyuan () means literally personnel or staff, and is used to create an identity out of an occupation. These kinds of identity labels can be thought of as labels of behavioral identity () and contrast sharply with the relational identity labels more central to Chinese social life (Blum 1997). Just a few of the identities yielded in the search for zhe () and renyuan () could be construed as not at risk, identities, usually involving professions such as scientists or government officials, or constructed by negating at risk identities (people who do not have a history of anal intercourse, people who are not homosexual). I can call this class of people zhumin (), residents or the stable people. The fact that much fewer behavioral identity labels are associated with this class of people is a result of most of them already fitting into conventional relational identity roles (father, mother, citizen). In fact, they are considered normal primarily because they usually do not take on identities based on activities and attributes they normally do not need to since they have not violated geographical, physical or behavioral boundaries. While all of these boundaries are in part determined by the realities of the epidemic HIV in China was indeed first detected in the rural southwest, the migrant population is indeed a major factor in its spread, as is the increase in previously proscribed sexual practices, and HIV infection in rural areas is a particularly serious problem, partly due to the contamination of the blood supply though practices like the
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buying and selling of blood (Rosental 2000b) they also represent a strategic move by users to invoke a new Discourse of State Control in a situation where the older revolutionary storyline no longer proves adequate. This Discourse constructs HIV neither as a result of foreign invasion nor as the result of abstract epidemiological factors, but as a consequence of luan (chaos), the unregulated movement across the various boundaries which contain the nation and the people. This construction is very different from that of the Discourse of Revolution, which not only encouraged but glorified movement across boundaries (overturning traditional hierarchies, sending city residents out into the countryside to learn from the peasants, etc.). Previously the Party stressed eliminating the three differences (rural versus urban; agricultural versus industrial; manual versus mental work) (Gold 1989: 175-6). Today, not just in AIDS discourse, but in virtually every sphere of government influence, the policy seems to be strengthening rather than eliminating these differences (Dutton 1998).

4.4 The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest

The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest is a striking example of the increasingly heteroglossic nature of AIDS discourse in contemporary China. On one hand, with its concern for both the nation and Beijing as the context of HIV infection and its heavy reliance on facts and figures official policies and health promotion slogans, the text resembles closely the type of history one might find in an official government report. On the other hand, it also gives voice to the Discourses of popular culture in framing itself as a contest, from journalistic Discourse in its focus on famous firsts, from educational Discourse by appropriating the format of a multiple choice test, and from the Discourse of public health, in presenting itself as a tool for AIDS education.
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The official voices of the Beijing Department of Hygiene and Epidemic Prevention Center are in continual dialogue with the journalistic voices of reporters and writers at the Beijing Evening News, and the professional voices of AIDS experts and educators at the Beijing Institute for STD Prevention and Treatment. It is also an example of a text where revolutionary and reformist uses of history exist in a seemingly amiable relationship mediated through the Discourse of Civilization. On the one hand, the contest form constructs a storyline in which AIDS is portrayed as invading from the outside, seen for example in question 7 which asks the nationality of the countrys first AIDS patient (here nationality being reduced to only two categories: Chinese or foreigner, insider or outsider). It also makes ample use of slogans, one of which, Give Priority to Prevention (), is taken verbatim from the Patriotic Public Health Campaigns () of the fifties. On the other hand, in many places it draws more reformist boundaries, portraying AIDS in global rather than national terms (seen in question 2 about global AIDS statistics and question 4 about World AIDS Day), placing less emphasis on foreign causes and more on internal factors driving the epidemic (prostitution activities, intravenous drug abuse and homosexual behavior question 20), and framing the assumption that AIDS is a disease of foreigners as clearly incorrect (question19). It even advocates the adoption of solutions from foreign experts (asking whether or not China should adopt the very effective and beneficial prevention measures used in foreign countries in a way which makes it easy to guess what the correct answer is question 15). At least as important as the boundary of the nation in the story of AIDS told in the contest form is the boundary between the countryside and the city (in particular, Beijing),
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reflected in questions 5, 8, 9, 12 and 13. Where older revolutionary discourses, however, portrayed the cities as the sources of disease and other social evils, and the countryside as healthy and ideologically pure, the contest form portrays AIDS as invading the city from the countryside in the form of visitors, non-residents, and migrant workers from backward rural areas where the virus has taken hold among uneducated peasants. Similarly, the ways temporal boundaries are drawn in the contest form also contrasts sharply with those seen in older public health histories. The primary temporal boundary in older histories is between Old China, in which feudalism and foreign aggression fueled devastating epidemics, and the New China, in which, due to the measures of the Party and the state to outlaw and eliminate the foreign evils of drugs and prostitution, dreaded diseases no longer threatened the masses. The contest form, however, like more reformist public health histories, chooses epidemiological rather than political milestones. Although the choice of these milestones, especially of what are known of as the Three Firsts () the first case of HIV infection within Chinas borders, the first Chinese STD patient to be found to be HIV infected, and the first case of infection involving a worker returning from abroad (AIDS is Right Beside Us Knowledge Contest receives 1998) retain an emphasis on the foreign and immoral origins of AIDS, these events are presented as things that were discovered () rather than caused by foreign aggression or internal subversion. The agents in the spread of AIDS, if there are any, are these people with HIV themselves who carry the virus first across national boundaries and later across the boundary separating rural and urban China. Although there is still attention given to government measures and policies

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(as in questions 10 and 11), these measures and policies are not presented as milestones, but rather as part of an ongoing national struggle against the virus. Finally, the ways social boundaries are drawn in the contest form also differ from older revolutionary histories which divided people on the basis of class origin and ideological commitment, as well as from pre-revolutionary Confucian Discourse, which assigned identity based on social roles, primarily within the family. Instead they are drawn with the behavioral-identity labels of the Discourse of Civilization. Prominent identities, for example, are foreigners, non-residents of Beijing, and migrant workers, identities created through the practice of crossing geographical boundaries. Other identities are predicated upon attributes which violate the boundaries of physical normality or moral propriety (like STD patients, drug addicts), and still others are predicated upon social practices which involve some kind of contact with the fringes of contemporary Chinese society (hotel workers, private entrepreneurs). The degree to which this vision of the nation and the spread of HIV within it is accepted by the reader, and the ways he or she is likely to appropriate it depends much on the relationship the text creates among its readers its authors and the invented communities it represents and the way it invites readers to situate themselves within the geographical, temporal and social boundaries it draws. The most obvious way the text creates a relationship between producers and consumers is through the discourse identities set up by its question/answer format and the social identities constructed through the appropriation of the genre of a multiple choice test. While on the level of discourse identities the authors are askers and the readers are answerers, unlike most question and answer sequences, the askers are already in

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possession of the information they seek. The questions, then, are essentially display questions (Coulthard 1985), questions like those used by teachers in classrooms not to elicit information but to test their students knowledge. Implicit in this format, of course, is a power relationship in which the authors take on a role not unlike that of a teacher, as well as a utilitarian view of knowledge which sees it as something that can divided up into different questions and quantitatively measured, the score readers achieve on the test being an indication of how much knowledge they possess. The most important function of this format, however, is to give readers a way to distance themselves from the at risk communities that are invented in the questions. By appropriating the format of a test, authors not only position themselves as possessors of knowledge, but also offer to readers a chance to define themselves in this way as well (by responding correctly), thus distinguishing themselves from the uneducated and unrestrained peasants that are portrayed as the source of HIV infection. Another way identities are claimed and imputed is through the use of the experiential shorthand of slogans, statistics and tifa. Slogans and tifa, constructions that collapse complex practices and policies into fixed expressions which are closed to critical assessment, and facts that collapse complex patterns of transmission into decontextualized bits of portable data, are important tools in the construction of AIDS as a credible threat. They are also important, however, in the negotiation of the identities between producers and consumers of the text. Slogans, tifa and statistics represent an implied shared language among authors and readers. The appropriation of these rhetorical devices works to both construct authors as qualified users of them (experts) and to construct readers as capable of decoding them properly. While their

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appropriation limits participation by those who do not have these codes available to them, for those who do, their use creates a sense of solidarity. This is especially evident in the use of slogans and tifa (). Among the most obvious appropriations of this type appears in the title itself in the words AIDS which is right beside us (), which is derived from an official government tifa for AIDS prevention, the full version being: Dont assume that AIDS is far away from us, AIDS is right beside us! ( ). Although constructions with similar meanings like AIDS is very close to us (), or AIDS is right next to us ()are possible, their use would not convey exactly the same meaning or command the same tone of authority. A search of my corpus of public discourse, including official government documents, health promotion materials, newspaper and magazine articles, computer mediated discourse and transcripts of radio call-in programs, reveals that this slogan (in whole or part) appears on the average in approximately one out of every ten texts. The metaphor of proximity embodied in the saying reinforces the construction of HIV as an entity which was originally geographically distant but has subsequently violated the borders (of the nation, province or city) and is moving rapidly towards us. The use of the pronoun us serves to create solidarity between the reader and the author by situating them both within these borders rather than as part of the carriers who populate the margins. Other more overtly political slogans also appear in the form, helping authors to construct themselves as mouthpieces of official policy (or at least as toeing the official line). Examples of these can be seen in question 11, in which the policy of the Beijing
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Municipal Department of Disease Control is summed up in four character slogans: Put Prevention First (), Intensify Propaganda (), Strengthen Surveillance () and Combine Administrative Efforts. (). These are old favorites in the Partys arsenal of cultural tools, having been used in almost every public health campaign before the advent of HIV in China. Other slogans from government sources similarly hearken back to mass movements of the past, for example Everybody take immediate action to participate in the anti-AIDS campaign ( ) (Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention and Beijing Municipal Health Education Institute nd). Political slogans of this type serve not just as mnemonic devices for public policy, but also as tools to promote loyalty and construct identity. They simultaneously set up a hierarchal face relationship between readers and authors, with the authors taking on the voice of the Party-state handing down the official line to readers, and a relationship of solidarity, claiming for authors and readers a place in a common political cause, defining them as comrades, people who share common political aspirations and, even more importantly, common discursive tools with which to express them. Even the term 9-5 () in question 11, meaning the Ninth Five-year Plan, which divides time not by the Gregorian or lunar calendars but by the administrative calendar of the state, constructs the readers as sharing these temporal boundaries by assuming that they can interpret it. It is only by considering these tifa and other social languages within the context of the multiple choice test format discussed above, however, that their full effect on the interpersonal dimension of the text can be fully appreciated. The structuring of the form as a test in which readers are invited to select from among a number of different
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prefabricated answers, puts readers in the position not of giving an answer, but of choosing an answer, which often means not just choosing the correct fact, but also choosing the appropriate packet of discourse through which it should be expressed. This tendency for questions to focus not just on what is said but also how it is said is particularly salient in questions which ask whether the way of saying presented is true or not, as in question 1, which reproduces the official definition of AIDS (see chapter 3):
1 A B 1. AIDS is a presently incurable, highly fatal communicable disease. Is it true that men, women, old and young all have the possibility of being infected? A false B true

Other questions ask readers to choose between two competing tifa:

19 A B 19. AIDS is a presently incurable but completely preventable communicable disease. The whole society should not discriminate against AIDS patients and AIDS infected people. But there are still people who assume that AIDS is a disease of foreigners, that it is very far away from them, that all they have to do is avoid unsafe behavior and they wont catch AIDS. Do you think the latter knowledge is right or not? A Right B Not Right

In some of the questions, it is possible for the reader to get the right answer without knowing the answer, as long as he or she knows the way such things are said. In the question below, for example, readers need only know that government policies are
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usually expressed in collections of four character expressions and that no self respecting government body would express policy in the pedestrian and unelaborated form given in choice B.
11 A B 11. During the Ninth Five-year Plan Beijings AIDS prevention and control policy has been: Give Priority to Prevention, Intensify Propaganda and Education, Strengthen Surveillance, Combine Administrative Efforts. What is the goal of this policy? A. Reduce Disease, Control its Spread, Work to Maintain the Low Prevalence. B. For AIDS not to occur.

While choice B is clearly not wrong in the semantic sense, making AIDS not occur being the goal of every prevention policy, it is not correct in terms of the interpersonal function this goal is meant to realize. This differentiation between right and wrong answers based on how closely they conform to conventional ways of saying constructs AIDS knowledge not so much as a collection of facts, but as a series of model answers, and constructs AIDS prevention not so much as doing the right thing as saying the right thing. The ability to reproduce packets of discourse in the right way and in the proper circumstances becomes the means by which participants enact social identities, the way experts show that they are experts, and the way non-experts construct themselves as not-at-risk. The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest, therefore, operates ideologically by constructing AIDS knowledge as the mastery of a particular Discourse which constructs risk in terms of social identities predicated on the crossing of various
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geographical and social boundaries. On one hand, the AIDS history in the contest form uses this Discourse to present a certain view of AIDS prevention. On the other hand, the contest form itself and the story of AIDS that it tells are used by this Discourse to present a certain view of the world. The real purpose of AIDS knowledge here is not so much to protect oneself against infection as to show oneself to be a legitimate participant in this Discourse, a civilized citizen of the nation. Along with this pedagogical nationalism, however, there is also another voice articulated. Possessing AIDS knowledge is not just a way to ensure ones place within the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of quality, it is also a way to qualify in a game with prizes above and beyond avoiding infection. While the multiple choice test format sets up a didactic relationship between authors and readers, the appropriation of the contest format sets up a commercial relationship between them. It links this text to other texts found in this as well as other newspapers and magazines like trivia quizzes and questionnaires which are meant to help readers evaluate things like their personality type, their EQ (emotional quotient), and the kinds of mates most suitable for them. The commercial voices in the text, however, fit as easily into the Discourse of Civilization as the nationalistic ones, indexing a rhetoric of self-improvement that both hearkens back to older revolutionary notions of the transformation of the self into a new socialist man and also invoking the more recent individualistic self-cultivation associated with consumerism. AIDS knowledge in this respect becomes a commodity that can be exchanged for a certain material reward and social status, an emblem of selfcultivation and quality () which can identify its wearers as not members of the uneducated masses. AIDS prevention is thus constructed as matter of raising the

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quality of the people (), inciting at the same time their attainment of new standards for civil behaviour and their desire for commodities (Anagnost 1994: 261). While this analysis can tell us much about the ideological potential of the text, we still cannot be certain of its ideological effect, which depends not just on what the text does, but also on what readers of the Beijing Evening News do with the text. Some readers might not read it at all, some might scan through it, some might read it thoroughly while not answering the questions, some might answer the questions without submitting the entry form, and some might appropriate it into interaction, using the questions to test their friends or spouses in earnest or in fun. We cannot generalize about the effect this text might have in the multitude of different activities and communities of practice into which it might be appropriated. Its producers, however, are kind enough to give us examples of the effect it is meant to have in another article in the Beijing Evening News several weeks after the publication of the original contest form. The article, entitled The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest Receives a Resounding Reception ("" ) (AIDS is Right Beside Us 1998), transforms the contest itself into an episode in the history of AIDS in Beijing. Much of it is devoted to describing how readers reported using the contest form to expand their participation in HIV prevention:
1 HIV

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One reader from Sichuan wrote, he once assumed talk of AIDS was like crying wolf, that there was no need to make a mountain out of a molehill, but when he saw in the Evening News that more than 10,000 people were infected he was shocked. He said, reform and opening up requires studying advanced science and technology not the debauchery of sexual openness, We need to say no to HIV, because we are Chinese. One retired teacher wrote, regarding AIDS, although he didn't turn pale at its mere mention, he did take special care when traveling or going to public places, eating in restaurants and going to the hospital, for fear that he might be infected. Through this activity he learned a lot about AIDS prevention which he wants to pass on to his children and those around him.

We can, of course, never know how representative these statements are of readers in general or of those who actually sent in the contest form. Rather than representative responses, they are better seen as model responses, provided along with the list of correct answers to the questions to give readers a way to assess their own reaction. They also provide further insights into the authors conceptualization of the relationship among history, action and AIDS prevention. First, the effects of the contest form reported by these model readers is seen in affective as well as cognitive terms knowledge leading primarily to a particular kind of emotional transformation (whether it is a transformation from denial to shock as in the first case, or from fear to rationality as in the second). Second, the actions taken are social rather than individual, involving the passing on of knowledge to other people or the assessment of government policy regarding reform and opening up, constructing AIDS not as an individual problem, but a collective one, and protection not as individual protection but as protection against a threat to the nation.

4.5 Chinas Patient Zero

Just as histories of other significant national events are full of parables, stories of

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heroes whose love for the state or its ideology leads them to victory, and of villains whose betrayal leads them to shame, AIDS histories also have parables, tales of courageous or upright citizens who have made contributions to the fight against AIDS, of innocent victims who contracted the virus through no fault of their own, and of guilty agents who, through either dissolute behavior or contact with world beyond the countrys borders, or both, act as bridges across which the epidemic passes from its foreign origins to its domestic manifestation (Jones 1998b, Shilts 1987).7 Not just in China but in many other countries as well, these popular histories and urban legends take as their subject particular individuals who have contracted HIV, transforming their illness experience into symbols of the nations experience with the virus. Sometimes these individuals are famous, either by virtue of the social status they held before infection or the status of their infection in the framework of the countrys epidemiology of HIV. One need only think of Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, or the Canadian air steward, Gaetan Dugas, dubbed first by Shilts (1987), and subsequently by nearly every major media outlet in America, Patient Zero, to appreciate the importance of such stories on the publics perception of AIDS, both in relation to risk behavior and in relation to attitudes towards HIV positive people (Jones 1998b). The second text I would like to look at is an example of such a parable, the story of Chinas first AIDS patient as dramatized in the book AIDS Closes in on China () by pop sociologist Fang Gang (1995) (see Appendix 2b). Whether this narrative constitutes an official or an unofficial history is difficult to state with any certainty. On the one hand, the story, and the book in which it appears, depends for
7

A rich compendium of AIDS parables can be found in the commercial publication AIDS: The Warning of the Century (AIDS:) (Ceng and Ren 1997). 211

its commercial appeal on its controversial status, the fact that it ostensibly raises topics and presents perspectives not typically addressed (or even actively avoided) in both official discourses and in everyday life, reflecting what Zha (1995) sees as a current trend in popular literature in China for authors to become famous on the basis of taboobreaking or truth-telling (Pappas 1998, Zha 1995). Indeed much of the first chapter of the book is devoted to the authors repeated claims that what we are reading is in fact Chinas first book about AIDS (as well as his claims to have written that same year Chinas first book about homosexuality, another taboo topic8). On the other hand, there is little in the book that authorities would have any reason to object to, and much, in fact, which appears to promote the Party line on AIDS prevention, sexual morality and health care policy. Like many recent commercial publications in China, the book depends for its commercial success on pushing the envelope, and on its official acceptance on staying within it (Zha 1995, Link 1992). The story I am concerned with here appears at the beginning of chapter two and is entitled A Special Patient Enters the Hospital (). The actual historical event involved is quite well known; many people I have met in China, in fact, have been able to reproduce the tale at least in part with reasonable accuracy. It concerns an Argentine person with AIDS who became ill while travelling in Xian in 1985 and was subsequently transferred to Beijing Union Medical College Hospital. After trying several unsuccessful treatments, the staff of the hospital contacted the patients doctor in his home country and found out that he had AIDS. There was mass hysteria among the staff, some refusing to administer care to the patient. After the patient died, special measures
8

Both of these claims are inaccurate. Regarding the second claim in particular, both Li and Wangs (1993) Their World () and Zhang Beichuans (1994) Homosexual Love in China () 212

were taken to disinfect the ward where he had been and everything that he had touched was burned. In addition, all of the healthcare workers who had come into contact with the patient were given HIV antibody tests, none of which turned out positive (Qiu 1997). Fang Gangs retelling of the story draws on tools from journalism and soap opera melodrama (Rofel 1995) as he describes the psychological effect the nations first AIDS patient had on those who experienced the event first hand, and from traditional morality tales, as he portrays the incident as a parable of professionalism and public responsibility. While the contest form I looked at in the last section constructs knowledge as the nations cumulative experience of the epidemic, Fang Gangs tale of Chinas patient zero creates from the experiences of the doctors and nurses at Beijing Union Hospital a symbol of the nations knowledge about AIDS. Although it uses a very different set of cultural tools from the contest form, many of the same voices can be heard, and many of the same boundaries are drawn. As in the contest form, the nations boundary figures prominently in, for example, the foreignness of the first patient and the premise of the book as a whole which frames AIDS in the context of the nations boundaries which are being closed in on. By calling the foreigner an American () (he was actually Argentine), Fang Gang, perhaps inadvertently, draws the same kind of boundary seen in the contests question about the same patients nationality, one which erases the borders between all other nations and sees everything as either Chinese or not. Boundaries between the city and the countryside are also featured, with Beijing in general and Union Hospital in particular portrayed as centers of knowledge and expertise, superior to places and hospitals outside of Beijing.

preceded Fang Gangs Homosexuality in China () (1995b). 213

Temporal boundaries are also drawn in similar ways, constructing the progression of the epidemic as a series of significant events, or, we might say, significant people. As in the contest form, the moment that AIDS enters the nation is assigned to the discovery of this particular infected individual. Whether or not other undetected cases, perhaps even among locals, might have preceded the entry of this tourist into the country is immaterial, as is the fact that there is no evidence that he infected anyone else while he was there. Chinas patient zero is constructed as the origin of AIDS in China, forever embedded in the conventional phrase that begins nearly every account of the spread of AIDS in China in my corpus: Since the first case of AIDS was discovered in Beijing in 1986 (19866l). Fang Gang transforms what in other accounts is an epidemiological event into a date of national significance, framing the melodrama he is about to tell squarely in the boundaries of the nation and the context of nationalism.
1 2 3 4 19856 ;

One day in June of 1985 is, for Chinese healthcare workers, a day worth remembering; if we can really regard AIDS as a common enemy of the entire society, then this day should be remembered by every single Chinese. On this day, China discovered its first AIDS patient.

Social boundaries are drawn as well in ways similar to those in the contest form which associate infection with mobility and outsider status. Chinas first AIDS patient is a floating person () in almost every respect: he is an outsider, he is a traveler (without a home), he is a diseased body (probably as the result of some inappropriate

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activity), and, typical of liumang (), he fails to disclose his true identity (as an AIDS patient). Central to the construction of the outsider and the insider in this narrative is the category of quality (). Quality is what distinguishes Beijing from other cities, and Beijing Union Hospital from other hospitals:
57 58

Union hospital was, after all, Union hospital. Its staff was impeccably trained, its professional ethics were also first rate.

It is also what distinguishes the staff who live up to this reputation, compassionately put(ting) all of their energy into saving this American friend (lns. 18-19) and bravely moving the body to the mortuary, despite their fear of infection (lns 58-9), from the low quality staff who panic and spread rumors, and from the patient himself who does not even have the decency to reveal his HIV infection, as well as from the other foreigner who visits in lines 40 to 47 and is so lacking in quality that he jokes about the solemn topic of AIDS and himself panics when he learns of the existence of the AIDS patient. As in the contest form, all of these boundaries are crucially mediated by the concept of AIDS knowledge. Equally as important as the temporal boundary between a China with AIDS and a China without AIDS is that the story draws between a China without AIDS knowledge and a China with AIDS knowledge, a distinction between the past, when nurses and doctors did not know how to treat AIDS patients and discriminated against them, and the present when AIDS patients receive good care as a result of the increased knowledge and experience among healthcare workers. Whereas the AIDS is Right Beside Us Contest frames knowledge as history, this story is a
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history of knowledge, the story of the journey from a state of ignorance to a state of enlightenment, a reinvention of the utopian storyline made possible through the cultivation of quality ().
84 85 86 87 19859 , 9

Nine years have passed since 1985, and in these nine years, over ten AIDS patients have ended their life journeys at Union Hospital. Among them have been both Chinese and foreigners. In their final days they received rather good care.

The kind of knowledge portrayed here is not just the knowledge of the facts of transmission and prevention, but knowledge gained through experience, knowledge which leads one towards a particular code of personal or professional behavior, a particular attitude or consciousness (). In this regard, AIDS itself is seen as a test of the quality () of the nations healthcare workers, and by extension, of the people as a whole:
81 82 83 87 88 89

The phenomenon of AIDS presents a kind of challenge to all doctors and nurses, a test of our understanding of the spirit of the profession. Going beyond psychological boundaries is not an easy task.although doctors and nurses went through various psychological and behavioral twists and turns, they were all finally able to take a scientific attitude towards treating AIDS patients and towards this disease itself.

Furthermore, just as in the contest form, this knowledge is not just individual, cognitive knowledge, but a kind of collective knowing, a collective experience of the epidemic
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leading to a collective effort to police the boundaries of social space and social behavior through the cultivation of a proper consciousness. And also as in the contest form, this construction is one which lends itself as easily to the promotion of nationalism and traditional morality as it does to the promotion of modernization, urbanity and professional or commercial morality.

4.6 History and Action

In this final section I return to the question we asked at the outset of this chapter: how do histories of AIDS operate ideologically when individuals appropriate them to take actions in everyday life? What, in other words, are the effects of the boundaries mapped out in texts and the Discourses they invoke on people who use these texts, and how do people manipulate these boundaries and Discourses to suit their own needs in particular situations. I am interested both in how historical identity is appropriated as a cultural tool to claim or impute participation in various communities of practice, and also in the consequences these appropriations have on how people perceive their individual risk of infection and formulate decisions about HIV prevention. This last text I will analyze is an excerpt of a conversation I had with a gay hotel worker in Fuzhou about how people in his city felt and acted about HIV infection (see Appendix 4c). To explain it to me, he appropriated two narratives, the main one, a recent story in the media about a local prostitute who had been infected with HIV and supposedly had passed in on to a large number of clients, and embedded within that story, his own version of the story of the first AIDS case in China, which he insisted had been a tourist traveling in Fuzhou, not Xian, before being transferred to Union Hospital in Beijing.
217

In appropriating the histories of Chinas first AIDS patient and the more recently infected Fuzhou sex worker, the speaker situates himself and those around him within the nations narrative of AIDS, and in doing so, reproduces the same boundaries we observed in the texts above and gives voice to the same Discourses. What is more important, however, is how he localizes these boundaries and modifies these Discourses to take particular actions, how he uses them strategically to frame the threat of AIDS in the context of his lived experience and position himself in relation to the boundaries of the nation, of his own city and of the various communities in his social world (prostitutes and their clients, other men who have sex with men, urban as opposed to rural residents). As in the histories we discussed above, AIDS history for this speaker is constructed as a series of significant events, and AIDS knowledge consists primarily of knowing how to respond to these events. The status of the story of the Fuzhou prostitute as an instrument of AIDS knowledge is summed up in the abstract (Labov 1972, Labov and Waletzky 1967) with which the speaker begins:
1 2 3 X:.... ..gay ..

X: In Fuzhou.. people got pretty scared after that last incident with the prostitute.. before that before this incident.. Fuzhou's prostitutes ah, clients ah, and also we gays all felt that AIDS was very far away.. but now it seems that AIDS is right beside us...9

As in Fang Gangs tale of Chinas patient zero, the Fuzhou prostitute represents the arrival of AIDS into the consciousness of the people, and the story is framed as one of a journey from ignorance to awareness. In telling it, the speaker positions himself both as a participant in this frame of transformation and as outside of it, already endowed with

For transcription conventions see chapter 3, footnote 7. 218

knowledge and watching as his fellow citizens wake up. The speakers verbatim appropriation of the health promotion slogan from which the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest takes its name, acts to situate this local experience within the national context created by the slogan, making the history of AIDS in Fuzhou a part of the nations history of AIDS. It also provides the speaker with a social language with which to claim a particular social identity, one not unlike that awarded to winners of the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest which distinguishes them from the ignorant and unsophisticated who are at risk of infection. Just as in both the contest form and the story by Fang Gang, the knowledge of an event of HIV infection brings with it this sense of proximity, proves the tifa. History rather than information is seen as the engine of behavior change.
23 24 ......

I think the last incident..uh..the one concerning that prostitute who got AIDS.. something good came of it..everyone..is very scared.

What mediates between the time when people took no precautions and the time when they began to is significantly not knowledge of the routes of transmission of HIV so much as the knowledge of a significant story whose effect on readers, hearers and viewers is not so much cognitive as affective. A proper attitude towards AIDS is the result of a vicarious emotional experience of the consequences of infection. The speaker reproduces this vicarious experience in his description of his own viewing of a television interview about the case:
111 112 113 114 ...... ...... ......uh.. 219

115 116

....... ......

On TV there was a man..who told the reporter..the reporter was interviewing him..the man was this prostitute's former boyfriend.. they didnt show his face..this man had no problem (was not infected).. he really liked this prostitute..because she was quite beautiful..really liked her.. uh.. but later when he found out she was a prostitute they broke up.. so he.. I saw that man crying..I saw him crying..

Geographical boundaries from official discourses are also reproduced in the speakers retelling of these stories. Not only does the prostitute come from the countryside, reproducing the portrayal of the spread of AIDS as a movement from rural to urban areas, but she also has a foreign connection: the client who is said to have infected her is believed to be from Taiwan, a province which has violated geographical boundaries by separating itself from the motherland, the epitome of a liumang () society in official discourse on the Mainland. These boundaries exert a direct effect on the speakers assessment of the seriousness of AIDS, which only becomes a threat insofar as it penetrates the boundaries of the nation in the second story he tells and the municipal boundaries of Fuzhou in the first. The kinds of social groups constructed in this excerpt also conform to the identities observed in the passages examined above: there are prostitutes, clients of prostitutes, gays, people who are residents of Fuzhou and people who are outsiders. And, as in the official uses of these histories, these identities are predicated on the act of crossing geographical and social boundaries, boundaries which come together in notion of quality (). Here again, quality is seen as a function of both geographical origin (urban vs. rural) and of knowledge or educational attainment (). What makes one
220

vulnerable to HIV infection is not primarily engaging in risk behavior but failure to attain a sufficient level of quality:
122 ... 125 126 127 128 129 130 .... ummm ...... .. ......... ..ah ... ... .. condom ........ condom.......

She probably hasnt graduated from elementary school.. ummm.. but the doctor.. was very sad.. very regretfully told her.. he said.. the disease you have is.. AIDS.. and then she asked the doctor..she said, Whats AIDS.. when will I recover..ah when can I leave the hospital...we all say this prostitutes quality is so low.. now I.. I think since her quality is so low she probably rarely or never used condoms.. I guess, probably.. when she was serving customers.. rarely or never used condoms.. or else.. she wouldnt say what is AIDS?

Where this text departs from the ideology of official uses of these tools from the Discourse of Civilization is in how they are mobilized. Rather than assigning quality (), for example, only to those individuals who remain within the boundaries established in official AIDS histories, this speaker uses the notion of quality to subvert these boundaries, creating within populations of liumang () space in which quality can mitigate their outsider status and reduce their perceived risk of infection. Thus, there are low quality prostitutes, like the one in the story, who are unable to protect themselves and others against infection, and high quality prostitutes and the clients of high quality nightclubs who use high quality condoms() (see below):
21 22 17 ........ ..box.. ..

221

Prostitutes.. they usually use them.. especially good quality ones ..at high-class nightclubs. the manager said so. .all his prostitutes have condoms in their bags.. also in the 'box' there are a lot of used ones..

Even sufferers of venereal disease are divided into high quality sufferers, who seek treatment in proper hospitals and clinics, and low quality sufferers who fail to adopt the proper attitude towards their disease and attempt to treat themselves:
17 18 19 20 .. .. ........ .... .. hotel .

There are also some people.. with lower educational levels.. we regard them as low quality people, not good.. they get gonorrhea. .and afterwards say.. getting gonorrhea is just like catching a cold, have an injection and its okay..some say I won't go to the doctor, Ill just buy the medicine..since I work at a hotel I know.

Part of what makes this subversion of the language of quality possible is the way the Discourse of Civilization, while holding in one arm the principles of socialist morality, embraces with the other the morality of the marketplace. Thus, behavior change, while constructed as a consequence of official histories, is evidenced not in the kind of moral transformation these histories aim for, but a transformation in consumer behavior much like that seen in the notion of brand consciousness that surfaced in the debate on condom advertising analyzed in chapter two:
12 13 14 15 16 X.... ... .. .... ...... hotel .. .......

X: It's changed a lot, you can see from that shop.. a lot have opened recently in Fuzhou.. sex shops.. that.. that.. the thing that these shops must sell the most of is condoms relatively expensive.. they like to buy them.. people who visit prostitutes frequently.. I work in a hotel so I 222

know.. people who go to prostitutes frequently like higher-priced condoms.. they think the material in foreign condoms is better.. they say Japanese are better.. they told me...

In the above excerpt, the rhetoric of the quality of people () interacts with the rhetoric of product quality () to construct the not-at risk person as a sophisticated consumer. Even the distinction between foreign and Chinese is subverted, foreign condoms seen to be of better quality () than Chinese ones. The states strategy of combining voices of socialist morality and consumerist modernity is then appropriated as a tactic to legitimate people and practices that official ideology proscribes, allowing the speaker to create a social space for the communities of practice (communities of prostitutes and communities of people who visit prostitutes) that are part of his everyday life as a hotel worker, and, by extension, his own community of practice (the community of men who have sex with men in Fuzhou). The informants retelling of the story of Chinas first AIDS patient serves to both complement the primary narrative of the local prostitute by reinforcing the physical, temporal and social boundaries which that story sets up, and also to construct the local story as part of the larger collection of narratives that make up the nations history. What is particularly interesting about the retelling is the degree and accuracy of the detail. There is the initial mystery surrounding the patient, the subsequent revelation of HIV infection and mass panic among healthcare workers, the disinfection of the ward and incineration of the patients personal effects, and finally, the administration of HIV antibody tests to the healthcare workers who had come into contact with the patient. Even the inaccuracies in the retelling, however, rather than subverting the boundaries set up in official uses of the story, serve to reinforce them. By assigning Fuzhou rather than Xian,

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as the site at which Chinas first AIDS patient first became ill, for example, the speaker, with some degree of pride even, inserts his own city into a significant national narrative, using this story to support the theme of the primary story, that AIDS is right beside us. Similarly, the inaccurate memory that the patient had had relations with a number of Chinese prostitutes and had been interrogated by the government, further links the two stories through the construction of prostitutes as the bridge between foreign and local infection and portrays the patient in a classical liumang () role, that of object of interrogation.10
94 95 96 Xmmm..... .. ......

X: mmm...I don't remember clearly, but it seems this foreigner had.. relations with a lot of Chinese prostitutes, right? It seems more than two or three had relations with him.. and the Chinese government wanted him to tell them.. with whom.. which Chinese did you have sex with..

One of the most important functions of this story lies not however, in the speakers recreation of the nation, but in his creation of himself in relation to the nation, and in relation to the people around him. Not unlike the contest form and subsequent responses from readers analyzed in 4.4, it helps the speaker to construct himself as someone possessing AIDS knowledge, and thus less at risk than the less knowledgeable people around him. The story is a demonstration of knowledge through which what Rofel (1999) calls cultural citizenship (see also Wu 1994, chapter seven) is claimed:
28
10

It also distances the patient, who most reports portray as homosexual (see for example Zhao 1996), from the speakers own community of practice. 224

29 30

....mm...... ..

Chinas first AIDS patient happened in Fuzhou.. you know?..mm.. this.. is not something many people know.. and they dont know what hospital and what year..

The function of this story as a demonstration of knowledge is further evidenced by the speakers frequent interruption of his telling in order to check his accuracy, asking, am I right, is that it? It is almost as if he is taking the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Test and I am meant to give him a score. Other kinds of knowledge contained in the excerpt, on the other hand, are seen as not to be associated with, such as his knowledge of condom use among prostitutes and their clients, and in these instances he distances himself from it by saying, I know because I work in a hotel (lns. 5, 20). Another such demonstration of knowledge can be seen in the speakers appropriation of the social languages of epidemiology and biomedicine in his assessment of the extent of damage caused by the prostitute:
43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 .. ........ ........ ...... ..condom.. .. ..... .... .......... ......... .... ...... .... ..

...in one day.. we all know prostitutes serve several customers in one day.. she served two.. on average they all serve one to two.. now she was already carrying the disease.. the latency period.. the latency period is two years.. or three years.. for two to three years on average every day she had relations with one man.. some might have used condoms.. some might have been lucky, uh?.. because you know it's not as easy for a woman to pass on AIDS to a man as it is for a man to pass 225

AIDS on to a woman.. not the same.. so.. but we figure.. from a doctor's perspective.. even if only half the men were infected.. it's still scary.. ah.. but.. she probably.. she served.. it's not to say that every night she had different customers.. they might have been the same.. it might be last times customer.. but if we calculate in this way.. if we calculate again this number is still scary.. but there are a few.. men who have been infected before who still might go to other prostitutes.. or other women. .if you calculate in this way you feel quite terrified.

What makes these demonstrations of knowledge tactically important in the excerpt is that they help him to reconcile his own social identity with the Discourse that he has appropriated. Through the meticulous retelling of both of these historical events, the speaker is in part mediating between his own imagined communities and the version of them that the Discourse of Civilization invents. In official uses of AIDS histories people like him are situated outside of the boarders of propriety, safety and cultural citizenship: he is a homosexual, someone who has had sexual contact with foreigners, someone who regularly engages in unprotected anal intercourse (albeit in the context of a stable relationship), and a hotel worker who not only has regular interaction with prostitutes (hostesses) who work in the hotel nightclub, but is involved in teaching them a foreign language, English, presumably so they are prepared to serve foreign clients. One way in which the speaker manipulates his position among the official boundaries of AIDS histories and the social boundaries of his real life is his strategic appropriation of the pronoun women (us or we). There are at least three uses of the word women in the passage. The first identifies the speaker as part of the community of men who have sex with men, a community whose at-risk status is confirmed by lumping it with prostitutes and people who visit prostitutes:
1 gay

Fuzhou's prostitutes, clients, and also we gays 226

At the same time, there is also a we that joins the speaker to the general public, the citizens of Fuzhou: readers of newspapers, watchers of TV, and even old women who cant speak putonghua () (ln. 32-33). The way the speaker mediates his identity as both inside of the boundaries of the socially sanctioned and outside of them is by creating a third we, the we of the knowledgeable, those who can assess the situation correctly, drawing on, for example, the kind of lay epidemiology (This is the way we figure it) () (ln. 43) that we saw above, those who read the right kinds of newspapers (we all like this kind of paper.. not like People's Daily which nobody reads.. nobody reads People's Daily or Fujian Daily.. wed rather read the local newspaper) ( .. .. ) (ln.70-71), those who can distinguish a low quality prostitute from a high quality one (we all say this prostitutes quality is so low) () (ln. 128), and those who are able to derive from this narrative the proper message: that AIDS is right beside us ( ) (ln. 3). Thus, while the speaker clearly reproduces the boundaries of official Discourses, he uses these boundaries to construct a very different kind of social reality, one in which the mastery of the nations stories about AIDS allows him and those around him to take on not at risk identities and to participate as legitimate citizens of the nation. Insofar as these stories give the speaker a way to manage his social self, they might in some ways limit his participation in AIDS prevention by, for example, helping him to justify risky practices on the basis of the not at risk identity he has carved out for himself within the
227

official Discourse 11 or upon which he imputes on others (being more willing, for example to forego condom use with a urban resident rather than a migrant from the countryside or a person whose quality seems to him high see chapter seven). They might also expand his participation, in obvious ways like, as the speaker points out, the affective force of the narrative motivating behavior change or the rhetoric of quality mitigating against self-treatment for STDs. For the speaker himself and his partner, the boundaries and stereotypes constructed in official histories are, at least in one regard, appropriated to take action which amplifies participation in AIDS prevention, providing them with an excuse to take an HIV anti-body test without having to reveal their identities as social outsiders:
131 132 133 134 135 136 ........ ...... mmm .. .. ........ .... lover .......

So for a variety of reasons.. I.. I like.. I like to go with my boyfriend.. every year or every few months.. to the hospital to have this kind of test..everytime we go for a test we say.. we were with mmm had relations with prostitutes..were very worried we didn't use.. the doctor asks us if we used a condom..and we say no..the doctor asks us..do you feel uncomfortable.. we say a little bit.. actually we dontbut I told my lover to say a little uncomfortable.. so then the doctor says..you had relations with a prostitute and you feel uncomfortable.. you need to get tested immediately!

* In this chapter I have explored how histories of AIDS in China mobilized in public discourse create a collective context for individual action. Far from subordinate to
11

Much as Mendes-Leite (1998) points out people construct imaginary protections through the symbolic manipulation of official prevention messages. For further evidence of this see Jones (1997b,c, 1999). For further discussion of imaginary protections see chapter seven. 228

scientific facts, historical narratives are constructed in China as essential components of AIDS knowledge and important tools for prevention. In official uses they are appropriated not just to illustrate facts or inspire fear, but also to reconstruct the nation itself by inventing the various communities of practice that both make it up and lie outside of its boundaries. At the same time, we have also observed how the ideological force of such histories is altered as they come into contact with actual people in actual situations who appropriate them to imagine their own identities. When appropriated into everyday interaction, AIDS histories not only serve to mediate the relationship between the individual and the nation as a whole, but are also used to mediate between the individual and his or her own local context. Individuals appropriate AIDS histories to tactically create themselves and the groups to which they belong and to take actions which either increase or decrease their vulnerability to HIV infection. While Wertsch and his colleagues regard creating in readers a sense of belonging to the nation one of the primary official uses of histories, an equally important function is representing those who do not belong. Whether or not users of these texts fall into the category of belonging or those who do not belong, however, depends also upon how they use them. Cultural citizenship, according to Rofel (1999: 457) is a kind of belonging that is not merely a political attribute but also a process in which culture becomes a relevant category of affinity. It is process of self-making and of being made, of active modes of affinity as well as techniques of normalization (Rofel 1999: 457, emphasis mine). The boundaries to be considered when histories are viewed as cultural tools, then, are not limited to those constructed by the text itself, but also necessarily include those

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constructed by the conditions of its use in the discursive construction of real life situations. When they are appropriated, histories function as what Wenger (1998) calls boundary objects, texts which form a nexus between communities of practice. Histories can mediate the boundaries between the state and its citizens, between various groups within a society, or between individuals and the communities of practice within which they participate. It is at these boundaries that evidence of the ideological force of official histories should be sought, in the tension between the set of boundaries drawn in the histories themselves and the boundaries individuals and communities create when using them. In the next two chapters I will further explore the interaction of identities invented in HIV/AIDS discourse and those imagined when cultural tools are appropriated to take mediated action, this time in educational discourse about AIDS targeted at the very communities which AIDS histories invent.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Five The Grammar of AIDS Prevention

77 16 130 4 98 12 2 AIDS Day, Prevention Experts Give 'Preventive Injection' When AIDS Prevention experts showed a slide show of AIDS sufferers, drug users undergoing forced treatment felt uneasy. One young man said softly to the person next to him, how terrible! Yesterday's lecture for drug users at the Shenyang Public Security Drug Rehabilitation Center was an important part of this year's World AIDS Day propaganda activities. The statistics released yesterday by the provincial Ministry of Hygiene indicate that the number of AIDS infected in the province has reached 77, with the youngest being a sixteen-yearold drug user. Based on the analysis of domestic experts, the ratio between reported cases of AIDS and the actual number of infected is 1:30, which is to say, the actual number of AIDS infected in the province possibly exceeds 1000. Drug users make up the group with the highest rate of infection. Sharing needles to inject drugs is an important route of transmission of AIDS. Just this year, four drug users in the Shenyang Public Security Drug Rehabilitation Center were found to be infected with the AIDS virus. Prevention experts hope that citizens will understand, AIDS is a kind of highly fatal communicable disease for which there is presently no cure or treatment, but it can be prevented. All people

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should understand the following measures: scrupulously observing moral integrity and abiding by sexual morality are the foundation for preventing sexual transmission; properly using condoms can reduce the danger of transmitting AIDS and STDs; treating STDs early and thoroughly curing them reduces the danger of transmitting AIDS; sharing needles to inject drugs is an important route for the transmission of AIDS, and therefore you should say no to drugs and cherish your life; avoiding unnecessary blood transfusions and injections and using blood products that have been tested for HIV antibodies can prevent blood borne transmission of AIDS. The introduction by experts yesterday shocked the drug users. One middle-aged man named Jin formerly did business on Taiyuan Street. Since coming into contact with drugs two years ago his life has become unmanageable. He said, 'Today I heard a lot of knowledge that I didn't understand before. I don't dare take drugs again. It only invites disaster, if you get AIDS, your life is finished. At the same time, experts pointed out that because the AIDS infected are living among people, healthy people should treat them with a proper attitude. Citizens should understand that everyday contact with AIDS patients (including eating meals, shaking hands, bathing) and working with them cannot transmit AIDS; showing concern, helping and not discriminating against AIDS patients and the AIDS infected is an important aspect of AIDS prevention and control. Capital Correspondent Li Zhengrong Shenyang Evening News, December 2, 1998

The story above from the Shenyang Evening News (Li Zhengrong 1998) provides an excellent example of the elements that go into creating AIDS prevention and control messages in China: scientific definitions, statistics, moral exhortations, medical advice, and stories of personal experiences. As in the last chapter, we can see how these elements are used to invent particular communities and portray them as more vulnerable to infection than others by defining them in terms of particular attributes or social practices. What this article also provides is a description of what Scollon (1997a, 1998) calls a site of engagement, a specific moment in which cultural tools are mobilized for the production of mediated actions and social identities. The tools in this case are things like slides showing images of people with HIV or AIDS, the speech genre of the lecture and various social languages, including the language of biomedicine and the language of traditional moral values. Among the identities claimed and imputed through these tools are prevention experts, citizens and drug users. It is the linkage of these ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being within an appropriate site of engagement that 232

creates the practice of AIDS prevention and control ( ), a practice which is not just something performed by the prevention experts through actions like teaching and warning, but also by those on the receiving end of the message, through such actions as expressing particular emotions (fear, shock), assessing their past actions and resolving to change their behavior. In the previous chapter we looked at the ways communities are invented through stories and narrative histories which speak of certain individuals and groups, and how these histories are then appropriated and adapted by these people and groups to imagine their own identities. In this chapter and the next we will turn our attention to the ways the tension between invention and imagination manifests itself in the production and consumption of texts which speak to these same individuals and groups, and how, through this tension, the practice of AIDS prevention is technologized and made available for appropriation into different situations as a tool for claiming and imputing identity. The data for this chapter is a corpus of fifty AIDS prevention pamphlets produced by national and provincial government departments and (quasi) non-governmental organizations collected over the past four years (see Appendix 5). In these pamphlets I will attempt to locate the patterns of linkages among people, actions and cultural tools that go into the invention of social practices and social identities. In the next chapter I will observe how these patterns are taken up in two sites of engagement: a popular Beijing radio call-in program called Life Hotline () and an afternoon of AIDS prevention outreach work conducted in a number of Beijing parks among the men who have sex with men who congregate there to socialize and search for sexual partners. 233

5.1 Whos Speaking Here?

One of the most striking things about the fifty AIDS prevention pamphlets in my corpus is how similar they all are. Whether they come from highly developed urban centers like Shenzhen or Beijing or from less developed provinces and autonomous regions like Anhui or Xinjiang, whether they are directed at IV drug users, commercial sex workers, homosexual men, or the general public, they all contain not only the same kinds of information but present it in the same way, using the same generic formulas and in many cases the same words and phrasing, more often than not nearly identical to the words and phrasing contained in official government guidelines for AIDS prevention. The advice given in the pamphlets, as well as by the prevention experts in the article above, tends to follow almost verbatim the ten Essential Knowledge Points () for AIDS prevention published by the Ministry of Health (China Ministry of Health 1998b: 3-4):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1. AIDS is a kind of highly fatal serious communicable disease for which there is presently no cure or treatment, but it can be prevented. 2. The three important routes of transmission for AIDS are sexual contact, blood and mother to infant transmission.

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3.

Having everyday contact and working with AIDS patients and the AIDS infected cannot transmit AIDS.

4.

Scrupulously observing moral integrity and abiding by sexual morality are the foundations for preventing the sexual transmission of AIDS.

5.

Properly using a condom can not only prevent pregnancy, but can also reduce the danger of contracting AIDS and STDs.

6. 7.

Treating STDs early and thoroughly curing them reduces the danger of contracting AIDS. Sharing needles to inject drugs is an important route of transmission of AIDS, and therefore you should reject drugs and cherish your life;

8.

Avoiding unnecessary blood transfusions and injections and using blood products that have been tested for HIV antibodies can prevent blood borne transmission of AIDS.

9.

Showing concern for, helping and not discriminating against AIDS patients and the AIDS infected is an important aspect of AIDS prevention and control.

10. AIDS threatens every individual and every family. Preventing AIDS is the responsibility of the whole society.

While it might be argued that many of the above points constitute common knowledge about AIDS prevention that is contained in messages about AIDS worldwide, what is extraordinary about their inclusion in Chinese AIDS prevention materials is that, more often than not, they are appropriated word for word from official sources, without even minor changes in syntax or lexical choice, thus coming to constitute what I have been calling tifa () or ways of saying; even the order in which the points are presented is almost always the same. So, in considering the vast majority of AIDS prevention materials from official sources in China, the most obvious answer to the question Whos voice is this? would be: the voice of the Ministry of Health. Closer examination of the ten points and attention to how such documents come into existence, however, would reveal that this voice is not as monologic as it seems. The 235

Ministry of Health, for one thing, does not consist of a single person, but rather a variety of people representing different political factions with different social and political agendas, and decisions about which points are included, how they are worded and the order in which they appear is often the result of intense negotiation among these different voices. Other voices as well, the voice of the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Education, and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, for example, also have a say in determining the content of such documents, as well as the voices of foreign experts or organizations such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank and UNAIDS. Attention to the speech genres and social languages in the document reveals even more voices: the voice of biomedicine, the voice of traditional morality, the voice of the law, the voice of family planning, the voice of education, the voice of human rights, and the voice of Socialist mass mobilization reminiscent of the patriotic public health campaigns () of the past. Furthermore, each local or regional organization brings to its appropriation of these points other voices: the voices of provincial and regional customs and patterns of speech and the voices of individual authors whose names often appear on the pamphlets, attributing to these individuals both credit and accountability for the words they contain. Therefore, beneath the relative homogeneity of official AIDS prevention materials in China is an underlying heteroglossia that combines a variety of different, and sometimes conflicting, voices and ideologies. This tension among voices, as I will discuss below, has the effect of creating multiple positions which authors and readers can

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take up in relation to the information provided and multiple frames through which to interpret this information. One of the main tensions set up in these materials is that between what I described in chapter two as a moral model and a medical model of HIV prevention (Goldstein 1991, Lupton 1994). The moral model is exemplified in the chengyu (): jieshenziai (), scrupulously uphold moral integrity (lit. clean body love self) (or sometimes jieshenzihao ), an expression which appears in thirty of the fifty pamphlets in the corpus. The medical model, on the other hand, is exemplified by the promotion of condoms, HIV anti-body testing and other technological measures, and features in most of these same pamphlets alongside the moral slogans. An example of this mixture of moral and medical approaches in the same text can be seen in the 1995 series of pamphlets from the National Health Education Institute ( ) which, along with detailed illustrated instructions on condom use, include the following warning:
: Remember: Properly using condoms can reduce the chances of contracting AIDS, but it is not foolproof. When condoms fail in contraception, an abortion is always an option. But when they fail in the prevention of AIDS there is no turning back. Preserving moral integrity (jieshenziai) is the only sure way to protect yourself against the threat of AIDS (23, 24, 25, 25, 26, 29, 30).1

Wu (ed. 1993) translates the expression jieshenziai () as:

Numbers correspond to the list of pamphlets in Appendix 5. The opposite of jieshenziai ()can also be expressed as a chengyu, namely: tongliu hewu (), an expression translated by Wu (ed. 1993) as: Associate oneself with undesirable elements [trends]; associate with evil elements; Birds of a feather flock together; Evil companions associate in evil;
2

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Refuse to be contaminated by an evil influence; exercise self control so as to protect oneself from immorality; have scruples and not to lower oneself; keep ones integrity [chastity]; lead an honest and clean life; maintain personal integrity (during chaotic times); preserve ones purity; refuse to soil ones hands. (1334)

Some (Xiao et al. 1987) attribute the expression to Menicus () who said: Cultivating moral cleanliness is all that is necessary (). Others (Mao and He eds. 1998) attribute the saying to Qing Dynasty prose writer Fang Bao () and his classic Biography of Four Gentlemen (). Thus it carries with it the voices of Confucian (or Neo-Confucian) morality and traditionalism. For most people, however, it also invokes the voice of Party propaganda. As one of my informants put it: the government always says this.. says it non-stop.. this is just officialeze (.. .. ) (Fuzhou 00-7).2 The most obvious metaphor embodied in this expression is one common to nearly all societies which equates goodness with cleanliness and evil with pollution. As Douglas (1984) has pointed out, most cultures use metaphors of purity and pollution as tools to create a symbolic order in the world, ensure social conformity and legitimate moral principles. Thus, according to an article in the Western Capital Times () (China is no longer 1998), what the discovery of HIV in China in 1985 meant was that China was no longer a pure land ().

The opposite of jieshenziai ()can also be expressed as a chengyu, namely: tongliu hewu (), an expression translated by Wu (ed. 1993) as: Associate oneself with undesirable elements [trends]; associate with evil elements; Birds of a feather flock together; Evil companions associate in evil; foul ones hands with sb.; go along with sb. in his evil deeds; go with the stream; thick as thieves; join in the courses of the vicious and unite in their bad practices; join in their evil doings[cesspool]; join with the vicious; lend oneself to dishonest schemes; play a part in their vile actions; wallow in the mire with sb. (2544).

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What is most significant about the expression jieshenziai (), however, is that it implicitly equates purity and pollution with particular kinds of people. The source of pollution in nearly all of the definitions offered above is not just impure practices, but getting mixed up with impure people, and pure people must protect their purity from the influence of such evil elements. True to its Confucian roots, the morality constructed by the expressions is relational. Pollution is not just a matter of violating the boundaries between cleanliness and dirt (Douglas 1966), but of violating the boundaries between proper and improper social identities and social intercourse. Central to this moral model, therefore, is not the Western Judeo-Christian notion of sin, but the Confucian notion of proper social conduct embodied in fulfilling ones pre-ordained station in life. HIV transmission in this model is primarily a result of violating the system of relationships which maintains social harmony. The medical model of AIDS prevention, on the other hand, focuses less on people and more on technological solutions such as properly using condoms () (5, 8, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 42) and avoiding unnecessary blood transfusions () (4, 19, 20, 42). Rather than set expressions from traditional culture, this model takes its tifa from the annals of biomedicine and actuarial science. It is the language of statistical analysis through which readers are invited to calculate the probability () or chances () of transmission associated with certain practices, and to reduce () these chances by faithfully carrying out various step by step procedures. In this model, responsibility for infection lies not in the social context but in the individual mind of the reader, and prevention is seen as a matter of cognition rather than interpersonal relationships. 239

Along with the tension between moral and medical voices, and related to it, other tensions surface in the pamphlets as well, such as that between the threat () of AIDS itself and the safety () associated with daily contact with those who are infected (what Cook and Colby 1992 call the alarm-and-reassurance pattern), that between AIDS as something that can be known (Know AIDS!) (!) (1, 4, 18, 19, 38, 42, 49) and something that is unknowable ( ) (21) (Ernie 1994, Jones 1997a), and that between what Joffe (1999) calls the risk model of disease (which sees it as something that can be systematically described, predicted and controlled by experts), and the danger model (which sees it as the uncontrollable result of fate or as punishment for improper behavior), seen in the frequent comparisons of AIDS to unavoidable natural disasters (plagues, floods and fires) (2, 3. 4, 7, 11, 21, 24, 27, 28, 44, 47) and descriptions of people living with HIV as unfortunate or unlucky () (24, 25, 26, 41). The risk model speaks of people contracting () (all pamphlets) AIDS; the danger model describes HIV transmission as meeting with the disaster () (23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29) of AIDS.3 One of the most significant tensions manifested in these texts is one around which the credibility of the messages themselves is constructed, the tension between the status of the materials as authoritative deriving their truth from the Party-state they claim as their source, and the need to mobilize outside voices, voices from science, advertising

A pamphlet for STD patients (23) provides a good example of these two models co-existing in a single sentence, readers being told that if they have as yet not contracted AIDS, there are two reasons: luck () and the fact that in the past there were very few infected in our country ( ), reducing the statistical chances of meeting up with one.

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and even Western human rights Discourse to persuade () the reader of this truth. According to Bakhtin, (1981: 342) authoritative, as opposed to internally persuasive, discourse demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused in it. The design of the pamphlets, the channels through which they are delivered (such as The Ministry of Railways) the tifa which they reproduce, and the names of the departments or bureaus which produced them displayed prominently on their covers all speak the voice of officialeze (). They are performances of the authority of the Party-state, and the dialogue they seek to set up with the reader is what Cheyne and Tarulli (1999: 11) call a Magistral dialogue, characterized by a superiority of the first (Magistral) voice over the second (novitiate) voice: the parent over the child, the teacher over the student, the tutor over the apprentice. In order perform this dialogue, authors appropriate a wide range of tools from the toolkit of the state including the law, political slogans telling readers what they should eliminate () establish (), sweep away (), preserve () and rectify (), appeals for mass mobilization, calls to resist the temptations () of bourgeois liberalization () and the labeling of deviant people and deviant practices with polarizing words like evil () and ugly (). Behind these performances, however, is the knowledge of how little authority these voices command nowadays. Thus, while the words are often little changed from those used in health campaigns from more revolutionary times, they are often packaged () (Barm 1999: 198) in the generic formats and social languages of advertising,

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counseling and public relations, voices which construct a very different kind of dialogue with the reader. In this dialogue the speech act changes from that of commanding to that of persuading, the identities of author and reader are constructed as more egalitarian, and the truth is constructed as something to be negotiated between the two parties. A pamphlet from the Chinese Institute of Preventative Medicine ( ) (12), for example, begins with something that more resembles a sales pitch than a warning:
: ? ? ? Friend: Have you heard of AIDS? Do you understand its dangers? Do you want to know what kind of threat AIDS constitutes to you? If you could only spend a few minutes to read through this little pamphlet we have edited, you will certainly find it profitable (lit. open book get benefit reading is always profitable).

Not only does the example start out by the author addressing the reader as an intimate with the word friend (), but also, throughout the message, strategies are used to accommodate the reader and lessen the imposition of the message (If you could only spend a few minutes). It is the reader rather than the message or the messenger that takes center stage. The readers knowledge and his or her desire to have more are presented as the foundation on which the product (this little pamphlet we have edited) is offered, and the value of the offer is in the benefit of the product for the individual reader rather than society as a whole, the people (), or the nation ().

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Similarly, A flyer advertising an AIDS hotline in Beijing (Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention 1999) (Fig. 5.1) resembles more one of the increasing ubiquitous advertisements for nightclubs, saunas, English schools and private STD clinics that litter Chinas urban streets than it does a piece of official discourse, appropriating the fonts, layout and persuasive techniques of modern advertising.

Fig. 5.1

Like the previous example, this flyer constructs the practice of AIDS prevention not as a patriotic obligation, but as a consumer service (), and the benefits of the service emphasized in the headline and bullet points are not that it can help the reader protect the nation against AIDS (or even explicitly protect him or herself from infection), but rather that it is available 24 hours a day (24 ), that it makes use of the latest telecommunications technology and provides the most up-to-date information (), that the confidentiality of callers will be strictly protected (), and perhaps most important, that it is free of charge

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(). The language used is designed more to attract than to inform, with phrases like abundant content () and the announcement: A new look for the AIDS counseling hotline () in larger lettering right above the bullet points. As with many commercial advertisements, the center of the flyer is occupied by the logo of the (government sponsored) NGO offering the service, giving it the status of a brand name. On the reverse side of the flyer is a calendar for the year 2000, a free gift for taking it and reading it and a feature of many such advertising flyers in China.4 Another example of the appropriation of marketing techniques into official discourse has been the incorporation of what Gouldner (1982) calls paleosymbolic scenes (Barm 1999), scenes which, unlike the socialist realist images of the past that depicted exemplary citizens enthusiastically engaged in public activities, depict subjective moments in the private lives of individuals, especially those associated with significant relationships (friendship, romantic love, family ties). According to Gouldner (1982: 225), the paleosymbolic implicates central persons, nuclear social relations and the affectively laden gratifications and securities associated with them. In their analysis of the uses of such scenes in corporate advertising in the West, Goldman and Papson (1996) claim that this strategy

This mobilization of voices from private and commercial Discourses in official propaganda texts is hardly limited to health promotion, but instead can be seen as part of a larger phenomena in China which Barm (1999:236) has dubbed Adcult PRC: a statist-corporate voice that offers basic definitions of group morality and ethics, consensus, coherence and community in ways more familiar to us from international corporate advertising practice than Maoist hyperpropaganda. Rather than treating readers as part of the masses, this new style of propaganda constructs them as individuals whose needs and desires for selffulfillment are paramount.

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blurs the boundary relations between public and private life, making them appear indistinguishable. Such ads siphon off political meanings, and yet by isolating intensely personal and subjective moments, they appear to have no ideological dimension (250, italics in original).

Such paleosymbolic scenes, romantic moments between couples (see for example 13, 25, 28), mothers cradling babies (see for example 3, 14), and people spending time with sick friends (see for example. 9), are, of course, the stock in trade of Western AIDS prevention materials, but their use in Chinese health promotion propaganda is a relatively recent development. Perhaps the most extreme example of this appropriation of paleosymbolic scenes can be seen the National Health Education Institutes pamphlet for gays which portrays gay men fishing (cruising) in a park (see next chapter) as something more resembling a tender moment than the act of hooliganism that it would have been labeled in the past. (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2 (30)

As important as who is speaking in these materials is whom they are addressing. As Voloshinov (1986: 86) puts it: The word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. Here again, however, the answer is not as simple as it first seems. Addressivity, in the Bakhtinian sense, is rarely singular; when we speak we often not only address our immediate interlocutors, but also address various 245

onlookers, likeminded people, opponents and enemies and invisible indefinite, unconcretized other(s) (Bakhtin 1986: 95). The most obvious way to answer the question, who is this pamphlet addressing? is by observing whom it summons. In some of the pamphlets, the target is summoned explicitly on the cover, as is true in all of the pamphlets in the 1995 series from the National Health Education Institute ( ), each of which bears a picture of the kind of person the pamphlet is addressing (or the cultural tools associated with them) along with a title like AID/STD and Farmers (Fig. 5.3) or AIDS/STD and Truck Drivers (Fig. 5.4) and a short slogan designed to attract the target audience.5

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Summonses of this kind are implicitly exclusionary, announcing not only for whom the pamphlets are intended, but also for whom they are not intended. Thus, the act

The pamphlet for Farmers (Fig. 5.3), for example, declares In every village and town, spread the news to every household, everyone prevent AIDS (), and the one for long distance truck drivers (Fig. 5.6) bears the slogan: Respecting traffic regulations is so important, preventing AIDS is just as important ( ). Other pamphlets summon their readers not through the invocation of social identities but through reference to the practices the targets are seen as participating in through titles like Drug use and AIDS ( ).

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of providing such materials to a given individual constitutes a clear imputation of identity, and the act of taking and reading them to some degree an acceptance of that identity. Distribution networks for such targeted materials are often carefully policed and the exclusionary nature of their summonses made rather explicit, as in the pamphlet for gays from the same series pictured above which on the back cover bears the directive: Only for distribution to homosexuals ( ) (30). In some cases the status of the summoned is ambiguous, as in the pamphlet pictured above (Fig. 5.5), intended for distribution to female commercial sex workers, whose cover bears the picture of three generic women and the generic statement: The threat of AIDS is greater for women ( ). The contents of the pamphlet mentions commercial sex work only obliquely and contains no textual or visual representations of it, and even the identity stated in the English title is euphemistic: AIDS and Women in Crisis. Here, the identity construction with which readers are summoned is not the actual identity of the commercial sex worker, but the idealized virtual identity (Goffman 1963, Jones 1997a) of the reformed sex worker, now an honest citizen, a faithful wife and an obedient daughter. Pamphlets for more general readers contain more inclusionary summonses, accomplished through titles like Common Knowledge about AIDS () (17, 37) and AIDS and the Family () (5). Some summon the reader using slogans as a kind of call to arms against the epidemic such as For your own health and that of humankind, prevent AIDS ( ) (6), Everybody join in, immediately take action, prevent AIDS ( / / ) (7), and Defeating AIDS requires every single persons effort (AIDS 247

) (11). Finally, some appropriate the voice of the reader, placing in his or her mouth a question which makes it seem that it is the author rather than the audience who is being summoned: Tell me how to prevent AIDS () (36) and How is AIDS transmitted? ( ?) (8). These summonses, however, are not just directed at the target audience, but also address what Bakhtin calls the third voice, an implicit third presence quite separate from the author and the targeted reader. The notion of the third voice, write Cheyne and Tarulli (1999: para. 29), raises what might be called the question of the other of dialogue, not an interlocutor, but an implicit third presence; the third party, person, or voice. A good example of this can be seen in the National Health Education Institute pamphlets discussed above in which the titles are in English, a language few members of the target audiences (farmers, truck drivers) could be expected to understand. The inclusion of the English language on the covers of these pamphlets not only lends to them the aura of modernity, but also constitutes a summons to another audience, a third voice, specifically that of English speaking foreign experts and international funders.6 Perhaps the most important third voice the authors are addressing in the pamphlets is that of their superiors, either immediate or more distant in the hierarchy of the Party-state. They speak dialogically to this voice by fulfilling the expectations, either explicit or implicit, set out by it, and by avoiding content or techniques which might offend it. This third voice may well account for the homogeneity of the pamphlets and the relative lack of more daring visual representations of sexual practices and more
6

In fact, it was this series of pamphlets that was presented to me as an example of indigenous AIDS prevention efforts on my visit to the Beijing office of UNAIDS by a director who himself could only understand the English text.

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aggressive promotion of condoms, features that seem much less restricted in commercial and journalistic discourses. The heteroglossic nature of the pamphlets is not just realized in the voices that speak through them and the multiple readers these voices address, but also in how these voices are spoken, whether they are invoked through numbers, written text, images, charts or graphs. The practice of AIDS prevention in China, as elsewhere, is achieved through multiple interacting and intersecting semiotic systems; the example which begins this chapter, for instance, involves spoken texts (a lecture and comments from the audience), a slide show doubtless including graphic representations of various kinds like photographs, maps and graphs, most likely some written text for participants to take away with them and study as well as a host of other codes like the gestures, facial expressions and dress of the doctors (who in China wear white coats and hats even for or especially for such exercises in public education, see next chapter), the uniforms of the guards at the Shenyang Public Security Bureau Drug Rehabilitation Center, notes and dossiers on each of the attendant drug users and other discursive elements in the environment like signs and banners. The pamphlets in my corpus use primarily written text (of different sizes, colors and fonts) and images, but in their distribution, spoken language and the other kinds of codes mentioned above are also invariably involved. Each of these codes has its own way of invoking voices, and the mixing of voices, not just within one code, but throughout a range of codes, demands of the recipient of the message what Kress and van Leeuwen call (1996: 37) an incessant translation; or transcoding between a range of semiotic modes. The way these different codes interact affects the way voices are heard (or

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listened to) with some voices (those expressed through dramatic visuals, for example) gaining salience over others (like those expressed in small writing on the bottom of a page). Sometimes one voice will interpret another, as when a caption anchors an image (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), and sometimes the line between words and images blur, words themselves becoming images through the use of special fonts, colors or shapes. This is particularly true of the word AIDS, which is portrayed, for instance, in figure 5.6 surrounded by skulls and in figure 5.7 as painted on the side of an ambulance.

Fig. 5.6 Fig 5.7

Through this choir of voices, those speaking and those spoken to, those that speak in words and those that speak in pictures, those that speak from authority and those that undermine it, representations of social actors and social practices which claim and impute identity and imagine and invent communities are created. It is this technologization of social practices and social identities and the textual mechanics underlying it to which I shall now turn.

5.2 The Technologization of Practice and Identity

Propaganda (), a word which has none of the negative connotations in China that it does in the West, is essentially, according to Barm (1999: 235), a representational pedagogy, an exercise which seeks to teach by presenting a particular 250

image of social reality. Central to understanding how this interplay of voices and modes of expression works to claim and impute identity in AIDS prevention materials is understanding how different elements of the texts work together to create representations of social actors and social practices and how these representations are linked to other sets of cultural representations both within and outside of the texts. The production and consumption of representations is the process through which practices and identities are technologized and AIDS knowledge is constructed. In this section the question I will address is how social identities and social practices are transformed into discourse about (identities and) social practices (van Leeuwen 1996: 35), and how these representations in turn contribute to the ongoing invention of the communities represented, as well as the imagination of the communities producing the representations. These questions have particular significance for AIDS prevention, a field in which the relationship between representations of people and representations of practices has long been a matter of contention. At the center of this debate is the invention in early Western discourses on AIDS of high risk groups (based on epidemiological transmission categories) and the social stigmatization which resulted from these inventions (Clatts 1995, Schiller et al. 1994, Treichler 1988). Now in the West, researchers, healthcare workers, health educators and activist are repeatedly exhorted to make clear the distinction between group membership and risk practices, and to see social identity not in terms of risk, but in terms of vulnerability. In China, however,

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the terms high risk group () and risk group( ) are still widely used.7 For the most part the invented communities portrayed as high risk in China are similar to those technologized in biomedical and journalistic discourse in other countries. A pamphlet entitled Common Knowledge about AIDS () from Gansu province (16), for example, lists the following as high risk groups:
( 1) ( 2) ( 3) ( 4) ( 5) (1) Male homosexuals and bisexuals (2) Prostitutes or their clients and their spouses (3) STD patients (4) Drug users who share syringes and needles to inject drugs (5) Infants born to mothers who carry the virus (17)

Other groups mentioned in my corpus are promiscuous people () (40, 48), people with multiple sexual partners () (14), and people who have received transfusions of blood and blood products () (17). One major difference between the construction of risk groups in China and that in the West is that in China they are often based not just on sexual or drug taking behavior but also on other behaviors, occupations or social statuses like travelers () (34), migrants or the

The appropriation of the concept of risk groups in China has its roots not just in Western epidemiology but also in a strong indigenous tradition of classifying people, from the dynastic practice of dividing society into categories like office holders, government employees, monks, Taoists, doctors, workers, hunters, common folks, intellectuals and beggars, to the practice during the Cultural Revolution of inventing identities like landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, moral degenerates, rightists, renegades, enemy agents, capitalist roaders and intellectuals (Li 1995:27).

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floating population () (24), truck drivers ( ) (29), medical workers () (1, 7, 9, 38. 49), and hotel workers (). Finally, as seen in the last chapter, foreigners (), those who have contact with them (), those who leave the country () (18, 33, 39, 48), and even people from other cities or provinces () are also often portrayed as high risk. Sometimes, as well, more general categories like youth () and women () are included. This construction of high risk groups, however, as in the West is often mixed with a contradictory construction which portrays everybody as at risk. The pamphlet Everyone Needs to Understand AIDS () (15) from the Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine (), for example, answers the question What kinds of people can get AIDS? (?) with the following list of risk groups: male, female, old, young all can get AIDS ( ). This paradoxical construction, far from problematic, gives to AIDS a convenient flexibility as a cultural tool: it can be used either to mobilize the entire society or to target particular communities of practice. The notion that risk groups can be identified and differentiated from the general public by their shared culture (Schiller et al. 1994: 1338) has been thoroughly critiqued by researchers, activists and social commentators who have argued that such inventions not only lay the groundwork for discrimination and social stigmatization, but also ignore the reality of the overlapping and contingent nature of group participation. As Treichler (1988: 221) points out, any analysis of AIDS based on a faith in stable boundaries 253

between risk groups ignores everything we know about the realities of human sexual behavior and sexually transmitted disease infection.8 My purpose here, however, is not so much to detail the social, epidemiological or health education consequences of categorizing people into high risk groups as to understand how these groups are technologized in the first place, how practices are transformed into identities in AIDS prevention discourse. From the point of view of mediated discourse analysis, drawing a prescriptive line between (high risk) groups and (high-risk) practices is not quite as simple as the discourse of Western AIDS activists, healthcare workers and social scientists makes it seem; no matter how hard we try to draw these boundaries, social practices and group membership can never be totally disengaged, for it is the technologization of social practice that is, in the final analysis, the basis for invented and imagined communities. What MDA can offer is a fuller understanding of the relationship between practices, identities and discourse, of how practices are appropriated and contested in the construction of social groups both from the outside and from the inside. It can also begin to show us how these invented communities can work to either limit or amplify individuals ability to protect themselves against infection. In order to examine these issues, we must turn our attention to technologies of representation, the strategies authors of such texts use to produce and reproduce stable and enduring linkages among cultural tools, social actors and mediated actions.
8

In China, for example, separating at-risk women into the categories of prostitute and IV drug user is problematic when, according to a study conducted by Anderson and Xu (1998), nearly half of female IV drug users surveyed reported some level of prostitution to support their habit. Similarly, the low number of reported cases of homosexual transmission in China is partly the result of the large number of men who engage in homosexual sex but do not consider themselves part of homosexuals as a group, and a large number of those who do consider themselves homosexuals reluctant to record that fact on a questionnaire in the context of an HIV antibody test (see chapter seven).

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Most interactions involve two kinds of representation. The first is the representation of people, places, things, concepts and social practices achieved through what Halliday (1973) calls ideational or experiential resources for meaning. Experiential representations in these pamphlets include portrayals of practices which either lead or do not lead to HIV infection and social identities of those who are either at-risk or not. The second kind of representation is that achieved making use of what Halliday calls interpersonal resources for meaning, the ways interactants represent themselves and what they are doing through the creation of discourse identities, relationships of power and distance (Brown and Levinson 1987) and indications of the attitudes they are taking towards the experiential representations which they are exchanging. In any interaction, however, these two types of representation can never be completely separated; they tend to blend into each other, experiential representations being taken up as tools for interpersonal meaning, and representations constructed through resources for interpersonal meaning restricting or amplifying the range of ideational representations possible and how they can be interpreted. This last point is especially important for these pamphlets, most of which provide experiential representations of the readers themselves and the practices they are thought to engage in as well as of the authors (or figures much like them) dispensing AIDS knowledge. Figures 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10 below are examples of such representations, all containing features of the prevention activity () described in the newspaper article that began this chapter, figures 5.8 and 5.9 constructing AIDS prevention as a kind of schooling involving experts addressing groups of students, and figure 5.10 constructing it in the reciprocal acts of warning and reacting, the man on the right

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pointing out a symbolic conflation of love (sex) and death and the man on the left registering on his face the appropriate emotional response.

Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.8

Fig. 5.9

Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) call these sites where experiential and interpersonal representations meet reflexive representations, the discursive representations people construct of the practices which they are engaged in and the kinds of social actors they are endeavoring to be (Scollon 2000). It is through examining this reflexive dimension of representation, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 26) claim, that we can discover the theories people have about their practices. Furthermore, representations of social actors and social practices are never totally separate. Practices require particular kinds of actors to perform them, and actors to a large extent derive their identities from the practices they are portrayed as performing. The AIDS educators in the images above, for example, are constructed as such through the practice of teaching about AIDS (signaled by the words written on the banner in figure 5.8 and the blackboard in figure 5.9). In other representations similar figures might be taken to have different identities; they might be regarded simply as a nurse and a teacher. At the same time, by drawing on these already technologized identities from other Discourses, namely the Discourses of teaching and nursing, the makers of these 256

representations construct the practice of AIDS education as involving these kinds of social actors, with the kinds of authority they command, and the practices they are associated with, along with the power relationships embedded in these practices. In representations, then, the technologization of identities and the technologization of social practices is a reciprocal process: identities are technologized by linking social actors to certain kinds of practices, and practices are technologized by linking actions with certain kinds of social actors. Perhaps the most important ways representations technologize social practices and social identities is not by what is included in them, but by what is left out. According to Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 16):
representation (is) a process in which the makers of signsseek to make a representation of some object or entity, whether physical or semiotic, and in which their interest in the object, at the point of making the representation, is a complex one, arising out of the cultural, social and psychological history of the sign-maker, and focused by the specific context in which the sign is produced. Interest guides the selection of what is seen as the criterial aspects of the object, and this criterial aspect is then regarded as adequately or sufficiently representative of the object in the given context. In other words, it is never the whole object but only ever its criterial aspects which are represented.

The inherent incompleteness of all representations is a key to understanding the dual processes of technologization and standardization. Representation is fundamentally a process of selection in which certain tools, actors or actions are made to be criterial or representative of practices and communities. It is the nature of representations of social practice and social identities that they never include every aspect of the practice (all of the tools and actions involved) or complete representations of the actors. Often, tools, actions and even actors can be left out, and yet the represented practices and identities 257

remain intact and, at times, seem even are more vividly communicated. As a kind of shorthand, representations allow their makers to form implicit links among tools, people actions and Discourses and to strengthen those links in the minds of the readers by guiding them to form them themselves. Thus, the technoligization of social identities and social practices are always dependent on the discursive and social context in which they are made, and the ways they are linked to other representations and the Discourses which they invoke. As I have indicated before, social practices and social identities are basically conjunctures of cultural tools, mediated actions and social actors. As practices and identities become more fully technologized into Discourses, criterial aspects of these tools, actions and people can be taken as representative of the practice as a whole and the social identity associated with it. These criterial aspects can then be lifted into other representations and linked to other tools, practices or actors, thus further technologizing practices and identities by linking them to other Discourses. Technologization, therefore involves a kind of reciprocal relationship between contextualization and de-contextualization: representations on the one hand draw their meaning from the surrounding context, and on the other, tend to isolate tools, actions and actors (or what have come to be seen as criterial aspects of them) from that context, creating the need for readers or viewers to fill in the gaps (Iser 1974) by themselves creating contextual links in order to make sense of them. Before looking at how this occurs in written text, it might be useful to observe the process in graphic representations. Figure 5.11 below depicts what we might regard as a complete social practice, including a series of actions through which drug taking ()

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is mediated through the tools of a syringe and a tourniquet by a social actor, the drug taker (). Many other linked actions and a complex social context are involved in this practice (as ethnographers like Agar 1973 have demonstrated). Here, however, the practice is de-contextualized, reduced to the action of injecting the drugs, and is offered to us as a specimen of this particular identity. This representation is simultaneously transactional, depicting an actor engaging in a material process with various material objects, and analytical, providing a kind of diagram of the practice of drug taking and the identity of the drug taker; it is, to use Gombrichs (1977) terms, a mirror, reflecting material reality, and a map, situating objects and actors in a particular pattern of relationships. Separated as it is from its social context, however, how does the viewer know that what is being depicted is an IV drug user rather than, say, a diabetic injecting insulin? This is where the context in which the image is placed (an AIDS prevention pamphlet) becomes crucial. By making reference to the discursive context of the pamphlet and the larger Discourse of AIDS prevention, readers are, with hardly a second thought, able to identify the practice as drug taking and to fit it into a relationship with other representations in the pamphlet, those which depict practices like sexual activity or receiving blood transfusions.

Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.14

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In figure 5.12 the practice has been even further de-contextualized; most of the actor has disappeared (most importantly, his face), and what is highlighted is the action performed by the disembodied hands and the cultural tool they are holding. The grammatical equivalent of this in written and spoken representations might be nominalization, when a process is isolated from the agent who performs it and made into a participant, as in a sentence like: IV drug use transmits AIDS ( ). The most important feature of these constructions, both graphic and verbal, is that the practice rather than a human actor has become the medium, the thing though which the action takes place. Rather than a dynamic and fluid relationship between participants, the action becomes stable and enduring, able to be further lifted out of its context and analyzed, dissected and joined with other representations.9 In the third picture (Fig. 5.13), both the actor and the action have disappeared completely and all that remains is the cultural tool, the syringe, which indexes the complete practice. This tool can be combined with other representations such as a red

In verbal representations in the pamphlets, these nominalization often become objects (or, to use Hallidays term, ranges) of the verb to do alternately expressed with the words gao () and zuodao () two terms which themselves further technologize the practices by dividing them into good practices and bad practices. Gao () (which can mean do, carry on, go in for, cause or mess around in) is used for practices that should not be engaged in, as in dont mess around in promiscuity and homosexuality (), and dont engage in prostitution or visiting prostitutes (). When combined with the word luan () (chaos), gao () becomes even more negative, as in dont mess around in and make chaotic relationships between men and women (). Zuodao (), on the other hand, a combination of a more neural verb to do () and the word for arrive (), meaning to accomplish some desired action, signals practices which should be aspired to. Readers are told to accomplish monogamy (), that they should accomplish scrupulously observing moral integrity (jieshenzihao) ( ), and that preventing AIDS is completely accomplishable (). In many of these constructions we can see an even higher order of nominalization possible in Chinese, the transformation of complex practices into four character expressions such as prostitution and visiting prostitutes (), scrupulously upholding moral integrity(), and one husband one wife (monogamy) ().

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ribbon (Fig. 5.14) which links it to Discourse of AIDS prevention and control. Similarly, in figure 5.15 below we can see this tool appropriated into a classificatory relationship with other cultural tools a bag of blood, a womans vagina during menstruation, the English word AIDS and the Chinese word blood (). The pictures represent members of a class, and the words are meant to represent super-oridnate terms, one referring to what these objects contain, and the other referring to what they cause.

Fig. 5.15 (14)

And so, what began as a complete practice with an actor, actions and tools has become itself a cultural tool which can be further linked in a set of relationships with other practices within a Discourse. The picture above is chiefly non-transactive (Hodge and Louie1998) or analytical (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). At the same time, however, each image continues to index certain actions and actors, practices and social identities. In a sense, all such images are simultaneously transactional and analytical because representations of cultural tools always carry with them the histories of the actions that are typically taken with them and the actors that typically use them. In figure 5.16 the social actor has been reintroduced into the picture, both in the drawing and in the photograph embedded within it, but this time he does not engage in the practice of taking drugs () but simply carries an oversized representation of the 261

cultural tool as an emblem of a practice which is being indexed and of his own identity. This practice becomes a possession, an attribute, in much the same way it does in the construction drug user () in which the practice of taking drugs is made into an attribute of a person with the possessive particle de (see below). The tool also functions as an attribute of the word AIDS written above (forming the letter I of the word) linking the figure and the word through this shared attribute.

Fig. 6.16 (41)

The image also appropriates other cultural tools, which index Discourses outside of the main Discourse of AIDS prevention. The orientation of the figures body, for example, looking behind him as if he is being pursued, and the other figure, a black and white photograph of a rather disoriented looking individual, embedded inside the Chinese word for drugs or poison (), the horizontal strokes of which, along with the bars in the lower left of the picture, making it seem as if he is in jail, index the Discourse of crime. The obstruction of the inner figures face just across his eyes further makes him resemble photographs of criminals in the popular press and of AIDS patients in medical texts about HIV (see below). 262

By being in possession of the practice in the form of a cultural tool, which itself is linked through words and images to other Discourses, the technologization of the social actor becomes complete. The practice of taking drugs and the social actor who performs this practice becomes much more than just a series of mediated actions performed with cultural tools but a highly evocative ideological construction in which the person becomes more important than any particular action he performs. Through such conjunctures we, as Scollon (2000: ch 5:4) describes it:
name and technologize our practices not as practicesbut as characteristics of human actors. Actors have or do not have practices. Communities of practice value or do not value practices and therefore they value or do not value the people who are constructedas having them.

At this level of technoligization the social actor is no longer doing the action or even performing the practice; rather, it is the practice which is performing the social actor. It is through this transformation of elements from participants engaging in processes to practices creating participants that the technoligization of social identities is accomplished. In figure 5.17 we again have a disembodied arm holding a cultural tool, but this arm represents more than the implied social actor that it does in figure 5.12, but the whole community of practice of drug users engaging no longer in the practice of taking drugs but in threatening a non-drug taker with a syringe that is simultaneously a gun.

Fig. 5. 17 (13)

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Not only does this picture link the practice of drug taking and the identity of the drug taker to larger cultural storylines of crime, violence, innocence and guilt, but it also creates its own storyline, a story in which the transmission of HIV becomes criminalized and communities invented around it become threats to the general public.

5.3 Technologization and Transitivity

Just as visual representations are created through the structured selections of criterial aspects of practices and identities, textual representations are similarly made up of different meaning selections integrated so as to form structures (Halliday 1973: 82). One of the most important elements in the way actors, tools and actions are technologized into practices and identities in textual representations is the way these selections are related to one another through the languages system of transitivity. Transitivity determines how mediated actions link participants in particular relationships like agent/patient, senser/phenomenon, sayer/receiver, carrier/attribute or identified/identifier (Halliday 1973, Martin et al. 1997). Since, as van Leeuwen (1996: 42) points out, there need not be congruence between the roles that social actors actually play in social practices and the grammatical roles they are given in texts, verbal representations can work to invent or reinvent practices and identities by reallocat(ing) roles and, rearrang(ing) the social relations between the participants. The agentive relationships between social actors and cultural tools constructed through transitivity have a particular significance in AIDS prevention materials as they impute upon actors (tools or circumstances) various levels of responsibility or blame for infection.

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The actions (or processes) which join participants are sometimes physical, what Halliday calls material processes, sometimes mental or verbal, and sometimes they join participants in analytical or classificatory relationships with one another (relational processes). In sentences in which participants are joined through material processes, they are represented as agents (acting upon tools or other actors), patients (being acted upon by some other participant) or beneficiaries (receiving some benefit from a mediated action in which they are not directly involved). 5.3.1 Material Processes In my corpus of AIDS prevention pamphlets, the majority of material processes are associated not with human actors, but with things and practices. The thing most commonly represented as an agent in the pamphlets is the virus itself. The AIDS virus (or sometimes simply AIDS) invades the body () (3, 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 20, 42 ), spreads () (1, 23, 40, 43, 44, 47) throughout regions and social groups and destroys () (23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31) both the immune system and the future of individuals, families and the nation as a whole.

Fig. 5.18 (Ceng and Ren 1997: 76)

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Fig. 5.19 (15)

Similarly, in graphic representations of HIV, the virus is often depicted as the agent in material processes, with the body which it has infected depicted as the patient or the range within which the viruss action takes place, as in figure 5.18 portraying the virus sucking the life out of its victim and figure 5.19 showing an army of viruses attacking the body with spears. The most active participants in the pamphlets, however, are neither things nor people but technologized practices. Practices like taking drugs (), promiscuity (), and visiting prostitutes (), are represented as the agents of HIV infection in constructions like:
(Promiscuity transmits AIDS) (13, 35) (Pre-marital and extra-marital sexual relations can give rise to infection) (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29) (Chaotic sexual relations and injecting drugs both transmit AIDS) (10, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28) (Anal sex and oral sex both easily transmit AIDS and STDs) (30)

Practices like monogamy (), and scrupulously upholding moral integrity (jieshenziai) (), on the other hand, are represented as agents of prevention. Thus, the dynamic of transmission and prevention as portrayed in the pamphlets is one in which agency tends not to be assigned to people but to practices. Even in the case of condom use, human actors are rarely portrayed as using (or told to

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use) condoms. Rather, they are told that the practice of properly using condoms can reduce the chances of transmission:
. Properly using condoms can reduce the chances of contracting AIDS. (23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30)

When human actors are portrayed as agents, the processes involved are most often actions which they should not perform, as in imperative sentences in which the material process is preceded by the word dont ():
(Dont intravenously inject drugs) (18) (Dont use injection equipment that has not been thoroughly sterilized) (5) () (Dont have sexual relations with a lot of partners or those who have a lot of partnersincluding prostitutes) (1) (Dont join in activities that easily transmit AIDS like homosexual anal sex and oral sex) (27)

Rather than the true agent in these imperative sentences, the implied you is more like an anti-agent, not taking action rather than taking it. Other times when human actors (including the reader) are portrayed as agents in material processes, the processes themselves reflect a kind of passivity through verbs like accept (), allow (), and sink into ():
(Drug addicts should quickly accept treatment) (1) HIV ? (Who should undergo an HIV test?) (17) (Your whole family will sink into terrible misfortune and disaster) (25)

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When these processes undertaken by human actors are more active, the object being acted upon is often not an external participant, but rather the reflexive participant of the actor him/herself. Thus readers are told to:
(Protect yourself) (4, 18, 36, 39, 45) (Cherish yourself) (18, 33, 39) (Restrain your behavior and bad habits) (18, 39) (Test yourself to see if you have contracted the AIDS virus) (4)

A good example of this textual world in which social actors are portrayed as being acted upon by practices rather than performing them can be seen in the introduction in National Health Education Institutes () pamphlet for students (27), which warns readers:
Do not give into the temptations of sexual freedom, for it can destroy lifes most precious things, including studies, health, true love, future career and even life itself.

The reader in this sentence is portrayed as an agent only insofar as he or she either gives into or rejects the practices of sexual freedom. The real agent is sexual freedom itself, which destroys those things in life which readers are meant to hold dear (themselves highly technologized social practices: studies, true love and career). The reader is portrayed as a passive participant in what is essentially a transaction between two sets of social practices. Similarly, avoiding infection is something that cannot be accomplished by the reader alone, but requires another non-human agent in the form of Our races excellent tradition of sexual civilization to perform an action of which the reader is a beneficiary: 268

 Our races excellent tradition of sexual civilization can help young people to avoid meeting with the calamity of AIDS.

Despite the emphasis in official AIDS discourse on personal responsibility and reminders that AIDS can be prevented () (2, 3, 4, 19), the textual world in which readers are embedded is one in which, at least in terms of material processes, the agentive positions available to them are severely limited. The transmission and prevention of HIV is portrayed as not so much a matter of readers performing or not performing certain practices, but of them either being drawn into improper practices or submitting to proper ones. While the locus of responsibility remains on the readers, the textual resources with which this responsibility can be fulfilled are situated outside of them. While human actors in the pamphlets are rarely associated with material processes, they are associated with other kinds of processes, most notably mental processes, in which they are portrayed as carrying out internal mental actions in regard to the people, tools and practices in their environment, verbal processes, in which they are depicted as speaking, asking, warning, advising, etc., and relational processes, in which they are fixed in certain kinds of relationships with these people, tools and practices. 5.3.2 Mental Processes The process types in which human actors (including readers) are most often portrayed as agents are mental processes. Throughout the pamphlets, for example, readers are advised to avoid infection through carrying out the mental processes of knowing AIDS () (1, 4, 18, 19, 38, 42, 49), understanding AIDS () (14, 269

15, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 20, 31, 43), thinking about their health, future and life () (27), thinking about their family missing them ( ) (18, 39), thinking about what would happen to their family if they got infected ( ) (4, 19), remembering to be healthy and not to be promiscuous () (40, 43), remembering the advice given in the pamphlets () (12), remembering to use a condom in casual sexual encounters ( ) (12) and paying attention to the fact that condoms are not 100% effective () (7). Graphic representations of people also often portray mental processes, sometimes symbolized through signs taken from the linguistic system (question marks, exclamation marks and words), as in figure 5.20, and sometimes through thought bubbles as in figures 5.21 and 5.22.

Fig. 5.20 (1)

Fig. 5.21 (31)

Fig. 5.22 (26)

Illustrations can show mental processes not just through such symbolic tools as question marks and thought bubbles, but also through the expressions on the faces of

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those engaged in these processes, what Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) call reactional processes. In such cases we might say that there are two linked processes represented, the thought and the thinkers physical reaction to that thought. As we saw both in the example that began this chapter and in the previous chapter, one of the most important aspects of AIDS prevention as technologized in official discourses in China is a kind of emotional reaction to information, which brings about a transformation in practices or social identity. Figures 5.21 and 5.22 above illustrate the two most common of these reactions: anxiety, signified by the womans frown and the position of her hands, and what might be termed mental resolve or single-mindedness, signified by the mans steadfast, forward-looking gaze and his hand, closed into a fist and held in the region of his heart. (In fact, in many ways this posture resembles that of typical model citizens in social realist paintings looking forward towards a utopian future.) These moments of thought are sometimes decontexualized, as in figure 5.20 representing only the practice of thinking or wondering, but they are also often linked to contextual storylines, both local storylines, as in figure 5.21, which is a panel of a comic strip entitled A Handsome Man Ruined Me () depicting the main character worrying after not using a condom in a previous sexual encounter with a handsome man (), and also to larger cultural storylines, the image of the traveler (Fig. 5.22) thinking of his home and family in order to avoid the temptations offered by the figures in the lower left of the picture, linking the image to a Chinese cultural storyline of familial loyalty that is thousands of years old. The sacredness of this storyline is further reinforced by the style of the thought bubble in which the family resides, which resembles something more like a thought halo. 271

Many of the mental processes represented in the pamphlets have as their objects already highly technologized practices or identities, and how the human agent acts in regard to these practices and identities is portrayed as having its basis in what (or whether) the social actor thinks about them. Figure 5.22 actually represents a number of social practices (childcare, traveling, prostitution) and social identities (husband, wife, prostitute, traveler), and each of these representations links the image to multiple storylines from sources as diverse as traditional moral tales and the lurid journalistic accounts of prostitution found in contemporary legal newspapers. All of these practices and identities are linked to construct the overall practice of resisting temptation by thinking of home and family, or refusing to be contaminated by evil influences and upholding moral integrity jieshenziai (). The practice represented here is, then, more than just the sum of all of the other practices and identities depicted. It is a highly technologized cultural practice involving relational processes, being part of a family, mental processes, thinking about ones family, material processes, not engaging in sexual activity with prostitutes, and possibly even verbal processes, refusing the solicitation of prostitutes and promising ones wife to be faithful. Most important, embodied in this practice is a particular social identity, that of a culturally legitimate and morally upright person. Just as correct thought processes are represented as an antidote to temptation and a way to avoid AIDS, incorrect throught processes are portrayed as leading to infection, as can be seen in the story below from the book AIDS: The Warning of the Century (AIDS:) (Ceng and Ren 1997: 43):
,

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""--- Wallowing in Degeneration A young woman in a certain big city in China admired and yearned after a luxurious life. In order to satisfy her desires, she 'made friends far and wide no matter whether they were Chinese or foreigners, black or white in an attempt to obtain money and beautiful clothes. She not only had no knowledge about AIDS, but also did not know that she herself had contracted the AIDS virus, and only blindly pursued her dream of marrying a foreigner and leaving the country. While she was living together with a Hong Kong businessman and preparing to get married, this couple both tested positive for the AIDS virus. Not long afterwards, the young woman developed full-blown AIDS and died far from home.

As in the narratives analyzed in the last chapter, HIV infection is portrayed here as a consequence of failing to observe boundaries: moral boundaries, geographical boundaries and racial boundaries. The action of crossing these boundaries, however, is itself a consequence of thought. The characters downfall into degeneration, disease and death is driven by mental processes or states: admiring (), yearning (), blindly pursuing a dream () and not having knowledge about AIDS (). These mental processes are what cause the material processes: making friends and dying. All of these mental processes converge in the mental practice or state of consciousness (see below) summed up in the four character expression wallowing in degeneration () which forms the storys title. In contrast to the picture discussed above (Fig. 5.22) in which the travelers state of mind links him to his family even when he is away from them, this characters mental state separates her from the protective network of family ties, and results in her dying away 273

from home (), considered in traditional Chinese thought to be the greatest of misfortunes. Thus, AIDS prevention and transmission is constructed not as primarily a matter of what people do, but of what people think. Protecting oneself against infection is first and foremost a matter of knowing AIDS and understanding AIDS, but this is only the first step in the mental practice of AIDS prevention. It also requires an act of will: wanting to know more () (1, 10, 15, 31, 37, 42, 49), wanting to progress in understanding AIDS knowledge () (39), and finally establishing and strengthening self-protective consciousness () (6, 19), a state of mind that must be upheld (), maintained (), and protected () against evil external influences. A number of scholars have pointed out how, since the beginning of the epidemic in China, official discourses have seen AIDS prevention as primarily a matter of mental processes, particularly of increasing knowledge (Evans 1995a, b, Gil 1991, 1994). According to Gil (1991), the basic premise of Chinas approach to health education, arising from the governments fundamental conceptualization of sex, is that increasing knowledge inevitably leads to changes in risk behavior. He writes:
Foremost in the modern sense and this is the party line is the belief that what fundamentally guides sexual behavior is sexual knowledge. This gives rise to the assumption that people act according to how much they know; knowledge being the regulator of sexual ethics. Thus, the concurrent assumption that if one wants to change sexual behavior, one has to change sexual knowledge. (528)

This official perspective can be seen not just in the planning and content of educational campaigns, but also in statements about AIDS in the media like the Beijing Reviews 274

1996 observation that if people would live and make social contacts in a scientific and hygienic way, AIDS could be easily prevented (Cui 1996). It can also be seen in representations of AIDS prevention activities, constructed, in the article which began this chapter, for instance, as a process of vaccinating citizens with an injection of knowledge: (AIDS experts administer a prevention injection ) (Li Zhengrong 1998). Similarly, the picture below (Fig. 5.23), from the English publication AIDS Prevention and Control in China (China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control and Chinese Association for the Prevention of STDs/AIDS 1994) portrays AIDS prevention as a matter of presenting information to the masses in the form of written texts. The caption reads (with apparently no pun intended), Educational activities for the board (sic) masses

Fig. 5.23

Most Western AIDS researchers would doubtless respond to these observations by pointing out the tenuousness of the relationship between knowledge and behavior when it comes to AIDS prevention, and cite a wealth of research showing that knowledge

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about AIDS and safe sex practice does not predict safer sexual behavior (see for example Baldwin and Baldwin 1988, Brown 1991). Studies on the relationship between knowledge and practice in China have yielded similar results. Pan (1995), for example, found that although men who have sex with men in China tend to have better knowledge of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases than the general population, this increased knowledge seems to have no risk-reducing effects on their sexual behaviour. To dismiss what these pamphlets are trying to do on this basis, however, would be a mistake. As I will argue below, knowing, understanding, remembering and paying attention in these pamphlets are portrayed as more than simply the cognitive processes that they are constructed as in the studies cited above. They are rather, as we have already seen in several examples, part of complex combinations of thought, speech, material actions and social relationships which are better characterized by the word consciousness () than knowledge. Consciousness is not just a state of mind in possession of a certain body of facts, but a process in which people situate themselves in particular patterns of social relations, see themselves as certain kinds of social beings, and act and speak in accordance with these relationships and identities. In order to fully understand this broader construction of knowledge, however, it is necessary to turn briefly to the other types of processes associated with what we have been calling mental practices: verbal processes, relational processes, and a fifth class of verbs that do not fit comfortably into any one of these categories but combine processes of thinking, doing, being, and saying. 5.3.3 Verbal Processes

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One of the most important aspects of AIDS knowledge as portrayed in the pamphlets is its existence not just as something that resides in the heads of social actors, but as something that exists between them, mediated through words and relationships. While the practice of AIDS prevention is technologized chiefly as a mental process, it is one which has its basis in discourse practices which involve not just the exchange of information between senders and receivers, but the enactment of particular social roles and relationships. Verbal processes in the pamphlets can be divided into two types, those associated with the purveyors of AIDS knowledge (medical professionals, health officials and the authors themselves), consisting mainly of verbs expressing the function of telling or teaching: say (), tell () explain (/) and teach (), and those associated with the seekers of knowledge, consisting of verbs expressing the function of asking: ask (), inquire () and request (). The most common participants associated with telling are people in positions of authority like doctors, government officials and prevention experts (). This function of telling or teaching, however, is also frequently associated with inanimate objects: symbolic constructs or practices, statistics about AIDS, the results of an HIV antibody test and the AIDS virus itself:
HIV (An AIDS virus antibody test can tell you if you are infected with HIV ) (8) (This little illustrated pamphlet tells you which behaviors are safe and which are unsafe) (14)

When verbs of telling are associated with social identities which are not experts such as the implied readers of the pamphlets, they are generally only used in the context 277

of testing their knowledge, as in Can you say if its dangerous or not? ( ?) (34) or when readers are encouraged to reveal things like past sexual practices or HIV antibody status to doctors or sexual partners, in which case the function of telling is more accurately glossed as revealing or confessing:
HIV (Definitely tell your sexual partner the fact that you are infected with HIV ) (9) HIV (Tell the healthcare worker about your situation of being infected with HIV) (9)

While verbs of telling usually create hierarchical relationships between participants, sometimes they are designed to create solidarity, as when both author and reader are seen to share the process of saying as in:
. (Because of this, we can say that presently AIDS cannot be cured) (37) (We can definitely say that restraining desire before marriage is not harmful) ( 27)

This strategy, of course, makes that which is said much more difficult for the reader to challenge since he or she is constructed as also saying it along with the author. Readers and other non-experts are more commonly associated with verbs of asking or requesting. Their voices are ventriloquated in the pamphlets giving voice to questions like: Please doctor may I ask you how AIDS can be prevented? ( ?) (46). They are told to seek counseling about any kind of problem having to do with AIDS () (14), and that if they have a question they should seek help from the AIDS counseling hotline (" " ) (2). They are also told whom not the ask questions of, for example: 278

"" (Dont seek help from fly-by-night doctors or take medicine indiscriminately) (6)

Questions and requests are not, however, to be directed only at experts. They are also to be directed towards sexual partners. Readers are instructed, for example, to ask their sexual partners to use condoms () (12). Sometimes this is couched as telling, as in figure 5.24 showing a woman saying No! If you dont use a condom I wont do it (14), a scene which is problematic in view of the typical power dynamics of gender relationships in China (Qiu 1997).

Fig. 5.24 (14)

Such requests are also problematic when directed towards authority figures. Advice to request that one needle per person is used in medical treatment ( ) (6) or to demand that blood which has undergone an HIV antibody test be used when readers have a blood transfusion ( ) (3, 5), is not always easy to follow within the often hierarchical face system maintained between healthcare workers and patients in China in which patients often prefer doctors to take decision making roles (Bennett et al. 1999, Kleinman 1980) or in circumstances in which ones medical condition may prevent one from making any sorts of requests at all. 279

Graphic representations of verbal processes also highlight the contrasting discourse roles of asking and telling and the social identities associated with these roles. In figures 5.25 and 5.26 below, for example, the expertise of the tellers is signaled by the garb of the medical profession, whereas askers are dressed in the clothes of regular citizens. The setting in which this exchange of knowledge takes place is typically the territory of the expert, a doctors office or clinic, and the symbolic boundary between the asker and the teller is highlighted by the physical placement of a desk or table between them. Even among askers there is sometimes a hierarchy implied, as in figure 5.25 in which it is the male member of the couple who is doing the asking while the woman next to him stands by passively. In figure 5.27, from the a comic book for sex workers entitled Xueer, Pingmei and Me ( ), one of the few representations of peer education in the corpus, the relationship between asker and teller is portrayed as more egalitarian, the only object that comes between them being the concept of the condom.

Fig. 5.25 (46) Fig. 5.27 (32)

Fig. 5.26 (7)

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Sometimes this asking/telling relationship is situated in Discourses other than those of biomedicine and counseling. In figure 5.28 and 5.29, for example, the Discourse of romance is invoked, the female asker and the male doctor speaking to each other through windows like lovers carrying on a secret assignation, a feat of interdiscursivity in which the Discourse of biomedicine intrudes into the bedroom and the hierarchical relationship between novice and expert reinforces the traditional hierarchical relations between the sexes.

Fig. 5.28 (36)

Fig 5.29 (36)

The discourse positions established for participants through verbal processes technologize AIDS education as a process of asking and telling in which the roles of asker and teller are stable and clearly defined. The function of these processes is not just to represent the action of information exchange, but also to portray a particular kind of relationship among participants. Coming into possession of AIDS knowledge then, is not just a matter of asking the right questions, but a matter of enacting a particular kind of social role in regard to those who are the sources of this knowledge. Verbal processes are also closely related to mental processes in many of the representations, as, for example figure 5.30 which portrays a caller asking the question, Mister, are you lonely (?) while the receiver of the call appears not to 281

be engaged in having a telephone conversation at all but rather in a practice which more resembles prayer or contemplation. Without the kinds of graphic signals of social identity we saw in the pictures of people seeking counseling in doctors office above, the identity of the caller is ambiguous. Most readers, however, would recognize the question as the tifa which typically opens telephone calls to male guests in hotel rooms from what are known as a ding-dang girls () (call-girls) (Pan 1996b, Qiu 1996b).10 It might also, however, be the receivers wife ( can mean husband as well as mister) calling to see if he misses her. In the first more probable reading, the question has the force of the speech act of tempting or seducing, an act which, in the context of AIDS prevention as it is technologized in the pamphlets is most appropriately responded to not through the verbal process of answering but through the mental process of resisting temptation.

Fig. 5.30 (26)

Verbal processes in these pamphlets, then, can never really be treated as verbal processes alone; they often also index mental processes and always relational processes,

10

In fact, I myself was frequently asked this question by women callers in the hotel rooms I stayed in during my fieldwork.

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processes which fix participants in particular relations of power and distance and both produce and reproduce technologized social identities. 5.3.4 Relational Processes As we have seen above, how one acquires AIDS knowledge and how one acts upon it is crucially determined by the web of social relationships within which one is embedded. Because of this, among the most important processes through which social practices and social identities are represented in the pamphlets are relational processes, processes in which participants are not portrayed as doing anything per se, but rather as existing in particular kinds of relationships with other participants. Such representations are chiefly analytical. Although they often do not depict material practices in an explicit way, however, actions are often implicit in the conjunctures of social actors and cultural tools created, and these implicit material processes play an important role in the formation of links between social practices and social identities. Given the topic and genre of these pamphlets it is not surprising to find a large number of relational processes. The most common verbs in the pamphlets are to be () and to have (), each occurring on an average of ten times per text. Functional grammarians have long noted that relational processes, along with the frequent nominalization of material processes, are common features of scientific or medical discourse (Halliday 1998, Halliday and Martin 1993, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Verbs, in these forms of language, write Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 159), often remain restricted to a relatively small set of (logical) connectors (is, has, leads to, causes, generates, develops into, and so on), almost as though they were function words, like articles and pronouns, rather than content words. The effect of these 283

relational processes in most scientific writing as well as in these pamphlets is to construct a world in which phenomena are seen as relatively stable objects rather than dynamic processes and participants are seen not as acting but as existing in rarified relationships with one another. In this world it is much more difficult for assertions to be questioned as they are represented as states rather than occurrences. One of the most common ways relationships are realized in processes is through identifying relational clauses (McDonald 1998), clauses which set up a relationship between elements of identified and identifier. Significant space in these texts is devoted to establishing such relationships, underscoring the importance in this construction of AIDS education of defining objects, people and practices and giving them their proper names. Identifying relational clauses are in almost every pamphlet associated with the virus itself in the definitional tifa: AIDS is a kind of highly fatal communicable disease for which there is still no effective cure ( ). They are also commonly associated with nominalized practices and phenomena:
(Homosexuality, prostitution and visiting prostitutes, and extra-marital sex are important ways AIDS is transmitted.(44)

as well as people:
(Young students are the future of the country and the hope of the race). (27)

Among the social identities most consistently defined in such constructions is that of people living with HIV infection. Identifying clauses used to invent this group however are unique in that they often do not strictly identify as highlight the difficulty of identifying such people. 284

 (The appearance of people who are infected with AIDS is just like that of healthy people, the greatest danger is having sexual relations with this kind of people) (23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29) (You cannot say whether or not that smiling stranger of the opposite sex waving at you is infected with the AIDS virus) (29)

The two participants, identified and identifier, stand on the two opposite poles of the distinction the sentences are trying to set up, that between abnormal and normal, sick and healthy (or the smiling and the infected). They are opposites linked by an identifying relational process which underscores the subversive nature of HIV and those infected with it who do not conform to definitional distinctions and masquerade as something they are not. Another kind of relational construction common in the pamphlets is classificatory; objects, people or practices are linked as members of a class, usually in the form of a list following a superordinate. These lists are commonly either lists of practices, introduced by phrases like What kinds of behavior are dangerous (?) (1) and What kinds of behavior cannot transmit AIDS? (?) (2), or lists of social identities preceded by phrases like: What kinds of people can get AIDS? (?) (14) or What kinds of people easily contract the AIDS virus? (?) (1, 16, 37, 45, 49). Classificatory relationships are among the most important in the technologization of practices and identities. They not only reveal the ways dominant Discourses divide up the social world, but also create relationships between identities and practices that transcend the defining (or criterial) characteristic expressed in the superordinate to 285

implicitly create a kind of guilt by association (van Leeuwen 1996). Thus, the relentless parataxis of homosexuals, prostitutes and drug addicts not only joins these identities under the superordinate of high-risk groups but also transfers to homosexuals the criminality associated with illegal drug use and prostitution and to prostitutes and drug addicts the perversion usually associated with homosexuality. Such relationships also often underscore the transformation of what may have before been considered activities into objectified social practices and identities. Foucault (1973, 1981), for example, has observed how the classificatory processes of biomedical Discourse operated in the late ninetieth century to create a new classification category of sexual orientation through which social actors who previously were functionalized were now, increasingly, classified (van Leeuwen 1996: 52).

Fig 5. 31 (13)

Fig. 5.32 (14)

Classificatory relations are also common in graphic representations such as those in figures 5.31 and 5.32, in which the similarity of the objects or practices is highlighted by their equal size and distance from one another and the timeless nature of the classification is realized through the more or less objective, decontextualized way they are presented (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). The taxonomies presented in such

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illustrations are generally what Kress and van Leeuwen (1996:81) call covert taxonomies, those in which the superordinate is either only indicated in the accompanying text, or inferred from such similarities as the viewer may perceive to exist between the Subordinates. Classificatory relationships, while chiefly being used to highlight similarities among objects, practices and people, can also be used to emphasize differences, as in the picture below from the book 88 Questions about the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS (88) (Yang and Fang 1994) (fig. 5.33) which pictures two famous AIDS celebrities (Jones 1998b), Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, a family which was infected through a blood transfusion given to the father, and an anonymous African villager.

Fig. 5.33

Each of these photos represents a different type of AIDS victim within the taxonomy of infection: the homosexual, the heterosexual, the innocent recipients of blood products (whose innocence is signaled by their placement in yet another classificatory relationship 287

as members of a family) and the African whose infection is portrayed more as a matter of who he is (poor and primitive) rather than any specific behavior. This last example brings us to the most important relationships represented in the pamphlets, which are not relationships among things or relationships among practices, but relationships among social actors. As I have discussed above, one of the major characteristics of AIDS prevention discourse in China is that prevention tends to be defined relationally, based on ones position in a network of social actors, the most important of whom are ones family members. What shields the traveler in figure 5.22 above from temptation and possible infection with HIV, for example, is the action of thinking of himself as part of a relational process, joined to his wife and child. Words for family or relatives (///), in fact, are among the most frequently occurring lexical items in the corpus of pamphlets, appearing 540 times (an average of more than ten times per text).11 Figure 5.34, is another example of how the practice of AIDS prevention is technologized as a relational process based on kinship ties. Each figure is a member of a class (husband, wife, child) as well as a part (or attribute) of the whole (the family). Each performs a particular role in it (the mother knitting, the father reading, and the child learning). The family depicted here is significantly not a traditional Chinese family with five generations under one roof but instead a modern, one-child family. Other features attributed to this group are the sofa they sit on, the book the father and child hold between them and the potted plant in the corner, all signaling a kind of civilized lifestyle. The
11

Scholars of Chinese culture have consistently noted the importance of social relationships, particularly those within the family, in Chinese conceptualizations of the self (Bond and Hwang 1986, Hsu 1985, Scollon and Scollon 1995, Yang 1993).

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most important characteristic of this family, however, and what links it with the larger Discourse of the pamphlet, is that they are, as the caption (AIDS prevention starts with the family) implies, undertaking the practice of preventing AIDS, not just by sharing the AIDS knowledge presumably contained in the book, but simply by being in a particular kind of relationship with one another.

Fig. 5.34 (4)

The family is portrayed in most of the pamphlets as the best tool one can appropriate to protect oneself from AIDS: ones status in the family as a filial son, faithful husband and responsible parent is seen to keep one safe, while those who do not fit into traditional family roles (like homosexuals) are invariably at risk. Significantly, the only pamphlet in the corpus especially designed for homosexuals (31) is also one of the only ones in which words for family or relatives do not appear at all. While the family is constructed as the best protection against HIV, it is also portrayed as the thing most threatened by it. In fact, HIV infection is more often talked about in terms of its potential to destroy the family (and the nation) than to destroy the health and happiness of the individual. The pamphlet AIDS and the Family

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() from the Beijing Association for the STD/AIDS Prevention () (4), for example, states:
AIDS prevention starts with the family The health of family members is an important guarantee of a familys prosperity. Everyone wants a beautiful, stable and prosperous family. The health of the adults in a family ensures its prosperity. Imagine if among the adults in a family there is one who has contracted the AIDS virus, what problems it would bring to the family. Besides the emotional pressure on the relatives, in order to care for and treat the sufferer, the life of the whole family would become chaotic, and they would have to bear the economic pressure as well. .12

Another important class of relationships among participants in the pamphlets is that of possession or attribution. Whereas classificatory relationships define participants in terms of their membership in a group or class of things, people or practices, possessive and attributive relationships define them in terms of their criterial parts. In graphic representations these parts or possessions are often labeled, as in the illustration of
12

This emphasis on the consequences of HIV infection not just on the individual but also on the family of which he or she is part is consistent with observations of the construction of health and illness in Chinese societies in which the disease of the individual is seen as extending to those around him and interfering with his or her ability to fulfill his or her duty within the family. Kleinman (1980:134) writes: Their tenure in the family places upon them privileges and obligations, the chief of which is to improve the family fortune, while not bringing shame on it. Related to this obligation is another, requiring them to treat their own person and body as if they are as inviolable as the family. Since neither belongs to them alone, injury to the person is in part injury to the family. In a recent study my colleagues and I conducted regarding the quality of life of people with AIDS in Hong Kong (Jones, Candlin and Yu 2000), we found that the anxiety Chinese PHAs experienced regarding their condition was usually couched in concerns about the effect it had on their families rather than the affect it had on themselves, and so disclosure to family members was usually avoided or accompanied with intense shame.

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HIV on the cover of Qiu Renzongs (1997) AIDS: Sex and Ethics ( ) (Fig. 5.35)

Fig. 5.35

Possessive or attributive relational processes are particularly important in the technologization of social identities because they link social actors, tools and practices in a relationship of carrier and attribute often in such a way that the attribute is portrayed as criterial, seen as inseparable from the carrier and fundamentally defining it as a particular kind of person. Again, actions, though often absent, in such representations, are implicit in the relationship between the carrier and the tool he/she/it possesses. Just as identifying relational clauses, attributive and possessive relational clauses are particularly important in the invention of the identity of people with HIV or AIDS. In such constructions, criterial attributes are generally symptoms such as tumors, lesions, and opportunistic infections. People with HIV are also seen as carriers of infectiousness (), risk ( ) and, of course, the virus itself.

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Graphic representations of people with AIDS (Fig. 5.36) are reminiscent of such representations in the West in the early days of the epidemic, making traits like weakness, frailty, passivity, and difference criterial (Gilman 1985, 1988a).13

Fig. 5.36 (23)

Fig. 5.37 (Lu 1994: plate 2)

In more specialized publications about AIDS, as in the book Chinese and Western Medical Approaches to AIDS Prevention and Treatment () (Lu 1994), photographs of actual people with HIV infection are often shown (Fig.3.7). In such depictions identity is technologized not just through the clinical gaze (Foucault 1973) and focus on visible signs of disease (tumors, lesions, thrush), but also through endowing the figures with masks, which in effect invents their identity by denying them one. The most common way relationships of possession are realized in these texts is not through processes, but through the use of the possessive particle de (). De can link elements in a way such that the first is represented as the carrier or possessor and the second is represented at the attribute or possessed. What is possessed by or attributed to the carrier in such constructions often becomes criterial of his her its identity.

13

Examples are the famous Benneton ad depicting a family gathered around the bedside of a dying son and Alon Reiningers prize winning 1986 photograph of PHA Ken Meeks (Fox and Karp 1988:189).

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In my corpus of pamphlets readers are typically endowed with one set of possessions through the use of the particle de, and social actors seen to be at risk for HIV infection (or are already infected) are given a very different set. The most common possessions granted to the reader in these constructions are relational: your family () (2, 4, 19, 24, 25, 26, 30, 34, 47), your family life () (4, 19, 28), your familys health, () (4, 24, 25, 30), your child () (34). Also commonly assigned to readers are more abstract possessions like your beautiful youth () (27), your splendid future () ( 27), your springtime () (28), your health () (3, 4, 5, 12, 19, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 41, 43, 47), your life () (13), and your everything () (24, 28). Finally, readers are also invented as either possessing or not possessing AIDS knowledge in constructions like all of the knowledge you have about AIDS prevention ( AIDS ) (6). Members of risk groups, on the other hand, are not portrayed as being in possession of families, bright futures or knowledge. Instead they possess sexual partners (), drug taking friends ("") behavior (), bodily fluids (), body parts like skin, legs and lymph nodes, and HIV antibody test results ( ) . De is most often used, however, in constructions which act as identity labels, much like the constructions using zhe discussed in the last chapter. Examples are:
(people who have contracted AIDS) (3, 4, 38) (people who have a lot of sexual partners) (12) (people who get AIDS easily) (16, 37, 45) (people who have had relations with prostitutes) (3, 17)

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 (people who inject drugs) (20) (promiscuous people) (20, 23, 28) (people who suffer from STDs) (24, 25, 30) (people who engage in behaviors that are of high risk of transmitting AIDS) (48)

Hodge and Louie (1998: 86) argue that such constructions essentially treat a relationship of classification as though it were like a relationship of possession, and have a particularly strong ideological function in Chinese. Built into the de-form, they write, is an act of judgment which, by virtue of its use in possessive constructions in which the first element possess the second, whatever the evaluation of the item before de, what follows must be inferior in status (87). Thus, the carrier in constructions like promiscuous person () is in some sense the practice of promiscuity not the person. One of the reasons this tiny particle is such an effective tool in the technologization of identity is that is portrays not an actor engaging in or possessing a practice or attribute which defines him or her, but as being possessed by that practice or attribute. 5.3.5 The Practice of Consciousness Thus far, in attempting to explicate the textual world in the pamphlets and to understand how representations work to technologize the practice of AIDS education I have considered the way cultural tools and social actors are linked through material processes, mental processes, verbal processes and relational processes. Many of the processes in the pamphlets associated with human actors, especially readers, however, are difficult to fit into any one of these categories. These processes are often material 294

processes which act as metaphors for mental, verbal and relational processes, processes like establish (/) uphold (), maintain (), strengthen (), observe or obey () eliminate (), abandon () prohibit (), and oppose (). Rather than strictly indexing one particular type of process, these verbs represent constellations of linked actions involving doing, thinking and sensing, being and having, and saying. One form of discourse in which these combination process types are common is political slogans (Gu 1996), and they serve a similar function in that genre. These are the processes through which consciousness, whether it be class consciousness; or AIDS prevention consciousness () is cultivated and performed, through which people enact ways of being in the world which include not just possessing knowledge but acting in a certain way, talking in a certain way and maintaining a certain set of relationships with other social actors. In many ways these processes act much like the auxiliary verbs to do or to achieve (gao , zuodao ) in that the participants that follow them are often nominalized practices which act as ranges (Halliday 1985). In other ways they are similar to a class of English verbs which Halliday calls behavioral processes and Lock (1996) calls mental-action processes, verbs in which mental processes are expressed as physical action. They exist somewhere in between the four poles of being and having, thinking and sensing, doing and happening and saying. Where they are situated in this experiential field depends on the participants they are linked to. The verbs establish (/), maintain (), strengthen () and eliminate (), for example, tend be associated with states of mind and relationships:
(establish the concept of prevention) (26, 30)

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 (maintain strong AIDS prevention consciousness) (18, 33, 39) (strengthen self-protection consciousness) (6, 19) (eliminate the concept that it has nothing to do with you) (4, 19) (establish trusting relationships) (17) (maintain monogamous sexual relationships and the trust between husband and wife) (21)

Uphold (), obey/observe (), promote (), abandon (), and refuse () are usually linked with behaviors or highly technologized practices which we might call policies and which are sometimes expressed in four character expressions:
(uphold safe sex) (8) (uphold one husband one wife) (35) (uphold the use of a safe, reliable condom) (1) (observe sexual morality) (1, 4, 19, 36, 40, 44, ) (obey the laws of the government) (34, 40, 43, ) (promote sexual morality) (35) (promote condom use) (20) (abandon risk behavior) (13) (abandon anal sex and oral sex) (24, 25, 26, 29, 30) (refuse promiscuity) (35)

Whether they are linked to states of mind, external phenomena or social practices, all of these verbs involve to some degree some mental action, some physical action, some relationship and often include some kind of verbal component. Sometimes in the pamphlets the relationship of these verbs to political slogans is made more explicit,

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advice about AIDS prevention delivered in a series of slogans, themselves packaged in sets of two or four characters like official policy statements (Li 1995, see last chapter).
Know AIDS, Study knowledge concerning AIDS, Eliminate complacency, Strengthen selfprotective consciousness (19)

What such slogans are designed to do, whether they appear in policy speeches or in AIDS prevention materials is exhort listeners not just to take some kind of action, but to have a certain kind of consciousness and to be a certain kind of person in relation to others in the society. Gu (1996) broadly divides Chinese political slogans into two types, those which speak of what is to be established (), associated with the Discourse of Reform, and those that speak of what is to be abolished (), more characteristic of the Discourse of Revolution. In the pamphlets, things to be established (or cultivated) are more typically states of mind, relationships, and policies. Things to be abolished (or avoided) also include states of mind, but are more commonly behaviors. The frequency of this kind of process in the pamphlets suggests a perspective on the uses of AIDS knowledge that is slightly different from that found in Western AIDS prevention and in research on it. Knowledge is not an object of cognition, used to make rational decisions about risk as in the Health Belief Model (Becker ed.1974, Janz and Becker 1984), but rather an object of consciousness. It is through knowledge and study that one strengthens a self-protective consciousness () and clears away the consciousness of complacency (). The purpose of AIDS knowledge, then, in the more expository form it is delivered in these pamphlets, just as in the narrative form in which it was delivered in the

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AIDS histories I looked at in the last chapter, is not to endow readers with a set of facts so much as to endow them with a set of social relationships and attitudes with which to approach those relationships. Furthermore, just as in the narratives analyzed in the last chapter, in which we saw HIV transmission associated with movement and prevention associated with stability, in AIDS educational materials, prevention is associated with mental/behavioral stability, an act of consciousness which holds the mind resolutely upon a particular policy, whereas transmission is associated with unconsidered actions and uncontrolled thoughts. This mental resoluteness is summed up in the expressions: Dont be led astray by the temptations of wealth and high position; dont let poverty or lowly condition make you swerve from your principles ( ) (25, 28, 29). This view of knowledge has its roots not just in Maoist thought, but also Confucion philosophy, which constructs proper consciousness as knowing speech (), knowing man () and 'knowing destiny' (). In each case, knowing involves an effort of the knower to put himself in a position and orientation toward the world and other people in order to achieve social harmony. As Cheng (1987: 29) writes, if we examine how Chinese philosophers speak of knowledge, we find that for most of them true knowledge is not understood as a simple record of factual or theoretical information but rather, as the understanding (or wisdom) of life that enables one to seek and achieve a more harmonious life in nature and in society. Reason and experience are so fused that we cannot distinguish one from another. This notion of the cultivation of consciousness through the control of mental, material and verbal processes also has roots in Buddhist philosophy in which the body 298

speech and mind are considered the doors of consciousness through which temptation enters, roots which find expression in the interdiscursive borrowing in one of the pamphlets of the image of the Buddha resisting the temptations of the Lord of Death in the form of a doctor, meditating on the dharma of AIDS knowledge and impervious to the memento morti lurking on the edges of the image (Fig. 5.38):

Fig. 5.38 (35)

5.4 The Interpersonal Construction of Practice and Identity

The practice of AIDS prevention and the identities associated with it are not just technologized through experiential representations. They are also constructed through the ways texts set up various kinds of relationships among the reader, the author(s) and the experiential representations in the texts through the interpersonal function of language. Interpersonal meaning can be realized in a number of ways. On the level of lexico-grammar, it is realized through various ways of expressing modality, the authors attitude towards the representations s/he has created (whether they are true and to what degree), and modulation, the authors attitude towards the reader (how obligated the reader is to follow the authors advice). It is also realized in the expression of mood,

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whether the author is asking a question, making a statement, issuing a command or making an offer, which governs the roles in the discourse that author and reader assign and take on. On a broader level, texts claim and impute identity for authors and readers through the interdiscursive appropriation of speech genres and social languages, cultural tools which, through having already been technologized into Discourses, come with their own built in sets of social practices and identities. Whereas lexicogrammatical tools construct discourse identities, the interdiscursive borrowing of speech genres and social languages construct social identities. 5.4.1 Modality and Modulation Particularly important when it comes to examining the technologization of the practice of AIDS education are the ways lexicogrammatical tools are used to realize things like probability and obligation, that is, how particular practices are technologized as either safe or risky and solutions as either effective or ineffective, obligatory or optional. Halliday (1985) makes the distinction between modality which is used in the exchange of information (propositions) and that which is involved in the exchange of goods and services (proposals), which he calls modulation. In terms of the technologization of AIDS prevention, modality is generally associated more with statements about transmission and modulation with statements about prevention. Modality and modulation are not just crucial ingredients in the construction of the risk HIV poses and what can be done to reduce or eliminate this risk. They are also crucial in the construction of the identities of authors and readers and of the relationship 300

between them. On the one hand, modality and modulation can be used to create a sense of solidarity between readers and authors by presenting modalized representations as shared truths and modulated representations as advice. Kress and van Leeuwen 1996: 160) stress that:
modality is interpersonal rather than ideational. It does not express absolute truths or falsehoods; it produces shared truths aligning readers or listeners with some statements and distancing them from others. It serves to create an imaginary we. It says, as it were, these are the things we consider true, and these are the things we distance ourselves from.

At the same time modality can create distance between authors and readers by imparting on authors both the power to judge reality and the power to compel readers to take or not take certain courses of action. In his study on modality in Chinese, Zhu (1985, 1996) takes from Halliday the distinction between modality and modulation. Modality (the expression of probability, frequency or usuality), he says, can be realized in Chinese through model verbs like keneng () (may), hui () (can), and gai () (should), each signaling a different degree of probability, frequency or usuality, as well as through adverbs like yiding () and kending () (definitely), full verbs such as xiangxin () (believe) and kan () (think), and the final particle ba (). Modulation, the expression of ability, inclination or obligation, is realized using some of the same model verbs, like hui () (can/able to), as well as others like neng () (can), ken () (be willing to), bixu () (need to), and yao () (must), and adverbs like yiding () (certainly).

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In a more sociolinguistic approach to modality in Chinese, Hodge and Louie (1998) divide model verbs into what they call Power (P) forms like bixu () (need to) and yindang () (must), forms associated with more formal registers like written directives and which they say highlight the hierarchal relationship between interlocutors, and Solidarity (S) forms which are more characteristic of everyday speech and create a relationship of solidarity between interlocutors like hui () (can/may), keyi () (can) and yao () (must). They are careful to point out, however, that given the ambiguity of meaning in some modal verbs (like hui and yao), the extent to which they index (P) relationships or (S) relationships depends heavily on context and strategic manipulation by users. They suggest that the ambiguity of model verbs is, in fact, a major ideological resource in Chinese, giving speakers ways to exert control over people and situations through manipulating the expression of power and solidarity in their statements of possibility or obligation. 14 AIDS prevention pamphlets are typically heavily modalized, taking as their task the construction of a cline of probability along which particular practices can be placed. In the example below (Fig. 5.39), from a prevention pamphlet produced for men who have sex with men in Hong Kong (see next chapter), oral sex is not only assessed relative to other practices (like anal sex), but the various circumstances around which oral sex might take place are also assessed for the degree to which they can increase or decrease risk.
14

Both Hodge and Louie (1998) and Lau and Raynard (1999) note that Chinese has fewer probability markers than English. This does not mean, however, that Chinese think less probabilistically than others, as Lau and Raynard are rather quick to conclude, but that the degree of probability expressed in these constructions is more closely dependent on contextual factors like the topic under discussion and the relative power and distance between the speakers.

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Fig. 5.39 (AIDS Concern 1995) SUCKING carries a low risk, using a condom will make it safer. Brushing the teeth before sex may cause the gums to bleed, thus increasing the risk of infection from HIV, so does swallowing CUM. Try using a flavoured condom!!! (translation in original)

The most significant feature in the passage quoted above is the frequent modification of the practice of oral sex with circumstantial adjuncts: if a condom is used (), if you brush your teeth before oral sex (). (if you) swallow cum (). The effect of these adjuncts is to construct the practice of oral sex not as in itself risky or safe but as a practice whose nature changes according to the circumstances in which it is performed. Another significant feature is the offer of an alternative at the end of the passage: Try using a flavoured condom!!! () in language which constructs the statement as friendly advice (theres no harm in using) () rather than a command. This offer

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not only creates solidarity between the reader and the author but also invests in the reader the power to affect the circumstances under which the practice takes place. In contrast, few of the pamphlets in my corpus exhibit these features. Rather than creating a cline of probability, modality is general expressed categorically, practices being classified as either safe or risky with very little distinction made among degrees of risk. Rather than constructing practices as contingent on circumstances, as in the example above, practices are technologized as stable, decontextualized entities whose nature is not affected by context. Thus, things like oral sex and anal sex are generally represented as carrying the same risk. Finally, suggestions about what readers can do to prevent infection are usually delivered as commands in the form of imperative sentences beginning with either do () or dont () rather than as the friendly advice seen above. The most common way statements about HIV transmission are modalized is through the use of the modal verbs like hui () (can) keneng () (may), and keyi (can), with the most frequently used being hui. The model verb hui () in Chinese has multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used. It can mean be likely to, be sure to, be able to, or be used as a marker of the future tense. The verbs most typically modalized with hui are chuanran () (to infect/transmit), ganran () (to contract/transmit) and chuanbo () (to transmit), and the most common participants in such constructions are nominalized social practices, as in Prostitution and visiting prostitutes can transmit AIDS () (25) and Injecting drugs can also transmit AIDS () (26). What is particularly significant about such constructions is that it is most often highly 304

technologized social practices (prostitution, homosexuality) rather than specific sexual behaviors (like unprotected anal intercourse) that are constructed as transmitting AIDS. Constrictions using hui () also sometimes have people as their agents, as in What kind of people can get AIDS? (?) (14). Again the people who hold positions of agency in such constructions are generally invented communities (homosexuals, travelers, STD patients) rather than individuals in particular circumstances. Finally, sometimes things like unsterilized needs, untested blood and blood products and the bodily fluids of people infected with HIV appear in constructions using hui (). The most common of these is the AIDS virus itself, in constructions like: The AIDS virus can endanger your life () (26) and The tiny AIDS virus can take advantage of your mistake () (43). The modal verb hui is used just as frequently with negative polarity as it is with positive polarity. In fact, most of the pamphlets explicitly divide practices and people based on the negative and positive polarity of the modal verb hui (), creating the two categories of hui () (can transmit/infect) and buhui () (cannot transmit/infect), sometimes arranged in lists using headings like What kind of behavior can transmit AIDS? ( ?) (1, 2). The function of hui in nearly all of these constructions is really more to classify particular practices and people then to express degrees of probability. There are, in fact, no degrees of probability in these constructions, only two mutually exclusive categories. In their studies of modality in Chinese, both Zhu (1985, 1996) and McDonald (1998)

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classify hui () as it is used in constructions expressing possibility or probability as expressing low probability compared to other verbs like gai () (should). In the constructions above, however, there is no sense of a continuum of possibility or probability. Rather what is expressed is closer to ability, a function Zhu associates with modulation rather than modality. The sense of ability expressed in the modal verb hui () constructs HIV transmission as a much more black and white issue. There is no gray area between practices and identities that categorically can transmit HIV and those that categorically cannot.15 Further complicating the modality expressed in hui is its other meaning as a future tense marker. Thus, Prostitution and visiting prostitutes can transmit AIDS ( )(25) could mean:
Prostitution and visiting prostitutes can (possibility) transmit AIDS Prostitution and visiting prostitutes can (ability) transmit AIDS Prostitution and visiting prostitutes will transmit AIDS

These three alternative meanings of hui work together to increase the categorical certainty expressed in the statement by adding to it a sense of inevitability. Another common modal verb used in statements about HIV transmission is keneng or you keneng (/) (may), as in: One moment of carelessness may cause a lifetime of regret ( ) (18) and If you can do the following things, you may avoid infection by the AIDS virus ( ) (12). Like hui, keneng can be
15

This use of hui () is also consistent with the agentive roles frequently given to nominalized practices discussed above. When used to express ability, Zhu claims, hui can generally only be used with human agents. In the case of the pamphlets, however, non-human agents (practices, the virus) easily fit into this participant slot by virtue of the fact that they are already constructed as having agency.

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associated with things, people or nominalized practices. As with hui (), keneng ()also often appears with negative polarity, as in A magic bullet to cure gonorrhea cannot stop the transmission of the AIDS virus ( ) (23). When used as a modal verb, keneng () provides much more of a sense of a range of possibility than hui (). The most common use of keneng however, is not as a modal verb, but as a noun (either keneng or kenengxing) (/) (meaning possibility) or an adjective (possible), as in: Using a condom can reduce the possibility of infection () (1), and Preventing AIDS is completely possible () (37). Such constructions constitute what Halliday (1985) refers to as metaphorical modality, the nominalization of possibility in which it is constructed not as part of a dynamic process but as a quality or thing. Like the use of hui () to express ability rather than possibility, metaphorical modality tends to present possibility and probability as more solid and categorical. It also, as Martin and his colleagues point out (1997), can have the effect of making assessments of possibility and probability seem more objective and less open to negotiation. In this form of modality in English, they write:
ideational resources for constructing participants are deployed to distance the assessment from the speaker and thus from negotiation. Adjectives such as possible, probable, certain, usual, common are commonly used to construe modalizations objectively as qualities; nouns such as possibility, probability, certainty, unusualness, regularity, typicality, and so on are commonly used to construe modalizations objectively as things. (69).

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The most frequently used word in constructions realizing this type of modality is the word weixian (), used sometimes as a noun, meaning danger (or risk), as in: The biggest danger is having sexual relations with these kinds of people ( ) (26) and The more sexual partners you have, the more danger you have of getting AIDS ( ) (1), and sometimes as an adjective, meaning dangerous (or risky), as in abandon dangerous behavior () (13) and Having sexual relations with him or her is very dangerous (()) (25). The expression of possibility through the word danger/dangerous constructs the possibility of HIV transmission/ infection as a criterial attribute of things, people or practices. As with other forms of modalization, this attribute is most often associated with practices, for example: Homosexual anal sex and oral sex carry an even greater danger (risk) of transmission () (1). Among the most significant uses this attribute, however, in terms of the invention of social identities, is when it is used to modify people as in high risk group () (1, 8, 45). Another particularly common way modality is expressed metaphorically is with the modifier rongyi (easy). Practices are represented as easily transmitting AIDS Anal sex more easily transmits AIDS ( (1) and people are represented as easily getting it People who engage in anal sex get AIDS more easily () (50). The AIDS virus is also frequently described as easily infecting certain people, as in The AIDS virus more easily attacks STD patients ( ) (23). Sometimes easy is used with zui () (most), 308

through the practices that are represented as easiest to transmit AIDS vary depending on the target audience of the pamphlet:
(The route through which the AIDS virus is most easily transmitted is through sexual contact) (13) (anal sex and oral sex are the easiest ways to transmit AIDS) (30) (sharing the same syringe and needle to inject drugs is the easiest way to be infected) (41)

Finally, the possibility of infection is sometimes talked about in terms of the strength () of the virus or the strength of infectiousness of things like bodily fluids or of people. For example:
" " (Because it is strongly infectious, and the death rate is high, it is called super cancer) (6) () (The blood, sperm, vaginal fluids, breast milk and the fluid from wounds of a person infected with the AIDS virus contain the AIDS virus and are strongly infectious, so having sex with him/her is very dangerous) (25)

In the first example above, the strength is an attribute of the virus that both constructs it as a threat and puts into doubt measures to combat it short of avoiding it altogether. In the second example, strength of infectiousness is attributed equally to all bodily fluids which contain the virus, no matter how much of it they might contain, and the threat implied in strength is confirmed with the word danger (risk), danger that apparently applies to all sex, regardless of whether or not it involves exchanging these fluids. As I mentioned above, what is missing from almost all of these representations of risk are circumstances. As with the technologization of practices and identity using the 309

languages system of transitivity, technoligization using interpersonal resources for meaning depends a great deal on removing people and practices from their social context and making whatever is left of that context criterial, an inalienable characteristic of that kind of person or that kind of practice. Once modalized into this categorical system in which risk is treated as a possession or attribute, practices, and more importantly, people, are invested with the criterial characteristics of danger, the chance to be infected, and the ability to infect other people, rather than what Western AIDS workers are now referring to as vulnerability, the circumstances people find themselves in which affect their ability to avoid infection. Moreover, in this world where people and practices are isolated from circumstances, very few alternatives are presented for mitigating risk: practices should either be established or eliminated rather than altered in a way that reduces the chances of infection, and people (in the case of others) are to be avoided or protected, and, in the case of the self, to be cherished () or reformed (). Just as modality tends to be categorical, so does modulation. Information on how to prevent AIDS, rather than presented in the form of advice or suggestions, is almost always expressed as commands in the form of imperative sentences, and rather than creating degrees of obligation, these constructions create only two choices: the dos and the donts. The modal verb most commonly used in these imperative sentences is yao () (must do) along with its negative form buyao () (dont/must not do). Commands constructed with yao () include:
(Do scrupulously uphold moral integrity) (40, 43) (Do pay attention to AIDS prevention) (18, 23, 34, 39) (Do obey the laws of the government) (40, 43) (Do restrain and be responsible for your own sexual behavior) (40)

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Examples of donts, commands using buyao (), include:

(Dont be promiscuous) (35, 40, 43) (Dont have premarital or extra-marital sex) (24, 25, 26, 27, 29) (Dont share needles with others to inject drugs) (20) "" (Dont give into the temptations of sexual liberation) (18, 33, 39) (Dont let AIDS invade our beautiful country) (25)

Like hui, yao has several different meanings depending on the context in which it is used and the power relationships between the people who use it. It can be used to express desire, obligation, future tense, or to mark a statement as hypothetical. Thus, You must (yao) () pay attention to AIDS prevention () can, depending on the context, mean:
You want to pay attention to AIDS prevention. You should pay attention to AIDS prevention. You must pay attention to AIDS prevention. You will pay attention to AIDS prevention.

Hodge and Louie (1998) argue that it is not correct to say that yao has four (or more) different meanings...The truth is that yao () has an ambiguous meaning potential and in particular contexts some of these potential meanings are treated as more relevant (93). Thus, even in imperative sentences like above in which the meaning of obligation is the most salient, there is the sense that a statement is being made not just about what the reader should do, but also about what he or she wants to do and will do. Furthermore, the meaning of yao () is highly dependent on the face relationships between interlocutors,

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yao () taking the force of a command in hierarchal relationships, yet able to express a friendly suggestion in more egalitarian relationships.16 A more formal expression of obligation is seen occasionally in constructions containing the word bixu () (must, need to). The commands using this word, however, seldom have to do with risk behavior, but rather tend to focus on broader policies:
""(Vaccinations for children should follow the policy of one needle per person) (20) (Preventing and controlling AIDS requires outlawing/suppressing the practices of prostitution and visiting prostitutes) (1) (AIDS Prevention requires the participation of the whole society) (50)

Just as statements of probability rarely include circumstances, statements of obligation rarely include options. In contrast to the passage analyzed above from the Hong Kong pamphlet, which expresses obligation as advice (Whats the harm in) () and dispenses with commands in favor of presenting information in a way which encourages readers to make their own decisions, in the pamphlets in my corpus, decisions about the best course of action (in all circumstances) have clearly already been made and it is only up to the readers to abide by the dos and donts. According to Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) modality is also an important aspect of graphic representations, signaling how more or less true to life the representation is.
16

Hodge and Louie classify yao as a Solidarity modal, which derives its force partly from the familiarity its use claims, as opposed to more formal ways of expressing obligation. Dont smoke ( ), for instance, is what people would be expected to say in face to face interaction. In a written genre like a public sign, however, the same meaning would be more likely to be rendered: Smoking is strictly prohibited ().

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The way this is signaled, however, they argue, depends a great deal on the uses to which images are being put. In genres like pornography (or in erotic representations on packages of products like condoms), high modality (or realism) is expressed through maximum colour saturation and detail, whereas in scientific or technical genres, black and white diagramic images with a minimum of detail are often regarded as more accurate depictions of reality than photographs. The credibility of an image, then, depends a great deal on what it is trying to do. Naturalistic representations often have a kind of narrative function, depicting a single moment in the life of an individual, whereas more diagramic representations aim to depict a type or specimen. In this regard, too much detail might detract from this goal, individualizing the representation to the point where its capacity to stand for a larger class of people, things or practices is diminished. The most important function of these representations is, in fact, to select the details which are to be made criterial, and in this regard they are powerful tools for the technologization of practices and identities. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) write about analytical visual representations:
Many analytical visuals have low modality, from the naturalistic point of view. Too much life-likeness, too much detail distracts from their analytical purpose. Only the essential features of the Possessive Attributes are shown, and for this reason drawings of various degrees of schematization are generally preferred over photographs or highly detail artwork. The representation of depth is reduced or absent, as is the detailed representation of light and shadow, and of subtle tonal distinctions. (90)

Not surprisingly, almost all of the images in these pamphlets have relatively low modality. Many of them are simple black and white drawings, and context (background) is almost always absent. Given the pamphlets pedagogical goals and medical subject

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matter, it is not detail, but lack of detail that gives the images credibility and allows them to highlight criterial features. Representations of sexual practices, like for example the image below (Fig.5.40) showing homosexual, lesbian and heterosexual sex, generally have the lowest modality, for to give more detail than necessary risks indexing the sensual rather than the clinical as the cover of the Hong Kong pamphlet analyzed above (Fig. 5.41) intentionally does.

Fig. 5.40 (7)

Fig. 5.41 (AIDS Concern 1995)

This lack of realism in the images in the pamphlets also has another interpersonal function, that of increasing the sense of solidarity between author and reader by presenting rather stylized, cartoonish and sometimes even playful representations of HIV and HIV infection. In this regard the pamphlets borrow voices not from the Discourse of biomedicine but from the Discourse of comic books (and some pamphlets even arrange these images in the form of comic books) (Fig.5.42). Such representations are doubtless designed to make the product more attractive to readers and to mitigate feelings of panic about AIDS. At the same time, many of the images seem to be designed to do the opposite, to instill fear, much like those from the grim

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reaper days of Western AIDS prevention (Lupton 1994). Such images include those of skulls, skeletons, tombstones, weapons, diseased and dead bodies and snakes (Fig.5.43 and 5.44).

Fig. 5.42 (Guangdong Hygiene Office et al. nd:4)

Fig. 5.43 (13)

Fig. 5.44 (44)

5.4.2 Interdiscursivity Another important way the pamphlets use interpersonal resources for meaning to construct identities for authors and readers and contribute to the technoligization of the practice of AIDS prevention is through the strategic use of interdiscursivity. By drawing on different kinds of social languages (like the language of advertising, the language of 315

biomedicine, the language of politics) and different speech genres (like political slogans, comic books), the texts create multiple social identities for readers to take up. I already discussed in the last chapter how, by appropriating the genre of a multiple choice test, authors of the AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest Form create between authors and readers a pedagogical relationship in which authors assume the role of teachers and readers assume the role of students. I also argued that, because of the heteroglossic nature of texts, the ways speech genres and social languages work in them to claim and impute identity is often complex, creating multiple identities for the authors and multiple reading positions for the readers through implicating the text in different social practices.17 In my corpus of pamphlets, the most important speech genre appropriated, of course, is the genre of the sexual hygiene () pamphlet itself, a genre that has a long history in China. According to Evans (1997: 144), educational materials on sexual hygiene in China often include advice by experts on how to maintain standards of hygiene, pictures of diseased genitalia, the gruesome message of which is often reinforced by the addition of lurid color photographs of people with terrible skin diseases and physical deformities...(and) lists of 10 dos and donts (to) inform their readers of
17

The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest Form, for example, through appropriating along with the multiple choice test format the genre of a contest, creates between author and readers a second kind of relationship, a commercial one. This multiplicity in writing and reading positions offers authors and readers considerable flexibility in the kinds of mediated actions and social practices texts like this can be appropriated into. The Knowledge Contest Form, for instance, could be appropriated into the context of a health education classroom as a piece of teaching material, or into a conversation in a bar as a form of entertainment in which questions and answered might be combined with humorous comments regarding ones interlocutors. It is important to remember, however, that all of the identities and relationships indexed by the various speech genres and social languages that go into making texts are always somehow present in every use; in the case of the contest form, the voice of commercialism to some degree finds its way into the classroom, and the voice of education inevitably intrudes into the barroom. Therefore, crucial to understanding how interdiscusivty contributes to the technologization of social practices and social identities is understanding the dialogue that the different kinds of identities constructed in texts have with one another.

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the proper techniques of healthy sex. The pamphlets I examined contain many of these features, experts advice, lists of things that should be cultivated and things that should be abandoned. They do not, however, feature the shocking pictures that Evans alludes to, this particular cultural tool still used in official exhibitions on AIDS but much more common today in commercial discourses like popular books, VCDs and signboards for private STD clinics. Along with these tools, others as well are characteristic of this genre, including lists of instructions (for condom use for example), analytical illustrations, diagrams and slogans. Among the most common features of this genre is the arrangement of information into a question/answer format, with each topic in the pamphlet signaled by a question like What is AIDS? (?) , Can causal contact transmit AIDS? ( ?) and How can AIDS be prevented? (?). Forty-two out of the fifty pamphlets I analyzed used this format, and it is also common in popular books like 88 Questions about the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS (88) (Yang and Fang 1994). On the one hand, the question/answer format has an important functional dimension, one which has also been observed in genres associated with health promotion in the West. Wright (1999), for example, has noted that questions are usually what motivate readers of such materials to read them to begin with, and this inevitably affects the strategies that they use to read them. She writes:
Because the readers of functional texts start with a question, their initial interaction with the document is to scan through rapidly looking for somewhere that may offer an answer. They usually do not read through in a linear manner but jump from section to section, sampling the content as their question changes during a single reading episode. (89)

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One of the most obvious reasons for the appropriation of the question/answer format in these pamphlets, then, is that it makes it easier for the reader to read them and to locate information of relevance. At the same time, the use of this format also contributes to the technologization of identities for authors and readers and of the practice of AIDS education itself. The presentation of information as a set of questions and answers works to construct the practice of AIDS education as a pedagogical exercise of questioning and answering in which the answerer or expert is the possessor of knowledge and the questioner consumes it. It puts the reader in the position of lacking knowledge and dependent on the knowledge of the author to such a degree that even the right questions have to be provided (Jones 1997a). It also helps to reduce the amount of possible negotiation regarding the information presented, giving it the status of the right or model answer. The practice of questioning and answering and the discourse positions it creates invoke the voices of the classroom and the clinic as well as the practices and identities associated with these places. AIDS knowledge is not just a list of facts, but a consequence of this practice of asking and answering and the relationships it sets up. In this regard, the pamphlets are pedagogical not just in that they teach readers about AIDS, but also insofar as they train them in the practice of AIDS education, showing them how to be competent askers of questions about AIDS. In one sense, then, these questions are more imperative than interrogative. While, on the one hand, they are meant to ventriloquate the voice of the reader, on the other hand, they come from the authors

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and are directed at the readers as both a test of their knowledge and a display of the proper questions that go along with this practice. While AIDS prevention is constructed as a process of seeking and imparting knowledge; it is a process that can never really end, because the hierarchal relationship between asker and answer will always exist. No matter how much knowledge readers possess, they can never know enough, and they certainly can never know as much as the prevention experts. To use Ernis (1994) distinction, AIDS knowledge is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. The question and answer format functions not just as a medium through which AIDS knowledge is transmitted, it also acts as a boundary, perpetually separating the expert from the novice, the knowledgeable from the ignorant, and the dangerous from the safe. This contradictory construction is particularly striking in the image below from a pamphlet designed by the Department of Disease Control ( ) and the Chinese Association for the Prevention of STDs and AIDS ( ) entitled Common Knowledge about AIDS () (Fig.5.45).

Fig. 5.45 (37)

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Despite the construction of the knowledge in question as common through the use of the characters changshi () (common knowledge), the knowledge represented in the images is far from common: the biomedical knowledge of the operating theater, and the criminological knowledge of the detective. The complexity of AIDS knowledge as it is constructed in such representations is not, however, meant to deter readers from seeking it, for, as we saw above, the purpose of knowledge as it is constructed in many of these pamphlets is not to master it in a cognitive sense but to react to it with the proper consciousness. Besides the question/answer format, there are other speech genres and social languages that are more selectively appropriated into pamphlets for particular groups. In fact, the inclusion or exclusion of particular cultural tools in a pamphlet plays an important role in the invention of the identity of the target group. The 1995 series by the National Health Education Institute () (23-30), for example includes instructions for condom use in its pamphlets for gay men, long distance truck drivers, farmers, and migrant workers, but leaves this feature out of its pamphlets for students, and in the pamphlet for commercial sex workers (most surprisingly) condom use is not even mentioned. This exclusion constructs both of these groups as not needing this tool, students being advised to delay sexual activity until marriage and sex workers told to embrace a new life based on either monogamy or celibacy. The same series also shows a number of rather creative instances of interdiscursive borrowing, as, for example, the appropriation of the language of traffic regulations in the pamphlet for truck drivers discussed above (fig. 5.4). Among the most

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interesting of these is the appropriation of a classical form of didactic poetry called Sanzijing () (The Three-character Classic). The original Sanzijing is a primer made up of short poems with lines of threecharacters, probably authored during the Mongol period and used extensively in both formal and informal literacy education up until the revolution (Liu 1985). The principle behind the book was that the poems rhyming structure served as a powerful mnemonic which could not only help students remember the forms of the characters but at the same time provide moral education, its contents instructing students in Confucian values like filial piety and the value of education and hard work. It was studied through continuous rhythmic choral recitation through which students were not only taught the written language but also in effect indoctrinated in certain social standards (Liu 1985: 191).18 The AIDS Prevention Sanzijing () included in the National Health Education Institutes 1995 series of AIDS prevention pamphlets goes like this:
! AIDS Prevention Sanzijing AIDS is an incurable disease If you are infected, you will lose your life
18

After the 1949 Revolution, the book ceased being used in China, and was particularly vilified during the Cultural Revolution as representing the thinking of the feudal ruling class. It seems however, to have made somewhat of a comeback, not just in AIDS education but also in classrooms where contemporary children recite from a new edition issued in 1995 with a revised set of poems, some retaining the old themes of hard work, kindness and obedience to parents, and others extolling the heroic deeds of such figures as Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong and the virtues of socialism, modernization and technology.

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Although its dangerous, please dont panic Theres a way to prevent it if you clearly remember: Dont visit prostitutes, Dont be a prostitute Dont take drugs, Avoid becoming addicted Young people, Respect your virginity Before marriage, Treasure yourselves Good couples, Remain faithful to each other Avoid promiscuity, Cut off outside affections Understand how to love yourself, Strive for moral virtue You can do it, Preserve peace and tranquility!

Although its language is modern, the themes echoed in this Sanzijing are not very different from the moral lessons of the classical version, and some lines like Strive for moral virtue () and Preserve peace and tranquility (!) would not be out of place in the original Sanzijing. The poem is included in the pamphlet for, women, STD patients, travelers, truck drivers and farmers. In most of them it is written from left to right (as above), but in the pamphlet for farmers the poem is rendered in a classical right to left/ top to bottom format. Not only does the inclusion of this genre position author and reader in the hierarchal relationship of traditional Confucian education, it also reinforces the construction of AIDS prevention as a matter of memorizing lines (or tifa) of AIDS knowledge with the purpose not just of learning facts but of becoming indoctrinated into a set of relationships and a system of ethics. AIDS knowledge represents a kind of literacy which, as with all other literacies (Barton and Hamilton 1998, Gee 1996, Heath 1983), is not just a matter of mastering a language system but understanding how to say things to whom and under what circumstances in order to show oneself a 322

legitimate (or moral) participant in a community. The moral message of this Sanzijing and of the pamphlets in my corpus on the whole, in fact, is not very different from that in the original classic which begins: Men at their birth are naturally good. Their natures are much the same; their habits become widely different. ( ).19 One of the most important things about this particular case of interdiscursive borrowing is where it is not borrowed. Of all the pamphlets in the series, the only two in which the AIDS Prevention Sanzijing is not included are those for the floating population () and for gays. Instead of classical poetry, these populations are offered political slogans:
Understand AIDS Prevent Aids

Pay attention to and study AIDS knowledge Change the attitude of complacency Establish the concept of prevention among all people Choose a healthy lifestyle Become adept at controlling your behavior Be triumphant in preventing AIDS

Whereas the other populations at least to some degree fit into the established order of social relationships (the only possible exception being women commercial sex workers
19

There is, however, also another Discourse invoked, probably unintentionally, in the appropriation of Sanzijing in materials about AIDS and sexual risk: in contemporary usage, sanzijing () is also a slang expression for foul or sexually explicit language.

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who, in any case, are treated throughout their pamphlet as reformed), gays and migrant worker are those who have stayed across boundaries (geographical and sexual). The voice presented to the first group of readers is that of a gray bearded Confucian sage giving instructions on how to be a moral man; the one presented to the second is the martial voice of state authority policing its boundaries.

5.5 The Practice of AID Prevention

In this chapter I have shown how through the manipulation of voices both on the level of discourse and on the micro-level of lexico-grammar, authors in these pamphlets invent the identities of those at-risk for HIV infection, imagine their own identities as prevention experts and technologize the practice of AIDS prevention through constructing particular cultural tools and particular mediated actions as criteral to particular social practices and particular groups of people. The criterial aspects of atrisk groups are constructed around their behavior and, in the case of people already infected, their bodies. The criteral aspects of those presented as safe are constructed around the relationships they have with other people which keep them safe. The criteral aspect of HIV risk is its categorical nature, a construction closer to what Joffe (1999) calls a danger model of disease as opposed to a risk model. Finally the criterial aspect of AIDS prevention is its construction as a mode of consciousness rather than as simply a matter of cognitive knowledge, superficial behavior change or technological solutions. We have also seen, however, that the pamphlets offer readers a variety of reading positions to take up through the interdiscursive borrowing of speech genres and social languages from fields other than AIDS prevention. Readers are invited to take up positions as students, as citizens of the nation, as readers of comic books, as comrades 324

(in the older sense of the word), as clients and as consumers. Most importantly they are invited to take on identities as either at-risk or safe, and how they occupy these various reading positions will crucially determine how they use the information I have attempted to describe how the practice of AIDS prevention is technologized in AIDS education materials in China through the strategic mixing of various textual building blocks. I have not attempted to judge this construction as good or bad, effective or ineffective, for, as I pointed out in previous chapters, to do so would be impossible without looking at the ways people appropriate elements of this practice into real life situations. The fact is, the vast majority of AIDS educators and prevention workers I met in China, both within the government and outside of it, do not even remotely subscribe to the moral model promoted by these pamphlets, advocating instead more practical solutions like the aggressive promotion of condoms and peer education within vulnerable groups like sex workers. At the same time, however, while they doubt the effectiveness of this model as a tool for AIDS prevention, they fully appreciate its effectiveness as a tool to ameliorate more conservative individuals or bureaus in the government (like the Bureau of Public Security) and to secure state funding, enabling them to pursue other avenues of AIDS prevention not quite as conspicuous as published pamphlets. Even within the pamphlets themselves, moralistic language provides authors with the credibility to also be able to include in the same pamphlets strong messages encouraging condom use and instructions on how to use them. In the end technologized practices are simply tools which people use in different circumstances to enact the moment-by-moment construction of their identity and that of

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those with which they interact. While all tools have built into them affordances and constraints, potential to either increase or decrease users vulnerability to infection, the only way this potential can be truly assessed is by examining how these tools are appropriated to meet the moment-by-moment demands of identity claims and imputations within particular sites of engagement. In this chapter we explored how practice is technologized on the micro-level of grammar and semantics in written texts. In the next chapter we will observe how people use the cultural tools provided by these texts to navigate among the multiple and overlapping claims and imputations of identity that make up the micro-dynamics of social interaction.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Six Sites of Engagement

to engage in interaction with others can be likened to climbing a tree that climbs you back. Erickson (in press: 10)

6.1 Context and Competencies

None of the of identity claims or imputations observed in the AIDS prevention materials discussed in the last chapter can be properly assessed through an analysis of these materials alone. As Scollon (1997a: 51), in an analysis of advertising handbills, a form of discourse not very different from the pamphlets I analyzed in the last chapter, notes, there is a considerable disparity between the very narrow interpretive/identity frame which is open to the receiver of this form of public discourse in the ordinary situations in which these handbills are used and the theoretically unbounded analytical frame of the analyst. Therefore, in order to really understand the effect of these texts of public discourse, it is necessary to examine how the identity claims and imputations implicit in the tools that make them up are taken up and negotiated by interactants in situated moments of social practice. Scollon (1997a, 1998a) calls these situated moments sites of engagement, the window(s) opened through the intersection of social practices in which participants may appropriate a text for mediated action (1998: 11). In terms of AIDS prevention, sites of engagement can be as varied as a romantic evening with a spouse, a transaction with a commercial sex worker, a medical consultation, or the
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moment when an AIDS prevention worker hands an AIDS education pamphlet to a passerby on the street. In some ways the notion of sites of engagement is similar to Candlins (1987) concepts of critical moments and moments of conflict which take place in what he calls crucial sites, moments in which contradictions between conflicting discourses must be resolved and the communicative competence (Hymes 1986) of interactants is challenged. Although Candlin has in mind particularly delicate situations like the communication of bad news by doctors to their clients, in a sense all sites of engagement crucially involve the two issues that he highlights: the interaction of conflicting Discourses and the demonstration of competence in the social practices governing those sites of engagement, a competence which is always open to challenge by other interactants. This convergence of conflict and crisis is also particularly salient in talk about AIDS, which invariably involves the invocation of multiple deep seated cultural and personal storylines and multiple claims and imputations of identity, the consequences of which can affect, for example, whether or not a condom is used or whether or not information provided is considered by the recipient to be relevant to him or herself. One of the most important features of sites of engagement in which the practice of AIDS education is performed is that they almost always involve people who are members of different communities of practice. What separates interactants is not just knowledge or experience, but also different norms of communication and different understandings of the role of communication in dealing with HIV, and different notions about what competence in AIDS prevention means. Much communication around AIDS prevention,

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then, is, in a sense, intercultural communication, communication among people who are speaking different languages and following different rules about how words and actions should be interpreted. From the point of view of socio-cultural practice studies, competence refers to the ability to participate in particular communities of practice in ways that are legitimate (Lave and Wenger 1991), in other words, ways which enable both continued participation in the community as well as movement within the community from the periphery towards the center, from the status of novice to that of expert. In terms of language use, learning to become a legitimate participant in a community involves learning how to talk (and not to talk) like participants (Jordan 1989). In terms of health related behaviors, it involves learning how to behave within the social constructions of risk built up within specific communities.1 Competence, then, exists not in generalized knowledge, but in communities of practice. In fact, it is how communities define competence, whether it be communicative competence or other kinds of social or cultural competence, that characterizes them as different from other communities, and it is through the act of gaining competence and displaying it that people become legitimate participants in these communities. What competence ultimately is is knowing how to enact a particular social role as a participant in a particular community of practice in particular sites of engagement through particular ways of deploying and combining the various resources that those sites make available.

In their examination of safety practices in a construction firm, Gherardi and her colleagues (1997), for example, observe that people do not learn safety, they learn safe and unsafe practices within the communities that these practices are a part. 2 When I first lived in China in 1987, hardly anybody had a phone in their private residence and making a phone call, especially a long distance phone call (even to a neighboring province) could be an ordeal that 329

In the practice of AIDS education, what crucially determines how messages are taken up is not just the contents of those messages, whether or not, for instance, they are culturally appropriate or scientifically accurate, but whether or not, in the exchange of the goods and services that constitutes AIDS education, interactants are able to display themselves as competent participants in the activity as competent askers and answerers of questions, for example, and competent representatives of the communities of practice they are claiming as their own, be they communities of medical experts or communities of comrades (gay men), and as competent participants in particular sites of engagement and the interaction orders (Goffman 1983) which develop within them. As I will argue below, among the most important tools through which AIDS prevention messages are mediated are ones that may not be immediately associated in our minds with the practice of AIDS prevention, i.e. the social practices which govern sites of engagement like city parks, radio call-in-programs, railway stations, STD clinics, prisons, drug rehabilitation centers and entertainment venues. It is through the banal competencies associated with activities like making a telephone call or walking in the park that participants lay the foundations for the claims and imputations of identity with which they position themselves in relation to AIDS, their interlocutors, and the message that is being communicated.

6.2 AIDS on the Air

One of the main differences between the way health related information was disseminated in China ten years ago and the way people get that information now centers on the availability of new forms of communication technology, the most important being

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the telephone.2 Since 1995, China has been the worlds largest market for telecommunications technology (Zhao 1997), and this technology has transformed the ways people manage their day-to-day interaction, structure social relationships and earn a living. It has also changed where, when and how Chinese talk about such topics and marriage, family and sex (Erwin 2000). One of the main reasons for this is the explosion around the country of hotlines (), special phone numbers set up for people to seek advice and information on such issues as finding a suitable mate, dealing with an unfaithful spouse, curing sexual dysfunction and preventing the transmission of HIV and other STDs. There are currently over 123 official national, provincial and municipal hotlines devoted to AIDS in the country (UNAIDS China 1999, Wang 1996), as well as a number of unofficial ones, like the Beijing Comrades Hotline () (Beijing Comrades Hotline 1999), a national hotline for gay men (comrades) that uses of a pager number rather than a fixed phone line.

Fig. 7.1 (9)

Fig. 7.2 (30)

Fig. 7.3 (12)

When I first lived in China in 1987, hardly anybody had a phone in their private residence and making a phone call, especially a long distance phone call (even to a neighboring province) could be an ordeal that took several hours. Starting in the early nineties, private telephones became increasingly common in peoples homes, and today one is just as likely to witness pedestrians on the street talking on cellular telephones in Beijing as in San Francisco. 331

Forty-eight of the fifty pamphlets discussed in the last chapter provide hotline telephone numbers for readers to call for more detailed information or counseling about HIV testing, and many of them provide graphic representations of social actors performing this practice as in figures 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 (see Appendix 5).3 By far the most influential types of hotlines are radio and television hotline call-in programs, a genre in which the Discourses of counseling and crisis intervention have been embedded in the Discourse of entertainment. In todays China it is almost impossible to turn a radio dial at anytime day or night without tuning into one of these programs with names like Your Partner til Dawn, Life Hotline and Call-In Lovers Island (Erwin 2000, Xu Guoping 1993). Such programs offer listeners a chance to express themselves publicly and at the same time remain unidentified, making them a popular medium not just for discussions about personal or sexual problems but also an avenue for people to complain about public services and criticize government policy.4 Call-in radio programs are also of increasing importance in the delivery of AIDS prevention messages and the negotiation of knowledge about HIV. In her study of HIV related knowledge, attitudes and behavior of university students in Xiamen, for example, Walsh-Childers (1997) reports that her subjects used the radio more consistently than any other media to get information about AIDS.

Private entrepreneurs have also joined in the act of providing hotlines for troubled or lonely citizens. The counselors who man such hotlines, which typically have names like Talk about Sex at Midnight ( ), are usually not volunteers or medical professionals but employees hired because of their desirable sounding voices, and the uses to which they are put are often little different from commercial phone-sex lines common in many Western countries. 4 This development is one which has been encouraged by the government, and even used by officials who regularly appear on these programs to answer questions and receive complaints from citizens (Barm 1999). A 1993 article in the China Reporter () called the development of such programs a powerful spring wind that has opened splendid vistas for broadcasting circles (Xu 1993, trans. Sullivan 1995:276). 332

In her study of troubles talk on radio hotline programs in China, Erwin (2000) observes how such sites of engagement reveal the reconfiguration of public and private discourses in the country. In a society where saving face is a paramount concern, she writes, hotlines allow Chinese citizens to voice their uncertainties, heartaches, and hopes to sympathetic but socially-distant ears. Because they provide relative anonymity, hotlines represent an escape, or freedom, from direct party-state or family constraints on individual expression and personal relationships (147). For Erwin, however, this new found freedom is a double-edged sword, also providing the state with a new means to exercise technologies of control. She writes:
the flourishing public discussions of sexuality via hotlines may point to new insertions of discursive and disciplinary power. Hotlines provide a means for the state to overhear (and thus monitor) the discursive negotiation of personal fulfillment and reconfigured family relations. They also allow the state to influence citizens actions and identities by promoting scientific interventions like psychological counseling and sex education (indirect, discursive forms of power that Foucault called biopower). (168)

This may very well be true, and in the analysis below the appropriation of ideological tools of the state by callers, hosts and experts and the reproduction of the kinds of power relationships seen in the pamphlets discussed in the last chapter will be abundantly evident. At the same time, however, we will also see how such technologies of control can be undermined by tactics which exploit the generic conventions both of radio programs and telephone calls. From the point of view of Mediated Discourse Analysis we cannot theorize about the operation of power on the social or political level without first taking into account how it operates on the local level, on the level of the

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ongoing series of claims, imputations, contestations and negotiations of identity in situated interaction. The following analysis is based on the transcripts of nine episodes of the popular Beijing radio program Life Hotline ( ) (Aizhi Action 1998). These nine episodes are part of a special series entitled Challenge AIDS to Battle () hosted by Liu Guanghua () and Wan Yanhai (). The programs were broadcast on Beijing Radio (828 megahertz) from the twentieth of September to the fifteenth of November, 1998, all of them airing between 11:00 and 12:00 at night. Each episode of the program focuses on one particular topic such as AIDS and Women or AIDS and Youth, and experts on each topic are invited to share their knowledge and experience. The typical format used is that first the topic is introduced by the hosts, who give some background and summarize the main issues involved, then experts are introduced and briefly interviewed by the hosts, and finally listeners are invited to call in to ask questions or express their views about what has been discussed. What I will be focusing on in my analysis is not so much the content of these programs, the kinds of information given by the hosts and experts or the kinds of questions asked by callers, but rather how this information and these questions are managed and negotiated within the framework offered by this particular site of engagement, and how, in this negotiation, identities like host, expert and listener are constructed through the display of various forms of competence in the micro-dynamics of interaction. Studies by Ethnomethodologists and Conversation Analysts have revealed a great deal about how participants in everyday activities like making a phone call produce order

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in interaction by drawing on specific sets of procedural rules governing such things as openings, closings and turn-taking (see for example Sacks 1992, Schegloff 1968). In the field of AIDS, as I mentioned in the first chapter, the tools of Conversation Analysis have been used to explore how interlocutors in professional/client interaction around HIV manage their identities and the possible embarrassment involved in talking about sex with strangers through exploiting the mechanisms of turn taking and pausing (Perakyla 1995, Silverman 1994a, 1994b, 1997, Silverman and Perakyla 1990). Mediated Discourse Analysis brings these observations one step further by attempting to link the local production of order and the micro-dynamics of role negotiation to the technologization of social practice and the invention and imagination of social identities. Evaluating the degree to which sites of engagement like radio call-in programs amplify either citizens ability to protect themselves against HIV infection or the states ability to promote its ideological agenda is impossible without first addressing the procedural machinery of this genre, the competencies associated with this machinery, the discourse identities it establishes and the ways it is appropriated and adapted by participants to accomplish particular goals. For Goffman (1959), every interaction is essentially a performance in which interactants make use of the various expressive equipment available to them to promote particular lines. In any interaction, he argues, the content of what is said and the form that it takes is always in some way subservient to the overriding goal of participants to maintain the performance. A Bakhtinian view of discourse highlights the fact that these performances always occur on multiple levels. Besides performing for our immediate audience, we are also performing for the various third voices (see last chapter)

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implicated in the interaction. This interperformativity is particularly salient in radio call-in programs in which, conversations among callers, hosts and expert guests function simultaneously as performances they enact for one another and performances they cooperatively create for the audience which is overhearing this interaction. The audience, however, is not the only, nor even the most important, third voice present. Participants are also performing for those individuals and institutions which made the broadcast possible, for experts who may evaluate the accuracy of the messages provided, and for censors who may object to what is said or what is not said. Like the pamphlets analyzed in the last chapter, these programs are basically composed of question and answer sequences, and it is these sequences that I would like to concentrate on here, for, as I pointed out in the last chapter, it is through theses practices of asking and answering that the foundations for identity claims and imputations around AIDS education are laid. Callers to the program do not just ask for information or advice, and the hosts and experts do not simply dispense information. Participants also perform the practices of asking and answering in a particular way, and it is the interplay between the practices of asking and answering as they have been technologized in the conventions of AIDS prevention and as they have been technologized in the genre of the radio call-in program that ultimately determines how the facts, beliefs, prejudices, fears, stereotypes, advice and knowledge exchanged in the sequences is made available to people to appropriate into their everyday lives. Within this framework of discourse identities created in question/answer sequences, three basic types of social identity are constructed. First is that of experts who, through appropriating things like titles, the names of the institutions they are

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connected with, statistics, historical narratives, and ways of speaking, take actions to portray themselves as competent and knowledgeable. Second is that of the callers, who similarly must appropriate a variety of speech genres and social languages to portray themselves as competent callers. Finally, there are the hosts, who must enact identities as competent hosts by acting as mediators between the questions of the callers and the answers of the experts in a way that ensures that the overall performance is successful, that, for example, participants do not stray too far from the designated topic or disruptive conflicts do not arise. One of the most important places participants establish discourse identities and position themselves to claim and impute social identities is in the opening sequences of calls. In his analysis of openings in telephone calls, Schegloff (1968, 1986) observes that phone conversations are initiated through a series of three kinds of conversational move, a summons/answer sequence, an identification sequence and a topic introduction sequence. These sequences are interrelated, the right to introduce the topic, for example, typically going to the party that issued the summons. Scollon (1998a) argues that it is more useful to think of these not as distinct linguistic entities but as tasks that must be attended to in the interaction: the task of opening the channel of communication, the task of ratifying the identities of the participants, and the task of introducing the topic to be discussed, or, on a broader level, to frame the call as a certain kind of call (a personal call or a business call, for example). For Scollon, the tasks of identity ratification and topic introduction are actually inseparable since when participants claim and impute identities they also claim and impute the rights to speak on particular topics. He

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summarizes the rules governing this process of identity negotiation in what he calls the Maxims of Stance:
1. 2. 3. Identify the self you are claiming for the current social encounter. Identify the self you are willing to ratify for the other participant(s). Identify the topic which will serve as the overt carrier of self you are claiming as well as the self (or selves) you are ratifying for the other participant(s) while claiming your right to speak on this topic. 4. Make a claim as to why you are addressing this topic to the other participant(s). (Scollon 1998a: 34)

When analyzing openings in radio hotline calls, it is important to remember, however, that the real opening sequences usually take place before the caller actually goes on the air. In the radio show I will be analyzing, as in most programs of this type in both China and the West, calls are received first by an operator who confirms with the caller that their call will be broadcast and determines the suitability of both the callers question and his or her identity; calls to a hotline dealing with sex from young children or obviously drunken people, for example, may be rejected. These pre-opening sequences accomplish much of the main work that must be done, opening the channel, establishing identity and negotiating the topic. There are, however, ways that callers can circumvent this screening, by, for example lying about their identity or the question they intend to ask or by re-framing the question in a way that is acceptable to the operator. One of my informants, for example, told me of an experience he had of calling such a program in which he was able to circumvent the rejection of his original topic, homosexuality, by reframing it as a different topic, marriage:
........ ...... ..uh ''........

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.... ...... ...... ....... There was a program called The Voice from Your Heart at Midnight .. I have an experience...it was right after we first got a telephone..1995..I called to the hotline.. when I was connected I said I would like to talk about my personal problem ..she asked me what my problem was.. I said I am a ..uh, a comrade.. I said homosexual.. said I was a homosexual.. Im suffering a lot.. Im very depressed.. Ive fallen in love with another man.. Can you help me?.. She said they didnt talk about this question.. theyre willing to talk when some people want to complain about the government or have a problem with their girlfriend.. So later I changed my question The second time I called I said to her.. I said now I have this kind of problem.. I dont want to get married.. but my mother and father always urge me to get married.. I want to be single forever.. and the host broadcast this question ...so everyone could hear it.. now I think its probably a little better. (Fuzhou 1998-5)

One of the most important functions of these pre-openings is that they allow the host to manage the overall course of the interaction by being able to select when calls are to be received and what topics are covered. The transformation of a call from a private conversation between the caller and an operator to a public performance is usually signaled by an invitation by one of the hosts such as Friends in the audience, welcome to join in our program. Please call the hotline numbers 65159058, 65159059 ( 6515905865159059). The opening sequences that are broadcast, then, are actually staged openings in which the host, rather than the caller issues the summons. Below is a typical example of such an opening:
. ?

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Liu: Hello. Caller: Hello to the two hosts. Id like to ask a question about the routes of transmission of AIDS. I know one is blood, and another is sex. Ive also heard of another. Shaving, actually from shaving, is it also easily transmitted? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3:325-329) 5

Throughout the corpus, the way callers introduce and ask their questions follows a typical pattern, beginning with a salutation (hello to the two hosts), followed by language which opens the question frame (Id like to ask), further followed by a lead-up to the question often including the reasons for asking it (I know one is), and finally ending with the question itself. What is striking about this in comparison to normal phone conversations is the absence of the sequences Schegloff catalogues. Although there is a summons-answer sequence, as noted above, it is not the caller who issues the summons, but the host who summons the caller from what might be a queue of waiting callers. There is no identification sequence, the caller making no attempt to identify him or herself and feeling no need to ratify the identity of the host except though the salutation. Finally, there is no explicit (onstage) negotiation of the topic, the caller simply launching into it without relying on any signals from the host. That is not to say that the work of identity management and topic negotiation is not taking place. Where it can be found is in the more implicit claims and imputations of identity embedded in the sequenced stages of the callers monologue and in the subsequent ways the host ratifies or challenges these claims and imputations.

In citations of this radio program, the first number represents the episode in the corpus, and the second number represents the line number in the transcript. 340

The purpose of the salutation in such calls is partially simply mechanical, an answer to the hosts summons and a confirmation of the opening of the channel. Many of them consist simply of the greeting ni hao (), but sometimes salutations can be particularly elaborate:
(Hello to the hosts and hello to the guests) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 221) (Hello, good evening to the two hosts) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 554) (Hello Teacher Liu and Teacher Wan) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 682)

In such cases salutations also play a role in establishing the relationship between interlocutors through things like the use of particular forms of address (Teacher Wan) and levels of formality. They are the callers first opportunity to display themselves as particular kinds of people, people with a certain level of politeness () and civilization (). The sometimes subtle identity claims and imputations in salutations act to frame everything that comes after as a certain kind of performance (friendly, respectful, combative) and position participants within particular face systems (Brown and Levinson 1987, Scollon and Scollon 1995) (egalitarian, hierarchal). After the salutation, callers usually proceed to a move I have been calling opening the question frame. This move is one of the most consistently observed in the corpus and generally consists of language such as:
(Id like to ask) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 267, 449, 667; 5:714; 6:158, 309, 612; 8:371, 399, 406, 768) (I have a question) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 308) (I have a few queries) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 1: 332) (Id like to confirm something) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 8:771)

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As with salutations, some callers make this move of opening the question frame even more elaborate, for example:
(Would you please answer two questions) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3:222) (I would like to seek advice from the hosts) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 9:731)

In many of the calls this questioning frame is closed after the caller has finished asking his or her question with phrases like:
(Thats the way it is) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 5: 362, 746) ( My question is finished, thank you) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 662) (Please give me an answer, okay? Ill hang up my telephone) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 6:201)

When listeners call with comments or opinions rather than questions they use similar devices to open a commenting frame:
( I would like to say something) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 8:480-1) ( Now Ill talk about my point of view) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 488) ( Id like to briefly talk about my opinion) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 351) ( This is the way I think it is) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 8: 750)

This commenting frame is also sometimes accompanied by an explicit closure after the caller has said his or her piece:
( Now Im finished talking) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 633) ( I hope you can consider this) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 633-4)

The purpose of these moves is not just to frame the interaction either as a question/answer or a comment/response sequence, but also to identify the caller as either a questioner or a commenter, positioning him or her in a corresponding relationship with the host and experts. This positioning involves the taking up and imputation of

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discourse identities, but also, to some degree, the taking up and imputation of social identities, questioners positioning host and experts as having the right to speak on the topic that will be introduced in the question, based on their expertise, and commenters positioning themselves as having the rights to make a comment, based on their knowledge of the situation or their status as concerned citizens. On a more subtle level they can act to frame the callers question as, for example, a question ( ), a query or doubt () or as a request for confirmation (), implicitly constructing the caller as having a certain relationship with or attitude towards the topic he or she will introduce in the question. It is also a place where callers can do further facework (Brown and Levinson 1987, Goffman 1967) by, for example, attempting to minimize the imposition of the question or comment (Would you please answer two questions) or by positioning the answerer in the role of teacher or counselor (I would like to seek advice from the hosts). Finally, this move can be used to direct the question or comment towards a particular person (hosts or experts), as in I would like to ask the hosts two questions () . The most important place identity claims and topic management are accomplished is in the lead-up to the question. It is here that callers introduce their topic (or ratify the topic already introduced by the hosts or guests), which serves as a carrier (Scollon 1998a) of the identity they will claim when asking the question. Consistent with observations by Young (1982), the Scollons (1995) and others regarding the discourse patterns of Chinese speakers, nearly all of the callers follow the opening of the questioning frame and precede the actual question with a lead-in which typically gives the reasons they are asking the question, using what the Scollons call an inductive

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rhetorical style and what Young, linking it to the grammatical structure of the Chinese sentence, calls a topic-comment pattern. This lead-in serves to establish the topic upon which the question functions as a kind of comment. One important function of the lead-in is the ratification of the topic the caller wishes to introduce by linking it to the topic already under discussion:
Today the topic under discussion is how safe sex can prevent AIDS, right? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 431-2)

Repeating the topic under discussion also functions to position the caller as a legitimate participant in the program, often achieved through the use of the pronoun we (/) as in the following example in which the caller includes himself as a participant in a segment of the program that occurred before his call:
We have just discussed the problem of STDs and syphilis (Taozhan aizi 1998, 6: 311)

Repetition of what has been said before can also act to position hosts or experts and create a certain kind of relationship between the callers and them. In the following example, the callers repetition of what the host has said is clearly meant not to ratify it but to challenge it.
You have just said that the problem of prostitution that we are experiencing now is not a moral problem. Thats what you said, isnt it? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 562)

The lead-in segment of the calls also serves to contextualize the question by providing background information, sometimes of a rather general nature like, There are more and more AIDS carriers in our country (

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) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 439) and sometimes of a more specific nature, indicating what kinds of AIDS knowledge callers are already in possession of and where they got it:
About five years ago, a newspaper reporter went to the Chinese Medicine Research Institute to interview people about AIDS. At that time it was reported that the results of research at our Chinese Medicine Research Institute have been widely used in Africa. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 1: 4625)

In these moves, callers not only contextualize the question, but also contextualize themselves within a social world in which AIDS knowledge is circulated in particular ways (through, for example, newspaper reports, movies and scientific articles, rather than through direct personal experience). The pronoun we is often important in this type of identity claim, functioning to construct the callers knowledge of AIDS as something he or she shares with the general public rather than as an index of his or her own behavior or participation in a high risk group:
This is one question, another is, according to the sexual knowledge we have at hand, AIDS is not only transmitted through sex, but also through blood. What about saliva? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 442-3)

Such lead-ins tend to be designed to simultaneously create a link between callers and their questions (through constructing callers as consumers of public discourse) and to distance them from their questions by situating their origin outside of callers own experiences. Sometimes callers achieve this simultaneous linking and distancing through appropriating the tool of the hypothetical situation, as in the following example in

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which the caller draws a boundary between what she thinks and the topic she introduces by using the subjunctive mode:
Because I think if, a female sufferer, for example, goes to the sauna, I wonder if menstrual blood also contains the AIDS virus? So if she goes to the sauna, and at the same time a lot of other women take a sauna, can they be infected? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 9: 736-8)

Sometimes these hypothetical situations are rendered in such detail as to make one wonder how hypothetical they are:
HIV If a healthy man had sexual contact with a foreign prostitute only once, and they didnt use a condom, and, after four months he had a blood test, which turned out to be HIV negative, is there any possibility that he could be infected? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 431-4)

At other times these hypothetical situations make strategic use of the pronoun you () to manipulate the callers agentive relationships to the situation described, as in the following example:
For example, to speak frankly, you really like this member of the opposite sex. Sometimes you don't worry about anything (you have no misgivings), you have tenderness for every part of her body. For example you worry, is there any possibility of infection from oral contact? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 1: 341-344)

OConnor (1994), in her analysis of positioning in the stabbing stories of prison inmates, notes that such uses of you tend to be multi-functional, contributing both to the construction of the narrative and the speakers construction of him or herself. Among the functions she notes is a distancing of the speaker from agentive responsibility for the act
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described, portraying it as a common experience. At the same time, you can also function to lessen the distance between speaker and hearer by involving the hearer in the story. This second function is at times manifested as a kind of challenge, a suggestion that the hearer might respond differently to the question if the situation were happening to them:
Caller: Hello. I'd like to ask if you think its good to isolate AIDS patients or live together with them if, for example, you had an AIDS patient next to you? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 265-7)

Sometimes these lead-in segments are also used by callers to perform facework involving references to the program itself through which callers construct themselves not only as participants but as loyal fans:
Caller: Hello, how are you? I always pay attention to your program. First of all I think that this program is well done because it benefits our whole countrys fight against AIDS, to eliminate it, although its hard to use this word eliminate, at least it makes people have the concept of prevention, makes them able to feel that you cant say AIDS is far away from us. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 122-8)

What is striking about this last example is that the way the caller gives face to the hosts is by appropriating the technologized practice of AIDS prevention that I have discussed in the last two chapters, a practice which takes as its object the nation rather than the individual and which takes as its purpose to make people able to feel in a certain way rather than just aiming to affect their factual knowledge or behavior. While positioning the hosts as competent AIDS educators, the caller also positions himself as a literate

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consumer of AIDS knowledge through his reproduction of the tifa you cant say AIDS is far away from us (). At times, however, claims of identity as a loyal fan can also become face threatening, as in the following example in which the caller uses his familiarity with the program to question the identity of the hosts (who are not normally hosts of this program but only host the segments about AIDS).
828 Caller: Hello hosts, hello guests, today we here would like to ask two questions, alright? Liu: Fine. As you like. Caller. You are 828 megahertz. Your station head is called Liu Mingzhi. Liu: That's right, that's right. Caller: I'm right, huh? There's also Su Jingping, right? Liu: Right. Thank you for being so familiar with our program. What do you want to ask? Caller: My second question. You are today's host, originally Si Jinping was the host. Later it was Lin Bai, Hua Xiaoxue. The first question is what is the host's name? Liu: You want to know the names of our hosts? Caller: Right. Liu I am Liu Guanghua.

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Wan: I'm called Wan. Wan Yanhai. I am also a host. Caller: Next time we will meet, alright? Wan: Alright. Caller: This is my first question. The second question. Wan Yan Hai, is it? Id like to raise a questionWhy is it called AIDS? Why not love-peace (aiheping) (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 221241)

By displaying his knowledge of the names of people who work at this radio station and are involved with the program Life Hotline, the caller not only constructs himself as a loyal fan but as in some ways an even more legitimate participant than the hosts themselves. After one of the hosts attempts to manage these claims by moving the caller on to his question (Thank you for being so familiar with our program. What do you want to ask?), the caller makes use of the slot opened by this question to intensify his claim by requesting that the hosts identify themselves. Interestingly, the implicit identity claims callers make in moves like the salutation, the lead-in and the question itself are often the only ways they claim identity. They hardly ever explicitly identify themselves in any way at all except occasionally as a member of a very broad social group like youth, and sometimes even these identity claims have to be coaxed out of them by hosts:
: : : : : : Caller: Id like to talk about my own opinion. Liu: Are you also a youth? Caller: I am. Liu: And you also listen to our program?

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Caller: Always. Liu: Thank you (Taozhan aizi 1998, 8: 665-71)

In this example the host elicits from the caller two kinds of identity claim which afford him the right to talk on the topic at hand (AIDS and Youth), the first being the callers status as a youth himself and the second being his identity as a loyal fan of the program. Usually callers claims of their rights to speak on the topics they address are based solely on their identities as callers, as members of the general public, or as frequent listeners, almost never on their own relationship with high risk behavior or high risk people. Even the questions themselves are, as we saw above, often carefully framed as being in no way related personally to the callers who ask them. Rarely do callers talk about their own experiences regarding AIDS prevention or their assessments of personal vulnerability, and when they do it is almost always their experiences of having learned things about AIDS from media like newspapers and television. This is actually a departure from most radio call-in programs having to do with sexual issues (and from most the other episodes of Life Hotline) in which callers almost always identify the source of their questions in their own lives, their relationships, marriages and sexual or romantic experiences, one of the explicit purposes of such programs being to give listeners a chance to engage in xinlihua ( ) (the disclosure of personal ordeals (Erwin 2000). Questions in my corpus, on the other hand are usually framed as general questions based on a desire for knowledge rather than a personal problem. AIDS is generally spoken of as an abstract medical topic or as social problem caused by others, and the callers use their questions to claim identity as people who do not engage in high risk behavior but are threatened by or concerned about those who do.
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This tactic on the one hand can serve to further isolate people living with HIV and risk groups and fuel feelings of invulnerability in people who do not identify themselves as belonging to these groups, but on the other hand it provides for callers a position in the discourse from which they can present personal questions that might implicate them in embarrassing or illegal behavior by appropriating from the practice of AIDS prevention the question and answer format, making of themselves, so to speak, rhetorical tools in this practice. When callers do personalize their questions, the identities they claim are usually not of social outsiders but of more innocuous risk groups like recipients of blood products.
91 Liu: Hello. Caller: Id like to ask a question. Ive had an operation and a blood transfusion. May I ask how long I need to wait before I know its okay. Liu: When did you have the operation? Caller: 1991. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 418-22)

In the following example, the caller claims an identity for herself and those around her as at risk due to their insufficient knowledge, a claim which is immediately mitigated by the fact that she is seeking knowledge by asking the question and by framing the purpose of AIDS knowledge as a way to protect oneself in contact with foreigners. Even her ignorance is constructed not as a personal problem but a universal problem in the context of the topic being discussed: womens self-protection. The host subsequently cooperates with her in reformulating her question as a request not for

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knowledge about how to protect herself in potentially risky situations but as how to tell whether another person is HIV positive in order that they might be avoided.
Caller: Hello, good evening to both of the hosts. I would also like to ask two questions. The first question is, you just talked about womens self-protection and all. I think none of the people around me including myself understand what AIDS is, what kinds of symptoms it has. That is to say, today you might come into contact with so many kinds of people, like we have some people going abroad to work who cant avoid having contact with foreigners. Our knowledge about this kind of thing is practically zero. This is what I want to know. Liu: That is to say, your first question is that when you come into contact with these people is it possible to tell from their appearance whether they are infected with AIDS? Caller: Right, right. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 553-70)

Another way the callers distance themselves from the issue is through the topics of their questions. Of the 97 questions isolated from my corpus of nine programs, most of the questions (33) are about transmission, though few of these questions involve sex or drug taking behavior. Instead they focus on whether or not things like visiting a beauty parlor, getting bitten by a mosquito or going to a public bathhouse can result in HIV transmission. Of the remaining questions, a large number (20) are academic questions that have little to do with personal vulnerability such as those about the origin of HIV, the epidemiology of its spread, the length of the latency period and advances in finding a cure or a vaccine. Significantly, only eight of the questions in the whole corpus focus on

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how AIDS can be prevented, perhaps because asking such a question would risk positioning the caller as someone who needs to do just that. Nearly a quarter of the questions (22) are about people with HIV themselves, whether they should be quarantined, government policy for dealing with them, what symptoms they experience and whether or not they can be identified based on their outward appearance. Most of these construct the person with AIDS as them rather than us, often drawing on the invented identities of at risk people from the kinds of official discourse that we have looked at in the previous chapters. In the next segment, for example, by framing his question as one about government policy, the caller positions people with HIV as objects of surveillance and control and contrasts them with normal people. He also manages to combine in the identity of the person with HIV the practices (and technologized identities associated with these practices) of both prostitution and drug taking. (It is almost, in fact, as if the practice of prostitution is inferred from the practice of drug-taking.)
HIV What kind of method does our Chinese government have to deal with those people who have already gotten AIDS? Are they gathered together and imprisoned, or are they allowed to live together with normal people? If these people lead the lives of normal people, I dont know what measures the government adopts to ensure that they restrain their behavior. For example, if a woman who takes drugs and knows she is already infected with HIV, after she is allowed into normal society, mightnt she continue to engage in prostitution leading to other people being infected with this disease? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 2: 363-9)

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The choice of topics by callers works to position them in regard to the overall cultural storyline of AIDS as responsible citizens displaying their quality () by taking steps to increase their AIDS knowledge, not as people looking for advice about how to conduct their own lives, but rather as people seeking information about how others should conduct their lives. This appropriation of invented identities from official discourses serves to other the topic of AIDS even when callers are asking about possibilities that may be closer to their own lives. In the next segment, for example, the caller appropriates the invented identity of the homosexual to ask a question about heterosexual transmission. He is, as well, careful to position himself in relation to this identity as one who has learned about it from the movies rather than from real life.
I have a few questions. There is a movie called Philadelphia. He was a homosexual. People say that among homosexuals comparatively more people get sick, the probability of contracting AIDS is very high. I would just like to ask, among heterosexuals, in oral sex, can men be infected? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 1: 332-6)

As with identity claims, identity imputations made by callers, as we have seen above, are, for the most part, implicit, discourse identities built into the roles set up in the question/answer sequence and social identities signaled by things like topics (which hosts and experts are constructed as having the right to address), titles like Teacher Wan and face strategies like hedging, minimizing the imposition of the question and making use of indirect or polite ways of asking. At times, however, callers question the identities claimed by hosts or experts, as in the following example in which the caller appropriates the technologized identity of the AIDS prevention expert as a medical worker to

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challenge the guests rights to talk on the issue. This is done not by asking them to identify their past experiences or education but by asking them to identify their community of practice: their work unit (). The guests attempt to defend their rights to speak on the topic also by appropriating tools from the technologized practice of AIDS prevention, the notions of social work, participation in hotlines and public service, but the caller is apparently dissatisfied with the identities of social worker, volunteer and concerned person which are claimed. The host (also named Wan) then moves in to ratify the guests identities by linking them with recognized communities of practice (or work units), the NGOs with which they are associated.
Liu: Hello, how are you? Caller: Could I please ask which work unit in Beijing the experts are from? Wan: Im a social worker who does volunteer work in AIDS prevention. Im a volunteer with an AIDS prevention hotline and a hotline for homosexuals. Shi: Were volunteers. We care about everyones health. Caller: Neither of you are medical workers? Wan (host): The guests that we have invited today do social work in the society. This gentleman is a member of the Chinese Sex Association and also a member of the Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 417-29)

The outcome of these implicit moves of framing and positioning by callers and the kinds of AIDS knowledge which is subsequently dispensed to them depends crucially on how the hosts respond to these claims. Hosts in such programs play a special
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role when it comes to positioning interactants and framing topics. They are holders of the most significant form of discursive power in the interaction, the power to delegate or to withhold delegation of discursive roles and topics to others (Scollon 1998a: 49). As Brand and Scannell (1991) have observed, radio hosts claim a certain neutrality through their institutional identity, but then can use this neutrality as a powerful tool to produce and maintain identities for themselves and others through the micro-dynamics of interaction. Whereas all participants have some role in framing the situation and positioning themselves and other participants in it, the hosts are what we might call master-positioners and master-framers. The strategies they use are also key in determining how the technologized practice of AIDS prevention is appropriated into the interaction and whether or not tools from it are taken up in ways which ratify official constructions or contest them. Even though the questioners seem to be the ones introducing the topic, the hosts are always in control of it, first of all by staking out its boundaries in very explicit ways like announcing the kinds of questions that will be entertained and, in regard to each caller, by deciding who will respond to the question, how it will be responded to, and whether or not it will be responded to at all. The most common ways hosts maintain this control, though, are not through explicitly mobilizing their powerful position in the discourse, refusing callers questions or obviously challenging the identities they are claiming, but rather through more subtle means on the level of interactional dynamics. These more subtle strategies can be seen most strongly in the turn immediately following the question, which the host almost always begins by repeating the question he has just been asked. For example:
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Liu: So what youre asking is after AIDS has been contracted is there is any possibility of curing it. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 441) Liu: Right. As a married woman how can one protect oneself. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 585)

Callers who have comments rather than questions also see their comments turned into reflective summaries by the host.
Liu: I understand what you mean. Youre saying that if we challenge AIDS, we cant just talk, but we also have to put it into practice. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 7: 440-1)

These reflective summaries serve a number of functions. One of them is a function demanded by the genre itself, a way to make sure not just that they (and their guests) have understood the question but also that the audience has understood it. Such summaries are in fact common on radio call-in shows as they help to structure question/answer sequences and highlight salient points in ways that make it easy for listeners to follow. Another important function of this move is to clarify the question, and sometimes the summary is preceded by an additional embedded question/answer sequence in which the host asks the caller to clear up certain ambiguities in the question:
Liu: Are you referring to insertive sex or non-insertive sex? Caller: insertive. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 443-4)

Sometimes, however, this clarification sequence is appropriated by the host not for the purpose of clarifying or ratifying the question at all, but for the purpose of challenging the assumptions implicit in it, as in the example below.

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 , Liu: Hello. How are you? Caller: Judging from the situation in our country, especially the present situation in Beijing, if when a person engages in abnormal sexual behavior... Liu: What do you mean by abnormal sexual behavior? Caller: Like prostitution and visiting prostitutes, engaging in homosexuality. Also when (people engage in) some ethically and morally abnormal behavior, what is the probability of infection? Liu: All along I havent understood what you mean by abnormal behavior. First, you assume that visiting prostitutes, this kind of behavior, is abnormal. Second, among members of the same sex what is abnormal sexual behavior? Caller: It is the first type. Liu: Because if you want the expert to reply, you need to state your question clearly. Now youve mixed up three questions. Caller: Actually my original meaning of abnormal sexual behavior is visiting prostitutes, this kind. heterosexual behavior, as far as Beijing is concerned, what is the probability of infection? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 352-65)

Here the host seeks clarification regarding the callers use of the term abnormal sexual behavior not just to get him to clarify which kinds of behavior he wants to focus on, but to challenge the concept of abnormality implicit in the question. After this clarification, the problem is not that he is unsure about what the questioner is asking about (homosexuality and prostitution) but the questioners grouping of these activities

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together and adding to them an evaluative label. The host challenges this label and the ideology behind it, however, not by appropriating the tools of biomedicine or sociology, but by appropriating the tools available to him as the host of a call-in radio program and his role as mediator between callers and experts. In this way, he is able to implicitly challenge the readers moral position by explicitly challenging his discourse position, constructing him as an incompetent caller, and the question as unacceptable not because it is judgmental but because it is unclear (if you want the expert to reply, you need to state your question clearly. Now youve mixed up three questions). Another important aspect of the negotiation of the topic between caller and host illustrated by the excerpt above is that callers, much more than hosts and guest, tend to appropriate the moral boundaries and at-risk identities technologized in official constructions of AIDS prevention (boundaries separating moral from immoral, normal from abnormal; and identities like homosexuals and prostitutes). Along with these boundaries, they also often appropriate the social languages and tifa of official constructions like prostitution and visiting prostitutes (). In this sense, the host not only uses the interactional mechanics of the genre to challenge the questioner, but also appropriates the questioner in order to challenge aspects of the official construction of AIDS to which he objects. The example below shows how strategies used by the host to control the construction of AIDS in the program and the tactics used by callers to advance their own version of this construction interact:
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 Caller: Hello host. I would like to ask a question. The guest just said that two homosexuals together, if they are relatively stable, cannot under any circumstances get AIDS. Ye: Right Caller: I just have this kind of question. The first question is, how is AIDS transmitted? Liu: We are talking about sexual behavior. Actually, where homosexuals are concerned you cannot eliminate other routes of transmission, for example transmission through blood. Caller: Im saying for homosexuals, they engage in every kind of style of sex, including anal sex. So they can't get AIDS? Ye: Id like to answer this question. I just talked about two healthy people, neither of which has contracted the AIDS virus, then it doesn't matter what method they use, whether or not they take precautions, they cant get AIDS. Caller: So, in this case, how was the fist case of AIDS transmitted? Wan: This friends question is very good. So can I ask you this question? Where did the first human being come from? Caller: This I cant answer clearly. Liu: What you are asking is the same kind of question. Wan: What is the origin of life? Science has not yet solved this question. Caller: My question really is wasnt AIDS created by homosexuality this kind of abnormal lifestyle? Liu: This is definitely a big misconception.

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Wan: This friends question is, is AIDS a disease which is transmitted through behavior or one which is created by a certain lifestyle? (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 115-36)

What is interesting about this segment is that none of the questions in it are genuine questions (truly meant to elicit information). Instead these questions are rhetorical moves in the negotiation of the topic and of how both HIV and homosexuality are to be constructed. The caller begins by repeating a statement already made by one of the guest as the lead-in to his question in a way which does not just function as a request for confirmation but also frames the subsequent questions as a challenge. In fact, the caller is not really looking for answers to these questions (How is AIDS transmitted?, How was the first case of AIDS transmitted?) at all but rather using them to challenge the guests assertion. The way the host deals with this is by playing with the caller at his own game, asking him a question (Where did the first human being come from?), which is also not really a question but a challenge to the legitimacy of the callers questions. When the caller is unable to defend the legitimacy of his question, he reveals his real question, which is also not really a question but itself an assertion (wasnt AIDS created by homosexuality this kind of abnormal lifestyle?). In his subsequent reflective summary, the host transforms the assertion disguised as a question into an actual question with two alternative answers, one representing the point of view of the caller and the other representing the point of view of the host, and passes that onto the guest for response. Even this, however, is not so much a question as an invitation to the guest to once again make the very same assertion that prompted the caller to call in the first place. Again, the way the host manages to challenge the content of the callers question is not by immediately denying the assertion but by questioning the way the question is asked, the kind of question it is. To the extent that the question allows the
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host to promote his own construction of homosexuality and AIDS prevention from the neutral position of host then, it is a very good question indeed. The last line of the example above illustrates a much more subtle and much more common use of reflective summaries by hosts to exercise control over topics, the processes of relexicaliztion and question transformation through which the host changes the original question into one he deems more acceptable. Sometimes relexicalization involves offering up alternate names for the people or practices under discussion, and thus offering alternate technologizations of these social practices and identities. In the case of the caller above who equated homosexuality and prostitution with abnormality, the host responds by relexicalizing prostitutes as sex workers ( ), prostitution as sexual service (), and the question of AIDS prevention within this practice as a one of rights () rather than of morality.
. Caller: Actually my original meaning of abnormal sexual behavior is visiting prostitutes, this kind. heterosexual behavior, as far as Beijing is concerned, what is the probability of infection? Wan: What you call visiting prostitutes, another way to say it is sex worker, in this case the danger is the same. If there is no barrier, then infection is possible. In the kind of sexual services involved in visiting prostitutes, theres a question of rights. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 4: 364-369)

At other times transformation of the question involves keeping the essential contents of the question intact, but reframing it as addressing a different issue than it originally intended to. In the next segment, for example, the host transforms what are essentially questions about how to control people with HIV so they are not a danger to others, who

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is responsible for this control and how much it is costing, to questions which focus on how can we better care for people with HIV?
Caller: Teacher Liu, Teacher Wan. I have some questions. First, What hospitals in Beijing or what healthcare institutions have authority over AIDS testing and surveillance? The second is what is the cost of the testing and surveillance? Also, towards those who are already confirmed carriers or those who have already reached the late stages of AIDS, what measures have been adopted by the government and healthcare organizations? We have already said that isolation is technically impossible, so what concrete measures are our government departments and healthcare organizations taking to insure that they dont continue to spread it. Liu: You are asking where those infected go for treatment, and, for those suffering from late stage AIDS, how can we give them concern in the end. Caller: Right, right. You can sum it up in these two questions. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 3: 681-93)

Despite the fact that the questions have been altered, the caller accepts the alterations without hesitation. In fact, one of the reasons relexicalization and question transformation are such a powerful means of topic control is that, when skillfully done, they are very difficult to challenge. Another function that relexicalization and question transformation achieve is pedagogical. Just as the questions in AIDS prevention pamphlets instruct readers on how to be competent questioners when seeking advice on this topic from experts, the reflective summaries of the hosts in these programs also serve to give back to the callers versions of their own questions in the way that they should be asked.

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One of the most important roles of the host is to mediate between the questioner and the expert, and the main way this is accomplished is through deciding which questions experts will answer. Generally, after their reflective summary, hosts summon one of the guests to field the question or choose to answer it themselves. Each of these selections embodies not just an imputation of identity onto the guest who is selected to answer as having the right to speak on the topic, but also on those who are not selected as perhaps having less right to address the issue. Experts themselves are often in the most complex position, having to display their expertise in a context in which they are not fully in control of the topic and most often being responsible not for expressing their own opinions but for animating (Goffman 1981) the policies of their work unit or the accepted truths of the particular scientific discipline they are part of. They are not merely themselves but also representatives of their communities of practice, and this can constrain the kinds of positions they are able to take up in the discourse. The following segment is a good example of how questions are negotiated among callers, experts and hosts, each move in this negotiation involving claims and imputations of identity and speaking rights by participants. The guest in this example is Doctor He Wei (), director of the Infectious Disease Division of the Beijing Epidemic Prevention Center ().
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Caller: Its spring, and my children are being inoculated against encephalitis. When I got home I discovered that one needle was used to give shots to all the children. Can this transmit AIDS? He: Speaking In general, this kind of situation in our country is not serious. Why do I say this? Now in the majority of places, when we give children inoculations, we follow the policy of one needle, one syringe per person. In some areas, in remote areas, in certain areas because of economic reasons this point still can't be guaranteed. But this virus is not completely the same as other diseases. Presently the rate of infection in the entire country is still at a relatively low level. In some areas it is higher, mostly restricted to adults, and is rising. Now, as far as children are concerned, presently it does not constitute a big problem. So when this age group receives vaccinations or shares needles, the danger of contracting this virus is very small. But we cannot eliminate some other factors, for example, some other sources of infection may still have some risk. But, as far as AIDS is concerned, it still doesn't constitute a very serious problem. Wan: Doctor He, you just mentioned, the overall level of infection is still not high, and the level of infection among children is possibly even lower. Under these circumstances, you assume that in many places the influence of sharing needles on the transmission of AIDS is not very big. Now we have this kind of problem. What will happen in the future? Because of mother to child transmission and other routes, AIDS infection among children has increased. Because of this kind of behavior in the future the threat of hidden cases of transmission exists. 365

He: The danger exists. Whether or not the problem that this last caller has just reflected is true, I do not doubt you. In actual work, when children are given inoculations, it is not necessarily one needle; after giving this child an injection, the needle is not changed, its not dealt with properly, after one vaccination, another child is given an injection. This situation strictly speaking does not accord with the operating regulations. If you cant change the syringe, you should change the needle. But material circumstances make this extremely difficult. We also should pay attention to this. We have to increase supervision in this aspect. Even though there are difficulties, in a short time, our government, that is to say the Ministry of Health, has the ability to solve this problem. Please everyone put your minds at rest. Liu: I think this parent has raised an extremely good question. At least he has health consciousness, so he can consider this problem. He should bring it up, including bringing up this opinion with the bureaus concerned. Actually, I think there are some parents who should have this kind of sensitivity, for the sake of their childrens health to clearly make known their attitude. I feel this last callers participation shows he has sensitive health consciousness. (Taozhan aizi 1998, 1: 154-97)

This is one of the few instances in the corpus in which the caller personalizes his question, and this personalization adds credibility to his challenge to the government official, which is couched, rather than as a challenge, as a question about routes of transmission (ln. 2). The guest responds to the challenge by attempting to reframe the question as one about general practice rather than the callers individual experience, appropriating the geographical boundaries between more materially advanced urban areas and remote and primitive regions which we saw in chapter four (lns. 3-5), as well as the language of epidemiology, to support his claim that re-using needles to inoculate children is not as dangerous as it seems (lns. 6-11). At this point, it is the host who joins in to challenge the expert, appropriating himself the social language of the experts field (lns. 12-15). The guest subsequently attempts to preserve the face claims of the caller by

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ensuring him that he is not questioning the truth of his assertions (ln. 16) and his own face claims by falling back on the authority of the community of practice he represents, the Ministry of Health, and its commitment to serving the people (lns. 20-22). Perhaps the strongest challenge to the guests response, however, comes from the other host (Liu), who rather than directly challenging the guest, uses the strategy of praising his opponent. The tools he uses to do this, furthermore, are taken directly from the toolkit of the guest, the technologized practice of AIDS prevention. First he refers to the caller as a parent, a revered identity in the system of relationships reproduced in AIDS prevention discourse. Second he frames the challenge as evidence that the caller is endowed with what official discourses construct as the essence of AIDS prevention: a proper consciousness. (I feel this last callers participation shows he has sensitive health consciousness) (lns. 23-26). There are several important points we can take from this analysis. First, and most obvious, is that official constructions of AIDS prevention in China are open to challenge not just through unofficial means but by voices of authority through what Western journalists call the state run media. These challenges to official constructions are often achieved, however, by being framed as challenges to particular callers who, in this regard, are themselves technologized as cultural tools. The second point to note is how strongly standardized the official version of AIDS prevention is in the minds of callers, probably because it is in part technologized through appropriating values, boundaries and stereotypes already firmly technologized into broader Discourses of the family and the nation. At the same time, however, we have seen how flexible this practice is, how it can be appropriated by participants in a variety of ways to construct their own identities and

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advance their own agendas even when these present a challenge to the very practice they are appropriating. The most important point we can take from the above, however, is that while the technologies of control embedded in the official practice of AIDS prevention are clearly exerted, these technologies are appropriated into a site of engagement with its own mechanisms of interactional control which are equally important in the way topics are constructed and callers are positioned in the field of HIV vulnerability. In these performances of the technologized practice of AIDS prevention, among the most important competencies involved are not those directly related to this practice, but those through which interactants claim and impute identity as competent users of the cultural tool of the radio call-in program.

6.3 A Walk in the Park

The pamphlets analyzed in the previous chapter are distributed to their target audiences in a number of different ways. They are made available in hospitals and clinics where people undergo testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. Pamphlets for travelers and migrant workers are passed out on trains and airplanes, and those for drug users and sex workers are distributed in rehabilitation centers and prisons. Sometimes, particularly (as in many other countries) on World AIDS Day, AIDS prevention materials are distributed to people on streets and in other public places. The three pictures below depict this practice.

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Fig. 7.4

Fig.7.5

Fig. 7.6

The first picture (fig. 7.5), from the Beijing Review (Cui 1997), bears the caption, Prevention activity on World AIDS Day in Yunnan Province. It shows a doctor extending her hand, which contains a sheath of papers, over a row of exhibition boards. No other hand, however, is seen extending from the opposite side of the picture to accept her offer. Her identity as a prevention expert is signaled by her dress which includes a white coat and surgical mask, and in many ways the practice of handing in which she is engaged is dependent on the identity she claims though her costume. As in the representations of AIDS education discussed in the last chapter, the boundary between expert and novice is clearly marked both by the clothes the experts are wearing and the boundary of exhibition boards that separates them from the public. The second picture (fig. 7.5) shows a more complete representation of the practice of handing: the hander, also bearing a conspicuous marker of her identity in the form of a sash that reads Spiritual Civilization Volunteer (), extending her hand to a recipient who looks at the papers it contains and, with some apparent difficulty, takes them into his hand which is already occupied by a suitcase. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this picture is that the recipient is not a member of the general public, but an Army officer. This picture, which appeared in the International Herald Tribute (China favors education 1998) on the day after World AIDS Day in 1998, creates a symbolic

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representation of the perspective found in many Western media accounts of AIDS in China: an AIDS volunteer attempting to educate a symbol of state authority who has difficulty accepting the message. The third instance of handing (fig.7.6), taken from the Far Eastern Economic Review (Forney 1998), is not strictly handing but taking, the figure on the left rolling up a free poster on AIDS prevention designed with drawings by Chinese children. The outstretched hand of the previous pictures has been replaced by a table upon which the items to be taken are placed, and behind this prevention workers stand, much like shop assistants, identified in an interesting act of interdiscursivity by both doctors coats and baseball caps. Similarly, the materials themselves have taken on the status of commodities and the takers are positioned more as consumers of rather than targets of AIDS knowledge perhaps one reason why recipients in this picture are noticeably more enthusiastic compared to those in the first two. Whether it is an AIDS prevention pamphlet, an ad for an English tutorial school or a free sample of shampoo or cigarettes, the act of handing people objects and texts in public places, as can be seen in the pictures above, is a practice in which claims and imputations of identity are centrally important. In his 1997 paper on handing in public places in Hong Kong, Scollon (1997a: 41) argues that an examination of the practice of handing in public places allows us to develop a closer analysis of the interpretative processes by which strangers impute, claim, ratify or contest publicly available identities. Having myself participated in the practice of handing AIDS prevention information and condoms to people on the streets of Hong Kong, also on World AIDS

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Days, in my capacity as a volunteer for a local NGO, I can attest to the fact that, when items handed to strangers have to do with AIDS and sexual practices, this process of identity negotiation can sometimes be rather delicate. Unlike the handers in the pictures above, my identity as a prevention worker on these occasions was not so clearly signaled I wore no cap, sash, t-shirt or doctors coat and my identity as a foreigner further complicated matters, for although the handing of items to strangers in public places is commonplace in Hong Kong, the people engaging in this practice are rarely non-Chinese. Thus, my outstretched hand was often met with reactions ranging from amusement to rejection. These reactions inevitably altered when recipients became aware of the nature of the object they had been handed, most registering surprise, some embarrassed laughter, some anger or annoyance, and some even returning the objects to me, refusing to accept the identity I had imputed on them in the act of giving them information about AIDS with words like I dont need this or this is not for me.6 The social identity of the recipients was especially an issue when the items to be handed were condoms, in which case certain passersby (small children, Buddhist monks) were intentionally overlooked. This was particularly problematic the year our NGO decided to package the condoms in red Chinese New Year envelopes with the Chinese character for fortune () (Cant. fuk) written on them. On this occasion small children were more difficult to overlook, many of them following me with outstretched hands assuming that the packets I was carrying contained, as they normally do, lucky money, and sometimes requiring me to explain to their angry parents why I would not give them to their children.

The same reaction would be very unusual in the case of other objects like handbills which passersby generally accept and, if they find them inappropriate or uninteresting, deposit in the next available litter bin which are sometimes brimming with identical discarded handbills. 371

The practice of handing AIDS prevention materials to people in public places in China rarely involves such difficulties, mainly because the identities of the handers are almost always explicitly marked as in the pictures above, and they are usually not (as in fig. 7.5) mobile, more often dispensing their information and other objects from a stationary position, a table set up on the street or in some other public venue with signs and banners bearing AIDS prevention slogans conspicuously displayed, thus giving passersby considerably more choice in deciding the degree to which they wish to engage in identity negotiation with the handers. In some instances of distributing AIDS prevention materials in China, however, the situation is far more complicated. Consider the examples below:
A= hander; B= recipient Example 1 A: B: A: B: A: Not many people here today. B: ... A: Do you think there are a lot of people or not? B: I dont know. Im not from around here. Example 2 B A B B: Are you selling this? A: Its free. B: Why are you giving away this kind of thing? Example 3 A: B: (A's pager rings. He takes it out of his pocket and reads the message.) 372

B: A: A: Hello. B: Hello. (A's pager rings. He takes it out of his pocket and reads the message.) B: What do you want? A: Nothing.

If these examples seem unusual it is because they are taken from my observations of the distribution of AIDS prevention materials in circumstances in which the negotiation of social identity for both the hander and the recipient is especially complex. The setting is a park in Beijing. Potential recipients of the materials are men who have sex with men, many of them for money, in search of potential partners. The hander is not a public health worker, but an unofficial AIDS prevention activist, and the materials he is distributing are not domestically produced pamphlets of the type analyzed in the last chapter, but instead pamphlets designed especially for MSM and donated to this individual by an NGO in Hong Kong (including images which many law enforcement officials might regard as pornographic) (see figs. 7.7 and 7.8).

Fig. 7.7 (AIDS Concern 1995)

Fig. 7.8 (AIDS Concern 1995)

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As can be seen in the above examples, the ways identities are claimed, imputed, accepted or rejected under these circumstances, and the consequences involved in such claims and imputations, are subtle and multi-layered both for the prevention worker and the men who gather in the park to fish. Example one shows how the prevention worker, in order to gain access to his targets, must claim for himself (and impute on his target) the identity of an insider, claims and imputations that in the activity of fishing are usually not issued directly upon initial contact but rather negotiated in more indirect ways like, as in the example, implying and assuming familiarity with the venue, in this case a park which is particularly well know as a fishing pond () by both local Beijingers and MSM from other cities and provinces (Not many people here today). The target does not immediately respond to the initial overture, and when pressed, responds with an ambiguous answer which, while denying familiarity with the venue, leaves open the possibility of MSM identity and of continued interaction. Example two attests to how unusual the practice of handing in these circumstances is, with the recipient initially interpreting the offer as a sales pitch and expressing disbelief that the hander would give away such materials for free. All the same, his response contains the same ambiguity as that observed in example one, open to be interpreted either as a rebuff (and a rejection of the identity imputed by the materials) or an invitation for the practice of AIDS education to proceed. In the third example the initial approach is abruptly terminated by a pager message7 sent to the prevention worker from a friend situated in another part of the

Telecommunications technology has had a significant influence on urban gay life in China, with mobile phone and pagers becoming important tools both for eluding police when engaged in fishing and public sex and as a tool for meeting potential partners or introducing potential partners to friends (a pager number offering much more safety and anonymity than a home phone number). They are also tools which mark one as fashionable, modern and financially independent (Zhao 1997), and so are sometimes used to distinguish safe partners from the money boys and migrants who are less likely to be able to afford them (see next 374

park indicating the presence of police (a potential danger for both the unauthorized distributor of AIDS knowledge and the fishers he is targeting). Just as in the radio call-in program analyzed above, the way information and advice about AIDS is accepted in these circumstances is dependent not just on the content of that information or advice but also on how it is delivered within the generic interactional constraints of the site of engagement. In such sites of engagement, an instance of public discourse like an AIDS prevention pamphlet becomes a tool not just for the promotion of AIDS knowledge, but also for the claims and imputations of identity through which, as Scollon (1997a: 44) writes, individuals go about the quotidian reproduction of their community of practice. In the last section of this chapter (6.2), I explored how participants perform the practice of asking and answering questions about AIDS in a site of engagement in which the performance of competence is multifaceted and contingent on the management of the micro-dynamics of interaction associated not only with the genre of AIDS education but also with the genre of the radio call-in program. A similar interperformativity can be observed in this more covert variety of AIDS education, in which the seemingly simple act of handing an AIDS prevention pamphlet to a stranger involves a whole host of competences involving how to look, how to stand, and how to avoid both suspicion from the targets of the handing and interference from those for whom the materials are not intended (in particular, the police). Scollon (1997a) argues that the practice of handing strangers objects and texts in public places involves the interaction of four distinct frames of activity:

chapter). One of my informants even went so far as to say that he would never have sex with a man who did not have at least a pager if not a mobile telephone. 375

the frame governing the overall social situation (a park, a street corner), the activity frame (or frames) which governs the ways practiced activities like handing and walking in public places are carried out, the frame created by the text itself or generic frame (whether or not, for example, it is an advertising flyer, a free sample, or an educational text), and a regulatory frame which places constraints on what kinds of texts can be distributed, where, when and what recipients are allowed to do with them when they receive them (for example, prohibitions on the distribution of illegal materials and prohibitions on littering).

The frames participants must manage in the type of situation we are examining here, however, are considerably more complicated than those involved in the simple acts of handing relatively innocuous handbills that Scollon analyzed, with the contextualization cues and competencies associated with some frames interacting in complex and contradictory ways with those associated with others. The social situation frame is an interpretative frame in which participants act out competencies related to some socially recognized practice often in situations or venues especially created for that practice. According to Scollon (1997a: 51), identity in this frame is displayed through the practice of appropriate activities, to the non-display of inappropriate activities. The failure to display the expected activities, he notes, identifies one along a continuum from incompetence to social outsider or foreigner. Conversely, displaying the right activity identifies one as a normal member. For men seeking companionship in urban parks, however, the social situation frame has more than one dimension. On the one hand, the social situation is simply a walk in the park. On the other hand, embedded in this frame and in many ways dependent on the various forms of subterfuge that it offers, another practice is being engaged in, one which is in many cases unobservable to those who do not understand the rules associated with it and the contextualization cues that signal it. Participants, then, must display competencies in both

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of these frames simultaneously, must show themselves to be both competent performers of the leisure activity of walking in the park and as open to participation in the rather less leisurely activity of fishing. For the AIDS educator, the challenge is to somehow fit the practice of AIDS education, with its attendant practices of handing out pamphlets, asking and answering questions and providing counseling into these overlapping frames and to convince those participating in the fishing frame to join him in this new frame as competent recipients of AIDS knowledge. Just as the fishing frame exists under the cloak of a walk in the park, the AIDS education frame must to some degree be concealed within the fishing frame. The walk in the park frame is in many ways an extremely convenient subterfuge for fishing (others include going to the toilet, taking a bath in a public bathhouse and reading a street side newspaper display board). First of all, the competencies involved are open to almost everybody rather than a select group of experts. Second, these competences can be enacted in so many different ways using a variety of different tools (newspapers, benches, portable radios, kites and other toys, bread crumbs or rice to feed to ducks and fishes, etc.) many of which can be further appropriated into the fishing frame (to make small talk about the daily news, for example).8 The interactive frames used to signal the various activities that make up the practice of fishing involve in the initial stages the same three tasks observed in my analysis of the openings of calls to radio call in programs: opening the channel (an act

The flexibility of this frame, in fact, has made it a popular subterfuge for a large number of social practices besides fishing such as assignations between heterosexual lovers, sensitive political talk, and the sale of illegal publications and CDs. The subversive potential of walks in the park, in fact, goes way back: During the Cultural Revolution citizens were warned to be watchful of the subversive behavior of bad elements in parks, where one might find wearers of pointed shoes and other bourgeois fashions, idlers playing chess and signs of illicit romance (Krauss 2000:305). Because of the cover parks provide for a 377

which in this case might be referred to as hooking), ratifying identity (both as fellow MSM and as suitable or unsuitable sexual partners), and negotiating the topic upon which further claims and imputations of identity are carried. The contextualization cues through which these tasks are managed, however, are considerably more subtle. The summons-answer sequence in such circumstances, for example, is often ambiguous, designed to, on one level, conceal ones intentions, and on another to communicate them with particular precision. This is achieved most often through the tool of the gaze, a tool with a rhetoric of its own which allows participants to not only issue summonses but also to communicate other aspects of their intentions (degree and type of interest, for example). In fact, often the exchange of gazes involves not just a summons-answer sequence but a negotiation of displays and confirmations of interest which often involves an number of gazes as well as gestures, facial expressions and sometimes movement (leading and following) to another part of the park, finally ending in the verbal issue of a summons (such as Hello, or Not many people here today) which is in itself not a summons at all but rather a ratification of a summonsanswer sequence already achieved. What is important in such situations, however, is not just how the summons is issued, but also how one signals ones availability to be summoned through things like posture, dress, the speed and style of ones walking, proxemics, and the fact of being solitary rather than part of the couples and families that regularly visit parks. One of the most important ways men signal their availability for engagement in this frame is where in any given park they stand, sit or walk. Every park I visited had special

variety of illegal or socially proscribed activities, one community of practice which sometimes uses the walk in the park frame as a subterfuge is that of plain-clothes public security officers. 378

regions where MSM congregate, often in more remote wooded areas or near the public toilets, and within and among these there were areas that were relatively hot, where the negotiation of sex was the primary activity, and those that were cool, where groups of men sat together chatting and smoking, as well as regions that were frequented by money boys, and those that had been staked out as their territory by particular cliques of friends.9 After the channel of communication is opened participants typically go on to ratify each others identities. Ratifying their identities as MSM or as potential sexual partners involves further non-verbal cues as well as verbal claims to identity which might involve anything as oblique as a reference to a certain pop-star and as obvious as a direct question like what kind of man do you like? (?). Erickson (in press) calls this process of claiming and imputing identity the establishment of situational co-membership, achieved within the local context of interaction as interlocutors reveal to one another aspects of common background (13). Among the men I observed, this establishment of situational co-membership was always at first rather tentative, contingent on interactants determining that neither was a threat (a police officer or blackmailer). The tentativeness of initial claims and imputations of identity seen in the examples with which I began, gives to participants what Erickson calls wiggle room, space to back out of or reframe the interaction if it doesnt work out the
9

Despite the importance for fishers to be competent in contextualization cues like the gaze in order to successfully open up the fishing frame, often these cues are not necessary at all. Especially in cases where one is a regular visitor at a certain venue, ones availability might be signaled by sitting and chatting with a group of other known regulars, and the first encounter with a potential sexual partner might be through an introduction by a friend rather than a furtive glance. In fact, most of the men I talked to preferred this more collective form of fishing rather than risking picking up a blackmailer or a money boy (). At the same time, however, economic considerations are not always absent from these friendly introductions, which sometimes also involve the exchange of gifts and money with both the introducer and the introduced (see next chapter). 379

way they hope. While this process may be more exaggerated in the encounters I observed, Erickson sees it as common to nearly all interaction. He writes:
The local construction of co-membership by interlocutors appears to provide, by means of relatively intuitive bricolage rather than of more thoroughgoing and deliberate innovation, a kind if wiggle room within which hegemonic reproduction can be partially interrupted, or slid aroundThe wiggle room of bricolage that inheres in the use of cultural tools within contingencies of local circumstances in ways that are purposive and adaptive, yet are outside conscious awareness, is inherent in the conduct of social action as practice. (28)

Besides using this segment of the interaction to ratify sexual identities, participants also use it to ratify other social identities that will be important in determining the future course of the interaction, claiming and imputing these identities through the appropriation of various tools from personal histories to portable telephones. Claming and imputing identities in this frame like businessman, student, prostitute, tourist or floating person, (many of which we are already familiar with from previous chapters) is, in fact, one of the major tools participants use to assess the relative safety of potential partners (both in terms of the risk of HIV infection and in terms of other risks). Like the callers in the radio programs we discussed above, participants rarely claim and impute identities directly, but rather invite inference through their choice of topics. In this regard, participants, through introducing topics which display knowledge of the venue, the activity of fishing or other practices associated with communities of MSM, claim not just legitimate identity but also negotiate their respective rights to speak on other more personal topics such as their or their interlocutors sexual desires. While often very personal questions about sexual experiences and sexual preferences are

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allowed, questions about ones work unit or business, questions which in other encounters with strangers (such as chats with taxi drivers see next chapter) would be perfectly acceptable, are frowned upon and put one in danger of claiming a spoiled identity (that of a police officer, a blackmailer or a money boy). As one of my informants put it:
.. uh...... .... He won't ask where your work unit is.. where your company is.. uh.. or.. private matters of your employment.. is your salary good or not.. he won't ask about this kind of thing. .if he does hes definitely a money boy (Fuzhou 1997-5)

Governing all of these frames, then, is a series of regulatory frames, some imposed by the authorities, which, for example, prohibit solicitation and public sex, and some imposed by the fishers themselves as protection from interference by authorities or swindlers. The way these regulatory frames work is not so much by prohibiting particular practices as by forcing them to work within their boundaries and adapt to their constraints, a process of adaptation which is often achieved rather skillfully. From the point of view of the AIDS educator, a further regulatory frame is imposed which mitigates against the generic frame he is attempting to open up with his AIDS prevention materials: the fact that unauthorized distribution of health related information (particularly materials that contain pictures of naked men engaging in sexual intercourse) is prohibited. Successful distribution of AIDS prevention materials in this situation requires that the hander not only be competent in all of the frames discussed above (the walk in the park frame, the fishing frame, and the interactive frames involved in issuing and answering summonses, negotiating identity and managing topics), but also that he be
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competent in strategically manipulating the borders of these frames to subvert the multiple regulatory frames which constrain him. Consequently, few of the encounters he had with the recipients of his pamphlets on the day I observed10 him involved directly handing them as in the pictures above, but rather he made use of the tools of the fishing frame to gain access to his targets by claiming for himself if not participation in this community, at least some insider status. Just as in fishing encounters, his interaction with targets often began with a gaze and a smile followed by small talk in which participants ratified their identities. One of the most common ways this occurred was through displays of knowledge about this and other venues associated with the fishing frame as in the opening in example one above: (Not many people here today), as well as in the example below:
A: B: A: B: A: B X A: A: Where are you from? B: The Northeast. A: Are there any good places there? B: Yes. A: Parks? B: There was a bar that opened last year called X.. but business wasnt good, not many people went, so it finally closed.

10

The observation was conducted in four different parks between three in the afternoon and ten at night. For most of the time I observed the AIDS educator from a distance, though sometimes I accompanied him in talking to some of the men. The AIDS educator carried with him a small pocket tape recorder with which he recorded his interaction. Time was spent beforehand discussing the ethical implications of taping the men without their consent, which would have been almost impossible to obtain under the circumstances, 382

A: Ah, it seems I heard of that.

Perhaps the hardest task for the AIDS educator I observed was to create somewhere in this negotiation a new activity frame that is in some ways like the physical frame set up by official AIDS educators with tables and display boards but considerably more subtle. This involved shifting frames, a process which always risked alienating men who might have been hooked using the fishing frame, making them feel cheated or suspicious or disappointed. The biggest problem with this act of shifting frames is that it does not just involve a change in the identity claims made by the AIDS educator, but also involves changing the identity he is imputing onto his interlocutor from, for example, an object of desire, to an object of risk. All AIDS education is essentially face threatening as it imputes upon the receiver an at-risk identity, and the ways this identity imputation is taken up or rejected by the receiver crucially determines the kind of information or advice that can be given and how it is interpreted. This, in fact, is one of the main challenges of AIDS education: being able to strategically impute an at risk identity in a way that interlocutors are willing to accept it and subsequently dealing with the tactics people might use to distance themselves from this identity. One typical strategy the AIDS educator used to open up the AIDS education frame was to simply introduce the topic of AIDS. Despite the obvious risks the introduction of this topic would hold for a legitimate fisher (claiming for the speaker or imputing on the hearer a risky identity), for the AIDS educator it gave him a way to delay claiming the identity of an outsider while effectively closing the fishing frame, as in the example below:

and ways in which their identities could be protected. (A precedent for this arrangement is the fact that calls to hotlines are regularly taped without callers consent for use in training). 383

A: ? B: ...... .... A: ........ . B: A: A: As far as the problem of AIDS is concerned are you afraid? B: Me.. I never thought about it.. I think now its relatively rare.. relatively rare.. I dont think there is any need to worry about this thing but its not certain. A: Not certain.. it depends on your extent of contact.. certainly if you have contact with few people the chances are probably relatively small, but if you have contact with a lot of people.. its all about the chances of infection not about the fact that its rare. B: You are? A: Allow me to introduce myself

In this example the target responds to the introduction of AIDS as a personal topic (a matter of his own fear) by distancing himself from it (I never thought about it) and then transforming it into the more general topic of the prevalence of HIV infection in Beijing. The AIDS educator, in turn, takes up this concern with prevalence but tries to repersonalize it by focusing on the number of sexual contacts his interlocutor might have had rather than the number of infections in general and by strategically mobilizing the pronoun you (if you have contact with few...) to simultaneously make his imputation of identity (as one who has possible contact with people with HIV) both personal and a matter of general experience. This prompts the target to seek ratification of the educators identity, given that this type of analysis of vulnerability (and the social language of epidemiology) is rather uncharacteristic of the fishing frame, opening up a slot for the AIDS educator to introduce himself. A similar dynamic can be seen in the following example:
A:

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B: . A: B: A: B: . A: B: . A: B: . A: ... B: ... A: ..... B: A: ......? B: ... A: .... B: . A: . A: This business of AIDS, does it scare you? B: There isnt any in China now A: Dont you think there is? B: A: For example, in this park could there be people who have gotten sexually transmitted diseases? B: There are sexually transmitted diseases. A: You know of people with them? B: I dont know. A: But youve heard. B: There are people with sexually transmitted diseases A: How do people regard sexually transmitted diseases?that is to say, what method do they use not to get sexually transmitted diseases.. to prevent them. B: with an injectionan injection of penicillin. A: How does one get an injection, by seeking a doctor to give it or by looking for a place for the injection yourself? B: A: Can I ask you a question?.. if you got a sexually transmitted disease right now, would you go to a hospital or a private clinic for treatment? 385

B: Private.. theres privacy. A: Theres privacy.. if you get it, why are you afraid to go to the hospital? B: Im afraid of being exposed. A: Being exposed.

In response to the AIDS educators question about his fear of AIDS, the target appropriates the nations borders and wraps himself in them for protection. By way of challenging the assertion that there is no AIDS in China, the AIDS educator appropriates the more local borders of the very park in which they are standing. At the same time, he widens the semantic field to include all sexually transmitted diseases, successfully eliciting an admission that STD transmission exists. Even this admission though is carefully crafted to distance the speaker from it. He will only assert that there are sexually transmitted diseases, not that he knows anyone who has ever gotten one or that he as even heard of anyone.11 Respecting the distance the speaker puts between himself and the topic, the AIDS educator continues to discuss it in general terms, what people do to prevent STDs. He then, however, makes another move to personalize by appropriating one of the tools we saw in the radio program above: the hypothetical situation. Whereas above hypothetical situations were used by callers to tactically distance themselves from their questions, here the AIDS educator uses the same tool to nudge the discussion back to the specific experiences of the target. He also, like the radio hosts above, uses the tool of reflective summary, feeding back the targets answers to him (Private, Being exposed), but in

11

This points to one of the paradoxes of knowledge about AIDS and STDs and how it relates to identity claims that I will be exploring in more detail in the next chapter: the fact that a little knowledge of general facts about AIDS sparingly demonstrated can be used to claim a safe identity, while knowledge about the details or knowledge of people who might have been infected signals at-risk identity. 386

this case it is not to constrain his interlocutors further control of the topic but rather to encourage him to continue. Along with the topic of HIV, the AIDS educator appropriated a number of other speech genres and social languages to achieve his goals, in particular, speech genres and social languages that fit as easily into the fishing frame as they do into the AIDS education frame such as talking about personal experiences and talking about sexuality. The interactive frames such tools signal are often in this case ambiguous. In the AIDS education frame such tools signal the activity of counseling; in the fishing frame they might signal the activity of flirting. Just as important as the strategies the AIDS educator uses to open up the AIDS education frame is how his interlocutors respond to this shift in frame, mobilizing tactics to either resist the imputation of identity signaled by the offer of the pamphlets or to impute upon the AIDS educator an identity that makes it more difficult for him to maintain interactional control. The following example is one in which the shift from the fishing frame to the AIDS education frame does not go nearly as smoothly as in the excerpts above:
1 B: ... 2 A: ....... 3 B: .. 4 A: . 5 B: ... 6 A: gay gay 7 B: gay. 8 A: gay gay 9 B: . 10 A: . 11 B: 12 A: . 13 B: . 14 A: . 15 B:

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

A: . B: A: B: ....... A: . B: A: . B: .. ... A: ... B: ... A: ... B: ..... ...... ...... .. ... A: ... B: .......... ...... .. A: . B: gay A: () B: gay ....... A: ... B: ()

B: Its useless.. taking this is useless. A: Im passing these out.. Prevent AIDS.. including enjoyment.. you also can use this for enjoyment. B: What enjoyment? Im so ugly.. who would like me? A: Do you like yourself? B: Do I like me? I like myself.. but Im not sure? A: You're not sure if you are gay or not? B: Im gay. A: Youre gay? When did you know you were gay. B: A year and a half ago. A: You knew it a year and a half ago. How old are you? B: What do you think? A: Younger than 20.

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B: 22 A: 22 B: Where are you from? A: I'm a Beijinger... When you knew were you happy or not? B: Whats there to be happy or not happy about? A: Ah? B: Whats there to be happy or not happy about? Its not that kind of thing.. thats life. A: Youre quite handsome, little guy. B: It's been a long time since someone praised me like this...am I your type? A: You can't ask me such detailed questions. B: You can ask me detailed questions. Why cant I ask you? Everybody is here to learn from each other.. right? You cant say that if you come and ask me these questions.. I have to answer them. A: What you have said is very reasonable.. very reasonable. B: Isnt it right? That's just the way it is. A: If youre willing, we could have a chat. B: Whats there not to be willing about.. actually this place is for meeting people to have a chat. If you find someone suitable you can play. . If theres nobody suitable, everyone just talks and makes friends.. nobody wants to impose themselves on you.. If today nobody wants to do this or that with you.. whats the difference.. right? That kind of thing doesnt matter. A: Im very sorry.. I misunderstood you. B: No.. what are you sorry about? Youre right.. coming here is for chatting.. understanding one another.. right? Theres no ulterior motive.. everybodys here to chat, isnt that right.. to understand.. Teach me all about your experiences .. Are you a Beijinger?. A: Im a Beijinger.. B: Youre not gay? A: (laughter) B: Youre gay. It doesnt matter.. here everything is clear.. I dont have to beat around the bush. A: I thought it didnt matter.. if I am I am.. if Im not Im not.

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B: (laughter)

The initial rejection of the pamphlet in this segment leads the AIDS educator to attempt to reframe it not as an AIDS prevention pamphlet but as a tool for enjoyment (ln. 2), something more compatible with the fishing frame. When the target responds with a self-deprecating remark (ln. 3) (not uncommon in the fishing frame a way of fishing for compliments), the AIDS educator takes it as an opportunity to reposition himself as a counselor (Do you like yourself?) (ln. 4). After an exchange of questions and answers in which the AIDS educator also makes use of reflective summaries, the target attempts to regain interactional control by requesting a ratification of identity with the question Where are you from? (ln. 15), which the AIDS educator answers simply by stating that he is a Beijinger before continuing his probing. After his interlocutor fails to respond to his questioning by talking about his feelings, the AIDS educator falls back on a line more compatible with the fishing frame, though perhaps only designed to refute the selfdeprecating remark that came a few lines before (You're quite handsome, little guy) (ln. 20) to which the target gives the appropriate response for the fishing frame: am I your type? (ln. 21). At this point the AIDS educator has lost interactional control; he is back in the fishing frame, and when he tires to resist answering, the target mobilizes his own reflective summary, reminding him that his questions had been rather personal as well (lns. 23-4). From here on in it is the target, working within his own frame, who has the most power in the situation, and he uses this power to impute outsider identity onto the AIDS educator and challenge his intentions, not explicitly, but by forcing him to remain in the fishing frame and even giving him instructions about what is allowed to go on in that frame. The AIDS educators attempt to re-enter the AIDS education frame by requesting to have a chat, for example, is relexicalized by the target and positioned back
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inside the fishing frame where a chat is the way one assesses the suitability of potential sexual partners (lns. 28-31), and it is this kind of chat rather than the kind that the AIDS educator is attempting to have that is characterized as having no ulterior motives (ln. 34). By the end of the passage the roles between the speakers are completely reversed, with the target asking the AIDS educator the very same kinds of questions he started out asking (Tell me all about your experiences, You're not gay?) (lns. 35, 37). Within his imputation of gay identity onto the AIDS educator Youre gay. It doesn't matter.. here everything is clear.. I don't have to beat around the bush (ln. 39) is concealed an imputation of outsider identity, an assertion that it is the AIDS educator who is not being clear and who is beating around the bush (). Although I have been focusing on the constraints the surrounding frames can put on the AIDS educators ability to enact the AIDS education frame, these frames also sometimes amplified action in the AIDS education frame. One example of this is the large number of people who received the pamphlet who read it from start to finish (or at least looked at all the pictures) while the AIDS educator stood or sat by, occasionally answering questions, behavior that one would never expect in a handing encounter on a busy city street but which the environment of a park and the more leisurely pace of fishing seems conducive to. The negotiation of identity, of course, does not end once the AIDS education frame is successfully opened, but sometimes, rather, it intensifies, participants appropriating tools from a variety of sources including the technologized practice of AIDS prevention itself to assert identities as not at-risk. One of the tools from the technologized practice of AIDS prevention

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most appropriated was the concept of knowledge and the social identity (of a person of quality ) that is associated with it. In the following excerpt the target, a university student, uses a variety of tools, including the English language, to index his knowledge and construct himself as not at risk:
A: B: ...... quite well educated .... A: ? B: ,..,, condom , .., ,, ,..no any protection.., ..no knowledge A: Do you know about AIDS, are you afraid? B: Lots of people are afraid.. because they dont understand much.. so theyre very afraid of AIDS.. probably because Im, how to say, quite well educated.. most university students know.. they know. A: What do you study? B: Im a first year student, I study English.. because I think Beijing is the capital and a big city, but even in such a big city as Beijing few people use condoms, because there are a lot of people who come from the countryside.. so, theres a bathhouse in Beijing where a lot of people directly do it under the water and also without any protection.. no any protection ..I think this is really dangerous, and its probably because of lack of knowledge.. no knowledge

As in the more official constructions of AIDS we saw in the last two chapters, this speaker constructs knowledge as the main determinant of vulnerability. This knowledge, however, is not a matter of knowing particular facts about transmission routes or how to put on a condom, but of being a particular kind of person, a knowledgeable person, a well-educated person, an identity the speaker signals several times in the excerpt through appropriating various English words and phrases including the term well-educated itself. Again, as we saw in AIDS histories, the boundary
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between knowledge and ignorance is really a geographical boundary, that between the city and the countryside. Unsafe behavior in places like public bathhouses is attributed to ignorant migrants from the countryside who invade the civilized city and spread disease. In this final example the target attempts to distance himself from the information the AIDS educator is attempting to dispense also by appropriating the notion of knowledge. Along with it, he, like many other men I observed responding to AIDS prevention messages, appropriates the borders of the nation (see above). In this case, however, knowledge is situated outside the countrys boarders and the speakers safe identity is predicated on his faith in foreign expertise.
A: B: . A: B: .. . A: B: .. .... .. . A: Do you understand AIDS? B: I don understand it. A: So are you afraid? B: Since I dont understand it, Im not afraid.. Theres probably no problem.. very few people in China have this kind of disease. A: Would you be afraid if you were with a foreigner? B: No, because foreigners understand.. they know what to do.. if they dont understand, how could we understand?

While any one of the cultural tools borrowed into other circumstances might amplify the speakers ability to protect himself against HIV, the way they are mixed in this passage severely limits it. Here knowledge becomes not a source of safety, but a source of fear, and ignorance a kind of protection. Furthermore, knowledge is seen as something that is practically unattainable for the speaker personally. The stereotype of foreigners as
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carriers of HIV is transformed into an image of foreigners as carriers of knowledge about HIV, and it is on the knowledge imputed onto these potential sexual partners that the speaker depends for his own safety.

6.4 Banal Competencies

In this chapter I have tried to show how the practice of AIDS education involves multiple and overlapping competencies that include not just competencies in such social languages as those of counseling and biomedicine, but also more banal competencies like those involved in making a telephone call or taking a walk in the park, and that it is often these more mundane competencies enacted in the frames that surround and overlap with the frame of AIDS education that are most influential in determining how AIDS prevention messages are taken up and used. Successful AIDS education, then, depends not just upon knowing who to talk to and what to say, but knowing how to integrate the tools of AIDS prevention into the procedural mechanisms governing the sites of engagement in which it takes place and into the ongoing flow of identity claims and imputations that occurs within those sites. This also applies to competent self-protection. Usually when we think of AIDS prevention on the level of the individual we think of the large obvious competencies like knowing how to properly use a condom, and we ignore how in the unfolding of either safer or unsafer sex many other competencies are also involved, competencies involving the ability to interpret the host of contextualization cues, some visual, some auditory, some tactile, with which partners negotiate the interactive frames of a sexual encounter, competencies in enacting a whole host of discourse and social identities, not to mention the physical competencies involved, competences that mix and interact in such
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complex ways, especially when condoms are introduced into the situation that, in comparison, it makes the not so simple task of handing somebody an AIDS prevention pamphlet seem like a walk in the park.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Seven Imagined Comrades

It doesnt just belong to homosexualsit also threatens you and me. AIDS: The Warning of the Century (Ceng and Ren 1997:6) .... People like us dont have it its all drug addicts or prostitutes (Fuzhou 98-4) Communities are to be distinguished not by the falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (Anderson 1991)

Figure 7.1 on the following page is a map of the nation. It is a map that was given to me in Beijing in 1996, a map that had been copied by hand, photocopied, faxed, corrected and added to as it passed through the hands of any number of men before it reached me. On it are marked the meeting spots for men who have sex with men in all the major cities in China: parks, public toilets, bathhouses, alleyways and newspaper display boards, places my participants referred to as fishing ponds (). Below it (Fig. 7.2) is another kind of map of sorts, the homepage of Reddust (

), one of the hundreds of internet websites that have grown-up in the last few
years for Chinese men who have sex with men (Langfitt 2000, Pomfret 2000, see also Gay China 1997, Guangzhou Tongzhi 2000). It is not just a single map. Each hyperlink on the site takes visitors to other maps, some appropriating the geography of the nation where men can click on the city of their choice to find names of bars, discos, parks, and

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saunas or email addresses of other tongzhi in those cities who have left personal ads seeking friends or sexual partners. Some of the links appropriate a different kind of

Fig. 7.1

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Fig. 7.2 (Reddust 2000)

geography, the virtual geography of internet chartrooms where men can engage in conversations based on particular interests or sexual proclivities. Other links take them to maps of the desires, hopes and frustrations of their fellow tongzhi in the form of personal stories and advice columns, others to wider global maps, news of gay life in other countries, and still others to maps of the body and its pleasures, erotic pictures of men both Chinese and foreign. Clearly a lot has happened since 1996. Since I first began this research in the midnineties I have witnessed rapid changes in the resources available to my participants to both amplify opportunities for interaction (including sexual interaction) with other men who have sex with men and to imagine themselves as belonging to a community that is larger than their particular communities of practice, a community that is not criminal, and

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is not foreign, but is firmly situated within the map of the nation. A community of comrades (). In the previous chapters I have explored how practices are technologized and social identities claimed and imputed in the fabric of texts and in the ongoing microdynamics of interaction. I have also discussed how these strategies and tactics in texts and conversations act to position speakers and writers within larger communities of practice and cultural storylines. In this chapter I will describe what I observed of how this ongoing dialogue between the texts of public discourse and the actions of everyday life occurred within the two communities men who have sex with men with which I spent time. Both of these communities are true communities of practice in Lave and Wengers (1991) sense of the term in that they consist of people who do things together, friends who go to the same bars and parks, have access to the same kinds of cultural resources, and, most importantly, engage in sexual behavior with one another. They are also, however, imagined communities which have over time assembled their own sets of cultural tools: stories and histories, identity labels, places, slang expressions, songs and memories which link them to other overlapping communities of practice in their respective cities as well as to national and transnational imagined communities of tongzhi (comrades) and gay men. The ways the men I spent time with imagined their sexual identities was neither uniform nor stable, but instead constituted a complex process of bricolage which brought together diverse elements of countless inventions of homosexuality in local and global media, in the pronouncements of government officials, in the annals of scientific journals, and in health education materials about HIV/AIDS.

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Finally, every man I met was also engaged in other imaginings that took place around other communities: communities defined by generation, region and ethnicity, economic class, communities of entertainers, sex workers, students, police officers, migrants from the same province or village, government workers, and private entrepreneurs, and, most important, the imagined community of the nation itself. It is in this thicket of multiple imaginings that we must look to trace the growth and change of gay identity in China and to understand how the way it is being imagined affects the way men who have sex with men there take action around AIDS. The question I will be asking in this chapter is how this overlapping participation in multiple communities, all in different states of technologization, influences the kinds of tools people have available to them to take action around sexual behavior and HIV risk and the kinds of actions these tools can be used for. I will be examining both the stratagems (ji) Chinese men who have sex with men employ collectively to create spaces for themselves within the current discursive order in China, and the stratagems they employ individually to create spaces in their own lives for same sex sexual interaction and to frame those interactions as either safe or risky. In both instances they create these spaces and make these claims and imputations through strategically appropriating and mixing tools from mainstream Discourses in ways which redraw discursive boundaries, tools like slogans and other tifa (), identity labels and forms of address, cultural categories like quality () and civilization (), histories both regional and national, and maps of the nations boundaries and the boundaries of their own communities like those at the start of this chapter.

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7.1 Communities: Implicit, Invented and Imagined

In the beginning of this thesis I argued for the importance of focusing on communities as sites which make cultural tools for AIDS prevention available to individuals and in which members learn to use these tools, not just to perform various social actions, but also to enact various social identities. Communities are what make technologization possible. They are where tools and practices are standardized through a cyclical process by which novices become socialized into the characteristic doings and canons of intertextuality (Lemke 1995: 41) of a group, gradually incorporating these conventional practices of choosing and using tools into their habitus (Bourdieu 1977), and, at the same time signaling their membership in these communities through using these tools and practices to perform mediated actions. Understanding communities is also crucial to understanding how technologies are undermined, twisted and adapted to different situations as actors position themselves in fields of participation that transverse multiple communities and frame the actions they perform as practices indexical of these communities. In the field of HIV prevention, the notion that perceptions of risk and practices associated with those perceptions grow out of the interaction between people within communities is central to many academic perspectives and intervention strategies. Watney (1990), for example, contends that safer sex is not a series of techniques that are mastered by individuals but a constellation of collective cultural practices that develop within communities, and Douglas and Calvez (1990) assert that individuals perceptions of risk develop through their interaction with other members of the

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communities to which they belong, and that community perceptions of risk develop through the interaction between peripheral and core communities in a society. The term community, however, has become a rather loaded one in AIDS work in the West, often seen as a kind of political project (Altman 1993) based on the individualistic tradition of identity politics (Sampson 1993, Takagi 1996). In this tradition, communities are imagined around sites of political struggle and confrontation, this struggle itself being technologized into a social identity. Such communities are often based not so much on shared tools and practices, but on shared oppression by more dominant communities, and enacting social identity in communities of this sort inevitably involves defining oneself against the dominant group. According to Gergen (1989), the primary tool identity politics uses to create communities is the rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent) (73). This concept of community as a political entity based on confrontation has become so pervasive in AIDS research, prevention and care that it has come by many to be seen as natural and unproblematic. In societies in which the notion of community traditionally falls within the bounds of kinship or regional ties rather than within the bourgeois public sphere, or in which political or economic constraints make the formation of explicit communities of resistance either impossible or unwise, this construction of community becomes less useful. Part of the difficulty in deciding whether or not men who have sex with men in China constitute a community (rather than simply a population) (Bartos 1994) is understanding what constituting a community means to them in a society which has

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divided people into families, clans, races, regions, work units, economic classes, departments, divisions, political factions, friends or enemies of the people, but rarely, until recently, into communities in the Western sense of the word. Even the emergent communities that are growing up around practices of consumption and leisure in urban centers (Davis 2000, Kraus 2000, Wang 1995), and the communities of political dissent both within China and in exile differ in important ways from comparable communities in North America and Europe. Even settling on a word for community in Chinese that mirrors the meaning of community as it is used by AIDS activists, researchers, prevention workers and people with HIV in the West is nearly impossible. In most of the public discourse on HIV in China I collected, the closest term I can find is shequn () , social group, or renqun () , group of people, neither of which construct the action of communing as conscious, cooperative and goal directed in the way the Western term does. Qun () in fact, meaning group can be used to describe both a community of people and a herd of cattle. Neither does it have the same positive connotations, often being used to label groups negatively as in high risk group (). Our model begins by considering communities or practice: specific individuals interacting with other specific individuals in pursuing shared goals. It is in these groupings, not larger symbolic groupings, where socialization and learning take place on a day-to-day basis. It is also necessary, however, to understand how these groups become to greater or lesser degrees symbolic entities, bounded not by proximity but by members shared recognition of one another and of the practices that they have in common. For it is in these imagined communities, whether they be nations, institutions, religions,
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political or intellectual factions, or people with a shared set of sexual interests, that the symbols, stories, social languages and speech genres people appropriate when they take action around HIV are produced and reproduced. Wertsch (1998b) sees this transformation of groups of people who merely share tools and practices into technologized communities through the framework provided by Anderson (1991) in his study of the imagined community of the nation-state. In Wertschs version, communities are divided into three different types, or more accurately, three stages of imagination: communities of practice, implicit communities and imagined communities. The fist corresponds to Lave and Wengers conception of communities of practice, groups of people who do things together. The second is based not on shared actions, but on shared tools and practices that transcend space and time. These shared tools and practices provide the potential for groups not bounded by space and time to grow into symbolic or technologized entities by creating representations of themselves around these tools and practices, but this potential remains implicit and unrealized. Imagined communities, on the other hand, are those which have, to varying degrees, come to be recognized as communities by members. In imagined communities, says Wertsch (1998:3) there is an emphasis given to recognizing or imagining the collectivity and to creating or reproducing it. The boundary between implicit and imagined communities is not, he emphasizes, hard and fast. Indeed, he says, one could think of implicit communities as unimagined communities, or as potential candidates to undergo the transformation required to become imagined ones (3). A better way to see it might be along a continuum of imagining which on one side would have highly technologized communities (institutions, professions, nations) and on

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the other side groups who have nothing more in common other than the fact that they use the same form of transportation to get to work in the morning. There is always the potential for groups on the implicit end of the continuum to move towards imagination, or, on the imagined end to move in the other direction, for nations to fragment, institutions to crumble or change, and professions to become obsolete. For Anderson (1991) the nation is the prototypical imagined community, made possible in the nineteenth century through the introduction of new cultural tools, most notably the printing press. The ability for nations to imagine and reproduce themselves in the minds of citizens, he argues, centers on the production and consumption of textual tools facilitated by technological tools. For Wertsch as well, the process of imagining has textual underpinnings, being carried out through the production and appropriation of voices. Others, as well (Anagnost 1997, Berman 1999, Bruner 1990, Fisher 1997, Gergen 2000, Gover 2000, Madsen 1984, Watson 1993b) have focused on the role of discourse, particularly narrative, in the formation of imagined communities. Like the technologization of practice, the imagination of communities is chiefly a matter of intertextuality, of borrowing images, symbols, languages and ideologies from other communities and mixing them in ways which fit the particular circumstances at hand. What is missing from Wertschs model of imagining is the fact that communities as symbolic entities exist in two ways: as subjects, imagined by members, and as objects, invented by others. The process of community formation takes place both within and outside of communities, both through representations members construct of themselves with stories, maps and other cultural tools, and representations constructed of them by others with the same kinds of cultural tools. Imagination and invention exist in a

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symbiotic relationship: imagining myself requires both that I invent a serviceable other (Sampson 1993) and that I to some degree buy into the inventions that this other has made of me. Social identity, then, is essentially dialogic, constructed in the conversation between the selves we imagine ourselves to be and the selves that others have invented for us. To be, says Bakhtin (1979: 312) means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other.

7.2 Inventing and Imagining Gay Community

Among scholars of MSM sexual behavior in the West, and among gay men themselves, the concepts of community affiliation and sexual identity have become central to discussions of HIV risk behavior and vulnerability. Numerous studies, both quantitative (see for example Kippax et al. 1993) and qualitative (see for example Dowsett 1996), have explored the relationship between risk behavior and whether or not individuals identify themselves as gay and are integrated into a community of gay men. Some have found gay community affiliation to be a predictor of successful behavior change (Chapple et al.1998, Gold 1995, Hays and Peterson 1994, Kippax et al. 1992). Others, however, have found acculturation into the gay community to have little influence on high-risk sexual behavior (see for example Ratti et al. 2000). Still others have taken a kind of middle ground, Gold, Skinner, and Rosenthal (1994), for example, finding that contact with the gay community plays different roles for different men, strengthening safer sex practices for those already orientated towards them and exasperating high-risk behavior in those who already participate in such behavior.

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One reason for the variability in studies of this type lies in the inherent ambiguity and context specific nature of the concepts of gay identity and gay community and the difficulties in operationalizing such concepts in social science research, especially survey research (Dowsett 1996, Gatter 1995). Indeed, any study seeking to understand the relationship between gay community affiliation and sexual risk behavior invariably involves the invention of a gay community on the part of researchers (Kendall 1995), inventions which often prove irrelevant when imported to different settings. The constellation of sexual, cultural and political practices isolated by Kippax and her colleagues (Kippax et. al 1992, 1993, 1994) to define gay community attachment in Australia, for instance, is difficult to apply in a setting like China, not just because of constraints on social organizing and public discourse resulting in the relative lack of gay organizations, gay media and a clearly defined gay political project, but also because of different cultural conceptions regarding the relationship between the self and the collective and different notions about the uses of community affiliations in social life (Li 1997), in short, a different way of imagining community and identity. Research on MSM communities in different cultures (see for example CarballoDiguez and Dolezal 1994, Parker 1986, Tan 1995) make abundantly apparent that notions of sexual identity and community are contingent on a whole host of social and economic factors and policed by knowledges developed in very specific historical circumstances (DEmilio 1993). Indeed, despite the increasing currency of a version of Western individualistic gay identity in the global marketplace, the number of men who have sex with men worldwide who regularly appropriate it is still a minority. This is not necessarily a sign of oppression, but rather evidence that the rhetoric of claiming

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space by claiming rights (Eenam and Hagland 1997) may not always fit in places where space must be carved out of very different discursive topographies, or in places where men who have sex with men have different scopes for political action, different kinds of oppression, and perhaps different ideas about what having sex with a man means. Even among those men who acknowledge a Western style gay identity, the way they imagine this identity may be radically different based on such factors as age, ethnicity, socio-economic class, and individual character or interests, leading many to suggest that it is better to speak of gay communities rather than the gay community (Dowsett 1996, Herek and Glunt 1995, Jones, Yu and Candlin 2000). Furthermore, even within the life of a single man, participation in communities and social and sexual networks (Moore et. al 1995) is not stable and measurable, but rather dynamic and evolving membership is better seen as a process rather than an attribute. As Dowsett (196: 195) writes:
The process of living a gay life, of creating ones gayness, is a complex and highly contingent processThere is a danger in (a) kind of convergent search for order in conceptualizing the gay community as a unity, as a distinctive system Neither gay identity nor gay community life is a singularity; each must be conceptualized as a multiplicity.

Even the affiliation side of the community affiliation equation, then, is problematic, failing capture the peripheral nature of all participation in communities (Lave and Wenger 1991) and giving rise to the invention of risk groups who are defined not by what they are but by what they are not, like non-community affiliated men who have sex with men.1

In the context of the present study, characteristics which in the West are more frequently associated with non-community affiliated MSM (for example, heterosexual marriage and reluctance to take on 409

To be fair, even as the researchers cited above have invented gay communities and identities to serve the purposes of their research agendas, they, along with others, have also vigorously engaged in interrogating their own and others inventions and uncovering their limitations. Indeed, social research on HIV/AIDS in the past twenty years has played an unprecedented role in problematizing the relationship between sexual identity and sexual behavior and promoting an appreciation of the variability in identity formations among men who have sex with men (Aggleton et al.1999, Pallotta-Chiarolli 1998). Evidence of this variability is particularly evident in studies of MSM from racial and ethnic minorities in multicultural Western settings (see for example Chng and Geliga-Varga 2000, Choi et al. 1995, Diaz et al. 1996, Heckman et al. 1999, Mays 1992, Matteson 1997, Pallotta-Chiarolli 1998, Ratti et al. 2000, Takagi 1996) in which ways of participating as legitimate members of the white dominated gay community have been found to be in conflict with ways of participating as legitimate members of communities built around ethnicity and kinship ties. This situation has been frequently described among Asian and Pacific Islander (APA) MSM in places like the United States (Choi et. al 1995, 1998) and Australia (Ayres 1999, Sanitioso1999, Ridge et al. 1999), who simultaneously face stigmatization within their families or ethnic groups for adopting gay identity and discrimination and objectification within the gay community based on their racial or ethnic origin (see for example Ayres 1999, Fung 1996, PallottaChiarolli 1998, Wat 1996). Choi and his colleagues (1995) refer to this phenomenon as cultural duality, the process of having to choose identities among the multiple communities one is associated with. Similarly, studies of MSM in non-Western cultures

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(see for example Altman 1996, 1997a, b, Ho 1996, Tan 1995) have uncovered dilemmas in reconciling increasingly technologized global gay identities from the West with local ways of organizing sexuality and relationships.2 The phenomenon of cultural duality described in such studies is, however, not limited to gay men. Every individual must come to terms with managing membership in multiple communities of practice, and the ways membership in one community is claimed may be at odds with the ways it is claimed in the other communities one might be a part of. Numerous scholars have discussed the necessity for individuals, especially those bearing potentially discreditable traits, to manage their social lives through compartmentalizing (Eisenstadt and Gatter 1999) and information management (Goffman 1963). The ways gay communities and gay identities are imagined, therefore, in any particular place at any particular point in time depends upon how these communities and identities are mapped against already existing invented and imagined communities and identities with their own particular cultural toolkits. Both individual and community identity are essentially procedural (Gatter 1995), continually emerging and contingent on the circumstances of social interaction, enacted and experienced, rented rather than owned.

7.3 Homosexuality and Identity in China

The cautions concerning equating sexual behavior with sexual identity outlined above are particularly important when considering homosexuality in China, where the term homosexuality is itself a relatively recent introduction into the language (Diktter
2

Ho (1996), for instance, in her study of gay identity in Hong Kong in the early nineties noted that assuming gay identity involved also assuming a kind of Western identity, and Altman has observed that the claiming of lesbian/gay identities in Asiais as much about being Western as sexuality. (1996:430) 411

1995, Pan and Aggleton 1996, Chow 1997). According the Pan and Aggleton, the word tongxinglian (same sex love) was appropriated from the English term homosexuality near the end of the last dynasty, and even today is not widely used or understood. The concept of the homosexual person as a distinct identity, achieved linguistically by adding to tongxinglian (homosexuality) the suffix -zhe (as we saw in chapter four) is even more recent. Tongxinglian, observes Pan (1996), is normally an intransitive verb, which is descriptive of behavior, rather than an adjective or noun descriptive of identity. In the past, and still to a large degree today, homosexuality in China, both linguistically and culturally, is indicative of a series of social practices rather than a distinct social being, and thus not, as it is largely viewed in the West, incompatible with heterosexual practices and even marriage (Diktter 1995). Perhaps the most important consequence of this situation for the purpose of HIV social research is the difficulty in assessing the extent of infection among MSM in China, many of whom do not fit easily into the Western epidemiological categories borrowed by Chinese researchers and clinicians (Aggleton et. al 1999) and most of whom would not claim homosexual identity in an HIV testing situation even if they had the cultural tools available to claim it. Official reports put the figure at less than 2%, but most AIDS workers and clinicians I spoke to believed the actual number to be much higher (Leicester 1993, Wan 1999, Zhang 1998b, Zhang et al. 2000, U.S. Embassy, Beijing 1997). In the past ten years, however, as a result of a host of factors including urbanization, economic prosperity, a wider dissemination of Western notions of sexuality and the public health demands of the AIDS pandemic itself, gay identities are being increasingly invented by official voices and imagined in the voices of MSM themselves.

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In the past five years in China, wrote Rofel in 1999 (451), cosmopolitan cities have witnessed a veritable explosion of people who call themselves gay. How these people call themselves gay and what they are doing when they do so, however, are complex issues. Few of the men I encountered used the official term tongxinglianzhe () to describe themselves, mostly because of its negative connotations in official discourse. As one of my informants put it:
...... .... The officials always give homosexuality a bad meaning.. associating it with promiscuity and AIDS.. so the word gives people a bad feeling.. not attractive.. its not that the word originally is unattractive.. but it has been associated too much with bad things. (Beijing 1997-5)

Another said:
We don't like to use this word 'homosexual'. .because everyone thinks.. society thinks that this word is like prostitute.. very dirty. Young people all like to say tongzhi (comrade) (Fuzhou 1998-9)

Even the term tongzhi, however, is largely limited to young, urban gays like this informant and, in my observation, used rather sparingly even by them. Another frequently used identity label is the English word gay. By far the most common labels my informants used to refer to themselves, however, were more ambiguous, terms like people like us (, ), friends like us () us people () and people in our group (). Often in their conversations, words for homosexuality or homosexual were absent altogether or ellipsed as in questions like, is he or isnt he? ().

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Which of these identity labels if any a given individual appropriates is not consistent, but varies from situation to situation, and when they are used they carry different meanings, signaling affiliation to a variety of imagined communities (local, national and transnational) and the different storylines of gay identity that they tell. As Rofel (1999: 465) writes:
tongzhi can signal an emphasis on a characteristic Chineseness but can also slip into inclusion of Western foreigners and thus into universal applicability. Gay can begin as a gesture toward universal identification but can also pinpoint gay people in China. Tongxinglian, now used infrequently, often indexes a conversation with people outside gay networks The interchangeability of these terms (tongxinglian, tongzhi and gay) speaks of the fraught moments of identification and division that occur both diasporically, among three political antagonists each of which sees itself as representing Chinese culture (Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China), and transnationally, across novel forms of sameness and difference produced out of neo-orientalisms in rhetorics of globalization.

Being gay in China, then, sometimes involves taking up the symbols of global gay identity and sometimes involves borrowing from more local ways of saying, and sometimes does not get said at all. What affects the articulation of gay identities is not just the political climate of the nation, but also, and even more importantly, the politics of situated social interaction, as people claim and impute membership in multiple and overlapping communities of practice (see last chapter). Each of these ways of being or social positions imagined around sexual practices (Weeks 1985) is staked out against a matrix of other overlapping identities: urban, rural, young, old, Northern, Southern, rich, poor, civilized and uncivilized. The imagining of identity and community among MSM in China takes place within a rich, contested field of diverse ways of imagining

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gayness and is crafted in ongoing processes of historical and cultural contingency (Rofel 1999: 467). My task here, therefore, is not to decide what it means to be gay in China, but to ask, as Rofel (1999: 457) does, What do Chinese gay men do with the representations of gayness that they receive and seek from others, how do they choose and use these representations to imagine themselves and take strategic action in various sites of engagement?

7.4 Invented Identities

Understanding the ways men who have sex with men in China imagine their identities must take into account the way these identities are strategized around inventions of them by other more powerful communities, epidemiologists who view them as members of a risk group, government bureaus who view them as a social problem, doctors who view them as sick, conservatives who view them as decadent, researchers who view them as subjects and writers, artists and marketers who view them as trendy. Although homosexual behavior has been practiced in China for thousands of years and in some periods of Chinese history has enjoyed wide acceptance and even institutional status (Hinsch 1992, Samsasha 1997), it has always occupied a rather ambiguous place in Chinese tradition, often tolerated but seldom referred to (Hodge and Louie 1998), a kind of classical dont ask, dont tell policy. Since the earliest explicit inventions of homosexuality in China in the nineteenth century, it has consistently been situated outside the boundaries of the nation, and until recently, the Party line was that it was a Western social disease, which deteriorates the racial spirit (Diktter 1995).

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Today, while most official inventions of homosexuals and homosexuality in China are far from positive, critiques of Chinese gay life in Western journalism and scholarship often misunderstand the degree and nature of persecution experienced by Chinese MSM, measuring it with the yardsticks of Western identity politics and human rights Discourse.3 The social obstacles to same sex intimacy, and particularly to the formation of social identities around it in China are indeed severe, causing most men who have sex with men to marry and to hide their inclinations (Chow 1996, Zhang et al. 2000). They generally do not, however, suffer the random acts of violence that plague gay men in the United States and, despite Western reports to the contrary (China arrests 2000), homosexual acts are legal. Most of my informants saw the main source of discrimination against them coming from society, the family and tradition rather than a homophobic state.4 In the past, men who have sex with men were detained under article 106 of Chinese Criminal Law, which stated All hooliganism should be subject to arrest and sentence (Ruan 1991). This article has since been repealed (replaced with other ways to police subaltern communities) (Dutton 1998), and today, while the association with hooliganism still doubtless exists in the minds of many officials, public security officers and members of the public, arrests are mostly limited to demonstrable acts of public sex.
3

Examples of this can be found in Western newspaper articles in which, for example, the closing of a single sauna and the arrest of a handful of male commercial sex workers in Guangzhou becomes a crackdown on gays (China anti-vice drive 2000, China arrests 2000), a decision in a liable case in favor of a man who objected to being portrayed as gay in Fang Gangss (1995b) Homosexuality in China is rendered as Chinese officials declaring homosexuality abnormal (ONeill 1999), and tongzhi activists interviewed by Western reporters invariably being described as dissidents (sometimes much to their dismay). 4 Even the persecution of MSM in earlier more revolutionary times like the Cultural Revolution is a rather complex issue. Although those who were discovered in same sex sexual interaction, were subject to criticism or arrest (as was anyone else who violated the strict norms of the times), several of the older tongzhi I spoke with described the Cultural Revolution as a time when opportunities for (and so, they claim, the practice of) homosexual sexual activity actually increased as families were separated and people were sent to the countryside. 416

Random police harassment, however, remains common in many places, officers intimidating MSM in parks and other public sex venues into paying fines so their activities will not be reported to their families or work units (An 1995, Chow 1996).5 Many of my informants, however, counted as the greatest danger they encountered in fishing ponds not the police, but other tongzhi, or those posing as them: money boys, blackmailers and thieves (of either their money or their hearts). In public discourse, moral models of homosexuality which portrayed it as a consequence of Western decadence and a threat to cultural purity and national security have mostly been replaced with medical models in which homosexuality is seen as a disease or perversion () (see for example Chinese Encyclopedia of Sexology Editorial Committee 1998, Liu ed. 1993, Ma 1998, Sun 1999, Yang and Fang 1994), and up until the early nineties (and even today in some places) government clinics offered treatments such as hate therapy6 to cure MSM of their desire for same sex eroticism (Ruan 1991, Zha 1995). Although such treatments are less prevalent today, the pathologization of homosexuality persists, and its association with HIV (more in accounts of the virus in the West than in the actual patterns of transmission in China) has only served to strengthen the link between gay sex and disease. More and more, however, Chinese officials, academics and clinicians are also abandoning these medical models of homosexuality and embracing social scientific constructions that see it as an identity rather than a mental disorder or a social problem.

This form of repression, cautions Rofel (1999:459), should not be mistaken for a special type of communist repression but rather should be seen as quite similar to what continues to happen in the United States. Police harassment, for example, often slides into garden-style corruption. 6 According to Zha (1995:97), In hate therapy, the patient would be asked to think of flies or the skeletons of those who had died of AIDS whenever he experienced homosexual arousal. Another cure 417

Just as I was finishing this thesis, in fact, the Chinese Psychiatric Association ( ) announced that it would remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders () (Chang 2001,Wan 2001). Sociologists, psychologists and medical doctors from institutions with close links to the state (like the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) have declared that homosexuality is just as prevalent in China as it is in the West (with estimates of between 40 to 50 million men who have sex with men in a population of 1.2 billion) (Li 1998, Pomfret 2000), and are beginning to approach MSM not as a collection of isolated cases of mental illness or hooliganism, but as a legitimate community () or sub-culture ( ) (Li 1998).7 Lengthy examinations in social science tracts of the cause (and prevention) of homosexuality are rapidly giving way to more careful descriptions of their behavior, their problems and their HIV vulnerability.8 Government and party voices are also increasingly tolerant, and sometimes even use reports of violence against gays in other countries as a tool to promote the superiority of the Chinese system. Newspapers in China, for instance, made much of the anti-gay murder of Matthew Shepherd in America, and a prominent article in the Peoples Daily in 1998 focused on the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis (Peoples Daily on the right side 1998). Despite the frequent closing of commercial establishments catering

was electric therapy, in which the doctor would show a video of men having sex and then apply an electrified probe to the patient's erect penis, so that he would associate gay sex with painful shocks. 7 This transformation is perhaps most apparent in the works of Zhang Beichuan (), who, in his 1994 Homosexual Love in China, advanced a medicalized version of homosexuality but today has emerged as the nations leading proponent of homosexual rights. 8 Even more conservative researchers are beginning to see some positive aspects of homosexual relationships. A researcher specializing in Marxism-Leninism at the University of Public Security, for example, recently submitted an internal report calling on Chinese heterosexuals to study the equality prevalent in homosexual relations (Pomfret 2000). 418

to MSM (as well as entertainment establishments catering to non-tongzhi) bars, discos, saunas and karaoke clubs are flourishing like never before.9 Representations of homosexuality in commercial culture range from more artistic endeavors (like the film East Palace, West Palace ) to more sensationalist exposs (see for example Intrepid Reporter 1998). At the same time, the argot of young, urban MSM has made its way into the popular imagination, many people using the word tongzhi to refer to gay men rather than compatriots (Zhao Tingpeng 1998). Like older official representations, however, popular representations also frequently appropriate the boundary of the nation, associating homosexuality with foreignness, as well as the violation of gender boundaries and moral boundaries. The picture below (Fig. 7.3) of the cover of the sensationalist novel Gay Club (

) is typical of the way these boundaries work to other the homosexual in popular
discourse.

In the summer of 1998, Chinese police released the owner of the Red Bat ( ) teahouse, a homosexual commercial sex establishment in Chengdu, after prosecutors determined that there was no law banning same-sex sex work (Intrepid reporter 1998, Homosexual establishments 1999, Pomfret 2000, Rennie 1999). 419

Fig 7.3

Almost a mirror image of Western constructions of the Oriental as mysterious, elusive, feminine (no matter what sex they are) (Said 1978, Fung 1996, Hwang 1989), the cover presents this construction through an Occidentalist (Chen 1995) gaze which undermines the homosexual by making of him a caricature in the minds of Westerners. The conflation of homosexuality, transvestitism and drag joins to this crossing of national boundaries the violation of gender boundaries: the Chinese homosexual becomes the foreigners woman. The scene in the background is not just a representation of a bar full of foreigners, but of foreignness itself it is the other country to which the Chinese homosexual is drawn. (Actually, the picture is not of a gay club at all, but instead of the mainstream commercial chain Planet Hollywood). 10

10

So far no book by an openly gay author has been published in China, though a novel called Peachcolored Lips () by Cui Zisi, who claims to be Chinas first gay novelist was published in Hong Kong in 1997. 420

The above example is a good illustration of the heteroglossia of portrayals of the homosexual person in public discourse in China, portrayals which often mix Discourses of science, biomedicine, traditional morality, Western consumerism, crime, gender and nationalism in a cacophony of local, transnational, traditional and contemporary voices. Public opinion of homosexuality in China is still largely negative (Liu et al. 1997), yet I rarely encountered open hostility towards homosexuals, and often the non-tongzhi I spoke to expressed at least mild tolerance. An example is the conversation below in which an informant of mine (not at my request) asked the driver of the taxi we were in what she thought of homosexuals:
.. .. .. .. .. .. .. : Taxi Driver: Everyone has their own lifestyle.. You should do what you want to do. Informant: So you think lifestyle is up to the individual. Taxi Driver: Its a personal choice.. Its perfectly understandable that with reform and opening up Western culture is also surging into our country. Informant: You think homosexuality is something we have learned from the West, or is it something native to China? Taxi Driver: Isnt it something that comes from Western countries? Informant: Not necessarily.. In early times China had it.

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Taxi Driver: Really? Informant: There are Chinese novels that talk about it: The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Golden Lotus, Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio. . Taxi Driver: It seems youve read a lot of books. Informant: No, Ive just read a few. Taxi Driver: You study history? Informant: No.. I just have a lot of contact with these kinds of peoplewhats your opinion? Taxi Driver: Whats your work unit? Informant: Im a writer. Taxi Driver: So, your work has something to do with books. (Beijing 1996-8)

In this conversation the driver appropriates an interesting mixture of cultural tools, simultaneously articulating the newer voices of individualism and lifestyle and older voices which construct the homosexual as an outsider. Like official and commercial representations of homosexuality discussed above, the first boundary the driver draws when the topic comes up is the boundary of the nation. Her national boundary, however, is slightly different from those in official discourse, constructing the West as a source not of spiritual pollution () but of modern lifestyles (). What is most interesting, though, is not just how she mixes these voices but how she uses them to manage the conversation, carefully positioning herself as a nave questioner and her interlocutor as a scholar in order to distance them both from the identity which they are discussing. Even when the informant claims identity, if not as a homosexual himself, at least as one who has contact with them, the driver attempts to convert this claim into a recognized social identity, asking him what his work unit () is and intimating that his knowledge of homosexuals must certainly have its source in books rather than in real life experience. Homosexuality is not legitimized as a social identity or collection of
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sexual practices so much as a subject of academic inquiry or something more like a fashion trend. In the background, if not at the center, of most official and unofficial inventions of the homosexual in China is the AIDS pandemic itself, which arrived there just as these new invented identities were beginning to be formulated and has shaped them in important ways. In fact, among official publications, the texts in which the homosexual person is represented most frequently are AIDS prevention materials.11 Even though official reports of HIV prevalence among MSM are low, homosexuals are almost always identified as a high-risk group in AIDS prevention materials (see chapter five) and journalistic treatments of AIDS, and often they are constructed as the source of AIDS, as in the figure 7.4 below from AIDS: The Warning of the Century (AIDS:) (Ceng and Ren 1997: 35). Consistent with other technologizations of risk identity we have seen, here the source of infection is portrayed not just as a homosexual, but as a traveler, leaving AIDS in his wake to spread to the general public (heterosexuals and finally children).

11

Even discourse about homosexuality which does not mention HIV sometimes uses the same tifa to describe gay men as are used to describe people with HIV, emphasizing their invisibility, and the fact that, like AIDS, they are right beside us ( ). As a 1993 article in the Economic Evening News ( ) (Jin, 1993 trans. Dutton 1998:70-4) declared, one has to recognize that the endlessly increasing reports of homosexuality within the mainland probably means that people that are close to us, or even living within our midst, are that way inclined. 423

Fig. 7.4

Similarly, in an article called Homosexuals Unlucky Star12 (), first published in Healthworld magazine () and later reprinted in the book Everybody Talk about AIDS ( AIDS) (Zhao 1996), MSM are constructed as the origin of AIDS in China through the appropriation of the story of Chinas first AIDS patient which I analyzed in chapter four, linked with the story of another patient zero, Chinas first reported case of homosexual transmission.
1985 5 27 1989 9 H V ) I ( On the 27th of May, 1985, an Argentine traveler landed in Shanghai, passed through Nanjing, Xian, planning to return home via Beijing. Falling ill on the way, he was admitted to Beijing Union Hospital. Two days later he died. The diagnosis was AIDS. He had a history of homosexuality. He was Mainland China's first AIDS patient. He came suddenly and left suddenly. In September of 1989 a middle aged man who worked in a food shop tested positive for HIV (human immuno-deficiency syndrome or the AIDS virus). He had suffered from syphilis twice

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before and had a history of homosexuality, had gotten divorced. He admitted that he had on many occasions had anal sex with foreigners. He was a sexually confused person. Before long he ended up outside the country. A few years ago it was said that he died of AIDS in a foreign country.

The same voices can be heard in this representation of HIV transmission and infection as in those analyzed in previous chapters. Not only are foreignness and deviance made criterial to HIV infection, but they are joined together through the underlying motif of movement the careful chronicle of the movements of Chinas first AIDS patient through the country (though there is no evidence that he infected anyone along the way) juxtaposed with the confused wanderings of the Chinese homosexual out of the country to die stripped of his cultural citizenship. Although there is no epidemiological connection between Chinas first AIDS patient and the local Chinese in the second story, by linking them chronologically and thematically, the passages creates a powerful narrative connection; they are both part of the same storyline of foreignness, deviance disease and movement. While AIDS has strengthened links among homosexuality, foreignness and disease, it has also (as in the West) contributed to the validation of gay identity as a socially recognizable self (rather than simply an unsavory activity), particularly in public health discourse in which homosexuals are constructed not just as a risk group to be avoided but as themselves targets of health education, legitimate consumers of AIDS knowledge. Reformist representations of the homosexual person in public health discourse, however, often subtly reinforce the distinctions seen in less positive portrayals, distinctions between foreignness and cultural citizenship, between movement and stability, and between quality () and lack of quality.
12

bane, disaster 425

In 1995, the first officially produced health education pamphlet for gays appeared in China, produced by the National Health Education Institute ( ) in cooperation with the Ministry of Health (See Appendix 7a) (China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation et al. 1995b). The pamphlet appeared as one of a series about STDs and AIDS targeted at different groups, including students, farmers, migrant workers, long distance truck drivers, STD patients and commercial sex workers (see chapter five). What is most significant about it is that it is perhaps the first instance in Chinese official discourse in which the homosexual subject is addressed directly rather than through representations intended for readers assumed not to be homosexual. Thus, the way MSM are constructed in the pamphlet centers not just on the ideational portrayals of gay men in the pictures and words, but also on how the authors use interpersonal resources and strategic intertextuality to construct a range of reading positions for their new audience. One way they do this is through its use of various social languages the languages of biomedicine, health promotion, patriotism, romance, traditional morality and even Western human rights which reconstruct certain kinds of social relationships and common sense knowledge. As with many of the pamphlets analyzed in chapter five, this one mixes moral and medical models of AIDS prevention in a single text, providing detailed information on such things as condom use and the symptoms of an array of sexually transmitted diseases alongside warnings regarding the ineffectiveness of technical solutions and exhortations to scrupulously uphold moral integrity (). In one sense these moral messages position readers as legitimate cultural citizens, able to participate in the practice of observing moral integrity despite their
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status in society as morally marginal. Strangely absent from the pamphlet, however, are direct references to Chinese cultural traditions, strange because they feature so prominently in other pamphlets in the series, particularly those for farmers and students. As I mentioned in chapter five, unlike the other pamphlets in the series which regularly portray readers as members of families (husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers), no references at all are made to kinship ties, and whereas other targets (like women, travelers) are pictured in interaction with family members, homosexuals are pictured in interaction with what are presumably strangers in city parks (see Fig. 7.5) (a rather sanitized representation of what my informants called fishing). This conspicuous absence of the family serves to position the homosexual in a kind of cultural-limbo. While the homosexual is in some ways presented as a legitimate social identity, he is at the same time portrayed as an incomplete one.

Fig. 7.5 This culturally neutered version of AIDS prevention, while in some ways releasing readers from the constraints of traditional social norms imposed on other target audiences, serves to cordon off the homosexual person from the rest of Chinese society, a
427

boundary made even stronger through the appropriation of the English identity label gays on the pamphlets cover. Calling Chinese homosexuals gays on the one hand makes them part of a recognized social group, but on the other hand reinforces the connection between homosexuality and foreignness. The speech genres the pamphlet appropriates also contribute to the segregation of the homosexual. Political slogans, for example, rather than the traditional poetry found in other pamphlets in the series (see chapter five) speak to readers in the more coercive voice of the Discourse of Revolution (Gu 1996). Even the pamphlet itself, with its restrictions on distribution to non-homosexuals stated clearly on the bottom of the last panel, constitutes a discursive boundary between the homosexual and the general public. Furthermore, while AIDS is used to give to the homosexual person legitimacy as a consumer of health related information, much of this legitimacy is premised on the same view of homosexuality as the source of AIDS as was seen in previous examples (Fig 7.4, Zhao 1996). The title of the pamphlet reminds readers: Worldwide the first to face the threat of AIDS were homosexuals (). Where the representations in the pamphlet work to give cultural legitimacy and salvation from AIDS to the homosexual is through mitigating his cultural extradition with the voices of true love, loyalty, modernity, urbanity, and science. Just as the pamphlet in the series aimed at sex workers portrays for readers the virtual identity (Goffman 1963, Jones 1997a) of a reformed sex worker (see chapter five), this pamphlet provides for gays the virtual identity of a quality gay, one who avoids casual sex, anal sex and oral sex, dresses well, has access to technology like telephones and personal computers (see chapter 6, Fig. 7.2) and only has sex (of a rather limited nature) with

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healthy people whom he completely understands and can trust ( ). This invocation of the Discourse of Civilization in the pamphlet both allows the homosexual to, if not completely reestablish cultural citizenship, at least find some space along the boarders of the current Discourse of State Control, and at the same time allows the state to fix the homosexual subject within the technologies of this Discourse. The final, and by far the most positive invention of the homosexual person I will consider before going on to discuss how my informants imagined their own identities is an essay written by Qingdao social scientist Zhang Beichuan in the first issue of a newsletter he started with assistance from the Ford Foundation to educate homosexuals about HIV and AIDS called Friends Exchange () (Zhang 1998a) (Appendix 7b). What is interesting about this portrayal is that, while its message is the most reformist of all of those we have looked at so far, the language that is used to deliver it is the most revolutionary. Like the above examples, Zhang appropriates the boundary of the nation and the ideology of nationalism in his construction of the homosexual person. What is different about this construction is that the homosexual is positioned within these boundaries rather than outside of them or at their margins. Much of the piece is written in what my informants called officialeze (), full of inflated rhetoric about the historical mission of the Chinese race and the ideology of the Party-state. The title itself is a series of political slogans: Disseminate Science (), Promote Health (), Initiate Love () and Build Civilization (), and the essay is structured in four parts to address the implications of each of these slogans in turn.
429

The Discourse the essay draws upon most heavily, however, is not the Discourse of Revolution nor the Discourse of Reform, but the Discourse of Civilization with its mixture of traditional morality, faith in science and focus on lifting the cultural level of the nation. Framed within this Discourse, the rise of the homosexual person in China is portrayed as a consequence of the advance of civilization () (ln. 10), the natural expression of sexual feelings long suppressed and neglected ( ) (lns. 11-12) by feudalism and uncivilized attitudes. The attitude with which we approach the question of homosexuality, Zhang writes, is closely related to the great enterprise of building civilization ( ) (lns. 82-3), and how well it deals with its homosexual question is one sign with which to measure a societys level of civilization. ( ) (lns. 15-16). Like other invocations of the Discourse of Civilization we have observed, the essay constructs civilization around the cultural categories of knowledge, stability and quality (). Not only does a scientific view of homosexuality ( ) (ln.17) display the quality of the nation, it also contributes to the overall stability of society () (lns. 66-7). Just as in the pamphlet I analyzed above, the homosexual person is not represented in this article as promiscuous, deviant or criminal, but as a cultural citizen capable of cultivating quality through leading a healthy lifestyle () (ln.51), regulating his own behavior () (ln. 54), serving the society more positively and making a

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greater contribution to society () (ln. 72). Unlike Western gay rights discourse, which approaches justice as a matter of individual rights, here justice is a matter of reinforcing social harmony. Through this approach, the author is able to construct tolerance for homosexuals as the natural outcome of traditional morality.
62 5000 63 64 China has a 5000 year history of glorious civilization. 'Compassion', 'Desiring nothing, imposing nothing on others', and 'valuing harmony' are excellent traditions of the Chinese culture

The political program of gay rights as constructed in this essay, then, is not as an exercise in confrontation, but an invitation for cooperation, or, perhaps more accurately, to borrow Chews (1995) term, an exercise in aikido politics, a stratagem through which people contest the power of dominant groups through membershipping, portraying themselves as part of them.
the aspiration of 'Friends' is to invite groups a different sexual orientations to build civilization together (ln. 73)

Perhaps the most important thing to take into account in analyzing this essay is the multiple reading positions it sets up. Although it appears in a newsletter for gay men, the language it uses and the arguments it makes are clearly not directed towards its readers, but rather towards the third voice of the Party-state. It is written for the Party in the language of the Party with the partial aim of convincing the Party that the homosexual

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identity legitimized by the newsletter is not a threat, but instead an integral part of the Partys own Campaign to Build Spiritual Civilization (). While Zhangs appropriation of the Discourse of Civilization in the newsletter amplifies participation in HIV prevention by gay men on the institutional level, building support in the public health establishment for positive interventions aimed at gay men, it also has the potential to limit it by creating a barrier of officialeze between its target audience and the AIDS prevention message the newsletter contains. The attitude my informants took towards Zhangs patriotic AIDS prevention for gay men was mixed. Most admired him for his concern, his tenacity and his ability to maneuver his project through the state bureaucracy. At the same time, they found his newsletter rather boring. One informant said:
.... ...... ..skin deep.... This thing doesnt directly address their internal world.. it doesnt address the problems that are of increasing concern to them.. it just talks about some superficial things.. it should be more important things like what youre supposed to do if youre blackmailed.. theres nothing about these important problems.. so I think its just skin deep.. so I dont like it. (Beijing 1998-8)

What was important for most MSM I talked to, however, was not the reading positions the newsletter opened for them (indeed, few of them bothered to read it), but the social positions that it opened up. Another informant said:
...... ........ Sure, its not very beautifully written.. but the first time I saw this magazine.. I was very excited.. because the government allowed it to come out.. didnt interfere with it in any way.. at least its

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supportive of tongzhi.. its a place where people speak up for us.. and we feel thats good. (Fuzhou 2000-9)

7.5 Imagining identities

All of these various ways homosexual identity is technologized in public discourse act as tools which MSM themselves appropriate and adapt to imagine their own identities, both individually and collectively, and to assess individual and community risk (Douglas and Calvez 1990). Just as in the West preoccupations with homosexuality in medical and legal discourse resulted in it beginning to speak in its own nameoften in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified (Foucault 1980: 101), the emerging official and unofficial inventions of the homosexual person in China provide for MSM there the very means of subverting the constraints imposed on them by these inventions. As Dutton (1998: 62) writes, while MSM in China witness themselves represented as examples of criminality or as specimens examined in the field of sex studies, it is this process of othering itself that gives them voice, no matter how faint the murmur. The key to understanding the ways MSM in China are building sexual identity and community lies in understanding the ways, both in the macro-political debate in public discourse and in the micro-politics of everyday interaction, they strategically appropriate the boundaries drawn by established Discourses most importantly, the Discourse of Civilization, with its attendant concepts of modernity, urbanity, knowledge, stability and quality (). It requires that we explore the regions where sexual identities camp-out on the borders of other, already existing overlapping and internested communities and identities.
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As we have seen in this and previous chapters, among the most important boundaries set up by the Discourse of Civilization is the boundary of the nation, which defines proper Chineseness (Wu 1994). Also important are various regional boundaries, boundaries set up between the city and the countryside, between stability and movement, residents and floaters. Finally, there are the boundaries that separate knowledge from ignorance, reason from superstition, the hygienic from the dirty, the civilized from the uncivilized and the normal from the abnormal. It is at the intersection of all these boundaries historical, geographical, social, and behavioral that what Rofel (1999) calls cultural citizenship is located. Cultural citizenship, rather than legal subjectivity or psychological personality, she writes (458), is what chiefly establishes proper and improper sex in post-socialist China. In terms of HIV vulnerability, the way communities of MSM imagine themselves along these boundaries to claim citizenship in other invented communities (the nation, the Party, the city, the family, etc.) is crucial in determining the kinds of cultural tools available to them to avoid infection. Such positioning might affect, for example, official support for MSM related prevention activities or official responses to MSM community activities. On the level of the interaction order, the ways individuals position themselves along these boundaries is central to the ways they give meaning to various social and sexual practices, assess personal vulnerability, and claim and impute identities of safety or risk. In fact, the factors my informants brought up in discussions of HIV risk most often centered not on particular kinds of sexual practices but rather on particular kinds of social identities (Jones 1999), a phenomenon which has also been observed both among

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MSM and among heterosexuals in other settings (see for example Adam et al. 2000, Ames et al.1995, Aveline, 1995, Gold, Skinner and Ross 1994, Maticka-Tyndale 1992, Metts and Fitzpatrick 1992, Williams et al. 1992). Choosing suitable partners, rather than using condoms, was the safer sex strategy of choice of most of the men that I talked to (see also Jones 1997c, Zhang et al. 2000). Sexual negotiation, involves not just a negotiation of practices, but, more importantly for my informants, a negotiation of identities. The dialectic of imagination and invention which takes place in the larger social arena is mirrored in social interaction in the moment by moment trading of claims and imputations of identity, and it is on the basis of these claims and imputations that many decisions regarding what practices are to be allowed, where, when and by whom are made (see last chapter). In speaking of identities of safety and risk however, it is important to remember that in the context of any sexual interaction the meanings of safety and risk are always multiple and often contradictory. One mistake AIDS researchers sometimes make when investigating how individuals and groups respond to the risk of HIV is to treat it as isolated from other kinds of risks and as somehow central (Jones, Yu and Candlin 2000). In reality the risk of contracting HIV is only one of a multitude of risks associated with sexual contact, others being the risk of being caught (especially in public sex venues), of being robbed, of being blackmailed, of being rejected, of being revealed (), not to mention all of the risks to ones face and the face of ones partner that invariably accompany sexual negotiation. In fact, nearly all of these risks were seen by my informants as much more pressing concerns than the risk of HIV infection. Risk-taking is a complex, multifaceted and socially constructed phenomenon associated with a wide

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range of possible negative and positive consequences for the risk-taker. Sometimes, as we will see below, actions taken to mitigate some risks, such as being robbed or blackmailed or claiming or imputing a spoiled identity (Goffman 1963), can be responsible for increasing the risks of HIV transmission. Another important thing about this complex constellation of risks associated with physical intimacy is that identities of risk imputed on the basis of one set of perceived dangers often translate quite readily to other sets of dangers. Thus, for my informants, assigning risky identities like thief, blackmailer or money boy to individuals almost automatically implicated those individuals in other risky identities (in particular the identity of a possible or probable AIDS carrier), and at the same time assigning identities like gentleman were almost always associated with assumptions of lower vulnerability to HIV. 7.5.1 National Boundaries As we saw in chapter four, one way Chinese MSM (or those who speak for them) claim cultural citizenship is by inserting themselves into the nations narratives. As Weeks (1985) observes, a large part of formulating a sexual identity is giving shape to unstable narratives through fitting them into appropriated histories. One common way this is done in China is by appropriating stories and idioms from dynastic history. Sympathetic researchers into homosexuality, both local (Li 1998, Li and Wang 1993, Zhang 1994, 1996) and foreign (Hinsch 1990, Ruan 1991), as well as MSM themselves, regularly catalogue the emperors and high officials of the past who are

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said to have had homosexual relationships13, and the fixed expressions that signal these historical narratives (like cut sleeves 14 and sharing a peach/ 15) are frequently appropriated by MSM and non-MSM alike to refer to same-sex love. Along with these stories and expressions comes a claim of naturalness for homosexuality grounded in Chinese tradition and philosophy. Some of my informants made these claims even more explicit by providing rereadings of Chinese classical texts. In the excerpt below, for example, an informant borrows the words of Confucius, the nations greatest proponent of boundaries, in order to argue that the moral and medical boundaries between hetero and homosexual behavior characteristic of public discourse have no basis in Chinese tradition:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13

The earliest recorded mention of homosexuality in Chinese literature is probably in the Shi Jing (), a collection of poems from the early Zhou Dynasty. The oldest historical record mentioning homosexuality is the Spring and Autumn Annals () (722-479 BC). Other stories from the Spring-Autumn Period and the Warring States period make frequent reference to homosexuality in the context of palace intrigues, politics and warfare. For two centuries at the height of the Han dynasty China was ruled by ten openly bisexual emperors and annals from the Western and Eastern Chin even include accounts of intercultural homosexual relationships between Han Chinese and foreign invaders. An anonymous author of the early nineteenth century complied approximately fifty famous historical cases of same sex love into a volume entitled Records of the Cut Sleeve () (Hinsch 1992, Liu 1993b, Ruan 1991, Samshasha 1997). 14 The expression cut sleeves () comes from the story of the Han Dynasty Emperor Ai and his lover Dong Xian recorded in the Book of Han (). The nineteenth century Records of the Cut Sleeve () relates the story like this: Emperor Ai was sleeping in the daytime with Dong Xian stretched out across his sleeve. When the emperor wanted to get up, Dong Xian was still asleep. Because he did not want to disturb him, the emperor cut off his own sleeve and got up. His love and thoughtfulness went this far! (quoted in Hinsch 1990:53, see also Liu 1993b, Ruan 1991, Samshasha 1997). Less sympathetic versions of the story, such as that in Ceng and Rens AIDS: The Warning of the Century ( AIDS:) ( 1997: 29) add to their telling the fact that, after the death of the emperor, Dong Xian was impeached by jealous ministers and he and his wife ended up committing suicide. 15 Sharing a peach () makes reference to the Zhou dynasty figure Mizi Xia, lover of the Duke of Wei (534-473 B.C.) who is said to have once bitten into a peach and, finding it exceedingly sweet, offered the remaining half to the ruler as a token of his love. In another incident, Mizi Xia borrowed the Dukes chariot in order to rush to the side of his ailing mother, even though, under the laws of the state of Wei, driving the rulers chariot was punishable by death. Not only did the Duke not punish his lover, but he publicly praised his filial piety (Hinsch 1990, Liu 1993b, Ruan 1991, Samshasha 1997). 437

I am what I am.. eating and sex are human nature.. thats what Confucius said.. eating and sex are human natureliking a certain kind of food and being inclined towards a particular sex are the same.. being inclined towards men.. or others being inclined toward women is the same as eating.. just different tastes.. they're both normal.. there's no differencethat's exactly what Confucius said. 16 (Fuzhou 1998-9)

In imagining themselves as part of the nations narrative, temporal boundaries also play an important role. On the one hand, the vision of history articulated in emergent communities of MSM and those sympathetic to them is distinctly golden age, looking back to a past in which not only were people like us tolerated, but we got to be emperors. On the other hand, it also advances a utopian view fueled by a faith in a scientific view of sex and in the growing strength of their own imaginings. One thing that allows these golden age and utopian perspectives to be held simultaneously is the temporal boundary drawn not with the ancient past but with the more recent past, the dark ages of the Cultural Revolution. In the following excerpt, for example, an informant contrasts the glory of the Han dynasty with the aberration of the Cultural Revolution:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . China had a very special dynasty the Han Dynasty. Ten emperors in the Western Han.. all were (homosexual).. also you can see that while China hasnt instituted any laws to protect minorities.. there also arent any laws to punish them.. One particularly unique time in China was the Cultural Revolution it was only at this time that homosexuals were killed.17 (Beijing 1997-7)

16

Zhang Beichuan, the Qingdao champion of tongzhi whose article I analyzed above appropriates a similarly culinary proverb in an interview with an American reporter when he says: I wish for a day when we live like the Chinese proverb saysRadishes or cabbage, everybodys got the thing they love (Pomfret 2000). 17 For a contrasting opinion on the Cultural Revolution see footnote 4. 438

The Cultural Revolution is appropriated here as a signifier of all that is unreasonable, excessive, chaotic and un-Chinese about Chinas recent past. By aligning homophobia with political excess, violence and chaos, the speaker is able to frame tolerance towards people like himself as way of rectifying the chaos and setting things right (/) (see chapter two). Chinese culture, both classical and revolutionary, is also appropriated in more playful ways. In one bar I visited in Dalian, for example, performers did drag in Beijing opera costumes, and in a popular gay karaoke in Fujian customers seemed particularly fond of singing along with revolutionary songs recorded by the Peoples Liberation Army Womens Chorus with exaggerated gestures and facial expressions.18 Were we to use Western terms, we might call such subversive acts of appropriating symbols from high culture camp. Like camp, such moments glorify a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon (Sontag 1964: 106) and take an attitude of delight in converting one thing into something else, elements we have already encountered in our discussion of ji () (see chapter three). They may also function in a similar way that they do in Western society, allowing gay men to neutralize the culture that oppresses them by poaching its most sacred symbols. Finally, like camp, these playful acts of appropriation serve important social functions, coming to constitute a kind of social language, which is used as a private code or badge of identity (Sontag 1964). I am, on the other hand, reluctant to use the Western term, which Sontag (1964) herself situates firmly in specific cultural and historical circumstances, to describe what
18

Karaoke clubs in China almost always have a selection of revolutionary songs available. In yet another example of the increasingly commercial face of Party propaganda, the Central Department of Propaganda began releasing patriotic songs in karaoke versions in 1991 (Barm 1999), and now commercial concerns have released their own versions, some set to rock rhythms (Zha 1995). 439

Chinese gay men do when they, for example, decorate their social spaces with busts of chairman Mao or compose ribald lyrics in the form of classical Chinese poems, first of all because the social conditions and social uses of these subversions are often quite different, and second because Chinas cultural marketplace is so full of subversive juxtapositions of official and unofficial voices (often more outrageous than anything I ever saw in a gay bar) that, as Barm (1999) puts it, one might be tempted to describe the whole country as camp.19 Rather than as something special to gay men, it is better to see such playful appropriations in terms of the larger discursive environment of contemporary China in which, in both public discourse and private interaction, irony seems sometimes to be the norm rather than the exception (Barm 1999). Further complicating the issue is the fact that, as seen in several of the examples above, often the same symbols which are appropriated in subversive or ironic ways are also, at times, appropriated with deadly seriousness. Rather than a repudiation of the Discourses from which these cultural tools are poached, such borrowings (whether in earnest or in jest) seem often to be more about recuperation than revolution (Moore 1992), part of a larger project of reclaiming cultural citizenship by blurring the discursive boundaries that separate men who have sex with men from the mainstream. In a sense the appropriation of the term tongzhi is another example of this ironic subversion of national symbols. What makes this tool particularly useful is its indeterminacy the multitude of voices that speak through it. On the one hand it claims cultural belonging, binding its users to a community of compatriots. On the other hand, it points outward to other communities of gay men in Hong Kong and Taiwan (where the

19

It is equally difficult to map words like drag onto the theatrical performances of Chinese MSM. Given that in classical Chinese opera male actors played female characters, does dressing in the costumes of 440

usage was coined) and beyond to global gay identities. The word strategically mixes the voices of kong-tai () modernity (Barm 1999) Party loyalty20 and dissident irony (Barm 1999). Its accent is simultaneously serious and ironic, playful and earnest.21 Which of these voices is made salient depends on when the term is used, by whom and to whom. Claiming cultural citizenship involves not just aligning oneself with the symbols of the nation, but also distinguishing oneself from that which is not part of the nation. Just as in public health discourse officials argue for AIDS prevention with Chinese characteristics (see chapter two), many MSM, both in their private discussions and in more public forums call for more indigenous models of gay identity (Chow 1997, Loo ed. 1999, Rofel 1999). For them the term tongzhi is not just intended to situate Chinese MSM identity within the boundaries of the nation and culture, but also to separate it from Western identity labels and the personal and political strategies associated with them like coming out and public demonstrations (Chow 1997). The term tongzhi, they say,

female characters in Chinese opera actually constitute drag? 20 According to Article 4 of the CPC First General Program as Any person, regardless of sex and nationality, can become a party member and our comrade (tongzhi) as long as he supports our party's program and policies, stays as a loyal member, and has the endorsement of a party member. After liberation, tongzhi became the form of address outside the party as well. Now out of fashion, when it is used not to describe homosexuals it is marked. For example Li (1995:453) notes that its sudden appearance in the greeting of a newsreader on CTV in November 1990 caused observers both inside and outside of China to wonder if the political climate was shifting further to the left. 21 This particular appropriation has not escaped censure in official discourse. Just as the MSM who use it claim for themselves credibility through the terms deep roots in local culture and Party ideology, the Party attempts to discredit this use of the term by, among other things, branding it foreign. An article in the China Youth Daily ( ) (Zhao 1998), for example, rails against the pollution of the Chinese language and attributes this mis-use of the word tongzhi to American gays who allegedly appropriated it from the popular television show Ellen and subsequently infected the Taiwanese with this odious slang. The article even uses disease metaphors to describe this process, noting, When America gets a cold, Taiwan sneezes; when Taiwan sneezes, the younger generation on the Mainland gets a runny nose ( ). This version, however, seems unlikely. It is uncertain when tongzhi first started to be used among MSM in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but its first public use was probably in the title of the First Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian () Film Festival in the mid 90s at least a year before the American television series Ellen began (Chow 1997). 441

embodies a completely different kind of political project, one of harmony rather than division, and a completely different view of the self and its place in society. Unlike gay or lesbian or the more confrontational queer, it is more consistent with Chinese patterns of inventing identities based on relationships rather than difference or individuality. The discourse of tongzhi is not just constructed in opposition to official voices, which insist that homosexuality is a foreign phenomenon, but also in opposition to foreign voices, which insist that Western gay identity is a universal phenomenon. This debate between tongzhi identity and gay identity emerges explicitly at sites of engagement like the Chinese Tongzhi Conference () (Loo ed. 1999, see chapter three), as well as implicitly in the politics among different Chinese and foreign communities of MSM in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. It is also reflected in the social organization of gay life in China in which foreign or transnational tools for the imagination of identity (like Western style gay bars and discos), which make one set of actions, interactions and identities possible, exist side by side with local tools (like traditional bathhouses), which make different kinds of actions, interactions and identities possible. Arguments about how much being gay is about being foreign, and how much it can be reconciled with traditional notions of being Chinese surface as well in the micro-politics of everyday interaction as individual MSM create situated identities by creatively mixing the voices of cultural citizenship and cosmopolitan sophistication. Complicating this Conversation between foreign and local ways of being gay is the fact that when foreign cultural tools are appropriated into local contexts they become indignized as they are adapted to new circumstances, and local tools change as well as they interact with foreign ones, becoming more internationalized (Jones 1999).

442

The effect of this is akin to what Boellstorff (2000), in his dual analysis of Indonesian gay identity and foreign television shows, describes as dubbing culture. While, as a collective strategy for claiming cultural belonging, the repudiation of Western ways of being gay has the potential of amplifying social action for MSM in China, on the level of individual sexual action, emphasizing differences between foreign and local ways of being gay can result in limiting participation in safer sex by activating powerful cultural metaphors equating foreignness with disease and giving rise to notions of cultural or racial immunity (Jones 1999, Quinn 1992). Throughout my interaction with my informants, while they often appropriated symbols and practices of Western gay identity with relish, they just as enthusiastically distanced themselves from them when it came to issues like relationships, coming out and HIV vulnerability. Often this included appropriating stereotypes from popular consciousness and Party propaganda regarding the promiscuity of foreigners in general, the superficiality of relationships in the West, and, most importantly, the construction of AIDS as a foreign disease. Many of the men I spoke to, as seen in the last chapter, regarded HIV infection as the consequence of sexual relations with foreigners and avoiding it as a matter of avoiding foreigners. As one of my informants put it:
.... .. We all feel.. you shouldn't have contact with foreigners.. whether they're Americans or any kind of foreigner.. this is more dangerous.. (Fuzhou 1999-3)

Sometimes this boundary between the foreign and Chinese was reinforced through the appropriation of a kind of lay epidemiology of the type we saw in chapter four:

443

.. .... .. I've never left China.. now within China I probably have a 1% chance of being infected.. right?.. in foreign countries there's a lot of AIDS...if I make love with a foreigner I probably have a 10% chance of being infected with AIDS.

Finally, it also sometimes involved appropriating tools from more revolutionary (and homophobic) AIDS histories from official discourses. Just like the revolutionary public health histories I analyzed in chapter four, many of my participants constructed AIDS as having invaded from the West as a result of reform and opening up (), seen in the following excerpt of a conversation I had with a group of men in a Beijing park.
A: .. .. B: .. RJ: B: ! RJ: B: RJ: A:.. B:...... A: Come on over.. heres a handsome foreigner.. do you want to play (have sex) with him? B: I dont dare, Im afraid of AIDS. RJ: Youre afraid of AIDS? B: You can speak Chinese! RJ: Why are you afraid of AIDS? B: AIDS is from foreign countries.. China has no AIDS. RJ: Really? A: Now (China) has it.. it has spread here. B: You can say China was a pure land.. but after reform and opening up.. foreigners came in.. and so all of these dirty things have flown in.

444

Even public association with foreigners could in some cases call into question ones reputation within the community. After my first visit to Fuzhou, for example, I received the following letter from one of my informants.
Last weekend, I went to the park again. I was told some rumor concerned me, it was rumored that I had AIDS. The reason was I touched a foreigner and I got much money by the prostitution. But I care little for the rumor. I know it was the first time for the gays in the park to find I can speak English this time they saw I talked to you in the park, they envied me and rumored me to my surprise, the rumor spreaded so quickly and widely, I mean my lover got wind of it and complained that the white are not only dirty but had AIDS. (Received 1996-11-12)

In the last two excerpts above, what is significant is not just the belief that avoiding foreigners means avoiding AIDS, but also the social uses to which this belief is put. In the first excerpt, for example, the speakers imputation of risk onto me (and foreigners in general) serves a number of strategic purposes in the interaction, on one hand as a humorous move in the joking frame his friend opened (by asking, heres a handsome foreigner.. do you want to play with him?), and on the other hand as a claim to the other members of his community of cultural solidarity and of his own safe identity. In the second excerpt the imputation of HIV vulnerability onto foreigners (and those who speak English with them in parks) serves both a political function within the community (a way to sanction a member for showing off) and an interpersonal function in the letter writers relationship with his lover, a way to enforce fidelity. Attention to the social functions of xenophobia in relation to HIV risk, then, reveals how complex and ambiguous such associations often are. They cannot be treated simply as matters of racism or ignorance but must be seen in the context of all the varied social actions they make possible.

445

While the above attitudes seemed to be the norm, quite a number of the men I met saw sexual interaction with foreigners as highly desirable, and among some a foreign boyfriend was considered a sign of social status. Even in the case of casual sex, while foreigners were constructed as more risky than Chinese in terms of having a greater probability of being infected with HIV, they were also sometimes constructed as safer by virtue of their superior knowledge of AIDS and sex, as we have already seen in the last chapter:
A: B: .. .... .. A: If you were with a foreigner, would you be afraid? B: No.. because foreigners.. they understand.. they know how to deal with it.. If they dont know.. how could we know? (Beijing 1996-8)

7.5.2 Regional Boundaries Another important set of geographical boundaries along which gay identity is forming in China and with which individuals and communities assess their personal and collective vulnerability to HIV are more local boundaries, boundaries between North and South, between more economically developed areas and poorer areas, and, most importantly, between the city and the countryside. Official histories of the spread of AIDS within China like those I examined in chapter four were often appropriated by my informants to claim identities of safety for themselves by situating HIV in other places and in other kinds of people:
.... .. .. .. .. we all think that in Fuzhou.. or in China it seems.. that.. drug addicts.. get AIDS more.. people like us get it less.. furthermore it's most serious over in Yunnan 446

Absent from the stories my informants told me of the spread of AIDS in China, however, were models of transmission like that in figure 7.4, in which gays are constructed as the source of HIV, or references to any cases of homosexual transmission at all, and most believed HIV to be a problem of other people (IV Drug users, sex workers and their clients) rather than of people like us. When they appropriated official histories of AIDS, they consistently wrote themselves out of them. What they retained in their appropriation of these histories, however, was the construction of AIDS as the consequence of crossing boundaries, in particular the boundary between the city and the countryside, between educated and civilized urban residents and what they referred to as outsiders (/). The category of outsider does not just index geographical origin. In fact, just being from another province or city does not necessarily earn one the status of an outsider. Instead, the label points to a whole host of distinctions including those between urban and rural, civilized and primitive, genuine and false, knowledgeable and ignorant, and safe and risky. Consistent with more official discourse, the community invented at the nexus of these distinctions in my participants discourse was invariably that of the floating population. One of my informants explained his feelings about these kinds of people this way:
...... .......... ........' '....''.. .. A lot of the floating population.. they come from the countryside.. especially for those with no purpose who are called blindly wandering.. since theyre from the countryside.. every aspect of their cultural quality is not very good.. they often rob and.. steal.. this kind of behavior.. and make 447

the society chaotic.. so we feel these kinds of people.. are not very good.. we say, from Sichuan.. maybe theyre not from Sichuan but from Anhui or Jiangxi or from some other place.. but the meaning of from Sichuan is.. theyre these kinds of people.. it gives the feeling that their social status is comparatively low. (Fuzhou 1997-7)

One of the main reasons my informants gave for this attitude was the prevalence of outsiders among the thieves, blackmailers and money boys () whom they encountered in parks, discos and bars. When particular places were seen to be increasingly occupied by outsiders (particularly money boys) they were labeled luan () (chaotic). In fact, planning an evening out on Saturday night with my informants often involved lengthy discussions about which venues were luan and which were not:
.. .. Now Beijingers usually dont go to that park.. its all money boys there.. more and more chaotic (luan) (Beijing 1997-5)

As well as associating the floating population with social disorder, my participants also associated it with bodily disorder (promiscuity, disease and perversion) as well as intellectual disorder (ignorance). Outsiders were universally constructed by my informants as dirty, wanton and of greater risk of HIV infection which they spread to the urban community because of their ignorance and greed. One informant noted:
..

They dont use condoms.. some dont even know how to use them.. their cultural level (educational level) is too low. (Fuzhou 1998-9)

Boundaries between the countryside and the city were also often implicated in the construction of gay or tongzhi identity itself with many of the urban men I spoke to refusing to grant floaters membership in imagined gay communities (believing most of them were just doing it for the money), and the men from the countryside I met much less
448

likely to refer to themselves as tongzhi or gay or even homosexual (), even if their desire for same sex eroticism was genuine. The distinction between urban and rural, between residents and floaters, is also sometimes appropriated by authorities to increase their control over communities of MSM, the possible presence of outsiders giving them an excuse to harass tongzhi in public meeting places (Dutton 1998). One informant told me:
. . GAY . . . . . . . . nobody will come up to you and shout.. youre gay, I arrest you.. its not like this.. they look for some other excuse.. I know a lot of people are arrested because they are outsiders (and dont have residency permits) (Beijing 1996-8)

7.5.3 Community Boundaries In addition to geographical boundaries separating the Chinese from the foreign, the urban from the rural, and the stable from the moving, within and among the communities of practice I observed, other boundaries also played an important part in how identity was strategized and how my informants claimed and imputed risk and safety in sexual negotiations. These boundaries have less to do with places and more to do with socio-economic class, education and the kinds of people one associates with. They cannot however, be completely separated from the geographical boundaries discussed above, first because place of origin often plays an important role in assigning other kinds of identities, and second because the categories through which these identities are constructed draw on the same Discourse of Civilization used to imagine identities like tongzhi and to invent those like the floating population.

449

The most important of these community boundaries, of course, is that which separates those who consider themselves part of an imagined community of MSM (gays, tongzhi, people like us) and those who imagine themselves as belonging to other communities. This boundary between what Western researchers might call communityaffiliated and non-community affiliated MSM is in some respects drawn in different ways and used to achieve different purposes in China than in many Western countries. One reason for this is the large number of community participants who also claim participation in heterosexual familial communities. Easily eighty percent of the MSM I met during my fieldwork were married, many had children, and even the unmarried ones often admitted that they were obligated to get married eventually. As one of my informants put it:
.... ........ .. .. .. .... .... .. .. .... China is a more traditional country.. marriage is the necessary outcome.. because when a man gets to be over thirty and he hasn't married he gets a lot of pressure.. so he definitely has to find a woman.. now I think for him.. any.. I think any homosexual if he didn't have the pressure wouldn't find a woman.. but because of the pressure he has no choice.. I know a lot.. my friends who have wives or girlfriends.. I ask them why.. no choice.. if.. in my case.. after a year or two I'll probably have to marry.. why? .. because I want to treat my father and mother right.. I don't want to see them hurt because of me.. because they have always had great hopes for me since I was small.. because I'm the only boy in the family.. so they put all their hopes on me. (Beijing 1998-8)

Unlike in the West, however, marriage is never something that precludes one from claiming affiliation in an imagined community of gay (or tongzhi) men, and the
450

men I observed rarely exhibited discomfort in claiming participation in both heterosexual and homosexual communities at once, talking about their girlfriends, fiancs or wives to other MSM, proudly showing pictures of their children to keep the conversation going during the practice of fishing. Although some of my informants professed reluctance to develop a relationship with a married man, this reluctance was not nearly as intense or widespread as it is in the West, probably because being married is the norm rather than the exception, and sometimes claiming the identities of a responsible husband, a good father and a filial son could actually make one even more desirable as a partner, these identities being seen as evidence of quality (), stability and sometimes even relative safety in regard to the possibility of HIV transmission. Just as participation in heterosexual communities did not exclude one from claiming an imagined gay identity, participation in communities of imagined comrades did not necessitate claiming that identity for oneself. Both of the communities I observed had regular participants who did not consider themselves gay, homosexual () or tongzhi, or, at least not full time tongzhi, and denying identities in these imagined communities rarely resulted in sanctions from those who claimed them. Just as in the West, however, the degree to which one imagines oneself as part of a gay community often has important consequences on how one assesses ones personal vulnerability to HIV and how one manages sexual risk (Chapple, Kippax and Smith 1998, Gold 1995, Hays and Peterson 1994). When I asked one of my participants whether or not he used condoms for anal sex, for example, he said:
..FULLTIME .. , ....

451

I only go to the fishing pond occasionally.. I'm not 'full-time'.. Ive also got a girlfriend, so I'm not the same as most comrades.. right?.. so I really hate to use condoms.. and I don't need to use them. (Fuzhou 1998-9)

One way this bifurcation of sexual practice and sexual identity was often achieved was by framing homosexual contact and heterosexual contact in different ways, heterosexual contact being seen as sex and homosexual contact being seen as play ( ).22 Also as in the West, non-affiliation with imagined gay communities is particularly prevalent among sex workers (Aggleton ed. 1999). While most of my informants constructed sex workers as more vulnerable to HIV infection, most of the sex workers I talked to believed themselves to be less so precisely because they regarded their same sex sexual practices as work rather than as part of their identity. The following exchange, for example, took place with sex worker I met in Dongdan Park:
RJ:..? SW: .. ..... RJ: ? SW: RJ: Doing this kind of business.. arent you afraid of STDs or AIDS? SW: No.. because Im not really for sale.. Im just doing it to earn my school fees.. Im also not this kind of person. RJ: This kind of person? SW: A homosexual.

22

Often this bifurcation also carried over to practices of risk reduction, with informants commonly using different strategies for safer sex with their male and female partners. They might, for example, use condoms with male partners but not their wives, since in the context of marriage condoms were not seen as necessary, or they might not use condoms with their male partners but use them with their wives for the purpose of birth control. 452

What is significant about this exchange is that the informant claims a safe identity not just by denying homosexual identity, but also by denying identity as a sex worker. What he does is not his identity, but simply an activity, and therefore (he believes), puts him less at risk. This last example brings me to the second important community boundary I observed among the MSM with whom I participated, that which separates those who are for sale () (or money boys) from those who are not. Like gay identity, identity as one who has sex for money transverses geographical, generational and class boundaries and plays and important role in decisions about sexual risk behavior. Also like gay or tongzhi identities, the category of for sale is inherently ambiguous and often does not have a one to one relationship with practices of having sex for money. In fact, a large number of men who have sex for money in China would not be considered for sale. 23 In Fuzhou, for example, masseurs in public bathhouses regularly provide sexual services to their male customers and yet would never be classified as for sale, and many other relationships, as I will discuss below, involve more subtle ways of managing the exchange of money (or goods) for sexual services which are framed not as commercial sex work but as introducing friends. The category of for sale () is really a social category, not an occupational one, contingent on ones place of origin (invariably the countryside), whether or not ones behavior is civilized or not, and ones cultural level (). Rofel (1999: 467) sums up the way identity of the money boy almost inevitably involves the drawing of geographical and class boundaries in her observation that:

453

Everyone assumes that money boys come from the countryside and that they pollute city life with their transgressions of the social divisions between masculine wealth and masculine love, between urban propriety and rural excess, and between proper and improper expressions of gay identity. (Rofel 467)

The category of money boy or for sale also transverses boundaries of gay or tongzhi identity. They are blamed by quality tongzhi for giving tongzhi a bad name and sometimes my informants appropriated less favorable inventions of the homosexual person with which to label this class of people:
.............. ........ ..GAY.......... A lot of outsiders.. theyre for sale.. they want money.. Ive heard so many stories.. including.. my family has so many difficulties.. my mother is sick.. I have to take a train to go and see her.. I dont have any money.. or I lost it.. I dont have anyplace to live.. In Beijing we have a saying a rabbits mouth.. rabbit means gay.. a rabbits mouth is like water in a public bathhouse.. which means a rabbits mouth is definitely very dirty.. so.. how can I put it.. we Beijingers dont really like this kind of people.

Finally, just as in official constructions of heterosexual transmission, for sale () people from the countryside were almost always portrayed by my informants as more vulnerable to HIV infection and sometimes as the source of infection in urban gay communities:
.... We think it's easier for 'for sale' people to get diseases.. this is true.. 'for sale' people definitely get diseases easily. (Fuzhou 1997-7)

23

A survey done among MSM in four large cities in the mid-nineties suggests that up to forty percent of MSM sexual activity is paid (Pan and Aggleton 1996, China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997). 454

There is, however, in the communities which I observed, a more civilized way to have sex for money which is usually referred to with terms like introducing friends (). This usually involves a friend or acquaintance arranging a meeting with a potential sexual partner. Although money or gifts are not always involved in such introductions, they often are. The individual to whom the friend is introduced not only gives gifts of money or goods to the friend but also to the introducer. So ambiguous is this relationship that sometimes the friend who is being introduced is not even aware of the underlying commercial nature of the transaction. One of my informants, for example, told this story:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When I was twenty someone introduced a friend to me. . he said he could introduce me to a nice guy.. so I said OKso I met this person.. and he wasnt bad.. he took me out.. and afterwards I made love with him.. not bad.. he also bought me a few things.. but later I found out that the person who introduced me to himoften introduced young men to him.. and then he would give him money.. so I felt.. I was upset.. and later when the one I had made love with phoned me.. I didnt answer.. I said to him I said, how can you use this method to meet people?.. I said you have money.. you have position.. youre also very attractive.. why do you use this method? he said, if I dont use this method, if I go out by myself fishing and what not.. Im afraid its too dangerous.. because I have money.. and he said he had been cheated before.. and so he had no choice but to look for people to introduce friends. (Fuzhou 2000-9)

It should be clear from the above excerpt that the practice of introducing friends can serve an important function in a social environment in which safe venues for meeting

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sexual partners are limited and one often must be careful about concealing ones activities. In fact it is often through paying for sex through such introductions that men, particularly married men or those of higher income, avoid the dangers they associate with the for sale () robbery and blackmail. In such cases, those they pay for sex are rarely considered for sale () and the payment is rarely considered payment, but rather a gift. The dividing line between these two kinds of transactions, however, one regarded as commercial sex (and a low quality activity) and one regarded as introducing friends and giving gifts (high quality activities) is often extremely ambiguous. As seen in the example above in which a Beijing informant explains the expression: a rabbits mouth is like the water in a public bathhouse, even individuals who are quite clearly for sale often couch their requests for money as requests for help (my mother is sick). Similarly, sometimes those who ridicule the for sale () as low class and dirty at the same time do not rule out taking money for sex themselves, framing it, however as something else, friendship, for example, or charity. One informant said:
........ ........ ...... If theres a old man.. he knows hes old.. its impossible for someone to love him.. so what can he use to get someone to make love with him.. all he can use is money.. as far as Im concerned.. if an eighty year old man wanted to make love with me.. first I would think.. he wants to make love with me.. he also has these kinds of needs.. he also has money.. so I guess it would be okay. (Beijing 1997-5)

What seemed to most clearly separate the for sale from the not for sale among my informants was the degree of an individuals integration into local communities.
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Local residents were less likely to be described as for sale, as were friends or frequent acquaintances. The for sale label was instead reserved mostly for migrants from the countryside and other cities or those in lower socio-economic classes. It was in fact possible for a man from another city to start out being for sale, but, through cultivating relationships in local communities of practice, later become a friend to be introduced to others. What complicates these transactions that teeter on the edge of sex work, particularly in terms of the negotiation of sexual risk behavior, is the need for participants to enact identities and face strategies with language and practices that are part of the domains of friendship and social etiquette rather than the domain of commercial sex work. The practice of introducing friends, especially among my older informants, is lodged within a larger collection of social practices and social relationships with deep cultural roots that can be summed up with the character li () (etiquette), which includes rules pertaining to the loyalty one owes to friends, the duty one owes to superiors, and the reciprocity one owes to those who have offered favors or gifts (Yang 1994). In such contexts, therefore, it might be more difficult for the friend who has been introduced to refuse practices like unprotected anal sex given the relationship of reciprocity he has with both his new friend and his old one, and the person to whom the friend was introduced might be more careful about engaging in practices that might impute spoiled identity onto his sexual partner (like suggesting condom use see below), for to do so would also risk the face of the friend who had done the introducing.

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7.6 Being a Quality Comrade

As in the official constructions of AIDS we have examined in previous chapters, all of the boundaries my informants appropriated to claim and impute individual and collective identities geographical boundaries, class boundaries, boundaries of education, sophistication, boundaries between those who sold their bodies () and those who simply accepted gifts from friends all intersect in a single cultural category, the category of quality (). Discussions of quality permeated almost every aspect of my informants lives. Many of their decisions about where to go, what to buy, with whom to associate and with whom to have sex (and how) centered around strategies for claiming and imputing various degrees of quality. As in official constructions, the notion of quality for my participants brought together traditional ideals of morality and filial piety, revolutionary ideals of patriotism and loyalty, and modern bourgeoisie ideals of technological advancement, style and wealth. One of my informants described quality like this:
A....... RJ A............ ....ah...... ...... ........ .... .. ........ . A: I think a persons 'quality' includes their thinking.. their educational (cultural) level.. also their moral standard.. combined together. RJ: Okay.. can you explain a bit more? A: Explain.. a person's thinking is his.. the boundaries of his thought. .it's a kind of level of thought.. and then.. I think educational level should be included as part of a person's 'quality'..

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especially now.. ah .. this kind of.. now the computers.. or a lot of technical things are things we need to study.. if you can't use these kinds of things.. then I think you're illiterate.. that's not to say you can't read.. but you can't use these tools.. tools that you must be able to use.. ha.. now another aspect.. a very important part of a person's 'quality' is their moral standard... in accordance with the behavioral standards of contemporary society.. this is very important.. and then there is his cultural level.. this is possibly.. also very important but.. but I myself think that the most important is his moral standard.

One of Rofels (1999) informants gives a similar analysis of the term, linking lack of quality (as we have seen time and time again) to people from the countryside.
Its a sweeping idea. It means your level, for example, your family environment, ever since you were a little child growing up, your educational environment, the people you have come into contact with these lead you to become a kind of person. [It means] how you interact with people, how you talk. Then people will have an evaluation of you. For example, there are a lot of people from the countryside who come to the city to work. Perhaps [one of them] is gay. He goes to Dong Dan Park because he needs to survive. He isnt willing to rely on his labor to earn money he goes this way to ask for money. A lot of people have a hard time accepting this. (466)

Also like constructions of quality in the other texts we have examined, quality was appropriated by my informants as a major tool for assessing the relative risk or safety of potential sexual partners (risk here including both the risk of being cheated or robbed and the risk of contracting an STD or HIV). The relationship between quality and possible HIV (or STD) infection centered on its association with characteristics like stability, knowledge and cleanliness, and of the association of lack of quality with ignorance, promiscuity and all of the transgressions of social, sexual and geographical boundaries associated with the floating population and those who were for sale.

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In discussions with my informants regarding how they assessed the relative quality of potential sexual partners, appearance, dress and hygiene were almost always the first things mentioned. One informant said:
....... .. .. .. ? I think it's a question of feelings.. right.. you talk.. but you can never be one hundred percent sure.. but the way I see it.. if I want to make love with someone.. I first have to consider this person.. see whether or not he is relatively strict with himself and clean.. right? (Beijing 1996-8)

Another admitted:
. . . . . . . . . . . . We think.. oh, you're so beautiful.. white skin.. it seems the clothes you are wearing are good.. or if you bathe frequently.. you're relatively cleaner.. it's not easy to get AIDS. (Fuzhou 1998-9)

And still another reported:

.. X .... In Fuzhou.. including X (another participant in the community).. he also says.. you can judge (whether they are infected with HIV) by whether or not the clothes they wear are clean and tasteful it makes a bit of sense, but not completely.. a bit though. (Fuzhou 2000-9)

Good grooming and nice clothes were seldom, however, sufficient to earn the label of a quality tongzhi, and some of my informants indicated that outward beauty and trendy, expensive clothes sometimes made them even more suspicious.24

24

One of my informants, for example, told me that he preferred fishing in public bathhouses because you could immediately judge the quality of a person by the underwear they wore. More expensive or imported underwear, however, did not signal to him high quality, but rather low quality (what high quality person would care so much about their underwear?). Another told me: Sometimes the more beautiful a person is the dirtier they are.. also the more money they have the dirtier they are.. because they can use their money to buy it (....) (Beijing 1997-11). 460

Another measure of quality frequently mentioned by my participants was knowledge or educational level, those with more education seen both as more desirable and safer:
.... .. .... .. You have to see if your partner's healthy.. you can tell from his skin.. you also have to look at his face.. does he have any education.. if this persons education is better.. or if he more gentile.. more civilized.. you can judge from this...you don't want to go with those money boys. (Fuzhou 1997-7)

Traditional values were also associated with quality, giving rise to situations in which married partners might even be considered more desirable than non-married ones:
. . m m . . . m m m. m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What he says is the most important. . mmm.. when he's talking you can find out his.. mmm moral standard and quality .. to take an example.. for example.. if a comrade says.. I really love my mother and father I.. I definitely have to get married even though I'm not willing I definitely have to get married.. because I love them.. it shows he has love.. he really loves his parents.. he has Chinas beautiful traditional morality.. this person.. his quality; is relatively high. (Fuzhou 1999-3)

Particularly notable in this excerpt are the collectivistic standards against which quality and desirability are measured in contrast to the individualistic standards valued in most gay communities in the West (honesty, authenticity). Whereas in the West social status is granted to those who are most willing to display their gay identity in public (even in the face of familial or societal rebuke), in China it is more likely to be granted to those who are able to gracefully enact tongzhi identity privately but publicly enact the identities of a good family man and a respectable citizen.

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Perhaps the most important marker of quality, and the one most directly related to decisions about sexual risk, is ones reputation in the community as either promiscuous () or not. Just as with conceptualizations of sex work, however, imputations of promiscuity are often not based solely on the number of sexual partners one has, but rather on the kinds of people with whom one associates, the places one visits and the ways one conducts and talks about sexual interactions. Perhaps the biggest irony associated with the cultural category of hua () (promiscuous) is its relationship with community participation and integration. It is often the case that the more fully one is integrated into communities of practice of MSM, the more one risks being assigned to the category of hua, whereas those who participate on the peripheries of such communities are sometimes considered less of a risk. One informant said, If you often show your face at these kinds of places (parks, bars and discos) they (potential sexual partners) will think that your quality is not high (..) (Beijing 1997-5). Another said:
........ ...... ...... .. OK First when youre talking to him.. you pay attention to whether or not he knows a lot of people in the circle.. or is very promiscuous (chaotic).. willing to make love with a lot of people.. in which case I wouldnt do it with him.. but.. if he doesnt come out much.. and hes relatively honest and innocent.. and moral.. not promiscuous.. doesnt accept money.. then OK, Id certainly be willing to make love with him. (Fuzhou 1997-7)

Consistent with observations about Chinese in other social contexts (Kleinman 1980, Mao 1994, Yang 1993), one of the most important factors governing the identities participants in the communities I observed had available to claim was the reputation (or
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lian ) they had earned during the period of their participation in the community. In such cases, as seen from the letter from the informant I discussed above, sexual practices can become tools in personal and community politics. Often judgments about the relative promiscuity of community members takes the form of narratives or nicknames which circulate among community members and become part of the community lore. One informant related this story:
. . Q . Q . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ' ' . . . . . . . . There was a really beautiful guy.. called AhQ.. we all called him AhQ.. but a lot of people weren't willing to make love with him.. he's really beautiful.. in the beginning everyone was really willing.. but because later everyone realized he was promiscuous.. then they gave him a nickname.. called him the no. 51 bus.. because in Fuzhou the no. 51 bus.. is really convenient.. which means anyone could 'take' him.. make love with him.. just too easy.. so because of this.. nobody likes him.(Fuzhou 1996-10)

Another marker of low quality in the domain of sexual practices which my informants mentioned, and also one with a direct impact on the conduct of sexual negotiation, was the explicit discussion of sexual practices, especially on the first meeting.
.... .. .. .. If he asks right away.. it really makes me feel uncomfortable.. for example.. can you be 'zero' I want to be 'one' ..I'd feel disgusted .. I'd think his 'quality' is low.. whether you are 'one' or 'zero' is a natural thing.. you shouldn't ask. (Fuzhou 1998-9)

The appropriation of the category of quality and all of the social boundaries that it draws as a resource for the imagination of individual and collective identities among MSM in China has a significant effect on the way they conduct their sexual negotiations.
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The negotiation of sex often becomes, in effect, a negotiation of quality, participants appropriating various cultural tools in an ongoing series of claims and imputations of education or ignorance, cleanliness or dirtiness, urban or rural origin, morality or promiscuity, and safety or risk. Not only do these claims and imputations of quality result in assigning social meaning to different kinds of practices and different kinds of people, but they also determine what other kinds of tools can be introduced into the situation and the meanings those tools carry. Within the boundaries appropriated from the Discourse of Civilization, for example, condom use, takes on shifting and ambiguous meanings. On the one hand, in some situations, or in abstract or hypothetical discussions, condom use can be a marker of high quality. One informant said:
........ Probably people with higher 'quality' will use condoms.. or say they don't like to do it.. if they don't use protective measures.. they will avoid .. anal sex.

Knowledge of condoms and safer sex as well can be used to display not just education but also modernity and sophistication. In the following excerpt, for example, an informant complains about the lack of condom consciousness among his fellow tongzhi, which for him seems to have more to do with brand recognition than with recognizing the risks of HIV infection.
.. .. Durex .... Durex...... .. Sometimes Ill ask some tongzhi...Ill ask them what brand do they like.. for example I like to use Durex.. they have no idea.. they dont know what Durex is.. they just buy what they can get their

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hands on.. and thats it.. they just think the imported ones are of better quality.. this is the extent of their condom consciousness. (Fuzhou 2000-7)

On the other hand, claims and imputations of quality made through such displays are also often seen as reasons to dispense with condom use. In fact, only a handful of the men I interviewed reported actually using condoms always or even often in their sexual encounters.25 The reason they gave most consistently was that they felt if they chose quality partners, condom use was unnecessary:
. . . . . . . . . I know how to use it.. but I've never used one before.. I don't think I need to.. because Im relatively careful.. relatively careful in choosing partners

In some situations, if fact, initiating condom use was seen as more of a risk than not using condoms, a threat to the positive face of both participants. So, while outside of sexual encounters talking about condoms might be used to claim or impute quality, within sexual encounters their use is seen as claiming or imputing risky identities
. . . . . . . . . . When two people are together.. and they like each other.. you cant use this (a condom).. if you use it it means you doubt your partner.. or you doubt yourself.

Another informant said:

............ ........ If I like my partner.. it feels strange to use this (a condom).. it gives the feeling that you dont trust me.. you think Im dirty.. and if you reverse it..no.. youre not dirty.. I just want to protect you.. then Im dirty.. this is the most important reason (Fuzhou 1997-7)

Such threats to claims of quality are even more problematic when love (or the promise of love) is involved. In this regard, the strategy of being a quality comrade by

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establishing a long term relationship based on love and trust which is advocated in health promotion materials for gay men (and by the men themselves) can work against the adoption of safer practices, unsafe sex itself being sometimes seen as a tool for establishing these kinds of relationships and maintaining them. In such cases, as has been observed elsewhere (see for example Edgar et al. 1992, Keogh et al. 1998, Jones, Yu and Candlin 2000, Rosenthal et al. 1999), sexual risk has a functional dimension, not using condoms seen as signaling trust, commitment and fidelity:
If I'm with the person I like the most.. I really believe him.. then I won't use a condom. (Beijing 1997-7)

At the same time, even though, as I stated above, knowledge of condoms (more as an accessory than as a tool for safer sex) can sometimes be used to claim quality, talking about condoms and safer sex too much can also negatively affect ones claims to quality in communities and in sexual interactions. This is particularly true when people are perceived to know too much or to be too interested in the issue of AIDS. Several of my informants told me that implementing peer education programs in their communities might be difficult since no one they knew in the community would be willing to take on the identity of an AIDS expert with the kinds of preoccupations and experiences it might imply. Others were afraid that displaying concern about AIDS could only result in further stigmatization of tongzhi and frequently when I brought up the issue of AIDS my informants reminded me that gay does not equal AIDS. Those who seek to build spaces for gay men in China and advocate for their rights through appropriating the safer frame of AIDS prevention (such as Zhang Beichuan and Wan Yanhai) (Tsang
25

In a survey conducted in the early nineties, only 6% of the MSM interviewed reported using condoms 466

2000, Zhang 1998a, b) are, as Leong (1995) calls it, walking a tightrope between the legitimatization that AIDS brings and the stigmatization that it brings.

7.7 Imaginary Protections and Imagined Communities

In this chapter I have shown how the appropriation of voices from the Discourse of Civilization into public discourse about homosexuality and the everyday conversations of tongzhi themselves is implicated in the formation of what Mends-Leite (1998) calls imaginary protections, boundaries communities and individuals create through reassigning meaning to official knowledge about AIDS in ways which conform more closely to the demands of their social lives. Among the imaginary protections constructed by my participants with tools from the Discourse of Civilization were the belief AIDS is more a matter of who you are or who you appear to be than what you do and that AIDS can be avoided by avoiding certain kinds of people and avoiding claiming certain kinds of social identities for oneself. The result of these imaginary protections is not just increased vulnerability to HIV by the men who appropriate them, but also the same kinds of discrimination and stigmatization within MSM communities (along the lines of class, education and geographical origin) which MSM suffer at the hands the larger society (Rofel 1999). While these voices from the Discourse of Civilization are used to construct imaginary protections, they are also, however, central to the imagination of community. The imaginary protections that make men more vulnerable to HIV are at the same time tools with which spaces for community empowerment are opened up and claims of cultural-citizenship are made, as well as tools with which individuals manage social
(Leicester 1993). 467

stigmatization, build self esteem and reconcile the demands of being a tongzhi with the demands of membership in the other communities (the family, the nation) in which they participate. This is not a contradiction, but an inherent characteristic of imaginary protections. Mends-Leite emphasizes that what distinguishes imaginary protections is not their irrationality but their rationality, although it is a rationality based on daily experiences and immediate social needs rather than scientific facts. She writes:
imaginary protection strategies do not imply that the individuals affected do not know about or do not believe in the effectiveness of HIV prevention. On the contrary, faced with the social demand to rationalize (sexual) behaviors and practices perceived by most as belonging to a natural or even instinctive framework, people create cultural responses which allow for both the preferred sexual practice and protection against HIV. (110)

While Mende-Leite, sees imaginary protections as a matter of individual cognition (a way of reducing cognitive dissonance), my data suggests (along the same lines taken by Douglas and Calvez 1990) that the most important dimension in the formation of imaginary protections is the social dimension. Imaginary protections can never really be separated from the imagination of community. All imagined communities, in a sense, are built from imaginary protections. Being a quality tongzhi in China may in many ways make MSM there more vulnerable to HIV infection, but in many other ways, it provides them tools with which to effectively minimize other risks (arrest, blackmail) and to manage their participation in overlapping communities of practice. In many ways, imaginary protections are responses to invented risks, not just the risks tongzhi themselves invent around money boys and people from the countryside, but also responses to the risks official discourse invents around MSM. The imaginary protections

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tongzhi build around themselves with the Discourse of Civilization may not protect them against AIDS, but they may in some ways protect them from being cast as the diseased Other as their communities take their first tentative steps towards legitimacy.

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Cite as: Jones, Rodney H. (2002) Mediated discourse and sexual risk: Discourses of sexuality and AIDS in the Peoples Republic of China. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Chapter Eight Mediated Action in HIV Research and Prevention

8.1 Action as Cartography
Throughout this thesis I have been preoccupied with boundaries, both physical and discursive: the boundaries between geographical regions (especially that between the city and the countryside), between communities and classes, between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, the civilized and the uncivilized, and most important, the boundary of the nation itself, that which separates being Chinese from being Other. Every action is in a sense an act of maneuvering the social self within these multiple and overlapping boundaries of community and identity by appropriating the cultural tools made available in the socio-cultural environment. On the one hand, these boundaries are fixed and policed by powerful Discourses, which emanate from and serve the interests of dominant communities and institutions within the society. On the other hand, however, within every action there is the potential for what we might call subversive cartography, for undermining, transgressing or redrawing boundaries, if only slightly, if only for a moment, through the strategic appropriation of the resources of the very Discourses which police these boundaries.

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Understanding action around HIV and sexual risk, I have suggested, requires examining the ways it is embedded both in the boundaries set by dominant Discourses and in the tactics (ji) through which individuals and emergent communities appropriate and adapt these boundaries to meet particular social goals, and, in so doing, imagine new forms of social identity and social practice. Sexual risk always involves both a macro and a micro dimension, embodying the tension between the possibilities for social action offered by the cultural toolkits society makes available and the ongoing series of identity claims and imputations that constitutes situated social interaction. In the context of the sexual transmission of HIV in China, especially among emergent communities of MSM, I have shown how the negotiation of sexual encounters is influenced by the standardization of practices and identities imposed by the dominant Discourses in society, particularly what we have been calling the Discourse of Civilization, with its cultural categories of stability, knowledge, civility, and quality ( ). At the same time, I have shown how individuals and groups which are marginalized by these Discourses find ways to subvert the technologies of control imposed on them, constructing themselves as legitimate cultural citizens and opening up spaces for both collective social action and individual sexual action. The effect of this interplay between culture and the ways it is strategically appropriated into sites of engagement is complex, sometimes amplifying peoples ability to protect themselves from HIV by, for example, increasing official willingness to engage in and support prevention programs for MSM and strengthening community networks through which AIDS prevention messages are circulated, and sometimes limiting participation by, for example, giving rise to imaginary protections and a sense of invulnerability. The paradox of HIV prevention

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for MSM in China is that, on the one hand it requires that MSM claim for themselves safe identities, identities that situate the homosexual person within cultural boundaries of civility, propriety and normality, and, on the other hand, the actions that tongzhi engage in, both collectively and individually to claim safe identities can sometimes result in unsafe practices. AIDS in China is a site of discursive contestation, one at which various Discourses construct competing representations of the virus and the people and practices associated with it, and the way individuals construct their identities and conduct their interaction in relation to the issue depends on the way they position themselves among these contradictory Discourses and in relation to larger social groups and the culture as a whole.

8.2 A Map for HIV Research and Prevention

In describing the cartography of AIDS in China, I have also created my own tentative map for crossing the boundaries that separate individualistic and cultural approaches to HIV research and prevention. In many ways this map is similar to those drawn by other explorers of the terrain of discourse and social practice (Bourdieu 1977, Candlin 2000, de Certeau 1984, Fairclough 1992a, Gee 1996, 1999, Halliday 1978, Hymes 1986, Layder 1993, Scollon 1998a, 2000). It is not meant to replace these other maps so much as to highlight different aspects of the terrain and to suggest alternate routes to the goal of understanding the relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity. Figure 8.1 is a schematic representation of this map. It should be stressed that what I have drawn here should by no means be seen as attempting to fully represent the complexity of social life and situated action. It is not a picture of reality. Like the
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representations of the practice of AIDS prevention I examined in chapter five, it makes some aspects of social action criterial and ignores others. It is hoped, however, that what is made criterial can provide a set of useful signposts, suggesting directions researchers might take in their quest to understand the conduct and the causes of HIV related risk behavior and prevention workers might take in working to amplify peoples ability to protect themselves against HIV.

Fig. 8.1 A Map for HIV Social Research

The validity of any theory of discourse and social life lies in part in how well it can account for the ways linguistic elements and themes converge in the data both on the level of the text (or social interaction) and on the level of the broader social aspects of its use (Fairclough 1992a, Gee 1999). The real test for the validity of any map of this type, however, is whether it gets us where we want to go, whether the dimensions of social
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action, the themes, motifs and conjunctures that it reveals are of practical use in helping us to understand and solve the problem at hand, in this case the sexual transmission of HIV. Every map may not be useful for every situation. Some parts of my theory may prove more or less relevant to different contexts and different purposes. Instead of seeing it as a set of guidelines for HIV research and prevention, it is better to see it as a set of principles, a sensitizing device (Layder 1993: 195), a tool which, like all tools has its own inherent set of constraints and affordances. According to Gee (1999), a good model must always be both reflective and flexible. Being reflective involves the acknowledgement among researchers and prevention workers that they, as much as those they are serving, are embedded in a social world and that the way they think and talk about this world is contingent on their own professional storylines and the storylines of the communities of practice they participate in. Being flexible means remembering that the tools and methods we develop must change as they are adapted to specific issues, problems and contexts. The principles of Mediated Discourse Analysis, I have argued, provide one way in which researchers and prevention workers can come to terms with these dual demands of reflexivity and flexibility. It gives a way, in both research and practice, to cross disciplinary boundaries and view phenomena from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Mediated Discourse Analysis is a nexus of practice where different tools and methods from various schools of linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology converge. It allows us to mold our approach to the demands of different research sites and research purposes, at one moment appropriating one set of tools (with its set of constraints and affordances) and at another moment drawing on a different set of tools (with different constraints and affordances). In

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this way, what we do when we do research or do prevention is not much different from what those we are observing are doing, piecing together scraps of the social world in strategic ways to perform situated actions that meet situated goals. HIV research and prevention from the perspective I have argued for in this thesis is a matter of seeing risk behavior as social practice always situated in both the context of the immediate setting with its unique interactional demands and constraints and the context of the larger socio-cultural environment. This approach shifts attention away from individual cognitive decision making and sweeping generalizations about the attitudes and behavior of entire groups and towards the actions that people take and the media through which they take them. It asks many of the same questions that AIDS researchers and prevention workers have been asking for years, questions like: What is the impact of the cultural tools individuals have available to them at any given moment (condoms, facts about transmission, attitudes about vulnerability) and their likelihood of engaging in risky behavior or their ability to mitigate risks? What is the relationship between the context of sexual behavior (or site of engagement), where it takes place, when, with whom, and what it means to participants, and the conduct of sexual behavior, whether, for example, condoms are used? How does public discourse, the mass media, AIDS prevention materials, the stories and rumors that spread through communities, and the systems of values and human relationships (Discourses) they invoke affect what people know about AIDS, what they think about it and what they do about it? And finally, what is the role of community in AIDS prevention; how do the ways and the degree to which people participate in various social groups, both those physically bounded by time and space and symbolic groups and institutions, affect the kinds of

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cultural tools, social practices and social identities they have available to them to take action around AIDS and sex? Rather than seeing these as separate questions, however, my approach sees them as interrelated within the cyclical process of the technologization and appropriation of social identity and social practice. This process, I have argued, involves the continual interplay among four dimensions of social life: the Discourses or cultural toolkits of the society, which define legitimate relationships among discourse, social practice and social identity, the cultural tools (most importantly, the various ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being) which these Discourses make available for social action, the communities and institutions which invent these tools and through which they circulate, and the sites of engagement into which individuals appropriate these tools to serve specific purposes. What holds together these four dimensions are the processes, recreated in every moment of social interaction, of technologization (through which ways of saying, social practices and communities are invented), standardization (through which conventions of tool use are enforced within communities), appropriation (through which individuals choose and mix these tools to perform mediated actions), and invocation and participation (through which mediated actions in situated circumstances are linked both to larger communities and ideologies and used to construct situated identities and situated relationships). Running through all of these dimensions, the dimension of communities, of cultural tools, of Discourses and of sites of engagement, is a fifth dimension: the dimension of history. This dimension is there to remind us that any observation of what is going on either on the level of culture or on the level of situated social interaction is an

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observation of a process rather than of a set of traits or characteristics or qualities. History is the temporal dimension through which all of the other elements move (Layder 1993), and as they move through history, whether it be the history of the nation, the history of a particular community, the history of a relationship between two people, or the history of a particular moment of social interaction, they change. For researchers this means that all analyses are contingent on historical circumstances and must be constantly open to revision. It also means that artifacts like the texts I have examined in the preceding chapters cannot be practically separated from the historical conditions of their use. It is no good just analyzing tools (such as AIDS prevention pamphlets) as things divorced from action, or practices (like using or not condoms) outside of the contexts in which they are performed. It is in the area of prevention, however, that understanding the dynamic flow of meaning, practice and social identity is the most crucial, for in this dynamic flow lies the answers to how risky behavior develops in a community and in the lives of individuals, and how health promotion and interventions can influence this development. Following this map, I have explored the Discourses that are invoked in discourse about AIDS in China, noting how the Conversation between those adopting a more revolutionary approach to AIDS prevention (attempting to change peoples behavior to conform to moral/political standards) and those adopting a more reformist line (attempting to devise solutions on the basis of peoples behavior) is mediated through a third approach, the Discourse of Civilization, with its capacity to make moral, medical, marketplace and Party voices sing in chorus. I have shown how the cultural tools of this

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Discourse, the ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being it makes available, are used in public discourse to construct particular kinds of identities and practices around HIV transmission and prevention, identities and practices which allow some kinds of social actions and social identities and marginalize others. I have also shown, however, how those who are marginalized by this Discourse strategically mobilize tools from it in order to carve out legitimate social spaces for themselves, and how individuals within these marginalized communities also appropriate these tools into specific sites of engagement to take strategic action around social relationships and sex. Most importantly, I have shown how the tools appropriated and identities claimed to make some sets of social actions possible, such as avoiding arrest or discovery, avoiding being blackmailed or robbed, gaining legitimate access to certain public spaces and imagining communities, can at the same time introduce constraints when it comes to the negotiation of safer sex. There are a number of assumptions about the way HIV related research and prevention should be carried out and about what people are doing when they are doing risky behavior that this approach, if not calling into question, at least provides a new perspective on. The first is the problematic relationship between social practices and social identities. This and other research into the social aspects of AIDS clearly shows how the technologization of social identities around risk practices not only works to stigmatize certain segments of the population but also to create situations wherein safer sex is seen more as a matter of whom you have sex with rather than the kind of sex that you have. Mediated Discourse Analysis, however, suggests that, even if we try, we can never really separate social identity from social practices, and just as dominant groups use conjunctures between practice and identity to marginalize other groups, such

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conjunctures are also used by marginalized groups to resist marginalization and imagine their own empowerment. On the level of social interaction (and sexual negotiation) practices are always indexical of identities. Using a condom, engaging in anal sex, talking about past sexual experiences or present wants, displaying knowledge or ignorance, fear or complacency about AIDS, and all of the other practices which can affect HIV risk behavior all constitute particular claims and imputations of identity in different situations. Approaches which preach treating every partner the same in regard to safer sex may not be particularly effective when practices of safer (or unsafer) sex are themselves tools which participants appropriate to show each other who they are and what their relationship is. Practices are by their nature social, ways of displaying how we are membered in a larger social world. The second assumption that this research calls attention to is that sexual risk is always or often a matter of deficiencies or obstacles and that effective AIDS prevention is chiefly a matter of curing deficiencies (through such things as injections of AIDS knowledge) or removing obstacles. The reports of my informants, however, suggest that risk behavior is often a matter not of deficiencies or barriers, but a matter of stratagems, and that more often than not sexual risk itself has a functional dimension (see also Edgar et al. 1992, Keogh et al. 1998, Rosenthal et. al 1999). This insight reveals the limitations of approaches which focus on eliminating risky behavior without attempting to understand the kinds of social actions and social identities such behavior makes possible. It also suggests that the answer to risk behavior may not lie so much in trying to eliminate or change it as in helping people to find alternate ways that the social functions fulfilled by risk behavior can be addressed.

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8.3 Exploring AIDS

More than anything else, the map that I outlined above is meant to provide a series of questions which we can use to investigate our own practices as AIDS researchers and prevention workers. It provides a variety of routes through which the needs of particular groups of research participants or clients and the contingencies of particular contexts of research or intervention can be explored. The way the four continents of communities, cultural tools, Discourses and sites of engagement are traveled will be different for different researchers and prevention workers. Some might enter through the dimensions of Discourses or cultural tools, focusing on the larger ideological forces in the society and the ways they conspire to construct a certain kind of AIDS, which is contracted by certain kinds of people performing certain kinds of practices, or on the constraints and affordances embedded in the tools (both technological and psychological) provided by these Discourses. Others may begin at sites of engagement, analyzing the moment by moment mechanics of social and sexual interaction, and still others might begin by exploring social groups, communities and sexual networks for answers to why people engage in risk behavior. No matter what dimension one begins with, however, successfully answering the questions raised in one dimension invariably requires that we cross over into the other dimensions. Successful research and prevention requires that no one aspect of this map be privileged above others, but rather that the macro and the micro dimensions of social life, the community and the individual, the Discourse and the word, the history and the moment are all seen as part of the same process. In the end, what we are really trying to understand is not any single dimension, but rather the dynamic relationships of appropriation, invocation,

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participation, technologization and standardization which hold these dimensions together and determine whether and how peoples ability to protect themselves against HIV is amplified or constrained. 8.3.1 Exploring Communities Perhaps the most important things researchers and prevention workers can explore are the communities they have invented to study or to serve. To say that the social groupings we conceptualize in research projects and prevention programs are essentially inventions does not make them any less real, any more than saying that imagined communities are merely imagined makes them any less important. The essential question is really how useful our inventions are. Inventions always make some aspects of the phenomenon criterial and hide other aspects from view, and so we must ask to what extent the aspects of this particular group of people which our inventions of them make salient are those which are relevant to our research or prevention goals. At the same time, we must aspire to understand how (and if) these communities exist apart from our inventions of them: are they merely groups of people who do things together, or have they taken on symbolic meaning for members? What effect does the ongoing process of imagining community have on the cultural tools available for individual members to protect themselves against AIDS and on our own ability to assist them in doing so? How do community norms, roles, and power relationships act to either limit or amplify participation in AIDS prevention, allowing some social identities and social practices and branding others as deviant or risky? In short, what parts of themselves do our subjects or clients themselves make criterial when they imagine themselves as part of a community?
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Most importantly, we should ask how the communities we study and serve exist not just in the minds of their members but also in their actions. How do particular acts of appropriation become ways of belonging to a community? How is participation claimed and imputed through mediated action, and how is the community itself, whether it be a group of friends, the tongzhi community, or the imagined community of the nation or race, itself used as a cultural tool to claim and impute identity and to negotiate sexual safety or risk? Finally, we must explore the relationship the communities we are studying or serving have with other communities, and at the multiple membership individuals in these communities have in different communities. As I have shown, ways of belonging in these different communities may not always be compatible, and attempts to reconcile participation in multiple communities (being a husband and father and being a tongzhi, for example), can affect the actions people take around HIV and the strategies that might be successful in helping them avoid it. 8.3.2 Exploring Cultural Tools Since communities grow out of tool use and claims and imputations of participation are achieved through the appropriation of tools, questions about communities invariably lead researchers and prevention workers to questions about the cultural tools that these communities make available to members. The obvious question to ask about cultural tools is how they can limit or amplify participation in AIDS prevention by members. At the same time, we must remember that constraints and affordances lie not just in tools, but also in the circumstances of their use. Tools which prevention workers might assume would naturally amplify participation in AIDS
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prevention might be appropriated in ways which actually limit it, and tools which limit participation in some ways might amplify it in others. In fact, one of the limitations of many current approaches to AIDS prevention (such as the use a condom every time approach) is that they focus almost exclusively on tools without sufficiently considering the contingencies of their use and the multiple purposes to which they are put. The tool of AIDS knowledge, for example, may amplify participation in AIDS prevention when used to assess the relative risk of various sexual practices in a given situation, but when used to claim or impute the identity of one who is knowledgeable it can sometimes interfere with the rational assessment of HIV risk. Most research focusing on cultural tools has given primacy to technological tools (like condoms) or cognitive tools (like knowledge of the routes of transmission). The model I am proposing widens our view of cultural tools to include ways of saying, speech genres and social languages through which people and groups construct the world and organize social interaction, ways of doing, the social practices that grow up within communities and come to be emblematic of participation in them, and ways of being, the various social identities that communities make available for members to take up, each with different sets of rights and responsibilities, privileges and sanctions both within and outside of the community. As a linguist, I have been primarily concerned in this thesis with ways of saying, the discursive tools that people mobilize in interaction about AIDS, including broader forms of talk (speech genres and social languages) through which texts and interaction are organized, as well as the more delicate tools of lexical choice, transitivity, modality, set expressions (tifa) and the procedural rules that govern different forms of

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communication. It is these kinds of cultural tools that are often ignored by researchers and prevention workers who, when they do concern themselves with language often limit their concern to things like the slang expressions different groups use when they talk about sexual practices. As I have attempted to demonstrate, however, discourse has consequences on social and sexual interaction that go far beyond the meanings we assign to the words we use or issues like whether or not people talk about AIDS with their partners or avoid talking about it. Discourse plays a central role in constructing in interaction around sex and HIV related risk certain kinds of relationships between interlocutors, a certain kind of world of people, tools and actions, and, ultimately, a certain kind of AIDS. Attention to the linguistic and discursive resources people have to draw upon when they take action around AIDS and the representations of their world and themselves they construct with these resources can provide valuable insights into how and why, in particular communities, certain kinds of practices and certain kinds of identities become associated with HIV transmission or disassociated from it. Ways of saying, ways of doing and ways of being cannot really be treated as separate. Who we are as social beings is completely contingent on what we say and what we do. Thus understanding social practices and social identity requires understanding how they are produced and reproduced in discourse, and understanding how people talk about AIDS (and how prevention workers can talk more successfully about it) requires understanding how discourse invokes social practices and enacts social identities. This in fact, as we have argued throughout this thesis, may be among the most important tasks of research into the social aspects of AIDS: explicating the relationship between what is said (or written) about it in the media, health promotion materials and in daily life, what

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people do about it, and who they are trying to be when they are engaging in these sayings and doings. In exploring this relationship, we are inevitably led to questions about the systems which regulate allowable sayings, doings and beings in social groups and societies, what we have been calling Discourses. 8.3.3 Exploring Discourses Attention to Discourses might seem something rather removed from the immediate concerns of many AIDS researchers and prevention workers, more the province of cultural critics like those we discussed in chapter one. As I have shown time and time again, however, it is impossible to interpret the things people say about AIDS, the practices that they construct around it and the ways they claim and impute identities of risk or safety without reference to the larger ideological systems from which they borrow cultural tools and rules about their use. Discourses are the systems that make mediated actions recognizable as indexing certain practices and social identities (Gee 1996. 1999). They are ultimately what make some versions of AIDS possible in a society and others less so by regulating the relationship among discourse, social practice and social identity in ways that technologize certain kinds of people and practices as safe and others as risky. At the same time, as I have shown, understanding the effect of Discourses on situated social action is extremely complex, first because in any society (and available to any individual) there are likely to be a number of dominant Discourses which interact and compete with one another, second because in any social interaction individuals are likely to give voice to more than one Discourse, and finally because Discourses themselves are

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extremely malleable, always changing as they come into contact with other Discourses and adapt themselves to changing social conditions. Perhaps Discourses are the closest we come in our model to the idea of culture. The advantage of a perspective which sees culture as a dynamic and contingent Conversation among the various Discourses in the society, rather than a reified set of characteristics groups of people possess is that it reminds us of the heteroglossic nature of culture and the multiplicity of tools people have available to them and helps us to avoid the stereotyping that ultimately results in seeing culture as something that resides inside of people. Attention to Discourses can also help us to understand how actions around HIV expand beyond the contexts in which they are taken, how they give voice to broader ideas about what is good or bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral and normal or abnormal and link people in complex ways to communities and institutions in their society. Examining the conjunctures among tools, actions and social actors constructed in Discourses can help us understand the mechanics through which attitudes and practices around AIDS come into being and come to exert pressures for conformity on individuals. I have also stressed, however, that Discourses are not deterministic of behavior. While they provide the terrain upon which action is taken around AIDS and define the boundaries that separate the safe from the risky, the ways individuals travel this terrain and negotiate these boundaries is highly variable, depending on peoples individual histories, social goals and the sites of engagement within which these Discourses are given voice to.

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8.3.4 Exploring Sites of Engagement One of the most important points I have made in this thesis is that the effect cultural tools have on behavior depends crucially on the sites of engagement they are borrowed into. The ability any tool has to either increases or decreases an individuals vulnerability to HIV is contingent on the context in which it is used, the tools that are appropriated along with it, the goals it is appropriated in the service of, the procedural rules governing the activity it is being used in, and the people who use it (including the personal and cultural storylines they share). Unfortunately, much of the research on risk behavior over the last twenty years has focused on isolating factors (tools, practices and social identities) from sites of engagement rather than examining the processes through which they are mobilized in real life (Bochow 1990, 1998, Gold and Skinner, Keogh et al. 1998, Rofes 1999, Turner 1997). When sites of engagement are examined, it is usually under the label of setting, focusing on the physical contingencies (private or public, for example) rather than those aspects of sites of engagement which are created moment by moment by participants through their mobilization of cultural tools and procedural rules to frame what they are doing and position themselves in regard to the activity and to their interlocutors (Keogh and Holland 1999). Sites of engagement are important, then, not just because of the constraints and affordances different settings and different procedural rules introduce into sexual negotiation, but also because of what they can tell us about the stratagems (ji) that individuals and communities develop over time to overcome barriers to certain social actions through creating creative conjunctures of tools from different Discourses to fit the

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contingencies of different sites of engagement. Understanding the mechanics of ji is particularly important for prevention workers, who themselves must often, as I have shown in chapter six, engage in their own stratagems to overcome the barriers imposed by the sites of engagement in which their interventions take place. The most important thing we can observe at sites of engagement is how the appropriation of cultural tools for AIDS prevention is always something that must be negotiated through an ongoing process of claiming and imputing identity, a process which is inherently inferential and directed towards multiple and sometimes contradictory goals. All actions around AIDS, whether they be those involved in engaging in sexual interaction or those involved in delivering AIDS prevention messages, are always acts of identity, and, whether or not a sexual interaction is safe or risky or a prevention message is accepted or rejected depends on the course of the moment-by-moment negotiation about who we are that constitutes all social interaction. Attending to the dynamic and procedural nature of sites of engagement can also help us to understand how one action, and the claims and imputations of identity embodied in it, propels participants into subsequent actions and subsequent claims and imputations of identity in what Scollon (2000) calls the funnel of commitment. Claims and imputations of quality made by gay men fishing in public parks in China during initial stages of interaction, for example might make condom use more difficult to introduce or seem less necessary later in the interaction. Whether or not two people have safe or unsafe sex together begins to be determined at the moment they say hello. Thus, just as attention to communities leads us naturally to questions about the cultural tools that circulate within them and the Discourses from which these tools come,

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and just as attention to cultural tools leads us naturally to questions about how they are actually used in real situations, attention to sites of engagement naturally leads us back to the exploration of communities, highlighting their existence not as stable, bounded entities but as processes that are negotiated moment by moment through mediated actions.

8.4 The Ji of AIDS Prevention

In this thesis I have attempted to show how the tools of linguistics and discourse analysis can help us to bridge the disciplinary divide that separates approaches to the study of social life which focus on the individual and those which focus on culture. I have advanced certain theories about the ways, as Gee (1999: 13) puts it, humans integrate language with non-language stuff, such as different ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols, tools, and objects in the right places and at the right times so as to enact and recognize different identities and activities. I have also aimed to demonstrate through the close analysis of different kinds of texts and interactions how tools from different schools of linguistics and discourse analysis can be mobilized to help explain why, in particular situations, people act as they do in response to the threat of HIV transmission. Finally, I have aimed, through my analysis of the discursive topography of HIV/AIDS in China and the routes communities and individuals travel through this topography, to show how complex the issue of culture and its relationship to HIV transmission and prevention really is. What I advocate in this thesis, though, is not so much a particular set of analytical techniques. Indeed, most AIDS researchers and prevention workers are neither equipped nor inclined to engage in the kind of close analysis of texts and interactions set out here. Instead, what I advocate is a particular perspective on HIV related sexual risk which sees
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it as embedded both in the broader ideological Conversations that take place within and among communities and institutions and the situated conversations people engage in with one another in real time. For HIV researchers and prevention workers, this perspective can suggest ways to go beyond models of risk behavior that see it as either a matter of individual knowledge or competence or of community norms and values, and explore the consequences of the dynamic interplay between the ways identities and practices are technologized around AIDS in communities and societies and the stratagems people use when they appropriate these identities and practices into real situations in the service of multiple goals. The essence of researching risk and formulating effective interventions is understanding the workings of ji () (stratagems) in social interaction, why people employ them and the kinds of social actions and social identities they make possible. This perspective invites us to view risk behavior through the logic of the lived experiences of communities and their members. The most important point AIDS researchers and prevention workers can take from this approach, however, is the awareness that we too are engaged in mediated action, and that the cultural tools we have available to us, the ways of thinking and talking about AIDS, the practices that grow up within our communities, and the identities we claim and impute when we go about our work, limit us in important ways. At the same time, we also have available to us the ability to mix these tools in creative ways to overcome barriers. The more we retreat into our own disciplines and protect the boundaries of our own territories, however, the less able we are to form the strategic conjunctures through which new and more effective methods of research and intervention can be

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formulated. Effective HIV research and prevention takes place at a nexus of practice (Scollon 2000), which brings together discourse, practices and people in ways which amplify opportunities for imagining, both in our own communities and in those which we seek to serve.

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Zheng Xiwen () (2000, January 31) How far is AIDS from us? ( ?). Science and Technology Daily (). Retrieved March 14, 2000 from the World Wide Web: http://www.aizhi.org Zhu B.X. (1999, August 10) Beijing And Shanghai Acquire Condom Machines. China Daily. Retrieved September 12, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www. chinadaily.com.cn/cndydb/1999/08/10.html Zhu Qi (1990) HIV is nothing, health behaviour is everything: An oriental view of AIDS. Paper presented at the First Sino-American Symposium of the Management of HIV Disease, 8-9 November, Beijing. Zhu Qi () (1997a, December 12) Questioning condoms: The condom debate 1 ( ) Southern Weekend (). Retrieved September 24, 1998 from the World Wide Web: http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/today/gb/zm/ Zhu Qi ( ) (1997b) Concerning the terms sex worker, sex partner and sexual liberation ("", ", "" ). Sexology () 6(1):33. Zhu Qi () (1997c) Chinas traditional culture is the foundation of the strategy for AIDS prevention and control ( ). A paper delivered at the China-Hong Kong Meeting on AIDS ( ), 24-26 May, Beijing. Zhu Xin () (1998) Gay club ( ). Guiyang (): Guizhou Peoples Publishing House (). Zhu, Y.S. (1985) Modality and modulation in Chinese. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 8 (1): 50-60. Zhu, Y.S. (1996) Modality and modulation in Chinese. In M. Berry, C.S. Butler, R.P. Fawcett and Huang Guowen (eds.) Meaning and form: Systemic functional interpretations: Meaning and choice in language: Studies for Michael Halliday. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 183-209. Zhuan Jinghua (ed.) ( ) (1999) Sex education made simple () Beijing (): Annals of Chinese Medicine Publishing House (). Zinchenko, V.P. (1985). Vygotskys ideas about units of analysis for the analysis of mind. In J.V. Wertsch (ed.) Culture, communication and cognition: Vygotskyian perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 94-118.

Appendix1
Summary of Corpus of Public Discourse Public Discourse: Primary Sources
Pamphlets Books 50 AIDS education pamphlets from all over China, produced by Government departments and NGOs. 200 pages and chapters from 22 titles, including medical and scientific texts, sex education texts, social science texts and popular books about AIDS and sex (see for example Ceng and Ren 1997, Fang 1995a, b, Jin and Sun 1995, Liu ed. 1993a, Sun 1999, Yang and Fang 1994). 15 official government documents including documents for external consumption (see for example China Ministry of Health and UNAIDS 1997) and internal use (see for example China Ministry of Health et. al 1998). 120 AIDS related articles from newspapers and magazines published between January 1998 and December 1999, some collected during the course of my fieldwork, and others taken from published collections, archives (such as that maintained by Aizhi Action, www.aizhi.sis.com.cn), or retrieved through Internet searches (see for example Beijing Municipal Hygiene Department et al. 1998, China is no longer a pure land 1998, Liu 1998). Transcripts of nine episodes of Life Hotline (), Beijing Radio 88 mgHz ( 88 mgHz). Examples of articles from scholarly journals on AIDS/STD treatment and prevention, sexology, and medicine; transcripts of discussions and debates which occurred at academic and scientific conferences on AIDS prevention (see for example Zhang 1996, Zhu 1997b). Various Internet home pages from government bodies, hospitals and nongovernmental (or semi-non-governmental) organizations, universities; examples of websites and chatrooms for men who have sex with men, and 50 postings on an AIDS related electronic bulletin board administered by the Guangzhou Union Medical University (bbs.gzums.edu.cn) (see for example Guangzhou Comrade 2000, Sir China 2000). Various advertisements and package labels from such products as condoms, VCDs, and anti-viral sprays and ointments. 180 scanned images from pamphlets, books, conference programs, product labels, posters, newspapers and magazines.

Government Documents

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Radio Broadcasts Academic Discourse

Computer Mediated Discourse

Commercial Discourse Images

535

Appendix 3
A. Scrupulously Observing Sexual Morality is the Miracle Cure for AIDS ( )
Li Chuanjun ( ) (1996, December 8) Scrupulously observing moral integrity is the miracle cure for AIDS (). Health Counseling News ( ), 8.

, 1996 9 12 1 2 1981---(AIDS 3 ) 4 . 5 ? 6 7 ? 8 90% 9 10 10% 11 12 13 14 15 16 ? 17 18 RNADNA 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 ; 26 . 27 28 29 30

Health Counseling News (8/12/96) Scrupulously Observing Sexual Morality is the Miracle Cure for AIDS Since the 1981 discovery by Americans of a new kind of sexually transmitted disease--AIDS-caused widespread concern in every country in the world, people from all sectors have come up with all kinds of measures and means to prevent the spread of AIDS. The situation shows that different people always have different points of view (lit. the benevolent see benevolence, the wise see wisdom). Can Condoms Prevent AIDS? One point of view assumes that the use of condoms can prevent AIDS? Is this really the case? Because it is easy for condoms to break or slip off, presently their use in family planning is only 90% effective. Therefore, the use of condoms to prevent AIDS is not completely reliable.

Since the AIDS virus is much smaller than a sperm, it can invade the body through the small wounds that occur when any part of the body is rubbed. So to use an unreliable method which fails more than 10% of the time as a way to prevent this so called super cancer--AIDS-isnt that like gambling with a human life? In Western society where promiscuity is rampant, and extramarital sex and infection with the AIDS virus are both a considered a matter of individual privacy, using condoms can at one level reduce the chances of transmission -- in this situation there is no better solution. China should not blindly follow this example, otherwise we will end up with the same kind of sexual chaos and extensive spread of AIDS. Can Special Drugs or Vaccines Stop the Spread of AIDS? Western countries are rushing to find some special drugs or a vaccine that can prevent AIDS. They still havent succeeded. One reason is that AIDS is a retro-virus and highly prone to mutation in the process of transformation from RNA to DNA. This makes producing a vaccine very difficult. Furthermore, the AIDS virus directly attacks the human immune system. These two factors pose grave difficulties to scientific research on the prevention of AIDS. Up until now no effective medicine or vaccine has yet been developed. The work of AIDS prevention and treatment is proceeding very slowly. Scrupulously Observing Sexual Morality is the Miracle Cure for Preventing AIDS As modern medicine still cannot halt the spread of venereal diseases and especially AIDS, adherence to sexual morality is the best and probably the only way to combat these diseases. The core of socialist sexual morality is that sexual relationships should be based on true love and monogamy. The rising standards of material wealth and spiritual civilization will induce a rise in standards of sexual morality. Marriage should not just be based on love, but also faithfulness, harmony and mutual respect. This is truly the miracle drug for the prevention of AIDS.

Text B
2 3 2000 4 5 6 7 Introduction to Product The invasion of mankind by the plague of the century, AIDS, has spread quickly over the last nine years. Millions of people have already died from this disease. Experts predict that by the year 2000 hundreds of millions will be dead. Please preserve your moral integrity, strengthen preventive measures to avoid infection. Experts at Tongji Medical University have put all efforts (lit.soak heart/pitch blood) into mining from the treasure house of Chinese medicine this AIDS viral prevention and cure fluid. Tests show that after 2 minutes it is able to kill ordinary bacteria and parasites, and after 5 minutes it is able to kill the AIDS virus. At the present time, it is the most effective prevention and treatment method available domestically.

Appendix 4 A. The AIDS is Right Beside Us AIDS Knowledge Contest Test Questions
Beijing Municipal Hygiene Department, Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention, Beijing Evening News, Beijing Epidemic Prevention Center, and Beijing Institute for STD Prevention and Treatment ( , , , ) (1998, October 21) The AIDS is right beside us AIDS knowledge contest form (). Beijing Evening News. ( ). Retrieved January 24, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ben.com.cn/BJWB/19981021/GB/default.htm 1998 10 21 1 A B 2 A 16000 B 8000 3 10676 A 10 B 30 4 A 111 B 121 5 A B 6 A 1989 B 1985 7 A B 8 A B 9 1988 A 1993 B 1989 10 A B 11 A

B 12 7 246 A 33 B 22 13 A B 14 A B 15 A B 16 A B 17 A 1993 B 1994 18 62238683, A 1995 B 1993 19 A B 20 A B 21 (1) 2 (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) A 4B 7 22 A B Beijing Evening News 21-10-98 Wednesday The 'AIDS is Right Beside Us' Contest Test Questions Sponsored by the Beijing Department of Hygiene, Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention Co-sponsored by the Beijing Department of Disease Control, Beijing Institute for STD Prevention

1. AIDS is a presently incurable, highly fatal communicable disease. Is it true that men, women, old and young all have the possibility of being infected? A false B true 2. Presently, worldwide approximately how many people are infected with the AIDS virus daily? A 16000 people B 8000 people 3. Presently our country has 10676 reported cases of HIV infection. What is the estimated actual number of cases? A around 100,000 B around 300,000 4. This year the theme of world AIDS day is 'AIDS and Youth' What day is World AIDS Day? A November 1 B December 1 5. Was our country's first AIDS patient found in Beijing? A yes B no 6. What year was our country's first AIDS patient found? A 1989 B 1985 7. What was the nationality of our country's first AIDS patient? A Foreign B Chinese 8. Were our country's first case of HIV infection to be found among STD patients and our country's fist case of HIV infection among workers returning from abroad both found in Beijing? A yes B no 9. Before 1988 all of the cases of HIV infection were foreigners. What year was the first case found among residents of Beijing? A 1993 B 1989 10. In order to strengthen the work of AIDS prevention and control, the newly established Municipal Committee for Hygiene and Disease Prevention Work convened a conference to take this work one step further. How many times has such a conference been held? A three times B once 11. In the period of Fifth Five Year Plan Beijings AIDS prevention and control policy has been Give Priority to Prevention, Intensify Propaganda and Education, Strengthen Surveillance, Combine Administrative Efforts. What is the goal of this policy? A Reduce Disease, Control it's Spread, Work to Maintain the Low Prevalence. B For AIDS not to occur. 12. Up until the end of July of this year, Beijing altogether had reported 246 cases of HIV infection (including foreigners, non-residents and Beijingers). Among these, approximately what percentage were Beijing residents? A 33% B 22% 13. The three main routes of transmission of AIDS are sexual contact, blood and from a mother to her child. How many of these routes of transmission have occurred in Beijing? A Two B Three 14. Daily life activities like using public toilets, shaking hands, hugging, swimming, polite kissing, and sharing tools cannot transmit the AIDS virus. Is this true? A yes B no 15. Abroad, adopting the policy of urging drug users who have not given up drugs not to share injection equipment, and the promotion of condoms [safety sheath] (condom [avoid pregnancy sheath] during sex in order to prevent AIDS has already been very effective. Should our country promote this kind of beneficial method? A Yes, it should B No, it shouldn't 16. Already among the AIDS infected people in our city there are hotel workers, shopkeepers, private businesspeople, drivers, artists, doctors, students, government functionaries and workers in many other vocations. Presently, have any infants been infected? A yes B no

17. In order to prevent the spread of AIDS through blood, in what year did Beijing begin requiring all blood used in medical treatment undergo an AIDS virus antibody test? A 1993 B 1994 18.The Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention AIDS counseling hotline 62238683 provides relevant knowledge, information, and at the same time protects clients' confidentiality. In what year was the hotline opened? A 1995 B 1993 19. AIDS is a presently incurable but completely preventable communicable disease. The whole society should not discriminate against AIDS patients and AIDS infected people. But there are still people who assume that AIDS is a disease of foreigners, that it is very far away from them, that all they have to do is avoid unsafe behavior and they won't catch AIDS Do you think the latter understanding is right or not? A Right B Not Right 20. In this city the important causes that have brought about the transmission of AIDS are: the behavior of visiting prostitutes, intravenous drug abuse and homosexual behavior. Presently have there been any cases where a husband or wife was infected and in turn infected their spouse? A Yes there have B No there haven't 21. Presently measures for AIDS prevention include (1) Do not share injection equipment to inject illegal drugs (2) It is recommended to have one monogamous sexual partner (3) Use condoms (4) Do not share or borrow razors, electric razors, or toothbrushes (5) Carry out an HIV anti-body test on all blood used in medical treatment (6) In surgery all surgical instruments and injection equipment should be carefully sterilized (7) Don't go to public places, don't go to the swimming pool. Of the two items listed below, which is incorrect? A 4 B 7 22. Where should one go to test whether or not they have contracted AIDS? A An approved hospital, epidemic control station, or STD prevention body with facilities for AIDS virus antibody testing B A medical work unit which has not obtained approval from the hygiene authorities.

B. A Special Patient Enters the Hospital, from AIDS Closes in on China

Fang Gang ( ) (1995a) AIDS Closes in on China (). Beijing (): Jilin Publishing House (), 15-18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 19856 ; --- . "

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

9 ICU ; :"Thank you" ! "" "!" "" ":: "! :"?" :"!" "!" "" " ": " " 24 .

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

: HIV 5 HIV : 19859 , 9

One day in June of 1985 is, as far as Chinese healthcare workers are concerned, a day worth remembering; if we can really regard AIDS as a common enemy of the entire society, then this day should be remembered by every single Chinese. On this day, China discovered its first AIDS patient. On this ordinary summer's day, Beijing's Union Hospital (Beijing Union Medical College Hospital)--China's most famous hospital, was running normally as on any day. When an American patient with pneumonia was transferred there, he did not cause any notice. As China's most prestigious hospital, Union had treated China's highest level leaders, foreign heads of state, experts. This American patient being transferred to this hospital was an ordinary occurrence. The doctors and nurses for foreign guests treated this patient who had been diagnosed with pneumonia just like everyone else. Had they known at the time of this patient's true condition, a dramatic scene would have ensued, rather than happening on the second day of his stay. The doctors discovered that, even though this American male exhibited the symptoms of pneumonia, he also had many other unexplainable diseases, they felt a bit perplexed. Following conventional treatment, the patient's condition failed to stabilize, difficulty in breathing developed, and his life was in peril. On that day at 9 PM, he was urgently transferred to the intensive care unit. Doctors and nurses put all their energy into saving him. The life of this American friend affected the feelings of the healthcare workers. He was connected to a respirator, stuck full of tubes, given a blood transfusion, etc. His life was finally saved, but his condition did not improve, and he was likely to once again face a perilous situation. Probably the patient's doctor in America could provide more details about this patient's condition and medical history; under hospital requirements, this American patient had supplied the phone number of his private doctor. The next morning, Union hospital immediately placed a long distance call and contacted this doctor. When the voice of the American doctor, distant but distinct, passed through the telephone receiver, the doctor from Union hospital was dumbstruck. After a long pause he said one sentence: "Thank you." This patient was an AIDS patient! A faraway concept, a bloody idea, a terrifying idea, a cruelidea, suddenly flashed before his eyes. The doctors and nurses at Union hospital had only heard all kinds of terrible rumors about AIDS, and now, an AIDS patient had suddenly appeared next to them, and they had been with him all day without knowing! The news immediately spread through all of Union hospital. The young nurses whispered, "I've heard there is no way to cure this disease."

"I've heard this disease is very contagious, blood, air, air particles, can all transmit it." "Those who get this disease are foreigners." But their understanding of AIDS stopped there. Coincidentally, just then another foreigner came to see a doctor, and the nurses took the opportunity to ask him about how AIDS was transmitted. As soon as the foreigner heard the word AIDS, he gave an exaggerated "AH!" and said, "AIDS? It's terrible! All you have to do is catch someone's eye from a distance and you can catch it!" The nurses turned white. They looked at each other. And then the foreigner said, "Why did you ask?" One nurse said: "We have an AIDS patient here." When the foreigner heard this he cried out, turned around and ran off. Which made these young nurses even more frightened. "Yesterday I gave him a transfusion." "We've probably already been infected!" For a time there came the sound of cursing, some people stamped their feet and cried, "How could I be so unlucky!" Others wept softly. Then one nurse cheered herself up saying, "I've heard that only homosexuals get this disease, I'm not a homosexual, I'm not afraid!" At that time, Chinese doctors were at a loss when it came to AIDS. A few hours later the American AIDS patient stopped breathing. Two nurses, trembling with fear, dealt with the body and notified the mortuary to come and get it. But the mortuary unexpectedly refused. This was the fist time this had ever happened in the history of Union hospital. Union hospital was, after all, Union hospital. Its staff was impeccably trained, its professional ethics were also first rate. Finally, the two nurses, despite their fear, still personally took the body to the mortuary. As soon as the patient's body was removed, the disinfection of the entire ward began, the doctors and nurses working together to completely fumigate the room with formaldehyde solution. The uniforms of the two nurses were incinerated, and everything the patient had used was destroyed. Without understanding and wanting to take thorough preventive measures, all they could do was burn whatever they could, but the panic remained. Moreover, the panic grew with the increasing rumors about AIDS to the point where some people started to despise the American patient who had not revealed he had AIDS when he came to the hospital. To lessen the nurses' panic, the hospital invited experts to speak, to tell everyone that AIDS has only three routes of transmission: semen, blood, and from a mother to her baby, the contact the nurses had had with the AIDS patient should not transmit AIDS. However, the panic still could not be completely dispelled. All of the nurses who had had contact with the AIDS patient underwent an HIV antibody test, and all tested negative. But, the shadow still remained. Five years later, all of them once again were tested without incidence. At that time, the panic was finally wiped clean from their minds. The first AIDS patient to enter a Chinese hospital was the first AIDS patient to be found within Chinese boarders. This situation led to great concern among the relevant departments and AIDS prevention and education were put on the agenda. At the same time, the care and treatment of AIDS patients became a formal topic of study for healthcare workers. This topic has two special aspects: the treatment of the physical disease and the attitude towards the patient. The phenomenon of AIDS presents a kind of challenge to all doctors and nurses, a test of our understanding of the spirit of the profession. Going beyond psychological boundaries is not an easy task. Yet, one thing to be grateful for is, we have taken the first step, and it is one we should be proud of. Nine years have passed since 1985, and in these nine years, over ten AIDS patients have ended their life journeys at Union Hospital. Among them have been both Chinese and foreigners. In their final days they received rather good care. Similarly, at other hospitals, although the doctors and nurses went through various psychological and behavioral twists and turns, they were all finally able to take a scientific attitude towards treating AIDS patients and towards this disease itself.

C. Interview

Excerpt from Interview, Fuzhou 99/3/30 (40:34:225) RJ: Interviewer X: 24 year old gay (tongzhi) hotel worker 1 X:.... 2 .. gay 3 .... 4 RJ 5 X: ...... 6 ....eh..... 7 .... 8 .. 9 RJ.. 10 X 11 RJ 12 X.. 13 ......... 14 ...... 15 hotel .... 16 ....... 17 .... 18 ........ 19 ...... 20 .. hotel . 21 ........ 22 .. box .. 22 .....uh.. 24 ........ 25 ........ 26 .. 27 .... 28 ....... 29 ....mm...... 30 .... 31 .... 32 .....uh.. 33 ...... 34 RJ.. Y .... 35 .. 36 X .. 37 RJ .. 38 X Aah ... case . . 39 Y ...... 40 .... 41 ...... 42 .........mmm.. 43 .......... 44 ........ 45 ........ 46 ...... 47 .. condom.. 48 .. 49 ......... 50 ..........

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

......... .... ...... .... .. RJ .... X ........ .. RJ X ....... RJ X .......... . RJ.. X ......... ... ... .... HIV .... ........ .... ...... .. local newspaper.. RJ: ..... X ... RJ . X: ahhh......... .......... ........... ...... ..... RJ ... X . RJ X .. RJ X ...... ...... ...... .... ...... ........ ....... RJ Xmmm..... .. ....... .. .. .. ........ .... .. .. OK ..? RJ ..

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

X.. RJ X. RJ X.. CCTV .. .......... .... ....... ........ah ...... ...... ......uh.. ....... ..... ...... ...... .... .... ..... .... uh ...... .. ummm ...... .. ......... ..ah ..... ... .. condom........ condom....... ........ ...... mmm .. .. ..3 ...... .... lover .......

RJ: Interviewer X: 24 year old gay (tongzhi) hotel worker X: In Fuzhou.. people got pretty scared after that last incident with the prostitute getting AIDS.. before that before this incident.. Fuzhou's prostitutes, clients, and also we gays all felt AIDS was very far away. .but now it seems that AIDS is right beside us... RJ: Did their concept change? X: It changed a lot.. the incident last time was too scary.. the whole of Fuzhou.. everyone discussed this incident. .if.. eh.. if you said to your friend tonight.. tonight I'm going to the nightclub, do you want to come? He might say.. jokingly.. I won't go to the nightclub, so dirty, its easy to get AIDS, if you go tonight you'll definitely get it.. like this. RJ: So you think their concept has changed.. what about their behavior? X: There's been a change. RJ: What kind of change? X: It's changed a lot, you can see from that shop.. a lot have opened recently in Fuzhou.. sex shops.. that.. that.. the thing that these shops must sell the most of is condoms, relatively expensive.. they like the buy them.. people who visit prostitutes frequently.. I work in a hotel so I know.. people who go to prostitutes frequently like higher-priced condoms.. they think the material in foreign condoms is better.. they say Japanese are better.. they told me...There are also some people.. with lower educational levels.. we regard them as 'low quality' people, not good.. they get gonorrhea.. and afterwards say.. getting gonorrhea is just like catching cold, have an injections and its okay.. some say I won't go to the doctor, I'll just buy the medicine.. since I work at a hotel I know. Prostitutes.. they usually use them.. especially good quality

ones ..at high class nightclubs.. the manager said so.. all his prostitutes have condoms in their bags.. also in the 'box' there are a lot of used ones.. I think the last incident.. uh.. the one concerning that prostitute who got AIDS.. something good came of it.. everyone.. is very scared ..In Fuzhou everyone is very afraid.. as soon as they read about the prostitute.. they got scared.. A lot of people know about it.. even that old lady knows.. because the newspaper and TV continuously reported it.. I feel that the Fuzhou government, it seems.. has never in this way reported anything about sexually transmitted diseases. .very little. .even the first case.. China's first case of AIDS happened in Fuzhou.. you know?..mm. .this.. is not something many people know.. they don't know what hospital, what year.. but this case everybody knows.. everyone knows how old she is and where she's from.. the effect this illness had on her family, on her neighborhood, on the people in her village.. a horrible effect. .everybody knows. .uh.. even very old ladies who can't speak putonghua know.. RJ: Now.. I remember Y. (informants friend) said.. when we were talking about AIDS Y said.. ah, Fuzhou has one. X: It's that prostitute.. That's the way we figure it. RJ: Right.. but does he think there is just one? X: Ahh...here he was definitely talking about this case.. but we certainly don't think there's just one.. Y was probably just saying.. nobody who reads the newspaper would think there is just one. .that prostitute had relations with a lot of men.. some had just gotten married.. some.. their wives had just gotten pregnant ..so.. so I assume it's not just one.. I think it must be a lot.. mmm.. We look at it this way.. we figure.. this prostitute.. was very good looking...in one day.. we all know prostitutes serve several customers in one day.. she served two.. on average they all serve one to two.. now she was already carrying the disease.. the latency period.. the latency period is two years.. or three years.. for two to three years on average every day she had relations with one man.. some might have used condoms.. some might have been lucky, uh?. .because you know it's not as easy for a woman to pass on AIDS to a man as it is for a man to pass AIDS on to a woman.. not the same.. so.. but we figure.. from a doctor's perspective.. even if only half the men were infected. .it's still scary.. ah.. but.. she probably.. she served.. it's not to say that every night she had different customers.. they might have been the same. .it might be last time's customer.. but if we calculate in this way.. if we calculate again this number is still scary.. but there are a few.. men who have been infected before who still might go to other prostitutes.. or other women. .if you calculate in this way you feel quite terrified. RJ: Besides this prostitute. .how many cases of AIDS.. do you think Fuzhou has. X: Widely reported. .not many. .widely reported.. only two or three have been reported in the newspaper, but I think.. RJ: Two or three? X: Right...these are published.. two or three reported cases.. but I think.. RJ: And in Fujian? X: ...Fujian...Fuzhou is important.. Fuzhou and Xiamen, these cities report.. if they have this kind of disease they come to Fuzhou. RJ: Right.. so you think Fujian just has two or three cases? X: No. .two or three cases have been reported.. huh.. reported in the newspaper for everyone to see.. reported on TV and written about in the newspaper...but I think in Fuzhou the number of infected...who have been to see a doctor.. who already have symptoms.. I estimate could be from 300 to 800..I estimate 300 to 500 or 800..who have already been detected but I've never seen it in the newspaper.. I never seen it.. I read the newspaper regularly.. The Fuzhou Evening News. .but I've never seen it. .this news should be in this kind of paper.. we all like this kind of paper.. not like People's Daily which nobody reads. .nobody reads People's Daily or Fujian Daily.. we'd rather read the local newspaper. RJ: Now.. you said before that the first case in China was in Fuzhou... X: Right.. it was in Fuzhou. RJ: Could you tell me the story? X: ahhh. .it's a very old story. .it seems it was.. 1987 or 1988..one of those two years.. it was a man.. but this man.. but he. .he wasn't a local.. he was a...it seems he was a foreigner.. I can't remember well.. he was a traveler.. the foreigner got infected. .later he was at Union Hospital in Beijing.. that's it, isn't it.. but Fuzhou's.. big hospitals didn't know what disease he had.. very strange!.. this guy... RJ: What does it have to do with Fuzhou?...wasn't it Beijing? X: It was Beijing.

RJ: Are you saying he was originally sent to Beijing from Fuzhou? RJ: Right, right, right, right, right.. RJ: He got sick in Fuzhou? X: He got sick in Fuzhou.. it was.. he had diarrhea and a fever.. and the doctors gave a lot of antibiotics but it didn't work.. later.. the doctors in Fuzhou didn't know what disease he had. .it was very strange. .later.. because he was a foreigner.. so they were more cautious. .later he was sent to a better hospital...the Beijing Union hospital which I think is probably China's number one or number two hospital.. so he went there.. but the doctors and experts in Beijing.. it's probably one of the bigger hospitals in Beijing.. they thought maybe...could it be.. a foreign virus.. but they suspected AIDS.. so they did a test.. and discovered it was AIDS. RJ: And then? X: mmm...I don't remember clearly, but it seems this foreigner had.. relations with a lot of Chinese prostitutes, right? It seems more than two or three had relations with him.. and the Chinese government want him to tell them.. with whom? Which Chinese did you have sex with?.. Later the nurses at Union hospital.. the hospital used disinfectant to clean everything.. the whole ward was disinfected.. everything that could be burned was burned.. all his clothes and medical supplies were thrown away.. later they were so scared.. after the patient died they were so afraid.. they went to be tested.. all of the nurses and doctors who had had contact with this patient.. the test showed no problem.. they were OK no problem. .right? RJ: How old were you when this happened in Fuzhou? X: Seventeen years old. RJ: Do you remember what reaction the people in Fuzhou had? X: No reaction. RJ: No reaction? X: Nothing special.. because China Central Television reported it.. but it seems he had already been sent to Beijing. .it seems nothing special.. but.. the Chinese government.. paid special attention....nothing.. but it's not the same ..this last time in Fuzhou.. not the same.. this time the nurses and doctors didn't panic in the same way.. ah on TV there was a man.. who told the reporter.. the reporter was interviewing him.. the man was this prostitute's former boyfriend.. they didn't show his face.. this man had no problem.. he really liked this prostitute.. because she was quite beautiful. .really liked her.. uh.. but later when he found out she was a prostitute they broke up. so he.. I saw that man crying.. I saw him crying.. People say this prostitute's AIDS.. came from a Taiwanese.. she never.. never served Americans.. Europeans. .these kind of white people, never. She liked.. the newspaper said she liked to serve Taiwanese the most.. and a lot of Taiwanese had this kind of relations with her.. it's said the doctors thought it was a Taiwanese who had infected her.. of course they didn't rule out a Mainlander.. her educational level was too low.. She probably hasn't graduated from elementary school.. uh she was around seventeen.. nineteen.. when she got the disease.. the doctor said she was about nineteen when she got it and she was twenty two when she got sick.. ummm.. but the doctor.. was very sad.. very regretfully told her..he said.. the disease you have is.. AIDS.. and then she asked the doctor.. she said, What's AIDS.. when will I recover.. ah when can I leave the hospital...we all say this prostitutes 'quality' is so low.. now I..I think since her 'quality' is so low she probably rarely or never used condoms.. I guess, probably.. when she was serving customers. .rarely or never used condoms. .or else.. she wouldn't say what is AIDS? So for a variety of reasons. .I..I like. .I like to go with my boyfriend. .every year or every few months. to the hospital to have this kind of test.. every time we go for a test we say.. we were with mmm had relations with prostitutes.. we're very worried we didn't use... the doctor asks us if we used a condom.. and we say no.. the doctor asks us. .do you feel uncomfortable.. we say little bit. .actually we don't. .but I told my lover to say a little uncomfortable.. so then the doctor says.. you had relations with a prostitute and you feel uncomfortable. .you need to get tested immediately!

D. Corpus search for behavioral identity lables: moving people

Behavioral Identity Labels formed with zhe and renyuan ( moving people)

Geographical Boundaries Foreign nationals Persons entering the borders Mobile (floating) people Mobile (blindly floating people) Migrant wage laborers Foreign migrant workers Invaders Physical Boundaries (Attributes) AIDS infected people AIDS sufferers AIDS patients AIDS victims Child AIDS sufferers Married AIDS infected people Virus carriers HIV HIV carriers Virus carriers HIV HIV antibody positive people

Person involved in foreign affairs People who leave the country People from other provinces and cities Travelers People returning from visiting relatives abroad Victims Unlucky victims Survivors STD sufferers Hemophiliacs Symptomatic people Non-symptomatic people People with genital ulcers Un-rehabilitated people People who have difficulty marrying

Moral/Behavioral Boundaries (Social Practices) People who engage in high risk IV drug users sex IV drug abusers People who have unsafe IV drug addicts sex Recovering IV drug users People who have pre-marital Blood donors sex Blood suppliers People who have extra-marital 'Professional' blood sellers sex Sperm donors People who have illicit sex Organ donors Promiscuous people (lit. 'sex chaos Marrow donors person') Recipients of blood Promiscuous people (lit. 'chaotic or blood products relations person') Recipients of blood transfusions Homosexuals Private entrepreneurs Bisexuals People who seduce women Bisexuals into prostitution Heterosexuals Criminals Passive partners in anal sex People who have made a mistake Prostitutes (delinquents, people who take a wrong step People engaged in prostitution in life) and visiting prostitutes The 'third party' People with a history of visiting prostitutes Physical Boundaries+ Attribute or Social Practice People who have used drugs Hotel workers overseas People who have left their People who have used families imported blood products People living separately from People who come from the their spouses countryside to sell blood People living together illegally

E. Corpus search for behavioral identity labels: stable people

stable people Most people Healthcare workers Domestic people Healthcare workers Residents of Beijing Healthcare workers Healthy people Researchers Healthy people Policy makers People who are not infected Leaders People who are not homosexual Scientists People who have no history of Scholars anal sex Educators Readers

Appendix 5
List of Pamphlets
1) All China Patriotic Health Campaign Committee Office, National Health Education Institute ( (nd) Know AIDS ( AIDS). 2) Anhui Hygiene Office Disease Prevention Bureau, Anhui Provincial Epidemic Prevention Center, Anhui Provincial Health Education Institute (, , ) (nd) It's possible to prevent AIDS (). 3) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention () (1997) Prevent AIDS for the health of yourself and humankind ( ). 4) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention () (nd) AIDS and the family; Preventing AIDS starts from the family ( ). 5) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention () (ND) For the health of yourself and humankind prevent AIDS, STDs; Facing up to AIDS, STDs is the beginning of prevention ( ). 6) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention, Beijing Municipal Health Education Institute ( , ) (nd) Everybody take immediate action to participate in the anti-AIDS campaign (, , ). 7) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention () (nd) How is AIDS transmitted? (?). 8) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention, Beijing Municipal Health Education Institute ( , ) (nd) How to avoid meeting with the disaster of AIDS ( ). 9) Beijing Association for STD/AIDS Prevention, Beijing Municipal Health Education Institute ( , ) (nd) Things AIDS infected people and patients should pay attention to) () 10) China Hygiene Testing and Educational Center () (nd) Defeating AIDS requires Everybodys effort ( AIDS TO CONQUER AIDS NEEDS EVERYBODY'S EFFORTS) 11) Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine () (nd) AIDS is the Enemy of All Humankind! Preventing AIDS is the whole society's responsibility! (! !). 12) Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine () (nd) For the sake of your own health and that of others Please prevent AIDS ( ). 13) Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine () (nd) Super plague (). 14) Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine, Funded by the World Bank and the World AIDS Foundation ( , , ) (nd) Everybody must understand AIDS ()

15) Chinese Institute of Preventive Medicine, Funded by the World Bank the World AIDS Foundation ( , , ) (nd) Termites and AIDS ( ) 16) Gansu Provincial Hygiene Office, Gansu Provincial Epidemic Prevention Center (, ) (nd) Common knowledge about AIDS (). 17) Gansu Provincial Hygiene Office, Gansu Provincial Epidemic Prevention Center (, ) (nd) The AIDS virus test is the basis of diagnosis (). 18) Gansu Provincial Hygiene Office, Gansu Provincial Epidemic Prevention Center (, ) (nd) How can travelers abroad prevent AIDS? ( ?). 19) Gansu Provincial Hygiene Office, Gansu Provincial Epidemic Prevention Center (, ) (nd) Preventing aids begins with the family (). 20) Hainan Provincial Hygiene Office () (nd) Eliminating the threat of AIDS completely depends on you scrupulously upholding moral integrity ( ) 21) Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (nd) (, ) (nd) Cut off the (sexual) routes of transmission of AIDS (()) 22) Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute ( , ) (nd) Sharing needles to inject drugs can transmit AIDS ( ). 23) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, , (1995) AIDS more easily attacks STD patients; AIDS and STD patients ( AIDS AND STD PATIENTS). 24) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute ( ) (1995) The floating population especially needs to pay attention to preventing AIDS and STDs; AIDS/STD and the Floating Population ( AIDS/STD AND FLOATING POPULATION). 25) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, , ) (1995) In every village and town, spread the news to every household, everyone prevent AIDS; AIDS/STDs and Farmers ( AIDS/STD and Farmers). 26) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, , ) (1995) Preventing AIDS and STDs and a safe journey; AIDS/STD and Safe Journey ( AIDS/STD AND SAFE JOURNEY). 27) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, , ) (1995) Students should pay attention to the prevention of AIDS and STDs; AIDS/STD and Students ( AIDS/STD AND STUDENTS). 28) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, ,

) (1995) The threat of AIDS to women is even greater; AIDS/STD and Women in Crisis ( AIDS/STD AND WOMEN IN CRISIS). 29) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (, , ) (1995) Truck drivers don't ignore preventing AIDS and STDs; AIDS/STD and Truck Drivers ( AIDS/STD AND TRUCK DRIVERS). 30) Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute (,, ) (1995) Worldwide the first to encounter the threat of AIDS were homosexuals; AIDS/STS and Gays ( AIDS/STD AND GAYS). 31) National AIDS Prevention and Control Center, funded by the World Bank ( , ) (nd) A handsome man ruined me (). 32) National AIDS Prevention and Control Center, funded by the World Bank , ) (nd) Xueer, Pingmei and me ( ). 33) National Health Education Institute () (1992) Take action before the AIDS epidemic develops: People who go abroad should Pay attention to preventing AIDS ( ). 34) National Health Education Institute () (1992) Take action before the AIDS epidemic develops: Prevention of AIDS in daily life; How to prevent AIDS ( HOW TO PREVENT AIDS). 35) National Health Education Institute () (1993) Choose health and life, not promiscuity (, , ). 36) National Health Education Institute () (nd) Tell me how to prevent AIDS ( TELL ME HOW TO PREVENT AIDS). 37) People's Republic of China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention (, ) (nd) AIDS prevention propaganda information No. 1: Common knowledge about AIDS ( ). 38) People's Republic of China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control ,Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention (, ) (nd) AIDS prevention propaganda information No. 2: What healthcare workers should know ( ). 39) People's Republic of China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention (, ) (nd) AIDS prevention propaganda information No. 3: What people who go abroad should know (). 40) People's Republic of China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention (, ) (nd) AIDS prevention propaganda information No. 4: The sexual transmission of AIDS ( ). 41) People's Republic of China Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, Chinese Association for STD/AIDS Prevention (,

) (nd) AIDS prevention propaganda information No. 5: Drug use and AIDS ( ) 42) Shanghai Municipal Hygiene Bureau () (nd) Prevent AIDS, please use a condom ( , ). 43) Shenzhen Provincial Institute of Infectious Diseases and Dermatology ( (nd) Do you understand AIDS? (?). 44) Shenzhen Municipal Hygiene Bureau, Shenzhen Municipal Health Education Institute, Shenzhen Municipal Epidemic Control Station (, , ) (nd) Plague of the century - AIDS, scrupulously observe moral integrity, prevent the spread of AIDS ( - ). 45) Shenzhen Municipal Hygiene Bureau, Louhu, Futian, Baoan, Longgang District Hygiene Bureau; Shenzhen Municipal Epidemic Control Station, Louhu, Futian, Baoan, Longgang District Louhu, Futian, Baoan, Longgang District Epidemic Control Station; Shenzhen Municipal Health Education Institute, Louhu, Futian, Baoan, Longgang District Health Education Institute (, , , , ; , , , , ; , , ) (nd) Prevent AIDS (). 46) Sichuan Hygiene Bureau Epidemic Control Section, Sichuan Provincial Epidemic Prevention and AIDS Testing Center (, ) (nd) Please Doctor, How can AIDS be prevented? (?). 47) Xiamen Hygiene Epidemic Testing Bureau AIDS/STD Counseling Center ( ,) (1995) Be on guard against AIDS and STDs (). 48) Xiamen Hygiene Epidemic Testing Bureau AIDS/STD Counseling Center ( ) (1996) Questions and answers about AIDS ( ). 49) Xinjiang Ugyuer Autonomous Region Hygiene Office () (1997) Know AIDS, prevent AIDS (). 50) Yunnan Provincial AIDS Prevention Committee Office () (nd) Preventing AIDS requires the participat

Appendix 7
A. National Health Education Institute Pamphlet for Gays
China Ministry of Health Office of Foreign Cooperation, Ministry of Health Department of Disease Control, National Health Education Institute ( , , ) (1995b) Worldwide the first to face the threat of AIDS were homosexuals: AIDS/STD and Gays (: AIDS/STD AND GAYS). Beijing: National Health Education Institute ().

National Health Education Institute AIDS/STD Education Pamphlet for 'Gays' English Translation PANEL 1 AIDS/STD prevention education Worldwide the first to face the threat of AIDS were homosexuals. AIDS/STD AND GAYS (in English) (Picture: two men in park) AIDS is already spreading among homosexuals in China. Ministry of Health, Department of International Cooperation Ministry of Health, Epidemic Control Department National Health Education Institute NATIONAL HEALTH EDUCATION INSTITUTE (in English) PANEL 2 Cherish your health Cherish your life (3 PICTURES: 2 OF MEN TALKING ON PHONE, ONE OF MAN LOOKING AT A COMPUTER SCREEN THAT SAYS : 'AIDS HIV STD') Do you know how homosexuals should prevent AIDS and STDs? 1. Only by having just one fixed, healthy sexual partner with whom you have mutual understanding and trust can you guarantee not becoming infected. Frequently changing partners or having many partners at the same time is extremely dangerous. 2. It is easier to contract the AIDS virus and STDs through oral and anal sex. Provided there are no small wounds on the hands or genitals, mutual masturbation is safe 3. Proper use of a condom can reduce the chances of infection, but it is not 100% reliable. You cannot regard a condom (bi yun tao) as a condom (an quan tao) or a condom (bao xian tao) 4. Do not engage in sex in public places. In such circumstances, even if you use a condom, because you are nervous, it is easy for the condom to slip off or break and for AIDS and STDs to be transmitted. 5. It is easier for those who suffer from STD's to be infected with the AIDS virus, so avoid STDs and promptly seek treatment. 6. You cannot tell from the genitals or anus whether or not a person has been infected with an STD. Just because people appear outwardly healthy does not mean they have not been infected by the AIDS virus. The only surefire strategy to prevent AIDS and STDs is by 'preserving moral integrity' (jie shen zi ai). 7. Do not take drugs. More importantly, do not share syringes to inject drugs. PANEL 3 What is AIDS? AIDS is a deadly disease mostly passed on through hertero or homosexual contact. It is also passed on through sharing syringes to inject drugs and having transfusions of blood that has not been tested. Up until now there is no effective treatment or vaccine. So presently AIDS remains a fatal illness. What is an 'AIDS infected person' (ai zi bing gan ran zhe) People who have contracted the AIDS virus are called 'AIDS infected people'. They look exactly like healthy people. Without having a laboratory test, even they do not know that they have already contracted this deadly virus. The blood, semen, vaginal fluids, breast milk, and puss of 'AIDS infected people' all contain the AIDS virus. The virus is highly infectious, and having sexual contact with an infected person is extremely dangerous. Going to an epidemic prevention station or hospital for a AIDS virus antibody test can determine for sure whether or not you have been infected with the AIDS virus, but, in the first three months directly following infection it is impossible to detect the antibodies. What is an AIDS Patient? After contracting the AIDS virus, as soon as half a year or as late as ten or more years AIDS begins to develop. The AIDS patient's immunity suffers serious damage, his resistance to diseases drops drastically, and it is easy to suffer from difficult to cure pneumonia, enteritis, encephalitis, herpes, oral yeast infections, malignant tumors, etc. The most commonly seen symptoms are fever, wasting, cough, diarrhea, headache, fatigue, mental abnormalities, rashes, swollen lymph glands, etc. Finally the entire body is exhausted and the patient dies. What are the modes of transmission of the AIDS virus? 1. Sexual transmission In sex without a regular partner or when partners are changed frequently, it

is easiest to contract the AIDS virus through anal sex and oral sex. 2. Transmission through blood several people using one unsterilized syringe and needle to inject drugs is the easiest way to contract AIDS. Apart from that, unserialized hospital and clinic syringes, acupuncture needles, dental equipment, prolonged deep kissing, unsterilized knives, scissors and needles for hair styling, beauty treatments, ear piercing, tattooing, and pedicure, electric razors, toothbrushes, bloody fist fights all can lead to infection. 3. Mother to infant transmission an AIDS infected mother infects her baby. 4. Transmission cannot take place in the following circumstances through foodstuffs, air, beverages, public communications equipment, schools, factories, shops, theaters, offices swimming pools and other public places and through daily contact. Brief, polite kissing with the lips, hugging in situations where there are no injuries to the skin, clean toilets, baths, and mosquitoes and other blood sucking insects all cannot lead to infection. What are the important STDs in China? Gonorrhea, non-gonococcal urethritis (including chlamydia) syphilis, acute condyloma, genital herpes, gential warts, STD related lymphpahdenopathy are the most important STDs to prevent and treat in China. Among them, the first 5 are the most frequently seen What harm comes from infection with an STD? 1. STD patients are more susceptible to contracting the AIDS virus. 2. Gonorrhea and NGU can lead to lifelong sterility. 3. Acute condyloma, genital herpes, are difficult to completely cure and easily re-occur 4. Acute condyloma, genital herpes can give rise to cervical cancer, penile cancer and other cancers of the reproductive system. 5. Syphilis, if not completely cured, can cause life-threatening damage to the brain and the heart. 6. Gonorrhea and Syphilis can both endanger the health and life of the next generation. What can I do if I suffer from an STD? 1. It is necessary to go to a hospital or STD clinic for treatment. The doctor will maintain your confidentiality. Do not use medicine yourself or place your trust in advertisements on the street promoting the treatment of STDs. Quacks cheat you of your money but do not completely cure the disease. To avoid improper treatment, private clinics are not permitted to treat STDs. 2. Alert your spouse and those you have had sexual contact with to go to the hospital for treatment. 3. Before you are cured, cease all sexual activity. 4. The disappearance of symptoms does not necessarily mean the disease is cured. Do not terminate treatment by yourself. Only a doctor can judge whether or not you are completely recovered. 5. Avoid non-sexual transmission to family members Use antiseptic washing powder to wash underwear. Do not share a bathtub or towels with family members. Especially guard against girls being infected. PANEL 5 How to properly use a condom 1. First look at the package to check whether or not the expiry date has passed 2. With your fingers, pinch the small bubble on the tip. Before use, do not unroll the condom. 3. Cover the head of the penis with the condom and smoothly unroll it downward 4. With condoms you can just apply water-based lubricants. You cannot use face cream, Vaseline or cooking oil. 5. During use if you find the condom slips off or breaks, discontinue sexual activity and immediately clean your genitals with antiseptic or soap 6. After ejaculation do not wait until the penis becomes soft. Tightly grasp the collar around the mouth of the condom and, at the same time, withdraw the penis 7. Put the used condom in a plastic bag and throw it in the rubbish bin. Do not flush it down the toilet. 8. Each condom can only be used once. Remember: Properly using condoms can reduce the chances of contracting AIDS, but it is not foolproof. When condoms fail in contraception, an abortion is always an option. But when they fail in the prevention of AIDS there is no turning back. 'Preserving moral integrity' (jie shen zi ai) is the only sure way to protect yourself against the threat of AIDS PANEL 6 Understand AIDS Prevent Aids Pay attention to and study AIDS knowledge Change the attitude of complacency Establish the concept of prevention among all people Choose a healthy lifestyle Become adept at controlling your behavior

Be triumphant in preventing AIDS (Distribution limited to homosexuals) ZJS AlDS/STD--95--08 Design: Zhu Qi Text: Zhu Qi Proofreading: Zhang Beichuan Illustrations: Li Huiling Li Qinping

B. Friends Exchange 1:2 ()

Zhang, Beichuan ( ) (1998a) Disseminate science, promote health, initiate love, build civilization (,,,). Friends Exchange ()1: 2. (also available from the World Wide Web: Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

2080 80 1001920 20 1992 2000

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

20 5000 20 25

Disseminate Science Promote Health Initiate Love Build Civilization Zhang Beichun (author)

Since the 1980s, reform and opening up has rejuvenated China .The market socialist economy has not only greatly liberated the forces of production but has also brought the liberation of the producers-people. This liberation has occurred on all levels in the social and individual lives of the people. Sex is an important aspect of human life. The advance of civilization has naturally led to an unprecedented transformation of sexual concepts and the style of sexual expression among Chinese people. At the same time, many types of long suppressed and neglected deep contradictions and conflicts regarding sex have emerged on the historical stage. Homosexuality (same sex love) is one important form of human sexuality that exists. At the present level of the development of human civilization every county must face its own societys homosexual problem. How well it deals with its homosexual question is one sign with which to measure a society's level of civilization. Since the 1980s, with the worldwide spread of AIDS, the significance of an objective, scientific view of homosexuality has become even clearer. Every level of Chinese society has begun to actively pay attention to the phenomenon of homosexuality. This is a historical inevitability. It is also the backdrop against which 'Friends Exchange' (henceforth referred to as 'Friends') meets you. The mottos of 'Friends" are: Disseminate Science, Promote Health, Initiate Love and Build Civilization. First: Disseminate Science Science is a standard bearer of society's progress. China lags behind both economically and culturally". Because of this, studying and drawing lessons from every country including developed capitalist countries to achieve a completely advanced civilization' is also the road to follow in dealing with the China's homosexual question. The scientific study of human sexuality already has more than 100 years of history. In the late 19th and early 20th century the great fathers of sexology already discovered and confirmed that whether someone is homosexual or heterosexual has no relationship to their moral standards. By the mid-20th century the progress in scientific research verified that there are no differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals in terms of intelligence, character, judgment, integrity, stability, or ability to work and contribute to society. Following the proof of many scientific studies, in 1992 the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders, and maintained that the phenomenon of homosexuality is just like heterosexuality and that homosexuals are a normal minority. However, the concept of homosexuality in China influenced by more than 2000 years of feudalism is still prevalent among the masses. (The situation in most countries is the same as China.) Traditional prejudices have brought about suffering and tragedy among many homosexuals and their spouses, relatives and family members. So, the promotion of a scientific approach to homosexuality has great significance for the safety and security of society. An equally important goal is 'promote health'. AIDS is already spreading in China. AIDS and STDs pose a grave challenge to contemporary China. They seriously threaten individual safety, family prosperity and the interests of the whole society. Among those who face the greatest threat from AIDS are youth, the bright hope for our future, and adults who are today's pillars of society. Much evidence indicates that AIDS is spreading in China's male homosexual community, sex between men being one of China's routes of transmission. In the era of AIDS, actively supporting homosexuals is in the interest of millions upon millions of families and the interest of the whole society. The spread of AIDS is related to an unhealthy lifestyle and behavior. A healthy lifestyle comes from a healthy psychological state and a healthy social environment. Vigorously developing AIDS and STD education for homosexuals, extensive propaganda regarding AIDS and STD knowledge, actively encouraging homosexuals to regulate their own behavior, and at the same time building a healthy social environment for homosexuals is the unshakable duty of 'Friends' . Third: Initiate Love Just regarding one kind of sexual orientation as worthy of existing and treating other sexualities as criminal is an impractical attitude. In medieval Europe and early-20th century Germany religious authority and the Nazi government both tried to exterminate homosexuals and homosexual phenomena. But history has proven that brutal and unreasonable measures cannot eliminate the homosexual community and homosexual phenomena. China has a 5000 year history of glorious civilization. 'Compassion', 'Desiring nothing, imposing nothing on others' and 'valuing harmony' are excellent traditions of Chinese culture. Presently, the entire country (including both the heterosexual and the homosexual communities) are devoting all their energy to economic development. Social stability is a prerequisite of economic development. Initiating love helps to consolidate the overall stability of society. Initiating love, tolerance towards people with different sexual orientations, not intensifying contradictions and conflicts, assists in social harmony. Under the leadership of science, respecting,

understanding, helping, accepting different sexual orientations, benefits everyone, and brings great benefits to the country and the people. Treating the homosexual community with bountiful love, not only helps this group live their lives, but also helps them serve the people and make a greater contribution to society. The aspiration of 'Friends' is to invite groups of different sexual orientations to build civilization together. Everyone has the responsibility to develop Chinese civilization. Making China into a prosperous, democratic, civilized contemporary socialist society requires the united struggle of the whole society. Since the middle of the20th century investigations in many countries have proven, no matter the social system, the economic system, the historical background, homosexuals make up 2-5 percent of the population. According the recent surveys in China, approximately 3% of Chinese are homosexuals or bisexuals. Authoritative surveys estimate, in China, that there are millions of homosexuals in China. Including their relatives, those whose lives are touched by homosexuality is more than a hundred million Because of this, the attitude with which we approach the question of homosexuality is closely related to the great enterprise of building civilization. The construction of modern civilization can be fundamentally ensured only through guiding and encouraging people with different sexual inclinations to cooperate and positively interact on good terms, resolutely suppressing our differences. This method will allow our countrys people to establish a broad and solid foundation, millions of people all of one mind, together establishing civilization. Our countrys leaders have already pointed out, sexual culture is one important ingredient of socialist spiritual civilization. 'Friends' aspires to make a contribution to the building of spiritual civilization. People today are still far away from the ideal civilization. The history of mankind is a movement from monarchy to freedom. "The freedom of each person is a condition for the freedom of all' (The Manifesto of the Communist Party) Friends is a friend to the homosexual community and the heterosexual community. Friends is willing to work together with people of insight in society to contribute to progress.