Podcast Crossover: Time to Say Goodbye on the documentary 'Ascension'

07/13/22 • 63 min

Hello from our summer hiatus! While we're away, the pod squad is thrilled to share episodes from podcasts we love and admire. This week, we have an episode from Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast about Asia, the Asian diaspora, politics, and international solidarity. Thank you to hosts E. Tammy Kim, Jay Caspian Kang, and (formerly) Andy Liu for letting us cross post this episode. Kudos to our podcast co-host Cindy Gao, for introducing this cross post and briefly emerging from dissertation work.
(Description below courtesy of TTSG. Episode was originally aired on February 1, 2022.)
"This week Andy talks with the director (Jessica Kingdon) and producer (Kira Simon-Kennedy) of the new film Ascension, a documentary about working life in contemporary China. Ascension has received critical acclaim and garnered major awards and nominations, including being shortlisted for the Academy Awards!

The film features scenes of quotidian working life in a period when the government has begun to promote the “Chinese Dream,” spanning textile and sex doll factories to etiquette school and social media influencers all the way to luxurious water parks and tropical vacation resorts. Together, these scenes raise provocative questions about China’s blindingly rapid development, the uneven pace of upward mobility, and whether China is an exotic outlier or a recognizably modern society, comparable with life in the US and other societies worldwide (all to music by Dan Deacon)."

Previous Episode

Outsourcing Repression with Lynette Ong

Professor Lynette Ong joins us on the podcast this week to discuss her new book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. While in conversation with Joanna Chiu, Lynette discusses China's use of nonstate actors who minimize resistance during government land grabs, housing demolitions, and (perhaps most notably) tracking foreign journalists while conducting sensitive reporting in China. Who are these nonstate actors? How are they recruited and why are they hired? Lynette's research fills in the gaps, gathered as the window narrowed and closed for China's civil society in recent years.
This episode concludes this season of the NüVoices podcast! Subscribe for exciting feed drops with affiliated podcasts this summer. Catch us in September for new episodes. Thank you for listening.
About Outsourcing Repression:
"How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts."

Next Episode

Podcast Crossover: Self-Evident, 'A Day at the Mall'

Hello from our summer hiatus! While we're away, the pod squad is thrilled to share episodes from podcasts we love and admire. This week, we have an episode from Self-Evident, a podcast for reported stories, personal histories, and participatory local events — all by and about Asian Americans.
Co-host and NüVoices board member Cindy Gao introduces today's episode. Thank you Cindy!
(Description below courtesy of Self-Evident. Episode was originally aired on January 18, 2021.)
"When producer Erica Mu moved back to her hometown in 2014, she said goodbye to a past life without any idea what exactly her new life should look like. Looking for the most grounded place she could find, she went to the local mall early one morning, turned on her tape recorder, and started talking to everyone she could meet.

As Erica made her way through this sprawling landscape of mostly Chinese businesses in one of the most East Asian cities in the country, she peeked into the dreams, annoyances, and love lives of dim sum diners, shop owners, security guards, young children, young parents, weightlifters, all-night partiers, and one very skilled harmonica player.

But as she grasped for some universal truth that would tie all the threads of the mall, Erica realized that the unpredictable, unresolved mess of everyday life is exactly what makes it something to treasure."