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Chang 1 THE GOLD MEDAL RUSH: Machine-body racializations of Chinese labor at the Olympics and beyond I. The Sportsmachine In the London 2012 Olympics, 14-year-old divers Cao Yuan and Zhang Yanquan, representing China, mounted the diving platform to compete in the men’s synchronized 10-meter diving event, positioning themselves at the edge of the concrete platform in preparation (“London 2012 livestream,” 2012). As the camera zoomed in on the divers’ fronts and sides, showcasing the two divers’ identical positions, BBC commentator Bob Ballard stated: “Here they are, 17 and 18, fresh off the production line. 1 ” In the lingering seconds before Cao and Zhang leaped off the platform, the shot of the duo’s stillness and identical stances evokes an unsettling, uncanny image of mechanized bodies off a “production line.” Ultimately, the visual emphasis on Cao and Zhang’s “robotic” synchronicity transcends the performativity of staged movement and finite athletic performance, addressing more broadly the perceived mechanical composition of their bodies both on and off-board. In this case, “off-board” addresses both the denaturalization of their bodies (“robotic precision,” as Ballard describes it) beyond/off the diving board, as well as their “off- board” – as in “fresh” off-board the boat – status as racialized, commodified labor forms. Firstly, the image of two athletes poised at the end of a platform visually evokes a conveyor belt and its commodities, transforming the two athletes into the embodiment of repetitive machine- labor and mass-production. Later, in the 2016 Rio Olympics, the diver Cao Yuan would return solo in the 3-meter springboard event, this time similarly described by NBC commentator Ted Robinson as a “robotic” athlete “off the conveyor belt” (“Rio 2016 replay,” 2016). As Cao approached the edge of the 3-meter springboard, whose length and narrowness conjures the image of a “conveyor 1 During the 2016 Rio Olympics, mentions of a “production line” occurred twice during the women’s springboard events, once during the women’s platform events, once during the men’s springboard events, and twice during the men’s platform events (both synchronized and solo).

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Page 1: THE GOLD MEDAL RUSH: Machine-body …asianstudies.buffalo.edu/.../2016/...thegoldmedalrush-NYCAS-2017.pdfTHE GOLD MEDAL RUSH: Machine-body racializations of Chinese labor at the Olympics

Chang 1

THE GOLD MEDAL RUSH: Machine-body racializations of Chinese labor at the Olympics and beyond

I. The Sportsmachine

In the London 2012 Olympics, 14-year-old divers Cao Yuan and Zhang Yanquan,

representing China, mounted the diving platform to compete in the men’s synchronized 10-meter

diving event, positioning themselves at the edge of the concrete platform in preparation (“London

2012 livestream,” 2012). As the camera zoomed in on the divers’ fronts and sides, showcasing the

two divers’ identical positions, BBC commentator Bob Ballard stated: “Here they are, 17 and 18,

fresh off the production line.1” In the lingering seconds before Cao and Zhang leaped off the

platform, the shot of the duo’s stillness and identical stances evokes an unsettling, uncanny image of

mechanized bodies off a “production line.” Ultimately, the visual emphasis on Cao and Zhang’s

“robotic” synchronicity transcends the performativity of staged movement and finite athletic

performance, addressing more broadly the perceived mechanical composition of their bodies both

on and off-board. In this case, “off-board” addresses both the denaturalization of their bodies

(“robotic precision,” as Ballard describes it) beyond/off the diving board, as well as their “off-

board” – as in “fresh” off-board the boat – status as racialized, commodified labor forms.

Firstly, the image of two athletes poised at the end of a platform visually evokes a conveyor

belt and its commodities, transforming the two athletes into the embodiment of repetitive machine-

labor and mass-production. Later, in the 2016 Rio Olympics, the diver Cao Yuan would return solo

in the 3-meter springboard event, this time similarly described by NBC commentator Ted Robinson

as a “robotic” athlete “off the conveyor belt” (“Rio 2016 replay,” 2016). As Cao approached the

edge of the 3-meter springboard, whose length and narrowness conjures the image of a “conveyor

1 During the 2016 Rio Olympics, mentions of a “production line” occurred twice during the women’s springboard events, once during the women’s platform events, once during the men’s springboard events, and twice during the men’s platform events (both synchronized and solo).

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Chang 2 belt,” the movement of his walk to the board’s edge alchemizes into machine mimicry, visually

depicting the Chinese body as a mass-produced mechanism – a simulacrum of the human athlete.

Ballard even narrates Zhang and Cao’s post-dive bow as “precise. Thus, their robot “precision” transcends the performativity of a finite athletic movement and interprets their inherent bodily composition (and

therefore movement quality) as – oxymoronically – naturally mechanical.

Similarly, when Ballard says “now, notice their robotic precision” as they are mounting the

platform, he further evokes an industrial, Fordist “production line” that orients the bodies of Cao

and Zhang into duplicate machines: inorganic, interchangeable, and unnaturally efficient bodies.

This visual association of Chinese athletes with the “robot” or the “machine” ultimately reveals the

racialization of Chinese Olympic athletes as the physical embodiment of industrial mechanized

labor. As a product of Western anxiety about the threat of Asiatic industrialization to European

technological and economic dominance, the “machine-body” – a term coined by Etienne Balibar –

depicts the machine-man hybrid as an embodied fear of labor displacement and what Iyko Day

(2016) describes as “dehumanized economism” and the “abstract domination” of industrial

capitalism (pg. 17). According to Balibar (1988), mechanized physical work requires a process

that “modifies the status of the human” and “creates body-men, men whose body is the machine-

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Chang 3 body, that is fragmented and dominated, and used to perform one isolable function of gesture, being

both destroyed in its integrity and fetishized, atrophied and hypertrophied in its ‘useful’ organs” (pg.

375). Fear of being “modified” by mechanized labor, of not only harnessing but becoming the

machine itself (the “machine-body”), reflects and amplifies anxiety about physical and elemental

alteration by a domineering, abstract economism, as well as the seemingly perverse “technological

speed-up” of labor (Day, 71).

According to Iyko Day (2016), machines, which reduce human labor time, evoke a

“dehumanized labor efficiency,” or the machine’s capacity to perform an “excess” or “unnatural”

form of labor (pg. 122). The result is a “discomfort zone,” in which the transposition of the

machine’s “abstract form of repetition” onto Chinese athletic bodies produces an anxiety for the

games’ commentators (Day, 2016). During the 2008 women’s gymnastics team finals, BBC

commentator Lester Holt attempted to describe the parallel bars as a “nightmare of an apparatus.2”

Yet, he narrates this “nightmare of an apparatus” as the camera pans over the parallel bars and

instead focuses on the face of Chinese gymnast He Kexin. Following comments on the

“unemotional” and “robotic” gymnastics team, his narration heightens the “discomfort zone,”

rendering He Kexin’s body not only the “apparatus” of a singular machine-body, but “apparatus” as

the entire framework or system that produces the degenerative, anti-natural “nightmare” of a

literally and figuratively “dehumanized” economism.

Furthermore, Ye Shiwen, a swimmer who broke the 400-meter world record at the 2012

London games, amidst much controversy over her “unbelievable” time, was asked by The Guardian

whether she resented being “treated as a robot,” and her response was that she was not, as it implied

consistency and precision: yet, it is this “excess” of precise and repetitive labor that labeled her an

“unconvincing,” “disturbing,” and “unbelievable” body, with commentator Clare Balding

2 In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the word “apparatus” was paired with images of various Chinese gymnasts 6 times throughout the team semifinals and finals.

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Chang 4 immediately stating “there will be a lot of questions” (“Ye Shiwen’s world record Olympic swim

‘disturbing,’” 2012) following her win. Even John Leonard, the director of the World Swimming

Coaches Association, stated that the 16-year-old’s time was “suspicious” and that it was simply not

“convincing” (Leonard). Similarly, when Lin Yue, Cao Yuan, and Zhang Yanquan won their gold

medals, NBC commentators Clare Balding, Dan Hicks, and Tom Hammond all emphasized the

word “convincing3” to describe their wins: Lin won it “convincingly,” Cao was “a convincing

competitor,” and Zhang “managed it convincingly” (“Rio 2016 replays,” 2016). The word

“convincing,” in the context of their prostheticized, mechanized bodies, not only refers to the

plausibility of their scores but their “convincing” performances as hybrid bodies passing or

performing as human. Even before doping allegations were targeted at Ye from both professionals

and fans, her status as “robot” was articulated as an illegality, confirming her “illegal” presence:

Balding, commenting on her “robotic work ethic,” jokingly asks fellow commentator if “she’s even

allowed” (“NBC replays,” 2012).

Therefore, when Balding commented during the 2016 aquatic sports preliminaries that

Chinese athletes were “odd sportsmen, very robotic…some people call them machines,” she

identifies the unnamed Chinese diver on-screen as a sportsmachine rather than a sportsman. By

equating the athletes with an unnatural or “illegal” machine form of labor, the commentators project

the intangible threat of what Petrus Liu (2015) calls the “impersonal domination” of capitalism onto

their bodies (pg. 28). Ultimately, the abstraction of their bodies into machine labor manifests as a

perversion precisely because it aligns them with the destabilization of labor temporality: NBC

commentator Rebecca Lowe and Al Michaels evoke the “technological speed-up” of labor when

describing the Chinese divers’ flip-rotations at Rio as “quick and robotic” (“2012 replays,” 2012).

The “sped-up” nature of the machine-body then combines with the “televisuality” of instant-replay

3 During the London 2012 Olympics, BBC commentators used the word “convincing” to describe Chinese athletes 5 separate times during the men’s finals (3-meter and 10-meter combined.)

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Chang 5 footage to visualize Chinese athletes not as a “fixed presence” (Han, 2007) but as a destabilization

of linear temporalities heightened and enforced by the televisual medium. For example, the effect of

the instant replay – narrated always in present tense – is to enhance the athlete’s “telepresence,” or

the dominance of their perpetual presence as present-tense. When a dive is immediately replayed

multiple times and narrated in present tense, the result disrupts the “security of linear time as the

dominant form of temporality” (Han), and instead presents the movement on-screen as an automatic,

perpetual “present.” The replay exemplifies the concept of a visual “stutter” (Han), described as an

inherently “mechanical action”: the same dive is reproduced/replayed two to four times in a

repetitive present-tense visuality, mechanically duplicating movement and body on screen. As

opposed to a past movement articulated as the past, the instant replay “unfixes” the Chinese body

from linear time and implicates them in a mechanical, perpetually-present repetition of the diving

rotation, resulting in an extension of movement and moment – the replay as “stutter” – that

produces “automatic” time. Television’s ability to stage repetition and the “speed-up” of movement

produces an automated time and abstract telepresence that enhances the “robotic” machine-stutter of

the athlete, aligning the sportsmachine with perverse temporalities.

The result is that the instant-replay is not only the medium through which the

sportsmachines’ movements are articulated, but a predisposed quality of the movements themselves:

the abstract sportsmachine is an “unfixed” telepresence dominated by a looped, constantly-repeating

present, and when paired with the Chinese sportsmachine body, already a “mechanism,” the result is

an especially unnatural temporality. The word “robotic” transposed over the mechanized replay

implicates the sportsmachine body as an alternate or perverse form of temporality. For instance,

Balding also states that Chinese athletes “work many more hours than [other countries’ athletes],”

and that consequently, they “are living a different life, you see, their lives are all work.” The

“different life” of Chinese athletes – their unnatural and excessive productivity – is represented by

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Chang 6 nonhuman machine-forms, evoking an “unnatural” body to illustrate its reduction to human

“capital” ruled by the “temporal domination of capitalism.” The sportsmachine is therefore a

perversion of the “sportsman,” embodying the abstract supremacy of industrial-capitalist labor as

social form. In 2012, when NBC commentator Rebecca Lowe described the gold-medaling divers

He Zi and Wu Mingxia as exceptionally “economical4 with their movements,” the “economical”

quality of their bodies assumes a double meaning. Lowe, who introduced the divers as “very young

and consistent as machines,” identifies the Chinese bodies with the efficiency of the machine,

abstracting Asian labor through what Iyko Day (2016) describes as “mechanical, nonhuman

representation” (pg. 51). Thus, the unusual use of the word “economical,” which lies outside of

common athletic terminology, is noteworthy for its connotations of the abstract. The word

“economical” to describe efficiency or precision of physical movement abstracts the bodied

movement from something tangible and concrete into something that can be categorized or treated

“economically” – in short, the ability of the divers’ physical bodies to move “economically”

delivers their movement to the economic realm, to capital itself. The categorization of their

movement as abstraction, as well the implication of a perverse “mode of efficiency,” highlights how

the physicality and movement of Chinese athletes can be made intangible through evoking their

bodies – and their modes of labor – as that of the “sportsmachine.” As a body with no potential for

normative social relationships, the sportsmachine is “all work,” all economic instrumentality – it

epitomizes “human capital” and is increasingly allied with economic, rather than human,

characteristics and modes of efficiency. Sportsmachines are ominous “oddities” precisely because

they are aligned with an unnatural temporality – the mechanical speed-up of labor that replaces the

tangibility of concrete human labor – culminating in the perception of “impersonal” machine-

domination.

4 During the Rio 2016 Olympics, the term “economical” was used by commentators Jeremy Roenick and Keith Richards to describe diver Qiu Bo as well.

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Chang 7

II. Man vs. the “absolute machine”

For instance, Chinese labor is increasingly abstracted into the threat of a “destructive

economism.” The Chinese diver Qiu Bo, nicknamed the “absolute machine” by British diver Tom

Daley and simple “the machine” by former-gold-medalist and American diver David Boudia,

epitomizes how the threatening, “intangibly abstract” domination of labor is projected onto the form

of the sportsmachine (Day, 2016). The abstraction of Chinese bodies into high-performing

machines signals the infiltration of a technologized, economized threat into the romanticized,

manicured arena of the Olympics, in which commentators typically illustrate athletic labor as

individualistic, humanized, and concrete. The mechanization of the Chinese bodies, and the

resulting perception of a looming and ever-penetrating “ominous reality” – how commentator

Cynthia Potter describes China’s sweeping of gold medals (despite the fact that the US wins the

most medals overall) – is especially prominent and embedded within the media coverage of the

rivalry between 10-meter platform divers Qiu Bo and Tom Daley (“Rio 2016 replays,” 2016).

For instance, BBC and NBC media coverage of Qiu Bo and his training exemplify the threat

of the “technological speed-up of labor,” as well as a degeneration of concrete labor visually

imagined as the machine-body “process of prostheticization” (Day, 2016). While Daley is the

“spirit and the culture” of the Olympics (BBC, 2016), Qiu Bo’s body physically represents the

“dark side of technology,” producing a profound sense of unease among both his fellow athletes and

the media (Day, 2016). Daley frequently comments on his “rivalry” with Qiu Bo – most often after

losing to him – by defaulting to language and images that participate in the “prostheticization” of

Qiu’s body. In one BBC interview, in which Daley was asked about the differences between

himself and Qiu, Daley states:

“The Chinese have got a different way of working. They’re taken out of school and away from their families. There’s just this conveyor belt of Chinese divers and they work them until they break and then the next one comes along and trains. So it’s completely different. I train five hours a

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Chang 8 day, six days a week, which is a lot. But the Chinese guys are maybe doing seven hours of training, and working so hard. But they don’t have a life. I do. I’m not constantly thinking about diving.” Daley’s portrayal of Qiu Bo and the Chinese training system as a “conveyor belt” of mass-

produced, denaturalized sportsmachines aligns with NBC and BBC’s history of sensationalized

coverage: “cruel gold medal factories,” “diving factories,” “Olympic dream factories,” and other

headlines equate depersonalized Chinese Olympic training and its athletes with industrial capitalism

and the “specter of mass production” (Day, 2016). Though the interviewer specifically enquires

about Daley’s perception of Qiu, Daley does not address Qiu as an individual, instead describing a

collective Chinese presence: “they work them until they break and then the next one comes along

and trains. So it’s completely different” (Daley, 2014). Daley is “completely different” from Qiu

because, unlike the disposable Qiu that will inevitably “break” like a machine and be replaced as

systematically as a mechanical part, Daley is the romantic Western individual, sportsman and not

sportsmachine. While Qiu is merely “the next one” that “comes along” in a conveyor belt of

depersonalized, commodified sportsmachines, Daley is irreplaceable and irreproducible, framed as

the antithesis of Qiu. As an “absolute machine” whose dives, according to commentator Tom

Hammond, are “like copies, never a fault,” Qiu embodies mechanized labor as commodified form.

While Daley’s unpredictability is a quality that “makes him the most unique diver,” the perception

of Chinese machine-copies stages their movement as purely “economical,” indicative of their bodies

as purely economic in movement-production (“A profile on Tom Daley,” 2012).

Therefore, when Daley states “The Chinese have got a different way of working,” he

highlights implies that Great Britain is somehow exempt from and inherently antithetical to the

“dehumanized economism” attributed to the Chinese “gold medal factory” training system (Reuters,

2016). According to Iyko Day (2016), the romantic anti-capitalism of the white West is one that

fetishizes white labor as “concrete, rooted, or organic”: thus, Daley’s framing of his training as

“organic” and concrete, while Qiu’s training is the product of an abstract industrialism, an

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Chang 9 “inorganic” machine body, and an “unrooted” background without a natural community or family

(pg. 63). Rather, Qiu epitomizes a “gold medal factory” system that “reduces human individuality

to an abstract form of repetition and equivalence” (Day, 2016). The commodification of Qiu’s body

as the mass-produced output of a “gold medal factory” – illustrating him as both perverse

“machine” and abstract, domineering system – articulates his embodied threat as the supremacy of

commodified labor.

Furthermore, when Daley states, “I train five hours a day, six days a week, which is a lot.

But the Chinese guys are maybe doing seven hours of training, and working so hard. But they don’t

have a life. I do. I’m not constantly thinking about diving,” he emphasizes that Chinese athletes are

incapable of “having a life.” The sportsmachine disrupts processes of social reproduction and is

instead in “nearly exclusive alignment with quasi-mechanized labor temporality, excluded from

normative social and domestic temporalities” (Day, 2016). The “quasi-mechanized” Chinese

athletes, defined by labor temporality, cannot maintain a “life” of “normative” social relationships.

Thus, they are personified as “the abstract, temporal domination of capitalism,” in which Chinese

bodies physically manifest the “abstract dimensions” of labor in the form of “temporal domination”

– no “life” outside of labor hours (Day, 2016). As barren machine-bodies, who are “discarded” and

replaced in their adolescence by the “production line,” they represent a perverse model of labor

temporality, such as achieving a “lifetime of medals by the age of 15,” as Tom Hammond spoke of

Rio gold medalist Ren Qian. Just as the machine cuts down labor time, the sportsmachine performs

“mechanized” labor temporalities that apparently remove them from normative social temporality:

for example, Hammond observes Ren Qian’s “lifetime of medals” has excluded her from “having a

normal life,” making friends, and other social or domestic temporalities (NBC, 2016).

Because the “Chinese guys” are perceived to be emotionally and socially “lifeless,” to have

no capacity for domestic enjoyment, community engagement, or social reproduction, this threatens

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Chang 10 the temporal stability of ‘socially necessary labor time’” (Day, 2016). The idea that the Chinese

“life” is defined solely by its capacity to generate value in the form of high scores and gold medals

characterizes Chinese athletes as possessing a “homogenized labor disposition” (Day, 2016). It is

precisely this definition of “life” as training time, as “temporal domination,” that leads Daley to

imply that competition with Qiu is inherently unfair, positioning himself as the man vs. the machine.

The “Chinese guys” – as sportsmachines embodying the mechanization of industrial labor –

destabilize “socially necessary labor time” because their inhuman lack of a “social life” (and

consequent capacity to work non-normatively and in inhuman excess) is perceived as perverting

“normal” intensity and production for human labor.

III. Fresh off the boat, fresh off the production line

Another characterization of the sportsmachine is unreadability and inscrutability: for

example, when Chinese swimmer Sun Yang (also nicknamed “the machine5” of the swimming

world) emerged from the warm-up areas for the 1500-meter freestyle at the Rio 2016 Olympics,

NBC commentator Dan Hicks remarked: “He’s, uh, mysterious,” later repeating that Sun Yang was

“really mysterious, a mysterious guy.” Similarly, at the same games, diver Chen Aisen was

described by Cynthia Potter during the 10-meter platform semifinals as “pretty unreadable.” The

sportsmachine’s perpetual unknowability as a body rehearses and restages the “Yellow Peril”

stereotype of the inscrutable Chinaman, a key attribute of the sportsmachine body. What is

threatening or sinister about the “machine” bodies is their essential “mystery” and unknowability,

creating a site of anxiety about an abstract tyranny: according to Masahiro Mori (1970), the

uncanniness or “disturbing” quality of some humanoid androids “play on subconscious fears of

reduction, replacement, and annihilation,” paralleling anxiety about the reduction of “human life” to

5 Korean archers are also commonly referred to by NBC commentators as “machines.”

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Chang 11 “repetition and equivalence,” the replacement of human labor with machine labor, and the perceived

annihilative effects of industrialization and capitalist modernity (pg. 39).

Whereas the sportsman is the embodiment of an illusory “pure and fair sportsmanship,” as

commentator Jeremy Roenick calls it, the sportsmachine is a threat to this “purity and fairness,”

highlighting the Chinese presence as an antinatural form of labor (NBC 2016). It is also no

coincidence that commentators emphasize the alterity of the sportsmachine by evoking older racial

imaginaries of the “fresh off the boat” stowaway (language mirrored in the phrase “fresh off the

production line”). This is further emphasized when, according to BBC commentary, Chinese

athletes such as Cao and Zhang “run away” with the gold, with the implication of stealing gold and

fleeing, while American diver David Boudia “brings home” the gold – though technically, because

Boudia is an American (not British) athlete, he is “running away” with the medal as much as Qiu is.

However, the image of stealing and fleeing is attached not to Boudia but to Qiu Bo. The

sportsmachine displaces, “steals,” and monopolizes the concrete realm of the white sportsman. And,

to the viewer, this hypocrisy – that Boudia’s white and Qiu’s “yellow” body, though both non-

British, are not equally foreign – does not register as incongruous. Rather, the racialized language

that aligns Chinese divers with immigrant bodies is obscured by a more abstract imaginary of

Chinese bodies as the intangible threat of the machine.

Therefore, the phrase “fresh off the production line” ultimately exemplifies the linked nature

of two racial imaginaries: not only the mechanization of Chinese bodies from sportsmen to

sportsmachine, but the “fresh off the boat6” racialization of the Chinese immigrant as a visibly

marked body targeted for exclusion from the nation. Firstly, the racialization of Chinese athletes as

sportsmachines embodying an abstract threat, coupled with the historical alienation of Chinese

bodies based on the visible, physical markings of being “colored” reveal not the replacement of one

6 The phrase “missed the boat” was used to describe Chinese divers 4 times during the London 2012 10-meter finals, and 2 times during the preliminaries and semifinals.

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Chang 12 model of racialization with another but fluid interactions between both. It would be erroneous to

assume that one can exist without the other, or that one has been replaced by the other. Rather, the

“fresh off the boat” immigrant and the abstract threat of the sportsmachine not only produce similar

responses (anxiety and nostalgia), but combine to illuminate how the athletes’ alignment with a

“dehumanized economism,” paired with the rise of the model minority, which increasingly depicts

Asian bodies as “human capital,” produces anxiety about abstract capital’s perceived tyranny (Day,

2016). Both the “fresh off the boat” image of the immigrant and the mechanization of Asian bodies

result in the perceived threat of contamination and a consequent call for removal, an attempt to cling

to antiquated notions of the bordered nation.

Chinese bodies manifesting as the “domination” of the global economy is intimately tied,

and in fact inextricable from, the Chinese body racially marked and “othered” for exclusion from

the nation-state. The history of cheap agricultural and industrial labor performed by low-wage

Asian workers – from Chinese sugarcane farmers of 1830s Hawaii, Chinese railroad and mining

labor in the 1850s, and Japanese farmers in California of the 1870s – created a racial imaginary that

justified exclusion, deportation, and alienation of Asian laborers based upon the strict borders and

definitions of America as an exclusionary white nation-state. Lisa Lowe describes how Asian

laborers were denied citizenship and marginalized as “contradictory, confusing, unintelligible

elements to be…returned to their alien origins” (Lowe, 1996). Thus, she describes a racialization of

Asians founded upon ideas of Asian removal and erasure, the product of assigned visual cues of

otherness, such as skin color, as well as Asian exclusion founded upon the possibility of being

“returned to” an alien origin. Ultimately, this mode of racialization relies upon a less globalized era,

a perception of Asia as a sequestered, “alien origin” rather than an active participant in the global

economy. It also assumed a near-exclusive marginalization of Asian bodies within low-wage

agricultural sectors, where the “historically sedimented particularities of race, national origin,

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Chang 13 locality” (Lowe) were constructs of the exclusionary citizenship policies and particular global

moment that produced an overwhelming presence of Asian labor in low-wage agricultural sectors.

Yet, as the majority of exclusionary laws, xenophobic rhetoric, and socio-political anxiety

now targets Latinx immigration, racial imaginaries must now accommodate the increased entrance

of Asian labor into high-tech and financial sectors. This does not disregard the continued existence

and flow of Asian immigration into domestic and service sectors. Instead, it questions how a new

influx of skilled Asian labor, not as blatantly targeted for exclusion or expulsion from the “native”

nation-state (but instead perceived as “good immigration”) simultaneously splits from and evolves

Lowe’s narrower imaginary. The racialization of Asian bodies has always been intimately and

inextricably linked to the global economy and the flow of labor. Now, as Iyko Day (2016) states in

regards to the Yellow Peril, “economic efficiency is the basis for exclusion,” an idea that rings

uncannily true (88). The increasing association of Asian bodies with economic efficiency – and

with the economy itself as the abstract, unknowable domination of global capitalism – continues to

enter the political imaginary and implicate Asian bodies as a threat to the “pure” reproduction of the

nation.

With an increasing demand for skilled Asian labor to enter new and different sects of the

economy, the influx of South and East Asian immigrants to banks, start-up companies, and the hi-

tech heartland of the Silicon Valley ultimately does not erase Lowe’s “alien” Asian as marked for

exclusion. Rather, as Iyko Day (2016) states, anxiety about Asian laborers abstracts them into

“agents of an economic takeover” (183). According to R. John William (2014), the West has

historically characterized the East as a romantic, pre-industrial fantasy that can “redeem Western

technoculture,” and ultimately rescue the industrial wasteland of the technologized West from a

“corrupt, mechanical inheritance” (pg 83). The East’s production methods were perceived not

as mass production or commodification, but as the individual crafting of cultural products not

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Chang 14 intended for global consumerism (Yu, 2002). However, the industrialization of Asia and the

relocation of mass-production to places such as China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have destabilized

the perception of the East as the ideal of romantic anti-capitalism, or as the “antidote” to machine-

culture. Rather, the East is increasingly characterized as the site of hyper-commodification and

hyper-industrialization, resulting in “barely concealed anxieties about [the West’s] economic

impotence” (Chun, 2003). Thus, the fear of “replacement and annihilation” by the machine

manifests in Orientalized form as fear of “replacement and annihilation” by the capitalist modernity

of the “East.” Perceptions of Asia as stagnant “native tribe” producing outside of the capitalist

marketplace now shifts to the East as hyper-technologized, producing laborers who are excessively

capitalistic and market-driven – marking skilled laborers from South and East Asia as the

supremacy of commodified labor’s “Eastern” (and therefore anti-natural) form. As the globalized

world increasingly adjusts the definition of a bordered nation-state, remaining anxiety over defining

the racial composition and boundaries of the outdated nation combines Iyko Day’s model of the

Asian (as a body manifesting an intangible economic domination) with Lowe’s portrayal of Asians

as physically, tangibly identified subjects for removal. One model cannot exist without the other, as

aspects of both imaginaries – illegibility, otherness, and mechanization – combine to identify the

Asian body as inherently threatening to “normative social and domestic temporalities” (Day, 2016).

For example, amidst Donald Trump’s hysterical demand to deport undocumented

immigrants, the majority of whom are Latinx, as well as his threat to repeal laws that mostly impact

Latinx immigrant communities, the Asian immigrant appears absent from most white-nationalist

rhetoric. Trump specifically marks the Latinx laborer as the alien Other, associating the presence of

Latin American immigrants with destroying the integrity and the “purity” of the nation. Meanwhile,

Asian immigrants – particularly skilled workers from India and China – are cast as “good

immigration,” with Donald Trump suggesting that allowing the entrance of engineers and other

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Chang 15 professionals from India is an integral part in preserving the integrity of the US immigration

system.7 Thus, while many Asian laborers are no longer solely racialized as low-wage

“mongrelizing” elements destructive to the “integrity” of the nation, the projection of new fears

about the abstract domination of capital onto Asian immigrants – an insidious potential for

racialization – prescribes suspicion, anxiety, and possible exclusion to the Asian presence. This was

most prominent during a discussion on immigration policy and the Trump administration’s planned

reforms, in which Trump stated that “You know, we have to keep our talented people in this

country” (Washington Post, 2016). Following a discussion on the status of international students at

Ivy League and other elite schools, with the majority of such students from South and East Asia, the

“talented people” becomes code for the “model minority” immigrant, the educated South/East Asian

who enters the U.S. in skilled sectors of the economy. Yet, the apparent inclusion of educated

Asians is undermined by Trump’s chief-of-staff Steve Bannon, who hesitates for several seconds

before stating, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South

Asia or from Asia, I think…” Bannon trails off, unable to finish the sentence. After a few seconds,

he begins a new one: “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society” (Washington

Post, 2016).

Bannon’s hesitance, his inability to articulate the “threat,” is extremely telling: while Trump

frames educated Asians as the ideal “human capital” and therefore the acceptable, even “model,”

members of the nation, it is the perceived “human capital” of Asian bodies that causes Bannon to

hesitate. Not only are his figures objectively incorrect and vastly overestimated, exposing his

anxiety over a perceived Asian threat that simply does not exist (less than 14 percent of Silicon

Valley managerial positions are occupied by Asian people), his inability to finish his sentence, to

identify the source of his anxiety, reveals the abstractness and intangibility of this racialization of

7 Donald Trump’s embrace of Hindu nationalism has led to the apparent “approval” of skilled immigration from India.

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Chang 16 Asian labor (Washington Post, 2016). Bannon, in expressing his discomfort over skilled Asian

labor, does not default to stereotypes or racial rhetoric about “draining the swamp” – rather, he trails

off, incapable of identifying the source of his own objection to Trump’s apparently welcoming

statement. Bannon’s anxiety over the Asian presence in new sectors is not in spite of perceptions of

their high-earning statuses, powerful roles in the global economy, and model-minority racialization

as “human capital” (as bodies primed, if not made for, earning capital and economic achievement)

but because of it.

Yet, Bannon himself cannot quite identify the source of his desire to exclude or mark the

Asian body for exclusion – instead, he begins a new, seemingly unrelated sentence about the

dangers of a country becoming “only” its economy. The two thoughts are directly linked, even if

Bannon himself cannot trace their trajectory: the threat of Asian domination in Silicon Valley

manifests as the threat of a country “becoming” an economy. Analogous to Iyko Day’s description

of white settler-colonists projecting the fear of “dehumanized economism” and “the domination of

finance capital” onto the alien Asian body, Bannon figures the Asian as a potential source of

destruction and degradation, a “nation” becoming economy: in short, anxiety about the annihilation

and dehumanization of civic, social, and democratic life, and the formation of a national and

cultural identity governed solely by economic interests (Day, 2016). The warning goes both ways:

governing a country based on economic interests also, according to Bannon’s logic, means a

takeover of Silicon Valley by brown bodies, disturbing his white-nationalist concept of nation.

Therefore, though the intangibility and immateriality of this racialization – exemplified by

Bannon’s inability to even concretely connect his sentences, to verbally articulate the link between

Asian bodies and economic domination – epitomizes Day’s model of reducing and abstracting

Asians to a perilously economized racial form. Yet, the impact of this shift in racialization, from

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Chang 17 physical stereotyping and blatantly exclusive rhetoric to figuring Asians as the intangible threat of

capitalist domination, ultimately results in similar forms of alienation from the nation.

When Bannon states, “We’re a civic society,” he implies that Asians are merely “economic”

bodies, just as sportsmachines are “economical” bodies. Inherently incapable of participating in

political and democratic life, and with no capacity for “civic life,” Asian bodies represent the

intangible threat of “economy” – the anxiety-producing intangibility of finance capital in opposition

to the concrete, romantic “anti-capitalism” of white labor (Day, 2016). Asians as physically

differentiated, “illegal,” or low-wage laborers in the 1800s were deemed “ineligible for citizenship,”

and similarly, Asian CEOs in the Silicon Valley, as solely economic agents, are implied to be

incapable of functioning fully as true “citizens.” Though this racialization manifests as a much

more abstract form than Lowe’s depiction of the racially-marked immigrant, both ultimately lead to

the same conclusion: potential immigration restriction. Bannon cannot ensure that the US will keep

or secure “talented” Asians in the country, because to do so is to threaten America as a “civic

society” – thus, the perceived integrity of the nation is destabilized by the presence of Asians as

purely economic beings, as the tyranny of capital itself. Lowe’s model of the alien Asian, ineligible

for citizenship and visibly tagged for removal, has not so much disappeared as evolved and adapted

to Asians entering the economy and the American workforce in new positions. Consequently, the

increasingly abstract racialization of Asian bodies – not only by skin color but by the alignment of

Asian bodies with machines, technologized and mechanized labor temporality, and “dehumanized

economism” – does not erase the Yellow Peril so much as channel it through new visual and

political representations. Day and Lowe’s racial imaginaries converge in that both models of

racialization not only exclude Asians from social and bodily normativity, but justify the removal of

their bodies as preserving the ideals and constructs of an exclusivist America. Though Bannon’s

hesitance over accepting skilled Asian workers stems from an abstract, in-articulable threat

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Chang 18 projected onto and embodied by Asians, the consequences of his anxiety could shape political

reality in material and physical ways. Bannon’s brand of “romantic anti-capitalism,” a concept that

Day articulates as the association of concrete labor and products with white bodies, while the idea

of “economic takeover” by capitalism’s “abstract dimensions” is credited to an Asian presence – a

presence that is ineligible because of a perceived inability to participate in “civic life.” Therefore,

“denaturalization” can refer to the dual phenomenon of denaturalizing the organic body into the

machine body and “denaturalization” as the process of removing or depriving the rights of

citizenship; ultimately, the Asian body is “denaturalized,” neither natural body nor naturalized

subject.

Ultimately, the fear of America becoming entirely an “economy” stems from anxiety about

capitalist “ruin,” in which capitalism “dominates” all human life and result in “an apocalyptic

endpoint: ecological breakdown, the biogenic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, and

total digital control over our lives” (Zizek). The tech workers of Silicon Valley embody the threat of

this “total digital control,” and the visual representation of Asian bodies in the Olympics as both

“manipulable machines” (mass-produced products of a “dehumanized” factory system) and

“ecological breakdown” (polluting agents) further exemplifies Bannon’s projection of capitalist

anxiety and a terror of the intangible “economy” onto Asian bodies. For example, the duality of

Lowe and Day’s models of racialization manifests again after Cao and Zhang, the two divers “fresh

off the production line,” won gold medals in the 2012 synchronized 10-meter platform, causing

Ballard to conclude that “The Chinese monopoly has been maintained” (NBC, 2016). The words

“Chinese monopoly” pair with the image of Cao and Zhang biting their gold medals, a typical

victory pose for all medal winners; however, the combination of the two divers mimicking the

consumption of gold coupled with the ominous threat of a “Chinese monopoly” hints at anxiety

over bodies “consuming,” internalizing, and becoming capital.

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Chang 19 Furthermore, when David Boudia received his first and only Olympic gold in 2012, NBC

commentator Tom Hammond stated that “The good days are happening again…We come away

from the results with a wonderful feeling about the health of the sport” (NBC, 2012). Boudia, by

defeating Qiu in the finals, reinstalls the “good days,” destabilizing the perceived “monopoly” on

gold by Chinese athletes. The term “monopoly” evokes Day’s abstract racialization, and the product

of this fear, which is nostalgia for eras of exclusion and absence, does not differ greatly from the

product of Lowe’s model of racialization. Hammond aligns Chinese athletic dominance with

monopoly, leading to a desire for the “good days”: the nostalgia of this statement establishes that

the “health of the sport” has been restored by Boudia’s rightful win, and that it is a “return” to an

imagined past before Chinese “monopoly,” an agent of illness that contaminates the “health” of the

sport. Though it is America that historically and indisputably earns the most medals out of all

nations, year after year, the perception of “monopoly” has never applied to the US – it is the threat

of Chinese “monopolization” that becomes synonymous with the “unnatural” domination of

industrial capitalism, while the true dominance of settler-colonialist America remains a “natural”

phenomenon.

Ultimately, Day’s model of abstract racialization both differs from and restages Lowe’s

racial imaginary: both result in socio-political exclusion and nostalgia for “the good days.” For

example, when the camera zooms in on Cao and Zhang mounting the podium in the London 2012

Olympics, Ballard negates the physical and visual presences of the divers by instead reflecting on

the historical absence of Chinese bodies: “They didn’t even compete [here] until 1984” (NBC,

2012). As the frame closes in around Cao and Yuan’s faces, attempting to capture their emotions at

a moment of victory, Ballard chooses to highlight the historical absence of Chinese athletes: the

Chinese Civil War and consequent disputes over whether Taiwan or mainland China was the true

China prevented the participation of the official PRC (People’s Republic of China) until 1984 (NBC,

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Chang 20 2012). Following his comments on the looming, sinister threat of a “Chinese monopoly” by alien

Chinese bodies, the false implication that the Olympics pre-1984 was unadulterated by such a

monopoly highlights the nostalgia for an era of Chinese exclusion – the illusion of a “pure” and fair

Olympic sportsmanship uncontaminated by the presence of “robotic” sportsmachines. The fantasy

of sportsmachine-exclusion from the Olympics as the “good days” free of unnatural machine

“monopoly” mirrors the romantic anti-capitalist nostalgia for an imagined era of concrete labor

uncontaminated by intangible – and therefore threatening and inscrutable – forms of labor and

capital.

Furthermore, it is impossible to divorce the abstract racialization of Chinese athletes by

commentators without incurring or reminding the audience of the presence and history of Chinese

labor and immigration: for example, in the commentary of Cao and Zhang, commentator Al

Michaels narrates footage of the spectators’ reactions to their final dive by remarking, “There’s a

support for the [two divers]…there’s a big Chinese population in and around London” (NBC, 2012).

This statement, overlaid on footage of the camera scanning a series of seemingly random Asian

faces in the audience, already assumes that the “Chinese population in and around London”

supports China rather than their “home team” of Britain – it also assumes and imagines an inherent

relationship between the Chinese athletes and the British-Chinese audience members, and links their

othered immigrant bodies with the imported “robotic” Chinese divers. Evoked in the same breath,

the Chinese divers are “fresh off the production line” and the “Chinese population” in London

confirms the presence of the Chinese athletes as an import commodity. In response to Potter’s

mention of a “big Chinese population” in the audience, Ballard states, “There’s a little production

line going on, around the corner…” just as the camera resumes its focus on Cao and Zhang (NBC,

2012). Yet, because he begins his statement about a “little production line” with the camera still

focused on the audience, and concludes his statement (“around the corner”) when the camera is

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Chang 21 back on Cao and Zhang, it is ambiguous whether his statement pertains to the “big Chinese”

immigrant population of London or to “athletic factories” in China.

The “little production line” that Ballard invokes during footage of British-Chinese audience

members produces the feeling of a sudden appearance or “production” of Asian bodies

“monopolizing” the audience. Though it later becomes clear that Potter and Ballard are discussing

athletic training in China and not the production of a “Chinese population” in London, the fact that

footage of presumed British-Chinese audience members evokes for him a Chinese “production line”

of machine-bodies reveals how the universalization and racialization of Chinese bodies, whether

immigrant or not, share the common thread of being both “fresh off the boat” and “the machine.”

IV. Draining the “swamp”

What Steve Bannon fears is not inherently racialized, but it is projected onto historically

racialized bodies and reinforces or justifies racialized policies. Yet, racialization of the Chinese

athletes does not solely manifest through the figurative and visual alignment of Chinese bodies with

abstract and intangible threats: rather, the identification of their bodies as visibly and tangibly

“alien” also emerges, operating within Lisa Lowe’s framework of the Asian as a physically

distinguishable other. The emerging strand of abstract racialization, in which the Chinese body is a

threatening, “ominous” presence because it embodies the intangible concept of “economic

takeover,” does not to discount or remove remnants of the body’s physical designation as “colored”;

as Henry Yu (2002) states, the tendency to detach social analysis from bodies, as the commentators

attempt to do, denies a lingering history of biological racism that has been central to ideas of racial

exclusion and impurity. Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” racialization continues to apply, as

evidenced by NBC’s coverage of the Rio 2016 pool “contamination” scandal. Halfway through

diving events, between August 8 and August 9, the diving pool color transformed from a

“transparent, azure blue” to a “murky dark green” overnight: spectators, commentators, and athletes

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Chang 22 flocked to social media in a frenzied inquiry (“Rio pool,” 2016). Why was the pool green? Was it

safe for the athletes? Would events proceed as scheduled? Though the competition continued, the

pool’s complete opacity and algae-green tone remained the main topic of conversation, with

commentators describing the change in color as “inorganic,” “disgusting,” “bizarre,” “ominous,”

“strange,” “dark,” and “muddy-looking.” NBC then released three separate slideshows of pictures

that “tracked the color of the pool day-by-day”: for each day of the diving competition, they posted

an image of a diver or a pair of divers entering the water with the date stamped in the corner (“Rio

pool,” 2016. Each day pictured a different team’s diver(s) landing in a differently-colored pool,

visually tracking the progression from “clear” to “murky,” “clean” to “polluted” – thus, though the

coverage was of the pool, NBC chose to center the bodies of athletes in the slideshow. Furthermore,

all countries dive on the same day: it is the events that are assigned to a specific day, meaning that

they actively, if not consciously, selected which divers would visually foreground which stage of

the pool’s pollution.

Thus, while the photo for August 7, which establishes the pool at its original “azure” and

“transparent” state, showcases two white divers, the following photos of the pool in various shades

of “murky, dark” green are accompanied by Chinese divers He Zi and Chen Ruolin, as well as Chen

Aisen and Lin Yue. NBC chose to couple the Chinese divers, some pictured entering the water, and

other pictured just before entrance, with the pool post-transformation, visually attributing Chinese

bodies with the pool’s “darkening” and increasingly “polluted” appearance. NBC commentators (as

well as American diver Abby Johnston) nicknamed the pool “the swamp,” and reported that it

would take “radical measures” to drain and refill it. To align Chinese bodies with the “swamping”

of the pool is a visceral visual manifestation of Trump’s imagined “swamp,” in which bodies

become drainable contaminations.

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Chang 23

A side-by-side comparison released by NBC on Twitter: to the left, team Germany diving into blue, and to the right, Team China diving into “murky” green

Team China, again, diving into dark green water to mark the pool’s “change.”

The pool’s media coverage ultimately reiterates Lisa Lowe’s model of racialization as a

means to exclude and “purify.” Yet the Chinese sportsmachine is both bodily “colored” and

carrying the threat of an abstract economism: the two racial imaginaries enhance each other to

enhance the effect of a “gold medal rush,” in which the Chinese bodies not only “run away with

gold” but embody “economical” machines. Just as the more concrete dimensions of capital (what

Day calls a “thingly” commodity, and in this case gold as well) have been abstracted into money,

the rise of the “sportsmachine” abstracts the embodied movements of athletes into the uncanny

bodilessness of industrial capitalist domination.

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Chang 24

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