photos: The Chinese Art of the Crowd

May 8, 2015 7:48 PM

"After viewing news photographs from China for years, one of my favorite visual themes is large crowd formations. Whether the subject is military parades or world-record attempts, mass exercises or enormous performances, the images are frequently remarkable. The masses of people can look beautiful or intimidating, projecting a sense of strength and abundance. Individuals can become pixels in a huge painting, or points on a grid, or echoes of each other in identical uniforms or costumes."
posted by paleyellowwithorange (38 comments total)

In the course of a long evening, billions of viewers were induced not so much to revise their opinion of China as to realize that its formidable manpower could be harnessed to the cause of astonishment. China supports a population of 1.3 billion, and the knowledge of that resource was never far away; indeed, the whole evening became an exercise in number-crunching, as mass art was constructed from a mass of humanity. One townful of men and women would race on, swarm into a shape, and race off, to be replaced by the next; if, deep below the spectacle, there was an unspoken suggestion that it would be an extremely bad idea to go to war against this nation, it never rose to the surface, although one aerial travelling shot of fireworks exploding in sequence along the street leading up to the stadium, displayed for us on screens inside, was a ringer for bombing-run footage from the Vietnam War.
posted by rankfreudlite at 8:18 PM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Man, Guinness is really hard up for new categories, huh?
posted by kmz at 8:23 PM on May 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Crowds"
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:39 PM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

There are more than 500 protests, riots, demonstrations and insurrections in China. Daily.

Daily.

We're told how in lockstep China is, and not told how Mandarin is a second or third language for many of the people who live there. Even for those who speak Madarin, regional dialects happen.

At this stage of the game, Turkey and Russia are way better at controlling internal dissent with extralegal brutality.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:46 PM on May 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Samsara got into this about four years ago The videos of Chinese soldiers marching in lockstep is kind of hypnotic.
posted by bl1nk at 9:22 PM on May 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

When I was in North Korea, I learned that it's all done by markings on the ground and had a photo taken of me attempting to goose step very poorly.
posted by gman at 9:30 PM on May 8, 2015 [5 favorites]

From a photographic perspective, gorgeous photos -- but something about the framing of the topic makes me uncomfortable.

Actually, I know exactly why it makes me uncomfortable, but I don't have the energy to fully articulate it. It has to do with the fiction of The West vs The East, "our individualism vs. their groupthink", "I hear that in China, 'may you live in interesting times' is an insult", "their test scores may be higher, but our colleges admit well-rounded students", etc.

(No offense, paleyellowwithorange - glad you made this post.)
posted by suedehead at 10:00 PM on May 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Suedehead, I feel you. These pictures do reinforce some cliches. The one I really liked was number 29, with one policeman up front and the line fading away behind him; the look on his face says, "I am completely calm and confident about my ability to stand in a perfect line, but I am also an individual who has better things to do, so is this over yet."
posted by Rinku at 12:16 AM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Imagine a pride parade.
posted by Nanukthedog at 1:34 AM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yes, this sort of thing is better with context. Marching bands are a popular phenomenon in the USA in a way they just aren't in Europe, for instance, as are mega-churches. It's par for the course with stereotypes: what we see as complex and differentiated in our own culture, we see as simplistic and easily-generalized in others.

It's especially a shame in the case of China, where the Communist government actively promotes the group-think stereotype, and when that's reinforced by the rest of the world, it leaves that much less free space for people there who do things differently. It's disappointing, to say the least, that this photo essay chose so very many government-sponsored events. Keep in mind that many of the people marching were not given much of a choice to participate and their synchronous performances came at high costs. Filmmaker Zhang Yimou directed the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing and had this to say:

"North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Through hard training and strict discipline," he said. Pyongyang's annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lockstep.

[In the West], "In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn't go into overtime and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights," he said of the unidentified opera production.

I have a hard time seeing beauty in that. Were it their choice, were they treated well, it would be different. People do choose this sort of thing: I trained 8 hours a week with a tenor saxophone around my neck for marching band while also taking a full class load, including other music performance courses, at university. We marched pretty well, went to the '95 Rose Bowl. Yes, tuba players also carry their instruments during rehearsals.
posted by fraula at 2:23 AM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it's possible to read these images, not as a statement of brute fact ("the Chinese are cogs in a vast collective machine") but as an attempt by certain organizers (not the photographer, and not the Atlantic) to assert that China is just that kind of super-mechanism. The loophole is that any attempt to assert assumes that somebody out there isn't persuaded yet. Do we fault the photographer for selecting state-sponsored events? But those are just the kind of event where this kind of phenomenon is most regularly produced; if you want to document the phenomenon, that's where you go to do it. If the photographer had hung a label on the pictures saying "THIS IS WHAT CHINA IS LIKE," well, ok, we see the over-generalization and the triteness, but surely there are enough images coming out of China these days that any such picture only says "THIS IS SOMETHING THAT SUPPOSEDLY HAPPENED IN CHINA."
For more examples of collective marching and pattern-forming, see Schnapp and Tiews, Crowds.
posted by homerica at 4:01 AM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I expected something different from the FPP, maybe an examination of patterns in spontaneous crowds. This wasn't that.

The many photos of military formations and marching didn't wow me, as they are exactly like photos that could be taken in almost any country in the world, on almost any day. The images are the intended product of those formations, and having actually participated in a few such things, I know they have a cost to the participants that is not expressed in the images.

And yes, the Guinness record for most people doing some thing or other is no longer remarkable, except as an expression of how you can get a lot of people to do something with no particular worth at the same time.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:33 AM on May 9, 2015 [4 favorites]

I just wonder what happens when on guy decides to cut the line to the front?
posted by sammyo at 6:01 AM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder how many of these parade organizers are the Chinese version of Lieutenant Scheisskopf and are so busy figuring out how to insert stainless-steel pins into the hips of the soldiers that they don't have time to fulfill the masochistic fantasies of their wives who end up having to seduce the cadets and causing Yossarian to throw himself upon Dori Duz every chance he gets.
posted by rankfreudlite at 8:04 AM on May 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

My thought on seeing these was how is everyone the same height!
posted by ellieBOA at 8:40 AM on May 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

My thought on seeing this, or Triumph of the Will, or the Macy's parade is...how many these people really, really have to go to the bathroom right now?
posted by umberto at 8:52 AM on May 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

When you think about it though, aren't we all just participants in parades? Marching in lock-step to whatever new "thing" the powers-that-be-deigned to mesmerize us with?

From the legions of Apple fans that blindly fork over their hard-earned cash to blindly buy the latest iThing to the mindless drones in China's Foxconn assembly plants who need suicide nets placed around the factory roofs? From the idiots who record YouTube videos raving about the wonders of the new flavor of Mountain Dew to the hipsters in Williamsburg who wax orgasmic over the kale that they put in every fucking thing they eat? From the teenager who worships at the feet of Justin Bieber, God's representative on Earth, to the political fanatic who staunchly supports whichever candidate pressed the right buttons in their pea-brain?

I say unto thee: Drink your Mountain Dew, eat your kale, listen to your Justin Bieber! What the fuck else is their to do?

Now, where were we? Oh yeah, cool pictures! I like #23. Nothing like the prescribed form of rage! I'm sure that there is a lot of individualism in China. As long as it's state-approved individualism.
posted by rankfreudlite at 9:13 AM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Samsara got into this about four years ago The videos of Chinese soldiers marching in lockstep is kind of hypnotic.

The mutilated soldier. . .
posted by rankfreudlite at 10:07 AM on May 9, 2015

For a more organic, Brazilian take on organizing masses of people artistically, check out City of Samba on Vimeo. Bonus: Tilt-shifty goodness. Parades start towards the middle.
posted by rankfreudlite at 10:14 AM on May 9, 2015

In picture #25, it must have been difficult to find so many women with identical knees. It reminds me of the Eurozone's legendary (apocryphal?) insistence on the standardization of bananas. O.k. I'll quit flooding with comments. It's just that I find this subject so damn fascinating on so many levels.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:04 AM on May 9, 2015

I like the skirts and boots in #25.

I was hoping for fewer state-sponsored or "show" displays. The more interesting ones to me are the ones that give me a sense of "holy shit, world population." Like the test-taking one, nobody was going for a "record", you just have to test that many people. I get the same feeling in japanese train stations during the rush - what are we going to do when we run out of real estate in the world?
posted by ctmf at 11:07 AM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

I lied. . . One more comment: In Darwin's theory of natural selection, progress is made by the outliers. Actually, one half of the outliers, because if we picture variability as a bell curve and if variations are random, half of the variations will give no competitive advantage while the other half will. So I guess the thing to be taken away from this mini-rant is that it is not enough just to be different.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:28 AM on May 9, 2015

I was hoping for fewer state-sponsored or "show" displays. The more interesting ones to me are the ones that give me a sense of "holy shit, world population." Like the test-taking one, nobody was going for a "record", you just have to test that many people. I get the same feeling in japanese train stations during the rush - what are we going to do when we run out of real estate in the world?

Thomas Malthus had something to say about that, or do we now live in a post-Malthusian world?
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:34 AM on May 9, 2015

For more examples of collective marching and pattern-forming, see Schnapp and Tiews, Crowds.

I love scholarly works that are so multi-disciplinary! For more about one of the authors see:
Jeffrey Schnapp.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:54 AM on May 9, 2015

Did you just invoke social Darwinism? Seriously?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:36 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Did you just invoke social Darwinism? Seriously?

My comment may have evoked social Darwinism to you, if that is what you were looking for. What I intended to illustrate is that it may not be good for people to all be the same. Of course, I know nothing about social Darwinism. Is it the latest intellectual hobgoblin that is in vogue to be shunned by those who are trying their damnedest to appear to think like everybody else? Seriously!
posted by rankfreudlite at 4:27 PM on May 9, 2015

No, it's just nonsense, and has been generally known to be so since before I was born. And I'm pretty old.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:55 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

No, it's just nonsense, and has been generally known to be so since before I was born. And I'm pretty old.

So, the thing that you erroneously suspected me of invoking is nonsense? That's good to know! I would hate to discover that I believed something that was nonsense. Thanks for the input!
posted by rankfreudlite at 8:36 PM on May 9, 2015

By applying Darwinism to social phenomena you're invoking social Darwinism. If I somehow got that wrong, do edify me.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:46 PM on May 9, 2015

By applying Darwinism to social phenomena you're invoking social Darwinism. If I somehow got that wrong, do edify me.

Oh! I just did not know what social Darwinism was. : ) Now that I know what it is, and that it is nonsense, I will be careful not to invoke it in the future. My bad!
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:05 PM on May 9, 2015

K
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:14 PM on May 9, 2015

Update: I've decided to become an anti-social Darwinist.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:40 PM on May 9, 2015

To poke at this derail...

It's important to note that the variation in the genetic code in Darwinian species, like the variation in many other social variables (money, fame), is not characterstically a Gaussian, Galton's assertions of it being so aside. P Bak asserted that it was a power law, but we would also have no real idea of that, it's just fat-tailed. This is important because the variance of a fat-tailed distribution can be infinite: as the real sample gets bigger, the variance gets right bigger with it, because there's correlational structure within the system you're looking at and the central limit theorem does not apply. So a whole genome can change massively in few generations: it is part of the statistical support for the claim of punctuated equilibria.

Size of revolutions is a pretty good fit to a power law.
posted by curuinor at 11:49 PM on May 9, 2015

It's important to note that the variation in the genetic code in Darwinian species, like the variation in many other social variables (money, fame), is not characterstically a Gaussian, Galton's assertions of it being so aside. P Bak asserted that it was a power law, but we would also have no real idea of that, it's just fat-tailed. This is important because the variance of a fat-tailed distribution can be infinite: as the real sample gets bigger, the variance gets right bigger with it, because there's correlational structure within the system you're looking at and the central limit theorem does not apply. So a whole genome can change massively in few generations: it is part of the statistical support for the claim of punctuated equilibria.

You bring up a good point. My characterization of genetic drift as a bell curve was over-simplified. I suppose that we could attribute the fits and starts common to the systems you mentioned (economics, biology, fame, and so on) to the enormous complexity of the variables that affect systems. For example it has been demonstrably argued that the rise of mammals was, in part, a result of the K-T boundary extinction event. Historically, it can be reasonably well argued that the Age of Enlightenment can be traced back to the Western Schism in the Catholic Church, a time when there was more than one recognized Pope. Thomas Kuhn gave a pretty good analysis of punctuated equilibrium. So, not only is there accumulated change, there is also change in the rate of accumulation. Oh, if we only had a way to model chaos. Einstein said "God does not play dice with the Universe." Perhaps there is no chaos but, rather, we have not figured out how to see the patterns.
posted by rankfreudlite at 1:09 AM on May 10, 2015

Of course, curuinor, we don't have to give equal weight to every variable. Some variables have a greater chance of producing the change that we are trying to predict. It's a fool's game to try to predict everything. Historically, the greatest changes generally follow extraordinary events. Prior to WWII, the general rule was to let your defeated opponent wallow in his misery. The Marshal plan changed all of that, whether the motivation was purely to help Germany recover or to halt Soviet expansion (not that there is much to debate regarding which was the case).
posted by rankfreudlite at 1:34 AM on May 10, 2015

Man, insomnia sucks. Regarding those insignificant variables that have little effect on a system, I suppose those could be looked at as the curve of an asymptote that, after an infinitely long curve, eventually reaches zero. People like to say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in North America it causes a hurricane in China. It's possible, but highly improbable. My mathematical literacy is not as good as I would like it to be but, this mode of thought is obviously the answer to Zeno's paradox. Now, this is what makes me toss and turn at night: does this mean that anything is possible? It might be (at least within the confines of the immutable laws of the universe). However, not everything is probable, at least not in a universe that has not existed infinitely.
posted by rankfreudlite at 2:02 AM on May 10, 2015

Mod note: Rankfreudlite, I'm sorry you have insomnia but this extended serial commenting thing isn't going to work here. This needs to be a conversation, not a free-association exercise. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 8:39 AM on May 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

[Rankfreudlite, I'm sorry you have insomnia but this extended serial commenting thing isn't going to work here. This needs to be a conversation, not a free-association exercise. Thanks. ]


Restless_nomad, thank you for your carefully-worded reproof. My previous experience of participating in an online community happened in the mid-90's and my go-to newsfroup was alt.stupidity. I lurked in MeFi for ten years and only now became a member. I suppose the difference is akin to reading books about basketball and playing basketball.
posted by rankfreudlite at 2:20 PM on May 11, 2015