Farish A Noor
September 18, 2005

Free time means, in the eyes of the ruling elite, time to plot against the state. What better way to ensure that this free time and excess cash is used up than by herding the masses to the waiting doors of Disneyland or the golden arches of McDonalds? That is why Mickey Mouse is being welcomed in China at the moment

Mickey Mouse, the dapper affable rodent that has served as America's low-brow cultural ambassador to the world, now finds himself in Hong Kong, China. Notwithstanding the fact that most of us would shriek in horror if we ever met a five-foot tall rat dressed in a suit, complete with waistcoat and tails, the shrill-voiced balloon-eared creature ranks as one of the most recognisable emblems of American pop culture and consumerism the world over. Now he finds himself, of all places, in the land of the cultural revolution where Mao's Revolutionary Guard once laid waste to anything and everything that symbolised the dreaded evil capitalist West.

Just how and why Disneyland would chose to expand its operations to the Far East is a question best left to the doyens of high finance and global capital. More interesting is the question of how the ostensibly Communist regime of China would permit this creature, along with his other furry and fuzzy friends, into their country. (One wonders, for instance, what Mickey Mouse's passport would look like and how his job description would read.) Some have already uttered the predictable refrain: "Chairman Mao must be spinning in his grave".

Well, upon closer inspection one would soon come to realise that whatever the state of the deceased Chairman might be, he is certainly not performing any acrobatics six feet under. Indeed, anyone with any understanding of the political culture of the Far East would soon realise just how useful Mr Mouse and his chums at Disney would be to an authoritarian regime such as that currently installed in Beijing.

Here lies the great divide between the often undifferentiated countries of Asia. While the entry of Mickey Mouse to a country like India or Pakistan would elicit the usual round of acrimonious debate and effigy-burning, culminating in the outpouring of venomous diatribes against Western cultural imperialism, the legacy of Orientalism, the evils of colonialism and the profound injustice of the new world order; in Far Eastern countries like China (and to some extent Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and others as well) the slow yet inexorable march of popular consumerism has been greeted with considerably more enthusiasm and less chest-thumping. Why?

A tentative answer that may be forwarded at this point would be that the governments (some might prefer the term "regimes") of countries like China understand the utility and practical uses of a phenomenon like Disneyland. Though not formally introduced to the Frankfurt school of thought pioneered by the likes of Theodore Adorno and his ilk, the sages of Beijing have undoubtedly cast a long and envious glance at how the states of the developed West have managed to domesticate their respective communities and forestalled the great social revolution predicted by the Communists of the ancient past.

No, it was not the threat of lathi-charges and teargas that kept the rowdy masses at bay. The lumpen proletariat of the West remained in their lumpen state as long as they were fed the polite fiction that theirs was a better life and that living as they did in the "developed world" they could afford the luxuries of consumerism which included the occasional visit to Disneyland, residence of the well-dressed rodent named Mickey.

While the Young Revolutionary Guard of Mao's era went around burning books, ransacking libraries and ensured a steady stream of unemployed ex-librarians standing in the dole queue, the workers of the West were fed instead fast food, pop culture and crass consumerism (the crasser, the better). Mickey Mouse did more to keep the masses in line than legions of national guard troops policing the factories ever did.

Consumerism was, in the end, the ultimate means to keep the workers at work and pacified by the myth of leisure and the promise of holidays. Disneyland therefore served (and still serves) the utilitarian purpose of social-management in its own quaint, parochial and sophisticated way. For regimes in search of means to domesticate the public, an outlet like Disneyland fulfils this need while generating considerable profit at the same time. Never has the phrase "killing two birds with one stone" been so apt!

China today serves as the perfect example of such an authoritarian regime that maintains a tight grip on the economy: a regime that sees economic management as part and parcel of social governance and thereby a tool for keeping society at bay. Here lies the main difference between the economies of the Far East (China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore) and that of their West Asian counterparts.

In the Far East, the economy remains under the control of the state and the state seems to be in no hurry to relax its grip on the reins that keeps the economy in check. Having succeeded ¡X via micro state planning and constant state intervention ¡X to generate both unprecedented economic growth and raised the level of public expectations, the regimes of the Far East now require effective means to contain new public expectations and demands.

The last thing that China, or the other Far Eastern states, wants at this stage is a population with too much money, too well educated, too well connected to the globalised world and with nothing to do. Free time means, in the eyes of the ruling elite, time to plot against the state. What better way to ensure that this free time and excess cash is used up than by herding the masses to the waiting doors of Disneyland or the golden arches of McDonalds? That is why Mickey Mouse is being welcomed in China at the moment.

Walt Disney's dream of creating a haven of consumerism for the newly urbanised lower-middle classes of America in the 1950s has proven to be a monumental success. Today that success is being emulated by the erstwhile "enemies" of the "Red Commie East" as never before. History is indeed full of ironies, and no one could have guessed that a five-foot tall rat would serve as the state's policing agent in one of the most repressive regimes in the world. And the latest news is that Mickey has become the guest of the Communist League of China! Chairman Mao must be smiling somewhere, and counting the dollars as the punters pay to get in.

Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist, based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin