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Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and
Millennial China

David H. Fleming · Simon Harrison

 Chinese Urban Shi-nema

“Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the

contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal
urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless
exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is
compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven
with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek
insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese
urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s
impressive book.”
—Andrew White, Independent Scholar and author of Digital
Media & Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2014)
David H. Fleming • Simon Harrison

Chinese Urban
Shi-nema
Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China
David H. Fleming Simon Harrison
University of Stirling City University of Hong Kong
Stirling, UK Hong Kong, China

ISBN 978-3-030-49674-6    ISBN 978-3-030-49675-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Mira, the captain of our ship, in memory of our adventures in Ningbo
DHF
For 陈星超, for making the city in this book a place to call home
SH
 Preface

Getting Started: And Learning from Our Students

With rapid changes in technology Chinese society has transformed radically…
(Anonymised UNNC Student Essay 2012, p. 1)

After spending the best part of a decade marking Chinese undergradu-

ate and master’s work at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China
(UNNC), we have each encountered many thousands of essays that began
with a riff on the line reproduced as our epigraph. Various modulating
iterations of which were invariably jerry-rigged to introduce a throng of
Arts and Humanities and Social Science arguments on a wide range of
subjects spanning: the rapid modernisation of Chinese urban infrastruc-
ture, the appearance of luxury shopping malls populated by foreign stores
and brands, the spread and acceleration of the internet, smartphone use,
social media apps and new-fangled ways of acting, living, viewing and
spending. These were what most Chinese students were naturally inclined
to write about. And while the vagueness and derivativeness of such open-
ing lines have—on the odd occasion—admittedly frustrated the marker,
when we retroactively reflect upon the sheer volume of these mantra-like
statements we have parsed, it now speaks to us as a general truism, or gen-
erational zeitgeist, indexing a shared impression that no doubt remains
very real to a vast number of young people growing up in China today.
With hindsight one particular dissertation exploring the “becoming-­
image” of Chinese culture under capitalism stands out as an illustrative
case in point, and can help us here to gesture towards the core themes of

vii
viii PREFACE

the current project. This was a visual anthropology master’s project that
was authored by a student that had undertaken an internship in a reassur-
ingly expensive Ningbo “pre-wedding” photo agency—just one manifes-
tation of the multimillion RMB modern wedding industry that produces
“fantasy” image-memories for Chinese couples engaged to be married.
Turning her free labour into university work had allowed this supervisee
to repurpose a vast archive of images that, to our Western eyes, looked
more like fashion magazine spreads than traditional wedding snaps. For, in
our experience, wedding pictures are often taken on the big day, then
hung up or archived in the family home, rather than being taken in advance
and then projected onto various screens during one’s wedding. What is
more, these image spreads typically captured the same bride adorning
three or more different wedding dresses across a shoot, while the groom
modelled a corresponding range of complementary styles and colours of
suit: a white wedding dress paired with a black tux and dickie bow, for
example, or a red Qipao with a traditional Chinese suit. All peppered with
an array of hats, shoes, canes, veils and props—sometimes requiring the
assistance of various camera men, drone operators, make-up artists and set
hands. Depending on the season and budget, we were informed, couples
could be bussed with their wardrobe and make-up artists to be imaged
next to: a grey horse in the beach surf; a row boat next to a picturesque
lake; a field of cherry blossoms; a traditional village or some other dynamic
touristic hot spot such as the Shanghai bund or DongQian Lake that pro-
vided their picture with a suitably aestheticised backdrop (Fig. 1).
More affluent couples, the author informed us, would often go abroad
with a crew, with Paris, Sydney and Santorini then being the most popular
options for a romantic shoot—a trend that was itself inculcated around
2008 after the widely covered destination wedding of the Chinese movie
star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who helped popularise and engrain a “No
travel, no wedding” ethos with regard to at least one of the three new-­
fangled wedding industry phases (pre-wedding, wedding, honeymoon)
(see e.g. Zhuang and Everett 2018, p. 84). The final images derived from
such events would invariably be edited and colour-corrected, with the
company removing haze and blueing the sky, while also performing com-
plementary 2D digital skin grafts and teeth-whitening procedures as needs
be. The dissertation argued that within the new geometry of Chinese sta-
tus, when eventually displayed on the Big Day or hung in the married
couple’s (invariably) new home, these commercial images signified that
ironclad distinctions between memory and fantasy, reality and fiction,
 PREFACE ix

Fig. 1 Wedding shoots at DongQian Lake, Ningbo

were eroding in contemporary China. Channelling Baudrillard she con-

cluded: “The Chinese no longer have traditional weddings or identities,
but they do produce wonderful hyperreal images.”1 For us, the student’s
project also made clear what Susan Sontag means when she argues that
social change has been “replaced by a change in images,” and that “the
production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology” (2018, p. 178).
Looking back on this period, and both detouring2 and distilling thou-
sands of comparable essays and dissertation work, what successive cohorts
of young people appeared to be experiencing—and often vicariously too
through the eyes of three generations of close-knit family—and docu-
menting was that they were bearing witness to an unprecedented event or
historical phase transition that marked nothing short of a complete recod-
ing and reorganisation of China’s socio-political fabric and cultural being.
Or again, that everything everywhere—from dating to working, exercis-
ing, eating, shitting and personally communicating—was being re-­
imagined, re-invented and overcoded. Which is to say, they were bearing
x PREFACE

witness to an unfolding mutation in the relationship between subjectivity

and its conditions of exteriority.
Many of these projects were not wrong in pointing to China’s joining
of the WTO in 2001 as a key catalyst for these changes, albeit better ones
acknowledged the pre-history of this trend through the market-economy
reform experiments of Deng Xiaoping or, better still, pointed to a longer
history of the Chinese state associating itself with civilising drives and
modernising teleologies. However, most young Chinese people saw the
nation’s new geopolitical orientation towards the outside developing
alongside a concomitant reorganisation of its internal cities and their
material infrastructure—as well as the modes of social life unfolding
therein (through the use of technologies—including “of the self”—and
techne more generally). It is these manifold processes that Chinese Urban
Shi-nema takes as its focus.
Looking back, perhaps a short blog piece we wrote together entitled
“Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?” retrospectively appears as a sig-
nificant prelude or prolegomenon to this book (Fleming and Harrison
2016). This was a project that we originally wrote together as a form of
report—in the style of a staged philosophical dialogue—derived from a
few conversations we were then having, and which reflexively speaking
demonstrates that we were also taking our lived environment not so much
as a standing reserve but as a stimulus and provocation for thought. That
dialogue developed and helped us to road test and work through a com-
plex of ideas and concepts that stemmed from, and helped to digest, our
different but overlapping lived experiences in China.
As a monograph project Chinese Urban Shi-nema began when we were
both living and working in the place where this book lays its scene, Ningbo,
China. However, as we put our finishing touches to the book today, we
both find ourselves living elsewhere: in Edinburgh and Hong Kong
respectively. It is therefore a book that is shaped by different moments and
speeds, and by a heat proximity and immediacy that has since been tem-
pered by distance and reflection. It remains therefore a work about transi-
tions and transformations—“a finding which is also a leaving” (Thrift
2008, p. 16)—that was contingently compounded by our own transfor-
mations in circumstances.

Stirling, UK David H. Fleming

Hong Kong, China  Simon Harrison
 PREFACE xi

Note
1. In their Brief history of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism,
Zhuang and Everett (2018) situate Chinese “pre-wedding photography”
within a booming 500-billion RMB wedding market as “the most essential
spending among all of the wedding event purchases” (p. 80). Our descrip-
tion of real estate showrooms in Chap. 3 explore how these trends become
mobilised in the sale of real estate, where they become further articulated
with what Zhuang and Everett refer to as “the behaviour of ‘travel with a
bridal gown (带着婚纱去旅行)’” (idem).
2. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion
of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy
Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist
International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,”
“diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis
208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement
must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any
inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users
Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure
is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling,
or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the
original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater effi-
cacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to
evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning.

References
Fleming, D. H., & Harrison, S. (2016). Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?
Published on Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC Blog, December 9,
2016. Retrieved from http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chine-
sestudies/2016/12/09/chinese-losing-gestures/.
Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin Classics.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge.
Zhuang, Y.J., & Everett, A. M. (2018). A Brief History of Chinese Wedding and
Bridal Photography Tourism‑: Through the Lens of Top Chinese Wedding
Photographers. In E. Yang & C. Khoo-Lattimore (Eds.), Asian Cultures and
Contemporary Tourism. Perspectives on Asian Tourism (pp. 79–100).
Singapore: Springer.
 Acknowledgements

Chinese Urban Shi-nema was written between 2016 and 2019, even if its
gestation preceded this by quite some time. There are accordingly innu-
merable people and organisations whose thoughts and actions directly and
indirectly impacted this project during different stages of its formation and
development, including the people of Ningbo, to whom we also dedicate
this work.
We would especially like to thank Paul Martin for sharing his material
on the Trent Buildings, which has been referenced in our university chap-
ter. We also extend a special thanks to Melissa Shani Brown for her valu-
able feedback on an earlier version of our manuscript. DHF would also
like to express thanks to Marielena Indelicato for inviting him to road test
an inchoate version of the museum chapter at the Ningbo Institute of
Technology, and David B. Clarke for his feedback and guidance on an
article version of this work.
Special praise also to our many many friends and ex-colleagues at
University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) who are all part of this
book in some way, shape or form. Particular thanks here to the following
for their inspiring chat, or for helping us bounce ideas around, and being
great sounding boards (in alphabetical order): Stephen Andriano-Moore,
Amy Brown, Yu-Hua Chen, Clifton Evers, Maris Farquharson, Fiano Fu,
Filippo Gilardi, Amarpreet Gill, Philip Hall, Lili Hernandez, Derek Irwin,
Daryl Johnson, Dorran Lamb, Peter Lamb, Bjarke Liboriussen, John
Lowe, David O’Brien, Jeanne O’Connell, Du Ping, Phil Ramsey, Richard
Silburn, Rob Smith, Marshall Stauffer, Jonathan Tillotson, James Walker,
Kim Wilcocks, and Siegfried Yeboah. We also thank the IC heads of school

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

(from 2010 to 2017): Paul Gladstone, Stephen Quinn, Adrian Hadland,

Fintan Cullen, Adam Knee and Andrew White; and the English heads of
school (from 2013 to 2018: Geoff Hall, Matthew Beedham, Margaret
Gillon Dowens, and Lixian Jin).
DHF would also like to thank the “Film-Philosophers” who have heard
and fed back on the Shi-nema work, or whose thoughts and ideas have
inspired this project more generally. Special mention on this outing to (in
alphabetical order): Lucy Bolton, William Brown, Yun-Hua Chen, David
Deamer, Victor Fan, David Leiwei Li, David Martin-Jones, Greg Singh
and David Sorfa. We also thank our friends, colleagues and mentors in
applied linguistics and gesture studies. Our showroom research was first
discussed through the lens of metaphor at panels organised by Thomas
Wiben Jensen and Linda Greve, where we received their generous feed-
back as well as insights from Cornelia Müller and Ray Gibbs. Yu-Hua
Chen contributed to the analyses of student talk in our chapter on the
transnational university, which also benefitted from discussions on panels
organised by Peter De Costa, Curtis Green-Eneix and Wendy Li.
SH thanks Chen Xingchao for enabling many privileged experiences of
Ningbo and for explaining their cultural significance with local insight, as
well as Mark Harrison for cheering on this work from overseas. DHF
thanks Mira, whose own work and inexhaustible support made the writing
of this book possible. This book is also dedicated to Phaedra and Tarran,
our lightning and thunder. Thanks as always to the Fleming and
Vakily Clans.
Parts of Chap. 3 originally appeared as David H. Fleming and Simon
Harrison. (2018). Selling dream (un) real estate with Shi(势)-nema:
Manipulation, not persuasion, in China’s contemporary cinematic cities.
Social Semiotics, 30(1), 45–64; and in Simon Harrison and David
H. Fleming (2019). Metaphoricity in the real estate showroom: Affordance
spaces for sensorimotor shopping. Metaphor & Symbol Special Issue:
Ecological Cognition and Metaphor, 34(1), 45–60. Some sections of Chap.
4 also appeared in David H. Fleming. (2017). The Architectural
Cinematicity of Wang Shu and the Architectonic Cinema of Jia Zhangke:
Diagrammatically decomposing the “main melody” in monu-mental
assemblage art. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 3(1), 33–52.
While we have tried to avoid them, all mistakes indubitably remain
our own.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Shi-Story and Theory 31

3 Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on

Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)
Real Estate in Contemporary China 63

4 In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main

Melody via Monu-mental Time-­Images 99

5 Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from

“Westworld” Regarding Neoliberal Dulosis, “Academic”
Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical University
in the Era of Global “Excellence”139

6 Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)185

7 Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a

New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”219

Index231

xv
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Approach to the salesroom 73

Fig. 3.2 Secluded beach set-up with private BBQ grill manned
by carte bleu chef 74
Fig. 3.3 Welcome foyer of salesroom 76
Fig. 3.4 Maquette and wall map perspectives 77
Fig. 3.5 The Southeast Asian decoration at Bali Sunday80
Fig. 3.6 Promotional video sent to social media accounts 81
Fig. 3.7 Salesroom with wedding suite mise-en-scène84
Fig. 3.8 Perspectives on the Price Wall 89
Fig. 4.1 The Ningbo Historic Museum 108
Fig. 4.2 Expressionistic cinematicity 122
Fig. 4.3 Expressionistic horror 123
Fig. 4.4 Rhythmical stone montaging 124
Fig. 4.5 Close-up time images 125
Fig. 4.6 Stratified geological aesthetics 126
Fig. 4.7 Opening image of I Wish I Knew126
Fig. 4.8 The larger lion overpowering a smaller cub 127
Fig. 4.9 Arrangements of mahjong tiles 128
Fig. 5.1 Nottingham building’s Classical Revival style.
(Source: https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/hr/job-
opportunities/jobs.aspx)144
Fig. 5.2 Scene from Sou suo featuring the UNNC Trent Building 145
Fig. 5.3 “Two Jags” (later “Two Jabs”) Prescott at UNNC 150
Fig. 5.4 University branded materials at UNNC. (Screen capture from
online store: https://h5.sosho.cn/shop/offer/list.html?mall_
id=168)152

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 5.5 Captured website image: “UNNC recognized as one of

Britain’s leading businesses in China” 157
Fig. 5.6 Mobile banner announcing success with the arrival of the
Thought Leader 163
Fig. 5.7 Jack Ma, The World Invites You: a student-led amateur short
blending corporate and academic worlds 165
Fig. 5.8 A K-pop dance routine incorporates a Starbucks coffee cup 168
Fig. 5.9 Starbucks outlet built into teaching/learning spaces 172
Fig. 5.10 Therapy animals in the petting zoo during RUOK Week
(displayed on the Department of Campus Life website) 174
Fig. 6.1 Encounter with the building site 192
Fig. 6.2 Wedding traditions reimagined in the grounds of Bali Sunday197
Fig. 6.3 (a) Golden eggs upon entry, (b) pitchman on stage, (c)
salesman dangles red envelope, (d) sizeable crowd gathers, (e)
live-streaming images from the promotion booths 199
Fig. 6.4 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock (left) and the
NBC logo (right) 205
Fig. 6.5 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock 206
Fig. 6.6 Busy mall in promotional video (top); empty mall in reality
(bottom)207
Fig. 6.7 Picket line at main entrance to mall 208
Fig. 6.8 Board game covers the floor of the mall (left), with the wheel
of fortune (right) 209
Fig. 6.9 Logic of the board game (left), with novelty gifts including a
tropical fish (right) 210
Fig. 6.10 Chinese Valentine’s Day instructions and the wheel of fortune 211
Fig. 6.11 Spinning the wheel (left); onlookers gather, player shushes
them (right) 211
Fig. 7.1 The vending machine (future tradition) in the Qiantong
enclosure (historically repurposed setting) 225
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Arguments for the political efficacy of film have always held onto the
idea that film must move off the screen into the world.
—Pratt and San Juan (2014, p. 1)
Cities, particularly large cities, were the places where the strangest
mixtures of food and genes, money and words, were concocted.
—DeLanda (2000, p. 211)
The postmodern city amounts to its posthumous continuation, its
fractal form.
—Clarke (2003, p. 94)

Chinese Urban Shi-nema dives into what has aptly been named the mise-­
en-­scène of Capitalism’s Second Coming to China (Li 2016, p. 5), to
explore what becomes of Chinese societies, cities and subjectivities during
an unprecedented period of urban and economic generation and transfor-
mation. Situating itself in the historical aftermath of the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the book offers a series of
grounded case studies from within the processual city of Ningbo (as it
transitioned from being a second tier city to a “new first tier city”) that
mosaic an archival image of how contemporary urban life in China is
undergoing a series of radical changes, transformations and reorganisa-
tions—including of “genes, memes, norms and routines” (see e.g.
DeLanda 2000, p. 212) as new forms of consumer culture bed in.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_1
2 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

Harnessing a pars pro toto approach, we explore five very different archi-
tectural assemblages, or technostructural arrangements—including luxury
real estate showrooms, a Pritzker prize winning history museum, China’s
“first and best” Sino-foreign university campus, a series of gamified urban
“any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014) (such as shopping malls and
building sites that channel and express the frenzied logic of so-called Casino
Capitalism) and a new “Old town”—that together cast light upon the
broader picture sweeping up Greater China during the most radical and
rapid period of urbanisation and infrastructural transformation the planet
has ever witnessed.
Our Realist soundings of these different assemblages typically hone in on
the psychophysiological experiences of various (domestic and alien) citizens
that become transactionally incorporated into these newly emerging forms
of affordance space, which we, in a nod to Le Corbusier, frame as contem-
porary “machines for living” (1986, p. 95) indicative of a postsocialist phase
of Chinese modernity. More specifically, the book’s triangulation of philo-
sophical concepts, empirical data and ethnographic observations become
mediated through a creative encounter between the Chinese concept of
“shi” (势) and the human geographer David B. Clarke’s notion of “cinema-
ticity.” Shi is described by sinologist philosopher François Jullien as the
inherent potentiality at work in configuration, or a “potential born of disposi-
tion” (1995, p. 27, emphasis in original), while the portmanteau cinematic-
ity blends theories of urbanism, cinema and contemporary capitalism
(illuminating both the cinematic qualities of the city and the city on screen)
with a sense of cinematic automaticity, suggesting something akin to the
automatic thinking of the city by the cinema and vice versa.
Paramount to this study is the emergence of new “entrepreneurial cit-
ies” in China, which arrive in tandem with a historically new species of
consumer citizen: or what David Leiwei Li, after Michel Foucault, re-­
christens homo economicus—that “instrumentalist figure forged in the
effervescent conditions of market competition” (Li 2016, p. 58). Keeping
one eye on each, or a blend of bodies-cities, we foreground contemporary
examples of what we playfully call urban shi-nema (and more on which in
Chap. 2) that surface as historically unique sites/sights designed to direct
and trigger a range of desired human (trans)actions, thoughts and feel-
ings. Collectively, in the following chapters we thus investigate what we
might call the “significant forms” and affective constellations of five differ-
ent urban configurations, which each expose how China’s external embrace
of global capitalism, its internal promotion of consumer culture and its
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

attendant mnemonic practices have radically reshaped modern life and

subjectivity. These vary from “apparatuses of capture” (to borrow Deleuze
and Guattari’s terminology; 2004b) to bona fide artworks, whose con-
trived arrangements (of objects, materials and their attendant qualities)
appear designed to move, make act or transform (change the status/
capacities of) the human traffic that pass through them: typically in a prof-
itable way (both to make profit in the case of a showroom in Chap. 3 and
the sales rooms of Chap. 6 and to endow the profits of a foreign educa-
tional model as per Chap. 5). Or, put differently, the urban spaces we
investigate all “intend” something and thus reveal forms of anticipation
and affective agency parametrically built into their material structures.
Chinese Urban Shi-nema accordingly strives to isolate what we might
call five pivotal points of 4E psychogeographic articulation within contem-
porary Ningbo in a manner designed to be at once productively alienating
and defamiliarising for (to momentarily speak like others) its Chinese and
Western readers alike. Ruminate here that with regard to our alien and
alienating methods we are keenly aware that, for good or for bad, the
practice generally known as “psychogeography” has, since the work of
Guy Debord (1981, p. 53), aptly been described as the “science fiction of
urbanism” (Asger Jorn quoted in Coverley 2010, p. 99). And while some
might no doubt parse this phrase in a pejorative fashion, we rather—recall-
ing Gilles Deleuze’s description of a good work of philosophy being part
detective novel, part science fiction—take this to be a positive thing, and a
necessary step in fashioning new perspectives or ways of thinking and pro-
ceeding (see e.g. Deleuze 2004a, p. xix; 2004b, p. 162). In point of fact,
we push Debord’s science fiction method for producing fresh alien per-
spectives even further by putting them into transformative compositions
with what has variously been called the new “E-approaches” (the “E” of
ecological, meaning embodied, extended, embedded and enactive). From
such perspectives each chapter explores how different combinatronics of
urban sensation and affect become constellated and arrayed in a manner
designed to transactionally guide or manipulate certain outcomes.
By such measures Chinese Urban Shi-nema also effectuates a form of
provocation, inasmuch as by setting itself the important but always diffi-
cult task of merging theoretical discussion with empirical analyses (while
blending philosophical thought, empirical data and (auto)ethnographic
observations) it strives to push readers to perceive how millennial urban
China is increasingly becoming-cinematic, or rather, as we will show in the
next chapter, operating upon hyperreal shi-nematic principles.
4 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

Notes Towards a Method

In the second half of the twentieth century Deleuze and his erstwhile col-
laborator Félix Guattari noted that the dominant system of global capital-
ism had undergone a mutation (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 2004a,
2004b; Deleuze 1997; Guattari 2010, 2013). Broadly speaking, since
Marx’s writing, capitalism has evolved and shifted away from enclosed
industrial structures (and disciplinary systems) geared towards production
and services towards new structures concerned with producing “signs,
syntax and … subjectivity” (Genosko 2012, p. 151)—a system that
Guattari’s friend Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2007, p. 76) later came to call
global semiocapitalism, wherein capital-flux increasingly “coagulates in
semiotic artefacts without materialising itself” (in Genosko 2012, p. 150)
and the “production and exchange of abstract signs has taken the pre-
dominant place in the overall process of accumulation” (Berardi 2015,
n.p.). These are notions that clearly align and resonate with a longer tradi-
tion of cultural criticism (stretching from Herbert Marcuse to Guy Debord
through Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Beller) that foregrounds how capi-
talism in the West (or the Global North) progressively came to function as
“a semiotic operator” that aimed to “[seize] individuals from the inside”
with the goal of “control‑ the whole of society” (Guattari in Genosko
2012, p. 149; see also Guattari 2010).
With this last point in mind, Berardi has more recently penned a grim
account of what he refers to as our “dark zeitgeist,” honing in on the pre-
vailing conditions of what he now calls absolute capitalism (on account of
the etymology of “absolute,” meaning emancipation from any limitation)
upon the collective well-being and mental health of people around the
planet. The paradigmatic political expressions of our global winter of dis-
content, he argues, have now become mass murder, murder-suicide and
self-murder (Berardi 2015).1 “Suicide is a reaction of humans facing the
destruction of their cultural references, and the humiliation of their dig-
nity. This is one of the reasons that it so indelibly marks the landscape of
our time” (2015, p. 159). And although incidences of suicide do form
pertinent vectors within each of our case studies here—with both authors
having witnessed the aftermath or been made aware of multiple suicides
and suicide attempts within and around the architectural assemblages fea-
turing in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6—for various political, personal and ethical
reasons we opt to screen out these considerations on this outing and
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

instead make reference to Berardi’s present-day work for an altogether

different purpose.
Indeed, above and beyond the overwhelmingly dark picture Berardi
extracts from contemporary life under absolute capitalist structures, there
remains a ray of light that emerges courtesy of his being convinced to
travel to the East Asian city of Seoul to deliver a talk on his political proj-
ect. Of importance to our approaches here, during this trip (to what is
ironically the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world,
see e.g. BBC 2019; WHO 2019), Berardi outlines gaining a fresh perspec-
tive courtesy of his alienating encounter with the unfamiliar citizenry and
urban construction of the Special City. There, he describes:

inspecting the faces of young people—their signs and gestures, and their
ironic declarations of the T-shirts (“I’m easy but too busy for you”)—I was
impressed by the importance of design in Seoul’s contemporary visual envi-
ronment. The traces of traditional life are hidden, overtaken by the new
designs of life. Social communication has been thoroughly redesigned by
the cellular smartphone. Vision has been thoroughly redesigned by screens
of all sizes. (2015, pp. 191–192)

Lingering on this last point he notes how it suddenly struck him that in
fact “Screens are everywhere: big screens on the walls of skyscrapers,
medium sized screens in the railway’s stations lobby. But the small private
screens of the smartphones demand the undivided devotion of the passing
hordes, as they calmly and silently shuffle through the city, heads bowed”
(Berardi 2015, p. 192).
Such observations, triggered by an acculturated Westerner’s alienating
encounter with an unfamiliar East Asian urban ecosystem, also chimes
with our experiences of living and working in the city of Ningbo China
(albeit for a more extended period, just shy of a decade), wherein the con-
vergence and synergy of screen media and city life forced us to take pause
and confront something of what China, and the world of techno-driven-­
semiocapitalism more generally, appears to be in the process of becoming
today. Accordingly, over a period that spanned 2010 to 2018 Ningbo
became a space that helped each of us grasp and rethink how global capi-
talism is not so much a system or process that makes us all the same but is
rather one that exploits and amplifies difference (in traditions, culture,
infrastructure, but also in wealth, social expectations, gender, class and
6 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

status), not least by innervating different fits and bursts of change and
growth in diverse geopolitical locales.
These differences are key to this book, which we hope might itself serve
the reader as a productive form of difference engine. With any luck, for
those familiar with Western urban studies, museum studies, education,
embodied cognition and so on, our Chinese studies offer alternative alien
examples that expose differences that may provoke fresh thought and
insight. To Chinese scholars and readers the book might equally provide
an enriching alien or barbarian perspective on the nature of the lived
ephemeral present. And for those more familiar with a single disciplinary
approach, our interdisciplinary melange of different perspectives and
aspects may also become constructively alienating and challenging. At
least we hope that any defamiliarisation and alienation we throw up might
be productive, as it was (reflexively speaking) for us.
So, while Berardi might note that there is today in Seoul—as is the case
in Ningbo—an explosive proliferation of material screens everywhere, in
our mosaic study we also aim to expose how the very principles and affects
of cinema and screen media have also become disarticulated from actual
screens and have moved into transformative co-composition with the very
fabric of China’s contemporary urban psychogeography, realising or actu-
alising something akin to the “universe of technologies of the screen in
which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary”
(Baudrillard 2014, p. 180).

Notes on Terminology 1: Films and “The Cinema”

While we always take care from chapter to chapter to hang our various shi-­
nematic case studies alongside contemporaneous examples of film (or at
least films relevant to them), throughout Chinese Urban Shi-nema we
essentially reframe the “cinema” as being far more than just films, describ-
ing cinema as something more akin to a mediating substratum of contem-
porary social reality and ontology. For one thing, the confrontation with
millennial postsocialist Chinese cityscapes—with their proliferation of
embedded screens of all sizes and their science fictional architecture and
light shows—helped us grasp what a thinker like Beller means when, in
updating Marx, he notes that the socio-technological processes associated
with twentieth-century capitalism had ensured that “all that is solid melts
into cinema” (Beller 2006, p. 16). Or, as William Brown more recently
puts it, the imaginary of cinema has effectively restructured and
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

reproduced the cultural imaginary so that “the cinema” increasingly

becomes the “measure of reality as opposed to reality becoming the mea-
sure of cinema” (2019, p. 231). All this to say, as aliens living among the
Chinese locals, it struck us that contemporary Ningbo (like other parallel
Chinese cities we visited) appeared to have stepped right out of the mov-
ies, meaning that (to paraphrase Baudrillard this time) in order to best
grasp its secrets, we should not simply “begin with the city and move
inwards towards the screen” but also consider (Chinese) screens in order
to concomitantly move “outwards towards the city” (Baudrillard 2015,
p. 56). And in the light of this, Chinese Urban Shi-nema necessarily
demanded that we stretch and twist everyday notions of what “cinema” is,
or means.
Of course, strict definitions of what “the cinema” is (or was, or is not)
has necessarily varied depending upon where—in space or time—a given
observer was situated, as well as what motivated their analysis and what
methods they prioritised when enframing it (technological, economic,
psychological, economic, social, political, ideological, philosophical, etc.).
For the purposes of Chinese Urban Shi-nema we try to deploy the term in
as broad and expansive (non-essentialist) a manner as possible, recognising
the cinema as a form of “philosophical perpetuum mobile” (Elsaesser 2008,
p. 239, emphasis in original), which always already refers to an ever-­
shifting and evolving confederate of material parts and socio-political-­
economic practices. Looking backwards, for example, we are happy to
follow in the footsteps of a philosopher like Jacques Ranciere by viewing
“the cinema” as an artistic idea that predated “the cinema as a technical
means and distinctive art” (2006, p. 6). Echoes here no doubt of an argu-
ment from the Film Theory annals that read Plato’s allegory of the cave as
the conceptual invention of the basic cinematic apparatus avant la lettre (à
la Jean-Louis Braudy 2004). Sticking with caves, a comparable belief also
finds film-philosophical expression in Werner Herzog’s The Cave of
Forgotten Dreams (2010), which implies through its (3D) form and con-
tent that a combination of wall paintings and promethean illumination by
our ancient ancestors (within the dark caverns of the Chauvet caves)
marked the dual emergence of the “modern mind” and proto-cinematic
forms of expression—aeons before Plato and the Greeks.
For some, such views no doubt simply expand a now century-old dis-
course that commonly framed the cinema as the ultimate “bastard art”—
which is to say, a complete art form that gradually came to re-combine,
re-mediate or expressively re-vision the properties, features and capacities
8 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

of older art forms and practices such as painting, literature, music, dance,
theatre, sculpture and opera. At their most extreme and bombastic, such
attitudes relegated the entire history of art to the status of “a massive foot-
note to the history of film” (Hollis Frampton in Beckman and Ma 2008,
p. 3). More conservative takes, such as those forwarded by the philoso-
pher Alain Badiou, paradigmatically frame the cinema as a “parasitic bas-
tard art” that “amalgamates the other arts without, for all that, actually
presenting them” (Ling 2010, p. 35).
In Cinema by Other Means (2012) Pavle Levi takes a different dialecti-
cal tack on such positions in order to expose the complex affects and
effects that the cinema reaped upon surrounding culture, here by specifi-
cally zooming in on Yugoslavian arts and avant-garde practices. As the
book’s title suggests, this is achieved by foregrounding how other con-
temporaneous practices (including poetry, art and optical devices) worked
to re-materialise and re-mediate the cinema, the absented centre of his
study—a method which recasts David B. Clarke’s idea that we now “move
through the world left in the wake of cinema” (2007, p. 29). With such
views in mind, we are also happy to look sideways and forwards from cin-
ema’s historical emergence as a prime mover and driver of modernity,2 and
to entertain the idea that cognate screen forms that were historically
derived from the cinema—such as digital cinema and videogames—can
also be comfortably housed under a “cinematic” category (without negat-
ing their obvious differences and specificities too, and more on which
throughout).3 Thus, following a philosopher of film like Berys Gaut, we
might trace the roots of kinematics back to “the study of things that
move,” meaning that the cinema at its broadest refers to “the medium of
moving images” (2010, p. 1). Tying such ideas back to Berardi’s observa-
tions above while interweaving thinkers like William Brown, we are also
content to see today’s smartphones—with their marketed abilities to
record, edit, post-produce, screen, stream, share and consume images—as
modern forms of “cinema-machine,” whose affordances and inbuilt mech-
anisms help amplify processes of control associated with semiocapitalist
structures and broader cultural processes of “becoming-cinema” (see e.g.
Brown 2019, p. 250; Beller 2006).
To similar ends, Badiou helpfully frames the cinema as a bastard mode
that has always purloined, borrowed and amalgamated features, parts and
processes from distinctly non-cinematic forms and non-art worlds too.4
With regard to blends of artistic and non-art forms that cross-pollinate,
and become re-mediated by the cinema today, in Chap. 3 we pick up an
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

idea developed by the formalist Soviet filmmaker and film-philosopher

Sergei Eisenstein, who maintained that choice examples of pre-cinematic
architecture (part art, part craft, part industry) were always already proto-­
cinematic in their form, function and affects/effects—a view that led him
to describe the Acropolis of Athens as a veritable “ancient film” (1989,
p. 112), whose spectacular ecological form and content helped (aestheti-
cally and epistemologically) nudge Western culture and civilisation towards
the invention of the cinema. But if Eisenstein saw architecture helping
pave the way towards cinematic cultures, in Chap. 4 we also explore how
the architecture that is emerging in a world after cinema, if you will,
becomes further modified by its encounters with today’s industrial prin-
ciples and practices, including digital-cinematic forms and semiocapitalist
technologies.
With the above perspectives in mind, our notion of “the cinema” might
thus be imagined operating somewhat like a “machinic phylum” (Guattari
1984, p. 120)—that is, an abstracted or self-contained unity or virtual
phase space, under the threshold of which various actual technological
classes and sub-species can be understood emerging and adapting (to spe-
cific ecological milieus), if not evolving and differentiating. As our brief
engagements with the likes of Debord, Baudrillard and Beller hopefully
have begun to make clear, we also take the cinema to be a form of symbi-
otic fantasy machine that infiltrates brains, bodies, thoughts and desires,
getting in between and (re)mediating the border zone between imagina-
tion and reality, inside and outside—synaptic notions that we will return
to in more detail when we begin our theory building in Chap. 2, after we
first turn to and set up our discussion of the unusual method we utilise
throughout this book.

Notes Towards a Vertiginous Method

So far we have argued that the cinema is a techno-art practice and politico-­
industrial praxis that has driven change and impacted the world around it.
Not least because, as Daniel Reynolds puts it in his recent Media in Mind,
“minds are ecological phenomena,” and technologies such as cinema
essentially help (re)structure the modes of seeing and feeling of those
encountering/using them (2019, p. 50). Historical intuitions of such
ideas abound, of course, especially after the popularisation and industriali-
sation of the cinema—as can be evidenced by the work of Walter Benjamin,
who noted in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
10 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

Reproduction” that watching film led to “profound changes in the apper-

ceptive apparatus,” which became experienced not only on the individual
or subjective scale “by the man in the street” but also “on a historical scale
by every present-day citizen” (2007, p. 250).
The worlds of critical and philosophical thought have certainly not
escaped this ecological cinematisation either. For example, in the realms of
Film Theory Braudy (1999) began to perceive the cinema as a
metapsychological-­technological reworking of human perceptive and psy-
chological processes, while a philosopher like Martin Heidegger moved in
the opposite direction by exposing how the mediatic impact of modern
optical technologies led humans to increasingly see “the world as picture”
(see e.g. Heidegger 1977, pp. 115–136; Beller 2006, p. 64). To take but
one more thinker to whom we will return throughout this book as another
illustrative case in point, we might recall how Baudrillard variously
described his unique sociological method as constituting a form of “cam-
era movement” or “tracking shot” with regard to the subject-objects of
his studies (2015, pp. 12, 13, 35). All of which to say that Chinese Urban
Shi-nema might also be taken as a productive exercise in cinematic-driven-­
thinking, which invites its readers to view contemporary Chinese life and
lifestyles through and with the lens of cinema, which we frame as a particu-
larly privileged site/sight of concrescence, or growing together, of the
modern Chinese city and its citizenry.
To such ends we also forward here a detoured notion of cinematicity
with unique Chinese characteristics (what we will relate in the next chapter
as shi-nematic assemblages) that become palpable within and across differ-
ent scales of register—ranging from the individual, through various collec-
tive groups, up to and including a national community (a statistical
population of many millions). And it would be fair to say that at times
during the development of this book, the sheer magnitude of trying to
bridge—let alone synthesise—these different scalar levels of analysis has on
occasion given the authors the odd unsettling feeling of vertigo. But
reflecting upon these feelings inevitably brought us by degrees back to the
cinema, and specifically what some take to be cinema’s Ur text: Vertigo
(Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958)—the form of which can help us to here
visualise certain aspects of our own cinematic method before we advance.
Indeed, the critical method developed hereafter might be fruitfully
thought of as actualising a form of “Vertigo effect”: a visceral visual tech-
nique (that in the study of film is sometimes referred to as a “dolly zoom”)
made most famous by Alfred Hitchcock, which entails the compositing or
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

collapsing together of a rapid pull of focus (typically using wide-angle

lenses in camera to adjust the angle of view) and a simultaneous backtrack-
ing dolly movement within a single shot. In Chaps. 3 through 6, for exam-
ple, we expressly fold together a focusing zoom on different urban
phenomena (so that we can keep sight of their specific differences and
singular details), while concomitantly undertaking a contextualising back-
track that allows us to simultaneously frame their contours and operations
in relation to a broader horizon and dynamically changing bigger picture.
Closely linked to this dynamic of zooming and backtracking is another
useful concept, or image of thought, we borrow from the intersecting
worlds of mathematics and philosophy: the fractal. We will go into the
specificities of this modelling in more detail in the following chapter but
for now wish to note en passant that a fractal is a self-same repeating pat-
tern, or a nested set of sets, whose patternings recur or repeat at different
scales of observation or register. The dynamic fractal model we outlay
(which should not be taken as being closed, fixed, stable or indeed the
only pattern we might perceive) is directly tied to our Realist modelling of
social ontology, which, as encountered in the work of materialist thinkers
such as Manuel DeLanda, helps us to bridge the “link between the micro-
and the macro-levels of social reality” (including the intermediary of the
meso-level; see e.g. DeLanda 2006, pp. 4–5).
Drawing heavily on the material philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
DeLanda approaches cities as ecological “assemblages of people, networks,
organizations, as well as of a variety of infrastructural components, from
buildings and streets to conduits for matter and energy flows” (2006,
p. 6) wherein different kinds of catalytic replicators and converters such as
“genes, memes, norms, routines” all get mixed up in nonlinear recodings
(see DeLanda 2000, p. 212). DeLanda also encourages us to view cities as
assemblages of matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various
kinds, “with each new layer of accumulated ‘stuff’ simply enriching the
reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatronics available
for the generation of novel structures and processes” (2000, p. 21). If the
city constitutes one level of study, closely linked to this is the co-built sub-
jectivity of the postsocialist Chinese citizen, which is increasingly the prod-
uct of urban experience—which is to say, we must recognise a form of
entangled or transactional relationship emerging between the city and its
subjects, as well as between ourselves and the subject-objects or partici-
pants (to speak social-scientifically) who we have been studying.
12 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

Of course, in the language of contemporary physics or continental phi-

losophy we might concede that we are always already materially entangled
with our world, or it reciprocally with us. However, unlike other animals, as
far as we are aware, the human species frequently fills its lived environments
with ever-new forms of tool and machine—what Michel Serres refers to as
“Exo-Darwinian” drivers—that help to mould and reshape the individuals
and populations who originally moulded them (2018, p. 45ff).
Uncomfortable resonances here, then, with Debord’s observation that
“[u]rbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment,”
which has historically remade “the totality of space into its own setting,” by
moulding all of its surroundings, while developing special techniques for
shaping its very territory and arranging “the solid ground” for a very spe-
cific “collection of tasks” which developed “logically into absolute domina-
tion” (1983, p. 169). A picture that both reflects the flattened totalitarian
universe presented in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1991) and antici-
pates Baudrillard’s take on later forms of consumer society which began
“laying hold of the whole of life,” so that “all activities are sequenced in the
same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in
advance, hour by hour, [and] where the ‘environment’ is total—fully air-
conditioned, organized, culturalized” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 37).
As this book will show, urban China has more and more been con-
ceived of as, and built into, a machinic-space of techno-capitalist transac-
tion: a concept that we use in two distinct but overlapping ways throughout
this book. Firstly, while the notion of “transaction” most commonly refers
to a commercial system of exchange, typically of goods, services or signs
for cash (or increasingly monetised data), we also here deploy the term
with a secondary philosophical and critical shade. This evokes a conceptual
notion of trans-actions that expose how the borders between inside and
outside, subject and object, human and media (and for us researcher and
researched) become blurred and smudged. Tied to this, we find it more
fitting to say that the commercial worlds we studied appeared to want
their human citizen-customers to become incorporated (as well as
immersed or entangled) into them. Or, put differently, Ningbo’s embed-
ded modern machines for living intend to incorporate individual and col-
lective desires into their operations, meaning that urban forms and
functions increasingly anticipate and co-constitute Sinicised versions of
homo economicus (Li 2016, p. 58).
Drawing inspiration from the influential assemblage models and meth-
ods of Elizabeth Grosz, we approach the corporeal body as a form of
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

“socio-cultural artefact” that provides the material conditions for contem-

porary subjectivity (1999, p. 381). Worth recalling here is that Grosz’s
models were originally developed as a critique of causal and representa-
tional models of the body/city relationship, which typically granted prece-
dence to one or other of the elements in the duelling pair. Against such,
Grosz projected a radical third way that recognises only transitory
moments of connection and two-way co-composition:

What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities

which sees them, not as megalithic total entities, distinct identities, but as
assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often tem-
porary sub- or micro-groupings. (1999, p. 385)

A series of different assemblage interfaces in millennial Ningbo become

the throbbing and dynamic focal points of this book. Or more precisely,
our pars pro toto approach isolates five or so embedded forms of modern
urban assemblage emerging from within the entrepreneurial city. Each was
chosen because it expresses something important about the contemporary
Chinese city more generally, and by extension the phase transition cur-
rently impacting urban China and its citizens’ subjectivities. Without pro-
viding any spoilers, this is first and foremost related to new forms of
consumerism and consumer culture linked with China’s embrace of global
capitalism. Thus, while something like Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999)
presented Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and cities such
as Berlin and New York came to embody and express the prevailing eco-
nomic and politico-aesthetic logic of the twentieth century (see e.g.
DeLanda 2000, p. 92; Baudrillard 2010), our book does something simi-
lar for China and its twenty-first-century city-building drives: albeit spe-
cifically harnessing Ningbo as a grounded case study that helps illuminate
how on-going processes of urbanisation see (second and first tier) Chinese
cities emerging as the capital case of twenty-first-century cine-city life. Or
again, taking China as “where the action is” in terms of the hyperreal city
culture, we offer a series of detailed soundings of heterogeneous commer-
cial and consumerist structures that “add themselves to the mix of previ-
ously existing ones, interacting with them, but never leaving them behind
as a prior stage of development (although, perhaps, creating the condi-
tions for their disappearance)” (DeLanda 2000, p. 271).
14 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

What is more, if in the Western context the coming together of urban

spaces and consumer politics resulted in the emergence of “postmodern-
ist” cities during the twentieth century, which Clarke describes as being
“less an identifiable city than a group of concepts—census tracts, special
purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei” (2003, p. 94), we report
back on similar phenomena currently defining the operations and topol-
ogy of what we might for reasons of symmetry here call “postsocialist”
Chinese cities.5 Inasmuch as the embrace of semiocapitalism and consumer
politics has resulted in the emergence of new forms of city in China, which
differ greatly from older feudal or Communist models, and expose the
Chinese city’s own “posthumous continuation, [in] its fractal form” (Clarke
2003, p. 94, emphasis in original).

On the State of a City

What is a city? This is necessarily a complex question to answer in the
abstract or concrete specific in such a slim volume. But it is one that we
need to address nevertheless. In hazarding a working definition that we
might pick up on here, Grosz notes how the city, in its material form,
might be taken as a complex dynamic assemblage knitting together power
networks, economic flows and particular “forms of management and
political organization, interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social rela-
tions, and the aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to cre-
ate a semi-permanent but everchanging built environment or milieu”
(1999, p. 382). With specific regard to the everchanging form cities take
within time, DeLanda points to how historians regularly remind us that
“urbanization has always been a discontinuous phenomenon,” defined by
fits and bursts, where periods of long stagnation are followed by rapid
bursts of growth, if not vice versa (2000, p. 29). Cities are also relational
entities, of course, that embody complex ever-shifting relations with other
cities, trade routes and nations. Which is to say, we are all too aware that
we can only ever gather partial and limited vantages, or fleeting glances, of
what any given city is.
For such reasons, it is perhaps best to approach cities as prime examples
of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: dynamic extended arrange-
ments that appear massively distributed in both time and space and whose
spatial and temporal forms expose nonlocal effects of action at a distance.
Indeed, in a passage worth quoting at length Morton tallies some of the
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

pertinent problems facing us when trying to conceptually define what a

city (in this case, London) is:

A city contains all kinds of paths and streets that one might have no idea of
on a day-to-day basis. Yet even more so, you could live in a city such as
London for fifty years and never fully grasp it in its scintillating, oppressive,
joyful London-ness. The streets and parks of London, the people who live
there, the trucks that drive through its streets, constitute London but are
not reducible to it. London is not a whole that is greater than the sum of its
parts. Nor is London reducible to those parts. London can’t be “under-
mined” downward or upward. Likewise London isn’t just an effect of my
mind, a human construct—think of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Nor is
London something that only exists when I walk through the Victoria Line
tunnel to the Tate Gallery at Plimco Underground Station, or when I think
about London, or write this sentence about London. London can’t be
“overmined” into an aftereffect of some (human) process such as thinking
or driving or essay writing. To this extent writing about music really is like
dancing about architecture—and a good thing too. Everything is like that.
[…] The streets beneath streets, the Roman Wall, the boarded-up houses,
the unexploded bombs, are records of everything that happened to London.
London’s history is its form. Form is memory. (2013, pp. 90–1)

And while the memory-form of the city is important to what follows,

pace Félix Guattari we also concede that cities operate through “abstract
machines,” which can be thought of here in terms of functions (see e.g.
Genosko 2012, p. 152). Our engagement with form and function
throughout this book in turn pays heed to the mediated or experiential
dimension of cities for their citizen-subjects. Which is to say, we remain
aware that we only ever meet the concrete-functional city half-way,
through an embodied and/or technologised interface. Here, the concrete
and abstract aspects of the city should be taken as key ingredients in the
social constitution of the body and mind of the urban subjects: constitut-
ing “a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an
unintegrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, pro-
cesses, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic, and
public relations” (Grosz 1999, p. 382).
16 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

Ningbo-a-Go-Go
The actual and virtual object of this book’s study, if you will, are (five or
so) processual urban interfaces emerging within contemporary Ningbo, a
sub-provincial port city located in Zhejiang Province on China’s eastern
coast, previously known as Ningpo in English, and which can be roughly
translated as 宁, ning “serene” or “tranquil” and 波, bo “waves” or
“waters.” Today Ningbo markets itself as being one of China’s oldest his-
torical cities—dating from around 4800 BCE. Recalling DeLanda’s point
that cities experience fits and bursts of growth and stagnation, the first two
decades of the new millennium have arguably overseen the most extensive
and rapid periods of urban growth and construction Ningbo has experi-
enced in its 6800-odd-year history, bearing witness to new-fangled forms
of ideology and politics that literally become concretised through urban
infrastructure and modern city planning (for more of infrastructure as ide-
ology see e.g. Thrift 2015). Consequently, the giant Ningbo-Zhoushan
port currently constitutes one of the busiest and deepest working seaports
in the world. This means that, no matter where in the world you might be
reading this book, and irrespective of whether you have ever heard of
Ningbo or not, this globalised place is intimately implicated in, and
expressly entangled with, the unfolding realities of your local milieu: even
if only through geopolitical notions of action at a distance. For, among
other things, Ningbo is continually mixed up with the circulation of the
100,000 or so shipping tankers (and the various products and goods
freighted within them) that are required to keep the global economy tick-
ing over (see e.g. Thrift 2015).
Of significance to the genesis of this book, as part of the then second
tier city’s millennial drive towards modernisation, the University of
Nottingham was invited to set up an overseas campus there in 2004, mak-
ing the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) the first Sino-­
foreign university to open its doors for business in postsocialist China (not
withstanding a previous wave of Anglo-American missionary universities
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to the 1949 foundation of
the People’s Republic of China; Bolton 2002, pp. 189–190). The authors
of this book began working at UNNC in 2010 (a census year that recorded
a growing Ningbo population of over seven million) and 2013 respec-
tively, living and working there during an extended period of rapid change
and urban development, which as of 2017 saw the entrepreneurial city
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

become recognised as one of China’s “new first-tier cities” (see e.g.

O’Donnell 2017).
As a consequence of UNNC’s arrival, the everchanging screenscapes of
Ningbo also, perhaps inevitably, began to serve as a form of standing
reserve for ever more anglophone studies and interdisciplinary academic
research projects. Over and above our own empirical, (auto)ethnographic
and ficto-critical work (together, alone or with other co-authors),6 and the
work of other known and unknown (to us) colleagues and scholars who
took UNNC as an academic, political, economic, pedagogical or ideologi-
cal object of study (and to which we will return in Chap. 5), one standout
example of critical urban work by Melissa Shani Brown and David O’Brien
warrants a brief mention here. This takes Ningbo’s Moon Lake mosque as
a singular case study that helps expose broader political drives associated
with the “sinicisation” of Islam within China more generally.
Although a study of the sinicisation of Islam may on first flush appear
to have little in common with the stated mission of Chinese Urban Shi-
nema, Brown and O’Brien’s methods and findings do reveal fertile paral-
lels and resonances with our own project. In the first place, the method of
analysing a contemporary Ningbo site/sight to expose broader trends
speaks to our own techniques, especially the way they show how a histori-
cally significant mosque gradually had its meanings, history and function
altered after becoming surrounded by a new assemblage of modern
machines and signs (including state-approved propaganda posters, surveil-
lance cameras, national emblems and commercial buildings). In this sense
Brown and O’Brien’s work, like ours, appears attuned to the material
expressions and transactional tensions emerging between a historically
transforming Chinese reality and the new forms of visual culture that over-
code it. In anticipation of what is to come, it is also of relevance that
Brown and O’Brien note in passing that since they first began visiting the
Ningbo mosque in 2013:

the majority of the old late Qing and early Republican era buildings sur-
rounding the lake and mosque have been demolished and replaced by newly
built constructions in generic “traditional” style. While some of these new
constructions reference the previous buildings on the site many more now
house Starbucks cafes, fashion boutiques, bars or chain restaurants. Though
evoking the Qing Dynasty streets, the “new old” neighbourhood includes
underground parking and security cameras. To the south of the mosque a
huge 30-storey luxury hotel has been built, towering over the faithful while
18 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

much of the land immediately surrounding the mosque has been cleared for
redevelopment. (2019, p. 8)

Brown and O’Brien’s isolation of an architectural space as an ethno-

graphic site capable of being mined for wider (implicit and explicit) mean-
ings and then articulated to broader political and discursive analysis also
chimes (albeit on a different scalar level) with our framing of Ningbo as a
type of universal Singular. That is, an object of attention that can be taken
as a “singular entity which persists as the universal in the multitude of its
interpretations” (Žižek 2007, p. xii), while also serving as a singular exam-
ple of a Chinese city that concomitantly indexes broader trends unfolding
in parallel places across the PRC.

Structure of Approach and Synopsis of Chapters

As is almost customary for books inspired by, or written in the wake of, A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a), we concede that this
book could pretty much be picked up and read in any order that the reader
sees fit. Someone with a research interest in Chinese museums might be
inclined to go directly to Chap. 4, for instance. Another reader interested
in commercial manipulation might go straight to Chap. 3 or 6, while yet
another interested in corporate universities or the embedding of transna-
tional higher education in China may want to hop straight into Chap. 5.
While admitting this, the book’s engineered structure does nevertheless
harbour an element of intent and functionality, with each chapter’s open-
ing, closing, focusings and backtracks forming into a broader pattern, or
series of movements, that build momentum and carry forward meanings
and understanding from one to the next.
Thus, both in anticipation of our forthcoming engagement with the
concept of shi—that which breathes life into landscapes and art, but is also
read and harnessed by military generals—and in memory of the restless
twisting murmurations of birds that so often kept us transfixed outside of
our office windows in the UNNC campus, we would like to quote at
length an instructive passage by Hans-Georg Gadamer that we feel speaks
to the nonlinear potential of this book and of taking our prearranged path
through it.

Experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intaking and outgivings. Their

succession is punctuated and made a rhythm by the existence of intervals,
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and prepar-
ing. William James aptly compared the course of a conscious experience to
the alternate flights and perchings of a bird. The flights and perchings are
intimately connected with one another; they are not so many unrelated
lightings succeeded by a number of equally unrelated hoppings. Each rest-
ing place in experience is an undergoing in which is absorbed and taken
home the consequences of prior doing, and, unless the doing is that of utter
caprice or sheer routine, each doing carries in itself meaning that has been
extracted and conserved. As with the advance of an army, all gains from what
has been already effected are periodically consolidated, and always with a
view to what is to be done next. If we move too rapidly, we get away from
the base of supplies—of accrued meanings—and the experience is flustered,
thin, and confused. If we dawdle too long after having extracted a net value,
experience perishes of inanition. (1995, p. 74)

Chapter 2 sets out the methodological mise-en-scène for all our subse-
quent analyses, providing the historical, theoretical and methodological
approaches relevant to our later case studies. It also sketches out how
theory and empirical data become articulated and synthesised. Beyond
setting context, we also work to define and illustrate a series of four (or so)
interrelating concepts important to our later analyses, first outlining what
we mean by cinematicity and shi-nema, before setting out our Realist frac-
tal modelling of Chinese life and our 4E Psychogeographic approaches.
Our next perching thereafter lands in the world of high-end lifestyle
consumerism and apartment building/buying (Chap. 3). We here frame a
series of ephemeral architectural assemblages—designed to advertise and
sell luxury lifestyle apartments—alongside contemporaneous examples of
“aspirational realist” Chinese cinema, the romantic versions of which
unabashedly promote consumerist lifestyle to a growing (predominantly)
female demographic that represents an increasingly important economic
force within contemporary China. However, while saying this, recent
studies have also illuminated how there is, by state-sponsored design, a
skewed gendered distribution of real estate wealth/ownership within
China today that asymmetrically favours (heterosexual) males (with
women ostensibly being systematically excluded from the biggest accumu-
lation of real estate wealth in history, courtesy of the state-backed resur-
gence of patrilineal gender norms; see e.g. Fincher 2014). It is therefore
notable that our key participant in this chapter was a local unmarried
Ningbonese woman who began visiting showrooms around the city in her
pursuit of buying real estate.
20 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

The photos and video clips that our participant naturally collected dur-
ing her showroom tours (to document her apartment-buying experience)
were subsequently shared with us, as were a raft of ephemeral promotional
posters, leaflets, flyers and web links that either she had procured from the
different sites or had been sent to her social media accounts. To add to this
archival data, we also joined our key participant on several visits (and
return visits) to the showrooms. The resulting wealth of materials, we
hope, allows us to reconstruct “the concreteness and materiality of the
situation which is [otherwise] hard to put into words,” while offering a
sense of “being there” to the reader “which is not just a report back”
(Thrift 2008, p. 16). Indeed, in and across five different examples of
showrooms, or modern affective environments (including the showroom
where our participant finally committed to the purchase of her boutique
apartment), we work to document and expose various tensions and affec-
tive forces used to steer the thoughts, feelings, associations and (trans)
actions of potential buyers. We ultimately argue that the various architec-
tural forms explored in this chapter (which we call “Commercial
Overground Shi-nema”) illuminate how aspirational cinematic imaginaries
(messages, products, desires and lifestyle affects) have become disarticu-
lated from the medium of cinema and put to work in different ways within
contemporary Ningbo streetscapes: specifically to increase the efficacy of
real estate showrooms as part of a wider politico-economic drive associ-
ated with stabilising the economy and promoting consumer lifestyles.
In Chap. 4 we then foreground some push back against these broader
drives, setting out to compare two singular artworks that although emerg-
ing from the distinct creative universes of museum architecture and art
cinema—Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s
Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)
respectively—appear to be undergirded by the same “abstract diagram.”
For the former is built out of the remaining fragments of an old city that
was bulldozed to make way for newer commercial high-rise complexes
(such as those being discussed in Chap. 2), while the latter is a state-­
commissioned art film whose mosaic body renews its auteur director’s
fascination with the processes of change and destruction associated with
China’s modernisation. This chapter, called “In-dependent Art Shi-nema,”
also necessarily puts a repurposed notion of assemblage theory into cre-
ative dialogue with the Chinese notion of shi, to illuminate how these
outstanding farrago projects emit discordant critical signals into China’s
processual cityscapes. Drawing on a hybrid model of image regimes from
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (2005a) and Cinema 2 (2005b) also allows us to

describe how artistic qualities help formally critique the temporal and tele-
ological narratives of progress that the Chinese state commissioners origi-
nally charged the artists with celebrating. This chapter accordingly works
to show how although Wang and Jia compose with radically different
media, the archival form of their rough and broken artworks directly com-
municate comparable ethico-aesthetic ideas to the viewer, which ultimately
interferes with, and deterritorialises, the dominant national zhu xuanlü
(main melody or leitmotif )—a dominant political elucidation associated
with the state’s embrace of modernisation and leading citizens into a bet-
ter future (see e.g. Lin 2010, p. 60; Zhang 2007, p. 2; Jaffee 2006, p. 98).
Chapter 5 then opts to rest in the campus world of a transnational
higher education institute located in Ningbo’s education zone. Specifically,
we zoom in on one of the better-known Sino-foreign ventures representa-
tive of the latest wave of Western higher educational franchises currently
doing business in the PRC—the University of Nottingham Ningbo China,
the self-proclaimed “first and best” Sino-alien university. This chapter,
entitled “Sci-Fi Shi-nema,” draws on contemporaneous Chinese movies
featuring neoliberal subjects and architectural simulacra (such as Zhang
Yuan’s Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English (1999), Jia Zhangke’s Shije/The
World (2004) and Chen Kaige’s Sou suo/Lost in the Web (2012)) as well as
classic Western science fiction films (including Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956) and Westworld (Michael Crichton 1973)) to
best frame the marketing and selling of alien “education experiences” to
the local population. Here, if the concrete buildings emerge as branded
simulacra of (other always already hyperreal buildings from) a Western
elsewhere, we also work to show how the actions and gestures of the
student-­centred interactive teaching staff (and the paying customers/stu-
dents in turn) have likewise become subsumed within, and infected by, a
larger network of gestures and (trans)actions associated with life under
what we might here call “Capitalist Realism” with Chinese characteristics
(see e.g. Fisher 2010). The analyses in this chapter draw on: auto ethnog-
raphy; the university’s publically available promotional materials (includ-
ing its own media propaganda); examples of real technology-enhanced
and Starbucks-endorsed classroom interaction from a study of the univer-
sity’s English language samples; informal interviews conducted with vari-
ous past and present members of the student and staff bodies. Throughout,
we also strive to situate our discussions of this material within a broader
picture surrounding the desires, drives and realities of universities,
22 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

researchers and students in the context of education ideologies, language

policies and global capitalism.
To emphasise the interactive, participatory and ecological dimensions
of cinematicity, Chap. 6, “Shi-nematic games,” examines different forms
of casino-like gamifications of consumption taking place within uniquely
Chinese “non-places” (Augé 1995) or “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming
2014) emblematic of globalisation in millennial Ningbo. Here, we exam-
ine the natural history of a new lifestyle assemblage—a massive complex
which integrates apartment buildings, a mall and a boutique hotel—as it
evolved from an empty lot-cum-building site to a smooth and sleek aspi-
rational environ where visitors live, shop, purchase and consume against
the backdrop of a Southeast Asian tropical island theme. Another corpus
of recordings—including participant observation and digital promotional
materials—are here used to identify how in the build up to this site’s open-
ing, a series of participatory games indicative of Casino Capitalism were
set up in order to transform players into payers, and payers into players
(paradoxically in a state space that otherwise outlaws casinos and
gambling).
The diversity of our ethnographic materials helps evaluate the experi-
ence and impact of these shi-nematic games from the different worldviews
and roles of the actors in the evolving apartment-mall-hotel network,
including property moguls, interior design companies, commercial ten-
ants, migrant workers, customers (accompanied by grandparents and chil-
dren) and a range of non-human animals that also become part of the
material and semiotic assemblage. We here put the processes witnessed in
the mall into dialogue with illegal financial investment strategies associated
with contemporaneous “Huallywood” film productions (which saw the
wilful manipulation of viewing figures and false critical reviews in order to
turn cinematic flops into stock market gold). Above and beyond the gami-
fications of the film industry, this chapter also draws parallels between the
dramas that play out in and around such spaces as they develop and the
mediated staging of various games, with the latter ranging from morality-­
lesson board games (e.g. Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders) and syndicated
game shows (e.g. The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune) to the reality TV
shows popular in today’s Chinese attention economies (e.g. The Voice of
China, If You Are the One). Delving into these overlaps not only allows us
to better identify the winners and losers of millennial China’s cinematic
cities but also to see how these malls become symptomatic of an
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

increasingly normalised landscape that exposes economic disparities, men-

tal health issues, environmental damage and the abuse of other animals.
Our short epilogue thereafter attempts to draw together many of the
dispersed threads found weaving throughout the book by turning our
attention to Ningbo’s new “old district” Nantang: a “visually edible”
(Baudrillard 2005, p. 64) or selfie-friendly “old street” space full of mod-
ern restaurants and bars nested inside repurposed simulacral façades of
older Chinese buildings. This “Disneyfied” space, which was finished in
2017 near to Ningbo’s new bullet train station, is designed as a key site/
sight of Ningbonese cinematicity, and another entrepreneurial city-space
associated with a broader cultural process of becoming-cinema. We here
read this hyperreal consumer district alongside modern transnational
examples of Disney and DreamWorks cinema that use a Chinese “recipe”
to market their wares. Before getting there, however, we invite our readers
to now hop through these other Ningbo sites/sights, where they can
perch momentarily to explore. For as per Gadamer, meanings therein
await to be extracted and consequences to be absorbed, conserved and
carried forwards or backwards. The next chapter contains the historical
and theoretical fodder for this course of conscious experience.

Notes
1. He there examines the suicides of Wall Street bankers in the wake of the
global financial crisis, Chinese factory workers toiling for Apple and
Foxconn, Indian farmers trapped and enslaved by multinational GM corpo-
rations such as Monsanto and French workers driven to despair under
Orange’s unethical managerialism.
2. For Susan Sontag it was photography more precisely which was the technol-
ogy responsible for making cultures modern, driving individuals and institu-
tions towards the practice of image making and exchanging: As she notes,
“A society has become ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing
and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to
determine our demands upon reality and themselves coveted substitutes for
first hand experience become indispensible to the health of the economy,
the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness” (2008,
p. 153). In acknowledging this, we at the same time recognise that, pace
Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (2008), the still image persisted as the substra-
tum and “optical unconscious” of cinema during the celluloid era; however,
we also argue later that this became reconfigured and replaced in the digital
24 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

era with the selfie, arguably the paradigmatic image of our time revealing a
more cinema modality or ontology (see e.g. Brown 2019).
3. There is certainly much evidence of increasing eddies and feedback loops
emerging between different transmedial forms or platforms today. As Sou
suo/Caught in the Web (Chen Kaige 2012), which we engage with in Chap.
5 makes clear, smartphone screens and social media applets increasingly
overlay, become embedded in or begin to reconfigure the optics of more
traditional screen forms (here narrative film, but also television shows and
videogames), while smartphones themselves concomitantly become the
hardware device through which most modern Chinese viewers stream and
view their movies.
4. Especially when it comes to cutting-edge technological, industrial and scien-
tific tools and hardware. We can think here of contributions from photo-
chemical processes, lens technologies, electrical circuits, industrial practices,
digital computing, motion capture, drones and so on. Going further still,
while theorists such as Braudy famously took the cinema to be a technologi-
cal metapsychological modelling or hardware actualisation of human wet-
ware or (brain and body) perception and thought (1999), other thinkers
and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Ronald Bogue and
Patricia Pisters have expanded such views by framing the universe itself as a
form of “metacinema” (for a survey of such positions see Pisters 2003,
p. 4 ff).
5. The term or concept postsocialism has gained a lot of currency in the new
millennium. In discussions of Chinese cinemas Zhang Yingjin maintains that
the term is best taken as a Chinese equivalent to Jean-François Lyotard’s
concept of “postmodernism,” which is expanded to account for a diverse
post-Maoist sociopolitical and artistic landscape that includes a broad range
of filmmakers from “different generations, aesthetic aspirations, and ideo-
logical persuasions [that] struggle to readjust or redefine their different stra-
tegic positions in different social, political, and economic situations” (2007,
pp. 50–2). Chris Berry on the other hand notes how postsocialism, like
postmodernism, should be read in terms of the stubborn persistence of
grand myths and narratives long after any real faith in them has been lost
(2007, p. 116).
6. In the collaborative process of marshalling and discussing the material for
this book, as well as then drafting the different chapters (and responding to
comments from peers and reviewers), we have found ourselves at times
adopting what we call dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies. We detour
this term from what is often described as an indeterminate set of loosely
connected creative and experimental practices emerging out of the new
humanities known as “fictocriticism.” The idea of precisely defining what
fictocriticism is often troubles writers associated with these transgressive and
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

defamiliarising practices (see e.g. Brewster 1996; Schlunke and Brewster

2006; Hass 2017). However, to aid readers here, we might note how ficto-
criticism is often associated with genre-bending, genre-blending, “genre-­
defying” or “non-genre” (see e.g. Hass, p. 101) forms of writing, which can
get mapped alongside other loosely defined practices including creative criti-
cism, gonzo-anthropology, para-fiction or ethnographic fiction. These com-
monly strive to engage with the wrinkle that emerges between the so-called
disinterested academic scholar and the invested and entangled participant
(see e.g. Brewster 1996, p. 29; this wrinkle also is embraced in some psycho-
logical research, e.g., Busch-Jensen and Schraube, 2019, p. 226).
Fictocriticism is thus associated with a situated and reflexive style of writing,
or a contextualised first-person experience that embraces performative
experimental methods in-formed by critical thoughts and concepts. Often
ficto-criticism is adopted or triggered by an attempt to articulate otherwise
untellable stories (Brewster 1996, p. 32). Resonating with our multi-­
perspectival approaches here, Katrin Schlunke and Anne Brewster note how
fictocritical strategies typically assume “the inventiveness of argument and
the creativity of truths,” with a key intention “of this kind of writing and
performance [being the] effort to convene new kinds of audiences” (2006,
p. 393). These experimental and performative practices often attempt to
express thinking through the style and practice of writing and can be linked
to attempts to open up new spaces for possibility and thought. As with our
ficto-critical work here, the method allows for creative re-orderings and
blendings that help us to convey ideas and observations in the sometimes
entertaining, amusing or shocking way they were experienced by us (p. 394).
In terms of practicalities or to offer concrete examples of this process, such
re-orderings and blendings could be seen to be occurring during our inter-
change of drafts, as one author began to layer the other author’s text with
additional details and alternative perspectives based on perceived overlap
and fruitful connection with his own material and experience. What we
referred to at the time as “layering” or “the appearance of a third author” is
what we now recognise as such dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies.

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 1 INTRODUCTION 29

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Filmography
Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Directed by Werner Herzog. 2010.
Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English. Directed by Yuan Zhang. 1999.
Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2010.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. 1956.
Shije/The World. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2004.
Sou suo/Caught in the Web. Directed by Kaige Chen. 2012.
Vertigo. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1958.
Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton. 1973.
 CHAPTER 2

Shi-Story and Theory

…it is only through shi that one can get a grip on the process of
reality.
—François Jullien (1995, p. 31)
[T]he experience of film becomes deeply enmeshed in the
metropolitan experience as a whole.
—Zhang Zhen (2005, p. xxx)
Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society…
—Siegfried Kracauer (1995, p. 292)

This chapter tasks itself with introducing and setting out four overlapping
concepts that impact, or intraface with, the case studies that follow. These
include what we mean by cinematicity, which we begin to expand on
below as we move towards a related discussion of what we mean by
Chinese urban shi-nema. We thereafter attempt to set out our fractalised
Realist approach to different scales of analysis, wherein individuals, cities
and nation states appear embedded or set within each other. Finally, some-
what aligned with these, we shall speak to our transactional 4E psychogeo-
graphical approaches to the individual-milieu-continuum, explaining how
this informs our various ethnographic (and ficto-critical autoethnographic)
studies. Along the way we will also work to set out the historical context
of our study and explore certain tensions emerging between statistical and
subjective, macro and micro levels of analysis, which raise questions about

© The Author(s) 2020 31

D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_2
32 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

individual freedom and subject group orientation. Such discussions are

primarily used to help us map out the coextensive nature of cinema and
capitalism within China today while ironing out the wrinkles between
theoretical and empirical approaches to our subject. In striving towards
such goals, we first begin by montaging together a series of historical dis-
cussions that can help set us up and on our way.

1935: From Zunyi to New York, Paris and Beijing …

via Hollywood and the Screen Body

In 1935, while resting in the city of Zunyi (遵义) during the Long March,
Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the Communist Politburo, which
made him the de facto leader of the Red Army. In that same year, while
recovering from an illness in a New York hospital, the sociologist Marcel
Mauss became distracted by his female nurses, and in particular the spooky
familiarity of their movements and gestures. He recounts wracking his
memory to recall where he had previously “seen girls walking as my nurses
walked.” And thereafter records: “I had the time to think about it. At last
I realized that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how
common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they
too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun
to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema” (Mauss 1973, p. 72). Similar
ideas find support in Dana B. Polan’s assertion that folks increasingly
learned “to kiss, to talk, to live, according to the shadows [of cinema]”
and that screen worshippers increasingly came to take “the flickers on the
screen” as the standard of their own reality (Polan in Beller 2006, p. 3).
Or, put differently, in the cinematic age film stars began to impart and
spread viral mimetisms, through which they began to “guide our manners,
gestures, poses, attitudes, […] the way we light a cigarette, exhale the
smoke, the way we lift a glass […] the way we wave or tip our hat” and so
on (Morin 2010, p. 136).
While such scenarios might from today’s perspective recall something
like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956)—a science fiction
narrative that touts on propagandistic fears of US citizens becoming mind-
less Communist zombies—it is worth recalling that under the chairman-
ship of Mao, Hollywood cinema was banned from communist China in an
attempt to prevent capitalist ideologies and practices from contaminating
Chinese minds. Of course, Mao inherited such views from Leftist thinkers
and KNT (Kuomintang or Chinese) nationalists, who had historically
 2 SHI-STORY AND THEORY 33

traded in similar fears—by framing Hollywood cinema as a corrosive

mode, or a noxious form of “spiritual pollution,” tantamount to the latest
“opium for the masses” (see e.g. Ying Hong in Su 2011, p. 191) pushed
on the Chinese by alien capitalists.1

Regarding the Cinematisation of Cities and Life

If we were to try to distil the ever-expanding corpus of interdisciplinary
work that gravitates around the liminal space situated in between the cin-
ema and the city, the city and the cinema, we might assert that: The cinema
and the city coil into a Möbius strip. Consider in such light Paul Virilio’s
argument that after the invention of the cinema the “screen abruptly
became the city square” (Virilio 2002, p. 447). This idea intensified after
the coming of the talkies, as can be evidenced by the now famous critique
of the culture industry by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who
grumbled that the filmgoer increasingly perceives the street outside the
cinema as a continuation of the film they have just left: “Real life is becom-
ing indistinguishable from the movies” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997,
p. 126)—a view that in turn anticipates Susan Sontag’s and Jean
Baudrillard’s arguments that modern peoples increasingly came to inhabit
a simulated or hyperreal world wherein meaningful distinctions between
true and false are increasingly difficult to discern (see Sontag 2008,
pp. 154–163; Baudrillard 2014, p. 162).
Sontag famously essayed that a society might be considered modern
when “one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images”:
meaning that images increasingly became essential to the health of mod-
ern economies, “the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private hap-
piness” (2008, p. 153). Of significance to what follows, she also observed
how within such visual cultures modern subjects would concurrently “feel
that they are images, and are made real by photographs” (p. 161). This
idea was taken in a different direction by radical thinkers such as Vilém
Flusser, who similarly noted that—well before the emergence of Facebook,
Instagram or the selfie—everyone now leads their lives “as though under
a magic spell for the benefit of cameras” (1983, p. 48).
Writing in the aftermath of Michelangelo Antonioni’s (in)famous
Chinese documentary Chung Kuo, Cina (1972), Sontag noted how the
Chinese appeared to have adopted a different ritualistic and ideological
approach to photography, with their images and visual culture divulging a
different temperament and ethico-aesthetic: one that always already
34 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

presupposed an idealised framing (read cliché) of the given subject/object

and incorporated the corresponding ideal (read moral) viewing position/
perspective (2008, p. 175). Irrespective of acculturated norms and politi-
cal ideologies, though, Sontag saw that the same corrosive truth under-
girded all modern visual cultures: “To possess the world in the form of
images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the
real” (2008, p. 164).
Writing about the US some years later, Baudrillard recasts such ideas to
put them into dialogue with moving images rather than stills photography,
noting “that life in America can be considered as a film, a movie, and you
cannot distinguish between a movie and America. You cannot experience
things beyond this hyperreality of films, signs and so on to get to its core,
its reality” (2014, p. 162). This echoes Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the
world increasingly came to look to us like a (bad) film (2005, p. 166), or
William Brown’s more recent assertion that the cinema is now “the mea-
sure of reality as opposed to reality being the measure of cinema” (2019,
p. 231). By such measure, the real ascendence of cinema (or the ascen-
dence of cinema to the status of the real) in modern cultures might also be
approached through Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of the medial “vanishing
point” (1999, p. 11ff): a concept built into technologically inscribed ways
of seeing, but also creatively associated with the dramatic emergence, and
apparent disappearance, of a popular form, as when the cinema suddenly
burst onto the scene only to undergo a series of deaths and disappear-
ances. Or, as Evan Calder Williams more recently explicates:

the vanishing point signals a process where the energies and techniques of
putatively different media become both ubiquitous and entangled, shaping
how we see and take on all the tensions, forces and flows that come with
them. […] in other words, this vanishing point marks the way that some-
thing becomes unseen not because it has been replaced or faded in impor-
tance, but because it has become naturalised, a structure and a given, as we
forget how it was to have been otherwise. (2017, p. 17)

Vanishing is here correlated with ubiquity, normalisation and the passage

of a technological means of perception into the realms of psychological
blindness. Alongside Zielinski, arguably the most sustained arguments
concerning the cinema’s restructuring of modern societies and subjectivity
belong to Jonathan Crary and Jonathan Beller, who chart the historical
remaking and reordering of human perception and consciousness together
 2 SHI-STORY AND THEORY 35

with, what Beller calls, the “cinematicity of capital” (2006, pp. 12–28). In
The Cinematic Mode of Production, for instance, Beller maps a broader
process of becoming-image—associated with the evolution of capitalism—
that began inculcating the “cinematization of social relations” and “the
cinematization of the subject” throughout the course of the twentieth
century (2006, pp. 14, 26). There, the “cinema and its succeeding, if still
simultaneous, formations, particularly television, video, computers and
internet, [have become the] deterritorialized factories in which spectators
work,” meaning that the cinematic image “and its legacy, that gossamer
imaginary arising out of a matrix of socio-psychomaterial relations, [is
where we] make our lives” (2006, p. 60). Such ideas enjoy a different vec-
tor of approach in Crary’s (2001) investigations into the birth of today’s
digitally mediated “attention economies,” through which the act of look-
ing (and the co-extensive desire to be seen) have become a form of com-
pulsory labour—a despotic capitalist system wherein the image “pervades
all appearing,” to the extent that subjects must “maintain themselves as
image,” and labour in the image, which becomes “the mise-en-scène of the
new work” (2001, p. 60).
All of which to say, since the nineteenth century the cinema and its
twenty-first-century cognate forms that egress from its vanishing point
have increasingly offered “the emerging paradigm for the total reorganisa-
tion of society and (therefore) the subject” under capitalism (Beller 2006,
p. 13). In today’s rapidly changing Chinese context these changes are
debatably more discernable than they are in many other countries, with
sweeping social and economic transformations emerging in tandem with
“new representational practices, and with a sweeping reorganization of
visual/auditory culture” (Crary 2001, p. 2). For such reasons we hereafter
expand Beller’s, Crary’s and Zielinski’s historical arguments to demon-
strate the extent to which “capital as an evolving system of organisation,
production, and exploitation” has also now become cinematic in the con-
temporary Chinese context (Beller 2006, p. 22, emphasis ours). Associated
with such, Chinese Urban Shi-nema labours to reveal how, in Chinese
consumer cultures where capitalist optics and visuality (including as trans-
parency) now reigns, “social theory needs to become film theory” (albeit
with distinctive Chinese characteristics) (p. 22).
Of course, articulating such debates to the Chinese context has already
become a latent theme undergirding much contemporary and historical
Chinese cinema-city scholarship. Consider in this light the very ending of
Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality, where—after literally and
36 D. H. FLEMING AND S. HARRISON

metaphorically “shanghaiing” classical “Western” film theory by passing it

through the defamiliarising prisms of Chinese and Buddhist philoso-
phies—Fan unbuttons Andre Bazin’s famous ontological question regard-
ing “What is Cinema?” (1967) in order to repose it as an enigmatic
Zen-like riddle concerning “What is not cinema?” (Fan 2015, p. 222; see
also Fleming 2017, p. 150). To similar ends, our consideration of Chinese
urban landscapes gesture towards the very heart of this problem, for if we
are to follow Fan in his claims that Chinese theorists understood cinema
as a medium and practice that is forever “approaching the real,” we here
foreground how the opposite appears ever more true today, in that the
new urban realities of China increasingly betray a complementary move-
ment towards becoming-cinema(tic).

Towards a Theory of Chinese Cinematicity

With the above debates in mind, we can now begin building upon a broad
but thin stratum of cinema-city works that explore notions of cinematicity
(see inter alia Clarke and Doel 2016; Geiger and Littau 2013; Williams
2013, 2016). Nevertheless, while the majority of works penned in this
grain tend to use films as their starting point for considering the cinema’s
“automatic thinking of the city” (see e.g. Clarke and Doel 2016, p. 3), in
a gesture in keeping with our positing here of a concomitant becoming-­
image of capitalist reality, Chinese Urban Shi-nema works to track down
and isolate examples of the modern city’s own affective film thinking (to
purloin Daniel Frampton’s terminology). To take a point advanced by
Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San as our departure point, then, we con-
tend that if film indeed operated as a historical “archive of urban space”
(2014, p. 11), it is now an undeniable truism that China’s urban spaces
ever more reveal their own concomitant archiving (and reterritorialisa-
tion) of cinematic tropes, signs, gestures and affects.
Indeed, as intimated in our introduction, the contemporary mega
cinematic-­cities of Greater China make for a particularly tantalising scene
or setting to explore backdrafted notions of urban cinematicity. For,
among other things, a near mythical cinematic-hyperreality is made pal-
pable by the newly erected multimodal ensembles of glass and light; the
aestheticised landscaped parks whose choreographed jets of water dance to
music pumped out from speakers hidden inside fibreglass rocks; the simu-
lacral streets and buildings that establish the consumable backdrops for
new forms of cinematic-citizen (avid image makers and voracious image
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
every Flemish heart, that even those who already knew of this
daring plot were appalled at the magnitude of such an outrage.
"Why not?" quoth William of Orange earnestly. "Less than a
hundred years ago the town of Brüges held the Archduke Maximilian
King of the Romans a prisoner within her walls, until he swore to
dismiss all foreign troops from the Netherlands within four days, and
gave hostages for his fidelity. What Brüges did then, cannot Ghent
do now? With Alva a prisoner in our hands, we can dictate our terms
to the King. It is a bold coup, seigniors, I own, but it hath every
chance of success."
A murmur of approval went round the table. Clémence alone
was silent. She was old and feeble, perhaps she had seen more than
one bold coup fail, and terrible reprisals follow such failures; but
Laurence was full of eagerness and enthusiasm.
"It cannot fail," he asserted vehemently. "Are there not two
thousand men in the city who are devoted to your Highness heart
and soul, and who are ready to give their lives for your cause? Two
thousand, and within three days there will be five! more than
enough for such a bold coup. It will and must succeed! One lucky
hazard, and we may win all that we have fought for, lived for, died
for, for over a century."
"It cannot fail!" came with fervent conviction from every one of
the others.
"Ghent can do what Brüges hath done!" they affirmed.
"With the tyrant a prisoner in our hands, we can dictate terms
as Brüges did an hundred years ago."
"Well said, seigniors," rejoined William of Orange, "and your
approval--you who know this city so much better than I do--hath
given me further encouragement. And now," he added with serious
earnestness, "you will want to know why I convened this meeting,
which by Mevrouw van Rycke's graciousness I have been able to do,
and you will wish to hear what role hath been assigned to each of
you in the great event which we are preparing."
"Let me but offer my life..." interposed Laurence eagerly.
"Nay! not your life, I hope, Messire," quoth the Prince with a
smile, "your forethought and prudence and your united co-operation
are what we want. Ye are risking your lives, seigniors, in this
enterprise, that I'll not deny--but ye are men and know which you
value most, your life or the very existence of your nation which is
threatened with complete destruction."
"For Orange, for faith and for liberty!" said one of the men
simply, and the others merely murmured: "Tell us what we must do."
"You must be wary and alert above all things, seigniors, for I
have chosen you for a very arduous task in connection with this
enterprise, and you must recognise that however carefully we
organise it, there will always be one weak link in the chain which we
are forging for the capture of that abominable tyrant, the Duke of
Alva."
"One weak link?"
"Yes. We do not and cannot know for certain on which date Alva
proposes to come to Ghent. The dates of his visits to Flemish towns
are always kept a secret until the very moment of departure."
"He dreads assassination," interposed one man with a sneer.
"On the last occasion of the Duke's visit to Ghent," said
Clémence van Rycke, "my husband was only apprised of it by courier
two hours before his arrival. The courier had started from Brussels a
bare half-hour before the Lieutenant-Governor and his cortège left
the city."
"Precisely, and even then the High-Bailiff was in advance of
every one else with the news," nodded the Prince, "and that is
where our difficulty lies. How to collect together a couple of
thousand men at perhaps an hour's notice--men who are scattered
in different portions of this city and probably engaged in their usual
avocations."
"Where will their leaders be?"
"Each at the different points where our secret stores of arms are
kept. There are four of these points and four captains whom I have
appointed to command five hundred men each. Having distributed
the arms, the captains will lead their respective companies to the
Waalpoort, where a crowd is sure to collect as soon as the rumour
has spread to the town that the Lieutenant-Governor is coming. Our
men will mix with the crowd, and at a given signal--when the Duke's
cortège crosses the bridge--they will rush the bodyguard, scatter
confusion among the escort, and in the mêlée seize the person of
Alva. During the inevitable tumult that will ensue among the soldiers
and the populace, our valuable hostage shall be conveyed in
absolute secrecy to Het Spanjaard's Kasteel, where of course we can
easily keep him a close prisoner whilst we negotiate with the King.
But this of course is for the future, seigniors," he added, "and my
concern now is to explain to you the method which I and my
councillors have devised for the calling together of our stalwarts as
soon as the Duke's coming visit is announced. Have I your close
attention, seigniors?"
 He had indeed. The four men round the table bent forward
more eagerly still so as not to lose one word of their noble chief's
commands. But before they could formulate the words of loyalty and
of enthusiasm which hovered on their lips, a soft sound like the
beating of a bird's wing against the window-pane froze those
whispered words upon their lips.
Every head was immediately turned to the window, every face
became rigid and pale, every brow was contracted with the effort to
strain the faculty of hearing to its tensest point. It seemed as if six
pairs of glowing eyes would pierce the folds of the velvet curtain
which hung before the window.

III

The Prince was the first to recover himself.

"It is Leatherface," he whispered, "come to give me warning."
He rose and would have gone to the window, but Clémence van
Rycke caught him by the arm and clung convulsively to him. "Not
you, Monseigneur," she entreated, "not you--it might be a traitor."
Then the tapping was repeated and Laurence went cautiously
up to the window, and after an instant's hesitation, he suddenly
drew the curtains aside with a resolute gesture. Then he unfastened
the tall casement and threw it open.
The night was of an inky blackness, and as the lattice flew open
a gust of wind and heavy driving rain nearly extinguished the light of
the candle, but in the framework of the window a man's head and
shoulders detached themselves from out the gloom. The head and
shoulders were closely enveloped in a hood and cape, and the face
was hidden by a mask, and all were dripping with wet.
"Leatherface!" murmured the Prince, and Clémence van Rycke
gave a sigh of relief.
"There is a light in the window above," whispered the man with
the mask, "and a shadow has crossed behind the windows of the
corridor. Someone is astir overhead--and the civic business at the
Town House is drawing to an end."
"We have nearly finished," murmured the Prince in reply. "And
I'll come away at once. Is the street clear?"
"Quite--and will be for another ten minutes till the night-
watchman comes round. I saw him just now, he is very drunk and
might make trouble."
"I come, friend," rejoined the Prince, "and as soon as may be."
The hooded head disappeared in the gloom; Laurence closed
the window and drew the curtains together again.
"I envy that man," he said, and Clémence murmured a fervent:
"God bless him!"

IV

Then the Prince turned once more to his friends.

"You see," he said with his grave smile, "how carefully my
dragon guards me. There is evidently no time for lengthy
explanations, and I must be as brief as I can."
He now opened the wallet at his belt and took out from it a
small packet of papers.
 "I am going to entrust these papers to Messire Laurence van
Rycke," he said, "they contain the names and places of abode and of
business of every one of those two thousand men who have actually
tendered me their oath of allegiance, and have sworn to give me
unconditional support. I propose that Messire van Rycke keep these
lists, because it will undoubtedly be his father, the High-Bailiff, who
will learn sooner than any one else in the town the day and hour of
the Duke of Alva's visit to Ghent. As soon as this is known to him,
Messire van Rycke will then go to each of you, seigniors, and give
you each a list of five hundred names, at the head of which will be
noted the rallying point where these men will have to meet their
captain and receive their arms. You in your turn will then each go
and beat up the five hundred men whose names will have been
given you, and order them to go to their respective rallying points.
All this plan," added the Prince, "has been very carefully thought
out, and it seems to me simple and easy of execution. But if any of
you, seigniors, can think of a better one, I am, of course, always
ready to take advice. You know your own city, better than I do--you
might devise something still more practical than what I propose."
"Nay!" interposed one of the men, "meseems that nothing could
be more simple, and I for one do vote unconditionally for the
acceptance of His Highness' plan."
The others all gave their assent--hastily now, for again that
gentle tapping was heard against the window-pane, only rather
more firmly, more urgently this time. But no one went to the window
to see what the tapping meant; obviously the faithful watcher
outside scented some still hidden danger. The Prince at once by
rising gave the signal that the conference was at an end. As he did
so he handed the packet of papers to Laurence van Rycke who
received it on bended knee.
"It is a treasure, Messire," said William of Orange earnestly,
"which involves the lives of many and even, perhaps, the whole
existence of this city. Where will you keep it?"
It was Clémence van Rycke who replied:
"This room," she said, "is mine own private withdrawing-room;
that bureau there hath a wonderful lock which defies the cleverest
thief; it contains my most valuable jewels. The papers will be safer
there than anywhere."
"Let me see you lock them up in there, mevrouw," rejoined the
Prince graciously, "I entrust them to you and to Laurence with
utmost confidence."
Clémence then handed a key to her son and he locked the
packet up in the tall bureau of carved and inlaid mahogany and
satin-wood which stood in an angle of the narrow room close to the
window and opposite to the door.
"I am meeting some friends and adherents to-morrow," said
William of Orange finally, "at the house of Messire the Procurator-
General whom of a truth God will bless for his loyalty--and I pray
you, seigniors, as many of you as can do so to meet me there at this
same hour. But should we not meet again, do you understand all
that you have to do?"
The men nodded in silence, whereupon the Prince took formal
leave of them and of his host and hostess. He said kind and grateful
words to Clémence van Rycke, who, with tears in her eyes, kissed
the gracious hand which was held out to her. She then escorted her
noble guest out of the room and across the dining-hall, the others
following closely behind. All were treading as noiselessly as they
could. The door which gave from the dining-room on the hall and
staircase beyond was wide open: the room itself was in absolute
darkness, and only a tiny light flickered in the hall, which made the
shadows round corners and in recesses appear all the more dense.
"Will your Highness grope your way to the front door,"
whispered Clémence van Rycke, "or shall my son bring a lanthorn to
guide you?"
"No, no," said William of Orange hurriedly, "that small light
yonder is quite sufficient. I can see my way, and we must try not to
wake your hall-porter."
"Oh! nothing will rouse him save a very severe shaking, and the
bolts and bars have been left undone, as my husband will be coming
home late to-night."
"And, if I am not mistaken," quoth the Prince, "my devoted
friend Leatherface is waiting for me outside to see me safely to my
lodgings. He is always mistrustful of hidden traps or hired assassins
for me. Farewell, seigniors!" he added lightly, "remember my
instructions in case we do not meet again."
"But to-morrow..." interposed Laurence van Rycke.
"Aye! to-morrow," said William of Orange, "at this hour at the
house of Messire Deynoot, the Procurator-General: those of you,
seigniors, who care to come will be welcome."
"Not one of us would care to stay away," rejoined Laurence with
earnest conviction.

CHAPTER VIII
 THE WATCHER IN THE NIGHT

Lenora, thinking that Mevrouw van Rycke was still astir, and pining
for motherly comfort and companionship, had crept softly down the
stairs candle in hand, when all of a sudden she paused in the vast
hall. Everything was so still and so weird that any noise, even that of
a mouse skimming over a carpet, would have made itself felt in the
absolute silence which lay over the house, and Lenora's ear had
most certainly heard--or rather felt, a noise--the sound of people
moving and speaking somewhere, not very far from where she stood
... listening ... every sense on the alert.
With a sudden instinct, half of fear and half of caution, she blew
out the candle and then groped her way, with hands outstretched,
hardly daring to breathe. The tiny, flickering light which came from
an iron lamp fixed to a bracket at the foot of the stairs made the hall
seem yet more vast and strange; but one small, elvish ray caught
the polished brass handle of the dining-room door, and this glimmer
of metal seemed to attract Lenora toward it. After awhile her eyes
became a little more accustomed to the gloom, she tip-toed up to
that door-handle which so attracted her, and placing both her hands
upon it, she crouched there--beside the door--listening.
In effect there were people moving and talking not far from
where she crouched--no doubt that they were in the small
withdrawing-room beyond, and that the door of communication
between the two rooms was open. Lenora--motionless, palpitating,
her heart beating so that it nearly choked her, felt that all her
faculties must now be merged into those of hearing, and, if possible,
seeing what was going on in this house, and at this hour of the night
when the High-Bailiff was from home.
Whether any thought of conspiracy or of State secrets had at
this time entered her head it were impossible to say, whether she
thought of Ramon's murderer or of her oath to her father just then,
who can tell? Certainly not the girl herself--she only listened--
listened with all her might, and anon she heard the scraping of a
chair against the tiled floor, then the iron rings of a curtain sliding
along the rod, finally the whistling sound of a gust of wind rushing
through an open window. This moment she chose as her
opportunity. She turned the handle of the door very gently, and quite
noiselessly it responded to her touch. Then she pushed the door
wide open and waited--listening.
The door into the withdrawing-room was wide open just as she
had conjectured, the wind was blowing the feeble light about which
flickered in that room, and there were men in there who moved
stealthily and spoke in whispers. Lenora crept forward--furtive as a
mouse. The darkness in the dining-hall was impenetrable, and she in
her house-dress of dark woollen stuff made no noise as she glided
along, keeping well within the gloom, her hands stretched out before
her to feel the objects that might be in her way.
At last she came within range of the open door and had a view
of the little room beyond. She saw the table in the centre, the men
sitting around it, and Clémence van Rycke in a high-back chair at its
further end. Just now they all had their faces turned toward the
window, where in the open casement the head and shoulders of a
man were dimly visible to Lenora for one instant and then
disappeared.
After that she heard the men talking together and heard what
they said: she saw that one man appeared to be the recipient of
great marks of respect, and that the others called him "Your
Highness." She was now listening as if her very life depended on
what she heard--crouching in the angle of the dining-room as closely
as her unwieldy farthingale would allow. She heard the man whom
the others called "Your Highness," and who could be none other
than the Prince of Orange, explain to the others a plan for massing
together two thousand men in connection with a forthcoming visit of
the Duke of Alva to Ghent, she heard the word "Leatherface" and a
great deal about a packet of papers. She heard the Prince speak
about a meeting to-morrow in the house of the Procurator-General,
and finally she saw Laurence van Rycke take a packet of papers from
the Prince's hand and lock it up in the bureau that stood close to the
window.
Indeed she could not for a moment be in doubt as to the
meaning of what she saw and heard.
Here was a living proof of that treachery, that underhand
conspiracy of which her father had so often spoken to her of late!
Here were these Netherlanders, living under the beneficent and just
laws of their Sovereign Lord and Master King Philip of Spain--the
man who in every born Spaniard's eyes was greater, nobler, more
just and more merciful than any other monarch alive, who next to
His Holiness himself was surely anointed by God Himself and placed
upon the mightiest throne on earth so that he might administer
God's will upon all his subjects--and here were these traitors plotting
and planning against the Government of that high and noble
monarch, plotting against his representative, the Lieutenant-
Governor whom he had himself put in authority over them.
To a girl born and bred in the atmosphere of quasi-worship
which surrounded Philip's throne, the revolt of these Netherlanders
was the most heinous outrage any people could commit. She
understood now the hatred and loathing which her father had for
them--she hated them too, since one of these vile conspirators had
foully murdered her cousin Ramon in the dark.
"Leatherface!"--the man in the room below whom the others
called "Your Highness" spoke of Leatherface as his friend!
A Prince consorting with a hired assassin! and Lenora felt that
her whole soul was filled with loathing for all these people. Was not
the man who had killed Ramon--foully, surreptitiously and in the
dark--was he not even now just outside this very house--the house
which was to be her home for life--waiting mayhap for some other
unsuspecting Spanish officer whom he could murder in the same
cowardly and treacherous way?--and were not all these people in
that room yonder, execrable assassins too?--had she not heard them
speaking of armed conspirators?--and could she not see even now in
her mind's eye the unsuspecting Duke of Alva falling into their
abominable trap?
But horror-struck as she was, she never stirred. Truth to tell, a
sudden fear held her now--the fear that she might be detected ere
she had done her best to save the Duke from this infamous plot.
What she would do presently, she did not know as yet--for the
moment all that she needed was safety from discovery and the
privacy of her own room where she could pray and think.
 After Laurence had locked the papers in the bureau it was
obvious that the meeting was at an end. She had only just time to
flit like a dark ghost through the dining-hall and to reach the stairs,
before she heard unmistakable signs that the Prince and his friends
were taking leave of their host and hostess. Gathering her wide
gown together in her hands, she crept up the stairs as fast as she
could. Fortunately she was well out of the range of the small light at
the foot of the stairs, before the five men and Clémence van Rycke
came out into the hall. She heard their few words of farewell and
heard the Prince arranging for the meeting the next evening at the
house of Messire Deynoot.
After that she felt that further delay would inevitably spell
detection. Even now someone must have opened the front door, for
a gust of wind and heavy rain driving into the house told the listener
quite clearly that the Prince and his friends were leaving the house:
anon Clémence and Laurence would be going up to their own
apartments.
As swiftly, as furtively as a mouse, Lenora made her way up the
stairs: and now there she sat once more in the vast bedchamber,
quivering with excitement and with horror, listening for footsteps
outside her door. She heard Clémence van Rycke's shuffling
footsteps passing down the corridor, and Laurence's more firm ones
following closely in their wake: a few whispered words were spoken
by mother and son, then doors were closed and all was still once
more.
 II

The fire had burnt low, only the last dying embers of the charred
pine logs threw a wide glowing band across the centre of the room.
Lenora sitting by the fire had scarcely moved for a quarter of an
hour or even more. Anon she heard the opening and shutting of the
front door.
It was the High-Bailiff returning home--not knowing, of a truth,
that his house had just been used as a meeting-place for
conspirators. The hall-porter slept between two doors in the outer
lobby. Lenora heard him scrambling out of bed, and the High-Bailiff's
voice bidding him close everything up for the night. Then came the
pushing home of bars and bolts and the rattle of chains, and finally
the sound of the High-Bailiff's heavy footsteps across the hall and up
the stairs.
After that silence once more.
Lenora, however, still sat on for awhile staring into the glow.
Vaguely she wondered if Mark would be staying out all night, or
whether he had been home all along, knowing perhaps, and perhaps
not caring about, what was going on in his father's house; keeping
aloof from it all: or like Laurence, up to his neck in all this treachery
and abominable rebellion!
Another quarter-of-an-hour went by: the clock of St. Bavon had
chimed the half after eleven, and now the quarter before midnight.
Lenora felt that at last she might slip downstairs with safety.
 Quickly now she took off her stuff gown and heavy farthingale
which had so impeded her movements awhile ago, and groped in
the press for a clinging robe which would envelop her closely and
glide noiselessly upon the tiled floors.
There is absolutely no doubt that all through this time Lenora
acted almost unconsciously. She never for one moment paused to
think: she was impelled by a force which she herself could not have
defined--a force which can best be described as a blind instinct.
Obedience! She had been born and bred in obedience and a sense
of sacred duty to her King as Sovereign Lord, to her faith and to her
father.
In the convent at Segovia she had learned the lesson of
obedience so absolutely that it never entered her mind to question
the decrees of those three all-potent arbiters of her destiny. And
when--as now--the hour came when the most sacred oath she had
ever spoken had to be fulfilled, she would have thought it a deadly
sin to search her own heart, to study her feelings, to argue with
herself about it. She would as soon have thought of arguing with
God.
On Ramon's death-bed she had sworn to her father that she
would act and work for her country and for her King in the way that
her father would direct.
The time had come, and she did what she believed to be her
duty without question and without false shame.
She knew that the knowledge which she already possessed was
of paramount importance to the Government: the Prince of Orange
was in Ghent--who but he would be called "your Highness"?--and
moving about among his friends surreptitiously and at dead of night?
Who but he would speak of the mysterious Leatherface as being on
the watch for him? The Prince of Orange was in Ghent and was
conspiring against the State. There had been talk of the Duke of
Alva's visit to Ghent and of two thousand men being secretly armed.
What other purpose save that of murder and bloodshed could be
served by such secret plottings and the levying of troops in this
illegal manner? The Prince of Orange was in Ghent and would on the
morrow continue his underhand and treasonable machinations in the
house of Messire Deynoot, Procurator-General of Ghent.
That was the extent of Lenora's knowledge, and what could she
do with such a secret in her possession--she, a helpless girl, a
stranger in the midst of all these enemies of her people and of her
race? Could she, having gleaned so much information, quietly go to
bed and sleep and let events shape their course?--and detach
herself, as it were, from the destinies of her own country which her
father had in a measure entrusted to her stewardship? Could she
above all be false to her oath at the very moment when God gave
her an opportunity of fulfilling it and of working for her country and
her King in a manner which was given to very few women to do?
Indeed she did not pause to think. Any thought save that of
obedience would be treason to the King and sinful before God. The
hour for thought would come later, and with it mayhap regret. Then
so be it. Whatever suffering she would have to endure in the future,
in her sentiment and in her feelings, she was ready to accept
unquestioningly, just as she was prepared to fulfil her duty
unquestioningly now. She knew a good deal, but surely not enough.
She had seen Laurence van Rycke lock up a packet of papers in the
bureau, and she had in her possession tied with a ribbon around her
neck, the precious pass-key which her father had given her on the
very morning when he told her how Ramon had come by his death--
the curiously-fashioned piece of steel made by the metal-worker of
Toledo--who had been put out of the way, because his skill had
made him dangerous--and which would turn any lock or open any
secret drawer.
She had no light now and did not know how to use the tinder,
but in the wall of the corridor outside her door there was a little
niche wherein stood a statue of the Virgin, and in front of the statute
a tiny light was kept burning day and night: this would do in lieu of a
candle. She would take it, she thought, and carry it into the
withdrawing-room with her: it would help to guide her to the bureau
where the papers were.
Yes! she was quite prepared for what she had to do, and there
was no reason to wait any longer. And yet for some unaccountable
reason she suddenly felt strangely inert: there were still a few dying
embers in the grate, and she could see quite distinctly the high-
backed chair in which she had sat last night, and the low one
wherein Mark had half sat, half kneeled close beside her: the
memory of that brief interview which she had had with him came
upon her with a rush. It had been the only interview between them
since the blessing of the Church had made them man and wife. It
had ended disastrously it is true. Her words: "I hate you!" had been
cruel and untrue, and overwhelming regret suddenly held her in its
grip once again--as it had done all the day.
Closing her eyes for a moment--for they felt hot and heavy--she
could almost believe that Mark was still there--his merry grey eyes
looking deeply earnest, trying to read her innermost thoughts. His
personality--so strange, so baffling even--seemed still to linger in
this dimly-lighted room, and she almost could hear his voice--
rugged, yet at times so sweet and tender--echoing softly along the
rafters.
And all of a sudden she realised the full horror of what she was
doing--of what she must do now or else become false and perjured--
a traitor to her race and to her King. No longer was she a blind and
unconscious tool of Fate--she was she herself--a woman who lived
and thought and suffered: and before her at this moment there was
nothing but an interminable vista of sorrow and suffering and regret.
Whether duty ruled her or sentiment, she--the innocent
handmaid of Fate--could reap nothing but remorse in the future; her
heart, her very youth, must inevitably be crushed between those two
potent factors which were struggling even now for mastery over her
soul.
Indeed was there ever a woman--a mere girl--confronted with
so appalling, so intricate a puzzle? The lives of men were in her
hands--the Prince of Orange, the High-Bailiff, Mark, Laurence,
Clémence on the one side, on the other the Duke of Alva, her own
father, her kindred, all those whom she had clung to and loved
throughout her life.
And knowing that she never could solve such an awful problem
by herself Lenora fell on her knees and prayed: she prayed with all
the fervour, but also with all the simplicity of primitive faith--the faith
that is willing and eager to leave everything in God's hands, to trust
to guidance and help from above when life has become a hopeless
and inextricable tangle--the faith which hath for its principle loyalty
and obedience and which accepts suffering in its cause, and glories
in it like in a martyr's crown.

III

After a few minutes Lenora felt more calm. Her deep and fervent
religious sentiment had risen triumphant over every doubt. While
she prayed so earnestly, so unquestioningly, it had been made clear
to her that the issue of the mighty problem which was putting her
very soul on the rack must remain in mightier hands than hers. She
could not be the arbiter of men's lives and of the destinies of the
State; all that she could do was to obey her father and fulfil her
oath; beyond that, God must decide; He had shown her the way
how to obtain the knowledge which she now possessed, and since
her father was now back in Brussels, she must find a means of
placing that knowledge in his hands. Her father of a surety was kind
and just and God would Himself punish whom He willed.
With this calmer state of mind her resolution became more firm.
She felt the pass-key safely in her bosom, then stealthily she slipped
out of her room: the tiny light was flickering dimly at the foot of the
Virgin's statue; Lenora lifted it carefully and with it in her hand
prepared to go downstairs.
Scarce a sound broke the silence of the night: only the patter of
the rain against the leaded panes of the windows and an occasional
gust of wind that came roaring down the huge chimneys and shook
the frames of windows and doors. Before descending the stairs
Lenora paused once more to listen. Down the corridor she could
hear Clémence van Rycke in her bedchamber still moving about, and
Laurence's footstep on the tiled floor of his room.
And then the girl--shading the tiny light with her hand--began to
descend.
She paused for a moment upon the landing and peeped into the
vast hall below. It was fortunate that she had the tiny light, as the
small lamp at the foot of the stairs had since been extinguished; but
the little wick she held only threw out a faint glimmer a yard or two
in front of her, and beyond this small circle there was nothing but
impenetrable darkness.
The house was very still, and Lenora was absolutely without
fear. From the church towers of the city, both near and far, there
came the sound of bells striking the midnight hour. She waited till
the last echo of the chimes had died away, then she continued her
way down.

IV

Lenora now entered the dining-hall and carefully closed the door
behind her. Light in hand she stood for a moment in the very angle
of the room from whence she had watched the plotters an hour ago.
Nothing had been deranged.
Then she went into the withdrawing-room, and placed the light
upon the centre table. She looked around her mutely challenging the
dumb objects--the chairs that stood about in disorder, the curtains
which were not closely drawn, the bureau that was in the corner--to
tell her all that she had failed to hear. In this spot a vile conspiracy
had been hatched against the Duke of Alva--two thousand men were
implicated in it--but in what way it threatened the Duke's life she did
not know--nor yet who were all these men who had sat around this
table and hatched treason against the King and State.
The tiny wick only shed a very feeble glimmer of light on the
top of the table: it made the shadows on the ceiling dance a weird
rigadoon and grow to fantastic proportions. But Lenora's eyes were
growing well-accustomed to the gloom. Quickly now she drew the
pass-key from between the folds of her kerchief and went up to the
bureau. The ribbon round her neck was in the way so she took it off;
with trembling, unerring fingers she groped for the lock and having
found it she inserted the pass-key into it. After a little adjustment, a
little tugging and pulling, she found that the lock yielded quite
smoothly to the pressure. The flap came down and displayed the
interior of the bureau, consisting of a number of wide pigeon-holes,
in each of which there was a small iron box such as the rich matrons
of Flanders used for putting away their pearls and other pieces of
jewellery. On the top of one of these boxes there was a packet of
papers, tied round with a piece of orange-coloured ribbon. Without a
moment's hesitation Lenora took it. She unfolded one of the papers
and laid it out flat upon the table, smoothing it out with her hand.
She drew the light a little nearer and examined the writing carefully:
it was just a list of names--fifty in all--with places of abode all set
out in a double column, and at the bottom was written in a bold
hand:

"All the above to Afsemble without any delay in the Barn which is
fituated in the North-Weft angle of the Cemetery at the back of the
Chapel of St. Jan ten Dullen."

Having satisfied herself that the other papers in the packet also
contained lists of names and brief orders as to place of assembly,
she tied them all up together again with the orange-coloured ribbon.
Then she closed the bureau, turned the pass-key in the lock and
slipped it, together with the packet, into the bosom of her gown.
Then she turned to go.

Light in hand she went tip-toeing across the dining-room; but close
to the threshold she paused. She had distinctly heard a furtive
footstep in the hall. At once she extinguished the light. Then she
waited. Her thoughts had flown to Laurence van Rycke. Perhaps he
felt anxious about the papers, and was coming down in order to
transfer them to some other place of safety. The supposition was
terrifying. Lenora felt as if an icy hand had suddenly gripped her
heart and was squeezing her very life out of it. In this deathlike
agony a few seconds went by--indeed they seemed to the
unfortunate girl like an eternity of torment. She had slipped close to
the wall right against the door, so that the moment it was opened
from the outside, and someone entered the room, she could contrive
to slip out. All might yet be well, if whoever entered did not happen
to carry a light.
Then suddenly she heard the steps again, and this time they
approached the dining-room door. Lenora's heart almost ceased to
beat: the next moment the door was opened and someone stood
upon the threshold--just for a second or two ... without moving,
whilst Lenora with senses as alert as those of some feline creature in
defence of its life--waited and watched for her opportunity.
But that opportunity never came, for the newcomer--whoever
he was--suddenly stepped into the room and immediately closed the
door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Lenora was a
prisoner, at the mercy of a man whose secrets she had stolen, and
whose life hung upon all that she had seen and heard this night.
The intruder now groped his way across the room and anon
Lenora heard him first draw aside the curtains from before the
window, and then proceed to open two of the casements. The
window gave on the Nieuwstraate, almost opposite the tavern of the
"Three Weavers," at the entrance of which there hung an iron street-
lamp. The light of this came slanting in through the open casements
and Lenora suddenly saw that it was Mark who was standing there.
Even at this instant he turned and faced her. He showed no sign
however of surprise, but exclaimed quite pleasantly: "By the stars,
Madonna! and who would have thought of meeting you here?"
The tension on Lenora's nerves had been so acute that her self-
control almost gave way with the intensity of her relief when she
recognised Mark and heard the sound of his voice. Her hands began
to shake so violently that the tiny lamp nearly dropped out of them.
She had been so startled that she could not as yet either speak
or move, but just stood there close to the wall, like a pale, slim
ghost only faintly illumined by the slanting light of the street-lamp,
her soft, white gown clinging round her trembling limbs. Her face,
bosom and arms were scarce less white than her gown, and in the
dim, mysterious light her luminous, dark eyes shone with a glow of
excitement still vaguely tinged with dread.
He thought that never in life had he seen anything quite so
beautiful, so pure, so desirable, and yet so pathetic as this young
girl, whom but forty hours ago he had sworn to love, to protect and
to cherish. Just now she looked sadly helpless, despite the fact that
gradually a little air of haughtiness replaced her first look of fear.
"Madonna," he said gently, "are you indeed yourself, or are you
your own wraith? If not, why are you wandering about alone at this
hour of the night?"
"I came to fetch my prayer-book," she said, trying to speak
lightly and with a steady voice. "I thought that I had left it here to-
day and missed it when I went to rest."
"You found the book, I hope," he said, without the slightest
trace of irony.
"No," she replied coldly. "Inez must have put it away. Will you
be so good as to unlock that door."
"I will with pleasure, Madonna. I locked it when I came in,
because I didn't want old Pierre to come shuffling in after me, as he
so often does when I go late to bed. But," he added, putting out his
hand, "may I take this lamp from you. Your hand does not appear to
be oversteady and if the oil were to drip it would spoil your gown."
"The draught blew it out," she retorted, "and I would be glad if
you would relight it. I am going back to my room."
"Precisely," he rejoined dryly as he took the lamp from her and
put it on the table, "and with your leave I would escort you thither."
"I thank you," she rejoined coldly, "I can find my way alone."
"As you please," he said with perfect indifference.
 Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the semi-darkness
she could see him more distinctly, and she stared at him in
amazement. His appearance was certainly very different to what it
habitually was--for he usually dressed himself with great care: but
now he had on dark clothes, made of thick woollen stuff, which
clung closely to his tall figure: he wore no ruff, and had on very high
boots which reached high above his knees. Both his clothes and
boots were bespattered with mud, and strangely enough looked also
wet through. Somehow the appearance appeared unreal. It was
Mark--and yet it was not. His face, too, looked flushed, and the lines
round his eyes were more deeply marked than they had ever
seemed to be before.
The recollection of all the abominable gossip retailed about him
by Inez and others took possession of her mind. She had been told
by all and sundry that Mark van Rycke had spent most of his day at
the "Three Weavers," and now the flush on his face, the curious
dilation of the pupils of his eyes, seemed to bear mute testimony to
all that she had heard.
Here, then, she already saw the hand of God guiding her future-
-and showing her the small glimmer of comfort which He vouchsafed
her in the midst of her perplexities. Life in this house and with this
man--who cared less than nothing for her--would anyhow be
intolerable--then obviously the way was clear for her to go back to
her father. She wished no harm to these people--none to this poor,
drunken wretch, who probably had no thought of rebellion or of
heresy, none to Laurence, who loved her, or to Clémence, who had
been kind to her. But she despised them--aye! and loathed them,
and was grateful to God for allowing her to keep her promise to her
father within the first few hours of her married life.
How terrible would have been the long and weary watching! the
irresolution, the temptation, mayhap, to be false to her oath through
sheer indolence or superacute sentiment!
So now all that she had to do was to go straight back to her
father, tell him all that she knew and then go--go back to the dear
old convent at Segovia--having done more than a woman's share in
the service of her country--and then to rest after that--to spend her
life in peace and in prayer--away from all political intrigues--
forgetting that she had ever been young and felt a vague yearning
for happiness.

VI

Mark had made no sign or movement while Lenora stood there

before him, gathering her strength together for what she felt might
prove a struggle. In some unaccountable way she felt a little afraid
of him--not physically of course, but, despite the fact that she had
so impulsively judged him just now--afraid of that searching glance
of his which seemed to lay her innermost thoughts like an open book
before his eyes. She put this strange timidity of hers down to the
knowledge that he had certain lawful rights over her as her lord and
husband and that she would have to obtain his consent before she
could think of going to Brussels on the morrow.
"Messire," she said abruptly, "during this day which you have
seen fit to spend among your habitual boon companions, making
merry no doubt, I have been a great deal alone. Solitude begets
sober reason--and I have come to the conclusion that life under
present conditions would be a perpetual martyrdom to me."
She paused and he rejoined quietly: "I don't think I quite
understand, Madonna. Under what conditions would your life
become a martyrdom?"
"Under those of a neglected wife, Messire," she said. "I have no
mind to sit at home--an object of suspicion to your kinsfolk and of
derision to your servants, while the whole town is alive with the
gossip that Messire Mark van Rycke spent the first day of his
marriage in the taverns of Ghent and left his bride to pine in
solitude."
"But methought, Madonna," he retorted, "that it was solitude
that you craved for. Both last night and even a moment ago you told
me very plainly that you had no desire for my company."
"Last night I was overwrought and would have made amends to
you for my thoughtlessness at once, only that you left me
incontinently without a further word. As for now, Messire, surely you
cannot wonder that I have no mind for your society after a day's
carouse has clouded your brain and made your glance unsteady."
She thought herself very brave in saying this, and more than
half expected an angry retort from him. Instead of which he
suddenly threw back his head and burst into an immoderate and
merry laughter. She gazed at him horrified and not a little
frightened--thinking indeed that his brain was overclouded--but he,
as soon as he had recovered his composure, asked her with grave
attempt at seriousness: "You think that I am drunk, Madonna? Ye
gods!" he exclaimed not without a touch of bitterness, "hath such a
farce ever been enacted before?"
"A farce to you perhaps," she said earnestly, "but a tragedy to
me. I have been rendered wretched and unhappy, Messire, and this
despite your protestations of chivalry. I did not seek you, Messire.
This marriage was forced upon me. It is ungenerous and cowardly to
make me suffer because of it."
"Dastardly and abominable," he assented gravely. "Indeed,
Madonna, you do me far too much honour even to deign to speak
with me. I am not worthy that you should waste a thought on me--
but since you have been so kind thus far, will you extend your
generosity to me by allowing me to give you my most solemn word--
to swear to you if need be that I am not the drunken wretch whom
evil tongues have thus described to you. There," he added more
lightly, "will you not deign to sit here a moment? You are tired and
overwrought; let me get you a cup of wine, and see if some less
strenuous talk will chase all those black thoughts from your mind."
He took her hand and then with gentle yet forceful pressure led
her to the wide hearth and made her sit in the big chair close beside
it.
"Alas! there are not even embers in the grate," he said, "I fear
me, you must be cold."
From somewhere out of the darkness--she could not see from
where--he brought a footstool for her feet; then he pulled a low
chair forward for himself and sat down at some little distance from
her, in his favourite attitude, with one elbow on his knee and his face
shaded by his hand. She remained silent for a moment or two, for
she suddenly felt an extraordinary sense of well-being; just the same
as she had felt last night, and once or twice before in his presence.
And she felt deeply sorry for him too. After all, perhaps he had no
more desired this marriage than she had--and no doubt the furrows
on his face came from anxiety and care, and she marvelled what it
was that troubled him.
"There," he asked gaily, "are you better now, Madonna?"
"Better, I thank you," she replied.
"Then shall I interpret the thoughts which were coursing behind
that smooth brow of yours, when first I startled you by my presence
here?"
"If you will."
He waited a moment, then said dryly: "You desired to convey to
me your wish to return to your father.... Oh! only for a little while,"
he added hastily, seeing that she had made a quick, protesting
gesture, "but that was in your mind, was it not?"
She could not deny it, and murmured: "Yes."
"Such a wish, Madonna," he rejoined, gravely, "is as a command
to me. In the late morning the horses will be at your disposal. I will
have the honour to accompany you to Brussels."
"You, Messire!" she exclaimed, "you would..."
"I would do anything to further your wishes, Madonna; this I
would have you believe. And a journey to Brussels is such a small
matter...."
"As you say," she murmured. For such are the contradictions of
a woman's heart that all of a sudden she did not wish to go away. All
thoughts of rebellion and conspiracies were unaccountably thrust
into the background of her mind, and ... she did not wish to go
away....
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