The Discourse of Wenming (‘Civilisation’): Moral Authority and Social Change in Contemporary Shanghai
Thao Thi Phuong Nguyen (ID: 10127468) Bachelor of Arts (Asian Studies with First Class Honours, 2006), Bachelor of Commerce (2005), The University of Western Australia
Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia, School of Social Sciences, Discipline of Asian Studies
2012
Statement of Authorship
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Abstract
More than three decades of economic reforms have substantially altered the social, political and economic landscape in China. Some of these changes, such as higher standards of living and better access to a variety of goods and services for the population, have been positive. However, reforms instigated by the ‘Open Door’ policies have also incurred significant costs for the Chinese people including, but not limited to, income inequality, increased pollution and opportunities for more corruption. In response to these challenges, the CCP has pledged commitment to a more ‘harmonious society’, a catch-all policy primarily aimed at reducing the income gap and to diffuse tensions created as a result of its polarising policies.
In the major cities, where there are visible signs of success, the focus has been on the promotion of civic virtues. As more Chinese cities vie for attention and scarce capital, these efforts can be viewed as both an urban image construction strategy and a political strategy aimed at placating the demands of an increasingly rights-conscious citizenry.
This thesis traces the state-sponsored efforts by ruling elites to mould the population into a more responsive, civic-minded citizenry who are capable of self-help, show an entrepreneurial spirit and are more sympathetic to the socio- political agenda of the CCP. It does so by emphasising one particular aspect of a multi-pronged approach, namely the civilising campaigns which began as early as the 1980s, just as economic reforms were beginning to take off. The thesis traces the uses of the campaign mobilisation strategy from Maoist times to the present. It challenges the assumption that market economic reforms have rendered redundant the socialist governing mentality in China.
Using governmentality studies pioneered by Michel Foucault, the thesis proposes the adaptation of this approach to a non-Western context such as China. Defined as the ‘conduct of conduct’, governmentality seeks to unravel the processes and discourses by which governments and their agents mould the citizenry for different purposes with unintended results. Without assuming the overarching influence of the state in the construction of civilised personhood or ignoring the will and agency of individuals in mapping out their futures, the thesis constructs a complex picture of state and society in constant flux.
This thesis also shows the ambiguous relationship between market economic reforms and democracy. Throughout the three decades of reforms, China has repeatedly challenged the assumption that only a democratic state can successfully run a market economy. Although there are now many bottlenecks and contradictions in the Chinese economy, the country is so enmeshed in the international economic system that it is impossible to conceive a reversal. The more pertinent question is whether, in the absence of democratic due process, can
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the Chinese party-state successfully mould the population into responsible, civic- minded citizens capable of leading China into the twenty-first century and beyond?
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Table of Contents
Statement of Authorship i
Abstract iii
List of Illustrations (Photos, Maps, Images, Diagrams) vi
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter One Introduction: civility, modernity and urbanity 1 in post-Mao China
Chapter Two Fieldwork and methodology: why Shanghai? 35
Chapter Three ‘Civilised modernity’ and the Chinese experience 57 in historical perspective
Chapter Four Elite discourses on ‘political civilisation’ construction 73 (zhengzhi wenming jianshe) and China’s efforts at political reforms
Chapter Five Reviving Maoist tactics: the role of mass mobilisation 104 campaigns in the past
Chapter Six Legitimacy crisis and the role of ‘socialist spiritual 132 civilisation’ (shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming) campaigns
Chapter Seven Governing through shequ/community: the Shanghai 158 example
Chapter Eight Re-inventing the campaign and the mass line: policing 181 public etiquette in Shanghai
Chapter Nine Conclusion: the limitations of wenming (civilisation) 205 discourse in resolving China’s myriad problems
Figures and Measurements 215
List of Acronyms 215
Glossary of Chinese Terms 215
Bibliography 220
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List of Illustrations (Photos, Tables, Maps, Images, Diagrams) All of the photos were taken by the author
Photos
Photo 1: (Front page of thesis) Sign above People’s Square metro entrance, Shanghai, reads: ‘Construct civilised society. Build a harmonious society.’
Photo 2: Drain cover of ‘Expo Town’ in Shanghai 1
Photo 3: Famous skyline of the Pudong financial district opposite the Bund 36
Photo 4: ‘Compact on the civilised use of public transportation’ 152
Photo 5: Civilised business operator sign 152
Photo 6: ‘Eight Socialist Concepts of Honour’ poster 153
Photo 7: Meilong Fourth Village ‘Civilised Community’ plaque 159
Photo 8: First part of banner reads ‘Strengthen the management of 171 migrants/outsiders’
Photo 9: Second part of banner reads ‘Protect social stability’ 171
Photo 10: Etiquette campaigns targeting the ‘window services’ 182
Photo 11: Community plaque supporting education 206
Table 1: World Bank table measuring the quality of China’s governance in comparison to other countries in similar income category 84
Map 1: Map of the Long March, 1934-1935 110
Diagram 1:
The Chain of Command in the Implementation of the ‘Million Families Learn Etiquette Campaign’, 2006-2007 193
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Acknowledgements
This thesis was supported by an Australian government ‘Australian Postgraduate Award’ (APA), a University of Western Australia (UWA) Graduate Research School Student Travel Award as well as funding from the UWA School of Social and Cultural Studies. This research also benefited from the financial assistance of a Chinese government, Ministry of Education, full scholarship (2006-2007) and funding from the School of Social Work and Public Administration of East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST).
First and foremost, I would like to thank my family for their support, love and compassion. The completion process witnessed the birth of my first child, Jacob Forrester, in 2009, to whom I dedicate this thesis. The experience of motherhood has broadened my views immeasurably even though the writing process was constantly interrupted by the needs of a growing child. My husband and constant companion, Joshua Forrester, has also put up with much and allowed me the time and patience to see this project to the end. My mum and dad, my mother-in-law, Heather, and the extended family also supported and encouraged me throughout and without them this thesis might never have seen the light of day.
Secondly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my co-ordinating supervisor, Professor Gary Sigley, who first suggested that I take up Honours at the end of a double degree in Asian Studies/Commerce. Then, with his encouragement, I began the Ph.D. program in 2006. I thank him not only in his capacity as a teacher and supervisor but also as a colleague, friend, and mentor throughout what at times seemed like impossible scenarios. Professor Sigley also provided me with invaluable experience outside of the thesis as well as challenged me to think outside the square. For this and his constant encouragement, this thesis owes much.
Thirdly, I also want to thank my co-supervisor, Professor Lyn Parker for her support, patience and superior editing skills. Professor Parker has put up with worst versions of this thesis and still her support has not waned. I thank her for the conversations we had, her mentoring and guidance and her willingness to lend a listening ear.
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There were also a number of other people and institutions that supported this thesis. In Beijing, the China Centre for Comparative Politics and Economics (CCCPE) under the directorship of Professor Yu Keping generously provided me with accommodation for one month while I was in the capital in April 2008. Professors Fan Bin and Xu Yongxiang and staff at ECUST’s Social Work and Public Administration also provided me with accommodation while I took up a Chinese language course in 2006-2007. Their guidance and invaluable comments also helped to shape this thesis.
In navigating the field that is urban Shanghai, I have also benefited from the support, friendship and patience of Chinese students from ECUST. Foremost are the Masters students of the school of Social Work and Public Administration. They came at their own free will and arranged to meet up to help me familiarise with Shanghai even though many of them were ‘outsiders’ themselves. I learnt a great deal through our interactions. In particular, I want to thank the students who have formed close friendships with me and assisted me with the transcribing, translating and collecting of data upon which the findings of this thesis are based. I am fortunate and grateful for their generosity, openness and support.
I also want to thank my one-time office mates, Dr CY Hoon, Dr Suzie Handajani, and Dr Margherita Viviani for their witty remarks and insights on life, love and other things. They provide a much needed balance to the solitude that defined the final stages of the writing-up process.
Associate Professor Stephen Dobbs also deserves special mention because he helped to shape my opinions and left an indelible mark on my academic life while I was an undergraduate at Asian Studies. His role in those formative years has helped me appreciate the labour of love that goes into academic work and through enrolment in his units, I also came to enjoy Asian Studies which was always so much fun.
Numerous others have contributed to the thesis in indirect ways. I thank them for their assistance, advice and invaluable insights: Danau Tanu, Dr Russell Harwood, Dr Ernest Koh, David Wang, Andrew Chubb, Wen Wen Zhang, Kieren Golby, Moshe Yehuda Bernstein, Elaine Burgess, Kim Wee, Pearl Chua, Juanita Perez, Mr Wang Liyong, Ms Mao Hongqi, Dr Wang Yi, Dr David Bourchier, Assistant
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Professor Laura Dales, Professor Van Ikin, Dr Jason Lim, Dr Leonie Stickland, Assistant Professor Romit Dasgupta, Dr Malcolm Mintz, Assistant Professor Tomoko Nakamatsu, Ms. Miho Masel, Associate Professor Judith Berman and all those at the Asian Studies department at UWA whom I may have accidentally left out.
Last but not least I want to express my sincere gratitude to the people of Shanghai, in particular, to the informants who have opened my eyes to the issues that face them and their society. Their interesting stories and rich conversations form the body of this thesis. They have been excellent hosts and I feel humbled to have had the opportunity to conduct research in their communities and tell their stories.
A final comment: although this thesis has benefited much from the meticulous editing and insightful comments from supervisors, colleagues, friends and family, they, however, should be relieved of any responsibility for any inconsistencies, mistakes or flaws that remain.
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Chapter One
Introduction: Governmentality and Civility in Post-Mao China
Photo 2: Drain cover of ‘Shibo Jiayuan’ (Expo Town) in April 2008.
In 2006, Shanghai was gripped with ‘Expo’ fever. The streets were covered in Expo advertising and a countdown clock, similar to the one counting down to the Olympics in Beijing, was set up on the Bund. City administrators promised a spectacular show and spared no efforts to this end. Dust and noise were constant reminders that Shanghai was in the midst of a construction frenzy. The pace of life could only be described as frenetic. While old neighbourhoods were being bulldozed to prepare the Expo site, massive new housing projects were being erected, as if overnight, on the outskirts of town, as compensation. One such project was aptly named, ‘Shanghai World Expo Town’. But at three hours away from the city by public transport, Expo Town remained a ghost community with very few residents. In addition to upgrading the physical infrastructure, authorities also paid a great deal of attention to improving the ‘software’ (ruanjian) of the city, namely the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of the population, via etiquette campaigns. Shanghai’s Civilisation Office (wenming bangongshi) presided over such civilisation activities, and public spaces were colonised by ‘civilising messages’ such as admonishments against spitting, jaywalking and even pyjama-wearing.1
As the title of this thesis suggests, this work explores the discourse of ‘civilisation’ (wenming). As Foucault (1983, 1997) has argued, discourse is the medium through which power relations create speaking subjects. In his work, Foucault (1983, 1997) traces the role of discourse in the wider social processes and its role in the legitimation of existing inequalities. Discourse is what it is possible to say – it is therefore both a limiting and a constructive force. By discourse, I do not mean the linguistic components that constitute ‘language’. Rather, I mean the use of language within a certain context. Nicola Woods (2006) identifies two approaches to the study of discourse, namely the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches. When one uses a top-down approach, discourse analysis begins with conceptualisation of the context within which the discourse is formed. The researcher looks ‘down’, so to speak, with the expectation of unearthing ‘evidence’ of the assumptions and social processes that define a particular context. Conversely, a bottom-up approach takes language as its departure point. The ways in which words and phrases are used and the frequency with which these occur will help the analyst account for the context within which it occurs. This thesis employs both a bottom-up and top-down approach to discourse analysis. It looks at both the particular ways in which the discourse of civilisation is used and the context that may account for it.
This thesis analyses how citizens become ‘civilised’ through their participation in etiquette campaigns carried out in Shanghai intermittently from September 2006 to September 2008. By specifically focusing on etiquette manuals and the ‘civilisation’ campaigns, this thesis argues that the Chinese party-state, through its bureaucratic arrangements, ideologies and campaign mobilisation strategies, has penetrated the life of urban dwellers in new and complex ways. Without under-estimating the agency of citizens in the transformation of their lives, this research argues that the state must be brought back into social analyses (Brødsgaard & Zheng, 2006). As I will explain below, the commonly assumed opposition between state and society is untenable and does not explain the longevity of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
1 Wearing pyjamas in public is common among ordinary Shanghainese. Even before the World Expo, authorities had expressed concern about this perceived ‘problem’ because it was seen as harmful to Shanghai’s image and aspirations to become a global city (China Hush, 2009). This will be discussed in Chapter Eight.
2 rule in China. This thesis will show how urban dwellers acquiesced to the version of modernity offered by the state and the legitimation strategies of the CCP in order to maintain order and stability.
State-Society Relations in the Period of Reforms (1978-present)
Scholars analysing state-society relations during the Maoist period have generally concurred that there was little that separated state from society (Chen, 1997). In fact, because life under Mao Zedong was highly politicised, the state suffused society and society became an extension of the state, making it difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint where the boundaries of the state ended and where those of society began. Vivienne Shue (1988) has argued that the way in which society was organised, that is, in a highly cellular fashion in communes and work units (danwei), allowed the state to reach into the intimate spheres of everyday life. Because these units were self- contained, they became the training grounds for the development of a revolutionary society where there was little distinction between private and public, state and society: shared space and communal ownership subsumed the interests of individuals under those of the state. In the post-Mao period, the initial tendency of scholars has been to impose the Western paradigm of state-society relations onto the Chinese body politic (Wright, 2010). This paradigm assumes that if the state is strong, then the forces of society must be weak and vice versa. In this thesis, I argue that the assumed opposition between state and society is inadequate for explaining why in some areas of social change, the state has stepped back from micro-management while re-asserting its presence in other areas it has identified as a priority. The Chinese state is no longer a ‘Leviathan’ bent on retaining power at all costs and society is no longer homogenous and politically acquiescent. While the lines between state and society are still blurred, what has changed in state-society relations in the post-Mao context is that with socioeconomic change, the state has had to be more accommodating to competing interests, including those from within and without the organisation.
Another common assumption of the state-society dichotomy is the tendency to interpret any rumblings of discontent as a sign of society’s opposition to the state (Wasserstrom, 1991). Western scholars have tended to look for signs that might indicate institutional weakness and jump to the conclusion that the state suffers from
3 a legitimacy crisis and is therefore on the brink of collapse (Wasserstrom, 1991). To be sure, the state under CCP rule does not take lightly challenges to its legitimacy and acts swiftly to silence opposition by ‘nipping in the bud’ signs of political opposition. However, for the most part, societal opposition has not directly challenged CCP rule per se (Lee, 2007). In fact, people are generally satisfied with the CCP and how it has handled China’s rise, particularly in the international context.2 They are cognisant of the CCP’s role in the delivery of prosperity and economic growth and remain wary of political alternatives for fear of ‘chaos’ or luan, which is a state of affairs commonly associated with an absence or weakness of a strong state.
Rather than viewing the state as foe and interpreting protest as opposition, it might be productive to view protest actions and state response as part of the same process, each informing the other, each constituting the other while pursuing their different interests. For example, Yu Jianrong (2010), a senior research fellow in the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), observes that when farmers protest illegal land confiscations, they produce photocopies of state documents and laws in making a case against the legality of such actions. So if the law says that it was illegal to take land without consultation and adequate compensation, then the local government is in contravention of state laws and the farmers, in acting within their legal right to protest, have a case against the local agents who are seeking to profit from the illegal land grabs.
Elizabeth Perry’s (2010) research into the nature of protest actions adds weight to the argument that the state-society binary must be re-negotiated. She argues that the tendency to equate protest with society’s opposition to the state has left Western scholars disappointed. Time and time again, protests have failed to trigger the much anticipated ‘democratic revolution’ in China. The reason, Perry argues, is that Western scholars failed to understand the motivations behind such protests. The protest actions of aggrieved Chinese citizens seeking redress from the state are informed by ‘rules awareness’ as distinct from ‘rights awareness’ in the West. Perry elaborates:
2 According to one poll, the majority of the population, some 95 percent of the population, supported the CCP-led political and economic reforms. It is difficult to dismiss the findings as the result of political indoctrination or fear of reprisal because the same surveys found people to be simultaneously highly critical of rising inequality, corruption and other issues. For more, see Shi and Pei, 2007.
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[W]e Western scholars have all misjudged the situation and there is a key reason why: we don’t understand what ordinary Chinese people are thinking. Actually, ordinary Chinese people take to the streets for different reasons than us Westerners. When Westerners take to the streets they are talking about rights; however when Chinese people take to the streets they are talking about rules. (Quoted in Yu, 2010).
For Yu (2010), ‘rules awareness’ means that while citizens will not admit that the laws themselves are wrong, they will use the laws as an instrument of leverage. Slowly and incrementally, the laws change to accommodate the growing needs of a changing society. The assumed opposition between state and society imposes hierarchical power relations that do not necessarily map onto social reality. It also imposes a rigidity that does not take into account the concessions made on the state’s part to accommodate a plethora of interests that have emerged in the post-Mao context and the active role citizens can play in the shaping of policies. If we apply the state-society binary to the analysis of civility campaigns in Shanghai, then these being state-sponsored campaigns, would be viewed as no more than the exercise of propaganda and state control (Brady, 2008). While not entirely groundless, this view nevertheless fails to take into account the voices from within society as well as those within the political establishment that have acquiesced to the version of modernity proffered by the state. From my own research findings, it is quite clear that certain ground rules and norms of exchange necessary for the effective socialisation of individuals in the society are desired by the general public. Further, people tend to look to the state for guidance in these matters even as they continue to contest its ‘educational’ and ‘ideological’ content. The proclivity of Western scholars to be stuck in the anachronism of a ‘totalitarian’ framework of analysis perpetuates the state-society dichotomy which fails to explain the longevity of CCP rule in China, now in power for more than six decades (Mertha, 2010).
Cadres are now effectively managers and caretakers of societal interests. Peripheral political actors and even the media have had substantial influence on state policies (Zhao, 1998). Although these actors do not seek to challenge the policies themselves, they have exercised their influence and forced state policies to meet their needs half- way, coincidentally incorporating the interests of society in the process (Gries & Rosen, 2004). To facilitate the discussion, I will employ a Foucauldian analytics of
5 government understood in the literature as the ‘conduct of conduct’ or ‘governmentality.’
Contextualising Governmentality
Foucault first introduced the concept of governmentality in his Paris lectures in 1978 to refer to the various ways in which government influenced conduct for various ends. Expanding on Foucault’s ideas, Dean (2010, p. 18) defines the ‘conduct of conduct’ as:
…[A]ny more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through the desires, interests and beliefs of various actors, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes.
In other words, governmentality is concerned with how we are governed and how subjects shape and direct their own conduct (and what happens to subjects which, for whatever reasons, are incapable of doing so). According to Foucault, modern political rationality has shifted from the model of the ‘Machiavellian state’, which was predominantly concerned with the preservation of political power for its own sake, to a preoccupation with the optimisation of human potential. This ‘arts of government’ may work directly through institutionalised methods such as large-scale campaigns, or, as noted by Foucault (1991), indirectly, without the knowledge or full awareness of the population concerned. This is made possible by linking up the objective of government with the activities and calculations of independent non-state actors and institutions including philanthropists, doctors, lawyers, managers, planners, parents and social workers, thereby enabling the personal and subjective aspirations of individuals to be incorporated within the scope of political action. This is what Rose (1999, p. 50) has termed ‘government at a distance’, understood as the ways in which political forces ‘instrumentalise’ different forms of authority in such a way as to embed the disparate elements in society into the fold of government. Viewed in this way, the autonomy of the individual does not pose a threat to government. Rather, it is seen as something that can be aligned with the political and social objectives of civility, economic success, and national population policy and with the conception of the importance and desirability of education. Therefore, a
6 concern for the welfare and well-being of the population is not removed from the private rationalities of individuals, but is somehow ‘immanent to the population’ itself (Foucault, 1991, p. 100).
Further, for government to work properly, it has to guarantee and nurture those private domains that constitute individual autonomy and that, ironically, are also supposed to act as its counterweight and limit. Thus, the free acting agent capable of self-reflection and moral actions is not a pre-given entity, but the desired subjects of liberalism whose task is to create, sustain and maintain its vitality and existence (Rose, 1999, p. 42). This is widely known in the literature as ‘governing through freedom’ with ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ being the artifact of this new form of power.
Until very recently, governmentality has been used to illuminate the processes and rationalities of government in predominantly liberal democracies of the Western world. However, it is also possible to apply this approach to an illiberal non- Western context such as China. I begin with outlining what liberalism means in an ideological and practical sense; I then make the argument that authoritarian rule, defined by Hindess (2001) as the ‘government of unfreedom’, is instrumental to the maintenance and defence of individual liberty, which is a major tenet of liberalism. This then makes comprehensible the dual authoritarian/neoliberalist tactics employed by China’s technocratic elite in the governing of the population.
Joined at the Hip: The Tyranny of Liberalism
According to liberal governing rationality, too much government is undesirable (Gray, 1986). This is informed by classical liberalism’s presumption of society as a ‘natural’ entity consisting of private domains that are run by their own rules and developmental tendencies which function best when left alone (Foucault, 1997). Liberalism’s critique of the ‘police state’ and its raison d’être3 stems from scepticism about the state’s ability to know with precision and accuracy what is to be governed and how to govern. In fact, according to the Anglo-Scottish school of early liberalism, not only was this impossible, it was also harmful because markets and commercial exchanges were quasi-natural domains with their own intrinsic logic and
3 The raison d’être of the ‘police state’ was the idea that it was possible for the state to have an adequate and detailed knowledge of what was to be governed in order to direct and shape reality in accordance with the state’s interests, i.e. increasing its wealth or strength.
7 rules of self-regulation (Burchell, 1993, p. 270). State intervention is likely to distort and produce outcomes different to those intended and is therefore unwarranted (Ibid.). Further, laissez-faire economics suggests that states will benefit more (i.e. become more rich and powerful) if they governed less (Ibid.).
The word ‘police’ is an obscure way to describe a method and philosophy of government. Nowadays it simply refers to an apparatus of government, a section of the bureaucracy concerned with maintaining law and order. But in the past, it denoted something more. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe, ‘police’ defined a view of government that ‘depended on the careful use of detailed and comprehensive information…about members of the population concerned, their forms of association and patterns of activity’ so as to exert disciplinary control over them (Hindess, 2001, p.95). This disciplinary form of government and its development are discussed in detail in Foucault’s (1979) seminal text, Discipline and Punish. As such, ‘police’ were excessively concerned with maintaining order and referred to ‘both the condition of order in the community and the ordinances that sought the institution and maintenance of that order’ (Dean, 2010, p. 108). Some of these ordinances and the kinds of things that police sought to regulate included sumptuary laws, etiquette laws and the regulation of morality in general. Adam Smith critiqued police as being concerned with ‘inferior’ things (cited in Dean 2010, p. 109). However, as Dean (2010) argues, it is precisely these attempts by police to know and to govern the ‘minutiae of everyday life’ – including manners and morals – that give them their potency.
In his classic text, The Wealth of Nations (Smith, [1776] 1999, Book IV, pp. xxxii- xxxiii), Adam Smith argued for the limited role of the state in the economic lives of individuals and collectivities, believing that:
No regulation of commerce can increase the quantity of industry in any society beyond what its capital can maintain. It can only divert a part of it into a direction into which it might not otherwise have gone; and it is by no means certain that this artificial direction is likely be more advantageous to the society than that into which it would have gone of its own accord.
Smith was the first to make the argument that market economics will engender such positive values as punctuality, industry, discretion, civility and other prudential
8 virtues in individuals as a result of their interaction in the market place. While the market is but one dimension, Hindess (2001) points out that it is part of a general argument of liberalism that society is made of different self-regulating domains, each with its own rules of conduct. To intervene in or interfere with its functions and processes would severely undermine its internal workings. In other words, the liberal critique of police could be that governments work best when subjects are free. Individuals must therefore be given a degree of autonomy to pursue their different interests. Accordingly, instead of presuming to know the outcomes of all calculated action (which is impossible), governments should act through the autonomy of subjects with a view to shaping their behaviour for particular ends. Thus, the problem space of government is not so much about what policies to pursue but rather to respond to questions of how to govern in relation to a collection of domains with their specific self-regulating principles and dynamics (Burchell, 1993, p. 272). Having established that liberalism is a normative political doctrine that seeks to set limits on government by governing through the freedom of populations, we now shift the discussion to the assumed constitution of subjects and the varied approaches to the ‘government of unfreedom.’
The ‘government of unfreedom’ is a term used to encapsulate both the liberal and illiberal aspects of liberalism. While the market has created subjects, who, for the most part, can be governed through freedom, not all subjects enjoy the same treatment. Implicit within liberal political reasoning is the idea that not all subjects are endowed with the characteristics that would deem them ‘free’ and capable of autonomous self-conduct (Hindess, 2001). In liberal democratic states, these may include minors, juvenile delinquents, the indigenous populations, the weak and feeble-minded and so on. Therefore, while some can be governed through their freedom and self-conduct, others cannot be trusted to do the same. These subjects must be trained, compelled, disciplined or, in the hopeless cases, removed or eradicated in order to make possible the defence and maintenance of government through freedom (Hindess, 2001).
Hindess (Ibid., p. 101) further contends that for liberalism to function at a practical level, it must deploy the full range of technologies to systematically categorise groups so as to determine the optimal level of intervention. For the first group deemed to be beyond help and incapable of improvement, such as the indigenous
9 populations of settler-colonial countries, extermination, enslavement and a process of ‘softening the pillow’4 were wholly justified. While liberal theorists may display ‘a civilised distaste for the dirty work of government’, this did not mean that they did not countenance this practice in reality (Hindess, 2001). For the second group, labeled ‘subjects of improvement’, there is a chance for redemption conditional upon the subject being exposed to extended and intense periods of training and discipline. The target population in this group may include children, the unemployed or other deviant members of the population. Finally, the last category of people refers to those within civilised countries who, for reasons of ill health, poverty, incomplete education and the like (and not innate characteristics as determined by race or gender), have the potential for autonomous conduct but only after many generations of improvement.
Even staunch defenders of liberty like J.S. Mill acknowledged that not all subjects are similarly constituted to make government through freedom a viable option. For instance, in Mill’s ([1859]1985, p. 69) important text, On Liberty, a caveat is placed on the universal assumption of liberty:
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.
It is thus clear that ‘freedom’ is not for everybody: only some sections of the population can be governed through their autonomy; for others, illiberal methods are justified. Of course, Mill wrote at a time when imperialism and colonialism were in full swing and his ideas found purchase among the colonial administrators charged with governing hitherto ‘barbaric races’. While this was to be expected as a colonial
4 ‘Smoothing the dying pillows’ or ‘softening the pillow’ were phrases commonly used by colonial administrators to refer to the inevitable demise of the indigenous population of Australia during the first half of the twentieth century and their efforts to make this as humane as possible. For instance, as late as November 1938, after representing the Northern Territory for four years, a Member of the House of Representatives voiced his ‘sincere endeavour to soften the pillow of the natives.’ See Gough Whitlam (1997): ‘Dragging the Chain 1897-1997’ The Second Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture held at the Northern Territory University, 29 August 1997.
10 strategy, what is disconcerting is its implementation among the internal populations of Western countries as well. Thus, liberal methods were reserved for those deemed capable of autonomous conduct while despotic means were justified for those without this quality ‘provided that the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end’ (Ibid.).
According to Valverde (1996, p. 362), an understanding of ‘habit’ can resolve the tension between despotic means and liberal ends:
‘Habit’ is an extremely useful category of and for governance because it mediates between consciousness and unconsciousness and between desire and compulsion. Compelled to eat our vegetables as children, as adults we come to experience a meal without vegetables as undesirable and even unnatural. As adults, we often compel ourselves to re-form, re-build our habits, by engaging in a self-despotism (e.g. throwing away all cigarettes or alcohol in the house so as not to ‘tempt’ the part of the self that is despotically ruled by the ‘higher’ self) that, we hope, will result in the permanent transformation of desire, so that eventually the lower self will not even want to smoke or drink.
Valverde’s argument draws on the assumption that the unimproved subject can be improved through training, education and the adoption of ‘good’ habits. However, it also draws our attention to the use of biopower5 in the governing of populations. For instance, the reason we find a meal without vegetables undesirable and even unnatural is that it has been ‘scientifically’ proven that consumption of vegetables helps facilitate good digestion and that a meal absent of this vital ingredient will be detrimental for our health and may lead to early death. The same applies to smoking and drinking. A subject capable of making the connection between vegetables, good health and good living will compel him/herself to change while a ‘lower quality’ subject will go ahead and continue with their old ways. Thus, distinctions could be made between the ideal subject and the less than ideal subject, who is nevertheless ‘improvable’, and between both of those and the hopeless cases who, in spite of having been exposed to these ‘scientific’ truths, continue to be willful or ignorant. It
5 Biopower is a term coined by Foucault (1998, p. 140) to refer to ‘numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.’ In contrast to traditional forms of power based on a threat of death, biopower emphasises the protection of life through regulation of bodies via notions such as ‘sexuality’. However, biopower also has a dark underside, that is, the power to take away life in the name of its preservation. Thus, ‘If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population’ (Ibid., p. 137).
11 must be noted here that government’s concern for our eating and drinking habits arises not from some unexplained benevolence but because ill health exacts a fiscal cost on the economy and therefore undermines the progress required to make the developmental project work.
Dean (2002) further makes the argument that illiberal methods in liberal reasoning are not a hypocritical denial of the liberal ethos – on the contrary, they are part and parcel of the same idea. Liberalism always makes the distinction between those who can govern themselves and those who cannot (Ibid.). For the latter, this often means a ‘despotic provision for their special needs’ in order to render them responsible and autonomous (Dean, 2010, p. 171). The danger, of course, is that in the process of improving subjects, some will inevitably be rendered without value and beyond improvement, thereby justifying coercion and even elimination. Thus, while non- liberal forms of rule are different from liberal forms of government, in that in the former there is a lack of recognition of a concept of limited government characterised by the rule of law and the protection of individual rights, such a distinction does not preclude us from seeing their similarities. First is that both liberal and non-liberal forms of rule are forever searching for new ways to articulate elements of sovereignty and bio-politics. Second, both these forms of rule operate through processes that are constitutive of a population rather than exterior to it (Ibid., p. 173). Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that authoritarian governmentality is an element of liberal forms of rule as well as a genre of political rationality partly because liberalism requires the ‘good despot’ to train and discipline certain sections of the population so that they will come to possess the desirable attributes required of the responsible and autonomous subject.
Chinese Governmentality between Plan and Market
Having established that a liberal arts of government shares similarities with authoritarian forms of government, we can now shift the focal lens to the Chinese case. Michel Foucault’s analysis of ‘governmentality’ coincided with the expansion of colonialism and administration in the West; hence it could be argued that ‘the government of subjects at home and abroad was and continues to be intertwined’ (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 5). However, while China’s ‘socialist arts of government’ shares with its Western ‘liberal’ counterparts a ‘bio-political imperative
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[for] the optimisation of the processes of life’ (Dean, 2010, p. 173), Chinese governmentality differs from Western liberalism in its view of what could be known about the objects to be governed (Sigley, 2009). Whereas liberal reasoning sets limits on what could be known about the population, China’s socialist governmentality not only purported to ‘know’ the object to be governed, but also to predict the precise outcome of any possible intervention’ (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 5). 6 This was particularly the case during the Maoist period, when direct and coercive interventions against supposed ‘enemies’ of the regime, including counter- revolutionaries and the natural world, were legitimated and facilitated in the name of socialism and in defence of the revolutionary cause (Dutton ,2009; Hoffman, 2009).
With the introduction of market reforms to China in the late 1970s, ‘the revolutionary and scientific hubris’ of Chinese socialism has taken a back seat to ‘reform and openness’, making it possible to govern the population through market mechanisms and autonomy (albeit in a limited fashion granted only to some) (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 7). However, as I will argue, this change by no means implies a relinquishing of power on the part of the party-state even as it seeks to incorporate previously excluded groups like businesspeople and the ‘middle class’ within its ranks. In fact, scholars have noted that where the state is retreating (e.g. in welfare provision), it is also regrouping (e.g. in re-deployment of community governance strategies) (Edin, 2004). Further, market economics engendered by the ‘socialist market economy’ did not render obsolete the role of the plan or displace the absolute rule of the CCP but merely provided the discursive tools by which a new government re-articulated (and re-legitimated) its relationship to the population, thereby binding ruler to ruled in a new social contract. This is particularly pertinent as the Party learnt from the ‘shock’ of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that it needed to be stronger and smarter, not weaker and duller.
Under the aegis of reforms, markets were to serve the dual purpose of creating docile labourers who would give China the comparative advantage over other developing countries and fostering the emergence of creative and entrepreneurial individuals in the hope of making Chinese businesses competitive on the world stage (Anagnost, 1997). However, this process has been neither smooth nor straightforward.
6 There are startling parallels with the raison d’être of police as previously discussed.
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Captured by the famous saying of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’, Deng Xiaoping’s reform agenda was very much in tune with the ‘governmentality’ understanding of how government works. Thus, while surface inspection may suggest change defined against a narrow (and negative) appraisal of socialist China under the planned economy, in reality, change has been disruptive, anarchic, and unpredictable. While some problems may have been resolved by the introduction of market reforms, such as the problems of food and shelter, new ones, like rampant corruption, have emerged with such tenacity that it is doubtful that government, in its present form, is able or willing to deal with them (Lü , 2000).
Etiquette problems pale in comparison with the larger, more imminent concerns of corruption, environmental degradation, social inequality and injustice. But, upon closer inspection, the ways these problems have been addressed reveal both the strengths and limits of state-directed problem solving. At the outset, I argued that the liberal ethos of self-government can also apply to China and that this is true for some of China’s population. However, I cast doubt on the degree of autonomy that informs the self-governing strategies of supposedly free subjects in China for the reasons of asymmetry of information and oftentimes incorrect or distorted information. China may have something resembling a market economy, but it is not ‘organically’ borne of the processes and struggles that define markets elsewhere. To elucidate the conundrum of ‘market socialism’, I concur with Donald Nonini’s (2008, p. 148) thesis that China is anything but neoliberal:
Neoliberal reforms in the US and UK from the 1970s occurred in social formations where capitalism, at a variety of levels, was entrenched institutionally, with its own legitimacy secured by widespread prosperity, the welfare state and Cold War militarism; in contrast, market socialist reforms by the CCP have had to invent capitalist practices and institutions from the top down in what have been risky economic and social experiments… Throughout I emphasize that the ruling logic of market socialism is that of an oligarchic Communist Party whose telos of self-reproduction, as well as its internal conflict between Party factions, drive the Chinese capitalist formation and bind its elements uneasily together.
Lacking the social, economic and institutional preconditions that would enable a ‘natural’ embedding of market concepts, it is clear that in China the market was invented and continues to rely on government directives in order to survive. By this,
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I do not mean that market economics cannot exist independently of state supervision,7 but rather I suggest that markets would not manifest in their current form, characterised by webs of intersecting interests (reflected in guanxi8 networks and networking practices) and interdependencies, without state orchestration (Fan, 2002). Huang Yasheng (2008) explains that the concept of ‘market socialism’ does not necessarily mean that a ‘market’ exists in China in the true sense of the word so much as it refers to the plain fact that the oligarchic/corporatist Party (with its ties to business) has access to markets and transnational capital through such channels as Hong Kong (which has a robust and fully functioning market economy) and the greater Chinese Diaspora (e.g. Taiwan). For this reason, China’s unique model of governance cannot be held as a model to be emulated elsewhere and least of all, as a model to be exported to other developing states (Ibid.)
Chinese governmentality does not view its role as one of ‘limited government’ confined to providing a palatable legal framework and social redistribution, but rather sees itself as actively pre-empting social, economic and political processes so as to predict outcomes rendering otherwise problematic events knowable, understandable and therefore controllable (Bakken, 2000). This is by no means a straightforward process. In China, the discourse of civilisation is embedded in the official language of the elite. It is constructed as a desirable attribute and a much sought-after quality in the pursuit of wealth and happiness. The tangible markers of ‘success’ in contemporary China include having money, status, and education while the intangible markers include being recognised by peers and the broader society and being worthy of respect. As professionals and educated persons, people are entitled a larger share of the vision of prosperity and are expected to participate in the economy through their consumption and cultural input. Having an education (i.e. possessing tertiary qualifications) is commensurate with possessing culture (you wenhua) while
7 There is evidence to suggest that Township and Village Enterprises set up during the early 1980s were experiments conducted by local authorities and villagers without the explicit approval of the central government. The literature suggests that the government may have ‘turned a blind eye’ to these experiments in order to see the outcome. After these experiments were deemed successful, they were retrospectively approved and then applied to other locations. See Huang Yasheng (2008), for example, who argues that the collapse of the rural enterprises is a result of a deliberate policy and ideological shift which favoured the cities on the eastern seaboard rather than an outcome of economic un-sustainability. Huang believes that leaders should be looking to China’s countryside to resolve economic bottlenecks created by these preferential policies. 8 Guanxi can be translated to mean ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’ but is most generally understood as dynamic networks of personalised relationships. In the absence of a clear legal framework in China, businesses have had to rely on guanxi in order to ‘get things done’.
15 the ‘lower classes’ (e.g. migrants, peasants, uneducated people) are not recognised as having culture. While I’m not suggesting that people are one-dimensional objects, nor are they expected to be; however, as the etiquette manuals and rhetoric suggest, there are certain behaviours that have been accepted (even become conventional wisdom) as characteristic of a certain ‘class of persons’.
The list of ‘uncivilised’ behaviours targeted by etiquette campaigns covers a diverse array of possible actions, canvassing everything from dress codes to international diplomacy rules. This is not so as to eradicate bad behaviour as such, but more to do with the ‘work style’ (dangfeng) of government. In governmentality terms, etiquette campaigns evince a concern over how to govern effectively and efficiently (i.e. at minimum cost, with maximum effect) and how much to govern without stifling the creative and progressive forces in society. I will elaborate below.
The ‘work style’ of the Hu-Wen administration has been defined by the twin imperative to create a xiaokang (moderately well-off) and hexie (harmonious) society. Xiaokang was first mentioned by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 as a goal of the reforms he authorised.9 In concrete, measurable terms, xiaokang at the time was expressed as the goal to achieve US $1,000 per capita GDP for everyone (Deng, 1995, p. 240). By 2002, Jiang Zemin had revised this figure to more than US $2,000 by the year 2020. The World Bank put China’s 2008 GDP per capita at US $3,267 and this figure continues to rise. However, just as incomes in China are rising, so too is the level of income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient.10 The China Daily considered a mouthpiece of the Party, puts China’s current Gini coefficient at 0.47, which is past the ‘recognised warning level of 0.4’ (Chen, 2010). The China Daily article further pointed out that much of the accumulated wealth of the richest 10 percent has been derived from ‘unjust’ or ‘corrupt’ means. Citing a report by the Economic Daily Information, ‘about 4.8 trillion yuan ($703 billion) of urban income evaded tax and was referred to as “hidden income”’ (Ibid.). Further, experts noted that ‘unreasonable high incomes were found in "monopoly trades of electronic information, oil, finance and tobacco" and "profiteering trades of real estate,
9 See Deng Xiaoping’s (1995) speech, ‘China’s goal is to achieve comparative prosperity by the end of the century’ in his Selected Works, vol. 2 p. 240. 10 The Gini coefficient is a widely recognised measure of income inequality in a country. It is a number between 0 and 1 and is calculated to reflect the level of income inequality. A measure of 0 means the country is perfectly equal while a measure of 1 denotes perfect inequality. All countries fall between 0 and 1.
16 coalmine exploration and securities"’ (Ibid.). In light of these alarming figures, the Party has emphasised not only the achievement of ‘moderate prosperity’ or xiaokang but also the need for more equal distribution of wealth captured by ‘harmony’ or hexie in its now widely touted slogan. China’s rising income inequality is not an unknown or hidden fact. However, what to do about this is a wholly different challenge, and one that is taken up with gusto by the Party but nevertheless reflects the limitations and weaknesses of its approach.
The years 1978 and 1992 are now widely regarded by China scholars as watershed moments in the history of the modern PRC. The year 1978 was important because it confirmed Deng’s position as leader of the Party, as indicated in his speech to the Military Commission in 1977 (Deng, 1995, p. 85). More importantly, it ushered in the ‘market’ to Chinese society. While there is no doubt that Deng had nurtured these ideas of economic reform well before he came to power in 1978, he could not openly proclaim the ascendancy of ‘market socialism’ without first neutralising opposition from within his own Party. For this reason, if we look to his speeches between 1979 and 1985 in the Selected Works (1995), we can see that Deng slowly and cumulatively proclaimed the separate elements that would eventually make up the conditions for ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.11 From 1975 to 1978, Deng debunks the ‘irrational’ and ‘dangerous’ aspects of Maoism (e.g. the cult of personality promoted by Mao). He then separates himself from the iconic leader by suggesting that while Mao was ‘70 percent correct, he was 30 percent incorrect’ which is a euphemism for saying that while the political control of the Party would remain intact and unchallenged, the purpose and direction of the country, the style of leadership by the Party and the means by which to achieve national goals would change.
In a 1979 public conversation (Deng 1995, pp. 235-239) between Deng and Frank B. Gibney, Paul Lin and others, Deng insisted that markets would enhance socialism in China:
11 If we look to Deng’s speeches before 1976, we see the tenor of his speech begin to change. Deng attends to ‘urgent’ matters of state such as the arrest and sentencing of the ‘gang of four’, seen as responsible for the Cultural Revolution; he then proceeds to resolve the Taiwan issue. Then, slowly and tentatively, Deng reaffirms the Party’s pre-eminent position and evokes the metaphor of ‘scientism’ and ‘productive forces’ to re-institute capitalism in China. Because there were still revolutionaries within the Party ranks who were unconvinced of China’s path towards market socialism, Deng had to build up his rhetoric to accommodate the leftists from within and also demands from without for greater reform.
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It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only “capitalist” market economy. Why can’t we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism… The socialist market economy mainly regulates interrelations between state-owned enterprises, between collectively owned enterprises and even between foreign capitalist enterprises. But in the final analysis, this is all done under socialism in a socialist society… As long as learning from capitalism is regarded as no more than a means to an end, it will not change the structure of socialism or bring China back to capitalism. (Ibid., p. 239)
Deng saw no contradiction between ‘the market’ and socialism so long as markets facilitated growth and so long as the Party retained the power to direct capitalistic practices. Capitalism, as Deng saw it, was simply a ‘means to an end’, reflecting the pragmatism of his approach. Together with other ‘productive’ and ‘progressive’ elements imported from overseas, capitalism would enrich China and bring it up to par with developed countries. The aim was to restore China’s ‘rightful’ place in the world and rectify perceived injustices perpetrated against it in the name of imperialism, colonialism and capitalist expansionism:
…If we want socialism to achieve superiority over capitalism, we should not hesitate to draw on the achievements of all cultures and to learn from other countries, including the developed capitalist countries, all advanced methods of operation and techniques of management that reflect the laws governing socialised production. (Deng, 1994, pp. 361- 362)
Sigley (2006) (also elaborated in Jeffreys and Sigley, 2009, p. 11) further notes that in addition to the capitalistic practices that were imported from outside China, there were at least four ways in which China’s ‘socialist arts of government’ were influenced by neoliberal practices in the West. The first came via the discourse of ‘good governance’ and ‘civil society’ in the policy texts and rhetoric of global governing institutions such as the World Bank and the non-government organisation (NGO) sector in the late 1980s and 1990s, which China also adopted and used. The second was the revitalisation of the social sciences in the 1980s after having suffered a hiatus as a result of the Cultural Revolution12 (Law & Jiang, 2008). Such fields as
12 Mao suspended the social sciences during his rule because they were seen to be propagating ‘bourgeois’ ideas and therefore were unsuitable for China’s revolutionary conditions. The re- institution of the social sciences and the growth of new areas of research such as social work did not occur until well into the 1990s.
18 economics, social work and public administration enjoyed a revival and with it, collaboration and cooperation with overseas institutions which facilitated the transfer of ideas and technology. Third, through cooperation with international organisations such as the UN Development Programme and the World Bank, a discourse of developmentalism was adopted, thereby facilitating the transfer of technologies of government, including ideas about ‘accountability’, ‘poverty alleviation’ and ‘good governance.’ Finally, the international NGO sector, through its charitable and philanthropic activities, also contributed somewhat to a ‘changing mindset about questions of government’ (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 11).
Yu Keping (2002), deputy director of the Central Translation Bureau and director of the China Centre for Comparative Politics and Economics (CCCPE), has been widely recognised for his role in bringing foreign concepts relating to governance to China. His think-tank is closely tied to the Hu-Wen administration and, in many ways, Yu is also a scholar-official. Yu (2002) identifies the World Bank’s 1992 annual report as a turning point for domestic discussions on governance issues in China. Yu’s article (2002) advocates the concept of ‘governance’ (zhili) over the concept of ‘government’ (zhengfu) for the following reasons. First, ‘government’ only referred to the apparatuses of state power and does not embrace the aspirations of non-government actors and institutions. Second, the power of ‘government’ is seen to be derived from ‘orders, statutes, bureaucracy, and coercion’, making it unsuitable for effectively dealing with conflicts, while ‘governance’ is better positioned because it is characterised by ‘collaboration, coordination, negotiation, social networking, neighbourhood, identity or consensus’ (Yu, 2002, p. 95). In effect, what Yu is saying is that ‘government’ is an inadequate concept to capture the changing power matrix between the various actors including the state, society and those that traverse both sides of the state-society dichotomy. Further, the state and society do not always have to be seen to be in opposition: they can be cooperative, mutually reinforcing and jointly engaging in the governing of populations. By shifting beyond a state-centred approach to government, Yu’s conceptualisation echoes Foucault’s governmentality. He explains why ‘governance’ is preferred over ‘government’ both as a means for rethinking government and as a practical method for improving specific governance problems in China:
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By Chinese scholars, governance is regarded widely as “governing without government”; a process of interaction between the state and civil society; a new cooperation between the government and the civil, public and private sectors; a management and coordination mechanism with consensus and identity, a social self-organizational net, and so on. (Yu, 2002, p. 195).
Perhaps what is more revealing is how Yu (2002, p. 196) distinguishes between ‘good government’ and ‘good governance’:
There might be good government under an authoritarian regime but never good governance without functioning democratic mechanisms. The objective of our political development should be good governance on the basis of democratic governance. Hence we conclude this paper with an attempt to develop a set of analytical criteria and indicators of Chinese democratic governance that would combine a synthesis of universal principles of democracy and good governance and particular Chinese features.
What Yu is saying, albeit in a convoluted way, is that the characterisation of ‘good government’ does not preclude authoritarian forms of government and while China may not be ready for democracy at this point in time, it should strive to achieve ‘good governance’ in every facet of governing. This may include the regulation, supervision and guidance of organisations, institutions and individuals traditionally seen to be outside the concern of state sovereignty. Further, ‘good governance’ practices can be measured, compared and improved in line with global discourses, as advocated in the policy texts of international organisations like the World Bank. Bo Zhiyue (2010, p. 1) even goes as far as to suggest that an authoritarian government should not be assessed based on whether it is authoritarian or not, but rather on whether it ‘governs’ at all:
To reformulate Huntington’s theory13 in Deng’s parlance14, one may get that it does not matter whether a government is democratic or authoritarian; it is a good government as long as it governs.
13 The relevant quotation from Samuel Huntington is: ‘The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organisation, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities’ (1968, p. 1). 14 Deng Xiaoping’s cat analogy is that it does not matter whether a cat is black or white; it is a good cat as long as it catches mice. When applied to the defence of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ this basically means that it does not matter whether an economic policy is socialist or capitalist; it is a good policy as long as it promotes economic growth.
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Bo (2010) described the failed democracies in states that he deemed as ‘premature’ or ‘not ready’ for democracy as belonging to a growing list of ‘lame duck’ governments: governments that were hastily and popularly elected, only to be ousted out of power, often in an violent or humiliating manner. China, by comparison, performed much better based on ‘good governance’ indicators (Ibid.). Bo (2010) saw things such as civil rights, rule of law and the like as ‘fetters’ to a good, well- functioning government, defined narrowly as delivering economic growth and successfully quelling domestic (in the cases he cites, predominantly ethnic e.g. Tibet and Xinjiang) unrest. Thus for both Yu (2002) and Bo (2010), a neoliberal understanding of concepts of government and governance does not preclude the practice of ‘socialist arts of governance’ which borrows the familiar concepts of sovereignty, autonomy and self-regulation but nevertheless continues to stress the importance and necessity of the CCP’s rule.
Jeffreys and Sigley (2009, p. 13) also point out that while discussions on governance in China have been largely confined to the domestic context, the ideas undergirding the promotion of a ‘socialist market economy’ nevertheless enable China to link up with the rest of the world in ways thought impossible under the socialist plan.15 These shifts also correspond with a shift in the terminology used to describe socialist planning. Sigley (2009) notes that the subtle change from ‘jihua’ to ‘guihua’ in governing discourse – both meaning ‘to plan’ – represents a re-conceptualisation of government roles. Jihua was a popular term associated with the Maoist period. It was understood as detailed planning and discipline associated with the state. Guihua, a reform-era term, is different in the sense that while incorporating all the aspects of the former, it also allows scope for cooperation and collaboration beyond the purview of state institutions. The concept of guihua thus facilitates the incorporation of interests seemingly without conflict or contradiction. Once again, we find startling similarities between liberal and authoritarian rationality (as practiced in China) which shifts thinking from a political centre to a multitude of sites including communities, classrooms, workplaces and homes, thus enabling national programs of government to influence the conduct of conduct at a ‘molecular’ level without being identified with the party-state per se (Rose 1999, p. 51).
15 The popular slogan used to capture this phenomenon is ‘yu guoji jiegui’ which means to ‘join with the world’s tracks.’
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The concern for proper etiquette could also be broadly understood as an attempt by the party-state to link public concern over ‘uncivilised’ behaviour with the rhetoric of ‘good governance.’ This not only enables the Party to pre-empt discussions on the subject but also to link civility to the goals of nation building, prosperity, harmony and stability. Government is thus a more diffuse activity, involving a wider segment of society than first envisaged and occurs in more subtle and benign ways than simply resorting to threats of violence or coercion. However, having said this, I must emphasise that this process which links the imperatives of government to the actions of subjects is much more tenuous than we are led to believe. Rose (1999, pp. 47-51) referred to this as a process of ‘translation’ – an effective but nevertheless imperfect mechanism that is not immune from ‘innumerable pressures and distortions.’ Therefore, government’s rule over populations does not ‘extend itself unproblematically across a territory, but [sic.] a matter of fragile relays, contested locales and fissiparous affiliations’ (Ibid., p. 51).
The etiquette campaigns demonstrate both the limits and the possibilities of state intervention in governing public conduct. They show, on the one hand, that in order for the ‘socialist market’ to function properly, a certain autonomy for society must be cultivated, and on the other, the tendency of the state to severely curtail this autonomy by setting administrative sanctions against the supposed ‘uncivilised’ aspects of public behaviour. Autonomy itself is a product of this new form of power. By rendering some behaviours ‘uncivilised’ and therefore undesirable, it also sets the conditions of entry to citizenship in the new polity in which ‘civility’ becomes the means through which subjects become transformed into citizens. Civility is therefore associated with all the idealised attributes that are embodied in the new citizenry: enterprising, self-determining, creative, prudent, law-abiding, nationalistic and, above all, politically acquiescent to CCP-led government.
The governmentality approach is more fruitful than either a state-centred or society centred approach which dominated political and sociological thought up until the 1980s. Instead of taking the state to be a calculating actor whose rule over society is necessitated by an apparatus of administrative sanctions, prohibitions and control, the concept of governmentality shifts the focus to a mix of actors and a diversity of forces in the effort to guide and regulate the conduct of individuals for various, and sometimes unintended, ends. By assuming that state and society are mutually
22 exclusive categories pitted against each other, we fail to capture the dynamic and at times contentious relationship between the forces that make up both camps. Further, it is in the state’s interests to see society prosper and flourish, the only caveat is that the state retains its leadership role in the process.
Civility, the City, and Socialisation
Although the statistics are contested 16 , the consensus is that China is rapidly becoming an urban society. The urbanisation of society means that more and more people will now jam the streets, metros and other public spaces, causing, among other things, traffic congestion and over-crowding. This is especially true of Shanghai, the cosmopolitan hub of Chinese modernity in the Yangtze River Delta and also a magnet for migrants from all over China. In recent years, the increase in population has raised concerns over the ability of the government to provide the necessary infrastructure and services to cater to the growing population. The concerns have predominantly been fiscal, that is, how a limited budget could be extended to provide for the migrant population who are now the main drivers of population increase (Zhu & Jiang, 2004). More recently, however, concerns have shifted to the maintenance of law and order and the effective socialisation of individuals into urban society (Li, et al., 2010).
The knowledge imparted by the civility campaigns is elementary, intended as a stop- gap measure to ensure that everyone is made aware of basic ground rules governing everyday conduct. The ‘rules’ relate to such mundane things as how to put on make- up when going out in public and how to how to carry oneself in public places (Minhang District Office, 2006). Civility campaigns in China elicit a different meaning to ‘civic virtues’ in the West. Civic virtue has been a major concern of political philosophy in the West. It refers to the cultivation of habits of personal living that conform to a social mode (e.g. civil society) which is the foundation of law and order in society (Dagger, 1997). It has been argued that Confucianism, which specifies that members of the society observe certain cultural virtues and traditions, is comparable to civic virtues in the West (De Bary, 2004). However it might be useful to conceive of civility as simply ‘ritual competencies’ necessary for
16 According to the 2009 City Development Report of China, 50 percent of the population of China is expected to be living in cities by 2020 (Xu, 2010).
23 routine interaction in public (Goffman, 1972), which partially explains why the content of etiquette booklets is so basic.
The sources from which information on the civilisation campaigns has been derived are official publications produced by the Civilisation Office and the Shanghai Municipal government. They are mainly propaganda materials and are of an ‘instructional’ nature, detailing the ways in which citizens can improve their ‘quality’ by adopting some of the specific behaviours and habits as specified in the manuals. Many of the etiquette manuals produced by the districts in Shanghai replicate the message by the Central Civilisation Office, thereby reflecting the hierarchical and top-down nature of the flow of information. While this is not to say that district governments do not have leeway in the ways in which they implement policy from higher levels of government, they nevertheless have to demonstrate obedience by paying lip service to higher authorities. Another distinctive quality about the civilisation campaigns in China is that they are also about making a clear distinction between urban and rural life, that is, urban life is considered more technologically advanced, more nearly perfect than rural life. To aspire to urban life, one must therefore adopt the norms of civilised conduct.
In public, people encounter a plethora of working ‘ground rules’ for individual and coordinated action. These rules are as varied as how to assist a person in need to choosing a seat on a bus. Submerged beneath explicit consciousness, these rules are occasionally highlighted and even made explicit through breaches of etiquette and require routine invocation and practice eventually to become entrenched as habit. Furthermore, normative expectations that apply in one place or situation may not apply in another. Therefore, individuals need to be sensitive to which rules apply to the setting they are in and the situations in which they find themselves. Usually, the socialisation process begins from childhood and many factors, including level of education, family background, and economic situation, determine the degree of ‘success’ in this process. The migrant experience in Chinese cities also requires mastery of the rules of public conduct so as to ‘blend in’ with the crowd. In China, another factor must be accounted for and that is the role of state.
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The State and Visions of Civilised Modernity
Any attempt to weaken government power and function is very dangerous. In the process of establishing a socialist market economy the function of government must be strengthened [not weakened] … the kind of strengthening that takes place must accord with and satisfy the demands of the market economy. (Zhang, 1996, p. 19, quoted in Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 11).
While serving the practical purposes of maintaining an interactional order in public, civility campaigns are also a product of state discourse about modernity. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping first made mention of the need to uphold ‘material’ (wuzhi wenming) and ‘spiritual’ civilisation (jingshen wenming) before an audience of writers and artists:
We must simultaneously raise social productive forces, reform and complete the socialist economic and political system, develop high- level socialist democracy and complete the socialist legal system. At the same time we must build a high level of material civilization, raise the scientific cultural level of all ethnic groups, develop a superior, rich and multi-faceted cultural life, and build a high level of socialist spiritual civilization. (Deng, 1993, p. 208)
Børge Bakken (2000, p. 54) has interpreted ‘material civilisation’ as the economic growth aspect while ‘spiritual civilisation’ represents the social control aspect. Bakken’s analysis has overly focused on the social control aspect while, as we shall see later, a closer textual analysis of Party documents reveals that it is the ‘material’ which guides the ‘spiritual.’ In other words, it is the ‘socialist market economy’ which establishes the conditions under which individuals are to be made ‘civilised.’ The contours of the civilising process are therefore defined by the needs of the socialist market economy: habits of civility like punctuality, neat dress, appropriate comportment, and so on, serve the market well. It produces subjects who are docile on the factory floor but nevertheless capable of self-improvement.
In recent years, the policy goal of building an ‘all-round well-off and harmonious society’ (quanmian xiaokang hexie shehui) under Hu Jintao has shifted the GDP- oriented growth model of the Deng period to other indicators of ‘progress’. Here, the theme of ‘human quality’ (ren de suzhi) is vital for understanding how the state governs different sectors of society. ‘Quality’ not only concerns a person’s cultural knowledge but refers to both ‘the innate and nurtured physical, psychological,
25 intellectual, moral, and ideological qualities of human bodies and their conduct’ (Jacka, 2009, p. 524). Human improvement is therefore linked to the development of the productive forces. In the past, the state assumed the pastoral role of governor in the ‘complete administration of life’ (Foucault, 1997). Now, it is delegating the task to individuals as potential agents in their own governance. Self-governance need not be viewed as external to state rule. Rather, as Nicholas Rose (1999) has argued, it is actually constitutive of the state itself.
Chinese Marxist theorists have generally agreed that the market is capable of producing subjectivities that are superior to those created under the planned economy (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009, p. 10). Lu Jianjie (1995, p. 22) for example, has said that ‘[u]nder the planned economy it [i.e. the socialist subject] is not an independent economic and decision-making subject, but an affiliate of the state.’ By contrast, the ‘socialist market economy demands that the subjectivity of the enterprise be re-made and its tremendous potential be released’, and this applies as much to enterprises as it does to individuals. It must be remembered, however, that the market itself is an artifact of reforms, that is, a means by which the Party has achieved material prosperity and through which new modalities of governance are being exercised. In this thesis, I show how civility discourses and practices have been premised on a mode of governing in which the market is posited as a depoliticised zone of autonomy and freedom. The explosion of consumer culture, with the articulated prevailing official and popular discourse on quality (suzhi), has contributed to a hegemonic model of merit and value which has naturalised emerging structures of inequality and exclusion by construing them as an unavoidable consequence of economic growth and not policy.
According to the state, civility campaigns serve a public good. However, we must be made aware that the call for civility, in whatever form, always has hidden socio- economic overtones. Manners, then and now, were as much about social distinction (for instance, in drawing class and gender divisions) as they were about a person’s actual moral character. Indeed, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has argued, maintaining and exemplifying social distinctions and stratifications is the key feature of all fashions, tastes and forms of etiquette. In addition, there is always a dominating cultural ethos at work in these transformations which links in complex ways economic and political power with privileged aesthetic and moral ideals. We
26 can think of this as a form of cultural ‘hegemony’, as theorised by Antonio Gramsci (1982), whereby the ideas and ideals of the ruling class, including their claim to social leadership, become part of common-sense understandings and habitual practices of the general population. From this perspective, what is regarded as ‘good taste’, ‘good manners’ and ‘good behaviour’ are cultural markers of those in power and help maintain the existing socio-political hierarchy. However, such expectations were not entirely fixed and uncontested. They could be gradually ‘transgressed’ and may have cumulative effects on the established norms of public opinion, which over time, may alter altogether. The example of proposals to ban pyjama-wearing in public on Shanghai’s streets and the public backlash that followed is an example of how rules can be challenged.
The Urban Sub-Conscious
To walk is to lack a place… The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place - an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. (De Certeau, 1984, p. 103).
Michel de Certeau’s provocative yet simple metaphor of walking unsettles the notion of the city as a ‘fixed place’ and therefore amenable to reconstruction and remaking by citizens. By conceiving of the city as a series of movements, by ascribing it the character of fluidity interwoven in innumerable social interactions, de Certeau evokes the tactics of the marginalised and dispossessed. The point is that no matter how strong the hand of the state and city planners in the administration and planning of urban space, urban life has a subconscious of its own. The city is simultaneously an iconic cultural centre as well as a repository of human vices. What is deemed as ‘permissible’ and ‘proper’ in one instance may be seen as culturally ‘improper’ in another.
As Henri Lefebvre (1994, p. 36) suggests, ‘every society, and particularly (for our purposes) the city, has an underground and repressed life, and hence an unconscious life of its own.’ He proposed that in order to appreciate the full complexity of life in cities, we need to think about the ‘lived experiences’ of the city in different ways not
27 previously taken into account by the frameworks of urban analysis. Urban studies would need to look beyond representations of the plans, architecture and arrangements to include what might be termed the spatial imagery of urban life ‘linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 33). It must be pointed out, however, that the city’s subconscious is not simply opposed to conceptually embodied urbanism as expressed by official representations of space. Rather, it should be construed as constitutive of urban life itself in ways that fail to comply with externally transmitted images of the city as a harmonious whole, a bastion of progress, the centre of knowledge and civilisation and model par excellence of good governance.
In China, people excluded from the city’s image of progress have resorted to diverse forms of popular reworking to express their resistance to growing inequity. While not seeking to overthrow the regime, people have nevertheless deployed everyday practices to subvert the agendas of controlling groups and undermine the dominant system of representation through ridicule, appropriation, unintended uses or socially unacceptable behaviour like graffiti and vandalism (Broudehoux, 2004). In Shanghai, those experiencing social exclusion have actively developed forms of incivility to mark their oppositional status to established norms. They believe the concerns of civilising campaigns are trivial and mask problems that continue to persist in Shanghai society such as inequality and inadequate social services.17 As a result, the messages of the campaigns are often ignored and rules of civilised conduct are only selectively adopted where it suits them. Sometimes this has helped to bring attention to the plight of the underprivileged in the city; at other times these tactics have backfired and attracted more discipline and policing by the state.
For example, some of the rural migrants I have had the chance to know have openly flaunted their ‘incivility’ as a way of showing indifference to the state’s campaigns. One of the seasonally employed workers remarked that since his ‘quality’ is so low, the state needs to do more to help him find work. This is clearly an example of disenfranchised groups using the state’s discourse against the state and there are many instances of this type of covert resistance in the unfolding of this process to ‘civilise’ the public.
17 This sentiment was conveyed to me on several occasions during informal chats with a local Shanghainese resident. Chats dated May 2008.
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The very notion of a public space being redefined to exclude certain kinds of people or certain kinds of behaviour can fuel moral panics (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1996). This is where perceived threats to norms of ‘decent’ behaviour can elicit disproportionate responses. In China, there are not so much moral panics but rather there is the pervasive sense of a moral crisis. In the undercurrent of public discourse, the public perception is that of something being amiss (Liu, 1999; Shao, 1996; Wang, 2002). But instead of a ‘moral crisis’, references to a ‘crisis of the spirit’ (jingshen weiji) or a ‘crisis of belief’ (xinyang weiji) are more prominent. A crisis of belief or spirit occurs when the ‘substance of the spirit’ or belief loses its power to inspire and convince (Ci, 1994). It has the quality of a moral crisis because the society is no longer able to make distinctions between right and wrong, or, more accurately, society is unable to uphold the norms of right and wrong (‘moral’ being defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the principles of right and wrong in human behaviour). The nature of the moral crisis is different in China than, say, in the West, because morality is explicitly contiguous with politics. Below I explain why an understanding of the nature of the moral crisis in China might better position us to appreciate the CCP’s efforts in these civilising campaigns. Civilising campaigns in China are seen by the state as a weapon against social decay and moral corruption.
The Moral Crisis in Post-Mao China
China’s move away from a planned to a market economy, albeit a ‘socialist market economy’, had a significant effect on debate among Chinese ethicists on the relationship between morality and the market. In the 1997 edition of the journal Zhexue Dongtai (Philosophical Trends), the debate among Chinese ethicists as to the effect of the market on morality was divided into three broad areas of concern: 1) Does the introduction of the market have a negative effect on morality? 2) Is economic behaviour distinct from other forms of social activity, therefore giving it an amoral character? 3) Does the market engender its own norms distinct from traditional moral philosophy?
As regards the first question, those scholars who believed that market reforms had indeed led to a drop in moral standards, cited examples of negative social phenomena like prostitution, gambling and organised crime, all of which were brought under control or had been driven underground and out of sight during the Maoist period, as
29 evidence of the negative impact of the market on morality (Zhao & Shao, 1997). Others cited the imbalance in the distribution of social wealth, and, in particular, the acquisition of wealth by corrupt or unjust means, as further evidence of the corrosive influence of the market (He, 2009). However, those who disagreed viewed the market as a positive force that tends to raise the level of society’s morals. This view shares a similar optimism with liberal thinkers like Adam Smith ([1776], 1999), J. S. Mill ([1859], 1985), and Friedrich Hayek, (1944) in that it holds that the market’s self-interest ultimately brings benefits to the wider community.
Referring to the second question, some Chinese ethicists advocated that morality be disassociated from activities in the market (Zhao & Shao, 1997). They cited China’s historical experience of both Confucianism and socialism as support for their position. Therefore, when judging economic issues, they believed that one cannot appeal to moral norms, nor should one apply economic laws when judging whether conduct is good or not. A slightly different view within this camp advocates the adoption of a ‘split personality’ (renge fenlie). This means that when people engage in commercial activity, they should unreservedly adhere to the principle of material interest. However, when they withdraw from this sphere, they should renounce that principle and act ethically.
Concerning the last question of whether the market engenders its own ‘moral’ norms as distinct from traditional moral norms, again the response was not straightforward. Advocates of this view believe that norms guarantee the healthy functioning of the market (Chen, 1997). Injunctions against cheating, violence and trespass can been seen as utilitarian and instrumentalist rather than as belonging to the ‘lofty meaning’ of morals which is absolute and sacred (Ibid.). This assumes, however, that the market is a perfecting operating mechanism when it fact, in the context of China, it is an artifact of reforms. By suggesting that the market is an ‘artifact’ I do not mean that markets only exist now in the post-1978 period, in fact, markets have predated the communist revolution. What I mean is that party-state control of market forces in China have produced a unique model of state capitalism in China on a scale not seen elsewhere in the world. Still lacking the legal framework and structural certainties that might optimise its functions, the market transition in China is imperfect and incomplete. As Vanberg (1994, p. 58) has argued, for morality to operate as a viable strategy, rewards for moral conduct and punishments for rule violation must be
30 appropriately allocated. In China, the lack of consistency in the allocation of rewards and punishments for moral/immoral behaviour has led to the perception of a moral crisis.
While academics and ethicists debated the relative merits and weaknesses of the socialist market economy, the perception on the ground is that something is seriously wrong with Chinese society. Examples such as the ‘tainted milk’ scandal in 2008 raise more than the issue of business ethics in China (Ramzy, 2008). Although this type of reporting has turned into an entertainment of sorts and an outlet for the collective channelling of outrage, without providing any real solutions, routinised exposure and the normalisation of such behaviour may actually heighten the sense of moral crisis rather than diminish it.
In this regard, Ci Jiwei (2009, p. 20) has identified four related phenomena which he sees as indicative of a moral crisis in China:
First, everyday norms of coexistence and cooperation – be they moral, legal or regulatory – are breached on an alarming scale. Second, every sector of society, including officialdom and the academic community, is implicated in a big way, with no single institution or profession being able to maintain a semblance of moral respectability. Third, the norms being violated by so many in every walk of life are very elementary ones indeed (dixian lunli, as they are called in Chinese), not ones that require altruistic acts or the adoption of perfectionist conceptions of the good. Violations of such elementary norms have resulted in all too many instances of dangerously unsafe food, medicine, water, traffic, not to mention coalmines, in many ways the most visible epitome of what has gone wrong and how difficult it is to fix it. Fourth, and finally, this state of affairs has become increasingly normal.
Ci maintains that his analysis is distinct from moral condemnation as it stands not on ‘moral high ground but on the ground of the crisis itself’ (Ibid., p. 19). The standards informing this crisis are therefore internal to Chinese society and are not a product of external standards being imposed from outside of the country. What we can take away from Ci’s analysis and how it relates to the civility campaigns in Shanghai is his notion of elementary norms. On the one hand, we see from Ci’s accounts that elementary norms are being breached on a massive scale. On the other hand, elementary norms are also being re-instilled using campaign-style mobilisation strategies. In order to reconcile Ci’s portrayal of Chinese society as lacking moral
31 anchorage with the state’s over-zealous attempts to socialise individuals into the polity, we need to acknowledge that the modernisation project in China is both liberating as it is dislocating. At the same time as old values and moral systems are being dislodged, abandoned and re-defined, new value systems are being embedded. To say that China is staring into a moral abyss is to underestimate the confidence Chinese people have in the system. Conversely, to feign ignorance of the serious ethical problems facing contemporary Chinese society reflects a naïve optimism in the power of globalisation to neutralise the exploitative effects of capitalism.
It has been said that China is in transition, and yet transition into what is not clear. The potential to shape Chinese society is there and it is just as important to look at how this process is played out as it is to predicting end-games. The Chinese state, for its part, is not sitting on its laurels as morality slips from its hands. It is actively seeking new ways to redefine Chinese identity and reform itself so that it can better deal with the challenges posed to social stability and, by extension, its own legitimacy. Society is similarly undergoing transformations which, while it may not lead to liberalisation that accords with Western notions, may actually force the state to incorporate its interests so that substantive policy changes can materialise.
Organisation of Thesis
This thesis traces the use of the campaign mobilisation strategy from Maoist times to the present. It challenges the assumption that market economic reforms have rendered redundant the socialist governing mentality in China. However, this is not to say that campaigns have been adopted wholesale from the Maoist period; rather, it is to suggest that the campaign mobilisation strategy continues to find utility in the present.
In the next chapter on methodology, I discuss some of the problems associated with fieldwork, particularly questions relating to access and the ethics of fieldwork in Shanghai. In this chapter, I will also explain why Shanghai is such an important site for the study of emergent discourses of citizenship, civic culture and civility and its role in the re-imagination of modernity with ‘Chinese characteristics.’
In chapter three, I follow the cue of ‘quality discourse’ (suzhi lunli) and examine the ways in which ‘civility’ has been associated with discourses of progress (civilisation)
32 epitomised by the city. I trace the etymology of the Chinese equivalent of civilisation, namely wenming, and argue that this concept was foreign to the Chinese language and was only recently adopted as a means for resisting foreign encroachments on China’s sovereignty in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter, I also explain how possessing the qualities that make one ‘civilised’ has become an unstated criterion for urban membership in Shanghai society. Using the concept of human quality, I argue that standards of civility have perpetuated categories of exclusive citizenship and inequality instead of potentially expanding the borders of inclusion.
I make the case in chapter four that in order to understand the importance of the civilisation narrative, discussion of Shanghai’s civilising campaigns must recognise the political developments that frame the discussion. Using the concept of ‘political civilisation’ (zhengzhi wenming), I argue that political reforms in China are by no means a linear process, that is, an assumed transition towards liberal democracy. I maintain that although the party-state enjoys near monopoly in discourse making, concepts such as wenming are highly contested and reflect the fractured nature of authoritarian rule in China.
In chapter five, I argue that in order to understand why the campaign method of mobilisation has been used as a means for propagating civilisation discourse, we need to explain its development through the recent past. This chapter will have an historical focus on Maoist society. I argue that Maoist society operated on a different set of rationales and therefore produced subjectivities that were ill-equipped for the challenges of the market. I view the civility campaigns as a means for re-socialising subjects of the planned economy into the ‘socialist market economy’. I also explain how the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) played a role in informing state conceptions that society needed moral guidance and must never again descend into the excesses of incivilities that characterised this period.
In chapter six, I use the example of ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns to explain why legitimacy based on economic growth has been insufficient to secure the Party’s mandate to rule. This chapter will trace the origins of the spiritual civilisation campaign in the 1980s and its development in the 1990s. Apart from being a legitimacy building exercise, the campaigns were also intended to rebuild the
33 moral order shattered by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and further shaken by the introduction of market reforms.
In chapter seven, I examine the government-led shequ (community) building project as a new social campaign and extension of the themes of the ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ of the 1990s. which were designed to resolve emerging social problems associated with reforms. The chapter draws from fieldwork data collected from Shanghai between 2006 and 2008. I argue that shequ should not be viewed as de- politicised zones autonomous from the state. Rather, as I will show, shequ governance works through the ‘autonomy’ of communities to impart knowledge on the norms of civilised conduct, the need for social order and for the state to exercise discipline and control of ‘problem’ groups such as the urban poor and rural-urban migrants.
Chapter eight will explore the ways in which a ‘typical’ etiquette campaign is carried out in Shanghai. The campaigns have not been without controversy and resistance, as this chapter will demonstrate. Further, they lack the ideological grounding that campaigns of the past enjoyed. Nevertheless, this chapter will show how the mass mobilisation method has been revived, albeit infused with new knowledges and rationalities imported from outside. Chapter Eight will also assess the outcomes of such a massive endeavor to change public etiquette and question its measure and definition of ‘success.’
I conclude in chapter nine by reiterating the need to re-examine the evolution of state-society relations not by seeing the state opposed to society but by viewing the state and society as mutually constitutive forces that both shape and limit the potential for social change. There is no doubt of a power imbalance in China and that at times the state has been excessively intrusive in the governing of social conduct. However, excessive social control also breeds deviance, which feeds back into the system, causing it to fracture from within. I also propose the possibility of comparison with other similar campaigns carried out by other countries to see whether China is unique in its endeavour to modernise its citizenry and if there are emergent patterns that may be conducive to comparative research.
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Chapter Two
Fieldwork and Methodology: Why Shanghai?
Photo 3: Famous skyline of the Pudong financial district opposite the Bund
Expressions of Shanghai’s aspiration shot up across the sky at an astonishing pace and in just fifteen years of economic boom time, Shanghai has achieved a skyline that took fifty years to create in New York and thirty in Hong Kong.
- (Gilmore, 2004, p. 172)
Shanghai is evidence of a new reality, a reality where centrally controlled planning embraces a Las Vegas free-for-all and Communists embrace capitalism more fervently than capitalists themselves. This landscape of commercial glam and exuberant energy is fast becoming the new China.
- (Marshall, 2003, p. 88)
Twenty-first century Shanghai has attracted the attention of academics and observers for many different reasons. The leisure and tourism industry, for example, views the city’s re-emergence as an opportunity: it’s time to tap into local resources such as the city’s past connections to the outside world in a bid to capitalise and profit from it (Morgan, 2004). Numerous travel guides purport to give ‘expert’ advice on where to shop, eat, and sight-see in Shanghai (Harper, 2006). They seem to view the city’s‘re-
35 birth’ as a ‘natural’ progression and the implicit proof that globalisation and capitalism have won the day. Fiona Gilmore’s (2004) work on ‘destination branding’, from which the first opening quote to this chapter was taken, shows how consumer branding of well-known global brands from Nike to Coca-Cola has been applied to ‘place marketing’ with outstanding results. People now identify the skyline of Pudong as synonymous with Shanghai. It appears on postcards and is the most popular backdrop for tourists keen to show that they have been to Shanghai.
But how far can Shanghai’s re-birth be interpreted as evidence of convergence globalisation and capitalism? Richard Marshall’s work (2003, p. 3), from which the second quote in the chapter’s opening was taken, takes Shanghai’s architecture, particularly its skyline, as evidence ‘of a convergence of sameness in the contemporary city in an age of globalisation’ even as it is being praised for being bold and distinctive. At the 16th Asian Corporate Conference held in Mumbai, Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-trained economist and a man known for his humanistic values, praised Shanghai as an example for developing countries:
Mumbai needs investment in urban renewal. Mumbai needs a world class airport. Mumbai needs better public transport. Mumbai must unlock the potential of its under-utilised assets, especially land. When I spoke of turning Mumbai into a Shanghai, many wondered what I had in mind. It is not my intention to draw a road map for Mumbai’s future. But I do believe that Mumbai can learn from Shanghai’s experience in reinventing itself; in rebuilding itself; in rediscovering itself. (Singh, 2006)
The World Bank has also been enamoured by Shanghai’s economic success (Yusuf & Nabeshima, 2010). In 2004, it held a special conference for poverty reduction there in which World Bank officials praised the city as a model for the developing world.19 The conclusion they drew from Shanghai’s experience was that a highly interventionist state can achieve rapid economic growth. What is more, a highly interventionist state can act to distribute wealth more evenly. This assumption, as I will show, will be challenged on a number of grounds because just as China is becoming wealthy, it is also correspondingly, becoming more unequal. China’s ability to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) is another reason why the World
19 According to the Information Office of the State Council (2011), the poverty-stricken rural population decreased from 94.22 million at the end of 2000 to 26.88 million at the end of 2010.
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Bank is so converted. For years, it has been preaching to developing countries the need to reduce barriers to investment as a precondition for loans and economic aid. China, in the World Bank’s eyes has been a ‘good student’ in this regard. In 2010, total FDI in India was US $24.2 billion while China attracted US $185.10 billion with Shanghai taking a lion’s share of this total, attracting US $15 billion (Shanghai Daily, 2010).
While the Shanghai model of high level state intervention is praised the world over, it is a model that is nevertheless largely misunderstood. The message that Shanghai authorities want to convey to the world is: come and see our city, this is what more than a decade of double-digit growth looks like. Although there are voices questioning Shanghai’s development, they lack the solid data to back up their criticisms, and they have been drowned by the spectacle and hype of Shanghai (Greenspan, 2006). Economist Huang Yasheng, however, gives an alternative, if not challenging view of China. In his book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Huang (2008) questions whether Shanghai is a laissez-faire capitalist city, like Hong Kong. Huang’s analysis of China’s economic reforms is focused on two separate eras, the 1980s and the 1990s.
From Deng Xiaoping’s calls to open the economy in 1978 to the early 1990s, the CCP emphasised rural development with little interference from above. This resulted in the proliferation of small and medium-sized businesses, creating an enormous surge in employment and grassroots wealth. Deng created the Special Economic Zones (SEZs)20 such as Shenzhen and Xiamen along the coast, where there was little established industry and where the new companies that sprang up were almost entirely private. Enter the second phase of reforms, the 1990s, which has more or less continued into the present, and we witness a dramatic reversal of policy and slowing down of the initial gains made in the 1980s. Now, according to Huang, the policies concentrated on the big cities. Here, Huang argues, the government would play a more interventionist role, pouring money into showcase infrastructure and favouring large state-owned enterprises over small private-owned ones. Furthermore, regulatory regimes and tax structures implemented since the
20 In 1980, four SEZs were initially established, including the cities of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou in Guangdong province and the city of Xiamen in Fujian province. In 2010, the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang province was also designated a SEZ.
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1990s tended to privilege foreign investors over domestic businesses – a trend that reached its apogee in Shanghai. As Huang writes:
Shanghai is a window into China of the 1990s. The Shanghai model, formulated in the last five years of the 1990s, was a precursor to China’s anti-rural bias and repression of small-scale and labor- intensive entrepreneurship in the 1990s…its rapid GDP growth, rising skyscrapers, and construction boom: [suggest that] it might have been heavily subsidised by the rest of the country…Because of its privileged position in Chinese politics in the 1990s, Shanghai was able to amass a huge amount of financial resources supplied from the rest of the country…It is in this sense that the Shanghai model can be described as being built on a Potemkin foundation. (Huang, 2008, pp. 227-228).
Given this formula of elite-led development, it is unsurprising that many ordinary Shanghainese have failed to benefit from the city’s prosperity. As Huang (2008, pp. 190-192) has shown, employment actually contracted in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the government was fuelling the city’s development by requisitioning land from residents, paying them minimal compensation, and selling at above-market rates. From 1998 to 2002, 15 million square meters of old neighbourhoods were torn down and developed (Greenspan, 2006). Although many Shanghai residents felt the impact of this growth as a direct rise in living standards, moving from small single- room flats to two- or three-bedroom apartments, many concerns were raised as the process of relocation continued (Greenspan, 2006). As Duncan Hewitt (2008, pp. 44-45) observes:
Even among those who were willing to move if they could get a new home with better facilities not too far from the city centre, there were growing complaints that what they actually got were flats in cheaply built housing blocks, in new suburbs with little infrastructure, [and] up to two hours by bus from the downtown areas where they had lived.
Another disadvantaged group who have been excluded from this vision of Shanghai modernity are the rural-urban migrant workers. They are conspicuously absent from the dazzling images of the city’s skyline, pushed out of sight and out of consciousness, prompting one Hong Kong newspaper to conclude that the Shanghai model is based on no more than Potempkinism:
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Through sheer chutzpah and public relations guile, Shanghai's super- smooth politicians somehow dissuade foreign investors, leaders and even journalists from looking too closely at their fair city's facade ... Shanghai is arguably a Potemkin village on a massive scale. (Shanghai Star, 2003)
Layla Dawson’s descriptions of the architectural feats in Beijing and Shanghai also contrast the ‘hyper-modernity’ of these places with the social divide it is engendering:
There are blank sloping metal or stone walls without shop windows or any indication of human occupation, building entrances without footpaths, and blazed precipices overlooking roads choked with taxis, cars, buses and intrepid bikers… In the boiling heat of the summer the streets offer no protection from the sun. And, in freezing winter there is no protection from the wind. This is an environment only bearable when viewed from an executive penthouse or air-conditioned limousine. (Dawson, 2005, p.16)
So while the image of the city is a powerful tool and a major asset in the selling of places, it is also highly divisive (Ward, 1998). Images are constituted through discourse – such as city marketing campaigns, promotional brochures and tourism advertising – and through more concrete physical transformations of the urban built environment including urban redevelopment, preservation of historic sights and public works (Broudehoux, 2004). In all of these processes, an elite version of modernity is being chosen at the expense of the ‘messy’ urbanity that characterises urban life elsewhere. As Peter Hall (1998, p. 989) writes in the conclusion to his Cities in Civilization, the greatest cities were not ‘earthly utopias’ but more like:
[P]laces of stress and conflict and sometimes actual misery…places where the adrenalin pumps through the bodies of the people and through the streets on which they walk; messy places, sordid places sometimes, but places nevertheless superbly worth living in.
But even as scholars like Peter Hall advocate a more inclusive urban environment, representations of space by elites continue to dominate city planning. As Anne- Marie Broudehoux (2004, p. 26) has argued, the chosen final image is based not on local reality but is a stereotyped version of place that ‘reflects the aspirations of a powerful elite and the values, lifestyles, and expectations of potential investors and tourists.’ We should therefore always be wary of elite-backed projects to modernise the city because behind every unified image lie struggles between various groups and contestation over its use and design.
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Through the remodelling of Shanghai’s urban landscape, the party-state also desired to reconcile the seemingly opposed ideological and economic imperatives inherent in the official state policy of promoting a ‘socialist market economy’. As the CCP continued to serve as the basis for Communist morality, the new image would have to proclaim China’s confidence in its newfound prosperity and also to serve as a model for the development of a modern capitalist culture. The example of Shanghai therefore shows the struggle by the party-state to reconcile international demands for a market-friendly environment and internal pressures for a socially responsible leadership. It is the example par excellence of state-controlled capitalism in China.
Starting in the early 1990s, the Shanghai government initiated a series of ambitious development projects aimed at remaking the world image of the city. The prime example is the redevelopment of the Pudong area, but many more urban projects were earmarked for redevelopment (Dawson, 2005). Through the modernisation of infrastructure, the rationalisation of neighbourhoods and the construction of modern buildings, the state wanted to project the image of a modern, entrepreneurial metropolis and hoped in the process, that it would turn the citizenry into disciplined modern subjects. Like Baron Haussman in his drastic reordering of Paris in the 1870s (Pinkney, 1958), Chinese modernisers wanted to impose order and transparency on a recalcitrant population. We can therefore interpret these urban renewal projects as a strategy of indirect government – a way of inducing the population to follow modern interpretations of civility, morality, decency and cleanliness.
In the next section, I explain why Shanghai is a good place for conducting an investigation into civilising campaigns. If Shanghai had not been designated a priority, would it have received the same level of attention it currently receives? It must be remembered that China’s re-entry into the global arena after years of self- imposed exile under Mao was a carefully crafted political manoeuvre (Kluver, 1996). Shanghai’s rebirth similarly required the political backing of leaders for whom the city would represent China’s success and global aspirations.
Shanghai’s Re-birth
Shanghai was chosen as the site of this research for three reasons: first, because of its privileged position in the national modernisation agenda; second, because of its
40 highly mobile population; and third, because it holds a special place in the Western imagination, and Chinese authorities, in recognising this, were keen to capitalise on the link. These reasons will be discussed in turn below.
(I) Shanghai, the ‘Dragon Head’ of China
There have been numerous references to Shanghai being the new ‘dragon head’ (longtou) of China. Given its favourable location on the Yangtze River Delta, its geography presents ample opportunities for development of the region and beyond.21 This factor alone should have made the city the prime candidate for economic reforms when the country tentatively began to implement its Open Door policy in 1978. However, to the contrary, Shanghai remained as it was before, mired in ‘socialism’, its infrastructure in disrepair, its doors more or less closed to the outside. But all this changed in 1992, following Deng Xiaoping’s now famous ‘Southern Tour’ (nan xun) which also included Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Wuchang. From this time, Shanghai was finally allowed to embrace economic reforms.
The aim of this tour was to consolidate the economic reforms instituted over a decade earlier. In the wake of a post-1989 conservative backlash, the reforms were in danger of stalling. In one of his speeches during the tour, Deng urged cadres not to hesitate like ‘women with bound feet’, but to rigorously and steadfastly push forward with reforms. Deng also made a stop in Shanghai and formally blessed the reforms there. While in the city, Deng expressed his deep regret for not including Shanghai as one of the original SEZs in 1979:
In retrospect, one of my biggest mistakes was leaving out Shanghai when we launched the four special economic zones. If Shanghai had been included, the situation with regard to reform and opening in the Yangtze Delta, the entire Yangtze River Valley and, indeed, the whole country would be quite different (Deng, Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai, January 18- February 21, 1992)
Many speculated that the reason for neglecting Shanghai in the first phase of economic reforms in 1979 was that China’s leadership, comprised of veteran revolutionaries, still ‘remained deeply suspicious of Shanghai, believing its residents
21 In June 1990, the PRC government opened the Pudong New Area in Shanghai to overseas investment, and additional cities along the Yangtze River valley, with Shanghai's Pudong New Area as its ‘dragon head’ (longtou).
41 to be far too interested in foreign ideas to be given too much freedom’ (Hewitt, 2008, p. 40). Thus, for many living in the city, life largely remained largely unchanged:
Millions were living crammed into the city’s old neighbourhoods. Houses originally designed for a single family - and perhaps a servant or two - were often home to five or six families, each inhabiting one or two rooms, and sharing kitchen and bathrooms. The subdivision of Shanghai’s houses had begun back in the 1930s, when many people fled into the foreign concessions to escape the march of the Japanese armies across eastern China. The Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution too, brought further waves of inhabitants to be squeezed into the old neighbourhoods. Such close proximity bred strong bonds and friendships, but many tensions too - particularly since the decades of political movements often turned neighbour against neighbour. (Hewitt, 2008, p. 39).
From the memoirs and recollections of foreigners returning to or visiting the city for the first time since the end of the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai was still spectacular by Chinese standards, but it had remained untouched by the reforms that were rapidly transforming China’s SEZs and surrounding regions. For example, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom’s (2009, p. 117) recollections of Shanghai in the 1980s reveal that although there was some evidence of economic restructuring, such as the presence of small-scale private enterprises and some large joint venture projects, it was uncertain whether significant reforms would transform the urban economy and urban social relations:
[A]s late as 1986, Shanghai did not yet have many of the things associated with its current largely privatized and re-globalized incarnation. It had no stock market, no karaoke bars, no internet cafes22, public spaces dominated by advertisements for products rather than for political campaigns, or glossy magazines telling those with upscale aspirations how to decorate their homes and what to wear. It had no new-style gated communities (though many socialist housing developments had gates) made up of villas modelled on those of Western countries. There were no luxury apartment buildings or car dealerships.
Another reason explaining Shanghai’s political backing was that both Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji were former mayors of the city. During the next decade, under the leadership of what was to be known as the ‘Shanghai clique’, the city was to be
22 Jeffrey Wasserstrom should not be surprised that there were no internet bars in Shanghai in 1986 because the first one was opened in San Francisco in 1991.
42 turned into the China’s largest commercial centre. Once unleashed, the city’s economy immediately began growing at nine to fifteen percent annually, a rate it has maintained for the past 13 years. As Huang (2008) has reminded us, the Shanghai ‘miracle’ is no miracle at all, but a highly orchestrated effort with the political backing of those at the highest echelons of power. We should therefore not mistake the forests of towers that now punctuate the Shanghai skyline as the triumph of capitalism. Rather, the Shanghai story represents the successful project of state capitalism in China which seeks to impose a singular vision on the city. This vision has a depoliticising effect despite it being a highly political process.
Given that Shanghai features prominently in the modernising agenda of the central authorities, it is not unreasonable for the authorities to also seek to control human conduct in the process. The planning mentality is not limited to transformations of the urban built environment – it extends into the realm of discourse, for example, in the many ‘citizen handbooks’ that urge citizens to behave in a way that is commensurate with Shanghai’s image as a modern and aspiring global city, therefore putting the onus on the citizenry to self-govern their conduct.
The rationale that modern facilities and infrastructure will ‘induce’ a certain mode of behaviour underlines the strategies of the government in the civilising campaigns. For example, it is believed that with the building of modern infrastructure, people will refrain out of sheer embarrassment from breaching the norms of socially acceptable conduct. As Erving Goffman (1972) has argued, the urban landscape provides the stage upon which people ‘act’ out their roles and perform civilities. This is by no means ‘false’ or pretentious, but is seen as ‘necessary’ by Goffman (1972) in lubricating social exchange so that interactions between people are achieved with a minimum of fuss and at the lowest possible cost.
However, as Richard Sennett (1977) has argued, sometimes, urban design can conspire to produce un-social individuals. The concentration of public housing in densely populated urban areas for example, can produce ghettos and encourage anti- social behaviour. As observed by Michel Foucault (1979), the new city, with all its modern trappings, is also a city of surveillance, where nothing can be hidden from public scrutiny. He reminds us:
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We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. (Foucault, 1979, pp. 216-217)
Modernist architects and planners believe that they can change society by transforming the urban environment (Boyer, 1994). Chinese authorities similarly use architecture and urbanism to engineer social relations so as to impose their modernist values on society. They are convinced that the creation of a perfectly ordered and spatially disciplined city will produce a more ‘civilised’ and progressive society. To the Chinese government, modern urban design and architecture represent visual markers of progress and civility and become the yardsticks of modernity which are essential for their recognition as an advanced nation.
(II) Shanghai, the Mobile Society
Largely absent from the glitzy image of Shanghai are the rural migrants who provide the human fuel for the city’s astronomical rise. Rural migrants are absent or denied representation because their presence, while necessary, is seen as blight by the social planners and architects. To them, the image of the rural migrant is a contradiction to the dominant image of the city as a transparent, legible and controllable space. Since 1978, the number of rural migrants to Shanghai has constantly increased. In 1981, the number of rural migrants in Shanghai was only 0.26 million, by 1986 the number rose to 1.55 million, and by the 1990s it exceeded 2.6 million, representing a tenfold increase in over a decade (Wang, et al., 2002, pp. 523-524). Such a large and unprecedented flow of people has significantly altered the population and demographics of the city and has serious social and political implications (Smith, 1996; Solinger, 1999).
Between the 1950s and early 1980s, migration was under tight government control. The most important mechanism of control was the hukou system of household registration (Cheng & Selden, 1994). Under this system, everyone had to register according to their place of residence. Furthermore, the type of registration was differentiated along the lines of ‘agricultural’ versus ‘non-agricultural’ status. Recently, the Chinese government has relaxed restrictions on population mobility in order to facilitate growth by allowing migrants temporary residency. However, the Shanghainese government has also begun to make internal differentiation between
44 migrants with skills and money and those without. From 1993 onwards, skilled and qualified migrants could obtain a blue hukou card (lanyin hukou) which was replaced with a full residence permit in 2002. Population migration control in Shanghai has therefore helped to produce two forms of inequality, one that distinguishes between citizens and rural migrants, and the other that distinguishes between migrants with skills and capacities and those without. This migration control practice has inevitably led to the formation of two societies under the same system.
In Chapter Seven, I explore in more detail how the divisive practices of the hukou registration system have produced multilayered definitions of what it means to be a ‘New Shanghainese’ in the city. For now, I make the general argument that ‘civilised modernity’ in Shanghai necessitates that an uncivilised ‘Other’ be created or ‘found’ so as to give the campaigns an objective goal. The corporeality of incivility is projected onto the body of the rural migrant, in their perceived and constructed ‘un-civilised’ habits and their physical demeanour. The spectre of the rural is a stark reminder of what Chinese society used to be before the reforms took off and a dangerous warning of the kind of fate that awaits those who fall behind in society.
The civilising of people left behind by the reforms is an attempt by the state to enhance the city’s image but it is also about disciplining the labour force (which is predominantly comprised of migrants) so as to get maximum returns from them. In the late 1990s, a campaign in the name of civility was conducted that targeted the ‘window services’, i.e. those employees who engaged face-to-face with customers (Shanghai Spiritual Civilisation Construction Committee, 1997). There was widespread complaint that the employees in this sector, who were mainly women migrants, were inadequately trained, rude and ill-equipped. But the identification of this specific group as ‘the un-civilised’ ignores the startling inequalities and poor working conditions of many of these migrants. Instead of improving working conditions and wages, the solution has been to place the onus on migrants to self- improve. In this context, the civilising campaigns serve as an instrument of social control, a means of popular pacification and a tool of state legitimation: the state is needed to raise the quality of these presumed ‘lower-level’ citizens whose presence is an example of the need for continued state interference.
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(III) The West’s Love-Affair with Shanghai
A third reason why the civilising campaigns in Shanghai merit attention is because of the West’s fascination with the city. This ‘love-affair’ with Shanghai reflects a romantic nostalgia for pre-modern, colonial times, when Europe ruled and the East was exotic. There is a willingness to search for the past in the present. Hence, when Westerners write about or reflect upon Shanghai’s past, they are projecting an image upon the city, redefining what it was and unknowingly influencing what it can become (Dong, 2001). Authorities are acutely aware of the cultural capital23 of the city, and when conducting large-scale refurbishments of the city’s famous colonial façades, they are keen to preserve what remains of the past, and even recreate it sometimes. Shanghai is now being revitalised to match its present opulent sophistication with its now mythic origins. The city’s conspicuous development combines super-modernity with a deep sense of nostalgia. This is evident in projects such as the Xintiandi redevelopment, an uptown part of Shanghai, where traditional shikumen architecture (stone tenement housing that is unique to Shanghai) is being transformed into expensive restaurants, up-market cafés and fashionable boutiques. Shanghai’s past is now a valuable asset which enables authorities to make the city a global financial centre and a true world city; the presence of the past legitimates this effort, providing evidence that Shanghai’s global aspirations are nothing new.
The past is also a source of shame for the Chinese government, whose claim to legitimacy is based on its role in the perceived ‘liberation’ of Shanghai from colonial powers. In a typical retelling of Shanghai’s past, negative phenomena such as ‘gambling dens, opium smoking, brothels, and human trafficking’ are juxtaposed against the city’s perceived positive attributes, such as the adventurist and pioneering spirit of its inhabitants (Shanghai Spiritual Civilisation Construction Office, 2005, pp. 2-3). In truth, the city was also a haven for political dissidents, refugees and liberal thinkers. According to the Shanghai government, the first National Congress of the CCP occurred at number 76-78 Xingye Road in Shanghai which is now under state protection and is often frequented by tourists (www.shanghai.gov.cn).
23 Cultural capital is a sociological concept that has gained prominence since it was first introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1986). While Bourdieu spoke of cultural capital in the context of individual attainment of skills, knowledge, education and other social advantages that can give a person a higher status in society, this does not mean that is limited to the individual alone. Cultural capital can be extended to the collective such as a community such that we can refer to the ‘cultural capital’ of a city or town. These are the non-financial assets that might promote the city beyond its economic means.
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Since its humiliating encounters with Western and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, modern China has been self-conscious about its position in the world and deeply preoccupied with its image. Contemporary efforts to re- construct Shanghai should be placed in the context of a tradition of Chinese concern for public recognition and personal prestige – a concept that is found in the sociological term of ‘face’. The concept of face provides insights into the widespread preoccupation with self-perception and a deep concern for outside opinion which has long characterised Chinese society.
The term mianzi, which means ‘face’ in English, actually connotes a much wider range of meanings than ‘face’ suggests. Mianzi can mean ‘reputation’ or ‘prestige’ and refers to a kind of public recognition ‘that comes from knowing one’s status and reflects concern with the congruency between one’s performance or appearance and one’s real worth’ (Huang, 1987). Like most forms of social prestige, it is greatly defined by how one is judged by others.
The concept of face can be extended from the individual to the collective and even to the level of the nation-state. This interpretation of face is essential for explaining the importance given to image and world recognition in contemporary China. As Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 258) has argued,
The desire to be recognised as responsible agents whose wishes… hopes and opinions ‘matter’, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic, [and] modern state [are universal]. The one aim is to be noticed: it is a search for an identity, and a demand that the identity be publicly acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as ‘being somebody in the world.’
Global recognition of Shanghai as a world player would therefore greatly enhance the prestige of the nation as a whole. It would also help in redefining Chinese identity in the twenty-first century.
I next comment on some of the general challenges of doing fieldwork in China and those issues that were specific to doing fieldwork in Shanghai. In the following section, I tack between the macro-level of state discourses that have informed the civilising project in China and the micro-level of the community and the individual. I argue throughout that one of the unintended consequences of the reforms has been their unpredictability. While the authorities want to limit the information flow to
47 benefit the economy and society in prescribed ways, reforms have also lent support to an ‘unofficial’ culture. Although this culture is not necessarily anti-state, it offers a critical outlet for the effective channelling of alternative views and opinions. In my research, it becomes quite clear that the objection to civilising campaigns is not so much their content as the methods of inculcation as well as questions pertaining to funding, effectiveness and participation.
Problems of Fieldwork in China
Although China has re-opened its doors to international exchange and trade, it is still a closed polity. By ‘closed’, I do not mean that a ‘culture of fear’ (Yang, 1994) exists, even though the threat of coercion or retribution still lingers. What I mean is that while the socialist surveillance methods and social control measures have withered significantly, they have not completely disappeared. Instead, there is positive pressure to conform and a reticence to speak on sensitive topics informed by ‘historical lessons’ and the negative experiences of others – real or imagined. The consequences were that oftentimes, I could not ask questions directly and I only received deflected vague responses when I attempted to do so. In other words, interviewees liked to speak on subjects that interested them and that were often only slightly related to my research concerns. This was both frustrating and illuminating. It forced me to think how the research could be redesigned to better reflect the concerns of citizens and the issues that most affected them. It was sometimes frustrating because it meant a waste of time and resources. China scholars who have been engaged in fieldwork research such as Mayfair Hui-Yang (1994), generally agree that three factors have the most impact on the outcome of research: the predominance of the party-state, the question of access, and the issue of collaboration (Heimer & Thøgersen, 2006, pp. 12-16). These factors have also had a bearing on my own research. Below, I discuss them in turn.
The Party-State
It is no exaggeration to say that the presence of the party-state poses the biggest challenge to research and fieldwork in China. There are two main dimensions to this claim: the first is direct political-ideological control and the second is the influence of Party discourses in everyday life (Heimer & Thøgersen, 2006). Here, I am not only referring to the publicly known, downright ‘no-go’ topics such as the political
48 status of Tibet or corruption within the highest ranks of the Party. Instead, the ‘hush- hush’ culture, which is equivalent to a culture of avoidance, persists for the simple fact that no rules are made explicit as to what is acceptable as opposed to what is unacceptable. For many scholars, officials and ordinary people this manifests itself in the practice of self-censorship. Since the limitations on what is deemed acceptable are always shifting and changing, self-censorship is one of the main coping strategies. This and other strategies of self-protection seem wise and prudent given the low tolerance for political and social dissent. Frustrating as it may be for the researcher, this method of social control is very effective. Perry Link (1992, pp. 177-178) identified ‘vagueness in the definition of misbehaviour and in the punishment for it… If most Chinese can’t know where the border lies between safety and punishment, at least they know that the farther they are from it, the safer they will be.’ A more current, albeit satirical, view of the situation is presented in the influential blog of Han Han, a successful post-1980s author and web celebrity made famous by his candid and insightful social commentary:
Dear leaders, dear teachers, dear students, how are you doing? ... We have too many restrictions. This is a restricted country. How can a restricted country produce a rich and abundant culture? I am a comrade who has very few restrictions. But when I write, I cannot help but think: I can't write about the police, I can't write about the leaders, I can't write about government policies, I can't write about the system, I can't write about the judiciary, I can't write about many pieces of history, I cannot write about Tibet, I cannot write about Xinjiang, I cannot write about mass assemblies, I cannot write about demonstration marches, I cannot write about pornography, I cannot write about censorship, I cannot write about art ... I am unable to write anything elegant …24
Fortunately, as researchers, there are strategies for avoiding ‘walking in the footsteps of the Chinese Communist Party’ (Hansen, 2006, p. 81). Thanks to the development of new technologies and the relatively open climate which reforms have facilitated, a ‘dual-discourse universe’ exists in China (He, 2009). One is the official line, ‘which is characterised by vagueness, abstractness, ambiguity, and indoctrination’ found in
24 Han Han made these remarks in his speech at Xiamen University earlier in 2011. The translated version of his speech can be accessed via the EastSouthWestNorth blog entitled ‘Han Han’s speech at Xiamen University: ‘The so-called Grand Cultural Nation’ website available at: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/201002a.brief.htm#004.
49 the mouthpieces of the Party media. The other is the private discourse of individuals, ‘characterized by non-hegemonic expressions ranging from radical nationalism to liberalism, materialism, and extreme cynicism’ which has been aided by the development of new technology platforms like the internet and SMS messaging (Ibid., pp. 44-45).
There are a number of other alternative sources of information to overcome the ‘immediate risk of getting stuck in official interpretations of Chinese social reality as formulated in the general political discourse’ (Heimer & Thøgersen, 2006, p. 13). In my case, they included critical articles in scholarly journals and ‘guerilla interviews’ whenever the opportunity arose. The latter ranged from talking to the local greengrocer to chats with the live-in nanny (baomu) about how these campaigns personally affected them, if at all, and what dimensions they thought important. The internet has also become a popular forum for contextualising the findings and for comparing official data with public opinion. Of course the problem with the internet is the sense of a ‘lack of mediation’ of what is being posted so these postings must always be checked against well researched articles on the same subject.
Having established that the party-state poses a formidable challenge, it is also important to recognise that understanding how the state operates and the ways in which it construes and orders reality is also important. Just because the state’s role is powerful in constructing discourse and in defining what topics informants can and cannot talk about, does not mean that the subject is irrelevant. In fact, many officially sanctioned discourses have fed into the personal narratives of ordinary Chinese. How ordinary people interact with prescriptions to civilise themselves, and how they in turn employ these same discourses to judge others and position themselves and others in the order of things, show the strength and limitations of state discourse.
Accessing the Field: Challenges
Besides the challenge of the party-state is the issue of access, which still needs to be negotiated on a case by case basis. Scholars who have engaged with China throughout the course of its ‘opening and reforms’ (gaige kaifang) admit that the reasons for limited access have changed. When China first opened to the world in the early 1980s, Chinese scholars were under closer scrutiny and surveillance and
50 were more deeply embedded in the country than they are today. These days, fieldwork tends to be short-term, and while the obstacle of close surveillance is removed, it does not mean that the challenge of access is overcome. Decentralisation in the tertiary education sector means that while a foreign researcher may be received and accommodated for the duration of fieldwork, affiliation with these institutions may mean no more than ‘fixing an invitation for the purpose of getting a research visa’ (Ibid., p. 14). This does not mean that the research contributions of foreign scholars is viewed as being of no value – it just means that due to the restructuring in the tertiary education sector, the projects of foreign researchers may be of less use to the host institutions or locality than local research on what are perceived to be more pertinent issues.
My supervisor at my host university remarked to me on many occasions, why on earth was I interested in civilising campaigns? Why not research the problem of the ageing population, or the lack of social services in China, or youth delinquency or anything else within the ‘problem-solution’ research framework? First, civilising campaigns were not seen to be addressing any inherent problems in Chinese society; therefore no solutions could possibly be proposed. So, where is the inherent value in this type of research? My reply at the time was that this research interest arose out of simple curiosity and chance, and does not come from a tradition that seeks to ‘cure China’s problems’. This is the tradition which seems to be the ‘shoulder of responsibility’ taken up by Chinese researchers. Gloria Davies’ (2007) work on the nature of critical intellectual discourse might help us better appreciate the discrepancy between the nature of critical inquiry in China and the Anglophone Chinese Studies tradition. According to Davies (Ibid.), patriotic worrying (youhuan), although it has evolved as a result of interaction with Euro-American vocabularies, still persists as a moral imperative for Chinese intellectuals engaged in critical inquiry. Therefore,
As a praxis, worrying about China carries the moral obligation of first identifying and then solving perceived Chinese problems (Zhongguo wenti), whether social, political, cultural, historical, or economic, in relation to the unified public cause of achieving China’s national perfection. This moral obligation resonates powerfully in the writings of many Chinese intellectuals, and it is strikingly discordant with the decidedly non- nationalistic tenor of self-reflexive Euro-American critical enquiry. (Davies, 2007, p. 7)
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Youhuan or ‘patriotic worrying’ also underscores the civilising discourse of those charged with carrying out the campaign’s goals. To the party-state and to an extent, the greater population, it is perfectly natural to desire progress through self- improvement and even if these are externally imposed, so long as the end is their progress, then it is justified. However, because of the nature of patriotic worrying in China, this moral obligation is particularly vulnerable to the pressures exerted by an authoritarian state (Ibid.). Complicating matters is that many intellectuals are both ‘intellectual’ and ‘official.’ In Maoist language, the Party has found a way to incorporate the contradiction between ‘expert’ and ‘red’ into a complex system of formal and informal controls. Inadvertently, in the process of debating the value of my research, the very subject of what is valuable and what is not came to constitute the data that make up part of this research. Civility campaigns are valuable in so far as they impose a unifying and totalising vision on what is a chaotic and messy urban landscape. In doing so, they reveal the structure of power at work and the inequality in assumptions made about who and what is regarded as civilised as opposed to uncivilised.
Collaboration in Fieldwork: Assistants and Informants
The final obstacle to fieldwork is the problem of collaboration. Most types of research in China rest on the researcher’s network of contacts. This also affects the type of access one receives. Good research depends on the quality of the relationship maintained with contacts. Through my contacts established with my host university, East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) in Shanghai, I was able to access community organisations that were charged with carrying out etiquette campaigns at the grassroots. These included the district neighbourhood committee, the district level Women’s Federation (Fulian), and the community-level cultural and leisure centres. While campaign organisers were keen to tell a foreigner of the lengths the city was going to improve public etiquette, ordinary people were not so enthusiastic. They liked to steer the conversation to the problems and hassles changes have brought to their lives and it seemed they often feel safe talking to a foreigner whom they believed had no stakes in their society.
When informants were reticent to comment on the subject of civilising campaigns and interviews has been less than fruitful, I had to persist through everyday
52 interaction in order to gain people’s trust and overcome the initial awkwardness of our first encounters. Sometimes a shared meal or a business exchange, like asking the bicycle repairman to patch up a burst tyre, would be a precursor to much deeper interaction and more meaningful conversation. Of course, this raises the ethical question of whether the researcher is ‘exploiting’ the informant for purely selfish gains. I argue that while this is a pertinent question in ethnographical research in general, I got the sense that rural migrants were more than happy to have their voices and opinions documented as part of this research because as one person remarked to me, he felt ‘invisible’ in Shanghai and had not been able to befriend a single Shanghainese after seven years of living and working in the city.
For the purposes of privacy and to protect my informants’ identity, I have used pseudonyms. However, where opinions come from representatives of official state organs like the Women’s Federation, these will be acknowledged for the simple fact that these organisations are the gatekeepers and disseminators of official discourse.
Sources of Data and Methods of Data Collection
If we are to believe the variant of modernisation theory that posits that one consequence of modernisation is decreasing reliance on face-to-face, particularistic relationships (e.g. Giddens, 1990), then we would think the same effect would be playing out in China. However, based on my own fieldwork experience, this could not be further from the truth. It is very hard, if not impossible, to conduct fieldwork in China without having the necessary networks or contacts in place. From the very outset, I had to be introduced as a ‘known quantity’ before I could have access to the ‘field’. With the official backing of the School of Social Work and Public Administration at ECUST, I was able to conduct official interviews. Having said this, while I did not need to produce official documentation to access the views of local residents, the walls in Shanghai society were nevertheless considerable if I could not show that I was somehow connected to it in some way. To highlight, I was often introduced by my colleagues as ‘Dr Thao Nguyen’ (Nguyen Boshi), to my great discomfort. I later realised that for status-conscious sections of Shanghai society, it helps to enhance one’s credentials; educational credentials are a source of esteem, and further, are reassuring to strangers. Once introduced as a friend and ‘educated’ person, I could easily enter into conversations and follow leads on my own. As in
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Gos Gamble’s (2003) ethnography of Shanghai, I relied heavily on guanxi or informal networks for access to informants outside those allocated by ECUST and the party-state. In her seminal work on guanxi, Mayfair Yang (1994, p. 6) defines this practice as involving:
[T]he exchange of gifts, favors, and banquets: the cultivation of personal relationships and networks of mutual dependence; and the manufacturing of obligation and indebtedness. What informs these practices and their native descriptions is the conception of the primacy and binding power of personal relationships and their importance in meeting the needs and desires of everyday life.
But while the advantage of building rapport in this way meant that once I had ‘broken into’ the right network, the potential to unearth a wealth of data was great, the disadvantage of course was that if I did not have the social capital25, I could be effectively shut out from other potentially informative networks.
The fact that I was officially enrolled as a language student at ECUST meant that the means of access to informants was through ‘tongxue’26 (schoolmates). From these formal links, informal ties were generated and the power of tongxue connections proved very helpful. I was surprised at the level of access I had based on what were very tenuous links. For me, tongxue is a form of ‘guanxi’ or personal network of reciprocal relationships cultivated during the course of my stay in Shanghai. For example, direct contacts may not have the information I was after but could introduce me to those who might be better positioned to provide insight on the problem.
While Chinese disagreed about the effectiveness of civilising campaigns and argued over the methods for inculcating ‘civilised’ habits, they generally agreed that a unified standard of social conduct was needed. A key Chinese conceptualisation in
25 Social capital is another key term introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. He defines it as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 249) 26 Tongxue literally means ‘same school’ but it also extends to people who share the same class, same teacher, or supervisor. The prefix ‘tong’ when applied to ‘xiang’ (township, village) means those who come from the same native place. In China, the cultural and social obligation to schoolmates and compatriots from the same native place is strong, meaning that ties of mutual obligation will extend to those who share these common networks. In business ventures, one will find that people will likely choose those with whom they share a link as ‘tongxue’ or ‘tongxiang’.
54 the civilisation discourse involved how ‘to be a person’ (zuoren) 28 . To Party ideologues, the ‘civilised’ (wenming) is the domain of social standards: of truth, beauty and goodness. It is believed, as official reasoning goes, that only under socialism will these standards be refined to the highest levels of sophistication (Yu, 1983). The ‘spiritual’ (jingshen) underscores the ‘material’ (wuzhi), the other necessary half of the discursive whole. Thus, only when members of the society exhibit ideal standards in every aspect of their being will society be deemed to have achieved ‘spiritual civilisation’ (jingshen wenming). But to ordinary people, to be civilised was to be a person, a basic requisite of living and interacting in the society. Specifically, people asked what a civilised individual would want, desire or pursue and what standards they adhered to or were ethically obliged to embrace in order to realise these. They in turn self-reflected on what a civilised person would need to know in order to obtain what was properly desired. The questions they posed and the responses I received pertained to the domain of ideals.
In all, I conducted 50 formal interviews with officials as well as ordinary citizens. However, I found that the most rewarding and candid responses came from unstructured interviews. I conducted over 100 of these and found that observation and interaction with the everyday provided significant research data. Apart from this, I also turned to the media for information. Shanghai is a highly literate and media- saturated society. People’s understandings of themselves and their societies were influenced and informed by both their personal interactions and information from the print and electronic media. While official media outlets were effectively ‘mouthpieces’ of the Party, the explosion of the internet and mobile phone technology has aided the proliferation of a ‘virtual sphere’ where ‘netizens’ continuously wage a protracted war to remain one step ahead of the censors and the ‘Great Firewall’ of China (Anon., 2006). Although people do not believe everything they saw or heard on TV, the increasingly sophisticated reporting meant that sometimes it was difficult for them to disentangle themselves from official discourse and people found it hard to express opinion independent of the press.
28 In May 2008, I visited a community program run by the Women’s Federation in Putuo District. The program enlisted the help of volunteer teachers (retired teachers) who would teach civic values to their class. I talked to one teacher; a retired university professor, who now spends his time between looking after his grandchild and teaching at the community hall. He said to me that the Chinese character, person or ‘ren’, says a lot about how Chinese people should behave. The pictograph is that of an ‘upright person’ and that to be a ‘person’, one had to uphold the values of honesty, conduct oneself with respect and dignity. To him, to be ‘civilised’ was to be a ‘person.’
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Another source of valuable information came from internal documents and booklets not distributed to the public. Through the course of fieldwork, I was given instructional booklets and how-to manuals that were designed to ‘instruct the teacher’ on how to impart knowledge on civilised conduct. For example, I was given a work- in-progress report by an employee at the CCCPE on the meaning of ‘environmental civilisation’ (zhengtai wenming). 29 The Shanghai Municipal level Women’s Federation also gave me a variety of evaluative reports dating back to 2006 when the civility campaigns began in anticipation of the World Expo (Shanghai Small Leadership Group, Education Reference for the ‘Million Families Learn Etiquette’ Program, 2006). These pedagogical texts are important because they reveal not only the techniques used to inculcate civilised standards of behaviour in the citizenry but also the embedded disciplinary logic to keep the party rank-and-file in line. Complementing this are the series of ‘compliance’ measures in place to ensure that the Party’s ‘foot soldiers’ diligently carry out tasks set out from above.
Having discussed the trials and tribulations of fieldwork and the attendant issues and challenges, in the next chapter, I explore the concept of wenming, or civility, as it is commonly rendered in English. I argue that wenming is closely aligned with state conceptualisations of quality (suzhi), with potentially wide ranging implications. One of the outcomes of this debate has been its consequences for understanding citizenship in China. I maintain that standards of civility have perpetuated exclusive categories of citizenship rather than expanding the boundaries of urban membership.
29 In oder to protect the identity of the author, I will not provide their name.
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Chapter Three
‘Civilised Modernity’ and the Chinese Experience in Historical Perspective
The original is unfaithful to the translation
- Jorge Luis Borges Quoted in (Kristal, 2002)
The act of translation is not usually a straightforward process of rendering one word into another. Rather, as noted by Lydia Liu (1995), the translingual production of meaning entails political struggles and power relations. Liu uses the concept of ‘translingual practice’ instead of ‘translation’ to emphasise that non-lingual practices such as political struggles for power are intimately related to this meaning-making process. This chapter examines the ways in which ‘civility’ has been associated with discourses of progress and its centrality to Chinese understandings of modernity. It does so through tracing the processes by which wenming, which is commonly rendered as ‘civility’, ‘civilised’ and ‘civilisation’ in English, becomes a political and social discourse with wide-ranging ramifications for categories of citizenship and ‘quality’ (suzhi) in a rapidly changing and globalised China. Because wenming has been so persistently associated with discourses of progress and China’s place in the modern world, I will render wenming in this context as ‘civilised modernity.’
Any discussion of wenming in the contemporary Chinese context will have to deal with the issue of its English equivalence. In terms of how ideas ‘travel’ from one place to another, I will argue that this is never an unproblematic process. Although ‘civilisation’ discourse developed in the nineteenth century as an integral part of the European colonising project, this does not mean that ideas about ‘civilisation’ were ‘transplanted’ unproblematically into the native language and cultural setting of the host country/environment. A central part of Lydia Liu’s (1995) work was to deconstruct the binary of domination-resistance as it related to modernity in the Chinese context. At various times during China’s search for a form of political modernity, nationalists of various political leanings have used discourses of progress,
57 both as a means to resist foreign domination and as self-critique of Chinese society. The adoption of ‘civilisation’ discourse by early modernisers as a means to locate Chinese modernity within the larger hierarchy of nation-states was a process involving more than the act of translation.
This chapter will be organised as follows. The first section will examine Europe’s colonial and ‘civilising’ imperative in the late nineteenth century, particularly its role in the subjugation of ‘other’ peoples and cultures and the legitimation discourses of colonial expansion in Asia. The second section will explore the emergence of wenming with reference to the historical context within which it emerged, and the desire by early modernisers to cultivate the ‘quality’ person and its centrality to reimagining Chinese modernity. The third section explores the role of wenming as expressed through notions of ‘suzhi’ in contemporary political discourse and its multiple manifestations across time (1979-present), especially the shift from being perceived as an ideological instrument to being largely accepted and internalised as a value system for measuring the personal progress of individuals in the modernisation of the nation-state.
Europe, Civilisation and China
This concept [civilisation] expresses the self-conscious[ness] of the West. One could even say: the national consciousness. It sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or “more primitive” contemporary ones. By this term Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world, and much more.
-Norbert Elias (1978, pp. 3-4).
It is difficult to begin to define ‘civilisation’ without acknowledging that this concept provided the self-reference against which ‘the West’ defined its superiority vis-à-vis less developed ‘Others’. Of course, as Elias (Ibid.) pointed out, ‘the West’ is not a homogenous geographical or political community, but when it came to defining what Europe was, it was nevertheless convenient to overlook these differences. Europe’s imperial and colonial expansion into Asia provided a compelling reason to downplay the continent’s heterogeneity in favour of the perceived common assumption of European civilisational superiority. The industrialisation of Europe, the rise of
58 liberal thinking and the rationalisation of power meant that imperialism needed legitimation beyond the search for resources, the expansion of markets and increase of profits. In other words, the activities and politics that constituted imperialism needed to be construed not as exploitation but as benefiting the native population (even if only the intermediaries and compradors).
For liberal thinkers and colonial administrators in the nineteenth century, Asia was seen to have no equivalent concept of ‘the modern’. In order to be propelled into the course of history and ‘be counted’, therefore, it must submit to the civilising discourses of imperialism. J.S. Mill ([1859] 1985, p. 136), for example, equates ‘improvement’ with ‘liberty’ and the common enemy of both as ‘custom’, which seems to have befallen most, if not all, of the ‘East’:
The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals. The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East.
Mill (Ibid., p. 137) further elucidates using the example of China as a ‘warning example’ of what would happen if Western societies became complacent. China was perceived by Mill (Ibid.) to be a civilisation that had lost its glory, trapped in cultural inertia and therefore incapable of improving on its own:
We have a warning example in China – a nation of much talent and, in some respects, even wisdom … Surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness and must have kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the contrary, they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners.
This view seems to be common to both European colonial administrators and the missionaries who sought to convert Chinese to Christianity. Although the published
59 works of missionaries in China strove to faithfully document Chinese way of life in a ‘neutral’ way and the missionaries themselves sought to ‘blend in’ with ‘the natives’, the self-referent was still Europe. Against European notions of progress, the ‘quaint’, ‘backward’ and ‘unexplained’ aspects of life in China betray a bias for which we now have a term: Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’.30 Williams Wells’ (1965 [1812- 1884]) documentation of the practice of night soil collecting is a good example: a seemingly neutral description, nodding to the benefits of a labour-intensive practice, simultaneously denigrates it as both noxious and absent of ‘science’. Wells (1965 [1812-1884], p. 8) observes:
The preparation of manure from night soil, by mixing it with earth and drying it into cakes, furnishes employment to multitudes [of people who] transport at all hours their noisome loads through the narrow city streets. Tanks are dug by the wayside, pails are placed in the streets and retiring stalls opened among the dwellings, whose contents are carried away in boats and buckets; but it is a small compensation for this constant pollution of the sweet breath of heaven to know that the avails are to be… brought to market. Science may yet ascertain how the benefits of this necessary work can be obtained without its disgusting exposure among the Chinese.
Missionary documentation of Chinese life and society was a regular staple of the literate public outside China and an important source of information for expatriate Europeans living in China. It also provided the materials with which the Chinese examined and critiqued themselves. Many Western classics were introduced to China via Japanese translation and it was through this route that many new concepts were consciously adopted while old ones acquired whole new meanings. As I will explain in the next section, the concept of wenming also re-entered Chinese discourse via this route. However, as I emphasised at the beginning of the chapter, translation is only the starting point of a complex process of meaning making: in the course of its evolution in China, wenming has acquired meanings that are quite different from those in the West.
30 In Said’s (1978) book Orientalism the author uses the term ‘Occident’ to refer to the West and the ‘Orient’ as a term for the misunderstood Middle and Far East. Central to Said’s argument is that through studies of ‘the Orient’, the West came to view itself as superior. The ‘Orient’ therefore constitutes the very notion of ‘the West’. Said’s work has helped to problematise the very ideas of ‘the West’ and ‘the Orient.’
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Early Modernity and the Discourse of Lack
Before the outbreak of World War II, many promising young Chinese were sent or went to Japan to acquire the knowledge and skills that would contribute to the modernisation of China. A great number of modern Chinese words, including ‘citizen’, ‘factory’, ‘proletarian’, and ‘cadre’, to name but a few, were coined by Japanese modernisers (Liu, 1995, see Appendices). The modern two-syllable word for ‘civilisation’, wenhua, was first coined by Meiji modernisers in the late nineteenth century from translated European works of sociology. The Japanese pronunciation, bunka combined the Chinese characters (kanji) for ‘script’ (wen) and ‘transformation’ (hua). The Chinese word for ‘cultivated’, ‘enlightened’ or ‘civilised’ (wenming) literally means ‘written language’ (wen) and ‘clear’ or ‘bright’ (ming). Thus, the Chinese words for ‘civilisation’ (wenhua) and ‘civil’ (wenming) connote education and literacy. In twenty-first century China, the link between education and civilisation is even stronger because to be ‘civilised’ (you wenhua) also means to be ‘transformed by writing.’
In Europe, an important mark of civilisation was that adults exhibit controlled, routinised behavior. Self-control was contrasted to spontaneous outbursts of behavior that were perceived to characterise peasants and children. Although every society has manners or courtesies, especially ways for dealing with ‘the stranger’, the urbanisation and modernisation of Europe accelerated the spread of ‘ritual competencies’ for dealing with strangers much faster than other societies. According to Elias (1978), European courtesies became routinised, first spreading among upwardly mobile urban males, then to women and much later to children. The word ‘courtesy’ comes from the ‘courtly’ behavior in the court of the French King (Ibid.). The word ‘etiquette’ comes from the French word for ‘ticket’, which was a list of polite phrases for courtiers and diplomats. The spread of simplified courtesies came at around the time of the late Middle Ages when people were increasingly exposed to strangers in independent cities. The critical point, however, came in the early sixteenth century with Erasmus’ publication of a guidebook, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (On Civility in Children), which for the first time, targeted the general population (Elias, 1978).
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China also had manners and ways for dealing with ‘the stranger.’ Ancient rites (li) that were performed to regulate the universe, ensure social stability and prevent conflict. The Chinese word for courtesy (limao) dates back to at least 300 BCE and to the philosopher Mencius. However, unlike Europe which separated courtesy from morality, under Chinese li, rites and courtesy encompassed both politeness and moral obligation (Creel, 1953, p. 32). Scholar-officials and clan leaders were seen as moral leaders. This differed significantly from religious models in Europe, which elevated Jesus, the saints and the clergy as moral exemplars and enforcers. Further, courtesies varied according to rank and position in the Confucian ‘five relationships’ (wu lun): ruler-ruled, father-son, husband-wife, elder brother-younger brother, and friend- friend. Except for the last relationship, all four relationships required one party to defer to another (Li, 1967). Deference toward male elders and superiors was central to Confucian society and individual behavior was not emphasised while relations with strangers barely merited mention. According to this society, one gained ‘face’ (mianzi) by maintaining harmonious relations with one’s superiors. Courtesy did not extend to strangers or inferiors.
This is also reflected in the saying ‘nei wai you bie’ (one treats insiders and outsiders differently). Even now, strangers are assessed before they are afforded basic courtesy – a practice that can make transient encounters difficult. Bo Yang (1985), a mainland writer who fled to Taiwan after 1949, calls this rudeness to strangers a ‘Chinese disease’. In one of his controversial publications, The Ugly Chinaman, Bo (Ibid., p. 51) explains this differentiation between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’:
Chinese people have to have a specific social relationship – such as friend – before they have humane feelings. Toward strangers, we not only have no feeling, sometimes we are downright cold-blooded.
Bo’s comments landed him in trouble, both in Taiwan and on the mainland, where he was criticised for ‘selling out’ his ‘Chineseness’. However controversial his views were, Bo’s writings nevertheless struck a chord with many Chinese. So while outside observers may see etiquette campaigns as something of a farce and adopt a cynical attitude, for Chinese, Bo’s comments marks a major turning point in the realignment of social relations. In her book, political scientist Anne-Marie Brady (2003, p. 26) discusses President Sun Yat-sen’s 1924 foundational speech, ‘The Three People’s Principles’, where he criticised the Chinese people for their lack of
62 concern for manners and personal grooming, earning them the disdain of foreigners. As Ruth Rogaski (2004) explained, leaders of the new republic in the early twentieth century constantly linked the need to improve propriety, personal hygiene, and sanitation to the discourse of modernisation and international respect. The respect of foreigners, Sun Yat-sen argued, was indispensable for reclaiming China’s right to govern itself and be free from foreign occupation (Brady, 2003, p. 26). As Liang Qichao, an early advocate of the modernisation effort, wrote, ‘the nation was the unit of self-love and the climax of human fraternity; anything less was uncivilised; and anything more was equally uncivilised’ (quoted in Y. C. Wang, 1966, p. 214). China’s failure to ward off armed imperialism and its inability to stand up and maintain its territorial integrity – resulting in unequal treaties – made the modernisation project an urgent issue.
The efforts of Chinese intellectuals working with the exigencies of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century to introduce new ideas and concepts could be viewed as bids to restore Chinese sovereignty and dignity. While there were strong continuities with the Chinese past, there were nevertheless significant ruptures in terms of how the population came to be viewed and its relationship to the nation- state. For Liang and others like him, national strength depended on the sum of the strength of individuals. In this thinking we begin to discern the emergence of a Chinese form of biopolitics whereby the relationship between state and population extends beyond the extraction of labour to other aspects of human life that need protection and regulation right from birth to death (Sigley, 2009, p. 541). As Ruth Rogaski (2004) noted, the Chinese term ‘weisheng’, which literally means to ‘protect life’, shifts from being a regimen of diet and meditation confined to the realm of the personal to encompassing state power, scientific standards of progress, cleanliness of bodies, and fitness of races. Having a large population was no longer equated with a strong state, and in tandem with this shift in thinking was a shift in emphasis from reducing population ‘quantity’ to enhancing population ‘quality’.31
Nowadays, suzhi, or ‘quality’, is a well-articulated and widely disseminated concept. But in the early twentieth century the word suzhi itself was never used, although
31 The practice of eugenics was not unique to China. It was already common in Japan and Germany. Chinese modernisers borrowed heavily from Japan and saw this as indispensable in their nation- building efforts. Evolutionary theories like social Darwinianism and survival-of-the-fittest gained popular support during this time.
63 concerns over the poor ‘quality’ of the population featured prominently in the writings of intellectuals. For example, in the work of Yan Fu, another early advocate of modernity and an important translator of concepts of evolution into Chinese, a positive correlation between the strength of nations and the strength and health of individuals is made:
Western scholars interested in statecraft always judge a nation by the physique, intelligence, and morals of its people. If by such criteria the quality of the people is high, neither their livelihood nor their status as a nation can be bad. If, on the other hand, the people are slow, unenlightened, and selfish, the group cannot last and will be humiliated and annihilated when faced with stronger groups. The process does not need to take the form of armed conflicts but may come about through a gradual collapse as can be seen from any historical episodes…In formulating a policy, the goal is always to improve the vigour, intelligence, and virtue of the people (Quoted in Y.C. Wang, 1966, p. 197).
For many intellectuals, the portrayals of Chinese life and society in the writings of missionaries were considered a true depiction of the state of China. Instead of triggering outrage, these writings prompted introspection and self-criticism of the national character of Chinese. For example, Lu Xun, a renowned literary figure in China, urged his students and fellow Chinese to read and take seriously Arthur Smith’s (1894) book, Chinese Characteristics, which documented Smith’s life as a missionary among villagers in the northeast of China. Lu Xun first came across Smith’s book while in Japan, and in a short span of time, Chinese Characteristics was translated into Chinese and enjoyed a wide readership. While it is certainly true that some things were lost in the process of translation, there is a persistent discourse of lack that permeates the writings of intellectuals grappling with the challenges of modernity. Lu Xun’s (1990 [1881-1936]) satire, The True Story of Ah-Q, not only reflects his mastery of the Chinese vernacular but also carries the important message that ignorance by the people was the root cause of China’s backwardness. For Lu Xun and others, the solution did not lie in a simple change of government – rather, what China needed was a ‘medicine of the spirit’ in the form of improved education and changed social habits.
At the height of the Nationalist Decade (1927-1937), some of the proposed social reforms were put into practice. The New Life Movement (Xin Shenghuo Yundong),
64 initiated in 1934, blended Confucianism, Nationalism, and even Christianity, in a bid to build morale in the nation which was beset with corruption, factionalism and opium addiction (Wakeman, 1995). Following rules set by the government, people were encouraged to be polite to their neighbours, clean up their streets and conserve energy, just to name a few. In schools, new rituals were put in place such as bowing to the national flag, singing the national anthem and compulsory wearing of school uniforms (Harrison, 2000). Public places also underwent beautification: night soil collecting was banned, the streets were lit and swept clean and anti-social and impolite behaviours like spitting in public were discouraged (Ibid.). In addition, policy was put in place to rid the streets of the underclass of beggars and refuge- seeking migrants (Lipkin, 2005). Although the intentions of the movement were good, the goals of the campaign were regarded as too lofty and unrealistic in the light of the conditions of war and hardship that were ravaging the country at the time. As a result, the campaigns failed to deliver the results they had set out to achieve.
The Nationalist Decade and the intellectual movement of the early twentieth century has been the subject of inquiry of other researchers and because of insufficiency of space I cannot do it justice here (Harrison, 2000; Wakeman, 1995). However, what I have shown and what I will show is that there is continuity between the ideas and concepts initially introduced from the West and present efforts to induce a civilising process from above. I emphasise that translation is an incomplete process in the making of meanings, particularly as it is played out in the struggles of the day and in the ongoing struggle to define Chinese modernity in the present. Inevitably, foreign ideas have had to encounter the domestic cultural context, producing a hybrid of Western notions of progress and Chinese notions of discipline and self- improvement.32
As we move into the period of Communist Party rule post-1949, many ideas initially advocated by the early reformers gave way to class politics and campaign-style mass mobilisation. Civilisation and suzhi discourse were likewise subordinated to the
32 The pragmatism which defines contemporary political discourse finds its roots in the intellectual movement of the early twentieth century. Of particular importance are ideas embodied in ‘zhongti xiyong’ which literally means ‘Chinese essence, Western use.’ The aim of early reformers was never to whole-heartedly adopt Western notions of progress. This, they thought, would surely fail. Liang Qichao, for example, opted for constitutional monarchy despite his initial radical views on Chinese culture and traditional morality. This seems to show some recourse to actually adopting Western notions after more local ideas proved untenable.
65 interests of ‘the collective’ and the needs of the political apparatus. In the next chapter, I focus more on this period and the techniques deployed in mass mobilisation campaigns. What is noteworthy about this period and worth mentioning for continuity for my present purposes is that even though the term ‘suzhi’ was never explicitly used, the ‘quality’ of the population continued to be of concern for the Communist government. For example, although Mao himself was initially pro- natalist, believing that a large population was a source of national strength, his views began to shift from the 1950s to a stance that advocated the planning of births:
I think humanity is most inept at managing itself. It has plans for industrial production… [but] it does not have plans for the production of humans. This is anarchism, no government, no organisation, no rules. If [we] go on this way, I think humanity will fall prematurely into strife and hasten toward destruction. (Mao, cited in MacFarquahar et al. 1989, p. 159).
Once the ‘quantity’ of the population was construed to be a problem hindering the development of the productive forces, it paved the way for consideration of the ‘quality’ of the population. The science of population drew inspiration from the work of Engels and his notion of the ‘twofold character of production’. This explained why population growth must be controlled so that resources could be focused on improving the ‘quality’ of the population. In an oft-quoted passage from Engels’ (1972, p. 71) first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the theoretical justification for treating the people like ‘things’ is made:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence…, on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
The ‘propagation of the species’ Engel speaks of concerns more than the birth planning policy – it legitimises a mode of governing that accepts governmental intervention in almost every sphere of life. If the womb is open to the rationality and calculation of government, then nothing, it seems, is off-limits.
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Suzhi: From Sacred Language to Everyday Use
English really lacks a term like suzhi. In English, while one may speak of human “qualities”, it is dehumanising to discuss “the quality” of an individual or group of human beings. Even if such a construction is grammatically acceptable, at least since the demise of eugenics it has become politically unacceptable. Though one may refer to the moral qualities of a person with the term “character,” the mental qualities with the term “intelligence” and the physical qualities with the term “strength,” there is no term like suzhi that can refer to all of these things at once. (Kipnis, 2006, p. 304)
Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams (1985), Andrew Kipnis argues that ‘suzhi’ has become a ‘keyword’ in the study of Chinese governance, culture and society (Kipnis, 2006). Although suzhi intersects with other keywords like ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’, it did not come into official usage until the late 1970s with the endorsement of the one-child policy. A brief linguistic history of the word suggests that before the late 1970s, suzhi, a compound character, referred to the ‘unadorned nature or character of something’ (Ibid., p. 297). By the early twentieth century however, intellectuals were influenced by the modern nurture/nature dichotomy and suzhi came to refer to inborn characteristics. The conceptual continuities between suzhi discourse and early twentieth century eugenics are hard to ignore. As Dikötter (1992) notes, much of the material on eugenics in China was derived from Western sources which made racial improvement their goal in a perceived struggle in which the fittest survive and the weakest perish. Party members in their political analyses and discourses have defined civilisation as a process of ‘natural selection’ (zishen taotai guilu) and view history as having a positive trajectory that follows a certain order:
Civilisation is a process of natural selection. That is to say, human civilisation follows a development path that is progressive, civilised, rational and scientific. In this process, along with technological innovation and the adoption of new values and new methods of social management, a new cultural environment develops while obsolete elements of civilisation slowly become eliminated. As the saying goes: ‘if the old does not go, the new will not come.’ Only when these old and obsolete elements are eliminated will a new civilisation be created (Ni & Ni, 1996, p.14, my translation).
Chinese Marxist historians have tended to organise the broad sweep of human social evolution into several major ‘periods’ (shiqi), ‘eras’ (shidai), and types of ‘society’
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(shehui). This followed the ideas of classical Marxist historiography as developed by Engels, Lenin and Stalin. In keeping with this model, the ‘socialist period’ (shehuizhuyi shiqi) was a distinctive stage or phase in the ‘era of civilisation’ (wenming shidai). It followed from the ‘capitalist period’ (zibenzhuyi shiqi) but preceded the ‘communist period’ (gongchanzhuyi shiqi). Chinese theorists were adamant that China is in the stage of socialism (or as of 1987, the ‘primary stage of socialism’), having emerged from an historical semi-feudal and semicolonial state.
The Chinese word for eugenics (youshengxue) literally means ‘superior birth.’ What distinguishes the present from the past is a shift from imagining the population as a race to imagining it asa ‘population’ and from a language of ‘improvement’ and a discourse of ‘lack’ to one of ‘raising quality.’
Since the late 1970s, the meanings and uses of suzhi have undergone remarkable transformations. Three changes in the connotation of the word are particularly noteworthy. First, suzhi no longer connotes a nature/nurture dichotomy. Although contemporary usage still alludes to innate characteristics, these qualities are nevertheless affected by one’s upbringing and social environment. Second, contemporary usage refers to the quality of humans rather than the quality of non- human entities like the military, the education system or industry. For the latter, the term zhiliang is used. Third, as Kipnis (2006) and others33 have noted, it has taken on hierarchical and moral overtones in the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality. Additionally, the CCP’s own legitimacy is increasingly dependent on its claims to ensuring a strong nation by raising the ‘quality’ of the people.
It must be noted that for much of the late 1970s and early 1980s, renkou zhiliang was almost exclusively used to denote ‘population quality.’ However, by the early 1990s, both renkou zhiliang and renkou suzhi were used synonymously. As Sigley (2009, pp. 553-554) observes, the Birth Planning Dictionary (Jihua Shengyu Cidian) describes ‘population quality’ as
[A] reflection of the substance [zhi] of a total population…The population quality [renkou zhiliang] discussed by population studies generally refers to the totality of a population’s physical quality [shenti
33 Until very recently, there was very little scholarship on suzhi. The most recent contribution to suzhi scholarship has been a collection of articles addressing suzhi in Positions, East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 17, no. 3, winter 2009, pp. 523-617.
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suzhi], scientific and cultural quality [kexue wenhua suzhi], and ideological and moral quality [sixiang daode suzhi]. It is a reflection of the conditions and ability of the population as a totality to recognise and transform the world.
But by the mid-1990s, renkou suzhi replaces renkou zhiliang in the official press. One reason for this move could be the CCP’s monopoly on language and its authoritarian language use. As Alan Kluver (1996, p. 6) has noted, the formalised use of language in Chinese politics serves to ‘circumscribe the reality that can be described.’ Michael Schoenhals (1992) further maintains that the role of formalised language is central to the national political process in China. Deploying the right formulations will give one access to the policy-making apparatus while using the wrong formulations is certain to bar one from reaching a wide audience and can even land one in deep trouble with the authorities. Accommodating the existing orthodoxy while ideologically legitimating the reforms has been a central goal of the regime. This explains how, while China continues to use global discourses like that found in neoliberal capital theory, raising ‘population quality’ continues to be described as a Marxist project. Strategies were adapted to overcome the Malthusian theory that too many people leads to misery (Anagnost, 1997). Indeed the problem of too many people would be resolved by controlling the quantity of the population and by raising its quality. Population quality therefore becomes a key factor in improving the productive forces of society, making it an important goal for all ‘good socialists’.
The discourse of ‘population quality’ has been linked to the CCP’s campaigns to construct ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ in many ways. For example, in a compilation of essential reading for cadres, a section is devoted to expounding the relationship between ‘population quality’ and ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ construction. One of the articles included in the compilation was an interview with the Party Secretary of Beijing University, Professor Ren (Bo, 1997). Through Professor Ren’s responses, we see the official view of human society, that is, not only in terms of competing nation-states but also in terms of competing individuals. Professor Ren elaborates:
Institutions of higher learning are an important site for the cultivation of socialist spiritual civilisation. Institutions of higher learning cultivate the person not only to satisfy the needs of the present, but, more importantly, it opens up a strategic vision for the future. Competition will be severe in the twenty-first century. This type of
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competition will not only be in the realm of the [natural] sciences or engineering between countries, it will also be a political competition. Apart from the [natural] sciences, the areas of political quality, level of morality, and the character of the person [will also be arenas of contest in the future]. (p. 238, my translation)
The way in which suzhi has been deployed in the above context suggests a greater emphasis on ‘nurture’ than on ‘nature’ in the nature/nurture dichotomy. When seen within the broader context of how suzhi is used, say, in the birth planning policy, both ‘superior birth’ (eugenics) and ‘superior upbringing’ (nurture and environmental factors) become crucially important. So where does this fit in with exhortations for civilised conduct? As I have already mentioned, the kind of governing rationality that emerges in the post-Mao context combines both foreign concepts as well as time- honoured ideas dating back to the early twentieth century. The fact that foreign concepts such as ‘neoliberalism’ are being used selectively by Chinese technocrats does not preclude state planning or mean the redundancy of social engineering. In fact, it has only acted to broaden the vocabulary and scope of vision of technocrats in China by expanding the realm of possibility for creative intervention. Suzhi is not a function of neoliberalism, as has been argued by Andrew Kipnis (2007). Combined with Marxist-Leninist ideology, suzhi produces categories of subjects along the lines of their nurtured and innate characteristics. So while some subjects are classified as ‘autonomous’ and of ‘high quality’, others are regarded as being of inferior quality and therefore must be subjected to further control and supervision.
By the 1990s, suzhi discourse had entered popular discourse, making it difficult for people to avoid its trappings. People are now enticed to purchase and consume all manner of products from pills to etiquette classes to improve their chances in the ‘socialist market’. In short, it has become a form of ‘biopower’ defined by Foucault to be a general strategy of power in which the ‘basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 1). In this sense, it is part of a regime of discipline and regulation; a form of power which is concerned with ‘distributing the living in the domain of value and utility’ (Bakken, 2000, p. 67). The exercise of biopower therefore constructs inequalities between citizens. In popular usage, ‘lacking quality’ has been used to discriminate against rural migrants, the poorly dressed, jaywalkers, and litterbugs, just to name a few.
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Because civility campaigns depend much on popular ideas around notions of suzhi, it becomes crucial that the concept be properly understood.
Since acquiring ‘quality’ is now common-sense in everyday discourse, who would want to oppose or question its motives? Many people, whether consciously or not, have acquiesced to its meanings. Even when people do attempt to subvert suzhi, they do so using the same language and vocabulary as the state. In the process, they help to perpetuate divisive suzhi categories, popularising its usage and limiting the potential for rethinking the contours of civilised modernity.
Conclusion
The cause and the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in the system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it.
-Friedrich Nietzsche (1989), On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 77.
Many keywords and ideas came into China via armed imperialism in the period straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a time of profound social and political upheaval and the Chinese people were forced to confront, largely against their will, the challenges and threats of ‘modernity’. One of the keywords of the period was ‘civilisation’ but in its Chinese re-incarnation, wenming, different meanings emerged, some of which were entirely different to the concerns of missionaries and colonial administrators. After all, the act of translation is only the beginning of the complex process of meaning making. The idea that languages are commensurate is a myth that philosophers, linguists and theorists of translation have tried hard to dispel. When a word enters the host culture having been invented anew, it has to encounter and negotiate with the pre-existing conditions of that society. For wenming, the predominant concern of intellectuals in the early twentieth century could be summarised as the preservation of the territorial sovereignty and integrity of the Chinese nation. This was a difficult task – a task that in many ways continues into the present.
My underlying argument has been that the civilising process, with its roots in ‘quality discourse’ dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is
71 unfinished business in China. I maintain that meanings of ‘civility’ go beyond mere ‘etiquette’ and are constitutive of a more resilient notion of idealised life – a concept that is bound up in both wenming and suzhi. As competition intensifies in Chinese society and inequality becomes even more conspicuous, the possibility of falling behind encourages people to buy into the trappings of suzhi. This partially explains the national obsession with suzhi cultivation. In Raymond Williams’ (1985, p. 59) book, ‘civilisation’ has been identified as a ‘keyword’ in defining culture and society in the West. Coleridge (Quoted in Williams, 1985, p. 59) highlights the ‘mixed blessing’ of civilised life, which, in many ways, resonates with the present challenges facing those who dream of ‘civilised modernity’ in post-Mao China:
The permanent distinction and the occasional contrast between cultivation and civilisation …The permanency of the nation…and its progressiveness and personal freedom….depend on a continuing and progressive civilisation. But civilisation itself is but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people, where this civilisation is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious developments of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity (Coleridge, Quoted in Williams, 1985, p. 59).
The only defence against social, moral and cultural decay, it seems, is endless self- improvement or, in Coleridge’s term, ‘cultivation’ and the ‘harmonious’ development of qualities and faculties common to all. In the next chapter, I provide insight into how typical Chinese academics view the question of ‘wenming’ and ‘suzhi’ in the context of furthering political reforms. Using the concept of ‘political civilisation’ (zhengzhi wenming), I explain how civilisation discourse embraces the possibility for political reforms and why some members of the ruling elite believe that this is a necessary step if civilising campaigns are to take hold in the broader society.
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Chapter Four
Elite Discourses on ‘Political Civilisation’ Construction (Zhengzhi Wenming Jianshe) and China’s Efforts at Political Reforms
China should take its own path in enhancing democracy. We never view socialism and democracy as something that is mutually exclusive… We should focus on efforts to promote economic development, protect lawful rights and interests of the people, fight corruption, increase public trust in government, strengthen government functions and enhance social harmony. And we should continue the reform in the political system by expanding democracy and improving the legal system. This will enable the other members in the international community to better appreciate and accept the path of development taken by the Chinese people. (Wen, 2007)
Reforms have been a double-edged sword for the party-state. On the one hand, the state has benefited immensely from the exchange in information and technology necessary for economic development. On the other, the socioeconomic and political challenges that have emerged from China’s modernisation have threatened China’s development goals upon which the CCP’s legitimacy now rests. These challenges include the deepening income divide, increasing regional disparities, corruption, environmental degradation, and rising demand for public goods amid the government’s diminished ability to supply them, as well as the social unrest sparked by these problems. Therefore, the political reforms alluded to by Wen Jiabao in the above quote, are, above all, aimed at securing the Party’s place as a ruling institution.
For most outside of China, the predominant political image of the country has been the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. However, the Party organisation and its approach to political reforms, have changed much since that day. The Tiananmen crisis and the collapse of the former Soviet Union have taught the CCP the lesson that it must change and anticipate change if it is to retain its ruling status. In 2004, the leadership made the frank admission that the ruling status of the CCP ‘is by no means a natural result of the Party’s founding and will not remain forever if the Party does
73 nothing to safeguard it’ (Xinhua, 26 September, 2004). But the Party is not only taking ‘negative’ lessons such as the collapse of the Soviet bloc – it is also taking ‘positive’ lessons from its Asian neighbours like Singapore and Japan and also looking further afield, to Cuba and Mexico.
While China is far from being a rule of law country and its political system is ‘unique’, political reforms are nevertheless firmly on the Party’s agenda. For example, at the First Plenary Session of the 11th NPC held in March 2008, Premier Wen Jiabao unveiled an overhauled administrative system characterised by transparency and efficiency. This is part of the ongoing reform package of ‘changing government function’ (zhengfu zhineng de zhuanbian). He also called on cadres to ‘accept the oversight of the news media and the general public’ (Xinhua, 4 March, 2008). Wen said the overhaul was intended to:
…build a service-oriented, responsible and honest government ruled by law to carry out the people-centred concept of governance more effectively, ernestly solve problems of the interests of the masses that are most real, most direct, and the cause of the most concern. (Xinhua, 4 March, 2008)
China’s political reforms are more inclusive than is at first apparent. Characterisations of China as having a monolithic top-down policymaking process therefore fail to take into account the diverse debate taking place in the country and pressures on the leadership. Decision-making in China is now a complex process and is beginning to reflect disparate and competing interests in the country. In the absence of official channels for the expression of public interest, Chinese intellectuals continue behind-the-scenes to articulate these diverse interests and mediate between state and society.
The Role of Chinese Intellectuals in Politics and Society
Although Maoist politics did much to undermine the role of intellectuals during the upheavals of the Chinese revolution, it did not manage to erase completely the cultural reverence for learning in China and the respect society has towards the learned. By the 1980s, most intellectuals who had been wrongly accused of being
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‘counter-revolutionary’ or ‘rightist’ were promptly rehabilitated and restored their former positions. This respect is reflected in the time-honoured Confucian classics:
Learning, enquiry, reasoning, distinguishing, and finally, action – this is the procedure to be followed by a gentleman of moral persuasion. Learning should be as continuous as it is broad because by definition it has no end. Inquiry, once begun, generates more inquiries; the inquirer should not stop until he finds what he has set out to achieve. Likewise, reasoning is a continuous process, and distinguishing – the process whereby good can be differentiated from evil and right from wrong – serves no purpose until the answer that is sought becomes definite and clear. Knowing the answer, a gentleman applies it to the conduct of his life and will not cease doing so as long as he lives. A superior man may be able to achieve his goal the first time he attempts it; a less endowed person may try ten or more times before the same goal is achieved. It is through constant efforts that an ignorant person becomes wise and a weak man becomes strong. (Li, 1967, p. 113)
Respect is also reflected in the manner of speech and the way students address their teachers with their surnames followed by their titles e.g. Wang Boshi (Dr Wang). Students never fail to address their teachers with their full title. This is the most obvious difference between Chinese intellectuals and their counterparts in the West where the student-teacher relationship tends to be less formal. But there are subtle differences as well. For the most part, Chinese intellectuals see themselves as part of the system that they wish to change and not outside of it. Consequently, while they will not refrain from pointing out faults in the system, they will not necessarily advocate its overthrow because at least, they have a vested interest in it and also because they do not see this to be their ‘proper’ role. Of course, this is not the case with all intellectuals and there is no shortage of voices calling for a complete political overhaul. However, for those within the establishment working under the watchful eye of the party-state, in order to be heard and have input into the important issues, they must know how to play the language game. This means careful wordplay or using the prescribed terminology and theories to address the important issues and following a formula that must not upset the status quo. Indeed, as Erika E. S. Evasdottir (2005, p. 11) observes of the role of Chinese archaeologists, intellectuals in China tended to exhibit a level of paternalism rarely seen in the West. By this, she means that:
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While an individual intellectual may choose to espouse democracy or support communism, extol the virtues of Western nations, or scorn them as morally defunct, in all cases he will subscribe to a strong form of paternalism. Intellectuals are convinced that both the rulers and the people of China need their knowledge, guidance, and aid to be raised up from the darkness of ignorance and tradition into the light of modernity. The leaders need advice; the peasants require guidance and paternalistic care. If the needs of one conflict with those of the other, then it is the intellectual’s responsibility to create a solution. (Ibid.)
Gloria Davies (2007) has identified ‘patriotic worrying’ (youhuan) as a distinct characteristic of Chinese intellectual writings. Davies (Ibid., p. 1) has further pointed out that although Chinese intellectuals have imported many new ideas from Euro- American vocabularies, this has not diminished the importance of an older tradition from which Chinese intellectuals have drawn their critical enquiry:
Youhuan…as a national praxis constitutes a normal discourse that renders all contributions to contemporary Chinese thought (Zhongguo dangdai sixiang) commensurable despite the different vocabularies in use and the divisions that have arisen and deepened among intellectuals as to the question of the best way forward for China.
In the responses of the intellectuals I interviewed there was a similar sense of profound ‘national anxiety’. But instead of being expressed as a form of ‘discordant self-reflexivity’, as is often found in the works of Euro-American intellectuals, this anxiety has been channelled and directed as youhuan which carries with it, a ‘moral obligation’ which involves identifying a problem with a view to finding solutions (Ibid., p. 7).
In this chapter, I explore typical academic views of the concept of ‘wenming’ and ‘suzhi’ through the prism of ‘political civilisation’ (zhengzhi wenming), a term that came into official usage in 2002. By typical, I mean that while views are diverse, most intellectuals in China do not view liberal democracy as the response to China’s challenges. During the 1980s, many intellectual movements were dominated by neoliberal ideas, especially among the university students who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests (Political Economy Research, 2008). These neoliberal ideas generally promoted the independence of capitalist enterprises, open markets and breaking down of the socialist economy. However, the intellectual movement began
76 to change direction by the late 1990s and early 2000s when many intellectuals, concerned by the number of people left behind by the reforms, began to advocate a different view. These intellectuals attracted the label of ‘new left’ although ‘New Left’ refers to a very broad category of intellectuals ranging from social democrat, nationalist, left nationalist, to Marxist. However, what they do share is criticism, in different degrees, of market-oriented reforms and a generally positive view of the Maoist period with its different emphases (Mishra, 2006).
Many new generation intellectuals reject ‘Western-capitalist’ style democracy, believing that it will only benefit the newly rich in China, but they reject a return to orthodox Marxism. These intellectuals are exploring a ‘third-way’ for China akin to the ‘Beijing Consensus’. The Beijing Consensus rejects the one-size-fits all model of the Washington Consensus by outlining an alternative path to economic development in the developing world. Made popular by Joshua Cooper Ramo34 (2004, p. 4), ‘The Beijing Consensus’ outlines some of the features of Chinese development that roughly constitute the ‘new physics of power’ reflecting China’s influence on the world stage:
The Washington Consensus was a hallmark of end-of-history arrogance; it left a trail of destroyed economies and bad feelings around the globe. China’s new development approach is driven by a desire to have equitable, peaceful high-quality growth. [C]ritically speaking, it turns traditional ideas like privatisation and free trade on their heads. It is flexible enough that it is barely classifiable as a doctrine. It does not believe in uniform solutions for every situation. It is defined by a ruthless willingness to innovate and experiment, by a lively defense of national borders and interests, and by the increasingly thoughtful accumulation of tools of asymmetric power projection. It is pragmatic and ideological at the same time, a reflection of an ancient Chinese philosophical outlook that makes little distinction between theory and practice.
Although not without its critics, the Beijing Consensus does serve an important goal.35 As Arif Dirlik (2009, p. 5) notes,
34 Joshua Cooper Ramo is former senior editor of Time magazine. 35 For example, Yang Yao, Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University raises doubts as to whether Beijing’s model of authoritarian growth, known as the Beijing Consensus, can survive:
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The most important aspect of the Beijing Consensus may be an approach to global relationships that seeks, in multinational relationships, a new global order founded on economic relationships, but which also recognizes political and cultural difference as well as differences in regional and national practices within a common global framework.
But for Dirlik, the greatest irony of the China model of development is that despite its efforts ‘to keep neo-liberalism at arm’s length’, its very success has depended on the successful manipulation of the neoliberal economy. He further notes the role of China’s ‘socialist legacy’ in the successful pursuit of economic modernisation in the country. This legacy is enduring and poses both opportunities as well challenges to further reforms in China. It is precisely this legacy of one-party rule that intellectuals and technocrats have had to work with and around in order to adapt to the changed socioeconomic context. Through the concept of ‘political civilisation’, I explore the tension between concepts of self-autonomy and control; between the belief in some quarters that only the party-state can resolve social problems through its pro-growth strategy and the contention that state interference thwarts the growth of self- determination, thereby contributing to a vicious cycle of dependency, political apathy and social discontent. These themes resonate in the civilising campaigns to improve public conduct that will be discussed in Chapter Seven. A nuanced understanding of the forces that shape public discourse will enable us to appreciate the challenges of Chinese modernisation and the pressures placed on the leadership to resolve them.
The content of this chapter is based on analysis of transcripts of six hour-long in- depth interviews conducted with ‘scholar-officials’ at the China Centre for Comparative Politics and Economics (CCCPE ) in Beijing while I was there as a
More important, Beijing’s ongoing efforts to promote GDP growth will inevitably result in infringements on people’s economic and political rights. For example, arbitrary land acquisitions are still prevalent in some cities, the government closely monitors the Internet, labor unions are suppressed, and workers have to endure long hours and unsafe conditions. Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance. Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary. (Yao, 2010)
78 guest ‘scholar-student’ in April 2008. Members of the CCCPE are predominantly concerned with how to fine-tune existing theories about political civilisation. In all, seven interviews were conducted but one person declined to be recorded. Apart from these officially scheduled interviews, I also had numerous conversations with other employees at the centre as well as casual conversations with ordinary Beijingers. Based on these interactions, both official and unofficial, my argument is that while social reformers like intellectuals at the CCCPE advocate more not less government, they do not always agree with CCP prescriptions on how problems are to be addressed.
The chapter will be organised as follows: the first section will define ‘political civilisation’ and its rationale as a platform for the introduction of political reforms in the country. The second section will outline some of the practical measures introduced as a result. Some of these measures are intended to strengthen the Party’s ruling capacity, but also they are intended to devolve power to lower-level political and grassroots institutions that are better positioned to address them. These include implementing the rule of law and promoting inner-party democracy (dangnei minzhu). The third section will introduce the CCCPE and its director, Professor Yu Keping, a significant player in the field of Chinese society and politics. In particular, I explain why state intellectuals working at this institution see advancing ‘political civilisation’ as key to all modernisation efforts, including efforts to modernise the citizenry. In the fourth section, I address the particular concerns of CCCPE intellectuals towards the current ‘state-of-things’. By this, I mean how they feel towards the status quo and their tenuous position, both as beneficiaries and agents of change, within it. The final section weaves together the themes of self-help, state-society relations, agency and empowerment through an example of a ‘government innovation’ campaign spearheaded by the CCCPE which is designed to encourage better governance and accountability at the grassroots.
Political Civilisation: Origins, Meanings and Limits
Political civilisation was first introduced into the official lexicon by Jiang Zemin in the last term of his presidency. During a graduation speech at the Central Party School on 31 March 2002, Jiang Zemin said, ‘Developing socialist democratic
79 politics and building socialist political civilisation are important goals for the modernisation of socialism’ (Gang, 2007). Not long after, this new phrase appeared in the report to the 16th Party Congress. On 14 March 2004, ‘political civilisation’ along with Jiang’s ‘Three Represents’ 36 were inserted into the Constitution. Although political civilisation came after both ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ civilisation, concepts that I will further explore in Chapter Six, this thesis argues that it is the ‘political’ which guides and subordinates other concerns. As Qian Gang (2007) observed, Jiang had harboured thoughts about political reforms since the time of Zhao Ziyang37, but did not go public about it because he did not want to convey the message that the kind of political reforms he was referring to were akin to liberal democracy.
Although political-system reform and institution-building reform were previously accommodated for by ‘spiritual civilisation’ in the form of anti-corruption campaigns and campaigns against ‘moral degeneration’ within the Party ranks, political civilisation also broke new ground in the sense that it placed a renewed and urgent focus on legal reforms, regulation, institution-building and governance. As Nicholas Dynon (2008, pp. 100-101) noted, ‘political civilisation stood for institutionalisation of political processes, highly controlled political reform and maintenance of the primacy of the Party through reform of the Party itself.’ Indeed, ‘inner-party democracy’ has been a major theme of the current regime, a theme that has built upon Jiang Zemin’s original concept of political civilisation.
However, since its addition to the Constitution, the use of the phrase ‘political civilisation’ in the official news media has been in gradual decline, reflecting a de- emphasis on political reforms (Gang, 2007). On the upside, ‘inner-party democracy’ has enjoyed media attention but it remains to be seen whether this can survive beyond Hu Jintao. But instead of viewing ideas like political civilisation as being attributable
36In Jiang Zemin's speech at the 16th CCP Congress, November 2002, he outlined the Three Represents as follows: ‘In a word, the Party must always represent the requirements of the development of China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of the development of China's advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China.’ 37 Zhao Ziyang was the third Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1980 to 1987, and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1987 to 1989. His economic policies and sympathy with student demonstrators during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 placed him at odds with some members of the party leadership, including Deng Xiaoping. In the aftermath of the events, Zhao was purged politically and placed under house arrest for the next 15 years.
80 to the politics of one person, such as Jiang Zemin or ‘inner-party democracy’ to Hu Jintao, it is more fruitful to view these as arising from a perceived need by the Party organisation to overhaul its image and streamline its functions so that it is better equipped and more ready to deal with the challenges (both sudden and long term) posed to the modernisation project, upon which the legitimacy of the Party now rests. As expectations grow, the Party is expected not only to provide the basic public service goods, but also to better manage social conflicts and ensure social stability. In order to do this, it must have the necessary wherewithal and an accompanying ideology with which to frame its development goals.
As far as the civilising imperative of the Party goes, the Party understands that in order to convince the population of the sincerity of its endeavours, the disciplinary gaze must be turned on the Party itself (Brødsgaard, 2004). In other words, political civilisation and related concepts are to convey to the public that campaigns to civilise the public are not limited to the public but also extend to the party organisation. No one, it seems, is immune from the civilising goal of the state’s modernisation project. For example, in 2005, the Party launched an old-style Party rectification campaign to stem the ‘moral degeneration’ of Party cadres, particularly to combat official corruption among Party ranks. Although this campaign was only the third of its kind since the death of Mao, the campaigns are crucially important for galvanising information from lower cadres and present an opportunity for reshuffling careers. But importantly, campaigns of this nature are about improving the Party’s governance capability. At his talk to the Party Politburo on 24 January 2005 following the launch of the campaign, Hu Jintao re-endorsed Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents but also emphasised the need to improve governance:
The ultimate goal of strengthening the building of the party’s advanced nature is to enable our party to always represent the demand for developing advanced productive forces in China, to represent the orientation of China’s advanced culture, and to represent the fundamental interests of the greatest majority of the people, by continuously raising the ability to govern, consolidating the position of the ruling party, and fulfilling the mission of governance. (Quoted in Fewsmith, 2005, p. 2)
Background to the campaigns can be traced to a large scale survey conducted in 2000 among 300,000 cadres in which around 32 percent of cadres at or above the county
81 level admitted that they focussed on satisfying the needs of their superiors rather than providing services to the people (Fewsmith, 2005, p. 3). Although these numbers are unsurprising, and given that accurate statistics are rare in China, one could assume that these rather modest statistics conceal a practice that has gone on unaddressed for quite some time. This suggests that the campaigns were in the making from 2000 to 2005. Indeed, on 15 December 2002, Hu Jintao gave an address to the Central Organization Department titled ‘Instructions on Several Questions Regarding the Educational Activities to Maintain the Advanced Nature of the CCP’ (CCP, 2004, p. 24). This was followed by the convening of a first meeting of the Central Party- Building Leadership Small Group on 31 December 2002. After the selection of test sites, the rectification campaign was finally underway in 2005.
Apart from Party rectification campaigns, political civilisation also embraces a variety of other initiatives, including the emphasis on law and inner-Party democracy. However, it should be reiterated that these steps, while positive, should be viewed as attempts to strengthen the Party’s governing ability. Below, these separate initiatives will be discussed and assessed to ascertain just how the rhetoric of political reforms has been applied in practice.
Rule of Law (Fazhi) as a Means for Strengthening Party Ruling Capacity
According to World Bank good governance indicators (see figure below), China has performed well in the area of ‘government effectiveness’, but it has fallen behind in all areas especially in the areas of ‘voice and accountability’, ‘political stability’, and surprisingly ‘control of corruption’.38 This suggests that while the government is strong, a view shared by many at the CCCPE, its ability to govern is slowly being eroded by a plethora of problems. As reforms continue, tensions and conflicts in the system between the Party and state organs, among state actors, between state and society, and among different groups have increased. It is no longer sufficient to rely on generalisations such as the purpose of the rule of law to facilitate economic development, provide a peaceful mechanism for resolving conflicts, promote social stability and enhance the legitimacy of government. As reforms enter a critical and
38 This is a surprise given China’s stern sentencing in corruption cases, with the toughest sentence being the death penalty. In 2003, China performed better than countries in the same income bracket. However, in 2010, it has fallen behind as the figures suggest. This is surprising given that the CCP has, in the past, put faith in sentencing as a punishment incentive. Criminology research shows that strictness of sentencing does not do much, except fill up jails (Dutton, 2000).
82 complex phase, the necessary reforms required are controversial and hotly contested. One thing that cannot be denied is the urgency of legal reforms.
90th-100th Percentile 50th-75th Percentile 10th-25th Percentile
75th-90th Percentile 25th-50th Percentile 0th-10th Percentile
Table 1: 2010 Quality of Governance: China Source: (World Bank b, 2011). The upper bar for each criterion is China and the lower bar is the upper-middle income country average.
The Party understands that political reforms are incomplete without the rule of law. This is why in February 2008, the State Council Information Office released a white paper entitled China's Efforts and Achievements in Promoting the Rule of Law to the public. Perhaps anticipating that 2008 was going to be a testing year, with Beijing hosting the summer Olympics, meaning that China would receive more international scrutiny than usual, the regime recognised that it could not properly govern without some form of commitment to the rule of law:
The rule of law has been established as a fundamental principle. It is a fundamental state principle as well as the common understanding of all sectors of society to govern the country according to law and build a socialist country under the rule of law. Moreover, the socialist idea of the rule of law has been gradually established, with the rule of law at the core, law enforcement for the people as an essential requirement,
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fairness and justice as a value to be pursued, serving the overall interests as an important mission, and with the leadership of the CCP as a fundamental guarantee. The awareness of law and the rule of law has been generally strengthened in all sectors of society, and a social atmosphere of consciously learning, observing and employing law is coming into being. (The State Council Information Office, 2008)
If a liberal democratic framework were the lens with which to assess China’s political reforms, then China’s incremental steps towards the rule of law would mean very little. However, in order to understand the development of China’s legal system and its subsequent development model, Peerenboom (2003) argues that we must look beyond the liberal democratic framework and rethink the rule of law in ways that are consistent with China’s current circumstances. Accordingly, all conceptions of rule of law in China have to encounter the two classical theories of rule of law dominated by Confucianism and Legalism.
Confucianists believe that the rule of law should complement morality and virtuous rulers as an instrument of governing. Its adherents believe that although legal punishments may deter people, it could not change people’s character or ensure harmonious co-existence. Legalists however, view the Confucian system as no more than a cover for the rule of man (renzhi). They instead advocate fixed standards of general applicability so as to limit the power on ruling elites. Although the legal principles advocated under Legalism resemble somewhat the concept of rule of law, Peerenboom (2003, p. 110) cautions us otherwise, arguing that ‘law was simply a pragmatic tool for obtaining and maintaining political control and social order’ and therefore more closely resembles rule by law.
Indeed, both ‘rule by law’ (fazhi) and ‘rule by virtue’ (dezhi) have been re-invoked by post-Mao leaderships. Rule by law enables the leadership to use different legal principles and foreign ideas so as to facilitate development in China while rule of virtue places the Party in an unquestionable position as the legitimate organisation to spearhead reforms. In a speech in 2001 to the chiefs of the propaganda department, Jiang Zemin had emphasised the complementarities of rule by law and rule by virtue and stressed the importance of their simultaneous practice. He further elaborated that ‘rule by law is part of the construction of politics and of political civilisation, while
84 ruling by virtue is part of ideological construction and spiritual civilisation’ (Jiang, 2006, p. 200). Used in this way, Jiang distinguishes between political and spiritual civilisation. Whereas political civilisation allows the government to specifically focus on law, institution-building and improving governance, spiritual civilisation endorses the Party’s moral authority to lead.
Political civilisation might have come late to the political landscape, but there is evidence to suggest that it had long been conceived by the post-Mao leadership. Its delayed introduction to the original ‘two-civilisations’ matrix, namely material and spiritual civilisation, representing economic development and the continuing leadership of the Party respectively, meant that it was only a matter of time before political reforms had to be formally addressed. Reforms have slowly but surely eroded the Party’s founding principles. With the introduction of the Three Represents paving the way for the entry of entrepreneurs into the Party ranks, the Party had to justify its ‘elite’ status. As Stig Thøgersen (2004, p. 204) suggests, Jiang’s Three Represents showed a ‘decisive move towards an understanding of the CCP as an elite party rather than a vanguard party in the Leninist sense.’ Legal reforms are an important part of recreating the Party’s image based not on its class credentials but on its innovative potential, which relies on continuous reforms to itself and continuous redefinitions of progress which now entail political reforms. If the Party is indeed superior to all alternative sources of power, then it must not shy from addressing political reforms and political civilisation with its emphasis on the rule of law. Legal reform has been one such area that the CCP has tackled with mixed results.
Promoting Inner-Party Democracy
At the Fourth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee, a decision on promoting ‘inner-party democracy’ (dangnei minzhu) was passed. Although this concept is closely identified with the leadership of Hu Jintao, it has had a long and fraught history in the PRC. For example, in October 1938, Mao Zedong at the 6th Plenary session of the 6th Central Committee pointed out, ‘expanding inner-party democracy should be seen as a necessary step in consolidating and developing the Party’ (Anon., 2004). In 1942, at the start of the Party rectification campaign, again, inner-party
85 democracy played an important role. At the Seventh Party Congress, Liu Shaoqi expounded the principles underlying inner-party democracy in the ‘Report on the Revision of the Party Charter’ (Guanyu Xiugai Dangde Zhangcheng Baogao) (Ibid.). However, despite efforts to outline members’ rights and obligations, efforts at building inner-party democracy have been marred by internal struggles.
When Deng Xiaoping took over the leadership, party reform was an important goal. At the 13th Party Congress, for the first time in the Party’s history, there were more candidates than seats for election to the Central Committee. However, inner-party democracy failed to curb the tensions that resulted in the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. But the political meltdown that led to this event did not deter the CCP from further attempts at inner-party democracy. Taking lessons from the fall of the CPSU in the Soviet Union, the CCP was again emphasising the need for further reforms to its organisation. Through the Provisional Regulations Governing Grassroots CCP Organising Elections which was formalised in 1994, the Party paved the way for orderly power transitions. Indeed, the power transition from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002 was the first that did not include a coup or uprising. But apart from ensuring successful and bloodless power transitions, what does inner-party democracy involve? And how can it function to control and manage its members so that it can effectively deal with the social and political tensions arising in society?
To date, the CCP has experimented with two forms of electoral democracy: ‘public recommendation, public election’ (gongtui gongxuan) and ‘public recommendation, direct election’ (gongtui zhixuan) (Lai, 2009). In the gongtui gongxuan model, those eligible to vote are expanded from the Party committee to include five to ten county Party and government cadres, all representatives to the township people’s congress, all members of the township Party and government, the primary village cadres (the Party secretary, the village head, and the village accountant), and some representatives of the villagers. Although this model expands participation beyond the Party committee, it is not a popular election; only those in the Party and government departments, or those very close to them, can become members of the electoral group. Additionally, not everyone’s votes are equal. For example, the votes of county-level cadres are weighted more heavily (Ibid., p. 62).
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The second model of gongtui zhixuan is more democratic in that all members can vote in an assembly but more controversial because it violates the principle of ‘the Party controlling cadres’. One of the most well-known direct elections of the township head was in Buyun township (Buyun Zhen) at the end of 1998. The election was repudiated by the Legal Daily in January 1999 as illegal and in violation of the constitution (Zha, 1999). The basis of the repudiation was that the direct elections had bypassed the local people’s congress. But instead of following the Legal Daily’s suit, Beijing allowed the results to stand, suggesting deep ambivalence (Chan, 1999).
Despite efforts to institutionalise CCP procedures, encourage transparency and overcome ‘informal politics’, there are fundamental obstacles to implementation of inner-party democracy. Chief of these is the ‘cadre management system’, which rewards compliance with orders from above, particularly from one’s immediate superior, rather than responding to the demands of those being governed. For instance, all cadres, whether elected or appointed, remain subject to the cadre evaluation system; county-level cadres will evaluate whether township cadres have fulfilled the tasks assigned to them. Bonuses, career advancement and removal from office are the real drivers or delimiters of efforts to build inner-party democracy. Further, because supervision from above prevails, inner-party democracy will likely be used as a diffuse valve for the resolution of crisis situations, but once crises subside or when cadre opposition builds up, innovations will be rolled back. For example, Pingchang County in Bazhong was facing financial crisis and social disorder when a ‘public recommendation, direct election’ (gongtui zhixuan) was held. The reform won an award in ‘Innovations and Excellence in Local Chinese Government’ from the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau in 2006 and was widely publicised (Wang, et al., 2007). However, when the crisis was resolved, direct election was stopped and much of the progress that had been made was reversed due to objections by cadres that direct elections had violated the principle of ‘the party controls the cadres’.39
While it is not unreasonable for an authoritarian government, concerned with corruption and social tension, to search for alternative methods to better manage its
39 The example of Bazhong County did come up in my conversations with CCCPE members but they have since informed me that the success of Bazhong has been lost and direct elections rolled back because of opposition from cadres giving rise to the view shared by many in the CCCPE that the Party is too strong. This is a theme that will be taken up towards the end of the chapter.
87 cadres and improve governance in the process, there are nevertheless severe setbacks in the realisation of inner-party democracy. As already noted, the main challenge is to make cadres accountable to those being governed. Second, in the absence of supervision from below, direct elections risk becoming a ‘release valve’ for the management of crisis situations only to have the progress made rolled back when crises subside. Unless these challenges are overcome, inner-party democracy will only have a marginal impact on the management of cadres.
The themes elucidated above re-emerged in the conversations I had with employees at the CCCPE. Many of these scholars are deeply and intimately engaged with political reforms at both the theoretical and practical levels. Their opinions expressed in the interviews suggest that instead of viewing the decision-making process in a top-down manner, it is more fruitful to be open-minded about the possibilities for reforms within an authoritarian system. While ultimately it is the party-state which has the final say, the CCP is open to suggestions and criticisms from outside and even from among its own ranks. Perhaps the reflections of Ethan J. Leib, expert on the concept of deliberative democracy, will allow us to appreciate the irony in and difficulty of instituting political reforms in a complex country like China. Leib was attending a conference on Deliberative Democracy which was held in Hangzhou for the first time in China in 2004. He made the following observations afterwards:
I had a few observations of my own when the conference was done. First and most superficially, I was imbued with a deep sense of the ungovernability of such a gigantic country that spans so much territory and includes so many different peoples. That realisation helped me make sense of the fact that we all spent very little time trying to imagine what a national democracy for China could look like, save some final comments by the CCP members…Second, I thought the use of the term ‘democracy’ in the context of our discussions about “deliberative democracy” was a bit too capacious…To be sure, talking and inclusion may be valuable even without basic liberal rights: but many deliberative democrats reasonably insist that participation and deliberation both require some preconditions in the form of civil rights and the rule of law. We all could have benefited from more attention to the big picture – and to the deep irony that we were considering the options for creating forms of deliberative democracy in a one-party authoritarian state. That some villages have experimented with some admirable exercises of citizen participation and elections should be welcomed; but using the term “democracy” to describe such ventures
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seemed to let the Chinese government off too easily. (Leib, 2005, pp. 3-5).
‘Democracy is a Good Thing’: The CCCPE and Professor Yu Keping
Professor Yu Keping rose to fame in 2006 when his article, ‘Democracy is a good thing’ (Minzhu shige hao dongxi), first published in 2005, became a media sensation. The article was based on an interview with Hong-Kong based Dagong Daily and was later reprinted in Beijing Daily before being taken up by every other major newspaper in the country (Yu, 2009). The following year, the influential Southern Daily named the article the year’s most influential written document and in 2008 Yu was named in the top 50 of China’s most influential people in the three decades of development since 1978 (Ibid.). While it is not rare to find an intellectual achieve celebrity status in China, Yu’s ideas have nevertheless found a receptive audience within the ruling elite. However, upon closer scrutiny of Yu’s concept of democracy, what we find is not a radical departure from previous forays into the subject but rather moderate calls in comparison with the ‘democracy fever’ of the 1980s. This position is understandable and as Cheng Li explains in his introduction to Yu’s translated edited body of work, for democracy to work in China, conditions must be made ‘safe’ (Ibid.). In other words, if the perceived costs of democracy are too high, that is, it brings too much disruption to people’s lives, it is not worth the effort and importantly, if it does not serve the best interests of the current ruling elite, it will not be considered. For this reason, a delicate balance between public and elite interests must be achieved. This seems to be the moderate position advocated by Yu Keping.
For the longest time, the idea of democracy has been closely associated with Westernisation. For this reason, China’s elites as well as some intellectuals, have viewed the concept with contempt and suspicion. In the humanistic tradition, Yu has helped overcome this fear of democracy by forcefully arguing for its universal value. Democracy, he suggests, is a ‘good thing’, but it is far from perfect, and for all the systems tried and tested, democracy yields optimal value with highest rates of return on investment. Moreover, democracy is the high civilisational state to which all humankind aspires as they climb that ever moving target of progress and development. These views are all made explicit in Yu’s seminal essay. Below is an excerpt:
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Democracy is a good thing, and this is not just for specific persons or certain officials; this is for the entire nation and its broad masses of people. Simply put, for those officials who care more about their own interests, democracy is not only not a good thing; in fact, it is a troublesome thing, even a bad thing. Just think, under conditions of democratic rule, officials must be elected by the citizens and they must gain the endorsement and support of the majority of the people; their powers will be curtailed by the citizens, they cannot do whatever they want, they have to sit down across the people and negotiate. Just these two points alone already make many people dislike it. Therefore, democratic politics will not operate on its own; it requires the people themselves and the government officials who represent the interests of the people to promote and implement.
Democracy is a good thing, but that does not mean that everything about democracy is good. Democracy is definitely not 100% perfect; it has many internal inadequacies. Democracy can make the citizens go into the streets, hold assemblies and then cause political instability; democracy can make certain very simple matters become complicated and frivolous under undemocratic conditions, thereby increasing the political and administrative costs; democracy often involves repeated negotiations and discussions, causing certain decisions that should have been made in a timely manner become suspended without resolution, thereby decreasing administrative efficiency; democracy often affords opportunities for certain sweet-talking political fraudsters to mislead the people, and so on. But among all the political systems that have been invented and implemented, democracy is the one with the least number of flaws. That is to say, relatively speaking, democracy is the best political system for humankind.40
In many ways, Yu’s thesis echoes Winston Churchill’s witty remark: ‘democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.’ Democracy and political reform in general are the primary research focus of the CCCPE. However, less well known are projects that aim to strengthen civil society organisations and enhance their working relationship with the CCP. The Centre is also heavily involved in comparative work, the aim of which is to draw upon the experiences of other countries and to learn and apply selectively from them and to make the case that China’s conditions are different and therefore resist a one-size- fits-all approach. Like all state-recognised research institutes in China, the CCCPE works closely with other institutions including non-governmental organisations as
40 The original text of Yu Keping’s essay is found in Asia Weekly and carried in many of China’s main media outlets. A translation of this essay is found at EastSouthWestNorth website, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20070109_1.htm.
90 well as the Central Party School, which is responsible for educating and training cadres in the values and ideologies of the CCP. The CCCPE is also affiliated with the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau and Central Committee of the CCP. In short, it is linked directly to the Hu-Wen administration and enjoys a close working relationship with the Party. This is unsurprising in the current climate, given that Jiang Zemin had already paved the way for the Party to become an elite institution. Indeed, as noted by Brødsgaard (2004), of the more than 40 million cadres, over 46 percent hold university degrees. The make-up of the cadre corps is not only younger and more educated, they also come from a range of backgrounds both ethnic and socioeconomic. This has led Bakken (2004) to conclude that the Party resembles more a ‘corporate’ Party than a Leninist vanguard Party.
The relationship between the CCCPE and the CCP is complex and complicated. I was told by ‘my minder’41, who is also a researcher at the Centre that before the CCCPE was set up in 1999, it was an affiliate of the Central Translation Bureau. The Central Translation Bureau was a humble institute established in the 1950s to translate the essential works of Marx and Lenin into Chinese in order to make their works more accessible to the elite. It has also translated some of the important works of Deng Xiaoping such as his Selected Works, which is now readily available in English. In the 1950s, the Centre served the revolutionary needs of the Party, which at that time was concerned with fomenting revolution and making Marxism- Leninism serve Chinese ends. However, as the political vicissitudes of the time revealed, being classified as an ‘intellectual’ was risky, if not downright dangerous, and from what has been insinuated to me, various anti-rightist movements of the period have left a negative imprint on many still working at the Centre.
After the death of Mao and the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, many intellectuals were rehabilitated and under this relatively ‘liberal’ climate, they aired their criticisms. Some were directed at Mao and his associates while others targeted
41 My stay at the CCCPE was wholly sponsored by the director and his work unit (danwei). They provided me with free accommodation and even arranged to have me picked up and dropped off at the domestic airport. Upon being designated a ‘scholar-student’, which was on my official registration records, a person was allocated to me and made responsible for all affairs concerning me. This person not only helped me liaise with the CCCPE, they also arranged my daily activities, from (official) interviews to sight-seeing on weekends. I call this person ‘my minder’ because my activities are closely monitored by this person throughout the time I was in Beijing. Perhaps because of the nature of the work of the CCCPE and the people to whom I had access at the Centre, this was deemed necessary, though I am not sure if all foreign scholars enjoyed the same treatment.
91 the very foundations of Communist rule. Although we now know the outcome of the student democracy movement in 1989, discussions on political reform did not stop there. Criticism came from voices within the Party concerned that uneven economic development had exacerbated some of the glaring problems of inequality between and within regions and between classes of different people (Ding, 1994). It was widely believed that these inequalities were not a result of the unmitigated pursuit of materialistic gains, but a consequence of the Party’s deliberate effort to ‘let some get rich first’. Further, issues of poor governance and inadequate service delivery made the situation untenable in many localities, with complaints of official malfeasance committed by local cadres attracting the ire of Beijing. Not all who work at the CCCPE could be presumed to be ‘pro-Party’. Indeed, many of the comments I recorded were unfavourable towards, if not downright critical of, Party policies. But, for different reasons, these academics have been co-opted to work for the government. Most see their role not as ‘props’ for government but as ‘agents’ for change. However, conceptions of ‘change’ must be viewed within the context of the institutional constraints and limitations under which all of these scholar-officials operate.
In the early 2000s, a dramatic shift in perceptions of government took place and the CCCPE was at the forefront of this development. This came in the wake of experimental policies instituted at the village level, known as ‘village-elections’: these enabled direct democratic elections to take place at the lowest levels of government (He, 2007). Although implemented much earlier, it was really in the 2000s that this initiative took off. The outcome was protests and fears on both sides of the debate, but on the whole, village-elections represented a positive move in the direction of more political reforms. 42 This came as recent comments made by Premier Wen Jiabao on the value of democracy in his visit to Shenzhen were interpreted as signalling that the Special Economic Zone may be the next ‘Special
42 Although village elections were trialed at the village level, these have not been applied to higher levels and China’s structure of one-party rule continues to predominate. For more on the effectiveness of village elections in producing ‘democratically’ elected officials, see Lin, 2010.
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Political Zone’.43 Conceptually, these tentative steps towards democratically elected government are broadly discussed under the rubric of ‘political civilisation’.
The adoption of political civilisation not only expanded the conceptual boundary of civilisation discourse in general, but also it signalled that ‘political reforms’ were finally on the agenda for the CCP. However, it was not as if the Party lacked a tool for conceptualising the importance of political reforms. Prior to the introduction of the ‘third civilisation’, the conduct of officials and cadres had been governed broadly under the trope of ‘spiritual civilisation’. Indeed spiritual civilisation offensives of the 1990s often urged cadres to study Marxism, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping theory, to propagate the fine traditions of the Party and to uphold the moral and ethical standards that governed the family, the professions and the broader society. But whereas spiritual civilisation treated Party members as individuals insofar as their thought and actions impacted the image of the Party, political civilisation was intended to tackle the Party organisation as a whole, including the structures and processes that supported it and the rules that governed the individual conduct of its members.
In the context of China, it is difficult to escape politics and the political nature of seemingly apolitical events. In particular, members of the CCCPE are engaged in drafting ‘innovative’ political experiments with a view to improving government capacity at the lowest levels of government. Their job is to concoct theories that fall into line with the general values and priorities of the Party and put these into practice with the aim of widespread application. However, this chapter will show through the example of a CCCPE supported ‘government innovation’ campaign, how theories about efficient and effective government do not always translate easily into real-life situations and demonstrate the limits of single-party rule and the corresponding frustrations of those who are meant to uphold its values.
CCCPE Interviews: State Intellectuals in a Difficult Position
For most of the intellectuals I interviewed, the overwhelming concern was how China was being viewed abroad. It just happened that while I was there in Beijing,
43Since a speech in August 2010 marking the 30th anniversary of Shenzhen being a Special Economic Zone, Premier Wen Jiabao has called for reforms on eleven separate occasions. However, his calls have been repeatedly ignored by the official Chinese media indicating a rift in the Party.
93 the city was in the final phases of preparation for the Beijing Olympics. It was also a time when the Lhasa riots took place, which left the ruling elite a little jittery. Similarly, I sensed in the responses of my interviewees, a tendency to go into somewhat of a ‘defensive mode’. They were keen to ‘correct’ the foreigner’s view that the CCP is a ‘bad’ organisation and urged outside observers to judge China’s political progress against its past and not against Western yardsticks of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.44 Dr Wang Yiwu,45 for example, believed that China’s progress should not be judged against Western notions of democracy, but rather, against its own history. From this stance, he believes China has made significant strides:
The West tends to measure China’s progress against its political development and not its economy…They often criticise us for a lack of democracy…When we talk of ‘political civilization,’ we refer to the challenges of political reforms.
I think we should not compare China’s political progress with other countries but against its past…In the past, even mention of the words ‘rule of law’, democracy, freedom, or equality could get one into trouble. Now it is publicly announced so this is a sign of progress even if a small one.
Dr Bo Liang46 believes that although a strong Chinese state is to blame for the lack of political progress in the country, a number of other factors should be considered. For example, he attributes the ‘low quality’ (di suzhi) of the Chinese population as a possible explanation:
Another explanation is the low quality of the Chinese population…People don’t understand they have rights, or they don’t know how to go about protecting their interests, especially rural people whose lives are backward or are influenced by tradition. Another way of looking at this is that the government hasn’t provided people with any resources to overcome these problems or to protect their rights.
44 Apart from Professor Yu Keping, the names of my interviewees are all pseudonyms to protect their identities. It must be clarified that my intention was to understand the rationale behind the government-led civilising campaigns. I was interested in how ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns translated to etiquette and civic awareness campaigns in practice. Throughout the interviews, I never made mention of China’s perceived lack of democratic progress nor did I have any criticisms of the general state of politics in the country. I simply asked them what they thought of the civilising campaigns and their government’s role in them. For the most part, they did the talking and I let them guide the conversation where they wanted it to go and to express what they felt was important but overlooked in the official discourse. 45 Dr Wang Yiwu is a pseudonym. Interview with Dr Wang Yiwu took place on 8 April 2008. 46 Dr Bo Liang is a pseudonym. Interview with Dr Bo Liang took place on 25 April 2008.
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Using the ‘Xiamen Protests’ in 2007 against the proposed construction of a chemical plant, Professor Han Zhili47 highlights the difference between the ‘political quality’ of the citizenry involved in the movement with the general lack of awareness of the population. Professor Han construes the protests against the building of the chemical factory as an example of ‘ecological’ and ‘political’ civilisation in action: ordinary residents concerned about their health and the potential damaging effects on the natural surrounds used mobile phones and the internet to take ‘quiet strolls’. He praised these citizens’ high level of awareness and pro-activeness, believing that political change could only come when the citizenry learn to ‘supervise’ the actions of business and government. In his view, it is not entirely the responsibility of government to set limits on businesses. Rather, it is up to people to supervise the government and to know their own rights.
The tension between people as ‘governable objects’ and ‘self-determining citizens’ was played out in the course of my conversation with Professor Han. While on the one hand, the state intellectuals at the CCCPE believed that the government must change in order to better manage expectations, on the other, they also put the onus on people to self-improve. Ironically however, it is the party-state that continues to stand in the way of political self-awareness so while it may continue to preach the virtues of a ‘self-actualising’ citizenry, it is still very much a part of the control structures that are stultifying the progress of political reforms.
‘Zhongguo Zhengfu tai Qiang Le’: The Chinese Government is ‘Too Strong’
Throughout my interview with Professor Yang Dali, 48 the single oft-repeated criticism he had of China’s political system was that ‘zhongguo zhengfu tai qiang le’, which can be translated to ‘the Chinese government is too strong’. Professor Yang’s research specialty is comparative politics – particularly US and Chinese politics. His responses were the most frank and critical of all the responses from my interviewees. Whereas the others saw the perceived ‘low quality’ of the citizenry as an important factor inhibiting political progress, Professor Yang saw the low political quality of the citizenry as being directly attributable to the Chinese government being too strong.
47 Professor Han Zhili is a pseudonym. Interview with Professor Han Zhili took place on 15 April 2008. 48 Professor Yang Dali is a pseudonym. Interview with Professor Yang Dali took place on 8 April 2008.
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Thus, an inverse relationship could be derived from the political quality of the citizenry and the strength of the party-state: the stronger the state the lower the political quality of the citizenry and vice versa. By ‘political quality’, Professor Yang was referring to the self-organising capacity of individuals to resolve their own problems. He posed the question to me thus:
Do I think that the political quality of Chinese people is less than that of Australians? I think not. I think we are basically the same at heart. We want the same things, education for our children, a roof over our heads, clothes on our back…But the difference between Chinese and Australian systems of government is that whereas your system remains stable so that it does not matter who is elected to the position of PM, we have no say and our system depends very much on the group that runs the country.
Professor Yang was very concerned by the lack of progress in political reforms. He elaborated on the positives and negatives of too much power vested in a single party:
The positives…how can I put it? The Party is a prestige organisation; it has a legitimate character about it…Through its tight organisation, it is able to instruct the lower levels, level-by-level…It can mobilise many cadres to take care of tasks and resolutely carry out the campaign [from beginning to finish]. The tasks are fulfilled quickly, the campaign is saturated in the media and ordinary people are mobilised accordingly…However, there are also many drawbacks…that is to say, if the government is too strong and the people are too weak, problems will likely arise.
Since political civilisation was first added by Jiang Zemin to the ‘two-civilisations’ matrix, political reforms have featured prominently. For researchers at the CCCPE, this is wrought with problems and contradictions. In theory, the Party has been preaching the values of ‘small government, big society’, but in practice, it continues to expand its involvement at the grassroots. Where the Party has retreated from macro-management, it is reasserting its presence in micro-management. There is widespread belief that support for hitherto ignored professions like social work is serving to extend and revitalise the Party’s role and reach in ever more dynamic ways. Community input and participation is just as likely to serve Party interests as it does the community and its residents. According to Leung et. al. (2012), from the governmentality perspective, social work becomes an ‘appropriate technology of government’ in which the personal failings of individuals are viewed as obstacles to
96 social harmony. Thus, helping the poor and underprivileged could also be seen as a means through which the government controls this population. For example, in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, there were concerted efforts to assist the migrant population by encouraging them to return home during the Games for fear that their presence would tarnish the good image authorities wanted to project on the world’s stage.49 Professor Yang Dali expands on the subtleties of the problem of ‘too much government’:
As you know, we are now practising ‘market economics’ (gao shichang jingji). However, under any circumstance, businesses and enterprises have to deal with the government. If your relationship with the government is not good, they are going to ‘look up’ trouble for you (zhao nide mafan). For example, if your relationship with the local government is not good, they will send the tax office around to check if you’ve paid your taxes, if you’ve paid the right amount and if your product complies with the various regulations. These actions are meant to cause you trouble.
The problem of a strong government, Professor Yang went on to explain, does not only mean controlling a strong army, strong police force and control of the instruments of force and coercion: more importantly, it is about control of resources, their use and distribution. There are different ways to control and govern the population nowadays – for example, when one wants to borrow money, the government has many stipulations to restrict your access and the terms under which you borrow and repay interest. Professor Yang also mentioned another type of power, shenpi quanli, or the power to grant rights/permission to do or carry out something such as the registration of business and NGOs. In the past, the government controlled the non-governmental sector by forbidding them50 to form, thereby sending them underground. These days, the government has created such an elaborate system of registration that it is almost impossible for NGOs to comply. Instead of fighting these regulations, people are often discouraged and simply drop the idea. However, this does not mean that NGOs do not exist in China: it just means that the system of governmental control is very sophisticated, putting the Party one step ahead of the game.
49 This was divulged during a conversation I had with an employee at the CCCPE dated April 15 2008. 50 The reference for ‘them’ is the non-governmental sector,’ not the organisations within it.
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Professor Yang specifically mentioned 1989 as a turning point in the changing relationship between state and society. Before the events of 4 June 1989, there were many organisations independent of government. However, after that, a new regulation was passed to restrict the emergence of these groups. Known as the ‘Sheituan Dengji Guanli Tiaolie’ or ‘Societies Registration Regulations’, it was designed precisely to make sure that another June 4 did not occur in future. As Professor Yang understood it, this fear of NGOs has historical antecedents dating back to the civil war days with the Nationalist Government:
The CCP understands through historical experience with the Nationalist Government that its organising of the grassroots into anti- government forces (e.g. unions, communes, students’ union, etc.) was used to garner support and to overthrow the Nationalists. [They were a rebel force after all]. So the CCP is understandably wary of granting any organising power to non-governmental groups for fear that history might repeat itself to the detriment of CCP rule.
However, balancing this mistrust of the people with the desire to become more efficient and effective as a modern governing institution requires that reforms be made. Since the 2000s, a concerted effort has been made, at least at the symbolic and rhetorical level, to convey the image of a service-oriented (fuwu zhengfu) and responsible government (zeren zhengfu). This also coincided with the ‘people- oriented’ (yiren wei ben) outlook of the Hu-Wen administration. But, as Professor Yang’s comments have revealed, the problem of ‘too much government’ continues to undermine these goals. As he puts it, a ‘strong government’ not only prevents the goals of ‘service-oriented’ and responsible government from being realised, it also discourages or stunts the growth of non-governmental organisations, leaving a power vacuum which only the Party can fill:
The government must reform, it must change its functions from an omnipotent government to a limited government…However, in order to be a responsible, service-oriented government, it must withdraw [from society]; it must be ‘smaller’…some tasks must be delegated to others. But [in China], grassroots organisations cannot develop. [Herein lies the dilemma], the government wants to unburden some of its responsibilities onto society, but there is no one to take its place…
Professor Yang believes that the true potential of the Chinese people has been significantly curtailed as a result of the Chinese government possessing too much power:
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When people can’t organise themselves, they’re like little potatoes, all dependent on the government…why can’t they organise themselves?...Are Chinese people deficient in this ability?...No…There are many examples in history to disprove this…But why, at this historical juncture, do the Chinese people still look to the government for mobilisation? This is a problem of government…No, it is a problem of the CCP’s own making and is also a problem for the CCP.
Political reforms have hit a critical juncture in China. While on the one hand one- party rule has produced one of the fastest growing economies in the world, in the process lifting millions out of poverty, on the other, one-party rule has also placed pressures on the leadership to do more. Reforms have been an uneven and socially and politically divisive process. Not all have benefited, leading to rising tensions and social discontent. One solution has been to delegate power to lower level governments through direct elections, but fear of losing control of the grassroots and the undermining of the central authorities has resulted in schizophrenic decision- making. Every step forward to let citizens have more input in decision-making has been accompanied by two steps backward out of fear of losing control. Unless systemic reforms to the political processes are made, reforms will remain arbitrary, ad hoc and frustrating for those keen to see more progress made.
‘Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance’: Campaigns to Improve Political Accountability at the Grassroots
In the realm of ‘political innovations’, the CCCPE has played a leading role. In 2000, the CCCPE cooperated with government to come up with ways to improve local governance. The 2005 round of this campaign was the third round of the Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG ) Program.
From the very outset, the IECLG Award was conceived as a way of improving Beijing’s supervision of local governments. There is widespread belief that it is China’s political peripheries that are letting the centre down. The image of local cadres as ‘peasant-eating parasites’ pervades rural China and as a local cadre quoted by Stig Thøgersen (2004, p. 194) revealed, even the governing elite in the countryside are thoroughly disillusioned with CCP rule:
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‘They [i.e., the cadres] are eating the peasants, and their sons and daughters are eating the peasants, the corps of peasant-eaters is growing in strength year by year.’
Nevertheless, the grievances of most petitioners who make the arduous journey to Beijing to seek political redress target local officials and not the CCP itself. For this reason, the CCP can promote itself as a corrupt-free or ‘clean’ government, playing a supervisory role over the conduct of officials at the local level. As the introduction to the IECLG report by Yu Keping makes clear, the objective of such initiatives is ‘to improve [the CCP’s] institutions and behaviours, [and] strengthen the citizen’s identification and trust in the government’. The program was never intended to grant citizens a supervisory role over government even though this is implied or at least desired. The IECLG program should be instead viewed as a self-improving mechanism and a practical adaptation of the theory of ‘political civilisation’ which is strictly out of bounds for ordinary people whose input at the grassroots is very limited.
In all, there were 245 applicants, of whom ten could be declared winners. Each of the final winners were awarded 50,000 RMB (approx AUD $8,500). It is unclear how the funds are to be used. The selection criteria included: 1) the degree of innovation (chuangxin chengdu) i.e. be one of a kind, 2) the degree of participation (canyu chengdu) i.e. encourage as many people as possible to participate, 3) the degree of social effects (xiaoyi chengdu) i.e. must have ‘obvious’ social effects, 4) the degree of significance (zhongyao chengdu), i.e. should bring about some significant change to people’s lives, 5) the degree of sustainability (jieyue chengdu), i.e. project must solve actual problems, and finally 6) the degree of transferability (guangda chengdu) i.e. the project must be made into a model for application in other areas and localities. To be eligible, the project must involve government, must be non-profit in nature, be creative and unique, must have ‘obvious social advantages’ and must have been in operation for at least a year before the application deadline. There were eight categories for which applicants could apply. These were: 1) governmental service and institutional innovations 2) social service 3) community service 4) environmental protection 5) social security and stability 6) culture and education 7) medical and health services 8) poverty reduction and assistance to the weak. Each applicant had to write a 500 character essay addressing the selection
100 criteria and after much deliberation, 20 finalists were selected and their projects personally inspected by representatives from the CCCPE.
Professor Gao Lihun51 was an executive director of the program. He had told me that although the selection process was fair and transparent, the aim is to get a representative sample of each category to reflect the separate areas of concern for government. In our interview, Professor Gao revealed that the Centre tries to select different cities in a bid to encourage wider participation. Programs such as these have had widespread influence by virtue of the fact that they command the attention of almost every media outlet. The IECLG Program was intended to foster self- organisation and local initiative; an example of state-led civil society. It should not however, be mistaken as separate from the party-state. This is an example of the government ‘re-grouping’ to better govern the grassroots by using a dynamic approach that deploys financial incentives to encourage local cadres to think of ways to improve their governing mechanisms. But instead of more autonomy as we might expect, we see more supervision and control from Beijing.
The IECLG is also an example of ‘mobilisation at work’ that harks back to the days of Maoist campaigns. Daily routines and bureaucracy are put aside in order to prioritise an increase in activities in service of the campaign. While devolution of power has meant more autonomy to local cadres in terms of organising effort, many also view these periodic episodes as a waste of resources and a distraction from other more urgent tasks. Local cadres are susceptible to dissimulation as they learn to anticipate and predict the outcome of campaigns and its ‘ebbs and flows’. For this reason, there is cause for concern that even well-intentioned projects like the IECLG program may actually encourage poor governance practices, which ironically is the opposite of what the CCCPE is about.
The problem stems from the omnipotence of government and its presence in obvious and subtle ways. These government-initiated and government-led campaigns also help familiarise the population to government initiatives generally; the population develops ‘programmed reactions’ to these campaigns ranging from ignorance to utter cynicism, and sometimes even enthusiasm, though this is rare. This stems from the
51 Professor Gao Lihun is a pseudonym. Interview with Professor Gao Lihun took place on 14 April 2008.
101 perception that anything Party-led is for the benefit of the Party and not the people. So if one is not connected to the Party, one can expect little benefit from participating in such campaigns. Manufactured enthusiasm for such campaigns is always part of the political culture that obliges participants to observe a measured degree of respect at least for the people behind the movements. However, for the general populace, a cautious distance is maintained and participation is limited to that of a ‘spectator’ role.
Conclusion
‘Political civilisation’, or its lack, dominated the in-depth interviews and exchanges I had with members of the CCCPE, who are widely regarded in China and abroad as the authoritative voices in the realm of politics. At first, these discussions seemed far removed from civilising campaigns; however, upon closer scrutiny, they are very much a part of the overall efforts to effectively govern China – politically, economically, and socially. Practically however, they are also about resolving tensions arising from three decades of uneven development: these tensions include deepening income inequality, corruption and environmental degradation. Safeguarding the modernisation project becomes the overriding objective, and diffusing tensions resulting from this project is imperative to maintaining social stability, a precondition for ongoing development and upon which the legitimacy of the CCP now rests.
There is no denying that the Party enjoys an overwhelming preponderance of power vis-à-vis other organisations. Only the Party can successfully mobilise society at short notice. However, an ‘omnipotent’ government also inhibits the creativity and talent of its citizenry. The dilemma could be put thus: on the one hand, a self- determining, self-cultivated, and self-organising citizenry is crucial for overcoming some of the bottlenecks emerging in China; on the other, this goal must be balanced with the need of the Party to retain its leading role.
This seems to be a source of frustration for some of the state officials I spoke with. Following a long-held tradition, many of them have come to assume the responsibility for ‘all under heaven’. Unable or unwilling to see themselves as separate from the fate of the nation, and bearing in mind the intense pressure to self- censor and toe the Party line, they are working with the system to improve the
102 system – not to change it. As the IECLG project has demonstrated, the model for advancing ‘political civilisation’ is campaign-style mobilisation. Like campaigns of old, these have become managed projects with highly predictable outcomes. This takes the competitive edge out of such programs, turning them into stage sets for the display of political loyalty and subservience rather than community-directed grassroots initiatives as they are often portrayed to be.
Since he rose to fame with ‘democracy is a good thing’, Professor Yu Keping has not revisited his thesis, thus signalling that now it is not ‘safe’ to elaborate on a controversial topic. Instead, Professor Yu has diverted our attention to talk of ‘happiness indicators’ as an alternative for conceptualising a healthy and stable society (Lim, 2010). However, as long as the omnipotent state continues to preside over the minutiae of planning and organising, it will not be long before this topic is re-ignited. As a concept, wenming is a subject that has gone in and out of fashion depending on the political ‘winds’ of the times. It can evoke strong opinions on both sides of the political spectrum. Wenming discourse portends the possibility of political uncertainty but also the possibility for political change and is not necessarily limited to discussions on ‘decency’ and ‘civility’.
In the next chapter I explore the mass mobilisation method as an instrument of policy implementation. I argue that the present campaigns to ‘civilise’ the public cannot be adequately understood without reference to and appreciation of the Maoist past. The aim of these campaigns is not to reminisce about or romanticise a so-called ‘Maoist utopia’ in which people readily sacrificed themselves for the collective good. Rather, I want to show how the legacy of the Maoist period has left an imprint on post-Mao Shanghai society and circumscribed the methods which the authorities have at their disposal to mobilise the public into civic action. I also explain in Chapter Five how the excesses of the Cultural Revolution demoralised society, fuelling perceptions of a moral vacuum in the initial stages of opening and reforms and the Party’s disavowal of the excesses and incivilities that characterised this chaotic period.
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Chapter Five
Reviving Maoist Tactics: The Role of Mass Mobilisation Campaigns in the Past
To win countrywide victory is only the first step in a long march of ten thousand li…The Chinese revolution is great, but the road after the revolution will be longer, the work greater and more arduous…We are not only good at destroying the old world, we are also good at building the new.
- Mao Zedong, Selected Works Vol. 3, 1967, p. 347
Since China embarked on economic reforms, everyday life appears to have been completely transformed, with very few visible traces of the Maoist period. With the exception of the Mao statues erected in school grounds and other monuments reminding the public of its socialist past, it would seem that China has moved on since the Chairman. However, although Mao may be long dead, not all of his legacies and methods of rule have been discarded. As I will investigate in this chapter, the mass mobilisation campaign has found new life in the reform era.
As Mao put it in the opening quotation, campaigns were not only used to ‘destroy the old world’ such as in the ‘Destroy the Four Olds’ campaign – they were also meant to build the new, like the ‘Study Marxism-Leninism’ campaign of 1956. I view the civilising campaigns of the present as belonging to the latter category, that is, they are a bold attempt to construct a new citizenry by combining the needs of a rapaciously growing economy with the party-state’s desire for social control. While it may be the case that China is looking for foreign examples to emulate, these campaigns are neither purely a foreign import nor are they exclusively Chinese. Rather, they are a blend of both and have developed in response to the ‘afflictions of modernity’ that bear a particularly ‘Chinese character.’ In arguing that Maoist methods of rule, such as the mass mobilisation campaign, still have relevance in the present, I am not, however, suggesting that Chinese society is little changed – far from it. What I want to suggest is that campaigns are finding utility in the present in
104 new and not so new ways. Without accounting for the past, we fail to appreciate the significance of the campaign method of mobilisation in the present. Further, the element of continuity with the Maoist past partially explains the longevity of CCP rule in China.
In this chapter, I outline some of the salient features of the mass mobilisation campaign. Of necessity, I will limit my discussion to the characteristics that survive into the present and not delve into the politics behind every campaign that ever took place in the PRC since its founding in 1949.52 In particular, I look at the institutional arrangements established during the Maoist period, such as the mass and grass roots organisations that continue to exert influence today. To begin discussion of the significance of mass mobilisation campaigns in China, I outline their origins and definition. I argue that although Chinese Marxists borrowed heavily from Soviet Russia, nowhere in the world were campaigns so frequently used to implement and disseminate public policy.
Yundong: Origins and Definition
Definition
Nowadays, the word yundong is rarely used to denote ‘campaign’ in Chinese. Instead, the word huodong is used in its place. Both yundong and huodong contain the verb, ‘dong’ which means to stir, act, move, change or alter. Consulting the Oxford Concise English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary (2001) reveals substantive and subtle differences between yundong and huodong. Whereas the former is a noun referring to 1) motion; movement, 2) sports; athletics; exercise, 3) (political) movement; campaign; drive, the latter can be both a noun and a verb (Ibid., p. 553). As a noun, huodong can refer to an ‘activity’ or ‘manoeuvre’ (Ibid., p. 192). However, it does not connote activities, like yundong does, that are of an exclusive political nature. So while one can say that a ‘zhengzhi huodong’ (political activity) is underway, activities can involve charities, communities and neighbourhoods and does not have to involve the state. Yundong, it would seem, is the exclusive domain of the state. When evoked, yundong belongs to the realm of the Maoist ‘past.’ With
52 For a good account of the different campaigns that took place and their typology, see Cell, 1977.
105 the party-state keen to distance itself from the trauma of its past, huodong instead of yundong is used to refer to campaigns in the contemporary period.
However, the use today of huodong to denote ‘campaign’ instead of yundong does not preclude the state’s leading role in mass mobilisation. Instead, the use of huodong shows a reconfigured relationship between state and society. The state may be the instigator of campaigns to improve public conduct but society has been substantially de-politicised since the end of the Maoist period, giving greater space to social forces to represent and contest (within certain limits) their competing claims. Huodong conveys a sense of spontaneity and responsiveness, unlike yundong which is largely associated with the political establishment.
Since opening up to the outside world in 1978, it has been the language of economic reforms that has driven social change and not the other way around. Starting with reforms to the agricultural sector in 1978, the language and logic of economic reforms has saturated other areas of life. Civility campaigns have likewise been ‘infected’ by the new vocabulary and rationale of economic reforms. The word yundong therefore does not adequately capture this altered state/society dynamic. Nevertheless, some aspects of yundong have found utility in the present and continue to serve the government well. In the next section, I explore the origins of the mass mobilisation campaign followed by an analysis of some of the institutional arrangements that were set up during the Maoist period which endure to the present day. I must clarify that although yundong was largely associated with politics, as a linguistic category, yundong can be ‘political’, ‘economic’ as well as having a ‘social’ character. Yundong therefore is not the exclusive domain of ‘political’ activities like the political purges that periodically occurred throughout the Maoist period. Rather, they can address such mundane problems like the infestation of flies or rats or the education campaign to raise literacy in the 1950s. What yundong does connote is the deep penetration of the state into the social and private realms. It also reflects the organisational capacity of the CCP to mobilise the population at short notice to its various causes.
Origins
(I) The Soviet Precedent
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There is certainly an argument to be made that the Chinese Marxists borrowed heavily from their Soviet counterparts. Before the ‘Sino-Soviet split’, which led to a complete severing of relations in 1969 resulting in border skirmishes between the two countries, Soviet influence in China was conspicuous. Soviet influence was obvious not only in the realm of ideology (including popular culture) and politics, but also in the cultural style of the literati and the propaganda messages of the party- state. Mass mobilisation campaigns were also borrowed from the Russian Soviets as an organisational and policy tool (Bennett, 1976). However, whereas the Soviets saw limited utility in the campaign, the Chinese Marxists saw great potential. As Chalmers Johnson (1970, p. 25) observed, Marxist rulers had a special place for ‘social mobilisation’ in their society:
A Communist party in power adopts a transfer culture, which it expounds and defends as moving society toward a utopian goal culture but which in fact has as its first two priorities the preservation of the party’s power monopoly and the maintenance of the social system. Third in priority, but still of decisive importance, are schemes thought to be necessary for achieving the goal culture - a classless society, the defeat of “imperialism,” socialist construction, the “new socialist man,” etc. It is the particular contents and precedents of the Marxist-Leninist goal culture that distinguish Communist from other revolutionary movements. All three goals of the transfer culture demand societal mobilisation.
Implicit in Johnson’s reasoning is that campaigns are only meant to be a temporary measure employed in the initial stages of national (re)construction. They were not meant to be used continuously, as the Chinese Marxists did, to implement all manner of policy.
Another point of difference was that whereas the Russian campaigns were characterised more by top-down control, the Chinese emphasised voluntary compliance, mass mobilisation and participation from below. Further, the Soviet Marxist leadership were largely of non-rural background and therefore distanced themselves from the peasantry, not believing that this class was a source for real change.53 According to Whyte (1970, pp. 286-292), the Russian leadership found it
53 However, at the time of their respective coming-to-power, both Soviet Russia and Communist China had a predominantly rural population. At the time of Party recruitment in 1917, only two per cent of Russian Marxists were of peasant background (Lewin, 1968). By comparison, as noted by Schurmann (1968, p. 133), 58 per cent of Chinese Marxists were peasants despite six years of Party recruitment in the cities ending in 1956.
107 difficult to penetrate village life and were frequently confronted with disruptions and resistance. This was unlike the situation in China where the CCP membership base was largely of peasant roots. In his detailed portrayal of a Chinese rectification campaign, Fanshen, William Hinton (1968) paints a graphic picture of how rural peasants were encouraged to criticise their own local Party cadres in a thorough- going manner, demonstrating the level of grass-roots participation and the political, psychological and emotional investment placed in the campaign.
Moreover, the methods used to induce compliance operated differently in Soviet Russia compared to China. For instance, the Russian leadership often resorted to coercion whereas the Chinese deployed persuasion. This is because the Russians did not believe in the ability of the individual to be transformed through the campaigns as the Chinese did. There was no Soviet equivalence of Mao’s ‘curing the illness in order to save the patient’. There was only a ‘you are with us or against us’ mentality under Stalin’s rule. As Frederick Teiwes (Quoted in Cell, 1977, p. 10) observed,
In both systems persuasive and coercive measures have been intertwined but the Chinese have been more subtle in combining the two methods and have shown a much greater willingness to rely on persuasive techniques.
While other ruling Communist Parties, in North Korea and Vietnam, for example, also used the campaign mobilisation strategy, their efforts largely postdate the socialist transformation process in China and will not be discussed here.54 Suffice to say that both the regimes of Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam have cautiously refrained from following exactly the Chinese model of mass mobilisation (Bennett, 1976). Even the Russian experience provided a limited precedent for the Chinese. We therefore need to look beyond the shared characteristics of Leninism-Marxism for an appreciation of the importance the CCP placed on mass mobilisation campaigns. One was the guerrilla war experience the Chinese Communists gained in Yan’an at the end of the Long March, and the development of ‘mass line’ politics as a result. These developments in the domestic context, it will be argued, have made a substantive difference to the evolution of the yundong in Maoist China. They also helped to form some of the enduring mass-line institutions that survive to the present day.
54 For a study of the campaign strategy in what was then known as North Vietnam, see Burchett, 1966. For North Korea, see Sik, 1970.
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(II) The Yan’an Experience and the Development of Maoist Politics
Yan’an contradicted all the metaphors of pollution, the sick China, the poisoned China, the diseased China, the China of coolies and Mandarins, the opium, the selling of children into slavery, and above all the internecine killing, warlordism, and domination by Japan and other countries. Yan’an was an alternative to all this, but it also embodied the heroism of survivors against repeated attempts to exterminate them… Yan’an was a center, a sanctuary, a mobilization space, a simulacrum of a utopic community. (Apter & Saich, 1994, p. 10)
There was a time when the CCP was a rag-tag guerrilla army fighting both the Guomindang (GMD) and the Japanese. Between 1928 and 1945, two armed base areas were set up, the first centered in the Jinggang Mountains in Jiangxi (1928), later shifting to the town of Ruijin near the Fujian border. The second centered in the town of Yan’an in the northern province of Shaanxi, near the border with Gansu and Ningxia.
Map 1: Map of the Long March, 1934-1935. Source: History Department of the US Military Academy, West Point, http://www.dean.usma.edu/history/web03/atlases/chinese%20civil%20war/chinese%20civil%20war% 20index.htm.
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The trials and tribulations of these harsh years (1928-1949) in opposition are considered a formative period for the CCP’s later leadership style. It was also here, trapped in the unforgiving environment, that the technique of mass mobilisation was forged, tested and developed.
Scholars have found roots linking the Soviet Republic of 1931-1934 to the mass line politics of later years. Mark Seldon (1971) in particular, has attributed the ‘Yan’an Way’ to the continuing success of communist rule in post-independent China. While based in this region, the CCP first wrestled with the challenges associated with making its unfamiliar rule popular. Not only did the CCP have to capture popular nationalist sentiments by declaring war on the Japanese in 1932, it also had to rebuild the country from the ground up. As a method of rule, popularisation was essential if the CCP were to hold onto power and extend its government beyond the base areas. By appealing to the anti-rich sentiments of the peasantry, the CCP was able to mobilise the masses into action, later involving not only the poor peasant corps but also the entire bureaucracy and even several soviet governments. Hence, what began as a land redistribution campaign evolved into a complex mass mobilisation system. But before their methods could develop and mature, the CCP was driven from its Jiangxi base.
The retreat from Jiangxi to Yan’an in 1934 would later become known as the Long March and go down in the annals of modern Chinese history as an epic journey that helped to solidify the leadership of Mao Zedong. When the CCP finally reached Yan’an, they encountered local partisans who had already started the redistribution of land but for some reason or other, their efforts had stalled and it was not until the CCP took over control that the campaign picked up momentum (Bennett, 1976). However, Japanese advances into north China forged an uneasy alliance between the CCP and the Nationalist Army (GMD) in the form of a United Front in 1935, contributing to a steady growth in the bureaucracy. This alliance, the second of its kind,55 was only short-lived and in 1941 it had all but dissolved. In the winter of 1942, the turning point for the CCP was reached: not only were they under attack from the Japanese, they were also blockaded by the GMD.
55 The first United Front between the KMT and the CCP was in 1926 and dissolved in 1927.
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The Communists’ initial response to these challenges was a ‘rectification’ campaign (Zhengfeng) carried out from 1942 to 1944. It was designed to unify and strengthen the Party organisation. This was followed by a series of mass-line policies aimed at changing the very fundamental aspects of village life and the economy. The methods developed during rectification such as tension-building methods of study, self- criticism, struggle and public admission of error were used not only to purge and strengthen the Party organisation, but also to resolve Mao’s so-called ‘non- antagonistic’ contradictions among the people. According to Mao, two types of ‘contradictions’ existed in society. The first are ‘antagonistic’ contradictions between hostile classes and hostile social systems and can only be resolved by force. The second are called ‘non-antagonistic’ contradictions which exist within socialist society and can be resolved using non-violent means through education, criticism and unification. Mao (1972, p. 307) explains:
We are confronted by two types of social contradictions – contradictions between ourselves and the enemy and contradictions among the people…The contradictions between ourselves and our enemies are antagonistic ones. Within the ranks of the people, contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between exploiters and the exploited classes have, apart from their antagonistic aspect, a non-antagonistic aspect.
In addition to resolving the two types of contradictions by means of a Rectification Campaign, the CCP also conducted other campaigns in the Yan’an years. These were aimed not only at creating revolution, but also at providing the vital social infrastructure necessary for rebuilding society from below. Mark Selden (1971, pp. 210-273) identifies six major campaigns carried out during this period:
1. Campaign for crack troops and simpler administration, 1941-1943 2. ‘Down-to-the-village’ campaign, 1941-1942 3. Campaign for the reduction of rent and interest, 1940-1944 4. Cooperative movement, 1942-1943 5. Great production movement, 1943 a. Participation of cadres in productive labour b. ‘Labour Hero’ emulation campaigns 6. Popular education movement, 1944
Enforced self-reliance, a product of both Japanese advances in the north and GMD blockades, had given the Yan’an Communists little choice but to develop their own counter-strategies. As Mark Selden observed, policies depended on villagers’
111 acquiescence to Communist rule without which it would have been easily decimated by the Nationalists. Citing a source who lived through these tumultuous times, Gordon Bennett (1976, p. 30) documents the challenges facing the Chinese communists in 1939:
Confronted by the blockade of the Kuomintang reactionaries, Comrade Mao Tse-tung asked the following question at a cadres’ meeting: “Are we going to starve to death or disband ourselves? Or are we going to do it ourselves?” He said: “Since no one wants to starve or disband, to do it ourselves is the answer.” He said: “We are convinced that we can solve the economic difficulties. Our answer to all problems in this connection is to do it ourselves.”
Bennett concluded that without any outside support or sanctuaries, the CCP had to outlive the GMD blockade and Japanese aggression or go under. This environment made mass mobilisation a matter of life and death, very unlike the campaigns of latter years which were about creating the conditions for ‘continuous revolution’. Enthusiasm for campaigns in the post-1949 period would face challenges different from the conditions of hardship of the Yan’an period. As I will discuss later in the chapter, the failure of the campaign strategy to adapt to peacetime conditions and the tendency to revert back to the methods developed while the CCP was in opposition, turned the campaign into something else – something resembling a public ritual bent on maintaining control of the momentum of revolution rather than the participatory democracy of the Chinese Soviet Republic of the Yan’an period (1935-1945).
A crucial aspect I have touched upon but not yet discussed is the development of ‘mass line’ politics developed during this time. Defining the ‘mass line’ is important for our understanding of campaigns in several ways, chief of which is the real and conceptual link between the ruler and the led. The mass line approach adds weight to the claim of ‘socialism by the people for the people’ because it forced cadres to learn from the peasantry and the peasantry to simultaneously improve themselves. This was a means by which the CCP stayed ‘in-touch’ with the concrete problems facing rural society. However, while the mass line approach conferred value on ‘learning from the masses’, thereby helping the CCP to perfect its propaganda methods, Mao was ambivalent towards the Chinese peasantry in general. He saw in
112 their numbers (more than 80 per cent of the total population in the 1950s) both a source of strength and a hindrance to the modernisation of China.
The Mass Line
The mass line was a hallmark of the Yan’an period and indeed the entire guerrilla movement. Principles of the mass line took the CCP beyond the immediate concerns of war and survival to a broader concern for the role of ‘man’ (sic) and society in the revolution. As a party seeking to take political power, the CCP relied on the mass line to re-articulate the relationship between leaders and ‘the people’ in the society that was taking shape in the base areas.
The mass line draws from the experience of the guerrilla years by emphasising the responsiveness of the Party to the popular needs and aspirations of the people which could only be properly ascertained through constant exchange and contact. Designed in response to the problems and limitations of the peasantry, mass line theory also conferred agency to the peasantry. The ‘labour heroes’ emulation campaigns, for example, bypassed the requirement for specialisation and brought within reach leadership roles for this marginalised class. As Mark Selden (1971, p. 276) argues,
Mass line conceptions of leadership brought honor and status within the grasp of every youth or adult who was prepared to devote himself [sic] wholeheartedly to the revolutionary cause, regardless of his class, formal training, or family background. If peasants could “rise” to leadership through struggle and self-education, students, bureaucrats, and traditional elite elements could “descend” by means of “to the village” and production campaigns to unite with and lead the people within the confines of the village. In either case, leadership implied a break with the elitism of the past and the acceptance of a multiplicity of roles which traditionally have been separate and distinct.
However, this is not to suggest that Mao entirely sided with the peasantry. As noted briefly above, he was at best ambivalent towards their perceived role in history, oscillating between attributing them with revolutionary agency on the one hand, and perceiving them as a liability in the modernisation of China on the other. Later policies, such as the institutionalisation of the internal ‘passport’ system known as hukou, would severely limit rural to urban migration and hold them ‘landlocked’ in their place of birth. The hukou system continues to play a major role in determining the life chances of rural-urban migrants living in cities to this day. An alternative
113 view was Mao’s inversionary politics: in reality China did not have a sufficient proletarian class to instigate a revolution, what it did have was a large peasant population. Mao had to first assign this class some importance and utilise their potential for fundamentally transforming feudal China.
One of the reasons why Mao succeeded, according to David Apter and Tony Saich (1994) was his ability to narrativise the revolution and tailor Marxism-Leninism to Chinese needs that won him the fight against the GMD. They elaborate:
Initially Mao did not claim that the peasantry was an enlightened class or the class of a higher political consciousness. He saw it simply as a class from which sufficient numbers could be recruited to support guerrilla armies. He saw it as a class whose grievances had in the past, and would continue for some time to produce, explosive potential…For Mao had to find a role for the peasants that made them the salt of the earth, a role more significant in their consciousness than mere insurrectionary violence might offer: they needed a deep sense of grievance, a yearning for justice while still lacking the larger vision that remains open to any proletariat. However, unlike the proletariat, there is no way in any Marxist theory that the peasantry can become the class of the future. Quite the contrary. By the very nature of the productive process, it is a class that would be marginalized even more if modernization and industrial development were finally to get under way on a large scale in China. It is a class of the past, not the class of potentiality. (Apter & Saich, 1994, pp. 128-129)
Even in Mao’s provocative metaphor in which he compared the Chinese peasantry to ‘blank sheets’ of paper, the limitations of this social group were nevertheless highlighted. Being ‘blank’ meant that they could be easily indoctrinated and in the initial stages of consolidation of his leadership Mao relied on this group for military support. However, being ‘blank’ also posed problems later on in modernisation efforts. Although Mao tied ‘human nature’ to ‘class nature’ and believed in ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’, the formidable challenges of raising the overall ‘quality’ of the population did become a daunting task towards the later years of his rule. In his speech at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature in 1942, Mao elucidates his views on ‘human nature’:
Is there such a thing as human nature? Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract. In a class society there is only human nature that bears the stamp of a class, but no human nature transcending classes. We uphold the human nature of the proletariat and of the great masses of the people, while the
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landlord and bourgeois classes uphold the nature of their own classes as if – though they do not say so outright – it were the only kind of human nature. (Mao, 1956, p. 86).
By defining human nature as contingent upon class nature, Mao opens the possibility for those of ‘undesirable’ class backgrounds to be reformed. This is because although Mao insisted on the indomitable strength of China’s rural masses, the Red Army were joined by thousands of intellectuals and students, who became organisers, teachers and bureaucratic cadres. Their experience and expertise were indispensable to the success of the armed struggle against the GMD and the Japanese. However, when intellectuals began challenging Mao’s worldview, he began to resurrect the ‘straw man’ of class enemies to uproot potential challengers. But unlike the terror campaigns of Stalinist Russia, which adopted an extermination policy, Mao employed the metaphor of the ‘sick patient’, referring to the methods used to psychologically and emotionally reform those from the ‘black’ classes. In a speech entitled, ‘Rectify the Party’s Style of Work’ delivered on 1 February 1942 at the opening of the Party School of the Central Committee of the CCP, Mao emphasised the importance of owning up to past mistakes and wrong thinking:
[I]n opposing subjectivism, sectarianism and stereotyped Party writing we must have in mind two purposes: first, "learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones", and second, "cure the sickness to save the patient". The mistakes of the past must be exposed without sparing anyone's sensibilities; it is necessary to analyse and criticize what was bad in the past with a scientific attitude so that work in the future will be done more carefully and done better. This is what is meant by "learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones". But our aim in exposing errors and criticizing shortcomings, like that of a doctor curing a sickness, is solely to save the patient and not to doctor him to death. A person with appendicitis is saved when the surgeon removes his appendix. So long as a person who has made mistakes does not hide his sickness for fear of treatment or persist in his mistakes until he is beyond cure, so long as he honestly and sincerely wishes to be cured and to mend his ways, we should welcome him and cure his sickness so that he can become a good comrade. We can never succeed if we just let ourselves go and lash out at him. In treating an ideological or a political malady, one must never be rough and rash but must adopt the approach of "curing the sickness to save the patient", which is the only correct and effective method.
- Mao, Selected Works Vol. 3, 1967, pp. 49-50.
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In using the analogy of ‘curing the sickness to save the patient,’ Mao hoped to create a unifying ideology that would bind the people to new definitions of personhood. The ‘New China’ would be one that is independent, self-sufficient, strong and prosperous. However, in order to realise this utopic vision of society where class distinctions would no longer find a cause to exist, Mao could not dispense with the old ‘class’ of professionals, scientists and intellectuals who were initially crucial to the rebuilding efforts. The analogy of the ‘sick patient’ was therefore a useful conceptual tool for making compatible a person of the ‘wrong’ class background with the new ideology of the Republic. Thus, a person who was a white-collar professional, for example, could theoretically become a member of the new society if s/he rigorously subjected him/herself to retraining his/her thoughts and actions.
Although this method of thought training was regarded as no more than brainwashing by some scholars (Lifton, 1961), these observations have been somewhat coloured by the Cold War mentality that drew on a dichotomous distinction between friend and foe. Perhaps because of the lack of reliable information since Maoist China was largely cut off from the outside, particularly the West, these narratives failed to appreciate the full breadth of achievement which were facilitated by the campaign mobilisation method. As Gordon Bennett (1976, p. 32) observed, the ‘amazing’ transformations of Chinese society would not have been possible without the mass mobilisation campaign:
Awesome changes in Chinese social structure were wrought. Within ten short years no debt-ridden peasant gave up half his crop to a landlord as rent. No rapacious private armies exacted their own taxes and plunder. No ESSO station pumped gas; instead a domestic petroleum industry supplied all of China’s needs. No other foreign enterprise hung out its shingle. No missionary preached; and church buildings became schoolrooms, Young Communist League offices, or new people’s commune headquarters. Prostitutes and beggars vanished from city streets. Sweet puffs of opium smoke could be scented no longer. Inflation had ground to a halt. Fly swatters became useless museum pieces. The scourge of schistosomiasis was ended…Internationally, China’s image as a giant ward – helpless and poverty-stricken – was pushed aside by its new image as a full-fledged and even threatening power. The paths to all these imposing social accomplishments were blazed with yundong.
In the next section, I focus on the post-1949 context and the role of mass campaigns in the transformation of Chinese society.
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The Role of Mass Mobilisation Campaigns in Post-1949 China
As noted by Charles P. Cell (1977), China carried out over 74 mass campaigns at the national level and approximately a third of that number again at the local level. Although ‘political-ideological’ campaigns received much publicity, to the consternation of observers in the West, many were of a ‘developmental- informational’ type (Liu, 1981). Developmental-informational campaigns typically involved measures for material improvement in such areas as birth control, public health or the preservation of forests. While political-ideological campaigns dominated the history of the PRC from 1949 to 1979, my focus will be on developmental-informational campaigns with the aim of understanding the standard organisation of Chinese campaigns and the steps typically involved in carrying out a campaign.
The General Pattern of Chinese Mobilisation Campaigns
Under Mao Zedong, the CCP sought to administer every conceivable aspect of a person’s life. It was able to do so due in large part to its organisational capacity, which extends from Beijing to every territorial-administrative unit and institution in China.56 However, as people grew tired of revolution, the challenge for the Party in the post-1949 context was to redefine its organisational purpose after the war was won. One way in which the Party was able to remain relevant was to continuously (re)create a revolutionary environment. ‘Enemies of the people’ from both within and without were sought out and ‘deviant labelling’ used to denounce those who had fallen out of favour with the ruling elite. As a result, the Party organisation in post- 1949 China thrived and was rejuvenated.
For example, despite the initial assault on the Party, Party membership greatly expanded during the Cultural Revolution. In 1959, Party membership was just under 14 million. But by the start of the Cultural Revolution, membership had swelled to 20 million, reaching 35 million by 1976. 57 Zheng’s core thesis was that mass campaigns reproduced the Party organisation at grassroots levels, thus giving it
56 Supplementing the Party is the state bureaucracy which ‘refers to the Chinese legislative, judicial, administrative, and military institutions, and those who manage these institutions’ (Zheng, 1997, p. 18). Zheng (Ibid.) makes specific distinctions between Party and state organs and argues that attempts at state building have been thwarted by the simultaneous attempt at Party strengthening, thus causing tensions and contradictions. 57 For membership changes from 1949 to 1996, see Appendix A, p. 268 in Zheng (1997).
117 relevance and meaning. This is an important observation to make, particularly as it relates to the post-Mao context in which the emphasis has now shifted to ‘cooperation’ between state and society – though the nature of this ‘cooperation’ may only be worth as much as the paper on which it was written. The real challenge for the Party is how to mobilise the masses to ‘help themselves’ (zizhu) without losing its purpose and relevance in a rapidly changing and increasingly diverse social environment.
Campaigns usually begin with a series of publications in the form of editorials and articles in official newspapers. Slogans traditionally accompany campaigns and may be hung on either side of doorways in the form of dui lian58 or may be incorporated in banners which are used during parades, hung over entrances or as backdrops for meetings and rallies. During Maoist times, the media was not as developed as it is now and much of the mobilisation relied on face-to-face persuasion, group meetings and study sessions. There are also organisational indicators that suggest a campaign has begun. The creation of ad hoc organisations is one such example. Alan Liu (1981, pp. 202-203) identifies three reasons why this is necessary. First, ad hoc organisations help to draw attention to the campaign, thereby lifting its profile. Second, ad hoc organisations ensure smoothness in communication and ‘thoroughness in execution’. Cadres may be sent from outside to the villages (xiang) or into urban work units (danwei) to assist or supervise the campaign on a temporary basis. The presence of the Party also imparts authority and lends the campaign prestige. Third, ad hoc organisations increase the level of participation of people from different areas. As I will show in Chapter Eight, the creation of ad hoc organisations is crucial to the success of etiquette campaigns in Shanghai. Etiquette committees, small group discussions as well as work groups and volunteers are crucial to the mobilisation success, helping to complement or sometimes override the bureaucratic inertia of regular institutions.
Campaigns cannot simply be ‘switched on’ at will. Even with the formidable organisational infrastructure at their disposal, the CCP still felt it necessary to train ‘activists’ or especially dedicated individuals on whom they can count to get the job
58 A ‘duilian’ is a Chinese couplet consisting of two lines of characters on opposing sides that have corresponding characteristics. They are typically hung outside of homes as part of New Year celebrations and are an enduring aspect of Chinese culture.
118 done. Activists must be thoroughly indoctrinated in the ideology and values of the Party. They need not be ‘experts’ or professionals but they need to be ‘red’ and of the ‘right’ class background. Of course experts have been recruited in areas where they were needed, like doctors in birth control campaigns or engineers in industrial construction campaigns. However, in most cases, the political qualification of an activist is given more weight than his/her professional qualification. The recruitment, training and using of activists are a constant concern for the Party. Recruitment of fresh talent is seen as a way to revitalise and sustain the Party corps. The use of activists means that the Party is able to circumvent the need to make institutional accommodations while broadening the impact of its policies in a relatively short period of time. For example, as Gray (1969, p. 131, quoted in Cell 1977, p. 135) noted,
[Mao regarded]… the state bureaucracy as the biggest obstacle to the growth of and appreciation among the population generally of the basic identity of individual and communal interests which the Party’s economic planning was supposed to enshrine.
Following the appointment of activists is the establishment of ‘testing points’ which is designed to canvass the overall nature of a problem to be addressed or resolved (Liu, 1981, p. 204). The use of testing points is an important precedent for contemporary campaigns: they continue to carry out this stage, which is viewed as necessary in the overall successful implementation of a campaign. For example, the ‘community’ (shequ) construction efforts of the current Hu-Wen administration are now widespread, in line with Hu Jintao’s rhetoric of ‘harmonious community’ construction. But before this became a nationwide campaign, investigations were conducted and only select cities chosen to participate in this initial testing phase. Shanghai was one of less than a handful to be included in the first trial runs. The experience gathered from these ‘testing points’ was then evaluated and used to refine or revise the original campaign.
However, because China is a large country both geographically and demographically, some campaigns which were nationally conceived, have had to be re-adjusted to meet the needs of locals. Therefore, ‘testing points’ were followed by ‘key points’ which were concerned with the execution of campaigns. In the campaign against schistosomiasis or snail fever in 1955, for example, following preliminary survey and
119 propaganda work, two out of five counties were selected as ‘focal points for a decisive attack’ (Liu, 1981, p. 205). From the accounts of Joshua S. Horn (1969, p. 97), an English surgeon who spent time in China from 1954 to 1969, there was no denying the awesome power of a Chinese mobilisation campaign, particularly those that were geared towards exterminating pests like snails:
All available labor power, medical resources, pumps, river-draining equipment were concentrated in these two counties and, within a short time, the snails there had suffered a mortal blow.
Once a particular campaign is successful at ‘key points’, it can then be activated on the ‘plane’ in a more broad-sweeping manner. Work at the ‘points’ is more intensive and methodical and more time consuming than work on the ‘plane.’ The methodology of ‘proceeding from point to surface’ or ‘plane’ (youdian daomian) is driven both by local initiative as well as with the formal or informal backing of higher-level policy makers. However, while the central government encourages local players to resolve local problems, the overarching policy goal of the centre continues to be to ‘guide’ the localities. As observed by Vivienne Shue (1980, pp. 322-323), while the point-to-surface method is ‘consciously experimental’ and remains a standard device of the Party, it is the central authorities who have the final say.
To the CCP, the media, as rudimentary as it was during Maoist times, was an indispensable tool in the mobilisation process. Once a campaign ultimately shifts gear from the preparation to execution stage and from ‘points’ to ‘planes’, the CCP commences a massive media blitz to saturate society with its message. But not all media are weighted with equal importance. For example, although all forms of media such as radio, movies and newspapers are utilised to the fullest extent, the CCP places greatest emphasis on media that stay close to the ‘folk’. Therefore, face- to-face persuasion is most valued despite its time-consuming nature.
Here, the role of neighbourhood committees (originally known as juweihui, now reformed as shequ) is vital. This is because neighbourhood committees are the lowest administrative unit in urban China that keeps updated records of all residents in their geographically designated areas. Since neighbourhood committee members are familiar with members of the community, they play a crucial role in the dissemination of propaganda and the enforcement of government policies. Quoting a county Party secretary in a land reform campaign, William Hinton (1968, p. 411)
120 observed that the mobilisation of peasants required more dedication from cadres than had initially been thought:
We must explain, discuss, report, evaluate, classify, post results; explain, discuss, and report – again and again. This is very troublesome, very difficult, very time consuming.
The example of the birth control education campaign of 1956-1957 is particularly revealing of the face-to-face approach to mobilisation. The motto of ‘extol one, praise two, criticise three, and prevent four’ was used to encourage young people to postpone marriage and popularise family planning among couples (Greenhalgh, 2005). In 1960, the minimum marriageable age for men was set at 20 and for women at 18. However, coercive measures were not adopted to enforce them. Instead, health workers, personnel cadres, street representatives, and women representatives in city organisations and enterprises as well as commune cadres and others were mobilised and carried out large-scale propaganda blitzes:
They approached individually those parents with many children who were experiencing living difficulties, those about to get married and those mothers-in-law who would let their daughters-in-law practice birth control. Because they work in the same unit, live together, and know one another well enough to talk without any reservation, such approaches, when repeatedly made, are difficult to resist. (Huang, 1971, p. 26).
Group meetings or sessions were particularly important for putting pressure on certain individuals to change. They were also used to change the group mindset of individuals who have not properly acquired the habits and thinking required by the revolution and for rectifying the mistakes of cadres who had violated CCP norms. In 1954 for example, a crisis occurred when peasants resisted efforts to transfer their scarce crop of grain to the state. In order to overcome this, county-level work teams were sent to grain-producing locales to convince and explain to the villagers why this was necessary:
The procedure began with the mobilization of the village leadership. The team would convene a Party branch conference (or some other meeting that included most of the village elite) for the purpose of studying the nation’s grain policy, ascertaining and rectifying the attitudes of Party members, and analysing the grain situation in the village. The first goal of the meeting was for every participant to gain a “correct” understanding of the supply crisis, so that everyone’s state of
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mind would be changed from a passive and pessimistic to an active and optimistic state. Next came sessions of criticism and self-criticism, in which each local Party member would report on how he had behaved during the crisis. Those who had joined in with grain-short claims now confessed their error…Cadres who had violated CCP norms felt threatened by disciplinary sanctions and no doubt redoubled their efforts to cooperate in the drive to reorganize supply. (Bernstein, 1969, pp. 392-393)
It is important to emphasise the CCP’s preference for face-to-face persuasion work over other media forms because even to the present day, these methods continue to be used, despite the rapidly changing social context, the diversity of media and the heterogeneity of Chinese cities. One plausible explanation could be that the mass institutions and infrastructure established during the Maoist period have not been done away with and continue to serve the Party at the grassroots. These mass organisations like the trade unions, women’s federation, and street committees provide the vital link between the Party and the people – an especially important role given the de-personalised nature of Chinese politics in the post-Mao period. However, the accounts above suggest that campaigns and the preparation and execution stages are smooth processes carried out in a civilised manner when in fact this may not have been the case. Although for the most part, these campaigns were straight-forward examples of propaganda and thought work, this does not mean that there was no resistance. Hinton’s (1968, p. 222) account of the land reform campaigns shows that even the peasants were becoming campaign-weary after they were required to attend many meetings and struggle sessions:
“Your mother’s...” 59 said Yuan-lung (an old peasant). “Another meeting! Will there ever be an end to meetings?” And he hummed a little jingle that he had heard that day from the disgruntled Li Ho-jen, “Under the Nationalists too many taxes; under the Communists too many meetings.”
Perhaps an over-reliance on campaigns to transform society made backsliding all the more conspicuous and of great concern to the Party. The population quickly sobered up to the reality of CCP rule, starting with the land reform in the 1950s. Then the anti-rightist campaign of 1957 put the intellectuals and artists on a tight leash. But all this paled in comparison to the terror that was yet to come: the Cultural Revolution, a
59 Although William Hinton included this in his book, I have chosen to not insert the rest of his quotation here because it is a graphic swear word and may offend readers: ta ma da. The equivalent meaning in English is the “C” word.
122 decade-long political campaign begun in 1966 and ending with Mao’s death in 1976. In the next section, I discuss some of the shortcomings of campaigns in general and the lessons of the Cultural Revolution decade, and then I discuss the implications for the current campaigns to re-establish morality in society.
Shortcomings
As part of the CCP’s strategy to ‘learn from past mistakes’, acknowledgement of shortcomings was a crucial and ritualised aspect of the campaign mobilisation process. However, the effectiveness of campaigns came to be questioned, particularly following the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in 1961-62 in which untold millions died from famine (Dikötter, 2010). Campaigns were only effective as ‘one-shot? undertakings’ (Bennett, 1976, p. 33) aimed at achieving what the CCP termed the ‘basic completion’ of China’s three major industries, namely agriculture, handicrafts and commerce. Once campaigns shifted from the economic ‘base’ to the ‘organisational, intellectual, and cultural superstructure’, their success rates were mixed and in some areas, even declined. As yundong began calling for shifts in the personal attitude and inner character of the person, they encountered resistance, with the consequence being ritualistic participation and feigned compliance. Doak Barnett (Barnett, 1967, p. 70) for example, observed diminished levels of engagement in campaigns over time:
Campaigns are still important today, but over time, especially since the late 1950s, in a slow and subtle way the regime has found it increasingly difficult to mobilize the cadres and inject a high level of tension into the system. Repeated campaigns have tended to inure many cadres to them, and some cadres appear to have gradually built up certain defense mechanisms, with the result that while they may go through the same motions as in the past they are sometimes able to avoid the same degree of psychological involvement.
As with other continuities with the Maoist past, this trend of ritualistic participation and feigned compliance has been re-born in the new post-Mao context. I highlight it here because, as I will further explain in Chapter Eight, as a strategy for policy implementation, campaigns actually encourage poor governance practices among the cadre class charged with carrying them out. The problem, of course, stems from the gap between lofty campaign goals and the reality of everyday life and constraints. This is not to say that all campaigns fail, but rather, those that are of a ‘political-
123 ideological’ nature will likely encounter more difficulties than those that are ‘developmental’ in character. This means that apart from paying lip-service to Beijing, local leaders may circumvent the necessary steps in the campaign, either because it is not in their best interests to do so or simply because it is too time consuming and wasteful of scarce resources. In other instances, the opposite may occur wherein local cadres are so over-zealous in demonstrating their compliance that they suppress and subordinate other legitimate concerns in order to meet and surpass campaign targets. The ‘most-civilised city’ campaign of the current government, for example, has engendered some dubious governing practices. These I will discuss further in Chapter Seven but suffice to say that these current problems did not emerge out of the unique circumstances of post-Mao economic reforms. Rather, there is strong evidence to suggest that they share common characteristics with campaigns of the past.
Given the sheer number of campaigns carried out, it is impossible to draw conclusions, even from a random sample, about the overall effectiveness of campaigns. Nevertheless, Charles Cell (1977) has tentatively concluded that economic campaigns achieved more than ideological and struggle campaigns. Cell (1977, pp. 39-40) proposed the following possible reasons for the relatively successful economic campaigns vis-à-vis other types of campaigns:
…[D]uring economic campaigns, for the average worker or peasant, there is a much clearer relationship between mobilization inputs and achievements, especially remunerative rewards. Hence it should be relatively easy to convince peasants to join Mutual Aid Teams by arguing, for example, that the harvest will increase, as a consequence, so will their income. The same level of mobilisation in an ideological, or especially, a struggle campaign may produce noticeably fewer achievements because it is considerably harder to convince a peasant of the utility of criticizing someone accused of bad thinking (especially if the accused works hard in the fields), or to struggle a capitalist roader who has never apparently harmed the peasants’ ability to improve their livelihood.
These shortcomings echo Zheng Shiping’s (1997) observation that as a revolutionary Party emerging from trench warfare in Yan’an, the CCP needed to continuously re- create the conditions for revolution, and mass campaigns were the means through which this was achieved. Campaigns were, in Zheng’s (1997, p. 155) words, the ‘mechanism of “political reproduction”’ for Mao’s regime. But even to those who
124 experienced the bitter struggle in the base areas, there were limits as to how many sacrifices individuals would make for the regime (Cell, 1977). As Cell’s (Ibid., pp. 39-40) interview data showed,
For everyone who has benefited there may be some who had to sacrifice. Resources are not infinite. There may be some slack available, but it is not without limits. For example, the peasants surely welcome the Barefoot Doctors programs and the great influx of well-trained mobile medical teams. But these medical workers had to make sacrifices for the peasants to benefit. Many made the sacrifices willingly, but it cannot be assumed that all did so.
For example, in order to fuel the Great Leap campaign of 1958-1961, Mao urged the population, in the absence of sophisticated technology and equipment, to ‘conquer nature’ (ren ding sheng tian) (Shapiro, 2001). Deforestation was primarily the product of the need to supply the steel furnaces that would transform China from being a ‘backward’ country into a robust industrial giant. But instead of catching up to Great Britain and the US,60 the Great Leap produced nearly 11 million tons of ‘worthless’ steel derived from everyday utensils and tools that otherwise would have continued to serve a useful purpose (Ibid., p. 75). Instead of working on the fields, planting and harvesting crops, the entire nation focused its energies on fulfilling campaign quotas. This had a disastrous outcome as yields from agriculture plummeted and China was unable to feed its population. The famine which resulted took about 45 million lives (Dikötter, 2010). However, in light of the severe deficiencies in fiscal capacity and administrative integration of the Party, the mass mobilisation technique was the low-cost option in policy-making and implementation. It helped to facilitate a ‘guerilla style’ of policy making, enabling the government to respond rapidly to crises and problems of bureaucracy and red tape. But campaign mobilisation also served as a convenient way for the central authorities to avoid responsibility for policy failures while receiving recognition for policy ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘innovations’.
Thus far, I have canvassed the mobilisational stages of campaigns that are of a developmental or informational nature. I have limited my discussion for the purposes of distilling the important stages of the campaign for later analysis and
60 Great Britain and the US were constantly used by Mao as benchmarks of the economic progress to which China aspired.
125 comparison with contemporary etiquette and community-building campaigns. But campaigns of the Maoist period not only sought to change the physical world in terms of increased economic output and improved standards of living: they also sought to change the subject-person from within. Therefore, it is impossible to avoid discussion of ideological campaigns. Indeed, the Maoist period was, above all, a period when the political dominated every other sphere of life. It was ideology that helped to bind people to new definitions of personhood and defined the parameters of power within the new discourse of the nation-state. The primary example of an ideological campaign was the Cultural Revolution (Cell, 1977). It is difficult to discuss campaigns of the Maoist past without acknowledging the continuing impact of this campaign on the socio-political life of contemporary China.
Ten Years of Chaos: The Cultural Revolution (1966-76)
Every person I spoke to over the age of 40 mentioned the subject of the Cultural Revolution. It was used as a contrast to the present climate of relative freedom and openness. People might have reminisced about a simple life in the days of Mao but they did not want a return to Mao, citing the Cultural Revolution as a paramount example. The Cultural Revolution was the ‘mother’ of all campaigns in China, leaving a generation of Chinese permanently scarred. Initiated in 1966, the Central Committee of the CCP delivered a 16 point decision to publicly set out tasks for the Cultural Revolution. The language in this document was decisively antagonistic to academics, intellectuals and the educated:
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage… At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all the other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system. (Baum & Bennett, 1971, p. 99)
The Cultural Revolution also spawned many more specific campaigns, including the Destroy the Four Olds and Establish the Four New Campaign, the Struggle, Criticism, Transformation Campaign and Mass Criticism and Repudiation Campaign. Mayfair
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Mei-Hui Yang (1994) has analysed the ‘cult of Mao’, a phenomenon that was unique to this period in terms of its impact on the construction of personhood and self in the production of guanxi or relationships that create reciprocal obligations. My focus is on how the Mao cult inverted and distorted the traditional values intrinsic to Confucian culture and subjected it to the service of the state. The Mao cult was both state-strengthening as well as state-destabilising. The cult of personality was sustained by the state apparatus, but ultimately it promoted Mao as being above the state and encouraged the destruction of the state bureaucracy. As Louis Althusser (1971) has argued, there is much more to state power than the repressive machinery of the army and police. State power also works to positively mold subjects who are simultaneously free and subjected. This means that subject-formation is both a process of domination as well as self-subordination (Foucault, 1983). Subjects do not need the repressive state apparatus to be subjected but can freely submit themselves to the state, thereby participating in their own subjection. Indeed, the subjects of Maoism did not need the external threat of violence to be moved by the Chairman’s words or deeds. Although fear was a factor, it was fear of the mob, fear of non-conformity, not fear of the state apparatus of violence per se that drove people’s motivations.
Different people remembered the Cultural Revolution differently, even confusing dates and details of what happened and where and when events took place. However, in general, whether as perpetrators or victims or perpetrator-turned-victim, they concurred that the Cultural Revolution was a ‘long nightmare from which the people have finally awakened’.61 The love and yearning for Mao reached its climax in 1968-1971 when the cult of Mao pervaded the cultural and everyday life of ordinary people. In 1968, people’s daily routines revolved around the ritual of ‘asking for instructions in the morning, thanking Mao for his kindness at noon, and reporting back at night’ (Landsberger, 2002). In the morning, people would bow three times to the portrait of Chairman Mao and announce the efforts they would make that day to
61 Jiang Ji-Li (2008) who was only 12 when the Cultural Revolution broke out wrote in her memoir that she was so thoroughly brainwashed that even though her family suffered, she did not hold Mao accountable. She explains: ‘To us Chairman Mao was God. He controlled everything we read, everything we heard, and everything we learned in school. We believed everything he said. Naturally, we only knew good things about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Anything else had to be the fault of others. Mao was blameless’ (p. 265). Only with the death of Mao did the people finally wake up from their nightmare: ‘It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 that people woke up’ (p. 266).
127 contribute to the revolution. This would be accompanied by a ‘loyalty dance’ (zhongzi wu) which involved no more than stretching one’s arm from the heart to the portrait of the Chairman. In groups, this loyalty dance would be performed to the tune of a revolutionary song like ‘Our Beloved Chairman Mao’ or ‘The Red Sun within Our Hearts’. Then, before they went to bed, people would report on their accomplishments or failures for the day and their plan for the next day.
As noted by Xing Lu (2004), Mao’s power was not simply derived from his images, his deeds or his commanding presence. Rather, it was through language and rhetoric condensed in Mao’s written works such as the Little Red Book that the Chairman’s reputation as leader, philosopher and ‘hero of the people’ was solidified. Between 1964 and 1967, the People’s Liberation Army Political Department printed nearly a billion copies of this book for circulation (Meisner, 1982, p. 165). When Mao stood before a crowd of youth at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing in 1970, they were waving his Little Red Book almost in unison. Many have interpreted this, and indeed the entire modern history of the PRC, as a continuation of an ‘autocratic tradition’. In his book, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics, Zhengyuan Fu (1993) maintains that the tradition of autocracy is the most enduring and important feature of Chinese political life for more than two millennia. Fu (1993, abstract, no page number) identified five features of Mao Zedong rule which testify to his assumptions:
The use of ideology for political control; concentration of power in the hands of a few; state power over all aspects of life; law as a tool wielded by the ruler, who is himself above the law; and the subjection of the individual to the state.
While this is one way of accounting for the lack of a liberal democratic tradition in China, the above assumptions take Chinese culture to be static when we know that culture is fluid, changing as the society changes. On some occasions, Mao’s actions resembled those of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China (Fu, 1993, p. 189). For example, Mao was angered by a drama, ‘Hairui Dismissed from Office’, in which a loyal official was depicted as being unfairly treated by Emperor Ming Jiaqing (Ibid.). As a result, the author of the drama, Wu Han, was one of the first targets of the Cultural Revolution.
However, as Mayfair Yang has argued, one of the main characteristics of the Mao cult was its anti-traditionalism. Not only were works of art targeted, so too were
128 cultural relics and monuments. While no doubt, people during the Cultural Revolution had personal motivations for getting involved in the ‘witch hunts’, what was significant about these campaigns was that they focused on destroying some of the enduring cultural, familial and traditional bonds deeply embedded in Chinese society – bonds that have survived the test of time. For example, sacred bonds between parent and child and husband and wife were severed or undermined as love for family was replaced by love for Chairman Mao. Most destructive was that in addition to the coercion and public struggle campaigns, people were encouraged and even pressured or forced to participate in campaigns to denounce figures of authority and objects of respect including students criticising teachers, sons criticising fathers, and subordinates criticising Party leaders. In short, the Cultural Revolution turned the traditional model of authority on its head and psychologically damaged an entire country, turning it against itself. Some have even argued that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is that it has engendered a mentality of ‘every man for himself’ in the present context (Ci, 1994). In Jung Chang’s recollections of her childhood during the years of the Cultural Revolution, images of students running amok and denouncing their teachers were telling of the period:
One day my mother bicycled to the school to find that the pupils had rounded up the headmaster, the academic supervisor, the graded teachers, whom they had understood from the official press to be ‘reactionary bourgeois authorities’, and any other teachers they disliked. They had shut them all up in a classroom and put a notice on the door saying ‘demons’ class. (Chang, 1991, p. 346)
It is ironic that for the CCP, the lesson to be drawn from this was the pitfall of leader worship. This partially explains the Party’s aversion to the mob. Simultaneously, the Cultural Revolution also taught a generation of youngsters how to ‘create chaos’ and even depose of authority through their agitation and violent techniques. But most damning of all has been damage to the fundamental moral fabric of society. As Jiwei Ci (1994) sardonically observed,
The Maoist state, through its total control of education and the media, has all but monopolized the resources to shape the written and, to a barely lesser extent, the spoken word… Moreover, Mao Zedong’s brand of anti- intellectualism, deeply rooted in the origins and aims of the revolution, has accentuated the inherent tendency of language toward the simplification of experience by discouraging all forms of intellectual complexity and, above all, complexity of human character and motivation… Out of this unique blend of
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circumstances has grown Maoist Chinese – cliché-ridden, heavy-handedly political, intellectually crude, emotionally shallow, aggressively judgemental, blindly self-confident – in a word, a linguistic medium supremely conducive to uniform and complacent stupidity ( Ci, 1994, pp. 71-72).
As Mayfair Yang observed in the 1980s, for those who were ready to reminisce, the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution meant that they could finally awaken from a nightmare.
Conclusion
I have found it necessary to go back to the Maoist period in search of answers to some of the most perplexing problems facing post-Mao society. Why is it, long after the death of Mao, that Maoist mass organisations and institutions such as campaigns continue to resurface and even find an important place in post-Mao society? Why does the Party feel the need to re-invent the socialist tradition of self-sacrifice long after socialism has been declared dead by default? The obvious answer is the legitimacy deficit, but most telling is the pattern of continuity, particularly in the realm of government. The CCP still finds utility in the campaign style of leadership because mass mobilisation campaigns have acquired symbolic significance. This symbolic significance derives in part from its role in establishing the Party’s leadership during its formative years in the base areas of Yan’an. Mass mobilisation is integral to the Party’s work style and is a part of its identity and even its reason for existence. This is both a curse and a blessing.
While mass mobilisation propelled the Party to victory in 1949, conditions in the country rapidly changed once it became the ruling Party in times of peace. As a revolutionary Party, its mission was to transform China until such time as socialism was achieved. Of course, this utopic conception of society would never materialise, creating in the meantime, a constant state of fear. But instead of vigilance against outside enemies, Mao turned the mobilisation weapons against his own people – the paramount example being the Cultural Revolution. It is unclear how many died as a result but what is clear is that irreparable damage had been done to the Chinese nation and its people.
In the next chapter, I explore why, with an enviable history of economic growth, the Party has felt it necessary to have a set a normative moral principles to rule the
130 country. Using the example of ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns, I demonstrate why a growth-based development model has proven inadequate. I show that despite efforts to reconcile ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ with the Leninist- Marxist-Maoist ideology upon which the Party was founded, glaring contradictions continue to undermine these state-sponsored efforts to rebuild the moral order.
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Chapter Six
Legitimacy Crisis and the Role of ‘Socialist Spiritual Civilisation’
(Shehui Zhuyi Jingshen Wenming) Campaigns
The socialist country that we want to build must have a high level of spiritual as well as material civilization. This so-called spiritual civilization refers not only to education, science, and culture (though this is absolutely necessary) but also to the revolutionary stances and principles of Communist thought, ideals, beliefs, virtues, and discipline, as well as comradely relations between people and the like … Besides depending on correct political directions on Yenan times up to the New China, have we not depended on this precious revolutionary spirit to attract the people of the entire country as well as friendly people abroad? How can socialism be built without this kind of spiritual civilization, without Communist thought, without Communist virtue? The more the Party and the government carry out policies of economic reform and opening up to the outside, the more must Party members, and especially high ranking Party authorities, put a high grade of emphasis on, and personally work vigorously for, Communist thought and virtue. (Deng, 1984, p. 348)
Official communist ideology in post-Mao China has been eclipsed by rapid socio- economic transformation. True believers of Mao Zedong Thought are few and far between. However, as the above quote from Deng Xiaoping demonstrates, this does not mean that the CCP no longer cares about ideology. Although the Party has loosened its ideological grip on policy in order to facilitate reforms, certain ideological doctrines remain symbolically significant, not only for maintaining the legitimacy of CCP rule but also for battling the moral decay that has come about as a result of the collapse of the old communist system of beliefs.
The CCP’s concern with this problem first emerged at the 1982 Twelfth Party Congress in which Hu Yaobang called for the development of ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’, a term first coined by Ye Jianying in 197962 and later developed by
62 Ye Jianying first used the term ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ at a rally celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the PRC (People’s Daily, 30 September 1979) but this did not receive much attention until 1980.
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Deng Xiaoping but receiving its most authoritative treatment in Hu’s speech. ‘Socialist spiritual civilisation’, in Hu’s usage, was an assemblage of ideology, morals, and values of Marxism necessary to prod all aspects of society towards ‘advancement’. More importantly, conceptualisation of ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ was intended to overcome two challenges posed to Party legitimacy: the first was the general disenchantment with socialism and the second was the challenge of Western culture and its perceived corrupt and decadent influences. Hu acknowledged that the Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution and the cult of Mao had done much to undermine the prestige of the Party – a prestige that was built upon the ‘Yan’an legacy’ and the spirit of egalitarianism and self-sacrifice of the early years of communism in China (Hu, 1982). Hu also admitted that the authority of the Party was being undermined by the ‘bourgeois’ influences coming from outside. However, despite the Party’s attempts to channel the growth of discontent, little became of this meeting and moral decline continued to worsen.
In October 1996, the Sixth Plenum of the Fourteenth Central Committee recommitted itself to the task of building ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’. At this meeting, the Party admitted that neglect of ideological and political education had been a major mistake. The Party believed that an over-emphasis on economic development or ‘material civilisation’ (wuzhi wenming) had led to the emergence of negative social phenomena, widespread social alienation and other social maladies. Below is an excerpt from the Sixth Plenum, in which the Party expressed concern that an over-focus on economic development or ‘material civilisation’ had led to the neglect of ‘spiritual civilisation’ and urged cadres to be vigilant against what it saw as moral and social ‘backsliding’:
At the same time [as building material civilisation] we must clearly see that under the leadership of some departments, neglect of ideological education, neglect of spiritual civilisation has meant that the problem of ‘one hand hard, one hand soft’ has continued to persist. As a result, many problems have emerged, some of them serious. Moral anomie, materialism, hedonism, individualism, superstition, drug addiction, and other ugly phenomena are rampant. Fake goods and fraud have become a social nuisance. The culture has been severely affected by these negative phenomena, damaging the health of our youth. Corrupt phenomena have crept into the Party organisation compromising Party ethics. Some have wavered in their commitment to socialism. In
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assessing the situation on spiritual civilisation construction, we must not forget these problems. (Li & Kang, 1996, p. 4, my translation)
In the following year, at the CCP’s Fifteenth National Congress, the Party again urged a balance between ‘spiritual development’ and ‘economic development’. Beyond what it sees as ‘ugly social phenomena’, what other problems does the CCP hope to address in this campaign? Why does the leadership stress its importance and urgency? Some have argued that the campaigns were designed to consolidate the leadership of Jiang Zemin while others believe that these were attempts to pacify the remaining conservative faction within the Party (Dynon, 2008). Although the campaigns have been largely identified with Jiang’s leadership, I argue that they were designed to address something much more pressing, that is, to defend the Party’s legitimacy and rebuild the moral order shattered by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and further shaken by the introduction of market reforms.
The chapter will be organised as follows. In the first section, I explore the nature of the legitimacy crisis in China in the early years of post-Mao reforms. I argue that this crisis did not disappear as a result of the Party’s adoption of the ‘socialist market economy’ in 1992. In fact, as I will show, it morphed into a moral crisis that permeated every sector in the society. The second section looks at the campaign goals and rationales, particularly the immediate and urgent goal to (re)build the moral order through exhortations for ‘civilised’ conduct in public, ideological training for Party cadres and patriotic education in schools and the broader community. While it is hard to deny that the rationale of the Party with these campaigns was to reverse the negative consequences of economic reforms, this does not mean that the campaigns were without flaws and constraints. This will be the subject of the final section of the chapter which will assess the overall effectiveness of the socialist spiritual civilisation drives of the 1990s.
Losing the ‘Mandate of Heaven’: The Legitimacy Crisis, 1977-1989
The Mandate of Heaven is not immutable
-Mencius, Ode 235, Book of Odes (Quoted in Lau, 2003, p. xiii).
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The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (tianming) is a Chinese philosophical concept that provided the basic explanation for the success and failure of kings and states down to the fall of the last Dynasty in 1912. It is similar to the European concept of the ‘divine right of kings’ in that both sought legitimation through divine approval. However, unlike the divine right of kings, a ruling house could only retain the Mandate so long as it acted morally and had the people’s interests at heart. Conversely, if a ruler was despotic and unjust, the Mandate would be removed, leading to the overthrow of that ruler. This is reflected in the Confucian proverb, ‘He who succeeds is a king or marquis; he who fails is an outlaw’ (cited in Perry, 2001, p. 164). But this did not mean that aspirants to the imperial throne could ignore the cultural or normative traditions that came with this position. If a ruler wanted to prolong his reign, it was imperative that he continued with the rituals and customs of the imperial court.
Chinese history is replete with rebellions and revolutions. Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Three Principles of the People’ helped inspire the 1911 Revolution that saw the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and Mao Zedong’s ‘People’s War’ fuelled the communist victory in 1949. Political challengers, whether peasants or foreign invaders, used popular rebellion as a means to political power. Rulers in China have always been acutely aware of the need to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of ‘the people’.
In the pre-reform era (1949-1976), the CCP relied on ideology and revolutionary charisma (in both its personal and collective forms) to bolster its political legitimacy. Weber defines ‘charisma’ as:
A certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he [sic] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, super-human, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary. On the basis of them, the individual concerned is treated as a leader. (Weber, 1968, p. 48)
Economic performance was perceived more as a product of the ‘superior socialist system’ than as a source from which the regime derived its legitimacy per se, whereas nowadays it is the crucial element in legitimacy. The Party’s ideology performed a moral function that justified the political system which it had built. The cult of Mao, for example, demonstrated the heavy reliance on charisma for that
135 period. Charisma also took shape in collective form such as the ‘organisational charisma’ of the Party state (Jowitt, 1992). The monopoly on power, the claims and ideals of the Party and its control over society were the principle bases upon which the Party laid its claim to rule.
While Mao’s charisma on its own was a powerful element in binding the population to the system, the legitimacy of that system was largely a product of the successful political socialisation campaigns. As Elizabeth Perry (2001, p. 164) observed, ‘Mao’s Mass Line insisted on the reciprocal linkage between leader and led in staking a claim to higher political morality.’ Although mass campaigns are less politicised now than they were in the Maoist past, campaigns continue to be used as an instrument for policy propagation and implementation. In addition, as I will show, campaigns continue to play an important role in socialising the population in the familiar discourse of post-Mao reforms and in establishing the moral authority of the Party.
It is fair to say that in the first ten years of CCP rule, socioeconomic performance actually matched the ideology and charisma of the regime and that as a result, the regime enjoyed overwhelming support and legitimacy (Schurmann, 1968). Although the revolutionary style of leadership proved disastrous in some cases, for example, in the mass irrigation campaign of 1957-58 (Oksenberg, 1969), on the whole, campaigns did lay the infrastructural foundations for subsequent gains made in the reform period. In the first decade, China truly achieved independence from foreign powers, enjoyed high rates of economic growth and socioeconomic equality thanks in large to the abolition of private ownership and the land reforms. Keith Buchanan (1970, p. 135) attributes improvements in living standards in 1960s China to the broad-sweeping reforms in the countryside such as the introduction of People’s Communes:
That the last decade or so has witnessed a steady rise in living levels is very clear to the author from comparing conditions in 1966 with conditions at the time of his earlier visits in 1964 and 1958; this increased well-being is attested to by the steady improvement in social services sketched above and by such indices as peasant purchases of bicycles, wrist-watches and radios in recent years.
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Even the catastrophic Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) did not dampen support for the Party. This is not because people did not react to this disastrous campaign but because the government prohibited the flow of accurate information from getting out (Dikötter, 2010). Further, because people were confined to small and discrete cells of organisation like the communes and work units, formal and informal networks through which doubts and dissenting views might have flowed were obstructed (Shue, 1988). The combination of strict censorship, social cellularisation, and recently experienced accomplishments of the PRC meant that few doubted the Party or the ideological tenets of its founding philosophy.
But all this changed with the Cultural Revolution, when ugly power struggles became public and the cult of Mao reached its apogee (Lu, 2004). The Party’s ‘noble’ image was shattered as chaos, persecution, and injustice alienated people from its ideology (Ibid.). The economy was neglected and people’s standards of living declined rapidly. The State Statistical Bureau (SSB, 1996, pp. 264-265) offered a sombre assessment of the Cultural Revolution and its deleterious impact on the economy:
The real wage level of state-owned enterprise employees went down by 6.5 percent between 1966 and 1976. In sectors like culture, education, public health, urban facilities, residential housing, employment, etc., there were countless outstanding accounts and the problems were simply allowed to pile up unresolved…. [T]here was [also] a notable decline in economic efficiency. During these ten years, the average per capita income increased by a mere 1.9 percent annually, which was far less than the 5.4 percent annual average of the earlier fourteen years. One hundred yuan of productive accumulation generated only 18 yuan of national income, which was 61 percent less than the 46 yuan average of the earlier fourteen years.
With Mao’s death in 1976 and criticism of his radical policies publicised, the Party found its ideology exhausted (Anon., 1981). The disastrous Cultural Revolution is one of two factors that contributed to the legitimacy crisis of the early post-reform period (1977-1989). The other factor is the adoption of economic reforms without corresponding political reforms.
There is no doubt that the post-Mao economic reforms have achieved successes and that, to some extent, they have repaired the damage done to the Party’s legitimacy. According to Huang Yasheng (2008, p. 56), the most rapid income gains were
137 experienced in the 1980s. For example, between 1978 and 1981, per capita rural income grew at a rate of 11.4 percent (Ibid.). Rural poverty also declined rapidly. In the first ten years, from 1978 to 1988, the number of China’s rural poor declined from 250 million in 1978 to 96 million in 1988 (Ibid., p. 53). The CCP’s evaluation of the preceding decade and Mao’s role in the Cultural Revolution was dealt with in its 1981 publication Resolution on CCP History. However, economic performance alone has not been enough to secure the Party’s Mandate. The formal adoption of the ‘socialist market economy’ in 1992 has only served to distract people from political concerns.
Deng’s slogan of ‘to be rich is glorious’ has encouraged the development of consumerism in China. Creating an internal market or encouraging domestic consumption is seen as vital if China is to overcome the bottlenecks of development. In 1998, the new Five Year Plan stressed the importance of consumption-led growth or developing domestic markets by advocating the need for ‘giving full play to the advantages of our domestic markets which are large and have great potential’ (Quoted in Croll, 2006, p. 1). As the former Premier, Zhu Rongji, lamented, the biggest challenge to further economic growth in China was the weak domestic market (Ibid.). By stimulating growth of domestic demand, Chinese authorities hoped to reduce reliance on exports and foreign markets and therefore shield the Chinese economy from external shocks should uncertainty in overseas markets threaten to disrupt the economy (Tong, 2009).
However, it cannot be assumed that consumption, which has been partly supported by the rise of the newly rich in China, would necessarily lead to democratisation. The theory that posits a direct link between growing wealth and democratisation is tenuous because, as observers of China have contended, China’s middle class are a product of the reforms that have allowed some to ‘get rich first’ over others (Tomba, 2009). The middle class therefore owe their existence to the party-state. Further, middle class fears of instability and anarchy – fears that are often projected onto the ‘floating’ migrant population – means that they are unlikely or unwilling to part with the privileges that come from having wealth (Zhang, 2001). And, as Donald and Zheng (2009) have argued, the success of the middle class is important for another reason: legitimising the ruling elite’s political and economic power. Middle class success is therefore indispensable to the ‘narrativisation of China’s economic miracle’
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(Ibid., p. 4). However, while economic performance retains its importance for authoritarian regimes simply because of a lack of other sources of legitimacy, reliance on economic performance alone can create problems in the long run.
For the CCP, with its origins in the tri-partite ideological tenets of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism, the introduction of the market and the concept of profit have created a crisis of rationality that has not been adequately addressed. Second, over- reliance on economic performance creates spiraling expectations for more and more wealth and material betterment. Once the doors have been open to outside trade and investment incorporating China within the global flows of capital and accumulation, they cannot be closed. Through consumption of images and ideas from the outside, people will also place higher expectations on the government amid the diminishing capacity of the party-state to provide for them. Finally, an over-reliance on economic performance creates compliance problems as the profit motive drives individuals in positions of power to accumulate personal wealth and perpetuate corrupt practices. These three problems of rationality, expectations and non- compliance will be discussed in some detail below.
The rationality crisis concerns the clash between the founding tenets of Chinese socialism and the pragmatic policies of post-Mao reforms designed to facilitate economic growth. If the ideological purity of the Party were to be maintained, then certain paths to economic improvement must be excluded on the basis of their incompatibility with the core tenets of Marxism. However, in order to facilitate development of the economy, the Party has essentially adopted whatever means necessary, rendering them compatible only because of improved performance. The theory of ‘the primary stage of socialism’ is one such attempt to reconcile the Party’s ideological and eudemonic claims to legitimacy (Misra, 1998). It is predicated on the Marxist assumption that facilitating the development of the productive forces is the sole dynamic of historical progress and that since post-Mao socialism was still characterised by poverty, the main task of the Party is therefore to eliminate poverty through productivity. Capitalist methods that were favourable to developing productivity were conceived as being independent of social systems. This meant that the Party could adopt capitalist methods without changing its Leninist system of rule. In his appeals for bolder reforms, Deng Xiaoping declared that capitalist systems did not have a ‘patent’ over economic artifacts such as markets, the stock exchange and
139 the commodity economy.63 In fact, these things were of a neutral character and could be adopted by any social system if they wished. Deng’s famous ‘black cat, white cat’64 analogy in which he urged Party members not to hesitate like ‘women with bound feet’ when it came to economic reforms, firmly grounded pragmatism as ‘the criterion of truth’. 65 In other words, improved economic performance is legitimate regardless of whether or not it clashed with the founding tenets of Chinese socialism.
But over-reliance on economic performance to justify one-party rule also generated a second crisis: that of expectations which the regime cannot hope to fulfill on a perpetual basis. As Michel Oksenberg (1991, p. 314) observed, ‘the population appeared to judge their rulers not by the record of a decade but by the immediate past; they judge their welfare not against the past but by their soaring hopes.’ In other words, people began to judge the legitimacy of the regime against their personally experienced economic circumstances. Moreover, the rapid spread of television and advertising facilitated comparisons to the outside world as people began to question
63 In an excerpt of a talk between Deng Xiaoping and Frank B. Gibney, Vice-Chairman of the Compilation Committee of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. of the United States and Paul T.K. Lin, Director of the Institute of East Asia at McGill University of Canada, among others, on 26 November 1979, Deng made it clear that the ‘socialist market economy’ was not the same as a ‘capitalist market economy’ and that capitalism did not have a monopoly over ‘markets’: It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only “capitalist” market economy. Why can’t we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy…We cannot say that market economy exists only under capitalism. Market economy was in its embryonic stages as early as feudalist society. We can surely develop it under socialism…As long as learning from capitalism is regarded as no more than a means to an end, it will not change the structure of socialism or bring China back to capitalism. The full excerpt can be found in volume 2 of Deng’s Selected Works, p. 239. 64 Despite being officially ‘socialist,’ by the 1990s, China’s leadership was pursuing what were essentially, capitalist reforms. Critics wondered if the kind of ‘socialism’ China was practicing was any different to ‘capitalism’ in the West. Deng brushed off these criticisms with the ‘black cat, white cat’ metaphor where the ‘colour’ of the cat did not matter - it was a ‘good’ cat as long as it catches mice. This is to say that so long as the Chinese economy was bringing prosperity to the people and lifting people out of poverty, then it is ‘good’ policy – never mind semantics. 65 In excerpts from talks given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai between 18 January 21 February, 1992, Jiang urged cadres to increase the speed of economic reforms: We should be bolder than before in conducting reform and opening to the outside and have the courage to experiment. We must not act like women with bound feet. Once we are sure that something should be done, we should dare to experiment and break a new path. The rest of the speech could be found in the online version of Deng Xiaoping’s Selected Works, Vol. 3, http://ia600300.us.archive.org/30/items/SelectedWorksOfDengXiaopingVol.3/Deng03.pdf (Accessed 2 December 2011).
140 the overall efficacy of socialism. As Ding Xueliang (1994, p. 121) observed, questions commonly voiced by soldiers and army officers in the 1980s were:
Why is it that our people’s living standards have been improved so slowly? Does the reason lie in the socialist system?... In some capitalist nations, science and technology are advanced and the economies are highly developed. Can we say that these facts demonstrate that capitalism is not decaying but superior to socialism?
The rise of industrial east Asia, in particular, the ‘tiger economies’ of Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore also made comparison inevitable. The World Economic Herald (17 April 1989, Quoted in Ding, 1994, p. 151) singled out Shanghai for reflection:
Shanghai used to be the first city in the Far East, known for fusing the Oriental and the Occidental and for her great wealth. It was she that hosted the journal New Youth which first brought Marxism into China. She was a birthplace of the revolution as well as the industrial capital of China… During the 40 years [1949-88], however, turbulent politics and changing policies have turned the city upside down and wasted opportunities for her.
In addition, the focus on economic performance had been to the neglect of other social values. This posed two challenges to regime legitimacy: first is the rise of social maladies which have been brought to the public’s attention; second and consequentially, the Party is ultimately seen as responsible for letting these problems develop unchecked. The student protests of 1987 and the nation-wide protest of 1989 demonstrated that economic performance alone could not guarantee political legitimacy.66 The party state’s assumption that people were economic animals has clearly been challenged by these events. Although reducing its ‘paternalistic’ role was necessary to facilitate the reforms, the Party continued to claim to be socialist and representative of the whole people. This fuelled cynicism and mistrust in the regime and those hurt by the reforms were openly hostile. A poster on the Democracy Forum wall in 1989 in Shenyang read:
…Why does no one ever mention Mao’s ‘Serve the people?’ Are [Deng’s] 4 basic principles [of socialism] mere verbiage? Was Mao
66 As mentioned above, Huang Yasheng’s findings suggest that it was in the 1980s that China experienced the most economic gains, including income growth and reduction of poverty levels. He argues that the decline of growth in the countryside or stalled growth in the countryside from the 1990s was a result of deliberate policy that privileged the cities and urban coastal areas of China. For more, see chapter three of Huang’s book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (2008).
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wrong to link education with production and labour? If hoodlums can successfully hold up and rob an entire passenger train, is this not the realm turmoil [dongluan]? Prices are rising, the currency is inflated, the population’s out of control. What does this all mean? Rare animals are being killed…our rivers are being polluted…marriage is a commodity…AIDS spreads unchecked…where is China going? (Cited in Gunn, 1991, p. 72)
As much as the questions in the poster above are self-probing, they also reflect the general mood of the people. Beijing might have been the focal point of the ‘pro- democracy’ student protests in the late 1980s, but protests were taking place across China by 1989. Although dis-united in their calls for change, these voices expressed a profound disconnect between Chinese society and its leadership and raised serious doubts about its future. As I will show shortly, it is against the experiences of these events that the Party intensified ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns. For now, it is reasonable to conclude that economic performance alone has not been able to manage the spiraling expectations of the citizenry, who, being gradually exposed to the ‘spiritual’ alternatives from outside, have begun to question and even to blame their government for the social malaise they see in society.
The third aspect of the legitimacy crisis concerns the issue of non-compliance with legal and moral norms. While the CCP has been successful in quelling political dissent, a lack of compliance in other areas of social life has made effective governance difficult. There are several reasons that explain why the emphasis on economic performance over other social values has led to moral decline. First, the overemphasis on economic performance undermines other social values such as altruism, necessary to enlist the support in the wider society and ensure long-term allegiance to the party-state. It is not as if Chinese people do not exhibit good social habits and moral values, it is because being the ‘good Samaritan’ does not always pay off.67 Second, pursuit of material interests can lead to materialism and hedonism
67 In 2009, A 75-year-old man in Nanjing, while getting off the bus, accidentally fell down from the rear door of the bus, was unable to get up, and the other passengers behind him just stood and watched. Only when the old man shouted: “I fell on my own, you all do not need to worry, it had nothing to do with you all” did the crowd of passengers go forth to help him. This goes back to the Peng Yu incident in 2006 in which a young person named Peng Yu helped an old woman who had fallen down. The result was that this old woman then maintained that it was Peng Yu who the person who had knocked her down. Despite maintaining his innocence Peng Yu was fined in the first instance to bear a portion of the old woman’s medical expensies, totally over 40,000 yuan, on the basis “common sense” that: “According to society’s logic/reason - if Peng Yu was doing a good deed, he could have let the old woman’s family send her to the hospital after they arrived, and then leave on his own.
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(Ci, 1994) where some people are encouraged to break the law and defy governmental authorities in order to acquire personal wealth, thereby fuelling the perception of anomie in society. Third and lastly, unfettered material incentives are socially divisive and could worsen the divide between rich and poor which can turn the losers of reforms against the government.
While erosion of legitimacy does not mean that the regime cannot rule or is collapsing, the fact that people no longer take the Party at its word is ominous for the regime’s future. In the absence of norms that encourage voluntary compliance, the Party will have to resort to coercion, thereby increasing the costs to governance. The legitimacy deficit has been slowly eroding the resources upon which the regime can draw to maintain effective rule. By resorting to socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns, the Party hoped to restore morale and dynamism damaged after the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. The Party saw the campaigns as a way to restore ‘normal’ standards of behaviour such as politeness, cleanliness and other similar virtues that had been undermined in the preceding period. The campaigns were also intended to shape the condition and mentality of citizens so that they would not abuse the newfound freedom created by economic reforms. In other words, they were intended to uphold the Party’s rule and to prevent experimentations in social and political reforms from getting out of hand.
Building ‘Socialist Spiritual Civilisation’: Campaign Goals and Rationales
There are two tasks we have to keep working at: on the one hand, the reform and opening process, and on the other, the crackdown on crime. We must be steadfast with regard to both. In combating crime and eliminating social evils, we must not be soft. Guangdong is trying to catch up with Asia’s “four little dragons” in 20 years, not only in terms of economic growth, but also in terms of improved public order and general social conduct - that is, we should surpass them in both material and ethical progress. Only that can be considered building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Thanks to a strict administration, Singapore has good public order. We should learn from its experience and surpass it in this respect.
-Deng Xiaoping, Excerpts from Talks given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai, 18 January-21 February 1992
However Peng Yu did not make such a choice, and his actions contradict what is reasonable” (China Smack, 2009).
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During his inspection tour of Guangdong Province in 1992, Deng praised Singapore as a model China could follow, a model characterised by economic growth and an authoritarian political order. Deng had expressed his worries about the decline of spiritual civilisation many times during the 1980s. But his concerns were overshadowed by his emphasis on economic reforms. Using Deng Xiaoping’s ‘two tough hands’ approach (one pushing economic development, the other enforcing the legal and ethical systems), the CCP is trying to justify its efforts to balance material and spiritual civilisation. The campaigns have targeted Party cadres, the media, and the general public. They are different from earlier ideological offensives in that whereas the campaigns of the 1960s were positive efforts to mould the people into ‘socialist men and women’, the campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s were intended to correct serious moral and ideological deviations as a result of the economic reforms. Thus, if the campaigns of the past were intended to make people morally better, the campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s were aimed at preventing society from descending into moral anomie.
The socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns continued to advocate the key moral and ideological principles of the Party – socialism, collectivism, and patriotism. Maintaining these core beliefs had been indispensable for the Party’s legitimacy. However, the definitions of these key principles have changed over the years. As will be shown below, significant modifications have been made to accommodate the campaigns to the changed socioeconomic context. Moreover, the conditions of post- Mao society have proven unfavourable to the CCP’s ideological and moral tenets. The socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns are therefore intended to keep these tenets meaningful and relevant.
Maintaining Ideological Authority
An important part of maintaining ideological authority has been to ensure that all leading cadres above the county level were trained in the ‘correct’ ideology of the Party. At a national conference on building ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’ held in November 1990, the Party urged cadres to promote and propagate values such as patriotism, self-sacrifice and loyalty to the CCP (R. Wang, 1990). It viewed the events culminating in the Beijing demonstrations in 1989 as a result of the Party neglecting ideological education and vowed to ‘never pursue temporary economic
144 growth at the expense of spiritual civilisation at any time’ (CCP, 1996, p. 6) In 1993, volume three of Deng Xiaoping’s Selected Works was published, providing the educational material upon which the Party would draw to achieve ideological conformity among its cadres. In 1994, an internal Party circular entitled ‘The Central Organisation Department and the Central Propaganda Department’s Suggestions on how to Strengthen and Improve the Education of Cadres’ was released identifying some of the reasons for a Party rectification campaign:
There are a number of cadres whose ideologies have not adapted to the new situation, to the demands of new tasks, or have not kept up with rapid changes in the understanding of objective reality: some cadres’ ideals and beliefs have wavered. There are serious distortions of life and values, money worship, hedonism, expansion of extreme individualism, abuse of power, bribery and other corrupt phenomena. At the same time, a number of cadres’ grasp of new knowledge has been inadequate. There is no shortage of those who, in their own posts have not played exemplary roles. We therefore must pay attention to these problems and do a good job in the education of cadres and comprehensively raise the quality of the cadre corps. Only then can we deepen reforms, promote economic development and social progress and give full play to the party organisation’s vanguard and exemplary role (Cited in Li & Kang, 1996, p. 125, my translation).
It has been reported by the People Daily (Cited in Guo, 2000, p. 60) that from 1993 to 1996, 21 million officials were sent to training classes in Deng Xiaoping Theory. Of this number, 390,000 were mid-level officials while 1,200 were higher-level officials (Ibid.). Following the Fifteenth National Party Congress, teams from the Propaganda Department were dispatched to disseminate Deng’s thoughts. When the chief of the Central Propaganda Department called on the media to make disseminating Deng’s theory a priority task, all major media outlets were saturated with ‘studies of Deng Xiaoping’ (Anon., 1996). Indeed, the 1990s could be said to have been the decade for promoting ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’.
Jiang was concerned that if cadres failed to behave themselves, the Party would lose its authority to lead and become a laughing stock. As the resolution of the Sixth Plenum stated, the Party and administrative authorities would be judged not only on their economic performance but also on their performance in the spiritual civilisation project. In a speech delivered to a meeting on strengthening the ideological work of the Propaganda Department on 24 January 1994, Jiang Zemin urged his subordinates
145 to promote ‘scientific theory’ and to ‘advance culture’, vigorously promote ‘moral conduct’ and reflect the ‘spirits of the times’ (cited in Li & Kang 1996, p. 757). Specifically, he ordered that every year works which reflect the values and missions of the Party be selected, including films, theatre productions, comedies, music, art or any other cultural form. In order to qualify, these works had to be ‘lively, excellent in quality, have strong appeal, and a competitive edge in the cultural market’ (Ibid.). Simultaneously, Jiang called for resistance against ‘the infiltration of Western ideologies’ and ‘the spread of Western cultural trash’ (CCP, 1996, p. 3).
Control of the media has also been a crucial task in maintaining ideological authority. In 1996, Jiang emphasised the importance of party control over the media at a meeting with the staff of Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily). At this meeting, Jiang explained the conditions for ‘the correct handling of public opinion’ as follows:
1. The press must be guided by the Party’s basic theory, basic line, and basic guideline, and keep politics, ideology, and action in conformity with the Party Central Committee. 2. The press must firmly keep to the standpoint of the Party, adhere to principle[s], and take [a] clear-cut stand on what to promote and what to oppose on cardinal issues of right and wrong. 3. The press must adhere to the Party’s guideline with stress on propaganda by positive examples, sing the praises of the people’s great achievements, and conduct the correct supervision of public opinion that should help the party and the state to improve work and the style of leadership, solve problems, enhance unity, and safeguard stability. 4. The press must sing the leitmotif, hold patriotism, collectivism and socialism on high, and use best things to arm, direct and mould the people. -Cited in Guo, 2000, pp. 55-56.
To this end, the media was placed under the control of politicians and subjected to ‘quasi-military criteria.’
As a result of Jiang’s instructions, the Propaganda Department implemented two concrete measures to control the media. First, it made all chief editors and station managers directly accountable to the Party leadership. Second, it placed ‘politically reliable’ persons in the position of Party secretaries of the major media outlets. These Party officials would share the same administrative duties as chief editors and radio and TV station managers and played important roles in making programming decisions. Apart from control of broadcasting mediums like the TV and radio, the Party also increased its censorship of periodicals, newspapers, and even tabloids.
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Several periodicals popular for introducing ideas from abroad were either forced to shut down, e.g. Xin Guancha (New Perspectives), Zhongguo Jingji Xinwen Bao (Chinese Economic News), Lilun Xinxi Bao (Theory and Information Paper) and Xiaoshuo Xuankan (Selected Novels) (Guo, 2000, p. 57). Others received stern warnings for running articles that deviated from the official line, e.g. Zhanlue yu Guanli (Strategy and Management). Following the Fifteenth National Congress, the CCP summoned the heads of all major national and local newspapers to a meeting and ordered them to heed the Party’s call to create an environment favourable to spiritual civilisation’s cultivation (Renmin Ribao, 1996).
Re-establishing the Party’s Moral Authority
As socioeconomic changes made the previously socialist and communist moral codes largely irrelevant, the Party needed to define morality based on the new economic reality. Its biggest challenge was to reconcile collectivism with the ethos of individual competition and profit that underlay the market economy. Since the onset of economic reforms, a persistent dilemma has been how to justify the pursuit of individual interests without forsaking socialist morality. In other words, if development of the productive forces necessitates that individual market interests should prevail, then socialist morals have no role to play in the process.
In its defence, the government released a series of articles arguing that China’s socialist market economy necessitated a balance between competition and cooperation, efficiency and fairness, individual wealth and common prosperity, economic and social costs. Zheng Bijian, deputy of the Central Propaganda Department, contended that since the market economy has to respond to society’s needs by providing goods and services, in the process realising their own interests, the notion of ‘serving the people’ was thus compatible with the market economy (Guangming Ribao Shelun, 1996). In publishing these articles, the Party hoped to diffuse tensions between socialist morality and the concept of a market economy. However, far from doing so, it only promoted confusion. The articles seemed to suggest that a market economy that is compliant with moral codes must have a ‘socialist’ character when it is well established that modern capitalist economies are well equipped with their own moral codes.
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To this day, the Party continues to wrestle with the persistent charge that socialist morality is incompatible with market economies. For example, a recent article published by the Party journal, Qiushi (1 October 2009), urged Party cadres and society to ‘unswervingly uphold the system of core socialist values’. The article rejects the application of so-called universal values such as ‘democracy, freedom and human rights’ to China because, as it explained,
There is no global standard for a development path or development model, nor is there a development path or model that is fixed and unchanging. We definitely cannot copy or adopt a model employed by a Western country. We must develop democracy based on conditions in China, constantly promote internal efforts to improve and develop the socialist political system, promote overall economic, social and personal development and follow the development path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
At the same time as waging an ideological campaign to convince the people of the worthiness of socialism and CCP rule, the Party is also taking concrete measures to foster moral rebirth. As in the pre-reform days, role models are being promoted as exemplars of virtues to be emulated by the rest of the population. In addition to the traditional labour heroes like Lei Feng, ordinary people from all walks of life have been chosen as models for the rest of society to follow. For example, in September 2006, the Civilisation Office issued an instruction to all government TV stations to promote ‘civilised China’. The result was a program on CCTV 10 called ‘Narrating Civilised China’ (Jiangshu. Wenming Zhongguo), which aired every evening at 9 pm. As the title suggests, the TV station’s approach has been to use oral story telling as the vehicle for promoting the virtues of civility, self-sacrifice, dedication and diligence. The program selected 68 stories of individuals from 60 cities across China. The instructions from the Civilisation Office implied an injunction to get as large a representative sample as possible so as to ensure broad mass appeal. The stories were varied but they followed a familiar pattern: protagonist faces a difficult challenge then overcomes the challenge after some trial and tribulation and emerges triumphant. Protagonists are not limited by their age, gender or socioeconomic background. They can include young children who display the virtues of filial piety or elderly citizens who show self-sacrifice. The challenges that the protagonists face do not have to involve a third party, meaning that the difficulty may relate to an illness like cancer that the protagonist has to personally overcome or endure. Also,
148 the methods for overcoming such challenges vary from seeking outside support to sheer will power.
Each protagonist is paraded as an ordinary ‘hero’ of the people. Unlike heroes of the past that hailed from ‘favourable’ class backgrounds like the military or the urban working class, these heroes come from all walks of life, showing that with persistence and due diligence, will power and hard work, people can overcome their difficulties. There is no doubt that the stories are deliberately chosen and perhaps even embellished to maximise their effect on audience response. What the stories have in common is their tear-jerking content: all are moving to the point of bringing the audience to tears. This is deliberate and intended to create an atmosphere of solidarity, to generate empathy in the hope of creating a following and to initiate public discussion. Although each story has been carefully selected, chosen because they reflect the virtues the Party identifies as desirable for upholding harmony in society, it is important to understand the underlying motivation behind such a campaign. Through such programs, the government hopes to demonstrate that even under the conditions of a market economy (even if it is ‘socialist’ in character), there are still Chinese who exhibited such admirable qualities as self-sacrifice, dedication, perseverance, and diligence.
This method of inculcation has some obvious drawbacks. With the age of mass communication giving people access to a variety of media and media formats, role models of this kind have little appeal, particularly to the youth. Also, the constructed reality in these stories does not always match the reality as lived by ordinary people who know no end or resolution to their troubles. So even if they tried to emulate the perseverance and diligence shown, they may not be able to overcome similar challenges. The result may be disappointment and further alienation from the system. For example, Børge Bakken (2000, p. 191) reports the following on Tianjin youth’s attitudes towards role models in general:
Today there are few young people who would actually like to be selected as models of any kind, unless for instrumental reasons of benefit or profit. A survey among 600 young people in Tianjin, 63 per cent of them young workers, found that as much as 91 per cent had no interest whatsoever in becoming model workers. Just as there seems to be a norm against the ‘rate buster’, so there would also seem to be a norm against the ‘do-gooder’ in general.
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Further, as reforms become more deeply entrenched in the society, the market is proving more attractive than socialism in the Party’s formula of the socialist market economy. People are finding it difficult to reconcile the rampant materialism in society with the collectivist virtues promoted by the party-state (Yan, 2009).
In addition to promoting role models for public emulation, the Party also implemented various systems of behavioural codes (gongyue) or conventions that attempt to govern the minutiae of citizen’s conduct. These gongyue supplement the Party’s already impressive control mechanisms. Gongyue are seen as a practical means of responding in a timely manner to the need to steer behaviour in accordance with Party priorities. The most well-known and widely disseminated gongyue is the ‘Citizens’ Compact’, which contains nine conventions typically found on community billboards of neighbourhood compounds. These can also be tailored to the specific area in which they are located. Below are the nine conventions disseminated in 1995 in Beijing (China Network, 2002, my translation):
1. Love the motherland, love Beijing and maintain stability and national unity; 2. Love labour, thrift, honesty and dedication; 3. Respect the law, maintain order and promote a healthy atmosphere; 4. Keep the capital beautiful, observe sanitation, and protect the environment; 5. Demonstrate a public spirit, protect public property and cultural relics; 6. Advocate science, respect teachers, continually self-improve, raise population quality; 7. Respect for the old, care for the young, embrace the military, assist the poor and needy; 8. Seek refinement and a healthy lifestyle, observe family planning rules, enhance one’s physique; 9. Be courteous and civilised when treating guests, be generous when assisting others.
Although they are promoted as a form of self-regulation, gongyue reflects the Party’s concern that social change has outpaced or outgrown its realm of control. For this reason, new gongyue are continually developed in response to the changing socioeconomic context. For example, the China Internet Network Information Centre reported in 2008 that the number of internet users in China had increased to 298 million, making it the country with the most internet users in the world (Wei, 2009). For the Party, unchecked internet use can cause social harm such as ‘games addiction’ as well as facilitating internet crimes like scams and fraud. But control of the internet is also vital for maintaining Party authority over information and public
150 opinion. For this reason, codes outlining ‘civilised internet use’ have been widely promoted, particularly among the young and educated (Hao, 2007).
Photo 4: Shanghai Citizens’ ‘Compact on the Civilised Use of Public Transportation’
Control is not limited to sanctions – it also involves handing out rewards, including symbolic recognition of a citizen’s compliant behaviour in the form of certificates and other bestowals of recognition. For example, households could earn the title of ‘ten-star households’ or ‘civilised households’ if they were seen to exhibit the desired civilised qualities (Dynon, 2008). Sometimes, if they demonstrated extraordinary ‘heroic feats’, the state may provide some financial reward and in turn publicise this to encourage others to do the same (Liu, 2007).
Photo 5: Bestowal of the title of ‘civilised business-operator’
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Patriotic Education
Photo 6: Community poster reads: ‘Eight Socialist Concepts of Honour’
Another crucial component of the spiritual civilisation drive has been the promotion of patriotic education. In the 1990s, patriotic education served two main goals: first, to bind people to new norms of social conduct and therefore enhance the Party’s legitimacy; and second, patriotic education was seen as a buffer against perceived Western intrusions and attempts to assimilate and eventually conquer China. Patriotic education was mainly targeted at China’s youth, the group seen to be most vulnerable to Western influences. However, patriotic education also targeted Party cadres and communities as well as the broader society. Following the October 1996 resolutions, the Central Propaganda Department called on the education and media sectors to use China’s ‘fine’ cultural traditions as a source for the promotion of socialist spiritual civilisation:
The great achievements and the grand goal of the modernization drive, the history of modern and contemporary China, the history of the Chinese Communist Party and basic national conditions, the fine traditions of the Chinese nation and revolution… should be taken as the main contents of patriotic education in the new era. (Quoted in Dynon, 2008, p. 94).
In order to encourage national pride and imbue in the youth a sense of national identity, ‘patriotic education sites’ were established under the sponsorship of the State Education Commission. Visits to revolutionary monuments like Martyrs’
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Square and Mao’s Mausoleum in Beijing, the former residences of revolutionary heroes like Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai, and even visits to the route of the Long March in Yan’an have been made a must for aspiring cadres. In addition to reveling in China’s revolutionary history, traditional rituals have been revived and re-invented. For example, the Qing Ming festival (5 April) or Tomb Sweeping Festival, which had previously passed without incident, now attracts widespread media attention. In 1995, Li Ruihan, a leading member of the CCP’s Standing Committee and Chair of the Chinese People’s political Consultative Conference, and Li Lanqing, Deputy Prime Minister, attended a conference celebrating the 2,425th anniversary of Confucius’s birth (Little, 1995). This is a symbolically significant event in that since the history of the PRC, no top communist leader had ever been present at such an event. Through their speeches, the leaders praised Confucianism as a positive and unifying force that would foster socialist spiritual civilisation and strengthen the Chinese nation.
Part of the patriotic education curriculum has been to teach the Chinese people about the history of ‘national humiliation’ (guoqing jiaoyu), particularly at the hands of foreign and Western powers. The ‘General Guideline on Strengthening Modern and Contemporary Chinese History and Education in China’s National Conditions’, passed in 1991, was designed to strengthen patriotism, faith in the Party and impart the lesson of China’s troubled past as a warning example that if it failed to modernise it would be humiliated (Jones, 2005, p. 87). As Alisa Jones (Ibid.) observed, the extremist and provocative language conveyed official sentiments of anti-foreignism. These sentiments coincided with the commercial publishing of two nationalistic novels, China Can Say “No”, published in 1996 (Song, et al., 1996) and I believe in China, published in 1997 and written by He Jie et. al. How far such state narratives are shaped by popular sentiment is difficult to ascertain. However, there is certainly congruence between official narratives and popular opinion, perhaps because of the omnipresence of official narratives in education, the media, and other state supervised arenas.
Campaign Drawbacks and Challenges
It is unfair to say that the spiritual civilisation campaigns have achieved nothing. At a minimum they have attracted attention to the problem of a moral crisis in China.
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However, the campaigns continue to be dogged by a number of challenges. One of the obvious drawbacks has been what Jurgen Habermas (1975) termed a ‘rationality crisis’, caused by a disjunction between current practices and the original ideological tenets upon which the regime was founded. Despite the Party’s attempts to reconcile its practice with socialist ideals by creating concepts such as the ‘primary stage of socialism’ and the ‘socialist market economy’, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish a substantial part of its ideology from its antithesis – capitalism.
Although elasticity in ideology may provide the Party with latitude to make policy manoeuvres and innovations, it cannot be the source of inspiration for moral renewal. Studying the civilising processes in Southeastern China, Sara Friedman (2004, p. 703) observed that socialist spiritual civilisation has become a ‘catchall’ phrase reflecting any worthy cause. If anything, the socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns have created a gap between what people are asked to believe and what they actually experienced in their daily lives. The values being promoted by the CCP, such as ‘serving the people’, ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘collectivism’, contrast sharply with the social environment where competition, money-making and the pursuit of personal interests prevails. Further, uncontrollable corruption has undermined much of the Party’s morals-building efforts.
Another drawback is that in manipulating the media to its advantage, the Party creates a ‘dual discourse’ universe in which a deep chasm exists between the official discourse as advocated by the Party and the private discourse of individuals (He, 2009). In doing so, it creates confusion, particularly over the terms of the reforms, for example, ‘letting some get rich first’, private ownership, and ‘exploitation’ by ‘capitalists’ (Chen, 1999). Chinese are thus faced with a unique dilemma: having to say or do one thing when they believe in something else.
This condition is particularly pervasive among the journalism profession in China but it is also having an effect on ordinary people (Shao, 2002). In the official discourse, certain ideas or assumptions are presented as being ‘true’ and ‘unchallengeable’. For example, the official discourse asserts that socialism is better than capitalism; that the Party is the saviour of China and that it is the only political party that can effectively govern a vast and complex country like China; that democracy in the West is hypocritical; that socialist morals have collective interests at heart; that corruption is
154 rare and severely punished; and that the economy is developing soundly under the able leadership of the Party. The private discourse however, has taken shape amid painful experiences or lessons that have taught people to distance themselves from politics. To ordinary Chinese, Communist ideology is obsolete and irrelevant and it is the increasingly market-oriented economy that determines their life chances. Most treat Communist values as a system of vague and meaningless symbols (Chou, 2003).
But what happens when socialist morality is continuously paraded in formalised and ritualised ways despite engendering a dual discourse universe in which everyone is aware of the hypocrisy but unable to change the status quo? According to Bakken (2000), it creates a ‘culture of simulation’ in which the campaign becomes an open theatre for demonstrating political loyalty. Thus, the campaign is turned into a ‘virtuocratic career-ladder for instigators and a battlefield of moral competition’ (Ibid., p. 425). Campaigns therefore will lose their power to transform people. Outwardly, they become more formalistic but covertly, standards are not being upheld. Over time, the sum total of resistance will erode the moral order, thus increasing the costs of governance and leaving the party-state few options apart from coercion.
Conclusion
‘Socialist spiritual civilisation’ was originally conceived by the Party as a way forward from the traumatic experiences of the Cultural Revolution: it was a way to restore faith in the Party that had been badly damaged by the excesses of the Revolution. By the 1980s, it had become increasingly clear that the campaigns were about restoring the ‘crisis of faith’ that had begun to be acutely felt, especially among the youth. However, at a fundamental level, it was also about restoring the standards of behaviour such as politeness, cleanliness and respect for authorities that had been undermined by the Cultural Revolution. As economic reforms necessitated that China ‘open up’ to the outside, the campaigns also functioned to shape the mentality of the citizens so that they would not ‘misuse’ the newfound freedom granted to them by market reforms. Put another way, they were intended to prevent the spread of democratic experiments from getting out of hand.
After the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the government intensified its efforts to censor the population, launching new waves of crackdowns and new rounds of
155 ideological campaigns to indoctrinate the population in its beliefs. CCP leaders blamed the decline in ideological education which it saw as the primary reason for setting the youth ‘astray’ in their thinking, leading them to take the protest path. The remedy was to proceed ‘full steam ahead’ with economic reforms, to take ‘bolder’ steps to open China’s economy to the outside. But this would be complemented with intensified and renewed efforts in new rounds of socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns. Indeed, the era of Jiang Zemin could be said to have been the era of socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns. Jiang’s version would be deeply imbued with cultural nationalism, reflected in part by domestic politics but also by newfound confidence on the world stage, reinforced by China’s successful bid to join the WTO and its winning bid for the Beijing Olympics.
The socialist spiritual civilisation campaigns reflect the Party’s deep-seated view that the country cannot be effectively governed without a unifying belief system that can only be shaped and provided for by the Party. However, there is much doubt that the Party will ever be able to fill the gap between the normative order it promotes and the reality that undermines these ideas. This contradiction will likely continue and intensify as market reforms become an entrenched reality in China, leading it further away from the socialist ideals promoted by the Party.
While most in China welcome the specific reform-oriented policies such as the ‘open-door’ measures and the introduction of a market economy, they do not necessarily identify with the grand ideology of Communism and the authoritarian political system derived from it. As a result, a ‘dual discourse universe’ made up of the official discourse universe of the party-state and the private discourse of the individual has been created. In the private discourse universe, socialist morals are largely obsolete and rendered a system of meaningless jargon and symbols. In the official domain, the Party is heralded as the saviour of the country and the only organisation capable of leading a vast and complex country like China. This contradiction is particularly acute among those charged with carrying out the campaign and is an issue that I will be revisiting in Chapter Eight. As spiritual campaigns become a formal institution, managing these contradictions will require people to display compliance, when in private they may harbour opposing views. The sum total of these opposing or contradicting views will serve to undermine the
156 norms being advocated by the official discourse such that, over time, the norms will cease to have any meaning or drawing power to bind the people to the party-state.
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Chapter Seven
Governing through Shequ/Community: the Shanghai Example
Photo 7: Meilong Fourth Village: Round plague reads: ‘Civilised Community’ model quarter.
The period from the early 1980s to 1992 was a time of transition. It was a time of great social uncertainty and political turmoil, with no clear path of where China was moving. From 1992 onwards, although uncertainties still lingered, one thing that was clear was that ‘socialist market economic’ reforms were now an irreversible reality. As discussed in the previous chapter, 1992 marked an important milestone in the country’s history, not only because it confirmed market economic reforms as the ‘right’ path for China, but also because in this year the Party encouraged the adoption of measures to speed up the reform process. But just as the reforms produced a new money-making ethos and new social mobility, they also caused the old structures of social control to fall by the wayside. As the Party dictatorship faded, the call to uphold ‘socialist values’ no longer stirred the masses into action. Maoist slogans about the ‘forward march of socialism’ (yiqie xiang qian kan) were parodied and replaced by new colloquial expressions that spoke of the ‘forward march of money’. With the desire to change their lives for the better, millions of peasants packed their
158 bags and left for the cities. While some found wealth, others lost their way. Those who lost their way would form the underclass from which urban fears of chaos and criminality would be projected. Aptly labelled the ‘floating blind’ (mangliu), they became a constant source of headache for the authorities but by no means the only one. Indeed, while economic reform has generated opportunities for wealth accumulation, it has also brought into sharp focus the issue of governance in China by posing the following questions: How can the Party effectively govern in an increasingly diverse and polarised society undergoing rapid transformation? More importantly, how can the Party maintain its political monopoly while also trying to control these forces for change?
Re-asserting control in a society currently experiencing rapid and often disruptive change has been an ongoing preoccupation and a growing pain for the CCP. Thus far, the party-state has averted crisis and continues to steer the country with some measure of skill and dexterity. However, in order to remain in control, the Party needs to continuously reinvent itself by redefining its role vis-à-vis the population. Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ (sange daibiao) and Hu Jintao’s ‘people- centredness’ (yiren weiben) are pivotal moments in reconceptualising the task of governing in the wake of greater societal polarisation and diversification. The state project of building a ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) is a culmination of these efforts to close the income and opportunity gap.
This chapter will examine the government-led community68 (shequ) building project as a new social campaign designed to solve emerging social problems associated with reforms. Specifically, the chapter draws from data collected from my field notes on the civilising campaigns (wenming huodong) carried out at the shequ level in Shanghai. Shequ building seeks to move away from a model based on direct government intervention towards a model of structured self-governance. In China, neighbourhood communities are seen as instruments for teaching ‘civilised behaviour’, for the inculcation of moral values and the overall ‘moral development’ of society (Heberer, 2009). Together with the family and schools, shequ form a bulwark against moral degeneration. More importantly, infusing shequ with ‘moral
68 Henceforth I will be using shequ (community) and ‘community’ interchangeably. However, where ‘community’ is used in the Chinese context, it will be Italicised to indicate that community does not confer the same meanings as we understand it in the Anglophone sense.
159 purpose’ also revitalises the Party’s legitimacy which has been waning in recent years.
The chapter begins with an explanation of the rationale behind shequ construction in China. In particular, it focuses on the issues that pose challenges to urban governance as they play out at the shequ level – problems such as the breakdown of the urban work unit (danwei), the privatisation of the housing market and the increase in rural to urban migration. This will be followed by a description of the laws, policies and programs carried out under the shequ construction project. In this section, the three ‘self’ (zizhi) functions of the shequ – citizen’s self-management, self-education, and self-service – will be assessed. The chapter argues that while steering people to govern themselves seems to invoke notions of neoliberal self- governance, this must be understood as a means to strengthening ‘the Party’s governing capacity’ (dangde zhizheng nengli). It should not to be mistaken as ‘autonomy’ as understood within Western liberal reasoning (Sigley, 2004). The final section explores the role of shequ in the ethical training of migrants in Shanghai based on models promoted by ‘spiritual civilisation’ campaigns (jingshen wenming huodong). It argues that the civilising influence of shequ relies on public practices that distinguish between the moral and amoral, fit and unfit, and as is commonly expressed in Chinese, between those of ‘high quality’ (gao suzhi) and those of ‘low quality’ (di suzhi). Contrary to expectations, these dividing practices enhance rather than undermine the governing capacity of shequ because they justify the necessity for state intervention.
The Rationale for Shequ Construction
In the era of the planned economy no shequ existed in the real sense of the term. In fact, it was not until the rehabilitation of sociology in the mid-1980s that the term shequ was taken up with gusto by the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MoCA). China’s establishment of a ‘socialist market economy’ and the subsequent dismantling of the danwei (work unit) provide the context for China’s current community building project. The implications of these changes will help to explain why shequ building was so urgently needed in the post-Mao70 era.
70 What I want to convey with the use of the term ‘post-Mao’ is not so much a historical break with the past (although at a certain level a break has occurred) but to suggest that with the official
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Urban China during the Maoist period was defined by the danwei system. This system evolved from being a tool for the effective mobilisation of labour to one that sought to oversee and administer every aspect of urban life in a comprehensive and all-encompassing way (Bray, 2005). The danwei provided not only employment for its members but also welfare benefits and social identity in return for political loyalty. The danwei was therefore the basic organisation of a ‘totalitarian society’ because ‘enterprises, educational institutions, hospitals, people’s communes and other organizations were nothing but danwei subordinate[s] to the government’ (Xu, 2008, p. 143). The danwei was thus the model par excellence of Chinese socialist government. Put another way, government in urban China was successfully realised at the level of the danwei.
In order to ‘join with the world’s tracks’ (yu guoji jiegui) and be part of the international supply chain, China’s opening up to the outside world meant that its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which also functioned as danwei, had to be radically overhauled to remain competitive (Wang, 2007). Many, if not all, SOEs were operating at below capacity and over-burdened by the welfare functions they were asked to fulfill under the planned economy (Naughton, 1997). As expected, a great number were sent bankrupt or downsized, resulting in hundreds of thousands losing their jobs and, along with this, their entitlements to basic services such as state- subsidised housing, healthcare and pensions (Burkett & Hart-Landsberg, 2004).
The coming apart of the danwei has been interpreted as a ‘hollowing out’ of the state, and to some extent this is true (F. Xu, 2008b). However, a ‘hollowing out’ should not be seen as a weakening of the party-state or that the party-state is impoverished by these changes. If anything, the party-state has removed potential future costs by unburdening itself of its social welfare function, shifting it onto ‘society’. Further,
endorsement of the ‘socialist market economy’ in the Chinese Constitution in 1992, China is no longer the society it once was under Mao and this needs to be acknowledged in some way. I have chosen to use ‘post-Mao’ to denote this change. My Chinese supervisors brought to my attention that in Chinese academic writing, ‘post-Mao’ is never used because CCP rule has not ended and that to do so was to convey that it has. What we are witnessing, I am told, is a transformation of party-state rule to meet the challenges arising out of adoption of a ‘market economy’. In other words, the market economy has transformed the CCP and not brought about its demise. The use of ‘post-Mao’ therefore conveys both change and continuity. For an appreciation of ‘Maoism’ in the current period, see Timothy Cheek’s (2006), Living with Reform: China since 1989, pp. 32-74.
161 its ‘get rich first’ policy has brought immense wealth to the state coffers affording it the ability to reconsolidate and invest in priority industries. In fact, as former vice premier Zhu Rongji once said, the objective of SOE reform was to ‘zhuada, fangxiao’, that is, to let go of the small unproductive and unprofitable industries while taking control and ownership of large and strategically important ones. This strategy has yielded dividends for the party-state, whose family members and business associates are now the major stakeholders (China Digital Times, 2006). According to a recent report compiled by Willy Lam for the China Brief (2011), the combined assets of the 129 central SOEs, also known as yangqi in Chinese, was $21 trillion yuan (US $3.17 trillion) accounting for 61.7 percent of the country’s total GDP in 2009. While these figures say nothing of the social equality in society, it does indicate the degree of state / SOE wealth gained as a result of SOE reforms.
The reforms have also contributed to Chinese residential spaces becoming more heterogeneous. As Luigi Tomba (2008, p. 50) has observed, Chinese cities are unlike other cities in the world:
What keeps urban social groups apart in China is not only their economic and social conditions, cultural clustering, ethnicity, or race, but also each group’s specific relationship with and ability to benefit from state policies.
The mix of people and their various relationships to the state has created a nightmare situation for the stability-obsessed government. To further complicate matters, the privatisation of the housing market has meant that more people now live further away from their place of work and that they lived among strangers than with co- workers as neighbours. This trend, together with the influx of rural-urban migrants, has meant that urban society has become more fragmented, heterogeneous and divisive providing a recipe for urban unrest if left unchecked.
Another important aspect of China’s transformation that is relevant to the concerns here has been the re-emergence of many social ills which were absent (or driven underground) during the Maoist period. Negative social phenomena such as crime, prostitution, gambling, addiction and epidemics like HIV/AIDS have created new challenges for the party-state. In the urban areas, rising unemployment, declining
162 living standards and forced relocations due to urban development have led urban residents to open confrontation with the local government (Perry, 2010). Although these protests target local actors in the administration, as was the case in the recent mass demonstrations in the northeastern city of Dalian,71 it is nevertheless seen as a veiled attack on the CCP’s legitimacy, which, lacking electoral grounding, is based on serving the people’s interests, no matter how vaguely defined these may be.
The shequ building project could be seen as the government’s response to these mounting pressures. Designed to replace the danwei and the neighbourhood committees, the shequ is meant to provide citizens with a sense of empowerment through formal political participation and to overcome the alienation associated with modernisation. It is hoped that through active participation at the shequ level, citizens (gongmin) will learn to cultivate the right kind of behaviour and mode of thinking necessary for the further ‘harmonious’ development of society. In the process, the Party organisation network is being strengthened even as it delegates the task of ‘governing’ to others more up to the task. This suggests that self-government and ‘governing’, key concepts in governmentality, has become a more diffuse and inclusive project that is not separate from state rule but is actually constitutive of it, that is, enhancing, enriching and revitalising the state in the process of improving, helping and guiding the population to ever higher levels of material wealth and spiritual well-being (Sigley, 2004).
From ‘Community Services’ to ‘Community Building’
The legal framework for the construction of shequ in China came in the form of the 1989 Law on Urban Residents Committee Organization (F. Xu, 2008b). While commonly translated into English as ‘community’, shequ actually refers to a territorially defined area. A compound character, shequ comprises of ‘she’ which
71 Authorities in Dalian have ordered the closure of a chemical plant after mass protests over pollution. The protests were organised through social media where people would collectively take ‘strolls’ at a designated time and place. This is an example of the increasing number of ‘not-in-my-backyard’ protests, which is a new form of resistance by locals willing to defend their interests. Another example of this type of protest is the anti-maglev protests in Shanghai by local residents objecting to the government’s construction of the maglev train line near their residential community. The concern is over health, pollution, threat of accident and depreciation of real estate values. For more on the Dalian protests, see BBC (2007). For more on the anti-maglev protests, see the Reuters report by Blanchard (2008).
163 means ‘society’ and ‘qu’ which refers to an area or zone (F. Xu, 2008, p. 634). Accordingly, community in China does not mean natural social groupings emerging out of common interests, background or living in close proximity, but rather refers to a spatially defined, officially administered urban unit. In China therefore, communities correlate to already existing grassroots administrative units as demarcated by the government (Bray, 2005). This is not to suggest that communities of the kind that exist in the West are not present in China, but to emphasise that communities in China are conceived and practiced for the purposes of enhancing the party-state’s ability to govern, hence ‘governing through community’ (Ibid.). As China rapidly urbanises, urban residential communities are thus the new frontiers of government in the twenty-first century.
As Feng Xu (2008, p. 26) notes, shequ building, which begun in the late 1980s, did not become national policy until 1998. 72 This corresponded with the rapid disintegration of the danwei system, resulting in large numbers of people being laid off and cut off from the social benefits they once enjoyed by virtue of being affiliated with their danwei. Reflecting Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic and cautious approach to reforms, which he once described as a process of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’, shequ construction also began its life as a series of ‘experiments’ in selected cities (Wang, 2006). The experiences at these sites were then given full consideration with debates ensuing in academic and policy circles as to the relative merits of each (Ibid.). Shanghai, being one of the pilot cities to participate in this experiment, underwent community construction in 1996, mainly in response to the new situation created by the deepening of SOE reforms and the corresponding need for new social management methods (F. Xu, 2008). Despite variations in practice from city to city, a model of community-building generally took shape. Kojima and Kokubun (2004, pp. 218-220) summarise the stages of shequ development in the following chronological order:
72 As noted above, the approach of the Chinese government in the era of economic reforms has been ‘from point to surface’. This has been described as ‘experimental urban governance’ in which decentralised reform initiatives and local reform experiments, once proven to have worked, result in nation-wide political programs. Although the actors involved enjoy quasi-autonomy to experiment, they do so under constant supervision. Ultimately, the centre has the final say. For more see Heilmann, 2011.
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Date Event 1986 The Ministry of Civil Affairs (MoCA) proposed the necessity of shequ services provided by street offices and residents’ committees May 1991 MoCA proposed construction of shequ. ‘Notice regarding the hearing about “Shequ Construction Plan”. They appointed Hebel district in the city of Tianjin and Xiacheng district in the city of Hangzhou as nationwide shequ construction pilot units and commenced experimental “shequ construction”. 1991-1992 MoCA held three symposiums on the nationwide shequ construction theory. 1996-present Jiang Zemin said that ‘intensification of shequ construction in urban areas and full exertion of the roles of street offices and residents’ committees needed’. The city of Shanghai attempted an arrangement of duties and authorities of city, district and street offices based on the city’s reform plan on June 1998 administrative system under ‘Two tier Government and Three Tier July 1998 Management.’ The city of Qingdao held a meeting to discuss shequ construction in all cities. 1999 As part of the reform of the central government administration system, the Bureau for the Construction of Basic Government of MoCA was renamed the Bureau for the Construction of Basic Government and Community (Shequ). The city of Shenyang promoted the reform of shequ system at the expiration of the members’ term of the residents’ committees. Cities such as Beijng, Tianjin, Chongqing and Nanjing commenced reform of all-city-level administrative system and ‘shequ’ construction activities. MoCA appointed the following 11 districts as nationwide shequ construction test-case districts in urban areas: Capital Times Square in the city of Beijing, Luwan district in the city of Shanghai, Jiangbei district in the city of Chongqing, Gulou district in the city of Nanjing, Xiacheng district in the city of Hangzhou, Shinan district and Sifang district in the city of Qingdao, Chang’an district in the city of Shijiazhuang, Zhendong district in the city of Haikou, Shenhe district in the city of Shenyang, and Hexi August 1999 district in the city of Tianjin. MoCA established the Research Centre for Urban Shequ Construction in China in Beijing (Beijing Academy of Social Sciences), Shanghai (East
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China Normal University), Tianjin (Nankai University), and Wuhan (Central China Normal University. MoCA held the first joint meeting among nationwide shequ construction test-case districts in Xiacheng district in the city of Hangzhou. MoCA appointed additional 15 districts including the following as nationwide shequ construction test-case districts in urban areas: Xuanwu January 2000 district in the city of Nanjing, Heping district in the city of Shenyang, Xishi district in the city of Hefei, Heping district in the city of Tianjin, Nangang November district and Daoli district in the city of Harbin, Xilui district in the city of 2000 Benxi and Xincheng district in the city of Xi’an, as well as provinces such as Liaoning and Hubei as province-level shequ construction test cases. April 2001 MoCA held the second joint meeting among nationwide shequ construction test-case districts in Zhendong district in the city of Haikou. July 2001 General Office of the Central CCP and State Council Agency transferred the ‘Opinion of the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MoCA) on Promoting Shequ Construction Nationwide’. MoCA held the third joint meeting among nationwide shequ construction test-case districts in Lixia district in the city of Jinan in Shandong province. MoCA held the first conference on nationwide shequ construction operation in the city of Qingdao, Shandong province. MoCA issued ‘Outline of model activity guidance in constructing shequ nationwide.’
In the beginning, community was only narrowly conceived as a means for replacing the danwei in terms of social service provision. Gradually, the scope of community work began to expand beyond the original idea of ‘community service’ (fuwu) to that of holistic ‘community building’ (jianshe), including culture, health, environment, education, morality, policing, grassroots democracy, and ‘Party building’ (Bray, 2006). The MoCA even set up a Division for Grassroots Authority and Shequ Building (jiceng zhengquan yu shequjianshe si) (F. Xu, 2008b, p. 26). In 1993, before community construction was officially adopted as policy, the MoCA (1993) released a document entitled ‘Some Suggestions Regarding the Acceleration and Development of Community Services’ (guanyu jiakuai fazhan shequ fuwu ye de yijian) in which shequ was defined as a functional replacement for danwei in terms of its social welfare role. However by 2000, ‘community building’ had replaced
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‘community services’ as the new paradigm of government. In this document, the MoCA (2000) outlined what community building involved:
1) Expanding services to marginalised or vulnerable populations such as the elderly, children, the disabled, less well-off families, and other people in need of social assistance. 2) Improve community healthcare through education and service provision. In particular, pay attention to family planning issues, disease prevention and generally promote healthy living. 3) Promote community culture. This is to be facilitated by the implementation of national programs of ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’. The spaces and resources of the community such as billboards, plaques and columns should be used to propagate a ‘healthy’ and ‘wholesome’ culture. The aim is to create citizens who will realize the goal of constructing a civilised and harmonious community. 4) Beautification of the community landscape. A clean, green, and sanitised community will be more conducive to healthy living. The goal is to increase residents’ awareness of the need for environmental protection. 5) Strengthening community policing/surveillance. Upholding public order and preventing crime lie at the core of this goal. Communities also have a responsibility to rehabilitate and monitor released prisoners. Management of the floating population is also another role of the community. In this way, social stability will be guaranteed. (MoCA, 2000)
The MoCA’s initial conception of shequ as a functional replacement for danwei was clearly inadequate for addressing the concerns of residents. However, after a decade of ‘community construction,’ it would appear that in moving beyond a narrow focus on services to overall community construction has yielded positive results. As Xu Yongxiang (2008, p. 147) observes: ‘fundamental changes in formerly “squalid” neighbourhoods, sanitation, landscaping and streets have been brought about.’ He further contends that
Community services and recreational facilities are gradually being set up for the benefit and convenience of residents, and security conditions and the cultural atmosphere are being improved. Increasingly, [what were once drab] neighbourhoods are [now] becoming communities. (Ibid.)
However, it remains to be seen whether the former identity of the ‘danwei person’ (danwei ren) has been succeeded by the new ‘community person’ (shequ ren), even though meaningful conceptions of citizenship and identity are emerging against this
167 backdrop (Heberer, 2009). The primary reason for this, as I will elaborate below, is the gap between official discourse about shequ and the reality as practiced at the grassroots. For example, community self-governance is being promoted as the new discourse of shequ construction in urban China. This, however, does not mean that communities are regarded as a ‘mechanism through which ordinary citizens can (collectively) confront the might of “faceless” government’ (Bray 2006, p. 532). Rather, community self-governance is a ‘containment strategy’ (Ibid.). Shequ building should therefore be viewed as an attempt by the party-state to build formal institutions of managed political participation to ensure that collective actions against the state can be organised in a ‘civilised’ and ‘orderly’ way and that they do not spill onto the streets and pose a threat to social stability.
Throughout the literature on shequ in Chinese, the idea of ‘self-governance’ (zizhi) is promoted as a core goal and strategy of community building in China. What does this mean? The natural inclination is to render zizhi as ‘autonomy’ in the sense that civil society is regarded as an autonomous sphere of action outside or beyond the reach of the state. However, in my interviews with local officials as well as ordinary citizens in Shanghai, zizhi does not connote action outside the established parameters of state discourse and practice. In fact, when zizhi is used, it is seen as an integral part of state discourse in developing the modern subject whether understood as a collectivity like a shequ or at the individual level of the citizen/subject (Herberer, 2009). Further, what is intimated in these responses is that China is different in the sense that the origins/context of its shequ project proceeds from an historically and politically specific set of circumstances. Compared to the Maoist past, Chinese now experience more freedoms than they have ever experienced. However, the condition of this freedom is circumscribed by the state making it a product of state discourse and not something that stands opposed to the state. The CCP has made repeated claims to the effect that China is ‘not ready’ for democracy because the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of its population is, on the whole, low (Yu, 2009). The development of shequ self-governance is meant to rectify this situation so that one day in the not too distant future, some form of representative government will eventuate in the PRC (Ibid.). The shequ should therefore be viewed as a training ground for the creation of citizens who will one day inherit the China of tomorrow and lead it into a bold new future (Goldman, 2005).
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Citizenship and the embryonic beginnings of participatory democracy could be potentially germinating at the level of shequ. The Chinese state links the promotion of the ‘full development of the individual’ (ren de quanmian fazhan) and the overall national strength (guojia de zonghe guoli) as part-and-parcel of the same project (Sigley, 2004). Nations are comprised of individuals but not just any individual. To be a modern and well respected nation state in a world of nation states, the Chinese party-state desires the kinds of individuals who are civilised, modern, consuming, and of a generally ‘higher’ quality. Add to this list, ‘political docility’ because upsetting the political status quo is tantamount to treachery. Above all else, this high quality individual must respect the political order. This suggests that community building forms the lowest level of government, namely at the level of the sub-district. Insofar as they are ‘self-governing’, communities lie outside the formal structures of government. Thus, although community building is a state-sponsored project, communities have limited autonomy in the management of their affairs.
The three ‘self-functions’, namely, self-management, self-education, and self-service of shequ, is a means for the state to offload some of its responsibilities onto social actors and organisations. In terms of self-management, communities are expected to mobilise themselves to meet policy goals. They are also expected to create and manage their own management structures like committees and sub-committees, as well as organise their own meetings (Bray, 2006). Concerning self-education and self-service, communities are expected to be self-reliant (Ibid.). In tandem with state goals to raise the overall quality of the population, communities must substantially rely on their own resources to improve the intellectual, spiritual and moral qualities of their population (Ibid.). The scope of shequ self-governance therefore extends beyond meeting the ‘economic shortfall’ to includethe moral and spiritual shortfall resulting from the collapse of communism as a hegemonic discourse in the post-Cold War world. From the MoCA (2000) document, it can be gleaned that ‘problematic’ sections of the population such as migrant labourers, delinquents, the unemployed, and the drug addicted are particular targets of ‘community building’.
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The next section explores how communities in Shanghai are realising the goal of building ‘harmonious communities’ at the grassroots. In particular, it elucidates the ways in which these communities attempt to make up the spiritual and moral shortfall through the example of ‘civilising campaigns’ (wenming huodong). The conceptual link between notions of ‘moral quality’ and ‘self-governance’ will be made and it will be argued that this linkage is imperative for the realisation of ‘harmonious society’ as envisioned by the Hu-Wen leadership. In making this link, however, it is inevitable that dividing practices be used to identify those who are capable of governing themselves and those who must be subjected to further supervision by their communities. However, communities are seen to have a morally uplifting character and a generally positive influence in the formation of citizen-subjects.
Divided Communities: Civilising Campaigns and the ‘New Shanghainese’ (Xin Shanghairen)
Photo 8: first part of banner reads: ‘Strengthen the management of migrants/outsiders’
Photo 9: second part of banner reads: ‘Protect social stability’
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In the twenty-first century, Shanghai symbolises Chinese aspirations for modernity. Its glittering skyline bedazzles spectators who flock to the Bund to admire the architectural feats of Chinese modernisation. With the Pudong financial district the central focus of the city’s reform efforts, Shanghai’s spatial divisions are fast altering the physical landscape and are having a tumultuous impact on the lives of everyday people. In order to comprehend the sheer impact of this change, we need look no further than the numbers. Shanghai has experienced an explosion in population size (both formal and informal) and the city is expanding and reclaiming what were once rural farmlands and turning these into habitable new neighbourhoods.73 Shanghai is also growing vertically, which means that more people than ever are living in apartments and high-rises.74 Shanghai demographics also indicate that its population is aging and that more migrants who in the past were expected to ‘move on’ have now permanently settled in the city. This has had the greatest impact on population dynamics and has problematised ‘Shanghai identity.’ Just who are the ‘new Shanghainese’ (xin Shanghairen) and how have they changed notions of citizenship in Shanghai? Crucially, how have ‘new Shanghainese’ been linked to the project of ‘harmonious community’ construction in this fast-changing metropolis?
The label ‘new Shanghainese’ (xin Shanghairen) was first coined by the Shanghai Spiritual Civilisation Office in a survey conducted to ascertain the city’s new demographic make-up (China Daily, 13 January 2007). According to the survey, ‘new Shanghainese’ referred to those who have come from overseas (including foreigners) or other provinces. They have either obtained a local hukou (residence permit) or a temporary residence permit and have lived in the city for more than five years. They also have decent jobs and stable incomes and plan to stay in the city long term. In other words, ‘new Shanghainese’ refer to an elite group of migrants, who in the past were barred from obtaining Shanghai citizenship (in the form of a local household registration) but in the present have been warmly welcomed with both arms by the authorities. Why has this been the case?
73 According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, Shanghai’s population in 1993 stood at approximately 23 million, which represented a growth of more than 37 percent from the 2000 census. 74 According to the 2000 Census, the average living space per inhabitant in Shanghai 11.8 square meters.
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It must be remembered that Shanghai was not always a ‘migrant-receiver’ city. During the Maoist period, the state launched two major city-to-countryside migration episodes (Li, et al., 2010). The first occurred in the 1950s: millions of Shanghai youth had their hukou annulled and were sent to the countryside to ‘build socialism’. The second wave occurred in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976): mostly skilled workers were sent to build military factories in far-flung places. With the rebuilding of Shanghai made a priority in the 1990s, the gates to hukou attainment were opened but this did not confer equal citizenship rights on all new arrivals. This is because the overarching strategy of the Shanghai Municipal Government is to develop the city through science and technology (kejiao xingshi) in order to transform the city into a ‘platform for talent’ (rencai gaodi). Restricting the granting of hukou to educated and wealthy migrants is a means to realising this ambition.
Li et al. (2010), in their in-depth analysis of the hukou system in Shanghai, found that there are three pathways to obtaining a hukou. The first is through what is known as the ‘talent scheme’ (rencai yinjin), the second is through attainment of college-level qualifications (the higher the better), and finally through inter-region marriages (liangdi hunyin). For migrants without ‘talent’ (i.e. educational attainment) and wealth (because talent is sometimes not enough), the best they can do is apply for a ‘transient residence card’ (linshi juzhuzheng). Hence they are commonly referred to as ‘second class’, and even ‘third class’, citizens, in the literature on migrants in China (Solinger, 1999). Even those with ‘talent cards’ cannot be guaranteed permanent residency. In fact, ‘talent’ is so broadly defined that in 2007, only 38% of college graduates with talent cards could successfully convert their temporary residency to official Shanghai hukou (Li, et al., 2010, p. 152). Gradations of talent depend on the ranking of the university one is enrolled with, the degree one is studying, the marks one gets, the prestige and stability of one’s place of employment, and so forth. The conferral of hukou has therefore become a complex process and a lucrative business for the Shanghai government (Ibid.).
City governments act like enterprises and weigh up their fiscal burden with the gains they will have made from the hukou system. While on the one hand, attracting people of ‘high quality’ or ‘talent’ is an absolute must to maintain Shanghai’s
172 competitiveness, on the other, city administrators do not want to shoulder the financial burden of social welfare provision. Many social commentators have decried the hukou system instituted in the 1950s to keep the rural population landlocked in their place of birth (Wang, 2005). In 2003, the tragic death of a migrant student, Sun Zhigang, while in police detention because he was found without the relevant residency permits unleashed a torrent of anger and led to the abolition of the then controversial detention and repatriation policy (China Daily, 2003). However, at the root of this problem lies the hukou system, which, far from being relaxed, has undergone substantial transformations that enhance the party- state’s capacity to exercise greater control, in particular, in deciding who can become full-fledged members of the society and who is excluded. The residency permit system thus creates a situation whereby a ‘regime of discrimination’ and ‘exclusion’ is normalised, based on ‘technoscientific’ reasoning which rewards ‘talent’ and punishes or dehumanises persons of ‘low-talent’ and ‘low-quality’ (Sigley, 2009). The fact that migrants without hukou are not counted as part of the local Shanghai population in the national census (they are counted as residing or belonging to the place where their hukou is registered) shows that migrants are regarded as sub- citizens, represented by a transient resident card that only recognises their capacity for labour and nothing else.
As the second generation of migrants (nongmingong er’dai) come of age, a new dilemma now faces the government: unlike their parents who have accepted a fate of rootlessness, this new generation want to make a life for themselves in the cities. For many children of migrants, returning to the countryside is not an option, but staying on in the cities is also nearly impossible given the low status and marginalisation of migrants due to systemic inequalities arising out of the hukou system. The Foxconn suicides in 2010 (Kahney, 2010) highlighted not only the plight of migrant workers in general but the grave situation facing many second generation migrants living in cities in particular. In response, sociologists in China have made a passionate appeal to the government and enterprises to make a conscious effort to make these new migrants full-fledged citizens. They put the problem thus:
Over the last thirty years, China has depended on huge numbers of cheap laborers, mainly from rural areas, who have forged an export-oriented
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style “world factory”, and fueled the rapid growth of China’s economy. But at the same time, the basic survival rights of the work force have been overlooked; we have denied migrant workers’ dignity, paid them at wage levels below the average for third world countries, made it impossible for them to settle and live in the cities, while leaving them to drift back and forth between cities and the countryside. We have made them live a migrancy life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of. In short, this is a life without dignity. From the tragedies at Foxconn, we can hear the loud cries for life from the second generation of migrant workers, warning society to reconsider this development model that has sacrificed people’s fundamental dignity (Ibid.)
The poignant article in the China Daily (13 January 2007) also points to the bitter irony in the label ‘new Shanghainese’: it is used to denote only the ‘high quality’ migrants while completely ignoring the millions of migrants who call Shanghai home. ‘New Shanghainese’ not only draws distinctions between the ‘old Shanghainese’ or locals and non-locals but also between different groups of migrants. The article calls on the government to include in the category of ‘new Shanghainese’ all those who have contributed to the prosperity of Shanghai but have been rendered invisible by this label:
While applauding the contribution made by these “new Shanghainese”, we seem to have forgotten about another, much larger, group of people who have probably made more of a contribution to the city’s boom over the past decade. They definitely deserve the title of “new Shanghainese” or even Shanghainese. They are the construction workers who have built the city’s futuristic skyline in Lujiazui, and the thousands of high-rises, subways, bridges, tunnels and ring roads, as well as the landmark Shanghai Museum, Pudong International Airport and Shanghai Grand Theater. They are also the nannies who look after children, cook and keep millions of Shanghai families clean and tidy. This group of people, usually young women, also work in the city’s many restaurants and entertainment venues that make Shanghai such an agreeable place to live. They are also the city’s many delivery workers, supermarket cashiers, refuse collectors, masseurs, and clothing and food vendors.
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Being a city that is built upon the labour of migrants, the plight of migrant workers thus forms the backdrop of community building efforts in Shanghai. The aim of community building with regards to the so-called ‘temporary’ migrant population is to generate a sense of belonging without affording them the full spectrum of rights and protection that would otherwise be conferred on hukou holders. The government does not want to be held liable for their welfare even though they are cognisant of their indispensable role in the modernisation of the city. ‘Socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns carried out at the community level are meant to create solidarity, promote societal cohesion, and reduce conflict by advocating self- responsibility. This fits nicely with the discourse of community self-governance by putting the blame squarely on migrants and their ‘low quality’ for their position within society.
Civilising campaigns also move the focus from ‘welfare provision’ to other, less tangible measures of overall well-being such as morality, ethics, culture, safety, and belonging. Since it cannot confer citizenship status to migrants, communities help bridge the gap by improving the quality of life for their migrant population through volunteer, educational and philanthropic activities. For example, while in Shanghai doing fieldwork for this research, I participated in a program wherein the social work students of my university volunteer their time as teachers in a migrant community school. The focus of the activities was not so much to replicate the curriculum taught at school but to bridge the knowledge gap arising out of disadvantage in background, culture and experiences of the students. Many of the students came from families that did not abide by the one-child policy and much of their time outside class was spent helping their families run small businesses or babysit younger siblings. In effect, many of these students did not have a childhood and as almost all did not have any fond memories or experiences of the countryside, they envision their futures in Shanghai. For this reason, the community initiative was to cultivate students’ sense of belonging and identification with Shanghai in the hope that one day the hukou system will ‘catch up’ with society and that full citizenship will eventually be attained.
Slogans painted throughout shequ in Shanghai capture the state’s desire for shequ self-governance: ‘wo zuo, wo canjia, wo xiangshou’ (‘I do, I participate, I benefit’).
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Further, it must be reiterated that although self-governance is an integral part of state rule it does not imply an equality between citizens in terms of the right to govern. As Nicholas Rose (1999) points out in the context of Western liberal forms of community governance, ‘self-government’ turns on a division between those ‘fit’ to rule and those fit only to be ruled by others. The majority of migrants are deemed to be at the ‘infant’ stage of self-help, which therefore supports the continuing role of government in their improvement and supervision. Migrants can, however, improve their ‘inner urbanisation’ not only through consumption and participation in the production of cheap and low end goods but also by improving their ‘personal quality’ in terms of skills, education and degree of urbanisation (F. Xu 2009, p. 55). Self- help books are replete with guides on how to improve one’s demeanour and behaviour and full of admonitions against social taboos like spitting in public, jaywalking and queue-jumping.75 Reminders to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’ show that restraint and self-control are the hallmarks of civilised personhood. However, improving the social capital of migrants could also be viewed as a conscious effort on the part of the state to move China up in the global supply chain from reliance on low-end, labour intensive, export-oriented production to high- end, technologically sophisticated work. If migrants have more skills and social capital, it is hoped that they can bargain for higher wages and better living conditions in the labour market. Improving the ‘quality’ of the migrant population is therefore linked to improvement of the social order and the overall economic standing of China.
As China adopts measures of ‘good governance’ in line with recommendations from international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations (UN), it is beginning to move away from dependence on coercive methods and towards a service-oriented, people-oriented approach. This is particularly true with regards to the treatment of migrants and slowly we are witnessing a realisation of Hu Jintao’s ‘people-first’ (yiren weiben) strategy. It also means that authorities are seeking new ways to make migrants ‘legible’ through hukou selection criteria, ranking systems, and other complex application and bureaucratic methods involved
75For example, the comprehensive, Liyi Daquan or Countenance (Cai Jian, ed., 2006) contains detailed instructions on how to behave in many hypothetical scenarios. It is an etiquette guide for the ordinary citizen. I purchased it from the self-help section of ‘Book City’ in Shanghai (Shanghai Shucheng).
176 in the registration process. On the economic front, this is also supported by the move away from an emphasis on GDP growth towards growth that addresses issues of inequality and poverty crystallised in efforts to build an ‘all round, well-off’ (quanmian, xiaokang) and ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui). However, the barriers to full urban membership in the community are still high for migrants living in cities like Shanghai. Although they can obtain temporary residence permits and their cheap labour is needed to fuel China’s continuing development, they are still held in contempt by locals and increasingly by other migrants of ‘talent’ and ‘higher quality.’ For example, an excerpt from a pamphlet distributed to volunteers at the migrant community I taught at reveals the ambivalent attitude towards migrants by other migrants:
… However, with the inward flow of these people is the danger that they [migrants], through their ‘naïve young eyes’ will view this [discrimination] as a type of ‘social inequality’. Their lack of understanding of the rational development of this inequality has contributed to this and has already seeped into their everyday lives and to the core of their very existence. It is very likely that a feeling of hatred will arise from this shared sentiment.76
In the past, the literature on rural-urban migrants in China has focused on discrimination arising from tensions between locals and non-locals, that is, between Shanghainese hukou holders and non-Shanghainese without hukou (Solinger, 1999). Nowadays, with the introduction of a new residency permit system on top of the already existing hukou system, internal differentiation is made between migrants of ‘higher quality’ and those of ‘lower quality’, determined predominantly on the basis of educational and cultural attainment. Some advocate a further distinction between the ‘new Shanghainese’ referring to these superior migrant-citizens and their ‘poorer quality’ country cousins (Li, et al., 2010). This goes to show just how unreliable and problematic the dichotomous distinction between outsider/insider, migrant/non- migrant can be. Moreover, the more the government divides this group, the more it is able to exert control over them. If migrants cannot coalesce around a common cause, they cannot pose a threat to the party-state. Thus, by granting some the
76 This came from a pamphlet written by Shanghai University students who made up the bulk of volunteers for the ‘Sunflower Project’. This project provided, amongst other things, Sunday classes to the children of migrant workers at the Minhang District migrant community where I volunteered as an English teacher. The initiative is part of a larger government project known as the ‘Community Project.’ For further information, visit www.community.org.cn. Translation is my own.
177 exclusive right to community urban membership denied to others, the state removes from local identity the need for ‘place embeddedness’ and hence lessens the potential for confrontation between migrants and the party-state. Therefore a migrant can be officially recognised as a Shanghainese citizen if s/he has ‘talent’ and money, even if they have only lived in the city for a short period of time. Conversely, a migrant labourer who has resided in Shanghai with his/her family for over two decades is not recognised or even counted as part of its official population.
Conclusion
In sociological parlance, communities are spontaneous sociological facts that can be made up of people in the same geographical location who share similar beliefs and have similar values. In China, the legal definition of community is a fixed geographical entity regardless of its internal composition. Communities formed along the lines of danwei were predictable and easily penetrated by government. People used to work and live together, the intimacies of their daily routines made known to all and the distinction between private and public was a non-issue. However, with the onset of reforms and the desire to link up to the global economy, danwei became the first casualty, shedding hundreds of millions of employees in the process. Simultaneously, population mobility was relaxed to supply the growing coastal cities with cheap labour to fuel the industrialisation process. No longer attached to the land or danwei, many found employment in the private sector that emerged almost overnight. This trend, coupled with the inadequate social infrastructure to cater to the new population demographic, troubled the CCP deeply. The CCP’s presence at the grassroots (previously via danwei) was disorganised and weak. People no longer looked to the state for survival, identity or sustenance. Party revitalisation was thus desperately needed.
Shequ building must be viewed in this context as a response to the demise of danwei society and a breakdown of the CCP’s political infrastructure at the grassroots. The much touted self-governance of shequ exists only on paper and is limited to encouraging residents to help themselves in the realm of public service provision, thereby significantly reducing the costs of governance. However, in the realm of political leadership, the ‘spiritual’ guidance of the Party has not yielded to social pressure. ‘Governing through community’, as analysed by Rose (1999), has become
178 the new strategy in linking government to disparate social elements similar to practices in neoliberal Western countries. However, where communities of interest in the West can converge to put demands on their government, communities in China can only make a difference when they pose a threat to the bottom line of social stability as shown by the Dalian example.
In the case of Shanghai, change has occurred: for example, hukou reform means that different residency statuses can be obtained, conferring access to different levels of benefits or welfare cover. For migrants of little ‘talent’ very few services are available, while for others with ‘talent’, who are regarded as of ‘higher quality’, a full range of rights and protection are offered. In this context, the label, ‘new Shanghainese’ (xin Shanghairen) is an example of how the party-state employs dividing strategies in the governing of this problematic group. ‘New Shanghainese’ refers to a new category of migrants with college degrees, cultural and financial capital and a desire to live in Shanghai long term. It ignores the contributions and even the existence of the millions of other migrants who have contributed to the industrialisation of Shanghai and the diversity of their communities who also call the city home.
Community building has arisen in the context of the need to better manage this underclass of migrants. The aim of community building is to turn migrants into ‘urbanites’ by focusing on ways in which they could improve. Civilising campaigns at the shequ level should be understood as attempts to rectify the ‘deficient’ component of China’s urbanisation process as manifested in the ‘poor quality’ of its vast workforce of rural-urban migrants. ‘Socialist spiritual civilisation’ campaigns encourage migrants to adopt the good habits of urban people. By internalising norms of proper dress, etiquette and polite forms of address, it is hoped that this will stop the social stigmatisation associated with migrants and rural China in general. However, even though self-governance is being promoted, migrants are, on the whole, regarded as being at the ‘infant’ stages of self-help, which means that while some are trusted to govern themselves (e.g. ‘new Shanghainese’), others require continued governmental intervention. Further, it is hoped that in the process of improving the skills and social capital of migrants, China will also be able to improve its economic standing by moving away from an economic model that relies
179 on keeping the migrant working population marginalised in order to remain competitive.
In the next chapter, I explore through the example of an etiquette campaign in Shanghai, the different methods the local authorities use to inculcate civilised norms. Largely an image-building exercise, the campaigns nevertheless strive to change subjectivities, in the process attracting their fair share of resistance and controversy. This chapter will also highlight the importance of the Maoist mobilisation strategy in the implementation of campaign goals. It will question the evaluative methods such as polling and opinion surveys in galvanising the campaign’s effectiveness.
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Chapter Eight
Re-inventing the Campaign and the Mass Line: Policing Public Etiquette in Shanghai
Photo 10: Etiquette campaigns targeting the ‘window services’
The upcoming 2010 Shanghai World Expo, an event that represents modern civilisation can no longer tolerate the ordinary people’s “bad habits”. Only two or three stops away from the World Expo site, Qiba residential community along with all the Expo areas in Pudong, will be sized up using standards of “modern civility”.
Shanghai residents must survive the stares of international eyes, “This is an issue of our country’s face.” Shen Guofang said.
- (China Hush, 2009)
While many foreigners saw pyjama-wearing in public as a charm and drawcard for visiting Shanghai, authorities in the city had been trying to eradicate this supposedly ‘bad habit.’ Shen Guofang (quoted above) was the ‘Alley President’ of Shanghai Pudong New Area Changlidong Road, Qiba residential community. His work was divided between managing the daily affairs of the residential district and ‘Welcoming the World Expo’. The ‘Not going outside wearing pyjamas, become a World Expo
181 civilised person’ initiative was part of the second aspect of his work. Twice a week, for one to two hours, Qiba residential district’s ‘civilised dress persuasion team’ stand at the entrance of the residential community and ‘persuade’ pyjama- wearing residents from going out in their sleepwear. Their presence is conspicuous: dressed in neat clothing and wearing a red silk sash, these ‘volunteers’ remind us of the Maoist period when mass line persuasion and face-to-face contact was most effective in campaign mobilisation.
Indeed, there were many things about the anti-pyjama wearing campaign that recall Maoist mass line politics, with the fundamental difference being the lack of violence or coercion. In the 1956 revision of the Party constitution, Deng Xiaoping added the following observation about adhering to the ‘mass line’:
The masses are the creators of history. The people’s fetters can only be by their own hands; the people’s happy lives can only be made with their own hands. We begin from this truth and the fundamental method of our work is: the masses and the leaders join together, working together to walk the mass line, freely mobilise the people, with the leaders launching mass movements on a grand scale, gathering the wisdom and ideas of the people, and relying upon the power of the masses to implement the general and specific policies of the Party. (Cited in Thornton, 2011, p. 243).
Learning from the masses and incorporating these into his persuasion techniques were essential to Shen Guofang’s campaign. He said that being too serious about the issue will be counter-productive. Instead, Shen preferred to ‘joke’ and ‘sidetrack’ before finally returning to the subject of pyjama-wearing in public with residents. Shen understood the people in his community and had many acquaintances in the neighbourhood so his techniques were effective in turning people’s behaviour around (China Hush, 2009). Shen’s persistence paid off: he was able to report that the number of people wearing pyjamas in public had reduced in the two months since the campaign’s initiation (Ibid.).
Qiba residential community is not the only community handpicked for this campaign. Across the Pudong area, communities were engaged in the same project. Shanggang community, Chuanxin community and Beicai community and so on, all carried out similar activities. But in each community, depending on the level of embeddedness of the alley presidents and volunteers, the approach was slightly different.
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Sometimes, children were used to maximise the persuasion efforts and make residents feel ‘shamed’ into regulating their conduct. For example, while on fieldwork in Shanghai, I had the opportunity to visit a Shanghai primary school. The primary school teacher explained to me that as part of their civics and morality class, students were encouraged to put into practice what they learned in class. This involved policing behaviour at home and reminding adults politely to observe the proper rules of conduct like not speaking loudly in public and so forth. This example of one component of the etiquette campaigns in Shanghai demonstrates the effectiveness of Mao-inspired mass line persuasion work and provides evidence of the ‘adaptive governance’ of the CCP in responding to the challenges of rapid economic reforms and the social changes these have engendered (Heilmann & Perry, 2011).
Where once pyjama-wearing (not that kind that Victoria Secrets models strut on the runway, but the loose-fitting, non-revealing variety made of cotton or polyester) was considered convenient attire for residents ducking out to market or taking a quiet stroll in the street, it is now regarded as ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilised’, a mark of the city’s underdevelopment and an image that the city’s leaders desperately want to shed. While many Shanghainese do not support wearing sleepwear in public, they do not necessarily condemn it. For example, Shanghai Online had a survey entitled ‘Shanghainese love to wear pyjamas on the street, what do you think?’ started on 20 July 2009 (Shanghai Online, 2009). The results showed that while the common view was that this habit was ‘low class, uncivil’ (42.03%), over half thought the practice was ‘normal’. These results confirm earlier findings of the Institute for Social Development at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences conducted in 2006 in which most respondents said that they still continued to wear pajamas outside despite the campaigns (Sun, 2006). How do we reconcile the efforts of the authorities to eradicate this practice with the defiance of the citizens in continuing to wear sleepwear in public?
What is worth noting also and seems to have been ignored are the context-specific circumstances in which this practice emerged. Shanghai residents live in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. In the summer, many families used to ‘camp’ outside on the pavement to escape the heat in deckchairs and so forth. Therefore, being seen in public in one’s sleepwear was very common and usual. One
183 could say it stemmed from the cramped living space resulting in people extending practices that would otherwise be ‘private’ out into the public domain. People did not view wearing their night attire as offensive or uncivilised but rather as a convenient and normal practice arising out of the specific circumstances of living in a densely populated area. For the most part, they did not see what the fuss was about, and this partly explains why the anti-pyjama wearing campaigns have repeatedly failed in the past.
Nevertheless, the pyjama-wearing issue represents the starting point of discussion into the methods used by the authorities to change entrenched habits. These methods are a mix of persuasion and appeals to the ‘higher self’ capable of autonomous conduct as well as active intervention in the form of applying public pressure. For example, I was told by an informant of an incident in 2009 (after I had returned from fieldwork) that a year out from the Expo the authorities were stepping up efforts in their anti-pyjama campaign, employing dozens of ‘etiquette police’ to seek and humiliate pyjama-wearing citizens. I even heard of a middle-aged woman being harassed and surrounded by a group of ‘volunteers’ who jeered and humiliated her so that she had no choice but to return to her apartment and change out of her pyjamas. These examples, however, are quite rare, and over-enthusiasm by those charged with enforcing the campaign is often a one-off occurrence. For the most part, while authorities do not lack the power to enforce the ‘no pyjamas in public’ rule, they however, lack the political will, which applies to all sorts of laws and rules in China, to eradicate this habit. Top-down pressure to ‘civilise’ the public cannot but be met with bottom-up pressures of resistance. The issue here is that the anti-pyjama wearing campaign risks oscillating between been a ‘civilising campaign’ and a Maoist-style campaign that masks prohibition with the façade of persuasion. As Hu Shoujun, professor of sociology at Fudan University observed:
Neighbourhood committee[s] can advocate not wearing pajamas to go outside, but they have no rights to prohibit or disguise their prohibition activities as persuasion. Although I am strongly opposed to wearing pajamas outside, I am also opposed to the mandatory or quasi- mandatory banning of pajamas on the street. For example, back then, the Down to the Countryside Movement was not mandatory. But ‘I advise you to go, go to classes, learn about Chairman Mao’s works….’ After repeated nagging, we agreed to go. I think it is bad if we follow these kinds of things. (China Hush, 2009)
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The Party is not limited to the method of Maoist mass mobilisation but it has not jettisoned this revolutionary legacy either. What we find in contemporary China is an amalgam of governance mechanisms that combine Maoist as well as post-Mao elements with foreign aspects thrown in the mix, leading Heilmann and Perry (2011, p. 10) to advance their principle thesis that
Moving from the Mao era’s “socialist construction” to the post-Mao era’s “reform and opening,” China has not simply jettisoned its revolutionary past as it “transits” toward a democratic future. Rather, a succession of post-Mao leaders have managed to fashion a surprisingly adaptive pattern of authoritarian rule capable so far of withstanding challenges, including grievous and growing social and spatial inequalities, which would surely have undone less robust or flexible regimes.
This chapter uses the etiquette campaigns conducted in Shanghai in 2006 (of which anti-pyjama wearing is one important component) to illustrate the persistence of Maoist mobilisation techniques in the post-Mao period. Conceptually, today’s etiquette campaigns perpetuate many features of revolutionary mass campaigns. Like their Maoist predecessors, the current campaigns posit a close connection between raising citizens’ subjective consciousness and material economic gains. There are also sometimes unfortunate continuities in implementation, including the use of group pressure by over-eager cadres in enforcing campaign objectives. But while the campaigns of the present have drawn inspiration from the past, they are nevertheless different in the sense that they are pragmatic, searching for workable models wherever they may be found.
The chapter will be organised as follows: in the first section, I outline the scope of the etiquette campaigns, their objectives, focus areas and main implementation approaches. I argue that there is much continuity with past campaigns to promote etiquette and good conduct. I maintain that while the technocrats that lead contemporary China have continued to pursue the campaign mobilisation strategy, they are also looking ‘outward’ to identify, adopt and adapt international and historical experiences to the present pursuit of developmental goals. The second section will look at how the authorities evaluate the campaign using surveys and questionnaires. While evaluations were instrumental in the past to galvanise the campaign’s success, Maoist ‘mass line’ politics have nevertheless been reconfigured and divested of its ideological and class content. However, this should not be
185 interpreted as closing the distance between the leader and the masses leading to a more representative and responsive form of government but as part of efforts to augment the state through refined knowledge of the masses’ feelings and thinking towards the campaign.
Etiquette Campaigns in Historical Perspective
Etiquette or ‘civility’ campaigns date back to the Republican period (1927-1937). It is notably exemplified by the New Life Movement (NLM) (1934-1935) a mass campaign initiated by the Nationalist government (GMD) which sought to improve the etiquette and personal/public hygiene of the nation. The campaigns were informed by an anti-communist stance, Christianity and state Confucianism with fascist overtones. Indeed The NLM resonated with the experience of totalitarian countries such as Italy. For example, Lloyd Eastman (1974, pp. 66-67) has described ‘[t]he NLM as one of the means that Chiang Kai-shek and the Blue Shirts would use to implant this spirit – this fascist spirit – among the Chinese people.’ But as Maria Hsia Chang (1985, pp. 28-29) has argued, against the backdrop of impending civil war and war with Japan, the NLM was a program that contributed to ‘the renaissance of China via the economic, political, and social modernization of Chinese society.’
Public sanitation and hygiene went hand in hand with the notion of improving individual health and well-being which helped to define, shape and underpin modern notions of citizenship in China. The scope for intervention was broad and therefore spectacularly ambitious. The NLM was launched within administrative organs, public places, shops, public toilets, factories, guild halls and labour unions and promoted the improvement of the city’s appearance and changes in etiquette and customs (for wedding, funerals and the like). In Nanchang, for example, at least 30 policemen went through a special training course and were assigned to work with the staff of the NLM whose duties included checking on taverns, teahouses, inns, cinemas, barbers and bathhouses to ensure compliance; the team issued praise or sanctions accordingly (Xin Shenghuo Yundong Cujin Zonghui, 1936, pp. 421-422).
In May 1935, a large-scale hygiene check-up event and thorough city clean-up were held as part of a campaign against trachoma (Ibid., pp. 179). The Public Security Bureau and the Public Health Office sent personnel from house to house to verify the
186 hygiene conditions. There were also campaigns to exterminate flies which were perceived as a great danger to public health, particularly in the case of butchers, bean curd shops and cold-food stalls, which were all exposing food potentially contaminated by the flies with the result that diseases would spread. The Public Health Office (Weisheng chu) proposed, as a method to prevent diseases spread by flies, to send personnel to disinfect public toilets and rubbish dumps. The concern for public health was connected to the eradication of bad habits and the promotion of public morality. It was also driven by a concern to make over China’s reputation and shake off its image as the ‘weak man of Asia’. As Ruth Rogaski (2004) has argued, with the arrival of violent imperialism, weisheng or ‘hygiene’ as it is rendered in Chinese, began to encompass broad meanings including national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies and fitness of races, all of which were perceived by foreign and Chinese elites alike to be lacking in China.
The NLM achieved some success but was cut short by civil war and Japanese confrontation. As Eastman (1974, pp. 66-73) critically observed, people mocked the campaigns as an inane diversion for a nation teetering on the brink of invasion and civil war. When the Communists took over power, they condemned refined behaviour as counterrevolutionary. In 1927, in his ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’, Mao wrote, ‘a revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay… it cannot be so refined (yazhi), so … courteous (gong), restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’ (Mao, 1961, p. 28). After 1949, Beijing’s land reform and class struggle continued to elevate workers, peasants, and soldiers. Annual March hygiene campaigns dredged sewers, killed flies, planted trees, vaccinated people, and urged good deeds but did not focus on courtesy. People shunned elaborate courtesies as dangerous symbols of privilege. Simple kinship and situational courtesies prevailed but became highly politicised. As Chen and Yu (1985, p. 29) observed, ‘polite language was not to be used toward “enemies of the people”’. Scholars, and traders or capitalists, were purged from the old privileged ranks while new social classes were established. Both moral and political leadership shifted to those ‘common people’ (renmin) with good political standing.
In 1966–67, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards attacked personal refinements as marks of privilege or treasonous foreign connections, as
187 when a woman was punished for saying ‘thank you’ too often (Chang, 1991, p. 290). On the streets of Shanghai, Red Guards debated whether they should change the traffic light signals so that ‘red’ would mean ‘go’ and ‘green’ mean ‘stop’ (Time Online, 2007). Because the Cultural Revolution was conducted in a particularly ‘discourteous’ manner, when it ended, many elites argued for moral campaigns to re- instill a sense of respect for authority and the normalisation of everyday courtesies severely undermined by this campaign. By the time of Mao’s death, politicised interactions had significantly diminished but campaign mobilisation did not disappear. In 1981, the CCP shifted its attention towards creating a clean, modern future of ‘civilisation and courtesy’ (wenming limao). The ‘five courteous phrases’ (nihao, xiexie, duibuqi, qing, zaijian or hello, thank you, sorry, please, goodbye) were modeled as suitable for everyone regardless of political status. Numbered goals featured ‘the Five Stresses, the Four Beautifuls, and the Three Ardent Loves’ (wu jiang, si mei, san re ai). The Five Stresses were identified as cultivation, courtesy, sanitation, order, and morality (wenming, limao, weisheng, chengxu, daode). The Four Beautifuls were identified as spirit, speech, behaviour, and the environment (jingshen, yuyan, xingwei, huanjing). The Three Ardent loves were the party, socialism, and the motherland (dang, shehui zhuyi, zu guo) (Pollack, 1997). Some campaigns have also targeted ‘spiritual pollution’ (jingshen wuran), especially pornography and prostitution, or roundups of criminals in the ‘Strike Hard’ crackdowns (Dutton, 2000).
Since 2000, courtesy has become part of the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaigns and has been added to the elementary school curriculum. Newly painted signboards in 2007 persuade citizens to be ‘civilised’ (wenming) and to avoid the ‘ten don’ts’ (shi bu). These vary slightly, as each city selects its own issues but typically forbid spitting, littering, public urination, damaging plants in parks, jaywalking—and loud, coarse language. The push for verbal and environmental hygiene springs from a widely shared desire for a cleaner, more modern and more civil public life. Hu and Wen’s push for a ‘harmonious society’ attempts to capitalise on this longing. Contested, unsettled standards for courtesy reflect broader attempts to calibrate rights and responsibilities. Tension appears in highly politicised Chinese disagreements over how much to center morality around the clan, party discipline, or the broader public. Although political campaigns have relaxed, disagreements continue over how much
188 deference to offer an educated elite versus a broader, consumer-oriented public, including peasant migrant workers (Anagnost, 1997). Chinese society has always equated having an education as the mark of the ‘gentleman’ and therefore worthy of respect (Li, 1967). In the past, having an education meant being literate and if able, mastering the Confucian Classics. In the present, while education is still valued generally, it also has a commercial value. Like a commodity, education, as with all services in China, can be purchased at a price and it comes with perks.
Most in China’s technocratic elite possess some form of higher education. The Party’s bid to overhaul its image as a ‘dinosaur’ institution of the past (members were old and ‘uneducated’, referring to their largely peasant backgrounds) means that education is a requisite nowadays. But education does not always command respect in society, because consumerism and the questionable ethics entailed in the pursuit of material riches have led people to view education as a means to an end. There is a saying in Shanghai which may apply to China generally: if a child is not bright enough to attend a good university or obtain a scholarship, then, if the parents are able, they should send that child to an overseas institution and pay for an education, ‘polishing’ their child so that they can secure a place in society. It is not as if the educated are now suddenly moral exemplars; it just shows that education (or perhaps possessing the ‘right’ degrees like science and engineering) is a means out of poverty and key to upward social mobility. It also shows how the past connection between education and moral ‘righteousness’ is rather tenuous these days. People may have more options and means to achieve social mobility but their methods and their positions do not always warrant admiration or respect as they did in the past.
It is interesting to note that, like China, Taiwan before democracy also conducted etiquette campaigns from the top-down. Taiwan offers an insightful comparison, showing how two systems have approached the perceived problem of lack of public etiquette with very different results. Taiwan is worth comparison because it is a young democracy and shares many attributes with the PRC in terms of culture and tradition. It also shares many historical similarities, having once also been led by a charismatic and authoritarian figure in the form of Chiang Kai-shek. David Schak (2009) argues that although having a democratic system of governance will not automatically guarantee civility in public, it nevertheless helps. Moreover, as Schak (Ibid.) has pointed out, there were also indirect forces that have contributed to the
189 transition to civility in Taiwan. These include higher incomes, better education among the citizenry and the emergence of a populist politics that has been misrepresented on the mainland as ‘chaotic politics’ and a major drawback of democracy. The emergence of ‘Taiwan identity’ has also contributed to increased identification with the norms in society, values and outlook. As a result, Taiwanese are more confident about their identity and their future, they are not afraid to air their grievances and regard their politicians as public servants rather than rulers of their country. These changes have fostered the development of civility and can provide an example of where China can expect to be some years down the track.
As Schak explained, while the emergence of incivility does appear from time to time, Taiwan’s democratisation and the emergence of civil society has improved the level of civility in the country:
Taiwan has democratized, civil society has expanded, and changes in the social and physical environment have made citizens feel more relaxed and secure, creating social conditions conducive to this transition to civility (Schak, 2009, pp. 456-457).
Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution to China’s woes, it would be useful to use Taiwan’s example as a way forward for some of the development bottlenecks that have built up in China as a result of a disproportionate focus on economic growth. China’s technocrats will find that once they move beyond the sensitive and awkward politics of the Taiwan Straits, useful lessons can be drawn from Taiwan’s development experience.
Etiquette Campaigns in Shanghai: Resurrecting Mass Organisations and Implementing the Campaign
China holds that the twenty-first century will be ‘China’s century’, when other nations acknowledge it as ‘the world’s leading civilisation’ (Zheng, 2004). When China was closed off to the world, international comparisons were taboo, and criticisms of rudeness drew very heated debates (Ding, 1994). But with the rise of the export economy and with millions of Chinese traveling or studying abroad, Beijing has cleverly outsourced the criticism of its crude habits. Shanghai’s six-year campaign to ‘Be Lovely Shanghainese’ (zuo keai de Shanghairen) aspired to attain international respect at the 2010 World Expo. It is considered a reflection of the
190 aspirations of Chinese to be the next global city, a commercial hub and a well- respected member of the international community.
The urgency of the etiquette campaigns therefore carried special weight in Shanghai. One would assume at first glance that with the rapid modernisation of the physical landscape, Maoist China had all but been swept out the door. However, what we are witnessing in contemporary China is not simply a replacement of outmoded revolutionary-style politics with a modern technocratic mode, but rather, a complex mixture of both. Campaigns are a powerful governance tool, capable of impressive achievements but they come at considerable human cost. Etiquette campaigns, while attending to the specific requirements of policy, are nevertheless built upon a legacy whose historical antecedents hark back to the early modernisation phase at the beginning of the twentieth century. These antecedents, from which the current campaigns draw their experience, rely much on the direction and guidance of the central authorities.
Once the Municipal Civilisation Office ‘blesses’ the campaign, signaled by ample coverage in state media and propaganda organs, the mass organs begin turning, indicating a complex and inter-related web of grass roots power and organisation and signaling that ‘etiquette activities’ have begun. In the case of the Million Families Learn Etiquette Program (Bai wan jiating xue liyi) (Shanghai Small Leadership Group for the 'A Million Families Learn Etiquette' Activity, 2007), an ad hoc organisation by the name of ‘Municipal-Level Leadership Group’ was created to specifically oversee the campaign. Like in the past, this temporary organisation is intended to overcome the bureaucratic inertia of regular institutions so that the campaigns run smoothly and on time.
Beneath this level are the district level offices, of which there are 18 in Shanghai, which are directly answerable to the municipal level. Beneath the district level is a hierarchical chain of various mass and grassroots entities, some vested with power from the state, including but not limited to the All China Women’s Federation, the trade unions, the education committees, and information offices (see diagram 1 below). Outside of the direct control of state institutions are the numerous charities that cater primarily to the needs of migrant and under-privileged urban communities. In these migrant enclaves, the outside is sealed off with high brick walls to prevent
191 the ‘unpleasantness’, ‘disorderly’ and ‘unhygienic’ living conditions of those inside from contaminating the ‘civilised’ suburbs (These are metaphors constructed by the authorities (and unfortunately perpetuated in everyday discourse) that convey that it is predominantly this group that needs the ‘civilising’ influence of the state). (F. Xu, 2008). Within these segregated communities can be found non-profit organisations funded by charities and sometimes by the state in partnership with society which also preach the virtues of leading a dignified and civilised life.
City Civilisation Office City City Information Municipal Level Leadership Group Union Committee (Office) in Charge of the “Million City WF City Party Committee City Families Learn Etiquette Campaign” Education
District District/County District District Level Leadership Group (Office) Civilisation District/Coun Union Information in Charge of the “Million Families Learn ty Party Committee District Etiquette Campaign” Committees WF District Other Ministry of Organisations Education
Assessment Management
Summary Report Various Grassroots “Training” Locations
Diagram 1: The Chain of Command in the Implementation of the ‘Million Families Learn Etiquette Campaign’, 2006-2007. (East China University of Science and Technology, 2006).
Although the administrative oversight of the newly created organisations ensures unobstructed communication in the chain of command, as can be seen in the diagram by the coloured arrows, it nevertheless allows little bottom-up input. The blue arrows show the relationship of one organisation to another. For example, the city- level Civilisation Office oversees the activities of their lower-level counterpart, the district level Civilisation Office, which is ultimately answerable to the Municipal level Leadership Office in charge of the etiquette campaign. Through the numerous compliance measures allocated by the central authorities, lower level authorities are kept in line and while they do have room to adapt the campaign to local conditions, they are predominantly preoccupied with meeting targets, fulfilling quotas and meeting the objectives of the authorities who preside over their career prospects. Thus, in the last instance, the motivations of lower-level administration are driven by
192 an imperative to please those above them and therefore divert the valuable and finite resources of the campaign into galvanising the degree of subordinates’ loyalty rather than the needs of the community per se.
Apart from the transient community of migrants, the etiquette campaigns also target the entrenched habits of older generations of Shanghainese. It would have been unthinkable in traditional China to hint at the possibility of educating seniors about the norms of etiquette simply because Confucian culture dictated that it was the young who had much to learn from the old (Bell, 2006). Filial piety and the tendency to associate wisdom with age would have prevented any one of these initiatives from taking off. But the advent of the communist revolution dissolved these distinctions, between young and old, male and female, intellectual and manual labourers, to create a classless society in which differences in intellect, gender and age did not matter; what mattered with the degree of commitment to the construction of a utopian order. The formative years of older Shanghainese were trained under these conditions and therefore made it much more difficult for them to change once economic reforms took hold. As one etiquette teacher lamented to me, ‘“bad habits” are so deeply entrenched that it will take a generation if not more to overcome’. Things she referred to include the tendency to not distinguish between private and public, resulting in what should be private behaviour being displayed in public. Practices like not using public lavatories properly, including not flushing cisterns after use or not closing lavatory doors when in use, frustrate the attempts of the etiquette police to shore up the image of Shanghai as a modern and outward looking city. As a result, more ‘modern’ toilets have been built and many sub-standard ones have been refurbished. The China Daily (9 April, 2010), for example, reported that in anticipation of the 70 million visitors who flocked to Shanghai for the World Exhibition, more than 11,000 public toilets were renovated while new high-tech mobile lavatories were placed at strategic locations around the city. Manuals have been distributed urging residents to heed the message of ‘good’ hygiene and instructions on how to ‘properly’ use a public toilet.
Talking loudly in Shanghainese and taking a combative stance has also been identified as a distinctive local trait most commonly perpetrated by Shanghainese,
193 according to another etiquette enforcer in Shanghai. 77 Shanghainese have a distinctive dialect that is unintelligible to the unaccustomed ear. China has an official 56 ethnic minorities (including the predominant Han population) speaking and practising different languages and customs that are not intelligible to outsiders. Even within the dominant group, the Han Chinese, who make up about 90 percent of the total population, differences are also noticeable. Local dialects demarcate ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, drawing invisible lines across the community. Governing this multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual country is thus difficult without a common language. But through the compulsory enforcement of teaching Putonghua (or Mandarin Chinese) throughout schooling and through ubiquitous media and government usage across society, communication has been facilitated. However, Shanghainese pride comes from mastering the Shanghainese dialect and helps to perpetuate local identity in a place that is a magnet for migrants from all over the country. The preference for local dialects continues despite the language campaigns.
‘Speak Putonghua’ (Shuo Putonghua) signs could be seen at bus stops and other public places all over the city. Surprisingly, while Chinese are urged to speak a unified language, they are also encouraged to speak English, which is considered the universal language of communication for globally-oriented Shanghai. Etiquette classes are frequently held by teachers who profess a mastery of both Putonghua and English.78 Civility is therefore about promoting a common national identity forged through the harmonisation of language.
The Shanghai etiquette campaigns are educational in content and approach. They straddle a fine line between advocating the limited autonomy of the person in deciding for themselves what is appropriate and inappropriate, and active state intervention in shaping the citizen-subject. Indeed, while the methods of inculcation appeal to the higher moral self, these moral exemplars are nevertheless in short supply in the society. They have to be manufactured, promoted and disseminated by the state media as an example of the existing virtue and goodness in society. Saying
77 From talks with etiquette teacher Mr Wang, a retired college teacher, dated 14 May 2008. 78 Here, I am not referring to private etiquette classes which have witnessed an explosion of interest as a result of rising incomes in cities like Shanghai. To lend these classes their prestige, they are usually conducted by foreigners, preferably a Westerner. The aim of the classes is less about ‘learning etiquette for etiquette’s sake’, than about upward social mobility, as more well-off Chinese rub shoulders with well-heeled foreigners in this cosmopolitan city. Perhaps in keeping with Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of ‘social capital’ this could be seen as perpetuating class inequalities disguised as etiquette.
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‘sorry’ for example, while considered good manners, may carry connotations of culpability or indicate guilt which can have expensive repercussions. The infamous hit-and-run cases in China are an extreme example of this.79 My own seemingly trivial experience in Shanghai also hints at this phenomenon:
In the early hours of yesterday morning, I was riding my bicycle on campus to meet some friends when almost out of nowhere a scooter collided with my bike. I was not injured (except for the grazed skin on right hand which I had thankfully protected with a pair of leather gloves) and neither was the rider whom I recognised as a security guard at the front gate. I immediately and profusely apologised in Chinese (duibuqi), out of habit and also just in case it was me who had broken some unspoken bicycle rule. His reaction was quite shocked. His wide-eyed stare communicated to me that he was unaccustomed to an apology particularly when the issue of who was at fault could have gone both ways. I had expected an apology from him too but got none except a frustrated ‘ai-ya’ and he left.80
I later asked a Chinese friend what to make of the situation and he remarked that the guard was probably a migrant with low education and therefore was not used to apologising. Shanghainese he assured me, would reciprocate with an apology. But another important and often overlooked function of etiquette is that it ‘lubricates’ social interaction therefore reducing the potential for conflict. Saying sorry pacifies a situation, reduces tension and forges trust and engenders empathy. My utterance of ‘sorry’ came out of habit; an automated response to a typical situation where intent to harm or injure was not there. My expectation that the apology would be reciprocated was a social expectation I had internalised growing up in Australia. To me, it was polite to say sorry regardless of who was at fault. In China, not only is one unaccustomed to saying ‘sorry’, but apologising could also be read as an admission of guilt. As Bo Yang, an essayist, writes in his controversial book, The Ugly Chinaman (Chou Lou de Zhongguo Ren) (1985, pp. 162-163) unless the ‘giver’ of
79 Chinese society has recently been rocked by a number of infamous hit-and-run cases, many resulting in death. What is newsworthy about these cases was that they could have been prevented had the drivers and/or onlookers exercised care and moral conscience. In almost all the cases which were solved by the authorities, the issue of admittance of guilt arose. In the most recent example involving a 2 year old by the name of ‘Yue Yue’, 18 passersby walked past without aiding the girl by removing her from the path of oncoming vehicles. In their defense, observers cite the inadequate legal system which can find fault in ‘good Samaritans’ resulting in expensive compensation payouts. The do-gooder in the society is therefore discouraged because aiding another in need is equivalent to admission of guilt which can be manipulated and used by the injured party to derive material gains (Hartley-Parkinson, 2011). 80 Incident occurred on the morning of 18 November 2006.
195 the apology truly means it, saying sorry is a false, mechanical and hypocritical response not worthy of admiration:
When Chinese people first arrive in the U.S., their biggest problem is the excessive politeness of Americans. When someone brushes you on the street, even if they bumped you for just an instant, even if they didn’t really bump you at all, they have to say, “excuse me” (dui bu qi)…. “Thank you” intimidates me the same way that “excuse me” does, it weighs equally heavily. It’s hard to believe that there are people who spit these words out without a thought.
In the absence of normalising influences, the state has had to step in with regular commentary on televisions and newspapers connecting small trespasses of incivility as the precursor to larger more serious offences which in the last instance, could threaten the state’s bottom line of social stability. Interestingly, while the etiquette campaigns have drawn inspiration from foreign models, equating etiquette with modernity (particularly in sections about adopting Western dress and make up), they have also taken a leaf from the Maoist past. While Mao may have identified etiquette as an unnecessary frivolity and a remnant of a feudal and exploited past, his mass mobilisational style has found utility in the present campaigns to cultivate norms of ‘proper’ conduct. As Tyrene White (1990, p. 75) observed of the one-child policy, ‘mobilisational methods have been recast in ways that make them useful to the reformist elite’.
Once or twice a week, residents of neighbourhood communities enjoy some kind of cultural activity related to the etiquette campaigns. It might be a qipao (the cheongsam) class, teaching residents how to carry themselves when wearing this traditional attire (especially on special occasions like weddings); other times, it might be a community-wide drawing competition involving child contestants who are asked to draw an example of when they exhibited civility. Residents’ committee members would survey the interest level of citizens to implement a preferred method appropriate to each age cohort. Elderly residents like traditional opera, so etiquette campaigns teaching about new behavioural norms will be performed in theatre complete with props and actors (albeit amateurs) to make the message stick. For the younger cohort, talent quests, essay-writing competitions, and illustrations are just some of the different methods used to encourage the adoption of new norms. This is an example of modern day mass line politics in which the authorities have gone to
196 the ‘masses’, learned about their preferences and re-packaged them so as to gain a better understanding of the governed and in turn, use this knowledge in the government of the population.
The level of state involvement differs from district to district, residents’ committee to residents’ committee. In priority districts like Luwan, which encompasses the old French Concession, the focus is more on urban image construction like sprucing up the façades outside the community gates and walls since it is most frequented by foreigners. In other outlying areas populated by migrants, the campaigns have adopted a disciplinary approach. These differentiated approaches could be seen as an example of ambitious attempts by the state to create new non-class forms of identity and more highly mediated forms of representation which define the social as an object of surveillance, manipulation, and control (Wu, 2005).
In the next section, I examine the evaluative methods employed to assess the effectiveness of the campaigns. I argue that in trying to impose objective measures of ‘success’, the state is unwittingly encouraging poor governance practices. As Norbert Elias (1982) observed of the civilising process in European countries, societies evolve on their own terms, sometimes precipitated by external factors like war and sometimes by internal factors like the disintegration of monarchical rule. By imposing political will over the direction and pace of social change, unintended negative consequences will result. Why should people behave civilly towards each other? Why should they show care and concern for strangers when traditionally, Chinese society has shown a distrust and disdain of strangers? These are more pertinent questions than whether or not the campaigns have been successful. The need to produce numbers confirms the ‘social engineering’ mentality of the technocratic elites more than anything else.
Evaluating the Etiquette Campaigns: Poor Governance Practices or Force for Change?
There is no denying the immense organising capacity of the CCP. Together with its vast network of mass organisations, projects that might take years to complete in the West can get done in China in a matter of months if not sooner. As Wen Jiabao gloated about China’s success at preventing the Chinese economy from bottoming out, ‘We have stabilised economic growth and employment and maintained social
197 stability over the past one year period, which is a comfort to me,’ others were more skeptical of the foundations upon which this growth is built:
That sense of triumph permeates China these days. The mainland’s quick rebound from the worldwide financial meltdown seems to have vindicated its brand of state-led capitalism… But delve beneath the muscular statistics and hype about advances in strategic industries, and China doesn’t seem so prepared to catapult into a role of global economic leadership… While Beijing’s $586 billion stimulus package and a 150% increase in bank lending have spurred impressive growth, “the question,” …[and what counts in the end is not the size of that growth] but “… the quality of that growth.” (Roberts & Engardio, 2009).
Concerning etiquette campaigns, there is also the underlining concern that these have been predominantly about image construction and that they have not addressed the more serious problems that over three decades of state-led development have engendered.
Evaluative reports form an important component of campaign mobilisation. They represent the last stage in the campaign cycle in which the main points of the campaigns are summed up, successes applauded and recommendations given. Criticisms are an indispensable tool of this ‘self-evaluative’ process. Only by being self-critical can individuals and collectives hope to improve in the future. The main drawbacks of the 2006 campaigns (East China University of Science and Technology, pp. 38-40) were identified by the evaluative group as follows:
1. Inadequate funding therefore the conditions for etiquette learning have not been met in some locations. 2. Mismatch between teaching content and everyday life. Much of the teachings on etiquette do not apply in an everyday setting. 3. Ineffectiveness of certain forms of propaganda. 4. Lack of training and control of campaign volunteers.
In what follows, I discuss each of these deficiencies in turn. First, much of the work related to the Expo, into which etiquette campaigns became subsumed, was extra work for the employees of mass organisations for which they did not get extra pay. In addition, campaign workers lamented having ‘more masters’ to please, as the Expo necessitated the introduction of ad hoc organisations which stood above them. Under-resourced and over-worked, many resident committee members were not as motivated as the media made them out to be. For example, when I questioned a
198 committee member about the anti-pyjama wearing campaign which had drawn controversy in Shanghai, he retorted that the priority had shifted to something else and was reticent to comment any further because this campaign had attracted the ire of Shanghai residents who interpreted it as an infringement on their right to free dress. Residents also said that this reminded them of the ‘fashion police’ during the Maoist period when anyone walking down the street wearing a certain item of clothing regarded as bourgeois or Western would be given a ‘talking down’ or even reprimanded. Their resistance is therefore justified in their eyes.
Second, the language of the campaigns conveys an overly optimistic attitude in the ability of authorities to positively mould human behaviour. Words like ‘ke ai’, which literally means ‘cute’, appeal to children rather than adults. Campaign organisers themselves doubt that the reprehensible behaviours, habits and attitudes of the general population can be changed even as they continue to churn out endless propaganda.81 When asked why the Shanghai Women’s Federation continues to publish material that nobody reads, the representative from the Federation simply replied that ‘it was her job.’ In an introduction to Minhang district’s etiquette manual (Small Leadership Group for the Construction of a Model Minhang District, 2006, p. 1), the lofty goals of the etiquette campaign were stated in no uncertain terms and the connection between raising people’s quality, raising the reputation of the district and staging a successful 2010 Expo were clearly made:
In order to facilitate the 2010 Shanghai Expo, to construct a good moral and cultural environment; to advance and raise the quality of the people and the civility level of the community; to create soft power for Minhang district; to construct a model district out of Minhang, the small leadership group under the guidance of the Shanghai government has been charged with launching the campaign, ‘A Million Families Learn Etiquette’ (Bai Wan Jiating Xue Liyi).
The etiquette campaign for the Shanghai Expo prioritised maintaining a quality environment and citizenry, and this preceded any genuine concern for the wellbeing of citizens. As one informant remarked to me, the campaigns are just a list of ‘prohibitions’ targeting vulnerable groups who do not have the means to display
81 This information was relayed to me during an interview with a representative of the Shanghai Municipal Women Federation. Interview in May 2008.
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‘civility’ in their everyday life. They therefore remain aloof and distance themselves as much as possible from the campaign.
Third, propaganda materials have been less than successful at conveying the message of civility or at turning people’s bad habits around. For example, the use of rhyming jingles, while effective in simplifying the message, nevertheless treats the subject too lightly. Below is a poem by the Putuo district’s federation for the disabled (2006, p. 9, my translation):
Help disabled people, protect their legal rights; Service disabled people, create enrichment activities; Guide disabled people, pursue a better life; Empathise with disabled people, promote social causes;
Rhyming jingles make memorising the message of a campaign easy, particularly for children. However, these messages are not backed up with concrete policies to fill the gap between those who do not have the means to help themselves and the privileged few. Instead, the campaigns have been overwhelmingly concerned with image-building such as ways to boost the profile of a place, be it a community, a district or at the city-level. The propaganda reminds the public that there are those less fortunate than themselves and that the government recognises the problem. But against the backdrop of the World Expo, these civility campaigns have been mainly an exercise in urban image construction.
Of note also has been the ‘feminisation of courtesy’ (Wang, 1987). Much of the ‘grunt work’ of etiquette campaigns, including conducting door-to-door surveys, hanging up banners and organising etiquette classes, is done by women, hence the involvement of the Women’s Federation in front-line work. From my observations, this is because women, particularly older, middle-aged women, came of age during the Cultural Revolution and have had the experience and training in propaganda dissemination and persuasion from that period. More practically, however, middle- aged women take up this kind of work because they are not full-time workers or may be recently retrenched from their work units. Although ‘civilisation work’ does not pay very well, it nevertheless gives them something to do. Women are also especially targeted by the campaigns because they are considered the mainstay of the
200 home and therefore a valuable partner in the fight against moral decay.82 Women are also least able to resist the persistence of campaign organisers hence their being regarded as an easy target.
Lastly, concerning the management of volunteers, the evaluators suggest that a better co-ordinated effort at ‘educating’ the volunteers would have turned out more informed helpers. Because of what they see as the insufficient training of volunteers, the quality of the campaigns has suffered. Additionally, because of the unappealing propaganda used to recruit volunteers, the number of volunteers enlisted for the campaigns was low. Having said this, the Shanghai Expo attracted 80,000 volunteers (Shanghai World Expo Official Website, 2010). On 1 April 2010, a mass oath- taking ceremony was conducted, committing the volunteers to the service of the Expo (Ibid). Extensively trained and thoroughly hand-picked, the volunteers assisted visitors but also importantly ensured that public order was maintained.
Overall, despite the shortcomings of the campaigns, the evaluative report was overwhelmingly positive about the outcomes of the campaigns, which succeeded in realising the following outcomes: promoting family etiquette, promoting community or public etiquette and healthy community development, all in keeping with Hu Jintao’s development of a ‘socialist harmonious society’ (Shanghai Small Leadership Group for the 'A Million Families Learn Etiquette' Activity, Evaluative Report, 2007). According to the report, a total of 5400 questionnaires were distributed by campaign organisers to the various participants and stakeholders to assess the effectiveness of the campaigns (ibid.). A total of 5400 questionnaires were distributed to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaigns. While the bulk of the surveys went out to campaign participants, 200 went to ‘training locations’ and the remaining 200 went to ‘campaign organisers’. Although the campaign purported to ‘civilise’ a million families, the number may be less, given the low level of attendance I witnessed at the community centres. In the past, non-attendance at a campaign could get one into deep trouble and attract the ire of the state. Nowadays, with the depoliticising effect of economic reforms, people are no longer compelled to participate unless they are coerced or threatened. Ms Ma83, a campaign organiser and member of the Women’s Federation, told me that a ‘lack of public enthusiasm’
82 This fact was relayed to me by an organiser of the etiquette campaign. Date 17 June 2008. 83 This is a pseudonym.
201 for the etiquette campaigns was a real problem.84 General apathy undermines the façade of ‘success’. Further, the pre-conceived questions to determine the campaign’s success do not accurately reflect the genuine concerns of citizens (as seen in the table below) but subordinate the priorities of the local government to that of their superiors.
Another question should be asked: who is being represented in these campaigns? The transition from the Maoist ‘mass line’ dialectical model of intense engagement at the grassroots to a more mediated process of polling and managing of public opinion is interpreted as evidence that the reform-era Party has taken efforts to become more democratic and more inclusive than it was during the Mao period. However, these polling practices could also be interpreted as a form of technocratic ‘social engineering’ that, while purporting to alleviate tensions, mostly function to displace and conceal the rising inequalities resulting from rapid marketisation. As Jürgen Habermas (1995, pp. 219-221) notes, polls and surveys are not expressions of a ‘democratic will’ but a substitute for it. Pierre Bourdieu (1979, p. 125) is more vocal in voicing his skepticism of public opinion polling, viewing it as an
artifact whose function is to conceal the fact that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of? forces, of tensions, and that there is nothing more inadequate than a percentage to represent the state of opinion… the [public opinion survey] creates the idea that a unanimous public opinion exists in order to legitimate a policy, and strengthens? the relations of force upon which it is based or make it possible.
Any analysis built on data where opinions have been translated into a number should therefore be treated with caution. When we are confronted with statements like, ‘60% of participants recorded improved family relations’ (in the table below) it is worth giving thought to how many decisions have resulted in that number. Considerable power is vested in the interests behind opinion polls, including those charged with carrying out the polls, the media presenting them, and the interests representing them. It is these interests that decide what questions to ask, how the answers should be grouped and coded, how the results should be interpreted, and finally how the conclusions should be presented.
84 Conversation took place on 9 July 2008.
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Table 1: Changes in the Relationship between Family Members Resulting from Participation in Etiquette Campaigns
Not Applicable Applicable Very Applicable (%) (%) (%)
Reduced Conflict between Family Members 4.1 60 35.9
Effective Communication between Family 3.3 57.7 38.9 Members
Improvement in Relations between Family 3.3 56.4 40.2 Members
Happiness Experienced in Everyday Life 3.5 56.1 40.3
Improvement in Qualify of Family Life 5 56.5 38.5
Source: Total number of interviewees: 5000 (East China University of Science and Technology, 2006)
Conclusion
Although campaigns today differ significantly from their Maoist forerunners, they still function as a powerful tool in harnessing China’s still significant mobilising capacity. Modernisation theory which posits a ‘natural’ evolution towards bureaucratic-legal rationalisation is inadequate for explaining the continuing utility of campaigns as a powerful tool of governance. While the engineers may have assumed power from the revolutionaries, the campaigns have not been done away with and still serve the regime well, particularly in overcoming bureaucratic inertia and resistance.
The new style of campaigns demonstrates the effective use of Maoist mobilisation methods adapted to present circumstances. It also represents a marked shift in governing rationality, where the party-state is no longer constrained by ideological orthodoxy but nevertheless finds utility in reviving one of the oldest proven methods of governance in the management of its population. This is a fine example of Chinese governmentality applying the planning mentality to the perceived needs of a globalised and heterogeneous city; where manners, an otherwise trivial matter, falls into the purview of state policing of public conduct.
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This chapter has also shown that while economic achievement has offered a rare opportunity to rework Confucian courtesies into the modern context, growth has also come at considerable cost, as social inequality remains the highest since opening and reforms were first introduced. It seems that neither revolution nor economic reforms have erased distinctions of power or rank, leaving reciprocated public civility an as yet, unrealised dream.
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Chapter Nine
Conclusion: The Limits of Wenming (Civilisation) Discourse in Resolving China’s Myriad Problems
Photo 11: Community plaque reads: ‘Pay attention to education, support education, develop education, enthusiastically raise the overall ‘cultural quality’ of the citizen.’
The Chinese economy has grown at a steady rate of around eight to ten percent over the last three decades but not without considerable cost to society. Problems include the worsening income divide, social uncertainty and alienation, corruption, pollution and environmental degradation. These and a raft of other problems constantly draw on the resources of the state. Governing such a large and complex nation is no easy task and the CCP has done well in keeping these problems from spilling into uncontrollable territory. Most Chinese see no alternative to CCP rule. They cite its role in steering the country to prosperity after decades of poverty and isolation; averting the social and political inertia that besieged transitional regimes following the collapse of the Cold War world; managing to balance competing interests while simultaneously maintaining the authority to lead; and restoring China’s dignity and sense of pride on the international stage as reasons for continued support (He, 2009). However, we should take any survey conducted in China on this question with a grain of salt given the diversity and complexity of the population and the sensitivity of the question itself. But despite these commendable achievements, problems
205 persist, in some cases becoming endemic: for instance, corruption and crime threaten to tear asunder the current regime’s wish for social harmony.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping envisioned a relatively ‘well-off’ (xiaokang) society as equal to GDP per capita of approximately USD $1,000 (Deng, 1995, p. 240). China’s current per capita incomes are considerably higher than that, particularly along the east coast.85 But in places far removed from the boom, the fruits of reforms have only been marginally felt. In some cases, people have experienced a reversal of gains as a result of the privileging of the coastal regions over the landlocked interior (Huang, 2008). China’s growth strategy is highly skewed and highly divisive, making it a highly sensitive topic. If some quarters in China are in fact experiencing xiaokang conditions, then no doubt the people’s needs and aspirations have changed. In the 1980s, the few foreigners who went to the country testified that it was still a largely ‘bicycle’ nation with this humble form of transport symbolising the stage of China’s development (Yang, 1994). China was under- developed, poor by international standards and still fearful of the consequences of talking to foreigners because of the legacies of Maoist politics (politics still carried the potential for political incarceration). Fast forward three decades into the present, and the social and physical contours of the Chinese urbanscape are undeniably modern: it is a car-obsessed country where consumerism is the religion of the newly rich. It is also a place of immense possibilities for both upward mobility and downward social decline. It is a decadent, noisy, polluted and yet powerfully attractive place. This is as true of Guangdong down south as it is of Beijing up north. Hundreds of millions of Chinese newly released from their rural homelands, thanks in large to a relaxation of the hukou system, now call the city home (even though they do not possess a hukou). However, the city can be a cold and unkind place for others. Millions of temporary migrant workers come into direct contact with one another, but none are obliged to be ‘civil’ to each another. After all, they are all strangers, and there is slight possibility that a courteous act will be reciprocated.
It is not as if China lacks a system of etiquette. In fact, traditional courtesies still exert a powerful, albeit variable, influence in today’s China. Courtesy or limao was hierarchical and calibrated by mutual obligations to a defined status. Courtesies
85 According to World Bank world development indicators, GNI per capita in 2010 was US $4, 270 (World Bank, 2011). Try and get GDP per capita.
206 varied according to rank, according to the Confucian ‘five relationships’ (wu lun). There were also unspoken courtesies conveyed by respectful postures, gestures and patterns of communication such as the number of times one refuses an offer. The ketou (kowtow) or prostration, was practised during the dynastic period as a mark of respect for authority whether it be parental authority or political authority. The number and depth of the prostration reflected the degree or rank of the person being addressed. In 1793, one of the reasons why the British mission to China failed was because Lord Macartney refused to prostrate himself to the Qianlong emperor. Following the overthrow of dynastic rule in 1911, prostrations were immediately abolished in favour of small bows and tips of the hat (Harrison, 2000).
While traditional courtesies afforded respect to those within the group, they did not extend to strangers. One gained face (lian) for the clan by perfecting one’s vertical relationships. Even today, strangers are assessed before they are given courtesy, a difficult task especially in transient encounters (Zhang, 2001). The recent promotion of civilising campaigns may seem silly and extreme to outsiders, but they map out a profound realignment of social relations neither defined by strict Confucian roles nor by the politically based revolutionary relationships of Maoist times. These new egalitarian courtesies raise new issues of rights versus responsibilities. They also function to reinforce the new social order.
But courtesy is only one aspect of a multifaceted process. With China’s newfound prosperity came newfound challenges and responsibilities. China’s top-down ‘civilising’ process is both about creating a new citizenry imbued with the new values of the socio-political system and about disciplining the elements within the population that threaten to derail the modernisation project. In the early years of reforms, just as China had ‘awoken’ from the ‘nightmare’ that was the Cultural Revolution, the civilising project was intended to restore the basic norms of behaviour that had been swept aside by the revolutionary fervour that took over the country. It was also about restoring the Party’s credibility, which had been badly shaken by the Cultural Revolution. The period also saw an outpouring of grief and disappointment as the Party scrambled to chart a new course for China. The predominant concern was economic restoration and social stability. It was under Deng Xiaoping that civilisation or wenming discourse was born.
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This thesis has charted the evolution of wenming discourse from its conception in 1979 to the present. The malleability of this concept has enabled it to embrace other ideas including ‘harmonious society’ and the possibility for legal and political reforms. This thesis has also shown that like any government conceived idea, it is a highly political concept. The word ‘civility’ in English shares an etymological root with the idea of ‘citizenship’ on the one hand and ‘civilisation’ on the other. The first sense of civility is found in the link to the idea of ‘civic behaviour’ coined by philosophy professor Cheshire Calhoun (2000) as ‘liberal civility’, referring specifically to the norms governing people’s participation in a liberal democratic polity. American sociologist Edward Shils (1997, p. 76) argues that ‘civility is an attitude and mode of action which attempts to strike balance between conflicting demands and conflicting interests.’ This means that no matter how much one holds one’s political opponents or adversaries in contempt, one must be tolerant of views other than one’s own, recognising that the principle of ‘shared governance’ has a superior claim to one’s allegiance over any sectional or ideological claim. This is a big ask but it lies at the heart of liberal democratic traditions.
While China does not share this liberal democratic tradition, this does not preclude discussion of political reforms. As this thesis has demonstrated in Chapter Four, political reforms feature prominently in any elite discussion over the impact and purpose of civilising campaigns. Intellectuals interviewed for the chapter concur that for the campaigns to be credible, the ‘disciplinary gaze’ must be turned inwards. Indeed, capitalising on the concept’s ‘catch-all’ ability, political reforms have been conveyed via the concept of ‘political civilisation’ (zhengzhi wenming) first promoted by Jiang Zemin, although the ideas espoused by him were hardly new. In fact, the scope of political civilisation would embrace another reform era slogan, that of ‘inner-party democracy’ (dangnei minzhu), thus allowing the party-state to adapt authoritarian rule to market conditions. The process nevertheless is ‘internal’, and, while calls for ‘public supervision’ are heard, the concept is turned into propaganda of sorts to mean ‘supervision of public opinion’.
The second sense of civility, the association with civilisation, is what concerns Chinese authorities more. Perhaps wary that discussion over political reforms might lead astray, the party-state has focused on a less-politicised (but no less political) aspect of civility, that of social civility, referring to the norms that govern social
208 behaviour in general. Although China has changed from the society that it was during Maoist times, in that people are now more educated, more urban and more mobile, this does not mean that civility is status blind. This is both a product of the enduring influence of ‘tradition’ and of the new status hierarchies produced as a result of state discourse about ‘quality’ or suzhi which has been readily accepted socially. As argued in Chapter Three, suzhi has become a ‘catch-all’ concept used by elites to argue for all manner of policy. At its most basic, suzhi is premised on the idea that people regarded as of ‘higher’ quality should be afforded respect and courtesy and people of ‘lower’ quality should give respect and courtesy. This explains why women, children and service workers are increasingly expected to give courtesies while their rights to receive them are less clear.
Chapter Three provided the reasons why suzhi has taken such a strong hold in the country. It explored the possible link with early discourses of lack begun in the period straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when China suffered repeated humiliations at the hands of Western and Japanese powers. Modernisation discourse arrived in China via armed imperialism, causing deep rifts in the country and forcing deep introspection into the ‘quality’ of the China’s population for the very first time. Many early modernisers, from Lu Xun to Sun Yat- sen, attributed China’s failure to resist foreign subjugation as being due to the ‘weak’ national character of its people. The absence of a national identity and the ‘poor quality’ of the Chinese people were cited as reasons for China’s decline in civilisational status. This theme continued throughout the Nationalist period as the GMD government sought to impose, in military fashion, codes of civility and hygiene upon the population. The Maoist leadership took up the task, although the mission was rearticulated in class terms.
In the post-Mao period, which is the focus of Chapters Four through Eight, suzhi features in the civilising campaigns once more. Ironically, suzhi is now the marker of new ‘civilised’ personhood. Despite its egalitarian rhetoric, suzhi acts to mask the inequalities produced by uneven economic reforms. People regarded as of ‘lower quality’ are not necessarily prone to ‘uncivilised’ behaviour. But their being regarded as of ‘lower quality’ (which can be determined from a combination of subjective and objective criteria from dress, manner of speech to general demeanour) necessarily subjects them to the disciplinary gaze of the state, which posits them as
209 the object of further improvement and supervision. They in turn internalise its message and are urged to improve their ‘inner-urbanisation’ through consumption of etiquette books or by subjecting themselves to further education. The point is, as I have emphasised, these processes of subjectification have been readily accepted by the general citizenry and largely naturalised. The yardstick by which the state measures the conduct of its citizens is now being adopted by citizens themselves to judge each other. Civility is no more a system of ‘status hierarchies’ than it is about a genuine desire for equality.
While Chapters Three to Six set up the conditions for discussion of China’s civilising campaign, Chapters Seven and Eight provide concrete examples in the setting of Shanghai. Chosen because it is China’s premier ‘showcase’ city, and touted as a model exemplar of what Chinese modernity should look like, Shanghai represents the dreams and aspirations of elites even as it is shaped and contested by forces from below. While the more serious aspects of civility, like its potential to embrace ‘political civility’, are undeniably important to any discussion about civility, in China, the focus has been primarily on image making and maintaining outer appearances. Indeed, in the community building campaigns to rebuild Shanghai, the predominant concern has been not so much to improve the living condition of residents per se (that is, after all, a by-product of the beautification campaigns) as to improve the administrative function of grassroots organisations so that they can better manage the population. Civility is reworked into new discourses about self-control and self- regulation and built into the new slogan of the three self-functions of neighbourhood communities, namely, self-management, self-education, and self-service.
While community-building efforts in the West have been a consultative process, community-construction in China has become the new frontier of government. As argued in Chapter Seven, in China, neighbourhood communities are seen as staging grounds for the inculcation of moral values, for the teaching of civilised behaviour and for the overall moral development of society. They offer a cauldron of research opportunities for explorations into social inequality, the effects of urban beautification projects and for explaining how Party-legitimacy is being re-bolstered and infused with ‘moral purpose’ after waning in influence in recent years.
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Civilising campaigns therefore offer the rare opportunity to peer into the state-led battle for the ‘soul’ of Chinese. Whether or not Chinese believe in the effectiveness of the campaigns to ‘raise their quality’ or ‘civilise their conduct’ is beyond the point. Most people just ignore it as propaganda. But it is just as important to ask what is being legitimated here: is it the reforms? Is it the Party? Or is it something else? Reforms are an irreversible reality of everyday life now and one cannot imagine them being reversed in the near or distant future (though the pace of reforms could be slowed). China is irrevocably part of the world economy now and disentangling it from the system of capitalist accumulation may prove dire for the rest of the world. Legitimacy is something that the Party does not take for granted by virtue of the fact that it won the ‘people’s war’. It is something that is consciously being reworked through propaganda and coercion. So what remains as an important task is legitimating the orientation of reforms. In other words, the current civilising project is about legitimating China’s path to modernisation. Put another way, it is about legitimating the methods used to achieve prosperity and dignity for all. If people believe that the ends justify the means, they will put up with hardships in order to realise this goal. This is very much a Utopian undertaking, although not of the Maoist variety that depicted a classless society. Rather, class or stratification is very much alive in China. The presence of both rich and poor is vital for China’s narrativisation of its success story: the presence of the rich vindicates the state’s pro- growth, pro-rich, pro-urban strategy, while the presence of the poor suggests the need for further regulation and state supervision. Social welfare is only a recently adopted concept that, while being re-worked into the governing discourse, is nevertheless premised on the idea that the downtrodden are somehow responsible for ‘their own lot’ in society.
The Party’s vision of a harmonious or xiaokang society responds to the need to harness the successes of the economic reform and address the traumatic social differentiations caused in the process. Although ‘harmonious society’ promises to redress, over time, the increasing gap between China’s rich and poor, it anticipates that an underclass would be created. This is the logic of uneven development under an authoritarian system. The presence of inequality is crucial for the legitimation of China’s development model: a model that is predicated upon allowing some to get rich first, based on the assumption that this wealth will eventually ‘trickle-down’ to
211 less developed areas. The malleability of the concept of wenming has enabled state actors to (re)mould the citizenry, a contentious concept in itself, in ways that are conducive to the deepening of reforms that simultaneously augment the state’s role in the process.
In summary, this thesis has shown that while campaigns represent an innovative adaptation of a past governing tool to present circumstances, they are nevertheless inadequate in addressing some of the deeper and more serious problems reforms have fostered. While on the one hand, reforms have positively altered Chinese society in many ways, including but not limited to poverty alleviation, job creation, greater consumer choice and so forth, on the other, reforms have also brought about a rationality crisis, in which the logic of the market economy conflicts with the tenets of socialism on which the Party’s foundation was built. Increasingly, the Party’s legitimacy rests less on its claim to ideological purity than on its performance, including economic performance and other ‘good governance’ indicators such as maintaining low rates of crime, managing social conflicts, and so forth. But as this thesis has argued, the Party recognises that it cannot rely on performance alone to bind people to the social body. Civility campaigns have attempted to fill the void left in the wake of the collapse of communism as a viable moral and political alternative to capitalism and Western liberal democracy. Civility campaigns have also attempted to revive socialism and adapt it to present circumstances, with mixed results.
The imposition of civilised standards from above has been met with many challenges. As shown in Chapter Five, the problem of dissimulation and feigned compliance are just some of the challenges the regime faces as a result of implementing the civilising process in this way. Ultimately, campaigns have been more successful at galvanising a degree of loyalty or willingness from lower level cadres and their functionaries to carry out orders from the top than in changing people’s ways which raises the governmentality of their intent. Perhaps it does not matter if people wear pyjamas in public or nor so long as they are loyal citizens.
There is no doubt that the mass mobilisation method will continue to find utility in the post-Mao context. It is a method that has proven its worth in the past and continues to be readapted to meet the challenges of the present. However, while it
212 may be easy to rally society to causes for which there is widespread consensus, such as the SARS epidemic in 2003, it is much more difficult to fill the moral vacuum. Although this moral vacuum is a product of China’s struggle with modernisation, a project that began well before the CCP became a ruling elite, the CCP has also contributed to the exacerbation of the problem, first under Mao Zedong, when the past was thoroughly destroyed or devalued during the Cultural Revolution, and then with the introduction of economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Some scholars have proposed a revival of the Confucian tradition, perhaps even a Confucian legal system, for the moral governance of society (Bell, 2006). The adaptive CCP has been selectively reviving Confucian tenets to uphold its ruling mandate but rejects aspects of Confucianism that call for unjust governments to be overthrown.
If we take a step back and reflect on the paths to modernisation of other countries like Singapore and Taiwan, it may be possible to predict China’s future trajectory. While flatly rejecting Taiwan as a model for emulation,86 Chinese technocrats look favourably to Singapore for inspiration. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping, while on a tour to the south of China, heralded Singapore as a model for how China could develop in the future: ‘Singapore’s social order is rather good. Its leaders exercise strict management. We should learn from their experience, and we should do a better job than they do’ (Kristof, 1992). High economic growth and an authoritarian government are the two attributes that attract the CCP to the ‘Singapore model’. But more than this, the social benefits derived from high incomes and a paternalistic government with limited tolerance of political dissent are seen to have produced a ‘superior’ group of people with university degrees, high incomes and good manners – all of which shows a shallow understanding of Singaporean society, history and politics. But this idealised vision of the potential path to developed country status continues to ‘stick’ in China. Still, it is quite bizarre that instead of looking to Hong Kong or Taiwan for inspiration – territories that China treats as its own and which share a Confucian heritage – China is looking overseas for examples. Perhaps the robust democratic tradition in Hong Kong and competitive elections in Taiwan present real challenges to the CCP by communicating to the Chinese people that it is
86 At the 2004 Hangzhou Conference on Deliberative Democracy, Ethan Leib (2005, p. 4), an expert on deliberate democracy and a participant at the conference, was perplexed as to why there was universal condemnation of Taiwan as a successful democratic model: ‘The unanimous disrespect afforded Taiwan at the conference by mainland Chinese democratic reformers was a bit hard to digest.’
213 not their supposedly ‘low’ political ‘quality’ that is preventing democracy from materialising on the mainland, but rather the CCP itself. Singapore, while fully developed economically, lacks the democratic aspect that might make this theory true: the civilising influence of democracy.
The civilising campaigns have made civility a condition of membership in urban society. There is consensus that a minimal level of civility is needed to maintain social relations in public. However, what this thesis has also shown is the high political stakes involved in the campaigns: civility is needed to maintain social harmony necessary for effective rule. Yet, to extend this concept to politics and political reforms undermines the CCP leadership. The campaigns could therefore be viewed as efforts by the CCP to reassert its legitimacy and moral authority in an increasingly heterogeneous but socially divided society.
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Figures and Measurements
1 Chinese yuan ≈ AUD $0.15 (US $0.16)1
List of Acronyms
CASS: Chinese Academy of Social Science CCTV: Chinese Central Television CCCPE: China Centre for Comparative Politics and Economics (Beijing) CIA: Central Intelligence Agency CCP: Chinese Communist Party CPSU: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union FDI: Foreign Direct Investment GDP: Gross Domestic Product GMD: Guomindang (Nationalist Government) IECLG: Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance IMF: International Monetary Fund MoCA: Ministry of Civil Affairs NGO: Non-Government Organisation NLM: New Life Movement NPC: National People’s Congress SEZ: Special Economic Zone SOE: State-Owned Enterprise SSB: State Statistical Bureau TVEs: Township and Village Enterprises UN: United Nations UWA: The University of Western Australia
Glossary of Chinese Terms baomu 保姆: nanny canyu chengdu 参与程度: degree of participation chuangxin chengdu 创新程度: degree of innovation
1 These figures reflect historical averages. At the time of writing the AUD depreciated significantly against the Chinese yuan (1 CNY ≈ AUD $0.23).
215 dangfeng 党风: Party work-style dangnei minzhu 党内民主: intra-party democracy danwei 单位: work unit dezhi 德治: rule by morality di sushi 底素质: ‘low quality’ dui lian 对联: banners hung outside of doorways on lunar new year fazhi 法治: rule by law fuwu zhengfu 服务政府: service-oriented government gaige kaifang 改革开放: ‘openness and reforms’ gao sushi 高素质: ‘high quality’ gongmin 公民: citizen gongchanzhuyi shiqi 共产主义时期: communist period gongtui gongxuan 公推公选: public recommendation, public election gongtui zhixuan 公推直选: public recommendation, direct election gongyue 公约: codes/pacts guangda chengdu 广大程度: degree of transferability guanxi 关系: connections guojia de zonghe guoli 国家的综合国力: overall national strength guoqing jiaoyu 国情教育: ‘national conditions’ education guihua 规划: to plan hexie 和谐: harmonious hexie shehui 和谐社会: harmonious society hukou 户口: household registration huodong 活动: campaign, activity, exercise jieyue chengdu 节约程度: degree of sustainability jihua 计划: to plan jingshen weiji 精神危机: ‘crisis of spirit’ jingshen wenming 精神文明: ‘spiritual civilisation’ kanji: Japanese script kejiao xingshi 科教形势: scientific model
216 ketou 磕头: kowtow or prostration lanyin hukou 蓝印户口: ‘blue’ hukou li 里: km li 礼: rites lian 脸: ‘face’ as in to ‘lose/gain face’ liangdi hunyin 两地婚姻: inter-region marriage limao 礼貌: courtesy or etiquette linshi juzhuzheng 临时居住证: transient residents’ card longtou 龙头: ‘dragon’s head’ luan 乱: chaos mangliu 盲流: ‘floating blind’ (refers to China’s ‘floating’ population of rural-urban migrants) mianzi 面子: literally means ‘face’ but also refers to ‘reputation’ or ‘prestige’ nan xun 南巡: Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 famous ‘Southern Tour’ of China nei wai you bie 内外有别: differences between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ nongmingong er’dai 农民工二代: second-generation rural-urban migrants pingtai 平台: platform qipao 旗袍: the cheongsam Putonghua 普通话: standard Mandarin quanmian xiaokang hexie shehui 全 面 小 康 和 谐 社 会 : ‘all-round well-off and harmonious society’ rencai gaodi 人才高地: ‘platform for talent’ rencai yinjin 人才引进: Shanghai’s ‘talent scheme’ ren de quanmian fazhan 人的全面发展: overall development of the person ren de suzhi 人的素质: ‘human quality’ ren ding sheng tian 人定胜天: conquer nature renge fenlie 人格分裂: ‘split spersonality’ renzhi 人治: rule of man ruanjian 软件: ‘software’ sange daibiao 三个代表: ‘Three Represents’ of Jiang Zemin
217 shehui 社会: society shehuizhuyi shiqi 社会主义时期: ‘socialist period’ shenpi quanli 审批权力: power to grant rights/permissions to carry out e.g. business or registration of NGO. shequ 社区: ‘community’ shidai 时代: era shikumen 石库门: stone tenement housing that is unique to Shanghai shimin 市民: citizen shiqi 时期: period suzhi 素质: ‘quality’ suzhi lunli 素质伦理: ‘quality’ discourse tianming 天明: mandate of Heaven tongxue 同学: schoolmates weisheng 卫生: health/hygiene wenhua 文化: culture wenming 文明: civil, civility, civilised, civilization wenming shidai 文明时代: ‘era of civilisation’ wu lun 五论: Confucian five relationships: ruler-ruled, father-son, husband-wife, elder brother-younger brother, and friend-friend wuzhi wenming 物质文明: ‘material civilisation’ xiang 乡: village xiaokang 小康: relatively well-off xiaoyi chengdu 效益程度: degree of social effects xinyang weiji 信仰危机: ‘crisis of belief’ yiren wei ben 以人为本: people-oriented government youdian daomian 由点到面: from ‘point’ to ‘surface’ youhuan 忧患: ‘patriotic worrying’ youshengxue 优生学: study of eugenics you wenhua 有文化: to ‘have culture’ or to be ‘educated/literate’ yu guoji jie gui 与国际接轨: ‘join with the world’s tracks’
218 yundong 运动: campaign, activity (usually of a political nature) zeren zhengfu 责任政府: responsible government zhengfeng 政风: rectification campaign zhengfu 政府: government zhengzhi wenming 政治文明: ‘political civilisation’ zhengzhi wenming jianshe 政治文明建设: ‘political civilisation’ construction zhili 治理: governance zhiliang 质量: quality (usually refers to things or systems not persons or people) zhongti xiyong 中体西用: ‘Chinese essence, Western use.’ zhongyao chengdu 重要程度: degree of significance zhuada, fangxiao 抓大放小: ‘grab the large, let go of the small’ zibenzhuyi shiqi 资本主义时期: capitalist period zishen taotai guilu 自身淘汰规律: rule of ‘natural selection’ zizhu 自主: self-help zuoren 做人: to be a person
219
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