Transtext(E)S Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 Journal of Global Cultural Studies

Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 Journal of Global Cultural Studies

5 | 2009 Varia

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/266 DOI : 10.4000/transtexts.266 ISSN : 2105-2549

Éditeur Gregory B. Lee

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 juin 2009 ISSN : 1771-2084

Référence électronique Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化, 5 | 2009 [En ligne], mis en ligne le 02 avril 2010, consulté le 24 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/266 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/transtexts.266

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 24 septembre 2020.

SOMMAIRE

(Re)Inventing ‘Realities’ in China Editorial [English Version] Florent VILLARD

(Re)Inventing ‘Realities’ in China Editorial [Version Française] Florent VILLARD

(Re)Inventing "Realities" in China

Une constance à la chinoise : Considérations sur l’art performatif extrême chinois Erik Bordeleau

Traitement moral de la question sociale dans la « société harmonieuse » de Hu Jintao Thomas BOUTONNET

Names and Reality in Mao Zedong’s Political Discourse on Intellectuals Maurizio Marinelli

Tibet in Debate: Narrative Construction and Misrepresentations in Seven Years in Tibet and Red River Valley Vanessa Frangville

“China Wahala”: the Tribulations of Nigerian “Bushfallers” in a Chinese Territory” Isabel Morais

Varia

The Internationalisation and Hybridization of Medicines in Perspective? Some Reflections and Comparisons between East and West Lionel Obadia

Anthropomorphism or Becoming-animal? Ka-shiang Liu’s Hill of Stray Dogs as a Case in Point Tsung-Huei Huang

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(Re)Inventing ‘Realities’ in China Editorial [English Version]

Florent VILLARD

1 Having inherited a vision of modernity which is of colonial and global origins, one of our main priorities is including papers which cross and go beyond pre-defined cultural areas. However we do not intend to neglect these areas. Our aim is achieving transculturalism without forgetting the historical backgrounds of different contexts, in which the dynamics of modernity, its alienations, its oppositions and its creative energy unfold.

2 Since the mid-19th century China has been a part of this modernity, and nowadays China is pictured as the most advanced country in terms of neo-liberal globalisation and industrial, technical, cultural and artistic (post)-modernity. China’s development pattern is, in many ways, a new outstanding phenomenon. There is also, however, a more hidden side to China’s development: the inequalities that exist within the country itself. In China, (post)-modernity also implies social and disciplinary control carried out by a political system which bases its legitimacy and functions outside the boundaries of the western liberal democracy system. China swings between a far-reaching liberalisation process and a persistent logic resembling power schemes of totalitarian regimes. 3 This issue of Transtext(e)s-Transcultures focuses on different forms of representation – for instance language and art – with special attention to their political performance. The following pages contain stimulating and inspiring papers, that objectively question China’s past and present “idiosyncrasies” (and those of Asia), with a focus on the (political) forms of domination and resistance which develop through language and body. 4 For instance in this issue Erik Bordeleau shows how performative art in China translates in/through “the body” the questions which are put forward by the contemporary social, economic and political spheres. The artists give rise to biopolitical issues on the human being which go beyond the Chinese context, even if their performances often express the political schizophrenia of China mentioned above.

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5 Thomas Boutonnet’s in-depth analysis of the discourse of “harmonious society”, or else of hexie shehui 和谐社会, questions the official ideology of contemporary China. In more detail, Boutonnet questions how concerns about disciplining and controlling the atomised and unstable social body hide behind the intention to civilise and educate. The background of this study is contradiction and inequality intrinsic to capitalism in contemporary China. 6 The topic of the political use of language is also dealt with by Maurizio Marinelli, who provides a detailed and thorough study on Mao Zedong’s and Deng Xiaoping’s speeches. Marinelli observes power patterns in contemporary China, together with the socio- political construction of reality by the propagandists. He also mentions language developments in China between the Maoist period and the 1980s, when official language and its hegemony began to crumble. 7 The fact we are dealing with the peculiar Chinese context does not mean, however, that we are free from the obligation to keep observing ourselves, the “Western” speaker, with a critical eye. A comparative historicised approach seems at this stage necessary. This approach can be adopted in order to prevent the space of enunciation of the object of study, in this case the “West”, from being perceived in an illusionary way as ideologically and politically flawless and independent. 8 Vanessa Frangville deliberately adopts this perspective to question the mixed representations of Tibet in Chinese and American cinema, through the films “Seven Years in Tibet” and “Hong Gu He红谷河” (Red River Valley). The author shows how, although the Chinese and the Western perspectives of Tibet differ in terms of diverging ideological discourses and conflicting historical interpretations, these two views also have common points. Tibet is depicted through biased representations, constantly orientalised and pictured as pure, natural, primitive, and Other. 9 Lionel Obadia adopts the same comparative approach to interpret a globalisation of medical practices. He avoids an ethnocentric perspective to ponder the mixed movements of “Western medicine” in Nepal and medical practices from Asia in Europe. His study focuses on a disjunction between the mixed forms of imagination in different historical contexts, and eludes the critical perspective of the “orientalisation” of the West through the trends of oriental kinds of medicine. The author points out a parallel but contrary movement, that is to say a westernisation of “Asian medicine”. 10 The dichotomy between Orient/Asia/China and the West, even within the critical perspective of Orientalism, does not always allow taking into account other less linear historical paths. Isabel Morais’s contribution to this issue shakes off traditional representations by introducing a topic which is often disregarded, i.e. contacts between China and Africa - through African emigration to Southern China and the Portuguese settlements in Macao. 11 Last but not least, Tsung-Huei Huang’s paper reinterpretsKa-shiang Liu’s novel Yegou zhi qiu 野狗之丘 (Hill of Stray Dogs) through a clever and audacious theoretical usage of the Deleuzian and Guattarian concept of “becoming”. In this paper Tsung-Huei Huang stresses the novelist’s capacity to speak for the animal-other without being caught up in an anthropocentric perspective, questioning therefore the “becoming-dog” possibility for the speaker. 12 Since the very first few issues, the main aim of this journal has been providing a publication that adopts a transcultural perspective which goes beyond boundaries

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between disciplines. The contributions of Transtext(e)s-Transcultures, number 5, fulfil this challenging objective through original approaches and interpretations. These papers raise some new questions, which are essential in order to reconfigure representations and put into practice a decolonisation of imaginaries.

AUTHOR

FLORENT VILLARD

Florent Villard is Maître de conferences at the University of Lyon 3. His doctorate on the Chinese theoretician Qu Qiubai (1899-1935) was completed in 2004. His current research focuses on language and nationalism, and cultural history.

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(Re)Inventing ‘Realities’ in China Editorial [Version Française]

Florent VILLARD

1 Héritiers de la dimension à l’origine coloniale et donc mondiale de la modernité, nous sommes soucieux de contributions qui traversent et transcendent les catégories construites des espaces géoculturels sans pour autant éluder les singularités historiques des différents contextes dans lesquels se déploient la dynamique de la modernité, ses aliénations, ses résistances et sa puissance créative.

2 Élément constitutif, depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle, de cette modernité, La Chine s’affirme aujourd’hui dans les imaginaires comme pointe avancée de la globalisation néo-libérale et de la (post)-modernité industrielle, technique, culturelle et artistique qui l’accompagne. C’est une situation nouvelle qui cache cependant le développement inégal à l’œuvre à l’intérieur même du pays. La (post)-modernité en Chine se décline aussi en termes de contrôle social et disciplinaire d’un système politique construisant sa légitimité en dehors du fonctionnement démocratique. La Chine oscille entre un processus de libéralisation tous azimut et la persistance d’une logique qui s’apparente aux techniques de pouvoir des régimes totalitaires. 3 La thématique dominante de ce numéro de Transtext(e)s-Transcultures concerne des formes variées de représentations – langage, art, images- en insistant sur leur performativité politique. Les contributions stimulantes proposées dans les pages suivantes s’appliquent à interroger sans complaisance les « particularismes » historiques et contemporains de la Chine (et de l’Asie), et notamment les formes de domination et de résistance (politiques) qui passent par les langues et les corps. 4 Dans ce numéro, Erik Bordeleau montre ainsi comment l’art performatif en Chine traduit dans/avec les corps les questions posées par les réalités sociales, économiques et politiques contemporaine. Les artistes engagent des problématiques biopolitiques sur l’humain allant au delà de la situation proprement chinoise, même si leurs performances manifestent souvent la schizophrénie politique de la Chine évoquée ci- dessus. 5 Thomas Boutonnet, en décortiquant le discours de la « société harmonieuse », ou hexie shehui和谐社会, interroge l’idéologie officielle de la Chine contemporaine, ou comment

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derrière l’intention civilisatrice et éducative se cache le souci de discipliner et de contrôler le corps social atomisé et instable d’une Chine contemporaine traversée par les contradictions et les inégalités du capitalisme. 6 C’est encore l’usage politique du langage qui est en jeu à travers une analyse précise et approfondie des discours de Mao Zedong et Deng Xiaoping par Maurizio Marinelli. Ce dernier étudie la grammaire du pouvoir en Chine contemporaine et la construction socio-politique de la réalité par les propagandistes. Il mentionne aussi les transformations des structures de la langue en Chine entre la période maoïste et la phase de décomposition du langage officiel et de son hégémonie à partir des années mil neuf cent quatre vingt. 7 La prise en compte du contexte singulier de la Chine ne doit pas nous exonérer de maintenir un regard critique sur la position du locuteur « occidental », de toujours s’observer en observant l’objet étudié. Une approche comparative historicisée se révèle nécessaire afin d’éviter d’ériger illusoirement son lieu d’énonciation, en l’occurrence l’ « Occident », comme espace pur et indépendant sur le plan idéologique et politique. 8 Vanessa Frangville adopte cette perspective à dessein pour interroger les représentations croisées du Tibet dans le cinéma chinois et américain, à travers les films « Seven Years in Tibet » et « Hong Gu He 红谷河 » (Red River Valley). L’auteur montre ainsi que malgré des discours idéologiques divergents et des lectures historiques conflictuelles entre les perspectives chinoise et occidentale du Tibet, on retrouve des imaginaires communs dans les représentations biaisées d’un Tibet constamment orientalisé : pur, naturel, primitif, Autre. 9 En empruntant cette même approche comparative pour interpréter une mondialisation des pratiques médicales, Lionel Obadia évite une perspective ethnocentrée pour penser les mouvements croisés de la « médecine occidentale » au Népal et des pratiques médicales venues d’Asie en Europe. Son étude, qui insiste sur une disjonction entre les imaginaires croisés dans des contextes historiques différents, déjoue la perspective critique de l’orientalisation de l’Occident à travers les modes des médecines orientales pour montrer le mouvement, parallèle mais inverse, d’une occidentalisation de la « médecine asiatique ». 10 La dichotomie Orient/Asie/Chine face à l’Occident, même dans la perspective critique de l’Orientalisme, ne permet pas de dire d’autres trajectoires historiques moins linéaires. La contribution d’Isabel Morais déjoue ainsi nos représentations traditionnelles en présentant une histoire négligée, oubliée, celle des échanges entre la Chine et l’Afrique à travers l’émigration africaine en Chine du Sud, par le truchement de l’implantation portugaise à Macao. 11 Enfin, à travers un usage théorique brillant et audacieux du concept deleuzo-guattarien de « devenir », l’essai conclusif de Tsung-Huei Huang réinterprète la nouvelle de Ka- shiang Liu, « La colline des chiens errants », ou Yegou zhi qiu 野狗之丘. Il insiste ici sur la capacité du romancier à parler pour l’animal-autre sans se fourvoyer dans une position anthropocentriste, interrogeant la possibilité d’un “devenir-chien” du locuteur. 12 L’ambition de ce journal depuis son lancement fut d’offrir un lieu pour penser dans une perspective anti-disciplinaire et transculturelle. Les contributions de Transtext(e)s- Transcultures, version 5, relèvent cette tâche exigeante en suivant des lignes de pensée

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et des perspectives originales, en posant parfois de nouvelles questions, indispensables à une reconfiguration des représentations et une décolonisation des imaginaires.

AUTEUR

FLORENT VILLARD

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(Re)Inventing "Realities" in China

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Une constance à la chinoise : Considérations sur l’art performatif extrême chinois

Erik Bordeleau

Pour civiliser l’esprit, il faut d’abord ensauvager le corps. Mao Zedong, Une étude de l’éducation physique (1917) 1 Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de rendre compte de l’évolution fulgurante de l’art performatif chinois à partir du début des années 90 jusqu’au début des années 2000, période relativement brève mais qui en constitue sans doute l’apogée. La radicalité et le caractère extrêmement controversé de certaines des transgressions opérées par les performances que nous allons discuter, transgressions qui plus est performées dans un contexte sociopolitique a priori réfractaire à ce genre de pratiques artistiques, en font des objets d’analyse politique presque trop évidents. On peut aisément interpréter l’art performatif en Chine dans l’optique d’une expression directe du malaise politique régnant dans la Chine post-Tiananmen. Une tension nette s’établit alors entre les dispositifs de contrôle social et des performances exutoires enracinées dans le monde de la vie, qui agissent comme une sorte de contre-effectuation émancipatrice de la violence étatique et son pouvoir d’extraction de vie nue. On pourrait dire que la puissance expressive de ces performances et leur potentiel d’émancipation propre résident dans leur capacité à exposer et reproduire intentionnellement l’événement de cette violence, par la mise en danger (en survie) de corps dans lesquels elle s’est inexorablement disséminée. Cependant, vers la fin des années 90, une nouvelle vague de performances compliquera les choses, ajoutant une dimension proprement biopolitique à la scène performative chinoise. Dans ce travail, nous essaierons d’élucider ce passage, en posant une distinction conceptuelle entre les performances du corps-soi et les performances du corps-chair.

2 Cette discussion de quelques unes de ces performances extrêmes, dont plusieurs ont été sévèrement condamnées pour leur insupportable cruauté, tient lieu sur fond d’une

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réflexion plus générale sur la nature de l’acte performatif et son inscription dans le contexte culturel chinois. Au fil de l’écriture, la question du rapport entre performance et politique s’est peu à peu constituée comme passage (particulièrement angoissant) sur la ligne de la forme de l’humain, suivant peut-être l’étonnement profond et maintes fois renouvelé que suscite le fait, à première vue banal, qu’en Chine, l’expression « art performatif » est généralement traduit par 行为艺术 ( xingwei yishu), qui signifie quelque chose comme « art relatif au comportement », ou « art béhavioral » (précisons qu’ailleurs en Asie de l’Est, on traduit généralement par 行动艺术 (xingdong yishu), littéralement action art). L’idée de comportement renvoie directement à la tradition confucéenne, pour laquelle toute conduite individuelle comporte une dimension rituelle qui exprime une certaine position dans l’ordre social. Gao Minglu a souligné avec beaucoup de clarté les implications sociopolitiques liées à ce choix terminologique : This traditional concept imparted to the Chinese performance art scene has inherently (or congenitally) a social significance. This social content is always present regardless of whether or not an individual performance artist attempts to express certain social content or not in his/her specific performance work.1 3 En traduisant « performatif » par « comportement » ou plutôt « conduite », les artistes chinois continentaux ont résolument signifié leur intention de confronter les règles régissant la conduite des corps dans l’espace public. Restant au plus près du mot xingwei, on pourrait le traduire par « démarche intentionnée » ou littéralement « démarche pour »; pensons par exemple à 人为renwei, qui souligne la qualité proprement humaine, et par extension, artificielle, d’un effort ou d’une entreprise. Wei implique un « en tant que » qui constitue un plan de représentation propre au comportement ou à la conduite humaine. Rapporté à xing, démarche, il en signifie le pour quoi.

4 En redoublant le plan de représentation éthique sur lequel se constitue l’humain, le xingwei yishu affirme haut et fort la contingence radicale de l’individualité, ce qui vient effectivement troubler une certaine idée de la cohésion ou « harmonie » sociale, spécialement en contexte chinois. Si on ajoute à cela l’immédiateté corporelle disruptive propre à la performance, on comprend aisément pourquoi elle est rapidement devenue un des moyens d’expression privilégiés pour la critique sociale en Chine : From Traditional Confucian ethics to the Cultural Revolution of the Maoist era to the current era of globalization, the behaviour of the individual has been continually seen as meaningless, albeit from different perspectives; thus the body may have been seen by the Chinese avant-garde as an active site of resistance to this constant obliteration of the self.2 5 Le rejet de l’art performatif par les institutions artistiques chinoises a également conduit à en faire un médium de choix pour les artistes voulant exprimer leur critique sociale. Cette censure a, ironiquement, contribué à donner une plus grande visibilité à cette forme d’art, qui jusqu’à tout récemment, était strictement interdite en Chine.

6 Le remarquable pragmatismede la traduction de « art performatif » par « art comportemental » apparaîtra peut-être réducteur à un lecteur occidental. Si elle permet de penser directement la dimension transgressive de l’art performatif, son va- et-vient subversif entre les sphères privée et publique et sa remise en question radicale des règles de transmission et de production culturelle, on peut par contre craindre qu’en moralisant excessivement l’acte performatif, elle fasse perdre de vue son idéalité

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événementielle – quelque chose comme sa détermination historique propre en tant que pratique artistique hypermoderne. Ne faudrait-il pas dès lors lui préférer l’expression 现场艺术 (xianchang yishu), art du « ici et maintenant » ou live art comme certains l’ont proposé?3 7 Discutant avec un ami chinois de mes recherches sur ce thème, il me raconta l’histoire d’un lettré du 3ème siècle après J.-C. dénommé Liu Ling, considéré comme un des « Sept sages de la forêt de bambou ». À une époque de grande turbulence politique, ces lettrés taoïstes ont choisi une vie retirée, en nature, affranchie des rites contraignants et des servitudes de la vie politique qui réglaient dans les moindres détails l'existence des lettrés chinois. Ils incarnent ainsi un idéal de spontanéité et de liberté individuelle qui a été très influent dans le monde des arts chinois, jusqu’à aujourd’hui. On n’a qu’à penser par exemple aux 5 films qui composent la série Sept intellectuels dans une forêt de bambou (2003-07) de Yang Fudong, qui réactualise ce mouvement taoïste dit de la « conversation pure » dans un contexte d'art contemporain. 8 Liu Ling s’est rendu célèbre pour avoir déclaré : « 我以天地为栋宇，屋室为裤衣。诸君何为入我裤中? » (traduction libre : « Le ciel et la terre sont ma maison, et cette chambre est mon pantalon. Messieurs, que faites-vous dans mes pantalons? ») Drapé dans l’univers, l’ivrogne-poète s’exhibe nonchalamment. Difficile de dire exactement ce qui a incité mon ami à me faire part de cette savoureuse anecdote. Est-ce parce qu’elle met en scène une nudité scandaleuse, laquelle en Chine est plus souvent qu’autrement associée à la performance?4 Ou serait-ce parce qu’elle présente un comportement qui à la fois ébranle et performe avec force poésie la situation intermédiaire de l’humain dans la cosmologie chinoise – l’humain comme trait d’union imaginaire entre le ciel et la terre, selon le principe du 天人感应 (tianren ganying)? On serait peut-être tenter de lui répondre avec la suffisance de celui qui s’adresse au non-initié : « Ceci n’est pas une performance. C’est un anachronisme, tout au plus », et de déplorer l’égarement auquel la traduction de « art performatif » par xingwei yishu a pu contribuer. Et, secrètement peut-être, retenir contre cet énergumène exhibitionniste de ne pas savoir aussi bien que nous, médianoïdes hypermodernes, ce que cela signifie, (s)’exposer. 9 Mais si ce n’était pas, au contraire, la définition même – l’institution esthétique – de l’art performatif qui viendrait elle-même problématisée dans ce rapprochement inusité entre des pratiques hypperréflexives hautement qualifiées et dites « performatives », et la boutade d’un mythique ivrogne-poète? Il y a une forte dose de conscience transcendantale qui couve dans le display performatif, sorte d’option spirituelle pro- analytique contemporaine où l’hyperréflexivité tient lieu d’éveil au corps dont on aurait trop longtemps négligé l’importance. Ce corps, entre-temps devenu le référent royal d’un certain art contemporain et l’objet d’une infinité d’études socioculturelles, ce corps qu’on se représente de manière performative pour d’autant mieux en « prendre conscience » et qui constitue ainsi l’ultime objet de l’hégémonie « consciensuelle » de notre époque, ce corps qui, paradoxalement, apparaît ainsi comme l’ultime avatar métaphysique qui n’en finit plus de nous hanter, ce corps trouve dans le contexte chinois une troublante réfraction dans les pratiques de soi d’inspiration bouddhiste et taoïste, ou, simplement, dans la pratique traditionnelle de la calligraphie – précisément parce que le « corps » n’y a jamais été « oublié ».5 Je dis troublante parce qu’elle donne lieu à une confusion qui semble assez répandue parmi les commentateurs de l’art performatif chinois. Commentant un passage du Zhuangzi où un artiste est reconnu comme tel par un seigneur en raison de son comportement à la fois méditatif et

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extravagant, le critique d’art chinois Fei Dawei s’exclame, assez naïvement il me semble : « Why is that even as early as 2000 years ago, behaviour and procedure were seen as « true art » rather than the technique of painting itself? »6Lorsque la conscience procédurale caractéristique de l’art performatif est assimilée à une approche taoïste du corps et de l’existence, il me semble que l’on risque de commettre un malheureux contresens.7 Non pas que l’action performative ne puisse comporter une forte dose méditative (le cas de Zhang Huan est certainement le plus éloquent à cet effet, comme nous aurons l’occasion de le constater); mais parce que l’art performatif, avec son intentionnalité et son pour quoi, institue nécessairement un plan de représentation qui me semble profondément étranger au devenir-imperceptible taoïste, lequel ne cherche vraisemblablement pas à se signifier – non pas en raison d’une hypothétique insuffisance historique, mais bien en fonction d’une orientation spirituelle radicalement opposée. Le rapport taoïste au corps vécu implique un régime d’activité étranger, et à la limite, hostile au display performatif, qu’on pourrait encore décrire comme une sorte de juste-au-corps métaphysique par sa manière de faire parfaitement coïncider un plan de représentation avec les limites corporelles d’un individu.8 Et encore : si le corps est effectivement au cœur de la pratique taoïste, ce n’est certainement pas en tant que matière d’expression, comme nous le rencontrons de manière paradigmatique dans certaines des œuvres que nous discuterons plus loin. 10 Au carrefour de la conception traditionnelle chinoise du corps rituel et de l’évolution récente de l’art performatif en Chine, nous posons donc deux questions, qui débordent largement ce contexte national : quels sont les enjeux impliqués dans l’expositionperformative d’une conduite humaine? Ou dans une optique plus biopolitique : que signifie exposer/dis-play (de) l’humain? Cette réflexion sur l’art performatif en Chine s’inscrira, en dernière analyse, sur fond d’un questionnement au croisement du biopolitique et de l’anthropogénétique, questionnement déjà bien présent dans de nombreuses œuvres que nous allons maintenant aborder.

Persistance – la performance comme action pure

Est-il possible de s’en tenir à la contre- effectuation d’un événement, simple représentation plane de l’acteur ou du danseur, tout en se gardant de la pleine effectuation qui caractérise la victime ou le vrai patient? Toutes ces questions accusent le ridicule du penseur (…) Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens

Évolution du contexte sociopolitique durant les années 90

11 Suite aux événements de la place Tiananmen, la situation de l’art expérimental en Chine est extrêmement précaire. Les artistes expérimentaux ne peuvent exposer leurs œuvres, et les revues d’art qui s’intéressent à leur travail sont étroitement contrôlées. Deux des plus grands critiques d’art chinois encore aujourd’hui, Gao Minglu et Li Xianting, qui à l’époque étaient respectivement les éditeurs en chef des revues Meishu bao (Fine arts newspaper) et Meishu (Fine arts), furent démis de leur fonction en 1989 et 1990. Au début des années 90, l’art expérimental en Chine apparaît au point mort.

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12 À partir de 1992-93, plusieurs des artistes qui relanceront la scène de l’art performatif en Chine vivent ensemble dans un petit village en périphérie de Beijing (East Beijing village). C’est une époque de profonds changements économiques, où la Chine accélère son entrée dans l’économie de marché et adopte les standards de la société de consommation. La libéralisation économique contraste fortement avec le contrôle qui continue de prévaloir sur la sphère politique et culturelle, créant une tension identitaire énorme qui se reflète inévitablement dans la production artistique de cette période. Cette situation schizophrénique donnera ainsi lieu à des pratiques performatives qui vont progressivement s’éloigner du modèle de performance comme action publique qui prédominait vers la fin des années 80, pour évoluer vers des pratiques qui se consacrent davantage à l’exploration du corps-soi et du corps- chair.Généralement, on peut faire l’hypothèse que la radicalisation de l’art performatif en Chine reflète la disparition progressive de la possibilité d’agir en tant que sujet symbolique dans l’espace public. L’usage du corps comme matière autonome d’expression et l’extrême cruauté qui va caractériser nombre de performances de cette période témoigneraient ainsi d’un procès général de réduction postpolitique de l’existence, lequel compromet les formes classiques de politisation du malaise socio- existentiel. 13 À première vue, ce cadre général d’interprétation s’applique plus particulièrement aux performances impliquant le corps-soi, c’est-à-dire celles où le corps individuel est volontairement soumis à des sévices extrêmes, et dont la valeur consiste dans la capacité du performeur à supporter la souffrance auto-infligée. Dans de tels cas, l’épreuve de la souffrance révèle un pouvoir individuel d’action inédit, qui vient défier les diktats du pouvoir. Pour Lesley Sanderson, The performance is a symbolic enactment of pain and suffering. (…) The value of the artistic gesture is in the fact that the artist chooses to put himself through the pain. This signals the authenticity of his intention and the artist’s need to comment on humanity, its suffering, and the lack of agency within real life situations. We interpret the willingness of the artist to take on the burden of suffering within the symbolic act of the performance as a heroic and significant act. It claims the potential of the individual’s agency to stand apart from the collective and demonstrate one’s accountability.9(Je souligne) 14 Cette description convient parfaitement aux performances de Yang Zhichao, Zhang Yuan et He Yunchang. Chacun à leur manière, ces trois artistes insistent sur la puissance individuelle d’action, ou plus précisément sur la valeur de persistance, qui est parfois soulignée par le caractère mythico-utopique et des efforts mis en scène (en particulier dans le cas de He Yunchang). Le caractère souvent héroïque des performances qui impliquent le corps-soi leur confère une valeur spécifiquement humaine qui contraste avec les installations et pratiques performatives qui utilisent le corps organique ou corps-chair comme matière autonome d’expression.10 Dans ce deuxième cas, le rapport expressiviste entre répression politique et performance ne s’applique plus qu’indirectement; et l’extrême cruauté mise en scène de relever d’une tentative passablement perverse de pousser à bout une froide logique biopolitique. D’une certaine manière, le défi de cet article consiste à marquer le seuil entre la performance entendue comme expression d’un malaise politico-existentiel et la performance comme acting-out d’une logique biopolitique.

15 Vers la fin des années 90, la pression se relâche sur le monde de l’art performatif, donnant lieu à une véritable éclosion de la discipline. Au mois de mai 1999, l’artiste Ma

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Liuming organise le China-Japan Performance Art exchange à Beijing, qui fut le premier événement international d’art performatif jamais tenu en sol chinois. Plusieurs rencontres internationales suivront, dont l’historique Fuck Off/不合作的方式 (bu hezuo de fangshi, « approche non-coopérative »), exposition satellite faisant partie de la Biennale de Shanghai de l’an 2000. Tous les artistes que nous allons étudier figurent dans le catalogue de l’exposition; il est par contre plus difficile de déterminer s’ils étaient tous au programme de l’exposition. Comme Berghuis l’a fait remarquer, il y a un écart considérable entre les œuvres qui ont été effectivement présentées et le catalogue de l’exposition, qui s’explique par l’autocensure ou « auto-inspection » (ziwo jiankong) effectuée par les commissaires de l’exposition.11 Berghuis ajoute également quelques remarques sur la réception occidentale de l’art contemporain chinois et sa tendance à reproduire l’opposition entre avant-garde et art « officiel », qui s’appliquerait difficilement à son avis dans le contexte chinois. Si un grand nombre de commentateurs semblent, comme lui, se satisfaire de cette critique interculturelle des ratés de la réception occidentale, notre approche consistera au contraire à approfondir le dialogue en proposant des contextes d’interprétation à la mesure des enjeux soulevés par ces œuvres si controversées. 16 La portée politique d’une exposition comme Fuck Off, même amputée par une « auto- inspection », reste indéniable. Le catalogue s’ouvre sur un texte signé par les deux commissaires de l’exposition, Ai Weiwei et Feng Boyi, texte qui donne le ton en insistant sur l’irréductibilité de l’art en rapport aux cercles de pouvoir : « Fuck off emphasis the independent and critical stance that is basic to art existence (…) What will last forever is the very uncoperativeness with any system of power discourse. »12La performance minimaliste de Ai Weiwei lui-même exprime l’esprit d’irrévérence générale qui caractérise l’exposition : deux photos juxtaposées nous montre l’artiste en train de faire un doigt d’honneur à la Maison blanche et à la Cité interdite respectivement. Les photos sont accompagnées d’un extrait d’un discours de Mao Zedong intitulé La tâche de la culture révolutionnaire dans cette période historique particulière : Those comrades who are firm and determined in today’s ideological struggles and those who have no fear of power and no compromise with vulgarization will be the hope of tomorrow’s new culture.13 17 Plus habitué aux parodies grinçantes du political pop et du réalisme cynique, on sera peut-être tenté de voir dans cette citation un clin d’œil ironique au camarade Mao. Mais force pourtant est de constater un singulier parallèle entre le volontarisme révolutionnaire et des pratiques performatives extrêmes résolument « non- coopératives » et déterminées à ne pas se conformer aux diktats du pouvoir en place.

Yang Zhichao: a-charné

That sense of realness makes me believe that performers must be early marxist revolutionnaries. Yang Zhichao 18 Yang Zhichao (1963) a été décrit comme un révolutionnaire qui tente de mettre en évidence certains enjeux sociaux par l’entremise de ses performances. À défaut de se démarquer par sa qualité poétique, la démarche de Yang est d’une remarquable cohérence et d’une limpidité incontestable. Le caractère extrême de ses performances

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exprime un implacable réalisme, une volonté absolue de littéralement s’inscrire dans le réel. De là que l’expérience de la douleur soit un élément essentiel de son œuvre, et plus encore, la force de volonté nécessaire pour la surmonter. « Seul l’expérience personnelle de la douleur me permet d’accéder à des intuitions qui ne peuvent être atteintes sur le plan de l’abstraction. La douleur est une manière d’accéder à un autre sentiment d’exister. »14

19 Chez Yang Zhichao, cette recherche d’un rapport brut au réel par l’expérience de la souffrance ne constitue cependant pas une fin en soi. Chacune de ses performances exprime une critique sociale forte et ciblée. Dans Fort Jiayu (1999-2000), Yang se fait admettre dans un hôpital psychiatrique d’une petite ville du Gansu, sa lointaine province natale. Pour ce faire, il n’aura fallu que le témoignage d’un proche (en l’occurrence, sa sœur) et un paiement pour couvrir les dépenses du séjour, qui durera un mois. Dès son admission, Yang recevra un traitement aux électrochocs de plus d’une demi-heure, qui sera complété par l’administration de fortes doses de sédatifs qui conduiront finalement l’artiste à douter de sa propre condition mentale. Durant son séjour, Yang a tenu un journal qui relate son expérience et a été secrètement filmé et photographié par son beau-frère.15 20 La même année, et peu de temps après son arrivée à Beijing, Yang fera marquer au fer rouge son numéro d’identification personnel sur son épaule droite par Ai Weiwei (Iron, 2000). Certains ont souligné la violence du choc entre le monde rural et le monde urbain pour expliquer cette performance. En réduisant volontairement son corps à une pure surface d’inscription du symbole par excellence du dispositif gouvernemental, il me semble pour ma part que cette performance doive être lue comme une tentative radicale de réappropriation de son propre corps, une sorte de contre-effectuation primaire de la gestion biopolitique des populations à laquelle il s’est volontairement soumis lors de son séjour traumatique en asile psychiatrique. 21 Un mois plus tard, Yang participe à l’exposition Fuck off avec une performance qui le rend célèbre. Dans Planting grass (2000), un chirurgien-jardinier fait deux entailles de 1cm x 1cm dans son épaule gauche sans anesthésie, pour ensuite y planter deux gerbes d’herbe recueillies précédemment sur les berges de la rivière Suzhou, à proximité du lieu de l’opération. À première vue, ce geste semble passablement énigmatique. Dans la foulée de Iron, on pourrait encore une fois le lire comme une métaphore biopolitique, le corps de Yang apparaissant comme simple substrat pour la croissance végétale. Ce premier niveau d’interprétation ne suffit cependant pas pour rendre compte de la dimension proprement spirituelle que Yang cherche à donner à sa démarche artistique : Pour moi, l’art a d’emblée une dimension religieuse. Je pense par exemple à ces moines bouddhistes en Chine, qui font face à la difficile tâche de rester fidèle à leurs croyances malgré la dure répression à laquelle ils sont soumis. En mettant leurs vies au service de la coexistence pacifique et en étant prêt à mourir si nécessaire, ils nous donnent le pouvoir d’être fidèle à nos propres idéaux. Ce qui se produit derrière les murs des monastères peut être porté à l’attention du public par les artistes.16 22 Si l’art a d’emblée une dimension spirituelle pour Yang, c’est au sens d’un croire qui s’actualise directement dans des pratiques réelles et qui donne une mesure à l’existence. Cette insistance sur le caractère spirituel de sa pratique se vérifie tout particulièrement dans Planting grass. Questionné sur le sens de cette violence auto- infligée, il répondra : « L’engourdissement spirituel est aussi une forme de violence ».

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La métaphore de la passivité végétative prend ainsi une tournure insoupçonnée, directement adressée à l’assistance : In a senseless atmosphere where everyone is temporarily laughing and joking, this method of seeking extremes definitely has the effect of sobering people up. You certainly can’t let a whole nation of people go around grinning like idiots.17 23 L’exigence de réel qui traverse l’œuvre de Yang et la mise en jeu radicale de son existence à travers ses performances révèlent ici leur dimension conversive et parrésiaque.

24 Dans sa performance Earth (2004), l’offensive spirituelle menée par Yang semble se renverser pour prendre une dimension proprement cosmologique. Comme dans Hide (2002), où il s’agissait d’introduire par chirurgie (sans anesthésie toujours) un objet dans sa cuisse, l’œuvre consiste en l’implantation d’un élément étranger à l’intérieur du corps, plus précisément un morceau de terre introduit dans le haut de son estomac. Dans cette performance, Yang s’éloigne visiblement de toute critique sociale pour faire intervenir son corps comme témoin direct de l’incommensurable écart qui sépare l’homme de la nature. La tragique contingence de l’existence humaine vient ainsi symbolisée par une performance mettant à l’épreuve la différence organique propre de l’humain. À l’ère des biotechnologies et de la lecture toujours plus fine des partitions de la nature, cette performance a quelque chose de profondément primitiviste. Serait-ce une barbare tentative au scalpel de réfuter le « principe céleste » ou le jugement de Dieu en se faisant un corps sans organes? Ou serait-ce plutôt l’expression d’un volontarisme déjanté cherchant à isoler aussi radicalement que possible la forme même de l’humain? L’intérêt de Yang ne semble pas tant porter sur l’aspect technologique de la performance que sur la dimension religieuse des aspirations intimes de l’humain : « Je sais que ce désir de combler l’écart entre l’homme et l’univers ne sera jamais entièrement réalisé. (…) Même si j’accepte la douleur, mon corps rejette la terre. Tout de même, c’est simplement humain que de vouloir combler cet écart. »18 À vouloir obstinément exposer les limites de sa chair, Yang, littéralement,s’a-charne; il est humain, trop humain.

Le devenir-mythique de He Yunchang

25 C’est une histoire que tous les Chinois connaissent, et que l’on enseigne très tôt et fort à propos à ceux qui auraient un jour décidé de s’atteler à la tâche d’étudier le mandarin.19 C’est l’histoire de « Yugong qui déplace les montagnes », « 愚公移山 » (Yu gong yi shan), un vieux fou qui décida un jour de déplacer la montagne qui obstruait l’entrée de sa maison à la sueur de son front et qui, à force d’une persévérance étendue sur plusieurs générations, finit par y arriver. Les performances de He appartiennent elles aussi à cet univers fantastique. Certaines de ses performances rejouent des mythes classiques de la culture chinoise : on pensera par exemple à Tenir promesse (2003), œuvre pour laquelle il emprisonne sa main dans un bloc de ciment durant 24 heures. Le titre de l’œuvre renvoie à l’histoire d’un rendez-vous manqué sous un pont entre un garçon nommé Wei et une fille nommée Qi. Wei se présenta à l’heure prévue malgré une forte tempête. La rivière était fort agitée, Wei s’accrocha à une des colonnes du pont et continua d’attendre, pour finalement en mourir. On ne s’étonnera pas non plus qu’il ait lui aussi tenté de Déplacer une montagne (1999), ou de couper une rivière en

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deux avec un couteau et le flot de son sang (Dialogue avec l’eau, 1999), ou encore de déplacer le soleil (Soleil doré, 1999).

26 Le ciment revient à plusieurs reprises comme élément auquel opposer sa force de volonté. Dans Un sac de ciment (2004), c’est toute l’industrie de la construction chinoise, laquelle accapare près de 70% de la production mondiale de ciment, qui se trouve ainsi mise au défi. Attaché par les pieds à une grue, He Yunchang déplace des sacs de ciment d’un point A à un point B, pendant qu’une grue l’imite en respectant le même rythme. Dans Au-delà de Tianshan (2002), He pousse un énorme bloc de ciment dans la direction d’un canon qu’il a lui-même fabriqué et qui fait exploser 1,25 kg de poudre à canon, donnant lieu à une explosion spectaculaire. Dans Casting (2004), il s’enferme durant 24 heures dans un bloc de ciment. Dans Ordre d’un général (2005) enfin, il trempe son corps jusqu’à la hauteur de sa poitrine dans un bloc de ciment encore liquide. La performance durera 1 heure, pendant laquelle le ciment durcira lentement, et He Yunchang s’en sortira avec d’innombrables coupures sur tout le corps. Ces coupures rappellent la manière dont Canetti décrit le mode d’action psychologique du mot d’ordre : ils se plantent comme des aiguillons dans la chair de ceux qui les reçoivent, ne laissant à ceux-ci d’autre choix que de les passer le plus vite possible à d’autres. Tout se passe comme si par cette performance, He cherchait à concrétiser l’interruption de ce processus de cimentification social, en résistant jusqu’aux limites du supportable à l’exécution de « l’ordre du général ». L’immédiateté corporelle de la performance en fait une forme d’art particulièrement efficace pour court-circuiter, au moins symboliquement, la vicariété intrinsèque du pouvoir, c’est-à-dire, la fonction de représentation et de délégation essentielle à sa consolidation. 27 Contrairement à Yang, l’essentiel chez He ne consiste pas dans le fait de la blessure, mais plutôt dans la création d’une situation de corps-à-corps avec une puissance matérielle donnée, confrontation qui vient mettre en valeur la force de résistance d’une volonté individuelle. Cette affirmation souffre toutefois d’une notable exception : dans Test de vision (2003), He fixera son regard sur un ensemble d’ampoules de 10 000 watts accrochés à un miroir pendant une durée d’une heure, ce qui lui causera des dommages irréparables à la vue. On peut également penser à sa performance aux chutes Niagara (2005), où, équipé d’une corde d’escalade, He brava une température de 3 degrés Celsius et s’accrocha à la paroi rocheuse. La performance fut interrompue par l’intervention des policiers, sans quoi il aurait bien pu mourir de froid. 28 Comme dans le cas de Yang, les performances de He exigent une grande endurance physique et une forte détermination. Le conflit instauré entre le corps et l’environnement extérieur devient une manière d’éprouver la puissance du soi. Plutôt que de rabattre l’existence humaine sur sa limite physique, les performances de He instaurent un plan de représentation à mi-chemin entre l’extrême dureté du réel et la puissance du mythe. La performance entrouvre une dimension mythique, d’où émergeront des forces pour affronter l’intraitable réel. « Rien ne peut nous empêcher de recourir à une imagination sans limite lorsque nous sommes confrontés à des circonstances adverses », dit-il, ajoutant que cet esprit utopique lui est inspiré par la remarquable détermination qu’il trouve chez les gens défavorisés. Les performances de He s’articulent ainsi comme des « contes pour adultes » selon sa propre expression, qui mettent en scène la puissance de la volonté individuelle dans le but de « créer de l’espace pour l’imagination »20. L’importance accordée à la vertu de persistance dans la

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culture chinoise trouve ainsi dans l’œuvre de He une illustration exemplaire – à hauteur d’homme.

Zhang Huan en méditation

À l’intérieur, je suis un bouddhiste; à l’extérieur, je suis un artiste. Zhang Huan 29 La démarche artistique de Zhang Huan est riche et complexe, travaillée de l’intérieur par une forte exigence spirituelle qui s’exprimera aussi bien dans l’extrême ascétisme des premières performances que dans les œuvres monumentales plus récentes qui témoignent de sa conversion au bouddhisme. Sa première performance publique est assez peu connue et s’intitule Ange (1993) : sur un grand drap blanc étendu sur le sol à l’entrée du Musée national d’art de Beijing, il lance une jarre remplie de peinture rouge sang et de fragments de poupée. Cette performance, réalisée à une époque où toute performance était interdite, conduira à la fermeture de l’exposition et l’obligera à payer une amende de 2000 Yuans. La critique politique relativement explicite contenue dans cette œuvre (référence à la politique de natalité chinoise et/ou au massacre de la jeunesse étudiante de place Tiananmen) contraste fortement avec l’évolution ultérieure de son travail, ce qui explique pourquoi cette première performance est souvent négligée.

30 C’est au sein de la communauté d’artistes du East Beijing Village que Zhang fera sa marque, avec une série de performances extrêmes qui ont fait forte impression. Dans 12 mètres (1994), il s’enduit de miel et de sauce à poisson et s’installe dans une toilette publique du village. Pendant près d’une heure, son corps est envahi par une nuée de mouches qui ne le quitteront que lorsqu’il se sera complètement immergé dans un étang pollué situé à proximité des toilettes. La description quasi-phénoménologique de cette performance offerte par Zhang nous plonge d’emblée dans la profondeur méditative de son travail : I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight. Life seemed to be leaving me far in the distance. I had no concrete thought except that my mind was completely empty. I could only feel my body, more and more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes, lips, ears, forehead, every part of me. I could feel them eating the liquid on my body. Some were stuck but did not stop eating. I could even tell that they were more interested in the fish liquid than the honey because there were more flies on the left part of my body, where that liquid was. The very concept of life was then for me the simple experience of the body.21 31 En regard de cette performance, Zhang rappellera également qu’elle n’a fait que refléter l’expérience ordinaire des gens qui doivent quotidiennement fréquenter ce lieu public. Cette insistance sur le caractère ordinaire de l’existence est à la source du travail de Zhang, marquant dès ses débuts une proximité avec la conception bouddhique du sacré comme banal quotidien. Mais de toute évidence, il est difficile de nier que dans ses premières performances, c’est plutôt l’élément cathartique qui prime. Dans 65 kg (1994), Zhang se suspend 3 mètres au-dessus du sol avec l’aide de chaînes. Il a préalablement inséré deux tubes de plastique dans ses bras, desquels s’écoule son sang, qui tombe sur une plaque de métal chauffée par un brûleur. La puanteur du sang brûlé s’imprègne dans les matelas qui couvrent les murs de la pièce, ajoutant au dégoût et à l’impression d’enfermement éprouvé par l’audience. Cet exercice masochiste en grand

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style s’intitule 65 kg, en référence au poids de Zhang avant la performance. Cette référence mathématique à la pure corporalité (12 mètres était aussi signé d’une même numérale impersonnalité) nous renvoie d’autant plus certainement à l’idée de performance comme extraction de vie nue. Parlant de 12 mètres et de 65 kg, il dira : « Dans mes performances, j’essaie de faire l’expérience du corps et de la réalité – survie. Je méprise l’aspect performatif de mes œuvres. » C’est dans la mise en survie performative que Zhang explore le rapport entre le corps et l’esprit, pour ainsi atteindre à la cruauté de l’existence : In performance, I try to let my mind leave my body and forget the surrounding conditions. At that moment, I cannot feel any pain. Yet, the mind cannot really leave the body. Instead, it keeps going back to the body. And when the mind returns to the body, there comes an ever stronger feeling of the body’s real situation. It makes you more conscious of the cruelty of the reality and makes you feel more uncomfortable. But it is not the physical pain in the physical body, but rather the spiritual uneasiness.22(Je souligne) 32 Le désir de cruauté de Zhang, ce désir de faire une expérience corporelle immédiate et fulgurante du réel, demeure inscrit dans une démarche spirituelle orientée par la recherche d’un effet cathartique, sur lequel il revient à de nombreuses reprises et qui compte davantage à ses yeux que l’endurance physique même : I try to experience the relationship between the physical body and the spiritual body in particularly designated circumstances. I want to make this experience clearer and deeper in some radical situations. Not just for the sake of testing the endurance of my physical body under external pressure, but rather through this process of endurance a deeper panic in the spirit might be released, though perhaps just temporarily.23(Je souligne) 33 Cette violente quête cathartique définit un premier temps dans l’œuvre de Zhang. Sur le plan existentiel, elle préfigure vraisemblablement, à quelques dix années de distance, sa conversion au bouddhisme. Entre-temps, le travail de Zhang acquiert une remarquable dimension poétique. Ajouter un mètre à une montagne inconnue (1995), œuvre à laquelle plusieurs artistes du East Beijing Village ont participé mais dont il réclame la paternité, rejoue le thème de la vie nue avec une grande sobriété. L’accumulation des corps en une pyramide anonyme sur le sommet d’une colline des environs de Beijing a quelque chose de profondément émouvant. De même avec Augmenter le niveau d’eau d’un étang (1997), une autre œuvre collective qui met en scène une quarantaine d’hommes, pour la plupart des travailleurs migrants. Une grande force tranquille émane de ces singularités quelconques ex-posées sur le seuil indécidable de la vie nue. La puissance d’expression de cette œuvre repose là encore sur le fait que les corps ne valent qu’en vertu de leur simple volume dans l’espace, ainsi que sur la tension dynamique entre l’élément aquatique yin, et ces innombrables corps d’homme qui se tiennent debout, l’eau à mi-corps, face à l’objectif.

34 En 1998, Zhang réalise 1/2 (fig. 1), dont le titre exprime la bipartition entre corps et esprit. Zhang se couvre successivement d’une côte de porc et de caractères chinois inscrits par les spectateurs présents. Cette performance au seuil de la vie organique animale et de l’inscription culturelle préfigure la quête identitaire qui va caractériser ses œuvres à venir. Quelques mois plus tard en effet, Zhang s’installe à New York. Il y restera jusqu’en 2006, date où coïncident grosso modo sa conversion au bouddhisme et son retour en Chine, à Shanghai plus précisément. À New York, Zhang aimait à dire que son studio, c’est son cerveau; à Shanghai en revanche, il s’installe dans un immense entrepôt qui lui laisse, ainsi qu’à son équipe de production, tout le loisir de créer

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d’immenses sculptures souvent inspirées par la figure majestueuse de Bouddha. Deux des œuvres les plus fascinantes de Zhang ont été créées peu après son arrivée à New York et témoignent du choc culturel qu’il a subi. Dans Pèlerinage : fengshui à New York (1998), une performance présentée dans le cadre de la célèbre exposition « Inside Out » consacrée à l’art contemporain chinois, Zhang Huan accomplit un rituel de prière bouddhiste avant de s’étendre durant six longues minutes sur un lit de glace de style antique chinois, avec des chiens attachés aux quatre coins. La prière bouddhique et la référence au fengshui, cet art traditionnel de l’habitation chinois désormais si populaire en Occident, soulignent à la fois les origines culturelles de Zhang et les efforts entrepris pour s’orienter dans son nouveau milieu. Le choc des cultures est dramatiquement symbolisé par sa tentative de rester couché sur le lit de glace. La chaleur du corps de Zhang, son brûlant désir de s’établir dans une nouvelle culture suffiront-t-ils à faire fondre le lit des traditions duquel il est issu? La position est intenable. Autour, les chiens aboient. Ils représentent, selon les dires de Zhang, la diversité culturelle de New York… Gao Minglu offre une très belle analyse de ce dernier élément symbolique, qui donne une dimension insoupçonnée à cette représentation agonique du choc des cultures: In China, he was like a human animal, and because almost everyone had nearly identical physical features and attitudes, he was able to realize in a very profound way the differences and also the relationship between his own animal-like human body and the human spirit. But in the West humans were cultural animals.24(Je souligne) 35 Le problème de l’inscription culturelle reviendra sous diverses formes dans les premières œuvres new-yorkaises de Zhang. Il aura tendance à s’exprimer dans des formes moins extrêmes sur le plan corporel, comme si, effectivement, il ne s’agissait plus tant de démontrer la puissance spirituelle de l’humain que de laisser voir la situation du corps lost in translation. Dans Arbre de famille (2000), trois calligraphes tracent un jour durant des caractères chinois sur le visage de Zhang, jusqu’à le noircir complètement. Parmi les nombreuses inscriptions, histoires traditionnelles, poèmes, noms, il demande qu’on écrive sur son front – et ce n’est certes pas un hasard – la fameuse histoire de Yukong le vieux fou qui réussit à déplacer une montagne. Histoire de persistance. Action pure. Est-ce que Zhang cherche par cette performance à faire corps avec les codes-sources de sa culture d’origine, comme le titre de la performance semble l’indiquer? Le titre d’une œuvre comme Keep Rooting (2003) par exemple, et plus généralement, l’importance croissante que prendra la tradition bouddhique dans son travail, nous donne toutes les raisons de le croire. Zhang se peint le visage : c’est un artiste. À l’intérieur…

36 Une autre lecture de cette œuvre reste possible, malgré la volonté explicite d’enracinement de Zhang, qui nous permettrait de traverser le plan de représentation identitaire. Une lecture anti-généraliste qui, au lieu d’insister sur le rôle fondateur du signifiant culturel comme marqueur comportemental et puissance de visagéification, mettrait plutôt l’accent sur sa contre-effectuation performative. Il y a un visage, plan d’inscription bioculturel, qui progressivement s’efface sous la prolifération de signes, lesquels s’annulent mutuellement jusqu’à ne plus signifier que la sur-face du langage. Et il y un corps, un corps désormais sans visage, un corps qui persiste et signe : il y a du langage, il y a la vie; et il y a une idéalité performative où l’individu se saisit comme événement.

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***

Le problème est donc de savoir comment l’individu pourrait dépasser sa forme et son lien syntaxique avec un monde pour atteindre à l’universelle communication des événements (…) Il faudrait que l’individu se saisisse lui-même comme événement. (…) Chaque individu serait comme un miroir pour la condensation des singularités, chaque monde une distance dans le miroir. Tel est le sens ultime de la contre-effectuation.25

Figure 1: Zhang Huan, 1/2, performance, 1998

Du corps-soi au corps-chair

Humain : tu n’es représenté ni par ton corps ni par ton cadavre. Peng Yu 37 L’a-charnement de Yang Zhichao, le devenir-mythique de He Yunchang et les catharsis spirituelles de Zhang Huan constituent autant de démarches dont l’exigence première consiste en un dépassement de soi dans la performance. Le corps y est mis en jeu de manière telle à mettre en valeur la force de volonté individuelle et son potentiel héroïque de résistance. Bien sûr, le corps y est à l’honneur; mais le rapport souffrance- ascétisme qui sous-tend ces performances constitue, ultimement, une affirmation de la puissance de l’esprit humain, ou encore de la force morale propre d’un individu comme il est commun de dire.

38 Quelque chose de sensiblement différent est en jeu dans cet autre courant d’art extrême que nous allons maintenant aborder et qui figurait lui aussi au programme de l’exposition Fuck off. À peu près à la même époque, c’est-à-dire vers la fin des années 90, émerge une série d’œuvres qui, plutôt que de mettre à l’épreuve la forme sensible

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de l’humain, cherche plutôt à en questionner la définition même. Dans Proches parents (1996) par exemple, Feng Weidong s’immerge dans un aquarium en compagnie des cadavres de 32 canards, poulets et oies et de 60 livres d’intestin de porc. Le titre de l’œuvre souligne une volonté d’interroger la différence entre l’humain et l’animal qu’on retrouvera dans de nombreuses œuvres subséquentes. Le statut de la corporalité humaine est également radicalement mis en cause par l’usage de la chair humaine comme matière autonome d’expression. La performance-vidéo Arc-en-ciel (1998) de Xu Zhen apparaît comme un cas liminaire qui donne un premier aperçu de la manière dont la chair vient isolée en tant qu’élément expressif propre, marquant ainsi une distance avec les performances extrêmes impliquant le corps-soi décrites précédemment. La vidéo, d’une durée de 4 minutes, montre le dos nu d’un individu anonyme dont la couleur change graduellement à mesure qu’il se fait fouetter. Dans cette œuvre, ce n’est pas tant la capacité de supporter la douleur que la réaction physiologique de la peau battue qui se constitue en valeur d’expression. 39 Deux expositions tenues à Beijing un peu avantFuck offmarquent l’émergence de ce nouveau courant artistique : Post-sensibility : Alien bodies and Delusion(1999)(Hòu ganxìng: yìxíng yu wàngxiang) et Infatuation with injury(2000)(Duì shanghai de míliàn). Ces deux expositions se distinguent par la présence de nombreuses œuvres impliquant l’usage de cadavres d’humains et d’animaux, au point que plusieurs critiques parleront de l’émergence d’une « école du cadavre » ainsi que d’une fascination pour le meat art dans l’art d’avant-garde chinois. Parmi les œuvres les plus célèbres de ces expositions reproduites dans le catalogue de Fuck off, on trouve celles du couple Sun Yuan et Peng Yu. L’installation Miel(1999) de Sun Yuan (fig. 2) est composée d’un visage de vieillard émergeant d’un lit de glace, sur lequel est lové un bébé mort-né. Une grande sérénité émane de la scène, qui nous fait presqu’oublier qu’il s’agit de cadavres. Selon Sun Yuan, cette œuvre évoque « un acte d’amour » : « le bébé pose sa joue contre le front du vieillard. Il quête le lien d’amour26 ». PourLes Corps connectés (2000) (fig. 3), Sun Yuan et Peng Yu effectuent une transfusion sanguine à deux bébés mort-nés. On voit le sang couler hors de la bouche des bébés et se répandre sur leur corps. Dans Huile d’humain (2000) (fig. 4) enfin, Peng Yu semble vouloir communiquer avec le cadavre d’un jeune enfant en lui injectant patiemment de l’huile d’humain. La sollicitude témoignée aux jeunes cadavres dans ces deux performances est profondément perturbante. Comme si le lien social, l’humanité qui nous lie à autrui était violemment exposée pour elle- même, isolée et réduite à un flot de sang et d’huile ; comme si le fait de soigner des cadavres, plutôt que de témoigner d’un souci pour le prochain, avait pour effet de profaner ce qui nous unit concrètement aux autres vivants. L’indistinction entre les vivants et les morts introduite par l’usage de cadavres humains nous amène sur un seuil où la vie humaine se voit systématiquement rabattue sur sa dimension biologique. Ces performances accomplissent l’isolation radicale du fait relationnel humain – en chinois, on pensera à 仁, ren, la vertu d’humanité, caractère composé du radical de l’homme et du chiffre 2, suggérant qu’il n’est d’humanité qu’en relation. 40 Quelque chose de l’ordre du malaise issu de cette indistinction biopolitique et de l’effet de mise en suspension qu’elle engendre sur le plan existentiel me semble pouvoir être lu dans cette définition de la post-sensibilité proposée par Qiu Zhijie, co-commissaire de l’exposition du même nom : « post-sensibilité est le sentiment de doute à propos du lien de sang qui te lie à tes parents, et le sentiment que n’importe qui sur la rue est pareil à toi. » Déracinement familial, expérience d’une sorte d’anonymat urbain : la description de la post-sensibilité n’aurait-elle pas quelque chose de profondément

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bloomesque? Ne trouve-t-on pas l’expression d’une violence de cet ordre dans la performance vidéo de Xu Zhen brillamment intitulée But I don’t need anything (1998) ( 而不需要什么, (er bu xuyao shenme), où un chat préalablement étranglé à mort est violemment battu sur le sol pendant 48 longues minutes? 41 L’usage de la chair humaine et les nombreux cas d’extrême cruauté envers les animaux dans l’art extrême chinois de ces dernières années ont souvent été lu comme une « metaphor for what flows raw, foetic and barbaric beneath the carapace of civilization. »27 Plusieurs sont également prompts à souligner la perte de repères moraux due à la destruction du cadre de valeurs traditionnel dans la société chinois post-maoïste. Je ne crois pas qu’aucune explication moraliste ou humaniste de ce genre ne soit en mesure de rendre compte de la puissance expressive propre d’œuvres parmi les plus radicales jamais réalisées sur la scène mondiale. Il ne s’agit certainement pas d’un défaut de civilisation, ou d’un retour à la barbarie originelle qui menacerait constamment de ressurgir des tréfonds de nos âmes policées, comme si la Chine avait été, pendant quelques années, le maillon faible du système éthico-civilisationnel mondial par où se seraient échappées des forces primitives et indomptées. Au contraire, il me semble qu’il faille lire dans ce foisonnement de performances extrêmes profanant l’idée d’humanité sur fond organique pur quelque chose de très actuel et de très réfléchi – quelque chose comme un acting-out d’une logique biopolitique intrinsèquement liée à l’intégration dans la sphère capitaliste globale.28 En guise de conclusion à ce travail, nous allons essayer de compléter cette réflexion sur le rapport entre ce type de performance et la question du biopolitique et de la vie nue par l’entremise d’une analyse détaillée de l’œuvre de Zhu Yu.

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Figure 2 : Sun Yuan, Miel, installation, 1999

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Figure 3 :Sun Yuan et Peng Yu, Corps connectés, performance, 2000

Figure 4 : Peng Yu,Huile d’humain, performance, 2000

De la performance comme extraction de vie nue: le cas Zhu Yu

Puisqu’on a pu « échanger ses fils pour les manger », on peut échanger n’importe quoi, manger n’importe qui. Lu Xun, Le journal d’un fou 42 L’œuvre de Zhu Yu est sans doute l’une des plus nihilistes de toute l’histoire de l’art. En effet, rares sont les démarches artistiques qui sont allées aussi loin dans la mise à nu et la déqualification de la vie humaine. La radicalité de son œuvre réside dans une tentative systématique pour rabattre l’idéalité de l’humain sur sa corporalité propre. Cette réduction « matérialiste » classique conditionne l’ensemble de sa démarche et explique l’omniprésence de la chair dans son travail, qu’elle soit humaine ou animale, vivante ou cadavérique. Mais en fait, il serait plus exact de dire que, malgré ce que l’on serait tenté de croire, sa matière première d’expression ne consiste pas tant en de la chair proprement dite, mais en des extraits « d’essence humaine » soigneusement prélevés à même le composé fictionnel humain. Le geste performatif de Zhu Yu – son display profanatoire – est en effet empreint d’une fascination morbide pour le réel de la science, celui que l’on découpe au scalpel et qui se déchire à belles dents. Pour Zhu Yu, l’humanité n’est qu’une fiction, qu’il a un jour décidé de réduire à néant par une sorte d’ acting out biopolitique primaire, qu’il a opéré en tant qu’authentique « homme sans contenu »29, maître ès extracteur de vie nue.

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43 Si la démarche profanatrice de Zhu Yu est somme toute relativement simple et univoque, force est de constater que sa réception demeure, encore aujourd’hui, largement insatisfaisante, cantonnée qu’elle est à la dimension juridico-morale du scandale qu’elle a provoqué. Qu’on me pardonne donc ce rapide aparté autour du concept de vie nue, lequel me permettra, dans un deuxième temps, de situer l’œuvre de Zhu Yu dans le contexte biopolitique qui lui est propre.

Qu’est-ce que la vie nue?

44 Le concept de vie nue apparaît une première fois dans la célèbre « Critique de la violence » (1921) de Walter Benjamin, où celui-ci s’en prend au dogme qui affirme le caractère sacré de la vie: «fausse et basse est la proposition selon laquelle l’existence se situerait plus haut que l’existence juste, si par existence on entend seulement le simple fait de vivre [en allemand bloß Leben, «vie nue»].» 30 C’est avec Homo sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (1995) du philosophe italien Giorgio Agamben que le concept de vie nue devient un incontournable de la philosophie politique contemporaine. Par définition, la vie nue est abstraite: elle est le fruit d’une extraction. En ce sens, la vie nue ne désigne pas un simple état de nature, comme certains ont parfois tendance à le croire, mais doit toujours être pensée comme le résultat d’un processus par lequel se fonde un pouvoir souverain et hiérarchique. «La vie nue, dit par exemple Agamben, habite dans le corps biologique de chaque être vivant»31, ajoutant: «Elle est un produit de la machine biopolitique et non quelque chose qui lui préexiste.»32 Dans cette optique, le concept de vie nue permet d’identifier un plan où la consistance humaine est pensée à l’intersection de la souveraineté étatique et de la biologie.

45 Comme chez Benjamin, le concept de vie nue chez Agamben suppose une distinction qualitative qui renvoie à l’idée d’une vie plus pleine, qui résiste à la violence souveraine: c’est l’idée d’une forme-de-vie, c’est-à-dire «une vie qui ne peut jamais être séparée de sa forme, une vie dont il n’est jamais possible d’isoler quelque chose comme une vie nue».33 Dans les traits d’union immanents à l’expression «forme-de-vie» se joue une pensée très complexe de l’image, et c’est sans doute là qu’il faut, en définitive, chercher la puissance politique inédite de la pensée d’Agamben. «L’image est le lieu, écrit Agamben, où le sujet se dépouille de sa mythique consistance psychosomatique»34, signifiant par là que l’ultime consistance de la vie humaine doit être cherchée sur un plan non pas biologique, mais imaginal. En somme, l’unité humaine élémentaire n’est pas le corps ou l’individu en chair et en os, mais la forme-de-vie, chargée d’images. C’est sur fond de cette pensée de l’image et de la forme-de-vie que le caractère pseudo- transgressif de l’œuvre de Zhu Yu pourra apparaître sous son jour propre, en marge des débats qu’elle a suscités concernant l’autonomie de l’art, les droits de la personne et les limites de la moralité publique. Toute la démarche de Zhu Yu peut ainsi être conçue comme une tentative de mise à l’épreuve de la consistance de « l’humain », interprétée en termes biopolitiques.

Science et profanation

46 Deux éléments structurent l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Zhu Yu: son goût marqué pour la profanation, et le rapport étroit qu’il entretient avec la science médicale, tant sur le plan pratique qu’épistémologique. Une des œuvres les plus intéressantes de Zhu Yu

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constitue sans contredit son installation intitulée Théologie de poche (1999) (袖珍神学, xiuzhen shenxué) (fig.5), présentée dans le cadre de l’exposition Post-sensibilité. Au plafond, un bras d’humain est suspendu à un crochet de métal qui rappelle ceux utilisé dans les boucheries. Le bras tient une corde qui gît en larges et multiples boucles sur le plancher, couvrant toute l’étendue de la pièce. Le fait que la corde ne se rattache à rien et qu’elle s’accumule désordonnément sur le sol suffit à créer un fort sentiment d’angoisse. La subversion de l’iconographie chrétienne de la main tendue par les cieux est efficace et sans appel : l’effet d’abandon divin est immédiat.

47 L’instrumentalisation de la métaphore religieuse caractérise également Joyeuses Pâques (2001) (复活节的快乐, Fuhuojie de kuaile) (fig. 6), une performance présentée dans le cadre du festival international Dakai d’art performatif de Chengdu (Sichuan). Zhu Yu planifie la mise sous anesthésie d’un porc et son opération littéralement à cœur ouvert afin d’exposer le cœur battant dans sa cavité, avant de refermer la plaie. Zhu Yu avait, semble-t-il, déjà fait un test auparavant dans une académie d’agriculture de Beijing, et le porc avait survécu à l’opération, faisant de lui un « ressuscité » selon ses propres termes, jouant ainsi sur la traduction chinoise du mystère chrétien – 复活fù huo, « retour à la vie »). Malheureusement, le porc utilisé lors de la performance n’aura pas la même chance. En raison d’une dose insuffisante d’anesthésiant, le porc se réveilla durant l’opération et se débattit violemment, pour finalement mourir au bout de son sang, sous le regard ahuri de l’assistance (certains artistes présents ont même tenté d’empêcher Zhu Yu de réaliser sa performance). La performance fut déclarée un échec. Notons que Zhu Yu a répété à plusieurs reprises qu’il était un chrétien pratiquant. Cela expliquerait-il, du moins en partie, sa remarquable « sensibilité religieuse »? 48 Une logique similaire est à l’œuvre dans la performance savamment intitulée Le fondement de toute épistémologie (1998) (全部知识学的基础, Quánbu zhishixué de jichu) (fig.7) Dans cette performance qui annonce le cadre conceptuel dans lequel s’inscriront celles à venir, Zhu Yu découpe et fait cuire 5 cerveaux humains, qu’il s’est procuré dans un hôpital non-identifié de Beijing. Il conditionne ensuite le jus de cerveau ainsi produit dans 80 bouteilles soigneusement décorées et identifiées à cet effet, qu’il mettra finalement en vente dans un supermarché de Shanghai ayant commandité l’événement. À la grande surprise de l’artiste, quinze bouteilles se sont vendues au prix très raisonnable de 98 yuans, c’est-à-dire l’équivalent d’à peu près 13$ CAN. Il faut dire qu’en offrant du cerveau à consommer, Zhu Yu fait fond d’une croyance populaire chinoise résumée par l’expression 吃脑哺脑 (chi nao bu nao, littéralement « manger cerveau nourrir cerveau »), selon laquelle manger du cerveau contribue directement à accroître l’intelligence (idéalement celle d’un jeune étudiant sur le point de faire un examen).35 49 Dans Joyeuses Pâques ainsi que dans Le fondement de toute épistémologie, la tension performative s’instaure très précisément dans la subtile mais décisive distance entre les mots et les choses. Cette idéalité, la performance tente, aussi consciemment et méthodiquement que possible, de l’annuler. Dans Manger du monde (2000) (食人, shi ren) (fig.8), performance réalisée en vue de l’exposition Fuck Off, la violence symbolique et performative n’aura pas besoin d’un titre pour se révéler. L’œuvre consiste en une série de photos de Zhu Yu en train de cuisiner et de manger ce qu’il prétend être un fœtus humain. Une photo qui a circulée sur Internet en 2001 a suscité une vive controverse sur la scène internationale et a même provoqué des investigations de la part du FBI et de Scotland Yard. Zhu Yu justifie ainsi son action : « Aucune religion n’interdit le

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cannibalisme. Et je n’ai trouvé aucune loi interdisant de manger des humains. J’ai pris avantage de cette zone grise entre la morale et la loi pour mon travail. »36 En transgressant le tabou du cannibalisme, c’est la définition même de l’humanité qui est radicalement mise en question. Par la négative, on comprend qu’il n’y a d’humanité que par définition. C’est exactement ce que Zhu Yu a à l’esprit lorsque, en réponse aux violentes réactions de dégoût de la part du public, il déclarera : « Un humain n’est-il pas simplement un assemblage d’hydrates de carbone? Et la morale n’est-elle pas simplement quelque chose que l’Homme change selon son bon vouloir en fonction de ses soi-disant besoins d’être humain au cours de son évolution? »37 Malgré son positivisme frondeur, Zhu Yu admettra avoir vomi à plusieurs reprises durant la « consommation » de sa performance, ce qui constitue, sans doute, une manifestation exemplaire, pour ne pas dire une attestation, de sa propre et « bien involontaire » humanité.

Les humains contre-attaquent

50 En 2001, une annonce est lancée par le ministère chinois de la Culture pour interdire toute activité portant atteinte aux cadavres humains au nom de l’art. Suspecté de se procurer des cadavres et des fœtus humains par voies illégales, Zhu Yu est poursuivi devant le Tribunal intermédiaire selon l’article 302 du Code Pénal chinois. Cet article stipule que toute insulte ou atteinte aux cadavres humains est interdite. En vertu de l’article 21 de la Loi chinoise sur le mariage, il est accusé d’avoir infligé la souffrance et la mort à des nouveau-nés. Il est finalement condamné pour «crime contre l’humanité» (traduction littérale du chef d’accusation).

51 Les profanations perpétrées par Zhu Yu ont ceci de troublant qu’elles nous exposent, aussi directement et brutalement que possible, à la question de notre humanité. Je ne souhaite pas ici rejouer le débat entre autonomie de l’art et moralité publique (et son bras légal armé), tel qu’il a eu lieu dans le contexte chinois, ni donner voix à un humanisme de bon aloi qui voudrait en faire une question de droits humains. Car, en définitive, «l’humanité» se défend-elle vraiment devant les tribunaux? Qu’est-ce donc en effet qui comparaît, dans un tel cas? Certainement pas le fin liseré spirituel ou imaginal par lequel s’active l’unité vivante et dynamique d’une forme-de-vie. Qu’on pense au célèbre Jugement de Dieu d’Antonin Artaud: la forme du jugement, que celui-ci soit moral ou proprement légal, agit comme fixum transcendant, qui nous assigne invariablement à notre étant-donné, c’est-à-dire à ce que nous sommes ou avons été – jamais à ce que l’on devient. 52 Il est plus intéressant à mon sens d’interroger la manière même par laquelle Zhu Yu cherche à révéler la supposée vacuité fictionnelle sur laquelle s’érige l’humain. Ce n’est peut-être qu’ainsi qu’on pourra appréhender sa monstrueuse contemporanéité. Les performances de Zhu Yu s’ordonnent comme autant d’expériences scientifiques. Elles prétendent mettre en œuvre et pousser à l’extrême le type de conscience réflexive qui fonde notre modernité et qui est privilégiée par le dis-play performatif. Dans l’expression dis-play, il faut entendre l’effort pour disjoindre ou interrompre le «jeu» de l’existence afin d’en exposer quelque ressort plus ou moins caché. Incidemment, nous faisons souvent remonter ce type de conscience-qui-expose au début de la Renaissance, au temps des premières dissections de cadavres à des fins de recherche médicale.

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53 La démarche artistique de Zhu Yu démontre en ce sens une cohérence proprement biopolitique. Qu’est-ce à dire? Chaque transgression qu’il opère met en jeu des représentations pseudo-scientifiques du corps, lesquelles nient la consistance imaginale des formes-de-vie. Chacune de ses performances peut ainsi se concevoir comme un prélèvement systématique et scientifique (dépassionné et mesuré) de vie nue, par lequel est touchée, «actionnée» si je puis dire, la limite imaginale humaine. En observant plus attentivement les photos de la performance cannibale, on remarquera que Zhu Yu n’est pas dupe de cette dimension scientifico-médicale, essentielle à son œuvre: au-dessus de lui, on trouve une image qui semble avoir été tirée d’un manuel d’anatomie, et qui expose quatre plans de dissection d’un œil. Ce «clin d’œil» autoréflexif adressé à son audience confirmera, si besoin était, son statut d’explorateur intrépide du nouveau corps biopolitique de l’humanité38 – statut à présent, on s’en doute, révoqué, pour cause d’inhumanité.

NOTES

1. Gao Minglu, « Private Experiences and Public Happenings, the Performance Art of Zhang Huan”, in Pilgrimage to Santiago, 2000. www.zhanghuan.com 2. Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, 2005, p.163. 3. Pour Gao Minglu encore, « Body art in the Chinese context is perhaps more contextualized and less conceptual than its Western counterpart. The context is affected primarily by the consciousness of an individual artists’ body language as a “behaviour”; this “behaviour”, moreover, is social and non-individual.” The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chine Art, p.163-164. 4. En 2005, 41 étudiants et étudiantes de l’académie des beaux-arts de l’université de Chengdu réalisèrent une performance dans laquelle ils se dénudèrent pour former un long domino humain en forme d’arobas. Le commentaire de Shao Daosheng, chercheur à l’académie chinoise des sciences sociales, reflète de manière exemplaire le malaise de l’establishment chinois à l’égard de l’art performatif. « En fin de compte, chaque société a sa propre culture. Je me préoccupe des étudiants universitaires chinois. Si le corps nu devient un idéal esthétique pour les étudiants universitaires d’aujourd’hui, et par suite un style de vie, et bien je ne peux pour ma part que dire qu’ils sont vraiment dégradés et sans espoir. »Cité in « Should naked human body be used as an art symbol?”, China Daily, 2005-07-20. 5. Tel n’était pas l’avis de Mao, mais il faut voir comment la question du corps est pour lui d’abord et avant tout une question nationale… « Our nation is wanting in strength. The military spirit has not been encouraged; the physical condition of the population deteriorates daily. This is an extremely disturbing phenomenon. The promoters of physical education have not grasped the essence of the problem, and therefore, their efforts, though prolonged, have not been effective. If this state continues, our weakness will increase further.” (Une étude de l’éducation physique, 1917). Disponible en ligne (en anglais) : http://www.amoymagic.mts.cn/ sportsmao.htm 6. Cité in Thomas J Berghuis, Performance art in China, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2006, p. 67. 7. Malgré ses remarques sur le concept de 环境 huanjing (environnement), le concept du « corps vécu » (身体, shenti) et l’idée néo-confucéenne de « faire corps avec son environnement »,

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Berghuis reste finalement très flou sur le rapport qui s’instaure entre pratiques performatives actuelles et la conception chinoise traditionnelle du corps. 8. Sur le rapport entre individu et représentation, voir la réflexion de François Jullien dans Le nu impossible, Seuil, Paris, 2005. Dans une optique résolument comparatiste dont ce n’est pas le lieu ici de faire le procès, Jullien s’interroge sur l’absence du Nu dans la tradition picturale chinoise et pose la question suivante : « comment rendre compte de ce fait élémentaire, que la Chine n’ait jamais conçu la mimésis? » (p.64) Dans le contexte de notre travail, la réflexion est d’autant plus intéressante qu’elle établit un rapport étroit entre la production de l’humain et la question de l’exposition et de la représentation : « le moment du Nu (…) appelle un redoublement de plan, fait surgir celui d’une pure représentation : seul l’homme est – peut être – nu. (…) Le Nu dresse l’homme à part du monde, et l’isole (…) Aussi, même quand il connaît la tentation naturaliste, voire prétend se dissimuler en elle, le nu ne saurait masquer ce puissant travail – d’abstraction et de séparation – dont, depuis ses origines, il a fait l’objet. » (p.27) Sur fond anthropogénétique, l’abstraction du Nu et le display performatif semblent avoir beaucoup d’éléments en commun. 9. Lesley Sanderson, « Body Male Fatigue », Yishu, Vol.7, N.3, Mai 2008, p.83. 10. La limite entre ces deux types de performance est évidemment poreuse et difficile à tracer. En guise d’illustration, on peut opposer les opérations d’un Yang Zhichao, qui sont réalisées sans anesthésie et qui mettent en évidence la capacité d’endurance de l’artiste, et la Greffe de peau (zhi pi) (2000) d’un Zhu Yu présentée dans le cadre de l’exposition Fascination pour la blessure (对伤害的迷恋, dui shanghai de milian) (2000), qui se fait enlever un morceau de peau pour le greffer ensuite sur un porc en ayant recours à l’anesthésie. Zhu Yu voulait ainsi illustrer « une sorte d’absurdité qui, dans la réalité, ressemble étrangement à ce morceau de peau, qui sous-entend une souffrance ou douleur cherchant la fuite en vain». Cité par Li Xianting, commissaire de l’exposition Addiction à la plaie, in « Les principales idées del’exposition Addiction à la plaie », http://person.artron.net/show_news.php?newid=16419 (visité le 23 juin 2008). 11. Voir Thomas J. Berghuis, « Considering Huanjing: Positioning Experimental Art in China », Positions, 12:3, hiver 2004. 12. Hua Tianxue, Ai Weiwei, and Feng Boyi, eds. Fuck Off / bu hezuo de fangshi, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, 2000. On peut bien sûr ironiser sur le fait que l’autocensure à laquelle se sont soumis les commissaires de l’exposition est précisément une forme de coopération avec les autorités. Dans un texte publié dans le catalogue de l’exposition Le moine et le démon, tenue à Lyon en 2004, Feng Boyi relativise quelque peu la dimension politique de l’événement et insiste plutôt sur le désir d’expression individuelle de chacun des artistes. Il souligne que « la motivation de cette exposition était l’espoir que l’art chinois d’avant-garde, dans une attitude de “non-coopération” avec le discours dominant du système chinois et avec le système artistique international, se constitue et s’affirme d’une façon personnelle et indépendante, propre à l’art contemporain chinois. » Il ajoute ensuite qu’il est « difficile d’y trouver trace de prétendues résistances politique et lutte idéologique. Car (…) ce que veulent au contraire les artistes, désireux de briser la glace, c’est oublier l’idéologie ou s’en défaire désespérément pour exprimer une individualité liée à leur propre environnement. » Feng Boyi, « “Under-Underground” et autre. Sur l’art chinois d’avant-garde depuis les années 1990 », in Le moine et le démon, 5 continents, Lyon, 2004. 13. Fuck Off / Bu hezuo de fangshi. 14. Cité in Ulrike Münter, Transitional Phase: Pain, http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?3776. 15. Pour plus de détails, voir Thomas J. Berghuis, Performance Art in China, p.182-183. 16. Cité in Ulrike Münster, Transitional Phase: Pain. 17. Cité dans Lesley Sanderson, « Male Body Fatigue », Yishu, Vol.7, N.3, Mai 2008, p.80. 18. Cité in Ulrike Münster, Transitional Phase: Pain. 19. La popularité de cette histoire ancienne dans la Chine moderne semble dépendre en partie du fait que Mao Zedong lui-même écrivit un article à son propos, intitulé « Comment Yugong

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déplaça les montagnes ». Dans cet article, Mao fait de Yugong une source d’inspiration pour le parti communiste. Pour plus de détails, voir http://www.ramou.net/fa/faMao-1945-Yugong.xml. 20. Cité par Li Xianting, « A Myth He Yunchang Writes and Directs and Challenges He Poses Against Himself. What I Have Learnt from He Yunchang’s Works”, The Rock Touring around Great Britain. He Yunchang Art Works, 2007. 21. Issu d’un entretien avec Qian Zhijian, « Performing Bodies », Art Journal, été 1999. On peut trouver l’entretien complet sur le site de Zhang Huan, www.zhanghuan.com. 22. Entretien avec Qian Zhijian, « Performing Bodies », www.zhanghuan.com 23. Entretien avec Qian Zhijian, « Performing Bodies », www.zhanghuan.com 24. Gao Minglu, « Private Experiences and Public Happenings, the Performance Art of Zhang Huan », www.zhanghuan.com 25. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1968, p.208-209. 26. Frédéric Bobin, « Deux enfants perdus de l’avant-garde chinoise », Le Monde, le 26 juin 2000, p. 25. Cité par He Qian, La représentation occidentale de la cruauté dans l’art contemporain chinois, mémoie de maîtrise présenté à l’UQAM, Montréal, 2008 (non-publié). 27. John Clark, Chinese Art at the End of the Millenium, p.22-23, cité par Berghuis, p. 115. 28. À une échelle plus locale si l’on peut dire, certains critiques ont insisté sur l’effet d’entraînement qui s’est créé à l’intérieur de ce petit groupe d’artistes pour expliquer cette surenchère de violence. Voir en ce sens l’excellent article de Meiling Cheng intitulé “Violent Capital: Zhu Yu on File”, où elle propose une interpretation de son oeuvre dans la perspective de ce qu’elle nomme “le capital violent”: “Thus, the recent trend toward extreme performance in China may indicate the allure of what I might term “violent capital,” that is, the capital— the artistic reputation and the rewards that come with it – gained by violent actions framed within the symbolic realm of art.” The Drama Review, 49, 3 Automne 2005, New York University and the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT). 29. Voir l’essai d’Agamben sur le rapport entre esthétique et nihilisme initulé L’uomo senza contenuto, Quodlibet, Macerata, 1994. 30. Walter Benjamin, « Critique de la violence », in Œuvres I, Gallimard, Paris, 2000, p.240. 31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Seuil, Paris, 1995, p.151. 32. Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003, p.112. 33. Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins, Payot & Rivages, Paris, 2002 (1995), p.13-14. 34. Giorgio Agamben, « Warburg o la scienza senza nome », in La potenza del pensiero, Neri Pozza, Vicenza, 2005. p.146. 35. Voir l’analyse qu’en fait Meiling Cheng dans « The Violent Capital : Zhu Yu on File ». Selon les dires de Zhu Yu, l’hôpital qui lui a fourni les cerveaux est ensuite devenu le principal fournisseur de l’école du cadavre. Dans une perspective qui demeure largement confinée à la question de la représentation identitaire, voir également la discussion de Larissa Heinrich sur le thème de la traite d’organe dans la littérature et les arts en Chine : « Souvenirs of the Organ Trade. The Diasporic Body in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Art », in Fran Martin et Larissa Heinrich (ed.), Embodied Modernities, Hawaii University Press, Honolulu, 2006, p.126-145. 36. "Baby-eating art show sparks upset." (January 3, 2003). BBC News. 37. Fuck Off / Bu hezuo de fangshi. 38. Voir Rojas, Carlos, “Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception”, in Post Modern Culture, 2002, qui est peut-être le premier à avoir analysé le rôle du tableau de l’œil disséqué dans l’économie de cette performance.

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RÉSUMÉS

Cet article se propose de rendre compte de l’évolution fulgurante de l’art performatif chinois à partir du début des années 90 jusqu’au début des années 2000, période relativement brève mais qui en constitue sans doute l’apogée. La radicalité et le caractère extrêmement controversé de certaines des performances discutées ici nous amène à nous questionner sur ce qui différencie les performances qui se présentent comme expression d’un malaise politico-existentiel et celles qui agissent comme acting-out d’une logique biopolitique. Notre travail s’articulera autour des questions suivantes : quels sont les enjeux impliqués dans l’expositionperformative d’une conduite humaine? Ou dans une optique plus biopolitique : que signifie exposer/dis-play (de) l’humain? Cette réflexion sur l’art performatif en Chine dans une optique biopolitique et anthropogénétique s’appuiera principalement sur les œuvres de Yang Zhichao, He Yunchang, Zhang Huan, Peng Yu, Sun Yuan et Zhu Yu.

At the turn of the 21st century, Chinese extreme performative art reached unprecedented level of radicality and controversy. In this article, I will try to mark a difference between performances which present themselves or can be interpreted as expressions of political and existential malaise, and those that could be thought of as a sort of acting-out of the biopolitical logic. My article will revolve around the following questions: what is at stake in the performative exhibition of human behaviour, as the Chinese translation of the term “performative art” (xingwei yishu) suggest? Or in a more biopolitical perspective: what does it mean to dis-play “some” human? This reflection on Chinese performative art in a biopolitical and anthropogenetical perspective will be based principally on the work of Yang Zhichao, He Yunchang, Zhang Huan, Peng Yu, Sun Yuan and Zhu Yu.

AUTEUR

ERIK BORDELEAU

Erik Bordeleau est chercheur postdoctoral en histoire de l’art et communication à la McGill University. Il a récemment complété un doctorat en littérature comparée à l’université de Montréal sur le rapport entre anonymat et politique dans le cinéma et l’art contemporain chinois, sous la direction de Tonglin Lu et Brian Massumi. Il collabore à diverses revues, dont Espai en blanc (Barcelone), Yishu : Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Vancouver), Chimères (Paris), Altérités, Inflexions, Hors-champ et OVNI (Montréal).

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Traitement moral de la question sociale dans la « société harmonieuse » de Hu Jintao

Thomas BOUTONNET

La racine de tous les paralogismes, (…) réside dans la capacité du langage de dire le rien, le néant, de faire exister dans les mots et par les mots ce qui n’existe pas dans les choses (…). Cette capacité potentielle, (…) les agents sociaux (et tout spécialement les professionnels de la politique, (…)) ne cessent de l’exploiter, pour le meilleur et pour le pire.1 1 C’est dans un contexte social très sensible, marqué par une forte polarisation de la société entre classes de consommateurs favorisés, aux revenus moyens et supérieurs, et classes défavorisées pauvres, que Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 prend la succession de Jiang Zemin 江泽民 en 2002 à la tête du Parti communiste chinois (PCC).2 Après avoir introduit en Chine l’économie de marché (dans un processus maîtrisé et accompagné par le PCC, et favorisant les collusions d’intérêt entre forces économiques et politiques) et la société de consommation (en permettant notamment aux consommateurs urbains d’accéder au “bonheur marchand” en échange d’un conservatisme de “classe” favorable à l’ordre établi), le Parti doit faire face aux dommages collatéraux, tant sociaux qu’environnementaux, que plus de vingt années de « réformes et d’ouverture » (gaige kaifang 改革开放) initiées par Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 ont entraînés. 3 Si le Parti communiste chinois a réussi, entre 1978 et 2002, à basculer la Chine dans une économie de marché, à restructurer l’ensemble du processus de production, auparavant régulé par une économie planifiée, et à « plier » la population chinoise aux règles du capitalisme et du productivisme, « la “mise au travail” [des Chinois], en donnant naissance à une nouvelle population “déclassée”, oblige » maintenant « l’État à intervenir, et à intervenir non plus dans les termes de la répression mais dans ceux de la discipline ».4

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2 C’est dans ce contexte donc que la « société harmonieuse » (hexie shehui 和谐社会) fait, en 2005, son entrée dans le paysage politique et discursif chinois.5 Parce la rhétorique socialiste du Parti n’est plus crédible (notamment depuis la quasi-disparition, durant les années 1990, des prestations sociales proposées par l’Etat-providence chinois), parce que les inégalités et les injustices sociales sont de plus en plus manifestes, et parce qu’il est impossible d’avouer l’inavouable (la nécessité structurelle d’une pauvreté, en l’occurrence institutionnellement entretenue, pour créer de la richesse économique) dans une société encore qualifiée de “communiste”, le PCC, menacé dans son exercice exclusif du pouvoir de plus en plus questionné, se retrouve dans la nécessité de développer un autre discours, un autre programme, capable d’expliquer, de justifier et d’accompagner les crises présentes.6 Ce discours, celui de la « société harmonieuse », n’aura pas pour intention première de convaincre, mais de fixer un cadre rhétorique dans lequel l’inacceptable polarisation sociale peut être (et devra être) acceptée. Le discours de la « société harmonieuse » s’affirme donc être un discours de crise, et la mise en place d’un tel discours correspond à ce « travail discursif des politiques » qui, pour une grande part, consiste « dans la production de slogans, de promesses et d’engagements » dans le but de renforcer « le lien de croyance et de confiance qu’ils doivent sans cesse maintenir et entretenir précisément parce que leur pouvoir est symbolique ».7 3 Autour de ce concept de « société harmonieuse », c’est donc tout un programme que va articuler la rhétorique officielle, et sur lequel nous allons revenir, en réponse aux maux de la société chinoise, trop prononcés pour ne pas être maintenant officiellement reconnus. Ainsi, le discours “fondateur” de la « société harmonieuse » expose-t-il très clairement les difficultés auxquelles la Chine doit faire face en ce nouveau millénaire. 综合起来看，在当前和今后相当长一段时间内，我国经济社会发展面临的矛盾和问题可能更复杂、更突出。(…)我国经济社会发展也出现了一些必须认真把握的新趋势(…)，主要是：资源能源紧缺(…)城乡发展不平衡、地区发展不平衡、经济社会发展不平衡的矛盾更加突出(…)各种思想文化相互激荡，人们受各种思想观念影响的渠道明显增多、程度明显加深，人们思想活动的独立性、选择性、多变性、差异性明显增强；社会上存在的消极腐败现象以及各类严重犯罪活动等也给社会稳定与和谐带来了严重影响，等等.8 Pour synthétiser, dès maintenant et sur un plus ou moins long terme, le développement social et économique de notre pays connaîtra, sans doute, des contradictions et des problèmes encore plus complexes et plus prononcés. (…) Dans le développement socio-économique de la Chine sont également apparues de nouvelles tendances (…) qu’il nous faut maîtriser complètement. Parmi elles, distinguons ces problèmes majeurs : la pénurie des ressources naturelles et énergétiques ; (…) le développement inégal entre les villes et les campagnes, le développement inégal entre les régions et le développement inégal au niveau socio- économique [qui] sont responsables de contradictions encore plus critiques ; (…) la cohabitation et la confrontation de toutes sortes de pensées et de cultures, l’augmentation manifeste des canaux de diffusion d’idées et de concepts propres à influencer les individus à un degré de plus en plus puissant ; l’indépendance, la sélectivité, la versatilité et la divergence des activités idéologiques des individus, manifestement plus prononcées et renforcées ; l’existence au sein de la société de phénomènes négatifs et de corruption, ainsi que de toutes sortes d’activités criminelles graves, autant d’éléments qui exercent sur l’harmonie et la stabilité de la société une influence défavorable. 4 Animé par cet impératif de (ré)affirmer la légitimité du pouvoir du Parti, par l’urgence des questions sociale et environnementale, et par la nécessité de constituer un corpus idéologique à même de reformuler de manière favorable la perception de la réalité à

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défaut de pouvoir la changer, Hu Jintao va faire de la « société harmonieuse » le concept clé de sa présidence.9

5 Le propos de cet article sera de démontrer que le credo politique officiel de la République populaire de Chine, l’édification de la « société harmonieuse » (goujian hexie shehui 构建和谐社会) s’inscrit essentiellement dans un processus de discipline et de civilisation des populations pauvres et défavorisées et participe d’une naturalisation de l’ordre social établi.10 6 Nous verrons donc, dans un premier temps, que la « société harmonieuse » développe un discours complexe qui fait appel aux principes confucianistes de concorde et d’harmonie des inégalités, mais qui surtout légitime les disparités socio-économiques en amalgamant les dispositions naturelles de l’individu (le caractère unique de chaque être) aux dispositions sociales (les conditions de son existence au sein de la société). En étudiant ensuite le discours fondateur de la « société harmonieuse », une allocution officielle du Hu Jintao datée du 19 février 2005, nous soulignerons l’importance primordiale de la discipline morale dans la mise en place cette harmonie sociale prônée par le président chinois. Enfin, en nous attardant quelque peu sur la campagne des « Huit honneurs et des huits hontes » (barong bachi 八荣八耻), une campagne idéologique lancée en 2006 dans le cadre de la construction de la hexie shehui 和谐社会, nous confirmerons que la « société harmonieuse » vise essentiellement à discipliner et à civiliser les populations paupérisées et vulnérabilisées par les réformes économiques qui transfigurent la Chine depuis 1978, et propose finalement une réponse morale à la question sociale.

Sous-texte – Naturalisation confucianiste des disparités socio-économiques

7 Le discours de la « société harmonieuse » n’est pas un simple énoncé : c’est un discours officiel qui articule et développe un certain nombre de notions, de concepts et autres stratégies discursives dont l’ensemble, cohérent, représente la perception officielle de la société et constitue, en soi, un véritable programme et une vision du monde. Ce discours tend à se diffuser dans les consciences et dans les imaginaires par sa sur- représentation dans l’espace public chinois et la répétition de ses énoncés. Car ce discours officiel de la « société harmonieuse » ne se construit pas uniquement sur les quelques textes officiels (écrits ou oraux) élaborés par les hauts dirigeants ou les hautes instances dirigeantes du Parti, il est également relayé et accompagné depuis 2005 par une grande quantité de textes (articles, essais, ouvrages) “para-officiels”, c’est-à-dire produits par des individus ou des entités ne s’exprimant pas au nom du Parti ou de l’Etat, et diffusés par les relais de propagande que le Parti a à sa disposition : les médias et un grand nombre de maisons d’éditions.11 Toutes ces productions forment un véritable bruit discursif autour du programme de « société harmonieuse » et, filtrées par la censure (ou l’autocensure), font toutes l’apologie du concept prôné par Hu Jintao.

8 La « société harmonieuse » est un discours complexe, qui participe avant tout d’un processus de civilisation, en ce sens qu’il développe un ensemble de principes (sociétaux, moraux, relationnels) susceptibles de mener la société chinoise à un stade qui serait “supérieur”, à un faîte dans une conception évolutionniste de l’histoire. Parmi les principes exposés par la « société harmonieuse », certains concernent

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directement le Parti ou les institutions et les entités au pouvoir : ce sont des mesures à entreprendre et des objectifs à réaliser en terme de développement économique et de protection sociale, ou des politiques à mettre en place dans l’intention de rendre la société plus “harmonieuse”. Mais d’autres principes vont concerner les individus eux- mêmes : ce sont des principes moraux, destinés à reformuler les postures intellectuelles, les consciences et les états d’esprit, qui formulent que la construction d’une Chine “civilisée” passe essentiellement par la “civilisation” de ses citoyens. Ce sont des principes déterminés par le pouvoir dominant pour les individus, une coercition qui prend la forme de la moralité et qui définit le citoyen modèle d’une société harmonieuse. 9 C’est, à nos yeux, le cœur et la finalité de toute l’entreprise de propagande autour de la « société harmonieuse » : la reconfiguration morale de l’individu comme réponse aux “disharmonies” de la Chine contemporaine. 10 Plutôt qu’un travail étymologique, nous opterons donc pour une approche transtextuelle pour mieux cerner le(s) sens et les connotations induites par le concept hexie shehui 和谐社会. Notre refus de nous aventurer dans une analyse étymologique du terme hexie 和谐 est étayé par deux raisons majeures. Tout d’abord, nous avons lu beaucoup trop d’interprétations contradictoires (et certaines farfelues) sur l’origine et la signification étymologique du terme hexie 和谐 pour pouvoir accorder un crédit à une explication plus qu’à une autre.12 Ensuite, et surtout, le sens d’un mot, et à plus forte raison d’un concept politique, ne découle pas de ses origines mais de l’usage qui en est fait dans la rhétorique et le discours dans lequel il intervient. En ce sens, et même si hexie 和谐 évoque ou fait écho à certaines notions présentes dans l’imaginaire populaire chinois, cette connotation se met au service d’une stratégie discursive particulière.13 Aussi, la signification que le terme hexie 和谐 revêt dans le discours de la « société harmonieuse » vient essentiellement de son emploi dans ce contexte précis. Car, comme le rappelle le sociologue Pierre-Jean Simon, « à strictement parler, un mot n’a pas de sens : il n’a, comme peuvent nous le rappeler les linguistes, que des emplois ».14 11 Idéologiquement, tout d’abord, le concept de « société harmonieuse socialiste », constitue avec le concept de « développement scientifique » (kexue fazhan 科学发展), l’apport théorique (et rhétorique) majeur de Hu Jintao à l’histoire idéologique du Parti communiste chinois.15 Hu Jintao perpétue ainsi une “tradition” politique, honorée avant lui par Jiang Zemin et ses « trois représentations » (san ge daibiao 三个代表) et par Deng Xiaoping et sa « société de petit confort » (xiaokang shehui 小康社会), selon laquelle le leader d’une génération de dirigeants se doit de laisser sa marque dans l’histoire du « socialisme aux caractéristiques chinoises » (you zhonguo tese de shehui zhuyi 有中国特色的社会主义).16 Cette “tradition” correspond surtout à une réalité plus pragmatique : chaque nouveau dirigeant suprême se doit d’asseoir son pouvoir sur l’ensemble de l’appareil, ou du moins sur la majorité de ses membres, et cette domination s’exerce également par le biais de symboles, de discours ou de concepts “originaux”, dont l’acceptation constituera et signifiera le soutien des membres de l’appareil au nouvel homme fort (mis) en place.17 12 Notons ensuite, à l’instar d’un certain nombre d’observateurs, que le discours de la « société harmonieuse » présente de grandes similitudes avec ce qu’on appelait dans les années 1980 les “valeurs asiatiques”.18 Dans le contexte de l’époque, l’émergence de trois des “petits dragons” (Singapour, Taiwan et Corée du Sud) dans les années

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1970-1980 et la performance économique de la Malaisie, appuyées sur un pouvoir autoritaire, avaient apporté la “preuve” que le développement économique n’était pas nécessairement lié à un régime démocratique, et que le contraire s’avérait également très efficace.19 13 Nées dans les années 1980 à Singapour et en Malaisie, conceptualisées et revendiquées par Lee Kuan Yew (Premier ministre de Singapour) et Mohamad Mahatir bin Mohamad (Premier ministre de Malaisie), les “valeurs asiatiques” correspondent à un ensemble de principes idéologiques, formalisées dans un Livre blanc en 1990, et s’affirment comme une réponse de l’Asie orientale face à “l’hégémonie des valeurs occidentales” des droits de l’homme et de la démocratie. Ces “valeurs asiatiques” sont avant toute chose des outils de domination et de contrôle, à l’instar du confucianisme : elles déterminent un cadre idéologique à même de pouvoir souder une communauté d’individus autour de l’unité et la prospérité nationales, et déterminent que la société et son développement doivent passer avant l’individu. Ainsi, les “valeurs asiatiques” promeuvent : la nation avant la communauté et la société avant l’individu ; la famille comme unité de base de la société ; la considération sociale pour l’individu soutenu par sa communauté ; le consensus plutôt que les querelles ; l’harmonie raciale et religieuse.20 Ces “valeurs” développent une idéologie qui justifie l’exercice d’un pouvoir autoritaire. Rien d’étonnant alors que « ceux qui mettent le plus fortement en avant ces fameuses “valeurs” ne sont ni des philosophes ni des théologiens, mais des hommes de pouvoir ». 21

14 Le modèle de société prôné par les “valeurs asiatiques” justifie la polarisation sociale par la promesse de l’accession à la réussite et s’appuie sur l’importance de l’abnégation et du sacrifice pour le bien de la communauté et de la société. Deux décennies plus tard, Hu Jintao, devant faire face aux crises structurelles et sociétales que plus de vingt années de réformes et de développement économique ont engendrées, développera un cadre idéologique similaire. 15 Apparu d’abord de manière assez informelle dans un rapport de Jiang Zemin lors du seizième Congrès du PCC en 2002, le concept d’« édification d’une société harmonieuse socialiste » (goujian shehuizhuyi hexie shehui 构建社会主义和谐社会) fait une première apparition lors du quatrième plénum du seizième Comité central du PCC, qui se tint du 16 au 19 septembre 2004.22 Mais sa véritable intronisation publique date du 19 février 2005 lorsque Hu Jintao, dans une longue allocution à l’Ecole centrale du Parti, s’adressera aux cadres du PCC et leur exposera en détail les motifs et les modalités d’édification d’une « société harmonieuse socialiste » (shehui zhuyi hexie shehui 社会主义和谐社会). La « société harmonieuse » intervient comme réponse au défi que représente pour le PCC « le classique compromis entre efficacité [économique] et équité [sociale] ».23 Comme l’expliquent les politologues Guo Baogang et Guo Sujian, « une poursuite obsédée de la croissance économique et une légitimité basée sur la performance est une posture qui (…) se retrouve éclipsée par les injustices sociales et économiques, les inégalités régionales et salariales, et les catastrophes environnementales ».24 Le PCC a besoin de se construire une nouvelle légitimité politique articulée autour de la crise sociale et environnementale présente. La pérennité de son pouvoir est définitivement menacée s’il ne parvient pas à lier croissance économique et égalité sociale, deux éléments à la cohabitation difficile pour ne pas dire antinomique.25 Le discours de la « société harmonieuse » aura donc pour rôle d’accompagner la situation présente, en prônant l’édification d’une société qui,

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tout en poursuivant un développement économique raisonné et raisonnable, mettrait l’harmonie sociale au centre de ses préoccupations et de ses actions : cette nouvelle stratégie discursive constitue les « habits neufs » du président Hu Jintao.26 16 Mais Hu Jintao et les hauts dirigeants du PCC « ne sont clairement pas intéressés par la construction d’une utopie moderne, mais par une reconstruction culturelle via un encadrement politique. Un tel encadrement implique la mise en valeur de nouvelles idées de manière à faire référence à un cadre discursif populaire existant, et à ainsi favoriser certaines interprétations et à en décourager d’autres ».27 Cette « reconstruction culturelle » que poursuit le discours de la « société harmonieuse » correspond à son caractère civilisateur. En stipulant des conventions sociales et des postures morales particulières, le discours de la « société harmonieuse » se propose d’éduquer les individus et de leur inculquer un ensemble de dispositions “civilisées” adapté à la « situation chinoise » (guoqing 国情). Mais la hexie shehui 和谐社会, parce qu’elle fait effectivement référence à un cadre culturel existant, s’affirme être, non une invention, mais une réinvention. En rappelant dans son allocution du 19 février 2005 que « la Chine a produit tout au long de son histoire un grand nombre de pensées sur l’harmonie sociale » («我国历史上就产生过不少有关社会和谐的思想»), Hu Jintao inscrit “sa” « société harmonieuse » dans une continuité historique et dans une “sinité” qui conféreront à son discours une légitimité culturelle.28 Mentionnant des penseurs comme Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, et des projets utopiques comme le royaume des Taiping (Taiping tianguo 太平天国), Hu Jintao cite surtout la société idéale de la « grande unité » (datong 大同) décrite par Confucius dans Livre des rites (Li Ji 礼记).29 «礼记·礼运»中描绘了“大道之行也，天下为公，选贤与能，讲信修睦。故人不独亲其亲，不独子其子，使老有所终，壮有所用，幼有所长，矜、寡、孤、独、废、疾者皆有所养”这样一种理想社会.30 Le Livre des rites décrit une société idéale dans laquelle “le dao était habité et la terre appartenait à tous, les hommes talentueux et vertueux [au pouvoir] inspiraient la confiance et entretenaient l’harmonie. Les hommes de cette époque ne se préoccupaient pas uniquement de leurs parents ou de leurs enfants : toutes les personnes âgées étaient prises en charge jusqu’à leurs derniers jours, aucun adulte n’était dans le besoin, les enfants étaient accompagnés dans leur croissance et leur éducation ; les veufs, les veuves, les orphelins, les personnes isolées, les handicapés et les malades étaient tous pris en charge. 17 L’harmonie sociale prônée dans la hexie shehui 和谐社会 fait donc référence à ce monde idéal, cet âge d’or de la « grande unité » (datong 大同), l’idéal d’un monde unique, la « philosophie d’un monde unique» (« a one world philosophy »), au même titre donc que la « société harmonieuse ».31 Cette référence au lexique de Confucius poursuit deux stratégies : il permet, à l’instar de l’idéologie confucianiste, de se baser sur des concepts confucéens réinterprétés, ou sur leur simple évocation, pour formuler un nouvel ordre social ; il permet également d’inscrire ce programme dans une continuité et une légitimité historique, de lui conférer une “sinité” propre à le naturaliser.32

18 Le concept de « grande unité » (datong 大同) auquel se réfère Hu Jintao implique une communauté harmonieuse et une fraternité universelle, une société juste et équitable où chaque individu voit ses besoins satisfaits, où les personnes âgées et les handicapés sont pris en charge, les jeunes éduqués, les actifs employés, une société basée sur des vertus et des valeurs morales qui mettent l’homme en harmonie avec les autres, avec la société et avec la nature. Mais comme le reconnaît le professeur Shi Zhongwen, l’harmonie dont parle le Livre des rites est avant tout une affaire d’éthique et de vertus individuelles.33 La cohésion de l’ensemble dépend de la capacité de chacun à s’intégrer

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dans le tout, par son humilité et sa disponibilité pour la communauté. L’accession au stade de la « grande unité » repose donc sur la bonne volonté de l’individu, mis au service de la société. 19 C’est sur cette conception de l’ordre social que s’appuie le confucianisme pour lequel le concept d’égalité ou d’unité (tong 同) « repose sur la cohérence d’un système de gouvernement total qui concerne tout le monde », dans une société où la vie (ming 命) d’un individu est « la vie telle que déterminée par le destin : elle est imposée à l’homme, tout comme son nom, par les dieux » et n’est rien d’autre qu’une « mission assignée à l’homme par le Ciel en lui donnant vie, et à laquelle il doit s’adapter au mieux en accomplissant le plus consciencieusement possible son devoir au sein de la société des hommes ».34 Le confucianisme, en transformant Confucius en une figure suprême de l’autorité, mis en place tout un système de représentations, articulé autour du concept de l’unité - l’unité du monde terrestre (tianxia 天下) avec l’ordre naturel des choses (dao 道) garantie par la cohésion du corps social dévoué dans un certain nombre de conventions et à la tête duquel se trouve l’empereur -, qui assura le maintien et la pérennité du despotisme impérial sur plus de deux milles ans. Un système de relations sociales hiérarchisé de part en part devait manifester cette unité. Il imposerait à chacun un rang et une position déterminée, lui prescrirait des devoirs spécifiques, exigerait de lui la vertu particulière qu’il fallait pour les remplir. Ce système distribuait de façon savante, à chacun selon sa place, un devoir de soumission vers le haut et un droit de domination vers le bas. Le fondement de cet édifice était le peuple (min 民) qui n’avait que le devoir de soumission. Au sommet se trouvait l’empereur (appelé souvent shang 上, le “Haut”) qui n’avait que le droit de dominer. Ce système avait une vocation, universelle, catholique. Il impliquait que chacun était responsable, dans son rôle, de l’harmonie du Tout et portait, en ce sens, une responsabilité totale. Il en résultait un devoir généralisé d’abnégation en faveur de la totalité. Le moi était haïssable.35 20 Cette conception de la société préfigure les formes de totalitarisme du vingtième siècle, associant contrôle total de la société par l’État et unité affirmée d’un peuple-Un.36 Car comme le rappelle le sinologue Wolfgang Bauer, « l’équation fondamentale pour un ordre mondial idéal, la tranquillité et l’égalité, peuvent donc déjà se trouver chez Confucius, bien que leur forme nous évoque plutôt une stabilisation uniforme de l’inégalité ».37 Nous verrons que c’est exactement ce que recherche le programme de la « société harmonieuse » de Hu Jintao : une stabilisation uniforme des inégalités dans l’acceptation par chacun de ses conditions d’existence (par une sorte de reformulation du concept de ming 命) et le sacrifice de chacun dans la construction d’un projet supérieur, la nation chinoise.

21 Nous ne tenons pas à amplifier plus qu’il ne faudrait la tonalité confucianiste de la « société harmonieuse », ne serait-ce que parce que l’utilisation de la figure de Confucius s’inscrit également dans une tentative de légitimer, de naturaliser, ce discours. Mais d’une manière générale, le programme de la « société harmonieuse », non seulement développe un ordre social très inspiré de la conception confucianiste de la société telle que nous venons de la présenter, mais également instrumentalise tout un corpus littéraire et toute une « culture au point de la refondre entièrement et d’en faire la base de l’ordre nouveau » tout comme l’ont fait auparavant « les empereurs, leurs conseillers et leurs agents » depuis la dynastie Han 汉. 38 Car comme l’explique Jean-François Billeter, pour faire oublier la violence et l’arbitraire dont l’empire était né, et par lesquels il se soutenait, il devait paraître conforme à l’ordre des choses. (…) Tous les domaines

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du savoir, toute la pensée, le langage, les représentations devaient concourir à persuader les esprits que cet ordre était, dans son essence, naturel. C’était le moyen le plus efficace d’assurer la pérennité du régime impérial, de ses hiérarchies, des formes de domination qu’il imposait, de la soumission qu’elles exigeaient. De cette refonte générale est née ce que les Chinois eux-mêmes ont considéré depuis lors, et que l’on considère aujourd’hui encore, en Chine ou ailleurs, comme la civilisation chinoise.39 22 Le confucianisme est né de cette volonté d’asseoir une domination en la naturalisant et en l’inscrivant dans une “tradition” culturelle réinventée pour l’occasion.40 Le confucianisme sur lequel se sont basés durant des siècles l’empire et la société chinoise pour fonctionner, n’est qu’une interprétation de la pensée développée par Confucius érigée en idéologie et en système, la transformation d’une philosophie morale régulant les rapports de l’individu avec le monde et dans le monde au rang d’idéologie politique imposée sur les comportements des individus afin de réguler la société et l’ordre.41 Et c’est là tout l’intérêt : partir de l’individuel et réguler l’individu pour enrégimenter la collectivité et maintenir l’ordre social. En ce sens, la conception confucianiste de l’harmonie est finalement très explicite. The concept of harmony (hexie) -- a classic Confucian term that connotes humanism, decency and honourable behaviour -- has been reinterpreted since imperial times by those in power to foster popular obedience and respect for authority. (…) its resurgence as the main keyword of the Hu government’s ideology (…) follows similar interpretations of Confucian doctrine as practiced by Asian states like Singapore, where it is used to justify marrying authoritarian politics with capitalist prosperity. In such selective rereading of the Confucian concept of harmony, compliant behaviour and submission to authority are emphasized, whereas notions of social justice, political dissent, and the moral duty of citizens to criticize abusive or oppressive rulers, are conveniently ignored.42 Le concept d’harmonie (hexie) – un terme confucéen classique qui implique humanisme, bienséance et comportement respectable – a été réinterprété depuis l’époque impériale par ceux au pouvoir pour favoriser l’obéissance populaire et le respect de l’autorité. Sa résurgence comme mot clé de l’idéologie du gouvernement de Hu (…) s’inscrit également dans les interprétations de la doctrine confucéenne tels qu’elles furent mise en pratique par des États asiatiques comme Singapour, où elle fut utilisée pour justifier le mariage entre politique autoritaire et prospérité capitaliste. Cette relecture plutôt partiale du concept confucéen d’harmonie insiste sur la docilité des comportements et la soumission à l’autorité, et ignore de manière commode les notions de justice sociale, de dissidence politique et de devoir moral des citoyens à critiquer un gouvernement coupable d’abus ou d’oppression. 23 La « société harmonieuse » s’affirme donc comme une double réinterprétation du confucianisme et de la pensée de Confucius, une transtextualité complexe dont nous retiendrons qu’elle implique un processus de pacification et de régulation des comportements sociaux. Car « la société d’harmonie socialiste revisite en effet le passé commun de la Chine pour mieux le réinventer et enfermer l’individu dans un “pseudo- holisme” aux tentations totalitaires. Cette harmonie de l’ordre social fait taire les dissonances ».43

24 Soulignons enfin une dernière fois que cette référence directe au lexique de Confucius permet également d’ancrer immédiatement le discours de la « société harmonieuse » dans les esprits en l’inscrivant dans un héritage culturel et intellectuel valorisant et “naturalisant”. Cette “confucianisation” du discours politique permet d’installer cet ensemble d’énoncés dans une certaine “sinité” tout en lui offrant un cadre idéologique et moral très efficace et favorable au maintien de l’ordre établi. Cette stratégie prend

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place dans une temporalité récente où Confucius a été officiellement imposé comme le nouveau “champion” de la Chine contemporaine.44 Le chercheur Sébastien Billioud confirme qu’il existe un « regain d’intérêt, très fort depuis le début des années 2000, pour la culture classique » en Chine, regain qui se manifeste sous différentes formes (religieuses, éducatives, touristiques) et qui s’illustre sur de multiples supports (feuilletons télévisés, sites internet). « La référence au “confucianisme” », que l’on « retrouve “en fragments” un peu partout » dans les productions culturelles et dans les médias, participe à la « réinvention (…) d’une culture traditionnelle », et si nous avons expliqué cette résurgence idéologiquement, on ne peut toutefois pas nier l’impact et les conséquences que l’émergence brutale de l’économie de marché ont pu avoir sur les esprits, les comportements, les pratiques et les relations humaines, le bouleversement des références et des repères qu’elle a induit chez certains et l’éventuel besoin d’une quête de sens ou d’identité incarné dans un intérêt vivace pour des pratiques et des pensées “traditionnelles”.45 25 Mais l’utilisation officielle de concepts “hérités” de Confucius ne confère pas nécessairement au discours de la « société harmonieuse » une force de conviction, cela signifie seulement que ce discours apparaît à sa place, juste, dans le contexte de l’époque. La force de conviction, comme l’explique Pierre Bourdieu, ne vient pas du discours lui-même mais du pouvoir symbolique que possède le porteur du discours. « Ce qui fait le pouvoir des mots et des mots d’ordre, pouvoir de maintenir l’ordre ou de le subvertir, c’est la croyance dans la légitimité des mots et de celui qui les prononce, croyance qu’il n’appartient pas aux mots de produire », et cette croyance est justement ce qui manque au Parti depuis la répression arbitraire de Tiananmen.46 Les discours ne prennent plus car « le pouvoir symbolique comme pouvoir de constituer le donné par l’énonciation (…), ne s’exerce que s’il est reconnu, c'est-à-dire méconnu comme arbitraire », alors que l’arbitraire du Parti Communiste chinois est connu et reconnu de tous.47 26 Nous allons voir, par l’étude des quelques textes officiels, que le discours de la « société harmonieuse », même si un certain nombre de mesures et de dispositions sociales vont effectivement être décidées (mais pas nécessairement appliquées ni applicables, loin s’en faut), vise avant tout à plier les consciences vers une disposition et une disponibilité d’esprit favorables à un nouvel ordre social où l’abnégation de l’individu serait justifiée par la réussite du “Tout”, c’est-à-dire la nation chinoise et son développement conçu en termes essentiellement économiques.

Texte – Discours “fondateur” de la « société harmonieuse » du 19 février 2005

27 La diffusion des concepts politiques ou idéologiques officiels au sein de l’espace public chinois se déroule généralement sous la forme de campagnes de masse, mobilisant l’ensemble du système de propagande du Parti. Les divers énoncés et slogans de la « société harmonieuse », initialement présentée le 19 février 2005, ont donc été projetés dans le champ social via de multiples canaux de diffusion publics contrôlés par le pouvoir : affichages urbains, reportages et émissions télévisées, articles de journaux, sessions d’étude et sites internet. Les relais dont dispose le PCC pour diffuser son expression sont nombreux et invasifs, en ce sens qu’ils exercent une véritable emprise quantitative sur les sens (la vue, l’ouïe sont fortement sollicitées). Cette emprise sur les

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sens (visuels, auditifs) n’est cependant pas, là non plus, nécessairement garantie d’emprise sur les consciences.48 Le système de propagande politique du PCC, historiquement très élaboré, reste encore très efficace et ses ramifications sont encore très présentes, même si la mondialisation de la Chine et l’augmentation exponentielle du nombre de canaux d’information différents ont inévitablement réduit son impact, et entamé sa prédominance sur l’espace public.49 Le système de propagande chinois (xuanchuan xitong 宣传系统) agit sur l’ensemble des médias existants pouvant diffuser de l’information sur le territoire chinois.50

28 En plus des allocutions publiques ou des slogans politiques à proprement parler, les campagnes idéologiques sont généralement “secondées” par une “salve” d’expressions individuelles : des sociologues, des historiens, des enseignants, des intellectuels ou des journalistes, vont s’exprimer publiquement dans les médias officiels pour exprimer une position, nécessairement favorable, sur la campagne en cours, sur sa signification et sur son importance. Cette “seconde salve” est nécessaire car elle participe à la tautologie du système : des personnalités faisant autorité confirment le bien fondé de la campagne en cours (et cette absence de discorde fait sa légitimité), et cette prise de parole publique confirme en retour leur autorité en la matière. Cette tautologie renforce l’omniprésence du discours, déjà dominant, dans le champ social, et participe à sa légitimité. Car comme l’expliquent Pierre Bourdieu et Luc Boltanski, la circulation d’un discours fait partie intégrante de sa production et il est impossible de les dissocier : les « propriétés les plus spécifiques » du discours, « à savoir l’ensemble des présupposés admis sans examen et la croyance collective qui leur est accordée, sont produites dans et par la circulation même », et le champ de production du discours s’affirme être « le lieu d’une circulation circulaire propre à produire un effet d’autoconfirmation et d’autorenforcement, et par là l’illusion de l’évidence immédiate ».51 29 La « société harmonieuse » ne s’exprime pas que dans les textes officiels : c’est une présence publique (essentiellement visuelle) permanente que permettent tous les moyens mis à disposition par un État qui garde le contrôle du domaine public ; c’est un discours qui imprègne les expressions publiques et, dans une autre mesure, les relations privées, et qui dispose de relais (médiatiques, institutionnels, etc.) qui vont bien au-delà des simples allocutions officielles ; c’est également un discours (re)construit au fur et à mesure qu’il se propage, et qui s’appuie sur un ensemble de préconstruits sociaux et culturels, la doxa, qu’il participe à légitimer en retour. Comme l’explique le linguiste Thierry Guilbert, « un discours s’autorise à la fois de la force de légitimation que donne l’implicite du coutumier, de la tradition, de l’idéologie du quotidien, de l’opinion et du sens commun, et s’appuie sur les forces idéologiques institutionnelles ou systèmes idéologiques constitués ».52 30 L’allocution de Hu Jintao le 19 février 2005 devant les cadres de l’Ecole centrale du Parti durant laquelle le président insiste sur la nécessité d’augmenter la capacité du Parti à édifier une « société harmonieuse socialiste » est donc la première sortie officielle du président sur le sujet, et pose ses bases idéologiques et pratiques. 31 Arguant qu’à partir d’un certain stade, « lorsque le Produit Intérieur Brut par personne dépasse la barre des mille dollars américains par habitant, le développement économique et social entre alors dans une phase cruciale », Hu Jintao souligne dans ce discours que certains pays ont négocié cette phase cruciale avec succès, « parce que des mesures appropriées ont favorisé le développement rapide de l’économie et le progrès de la société dans la stabilité », confirmant ainsi que le développement prioritaire de

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l’économie reste au cœur de la stratégie politique du gouvernement chinois.53 Sur la base de cette comparaison, Hu Jintao enferme alors la Chine dans ce postulat déterministe où le salut (le « succès ») d’une nation passe par le développement de son économie et la stabilité de sa société. 32 Hu Jintao continue en rappelant que le Parti a pour préoccupation et pour devoir de « protéger et développer les intérêts fondamentaux de la grande majorité du peuple » chinois, et non plus du peuple chinois dans sa totalité, une distinction apparue avec le concept des trois représentations (san ge daibiao 三个代表) développé par Jiang Zemin en 2001 ; et qu’il se doit de renforcer son « administration de la société, de créer un bon environnement humain, de maintenir un bon ordre social, de protéger la stabilité de la société et de garantir aux masses une vie paisible et un travail heureux », un énoncé que l’on peut juger équivoque, la protection de la stabilité sociale et le maintien de l’ordre pouvant autant passer par la prévention que par la répression.54 Mais tout cela s’avère indispensable pour permettre au Parti de mener à bien ses « trois grandes tâches historiques » («三大历史任务») : « réaliser la modernisation de notre pays, achever l’unité de notre patrie, protéger la paix mondiale » («推进现代化建设、完成祖国统一、维护世界和平»).55La notion de “modernisation” (xiandaihua 现代化) est une stratégie discursive habilement utilisée de manière récurrente dans le discours officiel pour justifier un certain nombre de choix économiques, aux conséquences sociales souvent problématiques, réalisés dans le cadre général du développement (fazhan 发展) du pays et qui correspondent en réalité à la mondialisation de l’espace social chinois. La notion de “modernisation” articule autour d’elle toute une rhétorique anxiogène centrée sur les termes de “retard” et de “rattrapage”, une rhétorique déjà initiée sous l’ère maoïste quand il s’agissait de « dépasser l’Angleterre et de rattraper les Etats- Unis » (lors du « Grand bond en avant », Da yuejin 大跃进). Mais présentement, la “modernisation” sert de paravent discursif pour tous les accomplissements de l’idéologie libérale dominante, elle exerce ce que Bourdieu appelle une « fonction d’écran » (ou « fonction de masques »).56 Le sociologue Jean-Marc Vernier voit dans le terme “modernisation” un « commode outil d’euphémisation politique », expliquant que « tous les gouvernants prônent ainsi résolument la nécessité de moderniser (…) l’État, les institutions. Ce bel unanimisme n’a d’égal que l’élasticité d’un mot fourre- tout qui ne répond plus qu’à des injonctions adressées au corps social et aux citoyens ». 57

33 Mais, continue Hu Jintao, les conditions présentes ne sont pas si défavorables à l’harmonie sociale. Elles sont même plutôt « propices » («有利条件»). Tout d’abord, « la direction du pays par le Parti communiste et notre système socialiste constituent les garanties les plus fondamentales pour la construction d’une société harmonieuse socialiste » ; cette affirmation, fondée sur elle-même, est nécessaire pour renforcer et légitimer la présence du Parti communiste à la tête du pays.58 Ensuite, le « développement continu depuis la fondation de la Nouvelle Chine et plus particulièrement depuis les réformes et l’ouverture » ont renforcé la « puissance nationale » (guoli 国力), et l’unité de la nation est assurée puisque « toutes les classes, tous les partis politiques, toutes les ethnies et toutes les communautés jouissent politiquement d’un statut égal, leurs intérêts fondamentaux sont identiques ».59 34 Néanmoins, et la remarque est d’importance, Hu Jintao reconnaît que « la Chine se trouve toujours et se trouvera encore pendant une longue période dans la phase initiale du socialisme » et que « l’établissement d’une société harmonieuse socialiste est une

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tâche difficile qu’il nous faudra assumer avec responsabilité sur une longue période. De la même manière que la construction d’un pays socialiste modernisé représente un long processus historique, la construction d’une société harmonieuse socialiste s’avère également être un long processus historique qu’il faudra sans cesse encourager ».60 Nous soulignons ce point particulier, car le Parti communiste chinois n’a eu de cesse de justifier l’échec de certains objectifs sociaux majeurs qu’il s’était fixé par la complexité du processus et des opérations, par la nécessité d’un long terme et l’importance de la patience et de l’abnégation.61 La prudence rhétorique de Hu Jintao soulignant que la Chine restera encore longtemps dans la phase initiale du socialisme, et qu’il faudra également redoubler d’efforts sur une longue période indéterminée pour construire une « société harmonieuse », révèle non seulement l’ampleur et la difficulté effectives de la tâche, mais également les limites et les inerties inhérentes à la situation sociale et politique chinoises (en tout premier lieu desquelles l’exercice exclusif du pouvoir par une seule entité, quand bien même hétérogène, et les collusions d’intérêts qui en découlent). 35 Hu Jintao en vient alors aux modalités pratiques de mise en œuvre de la « société harmonieuse ». Insistant sur l’importance de prendre pour principes directeurs « la théorie de Deng Xiaoping et l’importante pensée des “trois représentations” » («邓小平理论和“三个代表”重要思想»), une “formalité” discursive obligée pour inscrire le discours de la « société harmonieuse » dans une continuité idéologique, le texte insiste sur l’importance fondamentale de « maintenir comme objectif central le développement de l’économie » («坚持以经济建设为中心») tout en mettant en pratique le « concept de développement scientifique » («科学发展观»), c'est-à-dire un développement durable et rationnel.62 Hu Jintao appelle à « placer l’homme au centre des choses » («以人为本»), et à « prendre les intérêts fondamentaux de la grande majorité du peuple chinois comme points de départ et points d’achoppement fondamentaux du travail réalisé par l’État et le Parti ».63 Ce concept de « grande majorité du peuple chinois », introduit par les « trois représentations » de Jiang Zemin, diffère sensiblement du credo initial d’un Parti s’affirmant « au service du peuple » (wei renmin fuwu 为人民服务) dans sa totalité. Le Parti réaffirme qu’il est désormais le parti d’une partie de la population qu’il favorise par un accès privilégié à la société de consommation.64 Ce concept permet également de demander à l’individu de sacrifier ses intérêts “individuels” au nom des intérêts d’une “grande majorité du peuple chinois” dont il ne ferait pas nécessairement partie. Hu Jintao appelle également le Parti à accorder toute son « attention à l’égalité sociale » («必须注重社会公平»), puis résume en une phrase les impératifs du gouvernement chinois pour les années à venir : 必须正确处理改革发展稳定的关系，坚持把改革的力度、发展的速度和社会可以承受的程度统一起来，使改革发展稳定相互协调、相互促进，确保人民群众安居乐业，确保社会政治稳定和国家长治久安.65 Il est indispensable de traiter correctement la relation entre réformes, développement et stabilité, de persévérer dans cette approche unifiée réunissant intensité des réformes, vitesse du développement, et capacité de tolérance de la société de manière à coordonner et à promouvoir mutuellement réformes, développement et stabilité, de garantir aux masses populaires une vie paisible et un travail heureux, de garantir la stabilité politique et sociale ainsi que la gouvernance à long terme et sans trouble du pays. 36 Ce propos nous parait essentiel, car il révèle encore une fois que la priorité est au développement économique de la Chine, auquel il faudra habituer et adapter la population chinoise. Répétons tout de même que cette stratégie n’a rien de particulier à

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la Chine ni au Parti communiste chinois. Comme le disait Jean-François Billeter, « la société dans son ensemble, en particulier la société urbaine et le régime lui-même, n’ont fondamentalement plus d’autre perspective qu’un développement conçu en termes purement économiques. L’imaginaire dominant est désormais le même qu’ailleurs ».66

37 Hu Jintao poursuit son allocution en spécifiant les dix tâches à accomplir, qui s’imposent au Parti et à l’ensemble de la société chinoise, pour « promouvoir la construction d’une société harmonieuse socialiste » («促进社会主义和谐社会建设»).67 En tout premier lieu, il faut « maintenir consciencieusement le développement continu, rapide, coordonné et sain de l’économie », précisant une nouvelle fois que « la résolution des nombreux problèmes et contradictions auxquels fait face la Chine (…) réside dans le développement ».68 Le président Hu Jintao souligne ensuite l’importance du développement économique pour créer un « meilleur système de sécurité sociale » («更完善的(…)社会保障体系»), « créer davantage d’opportunités professionnelles et satisfaire continuellement les divers besoins des masses populaires », affirmant qu’un développement économique « cordonné et sain (…) est la garantie majeure, pour les masses, d’une amélioration continue de leur niveau de vie ».69 Abordant la question paysanne, Hu Jintao assure que « la vie des nombreux paysans s’améliore de jour en jour, leur qualité s’améliore également, les nombreux villages paysans vivent maintenant dans un climat paisible et bienveillant », une vision que tout le monde ne partage pas nécessairement sur le terrain.70 Evoquant ensuite l’importance de « développer consciencieusement la démocratie socialiste » («切实发展社会主义民主») et d’appliquer « les principes fondamentaux d’un État de droit » («切实落实依法治国的基本方略»), l’allocution aborde enfin la question de la morale.71 Il faut « renforcer consciencieusement la construction d’une morale idéologique » («切实加强思想道德建设») réaffirme Hu Jintao, soutenant que « l’harmonie d’une société et la capacité d’un pays à installer un gouvernement sur un long terme et sans troubles dépendent en grande partie de la qualité morale de l’ensemble de ses membres ».72 Il faut donc éduquer le peuple de manière à susciter chez lui « une confiance inébranlable dans le socialisme aux caractéristiques chinoises » et une « fibre nationale centrée sur le patriotisme » tout en le formant à « l’esprit de notre temps centré sur les réformes ».73 Pour ce faire, Hu Jintao appelle à mettre en œuvre énergiquement « les travaux de construction d’une morale citoyenne » («要积极实施公民道德建设工程»).74 广泛开展社会公德、职业道德、家庭美德教育，在全社会倡导爱国守法、明礼诚信、团结友善、勤俭自强、敬业奉献的基本道德规范，培养良好的道德品质和文明风尚.75 Il faut développer massivement une morale publique au sein de la société, une éthique professionnelle, et une excellence morale au sein des foyers, promouvoir dans toute la société des normes morales élémentaires basées sur l’amour de la patrie et le respect de la loi, la politesse, les bonnes manières, l’honnêteté et la confiance, la cohésion et la fraternité, la diligence, l’abnégation et l’amélioration de soi, le respect du travail et le sens du sacrifice. Il faut cultiver de bonnes qualités morales et des mœurs et coutumes civilisées. 38 « Morale » (daode 道德) et « civilisation » (wenming 文明) sont des éléments clés de la « société harmonieuse », dont le discours dessine les contours d’un “homme nouveau” : un “citoyen civilisé” et patriote, c'est-à-dire respectueux du Parti et de ses politiques, et à la “qualité morale” élevée, c'est-à-dire capable de faire passer les intérêts de la société, tels que le Parti les définit, avant ses propres intérêts, avec « abnégation » (qinjian 勤俭) « sens du sacrifice » (fengxian 奉献) en faveur de la « cohésion et de la

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fraternité » (tuanjie youshan 团结友善) de la société.76 Car, comme l’explique l’historien Limor Yagil, « l’idée de construire un homme nouveau, plus précisément un nouvel être humain, est inhérente à tout programme utopique d’une part, et constitue d’autre part le but et le noyau de toute idéologie totalitaire ou autoritaire ». Cet homo harmonicus, cet “homme de la société harmonieuse”, est au cœur du discours de la « société harmonieuse », il est l’élément primordial et la condition sine qua non à l’harmonie sociale. C’est essentiellement en ce sens que le discours de la « société harmonieuse » s’inscrit dans ce processus global de civilisation de la population chinoise, c'est-à-dire dans ce projet de faire des Chinois (et en particulier les plus défavorisés et les plus exploités d’entre eux) des citoyens “polis” et “civilisés”, capables de se mettre sans protester au service de l’économie de marché et de son fonctionnement.77 Et quand Hu Jintao insiste pour « donner une place prioritaire à l’éducation » («把教育摆在优先地位»), « garantir l’égalité dans l’accès à l’éducation » («保障教育公平»), et « bâtir un système éducatif sain et solide » («构建健全的教育体系») de manière à « promouvoir sans cesse l’augmentation et l’amélioration de la qualité de l’ensemble de la nation » («促进全民族素质不断提高»), il confirme le propos de Michel Foucault quand celui-ci précise que « tout système d’éducation est une manière politique de maintenir ou de modifier l’appropriation des discours, avec les savoirs et les pouvoirs qu’ils emportent avec eux ».78

39 Le discours de la « société harmonieuse », au travers de cette allocution officielle de Hu Jintao, constitue donc un programme qui se veut totalisant en « visant l’ensemble de la collectivité » et qui cherche à « jouer un rôle de “cadrage” » en prétendant « fixer le cadre général où lieux communs et énoncés orthodoxes peuvent être énoncés », aspirant par là à « un rôle normatif de délimitation des représentations de la collectivité ».79 Mais la « société harmonieuse » telle que la présente Hu Jintao ressemble plus à une utopie, au sens propre et au sens figuré : au sens propre, parce que la « société harmonieuse » se présente comme cette société de nulle part puisque encore à construire, une « société politique » caractérisée « par une constitution rationnelle, un idéal de perfection absolue, de la réalisation duquel découle le bonheur de tous les citoyens » ; au sens figuré, parce que les énoncés se résument pour la plupart à des objectifs à atteindre, des intentions et des impératifs officiels que rien dans la situation chinoise actuelle ne semble particulièrement conforter, et dont la réalisation semble au mieux difficile, si ce n’est impossible, dans les conditions présentes. S’il n’y a aucun doute à ce que le gouvernement chinois continue une politique centrée sur la croissance économique, il est par contre raisonnable de douter de sa capacité (et plus simplement de la possibilité) à mettre en place, par exemple, un système de sécurité sociale universel et efficace, un besoin pourtant urgent tant en zones urbaines qu’en zones rurales. 40 Finalement, à étudier de près cette allocution et les énoncés qu’elle développe, on peut estimer que, mis à part le développement économique et le développement d’un arsenal sécuritaire qui semblent être des objectifs réalisables pour le pouvoir en place, la construction d’une « société harmonieuse » repose manifestement et principalement sur la capacité du “citoyen” chinois à se comporter de manière “civilisée”, à faire preuve d’une haute “qualité morale” et à consacrer efforts et sacrifices au développement de l’économie et à la construction d’une nation chinoise unie et “harmonieuse”. La « société harmonieuse » s’affirme donc comme une vision du monde, elle met en place un modèle civilisationnel au sein duquel l’homo harmonicus

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joue un rôle fondamental : elle n’est donc pas uniquement un programme politique, elle est également, voire essentiellement, affaire de perception du monde, de posture intellectuelle, un processus de configuration morale des individus centré sur l’abnégation, la patience, le sacrifice et le dévouement à la nation que la campagne des « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » va par la suite exalter.80

Para-texte – La campagne d’éducation civique des « Huit honneurs et huit hontes »

41 Les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » (ba rong ba chi 八荣八耻), développés par Hu Jintao le 4 mars 2006 lors d’une allocution à la Conférence consultative politique du peuple chinois, sont huit préceptes construits de manière parallèle (chaque précepte est constitué de deux parties de sept caractères chacune) censés exprimer et signifier la « conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » (shehuizhuyi rongruguan 社会主义荣辱观).81 La construction de ces préceptes comme des versets, avec deux structures de sept caractères chacun, permet une mémorisation plus “ludique” car la forme, symétrique, permet la récitation ; et la récitation a ceci de particulier qu’elle permet l’énonciation et la diffusion d’un contenu distancié de son sens. La récitation permet une meilleure imprégnation des consciences car elle ne passe pas (entièrement) par une assimilation du sens mais par une assimilation du son.

42 Chaque précepte constitue un énoncé qui prétend distinguer le bien du mal, le glorieux du honteux, et expose une posture morale qu’il serait un “honneur” d’adopter et une “honte” de ne pas respecter. Ce code moral, destiné à l’origine à moraliser la vie politique, se retrouva très rapidement et massivement exposé publiquement, s’avérant finalement être une vaste entreprise d’éducation morale à destination de l’ensemble de la population.82 43 Dans cette allocution, Hu Jintao inscrit encore une fois son concept (la « conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte ») dans une continuité et une cohérence idéologiques lorsqu’il signifie que « la construction d’une société de petit confort sur tous les plans, et l’accélération du processus de modernisation socialiste nous impose de mettre le développement d’une culture socialiste avancée parmi nos tâches les plus prioritaires ».83 Ce terme, « culture socialiste avancée » (shehuizhuyi xianjin wenhua 社会主义先进文化), que nous retrouvons dans le « Programme de mise en œuvre de la construction d’une morale citoyenne » ne doit pas s’interpréter de manière trop étroite et doit être compris dans un sens anthropologique, faisant référence de manière globale aux mœurs et au mode de vie des individus.84 Ainsi, il apparaît impératif à Hu Jintao de développer une culture socialiste, et pour se faire de « concentrer notre attention sur l’élévation de la qualité des individus » («着眼于提高人的素质»), de « renforcer l’édification morale et idéologique » («加强思想道德建设») de manière à « former des citoyens socialistes porteurs d’idéaux, de morale, de culture et de discipline ».85 Le texte revient alors sur cette notion, récurrente, de “qualité” (suzhi 素质) de la population qu’il faudrait élever en affirmant que « la compétition globale entre les grandes puissances de ce monde est en finalité une compétition qui se joue sur la qualité de la nation », nation à prendre au sens de la communauté imaginée d’individus, ce qui revient à stigmatiser ceux qui parmi la population seraient de moins bonne “qualité”, les moins “civilisés”, culturellement les moins “avancés”, “responsables” proclamés du “retard” de la Chine dans la compétition mondiale.86 Ce

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type de discours est le discours typique de l’État néo-darwiniste tel que le définit le sociologue Loïc Wacquant, à savoir un État qui érige la compétition en fétiche et célèbre à tout crin la « responsabilité individuelle », qui « se replie alors sur ses fonctions régaliennes de maintien de l’ordre, (…) ainsi que sur sa mission symbolique de réaffirmation des valeurs communes par la vitupération publique des catégories déviantes. Ce darwinisme nouvelle manière loue et récompense les “gagnants” pour leur vigueur et leur intelligence et fustige les “perdants” de la “lutte pour l’existence” économique en pointant leurs carences de caractère ou de comportement.87 44 Cette stigmatisation, nous le verrons, vise tout autant les populations défavorisées par les choix économiques et politiques du Parti (les mingong, les xiagang, les chômeurs et les travailleurs pauvres) mais également tous les individus en situation de contestation ou de rupture avec le discours officiel du développement : ce sont ces populations qu’il s’agira de discipliner et d’éduquer, ce qui est d’ailleurs le propos principal des « Huit honneurs et huit hontes », et dont il s’agira de parfaire « l’édification morale et idéologique ».88 Toutes ces notions : développement, “modernisation”, “qualité”, réformes, opposés au “retard” et à la “médiocrité”, constituent un enchevêtrement discursif et sont le lexique d’un processus de civilisation de la population chinoise.

45 Hu Jintao continue en soulignant le « rôle fondamental de l’éducation dans l’élévation de la qualité d’un individu » («教育对提高人的素质的基础性作用») et appelle à réformer l’éducation nationale pour permettre la « généralisation de la scolarisation obligatoire » («加大对义务教育(...)的投入»), dont il faut rappeler qu’elle est, en Chine comme ailleurs, le principal médium des discours officiels et le lieu où se joue l’éducation civique, et où se construit “l’identité nationale”.89 Pour mettre en place cette « culture avancée », Hu Jintao insiste pour que la Chine « forme et cultive des individus talentueux en grand nombre » («培养大批优秀人才») car « le prestige d’une nation, vient avant tout de ses talents » («国家兴盛，人才为本»).90 Cette notion de “talent”, à rapprocher de celle de “qualité”, est encore et avant tout une perception officielle (ce qui n’est du reste pas l’apanage de la Chine), et le processus est tautologique : sera défini « talentueux » ce qui sera conforme à la « culture socialiste avancée » et à la « morale citoyenne » préalablement définies.91 46 Hu Jintao évoque enfin l’importance d’instituer « de bonnes mœurs sociales ».92 三是要树立良好的社会风气。社会风气是社会文明程度的重要标志(…)。树立良好的社会风气是广大人民群众的强烈愿望，也是经济社会顺利发展的必然要求。在我们的社会主义社会里，是非、善恶、美丑的界限绝对不能混淆，坚持什么、反对什么，倡导什么、抵制什么，都必须旗帜鲜明.93 Les conduites sociales sont un indicateur du degré de civilisation d’une société (…). Instituer de bonnes mœurs sociales est le souhait le plus cher des larges masses populaires, c’est aussi une condition indispensable au bon fonctionnement de l’économie et de la société. Dans notre société socialiste, la frontière entre le vrai et le faux, le bien et le mal, le beau et le laid ne peut pas être floue. Il est impératif de bien distinguer ce à quoi s’opposer, ce dans quoi il faut persévérer, ce qu’il faut promouvoir et ce à quoi il faut résister. 47 Hu Jintao affirme donc l’importance d’une moralité socialiste intègre pour que chaque citoyen puisse distinguer le bien du mal. La nécessité d’un cadre moral s’impose dans l’idée de discipliner et de “civiliser” la population chinoise : « il faut éduquer les cadres et les masses populaires, et en particulier les jeunes, à la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » conclut-il.94

48 Le texte termine donc par l’énoncé des huit honneurs et des huit hontes :

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以热爱祖国为荣、以危害祖国为耻 ; 以服务人民为荣、以背离人民为耻 ; 以崇尚科学为荣、以愚昧无知为耻 ; 以辛勤劳动为荣、以好逸恶劳为耻 ; 以团结互助为荣、以损人利己为耻 ; 以诚实守信为荣、以见利忘义为耻 ; 以遵纪守法为荣、以违法乱纪为耻 ; 以艰苦奋斗为荣、以骄奢淫逸为耻.95 Aimer sa patrie avec ardeur est un honneur, porter préjudice à sa patrie est une honte ; servir le peuple est un honneur, se détourner du peuple est une honte ; prôner et préconiser la science est un honneur, l’inculture et l’ignorance sont une honte ; l’âpreté à la tâche et le travail laborieux sont un honneur, le loisir et l’oisiveté sont une honte ; l’union et l’entraide sont un honneur, la recherche de son propre intérêt au détriment d’autrui est une honte ; l’honnêteté et la loyauté sont un honneur, l’absence de scrupules et l’appât du gain sont une honte ; observer la discipline et respecter la loi est un honneur, enfreindre la loi et transgresser la discipline est une honte ; une vie faite d’abnégation et de labeur est un honneur, une vie faite d’arrogance, de luxe, de débauche et d’oisiveté est une honte. 49 A l’énoncé de ces préceptes, il est difficile dans un premier temps de ne pas souligner que honnir « l’appât du gain » est quelque peu paradoxal quand le profit, « l’absence de scrupules » et la « recherche de son propre intérêt au détriment d’autrui » forment des pratiques intimement liées au fonctionnement d’une économie de marché, au sein de laquelle il n’existe de concurrence loyale que de mythe.96 Le développement de l’économie chinoise est passé et passe notamment, comme ailleurs, par des pratiques que les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » (ba rong ba chi 八荣八耻) qualifieraient de “honteuses”.97

50 Remarquons ensuite que bannir toute conduite immorale en proscrivant « le luxe, la débauche et l’oisiveté » est paradoxal quand, par ailleurs, ceux-ci sont sublimés par la société de consommation et la publicité marchande et sont le symbole d’une certaine réussite sociale, dispendieuse et ostensible. Louer « l’abnégation et le labeur » permet donc de mettre certains individus (ceux à qui le luxe est refusé) dans un cadre propice à la production marchande et au développement de l’économie en valorisant le travail salarié. C’est une stratégie discursive destinée à mettre les pauvres au travail, à « faire travailler les pauvres, là où l’illusion a déçu, et où la force s’est défaite ».98 Car le luxe et les modèles d’existence qui y sont associés jouent un rôle majeur dans l’acte d’achat des classes aux revenus supérieurs, et il apparaît alors manifeste que les ba rong ba chi ne s’adressent pas à l’ensemble de la population, mais essentiellement à celle défavorisée par les réformes, celle qu’il s’agira de mettre au travail. De la même manière, il conviendra de répudier le « loisir », pourtant majoritairement induit dans la consommation de marchandises, et de louer l’âpreté à la tâche, de manière à conforter les nombreux exclus de la “société de loisirs” dans leur existence laborieuse. 51 Ce code moral est certes destiné à configurer les postures sociales des individus, à les discipliner, c'est-à-dire à « jauger les individus “en vérité” » sans plus aucune autre nuance que le glorieux et le honteux.99 Mais c’est également et essentiellement une stratégie discursive destinée à “civiliser” une certaine partie de la population chinoise, celle défavorisée par les réformes, c’est-à-dire à l’adapter à « l’esprit de notre temps »

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(shidai jingshen 时代精神), aux nouvelles donnes de l’économie de marché, pour la grandeur de la patrie, à laquelle il serait une honte de « porter préjudice ». Les ba rong ba chi 八荣八耻 encadrent et normalisent par le discours les très nombreuses situations de précarité sociale et économique que subit une grande partie de la société chinoise et dont se nourrit son économie.100 Derrière leur naïveté apparente, ces énoncés forment l’architecture spirituelle de cet “homme nouveau” dont la « société harmonieuse » a besoin.101 La finalité, maintes fois exprimée, est de former des citoyens “civilisés”, capables de construire, par leurs attitudes et leur perception du monde, cette harmonie sociale que le seul matérialisme historique ne peut plus produire.102 52 Le discours de la « société harmonieuse » s’inscrit donc dans un processus global de rectification morale de la population chinoise pauvre ou défavorisée de manière à faire accepter l’inacceptable (l’indispensable exploitation d’une population pauvre à entretenir) et à rendre égal l’inégal (chacun est égal devant les inégalités, en ce sens que chacun participe avec ses “qualités” au “développement” de la Chine). Un nouvel ordre social harmonieux se dessine dans les discours et les représentations, où le sacrifice individuel d’une grande partie de la population serait considéré comme normal dans une société où les inégalités évolueraient en harmonie, car indiscutables et indiscutées. Le processus de civilisation de la population chinoise, par le biais de complexes discursifs et idéologiques tels que la « société harmonieuse » sert donc à asseoir la domination d’un ordre social établi, et plus particulièrement à garantir la production et la consommation de marchandises.

NOTES

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p.327. 2. Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 (1942 - ~) est depuis le 15 mars 2003 le président de la République populaire de Chine (il est le secrétaire général du Parti communiste chinois depuis 2002). Jiang Zemin 江泽民 (1926 - ~) fut le secrétaire général du Parti communiste chinois entre 1989 et 2002, et président de la République populaire de Chine de 1993 à 2003. 3. Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1904 - 1997), “leader” de la seconde génération de dirigeants chinois (il est d’ailleurs surnommé le « petit timonier », en référence au « grand timonier » Mao Zedong), eut un rôle majeur dans l’histoire politique chinoise, bien qu’il n’occupa officiellement aucun poste majeur (il fut uniquement secrétaire général du Parti communiste chinois de 1956 à 1967, date à laquelle il fut évincé du pouvoir car jugé trop libéral). Réhabilité en 1977 au sein du Bureau politique du Comité central, l’instance dirigeante du Parti en Chine, après sa disgrâce lors de la « Révolution culturelle », Deng Xiaoping sera le véritable homme fort du pouvoir durant les années 1980. Instigateur des politiques de « réformes et d’ouverture » (gaige kaifang 改革开放) économiques de la Chine, favorable à la répression du mouvement de la place Tiananmen, Deng est le véritable dirigeant de la Chine de la fin des années 1970 jusqu’au début des années 1990. 4. Jean-Louis Rocca, La Condition chinoise : la mise au travail capitaliste à l’âge des réformes (1978-2004), Paris, Karthala, 2006, p.107. Les éléments entre crochets ont été rajoutés par nous. 5. Le terme chinois hexie 和谐 signifie se traduit généralement par harmonie ou concorde.

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6. Sur la crise sociale en Chine contemporaine, voir Sun Liping 孙立平, Duanlie : ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai de zhongguo shehui 断裂:20世纪90年代以来的中国社会 (Fracture : la société chinoise depuis les années 1990), Pékin 北京, Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe 社会科学文献出版社, 2003. Sur la crise sociétale, voir Jean-François Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, Paris, Allia, 2006. Sur la crise environnementale, lire par exemple Brice Pedroletti, « Le revers de la médaille d’une croissance galopante », Le Monde, édition du 10 juillet 2007, Supplément Economie p. II ; Richard McGregor, « 750 000 a year killed by Chinese pollution », Financial Times, édition du 2 juillet 2007 ; Joseph Kahn & Jim Yardley « The dark side of China’ boom », Herald Tribune, édition du 27 août 2007. Sur l’aggravation du mécontentement et des mouvements de protestation populaires, voir Lucien Bianco, Peasants Without the Party: Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 2001 ; William Hurst, « Mass Frames and Worker Protest », in Kevin J. O’Brien (Dir.), Popular Protest in China, Cambridge, Havard University Press, 2008, pp.71-87 ; Kevin J. O’Brien & Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 7. John B. Thompson, « Préface », in Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p.46. 8. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » («胡锦涛在省部级主要领导干部提高构建社会主义和谐社会能力专题研讨班上的讲话»), prononcée le 19 février 2005 à l’Ecole centrale du Parti. Pour le texte intégral de cette allocution, voir Hongqi chubanshe 红旗出版社, Xuexi hujintao zai sheng buji zhuyao lingdao ganbu tigao goujian shehui zhuyi hexie shehui nengli zhuanti yantaoban shang de jianghua daodu / ganbu qunzhong guanxin de tongsu 学习胡锦涛在省部级主要领导干部提高构建社会主义和谐社会能力专题研讨班上的讲话导读/干部群众关心的通俗, Pékin 北京, hongqi chubanshe 红旗出版社, 2005. Ce texte est par ailleurs consultable dans son intégralité sur le portail officiel de la République populaire de Chine sur l’Internet, le site Zhongguowang 中国网, dirigé par le Bureau de l’information du Conseil d’État ( guowuyuan xinwenban 国务院新闻办), voir Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, « Hu Jintao guanyu goujian shehuizhuyi hexie shehui jianghua quanwen 胡锦涛关于构建社会主义和谐社会讲话全文 », Zhongguowang 中国网, publié le 26 juin 2005, consulté le 12 août 2009 sur http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/news/ 899546.htm.. 9. Avec celui de « développement scientifique » (kexue fazhan 科学发展). 10. Nous comprenons le terme « civilisation » (et ses dérivés « civilisé(e)(s) » et « civilisateur ») dans le sens défini par le sociologue Norbert Elias, pour qui la civilisation n’est pas seulement un état mais également « un processus qu’il s’agit de promouvoir ». (voir Norbert Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs, trad. de l’allemand par Pierre Kamnitzer, Paris, Calman-Lévy, 1991, p.69). La civilisation des mœurs dont parle Norbert Elias s’inscrit, dans la formation des États-nations modernes, comme une uniformisation et une normalisation des comportements, des habitudes et des attitudes en société, à l’aune des conventions sociales pratiquées par les classes dominantes et les élites (pratiques qui avaient d’ailleurs pour principe d’opérer une distinction d’avec les masses populaires). La civilisation des mœurs est avant tout un acte de domination et s’affirme donc comme l’incarnation du rapport dominant-dominé, c'est-à-dire un rapport qui prend chair, qui s’installe dans le corps. Sous sa forme actuelle en Chine, c'est-à-dire comme stratégie discursive et coercitive imposée sur les individus et destinée à favoriser le fonctionnement d’une économie de marché, le processus de civilisation de la population chinoise date de la fin des années 1970, avec le projet de « civilisation spirituelle » (jingshen wenming 精神文明) établi par Deng Xiaoping (voir Nicholas Dynon, « “Four Civilisations” and the Evolution of Post-Mao Chinese Socialist Ideology », The China Journal, n°60, juillet 2008). Mais cette volonté de “civiliser” et de discipliner le “bas peuple” à l’aune des mœurs et des normes pratiquées par l’élite

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intellectuelle se retrouve déjà dans le processus plus général de construction de la nation chinoise entamé au début du vingtième siècle. 11. Sur le système de propagande du PCC, lire la très complète étude de Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought work in contemporary China, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008 ; voir également Florence Padovani, L’action du département central de la propagande durant les années 1980, thèse de doctorat soutenue à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), 1996. Sur le rôle joué par les médias dans le système de propagande politique, et d’une manière plus générale, sur la complexe relation triangulaire entre l’État, les médias et le public, voir le travail (certes un peu daté) de Kevin Latham, « Nothing but the Truth: News Media, Power and Hegemony in South China », The China Quarterly, n°163, septembre 2000, pp. 633-654. 12. Mentionnons tout de même cette explication originale à défaut d’être réellement crédible, qui voit dans le terme hexie 和谐, un idéal de société “démocratique” où les individus (l’élément 口 du caractère he 和 est porteur d’une charge sémantique : « la bouche », et par extension, « l’individu ») mangeraient à leur faim (禾, « céréale »), et où l’ensemble de la population (l’élément 皆 du caractère xie 谐 est porteur de la charge sémantique : « tous ») jouirait de la liberté d’expression (言, « parole » , la forme d’écriture traditionnelle de xie 谐 s’écrit 諧). 13. Un exemple récent nous a été donné par l’utilisation de la figure de Jean Jaurès par Nicolas Sarkozy dans une allocution publique durant la campagne électorale de 2007 (au sujet de la stratégie électorale de Nicolas Sarkozy, voir Alain Badiou, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom ?, Paris, Lignes, 2007, pp.7-25). Cette utilisation ne signifie aucunement que Nicolas Sarkozy rejoint ou se retrouve dans les idées politiques développées par le socialiste Jean Jaurès : elle signifie que Nicolas Sarkozy utilise les connotations politiques et historiques associées au personnage de Jean Jaurès pour s’inscrire, lui, en tant qu’homme politique, dans une continuité historique et nationale auto-proclamée. 14. Pierre-Jean Simon, Pour une sociologie des relations interethniques et des minorités, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006, p.26. 15. Le concept de « développement scientifique » constitue en quelque sorte le volet économique de la rhétorique de Hu Jintao (la « société harmonieuse » correspond plutôt au volet social). Le « développement scientifique », proche du “développement durable”, prône un développement de l’économie de manière rationalisée et raisonnée (“scientifique”) par opposition à une croissance aveugle et irrespectueuse des ressources naturelles et humaines. Il intervient alors que la pollution de l’environnement devient un problème majeur et critique pour la population chinoise, mais surtout pour la production de marchandises elle-même. Le développement scientifique, parce que respectueux des forces en présence, est censé favoriser l’éclosion d’une société harmonieuse. 16. Hu Jintao fait partie de la quatrième génération de dirigeants. Sur les « trois représentations », voir Jiang Zemin 江泽民, Jiang Zemin wenxuan disanjuan 江泽民文选第三卷 (Écrits choisis de Jiang Zemin, Volume 3), Pékin 北京, Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, 2006 ; voir également Emilie Tran, « Les “trois représentations” », in Thierry Sanjuan (dir.), Dictionnaire de la Chine Contemporaine, Paris, Armand Colin, 2006, p. 260. Inscrite dans la constitution de la République populaire de Chine, la théorie des « trois représentations » stipule que le Parti communiste chinois se doit de représenter et d’incarner « les exigences de développement des forces productives avancées de la société chinoise » (« 中国先进社会生产力的发展要求»), « le dynamisme de la culture avancée chinoise » (« 中国先进文化的前进方向»), et « les intérêts fondamentaux de la majorité du peuple » («中国最广大人民的根本利益»). Sur la « société de petit confort », voir Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, Deng Xiaoping wenxuan di’erjuan 邓小平文选第二卷 (Écrits choisis de Deng Xiaoping, Volume 2), Pékin 北京, Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, 2002, p. 237-238). La xiaokang shehui 小康社会 est un objectif politique déterminé par Deng Xiaoping dans le cadre de sa politique de “modernisation” de la Chine (xiandaihua 现代化) élaborée dès 1979. La

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finalité de cette politique était l’édification et la concrétisation en Chine d’une société où chacun des individus vivrait dans une situation d’aisance matérielle suffisante pour être à l’abri des besoins essentiels. 17. Ce qui distingue Hu Jintao des autres dirigeants qui l’ont précédé, c’est qu’il aura finalement accédé à la reconnaissance de ses pairs assez rapidement, en l’espace de trois ans. Jiang Zemin, lui, a apporté ses « trois représentations » en 2001 seulement, soit douze ans après son accession au poste de secrétaire général, et un an seulement avant la passation de pouvoir à Hu Jintao. Dans la rhétorique du Parti, il est toujours indispensable de souligner et de marquer la continuité idéologique entre les différents dirigeants. Ainsi, dans les allocutions officielles, Hu Jintao (ainsi que tous les hauts dirigeants chinois) soulignent systématiquement, telle une litanie, comment telle ou telle politique s’inscrit dans la continuité directe du « marxisme-léninisme, de la pensée de Mao Zedong, de la théorie de Deng Xiaoping et de l’importante pensée des “trois représentations” » (makesi liening zhuyi, maozedong sixiang, dengxiaoping lilun he sangedaibiao zhongyao sixiang 马克思列宁主义、毛泽东思想、邓小平理论和“三个代表”重要思想). Ce lignage idéologique, essentiellement discursif, est fondamental : il permet de légitimer dans le discours (et donc en apparence) une décision politique quand bien même celle-ci serait dans les faits contraire à la pensée socialiste (par exemple, les « trois représentations », qui marquent l’éloignement définitif d’avec la base populaire du socialisme) ; plus important, il permet surtout de donner une cohérence, et donc une légitimité, à soixante années marquées idéologiquement et politiquement par un grand nombre de ruptures et de divergences. Le rappel incessant, non pas à l’histoire ou au passé, mais aux contributions idéologiques des dirigeants passés assoit l’immuabilité du Parti et légitime son exercice continu du pouvoir. 18. Voir par exemple Agnès Andresy, Who’s Hu : le président chinois Hu Jintao, sa politique et ses réseaux, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, pp.161-162 ; John Delury, « “Harmonious” In China: The ancient sources of modern doctrine », Policy Review, n°148, avril-mai 2008. 19. Cette “preuve” a visiblement échappé à tous les acteurs politiques et économiques des années 1990 qui, en toute hypocrisie, justifiaient la reprise d’échanges commerciaux avec la Chine malgré la répression de Tiananmen qu’ils dénonçaient vigoureusement quelques mois auparavant en avançant le principe, soi-disant infaillible, que la croissance économique allait nécessairement apporter la démocratie et développer les droits de l’homme en Chine. Vingt ans plus tard force est de reconnaître qu’ils avaient bien entendu tort. Soulignons néanmoins, d’un autre côté, qu’il n’est pas nécessairement absurde de parler d’un hégémonisme des “valeurs occidentales”, dont la revendication est tout autant discutable. Le concept de démocratie a souvent été déformé et utilisé de manière abusive pour justifier des pratiques intrusives tout à fait intéressées (la seconde guerre irakienne de 2003 en est le parfait exemple). Quant aux droits de l’homme, pour “universels” qu’ils soient depuis 1948, nombre de pays occidentaux, les premiers à dénoncer, justement, les abus du gouvernement chinois, sont loin d’être irréprochables en la matière. 20. Pierre Gentelle, « L’instrumentalisation du nom de Confucius par la Chine populaire », Monde chinois, n°8, été/automne 2006, note 6, p.53. Pierre Gentelle est géographe et travaille sur l’Asie orientale. 21. Bernard Cassen, « Du bon usage des “valeurs asiatiques” : un concept sur mesure né à Singapour et à Kuala-Lumpur », Le Monde Diplomatique, n°497, août 1995, p.2. Bernard Cassen est l’ancien directeur du Monde diplomatique. 22. Guo Baogang & Guo Sujian, « China in Search of Harmonious Society », in Guo Suijian et Guo Baogang, China in Search of Harmonious Society, Lahham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, p.2. Jiang Zemin avait mentionné l’édification d’une société harmonieuse comme l’un des six objectifs à accomplir dans le but d’atteindre la « société de petit confort sur tous les plans ». 23. Guo Baogang & Guo Sujian, « China in Search of Harmonious Society », p.3 (« the classical trade-off between efficiency and equity », les termes entre crochets ont été rajoutés par nous).

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24. Guo Baogang & Guo Sujian, « China in Search of Harmonious Society », p.3 (« single-minded pursuit of economic growth and an achievement-based legitimacy (…) is being overshadowed by social and economic injustice, income and regional disparities, and environmental disasters », les termes entre crochets ont été rajoutés par nous). 25. Il y parviendra dans le discours, en inventant des concepts hybrides comme « l’économie socialiste de marché », mais pas dans la réalité. 26. Le terme « habits neufs » est utillisé en référence au travail de Simon Leys, Les Habits neufs du président Mao, Paris, Champ Libre, 1977. Pierre Ryckmans, alias Simon Leys, fut le premier à traiter la « Révolution culturelle » pour ce qu’elle était : une lutte de pouvoirs et pour le pouvoir, abusivement déguisée en apologie des forces créatives. L’auteur eut le mérite de publier cet ouvrage dans le climat pro-maïste de l’époque en France, très hostile à la critique. Sa carrière universitaire dut en pâtir par la suite 27. Guo Baogang & Guo Sujian, « China in Search of Harmonious Society », p.4 (« are clearly not interested in building a modern utopia; instead, they are interested in the cultural reconstruction through political framing. Framing involves the packaging of new ideas in such a way as to make reference to an existing popular communication frame, thus to encourage certain interpretation and discourage others»). 28. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 29. Li Ji 礼记 est la restauration d’une compilation de textes, qu’auraient collectés Confucius et rédigés ses disciples, traitant de l’organisation sociale sous la dynastie des Zhou 周 (environ 1050 – 256 av. J.-C.). Confucius (Kongzi 孔子 ou Kongfuzi 孔夫子) est un philosophe chinois qui vécut entre 551 et 479 av. J.-C. Il n’existe pas d’écrits qui puissent lui être proprement attribués, mais un ensemble de ses réflexions et de ses propos ont été recueillis et compilés par ses disciples, notamment dans les Entretiens ( Lunyu 论语) Sa pensée a été interprétée pour former une idéologie d’État, le confucianisme, sous la dynastie Han 汉 (206 av.J.-C. – 220), basée sur le respect de la hiérarchie et de l’ordre établi, et la soumission via un ensemble de conventions sociales (li 礼). Sur Confucius, voir Confucius, Entretiens avec ses disciples, trad. du chinois par André Lévy, Paris, Flammarion, 1993 ; Pierre Ryckmans, Les Entretiens de Confucius, Paris, Gallimard, 1989. 30. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. Les éléments entre crochets ont été rajoutés par nous. 31. Guo Baogang, « Utopias of Reconstruction : Chinese Utopianism Form Hong Xiuquan to Mao Zedong », Journal of Comparative Asian Development, vol. 2, n°2, 2003, pp.97-210). L’un des slogans majeurs de la campagne des Jeux Olympiques en Chine était précisément, « one world, one dream » (tongyige shijie, tongyige mengxiang 同一个世界, 同一个梦想). Ce slogan, qui signifiait l’idée d’une communauté mondiale retrouvée autour du dépassement de soi prôné par les Jeux Olympiques, signifiait également la volonté de la Chine de marquer son appartenance à la “communauté mondiale”, en dépit des “spécificités” (guoqing 国情), celles de son régime politique totalitaire, qu’il allait falloir dorénavant accepter et dépasser au profit d’une grande communauté mondiale réconciliée. C’est dans ce sens qu’il faut comprendre le « monde harmonieux » (hexie shijie 和谐世界) que le PCC appelle à édifier, partie intégrante du discours de la « société harmonieuse » et qui constitue la ligne politique officielle de la République populaire de Chine dans ses relations internationales. C’est au nom de ce concept, un « monde harmonieux », un monde unifié, un, que la Chine ne consent pas de se “mêler” des affaires intérieures des pays africains chez qui elle se fournit en pétrole, et à qui elle vend ses services et ses armes (l’exemple du Soudan est assez connu et reconnu). Ce « monde harmonieux » prôné par Hu Jintao est un monde où les conflits et les injustices n’existent plus, parce qu’ils se taisent et ne peuvent

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s’exprimer. Le concept de « société harmonieuse » renferme exactement les mêmes mécanismes sémantiques et idéologiques. 32. Le confucianisme est une réinterprétation idéologique de la pensée développée par Confucius. 33. Shi Zhongwen, « Traditional Culture Embodied in Confucianism », in Guo Suijian et Guo Baogang, China in Search of Harmonious Society, Lahham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, p.37. Shi Zhongwen est professeur de littérature comparée. 34. Wolfgang Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness, trad. de l’allemand par Michael Shaw, New York, Seabury, 1976, p.21 (« equality rests on the consistency of the system of government in its totality and as it affects everyone »), p.37 (« life as decreed by fate. Together with his name, it is imposed on man by the gods (...) a mission heaven assigns to man as it gives him life, and to which he had to adapt as closely as possible by conscientiously fulfilling his part in human society »). Notre méconnaissance de la langue allemande nous a obligé à nous reporter sur la traduction anglaise de l’ouvrage de Wolfgang Bauer. 35. Jean-François Billeter, Contre François Jullien, Paris, Allia, 2006, pp.26-27 (les caractères chinois ont été rajoutés par nous). 36. Georges Orwell a parfaitement démontré, dans le trop sous-estimé Animal Farm (La Ferme des Animaux), comment s’installe le totalitarisme au sein d’une collectivité d’individus : la répartition “naturelle” des tâches, quelle que soit sa motivation, crée les conditions de formation d’une élite auto-proclamée (la division sociale s’installe de manière imperceptible dans le récit quand les cochons expliquent qu’ils ne sont naturellement doués en rien, mais qu’ils savent réfléchir : ils s’installent de ce fait dans la supervision des tâches de la nouvelle république des animaux que tous viennent de créer), et le contrôle de l’information, qui permet d’écrire (et de réécrire) l’histoire en permanence, entrave la transmission de la mémoire, et in fine la fin de l’histoire (voir George Orwell, Animal Farm, Londres, Longman, 1996). 37. Bauer, China and the Search for Happiness, p.22 («the fundamental equation of an ideal world order, calm and equality can thus already be found in Confucius, although its form rather reminds us a uniform stabilization of inequality »). 38. Billeter, Contre François Jullien, p.18. 39. Billeter, Contre François Jullien, pp.18-19. 40. Car le confucianisme n’est pas autre chose qu’une idéologie de la domination. Sur le confucianisme à l’époque moderne et contemporaine, voir Flora Blanchon & Rang-Ri Park-Barjot (Dir.), Le Nouvel âge de Confucius : Modern Confucianism in China and South Korea, Paris, PUPS, 2007 ; Wei Zhengtong 韦政通, Rujia yu xiandai Zhongguo 儒家与现代中国 (Confucianisme et Chine moderne), Taipei 台北, Dongda tushu 东大图书, 2001. 41. Billeter, Contre François Jullien, pp.28. 42. Anne-Marie Broudehoux, « Civilizing Beijing : Social beautification, civility, and citizenship at the 2008 Olympics », in Graeme Hayes & John Karamichas, Mega-events and Civil Societies: Environment and Globalisation, Accommodation and Resistance, London, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010 (à paraître), p.6 (du manuscrit). Nous tenons à remercier Anne-Marie Broudehoux de nous avoir permis d’utiliser ce travail encore non publié. 43. Leïla Choukroune & Antoine Garapon, « Les Normes de l’harmonie chinoise : un droit disciplinaire comme stabilisateur social », Perspectives Chinoises, n°2007/3, p.51. 44. L’époque où Confucius était honni au même titre que le « traître Lin Biao » (lors de la campagne fanlin fankong 反林反孔 de la « Révolution culturelle ») est bien loin. Confucius, au même titre que Cervantès pour l’Espagne, est le digne représentant de la Chine dans le monde via les Instituts Confucius. Sur l’instrumentalisation des concepts traditionnels par le PCC en quête de légitimité, voir Werner Meissmer, « Réflexions sur la quête d’une identité nationale et culturelle en Chine », Perspectives chinoises, n°97, septembre-décembre 2006, pp.45-59.

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45. Sébastien Billioud, « “Confucianisme”, “tradition culturelle” et discours officiels dans la Chine des années 2000 », Perspectives Chinoises, n°2007/3, pp.53-54. Sébastien Billioud y voit une « redécouverte populaire » de la pensée confucéenne. Mais dans une société du spectacle, où les rapports de pouvoir et de domination s’exercent en majeure partie via les média, il n’y a pas de « redécouverte populaire », il n’y a essentiellement que propagande et matraquage publicitaire. Billioud le reconnaît plus loin. « La fièvre pour les études nationales (c'est-à-dire les études classiques) que l’on observe alors, sans pouvoir être réduite à une stratégie politique, n’est pas pour autant sans lien avec l’incitation des autorités » (Billioud, « “Confucianisme”, “tradition culturelle” et discours officiels dans la Chine des années 2000 », p.56). Sur l’engouement autour des études nationales (guoxue 国学), Chen Yan établira le même constat : cette « fièvre » est en (grande) partie soutenue et alimentée par les autorités (voir Chen Yan, L’Eveil de la Chine : les bouleversements intellectuels après Mao (1976-2002), La Tour d’Aigues, Aube, 2002, p.304, note 286). Sébastien Billioud. C’est essentiellement une quête identitaire doublée d’une quête communautaire dans un contexte de déchirure des tissus sociaux (nous n’insisterons jamais assez sur les conséquences des expulsions dans les grandes villes en terme de destruction des mémoires (individuelles et urbaines) et de déconstruction des affinités de quartiers, une fois que les différentes existences individuelles se retrouvent éparpillées en périphéries ou en banlieues) qui ont poussé un grand nombre de Chinois à se tourner vers la secte Falungong (falun dafa 法轮大法). Si nous insistons sur le fait que ce “mouvement spirituel” est une véritable secte (avec gourou, mystifications, croyances mystiques, extorsions de fonds, et manipulations des esprits) poursuivant un certain agenda politique, soulignons également qu’une grande majorité de ses membres n’étaient pas nécessairement crédules pour autant. Sur la secte Falungong, voir Maria Hsia Chang, Falungong, secte chinoise : un défi au pouvoir, trad. de l’américain par Geneviève Brzustowski, Paris, Autrement, 2004 ; nous regrettons néanmoins l’absence d’une approche anthropologique et d’une étude sur les motivations des individus. 46. Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p.210. Sur le mouvement pro-démocratique de Tiananmen, voir par exemple Gregory B. Lee, China’s Lost Decade, Lyon, Tigre de Papier, 2009 ; Jean-Philippe Béja, Michel Bonnin & Alain Peyraube, Le Tremblement de terre de Pékin, Paris, Gallimard, 1991 ; Han Minzhu, Cries for Democracy : Writing and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990. 47. Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique, p.210. Nous n’insisterons pas plus sur cette question de l’impact du discours de la « société harmonieuse » sur les consciences (un point sur lequel il nous est raisonnablement impossible de nous prononcer), mais nous nous contenterons de souligner que le discours de la « société harmonieuse », parce qu’il s’inscrit dans un contexte et un climat favorables à sa présence, peut être convaincant sans pour autant arriver à convaincre : c'est-à-dire qu’il peut très bien développer un ensemble d’idées raisonnables et pleines de bon sens, sans pour autant être cru. 48. Nous insistons sur ce point : la présence massive (quantitative) des expressions du PCC dans l’espace public chinois est avérée et manifeste ; son emprise (qualitative) sur les consciences l’est beaucoup moins. D’une manière générale, en Chine, nous avons régulièrement constaté, autant chez les membres du Parti que chez le simple quidam, un recul manifeste, pour ne pas dire un réel détachement, d’avec cette propagande : ce n’est pas nécessairement le message qui est négligé ou ignoré, mais c’est l’émetteur du message, le Parti, qui n’est plus nécessairement cru (ou qui ne croit même plus à ses propres professions de foi). Mais nous ne discuterons pas ici de l’impact des messages de propagande sur les consciences, pour deux raisons : cette évaluation nous semble impossible à réaliser (et c’est d’ailleurs là, à nos yeux, la grande limite de la sociologie actuelle pratiquée en Chine, cette incapacité à reconnaître l’ineptie des enquêtes quantitatives (d’opinion ou autres), en ce sens qu’elles ne peuvent rien enseigner, hormis qu’il est impossible d’en exploiter les “résultats” tant les filtres et les précautions dans l’expression et la prise de parole des individus en Chine sont nombreux) ; ce n’est pas là le propos de notre

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travail, qui se veut être une étude des messages en soi, de cet espace “interstitiel” entre les émetteurs et les récepteurs. 49. Son impact en terme de présence quantitative s’est retrouvé dilué dans un champ maintenant également parsemé d’autres signes (publicités marchandes) qui rendent l’espace public visuellement “cacophonique”. 50. Il est utile de souligner que le terme chinois xuanchuan 宣传 (propagande) est, contrairement au français, un terme neutre qui n’est chargé d’aucune connotation péjorative. 51. Luc Boltanski & Pierre Bourdieu, La Production de l’idéologie dominante, Paris, Demopolis, 2008, p.120. Toute cette circulation de textes, d’expressions et d’opinions “para-officielles” (en ce sens qu’elles ne proviennent pas d’agents de l’Etat mais de personnalités “civiles”) constituent une grande partie du corpus idéologique de la « société harmonieuse » et sont régulièrement publiés et diffusés par les deux canaux officiels (pour ne pas dire organiques) du Parti, à savoir l’agence de presse Chine nouvelle (Xinhuashe 新华社) et le Quotidien du peuple (Renmin ribao 人民日报). 52. Thierry Guilbert, Le Discours idéologique ou la Force de l’évidence, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p.86. 53. «在人均国内生产总值突破1000美元之后，经济社会发展就进入了一个关键阶段» ; «既有因为举措得当从而促进经济快速发展和社会平稳进步的成功经验», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 54. «维护好、发展好最广大人民的根本利益» ; «必须加强社会建设和管理，营造良好的人际环境，保持良好的社会秩序，维护社会稳定，保证广大人民群众安居乐业», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 55. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. La « société harmonieuse » se veut également être la nouvelle politique de la Chine en matière d’affaires étrangères et de diplomatie. Une partie de cette allocution évoque d’ailleurs la construction d’un monde harmonieux. Cet aspect “international” de la société harmonieuse est important, et le gouvernement chinois en fait notamment usage dans ses relations avec les pays africains notamment, le Soudan en particulier, pour justifier sa collaboration économique avec des régimes politiques contestés pour leur autoritarisme, en arguant que seul le respect des différences permettra l’harmonie et la paix mondiales. Au sujet des relations entre la Chine et l’Afrique, voir Chris Alden & Christopher R. Hughes, « Harmony and Discord in China's Africa Strategy: Some Implications for Foreign Policy », China Quaterly, vol.199, septembre 2009, pp. 563-584 ; Julia C. Strauss, « The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China's Relations with Africa », China Quaterly, vol.199, septembre 2009, pp.777-795 ; voir également Michel Beuret, Serge Michel & Paolo Woods, La Chinafrique, Paris, Grasset, 2008. 56. Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux 2, Paris, Raisons d’agir, 2001, p.10. 57. Jean-Marc Vernier, « Modernisation », in Pascal Durand (Dir.), Les nouveaux mots du pouvoir : abécédaire critique, Bruxelles, Aden, 2007, p.312. Dans cette définition, Jean-Marc Vernier parlait spécifiquement de la France, mais cette approche est, nous semble-t-il, parfaitement applicable à tout autre pays régi par les règles de la mondialisation et du capitalisme libéral. 58. «中国共产党的领导和我国的社会主义制度，为构建社会主义和谐社会提供了最根本的保证», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 59. «经过新中国成立以来特别是改革开放以来的不断发展» ; «在我国，各阶层、各党派、各民族、各团体政治上享有平等地位», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du

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séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 60. «我国仍然处于并将长期处于社会主义初级阶段» ; «建成社会主义和谐社会任重道远。同建设社会主义现代化国家要经历一个很长历史过程一样，构建社会主义和谐社会也是一个需要随着经济、政治、文化的发展而不断推进的很长历史过程», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 61. Les objectifs de la « société de petit confort » prévus depuis le début des années 1980 pour l’an 2000 n’ont par exemple jamais été atteints. Un certain nombre de critères auraient dû être satisfaits, tels que : la consommation de marchandises ne doit plus se réduire aux besoins vitaux mais être également axée sur le plaisir et le développement personnel ; les individus seront propriétaires de leur logement et seront capables de voyager au moins une fois par an ; le fossé entre les revenus urbains et ruraux se réduira ; l’espérance de vie moyenne atteindra les 72 ans, etc. L’échec n’a jamais été reconnu, et a été au contraire retourné par une subtilité linguistique : dans sa rhétorique officielle, le Parti affirme que la Chine est depuis 2000 une « société de petit confort », soulignant juste que ce confort n’est pas présent partout et « sur tous les plans » (bu quanmian de 不全面的). 62. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 63. «始终把最广大人民的根本利益作为党和国家工作的根本出发点和落脚点», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 64. Ce sont les consommateurs moyens urbains, une « classe moyenne » créée par le Parti, constituée en grande partie de fonctionnaires pour qui l’accès à la propriété immobilière a été considérablement facilité par l’État dans les années 1990 (par le biais notamment de prêts bancaires très attractifs). En offrant à certains l’accès à la propriété, le Parti-État se ménage une « classe » d’individus nécessairement favorable à l’ordre social établi (et donc à sa pérennité) puisque celui-ci leur est, en définitive, très favorable. 65. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 66. Jean-François Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, Paris, Allia, 2006, p.61. 67. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 68. «切实保持经济持续快速协调健康发展» ; «解决我国(…)面临的许多矛盾和问题(…)，关键还是要靠发展», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 69. «才能创造更多就业机会，才能不断满足人民群众多方面的需求。经济发展(…)要协调健康，这是人民群众不断提高生活水平的重要保证», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 70. «广大农民日子过好了、素质提高了，广大农村形成安定祥和的局面了», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les

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cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 71. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 72. «一个社会是否和谐，一个国家能否实现长治久安，很大程度上取决于全体社会成员的思想道德素质», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 73. «引导全体人民坚定中国特色社会主义信念» ; «以爱国主义为核心的民族精神» ; «改革创新为核心的时代精神», extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. Insister sur « l’esprit de notre temps » est une stratégie discursive qui enferme l’interlocuteur dans une dualité modernisme contre passéisme qui empêche l’exercice de l’esprit critique. Dans ce discours, s’opposer aux réformes en Chine équivaut à s’opposer à « l’esprit de l’époque », et donc, nécessairement, à faire preuve d’un “passéisme réactionnaire” voir d’une “pensée féodale” (fengjian sixiang 封建思想), un lexique régulièrement avancé en opposition à la modernité (xiandai 现代). 74. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. On trouve les prémisses d’une moralisation de la question sociale dès 2001, avec la mise en place du « Programme de mise en œuvre de la construction d’une morale citoyenne » (gongmin daode jianshe shishi gangyao 公民道德建设实施纲要). Approuvé par le quinzième Comité central du Parti communiste chinois le 20 septembre 2001, ce programme vise à éduquer la population chinoise à la citoyenneté, une citoyenneté envisagée essentiellement dans sa dimension morale et résumée dans la mise en place de “bonnes” mœurs et de “bonnes” pratiques, susceptibles de créer un bon « climat social » (shehui fenwei 社会氛围). Sur ce programme, voir Xu Qixian 许启贤, Wenming beijingren « gongmin daode jianshe shishi gangyao » shimin duben 文明北京人«公民道德建设实施纲要»市民读本 (programme de mise en œuvre de la construction d’une morale citoyenne du Pékinois civilisé, manuel du citadin), Pékin 北京, Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe 北京师范大学出版社, 2003. 75. Extrait de l’« Allocution du président Hu Jintao lors du séminaire organisé pour les hauts dirigeants et les cadres provinciaux autour de la thématique “augmenter notre capacité à construire une société harmonieuse socialiste” » du 19 février 2005. 76. Limore Yagil, « L’Homme nouveau » et la Révolution nationale de Vichy (1940-1944), Villeneuve- d’Ascq, Septentrion, 1997, p.11. La création d’un « homme nouveau » a d’abord été l’une des finalités des utopies révolutionnaires avant de devenir le credo des régimes totalitaires. Ce fut par exemple le cas sous le régime maoïste lors de la « révolution culturelle » (wenhua dageming 文化大革命), mais bien avant déjà avec la création de la « Chine nouvelle » (xin Zhongguo 新中国). 77. Que la question de la moralité vise en particulier la population chinoise paupérisée est un discours bien relayé en Chine. Citons à titre d’exemple l’ouvrage de l’économiste Mao Yushi 茅于轼, Perspectives pour la moralité des Chinois (Zhongguoren de daode qianjing 中国人的道德前景), dans lequel un chapitre entier, intitulé « reconstruire le Chinois » («再造中国人»), décline le discours de la “crise de la moralité” des Chinois et souligne que « la morale est un facteur de stabilité pour une société moderne » («道德是现代社会的稳定剂») (voir Mao Yushi 茅于轼, Zhongguoren de daode qianjing 中国人的道德前景 (Perspectives pour la moralité des Chinois), Canton 广州, Jinan daxue chubanshe 暨南大学出版社, 2003, p.177). La première page de l’ouvrage, la page de titre, est sans équivoque : surplombé d’une dédicace par laquelle l’auteur « dédie ce livre à tous ceux qui se sentent concernés par le développement de la société chinoise » («谨以此书献给所有关心

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中国社会发展的人们 »), traîne en dessous du titre une photo en noir et blanc d’une file de mingong 民工 avec sacs et baluchons. L’amalgame est donc en place : le développement de la société chinoise passe par l’éducation morale de ses pauvres et ses mingong. 78. Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p.46. 79. Guilbert, Le Discours idéologique ou la Force de l’évidence, p.52. 80. Précisons, encore une fois, que nous ne nous intéressons pas à la réception de ce discours au sein de la population chinoise. Nous ne disons donc pas que la « société harmonieuse » convainc, ni qu’elle exerce une pression effective sur les conceptions morales des individus, et encore moins qu’elle parvient inévitablement à transformer la perception qu’ont les individus du monde. Nous disons seulement qu’elle y prétend. Pour résumer notre propos, nous ne disons pas que la société harmonieuse parvient à transformer l’ensemble de la population chinoise en homo harmonicus, nous disons simplement que ce discours est présent, et que l’on peut y distinguer des tendances et des motivations. Par ailleurs, un discours peut être totalisant, c'est-à-dire s’adresser à la totalité de la société prise sous tous ses aspects, sans nécessairement être dominant, c'est-à- dire imprégner effectivement et durablement les consciences. 81. Le texte de l’allocution de Hu Jintao du 4 mars 2006, intitulée « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » (« Laogu shuli shehuizhuyi rongruguan 牢固树立社会主义荣辱观 ») est paru dans le Renmin ribao quelques semaines plus tard (Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, « Laogu shuli shehuizhuyi rongruguan 牢固树立社会主义荣辱观 », Renmin ribao 人民日报, édition du 28 avril 2006). Ce texte est par ailleurs consultable sur le site Internet de l’agence Chine nouvelle (xinhuashe 新华社), voir Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, « Laogu shuli shehuizhuyi rongruguan 牢固树立社会主义荣辱观 », Xinhuawang 新华网, publié le 27 avril 2006, consulté le 12 août 2009 sur http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2006-04/27/content_4482066.htm. La Conférence consultative politique du peuple chinois (zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi 中国人民政治协商会议) est une assemblée sans pouvoir décisionnaire, regroupant l’ensemble des huit autres partis politiques démocratiques chinois “autorisés”, gage du centralisme démocratique affirmé par le PCC. 82. Une véritable campagne idéologique a pris le relais de cette allocution, et les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » se sont retrouvés affichés durant de nombreux mois dans les lieux publics (ils le sont encore dans certains endroits en 2009). Le ministre de l’éducation Zhou Ji 周济, très enthousiaste, déclara même à l’époque « vouloir faire entrer la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte dans les salles de classe, et dans la tête de chaque étudiant » («要把社会主义荣辱观(…)引入课堂、引入学生头脑» ) (Beijing chenbao 北京晨报, « Jiaoyubu buzhang zhouji: “barong bachi” yao yinru ketang 教育部部长周济：“八荣八耻”要引入课堂 » , Beijing chenbao 北京晨报, édition du 14 mars 2006). 83. «全面建设小康社会、加快推进社会主义现代化，要求我们必须把发展社会主义先进文化放到十分突出的位置», extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 84. Le terme wenhua 文化 se traduit également parfois par « civilisation », à comprendre comme désignant l’ensemble des pratiques culturelles d’une communauté. La wenhua 文化 (culture) fait d’ailleurs l’objet d’un programme de développement gouvernemental. Le dernier en date, le « Programme de développement de la culture inscrit dans le onzième plan quinquennal » (guojia “shiyiwu” shiqi wenhua fazhan guihua gangyao 国家“十一五”时期文化发展规划纲要), date de septembre 2006, et insiste particulièrement sur la “qualité morale des citoyens” et sur l’importance de la « conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » comme bases de la culture socialiste (Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, Guojia “shiyiwu” shiqi wenhua fazhan guihua gangyao 国家“十一五”时期文化发展规划纲要 (Programme de développement de la culture inscrit dans le onzième plan quinquennal), Pékin 北京, renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, 2006) . Comme l’explique Sébastien Billioud, la culture, selon ce programme, « doit fournir les “ressources spirituelles” pour construire une société d’harmonie socialiste et parvenir à une “société de bien-

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être moyen” (xiaokang shehui 小康社会) » (Billioud, « “Confucianisme”, “tradition culturelle” et discours officiels dans la Chine des années 2000 », pp.58-59). Le texte intégral du « Programme de développement de la culture inscrit dans le XI° plan quinquennal » est consultable sur le site du Quotidien du peuple (Renmin ribao 人民日报, « Guojia “shiyiwu” shiqi wenhua fazhan guihua gangyao (quanwen) 国家“十一五”时期文化发展规划纲要(全文) » , Renminwang 人民网, publié le 13 septembre 2006, consulté le 17 octobre 2008 sur http://culture.people.com.cn/GB/ 22226/71018/4814170.html). 85. «发展教育科学文化，培育有理想、有道德、有文化、有纪律的社会主义公民», extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 86. «当今世界的综合国力竞争，说到底是民族素质竞争», extrait de de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. Le terme suzhi 素质 (qualité) est régulièrement utilisé dans le discours dominant pour juger et déprécier, c’est-à-dire utilisé à la forme négative sur des individus considérés comme manquant de suzhi. Ce discours vise particulièrement la population rurale. Sur le terme suzhi 素质, voir Ann Anagnost, « The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi) », Public Culture, vol.16, n°2, 2004, p.195. Sur la notion de suzhi 素质, voir également Andrew Kipnis, « Suzhi: a Keyword Approach », The China Quaterly, n°186, 2006, pp.295-313. 87. Loïc Wacquant, Punir les pauvres : le nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale, Marseille, Agone, 2004, pp.26-27. 88. Mingong 民工 est la contraction de nongmin 农民 (paysan) et de gongren 工人 (travailleur). Le terme désigne ces migrants venus des régions rurales chercher en ville une activité rémunérée. On estime à environ 150 millions leur nombre dans les grandes métropoles chinoises. Sans protection sociale (ou très peu), ils sont généralement l’objet de discrimination, assimilés à des « étrangers » (waidiren 外地人), et travaillent dans des secteurs d’activité difficiles et peu qualifiés (les travaux publics et l’immobilier entre autres). Sur les mingong, voir Eric Florence, « Les Débats autour des représentations des migrants ruraux », Perspectives Chinoises, n°94, mars- avril 2006, pp.13-26 ; Hein Mallee, « Migration, hukou and resistance », in Elizabeth J. Perry & Mark Selden, Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (2nd Edition), London & New York, Routledge, 2003. Les xiagang 下岗 (dans sa forme complète : xiagang zhigong 下岗职工) sont des travailleurs du secteur public littéralement “descendus de leur poste”, “démobilisés”, c’est-à-dire sans affectation, sans poste. Ce sont dans les faits des personnes sans emploi, sans travail, mais dont l’ancien statut d’employé d’entreprise étatique ne permet pas le licenciement. 89. Extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 90. Extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 91. Par exemple, comme toutes les grandes entreprises chinoises, la compagnie chinoise Lenovo (anciennement Legend) est inévitablement « talentueuse » d’avoir racheté la branche PC du géant de l’informatique IBM en décembre 2004. A contrario, l’écrivain chinois naturalisé français Gao Xingjian 高行健, “banni” de Chine en 1987 pour le caractère anti-conformiste de ses livres, prix Nobel de littérature en 2000, n’est lui absolument pas « talentueux » parce que son œuvre n’est pas conforme à la « culture socialiste avancée ». 92. «要树立良好的社会风气», extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 93. Extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 94. «要教育广大干部群众特别是广大青少年树立社会主义荣辱观», extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006.

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95. Extrait de l’allocution de Hu Jintao « Mettons solidement en place la conception socialiste de l’honneur et de la honte » du 4 mars 2006. 96. Sur le mythe de la concurrence loyale et parfaite, voir Bernard Maris, Antimanuel d’économie, Vol.1 les fourmis, Rosny, Bréal, 2003, pp.108-144. 97. Jean-Louis Rocca, La Condition chinoise : la mise au travail capitaliste à l’âge des réformes (1978-2004), Paris, Karthala, 2006, p.57. 98. Guy Debord, « Avertissement pour la troisième édition française », p.XII. 99. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir : naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p.213 100. Cette possibilité de normaliser des situations de précarité par le biais des « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » n’a pas échappé aux employeurs. Le réalisateur Jean-Yves Cauchard dans son documentaire Made in China consacré aux travailleurs migrants (et par ailleurs très précieux dans son approche puisqu’il fait partie des rares productions à aborder la question du déracinement et de l’exil chez les mingong), montre le directeur d’une usine de taille moyenne consacrée à la production de marchandises destinées à l’exportation, s’adressant, accompagné du délégué du PCC de l’entreprise, à ses employés, en majorité mingong, lors d’une session d’étude idéologique (ces sessions de travail idéologique sont le relais au sein des entreprises des campagnes idéologiques initiées par le Parti). La session du jour porte sur les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes », et le patron lit à haute voix, un par un, chacun des huit préceptes devant une foule d’ouvriers plutôt apathiques et désintéressés. L’intérêt de la séquence, c’est que le directeur de l’usine interprète les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » de manière à justifier les conditions de travail de ses ouvriers, et finalement révèle la véritable nature de cette campagne d’éducation morale en exhortant les employés « aimer le travail » car l’usine est « comme une grande famille » tout en précisant qu’il faut « servir le peuple », rajoutant que « chaque travailleur le sait bien, tout ce que nous faisons c’est pour servir le peuple » (voir Jean-Yves Cauchard, Made in China, Hikari productions, 2006 ; la séquence se situe à une quarantaine de minutes du début du film). Les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes », comme toutes les stratégies discursives mises en œuvre dans le cadre de la « société harmonieuse », s’avèrent être un instrument discursif destiné à discipliner les populations pauvres et à justifier et valoriser leur exploitation. 101. Les « Huit honneurs et huit hontes » présentent finalement un grand nombre de similitudes avec le « Travail, famille, patrie » prôné par le régime de Vichy, régime qui également visait à la création d’un « homme nouveau » (notons tout de même que les régimes politiques et les circonstances historiques sont, eux, tout à fait différents). A ce sujet, Jean-Marie Guillon, «La nature du régime de Vichy : sa philosophie politique », in Jean-Pierre Azéma, François Bédarida (Dir.), Vichy et les Français, Paris, Fayard, 1992, pp.167-188. 102. Précisons encore une fois que l’écart est grand entre les prétentions d’un discours officiel et sa réception, son impact réel sur les individus. Voir l’article de Edward Cody, « Eight-Step Program for What Ails China », The Washington Post, édition du 23 mars 2006.

RÉSUMÉS

Chinese society in the beginning of this twenty-first century is undermined by growing socioeconomic and regional inequalities, as China has been disrupted by the reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, by the transition from a planned economy to a market economy and by the expansion of a mass consumer society. The discourse of « harmonious society » (hexie shehui 和谐社会), an official program introduced by President Hu Jintao in 2005, took place in

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this particular context to pacify social unrests. This dissertation aims to dismantle the strategies used by the « harmonious society » and to reveal that this discourse advocates social harmony not by resolving social inequities but by accepting them. Hexie shehui is part of a larger and earlier civilizing process of Chinese underprivileged population, since it appears to be a tool to control and discipline the poor and offers ethics response to social issues.

AUTEUR

THOMAS BOUTONNET

Thomas BOUTONNET est docteur en études chinoises et transculturelles, et a été directeur de l’Institut Confucius de Lyon (2009-2010). Chercheur au sein de l’Institut d’Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles (www.iett.eu), il enseigne actuellement la langue et la société contemporaine chinoises à l’université de Lyon – Jean Moulin. Sa thèse, intitulée « Vers une “société harmonieuse” de consommation ? Discours et spectacle de l’harmonie sociale dans la construction d’une Chine “civilisée” (1978-2008) », aborde le processus de civilisation des populations paupérisées durant le passage à une économie de marché en Chine. Son travail de recherche actuel porte sur la déconstruction des discours idéologiques en Chine contemporaine, sur l’étude des mots du pouvoir chinois et sur une analyse approfondie du concept de civilisation. Thomas BOUTONNET has a PhD in Chinese and Transcultural Studies and was the executive director of the Lyon Confucius Institute in 2009-2010. He currently lectures in the Chinese department of the University of Lyon - Jean Moulin and is an active member of the Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (www.iett.eu). His main research interests include ideology and discourse in contemporary China, Chinese official and political language, technologies of power, and the discourses surrounding the idea of “civilisation”. His PhD thesis, entitled “Towards a ‘Harmonious’ Consumer Society? The Discourse and Spectacle of Social Harmony in the Construction of a ‘Civilized’ China (1978-2008)”, focused on Hu Jintao's concept of a “harmonious society” and its relation to the development of consumerism.

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Names and Reality in Mao Zedong’s Political Discourse on Intellectuals

Maurizio Marinelli

The legacy of Confucius: ‘What is necessary is to rectify the names’ (必也正名)1

1 The term evolution indicates a process of continuous change: it alludes to the process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena. It intrinsically carries a positive connotation, suggesting a development, a deepening or a growth.2 For the purpose of this study, this term refers to the evolution of a specific relation between language, the representation of reality and the art of governing, since this article analyses contemporary political language within the framework of Confucian epistemology3, which was based on the zhengming (正名) theory.

2 From a semantic perspective, the compound rd 正名 [usually translated as ‘rectification of names’ but preferably as ‘(creation of the) correct names’] contains the character 正, which can function bothasa verb --meaning to rectify, to correct (as in the compound words 端正, 改正, 糾正)-- and as an adjective --meaning correct, right, but also formal or official (as in the compound words 正規,正常,正式). From an etymological perspective, this character literally means ‘to stop’ 止 ‘at the line’ 一: 正 is therefore associated with the creation of orthodoxy. 3 The character 正is also a constituent part of three policy-related characters. The first is zheng 政, which as a Verb means to govern [literally: correct (phonetics) + striking (semantic component)] and as a Noun, indicates the government or administration. The second character is zheng整, which as a Verb means to put in order or rectify, and as an Adjective: proper, in good order. 整 was used, for example, in 1942 at the launching of the ‘rectification movement’ (zhengfeng yundong整风运动). The third character is cheng 惩, which means to punish or punishment. In the evolution of the 正名 theory, 正 has a clear association with the art of governing (政). Therefore, 正名 can be interpreted as a politically connotated mechanism aimed at creating a prescriptive order of things (整),

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which responds to a sort of imposed and self-imposed regulatory practice (惩). The possible range of expression of reality via language is confined within the perimeter strategically defined by the epistemological limit of ‘stopping at the line’. 4 Beginning with ancient China, language has always played a crucial role in the construction of a virtual symbolic order and a claimed socio-political reality.4 5 According to Confucius an extremely precise relationship exists between the notion of ‘correctness’ (正), as expressed in the theory of ‘correct names’, and the art of governing the State (政). Confucius stated: ‘If names are not correct, the saying is not in accordance with the truth of things. If the saying is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs (of the State) cannot be carried on with success (ming bu zheng ze yan bushun , yan bushun ze shibucheng名不正则言不顺 , 言不顺则事不成).’ 5Confucius meant that names, and therefore language, embody norms and have a performative function6: the art of governing the State is based on the axiomatic principle of giving correct names to things and acting accordingly. This is one of the fundamental ideas of his political theory: Confucius argued that a good government is obtained only when all the relative duties, defined by their names, are maintained. This is the ‘real’ meaning of 正, in the sense of ‘stopping at the line’. This is thereason why, when one of his disciples asked: ‘What does it mean to govern?’ Confucius gave a univocally clear answer: ‘To govern means to rectify the names (zhengzhi, zhengye政者，正也). If you lead the people by being rectified yourself, who will not be rectified?’7 6 A crucial political strategy is to lead by correct example. Confucius argued also that a ruler able to ‘rectify names’, could set a clear example for his subjects to follow. When the ruler’s behaviour was in line with the standards defined by his words, the ruler was thought to literally embody codes of proper social behaviour. Conversely, when the behaviour of either ruler or ruled was out of line with the idealized standards ascribed to their social position, the prerogatives that normally attended that position no longer held. A king who misruled was no longer a proper ‘king’, and could be legitimately overthrown and replaced. Confucian rhetoric propounded a vertically structured social and ethical hierarchy, and the ‘rectification of names’ played a crucial role in mediating the movement between written ideal and social practice. 7 Keeping in mind the range of significance of the character 正, I believe that the interrelation between the triad of ‘correct name (ming名) – saying (yan言) – actuality (shi实)’ on the one hand, and politics on the other, is an epistemological paradigm extremely useful in analyzing language and political discourse in contemporary China. Yan is particularly important since it refers to the codified sayings or propositions, which are connecting elements between the names and the claimed reality, and contribute to the setting of the line which cannot be crossed. 8 During Mao Zedong’s era the ‘correct names’ theory was fully implemented through the mechanism of vertical propaganda. A logocentric model of representation of a claimed reality was fully enforced through the definition of a common set of rules and conventions shared by the speaker and the listener. These rules were pervasive, to the point where they became encoded in the patterns, style, syntagmatic bonds and lexical items typical of formalized language. Speech followed the expressive devices of regulated discursive formations: inculcated from top-down it carried an intrinsic performative power. The linguistic behaviour and metalinguistic acts of the individuals were supposed to operate in the ways required of him, according to a criterion of

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formal correctness based on the ‘harmony’ between the name (ming) and a claimed reality (shi) via the saying (yan). 9 The second dialectical term that I employ in my analysis is involution, which literally indicates the action of enfolding or entangling something. One can think of it literally as folding one thing inside another. Involution alludes to the change of shape or degree, usually implying a move from higher to lower, but in mathematics, for example, it also means exponentiation, indicating the process of raising a quantity to some assigned power. The range of significance of involution is particularly broad, since it could also mean engagement, involvement, participation, indicating the act of sharing in the activities of a group. Generally speaking, the idea of involution is associated with the concept of elaborateness, elaboration, intricacy, or abstraction, as something which is marked by elaborately complex details. In linguistics, the term involution refers to a long and complicated grammatical construction, characterised by the insertion of clauses between subject and predicate. But involution in medical science indicates either the reduction in size of an organ or part, or the regressive alterations of a body or its parts characteristic of the aging process. Therefore, the term involution is used in different contexts to indicate a more complicated scenario compared to a pre-existing one. 10 In this case, I use the term involution associated with evolution, to address the topic of the political use of formalised language in socialist China. I argue that what occurred after 1942 is a process of exponentiation, a sort of inward curvature or penetration of politics into common language and, progressively, a symbiotic relation between language and politics. 11 The last term that I employ is devolution: from the Latin devolutus, it is the past participle of the verb devolvere which means ‘to roll downward’ or ‘to fall’. Devolution is often used in the context of social and political sciences to refer to group action, social and political control, management and direction. It implies the idea of a transfer of authority or duties to a subordinate or substitute, and indicates a process of passing down power from a central entity to local units, through successive stages. In biological science this term assumes a derogatory connotation, becoming a synonym of degeneration. Here I use devolution to refer to the post-Mao era, when one sees the struggle for survival of a certain kind of political language, along with the progressive and increasing emergence of subjective forms of expression. 12 Through the textual, structural, and lexical analysis of selected documents, it becomes evident how the use of the set of paradigms evolution-involution-devolution does not intend to produce a deterministic interpretation, but rather to trace the parable of the relation between political language, power and constructed reality throughout an extended period of time.

The use of words

13 A crucial question in the study of political language is: What is language? A common answer is that language is a system of representation of reality. Steven Pinker associates the origin of language with instinctual nature since language is ‘so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it’.8 But when one considers the process of learning a foreign language, one discovers another element: a person memorizes single words and learns how to arrange certain

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patterns of words, compounded into sequences, but in order to be able to speak that language, one needs to learn how those strings of sounds have to be used. Pierre Bourdieu argues that language itself is a socio-historical phenomenon, which tends to exemplify the correct message and institutionalize specific social processes.9

14 Formalized political language is a code, which might appear to contain elements of foreignness or exclusivity, but intrinsically embodies the status of theoretical authority: it needs to be learnt and reproduced by the initiates. 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein points out that it is necessary to ‘Let the use of words teach you their significance’.10 This means to make language itself speak because the meaning of a word derives from how that particular word is used. According to Wittgenstein, ‘A picture is a fact’; in the sense that a picture also includes a pictorial relationship with the real thing, which is what makes it into a picture. He continues his inductive reasoning by aphorisms, explaining that: ‘The pictorial relationship consists in the correlations of the picture’s elements with things’11, and these correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements, with which the picture touches reality. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s conclusive conceptualisation of the relation between language and reality is epitomized as follows: ‘Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.’12 16 When one considers both the intrinsic imagist power of Chinese language and the Confucian emphasis on the importance of finding ‘correct names’ for the art of governing, one might be tempted to apply Wittgenstein’s argument on the interrelation between language and reality to the Chinese context. To proceed in that direction means to adopt an epistemological approach to language politics and to analyze the Chinese constructs of name-propositions and reality to shed light on the complex dynamics of political discourse. This can only occur within the conceptual framework of a long term historical perspective. 17 Wittgenstein’s idea of letting the use of words speak permeates my work, which focuses on the analysis of the main characteristics of crucial political documents that define the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy towards the intellectuals during three distinct historical phases: the Yan’an period, the beginning of the post-Mao era, and the 1990s, respectively. In this article I focus on the characteristics of Mao Zedong’s political language, analyzing his ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhuishangde jianghua在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话)’, delivered on 2 and 23 May 1942, respectively.13 I compare Mao Zedong’s and Deng Xiaoping’s political language, using Deng Xiaoping’s 13 October 1979 ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers (Zai Zhongguo wenxueyishu gongzuozhe disici daibiaodahuishang de zhuci在中国文学艺术工作者代表大会上的祝辞)’.14 In examining these documents, I concentrate on the stylistic and expressive patterns to shed light on the main features of the form of ‘Mao Zedong system ofthought(sixiang思想)’ and ‘Deng Xiaoping theory(lilun理论)’. My final aim is to reveal the elements of symmetry and asymmetry, the lines of convergence and divergence, and show the evolutionary- involutionary curve.

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The historical context of Mao’s and Deng’s speeches

18 The Yan’an Speeches were given by Mao Zedong in the middle of the ‘rectification movement’, which engaged the Party for three years, from the enlarged meeting of the Politburo held on September 1941 until 1944.

19 The official interpretation of this movement is epitomized as follows: ‘The content of the rectification movement is to oppose subjectivism byrectifying the style of study, to oppose factionalism by rectifying the style of the Party, to oppose the stereotyped Party jargon by rectifying the style of writing (fandui dangbagu yi zhengdun wenfeng反对党八股以整顿文风).’15 20 The third major reason for launching the rectification concerns the form. The expression ‘dang bagu’(stereotyped Party jargon) indicates a problematic continuity with the past: it implies a kind of symmetry between the ‘eight-part essay’ (baguwen八股文) and the CCP style of writing (wenfeng文风). The baguwen, the literary composition prescribed for the imperial civil service examination, was known for the rigidity of form and poverty of ideas. The association between baguwen and dangbagu（党八股） indicates that the problem of language was part of the political and intellectual discourses at Yan’an. The character feng (wind风) in the compound word wenfeng (文风 style of writing) has a clear political connotation and refers to the correct style set by the Party line. The idea of wenfeng has no dialectical power and paves the path for the progressive definition of ‘Mao’s style’ (Maowenti毛文体), in antithesis to the aspirations of many intellectuals who joined the CCP at Yan’an, but not necessarily to act as ‘docile bodies’.16 21 In Yan’an, the definition of a common and coherent Party policy program and the adherence to orthodoxy (both ideologically and stylistically) became Mao’s fundamental goals: they represented the sine qua non both for the unification of the whole country under the CCP’s rule, and the affirmation of his own personal power. Yan’an is the supreme moment in the formation of what Apter and Saich poignantly defined ‘a self-sufficient world of language, signs, and symbols into which only the initiated can belong’17: Mao used all the potentiality of Chinese language together with powerful metaphors and metonymies to ‘create a code out of elements of a semiology that enables the narrative to endow gesture, acts, dress, dwelling, and above all, language and literacy with the power of signifiers, while the teleology arranges the signifieds within a revolutionary frame.’18 The Yan’an speeches reveal a claimed correspondence between the signifiers and the signifieds. Yan’an is the benchmark in defining a style that exhibits the way in which grammatical resources, built into Chinese language, are used as tools of empowerment. By grammatical resources, I refer to the following features and characteristics that are so effectively incorporated in Mao’s speeches: • - Analytic nature of the language, which permits terseness, but can also create generalization or ambiguity; • - Symmetrical paratactic order, characterized by the coordination of clauses and phrases without use of connectors/modifiers; • - Repetition of the same lexical items and structural parallelism; • - Absence of relative pronouns and tendency to coordination; • - Use of modal verbs and ba (把) forms.

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22 Thirty-seven years later, in October 1979, in a completely changed historical context, Deng Xiaoping delivered his speech at the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers, exactly ten months after the program for the ‘four modernizations’ (agriculture, industry, science and technology, defence) had been launched and ratified during the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP (18-22 December 1978). Deng’s speech set the scope of the ‘opening’ in the cultural sphere, demonstrating the willingness to rehabilitate the intellectuals in order to gain their support for the new policy of the Party while, at the same time, showing the unacceptability of the requests raised during the movement for the so called ‘fifth modernization’ (e.g. democracy).19

23 Mao’s and Deng’s speeches are lucid examples of vertical propaganda, since they aim de facto at convincing the receivers to carry out directives derived from the top leaders. One of the main features of political discourse in authoritarian regimes is the action of the propaganda apparatus, which via language sets out the orthodox behavioural guidelines from the top, mobilizing the masses and directing their deeds to emulate specific models of orthoproxy or sanctioned behaviour. Jacques Ellul argues that: ‘Vertical propaganda uses all technical methods of centralized mass communication; it envelops a mass of individuals; but those who practice it are on the outside’.20 This is particularly true in Mao’s and Deng’s cases, even though Mao’s language seems to convey the idea of a closer relation with a claimed reality. The ‘truth’ of the words set forth in Mao’s speeches seems to be unassailable and definitive, thanks to the use of three major devices: direct examples from his personal experience raised as a model for emulation, the use of ‘questions and answers’ format, and rhetorical devices. 24 From a pragmalinguistic perspective, vertical propaganda requires the propagandist to have clearly formulated in his mind what should be the expected outcome and the propagandee to have a pre-desired response. The speaker uses language as an instrument in the socio-political construction of reality21, and directs the receiver’s actions towards a sanctioned behaviour. The ultimate reason why the speaker uses a precisely codified language, by means of conventional and fixed expressive patterns, lies in his intention to set, via the language, the limits beyond which the audience is forbidden to go. Wittgenstein argues that words and sentences have the power of setting a limit to the ‘expression of thoughts’ since the limits of language indicate and set the boundaries of one’s own world. Wittgenstein concludes: ‘It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense’.22 The maximum ability of the speaker is demonstrated when taboo expressions have no possibility of being realized in thought, because a sense of self- censorship prevails in the receiver. When vertical propaganda is effective it creates a habitus23, which defines the receiver’s range of expressivity, based on the discriminatory recognition of what is correct (zheng) and therefore good, and what is not. Since our symbolic world is consubstantial with our beings, the process of speaking presupposes a common understanding and aims at the assimilation of what is communicated via language. We ‘are’ language and our perception of the world is shaped by the structure of our particular language and by how we are told. As Martin Heidegger clarified in his analysis of the historically contingent nature of language: ‘Language speaks man’ rather than ‘Man speaks language’.24 Language is not a universal medium which is gradually taking on the true shape of the world or true self: language is a social construct. We are ‘being-in-the world’, in the sense that we, as human beings

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living in the world are constituted by the use of the words. These words are organized according to specific sentence patterns, based on a precise grammar style, in a way suitable to encode an important ideological content. These words carry powerful social meaning, and have direct social effects.

The receiving side

25 The titles of Mao’s and Deng’s speeches immediately reveal a difference of tone. Although none of them is directly addressed to the ‘intellectuals’ (zhishifenzi知识分子), in his ‘greeting words’ (zhuci祝辞) Deng directly refers to ‘the workers of the literary and artistic field’ (wenxue yishu gongzuozhe文学艺术工作者), which is more personalized than the term ‘Forum on Literature and Art’ (wenyi gongzuotanhui文艺工作谈会) used by Mao. In Mao’s case, the title indicates a political event, rather than addressing the alleged subject or receiver of the speeches.

26 Examining the opening of the two texts, a major feature of vertical propaganda becomes evident: a strong imperative connotation is implicit both in the exhortative tone of ‘Comrades!’ (Tongzhimen!同志们) used by Mao, and in the more formal ‘Dear representatives and comrades’ (Gewei daibiao, gewei tongzhimen各位代表, 各位同志们) used by Deng. 27 The emphasis on the ‘enlarged masses’ (dazhong大众), the repetitions and the exhortative tone, associated with the continuous use of first person plural pronoun ‘we’ (women我们) indicate both a highly excited tone and an all-inclusive function. Benedict Anderson in his work on ‘imagined communities’ argues that the language of the nation is intrinsically inclusive.25 A typical feature of Mao’s political language is the use of a plural pronoun subject [even when the subject seems to be a hypothetical ‘you’ (nimen你们)]. This is as a strategic choice, since the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ creates a sense of inclusiveness among the receivers (‘you’), and confers legitimacy to the subject’s positioning and acting. The use of ‘we’ reveals a strong symbolic capital: it is the epitome of collective emotional universe and implicitly indicates the majority of the people. ‘We’ ideally refers to ‘the masses’ but practically to the Party, which is its representative and beholds the correct (正) standpoint: the only one that has political (政) legitimacy. 28 In Chinese political language, the use of ‘we’ creates an antagonism with the others: those who are not right and are usually objectified as ‘a small number’ (shaobufen少部分) or ‘a tiny minority’ (shaoshuren少数人). The ambiguous expression ‘shaoshuren’ is a rhetoric trope, which carries a veiled derogatory connotation and, especially in the post-Mao era, has often been used as a substitute for what, in Mao’s style, was identified as ‘enemy’ (diren敌人). Shaoshuren became a codified epitaph to indicate those individuals who are ostracized from the ideal community of ‘the people’ (renmin 人民) and excluded as ‘non-people’ (feirenmin非人民) or, by inference, as ‘counter- revolutionary elements’ (fangemingfenzi反革命分子)26, because they are not in accordance with the ‘mandate of the Party’ (dangxing党性)27. The Party is the alleged embodiment of correctness and the representative of the will of the people. 29 The ‘you’ (nimen) is almost absent from these speeches, and therefore the ‘we’ (women) refers to the receivers, allegedly the intellectuals. But in Mao’s speeches, the word intellectuals (zhishifenzi) always carries a derogatory connotation. In his speeches, the

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intellectuals are termed ‘wenyi gongzuozhe’ (文艺工作者: workers engaged in the fields of literature and art). Deng Xiaoping tends to use the term zhishifenzi more often than Mao,but it is only with Jiang Zemin that the term zhishifenzi becomes predominant and positively connotated, although fundamentally restricted to the scientists.28 30 Who are the receivers of Mao’s speeches then? The ideal receivers of the speeches are the cadres in charge of cultural political matters, and the establishment intellectuals29 willing to ‘serve’ the revolution and the people; in other words, those who are entrusted with carrying out the political guidelines set by the Party. Therefore, the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ conceals and implicitly includes a second plural pronoun (nimen), and implies a profound sense of authority and appropriation: ‘we’ refers to the leading officials at the top of the Party hierarchy, and these leaders are urging ‘you’— the subordinate receiver, to take an active part in the implementation of Party’s policies and directives. ‘We’ is the subject of propaganda, as it serves to hide the distance and mystify the implicit hierarchical order between the speaker and the receiver. ‘We’ is the ideal subject-pronoun of political correctness as defined by the Party, while ‘I’ is the subject-pronoun of free stand, individual spirit, and alludes to free literary creation.30 ‘We’ is the most suitable subject for a system based on the political cliché of the Party culture, whose main features are the presumptions of ‘one and single public opinion’ (yulun yilu舆论一路) and, more figuratively, of the arbitrary existence of ‘one sentence/voice chamber’ (yiyantang一言堂). This second expression seems to carry a sort of Confucian resonance: yiyantang, which I would translate as ‘one person says’, is strictly related to the expression yanzhiyouli一言堂 (what one says is correct). In this sense yiyantang implies that only one kind of discourse is recognized as correct (zheng).

Political language as performative

31 Both in Mao and Deng’s eras, official language upheld the ‘one person says’ (yiyantang) axiom, although camouflaging its imperative style with an exhortative tone and metonym rhetoric tropes. Aristotle argued that the function of rhetoric in political discourse is the art of persuasion.31 The act of naming per se is profoundly rhetorical, and rhetoric is meant to teach the audience how to think and see the world in these terms (and not in those). Both the speaker and the receiver live in the world, in this world which has a certain history or anti-history. They share a claimed vision of reality through a certain symbolic universe, which is characterized by common signs transcribed in a certain text.

32 I suggest linking the Aristotelian hermeneutics of rhetoric to Austin’s paradigm of performative utterances.32 The key-phrases of Mao’s political texts have the property of combining utterance and performance. The frequent use of ba particle and modal verbs infuses in the key sentences a pragmatic force and a strong performative character as if, in the English translation, we were almost forced to use the form: ‘Let us act in order to achieve a certain result.’ 33 These texts originated as oral speeches and show the characteristics of indirect speech acts, in which one illocutionary force is performed indirectly by way of performing another.33 The pragmatic approach is particularly suitable in this case: one cannot assume a relation of equivalence between linguistic forms and communicative functions. We all know that there are many ways of giving simple commands (such as

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‘Close the door’). From a pragmatic point of view, commands are not uniquely expressed by means of imperative sentences and questions with interrogative sentences. In Chinese, commands can be formulated using the ba form, which emphasizes the object and exhorts the receiver to achieve a certain result. Mao’s speeches reveal a recurrent use of rhetorical questions associated with exhortations and commands. 34 Mao’s attention to the logic consequentiality of the various parts of his discourse relies on the relation between the correct names (ming) and a claimed reality (shi). The first paragraph of Mao’s initial speech at Yan’an contains what can be enucleated and recognized as the aim of the whole speech: the definition of ‘the correct (zhengque正确) development of the revolutionary literature and art.’ This expression refers to the imperative of linking together revolution (geming革命) with literature and art (wenyi文艺). Mao’s agenda was strongly influenced by the current situation of war and the necessity of gaining support from the intellectuals, seen as ‘docile bodies’, for the diffusion of the ‘Yan’an spirit’. Therefore, literature and art cannot be independent creative domains or goals in themselves: they are political tools within a conceptual framework of politics wherein the ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.34 Military wording is a major characteristic of Mao’s language; literature and art are conceived as military weapons in the revolutionary war, as clearly revealed by Mao’s reference to ‘thetwo battlefronts of culture and military’ (wenwu liangge zhanxian文武两个战线), and his portrayal of the intellectuals as soldiers: ‘the troops of literature and art’ (wenyi duiwu文艺队伍). 35 In the second and third paragraphs, Mao analyzes the ‘question of the (intellectual) work’ (gongzuo de wenti工作的问题), and uses the sentence pattern jiushi/zhe jiushi就是/ 这就是, to firmly state the logical relationof the various elementswithin the text. Again, when he analyses ‘the question of standpoint’ (lichang de wenti立场的问题) he uses the structural pattern jiuyao就要…. ye yao 也要……yejiushi也就是: these deixis infuse a strong pragmatic force in an oral speech.35 36 In the second paragraph, Mao also emphasizes that the final goal is to use art and literature as military weapons to ‘emancipate the mind’ (jiefang sixiang解放思想). This four-character compound phrase was coined by Mao Zedong, but it has been extensively reutilized by Deng Xiaoping after 1978: it represents a codified expression, concealing exactly the opposite semantic paradigm, since it does not refer to the freedom (ziyou自由) of the intellectuals, but to their ideal alignment with the Party line. In the following paragraphs of Mao’s ‘Speeches’, one can possibly find the operative instructions issued to the intellectuals in order to teach them how to fulfil this goal. Mao’s words assume the power of performative utterances: first, the intellectuals are required to correct their standpoint (lichang), which should coincide with the Party’s single standpoint. This concept is expressed by shifting the subject to whom ‘standpoint’ is referred from ‘the workers engaged in the fields of literature and art’ (wenyi gongzuozhe) to the Party itself. The shift is somehow concealed with the use of the first person plural pronoun [‘We (members of the) Communist Party’(women gongchangdang我们共产党)], indicating that the only possible correct position for the intellectuals is to support the Party’s standpoint. Therefore, according to Mao, literature and art are performative tools to obtain the Party’s aims. 37 Austin examines the difference between a statement, typical of constatative utterances of affirmation or announcement of a certain fact or event (in which the truth is taken

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for granted), and the performative utterance, which has a productive capacity.36 Intentional performativity is one of the most distinctive features of Mao’s language. The imperative/exhortative or slogan-type patterns frequently used can be considered as sub-components of a speech act. In Mao’s speeches, the majority of the sentences are not reducible to the simple production of a sound or phrase which one could judge, using a simplistic binary code, as true or false. A promise or request, for example, is not simply an enunciation, but rather the expression of the utterance that has produced it: sometimes the locutions are performing an act (illocutionary); sometimes they produce a certain effect or result (perlocutionary). In line with the evolutionary-involutionary curve, the question is not ‘What to say’ but ‘How to say what should be said’ (the yan), in accordance with the presumption of correctness embedded in the axiomatic harmony between name (ming) and actuality (shi). 38 Both Yan’an speeches aim at providing a univocal definition of Party directives, and should act like a sort of clarion call to action. Two of the main features of the documents are repetition of lexical items and structural parallelism; these devices can be interpreted as functions of ‘performative’ power. Many sentences are illocutionary, and the keywords are often following a modal verb such as yao要,yinggai应该, bixu必须 (must, should, have to). Modality devices contain a highly performative power and explicitly indicate the expected response. This power is more evident in Mao’s style of discourse, especially in Yan’an where the performative language should contribute to the creation of the symbolic capital necessary to consolidate the CCP’s position. Performativity is less perceptible in Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 strategically balanced and more pragmatic style. 39 Mao’s style is characterized by a highly agitative undertone, while Deng’s style appears mostly inclusive. Mao’s style derives from his vision of a developmental model based both on mass mobilization and, in1942, on the idea of politicizing (and policing) the intellectuals in order to create a close working relationship with the CCP. Deng Xiaoping strives to confer in his words a performative power, but his speech lacks any illocutionary force. A significant example is the paragraph in which Deng tries to draw a line of continuity with Mao’s theory on the workers in the artistic and literary field. Deng clearly uses the first person plural pronoun and a modal verb formulating the expression ‘We have to’ (Women yao我们要), followed by verbs and catchphrases, which should lend a performative energy to his utterances, but fail to achieve that result.37 Illocutionary utterances are linked to their effects in three ways: the certainty of the receiving side, the certainty that the directives and guidelines will be carried out, and the call for an answer. These three features are different from the simple production of effects, typical of performative utterances. As far as the receiving side is concerned, I agree with McDougall who argues that Mao, between the first speech and the conclusion, had ‘become more certain of the correctness of his views and the harmfulness of the opposition’.38 40 After 1949, the reception of his speeches was guaranteed thanks to the omnipresence of the Propaganda apparatus in charge of the capillary diffusion of the political guidelines. Concerning the certainty of implementation, the Yan’an speeches became the benchmark of the Chinese system of art and literary control for thirty-four years. Evidence of their efficacy as a call to action is the fact that many writers after Yan’an tried to correctly implement Mao’s guidelines; the clearest example is the case of Zhao Shuli’ s 1943 short story ‘The marriage of Xiaoerhei’ (Xiaoerhei jiehun小二黑结婚).39

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Propaganda: agitation and integration

41 Mao’s and Deng’s speeches use similar contrastive techniques, with a particular emphasis on antithetic categories such as ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘past’ and ‘present’. Nevertheless, the symbolic value and the connotation of these adjectives are very different, as a consequence of the differing historical periods.

42 The use of contrastive analysis in Deng’s speech can be epitomized in the expression ‘weed through the old to bring forth the new’ (tuichen chuxin推陈出新). This expression sounds ambiguous in the ‘new historical period of socialism’ (shehuizhuyi xinde lishishiqi 社会主义新的历史时期).40 Deng Xiaoping, on the one hand, intends to claim his continuity with the legacy of the past, namely with Mao’s policy towards the intellectuals in the ‘seventeen-year period (1949-66)’; while on the other, he strives to set himself and Mao Zedong apart from all the ‘mistakes’ made in the ‘ten years (1966-76)’ whose scapegoats are clearly identified in Deng’s speech as Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. 43 In Mao’s case, the fundamental idea is ‘to make the past serve the present’: he clarifies the need to remould the intellectuals and maintain a clear-cut distance from a certain past and incorrect standpoint (lichang), a past attitude (taidu态度), a past audience (gongzuoduixiang工作对象), work (gongzuo工作) and study (xuexi学习). Mao guides the audience by means of simple examples and using a question-answer format; he also applies manichean categories, so that the difference between what is ‘new’ - associated with ‘bright’ (guangming光明) - and what is ‘old’ – associated with ‘dark’ (hei’an黑暗) – becomes clearer and more precise. 44 The use of dichotomous categories is a characteristic of these speeches, since they both call for change, but the direction of ‘change’ always ends up implying the intellectuals’ mobilization to achieve the Party’s goals. Therefore, the intellectuals, who are allegedly the subject of these speeches, are in fact the objects, not only because they are the ‘receivers’ of the speeches, but also because they are explicitly required to perform the actions indicated. The intended direction of ‘change’ is very different: in Mao’s case the ‘literary workers’ should repudiate the ‘old world’ and establish a ‘new’ start towards a ‘revolutionary order’, while in Deng’s case the intellectuals are required to support the ‘four modernizations’ program. In accordance with the rhetoric style of propaganda and its performative function, the call for change is the leitmotif of the CCP’s major political documents, but the precondition of change is the recognition of the absolutely dominant position of the Party, and the full support of its policy. 45 The undertone of ‘change’ is also completely different: Mao’s style is characterized by the tone and structural devices typical of propaganda of agitation, while Deng’s speech shows all the typical features of propaganda of integration. In Mao’s case, agitative action and mobilization are meant to produce a change in the intellectual’s mindset: this seems to be a reaffirmation of the Confucian value of loyalty (zhong忠), in this case to the Party, in the sense of abiding by the directives and guidelines set by the rulers. In Deng’s case, the idea of change assumes the significance of a re-conquered loyalty (after the experience of the Cultural Revolution): the intellectuals are called to aggregate under Deng’s aegis and offer full support to the new leadership’s modernization drive.

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46 Even though Mao Zedong makes a larger use of linguistic devices typical of the propaganda of agitation, he, at times, skilfully mediates some elements typical of propaganda of integration. His political conception was based on the presupposition that, in order to fulfil a certain aim, it was necessary to make a lever of the ‘broad masses’ (dazhong), carrying out a general mobilization of the entire nation. The objective was always stated very clearly, even though the method to obtain a certain goal had, most of the time, to be inferred through an analysis of the underlying structure of the language. This is a characteristic of political language which Perry Link defines using the neologism weimubiaozhuyi为目标主义 (solely targetization). 41 This elusive feature of political language persisted and tended to become even more evident in the post-Mao era, as a consequence of the increasing dichotomy between the words and a claimed reality. A clear example can be found in the two expressions jingshen wuran精神污染(spiritual pollution) used in the 1983-84 political campaign, and jingshenwenming 精神文明 (spiritual civilization) used especially in the Nineties. In these two compound expressions, the meaning of the term jingshen精神 assumes two antithetic connotations, and its real significance essentially derives from the accompanying word (pollution in the first case, civilization in the second). Therefore the whole expression sounds extremely ambiguous and elusive. The term jingshenis one of the keywords of Deng’s speech but I would not translate it as ‘spirit’, rather a ‘policy’, since it refers to the most suitable policy of the moment.42 47 In Mao’s time, the targets of political campaigns were designed according to the political priorities of a specific historical moment. They were expressed by formulas as generic as ‘destroy the old social order’ (dadao jiushehuizhidu达到旧社会制度) or ‘to put art and literary works at the service of the masses’ (wei dazhong fuwu为大众服务). The interpretation of these ideas within Mao’s hegemonic discourse indicates that the intellectuals should put art and literature in the service of the Party and, finally, of Mao himself. The logocentric model of power enforced by Mao Zedong after Yan’an was based on the correspondence between signifier and signified, and revealed an implicit transitive property based on the syllogism that the CCP is the avant-garde of the proletariat and Mao is the leader-màximo of the CCP. 48 The aim of a political campaign was usually expressed by a syntagmatic unit (like weidazhongfuwu为大众服务), mostly in a four-character form and often including a numerical component. These devices show a high degree of mimetic value while having a semiotic value within the CCP totalitarian discursive strategy. The CCP has always been on the alert for ways to provide succinct expressions for the public: four- character expressions are easy to memorize since the structure is exactly the same as traditional Chinese set phrases (chengyu成语), proverbs (yanyu谚语), and rhymed couplets (duilian对联). 49 The use of numbers might create a problem of intelligibility to outside readers --since no specific references are made to the connotation of the number + Noun/Verb pattern- but it is always a matter of language in context: during the Cultural Revolution, for example, everybody knew what the two antithetic expressions ‘five red categories’ (hong wulei红五类) and ‘five black categories’ (heiwulei黑五类) were referring to.43 50 Numeric rhetorical tropes have often been used to epitomize and condense Party directives, more or less complicated and/or controversial ideological concepts, top leaders pronouncements or entire political campaigns. In the new, simple and

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condensed numerical form, these ‘ideas’ are ready to be memorized and quoted by everyone, no matter the degree of literacy of the receiver. These devices enable the speaker to reduce the complexity of political issues into a simple dichotomy between pre-defined (and absolutely correct) ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ categories. At the same time, the proper use of these four-characters and numerical expressions may be utilized to evaluate the political orthoproxy of individuals. 51 Three and four are favourite numbers; in the post-Mao era, the numeric rhetoric has not disappeared, but it is inscribed within Deng’s call for the intellectuals to support the Party in the ‘four modernizations’ (四个现代化or sihua四化) drive. All the socio- political campaigns of the post-Mao era (including Jiang Zemin’s era ‘three stresses’ – sanjiang53三讲-and‘three representatives’- sange daibiao三个代表) 44 can be considered parts of a major project: the realization of the policy of ‘opening and reform’ (gaige kaifang改革开放), whose success is the sine qua non for the CCP’s preservation of power and socio-political stability. 52 Deng Xiaoping’s political strategy consists in a broad and strategic use of the tools of propaganda of integration. Deng’s words reveal an overt attempt to include the ‘rehabilitated’ (pingfan平反or zhaoxue昭雪) intellectuals in the category of the working class, but his final aim is to convince them to trust and be loyal to the new leadership. Deng asks the intellectuals to put their skills and expertise to the service of the nation since this is a fundamental asset and a tool to consolidate his personal victory. Deng’s inclusive strategy takes for granted the intellectuals’ support for the cause of ‘modernization’. He insists that this is the intellectuals’ responsibility (zeren责任): ‘to achieve the common target of the four modernizations’; the verb to achieve (shixian实现) is a perfomative verb with a pragmatic force since it carries the connotation of ‘making real here and now’. The use of common (gongtong共同) is part of the strategy of showing as a shared value what is, in reality, Deng’s final aim. 53 Deng uses more than once the adverb tongyintongdede同音同德的 (to be of one heart and one mind), which carries a strong ethical connotation associated with a commendatory tone. This adverb expresses an idea similar to another slogan typical of the early Deng era: quanxinquanyi gao sihua全心全意搞四化(whole-heartedly achieve the four modernizations). Deng tries to capitalize on the traditional duty assigned to the intellectuals to be concerned about public affairs, which was based on an ascribed ethical sense of double responsibility towards the ruler and towards the people.45 But Deng’s ambiguity is revealed by the expression ‘develop the ethic of the prevailing custom’(peiyang daode fengshang培养道德风尚), which clearly refers to the ‘mandate of the Party’ (dangxing). Deng also strives to emphasize the continuity with Mao’s premises: he argues that ‘Our literature and art belong to the people’ (Womendewenyi shuyu renmin我们的文艺属于人民), using the all-inclusive plural pronoun while paraphrasing Mao’s famous slogan. Deng’s attempt to rely on Mao’s legacy is made even more explicit: ‘We must continue to sustain the direction–policy raised by Comrade Mao Zedong stating that literature and art must serve the largest masses of people(wenyi wei zuiguangda renmin qunzhong文艺为最广大人民群众), first of all the peasants-workers-soldiers.’46 The asymmetry with Deng consists in his idea that the intellectuals must be considered part of the working class, while in Mao’s speeches the term ‘intellectuals’ (zhishifenzi) mainly has a derogatory tone associated with the ‘petit bourgeoisie’ (xiaozichanjieji小资产阶级). For Mao, the high level of integration existing between workers-peasants-soldiers (gongnongbing工农兵) and, conversely, the

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exclusion of the ‘workers engaged in the fields of literature and art’ (wenyigongzuozhe) are irrefutable axioms. The first group was classified as renmin (people人民), while the second one was more or less explicitly considered as feirenmin (non-people非人民), and necessarily bound to be criticized and remoulded. Mao offers an example from his personal experience describing how he realized, changed (bianhua变化) and corrected (gaizao改造) his misconception about the ‘dirty’ (zang脏) peasants and the ‘clean’ (ganjing干净) intellectuals: ‘I can tell you something from my personal experience on the transformation of my feelings’47 and concludes: ‘[…] I came to realize that, compared with the workers and the peasants, the un-remoulded intellectuals were not clean […].’48 In the following passage, Mao uses the all-inclusive plural pronoun (women) to state his conclusion by means of a double-negative parallel rhetorical sentence: If our writers and artists, who come from the (bourgeois) intelligentsia, want their works to be received by the masses, they must change and remould their thinking and their feelings. If there isn’t such a change, such a remoulding, they cannot do anything well and will be misfits. (我们知识分子出生的文艺工作者, 要是自己的作品为群众所欢迎, 就得把自己的思想感情来一个变化, 来一番改造.没有这个变化, 没有这个改造什么事情都是做不好, 都是格格不入的).49 54 Mao’s statement is actually based on a disingenuous simulation, because the real problem is the acceptance/absorption of the intellectuals by the Party, not by the masses. Using the double negation pattern, Mao stresses the necessity to remould the intellectuals: the keyword is ‘change’ (bianhua), which for Mao has an internal and psychological connotation while the same term, used by Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin, carries a more external significance. In combination with bianhua, Mao uses the modal verb yao要(need/have to) and the adverb jiu就. Jiu is not translated into English, but acts like a diexis, carrying a pragmatic force and leading the receiver to the inevitable conclusion that remoulding is the sine qua non to be considered ‘correct’ and therefore accepted by the Party.

55 The double negative structure meiyou没有…meiyou没有indicates the total negation of any real way-out, unless the intellectuals support the Party line. The syntactic structure of this passage is meant to strengthen the rejection of any possible attempt to refute Mao’s words: the double negation confers a sense of absoluteness to Mao’s words. In political language, axiomatic principles are often expressed by means of a symmetric double negative structure: a typical example is the famous song called ‘Without the Communist Party there can be no new China’ (Meiyou gongchandang, jiu meiyou xinzhongguo没有共产党，就没有新中国). Another example of this structural pattern can be found in Mao’s speeches, when he refutes the possible existence of abstract ‘love’:‘In this world there is absolutely nothing like love without cause norreason (shishang juemeiyou wuyuanwugude ai世上绝没有无缘无故的爱),and there is no hate without cause nor reason (ye meiyou wuyuanwugude hen也没有无缘无故的恨), we cannot love our enemies, we cannot love the ugly phenomena of the society (women buneng ai diren, buneng ai shehuide chouloude xianxiang我们不能爱敌人，不能爱社会的丑陋的现象) … our aim is to make these kind of things perish and disappear (womende mudi shi xiaomiezhexie dongxi我们的目标是消灭这些东西)’.50 56 The different connotation of the keyword ‘change’ in Mao’s and Deng’s speeches could also be interpreted as if Deng Xiaoping wanted to imply that, thanks to the efforts of the Party in the Maoist era, the ‘petit bourgeois intellectuals’ have finally been successfully remoulded: they have accomplished their duty, their thoughts and feelings have become ‘clean’ and ‘correct’, so now, in the ‘new period’, the intellectuals are part

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of the working class. The completion theme of the remoulding process is also implicit in the speeches given by Jiang Zemin on the intellectuals: Jiang strives to show a similarity in the respective visions of Mao and Deng, and often uses the new expression ‘advanced intellectuals’ (xianjinde zhishifenzi先进的知识分子) as if the remoulding had already been successfully completed and new intellectuals had emerged. 51

The socio-political implications of grammar

57 Language is something alive: if a strict relation exists between language and politics, a parallel and intertwining relation exists between language and society. A specific language is both a precondition for a certain form of social life and a key instrument in the definition of socialization’s forms. In discursive regimes, however, the understanding of formalized language implies a logical analysis of the evolutionary relation between names and things. In political documents, language often assumes a performative rather than constatative force, and is therefore connected with promptings to act. Language acts in and on the organization of thoughts, feelings and communication; in any language semantics52, syntactics53 and pragmatics, 54 have a specific socio-political nature.55 The predominance of a certain grammatical structure implies a previous choice made by the speaker, who has to take into consideration the impact of a wide range of psychological and social factors on the possible achievement of an ideal symbiotic relation between the emic view of the speaker’s discourse (his value system), the comprehension and belief in the listener’s ability to absorb the implicit message, and a potential capacity to foresee the possible reaction of the audience. Reaching a harmonious relation between these three components is essential to achieve the intended goal of the author. Therefore, grammar in usage has intentional rather than preterintentional functions, and every language consists of a defined set of patterns (basic schemata or syntagmatic models) and combination rules which define the interrelation between specific ‘names’ and the relevant ‘actualities’. Grammatical rules have a precise role in connecting lexical items and conveying a certain meaning, making ourselves understood in a certain way instead of another. Bringing this idea to its extreme consequences, Kress and Hodge argue that ‘every rule of grammar is a social prescription, a form through which ideology is transmitted’.56

58 The grammatical structure of language has a socio-political significance which reveals its real essence. As Hans Georg Gadamer states: ‘Thanks to the linguistic nature of all interpretation, every interpretation includes the possibility of a relationship with others. There can be no speech that does not bind the speaker and the person’s contexts and symbols.’57This is also true in the Chinese case where the pragmalinguistic approach58, which deals with the context that is formally encoded in the inner structure of the language, is particularly suitable to reveal the interrelation between intratextual features (sentence patterns, cohesive ties, etc.), pretextual (the views of the writer and the reader) and contextual factors (the social and cultural environment).

Deconstructing political language: repetition

59 One of the main features of Mao’s and Deng’s speeches is repetition: this is typical of political communication since repetition has both the pragmatic force of successfully conveying the intended meaning of the message and a cohesive function. Repetition is

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a dual phenomenon: repetition of lexical items (e.g. same word or very similar expressions) on the one hand, and repetition of sentence patterns (with identical syntactical structure) on the other.

60 Repetition of the same lexical items is extensively used throughout the texts: the same keywords appear in the subject/object position in different sentences. Repetition of the same words and frequent use of coordination sentences seem to denote a high level of generality or lack of depth, but this phenomenon is intentional for at least two reasons. First, from an objective perspective, in 1942 the level of literacy and education was extremely low and, even though the diffusion of education witnessed significant improvements (especially in the period 1949-66), the average level of literacy was still low in 1979.59 61 Strategically, where a few fundamental words are repeated over and over, they can be learnt by heart and sediment in the receivers’ mind. Second, from the subjective perspective, the use of repetition is a powerful tactical tool of hegemonic discourse, typical of brainstorming techniques. It is also important to remember that in Mao’s China the propaganda apparatus often used loudspeakers.62 Listening is different from reading: if one is listening to a speech, one cannot go back to the previous paragraph and read it again, therefore the key concepts must be repeated over and over to be sure that they are heard, absorbed and memorized by the listeners. 62 Repetition, especially in Mao’s case, is accompanied by the use of coordinate clauses and rhetorical questions. If one considers the author’s language as an indication of the maturity level of development of the producer, one would be tempted to conclude that the writer is a child. In fact, the repeated use of coordination is typical of children’s writing and writing for children, but the authors of these speeches are skilful politicians. It is evident, therefore, that the use of this kind of language is intentional. It is aimed at leading the receiver by hand (as if he was a child): this technique positions the speaker and the receiver on the same level while, at the same time, implicitly reaffirms the speaker’s higher degree of experience. This kind of language aims at creating a climate of reciprocal trust: the receiver can trust the speaker who poses the questions and asks him to ponder the situation, but the receiver already knows that the answer will be offered to him, and is led to unconsciously accept that answer as reassuring and ‘correct’. 63 Repetition is an effective mnemonic device: it helps the receiver to accept and memorize certain ideas, when they are expressed using the same lexical items and reinforced by codified grammatical patterns. Repetition brings into existence a visual syntax of a claimed reality. In Mao’s speeches, the main clauses that remain inculcated in the receiver’s mind are the following three: jiefang sixiang解放思想(emancipate the mind), shishiqiushi 实事求是(to search truth in the facts), and wenyi …wei renmin fuwu文艺…为人民服务(literature and art to serve the people). 64 It is more difficult to enucleate a few repeated words or clauses in Deng’s speech. The opening of Deng’s speech seems to follow the same scheme and subdivision of Mao’s speeches, but then it reveals a less organized and consequential pattern. The first two paragraphs are followed by a long section clearly aimed at legitimizing Deng’s and the Party’s policy towards the intellectuals, as if this were the normal consequence of the ‘correct’ policy of the first ‘seventeen years’ (1949-66), disrupted by the Cultural Revolution and the mistakes of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. Deng’s speech is fundamentally based on the antagonist vision between past and present, but it also

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shows the intention to draw a line of continuity between the present situation and a certain representation of the past, accurately selected, and strategically reinterpreted using the abovementioned three key concepts of Mao’s speeches, but with a completely different connotation. The final result is ambiguous: with this speech Deng Xiaoping creates a range of possibilities rather than stating a definite line. The ‘new’ keywords of Deng’s discourse emerge through the technique of numerical rhetoric and contrastive devices, but they seem to contradict the continuity with Mao’s legacy, which Deng strives to claim. The ‘new’ paroles d’ordre are: sihua 四化(four modernizations) and shehuizhuyi xinde lishishiqi社会主义新的历史时期(or xinshiqi新世纪: new historical period of socialism). Deng tries to connect them with Mao’s three key expressions but also add something to them, for example when he argues that ‘the people need art but art needs the people even more’ (renmin xuyao yishu, yishu geng xuyao renmin人民需要艺术,艺术更需要人民).60 65 The second kind of repetition refers to the syntactical structure, and can be observed in the frequent use of coordinated sentences consisting of the typical Subject + Verb + Object (S+V+O) structure. This feature creates a structural parallelism, which should function as an inner cohesive link between the various parts of the text, and confer a higher degree of internal coherence to the whole text. This device combines two pragmatic forces: the explicit force (that lies on the surface and is unstated) and the implicit force (that is below the surface and understated). 66 The repeated sentence structure can be divided into two patterns. The first one is characterized by the symmetrical paratactic ordering S+V+O, leaving the Subject immutable and repeating the Verb, but modifying the Object. Mao’s speeches offer various examples of this parallel Subject Predicate sentence pattern, often with the negative form of the Verb, which confers a strong derogatory connotation towards the intellectuals. An emblematic examples is: ‘Our workers engaged in the fields of literature and art are not familiar with the workers, are not familiar with the peasants, are not familiar with the military and are not familiar with their cadres(我们的文艺工作者不熟悉工人(S+Neg.V+O),不熟悉农民,不熟悉士兵,也不熟悉他们的干部).’ Mao refers to the target of art and literary work (gongzuo duixiang wenti工作对象问题), and uses this particular technique to emphasize the negative side of these ‘workers’. The ‘truth’ is stated by means of a negative form. The first three parallel sentences (S + Neg. V + O, Neg. V + O, Neg. V + O) are coordinated sentences on the same level of generality, while the last one (with the same basic structure) comes as a conclusion, as an afterthought, almost fully independent. Analysing the contrastive pronouns, the final utterance is the interpretive key: at the beginning, the intellectuals are included in the Party by means of the all-inclusive pronoun ‘our’ (womende), but, in the final part, they are clearly put in a subordinate position, by means of the pronoun ‘their’ (tamende 他们的), which refers to the cadres of the Party. The key concept is that the intellectuals ‘are not familiar with their cadres’, and therefore they cannot be considered reliable and functional to the CCP. Here Mao reaches the climax of his speech, identifying the major problem with the intellectuals: their crime lies not so much in the fact that they do not understand the ‘people’ (the triad gongnongbing), but more so in the fact that they do not understand how the CCP leading cadres want them to express themselves in their works. 67 This indicates a shift between what apparently are three objects plus one into three objects (gongren工人... nongmin农民… shibing士兵) plus one subject (ganbu干部):

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according to Mao, the real purpose of art and literature is to lead the peasants, workers and military to think what the Party cadres want them to think. The intellectuals’ real duty is to strengthen the correct way of thinking, through the enforcement of a logocentric model of power based on a codified way of expressing themselves, as if their words automatically corresponded to a claimed reality. This pattern can be traced back to the paternalistic idea of Confucian political culture, embodied in the dual concepts of xiao-zhong孝忠 (filial piety and loyalty) and ren-yi仁义(benevolence and justice), appropriated and re-elaborated by the CCP. CCP leaders, from Yan’an onwards, have often presented themselves, by means of rhetoric pronouncements, as benevolent and as sage father-figures who know the ‘correct’ behaviour and can explain, for the wellbeing of the people, what is right and wrong. Even in the post-Mao era Mao has been considered by many people as a saint.61 68 The second sentence pattern S+V+O is characterized by the same Verb-Object scheme, with a variation of the Object (parallel object) and the frequent use of a multiple Subject, while the Verb remains practically unchanged. Sometimes the same verb is repeated, while other times a synonymous Verb is used, as when Mao states: The cadres of all types, soldiers in every army, workers in the factories, and peasants in the villages, if they know the characters (i.e. are literate), they all want to read books, read newspapers; if they don’t know the characters (are illiterate), they still want to see plays, they want to look at pictures, sing songs and listen to music…(各种干部,各队的战士,工厂的工人,农村的农民,他们识了字,就要看书、看报,不识字的, ( 他们– implied -)也要看戏、看画、唱歌、听音乐).62 69 In Chinese the dunhao顿号 (、) or repetition comma is used; it functions as a cohesive tie between the different terms and confers to the whole sentence a precise rhythm.

70 These are all specular sentences based on the structure S + V + O. The climax is reached in the conclusion:‘They are the receivers of our workers engaged in the fields of literature and art’ (Tamen jiu shi women wenyi gongzuozhede jieshouzhe他们就是我们文艺工作者的接受者). This technique is extremely useful since it clarifies how the intellectuals have to become one with the Party (our) and produce ‘words’ in line with the new ‘reality’. 71 In Deng’s speech, on the contrary, structural parallelism has a decisively inferior importance, and the two fundamental pragmatic forces, implicit and explicit, don’t seem to coincide. It becomes difficult to identify the implicit force acting between the source and the target messages and, sometimes, it becomes impossible to believe in the pragmatic effect of equivalence between the two messages. The gap existing between the source and target has become wider, and this widening of the gap is as a consequence of the irresolvable dichotomy between the name (ming) and the actuality (shi). In Deng’s case one can see a plurality of forces: the apparent intention of the message contained in Deng’s political speeches is not the same as its actual content, and everything becomes more ambiguous.

Rhetorical questions, connective devices and cohesive ties

72 Rhetorical questions carry an apparent denotation of uncertainty, but the speaker already knows the exact answer, and therefore this technique has an implicit syllogistic connotation of request-order to act accordingly. A clear example is contained in Mao’s

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second Yan’an speech conclusion, when he discredits the heightening (tigao提高) of knowledge and emphasizes the importance of diffusing (puji普及) knowledge among the masses. Like a good father-pedagogue Mao poses the rhetorical question: Yong shenme用什么? (How? Using what?), before explaining how to diffuse knowledge. This also shows that rhetorical questions function as connective devices between different paragraphs of the text. Mao frequently uses parallel rhetorical questions, either at the beginning of a paragraph, or as independent paragraphs, or to introduce the main theme of the whole paragraph. This technique is useful in emphasizing central ideas more effectively, and holding a big part of the text together.

73 This leads to the question of convergences and divergences between the grammatical structures of Mao’s and Deng’s texts. Mao makes extensive use of very simple, fully understandable examples, often linked to his personal life experience. He also uses rhetorical questions to link the various paragraphs of his speech, giving a sense of structural cohesion and coherence to the whole text. The overall result is that his speeches appear much less pragmatic or schematic than those of Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin. Deng often uses quotations and paraphrases, which show the intention to claim continuity with the previous leaders in cultural matters, but ultimately betray his interest in demonstrating the legitimacy of his own position of power. Jiang Zemin’s ‘style’ is more slogan-like and strives to emphasize a common understanding of the role of intellectuals from 1949 onwards.63 Different techniques are used in different texts as they are meant to achieve different results. In Deng’s speech, a recurrent cohesive device is the expression ‘the new historical period’: this refers to his own era, but the xin (新new) echoes the xin (new) of ‘Mao’s style’ expression ‘new China’ (xinzhongguo新中国), and tries to confer legitimacy to Deng’s position. Nevertheless Deng’s attempt to demonstrate the continuity between the Party’s policy towards the intellectuals in the ‘new period’ and the CCP policy before the Cultural Revolution remains ambiguous. The difficulty of advocating this standpoint is reflected in Deng’s language: the whole speech is full of generic and ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory expressions. The clearest example is the following statement: ‘During the seventeen years before the Great Cultural Revolution, our literary and artistic line has been basically correct (jibenshang shi zhunquede基本上是准确的), the achievements of the workers engaged in the fields of literature and art have been remarkable.’64 The whole passage sounds ambiguous, since the degree of certainty in Deng’s argument is invalidated by the use of the adverb jibenshang基本上(basically)in the first sentence. Jibenshang assumes an ironically antithetical connotation when associated with zhunque准确(correct), especially when the idea of correctness is historically contextualized, and associated with Confucius zhengming theory. Here the attempt to argue that the Party line on literature and art (and therefore the policy towards the intellectuals) has been ‘fundamentally correct’ (jibenshang shi zhengque) is followed by the extremely vague and elusive statement ‘the achievements … have been remarkable.’ In the restricted code of political language, the ambiguous expression jibenshang zhunque not only means ‘not completely’ (the opposite of wanquan 完全meaning ‘completely’), but leads the receiver to infer that the policy was ‘absolutely not correct’, and wonder what kind of ‘remarkable achievements’ Deng Xiaoping is referring to.65 74 Exhortative expressions and ba type sentences represent two other features typical of these speeches, and they are also clear examples of cohesive ties. The ba把form is a recurrent formula associated with agitation propaganda. When it is clearly expressed,

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the ba把form can reveal a political campaign in an ascending phase or in a more emphatic resumption trend. The ba把particle, especially when it is part of the final sentence and therefore positioned at the end of text, has the function of winding up a political campaign: it draws a certain inevitable conclusion and indicates a request, which is expressed more in the form of a call to action than in an explicit commendatory tone. These kinds of exhortative/imperative devices are meant to excite the sentiments of the people: they are typical of oral speeches, but are also frequently used in political slogans and posters, functioning as powerful epitomes of the ‘speech acts’ represented by the CCP’s key political documents.66 Therefore, a prerequisite of success for a political document is that it must contain a few fundamental sentences, such as, in Mao’s speeches, the expression ‘literature and art must serve the people’ (wenyi wei renmin fuwu). These key sentences can be distilled in slogans easy to memorize.

Conclusion

75 Prasenjit Duara argues: ‘Language as an arena of historical contest is where we may witness the historicity of History’.67 This article provides a study of language and political discourse in modern China by focusing on the ways in which Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, respectively, have attempted to codify cultural practices and shape language in order to create intellectual discourses within the framework of a specific social and political order.

76 I have analyzed, through political language, two symmetrical but partially antithetic key events in Chinese history: the consolidation of Mao’s political and cultural power in the cradle of the communist revolution in Yan’an (1942) and Deng Xiaoping’s affirmation of power in the cultural-political sphere in 1979. My aim was to provide a better understanding of: 1. CCP’s expectations from the intellectuals engaged in the artistic-literary field; 2. the relation between the mechanisms of production and reception of formalized political language. 77 The selected speeches show similarities but also significant differences, which I defined using the parameters of symmetry and asymmetry, within the conceptual framework of a curve delineating a process of evolution-involution-devolution of the relation between names and actualities. 78 Review of the evidence contained in these documents reveals that the expressions used in these speeches, the conjunctions and interactions of particular syntactical or semantic devices, discursive rules and pragmatic techniques are intentional. 79 My focus is on written political documents adapted from oral speeches since I agree with Jacques Derrida that writing (traces, as he says) is the beginning of everything. 68This is particularly relevant in the Chinese case, dominated for centuries by the axiomatic unity of writing and power: wen文indicates both the written language and the functional essence of the civil servant who was entitled to perform his duties only if he had acquired the ability to master the literary texts (dushu zuoguan读书做官), containing the ‘correct’ patterns of representation of a claimed reality. In Imperial China the discernment of writing was the only way to be part of the organizational structure of political power.

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80 Under Mao, the authoritarianism of a newly formalized language contains a high potential for alignment, absorption and internalization, and constitutes one of the most effective devices to set boundaries in the people’s range of re-presentation of the ‘real’ world. Mao’s Yan’an speeches combine an assertive tone, a simple and direct style, and the use of coordinative sentences linked by cohesive ties: their aim is to exhibit the highest possible degree of coherence and avoid any dubious remark, which might confuse the receiver. Thanks to a precise syntactic structure and a standardized repetitive pattern, the key concepts can directly reach the receivers expecting them to act accordingly. The reiteration of formalized sentence and grammar patterns through the media succeeded in creating a more or less fictitious image of a one-sided reality, based on the presumption of the annihilation of any possible dichotomy between surface and underlying structures of names (ming) and actuality (shi) by means of ‘correct’ and codified ‘sayings’ (yan). Mao’s political speeches had both a paternalistic tone and a performative force. Slogans, four-character political sayings and key words revealed an implicit and absolute directive to prevent a priori any possible emergence of heterodox forms of expressing personal feelings and ideas. The centuries old socio- psychological mechanism of Confucian-style role modelling combined with CCP style intellectuals’ remoulding and, last but not least, emotional internalization of a prescribed unilateral form of expression, demonstrated all their effectiveness during the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). During that period69 the alignment with the only authorized expressive code (both visually and verbally) reached its climax (but also its first point of no-return) as is evidenced by examining the case of the ‘docile bodies’ of Chinese intellectuals70, which fully shows the efficacy of the inversionary discourse. 81 In the post-Mao era, the master narrative of political language is the story of a progressive and unstoppable devolution due to an inexorable detachment between the ‘name’ (ming) and the ‘actuality’ (shi) via the dissolution of the ‘saying’ (yan). The gap between ming and shi and the impossibility of the yan to hold them together has opened new possibilities of pursuing subjective discursive practices. Distinguished voices have emerged in the artistic and literary fields, where intellectuals have experimented language disruptions, polylinguality, scattered words and phrases, alternative forms of narrative, disjunction, fragmentation and even fractured characters as in the case of the artwork of Xu Bing.71 The deconstruction of language is a fundamental element in his artwork: Xu Bing investigates the creation of language, how it is learned, the barriers and structures it creates, and the meaning and non-meaning of the written word. Xu Bing is well known as the inventor of thousands of ‘characters-non- characters’ inscribed in the ‘Book from the Sky (Tianshu天书)’ (1991), which represents the most significant example of language-based artwork. These signs, reinvented by the artist, look like authentic characters although they are absolutely unintelligible. In another artwork, ‘Chairman Mao said: Art for the people’, Xu Bing emphasizes with his own interpretation and understanding the famous Maoist ideological position on art and literature at Yan’an. In another installation, the ‘Living Word’ (2001), Xu Bing goes one step further, exploring the transformation of English and Chinese scripts: this work shows Xu’s invention of a new written language through the example of intertwining bird shapes. 82 These creative phenomena can be interpreted as signs of the urge for demystification of the formalized language that is characterized by a widening and unsolvable gap between the name (ming) and the actuality (shi), due to the dissolution of any possible

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connection between the political saying (yan) and the symbolic order of representation of reality.

NOTES

1. Confucius, The Analects (Lunyu), Book XIII, Chapter 3. http://www.afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/ wengu.php?l=Lunyu&no=320. Accessed 10/12/2008. See also: James Legge, The Chinese Classics, With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, in five volumes, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1960. Reprinted [1893-95]), and in particular vol. 1, 1861, available also on line at: http://nothingistic.org/library/confucius/analects/toc.html 2. In biological science, the term is associated with the theory of phylogeny, which argues for the origin of different plants and animals in other pre-existing types, and their progressive modification in successive generations. 3. In the sense of a study of a theory of the nature and ground of knowledge (and in this case political knowledge), especially with reference to its limits and validity. 4. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, London, Routledge, 2001 (Trans. Alan Sheridan). The idea of ‘claimed reality’ refers to the virtual symbolic order, what Jacques Lacan called ‘big Other’, which is the dominant political, cultural and mainstream media network that structures reality for us. 5. Confucius, The Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3. http://www.afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php? l=Lunyu&no=320 Accessed 11/12/2008. 6. Language is not merely a medium of communication but embodies an actual action as well. J. L. Austin introduced the notion of ‘performative utterances’: utterances which not only state that you intend to do something, but actually do that thing as a result of being spoken (for ex. a justice of peace uttering I now pronounce you husband and wife creates de facto a legal union). John L Austin, How to do Things with Words, New York, Oxford University Press, 1962. 7. Confucius, The Analects, Book XII, Chapter 17. http://www.afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php? l=Lunyu&no=310 Accessed 11/12/2008. 8. Steven Pinker, Language Instinct, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1994, p. 17. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 66-89. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, p. 220. 11. Ibid. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Routledge, 1961, pp. 14-15. Trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness. 13. I prefer to use ‘speech’ instead of ‘talk’ since these documents maintain all the typical characteristics of oral speeches. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ (Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhuishangde jianghua), 2 and 23 May 1942, In Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong XuanjiDisanjuan (Selected Work of Mao Zedong), vol. III, Beijing, Renmin Chubanshe, 1991, pp. 847-879. 14. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’ (Zai Zhongguo wenxueyishu gongzuozhe disici daibiaodahuishang de zhuci), 13 October 1979, In Deng, Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping WenxuanDierjuan (Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. II), Beijing, Renmin Chubanshe, 1983, 207-214. 15. Zhongguo jindaishilan中国近代史览1894-1999 (CD-Rom).

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16. I borrow this concept from Foucault and apply it to Liu Shaoqi’s theory on the personal aspirations of Communist Party members seen as ‘docile tools’ (xunfu gongjulun). This concept was first expressed in his 8 July 1937 speech at the Yan’an Marxism-Leninism Institute and then reasserted in a meeting organised by the Beijing Ribao on 30 th June 1958 (see: Beijing Ribao’s editorial 29 July 1958). Even though during the Cultural Revolution, this theory as expressed by Liu Shaoqi was condemned as a ‘negative example’, the apparent critique was merely meant to provide a more precise definition of this idea and aimed at indicating the intellectuals’ function to serve as ‘docile bodies’ in the implementation of Mao’s ‘correct line’ as opposed to the ‘revisionist’ one. See: Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, Vintage Books, 1977, pp. 135-169. Liu Shaoqi ‘Lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang’ (On the self- cultivation of Chinese Communist Party members), 8 July 1939. In Liu shaoqi Xuanji (Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi), vol. 1, Beijing, Beijing Renmin Chubanshe, 1949, pp. 97-167; Translated as ‘How to Be a Good Communist’ In Collected Works of Liu Shao-ch'i , vol. 1, Hong Kong, Union Research Institute, 1969, pp. 151–219. 17. David E. Apter, Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 99. 18. Ibid. 19. See: Wei Jingsheng, The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings, New York, Viking, 1997; James D. Seymour, The Fifth Modernization: China's Human Rights Movement, 1978-1979, New York, Human Rights Publishing Group, 1980. 20. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, New York, Vintage Books, 1965, p. 72. 21. Here I am paraphrasing the title of the book by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City (NY), Anchor Books, 1966. 22. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, pp. 5-6. 23. Habitus for Bourdieuis a system of practical knowledge, acquired over time, which creates in the social agents the tendency to perceive, act, and react with a certain naturalness within a specific social universe, without any need to be coordinated or governed by rules. See: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London, Routledge, 1984; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993. 24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, New York, Harper & Row, 1962. 25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso Books, 1991, pp. 6-7. 26. This axiomatic procedure of derogatory attribution is evident in the political language used after the repression of the 1989 students’ movement, when the two terms of shaoshu and fangemingfenzi were frequently associated in the official documents. 27. Dangxing is usually translated as ‘Party style’ but my translation suggests this as a modern version of the mandate of heaven(tianming). 28. Jiang Zemin, Jiang Zemin lun shehuizhuyi jingsheng wenming jianshe (Jiang Zemin on the construction of spiritual civilization), Beijing, Zhongyang wenxian Chubanshe, 1999, pp. 313-332. 29. See: Carol Lee Hamrin, Timothy Cheek (eds.) China’s Establishment Intellectuals, Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, 1986; Merle Goldman, Timothy Cheek, Carol Lee Hamrin (eds.), China's Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a new Relationship, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1987. 30. Gao Xingjian made a remark on this point during his talk at Harvard University on Feb. 27, 2001. He emphasized that in his 2000 novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain) he never uses the personal pronoun ‘Wo’ but only ni and ta (both masculine and feminine forms) as he strongly felt the suppression of the category of personal. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain, New York, HaperCollins, 2000.

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31. Aristotle, The Poetics, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1927. Trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe. Aristotle, The Politics, Cambridge, (Mass.), Loeb Classical Library, 1932. Trans. H. Rackman. 32. J. Austin, How to do Things with Words. See also: Herbert Fingarette, Confucius-The Secular as Sacred,New York, HarperCollins, 1972; Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992. 33. John Searle, ‘Indirect Speech Acts’, In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, New York, Academic Press, 1975. 34. See: Mao Zedong, ‘Problems of War and Strategy’, 6 November 1938, In Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Beijing, Foreign Language Press, 1965, vol. 2, pp. 219-235. 35. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, p.848. 36. J. Austin, How to do Things with Words. 37. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’, p. 210. 38. Bonnie McDougall, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’ A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1980, p. 14. 39. Zhao Shuli, Xiaoerhei jiehun, Huabei, Xinhua Shudian, 1943. See also: Merle Goldman, Leo Ou- fan Lee (eds.) An Intellectual History of Modern China, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 257-58. 40. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’, p. 212. 41. Perry Link, ‘Baituo jiquanzhuyide yuyan’ (Break Away from the Centralized Language), In Gangzhilian Tongxun (Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Movements of China), 16, pp. 1-4. Also in Banyang Suiji. Taibei, Sanmin Chubanshe, 1999, pp. 17-28. 42. Maurizio Marinelli, ‘The Desire of Power and the Annihilation of Emotions in Chinese Political Language.’ Ming Qing Yanjiu, 2003-2004 Napoli, pp. 143-160. 43. The five red categories identified: workers, soldiers, poor peasants, martyrs and communist cadres; while the five black categories identified landlords, rich-farmers, anti-revolutionists, bad- influencers, and right-wingers. 5. 3 On 5 December 1998 Jiang Zemin launched the ‘three stresses’ campaign allegedly targeting ‘leading officials above the county level through criticism, self-criticism and education, with stresses on studying theory, increasing political consciousness, and cultivating healthy trends.’ 44. In May 2000 Jiang made an inspection tour to Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. In line with his obsession with ‘stability above all’ (wending yadao yiqie), on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, Jiang stressed the future role of the CCP as ‘a faithful representative of the requirements in the development of advanced productive forces in China, the orientation of the advanced culture in China, and the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of the people in China. 45. For more on this see Fan Zhongyan, Fan Zhongyan quan ji(Complete Works of Fan Zhongyan), Chengdu, Sichuan Daxue chubanshe, 2002.Yongxian Li; Ronggui Wang(eds.). Fan Zhongyan (989– 1052) was the Northern Song Dynasty’s prominent statesman and literary figure who clarified how the intellectual was ‘the first person to bear hardships and the last one to enjoy comforts’ (xian tianxia zhi youeryou, hou tianxia zhi leerle). 46. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’, p. 211. 47. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, p.851. 48. Ibid. 49. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, pp.851-852. 50. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, p. 872. 51. Jiang Zemin, Jiang Zemin lun shehuizhuyi jingsheng wenming jianshe, pp. 313-332.

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52. Signs and their relation to the ‘outside world’. Semantics, syntactics and pragmatics are the three fundamental constituencies of semiotics. 53. Signs and their relations to the other signs. 54. Signs and their relations to users. 55. See: Bob Hodge, Gunther R. Kress, Language as Ideology,London, New York, Routledge, 1993; Stephen Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 35. 56. Bob Hodge, Kam Louie, The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture: The Art of Reading Dragons. London, New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 71. 57. Hans Georg Gadamer, Joel C. Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall (eds.), Truth and Method, New York,Continuum, 1993, pp. 119-120. 58. This method refers to the study of the pragmatic force of the language used in context, from the viewpoint of linguistic sources. 59. See: Ministry of Education, China [MOE] (2002) “Achievement of eradicating illiteracy”, available at: ; Ministry of Education, China [MOE] (2005) “The success of universal education in China”, available at: http://www.moe.edu.cn/edoas/website18/level3.jsp?tablename=217&infoid=17116. Both accessed on 12 March 2007. 6. 2 This was also true, although to a different extent, in Deng’s times: when I was studying at Tongji University in 1988-89, loudspeakers were often used to disseminate civic and political information. 60. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’, p. 212. 61. See: Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk (NY), M.E. Sharpe, 1996; G. R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999. 62. Mao Zedong, ‘Speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, p.850. In Chinese the dunhao (、) or repetition comma is used; it functions as a cohesive tie between the different terms and confers to the whole sentence a precise rhythm. 63. Jiang Zemin,Jiang Zemin lun shehuizhuyi jingsheng wenming jianshe, pp. 313-332. 64. Deng Xiaoping, ‘Greeting words to the Fourth Congress of Chinese literary and art workers’, p. 205. 65. A significant example of those 17 years could be the ‘anti-rightist’ campaign, launched in May 1957 when Deng Xiaoping himself was Secretary of the Party with the aim to ‘lure the snake out of the hole’ (yinshe chudong), luring out the intellectuals who had dared to speak against the Party during the ‘double flower’ movement. 66. Maurizio Marinelli, ‘The Desire of Power and the Annihilation of Emotions in Chinese Political language’, pp. 143-160. 67. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 235. 68. Jacques Derrida,De la grammatologie, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1967 ; Jacques Derrida,L'écriture et la difference, Paris, Le Seuil, 1979. 69. Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 117-55. 70. The literature on intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution is extremely wide. In the Nineties, one could argue that many intellectuals progressively became ‘strategic bodies’ as opposed to ‘docile bodies’. 71. See: Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Asian Art & Culture), Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001; Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C.Y. Ching (eds.), Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing,Princeton, Princeton University

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Press, 2006; Xu Bing, Cai Guoqiang, , Where Heaven & Earth Meet: The Art of Xu Bing and Cai Guo- Qiang, Timezone 8, 2005.

ABSTRACTS

This essay addresses the topic of the political use of formalized language. In the Chinese historical tradition the ‘correctness’ of language has always been considered a source of moral authority, official legitimacy and political stability. Political language has always had an intrinsic instrumental value, since its control is the most suitable way to express and convey the orthodox State ideology. Formalized language has also served as a device to standardize the range of expressiveness of Chinese intellectuals. Wittgenstein argues that words have the power to set the limit for the ‘expression of thoughts’, because the boundaries of language indicate the boundaries of one’s own world. My focus is on specific forms of power embodied in language practices and discursive formations recognizable in selected texts. This inquiry illuminates various possibilities for normalization and inculcation of formalized language. The internal constitution of selected texts is examined with an eye to the dialogic interaction with the production and reception of Mao’s and post-Mao’s political discourses on intellectuals. Analysis of language formation and use in a comparative perspective considers the socio-historical contexts and reveals a pattern of evolution, involution, and finally devolution of language.

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Tibet in Debate: Narrative Construction and Misrepresentations in Seven Years in Tibet and Red River Valley

Vanessa Frangville

1 Throughout the last thirty years, the ‘Tibet issue’ has become a significant topic on the international agenda, and a critical factor for conducting US-China relationship, as some legal measures may have suggested.1 Two positions chiefly became part of the public debates. On one stand, Tibet is considered as an “inalienable part of China”, “liberated” from feudal oppression and “guided to modernity” by the “elder Brother” Han.2 On the other stand, Tibetan government-in-exile depicts Tibet as an “independent state in fact and law” before the Chinese communist invasion in 1949, claiming for a “cultural genocide” in Tibet.3 The historical and political status of Tibet has been extensively discussed among scholars, and such positions, although much qualified, have found their way into academic discourses in China, in Tibetan exiled communities and in the “West”.4 As a consequence, pictures of Tibet have turned into more political and ideological representations to support discourses on the status of Tibet. In particular, cinematic representations of Tibet have intersected with politics, power and diplomacy, as this article will illustrate.

2 Hence, this study proposes to examine the construction of these narratives on Tibet in cinema. Cultural productions (novels, paintings, photographs, films…) are dramatically influential in shaping an imaginary of Tibet, not only in Europe and the United-States, but also in China.5 As the visual is central to the manufacturing of meanings to interpret “realities” in modern societies, films are one of the materials that produce narratives on what Tibet and Tibetan’s aspirations are supposed to be.6 They involve audiences in the construction of representations: spectators do not only receive representations, they also contribute to them when they accept images as evidences of “reality” or what theorist Jacques Aumont calls “impressions of realities”.7 Therefore, it

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is essential to analyse visual narratives to understand how perceptions of Tibet are constructed. 3 This article focuses on visual representations of Tibet and Tibetans in the context of two films both released in 1997: a Chinese film called Red River Valley (Chinese: Honghegu 红河谷) and a famous Franco-American film, Seven Years in Tibet. This study first attempts to provide a concise examination of representations of Tibet in Chinese cinema. Indeed, while some literature can be found on ‘Western’ representations of Tibet through cinematic production, little has been done on the shaping of an imaginary of Tibet through recent Chinese films.8 We contend that images and films are significant in the process of creating Tibet’s representations in China, probably even more than political propaganda and education. Besides, this essay proposes a comparative perspective of the construction of images of Tibet and Tibetans in the ‘West’ and in China. Surprisingly, while many studies tackle the Tibet issue from a Chinese perspective, or from a Tibetan perspective, very few make parallels of both versions.9 Our assumption is that none of these discourses can be fully understood if read isolated, since they mutually influence and induce each other. 4 By looking at images of Tibet in these films, it will be possible to identify significant rhetorical strategies as well as relevant similarities that characterize representations of Tibet in the two factions. The importance of the economic, political and cultural context in which films were produced should be underlined first. Indeed, images are received and perceived historically and rely upon larger discourses. Thus, a comprehensive but non-exhaustive historical overview of imaginaries of Tibet, as well as a general context of these specific productions will be given. This will be followed by a more detailed examination of the films. The point here is to deconstruct representations of Tibet, because modern representational practices produce knowledge, and representations establish control through knowledge formation.10 What this analysis suggests is that both discourses contribute to construct very similar collective imaginaries, rather than historical, political or social knowledge of Tibet through analogous processes and functions, to the point where confrontation focuses more on partisanship than on the way Tibetan experience their situation in Tibet. We argue that neither of these positions is able to provide a fully understanding of the situation of Tibet, and that such approaches prevent from seeing the Tibet issue as a serious political conflict involved in a global and complex context.

Tibet in Europe and in the ‘Western’ imaginaries

5 In Europe, growth of interest in Tibet since the end of the 18th century led to what has been called a “tibétophilie européenne” or European Tibetophilia11. According to French historian Hugues Didier, European fascination for Tibet dates back from the 17th century with the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Andrade’s Tibetan travel account.12 Although we do not completely follow Didier’s assessment of Tibet being “the only Asian culture with whom Europeans can identify”, one cannot deny Tibet’s appeal for some decades. Nevertheless, interest in Tibet were largely imbued with ideologies, may they be religious, political not to say racialist.

6 Indeed, some European scholars and Jesuits have sought close connections with Tibet, thus identified as an early place for Christianity’s influence and prosperity. The idea of Jesus travelling to Tibet was also largely spread and extensively discussed through the

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last century. Nicolas Notovitch, a Russian Jew converted to Greek Orthodoxy, claimed that he acquired a copy of a sacred book mentioning Jesus (called ‘Issa’ by Tibetans, close to Arabic word ‘Isa’ for Jesus) visiting Tibet and Lhasa, and gave a translation and an analysis of the texts in The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, first published in 1894 and reprinted in 1926. 13 Although ink flew in all directions to denounce the book, the idea of Jesus in Tibet resurfaced regularly within Christian communities to explain Jesus’ teenage years missing in the Holy Book but also, more than obviously, in an attempt to make a ‘spiritual’ bridge between Europe and Tibet to assess the idea of universalism in Christianity, as Tibet is often considered as one of the most remote and inaccessible place in the world.14 Tibetan religions and beliefs were very popular in the New Age Movement that emerged in the 19th century and took on a new life in the 1960-1970s.15 The New Age Movement indeed seeks for a ‘universal truth’ expressed by the ‘oneness’ of humankind. Hence, East Asian religions combined with mysticism, spiritualism and esotericism, are very influent among New Agers. Not only Buddhism and Lamaism but also Tibetan cultural and environmental practices or medicine are appropriated by what has been qualified equally as a counterculture, a religious movement, a political group or an profitable commercial activity.16 Mysticism also persisted through accounts from European climbers and explorers and documentary films shot along expeditions.17 Himalayas represented a significant challenge to “elevate the human spirit” and, implicitly to impose the “White” domination in conquering the Everest. 7 Pursuit of ‘universal truth’ went hand in hand with search for ‘purity’. An –extreme but sadly explicit– example of this search for ‘purity’ through Tibet is the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Organisation), founded by the very influent politician of the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler, and sent to Tibet to find about a Nazi ‘Shangri-la’.18 This team of Nazi SS ‘scientists’ mission consisted in examining Tibetan for signs of Aryan descent.19 Nazi’s racial beliefs were at the centre of the journey, and that Tibet was considered as the birthplace of the Aryan race at the end is not so difficult to comprehend for Tibet being, again, a ‘remote’ and ‘preserved’ place ‘untouched by the outside’s world influence’ in European imaginaries. 8 Recently a growing literature contested this approach of Tibet and deconstructed the Western “dreamworld” or “virtual” Tibet.20Therefore, Europeans’ identification with Tibet is less a “coincidentia oppositorum” (“union of oppositions”) as suggested by Hugues Didier, than a deliberate connection to assert and impose European values and beliefs, or “an ego trip of uniquely Western proportions”, in Orville Schell’s words.21 Tibet is thus a rich depository for the projections and fantasies of Westerners. Seven Years in Tibet is not excluded from this process, and is largely influenced by current debates on Tibet.

Seven Years in Tibet: Tibet F(or)ever

9 Seven Years in Tibet was released in 1997, directed by French Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring mostly American actors such as Brad Pitt. The film is based on the book of the same title by Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer who took refuge in Tibet after being imprisoned by the British22. Harrer and Aufschnaiter were part of an expedition in the Himalayas when the Second World War breaks out. Harrer is depicted as a selfish, ambitious and self-centred man who did not hesitate to leave his pregnant wife in Austria to reach the Himalayas and glory. Arrested by the British on a journey in

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India, the two climbers manage to escape and cross the Indian border to Tibet. They eventually arrive in Lhasa after month of wandering in the mountains. As they try to steal food, a Tibetan invite them at his home and they decide to settle in the city. They meet a young woman tailor they both try to seduce. Aufschnaiter and the young tailor finally get married, and Harrer takes refuge in the Potala Palace where the 14-year old Dalai Lama asks him to build a film theatre. From then on, Harrer becomes his instructor and his friend, as they happened to be both isolated and lonely people. Harrer is then able to accomplish his emotional transformation from an egotistic to a thoughtful person and father. In the mean time, the Chinese take control of Tibet, and the film portrays Tibetan as so pacifist and spiritual people that they are simply unable to build a proper army to defend the Potala Palace. This event coincides with Harrer’s decision to return to Austria, although the film does not make clear whether they are connected or not. The last minutes of the film show how Harrer finally comes to know his son in Austria and trains him in the art of climbing mountains. In the very last image, Harrer is at the peak of a mountain in Europe with a Tibetan flag.

10 The film was released while ‘Tibet fever’ was reaching its highest point in the United- States of America. In the late 1990s, American studios produced several films about Tibet, such as Kundun, Windhorse; in the mean time, such films as Red Corner described China as a complex, ambiguous and impenetrable country, starring Hollywood’s ‘Mr Tibet’ Richard Gere.23 Sympathy for Tibet and Tibetans was then expressed in “Concerts for a Free Tibet”, books on Tibet, Hollywood stars converting to Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist centres in the Unites-States.24 However, “Tibet fever” is much more than a cultural movement: interest for culture and political interests constantly overlap here. The role of the internationalisation strategy of the Tibetan exiled government should not be understated as it clearly intervenes in popular imaginaries The Dalai Lama is often portrayed as a passive victim overwhelmed with political conflicts and a supreme pontiff of Tibetan Buddhism in common narrative largely spread in Europe and the United over the last twenty years. 11 Nevertheless, the image of the Dalai Lama as an exclusively spiritual or religious leader advocating pacifism actions for Tibet’s rights, although very attractive, is a modern construction as Professor Robert Barnett argues.25 Furthermore, through the Dalai Lama, Tibetan people is dramatically represented as an abstract, unreal and unmaterialistic community. Such assessments, which both deny Tibetan’s ability to control and influence their own destiny and set them out of the real world, are very present in the “Tibet fever” movement. At the same time, this image is largely promoted and spread by the Tibetan government itself, although it has been established the Dalai Lama had entertained not only religious but also political leadership in the course of the Sino-Tibetan history.26 Not surprisingly, most of the texts supporting such discourses and waving historical arguments are written in American English, very likely to draw’s Americans’ sympathy for Tibetan exiled communities.27 12 In this context, Seven Years in Tibet was, among other events, emblematic of growing popular support for the Dalai Lama and Buddhism in a peculiar political context that should not be forgotten.28 The Dalai Lama himself was said to have given his approval for the film, and his sister, Jetsun Pema, even plays in the film as the Dalai Lama’s mother (and hence her own mother). Undoubtedly, this production played a major role in the shaping of a popular assessment of the Tibet questions, notably because it

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depicts the Chinese invasion with harsh images of a violent Chinese Army. The film, for its “brutal and impolite image” of the Chinese Communist Party, was condemned and forbidden in China. Interestingly enough, Red River Valley, released the same year, constitutes what could be seen as a response to Harrer’s romanticized seven-year experience in Tibet.

Uses of Tibet in Chinese imaginaries: From “Hell on Earth” to The Tibet Craze

13 Few studies tackled the Chinese imaginaries of Tibet before the twentieth century. Thomas Heberer, in his analysis of Chinese official journals, art and literature, insists on the “otherisation” of Tibetans through centuries that asserts Chinese control of the Tibet Plateau in the modern political discourse. The German scholar on China justifiably establishes a parallel between representations of Tibetan and representations of “Chinese ethnic minorities” in general, going back over the dichotomy between “barbarian outsiders” and “civilised Chinese” under the Chinese dynasties. The exclusion of the “Other” prevailed in the Chinese imaginary, as far as the “Chinese” can be defined as a cultural sphere governed mainly by Confucianism. What this study suggests, however, is that one cannot dissociate Chinese vision of Tibet from Chinese vision of non-Chinese in general. It does not give a precise and detailed account but only some clues of the Sino-Tibetan relationship before the twentieth century.

14 On the other hand, construction of Tibet in the Chinese official propaganda became a new object for scholars recently, in relation with issues on Tibet’s political status.29 The image of Tibet after 1950 has been debated in a more detailed and multi-layered way. Communist propaganda, soon after the foundation of the Popular Republic of China, provides relevant imageries of Tibet that someway persisted in the Post-Mao area. “Otherisation”, feminisation and infantilisation were largely spread to qualify Tibetans. Old Tibet was described as a “Hell on Earth” (as opposed to the imaginary “Garden of Eden” in Western narratives) in contrast with the “liberated New Tibet” after the Chinese army entered Lhasa in 1951.30 In order to promote the Chinese “liberation”, Chinese cultural and historical products emphasised the cruelty of the feudal system and the rudeness serfs experienced under a “dictatorial” theological leadership. One famous illustration in cinema is the film The Serf (in Chinese: Nongnu农奴), directed by Li Jun 李俊 and released in 1963. Unlike the many other “ethnic” films (shaoshu minzu pian少数民族片) produced in the 1950s and 1960s which rarely draw critics and scholars’ attention, The Serf caused a noticeable amount of ink to flow. It depicts the life of Jampa, a mute serf, brutalised and constantly humiliated by the feudal lords. Jampa and his peers are finally emancipated and re-humanised by the kindness of the Communist government’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers and the benevolent thought of the “Bodhisattva” Mao Zedong. The sympathetic image of Jampa, who finally recovers his voice when liberated from his lord’s oppression, contrasts with previous description of wild and barbaric Tibetans. It obviously appeals for Han Chinese compassion as it portrays Tibetan feudal system as extremely bloody and inhuman. The film is punctuated with visible marks of political propaganda, including symbols of the Communist Party and socialist views of work, religion, family and gender.31 Therefore, the film has been criticised for its depiction of “patriarchal”,

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“pedagogical” and “ideological” domination of Han over Tibetans.32 The impact of the film, largely diffused in Chinese urban and rural Han and non-Han communities, was certainly relevant in the Chinese communist cinema. It was clearly significant in shaping an imaginary of obscure and terrific representation of Tibet that support and legitimise the Chinese intervention and control of Tibet. 15 Elliot Sperling makes very clear that “the Tibet issue said to be reflective of centuries of popular consensus are actually very recent constructions”.33 As he demonstrates in a thorough analysis of Tibetan and Chinese historical material on the status of Tibet, Chinese assessment of Tibet being an integral part of China does not appear before the second part of the twentieth century.34 In spite of this, the Chinese perception of Tibet cannot be reduced to nationalistic and propagandist feelings, and images of Tibet as a “lost paradise” and a heaven for spirituality and purity are not the prerogative of the ‘West’. Tibet drew attention of numerous Chinese intellectuals and cultural producers in the 1980-1990s. Writers, painters, singers and even politicians made Tibet very popular through their works and policies. This appeal of Tibetan, and more generally of all ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu少数民族) cultures and areas, was involved in different intellectual movements in a post-cultural revolution context. In this context, Chinese anthropologists, including Fei Xiaotong, contended the need for the Han to learn from minority peoples’ vitality in contrast to the “feeble Han character”. 35 It was indeed part of a wider concern about post-Maoist China’s faith crisis, and an attempt to redefine ‘Chineseness’, as scholar Kam Louie 雷金慶 demonstrates in his study of Zheng Wanlong’s short stories.36 Search for “pure and original” China in rural areas was predominant among Chinese cultural theorists, although very ambiguous as the TV documentary series RiverElegy (He Shang河殇) has attested. 37 In this perspective, Tibet has been very present in the Chinese cultural world. To name a few, Ba Huang’s 巴荒 works on Tibet, as well as in Nyi Ma Tshe Ring’s (Chinese: Nima Zeren’s 尼玛泽仁) tanka paintings, are both very popular in China.38 Writer Zhaxi Dawa 扎西达娃, half-Han half- Tibetan, had success in the 1990s with his novels “inspired by Tibetan culture”.39 In such cases, Tibet became the support to resuscitate the dominant culture of the Han. 16 At the same time, the movement was definitely imbued with search for spiritualism as well as exoticism and ‘Otherness’. ‘Minority’ and ‘Tibetan’ flavour and motifs started to be a significant economic feature. Zheng Jun’s 郑钧 album’s single “Return to Lhasa” (回到拉萨) was a big hit in 1994, and Dadawa’s “Sister Drum” 阿姐鼓 shipped over a million copies in China in 1996. Their incorporation of ‘ethnic’ voices and images lent their music a certain novelty, but such marketing achievements caused fury among Tibetan exiled communities who accused Chinese artists to exploit and distort Tibetan culture and music for commercial purposes.40 Appropriations of ‘minorities’, including Uygurs, Mongols, Tibetans, Yi, Zhuang and some others, are very common, although still controversial, in contemporary Chinese cultural production in general.41 Cinema thus plays a major role in the shaping and the diffusion of an imaginary Tibet in the PRC. 17 The 1990s witnessed an outstanding growth in entertainment-focused cultural products in China; thus several market-oriented reforms were undertaken to boost the film industry.42 The association of entertainment and Tibet imagined characteristics (Tibetan music, clothing or landscapes) proved to be convincing in attracting mostly urban, educated, male and Han audiences.43 The process of consumption of the ‘Other’ was diplayed in a process of “internal orientalism” or “oriental orientalism”.44 In the

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late 1990s, state-industry collaboration was established by the Party and tried to create a more attractive form of propaganda through combining political authority and market forces: the so-called “major melody film” (zhu xuanlu pian主旋律片). In 1997, some propaganda films or “major melody films” were released, such as Liu Hulan (刘胡兰Liu Hulan by Shan Yaoting), The Great Turn Around (大转折上集Dazhuangzhe shang ji by Wei Lian) or The Opium War (鸦片战争yapian zhanzheng by Xie Jin), and Red River Valley. As a matter of fact, Red River Valley relays an imaginary Tibet as well as a commercial and political project.

Red River Valley

18 Red River Valley (aka ATale of the Sacred Mountain; in Chinese: Honghegu 红河谷) was released in 1997 in China. It was screened in the United-States only two years later but did not draw American audiences’ attention. Very few academic accounts have discussed this film.45 The story is also based on a book, Bayonet in Lhasa: The First Full Account of the British Invasion of Tibet in 1904 by a British travel writer, Peter Fleming.46 It relates to the British military action led in the Gyantse region in Tibet by the soldier- explorer Francis Younghusband. The film starts with a religious sacrifice, from which a young Han girl, Xu’er, escapes. Pursued by the villages, she falls in the river and eventually reaches the bank of a river in Tibet. As John Powers ironically mentions, “ Tibet’s rivers flow down into China, and so it is difficult to imagine that following her plunge she would have been carried upstream to Tibet”.47 There, a Tibetan family adopts her, and she meets Gesang, a handsome Tibetan youth whose masculinity is expressed in outstanding riding and shooting. The two fall in love, in spite of the local Tibetan princess’s attempt to seduce him. Meanwhile Gesang rescues a soldier-reporter, Younghusband (but renamed Mr Jones in the film), and other officers from an avalanche. There in Tibet, the British soldier found serenity among “pure” and friendly Tibetans who welcome him as a member of their family, treating his wounds and nursing him. When completely recovered, Younghusband/Jones leaves Tibet but comes back again at the head of British expedition to enforce trade agreements. On his way back to the Gyantse area, he understands that the real goal for their journey is the conquest of Tibet and its annexation to the British Empire. Negotiations are undertaken with the local force, whose commander is… a Han. As Tibetans refuse to “be freed” by the British and claim their belonging to the Chinese “big family”, the British troops kill “fifteen hundred Tibetans in fifteen minutes”. Younghusband/Jones witnesses, horrified and grieved, the cruel and bloody British invasion of Tibet. Xu’er, who fought at Gesang’s side with her Han brother, dies during the battle, trying to protect her beloved Tibetan who dies too. At the end, only Younghusband/Jones survives and declares that “the West” should not conquer “the Orient” or it will destroy its civilisation.

19 Red River Valley appealed to filmgoers through images of visual grandeur of Tibet, a love story between a Han girl and a Tibetan young man and an exotic blond-haired British soldier. Directed by Feng Xiaoning, this film is the first of a trilogy called “War and Peace” that tells historical events through foreigners’ lenses48. It was intentionally released in the same year as China’s recovery of Hong Kong and is very much a celebration of Chinese solidarity with the return of Hong Kong. Promoted by the Chinese central government and largely relayed by state-run mass media, the film won

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numerous prizes at China’s main award ceremonies, and served as the inaugural film of the 22nd Singaporean “Speak Mandarin Campaign” (讲华语运动Jiang huayu yundong) in 2000.49Red River Valley is thus definitely connected to a context of government’s ideological hardening and a renewed and necessary enthusiasm for big commercial production.

Narrating Tibet: Stereotyped and Naturalised Encounters

20 Both films are based on biographical fictions and use narrative techniques to stress the “authenticity” of the stories. Two non-Tibetan characters (Harrer in Seven Years in Tibet and Younghusband in Red River Valley) narrate the stories from their point of view in the major part of the films. The voice-over creates a storytelling effect that insists on the recording of observed facts, or what is supposed to be an account of roughly “true- life”.50 This approach is effective in naturalising the characters’ behaviours and relationships.

21 In the narrators’ eyes, Tibetans are backward and child-like, although in a positive way: they are represented as “Noble savages”, an ideal that has been very influential upon humanist movements in ‘the West’ and in China after the nineteenth century through anthropological studies.51 The perceived simplicity of Tibetan is regarded as a virtue, and savagery as the original and natural state for humankind. In the films, Tibetan main characters are naturally good and pure-minded and welcome both Han Chinese and Western foreigners as members of their families. Generosity, as well as their “innocence” (stressed by the presence of children and young women), their infinite loyalty to their foreign friends (they even die for them), their close relation to nature and apparent disregard for material and their “innate wisdom” are all aspects of the “Noble savage”. 22 Meanwhile, it is essential to consider myths of “Noble savage” and Golden Age closely.52 Tibet is thus perceived as a “Lost Paradise” having “something we (Western society) have long lost, that’s pure innocence”, in Younghusband’s words. Meanwhile, Seven Years in Tibet chiefly centres around Harrer’s change from an arrogant, selfish man to one very much enlightened by Tibetan culture. Tibet represents a redeeming hope for they all escaped from harsh fates (the Han girl from a sacrifice, Younghusband from an avalanche and Harrer from the British army) and found physical rest and spiritual redemption among Tibetans. The two stories are about Harrer and Younghusband’s spiritual transformations thanks to their experience in Tibet. 23 As a matter of fact, all of them use Tibet as a medium for constructing better Selves. Their relationship with Tibetans is largely influenced by such stereotypes. This supposed backwardness is shown as essential to Tibetans and to their relationship with Westerners and Han. Refined and learned Western men contrast with Tibetan children, childish women, strong but simplistic Tibetan men. Harrer (Brad Pitt) becomes the tutor of the young Dalai Lama on the one hand, teaching him what the world looks like in the literal sense, through geography lessons.53 On the other hand, Younghusband also introduces his new Tibetan friends to Western technology: the young Tibetan princess plays with Younghusband’s binoculars, jumping back when she naively thinks

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the yak is so big that it is rushing up to her; in the mean time, his “Tibetan family” (including the Han) is fascinated by his fashion magazines and pictures. 24 Similarly, Han, in Red River Valley, are depicted as more “civilised” than Tibetan. Tibetan are said to be primitive, living simple lives without any physical or moral restraints. They are, in Gesang’s words, free to “love the way they love”, to what Xu’er’s brother, who fortunately found her sister in Tibet, replied “I envy you, but I am Han”. In this perspective, Xu’er has to leave her adoptive family and Gesang when her brother tells her that she is Han and should not be acculturated to Tibetan ways. The concept of “oriental/internal orientalisation” is generally described as a two-part process: first, subjects perceive orientalised images of them, and then they reproduce these orientalised images on other subjects. However, the process of “otherisation” should not be underestimated in the process of “oriental” or “internal” orientalism, as it constitutes a major step that connects “orientalisation” to “internal/oriental orientalisation”. Contrasts between Tibetans and the main non-Tibetan characters involve a distance that carries out an “otherisation” of Tibetans. 25 Such representational logic stigmatises Tibetans and results in a fragmentation. As a matter of fact, the relationship is not well balanced for it hides asymmetrical relations of domination.54 The non-Tibetan is shown as the dominant, the one who possesses and shares knowledge, and produces knowledge of Tibet through his account. Western heroes tell Tibetans, but Tibetans do not tell them in return in the films, and remain subjected by the narrators. As a consequence, Tibetans are “passive” whereas non- Tibetans maintain a dominant position by producing narratives. Images and narratives are legitimised by the physical presence of the narrators in Tibet. The claim for authenticity is then established through Younghusband and Harrer’s historical experiences of Tibet.55 The appropriation of perceived “Tibetan characters and nature” is part of a process of a “cultural disguise”: Such ‘cultural disguise’ (…) enriches the privileged travellers, legitimises their authority as ‘minority expert’ and masks their appropriation of minority strengths as genuine facilitation of cross-exchange.56 26 This “cultural disguise” is to be pointed out at different levels: the narrators and the spectators who identify with the former. However, it is crucial not to underestimate this narrative strategy as a way to produce and sustain mythologies and relations of power.

Knowing Tibet: Ephemeral and Superficial Encounters

27 Delocalisation and deterritorialisation of the non-Tibetans come within the scope of the search for the Self through confronting the perceived “Other”. The experience of Tibet is a transition Harrer, Younghusband and the Xu’er actually benefit from. Unlike them, Tibetans are not intended to better their position, neither are they able to extract themselves from their fates. In the end, they get nothing good out of encounters with non-Tibetans: they are harmed by “invasions” of the Chinese in Seven Years in Tibet and the British in Red River Valley.

28 In this sense, this one-way relationship is only ephemeral and superficial. In Red River Valley, the Han girl adopted by the Tibetan family is able to break the rules of Chinese “traditional” society through transvestism or cross-dressing. Indeed, considering that clothes constitute a social stabiliser, wearing Tibetan clothes and adopting Tibetan way

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of life allow the young Han to go beyond her Han identity.57 She is even able not to wear clothes at all, bathing in the sacred lake and unconcerned when Gesang sees her, proving that she has adopted Tibetan’s disregard for “moral rules”. However, destabilising frontiers does not mean to subvert them: non-Tibetan hybridity through the appropriation of the perceived “Other” emphasises disparity between the Self and the “Other”, but does not undermine it. This cross-exchange is systematically unilateral: Chinese or Westerners may be able to “go back to the nature” for a while; but Tibetan people are condemned to stay at the stage of “savage” and never “proceed to the civilised world”. More, this supposed cross-exchange is only temporary and is not an ultimate end for neither of the Han girl, Younghusband and Harrer. All of them have to, for various reasons, leave Tibet and go back to the world they are said to belong to. The Han girl’s brother insists that she has to come back in the Han community since she “does not belong to Tibetan people”. She is then forced to leave Gesang and her adoptive family. This impossible love story between the Han girl and Tibetan Gesang is symbolic of the fundamental barriers that separate Han and Tibetan societies in orientalised imaginary. 29 As for Younghusband’s character, the Tibetan princess turned down his love, and he leaves Tibet after recovering his wounds. When he comes back, his mission to Lhasa turns into a nightmare and he would rather leave Tibet than being involved in the British invasion. In parallel, Harrer leave Tibet after the Chinese Army enters Lhasa and goes back to Austria where he could see his son for the first time: his departure from Tibet is romanticised by the ideal of a reunited family, thus emphasising his belonging to another group and another world. This is contrasted by the fact that his travelling companion, Peter Aufschnaiter (actor David Thewlis), already married to a local girl, does not go back home: unlike Harrer, and he is probably the character spectators can not identify with for he is not the omnipresent narrator.58 30 However, all these characters have mobility that Tibetans are not allowed. In brief, something is always separating Han and Westerners from Tibetans and their “mysterious and definitely impenetrable world” in Harrer’s words. As a result, deconstruction of Tibetan and non-Tibetan relationship leads to the reconstruction of the dominant-dominated rapport. This relationship is marked by the impossibility of really “knowing” the ‘Other’: Tibetans are always considered as mysterious, essentially different and unfathomable. Being a transition in their lives, Tibet remains a dream, a lost paradise, a fantasy shared by Chinese and Westerners. But, at the same time, these familiar narratives based on Harrer and Younghusband’s memories are presented as testimonies of historical facts.

Historicising Tibet: Memories, Histories and Politics

31 German cultural theorist and Egyptologist Jan Assman’s work distinguishes cultural and communicative memories.59 Communicative memory is based on communication in every day life. Memories are collected and selected by members of a family or a group, then transmitted between generations or within a specific community: in this perspective, all the members can be narrators. Narratives supported by communicative memory structure the group and its relation to other groups. As a matter of fact, communicative memory changes with the passing of times, and is openly controversial as other groups can sustain other versions of the same history in the present. More

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structured and codified, cultural memory refers to a master narrative that gives a plausible account of past, present and future: it ensures cultural continuity in a society. Cultural memory is hierarchical as not all members are narrators, and is similar to an official memory or, in Derrida’s words, an “archive”.60 The concept of cultural memory emphasises that “traditions” are the results of a construction or an invention.61 However, it is essential to go beyond this division and to point out the interactional aspect of these two levels. Indeed, as media and official discourse largely relay cultural memory, and memory is shaped by different social practices, communicative memory and cultural memory intertwine in many aspects.

32 Red River Valley as well as Seven Years in Tibet present personal accounts of specific period in the collective history. The familiarity with spectators, induced by the use of the first person singular in the narrative, seems to be a matter of communicative memory. Yet, as narratives are displayed in films, which constitute material for archiving, frontiers between communicative and cultural memories are blurred. It is even more difficult to distinguish which element belongs to one or another level as historical facts related by official documents and other cultural material are displayed. 33 The question of history is central to the question of Tibet’s status and the time-period and conflicts related to it (invasion by the British in 1904 and invasion by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s) have been deliberately selected.62 They obviously relate two different and competing versions of Tibet’s history. On the one hand, the Chinese film points out the role of the British Army in what is called a massacre of Tibetans in 1904. The narrative insists on the pretentious intent of the British to “civilize” and “liberate” the Tibetan people. On the other hand, the Chinese Communists invasion is strongly condemned by Seven Years in Tibet as it marks the end of a “peaceful” and a “happy” life for Harrer and for the Tibetan people. 34 Memory and history, which some scholars consider completely separate, are nevertheless parallel to each other, both claim for “authenticity” and are tools for political ends.63 An interesting point in the films is the assertion that memory and history do not conflict, but some modifications have been undertaken to construct this seeming coherence. In fact, the objectivity of the history and memory are highly questionable. Let’s consider Seven years in Tibet first. Interestingly, the film differs from the book, notably by making Harrer an anti-Nazi while he in reality joined the Nazi Party before the War. This incidentally made the film very controversial even before its release. As a response to multiple and severe criticisms that the film made a “Nazi a hero and a friend of the Dalai Lama”, the director, Annaud, and the film team decided to emphasise Harrer’s SS experience as part of his personal crisis he eventually solves in Tibet. Besides these historical arrangements on Harrer’s character, while in the book Harrer draws reader’s attention to a relatively disciplined and tolerant behaviour of the Chinese troops comparing to the previous 1910’s Chinese invasion, the film depicts the Chinese invasion as extremely violent and pitiless. Moreover, the book does not mention Harrer’s desperate love for a son he actually did not knew about when he was in Tibet, while the film is largely concerned with their virtual relationship of disowning and reunion. Finally, as for historical facts, the film omits and distorts significant details. For instance, in the film Harrer is in Lhasa when the Chinese army reaches the city. He is shown counselling the Dalai Lama and praying with him. He condemns the Tibetan surrender and insults the regent secretary for his weak attitude. Nevertheless, before the Chinese troops entered Lhasa, the actual Harrer had already fled to the

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Indian border with the Dalai Lama and his entourage. Only after several months did the Dalai Lama accepted the Seventeen-Point Agreement signed in Beijing and returned to Lhasa. As for Harrer, he was already on his way to Austria and did not go back to Tibet. 35 Moving onto Red River Valley, the film ends with a really violent and bloody fight between the British army and Tibetan people assisted by Han. The role of the Han girl is not part of Fleming’s book on Younghusband. It has been deliberately added to the story to justify and testify the presence of Han in Tibet and their “undeniable” and intimate connection with Tibetans. Besides, the harmony between Han and Tibetan is emphasised by their ability to communicate without translators (unlike British and Tibetan) and the paradoxical love-story between the young Han girl and Gesang. She becomes a Chinese Han martyr when she dies to protect her beloved Tibetan young man from a British soldier. Concerning the narrator, Jones alias Younghusband, it is not clear either what role the actual Younghusband played in the 1904 British intrusion in Tibet. Initially in charge of a small diplomatic assignment in Tibet, the actual aim of the expedition was to establish British hegemony on Tibet. In the film Younghusband is disenchanted when he finally comes to realise the actual reason for British Army’s presence in Tibet; in this case, it follows Fleming’s description of Younghusband’s experience in Gyantse region. But in other versions, Younghusband intentionally came to invade Tibet and defeat Tibetan authorities. His responsibility in the 1904 incident is thus very controversial and contested.64 This version of Younghusband’s story has been selected rather than others for obvious reasons. As he is very affected by the massacre he witnesses, he can sustain the Chinese disapproval of the British invasion in contrast with the faithful support of the Han. As the only main Western character, he is also the only character Western spectator is invited to identify with: the film clearly attempts to convince spectators that this version is the only correct version, although riddled with inaccuracies. The Chinese audience can as well identify with the Han while considering Younghusband as the only sympathetic British character.

Idealising Tibet: A Virgin Territory Outside the Modern World

36 In both cases, specific elements have been purposely omitted, distorted, simplified or artificially added to support opposed ideologies. As Sperling demonstrates, “critical aspects of history have been misconstrued by both sides”.65 Likewise, the popular consensus on Tibet that has been supposed to survive through centuries in both sides are modern constructions. Implausible facts and depiction of these confrontations in Tibet are intentionally exploited to draw the spectator’s attention to one or the other perception of Tibet, and are part of political strategies hidden behind seemingly sincere accounts of tragic events. All in all, these films depict very dark historical re-constructions without any nuance, turning them out to their advantage. Through this process, both Chinese and Western treat Tibetan “as objects in stories of heroic achievement by outsiders, or as victims of abuse incapable of agency”.66

37 While history represents a vast battlefield on which one side tries to be more imaginative than the other, what narratives underlie is that Tibetans should be preserved and protected from realities of the outside world, for the dream not to turn out into a nightmare. This fantasy of a dreamlike Tibet excludes it from the real world and denies Tibetans their history as well as their power to influence their own

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situation.67 What is obvious is that both sides try to put the blame on the other, without questioning their own role on Tibet’s actual situation. This process conceals any consideration for a shared responsibility. Tibet is always represented as a remote place, virgin and untouched by outside world. Red River Valley describes what seems to be the very first invasion of Tibet, omitting previous foreign incursions, notably Chinese incursions. Moreover, the British are blamed for being arrogant and pretending to educate Tibetan people, although Chinese used the same arguments to impose Communism in Tibet in 1950. Besides, involving Westerners and modernity in violation of Tibet exonerates the Chinese state as a perpetrator of abuse. At the same time, Seven Years in Tibet does not bring up the previous British invasion and focuses on Chinese invasion only, pretending that Tibet was a virgin territory intact until the arrival of the Chinese Army. 38 Although different in their origins and purposes, perceptions from both sides of a “pure and untouched” Tibet are central in both sides. Tibet, as a “primitive and barbarian” nation, requires to be “civilised” by the Han. In the mean time, pure and powerless Tibetan needs to be protected and preserved by the West. The image of “a virgin Tibet” is part of “pro-Tibet” and “pro-Chinese” strategies. In both cases, it is perceived that Tibetans are in need for modernity only through the formation of a state apparatus and strong nationalism, may they be Chinese or independent. Within the Western representations, modernisation and globalisation of Tibet in economic, industrial, cultural and social domains are assimilated to “the rape of Tibet and its special state of purity and isolation”, as Robert Barnett argues, in his essay on Tibet’s “violated specialness”.68 In this sense, Tibet is not expected to enter the modern world, but rather to be fixed in an imaginary and idealised past. As for the Chinese narratives, modernisation and emancipation of Tibet society are largely promoted to legitimate the Party line on the Tibet’s status, but it does not enable Tibetans to act by and for themselves. Tibet is represented as having no other alternative than to follow the Chinese central policy.

Tibet in Debate: What Tibet and What Debate?

39 The beginning of twenty-first century saw a growth of interest for Chinese films on minorities in China and in the West: hence the success in international festivals of Zhang Jiarui’s When Ruoma was Seventeen (2002), Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Delamu, Lu Chuan’s Kekexili (2004), Ning Hao’s Mongolian PingPong (2005), Liu Jie’s Courtehouse on the Horse Back (2006) etc. 69 In these films, political stakes are still very present, as they sustain the idea of a united and non-conflicting China, although in a more subtle way than Red River Valley. As for Western productions on Tibet, Eric Valli’s Hymalaya (1999), Nalin Pan’s Samsara (2001) and Shirley Knight’s Cry of the Snow Lion (2003) keep singing Tibet “spirituality” praises.

40 While Pro-Tibetan films focus on Tibetans, Chinese films also depict Mongolians, Dai, Zhuang, Miao or Yi. Although their representations are similar to Tibetans, for they are shown as essentially rural, poor, remote, simple and nature-related characters, Western audiences do not perceive them as political and ideological. Neither Tibetan exiled-community nor Human Right activist did criticise Mongolian PingPong or Courtehouse on the Horse Back although they particularly eulogize the Party policies. On the contrary, these films were very well received in Europe and in the United-States.

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However, they are part of the whole process of “otherisation” of non-Han for the central state’s political ends. 41 Therefore, cinematic representations of Tibet from both sides continue to cross and do not manage to go beyond the political conflict opposing Tibetan exiled and Chinese governments. Films do not present any new alternative and do not give optimist vision for a future resolution to the Tibet issue. Space for negotiation through cinema is thus decreasing in a worrying manner. 42 These two collective imaginings support two different not to say opposite ideologies: China representing itself as a unified state and a big family including “Tibetan brothers”; Tibetan defending what they perceive as “real authentic independent” Tibetan culture. However, this article suggests that Chinese propagandist film and Hollywood pro-Tibetans film both promote similar orientalist perceptions of Tibet. Therefore, practices of essentialising and stereotyping characters provide the backbone to put flesh to the imagined Tibetan. Meanwhile, a Knowledge/Power relationship is established that conceals social, political, economic and even ecological situation experienced by Tibetans in China. This analysis thus illustrates the Tibet issue is not a real political debate but more an “attempt to achieve political effects by engaging people in shared image or representation”70. 43 In fact, such polemical discussions suggest that the question of Tibet political status is complex and do not call for simplified or truncated answers. The necessity for multi- layered dimension is critical for, as Professor Robert Barnett from Columbia University noticed pertinently: (…) Fundamental questions underpinning these discussions are rarely broached: who are the Tibetan people? And what are Tibet’s boundaries?71 44 Indeed, Tibet is not as homogeneous as such discourses may pretend. Therefore, speaking in the name of Tibetans or defending such or such political status of Tibet is brought down when one has to consider the subject in its global nature. Neither Sautman nor Norbu do question what defines Tibetan people as a unified people. Rather, they avoid giving definition of their own subject (probably because there is not unambiguous definition). They omit to mention that there is not one Tibetan language and culture but several practices and dialects spread among different groups and subgroups in various regions of a large and indeterminate territory.72 They also leave the many non-Buddhist religious communities living in Tibet out of the discussion, as well as the several dissensions existing among Buddhist communities.73 Besides, historical evidences repeatedly used to impose a “truth” do not have relevance as long as they constitute hidden political tools rather than scientific facts.

45 This, of course, does not mean that Tibetan people do not, under certain circumstances that it would be useful to define, feel and regard themselves as a single and unified nation. But identity “is not so much a provable fact of history as a situation that Tibetan have created through their determination to be considered as a single people”.74 Furthermore, political identity among Tibetans is not so clearly determined either: Tibetan narrative on Tibet and China’s relationship is even less homogeneous than the Chinese discourse, and “even something as basic as the point in time at which Tibet finally fell under PRC domination has differed in various accounts”.75 The ambiguity on Tibetan political expectations, from independence to “real autonomy”, to “cultural rights” to “minimum rights protected under the PRC’s constitution”, dramatically illustrate dissents and hesitations among exiled Tibetan community and leadership. In short, regardless of

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who produce narrative, the manufacturing of a Tibet is inevitably questionable and problematic. Representing Tibetan culture and Tibetans’ experiences and aspirations as homogeneous is thus a false start and has to be questioned in order not to reach a political and social impasse.

NOTES

1. The American Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) was established in 2000, including a coordinator for Tibetan issues to “monitor and promote human rights” in China. See the official website of the CECC: http://www.cecc.gov/ 2. Chinese official positions on Tibet are stated in several white papers issued by the Information Office of the State Council: Tibet – Ownership and Human Rights Situation in 1992; The Development of the Tibetan Culture in 2000; Tibet’s March Toward Modernisation in 2001; Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet in 2004. The last issue, Tibetan-Chinese Education System Adopted in Tibet, has been published a few months after Tibetan riots in March 2008. Documents are available on Chinese embassies Websites; see for instance: www.china-embassy.org (Embassy of the PRC in the United-States of America). 3. Tibetan government in exile responded to 1992’s Chinese white paper and gave its own version of the Tibetan status: Tibetan – Proving Truth From Facts, 1993. Since then, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy issued numerous reports on Human rights violation in Tibet: most of them are available on the Government of Tibet in exile’s Website: www.tibet.org 4. See discussions between Barry Sautman, associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Jamyang Norbu, Tibetan writer and political activist exiled in India. Barry Sautman’s controversial article after protests in Tibet in March 2008 has widely circulated on Internet: Protests in Tibet and Separatism: the Olympics and Beyond, Letter submitted to South China Morning Post, March 2008. See: www.blackandwhitecat.org/2008/04/01/separatism-and- tibet/ followed by numerous comments by Internet users. Discussion of this article in Jamyang Norbu’s article “Running-Dog Propagandists” and “Barry Sautman's response to Jamyang Norbu's opinion piece "Running-Dog Propagandists"” are available online at www.phayul.com. 5. More details will be given in the following sections on production of images of Tibet in Europe and the United-States, and in China. 6. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, Paris, Gallimard, 1992; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulations, Paris, Galilée, 1985. 7. French theorist of cinema, Jacques Aumont, argues that “the impression of reality” results from the image and sound, the perception of a continuous movement and the coherence among diegetic universe constructed by the fiction. Jacques Aumont, Aesthetics of Film, translated by Richard Neupert, University of Texas Press, 1992, pp.121-125. 8. The exception is Tian Zhuanzhuang’s Horse Thief ( Daomazei盗马贼,1986) which has been extensively studied: Paul Clark, Reiventing China: A Generation and Its Films, Hong Kong, Chinese University Press, 2005, pp.106-114; Xia Hong (Ed.), Chinese Film Theory, A Guide to the New Era, Westport, Praeger Publishers, 1990, pp.31-38; Bérénice Reynaud, Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas, Paris, Cahier du cinéma, 1999, p.45. For a concise account of Western cinema of Tibet, see Peter Hansen "Tibetan Horizon: Tibet and the Cinema in the Early Twentieth Century", in Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther (Eds.), Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies,

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Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2001, pp. 91-110; “The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 101 (3), 1996, pp. 712-747. Scholar and journalist Orville Schell gives a thorough examination of “virtual Tibet” through interviews of actors and director of Seven Years in Tibet and visits on the shooting. See Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, New York, Henri Holt, 2000. 9. John Powers gives an interesting overview of the pro-Chinese and pro-Tibet literature, and probably the most unbiased examination of their competitive narratives in the West, comparing Tibetan and Chinese works in English on the Tibetan issue. Elliot Sperling provides a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Chinese historical arguments on Tibet’s political status. Apart from these two studies, we have not found such comparative approach. John Powers, History As Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles versus the People's Republic of China, Oxford University Press, 2004. Elliot Sperling, The Tibet-China Conflict: History and Polemics, East West Center Washington, 2004. 10. See Michel Foucault’s theories on Power and Knowledge, Power/Knowledge, Colin Gordon, 1980. See also L'ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971. 11. Kaschewsky gives a useful and well-documented overview of Tibet’s representation in the West from ancient Greece to the 18th century. See Rudolf Kaschewsky, “The Image of Tibet in the West before the Nineteenth Century”, in T. Dodin and H. Räther (Eds), Imagining Tibet, pp.3-20. 12. See Hugues Didier, "António de Andrade à l’origine de la tibétophilie européenne“, in Aufsätze zur Portugiesischen Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 20, 1988-1992, pp.45-71; and Les Portugais au Tibet, les premières relations jésuites (1624-1635), Magellane Chandeigne, Paris, 1996. A four-part television series includes the story of the Portuguese priest 2005 In Search of Myths and Heroes: The Search for Shangri-La, directed by Jean Smith and presented by Michael Wood. From Michael Wood’s book In Search of Myths and Heroes: Exploring Four Epic Legends of the World, University of California Press, 2005. 13. See Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, translated by J. H. Connelly and L. Landsberg, Dragon Key Press, 2002. 14. The book was extensively criticized by many, amongst which German Orientalist Max Müller (1823-1900) or Indian Buddhist scholar Swami Abhedananda (1866-1939). See Max Müller, “The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India”, The Nineteenth Century, n.36, 1894, pp.512-522. 15. See Frank J. Korom, “Old Age Tibet New Age America”, in F. Korom (ed.), Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Quebec, World Heritage Press, 1997, pp.73-97. 16. See Lisa Aldred’s critical article on the movement: “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality”, The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 24 (3), 2000, pp.329-352. On the New Age Movement as a religious movement, see for instance Ruth Prince and David Riches, The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movements, Berghahn Books, 2001. 17. On various expeditions undertaken in Tibet by the British and their political implications, see Peter Hansen’s article “The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 101 (3), 1996, pp. 712-747. This article also provides a comprehensive account of documentaries on Tibet produced in the 1920s. 18. Shangri-la is a fictional place in Tibet popularised by British writer James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, published in 1933. Considered as a paradise on earth or an ideal community ‘isolated from the corrupted civilisation’. See James Hilton, Lost Horizon, London, Macmillan, 1933. Several movies, mangas, novels, songs ans musical stages have been using the Shangri-la theme until nowadays. Like many others, a county in Chinese province of Yunnan, Zhongdian 中甸, has claimed to be the location of Hilton’s Shangri-la and was renamed after it 香格里拉 to attract tourists. See Ashild Kolas, Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition: A Place Called Shangrila, London, Routledge, 2008.

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19. See Christopher Hale, Himmler's Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race, Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2003. 20. See Schell, Virtual Tibet; and Martin Brauen, Dreamworld Tibet: Western Illusions, Weatherhill, 2004. 21. Schell, Virtual Tibet, p.45. 22. First published in 1953. Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet, Tarcher, 1997. 23. Peter Hansen mentions several films produced and released in the United-States and in Europe, which contributed to “the magic and mystery” image of Tibet: Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937,); Andrew Marton’s Storm Over Tibet (1952), Val Guest’s Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957), the remake of Lost Horizon (1973) and Michael Ritchie’s Golden Child (1986)… See Hansen, "Tibetan Horizon”. 24. See Barry Sautman, “The Tibet issue in post-summit Sino-American relations”, Pacific Affairs, Vol.72 (1), 1999, pp. 7-21. 25. Robert Barnett, “Introdution” to Steve Lehman, The Tibetans: A Struggle to Survive, Umbrage, 1998. 26. Sperling, The Tibet-China Conflict. 27. Sperling. see also Powers. 28. On the film’s context of production and release, see Sautman, “The Tibet issue”; Richard Kraus and Wan Jihong, “Hollywood and China as Adversaries and Allies”, Pacific Affairs, 2002, Vol. 75 (3), pp.419-434. 29. Thomas Heberer “Old Tibet a hell on Earth? The myth of Tibet and Tibetans in Chinese art and propaganda”, in T. Dodin and H. Räther (Eds), Imagining Tibet, pp.111-150; Warren Smith, China’s Tibet? Autonomy or Assimilation, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. 30. Heberer, “Old Tibet”. 31. This is especially remarkable when, at the end of the film, a portrait of Mao Zedong replaces the portrait of the Dalai Lama the spectator is shown in the main temple at the beginning. Red stars are also repeatedly displayed in the film. Besides, woman and men are encouraged to work together for their liberation. Their first Chinese language lessons consists in learning such vocabulary as “tractor”, “machine” etc, which introduces notions of modernity taught by the “elder brother Han”. 32. See Warren Smith’s third chapter on “Democratic Reforms” in Smith, China’s Tibet. 33. Sperling, introduction, p. x. 34. See also Barnett who argues that “the nationalistic perception of Tibet as a centuries-old "integral part of China" is new”, Barnett, introduction. 35. Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics, Durham, Duke University Press, 2000, p.114. 36. Kam Louie “Masculinities and Minorities: Alienation in Strange Tales from Strange Lands", in The China Quarterly, No. 132, Dec. 1992, pp. 1119-1135. 37. River Elegy by Su Xiaokang, aired in 1988, announced the death of the Chinese civilisation and calls for modernisation through westernisation. See the book derived from the film: Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the river: a reader's guide to the Chinese TV series Heshang, translated by Richard W. Bodman and Pin P. Wan, Ithaca, East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1991. On cultural and intellectual movements in China from the 1970s to 1989, see Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy, The Chinese Popular Culture Movement and Political Transformations, 1979-1989, Hong Kong, Chinese University Press, 1997. 38. See Ba Huang’s book Temptations of Sunshine and Wilderness–Ba Huang, Sichuan Art Publishing House, 1994; and his Website: http://www.bahuang.com/ As for Nima Zeren, he is now the vice- director of the Gandun Tibetan Autonomous District Art Institute and Research Fellow of traditional Tibetan and Buddhist Drawing in the Chinese Tibetan Institute. His Website displays his main works, also collected in a book. See http://nimazeren.artron.net See also Landsberger’s

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page dedicated to Nima Zeren: http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/sheji/sj-nmzr.html For an account on Tibetan’s cultural production after 1978, see Mark Stevenson and Susan Costello’s articles in Toni Huber (ed.), Ando Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the post-Mao era, Brill, 2002. 39. Among his work, see Zhaxi Dawa 扎西达娃, Fengma zhi yao 风马之耀 (Dazzling of Wind Horses), Beijing, Beijing wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1991; or Xizang, yinmi suiyue 西藏，隐秘岁月 (Hidden years of Tibet), Hubei Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992. 40. See Janet Upton’s article: “The Politics and Poetics of Sister Drum: ‘Tibetan’ Music in the Global Marketplace”, in Tim Craig and Richard King (Ded.), Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2001, pp.99-119. 41. Wang Luobin and Dao Lang are two major figures of the appropriation of Uygur culture and still play a significant role in shaping Xinjiang’s image. See Rachel Harris’ article on Wang Luobin’s controversy: “Wang Luobin, Folksong King of the Northwest or Song Thief?”, in Modern China, n.31, July 2005, pp.381-408. Dao Lang is sometimes considered as “Wang Luobin’s spiritual son”. His first album, First Snow of 2002 (2002 nian de diyi changxue2002年的第一场雪), put him at the height of fame. 42. For an account on Chinese film industry after the 1980s, see Paul Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films, Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press, 2005; Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, Londres, Routledge, 2004; Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006; Hao Xiaoming et Chen Y., « Film and Social Change: The Chinese Cinema in the Reform Era », Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2000, 28:1, pp.36-45. See also an History of the Chinese Film Industry, by the Australian Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, available online on the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Website: http://www.dfat.gov.au 43. See a depiction of cinema audiences in Hao Xiaoming et Chen Yanru, « Film and Social Change: The Chinese Cinema in the Reform Era », Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2000, vol. 28, nº1, pp.36-45. 44. See also Dru Gladney and Louisa Schein on “internal/oriental” orientalism: Dru Gladney, Dislocating China Reflections on Muslims, Minorities and Other Subaltern Subjects, London, Hurst and Company, 2004; and Louisa Schein, “Gender and Internal Orientalism in China”, Modern China, Jan.1997, 23:1, pp.69-98. 45. Except for John Powers, scholars usually skim over the film as part of the propagandist production after the Hong-Kong handover in 1997. See Powers, History as Propaganda, pp.89-96. See also Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity, Stanford University Press, 2001, pp.105-106. 46. First published in 1961. Peter Fleming, Bayonet in Lhasa: The First Full Account of the British Invasion of Tibet in 1904, London, Hart Davis, 1961. 47. Powers, History as Propaganda, p.90. 48. The second entry of Feng Xiaoning’s trilogy in 1999, Grief of the Yellow River(Huanghe juelian 黄河绝恋), deals with a grounded American pilot in the WW2 who is rescued by Chinese, and falls in love with a Chinese girl soldier fighting Japanese. The third film, released in 2001 (Purple Sunset- ziri 紫日 ), pays tribute to crossing borders friendship through the story of a Chinese prisoner, a Japanese officer and a Russian soldier who survived a big battle in 1945. 49. This campaign encourages young Singaporeans to speak Mandarin as a common language instead of dialects. First launched in 1979 by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, it is a year- round campaign including Mandarin handbooks, CD-Rom, music, films… See Lee Kuan Yew From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, Harpercollins, 2000. 50. On cinematic methods of narrative, see Laurent Jullier, L’analyse de séquences, Paris, Armand Colin, 2000; and Le son au cinéma, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006.

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51. The term of “bon sauvage” (good savage) dates back from the sixteenth century during the Renaissance and came back in the nineteenth century to serve anthropological and racist agendas. For a historical overview, see Ter Elligson, The Myth of the Noble Savage, University of California Press, 2001. 52. Elligson, p.12 53. In some parts of the film, Harrer also explains the young Dalai Lama what an elevator is, and helps him building a ‘movie house’ or theatre. Harrer is also able to repair an old radio, making Tibetans so happy that they immediately begin dancing. 54. Dibyesh Anand analyses Western colonial and neo-colonial discourses on Tibet and underlines asymmetrical power relations that remains not only in popular Western imagining but also among scholars. See Dibyesh Anand, “Western Colonial Representations of the Other: The Case of Exotica Tibet”, New Political Science, March 2007, 29:1, pp.23-42. 55. One may assume that this process allows Chinese to take distance from the story as well, and suggests that it is told from “White foreigner”’s point of view only. Chinese then seem to be neutral, spectator but not actor of the history of Tibet, avoiding any criticism on Chinese hegemony. 56. Esther Yau, “Is Chine the End of Hermeneutics? Or, Political and Cultural Usage of Non-Han Women in Mainland Chinese Films”, in Diane Carson, Linda Dittmare and Janice Welsch (eds.), Multiples Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, Minneapolis, University Press of Minnesota, 1994, p.289. 57. On the role of clothing being a “social sign” and a “public dimension”, see Peter Corrigan, « Interpreted, Circulating, Interpreting: The Three Dimensions of the Clothing Object », in The Socialness of Things, Essays on theSocio-semiotics of Objects, Stephan Riggins (Dir.), Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1994, pp.435-449; and Pierre Guiraud, La sémiologie, Paris, PUF, 1983. 58. The character played by Thewlis in the film does not go back to Austria. But the actual Aufschnaiter did leave Tibet one year after Harrer. He spent the rest of his life between Nepal and Austria, and a book was published as an account of his Tibetan experience, compiled and edited by Martin Brauen: Peter Aufschnaiter’s: Eight Years in Tibet, Orchid Press, 2002. 59. See also Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (translated from German by Rodney Livingstone), Stanford University Press, 2006. 60. Derrida’s conferences in London on the notion of archiving, as a selection of what has to be remembered and what has to be eluded, has been collected in an essay: Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive, Galilée, 1995. 61. Another approach of memory as an invention is developed in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 62. For an examination of the use of historical arguments in narratives of the Chinese government and the Tibetan government in exile, see Sperling. Another account of history as propaganda tool can be found in: Powers, History as Propaganda. 63. On the difference between history and memory, see for instance Paul Ricoeur, Le mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2003. 64. Tim Coates The British Invasion of Tibet: Colonel Younghusband, 1904, Abridged Ed, 1999. Michael Carrington, “Officers Gentlemen and Thieves: The Looting of Monasteries during the 1903/4 Younghusband Mission to Tibet”, Modern Asian Studies, vol.37 (1), 2003, PP 81-109. 65. Sperling, introduction, p.x. 66. Barnett (2001), p.272. 67. On the political impact of such “dreamlike Tibet”, see Jamyang Norbu “Behing the Lost Horizon: Demystifying Tibet”, in Dodin and Räther, pp.373-378. 68. Robert Barnett, “Violated Specialness”, p.274. 69. Documentary by Tian Zhuangzhuang : Delamu, Chama gudao zhi Delamu 茶马古道之德拉姆 (aka Tea-Horse Road Series: Delamu), Beijing, 2004.

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70. Robert Barnett, “Violated Specialness: Western Political Representations of Tibet”, in T. Dodin and H. Räther, 2001, p.279. 71. Robert Barnett, “Introdution” to Steve Lehman and Mark Bailey, The Tibetans: A Struggle to Survive, Umbrage/Twin Palms, 1998, p.1. 72. The lingua franca of Tibet is Lhasa dialect, though completely different and unintelligible to many Tibetan communities in Central, Western and Northeast past of the actual Tibet. See Nicolas Tournadre, “L'aire linguistique tibétaine et ses divers dialectes”, in Lalies, n°25, 2005, p. 7-56; Roland Bielmeier, “A survey of the development of Western and Southwestern Tibetan dialects”, in B. Nimri Aziz and M. Kapstein (Eds.), Soundings in Tibetan civilisation, New Delhi, Madohar,1985. 73. Muslim communities are quite important in Tibet (including Tibetan Muslims and Chinese Hui). Muslim and Buddhist communities relationship is another note of discord among intellectuals in and out of Tibet, Tibetan Buddhists being accused to persecute Muslims in order to keep Tibet “purely Buddhist”. See debates between Jamyang Norbu and the novelist Ian Buruma on the latter’s article: Ian Buruma, “Tibet Disenchanted”, in New York Review of Books, Vol. 47 (12), July 2000, pp.22-25; and Jamyang Norbu, “The Muslims of Tibet”, in New York Review of Books, Vol. 48 (15), October 2001. 74. Barnett, “Introduction”, p.2. 75. Elliot Sperling, The Tibet-China Conflict: History and Polemics, East-West Center Washington, 2004, p.15.

ABSTRACTS

This essay proposes a comparative perspective of the construction of narratives of Tibet and Tibetans in the ‘West’ and in China through cinema. It suggests that Chinese propagandist films and Hollywood pro-Tibetans films both promote similar orientalist and essentialising perceptions of an imagined and idealised Tibet, concealing social, political, economic and even ecological situation experienced by Tibetans in China. Considering that cinematic representations are dramatically influential in shaping imaginaries, this analysis thus illustrates that the Tibet issue is not a real political debate but more a battlefield that leads to an international and local impasse.

Cet article propose une analyse comparative de la construction des discours sur le Tibet et les Tibétains en « Occident » et en Chine. Il suggère que les films de propagande chinois comme les films hollywoodiens pro-tibétains mettent en place des perceptions orientalistes et essentialistes d’un Tibet imaginé et idéalisé, omettant ainsi la situation sociale, politique, économique ou même écologique telle qu’elle est vécue par les Tibétains en Chine. Les représentations cinématographiques participant grandement à la formation des imaginaires modernes, cette analyse illustre ainsi le fait que la question du Tibet n’est pas un vrai débat mais bien plus un champ de bataille politique qui mène à une impasse internationale et locale.

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AUTHOR

VANESSA FRANGVILLE

Vanessa Frangville completed her PhD in Chinese studies from Jean Moulin University of Lyon in 2007. She spent two years at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing (2002-2003 and 2004-2005) and has conducted extensive research on Chinese non-Han communities or "minority nationalities". Her research interests range across theoretical approaches of nationality, race and ethnicity, and visual and textual representation of minority groups in China, Taiwan and Japan.

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“China Wahala”: the Tribulations of Nigerian “Bushfallers” in a Chinese Territory”1

Isabel Morais

Introduction

. "In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central in a new understanding of what Europe was."4 Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History […] the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis.5 Derek Walcott, The Sea is History Recent scholarly studies and media coverage have primarily focused on China’s increasing presence and sometimes asymmetricalengagement with Africa in tandem with the new trend of Chinese migration to that continent. Yet, the inverse flux of Africans to China, and the emergence of mainly Western African communities in Southern China over the last decades is influencing some areas of the Pearl River Delta Region, and changing the fabric of cities like Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong, in a way without precedent. Some residential and business areas of Guangzhou, like Dongpu, Dengfeng Jie, and Yongping Jie have been designated “Chocolate Cities,” in a clear allusion somehow reminiscent of so-called Chinese “ethnoburbs” in Los Angeles.6 These ethnic clusters of African-owned shops of a

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majority of Nigerian entrepreneurs in what were once exclusively Chinese shopping malls are rapidly expanding and receiving scholarly attention.7 Also on China’s music and sports realms, for instance, in 2009, the cases of people of mixed ancestry like the Shanghainese Lou Jing, the first Afro-Chinese finalist to a TV singing contest, and of Ding Hui, the national team volleyball player, have received widespread attention throughout the media and blogosphere in People’s Republic of China, sometimes with clear racist overtones and epithets acknowledging that miscegenation, identity, and race are becoming debatable issues in China. 8 Although the presence of Africans in China seems a quite recent phenomenon and a few recent studies emphasize that “novelty,” their presence dates back to the first contacts between China and the Arabic/Islamic world. In the particular case of Macau, a long-standing Portuguese settlement, there was a steady presence of Africans dating back to the earliest period of European expansion in the Far East until nowadays.9 Chinese records, travel accounts, and fiction works indicate the presence of African people back to the Tang dynasty (608-907) when Arabs and other Muslims controlled the maritime and slave trades from East Africa to China and to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) when the Chinese sent maritime expeditions to East Africa.10 Throughout the centuries of the Portuguese maritime in Africa and Asia, Black African slaves became one of the commodities in the Portuguese maritime trade with China. The number ofAfricans in the South China region increased, thus becoming a constant from the second half of the sixteenth century, namely, coinciding with the arrival of the Portuguese navigators, the latter aiming at a large-scale maritime trade with China. 11 The Chinese, in particular, in the coastal areas, were the first to be exposed to foreigners at times that many African slaves, including women, were brought to Macau. With time, the territory eventually achieved a great importance due to its diverse commerce, including its slave trade, with China and Japan. The significance of that commerce is attested by the fact that Macau subsidized other colonies such as East Timor, and even Lisbon itself, particularly during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth-century. This declined significantly in later centuries, but a curious commonality amongst historical perspectives of the colony is their isolation from the vast Portuguese colonial context. The history of Portuguese colonization ignored this colonial reality avoiding any references to colonial practices in Macau, and all topics that were related to slavery in general.12 There have been relatively few studies of the Portuguese slave trade to Southeast Asia and China, and in general the African Black slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is notably underrepresented in the literature on slave-trading enterprise. Amidst international efforts to raise awareness on slavery and slave trade in the present context of resurge of colonial memory, through publications of large numbers of historical works and development of projects of memory, Portugal, unlike several European, American and African countries, has yet to fully address its historical and moral responsibility on the human traffic (either Black African slavery or Chinese coolie trade).13 Portuguese scholarly research has not only neglected the Atlantic slave trade, only a smaller body of research focuses on the African slave or even the Chinese collie trade, and fewer sources mention black slaves in China. Since the 1970s, particularly in the last decade before the transference of sovereignty, a considerable body of studies on Portuguese Africa and Macanese history has emerged, but no study has systematically

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analysed the interconnections between colonialism in Africa and in Macau. Numerous cultural publications in both Portugal and Macau have been published, but they have rarely addressed the types of relationships that were established between Macau and Africa. Moreover, work in the field is most often focused on historical aspects of the territory itself and its relation to China, and is isolated from the wider context of Portuguese colonial history. Charles Boxer remarked that “Macau’s political dynamics remain obscure [….] analysis has tended to focus on stereotyped views of power relationships in the enclave that have seldom been subject to more serious academic treatment.”14 Only recently, due to the intensification of China’s involvement in the Portuguese-speaking countries, there has been an interest in exploring those connections.

II Africans in Macau: A Silent But Constant Secular Presence

Although contacts between China and Africa were officially established in 1897 with the establishment of a consulate in South Africa, direct contacts between Chinese and Africans in Macau or with the Portuguese African colonies lasted throughout the centuries.15 Inter-relations between the Portuguese and other Westerners who settled in Macau and successive migrations of Chinese, other Asians, Africans, and even South Americans gave rise to the fascinating and multifaceted community, the Macanese, who today are only proud of their ‘Portuguese whiteness.” There were also exchanges that grew out of interaction between China and other Portuguese African colonies, mainly Mozambique, through slavery and the coolie trade. As one writer describes, “Macau in the early seventeenth-century had a distinctly African flavor.”16 From the earliest days of Macau, Chinese and Portuguese sources, although sparse, tell of slaves of different origins, mainly Chinese and African. The Macanese writer Estorninho considered as Macanese those of mixed Afro-Asian or Portuguese descent.17 Most Africans were assigned as galley slaves in the great trading ships that sailed from Macau to Portugal’s posts in India and Japan, while others were employed in various private households or at Jesuit establishments. European powers systematically included Africans in the wars waged to preserve the colonial order, and Portugal was no exception. As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese merchants and clergymen were encouraged to allow their slaves to settle personal disputes and to act in wars against other European powers as an advanced guard, like when the Dutch attacked Macau in 1622 and there was a scarcity of Portuguese and Macanese men who were away engaged in sea trade.18 After their victory upon the Dutch, they were granted freedom for their almost suicidal loyalty, and went on to contribute to the ethnic mixture of the Macanese community. Some Africans, however, served under Chinese forces or pirates and became known as “Black Daredevils” or were reported by Chinese authors as enticing local Chinese to steal their Western masters.19 Even after the abolition of slavery in every Portuguese possession in 1878, throughout the history of Macau, the Africans have maintained a presence in Portuguese enclave. In the nineteenth-century, Landin soldiers from Mozambique were enlisted in the Portuguese colonial army to serve in Angola, Timor, and Macau. They arrived in Macau in 1912 and the company’s main job was to guard the Macau–China border or the

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governor’s palace. Between 1920 and 1949, the Portuguese authorities faced Chinese population’s opposition to the Landin security forces due to an incident. In 1922, riots broke out after one member of the Mozambican garrison accidentally knocked over a Chinese child. From 1948 onwards, sources indicate that the African army composed by soldiers and caporals from Mozambique, Guinea, and Angola amounted to 500 were distributed in several garrisons at the Guia Fortress, Ilha Verde, and in the islands of Coloane and Taipa. The Portuguese army used Macau and these African troops as a training or transitional post for troops from Mozambique or Angola for half a century. As late as the 1975, when the Portuguese empire started collapsing, Mozambican sentinels who remained in Macau for a two-year commission were a common sight not only on duty as sentinels at the Portuguese governor’s palace but also when they were off duty and went shopping, traveled by rickshaws, or visited the Rua de Felicidade (Happiness Street), a narrow old street located at Macau’s infamous red light district famous for the “sing- song” girls. When the Estado Novo fell in April 25, 1974, the Macau’s Independent Territorial Command (Comando Territorial Independente de Macau) was abolished, and all the African soldiers left the territory. Under Salazar’s dictatorship during the Estado Novo, Portugal kept using Macau as another colony but the country had not diplomatic links with the People’s Republic of China since the Communists took the power. Despite of that, from 1950 and until the independence of the Portuguese colonies in mid 1970s, Angola and Mozambique were the major export destinations from the Macau’s industries facilitated by a free-duties policy. Simultaneously, after the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung in 1955, China started forging strong links with Africa in several areas by supporting African independence. In the 1960s, liberation and anti-colonial movements (FRELIMO, in Mozambique, UNITA and FNLA movements for Angola) inspired by the Maoist theories and revolutionary literature, gained strong political, financial and training support from the People’s Republic of China against Western powers. Zhou Enlai visited several African countries in 1963 and the PRC fully supported and offered concrete cooperation and credit to a number of aid and infrastructure projects (for instance, the TAMZAM railway project between Tanzania and Zambia). As part of this cooperation, in the 1960s, academic exchanges and scholarship and stipends program brought many African students to study in China to study technology and sciences. However, most of the students returned home within a year or two due to poor living standards, lack of social opportunities, and the political environment. The Chinese government restored the African scholarship program in the mid 1970s and began sending African students to universities outside of Beijing. After Portugal’s African colonies gained independence, during the decolonization process, from the 1975s to the 1990s, a considerable number of Africans of different ethnicities, Black, Mulattoes, and White Africans “retornados”(Portuguese for those who “returned” to the motherland or more specifically those who chose not to live in the independent colonies) fled directly the former Portuguese colonies or after a short stay in Portugal, came to Macau in search of work, mainly in the civil service. In the 1987s, a considerable number of Black African students who were granted scholarships for the University of Macau also came to the territory. Generally speaking, these students were younger, more political motivated than the “retornados,” enjoyed strong economic and political connections with the former leaders of the movements of liberation who became heads of state in the independent African countries. The

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majority graduated in Law, returned to their countries to serve in senior leadership and political high positions while others settled withy their families in Macau where they still practice at local law firms or in the local administration. During the 60s, 70s and 80s there were constant incidents involving students from different African countries in China which culminated with the 1988–89 Nanjing Anti- African protests when Chinese students took to the streets to protest against the government's inadequate handling of the alleged murder of a Chinese by an African student. Many of these students returned to China while a few from the Portuguese speaking countries came to Macau. During the so-called “transitional period” ( período the transição) from 1987 to 1999, a few Africans doctors from thePortuguese speaking countries graduated from Universities in China and who spoke both Putonghua and Portuguese came to Macau and were employed at Macau’s health services. This paper aims to locate African Diaspora in Macau as part of a more ambitious project which aims to assess the new forms of migration besides the African trading communitiesfrom Africa to China and from China to Africa as well as their impact and contribution to globalization. It revolves around life stories or narratives of Nigerian students living in Macau in recent years after the enclave’s transference of sovereignty. It is based on personal and familiar stories within individual biographies and on the migrant themselves through conversational interviews from about fifteen students from a Macau’s higher education institution. The interviewees were encouraged to relate their experiences, expectations and difficulties as Africans in a special administrative region of China praised by its multisecular multiculturalism. Based on interviews and observation, we hope to make this community more visible by unveiling new dynamics in the migratory fluxes to Macau but also by exposing the challenges they are facing. We argue that the reciprocity should prevail in economic and cultural exchanges between China and the African countries. In the particular case of Macau, perhaps due to emphasis on the enclave as a privileged platform in the economic interchanges between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries, somehow, the Africans from other countries, specially from Anglophone states from Africa, including Nigeria, are facing more difficulties in coming, living, and working in Macau SAR., aggravated by the lack of consular services, the language barrier, and the dominance of the Sino–Portuguese language and cultural matrix which is in practice contradicts the official claim of Macau as a multicultural or international place. Although Macau is a predominantly Chinese community, the term multiculturalism and other similar concepts are constantly evoked under the premises of its multisecular history and the presence of people from different nationalities.Yet, neither the Portuguese administration or nor the Chinese government have never attempted to address the issue of multiculturalism through appropriate legislation. Therefore, the celebration of multiculturalism is practically confined mainly to tourist initiatives aiming to promote the Macau’s exotic or cultures through popular festivals of traditional dancing and music, traditional gastronomy more associated to the Lusophone nature of Macau. First, this paper considers why Macau as a special administrative region of China has evolved and has being slowly converted into a new urban African formation due to opportunities and changes occurring in the region in the first years of the twenty-first

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century, then, it compares the new and old African communities of students and business people/migrant workers from former Portuguese colonies such as Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique.Then, borrowing the title of a sequel movie with the same title of the promising New African cinema, the paper focus on the “China Wahala” or the troubles of these Nigerian students through their tales of their experiences of racism/s and their negotiations and responses which radically contradicts not only the slogans of multiculturalism and cultural diversity propagated by the official discourse from the PRC’s central and local governments and tourist channels as these Nigerians are confronted daily withoften dramatic situations ranging from indifference, ostracism to exclusion. Finally, we argue the Sino-African cooperation should include cultural aspects, mainly the implementation of international exchanges of African and Chinese students.

III Macau: A Not so ‘City of Dreams’

(“They are Macua And eat raw meat. […]. Congo nurse, […].

Goes to the drugstore to buy soybean paste, The Chinaman gives little The nursemaid wants more, China dá-le chacha, The Chinaman beats her The nursemaid shouts: Aiô! [...] White women are innocent, Catherine Brunettes may pretend Black woman is abusive’ Catherine Revenge always asks for. [...] Whoever marries to black Has got little feelings. What matters if he is black? He has a good heart He catches dirt wind, Becomes of the colour of fruit.”)20 This earliest collection of popular verse in patuá of the Eurasian community of Macanese from the nineteenth century has curious allusions to the Africans in Macau and reveal how the Macanese perceived people with dark skin. Popular Macanese theatre in patuá from the twentieth century also includes mocking references to their presence.21 The Macuas from Mozambique, one of the ethnic groups who were brought as slaves from Mozambique to several geographical areas in the world from the Caribbe to Asia and their eating habits were satirically portrayed in the verses. Some of these Macanese perceptions are somehow similar to early Chinese’s cultural observations on the “barbarians” as they measured foreigners’ eating habits according to their relative

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degree of civilization.22 Other verses allude to the presence of the African female slaves which existed in great number at the Macanese and Portuguese merchants households and who were frequently victims of the abuse from their from masters and mistresses. Another curious allusion is the ambivalent attitude towards interracial marriage that was either criticized or accepted. What Chinese sources reveal, in fact, is how Chinese, Macanese, and Portuguese viewed those with dark skin and how these perceptions were perpetuated over time. Nowadays, in Macau it is still easy to find that the toponymy of the city, places of memory, for instance Mong Ha Hill (once popularized as the “Black Devils or “Black Ghost Fortress.” where a fort was converted into a barracks for one of the African Portuguese garrison stationed in Macao), popular legends (the defense of the city from a Dutch attach was led by the priests with the help of African slaves in particular of a woman who fought fiercely in the seventeenth century), and even hybrid gastronomy (Macau’s famous African Chicken) reveal the spark of memory still perpetuated the presence of Black Africans in the collective imagination of different segments of the population in Macau. This combination of places, stories and sites occupied by black Africans and other slaves should be accurately identified and preserved because they are of great heritage interest and assert its role in Macau’s collective memory. Although these sources do not provide information about what actual African slaves experienced in China, they are a valuable source because they reveal how Chinese, Portuguese, and Macanese viewed first what Chinese people imagined, and later, what they knew about African countries and their inhabitants. The widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin are a clear indication how some Chinese, Portuguese, and Macanese viewed them and, despite the eventual changes through time, these negative or ambivalent perceptions might still influence current attitudes on African citizens. Living in Macau’s stratified society, the cafres (Africans) were the last step in the social scale in Macau and they were satirized in patuá verses by the Creole community. Pina- Cabral describes this “characteristic as ‘the dynamic of despise’ — a process through which a person, feeling that he or she is the object of prejudice, attempts to shift the burden of that prejudice onto some other person.23 24 The Macanese folk verses reveal notions of class, gender, and racial discrimination widespread within the Macanese community in regard to successive waves of Africans from the black slaves to the Landin soldiers, as the authors tended to identify with and support the dominant European group, and despised other cultural ethnicities as white completion was highly appreciated and the colonial elites strived for “whiteness.” In the eighteenth-century, two Mainland Chinese, Yin Guang Ren and the Magistrate Zhang Ru Lin, visited Macau and, while in the Portuguese enclave, they became of color and class divisions.25 These Chinese envoys reported that Macau’s ladies and their Black Africans were placed at the lowest scale on their report. Recent studies on contemporary Africans in China, for instance, have changed over time from emphasis on the urban ghettoization of the African communities to the relevance of immigrant entrepreneurship as “bridges in the processes of Africa-China socio-economic integration.”26 We argue that in Macau, the Africans from Portuguese-speaking countries, unlike other African immigrants, actually benefit from their background and continue to enjoy a preferential treatment by the local authorities and are particularly privileged by the

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academy under Chinese rule. This favourable situation is reinforced by the existence of solid mechanisms of cooperation between China through Macau with the Portuguese speaking countries. These privileged relations with the Lusophone world that reinforce “the uniqueness of Macau vis-vis Guangdong and Macau”can contribute for the fact that majority of those Africanswho are coming to Macau are disproportionately from Portuguese colonies and to less extent from other African countries. 27 It seems that they do not encounter the same levels of discriminations, since they are perceived to be part of the historic legacy. Africans originally from outside the Lusophone world, in particular, the Nigerians, the largest African group, express concern that they are subject to exclusionary admissions policies at local academy. . Despite ostracism and the lack of reciprocal incentives from the central and local governments, the Nigerian students seem to be able to start carving out a niche in Macau’s society throughout academic and more broadly participation in the local society.Macau, as a long standing and renowned place influenced by the early Portuguese expansion, predisposes a favorable climate for multiples and interethnic encounters.There is clear evidence that Chinese women are much open minded and eager to be associated or involved with Africans. Although a significant number of our respondents has intermixed unions or liaisons with Chinese women from the Mainland, Macau, and Hong Kong, this does not imply a complete acceptance and integration. Yet, these unions have also been met with more opposition from Chinese males and several communities in Macau continue to perceive the Africans and other people in terms of racial differences, skin colour, and social status still prevailing.

“Bushfallers” in a Chinese Territory

The research participants were from both genders but they were predominantly males who were all born in Nigeria and are currently enrolled in a private university in Macau. They belong to different ethnic groups, religious creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Through conversational interviews, theypresented their own accounts of when they came to Asia and then settled in Macau, and what it meant to be a Black African student in Macau’s post transference of sovereignty period. The result is a fascinating kaleidoscope of cultural attitudes against a Chinese backdrop with still many traits of colonialism where these different Nigerian students wrestle with issues of education, language, and racism, and speak about their lives, hopes, achievements, and disappointments. Their thoughts as they reflected on how they saw themselves, how they felt that they were seen by society at large, and how they wanted to be seen. Their recollectionshelped to construct the history of this emergent community and fill the void left by newspaper accounts and official reports. The flow of the Nigerian Diaspora has been mainly to English speaking countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. But during the first decade after Macau’s transference of sovereignty to China, Southeast Asia, mainly Hong Kong, Macau, and ultimately China are becoming the most popular destinations for these “bushfallers,” a term which as become common in different African speaking countries to refer to those Africans living in the Diaspora. Several factors might have influenced the interest of many Africans coming to China in the post–Tiananmen period. First of all, the PRC started taking initiatives with special

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emphasis in developing Sino-African business and trade links. In 1979, China hosted a major China-Africa Seminar on Economic Reform, and attended the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference ( SADCC) in Zimbabwe in 1993 and the first Sino-African Forum was held in October 2000 with the presence of forty-four countries, where it was signed the Beijing Declaration of the Forum on China – Africa Co- operation.28 Other initiatives include the establishment of 11 Investment Development and Trade Promotion Centres in Africa and it has become common that every year the first official overseas visit from Beijing leaders is to Africa.From 2003 onwards, Chinese official statistics, estimate that the percentage of Africans in Guangzhou has been growing at 30-40% annually, the African population is around 100, 000 with a large majority of Nigerians involved in small business.29 2006 was declared the Year of Africa and on 12 January 2006, Beijing unveiled its first white paper on its relations with Africa, China's African Policy, elaborating a detailed plan for long-term ties with Africa covering economic, political, educational, scientific, cultural, environmental, health and social cooperation, as well as peacekeeping and security. China's new strategic partnership with Africa was also unveiled at the November 2006 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). In the particular case of Macau, in October 2003, the People of Republic of China’s Ministry of Economy created the Permanent Secretariat to the Forum for Economic and Trade Cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries in Macau (“The Macau Forum”) which is financially supported by the Macau SAR government. 30 The edge that Macau possesses to function as a business platform between the Mainland and the Portuguese-speaking countries has been recognised by the organisation of “The Forum for Economic and Trade Co-operation Between China and Portuguese- Speaking Countries” held in Macau every year.31 They have maintained links with Portuguese-speaking countries in business, culture, and tourism; Macau looks forward to becoming the business and service platform between these states and the Mainland through “Economic and Trade Opportunities Chinese-Speaking Countries” and a business matching database established to create wide space for co-operation. Most imports are allowed to enter Macau freely without tariffs being levied. The “Macau Forum“ supports the creation of associations with the Portuguese-speaking countries, the organization of the Macau’s Festival of Lusophony, international fairs, visits of commercial delegations, projects courses for workers from areas in economy, tourism, and nursing. Visitors from Portuguese-speaking countries, including top officials to the Mainland, routinely stopped over in Macao. In 2009, Vice- Minister of Commerce, Jianj Zengwei, led a trade and commerce delegation to visit Portugal, Angola which integrated Macau. China’s new policy towards Africa allied to the recent economic prosperity of Macau attracted a lot of attention overseas. The gambling liberalization created in 2000 in Macau favored the economic boom in the gaming, tourism, and construction sectors, thus attracting many newcomers. This factor was one of the motives that led many of our respondents to choose to come to Macau and that is probably one of the reasons they would like to remain if they were offered more incentives. The total number of Africans or a person of African origin, comprising white Africans, is less than 500, being the majority from the Portuguese-speaking countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sao Tome and Principe and East Timor).These different groups of Africans are easy to discern in the city, especially during the annual Lusophony Festival, which has became a tourist attraction and

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receives funds from the “Macau Forum” and other governmental bodies. During this Lusophone event, many Black and white Africans wear their African clothes, organize musical and cultural events, and showcase African gastronomy. The majority of these Portuguese-speaking Africans were former civil servants under the Portuguese administration who remained or returned to Macau after the transference of sovereignty. These Africans who became Macau’s permanent residents are well adapted and participate actively in the promotion of their respective countries. They received financial support Macau SAR government to create or reactivate associations aiming to foster the relations between their respective countries and China. The Nigerian students are quite different from those Africans who first came to China, since the latter were much more politicized or had strong economic and political connections with the former leaders of the movements of liberation who became heads of state in the independent African countries. All of them considered China a temporary place to stay and study as they planned to go back to their countries. Among the last cohort of Nigerian migrants to Macau one notices that there are more and more educated Nigerians migrants of both sexes and drawn from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. The growing wealth of the middle class in Nigeria which is expected to increase, has contributed for a great number of international student enrolments. In Nigeria, despite the oil resources, there are limited or non- existent economic opportunities as manufacturing industries are extremely deficient and the great majority of every-day consumer goods are being imported. More and more Africans have recently turned their attention to China, Hong Kong, and Macau and are trying to get visas permits under a limited quota and sometimes they have to wait for one year. Those who came are very much business oriented and have no plans to establish themselves longer in the territory or China. However, the recent Nigerian migrants to Macau, although they are impelled to improve their socio-economic status and wish to return, they want above all to get a diploma from local higher education institutions. Yet, if they were given job or academic opportunities in Macau after completing their studies, they might be tempted to remain in the territory. Nowadays, when many of them arrive as false pretence tourists, as it is rather difficult to rent apartments they choose to go to live at illegal guesthouses in the infamous residential buildings exactly right across the Macau’s Migration Office. Before leaving their home country, the great majority of who choose Macau has not heard much about Macau, except for its fame of prosperity and high standard of living; yet, they think that it willbe as industrialized as like China and other booming economies in Asia, where they can easily secure a job to sustain their living while pursuing further postgraduate studies in full-time and/or part-time modes in the field of international, business, management, and political sciences. Most of the students who came from Nigeria to study in Macau at the Master of Arts level studies, in MBA for instance, hope to get future jobs in managerial positions or starting up their own business with China market as a starting link. Unfortunately, the local economy, based exclusively on the gaming industry, policy, and conceived perception of Blacks, in general and of Nigerians in particular, do not give them the opportunity of getting either a part-time or a full-time job to support themselves according to their professional expertise and training. Consequently, the local employment recruitment agencies cannot help them in their career endeavors. Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, this new trend of students is contributing to Macau in becoming one the most popular destinations for Nigerians and other Africans

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students from English-speaking countries—an increasing tendency as the chain of members of friends and family from their own country can contribute for them to adjust easier. It is noticeable that Macau’s Nigerian students keep close family and friendship connections with other country fellows who primarily live and work in the cities of Guangdong and Hong Kong’s clothing export and import business. Using Macau as a basis for their studies, some of these Nigerian migrants turned students have also been applying successfully to other higher institutions in the region such as Japan and the Asia Pacific region. Although subjected to visa and other legal constraints, they are showing strong signs that they are able to adjust rapidly, to understand either Cantonese or Puthonghua, and to be involved in joint-research projects on China and Africa with other people from their country of origin if given the right opportunities. The majority of Nigerian students in Macau share common dreams with their country fellows who depend exclusively on business, they are interested to open a trade company, and be involved in the China African trade. Yet, Macau it is not the CITY of DREAMS that the tourist propaganda claims and many of them and their families imagine.32 And in some cases they are even prey of some unscrupulous countrymen turned student recruiters who deceive innocent students and their families in Nigeria by presenting a false side of Macau as a safe heaven where their basic needs can easily be sustained. In fact, as Macau’s new immigration restrictions targeting citizens from six African and South Asian countries were announced in 2009, it seems thatbetween the official discourse of cooperation both in the PRC and the Macau Special Administrative Region of China with African Countries and reality there is a great gap.33 First of all, all the respondents complained about the lack of reciprocity in the PRC‘s emigration policy. The process of getting visas for Chinese is much easier that for those Africans who apply for a visa to come to China. Besides, in the particular case of Macau, a former Portuguese colony, people from Portuguese speaking countries have been getting their resident permit with ease but the case of persons from other African countries, especially, the case of Nigerians, is more complicated. In the case of Nigerians married to Chinese citizens according to PRC law, the spouse is denied the one–year permit. Other African countries have been getting their resident permit with ease but the case of Nigerians is different. Even when a Nigerian is married to a Chinese Citizens according to Chinese law the person is still being denied the one year resident permit that the Chinese government gives to people in that category; rather, they will renew the person’s visa every three months in the case of Nigerian. Wives of Nigerians who have a resident permit can never claim through her husband's residency. Spouses who wish to come to China should apply and get a one-month visiting visa or otherwise will be there as illegal alien. Despite the lack of research on Chinese attitude towards Africans today and of the tensions, our respondents who speak Puthongua pointed that in many on-line forums, for instance, sina.com, a popular Chinese Web site, and chat rooms it is quite common to find racists comments, and stereotypes about Africans. On a daily basis at the universities, these students regularly encounter discrimination in nearly all facets of daily life in Macau. Even among their fellow students and teachers but, for personal reasons, they always declined to comment about it. They reported racially-motivated obstacles when looking for work (which is 99% impossible to have one) or a home to rent, when dealing with colleagues or some school officials.

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They also experienced discrimination when entering cafes, restaurants, shops, or are seated on the buses. Initially many Africans in Macau, including Nigerians, who were interviewed lamented about their inability of getting Chinese girlfriends even after residing here for more than one year in Macau. But in recent times, some of them have been able to get beautiful Chinese girls as their girlfriends but still have the difficulty of getting the “dream woman” they would have loved to marry. They justify it as a result of still negative perception of Blacks and, pressures from friends and family members who oppose to intermixed unions especially with Black Africans. Some expressed the idea that having a relationship with a Chinese girl has been greeted with mixed feeling. At first, the girls are difficult to get along with. According to one interview, this attitude should not be perceived as racism but rather as an influence of the Chinese culture that inhibits them from socializing with aliens. Most of our respondents consider that, despite of Macau being considered an international city, Chinese people in the enclave find it difficult to get along with a foreigner as local Chinese having been confined to a particular environment from birth without any opportunities of experiencing a different environment which could have provided considerable exposure. They gave as an example the fact that it is very easy to know among the Chinese who has lived in other countries in the first few minutes of initiating a conversation considering their openness and the willingness to answer to questions. Some feel scared due to their mindset about Africans. Basically, this is based on the information acquired from Chinese media depicting Africans with all sorts of vices. However, the last group considers language as a great barrier to effective communication; hence, local Chinese shy away from foreigners because the medium of communication will be in English. Despite these bottlenecks associated with having a relationship with Chinese girls, our respondents’ experiences have shown that Chinese girls are more stable and tolerable in a relationship than the African girls. For example a Chinese girl will handle more maturely a situation whereby she finds her boyfriend cheating on her than an African girl who might go physical if not controlled. Chinese girls who have African boyfriends have given good commendations about their experience prompting some of them to share that they will never go back to a Chinese guy because some of them are “boring, prefer to play the games and above all are not romantic at all according to some Chinese girls. The majority of the girls with African boyfriend are eager to get married. However, there are two hurdles: first, it is the refusal of the Chinese family accepting a marriage with an African. In a recent case it was a parent’s unwillingness to give away their only daughter in marriage to a Nigerian whom they feel might someday decide to live elsewhere. Another incidence was a situation where a Chinese girl was threatened to face excommunication from the family for marring an African. The second hurdle to marriage between a Chinese and an African is the problem of adaptability of a Chinese girl to another country with a different culture. Contrary to the wild perception of the Chinese, acknowledging that Africans get social status and other benefits through marriage, Africans on the other hand are not disposed to get married so easily to a Chinese girl. So many Africans have the plan of going back to their country after their education and experience they acquired here. Africa as a continent is in need of development and a lot is expected from those who have lived in developed and developing countries to bring back their wealth of experience to shape a sustainable development model for the continent. Most Africans are skeptical about a Chinese wife migrating with them back home as the environment is completely different. However

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these impediments have not in any way deterred the ever growing relationship between Chinese girls and African boys.

Conclusion

This research suggests that literature on Sino-African relations has focused more on strategic, economic, diplomatic, and political issues. There is, therefore a need for more research on the perceptions the Africans have regarding the Chinese and on the ones that the Chinese have on Africans. Contrary to the official discourse, the situation of African students in China was never peaceful. In the 1960s, 1970s, and in 1980 there many incidents involving African students which led to deportation and to formal protests from a few African government officials and the Organization of African Unity. The PRC government publicly denied criticism and responded at the racial attitude that many Chinese had towards African students could not be characterized as racism. While nowadays racial incidents involving African students in China did not have the repercussions of the previous decades, African students, in particular Nigerians, in both Macau and Mainland China, continue to feel subjected to prejudices despite the official discourse of praising Sino-African relationships which do not focus on a program of integrating foreign minorities.34 What we see in Macao is stereotyping in terms of traditional and outworn labels and so- called identities, negative labeling, exclusion, and marginalization with reference to the Nigerian students—taking the university as a system in miniature, a microcosm of a macro-social phenomenon in Macau. The ideology taught in China and the silence on ideology in Macau lets ideology be perpetuated, so that, when a visible difference occurs, people cannot handle it or refuse to handle it at all. The evidence of racial discrimination in Macau may be attributed to old racial stereotyping and elitist values dating back to a past when those who were dark were linked to servitude and denigrated but also to colonial legacy still very much associated to Gilberto Freyre’s Lusotropicalism which in name of a pretense of “racial harmony” obliterates issues of racism in Portuguese speaking countries or areas of the world. The experiences of the Nigerian at the hands of official channels (e.g., immigration) and the experiences of culture clash shows the introversion of locals and their reactions to difference, racism (or its modern-day mediation by all sorts of other strands). The irony is that, in Macau, which is often talked of as a multicultural community, actually multiculturalism in the same way means a combination of cultural rejection and marginalization. Multiculturalism is defined as different cultures coexisting in Macau but there is a total absence of social awareness in order to avoid racial discrimination. Contrary to the Macau’s government’s claim that the enclave is a “harmonious and multicultural society,” the state governance and the migration department office are not sensitive to the needs of aliens and there is not a generalized practice of a culture of acceptance. Previous studies in other countries have shown that language barriers is one of the obstacle for immigrants with poor English language proficiency but in Macau which boosts to be an international destination, those who do not speak either Chinese (Cantonese or Putonghua) and Portuguese are denied basic public services. Although is

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not widely spoken, Portuguese is the second official language alongside Chinese in the public administration and the legal system. For instance, all the information provided by the Macau’s Migration Services, including in its website, is in both Chinese and Portuguese. These language barriers and immigration papers can always represent a problem but in the particular case of Macau’s complex immigration system, language barriers experienced by immigrant groups deprive most of the prospective international students from an easy enrolling at higher education institutions. Regardless of their education, expertise or training, African immigrants, on average, and Nigerian students in particular are still perceived with suspicious as there is no recognition of the varieties of culture and benefits of African Diaspora. Racial hierarchy is still present and entrenched in Macau‘s society as a combination of colonial legacy, the local Chinese imaginary, and the construction of a “harmonious society” in based on the principle of “one country, two systems,” proclaimed as one of slogans the Macau’s government.35

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Li Zhigang, Xue Desheng, Michael Lyons, and Alison Brown, «The African Enclave of Guangzhou: A Case Study of Xiaobeilu»,Acta Geographica Sinica, 63 (2) , 2008.

Lusa, 3 November 2009; http://www.lusa.pt/lusaweb/user/showitem? service=310&listid=NewsList310&listpage=1&docid=10305889 ; accessed 20 December 2009.

Oriental Angel' triggers China race row, November 13, 2009; http://shanghaiist.com/2009/11/05/ ding_hui_still_chinese_still_black.php; accessed

Pedro Dá Mesquita, « Os Landins em Macau I», 16 October 2009, Revista Nam Van nº 23 - 1 de Abril de 1986

Philip Snow, The Star Raft China’s Encounter with Africa, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University. Press, 1988, pp.38- 39.

Santos NewsGdcom News Guangdonghttp://www.newsgd.com/news/PearlRiverDelta/content/ 2009-12/08/content_7141782.htm

South China Morning Post, “Africans protests in Guangzhou after Nigerian feared killed fleeing visa check”. July 16, 2009.

Washington Post, “Chinese Students Continue Protests Against Africans”, December 30, 1988; http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-1298037.html, accessed 20 December 2009.

Wei Li., “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles”, Urban Studies 35 (3): 1998, pp. 479–501; http://usj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/3/479 ; Accessed 2009-01-08.

Yap, Melanie; Man, Dianne . Colour, Confusion & Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa. Hong Kong University Press, 1996.

NOTES

1. The word “Wahala” is an expression used among Nigerians meaning “trouble” which became popularized in other African countries. The title of this paper “China Wahala” is borrowed from a Cameroonian movie with the same title in perhaps homage to the Nigerian cinema. “Bushfaller” is an expression originally from Cameroon which became popularized in Africa to refer to Africans who had migrated. 2. Wei Li (1998). “Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles.” Urban Studies 35 (3). 479-501. . 3. “Chinese Students Continue Protests Against Africans.” Washington Post; December 30, 1988. . [accessed 20 December 2009].

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4. Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993: 96. 5. Derek Alton Walcott (1930-) is a Caribbean Nobel Prize winner poet and playwright. [accessed: 20 December 2009]. 6. The term “ethnoburb” was first coined in 1997 by Wei Li in a paper on the Chinese in Los Angeles, US. Wei Li. Op. cit. 7. Bertoncello, Brigitte, and Sylvie Bredeloup, “The Emergence of New African “trading posts” in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.” Perspectives 1 (2007): 94-105. A recent study states that the majority of Africans in China, especially in Guangzhou, is originally from West Africa, mainly from Nigeria (77%), followed by migrants from Guinea, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. On the whole, more West Africans are found in the African population in Guangzhou. Adams Bodomo, “The African Trading Community in Guangzhou: An Emerging Bridge for Africa — China Relations,” presented at the China Quarterly Workshop, School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, September 25 - 28, 2008. 8. Lou Jing was one of one of Shanghai's five finalists for “Let's Go! Oriental Angel,” a TV singing contest American style show. Ding Hui (1989- ) from Hangzhou, of South African and Chinese ancestry, joined the China’s national volleyball team. See “Oriental Angel' Triggers China Race Row.” November 13, 2009; http://www.theage.com.au/world/oriental-angel-triggers-china-race- row-20091113-ie71.html “Ding Hui: Still Chinese, Still Black, Still Playing VolleyBall”. . [accessed 20 December 2009] 9. Bodomo, op. cit 10. Julie Wilensky. “The Magical Kunlun and ‘Devil Slaves:’ Chinese Perceptions of Dark-Skinned People and Africa before 1500.” Sino-Platonic Papers 122 (July 2002). 11. Jorge Álvares, a Portuguese feitor (treasurer) in the Chinese tributary port of Malacca (today Malaysia) found shelter on the shores of Lantau Island (now part of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) in 1513. 12. Here I echo Pina-Cabral’s justification for classifying the colonial period as running from 1846 to 1967: the formal terms of the government were, despite efforts to the contrary, inevitably expressed in a colonial mode and ethnic relations in the city had a ‘colonial’ character. João Pina-Cabral, Between China and Europe, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology. Berg, New York/Oxford, 2002, p. 226, n. 3. 13. After UNESCO launched the Slave Route Project in 1994, several countries like France, the United Kingdom, and South Africa took the initiative to recognize slavery and slave trade as crimes against humanity through commemorations, conferences, and state apologies. Yet, yet Portugal has neither publicly apologized for its role in the institutions of slavery nor even its pioneer role for its abolition. Several Portuguese academics have signed an on-line petition against the fact that during the first semester of 2009, the government of Portugal, and several Portuguese institutions as the University of Coimbra supported the organization of a contest to choose the Seven Portuguese Wonders in the World. The list of the sites to be voted included important slave trading outposts and warehouses on the route of the Atlantic slave trade (the Elmina Castle or the Castle of São Jorge da Mina, founded by the Portuguese in 1482, in present- day Ghana, the old city port of Ribeira Grande of Santiago Island (Cape Verde), and the San Sebastian Fortress (Mozambique). Yet, the organization of the contest omitted the history of these places despite the fact that nowadays the Elmina Castle is a museum dedicated to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and on the description of the Elmina Castle, it is said that this site served as slave’s warehouse only after the Dutch occupation in 1637. 14. Charles Boxer. Mary and Misogyny. Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas (1415-1815). Some Facts, Fancies and Personalities(London: Duckworth,1975), p. 3. 15. Melanie Yap, and Dianne Man. (1996). Colour, Confusion & Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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16. Philip Snow. The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University. Press, 1988), pp. 38- 39. 17. Carlos Estorninho. Macau e os Macaenses-Divagações e Achegas históricas, (Lisboa: Rotary Clube de Lisboa, 1962). 18. C.R. Boxer. “A derrota dos Hollandeses em Macau no ano de 1622.” Boletim Eclesiástico da Diocese de Macau 36, 1938. 86-122. 19. Ju Lin Chang. Ou-mun Kei-Leok, Monografia de Macau, trans. Luís Gonzaga Gomes. Lisbon: Edição Quinzena de Macau, 1979. 20. “Çã macuá/ Comê carne crua.[...]/ Chacha di Congo, de melmissó[...]/Vai botica comprá missó,China dá pôco,/ China dá-le chacha,Chacha querê tanto,/ hacha berá: Aiô[...] / Branca sã inocente,/ Cathrina/Morena capaz fingi/ Preta abusadéra, / Cathrina/ Vingança sempre pidi./ [...] / Quim casá cô preto/ Tem pôco sintimento/ Masqui seza preto?/ Tem bom coraçam/ Panhá vento suzo/ Ficá cor de jambolam. Almerindo Lessa, “The Population of Macao”. in Review of Culture, n. 20, 2nd series, p.79 21. Over centuries, the Macanese developed a rich culture. One of its characteristics is its distinctive language, the patois, which is rarely heard today, although ongoing attempts have been made in Macau and the Diaspora to revive and enrich it through theatre, literature, and music. From the play “Romeu co Julieta,” by Adé: Romeu, ioi-sua ladú/ Iou-sua Romeu/ Cáfri landim/ Estunga ora, / Vem buscá iou? (Romeu, I am your sweet/ I am yours, Romeu/ The Landim Kaffir/ Has now arrived. / Is he coming to arrest me?). José dos Santos Ferreira. Qui-nova, Chencho (Macau: Tipografia da Missão do Padroado, 1973). Landim is one of the linguistic and ethnic groups in Mozambique. Most of the African soldiers who came to Macau were Landins. 22. As Frank Dikotter notes in his work on the discourse of race in modern China, the barbarians in China were divided into two categories according to they eating habits, shengfan, “raw barbarians” or savage and rebellious who ate raw meat, and the shufan, or “cooked barbarians,” docile and submissive who didn’t. Frank Diköter, op. cit. p. 9. 23. Pina Cabral. Between China and Europe. Op. cit. 144. 24. João Filiciano Marques Pereira , “CancioneiroMusical,” in Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo, Série II, 1. 1901, 239-243. 25. Ju Lin Chang. Op. cit. 30. 26. Li Zhigang, Xue Desheng, Michael Lyons, and Alison Brown. “The African Enclave of Guangzhou: A Case Study of Xiaobeilu.” Acta Geographica Sinica 63 (2), 2008. 27. Moisés Silva Fernandes Quoted By José Carlos Matias, “Cementing Sino- Luso Relations” , Macau Business, October 2008. 28. Beijing Declaration of the Forum on China – Africa Co-operation; Beijing zw.china-embassy.org; accessed 25 November 2009. 29. Guangzhou Daily quoted by Bodomo, op.cit. 30. With exception of Sao Tome and Principe because of its close ties with Taiwan. 31. In the previous ministerial conference of the forum in 2006, the member nations adopted the “Action Plan for Economic and Trade Cooperation” to boost cooperation between China and the Portuguese-speaking nations. The CPLP aims to reinforce the economic links between China and the Portuguese speaking countries representing a potential market of 200 million people. As of November 2009, more than 1,900 officials and technicians from Portuguese-speaking countries had participated in research and training programs in China since the establishment of the forum, far exceeding the goal of 900 set in the Action Plan. NewsGdcom News Guangdong. . [accessed 10 November 2009].

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32. The City of Dreams is a mega project under construction in a reclamation area between two of the Macau’s islands where one can find hotels casinos, and residential towers. The first part of the project was concluded and inaugurated in 2009. 33. Macau vai impor restrições de visto à entrada turistas de de seis países. Lusa, 3 November 2009; http://www.lusa.pt/lusaweb/user/showitem? service=310&listid=NewsList310&listpage=1&docid=10305889 ; accessed 20 December 2009. 34. When this paper was delivered in Ohm in July 2009, there was an incident involving the Guangzhou police and illegal African immigrants which resulted on the death of an illegal Africa immigrant who tried to escape and jumped to his death. “Africans protests in Guangzhou After Nigerian Feared Killed Fleeing Visa Check.” South China Morning Post July 16, 2009. 35. “Macao’s Efforts Hailed to Build Harmonious Society.” Government Briefing and Spokesperson System, . [accessed: February 10, 2010].

ABSTRACTS

Recent scholarly studies and media coverage have primarily focused on China’s increasing presence and sometimes asymmetrical engagement with Africa in tandem with the new trend of Chinese migration to that continent. Yet, the inverse flux of Africans to China and the emergence of African communities in Southern China over the last decades is influencing some areas of the Pearl River Delta Region, and changing the fabric of cities like Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong, in a way without precedent. There are representations or exotic descriptions from some mass circulation magazines and newspapers on the infamous Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong or the so-called “Chocolate-city,”an area centered aroundHongqiao, the village- district and Canaan market in the city of Guangzhou, with its arcades and strip malls filled with ethnic businesses and transnational migrants. In Macau, significant concentrations of African population of different origins are also seen in the “Papa pun” commercial center or in downtown areas. Despite many studies devoted to the “ethnoburbs” in other latitudes, only very recently, these entrepreneurial African communities in Mainland China are starting to become worthy of serious scholarly attention. Yet,there is total absence of studies dealing with the presence of more and more African students and the cultural manifestations of African communities well portrayed in the new African cinema, in music produced by Afro-Chinese bands or even singers.2Besides a continuing inward flow of transient Africans who come to China for business on a regular basis, a significant number of settler African traders, particularly Nigerians, have already married local Chinese women, set up families, autonomously run their businesses without recourse to Chinese intermediaries, and established a web of informal and formal committees representing their home nations and states, to solve disputes while maintaining personal and business links with Africa. Besides, those emigrant ‘bushfallers’ who are coming to China solely for business purposes, a new form of “silent” migration of Nigerians comprising students from different backgrounds is enrolling in higher education institutions in the Macau Special Administrative Region of China. These students are coming to pursue their studies or to seek a job to pay their student fees at the margin of the PRC scholarship and stipendprograms for visiting African students that were popular in China in the 1960s and mid-1970s as part of CCP’s foreign policy for Third World aiming friendly relations with Africa. Today, these “transnational” Nigerian students are in their own way affirming their identity and

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difference, in southern China, in particularly in Macau SAR, thanks to their network of multiple interrelations across nation-states from Africa to Asia and to a combination of perseverance, zeal, and gentleness without subservience. Although they have not been targets for the hostility and even violence like the Shanghai incident of July 1979 or the Nanjing protests in December 1988 at Hehai University targeting African students, today these Nigerian students are facing more subtle forms of ethnocentrism and legal discrimination from immigration laws to daily practices, which always try to associate their citizenship to problematic or easy stereotypes of scam or colour.3 Yet, at the same time, everything seems to indicate that these newcomers are quick adapting and finding new forms of negotiating their social integration in the Chinese local society which in turn is offering more opportunities. This paper is part of a more ambitious project which aims to assess the new forms of migration from Africa to China and from China to Africa as well as their impact and contribution of globalization. First, this paper considers why and how Macau has evolved from a Portuguese outpost where slavery was a an institutionalized commodity to special administrative region of China where a new urban African community, mostly composed by Nigerian students, is in formation due to opportunities and rapid changes occurring in the region in the first years of the twenty-first century, by comparing the new to old African communities of students and business people/migrant workers from former Portuguese colonies (Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique).Finally, borrowing the title from a sequel movie with the same title of the promising New African cinema, the paper focus on the “China Wahala”or the troubles of these Nigerian students through their tales of their experiences of racism(s) and their negotiations and responses which radically contradicts not only the slogans of cultural diversity propagated by the official discourse and tourist channels as these Nigerians are confronted daily with often dramatic situations ranging from indifference and ostracism to exclusion.

AUTHOR

ISABEL MORAIS

University of Saint Joseph

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Varia

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The Internationalisation and Hybridization of Medicines in Perspective? Some Reflections and Comparisons between East and West

Lionel Obadia

1 In the three last decades, the so-called “alternative medicines” have witnessed a rapid growth (in numbers and in popularity) in Western countries, and especially in Western Europe. One interesting aspect of this phenomenon – among many others actually – is the fact many of these “medicines” are labelled “Asian” or at least contain a more or less explicit reference to “Asia” (as an encompassing cultural category). The most widespread of these are probably acupuncture, (different kinds of) meditation, and bodily-based healing practices like Reiki or Shiatsu, but one can also encounter many complete systems such as Chinese medicine, Indian Ayurveda, or Buddhist medicine (Tibetan, in particular). These few examples, although neither similar in importance, nor equal in their impact in the West, are all located in the very heart of a wider galaxy of “soft” therapeutic techniques that have recently flourished in industrial societies1. All of them are indeed among the new fashionable techniques of “well-being”, or “complementary therapies” in the West – two much discussed but empirically significant semantic categories.

2 The increase in visibility of such therapeutic methods, and their success among “Westerners” (urban and privileged people in particular) have led the governments and academics milieu in different areas (in Western Europe, Australia, and North America) to question their meaning and role in the transformations of Western therapeutic and religious landscapes, and to evaluate the relevance of their claims to provide a “complementary” (though “spiritual”) set of therapies to existing biomedical models and institutions. That is, scholars and academic institutions have carefully investigated this process sin English-speaking countries2, but in other countries, such as France, the institutional conditions surrounding these medicines look surprisingly similar – a point that justifies the use of the broad (and highly controversial) category of “The West”.

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3 The “success” that these “Asian” medicines have had in such social settings and cultural landscapes have hence already received much attention in academic fields. Issues such as therapeutic efficiency, psychological and organic effects, or their contribution to a better understanding and treatment of chronic diseases range among the preferred subjects of scientific investigation in the field3. 4 Otherwise, the apparent social and historical reasons for the progress of Asian-oriented or Asian-inspired new therapeutic techniques in the West have been under consideration in the Western mass-media for decades: the failures of modern therapies, the rise of new “spiritual” conceptions of health and sickness, their “traditional” ability to cure modern ailments, etc. Academically speaking, these arguments can be discussed. Yet, little attention has been paid to the description and analysis of the ideological conditions of reception of such systems, the diffusion processes underlying their expansion, and their adjustment in new social and cultural settings abroad. These Asian or Asian-oriented therapies nowadays spread in many ideological and practical spheres: management and coaching, techniques of well-being, or ordinary diet or mental preparation for professional sportsmen, for example. As with many people raised and educated in France, I have been sporadically in contact with Asian therapies in different contexts: my (western) doctor has a diploma in acupuncture, friends and relatives practice meditation for “feeling better”, members of social networks use herbal “native-American” or other traditional remedies, people encountered during my travels have been initiated in various techniques of “natural” therapies and praise the effectiveness and softness of such medicines. But despite the apparent social dispersion of “Asian” medicines, they concentrate in different geographic and social sectors of French (and Western) societies, and are particularly visible in what Colin Campbell has called the “cultic milieu”4. 5 The first aim of this paper is to highlight the conditions and modes of settlement of “Asian medicines” in the West.. But to focus solely upon the presence of Asian medicines in the West may overlook the counter-process of diffusion and settlement of Western medicine in Asia. The second aim of this paper is to combine these two processes in a unified theoretical scope: one cannot fully understand the issues of cultural acceptance and social appropriation of Asian medical systems in new environmental settings without a comparison with the parallel process: the diffusion of Western medicine in Asian countries – Nepal, in this case. First, I will briefly outline some of the consequences of such processes, with a special emphasis upon the issue of “easternization” or “orientalisation” of the Western therapeutic landscape.

Asian Medicines in the West

The path of Asian medicines in the West

6 Historical reconstitutions of Asian medicines’ path5 to Western countries are nowadays not has numerous as one might expect, despite the interest of social and biological sciences. Accordingly, the research lacks a general history of Asian medicines in the West. National-wide reconstitutions, such as Sita Reddy’s study of Ayurveda in the United States nevertheless demonstrate that each medical tradition has followed its own path but they generally surfaced in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. But the process has deeper historical roots.

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7 The cultural acceptance of Asian medical traditions – which can be Asian religious traditions converted into therapeutic ones – is alsolinked with the issue of Orientalism, at large. Edward Said's views of orientalism, while accurately pointing at the Western “fabric” of the East as a reverse mirror on which the Western fantasy is projected on an imagined East, was mainly (and stereotypically) limited to the context of colonial relationships between Europe and the Middle-East. This is not really a surprise: Said's influence extended far beyond his disciplinary region and area of study – in Asian studies his reflections have been at least as crucial as they were in (middle) Oriental studies6. But the ideological layers of “Asian” orientalism are quite different from those of “middle-East” orientalism. If, on the one hand, the Near Orient was initially seen as the site of sophisticated civilisations, it later came to represent the figuration of the horrifying Other. Far-East orientalism, however, stands at the opposite side of the Western imagination of the non-Western Other. Whilst the Middle-Eastern Other, initially constructed as the “Persian” (a enlightened intellectual) has turned into the “Arab”, (synonymous with “uncivilized”), the Far-Eastern Other, formerly shrouded in the mystery and strangeness of the remote and exotic, has transformed into a highly appealing and fashionable item. This appeal, which also applies to Asian cultural and religious “products”, dates from the late 19th century and is still growing today – although not all products from all Asian countries have become particularly popular been subjects of these Western appropriations. However, practical and symbolic therapeutic and spiritual traditions have become particularly popular and have been heavily imported since this time. “Asia” is indeed a powerful brand image for the importation or exportation of beliefs, practices, and goods in the West or to the West. 8 In his 1995 opus, Généalogies des médecines douces, Francis Zimmermann harshly criticized what he called the “ethnicist poison”: with this highly critical expression, the anthropologist, a specialist on Indian Ayurveda in its national context, was pointing to the misconceptions and misuses of traditional South-Asian medicines and spiritual beliefs in the West7. But in the introduction to their coedited volume Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge8, Charles Leslie and Allan Young adopt a very different attitude. They note that these ideological frames (on both sides, “Asian” and “Western”) played a key role in the mutual reception (or rejection) of these culturally rooted systems. As it was the case for Asian religions in the West, Asian medicines have been considered and “repackaged” in the different frames of the Western imagination. This not the place for a detailed description of these complex and diversified processes but one is worth mentioning nevertheless: the reframing of Asian religious traditions into therapeutic ones, namely, a process of “therapization” of Asian religions. 9 As early as the late 19th century – in a germinal phase – and the 20th century – in an expansive phase – Asian traditions (especially Hinduism and Buddhism) have indeed settled deeply in the West and were reinterpreted, partially or fully, as “therapeutic” systems. In other words, they were not entirely “therapeutic” (in the Western meaning of the term) before taking root in the West. Despite a common emphasis upon suffering (sanskrit: Dhukka) Buddhism and Hinduism are not exactly “therapeutic” per se, since Ayurveda, the ancient Indian medicine, and Buddhist medical systems are both embedded in religious traditions, yet they have a distinct identity – one that allowed them to circulated more or less independently from their religious backgrounds. 10 After the Second World War, the rise and growth of the New Age movement played a crucial role in the shaping of new conceptions of the body, the mind, and the health

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balance, and concomitantly in the reception of Asian traditions. The ideological layers of the “Aquarius” movement were indeed new “paradigms” centred upon the inner experience of health, an emphasis on mind-body relationships, and holistic forms of curing9. Asian traditions, especially those of Indian origin (Hinduism and Buddhism) were considered at the time as perfectly “fitting” these views since they were also inner-centred, emphasizing bodily experiences, and offering holistic methods – and they still are. Simultaneously, a large part of new Western “healing methods” and “new religions” were directly inspired by Asian traditions10. The intermingling between medicine and religion, East and West, Orientalism and the New Age movement, wound up appareing in two different adjustments of Asian religious traditions in the West: the “therapization” of Asian religious traditions (a process remarkably obvious in the case of Buddhism11) on the one hand, the location of Asian or Asian-based therapeutic movements (whether “genuine” or newly invented “medicines”) among the category of “complementary” medicines, on the other. 11 Since the early 1990s, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been instrumental in the recognition of the importance of “traditional medicine”, and its acceptance (by means of “promotion” and “development”) in established medical practices worldwide. The recent legitimacy granted to previously disqualified therapeutic non-western systems has led to the development of new research programs and guidelines12. One of the major shifts in the global policy of the WHO is the recognition of the spiritual dimension of traditional medicines, validated by the cultural embeddeness of such beliefs and practice systems13. However, the WHO concern with traditional medicines also blurs the distinction between “traditional” and other “complementary” or “alternative” medicines, all of which the WHO places under the same generic category14, at the risk of causing confusion over the differences between “traditional” and “non-traditional” medicines, and between “medicines” and “religions”. For instance, in 2002, the WHO for instance launched an international program for the promotion of “traditional medicines” – especially those relating to ethnopharmacology. But even if herbal medicines are popular in all Western and non- Western countries, they fall far short of epitomizing all the “traditional” medicines that have flourished in the West, and especially those Asian traditions that have been converted into “complementary” medicines. Moreover, the diversity of Asian (or Asian- oriented) medicines suppose an exploration of their paths, audiences and symbolic functions.

Asian medicines for Asian migrants: “traditional medicines” in motion

12 Academic research on Asian medicines has in recent years focused on the ways in which therapeutic beliefs and practices have become rooted in Western societies. Migration fluxes - or “transport” - is one of the main processes15. Asian medical beliefs and practices consequently, and above all, generally the most relied-upon responses to disease among Asian migrants, or populations from Asian origin, and to a significant extent they remain their first therapeutic choice, in spite of the prominence of a Western biomedical system16. In multicultural English-speaking societies, “ethnic- specific” health services have thus been established for the use of “minorities”, including those of Asian origin17. Accordingly, psychiatric services for “Asian” (newcomers or not) patients in the United Kingdom incorporate traditional forms of

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healing to which certain populations are attached to18, whilst Home Health Services are provided by “culturally competent” (i.e. ethnically focused) professionals for Asian Americans in the United States19. All in all, Western medical institutions and services for Asian minorities in Western multicultural countries are slowly but significantly transforming into integrative medical systems, encompassing both “traditional” and western medicines20. In this global trend, France is a curious case since no particular ethnically-oriented system exist for Asian migrants or (to the notable but isolated exception of “ethnopsychiatric” consultations of the Centre Georges Devereux in Paris, where the psychiatrist and anthropologist Tobie Nathan attempts to adapt the healing techniques of Western psychotherapy to the cultural references of migrants). But there is one important point to mention here: Asian medical traditions are obviously not only appealing to populations experiencing much psychological and/or social suffering, and neither do they attract displaced people only. Quite the contrary, “Westerners” (at large), and French people in particular (but for rather different reasons), are regular consumers of “Asian” therapies, but few of them actually suffer from the same ailments – if they ever truly “suffer”, given the fact that Asian “medicines” are much more sources of well-being rather than cures for illness.

13 Academic focus today is mainly on the fascination that “Westerners” have for Asian medicines. In Western countries, sociological studies have demonstrated that the spread of alternative medicines is obviously related to high levels of economic and industrial development in host countries: For instance, most of diseases are caused by behaviour rather than by biological sources, and chronic diseases – the pathological category in which alternative medicines flourish – largely originate from demographic patterns, such as the growing number of people reaching old age21. Asian medical systems (Tibetan medicine, Reiki and so on) target a population of urban, educated, middle-class individuals, more interested in “feeling better” than in searching for a cure for an identified disease. But it is not just because Asian medical systems have become “fashionable” that they are easily accepted in their Western host countries. The case of France illustrates a great paradox of Asian medicines, that they are torn between strong public appeal and official limited acceptance.

Tolerance, rationality and illegitimacy: the paradoxical situation of Asian medicines in France

14 In the late 1970s, around 34% of French people had used some form of complementary medicine at least once. In the mid-1980, this rate rested at 49%22, and was about the same in the late 1980s23.. According to the WHO’s Worldwide review, Legal Status of Traditional and Complementary Medicine (2001), a 1987 survey mentions that 36% of allopathic doctors used – occasionally, for most of them – complementary forms of therapies. The same survey estimates the number of non-allopathic therapists as topping 50,000 24, which is a very large figure. The most popular complementary or alternative medicines however remain those that share technical and ideological proximities with “official” medicines: homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, and thalassotherapy25. Nevertheless, and despite the rapid growth of “alternative” or “soft” medicines, non-allopathic medical practices are illegal in France (a situation that is slowly changing). The limited tolerance of French administrations and therapeutic

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institutions is related to the standard of scientificity of medical practice, which represents a frame for the cultural acceptance of foreign health practices.

15 In March 2007, an article entitled “France opens the door to Chinese traditional medicine” appeared in the French weekly journal L’Expansion. Following a visit of the French minister of Foreign Affairs to China, and the signature of cooperation contracts between France and China, the French government decided to experiment with the introduction of certain techniques derived from Chinese traditional medicine, in both research on and cures of chronic or rare diseases. This news is challenging the status quo of medicine in France. But in the country of Descartes, the history of medicine has gone through a long process of extreme positivistic rationalization and the expulsion of “folk” beliefs and practices from the medical domain. From Laurent Joubert’s Erreurs populaires au fait de la médecine (1578) to Anthelme Richerand’s Des erreurs relatives à la médecine (1812), France has witnessed a long stigmatisation of the “mistakes” of non- professional physicians and therapists, and the domination of biomedicine over second-rate “popular medicine”26. One of the main reasons for French government resistance to “unofficial” medicines lies in the spiritual emphasis most of the healers place in their practice. Consequently, many groups, movements or independent healers were suspected of “illegal” medical exercises and many were consequently prosecuted. These trials cut at the very heart of “sect controversy” in France: the French response to the expanding “healing religions” was to reaffirm the unconditional division between religion and medicine, and to sanction the therapeutic “shift” toward New Religious Movements, labelled as “sects”, from the first parliamentary report on sects (Rapport Parlementaire sur les Sectes) in 1995 to the last one published in 2008. 16 On the other hand, in the margins of “official” medicines, spiritually-oriented therapies are slowly growing. In France, purported “alternative” medicines (médecines parallèles) indeed embrace a wide range of beliefs and practices, ranging from “scientific- inspired” techniques (psycho-corporal, “energetic”, dietetic, homoeopathic) to more “spiritually-oriented” ones (meditative, faith-based). This opposition highlights the two opposite poles at the ends of the range of “alternative” medicines: the “scientific” one, and the “religious” one. In France, the two poles remain clearly separated and to a certain extent, hermetic to each other. In other contexts, (the United States, for example) healers dealing with “complementary medicines” attempt on the contrary to sort the two “paradigms” within one all-encompassing medical landscape27. Yet, New Age ideas are still infusing the practice of medicine, but the influence of these “unorthodox” conceptions still remains located at the margins of official medical institutions. In France, for instance, the biomedical system maintains hitherto its monopoly upon the institutional field of therapeutic practices. On the other side, Asian historical traditions or Asian-inspired New Religious Movements continue to absorb the New Age milieu, and especially the spiritual-healing movements28.

Western medicine in Asia

17 Western medicine – also called “allopathic” or “modern” medicine – penetrated Asian countries as early as the 16th century (despite the beginnings of the exploration of Asian societies in the 13th century), when travellers and missionaries began to settle and found themselves in greater contact with local populations. Medical conceptions and practices thus range among the many cultural influences Asia has received from

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the West. Asia is another anthropological site where Asian medicines and Western medicine encounter one another. In the Himalayan highlands, the therapeutic landscape is as diversified as it is in the West. Whilst the actors are quite the same (Western doctors and traditional healers), their relationships within the medical system, are, in such a context, similar: they are, again, characterized by competition and conflict. The case of Nepal will briefly offer an illustration of the similarities and differences between the two contexts – Western and an Asian ones.

Western medicine in Nepal

18 For geopolitical reasons (the political isolation of Nepal for a century), allopathic medicine entered the Hindu Kingdom slowly since the late XIXth century, when the first hospital was built in Kathmandu, in a time when the Indian Ayurveda was still the official (royal) medicine, but it catch on much before the 1950s29. In 1951, with the fall of the Rana dynasty, Nepal opened its frontiers to foreign influences, and aligned its economic, social, and sanitary politics alongside the Western ideologies of “development”. Since the mid-20th century, the Nepalese governments have systematized a series of five-years development plans, in order to remodel their productive, educative and medical institutions. The need to decrease the high rates of child mortality, to restrain the epidemiological extension of “poor countries’ illnesses” (tuberculosis, diarrhoea, etc.), and to increase the life expectancy ranged among the unequivocal goals of the medical section of these five-year plans, from their start in the early 1950s to the latest programs. Between 1999 and 2003, I conducted fieldwork over several periodes (in average, three months long each) in the highlands of Northern Nepal. In the early 1990s, a French NGO had established hospitals and dispensaries in the rural and remote areas at the foot of the mount Everest. In this region, the centralized state of Nepal has not succeeded in setting up a medical system as developed as it is in the valley of Kathmandu. Small primary health posts are scattered throughout the region, and there provide basic healt services. International NGOs, such as Himalayan Trust (founded by the New-Zelander mountaineer and first man to climb the summit of mount Everest, Edmund Hillary), CARE or Tashi Delek (based in France) supply all the facilities and services which the governmental health post cannot (surgery, gynecology or traumatology). In the villages of the Solukhumbu district, located at the foot of the mountain, Western medicine was introduced by “foreigners”: the government and the international non-governmental organisations. Both governmental health programs and NGO medical services are available to the underprivileged of the area. But Western medicine is considered by the Nepalese to be “medicine for the rich”, while the traditional therapies (shamanism, Buddhist medicine and Ayurveda) are seen as “medicine for the poor”. Western doctors working in Nepalese rural zones now openly question the nation’s choices relating to public health issues. After more than 35 years of practising medicine in Nepal, Stephen Bezruchka found the alignment of Nepalese health programs with Western ones objectionable30: in his view, the issue of health is not a medical one, but a sociological and economic one. The high rates of morbidity and mortality – although declining in recent years – are the indirect results of social pressure, poverty and low education in a highly-differentiated society. The most common ailments in Nepal are indeed those of most any disadvantaged country – tuberculosis, diarrhoea, pulmonary diseases, etc. – which can be prevented by simple everyday prophylactic behavior. health is not a

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medical issue but a social and economic one. The profound causes are not located in epidemiology, but in lifestyle. But nevertheless, the Nepalese medical system is currently aligning itself with the international standards of health and medicine – i.e. the standards of the World Health Organization.

Impacts: a cross-cultural comparison

An Orientalization of Western Medicine?

19 Colin Campbell’s famous thesis of the “orientalisation of the West”suggest that the cultural and religious spheres are, in the West, literally “irrigated” by cultural flows from the East. Campbell concludes that both religion and medicines have been deeply reshaped by eastern models31. But A. Dawson32refutes this thesis and maintains that eastern traditions have been “Westernized” during their expansion in the West.

20 On an empirical level, the proof of a “Westernization” of Asian traditions and therapies upon being absorbed in Western landscapes are ample and significant. This is, for instance, the case with Buddhism (as a religion) which has been repackaged as a “non- religion” or a “philosophy”, according to the leading modernist ideological views on religion33. Correspondingly, since Western societies pay more attention to the issue of health, many of the expanding Asian traditions, like the neo-Hinduist movement34 or the new Japanese religions such as the Soka Gakkai35, are now switching toward becoming spiritual therapies. Buddhism, in its Tibetan form, has also transmuted into a “soft medicine” by a process of “therapization”: collective rites, individual mediation and prayers, even if they are religious (i.e. soteriological) in purpose, are considered as therapeutic (i.e. “recovering” or “balancing”) in practice36. 21 Along the same lines, certain sectors of “official” Western medicine, (especially nursing and psychological) are now more open to the incorporation of the religious dimension of health and illness, and aim for a reconciliation between medicine and religion. Medical innovations, such as “spiritually oriented health interventions”, borrowing techniques – such as meditation – from Asian traditions are increasingly launched37. But this inflection towards a “spiritual medicine”, even if the latter sometimes resembles Asian traditions, is not exactly the result of Asian influences. Consider one of the major features of contemporary alternative medicines, Asian-inspired or not: holism. Many herbal remedies, acupressure techniques, and relaxing or meditative practices are included in the category of “holistic” medicines. Asian traditions – especially Tibetan, Japanese, Hindu or Chinese – have developed these features, but they are not unique to Asia. The New Age movement, though generally considered to have been “fertilized” by Asian influences, has also evolved in its own way, and the trajectory towards holistic religious and medical practices is not entirely influenced by Asian therapeutic and spiritual models38.

A “Westernization” of Asian Medicine?

22 In parallel, the establishment, promotion and improvement of the Western biomedical system in Asia, and especially in Nepal, can also lead to the conclusion that the Asian therapeutic landscapes are gradually being altered by the influence of Western medicine. Considering the world-wide spread of biomedicine, Marxian-inspired authors

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such as Bernard Hours, were prompt to lament the “imperialist” forced adoption of Western medicine by non-Western countries, and the concurrent destructive effects on traditional health systems39. This opinion, though controversial, is partially true in the context of Asian societies. In the “modern” urban context of South Korea, for example, traditional medicines have “suffered marginalization” following the introduction of Western medicine40. But the wide majority of ethnographic reports throughout Asia – and elsewhere – illustrates an opposite process surfacing: the resistance and even the renewal of “traditional” medicines, within the context of an expanding Western biomedical system. In he case of Nepal, the very syncretic nature of local medical systems could explain such abilities to resist the settlement of Western medicine41. But other (political and ideological) forces must be taken into account.

23 In the South Asian subcontinent, the promotion of Western medicine has undergone a complex process of officialization, state promotion, national-wide quantification of morbidity and epidemiological studies, and the medical activism of health professionals. The activism of newly-trained doctors, nurses and other health professionals, in particular, has had a significant impact on the diffusion of Western ideas on health and illness. The most visible of them is the strong-minded claim of the superiority of allopathic medicine over local, traditional ones. In Nepal, countless articles in national newspapers express these views, and the doctors explicitly charge local shamans (dhami-jhankris) with worsening their patients’ illnesses. The expansion of Western medicine is therefore associated with the expansion of scientific and positivistic ideologies, that are, to a certain extent, contesting the legitimacy of local and culturally-embedded traditions. When I was conducting my own fieldwork in the Himalayan highlands, I was struck by doctors and nurses' chronic indifference toward, and even criticism of, “traditional” medicines: it was actually quite difficult to enter the world of traditional medicines. Ethnographer : “I’d like to work with the shamans (dhami). I visited one today” Doctor (smiling): “What are you doing there? There is nothing to learn from them, except superstitions”. (extract from my fieldwork notes) 24 This “colonial” conquest by Western medicine of Asian countries42 is nevertheless largely limited to certain geographical areas and sociological segments of society (the urban milieu), and their impact is constrained by the resistance of “traditional” medicines. It is also worth mentioning an odd paradox: French or otherwise Western doctors are much more tolerant than their Nepalese counterparts. For instance, the aim of an NGO I have been working with, Tashi Delek-Himalayan Health, centers on the improvement of health by means of Western medicine, but also the conservation of local traditions. But traditional beliefs about health and illness, and the existing cultural institutions, have not needed this help to survive: Western medicine still has to adapt to local beliefs and practices. In this mountain region of Nepal, the failures of allopathic medicine are benefiting local medical systems in exactly the same way that Western medicine’s successes are related to the failures of “traditional” medicines. In the northern highlands of Nepal, as I observed, the establishment of Western medicine hence did not weaken local therapeutic traditions. Quite the reverse, Tibetan amchi medicine, the dhamis’ shamanic faith-healing and traditional vaidyas’ divination are on the contrary more visible and more active than ever. In this context, they have faced a challenge, and given the penetration of a new actor in the therapeutic landscape, they

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have responded with a increased promotion of their techniques and efficiency against the presence of a foreign and competitive therapeutic system43.

25 On the other, the metamorphosis of Asian medicines, while settling in Western societies, are not grounded solely on the level of beliefs and practices, but on the level of social organization and institutional shaping of medical training and curative practices. In many Western countries, Asian (or Asian-inspired) physicians, like other “alternative physicians” can adopt two different strategies. The first one is a process of professionalization, i.e., aligning their practice with the model of Western medicine, at least on the organizational level (standardization of knowledge, training in practice, official certification…)44 since the theories of health and illness, the scope of practice, and the issue of efficacy remain in stark contrast with “orthodox” forms of medicine45. For instance, the Indian Ayurveda now adopt a “professional” form in the United States46, and Chinese medicine has espoused an official “registration” for practice and training47.

Conclusion

26 The cases of the settlement and implementation of the Western biomedical system in Nepal and the diffusion of “Asian medicines” in the West are two remarkable illustrations of the contemporary internationalisation (or “globalization”) of medicines. They highlight both the complex movements (from the West to the East and from the East to the West), and the modes of cultural and social acceptance of the same medical systems in different cultural settings. Issues surrounding the legitimacy of “alternative” and “complementary” medicines or the problem of the “acculturation” of these medical systems, therefore, open new lines of thought. From a comparative point of view, (almost) the same actors are indeed rooting in a two pluralistic fields (but “plural” in a different way) in Asia (Nepal) and the West (France): Western allopathic medicine is, there, confronting Asian “holistic” and traditional therapeutic traditions. To a certain extent, the same lines of tension are observable. Yet, some clear convergences are brought to light by comparative study. In short, in the West Asian medicines resemble “psychiatric and social” responses, insofar as they concern both mental troubles (for migrants in despair) or well-being (for Westerners in search of blissfulness), and are based upon a relational conception of health (in social and symbolic relationships). Therefore, they turn out to be psychomedical and sociomedical systems48, but are only indirectly concerned wit organic troubles. In Asia (at least in this ethnographic context), the same distinction seems to be exist: local traditions favour the sphere of moral and social troubles (by means of magical and religious communication with non-human agents), while organic pathologies fall within the sphere of allopathic western medicine.

27 As noted by many authors, Western medicine seems to be in a state of “transition”, and this metamorphosis appears, to a certain extent, inspired by Asian cultural and religious traditions. Western “integrative” therapies (especially in psychiatry and nursing) today attempt to join Western and non-Western, “traditional” and “modern” forms of medicines in a same global system49. This trend could disclose a process of “hybridization” of medicines on the Western side – similar to the culturally adaptive “hybridising” strategies observable on the Asian side50, or the intermedical “mix”

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complementary which healers attempt to establish51. But are these medicines really and deeply hybridising? 28 The growth of Holistic-based practices (in consultations, preventive and curative nutrition) is surprisingly much more a Western development than an Asian influence: it is related to changes in the medical field, and the rediscovery of the “spiritual” roots of Western therapeutic systems as a “response” to modernity. Likewise, and in addition, the formulation of a concept of “spirituality” similar to those prevalent in Asian traditions (holistic and inherent to human nature) in the context of nursing52, has – apparently – little to do with Asian influences. Asian “medicines” also engage in metamorphosis: they adopt a double posture – a posture of “ubiquity” – in and out of the Western medical sphere, located in both the (positivistic) hard medical and (spiritual) soft healing sides of the cultural landscapes of their new host countries. The transcultural comparison of Asian and Western medicines’s adjustments suggests that, despite the WHO’s aspirations for reconciliation and mutual support between “traditional” and western medicine (since “all medicine is modern in so far as it is satisfactorily directed towards the common gaol of providing health care”53), their integration in a single system is a utopian dream. Local social conditions, ideological frames in contact, and issues in power and economic development shape the modes and the depth of the mutual tolerance and influences of these traditions in each others' presence.

NOTES

1. Actually these new spiritual and therapeutic resources are now spreading and settling worldwide, far beyond just 'Western' countries, but I will limit my scope here to « The West ». 2. Siahpush, M. (2000), “A Critical Review of the Sociology of Alternative Medicine: Research on Users, Practitioners and the Orthodoxy”, Health, 4 (2), 159-178. 3. Bombardieri, D. Easthope, G. (2000), “Convergence between Orthodox and Alternative Medicine : A Theoretical Elaboration and Empirical Test”, Health, 4 (4), 479-494. 4. Campbell, C. (1972) “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,”, : 119-136, in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain (London: SCM Press). 5. Reddy S. (2002) “Asian Medicine in America: The Ayurvedic Case”, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 583 (1): 97-121 6. Cf. for instance : Donald S. Lopez Jr (Ed) (1995) Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7. Zimmermann, F. (1995). Généalogies des médecines douces. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France 8. Leslie, C., Young, A (Eds). Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: UCP, 1992, 1-20) 9. Ferguson, M. (1980). The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles, J.P. Archer. 10. Robison, J. I., Wolfe, K., Ewards, L. (2004), “Holistic Nutrition: Nourishing the Body, Mind, and Spirit”, Complementary Health Practices Review, Vol 9, n° 1: 11-20. 11. Obadia, L. (2008), “The Economies of health in Western Buddhism: A Case Study of a Tibetan Buddhist Group in France”, Research in Economic Anthropology, 26, 227-259.

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12. World Health Organization (2000), General Guidelines for Methodologies on Research and Evaluation of Traditional Medicine, Geneva, WHO. 13. World Health Organization, (1978). he Promotion and Development of Traditional Medicine, Geneva, WHO, 1978. 14. WHO (2000), p. 1 15. Baer, H. A. (2007), “The Drive for Legitimation in Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture in Australia: Successes and Dilemmas”, Complementary Health Practices Review, 12 (2), April, 87-98. 16. In Australia: Kwok, C., Sullivan, G. (2007), “Health seeking behaviours among Chinese- Australian women: implications for health promotion programmes”, Health, 11 (3), 401-415. 17. For the United States, see Ito, K. L., Maramba, G. G. (2002), “Therapeutic Beliefs of Asian American Therapists: View from an Ethnic-Specific Clinic”, Transcultural Psychiatry, 39 (1), 33-73. 18. Dein, S., Sembhi, S. (2001), “The Use of Traditional Healing in South Asian Psychiatric Patients in the U.K.: Interactions Between Professional and Folk Psychiatries”, Transcultural Psychiatry, 38 (2), 243-257. 19. Xuequin M., Grace, Du, . (2000), “Culturally Competent Home Health Service Delivery for Asian Americans”, Home Health Care Management & Practice,12 (5), 16-24. 20. Yu, Wai-Kam S. (2006), “Adaptation and tradition in the pursuit of good health. Chinese people in the UK – the implications for ethnic-sensitive social work practice”, International Social Work, 49 (6), 757-766. 21. Siapush, op.cit.: 163. 22. Laplantine, F., Rabeyron, P.-L. (1987). Les médecines parallèles, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p.27. 23. WHO (2000) p.93. 24. WHO, 2000), p.93 25. WHO (2001), p. 92 26. Charuty, G. (1997), “L’invention de la médecine populaire”, Gradhiva, 22, 45-57. 27. Barnum, B. S. (1999), “Healers in Complementary Medicine”, Alternative Health Practitioner, 5 (3), 217-224. 28. English-Lueck, J. A., (1990), Health in the New Age, Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press. 29. Subedi, M. S. (2001), Medical Anthropology of Nepal, Kathmandu (Nep.): Udaya books., 12 and ff. 30. Bezruchka, S. (2003), “An Rx for Health Care in Nepal”, Himal South Asian, < http:// www.himalmag.com/2003/april/opinion.html > [accessed 25/08/2006] 31. Campbell, C. (1999) « The Easternization of the West », 35–48, in B. Wilson & J. Cresswell (Eds), New religious movements: Challenge and response, London: Routledge. 32. Dawson, A. (2006) « East is east, except when it’s west: The Easternization thesis and the Western habitus », Journal of Religion and Society, 8, 1–13. 33. Obadia, L. (2007), Le bouddhisme en Occident, Paris : La Découverte 34. Altglas, V. (2005) Le nouvel hindouisme occidental, Paris : CNRS Éditions. 35. Hourmant, L. (1995) Louis Hourmant, « Une religion orientée à l’action efficace dans le monde », 80-119, in D. Hervieu-Léger, F. Champion (Eds), De l’émotion en religion, Paris, Le Centurion. 36. Obadia, L. (2008), “The Economies of health in Western Buddhism”, op. cit. 37. Harris, Alex H., Thoresen, Carl E., McCullough, Michael E., Larson, David B. (1999), “Spiritually and Religiously Oriented Health Interventions”, Journal of health Psychology, 4 (3), 413-433. 38. See Fergurson, op. cit. 39. Hours, B. (2002) « D’un patrimoine (culturel) à l’autre (génétique). Les mutations du sujet et des objets de l’anthropologie médicale », Journal des Anthropologues, 88-89, pp. 21-28. 40. Kim, Y.-S., Wang, J., Mann, D., Gaylord, S., Lee, H.-J., Lee, M. (2005), “Korean Oriental Medicine in Stroke Care”, Complementary Health Practice Review, 10 (2), 105-117, p. 106

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41. Pigg, S. L. (1995) « The Social Symbolism of Healing in Nepal », Ethnology, 34 (1), pp. 17-36. 42. As described in India by Mridula Ramanna, Ramanna, Mridula, Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845-1895, New Perspectives in South Asian History 4, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002 43. Obadia, L. (2008) « Biomedicina versus medicinas tradicionales. Una aproximación no culturalista al pluralismo médico en Himalaya (Nepal”), Quaderns del l’Insitut Català d’Antropologia, 22, pp. 117-137. 44. Siahpush, op. cit.: 166 45. Bombardieri & Easthope, op.cit. : .480. 46. See Reddy, op.cit. 47. See Baer, op. cit. 48. Borrowing the expression from Laplantine, F. (1986). Anthropologie de la maladie, Paris, Payot, p.16. 49. Tseng, W.-S. (1999) « Culture and Psychotherapy: Review and Practical Guidelines », Transcultural Psychiatry, 36 (2), 131-179. 50. Frank R., Stollberg, G. (2004). Conceptualizing Hybridization. On the Diffusion of Asian Medical Knowledge to Germany. International Sociology, 19 (1) 71-88 51. See Barnum, op.cit. 52. Delgado, C. (2005), “A Discussion of the Concept of Spirituality”, Nursing Science Quaterly, 18 (2), 157-162. 53. WHO, 1978, p. 9

ABSTRACTS

During the four last decades, Asian medical and religious systems have poured into and become rooted in Western societies. The visibility of “Asian” or Asian-inspired practices and beliefs – whether therapeutic or not – epitomizes a wide-scale phenomenon, one that some authors, like Campbell (1999) have called an “easternization” of the West. However, the spread and rooting of Asian medical systems in the West parallels to another global process: the spread of Western medicine in Asian countries. Drawing on fieldwork, conducted on the Buddhist milieu in France and in Sherpa villages of Northern Nepal, this article attempts to highlight, in a comparative way, three different issues: the social determinants of “health” and uses of medical systems in these two different contexts, the conditions and modes of adaptation of foreign medical systems in new settlings, and the acculturative processes that are observable for the same medical systems, in two dissimilar environments. The discussion aims for a reconsideration of Campbell’s theory, after Dawson, and offers a critical examination of a similar and parallel process: the “westernization” of Asian medicines.

AUTHOR

LIONEL OBADIA

Professor in Anthropology, Université de Lyon - Lumière, France

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Anthropomorphism or Becoming- animal? Ka-shiang Liu’s Hill of Stray Dogs as a Case in Point

Tsung-Huei Huang

Introduction

1 Seeking to challenge anthropocentrism, animal writers often manage to interpret the language of animals or endow them with a voice of their own, so as to deepen our understanding of non-human animals.3 However, since it is debatable whether non- human animals have languages, we may wonder if their efforts of interpretation/ representation are ultimately to no avail. Actually, even when we admit that animals can engage in cognitive or communicative activities, there is still the risk that the verbalization is “for the speaker’s own benefit in that it is central to constructing a dialogue like exchange with the animal.”4 Under such circumstances, it stands to reason that we should thoroughly examine the writer’s mode of “speaking for” so as to determine whether he is just rendering “a discourse of man,” which remains “an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication.”5 In this paper, I will use Ka-shiang Liu’s 劉克襄 Hill of Stray Dogs as a case in point to investigate how Liu gives voice to what he understands to be the perspective of the strays.6 With a view to address the relations between humans and animals, this paper proposes to bring Liu’s animal concern in dialogue with contemporary theorists’ dealings of animals.

2 In his novella, Liu not only describes stray dogs’ behaviors like an ethologist, he also enables them to express their thoughts and even unearths their unconscious. Does this kind of animal writing realize the possibility of “becoming animal” that Deleuze and Guattari advocate, in which “it is no longer the subject of the statement who is a dog, with the subject of the enunciation remaining ‘like’ a man”, but “a circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming”—the becoming-dog of the man and the becoming-man of the dog?7 To answer the question, I will explore Liu’s animal writing as well as the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea of becoming-animal to see if they can shed light on each other.

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Notwithstanding that becoming-animal is “freed from the human organism’s interested and organizing perception”,8 Deleuze and Guattari’s main concern is not so much animals’ conditions of life as the human’s own desire for freedom.9 Therefore, in addition to identifying the correspondences between Liu’s writing and the concept of becoming-animal, I will discuss how Liu’s treatment and representation of stray dogs reveal that the idea in question is limited in scope. 3 Thirteen years ago, Taipei City Government implemented a new garbage disposal policy, which required all residents to place out their trash on the scheduled pickup time. Under the impact of this policy, the food sources of stray dogs were largely reduced, and it became harder and harder for them to survive in the harsh environment. In the same year, the City resorted to the methodology of high volume killing to control populations of stray dogs. While these policies seem prerequisites for the modernization of the city, in an article against the culling program, Liu maintains that stray dogs are also citizens. He does not go so far as to claim that stray dogs control is unnecessary; what Liu disapproves is the anthropocentric ideology which underlies the culling program: “valorizing safety and hygiene of the city, we ignore the fact that the city does not exclusively belong to human beings; what is more,we fail to reflect on the historical determinants that bring strays into existence.”10 Basically, Hill of Stray Dogs retains his concern for stray dogs. As Liu states in the epigraph, the book is executed in memory of the strays that were killed at that time. Yet unlike the article “Strays Dogs Have Been out of Sight for Twelve Years,” which is a straightforward outcry against strays eradication, Hill of Stray Dogs is multi-faceted, revealing the writer’s perspective as well as the dogs’. The setting of the novella is a hill in the neighborhood of Liu’s dwelling, where a number of stray dogs inhabit. Liu focuses on twelve of them to recount the story of their life. With the aid of the monocular telescope, Liu had been watching them from afar for 655 days and incessantly writing in his journal the observations of them. The novella in its present form is mainly based on extracts from Liu’s journal.11Although “anthropomorphophobia”12 is a common occurrence among animal writers and artists, Liu does not shy away from depicting dialogues between dogs, and he even deliberately compares their behaviors to those of human beings.13 Yet it is not to say that Liu’s writing is tantamount to an endorsement of anthropomorphism.14 Rather, as I am going to argue, he is attempting to “write like a dog,” namely, to “become animal.” 4 Before bearing out my argument that Liu’s animal writing is in consonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I will elaborate their idea of becoming-animal and account for how it may serve to open up the possibility for disrupting anthropocentrism. According to Deleuze, to write like an animal “does not mean writing about one’s dog, one’s cat, one’s horse or one’s favorite animal,” nor does it mean “making animal speak.” Rather, it means “writing as a rat traces a line, or as it twists its tail, as a bird sends out a sound, as a cat moves or else sleeps heavily.”15 However, this is not to say that the writer is supposed to imitate the animals’ movements. It is not through imitation that the writer is able to enter the “relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness” of the animal.16 Only when the writer is affected by the affecting animal can he become animal “in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy.”17 Notably, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the term “affect” is different from its original meaning in psychoanalytic terminology. By L’affect they mean “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another.”18 As the affects are “puissances, powers of affecting and

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being affected”,19 they are essential for charting the encounter between different beings.20 And when one allows one’s original identity to be swept away by the intensities of the other, one may thereby deterritorialize into the other. The famous Deleuzo-Guattarian wasp-orchid assemblage is exactly an exemplar of the mutual deterritorialization.21 Similarly, when the human is fascinated by what Deleuze and Guattari call “pack or affect animals”,22 having liberated himself from the limited perception, he will be able to undo his identity to join with the animal: Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings.23 5 Deleuze and Guattari also apply their concept of becoming-animal to reinterpret Freud’s cases such as Wolf-Man or little Hans. While Freud sees Wolf-Man’s fear of wolves as triggered by the traumatic primal scene, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that actually he is “fascinated by several wolves watching him.”24 It is the “wolfing”, 25 or, “the non-familial, non-individual (or pack-like) wandering of the wolves which attracts the wolf-man.”26 Likewise, defying Freud’s analysis that the horse with blinders represents Hans’s father and the heavily loaded horse, the pregnant mother,27 Deleuze and Guattari see in Hans the reality of a becoming-animal that “is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing.”28 Being drawn to “what a horse ‘can do’”, little Hans mounts an assemblage with the horse “in order to solve a problem from which all exits are barred him.”29 In this light, when Freud reads Hans’s phobia as “phantasies or subjective reveries”,30 he ignores it is the positivity of desire that enables Hans to “participate in movement” of the horse and “to stake out the path of escape.”31

6 Following Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, we will find that the established view of the body is also challenged, for the reason why one can be affected by the other is because every organ “is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of movement and rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of neighboring element.”32 A body is no longer defined by “Species or Genus characteristics”; rather, it is determined by what it can do, by “what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.”33 To be more specific, a body is defined only by “the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude)” and “the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).”34 Moreover, it is not merely the living organism that can make its conjunction with others. Even “[c]limate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them.”35 Take the statement “the animal stalks at five o’clock” for example. When we parse this statement, we tend to bring the subject, “the animal,” to the forefront. But for Deleuze and Guattari, “the animal- stalks-at-five-o’clock” “should be read without a pause”: “Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place!”36 In other words, each being is inseparable from its milieu.37 Like a rhizome made of intersecting lines, a being is a concrete individuation traversed by the spatiotemporal components, a mode of life that is determined “by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality.”38 Under such circumstances, we are no longer distinguished “from all of the becomings running through us”,39 and the privileged standpoint of human being, accordingly, will be destabilized:

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...there is no present life outside of its connections. We only have representations, images or thoughts because there have been “machinic” connections....Life is not about one privileged point—the self-contained mind of “man”—representing some inert outside world. Life is a proliferation of machinic connections, with the mind or brain being one (sophisticated) machine among others.40 7 However, man is not always willing to develop the creative potentialities of becoming. In fact, since the power of the affecting other “throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel”,41 if we are not ready to be deterritorialized by these forces, the experience of encountering the other may arouse our anxiety or even fear of annihilation. But the Deleuzo-Guattarian writer, as the “sorcerer,” “has a very particular relation to the animal,” and thus may “enter the privileged ‘experimental’ state of identity-suspension which they call becoming-animal.”42 To put it succinctly, the Deleuzo-Guattarian writer’s concern with creative invention and his ability to undo his identity allow him to enact the becoming, to “emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.”43

8 Liu Ka-shiang’s animal writing, to a great extent, verifies the Deleuzo-Guattarian thesis that “becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation” but a conversation, or, a matter of conjunction.44 Liu enters into the movement of becoming animal by commencing a conversation with stray dogs, which enables him to probe into their behavior as well as their mental states. As I have suggested, the Deleuzo-Guattarian writer is responsive to the fascinating multiplicity of pack animals. What must be added is that it is “always with the Anomalous” that one “enters into alliance to become-animal.”45 The anomalous is “the borderline” that enables the writer “to understand the various positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders.”46 Being fascinated by the affects of the anomalous, the writer is able to tie his writing to the new becoming. In Hill of Stray Dogs, the protagonist Little Winter Melon functions as the anomalous that leads Liu into his becoming-dog. As Liu states in the afterword, the way this pregnant dog shuttles between the hill and the scrap yard at the foot of the hill attracts Liu’s attention, and her movements, her relations with other stray dogs thus constitute the centerpiece of this novella. The first part of the novella is mainly about how Little Winter Melon nurtures her progeny, Potato and Teeny, and coaches them to survive in a harsh environment. The whole book, as a matter of fact, centers around her breeding behavior and ends with her giving birth to the fifth litter of pups. Notably, Liu does not attempt to grace Little Winter Melon by depicting her as a mother dog that would fight to the death to keep her offspring alive. Sometimes she nurses the pups without crouching over them, shortening the breastfeeding time as much as she can; sometimes she even deliberately refuses her breast to them.47 And when Little Winter Melon leads her young to embark on their search for food, she walks fast without paying attention to Teeny, the weaker one that straggles behind.48 Liu then explains the maternal indifference he witnesses from an ethological perspective: the aloofness of the mother makes sense because the pups must adapt themselves to the uncertain environment as early as possible if they want to make their way in the rocky world on their own.49 9 This is not to say that Liu’s book is little more than a record of his observations of stray dogs. Nor does he seek to analyze all their behaviors as if he could explicate every action pattern the strays display. As Liu affectively inhabits the strays’ milieu by integrating the spatiotemporal relations, which “are not predicates of the thing but

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dimensions of multiplicities”,50much multiplicity is lent to his objective account of their routine activities such as foraging, eating, seeking refuge, etc. Liu affectionately depicts the strays’ differences in terms of their movements and shows in detail how each stray, as an assemblage that is “inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air”,51 is traversed by the spatiotemporal components. The pup plays with its sibling in the morning, the dog rests in the shade at noon and searching for food in the scrap yard after midnight,52 the mother dog shelters in the shrubs with her pups during rainy days and buries her young when they freeze to death in winter, etc.53The narrative of this kind is not so much a litany of behavior observations as a description of the becoming- noon, becoming-night, or becoming-winter of the strays. It is not too much of a distortion to argue that the concrete individuation that Deleuze and Guattari champion finds a loud echo in Liu’s writing. 10 Moreover, Liu does not confine his descriptions of strays to the “movements in extension,” namely, their trajectories. He captures as well their “movements in ‘intension’,” the intensive forces that subtend the trajectories.54 Without involving himself in the philosophical debate about “whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institution, technics, clothing, lie, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so on”55, Liu directly affirms the strays’ ability to mourn and to experience death by depicting how Protein laments the death of her pup. When Protein’s pup is run over by a car and finally died, she holds its dead body in her mouth and drops it in front of a grocery store, hoping that the shopkeeper who used to feed them may bury her puppy. But since the accident happens in the early morning, the store is not yet open. Then a passer-by finds the dead puppy disgusting and throws it into a trash can. This very act leaves the mother dog in despair; all she can do is staying around the trash can and sniffing it unceasingly.56 Taking up Protein’s position to express grief on her behalf, Liu calls attention to the animal’s capability of mourning by representing its movement in intension. 11 The temptation to charge Liu with anthropocentric ventriloquism seems irresistible when we find Liu attempts to surmise how Protein laments the death of her pup. However, as Deleuze contends, In writing one always gives writing to those who do not have it, but the latter give writing a becoming without which it would not exist. . . . That the writer is minoritarian . . . means that writing always encounters a minority which does not write, and it does not undertake to write for this minority, in its place or at its bidding, but there is an encounter in which each pushes the other, draws it on to its line of flight in a combined deterritorialization. Writing always combines with something else...This is not a matter of imitation, but of conjunction.57 12 In other words, if the writer maintains a stance that is “[n]either identification nor distance, neither proximity nor remoteness,” he will be able to “speak with, write with” the minority without silencing it.58 Since Liu’s “objective” accounts and “subjective” descriptions are always already interpenetrated,59 he steers clear of “the two traps of distance and identification,” namely, “the one which offers us the mirror of contamination and identifications, and the one which points out to us the observation of the understanding.”60 Sometimes Liu reports on a series of mishaps that befall on the strays like a journalist, but what underlies the ostensibly objective descriptions is the writer’s deep concern and sympathy for the strays.61 In other cases, while the writer seems to be reading the stray’s mind arbitrarily, it turns out that the

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interpretation is based on his long-lasting observation.62 It is next to impossible to separate his objective descriptions from subjective interpretations, for Liu, to put it in Deleuzian terms, is “neither simulator of identifications nor the frigid doctor of distance.”63 As Deleuze cautions the writer, when writing with the other, “you do not need to mistake yourself for him. But you may perhaps put yourself in his shoes, you have something to assemble with him.”64 Fascinated by the multiplicity of the strays without thereby identifying himself with them, Liu writes with the strays by becoming animal.

13 Deleuze and Guattari claim that becoming-minoritarian “is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power, an active micropolitics.”65 Its political aim, to put it simply, is to subvert the “binary machines” such as “question-answer, masculine- feminine, man-animal, etc.”66 As the concept of becoming-animal binds the writer and the animal with each other, its political efficacy lies “in the unthinking or undoing of the conventionally human.”67 Revealing of Liu’s efforts to undo anthropocentric binarism are the analogies he constantly draws between human beings and strays. Mating behavior of the strays is likened to courtship between men and women at parties.68 The way Crazy Black Hair guards Protein and their pups is so civilized and moving that Liu believes the male dog can be compared to a human father.69 While antianthropomorphic thinkers may find these descriptions misleading, I contend that if anthropomorphic statements are derived from “introspection, reasoning by analogy, interpretive analysis, and intuition”,70 or, if the mental predicates are assigned to an animal “on the basis of the situation and behavior of the animal”,71 they may even further our understanding of animals. As John Andrew Fisher rightly observes, anthropomorphism, referring to “thinking in human terms about an object that is not human,” is almost used in a negative sense. The charge of anthropomorphism is not unconditionally justifiable, however. If we ascribe to animals the characteristics only humans have or even project onto them cultural stereotypes, such anthropomorphic identifications indeed smack of anthropocentrism.72 On the other hand, “if we assign to nonhumans human properties that those nonhumans also have, we have not made a mistake.”73 Some ethologists even suggest that “critical anthropomorphism” may serve as a useful heuristic device for us to understand animal behavior.74 Gordon M. Burghardt, for example, claims that critical anthropomorphism enables us “to pose and formulate questions and hypotheses about animal behavior” even though we can never experience directly what the animal thinks or feels.75 In this sense, we may say that Liu’s critical anthropomorphism is not so much the outcome of his subjective projection as the product of deterritorialization. Being deterritorialized by the force of stray dogs, Liu situates the boundaries human beings and the strays without deliberately shunning anthropomorphism.

14 Liu does not simply undo the human/nonhuman animal dichotomy by anthropomorphic inferences. His concern for the welfare of animals drives him to radically challenge our biases against stray dogs and further, to question if it is justified to assume them as intruders in the city. While a raft of people believe stray dogs would pose direct threat to passers-by, Liu notes that the dogs involved in incidents of attacks are usually pet dogs, especially the large and powerful breeds such as pit bulls and

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Rottweilers.76 While the authorities claim that stray dogs must be eliminated for the well-being of city residents, Liu finds dog culling to be a perpetual and futile cycle since culled areas are quickly repopulated by unsterilized and newly abandoned strays.77 Moreover, unlike those who allege that stray dogs disrupt the quality of life, Liu does not assume the menace of stray dogs to citizens as a hard-wired affair. On the contrary, in his narration, sometimes it is the human that catches the strays off guard by intruding into their dwelling places.78 Witnessing how strays manage to adapt themselves to human society, he poignantly questions why they are not entitled to citizenship and why they have to undergo such merciless culling.79 If for Deleuze and Guattari there is a much higher concern in writing than animal concern80 and thus “what becoming-animal does is close to what art does”,81 Liu’s becoming-animal, more than a mere rhetoric, moves toward the animal more closely by touching on the subject of animal rights.82 15 In fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, the immanent end of writing is not becoming-animal but becoming-imperceptible.83 To become imperceptible, that is, to “go unnoticed”, 84 anticipates the possibility of communicating and assembling with others: By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract....To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things.85 16 Given that becoming-imperceptible presupposes the elimination of “’all that is waste, death, and superfluity,’ complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense of pleading, everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves”,86 we have reasons to believe that somehow it will bring forth the disruption of anthropocentrism. In other words, since becoming’s movement away from the Oedipal human self “unhumans the human,” to a certain extent it suggests a moving toward the animal.87 However, what Deleuze and Gauattari seek to highlight in becoming-animal is not so much the animal per se as “the power of literature”, 88 for they contend that the writer “can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant things.”89 To be more specific, as long as “the unexpected” can prompt one to find “a creative line of escape”,90 it doesn’t matter what kind of animal it is: To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, . . . to find of world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow.91 17 It goes without saying that for Deleuze and Guattari becoming-animal is simply one of the means the writer adopts to cope with the rigid Oedipal structure. In fact, they rarely advocate the concept of becoming-animal without qualifications. For example, they do not rest content with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” commenting disapprovingly that Gregor’s becoming-animal ends up in “a becoming-dead” when his

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deterritorialization is blocked by the urge to be re-Oedipalized.92 Further, they imply that Gregor’s deterritorialization fails through no fault of his own: Isn’t it rather that the acts of becoming-animal cannot follow their principle all the way through—that they maintain a certain ambiguity that leads to their insufficiency and condemns them to defeat? Aren’t the animals still too formed, too significative, too territorialized? Doesn’t the whole of becoming-animal oscillate between a schizo escape and an Oedipal impasse?93 18 As I have said, Deleuze and Guattari classify the animal world into three categories, and prefer demonic animals, i.e., pack animal, on the ground that they give the writer’s imagination the freest scope. Given that the primary aim of becoming is to divert from the Oedipal trajectory and to undo the conventional significations, the animal that is “too formed, too significative, too territorialized” simply will not do. Little wonder that they would rather construe the animal as “animal molecule”94; be it a rat, a horse, a bird or a cat, the animal in question has to become “something else, bloc, line, sound, colour of sand—an abstract line” so as to combine with other molecules.95 Moreover, as Baker rightly observes, in “putting the animal to work against the forces of Oedipalization, Deleuze and Guattari’s writing reserves particular contempt for those upsetting aberrations,” namely, the “animal which is too much like a human.”96 On the question of the animal, Liu sharply differs from Deleuze and Guattari in the aforementioned aspects. To sum up, in Liu’s writing, how the writer may trace a creative line of escape through the animal molecule matters little; what is at stake is how the animal itself can find an escape in the human society. Further, while Deleuze and Guattari, in favor of the demonic, wild animals, disparage domestic animals for their lack of multiplicity,97 Liu aligns them with creative possibilities. 98 In my conclusion, I will draw on Steve Baker’s modification of becoming-animal to show how Liu displays the multiplicity of stray dogs through both written and visual representations.

Conclusion

19 The Hill of Stray Dogs includes about fifty pictures taken by Liu, and each picture is properly captioned to illustrate the variegated activities of the strays. Much in the line of the artists who feel slightly apprehensive about Deleuze and Guattari’s “seductive but elusive ideas” of becoming-animal, Liu attends to the animals’ “existence . . . their dignity and their beauty” by recording “the animal’s reality.”99 As Baker notices, “becomings-animal are increasingly evident in contemporary art.”100 Nevertheless, some postmodern artists’ use of animal imagery, instead of foregrounding their animal concern, is merely to serve the aesthetic purpose. In this way, they follow the Deleuzo- Guattarian becoming-animal without challenging it. Among those who seriously engage with the question of the animal and prove themselves able to add a new dimension to the practice of becoming-animal, Baker finds Olly and Suzi particularly impressive, for they deliberately allow animal-made marks a vital role to play in their oeuvre: “wherever it is possible without too much manipulation of the situation, they allow the animals depicted in their work to ‘interact’ with the work and mark it further themselves.”101 What is more important is that their work intends “above all to bring home the truth and immediacy of these animals’ precarious existence to a Western audience which has grown largely indifferent to the question of the endangered species.”102 As his like-minded artists, Liu aims at “giving visible form to what is animal

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in the animal”103 and proposes to direct our attention to stray dogs’ precarious existence in the city. Liu’s work is “marked by the animal” in the sense that the abundant photographs of the strays operate in the visual domain to supplement his narrative, and even to prick readers in the manner of the punctum. Observing the photograph in which two little girls look at a primitive airplane above their village, Ronald Barthes ponders, “[t]hey have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then already dead (yesterday).” 104 The “catastrophe which has already occurred” is what Barthes calls the punctum of intensity, the “lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”). In Liu’s work, the vivid images of the strays display the same intensity: no sooner had we readers exclaimed “how alive the strays are!” than we shuddered at the thought of their “death in the future.”105 Literally speaking, the strays fail to make any mark upon Liu’s work. However, as the insertion of photographs not only witnesses the strays’ presence but reminds us of “that-has- been,” each stray in the story leaves a singular trace that cannot possibly be erased.

20 Notably, to represent “what is animal in the animal” does not mean to capture every aspects of the animal in question as if the author were omniscient. On the contrary, it is only when “the idea of human completeness disappears” that the artist may “enable the viewer to glimpse and perhaps even to be swept up in something of the animal’s difference and distance from the human.”106 To put it simply, humility is the major requisite for the artist to create a work that sloughs off anthropocentric understanding of the animal. In Baker’s opinion, Britta Jaschinski is one of those who excel in “discouraging anthropomorphic identifications.”107 The images of animals in her photographs are often obscure or even unrecognizable; her gibbon photograph, Hylobates lar, for example, is sometimes mistaken for a frog. While the unfocused images in her photographs are prone to disorient the viewer, somehow they “show the animals keeping knowledge of their bodies to themselves, and refusing to be easily drawn out about what it is that they are.”108 Much in the similar vein, Liu constantly reminds us how dogs’ behaviors are beyond comprehension of human beings.109 It has to be recognized, according to Liu, that we human beings can never correctly decipher the communications among dogs.110 In order to awaken readers to “the animal’s unavailability to the human”,111 whenever the dialogues between the strays find their way into the narrative, Liu lays great store on the fictionality of the constructed scenes. 112 Having neither a conscious interest in the philosophical concept of become-animal nor a zest for postmodern art, Liu charts the animal’s line of flight from the human in a less tortuous, but not less effective way. The Hill of Stray Dogs, therefore, exemplifies how “interpreting for the animal or explaining his or her experiences and feelings” can be “intended to promote the interests of the animal”,113 and how animal writers can let the animal-other speak without necessarily running the risk of anthropocentric ventriloquism.

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NOTES

1. Steve Baker, « What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like? », in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 95. 2. Baker, pp. 95-96. 3. This paper was funded by a grant from National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 96-2628- H-002-074-MY3); the project title is “Seeing Animal Others through/beyond the Psychoanalytic Speculum.” 4. Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders, Regarding Animals, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1996, p. 67. 5. Jacques Derrida, tr. David Wills, « The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow) », Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, winter 2002, p. 405. 6. Ka-shiang Liu, Hill of Stray Dogs 野狗之丘, Taipei, Yuanliou Publishing Co., Ltd., 2007. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, tr. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 22. 8. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 129. 9. Baker, p. 95. 10. Ka-shiang Liu, « Strays Dogs Have Been out of Sight for Twelve Years » 野狗消失十二年, Chine Times, 28 Jan 2006, A19. 11. Though Liu makes some modifications of the dogs’ fates, he claims in the afterword that almost ninety percent of the novella is based on facts. See Liu, Hill of Stray Dogs, p. 191. 12. Steve Baker coins the word to refer to philosophers and postmodern artists’ fear of sentimentality: “a fear that they may be accused of uncritical sentimentality in their depiction or discussion of animals.” See Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, London, Reaktion Books, 2000, p. 175. 13. For example, Liu makes an analogy between pet dogs and upper-class ladies. Much as the ladies occupy themselves with shopping to squander time and money, pet dogs stroll around the streets to while time away simply because they don’t have to forage for food as laboriously as the strays. See Liu, p. 18. Besides, Liu compares the relationship between the male dog Crazy Black Hair and the female dog Protein to that of an intimate couple and constantly translates their “body language” into human speech. 14. However, I would not object to construing Liu’s animal writing as in tune with “critical anthropomorphism.” The distinction between anthropomorphism and critical anthropomorphism will be addressed later. 15. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Dialogues, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 75. 16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, tr. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 260. 17. Deleuze and Guattari,p. 258. 18. Deleuze and Guattari, xvi. 19. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature, New York, Routledge, 2003, p.171. 20. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of “being” sharply diverges from that of humanists; for them “there ‘is’ nothing other than the flow of becoming. All ‘beings’ are just relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life.” See Colebrook, pp. 125-126. The related concepts such as flow of becoming, fluxes, or the body “defined only by a longitude and a latitude”, will be clarified later. See Deleuze and Guattari, p. 260. 21. To explain the becoming as a conjunction rather than an imitation, Deleuze uses the “double capture” of “the wasp AND the orchid.” See Deleuze and Parnet, p. 7, for illustration: while the

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orchid seems to reproduce an image of the bee, in a deeper way it deterritorializes into the bee, and “the bee in turn deterritorializes by joining with the orchid.” That is, their resemblance is not so much a matter of imitation as a result of being deterritorialized by each other’s forces. See Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 14. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 241. Deleuze and Guattarihave distinguished three kinds of animals, namely, Oedipal animals, State animals, and “more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale....” In their opinion, the last one largely outweighs the other two in terms of its ability to effectuate becomings. What must be added is that “the animal as band or pack” cannot be understood literally as animals living in pack. By pack animal they refer to the animal that contains heterogeneous elements to connect with other beings, namely, the animal whose multiplicity fascinates us because it is “related to a multiplicity dwelling within us.” For detailed definitions of the three kinds of animals, see Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 239-243. 23. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 240. 24. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 239. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 239. 26. Colebrook, p. 135. 27. Interpreting the symbol of the horse in this way, Freud fulfills his purpose of relating Hans’s phobia to the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, Hans’s fear of the falling horse reveals two layers of meanings: he is afraid that his father might fall down because of his hostility toward him; on the other hand, given that the falling of the heavily loaded horse symbolizes a childbirth, a delivery, he is also afraid of the mother in childbirth. See Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud: Two Case Histories,vol. X, London, Hogarth Press, 1987. 28. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 259. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 257-260. 30. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 258. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 13. 32. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 256. 33. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 257. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 260. For Deleuze and Guattari, longitude and latitude correspond to the extensive and the intensive respectively. For example, “a body that is cold here and hot there” depends on its longitude; that is, it is determined by how it is mapped spatially. See Deleuze and Guattari, p. 261. As for the intensive latitude, it is “not objectifiable and quantifiable as a thing that we then perceive or of which we are conscious” but pre-personal perception or presupposed intention that “happens to us, across us.” See Colerook, p. 39. For example, in the case of “certain white skies of a hot summer”, we find a degree of heat combining “in latitude with an intensity of white.” See Deleuze and Guattari,p. 261. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 263. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 263. 37. Take little Hans’s case as an example again: in his becoming horse, Hans is not just forming a block with the horse; he enters the spatiotemporal relations as well. The family rooms, the streets, the warehouse across the street, the street-boys, the furniture-vans, etc., all these components of the milieu are combined with little Hans’s qualities and affects. See Bogue, p.171; Deleuze and Gauttari, p. 263. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 261. “Haecceity” is a term coined by Duns Scotus to refer to the distinctive qualities of the thing that make it particular. As Deleuze and Guattari explains, haecceity is “sometimes written ‘ecceity,’ deriving the word from ecce, ‘here is.’” Given that this word is created “from haec, ‘this thing’”, it is obviously an error to interchange haecceity with ecceity. However, Deleuze and Guattari call it a “fruitful error because it suggests a mode of

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individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or a subject”. See Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 540-541. In other words, “here is” is closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of haecceity. For them, all beings are actually haecceities “in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.” To put it another way, all beings are “unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects” before they are stabilized temporarily within a certain space. See Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 260-262. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 240. 40. Colebrook, p.56. 41. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 240. 42. Baker, « What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like? », pp. 67-68. Actually, for Deleuze and Guattari, writing itself is a becoming “traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings- writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.” See Deleuze and Guattari, p. 240. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 274-275. 44. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 2 and p. 44. 45. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 244. 46. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 245. 47. Liu, Hill of Stray Dogs, p. 39 and p. 44. 48. Liu, p. 31. 49. Liu, p. 31 and p. 39. 50. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 263. 51. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 262. 52. Liu, p. 38. 53. Liu, p. 45 and p. 130. 54. Bogue, p. 171. 55. Jacques Derrida, tr. David Wills, « And Say the Animal Responded? », in Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 137. Lacan proposes that while man, the subject of signifier, can pretend to pretend, the animal is only capable of the first degree of pretense: “an animal does not feign feigning. It does not make tracks whose deceptiveness lies in getting them to be taken as false, when in fact they are true— that is, tracks that indicate the right trail.” See Jacques Lacan, tr. Bruce Fink, Écrits, New York, W. W. Norton Company, 2006, p. 683. Taking the contrary position, Derrida argues that as long as it is impossible to distinguish between a feint and a feint of a feint in animals’ sexual parade or mating game, “every pretense of pretense remains a simple pretense, or else, on the contrary, and just as likely, that every pretense, however simple it may be, gets repeated and reposited undecidably, in its possibility, as pretense of pretense.” See Derrida, p. 135. Derrida also refutes the “naïve philosophy of the animal world” which asserts that “animals are incapable of keeping or even having a secret.” See Jacques Derrida, « How to Avoid Speaking: Denials », in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992, pp. 86-87. According to Derrida, be it an animal or a man, “the self is essentially constituted by an endless detour on its way back to itself.” Therefore, we have no reasons to believe that the animal “cannot return to itself” because it lacks “the power to reflect or to pose the question of Being.” See Henry Staten, « Derrida and the Affect of Self », Western Humanities Review, vol. 50, n°4-vol. 51, n°1, p. 348. However, Derrida’s insistence on reconsidering all the boundaries between man and animal is also questioned by other theorists. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy asks, “When you decide not to limit a potential ‘subjectivity’ to man, why do you then limit yourself simply to the animal?” See Jacques Derrida, « ’Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida », in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject?, New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 106. Likewise, while Derrida contends that the capacity to mourn is not exclusively the essential characteristic of the human subject, Henry Staten

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wonders, “wouldn’t there still be an essential distinction, if not between human and animal, at least between animals that mourn (such as chimpanzees, and perhaps dogs) and animals that do not, or that we suppose do not?” See Staten, p. 351. 56. Liu, p. 166. 57. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 44. 58. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 52, original emphasis. 59. Liu himself concedes in the afterword that he has no idea whether this work should be classified as a novella or reportage literature. He would like to leave the question for scholars to answer. See Liu, p. 191. 60. Deleuze and Parnet, pp. 52-53. 61. Even though Liu manages to speak in a neutral tone, it grieves the writer to see the strays being violently killed by human beings. See Liu, p. 167, for example. 62. For example, Liu once found the stray he names Beansprout behaved weirdly—she rushed to and forth in the alley, wandering restlessly in the rain without trying to find a shelter. Even though he cannot possibly give voice to the dog’s genuine subjective experience, he convinces the reader that the abnormal behavior results from the dog’s sense of frustration and the anxiety in her unconscious. See Liu, p. 47. It is his observation of her behavior that enables him to provide such a plausible explanation: According to Liu, Beansprout appears unsettled because another pet dog’s delivery completely occupies her owner. Unlike the pet dog pampered by her owner, Beansprout is a stray adopted later; as a latecomer, she is anxious that she will be ignored or even chased away since from now on her owner has to take care of the new born puppies. It is evident that for Liu, to imagine the animal’s desire or unconscious is by no means ridiculous. 63. Deleuze and Parnet, pp. 53-54. 64. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 53. 65. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 292. 66. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 2. 67. Baker, The Postmodern Animal, p. 104. 68. Liu, p. 98 and pp. 158-159. 69. Liu, p. 151. 70. Arluke and Sanders, p. 80. 71. John Andrew Fisher, « Anthropomorphism», in Marc Bekoff and Carron A. Meaney, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 70-71. 72. Disneyfication, for example, represents the negative version of anthropomorphism. In Disney movies, animal characters are often deformed to resemble humans and thereby to entertain the audience: “This is achieved by showing them with humanlike facial features (eyebrows, expressive lips) and altered forelimbs to resemble human hands.” See Slavoljub Milekic, « Disneyfication », Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, p. 133. 73. Fisher, p. 70. 74. Arluke and Sanders, p. 80. 75. Gordon M. Burghardt, « Critical Anthropomorphism », Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, p. 72. 76. Liu, p. 184. 77. Liu, p. 147. 78. Liu, p. 112 and p. 127. 79. Liu, p. 72, p. 152, and p. 172. 80. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 15. 81. Baker, « What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like? », p. 74. 82. Liu does not commit himself to animal rights campaign and has some reservations about the way the volunteer caregivers handle the problems of stray dogs. However, as he states in the afterword, the owners’ merciless abandonment of their pets and the barbaric act of stray culling

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make the following questions occupy the forefront of his mind: What are stray dogs thinking about? Don’t they have rights? How does a city treat its strays? See Liu, p.190. 83. As Deleuze claims, “[T]he aim, the finality of writing? Still way beyond a woman-becoming, a Negro-becoming, an animal-becoming, etc., beyond a minority-becoming, there is the final enterprise of the becoming-imperceptible.” See Deleuze and Parnet, p. 45. 84. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 279. 85. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 280. 86. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 279. 87. Baker, p. 80 and p. 86. 88. Colebrook, p. 136. 89. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 292, emphasis added. 90. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 36. 91. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 13, emphasis added. 92. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 15 and p. 36. 93. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 15. 94. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275. 95. Deleuze and Parnet, p. 75. Deleuze uses the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland as an example to reassert his contention that “man only becomes animal if the animal, for its part, becomes sound, colour, or line”: as Lewis Carroll indicates, “it is when the smile is without a cat that man can effectively become cat as soon as he smiles.” See Deleuze and Parnet, p. 73. 96. Baker, The Postmodern Animal, p. 119 and p. 125. 97. Deleuze and Guattari label domestic animals as “family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my dog’” and fault them for inviting us to regress and drawing us “into a narcissistic contemplation.” See Deleuze and Guattari, p. 240. 98. Liu, p. 149. 99. Baker, « What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like? », p. 68, p. 89, and p. 95. 100. Baker, p. 68. 101. Baker, p. 88. The animal-made mark, to name but a few, “may take the form of prints or urine stains left on an image by a bear or an elephant, or of chunks bitten of by a wolf or a shark, or may simply be the muddy trace of an anaconda that has moved across a painting.” See Baker, p. 88. 102. Baker, p. 88. 103. Baker, pp. 95-96. 104. Ronald Barthes, tr. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , London, Vintage Books, 2000, p. 96. 105. Barthes, p. 96. 106. Baker, p. 86 and p. 96. 107. Baker, p. 95. 108. Baker, p. 95. 109. See particularly Liu, pp.81-82 and p. 173. 110. Liu, p. 29. 111. Baker, p. 95. 112. Liu, pp. 78-79 and p. 89. 113. Arluke and Sanders, p. 67.

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ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I will use Ka-shiang Liu’s Hill of Stray Dogs as case in point to examine how he presents stray dogs’ behaviors, their language, and even their unconscious. I will engage with the questions as follows: is Liu’s animal writing in tune with the concept of becoming-animal which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari advocate? If for Deleuze and Guattari animals operate “more as a device of writing” than as living beings whose conditions of life are of direct concern to the writers,1 does Liu go beyond their limitation and succeed in “giving visible form to what is animal in the animal”?2 To put it another way, does Liu’s animal writing pave the way for human beings to see animals as what Jacques Derrida calls “the seeing other”? In short, this paper would seek to deal with the question concerning whether we human beings can ever let the animal-other speak without running the risk of anthropocentric ventriloquism.

AUTHOR

TSUNG-HUEI HUANG Associate Professor Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Taiwan University

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