Manufacturing Sectarian Divides Th E Chinese State, Identities, and Collective Violence Ƒ Patricia M
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— 9 — Manufacturing Sectarian Divides Th e Chinese State, Identities, and Collective Violence ƒ Patricia M. Th ornton In the predawn hours of 24 April 1999, an unusual group slowly began assem- bling before Zhongnanhai, the highly guarded and gated compound that houses the elite national leaders of the Chinese party-state. Appearing to arrive nearly simultaneously in small bands from all corners of Beijing, they silently congregated before the compound gates and formed a neat grid only a few blocks from famed Tiananmen Square, the site of the massive student demon- strations that had been brutally suppressed almost exactly ten years earlier. By noon, the crowd had swelled to over ten thousand and occupied at least three streets surrounding the perimeter of the compound, with most participants silently standing in meditation or reading the written works of Li Hongzhi, the venerated founder and leader of the quasi-Buddhist movement commonly known as Falun Gong (Practitioners or Cultivators of the Wheel of Law). Many of the participants had packed food and water to sustain them during their long vigil, and some even vowed to spend the night. Despite a week of unrest orchestrated by Falun Gong practitioners in nearby Tianjin, the Beijing police were caught off guard by the demonstration. Aft er stationing uniformed police offi cers every six meters around the perimeter of the protesters’ grid, police authorities took well over twelve hours to disperse the group. Most left voluntarily around 8:30pm aft er police threatened to herd them all onto eighty buses waiting behind the nearby Great Hall of the People. Opting instead for public transportation, they disappeared peacefully into the crowds on Beijing’s streets.1 Notes for this chapter are located on page 187. 172 | Patricia M. Th ornton Th e 24 April demonstration was striking for a number of reasons, includ- ing the size of the group, the silent and peaceful nature of the protest, and the strict discipline observed by the participants. During the protest, most of the petitioners refused to speak with nonparticipants; however, when a foreign reporter asked about their unusual organizational tactics, one par- ticipant purportedly responded: “We communicated by telephone and other networks from all over China, to gather here this morning” (Agence France- Press 1999). Several weeks later, when Master Li Hongzhi, the enigmatic founder and leader of the group, living in exile, was asked how the protestors had managed to pull off such a large-scale event without alerting Beijing’s formidable public security network, he confi rmed the importance of informa- tion technology to the group’s tactics: “You know, there is the Internet; they learned about it from the Internet.”2 Weeks later, Chinese party and state offi cials branded Falun Gong an “evil and heretical sect,” and outlawed the group’s meditative practices, the sale of Master Li’s writings, and any public display of the movement’s slogans or symbols. Th e organization’s assets were confi scated, its offi ces and practice sites—including 39 branches nationwide, 1,900 subunits, and some 23,000 places where it purportedly held gatherings—were sealed and placed under heavy police surveillance (O’Neill and Lam 1999). A March 2000 Amnesty International report on the crackdown noted that in the months that followed, tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were arbitrarily detained by police, some of them repeatedly, and put under extreme pressure to renounce their beliefs (Amnesty International 2000). Falun Gong sources based abroad claim that literally hundreds of practitioners in mainland China have been either tortured or beaten to death while imprisoned. More recently, evidence has surfaced that as many as six hundred practitioners are being held in spe- cially constructed psychiatric hospitals, collectively known as Ankang (Peace and Health) facilities administered and run by the Ministry of Public Security, diagnosed with highly dubious “mental illnesses” (Munro 2000). Not surpris- ingly, those who have spoken out publicly about the persecution of practitio- ners since the ban have suff ered harsh reprisals. Th e treatment of Falun Gong and otherqigong practitionerspractitioners byby ChineseChinese offioffi - cials raises several key questions about the nature of sectarian identity, social confl ict, and the modern nation-state. Th e consensus view in the scholarly literature is that modern states seek to broaden popular support and therefore the legitimacy of those in power by engaging in a variety of nation-build- ing activities, which are inclusive by design. Ethnic and sectarian tensions may become infl amed due to social dislocation, economic distress, or external pressures that undermine the allegiance of minority groups to the “imagined community” of the nation-state and threaten its continued survival by disen- twining its internal cohesiveness. According to this view, subnational ethnic, sectarian, and cultural acts of violence are primarily antimodern, antistate, and anticivic expressions of aberrant and primordialist rage. Manufacturing Sectarian Divides | 173 In this study, I adopt a diff erent approach. Instead of assuming the interests of state elites in building social unity and consensus, I argue that the roots of ethnic and sectarian confl ict lie in the foundation of physical violence that is part and parcel of the modern state-making process, which cordons off and claims specifi c strata of subject populations as legitimate targets for coer- cion and control. Th rough an analysis of Chinese legal documents and policy statements, I attempt to recover the elided history of exclusive nationalism and demonstrate that modern nation-states, when stripped of the pretense of civic inclusiveness, are at best little more than loosely organized machines of social violence that frequently resort to rituals of classifi cation, coercion, and compulsion to better control their subject populations. Yet as Falun Gong’s successful transition from spiritual group to outlawed cybersect shows, the information technologies that allow contemporary state offi cials to classify, surveil, and control their citizens can also be used by those same citizens to resist the incursions of the state. One key to the continued survival of groups accused of antistate agendas today may well be new information technolo- gies, such as the Internet, cellular phones, and instant text messaging systems, which aff ord such groups some ability to evade the traditional controls and coercive measures of the state. States and the Monopolization of Violence Th e imbrication of modern state building with overt expressions of violence has fi gured prominently in political and social science theory at least as far back as Max Weber, whose defi nition of the modern state is now axiomatic in the fi eld. It is “a compulsory political organization with continuous operations” in which an “administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” within “a given territorial area” (Weber 1978: 54). More recently, Charles Tilly has argued that modern nation-states are fi rst and foremost war machines. According to Tilly (1975, 1990), the bloody and brutal history of Western European state building involved, on the one hand, the elimination or subordination of internal political rivals and, on the other, the creation of diff erentiated, autonomous, centralized organizations designed to forcibly mobilize and extract resources for war. In the fi nal analysis, Tilly (1985) concludes, the modern nation-state resembles nothing so much as a far- fl ung protection racket, which extorts resources—sometimes violently—from its subject populations in the name of protecting them against presumably even more dire and violent exploitation at the hands of external enemies. Yet the protection provided in the name of citizenship is not extended to all who reside within the physical boundaries of the state. Rather, citizen- ship has most oft en been distributed on a preferential basis to the select few (Marx 2002: 106). As Bowman (2001: 31) has pointed out, the centralization of power inherent in the institutional architecture of the modern state strives 174 | Patricia M. Th ornton to “enclose an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ and exclude—oft times violently—others.” Th e some- times subtle distinctions between those included and those excluded from the nation’s “imagined community” have been shown by Hobsbawm and others to be deliberately constructed categories, oft en based upon invented traditions that serve the shift ing interests of those in positions of power at particular historical junctures (Hobsbawm 1983; cf. Berman 1998; Suny 2001). Partha Chatterjee has famously argued that the colonial state owes its existence as a modern regime of power in no small part to “the rule of colonial diff erence” based upon various socially constructed forms of exclusion tied to race, lan- guage, religion, class, and caste. Th e liberal-democratic ideology promulgated by the postcolonial Indian state was reinforced by an elaborate series of inter- nal boundary-drawing exercises, separating the public from the private, and acknowledging some diff erences while simultaneously suppressing others. Yet the modern nation’s proclaimed indiff erence to certain distinctions was “and continue[s] to be, overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the postcolo- nial state” (Chatterjee 1993: 10–11). If we presume, as much of the political science literature on state-led nation building does,3 that images of internal homogeneity and broad popular inclu- sion bolster domestic unity and therefore support for a regime, then why does modern nationalism so frequently resort to exclusivity? Anthony Marx pro- poses that exclusive nationalism may emerge when state elites attempt to strike bargains either to mend the slights and ruptures of the past or to avert threat- ened disunity among those viewed as members of a state’s core constituency. In the process of state making, central leaders have rarely faced unifi ed and internally homogeneous societies.