China Perspectives, 45 | January-February 2003 [Online], Online Since 31 July 2006, Connection on 04 October 2020

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China Perspectives

45 | january-february 2003 Varia

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/119 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.119 ISSN: 1996-4617

Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine

Printed version Date of publication: 1 February 2003 ISSN: 2070-3449

Electronic reference China Perspectives, 45 | january-february 2003 [Online], Online since 31 July 2006, connection on 04 October 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/119 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/chinaperspectives.119

This text was automatically generated on 4 October 2020.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Society

The New Middle Class in Peking: A Case Study Li Jian and Niu Xiaohan

Anthropology

Muslim Religious Education in China Élisabeth Allès

The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism The Current Situation and Future Prospects Nicolas Tournadre

Urbanism

Peking Between Modernisation and Preservation Aurore Merle and Peng Youjun

Literature

Women’s Writing in Present-Day China Jin Siyan

The Five Yuan Shi Shuqing

Book Reviews

Isabelle Thireau and Wang Hansheng eds, Disputes au village chinois. Formes du juste et recompositions locales des espaces normatifs (Disputes in a Chinese Village. Local Forms of Justice and Reconstructions of Normative Situations) Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, 2001, 342 pp. Gilles Guiheux

Philip C.C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China. The Qing and the Republic Compared Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, 246 pp. Vincent Goossaert

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Umberto Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism Taipei, Taipei Institute for Chinese Studies (Variétés Sinologiques New Series 90), IX + 652 pp. Léon Vandermeersch

Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, Éducation et politique en Chine : le rôle des élites du Jiangsu, 1905-1914 (Education and Politics in China—The Role of the Jiangsu Elite, 1905-1914) Paris, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2001, 438 pp. Marianne Bastid-Bruguière

Andrée Feillard ed., L’Islam en Asie, du Caucase à la Chine Paris, La documentation française, 2001, 248 pp. Rémi Castets

Feifei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu eds., Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 2002, 278 pp. Alain Roux

Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880 Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. xvii + 460 pp. Hardback. Peter Wesley-Smith

Grant Evans, Christopher Hutton, and Kuah Khun Eng (eds.), Where China Meets Southeast Asia, Social and Cultural Changes in the Border Regions Bangkok, White Lotus, Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000, 346 pp. Beatrice David

Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement. Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, University of California Press, 2002, 187pp. Rebecca Karni

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Society

China Perspectives, 45 | january-february 2003 4

The New Middle Class in Peking: A Case Study

Li Jian et Niu Xiaohan

1 The economic reforms of China since the 1980s have resulted in an increase of national wealth, changed the social and economic structure and created a social group that many observers call China’s “new rich”1. Some Western researchers have also identified this group as a “new middle class”2. However, the new rich and the new middle class are different social and economic groups in China. This article looks at the second of these, the new middle class, in Peking.

2 Our research shows that in the current period, there is indeed a new middle class in Peking. The generally accepted view in China is that the middle class has arisen from among the “new white-collar workers” in joint-venture and foreign-owned enterprises, the owners-operators of small and medium-sized private enterprises and individual entrepreneurs 3. In this article, we call these people the middle class “outside the system” (tizhiwai zhongchan jieji). Here “outside the system” means they work in the non-state-owned sector and do not have the fringe benefits provided by the state.

3 However in addition to the middle class “outside the system”, we have found through our research that there is a middle class “within the system” (tizhinei zhongchan jieji). They form the most influential group and the most stable elements of the new middle class in Peking. They work in state-owned work units and enjoy various fringe benefits provided by the state, such as cheap housing, virtually free health care and a pension plan. Through the housing reforms of recent years, many employees in the state-owned sectors became property owners. Overnight, they joined the ranks of the middle class. Without the state-controlled system, they would not have their socio-economic status and private assets. This group survives or falls within the system. For this reason, they are the strongest supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and its current political and economic system. Object and methodology of study 4 The earliest signs of the new middle class in China emerged in the big cities in the 1980s. Over the last twenty years, the economic reforms have not only created

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diversified forms of ownership and changed China’s industrial structure, they have also widened economic and income differences between urban and rural areas and between different regions and cities4. The economic level, industrial structure, development of diversified ownership and household income in Peking are different from those in other cities. These factors affect the composition of Peking’s new middle class.

5 However, the most distinctive feature of Peking, which has decisively affected the formation of Peking’s new middle class, is its peculiar position as China’s political and administrative centre. The new middle class “within the system” in Peking reflects the basic characteristics of China’s politics, economics and administration. They play a crucial role in the Party and government policy-making. These people either work in Party or government departments or have very close relations with these departments. They are currently using, and will increasingly use, their political power to protect their newly gained socio-economic status and the system that they rely on for their economic well-being. Studying the new middle class in Peking, both within and outside the system, can provide an important insight into understanding China’s present condition and predicting the country’s political, economic and social development in the future. In this sense, we can say that a thorough understanding of Peking’s middle class “within the system” is a key to understanding the country’s political and economic system in the current period.

6 In Peking many members of the middle class “outside the system” gained their socio- economic status not only because they had entrepreneurial ability and professional skills, but also because they could, to a great extent, access bureaucratic power and have special relations with the system. The government system generates a range of rights and benefits. These rights and benefits help the recipients to establish an extensive and often extremely profitable social network (guanxi wang). They are the particular social capital, or “organisational capital”5, that Peking’s new middle class both within and outside the system possess and use. The study of Peking’s new middle class will reveal the actual function of social capital in a country that is still under the control of the Communist Party.

7 This study is based on in-depth interviews conducted primarily between February and October 2000. Initially, we planned to use a questionnaire survey in order to be able to process large amounts of information. However, soon after we began the survey, we discovered that some questions, such as real household annual income, percentages of non-wage income in total income and how much tax to pay, were too “sensitive” for the respondents to answer. Therefore, we realised that we could not get reliable information and data and decided to abandon the survey and conduct in-depth interviews instead.

8 Before conducting interviews, we carefully determined who and how many people “within the system” and “outside the system” would be interviewed. We first interviewed a respondent to whom we knew his or her economic situation and income very well and took information that he or she told us as reference. Then we interviewed other people who work in the same sector or even in the same work unit. The references had turned out to be a very useful measure to test the information other respondents provided. In this way we not only interviewed a fairly adequate number of respondents, but also got more reliable and accurate information.

9 In total we interviewed 65 people in Peking, which resulted in some eighty hours of recorded tapes and videocassettes. The film shows face-to-face interviews, the living

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conditions of the middle class including their housing with its interior design, the working conditions, and other daily activities.

10 During the interviews, we found that the housing reforms of recent years provided us with an important measure to identify who are the new middle class in Peking. In this research, we will examine how the housing reforms enable employees “within the system” to become property owners and have enabled them to join the rank of the new middle class. Understanding the middle class 11 In the West, the concept of the middle class can be traced back to Aristotle. But theories of social class were fully elaborated in the nineteenth century. The most systematic theoretical framework for class is found in the Marxist and Weberian traditions. Within the Marxist tradition of class analysis, class divisions are defined primarily in terms of the link between property relations and exploitation. In a capitalist society, the form of exploitation exercised is based on property rights in relation to the means of production. These property rights generate three basic classes: the capitalist class, which owns the means of production and hires workers; the working class, which does not own the means of production and sells its labour to the capitalists; and the petty bourgeoisie—the middle class, which owns and uses the means of production without hiring others6.

12 Although many scholars have been working to find contrasts between Marx and Weber7, at least one thing is common to their conclusions: classes are economically determined. The control over economic resources is also central to the Weberian class analysis. In Economy and Society, Weber wrote, the class situation means the typical productivity of: 1. procuring goods; 2. gaining a position in life; and 3. finding inner satisfaction, a probability which derives from the relative control over goods and skills and from their income-producing uses within a given economic order.8 Weber’s class definition lends to it a certain continuity with Marx’s stress on property relations. Marx saw the middle class as auxiliary to the capitalist class.9 For Weber, the middle class came into being with the growing bureaucratisation of modern society and rationalisation of capitalist production10. While Marx focuses on the control of the means of production, Weber also insists on considering the different control over the methods of production in terms of “skill”.

13 In the 1950s, C Write Mills raised a concept of the new middle class in his book White Collar11. The new middle class is different from the independent and entrepreneurial old middle class. They include the middle managers and bureaucrats, the technocrats, professionals and service workers. They are basically salaried, conformist and entrepreneurial people. Since the emergence of the new middle class, the old middle class—the small business class—has not disappeared, but they have declined in relative numbers and influence.

14 In developed countries, such as the United States, most people think of themselves as middle class, whether shop assistants, cleaners, accountants or doctors. As long as they work for a living and do not depend on either social welfare or inherited wealth, they are likely to think of themselves as middle class. Although there are different definitions of middle class, there is a general understanding of what constitutes the middle class in the West. The middle class may include the middle and upper levels of clerical workers, people in technical and professional occupations, supervisors, businessmen and farmers.

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15 In China, views as to whether there is a middle class in China differ greatly. What are the features of the Chinese middle class; and who belongs to it? Many people, including scholars in China recognise the existence of the new rich created by the reforms. Researchers have carried out major studies of the disparity between the incomes of the urban rich and the urban poor12. However, Chinese scholars generally feel that there was no middle class in China in the 1990s. Li Peilin argues that only when white-collar workers account for 40% of the population [labour force], can there be a middle class in a society. According to this theory, as a majority of China’s labour force being still in the agricultural sector, and transferring them to the non-agricultural sector remaining a major task, there is no middle class in China13.

16 Li Qiang has studied the changes in the so-called social “intermediate stratum”(zhongchan jieceng) after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. He argues that from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, the “intermediate stratum” in Chinese society was mainly composed of ordinary officials, ordinary intellectuals and workers in the state-owned enterprises. After the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, this group lost their socio-economic status. According to him, in the 1990s, a new “intermediate stratum” emerged. These were young people in their 20s and 30s with a good education. They worked in joint ventures, foreign-owned enterprises, and in the newly emerging industrial sectors. This group came about as a result of changes in social and industrial structures. Although the group is still very small today, it is taking the place of the old “intermediate stratum”14.

17 Li Qiang does not use the concept of middle class to identify these young people in the social “intermediate stratum”. Instead he calls them an interest group (liyi qunti). According to him, class means that “integration of interest” (liyi zuhe) has been completed and the people in a class have relatively stable and similar material interests. Today, the interest structure (liyi jiegou) of Chinese society is changing rapidly. Various social interest groups are in the process of disorganisation and reintegration. Therefore, according to Li, class or social status are not appropriate concepts for describing the reality of China’s social landscape. In addition, he argues, before the economic reforms the concept of class had long been used indiscriminately within society. Chinese people had become tired of hearing about class and class analysis15.

18 In contrast with the academic view, a number of Chinese journalists have in recent years acknowledged the emergence of an urban middle class. They consider that the annual household income of the Chinese middle class ranges from US$10,000 - US$50,000 [83,000 - 415,000 yuan]. They are in the middle level of the society and political power structure and consist of non-manual labourers. They are white-collar workers. Because of their high incomes, they can copy and follow the lifestyle of the middle class in Western countries, especially their culture of consumption.16 These journalists firmly exclude Party and government officials from the Chinese middle class. According to them, though these officials may live in spacious apartments, they cannot have a middle class lifestyle and are struggling to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves17.

19 Among Western scholars, David S. G. Goodman has used the concept of the “new middle class” to describe the people who have power and wealth in China today. In particular he studied the new middle class in Shanxi province in the north-west. He divided them into three major categories: owner-operators; managers, including state capitalists,

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social capitalists and suburban executives; and service providers, including financial managers, business administrators, and lawyers. According to him, in 1997 a monthly income of 5,000 to 6,000 yuan was regarded as “well-off” in the more developed coastal areas of southern and eastern China. In the inland regions, 3,500 - 4,500 yuan could allow people a comfortable lifestyle18.

20 During our interviews we asked respondents if they felt there was a middle class in Peking and who belonged to this class. The responses varied. Some respondents regarded themselves without any doubt as belonging to a middle class. Others denied they belonged to the middle class, although their occupations and incomes fitted this distinction. Some respondents identified the middle class from a cultural perspective and system of values while others considered occupation and educational level important standards for middle class status. The majority of respondents however regarded household income as the most decisive factor.

21 A government research official told us of an allegory commonly heard in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It described ten groups of people in Chinese society19. Among them, the six and seventh groups were professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and actors, who could be regarded as the middle class. The eighth and ninth groups of people, teachers, researchers, and officials in less powerful Party and government departments, might be identified as a lower-middle class.

22 He added: “Between 1996-1998, many employees in state-owned enterprises were laid off, but new industrial sectors such as information technology were emerging in Peking. Employees in these newly emerging sectors are the middle class. Many of them graduated from good universities and earn 100,000 yuan a year. In addition, white- collar workers in joint venture and foreign enterprises and employees in some state- owned industrial monopolies also belong to the middle class”20.

23 A journalist with 18 years experience in reporting on enterprises and the economy told us: “Today, to own an apartment and have a car are the symbols of the middle class. But the middle class in China and the middle class in Western countries are very different. We often find many members of China’s middle class are less educated and have little sense of law. In a Western society, the middle class is the force behind social stability. But in China they are actually social “rebels”. The Chinese middle class is the cause of social instability. I think a true middle class should be representative of the mainstream system of values and the force of social stability. Household income cannot be the only standard for identifying the middle class”21.

24 An owner of a small private company that sells building materials told us: “In the last two years, my company’s annual net profit was more than 200,000 yuan. But I don’t dare to buy an apartment in Peking now. At present my urgent need is to buy a car. I cannot always take a taxi to go to meet my customers. If I buy a moderately sized car that can be used for my business, I will have to spend one year’s profit. My wife and daughter are still living in Guangdong. Although they don’t need me to send them money, I must save money for our daughter’s university education later, for unexpected health problems and for our retirement. You can say I am the middle class but I cannot be easy-going. In my opinion, the only standard for identifying class is money. In other words, how much money you have”22.

25 A senior manager in a private enterprise told us: “My household’s annual income was about 180,000 yuan in 1999. I think my family belongs to the middle class in Peking. But income is not the only standard for being a member of the middle class. A very

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important feature of the middle class is that they set high requirements for the quality of life they want. Now I am mostly concerned about how to improve the quality of life for my family”23.

26 A journalist in the Peking Television Station told us: “My annual income was 60,000 yuan and my husband earned 26,000 yuan in 1999. Compared to my colleagues, my income belongs to the upper-middle level. A few years ago, I came to Peking from another province and worked in several media-related work units. We don’t have an apartment assigned by the work unit and have to rent a private apartment. Since we began working in Peking we have been under financial pressure. My family is certainly not middle class”24.

Table 1 Market and System Housing Prices and Their Differences (Yuan)

Average price: 9,000 yuan. ** Average price: 7,500 yuan. ***Average price: 5,500 yuan.

27 A young pre-sales service manager in a private computer software company told us: “I can earn more than 10,000 yuan a month, which includes my wages, bonus and business travelling allowance. Compared to the people in my age group and with a similar educational level [three-year college graduate], I can be considered middle class. But in China, the people who really have money and also don’t need to work hard to make money are the officials. I used to work in a large Chinese insurance company. All division chief level officials’ housing in that company is worth one million yuan and above. With my income I could never think of buying an apartment like theirs. One’s occupation is the most important criterion to decide class”25.

28 To summarise, Chinese scholars generally deny there was a middle class in China in 1990s. Some scholars argue that the white-collar workers only made up a small percentage of the labour force. So China is far from being a middle-class society. Others acknowledge there has been an “intermediate stratum” since the 1950s. In the 1980s and the 1990s, a new intermediate stratum, which is mainly composed of young educated people, emerged. These young people are working in joint ventures, foreign enterprises and in some newly emerging industrial sectors. However, they don’t identify these people as middle-class.

29 Some young journalists and most of our respondents have acknowledged the emergence of a middle class in recent years. They regarded a family’s economic situation and income as the basic standards for identifying middle class status. According to them, the household income of the Peking middle class was 80,000 yuan and above in 2000. The symbols of the middle class are to have an apartment and a car. The Peking middle class consists of the new white-collar workers, employees in state

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industrial monopolies, and some professionals and private entrepreneurs. However journalists writing on this subject exclude Party and government officials from the Chinese middle class.

30 In our research we used the economic yardstick to identify a middle class. We found that there is indeed a middle class in China. In contrast to journalists’ conclusion that the Party and government officials are not the middle class, we discovered that many members of the new middle class are those who work in the Party and government organisations. They are today the most stable elements of the new middle class in Peking. Thanks to the recent housing reforms, the system helped them become owners of property and enabled them to become the middle class. Household income, housing reforms and the middle class in Peking 31 Level of household income is an important factor in identifying the middle classes. It is well-known that the true incomes of Peking households are very different from official statistics. Even the figures from government research institutes and the Bureau of Statistics on China’s urban income differ26. Many studies have been done on urban household income, but the figures in these studies remain inaccurate. Urban household income in China includes many items, such as wages, bonuses and various subsidies— housing, transportation, telecommunications, children’s education, free travel, and even subsidised lunches. Who can access these subsidies and how much an employee gains depends on the economic situation and administrative influence of his or her work unit. In recent years the income gained by some urban households from their assets has been rapidly increasing27. They include stock dividends, bank interest, bond yields and housing rents. In addition, many urban residents have second and third jobs earning a so-called “grey income (huise shouru)”. Some people also have a “black income (heise shouru)”, which comes from illegal economic activities. None of these incomes are transparent and can therefore not be easily calculated.

32 Being the owner of an apartment is an alternative way to define China’s middle class today. China’s housing reforms in the last two years provide us with an objective measure to study Peking household incomes and the new middle class. At the end of 1998, the Peking municipal government abolished the system of the administrative allotment of public housing (welfare housing) and implemented the system of commercialising housing allotments. This system involves replacing the government assignment of housing with an increase in employee incomes, establishing housing accumulation funds and encouraging employees in state-owned work units to buy commercial housing on the market28.

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Table 2 The Difference Between System Housing Prices and Market Housing Prices (1,000 yuan)

33 In 1998 the State Council set the regulations on living area for officials at every rank in the Party and government and for the same ranking personnel in state-owned work units29. According to this document, entitled No. 23, the living area for officials at bureau level (juji) and same ranking personnel is 120 square metres, 105 square metres for vice bureau level (fujuji) officials and same ranking personnel, 90 square metres and 80 square metres for division level (chuji) and vice division level (fuchuji) officials and same ranking personnel, 70 square metres for section level (keji) officials and same ranking personnel, and 60 square metres for ordinary employees who have worked for 25 years or more. According to these regulations, the money that an employee “within the system” (tizhinei guyuan) spends on buying housing should be four times the local average annual wage divided by sixty.

34 However, the real price of housing bought by employees within the system is very different from that stipulated by the regulations. The calculation of housing prices and the procedures for purchasing housing are very complicated. Some employees within the system paid considerably less than the standard price. Prices paid depend on many factors, such as the number of years in employment, an employee’s rank and the financial situation of his or her work unit. Some employees with the same official ranking but in different work units paid quite different prices when purchasing apartments of the same quality and in the same location. Even employees in the same work unit and of the same rank paid different prices for the same-sized apartments in the same building. A manager in a large state-owned trading company told us: “In this building [which was bought by his company and resold to the employees in the company], every family bought their apartments at different prices although some apartments are the same size, on the same floor, facing the same direction”30.

35 In our research we found that housing prices for employees within the system in Peking are generally 1,480 yuan per square metre (in this article we call this price “the system housing price” in order to distinguish it from the market housing price). This price is set by the Peking municipal government and is not available to employees

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“outside the system”. Because of different areas and the different quality of housing, the prices of housing in Peking vary greatly. But for employees within the system, no matter where the apartment buildings are located or the quality of the buildings, they generally only pay 1,480 yuan per square metre. Most residential buildings of Party and government departments, the state-owned companies, banks and institutions in Peking are within the fourth ring road or in the areas where housing prices have a great tendency to increase, such as the Zhongguancun area, popularly known as China’s Silicon Valley.

36 According to our investigation, in October 2000 market housing prices could be divided into three groups within the fourth ring road. The price of housing in the inner city (within the second ring road) ranged from 8,000 to 10,000 yuan and above per square metre. The price of housing between the second ring and third ring roads was from 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per square metre. The price of housing between the third ring and fourth ring roads was between 5,000 to 6,000 yuan per square metre. An article in the newspaper Jingpin gouwu zhinan (Shopping Guide), gives a detailed report on the commercial housing price in Peking. The average commercial housing prices within the fourth ring road is 5,000 yuan and above per square metre31. These figures clearly show the big difference between “the system housing price” (1,480 yuan) and the market housing prices (from 5,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan and above)— see Table 1.

37 After implementing the housing reform programme, the Peking housing market boomed. Many buyers of commercial housing were from Party and government departments and state-owned enterprises. In Chinese, this is called “group purchasing (jituan goumai)”. Zhongguo jianzhu bao (China Construction Daily) reported: “Some wealthy and powerful Party and government organisations, state institutions and enterprises use every means, using co-operative construction with employees as an excuse, to raise large sums of money to buy new housing at market prices. Then they resell these apartments to their employees at much cheaper prices”32. Group purchasing is the reason for the increase of housing prices in Peking.

38 In the purchase of housing, employees within the system only pay a small part of the money and their work units pay the rest. After these employees buy apartments from their work units, they not only have the right to live in the apartments, more importantly, they have property rights and become the owners of those apartments. Their right to use and own the apartments are acknowledged and protected by law. The huge amount paid by the work units to buy housing can be regarded as part of the employees’ income and those apartments become the employees’ personal assets. Through housing purchases, these employees within the system complete the transition from the proletariat to the new middle class overnight. In the case studies to follow, we will show how the housing reforms have effectively created a propertied class in Peking.

39 Compared to employees within the system, employees outside the system have to pay the full market price for purchasing housing. Here the difference between “the system housing price” and market housing prices can be regarded as expenditure of employees outside the system and income of employees within the system. People generally think that some individual workers, owners of private enterprises, and employees in joint- venture and foreign-owned enterprises are the winners of the reforms and the new middle class in Peking. However, our research finds that many members of the so- called new middle class cannot even afford to buy an apartment or at least cannot

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afford to buy a similar apartment, in terms of location and housing quality, that employees within the system are able to buy.

40 Here we can make a simple calculation of the income of employees within the system from their purchase of cheap housing. In order to understand their real income, we need not only calculate the current and absolute price difference between the system housing price and market housing prices, we also need to calculate the price difference after paying off a mortgage. The purchase of housing is a huge expense for most buyers, especially for employees outside the system. Now almost all of them buy their housing with mortgages.33

41 We take a 100-square-metre apartment at prices ranging from 10,000 yuan, 7,000 yuan, and 5,000 yuan per square metre as examples and compare the differences between system housing price and market housing prices. (See Table 2)

42 For buying a 100-square-metre apartment priced at 10,000 yuan, 7,000 yuan, or 5,000 yuan per square metre in one lump-sum payment, employees within the system will pay the same housing price—148,000 yuan. Employees outside the system will pay 1,000,000 yuan, 700,000 yuan and 500,000 yuan for buying them. Differences between the two system housing prices are 852,000 yuan, 552,000 yuan, and 352,000 yuan. The average difference is 585,000 yuan. That means that an employee outside the system has to pay an average of 585,000 yuan more than an employee within the system pays to buy a 100-square-metre apartment. For an employee within the system, this 585,000 yuan can be regarded as part of his income.

43 In reality, many employees within the system did not borrow money to buy housing due to low system housing prices. But many employees outside the system have to borrow money from financial institutions. To simplify the calculation, we suppose that all housing buyers, both employees within the system and outside the system, pay 30% downpayment and 70% with a 15-year mortgage.

44 To buy a 100-square-metre apartment, an employee within the system will pay 44,400 yuan (148,000 ÷ 0.3) downpayment and borrow 103,600 yuan. By the current mortgage interest of 5.58% (December 2000), interest paid on a 15-year mortgage is 49,562 yuan and principal and interest are 153,162 yuan. The total system housing price of a 100- square-metre apartment is 197,600 yuan (148,000 + 49,562).

45 If an employee outside the system buys a 100-square-metre apartment at a price of 10,000 yuan per square metre, the downpayment is 300,000 yuan and the mortgage 700,000 yuan. Interest paid on a 15-year mortgage is 334,900 yuan, and principal and interest are 1,034,900 yuan. The total housing price is 1,334,900 yuan. The difference between the housing price systems is 1,137,300 yuan. This means that an employee within the system can increase his household income by 75,800 yuan a year for the next 15 years (1,137,300 ÷ 15).

46 To buy a 100-square-metre apartment at a price of 7,000 yuan per square metre, an employee outside the system will pay 210,000 yuan as downpayment and take out a mortgage of 490,000 yuan. Interest paid on a 15-year mortgage is 234,400 yuan, and principal and interest are 724,400 yuan. The total housing price is 934,400 yuan. The difference between the two systems is 736,800 yuan. In comparison, an employee within the system can increase his household income by 49,100 yuan a year for the next 15 years.

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47 To buy a 100-square-metre apartment at a price of 5,000 yuan per square metre, an employee outside the system will pay 150,000 yuan as downpayment and take out a mortgage of 350,000 yuan. Interest paid on a 15-year mortgage is 167,000 yuan and the principal and interest are 517,000 yuan. Actual housing price is 667,000 yuan. The difference between the two systems is 469,400 yuan. The household income of an employee within the system can thus increase by 31,300 yuan a year for the next 15 years.

48 The average market housing price of a 100-square-metre apartment on 10,000 yuan, 7,000 yuan, and 5,000 yuan per square metre is 978,767 yuan after paying off a mortgage and the difference between the two systems is 781,167 yuan. If we divide 781,167 yuan by 15 (years), the annual household income of employees “within the system” will increase by 52,078 yuan over the next 15 years. Case studies 49 Several of our interviews help give a better understanding of the true income of employees within the system in terms of the following questions. How much did they receive from purchasing housing at system housing prices? And why should they be called the new middle class?

50 In the cases studies, we compared the different prices of two housing systems and calculated the housing income of employees “within the system” in Peking. Although some joint ventures, foreign-funded firms and even a few private enterprises give their employees housing subsidies, the subsidies are so tiny that they still have to take out big mortgages to buy housing at market prices.

51 In contrast to those high-income earners “outside the system”, almost all employees within the system bought housing by paying in one lump-sum because of the cheap price of “system housing”. These purchases have made these employees within the system a propertied class. If we look at their annual wages, however, they can appear to belong to the lower-income group. In 1998 the average annual wage of workers and staff in Peking was 12,285 yuan. The average wage of workers and staff in the state- owned sector was 11,971 yuan34. A 100-square-metre apartment at the market housing price of 5,000 yuan, 7,000 yuan and 10,000 yuan a square metre is, respectively, worth 41 years, 58 years and 83 years of the wages of an employee within the system. The prices of an apartment after paying off the mortgages are equivalent respectively to 54 years, 76 years and 108 years of the total wages of the same employees. From their income, it is possible to believe that they would never dream of becoming house owners, but they are. The government system has heavily subsidised their transformation into property owners and has made them the middle class within the system.

52 We also found that some employees within the system already owned two or even more apartments. By renting their spare housing, they can have two to five times more income than their annual wage. Employees “within the system” not only own apartments valued at tens of thousands yuan or even one million yuan and above, they also have relatively stable jobs and income. Their work units provide them free medical treatment and a pension plan. A white-collar worker in a foreign-funded enterprise told us: “Our wages have less value than the wages of officials. We have to spend much more to buy a low quality apartment in a worse area. We have to pay all our medical expenses, but their work units pay 90% or even 100% of their medical expenses. We

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have to save money for our retirement. They have the public pensions. One yuan is equivalent to 50 cents for us, but to 5 yuan for them”35.

Table 3 Respondents’ Personal Situations

*C: three-year? college graduate. U: four-year? university graduate. P: postgraduate.

53 A lawyer within the system told us: “My annual wage is 48,000 yuan but it is equal to 100,000 yuan for an employee outside the system. This 100-square-metre apartment cost me 100,000 yuan. They have to spend 800,000 yuan to buy it, or 60,000 yuan for one-year’s rent. The company gives me the use of a company car and also pays all the expenses for it, worth roughly 30,000 yuan a year. This car has become my own personal asset. The company pays me 10,000 yuan a year for telecommunications costs. Every year, I travel overseas several times because my company has a lot of international business. As you know, these are partly business trips and partly tourism at the public expense. If a private enterprise owner goes overseas for business, he has to travel at his own expense. If we count all of this income, my annual income is at least 100,000 yuan”36.

54 A survey on preferred choice of occupation, conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, gives support to our findings in another way. From July to August 1999, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted a questionnaire survey on 2,477 people aged 16 and above in 63 cities. The survey shows that although in recent years individual entrepreneurs, owners of private enterprises, employees in foreign and joint-venture enterprises and in entertainment are high profile and are regarded as high earners, occupations within the system are still preferred by most people, with government and Party officials being the first choice of position. Among 50 occupations, the top eight preferred posts are senior official in the Party and government, computer technician (first choice for 16 to 30 year-olds), official in

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industrial, commercial and taxation organisations, private entrepreneur, judge, lawyer, doctor and public procurator37. Among the top eight, six can be regarded as occupations “within the system”.

55 In studying China’s transition to a market economy, a number of scholars have carried out extensive studies on changes in income and rewards of redistributors (administrators) or producers (entrepreneurs, workers). Victor Nee has argued that the market transition reduced the rewards to former redistributors while the better educated, skilled workers, entrepreneurs and other people who are close to production have made greater gains38. Huang Yasheng finds that the income gap of government officials and enterprises employees rapidly widened in favour of producers in the 1980s39.

56 Some other researchers argue that administrators still hold strong bargaining power. With the lessening of central control, administrators and managers can obtain more benefits for themselves. These rewards were usually not in terms of fixed wages, but in housing and other fringe benefits40. Guthrie in his recent study found that producers close to the market and the most subject to intense competition are actually the least rewarded41.

57 The findings of our research show that by the late 1990s, employees “within the system” were generally the biggest winners from the reforms. As holders of political power and policy makers, they have obtained and will obtain more benefits than employees “outside the system” by creating policies and practices that are particularly advantageous for themselves.

58 THIS study shows that by early 2000 a middle class had emerged in Peking. Generally speaking, members of the middle class are white-collar workers, meaning mainly clerks, technical personal, middle-level mangers in joint ventures and foreign-owned enterprises and professionals in the newly emerging industrial sectors. With the rapid development of new industrial sectors and joint ventures and foreign-owned enterprises after the mid-1990s, the number of white-collar workers has been increasing. The middle class also includes owners of small and medium-sized private enterprises and some individual entrepreneurs. They are the elements of this class whose positions are not stable. The market transition and economic restructuring have had a significant impact on their lives. Some of these small private enterprise owners and individual entrepreneurs could become the new rich in a short time, while others may fall back into their original low-income socio-economic groups. The rapid changes in their economic and social status reflect the speed of the transformation of China’s economy and society.

59 In contrast to the ordinary idea that the middle class is mainly composed of the above group of people, our study finds that a majority of this class in Peking are employees within the system. They are the most stable elements of this class. A basic characteristic of the middle class within the system is that they stick to and strongly support the system. Without the system, they would lose the source of their interests and privileges. They survive or fall with the system. Therefore, they rely on the system and the political situation remaining stable. In our research, we found that even laid- off employees from Party and government sectors are entitled to benefits from the system. For example, in streamlining some Party and government organisations in 1998, laid-off employees in these departments were allowed to choose to work in profit- making companies still operating under their former departments and they could still

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live in and later buy their current housing. Some laid-off employees were given the opportunity to attend China’s best universities to study useful majors, with their work units paying for their tuition. It is the CCP-controlled system which has created this new middle class. Hence we believe the members of this new middle class “within the system” will use all their means to support the CCP system to protect their new situation.

Table 4 Differences Between System Housing Prices and Market Housing Prices and Household Income (1,000 yuan)

60 The middle class within the system also have a crucial influence on government policy- making. Through the housing reforms they became property owners in a very short time. Now they are not only Party and government officials and policy-makers, but also property owners and members of the new middle class. Their new socio-economic status will have a great impact on China’s political, social and economic development. They are willing to make use of their power to protect existing interests and seek more for themselves. The process of policy-making in the Party and government is that employees at the section level write policy proposals, which they report to division and bureau level officials, and which are finally approved by the relevant government ministry to become formal policy. In recent years many officials at the division and section levels have become part of the new middle class. They have formed common economic interests with the continuance of the current system. Protecting their private assets, the people who have the same economic interests, and the system that they rely on for their livelihoods are likely to become the first and most decisive factor when they make policy. We will examine the influence of the middle class “within the system” on policy-making in future research.

61 This study actually shows that inequalities between employees within the system and employees outside the system have further increased under the housing reforms. Even

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within the system the inequalities between employees in the state-monopolistic industrial sector or those sectors with a better economic performance and employees in other state sectors are also increasing. As society becomes increasingly unequal, this is likely to be the cause of much social and political instability.

62 This research has been kindly supported by the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies of Lund University, Sweden. We would like to thank Mia Turner, David S. G. Goodman, Michael Schoenhals, Anne-Marie Brady and Guo Xiaolin for extensive comments on earlier drafts. We would especially like to thank anonymous respondents for offering us valuable information. Case No. 1 (Interview No. 20, 2000) 63 Husband, 46 years old, four-year university graduate (1), Party member and division rank official in a government ministry, with an annual cash income of 24,000 yuan (2). Wife, 44 years old, three-year college graduate, Party member, a section level clerk in a state bank, with an annual cash income of 60,000 yuan. They have a son at junior high school.

64 They own two apartments. They bought the first apartment within the third ring road for 20,000 yuan. It is worth 200,000 yuan in the Peking housing market. In 1999, they spent a lump-sum payment of 148,000 yuan buying a new 100-square-metre high quality apartment from the ministry that employs the husband. The apartment building is located near the south-eastern second ring road, a central location where many foreign enterprises are based. His work unit bought 120 apartments in this housing area, only for officials of division rank and above, at the market price of 10,000 yuan per square metre, then resold these apartments to their own staff at the system housing price.

65 The wife told us: “After fitting out the apartment, we are going to rent the new apartment to foreign professionals who will be working in China for extended periods. The rent we will ask is less than that for government-built apartments for foreigners. And our apartment is in better condition. We think that foreigners have a sense of the law and will not damage the apartment. If they can help our son to learn English, we can even lower the rent.” She estimates that she will get a rent of 70,000 yuan a year and can save rental income for their son to study overseas later on.

66 The difference between the two system housing prices for this family is 75,800 yuan per year. Adding “system housing income” into their household income, their annual income becomes 171,800 yuan (without considering the husband’s overseas earnings). If they receive 60,000 yuan as rental income, their total annual income will be 219,800 yuan. (See Table 4) 1. In the following cases, all respondents have a college and above educational level. This is because from the mid-1980s only people with college and above educational levels were permitted to work in the Party and government organisations, state-owned institutions and universities. For employees without such an educational level, their work units created various opportunities to help them to obtain a university certiﬁcate or a degree. 2. He often works in an overseas ofﬁce that is run by his ministry. When he works overseas he earns two wages. His income in China is 24,000 yuan.

Case No. 2 (Interview 14, 2000)

67 Husband, 44 years old, four-year university graduate, Party member and division rank officer in a ministry research institute, with an annual cash income of 60,000 yuan (including salary, transportation and telecommunications subsidies). Wife, 45 years old,

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three-year college graduate, working in a private enterprise, with an annual cash income of 36,000 yuan. Their daughter is a senior high school student.

68 They own a 60-square-metre apartment in the ministry’s living quarters, three kilometres away from Peking’s Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun. They bought this apartment for 30,000 yuan. Because their current living area does not reach division rank officer entitlement, the husband can buy a new 100-square-metre apartment at “the system housing price”. But he has to sell the present apartment to the institute for less than 20,000 yuan. At the time of the interview, his work unit had not yet decided where it would buy the new apartment buildings. But the market price of new apartments in the area that the ministry was considering to buy was at least 5,000 yuan per square metre. We calculate that if his new apartment at a price of 5,000 yuan per square metre, the difference between the market price and the system price is 46,9800 yuan after paying off the mortgage. Their household income for the next 15 years will increase 31,300 yuan each year and the total annual household income will be 127,300 yuan. Case No. 3 (Interview No. 17, 2000) 69 Husband, 58 years old, four-year? university graduate, chief editor of a government ministry publishing house, with an annual cash income of 36,000 yuan. Wife, 58 years old, Party member, vice chief editor at a state-owned publishing house, with an annual cash income of 48,000 yuan. They have two sons. Both of them have a university degree and are economically independent.

70 The couple bought a 120-square-metre apartment for less than 100,000 yuan a few years ago. Recently, they bought a 120-square-metre new apartment at the system housing price without a mortgage. The market price of this apartment is 840,000 yuan. In compliance with regulations, they must sell their old apartment to the husband’s work unit at a price of less than 100,000 yuan. The difference between the market price and the system price of his new apartment is 923,700 yuan, calculating in a mortgage. The annual “system housing income” for this family is 61,580 yuan and their annual household income is 145,580 yuan.

71 Both the husband and wife have company cars with drivers. The annual expenses on maintaining a car in Peking are approximately 24,000 yuan (including petrol, registration and maintaining fees). If we add car subsides into their income, their annual household income will be almost 200,000 yuan. Case No. 4 (Interview No. 23, 2000) 72 Husband, 46 years old, four-year university graduate, an engineer in a state-owned computer factory, with an annual cash income of 36,000 yuan. Wife 44 years old, Party member and editor in a university publishing house, with an annual cash income of 30,000 yuan.

73 They have two apartments. One is on a university campus and the other is near the Zhongguancun area. The two apartments cost them a total of 50,000 yuan. On the housing market, the two apartments are valued at 400,000 yuan. The difference between the market price and the price they paid is 350,000 yuan. This will increase their annual household income by 23,300 yuan for the next 15 years. Currently they live in the apartment in the university and intend to rent out the other apartment. Annual rent will be 24,000 yuan. After renting the apartment their total annual household income will be about 113,300 yuan.

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74 They have a son studying at the university’s junior high school, a prestigious one in Peking. Because the wife works at the university’s publishing house, they do not pay “zanzhu fei (donations)” (1) to the school. Parents who do not work at the university have to pay 100,000 yuan for their child to study in the university’s junior or senior high school. The wife said: “The proportion of students entering university from this school is very high. Even if parents are willing to make the 100,000 yuan donations, their children cannot be accepted by the school because there are no vacancies. I work in the university so we do not need to give 200,000 yuan in donations. In other words, I earn 200,000 yuan compared to other parents. In addition, we live on the university campus and don’t need to pay for school accommodation for my son. Many parents have to spend 43,000 yuan a year for their children’s accommodation in the school. I think of this also as family income for us.”

75 Calculating this family’s real income, including salary, “system housing income”, rent and child education subsidies, their annual household income will be over 140,000 yuan.

76 In our investigation, we found that children’s education is the second largest household expenditure in Peking. Many parents want their children to study in good schools so that they can have a better chance of passing the university examination and have a better future. The educational quality of universities and some ministries’ primary and junior high schools is generally better than others. If parents work in those universities and ministries, they can save a lot of money from not having to give donations to the schools. But other parents who do not work in the universities and ministries have to pay such “donations” in addition to tuition. 1. Zanzhu fei is a disguised form of school fees, which those parents whose children are not qualiﬁed to attend certain highly-regarded schools are “invited” to pay.

Case No. 5 (Interview No. 10, 2000)

77 Husband, 45 years old, four-year university graduate, Party member, and middle level manager in a state-owned company, with a cash income of 120,000 yuan in 1999. Wife, 43 years old, four-year university graduate, a journalist in a government ministry newspaper, with an annual cash income of 36,000 yuan in 1999. They have a daughter studying at senior high school.

78 They have two apartments. In 1997, they spent 20,000 yuan to buy their first apartment from the husband’s work unit. In 1999, they spent 30,000 yuan to buy an apartment from the wife’s work unit. On the housing market, the two apartments are valued at 400,000 yuan. As in case 4, this family’s annual income will increase by 23,300 yuan over the next 15 years. They are planning to rent the recently bought apartment at an annual fee of 24,000 yuan. Now their annual cash income is about 159,300 yuan. Adding system housing income and rental income, they will have an annual income of 203,300 yuan (156,000 + 23,300 + 24,000). Case No. 6 (Interview No. 25, 2000) 79 Husband 45 years old, three-year? college graduate, Party member and vice division rank officer in a state-owned factory, with an annual cash income of 36,000 yuan. Wife, 45 years old, three-year college graduate, Party member and primary school teacher, with an annual cash income of 30,000 yuan. They have a son studying at a college.

80 In 1999 they bought a 90-square-metre apartment from the husband’s work unit for 90,000 yuan. It is located on the northern third ring road. The market price for the

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same apartment in that area are 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per square metre. If we calculate their apartment at 7,000 yuan per square metre, the difference between the two housing system prices is 663,200 yuan. Dividing it by 15 (years) and add it into their household income, their annual household income will increase by 44,200 yuan for the next 15 years. The total annual income for this family is 110,200 yuan. Case No. 7 (Interview No. 15, 2000) 81 Husband, 38 years old, four-year university graduate, senior editor in a financial newspaper with an annual cash income of 60,000 yuan. Wife, 42 years old, postgraduate, and senior manager in a private enterprise, with an annual income of 120,000 yuan. They have a three-year-old son.

82 The couple has two apartments. A few years ago, they bought an apartment for 20,000 yuan from the wife’s former work unit, a large newspaper. The price of this apartment on the housing market is now 150,000 yuan. The second apartment is a 120-square- metre apartment in Huilongguan residential area, outside the fourth ring road. The journey time from home to work in the city and home again is three hours on public transport. This residential area is the Peking municipal government’s model housing area for economic and practical housing (jingji shiyong fang). The government makes no profits from building and selling these apartments. Even in such situations, the price per square metre was 2,600 yuan when they bought it in 1999 (in 2000 the price per square metre rose to 3,000 yuan). They paid 50% of the total price and borrowed 50% from a bank as a ten-year mortgage. The annual principal and interest are 20,000 yuan. After adding the “system housing income” and deducting mortgage payments, their household income is around 190,000 yuan.

83 The wife’s wage can be regarded as high in Peking, but she feels she does not have job stability. She told us: “My income is good, but I have to work very hard and have always to be careful. My job is not very stable. From the day I started work in this company, I told myself I must keep this job for six months. I have worked in this company for almost three years but still I tell myself that this job could be only for the next six months.” Case No. 8 (Interview No. 7, 2000) 84 Husband, 36 years old, four-year university graduate, Party member, owner of a private enterprise. Before entering the business world, he was a vice-division level official in a bureau of the Peking municipal government. He left his work unit in 1993 to start his own business. From 1993 to 1996, his company did not make profits. In 1997, the company made some money. In 1998 and 1999, the company’s net profit was around 300,000 yuan. Wife, 31 years old, from 1992 to the end of 1999 worked in a semi-state- owned enterprise (1). She first worked as software designer and in 1995 was appointed manager of one of the company’s retail outlets in Zhongguancun. From 1995 to 1999, her average annual income was about 150,000 yuan. In late 1999, her retail outlet was pulled down because of developments in Zhongguancun area and she lost her job. From 2000 she started work in her husband’s company. They do not have a child.

85 After they married in 1993 they lived in a 17-square-metre room in a courtyard building. In late 1997 they bought a 90-square-metre apartment in the Wangjing residential area outside the fourth ring road, at 4,500 yuan a square metre. At that time, housing buyers could not take out a mortgage and they paid 395,000 yuan in one lump- sum payment to buy the apartment. When we interviewed them, they were looking for a 200-square-metre residential and commercial apartment, priced about 9,000 yuan per

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square metre, near the eastern third ring road. They were planning to borrow 70% of the price with a mortgage and will use the new apartment for their business and also to live in. With the expansion of the husband’s business, they need to have a better- looking office, which must be near the business area so they can meet clients. After they buy the new apartment, in order to cut the company’s expenses they will sell the present apartment and cancel a lease for renting the present office space. 1. The company she worked at was founded by two brothers as a private enterprise. Because its major business was in the telecommunication area, which is the state-monopolised sector, the company had to ﬁnd a state-owned company as its sponsor. But it is a state-owned company in name only and actually privately-owned and run.

Case No. 9 (Interview No. 1, 2000)

86 Husband, 33 years old, four-year university graduate, marketing manager in a small foreign-owned company, with an annual cash income of 100,000 yuan. Wife, 33 years old, Party member, four-year university graduate, manager for a small foreign-owned company (1), with an annual cash income of 60,000 yuan. They do not have a child.

87 The husband and wife used to work in two different state-owned enterprises. Because the husband’s enterprise lost money and he was very badly paid, he decided to “retire” at the age of 25. He was allowed to do this according to the factory’s own policy, which was called “neibu tuixiu” (The employees in the factory could retire before the legal retirement age because the factory wanted to reduce a number of workers and staff). As a “nei tui” employee, he would receive a small amount of money every month and could enjoy some of the benefits for employees of state-owned enterprises, including living in company housing. In 1999, the enterprise sold him a new 65-square-metre apartment priced at 90,000 yuan. The apartment building is located within the northern section of the third ring road. The market price of that apartment is 6,500 yuan per square metre. His home is valued at 422,500 yuan on the market. The difference in the two system housing prices is 425,700 yuan after paying off the mortgage. This will increase their household income by 29,000 yuan per year for the next 15 years.

88 After he bought the apartment, the factory was also sold to a private real estate developer. Now he has become a true employee “outside the system” and is no longer entitled to benefits from the system. The husband told us: “Although our income is not low, our jobs are not stable because the companies are very small. My company has less than twenty employees and my wife’s company has only eight employees. At the moment we are young and do not have a child. But we must save money for many expected and unexpected things, such as raising and educating a child, sickness, and even accidents. We are no longer employees “within the system” and nobody will take care of us except ourselves.” 1. The owners of both the husband and wife’s companies are overseas Chinese. They left China in the 1980s but returned to start their business in the mid-1990s.

Case No. 10 (Interview No. 38, 2000)

89 A single female clerk, 28 years old, four-year university graduate, working at a foreign media company and also working for a foreign marketing research company on a project-by-project basis.

90 Her annual income was US$18,000 in 1999. Because the company does not give her health insurance and a pension plan, she has to buy them herself. Now she lives with her parents and has not yet considered buying her own apartment. When we asked why

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she was not going to buy an apartment, she told us: “It looks like my income is not bad. Among my university classmates, my income belongs to the group of the highest income earners. But I don’t have any feeling of job security. Except for the salary, the company doesn’t pay anything for me. If one day I lost this job, I don’t know what sort of job I could find and when, so I must save money. Buying an apartment by myself is totally beyond my plans at least for the next few years”.

NOTES

1. See Li Peilin (ed.), Zhongguo xinshiqi jieji jieceng baogao (Class and Status in a New Period in China), Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1995. Ren Caifang and Cheng Xuebin, “Chengshi jumin shouru bu pingdeng yianjiu” (“Studying Disparity of Urban Residents’ Income”), Jingji yanjiu cankao (Reference of Economic Research) No. 157, 1996. David S. G. Goodman, “The People’s Republic of China: The party-state, capitalist revolution and new entrepreneurs,” in Richard Robison, David S. Goodman (ed.), New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle-Class Revolution, London and New York: Routledge 1996. Yang Yiyong, Gongping yu xiaolv: Dangdai Zhongguo shouru feipei wenti (Equality and Efficiency: Issues on Income and Distribution in China), Peking: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1997. He Qinglian, Xiandaihua de xianjing: Dangdai Zhongguo de jingji shehui wenti (The Trap of Modernization: Social and Economic Problems of Contemporary China), Peking: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1998. Zhao Renwei, Li Shi, Carl Riskin (ed.), Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zai yanjiu (Restudy of the Income Distribution of China Residents), Peking: Zhongguo caizhen jingji chubanshe, 1999. Fan Xinmin, Dushi Liehen (Urban Cracks), Jingji ribao chubanshe, 2000. Li Qiang, Shehui fenceng yu pinfu chabie (Social Stratification and Disparity between the Rich and Poor), Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2000. 2. David S. G. Goodman, “The New Middle Class”, in Merle Goldman, Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 241-261. 3. According to The Provisional Regulations of Private Enterprises of the People’s Republic of China, promulgated in June 1988, a private enterprise refers to an economic organ that makes profit and employs more than eight workers. An individual entrepreneur refers to a person who hires less than eight workers. 4. Zhao Renwei, Li Shi, “Zhongguo jumin shouru chaju de kuoda jiqi yuanyin” (“The Increase in the Widening Income Gap of Chinese Citizens and Reasons”) and John Knight, Li Shi, Zhao Renwei, “Zhongguo chengzheng gongzi he shouru chayi de quyu fenxi” (“A Regional Analysis of Differences in Urban Incomes in China”), in Zhao Renwei, Li Shi, Carl Riskin (ed.), Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zai yanjiu (Further Analysis on the Income Distribution on China Residents), Peking: Zhongguo caizhen jingji chubanshe, 1999, pp. 47-67, pp. 253-289. 5. Erik Olin Wright, Classes, London: Verson, 1985, p. 80. 6. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis, Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 17.

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7. Val. Burris, “The Neo-Marxist Synthesis of Marx and Weber on Class,” in N. Wiley (ed.) The Marx-Weber Debate, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987. Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Erik Olin Wright, Class Structure and Income Determination, New York: Academic Press, 1979. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 8. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols., G. Roth and C. Wittich (ed.), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, p. 302. 9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, New York: International, 1972, pp. 35-63. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, New York: International, 1973, pp. 290-301. 10. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Talcott Parsons (ed.), New York: Free Press, 1964, pp. 424-29. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. 2, G. Roth and C. Wittich (ed.), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, p. 302. 11. C. Wright Mills, White Collar, New York, Oxford University Press, 1956. 12. In recent years, there have been many studies on the income of China’s new rich and the disparity of the urban rich and the urban poor. See Li Peilin (ed.), Zhongguo xinshiqi jieji jieceng baogao (Class and Status in a New Period in China), Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1995. Ren Caifang and Cheng Xuebin, “Chengshi jumin shouru bu pingdeng yianjiu” (“Studying Disparity of Urban Residents’ Income”), Jingji yanjiu cankao (Reference of Economic Research) No. 157, 1996. Yang Yiyong, Gongping yu xiaolv: Dangdai Zhongguo shouru feipei wenti (Equality and Efficiency: Issues on Income and Distribution in China), Peking: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1997. Zhu Qinfang, “Chengzheng pinkun renkou de tedian, pinkun yuanyin he jiekun duice” (“Causes and Characteristics of the Urban Poor and Countermeasures”), Shehui kexue yanjiu (Research in Social Sciences), No. 1, 1998. Zhao Renwei, Li Shi, Carl Riskin (ed.), Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zai yanjiu (New Study on the Income Distribution of China Residents), Peking: Zhongguo caizhen jingji chubanshe, 1999. Li Qiang, Shehui fenceng yu pinfu chabie (Social Stratification and Disparity between the Rich and Poor), Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2000. 13. Li Peilin (ed.), Zhongguo xinshiqi jieji jieceng baogao (Class and Status in a New Period in China), Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1995, pp. 37-40. 14. Li Qiang, “Shichang zhuanxing yu Zhongguo zhongjian jieceng de daiji gengti”(“Market Transition and Replacement of Social Intermediate Stratum”), Zhanlv yu guanli (Strategy and Management), No. 34, 1999, pp. 35-44. 15. Li Qiang, Shehui fenceng yu pinfu chabie (Social Stratification and Disparity between the Rich and Poor), Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 2000, pp. 82-104. 16. Yin Yiping, Gaoji hui (Elegant Grey), Peking: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1999, pp. 278-80. Shi Tao, “Shuishi zhongchan jieji” (“Who is the Middle Class”), Shishang zazhi (Vogue Magazine), see http: 77fashion.sohu.com7frends799217frends9910-46.html 17. Yin Yiping, Gaoji hui (Elegant Grey), Peking: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1999, p. 280. 18. David S. G. Goodman, “The New Middle Class”, in Merle Goldman, Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 248-261. 19. It goes: “Yi lei ren shi gongpu, gao gao zai shang xiang qingfu; er lei ren zuo guandao, touji daoba you ren bao; san lei ren gao chengbao, chi he piao du quan

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baoxiao; si lei ren lai zulin, zuo zai jiali na lirun; wu lei ren da gai mao, chi le yuangao chi beigao. Liu lei ren shoushu dao, yao li chuaiman hong zhibao; qi lei ren dang yanyuan, niu niu pigu jiu zhuanqian; ba lei ren gao xuanchuan, ge san cha wu jie ge chan: jiu lei ren wei jiaoyuan, shan zhen hai wei ren bu quan; shi lei ren zhuren wong, lao lao shi shi xue Lei Feng.”(The first group is public servants. They are prominent persons who live comfortably. The second group is bureaucratic profiteers, who can make money illicitly under the protection of powerful officials in the government. The third group is contractors of state and collective enterprises. The enterprises pay for these contractors who frequent brothels, gambling casinos and bars. The fourth group of people make money by renting their housing to the people who do business. The fifth group is the people who wear “big lip caps” – policemen, judges and public procurators. They may receive bribes from both the defendants and prosecutors. The sixth group is surgeons who may get money from patients as gifts. The seventh group is performers who can make money by singing and dancing. The eighth group is the people who work in the Party propaganda department. Their craving for good food is occasionally satisfied. The ninth group is teachers. They have no opportunity to taste such delicacies. The tenth group is ordinary people. All they can do is learn from the model soldier Lei Feng.) This reflects the resentment of many people of the existing social inequality and corruption. 20. See Case No. 2, Interview No. 14, 2000. 21. Interview No. 9, 2000. 22. Interview No. 5, 2000. 23. See Case No. 7, Interview No. 15, 2000. 24. Interview No. 46, 2000. 25. Interview No. 3, 2000. 26. Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, “Income and Inequality in China: Composition, Distribution and Growth of Household Income 1988 to 1995”, China Quarterly, No. 154, June 1998, p. 231. 27. Li Shi, Wei Zhong, B. Gustaffsson, “Zhongguo chengzheng jumin de caichan fenpei” (“Distribution of Assets of China’s Urban Residents”), Jingji yanjiu (Research of Economy) No. 3, 2000, pp. 16-23. 28. See Guowuyuan guanyu jin yi bu shenhua chengzheng zhufang zhidu gaige jiakuai zhufang jianshe de tongzhi (The Circular of the State Council on Deepening the Reform of Urban Housing System and Speeding Up Construction of Residential Housing), State Council Document No. 23, 1998, issued on July 3rd 1998 and Zaijing zhongyang he guojia jiguan jin yi bu shenhua zhufang zhidu gaige shishi fangan (Plane for Implementing Housing Reform of Central Party Organs and Central Government Organs in Peking), endorsed by the general office of the Central Party Committee and the General Office of the State Council on August 16th 1999. 29. In China not only Party and government organisations and the people who work in these organisations have administrative rank, but also other state-owned work units and their employees enjoy corresponding rank. For example, most universities and some hospitals are ranked at the bureau level. Although people work in these universities and hospitals as professors and doctors, they can have the same size living space and other fringe benefits like corresponding rank officials in the Party and government organisations. 30. Interview No. 43, 2000. 31. Liu Guoning, Jingpin gouwu zhinan (Shopping Guide), see

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http//www.sinoi.com/realestate/bin/RS_Mar_H/RS_ar_H.asp?path=/realestate/RS_Mar_H/ 3808.htm 32. Xie Haoran, Zhongguo jianzhubao (China Construction Daily,) see http/www.sinoi.com/realestate/binIRS_Media/RS_Media.asp?=/realestate/RS_Media/3734.htm 33. Statistics of the People’s Bank of China show that housing and consumption loans from financial organisations increased 194.9 billion yuan from January to October 2000, 124.6 billion yuan more compared to the same period in 1999. It accounted for 41% of the total loans of these financial organisations. Forty percent of this 194.9 billion yuan was housing loans. According to a report in Beijing Chenbao (Peking Morning Post), 80% of individual consumption loans are borrowed for house-buying. (Fan Ji, Peking Morning Post, see http/www.sinoi.com/realestate/binIRS_Media/RS_Media.asp?=/realestate/RS_Media/3690.htm) In 2000 the Centre of Economic Monitoring of the China Statistical Bureau and MasterCard International conducted an investigation on loans to 2,100 citizens in seven big cities, including Peking, Shanghai and Guangzhou last year. The investigation shows that loans for housing, education, car, and medical service respectively account for 74.8%, 10%, 9.2% and 2.5%. (November 14th 2000, Xinhua News Agency) 34. Beijing Statistical Yearbook 1999, China Statistical Publishing Housing, 1999, p. 102. 35. See Case No. 3, Interview No. 17, 2000 36. Interview No. 55, 2000. 37. Xu Xinxin, “Maixiang 21 shiji de Zhongguo zhiye shengwang yu shimin zeye quxiang” (“Target Occupations and Employment in China in the 21st Century”), in Ru Xin, Lu Xueyi, and Lu Jianhua (eds) 2000 nian: Zhongguo shehui xingshi fenxi yu yuce (2000: Analysis of China’s Social Situation and Prediction), Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2000, pp. 19-39. 38. Victor Nee, “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets in State Socialism.” American Sociological Review, 1989, 54, pp. 663-681. “Organizational Dynamics of Market Transition: Hybrid Forms, Property Rights, and Mixed Economy in China.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1992, 37, pp. 1-27. “The Emergence of a Market Society”, American Journal of Sociology, 1996, 101, pp. 908-949. 39. Yasheng Huang, “Economic Bureaucracies and Enterprises During Reforms.” China Quarterly, No. 123, 1990, September, pp. 431-458. 40. John R. Logan and Yanjie Bian, “Inequalities in Access to Community Resources in China City.” Social Forces, 1993, 72(2), pp. 555-576. Yanjie Bian, Work and Inequality in Urban China, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Yanjie Bian and John R. Logan, “Market Transition and the Persistence of Power: The Changing Stratification System in Urban China”, American Sociological Review, 1996, 61, pp. 739-758. 41. Douglas Guthrie, Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: Foreign Investment, Regional Bureaucracies, and Market Reform in China, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

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Anthropology

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Muslim Religious Education in China

Élisabeth Allès

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Michael Black

1 Despite their diversity, China’s Muslims1 have been engaged for twenty years in a process of reaffirmation of their religion and identity2: construction and renovation of mosques, dissemination of information on Islam in the world, translation of religious texts, etc3. As is the case in the rest of the Muslim world, their efforts have also been aimed at the field of education. At first, in the early 1980s, education was restricted to the mosque schools, but quickly, through individual or collective initiatives, both local and provincial, a number of private Arabic or Sino-Arabic schools, as well as many institutes, have opened all over the country. During the surveys we carried out in 2000 and 2002 in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Henan, Yunnan and in Hainan, we were able to observe the extraordinary growth of this Muslim teaching4.

2 Muslim religious leaders in China have always complained of their co-religionists’ lack of religious knowledge: the flowering of schools does indeed answer a desire for education but also corresponds to the need to maintain and keep alive the Muslim religion among the faithful dispersed in the Chinese world, on whom twenty years of repression5 of all public religious activity have left their mark. Moreover, in the framework of the policy of reforms carried out in the field of education6 for over ten years (decisions taken in 1985 and 1993) which led to the decentralisation and privatisation of education, the objective of these Muslim initiatives is to compensate for the disengagement of the central state, and to make it possible for populations7 in difficult economic situations, and particularly for girls, to receive a basic education. Within the Chinese Muslim world, education and its modernisation are the objects of debate, controversy and competition between religious movements. These debates are not about the situation of the primary or secondary public schools, although it is a difficult situation, for these schools remain on a very low level despite the efforts made, particularly in the peripheral regions and along the frontiers8. According to Hui

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researchers, the situation of Hui public schools, as with other schools, has deteriorated, particularly with decentralisation. One of them gave a revealing description of a primary school in a Hui area of Xi’an, which does not seem to be the only one in this situation: “In order to be able to meet the needs of the school, whose expenses have increased considerably, the schoolyard has become a warehouse and a parking lot for taxis and lorries, and the school toilets have been made into public toilets”. He also noted the difficulties encountered in paying the salary supplements of teachers, and lamented the fact that many of the pupils had to work after school: “It means that they can open their books only during classes”. In 1997, the school lost one-third of its pupils.9 But since the public schools are the responsibility of the central and local authorities and the local population has little influence on their decisions, discussions tend to be about the private schools, over which the Muslims, having established them, have real power.

3 A study of the current development of denominational schools makes it possible to measure the degree of autonomy available to Muslims and to observe the way in which the political control of the state is exercised over this aspect of religious life nowadays. In fact education, a politically sensitive issue, is an area where many players confront each other, on a variety of levels.

4 In the Uygur autonomous region of Xinjiang, the authorities in Peking decided to impose strict and systematic control over education in the areas of both religion and language. Religious education, which had become widespread with the return of religious activities in the 1980s, was once again forbidden in 1996 following the troubles in the region (incidents in Khotan, Gulja, Bahren and Aksu). Since then there has been a slow recovery10. In 2002 an Imam was allowed to teach only one or two students11, and only with the backing of the Bureau of Religious Affairs and of the local authorities, whereas, as we shall see, there can be close to a hundred students in the mosque schools in other Chinese provinces. The rule which states that one must be over 18 to study religion is, in Xinjiang, strictly applied. Moreover it is not legally possible to open a Muslim school like the ones in the rest of the country. Only one Koranic Institute (jingxueyuan), managed and controlled by the authorities, is authorised in Urumqi. Basic religious instruction is provided in the Arabic language. On the linguistic level, in May 200212, Peking provided a reminder in the press of the decision—taken earlier but not yet really applied—to eliminate the Uygur language from higher education13. Moreover the poverty of Uygur families, especially in the oases in southern Tianshan, makes it impossible for their children to receive a normal education in public schools which have now become fee-paying, even for the theoretically obligatory first nine years of schooling. The result is that a Uygur child who does not come from an urban and relatively prosperous background has very little chance of being able to avail of an education beyond primary level, which he will usually have received in Uygur14. If a family seeks to compensate for this educational deficiency with religious schooling, they will have to wait until the child reaches the age of 18 and send him either abroad, in this case to Pakistan, if they can afford it, or to have him follow the course in a Koranic school in another part of China if they have been able to establish contact with the school15. The organisation of clandestine schools is indeed possible, but the risks are real. Thus, the limited opportunities for education mean, that in the streets of the cities, as in Khotan for example, numbers of young boys aged between 12 and 14 work as drivers of ramshackle

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taxi-carts pulled by donkeys in order to contribute to their families’ needs. Moreover, even a young Uygur graduate of the University of Urumqi has but little hope of professional employment in the region, as his low linguistic competence in Chinese will prevent him obtaining a job, preference being given to Han Chinese speakers. In these hopeless situations, it cannot come as any surprise that young people seek to leave the area or are attracted by a modern discourse which preaches the unity of Islam and a return to the Caliphate16. A number of them, suspected of belonging to the Hizb it-Tahrir17 (Liberation) movement, were arrested18 in the spring of 2001 in Xinjiang19.

5 In the other Chinese provinces, the situation is very different, in as much as it is mainly a case of Chinese-speaking Muslims (the Hui). The confrontation then takes place not only with the central state but more with the local authorities. Moreover religious education reveals the rivalries between Muslim religious movements. From mosque school to private school 6 There are about 40,00020 mosques in China, each of which, in theory, has a school 21. However, not all the ahong (Imams)22 of these places of worship have students. Apart from the authoritarian restrictions to be seen in Xinjiang, this can be due, in non- conflict situations, to the tiredness and advanced age of the ahong. In these circumstances, students can easily join another school nearby. While the average number of students can be estimated at twenty per mosque, some of them, which have space, better facilities and where the teaching of the ahong is renowned, can bring together a hundred students. In theory at least 18 years old23, these students are mainly boys, particularly in the provinces of the north-west. However the mosque schools are also open to girls when there are no mosques for women24 as in the provinces of the central plain. Some of the students have been to public school, up to the end of the second secondary syllabus (gaozhong); however a large number of them stopped at primary school or at the end of the first secondary school syllabus (chuzhong) and some are virtually illiterate in Chinese. They are natives of different regions and sometimes come from very far away. Tuition fees are paid for by the host community, as is accommodation, if the student’s family is unable to find the money. Some history 7 All through the history of Islam in China, as well as today, education has been a major issue. It is a question of maintaining communities of the faithful in an environment which is overwhelmingly non-Muslim. In the sixteenth century, schools were opened at the mosques to provide religious education called jintang jiaoyu (teaching of the room of the classics), characteristic of traditional Islam (laojiao)25, the content of which had been elaborated by an ahong from Shaanxi, Hu Dengzhou (1522-1597)26, on his return from a journey to Mecca. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the fundamentalist and reformist movement ikhwan 27, of Wahhabite inspiration, made the modernisation of education one of its watchwords, insisting at the time on the learning of Chinese and the education of women.

8 Other Muslim reformers involved in the intellectual ferment of the whole of Chinese society at the beginning of the twentieth century set up schools, such as the famous teacher’s training college, Chengda28, whose objective was to provide modern teaching combining the joint study of Chinese and Arabic, of history, mathematics, and the sciences, and to promote the sending of students abroad.

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9 The classic syllabus in traditional Islam (laojiao) called for over ten years of study, with several ahong. The halifa 29 learned Arabic and Persian, the basic texts (the haiti 30, the zaxue 31, the Koran, the sunna 32, the tafsir 33, the fiqh 34 ) and carried on35 with deepening texts in both languages with an emphasis on Persian36, particularly in the case of Sufi teaching and of that dispensed by the female ahong. It was a teaching based on the master to disciple relationship, which favoured a deepening of the understanding of the texts and a broadening of knowledge. This course ended, as it does today, with a ceremony called “the taking of the vestment” (chuanyi)37 which marks the progression from the rank of student to that of ahong. The situation today 10 With the revival of religious activity, the need to rejuvenate the ahong, and the pressure from reformed teaching, the form and content of the classical syllabus have been modified. The number of years of study has been reduced to four or five, and the special relationship between master and disciple is tending to dissipate, because of the sometimes rapid turnover among the ahong, but above all because of the increasing number of teachers. Where the content is concerned, teaching is limited to the learning of Arabic and knowledge of the basic texts, supplemented by a course on the religious policy of the state. Thus the modernisation of religious teaching takes into account one of the main criticisms made of the ahong of traditional Islam, which was that they are unable to express themselves in Arabic, and pronounce it with a strong Chinese intonation. Arabic is thus learned as a modern language and no longer simply as a written language, the sacred language of the Koran. In order to display the good level of Arabic of today’s young Chinese, competitions in reading the Koran are regularly organised, at provincial and national levels, in the presence of dignitaries from the Muslim world. This improved language training is taking place at the expense of Farsi, which, nevertheless, still remains a language of study in the teaching of the female ahong and the Sufi brotherhoods. However, the texts required for the final examination being mainly in Arabic, works in Persian are tackled less and less frequently. All in all, while young students now have a real ability to speak Arabic, there is, on the other hand, to the regret of many ahong, a reduction in religious knowledge. The academic cycle ends with an examination supervised by the local Bureau of Religious Affairs, by a representative of the local branch of the Islamic Association, if there is one, and by the local ahong. After having taken the vestment, the new ahong is invited by a local community to come and officiate. This reformed teaching has spread to all the mosques in the last few years, whatever movement they belong to.

11 Since the 1990s, on the initiative of ahong or of lay teachers, some of the mosque schools, while remaining on the premises or close to the religious building, have changed into independent organisations with the establishment of a director and a specific administration38. Other schools are being built independently. They all have the status of a private or specialised school (sili xuexiao, zhuanye xuexiao, or zhuanke xuexiao).

12 These private schools have acquired considerable importance. Some are known for the numbers of their students, male and female, the diversity of their training, and the possibility they offer of following university education in China (in the foreign language sections) or abroad. They often go by names such as “Sino-Arabic school” (zhong a xuexiao), “Arabic language school” (ayu or alaboyu xuexiao), or “Muslim Culture School” (musilin wenhua xuexiao). These names sometimes convey a specific option; certain schools choose the name “Arabic School” in order to emphasise that their main

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objective is the teaching of the language; others add another component showing their religious commitment such as Muguang alaboyu xuexiao (“Muslim Light” School of Arabic) or else an Arabic word: Xida zhong a xuexiao (Xidayah (The Right Path) Sino- Arabic School). Others emphasise their characteristic identity: Huizu wenhua xuexiao (School of Hui Culture). Those responsible for the Dali School have, deliberately, not mentioned “Arabic School” or “Sino-Arabic”, but use the concept of Muslim culture: Dali musilin wenhua zhuanke xuexiao (Dali Professional School of Muslim Culture). Indeed, their objective is not to restrict themselves to language learning, but to give the students as wide an awareness as possible of the contemporary world39. These designations show the tensions between what is specific to the Hui identity, what is part of the Muslim identity, and the desire to put Arabic in the forefront, but we cannot draw any general conclusions from this, for the choice of names depends not only on the founder(s) of the school, but also on the local community, on its history and on the circumstances of the moment.

13 It is difficult to have an exact idea of the number of these private schools in the whole of China. There are said to be twelve schools in Yunnan province40; for the other provinces, one can estimate that, where the number of Hui is relatively high41, there is a minimum of five or six schools. If one is to believe some young Hui students of this teaching, five schools are considered the most prestigious: one in Ningxia, two in Henan, and two in Yunnan. The content of the teaching is now largely identical; the differences lie in the facilities42, particularly in computers, and in the emphasis given to certain classes. The subjects taught include: Arabic, using textbooks produced in Peking or Shanghai; a more or less extensive basic religious education (Koran, Sunna, fiqh, tafsîr), for which the books come from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait; the history of China and of Islam, with books published in Chinese and mostly written by Hui43. Lastly, there is a course called social sciences, dealing with Chinese legislation and religious policy in China. Some schools offer instruction in modern and classical Chinese, and even sometimes additional courses in English44 and computing. Studies are spread over four years with a final examination which only a few succeed in passing. The schools are often co-educational (but with separate classes)45; the students are aged between 18 and 2546, with girls making up more than half of those registered. They are accepted after having passed the final secondary level examination (chuzhong or gaozhong) or reached an equivalent level. The number of students averages a hundred and can reach three hundred in the biggest schools. More than half come from the province in question, but also from all over China, and although the majority are Muslims (Hui and Uygur), there are also young Han, or, depending on the region, other minzu (Li, Yi, etc.) who convert when their studies begin47. The study costs of the least wealthy are usually paid for48 by the host community. In poor areas, costs are limited to 200 yuan for four years; elsewhere fees average 400 to 500 yuan a year, to which must be added food and lodging costs of between 50 and 100 yuan per month. These modest fees are explained by the financial involvement of the local communities and also by the low levels of remuneration given to teachers, some of whom are retired and work for nothing. Salaries are calculated according to a person’s family situation, geographical origins and training. Which is to say that a man who is the head of a family, who comes from another province from that of the school, and has studied abroad, will have the highest salary. Payments are in the range of 300 to 500 yuan a month. While the majority of teachers are men, about one-third are women. A noteworthy complementary activity is the regular publishing of a newspaper written by the teachers with the participation of

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the students. These publications are widely distributed in the mosques and in the other schools of each province and beyond; they are used to propagate theological ideas and to provide information on social issues. “If we want to develop Islam, girls must be educated!” 14 The education of women, a preoccupation often spelt out by the ahong, is one of the major components of current developments49. Thus, evening and sometimes morning classes in the mosques, aimed at adult working or older women, bring together dozens of people and sometimes more. These classes are given by ahong 50 of both sexes. An example is the evening school, called the women’s school (nüxiao), in Sanya on the island of Hainan. This establishment consists of two main buildings, one being reserved for the young girls who follow the regular teaching of one of the village’s mosques, the other being made up of four classrooms. The quiet of the day yields, at nine o’clock, to the buzz of comings and goings, and when the female ahong arrives, there rise the first sounds of the collective recitation of the surats of the Koran, sung out loud, surats which are repeated over and over in order to be remembered. There are about fifteen people in each classroom. The same evening classes are to be found in the women’s mosques in the Central Plain and also in the women’s mosque of Lanzhou (Gansu). A complete plan of action designed to favour the education of girls has gradually been put in place alongside the schools with regular courses. For example, instruction is given one evening a week in specially provided classrooms, or during the holidays in mosque schools, where one can see little girls of five or six learning the Arabic alphabet in chorus. Even more remarkable are those which, with few resources, manage to maintain instruction aimed at adolescent girls.

15 Let us take the example of a girls’ school in Shuijinwan, a village in northern Yunnan, near Zhaotong. This very poor village is 90% Hui, whose resources are essentially agricultural. It is a village where there has never really been any education for girls despite the existence of a public school, to which families virtually only send boys51. The situation has apparently grown worse with the advent of family planning. In 1982, an ahong ikhwan 52, along with a woman teacher from another part of Yunnan, decided to found a school for young girls in one of the mosques. This immediately had a hundred students. After having to move twice, the school found a permanent establishment in a former food factory. The son of the ahong took over, with the assistance of five young female teachers, and together they teach over 80 students aged between 12 and 20. The school is considered to be a minban, and receives funds from the local community; when things get too difficult the district authorities assign it a subsidy of 1,000 yuan for the year. The young girls pay no tuition fees, their families are too poor, the only costs are board and lodging (20 yuan per month) which some families cannot pay. The school adds up to 30 yuan per pupil per month. These conditions mean, of course, that the buildings remain dilapidated, the dormitories with floors of beaten earth are cleaned by the pupils, and the meals cooked by the older ones. The teachers are paid a salary of 150 to 200 yuan a month. All the pupils are boarders; they go home to their families only at weekends or on religious holidays. When one sees the harshness of life around it, the school seems a haven of peace, and it is without any doubt a protective place for girls. In principle, the pupils have attended public primary school, and in this school are preparing for the secondary school examinations (chuzhong and gaozhong), but because of infrequent attendance at primary school a remedial class is provided for the youngest. The day begins with exercise in the schoolyard and continues with teaching in Chinese (five hours a week) and the

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learning of Arabic (eight hours a week). These young girls also receive religious instruction which is increased in the third and fourth years. Few pupils manage to continue their studies, but it is notable that in 2002 four of them were able to go to a mosque school in Shandong.

16 For the young girls, the school is a way of getting out of their family environment. It is quite common to hear pupils recount their progress — sometimes rapid, from a few days to a year—from school to school: they stay in the one where they feel most comfortable. For others, it is a real source of hope. A young woman of 19, from a very religious Hui family in Xinjiang, told us how she had been obliged to stop going to primary school in order to help and support her sick mother. Her brothers and sisters were able to pursue their secondary studies normally, while she alone remained at home. When the family situation improved, she wanted to return to secondary studies, but no longer could; one of the religious schools in Yunnan then gave her a way out. The Koranic Institutes 17 In parallel with private initiatives, the state has founded Koranic Institutes (yisilanjiao jingxueyuan) at provincial level, through the Department of Religious Affairs and the Islamic Association of China. Established between 1983 and 1987, they now number eight, all over China, in the cities of Shenyang, Lanzhou, Yinchuan, Xining, Kunming, Peking53, Urumqi and Zhengzhou. They have university status54 and their objective is to train ahong, teachers, and Arabic language translators. These Institutes receive major funding55, and one can admire the enormous new buildings which admit numbers of male and female students which are much lower than in the mosque schools or the private schools. The Zhengzhou Institute has only 90 students (47 male, 43 female). The students enter these Institutes at the end of the second secondary cycle (gaozhong) after an examination. Until 2001, the length of studies was only three years, but is now five. Fees are relatively high: even if a student can obtain a grant, they must pay 1,600 yuan for tuition and 140 or 150 yuan a month for lodging. On the other hand the monthly salary of teachers is around 1,200 yuan. In order to attract students, the Institutes, such as the one in Zhengzhou, seek to diversify the syllabus by opening specialised courses in calligraphy, for example, or in martial arts. A considerable number of Muslim parents do not particularly want to send their children there: on top of the selection process for admission and the cost of studies, they are wary of the kind of religious instruction given, since this is entirely controlled by the political authorities. Religious education: a springboard for study abroad or for finding a job 18 Going abroad is an opening for these students who would have had no chance of being able to do so in the framework of public education (their families not being wealthy enough, or not being able to get into the best schools). When they return, having acquired a better knowledge of Muslim societies56, they relay the debates under way in the Muslim world: their approach to society and to the role of Muslims in the world, as well as their behaviour, often depend on where they have studied57.

19 For those who have not been lucky enough to go abroad, the normal syllabus leads to becoming an ahong; others become teachers or interpreters (in Canton and Shenzhen) or follow a university course at the Foreign Languages Department of Peking University. The young women, for their part, teach in private schools or can find a job in the kindergartens opened by local communities58. However, many Hui teachers and leaders emphasise that there are now more than enough ahong, and prefer to open

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other possibilities to the young. From this point of view, it is worth examining the experience of the Dali School. Situated in a small village near the south gate of the city the “Specialised School of Muslim Culture” (musilin wenhua zhuanke xuexiao) was founded by three retirees, two former high school teachers and a former school director. Having returned to their village, they were upset at the irrelevance of classical Koranic teaching to the needs of today and to changes in society. In 1991, they founded a school in a part of the mosque (laojiao), despite the reservations of the old ahong. As well modernised teaching, they decided to open a section entirely in Chinese in order to prepare students for the final examination for the teacher training university of Kunming (shifan daxue)59. In 2002, 13 of the 16 candidates registered passed the examination, which will make it possible for them to teach in a public establishment. Education: a muffled battleground between religious movements 20 Islam in China, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, is not monolithic. It has been and continues to be influenced by many movements. While in past centuries there were struggles for influence between traditional Islam and the Sufis, or between the Sufi brotherhoods themselves, since the beginning of the twentieth century the confrontation has widened out to one between a fundamentalist and a modernist Islam, represented by the ikhwan, and more recently to a more rigoristic movement called salafi (san tai)60. The places of confrontation are traditionally the mosque, and sometimes the street, but education has always been one of its main battlegrounds. Today, as in the past, the conflict can become very violent61; formerly disagreements concerned the interpretation of the Koran and religious practices. In our day, the debates have changed little, it is a question of returning to the purity of the origins, of reforming practices which have been overly adapted to local circumstances, of remaining faithful to the Koran and of advocating the unity of Islam. Education is thus by nature the place where these movements are expressed. It is generally on his return from a stay in the Holy Land that a man bearing a rejuvenated gospel introduces his teaching into a mosque school. His charisma, his ability to persuade and train disciples will be the driving force of the success of such a movement, as well, of course, as the social and political situation into which he fits. Consequently, after twenty years of religious activity, profound changes in Chinese society, the anxieties produced by social inequality resulting from economic development, the lack of bearings of many young people and the absence of any democratic political space, mean that a growing number of young people are attracted to the discourse of the salafi movement on the unity of Umma, and by the clarity and simplicity of its doctrine (a return to the faith of the elders (salaf)62. While there is here an attempt to find a kind of social morality, some ideals and a course of action for life—an attempt which is understandable after the preceding years of political campaigns and today’s upheavals—, this rigoristic trend produces other effects, more surprising in the contemporary Chinese context, particularly for women. One becomes aware of it63 at the sight of young girls being educated in the schools of salafi inspiration, who are entirely veiled in black, with their faces covered. This is a singular sight, for the young girls of the religious schools generally only wear a simple headscarf (hijâb) and sometimes long dresses. Religious education under surveillance 21 The question of religious education has preoccupied the Chinese authorities since long before September 11th. The increase in the number of schools, the growing numbers of students returning from Muslim countries, the circulation of the writings of reformers from the beginning of the century, which are now banned64, the situation in Xinjiang

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and also the activities of other movements such as those of the Christians and of the Falungong, have prompted the authorities to increase surveillance. Thus on April 23rd 200165 they established, through the very official Islamic Association of China, a “Committee in charge of Islamic education affairs”, considered to be a specialised commission (zhuanmen) at national level and made up of 16 members, with a Hui majority (10 out 16). The authorities have also provided themselves with an instrument to regain the upper hand and try to control not only the teaching but also the content of religious discourse: “Eliminating among the masses the false interpretations (wujie) and confusion (hunluan) about religious matters”66. The first public initiative took place in Xinjiang in August 2001 and was devoted to the presentation of a new book of sermons published by the Committee in July and strongly recommended67. Sermon competitions will be organised from now on, like those concerning the reading of the Koran. This committee is also responsible for the publishing of translations and of the textbooks for teaching. We have in fact been able to observe, in the private schools we visited, a kind of standardisation through the widespread use of the same books on language, history, etc. However the effectiveness of such methods is open to question, particularly in Xinjiang where the problem has never been of a religious kind. A significant event recently provided evidence of this: after a very official concert during which a poem exalting Uygur national sentiment was sung, a severe call to order68 was addressed to the Party cadres of the region, for an incident which manifestly had nothing to do with religion.

22 Thus while the Party is unable to exercise total control over the ideas in circulation, delegating their surveillance to the Muslims themselves seems to be a guarantee of restricting the growth of new movements. However, where the growth of the salafi is concerned, this calculation has so far been mistaken. In fact, the traditional independence of one mosque from another and the increasing autonomy of society make control more difficult. Consequently, between state intervention in matters of religion and the increasing forms of autonomy, there is an unstable balance, the duration of which is difficult to predict. Moreover, the exercise of this control will be all the more complicated because the government will not always be able to use the divisions of Islam among the various “nationalities”. There has been much emphasis on the heterogeneousness of the situations of these “nationalities” and on the differences which divide them on historical, linguistic and cultural levels. These differences are indisputable and are visible to any observer; it is nevertheless true that not only are there exchanges between these groups, but that similar movements of revitalisation pass through them and transcend their boundaries.

NOTES

1. Islam in China today includes ten “nationalities” (minzu) containing about 18 million people. These are partly the Turkish or Turko-mongol speaking communities (Uygur, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Bao’an, Dongxiang, Tatar, Ouzbek, Salar) living in the provinces of the Northwest of China (Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai), a small group of Farsi speakers,

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the Tadjik in Xinjiang, and partly a population of 9 million Chinese speaking Muslims, the Hui, who are scattered all over China. From the religious standpoint Muslims in China are Sunnis of the Hanefite rite. Only the Tadjik are Ismaeli Chiites. 2. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese. Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic, Cambridge and London, Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1991, (1996, 3rd ed.); Françoise Aubin, “Chine”, in H. Chambert-Loir et C. Guillot, Le culte des saints dans le monde musulman, Etudes Thématiques, No. 4, Paris, EFEO, 1995, pp. 367-388.; Elisabeth Allès, Musulmans de Chine. Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan, Paris, EHESS, 2000. 3. E. Allès, L. Chérif-Chebbi, C. H. Halfon, “L’islam chinois, unité et fragmentation”, in Archives des sciences sociales des religions, No. 115, 2001, pp. 26-28. 4. In the course of this research we were able to meet the authorities and the pupils of the mosque schools in the towns and villages we visited, of fifteen private schools and three Islamic institutes (jinxueyuan). The minban are village or collective schools under contract with the local authorities. 5. The first closings of mosques took place in 1958. Religious activities as a whole did not start again until after the beginning of the reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. 6. See on this subject the special report “Education” in China Perspectives, No. 36, July– August 2001. 7. Minority populations with nationality status (minzu) whose level of illiteracy is often higher than the national average. See the graph giving a summary by region of illiteracy among the non-Han populations. Thierry Pairault, 2001, “Formation initiale et développement économique”, China Perspectives, No. 36, July–August 2001, fig. 1, p. 6 8. Gerard A. Postiglione ed., China’s National Minority Education. Culture, Schooling, and Development, New York and London, Falmer Press, 1999. On the education of Muslims in China, see especially in this volume the articles by Dru Gladney, “Making Muslims in China: Education, Islamicization and Representation”, pp. 55-94, and Colin Mackerras, “Religion and the Education of China’s Minorities”, pp. 23-54. 9. Ma Bin, “Guanyu Xi’an huifang jiaoyu xianzhuang de sikao” (Reflections on the present situation of education in the Hui area of Xi’an), Huizu xuegan (Journal of Hui Studies), No. 1, 2001, pp. 199-205. 10. In August 2002 we observed in the towns of southern Tianshan the opening of mosques only during the hours of prayer, which made any teaching impossible. Only the great mosque of Id kah in Kashgar remained open to the public for tourist visits. 11. We were able to observe one exception to this rule. The ahong of a Hui mosque in Urumqi (Shaanxi mosque), which is the seat of the local Islamic association, has the privilege of having about twenty students. This privilege, granted for political reasons, poses a serious background problem of discrimination against other ahong, especially the Uygur ones. 12. AFP, Hong Kong, May 28th 2002. 13. While science studies were already in Chinese, Uygur was still regularly used in the other disciplines. 14. Each minzu uses its own language at primary school. The learning of Chinese (putonghua) generally begins in the last year of primary school and continues during secondary school at a rate of about three hours a week. 15. It is not unusual to see young Uygur boys and girls in the mosque schools in the provinces of central and southern China.

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16. To many Muslims an ideal model of the organisation of power, the Caliphate was abolished by Mustapha Kemal in 1924. 17. This movement has been active in Central Asia since 1995. For its thinking, its history and its organisation see Ahmed Rashid, Asie centrale, champ de guerres, (original title: Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia), Paris, Autrement, 2002, pp. 106-123; Olivier Roy, “Islamic Ferments and State Responses in Central Asia; Is there a Chinese Card?”, in François Godement, La Chine et son Occident. China and its western Frontier, Paris, Centre Asie, Ifri, 2002, p.151. 18. The Economist, March 30th 2002, p. 26. 19. On the general situation in Xinjiang, see the reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. 20. The Islamic Association of China in 1995 officially listed 33,300 mosques, including 23,000 in Xinjiang. These figures are approximate, and according to the sources cited vary considerably, with observation in the field prompting higher estimates. 21. As well as the Koranic schools, there are martial arts schools in some mosques. 22. The term ahong (from the Persian akhund) is used in Chinese Islam for Imam. 23. Some schools have pupils as young as 16. 24. These women’s mosques are a particularity of Chinese Islam. Directed by women ahong, they have existed for several centuries, particularly in the Central Plain. See Elisabeth Allès, 2000, Musulmans de Chine. Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan, Paris, EHESS, chaps. XII-XIII; M. Jaschok, Shui Jingjun, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of their Own, Richmond, Curzon Press, 2000. 25. Ancient teaching which corresponds to the term qadim (ancient) in Arabic or gedimu in Chinese transliteration. 26. This teaching is described by Françoise Aubin in: “L’enseignement dans la Chine islamique pré-communiste (du XVIe au milieu du XIXe siècle): entre affirmation identitaire et modernisme”, in N. Grandin et M. Gaborieau éds., Madrasa, La transmission du savoir dans le monde musulman, Paris, Arguments, 1997, pp. 374-375. 27. On this movement and its development in China, see J. Lipman, 1997, Familiar Strangers: a History of Muslims in Northwest China, University of Washington Press, Seattle-London, pp. 208-211. 28. Jinan Chengda shifan xuexiao. This school was created in 1925 in one of the mosques in Jinan by Ma Songjing (one of the four great ahong in China in the Republican period). In 1929, the school was transferred to the Dongsi Mosque in Peking. It was among the first to send groups of students to the biggest university in the Muslim world, Al-Azhar in Cairo. 29. From the Arabic khalifah (successor) used in China as a term for a student in theology. The term generally used in Arabic for student is talib. 30. Excerpts from the surats of the Koran in Arabic, annotated in Chinese transliteration, and translated. 31. A collection of the precepts relating to the ablutions and prayers of the day. It is conceived like the haiti, in Chinese transliteration from the Arabic. 32. Deeds and sayings of the Prophet. 33. Exegesis of the Koran. 34. Islamic law. Includes the study of the four schools of law (Hanafite, Malakite, Shafeite, Hanbalite). 35. The complete syllabus comprised 13 works. 36. The search for knowledge in Islam traditionally followed this slow path.

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37. Today this ceremony is a highpoint in the cohesion of the community. It brings together not only the members of the local community and their ahong, but also the ahong of the mosque where the candidate comes from. For the occasion, the latter wears a long green coat and an imposing white turban. 38. This structure had already been initiated in the 1920s, for example in the Chengda School previously mentioned. 39. Interview, July 2002. 40. Jacqueline Armijo-Hussein, 1999, “Resurgence of Islamic Education in China”, ISIM Newsletter, No. 4, p. 12. 41. The city of Yinchuan (Ningxia) alone has three Sino-Arabic schools open at present. 42. These schools generally began with very little equipment. The teaching materials were sometimes merely notebooks assembled by the teacher. 43. Some of the writers are retired teachers who devote most of their time to this dissemination of knowledge. A compilation of their texts on the history of Islam and of Islam in China was published in 2000, in a work entitled Musilin zhongdeng zhuanye xuexiao hanyu jiaocai, which is used in most of the schools. 44. Even in a laojiao mosque in Henan, we observed an English class in which Arabic was used as the language of translation. 45. Except in the Northwest (Ningxia, Gansu) where it is the schools which are separate. 46. In some schools the students can be up to 28 or 30 years old. 47. If one lives outside a major city, the difficulties in getting access to secondary or university education are the same, regardless of nationality. 48. As an overall figure for the schools we visited, 10 to 20% of the students are supported by the local community, but in certain regions, as in the north of Yunnan, 40 to 50% of the students need help. 49. Leila Cherif, “Ningxia, l’école au féminin”, Etudes Orientales, No. 13/14, 1994, pp. 156-162; Constance-Hélène Halfon, “Femme et musulmane à Lanzhou, au Gansu”, Etudes Orientales, No. 13/14, 1994, pp. 151-155. 50. In the Yunnan, the term shimu is used for a woman ahong. 51. This situation is not unique. The same thing can be seen in Ningxia, for example. 52. The other ahong of the town also belong to this movement. 53. A Koranic Institute already existed in 1955 in the Niu Jie area. Zhou Xiefan and Sha Qiuzhen, Yilisilanjiao zai Zhongguo (The Islamic Religion in China), Peking, Huawen chubanshe, 2002, p. 201. The present Institute opened 1986. 54. Interview, in April 2002, with the directors of the Institute in Zhengzhou. Presentation of the Zhengzhou Institute in Henan Musilin, April 15th 2002, p. 23. 55. The Institute in Yinchuan has been particularly well endowed, with a subsidy of 1 million yuan in 1986 as well as bank loan facilities. Via the Islamic Association of China, funds also came from the World Islamic Development Bank. 56. Armo-Hussein notes a certain disillusionment in the face of the realities of life in modern Muslim society, 1999, op. cit.. We ourselves have met young women who, having gone Saudi Arabia with their husbands, did not wish to remain there. 57. We have been able to have very open discussions with ahong who had returned from Iran or from Damascus, whereas they have felt a much more closed off and rigid attitude on the part of ahong who had studied at Medina, and who, for example, avoid looking an unveiled woman in the face when they speak to her.

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58. For example in Zhengzhou (Henan), a kindergarten has been opened in the mosque on Huayuan Street. It is attended by 100 children, of whom 80 are Hui. Likewise, the mosque on Maohuo Street in Zhaodong (Yunnan) has opened a kindergarten in buildings it leases from the Catholic church opposite the mosque. 59. The subjects taught are classical and modern Chinese, foreign literature, philosophy and pedagogy. 60. Dru Gladney, “The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Fundamentalism among the Muslim Chinese?”, in Leif Manger ed., Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts, Surrey, Curzon Press, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, No. 26, 1999, pp. 102-149. 61. Lipman Jonathan N., “Sufism in the Chinese Courts: Islam and Qing Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, in F. De Jong and B. Radtke eds., Islamic Mysticism Contested. Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, Brill, 1999, pp. 553-575; Cherif-Chebbi, Leila, “L’Yihewani, une machine de guerre contre le soufisme en Chine?” in F. DeJong and B. Radtke eds., ibidem, 1999, pp. 576-602. 62. The salafi take into consideration only the Koran and those Hadith which are considered to be authentic, and reject the schools of law which have grown up in Sunnism. It is common to hear young halifa say with a certain admiration: “They know the texts better!”. 63. We have observed this phenomenon in Yunnan. 64. On can still find, but only very rarely and very discreetly, translations of Mohamed Abduh in Chinese, as well as, in Xinjiang, texts by Maududi, but in Urdu. 65. Zhongguo musilin, 2001, No. 3, p. 8. 66. The complete definition of the tasks of this committee is presented in Zhongguo musilin, No. 3, 2001, p. 14. 67.Xinbian “wo er zi” (wa’z in Arabic) yanjiangti (New Compilation of Speeches for Sermons), Peking, Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2001, 136 pp. 68. South China Morning Post, September 20th 2002.

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The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism The Current Situation and Future Prospects

Nicolas Tournadre

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Peter Brown

1 The ecolinguistic situation in Tibet is complex and unstable, in a constant state of flux. Not only do two great literary languages, Tibetan 1 and Chinese, find themselves side by side, but there are also numerous Tibetan dialects, as well as around twenty other Tibetan-Burmese and Mongolian languages, spoken on the high plateau. This study will consider only the current situation of Tibetan and Chinese, leaving aside the other languages that play only a minor role today. We will examine the sociolinguistic factors at work as well as linguistic policy, in order to try to gain an understanding of the development of Tibetan and Chinese in the region 2.

2 Before the Chinese Communists took over in 1950, Tibetan was the only official language in the territories under the Lhasa government’s administration. Chinese was completely unknown to the Tibetan population except to a very few Tibetan intellectuals and traders. The linguistic situation was more complex outside the areas controlled by the Lhasa government in so far as Chinese-speaking peoples had already been settled there for a long time, living side by side with the Tibetans, especially in the border regions.

3 One of the first tasks of the new Chinese government in the Tibetan areas was to carry out the enormous task of translation into Tibetan of many modern texts, particularly those of a political and technological nature. Through this monumental work stretching over several decades, a great many neologisms were coined to translate the new scientific, technical and political concepts that had been completely unknown in Tibetan up until then. It also led to the publication of bilingual dictionaries. The

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neologisms were in the main based on calques or expressions drawn from classical Tibetan. The number of literary borrowings from Chinese has remained very low. Tibetan has benefited considerably from the input of Chinese in these areas, exceeding many of the South-East Asian languages in its lexical inventions.

4 In spite of these positive factors, we have been witnessing, especially since the early 1990s, a very marked decline of Tibetan in almost every walk of life. The real threat hovering over Tibetan has not gone unnoticed by the Chinese authorities. The government of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) recently issued regulations which aim to protect the language entitled Decree on the Study, Use and Development of the Tibetan Language 3. The simple fact that the government is acting to protect Tibetan through the introduction of legislation underscores the gravity of the situation. We will briefly analyse a few articles of these regulations and, in the sections that follow, paint a picture of the ecolinguistic reality of Tibet through some representative examples. The first regulations of their kind 5 A set of regulations on protecting the Tibetan language was adopted by the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the seventh sitting of the fifth session on May 22nd 2002. They were published in a Tibetan translation on the front page of the Tibet Daily (bod ljongs nyin re’i tshags par) on June 6th 2002, as well as on the sixth page of the Chinese language version of the same newspaper (Xizang ribao) 4. It was also partially reprinted in English on May 24th 2002 by Xinhua. Comprised of 19 articles, these are the first regulations of their kind, aiming to protect the language of a “minority nationality” in the People’s Republic of China. It corresponds to the amendment of an earlier draft bill (tshod lta’i lag bstar gyi khrims) voted by the NPC at the fourth sitting of the fifth session on September 9th 1987.

6 Article one states that “Tibetan is the common language of the Autonomous Region of Tibet” 5.

7 “Tibetan and Chinese have equal administrative status in the Autonomous Region of Tibet” (Article 3).

8 “The Chinese and those belonging to the other minorities living in the Autonomous Region of Tibet must learn Tibetan” (Article 8).

9 “Those bilingual in Chinese and Tibetan will receive priority in recruitment to administrative positions” (Article 10).

10 Some articles are striking in their ambiguity and lack of detail and realism. For example, what is the significance of the first article? Is it merely a pious wish or bureaucratic formula, when we know that in Lhasa as in most cities of the Autonomous Region, it is very difficult to catch a taxi, go to the market or to any public office if one speaks only Tibetan.

11 Also, what is the meaning of Article 4, which stipulates that for important meetings, both languages, or even just one of them (!) can be used. Yet, as long as it is possible to use only one language, there is scarcely any doubt that Chinese will be the one chosen. Another feature of this regulation is the absence of any coercive measure or meaningful incentive.

12 The previous bill voted in 1989 was more coercive. In particular, it required Tibetan children to learn Tibetan. According to the new regulations, the choice is left up to the family, and young Tibetan children may choose to enrol in Chinese classes 6(6) and sit

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their examinations only in Chinese. If they enrol in Tibetan classes 7(7), the Tibetan language becomes compulsory, but in Lhasa, the curriculum is completely in Chinese (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). In the county capitals, up to senior secondary level (ninth class out of the twelve years of the curriculum), the textbooks for scientific subjects have been fully translated, but only a number of teachers use them 8.

13 The entrance exam to university in no way encourages students to choose Tibetan, as they must also take a Chinese exam and are given a single overall mark equivalent to the mark they get for Chinese.

14 The 2002 regulations are admittedly a positive step forward, but one can have doubts about its implementation, as they are accompanied by no coercive measures or strong incentives to implement them. Moreover, they operate on a purely theoretical level, with no pragmatic dimension. No mention is made of the problem of dialects, nor of the standardising of the spoken language. The regulations, similarly, remain silent on diglossia (literary and spoken Tibetan), which does constitute an enormous barrier to the learning and spread of Tibetan language.

15 Since being passed, these regulations have gone largely unnoticed, even within the Tibetan population, and it has had no noticeable impact. Official meetings and documents are still in Chinese... which remains the language of the education system and of public administration.9 The “devaluation” of Tibetan 16 In China, the period of the Cultural Revolution turned out to be one of terrible regression in all fields of cultural endeavour, but in certain regions of Tibet this regression also affected the written language of Tibetan which was quite simply outlawed for several years. After this dark period, Tibetan was able to take off again in the 1980s. A number of literary journals sprang up and many popularising works appeared. Pilot schools in which scientific subjects (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) were taught in Tibetan were set up in various regions in Lhasa, Zhikatse (Chinese Rigaze) and in Lhokha (Chinese Shannan). In 1991, official Chinese statistics clearly showed that Tibetan high school students were obtaining better results in scientific subjects when they were taught in their mother tongue. These results were even announced on television in both Tibetan and Chinese.

17 However, since the mid-1990s, there has been a steady decline in the use of Tibetan and, conversely, a bolstering of Chinese which is becoming dominant. This new trend can in part be explained by a series of measures which were taken particularly in the field of education. These include an increase in the amount of time for Chinese in the curriculum, and its introduction at an earlier and earlier age (at the present time, it is taught right from the first class of primary school in the main cities). Young Tibetans are confronted with numerous cultural challenges: From the earliest age, for instance, they have to learn three writing systems. Tibetan (which offers few professional openings in present-day society), Chinese (which is the most difficult system in the world), and the Latin alphabet (which is used to learn Chinese phonetic transcription as well as English). That is not the end of the challenge since young Tibetans have recently had, in addition, to learn to count in Chinese, a language that they know only imperfectly and which they do not in general speak at home.

18 At university, all the scientific subjects and most of the social sciences are taught in Chinese. On the whole, in offices and institutions, only the texts written in Chinese are

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officially recognised, although theoretically Tibetan also has an official status. More serious still is the fact that all office meetings take place in Chinese and not in Tibetan; even when those taking part are all Tibetan themselves.

19 The lack of interest in Tibetan can be observed through several external signs. Thus, although there is a law requiring bilingual street signs and notice-boards, this regulation is not always respected in certain regions. In Lhasa, the regulation is applied, but the billboards in Tibetan are very often written in characters that are much smaller than their Chinese counterparts. Moreover, the signage is often spelled with mistakes in Tibetan, whereas this is rarely the case in the Chinese. One incident was reported concerning a large street sign in Lhasa that in Chinese said chuanzang gonglu—“Sichuan-Tibet Road”—and in Tibetan (on account of poor calligraphy) khron- bong gzhung lam—“the Sichuan donkey road”.

20 We could multiply such examples which suggest a decline in the importance of Tibetan. The lack of interest that Tibetans show in their own language is apparent both in their attitude and speech, as we shall see in the following section. They justify this lack of interest by saying that Tibetan does not allow them “to fill their stomachs”. It is indisputable that Tibetan is of practically no professional value.

21 There is, however, one area that brings some qualification to what has just been said: the media and, in particular, television. Over the past five years, Tibetan television has put considerable effort into developing programmes and films, and represents one of the rare fields in which Tibetan is promoted. Nevertheless, Tibetan-language television lags far behind the many Chinese channels that offer programmes that are much more varied and attractive. The sociolinguistic context and Tibetan-Chinese mixed speech 22 In the cities, over the past decade, the mixture of Tibetan and Chinese has become considerably more pronounced. In Tibet, this phenomenon is referred to by the term “speaking half-goat half-sheep” (ra-ma-lug skad). This Tibetan-Chinese mixed speech is so widespread that many young people in the urban areas are incapable of forming a sentence in Tibetan without using Chinese words, despite the fact that most of the time the Tibetan equivalents exist. Borrowings from Chinese concern more particularly certain linguistic categories (essentially substantives and more infrequently verbs and adjectives, etc.) and lexical fields. We will give a representative (but non-exhaustive) list of these fields. • The days of the week

23 In speech, Tibetans almost always use the Chinese terms xingqi yi, "Monday", xingqi er, "Tuesday", etc., instead of the traditional terms gza' zla-ba, "Monday", gza' mig dmar, "Tuesday", etc. For the time being, most people nonetheless understand the Tibetan terms. • Numbers

24 Numbers, and particularly telephone numbers, are almost always given in Chinese. When someone gives their phone number in Tibetan, apart from the surprise element, it seems that Tibetans often experience difficulties as they translate the Tibetan numbers back into Chinese. Dates are also often given in Chinese, especially when they correspond to the international calendar. On the other hand, when dealing with the Tibetan lunar calendar, the dates are given in Tibetan. • Place names

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25 The majority of names of streets, cities, villages and regions are provided in Chinese, even when these names are clearly present in the Tibetan tradition. For example, people will say Shannan instead of Lhokha (a region in southern Tibet), Qinghai instead of mtsho-sngon "Kokonor", Kangding instead of dar-btsen-mdo (Dhartsendo, a city in Kham province), sela lu instead of sera lam, "Sera Road" (an important thoroughfare in Lhasa leading to the monastery by the same name), etc. • The names of official institutions

26 Institutions and offices are generally referred to by their Chinese name. That is the case even for the most important institutions related to Tibetan culture. For instance, if you speak to a Tibetan taxi driver in Lhasa by referring to addresses like: bod-ljongs slob grwa chen-mo, "University of Tibet" or spyi-tshogs tshan-rig khang, “Academy of Social Sciences”, there is a good chance that he will not understand unless you opt for the Chinese terms, respectively Xizang daxue and Shehui kexueyuan. Even the Post Office is generally designated by its Chinese name youdianju and not by its Tibetan names sbrag- khang or yig-zam. • The majority of technical terms

27 Although many terms have been formed as indicated above, they are hardly used except by a minority of educated Tibetans. For example, television is more often called dianshi than brnyan 'phrin, a refrigerator bingxiang rather than 'khyag-sgam or a computer diannao rather than glog-klad 'phrul-'khor, which is however a calque on the excellent Chinese made-up expression “electric brain” to which Tibetans have added the word “machine” ('phrul-'khor). In some areas like that of motor parts, the technical terms are sometimes non-existent and in any case it is their Chinese equivalents that are always used.

28 The list is not, of course, exhaustive and has tended to get bigger over the past few years. Indeed, among some speakers we can observe massive borrowings of Chinese terms, while their grammar remains Tibetan. It is important to stress here that the problem is not only the high number of borrowings from Chinese but the constant switching, which is more or less conscious, between Tibetan and Chinese within the one conversation, or even the one sentence. This is perfectly comparable to the situation of certain North African immigrants in France, who are forever mixing French and (dialectal) Arabic in their conversation.

29 It is worth noting that many speakers in Tibet know both languages well enough to be able to express themselves in one or the other without mixing them up. It therefore seems that the practice of “speaking mixed Tibetan-Chinese” (ra-ma-lug skad) as well as code-switching are essentially related to sociolinguistic factors. Indeed, as has been observed for other languages (Anglo-American and Spanish, Russian and languages of the ex-Soviet Union, etc.), moving from one language to the other or the mixing of both languages corresponds to particular situations and environments. The choice of switching or speaking “pure” Chinese or “pure” Tibetan is most often significant and corresponds to definite social behaviour patterns. Let’s take as an example illustrating both mixed speech and code switching. The following dialogue was related to me by a Tibetan teacher who went to see the (Tibetan) accountant of his work unit (danwei) about getting a bonus. The Chinese expression is given in bold and the Tibetan in italics. A: shenfen-zheng ga-par yod

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“Where is your identity card?” B: 'dir yod “Here it is” A: haoma mar bris “Write down the number [of the card here]” B: ang gi chung drags nas mthong gi mi 'dug “The number is [written] too small, I can’t read it”. A: wo bu shi qu qian de! ni ziji xie! “I’m not the one who has come for money! Write it yourself!”

30 As can be observed in this short dialogue, the accountant is using two Chinese borrowings shenfen-zheng (identity card) and haoma (number). The client responds in Tibetan without any borrowing and in particular uses the word ang-gi “number”. His interlocutor then goes into Chinese. It seems here that the language-switching is motivated by the irritation of the accountant who does not think it to be part of his job to fill in the document.

31 One may without fear of contradiction suggest that the search for a certain complicity or consensus is, in some situations, going to trigger the move to Tibetan, whereas Chinese will, conversely, be associated with “power” and “the norm”. Things are however not quite as straightforward. Generally speaking, code switching and the massive borrowings reflect a linguistic or sociolinguistic insecurity. In fact, many Tibetans are not completely comfortable in either of the two languages.

32 The sociological context described above occurs in the cities, but in the countryside we find a very different situation. The majority of peasants and nomadic stock breeders who still make up 80% of the population, generally have a poor knowledge of Chinese and are often illiterate in Tibetan. When they go into town, these peasants and nomads are faced with an “ecolinguistic system” that is foreign to them. In order to function in urban society, one must really be fluent in Tibetan and Chinese as well as Tibetan- Chinese mixed speech. The Tibetan peasants who do not know or know only badly the latter two codes are accordingly marginalised. For example, when dealing with any public institution (hospital, administration, bank, etc.), their poor understanding of Chinese and of ra-ma-lug skad is a serious handicap. Language levels: another sociolinguistic partition 33 In order to complete the sociolinguistic table and present Tibet’s ecolinguistic system in all its complexity, we must not forget the question of language levels. Tibetan has in fact one of the world’s most complex honorific systems. The existence of language levels is an areal? feature that one finds especially in languages such as Japanese or Korean. The honorific register that is called in Tibetan zhe-sa appears in the form of personal pronouns, nouns, verbs, verbal auxiliaries, and even certain adjectives and adverbs. Four types of honorifics are to be distinguished: the ordinary, the higher, the humilific and the double honorific. Honorifics are used in central Tibetan (Ü) as well as in the dialects of the west (Tsang), but they are not very present in the eastern dialects (Amdo and Kham).

34 During the Cultural Revolution, the use of honorifics was very much looked down upon, and even considered dangerous, as it marked one’s belonging to certain social classes. For more than ten years, the honorific was therefore banned, but it made a comeback in the early 1980s. The ten-year interruption in the use of zhe-sa, as well as changes to society and the influence of Chinese have, however, had an impact on the concrete situation of honorifics, with a new type called zhe-sa rkang-chag (clumsy honorific)

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being introduced. For example, the honorific corresponding to the ordinary register expression chu ‘thung “drink some water” (informal) is chab mchod “drink some water” (formal), but at the present time an important part of the population in fact says chab- chu mchod-gnang, an “irregular” form from a traditional perspective, as on the one hand, it mixes honorific and crude language and, on the other, through hypercorrection, it adds a superfluous honorific. The correct use of honorifics is considered to be quite prestigious and, conversely, imperfect mastery of them puts the speaker at the bottom of the social scale. The causes of decline and marginalisation 35 As we have seen above, the sociolinguistic situation in Tibet is a very complex one. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify the main factors that have contributed to the creation of the current ecolinguistic system. Undeniably, linguistic and educational policies are playing a considerable role in the way in which Tibetans conceive of their own language. By excluding Tibetan from the administrative spheres and giving Chinese a predominant position at school and university, by offering only a handful of professional openings based on a command of Tibetan, the authorities have contributed to giving Tibetan the image of a “useless” language. The Tibetans, who are very pragmatic and have a great ability to adapt, have quickly turned away from their own language.

36 Another important factor is the presence on the High Plateau of numerous dialects that can be classified into three main groups 10: Ü-Tsang, Kham-Hor and Amdo that do not allow proper mutual comprehension. The speakers of Amdo often choose to speak Chinese in order to communicate with people from Central Tibet, although they use the same literary language. For a few decades now, there has been discussion about the need to define a standard Tibetan. In the diaspora, and to a lesser extent in China itself, standard Tibetan (Tibetan: spyi skad; Chinese: gonggongyuan) based on the language of Lhasa has been developing spontaneously.

37 In 1999, a very important book entitled Bod kyi spyi skad skor gyi ched rtsom phyogs bsgrigs (A Collection of Articles on Standard Tibetan) 11 was published in Peking with contributions from the leading Chinese experts in Tibetan language and culture, and coming from all the traditional regions of Tibet (Tibet Autonomous Region, and provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan). All the writers (46 in total), with one or two exceptions, called for giving official status to standard Tibetan based on the language of Lhasa. The regional and central authorities have for the time being remained deaf to this call that would however have important consequences for the economic and cultural development of the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Autonomous Prefectures.

38 Finally, one may also cite among the important factors the extraordinary prestige in Tibet of Chinese, which is rightly seen as a great literary and scientific language. This prestige is also due to the fact that all technological innovations come into Tibet through the Hans. The consequences of the present linguistic policy 39 In April 2001, Jack Lang, the then French Minister of Education, made a speech on regional languages in France which began thus: “For two centuries, the political authorities [in France] have fought against regional languages…”. Through this speech, the French government launched a campaign to rehabilitate and develop regional languages, considering them henceforth as forming part of French cultural heritage.

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None of the regional languages spoken in France 12 are, however, comparable from a cultural viewpoint to Tibetan, one of the oldest and greatest literary languages of Asia, alongside Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese and Mongolian. We must remember that, of the five thousand languages spoken in the world, only about thirty have an original writing system. Among the latter, few have been in existence for over a thousand years, as Tibetan has.

40 It seems that the education experts in China have not weighed up the heavy sociolinguistic consequences of a linguistic policy that targets only the development of Chinese and neglects Tibetan. In less than fifty years, Tibetan, which is currently part of the cultural heritage of China, has become an endangered language, condemned to an irreversible decline, if not to outright extinction within two generations, if the present linguistic policy is maintained. The responsibility of the regional and central governments in this is obvious. Spoken Tibetan, associated as it is with a major literary language and which benefits from the growing interest of the West, will not of course disappear body and soul, but considerable damage may well be inflicted on it. Moreover, the development of ra-ma-lug skad (Tibetan-Chinese mixed speech) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Autonomous Prefectures is detrimental to the learning of Tibetan and Chinese alike.

41 In the long term, the sociolinguistic resentments and behaviour patterns of peoples are unpredictable, as is shown by the totally irrational decision of the Republic of Yakutia (Russian Federation) which in 2001 opted for English as its official language to replace Russian. That would not have happened if the Russian authorities had developed a Russian-Yakut (a Turkish language) bilingualism instead of counting on Russian monolingualism (the Russians arrived in Yakouty four hundred years ago).

42 IN ORDER to enable proper integration as well as sustainable economic and cultural development in Tibet, it is vital to put in place a truly bilingual Tibetan-Chinese education system which would foster real harmony between the two cultures. In Europe, the cohabitation of different languages within the one state (French, German, Italian in Switzerland or Spanish and Catalan in Spain) could perfectly well serve as a model.

43 Over the past few years, Chinese has become crucial to Tibet 13 from both an economic and cultural point of view. However, the fact that the Tibetan language is being neglected may well have disastrous consequences for Tibetan society in the medium to long term. Conversely, developing standard Tibetan and making it official could considerably improve the situation in the field of education, particularly for people on the land and for nomads.

44 It is therefore urgent that the Party’s cadres and the education experts in China rethink their linguistic policy in the Tibetan-speaking regions. It is likely that the present regulations on the Tibetan language will have no significant impact and that only a far- reaching reform introducing a real Tibetan-Chinese bilingualism will be capable of changing the ecolinguistic situation. If this does not eventuate, the Chinese government’s responsibility in the predicted disappearance of Tibetan will not be easily brushed aside.

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NOTES

1. Nicolas Tournadre and Sangda Dorje, Manuel de tibétain standard, Asiathèque, 1998, Paris, republished in 2003 (Manual of Standard Tibetan, Snow Lion, New York, forthcoming). 2. This text was presented at the Franco-Tibetan Conference on Tibetan Studies held in Peking from October 14th to 16th 2001. Only the part concerning the regulation on Tibetan, which was passed in May 2002, has been subsequently added. 3. In Tibetan the regulations are entitled bod skad yig slob sbyong dang bed spyod gong ‘phel bcas gtong rgyu’i bod rang skyong ljongs kyi gtan ‘bebs. bod ljongs nyin re’i tshags par [Regulations on the Study, Use and Development of Tibetan], The Tibet Daily, June 6th 2002. [also published in the Chinese-language version of the same newspaper, Xizang ribao, of June 5th 2002, “Xizang zijiqu xuexi, shiyong he fazhan zang yuwen de guiding”,]. 4. The difference in priority of information between the Tibetan version (front page) and the Chinese one (page 6), as well as the immediate circulation over the internet incline us to think that we are dealing with a public relations ploy. 5. Chinese: zang yu wen shi zijiqu tongyong de yuyan wen zi. Tibetan: bod skad yig ni rang skyong ljongs kyi spyi spyod skad yig yin. Of course, the regulations apply only to the Tibetan Autonomous Region and not to the Autonomous Prefectures of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan, provinces which cover a territory that is almost the size of the Autonomous Region and whose Tibetan-speaking population is larger than the latter’s (2 096 718 for the TAR and 2 478 259 for the Prefectures. Cf. Catriona, Education in Tibet, Policy and Practice since 1959, Zed Books in association with TIN, p. 265). However, the linguistic situation in the ten Autonomous Prefectures is quite comparable to that of the Autonomous Region, Chinese being equally dominant in public life there. Of course, there are differences and particularities in the ecolinguistic situation of the Prefectures, but we will not go into these in this article 6. Chinese: hanzu ban; Tibetan: rgya rigs ’dzin grwa 7. Chinese: zangzu ban; Tibetan: bod rigs ’dzin grwa. 8. From the beginning of secondary education (the sixth year of twelve in the Chinese curriculum), instruction is given in Chinese in the majority of schools. This is the case in the districts of the Region, as it is in those of the Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. 9. Even if Tibetan is occasionally present, its status is de facto purely optional. 10. In fact, there are two other major groups: the Ladakhi-Balti and the Dzongkha- Sikkimese, but they are spoken outside of China 11. Bod kyi spyi skad skor gyi ched rtsom phyogs bsgrigs (Collection of Articles on Standard Spoken Tibetan), Bod yig brda tshad ldan du sgyur ba’i las don u yon lhan khang is bsgrigs (Committee for the Standardisation of the Tibetan Language), mirigs dpe-skrun-khang, Peking, 1999. 12. None, apart from Occitan, has an historic literary language 13. Both in the Autonomous Region and the Autonomous Prefectures of the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan.

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Urbanism

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Peking Between Modernisation and Preservation

Aurore Merle et Peng Youjun

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Nick Oates

1 Organised on the initiative of the Tsinghua University School of Architecture, the Tibet Heritage Fund, the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East) and the Observatoire de l’architecture de la Chine contemporaine (Observatory of Research in Architecture in Contemporary China), the colloquium on the future of old Peking sought to bring together Chinese and foreign specialists to share their experiences and, more urgently, arrived at some conclusions and proposals on the way forward for the Chinese capital city. The first day was given over to consideration of the official policies on the conservation of the national heritage in China, with contributions from architects and town planners, but also in Europe, in particular in Germany and France. Going beyond a simple inventory of the current legal and regulatory framework, the undertaking served to highlight the major problems presently confronting the management of China’s national heritage: how to reconcile the development of tourism with the protection of that national heritage? Does conservation have to be devoted to monuments or should the aim be to preserve the environment in which those monuments are recorded? The second day was dedicated to exchanging experiences in conservation and to reviewing study and restoration projects involving old districts in cities such as Xi’an and Lhasa but above all in Peking. At the end of the colloquium, which provided a rich seam of debate, what can be said about China’s present-day policy on the conservation of its national heritage? What obstacles lie in the way of the implementation of this policy and the management of that heritage? And what solutions were put forward by the participants in the colloquium? The policy of the conservation of the national heritage in China

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2 Despite the destruction that is in progress, Peking is the only capital of the Chinese empires that is still visible. What is at stake in the protection of Peking is thus crucial for the general protection of China’s national heritage, as it constitutes an example for other Chinese cities. According to Professor Zhao Zhongshu, Peking has existed as a city for more than three thousand years and as a capital for more than eight hundred years. It was built according to traditional and austere architectural rules, and despite the dynastic changes, the evolution of the city has been slow and very structured. Peking was conceived as a harmonious whole. Today, 25 “protected zones” have been classified (or rather conceded) within the city. This already represents some progress, but it is far from sufficient. What is even more inadmissible is that each individual district draws up its own urban planning projects.

3 Since 1949, the Chinese government has progressively instituted legal measures in the field of the protection of the national heritage at the municipal level, the neighbourhood level and at the level of individual buildings. Nationally, three distinct administrations are responsible for the protection of the national heritage: the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the Ministry of Construction for the protection of historic cities and the Ministry of Culture for the protection of the heritage that is referred to as non-material. Finally, there are two kinds of lists for the protection and conservation of the cultural heritage: that of the “officially protected heritage sites” (wenwu baohu danwei), and that of “historically and culturally famous cities” (lishi wenhua mingcheng). At the end of 2001, 1,268 officially protected heritage sites were recorded at the national level and 7,000 at the provincial level. 101 cities are classified as “heritage cities” at the national level.

4 Since 1949, several sets of provisional regulations have contributed to the protection of the national heritage. On May 24th 1950, the government published two such regulations, one prohibiting the export of objects and books classified as national treasures, the other regulating excavations of sites and tombs. This was the first time since the establishment of the People’s Republic that the concept of “cultural heritage” had been evoked. Through these regulations, the protection of the cultural heritage now came under the competence of the government, which has the right and the duty to conserve it. It was also the first time that a distinction was made between the different values inherent in the national heritage: cultural, revolutionary, historical, etc.

5 In the light of the destruction of so many historical buildings, the government issued a directive on July 6th 1950 emphasising the conservation of the ancient aspect of the national heritage. On May 7th 1951, the government and the Ministry of Culture conjointly published three regulations: the first concerned the assignment of the rights and duties within the management of heritage sites; the second related to the means used to protect regional heritage sites; and the third set out the organisation of the committees appointed to manage the heritage at the regional level. These regulations imposed a structured system for the protection of the heritage by specifying the competencies of the different organisations. Above all, they contributed to the institutionalisation of heritage protection: management committees were established in provinces that enjoyed a wealth of heritage treasures.

6 On October 12th 1953, the government published a directive to protect the “historical and revolutionary heritage” of buildings. And on April 2nd 1956, in a circular on the protection of the heritage in agricultural activities, the government drew up a list of

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“officially protected heritage sites”. It was in the 1960s that the first national heritage survey (by surface area) was conducted. And on March 4th 1961, the State Council published the first list of “important entities for the protection of the national heritage”. The provinces and the cities subsequently drew up their own lists.

7 In 1982, the government classified 24 cities in the initial list of “historically and culturally important cities” (lishi wenhua mingcheng). In 1986, a second, then a third list appeared (adding 38 and 37 cities respectively). Two other cities were added in 2001. A total of 101 “historically and culturally important cities” can be counted today.

8 Thus, contrary to received ideas, there are sufficient laws and regulations in China for the protection of historical cities. The problem resides in the failure to apply them. How can observance of the laws be realised in a country such as China, which is still not a state based on the rule of law? A policy of conservation in conflict with other policies of urban development 9 Although it has been possible for the conservation of the national heritage to materialise within a set of laws and regulations, it has come into conflict with other policies, such as those to improve transport or to develop green spaces. As underlined by Song Xiaolong, architect at the Peking Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design, the only participant representing an official institution, transport plans are currently decided on the sole criterion of efficiency and do not incorporate any consideration of the city’s traditional structures. The widening of roads carried out to improve traffic circulation not only destroys the old urban fabric, but also has repercussions at the economic level as a result of the disappearance of small local businesses and the hustle and bustle of the neighbourhood districts.

10 The policy that most threatens the conservation of the old city is the one that concerns the “reform of dangerous residential buildings” (weifang gaizao). Here, the boasted objectives of modernisation and the improvement of housing conditions leave the way open for the destruction of entire neighbourhoods, accompanied by the relocation of the original inhabitants, in order to construct new homes at higher prices and in architectural styles that show little respect for the harmony of the city. For writer Shu Yi, when this policy was first implemented on Peking’s peripheries, it was not a very serious matter as monuments and houses of historical value in these areas were rare. Now, however, this development has extended to touch the very heart of Peking; it is a genuine danger for the imperial city (huangcheng) and has clearly to be opposed: “The power to reform the old districts should not be placed in the hands of the developers”.

11 An example that is still sharp in the minds of the defenders of the national heritage is the house situated at no. 22 of the road Meishuguan houjie, where a siheyuan 1 of great value was destroyed as part of the works to widen Ping’an Avenue. In this connection, Shu Yi denounced the power of money and the collusion between political decision- makers and property developers: “Everything is a question of money. Behind the real estate, there is money. The relations between these characters are thus: you have money there; the property developers are here, and the government is there: they form a circle and behind it there is always money”.

12 Song Xiaolong, through the post that he occupies, does not express the same virulence as Shu Yi. He does recognise, however, that the policy of weifang gaizao is in conflict with the projects of his institute, in particular the implementation of the principle of renovation by stages and over mini-zones (weixun huanlun). He also painted a picture of the pressures that exist when the official lists of monuments and districts to be

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protected are drawn up. While the interests of these different actors—heritage offices, property developers, etc.—seem to stand in opposition to each other, they are sometimes very tightly interwoven, and those who officially protect the heritage are sometimes the first to destroy it. Thus, in a list of property developers published by the Ministry of Construction, the company Dongfang kangtai appears as an entity that belongs to the heritage office of the district of Dongcheng. The plurality of the functions of administrator and entrepreneur renders the possibility of any checks and balances or any recourse to the law particularly difficult.

13 The heart of the problem lies in the application of the law. When journalist Liu Xudun mobilised a protest at the end of the 1990s in Zhoushan in Zhejiang province to stop the destruction of the old town (or rather, what was left of it), he initiated a lawsuit to prevent his family home from being destroyed. He then discovered that the local government was putting pressure on the local courts and on the media: “Those who are carrying out the destruction are not the laobaixing (the people), but the governments and the officials”. Another evocative example is that given by Liang Congjie, historian and president of the Association of the Friends of Nature, during the round table which brought the colloquium to a close. Having written a letter to the secretary general of the State Council to point out to him that the tower in Dongfang square exceeded the legally permissible height, it was explained to him over the telephone by the secretary general that he knew this was against the law, but that he himself did not have the power to prevent it. “If he doesn’t, who does?” Liang concluded.

14 Recourse to justice is made difficult by the legal status of property, a problem brought up extensively during the various contributions. Writer Hua Xinmin (Catherine Xia) recalled the legal evolution of the status of land since 1949. After 1949, even though the state carried out expropriations and implemented a policy of nationalisation, at the legal level the land did not belong to the state. Landowners were given a certificate of ownership and each month they paid land taxes. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, numerous landowners “lost” their certificates and found themselves compelled to accept new inhabitants. From 1976, the landowners were able to recover their certificates, on the condition that they did not chase off the inhabitants who had arrived during the Cultural Revolution. Contrary to what is often thought, it was thus not until 1982 that the land, in the cities, became the property of the state. But if the urban land now belongs to the state, the owners retain a right of use of the land of indefinite duration. According to the law, it is not possible to sell the land on the market, but only the right of use pertaining to it. By virtue of this complexity, numerous owners are not aware of their rights and the property developers illegally deprive them of their rights. The conflict between conservation of the national heritage and the development of tourism 15 This question was extensively discussed during the colloquium, notably in the form of a debate chaired by Françoise Ged with Jean Rouger, vice-president of the National Association of Cities and Countries of Art and History. Addressing himself to Jean Rouger, one questioner emphasised the specific Chinese characteristics of the contradiction between conservation and tourism: “For the officials, the problem is: how can we earn money? They only see tourist resources in the monuments and not cultural resources. This is a phenomenon that spreads down from the top to the bottom. The civil servants say to themselves, if I can earn some money, I will invest all my efforts

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into protecting and managing our heritage. If I can’t, I am not going to protect or manage it”. The questioner illustrated his theme through the province of Shandong, and through two cities that have chosen contrasting models for the conservation and exploitation of their heritage. Qufu, in the area of Confucius’ birthplace, has opted for an intensive exploitation of its heritage to the profit of tourism, a choice that has led it to construct false monuments. The elevated earnings from tourism of this city contrast sharply with the difficulties faced by a neighbouring village, which has elected to give priority to protection, to respecting the rule of conservation, but which barely manages to attract any tourists: “It is thus the market that sets the value and it is according to this value that the methods of protection are decided on. This represents a very grave danger, because the market is blind”. In response to this example, Jean Rouger lays stress on the fact that in France there is a clear dissociation between protection of the national heritage, guaranteed by representatives of the state, and its exploitation. China is far from committed to a separation of functions since, as mentioned by one participant, around two years ago the work of conservation was entrusted to the care of the tourism offices. The only limit on these diversions, according to Lü Zhou, architect and professor at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture, is the recent publication of a regulation confirming that the heritage conservation units cannot become private enterprises.

16 The subordination of the cultural heritage to economic interests leads as a consequence to the favouring of rapid renovations catering to the tastes of tourists to the detriment of genuine restoration work. According to Lü, “in China, the renovation work is sometimes of a very bad quality, and we would be better off not renovating anything, there is a lack of people who possess the technical ability to restore historical monuments”. The problem of the quality of the conservation can be related to the absence of state certification of the competence of the restorers. Indeed, as architect and town planner Alain Marinos underlined, there exist in France bodies of professionals in the building trade which, under the supervision of the state, award qualifications, a certain number of which concern the restoration of historical monuments. To obtain contracts, companies have therefore to provide proof of their specialist skills. Moreover, financing is only granted subject to it being used by approved professionals. The work on the cultural heritage consequently demands that all levels of the restoration process are professionalised to a much greater extent.

17 The focus on tourism and economic exploitation of the cultural heritage raises the problem of the functions and value of this heritage. Can it be reduced to its economic and tourist value? Liang Congjie called to mind the problem of the lack of sensitivity of the political decision-makers, of the population and of a number of experts to the historical value of the heritage. If Wu Liangyong, an expert in the history of the urban development of Peking, declared “that it was never too late to start”, the question is knowing whether the decision-makers in the government, the residents and the experts have any awareness of the fact that the protection of old Peking is today indispensable. In reply to Wu Liangyong, Liang Conjie stated: “if people refuse to get down to the task, it will always be too late”. Conservation centred on the monument or on the environment: the problem of the population 18 If the Chinese legislation defines zones of protection (baohu qu), what are the principle prevailing criteria that determine the conservation of these zones? Bruno Fayolle-

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Lussac, historian and archaeologist at the School of Architecture and Landscape of Bordeaux, summarises the dilemma very succinctly: “either we decide that it is the architecture that is of value and the residents have to adapt to that, which often brings with it a change in the population, or it is left to the people to transform the heritage and we run the risk of accepting the habitual culture of those people who transform it”.

19 The city of Lhasa offers in this respect two radically opposed responses. For the project to renew the district of Xicheng (situated at the base of the Potala Palace) led by architects from Tsinghua, the local government set as a condition the relocation of the entire population in order to transform the district into a tourist zone. Despite the reservations of the architects, the last group of residents has just moved out and the district, despite the conservation of the architectural style, will experience a profound transformation. In contrast, the concern of the project headed by the Tibet Heritage Fund was to retain the original population and to get it involved with the project. The population thus took part in the renewal works, not financially, but by making contributions in kind—materials (wood, etc.), manual labour, and so on.

20 The problem in Peking in the restoration of the siheyuan or the dazayuan 2 is the density of the population, a result of the different waves of people arriving to live there and the effects of this concentration on the housing stock. The participation of the population in renovation projects is a delicate matter, for, as is underlined by Zou Huan, an architect in charge of a pilot renovation project in the district of Gulou, the residents are often ill informed and suspicious of institutions. Even if they have more knowledge of the question and are aware that their district is protected, recent examples of destruction inside the protected zones, such as that of Nanchizi and the green space projects, leave them defeated: “if I improve my siheyuan and afterwards it is destroyed to make way for a park, what can I do?” Faced by all these difficulties, what solutions can be envisaged for the protection of China’s capital city? Fighting to prevent destruction 21 Marianne Bujard, historian at the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, carried out a survey of the different temples that exist in the district of Gulou. For her, this survey is intended as a starting point for conducting genuine research into the heritage that has in part been forgotten, fallen into neglect or been used for other functions, or that has perhaps even been destroyed or is in the process of being so. It is a question here of stimulating the desire of historians or experts in architecture to carry out a real inventory of these temples, to learn their history in order to protect them. The inventory of this heritage is indeed a first step towards its recognition and thus towards its protection.

22 But recognition by the state is indispensable. Shu Yi formulated several concrete proposals to prevent the complete disappearance of old Peking. At the moment, only thirty zones are officially protected within the city’s boundaries. A proposal is needed to increase this list in one go by 300 other zones that have already been surveyed by experts (on a waiting list). Even if it cannot totally prevent the destruction, official registration on the list can nevertheless constitute a weapon for the defenders of cultural heritage. Similarly, of the 3,000 siheyuan surveyed in Peking, around six hundred have an important value as heritage sites and must be conserved. The Heritage Office has this list in its possession but has not published it yet. The official publication of this list is a high-stakes chip both for the defenders of the cultural heritage and for the property developers. For if these siheyuan are officially recognised as requiring protection, they will become “star turns” nailed into the

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urban landscape of Peking, something that will make it difficult for zones to be totally destroyed and for architects to design their urban projects.

23 But protection by the law is only possible through social mobilisation: “it is necessary that the experts and the general population unite with each other in a partnership to defend their heritage”, says writer Yuan Li, who suggests creating an association for the protection of the cultural heritage following the conference. Liu Xudun has demonstrated that at Zhoushan it was through the mobilisation of the residents and their legal fight that protection was possible. These forms of collective legal action are also being conducted in Peking, but come up against more obstacles. The sensitivity of Chinese and international opinion and the mobilisation of the media make up an integral part of the fight for protection. It is in fact by providing information on the laws, the rights of the owners and the illegal activity pursued by the property developers that pressure can be exerted on the political decision-makers. Combining protection of the heritage and modernisation of living conditions

24 In addition to action to prevent the destruction of the cultural heritage, projects to renovate old districts being conducted in other cities in China were also presented. The one headed by Bruno Fayolle-Lussac in a district of Xi’an may represent one possible path for renewal and restoration. The decision had been taken to refuse to change the public spaces but to retain the initial structures, in particular the width of the roads. By compromising the system of small plots of land as little as possible, it proved possible to let the residents reconstruct their space themselves. The results of this project have turned out to be overwhelmingly positive: the district has been successfully transformed, with the emergence of a road where businesses specialising in calligraphy proliferate, all the while conserving the life of the neighbourhood.

25 Zou Huan, architect at Tsinghua University, and Hirako Yutaka, of the Tibet Heritage Fund, presented a survey and pilot renovation project for three residential zones in old Peking. The aim of their research into the living conditions of the inhabitants was to provide material that would enable a residential zone to be improved and the structure of the social life to be conserved. At the end of their investigation, Zou Huan and Hirako Yutaka envisage finding financial solutions to encourage the residents who have other housing possibilities and who wish to move out to leave the dazayuan, so that a programme for the renewal of the housing stock can be started with the remaining residents. But, as Shu Yi underlines, to renovate the houses of the hutong, it is first necessary for the state to improve the public infrastructure, such as the sewage system, the electricity supply and the heating network. If the exterior is not modernised, it is impossible to even think of improving the living conditions on the inside. Between excitement and disappointment 26 A very genuine excitement was generated during the discussions, for the participants all feel concerned and are conscious of the urgency of the situation. Disappointment, however, was visible on the faces of the contributors, who expressed their feelings of impotence. In conclusion, however, it is possible to highlight two positives. Although the colloquium certainly provided an opportunity to make comparisons with other Chinese and foreign cities, it was for the first time almost entirely dedicated to the protection of Peking. Above all, it facilitated the encounter between experts and militants from different environments. If the relative absence of representatives from officialdom and contacts with the media is to be regretted, it was important that the

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architects and the professionals who are conducting the restoration projects were able to meet those who day by day fight to halt the destruction. •

NOTES

1. Siheyuan: a traditional house arranged around a square courtyard. 2. Dazayuan: a large traditional residence parcelled out into several individual homes.

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Literature

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Women’s Writing in Present-Day China

Jin Siyan

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Philip Liddell

1 Women’s writing, a literary genre closely linked to the building of identity, cannot be isolated from the question of gender. Immediately we speak of women’s writing, a whole series of questions arises. How should we define it? Does it really exist? Are we thinking of literature written by women or of literature written by men about women? Are we thinking of the nature of the female sex perceived as inferior or, on the contrary, of gender (xingbie) without the risk of reducing human beings to the animal state), a concept developed and demanded by feminists at the social and cultural level? It is not always easy to distinguish the female “I” from the wider sense of “I”. Defining literature by establishing the boundaries between the two sexes has been contributing for several years now to some significant research. The search for identity comes close to reducing literature to a sort of parcelling up process, in which the various elements of the human body are all so divided up, exposed and classified that the breath of life is eventually snuffed out; and, to that extent, women’s books represent the peculiarities of women’s writing. Women’s writing also represents a bisexuality that Flaubert referred to as “the third sex”, in which the limitations of gender are either transcended or neutralised. Women’s writing, in its diversity and its peculiarities, constitutes a different approach to and into the human state. It does not merely narrate experiences or give an autobiographical account. No longer does the feminine voice shut in the “I”. It is a view of the “I” that stamps a particular mark upon subjective writing.

2 What is the female viewpoint? From the female viewpoint how does the world look? How does the one woman see the other? How does she express it? How does she depict it and how does she comment upon it? What is the definition of women’s writing? What

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do Chinese women writers think of women’s writing? These are just a few of the questions frequently repeated in Chinese literary circles.

3 These questions show that masculine models unquestioningly interpreted as universal have now come under suspicion. That does not mean women’s writing is more fluctuating in its approach than men’s writing; it is neither more complex nor more problematic. Rather, the viewpoint is different. While Cheng Naishan, the writer of Girl’s Classic (Nüerjing), and Zhang Xinxin, who wrote Sharing the Roles (Zheci ni yan na yiban), are unsure how far they belong in the women’s category, Zhai Yongming scorns the definition of women’s writing as falling within the hierarchical concept of distinction according to gender: I am not a feminist, and so I am speaking about the possibility of “women’s” writing. Yet the embarrassing situation of women’s writing arises from the fact that there exists a hierarchical concept of distinction according to gender. Criticism of “women’s poetry” does not go beyond the same distinction in the political sense of the term. Judging from my own experiences, as an American woman writer used to say, “Only books dealing clearly with the problems of the female sex have been analysed 1.”

4 Women’s writing took shape thanks to the “new literature” movement (1917) under the influence of The Doll’s House by Ibsen (1828-1906). Its precursor in Baihua (vernacular Chinese) was the novel by Bing Xin (1900-2000), Two Families (Liangge jiating). Four periods may be distinguished, as well as three themes: women’s rights (funüquan), women and revolution, women and men. These three themes apply to all four periods.

5 First period (1917-1927): women’s rights. A woman is a human being; she is not an object. It is the flowering of the “I”, and of romantic subjectivity. Writers are concerned with social problems. Adopting Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House as a model, this writing was to be called “problem literature” (wentixiaoshuo). The writers of this period are Bing Xin, Lu Yin, Chen Hengzhe, Feng Huanjun, Shi Pingmei, Su Xuelin, Ling Shuhua and Bai Hui. They employ a style that is delicate, sentimental, poetic, with a predilection for private diaries and letters written in the first person. The female characters wish to live differently.

6 Second period (late 1920s-1940s): women and revolution. The subject here, in fact, is the conflict between love and revolution. A choice had to be made. It was impossible to have both at the same time, as Ding Ling clearly pointed out in her novel Spring 1930 in Shanghai (1930 nianchun Shanghai). The woman must choose. Either she sacrifices love to the revolution or else she sacrifices the revolution to love. In this regard, she is no different from her male counterpart, who is also obliged to choose. Xie Bingying writes: “Living in these historic times, I forget that I am a woman; I never think of personal matters; I hope only to devote my existence to the revolution 2.” Literary commitment ironed out all subtleties in writing that was dominated by ideology.

7 On the level of narrative technique, progress is clearly evident by the late 1920s. The romantic style is succeeded by narrative that is realistic, objective and usually devoid of lyricism. The outside world is substituted for the interior world; the subjectivity of the “I” gives way to the plurality of the “we”, and to historical events. Political and ideological consciousness prevails over literary consciousness. Men and women are alike in their revolutionary commitment. And what counts in writing is to “mirror” the image of this earthly utopia. The Sun Shines on the River of Sanggan (Taiyang zhaozai Sangganheshang) by Ding Ling and Original Strength (Yuandongli) by Cao Ming are

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examples of this endeavour. The “I” directed towards the revolutionary exterior ends in an alliance with the “we”.

8 But as the 1920s drew to a close, women writers were not all working to make utopia a reality. During the 1940s, in the big cities controlled by the Japanese, some women, such as Zhang Ailing and Su Qing in Shanghai, still took a passionate interest in the problems faced by men and women living together. Su Qing published in 1944 her autobiographical novel Ten Years of Marriage (Jiehun shinian). As in The Doll’s House, her heroine leaves her husband to live by herself. The book was reprinted 11 times in a few months. One small detail is revealing: despite the revolution, problems between women and men are still the main subject for the Chinese reader. Moreover, that is the main subject of Yu Ru’s novel, Distant Love (Yaoyuan de ai), which was very successful in cities controlled by the Nationalist Party. This is the story of an intellectual in revolt against the monotony of her life and the world of the “little I”. She is constantly in flight, searching for a more ambitious life, for an ideal associated with the masses.

9 A little later, from the 1950s until the end of the 1970s, committed literature condemned to silence even the faintest hankering among women to write. This was the third period. It was an empty period, or almost.

10 Zong Pu with Mungo Bean (Hongdou), Yang Mo with her Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge) and Ru Zhijuan with Lily (Baihehua), were among the few writers of note. The immense choir of the revolutionary “we” had swallowed up the voices of women.

11 The fourth period, (from 1978 until the present day): it has been qualified as a “new time” (xinshiqi), and has seen the rebirth of the subjectivity of the “I”. Once again, people speak of women’s writing. Zhang Jie, for example, defends the idea that women are not a sex, but human beings. And such writing raises a strong echo. Alongside Zhang Jie we should mention Dai Houying with Oh, Man, Man, (Ren a ren), Xiang Bin with Sacrifice of the Heart, Lu Xing’er with Oh, the Blue Bird (O, Qingniao) and Cheng Naishan with Girl’s Classic (Nüerjing).

12 Women’s writing of the “new time” does not really distance itself from romantic subjectivity or from committed realism. But the subjectivity that it expresses is not limited to the romantic circle of the “I”. The world of the “I” is more complicated, fractured, secret. The “I” is not merely faced with the classical problems—marriage, family, social position, women’s rights—it also takes on society’s taboos, in particular homosexual love. This development is accompanied at the same time by the appearance of the “woman hero”—of “superwoman” (nüqiangren). Writing adopts a strongly masculine (xiongxinghua) tone. Such women no longer live for the revolution, and they do not any longer commit themselves to ideological battles in the name of their homeland; if they commit themselves, it is to make their voices heard, to win their place in society. And the society they want is an egalitarian one.

13 Successive movements carried this writing to the front of the stage. First, as early as 1979, the novel by Zhang Jie 3 Love is Not Something You Forget (Ai shi buneng wangji de) had to face criticism that has still not died away. This novel addresses a sensitive question: after a long period during which love and marriage were politicised, how can one again live “normally” with love? Paradoxically, in a country like China where divorce is traditionally frowned upon, divorce is seen to be on the increase. How does a Chinese woman view this change? How does she adjust to social conventions? In her other two books, The Emerald (Zumiulü) and The Arch (Fangzhou), the writer describes the constraints that a celibate woman must suffer, and how her love obliges her to live

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through a painful memory of the past. The same theme is treated in depth by Zhang Kangkang 4 in Aurora Borealis (Beijiguang).

14 These two authors have attacked the basic problem of contemporary Chinese women: the right to love and the right to divorce, that is to say, the independence of women. That is the main concern of women’s writing in present-day China. It is true that this theme was also massively present in the literary output of the first half of the twentieth century. But a new dimension has been added. No longer is this the young couple whose love is corroded by daily life, as in Lu Xun’s Disappearance of Sadness (Shangshi, 1925), or the young woman tortured by love and yearning for love, as in Miss Sophie’s Diary (Shafenshi de riji, 1928) by Jing Ling (1904-1986), the novel which marked the end of the first period in women’s writing, or the woman in love with the revolutionary flower, as in the novel Manli (Manli) by Lu Yin (1898-1934). The young woman portrayed in Fields of Life and Death (Shengsi chang, 1935), by Xiao Hong (1911 to 1942) is no longer a model. In this “new time”, Chinese women are confronted as much by their own selves as by society. They claim not only the right to love but also the right to divorce as well as an equal place with men in society. This claim to an equal place strongly marks the writing of the past twenty years.

15 Zhang Xinxin (1953-) was the first to throw down the gauntlet with her novel On the Same Horizon (Zai tongyi dipingxian shang, 1981). The traditional place reserved for women was to be a “wise and helpful hand inside” the house (Xianneizhu). But today, as women enter professional life, how can these duties to family, marriage and profession be combined? Do they not depend on an attitude of mind? The novel describes this conflict, which eventually breaks up the relationship. This is the second aspect of women’s writing in this period: claiming the right within society to the same place as men. In the fictional world of Zhang Jie, women’s struggle comes to a lucid conclusion. The reader is reassured by the female character’s triumph in her arduous life. In Zhang’s other books, A Craving for Orchids (Fengkuang de junzilan), Along the Grand Canal (Zai lushang), Sharing Roles (Zheici ni yan na yiban 1989), women’s problem in society remains acute.

16 The subject is treated in a different way by Chen Rong (1936-) in When we Arrive in Middle Age (Ren dao zhongnian). The intellectual woman is crushed in the end by social and family restrictions. She can no longer breathe freely. The figure of this female intellectual represents an irony that reappears in her most recent novel, Weary of Divorce (Lande lihun): the heroine is still an intellectual, but is unable to feel. She is impervious to emotion. We are far from a happy ending, and the reader cannot see what solution there could be.

17 The novels of Wang Anyi 5 (1954-) arrive at the same conclusion. The woman’s consciousness claiming independence does not necessarily win through to success. On the contrary, she is crushed by the need to maintain the other two roles, those of mother and daughter, as in Hunt the Stag in the Middle of the Street (Zhulu zhongjie).

18 According to some critics, such female characters spring from a traditional model, the woman heroine Huamulan. This was a heroine who, as a girl, enlisted in the army in her father’s place and distinguished herself in battle before returning home. The story is told in Notes of poems for singing, yesterday and today (Gujin yuelu), a work from the fifth century Nanchao Dynasty: a heroic woman full of common sense, loyalty and family honour. Women’s novels of the 1980s still take their inspiration from this model, portraying “a woman who disguises herself as an asexual being” 6. In the above-

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mentioned novels, and in many others from that period, the female character is in effect a “superwoman”: she is intelligent, and aware of sharing the same social space as men and of speaking the same language as they do. The writing expresses this wish for equality: it is neutral, or rather male. It is no longer the traditional image of the half- veiled face, or the face hidden in the sleeve.

19 Added to the voice of the woman who is intellectualised and neutralised, another is heard, that of the woman refusing to be considered a subject. No longer will she measure herself by men, or dispute with them her social position. Here, the most extreme solution is likely to be sought. When a woman is humiliated to the last degree, experiences an attempt to rob her of humanity, to reduce her to a thoughtless existence, has she the right to end her life, rather than fight the attempts to degrade her? Has she the right to decide her own destiny? The problem is addressed in the novel by Zong Pu (1928-), Who Am I? (Wo shi shei?). We are at the start of the Cultural Revolution. The female character Wei Mi and her husband Meng Wen are dreadfully beaten by the revolutionaries. They are forbidden to let their hair grow. Their heads are half shaved. Meng Wen cannot stand these humiliations any longer and kills himself. His wife, Wei Mi, is on the edge of madness. A painful doubt haunts her: “Who am I?” She sees skeletons, snakes, insects, and scorpions nibbling at human bodies, gnawing at that which defines the character of mankind . . . She too ends up committing suicide.

20 Dai Houying, in her book Oh Man, Man (Ren a ren, 1980), rails at the fact that, claiming to seek what is good, ideology crushes the human soul. At the start of the 1980s, in Chinese literary circles, the protest expressed by the novel led to a debate on humanism.

21 Tie Ning, born in 1957 in Peking, is the youngest of the writers of the first generation after the Cultural Revolution. She is exclusively interested in the women of her own time. Employing a style both cold and keen, she paints conflicts that set tradition in opposition to the modern spirit, the civilised world to the animal world, the desire for independence to the dependent existence. Like Rousseau, she is sensitive to the process of civilisation: in her view, this is the source of the suffering endured by women. The only female characters likely to find peace and satisfaction are those not yet contaminated by civilisation, among them Xiangxue in Oh, Xiangxue ( A Xiangxue), Dazhiniang in Heaps of Straw (Maijieduo), The Pregnant Woman and the Cow (Yunfu yu niu) and the Daughters of the River (He zhi nü). A similar case is examined in Roses Round the Door (Meiguimen). The female character, Si Qiwen, is ready to fit in with the family and society, cost what it may, but in the end her efforts only make her cruel.

22 That is the main characteristic of the women’s writing of this period. The subjectivity of the “I” rests upon history, memory and events.

23 Another distinguishing feature is realism, or what critics call “the new realism” or “zero writing” (lingdu xiezuo). Frequently quoted on this subject are Fang Fang, Chi Li and Bi Shumin.

24 Xu Xiaobin (1951-) published in 1989 Enquiry into a Case of Madness (Dui yige jingshenbing huanzhe de diaocha). The depiction of a young girl’s delusions rocked the critical establishment. In her subsequent novels, Drunken Garden (Mihuan huayuan) and Pisces— The Ancient Story of One Woman with Three Men (Shuangyu xingzuo-yige nüren he sange nanren de gulao gushi), her mysterious and meditative writing goes much further. Her

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apparent desire is to emphasise that which is unknown and unknowable in the human heart, in the character’s destiny and in the civilisation he or she inhabits.

25 Chi Zijian was born in 1964, in Mohe, in the province of Heilongjiang. This region in the north of China offers an immense territory for her fiction. Her novels are set for the most part in that wintry expanse, empty, but full of peasants’ stories, customs, scenes of everyday life flowing like a long river, slow, unremarkable but oppressively quiet. Her best known books are At the Foot of the Tree (Shuxia), The Striking of the Morning Bell Resounding at Daybreak (Chenzhong xiangche huanghun), Tales of the Village at the North Pole (Beijicun tonghua, a collection of short stories), Journey Towards the Daylight (Xiangzhe baitian lüxing) and The Tomb of White Snow (Baixue de muyuan). Her novels recall the writing of Xiao Hong, a woman writer in the 1930s.

26 Xu Kun (1965-) draws upon the same sources, but in a different vein. She uses the oral and popular style, full of humour and irony. Perhaps it allows the narrator to keep her distance. This detachment reminds us of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) who sought to maintain an empty space between the actor and the spectators. Above all, that can be seen in Vanguard (Xianfeng), White Speech (Baihua) and Demonstrations (Youxing).

27 Another group of women novelists write mainly in colloquial language (sirenhuayu). The writing style is fragmented, “postponed” (in Derrida’s sense) about the most intimate personal experiences, a monologue of the “I” enclosing itself within its private world.

28 While the writing of Can Xue is considered as “semi-private”, that of Chen Ran (1962-) 7 is a completely private world. In her novel World-Weariness (Shijibing), she tells of the lives of present-day students and explores their states of mind. In 1990, with her novel Bottoms Up to the Past (Yu wangshi ganbei), she turns her attention to the experience of women living in a great city. In a direct and detailed style she describes the interior lives of women intellectuals, living without men. The “I” in the novel tells us of her feelings as a lonely woman, of the wounds caused by her broken marriage and of her discomfort in society. With this novel, Chen Ran has succeeded in creating a “private narrative” (sirenxing xiezuo). The style is autobiographical; the communication becomes very intimate, a shared intimacy between the narrator and the writer. One of her other novels, Private Life (Siren shenghuo), is a subtle monologue, the “I” rebelling against herself and the outside world. The main character is Ni Aoao, a single girl, headstrong and over-sensitive, living only within her own mind. She flatly denies the outside world; she is hostile to any collective consciousness, to any sense of “we”. She describes herself as a “disabled human being living in a disabled time”. The narration, precise and extravagant by turns, of the girl’s homosexual experiences makes the writing very “private” and particularly irritating in the view of her critics. The narrator is immersed in her world of senses and desires, refusing the lies and concealments in her private life.

29 This “private” literature takes a more personal, more exhibitionist, turn in the work of Lin Bai 8. Her novel A War of a Girl with Herself (Yigeren de zhanzheng) relates the emotional life of Duomi, a girl who, having suffered terribly in a world regulated by men, turns in upon herself. She is in love with herself. This unusual kind of love, and the naturalist descriptions of her sexual experiences and of her psychological torments, came in for severe criticism. Yet, the writer says at the start of her novel:

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A war of a girl by herself means that one hand fights with oneself, that oneself has only a wall to shelter against, that a flower destroys itself by itself. A war of a girl by herself means that a girl marries herself.

30 Lin Bai’s characters are young fighters, in constant conflict with the men who occupy the central position in society, in conflict with daily life which, in their eyes, is too commonplace. In One Cannot Separate from One’s Love (Tong xinaizhe buneng fenshou), Tell, oh Room (Shuoba, fangjian) and The Bullet Through the Apple (Zidan chuanguo pingguo), these conflicts unfold within the personal world of young girls, with unbearable interior violence. This is the tragedy of today’s women, a tragedy of the “I” face to face with itself, and confronted by its sensual experiences. This tragedy is grasped in all its immediacy and developed over the course of the narrative.

31 The novels of Chen Ran and Lin Bai are a world of personal experiences. It is a world of the “I” face to face with itself. The narrator’s perspective is interiorised, the exterior world is just a pretext for the narrative. The timescale is set within this interior space: this is a time outside time. Memory becomes extremely subjective, which leads to a fragmented, dispersed style. Is this world not also the utopia constructed by the female “I”?

32 This narrative dispersal is characteristic of the writings of Hai Nan 9. In her novel My Lovers (Wode qingrenmen), the narrative is punctuated by dialogue, memories of the dead, visions of a wild “I”. In her work, there are no more women driven to the tomb by the suffering caused by an unfaithful lover, the traditional ending of novels. The characters’ deaths are no longer the consequences of their amorous relationships. This romantic aspect of the classical Chinese novels and those of the 1920s, in line with the model of classical Western fiction (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Théophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse or Mérimé’s La Dame aux Camélias), has vanished among the young women writers of present-day China. A woman no longer believes in tears or promises: she lives for herself. She follows her feelings without allowing herself to be overwhelmed. All beauty is an encounter. Amorous relationships invigorate her mind. She is as she wishes to appear.

33 Zhai Yongming published in 1984 a long poem The Woman (Nüren). In it we see a woman who is sufficient for herself. She has an inexhaustible hinterland of the mind: as Saint- John Perse says in Exile, “There is no history but that of the soul—there is no ease but that of the soul”. In 1985 she published her second long poem, Village of Jingan (Jinganzhuang), in which the anguish of youth is rooted in the ancient soil and in recurrent time. In Woman, the Design of Death (Siwang de tuan, 1987), What One Calls Everything (Chengzhiwei yiqie, 1988) and Colours in the Colours (Yansezhong de yanse, 1989), one symbol reappears insistently: night. Night is a reservoir of signs for representing the frenzies of a woman’s soul; the interiorisation of the world passes through the incantation of woman’s discourse; it is the transfiguration of the imagination, transmuted memory. In this transfiguration, sensation and interior reality are reflected in a tirelessly fragmented discourse. Night is the material for the incarnation and manifestation of the female “I”. At the same time, it represents the distance between the “I” and the “self” (the unconscious mind), which only the incantation of poetic speech can put in communication with each other. The “I” never penetrates so deeply as when it writes. Exterior images are then but the shadow of its interior images.

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34 There are two other women poets who share this perception: Tang Yaping in Desert of Black Sand (Heise shamo) and Yi Lei in Bedroom of a Celibate Woman (Dushen nüren de woshi).

35 Both are strongly aware of being women of today, which sets them apart from Zhang Jie and from their generation. The model of Huamulan (the heroic woman disguised as a man, independent or claiming independence) becomes that of a woman living in her interior world, the world of love and sensual experiences. She is a woman first and last. She seeks a language appropriated to herself, far from the speech monopolised by men.

36 We are living in a period when life’s tragedies have changed, a period significantly marked by the experiences of exile, of nomad writing: language, like literature, is a floating space for a person writing for his or her interior reader, fleeting, for the most intimate “self”, and for the most distant. The writer experiences a double exile, interior and exterior at the level of subjectivity and writing. We may date the start of this period from the end of the 1970s.

37 During the 1990s, Chinese women writers who left China took a different approach to this theme of double exile. When the state apparatus of their country of origin no longer exists in their living space, when the political, social and moral “enemies” against whom they once fought with all their strength are now too far away to be physically opposed, and when the national frontier disappears, how do they live in their new existence? Each is directly confronted by herself and by the problem of the linguistic environment (yu jing). This double encounter is the hardest test. There is no longer an exterior world to be heroically resisted! How then can we know what will be the outcome of this encounter between the “I” and the “self”?! The exterior exile prompts another exile, far more serious, an exile in the interior of the “I”.

38 This exile becomes unbearable when it touches (inevitably) upon the problem of language. The language forged and conceived by political and national frontiers is no longer right for expressing so new an experience. The young women writers try to overthrow the dictatorship of this constricted language, seeking new connections between the signifier and the signified. But the frontiers have not disappeared, as one usually thinks: they are still there, between one’s country and other countries, between one’s native language and other languages, between the “I” and the “self”. Exterior exile leads to interior exile. It is the price of liberty. These writers realise that being free is in the end an unbearable lightness. Unbearable because their mother tongue suffers from this freedom; it lives in exile, at the meeting with the other language or the other languages, and in literature that is reflected by a serious slide. Language has its own frontiers closely connected to those of the state. How can it be maintained in this exile, between the frontiers of several cultural spaces?

39 Liu Suola is known for her novel You Have No Other Choice (Ni biewu xuanze). She lived in London before settling in the United States. London inspired her to write an unusual novel Hundunjialigeleng 10. In it she records her reflections on this freedom so longed for in China, on the weighty history of her homeland, and on the language that she cannot manage to do without. Critics have described this novel as “postmodernist”. Through the irony and the humour, there shows through a deep disappointment with the idea of freedom and a harsh critique of the Chinese tradition. The character Huang Haha has left China for London. She has dismissed the memory of the Cultural Revolution but without really being able to forget it. She feels attached to no country, but she needs Chinese, her mother tongue. Still worse, she uses only slang words, the coarsest street dialect of Peking. She had thought she could become a universal citizen and, now that

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she has fallen in love with a young British man, she finds she has only one wish: to read the family correspondence from Peking; she finds that she is forever thinking of “Peking Man”, 690,000 years old, who was discovered in 1927 in Zhoukoudian, near Peking, and who disappeared in the 1930s during the Sino-Japanese War. This popular style enables her to test the flexibility of the Chinese language.

40 In her short novel The Dream of Eden (Yidianyuan zhimeng, 1992), Liu Suola does not flinch from putting love in conflict with civilisations. The heroine refuses to be Adam’s concubine. She leaves in search of a dream lover to whom she has given the name Zhi (which means “to show”). Is he a spirit or a God? For her it does not matter. What is sure is that he is neither man nor woman, a sexless being, at least in the book. The woman ends by being transformed into a piece of stone between her mother’s legs. The symbolism, a human being metamorphosed into a thing, is very contemporary.

41 The image of a stone reappears in the writing of You You: The Stone Uttering a Piercing Cry (Jianjiao de shitou, 1991), Nothing to Say (Wuhua keshuo, 1991) and A Flying Stone (Huifeide shitou, 1993). The flying stone is divine: it defies gravity. It flies in the air; it travels with the female “I” in love. Suddenly the “I” tears itself apart in an explosion of blood and begins a sickening fall. The fall of the “I” and flight without gravity are two antithetical images. Woman’s destiny is soberly traced here. In her other novel, Huangxi huxi (1993), You You describes the psychological confusion caused by being in exile. Where am I? Among the family? English, the language in which the “I” is expressed, makes her realise that the “I” exists outside the context of her native language; while Chinese, in which the “I” is expressed at the same time, puts it back in the context of its own culture. Thus, the “I” fluctuates between two linguistic contexts. The language in which the “I” is expressed inspires in her a profound homesickness; is it Mandarin Chinese, or a certain dialect? The “I” does not know. It recognises each word, without being able to grasp the sense of what is said. So the “I” is in an odd situation: it no longer has any landmark or reference to safeguard its identity. Geographic exile (exterior) is accompanied by an exile still more difficult to manage, that of the language. The identity of the “I” is lost in this double exile. Where is this identity? It resides neither in the “I” nor in any specific place. It is nowhere; it is in the hand of the “I” that is ready at any moment to move on; and the “I” says to itself, “You are constantly on the move with ‘your family’ in your hand 11.” Gao Xingjian has spoken of the torments suffered by exiled Chinese writers. Questioned about the link he maintains with his own language, he replied that there was an interaction: he spoke the language and the language spoke to him at the same time. When writing, he said, he forged his own language, bent it to his inspiration, and the language, in return, fashioned him 12.

42 There is the time of the “I”—woman’s time, as some critics say—and historical time. Between them, between the unreal and the real, the “I” leaves an imperceptible trail. A first “I” lives in the memory of family life, or in the memory of its everyday life; another “I” constantly questions the accuracy of these fragments of memory, and the truth of what has happened, taking care not to fall into the woman-man dichotomy. It is a war of a single woman, a world of a single woman. The other person’s speech is that of the “I”. The “I” is dissociated and transformed into someone else.

43 Yan Geling (1959-) began publishing her novels in the 1980s. The best known, written before she left for the United States, are Green Blood, the Private Life of a Woman Soldier (Yigenübingde qiaoqiaohua) and A Female Meadow (Ci xing de caodi). While The Girl Xiaoyu

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(Shaonü Xiaoyu), written in the United States, caused quite a stir in the community of Chinese writers overseas, Le Fusang, her next novel, exploded like a bomb. In the epic style, the writer relates to us for the first time the dreadful life of prostitutes and of the immigrant Chinese labourers, in a society steeped in misunderstandings and racism. The epic style gives place to psychological writing in the novel The Human World (Renhuan) and the narrative becomes a monologue, the confession of a woman patient undergoing psycho-analytical therapy, angled from the specific point of view of a narrator who has grown up in the West. She casts a new eye on Chinese men, recounting their suffering as men. This is a story of the masculine world as seen by a female “I” in whom different cultures coexist.

44 Hong Ying (1962) begins writing poems in 1981. Seven years later, she turns to the novel. Resident in London, she still lives in her interior world, a world of the “I”, which is not, however, that of the “self”. “‘I’ is not the ‘self,’” she points out in the postface to her collection London, a Dangerous Place for a Date (Londres, weixian de youhui). The “I”, as Rimbaud said, is another. The Dirty Finger and the Cork (Zangshouzhi. Pinggaizi, 1994) is a fragmented piece of writing. The “I” is a figure composed of several young women thrown into constant battles, either with their families or with men. The novel tells of a young woman who says goodbye to her father. She sets off without knowing where she is going. She meets a man covered in the skin of a cat and makes love to him without knowing why. Love and humiliation, beauty and decadence, attraction and disgust become intertwined, cancelling each other out. She experiences the “awakening” while being present at the slaughter of a pregnant woman. The family network shackles her freedom. She is obliged to witness a terrible scene: the castration of a cat, the symbol for man in the novel. Her mother forbids her to write; she goes so far as to tear up her manuscript. What the reader is reading is only what survived the disaster. That explains why the story is so fragmented.

45 Here, the sensitive time, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s expression, does not coincide with the time of the story. The woman’s time (that of the events in solitude) and the time of the story (the social horizon of the experience) make up the fabric of the narrative—a chopped and fragmented narrative, in no way linear. The narrator keeps her distance from the events. She describes the problem of the “I” in a raw and direct way.

46 Elsewhere, in the telling of other stories of passion, one finds the same distancing of the “I”. So it is with Studies of Yu Hong over Recent Years (Jinnian Yuhong yanjiu, 1994). This is an enquiry carried out by the young poetess and researcher into her own grandmother, the writer Yu Hong. It is a name that seems dangerous to bear. A diary, photos and so on punctuate the story of the discovery. Who is Yu Hong? The ageing editor, who will have spent her whole life looking for her, decides to eradicate all trace of her physical body and of her work. She no longer exists, other than as a shadow, like the story of Yu Hong, a shadowy enigma.

47 This writing, which frees itself of chronological and cultural boundaries, paints a picture both personal and social of women’s experience. It is a new literary form, in which the female “I” constitutes, on the same social horizon as men, an open space with its own experience arising from accurate memory or from real memory. The boundaries between the accurate account and the real account have never been so confused. The writing is fragmented, subjective, interior. The problems that the “I” encounters spring not only from the conflict between traditional values and modern minds but also from the opposition between the “I” and the “self”. That is how Chinese

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women writers question themselves about the meaning of the “I” as well as about the meaning of the existence of the “I”.

48 Autobiographical writing has become these days a favoured literary genre. It is different from what it was in the years between 1920 and 1940. The gallery of characters is no longer ordered and structured around such themes as the revolt against the old system, the search for light in the darkness, and so on. No longer does the antagonism between romantic writing of the interior and the exterior serve as a model. Here, the exterior world is absent or exists only in the mind of the “I”. This subjective world, of the “I” stifled by interior images is not just a space reserved for memory writing. Subjective life occupies as much space as the work of memory.

49 In 1994, Ai Xiaoming (1953-) published her fictional memoir Consanguinity (Xuetong). The novel sets out to describe a childhood similar to that of her contemporaries and different from that of others, for it is in the social field that the “I” lives through its own experiences. A family story broken up by the viewpoint of the “I” in the revolutionary years—before, during and after the Cultural Revolution. What makes it different from other novels in the same literary genre is this fragmented writing, following the rhythm of the viewpoint of the “I”. This viewpoint enables us to perceive with the narrator everything felt by the “I”. The narrator is lavish with detail in descriptions of the space offered to the viewpoint of the “I”, the surroundings of the house, the rambling progress of the thinking of the “I” in contact with other people. What gives the novel its strength is the viewpoint of the “I” across the natural environment and among friends and family, reaching to the deepest part of the “I”. This is a new kind of autobiographical writing.

50 While Ai Xiaoming captures her world of the “I” using a fragmented style, Zhang Zhijun’s style remains soberly naturalistic. In her autobiographical novel The Red House (Hongfangzi), she shows us, in a raw but subtle way, her own experiences as a Chinese woman of poor origins. Very often, in autobiographical accounts of the revolutionary years, the narrator tells an extraordinary story of some rich and noble family whose members suffered appallingly. Many such accounts try to show how the proletarian revolution reduced people of the middle and upper classes, intellectuals and former nobility, to the condition of vagrants, beggars, in every sense of the term. The Red House, by contrast, relates the experience of a poor young woman, the child of a labouring family, and of an upward journey in the social scale over the thirty years that followed 1949. With her family she was part of the privileged class and was logically assured of a fine future. The life described was commonplace—but commonplace does not mean easy or free of stress. Whatever their origin, no one can escape being pauperised in a totalitarian society. The tensions are created, not merely out of the conflict between the “I” aspiring to freedom and the totalitarianism of society, but above all out of the conflict between the female “I” and a conservative society in which only the existence of men is recognised.

51 The “I” in The Red House is a woman of character. The strength of her character is what brings about the failure of her two marriages, which earns her the disapproval of a society in which divorce is frowned upon—and particularly when the divorce has been sought by the woman. But this same strength helps her to succeed in carving out for herself a place in society and in overcoming all her suffering. This “I” practises self- defence: it is not the traditional model for women in fiction (weak, poetically romantic

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and given to day-dreams). For the “I” in this case, it is a matter of life or death. Women must be born strong and resistant. Romanticism is a luxury that they cannot indulge in.

52 Thus, there appears a new pattern for the Chinese woman. No longer does she live in wait for a man. She is not shy about standing up to male critics. She does not depend on men. It so happens that the only man capable of bearing the harshness of their lives, a man who had helped the whole family to survive the most painful years, turns out to be her brother. He is neglected by the family and decides to end his life, just as living conditions are beginning to improve. He has to disappear for the “I” to realise how much she misses him. He is the only man she will love. This tragedy has a strong symbolic meaning: the world of men is far away; it is lost in the unknown. The narrative is sober and neutral. The author tells us of the dullness of life and of its cruelty, writing so soberly as to lend great force to the “I” of ordinary people. This is the vital force of human beings, the only force capable of overcoming the suffering of human existence.

53 At a time when the generation of women writers born in the 1960s is mostly absorbed in the intimate world of the deepest “I” and concentrated upon its monologue (duyu), Mei Zhuo, a Tibetan woman writer, is not content with the monologue; in common with a few of her contemporaries, she has abandoned the subjective world. She does not even use the first person, this “I” that is today omnipresent. In her novel The Tribe of the Sun (Taiyang buluo, 1997) 13, the narrator tells a story of life, love and death in a conflict between two Tibetan tribes. It is an epic story but one outside time, since the time is not defined in the novel. There are in Tibet two enemy tribes, all descended from Songzanganbu, a Tibetan rebirth of the Buddha Guanyin. Right from the start of the novel, the reader loses all notion of time: They ask him where he comes from. He points behind him. They do not understand his language, but conclude from his pointing finger that he comes from the sky. Accordingly, they make a litter and carry this man sent from heaven to the tribe 14.

54 Who is “he”? Where does “he” come from? Who are “they”? The first lines of the novel provide no answer to these questions (the same doubts that preoccupied Gauguin)—no more than do the closing lines. The narrator is content to repeat a legendary name, “Zanpu”, the first prince in Tibet’s history. Communication between “he” and “they” is impossible. Language, humankind’s most basic tool, becomes powerless here. Only belief counts in this kind of encounter. These first lines are based upon a Tibetan conviction as old as Tibet’s culture: there exists, beyond language, another way in which we think, act, communicate and understand: it is our sensitivity, elusive, immaterial—but palpably there, deep in our hearts.

55 “They” accept this unknown “he”; they think he has been sent from heaven. Dialogue with heaven is difficult, for they do not know whether heaven hears them; what they can be sure of is that this stranger is an “offering” sent to their tribe by heaven.

56 From the start, the narrative mixes legend, ancient customs and mystery; it plunges the reader into confusion. The questioning is as basic and as inexhaustible as the birth of the universe.

57 The love story and the story of the tribes are intertwined in a space devoid of chronological time. The narrative is fragmented. Now we read

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of the death of the parents of Jiacuo, an only son who had been until the age of 17 a careless young noble; now we read of the couple’s marriage, the bride having spent her first night with the steward of the house. Now we read of Jiacuo’s flight after his parents’ death, and of his stay with a poor, unknown family whose daughter he eventually marries at her father’s request. Why did the young bride give herself to the steward? According to a not very enlightening comment by her big sister, the steward looked like someone. Who was the “someone”? That remains a mystery. Why did the father of the daughter break into sobs in the middle of the night before begging the young man to marry his daughter? That remains a mystery. What is the origin of this ring of solar stone that is transmitted from generation to generation on the fingers of the heirs of the same blood? It has “the reflection of gold and silver, the virtue of jade” 15; it is made of the blood that passes from generation to generation. It is transparent, but this transparency conceals a deep mystery. It forecasts good and bad fortune: Thus, it sparkles, golden, and shines like the sun; its light irradiates every corner within the fortress of Yasaicang. For hundreds of years it has been predicting good times and bad for the tribe of Yazha. When its light is golden, the tribe knows propitious winds and timely rain and human beings and animals prosper; when the light is darker, and clouded, disaster will strike 16.

58 Where did she go, Xiang Sa, the young woman who lost, first, her father at the age of two and then her lover at the age of twenty and who took refuge in the cave where her grandmother, having been hunted by the tribe, spent her last days before disappearing? Who is this transparent man with a white beard whom the young woman perceived in front of the cave? After his appearance, the young woman’s little sister, who came to bring her food once a week, never found her again. All that remains a mystery.

59 These tales of generations, of tribes, unfold in a time when the present, the past and the future are mingled. The reader has no landmarks to date the period. The only reference point is love. Does the author mean that any love story is eternal, that it repeats itself forever in different guises? In the novel, nothing seems to be able to clear up these mysteries, nothing except death. Death, omnipresent, is the companion of love. The author writes: Only under a western sky can all Tibetans die in peace, simply because the western sky calls them, these extremely virtuous souls. They do not die; they transcend themselves into eternal samsara 17. The death of the body means no more than the end of suffering 18.

60 These mysteries are not merely part of the romantic fabric. They are rooted in Tibetan culture, so that the novel becomes the portrait of a way of life, representing a Tibetan mindset, so distant and yet also so close.

61 The question of time occupies an important place in Chinese women’s writing today. When it comes to language, society and literary themes, it is clear that there is a homology associated with the period. Writers tend not to date events. Historical time is absent, which would have been unthinkable during the 1950s or 1960s. In some way, writers give up historical time, and epic time.

62 The “I” becomes apparent during the 1970s, firstly among young poets who seek, fumbling, for a way of treating what presents itself to them, to recreate it from within.

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They wonder, “Where are our times that have disappeared?” (Women xiaoshi de suiyue zai nali?). They experiment with past, present and future, as though unrolling a length of material, without calibration in the narrative. It is a subjective form of time, stringing images together, making connections under a critical gaze. Subjective choices govern the excisions, rationally and irrationally.

63 This narrative time is strongly linked to the inner present. It enables memory to be transformed into imagination, and an accurate account (events) to be transformed into a true account (fictional writing). This narrative time does not suppress historical time —the memory of history—but reverses the priorities. Instead of measuring and dating the event, instead of structuring it, the writer means to occupy a panoptic, that is, to be everywhere at once, in the same time. This is one aspect of the modernity of Chinese subjective writing. Aan attempt is being made to be free to write as oneself about oneself in a world outside time.

64 Imaginary time in the work of Chinese writers is a rhythm set by a historical time, an inner time and an intermediary time. The historical time is the time of the event when the “I”, as narrator, sets himself or herself up as a biographical reference point, within a past that is reconstituted, updated by words. The inner time is that in which the “I” is not a historian. It is distanced from the accurate account to be independent of any historical truth of reported facts. Far from the generalising formalism of the grand national anthem sung by a crowd, the “I” concerns a particular truth, an uncertain truth. Between the past, the present and the future, chronological frontiers disappear. Timelessness. This is how it is in the work of the women writers we have mentioned.

65 These four periods of women’s writing lend emphasis to the development of subjectivity in Chinese literature. First comes the awakening of the “I” with writing devoted to social problems. Writers argue for women’s right to social equality. The awakened “I” then commits itself to the revolution, losing its subjective existence while joining in with the national chorus: thirty years go by. It has been recovering its subjective existence only during the past twenty years. To sum up: looking from inside to outside to win women’s rights round about the 1920s; looking from the revolutionary world of outside to the disappearance of the “I” in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s; again looking from inside the “I” to the exterior, reformist world, the world of men, from the 1970s to the 1980s; and finally, looking from the outside world to the deepest place within the “I”, an enquiry that brings us from the end of the 1980s to the present day.

NOTES

1. Zhai Yongming, “More on the subject of ‘the conscience of the night’ and of ‘women’s poetry’” (Zai tan “heiye yishi” he “nüxing shige), in Shitansuo, No. 1, 1995, p. 129. 2. Xie Yu-e ed., Studies on women’s writing (Nüxing wenxue yanjiu), Kaifeng, Henandaxue chubanshe, 1990, p. 325

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3. Zhang Jie, born in Peking in 1937, is a graduate of the People’s University (Ren Da) in Peking. She published, in July 1978, her story The Child Who Came from the Forest. We should mention here her main published works: The Sensitive Woman, There is a Young Person, Who Lives Best? and The Heavy Wings 4. Zhang Kangkang was born in 1950 in Hangzhou, and left school at 16. She worked for eight years on a state farm in Heilongjiang, and began publishing her work in 1972. Her novels include: The Dividing Line, The Right to Love, He is not a Hero and Summer. 5. Wang Anyi was born in 1954 in Fujian, and spent her childhood in Shanghai. In 1969, she went to work in a village in the north of Anhui. Her first published work appeared in 1975. 6. Cf. Chen Sihe, Textbook on the History of Chinese Contemporary Literature (Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng), Shanghai, Fudandaxue chubanshe, 1999, p. 350. 7. Chen Ran was born in Peking in 1962, and finished her studies at the Normal University of Peking (Beijing shifan daxue). 8. Lin Bai was born in 1958 in Guangxi. After spending years in the countryside as a young educated woman, she studied at the University of Wuhan. She was a librarian, and then an editor before becoming a writer 9. Hai Nan, whose real name is Su Lihua, came originally from Yunnan. Her early poems were published in 1982. A little later, she gave up poetry and turned to writing novels. 10. Liu Suola, Hundun jialigeleng, Hong Kong, Xianggang Tupo chubanshe, 1991 11. In Today (Jintian), 1993, No. 2, p. 37. 12.Gao Xingjian, interview with Jin Siyan and Wang Yipei, in Dialogue, Nice, Alliage, No. 2, 2001, p. 102. 13. Mei Zhuo, The Tribe of the Sun, Peking, Zhongguo wenlian chubangongsi, 2nd ed., 1998. 14. Mei Zhuo, ibid, p. 5. 15. Mei Zhuo, ibid, p. 13 16. Mei Zhuo, ibid, p. 13 17. The succession of rebirths and existences. 18. Mei Zhuo, op. cit., 1998, p. 290

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The Five Yuan

Shi Shuqing

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the Chinese original by Caroline Mason

1 The hillside slopes very steeply here, and the earth is so hard and dry that it looks as if it is covered with shards of tile. You can’t grow anything in a place like that, which is probably why it came to be used as the village graveyard.

2 Grave-mounds dot the steep slope here and there, but considering that for many years now every single person who has died in the village has been buried here, there aren’t many mounds to be seen. This is because a number of the oldest ones have gradually been worn away by the wind and rain. Some of them have disappeared altogether, and all that remains of others is a small bump, hardly perceptible unless you step on it or feel it with your hand—a slight swelling on the surface the only sign that there was probably once an old grave there.

3 But there are actually masses of bodies buried beneath this hillside, and even the villagers can’t say for sure whether there is someone buried in this or that small patch of ground. When there is a death in the village, the gravediggers sometimes walk up and down like prospectors, hunting for a vacant plot. They’ll choose a level area which appears to be unoccupied, and start digging, very gingerly, but then they’ll unearth human remains, sometimes new ones, sometimes old, so they hastily refill the hole and move elsewhere, to start digging again. This happens almost every time, and it’s very discouraging for the diggers. You see a little pile of freshly-turned earth in the graveyard, slowly changing colour, and it’s easy to tell, from the colour of the soil, how many hours of digging it represents.

4 Just at this moment, the gravediggers seem to have grown weary of their work. They have put down their picks and shovels and are squatting among the graves to eat their momo1 and have a drink of water. Their hands are covered with dirt, but since there is no way to wash them, they just hold them up to their mouths and blow on them hard a

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few times, though that doesn’t seem to dislodge anything at all. Then they break open their momo and begin to eat.

5 Their faces are the same colour as the soil which they throw up when digging graves: they are the regular gravediggers for the village, and the family of the deceased always pays them a mietie2, possibly as much as 15 yuan, or even 20, but at the very least seven, and in any case an amount not to be sneezed at. Every so often, as if in obedience to some law, they shoulder their picks and shovels and come out here to dig a grave. But today’s grave is clearly not an easy one to dig. They got here before the sun was very high in the sky, yet all they’ve managed to do by the time they stop for a break is to make a small pile of soil, and you couldn’t honestly call what they’ve dug a hole! The lumps of earth they have dug up are as hard as logs split with an axe. The walls and bottom of the hole are covered with soil which their picks have dislodged, and when it’s shovelled up, bit by bit, the marks made by their picks can be seen very close together, resembling a forest of strange, raised hands. The livid colour of many of these marks seems to express hostility and hatred.

6 The grave is getting harder and harder to dig.

7 There isn’t a single blade of grass more than five inches high in the whole graveyard. It’s not that there isn’t any grass—there’s plenty of it—but it’s of a kind which looks as if it has been trampled by the feet of thousands as soon as it emerged from the earth: cramped and despairing, it resembles dried cow-dung lying on the ground. Even when grown it looks more like a root than a plant. People here call it “ grass-tail”, and there couldn’t be a more fitting name for it. You never see this grass shake, even in the strongest wind. There isn’t actually anything here for the wind to shake.

8 Sitting beside their little mound of soil, the strapping gravediggers are not living up to their reputation for hard work. Like soldiers after a defeat, they’re sitting around eating, drinking, telling jokes. A biting wind blows through the graveyard in gusts which set their ears vibrating.

9 “Hajji3, when it’s your turn, try not to die in winter! The earth in winter is harder than stone, and even if we were paid extra to dig deeper, I’d never manage it!”

10 “If the Creator decides on winter, then winter it will be, and no one can do anything about it”, says the one they call Hajji, philosophically. He has a brown beard which juts out stiffly from his face. He sticks out his tongue and gently licks the spot on his hand between the thumb and the index finger, the one known as the “tiger’s mouth”. It’s painful, like a burn. The tip of his tongue licks the dirt off the spot, and that makes it feel better, although the blood seems ready to ooze out from beneath the maze of lines on his hand. He goes on: “But I think that dying in winter has something to be said for it—the grain is safely in, and the earth is resting. You just stay at home, with nothing else to do but eat! But if you die in the spring, who will do your sowing? And if you die in the summer, or the autumn, who will harvest all the stuff you took so much trouble to sow?” He presses hard on the “tiger’s mouth” with the thumb of his other hand, and massages it back and forth.

11 As he speaks these words of wisdom, one of the other gravediggers has noticed the position of the sun, and jumps hastily to his feet. “Quick, you lot, back to work! Look at the sun! If they bring the body now, and we haven’t even finished digging the grave, what on earth will we do!”

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12 High above them, the sun’s lack of sympathy infuriates them. Now they all get up, and without bothering to brush the earth off their dirt-covered trousers, they take up their picks and shovels again and get back to work.

13 The person who has died is Li Xiuhua,

14 At present, she is lying on a wooden bed, wrapped from head to foot in a white cloth. The cloth, together with the fact that the bed is a narrow single one, makes her look much thinner than she was when alive. But now that she’s dead her body, which became twisted and taut during her life from all the years of worry and hard work, has relaxed. Li Xiuhua never slept in a single bed before, nor did she ever sleep alone. In all her life she never slept as peacefully as she does now. If she could have imagined, when she was alive, that it was possible to sleep in such peace and quiet, even if only for a moment, it would have seemed harder to her than getting into Paradise!

15 There are actually a number of women in the village with the name Li Xiuhua, though you’d have to check their identity cards to find this out. The Li Xiuhua who has died hardly ever used that name in all her sixty-eight years on this earth, so telling the villagers that Li Xiuhua had died would have had them puzzled: they could tell from the name that the deceased was a woman, but they’d have had no idea which one. Even if you’d called out to the late Li Xiuhua herself, using her name, it would have taken a while to register with her. But if you’d said “Ma Liangdong’s mother”, or “Ma Wenshan’s wife”, everyone would have known at once who you were talking about—oh yes, the woman who has died, and is awaiting burial.

16 A group of women and girls, relatives of the dead woman, are weeping loudly around the bed. On the sideboard, the clock ticks steadily, without faltering, showing a dignity and sense of mystery befitting the occasion, as if the stillness and tranquillity emanating from the dead woman have somehow made its rhythm stronger and more confident.

17 Now and then people come in, lift a corner of the white cloth to look at the face of the dead woman, and go silently out again. Taking such a look is an extremely important matter, for the face of a dead person is the last mirror that person leaves to the rest of the world and the key to the sort of life they have led. If the face of the deceased is lean and yellow as an autumn leaf, people will think he or she lived a pure life and will rest in peace; if the face is round and black, as if charred, inevitably tongues will wag.

18 There are people standing around in the courtyard, too, in various attitudes. No one seems to know what to do.

19 One of the dead woman’s sons works in the county town, which explains why there are some city folk among the mourners. They stand apart from the villagers, the two groups as distinct as plots of land planted with totally different crops.

20 The younger of the dead woman’s two daughters got engaged recently, but isn’t married yet. She has cried herself hoarse, and is lying face-down on the raised platform in the yard, weeping, her thick black plaits hanging down and touching the ground. A cock walks across the yard to investigate what there is to eat, pecks around fruitlessly and goes away again, grumbling to himself. A woman crosses over to the girl and lifts her heavy plaits onto the platform. She pats the girl’s head and moves away, wiping her eyes.

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21 In another part of the courtyard, a little further off, a few women are standing mournfully round a bowl full of wet clothes. The dead woman must have put them there to soak, they’re saying, but didn’t have time to wash them before she died.

22 The women talk quietly among themselves. When a woman dies, it gives the other women in the village a rare chance to get together for a chat. These discussions can clarify many matters and make the women aware of things they were totally in the dark about before. They are very displeased with the behaviour of Ma Wenshan, who is squatting beside a ditch with another man and having a whispered conversation, punctuated with laughter. How dare he laugh like that! It’s disgusting! The women would like to ask him, “Have you forgotten that your wife is still lying on the bed inside the house just over there, and she hasn’t even been buried yet? Don’t you remember all she did for you, how she kept the kang warm for you all those years, and served up all those meals?”

23 The sun ambles across the sky, at such a leisurely pace that it makes people drowsy. The trees stand miserably in the yard, as if they have been abandoned. They probably look so tall and defenceless because it’s winter, and there are so few leaves left on the branches. They all convey the impression of being very solitary, though there are quite a lot of them, and they are not far apart from each other.

24 The sun has reached its zenith, when it’s too risky to look at it. It seems to hesitate, unsure whether to go on or back, as if wondering “Now where do I go?”

25 A child, dressed in mourning, comes running up to announce, “The in-laws are here, the in-laws are here!” He means the dead woman’s family, the one she left when she married.

26 Almost at once they hear the sound of chanting, coming from a long distance away on the road outside, and the atmosphere in the courtyard suddenly becomes more strained. A few men dressed in deep mourning, together with the elders of the village and Ma Wenshan, move towards the gate with the ahong4 of the district in their midst. White caps bob this way and that, like flowers in a strong wind. All the men here are Hui, but customs differ from one district to the next, and although in many places the mourning-dress of the Hui is very simple, for today’s funeral the four strapping sons of the dead woman are in deep mourning, and swathed in white from head to foot. The crowd are awed by this, because it makes them look as if they are on their way to Paradise—or else to the execution-ground.

27 The men swiftly make their way a short distance beyond the gate, to meet the dead woman’s family, who arrive covered with dust from their long journey.

28 Today, the dead woman’s family are the guests of honour, and must be treated with the utmost consideration. If they feel unhappy about something today they even have the right to show their anger by tipping the table over, and many tables have been overturned on such days in the past. The two groups of players in this drama stand motionless, a few yards apart, in front of the gate, near the place where the grain is ground. The villagers fold their arms and wait respectfully for the newcomers to finish their chanting.

29 In this highly-charged atmosphere, the sons of the dead woman cannot hold back their tears: it’s the first time that all the members of their mother’s family, old and young alike, have turned out in such strength and come to her home together like this, and some of them have never come before at all. It was not given to their mother to see

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such a splendid sight while she was alive—that’s how it is with some things, you never get the chance to see them during your life-time.

30 Now that everyone has gone out, the room where the dead woman lies is empty. The last of the sobbing mourners round the bed have been persuaded outside to watch what is going on, and she is left alone under the thin white cloth, as quiet and tranquil as a jar of water.

31 The main room of the house is small, and packed with people, like an old wooden chest stuffed full of odds and ends. It is permeated by a sense of age-old simplicity and grief, but also of human warmth, in which people are very glad to immerse themselves. The family of the deceased kneel on the kang with suitable solemnity, and their hosts kneel on the floor.

32 The time has come for the two sides to confess their failings honestly to each other.

33 First, it is the turn of the Ma family to give an account of their faults. Ma Wenshan’s brother, Ma Wenqing, takes on this task.

34 With an appropriately sad expression on his thin face, he starts off: “Kinsmen, we are so ashamed that we don’t know what to say. You freely presented our family with one of your own family members, and for many, many years she looked after our old folk and brought up our children and, to be honest, it was very hard work indeed. What grieves us is that my sister-in-law never enjoyed any happiness in our family, but had more than her fair share of hardship. You all know what times were like when she first came to us, and I will say no more about those years. But recently things have got a little easier, and some of her children have not been doing too badly, though no one could call them wealthy, exactly. We really meant to take care of her properly in her old age, and there was no way we could have known she would die early and leave us so suddenly. The children never had the chance to look after her as they would have wished, and neither did we, and that is how we have done her wrong. If she had had a few days of illness, and her children could have given her some medicine, or propped her up on pillows, they would feel less remorse, and we too would feel a little easier in our minds. Though of course, if we look at it differently, the good thing is that she didn’t have to suffer even a headache, she didn’t have a fever, and her death was an easy one, no doubt because she was such a good woman. I’ve had the chance to say these few words to you, but when all is said and done, we feel so ashamed that we don’t know what to say. Now our sister-in-law has come to the end of her allotted span and passed on, and it is your turn to say what you have to say. Our sense of shame is so great that we’ll keep our mouths shut even if you curse us and send the tables flying.”

35 Though he has used “Say what you have to say” in a neutral way here, what he means is, “We need to settle accounts.”

36 It is the dead woman’s brother, an old ahong of imposing appearance, who speaks for the other side.

37 He says, “Our sister came over here to be married when she was fifteen, and I remember very clearly how she left our home in a cart, and took a day and a night to get here. I’m happy that ever since then, right up to today, our two families have got along well together. That is what matters most. There’s no need to tell us that she never had any happiness, no need to tell us she had a difficult time. Didn’t we all go through that time? But she never had to cope with a major disaster, she was able to live in peace, and to return to her original purity at her death: if that isn’t ‘happiness’, what

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is? Though her sons, my nephews, are still not very well off, they did everything that they could for her, and have demonstrated their filial piety perfectly well—it’s just that you children are now motherless, and will be yat’m5 from today on.”

38 Sobs choke the old ahong, and the dead woman’s sons, kneeling on the floor, are so moved they can no longer hold back their grief, and keep having to wipe away tears with their big hands.

39 “Let me continue”, says the old man. “She was part of your family for a very long time, and there must have been some squabbles and difficult patches during that period. If our dear sister did wrong to anyone at such times, we beg you to forgive her, now that she is no more.”

40 And with that, the confessions are over, everyone is satisfied that duty has been done, and the continuation of harmonious relations is assured.

41 Next comes the reading of thirty sections of the Koran, and the start of the du’â6 invocations, using the beautiful and mysterious black and white stones.

42 When that ritual has been completed, the mietie is distributed, and the Ma family are very generous to the relatives of the deceased woman, giving 50 yuan to the ahong and 10 yuan to everyone else, young and old, men and women, even babes-in-arms. This pleases the dead woman’s family greatly, because they are aware they are being treated with respect, and their pleasure is reflected in their faces.

43 The distribution of the mietie is followed by the thanksgiving du’â.

44 As everyone stands for the du’â, the palms of their hands upwards, as if they were holding books and reading from them, the sound of a woman weeping is suddenly heard in the courtyard. People are startled, because no one has cried as loudly as this for a while now.

45 When Liu Fengcheng’s wife heard about Li Xiuhua’s death her heart sank, because she immediately recalled the five yuan that the dead woman had borrowed from her. “Now that she has died, and so unexpectedly, what can I do about the money?” she wondered.

46 She stayed indoors, but was too upset to keep still for long. Her husband had probably gone to the dead woman’s house, and her own house seemed so empty. They haven’t got any children, so they have never had the house done up, and it looks very shabby. But all the bowls and plates in the place have been washed and scoured so often over time that they almost seem to be alive.

47 She’s so far from being so well off that she doesn’t mind about the five yuan—but in fact, she’s really distressed about it. She’d like to be able to forget about it, to think of something else, but it was impossible—it was the only thing she could think about. If only it could have been sorted out before, she thought. And then she felt ashamed of herself. “Li Xiuhua is dead, how can you be so mean about this? You don’t honestly think she would die simply in order to avoid paying you back your five yuan, do you?”

48 But she still felt unhappy, even rather resentful, and unsure what to do. First she blamed the dead woman, then she blamed herself, until she was in a total muddle. If only she’d asked for it back before! If she had, then she could just go along to the funeral and things wouldn’t ever have become so complicated and messy.

49 But she never did ask for it back.

50 Let’s just put the relationship between the two women to one side and look at the facts. One, the loan happened fairly recently; two, although of course five yuan is not an

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inconsiderable sum to Liu Fengcheng’s wife, it isn’t a huge amount. Besides, and more importantly, Li Xiuhua must definitely have been short of money for a time, because she would have paid her back if she’d had any, without needing to be reminded, she knows that. It’s just that she never imagined such a good woman would suddenly up and die like this.

51 Deep down, she began to regret having lent her the money.

52 It had happened only a couple of weeks ago, when the two of them went to the local market, and of course neither woman knew how much money the other had on her. Li Xiuhua bought a kilo of salt and a packet of washing-powder, and then she bought two packets of dye and a thimble from a peddler. Liu Fengcheng’s wife bought only a pair of shoes for herself, and two ounces of tea for her husband. She has been regretting having taken out her money when she bought the things, because it must have looked as if she was showing off dreadfully. When she was buying the shoes she’d opened up the handkerchief in which she kept her money, without a thought of trying to hide it, and the same thing happened again when she was buying the tea. Hadn’t she in a way compelled the other woman to see how much she had? And yes, it was after she’d bought the shoes, and the tea had been weighed and wrapped, and they’d decided to go home that, all of a sudden, Li Xiuhua confessed rather sheepishly that she’d liked those shoes too, but she didn’t have enough money to buy them. They cost six yuan, and she only had one yuan left.

53 Her heart fell when she heard this, and she was in such a quandary she didn’t know what to say.

54 “Will you be buying anything else?” Li Xiuhua asked her, and without waiting for a reply she went on rather miserably, “Because if not, I wonder if you could you lend me some money, and I’ll pay you back as soon as I have any.” Though it was Liu Fengcheng’s wife who had bought the shoes a little earlier, both women had tried them on. It would have been churlish to refuse her the money, and she obviously couldn’t now say she had other things to buy. Though she felt very unhappy about it, she knew she didn’t have any choice but to lend the money. “All those sons, and you’re still short of money!” she said.

55 Li Xiuhua flushed red, as if someone had touched a raw nerve. She turned her head away and looked dully at a concrete post nearby.

56 “Let’s go home,” she said abruptly, and started off in the direction of the village. Now it was the turn of Liu Fengcheng’s wife to feel flustered. She grabbed the other woman’s sleeve and protested, “I never said I wouldn’t lend it to you—go on, buy them, see if you can’t get yourself some even nicer ones than mine!”

57 Li Xiuhua responded, “No, I don’t feel like buying them after all.” This made Liu Fengcheng’s wife feel even worse. She felt that she had absolutely no alternative but to lend her the five yuan, and even if Li Xiuhua had now decided she didn’t want to borrow the money, she would make her take it.

58 “Oh dear, are you angry with me? Well, I don’t care”, she said, and smiled. She grabbed Li Xiuhua’s arm so hard that it hurt, and dragged her back with her.

59 When they emerged from buying the shoes, Li Xiuhua was much more cheerful, and though by then the subject of their conversation had long moved on she said, “My sons have lives of their own to live, you know, but don’t worry—I’ll pay you back as soon as I get any money!”

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60 With a glow of pleasure at her own generosity, she said, “Now do stop going on about paying me back, we’re almost sisters after all, aren’t we? It won’t matter even if you can’t.” But she said this knowing for certain that she would be repaid.

61 Who’d have thought that Li Xiuhua would have upped and died before she’d had a chance to wear the new shoes for a single day!

62 It is now dusk, so dark she can barely make out even the threshold. The sound of the wind as it blows through the trees is freighted with sadness, so different in the winter from the sound it makes in summer. A hen steps across the threshold and comes into the house in search of food, for all the world as if she isn’t there.

63 “When an old person passes away leaving debts unpaid, it is up to that person’s descendants to settle them.”

64 She knows it says that somewhere in the Book, but as soon as this route presents itself she blocks it off. No, that’s not the way to do it. For a start, how would she ever bring herself to say anything about it? And when? Today is clearly not appropriate—but would it be any more appropriate afterwards? More to the point, what might happen if she did bring it up and the dead woman’s sons cast doubt on what she said? What if they repaid her the money but said ,“Our mother never mentioned this”? That would be too shameful! No, she can’t possibly ask for the money back. All right, all right—if that’s how it is, she won’t ask for it back.

65 Once she has decided not to reclaim her money she feels a little calmer. The next decision she has to make is whether to go to the funeral or not.

66 Not to go would be wrong. The two of them became very close over all those years of hardship, and exchanged so many confidences. But she knows herself too well—if she goes, the five yuan are bound to weigh heavily on her. It is impossible to decide what to do.

67 Ashamed and angry, she tells herself off. “Honestly, all this fuss over five yuan!”

68 A careful look tells her that the oiled paper panes in the window are now exactly half in sunlight, half in shadow. That means the sun is well down in the west.

69 As if under orders from an invisible master, Liu Fengcheng’s wife squats behind the door and gives herself a perfunctory wash, then sits abstractedly on the kang for a moment before chasing the hen out of the house, pulling the door to and going out.

70 She can hear the sound of the wind, blowing swiftly through the trees.

71 The sun has indeed sunk westwards, but it seems to be hesitating, waiting for her to go out. She hurries towards the dead woman’s house, still not quite sure why she’s doing this.

72 When she comes into the yard she suddenly starts to feel uncomfortable again. There are people standing there and she feels they are all watching her, as if she has done something unspeakable. She walks on, head down, and without looking at them goes into the room where the dead woman lies.

73 She comes out again, very quickly. How pale Li Xiuhua’s face looks! She walks over to a wall of the courtyard and stops beside it, thinking about the face she has just seen. It is so pale, so peaceful, unmarked by worry or anything out of the ordinary. This surprises her, because it isn’t what she expected.

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74 As she stands next to the wall she is prey to many different thoughts, and they are so unbearable that she breaks into loud sobs. Everyone looks at her now, of course, but it’s no good, she can’t stop, and with her head turned to one side she leans with her hands against the wall and weeps, facing the tall, leafless trees.

75 The blinds are now raised in the small, crowded main room and people are leaving the pitch darkness there and surging out into the yard, casting disconcerted glances at the weeping woman as they emerge.

76 She continues to weep, all alone, aware only of the few solitary trees in the yard, which are so tall it makes her giddy to look at them.

77 After some time, she feels a sharp tap on the shoulder—there is someone behind her, but she turns away and goes on crying. There are more taps on her shoulder, and a cross-looking man tells her to stop crying, because they’re now bathing the body.

78 This is the final wash the dead person will have. There must be no weeping while the ritual is being performed, because it might frighten the dead person and make their joints contract and become painful.

79 She tries as hard as she can to suppress her sobs, but her mouth is trembling so much that it’s impossible to stop at once, and her throat heaves like a frog’s when it basks in the sun.

80 Just then the lad whose job it has been to keep people informed about what is happening dashes into the yard and announces that the grave isn’t ready yet. Many of the people there cast anxious glances at the sun. If the grave isn’t ready yet, when will it be?

81 The gravediggers have seen the funeral procession in the distance, getting closer and closer, like a storm-cloud. They begin to panic.

82 “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

83 “Quick, hurry up!”

84 They all talk at once. Each of them seems to have gained some extra energy from somewhere. And they truly haven’t been slacking all this time. What good would that do? It’s their job, after all, it’s what they’re here for. Come on then, shut up and keep digging!

85 They are actually more concerned than anyone else, because no one knows better than they do what it means for a dead person to return to the earth—for that person it is like finding some precious treasure they had lost. They see the sun sinking little by little into the west and wish they had a pole or hook of some sort to hold it back with. One thing is certain—they haven’t finished digging the grave, and the dead woman is almost here. They knew she would be coming, of course, but had no idea it would be so soon!

86 The earth is getting harder the deeper they dig, it’s never been this hard before. Down they go, and keep finding rocks. They are digging as hard as they can, and breaking up the rocks as they go. The grave is so hard to dig that even their picks are feeling the strain. They hate these rocks—it’s been almost as if they were hiding there on purpose, just to give them a tough time - but by now they feel quite glad to have piles of the vile things lying around as proof of the difficulty they’ve been having.

87 Why haven’t they dug any deeper? There’s no need to ask—just look at the rocks! But in spite of the perfectly convincing reason for the delay, they still blame themselves, and

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they’ll only feel happy when the job is done. Heads down they struggle on, without a glance at the crowd of people who are approaching.

88 What a lot of them there are! They must have come from several of the neighbourhoods close by—a neighbourhood round here being the same thing as a village. The cortege forges ahead, the wind behind it. The dead woman is raised aloft, to give her a better look than she has ever had before, and from a higher viewpoint, at the place where she lived all these years.

89 Eventually the body is laid down on the hillside. It is so steep at that point that there is a real risk it could roll down the hill, so some of the people wedge it securely on one side with clods of earth which will later be put on top of the grave.

90 The wind is getting up, and whipping constantly at the white cloth wrapped round the body. The clothes of the crowd too are flapping noisily, and the whole graveyard is filled with the roar of the wind.

91 People are standing round the grave now, watching. The gravediggers dare not even raise their heads, they just keep toiling away, sparks flying every time their picks strike rock.

92 Someone asks, “How come there’s all this rock?”

93 Someone else remarks, “It’s lucky they haven’t broken through.” Round here, that means that with so little room left in the graveyard, they are lucky not to have found themselves digging into a pre-existing grave. The ahong calls on everyone to stand up straight, while he conducts the janaza7 for the deceased. The gravediggers brush the dirt off themselves, wipe the sweat from their brows and prepare to join in, but the ahong tells them to carry on digging, and they do as he says.

94 When the service is over, the crowd spreads out, and old and young alike kneel among the crumbling graves. Those of them who can read the prayers get out their copies of the Book and begin chanting. The pages are fluttering so wildly in the wind that even a hand spread over the Book can’t hold them down.

95 The women and girls kneel further from the graves than the menfolk.

96 The wind blows off the caps of several of the men present, and they have to hurry- scurry after them while others watch, their hands pressed to their heads to keep their own caps on. One man has to chase his cap right down into the ravine before he catches it.

97 Their faces grow stiff and numb as rock in the bitter wind. Some of the people from town have put on their dark glasses.

98 The service is over, the readings are finished—but still the grave is not ready. It is supposed to be deep enough for a person to stand in with his arms raised, but at the moment if a man stood up in it you’d still be able to see most of his torso.

99 Everyone is on their knees in the steeply sloping graveyard, the wind is blowing a gale, and nobody knows what to do next. With nothing to do, and unsure whether to sit or stand, some of them cast around for something, even a blade of grass, to pick—but there is nothing. It is hardly possible now, in the howling wind, to tell the city folk apart from the villagers. Although the graveyard is jammed with people, there isn’t a sign of life on the hillside, and in the merciless wind it presents a picture of loneliness.

100 The sound of the picks as they strike the rocks is as clear and sharp as ever. It’s almost as if they are fastening down the heavy curtain of wind with nails of stone.

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101 All at once the wind seems to mark out the dead woman for attention. It starts to whip insistently at her shroud, as if it’s blowing across a pool of water and forcing it into a corner it can’t get out of. If the cloth wasn’t tied so tightly round her body it would have been blown away long ago.

102 One of the dead woman’s sons, the one who works in the county-town, now addresses a salaam to all the people kneeling around him in the graveyard. While they are all there, he says, he wants to ask them something: since there are times in all our lives when we may be a little bit better off, and other times when money is short, he wonders if perhaps his mother ever borrowed from any of the villagers who are here at her funeral? If she did, would that person please make himself or herself known, and he will reimburse them at once, in front of his mother, so that the old lady can go peacefully to her rest. He speaks touchingly and with great sincerity, and the people kneeling there woodenly in the howling wind begin whispered consultations with one another.

103 Liu Fengcheng’s wife is there too, on her knees among the rest of them. The wind is snapping at her scarf, trying to make it slide down the back of her head. It won’t let her go, it keeps tugging at her, trying to take her away from this place. Kneeling there numbly, she doesn’t know what to do. Has she really heard what she thinks she has heard?

104 “If she never borrowed anything from anyone, and everything’s in order, then I’ll offer you all a salaam.” He turns to all four sides, one after the other, and says, “Peace be with you”. This is the ritual signal that the dead woman owed nothing to anyone. Even if she had done, once he has asked this question the slate is now wiped clean.

105 The sun is on the point of setting, and the mountains are all spewing out huge, dark shadows. The pagers of some of the mourners are beeping shrilly, and in among these wild, bare mountains they sound like frightened insects. Their owners lift up the bottoms of their jackets and look at them.

106 The wind has abated a little, but it still sounds very loud, because the mourners are so silent. Seeing all these people on their knees among the scattered graves, the dead woman’s relatives begin to look embarrassed and uncomfortable. The Ma family goes into a huddle with their in-laws and they discuss what should happen next. Standing for such a long time in the fierce wind has taken its toll on the old ahong, and after a heavy-hearted pause he says quietly, “Bury her.”

107 The gravediggers, who have been feeling bad about the delay, sense that they have been pardoned, and lay down their tools.

108 “We won’t be needing a mietie for this grave,” says one of them, his face red with shame, as he scratches up some dirt from the ground and sprinkles it on the raw patches on his hands.

109 And so that’s how she is buried.

110 It doesn’t take long for the people at the funeral to melt away. Now there is only the hillside covered with scattered graves, and the noise of the wind as it scurries between them, beginning now to sound a little surreptitious.

111 The new grave is easy to identify. It’s small and rather narrow, and it’s hard to imagine that underneath that little mound of soil there is someone who lived for sixty-eight years and was the mother of six children. The grave-mound is so precariously perched

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on the steep hillside that it looks as if a gentle push might send it crashing to the bottom of the ravine.

NOTES

1. Original title Hong hua lü ye (Red flowers, green leaves). 2. Reward in cash for services, often of a religious nature. 3. Honorific title for one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. 4. Imam (Muslim cleric). 5. Orphans. 6. Prayer to Allah. 7. Funeral service.

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Book Reviews

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Gilles Guiheux

1 This book, edited by Isabelle Thireau (CNRS/EHESS, Paris) and Wang Hansheng (Department of Sociology, Peking University), is the fruit of several years of collective work bringing together sociologists, anthropologists, historians and an economist. All these participants are asking themselves the same question―how to understand the making of a new social order in China. In Maoist society, political power aimed to be the only source of legitimacy in terms of norms, rules and customs practiced in society, in the sphere of both public and private life. Today, norms and rules are plural, and the authors are wondering how to explain these multiple but common references.

2 It is to the negotiations and disputes that erupt within contemporary society that the writers look in the search for the answers to their questions. Discussions among the main organised forces in society concerning the fair or correct way to behave in various situations, the frequency and the length of negotiations, disagreements with regard to the evaluation of the fair nature (in the sense of being justified, appropriate and reasonable) of an action, a proposal or a rule, form the subject matter of this book.

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The writers have picked up on an issue previously explored by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot 1(but, in this case, applied to the situation in China.

3 Legal disputes that are subject to settlement by judicial processes are not included within the scope of this study(.2 This analysis therefore focuses on disagreements, often described as informal, that arise within a rural environment (70% of the population) 3(, and in three specific provinces―Hebei, Anhui and Guangdong. This research is therefore presented as an insight into the daily life of a farming society that is undergoing major changes, confronted with the need to devise new social norms.

4 Each contributor examines a particular type of dispute or negotiation. Guo Yuhua concentrates on how the younger generations care for the elderly. Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan dissect disagreements arising on the subject of the utilisation of village areas and the distribution of collective assets (land, ponds, businesses and financial resources). Liu Xiaojing offers a detailed study of the row that breaks out between two groups of relatives following a young woman’s suicide. Liu Shiding analyses the process of redistribution of land among the families of a single village. Shen Yuan considers negotiations relating to the construction of a new market, as well as a revised allocation of stalls between the merchants. And lastly, Sun Liping studies the process of collecting the grain quotas that are sold to the state. In each of these cases, the writers focus on negotiations in which contradictory opinions are expressed. To answer the question about the principles of fairness according to which a certain decision will be chosen in preference to another, they analyse the discussions and the logical arguments of the various participants.

5 The book’s two concluding chapters recreate the idea of fairness in a typically Chinese tradition. Jérôme Bourgon re-examines the vitalist dimension of the Chinese legal system―the link between fairness and life―while Lucien Bianco considers the difference between the “vengeful” fairness of the xiedou, the veritable private inter- village wars, and the art of compromise as practiced by the fuxiong.

6 From a rich harvest of conclusions, four stand out above the others. Firstly, several of the contributors bring to the fore elements of continuity between contemporary society and that which existed pre-1949. The principle of an equitable exchange thus continues to govern the relationships between generations, although the nature of the resources that are exchanged, the economic foundation for the exchange and the moral contract that ensured its survival are no longer the same. This ancient principle is the subject of a new interpretation, members of the younger generation now attach greater value to material aspects―they will only help their elderly parents in proportion to what they have received themselves. Guo Yuhua shows how the changes we see today are not a recent phenomena, and that they actually began in the middle of the twentieth century. The economic reforms of the last twenty years have only magnified the effects of the state’s penetration in village society since 1949.

7 Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan are particularly concerned about the links that village communities maintain with the past. They identify several mechanisms through which the past is called upon to support the fair resolution of village affairs. The villagers thus resort to systems of interpretation that were previously fought against by the political system to give meaning to current situations and to determine appropriate behaviour. In the management of village affairs, we see other groups, representations or specialists (gods of the earth, guardians of the village entrance,

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Buddhist deities, ancestors, the deceased, mediums and other religious specialists), summoned to intervene, who were condemned by the authorities for many decades.

8 A second important conclusion stems from the nature of the relationships between village communities and the local authorities that represent the state. All the studies show that the negotiating power of individuals and groups with local officials is much greater today than it was previously. So many people are spouting forth the state message―an imperative for social stability or even a duty to remedy the inequalities and fight against any privileges unfairly acquired―providing proof of the extent to which the state has penetrated society. But at the same time, only snippets of these conversations or pieces of this message are solicited by the players who are looking to it to defend their personal or local interests.

9 Thirdly, the contributors clearly emphasise the place of the informal. Recourse to the legal system is rare because “going to the courts is never very socially acceptable” (p. 142). It is therefore the informal institutions, predominantly family groups, that play a mediation role when a dispute arises. These organisations have no legal foundation and co-exist alongside the official organs of power comprising the village committees and the Party bodies; the procedural and social norms that they influence play a fundamental role in the resolution of conflicts. What really distinguishes this process of searching for fairness from the legal mechanisms advocated by the courts, is the fact that the most fundamental tool is recourse to “reason”, in the sense of “practical reasoning” or “common sense”. A mediator must possess a special quality, over and above the prestige that he has in the eyes of the parties; he must be able to “rebalance” the situation (p. 241), that is, to take into consideration the advantages, the interests and the rights of each party, to integrate them in such a way as to arrive at a sort of equilibrium, and then to know how to find the legitimate principle on which the agreement is to be founded.

10 The informal exists not only on the side of the villagers. Sun Liping shows that the local authorities also have recourse to an informal exercise of official power. In certain circumstances, because they know that the abusive use of coercive measures would put them in an uncomfortable position (this particular point is also brought out in Jérôme Bourgon’s text), notably because of the links that arise from knowing each other, from family ties or from friendships that they maintain with their citizens, the exercise of informal power (respect for human feelings, renqing, or the granting or withdrawal of “face”) proves to be more efficient, more suitable than official power for resolving delicate problems.

11 The contributors ultimately show how personal relationships work in a rural society. These relationships, generally family-related or hierarchical, indicate to all concerned the correct and appropriate way of implementing the social norms involved in a given situation. Ignoring personal connections and taking into account social norms alone does not enable reasonable action to be taken.

12 This book, with its innovative methodology, is full of conclusions and offers many avenues for further research. However, one could question the authors’ decision not to analyse disputes that are subject to legal proceedings to support the search for a “sense of fairness”. With the Chinese legal system currently being particularly productive, a major challenge is the construction and the mobilisation by the main organised forces in society of the legal groups. The sociology based on interviews used in this book

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therefore calls for another work on texts that bear the marks of debates that, far from being abstract, talk about action currently taking place 4 .

NOTES

1. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, 1991, De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur (From justification. Economies of grandeur), Paris, Gallimard. Ten years ago, the two French sociologists were tempted to turn their attentions to the meaning of justice and the prescriptive supports invoked by those involved when they make a criticism. Since then, their endeavours, as well as those of researchers inspired by their work, have focused on placing these moments of justice and their constraints in the context of a whole range of action systems. If any proof were needed, Thireau and Wang’s work shows the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework analysis contributes to the understanding of the transformation of contemporary societies. 2. Shen Yuan writes: “If we want to discuss how norms change during a period of transition, we must first consider the basic groups within society, this everyday world in which various expectations are expressed and local agreements are reached” (p. 245). Here, the writer seems to consider legal standards to be the crystallisation of agreements previously reached within society. 3. For an analysis of disputes arising in an urban setting, see Isabelle Thireau and Linshan Hua, Le sens du juste en Chine. En quête d’un nouveau droit du travail (The sense of fairness in China. In search of a new labour law), Annales HSS, Nov-Dec 2001, no. 6, pp. 1283-1312 and Antoine Kernen, Des ouvriers chinois réapprenent la manif (Chinese workers relearn about “demos”), Critique Internationale, July 16th 2002, pp. 14-23. 4. See Evelyne Serverin and Pierre Lascoumes, Le droit comme activité sociale - pour une approche wébérienne des activités juridiques (The law as a social activity—in favour of a Weberian approach to legal activities), Droit et société, 1988, No. 9, pp. 171-194. This subject has in fact already been tackled by lsabelle Thireau and Linshan Hua (op. cit., 2001) who analyse the contribution made by employees to the formation of employment law

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Philip C.C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China. The Qing and the Republic Compared Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001, 246 pp.

Vincent Goossaert

1 Philip Huang set up a Los Angeles-based study group to examine Chinese law, and has created a collection with Stanford University Press, this being the sixth volume. This book is also the second part of an intended trilogy. Following his study on Qing civil law (Civil Justice in China, Representation and Practice in the Qing, 1996), he had planned to produce a volume on the Republican period, but found it more informative to present Republican civil law in contrast to that of the preceding period. This book is thus a new contribution to the history of Chinese law by an eminent authority in this field. But, by virtue of the book’s comparative approach, it also amounts to a study on the political and social changes that took place during the first half of the twentieth century from a legal perspective, a viewpoint that is often neglected by historians, undoubtedly because it is generally regarded as too “technical”.

2 The book is presented in two parts—the first, the shorter of the two, retraces the history of the code and the legal institutions from 1900-45. It recounts the work of the legal reform commissions during the decade from 1900 to 1910, which gave rise to new codes, both civil and penal, inspired notably by the German model. However, the draft civil code was never adopted, and a revised version based on the “civil” parts extracted from the Qing code remained in use until the promulgation of the civil code drawn up by the Kuomintang government in 1929-1930. Procedural reforms were, however, gradually applied from the latter years of the Qing period—separation of penal and civil law (which represented only “minor” matters in the Qing code and became a separate area), separation of the judiciary and the executive within the local administration, and the emergence of the legal profession. These developments in legal practices thus facilitated, not followed, the adoption of a law that was radically different from the Qing code. The second part of the book examines the similarities and the differences between Qing law and Republican law, in terms of the legal texts as well as the practices

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(through a sample of cases drawn from local archives), by means of five questions relating essentially to civil law—the conditional sale of land (dian), ownership of the topsoil (dual ownership of agricultural land), debts, support given to elderly parents, and family law as it applies to women (marriage, adultery and divorce). Philip Huang’s writing style is clear and his arguments are well-constructed. It is a great credit to him that he has made such a subject intelligible to non-specialists, such as this reviewer.

3 On each point, the author endeavours to bring to the fore the “logic” (the ideological foundations) of the two codes, the practices of the judges, and “custom” (in fact, here, simply the practices common among the people). Sometimes the codes try to follow “custom”, sometimes they rebuff it. On the whole, the contrast between the Qing and the 1929-30 codes appears larger than that between the real-life cases found in the archives from the Qing and Republican periods. In both kinds of archives, we find very similar issues, stemming from a popular practice that changed only slowly. Republican judges often tried to find compromises between the radically new logic of the 1929-30 code and traditional attitudes. Maybe this was because the code had unexpected consequences, maybe because the code itself retained traces of the paternalistic Qing ideology, or maybe simply because the judges still broadly shared the ancient “logic”. But changes in the code as well as in jurisprudence moved along similar lines. Philip Huang sums up this evolution in two breaks: 1) from an agricultural economy to a capitalist economy (the former supporting a farmer’s rights to his land and protecting him from usury and dispossession, and the latter recognising individual ownership, capital and investment); and 2) from a patriarchal law to an individualistic law, implying gender equality, marriage as a contract between two individuals, and the right of women to self-determination.

4 Without political prejudice, Philip Huang wants to highlight all the positive aspects of the Kuomintang legal undertaking by demonstrating the advances (women’s rights and a market economy) made possible by the new code as well as the legal practices that go with it. One might wonder if the examples chosen are representative of the Republican laws as a whole. Property law and the status of women are areas in which the Kuomintang had a genuine, positive, modernistic agenda. In a different area, which borders on civil law (which interests this reviewer), i.e. the law relating to temples and the clergy, the evolution is quite different. Admittedly, there too we move from an absolutist model (under the Qing, the emperor was the only religious authority, and could declare a cult illicit and ban it), to another ruled exclusively by law. However, by its anti-religious laws, the Nanking government practiced theology and arbitrarily sorted, under cover of scientific justification, the cults which it authorised and those that had to be banned. The laws relating to temples (notably those of 1915 and 1928) also marked a greater interference by the state in an essentially private area and new prerogatives for the local authorities, who, notably, allowed themselves to seize land from religious foundations, as well as to deny the existence of certain types of organisations (temple corporations) which, although they were not formally protected by Qing law, were recognised in practice by the magistrates.

5 In short, Philip Huang’s book paints a picture of the changes introduced by a code that stemmed from an imported ideology (free-market capitalism, giving priority to contracts between individuals as a source of social relationships). The adaptation of this ideology in the Chinese context is thus reflected in a mixed evolution in terms of liberties, increasing certain ones only to cut back on others.

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Umberto Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism Taipei, Taipei Institute for Chinese Studies (Variétés Sinologiques New Series 90), IX + 652 pp.

Léon Vandermeersch

1 Having represented state ideology from one end of eastern Asia to the other for two thousand years, Confucianism today is no more than a mark left on customs by this ideology. A profound mark, admittedly, but one that has been gradually fading for almost a century since the old system disappeared from China. What meaning then, can the movement that was launched hot on the heels of the May 4th Movement of 1919 and which took the name New Confucianism possibly have? The answer to this question is made clear in Umberto Bresciani’s excellent book.

2 First and foremost, as the author reminds us in his introduction, New Confucianism must be distinguished not only from Song Neoconfucianism (although New Confucians feel they are more in line with thinkers of this persuasion, especially after the refocusing brought about by Wang Shouren under the Ming), but even more so from the attempt at fundamentalist restoration of Confucian ideology that was led by Kang Youwei at the beginning of the Republican era. Just as Hu Shi, a follower of American liberalism, and Chen Duxiu, a Marxist, together the promoters of New Confucianism, advocated a real revolution—but a revolution based on Chinese culture, and not a revolution that would destroy this culture using cut-and-dried westernisation, whether it be American or Soviet style. A revolution that restored the values attached to authentic Chinese culture, destroyed by the degeneration of a pseudo-Confucian tradition through anti-scientific and anti-democratic corruption. This is what is explained at great length in a very detailed text published, in English in Hong Kong on January 1st 1958 in the magazine Democratic Tribune—firm proof of there being not the slightest affinity with Chinese chauvinism—under the founding title of A Manifesto on the Reappraisal of Chinese Culture.

3 Why did we have to wait until forty years after May 4th 1919 for this manifesto to appear? Because the early promoters of New Confucianism, while clearly asserting

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their differences with Marxism, did not dissociate themselves from the most revolutionary Chinese movement of the period between the two World Wars, i.e. the Communist Party. Liang Shuming (1893-1988), inventor of a philosophy of history as contrary to that of historical materialism as to that of traditional Chinese historiography, and Xiong Shili (1885-1968), whose ambition was to reshape Confucianism metaphysically by accentuating Buddhism, not sociologically based on the class struggle theory, were, nevertheless, both fellow travellers of the communists, and remained popular in China right up to their deaths. As for Feng Youlan (1903-82), after trying to regenerate Neoconfucianism (in the sense taken in the Yijing by the articulation of the two terms zhen-yuan (death-revival) that he used as titles for his philosophical writings) by radically reforming its methodology, in 1950 he sent Mao Zedong a confession of his full conversion to the new China.

4 But the establishment in mainland China of the communist regime did nevertheless provoke a reaction from the supporters of Neoconfucianism through the awareness that was to be expressed by the manifesto. On the mainland, the unconverted fellow travellers were soon to become voluntarily marginalised. Those who decided to follow the movement by breaking with communism emigrated to Hong Kong, where, on October 10th 1949, on the anniversary of the Chinese Republican revolution of 1911, Qian Mu (1895-1990) and Tang Junyi (1909-78) founded the New Asia College (Xinya shuyuan, initially called Yazhou wenshang shuyuan), which was to become the centre of second generation New Confucianism. While the first generation had displayed affinity more with socialism, the second generation responded to the antidemocratic radicalisation of Maoism by leaning much more towards liberalism, but not without keeping their distance from any political commitment. This concern for independence drove the major intellectuals of the movement to keep their own counsel in the context of the universities that gave them refuge. In Hong Kong, following the integration of New Asia College into the Chinese University founded in 1963, it was not long before Qian Mu withdrew, while Tang Junyi headed up an autonomous research centre. Mou Zongsan (1909-95), who had chosen Taiwan, initially dispensed his teachings at the teacher training college (Shifan shuyuan, later to become a university) that he founded himself, then, in September 1956 when he became head of the Department of Chinese at the Tunghai protestant university in Taichung, in the bimonthly lectures for a humanist club (Renwen youhui) that he organised as extracurricular activities.

5 The death of Tang Junyi in 1978 revealed, by the extent to which it was felt throughout Chinese intellectual circles in Hong Kong, Taiwan and America, the great influence attached to New Confucianism at that time. It was now supported by a third generation, which included, most importantly, in Hong Kong, Liu Shuxian (born in 1934 and a pupil of Fang Dongmei, director of the Department of Philosophy at the Chinese University from 1981), and in the US, Yu Yingshi (born in 1930 and Qian Mu’s star pupil, who, like his master, preferred to avoid the New Confucianism label, even though the essence of his teachings at Princeton is very similar), Du Weiming (born in 1940 and a pupil of Mou Zongsan and Xufuguan, became a Harvard professor), and Cheng Zhongying (born in 1935 and a pupil of Fang Dongmei, who taught in Hawaii). Their ideas found increasing support among a group of same-generation young intellectuals in Taiwan, Singapore and soon, even mainland China, where the discrediting of Marxism as a result of the massive expansion of the so-called socialist market economy, New Confucianism unexpectedly appeared as a questionable, if not acceptable, alternative. In 1984, the Confucius Foundation was established at Qufu, under the leadership of the

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octogenarian Liang Shuming. In 1986, a huge research project on New Confucianism was launched in Peking. Involving 47 researchers and 16 institutions, this project would lead to, among others, the publication in 1996 of 16 volumes of anthologies of works by the most representative authors of the movement. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of international symposia on the subject, as well as an increase in research works and the republication of previously published works. A young generation of philosophers is taking positions that are no longer purely theoretical and which call for political commitment. As is the case, for example, for a pupil of Du Weiming, Jiang Qing, a Shenzhen-based researcher, in an essay entitled Political Confucianism (Zhengzhi ruxue).

6 In Chapters 3 to 15 of his book, Umberto Bresciani reviews these three generations of New Confucianism, focusing on the movement’s 11 most influential figures. For each, he first presents a brief biography, followed by an analysis of their doctrine and their work, and finally, an evaluation of their ideas and influence. The systematic usage of this layout from one chapter to another, which is further emphasised by a standard typographical presentation, does make this book a bit starchy. But, this approach has the advantage of making the material very clear. This should ensure that the reader recognises the strength of such a complete firsthand account, which is evidenced by the abundance of very detailed notes and the lavishness of an excellent selective bibliography. The sixteenth and final chapter concludes by summing up the common characteristics of the thinkers examined – their belief in defending the values of true Confucianism, their sense of the spiritual dimension of the culture, their mistrust of the scientistic tendencies of contemporary science, and their attraction to East/West comparative philosophy.

7 Finally, Umberto Bresciani turns to the outlook for the future. Recognising that in its 80 year history, New Confucianism has continued to expand and to increase its audience among intellectual Chinese (a fact to which, oddly enough, Western sinology, being focused firmly on Maoism, has remained blind), he notes that this expansion is such that today, it is no longer possible to talk about a single New Confucianism for the mainland, for Taiwan, for Chinese communities in the West, even for countries in the Far East that are heavily influenced by China. What can we say if not that the prospect is taking shape that the twenty-first century might see, in an oriental Asia that has caught up with development in the West, a renaissance of a culture appropriate for the Chinese world in all its diversity? A renaissance for which, at the end of the last century, by opening the debate on Asian values, the anti-democratic powers in the region were looking to launch an early reactionary takeover bid, something at which we can hope that they remain unsuccessful.

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Marianne Bastid-Bruguière

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Bernie Mahapatra

1 Over the last thirty years, many works, both Chinese and foreign, have been devoted to the reformist activities of notables from various Chinese provinces during the last half- century of the Qing dynasty, particularly during the period 1901-12. These books have also covered the different forms of associations that these elite organised themselves into in order to increase the efficiency of their actions and their ability to negotiate with the imperial administration. In the general hubbub of activity that led the provincial elite to intellectual, political and social change after the Boxers, the notables and educated classes of Jiangsu held a distinguished position. This was achieved by sheer numbers as much as material means, particularly in the abundance of newspapers and print media they had at their disposal, and which left ample material for historical studies.

2 We are all familiar with the broad outline of the role played by the Jiangsu General Education Association, which was founded in 1905 by several eminent figures from the province and chaired by the illustrious businessman Zhang Jian, holder of a first-class

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doctorate. It became the mould for a real constitutional party, the forerunner Association to a constitutional regime that was at the forefront of political life during the latter years of the monarchy and which assured a fairly peaceful transition to the Republican regime when the 1911 revolution came. Xiaohong Xiao-Planes’ monograph provides us with a detailed account of the Association’s history from 1905 to 1914, thanks to the comprehensive collection of the organisation’s own publications as well as those of local institutions that supported it, and to which the author obtained access in both Shanghai and Nanking. These sources were supplemented by the incredible wealth of materials and works that have been published recently in mainland China and Taiwan. The book analyses this history as a model example of the development of the local elite’s collective representation and public action up to the time when the forced takeover by Yuan Shikai, in 1913-14, stripped these elite of the legal provincial power they had finally gained through their commitment to serve a political rebuilding of the imperial state after the Taiping defeat.

3 The book retraces the innovations introduced into the Jiangsu education system from 1860-1900, encouraged alternately by the local authorities and the educated classes. It then covers the application of the imperial reformist “New Policy” (xinzheng) after 1901 —a message relayed by the zealous initiatives of the notables, the young educated classes, the merchants and even scorned social groups, such as prostitutes, opera singers and barbers, calling for a reformed education system. The Jiangsu General Education Association was founded in October 1905, the day after the imperial examinations were abolished, against a background of multiple problems and disputes relating to the reform—retraining of prize-winners and entrants from the old examinations, funding and administration of the new establishments, and pedagogic anarchy. Its members comprised traditional educated people and young progressives, provincial notables and men from Shanghai, a city which, being the home and flagship of modernity, was chosen to house the association’s headquarters. The organisation modelled itself on the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, itself inspired by the “democratic” statutes of the municipal Council for the international concession. By officially establishing education associations in each sub-prefecture to assist in the administration of the education system, the imperial regulations of 1906 enabled the Jiangsu Association to become part of a wide network of local divisions that comprised more than 5,000 members in 1908.

4 The Association dedicated itself to providing guidance to and mediation between the provincial administration, local communities and educational establishments. Its business, very formal and correct, was conducted by a small nucleus of young educated people based in Shanghai. The new education administration, set up in 1906, inaugurated a sharing of functions between civil servants and educated notables, called in to act as “advisors”. On failing to obtain these “advisors” through local election, the Jiangsu General Education Association seized this opportunity to place its members at every level of the new departments. It filled in for administrative cadres to calm disputes over education, train teachers, sponsor youth education, relaunch elementary education, promote technical education, collect and manage the finances for education, and even co-ordinate and integrate educational establishments on a national scale. Among all these activities, there emerged, with cautious pragmatism, the implementation of a “professional power” and the use of democratic rules among the elite.

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5 The final part of the book examines the organisations and political undertakings that the Association’s members became involved with, involving the development of civics, the election and workings of the provincial assembly and local councils, petitions for the immediate convening of a parliament and appointment of an accountable cabinet, joining the Republican revolution, and support for Yuan Shikai.

6 At the end of this progression of events, that is sometimes heavy going but lavishly detailed, covering the local policy of the time, the author challenges any relevance held by the notions of “public sphere” and “civil society” in interpreting the evolution of the local Chinese elite at the end of the empire and the beginning of the Republic. In fact, despite its spontaneity, the activism of the local elite sought the support of power, it did not attempt to clash with it or to organise itself outside of its structure. It aimed to “extend an official approach to constitutionality of the regime”. The popular sovereignty that the activists sought from the administration had it foundations in the Confucian doctrine of minben, according to which, the people are the state’s raison d’être. In their eyes at least, this implied the existence of organic links between different localities, of the elite and of the people, following on from which, came the “pedagogic procedures” of political participation that they defended. Invested with new responsibilities in their locality, the most educated used these to initiate the people, in the sense of the general interest, so that the people could, in turn, participate in public affairs—the power of the notables would engender power among the people. Mrs Xiao-Planes emphasises, however, that although this political plan formed part of what P A Kuhn called the historical “constitutional programme” of the Chinese state (i.e. the recourse to administrative decentralisation and political participation by the rank and file to curb the chronic degradation of the government apparatus), the local autonomy (difang zizhi) demanded and practiced by the Jiangsu elite at the beginning of the twentieth century led to a plurality of independent political entities and to the rejection of a monolithic conception of central autocracy. In the end, she suggests a fundamentally different definition of the relationship between the state and society, a definition in which instead of functioning by integrating the dynamism of the society, the political organisation arbitrates between different interests. One weakness of the book is undoubtedly the fact that it does not weigh up exactly what the Jiangsu elite as a whole, whom the author calls “the activists” and who are the specific subject of her investigation, represent. However, armed with an outstanding critical and bibliographical apparatus, this erudite study of the inner workings of provincial modernity at the beginning of the last century provides much food for thought on this subject.

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Andrée Feillard ed., L’Islam en Asie, du Caucase à la Chine Paris, La documentation française, 2001, 248 pp.

Rémi Castets

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall

1 This collection sets out to show that Asian Islam is not peripheral, as is often supposed. Relying on their own specialist knowledge, each author gives a general picture of the historical spread of Islam in their particular area: in Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia for Stéphane Dudoignon; the Indian subcontinent for Aminah Mohammad-Arif; South-East Asia for Andrée Feillard; and China for Elisabeth Allès. They then analyse the current situation, with particular reference to such topics as the relationship between Islam and politics, religious practices, religious education, or the place of women in Asian Muslim societies.

2 In considering the contemporary period, Stéphane Dudoignon analyses the complex relations between “official” Islam, “parallel” Islam, mystical orders, and reformist and fundamentalist movements. On the one hand, he emphasises that these aspects, which are sometimes artificially isolated from each other, have come to intermingle in certain cases. On the other hand, he shows that an increasing number of movements are setting themselves up as vectors of alternative socio-political patterns competing with the systems actually in place 1, and are becoming increasingly radicalised because of their exclusion from political and religious life by the Central Asian regimes. Of course, external influences, particularly the spread of the salafi trend, have aided the expansion of new Islamist movements, especially the radical ones. Nonetheless, despite the growing number of links with the major international Islamist organizations, the writer emphasises (contrary to the belief of a number of Western observers) that the Islamic “revival” to be found in certain societies of the former Soviet Union is the outcome of evolutionary developments over a long period of time. Lots of current

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Islamist movements in this area have their roots in the period of renewal of traditional thinking in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, which had for example a deep impact on the emergence of the Islamic Renaissance Party (p. 57).

3 In the Indian subcontinent, the shift in status undergone by the Muslim populations, from dominant under the Muslim dynasties to dominated in the colonial period, gave rise to “movements of reaction” (pp. 98-101). Whether they are of the traditional Sufi Islam of the barelwi movement or reformist deobandi, or whether they are modernising or fundamentalist in tendency (Tablighi Jama’at or Jama’at-i-Islami)], all of these movements still play a major role in the political and social life of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Aminah Mohammad-Arif also gives us an analysis of the difficult steps towards improving the situation of women, as well as of the impact of the shortcomings in the religious education system (especially in professional training) in the big three countries of the subcontinent.

4 After laying emphasis on the role of trade, Sufism, and to a lesser extent military conquest (in Indonesia in particular) in the spread of Shafi’i Islam in South-East Asia, Andrée Feillard goes on to study the role of Islam in the nation-building process and the ideology of the different states of the region. She stresses the “problematic” nature of the integration of Muslim communities in the countries where Islam is a minority religion, and she uncovers a certain convergence here with the destiny of the two Islamic “heavyweights” of South-East Asia, namely Indonesia and Malaysia. Although the history of the relations between Islam and politics in these two countries was quite different, whether under colonialism or in the early years of independence, both are now facing a rising tide of Islamism which the governments in power have difficulty in managing.

5 As for China, without passing completely over the Turkic Muslims whose culture and history are more closely related to Central Asia, Elisabeth Allès focuses mainly on the Chinese-speaking Hui nationality, which accounts for nearly nine million out of the total of 17.5 million Muslims in China. The penetration of Islam into China took place via two routes: the first overland through Chinese Turkestan, and the other by sea to the coastal regions of southern China. It was not the outcome of military conquests but of immigration by Muslim merchants and officials (the latter mostly under the Yuan dynasty). The subsequent conversions and intermarriage with the Chinese population allowed the emergence of a homogeneous population, which was to become the Hui nationality in the twentieth century. After examining the rivalries, which were sometimes ferocious, between the Sufi sects, and also between different tendencies (traditional, reformist, ikhwâni, Xidaotang, etc.), the writer analyses the complex relations between the Chinese state and its Muslim subjects, as well as the political process leading to the establishment of the Hui nationality. The “nationality” status of the Hui, the Uighurs, the Kazakhs, etc., became definitively enshrined after the communists took power in 1949. However, since then the Chinese authorities have never ceased to be suspicious about any increase in Muslim claims in the social and political arena. The writer also emphasises the local nature of certain religious practices and the status of women, particularly the existence of women ahong 2.

6 This volume restores the richness of an Asian Islam hitherto unjustly ignored. Islam became part and parcel of societies which were often quite different from those of the Arab world, a process in which the “opening” of the hanafî school 3 and the Sufi propensity towards syncretism played a determining role. On the other hand, the

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relations between the historical centres of Islam and Asia very quickly ceased to be a one-way flow, with central Asia and India becoming leading religious centres exercising a widespread and lasting influence over the whole Islamic community. This is all the more reason why, for the last two centuries, the Asian or Eurasian centres of Islam have retained their influence through the spread of models belonging to both the modernising tendency 4 and the fundamentalist one with its claims to continue the deobandi heritage.

7 Even so, there is a regrettable absence perhaps of any in-depth study of the origin and nature of foreign Islamist influences, whether neo-hanbali, ikhwâni, salafi, or wahhabi. Although these are of external origin, they have provided ideological models for a number of modern radical movements in Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Some readers might also be disappointed by the brevity of the analyses of Afghanistan and Kashmir. Despite these few reservations, this clear work of synthesis is to be highly recommended to any reader who wishes to gain a deeper knowledge of Islam today in Asia, and in the heat of current events.

NOTES

1. These politico-religious movements reject particularly the favouritism and corruption characteristic of the local political systems (see for example the case of the jamâ’at in Daghestan on p. 63, or in Uzbekistan on p. 69). 2. The Chinese for “Imam”. 3. According to hanafi teaching, to become a Muslim “it is enough to accept the writings and the messengers from God”, a phrasing that allows recent converts to retain a good many of their traditions (p. 25). 4. Like the version spread by the Tatars in Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Feifei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu eds., Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing Armonk, N.Y., M.E. Sharpe, 2002, 278 pp.

Alain Roux

EDITOR'S NOTE

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall

1 This small volume contains the papers presented at the international conference with the same title held on November 22nd 1997 at Princeton University. The participants at that conference took every care to be as scrupulous as possible in their approach to the major controversy that had been raging in China and Japan since the 1980s over the sacking of Nanking from December 13th 1937 to early March 1938, when it was still the capital of Nationalist China. This war crime, among several others, came before the Tokyo International Tribunal, which then passed sentence on 25 of the so-called first- ranking war criminals. The latter included General Matsui Iwane, who had been commander-in-chief at the time. He was hanged on December 28th 1948. We know that the vicissitudes of the Cold War, which started during the thirty months taken by these endless trials, meant that 23 second-ranking war criminals, and 19 third-ranking ones, did not receive sentences and were mostly released by the end of 1948. These included Sasagawa Ryoichi, who set up a foundation in France which is still very active and honours his unpleasing memory. Such soft treatment by the Americans is in marked contrast with the comparative severity of the Nuremberg Trials, which passed judgment on Nazi war crimes before the beginning of the Cold War. And it certainly provided favourable ground for a campaign by the Japanese “denial” camp, which remained covert for a long time but then became increasingly open, as can be seen from publications like Tanaka Masaaki’s What Really Happened in Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth, Sekai Shuppan Publications, Tokyo, 2000, 145 pp.

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2 So this collection edited by Li, Sabella and Liu is to be welcomed as a necessary reminder of the reality of a massacre which cost the lives, often under appalling circumstances, of around 300,000 Chinese, of whom one-third were unarmed soldiers, and which was accompanied by the rape and murder of tens of thousands of women. In order to remove the burden of such deeds on the collective memory, along with the risk of their exploitation for political purposes, their reality must first of all be confronted. This is what the work does, with the greatest possible scrupulousness. Significantly, it includes contributions from many Japanese historians, which serves as a timely reminder that the Japanese “deniers” are mostly politicians and journalists, and that the scholarly community from that country only rarely shares their views. It is also worth remembering that the annual controversy over Japanese history textbooks is a politicians’ war. It busts out at the end of every spring, when the cherry blossoms beautify the countryside and the profitable label of Ministry of Education approval is bestowed upon this or that work, allowing various right-wing figures to accuse the historians of having a “masochistic vision” of national history. That is why all the favoured textbook writers sing the same tune when dealing with the Nanking “incident” (jiken; or in Chinese shijian) by denying that it was a massacre (gyakusatsu; in Chinese, nüesha). On this record, it is very useful to consult Guido Samarani’s remarkable report, “The Nanking Massacre in Some Japanese History Textbooks” in the 2001 issue of the Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie, pp. 3-6.

3 There are no such evasions in Memory and Healing. Here, not only does the remarkable bibliography provided with Takashi Yoshida’s article (“Refighting the Nanking Massacre: the Continuing Struggle Over Memory”) allow the careful reader to pursue further research (if he knows Japanese), but also the editors’ concern for objectivity even means that space is provided for one of the few historians in the “denial” camp, Higashinakano Shudo (“The Overall Picture of the ‘Nanking massacre’”, pp. 95-117). A reading of this reveals the general lines of the arguments by all such historians, to be found also in the aforementioned Tanaka Masaaki: viz. there is no direct testimony of the supposed massacres, particularly in the contemporary press; various frequently displayed photographs have been doctored; the communist authorities did not denounce these supposed massacres until the 1980s, in order to counteract the political consequences of opening the country to foreign influence, particularly from Japan. The same sophisms can be recognised at work in a recent article by a successful journalist to deny the September 11th attack on the Pentagon in Washington. If certain parts of the record are uncertain, that means the whole record is uncertain! And if it gets exploited politically, it must be a political fabrication! There is even the thesis put out by a certain Fujioka Nobukatsu, that the unarmed Chinese soldiers who had put on civilian clothes to avoid capture had thereby broken the Geneva Convention, and were therefore legitimately executed. Worse still, by their cowardly act they had thrown suspicion onto the civilian population, which had provoked certain excesses in response―which our scholar estimates at 47 people killed by mistake!

4 By contrast, the authors in this volume establish the facts in painstaking detail. In particular they show how the opening of the archives of the Yale Divinity School Library in 1997 gave access to the correspondence of American missionaries who were present in Nanking during the massacre. This includes the personal diary of John Rabe, which was published in Japan in 1997 and has since become widely known through Erwin Wickert’s book, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diary of John Rabe (New York, Alfred

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Knopf, 1998). And the photographs in a book published in Chicago in 1996 by Shi Young and James Yin, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs were very carefully selected, so that all photomontages and dubious items were removed. So the “deniers” have resorted to outright documentary manipulation and falsification. Tanaka Masaaki, for example, deliberately rewrote or rearranged 900 sentences and words in the war diaries of General Matsui Iwane (whom he had served as secretary, by the way) to downplay the shock effect of the revelations about the atrocities contained in the journal of Nakajima Kesago, another general guilty of massacre, which was published in 1984. Lee En-han’s article, “The Nanking Massacre Reassessed: A Study of the Sino-Japanese Controversy over the Factual Number of Massacred Victims” leaves no further room for doubt. I would add that there are no grounds for taking these facts beyond historically established limits, as the Peking authorities have sometimes done since setting up the memorial to the Nanking massacre in 1985, or as Inés Chang does in her provocatively entitled book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York, Harper Collier, 1997). To cast the guilt on the Japanese people as a whole is just as dangerous and false as to try to deny the crimes committed by the Imperial soldiery in China. In this respect I would draw attention to the moving article by Haruko Taya Cook, “Reporting the Fall of Nanking and the Suppression of a Japanese Literary Memory of the Nature of a War”. This deals with the work of the novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzo (1905-1985); as a reporter for the important paper Chu Koron, he followed a platoon of the Japanese army from November 2nd 1937 to early January 1938 in the Nanking region. He reported on this in March 1938, in a series entitled “Soldiers’ Lives” (Ikiteiru heitai), which the censors immediately banned. These reports gave an unembellished account of the frenzied acts of murder and rape committed by the Japanese troops.

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Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880 Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. xvii + 460 pp. Hardback.

Peter Wesley-Smith

1 Let me begin by declaring an interest: the author of this superb book is a friend of mine (though an indifferent correspondent), he cites my work (though too infrequently), and he includes me in his list of people deserving special (though insufficiently profuse) thanks. I read several chapters in draft form some years ago and was expecting a thoroughly good read. That is what we got. Munn's theme is the notion of British Hong Kong as the conjunction of East and West, a constructive engagement between cultures, and a standing demonstration of British good government in Asia. This—"Anglo- China"—was the vision and the boast of the colony's founders. But for the first thirty or so years of British rule it came nowhere near fulfilment. Munn suggests that by 1881 it was at least coming closer, though the most he can point to is the growth of a Chinese bourgeoisie, a degree of economic prosperity among Chinese merchants, and the beginnings of indigenous leadership through such institutions as the Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk. Grossly anti-Chinese legislative measures were however largely still in place, only one Chinese (born in Singapore) had been appointed to the Legislative Council (and only in 1880), and Chinese membership of the Executive Council was still decades away (1926). Obstruction more than co-operation, racial division rather than equality, repression not liberation: these are surely what characterised governance in Hong Kong during the nineteenth century and indeed into the twentieth. Munn's interpretation pleasingly advances Pope Hennessy's reputation (and, surprisingly, MacDonnell's, whose uncompromising policies "were essential preconditions for the apotheosis of the Chinese bourgeoisie during the Hennessy years" (p. 369)), for Hennessy's attitudes and sympathies, if disliked by the non-Chinese colonists, were in tune with the future as much as the aspirations of the past. What was emerging during Hennessy's governorship was an embryonic partnership between Chinese élite groups and the colonial government: scarcely sufficient to substantiate

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Anglo-China rhetoric, but a significant development nonetheless. Munn's treatment of it links with and pays deserving tribute to the work of Carl Smith and Elizabeth Sinn and shows how the narrative might be carried forward. This, like most colonial histories, is a study of government, but with a major focus on the legal system. Part Two, "Crime and Justice", is in some ways the meat of the book, for the rule of law was perhaps the core ingredient of British imperialist self-satisfaction and an ideal more dramatically subverted than any other. Instead of an even-handed system that was no respecter of persons, Hong Kong in its early years suffered the illegitimate application of Chinese law as much as English, draconian legislation, domineering officialdom, illegal and often savage punishments, discrimination between defendants on the grounds of race and class, bribery, intimidation of witnesses, malicious accusations and prosecutions, a paucity of defence counsel and interpreters, incompetent judges and court staff, unsatisfactory judicial premises, unscrupulous lawyers, and racially exclusive juries which routinely displayed contempt for accused orientals. The judicial system at all levels was "systematically biased against Chinese and other non-European defendants" (p. 251). This went hand-in-hand with intrusive schemes of governance: intensive policing, emergency powers, registration of persons, curfews, deportation, licensing, and so on. Indirect rule or non-intervention, also part of the Anglo-China myth, was demonstrably absent. Add to all this police extortion, large-scale corruption, protection rackets, and venal high-ranking officials and the claim that British traditions of government and justice were superior looks very thin. Munn writes well and usually finds the telling quote and the apt illustration. His documentation is impressive, his material rich and often entertaining, his typos are few. I do not know if a paperback version is planned, but if Frank Welsh's history of Hong Kong finds a place in airport bookshops there ought to be a ready sale for Munn's book. In some respects the timing is impeccable: with the British period now superseded, a new view of the colonial relationship is appropriate (and long overdue), one which reflects neither the complacency of the colonial historians nor the ideological rigidity of the Peking school of scholars. Munn has supplied a more thorough and honest examination of the roots of governance in British Hong Kong against which later developments, right up to and beyond 1997, can be assessed. It is an impressive achievement.

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Beatrice David

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall

1 The approach taken in this volume to the complex ongoing processes of change in the border regions where “China meets Southeast Asia” is definitely from the perspective of the social sciences, represented here by anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, and ethnography. The result of these research projects conducted on both sides of the border separating China from Laos, Burma (Myanmar), and Vietnam, is to provide a survey of these often overlooked areas, which, as the title of the book rightly reminds us, do not fit neatly within any geographical, cultural, or administrative boundaries.

2 The fifteen essays are introduced by Peter Hinton’s interesting critical contribution on the way the changes have been conceptualised in a region where, to cite his own title, “nothing is at it seems”. Geoff Wade’s chapter surveys the different ways in which the idea of “border” has been conceived at various times in the course of Chinese history, shifting between cultural, geographic, economic, and political definitions. This approach provides us with an essential historical dimension that is all too frequently lacking in sociological studies focused on the present moment. A later chapter under

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the joint authorship of Jean Michaud and Christian Culas likewise throws a historical light on the causes for the recent migrations of the Hmong people, from southern China to the mountains of the Southeast Asian peninsula, and then out of Asia completely, following the victory of the communist forces in Laos.

3 A concentration on social and cultural transformations does not mean neglecting the economic and political contexts in which they occur. A threadbare commonplace theory proclaims the disappearance of borders (and hence of the states themselves) following certain theorists of globalisation like Ohmae Kenichi. But on the spot investigations require a modification of such generalisations and overweening prophecies based on statistics taken out of context. In fact, the increase in cross-border traffic, which arose with the new economic policies adopted by the communist states from the 1980s onwards, has resulted in a tightening of state control in those border regions which are far from the central authorities. The effort to control this flow has necessitated the introduction of new practical and legislative measures, particularly in the area of trade. Kuah Khun Eng’s article pays particular attention to Chinese policy on the cross-border trade between Guangxi and Vietnam. And Andrew Walker’s observations on the economic rectangle on the upper reaches of the Mekong (between China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand) undermine the optimistic forecasts of the partisans of economic liberalisation, which is supposed to be putting an end to the nation states system.

4 The flows are certainly channelled and controlled, but political barriers are by their very nature fluid and permeable, and can never really stop them. This is amply shown by the way the vigorous trade in drugs, livestock, raw materials, and women, is growing up on both sides of the border. Moreover, the strength of this parallel economy, especially among the minority peoples, leads Peter Hinton to question the validity of a strict differentiation between “formal” and “informal” economies, since they are mutually intertwined in complex ways (p. 22). Reminding us of the often overlooked fact that ecology recognises no borders, the ethno-botanist Su Yongge presents a remarkably detailed and damning report on the disastrous trade in livestock and raw materials, over which official legislation is often powerless in the face of smuggling and the corruption of local authorities.

5 The political borders of modern nations form barriers between areas and peoples linked by long-standing ethnic, inter-ethnic, and trading relations. The ethnic networks which support cross-border exchanges are a major part of this relationship. Most of the writers in this volume tackle this fundamental issue, which is where the collection makes its most original contributions. Paul Cohen’s article, on the annual pilgrimage to the Buddhist reliquary at Muong Sing in northern Laos, shows how religious practices are intimately implicated in collective identities and politics. Since the 1990s, this pilgrimage has enjoyed unprecedented popular support among the Lue living on the Chinese side of the border in the Sip Song Panna (Xishuangbanna), and its influence is not restricted to a religious concern with making merit. This minority has been incorporated by official Chinese ethnic classifications into the Dai “nationality”, so the pilgrimage provides them with a space to express a collective identity which the Chinese state does not recognise. The Buddhist revival among the Lue can therefore be seen as a form of reaction against the threat to their minority situation from the growing pressure by the Han culture, and in this context, their religious practice is part of their passive resistance to the Chinese state (p. 156).

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6 In his article on the transformations of Jing Hong, the ancient royal capital of the Sip Song Panna, Grant Evans describes the same situation affecting the local populations, which Chinese communist state policy has turned into “national minorities”. He stresses particularly the impact of Han immigration, which has intensified since the beginning of the economic reforms and involves a massive relocation of people from the hinterland, especially Hunan. This recent Han influx is a major factor in the “irrevocable Hanification” of the border regions, a process which freezes the minority cultures into stereotypical images and symbols for Han consumption. For example, the sexualisation of Dai women follows the lines of long-standing Han fantasies, which attribute to the frontier “barbarians” a moral laxity and a propensity to wild sexual practices, and this has contributed to an escalation in sexual tourism based on the consumption of such images of women from the ethnic minorities (p. 170).

7 David Feingold addresses the close links between this flourishing traffic in women, mainly directed towards the sex industry in Thailand, and the drugs trade. His article lays emphasis on the direct threat to the cultural and physical survival of the minority peoples most affected, along the frontiers where China adjoins Burma and Thailand (peoples such as the Akha, Lahu, Lisu, Yao, Hmong, Shan, etc.). He examines the multiple internal and external factors behind the trade in women and girls, which hardly existed at all twenty years ago (p. 184), and which has played a role in transforming the local economy and making it dependent on an intake of women for prostitution.

8 Mika Toyota’s article on the social networks of the Akha caravan traders shows how their commercial activities, largely ignored by ethnographers despite their long established existence, have served to mediate changes in identity and forge inter- ethnic relations (p. 206). This study proves that anthropological research must not confine itself within the boundaries laid down by official state classifications, but must on the contrary concentrate on the strategies through which ethnic identities maintain themselves.

9 Formerly, other major participants in the caravan trade between China, Siam, and Burma were the Chinese Muslims from Yunnan (the Hui). But Jean Berlie makes the point that this ancient trade, whose routes were marked out by a network of mosques serving as both economic and religious centres (pp. 224-225), seems not to have survived the closing of the frontiers in the early 1950s, followed by the opening of the new sea routes in the early 1980s under the control of non-Muslim Chinese. But the decline in the Yunnan Muslims’ role in the cross-border trade between Yunnan and Thailand has in no way diminished the vitality of their religious observances, for these display very visible signs of a revival.

10 The last four chapters in the volume take us to the Sino-Vietnamese border. The question of Chinese transnational networks is examined in Chau Thi Hai’s essay on the practices of the social and economic networks which support the cross-border trade by the Hoa (the Sino-Vietnamese word for Vietnamese of Chinese origin), who are one of the 54 official ethnic groups comprising the Vietnamese nation. Unfortunately this essay provides little more than a repetition of the usual clichés on Chinese success. It is particularly regrettable that the writer makes no mention of the political conditions for the immigration underpinning the establishment of the transnational Chinese network, which he credits for the economic success of the Hoa.

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11 Xie Guangmao takes up the existence of women’s networks and demonstrates the leading role of women in the cross-border trade which is growing in the Chinese frontier village of Dongxing. This piece would probably have benefited from a parallel study of men’s economic activities, and even more from a closer look at the place occupied by women within the family circle. Such an approach would have lent finer nuances to her conclusions, for these tend to reduce the social role of women to a simple matter of economic status.

12 Cheung Siu Woo’s contribution is a very stimulating essay on the Kinh people of Guangxi. This is a community of Vietnamese origin, which one of the author’s informants, by playing upon the multiple meanings of the Chinese term minzu for both ethnicity and nationality, cleverly defines as “at once the smallest and the biggest ethnic group (minzu) in the People’s Republic of China”. Considered within the setting of the Chinese nation, the Kinh are indeed a small minority group, but on the other hand their Vietnamese ethnicity is the basis of a transnational identity. This contribution throws particular light on how this dual identity is articulated and expressed through their cultural practices, according to whether the emphasis is on their Chinese nationality or their Vietnamese ethnicity which underpins their privileged transnational links with the other Kinh.

13 Finally, Christopher Hutton brings a linguistic perspective to bear on the major question in studies of ethnicity, which is that of ethnic classification in relation to language. We know that language practices are not the basis of ethnic distinctions but, on the contrary, that it is linguistic classification which contributes largely to official ethnic distinctions. These in turn give official sanction to ethnic entities in which language is considered to play an important part. The author studies the Nung people of Vietnam, who provide an outstanding example of the extremely variable linguistic categories encompassing widely differing populations.

14 In sum, this is a collection of essays of varying merit, but which are mostly successful in showing the actual situation in the ancient southern marches of the Chinese empire, which the fixed political borders of the modern nation states have transformed into cross-border regions. They throw light on the sites of interconnectivity and many-sided entanglements which are held together through a number of different networks: ethnic, linguistic, economic, religious, family-based, etc.

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Rebecca Karni

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