Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Volume 2, Number 1
May 1999
Scholars from around the United States gathered on the weekend of May 8-9, 1999 on the University of California, Berkeley, campus to discuss an issue long neglected by both social science in general and China studies in particular: legitimacy. Conference organizer Vivienne Shue emphasized at the onset that the central issue to be addressed was not whether or not the Chinese Communist Party was legitimate, but rather the twin processes of state legitimation, and popular de-legitimation of the state. The conference's focus was on the various ways the Party- state seeks to represent itself as legitimate to key audiences both at home and abroad and on the responses and delegitimating counterclaims of those groups. This conference report begins with short summaries of the papers, and concludes with a brief discussion of the key issues discussed during the symposia.
Frederic Wakeman, Chair
Paul Pickowicz, Legitimating self-representations of the state in popular film
Vivienne Shue, State legitimation through officially sponsored charity and relief
Iain Johnston, Efforts at state legitimation through China's participation in organization of the international community
Stanley Lubman, Legitimating the state through the rule of law
Donald Moore, Discussant for Pickowicz and Shue
Susan Whiting, Discussant for Johnston and Lubman
Jean Oi, Chair
Marc Blecher, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of state-sector workers
Lu Xiaobo, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of peasants and farmers
Tom Gold, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of new groups of petty urbanites
Ann Anagnost, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of parents
Stanley Rosen, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of youth
Kevin O'Brien, Discussant for Blecher and Lu
Joyce Kallgren, Discussant for Gold, Anagnost, and Rosen
Liu Xin, Chair
Richard Kraus, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of artists and writers
Richard Baum, Processes of legitimation and delegitimation in Hong Kong
Stevan Harrell, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of those citizens classified as "national minorities"
Richard Madsen, State appeals for legitimacy in the eyes of Chinese Christians and other heterodox groups
James C. Scott, Discussant for Harrell and Madsen
Andrew Walder, Discussant for Kraus and Baum
Frederic Wakeman, Chair
Paul Pickowicz
History
University of California, San Diego
Paul Pickowicz began the symposium with a colorful video presentation of clips from four recent Chinese films. Each film revealed a different strategy by the state in its quest to use the movie industry to achieve greater legitimacy among the Chinese people. The four strategies were appeals to nationalism, material abundance, to upholding tradition, and even a claim to allowing artistic freedom.
Pickowicz began with Director Xie Jin's epic The Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng), which was produced to celebrate the Hong Kong handover celebrations in the Summer of 1997. The clip chosen shows an arrogant British demonstration of their military might, with cannons destroying a Chinese village. The clip ends, however, with a Chinese declaring that "we'd rather die than surrender." While highlighting national humiliation and degradation at the hands of Western imperialists, the film, Pickowicz argues, assures its audience that "China will recover its losses and be restored to a position of national respect and glory." Championing nationalism, Pickowicz concludes, is a vital legitimation strategy deployed by the Chinese state.
Director Zhang Yang's 1998 Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing ma la tang) provides an example of a very different legitimation strategy. Her the state looks forward rather than backward, appealing to modernity and material abundance for its raison d'être. Pickowicz highlights the theme of hedonism an obsession with pleasure and desire - underlying the five separate comic narratives that make up the film. The film depicts material abundance, suggesting that Chinese no longer confront material scarcity. Like "modern" peoples everywhere, Chinese today confront post-materialist issues of love and desire. In the Chinese context, Pickowicz suggests in the paper, a Maoist utopianism involving "extraordinary self-denial and asceticism" has been superseded by a Chinese state that encourages consumption and hedonist excess.
Pickowicz presents the third film, Wu Tianming's 1996 King of Masks (Bian lian), as an example of the state's claim to upholding traditional Chinese culture. Set in a Sichuan town in the 1920s and revolving around an old man and a "son" he buys who turns out to be a girl, the film undertakes the "culturally conservative" project of exploring cultural transmission and continuity. A "feel-good story," Pickowicz argues, King of Masks celebrates China's tradition to reassure its audience that "all is well."
Pickowicz concluded with a more lengthy clip from Zhang Yuan's 1996 "underground" film East Palace, West Palace (Dong gong xi gong). Pickowicz presented a nuanced interpretation of the film as an example of both popular delegitimation or subversion of the state and a state appeal to mainstream artists for legitimacy by claiming to provide artistic freedom. Revolving around a gay man's sadomasochistic relationship with a police officer one night in contemporary Beijing, the film, Pickowicz suggests, can be read as not simply about sex but also about power relations between the "people" and the state. In the clip, for instance, the gay man asks the policeman, "We love you . ... Why don't you love me?" The film can clearly be read as an allegory for state-society relations in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. The state permits such subversive films to court favor with mainstream artists, which the state needs in its legitimation efforts. In response to a question from panel chair Frederic Wakeman, Pickowicz argued that Zhang Yuan had "cut a deal" to allow him to make the film, reassured that it would not be openly aired in the mainland and so would make no broad impact. The state can thus afford to use underground directors like Zhang Yuan to appeal to a narrow constituency of artists.
In sum, the Chinese state, Pickowicz argues, has maintained "an iron grip" on movie making and distribution but has liberalized to make cinema a more effective weapon in its efforts to court popular opinion and secure regime legitimacy. The danger, however, is that some of the strategies chosen, such as appeals to nationalism and material abundance, "might backfire" if the state fails to live up to its promises.
Vivienne Shue
Government
Cornell University
Vivienne Shue began by noting the recent explosion of charitable activity in China, but by also cautioning observers not to view the charitable realm as a nascent element of a "civil society" independent and set against the state. This vibrant arena of social activity, she argues, is largely an "appendage" of the Communist Party, run by Party and government officials and retirees. Shue did not depict it as an example of top-down coercion, however, but instead gives a nuanced account of the state's uses of charity to persuade various audiences of its legitimacy, and of popular "counterstrategies" that seek to subvert that claim, delegitimating the regime.
Shue begins with an examination of the nature of authority to argue for its context specificity: "the appropriate strategies of state legitimation ... will depend on and vary with the fundamental theory of authority that underpins the polity." Where as authority originates in the mystical in Java, the divine in early modern Europe, and the people in modern democracies, in China, Shue argues, authority has long derived from the possession of moral truth.
While Shue argues that the promotion of charity is a vehicle through which the state can shape "ambient attitudes and values as well as actual behavior," her emphasis is on moral display: the state's efforts to literally "look good" before the people, thereby demonstrating its legitimacy or moral fitness to rule. Shue traced this strategy of state legitmation back to imperial times, when the emperor demonstrated his virtue through the display of compassion and charity. His enlightenment was expressed through virtuous rule. This old form of exemplary rulership, Shue argued, remains important in China today. It does so in two primary ways: directly through the promotion of "civility" in "spiritual civilization" campaigns and indirectly through association with those that do good. The latter provides an example of the interdependence of Party and popular elites: "In the Chinese charitable arena, the powerful keep company with the good, and both groups stand to realize benefits by the association."
Popular counterdiscourses, however, depict charitable activity as corrupt, challenging the state's claims to moral virtue and hence legitimacy. Party officials are seen as wasting charitable moneys on official banqueting, and those donating large sums are viewed as blatantly currying favor with local officials. Charity, Shue concluded, is a highly contentious realm of the Chinese polity.
Iain Johnston
Visiting at CISAC
Stanford University
Iain Johnston examined the state's uses of foreign policy as a legitimation strategy. He begins by defining a legitimate order as one where "losers" accept the normative order and do not imagine alternatives: "Legitimacy depends on a widely accepted 'oughtness' attributed to the status quo." This is accomplished, Johnston argues, through socialization processes that inculcate the myths, stories, and values of the "in-group" to internalize shared identification. Such socialization processes can take both "positive" and "negative" forms: the creation of pride in the in-group on the one hand, and "condescension strategies" that emphasize difference from "out-groups" of enemies on the other.
Foreign policy, Johnston argues, is fundamentally about defining in and out groups: "foreign policy is designed to preserve and accentuate differences along sovereign state lines." Johnston then hypothesizes that regimes facing legitimacy crises (for whatever reason) can turn to foreign policy "discourses of danger" that depict the world in dog-eat-dog realpolitik terms to increase in-group identity and resolve their crisis.
Johnston uses the Chinese case to test this hypothesis. The legitimation crisis sparked by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, he finds, triggered a rise in realpolitik foreign policy discourse. Through "frequency counts" of polar terms such as "independence" (duli) and "interdependence" (xianghu yicun), and "new international order" (gouji xin zhixu) and "new world order" (shijie xin zhixu) in major journals like World Economics and Politics and Foreign Affairs (Waijiao gailan) over the 1990s, Johnston argues for the rise of a "hyper-sovereignty" discourse in China that attacks "cosmopolitanism" and "global village consciousness."
Arguing that the Taiwan issue cannot be reduced to one of state wealth or power, Johnston also points to Taiwan policy as an example of such state legitimation processes. Rivalry with Taiwan, he notes, pervades Chinese diplomacy and has been the one issue that has compelled China to threaten to use its UN Security Council veto again and again. Legitimacy dynamics, he implies, impel such behaviors.
Johnston concludes by arguing that while victimhood and realism have dominated post-"Liberation" Chinese foreign policy, there is a "new challenger": China as a "responsible major power" participating in global institutions. The latter, however, derives not from agreement with the West about the content of international "responsibleness," but rather from a "satisfaction" that comes from "status backpatting from the international audience."
Stanley Lubman
Law
Stanford University
Stanley Lubman began by outlining the increasing importance and proliferation of the law under reform. New rights and the institutions to back them up have been created, and courts exercise a "modicum of power." There is now a bar of 120,000 lawyers and there have been great increases in the numbers of civil suits.
Lubman then emphasized, however, that law in China continues to be a tool of Communist rule; recent developments do not indicate the "rule of law." Jiang Zemin, for instance, argued that the country be ruled "according to the law" to protect the Chinese Communist Party's rule.
Lubman then identified three major obstacles to legal reform in China. The first is that the weakening of central control and fragmentation of authority inhibit systemic change. The second is a pervasive "normative chaos," which creates a "terrific mess" when it comes to implementing court decisions. The third is the lack of a "truly national" judiciary: court dependence on local governments for staffing and funding undermines judicial autonomy from the Party-state.
The Chinese Communist Party, Lubman concluded, is not interested in competition from the law. Legal reforms, rather, seek to enhance the state's legitimacy through addressing cadre corruption and the people's desires for a Party limited by law. Economic actors - foreign and domestic - also demand greater certainty through law. The Party also aims to use law to restore central government control over the localities.
Donald Moore
Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
Donald Moore began his extensive comments with Professor Shue's paper, before turning to Professor Pickowicz's. Moore is interested in what he calls the "double discursive twist" in Shue's work, which he traces back to the rejection of the state-society dichotomy in her 1988 Reach of the State: the charitable realm in China is separate from the state, yet linked to it. While Shue characterizes the charitable realm as an "appendage of state" not an element of a nascent civil society - Shue does not depict charitable activity as an example of top-down state control. Instead, Moore states, she examines how the "state gains symbolic capital" through association with the virtuous, confounding traditional state-society binaries. This dynamic reminds Moore of the feminist literature's examination of the gendered valences of interpretive struggles: both elites and their challengers appeal to traditional norms to achieve their objectives.
Turning to Professor Pickowicz's paper, Moore is most interested in the Chinese audiences of the cinema discussed. Pickowicz focused on the state's top-down uses of film, arguing that liberalization has made cinema a more effective medium for state legitimation. Moore asks, How are these films received? How do audiences read them? Are films targeted to particular audiences? For whom, on whom, and in whose name are these films produced and shown? Moore is particularly interested in "spectacles of subversion" like the film clip from East Palace, West Palace that Pickowicz discussed. Does the state really believe that if such "underground" films are not shown in Chinese theaters they have no impact? Do they make it back to China in video form? Finally, Moore explored the constitution of a Chinese subject through discourses of legitimation. The rise of nationalist longing in a transnationalist frame, Moore argues, simultaneously "provincializes" Europe and "unhinges the hyphen" in the Chinese nation-state.
Susan Whiting
Political Science
University of Washington
Noting how Johnston and Lubman's papers complement each other, Susan Whiting focused her comments on fundamental issues surrounding the nature and definition of legitimacy. Whiting began with the issue of change in the bases of legitimacy, arguing that while Lubman's approach embraced "flux" and the coexistence of both "means"- and "ends"- oriented legitimacy, Johnston's definition was static, tied to a vigorous defense of state sovereignty, victimhood, and the status quo. This framework, Whiting argued, fails to account for change: the existence of the new internationalist discourse Johnston himself discussed.
Whiting also took issue with the "thick rationalism" approach Johnston introduced in his paper, arguing that pure power politics approaches that view legitimacy as irrelevant ignore the high costs of enforcement/coercion. Johnston's rhetoric of "maximizing legitimacy," furthermore, is not productive: there is no single best legitimacy/coercion mix. Whiting also contended that Johnston's focus on the normative bases of legitimacy excluded the instrumental: Isn't "providing the goods" a source of legitimacy?
Whiting concluded by proffering her own typology of legitimacy. "Means" or "procedural"- oriented legitimacy focuses on process: if the means are deemed proper, the action is legitimate. "Ends"- oriented legitimacy, by contrast, focuses on outcomes: if the goals are correct, then anything goes.
Jean Oi, Chair
Marc Blecher
Politics
Oberlin College
Basing his arguments on intensive interviews with more than twenty-five workers and a number of surveys and newspaper articles, Marc Blecher analyzes the Chinese state's efforts to legitimate itself before state-sector workers. Because more than a decade of economic reform has systematically undermined the social and political status of state-sector workers, as well as chipped away at the economic security of their "iron rice bowl," Blecher declares this task a "tall order" for the state.
Blecher identifies five distinct categories of strategies that the state deploys in this task, although there is considerable overlap between them: structural, ideological, policy, institutional, and labor practices. Blecher deploys the metaphor of "trenches" to describe the structural way in which the state insulates itself from worker discontent by redirecting workers' ire at enterprises, the market, and other segments of the working class. By tying the fate of workers to the fate of their companies, the "trench of enterprise hegemony" creates a "line of defense" between the state and workers: strikes, slowdowns, and sit-ins, Blecher notes, are often directed at factory management, not the state. The "trench of market hegemony" also insulates the state from worker discontent. In this case, workers attribute their misfortunes to the vagaries of "the market," either with psychological resignation or a determination to use the market to search for new employment. The final "trench of working-class fragmentation" protects the state from worker ire by focusing workers' anger at other workers.
Blecher's second state strategy is "ideological interpolation," the "drumbeat of rhetoric" the state deploys to dig the trenches discussed above. Through an analysis of the Gongren ribao (Workers Daily), Blecher shows how the state "works hard to persuade workers" that enterprises, the market, etc., are to blame for their problems, not the state. The third strategy involves a variety of policy initiatives -reemployment and training programs, unemployment allowances, labor laws, etc. - that have "at best a marginal substantive effect" but seek to portray the state as on the workers' side. The fourth institutional strategy of organizing corporatist labor unions, Blecher argues, seeks to preempt protest against the state. The fifth and final strategy involves "hegemonic labor practices" that dull workers' political impulses. Following Michael Burawoy, Blecher argues that "piece rate" and other labor practices that promote competition "implicate workers in the extraction of surplus value from themselves."
Blecher concludes by arguing that despite stripping the urban proletariat of its exalted position in Chinese society, the Chinese state, through this "impressive array of strategies," is succeeding in deflecting worker discontent.
Lu Xiaobo
Visiting at Hoover Insitute
Stanford University
Lu Xiaobo turns to the countryside, first identifying the contentious issues and then examining both state and peasant strategies for achieving their goals. Lu focuses on four pressing issues: taxation, land ownership, cadre accountability, and urban bias. Although peasant real income has grown at a relatively constant 5 percent rate during reform, an increase in both formal and informal taxation has created a "problem of peasant burdens." Peasant resentment of informal levies in particular, Lu argues, stems from a perception of their "irregularity, arbitrariness, and lack of transparency in their use." Local cadre control of the allocation of land is also the source of great peasant anger, as are the corrupt behaviors of local cadres depicted as "tyrants." Lu reports that the majority of letters received at the Nongmin ribao (Peasants Daily) from farmers, for instance, complained of abuse from local officials. The fourth and final pressing rural concern is the Party's urban bias. Farmers, for example, pay much more for electricity than urban dwellers.
Lu then turns to the state's various strategies for gaining legitimacy in the eyes of resentful peasants. These include reducing fiscal burdens, extending labor contracts, and improving village-level governance. Lu emphasizes the role of the "letters and visits" (xinfang) system in channeling protest through "normal channels" of the bureaucracy. The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee/State Council Letters and Visits Bureau, Lu notes, was spared in the most recent staff downsizing. Beijing has also denied farmers a nationwide mass association, barring them a greater voice in central decision making. Their interests are instead represented through public advocacy in the media and the National People's Congress.
Rather than confront Beijing, peasants usually appeal to central policies in confronting abusive local cadres. The system of vertical accountability, Lu argues, creates a convergence of interest between Beijing and local farmers. Lu concludes by arguing both that "we need to disaggregate the state further" and that we need to disaggregate "China" as well: "the state faces more legitimacy problems in Agricultural China [the central heartland] than it does in both the Industrializing [the littoral east] and Subsistence [the northwest hinterland] Chinas."
Tom Gold
Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Rather than examine strategies the Chinese state deploys to legitimate itself in the eyes of the getihu (urban individual household enterprises) Tom Gold focuses on how the state seeks to legitimize the getihu before other segments of society. Having spent decades attacking private business, the Communist Party felt the need to justify its "newborn thing." To extend Gold's metaphor, the parent sought to go to bat for its illegitimate child before its siblings. By shifting emphasis from vertical state-society relations to horizontal society-society relations, Gold implies that the Party parent is not currently concerned about its legitimacy before its infant, nor does he address what their relationship will be like when the "newborn thing" grows up into a full-fledged adolescent. Defending the getihu, Gold implies, is part of the Party's larger project of defending its basic economic policy of reform.
Following the Cultural Revolution, the Party, Gold asserts, "feared the potential for criminal activity and general unrest" among the unemployed, which included former Red Guard rebels returned to the cities after years in the countryside. The constitution passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) in 1978 permitted "individual labor." Gold claims that the NPC hoped that individual enterprises would ease shortages in the urban private sector.
Gold also discusses various means the state employed to "grant" the getihu social prestige before the rest of society. They were given their own political association, permitted to join the NPC, and presented positively in the media and popular culture. Propaganda, for instance, argued that the quality of life for all urbanites had improved with getihu, and that to jump into the sea (xiahai) of private business was not a "loss of face."
Gold concludes that the state has been successful in legitimizing the getihu: they have been widely accepted by other segments of society and even foreigners, and have become an engine of China's economic growth.
Ann Anagnost
Anthropology
University of Washington
Ann Anagnost begins her essay by shifting the question: rather than examine how the state legitimates itself before parents, she will explore the historically contingent subject position of parenthood in China. By the end of her essay, however, it is clear that not only the state but also China have receded from analysis. Global capitalism, instead, is the primary agent of a "transnational transformation" of subject positions like "parent" and "child."
The bulk of the essay reviews the post-modem literature on the family, parenting, and the child. Anagnost is particularly inspired by Jacques Donzelot's recent The Policing of Families (1997). According to Gilles Deleuze's Forward, Donzelot presents a historiography of the European family in which the parent is not a unified subject position but instead located at the intersection of various social and economic forces.
Anagnost wishes to think about these issues in a Chinese context. During the socialist era ending in 1978, the family was "negated." Anagnost then asks whether child-rearing consumption has become a marker of "the modem" in China under reform. One newspaper editorial, Anagnost recounts, expressed pride in the new phenomenon of young couples who do not desire children as a marker of China's modernity. Although the state briefly appears here as Anagnost notes the PRC's continuing interference in the domain of reproduction with its one-child policy, her emphasis is on how parents' market-driven desires become a "powerful means of control." It is the "parenting industry," the relevant manifestation of global capitalism, not the Chinese state, that disciplines.
Stanley Rosen
Political Science
University of Southern California
Basing his comments largely on survey reports, Stanley Rosen explores three areas of change in youth attitudes during reform: internationalization, nationalism, and materialism. The implications of these shifting attitudes for regime legitimacy, Rosen argues, is that ideological appeals now fall on deaf ears: the Party must perform, meeting the rising expectations of China's youth, if it is to maintain its legitimacy in the 21 century.
Rosen begins his discussion of "internationalization" by noting the "basic contradiction" between the reform policy of "opening" (kaifang) and the state's continuing desire to socialize China's youth into "state-sanctioned values." Through a colorful discussion of the film preferences and reading habits of young Chinese, Rosen documents the rising influence of "global culture" on China's youth. While nationalists may decry "cultural colonialism" (wenhua zhimin zhuyi), China's youth prefer Titanic and the NBA to propaganda films like the 1997 flop Red Child (Hong haizi). Cultural authorities thus face a dilemma: a nationalist and market-driven desire to compete with foreign imports clashes with the political imperatives of propaganda work.
This rise in knowledge about the outside world, Rosen notes, paradoxically coexists with a simultaneous rise in nationalism. Realizing that its earlier insistence on forcing students to memorize and regurgitate Communist dogma was alienating students, contributing to 1989's Beijing Spring, the state has turned to championing nationalism to bolster its legitimacy. Rosen argues that while the state has been successful in "increasing suspicion and distrust of the United States," it is also playing with a "double-edged sword," raising expectations about China's current and future world status that will be difficult to meet.
The final development Rosen explores is the increasing importance of money as a vehicle for upward mobility for China's youth. Money can now secure admission to primary and secondary schools and is central to securing a good job. Today's youth, for example, seek to join the Chinese Communist Party for many of the same reasons they pursue MBAs: not out of ideological conviction, but rather as a "bargaining chip" to increase their chances in the job market.
The shift from ideological to performance-based criteria for assessing legitimacy, Rosen concludes, increases pressure on the regime: its performance vis-a-vis other nations can and will be counted and compared.
Kevin O'Brien
Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
Professor O'Brien began with a discussion of the "common ground" revealed by Blecher and Lu's papers on the state's strategies toward workers and peasants: the state's message toward both groups - "Your problems are not our fault, blame somebody else: your factory manager, local cadre, the market, anybody" - has been largely successful. The center has not only been good at channeling blame elsewhere, but has even positioned itself as a safeguard and even a benefactor that will step in to look out for people's interests. This strategy is a "high-wire act," however: legitimizing the state by de-legitimizing its agents is a dangerous game. O'Brien asked, Will blame stay where it has been placed?
O'Brien then turned to differences between the state's approaches to workers and peasants. To workers, the state says, essentially, that nothing can be done: accept and adjust to market forces. Toward peasants, by contrast, the state is more attentive, actively pursuing grievances with grass-roots officials.
O'Brien concluded with an in depth probing of the legitimacy dynamics between the state on the one hand and workers and peasants on the other. When villagers appeal to center policies and laws in their disputes with local cadres, are they expressing a sincere confidence in Beijing, or merely being strategic? If a farmer objects to a local official's handling of birth control policy, for instance, is he not simultaneously challenging the center's policy? If the local emperor is wearing no clothes, O'Brien suggests, then the emperor in Beijing can't be wearing anything either. Workers and peasants, O'Brien argues, deploy sophisticated strategies: it is imprudent to point fingers at the center, so they create an impression of state legitimacy.
Joyce Kallgren
Asian Survey
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Kallgren began with Anagnost's paper before turning to Gold's and Rosen's presentations. Kallgren was interested in Anagnost's discussion of China's one-child policy, which she argued is in opposition to traditional Chinese ideas about the family. What, Kallgren asked, are the implications of this policy for the state's legitimacy? For the Chinese nation-state?
Turning to Gold's paper, Kallgren questioned whether Gold's optimism was warranted. Being a member of the getihu might now be seen as a legitimate career, but is it a desirable one? Many workers in township and village enterprises (TVEs) and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are happy with their current jobs, Kallgren suggested, and do not necessarily want to "go into the sea" (xiahai) of private entrepreneurship.
Finally, on Rosen's paper, Kallgren concurred that nationalism is a dangerous legitimizer and that the turn to performance-based criteria for assessing the state's legitimacy is putting increasing pressure on the Chinese Communist Party.
Liu Xin, Chair
Richard Kraus
Political Science
University of Oregon
Richard Kraus argues that twenty years of marketizing reforms have had a depoliticizing effect on the cultural terrain. This applies both at the top and at the bottom. "The Party has lost its ability to police artists effectively," Kraus argues, in part because "the rise of entertainment culture has effectively demobilized the audience" for political art. The state no longer enjoys a media monopoly. Artists and writers, meanwhile, have also undergone a de-politicization, as "the figure of the artist-entrepreneur supplant[s] the ideal of the cultured mandarin." Like the rest of the citizenry, they have become "politically passive couch potatoes."
In an intriguing discussion, Kraus probes the evolving psychology of China's artists and writers. As intellectuals' political role in the polity declines, Kraus argues, their "sense of consequence" is vanishing, creating a widespread cynicism. Following Ci Jiwei's Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (1994) and echoing Paul Pickowitz's earlier discussion of Zhang Yang's 1998 Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing ma la tang), Kraus argues that the pursuit of individual pleasure is replacing revolutionary nihilism. Specifically, "The passive appeal of cynicism is joined by its boastful cousin, nationalism, as the emotional core of the new ideology." Intellectuals can now "enjoy the pleasures of a rising cultural chauvinism."
Kraus concludes with the argument that Chinese cultural politics is less unusual or strange than it used to be under Mao: China is "no longer Stalinist Russia." Realizing that intensely politicized art is alienating in China today, the Communist Party deals with cynical artists gingerly, buying them off with greater autonomy. Artists, meanwhile, focus on the pursuit of profit, leaving politics to the Party.
Richard Baum
Political Science
UCLA
Richard Baum began by noting that Beijing faced a "daunting" challenge in seeking to legitimate itself before Hong Kongers because the vast majority of them are refugees from the PRC. It would be analogous, Baum suggested, to asking Kosovars to legitimate Milosevic. The 1997 handover, however, went much more smoothly than predicted, raising an important question: How did the PRC do it?
Baum answers his question through a lengthy and detailed Beijing-centric history of the 1980s and 1990s Sino-British negotiations over the fate of Hong Kong. In 1982 only 4 percent of Hong Kongers preferred PRC sovereignty. The "Thatcher shock" when the British prime minister went to Beijing for negotiations initially led to a panic in the Hong Kong stock market, but by 1984 local nerves had soothed, with 79 percent agreeing on PRC sovereignty. Baum attributes this "remarkable change" to "cognitive dissonance": people make the best of a fait accompli.
Increasing emigration of rich and skilled Hong Kongers in the late 1980s pointed to problems, however, and Beijing responded with a savvy strategy of reaching out to Hong Kong business, professional, and media elites. Spearheaded by Xinhua's Xu Jiatun, Beijing "cajoled" and "seduced" Hong Kongers. By 1988, Baum argues, they had succeeded: Hong Kongers largely believed that Beijing would honor its commitments.
The 1989 Tiananmen incident, Baum argues, changed all that. Hong Kongers' confidence in Beijing plummeted, and democrats swept local elections. Beijing responded with a dual strategy of a "velvet glove" on the one hand and a "mailed fist" on the other: reassuring apolitical Hong Kongers, but using the "strong arm tactics" of arrest and intimidation with journalists and democrats. The PRC relationship with Britain soured with Governor Chris Patten's 1992 arrival in Hong Kong. The State Council's Lu Ping, for instance, called him a "criminal of all time." To retaliate, the PRC threatened to pull the plug on the 1995 elections, but then reassured Hong Kongers with the choice of the paternalistic C. H. Tong to run the post-1997 show. The handover itself went smoothly: Jiang and Tong were both reassuring in their speeches, and Hong Kongers went shopping, not demonstrating.
Baum concludes by citing a survey showing that most Hong Kongers view themselves as "Hong Kongers" or "Hong Kong Chinese" and not simply as "Chinese" to argue that "while the Chinese government has largely succeeded in neutralizing the post-Tiananmen fears and anxieties of most Hong Kong people, it has not yet succeeded in engendering widespread local identification with - or patriotic attachment to - the 'motherland."
Stevan Harrell
Anthropology
University of Washington
Stevan Harrell began by making a case for the importance of his subject: China's minorities number more than a hundred million people and occupy a third to half of the PRC's geographical area. The Chinese state, therefore, faces a twin challenge: legitimating itself before its substantial minorities and before the dominant Han, who expect Beijing to maintain a firm hold over every inch of Chinese territory.
Harrell examines both the "languages of legitimacy" and various policies that the state deploys to legitimize itself before these groups. The ways Chinese speak about China, he argues, are central to the legitimation project. China is not defined in the classic language of the nation-state, but rather as a multinational state. Unity is asserted, Harrell argues, not on the basis of cultural and linguistic commonality, but rather on a unity of history and purpose. Phrases like long de chuanren (children of the dragon), for instance, create a symbolic language of common origins: "we're all related," it asserts. A "co-optive language in the preemptive mode" takes a different tack, rendering words like guo (nation/country) unavailable to minority oppositional use: it can only be applied to all of China, so more cumbersome phrases like difang quanli (local power) must be used to refer to nations that existed in the past within the realm of what is currently China. The PRC also deploys a language of "progress" to legitimate itself before minorities: "you are better off now within us than in the 'bad old days' of 'slave society' under minority rule," such arguments run. Such contentions simultaneously appeal to chauvinist Han constituencies. Finally, the PRC's liberal minority language policies are expensive but bolster the state's project of depicting "China" as a multinational rather than exclusively Han nation.
Turning to policy, Harrell first examines education, arguing that although certain avenues of advancement are closed to non-Chinese speakers, education in minority languages help legitimize the PRC as a multinational state. Local administration policies that give minorities regional leadership positions create the appearance of minority autonomy: by "making minorities the state." The state, therefore, doesn't literally "look Han." Minorities, Harrell argues, thus become both producers and objects of the state's legitimation strategies. Finally, preferential minority policies like higher birth-quota allowances "take away a potential de-legitimizing complaint, rather than produce positive legitimacy for the state."
How well does it work? One must deconstruct "minorities" to even begin answering this question, Harrell argues. For minorities in the northwest- Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia - who possess real claims to independence based on historic nationhood it does not work. For minorities in the southwest without strong claims to nationhood, however, the state's legitimation strategies work better. What is legitimized - multinational China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Han is less clear, however.
Richard Madsen
Sociology
University of California, San Diego
Richard Madsen begins his paper by distinguishing between three "levels" of legitimacy: "negative legitimacy" entails a view of the state as "an embodiment of evil" to be removed, "positive legitimacy" entails an agreement with the state on its "moral project," and finally, "contingent legitimacy" lies somewhere in between, entailing a tolerance rather than active support for or active protest against the state.
Arguing that the great variety of Chinese Christians makes it impossible to generalize about them, Madsen devotes the majority of his paper to chronicling their disparate experiences. A minority see the PRC state as the anti-Christ. Some millenialist movements, for instance, are led by charismatics who perform miracles and faith healing and predict the end of the world. Such movements have much in common with Qigong movement, and are reminiscent of the Taiping rebels, who drew on both Christianity and native myths. The government harshly suppresses such Christian communities, using intense surveillance to crush them before movements can begin.
The state has also, however, sought to co-opt more mainstream Christian communities to create a positive legitimacy for themselves. In the 1950s the Chinese Communist Party created mass organizations for Protestants and Catholics under the Religious Affairs Bureau of the United Front Work Department. It recruited religious leaders with unquestioned loyalty to the Party in a corporatist attempt to control religious practice. Leaders who refused to cooperate were imprisoned. Catholics were required to sever their ties with the Vatican. Such suppression, Madsen argues, only created martyrs who can be deployed as a symbolic resource by oppositionist Christian groups. The state hopes that by allowing Christians to worship at a limited number of approved open churches, however, the number of Christians will be held in check and they will tolerate the state.
Madsen concludes by arguing that most Chinese Christians accept a contingent legitimacy for the government. Although only a minority give it negative legitimacy, that number could increase if the government steps up harassment or if Christians become more frustrated with government restrictions.
James C. Scott
Visiting at CASBS
Stanford University
James C. Scott began with his own view of legitimacy, likening it to the conference table with the plastic tablecloth he was sitting behind: it hid the presenters' "less worthy parts," highlighting their heads and arms. He then argued that the East German government had never been legitimate, yet had managed very well for decades by ensuring that some commodities cigarettes, beer, chocolate, cheap champagne, toys, etc. were never in short supply. As long as the small rituals of daily life of the petite bourgeoisie could be satisfied, he suggested, legitimacy was not an issue: even with economic problems, illegitimate regimes can last for a long time.
Scott then questioned Madsen's notion of "contingent legitimacy," declaring all legitimacy to be "contingent." The question, he asked, is What is legitimacy contingent upon? This led Scott to remark on the "resilience of state forms" in the face of profound global shocks. The collapse of communism in 1989, he argued, was analogous to events of 1848, 1930, and 1968, when a domino effect swept away state forms internationally. Yet the Chinese Communist Party survived the challenge of Tiananmen. How?
Scott concluded with a few specific questions for Harrell and Madsen. What was the role of Han physical colonization of minority areas'? Were minorities forced into the mountains by Han farmers? Scott then questioned Harrell's emphasis on the "independent" top-down effect of the state's use of language in its legitimation efforts. Can't the state's "language of legitimation" also easily be subverted to the ends of delegitimation? In Russia, for instance, "comrade" is now used as an insult. Turning to Madsen, Scott asked whether Christianity's influence on indigenous religious traditions might be more important than narrow visions of Christianity.
Andrew Walder
Sociology
Stanford University
Andrew Walder began with Kraus' paper before turning to Baum's. Are the arts, Walder asked Kraus, less central to PRC legitimacy today? Has the Chinese state exaggerated the importance of the arts all along, or is this a recent phenomena? Who is currently "minding the store" on artists? Are artists consciously thinking about state legitimacy, or just control? What are the specific conflicts and boundaries today? How does this compare to the situation in the 1980s? What is the "oppositional weight" of new avant-garde art? Does it cater to domestic or foreign audiences?
Turning to Baum's account of the politics of the Hong Kong handover, Walder wondered whether Baum's narrative might benefit from more emphasis on the emotional: changes in the relative status of British and Chinese in Hong Kong in the final days before the handover were charged in a way that instrumental accounts cannot explain. The slow but pronounced shift in language use, from predominantly English to Cantonese to Mandarin, for instance, was a highly emotional affair. The attitudes of British bureaucrats went from imperial to polite, while the pride of Chinese civil servants was genuine not an artifact of Beijing propaganda. How did these emotions figure into Sino-British handover negotiations?
Summarized by Peter Gries.
