Hoping for state policy and “policy-based resistance”: contested representations of a good society in a Chinese mining town

Abstract

Following the resurgence of anthropological interest in resistance studies, I show how resistance can be based on firm adherence to government policies, and can thus ideologically strengthen the state. Though it is common for anthropologists to conceptualize policies as political technologies of control, Chinese scholars have shown that policies can also be appropriated by citizens for purposes of resistance. These different views on policies imply a dichotomy between the state and society. However, drawing on ethnographic data on the resistance experiences of peasants and workers in a Chinese mining town (Pingan), I explore how Pingan people’s imagination of state policy implicates a “state-family” relationship in which “policy-based resistance” was bounded by a political-moral nexus. Pingan peasants and workers used state policies as a tool of resistance despite the policy restrictions placed on social life. They did not see state policies as offering opportunities of resistance but also saw them as resources for hoping the central state’s policies would bring them a happy family life. I illustrate this with three case studies in which Pingan people’s spatial imaginations of state policies connect to the notion of “family” (家). This article concludes by reflecting on the concept of “refusal,” arguing that those who employed policy-based resistance refused to acknowledge the local government as effective policy enforcer but accepted the central state as a benevolent policy-maker, offering them hope and allowing them to imagine a good society.