The farmer, the foreman, and the tinker: Irony and the displacement of meaning in Xiakou Village

Abstract

We have been visiting Xiakou Village, in western Sichuan, for twenty years, during which there have been many dramatic changes in village life. One of the most recent phenomena is the return of baba dianying (courtyard movie), a practice from the collective period where a team from the county culture bureau projects movies onto a bedsheet hung up outside in a courtyard on a summer’s night. Interestingly, baba dianying takes place in the same household courtyard as mass political meetings of the collective period. Just at the appointed hour, people stream in with stools, snacks, and flashlights. The film (almost always a kung fu movie) is dim and grainy, the sound quality is terrible, children interrupt or interact with the film to great hilarity, and everyone has a good time. The instant the movie is over, everyone immediately disperses back to their own homes. The baba dianying is the village chief ’s conscious effort to address the“scattered” (fen san) life in Xiakou, where attempts at cooperative ventures – bamboo processing, organic chickens, tourism, parking lots, even temple revivals – have all failed to gain any traction, and where state development policies are increasingly met with cynicism. People seem to come to baba dianying out of nostalgia and a latent pride of place, but it is a nostalgia that marks the condition of displacement, an act of sincerity in a context of ubiquitous irony. This chapter is a reflection on the ways in which irony measures ruptures ofmeaning in village life. Irony is a common way in which villagers mark historical change, and irony is itself historical, a way of speaking the post-revolutionary condition through juxtapositions of past in present (Feuchtwang 2011; Steinmuller 2011: 26-27). In particular, we will explore the ways in which state interventions and reversals engendered ironic stances, which in turn created a divide among some of the villagers, partly a generation gap but most substantially a divide along different frames of moral meaning, with the Great Leap Forward famine as the decisive historical break. The cohort for whom the famine was the decisive traumatic experience sought to regain fixed meaning through the “rectification of names” and efforts to remember the moral community, while those in the village who came of age during the ensuing “collective period” (jiti) of the Cultural Revolution inherited a worlddevoid of firm moral grounding, and an ironic worldview inflected sometimes with absurdity, sometimes with bitterness that still deeply colors current interactions with the state, perceptions of governance, and relations within the village. The deepening economic reform heralded by Deng Xiaoping’s southerntour in 1992 was a historical conjuncture. Entrepreneurs and government officials began “jumping into the sea” (xia hai) of “bolder, faster” economic reforms, giving rise to corruption, materialism, and to much soul searching about “the vacuum of values” and “the crisis of belief.” Yan Yunxiang has described this moment as a basic shift in the moral ordering of the landscape toward individual rights instead of community-based obligations (Yan, 2011). Others have characterized the shift in values as the move from an ideal of a unified or “fixed” moral code to a more relativistic set of constructions, where many new positional moralities emerge out of the variety of social positions in the turbulent market economy. Chinese cultural critics describe a change from the age of heroism under Maoism, where everyday actions had to be placed in the context of a grand unified vision (datong), to a new age characterized by the quotidian decisions of petty affluence (Steinmuller 2011: 26). Oxfeld (2010) describes the people in the Chinese village she studied as choosing among competing models of morality in particular circumstances – selecting from traditional, Maoist, and modern frames to suit their needs. Feuchtwang (this volume) explores how the concepts of culture and civilization in China have evolved from a focus on a single imperial centre to multiple centres, implying a multiplication of voices within the individual, negotiated and combined as they see fit, according to the situation. Looking back at revolutionary experiences from the perspective of 1992,villagers in Xiakou could see that the political rhetoric of the revolution had not accorded with realities of village life, and now in the “great reversal” of market reforms, the struggles of the past were for nothing in any case. The contradictions that emerged under post-socialism gave rise to irony as an expression of moral disorientation. Watson (2011) and Steinmuller (2011: 26-29) have highlighted how humor is a common mode of recounting the Cultural Revolution. Feuchtwang observes that the use of irony allows narrators to affirm the positive values of Maoism while acknowledging the problems with its implementations, seeing irony as the expression of a new search for moral grounding while exercising the ruthlessness necessary for self-reinvention (Feuchtwang 2011: 58).Watson and Feuchtwang both portray the younger generation of today as having internalized the failures of the Maoist era in their dedication to living in the moment, and abandonment of larger principled idealisms. Looking back over the last twenty years in Xiakou, it seems to us now thatthe early 1990s was a moment of historical disjuncture where sincere attempts to remember the moral community were balanced against irony and cynicism as positions in the social disorientation of the post-socialist village. The older generation aimed at reintegrating a more coherent moral code based oncommunity, fairness, and cultivated learning. Over the course of the 1990s, the state weighed in with policies of displacement that tipped the scales toward the irony that prevails today. In this essay we reflect on conversations in 1992 with three individuals who for us capture the diverging stances toward the ironic turn. “The farmer,” Wu Guangxing, resisted the ironic condition of post-socialism by seeking moral certainty in the face of what he saw as the rise of relativism, corruption, and social inequality. “The foreman,” Yang Zhengguo, embittered by his experiences as a member of the Cultural Revolution generation, held a deeply cynical view of life that he expressed in intentional irony and sardonic humor. “The tinker,” Wu Wenxue, was an ironic figure not in the intentional, cynical sense of Zhengguo, but in consequence of contextual irony, where other villagers viewed his values and lifestyle as out of step with the times. Following these three portraits of belief, we briefly consider the wave of temple revivals during that pivotal period of the early 1990s as attempts to remember the moral community and restore sincerity that ultimately failed, undermined by state policies that negated the relevance of place and accelerated the ironic turn. Today a new generation has inherited this rocky moral landscape in which good governance and community cooperation have a hard time taking root.