The Offense of Hooliganism and The Moral Dimension of China's Pursuit of Modernity, 1979–1996

Abstract

The Offense of Hooliganism and The Moral Dimension of China's Pursuit of Modernity, 1979-19961 by Harold M. Tanner Between 1979 and 1996, an unknown number of Chinese were punished by law for the criminal offense of hooliganism. Ironically, prosecutions for hooliganism took place while China experienced an explosion of literature, film, music, style, and attitude that most Chinese would regard as being hooliganlike , though not necessarily criminal. Just what was this "hooliganism" and who were the "hooligans?" What was the difference between the legally defined criminal offense of hooliganism and the vogue for hooligan culture, and what was the relationship between the two? For what purpose did the Chinese regime define the criminal offense of hooliganism? Once written, how was the law enforced? And why was the offense of hooliganism removed in the amended version of the Criminal Law in 1997? In this paper I will answer those questions through a discussion the historical derivation and the modem uses of the Chinese term liumang (hooligan) and the criminal offense of hooliganism (liumangzui). In doing so, I will argue that the key to understanding the phenomena of liumangzui and liumang culture lies in their relationship to the moral dimension of the Deng regime's modernization program. MODERNIZATION AND MORALITY Discussion of the moral dimension of China's pursuit of modernity must be based on a distinction between two concepts: modernization and modernization theory. Modernization theory suggests a teleological historical process whose end point is the combination of capitalism, industrial urban economies, representative democracy, and individualism that is seen in Western Europe and, especially , in the United States of America.2 As I intend to use it here, the term "modernization" refers, not to the teleological scheme of modernization theory, but to what the American historian Richard Brown calls "dramatic technological advances in communications, transportation, and production as well as the creation of the nation-state."3 Thus understood, modernization is a process of transformation. The concrete way in which that transformation is carried out and the particular social, economic, and political results of that transformation may vary from place to place.4 Following Benjamin Schwartz, I would see the Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 26, NO.1 (November, 2000): 1-40 2 Twentieth-Century China core of modernity as being the scientific paradigm.5 It is the confidence that we live in a rational world, and that human beings have the power to understand and manipulate the laws of nature, and of society, politics, economics, and any other field of human endeavor in order constantly to improve the quality of human life. Modernity itself is an unstable state of affairs-for at its very heart lies a faith in never-ending progress, and thus never-ending change. For the West (understood as Western Europe and America), modernization was in most respects an unplanned, even shocking thing. Indeed, the word "modem" had negative connotations in the eighteenth and even in the nineteenth centuries.6 Modernization involved unrest. It involved the questioning of old ways of life and, ultimately, their destruction. It involved the transfer-migration --of population from rural to urban areas and the creation of a whole new class of people: the necessary, but suspicious, even dangerous urban working class. For the Western bourgeoisie of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries , the helter-skelter, all-too-often unruly process of modernization brought about social and moral phenomena that seemed to cry out for the same rational, scientific management that one would apply to the management of the material world. On the one hand, there was the spectacle of social disorder associated with the influx of rural migrants, some of them from different regions or even different countries. On the other hand, there was the resistance of the poor, of the displaced, and of the aesthetically inclined to what they perceived as an increasingly rigid and regimented modem society. For the West, modernity involved not only material progress, but also a sense of what Kai T. Erikson refers to as a' "boundary crisis."7 That is, the leading elements of Western bourgeois society believed that they needed to re-establish the boundaries between moral and immoral behavior-boundaries that had been...