Post-Mao China Research Articles

REINVENTING THE SELF UNDER SOCIALISM

As part of a massive rural-to-urban migrant population in post-Mao reform era China, rural male migrants in their early twenties are increasingly entering the sex industry, which offers same-sex sexual services to other men. These young men, known as “money boys,” form a new urban subject. From continuous ethnographic research on the male sex industry in China since 2004, the author argues that this new urban subject represents the site of multiple contradictions in China's continual transformations, which are at once authoritarian and neoliberal. The neoliberal reconfiguration, such as development strategies, commercialization of bodies, and liberalization of identities, opens up new social and sexual spaces and nurtures in thema new enterprising and desiring ethics of the self. However, their pursuit of needs, wants, and desires for work, love, and sex remains constricted by authoritarian codes such as the hukou system, antiprostitution measures, and the stratified cosmopolitan tongzhi community. Money boys are new urban subjects, but city outcasts; they are new labor subjects, but illegal dagongzai; they are new queer subjects, but “improper” tongzhi. Using the narratives of three money boys, the author argues that they, though endorsing neoliberal “ways of doing things” to create viable spaces for survival, do not embrace neoliberal political projects that tend to reinforce the hierarchical structure of urban-rural divisions, legal/illegal labor relationships, and illicit/licit desires. This article contributes to studies of migration, prostitution, and homosexuality in China, as well as to an understanding of the relationship between capitalism, state governance, and subjectivity in post-socialist China.

Negotiating with the Past: The Art of Calligraphy in Post-Mao China

Chinese Calligraphy, an integrated form that combines language, art, philosophy, and poetry, was considered the highest art in traditional China. Although no longer used for daily communication, calligraphy manages to sustain its presence in Chinese cultural life even in the computer age. The classical forms that were canonized nearly two millenniums ago continue to command a large following while new styles and new practices have emerged in response to social, cultural and artistic influences. This paper looks at present trends in calligraphy and calligraphy-inspired practices against the backdrop of tradtions. It is apparent that even within the most radical changes that have taken place, whether in the way calligraphy is practiced or evaluated, there are strong indications that the fundamental aesthetic principles passed down from the past are still very much alive today, showing the resilience of this ancient art.

‘Politically indifferent’ nationalists? Chinese youth negotiating political identity in the internet age

This article explores why apparent political indifference coincides with nationalist passion in Chinese cyberspace. Drawing on interviews with university students and the notion of ‘new politics’, this article argues that online nationalism constitutes an important extension of the political being in the Chinese context, or a form of ‘new politics’ among contemporary youth in certain societies. The ‘dual’ political identity emerging from Chinese youth’s uses of the internet is reflective of, and reinforces, their offline self. Both their apparent lack of interest in engaging with the government and their strong nationalism are products of the same changing subjectivities in post-Mao China.

The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China by You-tien Hsing (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China by You-tien Hsing Terry G. McGee (bio) You-tien Hsing. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv, 278 pp. Hardcover $80.00, isbn 978-0-19-956804-8. In the last two decades, China has moved rapidly to reach a level of urbanization that, by various estimates, reached 50 percent by the end of 2010. This figure, [End Page 87] which is often used as a threshold for defining an urbanized society, is subject to much debate because of the methods adopted in Chinese statistical systems of data definition and collection, a fact that Chan Kam Wing (1994, 2007) has been pointing out for almost twenty years. While his revisions would suggest slightly lower estimates of the urban population of China, they make little difference in the fact that China has experienced one of the most rapid urban transformations in the history of the world over the last forty years of the post-reform period. Furthermore, this transformation has involved an unprecedented increase in the population being added to urban areas. UN estimates suggest that China’s urban population will continue to grow, reaching a level of 75 percent by 2050 with an increase of more than 400 million people in the next forty years. It is not surprising that this great urban transformation has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers from both within and outside of China. In an era of global economic volatility, environmental challenges, and social transformation, the level of success that China achieves in responding to these urbanization challenges is important not only to China but also to the world at large, particularly the other developing countries of Africa and Asia where similar processes of rapid urban transformation are occurring. The idea that the Chinese developmental experience may offer a model for other developing countries is, of course, very relevant to the Anglo-European concept of the Beijing Consensus to which China, publicly at least, has been rather cool. However, the announcement at the 2012 meeting of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) leaders that discussed the establishment of a BRICS Development Bank that would fund projects in developing nations suggests that the ideas has some validity. This is the broader context in which Hsing’s valuable book is situated. In this book, the author focuses on trying to provide the answer to two main questions: “[F]irst, how does the state and society shape and become shaped by the urban transformation in post-Mao China?” and, “[S]econd, how does space in the form of territoriality play a role in these contested processes?” (p. 23). In order to answer these questions, Hsing makes the persuasive argument that “land has moved to the center of local politics in post-Mao China. It now shapes the restructuring of Chinese state power and radically impacts state-society relations” (p. 5). Central to this process is the manner in which land has become increasingly commodified since 1988 while not changing the basic constitutional provision of the state ownership of land. This has encouraged local governments to use land-centered accumulation and the rents from this leased land as a key strategy in local state building. It is further argued that the consequences of these processes are to reconfigure “relationships among the local state, the market and society” (p. 6) that are largely “the result of the distributional consequences of this land accumulation that trigger challenges to the process as the local state’s occupation and domination of territory are hotly contested” (p. 8). This assumes [End Page 88] various forms of resistance in different zones within the expanding urban territory that is the consequence of the urbanization process. Often this process is portrayed as a top-down, linear-driven process from national to local levels, sometimes called “state-led urbanization.” This is perhaps best represented by the idea that various administrative scales from national to local levels make up a form of embedded hierarchy, in which the various administrative scales are nested within national and subnational hierarchies. This facilitates more...

The Chinese Buddhist Ecology in Post-Mao China: Contours, Types and Dynamics

The author delineates the configuration of the Chinese Buddhist ecology in post-Mao China by focusing on three major types of religious actor found in the ecology. She spells out how the interactions between the internal characteristics of religious groups and external structural conditions have shaped the development patterns of groups in each type. First, the dominant Buddhist temples, which enjoy state recognition, have been beset by the hollowing-out process. Second, the type of Buddhist groups with ambiguous legal status has been growing vigorously in the interstices of the current Chinese socio-political structure but faces uncertainties. An array of actors and forms, including self-appointed monks and the mixed form of Buddhism and popular religion, exist on the fringe of institutional Buddhism and constitute the third type. Within this type, the syncretic sects, receiving censure from both the state and the Buddhist establishment, are forced to operate underground.

Review Essay—Access to Justice in Post-Mao China: Assessing the Politics of Criminal and Administrative Law

Since the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976), post-Mao China has witnessed a sustained period of unprecedented legal reform. Criminal prosecutions and citizen lawsuits against the government, because they pit individual litigants against the authoritarian Chinese state, are two politically significant areas of law. We examine and critically assess the sociolegal scholarship on criminal and administrative legal reform as it has developed over the past few decades, with special attention to shifts in the conventional wisdom regarding legal reform and political liberalism in China and elsewhere. Additionally, we offer both theoretical and empirical suggestions for enhancing the explanatory power of sociolegal research in China.

In Pursuit of an Alternative Model? The Modernisation Trap in China’s Official Development Discourse

This article contributes to the debates on China’s socio-political transformations by tracing the link between China’s modernization and nationalism, and analysing their mutual interplay. Many recent studies discuss post-Mao China’s development as a unique model challenging earlier development approaches. Instead, the argument pursued here points to the dependence of China’s dominant development thinking on the paradigm of modernization and its symbolic celebration in official discourse and public rituals. By tracing the impact of the modernization paradigm in the influential annual publication China Modernization Report and in the 2009 National Day mass parade, the article shows how and what kind of Chinese nation is produced. I argue that China’s ostensibly unique development model is constrained by the modernization thinking underlying it. Analysis of the discourses on modernity and ‘scientific development’ and the symbolism associated with them reveals a series of dichotomies and oppositions underpinning China’s nation-building. China’s pursuit of modernization relies on the suppression of other possible development paths within China and subsumes Chinese development experiences under those of the generalised West, thereby restricting development alternatives to those allowed within a hierarchical view of the world.

The proliferation of stem cell therapies in post-Mao China: problematizing ethical regulation

Thousands of foreign patients have sought experimental stem cell therapies in China since 2001. Despite critical scrutiny from scientific experts and tightening guidelines on the conduct of translational medicine, stem cell clinics have continued to proliferate in contemporary China. This article delves beyond regulatory exteriors to provide an ethnographic account of why unauthorized stem cell clinics targeting foreign clients have flourished under “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As the former emphasis on preventive care during Mao's era of collectivism has given way to a market-driven pursuit of high-tech interventions, changes in the political economy of healthcare have transformed China's urban medical system into a laboratory for entrepreneurial tactics. This article traces how medical entrepreneurs operate within and beyond the socialist market economy by co-opting public hospital facilities for private gain and capitalizing on the hope and hype over stem cell research to promote dubious procedures. Rather than producing biopolitical modes of governance, formal regulation in China often invites enterprising tactics and hybrid practices that ultimately remake the boundaries between public and private, as well as ethical and unethical.

Capitalist market values in East Malaysia and China

This article discusses the ecological and political bases of values, and their significance in our understanding of cultural life, through an ethnographic reflection of an indigenous minority in East Malaysia, the Badeng Kenyah’s, encounter with capitalist markets. In addition, post-Mao China’s encounter with the global capitalist market is also discussed to show the nature of values and social change and the need to reinvent values and create institutions to reinforce relevant values that will shape new cultural forms. Human values, including values that emphasize social welfare and harmony with nature, have their roots in the principle of reciprocity in egalitarian small-scale societies. However, values embedded in human cultural traditions are swept away by market forces in an increasingly globalized world. Ecological humanism is an emerging new worldview that influences the reinvention of values and fosters the formation of new cultural forms.

China and the Question of Freedom

In three decades of reform China has become a society that is radically different both from what it used to be in Mao's time and from a liberal society. This new China poses especially interesting questions about freedom—interesting not only in the Chinese context but also more generally. Pivotal for my treatment of these questions is a distinction I draw between de facto freedom and the value of freedom, the latter in turn understood in terms of a larger notion of agency, and divided into such distinct dimensions as moral resource, right, and mode of subjection. This distinction allows me to argue that while China has no shortage of de facto freedom, it lacks the value of freedom, especially freedom as a mode of subjection. The lack of freedom as a value has serious moral and political consequences, as manifested in a prolonged moral crisis in post-Mao China and in a certain fragility of social order caused by the pitting of order against freedom. Such consequences suggest a strong need for China to develop the value of freedom. But it is possible and important to do so in a critical spirit, as I argue through a critical analysis of the place of freedom in a liberal society.

Urban Workers’ Leisure Culture and the ‘Public Sphere’: A Study of the Transformation of the Workers’ Cultural Palace in Reform-Era China

This article looks into urban Chinese working-class leisure culture through a case study of the transformed Workers’ Cultural Palace in Zhengzhou in Henan province. Making timely and engaging contribution to the discussion on changing working-class subjectivities in post-Mao China, the author investigates Zhengzhou workers’ cultural and communicative activities, including songs, dramas and political discussions in an urban space. The case study provides hints of a re-politicized space which constitutes a public sphere, attended by the working class, of free discussion on class inequalities and related issues. In the emergent public sphere inhabited by urban workers, class consciousness is nurtured as distinct from the Chinese middle class. The findings point to contested public spheres in China’s increasingly class-divided society and the return of class politics at the bottom rungs, taking issue with seemingly conventional wisdom purporting to declare the end of class in practical Chinese politics and scholarly Chinese studies.

Class Location and Wage Distribution in a High-Technology Development Zone: An Application of Wright's Class Analysis to Post-Mao China

This papers applies Wright's neo-Marxist class analysis to a case study of income determination in a Chinese New- and High-Technology Development Zone. After controlling for individual endowments with human and social capital, relationally-defined class locations have a positive and significant effect on wage determination. The presence of structural determinants of inequality in post-Mao China is generally explained as a legacy of the socialist economy. This study suggests instead that structured social inequality is also linked to the emerging capitalist features of the Chinese economy, and cannot simply be seen as a transitional feature of 'partial' reforms. The paper includes an Appendix on the operationalization of class variables.

Rethinking China's Strategy in Asia and Beyond: Can We All Get It Right?

A s Steven Levine astutely observed back in 1984, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was “a regional power without a regional policy.”1 Indeed, China was without an Asia strategy until the end of the Cold War. While a number of books have examined the rise of China in the Asian context or looked at Beijing’s relations with its neighbors, until now there has not been a study focused on how China thinks about Asia. Gilbert Rozman’s book Chinese Strategic Thought toward Asia is, therefore, an important book. Strategy is probably the most overused and least defined word in the lexicon of the U.S. national security community. The closest Rozman comes to clarifying what he means by the term “strategic thought” appears well into the volume when he says he is referring to “ideas...[about the] means to realize ends” (p. 68). What Rozman seems to mean by the term is what is widely known as “grand strategy” (pp. 2, 3). In essence, the book is a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of big-picture thinking about Asia in post-Mao China. There is probably no scholar better equipped to tackle this topic. Rozman has written extensively on Chinese analyses of the countries on China’s periphery and those states’ analyses of China. The result is a tour de force treatment organized chronologically and geographically with a stand-alone overview introductory chapter. The first part consists of four chapters that divide Chinese thinking into four periods. Chapter 2 examines the decade of the 1980s, chapters 3 and 4 survey the 1990s, and chapter 5 explores the 2000s. The latter part of the book examines Chinese thinking toward Asian countries or subregions. There are separate chapters on Japan and Korea, Russia shares

NennuandShunu: Gender, Body Politics, and the Beauty Economy in China

This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

BEYOND REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE—CHRISTIAN LOVE AND CHINA'S HARMONIOUS SOCIETY

Previous articleNext article No AccessBEYOND REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE—CHRISTIAN LOVE AND CHINA'S HARMONIOUS SOCIETYGerda WielanderGerda Wielander Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 65January 2011 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/tcj.65.25790560 Views: 74Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref © The China JournalPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Milena Marchesi ‘I volunteer at home too!’ Gendering affective citizenship, Critique of Anthropology 41, no.11 (Jan 2021): 21–42.https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20974093Ting Guo Politics of love: Love as a religious and political discourse in modern China through the lens of political leaders, Critical Research on Religion 8, no.11 (Sep 2019): 39–52.https://doi.org/10.1177/2050303219874366Francis Khek Gee Lim Religion and development ethics in global perspective: a case study of a foreign Christian NGO in China, Journal of Contemporary Religion 35, no.11 (Jan 2020): 13–30.https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.1695793Yi’En Cheng, Jane Margaret Jacobs Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: citizenship and social actions at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Space and Polity 24, no.11 (Sep 2019): 12–29.https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2019.1670053Zhenzhou Zhao Religion and the cultivation of citizenship in Chinese higher education, Higher Education 74, no.44 (Oct 2016): 635–649.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0069-xKeping Wu The Philanthropic Turn of Religions in Post-Mao China: Bureaucratization, Professionalization, and the Making of a Moral Subject, Modern China 43, no.44 (Nov 2016): 425–455.https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700416675310Lisa M. Hoffman, Hope Reidun St. John “Doing Good”: Affect, Neoliberalism, and Responsibilization Among Volunteers in China and the United States, (Apr 2017): 243–262.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58204-1_12Karrie J. Koesel The Political Economy of Religious Revival, Politics and Religion 8, no.22 (May 2015): 211–235.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048315000231Ke-hsien Huang Dyadic Nexus Fighting Two-Front Battles: A Study of the Microlevel Process of the Official-Religion-State Relationship in China, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53, no.44 (Dec 2014): 706–721.https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12149Sean Upton-McLaughlin The many faces of suzhi in the Chinese organization and society, Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management 5, no.11 (May 2014): 51–61.https://doi.org/10.1108/JCHRM-01-2014-0004Nanlai Cao Elite Christianity and Spiritual Nationalism, Chinese Sociological Review 45, no.22 (May 2013): 27–47.https://doi.org/10.2753/CSA2162-0555450202

A Class Analysis of Benefits Distribution in a Chinese High-Technology Development Zone

Most studies of income determination in post-Mao China reduce nonwage forms of compensation (benefits) to their monetary equivalent and are only concerned with their contribution to total incomes. I suggest instead that the nature, function and combination of benefits are as important as their monetary value. Building upon Wright's neo-Marxist class analysis, I argue that benefits should be conceptualized as mechanisms of social control over labour. Since mechanisms of social control are not homogeneous across class locations, the processes governing the distribution of different forms of benefits can be expected to vary according to the class location of individuals. In this study, the neo-Marxist class model proposed by Wright in 'Class Counts' (1997) was used to allocate employees to a class location according to their degrees of authority and expertise. A series of probit models was then estimated to investigate how class location and individual-level attributes affected the distribution of different categories of benefits. The results of the study were largely consistent with Wright's predictions. In particular, benefits related to long-term career prospects and to temporal class trajectories were strongly associated with middle class locations -- locations defined, in Wright's terminology, as 'contradictory locations within capitalist class relations.' The paper includes an Appendix on the operationalization of class variables.

The Promotion of Tea in South China: Re-Inventing Tradition in an Old Industry

This article describes the promotion and consumption of tea in South China, particulaly in Quanzhou, Fujian. Contrary to popular knowledge of tea drinking as an ancient Chinese tradition, tea drinking in Quanzhou today is actually a re-invented tradition. The article shows that the popularity of tea drinking in Quanzhou today came about as a result of promotion by various agents involving tea farmers, tea merchants, and the government in post-Mao China. In addition, Taiwanese tea industry and businesspeople also play important roles in the production and modernization of Anxi tea. The re-invented tradition of tea consumption provides a new way of consuming tea and conducting social relations. The culture of tea consumption in Quanzhou today is shaped by both the forces of post-reform economic development and changing perception of social status and modernity.

Pierre-François Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era

China, or Zhongguo (literally “central state”), is seen by many as naturally or traditionally centralized under authoritarian rule. Yet China recently has enjoyed a brisk boom of prosperity that local entrepreneurs have brought by eroding a formerly centralized, now competitive market. How has the Communist Party maintained political control, as the economy has burgeoned and diversified? Pierre Landry answers this question by analyzing the efficiency of appointment and promotion systems. Presuming that the main motive of any official is to retain his/her current position (or, better, to move up the government ladder), an efficient system allocates appointment powers to a level that can effectively monitor and sanction cadres. Deductive theory suggests that if administrative appointing agents are located too far above a post to be filled, they will lack enough information about potential candidates. But if the appointing officials are too close in level to the vacant post, a talented appointee could later challenge their own authority. Post-Mao China offered a natural experiment to put empirical flesh on the bones of this theory: In the early 1980s, the Party’s Central Organization Department mandated a “two levels down” (xia liangji) rule: Any appointment to an important post was approved by a Party group not at the next-higher level, but two levels up. This procedure did not work well. So since 1984, the norm has been changed: the Party makes appointments just one level down. This applies to all leadership posts—in the state bureaucracy, businesses, congregations, universities, the media, and the Party itself. Specifically, the Party’s Organization Department in Beijing appoints provincelevel leaders (governors, Party secretaries, provincial Party standing committees, chairs of provincial people’s consultative conferences, chief justices and procurators, J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2010) 15:337–338 DOI 10.1007/s11366-010-9105-3

Economic Freedom and Political Control in Post-Mao China: A Perspective of Upward Accountability and Asymmetric Decentralization

With post-Mao China as a case study, this article aims to examine the political economy of asymmetric decentralization in relation to development at the national, regional (inter-local) and local levels. Economically, sub-national governments have been granted greater autonomy with huge decentralized fiscal and administrative powers and competencies. Politically, however, China is still a state under Communist Party domination. Local officials are not elected locally but are assigned by the party. This phenomenon of ‘economic decentralization to the local’ along with ‘political centralization under the party’ is described as ‘asymmetric decentralization’. The mechanism behind asymmetric decentralization is upward accountability—the greater the economic growth, the better chances there are for local leaders to receive political promotions, administrative power and many tangible and intangible perks. The article further discusses six Janus-faced consequences of asymmetric decentralization, which can be grouped into three pairs of administrative levels: (1) at the national level—positive for relative national economic stability but negative for uneven development across the country; (2) at the regional (inter-local) level—bad for inter-local fragmentation but good for cross-regional cadre transfer; and (3) at the local level—where local policy innovation is a strength but local unsustainable development is a weakness. These consequences, which look contradictory or incompatible on the surface, can be better understood through the analytic framework of ‘asymmetric decentralization with upward accountability’.

Between Business and Bureaucrats: Pingtan Storytelling in Maoist and Post-Maoist China

This article examines the complex relationship of the state, market, and artists in pingtan storytelling in post-1949 China. By focusing on Su Yuyin, a pingtan storyteller, and his performing career, this article explores the persistence of cultural markets after the Communist victory in 1949 and argues that the market continued to play a significant role in shaping China’s popular culture, which the government was keen on patronizing and politicizing. By comparing the regime’s management of pingtan storytelling before and after the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976), this article further argues that the regime’s censorship of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was handicapped by its lack of financial resources and the continued existence of cultural markets. The result was that censorship was not as strictly and efficiently enforced as has been assumed.