Cooperation in Chinese Communities: Morality and Practice 9781350077195, 9781350077188, 9781350077201, 9781350077218

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Contributor Biographies
Preface: The Morality of Chinese Cooperation
Chapter One Kin and non-kin cooperation in China
Chapter Two Playing ball: Cooperation and competition in two Chinese primary schools
Chapter Three The role of xiao in moral reputation management and cooperation in urban China and Taiwan
Chapter Four Harmony ideology in Chinese families: Cooperating despite unfairness
Chapter Five Cooperation in funerals in a patrilineal village in Jinmen (Taiwan)
Chapter Six Memory leaks: Local histories of cooperation as a solution to water-related cooperation problems
Chapter Seven Care as bureaucratic lubricant: The role of female care workers in an old people’s home in rural China
Chapter Eight Reputation, morality and power in an emigrant community (qiaoxiang) in Guangdong Province
Chapter Nine Jiaoqing ethics and the sustainability of non-kin cooperation
Chapter Ten Power, gender and ‘network-based cooperation’: A study of migrant workers in Shenzhen
Chapter Eleven Challenges to ethnic cooperation among Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland
Chapter Twelve Problems in the new cooperative movement: A window onto changing cooperation mechanisms
Chapter Thirteen Cooperation, competition and care: Notes from China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System
References
Index

Citation preview

Cooperation in Chinese Communities

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LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS MONOGRAPHS ON SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Managing Editor: Laura Bear

The Monographs on Social Anthropology were established in 1940 and aim to publish results of modern anthropological research of primary interest to specialists. The continuation of the series was made possible by a grant in aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and more recently by a further grant from the Governors of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Income from sales is returned to a revolving fund to assist further publications. The Monographs are under the direction of an Editorial Board associated with the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Cooperation in Chinese Communities Morality and Practice Edited By

CHARLES STAFFORD, ELLEN R. JUDD AND EONA BELL LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS MONOGRAPHS ON SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 84

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd, Eona Bell and Contributors, 2019 Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd and Eona Bell have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Radius Images / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7719-5 PB: 978-1-3500-7718-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7720-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-7721-8 Series: LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Contributor biographies  vii Preface: The morality of Chinese cooperation Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd and Eona Bell  x

1 Kin and non-kin cooperation in China  Charles Stafford  1 2 Playing ball: Cooperation and competition in two Chinese primary schools  Anni Kajanus 

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3 The role of xiao in moral reputation management and cooperation in urban China and Taiwan  Désirée Remmert  41 4 Harmony ideology in Chinese families: Cooperating despite unfairness  Magdalena Wong  63 5 Cooperation in funerals in a patrilineal village in Jinmen (Taiwan)  Hsiao-Chiao Chiu  81 6 Memory leaks: Local histories of cooperation as a solution to water-related cooperation problems  Andrea E. Pia  101 7 Care as bureaucratic lubricant: The role of female care workers in an old people’s home in rural China  Cecilia Liu  121

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8 Reputation, morality and power in an emigrant community (qiaoxiang) in Guangdong Province  Meixuan Chen  137 9 Jiaoqing ethics and the sustainability of non-kin cooperation  Di Wu  153 10 Power, gender and ‘network-based cooperation’: A study of migrant workers in Shenzhen  I-Chieh Fang  169 11 Challenges to ethnic cooperation among Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland  Eona Bell 

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12 Problems in the new cooperative movement: A window onto changing cooperation mechanisms  Mark Stanford  211 13 Cooperation, competition and care: Notes from China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System  Ellen R. Judd  231 Notes  257 References  263 Index  283

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Eona Bell is an Affiliated Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and Research Officer at the London School of Economics. She has carried out fieldwork in Chinese communities in the UK and is now doing archival research on overseas Chinese temples in Singapore. Meixuan Chen is Newton Fund Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She is the co-author of a recent publication on rural welfare in China and Vietnam. Hsiao-Chiao Chiu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on the ERC-funded project ‘A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage’. For this project she is conducting research in Jinmen and southeast China on changes to marriage in the contrasting regimes of Taiwan and China. I-Chieh Fang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She has recently been conducting research on how migrants learn through practice under the context of both urbanization and counter-urbanization. Ellen R. Judd is Distinguished Professor and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of Gender and Power in Rural North China and is currently completing a project on inclusion/exclusion, cooperation and mutuality in rural and migrant south China. Anni Kajanus has been Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at London School of Economics and is taking up an Assistant Professorship in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki.

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She is the author of Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family. Her recent research, which explores human cooperation, competition and conflict, brings together methods and approaches from anthropology and developmental psychology. Cecilia Liu has been Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is the author of articles in English and Chinese on post-socialist welfare, gender and other topics. In addition to lecturing in anthropology at Chinese universities, she is preparing for a new project that will explore urban life through a comparative perspective. Andrea E. Pia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His first book manuscript, The People’s Lifeline:  Moving Water and the Political in Southwest China, examines questions of human cooperation through the lenses of China’s ongoing water crisis. Désirée Remmert has been Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Teubingen and is now Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. She has conducted fieldwork in urban China and Taiwan and recently worked on a project examining intergenerational differences in decision-making and notions of fate in Taipei. Charles Stafford is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the editor of Ordinary Ethics in China, and the author of Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics (forthcoming). Mark Stanford is Postdoctoral Researcher in cognitive anthropology and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He has carried out research on morality and cooperation in China and Myanmar, and is currently involved in a multinational project on religion and moral psychology. Magdalena Wong is Honorary Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese, Hong Kong University, and Part-Time Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She obtained her PhD in anthropology at LSE in 2017 and is doing further research on questions related to gender. Di Wu is Senior Research Associate at Sun Yat-Sen University, China and Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London.

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He carried out his doctoral research in Zambia looking at issues of cross-cultural communication, moral interaction and community building. Recently, he has been conducting fieldwork along the China-North Korean border.

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PREFACE: THE MORALITY OF CHINESE COOPERATION Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd and Eona Bell

This book focuses on the challenges faced by ordinary Chinese people when they try to cooperate with others, for example, when it comes to conducting rituals, caring for the elderly, running community schools, allocating shared resources such as water and so on. But cooperation is an extremely general term and one that covers a great deal of ground – what exactly does it mean? In English, when we say that two or more people are cooperating we usually just mean they are engaged in a joint activity of some kind with a common purpose: moving a table together, building a house together and so forth. A similar term in Chinese is hezuo, literally ‘doing [something] together’. For example, one might say:  ‘The people in that village cooperate [hezuo] by sharing out childcare duties between households.’ Notably, in the real-world contexts studied by anthropologists, activity of this kind very often has a strong element of reciprocity built into it:  ‘This week you’re watching our children but it’s understood that next week, or the week after, it will be our turn.’ Indeed, anthropologists typically describe and theorize cooperation

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in terms of reciprocity rather than in terms of cooperation per se. Following Marcel Mauss, they seek to understand what compels people to engage in reciprocal social activities such as backand-forth exchanges of gifts, favours, mutual support, marriage partners and so forth. Further to this, the moral obligations that underpin reciprocity in human societies have long been a focus of anthropological study. This is not because anthropologists believe that the morality of reciprocity is universal  – the same everywhere  – but rather because it manifests itself so differently, and so interestingly, across human societies and over time (for the particular case of China, see Yan 1996). Meanwhile, scholars from a wide range of other disciplines  – including evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, institutional economics and many others  – have also investigated the moral bases of human cooperation. Of course, these scholars know well that a high proportion of cooperation is reciprocal in kind. They also know well that actual practices and institutions of cooperation vary both in time and space, sometimes dramatically. Nevertheless, a good deal of the non-anthropological research on cooperation aims to uncover its universal bedrock, history and culture notwithstanding. For example, psychologists have asked whether we have evolved psychological dispositions that support cooperation, such as an intuitive preference for treating others fairly. Further to this, one can ask if the problems that we have when cooperating with each other (e.g. encountering people who do not treat us fairly) take a common form everywhere, that is, in spite of the obvious cultural–historical variation in how cooperation is understood and institutionally organized. It is worth noting that much of the non-anthropological work on cooperation starts from a conception of cooperation that is very different from the anthropological one. In many approaches to the topic, to behave cooperatively is to incur a ‘cost’ in terms of time, effort or money, in order to ‘benefit’ someone else. The basic question is why anybody should bother to do this. As the example of shared childcare duties suggests, some forms of cooperation are clearly reciprocal:  all sides should benefit in due course, at least in theory. The logic of this is not mysterious. What is more mysterious is the existence of cooperation where there is no obvious payback for it. In the Dictator Game task run by experimental economists, for example, most participants give resources to strangers in spite of the fact

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that there is no requirement whatsoever for them to do so. Many scholars believe that findings of this kind tell us something deep and general about our species. Stepping back, then, one can say that the bulk of anthropological studies of cooperation have been studies of reciprocity, and that the main focus has been on variation in reciprocity and in the morality that underpins it across societies and over time. For anthropologists, what has been and continues to be especially interesting is the creation and maintenance of long-term reciprocity within and between communities. In the interdisciplinary literature on cooperation, by contrast, there is much less of a focus on cultural and historical variation and more of a search for basic commonalities, even universals. There has also been less interest in long-term reciprocal cooperation, which is arguably nonmysterious, and more in the morality of non-reciprocal cooperation, such as that between strangers. In our view, however, these contrasting scholarly perspectives on cooperation provide a fertile ground for converging explorations of this crucial phenomenon – which, one might add, is being renewed and transformed in the modern era even amidst the uncertainties of social life as we experience it today and the concurrent thriving of inequality. More specifically, we would suggest that:  (a) finegrained anthropological accounts of real-world cooperation, such as those found in the chapters of this book, can make an important contribution to recent interdisciplinary debates, and (b) anthropologists themselves can enrich their own approaches to cooperation by engaging (however critically) with ideas, theories and findings now emerging from other disciplines. Thus it is, for example, that our contributors draw on theories and findings from developmental psychologists about cooperation in infancy and early childhood (Chapter Two), from institutional economics and political science about the management of common-pool resources (Chapter Six), and from evolutionary cognitive science about cooperation problems in general (Chapter Twelve). Our studies are located in specific geographic and historical contexts – in China, Taiwan, the UK and Zambia – and our primary focus is on the specific social and cultural factors that shape how local people cooperate, with whom and in what circumstances. For example, a number of our chapters illustrate that there can be significant differences in the cooperative behaviours of men and

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women (see the chapters by Fang, Chiu, Wong, Remmert). Scholars in other fields might relate these patterns back to identifiable and universal gender differences in communication and patterns of social relations – or, perhaps more commonly, just leave the question of gender aside. As anthropologists, we are able to contextualize these examples of gendered behaviour in relation to gender asymmetry and hierarchy arising from culturally specific gender roles and norms within the particular contexts we study. In considering ‘Chinese cooperation’ as a broad topic, there are two factors that should be noted at the outset. First, to state the obvious, the People’s Republic of China has a very special history when it comes to cooperation, including the socialist experience of radical collectivization under the Chinese Communist Party and the long unravelling of this in the reform era (a trajectory that has also had many implications for Taiwan and for Chinese diasporic communities living elsewhere). Another way of putting this is to say that the institutions of Chinese cooperation – ranging from communes to informal personalistic networks to large corporations – have varied in history and continue to do so today. This is one of the core themes of this volume. The second factor is that China is a kinship-oriented, one might even say ‘familistic’, society in the sense that ideas, practices and values linked to family life tend to permeate other domains – including cooperation as it is experienced outside of kinship settings. So, for example, even when we talk about cooperation in what are notionally non-kin environments, such as schools and workplaces, it turns out that family often matters greatly there too. This is another core focus of this volume. In Chapter One, Charles Stafford will explore this second theme, specifically asking how kin and non-kin cooperation are articulated in Chinese communities, drawing not only on his own research in rural Taiwan, but also on other chapters in the volume. In Chapter Thirteen, Ellen R. Judd will explore the first theme, drawing on the other chapters and on her own research in rural and translocal China, which examines how healthcare provision is changing because of broader institutional (political, economic and moral) shifts. Between these chapters, we present eleven case studies of cooperation in Chinese communities. These range widely across topics and geographic locations. Anni Kajanus (in Chapter Two) explores how young children learn to cooperate  – and

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compete – through her account of a ball game that she introduced during fieldwork in two Nanjing primary schools. Developing the notion that kin cooperation affects social relations beyond the parent-child dyad, Désirée Remmert (Chapter Three) shows that the cooperative practices of filial piety in Taiwan and China have ramifications for a man’s reputation outside of his family. Magdalena Wong (Chapter Four) asks whether it is the principle of fairness or rather a desire for harmony that motivates family-based cooperation in Sichuan, while Hsiao-Chiao Chiu (Chapter Five) describes some of the challenges faced in ensuring the cooperative behaviour of everyone (kin and non-kin) who takes part in a ‘successful’ Taiwanese funeral. Andrea Pia (Chapter Six) considers the problems that arise when villagers in Yunnan try to manage a shared resource, water, while Cecilia Liu (Chapter Seven) points out the difficulty of ensuring cooperation between carers and residents in a state-run home for the elderly – especially when the individuals there resist the social roles in which they have been cast (in part by the state). Meixuan Chen (Chapter Eight) picks up the topic of reputation, a central concern for overseas Chinese migrants who engage in cooperative projects back in their home villages. Di Wu’s (Chapter Nine) explores the ethics of kin and non-kin cooperation in everyday interactions within the Chinese migrant community in Zambia, while I-Chieh Fang (Chapter Ten) asks how rural–urban migrant workers in a Chinese factory decide which strangers they can trust, and thus cooperate with – something that turns out to be heavily gendered. Eona Bell (Chapter Eleven) addresses the difficulties that arise when Chinese people in Scotland (some of them from very different backgrounds) work together to run a community school. In the penultimate chapter, Mark Stanford (Chapter Twelve) looks at reform-era China’s floundering cooperative movement, placing the Chinese case within an international history of institutional cooperation. In recent decades China has moved from a marginal and even esoteric place in anthropological thought to being recognized as deeply entangled with the dynamics that are shaping life everywhere in the twenty-first century. This is ethnographically evident, both inside and outside of China, in processes of social transformation and mobility that affect kin-based and wider social ties as people remake these in their everyday practices of cooperation. The

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deterritorialization of kinship has posed especially interesting practical problems as families are dispersed and people find creative ways to build translocal and non-kin (but often kin-like) ties that engender new forms of relatedness and cooperation. An important corollary of this has been a moral commentary about kin and also about wider ties of local, national and dispersed community that is both culturally specific and inseparable from international questioning. The result is a provocative set of variations on the central human problem of striving to live in a world together.

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CHAPTER ONE

Kin and non-kin cooperation in China Charles Stafford

The fact that people in China (and elsewhere) cooperate in various senses with close kin  – for example, that Chinese parents make sacrifices for their children with an eye on the future  – is not surprising. From an evolutionary point of view, it could be said to make good sense. What is more surprising, one could say, is the fact that people in China (and elsewhere) cooperate so readily with nonkin and even with total strangers. To be clear, both of these facts – that is, the fact of cooperation with kin and the fact of cooperation with non-kin – are scientifically important and have been heavily studied and theorized, most famously in Hamilton’s Rule and subsequent contributions to kin selection theory (Hamilton 1964a, 1964b; Birch and Okasha 2015). There has also been a great deal of back and forth about what ‘cooperation’ actually consists of and how it might have evolved in humans and other species (West, Griffin and Gardner 2007; Amici 2015). But it has primarily been the second – if you like, more surprising – fact of cooperation with non-kin that has generated a huge amount of empirical and theoretical work across a wide range of disciplines in recent decades. To give an example: experimental economists, inspired by game theoretic approaches, have investigated how individuals will behave

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when asked to divide money with a partner under a given set of rules (for a critical overview of this field, see Guala 2005). One broad finding is that humans are surprisingly ‘cooperative’ on average, in the sense that they will give resources to others even when the rules of a particular game allow them to be as selfish as they like. Notably, however, virtually all such research is about cooperation between non-kin; in fact, it is primarily about cooperation between strangers who do not even meet in person for the sake of the experimental task. To give another, very different, example:  developmental psychologists, by means of an ingenious set of studies, have shown that human infants and children are readily disposed to cooperate with others (for a general introduction to such studies, see Tomasello 2009). More specifically, they have better skills and dispositions for cooperation, for example, when it comes to intention-reading, than do our close primate relatives. But, again, the bulk of such research examines cooperation between non-kin. For instance, psychologists have studied whether infants/children are disposed to ‘cooperatively’ share information with strangers by pointing things out to them in a helpful way (it seems that they are). Meanwhile, studies that focus on cooperation between infants/children who are actually related to one another, for example, between siblings or cousins, remain rare.1 Why kinship has not been more central to recent work on human cooperation by experimental economists, developmental psychologists and others  – notwithstanding its centrality to evolutionary theories of cooperation  – is a complex question of intellectual history that is beyond the scope of this chapter. From the point of view of a social anthropologist, however, this seems an odd state of affairs for at least five reasons: 1 In the real world, a high proportion of human cooperation takes place between kin. 2 In the real world, the distinction between kin and non-kin is often very porous. 3 In the real world, the distinction between kin and non-kin cooperation is also often porous, and this has significant consequences for many (arguably all) forms of ‘non-kin’ cooperation. 4 In the real world, family life impinges heavily on the development of children’s knowledge, skills and dispositions

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for cooperation, for example, when they learn how to cooperate through interactions with siblings and then extend this to interactions with non-kin. 5 In the real world, cooperation with kin entails many, if not most, of the challenges faced in non-kin cooperation, which suggests the two things ought to be studied together. Before going any further, let me pause briefly to illustrate these five points ethnographically. My first period of long-term fieldwork was conducted in the Taiwanese fishing community of Angang in the mid-to-late 1980s (Stafford 1995, 2000b). The people I  met there were quick to identify Angang as a relatively ‘traditional’ place. Certainly, local religious life proceeded along broadly traditional lines and was notably intense. Much of this centred around a large number of spirit mediums who communicated with gods on behalf of their local clients virtually every day of the week at domestic altars, communal temples and even on the village streets. This was also a place where kinship concerns were salient and absorbed a great deal of time and mental energy. Angang was not a classic single surname community of the kind to be found elsewhere in rural Taiwan and China, and there were no obvious signs of patrilineal organization such as lineage halls and ancestral temples. Still, there were identifiable surname clusters in the villages and there had also been a high (although declining) rate of local marriages over the years. As a result, the majority of people lived surrounded by many agnatic and affinal relatives. They sometimes told me that ‘everybody [here] is one family’ (dou yijia ren), although this was not strictly true (as I will discuss later). Against this background, a number of general observations can be made about cooperation in Angang, ones that are consistent with the points already outlined earlier. As would be expected, there was a great deal of cooperation within households, including between spouses or between parents and their children. But there was also a great deal of cooperation between households that shared a kin connection of some kind. For example, adult siblings who lived in the same neighbourhood, or in adjacent villages, sometimes engaged in cooperative activities such as tending vegetable plots together or co-funding religious rituals to be held at their respective domestic altars. There existed some degree of coordination at the higher level

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of surname groups/clusters. I  was told, for instance, that when it came to local elections people tended to vote along surname lines. So one can say not only that kinship is pervasive in Angang but also that kin-based cooperation is pervasive (as per point 1, see also the findings in Henrich and Henrich 2007). Admittedly, this may sound like a statement of the obvious and the inevitable. With so many relatives in the same vicinity, the odds of cooperating with at least some of them presumably goes up. Who else is there? Beyond this, however, it is important to add that in Angang the boundary between kin and non-kin is very porous (as per point 2). Because there are many relatives around, and especially because there has been a high rate of local marriage, people often say that they are related to somebody else in Angang  – and then find it hard to actually specify the connection. There is a quick fading out, in other words, from absolute claims of kinship (‘he is my brother’), to more complex but still firm claims of kinship (‘let me think, she is the daughter of my mother’s brother’), to claims of kinship that have little substance and, in many cases, little real-world significance (‘he is a Chen, like me, but I don’t know what the connection is, and I don’t have that much to do with him’). Affinal connections fade out in the same way. For example, because some Chens have married some Lis, a local Chen may feel that he is related, in a vague sense, to all the local Lis  – but then not be able to say, in particular cases, what this relationship really consists of. Then there is a deeper point about the porousness of the kin/nonkin boundary in Angang. In terms of traditional Chinese ideologies, one’s basic kinship identity is strictly determined by patrilineal descent and the facts of birth and marriage. You either are or are not kin. The reality, however, is that the lived system of Chinese kinship and relatedness is much more ‘fluid’ and ‘processual’ in practice than these ideologies suggest (Stafford 2000a). On the one hand, kin who fail to live up to their moral and practical obligations, such as providing ‘nurturance’ (yang) to the elders, may become non-kin – or at least be treated as such for practical purposes. On the other hand, people who are non-kin may become kin  – or at least be treated as such for practical purposes – by virtue of giving or receiving nurturance within cycles of reciprocity, for example, to children they have fostered. Moreover, these processes through which non-kin become kin are largely coterminous with the processes (such as providing care and sharing food) through which

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non-kin, including complete strangers, are transformed over time into friends and even quasi-relatives  – while never quite actually becoming kin, as in the case of ‘sworn brothers’. To put it simply, then: if people in Angang claim that they are one family, it is not only because the majority of them are (more or less) related, but also because many unrelated people in the community end up being treated as if they were. Given the pervasiveness of kinship in Angang, and the porousness of kin identity, it is not surprising that kinship becomes a factor in virtually ‘everything’  – including what appear, on the surface, to be examples of non-kin cooperation (as per point 3). Take, for example, the local branch of the Fisherman’s Association, which is explicitly set up as a cooperative to promote the welfare and interests of its members. This association has nothing to do in formal terms with kinship. The reality, however, is that a fisherman from Angang who attended a meeting of this cooperative in the 1980s would likely have been surrounded by his relatives (close and distant), not to mention a number of kin-like friends. If the association did something to promote the interests of its members this would also, as a matter of definition, be something that benefited his close kin and his distant kin, as well as his kin-like friends. Moreover, considerations of kinship might affect how he votes for officers in the association, just as they might affect how he votes in local elections for government officials such as the township head. Needless to say, if kinship permeates local life to the extent that it does in Angang, it is going to have some impact, and possibly a major impact, on local organizations such as the Fisherman’s Association. Again, this just seems inevitable. But I  want to give two further, more extended, illustrations of this point in order to show that the ramifications of it can be non-obvious and anthropologically interesting. The first has to do with schooling. School life in Angang, as elsewhere, involves a lot of cooperative activities: children play sports together, carry out projects together, go on outings together, and so on. Such activities are normally very structured and have a range of more or less explicit pedagogical aims in mind. As in most parts of the modern world, schools in Taiwan are organized nationally, and education in general is considered a major priority  – something of political significance. More specifically, at the time of my fieldwork, Taiwan was governed by

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the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese nationalists), and schools were a central part of the long-term KMT agenda for turning China into a strong, modern nation. As I have explained elsewhere, one anxiety of the nationalists was the priority that most ordinary people gave to family loyalties – something that was viewed as a direct threat to nationalism and thus to the rise of a properly modern China (Stafford 1992, 1995). In an important sense, then, walking into (nationalist) schools was meant to be about leaving one’s family behind and learning to cooperate with children from other families as fellow students and, ultimately, as fellow citizens – that is, to put the nation above kinship. In a place like Angang, however, students entering the school grounds will inevitably start bumping into a number of their (close and distant) kin. Kin considerations thus routinely factor in school-based cooperation, for example, on the sports ground, much as they factor in the Fishermen’s Association, in local elections, and so on. Moreover, although some of the adults working in the schools – middle school teachers in particular – are recruited from outside, a good number of them are from Angang, and thus are also the students’ relatives. Then there is the question of what happens outside of school hours and beyond the school gates. During my fieldwork, I came to know well the children in one ‘homework group’ comprised of several sisters, their one brother, and – from time to time – other children from the neighbourhood (these were usually relatives, too, in line with the kin-based clustering of residence). In the evenings, these children would sit in an upstairs room of their home and – between outbreaks of hilarity – help each other with their studies. This is a simple illustration of how a cooperative activity involving kin, doing homework together, may have consequences for life inside the (notionally non-kin-oriented) school, that is, given that the main function of this group was to enhance the children’s grasp of school-based knowledge. Of course, this might be felt to be a rather low-grade type of cooperation: the stakes were not especially high. And yet this was, as I witnessed, a complex activity in terms of its social/psychological/linguistic content and consequences. It gave these young children not only some help with their schoolwork but also repeated opportunities (as per point 4) to learn something about cooperation in general, such as the fact that outbreaks of hilarity sometimes make group activity not only more fun but also

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more productive, an insight they might later transfer to cooperation with non-kin. Importantly, children’s outside-of-school life is typically observed by, and to some extent policed by, relatives. This particular children’s group was discretely supervised by the mother of the household and other neighbouring adults (normally kin) who occasionally stopped by for a quick look. Moreover, observant adults of this kind, in Angang, really do want their children to perform well in school. This relates to a broader point, which again is an obvious one for anthropologists: that cultural values and ideals prevailing outside of the school grounds, and to some extent policed by local adults, are bound to impinge on the process of school-based learning. As I have already explained above, entering KMT schools was – in theory – about leaving one’s family behind and not being motivated by family concerns but rather those of the nation. In practice, however, local adults in Angang saw schools as the sites par excellence where children could fulfil their kinship duties (Stafford 1992, 1995). By performing well academically, that is, they could (eventually) play their part in the cooperative family activity of achieving success and upward mobility – or, more modestly, at least discharge the basic filial duty of securing a job so as to support their parents in old age. This brings me to the second illustration, which relates to economic life. Many of the shops in Angang were cooperative Chinese family enterprises of a classic kind. In one case I knew well, a woman and her energetic daughters ran a small (and very successful) food and provisions shop. This was essentially a convenience store in which local people bought goods such as beer, cigarettes, betel nuts, snack foods, newspapers and also everyday religious items such as incense and spirit money. From the mother’s point of view, running the shop with her daughters was not simply an economic activity – all kinds of family considerations came into it as well, as one might expect. Similarly, the effort her daughters put into this business, and all the forms of cooperation it entailed (for example, coordinating their separate plans for schooling and outside work so that someone was always in residence in Angang to help their mother), were not seen by them as work in the normal sense. It was their contribution to the family, to their mother’s well-being and happiness and to their own futures. This business was essentially a kinship thing.

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But what about the customers? People from the surrounding neighbourhood visited the shop often, some of them multiple times in a single day, and it was unsurprisingly treated as a de facto social centre. Many locals also seemed deeply fond of the shopkeeper and her daughters: they were treated with great warmth and familiarity by customers and vice versa. Indeed, people from the neighbourhood often helped out with restocking shelves, rolling betel nets, making deliveries and other tasks. Beyond this, the women’s shop was, predictably, a place in which any given customer was likely to bump into his or her own relatives, as happened to fishermen when they walked into the Fishermen’s Association or to students when they walked into the local middle school. Thus one could say that kinship insinuated itself into this economic space – a local shop – both from the point of view of the owners (it was a family business) and from the point of view of the customers (it was located in a kin-permeated neighbourhood and was treated by many as this neighbourhood’s de facto community store). Crucially, however, the woman and her daughters were not related to their customers. They were basically kin-like friends. And in spite of the points I have made about the porousness of the kin/ non-kin boundary, these women remained non-kin. The mother was from elsewhere in Taiwan and had married a man who was also a migrant from outside. He was no longer normally resident in Angang, but together they had set up a business in this new place some years before. Their outsider status was thus clearly marked. You might well ask why local people did not just set up their own shop instead, that is, one in which kin could sell to kin, thus avoiding the potential pitfalls of doing business with strangers/outsiders. Various factors may have contributed to this, but when I asked it was explained to me that a person from Angang who opened a shop of this kind would soon find herself giving everything away  – to kin – whereas for an outsider it was a little easier to make money and stay in business. The other shop that I came to know well was run on a similar basis: it was a family enterprise owned by outsiders who had become long-term residents. This example, in addition to illustrating how kinship permeates ‘non-kin’ cooperation (as with the Fisherman’s Association, local elections and the local schools), thus illustrates a different kind of point. Of course it is true that economic interactions with nonkin – including strangers – carry the risk of being taken advantage

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of, but exactly the same can be said of economic interactions with kin. In other words, it’s not as if dealing with kin is intrinsically easy whereas dealing with non-kin is intrinsically difficult – in this particular case, the opposite was said to be true (see also Stafford 2006). This illustrates the broader point that kin-based cooperation can be difficult in ways that overlap significantly with the difficulties encountered in non-kin cooperation (as per point 5)  – although, I would stress, this is not to say that they are the same.2 I do not think what I  have touched on thus far in this ­chapter  – concerning the important role played by kinship in human cooperation  – should be very controversial, at least not for social anthropologists. I  can well imagine, however, that some readers might think Angang is an odd case study to depend on if the goal here is to make general statements about kin and nonkin cooperation in modern China and/or Taiwan, not to mention elsewhere in the world. As I have explained, Angang is a markedly ‘traditional’ place – at least in the view of its residents – in which the locals sometimes claim to be related to everybody around them, even if in truth they are not. Thanks to a converging set of social and historical processes, a strikingly kin-oriented place of this kind might be said to be increasingly anomalous in the modern Chinese/Taiwanese world. These processes include mass rural to urban migration, the impact of globalization, the apparent rise of individualism and consumerism and the decline of traditional ideologies and practices. In fact, however, the points highlighted in this chapter about kin and non-kin cooperation are amply illustrated both by previous anthropological research in China and Taiwan and by the other case studies in this book, that is, in spite of the fact that the fieldwork settings on which they are based are often very different from – in some cases, radically different from – Angang. (Note that in some of the comments below I  am drawing on my knowledge of the wider projects of the contributors to this book, as opposed to what they specifically discuss in their individual chapters.) For example, the fact that a high proportion of cooperation takes place between kin (point 1) is seen not only in Hsiao-Chiao Chiu’s case study of kin and non-kin ritual cooperation in Jinmen, Taiwan  – a place that in some respects is very like Angang  – but equally in Désirée Remmert’s comparative project based on fieldwork in

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contemporary Beijing and Taipei. For the young urbanites that Remmert studied, intergenerational cooperation between parents and children based around traditional Confucian ideals of filial obedience (xiao) remains profoundly important – not least because one’s performance as a good son or daughter may have enduring consequences for one’s reputation in wider society. (Interestingly, to be overzealous in caring for one’s parents may be seen by others, including prospective marriage partners and their families, as a bad thing.) My point here is not that kin-based cooperation in Beijing and Taipei is the same as kin-based cooperation in places like Angang and Jinmen: it definitely is not. Indeed, a crucial finding for Remmert is that kin-based cooperation differs significantly between her two urban fieldwork sites – in spite of their shared ‘Chineseness’ and their shared modernity. Among other things, the young people she studied in Beijing often live much further away from their parents than do young people in Taipei, something that strongly shapes the actual practice of parent-child cooperation across the lifecycle. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of kin-based cooperation – however problematic and difficult it may be in practice – is there to be seen in all the life stories collected by Remmert, just as it would be in the (arguably much more traditional-sounding) life stories one could collect in Angang and Jinmen.3 Meanwhile, the fact that the kin and non-kin boundary is porous in various senses (point 2) has been illustrated in many previous anthropological studies of pre- and post-reform China4 and is also amply illustrated across the chapters in this book. To cite one interesting example, it is seen in Magdalena Wong’s account of an unconventional family setup that she studied during her fieldwork in Sichuan. In brief, after a couple’s son died, his wife, that is, the couple’s daughter-in-law, continued to live with them in their home. The daughter-in-law’s lover then subsequently moved into this household and  – not without considerable awkwardness – became something like their de facto son. Or should it be son-in-law? The point here is that the kinship (or quasi kinship) arrangements between the people in this household are not a ‘given’ thing: the relations have to be worked out in practice. And this is equally true for people living in what may appear, on the surface, to be much more conventional family circumstances. The porousness of the kin/non-kin boundary is also seen in I-Chieh Fang’s account of cooperation and partner

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choice among women who work a Shenzhen factory. These young women are (mostly) unrelated, and the factory appears to have nothing to do with kinship per se.5 And yet their lives are pervaded by ideas and practices emanating from kinship, including the expectation that they should behave, in a deep sense, as mothers, daughters and/or sisters towards their fellow workers in given circumstances  – while, all along, behaving as prospective wives towards the unmarried men they meet. Of course, social expectations of these kinds come from somewhere, which brings us to the developmental question – and thus to Anni Kajanus’s study of children in contemporary Nanjing. Her work illustrates the point that children typically learn about cooperation in kin-saturated environments and then apply lessons from this in other settings, such as schools (point 4). As with the Angang material discussed earlier, however, this works itself out in complex ways. Kajanus studied children who attend two different schools in Nanjing and who come from very different backgrounds. The children at the University School are from distinctly middleclass, urban families. The children at the nearby Community School are from a rural area that has gradually been absorbed into the city, and where kin relations well beyond the parent-child dyad are salient. As Kajanus explains, there are in fact many similarities between the lives of these two groups of children. They are all from the same ‘one-child’ generation and thus have mostly lived their lives as singletons (thereby lacking the chance to cooperate with siblings, an experience that traditionally played a key role in Chinese ideas about child development and personhood).6 Moreover, the parents of all of these children, at least on the surface, share many of the same values and basic priorities, one of which concerns the importance of education. And yet Kajanus notes two important ways in which the lives of the two groups of children are different. The University School children are largely caught up in a separate world for children/ students, one which occupies almost all of their time. By contrast, the Community School children spend quite a bit of their time in the normal adult world, outside of school, and thus have repeated opportunities to observe cooperation between adults (many of them kin) and to learn from this. It is also the case that the pedagogical orientations of the two schools, in spite of their geographic proximity, are different. In brief, while the Community School is

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more authoritarian (students and parents defer to teachers), there is in practice much less micro-management of students, and thus of student cooperation, than is found at the University School down the road. This partly reflects the demands and expectations of the two communities that these schools serve and from which their student populations are drawn. Although this case study illustrates the developmental consequences of kin-based cooperation, it does so with an interesting twist. Whether children are able to observe, and thus learn from, ‘adult cooperation with kin’, is partly a function of the kinds of communities in which they live. Moreover, their own cooperative interactions with other children will be a function, in part, of the schools they happen to attend  – for example, those who micromanage cooperation versus those who do not – and this, in turn, is in part a function of the expectations held by their parents/families/ communities about schooling and teachers. My assumption is that some version of the story Kajanus tells is relevant to all children in Taiwan and China, and thus by extension to all the other case studies in this book. For example, when I-Chieh Fang tells us about cooperation among migrant factory workers in Shenzhen, or when Di Wu tells us about cooperation within the Chinese migrant community in Zambia, I take it for granted that all of those migrants came from family/community/school backgrounds in which they learned things about cooperation – such as the distinctive roles that men and women are meant to play in it – long before arriving in Shenzhen or Zambia. Roughly half the case studies in this book (including the migrationfocused ones by Fang and Wu) are about cooperation that is not explicitly defined by kinship. This is true of the case studies by Mark Stanford on the reform era cooperative movement, by Eona Bell on Chinese community schooling in Scotland, by Liu Xiaoqian on state provision of care to the elderly in Sichuan and by Andrea Pia on water allocation problems (and solutions) in rural Yunnan. Still, in all of these instances one can clearly say, first, that the respective agents in them have come from family and community backgrounds in which they learned things about cooperation before the cooperation problems studied by Fang, Wu, Liu, Stanford, Bell and Pia materialized.7 Indeed, if one assumes that kinship always impinges on the learning of cooperation (again, point 4) it should

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thus impinge on all forms of cooperation, including non-kin cooperation, as a matter of definition. But these case studies also illustrate the fact that cooperation with kin may impinge on (notionally) non-kin cooperation in a wider range of ways (point 3), that is, not just developmentally. Indeed, it is difficult to speak of cooperative institutions in the case of China – be they Mao-era communes and urban danwei or the reform era cooperative movement studied by Mark Stanford  – without taking kinship into account at some point. This is not least because these institutions have been framed, to a significant extent, against kinship. As with the Taiwanese schools I  studied in Angang, the key question has been whether Chinese people could ever transcend family loyalties enough to do something for the wider (non-familial) collective good instead. Moreover  – and in spite of this aspiration  – kinship has repeatedly seeped into Chinese collectivism (for instance, see Potter and Potter [1990] on the complex role family and kinship played in communes in the early stages and beyond). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the starting point for the entire post-Mao reform era in China was a return to ‘family responsibility’ as the basis for agricultural production, that is, because family is precisely what loomed in the first place over the whole exercise in collectivism. Cecilia Liu’s case study on ‘respect the elderly’ care homes in rural Sichuan shines an interesting light on this. Briefly, the Chinese state is currently stepping in to provide care to the elderly in cases where, for various reasons, it is not being provided by families. To some extent, this can be interpreted as a ‘face project’ for the state, that is, an attempt to show the state in a good moral light. Of course, the folk view in China is that elder care, in line with Confucian values, is a fundamental obligation of children, of families and of wider kin groups. As a result, one basically cannot have the state providing elder care without kinship considerations permeating all of the relevant institutions and practices at every step. In Liu’s project, this sometimes manifested itself in poignant ways that foreground the ethical dilemmas of family-based versus institution-based (and in this case, state-organized) cooperation. To give a small but telling example, the elderly residents are normally expected to eat together at the home, and this is considered a crucial aspect of the state’s provision of care. Only exceptionally, on big holidays, for example, some residents may be permitted to leave the

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institution to eat with their kin. In a case recorded by Liu, however, this was a disappointment. On the one hand, the elderly resident in question was pleased to return to the ‘normal’ condition, that is, of being an elder among his own relatives, sharing food with them. This highlights the anomalous nature of life in the care home (and of feeding practices there) within the local moral universe. But he quickly found himself annoyed by the way his kin treated him on the outside and actually went back to the home sooner than had been originally planned. One might still say, however, that his kin were very present in their absence. This brings me to the last point I want to discuss. As I said at the outset, the fact that humans cooperate so readily with non-kin can be said to be surprising. As an extension of this, there is perhaps a temptation to think that cooperation with kin is somehow more natural than, and also easier than, cooperation with non-kin – and that it is therefore less in need of explanation. Moreover, we know that many forms of cooperation with kin are at least perceived as being obligatory (this is certainly the case with parent-child cooperation in China), whereas many forms of cooperation with non-kin are perceived as being optional. You cannot choose your family, as the saying has it. Against this, however, various points can be made, the most obvious of which is that cooperation with kin is often not easy at all – on the contrary. Indeed, one can even argue that cooperation with kin is in some respects a lot harder and more complicated for many of us than cooperation with complete strangers.8 Be that as it may, here let me return to the more specific point already outlined above: that cooperation with kin entails many of the same challenges as cooperation with non-kin (point 5). With respect to this, Wong’s comments in her case study of families in urban Sichuan are highly pertinent. As she explains, her fieldwork interlocutors are not sure at all that ‘cooperation’ (hezuo) is a very good word to use to describe what takes place inside of families. People ‘cooperate’ in work environments, of course, but the terminology sounds wrong if you are talking about parents and their own children, for instance. And yet, some of her interlocutors, on reflection, do agree that in substantive terms there is cooperation within families:  people work together towards common goals, obviously, and make different contributions towards this. Similarly,

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some people she met are not sure if ‘fairness’ is a very good concept to apply with regard to family life. If you were constantly trying to figure out if family members are being treated fairly – for instance, if the work input of the husband and the wife is balanced – families as we know them simply could not function. And yet, again, it turns out (I should think unsurprisingly) that people do care about fairness within their families, even if they are not sure about the terminology one should use to describe this, and even if the way of thinking about fairness varies between kin and non-kin contexts. In other words, and further to Wong’s evidence, I am not suggesting that kin and non-kin cooperation are always thought about or talked about in the same way. Clearly they are not. (In the economic example from Angang that I gave above, people may want to avoid economic transactions involving kin precisely because these are tricky in a way that transactions involving non-kin are not.) What I  argue is that, in spite of the differences between kin and nonkin cooperation, and indeed in spite of clear cultural variation in how kin and non-kin cooperation are conceived, there is significant overlap in the problems intrinsic to them. Here I will not try to present this as a universal claim, but simply base it on my direct experience of China  – specifically, on my fieldwork not only in Angang but also in Dragon Head (in northeast China), South Gate (in western Taiwan) and Protected Mountain (in southwest China). And what I specifically want to draw attention to is the strong overlap between the issues encountered in realworld cooperation with kin  – of the kind that I  observed during fieldwork  – and those that have been discussed and theorized in the interdisciplinary literature on cooperation with non-kin (for an especially interesting, and I  would say anthropologically important, example from this literature, see Baumard, André and Sperber 2013). In the communities where I have worked, then, it is definitely the case that people care about free-riding when it comes to cooperation with kin, for example if a brother does not provide care and support to his elderly parents while his other siblings are doing so, just as they care about free-riding when it comes to cooperation with non-kin. They therefore can also be said, in my view, to care about fairness between kin even if they agree (as per Wong’s chapter) that family life is bound to be intrinsically unfair in some respects and believe that one usually just has to deal with this as it comes. They also, I would note, often confront the problem of

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partner choice when cooperating with kin, just as they confront it in contexts of non-kin cooperation (notwithstanding the widely held folk view that cooperation with kin is obligatory). For example, cooperation between siblings is often selective, that is, people choose to cooperate with one sister rather than another. Indeed, even when it comes to parents and their own children, choices are made about who to cooperate with, such as which child to depend on for care in the future, and thus which child to support the most assiduously now. In kin-saturated communities such as Angang, Dragon Head, South Gate and Protected Mountain, examples of this tendency multiply. The fact is that there are hundreds of ‘kin’ in the vicinity, and it is not as if a given person can do everything with all of her kin, all of the time. On the contrary, cooperation in various spheres – religion, for example – is highly selective, and people do often actively take decisions about whom to cooperate with and, conversely, whom to avoid. Further to this, reputation is very consequential in the context of cooperation with kin, just as it is in the context of cooperation with non-kin. When it comes to non-kin cooperation we could say that, all things being equal, someone with a good reputation  – for example, for fairness  – is more likely to be chosen as a partner. But, of course, families themselves (and especially large and extensive kin networks) can be breeding grounds for ‘internal’ gossip about the abilities, dispositions, personalities and so on of individuals, who thereby acquire (good and bad) reputations. A very interesting case study with regard to this last point is Meixuan Chen’s research on a huaqiao (Chinese sojourner) community in south China. This is one of the many rural Chinese places where successful overseas migrants have made ‘glorious returns’ in recent years – and have started investing heavily in their natal villages on the basis of kinship. This is all about cooperation between kin (prototypically between ‘brothers’) for the sake of the collective good and the collective glory of the ancestors. As might be expected, however, some kin benefit more from this than do others and many people gripe about the whole business (note the parallels in Watson’s [1985] study of inequality within a Chinese lineage). For individuals (and/or for individual families, and/or for particular lines with the broader kinship group) huaqiao philanthropy  – however well-intentioned – is something done in part for the sake of enhancing the reputation of oneself or one’s immediate group.

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It is thus competitive. More darkly, such philanthropy can actually be an act of revenge, as when wealthy kinsmen return to aid the local community but also to humiliate those who wronged them in the past. As this last illustration reminds us, then, cooperation with kin is sometimes a rough and complex business  – but then so too is cooperation with non-kin. By studying the two things together, I  want to argue, and also by recognizing the extent to which the boundary between them is porous in practice, we can enhance our understanding of cooperation in general. To put this more critically: I would say that the failure to properly deal with kinship in many of the existing scholarly approaches to human cooperation is indeed a failing – that is, if one accepts that all human cooperation, including what we think of as non-kin cooperation, has kinship at its core.

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CHAPTER TWO

Playing ball: Cooperation and competition in two Chinese primary schools Anni Kajanus

This child-focused chapter explores the complex relationship between cooperative and competitive relationships in early childhood, drawing on my study of a ball game that I introduced in two primary schools in Nanjing, China. One of the schools is located in an urban, middle-class community and the other one in a working-class community that has recently been incorporated into the city. The comparison illuminates how different mechanisms of cooperation  – ones that have been labelled in the psychological literature as ‘mutualistic’ (Tomasello 2009) and ‘altruistic’ (Hepach, Vaish and Tomasello 2012; Warneken 2016;) – work in this directed setting, in line with the differences in the models of cooperation children acquire in their respective learning environments. I focus on how the patterns of joint action, responsibility, authority and competition the children encounter in these learning environments shape their cooperative and non-cooperative relationships. Through a detailed ethnographic treatment of the different mechanisms of cooperation that unfolded during the ball game, I  wish to move beyond some of the standard debates in the interdisciplinary

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literatures on cooperation  – for example, concerning whether reciprocity or altruism is at the core of cooperative relationships – and to look instead at the social processes that lead to a particular type of cooperation. The two communities I  studied are located less than five miles from each other, and they share many cultural models and social practices related to child-rearing and education. In both communities, most children grow up as the highly valued only child of their parents. In early childhood, many of them are cared for by doting grandparents, as their parents work long hours. The two schools follow the same curriculum and the school leadership and the teachers engage in knowledge and training exchanges. Yet the patterns of cooperation and competition in these two learning environments differ significantly, and some of these differences are manifest in the development of a ball game, a competition between two teams, that the second graders in both schools played over the course of five weeks, as part of their physical education (PE). Before investigating these differences in detail, let me briefly outline the theoretical underpinnings of the study of human cooperation from an evolutionary perspective, in specific cultural–historical environments.

Cooperation and child development The general view of the evolutionary theories of cooperation is that motivation and skills for extensive cooperation across genetically non-related groups is one of the defining features that distinguishes humans from other primates (Baumard and Sperber 2012; Tomasello and Vaish 2013). These evolved dispositions of our species become manifested from early infancy, but the actual patterns of helping, sharing, coordinating interests and actions, and so on, develop in specific cultural–historical learning environments. There has been some debate over what is the primary form of human cooperation. The altruism-punishment model for cooperation is based on the idea that cooperation is primarily driven by altruism and that people punish free-riders and defectors even if the punishment incurs cost to themselves, such as getting into a fight or losing money. Punishments range from forms that are ‘non-costly’ to the punisher, such as reporting a defector to an authority or damaging

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their reputation through gossip, to those that are ‘costly’, such as fighting. Another model of cooperation suggests that ‘mutualistic collaboration’ is the most typical form, driven by the mutual benefits of working together (Tomasello 2009). Partner choice plays the key role in the operation of mutualistic collaboration; the argument is that rather than punishing bad cooperators, humans prefer to avoid them. Earning and managing a reputation as a good cooperator is therefore key to obtaining and maintaining cooperative relationships in the mutualistic framework. While these two models are not mutually exclusive  – it is acknowledged that cooperation can take many forms  – there has been little research that focuses on how these different elements relate to each other as they unfold in the course of actual everyday cooperative activities. The comparative research on human cooperation mostly draws from studies of sharing, helping, punishment, joint action, and so forth, in systematic experimental settings. Investigating the dynamics of these elements in real life, in children’s cooperative and noncooperative behaviours with peers who are part of their daily social field, allows us to see how the cooperative patterns are embedded in children’s wider learning environments. Furthermore, it will become clear in this chapter that altruistic and mutualistic motivations behind cooperation are not always easily distinguishable, and any attempt to understand motivations requires an in-depth understanding of the wider context of the cooperative activity. This leads us to look at various cultural and social processes discussed in this volume, involving power and authority, kinship networks and class hierarchies. While this study is grounded on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two schools and communities, in this chapter I  will focus on discussing children’s behaviours in the ball game. Introducing something new to the field site and observing its development is not something anthropologists would regularly do. However, focusing on the ball game has two benefits. First, it brings together cooperative and competitive motivations, as cooperation between members of the same team is a prerequisite for competing against the other team, but also, as we will see, the effort to cooperate well can take precedence over competition. Second, in this semi-controlled set-up of learning a ball game that was new to the children in both schools, it was possible to compare the development of the game over time, as the children started to develop strategies and patterns

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of behaviour, which differed significantly between the two schools. Methodologically, the ball game falls somewhere between classic ethnographic research and a controlled experiment. Indeed, my decision to introduce this game to the groups of children, who had little experience of playing ball games, emerged in the course of managing the roles of an ethnographer and a sports instructor in the two schools. In negotiating access, I was recruited as a sports instructor to second graders. In this role I was expected to teach the children new activities. I started by teaching martial arts, but as my fieldwork progressed and my relationship with the children grew closer, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the authoritarian and distant role required for safe instruction of martial arts to groups of thirty to seventy young children (Kajanus 2016). I needed to come up with a physical activity that allowed more freedom for the children, while maintaining a degree of control for reasons of safety, and quite frankly, appearances. This ball game that has simple rules and is generally quite enjoyable because it mostly involves running around, served the purpose well. As soon as we started playing the game in the two schools, the significant differences in the way it developed became clear, and I continued to observe them in quantitative and qualitative terms over the weeks we played. But considering that the introduction of the game was motivated by the freedom from adult direction it allows, it is clear that this was not a controlled experiment in a strict sense. Before going into the analysis of how cooperative behaviours, such as partner choice, altruistic helping, mutualistic collaboration and punishment emerged during the ball game, let me describe the home and school lives of the children in the two communities, and highlight some of their important differences, as they gave rise to the development of distinct cooperative patterns.

Early childhood learning in the two communities One of the schools I studied is located, as noted, in a middle-class community; the parents of the children are highly educated, many are academics and some have experience of studying and working abroad. The University School that serves the community boasts

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excellent resources and has a reputation of progressive teaching that supports every child in the cultivation of their individual abilities and interests in becoming a successful member of a modern, international society. The other community is located in the fringes of the city; a former rural area, it was attached to the city a decade ago. The former farming families there now mostly work in the service sector and industry. The Community School serves this local community and some labour migrant families. When considering the two communities as early childhood learning environments where cognitive and social skills and motivations for cooperation develop, there are some significant similarities and differences. Barbara Rogoff (2003) has identified several sets of developmental and child-caring patterns that have been found to correlate with some consistency in a variety of cultural– historical contexts. The one of particular relevance to cooperative patterns relates to children’s participation in community activities and its implications for learning. The pattern commonly found in middle-class Euro-American families is for children to spend much of their time in age-graded groups, engaged in activities specifically designed for children that often have a learning objective. That is to say, before children can participate in adult activities and make genuine contributions to their wider community, they must be trained in being an adult through ‘age-appropriate’ learning activities (Goodwin 2007; Fasulo, Loyd and Padiglione 2007; Ochs and Izquierdo 2009). Children are given special objects (toys) to play with, spoken to in a special tone of voice and language, taken to designated areas (parks and playgrounds) to do activities and use equipment that no one else in the community uses, and so on. Teaching is largely based on one-on-one deliberate explaining and demonstrating, and adults help children to complete tasks until they have developed the skills to take ownership of the task. Rule-based cooperation and individual ownership of tasks are characteristic of this pattern, which is set in contrast to the one found, for example, in many indigenous American communities, in Kenya and in Samoa (Whiting, Whiting and Longabaugh 1975; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Ochs 1988; Rogoff 2003). In these settings, children spend much of their time in multi-age groups, where younger children tag along and learn through observation and participation in the activities of older children and adults. They are able to observe adults working and going about their

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daily chores, and learning in general takes place through observing and pitching in (Paradise and Rogoff 2009). Children’s attention is directed outwards, towards other people, and face-to-face interaction with the caregiver might be very limited. This pattern of learning and participation is found to correlate with active contributions to communal activities from an early age, and with a subtle coordination of interest and activities with others, as opposed to cooperation on the basis of explicit rules and reciprocal patterns. Bearing in mind these two patterns of learning, participation and cooperation in child development, significant similarities and differences in the learning environments of the two groups of children that I studied in Nanjing can be observed. As mentioned, a majority of children in both communities grow up without siblings. They therefore spend a great part of their early childhood with adults and have limited opportunities to socialize in multiage peer groups. Before preschool age (three years), the primary caregivers are usually mothers and grandmothers, although some grandfathers also contribute significantly. Because of the central role of grandparents, the early socialization of children in the two communities is not as different as might be expected. In the courtyards and playgrounds of both communities, groups of grandmothers can be observed to engage in very similar childcaring activities. Chatting among themselves, each closely attends to her baby, following at arm’s length as they stagger along the pavement. Those with even younger infants line up to watch who is coming and who is going; all of them holding their babies outwards and directing them to pay attention to other people, acquaintances and strangers alike. ‘Call Aunt, “Aunt” ’, ‘Big Sister, “Big Sister” ’, ‘See what Big Brother is doing, learn from him,’ they direct the babies who are too young to utter a word, let  alone follow ‘Big Brother’ (any older male child) who is climbing up a ladder. This combination of each child being attended to by one adult, while directing their attention outwards rather than towards one-on-one interaction with the caregiver, is a mix of the two patterns above. After children start preschool, their upbringing moves more towards the first pattern. Teachers and parents take a bigger role in childcare, and even if some grandparents remain involved, much of their time is now spent on supervising the child in learning activities designed by the teachers (homework, piano practice, etc.). Child socialization now revolves around specific learning activities, which

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are taught via one-on-one instruction or via group instruction in schools. At weekends, the grandmothers and babies in the courtyards of the middle-class community are joined by parents, often fathers, teaching an older child a specific skill, such as riding a bike, roller-skating or flying a kite. At this point, the childcare practices in the two communities start to differ increasingly. First, from early on, the middle-class children spend more of their time in preschool, school and after-school classes. In the working-class community, children might spend a part of their day in their parents’ workplace, a small shop or a restaurant, or with some relatives who live nearby. Second, the families of the middle-class community have moved to this relatively isolated suburb of a major city because of their university jobs and very few of them have local kinship networks, apart from the grandparents who move in to take care of the child in the first couple of years. In contrast, the working-class families originate from the area, and have extensive networks of kin, friends and neighbours, with whom they regularly socialize. In this community, the children have many more opportunities to observe adults cooperating and working together, and to be part of the social life between families, including a long line of Big Sisters and Little Brothers of different ages. Considering the patterns of observation of and participation in community activities in early childhood, a mix of elements from the patterns identified by Rogoff (2003) can be observed in both communities. The most significant differences between the communities relate to the time and opportunities children have to get involved in the social and work activities of adults and children of various ages. Increasingly with age, the middle-class children start to live in a separate child’s world that is designed and directed by adults, while the working-class children remain participants to a greater degree in the general community life.

Cooperation, competition and authority in school The schools have a similar class size of between thirty-five and thirty-eight children led by a classroom teacher. The school day is similarly structured, alternating between reading time and

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taught classes, with short breaks of five to ten minutes in between. During the breaks, the second graders are not allowed to wander off to the playground, but must stay on the second floor, in the vicinity of their classroom. For these brief moments intermitting their intense schoolwork, the corridors are full of children rushing to the bathroom and to fill their hot water bottles; small groups gather around a toy someone has smuggled in, or quickly organize for a game of ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ (Lao lan ji dian le) or ‘Whack the mouse’ (Da di shu). Once a week in the University School, and once a day in the Community School, the entire school lines up on the playground to face the head PE teacher who stands on a platform with a microphone. The teacher’s instructions are barely audible over the sound system that blares out the tune for the latest group gymnastic routine that has been distributed in the school district. The entire school moves more or less in unison, the enthusiasm of the smallest children in the front rows balanced out by the somewhat less committed lines of pre-teens at the back. The Community School children complete their routine on a concrete yard, surrounded by the school buildings on three sides and opening up to the sports ground on the fourth. The sports ground has a tarmac running track and a planted grass field in the middle, but because of the unmaintained state of the grass, PE classes take place on the tarmac. Next to the sports ground stands a newly renovated sports hall building that is not for the children to use; it has been rented out for office space. In the University School, the collective routines take place behind the four-storeyed sports building that houses, among other things, basketball courts, ping-pong tables, music rooms with instruments, tracks for electric cars, pools for miniature ships, and studios for arts and crafts, baking and building robots. The south side of the sports ground adjoins a miniature Great Wall guarded by a fullsize replica of a terracotta warrior, descending to a small artificial pond complete with lotus pavilion. The neat artificial grass of the sports ground is surrounded by soft tarmac-paved playgrounds with climbing equipment. After the group exercise, the teachers lead the children back to the classrooms. In the University School, the classrooms are airy and well-lit. The arrangement of desks varies depending on the preference of the classroom teacher; many of them line up the desks in pairs or arrange them in groups of four. Some teachers have a

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desk, others choose to not have one but work at a side table when correcting assignments, otherwise moving around the classroom. At the front of the classroom are a whiteboard, computer and projector, and a smiley board where rows of smiley faces indicate the good performance, or lack of it, of individual children and groups of four. The back wall is covered with children’s artwork and photographs. The teachers use a combination of teacher-centred, child-led and cooperative teaching methods. For example, during mathematics, children mostly work individually following the teacher’s instruction, but are also often called to tutor, correct and evaluate each other. In Chinese classes, group work such as collective recital of texts, preparing short plays, or team quizzes are commonly used. These methods clearly encourage cooperative learning, peer tutoring and peer responsibility for learning. Children also receive constant, explicit moral education in being a good student, a good child and a good citizen. Helping and being considerate to others, returning favours, showing gratitude and sharing – in other words, being a good cooperator  – constitutes an essential part of these moral teachings. However, this emphasis on cooperation in the teaching methods and moral education is somewhat at odds with the overwhelming emphasis on competition that infiltrates even the cooperative activities. Group work is often framed as a competition between groups, who are praised and punished in accordance with the performance of individual members. The cooperative and competitive techniques are part of a wide range of subtle motivational and disciplinary methods that the University School teachers deploy to keep the children under control and motivated. The former include, for example, verbal encouragement and praise, rewards of smiley faces and leisurely reading time, sharing of exemplary moral stories about good behaviour and performance, and publicly singling out individuals and groups for good performance. Forms of discipline are relatively mild but omnipresent. They include shaming in front of others for bad performance, self-criticism, peer-criticism, group and individual scolding and moral lecturing. All of these are directed towards reforming attitudes, as opposed to a focus on correcting behaviours. Classic Chinese thought on education is based on the idea that the human mind is malleable, and through an appropriate education that focuses on moulding attitudes, any person can become correctly dispositioned regardless of their background.

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Emulating role models is considered an effective way to motivate a person to reform their attitudes, and self-criticism, rather than simply apologizing or enduring a punishment, is a way to display the attitude change (Munro 1973). Finally, children are disciplined through Foucauldian ‘moral orthopaedics’ (Deacon 2006). Their movement, both in the school area and in bodily posture and disposition, is governed in various ways. When moving from one classroom to another, or to the school canteen, children are expected to walk in lines and in silence. The children’s access to areas and equipment is heavily regulated. For example, the school has several play areas and excellent resources for interesting and fun activities, but only on Wednesdays, after the group gymnastics, are the children allowed to use the outdoor play area for about thirty minutes under the teacher’s supervision: at other times it remains empty. The children are expected to eat in silence, to raise their hand in a certain way, and to follow physical routines accompanied with shouted slogans when lining up, starting or ending a lesson, praising a classmate for good performance and so on. These are common practices in schools across China, but in comparison to the Community School, they are much more strictly enforced at the University School. The home and school lives of the University School children are characterized by the tension between an overwhelming regulation of time and activities by parents and teachers, on the one hand, and the emphasis on developing critical thinking and independence, on the other. Their highly educated parents are critical of the school system and the teachers’ methods, but at the same time, consider it their responsibility to ensure their child will do well in the competitive education system, which means obeying the teachers and spending most of their free time in directed learning activities. The everyday classroom practice at the Community School is markedly different. The classrooms are arranged in a simple layout of six lines of desks facing the teacher’s desk (but no chair, as the teachers are not permitted to sit while they teach), and blackboards at the front and at the back of the classroom. After a recent renovation, each classroom is supplied with a computer and a roll-up screen that allows the teachers to use electronic teaching materials provided by the school district. During renovation, the classrooms have also been fitted with lights, but these are not used. Teaching is carried out in a straightforward teacher-centred manner

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involving very limited individual feedback. Responding to raised hands or nominating children to respond, teachers rarely comment on good or bad performance, simply moving on to the next child. Cooperative teaching methods, team work and group responsibility are almost entirely absent from classroom practice and apart from the moral classes that are part of the curriculum, teachers rarely utilize exemplary stories or encourage children to think about how to be a good person. The teaching practice is simply directed at communicating knowledge, diligent work is the basis for cultivating virtue, and children are expected to be motivated by a sense of duty and respect for teacher’s authority, rather than by competitive and cooperative motivational devices. In comparison to the University School, where relatively mild disciplining methods are a constant element of teaching, the Community School teachers rarely enforce discipline. When they do, the methods are simple and comparatively harsh. When the children at the University School fidget and chat during class, they might receive a moral lecture about being respectful towards the teacher and their classmates. In the Community School, the teacher will simply bark out ‘Silence!’ to restore order. But in comparison to the University School, where such interventions from the teacher might occur some twenty times during a regular class, they will be much less frequent in the Community School. The teacher of the class where my research was based regularly managed the classroom from start to finish without a single intervention to enforce discipline. But of course, the Community School children sometimes get into trouble, and when they do, it is most likely due to rough play that has led to someone getting hurt, or for repeated failure to do homework. A  child is summoned to the teachers’ office and a parent is called to come in immediately. The parent then has to stand witness to the harsh scolding the child receives from the classroom teacher who is often joined by other teachers who happen to be present. The child is expected to, and often does, sustain this scolding in stern silence. This is not an insignificant achievement for an eight-year-old, who has to stand still and look the teacher in the eye for ten to twenty minutes, while listening to angry reprimands detailing her or his wrongdoings, pointing out the loss of face (and potentially money) she is inflicting on her suffering and loving parents and repeatedly demanding an explanation: ‘Why did you do it? Why? Why?’ – a question that

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she is not expected to answer. It is best not to cry as this will most likely add fuel to the scolding. The line of authority between adults and children in the Community School is straightforward:  both the children and the parents defer to teachers’ authority. But at the same time, children spend less of their time in directed learning activities and their time, space and movement are not as strongly regulated as at the University School. They participate in community life, observe adults working together, learn through participation in these adult activities and, importantly, have more time and space to socialize freely with their peer group both at school and at home. At school they can be left to work unsupervised, and there is little difference in their behaviour in the presence or absence of authority. This again is in marked contrast to the children at the University School. Under the overwhelming control of their time and space and the omnipresent moral education, the children do not internalize much of what is being imposed upon them, but learn to be strategic in their talk and behaviour. When the teacher is present, they mostly follow rules, but this is in stark contrast to the way they behave when unsupervised. In sum, the University School children spend most of their time in adult-directed activities, which sometimes explicitly promote cooperative skills and motivations. At the same time, there is an extreme emphasis on competition, both explicitly as in setting up activities as competitions, and implicitly in the form of motivational and disciplinary techniques that are based on public comparison of performance. In the Community School, there is little emphasis on competition, children are not routinely set in comparison with each other and they are rarely singled out for good or bad performance. Teaching methods are teacher-centred and do not explicitly support cooperative skills and motivation in children. The authority of adults is largely unquestioned, but at the same time, children have more freedom, time and space for independent and peer group activities than the University School children. I will now move on to discuss how these patterns of authority, cooperation and competition in the children’s lives outside of school relate to what I observed when I introduced the ball game. As will be seen, the children’s motivations for cooperation and noncooperation with others were very mixed, ranging from blatant selfinterest to a complex mix of altruism and perceived mutual benefit.

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The ball game In my role as a PE instructor to second graders in the two schools, I was able to teach and observe the development of a simple ball game between two teams. The teams start from opposite sides of a basketball court; each team has a soft ball. Their objective is to ‘burn’ the members of the opposite team by hitting them with the ball below the waist. If the ball touches the ground first, it does not count, and if the targeted player catches the ball before it touches the ground, the one who threw it gets burned. The burned players move to the back and the sides of the opposite team and work together with the remaining unburned members of their team to burn the members of the opposite team. This means that although they must leave the court, they still actively participate in the game by standing on the sides, trying to catch the ball and hit the members of the opposite team. The game ends when all the members of one of the teams have been burned, or alternatively, at the end of the game the remaining members of each team in the court are counted. Whichever team has more unburned members has won. Playing ball games is not part of PE for second graders in either school. The children learn how to handle a ball but only start to play games in the fourth grade. At the time of my fieldwork, ball games were not among the popular after-school classes, which included individual activities such as calligraphy, piano, building with Lego and dancing. In both schools PE is based on learning techniques and activities that are performed individually. Many of the classes for second graders consist of standing in lines and repeating an action after the teacher’s example, such as skipping rope or throwing ball (Kajanus 2016). The children in both schools thus had very little experience of not only playing ball, but also of playing team games that are competitive and require team effort, coordination of action and cooperation. They were quick to develop a liking for the game, a majority of them much preferring it to the practice of martial arts that had been the content of my classes in the preceding months and similar in style to their regular PE activities: working in lines, practicing individual techniques or working with a partner and carefully following the teacher’s example and instructions. In their opinion, playing a ball game was more fun, less tiring and less boring.

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There were significant differences in the way the ball game developed in the two schools. In both, I had given similar instruction in the rules of the game and strategies to make the game run better. When the children became familiar with the rules, I started to pass on the management of the game to them, only refereeing the first game of the class and then telling the children that I  would not interfere in the following ones. Between the games, we discussed any issues that had arisen and went over the rules if necessary. When we first started playing, each child at the University School was focused on being the one to have the ball and to throw it. Both the competitive and the cooperative motivations in the game require an orientation towards the group and the joint activity, but the University School children were focused on competing individually against all the other children, including their team mates. This disrupted the game so much that I  introduced a rule that if there were members of the same team fighting over the ball, it would be passed to the opposite team. This rule-based explicit direction towards cooperation was effective, and the children’s orientation started to shift from themselves towards their team. At the Community School, such incidents were few from the beginning, and the children’s motivation in the game was clearly oriented towards cooperation.

The development of forms of cooperation As the weeks passed, children at both schools started to cooperate increasingly during the game. The most common form of cooperation was passing the ball on to a good thrower, or between the burned and unburned members of the same team; a type of mutualistic collaboration that directly helps the team to win and thus also benefits the player who decides to pass the ball on. Another common form of cooperation was defending a team member in an argument over the ball, a burn, or a border breach. These were the two types of cooperation that occurred at the University School, and their occurrence was on average higher in comparison to the Community School. At the latter, there was a range of other forms, some of them collaborative in terms of being beneficial to both,

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others arguably more altruistic in nature. The children managed their team members in various ways. The known troublemakers were pulled away from potential arguments, weak players were allowed to hide behind the backs of other players, or even pushed to the back of the group and told to stay there. Sometimes the ball was passed on to a weak player who would not get hold of it otherwise, or to a player who had fallen and got hurt, as a form of consolation. This management of the team resulted in a smoother running of the game, reduced the number of interferences from my part, and kept the players engaged. This was in contrast to the University School, where part of the group frequently stopped participating. As the balls moved between the good throwers and fast runners and the game was disrupted by frequent arguments, a number of children soon became uninterested and started playing something else in the margins. This did not occur at the Community School. Looking at these differences through the lens of Tomasello’s (2009) mutualistic collaboration framework, it appears at first glance that the University School children were more mutualistic in their cooperation, while the Community School children were more prone to help each other altruistically. At the University School, the children were at first motivated by self-interest, that is, keeping the ball to themselves or being the one to throw it. But with continued practice, they came to understand the cooperative nature of the game and, without my instruction, came up with ways to cooperate with team members that involved some cost to the one who passed the ball or who volunteered to defend a team member and thus got involved in an argument or even a fight, but benefited both as members of the same team. These forms of mutualistic collaboration (except for fighting) also occurred but were less frequent at the Community School. Importantly, however, the Community School children also engaged in acts towards team members that could be classed as altruistic helping, because passing the ball to a weak player does not contribute to the team’s chances of winning. But when taking away from the analysis the assumption that the teams want to win, the latter also come to appear as incidents of mutualistic collaboration. Involving all members of the team in the game and policing one’s own team members does not contribute to winning, but it makes the game run better, prompts fewer interferences from an authority, and keeps everyone happy, resulting in fewer arguments and complaints. If the joint goal is to

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continue to play and to have a good time, these acts were clearly mutually beneficial. The categorization of cooperative motivations into altruistic or mutualistic thus requires a broader understanding of the goals that motivate the group. Moreover, the members of any given group, here teams in a ball game, can of course have a variety of goals and motivations behind their actions. Working well as a group, coordinating interests and collaborating in mutually beneficial ways does not mean that group members always act benevolently towards each other. Illustrative of this is the way one Community School team managed a particularly weak player in their team. It was clear that fully participating in the game, as in many activities at the school, was too challenging for this particular child, and that his classmates were accustomed to managing his participation. He was included in the group by being assigned a role that kept him involved but at a distance from the centre of activity. In the ball game, he was told to stay at the back of the court, where he would not get burned easily. Most of the time he happily ran around, participating in the excitement of the game. Significantly, his teammates sometimes passed the ball to him and brought him to the front of the court to throw it. But when he once got the ball by chance, grabbed it and excitedly started running around, he was promptly attacked by two of his teammates who struggled the ball away from him and ordered him to squat behind the other players, enforcing the command with a kick before moving back to the front line. The efficient management of the group left no room for unmediated participation.

Arguments and the importance of rules In both schools, the main cause of arguments during the games were disagreements over a burn. Children did not want to leave the court, and often it was impossible for others to tell if a player had been burned or not. At the University School, these arguments could escalate into fights that involved kicking, punching and pulling. This problem became so significant that several times I had to interrupt the game and either start refereeing, or in the case of recurring fights, lead the class back to the classroom. One of the

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groups at the University School came up with a resolution to the fighting problem. The arguing over burns had been particularly frequent during one class, and I had issued a warning that were any fighting to occur, we would return to the classroom. During the next game, the arguing stopped, and the children played happily for the remainder of the class – without a single player leaving the court. This arrangement of everyone staying in the court also occurred with one of the Community School groups but for different reasons. The University School group was motivated to stop the escalation of arguments in order to be allowed to continue to play, and they found a way to do this through an unspoken agreement that everybody would simply stay in the court until the end of the PE class. The children in the Community School did not want to leave the court either and the players who had thrown the ball and seen the burn made feeble attempts to persuade the burned player to leave the court. These did not escalate into arguments, let alone fights, because the thrower easily gave up this effort and was quickly distracted by the continuing game. At times the child was also pulled away from a potential argument by a team member. In fact, during the weeks of playing the ball game, not a single incident of fighting occurred at the Community School, where altogether 216 children played the game, in comparison to the eleven incidents among the seventy University School children who played it. These examples of the ways the children resolved conflicts are characteristic of the differences in their general orientation to cooperation, which was more rule-based at the University School, while at the Community School it was more grounded on subtle alignment of activities and interests with those of others. These two groups, one in each school, essentially broke the basic rule of the game by allowing burned players to stay in the court, and thus removed the competitive rationale of the game. At the Community School group this occurred due to limited commitment to the rules – rules mattered, but trying to enforce them was not considered worth disrupting the game. The University School group, in contrast, was so committed to arguing over rule breaches, that when faced with the ultimatum to stop the arguments from escalating into physical fights, they saw it best to abandon the rules altogether. At the Community School there was no great difference between the ways the children played when I  refereed and when they managed the game themselves. Both types always involved some

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rule breaches, but arguments were infrequent and the games ran relatively well. At the University School the games varied greatly. Many of the children preferred me to act as a referee, as that prevented some rule breaches. At the same time, when I took the referee role, many children adopted the policy that ‘if she didn’t see it, it didn’t happen’, which of course caused many arguments between the teams. When they played without my interference, the games in fact sometimes ran better, as the children took more responsibility for following the rules. Perhaps the most remarkable difference between the two schools with regards to rule-following was that some of the Community School groups got into a habit of policing their own team members for rule breaches. The arguments would not be between the teams, but between team members, as the burned members were swiftly pushed out of the court or players were ordered back when they tried to breach borders to get the ball. This intra-team policing resulted in the fewest complaints and arguments during games that ran particularly well. Rule-following was prioritized over winning, and rules were enforced with the goal of a more enjoyable game for all the players. At the University School the children did not police their own team members. Instead, when there were one or two children in the group who continued to make trouble and get into arguments, the children asked me to remove the troublemakers from the game and let others continue without them. Spending most of their time in activities designed and directly regulated by adults (the vast majority for explicit learning purposes), the children lacked subtle mechanisms to enforce rule-following, align interests and manage the different personalities and skill levels in their team, without the support of adults.

The importance of winning I have already suggested that understanding the motivations behind cooperation is contingent on understanding the goals of cooperation. The same cooperative act can be interpreted as mutualistic, altruistic, or even self-interested in motivation. In the ball game, the goal of cooperation varied on a continuum between an intense focus on winning the game, and a total disregard of its

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competitive element, instead focusing on playing a ‘good game’, with full participation and no interruptions. In the first few weeks, I made a point of announcing the winning team at the end of the game, which was usually based on counting the unburned members. At both schools this resulted in cheering from the winners. At the University School, emotions sometimes ran high as we walked back to the classroom, some children still celebrating their victory or lamenting their loss, or continuing to argue over rule breaches. But as the weeks passed, children started to lose interest in the end result; I started to forget to do the head count or announce the winner and the children did not remind me. It was clear that the children mostly cared about playing as many games as possible; they were uncharacteristically quick to line up between games and did not want to discuss the game or the rules if there was still time for one more. Even though the game was directly framed as a competition between two teams from the outset, the focus of the Community School children was not on winning:  this much was clear. But consider, also, that the University School children did not care that much about winning either. At both schools, children cared about rule breaches. These were a major source of arguments during the game and dominated post-game talk. When arguments escalated into fights at the University School, the anger was often fuelled by frustration that came from the group’s inability to enforce shared rules, rather than from the frustration of not winning.

Punishment Punishment and partner choice are cooperative mechanisms that are aimed at ensuring that cooperation is beneficial. Those who turn out to be bad cooperators can be avoided and norm violators can be punished. These mechanisms also worked in distinct ways in the two schools. The University School children joined team members to engage in ‘costly’ (fighting) and ‘non-costly’ (arguing) punishment of the rule breachers in the opposite team. Children did not get to choose their own team members. Significantly, however, the University School children found ways to enforce ostracism and avoidance, mechanisms of partner choice, towards bad cooperators in their teams. When particular members continuously

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made trouble, they asked me to remove them from the game. Some children decided that the entire team was not cooperating well, and decided not to be part of it. When they were not given the chance to participate in the game, after a while they lost interest, moved to the back of the court and started playing something else. At the Community School, ostracism or avoidance was not practiced, as all team members were ‘managed’. Weak players were helped and troublemakers distracted or disciplined. In those groups that chose to enforce rules on their own team members, this intra-team policing largely removed the issue of having to punish (via arguing) the rule breachers of the opposite team. In general, costly punishment did not occur at the Community School, for the reason that the subtler forms of coordinating the groups’ interests and actions worked well to keep incidents from escalating.

Conclusion From this intra-cultural comparison between two Han Chinese communities less than five miles away from each other, it is clear that the dynamics of cooperation and competition in a directed setting are strongly linked to the models of cooperation the children encounter in their wider learning environments. To understand modes of human cooperation, it is necessary to investigate in detail the particular dynamics of its mechanisms (e.g. punishment, helping, partner choice) that emerge in real-life cooperative activities between people in specific cultural–historical settings. In brief, the main differences between the two schools were that the Community School children were more skilled in managing the ball game without interference from an authority. At the University School, the arguments were more frequent and sometimes escalated into physical fights. The University School children cooperated more in ways that helped the team win the game, while the Community School children also cooperated in ways that did not directly contribute to winning, but made the team more coherent and levelled individual ‘weaknesses’. There was more strategic rulefollowing at the University School and without the interference of an authority, children self-policed more, but their other-policing was directed at the members of the opposite team. The interference and non-interference from an authority did not have significant

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influence on the self-policing of the Community School children, and in some cases their other-policing was also directed at their own team members. At the University School, the children organized cooperation around specific, clear goals, and struggled to manage the coordination of activities and joint goals when there was no authority to enforce rules. While the children first appeared to be highly focused on the competitive set-up of the ball game, it is questionable how much they actually cared about winning as the weeks passed and they got more into the game. This suggests that while the emphasis on competition in their learning environment is explicit and overwhelming, the children only internalize this motivation to a limited degree. It is possible that they were first focused on winning because the competitive set-up is familiar to them; in other words, competitive motivation is something expected of them. But as the game developed over time, they largely lost interest in the end result, and came to care about the rules, that is, about the coordination of group activity. This was not a smooth process, and the arguments continued to arise from the frustration over rule breaches. For the Community School children, this type of group activity seemed to come very easily, despite the lack of experience in ball games. While their learning environment is in some ways more authoritarian, their time, space and movement are not micromanaged by adults to the same degree as for the University School children. The absence of teaching techniques and adult-directed activities that explicitly promote cooperative skills and motivations does not mean the children lack them. On the contrary, the relative lack of direction and supervision leaves room for the children to develop these skills in free peer-group interaction and importantly, through observation of and participation in adult activities in the community. Unlike the University School children who spend most of their time outside school doing homework or participating in adult-directed learning or leisure activities, the Community School children have more ‘unstructured’ time, which they spend at home, in the courtyards and playgrounds of the community, or at their parents’ workplaces. The generally wide networks of kin, friends and neighbours in the community facilitate these interactions. Humans are born with a range of cognitive capacities and psychological dispositions for cooperation with genetically nonrelated conspecifics. The development of specific patterns of

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cooperative and non-cooperative motivations and mechanisms, however, is highly susceptible to the social, cultural and structural processes we are embedded in. Zoning in on these moments of cooperation – sharing the proceedings of communal fishing, caring for an infant, helping a stranger, playing a novel ball game – in a comparative manner that builds on an in-depth understanding of the context of the cooperative activity, can help us understand the way that social processes give rise to particular forms of cooperation.

CHAPTER THREE

The role of xiao in moral reputation management and cooperation in urban China and Taiwan Désirée Remmert

In Chapter Two, Anni Kajanus explored cooperative and competitive relationships between children. In this chapter, my focus is on parent–child relationships and also on how these, in turn, help shape relationships beyond the family. To be more specific, I explore how notions of moral conduct that are conveyed through ideals of filial piety (xiao) within family relationships affect reputation management among non-kin in urban China and Taiwan. My central claim is that behavioural rules learnt through the cultural model of xiao make an important contribution to the maintenance of a moral reputation in the wider society. However, while in general, moral conduct towards parents appears to reflect positively on an individual’s perception by others, extreme demonstrations of filiality may actually have detrimental consequences. Issues of this kind seemed to be more prone to arise among young Taiwanese who, as I will explain, are required to respond to more traditional filial expectations than their Chinese peers.

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Drawing on case studies of young men in Beijing and Taipei in 2012 and 2013, I  will show how filial conduct can facilitate yet, if exaggerated, also complicate romantic relationships, friendships and, in China, the attainment of leadership positions within the Communist Party. As my choice of cases with which I  try to demonstrate the impact of filiality on moral reputation might at first glance appear peculiar, I should mention that for the young Chinese and Taiwanese I  interviewed, the assessment of a person’s morality seemed to be particularly crucial in exactly these contexts: that is, romance, friendship and the pursuit of positions of power. This is hardly surprising as in their mid- to late-twenties, these young men were about to start their careers and families. In societies within which social status is highly dependent on family relations and professional achievements, these topics were among their top concerns. To understand the encompassing moral concept within which the ideal features distinguishing a reliable partner are grounded, a closer look at the notion of filial piety is vital. For this reason, I will focus on the ideals and expressions of filiality in the first part of this chapter before, in the second part, assessing how these learnt concepts of moral behaviour unravel in reputation management beyond the natal family. Further, it should be noted that the mechanisms and processes behind selecting a romantic partner and a political party member are vastly different; the first can be assumed to be a more individual choice while the second is supposed to be collective. However, while, as Yan (2003) and others note, the choice of spouses has become notably individualized as the importance of conjugality has increased in both China and Taiwan in recent decades, data gathered by Zhang and Sun (2014) as well as Hong Fincher (2014) indicate that partner choice and marriage is still a communal matter that involves parents and children (see also Farrer 2002; Yan 2009). My observations in urban China and Taiwan confirm that while children’s preferences are surely important and love marriages have become the norm, the final decision as to when and whom to marry is mostly still made under the premise of parental consent in both societies. Moreover, as filial ideals are still very dominant and prescribe overarching values that not only pertain to the realm of the parent–child relationship but also influence the assessment of a person’s moral disposition in other contexts of social life, it should not be surprising that filial conduct can also influence the

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moral assessment of a person in collective decisions on political leadership. An example of the actuality of the topic has been demonstrated by the record numbers of viewers that reality TV shows like Where Are We Going, Dad? (Baba qu nar?) or The Greatest Love (Xuanfeng xiaozi) attracted in China. The different concepts of filiality held by national celebrities that were showcased in the episodes reignited lively discussions on responsibilities of parents and their children in the Chinese media, demonstrating that the topic has lost nothing of its significance despite China’s wide-ranging societal changes. Concerns about the future of parent–child relations in the face of demographic transformations are also reflected in the recent revision of China’s legislation. In 2013, responding to growing fears about the neglect of the elderly, a new law called the ‘Protection of the Rights and Interests of Elderly People’ was enacted that summoned adult children to tend to their parents’ physical and ‘spiritual’ needs (Wong 2013). In 2012, the year before the new law delineating filial duties had been passed, the Chinese government issued an updated version of Guo Jujing’s 600-year-old work, The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, a collection of moralistic folk tales, to remind the young of their duties towards parents (Jacobs and Century 2012). What is more, Confucian thought has been reported to play a key role in the Chinese government’s current endeavour of filling the ideological vacuum that has emerged in recent decades; a return to Confucian values might be the Party’s strategy to avert calls for democratic reforms and the spread of Western thought (Page 2015). As these examples show, Confucian values, in particular concepts of filiality are still influential in modern social, economic and political life in China and Taiwan; for this reason they deserve attention in the examination of what makes people trustworthy partners in private life as well as in the public sphere. In its most general sense, the Confucian concept of intergenerational support denotes reciprocal obligations between parents and children to care for each other’s well-being across different life stages. It comprises parents’ responsibility to provide their children with the material and spiritual support to become moral adults as well as children’s obligation to return care with material and physical assistance during their parents’ old age (Fei 1992 [1948]: 43; Chan 2004; Ikels 2004). At the same time, parents’

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teaching of filial piety conveys to children more comprehensive moral values and social norms that prepare them to navigate social interactions beyond the parent–child relationship (Fei 1992 [1948]: 74; Luo, Tamis-LeMonda and Song 2013; Stafford 1995). Researchers suggest that in Confucian-influenced societies, the performance of xiao is considered indicative of moral character in the evaluation of social relationships with non-kin (Oxfeld 2010: 92–93; Tan and Chee 2005; Wah 2001). In this sense, they argue, even trustworthiness in the context of business relationships is judged according to an individual’s demonstration of family values in the private sphere; respect shown to parents hence accounts for ‘a testimony of “good character to trust” ’ (Tan and Chee 2005: 206). Thus, coordination with kin or even moderately altruistic behaviour towards family members appears to positively affect a person’s moral reputation in non-kin circles. Wu’s chapter in this volume outlines the increasing importance in a highly mobile Chinese world of mechanisms for evaluating the trustworthiness of non-kin. As cooperation with strangers becomes increasingly necessary in business and private life, he argues, interpersonal trust is more and more dependent on friendship and a history of good conduct in previous cooperative projects. Projecting oneself as a trustworthy person is hence of increasing importance in times in which social and demographic changes accelerate. These observations are in line with the claim of Baumard and others that individuals with a moral reputation are more often chosen as cooperators and thus have better chances to succeed in the long run (Baumard, André and Sperber 2013). In this context, Baumard et al. clearly differentiate between ‘mutualistic cooperation’ among impartial partners and more altruistic forms of cooperation among kin (60–61). Yet, as I  have just been saying and has been shown in ethnographic studies, it can be expected in China that an individual’s conduct towards kin reflects on his moral reputation in the wider social environment (Oxfeld 2010; Yan 2003). Moreover, the moral ideals underlying family relationships might pinpoint more general social norms in a society. In particular, Tomasello and Vaish explain, the ability to align personal interests with those of others is an important precondition to cooperation (Tomasello and Vaish 2013:  232). Notably, self-restraint (yue) and deference to social hierarchies are central values in Confucian thought and are conveyed early by parents through different parenting practices

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(Fung 1999; Luo, Tamis-LeMonda and Song 2013: 845). Talking to young adults and their parents in Taipei and Beijing, it emerged that these had been key values parents conveyed in both locales despite the politico-ideological differences between Taiwan and China. While adherence to the cultural concept of xiao remains strong in Chinese societies, the ways it is practiced and the impact it has on other social relationships beyond the family can also be expected to change with the wider transformations in the socio-economic and political spheres. The societies of China and Taiwan offer ideal settings to compare the influence that economic and political factors have on the learning of filial conduct and its transferability into other realms of social life. China and Taiwan share a cultural heritage that is especially expressed in its Confucian-inspired family ideology and rules of interpersonal reciprocity. However, the two societies have pursued very different paths of economic and political development that also affect family life and the practice of xiao in a number of ways. Since 1949, China has been under the autocratic rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while Taiwan’s political system has evolved from an authoritarian one-party rule under the Kuomintang (KMT) to a democracy in the late 1980s. In the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, the Chinese government first implemented a planned economy that was then reformed into state capitalism from the late 1970s. Meanwhile, with US assistance, the KMT introduced a free market economy in Taiwan from the mid-1950s. Moreover, the CCP on the Chinese Mainland rejected Confucian ethics and tried to substitute traditional obligations to the elders with a sense of commitment to the Party. At the same time, the KMT drew on Confucian ideology to project Taiwan as the true repository of Chinese culture and to Sinicize the population after fifty years of Japanese colonial rule (Fetzer and Soper 2013: 47–48). The different emphases the ruling parties placed on Confucian values as well as the distinct demographic and economic structures of China and Taiwan affected family relationships and residential choices in both societies. Several studies conducted throughout the past decades suggest that compared to China, expectations of filial support, post-marital residence practices as well as gender role models in marriage are more conservative in Taiwan (Chu and Yu 2010; Whyte 2004; Yu and Liu 2014). That is, despite Taiwan’s higher level of economic development, the current generation of young

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Taiwanese are still subject to more traditional filial obligations than their Chinese peers. However, the one-child policy  – introduced by the Chinese government in the late 1970s and in force until 2015 – had a strong impact on parental relations with their only children and contributed to a renewal of parental expectations on their offspring, especially after the abolition of the ‘iron rice bowl’ in the reform era (Fong 2004). Facing the prospect of having to provide care for their ageing parents alone, the younger generation of Chinese are thus under equal obligations of filial support to their Taiwanese peers. In this chapter I  draw on eighteen months of multi-sited field research among young adults in Beijing and Taipei from 2012 to 2013. The research examined the aspirations and life choices of young people against the different societal backgrounds of China and Taiwan. In the following, I will compare the cases of two young men I met in the field. Chao, a PhD student in Beijing, left his rural home to pursue higher education in the capital. Pei-chun, a young professional from Taipei, still lived at his natal home and supported his widowed mother. Chao’s sense of filiality was expressed through his diligent work ethic. He tried to demonstrate to his parents, both migrant labourers, that their years of investment in his education would pay off. Pei-chun realized his filial duties through his presence at his natal home and generous financial support of his family. At the time I met them, the two young men pursued quite distinct aspirations in which their sense of filiality would come to play a major role. While Chao aspired to a career as a government official, Pei-chun was searching for a wife. Both goals required them to convey the impression that they were good partners – either as a Party member and potential colleague or as someone who knew when to prioritize the romantic relationship over loyalty to parents. Yet, their sense of filiality elicited different reactions from their social environment that can be explained, at least in part, with reference to the distinct political ideologies and notions of family life in China and Taiwan. I will first illustrate how the concept of filial piety moderates the learning of morals and behavioural rules that are also critical to maintain non-kin relationships. Later, I  will take a closer look at the impact that the concept of filiality has on moral reputation in the context of romance, friendship and the educational system. In the remainder, I will compare my findings against the different

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backgrounds of China and Taiwan with special consideration of economic and politico-ideological differences.

Moral ambitions and the performance of xiao among young men in Beijing and Taipei ‘I’m very lucky to be here [at university] and to have a good future’, Chao reminisced, ‘several months ago, I was not sure whether I should continue studying or not. I discussed it with my parents and when they encouraged me to go on with my studies I made the decision to stay’. Chao was studying for a PhD at the university department I was affiliated to during my field research in Beijing in 2013. That afternoon, we were drinking milk tea at the campus cafeteria and, talking about his plans for the future, the conversation inevitably turned towards the relationship with his parents. Originally from a rural village in Hebei, Chao’s parents now worked in menial jobs in a southern province. Their support made Chao increasingly uneasy. ‘My father and my mother work very hard,’ he explained, ‘I want to earn money as soon as possible, so I  can support them. When I earn some money, I can give them a better life, you know.’ Chao saw his major filial responsibility in providing his parents with a comfortable home for their old age. However, he did not want to wait until he completed his doctorate to show his parents his gratitude. Despite his restricted resources, Chao had saved a small sum of money and ordered some delicacies with which he wanted to surprise his parents: ‘When I graduate from my PhD studies, maybe my parents will already be old. If you want to do something for your parents, you can’t wait for that. You must do it now, right now.’ Chao was clearly alluding to the Chinese cultural concept of filial duties (xiao) that I have outlined previously. He felt extremely responsible for providing his parents with a pleasant old age free of physical labour and financial concerns. Even though his parents were only of middle age at that time, he worried that the years he still had with them might not suffice to repay them for what he perceived to be his immense debt. ‘My parents never gave me any advice, [. . .] they are full of confidence in me’, Chao stressed to explain the pressure he felt not

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to disappoint his parents but to return their unwavering support throughout the long years of his education. When he was a young child, his father had left the family home to migrate to Guangzhou where he worked at a chemical plant. Chao and his mother stayed behind on his paternal grandparents’ farm and Chao only saw his father on his annual visits home during Chinese New Year. However, his father wrote him letters regularly in which he urged Chao to study diligently so that one day, he would have a better life. While Chao’s friends quit after junior high school, his parents encouraged him to continue with his education. As a teenager, Chao sometimes envied his friends for their apparent freedom. However, now he thanked his parents for their foresight as his former classmates were working in low-paid, exhausting jobs. ‘They don’t understand my life,’ he explained, ‘all my friends from my neighbourhood have got married and several of them have children. So they can’t understand why I keep on studying.’ As mentioned above, a strong commitment to the morals of xiao had not only been palpable among Chinese young adults but was also a central aspect determining the future plans and aspirations of many young Taiwanese. Yet, the different social policies of the two locales, in particular the CCP’s control of reproduction, had left an imprint on how filiality could be practiced in Chinese and Taiwanese families. Many informants in Beijing were single children born after the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979. They were hence solely responsible for their parents’ wellbeing in old age (cf. Fong 2002). This was a particularly heavy burden as the social welfare system that had provided families with state-allocated housing, employment and other social benefits during the Mao era had been gradually abolished in the reform period (Whyte 2004). Most of the young Taiwanese participating in my research, however, had siblings and could share filial duties. Nevertheless, a more traditional approach to filial obligations stressed the particularly heavy obligations of the eldest son towards his parents. These obligations, Whyte and colleagues argue, often include the expectation of co-residence with parents after marriage and a heavier emphasis on the care responsibilities of daughtersin-law (Whyte 2004). The apparently more conservative approach to filial obligations in urban Taiwan, they stress, can be explained by the strong economic dependencies within families that emerged with the prevalence of family businesses during Taiwan’s economic

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boom (Whyte, Hermelin, and Ofstedal 2003; Whyte 2004). The influence of family businesses has decreased in recent decades, yet the repercussions of the power relationships they created are still palpable in Taiwanese families today (Cornman, Chen and Hermelin 2003; Whyte 2004; Chan 2008; Chu, Xie and Yu 2011). Even though few of my Taiwanese informants still worked in family businesses and neolocal residence after marriage had become increasingly common, they often had to compromise between personal preferences and parental expectations upon marriage. The issue of post-marital residence still gave rise to frequent disputes as young men felt conflicted between the preferences of their families and their young wives. One particularly memorable case in this context was Pei-chun, whom I  met in a youth group of aspiring world travellers at the beginning of my fieldwork in Taipei in 2012. It seemed ironic that this was our first point of contact; at the age of thirty-one, he hardly ever took time off from his busy job as a computer engineer and rarely ventured beyond the borders of the suburban region of Taipei where his family lived. One rainy Sunday afternoon in late March, Pei-chun and I met in a coffee shop. I was interested in why he had participated in the meeting of the travel group. Pei-chun complained to me about the monotony of his job and the lack of innovation he observed in the Taiwanese high-tech industries. I thus assumed that he planned to search for work abroad. Yet, when I  asked him about his plans he strongly rejected the idea of leaving Taipei and asserted that he had to stay with his family. His face grew soft when he told me that his paternal grandmother, now in her nineties, had raised him while his parents worked. After the death of his father, he thus felt responsible not only to care for his mother and unmarried younger sister, but also to secure his grandmother a pleasant old age. He insisted that even though he would still be able to contribute financially to their livelihood if he worked abroad, he had to be physically present in the family household. I scribbled the character of xiao on a paper tissue and showed it to him, asking how he would interpret the concept. Pei-chun instantly smiled. This meant, he explained, that if his mother bought two loaves of bread, she would definitely give him the bigger, tastier one. Interestingly, Pei-chun, like Chao, defined xiao first and foremost through the concept of parental benevolence and less in terms of personal duty. This perception might be closely associated, as will be explained

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below, with the way moral principles are imparted to children by their parents. Knowing that Pei-chun was searching for a wife to start a family with, I asked him if his mother sometimes worried that he might neglect his care obligations in the future. ‘There is no need to be anxious about that’, he stressed. He would not forget his responsibility to take care of her. For this reason, he emphasized, he also expected his future wife to show respect to his mother and grandmother and to get along with them well. Pei-chun had broken off his previous relationship since his girlfriend and his mother did not like each other. He feared that this might disturb the close relationship with his family in the long run. Yet, as time passed he grew increasingly tense about still being single while his family was expecting him to marry. Unlike my informants in Beijing, whose family members were often scattered across different provinces, many young Taiwanese lived in relatively close proximity to parents and in-laws. It was thus not unusual in Taiwan to move into the same house and, at times, even into the same household with the husband’s parents (Cornman, Chen and Hermelin 2003; Chu, Xie and Yu 2011). Likewise, to Pei-chun marriage did not mean a plunge into independence from his family. He expected to continue to live in his family’s house after the wedding and hoped for his future wife to align her needs and demands with those of the other members of the household. Recalling Chao’s strong sense of obligation and comparing it with Pei-chun’s plans for the future, it appears that the moral principles of xiao are still very influential in both China and Taiwan, even though the two societies have been exposed to very different political ideologies and socio-economic transformations in the last sixty years. Certainly, both Chao and Pei-chun were concerned about meeting their duties towards their parents and in both cases their strong sense of filiality had direct influence on social interactions outside of their family environment. However, the structural differences of the two localities become much more pronounced if we take a closer look at how filial piety is actually practiced. In China, obligations seem to have been adjusted to the changing economic and demographic landscapes of the country. Chao’s parents, like those of many other informants, agreed to an at least temporary (but nevertheless long-term) separation from their child in order to enable him to establish a career in the

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cities. The aspect of seeking success in life appeared to outweigh the obligation to be physically present (cf. Johnston 2013). In Taiwan, as Pei-chun’s case demonstrates, filial obligations were interpreted in a comparatively conservative way by parents and children; physical presence and assistance in old age were perceived as being at least as important as financial assistance. The reasons for this apparent traditionalism might lie in Taiwan’s smaller size and comparative affluence that allowed children to stay closer to parents even in cases where this was economically disadvantageous. Even though the two young men grew up in distinctively different environments, Chao in a rural Chinese village and Pei-chun in the urban environment of Taipei, they seemed to be equally determined to meet the obligations of xiao and, what is more, appeared to perceive their moral self-worth as closely tied to their ability to demonstrate filial care.

Building a moral reputation by meeting the standards of xiao – morality in the classroom and beyond Numerous studies in developmental psychology and anthropology have found that parenting in the Chinese cultural context shows a dominant concern for social conduct (Stafford 1995; cf. Fung 1999; Fung and Chen 2001; Fong 2004; Kuan 2015). Luo and colleagues argue that ‘a main developmental goal held by Chinese parents is for young children to internalize and follow the social norms of their cultural community’ (Luo, Tamis-LeMonda and Song 2013:  845). They stress that the values parents impart to their children are closely oriented towards traditional Confucian virtues such as respect for social hierarchies, academic vigilance and modesty. In daily conversations, they claim, Chinese parents ‘convey more knowledge about social norms, proper behaviours, and social relationships [. . .] than do Western parents’ (2013: 853). Moreover, several studies found that Chinese mothers pay closer attention to relational context when explaining complex concepts than Western mothers (i.e. using more verbs than nouns), which might point to a stronger emphasis on values around interdependence (Gelman and Tardif 1998; Chan, Brandone and Tardif 2009). Pei-chun’s

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description of his filial responsibilities as emanating from his mother’s action (giving him the better bread), which induce him to return the favour in the form of care in the future might index this relational perspective from which obligations of xiao are perceived. The stress on interdependency, Fung and colleagues suggest (1999; 2001; 2003), is also evident in the teaching of moral behaviour. Various studies indicate that emotions of guilt and shame play an important role in the self-regulation of behaviour in childhood (cf. Tomasello and Vaish 2013:  247–249). However, based on longitudinal comparative research, Fung and colleagues argue that the socialization of shame takes a particularly important role in the internalization of moral rules in Confucian-influenced societies. They observed that compared with American parents, Taiwanese and Hong Kong parents dealt with misconduct by referring to the negative reactions it elicited from others, thereby provoking feelings of inferiority and incompetence in their children, rather than explaining wrongdoing by directly alluding to abstract rules of behaviour. Hence, from an early age, children are made aware of the relational context their actions are embedded in and are induced to feel shame when their behaviour does not conform to the morals their position within the group dictates (Fung 1999; Fung and Chen 2001; Fung, Lieber and Leung 2003). Indeed, many informants told me of memorable experiences of severe shame and guilt, mostly connected to the disappointment of parental expectations. The fear of reliving such emotional turmoil also appeared to prompt my informants to avoid situations that could put their moral self-image as well as their filial reputation at further risk. The young Taiwanese Pei-chun recalled how a personal failure during adolescence that coincided with a tragic loss came to serve him as motivational force to realize his filial duties. During his time at junior high school, Pei-chun did not invest much effort in his studies and preferred spending time on the basketball court with his friends. ‘I didn’t have any ideals. My grandfather told me when I  was young:  “You have got to be an engineer.” He thought that it was a good job with a good wage.’ Yet, at that time, Pei-chun was far from realizing his grandfather’s dream. Due to his poor performance, he had just been assigned to a special class for lowachieving students which, he complained, led to him falling behind the curriculum even further. As a consequence, he failed several entrance examinations that would have granted him access to a

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senior high school or junior college. At the same time, Pei-chun’s father died suddenly of an aneurysm. Overnight, Pei-chun felt the responsibility for the remaining members of his family as the only son resting on his shoulders. ‘When I  lost my father I  knew that I was the one to take care of my family,’ he remembered, ‘I thought that I had to study to get a good degree so that I could find a good job easily. My mother was very sad and felt helpless. She was afraid of the future as she feared that the money would not be enough to pay for our education. She felt very scared.’ Curiously, Pei-chun described the death of his father as the decisive event that fuelled his determination to achieve academic success. In our conversations, he expressed how his feelings of guilt for burdening his mother additionally with his academic failure fuelled his decision to study as hard as he could to be accepted into a vocational college. When I asked Pei-chun’s mother about her hopes for her children’s future, she insisted that her only wish was for them to finish their education. She wanted to spare them the difficulties she had experienced in lowskilled jobs due to her limited education. As a young woman she had worked long hours as a maid and then worked in a low-skilled factory job during Taiwan’s economic boom in the 1970s. All the time, she financially supported her parents in the countryside. She thus wanted to provide her children with better opportunities for the future than she had as a young woman. Hence, disappointing his mother’s expectations during the emotionally stressful time of his father’s death might have augmented Pei-chun’s feelings of inferiority and fuelled his wish to compensate for this perceived failure through academic diligence. In traditional Confucian thought, the pursuit of knowledge is considered a moral virtue which might require the willingness to make personal sacrifices; academic success is hence also believed to give some indication of an individual’s moral character (Li 2005; Kipnis 2009; Li 2014: 179). The interconnection between filiality and academic excellence is actively reinforced by schools. Hansen observed during her fieldwork at a rural Chinese high school that extracurricular motivational lectures encouraged teenagers to acknowledge their personal moral responsibility towards parents and to express filiality by rejecting any leisure activities or interpersonal relations that might obstruct their academic performance (2015: 141). Moreover, recalling experiences at school, many young Chinese and Taiwanese reported that being a high-achieving student

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was not only a way to express filiality, but often also translated into being popular with peers. Parents encourage their children to socialize with good students, not only because they hope that their achievements might serve as motivation, but also since high achievers are believed to have overall higher moral standards (cf. Hansen 2015: 59–60). Failure in class accordingly had far-reaching consequences for one’s own and one’s family’s reputation and was often referred to by informants as intensely shameful. The intensity of Pei-chun’s experience of guilt following his misconduct in adolescence became clearer when I  realized that moral conduct was also an important aspect in the definition of his self-image as a friend. When I  accompanied him to activities with his friends, I  observed that he was highly attentive to their opinions and needs that he showed by taking care that nobody was disadvantaged in common decisions, that none of his friends got lost on night market visits and by listening closely in discussions. He was appreciated for his modest and considerate behaviour and, not shunning away from responsibility, often seemed to be the one entrusted with being in charge of common activities. The role as a carer and benevolent authority he took within his family thus seemed to be extended into other areas of his social life. Chao, the young Chinese student introduced in the beginning, shared similar fears of disappointing his parents that motivated him also to excel in his academic career. At the same time, he was eager to prove his moral character by repaying what he perceived as his personal debt to the Communist Party. Chao remembered that in secondary school he found it more difficult to defend his place at the top of the class and was tormented with fears of disappointing his parents as well as the teachers who supported him. When Chao’s mother could not supervise his homework any longer, his maternal uncle, who happened to be a teacher at his junior high school, assumed a mentoring role. ‘He is a very important person in my life,’ Chao explained, ‘he helped me, but also put a lot of pressure on me. As a child, I was very afraid of him.’ Chao thus worked diligently, not only in the classes his uncle taught, but also in those taught by other teachers as he knew that his uncle would ask them about his performance. Moreover, Chao strove for academic success not only to meet his direct filial obligations to his parents, but, also to fulfil his duties as a moral citizen. One of Chao’s major sources of inspiration and

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advice was a brother of his paternal grandfather who had worked as a manager of a state factory for several decades. He often stressed that it had been thanks to the land reform that the CCP initiated in the early 1950s that the family had been able to build up a safe existence. ‘Even though he never told me directly,’ Chao explained, ‘I knew that he wanted me to work for the government.’ He thus conceived the fulfilment of his older relative’s aspiration not only as part of his extended filial duties, but also as his obligation towards the Party and was willing to make significant personal sacrifices for its realization. Chao had always been an ambitious student and was usually the first in the classroom in the mornings, eager to learn and to assist his classmates. His diligence and reliability was recognized early by his teachers and peers and he was not only asked to become a member of the Young Pioneers of the CCP before his classmates, but was even promoted to be a team leader shortly afterwards. Chao enjoyed taking responsibility and organizing events and eventually became the school leader of the youth group (cf. Woronov 2008). At high school, Chao was suggested for membership of the CCP due to his successful engagement as an organizer of sports tournaments. Chao was proud of his party membership and continued to take his social engagements seriously. At the time we met, he was head of the student’s association and I got an impression of his sense of duty when during the first cold autumn days, the heating in the female dormitory broke and students were complaining about the cold. Despite his tight schedule he immediately inspected the heating and wrote a letter of complaint to the responsible university unit. When the problem was still not fixed a few days afterwards, he planned to complain to the next higher instance, anxious not to disappoint his peers’ expectations of him. Likewise, I  observed that he assumed an almost paternal role in his circle of friends. When we were out together, he was the one asked for advice on academic and personal matters and was also relied on to decide where to meet or what to do. It seemed as if Chao’s academic ambitions and strong work ethic that mainly originated from a deep sense of moral obligation towards his parents also affected the perception his peers and superiors held of him as a trustworthy partner. This was also confirmed in the reactions of his superiors at university. Having proven himself a diligent and reliable student, he had been assigned a position by his supervisor

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to assist him in an important research project that Chao grew increasingly passionate about. He wanted to be able to contribute to the common good with his future work, he emphasized, and this job was already giving him a chance to apply his studies for an important cause. Being moral, in Chao’s eyes, did not only mean meeting the obligations of xiao but, driven by a sense of duty to repay the party for the assistance his family received several generations before, he also aimed at reciprocating to the state. As his promotion through the ranks of the Communist Youth League illustrates, being a promising future member of the CCP was closely tied to academic diligence, an important component of filial piety. However, with the rising discourse on the state-supported concept of population quality (suzhi) in the post-Mao era, academic achievement took on an even more central role not only as a means to social mobility, but also as an indicator of an individual’s moral character (Anagnost 2004; Kipnis 2006; Woronov 2009). Academic attainment but also, as Fong (2007) illustrates, more conservative kinds of morality of Confucian origin and patriotism have become markers of high moral quality. Chao’s academic achievements made in the framework of xiao hence not only reflected on his moral reputation as a caring child, but also contributed to his attainment of ideal moral personhood as defined by the state and thus granted him access to promising opportunities in the Party and his professional career.

Being moral, but not being too moral – managing moral reputation through self-restraint In modern societies where interactions with strangers are ubiquitous, Baumard and Sperber (2012) note, gathering information on an individual’s moral character has become increasingly difficult and complex; relying on his or her reputation is often the only way to establish cooperative relationships. Reputation management, in particular the ability to anticipate how one’s actions are perceived by others and which reactions they will elicit in return, has thus assumed unprecedented importance (2012: 510–511).

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In China and Taiwan, teaching children to protect their own as well as their family’s moral reputation has traditionally been a major concern of parents (Hu 1944: 50–51). This is also reflected in interactions between mothers and their children. Chen and McCollum found, for example, that Taiwanese mothers try to convey to their young children an understanding of other persons’ perspectives in order to teach them how to maintain harmonious relationships whereas this is not a priority for European-American mothers (2000; 2001). However, while a certain sensitivity to the perspectives of others is certainly helpful in navigating social relationships, preserving one’s moral reputation requires simultaneously the ability to refrain from actions that might provide a momentary benefit but would have detrimental consequences (Tomasello 2014b: 191). Moreover, as Wong illustrates in this volume, the regulation of personal desires does not only serve the purpose of reputation management, but is also an important aspect in furthering family coherence in times of economic and emotional hardship. It is thus not surprising that selfrestraint belongs to the essential skills Chinese parents try to convey to children at a young age (Zhou et al. 2004). Above I have suggested that the early socialization of the emotion of shame has effects on young people’s observation of their filial duties by restraining personal desires in early adulthood. In the following, it will be demonstrated how self-regulation practiced within the context of xiao engenders certain expectations about a person’s moral behaviour in non-kin environments. Self-regulation enables people to adjust their behaviour to social standards and is considered to contribute positively to an individual’s integration into the social environment (Baumeister and Vohs 2007: 115). The ability to defer their personal needs for a higher good appeared to be very pronounced in the cases of Chao and Pei-chun. Chao, from primary school onwards, invested much effort in presenting himself as a diligent student and a reliable peer in political youth groups. Moreover, he participated in numerous extracurricular events and undertook time-consuming organizational roles, which he had to integrate into his rigorous study regime. From a young age, Chao had thus aligned his personal aspirations with those of his parents and the more overarching ideals promoted by the Chinese concept of suzhi. He had declared his goal to realize his family’s ambitions for him of a position in central government,

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not only to reach financial stability but also to reciprocate for past favours received from the Party. Even though he often appeared to be overworked and stressed when we met, he never complained about his austere life on campus and the responsibilities resting on him. Yet, even though highly regarded by his classmates, his reputation as model student appeared to cause insecurities in his peers. During gatherings with his classmates, I  sensed that some of his friends were fearful of not meeting the high standards Chao applied not only to academic work, but also to his notions of fairness and conscientiousness. I was directly involved in one of these situations. A few months into my research, I asked Chao if I could make a trip with him to his home village to visit his parents. He immediately made extensive plans of a tour not only to his village, but also to the village of one of his classmates. The young woman looked anxious and questioned the practicality of his plans that involved long preparations. She did not seem happy about the prospect of touring around Hebei with Chao and me, yet still she agreed, seeing how eager Chao was to help me. I did not press for the realization of the plan after having noticed how uncomfortable she was with it. Yet, it gave me an impression of the way Chao interacted with others in the planning of common activities. That his attitude towards his duties was considered slightly exaggerated by his peers was also evident from their teasing side remarks. When he was invited by a former teacher to deliver a speech to high school students on how to succeed in academia, the same young woman he obliged to participate in our trip teasingly called Chao, ‘teacher’s pet’ (pai ma pi), which he instantly vehemently denied. However, it was undeniable that Chao set the moral bar high and might have intimidated those who were not willing to sacrifice equally to fulfil the ideal of a model son, student and citizen. Unlike Chao, Pei-chun pursued his personal interests as a young teenager and neglected his school work. However, the death of his father and his ensuing failure in an important exam constituted a turning point after which he placed his individual desires second. Pei-chun demonstrated this when he set back his interest in sports to study for his examinations. He attained such a high score that he was admitted to a top university and could eventually fulfil his grandfather’s wish for him to become an engineer. Later, he

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refrained from a more rewarding career abroad to be present in the family household. Pei-chun was also prepared to make emotional sacrifices to realize his filial duties: he terminated the relationship with his first serious girlfriend as she did not get  along with his mother and selected his future wife under the premise that she harmonized with his family. While the moral reputation Chao built up, mostly due to his careful consideration of xiao and his striving for high suzhi, opened doors to potential professional opportunities at university in Beijing and in the Communist Party, Pei-chun’s moral reputation had its most decisive effect on his private life. A few months after we met, he proudly told me that he had found a girlfriend and that they were already planning to marry and talked about having children. When he introduced the young woman to me she reported with a beaming face that she had long searched for a man exactly like Pei-chun. She did not only appreciate his diligent work ethic, that provided him with a stable job in Taiwan’s high-tech industries, but also valued that he was very family-oriented. Pei-chun had already introduced her to his family, unusually soon by Taiwanese standards, which had conveyed on their relationship an official status. However, as it turned out later, the two disagreed about Peichun’s plan to live with his family after their planned marriage. She would eventually arrange a compromise with him in which they lived in a separate apartment but spent every weekend at his family home. He told me later on that she had refused to move into his family household, worried that as a daughter-in-law she would have to conform to the high filial standards Pei-chun applied to himself. From this follows that self-restraint and diligence, learnt through the concept of filial piety, can positively contribute to an individual’s moral reputation in social contexts such as friendship, courtship and the educational environment. Yet, if these values are advocated beyond normative standards, too much pressure is evoked on other actors to conform in a way that might require a measure of selfrestraint that is perceived unacceptable. This was palpable in the hesitation Chao’s friend showed when he pressured her to join us on a trip as well as Pei-chun’s girlfriend’s reluctance to move into the same household with his family. A ‘subtle balance of expectations and commitments’ as Sperber and Baumard (2012:  508) term it, must thus be maintained for cooperation, in this case in friendship as in marriage.

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Conclusion The concept of filial piety conveys moral values and behavioural standards that are not only important to maintain relationships with parents, but also to manage moral reputation in interaction with individuals and groups beyond the family. For this reason, parents take great care in cultivating adherence to xiao and sensitivity to the social consequences of norm-violating behaviour in children from an early age. Moreover, this chapter has illustrated that the concept of xiao, while conveying basic ethics that are important to be accepted as a trustworthy cooperator in both societies, has been adjusted to the specific social environments of China and Taiwan. In China, xiao transmits the ethical principles that assist an individual in navigating the duties of a single child as well as the ideological landscape of the communist one-party state. In Taiwan, it tends to induce young adults to shelve personal aspirations for a more autonomous life to meet the moral expectations of a society that for various political and socio-economic reasons retains more traditional Confucian family values. Chao’s pursuit of educational achievements was initially motivated by the obligations he felt towards his parents and older relatives to make a career as a government official. Yet, with his striving for academic success he was simultaneously responding to the state’s call on its citizens to raise their individual ‘quality’ (suzhi) (Kipnis 2006: 296). His early admittance into the CCP due to his demonstration of high suzhi had thus indirectly been enabled through his strong sense of filiality. Among his friends, he gained the reputation of a reliable partner with high moral standards that would put his obligations as a friend above his personal needs. At the same time, however, his fierce demonstration of xiao and patriotism exerted significant pressure on his peers who feared that Chao would apply the same standards towards them in cooperative projects. As a consequence, his friends quietly withdrew from overwhelming demands. This illustrates that the ‘cooperation market’, as Sperber and Baumard note, ‘selects not for just any kind of morality, but for fairness’ (2012: 508). Pei-chun’s demonstration of filiality had less direct consequences on his moral reputation as a citizen, which in the political context of Taiwan might not be as closely connected to social status and

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moral reputation as in Chinese society, but was more influential in his search for a wife. Pei-chun’s conscientious performance of xiao after his father’s premature death had not only provided his family with a sense of safety, but also bolstered his reputation as a family-oriented and diligent young man within the framework of the more traditional notions of filiality held by Taiwanese society. For many young Taiwanese women, this was an important attribute in a potential husband as all too often, they complained to me, they were missing a sense of sincerity and commitment in their partners. His girlfriend and future wife was not only expecting a financially secure future. Moreover, she had also been attracted by Pei-chun’s sense of commitment with which she expected him to assume his obligations as a father and husband. However, she became insecure when she realized that his loyalties towards his natal family would remain stronger than those to her even after the wedding. Only when Pei-chun agreed to cut back on his filial obligations and promised to move into an own apartment with her, was she willing to marry him. From this follows that strategic reputation management also requires sensitivity to know just how much filiality can be expressed. Pei-chun’s case shows that a too vigorous expression of filiality can be perceived as favouring natal family members at the cost of others. Likewise, Chao’s example shows that being driven by overtly moral ideals might compromise one’s suitability as a reliable partner in the eyes of those who fear being held to equally strict moral standards. Moreover, as the two case studies suggest, the societal environment plays a major role in how filiality is perceived. In China, filiality expressed through academic diligence and general trustworthiness contributes to meeting the standards of ‘population quality’ (suzhi) and can help advance private friendships as well as a political career up to a certain degree. In Taiwan, where notions of filiality tend to imply more conservative expectations like post-marital cohabitation and physical assistance in old age, conflicts of loyalty can easily occur especially in romantic relationships. That is, while a certain degree of altruism expressed towards family members seems to be beneficial to an individual’s overall moral reputation in both contexts, too much of it can potentially undermine relationships outside of the natal family. These two cases not only convey an understanding of how filial piety influences young men’s moral reputation in diverse spheres

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of their social lives, but also illustrate how the concept of xiao is connected to the different ideological and economic landscapes of China and Taiwan. In China, the filial duty of academic diligence is closely connected to the concept of population quality (suzhi). Paradoxically, while Confucian moral thought had been attacked during the Mao era, it is now instrumentalized in the realization of a state-informed ideal of moral quality and is decisive in achieving access to positions of power in politics and the economy (Kipnis 2011: 144–145; cf. Hansen 2015: 71–78). In Taiwan, where the KMT government has supported the teaching of Confucian thought in schools in order to Sinicize the Taiwanese population in the first decades of their regime, the importance of filial piety has not experienced any contestation by the state (Fetzer and Soper 2013:  48). Further, specific infrastructural and demographic aspects contributed to closer family coherence and a more traditional stance to filial duties in Taiwan compared to in China (Cornman, Chen and Hermelin 2003; Whyte 2004; Chu, Xie and Yu 2011). For these reasons, expectations of parents might at times be more difficult to reintegrate with young people’s aspirations for independence. The maintenance of a moral reputation thus tends to involve considerable emotional and lifestyle sacrifices. Compared with young informants in Beijing who often lived distanced from parents, the filial expectations of Taiwanese parents could often undermine an individual’s moral reputation with potential marriage partners and affines. However, no matter whether it concerned private, academic or political matters, in all cases the social environment evaluated the young men’s suitability as cooperative partners by their likeliness to reciprocate; a central moral component of the teachings of xiao. It thus seems likely that filial piety in Chinese societies is one of those culturally specific concepts that are decisive in the learning process of the social competencies enabling cooperation (Sperber and Baumard 2012: 513; Tomasello and Vaish 2013: 250). Learning to be a good cooperator through xiao thus also means recognizing the limits of one’s obligations as a filial son in order to be able to transfer the same sense of loyalty and conscientiousness to other forms of social interactions beyond the parent–child relationship.

CHAPTER FOUR

Harmony ideology in Chinese families: Cooperating despite unfairness Magdalena Wong

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have suggested that humans, more than any other primate species, are especially cooperative. People cooperate intuitively for mutual advantage and also to benefit themselves in partner selection processes, something that can be said to benefit the species as a whole on an evolutionary level (Baumard, André and Sperber 2013; Rand and Nowak 2013; Tomasello and Vaish 2013; Tomasello 2014). According to experimental research, a fairness principle, which roughly means a fair distribution of costs and benefits among partners, is upheld when people engage in joint activities. This sense of fairness is considered to be innate and is critical for sustaining relationships: ‘The cooperation market selects not for just any kind of morality, but for fairness’ (Sperber and Baumard 2012: 508). Almost all of the relevant theories and empirical studies focus on cooperation in non-kin contexts. Presumably, individuals who are closely related are more likely to cooperate. However, this

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chapter will ask whether people in a tightly organized kin group or family do – at a conscious level – perceive their daily interactions as ‘cooperation’. If so, do they cooperate using the same principles and manners that evolutionary psychologists have suggested operate between non-kin members, and in particular is the concern with fairness paramount? This chapter situates cooperation in the domain of kinship and also reflects on the concept of ‘mutuality’ in Chinese culture, as will be explained below. My analysis is mainly based on fifteen months of participant observation fieldwork in the city of Nanchong, Sichuan Province, from September 2013 to December 2014. I  revisited the field in August and September 2015, during which time I  raised more specific inquiries to my informants on the subject of cooperation. From my findings, I  propose that cooperation among family members indeed does invoke considerations of fairness. However, while the mutualistic model of cooperation suggests that humans cooperate when benefits match or outweigh the costs, I  advance the idea that a deeper form of cooperation that impels people to cooperate despite a recognition of unfairness governs kinship in China (and arguably also in other regions). This phenomenon, in the Chinese context, should be understood in relation to the ideology of harmony (hexie). My study shows that fairness is not the only basis of cooperation; the yearning for harmony despite unfairness often takes precedence in kin relationships. Many people I met are hesitant to use the word hezuo, the general translation of cooperation in the Chinese language, to describe their daily activities that are obviously for joint purposes and of a cooperative nature. This may not be too different from English-speaking families, where people might use the words ‘helping out’ or ‘working together’ in their daily acts and offerings to their close ones, more often than the word ‘cooperating’. What is specific in China is that these acts and offerings are underscored by a strong ideology of harmony. Indeed, the teachings of harmony are so entrenched that people willingly cooperate even when they consider things to be unfair for them personally. There is a strong tendency to conciliate and sometimes even sacrifice one’s self-interest when conflicts arise. In contrast to the ‘harmony ideology’ examined by Laura Nader (1990) in her work on the Talean Zapotec of Mexico, Chinese people do not opt for a third party, such as the court for the Taleans, to settle disputes and to seek justice. Instead, harmony is achieved by restraint and

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self-regulation. As a result, what Nader calls ‘coercive harmony’ is not obvious in the case of China – at least within a family context. The will to reconcile disagreement and restore harmony is largely voluntary. Nevertheless, the ideology of harmony, which dictates these voluntary and seemingly autonomous decisions, can also have a hegemonic and controlling effect (see Nader 1997). People are compelled to cooperate so as to maintain peace and the unity of the family, sometimes despite a strong sense of unfairness.

The ubiquity of cooperative exchange in families Cooperation, taken in the broadest sense, means ‘behaviours which provide a benefit to another individual (recipient) or are beneficial to both the actor and the recipient’ (Melis and Semmann 2010: 2663). It is not hard to categorize daily activities in a household as cooperative interactions, the most obvious evidence of which is the division of labour. In Nanchong, as in China overall, a typical family has three members: a married couple and a child. Although the wife usually also holds down a job, the husband is considered the primary breadwinner. The wife is ultimately responsible for domestic duties, but it is common for the husband to share various household tasks such as cooking and cleaning. Many couples have support from their parents or in-laws, who may not live under the same roof, but take care of their grandchild and even help out with domestic work. Intergenerational support is the norm in Nanchong. When the elderly need support as they age, children are expected to reciprocate for the care they received in childhood (see Remmert’s discussion of filial piety in this volume). These are the most fundamental acts of cooperation in Chinese families. But do people consider this division and exchange of duties as cooperation, per se? Over the course of my second visit to Nanchong, I spoke to a total of eighteen informants on the subject of intra-familial cooperation whenever I  had the opportunity to do so. Whereas cooperation is clearly inherent in family life, at least some people resist using the word hezuo  – the most common translation of cooperation in Chinese (he, ‘together’, zuo, ‘do’) – to describe those essentially cooperative behaviours. Furthermore, I found that fairness is not a

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conscious principle underlying cooperative behaviour in families; instead, cooperation despite a sense of unfairness is considered necessary among close kin. A family can only thrive and advance towards common goals if members cooperate without regard for fairness. I give two brief examples below. I asked a couple in their late twenties, Fang and Kuo, if their family lives could be described as a form of cooperation. Kuo, the wife who has a spontaneous temperament, said immediately, ‘No, family life cannot be called cooperation.’ She explained that the idea of cooperation sounds goal-oriented (you mudi xing) and calculating (suanji): it could be applied in business and social contexts, but not in familial relationships. Fang, a thoughtful man, agreed with his wife, but added a caveat: ‘In fact, cooperation exists in family life, in terms of division of work such as the husband having primary responsibility for making money and the wife taking care of household chores; but we don’t call it cooperation, which sounds utilitarian (liyi xing) and purposeful.’ For him, cooperative behaviours within a family are natural, voluntary, and ‘ought-to-be’ (yinggai de). I then asked them if a concept of fairness could be used to describe how family members divide their work and interact with one another. As expected, the answer was a resounding ‘no’ from both of them:  should fairness be required, it would lead to constant conflicts among members and disharmony (bu hexie), followed by an eventual breakdown of the family. This acquiescence to the overall well-being of the family can be summarized by the five colourful Chinese characters embroidered on a piece of cloth, displayed in a frame on the wall in the entrance of their home: jia he wan shi xing, which means ‘ten thousand things prosper when a family is harmonious’. I discussed the same topic with another couple, Zhao and Ting. They own a 24-hour internet café business, which is basically run by Zhao, the husband. Ting has a full-time light-duty office job. She takes their nine-year-old daughter to school in the morning before going to work. Zhao picks up the daughter at noon and all of them will return home for lunch, which is prepared by Zhao’s mother. The old woman is seventy-two years old and stays nearby with her elder son’s family. She prepares breakfast for the elder son’s threemember family, comes to the younger son’s home to prepare lunch, does some washing and cleaning, then goes back to the elder son’s around 4:00 pm, which would give her just enough time to prepare a simple dinner.

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Zhao buys vegetables and meat at the market nearby; he usually picks up their daughter in the late afternoon also. The couple have a shared bank account that is transparent to both. Major decisions and purchases of high-value items for the family are made jointly. Apart from sharing the financial responsibility, Ting is solely responsible for their daughter’s education, which is usually construed as a huge responsibility in Chinese families especially in the one-child policy era. She would review classwork with their daughter every night, send her to a music class, develop her hobbies, and arrange different activities for her during the weekends and school holidays. Zhao’s mother looks quite frail and her hair has turned grey; her movements are very slow, though steady. She moved from her rural home to stay with her two sons after her husband passed away several years ago. I  asked Zhao and Ting a few times if they felt uneasy having the old woman perform so much hard labour. They expressed that this was not ideal, but everyone had much to tend to in the family. They seemed to share Fang’s view that parents ‘ought to’ give assistance to children, and they would surely do the same for their own daughter and son-in-law in the future. Zhao’s old mother does not, in my view, look like a happy woman. My sense is that her unhappiness is not so much about her own welfare, but about the relationship between her son and daughter-in-law. The couple always quarrel because Zhao gambles every day. Zhao told me he and Ting have no common interests and they always disagree with each other. On the subject of cooperation, however, they have a similar mindset. Though I spoke to them separately, both considered cooperation intrinsic to family life and  – unlike the informants described above  – said that the term ‘cooperation’ (hezuo) could be aptly used to describe it. Both quoted a Chinese proverb to depict metaphorically the ideal state of spousal cooperation – ‘The husband sings and the wife echoes [fuchang fusui)]’  – implying that the couple had discussed this subject before. Zhao said that he would be happy to echo or to follow Ting if she were sensible and capable, but she was not. Ting admitted that she was more in control in the family because her husband did not want to lead, yet he refused to cooperate with her (bu genwo hezuo). For example, Ting is interested in investing in small building projects; but Zhao prefers to engage in other business such as trading seasonal fruits and rearing chickens. As a result of their diverging efforts and non-cooperation, none of the

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side-businesses work out profitably. They both describe their state of cooperation as mediocre and superficial. Despite the disharmony, they choose to stay together because of their daughter. Also, as Ting said, disputes between husband and wife should not last more than one night.

Isn’t family a ‘cooperative performance’, disregarding reasons and fairness? Among the eighteen informants (ten women and eight men) I spoke to about cooperation in Nanchong, opinions were divided on whether or not the term cooperation, or hezuo, was appropriate in a familial context. The responses given were very decisive and matter-of-fact: almost everyone agreed that the principle of fairness was not relevant in interactions within families. Those who rejected the notions of cooperation and fairness would try to convince me by using a folk saying in China:  ‘Family is not a place to speak of reasons [jiangli], it is a place to speak of feelings [jiangqing].’ They seemed to be suggesting that cooperation and considerations of fairness lean on the rational rather than emotional side of human nature. For these people, it is almost trivial to label relationships in a family as cooperation, which connotes calculated means, even for mutual benefits; it hurts one another’s feelings if exchange-ofbenefits conversations are brought up. This rationale is echoed in Wu’s chapter (this volume), which deals with ‘interactional affection’ between close associates. Conversely, for those who endorse the use of the notion of cooperation in familial settings, a family simply cannot survive without cooperation. It is a simple fact that attendance to everyday duties requires cooperative effort. Furthermore, every family has its short-term and long-term goals, which can be achieved only if members work jointly towards them. A  rhetorical line offered by my informants is:  ‘Isn’t family (or marriage) a cooperative performance?’ (‘jiating [or hunyin] bujiushi yichang hezuo ma?’). Even so, it is hard for them to claim fairness in what they call a cooperative performance. Once fairness is demanded, conflict arises. It is impossible to consider fairness also because things such

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as effort, care and love, which are part and parcel of exchanges between family members, are neither quantifiable nor comparable. As articulated by a young informant in his twenties, family is not like a piece of land that can be divided between two persons according to some objective rules. It is one coherent unit, mutually owned and constructed by its members. Having had these conversations, I  came to the conclusion that pushing the vocabulary of ‘cooperation’ (hezuo) was not very useful. People concur that cooperation actually exists in families, but it is so natural that one does not necessarily call or see it as cooperation; it forms what many describe as an ‘unspoken contract’ (moqi) between family members. Like so many things, cooperation in a family is most noticeable when absent. Semantics aside, I find much consistency in the way cooperation is perceived and lived out in Chinese families. A key principle that guides cooperation is the concept of harmony: he (note this is a different Chinese character from the he in hezuo).

The Chinese cultural concept of harmony (he) The word he, used as a noun, means ‘mutuality’ (xiangying),1 harmony (xie),2 or ‘the sum’ in arithmetic. Used as a preposition, it means ‘and’, ‘with’, or ‘to’. As a verb, it means ‘to blend/ to mix’. It can be combined with many other characters to give meanings such as ‘smooth’ (heshun), ‘kind and easy’ (heshan), ‘cooperative’ (heqi), ‘peace’ (heping) and ‘a difficult relationship untangled with understanding’ (hejie). It may be seen that the use of the word implies mutual cooperation in every sense. This concept of cooperation was taught by Confucius: ‘The application of the doctrine of rites is to make harmony (he) a treasured value [lizhiyong, heweigui].’3 Another popular saying about harmony is offered by Mencius:  ‘Timing from heaven is less important than an earthly opportunity, an earthly opportunity is less important than harmony of people [tianshi buru dili, dili buru renhe].’4 The value of harmony is a rare concept, elaborated and prized by all the four schools of philosophy in China: Confucian, Taoist, Legalist and Buddhist (Huang 2005; Delury 2008). Huang (2005) relates

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harmony to an important Chinese philosophical concept:  ‘unity between men and nature [tianren heyi]’. For the sake of brevity, I  will simplify. This concept refers to a blissful state of being whereby the individual is liberated and becomes part of the ‘ten thousand things’ (that is, everything) in the cosmic world:  it is a cross-over between the limited self (youxian) and infinity (wuxian). The result is man’s harmony with nature, as well as harmony within himself, to form a seamless whole. According to Huang, this cosmic view is also extended to the social world, with family being the starting point. From an exhaustive search of Chinese proverbs and idioms related to harmony, Huang found that twenty-three out of sixty-three phrases were related to family relationships; quite a few of these were cited by my informants. Huang usefully observed that many of those proverbs and idioms contain a utilitarian promise to cooperators. The most common promise is prosperity:  ‘Ten thousand things prosper when the family is harmonious’ and ‘a disharmonious family means poverty to ten thousand generations [jia buhe, wanshi qiong]’. Some other mutual benefits are peace, safety and happiness. As many readers will know, the significance of harmony in Chinese culture can be observed in the recent political scene. President Hu Jintao used ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) as a strategic slogan for socialist China in 2006. Xi Jinping, Hu’s successor, said the following at a China International Friendship Conference in 2014: The concept of harmony is an important part of Chinese culture that has a long history and strong appeal. We believe in unity between man and nature, peace among countries, the approach of ‘agreeing to disagree’ [he er butong] and the good nature [he shan]of people [. . .] Peace [he] is most precious.5 This kind of political talk no doubt shapes Chinese public ideology and social discourse, but other social institutions are also influential. For example, the importance of cooperation permeates the content of a study manual that people have to read to qualify as marriage and family counsellors. The 620-page manual begins thus: People in families learn how to cooperate and to give – negotiate, care, get involved, make promises, take responsibilities  – this

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learned ability to cooperate and the giving mentality will be applied in society . . . that will lay the basic [lunli] foundation for a harmonious society and set the moral ground for a country that is ruled by law. (Zheng 2005: 1, my translation) With such a strong cultural, ideological heritage, it is no wonder that when people discuss the topic of cooperation, they will eventually bring up the word he, or hexie. The essence of harmony can be described as a mutual and harmonious coexistence of different beings as one unit. Many of my informants said that the gist and the challenge of cooperation is each member’s ability to accommodate and accept (baorong) others, even when inadequacy and inequity are detected in the relationship. This speaks of the mutuality of being that is implied in the philosophy of ‘unity between men and nature’. Understandably, this is not easy. Therefore, it cannot be expected from every type of relationship. The closer the relationship, the more important it is for people to baorong other members, and the more improper it is to demand fair distribution of benefits and costs. In Chinese culture, family is no doubt the starting point for practicing the art of harmony, which is supposed to be extended to the ways in which one relates to the country and cosmic universe. For average persons, harmony is all positive. However, harmony is notorious for being controlling and hegemonic. In the next section, I explore whether the ideology of coercive harmony, which is expanded in full length by the legal anthropologist Laura Nader (1990; 1997), applies to intrafamilial cooperation in China.

The ideology of coercive harmony Nader (1990) uses the term ‘harmony ideology’ to describe the social and cultural control that was exercised among the Talean Zapotec of Mexico. The region was under colonial and missionary influence for nearly five hundred years. The Taleans liked to bring disputes between individuals and between groups to court. Nader and her colleagues studied a total of 409 legal cases, which involved a wide range of conflicts and litigations. To give just a few examples, there were cases about stealing and cheating, adultery and wife-beating, homicide and property rights disputes. The study showed a strong motive for Taleans to go to court for conciliation

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and settlement, and the significant value the court placed on harmony and on achieving agreement between the principals in a case: ‘It is compromise arrived at by adjudication or, in some cases, adjudication arrived at by compromise’ (Nader 1990: 109). Nader observed that all the parties involved aimed at finding outcomes that would support the ideal of village harmony. She contended that this compromise model, or harmony tradition, stemmed from both Spanish and Christian origins, and had been used by the colonizers as a hegemonic tool to encourage harmonious rather than contentious behaviour. The Zapotecs gradually claimed as their own the Spanish proverb, ‘a bad agreement is better than a good fight’, and turned it into a counterhegemonic technique to avoid bringing cases to state courts. For the indigenous people, settlement at the village level was less costly and more predictable; for the rulers and judges, it meant easier management from within and also additional income from fines and penalties. Nader draws on comparative cases to show the hegemonic nature and controlling processes of this harmony ideology, mainly in postcolonial states, but also the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) movement in the United States (1990:  291–308; see also Nader 1997, 2001). The ideology of harmony in China, however, is not discussed. One reason for this could be that Nader’s expertise is on legal anthropology, and she has focused on the exercise of harmony ideology through third-party settlements. Nader (1990: 2) acknowledges that the basic components of harmony are the same everywhere:  ‘An emphasis on conciliation, recognition that resolution of conflict is inherently good and that the reverse – continued conflict or controversy  – is bad or dysfunctional, a view of harmonious behaviour as more civilized than disputing behaviour, the belief that consensus is of greater survival value than controversy.’ Nevertheless, there is a price to pay for harmony. Inherent in the social and legal system is not a concern for justice – ‘fault-finding and fact-finding are considerably played down’ – instead, reasoning is ‘directed toward future harmony rather than past misconduct’ (1990: 123). Nader’s viewpoint is very clear: The harmony ideology is ‘used as a mechanism for the transmission of hegemonic ideas’ whose primary function is ‘producing order of a repressive sort’ (1997:  715). Those in control, needless to say, are the people in power.

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The elements of conciliation, dispute settlement, peacemaking and consensus may all return to the notion of cooperation. The question worth exploring is whether the ideology of harmony, practiced in terms of cooperative behaviour in daily family lives, is in any sense controlling and coercive? I  follow Beyer and Girke (2015) in highlighting the importance of gathering an emic understanding of how natives conceive harmony, and how they reflect on their own cultural practices of ‘doing’ harmony. Looking back at the point I  made earlier  – that kinsmen feel compelled to cooperate despite a sense of unfairness  – it seems plausible that harmony practiced in family contexts may be coercive. But who benefits from the harmonizing process? According to classic Chinese teachings of harmony, it should benefit everyone in the family for generations. Then does it make the control a healthier and less coercive one? I will try to answer these questions through an ethnographic case.

‘Coercive harmony’ in the family of Guan The Guan household has six members living in a duplex flat: old Guan and his wife, their widowed daughter-in-law Shou, their two grandchildren born to Shou, and Shou’s boyfriend Lu, a hawker who sells ready-to-eat food on the street. Shou’s husband died in a car accident five years ago. About two years after the car accident, Shou and Lu developed a romantic relationship. Shou’s mother-inlaw told me, in unambiguous terms, that Shou and Lu had had an affair even before her son’s death. A neighbour who was close to the mother-in-law gossiped to me that the man died the same day that he saw his wife and Lu lying together on the sofa in the morning. This may be pure slander, because Shou and Lu gave me a totally different account of what happened on the day of the accident. Regardless, it might be imagined that the old woman would have nothing but misgivings and animosity towards the couple. However, by the time I met the family, Lu had moved into the Guan household without even marrying Shou. Had they been married, it would have been labelled an uxorilocal marriage, which is typically accepted only by relatively poor or disadvantaged men in Chinese society.

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Despite the fact that Lu and Shou are not married, one cannot help but see them as part of a family defined by ‘relatedness’. The six members of the Guan family live and eat together every day. Their routines reflect an intricate pattern of cooperation: the grandmother is responsible for breakfast and buying all groceries. Shou cleans and washes, and handles all utility bills. Lu prepares lunch, the most important meal for the whole family. Dinner is simple; it is prepared by either Shou or the grandmother, who takes food to Lu when they finish eating at home. The two women also cooperate by helping Lu’s business. Lu sells food on a street in the neighbourhood. He pulls his cart out around 4:30 every afternoon and does not return home until 11:30 pm. Lu has to prepare a lot of garlic and condiments every day, a laborious chore that he seems to loathe. Shou and her mother-in-law always help him peel cloves of garlic. Shou is a saleslady who works shifts and helps on the food stand when she is not at work. She always helps Lu ‘close the store’ and pull back the cart to a rented car park, a fifteen-minute walk away. They then have to take out all the leftover food and climb up to their home on the sixth floor. Shou told me that the business could not be managed by one person, which must be true, as other similar hawkers operated in pairs. Conflicts had arisen in the relationship since the day Shou announced to her in-laws their plan for Lu to move in. The in-laws asked what the couple were prepared to pay, which Lu considered to be mean and highly unwelcoming. They reached an agreement whereby Shou would pay a monthly fee of 600 RMB to cover the expenses for herself, Lu, and her two children. The grandmother often complained that the money did not even cover food costs, and she gave free childcare for the grandchildren. She did not mind taking care of the grandchildren who were her family members; however, Lu was an outsider. She told me Shou was crazy dating a man whom she had to subsidize and who did not want to marry her. The relationship between the couple had its ups and downs. Shou wanted to tie the knot legally, but Lu was reluctant. In times of conflict, Shou would tell me how stupid it was for her to stay with Lu, a man who seemed to treat their relationship instrumentally and who did not really love her. Believing that signs of love include generosity with one’s time and money, Shou found Lu exceptionally mean and selfish: he did not contribute to the living costs of 600 RMB and he never bought anything for her two children, whereas

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she would buy things for Lu’s son who stayed with Lu’s mother in a village (Lu’s wife ran away two months after giving birth to the child). Lu once arrived empty-handed at Shou’s mother’s birthday banquet, a big loss of face for Shou, and on another occasion, Shou’s daughter asked Lu to give her 200 RMB to buy a bicycle, but he refused. Fairness should be objective and calculable when money is the medium of exchange. In China especially, an offer of money can serve as an offer of everything that matters. In this case, Lu appears to be a free-rider, and is therefore not a good partner. Apart from preparing lunch, Lu is very aloof in the household. Lu actually knew that he was considered a free-rider, which he found very unfair. He did not need to stay in the house, but he did not want to upset Shou. He counted his emotional costs in the relationship, and the cost was dear  – he had to accept old Guan’s bad temper and indignation. The two men had two big quarrels, with the grandfather telling Lu to leave, until Shou and the grandmother intervened. The women sympathized with Lu for being a convenient target for the old man to vent his distress. Lu said that he had no right to say anything and therefore, no responsibility within the household. Lu continued to stay with the family and cooperate to the best of his abilities for the sake of shelter and a woman who loved him. The feeling of being loved is empowering. I saw Lu exuding a sense of masculine pride when he asked Shou to clean the house, help him with his garlic, or buy him a bottle of beer. He paid his obligatory price by preparing lunches and staying quiet, accepting disgrace on his part and absorbing the anger of the old man. Shou, on the other hand, stated explicitly that her relationship with Lu was unfair. However, she always became a contented, blissful woman when Lu behaved affectionately towards her, reflecting her genuine love for him. Love alone seems to be the prize that makes all costs and obligations worthwhile for Shou. It would be almost impossible for the grandmother to perceive the relationship between Lu and her family as fair. Despite her ill feelings about the circumstances of her son’s death, and Lu and Shou’s minimal contributions, she continued to cooperate nonetheless. I often saw the old woman sitting on a small bench on the floor, peeling garlic bulbs one by one for Lu. She would tell me with a resigned tone: ‘I have to help; he can’t handle everything on his own.’ One can only postulate that the old woman is cooperative

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because of her compassion for the family members, possibly including Lu, and because she has a will to push her family towards harmony. She genuinely wants the family to prosper and her two grandchildren to develop healthily with both a mother and a father figure. A few months before I  left the field, Lu’s value as a necessary partner in the household was realized when the old man suffered a stroke. From then onward, Guan could not walk without help. It was Lu who carried the old man up and down six flights of stairs from their home to the ground floor when needed. Guan’s son tried, but could only walk a few steps with his father on his back. Lu, the strong man, had finally become a worthy member of the Guan family. In my revisit to Nanchong about a year later, I saw that Guan was still quite immobile, but he could walk with some assistance. I  got a chance to ask him and Lu, on separate occasions, about cooperation. Lu, in his usual uncertain tone, replied that cooperation was necessary in a family because ‘family members have to work together to reach some common goals’. ‘So what are the common goals?’ I  asked. He said with greater certainty, ‘To improve the living of the family and to create a better future for children’, adding that this might be the most traditional answer I received but it was what he believed. As a matter of fact, I had heard the same ‘traditional’ answer from many others. Guan’s answer was even more illuminating. Being a doctor who practiced Chinese medicine, he drew on the theory of yin and yang to describe the complementary and therefore, cooperative role, between a man and woman. He also lectured me on the evolutionary fact that cooperation in a family context was essential for the human race to continue: men and women give birth and nurture their children, who carry on their family lines. On fairness, he said with a determined voice, ‘No, you cannot ask for fairness [gongping] in a family, but you can seek justice [gongzheng] and be reasonable [heli].’ He explained this by a principle of distributive justice and communal spirit: everyone is different and has different capabilities, so each should contribute what he or she could, with a good heart; things will then be just and proper for everyone. With a patriarchal tone, he emphasized that a family is an ‘indivisible unit’: everything within a family belongs to a ‘complete whole’ that cannot be divided, and members of a family should give generously and share everything they own. To divide

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would be to shatter the unit, which would make life difficult and meaningless for everyone. Guan expressed the communist and utopian goal  – ‘to each according to his ability and needs’  – and he emphasized the importance of keeping the family intact as a ‘complete whole’. This may explain why the old couple were receptive to Lu despite suspecting an affair between Shou and Lu before their son died, and the little financial contribution the young couple made. They knew too well that their grandchildren needed a mother and a father, and a family is better at peace than in conflict. Guan released his pent-up frustration and resentment from time to time, with Lu his target, but there were always limits to what he said and these never escalated to a point that would shatter the family’s coherence. Shou and her mother-in-law would mediate whenever necessary. Lu considered himself oppressed and silenced, the victim of Guan’s temper, but he continued to stay in the house and adjust his conduct in the family. Life went on in a cooperative mode as reflected in their daily routines. Lu, while not contributing financially to the family, was faithful in performing his role in cooking, absorbing the resentment from Guan, and showing just sufficient affection to Shou to keep her by his side. By the mutualistic approach to morality (Baumard, André and Sperber 2013), Lu tried his best not to be a free-rider so that he could continue to be a chosen partner. It is difficult to say whether or not the harmony achieved, or half-achieved, in the Guan family is coercive. All four adult members of the family would feel coerced to a certain extent, by forces embedded in the culture of harmony. Unlike the Talean Zapotecs, they do not need to bring their disputes to a third party for settlement. They could always make peace through their own consent, or ‘free will’, even though consent was constrained. The value of peace overrides a concern for fairness. According to Guan, justice (gongzheng) is pursued but ‘You cannot ask for fairness [gongping] in a family’. He could not give a perfect definition of the difference between fairness and justice, which in itself is a topic of intense intellectual debate. In elaborating the idea of ‘harmony ideology’, Nader always assumes the existence of hegemonic power and that the stronger is privileged in negotiating peace, so that ‘consensual social control was more likely an illusion that served special interests’ (1997: 719). This is reminiscent of Watson’s (1985) study of inequality, class and kinship in South China. Watson shows

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how a wealthy class of landlord-merchants emphasized the lineage ideals of brotherhood, sharing, equality and cooperation, but in practice dominated over the smallholder-tenants in local politics and economic activities. In my ethnographic case, I would imagine that Lu would agree with Nader in that Guan was the old patriarch who dominated and controlled the family’s welfare, while he was the subordinate. It would not be seen as such by the other members. Even Shou told me many times that her parents-in-law were kind and generous to them, and that Lu was the one ultimately in control because he would not agree to marry her. In this respect, Lu exercised his hegemonic power as a man; Shou had to submit to a form of repressive harmony in the relationship she valued so much. Regardless of this, my understanding is that all parties would prefer to opt into a practice of ‘doing’ harmony in their daily lives to ‘seek for an asymptotic path to peaceful coexistence and cooperation’ (Beyer and Girke 2015: 235). One may wonder if people such as Guan and Lu could find better alternatives. They could have argued more actively to seek better justice through fact-finding and negotiation, but this would certainly upset the peace, possibly resulting in departures and a broken family. Nader does not seem to have suggested any alternative ways for the Zapotecs to settle their disputes. As the Chinese always say in these circumstances, ‘there is no better solution [mei banfa]’. The ideology of harmony can at least maintain consensual control and harmony as ‘the natural order of things’ (Nader 1997:  723). The virtue of harmony, therefore, takes priority over that of fairness.

Conclusion In this chapter, I  have explored how the ideology of harmony acts as a control mechanism in regulating relationships and cooperative behaviours in Chinese families. Harmony is an ideal that foreshadows cooperation. This traditional ideology says that people in a unit are essentially different and that conflicts of interests are expected. However, for the mutual benefit of the whole unit as well as individual members, people need to compromise, set aside their differences, be self-sacrificing and achieve reconciliation. This enables the unit to maintain a state of harmony, thus benefitting everyone. In reality, not everyone enjoys the same level of benefit

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and the ideology of harmony may end up reinforcing an unjust distribution of power within the family, it is also likely to evoke grudges and feelings of entrapment among members, although it does achieve peace as the end result. Several chapters in this volume, such as those by Bell, Liu and Stanford, discuss how cooperation fails or how difficult it is for people to cooperate. Their ethnographic contexts are set outside the circle of close kin members. Remmert’s paper explores cooperation through the moral teachings of filial piety and intergenerational reciprocity. There is reason to believe that cooperation and genuine harmony are more achievable among close kin. The closer the blood relations and emotional ties, the harder it is for people to calculate costs and benefits and to count on fairness. The impulse to cooperate is strong and steadfast. I  am not arguing that the ideology of harmony alone is sufficient to keep family relationships on track, since many other factors may be significant. Psychologists Baumeister and Vohs (2007), for instance, emphasize the human capacity for self-regulation, which enables people to override their self-oriented motives to follow rules, match ideals, or pursue collective goals. My study elucidates that the desire for harmony can explain the human cooperative behaviour that seems naturally ingrained in family relationships. Fairness is still expected in human cooperation, but it is the willingness to cooperate despite unfairness, which sustains close kinship. The norms of harmony interact with the concern for fairness and often override it in Chinese families.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Cooperation in funerals in a patrilineal village in Jinmen (Taiwan) Hsiao-Chiao Chiu

The focus in this chapter is on a very particular kind of human cooperation: that entailed in putting on rituals. Under the framework of patrilineal-cum-Confucian ideologies, the scale and complexity of Chinese funerary rituals is meant to vary according to the status of the dead. The funerals of young people who die before their time are ritually less intricate and relatively poorly attended because the dead are thought to have failed in fulfilling their life obligations (to have children, to bury their parents, etc.). In contrast, the funerals of aged people are considered ‘white happy events’ that should entail elaborate rituals, a very large audience and banquets to thank the helpers and attendees, which together require a great cash outlay by ordinary households.1 This kind of expensive and elaborate funeral is still prevalent in contemporary Jinmen (a group of islands under Taiwan’s governance), especially in the patrilineal villages, where a patrilineal kinship group dominates most of a village’s population. During my fifteen months of fieldwork in Jinmen in 2013 and 2014, I attended six white happy events: five in the large patrilineal village where I  stayed and one in another smaller village. All the

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funerals involved a great deal of voluntary help from the bereaved families’ kin communities (unlike the heavy reliance on commercial providers of funerary services in urban Taiwan) and a large body of guests of different social positions including government officials and political personnel. Why do villagers prefer this kind of largescale funeral? What are the motives of the people of various statuses in their participation or cooperation in producing a satisfactory white happy event? Existing anthropological studies have noted the motives of certain actors to do or participate in funerals in particular ways. For example, in her study of revived funerary rituals in postreform China, Oxfeld (2004b) argues that the living hold the funeral in traditional ways to express their deeply internalized sense of moral debt to the dead and to confirm or establish a family’s status. Chau (2004) offers a broader discussion of the links between Chinese sociality and ritual organization by shifting analytical attention from the ritual-procedural aspects (which have long been the focus of anthropological studies of Chinese funerals) to the hosting aspects. The funerals that Chau observed in northern China are similar to those in Jinmen, both involving voluntary help from the villagers and banquets provided by the bereaved families to thank the attendants. Chau contends that the success of such funerals is grounded in the common characteristics of social organization present in both the ritual activities and the secular life of ordinary Chinese, such as volunteerism based on the principle of reciprocity and the symbolic weight placed upon the importance of being a good host. While these two studies are suggestive, they only touch on part of the human sentiments and relationships that may be present in the funerals. This chapter analyses Jinmen’s large-scale funerals that involve a large number of actors with divergent social positions by distinguishing three sets of cooperative relationships: 1 cooperation between parents and children; 2 cooperation between kin; and 3 cooperation between non-kin. This is helpful to explore the motives of various actors who together contribute to a successful funeral.

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In my analysis of the three cooperative relationships, I  will explore further the cultural mechanisms that ensure cooperation in the funerals, such as those noted by Oxfeld and Chau including the ideas of xiao (filiality or moral debt to parents; see also Remmert’s discussion in this collection), mianzi (status or reputation), reciprocity and hospitality. In addition, I bring in Sperber and Baumard’s (2012) thesis that combines evolutionary and cognitive approaches to examine the relationships between morality, reputation and human cooperation in the mortuary situation. Sperber and Baumard suggest a universal human ability of managing self-reputation, which sheds new light on the understandings of Chinese sociality and cooperation that have long been discussed with reference to the Chinese notions of mianzi, guanxi, reciprocity and so on. While the above mentioned cultural mechanisms might suggest a normative mode of behaving for Chinese people in funerals, this does not preclude an individual from thinking about or reacting to the ways that the funeral is conducted. In the later part of this chapter, by drawing on the analytical distinction between ethics and morals proposed by anthropologists (cf. Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Stafford 2010, 2013), I will discuss some instances of how the people of Jinmen reflect on the current expansive form of funeral. I  will show how this analytical distinction illuminates the contestation between the mode that is socially promoted and the mode that is personally judged as proper or good. The following discussion begins with a depiction of how white happy events are generally organized and conducted in contemporary Jinmen. It is succeeded by an analysis of the three kinds of cooperative relationships and the mechanisms that keep cooperation on track. Against the socially promoted large-scale white happy events, the third section provides some instances illustrating individuals’ ethical judgements but also their ambivalent feelings about making any modifications. Given that the aforementioned three kinds of cooperative relationships are also effective in the divergent contexts, the persistence of the grand funerals can be understood as a demonstration of people’s attempts to enhance those relationships that are especially important to everyday living in the intimate world of patrilineal community. The following description of a typical ‘white happy’ funeral for the elderly dead (i.e. those who had enjoyed a long life, had male

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offspring and finally passed away at home) in Jinmen is based on my observations of five funerals in a patrilineal village where I  stayed. However, on the basis of studies by local intellectuals (Yang and Lin 1997), I  contend that it reflects the common pattern for such events throughout Jinmen. Later I  separate the white happy event into several stages, summarizing the duties of the bereaved family and the involvement of kin and non-kin participants in each stage. Despite some differences in the details, the ritual-procedural aspects of the funerals in Jinmen are similar to those summarized by Watson (1988), which are largely based on the imperial neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi’s simplified version of funerary rites. Instead of the meanings of the funerary rituals, I  highlight the various tasks that suggest cooperation between different agents. I  also demonstrate the incorporation of the modern state’s westernized funerary etiquette and the official bodies in the funerals of ordinary households, and the abundant presence of commercialized funerary items (e.g. condolence gifts) that villagers acquired from Taiwan when their living standards generally improved from the 1980s onwards.

Before the occurrence of death It is generally believed among the people of Jinmen that it is good to end of one’s life at one’s native place. The customs require moving the dying person to the main area of the ancestral house where ancestral tablets are placed, laying out the person on a bed of boards supported by benches. Usually, no external assistance is needed at this moment but a group of experienced male villagers would keep an eye on developments. A difficult situation happened during my fieldwork, in which an elderly woman was requested to help clean and dress a dying lady who had been staying in the ancestral house for days. The female helper never expressed directly her fear of touching the dying body but she refused to attend a wedding banquet in that period, out of her self-consciousness and the villagers’ view of her association with something ‘unclean’. She nevertheless murmured to me that she had no other choice but to give her aid because she and the sick lady are the daughters-in-law of the same lineage branch.

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Upon the occurrence of death The bereaved family enters the period of shou ling (‘attending the soul of the dead’). The family members change into mourning clothes immediately, and sons and daughters-in-law in particular wait beside the corpse to avoid any inauspicious situations. They also go through a series of customs that continue up until the corpse is enclosed in the coffin and a soul tablet for the deceased is installed on a temporary altar set up in front of the coffin. They should then remain beside the coffin until the burial day, during which time the relatives and friends of the dead and the bereaved family come successively to pay respect to the dead by offering incense sticks before the temporary altar. The bereaved family relies on the experienced lineage men to contact the businesses selling funerary paraphernalia, such as coffins and mourning attire. Also, an important task at this moment is to choose the day for the formal funeral ceremony and burial. The bereaved family selects an auspicious date for burial according to folk beliefs (some dates are considered particularly good or bad according to the timing and date of the deceased’s birth) or on the basis of advice from a ritual specialist, and then ask for the permission and guidance of the main deity of the village temple. In present-day Jinmen, people tend to choose a date falling on the weekend in order to have more funeral attendees, especially guests who are public employees or work away in Taiwan or elsewhere.

Before the day of burial Various things must be done after the decision of the burial date, such as employing the ritual experts (usually Daoists) and music bands, formally sending the death notification to affines if the deceased is female, publishing the obituary notice in the local newspaper and preparing the mourning accessories for the funeral helpers and attendants. The bereaved family counts on their kin and neighbours for the above tasks as they should concentrate on their own mourning duties. There is evidently labour division between male and female helpers. The educated and experienced men assist in formal work

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such as arranging the ceremony and preparing the obituary notice for the newspaper. The practice of publishing obituary notices in the local newspaper was probably learned from Taiwan around the mid-1980s and has quickly become very popular in Jinmen. The obituary notice usually covers half of one newspaper page and consists of two lists:  one list of the zhisang weiyuanhui (a committee dealing with the funerary affairs) comprising the magistrate of Jinmen County and the department directors of the county government; the other list is of the deceased’s living spouse and siblings, and descendants by birth, adoption and marriage. The zhisang weiyuanhui is a nominal organization, not involved in the actual arranging of funerals. However, on the day of the formal funeral ceremony, the magistrate and local officials may attend the ceremony to pay respect to the dead. Women help with various tasks that appear more informal and private, but are essential to the satisfactory completion of a funeral. During the period of shou ling, the daughters-in-law of the deceased are discouraged from cooking as they are assumed to be too sorrowful to eat. It is fortunate if they can rely on their female relatives (usually the daughters-in-law of the same lineage branch) to prepare at least the daily dinner. This can be a tough job because the number of mourners during this period sometimes reaches forty or fifty and this can continue for one to two weeks. The village women, especially those who belong to the same lineage branch, also offer a helping hand in folding paper printed with Buddhist scriptures into the shapes of lotus flowers and yuanbao (gold ingots) that are eventually burned to help smooth the way of the deceased to xifang jile shijie (the Western Paradise) where the soul might go to avoid the endless cycle of reincarnation. This is also a new element imported from Taiwan in recent decades, and my elderly female informants appeared fond of and skilled at this practice. They usually do this work in the house of the bereaved family, where they spend one to two hours chatting with their female acquaintances and some members of the bereaved family. A  few days prior to the funeral ceremony, they gather together again to prepare the mourning cloth, face towels and auspicious red strings for the funeral participants. Such collaboration in the funerals is one channel through which village women build up and consolidate their affective relationships, though the sense of moral obligation is also pressing.

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Condolence gifts including elegantly designed pots of flowers, stylized piles of bottled or canned drinks, and scrolls with condolence messages from kin, friends, colleagues, local political figures and official bodies also arrive at the house of the bereaved family during this period. These are displayed outside the house and, in the eyes of the villagers, they are an evident mark of the mianzi of the deceased and the bereaved family (cf. Oxfeld 2004b: 975). The host family rewards the male helpers who assist in carrying the coffin and other funerary items on the burial day with tobacco wrapped in the mourning cloth prepared by the village women. On the eve of the burial, the host family also arranges a simple banquet for close kin and certain essential voluntary helpers to thank them for their support. In the past, the banquet used to be entirely dependent on the unpaid assistance of the host family’s female relatives and neighbours, but it is now prepared by the commercial catering services that appeared in Jinmen from the 1990s.

Upon the day of funeral ceremony and burial As the funeral ceremony is set to begin at noon, multiple preparations begin simultaneously from the early morning, all of which are carried out by kin with some assistance from paid professionals. These include digging a hole for the coffin at the chosen grave site (most households choose to bury the dead in the public cemetery), getting the site of the ceremony ready and preparing food for mourners and funeral helpers. The village men help with setting up the ceremonial site, placing a long table covered with sacrificial offerings in the middle of an open area right in front of the deceased’s ancestral home – a location that allows the ancestors to witness the departure of their descendant. Some metres away from the ceremonial site, female villagers cook porridge for the kin mourners, helpers and guests to eat as the funeral will last three to four hours with no interval for lunch. More condolence gifts from guests and kin, such as cash and bed linen, are received at a table set up beside the ceremonial site. In the meantime, the deceased’s close kin gather together in front of the coffin at the ancestral house and follow the guidance of a

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Daoist specialist in the performance of the ritual of zhuan xifeng (‘turning the West Wind’, which is to send the dead to the Western Paradise), while a traditional music ensemble plays mortuary tunes at the side. At the appointed time for the funeral ceremony, several village men carry the coffin to the designated site, where the Daoist leads the mourners to implement the last round of the zhuan xifeng ritual. The funeral ceremony for people to pay their final respects to the dead consists of two parts: the first is the jiaji (family ceremony) for the deceased’s kin and affines, which is carried out according to traditional etiquette; the second is the gongji (public ceremony) for non-kin individuals and groups, which is conducted according to the westernized procedures set up by the Republican state in the 1970s. The zhisang weiyuanhui consisting of the magistrate of Jinmen county and the directors of the county departments is usually the first group to pay respect in the gongji. Several experienced lineage men take the crucial positions of master of ceremonies, addressor of mortuary scripts and ritual assistants for both ceremonies. After the public ceremony, the coffin is placed on a van and accompanied by a long procession for a tour around the village before being transferred to the burial site. Numerous trucks (usually about fifteen to twenty) decorated with flowers and funerary symbols, which are condolence gifts from kin and acquaintances of the bereaved family, lead the procession. The trucks are followed by ritual specialists, music bands, male helpers who hold scrolls with condolence messages (sent by the official bodies, public and private institutions and individuals) or customary funerary objects, the van carrying the coffin, and a long line of people composed of the offspring of the dead and kin villagers (including the representatives sent from households belonging to the lineage branch of which the dead was part and voluntary attendees from other branches). The length of the funerary procession is a hot topic of conversation among the funeral participants and onlookers along the road, who comment not only on the social status of the deceased, the family’s reputation, social networks and economic ability but also the unity and reputation of the lineage as a whole. The procession finally stops at the village exit and only the offspring of the dead, Daoist specialist, the ritual assistants, and some lineage men escort the coffin to the burial site. Before placing the coffin in the ground, three rites are performed by three particular persons:  the director of the local branch of the Nationalist Party

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(which exerted one-party rule in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987), the chief of the local police station, and the head of the township. This may be derived from an imperial custom that the bereaved family invited the local gentry or officials to perform the three rites (Yang and Lin 1997: 94–100). I am not aware of when the roles became the responsibility of the aforementioned three officials, but this phenomenon suggests the Nationalist Party’s attempt to build its legitimacy on Jinmen by involving itself in local ritual events during its authoritarian rule. After the fulfilment of the three rites, the offspring of the deceased follow the Daoist’s guidance to complete the burial and bring the deceased’s tablet back to the village. The villagers who formed the procession earlier wait at the village exit for the return of the mourners; then, following behind the mourners, they carry out the second round of touring the village but in the reverse direction. The funeral helpers and attendants are then invited to a postfuneral banquet, which was arranged by the female relatives and neighbours of the host family in the past, but is now prepared by commercial catering services. During the banquet, the Daoist moves between the tables to exercise purification rituals by reciting a short incantation and spreading salt on the bodies of the participants. The deceased’s sons then go from table to table to express their gratitude to the helpers and guests. This marks the satisfactory completion of a white happy event, although the deceased’s immediate family has further mourning duties. According to the data I collected, the average cost of these white happy events is about 500,000–800,000 Taiwanese dollars (USD 16,000–26,000). The condolence gifts in monetary form (baibao, white envelopes) from relatives and guests may constitute thirty to forty percent of the total expenditure. The value of the monetary gifts from the bereaved family’s kin community is usually low but the kin villagers send other gifts in material form (flower pots, decorated trucks in the funerary procession, etc.) that manifest the mianzi of the host family.2 As such, many informants confirmed that the two banquets before and after the funeral, which may involve thirty to forty tables in total (the host family tends to prepare extra tables just in case they are needed) to thank their kin, are the largest expenditure. However, my older informants said that it was impossible to spend so much money on the funeral before the 1980s when life was still hard, and therefore the poor

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families of the same lineage branch had needed to set up a huzhuhui (burial association) to help each other, physically and financially, to complete the funeral. The current enlarged form of white happy events therefore pushes the elderly’s own financial investment in their future funerals and provokes reflections by the young on the large-scale funeral discussed. The preceding ethnography demonstrates that white happy events in contemporary Jinmen have been enlarged by a combination of conventional funerary customs and new funerary etiquette promoted by the modern state. They also involve more people with divergent social positions as helpers or attendees and, accordingly, more material flows between the bereaved family and the participants. In what follows, I discuss the social organization of such large-scale funerals in the three sets of cooperative relationships, unpacking the motives of the various participants and why such grand funerals are favoured in Jinmen.

Cooperation between parents and children The white happy events are apparently linked to the Chinese patrilineal-cum-Confucian ideologies, under which the holding of a ritually proper funeral for the dead parents by the living (particularly the male offspring) is a demonstration of their filiality or, as Oxfeld (2004b) argues, a means of repaying their moral debt to their parents. However, I find that the folk model of the cycle of yang discussed by Stafford (2000a) to be helpful for singling out the cooperative aspect of the relationship between parents and children. This model refers to the norm that parents are obliged to yang (raise and care for) their children and, in turn, children are obliged to fengyang (provide support and nurturance to) their elderly parents. Additionally, it illuminates the actual processes of yang between the two generations, recognizing that yang takes a broad variety of forms, such as the organizing of the major household events of weddings and funerals. As Stafford (2000a: 43) explains, a wedding is the last, and usually very expensive, obligation of Chinese parents to their child. This is especially the case for sons because of the

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potential expenditure on a new house, new furniture, betrothal gifts, banquets, and so forth upon which a successful wedding depends. Notice, however, that the bride and groom will also very likely be involved in providing themselves with a wedding  – as the money they earned and handed over to their parents before marriage was partly or entirely saved by their parents to cover future wedding expenses. The organizing of a wedding is therefore an embodiment of parent–child cooperation, and a similar cooperative relationship can be seen to be involved in the arranging of funerals for parents. White happy events like that described above tend to involve great additional expenditure for ordinary households. One informant told me that most elderly people in Jinmen have pensions of various kinds, which are saved for their own funerals in the hope of not leaving a financial burden for their children. The cooperation between the two generations could also be seen as the result of concern over the afterlife of the deceased and the well-being of the living. The folk beliefs suggest that a ritually proper funeral is important for both the dead and the living, because the correct and careful treatment of the deceased’s body and soul in accordance with the mortuary customs and rituals can prevent the deceased from becoming an evil spirit that may cause harm to the living. Though the younger villagers may not take these folk beliefs seriously, they still tend to abide by these ritual requirements as they want to avoid any possible gossip and criticism from their close kin and neighbours for their ‘unfilial’ behaviour. The evaluation of filiality is linked to the degree of elaboration of a funeral (including the gifts and banquets to thank helpers and attendees)  – and therefore to the mianzi of the family staging the funeral (cf. Oxfeld 2004b)  – and to the assessment of whether the bereaved family have been good hosts or not (cf. Chau 2004). To achieve success in this regard requires that parents and children cooperate and invest financially in the organization of a grand funeral. Though I rarely heard the bereaved families express their concerns about mianzi directly, their ability to hold a white happy event itself indicates the fuqi (good fortune) of the dead and the mianzi of the bereaved family. For example, one young female informant told me that her father-in-law’s funeral was very lengqing (cold and desolate) because at the moment of his death (at the relatively young age of his early sixties) none of his three sons had given him a grandson and therefore his funeral could not count as a white happy event.

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Her marital family could only hold a small-scale funeral without the large audience and many condolence gifts that would have manifested the family’s mianzi.

Cooperation between kin Rather than relying fully on paid funerary professionals as in urban Taiwan, the above ethnography shows that the white happy events in Jinmen involve plenty of voluntary assistance from the deceased’s lineage community in both ritual and hosting duties. The bereaved family attains help from kin in various respects such as knowledge about funerary customs and procedure, labour and time devoted to the diverse range of tasks, and in the form of the condolence gifts and attendance at the funeral that manifest the good fortune of the dead who had filial offspring and the mianzi of the host family. Cooperation between the kin helpers is also essential to a successful funeral. In the village that I studied, a group composed of the lineage men acquainted with funerary affairs mobilizes immediately after receiving news of a death in a lineage family. The male village head, who is renowned for his sophistication about customs, takes the leading role in organizing the funeral and coordinates the different parties involved, including the bereaved family, the ritual specialists, the sellers of funerary items, the catering service and the village voluntary group. The village head and some experienced men are always present at every funeral in the village and are responsible for certain duties (e.g. arranging and controlling the procedure of the funeral ceremony), while the rest of the men are occasional helpers carrying out tasks assigned by their seniors (e.g. setting up the site of the funeral ceremony, carrying the coffin and holding funerary items in the procession). The village voluntary group, of which most members are middle-aged and elderly women, has become a reliable source of assistance at funerary events since its establishment in the late 1990s. This group always turns up to help prepare mourning accessories at the house of the dead and cook porridge on the day of burial, joined by other voluntary labour including female relatives and neighbours of the bereaved family. The phenomenon that the bereaved family receives voluntary assistance from their kin community to complete a white happy event appears to support Freedman’s (1958: 94) assumption that a

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stronger moral bond exists between kin living in a localized lineage. As my senior informants said, during the previous decades of economic difficulty the bereaved family had to rely on the generous support from kin of the same lineage branch to hold a ritually proper funeral. The great improvement of living standards in recent decades has made it possible to hold large-scale funerals that involve kin beyond the branch distinction, and these funerals are thus manifestations of the lineage-village as an integrated community. In other words, kin collaboration in the funeral is generated not only by moral obligations but also by the mianzi of the group as a whole. Moreover, women can have significant contribution to the enhancement of the lineage’s reputation. For example, several times, I heard people from outside of my field village complimenting the village voluntary group on their efficient organization and excellent cooking skills. Apart from the steady presence of the group of experienced lineage men and the village voluntary group, other kin participants give their support out of the deeper moral bond between kin of the same lineage branch. Indeed, over time, the mutual support between genealogically close families forms the cycle of reciprocity or the exchange of labour (cf. Chau 2004). But, rather than viewing this support in transactional terms, many of my female informants emphasized their affective ties with the bereaved family of the same branch, which are grounded in regular communication and cooperation in everyday life and other ritual activities (e.g. ancestral rituals beyond the domestic level). Thus the gathering of women in the house of the bereaved family to help with various matters further consolidates their mutual sentiments. It is also common that people reach beyond their own lineage branch to help more genealogically distant bereaved family in the way of taking leave from their jobs in order to show their physical and/or spiritual support in the funeral.

Cooperation between non-kin The above ethnography shows that the host family may receive support from non-kin primarily in the forms of condolence gifts and attendance at the funeral ceremony, both of which contribute to the bereaved family’s mianzi. In contemporary Chinese societies, the idea of death pollution may be deemed superstitious and would

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not dissuade people from attending, especially if the host family has prepared appropriate protective measures (e.g. the attendees are given particular plants thought to ward off evil spirits). But, as many ethnographies have noted, the host families that possess good social prestige and wide guanxi (social relationships or ‘connections’) networks are more likely to receive guests beyond the circle of close kin (Yan 1996:  95; Kipnis 1997:  96–103; cf. Chau 2004; Oxfeld 2004b). But guanxi in its literal sense is not sufficient to account for a person’s attendance at another person’s funeral. For instance, some funeral attendees tended to emphasize their affective bond with the deceased or the deceased’s family rather than their mere guanxi by recalling some memories illustrating their good relationships. The stress they place on their sincere feelings is similar to the notion of jiaoqing (interactional affection) analysed by Wu in this collection. It is less difficult to explicate the presence of the representatives of official bodies and individual political figures at an ordinary household’s funeral which, at least in the eyes of the ordinary villagers, is undoubtedly related to their attempts to legitimize their governance or boost their political prospects however they might explain it themselves. But, instead of trying to pin down each individual’s explicit motivations, I  have found that Sperber and Baumard’s (2012) discussion of the relationship between morality and reputation provides an enlightening, alternative analytical lens. Grounded on a combination of evolutionary and cognitive approaches, Sperber and Baumard’s main argument is that the function of moral behaviours is to help individuals gain a good reputation as cooperators, which is accompanied by the issue of hypocrisy indicating that the motivation for behaving morally is self-interested and instrumental rather than genuinely moral. Sperber and Baumard contend that, because of human beings’ capacity for communication, our reputation is not merely built upon our behaviours but the outcome of the exchange of opinions between different persons. As part of the conversational community, we develop a reflective management of our reputation, which involves anticipating how our behaviours would be interpreted and commented upon and defending our reputation by joining in the conversation with an acceptable justification. This kind of moral reasoning or reflection, as opposed to moral intuition that is genuinely moral, does not guide our action directly but may

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encourage our choice of a course of action that can be more easily justified. Sperber and Baumard thus conclude that, for the purpose of securing a good reputation, it is advantageous ‘to appear to be moral and the most effective way to do so is to actually be moral, to conform to the social selection pressure for genuine morality’ (2012: 513). From this perspective, we could suppose that among the various non-kin attendants at a white happy event, some people’s motivations were genuinely moral whereas some were self-interested:  among the self-interested motivations was the desire to secure a good reputation, such as the county magistrate and the representatives of different political parties who have explicit aims of reinforcing their moral reputation (which is helpful to their political careers) through their delivery of spiritual support to the bereaved family in person. Sperber and Baumard’s thesis also sheds new light on the efforts of the living offspring to hold a ritually satisfactory funeral for their parents and the generosity of kin in helping with some potentially polluting tasks. Whatever else they may have in mind, the living offspring hope to maintain their own and their family’s good reputations among the intimate kin community by following all the necessary requirements for a successful funeral. However good or bad their private relationships with the bereaved family might be, their kin in the village try to offer proper support in order to secure their good reputations, which in time guarantees them equivalent help when they are in need. The above example of a senior woman who was requested to clean and dress a dying relative can also be analysed in light of this theory. Although she submitted to the moral requirement of cooperation, this senior woman also expressed her personal thoughts to me regarding her obligation towards a member of the same lineage branch including her reluctance to perform the task and her implicit grievance about being viewed as a person associated with death. However, regardless of her own mixed feelings, the senior woman’s action was positively evaluated by the villagers. I  heard some villagers commend the senior woman, saying, ‘You are great. You did a good thing that most people would not want to do.’ This case supports Sperber and Baumard’s thesis of the positive correlation between a good reputation and (genuinely) moral behaviour, which involves both the first-party’s own self-evaluations and the third-party’s observation and judgments. Despite the senior woman’s ambivalent

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feelings, she undoubtedly built up a good reputation for herself in the village. The preceding section on the three categories of cooperative relationships indicates the cultural logics or social norms that motivate human cooperation in the organizing of a large-scale funeral. However, is this kind of expensive funeral really wanted by all the people involved? Though I did not observe any explicit rejection or negotiation regarding a grand funeral for an elderly person, this does not exclude the possibility of self-reflections and judgments by the people involved. Viewing the expanded form of white happy events as being supported by a number of social norms suggests a Durkheimian conceptualization of the moral as involving collectively sanctioned rules, values and opinions. But James Laidlaw (2002, 2013) criticizes this approach and points out that Durkheim’s presumption of society as a system of moral facts led to a reductionist understanding of moral concepts as functional devices of social control. To go beyond a Durkheimian definition of morality, Laidlaw draws on philosopher Bernard Williams and historian Michael Foucault to argue for an analytical distinction between morality and ethics, in which the term ‘moral’ refers to rules and regulations enforced by institutions whereas ‘ethics’ relates to the attempts that people make to do what they consider right or good (cf. Stafford 2010). An ethnographic study of ethics and morality should therefore reveal ‘the complexity and specificity of ethical reflection, reasoning, dilemma, doubt, conflict, judgment, and decision’ in human life rather than unilateral attention to moral codes (Laidlaw 2013: 23). In light of this approach, below I provide examples that demonstrate the individuals’ reflections on the socially promoted form of white happy events in contemporary Jinmen. 1. In deciding the date of the funeral ceremony and burial for an elderly villager, some auspicious dates clashed with a pilgrimage trip to China by several of the lineage men in charge of funerary affairs and many villagers who were crucial to the holding of a grand and ritually elaborate funeral. The bereaved family thus decided to choose a date three weeks after the death (the average wait is one to two weeks), by when the pilgrimage group would have returned to the village. While I was chatting with an elderly female informant about the delay, she shook her head and said,

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‘It’s best to finish the funeral within one week, otherwise it would be very troublesome for the young people living on Taiwan.’ Her sentiments were actually shared by many elderly villagers who did not disagree with the customs or folk concerns about selecting an auspicious burial date, but nonetheless expressed their worries about the potential inconvenience this could cause to their offspring after they die. Given the high proportion of the younger generation who have established permanent residence on Taiwan or elsewhere, the senior generation are well aware of the burden of a conventional funeral for their offspring in terms of the difficulty in taking longterm leave from work and the money and time they would have to spend on travelling. However, it is not an easy matter for an elder to request to have his or her own funeral conducted in a ritually simplified manner (i.e. one that could be completed within a few days) because their concerns about their offspring are balanced against other concerns. For example, they may be worried that their prospects for the afterlife are linked to the proper performance of the funerary rites, and also about the implications for the family’s mianzi if a grand funeral ceremony does not take place. 2. There has been some private discussion among the male villagers who usually help with funerals in the village about the increasing levels of expenditure on funerary banquets. Some complained that in recent years the banquets have grown too extravagant, whereas in the difficult days of the past they were very simple and only involved close kin and a few essential helpers. However, the village head said that it is hard to change the trend as the large banquet affects the mianzi of the host family as well as offering some return for banquets hosted previously by other households. Interestingly, in some ways, the increasing scale of the funeral was also viewed in a positive light. One middle-aged man, who usually helps with the funerals in the village, gave an interesting response when he was asked by the host of a funeral (the son of the deceased) about the necessity of a grand funeral. He replied, ‘You see, it’s our ancestors’ wisdom. To hold such a grand funeral is to bring together the lineage members which can enhance our mutual sentiments and affections [lianluo ganqing].’ His insightful response linked the funeral of a lineage member to the sense of lineage unity that is experienced by the lineage members involved in a funeral through their collaboration in the diverse funerary tasks, gathering together to send off the deceased and enjoying the post-funeral

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banquet. This kind of embodied experience of lineage unity may have encouraged the villagers’ collective silent agreement on the desirability of large-scale funerals. 3. While attending a funeral in a smaller village, I met an elderly man who was representing the common-surname association to which the deceased’s lineage belongs. Knowing my status as a researcher of Jinmen, this man told me, ‘There is a bad custom [huai xiguan] in Jinmen today; that is, the funerals are too large.’ As I pondered his remark, he continued, ‘The practice of publishing obituary notices in the local newspaper is money-consuming and the setting up of zhisang weiyuanhui occupies a substantial amount of the magistrate’s and government employees’ time [because they manage to attend the funerals in person and sometimes there are two or three funerals in one day].’ I  nodded my agreement, and he made a final remark, ‘However, none of the magistrates has so far dared to abrogate the practice because they are concerned about votes in the elections (weile xuanpiao).’ One of my female informants also expressed criticism of the practice of publishing obituary notices in the newspaper. She said that the duration between death and burial is very often extended to allow time for the preparation and publishing of the obituary notice and for the government employees to prepare and send the condolence scrolls and flower pots to the bereaved family. But, she also admitted that the presence of the official bodies and political figures is considered important for displaying the mianzi of the bereaved family. The magistrate and political figures earn support from the ordinary people by gei (giving or adding) mianzi to the ordinary families staging the funeral – a kind of electoral strategy to build up their reputation and affective ties with the potential voters. Conversely, the bereaved family and the wider community of which it is part may find they lose mianzi if the magistrate and political figures attend the funerals in other villages but not theirs. Together, the three instances above suggest the difficulty involved in altering or simplifying the current form of white happy events as any changes imply the potential destruction of existent social relationships and the benefits they bring. However, it can be anticipated that the discussion and debates about the necessity and appropriateness of holding large-scale funerals will become ever more intense among the younger generations as many of them have established permanent residence far away from home, in stark

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contrast to the senior generations who have spent most of their lifetime in the natal villages and remain deeply embedded in the familiar circles of collaboration. The younger generations who live on Taiwan may also be indifferent to the mianzi given by the presence of local political figures at the funerals. As the numbers of elderly villagers who usually help with the funerary affairs are declining, it would not be surprising if one day the bereaved family has to rely on paid funerary professionals to make all the necessary preparations. On the other hand, while recognizing the potential for future changes, it may be that the man in instance (2)  is not alone in seeing the value of the large-scale funerals as being in their ability to create large gatherings of lineage members. The impression of lineage unity created in the process of conducing a grand funeral may be sufficient to encourage the continuation of this way of conducting funerals despite the time, effort and money they consume. As this chapter has demonstrated, the success of a large-scale white happy event is based on the effective coordination and cooperation of many human agents with different social positions. Notably, the cultural mechanisms on which the three sets of cooperative relationships involved in funerals are built are actually also at work in other social contexts. For the cooperation between parents and children, the model of the cycle of yang and the concern of family’s mianzi drive the co-efforts of the two generations in holding a grand wedding banquet or building a big house to accommodate family members of three generations or more. For the cooperation between kin, factors such as senses of moral obligation, the cycle of reciprocity, the mianzi of the individual family and of the lineage as a whole, and personal sentiments are essential to vitalize the kin organization in the diverse activities concerning the entire lineage and in the campaigns for kin candidates in the local-level political elections. For the cooperation between non-kin, people may be merely motivated by their guanxi of various kinds, but very often there is an emphasis on mutual sentiments, reciprocity or instrumental considerations depending on the particular situations. For example, the political figures not only attend funerals but also visit the wedding banquets of ordinary households with big monetary gifts (hongbao), by means of which they want to build up a good reputation for themselves as well as win votes. Moreover, a common

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characteristic in all the above sets of cooperative relationships is the individual agent’s concern with moral reputation. In sum, a white happy event provides an occasion on which the various kinds of pre-existing interpersonal relationships are confirmed and strengthened, and these relationships are essential to the normal running of people’s everyday life and to the achievement of various personal projects and ambitions in the close-knit society of Jinmen.

CHAPTER SIX

Memory leaks: Local histories of cooperation as a solution to water-related cooperation problems Andrea E. Pia

This chapter explores the morality of cooperation in rural China through the lens of water management. For reasons that will be clear shortly, the project of putting water to human use presents several problems of coordination and cooperation among different users that are relevant to the collective aim of this volume. Moreover, the management of water is ubiquitously charged with contending visions of human advancement and progress that are very often overtly construed in moral terms (e.g. Trawick 2003; Strang 2009; Wutich 2011; Tilt 2015). In this chapter I  will address some questions emerging from the study of water-related cooperation problems, especially those developed within the framework provided by Ostrom (1990), through an ethnographic study of water policies and management in Yancong, a waterstressed rural township of northeast Yunnan where I  conducted long-term fieldwork.1 I  will suggest that Ostrom’s theory of

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cooperation can be made empirically sounder if integrated with a focus on the symbolic dimension of infrastructure and on the moral narratives people produce in relation to their construction and meaning. Let me first begin from the materiality of water and how it consistently frustrates cooperative projects of water distribution and use. In the interdisciplinary studies of resource management, water and water infrastructure stand out because of something they usually do, namely leaking. Leaking is what liquids do when they move through intentional barriers or out of predetermined routes, escaping easy capture. Water gushes out of the ground and its flow disperses into thousands of rivulets. Irrigation channels and pipes leak, losing water as they carry it to the fields. Wooden buckets spill water as they are carried along. Leaking is bad because it makes human plans for water difficult to carry out. The political ecologist Karen Bakker has described this annoying tendency of water to resist human designs on productivity as stemming from water’s own uncooperative nature (Bakker 2003:  28–36, 2007: 442). More famously, Elinor Ostrom has studied this very same tendency by exploring its implications for the social use of water. She calls water a common-pool resource characterized by non-excludability, that is, by its tendency to flow away from someone’s hands potentially into someone else’s (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994: 6), disrupting individuals’ acts of appropriation. This way, leakages are unequivocally understood as the outcome of ill-conceived water management, water that is not put to good collective use because of faulty and inattentive human design (Vermillion, Ostrom and Yoder 2005:  496–497; World Bank 2009: 26; Carmody 2010: 53).2 This chapter, however, will argue that not all leakages are necessarily bad leakages (see Anand 2015). One way in which the uncooperative flow of water helps bring about cooperative projects of water access and distribution is in fact by resisting schemes of full appropriation by one single actor or infrastructure. As we shall see in this chapter, the water stored behind the tall walls of a dam may seep into the soil to become later accessible, via tube wells, as ground or surfacing water to otherwise under-served communities. There is however another important sense in which the supply of water may leak in socially productive and helpful ways. This is when water institutions and their infrastructures (i.e. rules, norms,

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social arrangements and their accompanying physical apparatus) leak memories. I hope that such phrasing will not sound too odd to the reader. For water to meet and sustain human desires, the flow of water needs to be organized and channelled through the landscape. This organization requires at the bare minimum some form of shared knowledge, political agreement and continuous and coordinated actions among groups of people to be carried out successfully (e.g. Ostrom 1992). My starting point in this chapter is that the enduring and enabling set of social and physical arrangements that allows the distribution of water among users always carries the legacy of local histories of cooperation. Beyond redirecting water, the practice of managing water is the embodiment of collective histories regarding human projects of water distribution that individuals could potentially tap in to. These histories meaningfully underpin projects of water circulation and provide useful know-how with respect to present-day issues. When retold into the present, however, these histories may well make the present look different – even hostile, as I will show later on – and spur individuals to collective action against the predicaments of the present. Thus, the central argument of this chapter is that histories of cooperation are, like water, stored behind the institutional and infrastructural arrangements governing the supply of water at any given time. And again, like water, these histories could ‘leak away’ from regimented schemes of appropriation and later become available to water users in unexpected, cooperative or antagonistic forms. In water studies the successful organization of norms and practices to manage common water sources to collective advantage goes under the name of ‘cooperation’ (e.g. Tang 1992; Cascão 2009; Yu 2014; Mirumachi 2015). It is cooperation that produces long-term positive outcomes (e.g. sustainable access to water) for the group of cooperative actors involved. Since Ostrom’s seminal work, Governing the Commons (1990), scholars of water-related cooperative processes have laboured to identify what factors may determine or predict instances of successful cooperation. Some have focused on the material quality of water (Ostrom 1990), others on the available social institutions and norms (Cleaver and Koning 2015). Moral convictions and motivations have also recently surfaced to further enrich the debate (Van Zomeren, Postmes and Spears 2012; Mazzoni and Cicognani 2013).

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However, as critical social scientists engaging with Ostrom’s work have already pointed out, part of the problem with the approach to natural resource management it proposes is that it diverts attention from structural and political economic factors impinging on local actors’ capacity to restrain overconsumption and halt dispossession. That is, by focusing on the dynamics of cooperation between de-contextualized individuals in small-scale scenarios, Ostrom’s approach would seemingly struggle to explain issues such as asymmetrical power, market-induced dispossession and large-scale modern environmental crises (Rabinowitz 2010; Cleaver, Franks and Maganga 2013; Wall 2014: Ch. 8). My aim in this chapter is to contribute to this debate through an anthropological appreciation of the histories that underpin and inflect cooperative projects on water supply systems. Approached through the anthropological study of materiality (e.g. Keane 2003), social time (e.g. Bear 2014) and the emotional responses their appraisal may generate in individuals (Van Zomeren, M., Spears R., Fischer, A.  H., Leach, C.  W. 2004; Féaux de la Croix 2010) such histories both thicken Ostromian understandings of human motivations for cooperation and provide an analytical link between small-scale cooperative processes and the bigger scale of the political context in which they unfold. They do so by showing how cooperation on particular projects of resource sharing and circulation may be informed by affective and ethical appreciations of previous collective achievements. For what concerns water management, these past achievements are evoked by and crystallized into surviving hydraulic structures. In turn, this appreciation may elicit moral responses to perceived departures from said achievements that are imputable to adverse political and economic processes in the present. These responses are shown to further reinforce individuals’ willingness to cooperate. In saying so, my contention is that there is no need to scrap Ostrom’s theory of cooperation to provide for such a link. In fact, one crucial point that was first formulated by Ostrom, and later became part of the social scientific consensus, is that the motivations pushing people to engage in acts of cooperation need not be rational at all (e.g. Ostrom 2010: 24). Rather, in a commonpool resource setting, such as those involving the supply of water, it would be ‘all too rational for individuals to over-exploit such resources’ (Acheson 2011: 331). The rational choice here would in

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fact be to free-ride on the system’s maintenance costs (e.g. pooling money and labour together to govern, maintain and policing the supply infrastructure) taking advantage of a few ‘suckers’ (Ostrom 2009: 433) who stubbornly keep paying for them. Leading on from Ostrom’s insight, this chapter will start from the point that there is more than mere self-interested calculus in people’s cooperative engagement with water distribution. Moral norms and ethical reflexivity have a greater role to play in processes of cooperation than was predicted by mainstream social theory before Ostrom (e.g. Olson 1965). Set against this background, this chapter argues that, prompted by individuals’ contiguity to infrastructure collectively built in the past, the recollection of past instances of cooperation works as a supplier of ethical lessons for present-day collective action problems. Histories of cooperation are one way in which historically ‘saturated’ modes of moral sensibilities (Feuchtwang 2013:  221) and ethical reflexivity feature in human cooperation. In the context of water management, they support the prefiguration and the subsequent realization of moral modes of collaboration on water distribution. My case study from Yancong Township will show some of the implications of these local histories for present day projects of water distribution in the water-stressed Chinese countryside. I will start my discussion by giving a snapshot of water stress in Yancong and what this entails for its inhabitants. Second, I will broach the question of what the collectively built hydraulic structures of the past (e.g. dams, canals, wells) – still in use in Yancong today – mean for the people living and working there, what memories they ‘leak’. Third, I will move to the allocative and redistributive effects of the regime of water management currently in operation in my field site. This section will provide the foil against which the recollection of past deeds acquire a moral standing and provide directions for present-day cooperative coping mechanisms. Lastly, through the ethnography of Yancong’s water wells, I will highlight the feelings of resentment and betrayal many harbour towards the current way in which the state manages water in this locale. These feelings are seen as cementing cooperation on antagonistic forms of water circulation in the township. In the conclusion, I will draw out some of the implications of this study for anthropological engagement with the theory of cooperation as developed in the Ostromian tradition.

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Water stress in Yancong Township According to the available literature, Yunnan is at ‘high’ or ‘extreme’ risk of water stress.3 Its northeastern countryside, in particular, has in recent years been experiencing major problems with water availability. As a way of tackling these problems, the local government has begun experimenting with targeted water sector reforms, such as raising the price of water, installing water meters in every rural household and establishing water users’ associations to make water use less wasteful (see Pia 2017b). There are at least four factors that reinforce the experience of shortage in Yancong. First, there are the demands of its growing economy. At the time of fieldwork, the various dams of Huize County, where Yancong were being converted and integrated into the Provincial hydroelectricity grid (see Harwood 2013:  46). Hydropower represents a soaring share of the provincial economy and a key asset for the future development of all southwest China. In many cases, this expansion of hydropower was, according to some of the water bureaucrats I worked with, draining water resources out of the pool traditionally available for irrigated agriculture (see CrowMiller 2015: 177, fn8; Mertha 2008: 45). Second, the policies regulating the allocation of water in the locale prioritized urban and higher-return uses. This was so because the new managerial framework that was being imposed on state water provisions, generally termed ‘market environmentalism’ (ziyou shichang huanjingzhuyi), considers sustainable water use only achievable via market-mediated control of water demand (Pia 2017a). In this new regulatory context, state-owned but forprofit water supply companies were being incentivized to decrease wasteful uses only where it was fiscally affordable to do so: within the urban sector. In my field site, one such company was in charge of developing the urban-rural water supply network. The result of its involvement in the provision of rural water supply was that to save its fiscal bottom line while showing its contribution to the cause of sustainability, the company preferred investing in the urban sector, neglecting the maintenance of the rural supply, ultimately producing an unreliable, poor-quality yet pricey service for the people of Yancong. Third, a fluctuating pattern of monsoon weather determined a period of dry weather. This period – five years between 2009 and 20134 – rather than affecting the quantity of irrigation and drinking

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water made available by the Xiaowa Reservoir to Yancong, was rather favouring the depletion of many of the small rain-fed water cisterns and cellars (shuijiao) commonly used in the locale and built independently by rural families for domestic and farm use. The topography of water access was thereby redrawn, causing many families to suddenly and unwillingly become dependent on statesponsored water delivery campaigns (songshui huodong) or on bottled water available at local supermarkets. Fourth, at the micro level of Yancong water users, rules governing limited access to ground water wells were very often broken, while water theft, diversion of water pipes and overdrawing were widespread phenomena. In fact, a huge chunk of my fieldwork was spent in company of Old Z, a retired member of the local state water agency, who went to great pains to replace the broken locks on water conservancy structures or repair severed water pipes. On inspection rounds, Old Z would regularly comment that without clear rules against overdrawing, ‘people wouldn’t know how they should behave’ and that as a consequence water would leak without use (shenlou sunshi). For this reason, he took on himself the arduous job of writing these rules on whatever surface he had at his disposal in the vicinity of some threatened water structure or source.

An inspiring past A collectively debated history of water management inflected all such present-day attempts to secure water access for locals. This was an ambivalent history of misery and triumph that often came up in conversations with local farmers and water officials. What is important to note about this history, of which I  will give a glimpse below, is that surviving water infrastructures were often used as conversational ice breakers or memory props to produce meaningful narratives of past collective achievements in relation to present day circumstances. As the following ethnographic snapshot will show, water infrastructures do not simply leak water, but also histories of cooperation. In front of the Xiaowa Reservoir stands a commemorative monument. This is a tall pillar, five or six metres high, made of black and white stone surmounted by a steel emblem of the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources. Along its vertical surface, a line of

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golden Chinese characters commemorate the building of the dam, which occurred during the Great Leap Forward (GLF, dayuejin). The ‘Leap’ was one of Mao’s sponsored mass campaigns which, among other things, brought about an unprecedented overhauling of the country’s water infrastructures. It was right by the bottom of the pillar, on my very first day visiting the site, that Peng Youling, the head of the office supervising the reservoir’s daily operations and maintenance, had arranged our first meeting. That day, I  had originally intended to ask Peng some rather technical questions about the average amount of water annually discharged from the Xiowa reservoir towards Yancong Township, my main research site. My idea was to determine whether variations in the availability of irrigation and drinking water people in Yancong had been experiencing for quite some time prior to my arrival had something to do with how this reservoir was run, and in particular with the locally renowned divisive politics of its management. Unfortunately that day, Dr Peng, a party cadre who retrained as a water engineer to take up his new job as Head of the Reservoir, was not in the mood for technicalities. Rather, what he was keen to do was to share the adventurous story of the construction of the Xiaowa Reservoir, a tale of blood, sweat and tears, of collective achievements and seemingly collective misery. Peng recounted how thousands of humble but dedicated farmers, mobilized by the Party motto, ‘Man Must Conquer Nature’ (Ren Ding Sheng Tian) toiled to erect the incredible hydraulic edifice. It was also a story of unforeseeable tragedy and plight, as due to its faulty design the reservoir was ultimately breached a few years after its completion: thousands perished in the flood that followed. As a final gloss to what was a compelling yet gut-punching story, Dr Peng made the following remark:  ‘We owe it all to Mao:  the bad and the good. Today there are many different opinions about this, but back then we did achieve something great (chengong).’ By then, it was not the first time I had listened to people in Yancong – local water bureaucrats, cadres and common villagers alike  – eagerly exonerating Mao’s reckless policies of hasty water resource development. And yet, the well-intended iteration of such claims made them no less surprising as time went on. In fact, in northern Yunnan, the decade of the GLF was particularly dramatic, due to the ferocity with which people were dragooned into forced labour and the many episodes of unintended flooding, environmental

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mismanagement and famine (see Mueggler 2001, 2007:  67; Zhu 2003; Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden 1991: 72–74; Zhun 2013). At every occasion, I  would ask myself:  why would people in Yancong feel the need to embellish such distressing events? What many of my interlocutors were keen to stress, however, was that despite having been a dramatic period for Yancong, the radical vicissitudes of the GLF were still significant to its residents. Indeed, without the mobilization of people and the purposeful cooperation that the GLF accomplished  – I  was told  – the township and its agriculture would not exist. In fact, this particular area started to be massively occupied and farmed by migrants from different parts of southwest China who were forcibly relocated by a Maoist campaign. It was precisely thanks to the new farming land made available by the collective irrigation work carried out during the GLF that many migrant families were able to earn a living. That is, in Yancong this particular instantiation of coercive populist campaigns epitomized by the experience of back-breaking collective labour on water infrastructure had a powerful grip on its residents’ sense of purpose and belonging. Locals looked to such infrastructure for traces of past collective deeds. Thus, the first point that needs to be made here is about the specific role that material infrastructure plays in cooperative solutions to water issues. While testifying to a history of investment for the common good, infrastructure also makes this history constantly available for reconsideration, rehabilitation and redeployment by the people who use it every day (see Latour 2002: 249; Keane 2003: 415–417; Féaux de la Croix 2011). But what to make of these public acts of ‘infrastructure stimulated’ recollection? The next section shows that the histories of cooperation (i.e. pooling labour and resources towards a common end) in hydraulic structures of an earlier era are indeed becoming more and more salient and appealing to the people of Yancong when compared to present day technological devices and allocative practices whisked into existence by the new regime of water government.

Keeping access to water During the time of my fieldwork, water access was artificially limited for the people of Yancong. Yancong Township is made of

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twenty-seven natural and administrative villages, each of which is composed of between fifteen and twenty subsections called xiaozu, for a total of 409 localities and a population of circa 96,000 people. The area covered by the township is more or less 470 square kilometres of mountainous terrain, within which the 22,000 people to whom the Yancong Water Office supply drinking water reside. Each day, the bureau-managed supply network carries 1100 cubic metres of water to the community. Based on local regulations, those rural households who were lucky enough to be plugged into the supply network were provided with at least fifteen cubic metres of safe drinking water per day, free of charge. Anything exceeding that amount would be charged according to a locally set parameter that, throughout my fieldwork, was in fact moving upwards, but hovered for the most part around three RMB per cubic metre. The local water bureaucracy, while somewhat disagreeing with what they knew was a unaffordable price tag for the poorest households, still recognized that, given a policy of cuts to state subsidy of water provision, the entire sustainability of the delivery system, their jobs included, rested on making water users pay. Now, the reader should notice that this managerial system that prioritized fiscal soundness over accessibility – a token of ‘market environmentalism’ – was in stark contrast with how drinking water was made available and regulated in Yancong up to the early 1980s. Prior to this (slow) reform of water services,5 far-flung rural hamlets in Yancong were used to a delivery system whereby water was accessed via communal water taps (longtou) financed by the local state. This water was paid in ‘water stamps’ (shuipiao) that individual households earned by taking part in collective water conservancy infrastructural works. Stamps allowed the owner (who would represent his or her own household) to draw out of the collective tap a commensurate number of hours of water per day of work. When the delivery network failed due to technical problems like insufficient pressure, leakages or cyclical natural shortages, local redistributive practices stepped in. These would see water-rich households, usually living upstream or close to alternative water sources, give part of their stored water to water-poor ones, usually located downstream. At other times villagers would pool labour and resources together to build collectively owned water cisterns (shuijiao) or wells (shuijing) to extend water access to the whole community.

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Supplementing in part the discussion of instances of failed cooperation provided by Stanford (this volume), these practices were still widespread at the time of fieldwork. While the stampfor-water era was, much to many villagers’ regret, irremediably gone, solidarity and material networks of the type discussed above were an indispensable reality of ordinary life under shortage and constrained access in Yancong. Here I want to draw from a couple of interviews I  recorded with two key figures responsible for organizing such cooperative networks, to show how in Yancong contemporary cooperative projects of water distribution and access pivot on the re-articulation of the past.6 The act of retelling past instances of successful cooperation is seen as instrumental to guiding everyday management practices and prefiguring potentially advantageous futures. The first interviewee is Group Leader (xiaozuzhang) Teng, man in his fifties, who had been appointed by his small constituency to ‘steward water’ (shuizhang), handling inter-household conflicts that came up during shortages. Explaining to me how local communities usually elect one person among them to act as water steward, in recognition of that person’s authority and persuasiveness, Teng gave me a long exposé of how the historical collective experience of living through shortage had moulded present-day political practices of water distribution in time of shortage. These practices consisted of a form of redistribution going from the water ‘haves’ to the ‘have-nots’. I’m not sure whether these practices were something that we started doing with the commune [gongshefa], or if it was something that we were doing before that and have kept doing all along (xiguanfa) [. . .] Through [community wide] consultations we control people’s behaviour:  we collectively single out and criticize (piping) the person who has done something wrong [. . .] If you think about the problem of local shortage (xiaodifang de queshui), it is crucial that people maintain good relationships with others (renqinghao). If I  care about others, if others care about me (huxiangguanxin), I won’t have any reason to excavate my own well or to steal water for the communal tap. The coping mechanisms envisioned by Teng rely on moments of collective critique, recalling the ‘speak bitterness session’ (suku)

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typical of revolutionary Maoism (Wu 2014), though couched in a decidedly less violent language. In Teng’s account, cooperation on issues of water availability is predicated upon moral notions of mutual care and responsiveness to individual needs. This is an ethical appreciation of past agreements which, according to Teng and many other villagers I  talked to, comes out of the collective experience of living under constrained access. Similarly, in the following interview, Master Du, an almost sixty-year-old prominent party cadre living in a very impoverished mountain community north of Yancong, alludes to various collectively drafted norms to restrain access to drinking water. These shared norms, arrived at through a long history of local governance and cooperation (Pia 2016) are applied in the present situation to foster a particular ethical vision of living together. This vision draws once again from the past and in particular from a purposive re-articulation and redeployment of the social imaginary of the GLF. In a particular point in the village, there once stood a communal tap (longtou) set up with funding from the state. We had specific rules for its correct use: for instance, you could not let the tap run for more than three hours a day. There was one particular household taking more water than allowed, for its own domestic use and for the fields. They took three days of water out of the tap. The day I discovered they were doing so, I got really upset. I told them:  ‘You snatched water from the tap and seriously harmed the whole community. Do you realize that everyone’s problem is anyone’s problem (zhongren de wenti daodi shi geren de wenti)?’ [. . .] In 1991, I became the superintendent of the Plateau: my aim was to rectify the condition of extreme poverty which affected my home township. I said: ‘Happiness will not drip down from heaven [xingfu bu hui cong tian jiang]: a comfortable life can’t be achieved, unless one tries.’ While I was in office, we wished some of our needs and desires could be realized: we wished we could get water, get electricity, get a road; we wished to be better off. In the community, everybody aspired to a good society, to an environment where one could live a good life and enjoy it. Master Du is here making explicit reference to Mao’s vision of the Chinese peasantry as a clear-sighted, ambitious and self-aware class of individuals who are embarked on a quest for collective

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subsistence and advancement (see Perry 2008). In fact, Du directly quotes the folk song ‘Happiness Will Not Drip down from Heaven’ from the famous 1959 socialist movie The Young People of our Village (Women Cunli de Nianqingren). The movie portrays a young group of enthusiasts of the GLF who set out to build an irrigation canal in a remote, mountainous village. In the above excerpts, organizing and taking action together is the means to achieve a ‘good society’, one where ‘small affluence’ (xiaokang) is attainable by collective effort and where good human relations lead to stable access to drinking water. Access to water for the community is here conceptualized as one of the components of a life one ‘could enjoy’ in the future. Participant observation confirmed to me that water in these two villages was available and that villagers individually took care of interruption in the delivery by redistributing water between households or organizing time-constrained rotation in accessing the communal tap. When interrogated about such practices, villagers would answer that they tried to live up to the examples set by their water stewards, who in the past showed them how to live through collective hardship. That is to say that histories of cooperation serve to mobilize collective action in the present. Now, let me briefly tie the first two sections of this chapter together to elaborate my historically inflected concept of cooperation. Drawing from works in anthropology on ‘historicity’ and ‘materiality’, I  argue that histories of cooperation are interpretations of local historical vicissitudes (here relative to water control). This is a kind of intersubjective narrativization of past events, or the direct experience thereof, which provides ethical directions to present-day social interactions and helps prefigure future states of affair, thus potentially promoting purposeful cooperative behaviours in the present (Ricoeur 1992: 170; Hirsch and Stewart 2005:  262–263; Feuchtwang 2013; Bear 2014). In Yancong, these narratives draw heavily on the experience of collective labour and the radical political mobilization of rural communities. The GLF, represented in speech and enshrined in surviving water structures, epitomizes this experience of collective advancement. Crucially, it is the material qualities of infrastructures, their time-honoured solidity, gravity and purposefulness that allow for such interpretations of the past to occur (Latour 2002; Keane 2003; Strang 2014).

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From this vantage point, man-made infrastructures are seen as having the capacity to inspire people to imagine potential courses of actions and collaborate against present-day predicaments. Importantly, as the last section of this chapter will show, histories of cooperation do not just provide motivations to reiterate cooperative behaviours with kin, familiar or otherwise trustworthy individuals, but are narrative mechanisms that, while extending solidarity and cooperation to others, also draw clear in/out boundaries. These boundaries distinguish between cooperative individuals and the supporters of the disenfranchising forces of present-day water policies. In the eyes of Yancong villagers, it is the state and its agents who are currently invalidating their historical collective achievements by implementing policies that modify water access in disempowering and unilateral ways.

Wells don’t know how to count! Old Z had many stories to share with me about his personal engagement with managing water in Yancong. Simply put, Old Z could not accept the reform undergone by water management after the 1980s. This he described as a shift from a system run by farmers (nong qilai jiti guanli) to one run by the economy (jingji guanli). The reform was designed to allocate labour more efficiently (tiao laoli), but it resulted in widespread disenfranchisement. Yes, the local state had ‘the people at the core’ (yi ren wei ben) as he was constantly reminded during the many official banquets we attended together, and yet whatever the government did it ended up taking away from the people the power to decide about common resources. Old Z said to me once: ‘The Great Leap Forward was the demonstration that manpower (rengong), that men together, could achieve many things. Then it was decided that the government should be running the country alone. Well, now at the village level there’s no control whatsoever (cunshang buguan). Few things are well managed: water cellars, water cisterns, small waste channels. These are made, used, governed by the people [laobaixing]. [. . .] It is only because of that that we achieve factual security in drinking water supply.’ The literature on post-socialist societies has often referred to the longing for a specific sense of community, of collective achievements, which survived among the citizens of ex-socialist countries after the

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demise of the socialist state project (Brandtstädter 2003: 437; Hann 2003:  26–29; Svašek 2006:  12; Dunn 2004:  119–125; Todorova 2010: 7). In these countries, forms of intimate association in mass mobilization have left a deep trace on people’s sentiments towards human relations and cooperation. In some post-socialist countries, the memories of the socialist era, along with the sentiments attached to it, are imbued in the material legacy of that period. As Old Z noticed, and as Féaux de la Croix (2010, 2011) has found in Kyrgyzstan, water management infrastructure, such as dams or canals, could be part of this surviving legacy of factual cooperation.7 In my field site, water management – that is ponds, wells, moving or stored bodies of water accessed jointly by different users – is the recipient of a history of effort and investment for the common good, of histories of cooperation. One could take Yancong’s water wells as an example of this. Round or octagonal in shape, these wells were all made of stone. While most had been built in the last ten years, many dated back to the 1960s and 1970s. Farmers used to take water out of these wells unrestrainedly (suiyi nashui). Well water was generally used in households for drinking, cleaning and cooking. Some villagers used it for their own cattle. Others would take it and use it on the spot to clean fruit, vegetables or their own body and working tools. Octagonal wells usually have engraved on one face the year of completion and the names of families who took part in its construction. Official documents recorded 970 wells in Yancong, although farmers claimed that in the area one could find one well for every ten households, so that ‘it’s easier collecting water if one is in need’. Wells drew water from shallow underground aquifers, which according to local water bureaucrats were replenished by the water leaking out of the Xiaowa Reservoir. This is an instance of leakages effectively contributing to expansive water access. Wells could be held privately (siyou de, siyong de) but were always used jointly (gongyong de), and importantly were used irrespective of kin ties (see Wu this volume). During a survey carried out by me and two assistants among thirty farming households, respondents stressed that well water was used in common, with no right to exclude others from its use:  ‘If you need water you come and take it. There’s no payment involved [mianfei de].’ Other important water delivery infrastructure built by Yancong residents during the GLF or immediately afterwards, which punctuated the

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countryside, were two big sluice gates for irrigation water and several square kilometres of irrigation ditches used for watering rice paddies. Locals took great pride in telling me the stories of their construction. To my informants, these wells and age-old water infrastructures stood in glaring opposition to the contemporary devices of water supply, specifically water meters (shuibiao). In fact, water meters, which are now ubiquitous in Yancong as part of the implementation of the water sector reform, allow for measuring the amount of water any particular household consumes over time, an amount which would later be used by tax collectors to calculate sums due. To my research participants, such devices – which were tellingly tweaked, broken or intentionally smashed by owners – were not just putting the burden of fees payment on their shoulders, but also making the redistribution of water ‘countable’ and thus more onerous for poorer households to afford. As an old farmer told me while trying to explain why his own water meter never worked properly: ‘Look, water wells don’t know how to count (shuijing buneng suan)! We always had our own ways to get drinking water, and we believe that no one should be asked to bear the costs of a common need [shehui gonggong xuyao de] alone! That’s why my water meter is dead wood [kuzhi].’ This review of the social life of water wells in Yancong allows me to draw a further point about the histories of cooperation told by old water infrastructure. Above, I  show how water structures such as the Xiaowa Reservoir could be seen as testaments of a bygone era of cooperative efforts. But this infrastructure is not just a material witness of past episodes of successful cooperation (i.e. a recipient of history) but more tellingly, a repository of potential solutions to present-day collective dilemmas. The construction of water wells becomes a viable alternative to water meters when the cooperative network that they rely on is proved to work in a context of increasing political deprioritization of rural households’ needs. Of the many stories of perceived injustice told to me during fieldwork, those which stood out the most for my informants were related to how the local state robbed villagers of their collectively built water structures. When, in the early 1980s, an old drinking water channel was diverted by the state to provide water to a newly built hydropower station, many were outraged. ‘We were cut off the network, and we had to figure out for ourselves how to get water

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for our families’ a Yancong dweller told me once. ‘Well, the good news is that we succeeded (zuizhong laobaixing chenggongle). But the government didn’t care then as it doesn’t care now. It is a good feeling to have proved them wrong [zhengming zhengfu cuo le].’ The final point I  wish to make here in relation to the ethnography above is about the social splintering effect that the particular history of cooperation Yancong inhabitants tell each other produces in the local community. In their view, the past has been one where ‘man together can achieve many things’, as Old Z told me. Here, the long-lasting legacy of the GLF functions as living proof of this narrative. Conversely, the present way in which water circulates in the community is one where ‘manpower’ does not count anymore, where people are supplied water by the state without their direct involvement. Insofar as the state and its agents are responsible for producing such rupture in a deeply cherished history of collective efforts and achievements, their involvement in local water management is met with anger, frustration and disillusionment. The social psychologist, Martijn van Zomeren has noted how group-based anger can provide a ‘pathway to collective action’ (2004:  649). Projected against the collective disadvantage produced by the water sector’s reform and its enactors (e.g. local state agents), these feelings of betrayal translate into a reaffirmation of a collective identity, the laobaixing, which seems to further consolidate villagers’ cooperation on water management.

Conclusions How do people in a drought-prone area of Yunnan Province sort out the deeply practical cooperation problems of water management? What are the material and symbolic resources they draw on to find ways of collaborating with one another so that water can keep flowing in their community? Does the way in which we talk about the past – the ethical lessons we can draw from it as well as from its material remnants – matter for present-day cooperation dilemmas? This chapter has sought to provide an answer to these questions by exploring the moral norms, affective responses and material practices Yancong residents creatively come up with to solve problems related to water access in their community. The ethnographic investigation of these problems has demonstrated

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that the purposeful recollection and wielding of the past has a role to play in the ways in which individuals find common ground and get together to tackle problems that affect them collectively. The approach proposed here, I contend, has implications for the interdisciplinary study of human cooperation, and especially for those related to the governance of common-pool resources. As discussed above, Ostrom is usually read by anthropologists as missing largescale political processes of resource capture. In Yancong, various structural factors lie behind the current experience of shortage for local residents and only a few of these factors fall under their direct cooperative control (see Mehta 2007). Yet, I  believe that there is potential on this issue, if not for full agreement (see Agrawal and Chhatre 2006), at least space for reconciliation between the two positions. In fact, some of the most recent work in the Ostromian tradition espouse a commitment to understand the government of common resources as political processes mediated by power-laden institutions operating at different scales and local bureaucratic interests and practices that are contextually adaptive (e.g. Poteete Janssen and Ostrom 2010: Ch. 9; Stern 2011; Dereniowska 2013; Araral 2014). Instead, this chapter has advanced a less common critique to this strand of thought on human cooperation (but see Mosse 2008). This has to do with what I think is sometimes ‘lost in translation’ by fieldworkers of the commons in their generalizing attempt at building models in order to clarify individual behaviours in real life cooperation problems. Such models, while going beyond the notion of the purely rational agent to discover anthropologicalsounding motivating forces such as trust, reciprocity and shared norms as the ‘core determinant of collective action’ (Araral 2014: 14), still maintain an actor-centred, ahistorical and semioticblind understanding of how these abstract concepts are made into concrete human relationships that can foreground the cooperative management of common resources. That is, studies of the commons usually encode and control for ethnographically recorded behaviours (e.g. cooperative or freeriding) as instantiating one-to-one, long-term iterative processes of trust-building or reciprocity which, if protracted in time, could potentially establish the trust needed to produce purposeful collective actions on specific problems. In so doing, however, they simply produce what could be called ‘chronologies’ of cooperation,

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as opposed to histories. These chronologies arguably fall short of describing the implications that the overarching historical narratives described in this chapter may have for our understanding of cooperation, including its orientation and resilience. This is an important point to make if one considers that in the case of Yancong’s water wells, one does not need to be already ‘trusted’ to have access to water wells. One is actually granted such access by the way in which a particular history of cooperation is told. This history pits all villagers together in a symbolic group of sharers against the state. Therefore, histories of cooperation are a mechanism to extend cooperation to others, regardless of their trustworthiness or membership in kin groups. Arguably, this approach would enable anthropologists interested in the intellectual legacy of Ostrom to chart new terms of engagement with it, moving away from outdated contributions to or critique of abstract models of cooperation – which often fail to account for crucial variables on the ground – towards a critical appreciation for Ostrom’s often unrecognized interest in questions of politics, ethics and materiality (Ostrom 2010). It is along the lines proposed by Ostrom in her later works that anthropologists could find fertile ground for engagement. In fact, while recognizing that human everyday relationality – its ethics, values, history and politics – is a determinant factor in explaining successful or unsuccessful instances of purposeful cooperation, the later works of Ostrom and those following in her footsteps still maintain a surprisingly simplistic understanding of how history may inflect this relationality (see Cleaver and Koning 2015). This chapter has argued that a focus on histories of cooperation could be a way of constructively thickening the sometimes overly simplistic understanding of human motivations and collective aspirations that studies of the commons currently maintain (e.g. Van Laerhoven, Ostrom 2007). Moreover, this chapter’s attentiveness to local histories allows us to investigate the active recuperation and re-articulation by common villagers and local cadres of both the symbolic and material legacy of the GLF in the solution of cooperation problems relative to the supply of drinking water and its redistribution in the locale. The ethnography contained in this chapter shows how specific ethical projects of human cooperation and collective advancement are underpinned by the actors’ own understanding of past events as blueprints for a potential future state of affairs

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that may be fought for in the present. In Yancong, the symbolic and material legacy of Maoism and the GLF – now crystallized in grassroots political practices as well as in hydraulic structures – is able to spur cooperative relations, especially when contrasted with the current regime of water management and its top-heavy, disenfranchising implementation in the community. Histories of cooperation can recover one aspect of cooperative dynamics that tend to be overlooked by Ostromian approaches due to their shallow and thin use of social time, and this is the role played by the built environment and the stories it tells.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Care as bureaucratic lubricant: The role of female care workers in an old people’s home in rural China Cecilia Liu

Most chapters in this volume are based on family-based or community-based ethnography, whereas this chapter is based on the ethnography of an institution. In studies of ‘total institutions’, the main focus has been on the boundaries between staff and residents, and between inside and outside the institutions (Goffman 1961; Handelman 1981). Staff manage residents by either excluding them from making decisions on organizational affairs or blurring the staff–resident boundary so that the management appears less hierarchical. Meanwhile, the distinction between inside the institutions and outside remains sharp. These barriers, especially the hierarchy between staff and residents, predict corresponding mechanisms and dynamics to achieve the intended cooperation across institutional lines. Recently, with the rapid expansion of an aging population as a recognized social problem, studies on public institutions for elderly care in Western societies have increasingly

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investigated the delivery of ‘professional’ care services, in which the relationship between the residents and care workers is often, implicitly and explicitly, likened to that between nurse and patient, and there is a tendency to merge elderly care with medical service delivery. Cooperation between residents and care workers in these circumstances is premised upon the medicalization of the needs of the aged residents and acknowledges the privilege of the professional knowledge assumed of doctors and nurses. The anthropology of rural China since the turn of the twentyfirst century reveals a general picture of aggravated disruption and subsequent reconstitution. Noticeably, on the one hand, the institution of family is being fragmented, because of both outmigration and the easing of moral pressures that once regulated intergenerational relations; yet, on the other hand, there seems to be an intensified intersection of the public and private spheres through which familial relations and values find their current social life. Specifically, the literature shows that because of outmigration, households remaining in the rural areas are becoming incomplete.1 The authority of the elderly is undermined and their status is declining, yet intergenerational relationships within the extended family are still important to the well-being of the elderly (Yan 2003; Fong 2004). Middle-generation women  – broadly speaking, those in their forties and fifties – are often assigned the role of staying at home to care for other family members. Younger women enjoy more autonomy than their elders, and tend to out-migrate, by themselves or with their husbands. Gender and family relations remain pertinent to understanding the intensified disruptions and changes in rural society (Judd 2009). Family is still taken as the key unit to organize social and economic life, particularly in rural areas, and familial moral values and the legal stipulations regulating the public sphere intersect with each other and bring about distinctive effects (Huang 2011). While the public space shrinks, local governance is entrenched in deciding whether and how Confucian values should constitute an important part of the ideological discourse by intervening private space. Not only are the key rural policies, such as those on land distribution and social protection, unfavourable to the livelihood and security of women, but also the general perception that women are inferior to men is conspicuous and seems to be internalized by many local women (Judd 1990, 1994, 2002; see also Fang’s chapter in this

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volume on the gender problem and persistence of women’s roles in contemporary China). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, government-initiated experimental projects to increase the public provision of social protection for vulnerable groups in rural areas are booming during this period (Wu, Mao and Xu 2008). In the past decade, my fellow researchers and I  have subsequently examined the matter of cooperation in state-sponsored projects in various localities in China, employing the respective analytical idiom (i.e. the chapters by Stanford and Pia in this volume). I carried out fourteen months of fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 in a range of old people’s homes in three areas.2 One type of old people’s home that I visited was the ‘Central Respect the Elderly Home’ (CREH). The CREH originated in the Maoist period, funded and managed by government and mainly accommodated the so-called Five-Guarantees Elderly (FGE).3 Typically, the staff was composed of two directors, a man and a woman, appointed by the county Civil Affairs Bureau from among its officers (gong wu yuan), and care workers, mostly women, recruited locally on annually renewable contracts. Residents, mostly men, were often local villagers, gathered from adjacent townships. Most residents were healthy enough to manage their own routines, and some could, and did, work as labourers or run micro-businesses such as selling fruits at a local market. The scale of these homes and the ratio between staff and residents varied. Generally speaking, compared with earlier old people’s homes in rural areas, the CREHs were larger in scale, had improved infrastructure and often a few workers serving a much larger number of residents. For example, in the CREH (abbreviated as the Home in the following) where the cases in this chapter were collected, there were sixteen care workers, thirteen of whom were women, and nearly six hundred residents, 95 percent of whom were men. In recent literature on institutionalized care provision settings, care work is conceived to be entangled with expectations concerning workers’ attunement of their emotions, summarily called emotional labour (for a review, see Wharton 2009). This literature recognizes the interpersonal nature of actual working processes in organizational settings and attempts to examine how micro-interactions at this level, characterized by emotional interplay, connect with relatively more static structures. Meanwhile, a gendered pattern in the provision of care, paid or unpaid, in

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family and professionalized settings, has also been observed (Wharton and Erickson 1993; Pierce 1995; Erickson 2005; Lively and Powell 2006; George 2008). It is suggested that care work is conventionally taken as a feminine profession and that the demand on a worker’s personal characteristics, notably the performance of kindness and friendliness, often outweighs that on her professional skills, albeit circumstantial factors may influence the degree to which this stereotype applies. In my view, this literature not only reminds us of the significance of the so-called non-rational interactions prompted by emotions, but perhaps more importantly, it suggests one relatively neglected consequence of the professionalization of care work, namely, the professionalization of emotions and the new complexities, or simplicities, in care work that follow. On the other hand, given that China has achieved remarkable development of its own characteristics with an accelerated pace, it is reasonable to assume that although the care service in these homes may still be generally less ‘professional’ than the current western practice, it is comfortably apt to change. Thus, relating the emotional labour literature to the context at issue, one may be tempted to ask whether ‘emotional service’ is also on demand in these homes; if so, how it is perceived and how it travels between the care providers and the residents, is regulated and integrated with life across the institutional lines. I have previously pointed out that one important feature of CREHs is that they have a double mission, which in theory demands contradictory practices. On the one hand, public discourse calls for respect to residents as a superior moral guidance, a notion rooted in the Confucian moral discourse that informs Chinese national virtues (zhong hua min zu de mei de). On the other hand, the staff manage the residents to present the required image to external visitors and supervision, an image crucially important to the achievement of ‘good’ institutional performance as measured by the bureaucracy. From my observations, above all, this means that the residents are required to submit their personal idiosyncrasies to institutional rules, such as queuing properly before each meal. The enforcement of these rules can hardly be seen as respectful and caring. In my view, this institutional paradox of respect and discipline informs the minute details through which the cooperation between staff and residents unfold every day. It also poses a main question: How are institutional exclusion and dominion achieved in

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an official discourse of respect and ‘nurturance’ (yang)? Meanwhile, relating to the gender issue, we also need to understand whether and how the ways in which care workers facilitate cooperation are influenced by their gender identity and how we should understand this connection. To address these questions, I present four ethnographic cases to illustrate how cooperation between staff and residents, mediated by female care workers, unfolds in the Home in practice. I assert that, first, a framework that focuses on a staff–resident dichotomy conceals as much as it reveals. There are sub-groups and sub-hierarchies in each of these two cohorts, as well as collaboration between them, which means that the actual dynamics are more malleable than a single structural model could properly explain. Second, the moral values of wider society penetrate institutional boundaries; in some cases, they may define both the need and solution for cooperation. These cooperation cases are all mediated by female care workers and present good illustrations in this regard. Although staff, the female care workers are not in a position to decide the institutional agenda, but enforce rules while serving the residents at the frontline; in this way, they form a contact zone, often buffering between staff management and residents by acting on local moral expectations when confrontation erupts. Common to the ways in which the mediating function is fulfilled is the female care workers’ expression of local moral values that define a ‘good woman’, more than those of professional care work. Often, though not always, the female care workers embody some degree of self-deprecation, tolerance and sacrifice, which is key to the male residents’ acceptance of the institutional rules and thus leads to the intended cooperation. Last but not least, although the mediation done by female care workers is indispensable in mollifying confrontational agendas, it is rarely recognized in the end result.

The four cases The first case concerns a resident called Old Xu. Xu was a 78-yearold bachelor when I met him and had been a production brigade leader for more than twenty years before retiring. After living by himself for some years, he moved into the CREH. Two years into his life at the Home, he was promoted to manage general matters

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regarding his floor of the building and later appointed a member of the Elderly Committee (EC), representing residents in management decision-making. When Xu moved into the CREH, many rules were still in the process of being finalized and not yet established. If they wanted to leave the Home temporarily, a resident was supposed to ask for permission in advance and return on the agreed date. Xu was aware of this, but like most others at that time, was not used to it, nor did he take the rule very seriously. On one occasion, having been granted three days’ leave, Xu stayed away for over a month. When he returned and went to Director Zhu to claim his allowance for this period, he was told that because he had been away for much longer than had been agreed, he would have to forfeit the money.4 Xu felt this justifiable, but was very unhappy about it. After some thought, he went back to Director Zhu, intending to negotiate a refund of his ‘meal money’ for the period of his leave; he reasoned that it was fair to pay him the equivalent monetary value – about 4.5 RMB per day  – of the food he had not consumed. Again, he was refused. This time, the justification was that food was arranged at a ‘collective level’ (ji ti ceng mian), not per individual, thus if someone did not consume his share, other residents then had more to enjoy. In the end, Xu had to accept his total monetary loss for the period of his leave and was very unhappy. He also told me that he understood why he was given these explanations and that was why later he thought perhaps he should learn something from this experience. After some time, Xu’s floor leader was relocated to another job and recommended Xu as his successor. When Director Zhu approached Xu about this, Xu turned him down. Xu told me that he did so because he was still unhappy about the money previously denied him because of his prolonged leave and so he did not want to cooperate with Director Zhu. For some time, there was no one to organize cleaning and other routines on that floor and rubbish was often seen in the corridor. A few days later Zhiying, the female head of care workers, approached Xu. Xu later explained to me how Zhiying had persuaded him to accept the post, imitating her way of speaking: Xu daye [Big Grandpa], your surname is Xu; and this is also my mother’s surname. So we can be counted as belonging to ‘one

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family’ [yi jia ren]. Given this affinity [kan zai zhe fen shang], can you just think of it as doing me a ‘personal favour’ to help with the cleaning work? We don’t have to immediately talk about being a floor leader or not, just do me a personal favour to make the cleaning work go on first. Xu observed, ‘You see, she knows how to behave correctly [lit. ‘do a person’, zuo ren], so I  thought, “It’s fine, we should help each other.” ’ In addition, both Xu and Zhiying recalled that Zhiying also promised to add another ten RMB each month from her budget to Xu’s allowance to thank him for this favour. Xu started to do the cleaning work. After several months, Director Zhu called Xu to his office and again brought up the matter of being a floor leader: Xu daye, you have been sweeping the floor of the TV hall for quite a while and have been doing a great job. In fact I myself never took you just for a cleaner; as you know, I have always respected you as a floor leader. Why not just take the post formally? This time Xu accepted and has been a floor leader ever since. The second case concerns Old Zhong. According to most care workers, Zhong was a very ‘disobedient’ (jue) resident, who had brought many of his eccentric habits to the Home. One was that he liked peanuts and needed to pile as many as possible next to him on his bed as he slept, in order to feel safe and happy. Hehong, the care worker for his floor, repeatedly tried to get him to comply with the rule that the bed must be kept clear during the daytime, but Zhong refused. Often when Hehong went to remonstrate with him about the condition of his room, Zhong would retort: It’s only because you are the wife of a bullshit land official that you dare to bully me. I’m just waiting here to see what you dare to do to me: are you going to kill me? I tell you that I’m already of this age and I am not afraid of anything. This is my room, and you can never order me about as though I were a prisoner! Hehong did not take kindly to these words; and the two frequently quarrelled. As their fight escalated, Director Zhu also became involved. He once went to Zhong’s room with some male care workers:  without saying anything, they started to throw Zhong’s

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possessions out and warned him that if he continued to flout the hygiene rules, he would be left in an empty room to sleep on the floor with his peanuts. Zhong roared and fought physically with these younger men. Rather than being overwhelmed by their physical strength, Zhong was provoked to extreme anger and threatened to commit suicide if anyone dared move a single piece of furniture out of his room. Zhong’s unyielding resistance was a real problem for the staff, and his resolution to defend his habits with his life proved very effective. After some time, the staff had the idea of moving Zhong to a corner room on the floor under the charge of another female care worker, Murong. This proved the ideal solution: due to the room’s location, hardly anyone passed by and thus it (and Zhong’s peanuts) were far less conspicuous than before. Moreover, compared to Hehong, Murong had a much softer character and never quarrelled fiercely with residents. Instead of pushing ‘disobedient’ residents like Zhong to clean, she often carried out their chores herself. In fact, Zhong continued his habit of piling peanuts on his bed after being moved to the new room, but he gradually accepted other hygiene rules, such as sweeping the floor; and his eccentricity became less of a thorny issue. The third case involves Zheng Xiucheng, a female resident in her forties.5 Zheng had suffered from rheumatism since she was a teenager and over time, this had worsened; her limbs were swollen and painful and her mobility became increasingly hindered by this illness. She had been one of two female residents on the third floor of Building I where the rooms had no private toilet. By the time I met Zheng, she had managed to move to a room with a private toilet on the ground floor of Building III. Comparing the two dorms she had lived in, Zheng started by recalling the humiliating experience of using the public toilet in the corridor of the first dorm: as there was no separate space for bathing, she used to fill a bucket of water and wash herself in the toilet. Although the public toilets were equally distributed between men and women with gender signs on the doors,6 the fact that the majority of residents on this floor were men made these gendered toilets effectively genderless in actual use:  male residents often used both. For the considerably fewer female residents, going to the toilet thus necessitated particular caution to avoid embarrassing encounters. In addition, Zheng’s swollen fingers could not lock the door without help, so each time

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she could only hope that others would know someone was washing and not disturb her. But this was not assured. More than once some male residents had pushed in, not necessarily harming her, but making insulting remarks, laughing and then walking away. This made Zheng nervous, but she saw no way out. She was too embarrassed to report such matters to the directors, and thought that even if she did so, they would not be able to help. Eventually, her problem was noticed by a few female workers, who felt sorry for her. It was finally resolved when the female care worker for her current floor arranged for her to move to a room with a private toilet, whose previous occupant had passed away. The toilet issue was never mentioned publicly; the move was explained as saving Zheng from her difficulties in climbing the stairs. Zheng was very grateful to the care worker and felt that she had nothing with which to thank her. I  asked Zheng if this could conceivably have been done by a male care worker;7 she replied clearly after a second of seeming surprise at this question: ‘Impossible [bu ke neng]!’ The last case is related to the use of communication technologies. Residents had rarely encountered these technologies before entering the CREH. Like other artefacts of modern state governance, such as ID cards and other certificates, residents increasingly recognized the need for telephones (either landline or mobile) to be connected with their relatives; radio to hear about new policies on rural elderly welfare with which they were particularly concerned and wanted to access directly; and television as a main medium of entertainment. This created a set of dynamics and needs requiring help from others: most residents either did not have such items, or did not know how to use them and so often, they approached care workers for assistance. This kind of help was not defined in written documents on care, nor in professional training, but emerged in the everyday life and constituted a major part of the actual care requested by the residents. The use of the telephone may tell us something about the cooperation needed in providing this kind of care service. The Home had one telephone, then installed in the directors office. When residents wanted to use it, they often went first to a care worker. Over time, I  noticed that when Xiaofang was on duty, fewer residents asked to use the telephone than when Mei was there. (Xiaofang and Mei were two female care workers.) I asked Maotou, a male resident, about this. His explanation was revealing: Mei was much more easy-going (lao shi) than Xiaofang,

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so it was ‘more comfortable’ (geng shu fu) to ask her to help use the telephone. Most residents did not (or at least, thought they could not) know how to use the telephone:  Mei often connected the call so that the residents only needed to talk, whereas Xiaofang sometimes obfuscated matters before she helped.8 I pushed further:  as the telephone was in the director’s office, why did they not just ask the director to help when he was free? Maotou stared at me, saying, ‘I did not think of this,’ then after a while, added, ‘these “little matters” [xiao shi] are for care workers.’

Analysis Even in a society like China, where it is often perceived that interpersonal relations are more intense than in Western societies, we find that cooperation between staff and residents shown in the earlier cases does not happen wilfully or easily. In the first two cases, the need for cooperation was initiated by the staff for the purpose of keeping the home clean. Xu was dissatisfied with Director Zhu because of his earlier denial of his allowance and meal money and it was this which prevented Xu from cooperating with Zhu’s request to be the floor leader. In the case of Zhong, his refusal to change his habit of having peanuts on his bed seemed non-negotiable, regardless of regulations and physical threat. The next two cases show what happens when the need for cooperation comes from the residents’ side. Zheng’s reluctance to report her problems with using the shared toilet precluded the possibility that the directors might assist her. The last case shows that asking for help to make a phone call also involves subtle choices about whom to approach for such help: for many residents like Maotou, the directors are not considered simply because of their position; and among the care workers, the more tolerant person is preferred. What causes the obstacle to the intended cooperation in each specific case? From the first two cases, we may gather that when the need for cooperation comes from the staff, the purpose is often to ensure institutional order; above all, this involves the residents conforming to certain behaviours. In both cases, conformity means curbing individual autonomy. In Xu’s case, it means that he cannot leave the Home as independently as he wishes, yet he allows himself to be persuaded to take the job of floor leader; and

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in Zhong’s case, it means that he will need to give up his habit of piling up peanuts on his bed. These cases give us a sense of the institutional hierarchy between staff and residents:  it is an inadequate structural establishment, namely, the hierarchy itself prescribes the imposition of certain rules, but is insufficient to enforce such impositions; in other words, there is the space for unwilling residents to resist and annul the intended cooperation. The latter two cases seem to suggest that residents’ various concerns prevent them from inviting cooperative action from the staff. In the third case, Zheng’s reluctance comes from her embarrassment over her experience in the toilet, possibly deriving from her sense of shame in being physically unable to lock the door properly, her disability and the sexual insults. In the fourth case, the assumption that the directors should not help with ‘small’ things like making phone calls precludes their service. In these cases, the residents do not seem to consider themselves ‘deserving’ of these services; and there is always some caution involved when they invite the service as a form of cooperation. These concerns and perceptions, acted as barriers to cooperation, seem to derive largely from the wider cultural background that stipulates stigma and taboos associated with sex, gender, disability and hierarchy (Goffman 1968). On the staff side, it seems that the decision as to whether to cooperate with residents is noticeably individual and situational. This causes a kind of fluidity that increases the uncertainty in this kind of cooperation. This is revealing to our understanding of cooperation between staff and residents in hierarchical and institutional settings. Let us then look at the moments when these difficulties are overcome and cooperation is made possible. In the case of Xu, care worker Zhiying’s intervention reverses the situation. As Xu’s recollection shows, a key factor that makes him change his mind is Zhiying’s mediation. Zhiying talks with Xu using personal terms, such as addressing Xu with the colloquial kin term da ye (Big Grandpa), emphasizing the common surname of her own mother and Xu to establish personal affinity; she also, on her own initiative, offers Xu a material incentive of an extra ten RMB each month, couched in the terms of a personal gift. Her rhetoric and the gift soften the earlier accumulated antagonism between Zhu and Xu. Zhiying’s way of working thus proves effective as Xu agrees to do the work. In other words, the demand by Director Zhu to have Xu cooperate with him

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for institutional purposes is met by the care worker Zhiying making personal affinities with Xu through rhetorical tactics and monetary incentive, both of which blur the hierarchical opposition in their relative institutional positions. In this way, Xu is able to feel that he has gained face and income and so agrees to cooperate with the agenda, be it imposed or not. Zhong’s story is one of many cases in which individual preference is in direct conflict with the Home’s hygiene criteria. The peanuts on his bed are considered ‘dirty’ by institutional measures. The solution to his ‘disobedience’ takes the form of an uncertain and rather dramatic process of confrontation and aggression. Zhong, like Xu, does not surrender to direct punishment and the threats of the younger men. These are then followed by the spatial tactic of moving him to a corner room and matching him with the female care worker Murong whose ‘personality’ is said to be able to tame Zhong in meeting the hygiene standard when needed. Thus, even though Zhong’s ‘unclean’ behaviour of piling peanuts is not, in fact, corrected, its invisibility, brought about by spatial marginalization and Murong’s generous labour, makes it appear as if a successful reformation of an otherwise stubborn old bachelor has been effected, and thus as if cooperation is achieved. Murong is perceived by others to have a ‘good temper’ (xing ge hao); in this case, we may understand that one embodiment of a ‘good temper’ is to ‘do more and instruct less’ (duo zuo shao shuo), as Murong does for Zhong, which proves indispensable in making the residents like Zhong conform to institutional living. Zheng suffers from the jokes and insults thrown at her, but is reluctant to report this to the management, both because she believes that her problem cannot be solved and because of her embarrassment. The female care worker’s sympathy for Zheng motivates her to help with the problem. Zheng’s remark that it would be ‘impossible’ for male care workers to offer this help may suggest that she regards such sympathy to have a gender dimension:  women are in a better position to empathize with distress associated with being a woman. Same-sex sympathy is the key here to removing invisible institutional barriers to make the Home responsive to a woman resident’s suffering. In addition, I am also tempted to think that the sympathy from the female care worker derives from the same source that prevents Zheng from

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reporting the matter formally: the perception that it is shameful for a woman to be made fun of like this (Herzfeld 1996). The fourth case illustrates how residents choose who to ask for help when they need a service like making a phone call. It is representative of the ‘grey zone’ of ordinary, everyday matters that residents are not able (or feel unable) to resolve themselves and that staff may or may not help with. In this case, Xiaofang does help but may pique the residents before doing so. By comparison, Mei’s easy-going nature is considered an important factor in the residents’ decision to ask her for help. Being easy-going in this case means not making additional trouble before offering help and instead doing everything possible to ensure the residents feel comfortable. In my observation, this is representative of residents’ choice and assessment of care workers. While a more visible hierarchy is seen when residents say that the directors should not be troubled with such minor matters simply because they are directors, it seems that the relationship between residents and female care workers is more subject to interpretation and malleability. In all these cases, I  would like to contend, the ways in which female care workers make cooperation possible share the common feature that they perform some degree of selfdeprecation, tolerance or sacrifice so that the assumed tension between management and residents is loosened. When the head care worker, Zhiying, talks with Xu about being a floor leader, she presents it as if Xu is helping her. She also reciprocates Xu’s help with a monetary gift of ten RMB per month. Murong ensures the cleanliness of Zhong’s room without asking Zhong to do the required cleaning. The female care worker’s sympathy for Zheng and effort to help her move to another room dissolves institutional indifference. Residents prefer the service of making a phone call to be offered conveniently and respectfully, and this is what Mei does. From a different angle, this may also suggest that, compared to the directors, the actual relative position of female care workers to the residents is defined less by their identity as staff and more by gender. The rhetoric of ‘offering help’ (bang ge mang) is very present in these cases of cooperation. Why should the cooperation between female care workers and residents be talked about in the idiom of ‘help’, given that there is an institutional hierarchy between them? It seems to me that

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the rhetoric of ‘offering help’ has the function of blurring the hierarchies therein, that is, the notion that the helper is more powerful than the helped interacts with other present hierarchies and makes a single hierarchical relationship felt less conspicuous. While sharing commonality, we also see that the individual characters of female care workers are very present in fulfilling this function:  they serve with a variety of expressions. This is to say that while having the effect of making a uniform subject, whether worker or resident, this institution is still able to leave room for individuality in delivering care services. In my view, this is extraordinary; while we understand that modern care-providing institutions, through their very structure, suppress individuality and prioritize professionalism at the cost of personal affinity, these cases seem to suggest that under certain circumstances, individuality can be preserved to serve the institutional purpose. Compared to the actual function of female care workers in making intra-institutional cooperation possible, their work is nevertheless almost invisible in the institutional display of its performance to external audit. Furthermore, while in having residents conform to institutional rules or meeting residents’ requests, the care workers do not seem to have their own agenda (Tomasello and Vaish 2013), nor do they seem to care much whether their work is equally represented and recognized. (They do, however, seem to care about their wages; in fact, it appears that they take their wage as the only measure of the value of their work.) Some female care workers explained how they think about this job in a way that may be enlightening: the main motivation for working in the Home is that it allows one to work close to home, as opposed to migrating, and physically, the work is much less strenuous than, for example, a factory job. This means that they have the time and energy to take care of their children and elderly relatives, as well as attend to other local affairs, all of which they consider to be their ‘personal matters’ (zi ji de shi). The general wish to prioritize their familial tasks heavily influences their opinion of this work; and also noticeably, their corresponding performance in this regard seems to be well received by both male workers and residents. In this way, the identities of these female care workers as ordinary women in family and kin-based rural societies in China permeate their work in this newly established public institution.

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Conclusion: Care as bureaucratic lubricant The number of old people’s homes has soared in many areas of the world as a response to the aging population, which provides a fitting context for comparative studies on relevant topics. To understand this type of institution in China, however, convenient copying of Western management and medical models is often proved inadequate to capture the social and institutional circumstances that circumscribe these homes. The cooperation cases in this chapter suggest that the circumstantial factors around such settings, specifically the moral values on gender and family, not only heavily inform what happens inside, but at times author it. Care workers need not only to help directors enforce the rules conducive to institutional order, but also at times to make the residents feel that their autonomy is not affected and that they are respected. In other words, the care workers have the double role of taking care of both the performance of the state institution and the feelings of the welfare recipients. As the two functions are constantly in conflict, female care workers mitigate tension by being particularly flexible. In practice, they often act submissively, being tolerant and self-sacrificial, so as to meet the expectations of residents and staff expressed in kaleidoscopic forms. Yet, their contribution of this sort is often not represented in the institution’s static presentations of its achievement to outsiders. For this reason, I liken their function in these cooperation cases to the lubricant of a new bureaucratic machine: indispensable to the running in of the hardware, yet invisible.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Reputation, morality and power in an emigrant community (qiaoxiang) in Guangdong Province Meixuan Chen

In studies of huaqiao (emigrants or ‘sojourners’ who have left China), scholars have described various cooperation mechanisms – for the most part, apparently successful ones – involving the Overseas Chinese and those still living in their home communities. Investments and donations made by Overseas Chinese are regarded as having played a major role in China’s recent economic boom, and also in the visibly improved infrastructure in many qiaoxiang (emigrant communities) in the past several decades. What drives this process? In Watson’s (1975) study of Man emigrants in England and Holland, their lineage-based kinship ties and their search for old-age security drove huaqiao to continue a financial relationship with their ancestral villages in Hong Kong. In most studies, networks and lineages – the major cooperation mechanisms in such cases  – are taken for granted as the result of group or cultural affinity; the ongoing connection of huaqiao to their home town is perceived to be driven primarily by economic interests

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or kinship ties (Hoe 2007: 93). In Chinese state discourse, the (very welcome) willingness of huaqiao to contribute towards economic development is interpreted as a manifestation of patriotism combined with the cultural values of home town and family loyalty. This chapter focuses on cooperation among members of a lineage subgroup in a qiaoxiang village in Guangdong Province. Drawing on a case study of conflicts over land ownership in this qiaoxiang, I want to suggest that neither kinship ties nor shared cultural values nor economic interests per se are enough to convince people to cooperate. In making this point, I  will focus on the concern for reputation that is at play in cooperation processes involving huaqiao and their home town folks – and also cooperation among locals in a range of projects. Huaqiao make return visits to their ancestral villages in Guangdong since the 1980s and, in doing so, they make many things happen. But their ‘homecoming’ is often problematic rather than simply welcomed by all the locals. Moreover, their philanthropic patronage, for example, in the building of temples and village school, is done for the glory not only of the family but also for that of individuals. The benefactors’ ‘absent presence’ – a notion I will return to below – may be very disruptive and create moral dilemmas for local people. The following ethnographic materials came from fieldwork in the qiaoxiang I  call Mashan in 2006 and 2007. I  will show how people from a lineage subgroup in this community renew and strengthen their cooperation in ancestral worship in spite of conflicts related to monetary and moral interests. In this type of ‘conflict-laden cooperation’, they have to (re-)negotiate long-term reputational concerns of their group and immediate individual monetary gratification. I will demonstrate that in this process the concern for moral reputation is at work as a central mechanism for making cooperation happen. Here, I find it useful to draw on the discussion by Sperber and Baumard (2012) of reputation. As they note, ‘Reputation is an important aspect of human sociality and culture. It is a socially transmitted typically evaluative judgment that is presented as consensual, or at least as widely shared’ (Sperber and Baumard 2012:  509). In the case that follows, I  will show how people in Mashan deploy their social-cultural competence in ‘reflective management of moral reputation’ (511). More specifically, they anticipate the reputational effects of their actions, that is, how these

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actions will be interpreted in both home and overseas Mashanese communities. In line with the theory of ‘mutualistic morality’ (509), my informants certainly not just care about the reputations of others (with whom they might cooperate) but also care how they themselves may be seen. The definition of moral reputation by Sperber and Baumard may be particularly useful in the present exploration of cooperation within kinship groups, as discussed in the introduction to this collection. Indeed, their notion of ‘mutualistic morality’ corresponds in interesting ways with Sahlins’s (2011a: 10) explanation of what a kinship system is:  ‘A manifold of intersubjective participations, founded on mutualities of being.’ ‘Mutuality of being,’ according to Sahlins, suggests ‘people who are intrinsic to one another’s existence’ (2012a: 2). Moral coexistence through negotiation and cooperation is an important dimension of the ‘mutuality of being’ that Sahlins discusses. This chapter looks in particular at cooperation within a lineage subgroup, and thus beyond the level of individual and nuclear family. More specifically, the relevant cooperation involves three generations whose acknowledged common ancestor is four generations ‘above’ the oldest living generation. Geographically, it involves people who are village-based and those who are absent in overseas countries as well as more recent rural-to-urban migrants who live in China’s coastal urban cities. I suggest that the notion of reputation can be further unpacked in the specific case of qiaoxiang (or migrant) relationships, for here there are various reputational structures at play: 1 In theory, people care about the reputation of their ancestors. They claim their efforts (e.g. to make money and to contribute to home town projects) are meant to ‘glorify the ancestors’. 2 They care about the reputation of their existing kinship group. Members of certain lineage subgroups tell me they are proud to belong to their group as it is recognized as a powerful one that can afford decent ancestor worship rituals, and so forth. 3 They care about the reputation they have as individuals within the kinship group. There is obvious competition

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among group members for who has the higher reputation or more prestige as measured by donations. 4 They care about the reputation they have outside of the kinship group as individuals or vis-à-vis their group as a whole, either the official recognition by the local and provincial state or in their Overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia or Hong Kong. The obsession and concern of local people with reputation does not come from nowhere, of course. As it happens, they live in a world where public displays of Overseas Chinese (huaqiao) reputation are ubiquitous. In the next section, I  will first describe the qiaoxiang village and its particular moral geography of public reputation. Then by telling the ethnographic story of conflicts over a piece of land, I will show how reputation works as a mechanism of cooperation in a contemporary lineage village with strong overseas connections.

Reputation on public display At the beginning of my fieldwork, I hired a driver to take me on his motorbike from the county town to the village of Mashan, a locally well-known qiaoxiang (home town to Overseas Chinese). After he learned about my interest in studying huaqiao (Overseas Chinese), the driver immediately noted that Mashan was a proper qiaoxiang for me to study, and then commented:  ‘Those huaqiao care simply for their own reputations [ai mingshen, ‘love their names and sound’]. That’s why they come back to give money.’ He was explicitly critical of huaqiao for their self-serving pursuit of reputation by means of donations. His negative comments stood in stark contrast to those of the official discourse which cites huaqiao’s monetary donations as proof of their selflessness in front of their kin. Reputation is a significant concept in Chinese culture, and one often reflected on by ordinary people (such as my driver). The Chinese characters and phrases for the word ‘reputation’ are related to a person’s ‘name’: mingsheng (name and sound), mingyu (name and honour), shengyu (sound and honour). Morality is implied in these phrases, as the prefixes most often placed before these two nouns

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are good (hao) and bad (huai). This moral implication of reputation is clearly indicated in another four-character phrase frequently employed to describe someone with good reputation:  degao wangzhong), literally, ‘high moral accomplishment and weighty reputation’. Not only is such a person respectable and influential but also what they say is bound to be reliable and trustworthy. Chinese phrases of these kinds come up frequently in villagers’ daily conversations and in the quarterly Overseas Chinese Newsletter that is produced in Mashan and regularly distributed to overseas Mashanese communities. These vocabularies of reputation play a significant part in the moral and social discourse and practice of the local world. Reputation travels. Notably, two of the three local equivalents of ‘reputation’ mentioned above contain the character meaning ‘sound’ (sheng). This indicates reputation can travel like sound, that is, fast and easy. Reputation travels across generations within the village. Villagers today can talk about the glorious reputation of their ancestors several generations back. Since the 1990s, with telephones, post and printing technologies readily accessible in the village, reputation travels across village and national borders, back and forth between home and Overseas Chinese communities. This quality of reputation will become clearer in the ethnographic case that I present in the second part. Before I  detail the moral geography of reputation, however, I should first give a more general picture of the village. The village Mashan is the native place to more than five thousand Overseas Chinese (huaqiao), who mostly left before 1949 for Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong or Taiwan to work as manual labourers (coolies). Over 90 percent of households today claim to have at least one family member overseas. Most are members of the dominant lineage. They began to make return visits to the village en masse starting in the mid-1980s. The village is frequently referred to as the place where their ‘placenta was buried’. This sentiment in this popular discourse of one’s ‘native place’, or ‘village of origin’ is contingent with the national, provincial and local government policy that promotes overseas connections as a route to economic development. In the two decades following the implementation of a state policy that favours the return of huaqiao, they have exerted a huge influence on economic, political and social life in Mashan,

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though importantly, most of the year they are physically absent from the village. As a result, huaqiao are a powerful ‘absent presence’ in the village. One major source of their influence and power comes from their philanthropic donations in various domains. These go to members of the lineage or various lineage subgroups, that is, benefiting relatively distant kin. They are neither directed to the benefactor’s immediate family members, for example, parents and children, nor to total strangers unknown to the financier. In some respects, this is more like cooperation on a ‘home town’ basis than cooperation between very closely related people. Financial contribution towards village public-interest projects – such as improvements to local amenities – is a form of cooperation, by definition. These huaqiao are ‘doing good’ (like philanthropists), but in a context where the self-serving aspect of it is fairly explicit – it is for their kin, however distant, not for strangers. They gain social and moral reputation in the local world and in the kin network both at home and overseas. Strictly speaking, it is not an expression of altruism in the sense of the Western philanthropic tradition. This kind of huaqiao ‘philanthropy towards kin’ in their ancestral place raises interesting questions about reputation, cooperation and altruism. Indeed, the word ‘philanthropy’ can be interrogated here. In the village-based Overseas Chinese Newsletter (qiaokan), the local literati in Mashan use several equivalent phrases interchangeably for ‘philanthropy’ in Chinese: shanshi (kind deeds), cishan (charity) and gongyi (public interests). The most common vernacular one is the first one: shanshi, as in zuo shanshi, ‘doing good’. But the locals emphasize that ‘doing good in a good way’ (shanshi shanwei) is as important as ‘doing good’ (zuo shanshi). ‘Doing good in a good way’ indicates that givers show respect or moral concern to the recipients in carrying out charitable actions. In other words, a sense of cooperation involving both givers and recipients is assumed in this way. In comparison, simply ‘doing good’ may imply a lack of such concern. This implies that the givers are mostly interested in gaining personal reputation. Sometimes this may cause them to earn a bad reputation, even after offering a large amount of monetary donation to some public-interest project. The most visible effect of overseas benefactors’ donations is the much improved and ‘modernized’ village infrastructure and public

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buildings, usually named after certain huaqiao. Villagers living in Mashan cannot avoid exposure to the presence of huaqiao in their everyday life. Any villager who leaves his house will have to walk along the village paths that are now paved with cement and various cement bridges connecting up different parts of the village. He will see square stone tablets engraved with the name(s) of overseas financial patrons that appear along these paths and bridges. Children go to the village kindergarten and primary school, where every classroom in both old and new school buildings is named after a certain wealthy individual. Their names are written in big red characters and their portraits look down at the students or any visitors from the walls of the school auditorium. When villagers perform rituals in ancestral halls, they will be confronted with names of huaqiao who have bankrolled the renovation projects and the rituals there. Evidence of huaqiao investment in lineage and public projects both before 1949 and after 1980 can be found in almost every aspect of the village life: the irrigation system for paddy fields, roads and paths, school buildings, recreation, water provision, electricity and medical clinics. Largely thanks to this kind of improvement or ‘modernization’ in all these domains, Mashan was handpicked by local state agents to be one of the four model villages in the local county described as ‘Socialist New Villages’ on the list submitted to the provincial government. It should be pointed out, these huaqiao-funded projects, often identified as community projects for the public good (gongyi shiye), are not the product of one-way donation from overseas. Rather, they result from at least two-way cooperation between home town people on the one hand and overseas patrons on the other. People at home, especially the lineage elders and village officials have to actively employ a number of mobilization strategies to attract funding. They are seen as those who work with a ‘public heart’ (gongxin) for the public good. They are deemed trustworthy public figures in the village, that is, enjoying a good and clean reputation. In fact, the four-character phrase mentioned at the beginning of this ­chapter – ‘high moral accomplishment and weighty reputation’ (degao wangzhong)  – is also applied to them. By successfully convincing huaqiao to donate, that is, to cooperate in building their home village, they have achieved good social reputation and risen or re-established themselves to be powerful village elites. Some of them are directly involved in the story that I will tell in the second

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part. The village elders’ rise to power through their connection to overseas wealth also points to the correlation between reputation and power. I will come back to this point further below. The village elites try to distinguish all the overseas-funded buildings by calling them ‘Overseas Chinese architecture’ (huaqiao jianzhu or qiaoxiang jianzhu). This points to the prominent materiality in the village landscape and indicates the privileged link of the lineage village to the Overseas Chinese community. To most locals, this would be interpreted first as a moral geography of reunion, because it has the power to attract dispersed sons and daughters back to the village community (cf. Stafford 1999, 2003). In short, the moral imperative to return home is manifested in these buildings for the public good. But I would like to propose further that this is a moral geography of public reputation. Here I  use the term ‘moral geography’ in a similar way to Johnston (2013:  60–63) when he discusses the building of houses and tombs by absent villagers in an Anhui village. In his case, the building of new houses and tombs accentuates the moral pressure on absent children to return to their parental home. In a similar vein, these Overseas Chinese buildings not only vividly objectify the reputation of huaqiao, but also exert moral pressure on villagers who live their daily life in the village. One example is that local young people are likely to attract a bad reputation of being ‘left behind’ if they do not leave the village for work in cities and so lose the opportunity to make a ‘glorious return’ one day in the future like the wealthy overseas donors (cf. Trémon 2017). Though in private conversation villagers make negative passing comments like that of my driver, most would like to maintain the coherent image and reputation of being worthy recipients of these overseas donations. This is particularly so when they face outsiders, their overseas kin or any potential patrons. The driver’s comment implied a negative moral judgement of huaqiao benefactors. He saw their philanthropic donations as selfish, linked to their names and personal gain in the local world. And he is right to point out that huaqiao can establish a good reputation for themselves and their immediate family by giving donations. As in other qiaoxiang, the overseas funders are documented in written form and praised in public discourse for their generosity, loyalty to their ancestral land and community spirit. Pertinent to this private and family reputation, the national official discourse of huaqiao

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patriotism (huaqiao aiguo) raises huaqiao and their contribution onto an even higher moral level. Giving donations becomes a socially recognized and established channel to build up one’s ‘name and voice’ among one’s extended kin network. Living within this ‘moral geography of reputation’, people in the qiaoxiang village where I  did fieldwork are fully aware they live under the gaze of not only their fellow villagers but also their counterparts in overseas Mashanese communities. They have learned to carefully manage their personal reputation and the collective reputation of their lineage subgroup. Thus far, I  have treated reputation as morality and (symbolic) power that can travel across time and space. Specifically in the qiaoxiang context, reputation is generated through ‘doing good’ with a cooperative attitude. In the following ethnographic vignette, concern for individual and group reputation shape people’s negotiation and actions in deciding whether to cooperate or not, that is, the morality of cooperation.

Reputation and cooperation in Mashan In turning to my case study, I  should start by mentioning the ‘financialization of morality’ that has taken place in Mashan in the early years of this century. This is related to another result of the mass return visits from Overseas Chinese:  the revival of group ancestral worship rituals. These rituals are financed by various ancestral trusts, most of which have re-emerged after their disappearance in the Mao era. The re-emergence, however, is not based on a simple return to the old ways of funding ancestral trusts such as joint ownership of a piece of forest or paddy field (cf. Brandstädter 2001). In contrast, the ancestral trusts, albeit sometimes in the same ancestral names, now take the form of a cash deposit, mostly in a pawnshop in Singapore or Malaysia. Some trusts are simply a new creation. Nevertheless, the emergence of most of these ancestral trusts is sponsored with overseas cash remittances. The financial boost from overseas migrants has initially encouraged the enthusiastic cooperation of villagers in performing ancestral worship together.

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This revival, however, has been followed by a gradual decline in the past two decades due to inflation and de-population brought about by the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration. Moreover, the phrase ‘no money, no tomb worship’ is used to criticize locals who decline to take part in tomb worship rituals when no ‘red envelope’ (hongbao) money is handed out to them due to insufficient funding from the Trusts. The difficulty of finding a household that will agree to head the largest-scale annual worship for the village founding ancestors is widely acknowledged, ‘because the head household has to take money out of his own pocket to cover the total cost of the ritual and the banquet afterwards’. This is deemed a big financial burden, and the social prestige associated with the ritual does not, it seems, provide enough incentive to overcome this burden. But among the many conflicts arising in relation to huaqiao investment in this community, those surrounding land ownership are some of the most interesting. The following story illustrates land ownership conflicts connected with group ancestral worship, brought to a head by the commercialization of formerly fallow land. In 2007, a Taiwanese timber company was interested in leasing for the next 50 years some large mountain ranges that fall within the village boundaries; it offered a one-off, up-front cash payment of the total rent to the relevant households who would agree to the lease. This money offer was a windfall to those households whose forest land lay within the mountain ranges. It was said certain households would receive up to 100,000 RMB, enough to build a two-storey cement house. The village cadres who acted as the agents for the Taiwanese company needed little effort to persuade villagers to accept the lease. In many cases, however, the land demarcation was messy. It was not clear which households should be entitled to receive the money. Over 85,000 RMB was offered for a plot of land as part of the mountain ranges that the Taiwanese company wanted to lease. This windfall triggered a major conflict among twenty-five extended households (over three hundred people) over the division of the windfall and, by extension, a heated debate about their ancestral trust and ancestral worship. A strong claim of collective ownership immediately emerged, with the plot described by one side in the ensuing dispute as ‘our ancestral mountain land’ or ‘the land from our ancestors’.

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In short, the unexpected offer of a lump-sum rent reactivated the memory of ancestral land ownership prior to the 1952 reforms under the Chinese Communist Party. The basic oral history of the land is that in the nineteenth-century Longzeng, the common ancestor of the twenty-five households, was one of the first villagers to go overseas and make his fortune in Malaysia. He was recognized as one of the few really successful pioneering emigrants in village history. He purchased the land as an ancestral estate and passed it down to his six sons, whose descendants, by the early twenty-first century, had developed into the twenty-five households. These twenty-five households have re-surfaced in recent years as a sub-lineage ‘worship group’. The emergence of this group has been directly shaped by the reactivation of the households’ overseas connections and financial support from huaqiao. The ancestral trust established before 1949 in the name of Longzeng is in fact deposited in a pawnshop in Singapore. The annual interest derived from the trust is supposed to be sent back to the village to cover the expense of worshipping ancestral tombs. After an interruption of over thirty years starting in the 1950s, this overseas remittance resumed in the 1980s when the Overseas Chinese connection was reactivated following a change of central government policy. Before the dispute over the windfall from the ‘ancestral land’, the group had enjoyed a good reputation for their well-coordinated performance of ancestral worship. They were regarded as one of the two most powerful sub-lineage groups in the lineage village. Due to inflation, the annual interest on the pawnshop account in Singapore (about 700 RMB, a decent amount in the early 1980s, but little in today’s terms) became less and less sufficient over the years, barely enough to cover the basic ritual cost. Despite the financial support for ritual expenses from huaqiao, as a descent group they have basically experienced a decline of commensality (meaning joint banqueting) and cooperation in general since the 1980s. The annual group-wide tomb visit for Tomb-Sweeping Day (Qingming), organized each year by a leading household, was discontinued due to lack of money and human resources. The twenty-five households instead each carried out the task of tomb-sweeping on a three-year rotation. Only one or two members from the individual household on duty would visit the tomb. No more group banquets were organized in their spacious ancestral hall following the tomb visits. Against this recent decline of commensality, and faced with the offer

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of money from the Taiwanese company, it was an open question as to whether or not they would be united as a group to enrich their ancestral trust or, in effect, act as self-interested, calculating individuals. The question of the ownership of their ancestral land was entangled, of course, in the history of socialist state land reforms and policies. According to official records that the production team leader dug out of the document bureau at the local town Land Registry, not all of the twenty-five households were legally entitled to the land in question. Like all rural land in China, the mountain land was subject to the 1952 Land Reform led by the Chinese Communist Party and subsequent redistribution in 1982. During the 1952 Land Reform, all corporate lineage property including land was first confiscated and then redistributed. Only the descendant households who received the class label ‘poor peasant’ were entitled to an allocation of mountain land. The descendants with ‘landlord’ labels and those who stayed overseas were excluded; among them was Longzeng’s eldest grandson who was the manager of the ancestral estate up until the 1950s. In 1982, when the Household Responsibility System was installed, the 1952 allocation of mountain land basically stayed the same. As might be expected, more people than those who were legally entitled have now claimed ownership of the land and thus the money. The ensuing dispute became a make-or-break moment for the kinship group. At issue in this conflict is whether to effectively privatize the rent to legally entitled individuals or to contribute it to the common ancestral Trust. Those dispossessed by the state law supported the idea of the common ancestral fund and the idea of the lineage group. They pleaded for the customary law. That is, as descendants of the same ancestor they were all entitled to a share (youfen) of the money from ‘our ancestral mountain’. In addition they did not want to allow others (who were the legal recipients according to state law) to make personal gain. At the prospect of money, they advocated the rhetoric of the lineage ideology and ‘glorifying the ancestor’. They insisted there was no other option than that the money should be donated to the existing ancestral trust, which had fallen on hard times due to inflation, and so on. It is probably not surprising that the strongest supporters for the idea of ‘joint ownership’ (gongtong xiangyou) turned out to be those excluded from land ownership in 1952. The argument of

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‘equality in front of the ancestor’ was put forward since all the households had participated in the ancestral worship: it was a matter of ‘fairness’. One of the supporters for this side was the pre-1949 ancestral estate manager who is the current village-based recipient of overseas remittance that covers the annual ritual expense. He is known by many huaqiao and has a good reputation in Overseas Chinese communities that he could employ as power in this conflict. In his early eighties, he said if the rent was not shared by all he would inform the overseas relatives about it: ‘Let the ancestor no longer be worshipped!’ This would not only mean the dissolution of the overseas fund, but also the discontinuity of their prestigious overseas ties. The other, who was a high-ranking retired communist official, let it be known that if the money did not go to the ancestral trust they would disassemble the ancestral hall and sell the beams. He also threatened not to participate in ancestral worship rotation or attend any group banquets. Many recognized that if the money was ‘privatized’, in effect, both ancestor worship and their Overseas Chinese connection would be at stake. By contrast, at least one senior male lineage member did not shy away from voicing his idea that the money should be divided up and that he should receive his share. He insisted on his ‘legal rights’. If the money was apportioned, he would be entitled to 4000–5000 RMB. He disagreed with ‘giving up’ the money to the ancestral fund. Others criticized him as selfish and said he was ‘dishonouring the ancestors’. To invalidate his claim, they started to mention some of his past disgraces such as visiting a prostitute and his failure in building a tomb for his mother. That is, he has had a bad reputation that does not work in his favour within the group and the village. The tension remained high between those in favour of dividing the money and those who supported the ancestral trust. A general worry expressed by the majority was internal conflicts. Closely related with this was their concern for group reputation, as they were acutely aware that any discord would damage their reputation both within the village and overseas as a respectable and powerful group. ‘Dividing up the money would shame us in the village. It would look bad to outsiders.’ Throughout, the dispute remained a sensitive issue only discussed within the group. I was fortunate to be allowed to hear and see how it evolved, thanks to my established position as a niece of one reputable senior member of the lineage.

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The potentially explosive dynamics were carefully kept under the carpet. They wanted to avoid ‘being shamed and gossiped about for a long time [bei ren shuo]’ in the village. Not only money counts when eliciting the sense of group identity, but also the preoccupation with avoiding internal conflicts and thus being represented in the public eye as a ‘strong’ and cohesive lineage  – one not riven by internal conflicts. In the end, a written agreement (xieyi) to ‘contribute the money to our ancestors’ was reached on April 2008 which meant the money would be dedicated to the trust. The agreement would not have been achieved were it not for the overseas gaze, and more specifically, the high annual interest rates offered by a millionaire migrant. This migrant was one of the rural-to-urban migrants who left the village in the early 1990s. He made his fortune in the booming real estate business in Shenzhen and over the past decade had established himself as a trustworthy and reputable person by financial contributions to group and village events and projects. He happened to return for a brief visit from Shenzhen when the conflict broke out. In an effort to find a solution to the conflict, he offered a high annual interest rate (double that of bank rates) on the windfall money, provided it was deposited in his business in Shenzhen. All group members happily accepted this alternative solution. They thanked the migrant for his generosity. By doing so, the millionaire migrant again demonstrated his good reputation and power in the community. He was probably using this as a chance to further consolidate his reputation as a leader of his generation. All legal recipients signed the agreement. Tempted by this lucrative offer as well as ‘under pressure’, the main dissenter also signed his name. Others said the agreement was meant to ‘avoid trouble from other families who have no legal claims.’ Some said the money should be seen as the manifestation of their ancestors’ efficacy and should go back to the ancestors. The calculation of the monetary benefit also came in to play: as some said privately, even though the total sounded like a large sum of money, once divided, some legal recipients would receive only about 1000 RMB. With this reasoning, it did not seem worthwhile to take the relatively small amount of money that would surely bring about conflicts and a bad reputation. By opting not to take the money and contributing it to the trust, both the kinship group as a whole and each individual

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member would be rewarded with a good moral reputation, at home and abroad. In the end, all of the money offered by the Taiwanese company for the mountain land went to the existing trust. The majority of the group was relieved, as the dissolution of worship of the focal ancestor, the discontinuity of the social-economic overseas connections and a serious loss of face in front of the village public were all avoided. By signing the agreement, the twenty-five households now became co-owners of the landed property. The joint ownership reinstated the land as an ancestral estate, at least according to the customary code: as co-owners of the ancestral estate, they become equal again in the eyes of their ancestor. After over sixty years’ disruption without a property base, the focal ancestor of the group has firmly ‘reappeared’, and notably, its reappearance took place in the market-oriented context in a model ‘New Socialist Village’. Following the tomb visit in the spring of that year, an eight-table banquet was held in the ancestral hall. It was announced that the annual interest of the now boosted trust would not only pay the ritual and banquet expense, but also reward young members who secure university admission and cover part of the hospital costs and funeral expenses of any member in the future. The motivation of maintaining a good reputation does not work on its own. Rather it is entangled with the financial motivation of individual members. There was a strong material incentive for each member involved in the decision to cede the new money to the ancestral trust. This is not surprising to see in the village context where it is perceived to be only natural that ‘no money means no tomb worship’, and the wider Chinese social context where individualization is rapidly increasing (cf. Yan 2009). The dispute turned out to strengthen the group as a cooperation unit. With the agreement, the pre-1952 memory of the ancestral land was confirmed. The twenty-five households managed to maintain their image as a unified group. They managed to act as a group, balancing the commercial and moral gains, personal gratification and group reputation. Their moral reputation as a group in relation to overseas and home communities remained intact after an internal storm of conflict over ancestral land ownership. The prospect of money from the market strengthened their sense of the group, resulting in the renewal of the traditional mechanism of cooperation:  on the one hand, those dispossessed by state law

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wanted to be included in the trust, while on the other, those who did want to get their own share and not contribute to the trust, consented to the idea of the ancestral trust only when the money increased with the offer made by the migrant millionaire. In this case, a land ownership conflict threatened to bring an end to group ancestral worship, the traditional mechanism of cooperation in this place. I  have demonstrated, however, that cooperation in group ancestral worship is difficult yet it can be renewed through processes of conflict and compromise, both monetary and moral, which are themselves contingent on local and national histories.

Discussion: Kinship, cooperation and reputation Land ownership is a fertile ground for cooperation. When power and resources are involved, it entails challenges to the kinship group and its constitution. Here, individual and group reputation – good or bad – and landownership – corporate or individual – are in play. The former is invisible while the latter is visible. They are the unequally distributed power and resources that shape cooperation among group members. At any historical point when conflict arises, cooperation based on land ownership and common ancestry faces possible discontinuation. The way the windfall money is used for both the dead and the living in a qiaoxiang in twenty-first-century China is not a new situation, but a retelling of the old story in the new social, economic and political context. The windfall money is justified by its use in a way that consolidates group identity and the mutual constitution of kinship. Here, the mutuality of reputation, both as morality and power, works as an intimate part of the ‘mutuality of being’. Sperber et al. (2012) identify two inseparable reasons for people’s moral behaviour:  genuine moral concern and the instrumental reason of gaining the approval of others. This concept of reputation as morality and its emphasis on mutuality has been useful to better our understanding of conflict and cooperation in this case.

CHAPTER NINE

Jiaoqing ethics and the sustainability of non-kin cooperation Di Wu

As Eona Bell acutely observes in this volume (see Chapter  11), cooperation between the long-term Chinese migrants she studied in Scotland is not always easy ‘despite [them] sharing both ethnicity and a belief in the moral good of providing heritage language education for children’ – which was the activity around which they tried to cooperate. In this chapter, corresponding to Bell’s discussions, I  would like to investigate the same social phenomena, that is, cooperation between Chinese migrants, but from the other side of the coin. Instead of describing difficulties that my Chinese informants face when cooperating with each other, my main question here is how cooperation becomes possible and actually sustainable. This enquiry originally began with a pair of contradictory discourses that I heard at my field sites. During my time among the Chinese migrant community in Zambia between 2010 and 2012, the people I  met regularly said two different things. On the one hand, they often advised me that I should not trust people so easily, especially under circumstances where I was ‘outside home’ (chumenzaiwai), dealing with strangers.

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Even with acquaintances, I was advised to be cautious because, I was told, ‘one can know the other person’s face but not his/her heart’ (zhiren zhimian buzhixin). On the other hand, I was also told that ‘one relies on brothers at home and depends on friends when out’ (zaijiakaoxiongdi zaiwaikaopengyou). In the juxtaposition of these two discourses, a paradox emerges. The latter clearly recognizes the necessity of friendship (in my terms, sustainable non-kin cooperation) for one’s survival and success as a migrant, whereas the former reveals that mistrust is a widely distributed social disposition, in short, that social interaction beyond kin is usually considered risky.1 This paradox not only discloses a fundamental dilemma that my Chinese interlocutors faced on a daily basis, but also poses a challenging question for anthropologists of China: How can non-kin cooperation be formed and sustained when mistrust is such a pervasive phenomenon in social interactions? The rapid transformation of China’s social landscapes in the past two decades makes solving this paradox academically worthwhile. First of all, extensive urbanization and market liberalization policies in China have driven unprecedented migration and demographic relocation, not only within China, but also from China to other countries (Murphy 2002, 2008; Pieke 2002; Zhang 2001). As a result, more and more Chinese find themselves working and living alongside strangers. In such a context, dealing with non-kin becomes inevitable. Moreover, since the 1980s, the implementation of the ‘one-child policy’ has fundamentally changed Chinese family structure (Hsu 1949; Tan 2010). The influence of the extended family, as a social institution, is diminishing. The balinghou (‘post1980’) generation of young people grew up in nuclear families often having no siblings to rely on when competing in an alien metropolis (Zhang and Ong 2008; Liu 2010; Fang 2012). Consequently, cooperating with non-kin becomes a necessary social skill for survival and success. Nevertheless, non-kin cooperation is subject to serious social barriers in China. Scholars have long argued that Chinese familism and its particularistic morality, which is based on the Confucian tradition, nurtures a pervasive mistrust between strangers, preventing the occurrence of ‘spontaneous sociality’ and making cooperation beyond the circle of family relatively difficult (Fukuyama 1995; Fei 1992; Yan 2009a). A great deal of academic research has been carried out on the post-Mao phenomenon of

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making and using ‘social connections’, guanxi, which was seen as the primary mechanism through which Chinese non-kin social interactions were realized (Jacobs 1979; Walder 1986; Yang 1994; Kipnis 1997). However, as guanxi became a much commented on phenomenon among ordinary people – and increasingly seen as a skill for social networking that could actually be learned (guanxiology in Yang’s term [1994:  8])  – it arguably began to lose its social function in China. In short, ordinary people have become consciously aware of the utilitarian nature of guanxi. Instrumental motivations, often selfish and sometimes even malicious, become almost the default assumption in the course of everyday interaction (Yan 1996, 2009a, 2010, 2013). Therefore, guanxi not only becomes inadequate for explaining the sustainability of sincere non-kin cooperation but also creates a new social context in which mistrust between strangers intensifies (i.e. because even people who are being incredibly solicitous should not be trusted). This leaves the paradox unsolved and a crucial question remains unanswered, namely: In the post-guanxi era of rapid marketization and urbanization, what mechanisms help people to willingly form long-lasting cooperation beyond the kin group? This is the question I  will attempt to answer in this chapter. Ethnographic data of everyday social interactions among Chinese migrants in Zambia can shed light on the problem. Note that although my PhD project was on the broader topic of ‘China in Africa’, the ethnographic descriptions below are mostly about interactions between Chinese migrants. The relative absence, in this account, of interactions between Chinese and Zambians is not due to their insignificance or my personal ignorance of them. It is because, as I  learned, cooperation among Chinese is just as difficult as cooperation between Chinese and Zambians. As I have reasoned in my thesis, to comprehend the latter, researchers may need to take the former as a reference. To be specific in relation to cooperation, to deeply understand problems in Sino-Zambian interaction, one may first need to unpack already complicated cases of cooperation among Chinese migrants. Based on my fieldwork observations, I argue that it is jiaoqing (which I translate as ‘interactional affection’) and its corresponding ethical practices that promote and maintain cooperation among Chinese migrants. Echoing the partner-choice approach to mutualistic cooperation, and Sperber’s (2013:  61) claim that

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‘morality may be seen as a consequence of these cooperative interactions and emerged to guide the distribution of gains resulting from these interactions’, I  contend that jiaoqing ethics, in turn, guide my Chinese interlocutors to choose partners for cooperation, as well as help ensure that such cooperation remains sincere. Interactional affection and cooperation are in a loop:  The more cooperation partners are involved, the more interactional affection grows, and the more jiaoqing ethics are practiced, the longer cooperation will last. To substantiate my argument, first, I  present the interactions between the Zou farming family and a man known as Boss Deng. This example highlights the importance of interactional affection in forming and maintaining non-kin cooperative relationships. Then, through analysing the example, I will unpack jiaoqing ethics in comparison with renqing ethics (Yan 1996). More specifically, I explore how a set of cultural practices, which is called ‘anti-antijiaoqing’, keeps cooperation on track. To conclude, I would like to point out a new direction for further research, namely the effect of emotional proximity, which grows in everyday interactions, on cooperation. Before I  start the ethnographic description, however, I  must clarify several working definitions and premises for my analysis. First, following the anthropology of morality, I  intentionally separate morality and ethics, taking morality as ‘categorical imperatives’ and ethics as a set of virtues for cultivation (Laidlaw 2002, 2013). The former leans towards rules and structure; whereas the latter stresses agency, deliberate reflection and conscious choice (Stafford 2010). Secondly, cooperation is used in contrast to unconscious coordination processes. Cooperation as I  apply it here entails willfulness. It is presumed (by ordinary people) to be voluntary and subject to decision-making processes. It is in this way that sustainable cooperation requires sincerity. To invoke Fang’s distinction (this volume), what I mean by cooperation here is ‘organic’, not ‘mechanical’ in kind. Based on these distinctions, I treat cooperation as an on-going process: a form of daily social interaction. In this chapter, my analysis will be microscopic and focus mainly on the everydayness of cooperation. Again, in brief, my aim is to investigate the sustainability of voluntary and genuine cooperation beyond the circle of kin. Certainly, there are many social mechanisms influencing non-kin cooperation, for example,

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an authoritarian government or a sophisticated market may establish the rules of play. However, such mechanisms are beyond the analytical scope of this chapter. I was first introduced to Boss Deng by the Zou family, my hosts for the second half of my fieldwork. At that time, my research focused on the daily life of Chinese migrants who run private farms or businesses in Lusaka. Like the majority of the Chinese in Zambia, the Zous count as first-generation migrants. Originally from Jiangxi Province, Father Zou came to Zambia in the late 1990s under a three-year contract as a cook with a Chinese state-owned construction company. After the project finished, Father Zou did not go back to China with the company. Instead he rented a small plot of land to grow vegetables in an eastern suburb of Lusaka. In 2002, Mother Zou arrived in Zambia and four years later, their son and daughter-in-law joined them. In 2009, the family bought their own farm. My first encounter with Boss Deng was during a routine Saturday gathering of the Zou and Deng families. Although they had never met before moving to Zambia, this weekly social event had been occurring for more than six years. Like Father Zou, Boss Deng is from Jiangxi Province. He came to Zambia with a state enterprise then remained to run a catering business. He opened the first Chinese restaurant in Lusaka and when I met him he was planning to build a five-storey business/entertainment centre. Boss Deng was a successful businessman and widely respected in the Chinese community in Lusaka. According to Mother Zou, Boss Deng’s success was due to his virtuous character. When I  asked Mother Zou why they trusted Boss Deng, she told me, ‘Boss Deng is a man with affection and faith [youqing youyi]. He is not calculating [jinjin jijiao] when dealing with people. He values interactional affection [jiaoqing]. He is not some lesser man [xiaoren] who forgets righteousness as soon as he sees profits [jianli wangyi]’. It was quite well known in the Chinese community that the Zou and Deng families had a ‘very deep interactional affection’ (jiaoqing henshen). From what I  observed, their long-lasting cooperation was not simply due to mutual benefits in business, although there were clearly some of those as well. Most importantly, it was the result of their long-term engagements – mutual care, assistance and sometimes even sacrifice. When their jiaoqing was put to the test,

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both parties avoided committing acts which might have harmed the affection. The case of family farm building is a good illustration of their jiaoqing. When they started building their family farm, the Zou family could not secure enough funds, despite asking for help from relatives and laoxiang (peers from the same town). Although they had not approached him, Boss Deng – with whom they were already close  – acknowledged their difficulties and lent them US$30,000 with no interest. Five years later, the Zou family still owed him US$10,000. Several times the Zou family suggested paying interest to Boss Deng, but he would firmly refuse. Once, I overheard Boss Deng telling Mother Zou while she was offering him money as interest: ‘If you do this again, you do not need to come to me any more. We have known each other for years. I  lent money out of our long-term interactional affection [jiaoqing]. Now you give me interest. If others see this, they will think I  am some kind of parsimonious person [xiaoren]. Did I lend you the money just for that interest? You are putting me in an immoral [buyi] position!’ Boss Deng’s action earned enormous gratitude from the Zou family and was praised by every Chinese who heard the story. People complimented Boss Deng by describing him as youqing youyi (possessing an affectionate and faithful character) and zhideshenjiao (a deeply trustworthy friend). Mother Zou often said to me that without the help of Boss Deng, they could not survive in Zambia: ‘Only adversity reveals real affection [huannan jianzhenqing]. He [Boss Deng] is our family’s saviour [da’enren]. It is our family’s fortune [fuqi] to meet Boss Deng. He has really “travelled miles in the snow storm to deliver coal [xuezhong songtan]”.2 We will never forget our gratitude to him [enqing].’ The deep emotional bond between the Zou family and Boss Deng made their business cooperation run smoothly, in my experience. Running a successful restaurant, Boss Deng would purchase Chinese vegetables from the Zou family. The Zou family would always sell to him at a low price and give him extra free. When I asked Xiao Zou’s wife (the daughter-in-law of the Zou family) if they could actually earn any profit through transactions with Boss Deng, she was, at first, surprised that I could even have asked such a question; then she said it was not about gains or loss at all. She told me that even though the Zou family visited Boss Deng every weekend and often ate dinner at his house, Boss Deng never calculated the loss.

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‘If everything was calculated so clearly, there would be no friends,’ she said. I am very aware that this case can be read as one involving selfinterested motives; what I am stressing, as an ethnographer, is that I  felt the emotions behind this particular case to be very genuine and sincere. When these people talk about not using one another, and not calculating things, they sincerely mean it. To comprehend the ethnographic example above, first of all we have to unpack the meaning of jiaoqing. Semantically, it has two elements: jiao (interaction) and qing (affection). Its two components capture perfectly the characteristics of the term. On the one hand, it stresses inter-action. When compared to ganqing (emotion), which often focuses more on the inner psyche (Lutz 1986), jiaoqing emphasizes intersubjectivity and shared experiences based on joint activities. On the other hand, it incorporates affection. Jiaoqing captures the sincerity of social interaction in a way that the contrasting concept of renqing (human emotion, see Yan 1996) fails to do. This is because the discourse on renqing connotes utilitarian aspects and already entails manipulative inclination.3 By contrast, the locus of jiaoqing is on the emotional proximity generated via long-term interaction of the communicative parties. It pinpoints the temporality to eliminate the instrumentality, as well as accentuates interactivity to diminish individuality. Most importantly, jiaoqing takes affection as the foundation of social relations. My Chinese interlocutors consciously distinguished jiaoqing from renqing. Once, when helping Mother Zou pack some gifts for another Chinese migrant’s son’s wedding banquet, I asked Mother Zou how they became friends. She corrected me: ‘We are not friends. We do not have any interactional affection [jiaoqing]. We hardly socialize [zoudong] at all. To be honest, I do not really want to go to the wedding but I do not want others to say that I do not know renqing [human emotion]. The circle [quanzi, i.e. the network of Chinese private entrepreneurs in Lusaka] is small here. I won’t stay [at the banquet] long. I will come back as soon as I give them the gifts.’4 From this statement, we can see that Mother Zou is aware of the difference between jiaoqing and renqing. The former refers to affection growing through continuous socializing. It is the anchor of friendship. The latter is used in respect of moral obligation:  it is what one should do. Arguably, jiaoqing is interpersonal (as in

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between friends), whereas renqing is universal (as in a Chinese moral norm). In brief, renqing does not guarantee the occurrence of jiaoqing, but jiaoqing can encompass renqing practices. Considering that jiaoqing is mostly communicated indirectly via everyday actions, documenting its explicit form and its direct impact on cooperation becomes difficult. Nevertheless, at my field sites, people did often give moral evaluations of actions that may harm the interactional affection (as shown in the last section). This amounts to one way, I suggest, of protecting established intimacy. Therefore, ethics in relation to jiaoqing often goes hand in hand with antithetical behaviours. In other words, in the process of daily cooperation, my Chinese interlocutors raise the alarm over actions that are against jiaoqing, while simultaneously avoiding or pushing away people who do not hold the virtues of cherishing jiaoqing. I call this manifestation of cooperation ‘anti-anti-jiaoqing’. One of the most common anti-affection actions is calculation. This can appear in various forms. Calculation encapsulates the meaning of jisuan (computing or counting) as well as suanji (strategic plotting). In linguistic applications, the former is often followed by things as an accusative, while the latter is often applied to a person, in short calculating (jisuan) something and calculating (suanji) somebody. It is suanji that my interlocutors resented most because it comprises a means to achieve personal ends. This kind of action is the one most commonly subjected to suspicion and is perceived as harmful to the maintenance of mutual affection. Jisuan could also sometimes be regarded as actions which potentially harm interactional affection. Nevertheless, the relationship between jisuan and jiaoqing is better described as dialectic. As Stafford (2009, 2010) illustrates, counting can be emotionally loaded. If it is intended for the good of the other party in a relationship, or the good of the group as a whole, jisuan will enhance the emotional ties. This is particularly so if the action involves self-sacrifice. But over-calculating (jisuan) between the interacting parties in a relationship may be considered as too formal and can be interpreted as a gesture of unwillingness to form an emotional bond. In my Chinese interlocutors’ terminology, it is called keqi (over-polite/ritualized) or jianwai (seeing oneself as an outsider). To do it in excess is to face the potential danger of converting jisuan (counting) into suanji (plotting). This interplay between calculation and intimacy was originally pointed out by Fei

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in his study of Chinese consanguinity and regionalism. As he writes, ‘[i]‌n fact, people are afraid to square their accounts (suanzhang). To settle accounts (suanzhang) or to be completely square (qingsuan) with somebody means to break off relationships, because if people do not owe something to each other, there will be no need for further contact’ (Fei 1992:  125). This dialectic relationship has been explained further by Yan when studying economic agency in China. As he argues, ‘a person who is good only at economic calculation is regarded as too calculating and thus anti-social and immoral. It is only at the third level (the consideration and practice of self-cultivation in order to be a proper person in the culture of guanxi and renqing) that one can simultaneously secure economic prosperity and a good reputation, and become a wise person who really knows how to calculate and plan (hui suanji) over the long run . . . After all, in a moral economy calculability must operate under the constraints of renqing ethics, thus providing a cultural element that co-exists with economic rationality’ (Yan 2009b:  204). To return to the ethnographic vignette above, the dialectical relations presented here explicitly explain the meaning of the daughter-in-law’s response to my question: ‘If everything was calculated so clearly, there would be no friends.’ The resentment of calculation (suanji) could be demonstrated in various sets of oppositional concepts referred to and practised in ordinary life by my Chinese interlocutors. At my field sites, people frequently complained about those who over-emphasized money and personal gains. Over-emphasizing money and personal gains during interaction is a characteristic usually termed xiaoqi (parsimony) by Chinese migrants. Xiaoqi is considered as a consequential action of over-focusing on one’s gains (de) and loss (shi) to the extent that mutual affection might be overlooked. This kind of action is described as jianli wangyi (to forget friendship/ right conduct when one sees money) and the people who regularly commit such action are regarded as xiaoren (lesser men).5 A general attitude towards xiaoren is trying one’s best to avoid socializing with them. The opposite of xiaoqi (parsimonious) is kangkai (generous). Generous people are morally praised, because they are willing to sacrifice their wealth to maintain interactional affection, especially if one party is in need of help. My Chinese interlocutors often describe such people as zhangyi shucai (generous with money in the name of yi).

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In the four-character idioms discussed above, yi is an oppositional concept against li (profits) and is rich with meaning (for more, see Ames 2011). It can refer to righteousness as well as faithfulness. In Confucian classics, it is one of the five core virtues for praise and self-cultivation. In my field sites, it was often used in combination, as in yiqi, which denotes a personal characteristic of willingness to take risks or sacrifice the self for the sake of interactional affection. The notion has been popularized in Chinese literature along with the concept of jianghu (literally, lake and sea; society) and is widely practised by secret societies (heshehui) in China (Osburg 2013). It is also because of this association that yiqi has been demonized as a residue of the Chinese feudalist past in recent years by the official discourse of Chinese central government. Such ‘demonization’ is an aspect of the process of political centralization. Nevertheless, as the conversations between Boss Deng and Mother Zou presented in the last section make clear, in everyday interactions, yi as a moral ideal is still being evaluated and continues to be practised as a form of virtue. In short, any communicator who possesses the character of yi is potentially a reliable and trustworthy candidate for cooperation. Owing to its material nature and ease of calculation, money is often used as a ‘litmus test’ to judge another person’s character and the mutual affection between two people. During my fieldwork, borrowing money was sometimes inevitable. This was so, despite my Chinese interlocutors endeavouring to avoid it because financial involvement could potentially harm interactional affection. Normally, prospective borrowers would approach people with whom they had already built emotional bonds. This emotional bond could increase the borrowers’ chance of getting the loan; meanwhile, it can also provide lenders with some security against the risk of unreturned money. If the money is not paid back, the emotional bond is in danger of being broken. As I have described elsewhere, Zambian workers often sought to borrow money from Chinese bosses.6 This often caused unnecessary arguments and resentment. To the Zambian workers, borrowing money from the boss is unquestionable. This is because the boss is the one who workers should go to if there is any difficulty and who should take care of the workers. Nevertheless, it is a ‘taboo’ for the Chinese bosses. For them, the workers should not put forward this kind of request at all because there is no strong interactional affection between the boss and the worker. By being approached

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in this way, the Chinese boss is forced into a difficult dilemma. Afraid of never being paid back, the boss is very reluctant to lend the money. Nevertheless, if s/he refuses to lend the money, the boss would consider the refusal as a potential threat to a good working relationship. Therefore, such action often leaves the Chinese bosses very annoyed, and they criticize the Zambian workers who ‘do not know the way to deal with human emotion [renqing shigu]’. This function of money as a ‘litmus test’ is well demonstrated by the money-lending practices which Xiao Liü became involved in. Xiao Liü is a translator at a Chinese educational farm in Zambia. Like most young Chinese, he was very open to talking with Zambian workers and making friends with them. Gasper was a Zambian worker with whom Xiao Liü quickly became acquainted. When I arrived at the educational farm for fieldwork, Xiao Liü had already formed a certain bond with Gasper. He would ask Gasper to help him with some personal matters and told me that I could trust Gasper. However, one afternoon, Xiao Liü looked very worried when he was seeking advice from Liü Wei (a Chinese administrative staff member) on the matter of whether he should lend money to Gasper. Liü Wei: What is the money for? They are going to get paid next Thursday! Xiao Liü:  He told me that he needed to attend a funeral in Livingston this weekend and he is short of money to travel. It might just be an excuse. Liü Wei: Hmmm, sometimes, they [Zambians] can be full of shit. Do you think he [Gasper] will pay you back? Xiao Liü:  He seems a trustworthy guy. Normally, my heart is at ease [fangxin)] when he helps me with tasks. He is not like the others. Sometimes he even brings me something he has cooked at home. [He] seems to have the ‘sense of human emotion’ [renqingwei’er]. Plus, he did not want to borrow a lot. I do not want him to think me too parsimonious [xiaoqi]. Liü Wei: How much did he want? Xiao Liü: 50000 kwacha [US$10]. Liü Wei: Hmmm, it is not much. If he did not pay you back, you could consider it as a lesson learned [huaqian mage jiaoxun] and there would be no need to socialize [dali]with him in the future.

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Xiao Liü lent the money to Gasper, and two weeks later, Xiao Liü came to my room and told me amiably, ‘Gasper is good. He paid me back. It is worth getting to know him better [zhide shenjiao].’ Apart from borrowing/lending money, another common sign of resentment towards calculation is the negative attitude that my Chinese interlocutors held towards drawing up contracts. Contracts to them seem cold, fixed and formal, which is the opposite of what proper mutual affection should be, namely fluid and informal. Therefore, drawing contracts between friends is perceived as a gesture of ‘alienation’ implying mistrust and potentially damaging interactional affection (jiaoqing). If such an intention is ever raised, a typical response from the other party is ‘relying on our long-term interactional affection, can’t I trust you?’ A Chinese phrase could well capture the interplay between contract as a form of law and affection as the fundamental bond in social interaction: fa bu waihu renqing (law does not lie outside the sphere of human feeling). Note, here again, that human feeling (renqing) does not merely refer to the instrumental character of social interaction but also embraces the notion of sympathy and moral sentiment as a whole. Fei (1992: 127) provides a clear analysis of the rationale behind this resentment of contracts: ‘To fulfil the conditions of a contract is to settle accounts – to take complete care of the rights and obligations as required by the terms of the contract. This requires careful calculation, an exact unit of exchange, and a reliable medium of exchange. Calm thinking is involved, not personal emotion. Reason dominates contractual activities. These are special features of modern society, and they are exactly what rural society lacks.’ I was half-way through my fieldwork when I  started to notice the reluctance of my Chinese interlocutors to draw up contracts. The interaction between Zou family and their local Zambian host can illustrate the point. The vegetables on Zous’ farm often suffered from premature growth. For example, the coriander often blossomed before the leaves grew big. After trying several different types of seeds, Father Zou was convinced that the problem could be solved with more advanced agricultural skills. As nobody in the family had farming experience before coming to Zambia, Father Zou was eager to get help from agricultural experts. The family treated Technician Xu from the Chinese educational farm next door to several nice meals and asked some advice. However, due to his busy schedule, it became more and more difficult to

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invite Xu over. Seeing their worries, I  suggested that Father Zou could hire the UNZA farm (University of Zambia) technician as a part-time consultant. In the beginning, Father Zou was hesitant but he decided to give it a try after he realized that getting help from the Chinese technicians next door was a dead-end. Having discussed the matter on the phone a couple of times, the UNZA technician was happy to take the position. When we were meeting for tea to talk about the details, he mentioned that he needed a formal agreement for reference. To me, it was a very reasonable requirement; however, Father Zou looked concerned. Although he said nothing, the meeting finished a couple of minutes later when Father Zou said he still had other things to attend to. Driving back to the farm, Father Zou told me that it was better to postpone the negotiation, allowing time for him to see if he could contact any other Chinese experts for help. I was very puzzled by his reaction as I could see nothing wrong during the meeting, so I asked him why he did not want to pursue the work. Father Zou told me, ‘He does not trust us. What is the contract for? If it is already so problematic [mafan] from the start, there will be more trouble in future. So it is better to leave it now.’ Clearly, in Father Zou’s mind, a contract is for people who do not trust each other. What is more interesting, however, is that a contract is designed to prevent problems in future; nevertheless, it is considered problematic from the outset by my Chinese interlocutors. Thus far, I  hope that the stories of my Chinese interlocutors in Zambia provided above have clearly illustrated that voluntary, sincere and long-lasting cooperation among non-kin does exist and is becoming increasingly practised. Nevertheless, how to identify and analyse such social phenomena remains a challenge. Under the circumstances of dramatic social transformation in China, tackling this problem  – the formation and sustainability of nonkin cooperation – is also becoming more and more salient. On the one hand, extended family is shrinking due to the implementation of the one-child policy. Reliance on kin is gradually giving way to cooperation between non-kin. On the other hand, more and more people find themselves living alongside strangers as a result of the rapid urbanization and massive scale of migration in China. In such a context, cooperating with non-kin becomes necessary for survival.

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When identifying and analysing non-kin cooperation, I  argue that two theoretical obstacles need to be overcome. First of all, non-kin cooperation should not be identified as a mere extension of familial cooperation and should not be analysed under the strong notion of Chinese familism. This is so despite the fact that fictive kinship terms sometimes permeate such interactions. Following Morton Fried (1969), I  contend that non-kin cooperation is separable from the familial cooperation as it runs subject to different moral principles of social interaction. Putting it under the shadow of Chinese familism risks overlooking the fluidity of nonkin relationships and the creativity of social actors in the process of cooperation (Brandtstädter and Santos 2009). Furthermore, the investigation of everyday non-kin cooperation in China needs to go beyond the dogma of guanxi (social networking). Arguably, for the last couple of decades, guanxi and its analytical variations, such as gift exchange and particularism, have comprised the dominant paradigm in the investigation of Chinese social interactions and relations outside kinship. The model is often associated with strong rationality, instrumentality and utilitarian characteristics. Jacobs defines guanxi as ‘particularistic ties’ (1979:  238) that are subject to personal manipulation and strategic plan, especially for the purpose of constructing political alliances. While studying socialist institutions, Walder describes guanxi as ‘instrumental-personal ties’ (1986:  179) informally utilized by workers in socialist factories to secure resources without challenging authority. Perhaps the most thorough study of guanxi is Yang’s (1994) monograph on guanxi-ology (guanxixue), in which she treats ‘gift economy’ and guanxi as interchangeable. Aiming to study guanxi as a social fact, instead of mere representation, which constitutes a Chinese ‘civil society’ against the power of socialist state, Yang (1994:  8) tries to understand guanxi from an emic point of view and stresses its ‘artfulness’ which draws on ‘the sense of skill, subtlety, and cunning conveyed by the word’. Such theoretical treatments, I suggest, inevitably have two negative consequences. First, Chinese social interactions are unnecessarily portrayed as fundamentally instrumental to the extent that Chinese society somehow becomes intrinsically Machiavellian. Second, a focus on the utilitarian characteristics of guanxi may blind us to the sincerity also found in social relationships, as symbolized in gifts (Yan 1996).

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More significantly, the objectification of guanxi, practically and academically, is making guanxi – as the mechanism of organizing social interactions  – dysfunctional. My Chinese interlocutors are very aware of its instrumentality. Negative views of guanxi are widely shared. As Yang documented with pages of interviews on the definition and evaluation of guanxi, almost all of the reports contain images of manipulation, self-interest as a driver, deception and symptoms of moral decline (1994: 49–74). This selfconsciousness of the instrumentality inherent to guanxi practice has also soared and been transformed in recent years under the social conditions of continuous marketization, the inflation of material gifts, and intense anti-corruption campaigns led by the Chinese central government (Osburg 2013). What is more intriguing is that, upon being objectified as a form of discourse, guanxi has itself become a social factor transforming the process of everyday social interaction. When guanxi is widely applied, instrumentality is presumed when one is approached by strangers. The social world becomes intrinsically bad, dangerous, and has to be treated with extra caution as a result (Steinmüller and Wu 2011). As my ethnographic data above reveals, while mistrust is pervasive, when forming and solidifying non-kin relations my Chinese interlocutors also began to focus on shared experiences, and emphasized the growth of mutual affection through continuous daily interactions. Similarly, in his fascinating ethnography of social networking among Chinese elites (entrepreneurs as well as officials) in Chengdu, Sichuan, Osburg also documents the increasingly significant role that ‘entertainment and leisure’ as forms of action are playing in social networking processes because ‘the inflation in forms of commodified pleasure has begun to reach its limit’ (2013: 39). He shows how relationships are ‘forged and maintained through ritualized leisure  – experiences of shared pleasure’ (2013: 26). Moreover, he argues that these experiences serve as the foundation for affective ties between men and their social intimacy, which in turn, offers further possibility for networking. The significance of continuous interaction in forming social relations in China has already been clearly pointed out by Stafford (2000). In contrast to the lineage paradigm, Stafford invokes the local concepts of yang and laiwang, which are held to produce relatedness between individuals and further demonstrates how relations are constituted beyond kin and affinity in which ‘kinship

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and friendship are seen to be hard work, the product of everyday human interactions’ (2000: 52). It is the ‘cycle of yang and laiwang’, with its emphasis on nurturing via daily actions, which connects individuals across time and space. Applying this approach  – identifying non-kin cooperation as voluntary association and analysing it as a form of action, an on-going process at everyday level  – in this chapter, I  have endeavoured to show the significant impact of jiaoqing ethics on non-kin cooperation. At my field sites, in the course of cooperation, virtues bundled with jiaoqing practices are the focus of discussion and evaluation when choosing potential cooperators. Moreover, voluntary cooperation is nurtured with continuous care, affection and interaction. My Chinese interlocutors consciously cherish interactional affection with cultural devices, testing and acting against any calculative actions that may potentially harm the relationship. It is mutual affection that binds them, keeps the cooperation going and ensures it remains on track. It is also their ordinary daily actions that have provided me with a way to solve the paradox laid out at the beginning of this chapter.

CHAPTER TEN

Power, gender and ‘network-based cooperation’: A study of migrant workers in Shenzhen I-Chieh Fang

In this chapter, drawing on research among rural migrants who work together in a Shenzhen factory, I want to explore the role of power in cooperative relationships. I will suggest that power should not be ignored in the study of cooperation, perhaps especially in China where network-based cooperation is very prevalent. Further to this, I will be looking specifically at cooperation from a gender perspective. Work typically involves organizing people in order to achieve a task. Cooperation is unavoidable in the work place:  in the factory it is sometimes organized officially, through ‘standard operating procedures’, manuals and so on. But cooperation also happens informally and is organized through hidden rules, norms and implicit agreements, of which the participants may be unaware. I  am particularly interested in such informal cooperation and

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the way in which it unfolds. Formal and informal cooperation are not mutually exclusive. They often coexist, overlapping, and complimenting or embedded in each other, especially when seen from the perspective of gender, as I shall discuss. The division of labour is culturally determined in human societies, and the meaning of work for men and women is often viewed as radically different. Even when they do the same work, the value, social expectations and payment for it are often gender-specific. In her book, Technology and Gender, Bray (1997) points out that in traditional China, labour was one of the crucial categories marking gender identity, in which every woman must participate regardless of her class. However, the gendered division of labour changed according to historical context. Before the Song dynasty, spinning was exclusively the work of women but, starting from the late Ming dynasty, it became an industry controlled mainly by men. When the modern textile industry was emerging, and many female workers were hired to work in factories, this was ironically seen by some as the ‘feminization’ of the industry. In addition, textile work, as a form of skilled labour, was viewed with some suspicion under the Confucian moral order and political doctrine due to fears that it might lead to social breakdown – that is, because it generated profits for self-interested individuals. However, women’s textile skills and work mostly evaded such suspicion, because it was believed they were converted to increased taxes and not to personal income (Bray 1997:  184–186). Furthermore, labour and work may be seen as embodying personal virtue, representing one’s value as a human being (see also Harris 2007). For example, through the labour entailed in textile work, fundamental virtues like hard work, thrift and selforganization are transmitted. Women engaging in textile work meant that women’s virtues, and the social order more broadly, could be maintained. The social hierarchy at home would also be strengthened during the process of organizing work (Bray 1997: 189–190). If work and labour already vary significantly for men and women, does this imply that gender-specific cooperation patterns have also been determined by cultural prerequisites? If, before a task is undertaken, it has already been organized by some prerequisite meaning, value or hidden agreement, and is performed within a specific set of interactional modes, then how do so-called calculation and rationality work within the task? In short, how does organizational culture impact on the mode of cooperation?

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Sometimes even where cooperation is clearly beyond the interaction between two individuals and their personal calculations, the organizational network and its ‘culture’ must be taken into account. Furthermore, we should also pay attention to the process of network and organization formation. Many built-in rules, the so-called culture, help shape individual economic rationality and calculation. This chapter thus sets out to understand the relationship between individual rationality and group rationality and how people act between the two.

Decision-making for the selection of potential collaborators Being a factory worker is not the final destination in the journey of many young migrant workers. Most of them wish to accumulate enough money during their stay to move on, either back to their home town, or to a nearby provincial capital or somewhere else in Shenzhen, where they will establish a family or start up their own business. In short, due to their dream of ‘being the boss’, while still in the factory they often look for potential cooperation partners for their future activities. On the one hand, rural workers of the younger generation are adept at using words and expressions linked to modernization. Expressions such as ‘independence’, ‘autonomy’, ‘freedom’, ‘personal desire’, ‘my own decision’ and ‘choice’ are prevalent in their daily conversations. On the other hand, in reality, the journey of migration they experience is largely focused on relationships of ‘dependency’ and on guanxi networks of various kinds:  personal contacts or connections of the kinds they might need to start a business. They learn how connections matter when it comes to gaining promotion, finding new jobs or getting married. When young migrants emphasize guanxi and reciprocal obligations, they see this as their preferred way of implementing their agency and, paradoxically, as their preferred way of being independent and autonomous. When they try to pursue what they want, they seem to be caught in an in-between position between two ideologies, both in terms of the ends they choose and the means they adopt to achieve them.

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How do migrant workers select from potential collaborators and what matters to them during the selection process? The workers I  met certainly think about and evaluate potential collaborators before any kind of joint activity happens. In general, I found that migrants, male and female alike, tend to ‘cooperate’ with the people they know well. However, while female workers tend to cooperate with acquaintances, people they already know or have some link to, male managers tend to demonstrate their power of influence to ‘manage cooperators’ hearts’ by cooperating with strangers. This chapter argues that in the factory context, a workable cooperation mechanism is gendered and must be negotiable for all the parties involved. However, when social actors choose potential partners for cooperation, what they are really concerned with is not economic interests, but power relationships. I argue that this reflects the fact that China is a network-based society and that guanxi is still essential for organizing people. Therefore, instead of asking how Chinese migrant workers ‘choose’ potential cooperation partners in their daily lives, I focus on how they ‘create’ such partners and form a functional network, flexible enough to serve any context when needed. I  find the crucial point of workable cooperation, in this context, is not pursuing the maximum interest or creating a winwin situation. Instead, it is a process of reconfirming and ensuring a degree of predictability and loyalty. Cooperation in a Chinese context, we could say, is an issue not only of economics, but also of politics. This chapter is based on research I  conducted among young people from the Chinese countryside who migrate away from home to work in urban factories. I  spent twelve months between October 2007 and October 2008 conducting fieldwork in China, primarily in an electronics factory which I call THS, in Shenzhen’s special economic zone (SEZ). I  also collected material in three other factories (KS1, KS2 and KS3) in Kunshan, near Shanghai. While staying at THS I  was allowed to walk around freely and talk to workers spontaneously. I  attended training courses with workers and sat with them during a recruitment fair. I  regularly sat observing workers at the assembly line. I shared a room in the female dormitory with three other workers and ate three meals a day, seven days a week in the canteen with the workers, In this way, I collected data about the ‘reality’ these workers face: what is happening in the society around them (e.g. the financial crisis, new

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labour laws etc.), the immediate environment of migrant workers, their background, experiences and social roles. Second, I collected data about the desires, dreams and hopes of young migrant workers, and third, I noted the decisions they made about life choices and the motives which lay behind them. In the following section, I  will describe how cooperation happened in the factory setting. Next, I will use the perspective of network-based cooperation to analyse the ethnographic data and discuss whether viewing cooperation from a network perspective will help us understand it better in the Chinese context.

Shu (‘know well’) and dai xin (‘manageable heart’) How do workers cooperate in the factory? Needless to say, migrant workers from different provinces and different backgrounds need to find a way to cooperate in the factory, not only for work, but also for daily living. They live together in a compound, which is always kept locked and guarded. Living in a limited space, they must cooperate in some way and, most of the time, migrant workers just obey the rules and arrangements made by the authorities. With regard to the work itself, migrant workers need to cooperate even more. Although cooperation by unskilled workers has been reduced to the minimum, they still need to communicate with their fellow workers when things go wrong, when they are training a novice, or when they have disagreements. Sometimes, the cooperation is not directly between two people, but between two sections or groups of people. This kind of cooperation often involves a certain degree of negotiation, to pass information to the other group and negotiate the workload and schedule for each section. These decisions impact on the interests of the group as a whole. Young migrants, especially women, often use the key words shu bu shu (‘know [a person] well or not’) to justify their decision on whether to put themselves forward for cooperation. If they ‘don’t know the person well’ (bu shu), they will refuse to move. The explanation ‘I don’t know her/him well’ is often given as a reason to refuse an assignment:  sometimes it is accepted. It seems, for

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both managers and workers, that the statement bu shu has already predicted the failure of cooperation. In order to secure successful cooperation, it is better to find someone you ‘know well’. For the male manager Laoding, however, the behaviour of the xiao nusheng (‘little girls’) who work for him is really funny: ‘They are just afraid of strangers’ (tamen zhishi pasheng). He sees this as a typical reaction of socially inexperienced young girls. Laoding is in his forties and from Hubei province. As a buyer with almost twenty years’ working experience, he believes shu should not be the foundation of cooperation but, on the contrary, its result. For Laoding, shu is undeniably the key to cooperation, although not in the way the ‘little girls’ hold. He explains that shu means the power of influence. In his theory, if you shu (know) someone, ‘your words will have done something to them’ (keyi shoudeshang hua). This kind of influence will open a space to negotiate outside the sphere defined by regulations and rules. The negotiation will be more flexible, more contextualized and capable of bringing all kinds of exchange to the table in order to achieve the desired consent. On the basis of shu, you will know how and what to exchange. A further question emerges here. When I asked Laoding, ‘How do you find a workable “power of influence” over a person you don’t know well?’ Laoding explained that for a sophisticated and experienced person like him, the ‘power of influence’ is not grounded on previous relationships, as it is for the ‘little girls’, but mainly on ‘experiences’, which allow him to make a quick assessment of the situation and find the key points. Through correct judgement, then, ‘the raw person becomes a cooked person’, or in other words, the stranger becomes an acquaintance. For Laoding, most working women lack this ability, which is why they can only work in a familiar environment with acquaintances, and that is their obvious weakness. Laoding gave further explanation of his theory of cooperation. In his mind, apart from shu, the most important thing is xin (heart). If you can understand a person’s heart, you can succeed in any cooperation. I also heard this theory from the general manager of the factory, Caodong – in fact, it is quite possible Laoding learned it from him. ‘To manage people means to manage their hearts’ (dairen yao daixin), Caodong often said in meetings of various kinds, reminding his colleagues that the art of management, the way to achieve a harmonious working environment is to know

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your subordinates in every aspect, and then make their hearts manageable. To turn workers’ hearts into manageable hearts, in Caodong’s theory, you have to lead (tongyu) rather than manage (lingdao). These are two different concepts for Caodong. Lingdao (manage) means giving orders and asking people to obey, no matter whether they are willing. Tongyu (lead), on the other hand, means controlling people’s hearts: making them willing to do what you want. That is Caodong’s ultimate goal, and he asks all his managers to achieve it in order to create an ideal environment for work. So, what exactly does Caodong do to achieve his goal of leading? During my fieldwork, Caodong spent much of his time taking team members out to play billiards, eat, drink beer, have foot massage or play mahjong. He told me that he could see his team members’ personalities very clearly through these activities, which revealed their attitudes to competition, how aggressive they were, their strengths and weaknesses. Besides, on these informal occasions, it was easier for him to bring private topics like family background or personal plans into the conversation. In the end, he would make these team members’ hearts ‘manageable’ and lead them to achieve his goal.

Cooperation on the basis of shu and xin Researchers have pointed out that guanxi is crucial for Chinese people to cooperate (Yang 1994). But what does guanxi mean? I try to use the words shu and xin, which I learned from my informants, to answer this question afresh. For my informants, male and female alike, what matters for successful cooperation is not only trust but also justice (meaning fairness in a transaction). The trust that matters to them in an act of cooperation is not the faith that ‘I am interacting with this person with integrity and trustworthiness,’ but that ‘I am working with this person to the extent I can predict his behaviour and expect his reactions.’ Thus, to know someone well, that is, shu, is to guarantee this kind of trust will be present during the cooperation. The focus on ‘heart’ and trying to make it ‘manageable’ is a way of taking this further. Seeing cooperation from this point of view, it is arguable that ‘real’ cooperation, rather

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than a ‘mechanical’ form of it, is often unrelated to rules, regulations or contracts. For my informants, there are two cooperation mechanisms: mechanical cooperation and real cooperation. The former is definitely happening in the work setting on a daily basis, even where there is no trust between people. But mechanical cooperation will not guarantee success: most often it does not. What will guarantee a successful outcome is real cooperation. To achieve it, the people involved must negotiate an agreeable deal, of their own version, with their own unique strings attached, against their agreed concept of justice or fairness. When they are both happy with the terms of the deal – to what extent exploitation can be accepted, who should give how much and in what way – after the implicit negotiations, the real cooperation takes place. Even though male managers do not view females as potential cooperators, I  found female workers still form their own pattern for cooperating with the people around them, in order to exercise personal rationality in the context of specific power relationships. In the following sections, I  will present three cases, those of Hu, Huahua and Xiaojuan, to elaborate three typical types of female cooperation in the factory, and then reflect on the picture of power relations in cooperation depicted by some feminist scholars.

Case 1: Hu Miss Hu is the vice-general manager of THS factory. Around forty years old, she is Taiwanese and unmarried. She was recruited and brought to Shenzhen by Caodong and represents him when he is away. Apart from Laoding and one other male colleague, driver Wei, Miss Hu mainly cooperates with a group of young women, asserting her power by giving orders arbitrarily and yelling at her subordinates. She justifies her actions by telling them, ‘This is for your own good [zheshi weinihao],’ ‘I am giving you the chance to learn [wo zai geinai jihui xuexi]’ and ‘Crying will bring you growth [kuguo caihui chengzhang].’ It seems Miss Hu is trying to show that, when she yells at them, she is actually voluntarily shouldering the responsibility of growing up for these young female subordinates. The young women often cried during their work but they also accepted the orders, in order to show their firm loyalty to Miss

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Hu. They enjoyed keeping her company, since she would take them to eat in good restaurants, have massages, haircuts and free rides, among other things. Miss Hu was also very keen to get involved in mentoring her team members’ love affairs. She would give advice and sometimes financial support to those dating couples she favoured. Even though Miss Hu was the senior woman in charge of the factory, in the dormitory, she would help Caodong wash and hang up clothes, cook, pack and unpack his luggage. Caodong and Miss Hu seemed quite comfortable with this ‘division of labour’. Wei told me he considered Miss Hu unsuitable for her position because of her short temper. Wei said Miss Hu should behave like the hostess of the factory, or like Caodong’s wife, and be a mother for the workers. But Miss Hu failed to do that.

Case 2: Huahua Huahua is the team leader [xiao zuzhang] of one of the assembly lines. She is seventeen years old, from a rural village in Hubei, unmarried, but with a boyfriend also working in the THS factory. The team members in Huahua’s line are all female and of a similar age to her. They are often responsible for fine, delicate labour, like packing or assembling small elements of electronic products. Since Huahua used to be a team member before her promotion to team leader, she maintained a friendly relationship with the team, treating them more as equals than other leaders would. She also mingled with them during break or after work, sharing secrets, gossip, worries, giggles and snacks; they behaved very much like sisters. Sometimes they would say they wanted to move together to other factories since they had such a good relationship. Their sisterhood was powerful:  for example, Huahua once rallied her sisters to collectively disobey or ignore orders from Sunny, another team leader on the line, in order to force Sunny to step down from her position as leader.

Case 3: Xiaojuan Xiaojuan was one of my roommates in the factory. Sometimes she would bring me a meal of duck neck with sauce, which I knew meant

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she had been on a date with her Hunnanese boyfriend, who would often give her some Hunan speciality to share with us. The young man had learned to make duck neck with sauce, and planned to set up his own business selling it in the future. Xiaojuan often went to learn with him after working hours. She spent weekends there too and was saving money. It seemed to me she seriously planned to cooperate in this business with her boyfriend, who might be her future husband. However, they broke up after a few months and the food business idea was abandoned. Xiaojuan started to date another boy from her home town and told me she had another plan for the future, which was to open a small clothes shop with her new boyfriend in the provincial capital.

Why shu matters for gendered cooperation mechanisms It is not a new phenomenon for Chinese women to leave their home towns and spend the rest of their lives in another place. Regardless of whether her husband’s family lives far from or close to her natal family, a married woman is essentially a migrant and destined to learn how to work with strangers. In this sense, Chinese women are supposed to be more diplomatic and better prepared than men to cooperate and network with strangers (Wolf 1972). However, research also points out that women’s networking, compared to men’s, is limited and constrained (in relation to career development), since the power holders are mostly men who prevent working women from entering the circle of brotherhood (Broadbridge 2010). Seeing work and cooperation in terms of gender, we will see cooperation has been embedded in a pre-existing power network. In previous research pertaining to gender and economy, many feminist scholars have argued that men and women have different capacities for decision-making and mobilizing the labour of others. This results partly from the male bias of researchers: for example, Bossen points out, ‘Early descriptions of economic activities in other cultures largely ignored women. When women’s work was recognized, individual women were rarely described making decisions about production, investment, distribution and consumption’ (Bossen 1989: 318). However, other scholars argue, based on ethnographic

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evidence, that gender inequality exists not only in the difference of property and land-owning rights, but also in the different abilities of men and women to control other people’s labour. Women’s labour is often ‘naturally’ considered to belong to men (their fathers or their husbands). Nevertheless, men’s labour never belongs to women. In some cultures, even if a woman has property rights and land under her name, she still has no right or capacity to control other people’s labour. If she wants her husband to cultivate her lands, she must pay for the labour in food or drink. If she needs labour from other people in the community, she can only obtain it through her husband’s, her son’s or other male relatives’ networks (Harris 1984; Moore 1988; Li 1998). Given the capacity of women to control, mobilize and gain other people’s labour is far less than that of men, it may be understood why women in THS, unlike men in the factory, seldom use the technique of ‘managing heart’ (daixin) to gain the advantage in cooperation. Daily experience, the socialization process and customs have made men and women realize they face different ‘premises’ or conditions even before cooperation starts. The women in THS, just like women in other cultures depicted by ethnographers, know they could never mobilize other people’s labour as men do. Even for Miss Hu, a highranking manager, gender is still an issue. With the position of deputy manager, Miss Hu is able to control the labour of her subordinates to some extent. However, in most circumstances, she still needs to ‘borrow’ her supervisor’s authority to endorse her commands, or to be a ‘motherly figure’ (even though she is still single and childless) in order to make her orders more proper and efficient. However, it is worth noticing that even under the unequal power structure, women still have power and agency. Li (1998) argues, through investigating women’s economic strategies in terms of cooperation, that women are not silent victims even when they do not provoke crisis or resist the working process. Their agency is mainly rooted in the careful manipulation of the discrepancy in economic logic and rules within the household and between households (Sahlins 1974) (although we should be very careful with the dichotomy between culture and nature and beware of not ‘naturalizing’ the division of labour within the household as Harris (1984) reminds us). The rules and logic applied within the household continue to exist even after the state has intervened to introduce and implement different rules (Li 1988). Women are

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subject to the authority and control of a male household head, but at the same time, they negotiate and modify the rules in their best interest (Harris 1984; Moore 1988; Li 1988). Li (1988) thus argues that the social economic structure has changed when normal life continues, silently. In this context, it is easier to understand why shu has been the principal cooperation strategy adopted by female workers in THS. Shu temporarily takes female workers away from the workplace context and back to the context of the household. When working with family, relatives and good friends, rather than with strangers, despite an unfavourable power structure, female workers in THS can still negotiate their best ‘contract’ in cooperation. In this regard, cooperation mechanisms in China could be said to be highly gendered. Men and women are written into preexisting gender roles and generally have no escape from their inscribed gender scripts. This happened in the factory where I conducted fieldwork: Miss Hu, although unmarried, is expected to work and act like a mother, Huahua is supposed to act like a sister, and Xiaojuan behaves like a wife when she is thinking about cooperation. By attaching themselves to such gendered roles, they on the one hand gain the trust they need for cooperation (as I explained earlier, this means being predictable), and on the other, find a position or baseline to negotiate for their best interest outside the market economy. When they negotiate with their team members (i.e. potential cooperators), they do not negotiate as a vice-general president, a team leader or a worker: they negotiate as a caring and responsible mother, a loved sister or a future wife.

Xin, shu, guanxi and network-based cooperation In this section, I want to take a further step towards the ‘cultural source’ of the ethnography mentioned earlier pertaining to xin, shu and gendered cooperation. In doing so, I would like to demonstrate the importance of guanxi. Previous research has already demonstrated that guanxi is the Chinese way to form cooperative relationships. However, I  want to re-examine guanxi in relation to my ethnographic data and argue that its key characteristic is

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network-based cooperation. Here, joining a network is the premise of any cooperation, rather than any individual endeavour. Thus, xin, shu and conformity to gender roles are all the skills needed to help an individual enter a possible cooperative network. Existing research on cooperation often focuses on individual selfishness, although with contrasting arguments. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to argue that it is human nature to sacrifice individual interests for the needs of social groups. In contrast, economists and biologists argue that cooperation is performed based on selfish intentions, to maximize individuals’ long-term material interests (Gintis et al. 2005). However, such debate seems irrelevant to the Chinese context. Guanxi (networks, personal relationships personal connections), renqing (human feeling) and manzi (face) are essential elements in Chinese society (Smart 1999; Yan 1996, 2004; Yang 1989). The question thus arises of how cooperation will occur if the individual is not the main social actor and instead cooperation is achieved by networks. Networks have been sustained unbroken in China, even under dramatic changes in the political and economic system. For example, in post-Mao China, with the establishment of the market economy when property rights were reintroduced to rural families, the ‘network family’ has bloomed in rural villages. Although the extended family has not been a possible model under the one-child policy and married sons move out to form their own families, they still maintain close relationships with their parents in order to exchange childcare and elder care (Unger 1993). It seems the network is the foundation and infrastructure of Chinese cooperation. All possible cooperation is formed through the network. To be included in the network is the first step towards achieving cooperation. To be excluded from the network makes it virtually impossible to secure a cooperation partner. According to Fei Xiaotong (1992), the Chinese ‘network’, which he terms chaxugeju (the differential mode of association), is a complex structure with multiple centres. Each individual is at the centre of a web, which extends outwards through relationships, to form a larger web. Under such a mode, the line between individual and group/association is thus different from the Western ‘organizational mode of association’ (tuanti geju) in which public and private rights and obligations belong to different ‘organizations’ and are divided distinctly. People treat distant strangers, acquaintances, close friends

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or relatives with different moral judgments, trust and reciprocal obligations. Yang (1994) argues that such a ‘guanxi network’ is an autonomous, grassroots social order based on friendship. Chinese society is a ‘guanxi society’ and its civil society, which Yang terms mingjian (Yang 1994:  305–311), is thus different from Western civil society. Given that the guanxi network is crucial for social relationships and social organization, taking the guanxi network into account must shed light on the pattern and characteristics of the Chinese way of cooperation. In cooperation built based on guanxi networks, according to Yang, goals and actions are self-organized and synchronized autonomously. Within the networks, the relationships between each individual are linear, with few branches, and networks are temporary. To achieve an aim (such as making a TV series), friends or acquaintances would gather to form a network of relationships, a ‘quasi-group’ (Yang 1994: 302–303).1 This cooperation network is like ‘casting a fishnet into the sea’ (Yang 1994: 304). After catching fish, the people who held the net disperse. Next time the net is cast out, the people holding it will be different (Yang 1994: 304). Yang also emphasizes that the leader (named ‘cave head’), who is able to gather enough people and synchronize them to ‘cast a fishnet’ properly, will be crucial for such a quasi-group. If cooperation in the Chinese context is often carried out through networks, what is the mechanism by which it is established? In her book, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China, Yang (1994) argues that the art of guanxi  – known as guanxixue  – is closely tied to power relations. It is related to the obedience of power and to the subversion of power. Guanxixue involves the exchange of gifts, favors and banquets; the cultivation of personal relationships and networks of mutual dependence; and the manufacturing of obligation and indebtedness . . . What informs these practices and their native descriptions is the conception of the primacy and binding power of personal relationships and their importance in meeting the needs and desires of everyday life. (Yang 1994: 6) Guanxi is the art of gift exchange. Its basic logic is very close to the non-market exchange which concerned Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists (Yang 1994: 8); however, this is not only a

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willing reciprocal exchange, but also involves the invisible power relations between the debt giver and the debt taker. The power comes after the gift exchange. The key skills of guanxixue involve the manipulation of a moral debt and the timing of a request for repayment. Yang (1994: 8) states that the ‘ “art of guanxi” places an emphasis on the binding power and emotional and ethical qualities of personal relationships’. In network-based cooperation, which develops through a network rather than the individual, a dilemma must emerge at some point: is it better to maximize individual interest or network/ group interest? Sometimes these two are in conflict. If the individual only tries to maximize her own interest within a network, this risks damaging the network’s interest as a whole, and may even lead to the breakdown or dissolution of the network. But if one works only for the network’s interest and personal interest is left unfulfilled, the cooperation network may also come close to collapse and dysfunction. The individual lacks any motive to stay in the network. Thus, the role and recognition of a social actor within a network is crucial. We could argue that when Chinese ‘choose’ or ‘create’ cooperation partners, what they really do is to weigh up the potential partners and think about the possible roles they could play when the cooperation bond has been formed: ‘what is the potential role I will obtain if I enter this person’s network?’, ‘how can I maximize my personal interest in this network’ and ‘once I recruit this person into my network, what will s/he bring me?’ In short, they think of cooperation through the network. On the basis of this, shu and xin reflect how the social actors identify themselves within a network when they envision possible cooperation. When social actors view themselves as people waiting passively to ‘be networked’, they would consider shu bu shu, being familiar or not, as a criterion to judge whether or not to join the network. This could explain why most female migrant workers say shu is their cooperation premise. They seem to consider that they are unable to form a network and actively recruit people they consider fit. They also seem not to consider that people would actively recruit them into a network. Therefore, they just wait passively and feel satisfied with the given networks. Among shu people, an implicit, invisible, ‘quasi-group’ has already formed. With shu, social actors have already been granted membership in such a group.

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When thinking about shu and referring to what Laoding called ‘the power of influence’, we next turn our attention to the political side of network-based cooperation. The ethnographic data reminds us that a network is constituted of hierarchical roles and each member holds a different power within it. Some people play leaders while others are followers; the members of the network gather because of the leader’s power of influence. The goals and activities of the network, as a quasi-group, are also set by these leaders. In this sense, we can easily explain why xin (heart) and ‘leading the heart’ becomes so crucial for sophisticated men wishing to ‘create’ a cooperation partner. When Laoding and Caodong consider themselves leaders in network-based cooperation, they actively recruit people to their networks by manipulating their hearts. As Fei Xiaotong pointed out, the centre of the network could be plural; Laoding and Caodong could both be at the centre of the network at the same time and bring their network to cooperate when necessary. Network and guanxi could also explain why ‘predictability’ and ‘loyalty’ are more important than descent and trustworthiness in Chinese cooperation. For the leader of network-based cooperation, the most important thing is to make sure people can be relied on to hold the net when it needs to be thrown into the sea, for whatever reasons. In short, shu and xin reflect the strategies social actors adopt when they identify themselves with the different roles within networkbased cooperation. When social actors are passive and expect to ‘be networked’, like most female migrant workers, they take shu as the principle of successful cooperation. Meanwhile, when social actors want to expand their power of influence and actively form a network to recruit other people as members, they would not be satisfied with the principle of shu and staying in the given network. They would like to expand their network (of which they are the centre) and power through manipulating other people’s hearts. Why do women choose to conform to their gender roles? This is because ‘the right of self-recognition of role in the network’ can determine the success or failure of cooperation. For followers, being predictable is crucial to being recruited into a network. By such reasoning, female migrant workers mostly choose to closely attach themselves to the ‘ideal female gender role’, as mother, wife or sister. By doing so, they increase their predictability as well as the possibility of being recruited into the network. Male and female

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models of cooperation thus differ dramatically. Most of the time, men consider themselves to be holders of power, who can decide the network operating style. Women, on the contrary, are to be selected by the network. As followers, they join the network led by a male leader, who decides the right way to settle oneself into a network.

Conclusion This chapter attempts to rethink the nature of cooperation through focusing on gendered cooperation among workers in an electronics factory in Shenzhen. I found that shu (know well) is often a basis for formal and informal cooperation among the young women migrants who work in the factory. On the other hand, male managers assume they can actively influence people. Thus, rather than merely look for shu, their operative principle is daixin, the ability to exercise influence and thus change peoples’ feelings. This can be done by playing mahjong and drinking or engaging in other leisure activities with members of the management team, thus changing their feelings and mindset so they will be more open to a manager’s initiatives. This chapter attempts to give an explanation of such phenomena. I have argued that (1) cooperation is embedded in a pre-existing power network and that men and women have different capacities for decision-making and mobilizing the labour of others. Thus, power is crucial for cooperation and must be taken into account in the analysis, and (2)  the actor of the cooperation could be a group of people rather than an individual. The division of labour and role that each person takes within the group are often genderspecific and culturally sensitive. Given that women culturally have less capacity than men to control the labour of others, it may be understood why women in THS, unlike men in the factory, seldom use the technique of managing heart to gain the advantage in cooperation. Even women in relatively powerful positions, such as the vice-general manager of the factory Miss Hu, employed or were expected to utilize different styles of cooperation and collaboration from their male colleagues. Female workers both tend and were expected to cooperate by placing themselves in familiar gendered roles, such as acting like a mother, sister or wife, in order to achieve the cooperation they desired. This ‘choice’ does not mean they are doomed to

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play passive roles in cooperation. I  would rather say that shu (familiarity), on the contrary, may generate some agency. It is worth noticing that even under the unequal power structure, women are not deprived of power and agency: women are good at bending the rules, negotiating their interests or implementing their power by using emotional ties and ‘familizing’ workplaces. Several scholars have pointed out that the agency of women is mainly rooted in the careful manipulation of discrepancies between economic logic and rules within the household and between households (Sahlins 1974). Through this strategy, they can change the social-economic structure in the course of normal life. By cooperating with acquaintances on the basis of familiarity and making the workplace ‘family-like’, they ‘actively create’ a discrepancy in economic logic and rules. Once the discrepancy has been created, they may more easily find a chance to manipulate a ‘family-like co-worker’ by carefully choosing ‘rules within the household’ and ‘rules between households’ which serve their best interest in the context when cooperating. Real cooperation, unlike mechanical cooperation, is certainly related to trust. In one-to-one cooperation, when selecting partners, the level of trust is key. However, if the cooperation is networkbased, that is, the partner is not an ‘other’ but one of us, the key to considering cooperation partners becomes not trust, but loyalty. People try to ‘create’ cooperation partners by observing their degree of predictability and creating, nourishing and fostering the potential partner’s loyalty. According to my observation in a factory in China, I would say that being predictable is often the key to network-based cooperation, which is crucial for getting opportunities to cooperate. In network-based cooperation, there are bound to be differences in power. A ‘head’ must emerge to organize the network. He or she will be the ‘centre’ of his or her network. This head is in charge of obtaining opportunities for outward cooperation. The buyer Laoding and the general manager Caodong are both considered able to find opportunities for outward cooperation. Internally, the head of network-based cooperation is supposed to decide and assign the division of labour within the network, so he or she must have enough power of influence to achieve this. Such cooperation, since it is on the basis of a network, is involved not only in ‘economic’ issues, but also in politics. A network is a loose organization. Compared to a formal organization, a network-based organization has a high degree of

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informality and flexibility. Therefore the power of the head is not granted from a formal structure or a top-down authority. On the contrary, it arises from ‘creating’, from active management (such as dai xin – leading the heart). According to the folk theory of my informants, first, the head or centre of the network must create ‘familiarity’ among potential network members; next, the head must provide resources to meet members’ needs. Through eating, playing and exchanging favours and gratitude again and again, the head gathers his or her power of influence. Meanwhile, the followers are also performing and reconfirming their ‘loyalty’ both to the head and to the network. This process gradually builds a mutual reciprocity of obligation between the head and the followers. When the head wins the loyalty of the followers, he or she will finally consider them good candidates for cooperation because now he or she can ‘lead their hearts’. How, then, do Chinese people confirm, sense and capture the loyalty necessary for network-based cooperation? Apart for the degree of ‘predictability’ rooted in personality, another sign is ‘fitting into the form/role’. If a person behaves in the way the network expects of their role, he or she will be considered loyal. Therefore, as followers in the network, female migrant workers are either expected to behave, or actively shape their behaviour to the ideal gender role of mother, wife or sister. In this way, by showing their high degree of ‘predictability’ and loyalty, they claim to be potential partners in network-based cooperation.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Challenges to ethnic cooperation among Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland Eona Bell

In studies of the Chinese diaspora, scholars have described various cooperation mechanisms, which are generally portrayed favourably as reasons for the economic and educational success and upwards social mobility of Chinese migrants around the world. Some are presented as cultural forms carried with the people when they migrate, and some are shown to have evolved in response to the new social environments where people find themselves. For example, Watson (1975) described the existing kinship-based lineage organization as a cooperation mechanism that not only facilitated migration from the New Territories, but largely structured the working lives of a first generation of Hong Kong Chinese men employed in restaurants in London. In the United States, Chinatowns have been analysed as exemplars of immigrant mutual self-help, where by working together commercially and socially in economic enclaves, Chinese immigrants and their children achieve what Zhou (1992) terms ‘ethnic capital’, shared skills and knowledge that enable individuals to progress in their lives. More generally, the cultural values of patriarchy and family loyalty, both of which may inspire

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cooperation and/or coordinated action by group members (albeit with varying degrees of willingness or coercion), have been said to be key to the success of Chinese enterprises around the world (Harrell 1985; Oxfeld 1993; Song 1999). In this chapter, I  discuss an example of cooperation by Hong Kong Chinese people in Scotland, as they seek to organize language classes in their mother tongue for their Scottish-born children as part of a community-run, complementary school  – offering Saturday classes in Cantonese and Mandarin language, Chinese dance, music and the visual arts for both Chinese and non-Chinese children and adults. The Chinese community school is different from the ethnic enterprises, which Zhou, Oxfeld, Song and others have written about, and not only because it is a voluntary organization, not a business  – a point to which I  return later. It is a project that brings together people who have little contact with each other except in relation to the school, and this raises important questions about the definition of the ‘ethnic community’ in the West. Cooperation within a Chinese diasporic community is not always easy, and a shared Chinese background may not be enough to convince people that it is safe or even desirable to trust a potential cooperation partner. Against this background, immigrant parents, I would argue, face a predicament common to people who have migrated from China to the West in recent decades. They have to deal with the problem of how (and indeed whether) to establish mutualistic relationships with other Chinese with whom they often share little – other than what might more accurately be termed race rather than ethnicity. At the same time, they must do this in a social context where there are existing institutions and relationships, both between earlier generations of Chinese migrants, and between those settled communities and their non-Chinese neighbours (Pieke 2007:  82–83). Thus, for individual migrants, there is a problem of finding a position within a social network that is not based on kinship or other shared histories:  How do people decide whom to trust as a reliable partner for cooperation? Wu (this volume) discusses another Overseas Chinese community where people must first build up a bank of shared experiences and social interaction, in order to overcome the barrier of mistrust of other Chinese who are not kin, before they are able to begin cooperating:  a shared linguistic and cultural background is not in itself sufficient to ‘mark’ a suitable partner in cooperation. Wu shows how Chinese people

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in Zambia use the performance of ‘interactional affection’ to build trusting relationships with strangers, making cooperation possible. In what follows, I  step back from the fine-grained analysis of interpersonal relations, to examine some of the structural relations between Chinese people in Scotland, and explore how positions of power and influence, within the Chinese community and with outsiders, limit the possibility of cooperation between groups and individuals. In the particular case of the Chinese school, I wondered what it was that motivated individuals to volunteer, and later found that what seemed like a good and mutually beneficial project had resulted in bitter interpersonal conflicts and ruptures within the group. Could it be that differing and contradictory reasons for working together and different criteria for choosing cooperation partners ultimately lead to the failure of cooperation? The answer, as I will show, speaks to other debates in this volume on the social asymmetries and inequalities present in many settings for cooperation. In what follows I  will illustrate these different motivations for cooperation in my field site, after saying a little more about the ethnographic context.

Diversity of the Chinese population in Scotland Hong Kong Chinese people in the Scottish city where I conducted fieldwork in 2005–2006 work in a variety of occupations, principally the ethnic catering trade but also the professions and academia. Compared with the New Territories migrants to London, which Watson (1975) describes, there are no large lineage groups within the Scottish Chinese population, which is largely made up of people who are unrelated to each other. This reflects a series of migration waves, as elsewhere in Western Europe (Benton and Pieke 1998), which started with rural, largely unskilled Cantonese and Hakka migrants arriving in Scotland from Hong Kong in the 1960s onwards to work with their family members in restaurants and takeaway shops, followed by smaller numbers of Hong Kong Chinese professionals and low-skilled workers around 1997, and more recently by larger numbers of Mandarin-speaking professional people and students from the People’s Republic of China and South

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East Asia. Nowadays, middle-class Chinese migrants often aim to bypass the ethnic economy altogether and achieve rapid integration into the professional classes, but some find that racism and the glass ceiling push them back to work with other Chinese in less prestigious occupations (Business in the Community 2014). For less wealthy migrants, the opportunities to work in ethnic restaurants or other businesses may still be a positive pull factor, as they know that there is a steady demand for workers who are prepared to accept substandard pay and working conditions (Benton and Gomez 2008). Thus, the people I  write about represent a changed ethinic Chinese population that has, since the 1990s, become more diffuse and diverse than in previous generations, with migrants coming from a wide range of social, linguistic and educational backgrounds and less likely than the restaurant workers who arrived in the 1960s to depend on the cooperation of other Chinese either in the moment of migration itself or in their employment. While Benton and Gomez may go too far in their assertion that a sense of community is entirely absent among the Chinese in Britain,1 it is undoubtedly becoming much harder either for scholars or for Chinese migrants themselves to sustain the mental concept of a ‘Chinese community’ united by shared assumptions and moral values.

The wider context for cooperation – multiculturalism and interethnic cooperation Within the vast literature on multiculturalism that has emerged from various academic disciplines, anthropologists and sociologists have challenged the way that multicultural policies are often based on a highly problematic understanding of culture as something ‘singular, unified and bounded’ (Phillips 2007: 53). As I go on to show how this particular Chinese community has changed in its approach to cooperation over several decades, I  thus engage with recent scholarly debates on ethnicity, multiculturalism and the dangers of essentializing minority ethnic cultures. The culturalist approach to Chinese overseas represented by scholars such as Watson has been heavily criticized by more recent scholars arguing that migrants

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do not unquestioningly maintain the practices (or indeed moral values) of their places of origin, and furthermore ethnicity or the cultural practices of one’s parents and grandparents are not the only influences on people’s behaviour and values (Wikan 2002; Modood 2007). However, as Brubaker (2004) has pointed out, while scholars should beware of the trap of taking the ‘ethnic group’ as a predetermined category for analysis, it is undoubtedly true that in ordinary social life and discourse, people do make assumptions about the existence of such ethnically defined ‘communities’, and it is this social phenomenon that we should address. In relation to cooperation, this means exploring what norms and expectations people hold concerning cooperation within and between ethnic groups. In the case of Chinese families in Scotland, the question then is not only whether they expect other Chinese to cooperate effectively with them, and feel morally obliged to participate in such action, but also whether non-Chinese people share the expectation that immigrant groups will work to support each other. What does the broader political discourse on multiculturalism have to say about cooperation between ethnic groups in Western societies? Volunteering in Chinese community schools fits within a wider UK context of multiculturalism and institutional support for heritage language learning that actually relies on an assumption that people will contribute time and skills altruistically to a project built around shared ethnicity. The idea of a ‘Chinese community’ is very real in public discourse in contemporary Scotland, where political devolution and government by the Scottish National Party since 1997 have led to ongoing debate about Scottish nationhood and ethnicity. Unlike the UK government, the Scottish government under both Labour and Scottish National Party (SNP) administrations has encouraged immigration to tackle the problem of population decline (Scottish Executive, 2004), and during my time in the field, the then SNP First Minister Alex Salmond defined his party’s policy of ‘multicultural nationalism’ as one that welcomed the distinctive contributions to society of immigrants (Hussain and Miller 2006). In a speech to the Pakistan Welfare Trust in June 2007 he stated: I’ve said many times before that the diversity the Asian communities bring to Scotland is a great strength. The Pakistani

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community has brought variety and passion to Scotland. And it has also brought a hard work ethic, a strong faith – and a belief in the strength of community and family. Different traditions do not undermine Scottish culture – they enrich and enhance it. There are many shades and strands in the Scottish tartan. (Scottish Government, 2007) This political vision of diverse ethnic groups weaving together a colourful and cohesive social fabric for contemporary Scotland speaks for itself about the assumptions of cooperation between ethnically defined social groups and also about the unity  – and shared moral values – within them. Therefore, a further question for this chapter is to explore how people within the school balance the wish to cooperate within the Chinese community with a desire to cooperate with the Scottish state in its project of multiculturalism, which poses the apparently irreconcilable demand that minority ethnic groups both preserve their cultural distinctiveness (including desirable characteristics such as hard work and familism) and reach beyond ethnic boundaries to contribute to Scottish society as a whole. If we understand in-group cooperation to be an active agent in the maintenance of group cohesion, how is it possible to be a morally upright member of the group and secure the place of the group in relation to other ethnicities?

Ethnic markers and cooperation Another body of literature has focused on the widespread tendency of people to cooperate preferentially with members of their own ethnic group. An evolutionary argument (Henrich and Henrich 2007) suggests that humans are motivated to interact with, and learn from their co-ethnics by the benefits that are likely to accrue from people who share your own social norms and expectations. If everyone is playing by the same rules, interactions are likely to proceed more smoothly, and thus in-group interaction is rewarded by more positive experiences and goals achieved. In his chapter in this volume, Wu describes the shared cultural norm of ‘interactional affection’ as a mode of relating to others, which serves precisely as the kind of unspoken rule that binds together Chinese immigrants in a self-identifying ethnic community. As the rules and assumptions

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that people hold are usually invisible, until the moment they come into play, people must rely on external cues, or markers, to determine whether a person is likely to be a reliable cooperation partner (Nettle and Dunbar 1997):  such cues often overlap with signals of ethnicity such as language (even accent), dress or other characteristics, which are both evident and relatively hard to fake. In this way, a person can make assumptions about the other that allow them both to avoid the costs of unsuccessful cooperation, and also to choose whom to approach in order to learn proper ways of behaviour. In theory, then, the ethnic group holds together because people choose to interact preferentially with others like them, because they think they know how those others will behave. As Chen argues (this volume), mechanisms of gossip and reputation within the group regulate behaviour, encouraging people to conform or risk social sanctions. However, I  have already mentioned that the Chinese community in Scotland is far from being a stable, unified group, and as Stanford elaborates in his chapter, a community in flux (in this case as the result of successive waves of migration) is not wellstructured for cooperation.

Distinctively Chinese cooperation and beliefs about power Attempts have been made to define Chinese cooperation as something distinct from the Western modes of cooperation most often discussed in the psychological literature. In their review of the literature, Leung and Au (2010) find that previous stereotypical perceptions of the Chinese have been challenged by more recent studies complicating the view that Chinese people were more collective than individualistic in their social orientation, and therefore better at cooperation. As the chapters in this present volume show, rapid social change and the disruption of longestablished social institutions has upset past expectations. In their discussion of the impacts of social change on cooperative orientations, most relevant to this chapter is Leung and Au’s (2010) discussion of power: people are likely to take either a cooperative or a competitive goal orientation depending on their beliefs about

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power. Those who believe power can be shared between leaders and subordinates are more likely to cooperate than those who take a more hierarchical, top-down approach (Tjosvold, Coleman and Sun 2003). Chinese now are said to be moving towards sharing power rather than withholding it (Leung and Au 2010) but at least one study has found Hong Kong Chinese more inclined to favour hierarchical power structures than the more cooperative Mainland Chinese (Tse et al. 1988). The Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland come from (at least) two distinct groups, separated by the transformation of Hong Kong through modernization and urbanization over the past fifty years. The first generation of migrants grew up in lineage villages of the rural New Territories, characterized by great inequalities of wealth and political power, albeit masked by the illusion of cooperation and mutual help within the lineage organization (Watson 1985). The new migrants come from urban Hong Kong, where increased educational opportunities for men and women, inward migration and new housing arrangements have overturned past hierarchies within families and, to some extent, between the genders.

Motivations for volunteering – reputation or altruism There are a number of ways in which individuals may support the Chinese school, from financial contributions to giving time to teaching, governance or administration. At the broadest level, we can assume that each person involved shares a common goal of providing good quality education for the Scottish Chinese community. However, I  would like to dig a little deeper below the surface and explore some of the more complex motivations that seem to lie behind the decision of individual volunteers to engage in cooperation with other adults at the school. In the following sections, I look in turn at some of these varied forms of cooperation within the Chinese school community, in each case examining both the motivation for volunteering, and the success or otherwise of the effort to work with others on this shared enterprise.

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Case 1: The funders Sometimes you ask, are you the best person to do it, but really none of us is the best person, but we are involved in the school and we remain involved because we believe that it’s a good cause. I suppose it’s a little ‘make peace’ thing for yourself, you want to do something for the community, so you help this charity as much as you can. (‘Andy’, aged 40, British-born Chinese, board member and parent) Chinese language schools have been seen as a ‘good cause’ within the diaspora over many years (Benton and Gomez 2008), and the literature on Chinese overseas communities shows how often they become the focus of community-based philanthropy. The Chinese school that I discuss in this chapter began in the 1970s, when a small group of Hong Kong Chinese mothers and children started to meet in a family home, to teach the children to read and write Cantonese. They had very recently come to Britain, and their arrival changed the demographic profile of the Chinese immigrant population, which had previously been mainly male. The male immigrants had organized themselves for mutual help in voluntary associations that were part social clubs and part business associations. Their activities included running a club room where restaurant workers could come to relax, watch Chinese movies on video and read newspapers – and organizing a Chinese New Year procession in the city centre, making more visible the presence of the Chinese community and its restaurant trade in what was still a largely monocultural city. Over time, the office-bearers of the Chinese restaurateurs’ association became spokesmen for the Chinese community in interactions with the Scottish local authorities and media, for example being asked for comments on crimes involving Chinese people in Scotland or attending functions at the city council including a reception celebrating thirty years of Chinese education, attended by the Queen (Monteith 2001). As Chen describes in this volume, concern for reputation can be a strong motivator for cooperation, and two of my research participants mentioned ‘meeting some very influential people’ as one of the highlights of their service as office-bearers for these Chinese restaurateurs’ associations.

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Mr Leung, now in his eighties, told me that the first restaurateurs’ association was founded in 1972, but there were always political differences between its members, relating to the domestic political situation in China, and in 1981 he founded a separate organization. Both groups had office-bearers serving at least a year’s term of office, and both existed to serve those Chinese people in the city who were involved in the restaurant trade. By the time of my fieldwork in the mid-2000s, the original association continued as an organization on paper, with committee posts handed on from person to person each year, but Mr Leung told me frankly in 2005 that they did very little in practice. Mrs Shek, a woman in her late forties whose husband’s family had been heavily involved in the association, observed that ‘The second generation who grew up here are more blended with Scottish society and have no desire for these Chinese associations.’ By 1988, many of the members of these two groups were reaching retirement age and they decided to form a new organization for mutual self-help among the Chinese elderly. By the time of my fieldwork, the work of the elders’ association had become wellestablished with a weekly lunch club, a sheltered housing complex for Chinese elders and a drop-in centre for individuals needing practical help and advice. Mr Leung, a founder member of the restaurateurs’ association, had served for several years as chair of the elders’ association. The other significant legacy of the restaurateurs’ association in particular was the Chinese school, which grew out of those informal Cantonese language classes of the 1970s to become established as a formal institution in the 1980s. As I have described elsewhere (Bell 2013), the Chinese school was from early on encouraged by the Scottish local education authorities who from the 1980s onwards pursued policies of multicultural education, which included fostering the literacy of minority ethnic children in their mother tongues. In 1995, the school became a registered charity, a legal status that required its organizers to demonstrate that the school had charitable purposes and existed for public benefit. It continued to raise funds and to recruit teachers and committee members from within the Chinese community, but also sought support from local governmental organizations; evidence of the school’s intention to forge links with the wider Scottish society. At the time of my research, the school received local authority funding for teachers’ sessional pay and was visited and supported by dedicated Quality Assurance

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Officers from the council’s children and families department. In interviews with many of my Chinese research participants, however, the funding and administration of the school was predominantly a matter for the Chinese community and something in which they took great pride. This issue, in fact, became the trigger for a major breakdown in cooperation between the Chinese associations and the original Chinese school. As Mrs Shek explained, [The school] had originally been founded by [the restaurant owners’ association] but as that head became more confident and applied for funding from the council, the school became self-sufficient and the head teacher detached herself from [the association]. She seemed to be going off on her own to apply for funding from outside instead of working with others in the Chinese community. A lot of people were not happy with her. It was felt as a betrayal, and the people didn’t like it at all. It’s the same if you own a restaurant – if I’m the owner, and go off on holiday, leaving a manager in charge, it’s not good if the manager takes over and starts running the restaurant in his own way. Mrs Shek’s comparison of the school administration to the hierarchical organization of a restaurant indicates very clearly the paternalistic model of ‘cooperation’ that was valued in both the older restaurateurs’ associations and the school as it was originally set up. In response to what they perceived as betrayal by the head teacher, the two Chinese business associations joined forces with the elders’ association and the local Chinese women’s group (which had begun as a local-authority-funded group of mothers, but itself became self-supporting) to found a new Chinese community school towards the end of 1999; it was registered as a separate charity in 2000. Having the status of registered charities under Scottish law, both schools were at the time of my fieldwork required to make public their financial accounts and names of trustees, and did so diligently. Yet, despite this similar form of governance on paper, it was clear that differences were emerging in who might be elected to the board of trustees in the respective schools, in the power of the head teachers, and particularly the source of funding. The original school had to work hard to win grants from external public bodies to continue in operation after the Chinese associations withdrew

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their support and at the time of my research, a high proportion of its volunteers and board members had experience of work in the public or voluntary sector in Scotland, making them more accustomed to seeking funds and establishing partnerships with external agencies. When I met him at the school’s annual general meeting, the chairman – a British-born Chinese financial advisor – explained that his principal role was to make personal approaches to friends and contacts, seeking donations to the school at the time of Chinese New Year, a task that he found challenging since so many local Chinese families had transferred their support to the new school. Apart from that, he was rarely seen at the school, and major decisions and actions such as negotiating the lease of rooms were handled by the head teacher. Although the trustees of the community school were not exclusively from restaurant-owning families, many were selfemployed or business owners and the school continued to draw the bulk of its funding from private donors within the Chinese community. By the time of my research, this school was also partially funded by the local authority, but the role of the Chinese associations as sponsors was still made prominent on all publicity relating to the school and especially at public-facing events such as the Chinese New Year celebration when individual as well as corporate donors were publicly thanked, with their names listed in an annual report. Confirming that leadership of the school had become the new source of authority and self-assigned reputation within the city’s Chinese community, when he was interviewed in 2013 for a newspaper article on Chinese investment in the Scottish property market, the previous chair of the business association described himself as chair of the Chinese Community School. By contrast, when the older school was approached by local media for comment on a Chinese festival, it was the head teacher, not the chair of trustees who acted as spokesperson, underlining the school’s reputation as a successful educational institution.

Case 2: The teachers Hand on heart, the teachers are great because we’re not, we don’t pay them a commercial rate, because we can’t afford to, but then I believe the teachers who come to work for us don’t see

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this as any more than a travel reimbursement, rather than being paid on a commercial basis, so there’s a lot of goodwill we’re drawing from the community. (Andy, Chair of the community school board 2006) Teaching at the school meant altruistically donating time and energy to a voluntary project. Although teachers were paid at a sessional rate, this small amount covered only the two hours a week of class time, and not the additional hours required for preparation during the week. I wondered what drew the teachers and classroom assistants to give their time in this way. If the office-bearers of the sponsoring organizations gained in reputation through their involvement with the school, the people who volunteered to work as teachers had less to gain in terms of status within the community. However, for people who started off far lower down the social hierarchy than the restaurant owners who led the community associations, cooperation with the school teaching staff could be rewarded with new skills and opportunities for upwards social mobility. May was born in the 1950s to a Tanka family living on a boat off Sai Kung in the New Territories. She left school at the age of eleven to start work to support her parents and younger siblings. May and her husband migrated to Scotland with their young daughter in 1997 to ‘try something new’, in her own words, and immediately found work as restaurant employees, although May worked only part-time in order to care for the little girl. For May, becoming a teacher was part of a conscious choice to be an active member of the Chinese community. She first volunteered at the lunch club for Chinese elderly and was then invited to become a classroom assistant by the head teacher, who saw that she was a reliable person, whose readiness to help compensated for her lack of skills and experience. This same head teacher had been instrumental in starting a support group for Chinese women in the city and was evidently conscious of the isolation and loneliness of many newly arrived women. Thus, inviting May to teach at the Chinese school was also a means to invite her into a community of other Chinese mothers, as well as develop her own skills and of course support the children’s learning. May was at first reluctant because she had never learned to read or write Chinese confidently, but was persuaded by the head teacher who said she would only have to help the small children hold their pencils, and so on.

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Over time, May’s confidence grew and she soon became the lead teacher of class 1. When I met May some years later, she asked me to help her complete an application form for a childcare course at the local college. Having no formal qualifications and little work experience, she decided to cite her experience as a volunteer teacher at the Chinese school as evidence of our suitability for the course. In this sense, May’s experience with the Chinese school exemplifies the process of accumulating ethnic and social capital, which Zhou describes as characteristic of Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves. There were others on the school staff who had less to gain, in terms of career progression, from being part of the teaching team. Linda was a university graduate and trained secondary school teacher who was employed to teach Chinese to non-native speakers at a private boarding school. She also taught a senior class at the Chinese Saturday school. Halfway through the school year, she appeared at the monthly staff meeting at the Chinese community school, carrying a large cake which she offered round. This, she explained, was to celebrate the fact that she had been approved as an examiner for the new Scottish Qualifications Authority exam in Mandarin Chinese  – previously Scottish candidates wishing to sit an exam had had to take papers set by English exam boards. Linda’s apparent willingness to celebrate with her Chinese school colleagues was rather dissipated, however, in a comment she made to me privately after the event, when she remarked, ‘I don’t suppose any of them really appreciate what it means. All they’re interested in is discussing recipes and gossip. But I thought I should tell them anyway.’ This rather startling observation spoke volumes about the social gulf within the teaching staff between those who joined as working-class parents, with little experience outside the catering trade and their home lives, and those who were well-educated professional people, able to work within the Scottish education system. Even day-to-day cooperation between this disparate group, however united in the desire to keep the Chinese school running, could be strained.

Case 3: The parents One aspect of the good will that teachers showed towards the school arose from the fact that the majority were also parents and

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motivated in part by their sense of responsibility towards their own children. A number of the teachers told me that they volunteered in order to encourage their children’s own cooperation with the project of Chinese language learning. Mrs Ma’s three children had all attended the school, and when they were young, she decided to volunteer as a teacher to consciously model an attitude of commitment to learning Cantonese. The children were all born in Scotland after Mr Ma came to the UK as a Hong Kong government employee. Mrs Ma was determined that the children should ‘learn Chinese and take their culture seriously’ but, as she explained, It’s a very difficult thing, persuading children to do something, such as learning Chinese which is really difficult! Most Friday evenings and Saturday mornings our home would be a battleground because the children hadn’t done their homework for Chinese school. The son of another teacher finally dropped out of Chinese school at the age of thirteen, after many similar arguments including one row when he yelled, ‘There’s no point in me going there. We’re just playing at being Chinese!’ At a very deep level, the son perceived the whole enterprise of Chinese school to be fake and a matter of assumed identity, a game in which he was no longer willing to play. Thus for parents, involvement with the Chinese school required not only their own willingness to cooperate as teachers, but also the effort to engage their children’s cooperation with the patently challenging task of learning a difficult language on top of all their other school and extra-curricular commitments as young people growing up in an English-speaking environment. Mostly this resulted in a compromise, where parents accepted that their children would never achieve very high standards in Chinese, but still insisted that they at least attend classes until the pressure of their mainstream schoolwork became too heavy, especially when the children became teenagers. May once expressed her frustration at the parents’ failure to cooperate with her project of educating their children. Towards the end of term, as she was writing exam questions for her junior class, May told me that some parents had phoned her to ask if their children could be excused the exam because they did not like writing Chinese. The parents did not mind this  – they just

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wanted them to speak Chinese and would have enrolled them in a conversation class if one had been offered. This idea certainly clashed with May’s assumption, shared with others, that achieving literacy, not only oral competence in Chinese, was crucial to becoming a proper Chinese person, which she believed was the point of attending Chinese school. In her view, those parents who wanted their children to avoid writing were failing in their duty as parents to encourage their children’s learning. Her response to their request was uncompromising: ‘This is Chinese school – we have to teach them writing. And as long as they’re in my class, they have to write and they have to take the exam.’ At an institutional level, the school itself was very proud of its academic achievement, with the A  and A* grades achieved by its pupils at GSCE and A  level displayed prominently on the school website and in the programme handed out to the large audience at the schools Chinese New Year show. However, the experiences of both teachers and parents revealed that not everyone was equally committed to achieving these excellent results.

Case 4: The anthropologist In September 2006, I  myself became a volunteer at the Chinese school, having asked the head teacher if there was anything I could do to reciprocate for the help that she and other teachers had promised to give me in my fieldwork in the school over the following twelve months. Clearly, a large part of my motivation in this was selfish, as I  was trying to maximize opportunities to interact with people in the school, for the sake of collecting more ethnographic data, and I sensed that working together on a shared project would encourage people to speak to me more freely, as someone who was not purely a stranger but an active part of the group. As for any field researcher, the boundary between my professional and research goals, and more personal concerns was sometimes blurred. A  newcomer to this social scene, I  was also anxious to build up a reputation for myself as a person who was in some way useful and not merely an annoyance, imposing myself on classes, asking questions about personal matters and taking up people’s time. Showing willingness to take on work for the good of the group would, I hoped, warm the school community to me.

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In the end, the task assigned to me  – updating a spreadsheet of names and contact details for local organizations and individuals who would be invited to the school’s annual celebration of Chinese New Year – was hardly onerous and took me only a few hours to complete; I doubt that more than one or two people at the school were aware I had even done it, so it might be said to be a failure in introducing me as a member of the mutualistic community of the school. However, the exercise seemed to me a positive moment in the research process, opening a door a little wider for me to become a familiar part of the school community, even for the relatively short period I would be there. On reflection, I was not so different from many of the Chinese teachers, and parents, who come into contact with the Chinese school for a shorter or longer time, and for the duration of their stay offer what they can in exchange for a personal or emotional reward, whether that be work experience to boost a CV, or the sense of no longer being so alone as a migrant in a new place. It may indeed be that the Chinese school, like the cooperatives that Stanford describes in this volume, is no longer a community united by shared personal histories and economic ties, but a more fragmented and transitory community. I would argue, however, that the opportunity for cooperation still draws people who wish to become part of a larger social group, and at some level this incentive makes it possible to ignore differences that could potentially foil cooperation.

Discussion A Chinese complementary school is a place where everyone is quite self-conscious about being Chinese – while aware that there are subtle degrees of ‘Chineseness’ and nuanced differentiation, between the adult migrants from different places of origin, between mainly first-generation migrant teachers and second-generation children, but also between overseas-born and Chinese-born pupils at the schools, all of which make specific claims about belonging to the ‘Chinese community’ (Mau, Francis and Archer 2009; Wang 2014). For many of those who attend the Chinese school, whether as teachers, pupils or parents, the two to three hours of classes on a Saturday are the only time in the week when they socialize with other Chinese outside their immediate families. Thus, any moral

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values attached to cooperative behaviour as an example of proper ‘Chinese’ behaviour are particularly salient, and the ethnic markers described in the theory on ethnic cooperation could hardly be more evident. Yet I  have shown in this chapter that there are weaknesses in the ethnic markers model, since what seem to be relevant signals of potential cooperation  – shared Cantonese language and Hong Kong origins  – can deceive, as the previous school head teacher and the board of trustees found to their consternation when their shared ethnicity did not prevent them from behaving in quite unpredictable ways. I argue that this is due to different beliefs about the importance of guarding the ethnic boundary as a limit to the field of cooperation. While both the ‘old’ school trustees and the ‘new’ governing body and teachers upheld the value of sustaining relationships and distinctive cultural practices within the Chinese minority ethnic group in Scotland, the new generation have realized that their cultural values and heritage (in the shape of language and other performances of cultural identity) are not threatened by cooperation with other ethnic groups. In fact, by engaging with the Scottish authorities in their project of promoting bilingualism and multiculturalism, the head teacher was able to attract both funding and useful political backing for the school project. And I was not the only non-Chinese person to be hanging around the school: growing numbers of adults and children from other ethnic groups, both white Scots and migrants from other places are enrolling to learn Cantonese or Mandarin for reasons of their own. Again, the evidence is that ethnic markers are not exclusive to those who claim them by birth but can be adopted by anyone, albeit on the condition that we were also committed to cooperating with the rules and behavioural norms of the school. I have described a situation where, despite sharing both ethnicity and a belief in the moral good of providing heritage language education for children, people do not find it easy to cooperate. Observation of the everyday interactions between people involved in this shared project reveal how important social differences in gender, economic and educational status can override any concerns about working together with other Chinese migrants for mutual benefit. Attendance at the Chinese complementary school is essentially a leisure activity, as all of its pupils attend (English-medium) primary

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and secondary schools during the week and, unlike some other community schools in the UK and North America, the Chinese schools I  describe do not provide homework help or additional tutoring to support the mainstream curriculum. People are free to choose whether or not to participate in the Chinese school, but I  would extend this point to stress that here people are making a conscious choice not only to give up their spare time to help others, but also to identify themselves as part of a ‘Scottish Chinese community’ with all the moral, emotional and even political entanglements that might imply. In the accounts of my informants, their involvement with the Chinese school is characterized repeatedly in terms of its charitable nature: it is a ‘good cause’ built on ‘good will’ and demanding commitment from adults and children. As a voluntary organization, the Chinese school serves as a contrasting case to some of the more vital social institutions described in this volume  – such as the water supply in Pia’s work and the factory described by Fang – where people’s livelihoods and indeed survival depends on their successful cooperation with others. It may be more akin to the cooperatives that Stanford describes, which are built on a predefined conception of their nature as organizations to which people will contribute willingly, for the greater good. In the preceding case studies, I  have shown that participation in the cooperative project of running the school could in fact be motivated by an array of selfish and competitive desires:  the newcomer teacher sees it as the first rung on her career ladder; the parents wants their child to have the competitive advantage of speaking a prestigious language; and the trustee may gain some publicity and positive branding for his business, by association with this charitable organization. In this sense, despite being a voluntary activity, the cooperative behaviour that the school promotes cannot be described as purely altruistic. For the trustees who compared the ‘disloyal’ head teacher to an irresponsible employee, the similarities between the school and a business venture were quite apparent. However, others in the community were shocked at their treatment and refusal to cooperate further with the head teacher, a person who was seen to have given her time and skills generously for the benefit of others. I  would argue that this demonstrates that people held different expectations of mutual respect within a voluntary organization than they might have done in a commercial organization.

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This leads to the question of paternalism and hierarchy within a cooperative group. In contrasting the male-dominated restaurateurs’ associations with the more gender-balanced, egalitarian school governing body of today, I have pointed to a cultural shift within the British Chinese community. In this chapter, little has been said about gender dynamics, but this change in the leadership of the Chinese school has been characterized by a shift to female leadership, with some 80 percent of the teaching staff being women, and three successive female head teachers. Elsewhere (Bell 2012) I  have discussed in more depth the divergence of gender roles in work and leisure activities among the Scottish Chinese, showing how they tend to cooperate in distinctly gendered practices. It is apparent that the hierarchical style of social organization that was so effective in organizing the first wave of migration of kinsmen to work in restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s, is no longer appropriate as a form of coordinating the activities of migrants who have no previous history of interaction or knowledge of each other. The head teacher who threatened the authority of the community leaders by seeking donations elsewhere (thus also undermining their reputation as wealthy benefactors of the school) was opting to widen her field of cooperation to new partners – and in this case was able to do so because she had (English) language skills and professional experience that made her less reliant on the support of other Chinese. The older trustees were shocked when the head teacher refused to conform to their authority, and the school as it then existed could not continue. In its place, a new form of governance has emerged, which allows for individuals to participate in the cooperative project for their own diverse reasons, but this is now couched in the language of the British voluntary sector where people express a desire to ‘give something back’ to the community. This chapter has set out to demonstrate how a new network of cooperating people is formed and established, in a way that tries to minimize inequalities by putting moral reputation to the fore. This contrasts with the model of the business associations that were organized on a hierarchical basis. In the case of the teachers, the school itself became a new mechanism of cooperation through which it was possible to form new relationships. Forming a new community of teachers was not easy, as once again differences in class and education left underlying feelings of mistrust between them. It was important to prove one’s honour and trustworthiness.

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May was recruited to teach because she had already demonstrated her moral worth as a regular volunteer at the elder people’s lunch club, and moral reputation remained a strong motivator for May, for instance when she insisted on setting a proper exam paper to show she was a good teacher. I have used the day-to-day experiences of parents trying to bring their children to Chinese school to show that cooperation on the basis of shared ethnicity certainly does not come easily or naturally to all. Here another kind of inequality can be seen  – the power of parents over their children, which itself ebbs as children grow older and more capable of resisting their parents’ attempts to coerce them into cooperation. I have also pointed to the delicate weighing up of moral value by parents and children who must decide whether to devote more time and energy to learning Chinese and, through effort, remaining part of the local Chinese community, or to focus on their mainstream schoolwork. As the Scottish Chinese population goes into its third and fourth generations, and becomes less dependent on mutual self-help for basic survival and social support, cooperation on the basis of ethnicity becomes increasingly a matter of choice, not of necessity or even moral obligation.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Problems in the new cooperative movement: A window onto changing cooperation mechanisms Mark Stanford

From its beginnings in nineteenth-century Britain, the global cooperative movement has attempted to transform the organization of production and consumption through new, democratic organizational forms and an accompanying ethos of mutual aid and collective self-help. Anthropologists have long recognized that these conscious attempts to reorganize economic life constitute a form of cultural engineering, the expression of which depends heavily on the social context in which it takes place (Nash and Hopkins 1976). Whether they attempt to supplant or complement preexisting forms of cooperation, cooperatives must contend with the values, conceptions and social structures produced by those forms. Moreover, cooperatives bring challenges which are often entirely new, such as collective resource management and democratic participation, discussion and decision-making. They are thus an important testing ground for theories of cooperation.

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At first glance, the Chinese cooperative movement may seem to have failed spectacularly. Though cooperatives were established and spread throughout China before 1949, the Communist victory saw these successful cooperatives rapidly transformed into People’s Communes – according to Marxist–Leninist theory, a ‘higher’ form of cooperative that should have been still more successful. Instead, the People’s Communes failed tragically, and were dismantled in the wake of famine and stagnation. How can this failure be explained? One approach to answering this question is that of an increasingly important interdisciplinary programme of research on human cooperation (Poteete, Henrich and Henrich 2007; Janssen and Ostrom 2010). This research provides a tantalizingly simple way to account for the failure of the People’s Communes. That is the idea of ‘crowding out’ (Ostrom 1990): cooperation is often supported by myriad informal practices, developed over centuries or millennia, whose role in supporting cooperation may not be obvious to participants. When conscious attempts are made to introduce incentives to cooperate, they may ride roughshod over existing practices, and result in a suppression of cooperation. Prior to 1949, cooperation problems in China had long been addressed through a system of exchange through networks of relationships governed by a particularistic ethic (Weber 1978 [1922]; Fei 1939; Brewer and Chen 2007). The early Chinese cooperative movement took advantage of this system, by basing cooperatives on pre-existing networks of kin, neighbours and friends (Fried 1953: 117; Potter and Potter 1990: 60; Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden 1991:  53). But after 1949, these small cooperatives were amalgamated into enormous Communes, in which these networks could no longer function. With a pre-existing moral system based on obligations to known exchange partners, not strangers, it is hardly surprising that cooperation rapidly broke down, leading to a mass experience of the grave dangers of indiscriminately pooling resources  – a problem known in cooperation research as ‘free-riding’. Thus cooperation research may help us to understand the tragic history of the Chinese cooperative movement. But more importantly, it may also help us to understand its present. For in spite of this experience, the cooperative ideal was revived in China during the reform era in several waves: first, a series of experimental industrial

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cooperative projects, led by idealistic foreign activists in the 1980s; second, an experiment with privatizing large numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises into so-called shareholding cooperatives (SHCs) in the 1990s; and finally, a wave of new agricultural ‘peasant specialized cooperatives’ (PSCs) beginning in 2007. While these new cooperatives have not resulted in anything like the disasters of the 1960s, they, too, have thus far failed to fulfil the aspirations of many cooperativist activists. This chapter explores the failure (by their own lights) of these new cooperatives, which have either disappeared, or survived by virtue of either avoiding cooperation problems, or solving them in ways which depend neither on trust nor on overcoming free-riding problems. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2013, it argues that the cooperatives have neither returned to the particularistic cooperation of pre-revolutionary experiments, nor turned to the collectivistic cooperation of the international cooperative movement. Instead, their failure points to a wider breakdown of interpersonal interdependence, and a growth in marketization and individualization. However, the simultaneous persistence of genuinely enthusiastic cooperative activists suggests that a straightforward story of general moral breakdown is not sufficient to describe the trajectory of contemporary China.

The unreality of the cooperatives The desert county of Meibian1 is not the sort of place that springs to mind when one thinks of modern Chinese industrialization. Located in a remote area of western China, Meibian is a largely agricultural county which is rapidly losing its youth, as young people emigrate to cities in search of work. In the 1980s, it was selected as the site of one of several ‘cooperative experimental zones’, and more than a dozen small industrial cooperatives were founded there. After many months searching for industrial coops around China, and finding that those which did exist have disappeared, I  was assured by cooperative activists that Meibian would certainly still have them. When I arrived in Meibian, I was greeted by the head of the local cooperative federation, Mr Zhang, as well as several cooperative activists who were affiliated with the National Cooperative Federation. Over dinner, we discussed the history of coops in

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Meibian, and Zhang opined that many experiments had failed, though the federation continued to provide training and guidance to local agricultural coops, maintaining a close relationship with them. When I inquired about the industrial coops, Zhang hesitated. He had not heard from them for a long time, though he believed most of them were still operating. He provided me with a list, so I could investigate them myself. Over the next few months, I  travelled the length and breadth of Meibian County by motorbike, attempting to track down these industrial coops. In every case, I  found derelict buildings and overgrown fields. Locals in each village explained why. ‘How can linen production continue here,’ explained one farmer, ‘when prices are so high, and anyway all the young have moved to Shenzhen? No one here is interested in cooperatives  – there is no money in them.’ In the context of ruthless market competition, in which Chinese industry has clustered along the coasts in the east of the country, these cooperatives in the remote desert lacked an economic rationale, and vanished. But in the 1990s, a flowering of ideas for new economic alternatives produced another suggestion. Why not combine the benefits of coops and corporations, to produce a new ‘third way’? The result of this was the SHCs, firms which took a great variety of forms, combining aspects of share ownership and cooperativism, and which were initially cautiously endorsed by the official cooperative movement. Gongshi City was a pioneer of SHCs, in which many factories were privatized through mandatory sale of shares to the workers themselves. But when I  interviewed managers and staff at these factories in 2011, they explained that after this transition period, they had simply been ordered from above to conduct management buyouts and become manager-owned companies. While on paper, the SHCs were autonomous, worker-owned, and democratically controlled, the experience of these workers was that the state first directed the factory to be privatized into a shareholding cooperative, then directed it to become managerowned, and all the while, nothing substantial changed in the factory. ‘We did not experience a change in our style of work, or our way of doing business,’ explained a middle-level manager at an electronics factory in Gongshi. ‘Yes, on paper, we were owners of the factory. But no one here is going to go to court to enforce their rights. No

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one took any notice. The management and the business were the same as always.’ Academics I interviewed who were involved in the policy-making process in Beijing explained the theory, based on neoclassical economics, that the SHCs could not function because of unclear property rights and because managers lacked sufficient incentives if firms were owned by workers; and local officials across the country, including Mr Zhang in Meibian, explained repeatedly that they had failed because they were ‘neither deer nor horse’ (bu lu bu ma), a stock phrase which seems to suggest this was the official explanation put forward by the central government when the SHCs were decommissioned. But if the experiences of the Gongshi factories are in any way representative, it would seem the high-minded theories of policymakers are of limited relevance: changes in ownership forms of these factories were experienced as nothing but arbitrary central diktats which had no effect on day-to-day management. Again, daily economic life appeared to go on oblivious to political discourse. A third wave of cooperatives began in 2007, with the passage of the Peasant Specialized Cooperative Law, which enshrined the principles of the International Cooperative Association in Chinese legislation. These PSCs have been rolled out across the country, principally as a way of increasing the scale of agriculture from small family plots. But like the industrial and SHCs, many of these have vanished, too. In the Ningxia County of Jiaohu, dozens of PSCs were formed with the help of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) supported by Beijing-based and foreign development organizations, but virtually none of them remain. While they still exist on paper, and thus add to the official figures for the number of PSCs at a national level, they have simply broken down and ceased to function. According to the head of the NGO which backed them, this is because people in the area lack education and resources, and cannot be persuaded to see the benefits of the cooperatives. The one cooperative which was still functioning was in the village of Damo, but after some weeks in this village, it became clear that this cooperative was nothing of the sort – legally, it existed as an entity for local farmers to buy inputs for their pig farms together, but in fact, the cooperative almost never met, people were unaware of its existence, and the leadership of the cooperative was indistinguishable from the leadership of the

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village. In short, it remained as the sole ‘functioning’ cooperative in Jiaohu because it was nothing but an accounting device. Another example of nominal cooperatives serving as mere legal devices comes from the remaining SHCs in Shanghai. As already mentioned, Shanghai is the one remaining place in China where there are still SHCs  – according to the Shanghai Federation of Shareholding Cooperatives, nearly 5,000. Indeed, the experience of shareholding cooperatives there appears to have been very different from that of Gongshi and elsewhere. Certainly in the early years, it would appear that workers in many Shanghai SHCs actively exercised their ownership rights, sometimes in direct conflict with the desires of management and Party officials; in the early 2000s, this often manifested itself in workers choosing to liquidate their factories, to take advantage of a property price boom, in spite of the Party’s wishes for them to continue in operation. This ‘special characteristic’ was explained by informants both in and out of the city as due to the particular culture of Shanghai:  supposedly, Shanghai people are more educated, more aware of their rights and more likely to take legal action in defence of those rights. Even informants in Gongshi, when questioned about why they had not exercised their legal rights as owners in the same way as those in Shanghai, repeated this trope: we did not understand our rights, and could not have taken effective legal action anyway, but Shanghai is different; in Shanghai, people will go to court to fight for their rights. If this characterization is correct, it is hardly surprising that SHCs remain in Shanghai, in spite of the central government’s decision to eradicate them across the country. However, speaking to members of Shanghai SHCs, and the leader of their federation, quickly revealed that even these cooperatives are no longer functioning as cooperatives. As Shanghai’s property prices and labour costs have skyrocketed, it has become increasingly uneconomical to manufacture in the city, particularly without the use of migrant labour. Thus the cooperatives began to employ migrant labourers from other provinces, and gradually arrived at the situation today, in which their workforce consists almost entirely of these employed labourers, who are neither owners nor members of the cooperative. Instead, ownership rights remain with the original workers who received them in the 1990s, but have now retired. The SHCs have become a form of joint-stock company, in which the shareholders are former workers, who now employ a hired labour

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force. Without a cooperative ideology to drive them, and without an interest in long-term prospects for continuing production, they have no reason to incorporate the new workers as shareholders, as this would only diminish their share of the profits. According to the leader of the shareholding cooperative federation, the main purpose of privatizing firms in this way was to offload pension responsibilities previously held by the Shanghai government: workers were promised this would be a new economic model in which they would continue to receive support, but they were then cut loose and forgotten about by the state. ‘The government used to support us, and they promised their continued support,’ he explained. ‘But now they have forgotten about us, and we are left to fend for ourselves.’ As a result, the primary raison d’être of the cooperatives today is to provide a pension to these retired workers in the absence of state support. Again, these cooperatives turned out to be a means of privatization and the transition to a capitalist economy. A similar story may be told about another category of cooperative in Shanghai: small ‘handicraft’ cooperatives set up in the late 1970s and early 1980s to provide employment to returning ‘sent-down youth’ in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. These cooperatives are still in existence, though their legal status was never clarified, and again, they do not appear to engage in any economic activity, except for receiving pension funds from the state, and ostensibly ‘employing’ their members.

The experience of ‘actually existing’ cooperatives Nevertheless, there are many cooperatives, particularly PSCs, which are economically active and do appear to function as cooperatives. The question, then, is:  How do they do so, and why do these cooperatives continue to function, while so many others have failed? A striking feature of many of the functioning cooperatives I  studied was the care that was consciously taken to minimize exposure to collective action problems. As the founder of one cooperative explained, it was crucial to avoid any form of sharing of land or tools, or pooling of resources; this was the only way to avoid the free-riding problems associated with the People’s Communes of

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the 1950s. That is not to say that labour exchange did not take place on these patches of land; farmers in a grain cooperative in Meibian made extensive use of labour exchange through networks of kin and neighbours. But these network-based exchanges can be easily monitored and reciprocated, thus preventing free-riding and any form of collective action problem. The cooperative itself assiduously avoided any form of collective labour or ownership. Thus cooperation continued as it had before the cooperative existed, and the cooperative form was able to survive precisely because no attempt was made to use it to restructure cooperation. Similarly, the Meibian grain cooperative attempted to overcome problems of trust in management, not by relationship management or appeals to cooperative ideals, but by leaving account books open to inspection by all members, and making all transactions as public as possible. I found similar practices – dealing with the lack of trust by obviating the need for trust  – at all functioning cooperatives I  visited. These instances of ‘cooperation without trust’ (Cook, Hardin and Levi 2007) are a creative adaptation to an increasingly unpredictable social world. But not all cooperation problems can be solved in these ways, and there were clear examples of failure. At an organic fruit cooperative in the Shandong countryside, the manager explained that there was no way to ensure that members did not use pesticides and industrial fertilizers on their crops. He would try to exhort them to maintain organic production in order to maintain the strength of the cooperative’s brand, but he admitted there was no way to monitor compliance and expressed frustration that the members were only interested in the cooperative for the immediate economic benefit of their families and were thus unresponsive to appeals to take a sense of ownership of the cooperative as something larger. Having worked previously as a manager in a private company, he complained that in the cooperative, because members were legally in control, he had no way of effectively sanctioning them, and because they would not listen to his entreaties, he was struggling to hold the enterprise together. That is to say, confronted with a cooperation problem which could be neither restructured as a dyadic exchange nor dissolved through simple monitoring, the cooperative had no effective solution. More fundamentally, cooperation problems appeared to afflict one of the supposedly defining principles of the cooperatives: member participation and ‘democratic management’. Cooperative managers

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complained consistently about the impossibility of inducing their members to participate in meetings, to voice their opinions or to take active part in management. As one cooperative leader in Meibian had it, members would remain in the cooperative only as long as it benefited them economically; if they felt the manager was making poor decisions, they would say nothing and simply leave when it suited them. Management was considered the responsibility of the leader, not of the households which were members, and if he managed badly, their response was to leave the cooperative. As a cooperative member in the Shandong countryside put it, ‘Democracy just cannot work in China. There must always be a leader [lingdao]. Equality is a nice idea, but no one really believes in it.’ Indeed, a common theme arising from interviews with members of various cooperatives was a lack of knowledge of or interest in the workings of the cooperative, cooperative principles or management procedures; while managers consistently complained about lack of member participation and feedback. This is hardly surprising, for participation in meetings itself involves problems of free-riding. To raise one’s hand and voice an opinion is to take a risk that one may be seen as acting out of a hidden personal agenda, or worse, that one’s suggestion might result in a disadvantage to others, for which one will be held personally responsible. To do nothing is, by default, to leave all responsibility with the designated leader. Thus even if the whole membership are of a mind to disagree with the leader on some issue, it is in each individual’s interest to stay silent, leaving the leader ignorant of the members’ sentiment. The mayor and head of the cooperative in Damo village, Ningxia, explained it thus: in village meetings, no one will speak their mind, for fear that others will think that they only want face. If they applaud him in meetings, others might think he has paid them or done some favour to induce them to do so, and might therefore resent them for it. If they criticize him, they might themselves make a mistake and lose face for it. If he wants to canvass opinion in the village, he must go one by one to households, drink with them and attempt to elicit their opinions; even then, he says, most people will not tell him honestly what they think, and he can only sometimes approximate this by asking people what others think. Thus, contrary to rhetoric about ‘democratic management’, many cooperatives are struggling to overcome the cooperation problem inherent in participation itself.

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Institutions of the cooperative movement Although they enjoy nominal independence, cooperatives in reformera China, like most other forms of organization, are closely tied to the apparatus of Party and state. As the historical discussion above showed, some intellectuals hoped that both the new industrial cooperatives of the 1980s and the SHCs of the 1990s would yield a new form of market socialism, in which state direction would give way to autonomous, decentralized decision-making, while remaining within the socialist mould. Indeed, the institutional apparatus supporting cooperatives continues to espouse this sentiment in its educational and promotional literature. However, as this section will show, cooperatives of all kinds are heavily dependent on a network of institutions which are themselves dependent on various levels of the Chinese state. Moreover, foreign individuals and organizations play a key role in resource provision and leadership in some of these institutions, and have arguably introduced their own cooperativist values into the movement. This dependence enforces a hierarchical model in which both cooperatives and individuals employed by cooperativist institutions ritualistically display adherence to cooperativism in exchange for resources ultimately provided by the state, regardless of whether they themselves adhere to cooperative values. Far from being a spontaneous movement, cooperativism in China is propelled and directed from above, and fed by the ideological agenda of foreign cooperativists.

NCF Beijing At the centre of the network of cooperativist institutions is the National Cooperative Federation (NCF). The headquarters of NCF are located in a residential block in a suburban neighbourhood of Beijing, staffed by two secretaries and decorated by dusty photos and plaques commemorating visits by friendly international sympathizers. The Beijing office lacks resources, and it does not function as a hub of activity. Instead, its influence is derived from the individuals who sit on the board of directors and the network of relationships in which those individuals are embedded.

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When the decision was taken to revive NCF in the early 1980s after several decades of dormancy, several foreign cooperativist activists became centrally involved. Among them was Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who had come to China to found cooperatives in the 1920s, and stayed on as a Communist sympathizer after 1949, was brought symbolically out of retirement to reinaugurate the organization and help found one of the Cooperative Experimental Zones, in an area where he had been decades before, in Gansu. Through Alley’s connections, cooperativist activists from New Zealand and Canada played a part in the refounding of the organization. They orientated it towards the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), which promotes uniform standards of democracy, autonomy and fair distribution among cooperatives across the world. Much of NCF’s work since that time has revolved around attempting to introduce these principles into a Chinese context. However, after three decades of experience, Robert, one foreign activist who is centrally involved, appears somewhat disheartened. He repeated a theme which I  heard on many occasions when discussing cooperatives with informants:  democracy is a concept alien to Chinese culture, and most so-called cooperatives are therefore nothing but a sham. There was a certain frustration in his tone whenever I spoke to him: the problem of reconciling ‘international’ cooperative ideals with the Chinese context seemed intractable, and the only solution he could offer was to modify those principles. As seen later, this does not appear to be an uncommon experience for idealistic foreign activists involved in Chinese cooperatives. However, NCF is run not mainly by foreigners, but by a larger faction of Chinese academics who sit on its board of directors, and also lend it a great deal of influence. Their view is somewhat less idealistic than the foreign activists; in interviews, they expressed on multiple occasions the view that the main function of the new PSCs was to assist in the transition of agriculture from the smallholdings created by the Household Responsibility System to larger-scale agricultural units; and that the SHCs of the 1990s had to be eradicated through state-supported management buyouts because worker-owned firms did not give sufficient incentives to managers in a market short of managerial talent. That is to say, while my conversations with foreign activists about cooperatives revolved around the problems of introducing democratic and egalitarian

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ideals into Chinese communities, their Chinese colleagues framed their conversations in the technocratic terms of neoclassical economic theory, and appeared to view cooperatives as nothing but a means to an end, in which adherence to the ICA principles was only important insofar as it led to the achievement of that end: the successful transition of the Chinese economy to an efficient market enjoying economies of scale in production. The writing of the ICA principles into the PSC law is thus emblematic of the basic tension at the heart of the Chinese cooperative movement: on the surface, the law appears deeply concerned about ideals, but even those who drafted it frankly admit that the realization of those ideals at the local level is quite unrealistic. While NCF in Beijing exercises some influence on the formation of cooperative policy, it does not function directly as the hierarchical superior of any other organizations in China. Instead, it sits at the centre of a network of institutions, some of which it is useful to explore in more detail.

The Institute of Cooperatives Founded in 2008, the Institute of Cooperatives has taken some support from NCF in Beijing, as well as from international donors, but while its founding was spurred on by the passage of the PSC law in 2007, it is run independently of NCF. The Institute is adorned with all the paraphernalia of a centre of idealistic cooperativism and international cooperation. The walls are festooned with posters espousing the ICA principles of cooperatives, and alongside pictures of Marx and Engels are those of Robert Owen, the Rochdale Pioneers, and other heroes of Western and Japanese cooperativism. Then there is the evidence of the Institute’s national and international connections:  photos of the leadership proudly meeting international delegations from Europe and Japan, a plaque declaring the Institute to be an NCF station, plaques commemorating foreign aid received, and most prominently, hung next to the main entrance, a plaque describing it as a centre of ‘cross-straits collaboration’ with Taiwanese organizations. Clearly, the physical décor was designed to present an image of belonging to the history of the international cooperative movement, and of connecting the university to prestigious national and foreign institutions.

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Very few of the staff of the Institute come from a background of specialization in cooperatives; they are, for the most part, trained in technical disciplines with no particular relationship to cooperativism. In my conversations with them, it was clear that they took jobs at the Institute simply because these jobs were available, secure and close to their families, and that prior to working there, they had little interest in cooperativism as such. Similarly, one of the heads of the Institute gave the consistent impression of being uninterested in cooperativism as an idealistic pursuit. When I  explained my initial desire to study employee-owned or cooperative industries, in the mistaken belief that SHCs were still in existence, he told me that such things were impossible and had failed in China. He was certainly keen to discuss the experience of cooperatives in other countries, but when it came to China, he tended to be more interested in technical problems faced by cooperatives than the implementation of cooperative principles themselves. Some of the staff expressed more idealistic motivations. One in particular, perhaps the most idealistic member of the staff, felt frustrated by what he saw in the cooperative movement. He invited me to his apartment on several occasions to show me publications about cooperatives in China and to discuss cooperativism excitedly with me. Like Robert, he appeared enthusiastic about the idea of cooperatives transforming China for the better, through a more democratic and egalitarian ethos. But in the presence of the leadership of the Institute and others with a more pragmatic bent, he tended not to mention these concerns. In private, he expressed frustration that many in the cooperative movement saw its institutions as simply a career opportunity, and had little concern for higher motives. A key role of the Institute was receiving not only foreign visitors, but also providing training workshops for delegations of cooperative leaders from around the country. Periodically, PSC leaders would receive funding from their local and provincial governments to travel to the Institute and receive training. These visits would last several days. During the day, the cooperative leaders would attend lectures, primarily concerned not with the specific problems of cooperatives and their organization, but with technical issues that would concern any small commercial organization, such as accounting, marketing and the development and production of secondary goods. In general, the cooperative leaders appeared

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bored and uninterested in lectures, but more interested in social activities which took place afterwards. First, a coach would take the delegation to the nearby city for sightseeing and to buy souvenirs for friends and family back home. Then, an extended dinner and drinking would inevitably follow. Thus, these delegations may or may not have returned home having learned much of practical use; they went laden with gifts and stories, but they arguably had not steeped themselves in the cooperative ideals which the Institute ostensibly promoted. At the same time, the Institute developed and maintained a close paternalistic relationship with many cooperatives in the nearby countryside and further afield in the province. It has helped to found and cultivate cooperatives from the ground up, and provides them with resources which act as an incentive for them to maintain the relationship. The Institute trains these cooperatives on technical matters and provides them with literature on how cooperatives should be governed: the walls of their offices are typically plastered with posters espousing the ICA principles and the text of the PSC law. Institute staff make regular visits to a few model cooperatives, bringing groups of students, who inspect them and hear from the leaders about their experience. In some cases the Institute is able to provide some funds or help cooperatives to obtain loans, and it also provides the more intangible benefit of high status, which comes from association with a larger, urban institution. The price of this is that they must appear to be what the Institute requires:  when visitors or student groups are brought, they should display cooperative values just as the Institute itself does, through signs hung prominently on the walls, and for the leaders to espouse these in their speech. Thus the Institute creates incentives for a display of cooperativist symbols, but not necessarily for internalization of cooperative values.

The institutional environment: Conclusions A pattern thus emerges from institutions supporting cooperatives across China. From the beginning, these institutions have been influenced by foreign idealists who subscribe to cooperative

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values, and have received resources, both tangible and intangible, in exchange for appearing to endorse those values. There are, of course, many Chinese people involved in the cooperative movement who are convinced and motivated by cooperativist values. But there are also many who are involved purely for pragmatic, self-interested reasons. Thus it matters little to them that many PSCs are run as the personal fiefdoms of one man and his immediate kin or that many ‘cooperatives’ in Shanghai are nothing but legal vehicles for pension delivery. The key thing is often to inculcate not cooperative values, but the ritualistic repetition of cooperative principles, at least when in the presence of those who will only release resources in exchange for the performance of this ritual.

The role of the state A final actor worthy of further exploration is the Chinese state. It goes without saying that the distinction between state and nonstate is blurred in China, and as the above discussion has shown, institutions of the cooperative movement are deeply embedded in state networks, both nationally and in the locales in which they operate. Any analysis of the movement would be incomplete without a mention of the role the state has played. Of course, state involvement has brought many benefits to cooperatives. Political endorsement led to the creation of the Cooperative Experimental Zones and the revival of the NCF in the 1980s. After successful local experiments in several provinces, it was the central government which adopted SHCs as a standard method of privatization in the early 1990s. And the 2007 PSC law, as well as funding and endorsement of the institutions that have attempted to implement it, originated with the backing of the state. Had it not been for these political foundations, the movement would certainly not have had the resources from which it has benefited. However, at each stage, state backing has coloured the cooperative movement with wider political motives driven by factions within the state. SHCs became a vehicle for privatization through a transitional stage of ostensible worker ownership, and a method for the state to offload its pension obligations; after these steps had been achieved, the central government rapidly abandoned support for SHCs. The PSC law is interpreted by many as simply a method to transition

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to large-scale industrial agriculture, exemplified by the approach taken by the local Yunnan government described above. It could be argued that cooperativism might provide a useful ideological smokescreen for a political agenda which is ultimately aimed not at cooperativism, but at ostensible economic efficiency achieved through privatization of enterprises and agglomeration of land. Perhaps a deeper problem, however, comes with state provision of resources to those who create cooperatives and cooperative institutions. When the state provides subsidies, technical training and favourable loans, it creates an incentive for people who neither understand nor care about cooperativism to claim to adhere to cooperative values, in exchange for the resources on offer. Even in a state of law, it is notoriously difficult to verify whether a cooperative adheres to the ICA principles; in China, it is even more so. Thus the more resources the state provides, the greater the danger it will ‘crowd out’ moral motivation within the cooperative movement by attracting people who simply want access to the resources being provided (Ostrom 1990). In summary, cooperativism in China must be understood in the context of political processes operating over the past 30  years. In marked contradistinction to the way in which the Maoist state exhorted people to join new institutions on the basis of moral motivation and with a view to building new social forms, the reform-era state has used cooperatives for a variety of wider political motives and has attempted to induce people to join them using purely transactional means. The result of this is that the cooperatives themselves are only half-formed, and moral motivation appears to be undermined.

Morality and cooperation What, then, is the role of moral motives in the cooperative movement? Again, as for the collectivistic ideals promoted by cooperativist institutions, there is a clear asymmetry between the rhetoric which cooperative leaders often repeat and the experience of members themselves. In one case of discourse about meeting participation, the leader of a Shandong fruit cooperative, who presented his cooperative as exemplifying cooperative principles, said that members participated actively and enthusiastically in

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meetings. As an example of members making a major decision in meetings, he said that the design of the packaging for their products  – a rather elaborate graphic design printed on boxes of fruit  – had been spontaneously suggested by a member in a meeting, debated and democratically endorsed. But members of the cooperative later denied that this debate had taken place and gave a different account, that the packaging had been designed by a friend and neighbour of the leader. Again, while the manager clearly wished to present his cooperative in terms of cooperative principles, these appeared to lack moral force in daily life. Indeed, in some cases I  encountered managers who seemed to subscribe to cooperative ideals and expressed frustration that they could not persuade their members to do so as well. A Shandong cooperative leader, repeating a metaphor often used in organizations of all kinds in China, said that the cooperative should be like a ‘family’, that he tried to encourage members to do things together socially and that he often spoke to them to try to show how their interests were all united; but they nevertheless failed to show any interest in the idea of the cooperative beyond monetary gain. A Meibian cooperative leader went further: ‘This is not a real cooperative, because the members do not participate, and do not care about it. In fact, I think there cannot be real cooperatives in China.’ One might think, however, that a different, particularistic kind of morality (Fei 1939; Weber 1978 [1922]; Brewer and Chen 2007) might be employed instead, to make the cooperatives function. At a Shandong agricultural cooperative, the manager told me the cooperative had very strict procedures for admitting new members. New members had to go through a trial membership period of 6  months, to make sure that they would not harm the interests of the cooperative, and most importantly, to make sure that they demonstrated ‘integrity’ (chengxin). This particular cooperative not only did not engage in any collective labour, but it also lacked even the type of public goods problem exhibited by the organic vegetable cooperative. I attempted to probe further, to elicit what exactly was being evaluated in the trial period. In response, the manager said that they had to make sure new members would not quarrel, spread gossip or destroy harmony. But when asked whether anyone had ever caused these problems, he responded that they had not. Later, in private, a research assistant who was present in the interview

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expressed cynical frustration: ‘What is chengxin anyway? It is just a word you see in business books and people say it without a clear meaning or purpose.’ In fact, it turned out that the cooperative recruited new members who happened to have land which abutted that of existing members. It was, in fact, a cooperative of neighbours; and the careful screening process described by the manager appeared to be of little actual importance. Given the historical organization of villages in China through networks of kin, neighbours and friends, we might expect this organizing principle to help overcome the cooperation problems of cooperatives. However, while all of the functioning agricultural cooperatives that I visited recruited new members who happened to be neighbours, and were often kin, this appeared to be motivated more by convenience than by a desire to use these relationships to enforce cooperation. In the end, the relationship that mattered was the relationship to the leader, who founded the cooperative and had an obligation to members to deliver a financial benefit; their obligation to him was minimal. Several cooperative managers explained this as the result of rural-urban migration:  long-term relationships no longer mattered anymore, because young people always had the option of going to the city and taking better work there. Thus it was increasingly difficult to rely on anyone on the basis of their long-term ties to a place or the network of people who once inhabited it. This is consistent with the idea that cooperation driven by indirect reciprocity relies on the existence of relatively stable social networks (Cook, Hardin and Levi 2007). It is also evident that there has been a breakdown in collectivistic morality. In Chinese society as a whole, this has come about as a reaction to the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the end of official endorsement of a collectivistic ideology. But that is not to say that what remains is a moral vacuum (Oxfeld 2010); and the cooperative movement provides a window onto how a new moral equilibrium might be maintained. For the movement is not devoid of idealistic activists, both Chinese and foreign. These activists, however, are constantly frustrated by an institutional and social environment that does not share their collectivistic views. At best, their efforts are thwarted by their circumstances; at worst, they, too, experience disillusionment with collectivism. Again, the maintenance of a moral norm is reliant on the perception that one lives in a society of cooperators; when experience belies this

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perception, there is little hope of spreading a new norm (Poteete et al. 2010; Henrich and Henrich 2007).

Conclusions The fate of cooperatives in the reform era provides an insight into changing cooperation and social structure in China more generally. It is hardly surprising that collectivism has failed to take root again in the new cooperatives, given the recent historical trauma associated with the People’s Communes and the widespread disillusionment with collectivist ideals in the reform era. More surprising is that the particularistic networks which appear to have supported prerevolutionary cooperatives have failed to re-emerge as foundations of cooperation in contemporary ones. Rather than cooperatives being formed by relatively stable kin and friendship networks, embedded in wider village social structure, today they consist of members in constant flux, as the exodus from the countryside continues. Both urban and rural cooperatives are vitiated by distrust and a lack of commitment to a common endeavour. In short, the cooperatives seem to suggest a society becoming increasingly individualized and fragmented – and one in which interpersonal cooperation outside of market mechanisms is becoming less salient all the time.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cooperation, competition and care: Notes from China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System Ellen R. Judd

The recreation of a rural cooperative medical system during the past decade has brought renewed possibilities for access to healthcare in China’s countryside. In this process, it has opened a window onto questions of how people face fundamental problems of healthcare together amid contemporary complexities and uncertainties. China has long been exploring these questions on a varied basis of experimentation with both socialism and capitalism, and now with post-neoliberalism. One might ask: Is it possible to fashion a contemporary form of social programme that achieves acceptable standards of healthcare on the basis of ‘from each according to her abilities, to each according to her contribution’? If not, and if also not able to realize or to contemplate ‘to each according to her needs’, how can access to healthcare be addressed in a substantive and successful way? One might add a further question about how filial piety and its requirements of care can become expressed in a

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social environment shaped by inequality within both the public and the familial structures of healthcare. China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS; xin nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu) was piloted from 2003, reached wide geographic coverage by 2008 and remains under constant revision as part of a national plan to provide universal basic healthcare in China by 2020. The NRCMS is a hybrid medical insurance plan that evokes the vision of an earlier cooperative approach to healthcare found in rural China to varying degrees during its dualtrack socialist era. That earlier plan, embedded in the structure of rural collectives, had included limited local health services directly dependent on rural contributions, and in at least some locations had provided a modest level of cooperatively funded access to higherlevel healthcare for major illness. This earlier cooperative system was lost in the era of the rural economic reform (from 1979), as the collective base for it was reduced in the reform process and as national priorities turned sharply towards market-based economic growth. The erosion of social programmes was starkly evident in communities in rural West China where I was doing fieldwork on the eve of the introduction of the NRCMS (Judd 2010). Only a few of the paramedics and midwives trained in the earlier cooperative era were present in villages, then practicing privately, and simple clinics at town(ship) level were operating primarily on a fee-forservice basis. The accounts I  heard of unmet health-care needs followed shortly by the initiation of the NRCMS sparked the study described here. Cooperation figures prominently in two distinct dimensions. The first of these is located in the NRCMS itself. This exists immediately in the formal sense in its localized and voluntary basis. Rural residents are mobilized by village leaders to join the cooperative system on a household basis each year by paying a small fee per person for every member in the household. The result, at a limited discursive and financial level, is a pool of localized cooperation in health-care insurance that at the same time funds enhanced local provision of health services. Beyond this, the frame of cooperation is significantly extended through the mechanism of matching individual contributions at increasing multiples by each ascending level of government – county, province/city and nation. This expands the concept of cooperation to address issues of scale and especially to address the issue of rural-urban and regional disparities by

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redistributing a portion of the wealth of coastal and urban regions to the rural residents and the rural-urban migrants who subsidize and enable that wealth to be created. This stretches the usual explicit or implicit idea of cooperation as relatively horizontal or symmetrical to allow it to operate on a more complex, asymmetrical and clearly unequal terrain. However, it does so while locating rural residents and migrants in a health-care system inferior to that available to most of those with official urban household registration status. This extension is not easy and is, in practice, fraught with difficulties. One of the foremost is the limited funding base, which, even with matching funds, leaves a large portion of healthcare outside or barely touched by the NRCMS. An additional formidable challenge is presented by the localization of the cooperation which, while beneficial to building the rural health system, poses often insurmountable problems of access for the large numbers of cooperative members working and living away from their formal locality, and the scale of this issue was already apparent at the time the programme was being planned and piloted. Rural-urban migrant numbers were in the vicinity of 150,000,000 at the turn of the millennium, approached 200,000,000 by the time of this study and have since risen above 250,000,000 (Zhang 2006:  37–38; Chan 2009, 2012). These circumstances combine to accentuate the extent to which rural and rural-urban migrant healthcare is dependent on familial cooperation, even to the point where families have primary importance in funding and in care services that might otherwise be provided by funded personnel: that is, in areas one might expect to be in the non-familial cooperative realm. This is one of the reasons why it can be illuminating to view familial health-care arrangements from a broad perspective of cooperation. At the same time, questions immediately appear about whether such arrangements might be equally or even better considered from a perspective of care. The instances presented or summarized here all exemplify the complex and multistranded nature of human sociality and the problematic nature of boundaries between self and other. Kinship as the mutuality of being in Sahlins’s (2011a, 2011b) formulation might be viewed interestingly as a more general expression of the mutuality and continuity of being in filial piety. In The Classic of Filial Piety, Master Kung is recorded as saying, ‘In serving his parents, a filial son reveres them in daily life; he makes them happy

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when he nourishes them; he takes anxious care of them in sickness; he shows great sorrow over their death; and he sacrifices to them with solemnity’ (quoted in Ikels 2004:  3). A  person living within this moral framework is exhorted to subject the self to service to others in an order that is both hierarchical and caring. The state is the family writ large while the family is a microcosm of the state. And Master Kung notwithstanding, women are called upon to be filial, as well, in gender-specific ways. Filial piety may rest ethically on the individual, but is commonly pursued in concert with others, although those others are not all classically constructed as equals (also see Huang 2015). There is cooperation in filial piety, most notably among brothers and among patrikin, if not as free from hierarchy as in some other formulations of cooperation (Tomasello 2014). It is interesting and productive to turn for contrast to Kropotkin (1902), whose vision of human sociality and whose turn against competition took him to a place of resolutely mutual cooperation, dismissive of parental feeling or love: It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind . . . It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of everyone’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. (Kropotkin 2002: 5) Mutual aid or mutuality in this sense brought with it mutual respect and dignity, as well as a powerful productive impetus for all, with attendant benefits for survival and well-being. It is a formidable buttress against models of competition and has correspondingly made itself part of the moral universe in China, as well as elsewhere. This is valuable to keep in view in the present discussion as the overall shape of China’s current social formation is characterized by intense competition and deep inequality affecting all life chances and the underlying social determinants of health. The rural-urban divide and the exclusion of rural-urban migrants from fully urban status and entitlements continue to generate some of the deepest disparities. In the present discussion, this permeates every aspect of the search for healthcare – in the meagre economic means rural

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residents and rural-urban migrants have to purchase healthcare, in their limited access to health insurance vehicles (most are restricted to the NRCMS) and in the marketized for-fee character of the health system itself. The NRCMS should be seen as part of the state’s postneoliberal response through creating social programmes designed to mitigate the impact of continuing inequality on health (Judd 2011).

The study The research reported here derives from a field research project conducted over several years in the political economy of healthcare, exploring how rural-urban migrants care for the health of themselves and their translocal kin in circumstances of social dislocation and high mobility. The study explores how migrants use diverse resources from family and kin, available market channels and especially newly emergent (as well as residual and continuing) public health-care systems. The migrants included in the study were all people who were classed as agricultural/rural in China’s bifurcate household registration system and continued to have ties and family in rural communities, even if they had long been working away. Among the many consequences of this status, they were excluded from the health and benefits available to many urban workers. Although some had access to emergent programmes for migrants mirrored on the urban plans, these were not widely available or used. Commercial insurance was nominally available and, while a few study participants purchased it, none reported making successful private claims. These avenues were investigated and are included in the larger study, but they are not pertinent to this discussion of cooperation, except insofar as their effective absence is part of the lived frame of limited access to healthcare. The study collected narrative accounts of significant health-care needs since the availability of the NRCMS in their registered locales (c. 2007) and of how each instance was addressed by migrants, in order to care for themselves and for family members, either with them in their migrant location or remaining in the countryside. For two months in November and December 2009, members of fifty migrant families in a major coastal urban centre were interviewed, and for two months in June–July 2010 and October–November 2011 members of fifty migrant families in a major west China urban

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centre were interviewed. In both locations those interviewed were all rural-urban migrants holding agricultural household registration in the two west China provinces where field investigation in rural sending communities had been conducted from 2002 to 2005, Sichuan and Chongqing. Initial recruitment was sought through the networks of multiple local contacts and each participant was asked to recommend further participants, which many did. The resulting sample has both wide diversity and clusters of connected households. The diversity provides the sample with a range of coverage (of economic level, occupation, family ties, access to health-care resources and healthcare needs) and each cluster is a nexus of depth providing multiple positioning on shared experiences around a particular theme (of bereavement, elder care, health-care access and health insurance claims). Participants were prescreened for recent individual or familial experience of health-care needs and the sample intentionally excluded younger workers (except as additional family members) and focused on the middle-aged persons who commonly carry primary responsibility for family healthcare. Young migrant workers may provide significant economic resources for care, but it is generally their parents who actively manage the healthcare of themselves and their families. A focus on this middle generation has proved highly fruitful for adding attention to critical portions of the migrant population outside the more visible milieux of factory workers and entrepreneurs (Judd 2017). All available adults were interviewed in each family and the interviews were conducted in their homes, if possible, or occasionally in or near workplaces. For each family two kinds of data were collected. The first consisted of systematic data on family membership, relationships and locations of work and residence, and on the access of each member to public and private health and related insurance or benefit programmes (worker’s compensation, pension, life insurance) and whether these had been used. The second consisted of narratives of major instances of family need for healthcare. The narratives were collected in a semi-structured manner and often allowed for additional exploration of specific issues. Efforts were made to ensure that in each case the interviews elicited specific details concerning the health-care need: its process of identification and the history of steps taken to address it, including medical care, hospitalization, medication, personal care and

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other health-related measures; the human, material, financial and knowledge resources mobilized; financial and familial implications of the health-care issue and its resolution; and the outcome and assessments of the outcome. A  total of 177 cases were recorded that met the study criteria, as well as a few outside the study frame (minor illnesses, urban household registration and family members in other provinces).

A cooperative health-care programme As labour migration mushroomed in China after 1992, rural residents embarked on their near and distant travels with little remaining of the socialist-era collective social programmes, and none that were portable. Cooperative healthcare, which had been brought to the countryside as the collective era proceeded, had been lost when the collectives were dismantled in the rural economic reform of the 1980s (Wang 2009). There were some residual elements remaining in the form of basic public health provisions and in the form of paramedics (‘barefoot doctors’; chijiao yisheng) who had been trained earlier to provide basic medical care and midwifery services. These were no longer provided with any public support when the collective channel for that disappeared, but the trained personnel remained and some continued to work on a feefor-service basis, as did some traditional healers in various forms of Chinese and herbal medicine. In response to a widespread and urgent sense of social injustice by 2003 as the disparities between growing affluence and remaining absolute poverty became increasingly jarring (O’Brien and Li 2006; Lee 2007), a series of steps were taken to reduce the disadvantages faced by the rural population. Health was a major concern, especially as market provision of healthcare made it unaffordable for the poorer rural residents, resulting in households being forced into poverty by a serious illness of any member, and in people suffering disability, ill health and premature death when unable to meet health-care costs (Li 2008). National policy moved towards a plan to provide basic and affordable healthcare throughout the country by 2020 (Chen 2008), with gradual work towards this

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goal in test sites from 2003 and wider application being extended shortly thereafter. These programmes share a broad national vision and framework of state subsidy, but are locally based and tied to local financing, with the key level located at the county. This results in a programme designed to promote health-care provision at the local level throughout rural China, reaching down to the level of town and township health hospitals (the level below the county). Migrants remain predominantly and problematically within the realm of the rural health-care system in their officially registered localities  – no matter how far away they may be – with two exceptions. The minority of migrants who cross over to non-agricultural registration lose access to the rural system and potentially gain access to urban healthcare as they are incorporated into the urban population. There have also begun to be programmes specifically for migrants who are in relatively stable long-term employment with larger and more established employers, although these programmes reach relatively few. Consequently, the key for access to healthcare for the overwhelming majority of migrants, and especially for those with marginal and poorly remunerated work, is the emerging programme for rural healthcare. Within shared national parameters, the NRCMS is a set of locally based systems that enrol rural residents on a voluntary but actively encouraged and subsidized basis. Each officially registered rural resident (including migrants) is eligible to join, but households must join as a unit, in that all household members who hold agricultural residence at a given place join together. Joining initially required payment of ten RMB per person per year, rose a few years later to twenty RMB per person per year, and was due to rise to fifty RMB per person per year in 2012 for an optional higher level of coverage in rural localities close to the inland site. The fee is collected for the household around the time of Spring Festival when some members may return home, although registration and payment may be done on their behalf by relatives in their home rural community. The initial charge was low enough that a high rate of registration and payment (exceeding 90 percent) was reported early on, although the amount in the fund is so small that it does not provide for a high level of coverage. The main purpose is to provide partial economic relief for more serious illnesses that typically (but again, this varies) require at least three days’ stay at the township hospital. The coverage then will still only

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be for a proportion of the cost and will be subject to a ceiling. This may facilitate greater use of local health-care facilities, although there is widespread preference for avoiding medical care and for self-medicating, practices which are encouraged by the deductibles that must be paid prior to receiving almost any coverage through this system. Each county has its own specific plans, regulations and rates of reimbursement, but one instance from rural Chongqing may serve as a useful illustration, especially as its regulations give detailed indications of what was available at the time of the fieldwork and collected narratives (Chongqingshi Shuangqiaoqu renmin zhengfu bangongshi 2008).1 While the regulations specify financial sustainability and limitations, they also present a positive picture in some important respects. For instance, combined financial resources per person were set as 10 RMB from household enrolment fees, 10 RMB from the district (county level), 30 RMB from Chongqing City (provincial level) and 40 RMB from the central government. The major anticipated expense of hospitalization at an approved (dingdian) hospital was to be reimbursed at a rate of 65 percent for a town(ship)-level hospital (with 50 RMB deductible), 50 percent at the county-level hospital (with 200 RMB deductible), and 25 percent at a city-level hospital (with 1,000 RMB deductible), with a total maximum across all categories of hospital of 30,000 RMB. Care for nine chronic illnesses was also specified as eligible for reimbursement at a level of 50 percent for up to 500 RMB per year, provided there was pre-authorization and treatment at an approved hospital (hospitals in China provide outpatient as well as inpatient services). Each county-level system varies, but all share the feature that the highest rate of reimbursement is within the town(ship) level and where the care involves inpatient care in the town(ship) hospital, with lower rates of reimbursement at the county-level hospital and lower still at the prefectural level or city-level hospital. There is commonly no provision for reimbursement of expenses incurred elsewhere, although in some cases receipts may be taken to the migrants’ official rural home for a low level of reimbursement, contingent upon local approval. In addition, there is beginning to be a system of designated hospitals that can serve migrants within the limited framework of the NRCMS in locations where there

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are concentrations of migrants from the same region. In addition, those making no claims in a year may be provided (depending on local regulations) with a yearly amount of 40 RMB, which can be used towards medicine or health-care costs not otherwise covered. Although this partially runs counter to the idea of cooperative pooling of funds for serious health-care needs, it makes the NRCMS attractive to participants through the mechanism of distributing public subsidies for smaller expenses. This is essential for building confidence and sustaining participation in the programme by demonstrating that payments will be made. There is no provision for home care, apparently construed as cost-free, which is a major issue for the many migrants who are contributing to the support and care of aging parents, even when these are in the countryside, and who find this very difficult to combine with necessary subsistence work. This system is especially difficult to access on the part of migrants, who are located outside the better-funded provisions of urban workers (where those are covered). Some measures were being taken concurrently with the NRCMS, although starting slightly later, to introduce comprehensive benefit plans for migrant workers and still later (from 2012) to start to reduce the rural-urban disparity, both steps first being piloted in selected major cities. Within this study, the plans designated for migrant workers had limited scope and the reduction in rural-urban barriers was still only a prospective change. The experiences of the families in this study show widespread attempts to use the NRCMS, with limited although increasing success. In the coastal site that was studied earlier in the creation of the programme and where participants were far from their registered homes, there was notably little success unless the migrants returned to their home communities for care. Some did so, using a combination of township hospitals, local city hospitals and, to a considerable extent, rural practitioners they had known and trusted before they migrated and whose services they could afford. Many of these were medics from the older cooperative system who had continued to practice on a fee-for-service basis and who were preferred for care that was affordable, familiar and found adequate for moderate, chronic and long-term care. Many participants were dissatisfied with the lack of reimbursement for care in their working locations, with the difficulty of knowing what would or would not be covered, and with the high cost for returning home

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to seek reimbursement. Occasionally there was a sense of uneven treatment, either for better or for worse, depending on their local ties, but the funds available were so slight that they expressed less a sense of unfairness within the NRCMS than a sense that it was not very adequate. They were more likely to travel home when ill for the economies of subsistence, for the possibility of caregivers and for lower out-of-pocket medical costs than for NRCMS funds. Where a sense of anger and injustice arose, it was frequently about the high cost of urban medical care and an assessment that those costs were predatory. This was added to grievances about employers and landlords and was part of a wider and deeper consciousness of the economic disparity that diminished and threatened their lives. The limited cooperation of the NRCMS was simply too under-funded to make a difference. One of the results of this was consequently very considerable reliance on familial modes of cooperation and care (Judd 2011).

Familial cooperation Tracing people’s resources, choices and the unfolding of their healthcare situations demonstrated a high degree of reliance on families and often on wider kin networks, in terms of both cooperation and care. Here I  will indicate three diverse points of entrance to these situations. The first starts from the issue of spousal care, which is the closest to a paradigm of care and draws upon Sahlins’s conception of kinship as a mutuality of being, to such a degree that cooperation might seem to be a stretched concept in this context, although cooperation certainly figures in the total picture. The second addresses what would appear to be the most classically or formally cooperative mode of familial response to health-care need, in the sharing between siblings in care for ill or frail parents. The third addresses the issue of elder care more widely, where it draws upon a wider range of kin and resources, and leads the discussion to the intersections of family with encompassing societal demands and market inequalities. Spousal care in illness and frailty is widespread and almost always the primary source of care and support, provided there is a living spouse capable of giving care. Except in cases of marital breakdown or estrangement, migrants are often able to arrange de

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facto co-residence with spouses, or are at least able to adjust their location when necessary and can normally be available for spousal care, although this may require an interruption of employment. This applies also to the rural elderly, usually residing together in the countryside, drawing upon any savings and providing immediate care to the extent that the spouse of the ailing person is able. The major limitations on spousal care in practice lie in the seriousness of the illness and the economic resources available. These could be dire constraints, as expressed in the words of one migrant speaking of the everyday courage needed for hard migrant labour and adding, ‘I am afraid of nothing but getting ill.’ One small cluster may serve to indicate the larger picture. The core of this group consists of a number of women tied through marriage to related men, and so coming from a common marital village through patrilocal post-marital residence (Judd 2008). The women key to the present discussion are the widows of two brothers, living a short walk from each other and each renting a small shared room together or contiguous with their own adult children (and their families) and the wife of their husbands’ nephew. The older women had come to work here through a chain of introductions, as is common for migrants, and had later brought their husbands and then their children when old enough, although some of the children had gone to other urban centres in search of better opportunities. One of the women, who viewed this as a home away from home (‘we are all relatives’) had been widowed about two years before we met. She and her daughter had pressed her husband to get medical attention for his persistent ill health, a step migrants are loath to take in light of both cost and the prospect of devastating diagnosis. He was diagnosed in a coastal hospital as having liver cancer and he and his wife went to the leading hospital in their home province for a second opinion. He spent some days in this hospital for further tests, with the result that the cancer diagnosis was confirmed. The doctors there declined to treat him, as his cancer was already terminal (a common story heard from migrants in this study) and the family could not afford treatment that would not save his life. The family returned with him to his rural home. His wife and daughter left their jobs and cared for him there, with some support from the township hospital, and he died three months later. The family spent all their savings, sold possessions and went into debt for his care during his final illness. The family had been enrolled in the NRCMS since it

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began in their locality in 2006, but they were not reimbursed for care in the city hospitals or for home care, but only for a portion of the township hospital costs. At the time of the interview in late 2009, his widow was still working to repay money she had borrowed from relatives, and the NRCMS was not viewed in this family as having been useful, although they continued to be enrolled in it. Her sister-in-law (saozi) had a somewhat similar but more unusual history of care for her husband, who passed away in 2008. She was the relative who had introduced her sister-in-law to work in the coastal city, having herself come there two years earlier, in 1997, similarly bringing her husband slightly later and leaving her three young teenaged and preteen children to care for themselves. Her husband initially became ill in 2003, and was diagnosed with high blood pressure in the coastal city. On a visit to his rural family in 2004, he had a stroke and became paralyzed. After one month of care in the countryside, his wife concluded that it was economically necessary for her to take him to the city where she would be able both to work and to care for him. This was an unusual decision, as ill family members are more commonly cared for in the countryside, but this requires that someone be available there to provide care. She had an exceptionally demanding and painful period of caring for her husband under these difficult conditions. She received some help from relatives, although the time demands meant that help from her husband’s nephew’s widow had to be reimbursed, even though there was no source of public support to cover this cost. His three brief hospitalizations in the coastal city were also not covered. Even with his wife’s continued work, this resulted in heavy expenses and family debt. When his condition worsened in 2008, she took him to their rural home for his final illness and he passed away a few months later. The NRCMS, in which his family was enrolled from 2006, covered a portion of this final care only. She was herself ill throughout this period with an intestinal ailment, which she declined to have treated during her husband’s illness and for which she sought affordable township treatment and inexpensive medication only later. She spoke powerfully and emotionally of these years, with repeated emphasis that she was the source of her husband’s care through these years: ‘I look after everything myself.’ The toll on her had been heavy and she had been left still hardworking and strong, but fearful of illness and the prospect of death it carries.

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The world of rural migrants in urban China is directly dependent on the immediate labour of the migrants, both for income and for essential care. This is especially so for those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, who lack significant property or savings. In such a situation, the contribution of every family member is critical and the loss of each contributor places a severe strain on the wellbeing of the whole family. In this case, multiple illnesses (another death from cancer, two children with disabilities and a minor illness) in this moderately sized network of relatives added demands for intensive cooperation, especially on the middle-aged generation as it strove to shelter children even when adult, and reduced the extent of assistance available in each instance. Even migrants with mature relatives close at hand and sharing indispensable help could feel as if they were dealing with the situation on their own and even so be left with crushing debt. As these instances demonstrate, the resources of spouses are critical and these may be significantly aided by close family, in giving a level and type of support that breaks beyond the limits of cooperation. This need not be read as departing altogether from cooperation, but rather as adding a dimension of depth and unidirectional giving that I  would argue may be essential and common to cooperation where it is most embedded in mutuality and where it matters most. It is still mingled with cooperation as more generally found in the additional and reciprocal ties with a wider network of relatives. This also raises the question of non-familial cooperation in healthcare. When migrants face illness in the cities, they may readily purchase medicines or consult health-care providers working in the pharmacies that dot migrant neighbourhoods, but are unlikely to attend clinics in urban hospitals unless they are very ill and often then only if pressed to do so by a family member. The high costs produced by the fee-for-service funding basis of hospitals and the spatially limited or simply unavailable NRCMS coverage for such visits in the cities – and only partial coverage in the countryside – result in delays and avoidance of diagnosis that commonly make successful medical treatment difficult or impossible. Such care as is possible may nevertheless be financially catastrophic for the family, even where care is sought in the rural home or home province. As in these cases, most commonly the only public resources available are the rural health-care system and the NRCMS.

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Access to healthcare is severely restricted beyond any discussion of cooperation or care, by the operations of market forces that initially limit the resources families and kin can bring to each situation, and then also restrict how much the NRCMS and the wider health system can offer, as long they are tied to market mechanisms. Were those elements reduced, the burden on both familial cooperation and familial care would be greatly lightened, and outcomes might well be improved.2 As the invisible hand of the market operates, it leaves its signature on the bodies of those with least access to public cooperation and with reduced access to even familial cooperation caused by the irreconcilable dual burdens of care and subsistence that fall on family members dispersed and mobile over considerable distances. The issue of illness is serious for everyone, but looms especially large for migrants in posing exceptional challenges for medical and for financial resolution. These challenges arise in the first instance from the localized spatial structure of health-care cooperation, with the resulting exclusions of so many migrants. They also arise from at least partially understandable restrictions on coverage, necessary as they are to ensure sustainability of the present cooperative funding mechanism, and the consequent exclusion of so much of necessary care from eligibility for remuneration. Another view of familial cooperation can be gained from looking at how it is mobilized in an explicitly shared and fair manner as adult siblings strive to meet the health-care needs of their parents. Care for the elderly is a pervasive issue – of the 177 cases of recent family illness included in this study, 82 involved illnesses of elderly family members. Care of parents in ill health is a classic requirement of filial piety and of personal ethics that is still active and salient in everyday experience, an exhortation to subject the self to service to others in a paternalistic order that is both hierarchical and caring (Judd 2014). The generation recently and presently confronting the ill health of parents may often include sizeable sibling sets born and surviving through the early post-Liberation years, even in relatively disadvantaged rural areas, and responsibility can then be expected to be shared among siblings. This burden rests primarily on sons, although daughters also have both obligations and emotional ties they strive to fulfil. There are clear and agreed expectations widely expressed that sons should share equally, and daughters as their

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circumstances permit (on the understanding that they have prior obligations to parents-in-law). None of this precludes cooperative or public support and resources, but these rarely extended at this time beyond the modest provisions of the NRCMS.3 This situation is complicated by the translocality created by widespread contemporary mobility and by differences in the economic resources and on-site availability of each sibling. Very many rural elderly live in the countryside and support themselves in agricultural work, sidelines and petty commerce on their own – even at advanced age– since the cost of living in the cities precludes their moving there unless their children are economically very successful. Most or all of their children may well have migrated. The result is one of complicated arrangements for travel home in case of serious parental illness (a standard expectation), shared financial arrangements for healthcare and complex rotations and compensations for personal care when that is needed. Where health-care expenses for parents were incurred – following stroke or cardiac incident, for ­example  – even a modest course of treatment could become a serious drain on familial financial resources. Where parents themselves had savings, these would be used and in some cases exhausted. It was not unusual to have strictly equivalent financial contributions reported from brothers, paralleling the equivalent shares for livelihood and sometimes rotational living in standard household division. Daughters gave more flexibly, depending on their financial circumstances and other obligations, and could be important contributors. Loans might be incurred from other relatives, although less so than in the case of younger patients. Over the period of the study, it appeared that reimbursement from the NRCMS increased, but remained a limited portion of the total cost and occurred only with in-hospital care, which was an expense normally kept to a bare minimum. When it did occur, it was focused on diagnostic procedures or targeted interventions, such as removal of a kidney or resolving a gastric obstruction. There is commonly also some attention to medication for chronic illnesses such diabetes and high blood pressure. However, ailments considered part of aging may not be actively treated, including loss of sight, hearing or mobility, even where they might be amenable to treatment. Major interventions, as for cancer, are rarely reported for older rural people, and being older in this context may begin as early as

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the onset of a decline in physical working ability or employability, in a person’s fifties. The overall picture is one of the older and especially the elderly avoiding or declining treatment. This is widely described by younger family members as a preference of the rural elderly. In part, this is consistent with lifetimes of limited access to anything beyond local Chinese medicine and herbal care. These continue to be available and promoted as known, affordable and effective treatments for many illnesses, but are also sparingly used. There appears to be a wide resistance to treatment and an acceptance of declining health as eventually inevitable. There is certainly also a sense of the great expense of major illness, expense that cannot be recouped in the future work of an elderly person and that may be crippling for the person’s family. The high expenses mean that even younger people are compelled to make choices between major health-care expenses and family poverty. In this economic environment, the choice to avoid or decline healthcare might well be seen as a gift an ill person gives to her or his family, and there is sometimes a sense that such a gift may be expected by family members. There are also occasions when a decision about level of intervention and cost is made by the younger generation without the involvement or knowledge of the elderly patient. The importance of financial considerations in these cases is supported by the observation that the few incidents reported of elderly people actively seeking major medical intervention occurred in families that could better afford the costs, although this is not to suggest that this is the only consideration. Apart from the direct problem of illness and limited personal and public medical and financial resources, the income-related pressures to work away create spatial problems, exacerbated by the regulatory barriers to portability of healthcare and the greater cost of accommodation and food in the city. The result is that the elderly are almost always cared for wholly in the countryside when ill, although in a minority of cases they may come temporarily to the city seeking a medical solution they could not find in the countryside. This is most likely to involve medical consultation for a diagnosis or recommendation of treatment and medication, followed by return to the countryside. Much of the practical concern is for devising ways to provide the personal care required by long-term frailty and untreated or undertreated infirmities, and to do so at a distance and while

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still working. This is where the most difficult and demanding requirements for cooperation and care arise. Here, too, there is a sense of filial obligation to be shared, and again brothers may try to arrange this equally, with sisters joining optionally and as able and willing. This is a more complicated and demanding matter to share than the dividing of medical costs. Where the parents requiring long-term care are in the countryside (the usual situation) and at least some of the children in one or more remote location(s), distance alone creates problems. There are instances where rotation of personal care may be attempted, especially if more than one of the children is local. The other(s) may then hire a caregiver, who might be a rural relative or, in one case, an older village bachelor (‘bare stick’) who was underemployed and available. In an instance in the inland site, where the migrant siblings were clustered, they decided to share the cost to bring their aging but basically healthy father to live in an urban seniors’ home. Shortly after he arrived there, he suffered a stroke and this was presenting problems, as the seniors’ home was not a care facility, and the siblings were jointly working on finding an urban solution. One of the sources of variation is the nature of the need being very largely personal care and the main providers of it, when a spouse is not available, being usually a daughter-in-law or a daughter, although sons may also be the primary caregivers. The structural tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are such as to make the demands of this role very difficult. The closest relations of care I have observed in rural fieldwork and again in these cases have been those of daughters caring for their own mothers. Decisions vary, and the gamut of elder care the migrants report giving is very broad. It extends from the extreme of a migrant woman leaving her family in the city while she returned to the countryside to care for her mother who was living with paralysis and dementia through her final five years, to the other of people reporting that they give very little care or support. Between these extremes, there are commonly cases of migrants returning at times of serious illness to provide personal care and emotional support. The third major area of cooperation extends the issue of elder care to the more marketized context of the work of migrant women as caregivers in urban centres. In the inland urban field site, this study benefited from the inclusion of a loose cluster of older women

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(most in their fifties) who were providing live-in elder care in middle-class and professional homes. The migrant women who were providing live-in elder care were each placing themselves in an anomalous and at least potentially conflicted situation. Each of these women was spatially, and in diverse ways socially, distanced from her family to do this work. At the very least, she would be living separately even if her family were in the same city. All but one reported that their parents and parentsin-law were deceased, so that they could not be construed as leaving their own filial obligations. But there were still complex tensions involving the unavoidable distancing from ties of kinship and care that their work and living arrangements entailed, for women of their generation are often key to care of spouses and both younger and older generations, as well as for both natal and marital families. One of these women’s narratives underlined the extent of this in her long-term involvement with the care of her husband’s older brother, a man whose frail health had made him unmarriageable. Further decline of his health in the past three years had resulted in nearblindness and multiple hospitalizations. As a destitute man without children, he had at this point become a ‘five-guarantee’ household, which meant he was supported through local government at a very basic level, a recourse not available to the rural elderly who do have children. Nevertheless, this man’s younger brother and sister-in-law visited him, and provided some personal care and supplemental medications. Elder care is an important issue and a moral imperative within the Chinese framework of filial piety. Migrant work generates greater financial resources for families, but does so under very demanding circumstances. Discourses of rural ‘surplus labour’ hide the extent to which truly essential labour is being drained from the countryside, especially as much of it is the socially invisible and unpaid work of care commonly performed by women (and also by men, especially as sons and husbands). Counter-intuitive as it might seem, the reality of rural and migrant life is that of a shortage of people to do all the work that is needed and, in socially concrete terms, to join in cooperation and care. It is widely observed in rural China that middle-aged and older women provide essential care for children, the elderly, the ill and the disabled, as well as domestic labour for their households. They normatively do so in combination with income-generating

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agricultural or animal husbandry work on small plots and courtyard space, work embedded in structured patterns of gendered cooperation in livelihood. When a middle-aged woman is called upon to migrate to the city to provide cash income, her household and often closely related households (those of parents, parentsin-law and siblings who share in elder care) face a major loss of essential care. This is so even without serious illness, but that circumstance is virtually certain to occur within a family at various times. The care demands are accentuated by the lack of public home care and by requirements for familial personal care on a full-time basis for anyone hospitalized (unless able to care for him/herself). Extraordinary pressures are placed on those middle-aged women who leave the countryside to work in the cities, where they are very commonly underpaid providers of care that lightens the burden on more privileged urban dwellers. Current improvements to rural healthcare will, as they are extended, increasingly address the direct medical aspects of this problem, and eventually the rural pension plan will help further. At present, the rural health system appears only modestly helpful with procedures and reimbursement for relatively treatable and mid-range medical problems. Deductibles discourage regular checkups or early treatment that could provide timely diagnosis and treatment, and limitations in remuneration levels mean that it is not yet adequate for catastrophic care. The exclusion of personal care from the system, while comprehensible, is a major limitation, and one that has especially serious consequences for migrants and their families.

Observations The picture that emerges returns us to the starting point of this chapter and to questions of how people face fundamental problems of healthcare together amid contemporary complexities and uncertainties. One observation is that healthcare in rural and migrant China is profoundly reliant upon cooperation and morality. To begin with the New Rural Cooperative Medical System itself, the issues of formality, frame and scale can be usefully foregrounded. The NRCMS is formally quite limited in what it

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does: it is a subsidized cooperative fund for lightening the financial burden of a modest portion of healthcare. As with the institutional mechanisms for formal cooperation examined in this volume by Andrea Pia in the case of water control and by Mark Stanford in relation to industrial cooperatives, it is possible to explore how well the cooperative mechanism works for its specific purposes. In this case, the problem is less with the internal working of the NRCMS than with its location within a complex and profoundly unequal social formation and the very limited contribution it can make even when it works well. The weight of impoverishment presses upon and pervades the NRCMS. It is still inadequate to meet medical needs and is not proposed to achieve basic provision on a national level until 2020. While this study is not epidemiological in nature, it shows widespread limitations arising from exclusions, deductibles, ceilings, co-payments, non-portability and arbitrary denials of coverage. I did find indications of remuneration for hospitalization that measurably reduced the financial burden on patients and their families, but little cause to conclude that the NRCMS was resulting in greater use of health-care facilities. At the same time, the NRCMS is the non-familial cooperative resource that has been publicly created to address these issues and that is most widely available to migrants as well as to rural residents. It embodies and represents an effort to create a frame within which cooperation can have a ground or space to work against the grain of inequality and competition in the larger society through recognized mechanisms of mutual aid. Through its focus on finance, the NRCMS embodies a promise of bridging social boundaries and expanding social mobilization such that the cost of healthcare might become less unequal. The thread of what it can potentially, and already partially offer is enabled by the very thinness of what it attempts to introduce across the larger social pool required in order for it to be effective. This is a precarious sociality stretched and undermined by the external dominance of market systems that control both health markets themselves and the larger economic environment. This sociality is also internally constrained by its dependence on unequal relations of gender embedded in both workplace and family, operations one can also observe in this volume in the gendered

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studies by Cecilia Liu on elder care in formal rural institutions for the elderly and by I-Chieh Fang on industrial workplace cooperation. The case of the NRCMS and, indeed, other public health-care systems with better provisions, such as those increasingly available to migrants with stable employment in larger workplaces, focus their health-care provision on in-patient hospital costs. Personal care (even including in-hospital personal care) is excluded, with grave consequences for the large number of people requiring care at home and for their caregivers. The caregivers are primarily women who are predominantly unpaid when caring for a relative, although compensation within families is sometimes reported. Significantly, middle-aged women are also being drained away from caring roles in the countryside to provide live-in elder care in urban homes able to afford modest remuneration. This is part of a global pattern of gendered differentials in burdens of care, access to care and caregiving, with particular and conjunctural specifics related to China’s current pattern of rural-urban distinction and migration, as well as of gender roles.4 This can also be seen as part of a concurrent deterritorialization of kinship that is occurring on a formidable scale – in terms of the numbers of persons and families affected, the distances involved and even the frequency of relocation. All of this involves not only effort and connection over distance, but also a creative refiguring of kinship and a different and greater need for non-kin modes of cooperation, whether formal or informal. Important modes of deterritorialized and differently territorialized kinship and cooperation can be seen in this volume in the studies by Di Wu in Africa and by Eona Bell in Scotland. In those instances, to the extent that migrants are able to secure livelihoods and nuclear families in new locations, the enhancing aspects of mobility – as well as their challenges – can be ethnographically and productively foregrounded. There is a sense, also, in which issues of familial health almost inevitably arise and work and livelihood can be problematic even in these instances. As considered in relation to the situation of China’s translocal migrants, deterritorialization is notably challenging as both familial and non-familial resources can be very severely stretched. The responses the migrants and their kin make to the entire range of health-care issues tend to show people drawing upon all possible resources  – but primarily on familial resources that require considerable cooperation and coordination, often among numerous

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and dispersed family members in a range of kinship roles. The translocal migrant families in this study were rarely affluent enough or well enough resourced in any other sense that they could address a serious or prolonged health-care need without multiple lines of assistance, and without a concerted commitment. Some of the observations fit a formal model of cooperation well. The generational configuration of the aging population in China still consists of people who may have a number of children who can cooperate and share expenses, personal care and visits. These are typically arranged in ways that meet formal ideas of fairness, explicitly moderated by ability to contribute and sometimes by feasibility related to location. From a slightly distanced vantage point, it is also possible to see how such formal moments of cooperation are tightly framed and narrowly constructed, as in brothers sharing a hospital bill. Whether in the institutional public provisions of the NRCMS or in the diffuse support of families and kin, it is possible to revisit Kropotkin’s classic conceptualization of cooperation. Its insistence on mutual aid as a foundation for justice and equity is one that enables the wider sociality necessary for pooling resources for a human economy in conditions where market and state structures generate constructed inequality in matters of health, life and death. It can additionally do so by expanding resources through valuing everyone’s contribution and avoiding artificially constructed dependencies. This imparts a depth of dignity that makes Kropotkin’s mutual aid much more than utilitarian cooperation and instead a key to sociality founded in a mutuality of work. Where it encounters a limitation is in its abstracted conceptualization of sociality to the point of finding mutual aid in itself capable of generating an instinct for the spontaneous excess that sociality and morality require in lived actuality. As seen in this ethnographic setting, provision of healthcare greatly depends on actions that exceed, transcend, or qualitatively expand the frame of cooperation – in the giving of extended home care for a parent living with dementia, the denial of life-saving treatment for oneself to reduce a family burden and very many of the practical acts of giving healthcare. Cooperation in healthcare requires more than cooperation in order actually to work, and the unpredictable and critical (as opposed to calendrical) timeframe renders it forever asymmetrical and uncertain. The morality

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required is that of a mutuality of being that might yearn for fairness and gives what is needed. When it can. One might consequently find that it is in the intimate mutuality of being of kinship and love that such excess will most powerfully arise. And one might also find that such a location is too close and too small to provide an adequate basis for morality in society, so that it is only in the more expansive mutuality of work that a morality of care and of tending to need can be reliably present. Conceivably one might find here a convergence of mutualities in the moral conduct of life. This is not an ending but a way-station on a long road. Cooperation is a choice and is very clearly both present and not working as imagined in the ethnographic cases explored in this volume. These studies together show us how cooperation and mutuality can well up from life and work with inspiring depths of generosity, both as heartfelt excess and patiently cultivated sociality. It is also evident that cooperation is co-mingled in complex ways with modes of social coordination from which it cannot be easily abstracted. Cooperation is commonly cherished as a moral value and as a social resource that can aid in overcoming inequality, but it may also be deeply implicated in inequality. If one examines, as in this concluding case, the potential available through cooperative mechanisms such as the NRCMS, it is evident that the formal structure of cooperation is essentially framed by the exclusion of its members from equality in the larger social body. What is cooperation from one immediate perspective is inequality and appropriation within a more encompassing frame. This leads unavoidably to the question of the impact of hierarchy in the practice of cooperation. China offers a storehouse of examples of unusual depth and richness on the challenge of how to practice cooperation morally within a hierarchical social order. This might seem a peculiar issue to examine. The profound persistence of hierarchy, even through repeated and strenuous efforts to reduce or eliminate it, together with the extent and depth of Chinese political thought, suggest otherwise. China’s engagement with transformational movements, where internal cooperation has been a persistent problem, underlines the importance and intractability of living within hierarchy while attempting to prefigure equality and mutuality. This may not be such a peculiar issue after all.

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Acknowledgements The research reported here has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Global Political Economy Program of the University of Manitoba. Documentary and field assistance has been provided by Lü Xiuyuan, Rosa Sanchez, Song Pianpian, Alesa Sutherland, Zhang Feng, Zhang Ke, Zhang Ting, Zhao Jun, and Zhou Yao. I am especially grateful to the participants who provided their experiences and insights and to all those who facilitated the field research in both sites. Earlier versions of limited portions of this article appeared as Judd (2011, 2017), and are included with permission.

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Chapter One 1 This is not to say that studies of cooperation between kin do not exist (e.g. see Spokes and Spelke 2016), only that they are very rare compared to studies of cooperation between non-kin. 2 For a number of empirical illustrations of this related to non-human sibling cooperation and competition, see Roulin and Dreiss (2012). 3 Other studies of families in China and Taiwan underline the point that family members are still expected to cooperate in providing for their parents in old age, although traditional family structures have to some extent been replaced in rural areas by a kind of ‘networked family’ (Unger 1993), in which adult children form independent households, but may retain close cooperative links in productive and childcare activities. In the cities, there is little productive cooperation among related families in many settings because most people are salaried, but there may still be a good deal of cooperation in childcare and consumption (Davis 1993). 4 For example, during the collectivization era, danwei work units were frequently likened to biological families, ‘eating out of one big pot’ (chi daguo fan) as they provided for all the material and social needs of their members (see Rofel 1999). The reform era has seen attempts by individuals to escape from the obligations of mutualistic cooperation, such as the wealthy Chengdu businessmen described by Osburg (2013) who aspire to personal autonomy but cannot escape the necessity of forming bonds through the sharing with clients and business patrons of food, drink, sex and celebrations – all things which might be associated with kinship. 5 Another study of young female migrant factory workers in reformera China has shown the enduring importance within the workplace of relationships based on actual kinship or common place of origin (Pun 2005). 6 See, for example, Goh (2011).

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7 This was also the case for environmental protest movements in 1990s Taiwan, where pre-existing social ties, based on kinship, came into play during demonstrations against environmental pollution in local areas (Weller 2006). 8 As Cohen (1976) observed, limits to kin cooperation were built into normal family practices: for instance, the division of family property was a recognized point in the family cycle, ending the period of mutual obligation. The difficulty of kin cooperation was also acknowledged in the practice of minor marriage, when future brides were adopted into their husbands’ households as girls, in the hope of averting the type of conflicts that could arise between adult brides and their mothers-inlaw (Wolf and Huang 1980).

Chapter Two This research was supported by the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions [623128 IIDEV FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF]; and The Leverhulme Trust [ECF-2016-072]. I thank the editors and the other contributors to this volume, as well as Audun Dahl and Harry Walker, for their comments on this paper.

Chapter Four 1 The explanation, ‘he is mutuality’, comes from Shuowen Jiezi, which was written in 100–121 AD. See Xinbian Shuowen Jiezi Zidian (2007), Henan Daxue Chubanshe, P. 212. 2 The link with harmony comes from Guangya, which was written in 227–232 AD. See Guangya Gulin (1992), Jiangsu Zhuji Chubanshe, P. 239–240. 3 From the Analects, Chapter of Xueer, verse 12. 4 From The Book of Mencius, Chapter of Gongsunchou II, verse 1. 5 http://en.cpaffc.org.cn/content/details25-47426.html. I have highlighted the use of the word he in the original Chinese version.

Chapter Five I am grateful to the Alfred Gell Research Proposal Prize and the Newby Trust Award for financial support in relation to my fieldwork in Jinmen.

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1 Funerals for the elderly dead are ‘white happy events’ and are viewed as are analogous to weddings, or ‘red happy events’, in the sense that both are deemed to be the realization of particular life stages and should therefore be ritually celebrated. 2 In other parts of Taiwan and China, the overall funeral and wedding expenses may be to a large extent covered by the white or red envelopes of money given by the host families’ relatives and guests. For example, in Taiwan, the attendees at a wedding banquet will evaluate how much money should be in the red envelope according to the average expenses in the place where the banquet will be held. Interestingly, at least in the village that I studied, it is now common that the family that stages a wedding banquet does not receive red envelopes from their kin villagers. My informants said this was because the living standards of most households have been largely improved and there is a back-and-forth flow between kin.

Chapter Six 1 Due to confidentiality agreements, I will make use of pseudonyms throughout the chapter. Fieldwork was carried out between September 2011 and January 2013. This research was made possible by the generous support of the LSE Financial Support Office, the Chiang ChingKuo Foundation, the Chinese Scholarship Council, the Universities’ China Committee in London and the John Wright Memorial Trust. 2 There is a famous Chinese saying that expresses the negative moral status attributed to leakage: ‘a married out daughter is like spilt water’ (jia chuqu de nüer, po chuqu de shui). In a patrilineal system such as that of China (see Chiu, this volume), married-out daughters are temporary members of their original families who, similarly to spilt water, can no longer be put to good use. 3 Water stress occurs when the demand for water exceeds the available amount during a certain period or when poor quality restricts its use. See Su et al. (2012). 4 Huize County has been a major victim of this Yunnanese trend. See local media coverage at http://society.yunnan.cn/html/2011-09/04/ content_1806985.htm.; http://society.yunnan.cn/html/2011-09/04/ content_1806962.htm (In Chinese) and https://www.chinadialogue. net/article/show/single/en/5940-Why-has-water-rich-Yunnan-becomea-drought-hotspot-. (English). 5 This can be described as an attempt to constrain a booming water demand while at the same time cutting down state welfare expenses (see Nickum 2010).

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6 Zhu Xiaoyang’s Yunnanese ethnography offers a similar discussion of grassroots water management (2011: 46). 7 On the other hand, unbearable memories of punitive back-breaking toil could also be present in China (see Friedman, Pickowicz, Selden 1991: 72–74).

Chapter Seven 1 By this I mean that not all the members registered in a household stay in for most time of a year. 2 In the townships of Beijing, and villages in Shandong and Sichuan. 3 The official eligibility criteria for applying for FGE are the three ‘No’s (no son, no source of income and no ability to work); and the five guaranteed items include housing, clothing, food, medication and cremation. 4 Each resident receives a small monthly allowance from the Home, which is described as ‘pocket money’ to spend on personal needs. 5 In addition to FGE, there were also a few younger residents with disabilities. 6 The dorms and most facilities were not segregated by gender. The women’s toilets were the only place specifically for female residents. 7 In the original conversation, I did not use the term ‘a male care worker’. I named the male workers and asked Zheng one by one whether she thought they could offer this help. She invariably said ‘no’, but varied in her tone of firmness when thinking about each person. 8 For example, Xiaofang might tell the resident that the phone was not working or that the resident had to return at another time.

Chapter Nine 1 For more ethnographic descriptions on mistrust and suspicion, please refer to ‘Chapter One: Living with Strangers, Anxiously’ in Wu. D. (2014), ‘The Everyday Life of Chinese Migrants in Zambia: Emotion, Sociality and Moral Interaction’, London School of Economics PhD Dissertation. 2 Xuezhong Songtan is a Chinese four-character idiom based on analogy. It means someone offers help, even though it might bring difficulty or danger to oneself, when the other is in urgent need. The message conveyed in the analogy is to acknowledge the sincerity and affection

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manifested via actions – adversity or emergency is a test-stone of genuine interactional affection. In Chinese four-letter idioms, renqing is often used as the abbreviation of renqing shigu, in which shigu stresses the sophistication of one’s social networking skills, as learned through social practices. I will come back to this point at the end of this chapter. I thank Professor Tan Tongxue for pointing out this distinction. Xiaoren in Chinese is the opposite notion of junzi (man of honour) and they always appear as a pair. This pair of concepts is crucial in Confucian dogma as well as in Chinese morality. In Analects, it is noted that juziyuyuyi, xiarenyuyuli (gentlemen distinguish themselves by upholding values, while lesser men, by pursuing personal gains). See ‘Chapter Three: Leadership, Dependency and Asymmetrical Attentiveness’ in D. Wu (2014), ‘The Everyday Life of Chinese Migrants in Zambia: Emotion, Sociality and Moral Interaction’, London School of Economics PhD Dissertation.

Chapter Ten 1 A ‘quasi-group’ is ‘a group recruited by one or more people. People, who meet different requirements, are gathering to achieve something and form an organization. It is not a permanent social group, unless it carries out further restructuring …’ See Mayer (1996).

Chapter Eleven 1 ‘Although joined by a common linguistic and cultural heritage, and a shared set of moral values, in most other respects the Chinese in Britain lack the attributes held to signify community. These include territorial closeness, sympathetic association, and the will to pursue collective interests. They therefore suffer a “double social exclusion” – not just from mainstream society, which treats them “more as a commodity than as a citizen”, but from each other (Benton and Gomez 2008: 199–200). See also Beck (2007).

Chapter Twelve 1 Names of individuals, organizations and locations below the provincial level have been anonymized to maintain confidentiality.

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Chapter Thirteen 1 The NRCMS has continued to improve in funding, accessibility of information, and flexibility of use, but the present discussion will be limited to the period of fieldwork and collected narratives (2007– 2011), as they provide the framework of resources then available. 2 All the cases of cancer encountered in this study were advanced. Checkups and screening are widely avoided and were reported as occurring only when required for employment. The study included one case of a factory-required checkup that resulted in successful surgery for a benign internal growth, covered entirely by the emerging urban health-care programme for migrants. 3 A small number of older rural residents had additional income support from pensions from previous urban or official employment, pensions that had recently been introduced for retired rural cadres, and the modest beginning around 2010 of a wider income support system for the rural elderly that resembled the NRCMS in being a combination of contributions and public redistribution. This was beginning to be reported as a health-care resource in interviews in late 2011. 4 The dual demands for care of both natal and marital families fall especially heavily on women, as they are more actively caregivers in both. Men might be expected to join in financial assistance or loans for care of a wife’s family but are not normally expected to be present as caregivers.

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282

INDEX

affection see jiaoqing altruistic cooperation 20–2, 33–4, 44, 142, 197, 201 ancestors 3, 84, 87, 93, 97, 137–52 ancestral trusts 145–52 Angang 3–9, 15–16 balinghou (‘post-1980’ generation) 154 barefoot doctors (chijiao yisheng) 237 Beijing 47–62, 220–4 calculation 66, 68, 148, 160–4, 170–1 capitalism 45, 215, 217, 222, 231 care of children 4, 11–12, 24–5, 43, 52, 65, 74, 90 of elderly 13–14, 49–51, 90, 121–35, 241, 245–9 personal 236, 246–53 of spouse 241–4 see also filial piety care workers 121–44 Central Respect the Elderly Home (CREH) 123–43 chaxugeju (Fei Xiaotong, the differential mode of association) 181–2, 184 children cooperative behaviour among 2, 5–7, 19–40, 203 see also care of children; education; filial piety; schools

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 42, 55–6, 59–60, 147–9 Chongqing 236, 239 Classic of Filial Piety, The (Master Kung) 233–4 coercion 65, 71–9, 108–9 collective labour 105, 107–10, 113, 212, 218 collectivism 13, 104–19, 126, 195, 211–29, 232 common-pool resources (Ostrom) 102–5, 118–20 community schools Jiangsu 11, 23, 26–39 Scotland 190–209 competition 25–30, 139, 175, 214, 231–4 Confucian thought on cooperation 69, 84 in family life 13, 43–5, 51–3, 56, 81, 90, 233–4 see also filial piety in politics 43–5, 60–2, 84, 122–4, 170 cooperative experimental zones 213, 221, 225 cooperative movement 210–30 crowding out (Ostrom) 212, 226 Cultural Revolution 217, 228 Daoism 85, 88–9 education 5–6, 27–8, 46–8, 60, 67, 190 moral 27, 30, 53, 57

284

284

Index

see also schools emigrant communities 137–52 see also migrants emotion 52–3, 57–9, 75, 123–4, 156–65 see also renqing and jiaoqing ethnicity 189–210 evolutionary theory 1, 20–1, 44, 63–4, 83, 94–5, 194 factories 53, 55, 166, 172–87, 214–16 fairness 15–16, 58–60, 63–71, 75– 9, 149, 175–6, 245–8, 253–4 familial cooperation see kin cooperation familiarity (shu) 173–87 filial piety 7, 10, 13–14, 41–62, 67, 82–3, 90–2, 144, 233–4 see also Confucian values; Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, The (Guo Jujing) food, sharing of 13–14, 126 free-riding 15, 20, 75–7, 105, 212– 13, 217–19 funerals 81–100 game theory 1–2 gender 132–5, 208, 234, 251–2 in Chinese families 45, 48, 122 in funeral ritual 85–6 in workplaces 123–34, 170–1, 176–80, 185–7 Gifts, Favors and Banquets (Yang) 182 Governing the Commons (Ostrom) 103 see also common-pool resources grandparents 20, 24–5 Great Leap Forward (dayuejin) 108–9, 112–17, 119–20 Guangdong Province 137–52 guanxi 83, 94–9, 155, 161, 166–7, 175, 180–4

harmony 57, 59, 64–79 Chinese cultural concept 69–71 ideology (Nader) 64–5, 71–3, 77–8 he, hexie see harmony healthcare 231–54 historicity 113–14 hospitals 238–40 household registration (hukou) system 233, 235–8 huaqiao see migrants Institute of Cooperatives 222–4 intergenerational support see care International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) 221–2, 224, 226 Jiangsu 19–40 jiaoqing (interactional affection) 94, 153–68 Jinmen 81–100 kin and non-kin boundary 2, 4, 8, 10, 17 kinship basis for cooperation 1–17, 63– 79, 81–100, 138–52, 233–4, 241–50 deterritorialization of 252–3 see also migrants kin selection theory 1 Kuomintang (KMT) 6–7, 45–6, 62, 88–99 labour migration see migrants land ownership 146–52 see also reform lineages 84–90, 92–100, 137–50, 190, 196 see also ancestors Mao era 48, 62, 108–9, 112–13, 120, 123, 226 marriage 42–3, 49–50, 68–71 see also partner choice

Index Marxist-Leninism 212 materiality 102, 105, 113 Meibian 213–15, 217–19 mianzi see reputation migrants huaqiao, Overseas Chinese 16, 137–52, 153–68, 189–210 rural-urban 3, 23, 46, 169–87, 228, 233–7 moral geography 144–5 multiculturalism 192–3 mutuality 63–4, 68–71, 78–9, 211, 244 of being (Sahlins) 139, 152, 233–4, 241, 253–4 mutualistic cooperation 19–22, 32–4, 44, 64, 77, 190–1 Nanchong 64–79 Nanjing 11–12 National Cooperative Federation 214 network-based cooperation 39, 111, 169–87, 190, 212–29 see also chaxugeju New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS; xin nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu) 232–54 New Socialist Villages 143, 151 New Territories 189, 191, 196, 201 non-kin cooperation 1–17, 25–62, 101–35, 153–229, 245 nurturance see yang one-child policy 11, 46, 48, 67, 154, 181 Overseas Chinese see migrants parents duties of 1, 16, 43, 54, 57, 65–7, 90–2, 202–3, 209 parenting style 44–5, 51–2 partner choice

285

for cooperation 15–16, 21–2, 37–8, 55–6, 62, 155–6, 171–2, 181–7, 190–1, 195 for marriage 42–3, 75 Peasant Specialized Cooperatives (PSCs) 213–22 PSC Law (2007) 215 People’s Communes 212, 217 People’s Republic of China (PRC) see China philanthropy 16–17, 134, 142–5, 197–200 post-socialism 114–15 poverty 112, 237, 247 power 25–30, 38–9, 178–80, 187, 195–6 psychology, developmental 2, 11–13, 20–4, 51–2 punishment 20–2, 37–8, 132 qiaoxiang see emigrant communities rationality 68, 104–5, 118, 161, 170–1 reciprocity 4, 20, 24, 43–5, 118 cycles of 4 see also care reform economic 106, 110, 114–17, 212–17, 232, 237 land 55, 147–8 political 43, 45 social care 46, 48, 237–41 religion see ritual renqing (emotion) 159–64, 181, 261 reputation family 54, 57, 83, 87–8, 91–3, 97–9 individual 10, 16, 21, 41–62, 137–52, 196–209 lineage group 137–52 management 41–62, 139–40 ritual 3, 81–2, 89–97, 143, 145–51

286

286

Index

romantic love 42, 46, 61, 73–4, 177 rural communities 3–9, 102–35, 138–52, 231–54 rural-urban disparities 232–5 schools 5–6, 11–12, 19–40, 52–5, 62, 143 complementary language 189–210 see also community schools; education; University School Scotland 189–210 self-restraint (yue) 44, 56–9 Shandong 218–19, 226–7 Shanghai 216–17 Shareholding Cooperatives (SHCs) 213–16, 220–5 Shenzhen 169–88 shu see familiarity Sichuan 63–80, 236 socialism 70, 113, 143, 166, 220, 232

suzhi (‘population quality’) 56–62 Taipei 10, 45–54, 58–9 Technology and Gender (Bray) 170 trust 118–19, 153–67, 175–6, 186, 190–1, 218 trustworthiness 43–4, 55, 61, 141–3, 184, 208 Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, The (Guo Jujing) 43 University School 11–12, 22–3, 26–39 xiao see filial piety yang (nurturance) 4, 90, 99, 125, 167–8 see also care Yunnan 101–20 Zambia 153–68 Zapotec people 71–2, 77–8