Emptiness and Fullness: Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China 9781785335815

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness ‘My Generation Was Raised on Poisoned Milk’
Chapter 2 Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse and the Ritual Production of Political Compliance
Chapter 3 Interior Space s of Hope: Inner Selves, Intersubjectivity and Agency among Chinese Christians in Beijing
Chapter 4 The Tower and The Tower: Excess and Vacancy in China’s Ghost Cities
Chapter 5 The Manchu in the Mirror: The Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Theory
Chapter 6 Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei
Chapter 7 The Potentials of Feicui: Indeterminacy and Determination in Human-Jade Interactions in South-west China
Index

Citation preview

Emptiness and Fullness

Studies in Social Analysis General Editor: Martin Holbraad University College London Focusing on analysis as a meeting ground of the empirical and the conceptual, this series provides a platform for exploring anthropological approaches to social analysis while seeking to open new avenues of communication between anthropology and the humanities, as well as other social sciences.

Volume 1 Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion Edited by Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic Volume 2 Emptiness and Fullness: Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China Edited by Susanne Bregnbæk and Mikkel Bunkenborg Forthcoming Volume 3 Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion Edited by Daan Beekers and David Kloos Volume 4 Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State Edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann Volume 5 Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions Edited by Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves

Emptiness and Fullness Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China

Edited by

Susanne Bregnbæk and Mikkel Bunkenborg

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2017 Susanne Bregnbæk and Mikkel Bunkenborg All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-78533-580-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-581-5 (ebook)

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction Mikkel Bunkenborg and Susanne Bregnbæk 1 Chapter 1 China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness: ‘My Generation was Raised on Poisoned Milk’ Zachary M. Howlett 15 Chapter 2 Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse and the Ritual Production of Political Compliance Anders Sybrandt Hansen 35 Chapter 3 Interior Spaces of Hope: Inner Selves, Intersubjectivity and Agency among Chinese Christians in Beijing Susanne Bregnbæk 52 Chapter 4 The Tower and The Tower: Excess and Vacancy in China’s Ghost Cities Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne 67 Chapter 5 The Manchu in the Mirror: The Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Theory Kevin Carrico 85 Chapter 6 Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei Mikkel Bunkenborg 104 –v–

vi | Contents

Chapter 7 The Potentials of Feicui: Indeterminacy and Determination in HumanJade Interactions in South-West China Henrik Kloppenborg Møller 120 Index 139

Illustrations 4.1  The Coal Tower 1 4.2  The Coal Tower 2 7.1 A light is flashed through a ‘Heavenly Window’ ground into the surface of a feicui stone to infer its content

– vii –

68 80 126

JK Introduction Mikkel Bunkenborg and Susanne Bregnbæk

The societal transformations of the post-Mao era in China have been accompanied by increasing anxiety about the quality, authenticity and value of people, goods and words. While China no longer suffers the general lack of vitality and modernity that once made the country appear to be ‘the sick man of Asia’, a century of political and economic sea changes has produced more specific states of lack and much uncertainty as to what is true, beautiful and good. This uncertainty often seems to be articulated as doubts about the interior make-up of things. Suspecting that persons, objects, institutions and ideologies are not what they seem, critical voices accuse them of emptiness and they are thus laid open to new investments of meaning and value. Ethnographies of contemporary China describe how state discourse on population quality constructs ‘the people’ in terms of lack of quality and present this perceived lack as a key to the coding of social differences in China. The growing popular interest in religion over the past decades is likewise said to stem from a lack, a moral or spiritual vacuum, and the valorization of authentic inner selves thus goes hand in hand with critique of an exterior world deemed to be hollow and false. Diagnoses of lack seem to cut across a whole range of different domains: people in search of a new faith, educational reforms, counterfeit goods, ­housing bubbles, conspicuous consumption and official rhetoric are all described as embodying a variety of vacuities – lack of quality, moral bearings,

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strength, value or fulfilment. The seemingly pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness suggests that people and things are seen to be drained of content, value or meaning, and in this volume we pursue the idea that a focus on emptiness and fullness may offer important insights into ongoing negotiations of quality, authenticity and value in China.

Emptiness in Contemporary China In contemporary China, politics and emptiness go hand in hand. Since president Xi Jinping introduced his new political slogan of ‘The Chinese Dream’ (Zhongguo meng 中国梦) much speculation has gone into discerning its meaning and scope. Chinese citizens ask themselves ‘is this empty rhetoric or does it have some political content?’ Chinese slogans are commonly interpreted as depicting the opposite of present social reality (Steinmüller 2011; Thøgersen 2003). Former president Hu Jintao, for example, presented the idea of the ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui 和谐社会) at a time when growing social unrest represented a serious threat to the party. President Xi Jinping’s invocation, quoted in the Economist (2013), that ‘young people should dare to dream’ should likewise be understood in the context of a rapid decrease of chances for social mobility. And at the same time even though the actual content may seem empty, such rhetorical flourishes will most probably have political consequences. Profound scepticism and sometimes outright cynicism is widespread in China, and the content of China’s changing political slogans remains mysterious and opaque, even to party members themselves, but few Chinese citizens doubt that the government has the capacity to implement far-reaching plans. During the Mao era, political slogans at the height of the Cultural Revolution became so exaggerated and disconnected from social reality that the aftermath has been described as a period of returning from heaven back to earth (Croll 1991: 11). Today, billboards scattered across urban China promote slogans such as ‘Patriotism, Virtue and Civilization’ accompanied by futuristic images of high-rise utopias that look like wishful thinking. It is not an uncommon experience to return to China to find that seemingly unrealistic plans for highrise development have already been executed, but it also happens that they prove to be Potemkin villages, superficial beautifications that are known in China as ‘face projects’ (Steinmüller 2011: 22). In an article called ‘The State of Irony in China’, Hans Steinmüller gives two compelling examples of ironies about past and future that speak forcefully about the present condition of China. We recount these two stories here because they share common ground with the theme of political and moral emptiness discussed in the chapters in this volume. First, Steinmüller tells the story of an old cynical peasant cadre who is the laughing stock of the village, because he nostalgically longs for a Maoist past. Despite the fact that he suffered real hardship under the Cultural Revolution, he now idealizes the Maoist era and dismisses the contemporary political slogans of transforming

Introduction | 3

the Chinese countryside as empty. ‘What they call a “model village” and a “new countryside” is really just a “face project”, Lao Ma said with indignation. They just use some part of the resources they get from higher government levels to paint the facades of the houses next to the public road and then “eat” the bigger part of public funds themselves’ (Steinmüller 2011: 22). Second, Steinmüller recounts the cynicism expressed by Lao Chen, the narrator in a dystopic science fiction novel called The Fat Years – China 2013. The novel paints a picture of life in China in the year 2013, where prosperity goes hand in hand with social amnesia. There are no problems in the People’s Republic and everyone is happy in the new harmonious society. A very small minority, however, is concerned with a month that has gone missing, and Lao Chen is gradually convinced that something important occurred in that missing month. However, no one really remembers what it was and all public records from the time appear to have been retrospectively cleansed. While the majority has forgotten the Cultural Revolution and the events of the missing month (a reference to the political turmoil of 1989), Lao Ma and Lao Chen find that something crucial has been lost. ‘While everyone else is fully aware that “times have changed”, Lao Ma is stubbornly sticking to the Maoist mores of old. While everyone else lives happily in the new age of prosperity, Lao Chen is struggling to conceal his cynicism and growing disbelief’ (ibid.: 24). In Lao Ma’s case, the gaps in contemporary Chinese society become apparent by contrasting the present with a lost age of Maoist morality. In Lao Chen’s case, the present is measured against the fat years of a not-so-distant future, but this golden age turns out to be hollow because it builds upon amnesia in the present. Measured against the past or the future and diagnosed with either a lack of morality or a lack of memory, contemporary China is presented in these two stories as a society struggling with different forms of lack. We suggest that the gaps and absences pointed out by Lao Ma and Lao Chen are indicative of a broad societal concern with emptiness, and this emptiness, and the ways it becomes manifest in different domains in Chinese society, is what we set out to explore in this volume.

Lack and Desire in the Ethnography of Contemporary China Among the first to point out the central role of conceptions of lack in contemporary Chinese politics, Ann Anagnost described how elite discourse on population quality contributed to ‘the concerted construction of “the people” in terms of lack, unready for political sovereignty but, as we shall see, being disciplined and rendered docile for the employ of global capital’ (1997: 78). Iterating themes from the May 4th modernizers of the early twentieth century, this renewed concern with low quality and lack of civility in the late twentieth century provided the Communist Party with a new sense of purpose: As vanguard modernizers, only they could help the Chinese population escape from their state of general backwardness (ibid.). Deferring claims to political sovereignty and citizenship among native populations with a ‘not

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yet’ was central to the colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and it was hardly unusual for newly independent elites in nations with (semi-) colonial pasts to adopt a view of their countrymen as being, in some respects, lacking. In the case of India, Dipesh Chakrabarty thus notes a ‘tendency to read Indian history in terms of a lack, an absence, or incompleteness, that translates into “inadequacy”’ (2000: 32). At the level of the population, the perceived absence of political maturity served as a justification for continued colonial rule, but ideas about lack also operated at the level of subjects, who were deemed to lack the sort of education, individuality and private life that would justify political rights as citizens. This reading of constructions of lack as part of a governmentally orchestrated deferral of full subjecthood and rights to political participation may contribute to elucidate the contemporary discourse of lack, backwardness and low population quality. But there are many other kinds of lack in China: while the party-state propagates the idea of a lack of quality, party members are themselves criticized for their lack of morality and for having created a society without moral bearings. Chinese society is often said to be troubled by a ‘moral crisis’ or ‘spiritual vacuum’ that has lasted ever since the end of Maoism. A widespread concern with a perceived lack of public morality is not only evident in popular discourse, but has also been integrated in anthropological analyses such as Liu Xin’s (2000) description of the ‘immoral economy’ of rural Shaanxi and Yan Yunxiang’s (2003, 2009) account of the emergence of the ‘uncivil individual’ as an unfortunate outcome of the socialist state’s attack on traditional social institutions in rural China. In a more recent anthology entitled Deep China, Kleinman et al. (2011) explore how subjectivities in China are affected by this lack of moral consistency. Delving below the surface of government policies, social institutions and market activities in order to elucidate how the person has been remade in China over the past three decades, Kleinman (2011) sees indications that the interiority of the person is deepening and complexifying and he suggests that ‘the divided self’ is an apt description for persons who live with internal divides between public and private selves and who are simultaneously complicit in and critical of the workings of the authoritarian state. While Kleinman highlights the positive side of this process by describing how people embark upon individual quests for moral purpose and meaning in a variety of ways, the backdrop to this expansion of subjectivity and interior space is an exterior world troubled by immorality and meaninglessness. Where the socialist state operated at the level of public morality, Lisa Rofel (2007) would argue, the postsocialist state operates at the level of desire, and the shaky state of public morality in contemporary China reflects the emergence of the desiring subject, an individual whose sexual, material and affective self-interest is deemed to be legitimate and natural. People in China did not simply cast off socialism and discover inner selves; rather, such interiorities grew out of engagements with public culture and gradually became furnished with the longings and desires appropriate to a neoliberal economy.

Introduction | 5

Like Kleinman, Rofel emphasizes the emergence of complex inner selves in the postsocialist era, but while Kleinman tends to describe the expansion of interiority more as a retreat from a morally dubious society, Rofel suggests that these new subjects with interior aspirations and desires are shaped by their engagement with a neoliberal economy. Lack is not an explicit issue in Rofel’s analysis of the production of desire in contemporary China and desire is conceptualized by reference to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari rather than to Lacan (Rofel 2007: 211 n. 43), but the production of desire would seem to go hand in hand with the production of lack. If desires, longings and yearnings have an object, the absence of that which is desired must first be established and in this sense, as the flip side of desire, lack is an implicit theme in ethnographies of desire.

Reading Lack Otherwise Whether presented as a concern with low quality, as a moral crisis, or as an implicit corollary of the production of desiring subjects, constructions of lack and desire play a central role in the contemporary ethnography of China. While drawing inspiration from these different approaches to emerging subjectivities, this volume is an attempt to heed Chakrabarty’s injunction ‘To read “lack” otherwise’ (2000: 34). In the alternative reading presented here, lack of civility and lack of morality are simply two among many forms of lack that shape desires in contemporary China. We argue that such specific forms of lack, absence, incompleteness and inadequacy may be interpreted as indications of a more pervasive concern with emptiness that haunts contemporary China in a variety of ways, an emptiness that is not only at work within emerging subjectivities and the semiotic world of signs but equally manifest in the phenomenal world of bodies and objects. By subsuming lack under the broader category of emptiness, we attempt to lift the lid on a Pandora’s box of ethnography that shows how emptiness pertains to words and things as well as persons and populations and how it can be simultaneously threatening and productive. ‘Lack’, in Bruce Fink’s reading of Lacan, is the first step beyond nothingness. To qualify something as empty is to use a spatial metaphor implying that it could alternatively be full, that it has some sort of existence above and beyond its being full or empty. A metaphor often used by Lacan is that of something qui manque à sa place, which is out of place, not where it should be or usually is; in other words, something which is missing. Now for something to be missing, it must first have been present and localized; it must first have had a place. (Fink 1995: 52)

Discussions of lack may point to symbolic structures in which it becomes manifest, but according to Lacan, lack is also a necessary corollary of coming into being as a subject:

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The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted and this relationship is most disrupted when there is no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially while she is wiping his backside. (Lacan 2014: 53–54)

If all its needs were immediately satisfied, a child would never have cause to learn how to speak, and it is through lack and its attendant desire, Lacan suggests, that a child comes into being as a subject. In this volume, we attempt to bring lack out of the intersubjective relationship between mother and child and explore more broadly how lack generates new desires and imaginaries in contemporary China and how it becomes an issue, not only in the becoming of subjects, but also in reforming and evaluating institutions, ideologies and material objects. The fact that Lacan has ‘de-essentialized’ Freud’s libido from biological drives and emphasizes the role of language makes his ideas more clearly relevant to anthropology, as Sangren has pointed out (2004: 114). In this volume, we draw inspiration from Lacanian ideas about lack, but in order to bring contemporary China into focus, we have aimed to capture emptiness rather than lack. In China, we suggest, lack may be understood as a form of emptiness, and in contrast to lack, emptiness is a term that has a whole range of connotations in the Chinese language.

Emptiness and Fullness In Chinese philosophy, emptiness is not so much seen as a static reference to a symbolic system in which something is missing, but rather as a harbinger of change: ‘Emptiness is not merely a neutral space serving to defuse the shock without changing the nature of the opposition. It is the nodal point where potentiality and becoming interweave, in which deficiency and plenitude, self-sameness and otherness, meet’ (Cheng 1994: 51). The form of emptiness that we have in mind, is not, in the words of Francois Jullien (2004: 110), the non-being of Buddhism (kong 空) but the functional emptiness of Daoism (xu 虛) that operates in relation to fullness, an emptiness that animates things and forms and augurs changes in the stasis of excessive fullness. Emptiness appears to have a particular cachet in the changing social landscape of contemporary China, and the chapters in this volume explore the implications of emptiness and fullness in education, politics and religion, as well as in buildings, bodies and gemstones. As a common point of reference, we take the Chinese word xu, which literally means empty and has the added connotations of false, weak and virtual. The opposite of being empty is to be full (shi 实), which also implies solid and real. Taken together, these terms constitute a classical binary that runs through Daoist philosophy, Chinese medicine, military strategy, linguistics and landscape painting. But while they carry rich philosophical connotations, ideas of emptiness and fullness are also embedded in mundane practices and everyday language.

Introduction | 7

In a book entitled Appetites (2002), Judith Farquhar explores shifting desires for food and sex in contemporary China and points to the dyad of xu and shi as a key to understanding the ‘pathologies of uneven distribution’ (ibid.: 124) that have affected not just individual bodies but also the People’s Republic of China as a whole. Rendered as depletion and repletion in the domain of Chinese medicine and as deficiency and excess in the domain of economics, Farquhar’s reading of Chinese texts on medicine and food suggest that emptiness and fullness describe not only medical problems, but also social ones: Whatever the domain of material life, these sources suggest, the logic of excess and deficiency can accommodate and clarify a wide range of experiences. Further, because this dyad is of special concern in Chinese medicine, one can read the social from a foothold in medical practice. Rather than understanding medicine as a figure that expresses the form of a broader contextualizing society or social structure as analogous to the biological body – medicine and society are not separate entities like text and content or map and territory – what I seek is a certain level at which Chinese medicine shares forms of habitus and common sense with other, parallel yet overlapping domains of the social, in this case eating and writing about eating. (2002: 136)

The contributions in this volume support Farquhar’s claim that the logic of depletion and repletion is widely known and applied to a variety of phenomena in China, but as the chapters abandon Chinese medicine as a foothold and pursue the dyad through different field sites, it becomes clear that it is not so much fullness as emptiness that causes concern in ethnographic settings ranging from rural homes to urban, underground churches, from educational institutions to movements for cultural revival, and from ghost cities to the workshops of jade carvers. It also becomes clear that the specific instances and invocations of emptiness and fullness addressed in the individual contributions lend themselves to interpretations from a multiplicity of analytical vantage points.

The Chapters Through the lens of emptiness and fullness we here present new ethnographies that shed light on the relationship between the state and ideology, words and action. Zachary Howlett in the chapter ‘China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness: My Generation was Raised on Poison Milk’ addresses the ideology of the Chinese national college entrance exams (gaokao 高考) through the lens of what he calls ‘the fabrication of fairness’. He points to what is seemingly a paradox, namely that despite glaring social differences in China, in particular between urban and rural areas, most Chinese believe that the college entrance examination is a relatively fair vehicle for social mobility. Therefore preparing students for the exam is like drilling soldiers for combat. High-school life thus resembles what Steven Sangren has called an

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‘instituted fantasy’ (Sangren 2013), by which he points to the tension between institutional arrangements and the ideals towards which those arrangements are oriented. Ultimately unrealizable, they obscure the exploitative aspects of those arrangements. In this way Howlett argues that the achievement of fairness through examination represents an unrealizable ideal that nevertheless captivates many of those whom it institutionally disadvantages. As one highschool principal put it, ‘If we did not have gaokao there would be a revolution’ (Howlett, this volume). Whereas Howlett‘s ethnography tells us about the lack of social mobility from China’s marginal regions, Anders Sybrandt Hansen has carried out fieldwork among young Chinese elite party members in Beijing. 1 October 2009 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and sixty years of rule for the Communist Party of China. Hansen took part in the celebration of the occasion, which involved a military parade, a mass pageant, and finally an evening gala on Tiananmen Square. President Hu Jintao held his address to the nation from Tiananmen and Hansen was initially intrigued to find that none of the students he spoke to, who had participated in the mass pageant, could bring to mind anything the president had actually said. Where the protagonists in Steinmüller’s account both point out the emptiness behind the scenes and the meaninglessness of contradictory slogans, Hansen in this volume sets out to answer an intriguing question; namely, why is it that ‘officialese’ (guanhua 官话) appears to work even when it is regarded as empty talk? He argues that the actual content of political slogans is largely beside the point. According to Hansen, we need to place the performance of guanhua in its social context of political ritual to appreciate how it manages to reinforce political compliance. Above and beyond the contents of ‘officialese’, guanhua rituals manage to convey to the Chinese public that the Chinese Communist Party has the right to declare and to compel silence, and that it has the ability and authority to choreograph social reality. The very fact that such ritual choreography is achieved ‘demonstrates the power of its designers and discourages its audience from alternative political engagement. Guanhua ritual in this way bolsters political compliance by reaffirming the seeming inevitability of the current political order’ (Hansen, this volume). The fact that guanhua may to a large degree produce political compliance does not mean that Chinese citizens have no potential for imagining alternatives. In some cases, Susanne Bregnbæk argues, the fact that the Chinese Communist Party slogans strike listeners as empty and false partly explains the widespread conversion to house-church Christianity among young well-educated urbanites. As one of her interlocutors, Bolin, put it, ‘We have been brought up in a bubble of lies. And then when you get to a point where you totally disbelieve the government, then what can you believe?’ For Bolin, Christianity constituted an alternative moral horizon, a space of hope carved out in the emptiness and corruption of the public sphere. In other words, the sense of moral emptiness is here phrased and experienced as an inner void that conversion to Christianity can fill out. In this sense, Bregnbæk argues, what may at first glance appear as a retreat from politics into private house-churches

Introduction | 9

and a turning inwards, can also be a way of restoring a sense of agency and exercising the freedom to imagine alternatives. From lack defined morally, politically and existentially, Michael Ulfstjerne’s chapter ‘The Tower and the Tower: Excess and Vacancy in China’s Ghost Cities’ speaks of emptiness in the concrete material shape of unfinished construction projects that were repositories of investment capital and wild fantasies during the economic boom and then came to serve as shelters for migrant workers with less ambitious projects once the bubble burst. Focusing on a real estate development called the Coal Tower, Ulfstjerne tells the story of the ‘ghost town’ of Ordos, which from being a poor outpost characterized by outbound migration and infertile soil became one of the fastest developing regions in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR). His ethnography conveys a chilling story of real estate speculation and the futuristic fantasies that underlie a cycle from economic boom via bubble to bust over the course of just a few years. Towards the end of 2011, the local real estate market crashed and turned millions of square meters of ongoing construction into premature ruins. The vacant space in the Coal Tower was initially read as a glorious future waiting to be filled out and imbued with a transformative potential that inspired utopian dreams of prosperity and practices of conspicuous consumption. However, when the real estate market collapsed entirely a few years later, the vacant spaces precipitated a reshuffling of social relations; as the occupants turned on each other in struggles over outstanding debts, migrant workers moved into the empty office space, and it became clear that the tower was not so much a promising real estate development as a ruin. Kevin Carrico’s chapter takes us from fantasies about the future to fantasies of the past. Focusing on the so-called Han Clothing Movement, whose members anchor their utopian longings in the glorious past of the Han Dynasty (From 206 bce to 220 ce), Carrico describes the resurgence of this popular traditionalist majority ethnonationalist group and its paranoid fantasies about Manchu control. According to the Han Clothing Movement, the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 (which is generally understood as an anti-colonial revolution that brought Manchu rule to an end) was in fact only a first strike against Manchu domination and violence in a permanent Xinhai revolution that continues to this day. Far from today’s urban China and what these members see as an empty wasteland of high-rise buildings, decadent clothing styles and individualized cut-throat competition, they envision a long lost world of courtyard houses, authoritarian harmony and national glory. The emptiness of the present, the members of this movement claim, is caused by the cultural barbarism of Manchus, who continue to occupy central places of governance, and Carrico shows how these young nationalists dream of filling the void with real and authentic Han Chinese culture. Somewhat like Steinmüller’s old cadre, Lao Ma, the emptiness of the present for these young nationalists lies in the fullness of the past. Obviously, the Han Clothing Movement exhibits an unusual intensity in its desire to rebuild a glorious past, but President Xi Jinping’s vision of the Chinese Dream would actually

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seem to tap into similar sentiments by encouraging the Chinese people to overcome a century of colonial humiliation and contribute to the renaissance of Chinese civilization. When members of the Han Clothing Movement suggest that the Chinese state apparatus, notably the National Health and Family Planning Commission, is animated by a demonic Manchu cabal with genocidal intentions, these paranoid fantasies bear an uncanny resemblance to the stories of possession recounted in Mikkel Bunkenborg’s chapter. Taking emptiness in rural China as a point of departure, Bunkenborg presents cases of a local category of diseases known as ‘empty diseases’ (xubing 虚病) and suggests that possession by wild ghosts, spirits of deceased relatives or deities is predicated upon a prior condition of emptiness that lays the victim open to invasion from the outside. The emptiness that precedes possession is sometimes construed as a somatic depletion in a way that resonates with Chinese medicine, but emptiness also seems to occur as an effect of disrupted social relations and experiences of meaninglessness. Bunkenborg’s use of the term ‘horror vacui’ alludes to the fact that emptiness is mostly associated with disease and danger in this part of China, but it is also a reference to a classical postulate in physics to the effect that there are no voids in nature, as they would immediately be filled with surrounding material. While possession by ghosts and deceased relatives may be horrifying, becoming a spirit medium may actually be a change for the better and the common denominator of the cases is that emptiness drives transformations and draws stuff from the outside into the interior of depleted bodies. Arthur and Joan Kleinman have argued that ‘the study of depression in society shows us the sociosomatic reticulum (the symbolic bridge) that connects individuals to each other and to their life-world’ (1985: 429), and the same might be said of these empty diseases that appear to be simultaneously somatic, social and semiotic. The causal connection between emptiness and possession makes it possible to speak of transactions across the boundaries of these distinct domains, and thus it offers a distinct way of thinking about the interconnections between body, society and self. Henrik Kloppenborg Møller’s study of the jade trade in south-west China shifts the focus from emptiness in bodies and persons to emptiness in material objects. Jade is initially traded in the form of ‘betting stones’, raw boulders with an opaque skin that may conceal precious kingfisher jade, and Møller describes how the deceptive surfaces of these indeterminate and potentially worthless boulders invite human investments of value, labour and meaning. While traders tend to regard jade stones as passive receptacles of economic value ascribed by humans, the carvers tend to present jade as having certain agential capacities in relation to the humans who deal with the stones. Jade stones are sometimes said to be predestined for certain owners, the carvers claim that the material guides the carving, and the finished pieces are said to absorb the energy of the wearer. When jade stones circulate as commodities, their indeterminacy constitutes a form of emptiness that invites ascriptions of value and suspicions of forgery. At the same time, however, jade stones are construed as being full of meaning and determination in ways that spill over

Introduction | 11

into the domain of humans. Relations between humans and jade stones thus are mutually constitutive, and Møller demonstrates how jade and people shape each other through processes of emptying and filling.

Conclusion Contemporary ethnography often describes the formation of subjectivities in post-Mao China as an ongoing construction of lack and desire, where subjects are made aware of their shortcomings through the state-sponsored discourse on population quality and trained to desire in appropriate ways through public culture. Reading ethnographies on China also gives an impression of a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, a spiritual vacuum that has lasted pretty much since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. This vacuum, however, is seldom addressed in any detail and it generally comes across as a context for processes of subject formation, not as an integral part. The point of departure for this volume is the idea that these two distinct developments, the formation of subjectivities through lack and desire and the widespread complaints about emptiness, are intimately connected and that experiences of emptiness play a crucial role in the formation of subjects and the transformation of contemporary Chinese society. ‘Who are you?’ is the central question that people ask the victims of empty diseases in the Hebei village studied by Bunkenborg, and emptiness is clearly not a context here, but something that affects the interior of subjects, something that makes it doubtful who they are and renders them open to possession and transformation. In a similar vein, Bregnbæk’s interlocutor experiences the general lack of morality in society at large as an inner void that was filled by conversion to Christianity. While it may be experienced in the interior of the person as physical exhaustion and spiritual want, emptiness is imagined as something that exists in the exterior world, and the contributions in this volume explore how institutions and ideologies as well as buildings and gems are prone to suspicions of emptiness and engage humans in processes of emptying and filling. Discussions of emptiness in China serve to question whether things are what they seem and what they should be, and such discussions are critical points for understanding not just contemporary social realities but also the symbolic orders that these realities are measured against. Lack emerges as a problem in relation to an imagined modernity that is perpetually deferred and the building spree in Ordos seems to attest to a desire for instant modernization. But the infrastructure that was built to attract and harness such development remains empty and it now marks the gap between the present realities and the perfect modernity that might have been. For the members of the Han Clothing Movement, what is lacking in the present becomes apparent when they measure contemporary society against an imagined golden age, and emptiness seems to grow just as well in the gap between past and present as it does in the gap between the present and the future.

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While the ethnographies of persons and things in this volume suggest that emptiness facilitates change and renders things open to new investments of meaning and value, the contributions that deal with social institutions seem rather less hopeful. Party rhetoric appears to work even without political substance and while the audience may balk at the emptiness, they do not appear to envision any possible alternative and much the same goes for the instituted fantasy of fairness in the university entrance examinations, where people note the discrepancy between ideals and realities without much hope that this emptiness will lead to meaningful changes. Presenting fresh ethnographic data from a broad variety of settings in China, this volume explores the critical role of dynamics of emptying and filling in China, and while the diversity of these ethnographic accounts militates against any single conclusion as to what this emptiness really is, they do suggest that experiences and suspicions of emptiness are integral to the ongoing transformations and enduring conflicts that shape subjectivities in the social landscape of contemporary China.

Acknowledgements This volume started out in Copenhagen as a conversation among a group of friends and colleagues with an interest in the anthropology of China. In spite of our very different research projects, the theme of emptiness and fullness proved relevant to all of them in various intriguing ways and the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association’s in Chicago provided an opportunity to widen the discussion. We wish to thank Ayo Wahlberg, Bjørn Schwartz, Hans Steinmüller, Nikolaj Blichfeldt, and Teresa Kuan for taking part, and in particular, we owe a debt of gratitude to Professors Steven Sangren and Michael Puett for providing generous and useful comments that have guided our work.

Mikkel Bunkenborg is an associate professor in China Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Trained in anthropology and Chinese, he conducted an ethnographic study of health practices in the township of Fanzhuang in rural North China for his PhD and has since been engaged in collaborative research projects on Chinese infrastructure construction, resource extraction, and trade in Mongolia and Mozambique and, more recently, on morality and food in China. Susanne Bregnbæk is an assistant professor at University College Capital in Copenhagen. She has worked on higher education, generations, Christianity and the state in China. Her monograph Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. She is currently doing research about the encounter between refugee children, their families and day-care institutions in Denmark.

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References Anagnost, A. 1997. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cheng, F. 1994. Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting. Boston: Random House. Croll, E.J. 1991. ‘Imaging Heaven: Collective and Gendered Dreams in China’, Anthropology Today 7(4): 7–12. Farquhar, J. 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham: Duke University Press. Fink, B. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jullien, F. 2004. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kleinman, A. 2011. ‘Quests for Meaning’, in A. Kleinman, Y. Yan, J. Jing, S. Lee, E. Zhang, T. Pan, F. Wu and J. Guo, Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell us About China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 263–90. Kleinman, A. and J. Kleinman. 1985. ‘Somatization: The Interconnections in Chinese Society among Culture, Depressive Experiences, and the Meanings of Pain’, in A. Kleinman and B. Good (eds), Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 429–90. Kleinman, A., Y. Yan, J. Jing, S. Lee, E. Zhang, T. Pan, F. Wu and J. Guo. 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell us About China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Cambridge: Polity Press. Liu, X. 2000. In One’s Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of PostReform Rural China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rofel, L. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Sangren, P.S. 2004. ‘Psychoanalysis and its Resistances in Michel Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality”: Lessons for Anthropology’, Ethos 32(1): 110–22. ———. 2013. ‘The Chinese Family as Instituted Fantasy: Or, Rescuing Kinship Imaginaries from the “Symbolic”’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (19): 279–299. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12033 Steinmüller, H. 2011. ‘The State of Irony in China’, Critique of Anthropology 31(1): 21–42. doi: 10.1177/0308275x10393434 The Economist. 2013. ‘China’s future: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Dream’, 4 May. Thøgersen, S. 2003. ‘Parasites or Civilizers: The Legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in Rural Areas’, China: An International Journal 1(2): 200–23. Yan, Y. 2003. Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009. ‘The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China’, Social Anthropology 17(1): 9–24.

JK Chapter 1

China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness ‘My Generation Was Raised on Poisoned Milk’ Zachary M. Howlett

‘Without the Gaokao, there would be social revolution in China’. This was how a high-school principal in rural southeastern China – Mr Gu – described the significance of China’s National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao 高考), which he discussed with me in a series of tête-à-têtes in 2013.1 This principal’s assessment accords with scholarly appraisals of China’s longstanding obsession with examinations – its examination fever.2 China was probably the first society to select its governing elite by examination (Teng 1943). The imperial-era civil-examination system (keju 科举) lasted with few interruptions from its flowering in the Song Dynasty (960–1279 ce) to its abolishment in 1905 (Chaffee 1995; Elman 2014). The civil exams provided a ‘cultural gyroscope’ for society, ‘even in the minds of millions who failed’ (Elman 2014: 170); conversely, periods of social tumult, rebellion, and dynastic change were associated with breakdowns in the system (Jones and Kuhn 1978). Today many regard the Gaokao as the cultural heir of the civil exams. The Gaokao determines access to higher education and social mobility for most Chinese. The whole Chinese education system is geared towards preparation for the Gaokao. Study is intense and ascetic, particularly in rural areas and high-ranking schools. Chinese high-school teachers liken students to soldiers Notes for this chapter begin on page 30.

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drilling for combat. As in the past, the perception that the exam can ‘transform destiny’ (gaibian mingyun 改变命运) has spawned feverish devotion. In most other social competitions, the results are perceived to be arranged ahead of time backstage through particularistic relationships (anxiang caozuo 暗箱操作). By contrast, the ostensibly universalistic or rules-based selection of the Gaokao is understood to be both consequential and undetermined. People thus see the Gaokao as what Erving Goffman (1967) terms a ‘fateful’ or potentially life-altering event, success in which requires the display of merit – socially sacred values such as character and composure. Hence informants of many backgrounds broadly agree that in a society dominated by particularistic connections (guanxi 关系) the Gaokao forms ‘the only relatively fair [gongping 公平] competition’. As one taxi-driver father put it, ‘Even if 50 per cent of the kids get into college with guanxi, there’s room for me and my kid to squeeze in behind through hard work’. However, great disparities in opportunity exist between rural and urban places, and between high-ranking and low-ranking schools (Hannum et al. 2011; Huang 2008; Wang et al. 2013; D. Yang 2008; Yeung 2013). These disparities belie people’s perception that the results of the examination are undetermined; in other words, social inequality calls into doubt the degree to which the examination objectively presents a probabilistic opportunity for social advancement. This chapter seeks to account for why people in China nevertheless widely perceive the Gaokao to be a relatively fair vehicle for social mobility. I carried out two years of continuous fieldwork on the Gaokao in China’s southeastern Fujian Province from 2011 to 2013. To observe geographical variation, I was mindful of G. William Skinner’s framework of regional analysis (Skinner 1964). This approach aims to account for spatiotemporal patterns of human interaction within and among regions of China. It considers China to consist of integrated systems of geographical and administrative hierarchies that extend from major metropolises positioned along important river basins to peripheral market towns and villages with only indirect access to central places. I conducted most of my fieldwork at three contiguous points along such a core-periphery hierarchy – in the major coastal port city of Xiamen (厦门; also called Amoy, population 3.5 million); in a neighbouring backwater prefectural capital, which I will term Ningzhou (approximately 300,000); and in the seat – ‘Mountain Valley’ (70,000) – of a peripherally located county of Ningzhou Prefecture.3 At all three places, I observed classes; interacted with students; and conducted interviews with parents, teachers, temple-goers, administrators, and officials. I carried out participant observation as an English teacher at the public boarding high school in Mountain Valley and at an under-resourced urban high school in a blue-collar migrant-worker neighbourhood in Xiamen. I supplemented this data by interviewing university students (recent examinees) from wider Fujian and from other provinces.

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The Emptiness of Fabrication and the Fullness of Instituted Fantasy In China, as elsewhere, superficial appearances – for example, of the authenticity of a product, or genuineness of an intention – can be deceptive (Blum 2007; Lin 2011). Note, for example, how a student of mine responded to my question about how he maintained psychic equilibrium in the face of nepotistic, collusive practices at his rural high school. Alluding to the tainted-milk scandal that rocked China in 2008, he compared his school’s assertions of fair treatment to a counterfeit product: ‘If you don’t have a good attitude, you’re done for. My generation is strong. We were raised on poison milk’.4 Thus a discrepancy exists between the surface and the interior, appearance and essence, of certain things, persons, and practices. This discrepancy finds expression in a cultural plethora of idioms, such as ‘the outside and the inside are not the same’ (biao li bu yi 表里不一). In everyday speech, the ‘empty/ full’ (xu/shi 虚实) dichotomy indexes this divide. Many things seem one way ‘on the surface’ (biaomian shang 表面上) but are quite different ‘in actuality’ (shiji shang 实际上). Such things are associated with emptiness in its many valences – among them, ‘fake’ (xujia 虚假); ‘hollow’ (kongxu 空虚, kongdong 空洞); ‘vain’ (xurong 虚荣); or ‘hypocritical’ (xuwei 虚伪). These things include ‘formalistic’ (xingshihua 形式化) practices, which are often accompanied by speech described as ‘staged’ (changmianhua 场面话) or just ‘fake’ or ‘empty’ (jiahua 假话; konghua 空话) – qualities that people associate with the style of official rhetoric (guanqiang 官腔; see Hansen’s chapter on ‘official speak’ – guanhua – this volume). They also include ‘guises’ (huangzi 幌子), the classic exemplum of which is ‘selling dog meat with a lamb’s head’ (gua yangtou, mai gourou 挂羊头卖狗肉). To these empty or virtual things, people contrast those that they describe as ‘genuine’ (zhenshi 真实); ‘real’ (xianshi 现 实); ‘solid’ (tashi 踏实); ‘practical’ (shiji 实际); or ‘down-to-earth’ (shizai 实 在). The opposite of empty talk is ‘full talk’, or truth (shihua 实话). Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘fabrication’ provides a useful rubric with which to approach the empty/full distinction. Fabrication refers to ‘the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on’ (Goffman 1974: 83). For Goffman, fabrication is different from but similar to ‘keying’, which he defines as a modification of some activity, already meaningful in terms of a primary framework or gestalt of experience, into something ‘patterned on that activity, but seen to be something very different’ – including rehearsal, make-believe, daydream, play, satire, and so on (ibid.: 43–44). Unlike keying, fabrication involves an element of deception and collusion. Those ‘excolluded’ from the fabrication are ‘contained’ by it – that is, they believe that a falsification of some part of reality is what it appears to be, although this belief may be open to suspicion and doubt. I propose that in normal speech ‘empty’ often denotes hollow fabrications or keyings, whereas ‘full’ designates unlaminated realities. ‘Virtual/real’ thus provides a

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s­ erviceable complementary translation. These terms might in part be understood as emic categories of social-critical analysis. The empty/full dichotomy pervades many institutional contexts, including Chinese high-school life. Emptiness, or virtuality, is associated with practices that are performed or fabricated front stage for an audience inside or outside the institution; fullness, or reality, with practices that take place backstage, have their own reward, and possess intrinsic effectiveness. In a sense, the latter are not staged but really are what they seem to be, with the caveat that ‘reality’ itself is always already the result of ritualized social interchange and performance (Butler 1990). Accordingly, the fullness of backstage reality at Chinese high schools is itself oriented towards ultimately unrealizable ideals – principal among them ‘fairness’. The emptiness of fabrication, daydream, and rehearsal thus stands in a supplementary relationship to the fullness of reality: As I argue below, the desire to fabricate, catalogue, and perform fairness buttresses the ideal of fairness even as the feverishness of such practices indexes the ultimate lack or emptiness of this ideal. High-school life thus resembles what Sangren (2013) terms ‘instituted fantasy’. Instituted fantasy refers to the ‘synergistic’ tension between institutional arrangements and the institutional ideals towards which those arrangements are oriented (ibid.). Ultimately unrealizable, these ideals veil or obscure exploitative aspects of those arrangements. Similar to the way in which the ideal of the patrilineal family veils the labour of women (ibid.), the achievement of fairness through examination represents an unrealizable ideal that nevertheless captivates many of those whom it institutionally disadvantages. In other words, despite their consciousness of the ‘emptiness’ or lack of fairness in many day-to-day high-school practices, students nevertheless embrace the idea that the Gaokao itself remains ‘in actuality’ relatively fair. The difference between ‘fullness’ or ‘actuality’, on the one hand, and ‘emptiness’ or ‘mere performance’, on the other, lies in social actors’ relative detachment from social roles that they associate with the latter. In ‘empty’ roles, people lack what Goffman terms ‘embracement’ or ‘involvement’ (Goffman 1961) – a Chinese equivalent of which may be found in the term touru (投入), literally, ‘to throw oneself into’. Embracement may, however, be feigned. In feigned embracement, ‘mouth and heart are not one’ (xin kou bu yi 心口不一) – a state that prevails, for example, when students simulate belief in official ideology to pass an examination (see also Hansen’s chapter, this volume). In contrast to their attitude towards official slogans, however, examinees’ belief in the ‘relative fairness’ of the Gaokao evinces little cynicism. In light of glaring social disparities in educational opportunity – which I further outline below – this relative lack of cynicism betrays a certain degree of self-deception or suspension of disbelief. Attitudes towards the examination resemble in this respect those towards popular divination. Jordan (1982) reports that diviners simultaneously take account of and suspend disbelief in the statistical characteristics that underlie mantic practices such as poe divination (the casting of ‘moon blocks’). Even

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as practitioners manipulate divination to increase the chances of receiving the results that they desire, they paradoxically understand these results to express divine will. In spite of such manipulation, the aleatory element of mantic techniques undergirds the perception that these techniques reveal the workings of transcendent powers, such as ‘fate’ (ming 命). Stamping mantic practices with the authority of something beyond human control, this aleatory element encourages believers in their perception that divination gives voice to divine forces. Similarly, I argue that the belief in the Gaokao’s fairness relies on the assessment that, despite glaring disparities in educational opportunity, the result of the examination remains undetermined.5 By undetermined, I mean that examinees see the result of the examination to be determined by their individual meritorious performance and fortune on test day rather than by their social position and connections ahead of time. In this sense, the exam resembles the ‘betting stones’ described by Møller in this volume. As he explains, these opaque-skinned rocks are prized by jade traders because they may contain, concealed within, precious kingfisher jade. The ‘charm’ of these stones consists in the skill and luck required to divine their value. Note, therefore, how both exams and betting stones derive their fascination from indeterminacy – the inability to know for certain ahead of time what they contain. Because of indeterminacy, meritorious performance on examinations requires something much more precarious than the mere regurgitation of accumulated knowledge. Many haphazard factors intrude on examinees’ performance. Such factors include the types of questions that they receive, the accuracy of their guesswork, their health, and even the weather (test venues are not air conditioned) – all of which can greatly affect outcome. Under such uncertain conditions, anxiety overwhelms many examinees, who struggle against their own bodies to maintain composure. Even for the best prepared and most privileged of candidates, therefore, the Gaokao inevitably constitutes a nerve-rackingly precarious experience. Because of this precariousness, students and stakeholders conceive the examination to be undetermined and therefore fateful. In other words, they perceive the test as a life-altering event in which individual merit is assessed and destiny decided – all this despite their awareness of how educational inequality disadvantages certain candidates. Similar to the way in which the aleatory element in divination provides believers with divine confirmation of the divination’s correctness despite manipulation, indeterminacy in the examination provides examinees with seemingly objective confirmation of their self-understandings as deserving or undeserving despite social inequality. Thus indeterminacy encourages test takers in their belief that the test’s judgment issues from transcendent, ‘fair’ social authorities or powers – notably, the examination itself, as it hypostatizes a universalistic national authority, but ultimately also ‘fate’, the final karmic arbiter. Understandably, then, administrators and officials devote much effort to undergirding the perception that the examination constitutes an undetermined – and therefore fateful and fair – test of merit. As I argue below, this indeterminacy is largely fabricated.

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Just because students perceive the test to be fair, however, does not mean that they perceive educational institutions to be fair. Perceptions of fairness and conceptions of merit, moreover, vary along the central-place hierarchy.

Spatial Variations: Perceptions of Fairness and Conceptions of Merit In general, the more peripheral an institution in the regional hierarchy, the emptier or more fabricated compliance with centrally dictated policies or norms becomes. Schools form no exception. My data suggest a corollary to this hypothesis – namely, that actors who are more centrally situated in the regional hierarchy are more likely to embrace the ideals that such policies embody, whereas those lower on the hierarchy tend to have a more cynical attitude towards those ideals. To some degree, moreover, central-place and school-ranking hierarchies are interchangeable in their exhibition of these tendencies. In many respects, for example, the highest-ranking school in my intermediary field site – the backwater prefectural capital of Ningzhou – resembles schools in Xiamen, whereas lower-ranking schools in Ningzhou resemble rural schools. Furthermore, people move up and down the hierarchy, thus encountering varying attitudes with respect to policy ideals. Prominent among practices that many consider empty are those associated with ‘education for quality’ (suzhi jiaoyu 素质教育). ‘Quality’ (suzhi 素质) discourse has eugenicist overtones and is historically connected to China’s onechild policy (Murphy 2004). Education for quality refers to a raft of reforms that Chinese authorities have pursued since the 1990s to encourage creativity, student-centred learning, and moral behaviour (Kipnis 2006; Woronov 2008). These initiatives are intended to counterbalance what the Chinese public and educators broadly perceive to be an excessive emphasis on examinations within the Chinese education system (‘exam-oriented education’ or yingshi jiaoyu 应试教育) – an excess that they associate with rote memorization, teacher-­centred learning, and fierce competition (Dello-Iacovo 2009). However, teachers often complain that education-for-quality reforms ‘have not been implemented in reality’ (meiyou luo dao shichu 没有落到实处), and thus remain relatively empty and formalistic.6 Moreover, this perception seems to increase the farther one travels into the countryside. By contrast, in urban places and high-ranking schools – places associated with ‘high quality’ – one is more likely to encounter actors who ‘throw themselves into’ reforms. Similar rural-urban variation in attitudes seems to prevail with respect to the ideal of fairness. Structured by the universalistic principle that people of equal status deserve equal treatment, this ideal has long been dominated by the ethic of diligence (nuli 努力), which consists in the notion that ‘reward reciprocates effort’ (fu chu de nuli you huibao 付出的努力有回报).7 However, quality – a notoriously protean concept (Anagnost 2004; L. Yi 2011) – represents a supplementary and sometimes competing ideal of merit or character that is gaining ground in more centrally located places and among wealthier people. As rural

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residents complain, the increasing propensity to emphasize quality in testing and college admissions tends to advantage those in urban places. Following education-for-quality reforms, the ratio of rural people attending top-tier (yiben 一本) universities has fallen, despite an unprecedented expansion in higher-education enrolment (Yeung 2013). Urban residents are more likely to have been socialized into acquiring forms of cultural capital that are associated with high quality (Anagnost 2004; Kipnis 2001; Murphy 2004; H. Yan 2003; L. Yi 2011). Conversely, traditional educational approaches of drilling and memorization are more egalitarian (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Kipnis 2001). They require less cultural capital and correspond more closely to a traditional rural ethos of diligent labour. Some representative institutional variations between my three field sites can be adumbrated in support of the above discussion. In particular, I examine varying approaches and attitudes towards (1) tracking classes by student test score (fenban 分班); (2) holding classes on Saturday; (3) role embracement of teachers; and (4) quality-oriented pedagogy, including electives and extracurricular activities. In Xiamen senior high schools, the ideals of education for quality and organizational fairness are more completely instituted in reality than they are in more peripheral places, where they are more unambiguously perceived as fabrication. To promote the impression of fairness, Xiamen high-school classes are tracked into only two levels, namely normal classes and ‘keypoint’ or ‘experimental’ classes (zhongdian ban 重点班; shiyan ban 实验班). By the same token, quality-education policies to lighten students’ loads (jianfu 肩负) by banning weekend instruction are strictly enforced. Since classes are not held on the weekend, many students seek extra tuition in private businesses.8 Quality-oriented pedagogic methods associated with curricular reforms – such as encouraging student-student interaction in foreign-language classes (communicative methods) – are frequently staged in special ‘demonstration lessons’ (gongkai ke 公开课) for teachers visiting from other schools and for inspecting officials. Such demonstration lessons may be considered one genre of performative ‘official speak’ (see Hansen, this volume). Playing along, students describe these charades as ‘empty’.9 To a certain extent, however, quality-oriented methods also percolate into the curriculum in actuality, although they tend to be abandoned in the all-important last year of study before the Gaokao. Meanwhile, most teachers – especially homeroom or form teachers (banzhuren 班主任) – generally embrace their roles with relative sincerity and commitment, even in low-ranking schools. Electives and extracurricular activities are relatively common. At top-ranking or ‘keypoint’ schools, these activities are taken very seriously. In Ningzhou, by contrast, fairness and quality are more consciously regarded as ideals to be staged rather than realities to be implemented. Classes appear to be parallel but in fact often they are not. For example, a homeroom teacher at the keypoint school in Ningzhou reported discovering that her class had an average test score that was significantly lower than that of other classes. She speculated that administrators foist off low-scoring students on

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inexperienced teachers like her. Meanwhile, it is an open secret that special ‘connections classes’ (guanxi ban 关系班) exist for the children of business people and officials. In Xiamen, by contrast, such nepotistic practices are veiled in greater secrecy, confined to the deep backstage. Meanwhile, this Ningzhou school, contrary to policy, holds classes on Saturdays, but only does so after observing slightly higher-ranking schools in neighbouring prefectural capitals lead the way in flouting this regulation. If anybody asks, teachers are instructed to respond in the guise of volunteers – students have ‘voluntarily’ (ziyuan de 自愿地) come to class, and teachers are ‘voluntarily’ teaching them. Despite curricular reforms, exam-oriented pedagogy prevails all over Ningzhou, except in relatively rare special demonstration lessons. Teachers at top-ranking schools in Ningzhou embrace their roles, but students at lower-ranking schools describe their teachers as ‘unserious’ (bu renzhen 不认真), because, for example, they smoke and drink tea when they should be supervising students’ study. Even at the top schools in Ningzhou, extracurricular activities and electives are mainly considered a waste of time and distraction from test-oriented study. Great cynicism prevails at my rural field site with regard to both fairness and education for quality. As is common in rural areas, where schools are few, Mountain Valley High School is required to admit students with a wide range of test scores. It responds to this problem with aggressive tracking of classes. Students are divided into four levels of classes – a procedure that administrators say improves the school’s overall showing on the Gaokao. In essence, therefore, the school is like two or three schools combined in one. Top-ranking classes receive committed teachers and other forms of preferential treatment, including Saturday instruction. By contrast, students in low-ranking classes receive unserious or low-performing teachers and complain about having no Saturday tuition. Saturday classes are denied them until their third year of high school, at which point all students begin to have instruction seven days per week. In this case, low-scoring students are deprived of resources under the guise of reducing their loads. Some teachers refer to low-ranking classes behind their backs as ‘garbage classes’ (laji ban 垃圾班). Unsurprisingly, students complain about such treatment. Some say it is ‘like the difference between the rich and poor’. Others say, ‘Our test scores may be low, but we work hard – we deserve a fair chance’. It is common knowledge that many students in top classes secure these positions through family connections (guanxi). Thus many students feel that their scores would normally entitle them entrance into top classes if ‘guanxi students’ did not occupy so many places. Official inspections are infrequent, other high schools few and distant. Hence, few opportunities for staged demonstration lessons present themselves. Pedagogy consists solely in the time-tested methods of drilling and memorization. Extracurricular activities and electives were briefly implemented when the school was inspected for a certification, but withdrawn after inspectors left. In contrast to the perceived emptiness of education for quality and institutional measures to advance fairness, informants in all three places consider test

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scores themselves to be comparably genuine (zhenshi 真实) and, therefore, ‘relatively fair’. Informants identify the source of this genuineness in many factors. First, Gaokao scores seem to issue from a universalistic national authority that transcends the particularistic politics of place. As opposed to mock examinations leading up to the final exam, which are graded in the school or municipality, the Gaokao – a tightly synchronized national ritual – is scored in provincial capitals to augment the impression of fairness. Second, students who succeed in the Gaokao are seen to have good character – to display the merits of diligence, on the one hand, and ‘psychological quality’ (xinli suzhi 心理素质) or self-possession, on the other. Study is intense and ascetic, the examination ritual feverishly repetitive. Students take monthly mock examinations that closely resemble the college entrance exam in form and content, thus constituting, in the militaristic metaphors common in this fateful contest, dry runs for the ‘final battle’. In their effort to maximize test scores, teachers and administrators diligently pore over the archive of test-score data generated in these rehearsal exams. They use these data to identify strategic points of intervention in the curriculum, the composition of classes, the family, and students’ psyches. No amount of drilling, however, can guarantee success on test day, which requires students to demonstrate great composure in addition to diligent preparation. Finally, students, teachers, and administrators alike measure their success with scores. As a quantified and auditable measure of human value, scores represent a calculating rationality that is extraordinarily well suited to the purpose of ranking people and institutions.10 People say that in the final analysis, test scores are how students get into college, how teachers secure status and bonuses, and how administrators and officials achieve promotions. For this reason, they are all likely to say of exam-orientated education, with a resigned sigh, that it is just the ‘reality’ (xianshi 现实). This perception increases the farther one travels into the countryside, where alternative, more quality-oriented avenues into college – such as opportunities for education abroad, ‘direct admission’ (baosong 报送) to prestigious colleges, or participation in special ‘independent admissions tests’ (zizhu kaoshi 自主考 试) – become progressively rarer (Zheng 2011).

Negotiating Hegemony through the Staging of Modernity Analysis can begin to account for the above-described patterns of variation by considering complementary variation in the structure and organization of interpersonal relationships at different points along the central-place hierarchy. In rural places, as the saying goes, ‘Heaven is high and the emperor is far away’ (tian gao, huangdi yuan 天高皇帝远). Patronage and densely interwoven networks of kinship and sib affiliation – guanxi – dominate rural interpersonal relationships (Kipnis 1997; Y. Yan 1996), constituting what I term ‘particularistic reciprocity’. In Mountain Valley High School, only two teachers came from outside the county, and I was one of them. The fates of local educational officials there are tied to the success of the local high school, with which

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they have many personal connections. Thus officials can be counted on to collude with administrators to maintain the appearance of adherence to policy for prefectural inspectors. As another saying goes, ‘It is difficult for a strong dragon [central officials] to dominate a snake close to the grass [local officials and administrators]’ (qianglong nan ya ditou she 强龙难压地头蛇). In this regard, the backwater prefectural capital of Ningzhou forms an intermediary case, whereas at the other end of the spectrum, in places like Xiamen, the high density of schools and close proximity to central authorities create an ethos of mutual supervision grounded in strong interpersonal and inter-institutional competition. By the same token, Ningzhou draws its teachers mainly from the city and its subordinate counties, including Mountain Valley; Xiamen from all over Fujian Province and China. Despite cross-cutting particularistic relationships, urban interpersonal relationships involve a much more dominant element of ‘universalistic reciprocity’, or equal treatment according to organizational status – the principle that I identify above as structuring organizational fairness. Distinctions similar to that between particularistic and universalistic reciprocity are common in anthropological thought, but tend to be deployed in a dichotomizing manner that the Chinese case complicates (M.M. Yang 1994).11 By attending to spatial, temporal, and contextual variation, the approach that I advocate seeks to avoid reductive Eurocentric bifurcation of phenomena into ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ (Sangren 2010). In China, particularistic reciprocity is associated with ‘personal loyalty’ (yiqi 義氣), ‘special treatment’ (teshu daiyu 特殊待遇), and ‘feudalistic’ (fengjian 封 建) practices and thought; universalistic reciprocity with ‘rule of law’ (fazhi 法 治), ‘standardization’ (guifanhua 规范化), and ‘modernization’ (xiandaihua 现代化). The enactment of reform, standardization, and modernization percolates into the periphery from relatively central places, which assume a largely imagined Western other as their idealized template for modernization. Chinese educators and students widely imagine the West to be the model of quality. In the West, they say, educational practices that instil morality and creativity are ‘real’ and ‘full’, not ‘empty’ and ‘fake’ as they tend to be in China. One teacher from the backwater prefecture puts it this way: The more central a place is, the more closely the policy is carried out because [social actors in central places] are being supervised by central authorities. And [central places] want to be more competitive within the scope of the whole nation. … In Xiamen [schools], the real aim [of authorities and administrators] is to compete with international schools. [In other words, Xiamen schools] want their students to be … recognized by the world.

The spatial hierarchy thus has temporal aspects. As quality-oriented policies percolate down the regional hierarchy from the centre, so does the staging of modernity.12 Urban areas play front stage to a rural backstage. For this reason, among others, rural areas are described as relatively ‘backward’ (luohou 落 后) and ‘feudalistic’ but also more ‘down-to-earth’; urban areas as relatively more ‘advanced’ (xianjin 先进) and ‘modernized’ (xiandaihua 现代化) but

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also ‘emptier’. Much as ‘primitive’ ethnic minorities serve as the foil for the ‘civilized’ Han majority (Fiskesjö 2006), the ‘backwardness’ of rural areas, in which modern practices are either lacking or more obviously staged, supplements the perception of the relative reality of ‘modernity’ in urban areas.13 Yet universalistic reciprocity also undergirds the universalistic selection of the Gaokao, which has long been regarded with special reverence in the countryside. People of rural origin are obstructed in their social mobility by their lack of connections as well as by their rural household registration (nongcun hukou 农村户口), which denies them citizenship rights equal to those available to urban dwellers. The Gaokao gives rural residents one of the few legal ways to pursue these rights (Yu and Suen 2005). Many thus suppose that for people without guanxi, the Gaokao provides ‘the only way out’ (weiyi chulu 唯 一出路) of a precarious life of manual drudgery. China has a long tradition of using universalistic selection as a corrective to particularistic connections. The imperial civil exams were carefully anonymized so that any particularistic relationships between examiners and students would not pollute the universalistic selection process (Miyazaki 1981). This innovation influenced the European Enlightenment and Western civil-service examinations (Teng 1943; Woodside 2006). In fact, however, imperial examination culture reflected the interests of a rising status group of scholar-gentry landowner elite, who legitimized their social position through examination results instead of through bloodline, as the old elite had done (Elman 2014; Hartwell 1982). Ironically, China abandoned the examination in 1905 as part of its modernization efforts, but soon reimported Westernized examinations for college admission and the civil service (Woodside 2006). The contemporary tension between exam-oriented education and education for quality echoes age-old Chinese debates about whether or not examinations select people of high moral value. These debates are probably inherent to examination systems. Different social groups negotiate with each other to secure canonical status for examination contents that will be advantageous to their particular social interests (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Guillory 1993). For these reasons, intellectual currents that are initially identified with moral reservations towards examinations, such as education for quality – or, in a far earlier age, Neo-Confucianism (Bol 2008) – can eventually become incorporated into the examination orthodoxy. In the last analysis, competing examination contents reflect different ideals of merit or character and thus personhood. I suggest that the current iteration of these debates reflects a hegemonic negotiation between (1) an alliance of state authorities and big business interests; (2) a Westward-looking, quality-minded elite, largely located in increasingly internationalizing central places; and (3) less privileged groups mainly situated in more peripheral places, for whom diligence represents the only way to compete with vested interests.14 The above-mentioned staging of ­modernity – including associated universalistic ideals of merit (‘diligence’, ‘quality’) – constitutes an important context in which this negotiation takes place. Yet particularistic interests form an uncanny trace that haunts the ideal

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of ­universalistic selection. The feverish asceticism of study practices and the calculating rationality of the examination ritual undergird hegemony but can never entirely erase the fear that the examination merely serves to reproduce social inequality.

The Fabrication of Fairness Because of this hegemonic quality, the Gaokao might be regarded as a society-wide instituted fantasy.15 Those who embrace the examination understand it as a genuinely ‘fair’ chance to change their destiny through hard work, character, and good luck. The examination provides, as a popular high-school slogan put it, the only way to ‘beat the second-generation rich’ (pin de guo fu’erdai 拼得过富二代), who are widely perceived to rely on their parents’ wealth and connections to succeed in society. The Gaokao thus constitutes a sublimated form of class conflict – a locus of desire for social mobility. Every mock examination provides an occasion for fantasy. Students fantasize about admission into a good college, teachers about status and bonuses, leaders about fame and promotion. As a provincial educational official said, the Gaokao buttresses social stability ‘by giving the common people hope’. The social significance of the Gaokao thus lies in reversing the normal order of things. What is normally ‘empty’ or ‘virtual’ – the universalistic reciprocity of organizational fairness – is seen within the context of the examination to become relatively ‘solid’ and ‘real’.16 As I argue above, these perceptions of fairness and legitimacy require the Gaokao to be seen as truly undetermined. Captivation requires suspense. The probabilistic opportunity for social advancement presented by the Gaokao, however, consists largely in fabrication. The test is undetermined, but not as undetermined as many suppose. If the Gaokao is a race, then many students ‘lose on the starting line’, as critics put it. As mentioned, great regional disparities in opportunity exist (Hannum and Wang 2006). Within regions, substantial score discrepancies loom between central and peripheral places (D. Yang 2006). My field sites form no exception. At Mountain Valley High School, about 25 per cent of students gained admission to top-tier colleges in 2013. At the best high school in the backwater prefecture, this rate was close to 70 per cent. At top high schools in Xiamen, it hovered around 90 per cent. The rate at the under-resourced urban school, by contrast, was only 2 per cent.17 Analysis cannot account for such variation solely by appealing to emic categories of merit, whether construed as diligence or quality; instead, such test-score disparities derive in large part from effects that can be summarized under the rubrics of social and cultural capital (Yeung 2013). Although individuals’ scores may improve or deteriorate, informants report little variation in institutional ranking, whether that ranking is determined by the average test score of admitted or of graduating students. Where such variation occurs, it often correlates with backstage politicking, policy shifts, or economic change rather than solely with the efforts of students and teachers per se (D. Yang

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2006). For example, the principal of Mountain Valley High School had been promoted from the same job at a lower-ranking school only after his friend, the county education minister, had taken measures to ensure that enough high-scoring students would be funnelled into Mountain Valley to demonstrate ‘improvements’ vis-à-vis higher-ranking schools. In China, there is actually much public discussion of such issues (D. Yang 2006; Zheng 2011). To keep students motivated, however, teachers as a rule do not ‘amplify [such] unchangeable objective factors’, as one put it. Instead, they choose to emphasize factors that they see as being within the individual’s control, such as study effort and ‘attitude’ (xintai 心态). At a broader scale, however, few, if any, of the public possess objective knowledge of the degree of inequality and disparity in the system. Only top-ranking schools self-publish college admissions data. Even well-respected education researchers sitting on national advisory committees cannot access detailed data broken down by subregion or school. Such researchers state that officialdom censors this information to dampen debate over social inequality.18 As the above-mentioned education official put it to me, publishing these numbers would only ‘take away people’s hope’. In this official’s view, such a disclosure would merely ‘exacerbate the unfair trend’, since parents would feel even more passionate about securing, by hook or crook, admission for their children to top schools. I propose that such censorship is effective in distorting people’s views of opportunity in part because the resulting picture of reality more closely conforms with their ideals of diligence and quality. Nonetheless, many of my interlocutors deem the contradictions of the system to be glaring. As I note above, therefore, just as faith in moon-block divination requires suspension of disbelief, acceptance of examination results requires some degree of self-deception. This self-deception proceeds in different ways for successful and unsuccessful candidates. On the one hand, those who do well on the examination naturally tend to recognize its authority because the examination has recognized their merit (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). For example, focus groups of recent examinees at top-tier Xiamen University muscularly contended that Gaokao scores derive ‘20 per cent from social factors, 80 per cent from individual factors’ – a view that many of my rural students in ‘garbage classes’ contested. From positions lower on the central-place and school-ranking hierarchies, it is generally easier to see that human and social resources concentrate themselves in hierarchically advantaged positions. From the peripheral vantage, the notion that reward reciprocates effort thus appears relatively empty. However, even for socially advantaged examinees, success requires great diligence and composure. Well-qualified examinees can ‘choke’ (kaoza 考砸) on test day while so-called ‘dark horses’ (heima 黑马) may become ‘examination heroes’ (kaoshi yingxiong 考试英语). Therefore, those who fail to fulfil their hopes for examination success tend to blame their own lack of diligence or ‘psychological quality’.19 In other words, the examination experience generates theodicies of the gap between expectation and experience (Sangren 2012). As one teacher said, the exam provides occasion both for families and for schools to dispel fantasy and come to terms with reality.

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Yet the fear that fairness is empty – that the test merely reproduces social inequality – haunts the examination. As I suggest above, this fear feeds examination fever. Unable to accept their results, many candidates – particularly of rural origin – repeat the exam for years in a row. Examinees also fret about the many haphazard factors that affect outcome, including, as I note above, weather, health, and guesswork. Finally, little mistakes have big effects. As one student put it, ‘If your hand slips, you lose five points, and your whole fate [ming 命] is different’. This precariousness of the examination experience leads many candidates to appeal in the last analysis to transcendent categories such as ‘fate’, ‘luck’ (yunqi 运气), divine intervention, and notions of karmic merit (gongde 功德; renpin 人品) to square the unequal account between effort/quality and reward. In consonance with these beliefs, not only parents and students but also teachers and administrators conduct pilgrimages to pray for success on the Gaokao at local temples – significant among them the temple to Wenchang (文昌), the god of examinations and scholars. High-ranking high schools officially organize these trips, hiring tour busses for the occasion. Because such activity is inconsistent with official secular ideology, participants keep these pilgrimages carefully confined to the institutional backstage. These conflicting demands of official secular ideology and pious belief, public relations and prayer, sometimes result in great contortions of impression management. When a student committed suicide at one rural school, administrators closed the school the next day, inviting a ritual specialist (daoshi 道士) to conduct an exorcism. To justify the closure, the school announced that it was conducting disinfection following a flu outbreak – a fabrication that presumably suggested itself because of the close metaphorical association of spiritual and biological forms of contagion. Such engagement with divinity through ritual and prayer helps people make sense of fateful events such as examinations (Sangren 2000). However, appealing to divinity is not strictly a comforting experience. One can blame bad scores on ritual failure just as easily as one can attribute success to divine assistance. For example, one teacher worried that her class performed suboptimally because she participated in an official school pilgrimage during her menses, which is considered ritually polluting. More fundamentally, people’s appeals to the divine point towards their failure to square the account of effort/quality and reward in rational terms. Indexing this inherent lack or emptiness in the calculating apparatus of the examination, notions of fate, karmic merit, and divine power possess intrinsic volatility. Although such notions may provide subjects with cognitive coherence, they may also form objects of obsessive fascination, potentially leading to possession, madness, and rebellion (Siegel 2006). In both historical and contemporary times, heterodox religious sects bent on rebellion and revolution have drawn charismatic leaders from the ranks of failed examination candidates who – no longer captivated by orthodox instituted fantasy – claim to be possessed by divine powers that are dedicated to instituting new social arrangements (Dunn 2009; Weller 1994).20

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Conclusion: Emptiness in Fullness There is ‘emptiness in fullness, and fullness in emptiness’ (xu zhong you shi, shi zhong you xu 虚中有实，实中有实), the philosophical adage goes. As some informants said of the tension between the empty and the full, ‘Chinese people live a very split existence’ (huo de hen fenlie 活得很分裂). One teacher remarked, ‘I feel like I am always pacing back and forth between ideal and reality’. Notions of diligence and quality, fate and luck represent attempts to bridge this gap. However, such notions index emptiness and contradiction in social arrangements even as they provide some measure of meaning and coherence. As the proverb says, ‘Every medicine contains some poison’ (shi yao san fen du 是药三分毒). The feverish repetition of examination ritual props up the legitimacy of a ‘deserving’ elite even as this repetition never quite erases the trace of that elite’s historical contingency. Indeed, many Chinese worry that the ascetic, repetitive focus on examinations that they identify as ‘full’ and ‘real’ in the Chinese education system – its examination fever – renders the system ‘empty’ and ‘hollow’ on the whole. Yet from Shanghai and other front-stage places, China broadcasts a picture of educational success to an outside world that is seemingly eager to consume such images.21 By contrast, people at my field sites felt deep disillusionment with this overwhelming emphasis on tests and memorization. Without doubt this disillusionment contributes to the great upsurge in Chinese seeking education in the West, where they generally believe schooling to be comparably ‘practical’, ‘down-to-earth’, and ‘real’.22 Such feelings were given expression by the above-mentioned rural principal, Mr Gu, who sent his own daughter to study in the United States. Evoking the spectre of a nation growing anaemic from the emptiness of its youth, he compared Chinese educational practices to the techniques of profit-hungry farmers who grow chemical-laced produce for consumption in the cities: ‘Our children are like beansprouts grown with hydroponic techniques and artificial nutrients. They grow very quickly, but are poisonous’. And as a teacher responded to the above-described student’s comments on the poison milk of fairness, ‘What really makes you numb [mamu 麻木] is when you know something is poison, but have to eat it anyway’.

Acknowledgements I acknowledge with gratitude the funding provided for this research by a U.S. Department of Education Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Cornell University Einaudi Center for International Studies Travel Grant, and a Mellon Foundation/ IIE Graduate Research Fellowship (awarded to replace the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship following 2011 Congressional budget cuts). I owe a great debt of gratitude to P. Steven Sangren, Magnus Fiskesjö, TJ Hinrichs, Andrew Wilford, Lin Yi, Yuanchong Wang, Jack Meng-Tat Chia, Susanne Bregnbæk,

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Mikkel Bunkenborg, Chris Kai-Jones, and Ting Hui Lau for their suggestions, inspiration, and support. I am profoundly grateful to my friends and contacts in China who facilitated this research and to my students, who taught me so much.

Zachary M. Howlett is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He received his BA from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is currently working on his first book, which is tentatively titled ‘Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Rural Rebellion, Middle-Class Flight, and the National College Entrance Examination in PostMao China’.

Notes   1. Mr Gu, whose name I have changed, is the executive administrator and a founding co-owner of a successful rural private junior high school. Having started life as a factory worker, he himself ‘changed his destiny’ by taking the Gaokao in the mid1980s, after which he worked as a public high-school teacher and administrator for two decades before starting his own school. As a young teacher, he was disciplined for peripheral involvement in the wave of protests that swept the country in 1989. This personal history combined with his long experience in rural education informs his insight into the examination’s significance to rural families.   2. Kipnis (2011) and Yu and Suen (2005) discuss this obsession with exams in terms of China’s contemporary and historical ‘education fever’. Contemporary popular discourse sometimes refers to this phenomenon as ‘Gaokao fever’ (Gaokao re 高 考热). Palmer (2007: 21–22) also provides a useful discussion of the use of ‘fever’ (re) to characterize Chinese social movements.   3. To protect the confidentiality of my informants, I have changed the names of the latter two field sites.   4. Milk producers concealed the widespread practice of diluting milk with water by adding melamine, a poisonous chemical that simulates protein (Xiu and Klein 2010). My analysis of China’s examination fever draws inspiration from Derrida’s notion of ‘archive fever’ (Derrida 1996) and his discussion of writing as Pharmakon (in this case, figured as examination ritual) that ambivalently constitutes both poison and remedy (Derrida 1981).   5. Luhmann (1969) similarly observes that procedural legitimacy in judicial process rests on indeterminacy of outcome.   6. Most observers have described this disconnect between education for quality and test-oriented education in Chinese education – among them Dello-Iacovo (2009), Kipnis (2011), Woronov (2008), and Wu (2012).  7. Similarly, Harrell (1985), Kipnis (2011) and Miyazaki (1981) examine the deep roots of meritocratic striving in Chinese culture more generally and in examinations more specifically.   8. Kipnis (2001, 2011) describes resistances to study reduction.

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 9. Wu (2012: 661) similarly describes how ‘the everyday practices of the teachers and students fabricate a “successful” front of reform despite hidden contradictions backstage’. 10. Kipnis (2008) provides a useful discussion of Chinese audit culture. 11. This distinction often figures as the difference between ‘gift exchange’ and ‘commodity exchange’, or ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ society. My own analysis draws inspiration from Xiaotong Fei’s (1992 [1947]) distinction between ‘differential’ and ‘organizational’ modes of association. 12. Thus actors do not merely objectify (Bourdieu 1977) modern/traditional distinctions but also perform them (Wilkerson 2012). For a similar analysis, see also Schein (1999). 13. Anagnost (1997) similarly suggests that the urbanized elite positions itself as more modern and Westernized vis-à-vis a rural poor, which haunts the elite as an undeveloped national past that it desires to transcend. 14. Summarizing relevant literature, Lin Yi (2011) terms these three groups the ‘cadre-capitalist class’, ‘the middle class’ and ‘the dispossessed’. 15. However, scepticism about the Gaokao is growing. The dispossessed drop out to work (H. Yi et al. 2012), the middle class to pursue study abroad (see discussion below). 16. The examination thus provides a partial antidote to widespread existential disaffection over the perceived moral and spiritual vacuum of contemporary society – a vacuum that drives many to seek meaning and solace in religion (see Bregnbæk, this volume). In other words, the examination partially sates people’s desires for justice, salvation, and moral legitimacy – desires that undergird their striving for social mobility. 17. Only keypoint schools make such statistics generally available (see below). I gathered these figures from teachers and administrators. I believe them to be relatively free of backstage manipulation. 18. Of course the use of statistics to stage modernization occurs in many areas ranging, for example, from economic development (Huang 2008) to compulsory education fulfilment (H. Yi et al. 2012). 19. Anagnost (2004), Murphy (2004), and H. Yan (2003) among others similarly argue that quality discourse helps legitimate social inequality. 20. Inspired by visions that he was Jesus’ little brother, failed civil-examination candidate Hong Xiuquan started the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) (Weller 1994). The Rebellion led to a civil war that engulfed China and later inspired Mao Zedong. In contemporary times, a failed Gaokao candidate – similarly possessed of charismatic visions – has been worshipped as the ‘Female Christ’ by Eastern Lightning (Dunn 2009). This rebellious ‘heterodox cult’ (xiejiao 邪教) was subject to a widespread crackdown during my fieldwork. 21. See Loveless (2014) on the recent controversy surrounding Shanghai’s internationally publicized performance on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examinations. 22. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), the number of Chinese students studying in the United States has nearly doubled from 127,628 in 2009/10 to 235,597 in 2012/13. See http://www.iie.org/research-and-publications/opendoors (accessed 29 April 2014).

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Hartwell, R.M. 1982. ‘Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 7501550’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42(2): 365–442. Huang, Y. 2008. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, S.M. and P.A. Kuhn. 1978. ‘Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion’, in D.C. Twitchett and J.K. Fairbank (eds), Cambridge History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107–62. Jordan, D.K. 1982. ‘Taiwanese Poe Divination: Statistical Awareness and Religious Belief’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21(2): 114–18. Kipnis, A.B. 1997. Producing Guanxi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2001. ‘The Disturbing Educational Discipline of “Peasants”’, China Journal 46 (July): 1–24. ———. 2006. ‘Suzhi: A Keyword Approach’, China Quarterly 186: 295–313. ———. 2008. ‘Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?’ American Ethnologist 35(2): 275–89. ———. 2011. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loveless, T. 2014. ‘Lessons from the PISA-Shanghai Controversy’, The Brookings Institution. Retrieved 29 April 2014 from http://www.brookings.edu/research/ reports/2014/03/18-pisa-shanghai-loveless Luhmann, N. 1969. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand. Miyazaki, I. 1981. China’s Examination Hell, trans. C. Schirokauer. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Murphy, R. 2004. ‘Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: “Population Quality” Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education’, The China Quarterly 177: 1. Palmer, D.A. 2007. Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Sangren, P.S. 2000. Chinese Sociologics. London: Athlone. ———. 2010. ‘Lessons for General Social Theory in the Legacy of G. William Skinner from the Perspectives of Gregory Bateson and Terence Turner’, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 8(1): 47–64. ———. 2012. ‘Fate, Agency, and the Economy of Desire in Chinese Ritual and Society’, Social Analysis 56(2): 117–35. ———. 2013. ‘The Chinese Family as Instituted Fantasy: Or, Rescuing Kinship Imaginaries from the “Symbolic”’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(2): 279–99. Schein, L. 1999. ‘Performing Modernity’, Cultural Anthropology 14(3): 361–95. Siegel, J.T. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Skinner, G.W. 1964. ‘Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China’, Journal of Asian Studies Parts I-III(24): 3–43; 195–228; 363–99. Teng, S. 1943. ‘Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7(4): 267–312. Wang, X., C. Liu, L. Zhang, Y. Shi and S. Rozelle. 2013. ‘College is a Rich, Han, Urban, Male Club: Research Notes from a Census Survey of Four Tier One Colleges in China’, The China Quarterly 214 (June): 456–70. Weller, R.P. 1994. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wilkerson, J. 2012. ‘Performance as a Mechanism for Social Change’, in Modalities of Change: The Interface of Tradition and Modernity in East Asia. New York: Berghahn, pp. 225–40.

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Woodside, A. 2006. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woronov, T.E. 2008. ‘Raising Quality, Fostering “Creativity”: Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(4): 401–22. Wu, J. 2012. ‘Governing Suzhi and Curriculum Reform in Rural Ethnic China: Viewpoints From the Miao and Dong Communities in Qiandongnan’, Curriculum Inquiry 42(5): 652–81. Xiu, C. and K.K. Klein. 2010. ‘Melamine in Milk Products in China: Examining the Factors that Led to Deliberate Use of the Contaminant’, Food Policy 35(5): 463–70. Yan, H. 2003. ‘Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks’, Cultural Anthropology 18(4): 493–523. Yan, Y. 1996. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yang, Dongping 杨东平. 2006. Zhongguo jiaoyu gongping de lixiang yu xianshi 中国教 育公平的理想与现实 [Chinese Educational Fairness: Ideals and Realities]. Beijing: Peking University Press. Yang, M.M. 1994. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yeung, W-J. J. 2013. ‘Higher Education Expansion and Social Stratification in China’, Chinese Sociological Review 45(4): 54–80. Yi, H., L. Zhang, R. Luo, Y. Shi, D. Mo, X. Chen, C. Brinton and S. Rozelle. 2012. ‘Dropping Out: Why are Students Leaving Junior High in China’s Poor Rural Areas?’ International Journal of Educational Development 32(4): 555–63. Yi, L. 2011. ‘Turning Rurality into Modernity: Suzhi Education in a Suburban Public School of Migrant Children in Xiamen’, The China Quarterly 206: 313–30. Yu, L. and H.K. Suen. 2005. ‘Historical and Contemporary Exam-Driven Education Fever in China’, KEDI Journal of Educational Policy 2(1): 17–33. Zheng, Ruoling郑若羚. 2011. Gaokao gaige kunjing yu tupo 高考改革困境与突破 [Difficulties and Breakthroughs in the Reform of the Gaokao]. Yangzhou, China: Jiangsu Education Publishing House.

JK Chapter 2

Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse and the Ritual Production of Political Compliance Anders Sybrandt Hansen

1 October 2009 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and sixty years of rule for the Communist Party of China (CPC). In celebration of the occasion, the day was reserved for a military parade, a mass pageant and finally an evening gala on Tiananmen Square. The centrepiece of the event, involving a total of 200,000 participants, was former Secretary General Hu Jintao’s address to the nation held from atop Tiananmen following his review of the troops amassed alongside Chang’an Avenue. I was in Beijing researching the reception of CPC discourse among university students, only to find that from among the students I talked to and interviewed, many of whom had participated in the mass pageant, not one could bring to mind anything the former Secretary General had actually said. Some seemed slightly uncomfortable with this, and one student told me that a fellow student had told her that what had made the deepest impression on her was what Hu Jintao had said regarding Taiwan. And though this word was not actually uttered, Taiwan was alluded to in the speech by way of phrases such as ‘cross-strait relationships’ and ‘peaceful reunification’. Other students, however, confided to me that they really did not pay much attention when leaders spoke. Yan Qiang,1 who studied at China University of Mining and Technology, put it this way: ‘We hear Notes for this chapter begin on page 48.

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this kind of talk (zhe zhong hua 这种话) all the time, but we do not care at all. Say whatever you like. If there is an assembly, for example, you just be on top saying yours and I will be down here thinking mine’. In Qiang’s account, the official message was little more than empty words. How should we understand this coincidence of ritual participation in support of the political order with disinterest in the contents of political discourse?2 In the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, an individual’s ideological becoming takes place through the discourse of others. It happens through the immersion in and appropriation of words that are already overpopulated with the intensions of others. This process, he argued, is frequently characterized by a struggle between internally persuasive discourse and the voice of authoritative discourse that demands that we acknowledge it ‘quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused into it’ (Bakhtin 1981: 342; cf. Vološinov 1973). Bakhtin emphasized the dialogic nature of all discourse. But as Matt Tomlinson argues, the fact that a truly monologic discourse is never wholly achievable does not preclude people from trying to achieve one, especially when speaking on the behalf of a god, history or the people (Tomlinson 2013). Authoritative discourse rarely expects a response and can be said to tend towards monologue to the extent that it compels silence in place of response. In this chapter I conceptualize official CPC language as an instance of authoritative discourse and discuss its reception among a number of less than wholly persuaded university students in Beijing. The word of choice among Beijing students for the kind of talk Yan Qiang referred to above was guanhua 官话. Historically this term means simply ‘Mandarin’, the shared administrative language of Qing Dynasty officials (as opposed to Putonghua, the national standard language institutionalized in the PRC in the 1950s). In the students’ use, however, the meaning of guanhua was closer to its literal English rendition as ‘official-speak’. Their choice of this term is instructive in two ways. When choosing it, the speaker both designates a sociolect (official-speak is the language of party-state officials) and suggests a negative evaluation of this sociolect. Why this is the case becomes clear once we look at the historical connotations suggested by the character guan 官. In contemporary China, as Stig Thøgersen reminds us, party-state representatives may be called cadres (ganbu 干部), public servants (gongwuyuan 公务员), officials (guanyuan 官员) and office holders (dangguande 当官的), while the general population may be called the masses (qunzhong 群众), citizens (gongmin 公民) or common people (laobaixing 老百 姓) (Thøgersen 2006: 117–118). These are not neutral terms; they belong to the vocabularies of different social groups and carry the ‘taste’ of different professions, generations, political inclinations and worldviews (Bakhtin 1981: 293). Accordingly, the term dangguande practically always suggests negative connotations and cadres rarely use it. The reason for this, Thøgersen continues, is that the character guan points backwards in time to the dubious public administration of the late Qing and the pre-1949 Nationalist government, making dangguande the obvious choice for expressing that there is nothing new under

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the sun: the common people are still ruled by corrupt officials (Thøgersen 2006: 117). In a similar fashion, guanhua formerly referred to the formalized administrative language of Qing Dynasty officials, which was superseded by the more commonly intelligible vernacular. When Beijing students designate the language of party-state representatives as guanhua, their use mirrors that of dangguande, suggesting that they hold current cadre language to be just as embellished and formal as the original guanhua of dynastic officials. While the production of authoritative discourse in the PRC has been addressed persuasively elsewhere (Anagnost 1997; Bo 2004; Latham 2009; Schoenhals 1992, 2008; Shambaugh 2007), I aim in this chapter to add to our understanding of guanhua by addressing its reception. To this end I rely empirically on my participation in an ideology course at Beijing University that is compulsory throughout all PRC universities, ‘An Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought and the Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’; on formal interviews with fifteen students from four different Beijing universities; and on numerous informal discussions within and outside this group carried out through ten months of fieldwork in 2009 and 2010. In the following I briefly present Michael Schoenhals’ (1992) discussion of formalized language as a form of power in the PRC. I then turn to the matter of reception and the question of whether authoritative discourse in fact produces those effects it is presumed to aim for. I here show that my informants frequently approached authoritative discourse as little more than empty words. Not only did they describe it as formulaic, repetitive and pointless, they would at times completely ignore its contents and interpret it indexically as meaning simply ‘the party is speaking’. Drawing on Alexei Yurchak’s (2006) discussions of late Soviet ideology, I finally consider the performance of guanhua in its full social context of political ritual and argue that such rituals bolster political compliance even when their contents fail to persuade.

Doing Things to Words in Order to Do Things with Words Michael Schoenhals’ 1992 Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics is a seminal work with regards to CPC language use. In this book Schoenhals follows Austin in regarding language as not just a vehicle of meaning but also a means of creating a certain social reality. The key to understanding official CPC discourse, argues Schoenhals, is to grasp this intra-party conviction that words allow you to do things (Schoenhals 1992; cf. Anagnost 1997; Austin 1975; Woolard 1998). I should note here that when dealing with guanhua, we are rarely dealing with true performatives in Austin’s sense. This is the case because the enunciating subject is generally omitted in guanhua. For example, instead of saying ‘I (hereby) declare that the socialist market economy is a way of sustaining socialism’, the lecturer teaching the ideology course at Beijing University said simply ‘the socialist market economy is a way of sustaining socialism’. This makes for the curious situation of statements that look like constatives (in Austin’s terminology), which would make them amenable to

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a test of truth or falsity, but which appear to be intended as performatives.3 That is to say, statements that appear to aim to make what they state seem unquestionably the case for their addressees without calling direct attention to this performative intention. This reading helps us understand the ongoing preoccupation with defining formulations in terms of correctness or incorrectness. The CPC criterion for judging the correctness of a formulation, writes Schoenhals, is whether it is scientific, but, he continues: ‘The use of a “scientific” criterion is somewhat misleading in the sense that what is being judged is not the scientific verifiability or truthfulness of a formulation but its political utility. A formulation used to produce a certain effect upon feelings, thoughts or actions of the target audience is regarded as scientific if the effect is indeed forthcoming. ‘“Science” is what appears to work’ (Schoenhals 1992: 9–10). This concern with the expected outcomes of using specific formulations also allows for the meaning and implications of earlier formulations within the vocabulary of authoritative discourse to be continuously readjusted (Bichler 1996; Dynon 2008; Schoenhals 1986; 1992). With Alexei Yurchak’s terms, we may consequently find two particular practices taking place simultaneously in the production of guanhua: both a hypernormalization of discourse and heteronymous shifts in the meaning of single terms (Boyer and Yurchak 2010; Yurchak 2006). This is to say that party discourse, on the one hand, is highly formalized, self-referential and closed off from outside influence. On the other hand, however, the party reserves the right to revise the meaning of former concepts without altering the authority of these concepts. Regardless of apparent diachronic inconsistencies and ideational incoherencies in party discourse, current policy is thus invariably presented as both correct and fundamentally in line with earlier convictions. Let me suggest by way of an example that authoritative discourse still appears willing to sacrifice ideational coherence and diachronic consistency when this is held to be expedient in pursuit of present objectives. This may be illustrated by the entry of ‘the important thought of the three represents’ into the existing repertoire of authoritative concepts. This concept, originating with Jiang Zemin, makes separate mention of the interests of advanced productive forces (the first of three factors represented by the party according to ‘three represents’ thought) and advanced culture (the second) as distinct from those of the majority of Chinese (the third), and it served as the theoretical underpinning of the shift towards the new middle and upper classes in party recruitment strategies. The political objective of this concept, in short, was to authorize party recruitment of capitalist entrepreneurs, and it therefore signalled a considerable departure from socialist ideology for political observers. However, former Secretary General Hu Jintao authorized the concept precisely with reference to the thought of his socialist predecessors. During the 2003 Central Party symposium devoted to studying the concept, the former Secretary General stressed that ‘the important thought of “the three represents” derives from the same origin as Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong thought and Deng Xiaoping theory’.4 This was a case of Hu Jintao proclaiming loyalty to

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his immediate predecessor, Jiang Zemin. But of more immediate concern is the fact that the concept of ‘the three represents’ was here authorized by asserting its fidelity to already authoritative concepts, regardless of disagreement in terms of ideational content. The correct use of statements such as the above is a necessary skill for the representatives of the party-state. It requires a certain ‘ideological literacy’ (Yurchak 2006), which is to say, the ability to reproduce the precise form of current authoritative discourse. In The Good Communist Frank Pieke has shown how ideological literacy is today acquired through the party school system. During cadre training, writes Pieke, discussions about the truth or falsehood of the contents of party theory are beside the point. What cadres must acquire is, rather, a level of familiarity with the currently authoritative formulations sufficient for them to reproduce the kind of language that is expected of them in their jobs (Pieke 2009: 33). Now, one may reasonably ask if this is not simply what political rhetoric is about: choosing terminology that speaks to ones benefit while navigating popular opinion and demands for growth and redistribution. This may well be the case, but an important distinction between CPC rhetoric and political rhetoric in multiparty states is that in the single-party state no alternative political entity is legally entitled to seize the party’s words, convert them, and use them against the party (for example, by calling conservatism that which authoritative discourse calls stability). This is not to say that authoritative discourse is hegemonic, far from it. In private conversations and on the Internet a cynical distance from the truth claims of authoritative discourse is widespread, and critiques, parodies and satirical reversals are plentiful (Gong and Yang 2010; Hansen 2013; Latham 2009; Steinmüller 2011, 2014; Thornton 2002; Warner 2013). Authoritative discourse nonetheless remains largely unchallenged in public. This is in no small part because it is still hazardous to publicly oppose the party line as was amply demonstrated by the number of pre-emptory arrests made in Beijing in the wake of the North African Jasmine Revolutions in the spring of 2011. The insistence on safeguarding the single-party system notwithstanding, it is clear that the officially endorsed terminology for talking politics has changed through time alongside the CPC. Despite these shifts in official vocabulary, the party remains in power, and we may trace various claims to legitimacy in the course of its history. Because of such fluctuations it has been frequently noted that today the CPC appears as an ‘un-ideological’ institution struggling to persuade of its necessity (Hughes 2006; Thøgersen 2003; Wang 2006; Zhang 2000). The chief constant in authoritative discourse consequently seems to be the party and its correctness, even though this correctness is asserted through shifting claims to legitimacy. The party-state has reserved itself the right to promote a number of disparate ideas diachronically, while brooking little opposition synchronically to the concepts that are held to be correct at each point in history.

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The Less than Wholly Persuaded Beijing students encounter guanhua on a daily basis. In this section I discuss their reception of three particular forms: slogan posters, compulsory ideology lectures and the public speeches of the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC. More specifically, I present and discuss my informants’ critical responses to authoritative discourse: they often derided guanhua as empty and disengaging. Such critical responses were not universal, and I do not claim that they are representative of the viewpoints of Beijing students in general. The student accounts I present below offer something else. They offer an insight into how authoritative discourse is currently experienced by the less than wholly persuaded. Let us return to Yan Qiang, the student mentioned in the introduction. Qiang argued that no one was willing to listen to guanhua because each slogan was repeated ad nauseam, and ‘once you get the bureaucratic tone (guanqiang 官腔) going, it is neither persuasive nor something anyone is really willing to listen to’. ‘When there’s a rally’, he continued ‘you know for sure that there is going to be a speech. Furthermore, you know for sure that this speech is going to be the same old tune all over again (laodiao chongtan 老调重弹)’. Qiang added that in fact he had told a fellow student as much just prior to Hu Jintao’s anniversary speech, and, as expected, it had turned out to be nothing but guanhua. When I asked him what sort of impression he thought such speeches left people, he laughed and said he did not know, ‘because we are all really apathetic’. Another student who partook in the anniversary mass pageant, Li Rongrong, explained that as far as she was concerned, PRC leaders’ speeches lacked any appeal. She elaborated by comparing their speeches to those of U.S. presidents Bush and Obama: ‘These American Presidents, they are politicians as well, and sometimes they waver. That is, sometimes they speak rubbish, but they are enthusiastic. They are engaging in an exchange’. What about PRC leaders then? They lack enthusiasm because they are not speaking from their hearts, she argued: ‘Who listens? Only other politicians can bear listening to it. Do you know what keeps them busy before an assembly?’ she asked rhetorically, ‘learning manuscripts by heart’. Ren Zhen, who studied at Beijing Language and Culture University, similarly told me that whereas her participation in the anniversary parade had moved her emotionally, the TV hosts who did the anniversary broadcast had frustrated her. ‘Sometimes they just speak too much’, she complained, ‘simply paying attention to the sound of the marching steps gives you a really majestic feeling. You really don’t need someone saying this is so-and-so’. During an earlier conversation, Zhen had told me that she could not stand listening to guanhua: ‘You know China loves having an assembly (Zhongguo ai kaihui 中国爱开会). Only nothing ever comes from these assemblies, only a lot of people speaking this meaningless language, wasting people’s time’. Similarly, her frustration with the TV transmission sprang from the contextualization offered by the hosts, who constantly guided her reflection towards guanhua

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references, informing her of the authoritative interpretation of sounds and images that had already occasioned a more immediate emotional response. Student disregard for authoritative discourse was not limited to such high profile events. I found a similar disinterest on display among the students participating in the compulsory ideology course at Beijing University (see also Howlett’s chapter in this volume for a wider discussion of the role of ‘empty’ performances within the PRC education system). As a rule, of the approximately 150 people attending the course, only ten or twelve of us paid attention to the lectures, whereas the vast majority visibly prepared for other courses or surfed the Internet. One of the students put the situation to me in this way: ‘It looks as if you are the only one paying serious attention’. Wang Yifan, who studied at Beijing University, shed some light on the frustrations with the ideology course. These lectures intended for third-year bachelor students, he explained, were not the first compulsory lectures on socialism with Chinese characteristics the students had heard. Before this course were other compulsory university courses, and before those were similar classes in high school, middle school and primary school, covering such aspects of life as patriotism and moral thought. According to Yifan, these compulsory courses should all be counted under the label of ‘political correctness classes’. And the current course on the theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics was to him simply a marginal addition to things he had already been told a number of times, only this time on a slightly more abstract theoretical level: ‘These things, they coil around our ears from the time we were kids’. When I asked Yifan why he thought the course was compulsory, he told me that ‘everybody knows it is meant to impart ideology, and most teachers stick to orthodoxy, empty talk and dogma’. Explaining why she thought no one in her class had paid attention to the compulsory course on socialism with Chinese characteristics, Zhang Feiyan, a recent graduate from Beijing Foreign Studies University, likewise presented four rather frank reasons: (1) It is guanhua, (2) It is irrelevant to your life, (3) There are no political alternatives, so why care about politics? (4) It is the party speaking. What these voices share is dissociation from authoritative discourse. It is also worth noting that they were in accord in regarding their sentiments as more or less universal among students. Of course, this in no way establishes that such sentiments are universal, but it does indicate that students who find guanhua unpersuasive do not see themselves as alone in holding this opinion. Guanhua does not engage you in an exchange, Li Rongrong complained, while Ren Zhen called it meaningless. As shown above, Yan Qiang added to this by protesting its bureaucratic tone, while Wang Yifan bemoaned its dogmatic repetition.5 Li Rongrong’s critique is illuminating because it points to the monologic tendency of guanhua. To the extent that the speaker presumes to already speak on the behalf of the addressee, no response is expected and no exchange can take place. As a consequence guanhua may estrange its audience to the extent that even those who agree fully that the party holds legitimate authority to speak

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on their behalf sometimes feel challenged by having to listen to it. This was indicated by a situation in which I asked Yan Qiang to elaborate on guanhua while we were in the company of his peer Li Kai. Qiang proceeded to revise his earlier account, explaining that he had not actually been talking about the language of the party centre, only about that of local-level cadres. There can be a number of reasons why Qiang was reluctant to enter into this discussion at that time, but since I had already done an interview with Li Kai in which he had expressed rather official-sounding views, this suggested that Qiang’s ideas about Kai’s views might be what made him revise his earlier account. In any event, Kai, to my surprise, came to Qiang’s assistance, conceding by analogy that listening to this kind of talk was ‘like having a teacher who is always right, and sometimes, even when you know he is right, you just do not want to listen’. Zhang Feiyan’s critique takes us one step further by implying an indexical reading of authoritative discourse. When she argued that students disregard lectures on socialism with Chinese characteristics because it is guanhua, and because it is the party speaking, she hinted at something important: because these ideology lectures and political speeches are not felt to invite any form of response, they end up principally signifying their manner of signification. They come to signify the very existence of guanhua as the officially endorsed medium of political expression. This manner of signification is then interpreted, to borrow Michael Silverstein’s term, ‘meta-culturally’ as an index of the speaking party (Silverstein 2004). For some students this indexical reading evidently operated before and regardless of any evaluation of ideational content. Zhang Feiyan and Yan Qiang both suggested this when they explained that they could immediately identify guanhua by its form, and would then proceed to disregard its content. Feiyan put it this way: ‘If a statement begins with “based on the principles of something-or-other” [shenme shenme 什么什 么], you immediately know it is guanhua and you may ignore it’. To some of my student informants guanhua consequently signified little more than ‘the party is speaking’. But before turning to the political implications of this, let us consider a final medium of guanhua: the slogan poster. While living in the Beijing district of Wudaokou in 2009–2010, I located forty-eight individual sites featuring state-sponsored posters in my immediate neighbourhood. These were to be found within the block encompassing the campuses of Beijing Language and Culture University and China University of Mining and Technology. The contents of state-sponsored posters in the area were not limited to slogans; they publicly announced legislative changes in such fields as retirement benefits and migrant labour regulations, and they addressed public health by suggesting measures against catching the H1N1 flu and by presenting the food pyramid. Public security was also in focus, with posters suggesting how to avoid various kinds of fraud, and, in the months preceding Chinese New Year, information on the safe handling of fireworks. More numerous, however, were the slogan posters, the conventional form of which is a horizontal white-on-red banner. When I discussed guanhua with Zhang Feiyan, she said it would be easier if we had an example to consider. I therefore suggested this slogan displayed

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on a banner suspended above the front gate to the main building of Beijing Language and Culture University: ‘Construct a modern socialist country that is prosperous and strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious’ (Jianshe fuqiang minzhu wenming hexie de shezhuyi xiandaihua guojia 建设富强民主 文明和谐的社会主义现代化国家). Agreeing that this was typical guanhua, Feiyan pointed out that the excessive accumulation of attributives (adjectival and nominal qualifiers) was an obvious departure from ‘ordinary’ Chinese language. The formulation uses fifteen characters out of twenty to qualify the object ‘country’, to which the verb ‘construct’ is directed. The sentence would therefore be something of a syntactic curiosity if this kind of overloading of qualifiers was not so typical of guanhua. Syntactically, the slogan must be regarded as a verbal predicate lacking a grammatical subject; semantically, it urges its addressee to action, and for these reasons it should be translated to the imperative mood. Since the slogan presents no argument, it cannot persuade its addressee and must instead be read as an injunction, but as an injunction that borders on the nonsensical. How could the reader ever hope to satisfy it? What would the slogan actually have you do (in order to construct a modern socialist country that is prosperous and strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious?). The analytical difficulty with such slogans is that it appears impossible to satisfy their ostensive intent. Unsurprisingly, the reactions of the students I talked to were quite different from those the slogans appeared to aim for when read literally. One of the student presentations I observed following lectures at Beijing University was, precisely, a critical look at ‘slogan culture’. The student doing the presentation, Guo Xiaonuo, told us that as she was looking into the phenomenon she realized that: ‘It is really very curious, for we see these slogans every day, but we do not seem to pay attention to what they are actually saying’. ‘For example’, she asked us, ‘how many slogans can you recall?’ If anything, slogans simply left her uncomfortable, she told us, and presented a number of examples from electronic slides, reaping laughter for one satirical slide interposed between the others. In the iconic heroic socialist style, the slide featured a soldier, a worker and a peasant, each with one outstretched hand, accompanied by the mock slogan: ‘Comrades, remember to flush!’ This satirical aside led us to the central point of her presentation; that slogans have turned into empty catchphrases. They do not disseminate knowledge, Xiaonuo argued, and should therefore be regarded ‘as a form of visual pollution [shijue wuran 视觉污染]; the result of a policy to “dumb people down” [yumin zhengce 愚民政策]’. While this argument on her part struck me as perilously bordering the unsuitable, Xiaonuo skilfully concluded her criticism on the more edifying note that we should uncover new methods for propagating government announcements to replace the slogan poster.6 These new methods, she argued, ought to be less wasteful of resources and more in line with the concept of ‘putting people first’ (yi ren wei ben 以人为本). And by way of this concept currently promoted by the CPC, she demonstrated her ideological literacy. It allowed her to frame her critique as if the issue with the practice of slogan posters was that

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they departed from correct CPC ideology. This was almost invariably the edifying note that critical presentations would end on, a note that allowed students to stay within the permissible by turning currently authoritative party concepts to their own uses.

Claiming Space for Authoritative Discourse Even though the faithful reproduction of authoritative discourse is a serious matter for party-state representatives, and though it generally manages to hold the floor during public performances, it seemed curiously futile in the accounts of my student informants. It was unpersuasive; it was irrelevant to your life; it was empty and meaningless, they variously claimed. We should therefore join Austin in asking: can saying make it so? Performative language leans upon extralinguistic factors for its force, and Austin consequently cautioned us to consider the total speech situation in which performative language succeeds or fails in performing effects (Austin 1975: 7, 14–15, 139). In the below I place the performance of guanhua in its social context of political ritual and argue that guanhua rituals may in fact bolster political compliance even when the people involved have reservations about the choreography of social reality that takes place in these rituals. The mass pageant of the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC involved the participation of tens of thousands of university student volunteers. Following the morning military review, students from various Beijing universities marched past Tiananmen in thirty-six civilian formations grouped around parade floats. Preparations for the march included several weeks of training over the summer, a period when students would ordinarily leave university campuses for their homes or find short-term jobs in the city. ‘If I had had the choice, I would not have participated’, Li Rongrong told me, when I asked her to compare her experiences as a parade volunteer with another of her volunteer experiences. Now, although the term ‘volunteer’ (zhiyuanzhe 志愿者) was the standard term for participants, I had another four reports of ‘compulsory volunteering’ from students at two universities.7 Adding to the confusion, participating students received two points of academic credit as well as a monetary reimbursement in the range of RMB 700 (approximately US$100) for their efforts, which led to some consternation among students at China University of Mining and Technology, as rumour had it that students at other universities were receiving larger reimbursements. A similar case of in-some-cases-compulsory volunteering held for the colossal number of security volunteers that appeared in the city in the weeks preceding 1 October. For example, a friend reported that he arrived in his central Beijing shop one morning to find that he had been issued red security volunteer armbands without any prior contact by the local party committee. These are truly performative language practices that choreograph social reality through acts of naming. However, we encounter again the analytical difficulty that the addressees of performative language dissociate from the version of reality that is choreographed by way of this language. This was the

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case, as mentioned above, with Ren Zhen when she complained about the TV hosts’ authoritative reading of the anniversary parade, and she was not alone with this ambivalence. While several students told me they were emotionally moved by participating in the parade, and some were roused to tears by singing the national anthem, no one could reproduce anything from the centrepiece presidential address. A clear tension could be found between the emotional dimension of ritual participation and the disinterest in the official message of the anniversary celebration. In Ritual and its Consequences, Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon argue that ritual is an invitation to illusion. It invites to a shared subjunctive as-if order that always exists in tension with the surrounding non-ritual world (Seligman et al. 2008). Here I cannot fully explore how this stimulating thesis would play out with regards to political ritual in the single-party state except to say that to my informants the guanhua performances seemed to trivialize the ritual events of the anniversary. Their exposure to the official message did not contribute to, but rather detracted from their immersion in the ritual as-if order. Li Rongrong explained this ambivalence in the following way: ‘We didn’t come to see the leaders. The CPC does not represent China; or well, it may represent China, but the party is by no means equivalent to China. China is my mother country. It is the place I was born and raised’. For Rongrong, then, ‘the party was not really there’ when she celebrated her mother country. For others, catching a smile from famous athlete Liu Xiang, who stood on top of the float of a neighbouring formation, was the climax of their parade participation. In this way the students could dissociate from the official anniversary narrative arranged around the notion of a vanguard or elite party leading China to progress. This reluctance on the part of my informants has a strong parallel in Alexei Yurchak’s discussion of late Soviet political ritual. Following Michael Warner, Yurchak argues that the predominant mode of relating to public speeches in the late Soviet union involved a ‘partial nonidentity with the object of address’ (Warner cited in Yurchak 2006: 117). What he means by this is a sensation that the official message is not actually intended for you; it is not felt to be addressing exactly you, and consequently not felt to really concern you. In the above we have seen a number of examples of this attitude towards authoritative discourse. While several of my informants did not in fact experience themselves as volunteering and were not actually persuaded by the official narrative, this did not, however, show in the TV broadcast of the anniversary parade. When Yan Qiang reacted to political speeches in the mode of ‘you just be on top, saying yours, and I will be down here, thinking mine’, this did not show either. If we may reasonably conjecture that guanhua ritual is (at least partly) intended to demonstrate mass support for the CPC this is highly significant. Let us therefore shift our perspective away from that of the ritual participants and consider the role of the audience. Compulsory lectures, political speeches and public anniversaries are central elements in the official choreography of political reality. And the role reserved

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for the audience present on these occasions is primarily one of affirming the legitimacy of the representatives speaking (cf. Anagnost 1997: 113–114). As an audience to compulsory lectures and political speeches, Beijing students do not have to care what is said, or agree, since they already add to the political ritual by their very presence. Li Rongrong’s account supports this interpretation, as is shown by her description of the attitude of guanhua performers: ‘I’ll just read this aloud to you. I don’t care if you understand it or not, as long as you listen to me’. With this reading, I want to argue that guanhua rituals can reproduce party authority even if the individual student interprets them as empty and pointless, and that they may do so regardless of whether they are considered from a ‘naive’ or a ‘cynical’ angle. In a ‘naive’ reading of guanhua ritual, Beijing students may bolster party authority without personally being persuaded by authoritative discourse. They do this directly if cast by their peers as loyal supporters of the political order; they do it indirectly in the case of a TV audience. In this reading, the mode of reception of the ‘naive’ unpersuaded student would be something like ‘although I am not personally persuaded by what the lecturer tells me (e.g., that the socialist market economy really is a way of sustaining socialism), it seems that the others believe’. And the mode of reception of the ‘naive’ unpersuaded TV viewer would be something like ‘although I do not personally support single-party rule, I can tell from all these volunteers that a lot of people do’. In both cases the ostensible demonstration of mass support bolsters party authority regardless of what the participants actually think about their participation.8 Moreover, guanhua ritual can reinforce political compliance even when it fails to convince its audience of the sincerity of the ritual participants. One of Zhang Feiyan’s four criteria for why people do not pay attention to guanhua suggests this is the case. ‘There are no alternatives, so why care about politics?’ she asked, and thereby pointed to the depoliticizing effects of guanhua ritual. Even in a thoroughly ‘cynical’ reading, guanhua rituals make one thing certain: the party’s practical power to claim discursive and physical space for its voice. This is to say that even if the individual student interprets authoritative discourse in the mode of ‘I am personally unpersuaded (e.g., that ‘three represents’ thought really does reflect the common aspirations of the vast majority of the Chinese people), and nor do I think the others believe this’, an afterthought should be added to this: ‘nevertheless, I can clearly tell that the party is capable of having us feign belief’. This is what a ‘power reading’ of guanhua ritual conveys to the less than wholly persuaded (Barnett 2008).9 To my informants guanhua was rarely persuasive. But it was pervasive, and this very fact demonstrated the seeming inevitability of single-party rule. If nothing else, each instance of guanhua reaffirms the practical political reality of party authority by claiming discursive and physical space for the voice of the party-state. Even after dissolving authoritative discourse into only an index of the party, the political speeches and slogan posters accompanying public life in contemporary China reaffirm this fact for their addressees. For the disenchanted it seems there are no political alternatives, and guanhua only

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repeats the inane impossibility of any other political reality, so why, indeed, care about politics?

Conclusion How does one relate to the official language of a political institution that is without public opposition? To a discourse that presents current policy as invariably both correct and in line with former convictions regardless of apparent diachronic inconsistencies and referential incoherencies? My student informants rarely engaged with the ideational contents of guanhua. They regularly treated authoritative discourse as empty, predictable and lacking in authentic expressivity, and they often appeared to not so much hear what was said as to register it indexically as meaning little more than ‘the party is speaking’. As I was told a number of times by various students that they could not stand listening to guanhua, I eventually asked Zhang Feiyan whether she thought party members were aware of the low esteem guanhua was held in. She had no doubt that this was the case. While she had not joined the party herself, several of her fellow students had, and guanhua was worse on them than on other people, she argued, for they did not just have to listen to it, they also had to speak it. This seemed the case for Ren Zhen, who had been a reluctant party applicant. Despite her disheartened attitude, Zhen’s sustained subjection to authoritative discourse also had a productive facet. She had become ideologically literate by way of the copious theory courses on socialism with Chinese characteristics she had attended throughout her school years. This had taught her acceptable modes of speaking, reading, writing and listening to authoritative discourse, and thereby, in part, paved the way for her party membership and its practical benefits. The longer you attend school, the better you learn to reproduce authoritative discourse in class and in exams, and if you want to engage with the party, for whatever reason, you cannot simply ignore guanhua. You are compelled to produce acceptable performances of ideological support. This is particularly the case if aiming for a career in the state sector and taking part in the civil servant exam. For some students, a level of mastery of authoritative discourse was also productive in critical pursuits. For example, when Guo Xiaonuo addressed slogan posters with the concept of ‘putting people first’ she was putting the concept to her own critical use. However, to the majority of my informants authoritative discourse figured chiefly as an uninspiring and tiresome backdrop accompanying public occasions. That anyone’s world view could really be in authentic accord with that of guanhua seemed so unconvincing to Zhang Feiyan, at any rate, that after helping me transcribe an interview I had done with Li Kai, whose interpretations of events were quite in line with the official account, she was astonished by his answers: ‘His answers are all high and mighty, and of course there may be people who think like this, but they will be few and far between’.

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If authoritative discourse is deprived of its authority, Bakhtin argued, it ceases to move its addressees and becomes like a dead object, a relic, a thing (Bakhtin 1981: 344). It will be treated as empty words. I maintain that this is the case for a number of Chinese students today. When we examine the performance of authoritative discourse in its social context of political ritual we may nonetheless see that it can bring about political effects. This is the case because the ritual context impresses the practical reality of party authority upon its addressees even when the words fail to persuade. Performers of guanhua generally manage to hold the stage and compel silence from their audience for the duration of their performance, and this contextual fact comes to serve as a marker of the party-state’s right to declare. In a power reading of guanhua ritual, what is important is not so much whether the explicit message of a certain choreography of social reality is persuasive, but rather the very fact that this choreography was achieved. This demonstrates the power of its designers and discourages its audience from alternative political engagement. Guanhua ritual in this way bolsters political compliance by reaffirming the seeming inevitability of the current political order.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was made possible by research grants from the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication, the Augustinus Foundation and the Knud Højgaard Foundation. I am indebted to Matt Tomlinson, Keir Martin and Stig Thøgersen for valuable input and suggestions.

Anders Sybrandt Hansen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. His research focuses on contemporary Chinese society and culture. He has written on university students’ engagement with the Communist Party of China, on Chinese migrants’ integration with the global capitalist economy, on Chinese students abroad and on the use of history in contemporary PRC historiography. His publications include ‘The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition’ (2015), ‘Purity and Corruption: Chinese Communist Party Applicants and the Problem of Evil’ (2013) and ‘Learning the Knacks of Actually Existing Capitalism: Young Beijing Migrants and the Problem of Value’ (2012).

Notes 1. This is a pseudonym and I will be using such for all informants referred to in the chapter. 2. If we turn to the study of ritual in late imperial and early modern China for an answer to this question, James Watson has made a case for orthopraxy (as opposed to ortho-

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doxy). According to Watson, the internal states of participants in many traditional rituals were largely irrelevant. Imperial authorities, writes Watson, were content to control and legislate action, not belief: ‘What matters is that the rites are performed according to accepted procedure’ (Watson 1988: 10). Regarded from a structural viewpoint, I similarly argue that the reproductive capacities of political ritual in the contemporary PRC hinge more on the ability to choreograph practice than on the regulation of belief. However, my student informants did not regard the meaning content of the rituals in question with neutral indifference (as Watson (2007) reports was common with his informants). They often reacted with estrangement, frustration and disbelief. I return to this point throughout the chapter to illustrate how the performance of authoritative discourse in certain cases detracts from the ritual immersion of its audience. 3. I am indebted to Matt Tomlinson for this very precise way of phrasing the problem. 4. ‘“Sange Daibiao’ zhongyao sixiang tong Makesi Liening zhuyi, Mao Zedong sixiang he Deng Xiaoping lilun shi yimai xiangcheng’ (‘“三个代表’ 重要思想同马克思列宁 主义、毛泽东思想和邓小平理论是一脉相承”’). Chinese Government news agency, Xinhua, 1 June 2003. Retrieved 27 January 2015 from http://news.xinhuanet.com/ newscenter/2003-07/01/content_948197.htm 5. For a similar assessment of guanhua in a PRC academic journal, see Yan (2010). 6. According to another Beijing University student, Wang Yong, there were subtle limits to what might be said during presentations. ‘It is not clearly stipulated, but you know what is off limits from experience’, he told me, and gave the example that it seemed to be alright to criticize the administrative branch of government but not to criticize the party. In an interview with one of the more inspiring lecturers, Chen Xinmin, I brought up the coexistence of the concept of emancipated thought with subtle practical limits to what is deemed suitable for expression. According to Chen, ‘there are no limits to what university students may look into, and even if their views are not in agreement with those of the Secretary General, there is absolutely no need to worry’. However, he continued, there are regulations on propagation, and you should not propagate your opinions or agitate on unsuitable occasions. 7. Party-initiated voluntary labour has a continuous history in the PRC. It was formerly known as duty work (yiwu laodong 义务劳动) and usually did not involve remuneration (Rolandsen 2010). 8. There is a parallel here to Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian argument that belief ‘works through the other’. By this he means that believing that others genuinely believe is sufficient to produce the same kind of behaviour expected of a genuine believer, with the sociological result that no one has to believe in ideology directly for it to function (Žižek 1997: 42). 9. Robert Barnett uses the term ‘power reading’ to describe the way in which cadre language is scrutinized in the Tibet Autonomous Region with an eye towards discerning the real-world political developments that are forecast by minute changes in otherwise formulaic statements (Barnett 2008). Similarly, the power reading of guanhua ritual undertaken by my informants is concerned more with the very fact of social choreography, its success and pervasiveness, than with the official meaning content that this choreography is held to express.

References Anagnost, A. 1997. National Past-Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barnett, R. 2008. ‘Language and Ethnicity: Cadre-Speak in Contemporary Tibet’, Inner Asia 10: 171–205. Bichler, L. 1996. ‘Coming to Terms with a Term’, in H. Chung (ed.), In the Party Spirit. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 30–43. Bo, Z. 2004. ‘Hu Jintao and the CCP’s Ideology: A Historical Perspective’, Journal of Chinese Political Science 9(2): 27–45. Boyer, D. and A. Yurchak. 2010. ‘American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West’, Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 179–221. Dynon, N. 2008. ‘“Four Civilizations” and the Evolution of Post-Mao Chinese Socialist Ideology’, The China Journal 60: 83–109. Gong, H. and X. Yang. 2010. ‘Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China’, China Information 24(1): 3–26. Hansen, A.S. 2013. ‘Purity and Corruption: Chinese Communist Party Applicants and the Problem of Evil’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78(1): 47–74. Hughes, C. 2006. Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era. London: Routledge. Latham, K. 2009. ‘Media and the Limits of Cynicisms in Postsocialist China’, in H. West and P. Raman (eds), Enduring Socialism. New York: Berghahn, pp. 190–213. Pieke, F. 2009. The Good Communist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rolandsen, U.M.H. 2010. ‘A Collective of Their Own: Young Volunteers on the Fringe of the Party Realm’, in M.H. Hansen and R. Svarverud (eds), The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 132–63. Schoenhals, M. 1986. ‘Original Contradictions: On the Unrevised Text of Mao Zedong’s “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 16: 99–112. ———. 1992. Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics. Berkeley: University of California China Research Monographs. ———. 2008. ‘Abandoned or Merely Lost in Translation?’ Inner Asia 10: 113–30. Seligman, A., R. Weller, M. Puett and B. Simon. 2008. Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shambaugh, D. 2007. ‘China’s Propaganda System’, The China Quarterly 57: 25–58. Silverstein, M. 2004. ‘“Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus’, Current Anthropology 45(5): 621–52. Steinmüller, H. 2011. ‘The State of Irony in China’, Critique of Anthropology 31(1): 21–42. ———. 2014. ‘A Minimal Definition of Cynicism: Everyday Social Criticism and Some Meanings of “Life” in Contemporary China’, Anthropology of this Century 11: http://aotcpress.com/articles/minimal-definition-cynicism-everyday-social-criticism-meanings-life/ Thornton, P. 2002. ‘Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy’, The China Quarterly 171: 661–81. Thøgersen, S. 2003. ‘Parasites or Civilisers: The Legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in Rural Areas’, China: An International Journal 1(2): 200–23. ———. 2006. ‘Beyond Official Language: Language Codes and Strategies’, in M. Heimer and S. Thøgersen (eds), Doing Fieldwork in China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 110–26. Tomlinson, M. 2013. ‘Three Aspects of Monologue’, paper presented at symposium, ‘The Monologic Imagination’, 112th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 19–24 November. Used with the author’s permission. Vološinov, V. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press.

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Wang, H. 2006. ‘Depoliticized Politics from East to West’, New Left Review 41: 29–45. Warner, C. 2013. ‘Hope and Sorrow: Uncivil Religion, Tibetan Music Videos, and YouTube’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78(4): 543–68. Watson, J.L. 1988. ‘The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites’, in J.L Watson and E.S Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–19. ———. 2007. ‘Orthopraxy Revisited’, Modern China 33(1): 154–58. Woolard, K. 1998. ‘Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry’, B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard and P. Kroskrity (eds), Language Ideologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–47. Yan, Lieshan 鄢烈山. 2010. ‘Guanhua yu renhua 官话与人话 [Official-Speak and Sensible Talk]’, Zawen Yuekan 杂文月刊 [Essays Monthly] 5: 22. Yurchak, A. 2006. Everything Was Forever, until it Was no More. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zhang, Jian 张健. 2000. ‘Hefaxing yu Zhongguo zhengzhi 合法性与中国政治 [Legitimacy and Chinese Politics]’, Zhanlüe Yu Guanli 战略与管理 [Strategy and Management] 5: 1–15. Žižek, S. 1997. ‘The Supposed Subjects of Ideology’, Critical Quarterly 39(2): 39–59.

JK Chapter 3

Interior Spaces of Hope Inner Selves, Intersubjectivity and Agency among Chinese Christians in Beijing Susanne Bregnbæk

Do not go out, return to yourself, truth dwells in the inner man. —Augustine, De Vera Religione

‘We grow up with the demands, you must [ni yingai 你应该]!’ Tingting, a 39-year-old urban professional said, while sipping coffee at a coffee shop located on the ground floor of the Beijing office building where she worked. She was explaining why Christianity is growing in urban China these days. ‘What I mean is, you must study diligently, you must get into university, you must make a lot of money, you must get married, you must take care of your parents’. Everything is ‘you must! You must! But few Chinese ask themselves what kind of life they would like to lead’. This struggle for success and to keep up appearances had previously made her feel spiritually empty, but faith in God had profoundly changed her life, she said. And like a teacher she took out a pen and tried to draw what she was trying to tell me in my notebook. She drew a model of the person like an onion consisting of concentric circles called ti 体, hun 魂 and ling 灵. The ti, she explained, was the outer person – the body shenti 身体. The hun was the personality. But the ling was what belief Notes for this chapter begin on page 64.

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in God cultivated – an inner self that was connected to spirituality, cosmos and eternity. In other words, she made a direct link between the shallowness of merely living out one’s social role as dictated by the society at large, and in particular by the Chinese Communist Party, and an experience of inner emptiness. In this chapter I start from this idea of an inner void that can be filled out by faith in God. I explore what is at stake for young well-educated ­urbanites, such as Tingting, who convert to Christianity and become part of unregistered house-churches (jiating jiaohui 家庭教会) that operate in the shadow of state control. In ‘Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology’(L’Être et le neant: Essai d’ontologie phenomenologique), Jean-Paul Sartre in a rather gloomy way saw man as a creature haunted by a vision of ‘completion’, or what he calls ‘ens causa sui’, or literally ‘a being that causes itself’, something many religions and philosophers identify as God. As human beings we often have expectations that are not fulfilled. For Sartre, somewhat paradoxically, the way to achieve fulfilment was to escape all quests by completing them. This means that any person is obliged to continuously struggle between two impulses. On the one hand: the conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfilment through actions and social roles – as if living within a portrait that one actively paints oneself. And on the other: of choosing to overturn one’s roles and strike out on new paths (Sartre 2005 [1943]: 36–38). Psychoanalytically inspired anthropologists have questioned the existence of a free, self-possessed consciousness and argued that we as human beings are not even transparent to ourselves; our unconscious is ‘shaped by socially salient forms of power’ (Gammeltoft 2014). In this chapter I will bracket out the question of the unconscious and by extension whether an entirely free will exists. I take from Sartre the idea that freedom lies in the capacity to imagine alternatives. My focus is on the relationship between rejecting the public sphere – a social world that is experienced as morally empty, stressful and a source of frustration and anger – and turning inwards to private housechurches and an inner self as a source of fulfilment. To begin with I describe the sociopolitical setting within which house-churches are situated.

The Rise of Christianity While Christianity �has existed in China since the seventh century, it is now the fastest growing religion in China, and this is particularly the case for house-churches, whereas the government-authorized churches are often seen as being false churches (Bautista and Lim 2009). Several scholars have argued that Chinese society is in a state of moral crisis (Kleinman 2011; Yan 2009b), and some attribute the rise of religion to the crisis of legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and thus see religion as filling out an ideological, moral or spiritual void (Shue 2004; Yang 2005). At a time when China has become an economic giant, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist

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Party (CCP), which ascribes to an atheist ideology, a widespread religious revival is taking place1 (Aikman 2003; Ashiwa and Wank 2009; Madsen 1998; Scott 2007; Yang 2008). Religiosity has boomed in the post-Mao era and has by far exceeded the boundaries within which Deng Xiaoping’s period of Opening Up and Reform allowed a revival of religiosity2 (Madsen 2011: 18). Catholic and protestant churches are administered and monitored by the ‘Catholic Patriotic Association’ and ‘The Three-Self Patriotic Association’, which both fall under China’s Bureau for Religious Affairs. China defines itself as an atheist country even though Buddhism and Daoism are tolerated, while Christianity, which is seen as a foreign religion, is strongly controlled (ibid.). Fenggang Yang has argued that the rise of Christianity in urban China and in particular its popularity among highly educated urbanites should be understood in the context of the increasingly globalized market economy under political repression. Christianity provides ‘some peace and certainty in the face of wild market forces’, he argues (Yang 2005). With the dissolution of the cradle-to-grave social security provided during the Mao era, China has undergone a period of individualization (Hansen and Svarverud 2010; Yan 2009a). In this way China has transformed from a rice-bowl to a risk society. Chinese society always entailed risks but the road to success now goes through individual self-development. This means that Chinese citizens are being brought up to be ‘striving individuals’ who are responsible for their own success or failure. The increasing space for individual choice-making thus goes hand in hand with a tremendous sense of pressure and anxiety, and as Tingting put it, it in fact leads to a situation where most people stick to a road of conformity out of fear of being left behind. Through Christianity she felt that she had found a ‘higher truth’ and explained that this was a source of fulfilment. She had previously tried out different religious practices, but found that they were too pragmatic. ‘When you go to a Buddhist temple, the air will be thick with the smell of burning money’, she said, indicating what she felt was an opportunistic approach to religion. ‘Christianity is more pure’, she claimed. ‘It gives me peace inside’. Before turning to an ethnographic exploration of these questions, I shall outline in more detail the theoretical perspectives that inform my analysis.

Interiority and Agency Most historians of thought agree that a genealogy of interiority should start with St. Augustin’s role in the history of the modern notions of ‘self’ and ‘subject’, as he is seen as being responsible for ‘inventing the inner person’ (Eksen 2010). Some scholars argue that Augustine’s philosophy gives an important place to the idea of self-knowledge – I doubt therefore I am – and can thus be seen as a precursor to Descartes’ cogito argument – I think therefore I am. Others emphasize the Augustinian notion of ‘inward turn’ that has been influential in shaping the modern notion of the inner self (ibid.).

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The question of interiority is troubling to anthropologists because of its seemingly Judo-Christian and modernist baggage. Quite a number of anthropological studies of religion often take up Talal Asad’s rejection of Clifford Geertz’s (1966) definition of religion, claiming that it is overly rooted in a preoccupation with inner beliefs as well as the historical rise of Western secularism (Asad 1993). Following Foucault, Asad described the rise of confession as a mode of social regulation in medieval Christianity and argued that the form of truth confession generates is tied to the externalization of inner states. Asad argued that the Western association between religion and problems of inner meaning stems from this form of truth. In Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that the sense of the ‘inner depth’ of selfhood, which in the West has long been imagined to concern an interior space of personal struggle, derived from the historical emergence of an emphasis on rational self-control as well as from a religious and literary language of ‘inwardness’ (Taylor 1989: 27). In contrast to such philosophies of discontinuity, the religious historian Gavin Flood has argued that this claim that ‘a deeper truth than we encounter in the everyday world can be found within the self, has been a central claim of many religions throughout history’ (Flood 2014: xii).3 He argued that in theistic religions – not only Christianity but also some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism – the ‘truth within’ is conflated with the idea of God within, and in all cases this inner truth is thought to be not only the heart of the person, but also the heart of the universe itself (ibid.). Furthermore, he argued that the idea of an authentic private realm unique to each person – a space in which ‘one composes poetry, falls in love or contemplates one’s feelings’ – may be a recent development, but he suggested that the ability to express the sentiment ‘I want’ is probably universal. This thus broaches the question of agency and brings us back to Tingting’s opening quote about ‘you must!’ – an experience of being bogged down by external expectations and demands as opposed to making one’s own life choices. Even though Tingting drew a chart of the inner Christian person, my concern is not to come up with a new post-humanist ontology (Pedersen 2012; Holbraad 2012) or topography of being (Pandian 2010). Rather, I think the preoccupation with interiority should be understood in relation to intersubjectivity, understood broadly as encompassing relationships to family members, fellow believers and non-believers and the Chinese state. In this way I share common ground with Gananath Obeyesekere, who in his psychoanalytically informed analysis of Sri Lankan Hindu-Buddhist ecstatics argued that there is always some form of reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimensions of a symbol or idea and the role it is given by a specific community (Obeyesekere 1981). Furthermore, according to Michael Jackson intersubjectivity involves an oscillation between being part of other people’s lives and turning inward to one’s self (Jackson 2012). Here, the interesting question is why at a particular moment in history and at particular points in their lives do young Chinese Christians become preoccupied with their own interiority? And is this ‘turning inwards’ a retreat from the world – a substitute for political agency?

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Let Jesus Change China, Let Jesus Seize China Xiao Lin, who was a student of English literature, was the first to take me to her house-church,4 located in Haidian District. I met her on a hot morning in front of a multistorey bookstore, and from there we walked a few blocks to the church. When I asked whether it was ok for me – a foreigner – to show up, she insisted that it was not a problem. ‘Our church is kaifang 开放’, she said – a term that means open, liberal, progressive (and also the word used by Deng Xiaoping to denote the reforms of opening up). In her opinion, this word was the exact opposite of the word ‘patriotic’. She told me that recently she had begun to hate the word ‘patriotic’, since in her opinion this word was used by the Chinese government to cover over all sorts of policies. On the way, we passed the officially recognized Haidian Church. The church bells were chiming as we walked past the imposing white concrete building with a huge cross over the main entrance, but Xiao Lin seemed to step up her pace and told me that she found this to be a false church. Finally, we arrived at a nondescript grey building. We took the back entrance, passed smelly garbage cans and parked cars and finally took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. Here we entered a room where approximately sixty Chinese people were sitting on simple wooden chairs aligned in rows. The adjoining rooms were also full of seats. At the further end of the room, black curtains covered the windows, letting in very little daylight. There was practically no adornment on the bare walls except for a small cross on one side of the wall as well as an inscription with the church’s name. The female pastor warmly shook my hand and welcomed me. A young man opened the ceremony by playing acoustic guitar and people sang psalms in Chinese. Many people had tears in their eyes. In the sermon that followed, the priest several times made an analogy between the closing of the famous Shouwang church5 and the eviction from the Holy Land of Egypt. Towards the end of the ceremony five young people were baptized. They each stood up on stage to give testimony – that is, little speeches in which they explained their reasons for becoming Christians. Their stories revolved around themes such as sickness, failed educational expectations, divorce, pressure or depression. In several cases they mentioned how their family members were members of the CCP and how they hoped also to transform them and to bring their hearts closer to God. After a long session of prayers and speeches the last song was sung – and one that I found was sung every Sunday. It had a refrain that went: ‘Let Jesus change China, Let Jesus seize China’.

Empty Dreams On a hot morning in June 2013, I took a taxi to the other end of town to meet with Dr Han, a social science researcher at a Beijing research institute. As we

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drove past various gated communities with English names such as Oakwood, Watercrest or Grand Fortune Garden, the taxi driver talked about how Beijing had changed a lot over the past fifteen to twenty years. He said that money now means everything and that people like him – laobaixing 老百姓, a term that means the ‘hundred old names’– that originally inhabited Beijing inside the old city gates were being squeezed out, as their neighbourhoods were being demolished and new ones were being built instead. On hearing that I was going to a government-driven research centre he frowned and told me that ‘their hearts are not pure. They are not red like ours, but black’. When I asked him to explain what he meant he said that the researchers there were not real researchers but talking in the empty rhetoric (guanhua 官话) of the government. (For a discussion of guanhua, the language of the party, see Hansen in this volume.) As we approached the building and drove through the gate, past the armed guards, I felt my own heartbeat intensifying. A secretary greeted me in the lobby, and when I told her I had an appointment with Dr Han, she asked me to fill out a form and then called for him to come down to pick me up. A small man of about forty wearing a grey suit came to greet me. We somewhat awkwardly made small talk as we took a crowded elevator to the tenth floor. He told me about his research on the Russian Orthodox Church and took me to a crowded room full of other researchers and politely introduced me to them one by one. It seemed impossible to discuss my interest in Chinese underground churches in front of colleagues whom I did not know if I could trust. To my relief Dr Han suggested that we should go for a walk in the garden. Once outside, I struggled to hear his low voice, which was dimmed by the sound of cicadas. ‘I believe in God’, he said, and added, ‘but I have to be very careful’. He explained that he would sometimes walk straight from lunch with government officials to his house-church. Dr Han went on to explain that he found himself to be caught between a rock and a hard place, since he found it inadequate to see religion as a private matter to be kept away from the gaze of the government and the general public. ‘Many Chinese Christians want to create their own private spaces – their own little hidden world’, he said. ‘Some even take their children out of school and resort to homeschooling in order to escape the indoctrination, but this is a bad solution’. He, on the other hand, felt that Christianity could change society. ‘We need Jesus’, he said, with great emphasis, and added that if Christianity were ever to be recognized in China – and not as it is now – wrongly seen as a Western phenomenon – the way to achieve this would have to be via Confucius. Puzzled, I asked him to explain and his answer took me by surprise. He said, ‘Confucius is like John the Baptist. He is paving the way for Jesus’. He said that Confucianism and Christianity entail many shared ideas. The Christian principle of loving thy neighbour was in his opinion comparable to the Confucian virtue of goodness and benevolence. However, he felt that Christianity was more profound because of God. It had to do with saving people’s souls, their inner life – not only their outward moral conduct.

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When I asked him how he had first encountered Christianity and how he had come to believe, he answered that ten years ago a student of his, who was a Christian, had invited him to go to church. ‘It was the singing’, he said. ‘I was so moved by the sound of the choir. I had never heard anything like it’. ‘This made me come again and gradually I was transformed. It made me so peaceful’. Society is so fuzao 浮躁 – a term that he explained as denoting something to the effect of ‘worried, greedy, stressed and unhappy’ – and going to church had been a kind of safe haven; a way of stepping momentarily out of the stresses and anxieties of everyday life by offering a space for reflection and distance. ‘It strikes me every time I go to church’, he said. ‘I relax, I feel at ease’. Drawing on a phenomenologically inspired approach to anthropology, my focus is not on religious doctrines per se but on religious experience. This also entails taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s perspective that our being-in-theworld is not merely logocentric but has a bodily, sensuous and sonoric capacity to it (Feld 1982; Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]). As for Dr Han, his primary conversion experience precluded any logocentric modality. Rather, he was moved to tears by the singing of the choir. This shows the difference between life as experienced and life as reflected, since later on, his relationship to Christianity became very much tied to political concerns of wishing to change the ethos of the party and of the nation, seeking to pave the way for a new form of citizenship. He wanted his faith to have a space in the public sphere. He went on to talk about how China in his view is in a state of moral decline. Even though he was far more eloquent than the taxi driver, their stories were strikingly similar and echoed views that I would hear again and again. ‘Many people have become rich but they are spiritually empty’, he said. According to this narrative, greed has corrupted the morals of the population, and this is particularly highlighted by the corruption of many CCP officials, which leads to cynicism and discontent. He mentioned some public stories about traffic accidents where the offenders left their injured victims in order to avoid being sued, and stories of extortion that had attracted a lot of media attention and public debate. Such cases, where ‘good Samaritans’ who try to help strangers in the public sphere end up being extorted by the person they intended to help, have been analysed by Yunxiang Yan, who has argued that the moral landscape is changing in contemporary China and that there is no room for compassion in the public sphere (Yan 2009b: 10). ‘People need more than money to be happy. We need peace of mind. We need Jesus’, he repeated again. He told me that his own father, who had recently died, had converted to Christianity on his deathbed. His eyes grew soft as he said this and it was clear that this had been a pivotal moment in his own life. His father had been a member of the CCP, he told me, but he managed to convince him that there is a God, just before he died. ‘This gives me hope’, he said. ‘There is hope for China’. He showed me a book, which he had co-published – hoping it could be integrated into the Chinese school curriculum. He proudly told me that it was being reprinted for the third time. The book was about ethics and based on

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stories that indirectly drew on inspiration from the Bible, although God and Jesus were never explicitly mentioned. When I met Dr Han again during the summer of 2014 he spoke even more aggressively against the government, as he felt that things had worsened under the leadership of president Xi Jinping. ‘Many more churches have been demolished, especially in Anhui province, and crosses of churches have been broken. Also in Beijing. We have to be even more careful’, he said. When I asked him what he thought about president Xi Jinping’s slogan of the Chinese Dream, he frowned and said, ‘The Chinese Dream is a materialistic dream. It is the same thing; get rich, buy a house, buy a car, new clothes … it’s materialistic … not spiritual … and because of this people suffer’. Before we parted, he gave me a copy of his book and when I asked him how this kind of book made its way past the censorship, he said with a smile, ‘I think I was lucky. After all, they cannot read everything’.

A Bubble of Lies Bolin, a 26-year-old engineer, told me that the fact that Christian underground churches were illegal was exactly why he had been drawn into this field. He explained that about a year ago he had been in Kazakhstan, working as an engineer at a large construction site, and he heard in the international media about the closing of the Shouwang Church. Being outside China had given him a sense of having been brought up in a bubble of lies. Having been abroad, he felt he had become more and more aware of having been through an educational system that presents one version of reality and bans others. When he heard about this group of believers who were bold enough to contradict the Chinese government and declare their alternative thoughts in a public space, he had thought ‘Maybe this is the truth!’ He said he knew very little about Christianity but felt that he had to find out more about it. He sent an email to the Shouwang priest but received the response that he could no longer preach. The priest, however, advised him to contact this particular house-church. He recalled the first time he came to the church. It was during the Spring Festival, when many people had left Beijing to go home to their families; therefore, the church was rather empty. He felt at ease in the church, he said, even though he still does not trust everybody. And he said he had gradually come to believe in God. He also explained that as a state-employed worker he was practising secretly, as he would be fired if they knew about his religious life. He never missed a Sunday service despite having to get up at five in the morning and go through the hassles of Beijing’s traffic, but he said that reading the Bible enabled him to feel that he was not wasting time and that it made it easier to cope with crowds of people pushing and shoving around him. In this way he resorted to an interior world while keeping social life around him at a distance. ‘Corruption is everywhere’, he said. When I asked him to explain, he said that it was so obvious in his home town that the cadres were getting rich, living in better houses than the general population, but that this was not

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because they are youxiu ren 优秀人 – particularly talented or morally superior people. He added that he felt that the government was lying and he suspected that the government prefers a population that does not think. ‘This is why the government prefers a great part of the population to study science, not arts or social science. It is better if people do not ask too many questions. It is like in George Orwell’s novel. This is a police state. This is not a joke, this is for real’, he said. He also added with a grin that the censorship also works against itself. ‘Whenever you see a film that is forbidden you will know that it is probably worth watching!’ ‘But you are also an engineer’, I said. ‘But still you are asking these questions?’ He said that when he had had to choose a degree he did not know what he was interested in. ‘I was very immature then’, he said, ‘my father and I settled for engineering, but in fact I found it boring. I played computer games for an entire year’. ‘I had no aim. No purpose. If you are a sensitive person, you will think more. I am a sceptic …why can’t we open certain web pages? And still, few people battle against the wall’, he said, referring to the Great Firewall of China, but he added that this was surprising since he found it was relatively easy to work one’s way past it by getting a private VPN system. He found it difficult to understand that so few people had this kind of curiosity. ‘It is a question of psychology and it has to do with the educational system, with the brainwashing that goes on … every question has one answer’. ‘And then when you get to a point where you totally disbelieve the government, then what can you believe?’ The question was left hanging in the air. When I asked him about his family background, he said about his parents: ‘Their lives were destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. This generation was totally destroyed by the government … they were brainwashed … there is a deep generation gap’. He explained that his father was originally from the city of Xian, but during the Cultural Revolution he was sent to the countryside for a period of five to six years and he never made it back to the city. He did not get an education and he eventually got a job as a construction worker in a county 40 km from Xian. ‘My father is unhappy about his life and he spends his time drinking, smoking and gambling’, he said. He had a great deal of affection for his mother – whom he described as more sensitive – more like himself – whereas his father and older sister he found to be cynical, opportunistic and, in his father’s case, also violent. During gaokao 高考, the national university entrance exams (for an analysis of the fabrication of fairness within the Chinese examination system, see Zachary Howlett, this volume), the drinking and violence felt particularly oppressive and he wanted to leave home. He also explained that he read a lot of books about China’s ‘real history’. ‘Via the internet I found those books. And this was mind-blowing … I had never heard about 1989 and many of the things that happened during the Cultural Revolution. They are cut out of the curriculum’. He also talked about his sister, who was five years older than him and how she had cheated him – having borrowed quite a large sum of money, which she had never paid back. He said about himself that he wondered how he had not been more damaged having grown up in that home and this was part of the

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reason he had concluded that there is a God: ‘God must have been protecting me’, he said. The critique of corrupt cadres and disillusion with political realities clearly had a direct impact on his own family relationships. Bolin felt that a revolution would have to take place in China. ‘Things cannot continue like this’, he said, although he was not very specific about what such a revolution would entail and how it would happen. He mentioned the Arab Spring and said that something like that might happen in China, but then he also mentioned how 1989 had crushed such aspirations. Shrugging his shoulders he added ‘Without God, there would be no hope’. In his work on hope, Ernst Bloch reasoned that longing for the new has its origins in a sense that there is something missing in our lives (Bloch 1988). The spirit of utopia (ou-topos) entails a longing for an imagined elsewhere at the periphery of our vision, where our new life can begin (Bloch and Adorno 1988: 1–17). Hope and despair were intimately connected, and for Bolin the inner hope he found through prayer and belief in God at the same time was not merely a turning away from the world. It also seemed to entail a desire for reaching out towards a global sphere. Unlike Dr Han, who worked towards the creation of a form of indigenous Chinese Christianity, for Bolin God seemed connected to a penumbral domain that was often linked to ideas about life outside China’s borders. He would often refer to ‘our God’ – even though I somewhat awkwardly had to keep reminding him that I do not actually consider myself as being Christian. Bolin said that ‘The believers of Shouwang did the right thing’, but he added that he did not really have the courage to be public about his faith and risk any direct confrontation with the authorities, so for the time being he kept his secret life to himself and his fellow ‘brothers and sisters’. It seemed as if the religious sphere represented an alternative family, a place in which he found the kind of solidarity he had missed all his life. And perhaps just as importantly it enabled him to imagine alternatives – not just one question having one answer, as he put it, but the possibility that things could be different. According to Sartre’s theory of the imagination, the space of religion may be thought of as similar to the space of dreams, it is a space as haunted as much by established ideas of the status quo as it is filled with ‘the aura of imagined possibilities’ (Jackson 2013: 163; Sartre 2004). Put differently, human beings have recourse to fantasy when action in the ‘real world’ is blocked. And yet, is one world really more real than the other? Paradoxically, believers like Bolin search for something more ‘real’ than the falseness and shallowness of the social world, which they identify with daunting competition, being lost in meaningless consumption and escaping reality through computer games or being guided by empty dreams.

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Final Remarks By being part of house-church communities that are hidden or semi-hidden from the gaze of the state, I have argued that the individuals whose stories I have recounted seem to be turning inwards in two senses. They seek to cultivate their inner selves but they cannot achieve this alone. Rather they do so by becoming part of private house-churches comprised of like-minded believers and by extension to God and an eternal life. This movement is in a sense a form of withdrawal – a way of seeking an antidote to a social world that is deemed hollow, superficial and in moral decay. At the same time, it also entailed creating new ties to fellow believers and sometimes also an imagined connection to life outside of China’s borders. The rise of Christianity in China thus cannot be understood without careful attention given to the societal transformations that have accompanied China’s transition to a market economy under the guidance of China’s Communist Party (Yang 2005). At the same time, neither political nor structural explanations alone can account for why some individuals and at different points in their lives are attracted to Christianity’s promise of a new inner life. The ethnographic and biographical accounts presented in this chapter indicate a strong desire among my young Chinese interlocutors to have some say in determining their own lives. Tingting clearly connected her faith in God with acquiring the courage to take new life choices, straying away from the generally accepted path. Bolin rejected state discourse – in particular its amnesia when it comes to events such as 1989 – in the same way that he rejects his own father – whose life was crushed by the policies of the Cultural Revolution – as a ‘bubble of lies’. But unlike the protagonists of Hans Steinmüller’s chapter (see introduction to this volume) who were social misfits unable to share their experience of not fitting into the times, Bolin in the community of the church found a space in which he could express such repressed thoughts. I am thinking here of Steinmüller’s depiction of the old cadre, Lao Ma, who nostalgically longed for a Maoist past and dismissed the present policies of the CCP as ‘face projects’, and the narrator of the dystopic novel China’s Fat Years, who, like the emperor in The Emperor’s New Clothes, was alone in pointing out that life in the harmonious society was empty, since it is built on the amnesia of the past (Steinmüller 2011). Bolin’s feeling of estrangement – when he went to Kazakhstan and started sensing that something was missing; that something was not real – drove him to a community of kindred spirits in the Beijing house-church. Fellow believers such as Tingting and Dr Han shared the conviction of an alternative truth. Although they placed this truth in the inner person (ling), I have argued that it cannot be understood separately from intersubjectivity and from the question of choice. Bolin seemed to regard his fellow believers as an alternative or surrogate family – they created a space of relative truthfulness and trust as opposed to deception and cynicism. Cultivation of an inner self (ling) entailed being connected to a wider sphere, ‘a penumbral space’, of eternity as a moral alternative to the cor-

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ruption and unfairness of society. I have argued that the moral vacuum in contemporary China propels some young people to convert to Christianity and it is thus a window to societal change. Yet, in doing so, I have pursued an approach that does not reduce the preoccupation with emptiness and fullness to a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor to an exclusively Christian one. I see these people’s quests for an alternative utopia as expressions of a need to have some say over one’s own life, even if this means having recourse to the imagination. It is clear that Tingting, Dr Han and Bolin, as well as my other Christian interlocutors, experienced changes in their lives, and the question of whether this will in time also change society remains open-ended. By turning inwards they momentarily created an alternative space of hope as opposed to the perceived emptiness of the political sphere. In this way, they turned the stresses of life (fuzao) into inner tranquillity and even redefined patriotism in the image of God. Furthermore, the Chinese government is clearly worried about the attraction of Christianity as a foreign religion, and the fact that so many people gather around an alternative authority – God not the Party – may lead to a new sense of hope for the future. ‘Without God, there would be no hope’, as Bolin put it. Some measure of freedom is exercised and understood as the power to imagine alternatives. Furthermore, the case of the Shouwang Church showed that such private house-churches sometimes hold the potential to become large and to turn outwards into the public sphere. Only time will tell whether Christianity will really challenge the CCP, whether Jesus will eventually be afforded a space in the pantheon of the state, or whether Chinese Christians will continue to experience a split between God and the Party and between what can be publicly expressed and inwardly endured and reworked. To me it also seems likely that if the Chinese state relaxes its ban on religious groups they might in fact lose their attraction, as there would no longer be the need to create such interior spaces of hope that work to fill out a void of empty political repression.

Acknowledgements I want to warmly thank the following people for support and inspiration: Michael Puett, Michael Jackson, Steven Sangren, Tine Gammeltoft, Claus A. Lassen and Mikkel Bunkenborg. I also thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK) for funding my research. My greatest debt of gratitude goes to my Chinese interlocutors, whom I here thank anonymously.

Susanne Bregnbæk is an assistant professor at University College Capital in Copenhagen. She has worked on higher education, generations, Christianity and the state in China. Her monograph Fragile Elite: The Dilemma of China’s Top University Students was published by Stanford University Press in 2016.

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She is currently doing research about the encounter between refugee children, their families and day-care institutions in Denmark.

Notes 1. In China there are protestant churches (Jidujiao 基督教, which literally means ‘Jesus teaching’, or Xin Jiao 新教, which means ‘the new teaching’), Catholics (Tianzhujiao 天主教, which means ‘the heavenly lord’s teaching’) and a smaller amount of orthodox Christians (Bautista and Lim 2009). 2. Since religion is a sensitive topic for the Chinese state it is not possible to find conclusive or unbiased statistics over the amount of religious believers in China (Madsen 1998: 18). According to Chinese official statistics there are 20 million Chinese Christians. However, according to Western academic estimates, the amount is rather somewhere between 100 and 130 million. Chinese Christians themselves tended to say that the number of Christians in China probably exceeds the number of party members – that is, approximately 74 million people. 3. Much scholarly work has focused on the vexed relationship between religion and the state in China. See, for example, Feuchtwang 1997, 2001, 2002; Madsen 1998; Lozada 2001; Perry 2002; Valla 2009; Ashiwa and Wank 2009; Bautista and Lim 2009; Cook and Pao 2011. 4. Similarly, Anand Pandian has argued that although these arguments have been elaborated in specific historical circumstances and with particular Western problems in mind, the images of involuted interiors and exteriors is useful for understanding diverse forms of selfhood elsewhere. In southern India, where he conducted fieldwork, he argued that a folding of exterior forms of life works upon ‘the heart’ as an ‘interior space of ethical engagement’ (Pandian 2010: 68). 5. Due to matters of confidentiality I do not name this church and the names of my interlocutors are pseudonyms. 6. In 2010 a church called the Shouwang Church was shut down by the authorities. The church started out in 1993 in the home of a newly-wed couple but continued to grow larger and larger. Eventually it comprised about 1,000 members and filled a whole floor of a high-rise building. In 2009, government intervention led to the early cancellation of a contract with a Beijing office building. One day the place was closed – literally sealed from the outside so that believers could no longer enter. Subsequently, the church was homeless and on two occasions the priest carried out a sermon in a public park. As a result, the police came and many believers were placed in detention, while the priest was placed under a form of house arrest. See Andrew Jakobs (2011).

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Bautista, J. and F.K.G. Lim (eds). 2009. Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict. Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Bloch, E. 1986. The Principle of Hope, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, E. and T.W. Adorno.1988. ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in E. Bloch, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–17. Cook, R.R. and D.W. Pao (eds). 2011. After Imperialism: Christian Identity in China and the Global Evangelical Movement. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Eksen, K. 2010. ‘“Inward turn” and the Augustinian Self’, Diametros 25: 132–45. Feld, S. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feuchtwang, S. 1997. The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China. London and New York: Routledge ———. 2001. Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. Surrey: Curson Press. ———. 2002. ‘Remnants of Revolution in China’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 196–215. Flood, G. 2013. The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. 1998. ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, in J. Faubian (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. New York: The New Press, pp. 269–78. Gammeltoft, T. 2014. ‘Towards and Anthropology of the Imaginary: Specters of Disability in Vietnam’, ETHOS 42(2): 153–74. Hansen, M.H. and R.S. 2010. I-China: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Holbraad, M. 2012. Truth in Motion: A Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, M. 2012. Between One and One Another. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jakobs, A. ‘Illicit Church, Evicted, Tries to Buck Beijing’. 2011, The New York Times, 17 April 2011. Kleinman, A., Y. Yan, J. Jun, S. Lee, E. Zhang, P. Tianshu, W. Fei and G. Jinhua (eds). 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lozada, Jr. E. 2001. God Aboveground: Catholic Church, Postsocialist State, and Transnational Processes in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Madsen, R. 1998. China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society. Berkeley: California University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Religious Renaissance in China Today’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, German Institute of Global and Area Studies 40(2):17–42. Mahmood, S. 2001. ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections of the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 202–36. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. 1967 [1887]. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Obeyesekere, G. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Pandian, A. 2010. ‘Interior Horizons: An Ethical Space of Selfhood in South India’, JRAI (N.S.) 16: 64–83. Pedersen, M.A. 2012. ‘Proposing the Motion’, Critique of Anthropology 32(1): 59–65. Perry, E. 2002. Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protests and State Formation in China. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Sartre, J-P. 2005 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H.E. Barnes. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imaginary, trans. J.W. London: Routledge. Scott, J.L. 2007. ‘For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors: The Chinese Tradition of Paper Offerings’, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Shue, V. 2004. ‘Legitimacy Crisis in China?’, in P.H. Gries and S. Rosen (eds), State and the Society in the 21st Century China: Crisis, Contention and Legitimation. London: Routledge. Steinmüller, H. 2011. ‘The State of Irony in China’, Critique of Anthropology 31(1): 21–42. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Valla, C.T. 2009 ‘Pathways to the Pulpit: Leadership Training in “Patriotic” and Unregistered Chinese Protestant Churches’, in Y. Ashiwa and D.L. Wank (eds), Making Religion, Making the State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yan, Y. 2009a. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2009b. ‘The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of The Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China’, Social Anthropology/Antropologie Sociale 17(1): 9–24. Yang, M. 2008. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yang, F. 2005. ‘Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44(4): 423–41. ———. 2012. Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

JK Chapter 4

The Tower and The Tower Excess and Vacancy in China’s Ghost Cities Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne

… it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury”, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems. —Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

In July 2012, I returned to the Coal Tower, an office building in Ordos Municipality where I had spent considerable time among a group of young associates, who had joined together in Litai Investment Group, profiting from the booming economy in what at that time was popularly known as ‘China’s Dubai’. From 2010 until late 2014 I followed the city’s turbulent trajectory from boom to bust, giving particular emphasis to the social implications of rapid urbanization, occupancy and the transformations of built space. As ethnographic fieldwork took place on either side of the burst of what turned out to be a local real estate bubble, it provided an intimate account of the flip side of the so-called ‘Chinese Dream’, as it had come to materialize in its predominantly urban form. My attempt to follow up on the group of young associates stands out in my notes and memory as an unmistakable sign that things had changed. Notes for this chapter begin on page 83.

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Illustration 4.1  The Coal Tower 1. Photo by Michael Ulfstjerne

As I entered the office building litter was scattered across the entrance hall. In the lobby a stale scent of vomit drew attention to one of the corners on the ground floor. A security guard was sleeping behind a glass pane in a shabby glass booth. The thin sheets of cardboard that covered the ceiling of the lobby were stained. On the walls I found official announcements from the local energy department announcing that the building would be cut off from power within a fortnight due to deferred payments. As the doors were locked and no one in Litai’s main offices on the third floor immediately answered my knocking, I went on up to the higher floors of the office building. On several of the floors renovations appeared to have been stopped midway. With the general absence of office staff or other occupants it was difficult to establish whether these office spaces were still in the process of renovation, or merely decaying so fast that it appeared so. Numerous rooms were crammed with construction materials and on the sixth floor a few disoriented workers had taken refuge among scattered bits and pieces. On the seventh floor, most offices were vacant except for one meticulously furnished one. From the adverts and exhibition samples gathered in an ivory bookcase, the enterprise had specialized in selling Moutai, an expensive Chinese brand of alcohol. Family pictures were still displayed on the pristine wooden work desk. On the table, next to the family idyll, stood a full taxidermy wolf. The door was secured with a chain lock and on the floor were stacks of local newspapers and official notices, but mostly real estate advertisements. The office with its family portraits and office wildlife contrasted with the majority of other vacant workspaces, of which most bore almost no traces of personal lives. Some floors still had offices running, although the employees I encountered were not sure for how long they would endure. Almost every level of the building had countless notices announcing cheap subleases, often just written on a wall with a ball pen.

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Prices had dropped from a monthly meters squared price of RMB 60 to RMB 20 (the renminbi traded at rates between 8.0 and 6.8 to the US$ during the terms of fieldwork) within a year. As no new businesses were occupying space, no real assessment of lease value existed. On the eighteenth floor there were no visible tenants. Toilet facilities were sealed off. Small piles of excrement were scattered across every 1–2 m2 of floor space, accompanied by bits of used paper and cigarette stubs. A handwritten note on a wall said, ‘this dormitory is my home – sanitary conditions are the responsibility of everyone’. Not simply confined to corners, most of the floor space had been transformed into a massive lavatory. Although many of the tower’s vacant or not yet installed spaces were left unchanged, revisiting the Coal Tower revealed a stark contrast between the potential emptiness of a developing frontier and the progressive ruination of a partly evacuated building amid a local economy in decline. From the unique vantage point of examining both boom and bust through a single case study, the aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to describe the change of moods and activities that played out inside some of Ordos’ newly constructed office spaces: in boom and in bust. Secondly, as opposed to other readings of emptiness as an abstract or existential category, often designating emptiness as something malign, deceitful or outright false (see, for example, chapters by Bunkenborg and Bregnbæk, this volume), this chapter literally examines emptiness as vacancy in superfluous construction. Somewhat parallel to Anders Sybrandt Hansen (present volume), who explores the efficacy of official rhetoric – guanhua 官话 – even in spite of its striking absence of meaningful content, this chapter explores vacant spaces in an office building, focusing more on their transformative and imaginary qualities than their lack of something, or someone. From being a poor outpost characterized by outbound migration and infertile soil for subsistence farmers, Ordos became one of the fastest developing regions in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR). Displaying a yearly revenue growth of 32.5 per cent and sustaining an annual average GDP growth of 18.5 per cent between 2006 and 2011, Ordos seemed unaffected by the global financial crisis.1 And due to its rich energy resources and real estatedriven economy, Ordos gained a reputation as ‘China’s Dubai’ in popular as well as official discourse. Yet with the increasing popularity of critical reports designating Ordos as China’s ‘modern ghost city’ (Powell 2010), Ordos had also become synonymous with real estate glut through its construction of spectacular yet largely empty district developments (Chovanek 2010; Ulfstjerne and de Muynck 2012). Towards the end of 2011, the local property market crashed, triggering the outbound migration of labourers who had arrived just recently to seize the opportunities offered by a boomtown economy. Millions of square meters of idle construction turned into premature ruins. The nationwide booming property development sector combined with economic incentives to subnational level governments has partly created the foundation for this phenomenon (cf. Hsing 2010: 41–42; Wu 2007: 9). Moreover, driven by latecomer imaginaries as those noted by Li Zhang (2006) in the case of Kunming, Ordos displayed a similar urgency to leapfrog progressive stages

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of urbanization. Yet rather than rendering the oversupply of urban space as flawed macroeconomic planning or a byproduct of latecomer development imaginaries propelled by elite pro-growth coalitions, this chapter complements these perspectives by looking at more vernacular forms of wealth and modernity in contemporary China, giving ethnographic attention to both social and material transformations inside these everyday spaces. Drawing on Hetherington and Lee’s thought-provoking analysis of the role of ‘blank figures’ (2000) in the constitution of social and spatial orders, it examines the potentiality for vacancy in places like the Coal Tower to instigate investments and set things in motion, shedding light on its potential for order as well as disorder. It shows how, by their quality of being ‘blank’ and thus yet underdetermined, these spaces helped to sustain certain imaginaries of fast and easy money, while they at the same time acted as a generator for escalating investments and change (ibid.: 176). Rapid urbanization, superfluous construction and landmark architecture are not simply embodiments of modernity finally arrived, but, as recent studies suggest (Musaraj 2011; Pelkmans 2006; Verdery 1995), actual processes of modernization often feed into and exacerbate local political tensions, enabling scheming and frenzies to gain force. Moreover, rather than simply understanding financial schemes and superfluous real estate from its economic incentives, the chapter follows Georg Bataille’s perspective on excess (1991[1949]), in turn, acknowledging the significance of waste and destruction as useful for understanding the economy in a broader sense, encompassing both cultural and ritualistic elements. The first part thus deals with the boomtown atmosphere to illustrate the capacity of newly built office space to draw people from different backgrounds into new social configurations. The chapter’s second half offers insights into the ruinous effects that the crisis had within social groups who had joined together in the booming economy. I do this partly by my attempt to locate and follow up on the young business associates, but also from observations of more general changes in visible forms of occupation in the building. Seen through accounts from inside of a simple office building, this chapter thus presents Ordos Municipality’s radical passage from boom to bust in a condensed and simplified version. To emphasize the radical changes in atmosphere and forms of occupancy experienced in the same space, the chapter’s title renders this a story of two separate towers, overlapping in the same space – and this almost simultaneously. While the first tower founded itself upon the potentiality of vacancies in the context of a boomtown economy, the second tower stands as an untimely relic over a past that has just been lost – one of excess and abundance that in a broader light draws attention to some of the emerging fissures in the Chinese Dream. The Coal Tower, however, was not completely abandoned, and signs of new forms of dwelling and uses of space emerged. In the final account, whether boom or bust, what seemed the most palpable explanation for occupants’ particular demeanour and form of occupancy was not so much the wider economic conjunctions but their individual perceptions of vacancy.

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The Coal Tower, 2011 My first visit to the Coal Tower was in summer 2011, almost exactly a year before the above description. Facing west, on the top of an eighteen storey office building in the rapidly expanding Dongsheng district of Ordos Municipality, large yellow Chinese characters read Meitan Dasha, which literally means Coal Tower. It was constructed a year before my arrival. Initially, a local developer had obtained the licence to commence construction; yet even before the completion of the building’s basic components, the developer resold the entire office building to three main investors. These would either be responsible for basic renovation of the office space or, what proved to be the case, would simply rent out the basic ground space to tenants, who would then put money into renovation, or further sublease smaller office plots. Each of the eighteen floors offered 2,000 m2 of office space divided into smaller lots, usually leased by various enterprises. Inside the Coal Tower local businesses proliferated. Looking closer at one of these businesses, the following outlines prevailing moods and activities that played out in the spaces of the office building by making a brief foray into a newly established investment group.

Litai Investment Group At the beginning of 2011 the first three floors in the Coal Tower were purchased and subsequently occupied by two brothers, Mr Qian Yong and Mr Qian Hu, who were also the main shareholders of Litai. The associates were all local guys in their late twenties or early thirties, with a majority of Han Chinese. When I first encountered Litai in summer 2011, they numbered between twelve and fifteen with varying assets in the company. Including office staff, Litai had more than twenty employees. Mr Qian Yong was twenty-nine in 2011 and held the largest share in the company. Being an accountant by profession, he acquired most of his wealth through his employment connections in a coal mine company, not far outside Dongsheng District. Buying and selling coal proved a successful endeavour for Mr Qian Yong and eventually led to sufficient profit to ‘expand’ (kuoda 扩大) his business into other niches. Forming the core of Litai, the two brothers increasingly invested their funds into property, both in and outside Ordos, while simultaneously engaging in the legally greyish market for non-bank, high-interest lending – the high-interest loans (gaolidai 高利贷) that financed a substantial part of new real estate developments. Coal resale, real estate and acting as a lending intermediary were by far the most central means of making profit for Litai. Nevertheless, Litai boasted an additional range of various businesses that included advertisement, a Thai restaurant, renovation, sand buggy auto rental and event management. Associates only rarely had prior experience within these business niches, and for several of them their engagement in Litai was a part-time occupation.

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Although Litai associates would commonly use the term nouveau riche (baofahu 暴发户) teasingly about one another, one could often find a spiteful joy in being labelled a ‘low quality person’ (meiyou suzhi de ren 没有素质的 人), a wealthy one nevertheless, driving luxury cars and enjoying an affluent urban lifestyle. In spite of popular stereotypes that revolve around private entrepreneurs and the wealth of the baofahu in post-reform China (Osburg 2013: 6–13), the Litai Investment Group was a far from uniform group. Some had obtained good education, one even abroad. Some came from rural backgrounds, while others had grown up in Ordos’ urban districts. Besides their engagement in Litai as entrepreneurs, some held positions as civil servants, while others were employed in the private sector. Still others undertook less lawful activities. Friendly terms and colloquial dialogue between the associates helped, at least partly, to conceal hierarchies. Yet most of Litai’s entrepreneurs acted as tenants and thus rented the space for their small niche businesses. And although contracts were rarely explicit, as a general rule, Mr Qian Yong held a 60 per cent share of all the niches. In addition to the heterogeneity of the group, associates were mutually implicated through various kinds of informal loans extended haphazardly between associates, which attested to Litai’s somewhat opaque organizational structure. The general lack of work experience of the associates within Litai’s wide array of niche businesses not only revealed their ‘big nerve’ (danzi da 胆子大), as they liked to call it, but also hinted at a widely shared assumption that most ventures amid Ordos’ growth would yield profits, and that potentially everyone could simply tap into it.

Red Hot Sociality The third floor of the Coal Tower accounted for Litai’s main office area. Rarely would any of Litai’s associates spend much time alone in their offices. Rather, they would group together in some of the larger offices for socializing. Unlike most offices, Mr Yong’s office was luxurious: dark leather covered couches, chairs and a wooden work desk with a shining Macintosh computer, all in large dimensions. Opposite the windows was a barrier constituted by a wallsized aquarium with large, colourful fish. Apart from Mr Qian Yong and his brother’s offices, additional office space displayed no wealth at all and rarely had any furniture or interior decoration besides the absolutely necessary: a computer, a few chairs or a bed and a flat surface that could be used for playing cards and sniffing the office drug of choice. A soldering iron that would be plugged into the office power supply was used to bring out a grey, dense smoke from the so-called annajia 安钠咖 that associates inhaled through rolled money bills.2 Together with Chinese Red Bull, soft drinks and cigarettes, annajia made up a considerable part of collective consumption at Litai. Annajia consumption mostly served to fuel gaming and counter post-lunch fatigue, and was therefore less a means of working long hours. Commonly, activities centred on more leisure and less work.

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Immersed in the oversized leather furniture in Mr Qian Yong’s office, the young guys often discussed the preceding night’s computer games. Despite differences in ambition among Litai’s associates, most found time to partake in the joking, playing cards, computer games and mah-jong. They played Chinese-style poker games such as ‘Three attack one’ (San da yi 三打一) or ‘Struggle against the landlord’ (Dou dizhu 斗地主). The winnings from card games, which could easily amount to RMB 5–10,000, could help subsidize evening banquets or KTV (karaoke), or were simply reinserted as stakes in mah-jong games later in the evening. As winnings were often redistributed through collective consumption, associates argued that you could not really lose or win so it could not be considered gambling. Conversation in the offices was distinctly unpolished, and mostly revolved around money, cars, women, gambling in Macau, KTV (karaoke), gaolidai and heated debates about which one of them would be the most henpecked by their respective wives and girlfriends. Even during work hours, leisure was hard to distinguish from work, and distinctions between friends and associates overlapped, or were, at least, not pronounced. During particularly vibrant sessions of swearing, joking and gaming, the atmosphere was referred to as ‘red fire’ or ‘red hot’ (honghuo 红火), an expression that carried connotations of exuberance, sex and the lively sociality that played out during mah-jong or card games.

From Rubble to Restaurant Despite the laid-back atmosphere in the office, investments did thrive and associates’ aspirations to expand the scope of business seemed amplified amid the excess of vacancies. Providing one example of how such space incited investment in the context of Ordos’ boom I briefly trace one entrepreneur’s trajectory back from before Litai and onwards to capture the way occupation of new spaces resonated with the aspirations of interlocutors: in terms of new possibilities, and in terms of independence from the claims and expectations of family. Mr Li (31) belonged to the more ambitious group of the lot and had consequently earned the honorary name of ‘Granduncle Li’ (Li daye 李大爷) amongst the others. He studied in the United Kingdom before he came back to Ordos in 2006, during the middle years of Ordos’ tremendous growth. And since then, he had kept himself busy in a myriad of small and large schemes ‘to expand’. He mostly relied on income from his building insulation enterprise, having landed several middle-size contracts for the local government, insulating residential high-rises in a new expanding urban district. In addition, a large part of his more stable income came from subleasing commercial properties, and, like everyone else, the gaolidai. Every month, Mr Li would pay a set RMB 70,000 on interest for obtained loans, but was making more than twice that amount through real estate sublease, building insulation contracts and monthly dividends from interest-bearing loans he had extended to others. With

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the pace of things, he expected that in some ten to fifteen years he would have expanded business enough to list his own company. ‘When you got money, you got power’, he assured me. Besides materializing as a new horizon of opportunity, Ordos’ growth also offered young men like Mr Li a certain freedom from the trodden paths of fathers. Despite his deep respect for his father’s many accomplishments and lifetime engagement in the influential Yitai Coal Co. Ltd., Mr Li made great efforts to keep clear of asking any favours: both in terms of benefiting from his father’s wide and influential network, but also in terms of raising funds for his business endeavours through close family. In 2010, Mr Li and several others joined the two brothers at the Litai Investment Group that with its slight phonetic resemblance to his father’s worksite through many years – Yitai – would form a plateau from where Mr Li would soon launch his luxurious Thai restaurant, the Chang Mai. In 2011 Mr Li’s largest investment was the 2000 m2 Thai restaurant. On many of our encounters he was busy choosing the design, recruiting staff, renovating the large space needed for the restaurant and exploring the set-up of other successful restaurants. Mr Li’s Thai restaurant was set up as a joint collaboration with two friends: Mr Qian Yong, the largest shareholder in Litai, and Mr Qiu, a young man working a family-run ‘underground bank’ (qianzhuang 钱庄), who was only connected to Litai through his minor investment in the Thai restaurant. Mr Li walked me along the second floor, where he was preparing to launch the restaurant within months. As we staggered along the rough concrete where workers were busy with basic renovation – plumbing, etc., Mr Li carefully explained all the plans for running a large Thai restaurant. Amid the rubble and dust, Li perfectly described even the smallest details of the design, installations and the whereabouts of everything. The entire 2,000 m2 of floor space was dedicated to the project. Several extra luxurious rooms with tea-party installations, TV sets, mah-jong tables and Karaoke would occupy the spaces of the building’s north side, while towards the southern side there would be a large open dining room. Close by the intended kitchen he would install a room for children and youngsters where they could play computer games and watch television, offering their parents time to enjoy their meals. If we dwell upon Mr Li’s invocation to ‘expand’, his rigorous and diverse plans, and the way Chang Mai came to life from his detailed depictions of design, materials and considerations of the restaurant’s various adornments, we get a sense of the way empty and vacant building space facilitated imaginary work in the context of a seemingly expanding economy. Mr Li, or Litai for that matter, did not represent a unique case of entrepreneurship. Inside the lobby of the Coal Tower there was no overview of the listed companies, as various enterprises took over new floor space at a rate that would likely render the effort obsolete. In some cases, tenants occupied entire floors or, at least, had acquired entire floors in order to profit from subleasing, as the case of Litai might also suggest. As a consequence, some floors were luxurious and fully installed, while other floors or offices were still to undergo basic renovation. In the summer of 2011 there were few ‘real’ vacancies in the building, although

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many were still under renovation or simply waiting to be subleased. The Coal Tower hosted several expensive brands of liquor outlets (European red wine import and Chinese high-end alcohol), and several luxurious restaurants with adjacent rooms where customers could sing or work out. Yet the majority of leaseholders were local investment companies similar to Litai Investment Group. These covered a variety of enterprises such as renovation, advertisement, construction, real estate and so on. In reality though, as suggested by Litai’s two brothers’ business model, most would primarily make money from the buying and reselling of coal and flipping property titles, and would further be engaged in the gaolidai, acting as some form of lending intermediary. Reflecting the wider optimism that was intimately linked to vacant space at the time, Litai resonated with general forms of entrepreneurship outside the tower, where people from different social backgrounds acquired licences as real estate agents or construction firms, or became middlemen in the supply of informal credit. Entire families would suddenly emerge as family firms.

Enchantments of Vacant Space In his article ‘Social Life of Empty Buildings’, Mathijs Pelkmans (2006) unravels the significance and popular perceptions of new, conspicuously empty urban construction in post-Soviet Ajaria, Georgia. Pelkmans writes: ‘New buildings had overt imaginary qualities, which were important in the creation and continuation of dreams about a future of abundance and leisure’ (ibid.: 208). Although popular perceptions differed and some were critical, and even in spite of early signs of material decay, new buildings were generally held to be a sign that things had taken a turn for the better (ibid.: 199, 207). In some cases, construction itself seemed more important than the actual use of buildings; people were attached to these as embodiments of a modernity that had finally found its way to Ajaria. Although Pelkmans mainly deals with the emptiness of more prestigious buildings, which were to embody the modernizing ambitions of the regional political elite, the oversupply of empty floor space in Ordos seemed to yield similar effects and optimistic attachments. Also, by its less elitist vestige, vacancies in the newly built mass of modern office buildings prompted investments and enchantments among a broader cross section of society. In their analysis of the role of ‘blank figures’ in both constituting and reshuffling social orders, Hetherington and Lee (2000) lend us another way to engage with Ordos’ oversupply of urban space. The authors suggest that those things characterized by a ‘lack of characteristics’ can play a central role in maintaining social orders (ibid.: 175). The mass of unfinished or empty floor space generated an optimistic and economic attachment that compelled interlocutors to refute any signs of an overheated property sector or inflated prices. Through my increasing familiarity with the everyday lives of Litai’s associates the above portrait draws attention to the efficacy of vacant floor space in the context of a booming economy. Young associates reconfigured

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their status and social relations against the backdrop of the evocative imaginaries spurred by a decade of growth. This enabled some youngsters like Mr Li to become ‘Grandfather-like’ figures among friends and fellow associates. New wealth manifested in ambitious attempts to expand business as well as in more exuberant ‘red-hot’ sociality, spending and leisure. In Ordos, nevertheless, that which had been expanding so rapidly would soon contract equally fast, and the wealth that had appeared solid would prove ephemeral. Next, I return to the time of the chapter’s opening vignette and my attempts to revisit the associates in Litai.

Untimely Ruination In my search for Litai’s associates that sent me on a search throughout the building, I finally managed to reach Mr Li on his cell phone. Despite the deteriorating conditions of the Coal Tower, Mr Li was now set up in an office on the second floor with his recently opened restaurant. Asking about his view on the changes that had occurred since last year, he explained that besides leaseholders’ preoccupation with declining prices, basic maintenance was becoming a problem. Although he was mostly unfamiliar with the circumstances above Litai’s first three levels, Mr Li explained the bad conditions of the foyer as a general problem of lacking faith in the service provider: ‘Nobody really wants to pay. The last company that was responsible for maintenance collected fees from all of the leaseholders and just left – with the maintenance fees’. After that, another building maintenance provider took over but simply lacked the funds to maintain the building, as the leaseholders were afraid that they, like their predecessors, would also take off. Mr Li opened the Chang Mai restaurant in spring 2012, but even after a few months of operation and advertising, the restaurant manager and around thirty employees at Chang Mai had attended few paying customers. In hindsight, most of Mr Li’s plans had materialized, and with Chang Mai’s many colourful and golden ornaments, luxurious and exotic décor, mah-jong rooms and dark wood interior, the restaurant stood in stark contrast to the Coal Tower’s tainted lobby. In the back of the restaurant, most of Chang Mai’s employees were accommodated in simple dormitory-like quarters, provided by Litai. Although Mr Li had worked hard to open the restaurant, and invested more than RMB 7 million altogether, business was not going well. He pointed out that a large chunk of the local population used to live off the interests of the private loans in the gaolidai and would often have an extra RMB 30,000 monthly to spend wining and dining, making the local restaurant business a profitable endeavour. With the crisis, however, as people no longer ‘ate interests’ (chi lixi 吃 利息) he rarely received customers. In an attempt to keep things running, he had recently been forced to collateralize much of his family’s property, and even his private residence. Credit was hard to come by and despite his efforts Mr Li doubted whether his endeavour would yield any significant profits. ‘In these times’, Li stated, ‘only lawyers and mafia make good profit … any other

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kind of business will surely run at a deficit’. Several of Litai’s additional niche businesses on the third floor had stopped and many of the associates could no longer afford to pay rent to Mr Qian Yong, adding to the mass of vacant office space. Only a week earlier a large man and two of his companions had detained a young fellow in one of Litai’s newly emptied offices. The large man, known as Brother Fei among Litai’s staff and associates, often visited Litai in 2011. Although he had no real share in the company, favours were sometimes exchanged between Brother Fei and the two main stakeholders in Litai. Brother Fei and two of his companions from Heilongjiang Province therefore agreed to keep the young debtor there until he could find a way to pay his debts. Despite the fact that his debt was minor in comparison to the general measure of loans in Ordos during 2011, the young man was not allowed to eat, rest or visit the restrooms during his stay at the Coal Tower. About thirty hours later the young man’s mother arrived in the office with enough money to bring her son home. Brother Fei’s ‘bring-in-debt company’ (yaozhai gongsi 要债公司) took between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the debt that they managed to collect. Many of the very same offices that were just recently perceived as easily convertible to cash through simple leaseholds no longer yielded profits, but had become sites of anxiety, debt and rot. In several places, water dripped down on the floor through small tainted cardboard pieces in the spoiled ceiling. In other offices missing windows in rugged concrete walls opened horizons of countless construction sites and partly finished high-rises that stretched out towards the fringe of the district. Most office towers that had proliferated in pre-crisis times never saw activity, having simply grown into ruins before completion, reminiscent of what Nick Yablon (2009) terms ‘untimely ruins’, which in light of their premature abandonment became symbols of temporariness instead of signs that history was proceeding as planned.

Revisiting Litai Apart from my encounter with Brother Fei and his new profitable work as debt collector, Mr Li assisted me in following up on several of the associates that I had met a year earlier. Some, however, were indisposed, as they had resigned from their part in Litai and returned to occupations they had held prior to their Litai engagement. The underground banker, Mr Qiu, who often came to visit friends in Litai and inspect the progress of the Chang Mai restaurant, withdrew from the collaboration and only rarely frequented the tower. The unlicensed lending business his father and he operated no longer yielded profits. Since 2011, his father had tried to get them out of the business due to a hunch that the market would destabilize. Yet, unable to withdraw, they were stuck in between creditors and debtors throughout 2012 and 2013. Faced with the increasing pressure from creditors, Mr Qiu took up a simple administrative job with an uncle of his in one of Ordos’ more peripheral areas. When in town he kept to himself and preferred to stay at home with his wife and son. Mr Qian

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Yong, the main stakeholder in Litai, would rarely spend time at the office and had encountered significant setbacks during the last year. Most of Litai’s investors had become insolvent or would simply withdraw from the association of friends that, at that time, appeared more fragmented. By midsummer 2012, Litai’s office staff had been reduced to only a few employees. For the migrant labour force, working conditions were no less precarious. In August 2012, the Chang Mai closed within less than six months of its opening. The thirty employees who lodged at the back of the Thai restaurant had to find work and accommodation elsewhere after just a few months of employment. In the wake of the crisis, many employees were laid off and dispersed; in some cases they would have to settle for less than agreed, as most employers faced liquidity problems. As employment opportunities were scarce in the aftermath of the crisis, employees most likely parted with colleagues and were left with no option than to leave Ordos. On several occasions, some of the old friends still met at Litai, playing cards in some of the many vacant office spaces or in small luxurious mah-jong rooms at the Chang Mai restaurant on the second floor. The nature of the game was essentially unchanged, although the fat wallets and stacks of RMB 100 bills had gone. On one of these occasions a few of Litai’s associates gathered in Mr Li’s managerial office from where he oversaw Chang Mai’s operations. Modest bills of RMB 1, 5 or 10 had taken the place of the RMB 100 bills that were the lowest stake during 2011. Mr Liu Ziyue, a minor stakeholder of Litai during 2011, entered the room bruised with a swollen blue-blackish eye. Several stitches crossed a shaved patch on the side of his head. He sat amongst the others, who paid no obvious attention to his condition. A year earlier, Mr Liu Ziyue had had an office on the third floor, where he primarily invested in the cashmere wool market. As the gaolidai circuits collapsed towards the end of 2011, many were left with substantial debts. Mr Liu Ziyue was subsequently forced to give up his new undertaking. His creditors, who were mostly friends and even kin, seized and sold his new Land Rover and several properties that he had acquired during the last couple of years. A former associate of his later explained that despite having had both car and property seized, Mr Liu Ziyue was far from debt-free. Due to Mr Liu Ziyue’s debt to one of the more successful friends at Litai, he was further relieved of his business share and, later, also of his office space, due to rent deferral. He watched as the others played, and occasionally smiled when jokes ran loud. The distinction between close friends and acquaintances was accentuated along with the escalation of the crisis. Several disagreements regarding flawed investments and outstanding loans between associates at Litai divided them into smaller, more antagonistic groups. On most days associates were occupied managing their losses, constantly making calls to debtors or debtors’ families in an attempt to retrieve loans. Frustrations occurred when somebody refused to answer. The less patient turned to alternative means of settling debts through the use of threats, abductions or private debt collectors, such as Brother Fei. The crisis seemed to bring about an inversion where credit among friends and associates was suddenly hard to obtain, and where the assumption

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that one could spawn cash from simply occupying space or flipping leaseholds was suddenly challenged.

New Occupants In spite of the temptation of understanding ongoing ruination as a singular and unambiguous process, some impressions and accounts from occupants made for a more muddled picture. The building even saw small occurrences of revival and reconstitution. In March 2013 a joint meeting took place where the residing tenants discussed problems of building maintenance of the common areas and assessed price reduction and potential strategies for sublease. Most of the building’s leaseholders did not attend. During the meeting it was decided to sublease a small parcel of the lobby for a cheap annual rent. In the time after the decision, the lobby underwent restoration due to the successful sublease of 65 m2 of ground space for a cigarette and liquor shop, leased at RMB 40,000 a year. Other small improvements in the building’s condition were visible; mostly maintenance and repair of the common areas – primarily of storefronts at the ground level. In addition, the money was deployed to pay for another period of building security. On some of the remaining floors the building displayed a more unambiguous decay: footmarks on walls, cigarette butts, empty bottles, food wrappings and excrement. Despite the increasing number of empty dorms and offices, new forms of dwelling would emerge. On the very top floor a local family lived from selling black tea. Their home was nicely furnished. Their boy attended school. His friends would visit. Taking escalators the family would necessarily pass the rot and faeces, but seemed to pay little heed to the otherwise palpable evidence of the building’s progressive decay. On the sixth floor, other traces attested to the heterogeneous and differential process that accounts of ruination often suppress for the sake of clarity (Stoler 2008).3 Towards the north-facing side of the building, mostly vacant offices occupied the floor space. At the very southernmost end one could find a differently inhabited office space. My first visit was during ordinary work hours, yet no people were inside. Despite the same room specs and materials, occupants had installed a double bed complete with colourful linen. Another was installed in the other end of the roughly 80 m2 room. A framed wedding picture was placed above a simple device for storage of clothes. Around a corner, several large plants occupied one side of the office hallway. An electric bike was parked next to these. Much was reminiscent of the physical arrangement of traditional courtyard-like residences. Large red carpets covered the otherwise sterile corridors. An open space with a small office of around 25 m2 had been converted into what appeared as a family dining room. Instead of glass panes, washing lines were extended from one end to the other. Underneath were slippers, small plastic chairs, a table and a simple stove for cooking. It turned out to be the living arrangements of a migrant community from Xian, Shaanxi. On several later occasions I met with a small family who had resided there for more than six months: a

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Illustration 4.2  The Coal Tower 2. Photo by Michael Ulfstjerne

three-year-old boy, his parents and the boy’s grandmother, who was mostly responsible for seeing to the child while the parents were working. They were merely one of the families that now lived in the Coal Tower. The families had an arrangement paying low rents for the office spaces that they now suitably converted into residential dwellings. A year earlier, a few migrant workers had found refuge amid scattered construction materials and trash. It was hard to recognize while tea was being served from a large decorated wood table in one of the furnished offices. Almost half of the sixth floor was recast as what the families expressed to be reasonable living environments. While some were moving in, others were moving out. As no resolution had been found regarding the future use of Litai’s offices, and with the increasingly tense atmosphere that had manifested between different groups of friends within the group, by August 2013, Mr Li and a few of his associates had moved their base, including collective computer gaming and card and mah-jong playing, to the ninth floor in the ‘Prosperous Cow Business Building’, another of Dongsheng’s new, yet largely vacant, office buildings. A friend of Mr Li had set up the place with two rooms, both simple quarters with no decoration: one smaller room included two tables for cards and mah-jong, and a bed to rest on. The largest room that measured around 50 m2 included twelve computers lined up in two rows, a television set, an additional bed and a small refrigerator that contained the reserve supply of Red Bull and soft drinks for long nights of gaming. Ashtrays were filled and in the corner a soldering iron was plugged into the power supply to provide for the annajia consumption. For the Litai associates that I had become familiar with, there

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was little or no noticeable sentimentality in leaving Litai’s old office space. Given the speed at which renters would take over new space, and the way new projects would materialize, change appeared to render actual spaces themselves or perceptions of these as secondary. The common flipping of leaseholds in the Coal Tower was something that seemed to affect the way many occupants engaged with the space: as something temporary, and in most cases, not one’s own. Places themselves were less important, several of the investors noticed in the process. Activities simply unfolded in new territories as in the ‘Prosperous Cow Business Building’. Despite the ruinous effects of the crisis, observations among Litai associates in 2012 and 2013 did nevertheless give a less straightforward impression of the state of decline, as such forms of sociality went on unhindered. And as offices morphed into dwellings, some spaces in the building even showed signs of revitalization.

Filling in the Blanks What was the role of space in this, and how did the perceptions of it change from being frugal sites of investment to a place of decay and defecation? In this last part I discuss the implication of vacant floor space in Ordos more broadly. As instantiations of ‘blank figures’ (Hetherington and Lee 2000), vacancies in the context of urban growth were essential to maintain the surface of an impending bubble before it burst. Not so much space itself, but particularly vacant floor space in newly or soon to be built real estate. Besides their capacity to maintain certain growth imaginaries, ‘blank figures’ perhaps played an equally important role in better explaining the processes that took place in the chapter’s second part. Akin to the joker in a card game, blanks contain the potentiality to turn things around, make new constellations of power and thus accelerate processes of dis- and re-ordering (ibid.: 176). To illustrate this point, the authors draw out the game of solitaire to underline a shift of attention from the hand that moves the pegs across the board to the significance of the blank space with no peg in it. In the game, it is argued, rather than a sole focus on the intentionality of a subject (be that a municipal government, property developer, etc.), it is the initial blank space that compels movement and thus sets things in motion (ibid.: 182). From this intervention, the authors argue that the underdetermined character of a ‘blank figure’ can draw together and potentially reconfigure a line of stakeholders – in this case, actors from across official and private domains into new compositions. This shift of emphasis, I argue, helps to account for the fact that people from all walks of life engaged with these spaces, within a frame that can encompass strategic flipping of entire floors of a building to the tactics of morphing space designed for one use into another. Beyond rendering citizens as either resisting or complying with local states’ attempt to develop and urbanize, or seen simply as manifestation of an urgency rooted in developmental lateness (Zhang 2006), the shift from intentionality to ‘blank figures’ enables us to acknowledge the role of vacancy

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itself in a way that adds perspective to the excessive production of space for which Ordos had become so infamous. As illustrated by the case of Chang Mai, the oversupply of empty office space paired with the years of conspicuous modernist urbanization drew citizens into the vortex of a seemingly expanding economy. And, as illustrated by the new occupants in the tower, some were also drawn into the voids that emerged as the local economy collapsed. This intervention is indeed evocative but leaves us short of explaining why these vacant spaces attracted rot as well as investment, and, from the ambiguous character of the building, almost simultaneously. Admittedly, ‘blank figures’ might well contain the capacity to uphold certain growth imaginaries or myths by way of their underdetermined quality, being potentially filled and valuable as in the case of Pelkmans’ empty buildings in Ajaria. Yet the way empty or vacated office space was filled seemed predicated on how occupants perceived them: as places suitable for investment or evacuation. In the title, I hint at China Miéville’s fantasy-crime novel The City & The City (2009). In the novel, Miéville depicts two cities that coexist and even overlap in the same physical territory: one decaying and unruly, while the other an up-and-coming city-state power. To keep the two cities apart, citizens are trained to recognize the ‘other city’, its residents and architecture, although without seeing it. In the Coal Tower, the strange coexistence of boom and bust brought to mind Miéville’s novel; the physical overlapping of two separate towers, one under construction and the other in decay. The twin cities in Miéville’s book essentially carry the same physical traits, yet are kept apart by the collective effort of citizens unseeing and unsensing what is actually there, a vision that ignores facets of the city’s real conditions. But what underlying reality can we point to given differences in perceptions and ensuing forms of occupancy in the Coal Tower? Clearly, accounts from inside the Coal Tower mark an odd passage from the promising spaces in a developing frontier region to the vacant or evacuated spaces of a city dotted with unfinished construction and ruination. In many cases the spaces remained the same while the perceptions around them changed dramatically. Yet beyond the simple temporal progression from boom to bust, the building’s ambiguities, its almost simultaneous coexistence of boom and bust struck me. It seemed neither vacancy nor the wider conjunctions in the economy could entirely account for the question of why some occupants chose to defecate in the same spaces that others used to invest in, or dwell in. Although vacant spaces did yield effects – as they contributed to the rapidly shifting leaseholds, the flipping of property titles and a widely held belief that growth would continue – this hardly explains the heterogeneous nature of occupancy inside the tower; neither before nor after the bubble burst. The conundrum of the Coal Tower’s coexisting yet widely differing forms of occupancy evokes Žižek’s notion of the ‘parallax Real’ as ‘that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances’ (Žižek 2006: 26). Engaging Lacan’s notion of the Real, Žižek argues that it is the multiple

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ways that this elusive reality is perceived and captured that constitutes the Real – that is, not as any inherent or tangible quality of an object or some underlying objective reality that is out there. In this light, perceptions are not qualified as to their proximity to some neutral reality, like for instance a clear line between an economy in either growth or decline. Rather these are complementary, as one serves to fill out the gap in what is elusive in the other. Occupants, it appeared, made and remade their lives in the office building from different points of view of the Real: like the small family not seeing the decay, or the collective faith in escalating property prices that called for more expansion: of credit or new business plans. Even the migrant community that morphed sterile office space into spaces of dwelling pointed at a decisive viewpoint of conditions in the tower, and what they made of it. In effect, this could better account for how spaces were subleased, filled, abandoned and put to new uses as lavatories or residential quarters for migrant communities.

Michael Ulfstjerne is currently employed as a researcher at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University. With a background in anthropology Michael received his Ph.D. from the Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, Copenhagen University. In his dissertation – ‘Unreal Estate: the Social Life of Temporary Wealth in China’ – Michael traces a municipality in China’s northern frontiers from boom to bust. Publications focus on creative industries, urban development, debt, the material debris of bubble phenomena, and the potential gains of exploring surfaces in anthropology.

Notes 1. http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/8323346.html (last accessed 2 June 2014). 2. In Ordos, annaka (安钠咖 locally pronounced annajia) comes in the form of a white substance formed into what looks like a golf ball. The provider of Litai’s annajia explained how veterinarians commonly used the drug (Benzoic acid sodium caffeine) in a more basic form to treat bacterial infections. 3. Resisting the temptation of merely regarding ruination as still remnants or as genealogies of either catastrophe or redemption, Ann Laura Stoler provides a way to allow ruins and ruination to be perceived while in the making. Ruins and ruination might therefore serve us to recognize that they, in Stoler’s words, ‘are unfinished histories, not of victimized pasts but consequential histories that open to differential futures’ (Stoler 2008: 195).

References Bataille, G. 1991 [1949]. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1: Consumption. New York: Zone Books.

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Chovanek, P. 2010. ‘Insight on Ordos’. Retrieved 2 June 2014 from http://chovanec. wordpress.com/2010/05/13/insight-on-ordos/ Hetherington, K. and N. Lee. 2000. ‘Social Order and the Blank Figure’, Environment and Planning D 18(2): 169–84. Hsing, Y. 2010. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford University Press. Miéville, C. 2009. The City & The City. New York: Del Rey Ballantine Books. Musaraj, S. 2011. ‘Tales from Alborado: The Materiality of Pyramid Schemes in Postsocialist Albania’, Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 84–110. Osburg, J. 2013. Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pelkmans, M. 2006. ‘The Social Life of Empty Buildings: Imagining the Transition in Post-Soviet Ajaria’, in Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Powell, B. 2010. ‘Inside China’s Runaway Building Boom’, Time. Retrieved 3 June 2014. from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1975336,00.html. Stoler, A.L. 2008. ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 191–219. Taussig, M.T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ulfstjerne, M. and B. de Muynck. 2012. ‘Ordos: A Chinese City Constructed in the Fast Lane’, in Portal 9 Stories and Critical Writing about the City. Solidere Multidisciplinary Design Department, pp. 66–71. Verdery, K. 1995. ‘Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 19901994’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(4): 625–69. Wu, F. 2007. China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Yablon, N. 2009. Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 18191919. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Zhang, Li. 2006. ‘Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late-Socialist China’, Current Anthropology 47(3): 461–84. Žižek, S. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

JK Chapter 5

The Manchu in the Mirror The Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Theory Kevin Carrico

Society is made of those whom it comprises. If the latter would fully admit their dependence on man-made conditions, they would somehow have to blame themselves, would have to recognize not only their impotence but also that they are the cause of this impotence and would have to take responsibilities which today are extremely hard to take. This may be one of the reasons why they like so much to project their dependence upon something else, be it a conspiracy of Wall Street bankers or the constellation of the stars. —Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth

Why does a group of young people in China today believe that the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) never ended, and that members of the Manchu minority control every aspect of contemporary life? And why do they believe that this supposed Manchu control is characterized foremost by oppression and even genocide against the demographically and politically dominant Han majority? These unexpected questions arose during my fieldwork with the Han Clothing Movement, a nationalist group that has emerged in urban areas of China over the past decade, dedicated to revitalizing the majority Han Notes for this chapter begin on page 100.

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­ ationality through the promotion of traditional-style clothing, ritual, etin quette and education. Alongside these culturalist activities, filling in the emptiness of China’s default identity, another important yet rarely acknowledged aspect of the Movement, I soon learned, is the production and distribution of elaborate conspiracy theories about ‘the Manchus’. Such conspiracy theorization is a project that most participants found just as fascinating as their work on cultural revitalization. Discussing clothing styles with Movement enthusiasts over dinner in Guangzhou early in my research in 2010, participants repeatedly emphasized that only Han clothing, currently so rare in China today, could ever be the real Chinese clothing, in contrast to the qipao 旗袍 (or cheongsam) and magua 马褂 (or tangzhuang 唐装), traced to the Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty. These ‘foreign’ clothing styles have in recent decades been at the forefront of symbolizing ‘traditional Chinese clothing’ in venues as diverse as the 2001 APEC meeting in Shanghai, where world leaders donned the magua for the standard APEC photo op in ‘local attire’, to fashion shows and highend clothing stores, where the qipao has reemerged as a sartorial embodiment of Chinese tradition (Chew 2007). Denouncing the dominance of these styles, participants took pains to explicate their foreign and thus inferior and barbarian origins to me. The ma in magua, they noted, refers to horses, animals that represented Manchu identity in the Qing Dynasty through the carefully cultivated ethnic marker of horsemanship (Rhoads 2000: 61). ‘Look around’, one acquaintance asked, ‘do you see us Han riding around on horses? Ever? What use is a horse jacket [magua] to us?’ Similarly, the qi in qipao, another noted, refers to ‘banners’, a term designating hereditary soldiers of the Qing Dynasty and their families, recognized as ‘the principal institution which unified the Manchu people and defined Manchu identity’ in the Qing era (Lee and Eng 1984: 8, quoted in Rhoads 2000: 18). My acquaintances were clearly unimpressed: ‘these are savage clothing styles, for primitive Manchu people, who ride around on horses’, they continued as I listened in perplexity. ‘You see, that’s why the slit on the qipao’s leg stretches so high. Nowadays, it’s only good for hookers who want to put their goods on display’. Such vehement denunciations of clothing styles were at first surprising. Yet I soon found that the prominence of these Manchu clothing styles, in the eyes of Movement enthusiasts, was imagined to be just one manifestation of a far more extensive Manchu-led conspiracy against China, purportedly extending through sectors as diverse as clothing, food, culture, education, finance, politics and even military power. Movement participants told me that a full century after the fall of the Qing in 1911 the Manchus remained in power and the ultimate goal of their conspiracy is the extermination of the Han nationality, destruction of China and revitalization of the Qing Dynasty: goals which Movement participants claim the Manchus are gradually accomplishing in the present. In light of these unexpected and clearly untenable beliefs, this chapter then asks a straightforward yet analytically complex question: why would anyone believe this? And why do devotees believe so deeply in these imaginary narratives as the ultimate truth?

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The answer to these questions, I argue, is found in the relationship between the emptiness of experiential identity that perpetually exasperates Movement participants and the comparative explanatory fullness of conspiracy theory. In its own self-description, the Han Clothing Movement is dedicated to popularizing a traditional uniform for the Han nationality, along with the promotion of ritual, etiquette and Confucianist education, all directed towards the goal of restoring the Han nationality and its Chinese nation to their imagined past glory. It is a movement structured around and intertwined with identity, represented, stabilized and fulfilled through these various cultural practices. Another unarticulated yet essential component of this identity project, however, is the production of equally elaborate conspiracy theories about ‘the Manchus’, distributed over the Internet, in group gatherings and in private discussions, wherein the Han majority, constituting roughly 92 per cent of China’s population, and the Manchus, constituting less than 1 per cent of the population, are imagined to be engaged in a merciless and unyielding racial war. These puzzling theories, I discovered, provide a fulfilling conspiratorial foundation for an otherwise lacking pure and ideal Han identity: the intertwinement of identity and conspiracy theory, each relying upon and filling in the emptiness of the other, is the primary focus of the analyses that follow, examining the seduction, when faced with the very real challenges of the world, of a fundamentally unreal theory of the world and its challenges.

The Paranoid Style in Chinese Ethnic Politics: A Permanent Xinhai Revolution In order to understand the power of this conspiratorial world view, which Han Clothing Movement enthusiasts eagerly embrace and perpetually refine, it is necessary to begin with a brief review of the main components of these conspiracy theories. Starting from the beginning, according to devotees of the Han Clothing Movement, there was once a distinction between Chinese and barbarians (Hua Yi zhi bian 华夷之辨). Although often idealized as a form of universalizing culturalism devoid of ethnoracial implications, the distinction between Chinese and barbarians in practice lacked any such nuanced distinction between culture and race: the two were viewed as overlapping, essentially biologizing or racializing civilization itself, such that those dwelling outside of Chinese culture were viewed as ‘distant savages hovering on the edge of bestiality’ (Dikötter 1992: 4). The distinction between Chinese and barbarians, which Han Clothing enthusiasts today believe maintained the purity of their race and thus civilization, was first historically weakened by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), which is portrayed, in contrast to prevailing state ideologies of the Yuan’s Chineseness (see Bulag 2002), as a barbarian invasion of civilization proper. The proper order of things was briefly restored by the illustrious Ming (1368–1644) before the distinction between Chinese and barbarians collapsed completely with the rise of the Manchu-controlled Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Rather than barbarians adopting Chinese ways as a

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step towards civilization, the assumption inherent within this distinction, Han Clothing Movement enthusiasts emphasize that the Qing was the beginning of Chinese adopting barbarian ways, and thus the end of a previously pure Chinese culture. This tragic transformation is embodied within Movement narratives in the historically accurate image of the queue reshaping the Chinese body, as well as in a historically inaccurate but commonly cited tale of the Qing eliminating Han clothing by force,1 purportedly leading to the collapse of Chinese civilization as a whole. Movement narratives furthermore portray the Qing as not only culturally imperialist in a barbarian mode but indeed as a genocidal dynasty, intent upon exterminating the Han: a goal that purportedly remains at the centre of Manchu motivations to this day. Fascinatingly, evidence for this claim is found in a widely-shared and ominous-sounding document entitled ‘Policies to Eliminate the Han’ (Mie Han Zhengce 灭汉政策), which claims to document genocidal Manchu plans for the Han in the late Qing Dynasty. Divided into sections detailing plans for eliminating various groups within the Han (peasants and merchants, students, scholar officials, soldiers, women and monks), a brief excerpt is sufficient to capture this perplexing pamphlet’s tone: We are a nomadic people. Three hundred years ago, Heaven guided us through the pass. The Chongzhen Emperor lost his realm, and the bandit Wu Sangui betrayed his ancestors and surrendered to us … Any Han people who rebelled would be killed. And any who surrendered would be played like a fool. We drained their wealth as an offering to ourselves, and we muddled their brains to enhance our power … If the Han dare to think of opposing the Manchus, how could we then not choose to eliminate them? … While many of them still have yet to awaken and their oppositional power is not yet strong, it will be easier to eliminate them once and for all, sooner rather than later. (Featured in Kong and Murata 2006: 121–23)

As this excerpt undoubtedly suggests to the discerning reader, these ‘Policies’ are not actual policies drafted or implemented by the Qing. Rather, according to a recent paper by Kong Xiangji and Murata Yujiro (2006), these supposed policies are a forgery drafted in the early part of the twentieth century by anti-Manchu activists in Japan, and later smuggled into China for distribution. Claiming that the document was discovered by a well-placed Han official in the palaces of Beijing, the publication and distribution of these forged policies was intended to foment popular antagonism against the Manchu Qing Dynasty in the early twentieth century. The online resurgence of this forgery a century later as proof of the Manchus’ longstanding genocidal intentions provides this peculiar pamphlet with an even more curious afterlife, playing a recurring role within these paranoid theories similar to the role of another infamous forgery, the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, in twentieth and twenty-first century anti-Semitism (Goldstein 2012). Framed within the racial war through which they interpret both history and current affairs, Han Clothing Movement participants view the Xinhai

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Revolution of 1911 as an anti-Manchu rather than anti-imperial revolution. And whereas the Xinhai Revolution is generally understood to have ended the Qing Dynasty and thus Manchu power, according to Movement narratives, the revolution was in fact only a first strike against Manchu domination and violence in a struggle that continues to this day, as Movement participants rewrite history in their particular vision. The 1911 Revolution, I was told by Movement participants, was a political Xinhai Revolution, recapturing political power from the genocidal Manchu ruling class. Yet soon thereafter the Manchus returned a fatal blow with the rise to power of the Beiyang Clique of warlords and the emergence of Manchukuo with Emperor Pu Yi as head of state. The defeat of Japan in 1945 and the rise of the Communists to power in 1949 were then military Xinhai Revolutions, insofar as they successfully eliminated the remaining military power of the Manchus, which is presumed to have been the primary source of instability in the notoriously tumultuous Republican era. Following this logic, the period from 1966 through 1976, usually known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was in fact a Cultural Xinhai Revolution targeting Manchu culture. Through this framework, despite their deep attachment to the idea of traditional culture, Movement enthusiasts are still able to idealize and identify with the Maoist era without experiencing jarring cognitive dissonance: when raising the issue of Mao’s clearly articulated opposition to the ‘Four Olds’ (i.e., old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas), I was reassured that by the time the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ began in 1966, true Chinese culture had already been destroyed centuries before by the Qing. The culture upon which the Cultural Revolution declared war was then in fact an oppressive, alien Manchu culture in need of elimination in order to revitalize true Chinese culture. For example, the death of renowned author and supposed ‘Manchu lackey’ Lao She in 1966 is celebrated in Han Clothing circles as a sign that the permanent Xinhai Revolution was finally rooting out the final vestiges of the Manchu power base once and for all. Within this world view, anti-Manchu sentiment from the 1911 Revolution combines with Maoist revolutionary terminology to produce a permanent Xinhai Revolution that continues to this day. Despite the repeated victories over Manchu power in the first eight decades of the twentieth century, Movement participants trace a rapid Manchu restoration throughout the halls of power in the post-Mao era. Former State Council Spokesman Yuan Mu, supposedly a descendant of a Hanjun bannerman,2 is often cited as one of the most prominent examples of clandestine Manchus at the pinnacle of state power, along with former Beijing mayor Chen Xitong and other figures in the state-cultural apparatus, in particular in family planning institutions. Precisely on account of the self-affirming and self-reproducing logic of conspiracy theory (Barkun 2013: 70), regardless of whether an official is actually Manchu or not (and the majority indeed self-identify as Han), their description as Han is interpreted solely as a means of hiding their nefarious Manchu nature and deeds, thus reaffirming the conspiracy in its denial: a point to which our analysis will soon return. Manchu infiltration of the People’s Liberation Army is proven by the unfounded yet widespread

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rumour that China’s first aircraft carrier was originally supposed to be named after Shi Lang, a Han ‘traitor’ who commanded Qing fleets in the seventeenth century. At the same time, today’s rampant corruption and reliable lack of state accountability are furthermore attributed to the Manchu infiltration of all branches of government and the innate Manchu tendency towards despotism, imagined to have been imported into China during the Qing, polluting a once pure and benevolent political system founded in the clear division between civilization and barbarism. Corresponding to their perceived ever-expanding role in government, Manchus are furthermore imagined to be central to the functioning of the economy in contemporary China. Similar to anti-Semitic portrayals of ‘the Jews’, Manchus are presumed to pull the strings of the economy, and to use this control solely to their advantage: they are imagined to exercise control over that which is in fact uncontrollable (cf. Luhmann 1997). As such, the state-owned enterprise layoffs of the 1990s are the product of Manchu policy to impoverish the Han, as are the unpredictable yet frequent fluctuations in China’s stock exchanges: purportedly blatant examples of the Manchus’ unrelenting yet well-disguised pursuit of self-interest and control over all matters. Other economic troubles, such as sky-high real estate prices, are attributed to Manchus in government and in business (the two are deemed inseparable) hiding their ill-gotten gains safely in the inflationary real estate market: a potentially perceptive analysis of the current state of real estate inflation muddled by a deceptive ethnic spin. And in the culinary industry, such companies as the Qiao Jiangnan Group, which runs a chain of Sichuanese restaurants across the country, are accused of being sly fronts for Manchu power. Beyond funding the reestablishment of the Qing, these restaurants are furthermore accused of serving well-disguised non-Manchu food cooked in gutter oil (digouyou 地沟 油) and other poisonous additives, so as to render unsuspecting Han customers infertile and shorten their life spans, making customers willing consumers of their own destruction. Beyond politics and economics, Manchu influence is furthermore imagined to have had a profound effect upon contemporary culture. Throughout my research, any and all disconcerting trends in contemporary China were attributed directly to Manchu influence: the crass materialism and ostentatious displays of wealth characteristic of the nouveau riche (baofahu 暴发户) are traced back to the Qing, whose rulers, having made the transition from barbarians to elites, are viewed as the original garish nouveau riche; coarse practices such as spitting, relieving oneself in public, cheating others (pianzi 骗子) and forcing others to drink in over-zealous toasts (quanjiu劝酒) are attributed to the influence of a barbarian Manchu culture upon a once pristine Han culture; and state violence and repression are again attributed to a backwards Manchu political culture characterized by violence and literary inquisition (wenziyu 文 字狱), in contrast to a pure political culture characterized by harmony and a reassuring unity. In the field of cultural production, a number of theories also circulate about a Manchu stranglehold on the Ministry of Culture and the Propaganda

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Department, two institutions whose opaqueness and overwhelming power make them particularly ripe for such conspiracy theories. The popularity of programmes like ‘Lecture Room’, which repackages dynastic history to produce state-friendly ideological arguments about the present, are interpreted as symbols of Manchu control of television due to their frequent romanticized discussions of the Qing. And the Qing-era costume dramas that have long been a staple of prime time television, derisively called ‘queue shows’ (bianzi xi 辫子戏) by Movement participants, are read as ominous signs of Manchu dominance and beautification of their lost reign. Such interpretation is an example of the tendency within conspiracy theories to read deeper and more ominous meanings into pieces of fiction and entertainment than can be logically justified (Barkun 2013: 35), similar to the belief that ‘the Jews’ control Hollywood and the mass media or, somewhat more amusingly, the idea touted by Jerry Falwell in the late 1990s that the Teletubbies were a medium for gay propaganda.3 Revealingly, a number of Movement participants told me throughout my research that the miniseries ‘Great Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty’ and ‘Great Han Empire’ had been banned because they violated the state’s anti-Han policy, despite the fact that these shows were, according to my direct observation, still broadcast all too frequently. Rumours also circulated throughout my research that middle schools across the country were on the verge of announcing compulsory courses in Manchu culture for all students, while Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film The Last Emperor is imagined to be part of the internationalization of the Qing restoration project for its perceived romanticization of Manchu rule. These examples, ranging from politics to economics to culture to everything in between, are shared here to introduce the world-image constructed through these conspiracy theories. We might call this image unrealistic, or even dark. Yet what stands out most about this description, I argue, is its constructed completeness, combining what Kathleen Stewart has described as ‘tiny details and big structures of feeling’ (Stewart 1999: 15). The Manchu conspiracy theory promoted by members of the Han Clothing Movement does not simply explain a few random phenomena in China today. It is a comprehensive, all-encompassing narrative that, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, is ‘full of rich and proliferating detail’ (1964: 81), covering and explaining all major issues in contemporary society from politics to economics to culture, inscribed within a heroic and unifying narrative of Han innocence and noble resistance. Conspiracy theory is, if anything, full. Such completeness or fullness is precisely the final destination sought by the Han Clothing Movement’s identity project: ironically, however, this elusive fullness can only be achieved via conspiracy theory, which serves as a necessary supplement to the perpetual experiential failure and emptiness of identity.

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The Manchu in the Mirror: A Structural Reading of the Relationship between Conspiracy and Identity The sheer fullness of conspiracy theory and its all-encompassing explanatory nature immediately stand in stark contrast to the perpetually uncertain and even empty experience of identity, the goal explicitly articulated as central to the Han Clothing Movement. Although the Movement is structured around the celebration of an idealized Han identity, such an identity remains elusive due precisely to its grandiose nature. Han-ness as an ideal image for Han Clothing Movement participants is characterized by power, glory, dignity and peace: characteristics that are notably lacking in participants’ daily lives. Identity thus becomes not only a source of pride but also, paradoxically, a source of disappointment and emptiness, marked by an internal gap that can only be sutured via conspiracy theory’s externalizing explanations. The centrality of this insurmountable gap within the ideals of Han-ness first came to my attention during another gathering early in my research in Shenzhen to mark the 2010 Mid-Autumn Festival. Here I met Zhong, a computer repairman in his late twenties from rural Anhui Province. In our first of many conversations, Zhong asked how much I knew about ‘Chinese traditional culture’. Answering his own question before I could, he began a monologue highlighting four core aspects of culture: clothing, food, housing and means of moving about (yi-shi-zhu-xing 衣食住行). Considering the setting, he began appropriately from clothing: clothing, he claimed, was elaborate and beautiful in the imperial era, and proper attire was a central component ordering society. But Han nowadays, he noted, wear ‘Western clothes’. Men wear suits (西装),4 he claimed, that never quite fit them correctly, and women, he said, walk around in revealing attire with their breasts and buttocks exposed, in clear violation of what he deemed to be proper dress. The longstanding national clothing, Han clothing, which had been passed down generation to generation from the time of the Yellow Emperor, had been lost and replaced by qipao and magua, which he derided as ‘savage clothing’, embodying the barbarization of culture. Another central component of culture, he continued, is food. Chinese cuisine is rich and diverse, and the social experience of sharing a meal creates lasting bonds between people. Yet he quickly added that food nowadays is not always safe, and one must be careful what one eats. There is the infamous gutter oil (see Zhou 2006), supposedly a Manchu invention, as well as genetically modified foods created by the ‘American imperialists’ (see claims in He 2010). Returning to the past, he affirmed the architectural skills of his ancestors. Ancient homes, he told me, were built using interlocking logs, providing unparalleled structural stability. One could remain safe from earthquakes and any other external threats within these structures, a protection no longer afforded by contemporary housing. Pointing to the skyscrapers beyond the window, he asked ‘how long do you think those buildings will last? Apartments fall apart nowadays before you’ve even finished paying for them’.5 Already seeing the pattern of this monologue, I was not surprised when he

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followed up his final comments about the importance of quiet solitude and meditative wandering within traditional Chinese culture with a simultaneously frustrated yet longing question: ‘where can anyone find time or space for that today?’ Then, with a sigh, he told me ‘the China out there today, the China that you are visiting and in which we live … that is absolutely not the real China’. In this monologue, we encounter a dual, split image of Hanness and Chineseness, which gives voice to the dilemma of identity that is the core motivation of this Movement, rendering the concrete reality of China as ‘not the real China’. In the celebration of Han-ness or Chinese-ness, these ideas become projecting screens for larger than life fantasies: a land of rites and etiquette or a cultural-civilizational superpower, awe-inspiring images of ancient rituals and inviolable morals ordering a smoothly functioning society, exquisite robes rendering people into walking embodiments of aesthetics, and absolute security, peace, and quiet. These fulfilling images of identity remind us that no community of people organizes itself around banal ideas: rather than imagined communities operating through printing presses, daily rituals and homogeneous, empty time (Anderson 1983), nations are better understood as imaginary communities (Rée 1992), or fantasies, operating around flowery, ever-expanding language, peaks of excitement and the promise of a full and final perfection. Yet, at the same time, as is highlighted so poignantly in the representations of the present in this monologue, there is also no community that can escape living within a banal, disappointing, empty and even disturbing reality, which does not correspond to its own fantasies. In contrast to the ideal and imposing identificatory images of the ‘real China’, within the geographic experiential space labelled as China, which is largely populated, produced and indeed dominated by people labelled by the signifier Han, there exists a number of disappointments and uncertainties that reliably fail to correspond to the grandiose signifying chain of Han-ness. As is the case in any community or nation, the name does not match the thing, precisely because the purported reality around which the community builds itself is so fantastic as to be completely unattainable at an experiential level. Despite their being proud members of the Han, a majority identity that in their eyes should give them power as the core of Chinese civilization, they perceived themselves to have attained no benefits or privileges from this identity. And accordingly, despite their celebrating an identity with five millennia of cultural history, the legendary figures, mythical feats and cultural grandeur of the imagined past that to them constituted the core of Han-ness or indeed the ‘real China’ could not have felt more distant. Participants’ diverse backgrounds and experiences came together in the real China in a common distance from their ideal of the real China, a common desire to close this gap and the need for an explanation for this distance. I have elsewhere analysed the culturalist activities of the Movement as an attempt to close this gap (Carrico 2017), grafting the Movement’s fulfilling and sacred vision of Han-ness onto the emptiness of profane reality. Here, I trace the fullness of conspiracy theory as another response to this emptiness of Han-ness, providing an explanation for that which cannot explain itself.

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Examining the structure of conspiracy theory, two primary processes in its representation of the world reveal its relationship with identity and thus the source of its appeal: (1) a clear, founding division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and (2) an all-encompassing explanation of the world according to this distinction. First, a conspiracy theory divides the world into two clearly distinct groups, ‘us’ and ‘them’, with seemingly clear characteristics on each side: positive characteristics are attributed to ‘us’ while negative or conniving characteristics are attributed to ‘them’. In the case of the Manchu conspiracy theories examined here, the primary distinction is ‘Han’ and ‘Manchu’. In the case of the majority of Chinese nationalist conspiracy theories (e.g., Liu and Li 1996), the primary distinction is between ‘China’ and ‘the West’ or ‘Japan’. In the case of the best-known global conspiracy theory of the world domination of ‘the Jews’, the primary distinction is between ‘us’ (whoever is articulating the theory) and ‘the Jews’. In the case of simplistic Marxism as a ‘conspiracy theory of society’ (Popper 1963: 94–95), the primary distinction lies between ‘the proletariat’ and ‘the capitalists’ or ‘the people’ and ‘the non-people’. In each of these representations, the world is divided into simplistic and easily intelligible binaries, with clearly defined characteristics attributed to each side. Such a process of division and attribution along boundaries, notably, is also a founding process in identification (Barth 1969). Within this first step in conspiracy theory, then, conspiracy relies upon identity for its formation along the distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the second step in its formation, however, conspiracy theory proceeds to affirm identity in a manner that the structure of identity itself, founded upon difference and a perpetual experiential lack, cannot achieve. Despite the seemingly unifying bonds of identity, as noted above, reality never matches the ideal, and identificatory commonalities do not necessarily produce benevolence, or even for that matter amity. Yet this is not the case in conspiracy theory. After dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, conspiracy theories proceed to explain everything in the world according to this very division without the possibility of refutation, thereby perpetually reproducing this framework, such that all actions and developments are based in identity and can thus be predicted. The distinction of us and them produced in any conspiracy theory is then not envisioned as simply one explanatory factor among others, but is rather imagined to be the sole reason: the reason that can explain anything and everything, thereby mapping the entire world in accordance with its founding identificatory distinction.6 The world as conspiracy theory thus ‘makes sense’ far more than the world as reality. As illustrated in the examples noted above, the imaginary Manchu cabal provides an explanation for matters large and small, pressing and inconsequential, from spitting to state massacre, from the fall of the imperium to contemporary macroeconomic concerns, and from tedious television miniseries to widespread corruption. Identity as an idealized image fails to incorporate and explain such imperfect phenomena itself, and this is where the all-encompassing binaries of conspiracy theory step in: by locating a single

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external source for these problems, not only is the overwhelming complexity of experience reassuringly simplified, but the singular cause of these issues is found comfortably outside of one’s identity label, in ‘them’. Conspiracy theory’s fullness is a response to the fundamental emptiness of identity: conspiracy theory is then not only therapeutic (Harding and Stewart 2003), but indeed fundamentally redemptive of an otherwise elusive stable sense of self. Explanation through the distinction between Han and Manchu, then, autopoeitically reproduces this distinction of Han and Manchu along lines of good and bad, using its output as its input (Luhmann 1995) and thus achieving the maintenance and sustenance of a unified and ideal image of ‘us’, the Han, through the maintenance of a corresponding unified and negative image of ‘them’, the Manchus. Identity itself can then only be realized via conspiracy theory’s production of a stable, simplified, fulfilling and fully encompassing vision of the world, redeeming and indeed rescuing ‘us’ through the figure of ‘them’. Conspiracy theory is, then, the redeemer of a positive sense of identity against the reliable offenses of reality, producing the only secure path of a flattering and stable self-image for ‘us’. Similar externalizing and redemptive trends can be seen in, for example, the recent predictable yet outlandish rumours within the Muslim world that the Islamic State is a ‘Zionist plot’ whose leaders are trained by the Mossad,7 claims in Russia that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by the ‘global elite’ aiming to prevent the revelation of a cure for HIV/AIDS,8 Arab leaders’ manipulation of the idea of a ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States to explain Middle East policy (Al-Azm 2011), the unfortunate idea circulating amongst some parents that all children’s problems are the product of vaccines, or the attempts to attribute the United States’ recent political and economic challenges to the President’s being an ‘outsider’, one of ‘them’. While conspiracy theory is thus universally used to redeem a positive sense of identity through its mapping of ‘us’ and ‘them’, this function is realized in particular sociocultural settings through local cultural manifestations. In the context of urban China’s Han Clothing Movement, then, why have the Manchus been placed in the role of ‘them’? In my analysis, two primary components of Manchu-ness make this nationality an ideal subject for the reconstruction and indeed the redemption of Han identity. First, in comparison to most conspiracy theories, the fact that the Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty actually existed and reigned over China for three centuries provides a crucial foundation lacking in most conspiracy theories. Such historical facts, however, are used to support far more unrealistic conclusions. For example, illustrating the redemptive and ideal-identificatory function of conspiracy theory, through this anti-Manchu world view, the reform-era trope of the century of humiliation (1842–1949) is able to be conspiratorially transferred onto the image of the Manchu, whose barbarian theft of the mandate of heaven explains the disarray and disintegration of the idealized ‘unity of heaven and earth’ in the nineteenth and twentieth century. ‘If you hand the mandate of heaven over to a bunch of barbarians’, one Movement enthusiast told me, ‘what do you

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expect to happen?’ The source of the downfall of the empire and the well-ordered ideal society over which it reigned is then not to be found in any defects within this sociopolitical order, and should not be a cause for reflection. The imperial order is thereby redeemed as the ultimate pinnacle of Han culture, in need of restoration as the sole political order suited for China: precisely the traditionalist political argument made by many Han Clothing Movement enthusiasts, and a conclusion that could only be logically reached through this illogical conspiracy theory. Beyond providing an ideal historical symbol for the reassuring externalization of some of the most disconcerting developments of early modernity, however, how is this narrative of ‘the Manchu’ transferred into the present? In contrast to the real power of the Manchus in the past, the second core component of Manchu-ness contributing to the viability of this conspiracy theory is the Manchu’s fundamentally indiscernible nature in the present. The Manchu population of China today is small and largely Sinicized. As a friend of Manchu descent in Guangzhou commented while discussing my research on these conspiracy theories: ‘we Manchus have been completely Sinicized over the past century. We don’t have any land, any customs, or any distinguishing features. Our language is almost dead. So how could we be running this country?’ From such a rational perspective, historical Sinicization or Hanification (Hanhua 汉化) and the resulting non-distinct nature of the Manchu would indicate the Manchu’s lack of power in the present. Yet in practice, this largely non-distinct yet foreign nature means that the Manchu can be found anywhere and everywhere, and can thus be used to explain anything and everything as an unrecognized outsider intervening in China’s internal affairs (neizheng 内 政). It is then precisely because ‘the Manchus’ have been thoroughly Sinicized and have neither strongly distinguishing features, nor customs, nor language that they can be imagined as the omnipotent and omnipresent cabal secretly running the country and destroying its culture.9 Their fullness as an explanatory trope is based in the emptiness of their identifying markers in China today. And as noted above, the denial of any figure’s perceived Manchu-ness is deemed to be part of the conspiracy and thus an affirmation of said figure’s Manchu nature: this explanation is thus irrefutable and self-reproducing, exercising complete explanatory control over an otherwise inexplicable and often quite disappointing world. The perpetually self-reaffirming and all-encompassing nature of conspiracy theory thus realizes a self-reaffirming sense of idealized and full Han identity and community that is not only reliably lost in the everyday empty experience of disillusioned modern Han-ness and Chineseness,10 but that indeed cannot be attained by any other means. And the Manchu, as a once powerful figure in modern Chinese history and a now largely invisible but imaginarily ominous figure, comes to serve as the devil of identificatory theodicy, rescuing subjects’ image of Han-ness from its perpetual slippage and failure. The permanent Xinhai revolution is, then, an imaginary struggle against the emptiness of everyday existence, and for this very reason, it is the realization of an otherwise unattainable identificatory fullness. A final example of conspiracy theo-

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ries surrounding the one-child policy will apply this analytical rubric to reading conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy Theories: Negative and Positive, Empty and Full Shen was one of the first Movement participants I met during my research in Guangzhou. Arriving an hour and a half late for our scheduled meeting in full Han regalia, her elaborate and carefully designed traditional-style outfit not only stood out sharply from the surrounding urban landscape, but also clashed immediately with her haphazard personal style. As a single young lady approaching the age of thirty, at which point she would officially become a ‘leftover woman’ (shengnü 剩女), I saw Shen move from one potential suitor to the next, in perpetual search of Mr Right. Her career was similarly in flux, as she has moved from one get-rich-quick plan to another in the years that I have known her, none of which seem to have succeeded. Shen’s life is quite uncertain, characterized by an all-encompassing precarity. But as we talked over tea one afternoon in the early spring in Guangzhou, there was one matter of which she was quite certain: when she did eventually settle down with Mr Right, she would be unable to have more than one child, a restriction that clashed with her understanding of Chinese tradition as encouraging large, harmonious families that all lived under one roof. And she was furthermore certain that this policy was the product of Manchu infiltration and control of the government, towards the goal of enslaving and eliminating the Han majority. Han Clothing Movement participants like Shen unanimously trace the reform-era resurgence of Manchu power to a moment in 1979, when Tian Xueyuan, a supposed descendant of a line of Manchu bannermen, was named the Director of the Population Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Soon after taking this position, Tian became the architect of the one-child policy, which mandated until late 2015 that urban residents have only one child. Similar to theories surrounding such secretive state entities as the Propaganda Department mentioned above, one can easily understand why this policy has emerged as a focus of conspiracy theories: no phenomenon could be more amenable to such conspiratorial theorization than a state policy that monitors and intervenes in the most intimate of reproductive processes and the very origins of life itself. Yet beyond the ripeness of this phenomenon for conspiratorial thinking, the most fascinating aspect of these conspiracy theories is the story that they tell about Movement participants’ views of China today through the metaphor of the one-child policy: enthusiasts see the policy as representative of the barbarian fall of contemporary society and the oppressed fate of the Han majority therein, at the mercy of a dominant and brutal Manchu minority driving the tragic course of history. Shen viewed the one-child policy as an exclusively Han one-child policy, exaggerating the slightly more relaxed controls on rural minority populations to present them as evidence of Manchu collusion in the drafting of this policy. Revealing the centrality of affect in the production and reproduction of

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c­ onspiracy theory, she and many others over the course of my research asked, ‘Does this [the one-child policy] seem like something that a nationality would do to its own people?’ This question gives voice to the alien feeling of this policy, which in turn serves as evidence of its supposed alien origins: the entire family planning bureaucracy and its rationalized yet thoroughly irrational means of attaining its goals come to be seen as persecution of one nationality by another. Reminiscent of Hofstadter’s observation that the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world (1964: 86), such an explanation seems far more rational and undoubtedly provides a more redeeming narrative than the identity shattering fact that a largely Han state (also part of ‘us’) has arbitrarily imposed this policy upon a largely Han populace. By associating the Manchus primarily with the one-child policy, rather than, for example, something considerably more benign such as taxation or long lines at automobile registration offices, the imagined Manchus in power are proven not to be regular bureaucrats, but indeed bloodthirsty madmen and madwomen, descendants of the genocidal Qing: the Han, on the other side of this binary, are thereby constructed as the unified innocent victims of a cruel and rapacious external power. Among Tian’s purported secret Manchu allies is Li Bin, former Minister of the State Population and Family Planning Commission, and currently the Chairperson of the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Movement participants portray Li as a bloodthirsty baby killer, ‘crueller than the Japanese’, in a post that juxtaposes Li’s image with a disturbing photograph of Feng Jianmei. Feng is a mother from Shaanxi in her twenties who was forced to abort her child at seven months in 2012 because she could not afford the fine for a second child. Yet after the procedure, Feng took the dramatic step of graphically photographing herself in bed alongside her blood-covered thirty-week foetus. The post juxtaposing these two images labels Feng as a ‘helpless Han mother’ (wuzhu de Hanzu muqin 无 助的汉族母亲) and reads: Manchu Tartary Family Planning Official and Child-Killing Beast Li Bin Specializes in Killing Han Babies Minister of the State Family Planning and Population Commission and leader of the entire family planning enterprise Li Bin is a Manchu-Tartary descendant of Li Guoxiong. Li Guoxiong was a lackey of Manchukuo who “led the wolf right into the house” by collaborating with the Japanese Imperial Army in occupying Northeast China, wasting the human resources, material resources, and fiscal resources of the region and enslaving its people, and collaborating with the invading imperial army in the killing of Chinese soldiers. Li Bin loves living by a double standard, using her power to manufacture false population statistics so as to deceive the Chinese people and the entire world. This Manchu-Tartary baby-killing beast has in the name of “family planning” stripped the Han nationality of its equal rights to reproduction and conspired to eliminate the Han nationality so as to Tartar-ize China. She aims to overthrow China to reassert her control of all under heaven, revealing that her inhuman and rapacious designs remain as strong as ever.11

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Such representations externalize this experientially incomprehensible policy, while at the same time presenting the scapegoat as not only a completely different type but indeed as a fundamental existential threat. This image then serves as a rallying cry for Han unity, consolidating and even exaggerating a sense of ‘us’ through an exaggerated sense of a completely foreign ‘them’, thereby making the otherwise unclear category of ‘Han-ness’ that the Movement aims to promote present and real in an unprecedented and immediate way. It is not only affectively necessary to imagine that those who did this to Feng are alien outsiders precisely because what they have done is so inexplicably horrid; at the same time, this representation, by externalizing incomprehensible internal Han behaviour, makes the unifying ideal of Hanness more real than it could otherwise ever be. Finally, on account of this supposedly evil genocidal power, the Han as a whole is portrayed as oppressed and fundamentally endangered, a feeling experienced in the emptiness of reality by Han Clothing Movement participants and then transferred onto an imaginary foe in the figure of the Manchu. ‘This isn’t my China’, Shen said. Within the context of a society largely produced and dominated by people who self-identify as ‘Han’, this portrayal of the oppression of the Han serves to explain the reliable evasiveness of the Movement’s ideals, or the inescapable gap between Han identity as presented by the Movement and the realities of everyday experience in contemporary China. Such portrayals cast the Han as the victim of a cruel society controlled by others, irrationally dedicated to the Han’s destruction, in a narrative similar to the American far right’s portrayals of the ‘war on Christmas’ or a white minority under siege. A dual operation of amnesty and fantasy is thereby realized, whereby members of ‘the Han’ are exonerated from having produced the present society with which they are disillusioned (not the real China, not produced by the real Han), while at the same time imagining in its place a ‘true Han society’ that must and most importantly can be recaptured in order to realize, as the following section describes, the ‘real China’. Unity of identity, unable to be reached by any other means, is finally achieved through a complex, imaginary network of paranoid victimization: a positive conspiracy theory of pure and ideal Han identity unharmed by the ravages of reality is affirmed only through the negative conspiracy theory of imagined Manchu cruelty.

Conclusion: Between the Emptiness of Identity and the Fullness of Conspiracy Examining the structure of conspiracy theory, from division and externalization, to the reassuring unity of explanation, to the resuscitation of the otherwise untenable ideal of identity across a clear binary of good and evil, we can see that the imaginary figure of the evil Manchu is in fact the core of a similarly imaginary Han identity within Han Clothing Movement narratives. The fulfilling ideal of untarnished Han-ness lost in the corruption of

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the empty real world is redeemed through the imaginary figure of the evil Manchu engaging in perpetual acts of sabotage against what should otherwise be a perfect polity and society: similar to Bunkenborg’s analysis of possession in this volume, China within this world view is ‘possessed’. This negative conspiracy theory of the all-powerful Manchu cabal, then, primarily serves to maintain a fulfilling positive conspiracy theory of a Han society and a Han state, which would solely by right of their pure Han identity alone be benevolent and perfect. Such an affirmative conclusion is the final goal that the Movement ultimately aims to produce, despite the constant rebuttals of reality against this fantasy: fullness is a compensatory response to emptiness insofar as a very real and fundamental emptiness generates the yearning for imaginary fullness. The shift from identity to an explanatory, all-encompassing and externalizing conspiracy theory achieves the transformation of a fundamentally imaginary and perpetually disjointed community into a thoroughly documented and perpetually self-reaffirming community, concretized in its opposition to those who ruin it and thus reproduce it as it is. The identificatory role of conspiracy theory thus casts the proliferation of such theories in contemporary Chinese society as well as in societies across the world in a new light: conspiracy’s paranoid structure allows for the stabilization and attainment of an otherwise lost and perpetually elusive sense of complete identity in the present. As identity perpetually splits and slips away, conspiracy theories serve in turn to resuscitate identity towards an unattainable ideal, in a process that Han Clothing Movement participants portray as a permanent Xinhai Revolution, but is in the end really only a war against themselves and their fantasies represented as identity via the unexpected detour of conspiracy.

Kevin Carrico is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University. His research focuses on nationalism and ethnic relations in contemporary China. He is the author of The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today (UC Press, 2017), a study of the Han Clothing Movement. He is also the translator of Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire, and is currently pursuing an ethnography of the Hong Kong independence movement.

Notes I would like to acknowledge the generous funding provided for this research by the US Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. Thanks to Sun Yat-sen University’s Comparative Literature Section, which provided an intellectually vibrant home away from home during my research. Thanks as well to Stanford University’s East Asian Studies Colloquium, where portions of this chapter were presented, discussed, and developed.

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  1. Historian Edward J.M. Rhoads, tracing sartorial policy in the Qing Dynasty, notes that the adoption of Manchu clothing was only required of the male scholar-official elite: ‘the great majority of Han men were free to continue to dress as they had during the Ming’ (Rhoads 2000: 61). Similarly, Han women were not required to adopt Manchu dress (Rhoads 2000: 62). Although sartorial policy was not then a matter of great concern for the Qing, the imagined forcible suppression of Han clothing in this era serves as a central explanatory point for contemporary subjects’ unfamiliarity with this invented tradition, providing a crucial historical foothold through its alleged erasure and indeed suppression.  2. Hanjun 汉军 bannermen are soldiers of the Han ethnicity who fought in support of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.   3. ‘Gay Tinky Winky Bad for Children’, BBC News, 15 February 1999. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/276677.stm.  4. On another occasion, a Movement participant explained to me the ‘barbarian’ origins of the ‘Western’ suit (xizhuang西装), claiming that the suit was originally ‘pirate clothing’ and that the tie was ‘slave clothing’ used to transport slaves. He proceeded to bemoan the women of today, whom he claimed only saw sophistication in what was in fact savagery.   5. This comment echoes some of Ulfstjerne’s findings in this volume on the creeping emptiness of an unrealistically full real estate market.   6. This pattern can also be seen in state media narratives of ‘anti-China forces’, in the often used simplifying yet confident declaration that ‘there is only one reason’ (yuanyin zhi you yige 原因只有一个) for whatever issue is being explained at the moment through this conspiracy theory.   7. ‘Claims that ISIS has Jewish Roots Grow in Muslim World’, Official Blog of the AntiDefamation League, 26 August 2014. Retrieved 29 September 2014 from http:// blog.adl.org/international/claims-that-isis-has-jewish-roots-grow-in-muslim-world  8. Padraig Reddy, ‘MH 17: Five of the Most Bizarre Conspiracy Theories’, The Guardian, 22 July 2014. Retrieved 29 September 2014 from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/mh17-five-bizarre-conspiracy-theories-zionist-plots-illuminati-russian-tv.   9. The indistinguishable nature of the Manchu is reminiscent of Slavov Zizek’s analysis of the internally undetectable yet foreign figure of ‘the Jew’ (1989). 10. In Movement rhetoric, in a world in which all is right, there would be no discernible distinction between ‘Han-ness’ and ‘Chineseness’. 11. ‘Manchu Tartary Family Planning Official and Child-Killing Beast Li Bin Specializes in Killing Han Babies’ http://bbs.hanminzu.org/forum.

References Adorno, T. 2002. The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. London: Routledge. Al-Azm, S.J. 2011. ‘Orientalism and Conspiracy’, in A. Graf, S. Fathi and L. Paul (eds), Orientalism and Conspiracy Theory: Politics and Conspiracy Theory in the Contemporary Islamic World, Essays in Honor of Sadik J. Al-Azm. London: IB Tauris. Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barkun, M. 2013. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Bulag, U. 2002. The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Carrico, K. 2017. The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press (in press). Chew, M. 2007. ‘Contemporary Re-emergence of the Qipao: Political Nationalism, Cultural Production and Popular Consumption of a Traditional Chinese Dress’, China Quarterly (189): 144–61. Chun, A. 2012. ‘Toward a Postcolonial Critique of the State in Singapore’, Cultural Studies 26(5): 670–87. Clark, H. 2000. The Cheongsam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dikötter, F. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goldstein, P. 2012. A Convenient Hatred: The History of Anti-Semitism. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves. Harding, S. and K. Stewart. 2003. ‘Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America’, in H.G. West and T. Sanders (eds), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham: Duke University Press. Harrell, S. 1994. ‘Introduction’, in S. Harrell (ed.), Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: University of Washington Press. He, Xin 何新. 2010. Shei tongzhizhe shijie? Shenmi Gongqihui yu xin zhanzheng xiemi 谁统治着世界？神秘共齐会与心战争泄密 [Who Rules the World? Revealing the Mysterious Freemasons and the New War]. Hong Kong: CNHK Publications Limited. Hofstadter, R. 1964. ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Harper’s Magazine, November, 77–86. Keeley, B. 1999. ‘Of Conspiracy Theories’, The Journal of Philosophy 96(3): 109–26. Kong, Xiangji 孔祥吉 and Murata, Yujiro 村田雄二郎. 2006. ‘“Sun Yixian yanshuo” yu “miehan zhengce” – dui Riben dang’an zhong liangfen zhongyao fan Man wenxian zhi kaocha’ 孙逸仙演说与灭汉政策—对日本档案中两份重要反满文献之考察 [‘“Speeches of Sun Yat-sen” and “Policies to Eliminate the Han”: An Examination of Two Important Anti-Manchu Documents from the Japanese Diplomatic Files’], in Jinian Sun Zhongshan danchen 140 zhounian guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji 纪念 孙中山诞辰140周年国际学术研讨会论文集[Collection of Papers from an International Academic Seminar Marking the 140th Anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s Birth]. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: Beijing. Liu, Kang 刘康. and Li Xiguang 李希光. 1996. Yaomohua Zhongguo de beihou 妖魔 化中国的背后 [Behind the Plot to Demonize China]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing. Luhmann, N. 1995. ‘Why Does Society Describe itself as Postmodern?’, Cultural Critique (Spring): 171–86. ———. 1997. ‘The Limits of Steering’, Theory, Culture, and Society 14(1): 41–57. Popper, K. 1963. The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rée, J. 1992. ‘Internationality’, Radical Philosophy (60): 3–11. Rhoads, E.J.M. 2000. Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stewart, K. 1999. ‘Conspiracy Theory’s Worlds’, in G. Marcus (ed.), Paranoia within Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 13–19.

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Tsou, Jung 鄒容. 1968 [1903]. The Revolutionary Army: A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903 [革命军 Geming jun], trans. J. Lust. Paris: Mouton & Co. Wiens, M.C. 1969. ‘Anti-Manchu Thought during the Early Ch’ing’, Papers on China, from Seminars at Harvard University (Vol. 22A). Cambridge: East Asia Research Centre, Harvard University. Zhou, Qing 周勍. 2006. Min yi he shi wei tian: Zhongguo shipin anquan xianzhuang diaocha 民以何食为天- 中国食品安全现状调查 [What Kind of God? A Survey of Food Safety in China Today]. Beijing: Worker’s Publishing House. Zizek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

JK Chapter 6

Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei Mikkel Bunkenborg

Contemporary China seems to be haunted by sensations and suspicions of emptiness, an emptiness that becomes manifest not only in people who are physically and mentally exhausted by the race to get ahead, but also in counterfeit goods that are not what they seem, and in political rhetoric that has no substance. This pervasive concern with emptiness is reflected in a book review by John Osburg, who takes up the perennial theme of the ideological vacuum left by Mao’s death and the victory of materialism and pragmatism: This has led to what intellectuals and ordinary Chinese call a “moral crisis” or a “spiritual vacuum”, which they cite to explain everything from the pervasiveness of corruption to scandals over tainted food that has cost hundreds of lives and outraged China’s neophyte consumers. It seems to many Chinese that in the absence of a widely shared set of values, concern for fellow citizens has become a scarce commodity – and that life itself has become cheap. (Osburg 2014: 147)

Osburg emphasizes the fragility of a society troubled by ‘economic bubbles’ and ‘institutions hollowed out by corruption’, and through the choice of words – spiritual vacuum, economic bubbles, hollow institutions – the reader may gain an intuitive sense of various forms of emptiness in Chinese society. But the reader may also remain puzzled. What is this emptiness that has lasted for

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almost forty years, explains all manner of things and seems to take its toll on life itself? This chapter is an attempt to explore the cosmological underpinnings and practical implications of ideas about emptiness in contemporary China as they unfold in a limited field of social practice. In the rural township of Fanzhuang in Hebei Province, people distinguish between ‘full diseases’ shibing 实病 and ‘empty diseases’ xubing 虚病. Whereas full diseases may be diagnosed and sometimes cured by doctors of Chinese or Western medicine, empty diseases are said to involve supernatural agency and require the help of a spirit medium or an exorcist who can determine the identity of the supernatural agent and stop it from causing further trouble, by appeasement or by threats of violence. Practitioners of Chinese medicine use the word xu to describe bodily conditions of depletion or deficiency, but in popular usage in this part of China, the same word describes diseases – often cases of possession – that occur when a condition of emptiness has given invasive spirits access to the interior of a person. In order to qualify the nature of the emptiness involved in the so-called empty diseases three very different cases are presented and analysed. In the first case the agent of possession is a ghost and the narrator is an observer. In the second case, the victim is possessed by the spirit of a dead relative and the story is told by the exorcist. In the third case, the story is narrated by the victim, who was haunted by the gods of her grandmother. These cases emphasize different aspects of emptiness, ranging from bodily depletion to broken social relations and meaninglessness, but they share a concern with the way emptiness, in its various forms, lays subjects open to invasion, possession and change. In a study of emptiness in Chinese landscape painting, Francois Cheng (1994) pointed out that emptiness and the binary of full and empty have never been studied systematically even though they are central themes in Chinese culture. ‘Emptiness’, Francois Cheng suggests, ‘introduces discontinuity and reversibility into a given system and thus permits the elements composing the system to transcend rigid opposition and one-sided development’ (1994: 36). Emptiness exhibits a similar transformative potential in stories of empty diseases, but while emptiness may create an elegant dynamism between mountains and water in Chinese landscape painting, the emptiness that affects bodies and persons in Fanzhuang is more often seen as disruptive and threatening and it is this horror vacui that will be explored in the following pages.

Divination and Empty Diseases in Fanzhuang Fanzhuang 范庄 is located in the pear district that stretches across the eastern third of Zhao County in the southern part of Hebei Province. As the administrative centre for nine villages, Fanzhuang houses the township government, a court house, a high school and even a hospital with fifty beds. The population of some 5,000 people is fairly average for villages in the area, but the business opportunities in Fanzhuang have also attracted an estimated 700 people from the outside. The local economy revolves around the cultivation,

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packaging and transportation of pears, and the landscape is dotted with cold storage facilities where some of the harvest is stored. Factories along the main roads churn out cardboard boxes for the pears, the owners of lorries haul loads of fruit as far as Vietnam, and small seasonal workshops weld ladders and produce wrappings for the pears. On market days, people converge upon Fanzhuang to sell their goats and vegetables and set up stalls with shoes and clothing, food, farm implements and ritual paper money for the dead. In addition to the pears, Fanzhuang is known for an annual temple fair in honour of a local dragon deity. Revived in 1983 when Fanzhuang was decollectivized, the Longpaihui 龙牌会 attracted thousands of local visitors every year, and eventually a number of academics and journalists, mostly Chinese, but also a few foreigners, who started to take an interest in the temple fair (Bunkenborg 2012, 2014; Gao 2006, 2014: Gao and Ma 2011; Zhao and Bell 2007). I first visited the celebrations in 2002 with Professor Zhao Xudong and a group of students from Peking University, and when I was looking for a field site to study health practices in rural China three years later, I returned to Fanzhuang. The well-educated and influential Mr Wu, who used to take care of visitors to the temple fair, invited me to stay in a vacant room, and his home became the permanent base for ten months of fieldwork between 2005 and 2008. One of the attractions of the temple fair in Fanzhuang is the possibility of communicating with the deities by consulting the diviners who work in the smoke-filled interior of the temple. In this part of China, divination revolves around a burning bundle of incense and the local diviners are accordingly known as xiangtou 香头, which may literally be translated as ‘incense heads’ (Bunkenborg 2015). These diviners do not usually evince any trance-like behaviour, and thus it is not immediately apparent that they are actually spirit mediums who are capable of communicating with supernatural agents while they observe the burning incense. The particular type of mediumship described in this chapter, one that centres on divination with incense, may be a Hebei specialty. It is described in a few studies from the Republican era (Körner 1959; Li 1948) and then again in a number of contemporary studies (Fan 2003; DuBois 2005; Yue 2004), but the practice of the xiangtou is a variation on the themes of mediumship, shamanism, possession and trance that unfold in a great variety of forms in Chinese societies (Chan 2014; Chao 1999, Cline 2010; DeBernardi 2006; Elliott 1955; Kleinman 1980; Martin 1973; Nickerson 2001; Potter 1974; Wolf 1990). The xiangtou usually divine in front of a religious effigy, either in a temple or in their own homes. The supplicants come with a donation and kneel in front of the altar as they state their names, where they live and why they have come. Some supplicants ask for help in relation to jobs, business ventures, family affairs and exams, but the most frequently asked questions concern illness and the xiangtou then seek to determine whether an illness is a full disease or an empty disease. Disease may be either shi 实 or xu 虚. The first character conveys the meanings of full, solid, true and real, while the second has the opposite meanings of empty, weak, false and virtual. The shi diseases are said to be quite straight-

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forward, as they can be diagnosed and frequently cured by a doctor, but the xu diseases are rather more mysterious. A minority of resolute materialists in Fanzhuang claim that xubing means false disease and has no basis in fact, but is merely a concomitant of mental illness. The majority, however, maintain that empty disorders are as real as full diseases and involve supernatural agency. The standard examples of empty diseases are cases of possession: a person suddenly starts talking gibberish in an unfamiliar voice, the relatives of the victim consult a spirit medium or an exorcist and the ghost is induced to leave either with offerings of food and money or with threats of violence and acupuncture needles. But stories of empty diseases are nevertheless infinitely varied. A person may be attacked by a ghost, haunted by the spirits of dead relatives or tormented by an animal spirit or a god. Diseases that seem full may prove to be empty, and the spirit mediums and exorcists have a wide range of methods at their disposal. Sometimes an empty disorder is simply an ephemeral tingling in the scalp caused by some unspecified malign influence, a slight chill that signals the onset of a cold, and sometimes it is a life threatening affliction that goes on for years until the victim realizes that a specific deity is seeking to speak through the victim and is forcing him or her to become a spirit medium. People differentiate between natural diseases and diseases involving supernatural agency elsewhere in China, but they use other terms, distinguishing between regular diseases zhengbing 正病 and irregular diseases xiebing 邪病 (Chau 2006: 55) or between diseases whose causes are to be found ‘within the body’ and ‘outside the body’ (Kleinman 1980: 199). The distinction between full and empty disorders is a local usage, and to my knowledge, the only publication in English that mentions it is Thomas DuBois’ The Sacred Village, a description of religious life in a rural area close by in south-eastern Hebei, which states that: [P]easants in Cang County distinguish between “ordinary sicknesses of the body (shi) and those of supernatural origin (xu). Shi sicknesses can be thought of as clearly defined and evident maladies, such as cancer or infection, which should be treated by a physician, of either Western or traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast, xu sickness is a general weakness of the body, which can easily give rise to shi sickness and require the services of a xiangtou. Xu illness can be caused by fatigue or poor conditions, but is most often attributed to one of a number of supernatural causes. (DuBois 2005: 66)

Turning to the note for clarification, one learns that: The terms shi and xu, which are most commonly translated as “true” and “false” are somewhat misleading at first glance. A xu condition is as real as a shi disease, the difference being that the former has not yet manifested itself with specific physical symptoms. (Ibid.: 226)

Strangely, xubing is here described both as a sickness caused by supernatural agents and as a condition of general weakness with no specific physical

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symptoms caused naturally by fatigue. Does the term xubing imply that the agent of a disease is a supernatural entity or that the patient is weakened, fatigued and susceptible to diseases? It looks as if Thomas DuBois is conflating two different theories of disease causation. One is a popular theory of supernatural agents making people ill and the other is the theory of Chinese medicine, which became naturalistic a long time ago and primarily seeks the root of disease in internal imbalances. But by mixing these two different theories, Thomas Dubois may actually have hit the nail on the head.

Ghost Attack Mr Liu was a boisterous 58-year-old farmer who was often employed as a cook at banquets in the village. On these occasions, he frequently had a drink too many and after many interesting but incoherent exchanges with Mr Liu on the streets of Fanzhuang, I decided to visit him in his home at a time when he was sober. Mr Liu regretted that he had recently been drunk at a banquet and said things that he should not have said. It wasn’t the first time, but this time Mr Liu intended to stop drinking. This resolute goodbye to alcohol did not, however, prevent Mr Liu from drinking his daily draught of medicine, a fiery mixture produced by steeping wolfberries, ginseng and a fungus called lingzhi 灵芝 in alcohol. In response to my questions about empty diseases, Mr Liu told the following story of an exorcism he witnessed in the 1970s. L: One day I had finished harvesting maize, and I was keeping an eye on the corn piled up in the yard where they fed livestock. This was when we were a collective. A friend came looking for me at night and said “Go fetch Master Junke, your cousin is sick”. I took my bicycle and said I had to leave. I had a drop of liquor because it was pitch dark and raining and I cycled five or six li [one li is half a kilometre] and came back with him. That was really xubing. It took five or six people to get rid of that person [the ghost]. MB: That bad, was it? L: We had to carry him, we had to catch that soul and drive it off. In the beginning he [Master Junke] tried to be nice: “Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you, if you need money, I’ll give you money, if you need clothing I’ll give you clothing”. Clothes made of paper that you burn. “Whatever you need I’ll give it to you”. No good. When it didn’t work, Master Junke became agitated, and he started cursing and said: “Why the hell won’t you take what I give you”. Then Master Junke took another swig of liquor, found a needle and started stabbing. He could see the thing [the ghost] and where it went, the body would quiver. Sometimes it was at renzhong and he’d jab at renzhong [pointing to the acupoint under the nose], and here at the temple. MB: So you jab the acupoints? L: It occupies these places, these acupoints. The last one, there were five needles, he [Master Junke] stuck in the arm. He had experience in these matters

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and stuck it in at an angle, but he couldn’t get it out. Usually they [the exorcists] coax them, give them enough and they leave. They have a yin style, but this one had a yang style. He also coaxes and wheedles but if it really doesn’t work, he has the technique to take you [the ghost] on and do you in. Haha, he stuck a needle in his arm, and the day after, they went to the hospital to have it removed. He was cured and he hasn’t been ill since, I was there and what I’m saying is seeking truth from facts. MB: So first you try coaxing and if it doesn’t work you use needles? L: Yes, you use iron needles. MB: Are they thick ones? L: He used needles for sewing. When he hits them he kills them with the needles, these thing you can’t see and can’t touch. These years, people are strong and well, those days it was weak people who were easily possessed. They possess people with weak bodies (shenzi xuruo 身子虚弱), if you are strong, they can’t attach themselves.

In this case, the ghost was exorcised by violent means, and it really is a frightening scene – five or six men struggling with the victim at night, drinking alcohol, shouting and sticking needles in his face. But why would a ghost be scared of physical violence and needles? We usually think of ghosts as disembodied entities, but these ghosts seem different. Even if ordinary people cannot see them or touch them, they are apparently sufficiently physical to be killed with needles. The way Mr Liu spoke of and dealt with ghosts and amorphous noxious influences suggested that he thought of these bad things as material stuff. For instance, Mr Liu made it a habit to rub his head from front to back a few times when he came in from the outside. Mr Liu learned this preventive measure from his paternal grandmother, who knew how to get rid of ghosts by massaging the acupoints. She had taught Mr Liu this technique but he seldom used it because he was afraid that the ghost would turn on him; that he himself would be harmed by the noxious influence he was trying to dispel. And this brings us back to the medicinal draught that Mr Liu was imbibing. Shortly after his marriage, he had been hospitalized for a few days due to overexertion in the marital bed, and since then he has been concerned with a condition known as shenxu 肾虚, which literally means kidney emptiness (Shapiro 1998; Zhang 2007). In Chinese medicine, depletion of the kidney system is associated with loss of vitality and aging, and as such it may affect both men and women (Ots 1990: 45). Men frequently experience the condition as impotence and ascribe it to the loss of seminal essence through excessive sexual activity. Mr Liu took his daily drought to bolster or patch his kidneys bushen 补肾, and it was this concern with an interior emptiness that made him reluctant to deal with ghosts. Bachelors were not possessed by ghosts, Mr Liu claimed, presumably because they were full of vitality, but men who lacked this vitality could well be possessed, and Mr Liu seemed to understand the depleted interior as an empty physical space that a ghost could easily slip into.

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Possession by Relatives Mr Yao was a quiet man in his early forties. He had a small shop that sold pesticides, but he was also a member of Hongyangdao 弘阳道, a secret society of Daoists. As a young man, Mr Yao had smashed a statue of a god and for years he had suffered from severe headaches. When he was finally cured by an elderly member of the Hongyangdao, he decided to learn his secrets and kneeled until he was accepted as a disciple. The followers of Hongyangdao set out offerings of food and incense but they have no religious image and cultivate themselves by meditating with their face to the north. Having done so for several hours every evening for three years, Mr Yao’s knowledge and ability was tested by a board, and he was initiated with a ceremony called ‘opening the celestial door’ kai tianmen 开天门, where the master presses a finger against the initiate’s palate and opens three passages at the top of the skull. Mr Yao was afraid of needles and thus he never learned the needle technique described above, but the other members of the society taught him a variety of techniques and spells to deal with possession. It was Mr Yao who related one of the most touching cases of xubing in Fanzhuang: the story of a deceased father who missed his children. A young man in Fanzhuang died at the age of twenty-nine, leaving two children and a wife. A few years later, the widow married again, but she chose a man from a poor area near Zhangjiakou who could be induced to move in. One day, the new husband was acting strangely, and when his wife asked him what he was doing, and who he was, he replied in the local dialect, not with his native accent, that he had returned to see his children. The ghost refused to leave the body of the living husband and asked his former wife not to fetch his uncle, Mr Yao. She found an excuse, however, and slipped out to fetch this very uncle, who rushed over to help. Mr Yao started by asking the ghost if he needed money, but the ghost replied that Mazang, a woman who lived next door, had given him some money a few days ago and that he had not returned for want of money, but because he missed his children. The uncle then reasoned with the ghost, telling him that he should not enter the home and cause trouble but content himself with watching his children from afar, and after a while he was ‘coaxed off’. The new husband came to his senses, reverted to his usual accent, and had no memory of the incident. It turned out that Mazang had in fact made an offering of paper money for wild ghosts a few days earlier because she sensed that something strange was going on. When Mr Yao is called out to cure patients suffering from an empty disease, he kneels in front of a burning stick of incense and mumbles a spell as he visualizes the storeroom of his spiritual master and picks out a suit of clothing to protect him from harm. The healing itself is a dialogue with the possessed intended to determine who is speaking through the victim’s mouth. Mr Yao tries to coax the supernatural agent into leaving, but there is also the threat of violence. Before the dialogue even starts, Mr Yao visualizes a weapon, a sword or a thunderbolt, and the arrival of this weapon is indicated by a tickling

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sensation in his left hand. As he speaks to the supernatural agent, he gesticulates with his right hand while keeping his left hand with the weapon tucked away in a pocket, out of sight but ready for use. The most important thing is to establish the identity of the ghost and how it is related to the victim. Ghosts tend to lie, Mr Yao claimed, but he was able to use his face as a diagnostic instrument. I was allowed to flick through his books with handwritten spells and came across a drawing of a hand with the word ‘debt of destiny’ mingqian 命欠 written on the thumb, and then ‘family debt’ jiatingqian 家庭欠, ‘affinal debt’ hunyuanqian 婚缘欠, ‘debt of the past’ qianqian 前欠 and ‘debt of the tongue’ shekouqian 舌口欠 on the other digits. The drawing proved to be a topography of a face transferred to a hand. Depending on the kind of debt involved in the possession, Mr Yao’s face will twitch in different places, and by placing his hand against his cheek and checking the place of the twitch against the position of his fingers, he is able to determine approximately the identity of the supernatural agent. The left part of the face indicates a male and the right a female. Along the cheekbone, the souls of close relatives will cause a twitch near the ear and more distant relations will be closer to the nose. Someone from a senior generation will cause an upward twitch, someone from a junior generation a downward twitch and someone from the same generation as the victim effects a sideways twitch. The ghost of a person who jumped in a well causes a twitch under the eye, and the ghost of someone who committed suicide by hanging affects the eyelid. A twitch in the ear indicates something to do with the temple, the souls of foxes and cats are sensed under the nose, and so on. Mr Yao’s approach to empty diseases foregrounds social relations. The story of the new husband who was possessed by the dead husband offers no information on the victim’s physical condition prior to the possession, and in this case, it seems to be the social situation of the new husband that is important. Marriages where the husband moves in with the wife’s family are not uncommon, especially when the girl’s parents have no sons and adopt the young man prior to the marriage, but the men who can be induced to abandon their own name and patrilineage in this way are usually poor and frequently despised. Having stepped into another man’s family, the poor man from Zhangjiakou was cut off from the family relations that sustained him as a person back home, and was possibly looked down upon as a man who has moved in with his wife. Divested of his own relations, the man became socially blank, an empty body inserted into another man’s relations, and it seems almost logical that he should be possessed by the soul of the man he replaced. The social origins of emptiness are equally apparent in Mr Yao’s diagnostic practice that revolves around the identification of debts. What Mr Yao is looking for is broken social relations and the deficits that they left in the victim, the particular forms of emptiness that might give particular agents of possession access to the interior of the victim.

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Initiation Sickness Unusually articulate and neatly dressed, Luo Buqin might have been a retired school teacher, and she seemed an unlikely spirit medium. Having divorced her first husband, a cadre with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree, she moved to another village to marry again. When her second husband died in the 1980s, she returned to live with her son, but there was much talk of her dubious moral character and scandalous behaviour. An old man jokingly warned me against visiting Luo Buqin in her home and told me she was a regular man-eater. I found it rather funny that a married man approaching eighty years of age should warn me of the sexual appetite of a woman in her seventies, but sometime later, I heard rumours that the two of them had recently had a brief, illicit affair. A few years after she returned to the village, she started practising as a spirit medium. Some people doubted her competence and said that her practice was merely a way of securing an income and a social position in the village, but she herself explained that her vocation as a medium started as an empty disease. After moving back to Fanzhuang, Luo Buqin suffered from a severe pain in one arm, and she consulted one doctor after another. Having tried any number of things to make the pain go away, she finally went to see a male medium in the nearby village of Dai’an. This man claimed that he saw a group of deities following her, and he promised that the pain in her arm would disappear that very evening if she would only consent to serve them as a spirit medium. The gods were identical to the ones depicted on a religious image, a shen’an 神案, that her paternal grandmother used to serve. This shen’an was burned when the grandmother became too infirm to serve the gods properly, but Luo Buqin had partially revived the cult by writing the names of the gods on a piece of paper. According to the male medium, the gods were dissatisfied with this and caused her pain to make her provide them with proper clothing and serve them as a medium. On that very day, Luo Buqin commissioned a shen’an from a local painter and the gods started to speak through her instead of causing her pain. In contrast to the other two cases of empty disease that were resolved and ended, Luo Buqin’s trouble did not really end when the pain in her arm disappeared. It is common that mediums start their careers with an empty disease where the deity ‘sticks his head out’ chutou 出头 and torments the chosen one until he or she accepts the vocation as a medium. Luo Buqin’s empty disease proved to be this form of initiation sickness and, in a way, the emptiness that she first experienced as a pain in the arm became a chronic condition. Luo Buqin described her work as a medium as a process of ‘double cultivation’ shuangxiu 双修: she was accumulating merit by helping the deities, and they were accumulating merit by performing good deeds and speaking through her. But even after she had accepted the task of channelling the words and deeds of deities, the exact calibration of this capacity was an ongoing challenge, and Luo Buqin frequently had to consider which deities she would accommodate. Her grandmother’s shen’an only had five tiers, but Luo Buqin’s kept growing. Some years after starting her practice as a medium, she helped the master in

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Dai’an when he performed the annual celebration for his own coterie of gods. He asked her to take care of his deities when he died, and she accordingly commissioned a new shen’an combining her grandmother’s gods with his. Later on, new gods regularly came to her in dreams, hinted at their identity in riddles and asked to join her of their own accord, so she had to revise the shen’an every three to five years. The emptiness at stake in this particular case is not a physical one, and while the context of the story suggests that Luo Buqin was not only troubled by the pain in her arm but also by a very difficult social situation when she moved back to the village of the husband she divorced, this social emptiness does not play a role in the story as she recounted it. What makes the pain in her arm an empty rather than a full disease is the fact that it cannot be explained or cured without recourse to the supernatural. It is the apparent meaninglessness of the pain that drives her from one doctor to another until she finally finds an explanation, and thus the emptiness in this particular case appears to be a deficit of meaning. Claude Levi-Strauss notes how the so-called pathological thinking of shamans overflows with meanings to supplement an otherwise deficient reality: ‘For normal thinking there exists something which cannot be empirically verified and is, therefore “claimable.” For pathological thinking there exist experiences without objects, something “available.” We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas pathological thought (at least in some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 181). In this perspective, an empty disease is something claimable, a semiotic emptiness that can only be filled with the available, object-less experiences of a spirit medium. Many of the mediums around Fanzhuang would emphasize that they themselves ‘had no culture’ mei wenhua 没文化, and it added significantly to the mystery of possession, when they, uneducated and illiterate as many of them claimed to be, were suddenly possessed of superior knowledge and spoke as if they were reading classical Chinese from a book. Paradoxically, it seems to be the mediums’ lack of learning that gives the deities access to their interior and make them overflow with explanations and associations during possession.

Emptiness in Chinese Medicine and Popular Usage In Chinese medicine, the binary of shi and xu is one of the four conceptual dyads of yin-yang, interior-exterior, hot-cold and full-empty, which are used to differentiate syndromes according to the eight rubrics or principles bagang 八纲. Ted Kaptchuk (2000: 219) translates shi and xu as excess and deficiency, while Judith Farquhar (1994: 77) uses the terms repletion and depletion and notes that this diagnostic system has much in common with non-medical thinking about health and illness. There does seem to be a certain overlap between popular understandings of fullness and emptiness and Chinese medical theory, but there are also substantial discrepancies. In Fanzhuang, doctors trained in Chinese medicine would often scoff at the superstitions of

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farmers and emphasize that professionals used the term xu to describe the body or a particular aspect of the body as ‘functionally insufficient’ gongneng buzu 功能不足, and that such insufficiency had absolutely nothing to do with supernatural agents. In Chinese medicine, a wide range of different symptoms may indicate depletion and repletion of qi, blood or each of the five visceral systems, and apart from the well-known problem of ‘depleted kidneys’ shenxu 肾虚, such specificities are completely ignored in popular talk of empty disease. But while local ideas about empty diseases are not supported by current conceptions of emptiness in Chinese medicine, they do seem to resonate with older forms of medical thinking in China. In a comparative study of classical Greek and Chinese medicine, Shigehisa Kuriyama offers an interesting interpretation of the paired concepts of shi and xu, which he translates as fullness and emptiness. Suggesting that bloodletting and acupuncture may have a common origin in the practice of topological bleeding – that is, drawing blood from specific places on the body to cure different ills, Kuriyama seeks to explain why bloodletting had all but disappeared by the late Han dynasty in China, but continued in Europe. Classical Greek medical philosophy was concerned with draining off corrupting residues that accumulated naturally within the body, hence the centrality of bloodletting, but in the classical Chinese medical philosophy that made bloodletting marginal, fullness was a secondary concern. Excess was not perceived to arise within the body by itself; rather, it occurred as a consequence of an internal emptiness that allowed noxious influences to invade the body from the outside. The notion of invasion is linked to the preoccupation with demons and evil spirits in earlier medical thinking, but the paradigm founded in the Han dynasty speaks instead of the meteorological influences of wind, cold, heat, dryness and dampness and presents the harmfulness of these influences as being contingent upon a pre-existing state of emptiness in the patient (Kuriyama 1999: 222). ‘Emptiness defined the necessary precondition of fullness. The governing logic was that of war: shi was the excess of a body occupied by foreign intruders, xu the depletion of inner strength that invited intrusion. The former corresponded to a surfeit of xieqi, noxious breaths from without, the latter, the lack of inner vitality’ (ibid.: 220). Noting that the contrast is not entirely clear-cut, as depletion was also a concern to Greek doctors and excess to Chinese ones, Kuriyama nevertheless maintains that there was a distinct difference in emphasis with a pathology of excess and fears of retention and corruption dominating in Greece, and a pathology of emptiness and fears of dissipation, lack, loss and invasion dominating in China. The origins of acupuncture are subject to much debate, but one of the earliest references that has been interpreted as a description of the use of acupuncture is a story from the Zuozhuan 左传, a historical work compiled around the fourth century BCE, where a prince is taken ill and calls for his doctor. Before the doctor arrives, the prince has a vision of two men hiding inside his body, first discussing how they can elude the clever doctor, and then deciding to make their stand between the heart and the diaphragm. When the doctor arrives, he is obliged to inform the prince that the disease is incurable, as it has settled between the heart and the diaphragm where nothing can pen-

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etrate. The story is recounted by Lu Gwei-djen and Joseph Needham, but they limit themselves to lauding the doctor’s candour as an expression of a ‘very rational and scientific spirit’ and fail to pursue the rather obvious link between exorcism and acupuncture suggested by this story (1980: 78). Paul Unschuld, however, recognizes the link and speculates that acupuncture may originally have developed from the practice of ‘demonic medicine’ in the Zhou dynasty and that acupuncture needles were viewed as weapons against personified agents of disease, much like the spears brandished by shamans in rituals of exorcism (1985: 37, 96). The paradigmatic theories of acupuncture, however, are tied to the medical philosophy of the Han dynasty, when medical experts tended to doubt the existence of spirits and preferred to speak of impersonal pathogens like wind feng 风 and evil influences xieqi 邪气 (Unschuld 1985: 68). The use of acupuncture to exorcise demonic agents of disease is not on the official curriculum of institutionalized Chinese medicine, but thinking of acupuncture in such terms is not historically unprecedented. The links between historical conceptions of emptiness in Chinese medicine and contemporary popular usage of the term are also evident in an article on experiences of emptiness in Taiwan by Chang Hsun (2011). Probably the most detailed study of popular ideas about emptiness, the article is a phenomenological exploration of bodily sensations of emptiness that draws inspiration from Clifford Geertz’ concept of local knowledge and Margaret Lock’s concept of local biologies. Chang Hsun’s informants describe their bodies as empty to express that they are easily tired and lack energy; that they easily catch the flu during winter and are affected by heat in summer, or that they find it difficult to concentrate and experience a bodily lightness and faintness. In more serious cases, it indicates frequent fear of the cold, diarrhoea, cold sweats or even feeling fidgety, restless, nervous, anxious, etc. (ibid.: 27). Asking questions about emptiness results in explanations of physical and psychological discomfort, but it also elicits stories such as the one I have translated here: One day, my old mother suddenly sat down on the ground, disoriented and mumbling to herself. She was like this for many days. When we asked her, she didn’t know who she was, she couldn’t recognize her relatives or remember anything. She was hospitalized for a week, but they couldn’t find anything. The doctor said there was something wrong with her brain and wanted to operate. We thought it was too risky and wouldn’t allow it. In the end, we went to consult the deities and got the answer that a small ghost had possessed her. The family found this to be accurate because her behaviour did resemble that of a child; she would sit on the ground and play with the buttons on her clothing, and in the middle of the night, she would take a chair to the window and look out while mumbling to herself. (Ibid.: 41)

In cases involving minor discomfort, the person affected by sensations of emptiness will attempt to ‘bolster’ or ‘patch’ bu 补 their bodies with food and self-prescribed medicine, but as evident in the story above, serious cases lead people to seek the advice of doctors and ritual experts. Emptiness indicates a lack of vitality and signals that something is not quite as it should be, but

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as was the case in Fanzhuang, the term is associated with an extraordinarily broad range of abnormalities from slight bodily discomfort to cases of possession where people cease to be themselves. Chang Hsun’s article starts out with a clear conception of emptiness as a bodily experience, but it becomes progressively more difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of emptiness as the analysis of interview transcripts and historical medical documents proceeds. The sensation of emptiness affects women in relation to childbirth and menopause, but men may also experience it as a result of excessive sexual activity and loss of vitality. Emptiness affects both fat people and thin. It may be the result of illness, but it may also signal the onset of disease. ‘The bodily sensation of emptiness is something that occurs in daily life, it is not exclusively associated with any particular group, age, occupation, or place, it is something that anyone may experience in the course of life’ (ibid.: 28). But then again, emptiness is in fact associated with particular places such as sites where car crashes have occurred. It is also associated with empty spaces, with people and objects related to the dead, with winter and with particular points in time where people are deemed to be vulnerable according to their individual eight-character horoscope (ibid.: 41–43). Much like the assortment of things that are cosmologically classified as yin, emptiness is unevenly distributed across space and time, and while emptiness is associated with a particular bodily sensation, Chang Hsun’s informants also seem to insist that they experience this sensation in relation to people, things, times and places that are in themselves ghostly and empty.

Conclusion As the term empty disease is used in the area around Fanzhuang, it covers an extraordinary range of phenomena, including physical weakness, possession by wild ghosts, broken social relations, dead relatives haunting the living and inexplicable pain that occurs when deities force people to become spirit mediums. There does seem to be a common logic in the way internal vacuity is presented as a condition that renders subjects open to invasion and transformation, but while emptiness is a general concern, it is difficult to qualify this emptiness in any definite way. For Mr Liu, ghosts and noxious influences are imagined as physical stuff that slips into interior spaces left empty by corporeal depletion and lack of vitality. For Mr Yao, subjects are seemingly filled out by social relations and rendered existentially empty by social debts when relations break down. For Mrs Luo, emptiness is a deficit of meaning that precedes an invasion of voices and visions. Emptiness, it seems, is simultaneously semiotic, social and corporeal, and this resistance against qualification is a defining characteristic. The reason why physical exhaustion, social exclusion and meaninglessness may be understood within the framework of empty diseases is that emptiness is seen to cut across distinct domains and categories. China has seen an astonishing surge of interest in religion in the past three decades, and this has often been explained as an effect of a ‘moral, ideological,

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and spiritual vacuum’ at the end of Maoism (Kipnis 2001: 42). Some of the cases of empty disease that were brought up in Fanzhuang date as far back as the 1950s, and the ‘superstitious’ practices of spirit mediums and exorcists apparently persisted even in the days of high socialism, but even so, the surge of interest in popular religion and the concern with empty diseases do seem to coincide with the societal transformations of the post-Mao era. The stories about empty diseases recounted here bear witness to a pervasive concern with emptiness, and in that sense the vacuum explanation may not be so far from the mark, but the question is whether the emptiness people experience can be so neatly compartmentalized; that it is only moral, ideological and spiritual. If emptiness is a phenomenon that cuts across corporeal, social and semiotic domains, as the stories of empty diseases suggest, then a vacuum is not simply a question of a defunct superstructure that makes people slightly dizzy while life goes on much as before. The horror vacui that one encounters in rural Hebei does not stem from a neatly circumscribed spiritual vacuum, but from a much more fundamental concern with the ontological stability of persons. When people suspect that they are dealing with an empty disease, the first question they ask their loved ones is: ‘Who are you?’

Mikkel Bunkenborg is an associate professor in China Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Trained in anthropology and Chinese, he conducted an ethnographic study of health practices in the township of Fanzhuang in rural north China for his Ph.D. and has since been engaged in collaborative research projects on Chinese infrastructure construction, resource extraction, and trade in Mongolia and Mozambique, and, more recently, on morality and food in China.

References Bunkenborg, M. 2012. ‘Popular Religion Inside Out: Gender and Ritual Revival in a Hebei Township’, China Information 26(3): 359–376. ———2014. ‘From Metaphors of Empire to Enactments of State: Popular Religious Movements and Health in Rural North China’, Positions 22(3): 573–602. ———2015. ‘Incense and the Magic of Disappearances’, in V. Steffen, S. Jöhncke and K.M. Raahauge (eds), Between Magic and Rationality: On the Limits of Reason in the Modern World. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, pp. 175–95. Chan, M. 2014. ‘Tangki War Magic: The Virtuality of Spirit Warfare and the Actuality of Peace’, Social Analysis 58(1): 25–46. DOI: 10.3167/sa.2014.580102 Chang, Hsun 張珣. 2011. ‘日常生活中「虛」的身體經驗 (Daily Life Experience: Bodily Experience of the Emptiness)’. 考古人類學刊 Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 74: 11–52. Chao, E. 1999. ‘The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory’, Cultural Anthropology 14(4): 505–34.

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Chau, A.Y. 2006. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cheng, F. 1994. Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting. Boston: Shambhala. Cline, E.M. 2010. ‘Female Spirit Mediums and Religious Authority in Contemporary Southeastern China’, Modern China 36(5): 520–55. DOI: 10.1177/0097700410 372921 DeBernardi, J.E. 2006. The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. DuBois, T.D. 2005. The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Elliott, A.J.A. 1955. Chinese Spirit-Medium Cults in Singapore. [London]: Published for Dept. of Anthropology. Fan, L. 2003. ‘The Cult of the Silkworm Mother as a Core of Local Community Religion in a North China Village: Field Study in Zhiwuying Baoding, Hebei’, China Quarterly 174: 359–72. Farquhar, J. 1994. Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter in Chinese Medicine. Boulder: Westview Press. Gao, Bingzhong 高丙中. 2006. ‘一座博物馆—庙宇建筑的民族志 -- 论成为政治艺术的双 名制 [The Ethnography of a Temple-Museum: On the System of Double Names as Political Art]’, 社会学研究 Sociological Studies (1): 154–68. ———. 2014. ‘How Does Superstition Become Intangible Cultural Heritage in Postsocialist China?’ Positions 22(3): 551–72. Gao, B. and Q. Ma. 2011. ‘From Grassroots Association to Civil Society Organization: A Case Study of the Hebei Province Dragon Tablet Fair’, in F. Yang and G. Lang (eds), Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories, and Findings. Boston: Brill, pp. 195–26. Kaptchuk, T.J. 2000. The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine. Chicago: Contemporary Books. Kipnis, A. 2001. ‘The Flourishing of Religion in Post-Mao China and the Anthropological Category of Religion’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12(1): 32–46. Kleinman, A. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuriyama, S. 1999. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Körner, B. 1959. Die Religiöse Welt der Bäuerin in Nordchina: Reports from the Scientific Expedition to the North-Western Provinces of China under the Leadership of Sven Hedin. Stockholm: Statens etnografiska museum. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Li, W. 1948. ‘On the Cult of the Four Sacred Animals (四大門) in the Neighbourhood of Peking’, Folklore Studies 7: 1–94. Lu, G-D. and J. Needham. 1980. Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, E. 1973. The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nickerson, P. 2001. ‘A Poetics and Politics of Possession: Taiwanese Spirit-Medium Cults and Autonomous Popular Cultural Space’, Positions 9(1): 187–217. Osburg, J. 2014. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love: China’s New Rich and Its Crisis of Values’, Foreign Affairs 93(5): 144–149. Ots, T. 1990. ‘The Angry Liver, the Anxious Heart and the Melancholy Spleen: The Phenomenology of Perceptions in Chinese Culture’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14(1): 21–58.

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Potter, J.M. 1974. ‘Cantonese Shamanism’, in A. Wolf (ed.), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 207–31. Shapiro, H. 1998. ‘The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China’, Positions 6(3): 551–96. Unschuld, P.U. 1985. Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf, M. 1990. ‘The Woman Who Did Not Become a Shaman’, American Ethnologist 17(3): 419–30. Yue, Yongyi 岳永逸. 2004. ‘庙会的生产：当代河北赵县梨区庙会的田野考察 [The Production of Temple Fairs: Field Study of Temple Fairs in the Pear District of Zhao County in Contemporary Hebei]’, 博士论文 [Ph.D. dissertation]. 北京师范大学 [Beijing Normal University]. Zhang, E.Y. 2007. ‘Switching between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Viagra: Cosmopolitanism and Medical Pluralism Today’, Medical Anthropology 26(1): 53–96. Zhao, X. and D. Bell. 2007. ‘Miaohui: The Temples Meeting Festival in North China’, China Information 21(3): 457–79. DOI: 10.1177/0920203x07083323.

JK Chapter 7

The Potentials of Feicui Indeterminacy and Determination in Human-Jade Interactions in South-west China Henrik Kloppenborg Møller

Stone is primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds. — Jeffrey Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Why is jade is so highly valued in China? People in Ruili commonly answered this question with the popular Chinese proverb, ‘people cultivate jade, and jade cultivates people’ (ren yang yu, yu yang ren 人养玉, 玉养人). Such human-jade cultivations can manifest, for example, as material changes in jade and corporeal effects in humans following their physical interaction, or comprise a human striving towards moral, spiritual and aesthetic ideals thought to be manifested in jade. While jade in China’s contemporary market economy is charged with unprecedented economic potentials in terms of sales prices and volumes, the material also for some seems to charge a moral and spiritual lack that derives partly from economic abundance and social flux. Ruili, a bustling border town in China’s Yunnan Province neighbouring Myanmar, has since the early 1990s developed into a hub for Chinese imports Notes for this chapter begin on page 136.

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and sales of a particular type of Burmese jade, which is called feicui 翡翠 in Chinese. This chapter discusses how carvers, traders and consumers in Ruili interact with feicui to realize different potentials. This realization of potentials is conceptualized as a process of determining the indeterminate. While emptiness can characterize a lack of content in a domain, or a depletion of internal content that is replaced or transformed by external content or forces, indeterminacy here designates a state, where meanings and values of a phenomenon have not yet been fixed, or determined. Diverging from an epistemological priority of human interpretations and meanings as separable from the beings of material things (see Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007), the chapter demonstrates how its material properties contribute in constituting feicui as partially indeterminate. This partial indeterminacy, in turn, fosters intimate human interactions with feicui in order to determine it, and realize its potentials. The indeterminacy-determinacy binary exposes some resonance with the Chinese binary of xu 虚 and shi 实, which can mean empty and full, respectively. Whereas xu is posited as depletion in some Chinese perceptions of health (Bunkenborg, this volume), it can also indicate openness and opportunities. A woman in Ruili recounted the following legend: a villager asked Kongzi why people came to see him. Kongzi answered, ‘They come here to study Dao [‘The Way’]’. The villager said, ‘Dao is xu. There are many other things shi, which are more important’. Kongzi responded, ‘You see this house, if it is full of things, do you think it is still useful? It is useful, because it is xu’. The lesson of the story is that xu, understood as emptiness, preconditions and facilitates shi as a filling up of the house with things and people. Here, xu designates emptiness as an indeterminate potential that can be realized and determined as shi in different ways, and the chapter discusses indeterminacy and determination of feicui in this sense. On the one hand, traders embrace the partial indeterminacy of feicui stones as an opportunity for making a good deal by making inferences about its internal substance from its surface properties or submitting themselves to forces of luck, and some carvers and consumers express a fascination with the indeterminacy of skin-covered feicui stones as potentials kept open. On the other hand, some informants explain how feicui guides their interactions both with the material itself and with other people, and how feicui can choose its owner, constitutes spiritual fullness and an ideal for self-cultivation in a changing society, and can accumulate and transmit properties and effects into their bodies and their social and spiritual lives. Encompassing dualisms that are often posited as mutually constitutive, feicui may thus appear both as an indeterminate container, which invites human investments of labour, meaning and value, and as a partially determined, stimulating agent. The chapter argues that certain Chinese human-jade interactions through contingent processes of absorbing and transmitting concretizes distinctions and relations between economic and spiritual domains, and affords us a conceptualisation of humans and jade in China as distinct, but unbounded and mutually constitutive entities.

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The chapter employs Graeber’s (2001) notion of value as potentials realized within larger systems of differences and Lévi-Strauss’ (1962) discussion of contrastive classifications of natural phenomena in conceptualizing how feicui is determined and concretizes domains in human worlds. But whereas the two scholars ultimately situate value and meanings in human worlds, I pay particular attention to how the materiality of feicui may condition its own determination, or lack thereof, as well as the symbolic and corporeal worlds of people interacting with it. Employing a structuralist analysis of how interactions between humans and jade concretize both as mutually receptive and agentive entities in China, the discussion further draws upon approaches that relativize a rigid dualism between human and non-human, and point to an anthropology that renounces ‘a great part of its anthropocentrism’ (Descola 2013: 5).

Jade and Feicui Feicui is the highest priced version of jade in China. While gemmologists classify the material as jadeite, the Chinese term feicui designates the similarity of its preferred brilliant emerald-green colour to the neck feathers of the Kingfisher bird. In China, jade (yu 玉) is a generic category for stones suitable for carving, and materials considered jade have been used and revered in China for at least 8,000 years (Keverne 1991; Rawson 1996; Yu 2009). Feicui is thus seen as a particular version of jade, even though the material, which is mined primarily around Hpakant in the Kachin state of northern Myanmar, did not attain widespread significance in China until the early eighteenth century (Sun 2011: 203, 207). The material properties of feicui distinguish it from the cheaper domestic Chinese nephrite, or ‘soft jade’ (ruanyu 软玉), which is extracted primarily in Hetian in Xinjiang Province.1 Feicui is harder, has a higher acoustic pitch and in most cases features a higher lustre, transparency and translucency than ruanyu. Feicui furthermore hosts a potential discordance between surface and substance, which is not equally present in ruanyu. An opaque layer of ‘skin’ (pifu 皮肤) covers raw feicui stones, and carvers and traders thus cannot positively know what kind of ‘meat’ (rou 肉) hides beneath the skin. This partial indeterminacy renders feicui stones particularly suitable for economic gambling and spiritual investments. The necessity of inferring substance from the surface of feicui stones further instils reliance on personal evaluation skills, rather than on institutions, as guarantors of authenticity, quality and value. Carvers and traders must develop personal knowledge about the material properties (wuxing 物性) of feicui through tactile engagements with the material. Underpinning Chinese craftsmanship, knowledge about wuxing can be described as rooted in ‘human beings’ innate understanding and sensual experience of a natural substance’ (Xu 2013: 158). It constitutes a ‘practical knowledge’ that emerges in human tactile engagements with the natural environment, thus contrasting more formal, deductive, epistemic knowledge associated with state conditioning of natural resources as commodities (Scott 1998:

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309–42). In Chinese craft, such knowledge has typically been transmitted through apprenticeship as including and excluding ‘communities of practices’ (Gowlland 2012). Partly oral, it has often been associated with secrecy (Eyferth 2009: 188–92). The challenge of inferring substance from surfaces might be seen as a basic condition in late-socialist Chinese society, which is described by some as abundant with potentially deceiving surfaces. Party-state discourse is sometimes experienced as ‘empty words’ (Hansen, this volume), while concerns deriving from an abundance of counterfeit goods and not always sincere vendors in Chinese markets have been discussed as a ‘value anxiety’ (Brandtstädter 2009) and ‘authenticity anxiety’ (Notar 2006). Ethnographies from other postsocialist settings have discussed how moral critiques can take the form of indexical homologies between the surfaces of certain materials and the substance of particular groups of people (Humphrey 2002: 175–202; Lemon 1998; Pedersen 2004). In Ruili, Han Chinese people commonly associate the deceiving surface of counterfeit feicui with a lack of inner moral substance among Burmese street vendors. The material properties of feicui and the ways in which it is traded in Ruili’s multi-ethnic markets seem to combine with wider concerns about a potential lack of inner value, quality and authenticity of objects, people and official representations, and the absence of a detached way of determining them in creating a heightened sensibility to relations between surface and substance.

Capital, Risk and Flexibility Aside from capital, operating in the Sino-Myanmar feicui trade demands risk-taking and flexibility. These human orientations derive from the high economic stakes, illegality and involvement of various groups in much of the trade, as well as from the partial indeterminacy of feicui. Global Witness (2015: 6) estimates the value of official jade production in Myanmar in 2014 to have been as much as US$ 31 billion, a figure that equates 48 per cent of Myanmar’s official GDP and is 46 times government expenditure on health. Chinese traders with the right connections and enough capital to invest may make high profits in the feicui trade. A jade company in Ruili, in which I conducted parts of my fieldwork, had acquired mining concessions from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Kachin state. A six-ton stone containing three types of high quality feicui was excavated from one of the mines, and transported to the company office in Ruili. The director and co-owner of the company estimated that the stone would be sold for around 640 million RMB, roughly US$ 100 million.2 In Ruili, Han Chinese control the major feicui businesses and the carving sector due to their wider access to capital and Chinese buyers, while other ethnic groups mostly work as transporters, middlemen, small-scale traders and polishers. In the Chinese community of feicui traders, investment capital is often distributed as credit in the private loan market, frequently with feicui as

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security. As a general rule, you can borrow 50 to 70 per cent of the estimated value of feicui deposited with a creditor at an interest rate of 3 to 5 per cent monthly. Different ethnic groups partake in the transportation and trade of feicui between Myanmar’s Kachin state and Ruili. These include Kachin, Shan, Bamar and Rohingya, alongside Han Chinese from China and Myanmar. According to traders, the Myanmar government officially taxes feicui at 33 per cent of its estimated sales value, while a 34 per cent import tax is levied in China. The taxing regimes have created a vast black market for untaxed stones, which are smuggled into Ruili.3 While reducing costs and thus promising higher profits, the illegality of untaxed feicui stones compounds hazards of paying bribes, having stones confiscated or being imprisoned. This necessitates taking risks and cultivating personal connections across ethnic and religious affiliations. Interethnic marriages, such as those between Sunni-Muslim Rohingya men and Christian Kachin women, thus seem to cement alliances in the jade trade. Emphasizing an ethos of risk-taking and gambling among Yunnanese underground feicui traders in Burma during the socialist period (1962–1998), Chang (2011: 471) parallels the uncertainty of the Burmese situation with ‘the indeterminacy of the quality of jade stones that compounded the risk of the trade’. In Ruili today, feicui traders adopt flexibility, risk-taking and a heightened attention to appearances both in their relations with clients, partners and adversaries, and in their dealings with feicui stones.

Surface and Substance After arriving in Ruili, a feicui stone usually undergoes a series of material processes, which gradually expose the substance hidden beneath its surface. This progressive material determination of feicui consequently increases or decreases its economic value. Meanwhile, some prefer to maintain its indeterminacy, to keep its potentials open. Carvers and traders employ different methods in assessing the substance of skin-covered feicui stones. They carefully examine the surface of the stone, and sometimes hit it with a hammer to evaluate its sound. Finally, they shine a light on the skin with a flashlight. If there is feicui just underneath the skin, its colour will shine through, hence revealing that there is feicui inside, but not the quantity. Even if no translucence is found by using the flashlight, there may still be feicui deeper inside the stone. Depending on the colour and texture of its skin, a skilled trader will know which ‘type’ (zhong 种) of feicui it is, and sometimes from which particular mine it derives. Traders distinguish between ‘old mine’ (lao keng 老坑) and ‘new mine’ (xin keng 新坑), referring to how long a particular mine has been worked. Stones from old mines are easier to evaluate, because they are more similar and have circulated for a longer time. Appearances are often more deceptive in stones from new mines. One trader described such stones as gao yao 膏药, a ‘plaster’, which hides what is underneath.

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Some traders specialize in skin-covered stones, which are referred to as ‘betting stones’ (dushi 赌石). In Geertz’s (1963) ‘bazaar-type economy’, the crucial factor for traders is to know more about the commodity traded and its market than their transaction opponents, and to maintain the relative exclusivity of that knowledge. Trading betting stones poses high economic opportunities and risks, because their skin hides their substance. For many traders, this indeterminacy constitutes a primary attraction of trading feicui. As one trader explained: You can see the signs on the skin. You have to evaluate the skin. You can become broke or become a millionaire overnight. This is the charm of jade. It’s even difficult for God to know its value. Even with scientific development, it’s impossible to know the value inside jade. That’s the secret of jade. The appearance is not always what it seems.

The indeterminacy of feicui opens up a space of individual agency and entitlement, where skills of inferring substance from surfaces translate as competitive advantages in the market. Mr Zhang, a local government official and feicui trader, thus takes pride in his nickname ‘evil eyes’ (duyan 毒眼), which designates his alleged ability to see through the skin of feicui stones. If a feicui ore is found in a stone, its owner can decide to open a ‘Heavenly Window’ (tianchuang 天窗) by grinding off the skin in a small area, allowing prospective buyers to assess the quality of feicui inside the ore with their flashlight. This may significantly increase or decrease the value of a betting stone. A trader explained how he bought a stone for RMB 120,000 and opened a window only to find bad quality feicui inside. Someone offered him RMB 20,000, but he refused the offer, and instead opened another window, which reduced the next offer to RMB 12,000. Cutting (qie 切) a feicui stone is a major step in revealing its substance, and all professional traders have stories about economic losses or gains related to this process. The placement of the cut is essential, as it comprises a risk of cutting straight through a feicui ore, which will minimize its economic value. One trader advised me to ‘Never cut the jade until you are a master. Only the master will recognize the feicui inside. To become a feicui master can take all your life to learn’. His uncle once did an extremely profitable deal. An eight-ton stone was cut in two halves, which revealed a poor quality material inside. The stone was put in the Myanmar government jade auction, but no one bought it for three consecutive years. But when his uncle examined the skin very carefully, he saw something and bought the stone for RMB 500,000. After cutting it several times, he found high quality feicui inside. He sold the stone for RMB 60 million. Such stories about gains and losses in the feicui market emphasize personal evaluation skills, as well as luck, risk-taking and economic agency. Traders must be at the right place at the right time, and have the courage and ability to invest substantial sums of money in a potentially empty stone. The final process is the carving and polishing of the stone. Also the carver Mr Wang is fascinated by the tension that feicui hosts between surface and substance. Stones without this tension can be controlled, but when carving

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Illustration 7.1  A light is flashed through a ‘Heavenly Window’ ground into the surface of a feicui stone to infer its content. Photo by Henrik Kloppenborg Møller

feicui you have to immerse yourself into the stone and let it guide you. Wang explained: In ruanyu, the surface and the inside are the same. There will not be any surprises. But with feicui, you have to read the stone, to feel the stone. Then you have an idea, but when you start to carve it, you always find surprises inside the stone. So you have to follow the stone, the stone leads you somewhere. That’s the charm of feicui carving.

In Mr Wang’s explanation, feicui appears both indeterminate in the sense of hiding its substance, and determined in guiding its carver. Indeterminacy can indicate opportunities kept open. Wang has kept certain skin-covered stones for years. He is reluctant to carve them, because this will expose their substance. A recent trend among consumers to wear raw, skin-covered feicui pebbles as necklace pendants indicates a similar fascination with the indeterminacy of the material that resonates with the potentials of xu in Chinese Daoism, as discussed in the introduction of this chapter.

Hammer and Spectrometer Some of Ruili’s feicui traders use expressions like ‘the stone doesn’t cheat people, but people cheat people’, and ‘never trust the seller, only trust the

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stone’. Juxtaposing honest stones with dishonest vendors in the market, they emphasize the necessity of tactile engagements with feicui in determining its authenticity, quality and value. As compared to the moral and legal effects of intellectual property rights in Western capitalism, scholars have pointed to a more pragmatic and flexible approach to creation in China (Han 2011), which comprises a sometimes positively valued cultural tradition of imitation (Alford 1995). Nonetheless, the pervasiveness of counterfeiting in a wide range of product categories in contemporary China has intensified concerns that the surfaces of goods may conceal an internal lack of authenticity, quality and value. Also feicui is counterfeited in China. In gemmological terms, jade simulants are ‘those natural gem minerals and glass or plastic substitutes that appear to have some of the same visual characteristics as jade, but that lack jade’s unique optical, physical and chemical properties’ (Walker 1991: 28). Traders distinguish between A, B, C, and D-quality feicui, roughly as follows: A-quality is natural feicui, which is untreated or subjected to colourless wax polishing. B-quality is treated with acid to remove impurities in the crystalline structure and impregnated with resin to enhance its translucency. C-quality has been boiled to open cracks in its structure and then infused with colour. D-quality designates other materials, which are marketed as feicui. Traders generally consider the B, C, and D-quality materials counterfeit. Many Han Chinese in Ruili associate counterfeit feicui particularly with Burmese street vendors. Reflecting ethnic stereotypes, business stratification and hierarchies of trust, this association also points to the relative ease with which mobile street vendors could disappear after a transaction, while fixed shops are easier to hold accountable if discovered to sell counterfeits. I was offered counterfeit feicui, which was easily distinguishable by a layer of colour that came off on the fingers, in the streets of Ruili’s Zhubaojie jade bazaar, but never inside shops. For buyers, the determination of a piece of feicui as counterfeit effectively drains it of its valued properties. But it might be full of dangerous substances. A young man said his mother bought a feicui bangle, which looked counterfeit to him. He told her not to wear it, because it could be radioactive and full of dangerous chemical substances. They took the bangle to a shop, where a worker knocked it with a metal hammer and from the sound determined that it was not feicui. His mother consequently stopped wearing it. While Ruili’s feicui traders probe the surfaces of feicui pieces with hammers, flashlights and touch to assess their internal content through sound, sight and feeling, the local government has introduced gem-testing stations, which employ gemmological methods like spectroscopic analysis, X-ray diffraction and refractive index readings. These methods determine feicui through mutual exclusion. For example, by placing light refracted by feicui into numerically demarcated domains, the boundaries between domains can exclude the possibility of it being another material like ruanyu. Such exclusive categorical definitions can be seen as a ‘narrowing of vision’, which ‘makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to

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careful measurement and calculation’, thereby facilitating ‘schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation’ (Scott 1998: 11). The purpose of promoting standardized evaluation scales seems to be to accommodate authenticity anxieties mainly among Han Chinese feicui tourists in Ruili. The gemmological test certifies the authenticity of a material as feicui with a certificate. However, because government agencies are widely associated with corruption, they are not uniformly considered legitimate guarantors of the authenticity of feicui. While the gemmological certificate manifests claims of a detached determination of feicui, some buyers express concerns that the certificates themselves may be counterfeit. As one buyer asked: ‘How can I know that [the gem-testing stations] do not have a deal with the shop owner?’ Furthermore, both the personal preferences and attachments of individuals to particular stones and the material singularity of feicui prevent a detached, standardized system of determining the quality and value of the material from being widely implemented. Also, the gemmological methods only work on exposed crystalline substance, and thus cannot determine authenticity of the substance inside skin-covered stones. While for feicui tourists the lack of a trusted disinterested evaluation amplifies concerns about the authenticity, quality and value of their purchases in Ruili, the potentials of feicui for the city’s professional traders are predicated exactly upon the lack of detached ways of evaluating it. For them, the only way to realize these potentials is to cultivate an intimate knowledge about the material. To ‘follow the stone’, as the carver Mr Wang suggests.

Immutable Jade and Transitory Humans Some carvers and traders posit feicui as manifesting the fullness, substance and stability of an unchangeable natural world in a society characterized by sweeping changes. Mr Min is a feicui trader in his early forties who presents himself as a devout Buddhist. Choosing the right stone, he says, demands both experience and luck (yunqi 运气). One way for Mr Min to improve his luck is through prayers. He says: ‘Jade jewellery will bring luck and safety to its wearer, but only if you believe in it. Personally, I believe in jade’. This belief includes the potential of jade in influencing the minds and bodies of humans. For example, touching a piece of feicui makes him feel peaceful (anjing 安静), while he also believes that jade jewellery can stimulate blood pressure in the human body. Mr Min further explains: Jade is very old, it has existed in nature throughout history. But we people are young. When we face jade, we are very small. We cannot own jade, but it can help us think about our place in the universe. But these days, many people do not appreciate these traditional understandings of jade. They just buy it as investments, or to show off.

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Mr Min thus posits jade as a persistent solid material existence through which to understand the transitory existence of humans. He also passes a moral condemnation of the replacement of such traditional beliefs in jade by its uses as a store of value and signal of wealth, even as he himself makes his living from the current intense commodification of jade. While spiritual and economic domains can be morally conflicting in China, the potentials of jade may be realized in both domains for a person. For the carver Mr Wang, jade likewise constitutes an unchangeable and even sincere existence, when juxtaposed to what he sees as the changeability and insincerity of people in contemporary China. He explains: ‘To speak with people can be very exhausting, but to communicate with stones is a relaxing process. There may be surprises inside the stone, but the stone does not change itself’. Bregnbæk in this volume discusses how Christianity for young converts in Beijing provides withdrawal from a perceived emptiness of the political sphere and fills up ‘interior spaces of hope’ that promise to restore a sense of agency in their lives. In a somewhat similar manner, especially non-local Han Chinese carvers and traders in Ruili frame their engagement with feicui as a withdrawal from perpetual changes in Chinese society, which provides an experience of something unchangeable and genuine. Many see jade as a manifestation of Chinese cultural ‘tradition’ (chuantong 传统), while a woman explains the renewed demand for jade among urban Chinese as part of a ‘national fever’ (guoxue re 国学热), which she also sees in a recent blossoming of teahouses, and schools for Chinese martial arts and traditional Chinese music in her home city of Shanghai. The Han Clothing Movement discussed by Carrico in this volume demonstrates a similar revived nationalism and nostalgia. Nostalgia and quests for authenticity believed to be located in tradition have been discussed as reactions to an overload of things, images and information, accompanied by rationalization and disintegration of grand narratives in late modern societies (Featherstone 1991). Diagnoses of a lack of spirituality and tradition by some feicui carvers and traders in Ruili may similarly emanate partly from an abundant volatility in China’s consumer society. For some of my interlocutors, the temporal and material solidity of jade carries a potential of mending this lack.

Predestined Encounters and Karmic Transmission People in Ruili sometimes describe meetings and interactions between people, as well as between people and feicui, with the concept of yuanfen 缘分, which means ‘destiny’ or ‘predestined encounter’. Some also posit feicui as an accumulator and transmitter of karma (ye 业) between humans. Some respondents described our meeting each other as yuanfen, which characterizes a predestined and warm encounter. During an interview with a feicui carver, I rephrased a statement he made. He said: ‘Some people have yuanfen with Buddhism. You have yuanfen with feicui. You understand what

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I mean about the character and nature of feicui’. Yuanfen indicates that forces beyond human agency guide encounters and relationships. Some buyers say they do not choose a particular piece of feicui, but rather that the feicui chooses them. Also, people who plan to depart with a piece of feicui to realize its economic value may be interrupted in their decision by their yuanfen with the stone. A woman in Ruili told me about a friend of hers who wanted to sell her feicui pendant, because she expected to make a good profit. One night, she dreamt that her teeth were made of jade. After the dream, she decided to keep and wear the pendant, and with time it acquired a darker and more translucent green colour. Such material changes are thought to indicate that feicui absorbs the ‘life energy’ (qi 气) of its wearer. The woman took its material change as a sign that she had yuanfen with the piece of feicui. A yuanfen encounter does not always last throughout time, as it may be interrupted by other yuanfen encounters. Traders may depart with a piece of feicui before realizing its economic value, because the stone has yuanfen with another person. In such cases, regrets about economic losses do not make sense. The same woman further told me about a famous businessman in Ruili, who bought a large stone and cut it. He found nothing inside, and used the stone as a tea table, until one of his Burmese workers bought it for a few hundred RMB. The worker found top-quality feicui inside, and sold the stone to a Hong Kong investor for more than RMB 50 million. The previous owner said: ‘That is the charm of feicui. It did not belong to me, it belonged to someone else. He had yuanfen with the stone’. While yuanfen entails non-human agency, conceptions of feicui as an accumulator and transmitter of karma charge the material with potentials deriving from human action. These potentials may later be realized in the lives of other humans. A young woman said you have to be careful about wearing jade worn by others, because you do not know which kind of karma has been deposited in the jade. She wore a feicui bracelet inherited from her grandmother, and figured that since her grandmother belonged to a rich bourgeois Shanghai family before the communist takeover, the karmic transmission should not be unfavourable.

Instrumental and Affective Interactions Differential investments in economic and spiritual potentials of feicui are socially manifest in engagements in guanxi 关系 and junzi 君子. As ideal-typical interaction forms, guanxi can be seen as extrovert and focused on form, and junzi as introvert, manifesting substance. In Ruili, guanxi interactions facilitate transactions of different resources for traders, whereas the ideal of the ‘gentleman’, junzi, is more intimately tied to the substance of jade, and constitutes a template for self-cultivation and interaction, especially among carvers. Guanxi underpins business and bureaucracy in China’s market economy as a way of establishing trust and making deals through informal exchanges of gifts, favours and sometimes money (see for example Yang 1994). While

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guanxi interactions help to secure reliable supply, trading licenses and regular customers for feicui traders, feicui itself is a favoured gift between guanxi partners in China, partly because it can contain a very high economic value in a physically compact material, the transaction history of which is not easily traceable. Sántha and Safonova (2013: 30–67) discuss the Russian term pokazukha (‘to show off’) as a non-communicative, ritualized performativity, which allows Evenki people to maintain their distinctive ethos when dealing with Russian bureaucracy. Guanxi interactions in Ruili similarly provide a ritualized form that makes it possible for people to do business together without necessarily engaging ‘substantially’ in trading partners or the object traded. Thirty-six-year-old Mr Liu came to Ruili in 2006 from Hunan Province and now operates a feicui business, two hotels and a restaurant with two hometown friends. Liu told me, ‘We are farmers. We are not educated. We came here to Ruili to make money, because we heard that there are good profits in the feicui business’. A successful businessman, Liu appears pragmatic, unsentimental and skilled in guanxi interactions. Zheng (2006) discusses how displays of masculine deference, generosity, self-control and manipulation of women in KTVs (Karaoke bars) serve to establish trust among male business partners in Dalian. With his wife and child staying in his hometown, Liu is accompanied by shifting young girlfriends in Ruili’s discos, where he distributes his business card and cigarettes to potential business partners and clients. While such exteriorized guanxi interactions help expand Liu’s business networks in Ruili, he expresses no overtly affective engagement with his interaction partners, or with feicui. Liu laughs: ‘Actually, us Hunan people, we don’t like feicui. We like gold. And we like money’. With its more restricted evaluation parameters of carat and weight, gold is more easily translated into decipherable economic value than feicui. Gold signals money, and for new rich Chinese entrepreneurs like Liu consequently also social status in a more direct way than feicui. Gold can be melted and moulded into a standardized form, the surface and substance of which is congruent. Feicui has less potential for standardized reproduction, as it is harder and does not melt, and exposes great variation between different types and pieces. Furthermore, even when carved, feicui often hosts a tension between surface and substance, which varies with the type. The colourless, transparent, glass-like boli zhong 玻璃种 is thus easier to evaluate than mo cui 墨翠, which is black on the surface but a translucent green when penetrated by light. A young woman said that gold is popular among China’s new rich, while old bourgeois families fancy jade. She describes gold as shiny and worn to show off to others. She also feels that jade is shiny, but that it shines inwards rather than outwards, and consequently characterizes jade in opposition to gold as a material with ‘substance’ (neihan 内涵). A jade trader applied a similar distinction between exteriority and interiority to the use of jade itself, arguing that many young people wear jade outside on their clothes for people to see, but that ‘people who really care about jade will wear it inside on the skin’. Throughout Chinese history, jade has symbolized virtues that people should strive to live up to, and can be compared to. The ancient Chinese

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revered five material properties of jade; soft sheen, uniformity both inside and outside, a sharp sound when struck, hard texture and strength. These properties symbolized benevolence, justice, wisdom, courage and purity as five human virtues (Yu 2009: 4). Based on Confucian human-jade homologies, an expanded list of human virtues corresponding to material properties of jade ‘became the criteria for gentlemen in conducting themselves in society with self-discipline’ (ibid.). Mr Wang describes carving a piece of feicui as both exposing and refining (zhuo 琢) its inner character. Refining a jade stone and a person is an analogous process for Wang, and he sees feicui-carving as a process of self-cultivation. Conceptualized with the term zhuo, carving involves a mutual determination of the character of feicui and its carver. But through his knowledge of the cultural history of jade, feicui is also pre-determined for Wang, as it functions as an ideal that guides his moral self-perception and behaviour. Another carver, Mr Zhou, describes how he and other carvers sometimes gather around a feicui stone. Sharing their ideas about how to read and carve the stone, or simply watching it in silence, they have developed deep friendships. Such interactions can be described with the idiom ‘a gentleman’s friendship, as thin as water’, (junzi zhi jiao dan ru shui 君子之交淡如水), designating a thin, observable form of interaction with a substantial content. Junzi may in this sense be analytically opposed to guanxi relations, which are publicly displayed as solid, but feel superficial, hollow and instrumental for some participants. A young woman thus diagnosed guanxi and the quest for money and social ‘face’ (mianzi 面子) as expressing a spiritual lack. She explained: ‘Some Chinese people, their lives are without soul. They just think a friend is someone who can help you when you are in trouble. Their spirit is indigent, so they pay a lot of attention to money and face’. Instrumental and affective relations are not necessarily conflicting in China, as the former may generate the latter (Kipnis 2002). But while Ruili’s jade traders and carvers routinely switch between guanxi and junzi in different situations, the two interactional modes can direct the realization of potentials of jade towards economic and spiritual domains, respectively. For traders like Liu, guanxi interactions facilitate market exchanges of feicui, which constitute the material as a container that can accumulate and release economic value. Meanwhile, their intimate interactions with feicui, and knowledge of its cultural history for carvers like Mr Wang and Mr Zhou, determine the material as manifesting the moral ideal of junzi, which in turn guides a more interiorized mode of self-cultivation and interpersonal interactions.

Domains and Determination The determination of feicui can be conceptualized as a temporary fixation of meanings and values in different domains, while domains and their boundaries may be concretized through juxtapositions and transference of content like feicui.

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A young woman compared the economic value of jade in monetary terms to that of an iPhone. In line with Chinese tradition, she expected to inherit jade through her maternal family line at her wedding or her mothers’ passing away. But even though she preferred an iPhone to a piece of jade, she would not sell inherited jade. She explained this with a belief that jade jewellery worn on the skin is infused with the spirit (ling 灵) of its owner, in this case her mother. The notion of ling being transferred between humans through jade brings to mind Mauss’ (1990 [1925]: 11–12) discussion of how gifts for Maori are infused with the spirit (hau) of the giver. To accept a gift from somebody here ‘is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul’ (ibid.: 12). For the young woman, selling inherited jade jewellery would to some extent amount to selling her mother’s spirit. Her considering whether to do so juxtaposes and thereby concretizes the economic potentials of jade as an alienable commodity in the market domain, and its social and spiritual potentials as an inalienable heirloom in the moral domain of the family. Realizing the potentials of feicui thus involves placing the material in a wider system of categories. In Lévi-Strauss’ (1962) structuralist analysis of totemism, social distinctions in the human world are made and affirmed through contrastive classifications of the non-human world. The use of natural species like vegetables and animals as totems is thus ‘not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think”’ (Levi-Strauss 1962: 89). Combining a Marxist focus on production with Saussurean structuralism, Graeber (2001) sees value as potentials. Emanating from ‘hidden, generative powers of action’, value is ‘inherently contrastive’, and can only be realized in ‘a relatively public context, as part of some larger social whole’ (Graeber 2001: 47, 70). These discussions remind us of how feicui is determined referentially in human classificatory systems or domains. Heeding Lévi-Strauss’ premise that things are ‘good to think’ while de-universalising a distinction between human meaning and material matter may support a notion of feicui as guiding human conceptions, rather representing them. Pedersen (2007) discusses how the Darhad Mongolian shamanic costume ‘triggers peoples’ momentary conceptualization of social relationships which otherwise remain unseen’ (ibid.: 141). As Henare, Holbraad and Wastell (2007: 26) put it, the objects of Pedersen’s analysis ‘are more than representations of specific kinds of social knowledge, rather they are the vehicles whose very form and substance make that knowledge possible’. In a somewhat similar manner, the absorbing and transmitting properties of jade facilitate an articulation by the young woman discussed above of her moral relationship with her mother. The relationship is signified by spirit, ling, which can be transferred from the mother into jade, and from here passed on to the daughter. While feicui may thus mobilize and concretize human concepts and domains, it is also to some extent self-referential in conditioning its own determination. Descola (2013: 23) sees in structural anthropology a monism of the mind and of the world that creates the grounds for ‘a method of analysis in which natural relativism – the variety of environments – plays a role elsewhere allotted to cultural relativism’. If a prominent trait of cultural relativism

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is self-reflexivity, we could perhaps suggest the partial self-determination of non-human phenomena like feicui as a feature of such a natural relativism. My discussion of how the materiality of feicui, as compared to that of gold, restricts standardized valuation in that sense supports an attention to how differential determination of certain things derives from their comprising different ‘natures’, rather than exclusively from different ‘cultural’ interpretations.

Oppositions and Transgressions Certain historical and contemporary conceptions of jade in China seem to soften a definitive distinction between humans and non-humans, and point to an ontological positing of opposites as mutually constitutive, rather than mutually exclusive. We can identify in Chinese cultural history three properties of jade that are particularly pertinent to human bodies: jade as a receiving container, a stimulating agent and a protective shield. We have noted how jade is sometimes thought capable of absorbing human energies, while containing properties that can affect the human body and mind. Jade has furthermore been used both to shield the body from dangers in the outside environment, and to block energies from leaving the body. Addressing the first type of shielding, a woman from Shanghai told me about a woman who was left unharmed in a crash while her jade bangle broke, arguing that jade will sacrifice itself for its owner if she is in danger. Exemplifying the second type, ancient carved funerary jade functioned as a shield against an internal draining, as it was thought to prevent life-nurturing essences from leaving the body. The ‘nine orifices’ (jiuqiao 九窍) jade, for example, was thought to block the two eyes, two earholes, two nostrils, the mouth, genitalia and anus from leaking human energy (Yu 2009: 14). Conceptions of jade as a container, stimulant and shield for energies and properties in human bodies to some extent dissolve a definitive contrastive demarcation of humans and feicui as self-contained units. Mutual effects, such as the change of colour in jade or the stimulation of blood pressure in humans, presuppose interaction via the human skin, and some people therefore never take off their jade jewellery. Human skin thus appears as a porous boundary that can be penetrated by non-human agents, a notion also coined in Bunkenborg’s (2009) discussion of ‘empty disorders’ (xubing 虚病) in rural north China. Modern Western thought has been described as resting upon a separation between mind and matter, human and non-human, culture and nature, representation and reality (Descola 2013; Graeber 2011: 244; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 6–9). Chinese philosophical tradition might in turn be seen as directed towards a unity of opposites, rather than their separation. LeviStrauss (1962: 89) saw the Daoist yin-yang system as the most general model of correlations and oppositions, ‘the union of which results in an organized totality’, while Freiberg (1975: 321) described the Daoist ontology as ‘of a unified world, which is made manifest in paired oppositions’. As Bunkenborg

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(2009: 9) points out, the yin-yang symbol itself indicates the mutual constituency of opposites, which ‘contain the potential of each other’. An account of nephrite jade collection in the White and Green Jade Rivers in Xinjiang during the reign of the Emperor Qianlong (1735–1796) describes how women were thought best suited to recognize jade with their toes, ‘as the female yin attracted the male yang that emanated from the stones’ (Levy and Scott-Clark 2001: 14–15). In this description, jade was seen by Chinese officials as hosting an active yang potential directing it towards the passive female yin, while in the Book of Changes, jade is conversely associated with the yin, as opposed to ice in the yang line (Freiberg 1975: 312). People in Ruili commonly emphasize the attraction of opposites as an explanation for why men wear jade necklace pendants carved as the female Bodhisattva Guanyin 观音, while females wear carvings of the male Buddha (Fo 佛). They interchangeably describe jade as female and male, passive and active, soft and hard, cold and hot. Raffles (2010) discusses how participants in cricket-fighting in Shanghai assume a perspective where they are both similar and different to crickets; an apparent contradiction that ‘simply persists as a fact of existence and does not require resolution’ (ibid.: 215). Likewise, opposites encompassed by jade are not always sought determined as either/or, but are sometimes accepted as both/and.

Conclusion: Economic Detachment and Spiritual Intimacy The contributions to this volume have discussed how concerns about emptiness play out in different domains and ethnographic settings in contemporary China. The cases point to a variation in opportunities and ways of filling out such empty spaces with meanings and agency. The present chapter has discussed how carvers, traders and consumers in Ruili engage with a particular type of jade, which is known in China as feicui, as both as an indeterminate container for human investments and as a determined agent that interacts with humans in various ways. An opaque surface of feicui conditions human concepts and domains, as well as the trade, valuation, and eventual determination of feicui itself. This opaque materiality may feed into concerns in contemporary Chinese society that exterior manifestations cover a lack of internal authenticity, quality, and value. But whereas counterfeit feicui manifests a lack that invites distrust and anxiety, the indeterminacy of skin-covered ‘betting stones’ mobilizes agency and entitlement in evaluating stones to sell, buy, and carve for those who cultivate specialized knowledge and skills. I initiated this chapter by asking why jade is so highly valued in China. One economic answer is that more Chinese people have invested in the material as a tangible store of value following the draining of value in other investment domains like real estate and stocks. These investments have to some extent constituted jade in China not unlike gold as bullion money; that is, a ‘material substance that is also an abstraction’, a valuable material publicly trusted

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to be exchangeable for other goods (Graeber 2011: 18, 245). Simmel (2005 [1900]) discussed a process of objectification and abstraction that departs from a ‘an undifferentiated state in which the Ego and its objects are not yet distinguished’ and ‘gives rise to a distance between the self and its objects, through which each of them becomes a separate entity’ (ibid.: 60, 62). As we have seen, some of my informants express moral concerns about the commodification of jade. While such concerns may address the commodification of many types of things, the broadly based and intimate relations between jade and many Chinese people to some extent resonate with Simmel’s ‘undifferentiated state’. As jewellery, inheritance object, agent in carving processes and predestined encounters, accumulator and transmitter of spirit and karma, spiritual anchor and index of cultural tradition, ideal for self-cultivation and interpersonal interactions, as well as a stimulant, container and shield for human energies, jade is sometimes seen as interacting with humans in mutually constitutive ways in China. Such interactions may render the massive commodification of jade in contemporary China particularly morally disturbing for some, but they also underpin a consumer demand that preconditions this commodification.

Henrik Kloppenborg Møller is Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, Lund University. Møller has done fieldwork among vendors of counterfeit fashion goods in Shanghai, and among jade traders and carvers in China’s Yunnan province and Myanmar’s Kachin state. Møller’s research interests include jade trade, social organization, ethnicity and economic development in the SinoMyanmar borderlands, as well as relations between materiality, knowledge, value and identity in China.

Notes 1. The English word jade derives from a mispronunciation of the Spanish term piedra de hijada, or ‘loin stone’, which was first recorded in 1565, and rooted in the belief among Aztecs that jadeite could cure ailments of the loin and kidneys. The French mineralogist A. Damour in 1863 was the first to use the term jadeite for materials distinguishable from nephrite jade. In gemmological language, jadeite is an aluminium-rich pyroxene with an interlocking granular structure and a hardness of 6.5 to 7 on Moh’s scale, while nephrite is a magnesium-rich amphibole with an interwoven fibrous structure and a hardness of 6 to 6.5. For an introduction to the gemmological properties of jadeite, see for example Walker (1991). 2. The exchange was approximately US$ 0.16 to the RMB during my fieldwork in Ruili in 2012–2013 and 2014–2015. 3. The extent of this informal trade is obviously hard to assess, but based on interviews with numerous industry sources, Global Witness (2015: 24) estimates that 50 to 80 per cent of jadeite from Myanmar is smuggled across the border to China.

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References Alford, W. 1995. To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offence: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brandtstädter, S. 2009. ‘Fakes: Fraud, Value-Anxiety, and the Politics of Sincerity’, in K. Sykes (ed.), Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 139–60. Bunkenborg, M. 2009. ‘Porous Persons and Empty Disorders: Producing Healthy People in Rural North China’, Ph.D. dissertation. University of Copenhagen. Chang, W-C. 2011. ‘From a Shiji Episode to the Forbidden Jade Trade during the Socialist Regime in Burma’, in E. Tagliacozzo and W.C. Chang (eds), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 455–80. Cohen, J. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Descola, P. 2013. The Ecology of Others, trans. G. Godbout and B.P. Luley. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Eyferth, J. 2009. ‘Craft Knowledge at the Interface of Written and Oral Cultures’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (4): 185–205. Featherstone, M. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Freiberg, J.W. 1975. ‘The Taoist Mind: A Case Study in a “Structure of Consciousness”’, Sociological Analysis 35(4): 304–22. Geertz, C. 1963. Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Global Witness. 2015. Jade: Myanmar’s ‘Big State Secret’. London: Global Witness Limited. Gowlland, G. 2012. ‘Learning Craft Skills in China: Apprenticeship and Social Capital in an Artisan Community of Practice’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 43(4): 358–71. Graeber, D. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House. Han, B-C. 2011. Shanzhai, trans. A. de Cuveland. Göteborg: Korpen Koloni Förlag. Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell. 2007. ‘Introduction: Thinking through Things’, in A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–32. Humphrey, C. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Keverne, R. (ed.). 1991. Jade. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ———. 1991. ‘Introduction’, in R. Keverne (ed.), Jade. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, pp. 7–13. Kipnis, A. 2002. ‘Practices of Guanxi Production and Practices of Ganqing Avoidance’, in T. Gold, D. Guthrie and D. Wank (eds), Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–37. Lemon, A. 1998. ‘“Your Eyes are Green like Dollars”: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia’, Cultural Anthropology 13(1): 22–51. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1962. Totemism, trans. R. Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. Levy, A. and C. Scott-Clark. 2001. The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

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Index

Index acquaintances, close friends and, 78–9 acupoints, 108–9 acupuncture, origins of, 114–15 affective interactions, 130–32 agency, 9, 125, 129–30, 135 interiority and, 54–5 supernatural agency, 107, 108–9, 110–11 attitude (xintai), 17, 18, 20, 27 St. Augustin, 54 authenticity, 17, 122–3, 127, 128, 129, 135 doubts about, 1–2 lack of, 127, 135 quality and, 122, 123, 127 authoritative discourse claiming space for, 44–7 critiques of, 39, 41–2, 47–8 deprivation of authority in, 48 production of, 37, 47 student disregard for, 40–42 barbarians, distinction between Chinese and, 87–8 ‘betting stones’, 10,19, 125, 135 ‘blank figures’ in social and spatial orders, 70, 75, 81–2 bloodletting, 114 boomtown economy and atmosphere, 69–70 boom and bust, coexistence of, 82 bring-in-debt company (yaozhai gongsi), 77 ‘bubble’ of lies, 59–61 Buddhism, non-being of, 6, 54, 55, 129–30

built space, transformations of, 67 Bush, George W., 40 capital and capitalism capitalist entrepreneurs, party recruitment of, 38–9 risk, flexibility and, 123–4 carvers of jade, 7, 10, 121, 122, 124. 125–6, 128–9, 130, 132, 135 Catholic Patriotic Association, 54 Chang Mai restaurant, 74, 76, 77–8, 82 Chinese and classical Greek medicine, comparative study of, 114 ‘Chinese Dream’ (slogan), 2, 9, 59, 67, 70 Christianity, 8, 11, 12, 52, 61, 62, 63, 129 experience of embrace of, 57–8 medieval Christianity, 55 rise of, 53–4, 62 See also hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of civil examination system (keju), 15 civilization-barbarism binary, 89–90 clothing, 9, 86, 92, 101n4, 106, 108, 110, 112, 115 Coal Tower, 9, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74–5, 76, 77, 80–81, 82 descriptions of, 68–9, 74–5, 79–80 leaseholds in, flipping of, 80–81 College Entrance Examination (Gaokao), 15–16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30n1–2, 31n15, 31n20, 60 colonialism, 4 commodification of jade, 136

140 | Index

Communist Party (CCP), 3–4, 36, 37, 43–4, 45, 53–4, 56 Central Party symposium (2003), 38–9 hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of, 53–4, 56 ideology of, 18, 38–9, 41, 43–4, 53–4, 116–17 rhetoric of, 12 sixtieth anniversary celebrations (2009), 35, 40–41, 44 Confucius, Confucianism and, 57, 87 hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of, 57 human-jade homologies, 132 identity, emptiness of; conspiracy theory, fullness of, 87 connections (guanxi), 16, 23–5, 130–31, 132 conspiracy theories, 97–9 fullness of, 87 identity and, 92–7 self-affirming nature of, 96–7 structures of, 94 world-image constructed from, 91 construction construction projects, 9 floor-space oversupply and, 75 core-periphery hierarchy, 16 correctness or incorrectness, defining formulations in terms of, 38 corruption, 8, 37, 58, 59–60, 61, 90, 94, 99–100, 104, 114, 128 cuisine, 92 cultural idioms, 17 Cultural Revolution, 2, 3, 60, 62, 89 hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of, 2, 3, 60, 62, 89 political slogans during, 2 Cultural Xinhai Revolution, 89 culture core aspects of, 92 Manchu influences on, 90–91 Dai’an, 112–13 Daoism, 54, 110, 126, 134 Dao (‘The Way’), 121 functional emptiness of, 6

debt, 9, 77–8 bring-in-debt company (yaozhai gongsi), 77 family debt (jiatingqian), 111 social debts, 116 decollectivization, 106 deficiency, 6, 7, 105, 113 deities, 10, 106, 107, 112–13, 115, 116 Deng Xiaoping, 38, 54, 56 depletion, 7, 10, 105, 109, 113–14, 116, 121 desire, 53, 61, 93 lack and, construction of, 11 self-determination and, 62 shifting nature of, 3–5, 6, 7, 9–10, 18–19, 31n16 social mobility and, 26 determination, domains and, 132–4 developmental lateness, 81–2 disease causation, theories of, 107–8 disillusionment, 29, 61, 96, 99 divided self, 4 divination, 18–19, 27, 105–8 diviners (xiangtou), 106, 107 double cultivation (shuangxiu), process of, 112–13 Dubai of China, 67, 69 dwellings, emergence of new forms of, 79 economic detachment, 135–6 education for quality (suzhi jiaoyu), 20, 21, 22–3 education system, 15–16, 20, 29, 41 emptiness as bodily sensation, 115–16 in Chinese medicine and popular usage, 113–16 cosmological basis for, 105 Daoism, functional emptiness of, 6 empty dreams, 56–9 experiential identity, emptiness of, 87 fabrication, emptiness of, 17–20 fullness and, 6–7, 63 fullness in emptiness (shi zhong you xu), 29 in fullness (xu zhong you shi), 29

Index | 141

Ghost Cities, excess and emptiness in, 9, 11, 67–83 of identity, fullness of conspiracy and, 99–100 lack and, 121 politics in today’s China and, 2–3, 11–12 precondition for fullness, 114 reality, banal emptiness of, 93 semiotic emptiness, 113, 116–17 social emptiness, 113 social inequality and emptiness of fairness, 28 social landscape and, 6 society, fragility and emptiness of, 104–5 spatial metaphor of, 5 in Taiwan, experiences of, 115–16 valences of, 17 empty diseases (xubing), 105, 106–8, 110–11 social relations and, 111 terminology of, 116–17 empty dreams, 56–9 empty talk, 8, 17, 41 entrepreneurial expansion, 73–4 ethnic politics, paranoid style in, 87–91 examinations civil examination system (keju), 15 College Entrance Examination (Gaokao), 15–16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30n1–2, 31n15, 31n20, 60 connections (guanxi) and, 16, 23–5 diligence (nuli) and, 20–21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29 divination and, 18–19, 27 education for quality (suzhi jiaoyu), 20, 21, 22–3 examination fever, fabrication of fairness and, 7–8, 12, 15–29 examination ritual, 23, 26, 30n4, 39 examinees, performance of, 19, 27 fullness of institutional exploitation and, 17–20 hegemony, modernity and negotiation of, 23–6 imperial examination culture, 25 indeterminacy and, 19, 30n5

inequality and, 16, 19, 26, 27, 31n19, 38 instituted fantasy and, 26, 28 legitimacy, perceptions of, 26 merit, conceptions of, 20–21, 25, 26–7, 28 psychological quality (xinli suzhi), 23, 27 quality-oriented policies, 24–5 See also fairness; fate; quality excess, 7, 20, 70, 73, 113, 114 exorcism, 105 experience of, 108–9 practices of exorcists, 117 experiential identity, emptiness of, 87 extortion, 58 fabrication emptiness of, 17–20 Goffman’s notion of, 17, 18, 21, 26, 28, 60 fairness fabrication of, 7, 18, 21, 22–3, 26–8, 60 ideal of, 18, 20–21, 21–2 organizational, 24 perceptions of, 20–23 social inequality and emptiness of, 28 faith life choices and, 62–3 risk of confrontation on, 61 fantasy fullness of institutional exploitation and, 17–20 instituted fantasy, 8, 12, 26, 28 Fanzhuang divination and empty diseases in, 105–8, 116 temple fair in, 106 fate fate (ming), 19, 28, 29, 97 fateful events, 16 feicui (Burmese jade), 121, 122–4, 125–6, 128–9, 133–4 affective interactions and, 130–32 counterfeit stones, 127–8, 135 evaluation of, 131 gemmological testing on, 127–8

142 | Index

feicui (Burmese jade) (cont.) influences on humans of, 128–9, 133–4 nine orifices (jiuqiao) and, 134 potentials of, realization of, 133 predestination and, 129–30 quality categories of, 127 tradition, nostalgia and, 129 Feng Jianmei, 98–9 financial schemes, 70 food safety, 104 formulations of language, 37–9, 42–3 Four Olds, Mao’s opposition to, 89 free, self-possessed consciousness, 53 Fujian Province, fieldwork in, 16 full diseases (shibing), 105, 106–7 full (shi), 17–18, 24, 29 fullness, 2, 9, 63, 87, 91, 92, 93, 95 of conspiracy, emptiness of identity and, 9–10, 11, 85, 99–100 emptiness and, 6–7 in emptiness (shi zhong you xu), 29 of institutional exploitation and, 17–20 gap between expectation and experience, 11, 27, 29, 93 generation gap, 60 garbage classes (laji ban), 22, 27 genocide, 85 ghost attack, 108–9 Ghost Cities, excess and emptiness in, 9, 11, 67–83 government, governmentality and, 2, 3, 4, 8, 43, 49n6, 56, 57, 59–60, 63, 64n6, 81, 90, 97, 128 churches, government-authorized, 53–4 health expenditure, 123 local government, 73–4, 125, 127 Manchu influences on, 90–91 Myanmar government, 124, 125 nationalist government, 36–7 subnational level, 69–70 township government, 105–6

guanhua (officialese), 8, 17, 36–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45–6, 57, 69 political compliance, ritual production of, 8, 17, 36–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45–8 ritual of, political compliance and, 46–7, 47–8 hammer and spectrometer, 126–8 Han Clothing Movement, 9–10, 11, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 91, 92, 99, 100 Manchu-ness and, 95–6, 97–8 Han Dynasty, 9, 91, 114 Han identity, 87, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100 ideals of Han-ness, 92–3 Han-ness, ideals of, 92–3 Hanification (Hanhua), 96 harmonious society (hexie shehui), idea of, 2, 3, 62 Hebei Province, 105–6 hegemony, modernity and negotiation of, 23–6 hidden communities, 62 high-interest loans (gaolidai), 71 Hong Xiuquan, 31n20 Hongyangdao, 110 hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of, 8–9, 11, 52–64 hopefulness, 58–9 horror vacui, 10, 105, 117 house-churches (jiating jiaohui), 8–9, 53, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63 housing, 92 Hu Jintao, 2, 35, 38–9, 40 hypernormalization, 38 ideational incoherencies, sacrifice of, 38 identity, emptiness of; conspiracy theory, fullness of, 9–10, 11, 85–100 identity, idealized image of, 94–5 ideology Communist Party (CCP) ideology, 18, 38–9, 41, 43–4, 53–4, 116–17 ideological literacy, 39, 47 ideological vacuum, 104 imagination, Sartre’s theory of, 61

Index | 143

immutable jade, transitory humans and, 128–9 imperial examination culture, 25 impotence, 109 incense, 106. 110 indeterminacy-determinacy binary, 121 individualization, 54 inequality, 16, 19, 26, 27, 31n19, 38 initiation sickness, 112–13 Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), 69 inner self (ling), cultivation of, 52–3, 62–3 inner truth, concept of, 55 institutional contexts, empty/full dichotomy in, 18 instrumental interactions, 130–32 intellectual property rights, 127 interiority, 4, 5, 131 agency and, 54–5 internal affairs (neizheng), 96 intersubjectivity, 6, 55, 62 invasion, 10, 87, 105, 114, 116 involvement, lack of, 18 jade carvers of, 7, 10, 121, 122, 124. 125–6, 128–9, 130, 132, 135 commodification of, 136 feicui (Burmese jade) and, 122–3 immutable jade, transitory humans and, 128–9 material properties of, 132 trade in south-west China in, 10–11, 120–36 value in China of, 120, 131–2, 135–6 See also feicui (Burmese jade) Jesus Christ, China and, 31n20, 56, 57, 58–9, 63, 64n1 Jiang Zemin, 38–9 karaoke, 73, 74, 131 karmic transmission, 129–30 kidney emptiness (shenxu), 109 lack, 1–2, 3–5, 5–6, 9, 28, 69 authenticity, lack of, 127, 135 characteristics, lack of, 75–6 desire and, construction of, 11

determination, lack of, 122 of diligence or ‘psychological quality’, 27 emptiness and, 121 energy and vitality, lack of, 115–16 enthusiasm, lack of, 40 evaluatory detachment, lack of, 128 experiential lack, 94 inner vitality, lack of, 114 involvement, lack of, 18 moral substance, lack of, 123 of morality in society, 11 social mobility, lack of, 8, 25 spirituality, lack of, 129, 132 state accountability, lack of, 90 work experience, lack of, 72 language formulations of, 6, 37–9, 42–3 official language, 8, 17, 36–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 57, 69 performative language, 44 Lao She, 89 leaseholds, leaseholders and, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82 legitimacy, perceptions of, 26 Li Bin, 98, 101n11 lies, perspective on ‘bubble’ of, 59–61 Litai Investment Group, 67, 68, 71–2, 73, 74, 75–6, 80–81, 83n2 return visit to, 77–9 sociality, ‘red hot’ and otherwise, 72–3, 76, 81 Liu Xiang, 45 Manchu power (and identity), 9–10, 85–92, 94–9, 99–100, 101n1–2, 101n9, 101n11 Manchukuo, 89, 98 Mao Zedong (and era of), 2–3, 11, 31n20, 37, 38, 49n4, 54, 62, 89, 104 post-Mao era, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 54, 89, 117 May 4th modernizers, 3–4 meaninglessness, 4, 8, 10, 105, 113, 116 medicine Chinese, 6, 7, 10, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113–14, 115 Classical Greek, 114

144 | Index

medicine (cont.) demonic in Zhou dynasty, 114 Han dynasty, 114 self-prescribed, 115–16 Western, 105 meditative wandering, 93 mediumship, 106 merit, conceptions of, 20–21, 25, 26–7, 28 meta-cultural speech, 42 mind and matter, separation of, 134–5 modernity, 70 embodiments of, 75 hegemony, modernity and negotiation of, 23–6 staging of, 23–6 modernization, processes of, 70 moral crisis, 1, 4, 5, 11, 58, 104 moral decline, 58 moral vacuum, 63 movement narratives, 88 Myanmar, 120–21 national fever (guoxue re), 129 neoliberal economy, 4–5 nothingness, Sartre’s conception of being and, 53 nouveau riche (baofahu), 72, 90 Obama, Barack, 40 occupancy, renewal of, 79–81, 83 office-holders (dangguande), 36–7 official language, 8, 17, 36–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 57, 69 one-child policy (and effects of), 97–9 opening the celestial door (kai tianmen), 110 opportunities, disparities in, 16 opposites, attraction of, 135 oppositions, transgressions and, 134–5 Ordos Municipality, 9, 11, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75–6, 77, 78, 81–2, 83n2 investment in boom time, 73–4 Orwell, George, 60 oversupply of space, 70, 75, 82 parallax Real, Žižek’s notion of, 82–3 particularistic connections (guanxi), 16, 23–5, 130–31, 132

particularistic relationships (anxiang caozuo), 16 party-state representatives, designations of, 36–7 pathological thinking, Levi-Strauss on, 113 pathology, 7, 113–14 penumbral space, 62–3 the people, 1, 3, 36, 44, 94 ‘low quality person’ (meiyou suzhi de ren), labelling as, 72 non-people, 94 putting people first (yi ren wei ben), concept of, 43–4 People’s Liberation Army, Manchu infiltration of, 89–90 performativity, 21, 37, 38, 131 performative language, 44 personhood, 25 persuasiveness, deficiencies in, 40–44 poker games, 73 Policies to Eliminate the Han (Mie Han Zhengce), 88 political compliance, ritual production of, 8, 35–48 political order, ritual participation in, 36 political realities, disillusion with, 61 political ritual emotional response to, 40–41 identity and, 45 See also ritual popular divination, 18–19, 27–8 possession, 11, 28, 100, 105, 106, 107, 113, 116 by relatives, 110–11 self-possession, 23 stories of, 10 power, formalized language as form of, 37–9 predestination, 10, 129–30, 136 predestined encounters, karmic transmission and, 129–30 Propaganda Department, influence of, 90–91, 97 property development, nationwide boom in, 69–70 Prosperous Cow Business Building, 80, 81

Index | 145

psychoanalytical anthropology, 53 Pu Yi, 89 Qiao Jiangnan Group, 90 Qing Dynasty, 36–7, 85–6, 87–8, 89–91, 95, 98, 101n1–2 quality, 1–2, 5, 26–7, 28, 29, 30n6, 31n19, 82–3, 128, 130 authenticity and, 122, 123, 127 education for quality (suzhi jiaoyu), 20, 21, 22–3 ‘low quality person’ (meiyou suzhi de ren), labelling as, 72 population quality, 3–4, 11 psychological quality (xinli suzhi), 23, 27 quality-oriented policies, 24–5 West as model of, 24 real estate bubble, 67 reality, 17–18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 29, 59, 61, 82–3, 95 banal emptiness of, 93 choreographing of, 44–5, 45–6 political reality, 45–6, 46–7 social reality, 2, 8, 37, 44, 48 reciprocity, 23, 26, 55 universalistic and particularistic, 24–5 regular diseases (zhengbing), 107 religion, 1, 6, 28, 31n16 hope, Chinese Christians and interior space of, 53–5, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64n2–3 popular religion, 117 religious image (shen’an), 112–13 religious life, 107 religious life, surge in interest in, 116–17 repletion, 7, 113, 114 ritual, 85, 86, 106, 115–16 examination ritual, 23, 26, 30n4, 39 guanhua (officialese) ritual, political compliance and, 46–7, 47–8 identity and political ritual, 45 political compliance, ritual production of, 8, 17, 36–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45–8 ritual specialist (daoshi), 28

Ruili, border town (and fieldwork location), 120–21, 123–4, 126–7, 128–9, 129–30, 130–31, 132, 135 ruination process, 76–7, 79 rural China, emptiness of disease and danger in, 10, 11, 104–17 rural-urban variation in attitudes, 20–21 Russian Orthodox Church, 57 scepticism, 60 cynicism, widespread nature of, 2–3 hope and, 60 secret society, 110 selfhood, 55, 64n4 semiotic emptiness, 113, 116–17 shamanism, 106 Shi Lang, 90 Shouwang Church, 56, 59, 61, 63, 64n6 single-party system, safeguarding of, 39 slogan culture, 43 social (and political) reality, choreographing of, 44–5, 45–6 social emptiness, 113 social mobility, 7, 8, 15, 26, 31n16 decrease in, 2 lack of, 8, 25 social orders, maintenance of, 75–6 social realities, symbolic orders and, 11 societal transformations in post-Mao China, 1–2 society Adorno’s notion of, 85 fragility and emptiness of, 104–5 sociosomatic reticulum, 10 spatial hierarchy, temporal aspects of, 24–5 spatial variations, 20–23 speculation, 2, 9 spirit mediums, practices of, 10, 105, 106, 107, 112–13, 116, 117 spiritual intimacy, 135–6 spiritual vacuum, 1, 4, 11, 31n16, 104, 117, 120 Spring Festival, 59 Sri Lankan Hindu-Buddhist ecstatics, 55 state-sponsored posters, 42–3 stock exchange fluctuations, 90

146 | Index

subjectivities, 4, 5–6, 11, 12 subjects, 4, 5–6, 11, 28, 96, 101n1, 105, 116 success measurement of, 22–3 pilgrimages and prayer for, 28 struggle for, 52 supernatural agency, 108–9, 110–11 surface and substance, 124–7 Taiwan emptiness in, experiences of, 115–16 official view on relationship with, 35–6 television, Manchu influences on, 91 traditional institutions, socialist state antipathy towards, 4 the unconscious, 53 underground bank (qianzhuang), 74 undetermination, 16, 19, 26

urbanization, rapidity in, 70 utopia, vision of spirit of, 61 vacant spaces enchantments of, 75–6 filling in ‘blanks’ of, 81–3 vacuum ideological vacuum, 104 spiritual vacuum, 1, 4, 11, 31n16, 104, 117, 120 vitality, 1, 109, 114, 115–16 volunteer (zhiyuanzhe), 44 words, doing things with and to, 37–9 Wu Sangui, 88 Xi Jinping, 2, 59 Xiamen, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27 Xinhai Revolution (1911), 9, 88–9, 96, 100 Yuan Dynasty, 87 Yuan Mu, 89