Everyday Modernity in China 0295986026, 9780295986029

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China - Hanchao Lu
2. The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China - Rebecca Karl
3. Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories - Wang Hui
4. The Modernity of Savings, 1900–1937 - Brett Sheehan
5. Reimagining China: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity - James A. Cook
6. Shanghai’s China Traveler - Madeleine Yue Dong
7. Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value - Yan Hairong
8. The Remains of the Everyday: One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing - Joshua Goldstein
9. From Provision to Exchange: Legalizing the Market in China’s Urban Water Supply - Alana Boland
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Studies in Modernity and National Identity ˘ AN AND RES¸ AT KASABA, Series Editors SIBEL BOZDOG

Studies in Modernity and National Identity examine the relationships among modernity, the nation-state, and nationalism as these have evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Titles in this interdisciplinary and transregional series also illuminate how the nation-state is being undermined by the forces of globalization, international migration, and electronic information flows, as well as resurgent ethnic and religious a‹liations. These books highlight historical parallels and continuities while documenting the social, cultural, and spatial expressions through which modern national identities have been constructed, contested, and reinvented. Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic by sibel bozdog ˘ an Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India by vikramaditya prakash Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics by jenny b. white The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space edited by evgeny dobrenko and eric naiman Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism by brian l. mclaren Everyday Modernity in China edited by madeleine yue dong and joshua l. goldstein

EVERYDAY

modernity IN CHINA

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seattle & london

EDITED BY

university of washington press

MADELEINE YUE DONG

JOSHUA L. GOLDSTEIN

a china program book

This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Support was also provided by the China Studies Program, a division of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

© 2006 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America Design by Ashley Saleeba 12 11 10 09 08 07 06

5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

university of washington press P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 www.washington.edu/uwpress

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Everyday modernity in China / edited by Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein. p. cm. — (Studies in modernity and national identity) “A China program book.” Includes index. isbn 0-295-98602-6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. China—Social conditions 2000— 2. National characteristics, Chinese. I. Dong, Madeleine Yue, 1964— II. Goldstein, Joshua L. III. Series. hn733.5.e84

2006

306.0951'0904—dc22

2006008879

Printed on EcoBook 50, containing a minimum 50% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free. The balance contains virgin pulp, including 25% Forest Stewardship Council Certified for no old growth tree cutting, processed either TCF or ECF. The sheet is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso-z39–48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8A

Contents

Acknowledgments

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vii

Introduction by joshua goldstein

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3

1 Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China | 22 hanchao lu 2 The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China rebecca karl

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52

3 Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories | 80 wang hui 4 The Modernity of Savings, 1900–1937 brett sheehan

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121

5 Reimagining China: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity | 156 james a. cook 6 Shanghai’s China Traveler madeleine yue dong

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195

7 Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value | 227 yan hairong 8 The Remains of the Everyday: One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing | 260 joshua goldstein 9 From Provision to Exchange: Legalizing the Market in China’s Urban Water Supply | 303 alana boland Contributors Index

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335

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333

Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been possible without the generous support given to us by the following institutions at the University of Washington: the China Studies Program and the International Studies Program in the Jackson School of International Studies; the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities; and the Project for Critical Asian Studies, a Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored program at the University of Washington. We are especially grateful for the support of David Bachman and Kent Guy, chairs of the China Studies Program; Res¸at Kasaba, chair of the International Studies Program; Kathleen Woodward, director of the Simpson Center; and Ann Anagnost and Tani Barlow, of the Project for Critical Asian Studies. We also warmly thank David Strand, Christine Wong, Susan Whiting, and Cui Zhiyuan for their participation in the conference that launched this volume. We are grateful as well for the encouragement, advice, and patience of Sibel Bozdog˘ an and Res¸at Kasaba, editors of the Studies in Modernity and National Identity series, and to Michael Duckworth, Marilyn Trueblood, and Jane Kepp at the University of Washington Press.

Everyday Modernity in China

Introduction joshua goldstein

To critique historicism . . . is to learn to think the present—the “now” that we inhabit as we speak—as irreducibly not-one. —dipesh chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe

As much as we might try to dispel the conflation of the temporal concept “modern” with the spatial notion called “the West,” this conflation is still everywhere and every day reproduced by capitalist and state forces that propel us at terrific speed toward what is rather misleadingly termed “globalization.”1 Part of the problem, as many postcolonial theorists have demonstrated, is that the West-versus-the-rest and modern-versus-nonmodern dichotomies have always been produced fractally and through a seemingly endless number of stand-ins and displacements.2 In the late nineteenth century, for example, Japan could attempt to “de-Asianize” itself and thereby stand in for the West in relation to the rest of Asia. In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai, the Paris of the East, could take on a cosmopolitan air and model modernity for the Chinese hinterland. Such displacements have drawn some scholars to the idea of “alternative modernities”—trends that resemble Western modernity but have a Chinese, Japanese, or (fill in the blank with your favorite non-Western culture) flavor. Yet the arguments for deconstructing or pluralizing modernity into a range of alternative modernities leave the impression that there is still some “original modernity” that began in the West and that all other instances are somehow derivative copies. Indeed, the phrase “alternative modernity” itself under-

4

Introduction

writes the assumption that where the term modernity appears unmarked, it must, by default, mean Western. As Partha Chatterjee plainly put it, if we persist in viewing modernity as a modular form originating in the West and borrowed by the Other, then “history, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.”3 A somewhat more eªective approach has been to attack the Western-equalsmodern equation by showing that key conceptual and systemic bulwarks of modernity were born not in Europe but in the colonial periphery. Benedict Anderson showed that modern nationalism originated in the culturally complex Creole Americas.4 Paul Rabinow, Gwendolyn Wright, and Timothy Mitchell all demonstrated that key technologies of modern social control first appeared in Indochinese and African colonies and not in the Western metropole.5 Yet despite these scholarly eªorts, the conflation Western equals modern remains almost automatic. “The West,” more than being an arbitrary term for a geographical zone, is a pliant, resilient, and ideologically loaded concept that does much of our “mapping” for us, incessantly returning to rationalize and locate historical and political diªerences in a system of unequal power relations. Despite the intransigence of this conceptual coupling, the critique goes on, and not, one hopes, unproductively. Many of the most lucid and poetic descriptions, as well as the most trenchant critiques, of modernity have taken as their focus everyday practice and experience. Inspired by this approach, the contributors to this volume take the everyday as a site from which to launch a critique aimed at problematizing and enriching our understanding of modernity. As Harry Harootunian notes of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life— but in a spirit that could apply equally well to Marx’s detailed exploration of factory work routines and commodity consumption, not to mention the explicit theorizations of the everyday in Simmel, Lefebvre, and de Certeau— for Freud, nothing was insignificant, and the most mundane speech situation could have unsuspected meanings. . . . [The everyday] was no longer simply the place of positivistic facticity but the space where common experience concealed deeper conflicts and contradictions whose elucidation was available to a rational consciousness. Rather than being an inert experience of facts, everyday life was increasingly seen as the site that revealed symptoms of society’s deepest conflicts and aspirations.6

Introduction

The idea that many of the most mundane everyday life experiences provide excellent material from which to launch investigations into processes of modernity is central to our collection of essays on twentieth-century China. The contributors arrive at no comprehensive agreement about the nature of Chinese modernity, nor do they produce a laundry list of its distinctive characteristics. Some are directly engaged in theorizing the conflicting, violent, and potentially liberating discursive spaces of modernity; others are more concerned with providing evocative empirical descriptions of the lived textures of modern life. What unites the essays—across subject matter, discipline, and era—is an attentiveness to the “everyday,” the concrete quotidian details and expressive trivialities, the at once startling and hardly noticed shifts in the routines and meanings of daily experience. The authors of these essays engage the everyday—some directly, others indirectly—from diverse angles and for diverse reasons. Before introducing the individual chapters and their concerns, however, I would like to explain why we see the everyday as a productive seam from which to address issues of modernity and identity, particularly in a non-Western context. In History’s Disquiet, a collection of essays on modern Japanese intellectual history, Harry Harootunian elaborated on how using the everyday as a conceptual category might eªectively disrupt many of the fallacies that prop up the West-equals-modern, non-West-equals-traditional binary that so stymies critique. Drawing above all on the work of Henri Lefebvre, he described how modernity and the everyday were related to each other: Everydayness constitutes a cultural form that shares with modernity the experience of capitalism and is thus coeval with it. Both are also temporal categories. . . . [But they are also conceptually diªerent.] Modernity is represented here as the new, and everydayness is seen as the durational present, incomplete but “situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as ‘rational.’”7

Thus the everyday reminds us that modernity always fails, is ever incomplete. Modernity functions something like a Platonic ideal, its material instantiations always falling short, little more than pale shadows of the

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Introduction

dream—but with the added twist that the subjectivity modernity works to create is constantly attempting to perfect it, constantly denying or deferring recognition of the impossibility of modernity. Modernity’s failures seem only to reinforce the spell of its ultimate success. This ideological sleight of hand seriously muddles our study of non-Western histories and cultures, with the successes implied by non-Western “failures” being attributed axiomatically to the West. The everyday, when properly framed, can help shatter this “moderner than thou” logic. The everyday as Lefebvre described it is precisely the space of incompleteness, where the contradictory rhythms of daily life collide and repeat. The everyday reminds us that modernity never exists outside particular material conditions and that modernity’s pretense to totality is precisely how it masks its will to power. The everyday is no more or less authentic anywhere it is experienced; it has no core or periphery. The everyday possesses an ontological quality that “always calls attention to the structure of temporal immanence it shares with other societies even as we concentrate on local experience.”8 Unlike modernity, the everyday is, as Chakrabarty might say, “a present that is irreducibly not-one”; it refuses to fit into any single historical framework or linear narrative. But concentrating on the everyday is by no means an attempt to bypass or avoid analyzing the modern. Modernity is staged in the space of the everyday, in its myriad particular contexts, and modernity in many ways reproduces and reshapes the way the everyday is lived. The everyday has always been center stage for the engineers of modernization. The parceling of labor into regularly waged and interchangeable hours and days; the patterning and planning of cities to facilitate homogeneous daily routines of work and leisure; eªorts to train citizens in the appropriate habitual behavior and dress befitting the everyday use of public spaces; the outburst of media, from newspapers to the Internet, that update and entertain their publics like clockwork—all these phenomena point to the centrality of the everyday as the privileged space for staging modernity on the most basic, concrete level. The everyday, then, is both a materializing space and a conceptual category that enables a more critical study of modernity. What advantages are there in using the everyday to supplement our analysis of modernity? A simple example might help answer this question. I borrow

Introduction

one from Hanchao Lu’s essay in this volume (chapter 2), in which he briefly describes the installation of gas streetlights in Shanghai in 1865: The gas that lit up street lamps was known as “earth fire” (dihuo) because the gas pipes were laid underground. Since it was seen as a kind of fire, many people believed that the streets where gas pipes were laid must be heated, and so thick shoes were needed when walking in those areas. For a while people detoured around North Tibet Road, where the gasworks was located, for it was believed that the surface of that road was hot. It was even rumored that the heat transmitted from the ground into human feet had the accumulative eªect of causing fatal heart disease and that Shanghai’s barefoot coolies were particularly vulnerable.

Using a typical modern-tradition binary, one might interpret this anecdote as demonstrating how the traditional ideas of Shanghai’s residents led to a nonoptimal modernizing process—the avoidance of well-lit streets. Such an interpretation implies that a more pristine modernity exists, a modernity beyond the taint of contradictory local conditions. Under the more fitting conditions of that original modernity—read “Western,” because streetlights, like so many other modern technologies, originated in Europe—such tensions would not arise. In that world of ideally smooth modernization, residents would enjoy increased commerce and take safe evening strolls on the newly lit avenues. But such assumptions are both ideologically loaded and historically false. If we turn to the history of streetlight installation in Paris, the “city of light,” we find that it was hardly a smooth process. Smashing streetlights was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch explained, an “extremely enjoyable activity” common among the urban underclass and revelers up through the early nineteenth century; it became truly epidemic during political upheavals.9 Moreover, in the 1880s, following the advent of electricity, outlandish ideas—such as erecting a giant Sun Tower to light the entirety of Paris from one electrical lighthouse—were proposed in all seriousness.10 Clearly, the notion that modernity in Paris was somehow more perfect, more rational, less resisted, or less thoroughly entangled in local conditions and cultural contradictions than it was in Shanghai is untenable.

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Introduction

Applying the concept of everydayness helps us avoid such pitfalls. It allows us to retain the obvious fact that a gas streetlight system is a modern technology of centralized urban development, but it never lets us forget that the modern is always articulated in particular contexts. Everydayness is that temporal space where modernity—the streetlight system—meets with countless individual, contingent conditions, whether those are the medical concepts of Shanghai residents or the rebellious libidinal and political urges of Parisian lantern smashers. The everyday frustrates the tendency to devolve into “moderner than thou” rhetorical assumptions. More importantly, it helps open such hierarchies to analysis, both as distorting rhetoric and as historical situations of uneven political-economic relations—for clearly, in both Paris and Shanghai, political and cultural tensions existed between various fractions of local society that interpreted and interacted with the street-lighting project in ways reflecting their diªering interests, their diªerent everyday practices and aspirations. Observing from this perspective, the contributors to this volume see in the everyday a means of rooting their discussions of modernity in their historical contexts, particularizing and materializing them. Each essay is grounded in a rich empirical base, whether that means close or exhaustive readings of primary source materials or intimate fieldwork interviews. But the authors are not satisfied with merely presenting vivid, particularized accounts of singular situations. The seemingly insignificant details and repetitive patterns of daily life serve as sites from which to unravel the cascading eªects of much larger, systemic changes. In Brett Sheehan’s piece on savings banks, the small habit of regularly setting aside a few cents to put into the bank clues us into the rise of popular nationalism in the republican era. Yan Hairong, beginning with an account of a momentary smile exchanged between a domestic worker and her employer, builds a masterful analysis of the contemporary economic structures of exploitation in today’s urban China. Alana Boland explains how a minor dispute in a Beijing tenement over collecting water fees can shed light on the complexities of the “rule of law” ideology being promoted in China today. In many of the pages to come, such seemingly inconsequential details are proved to be far more significant than they at first appear. The essays that follow are grouped informally into three sections, each of three chapters linked both topically and by time period. These convergences

Introduction

of historical moment and topical theme were not accidental; particular aspects of the everyday often undergo profound changes at specific historical moments, and the essays in each section reflect this interconnection. In the rest of this introduction I briefly describe each essay and the themes of each section, while also filling in a bit of historical context for readers less thoroughly acquainted with the main events and trends of modern Chinese history.

EMERGING DISCOURSE: THE LATE QING–EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA With its focus on the material details of daily existence, Hanchao Lu’s essay on the everyday history of the common people is an ideal opener to this volume. The essays in the first section all focus on the emergence of new discourses of the everyday. In Lu’s case this “new discourse” is one produced by doing a new kind of cultural history, a history from the perspective of what he calls the “bamboo food basket.” Lu points out that throughout most of modern Chinese history, the vast majority of Chinese spent the bulk of their time in pursuit of the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, and clothing. The source materials that cultural historians typically rely upon—popular novels, newspapers, popular entertainments—were well beyond the reach of many of the urban poor, who actually had very little exposure to such distractions. Lu advocates that if we wish to write a history of this silent majority, we must find new sources. We should look instead at how the common folk expressed their culture simply by meeting the basic necessities of daily life: through what they ate and drank, the way they dressed, what routes they took to get to work, and so on. He assembles a variety of observations, from how urban residents responded to changes in infrastructure such as piped water and streetlights to how the details of people’s diets reflected elusive but important changes in their everyday economic and environmental conditions. Folk sayings, popular ditties, and stray anecdotes testify that such changes in the texture of daily life did not escape the notice or the ironic political commentary of the common people. Lu begins his essay with the way Shanghai residents in the late Qing dynasty responded to new technologies, but he extends the discussion to touch upon the Mao years (1949–76) as well, so his chapter truly spans most of the periods of interest in this volume. The other two essays in this section concentrate exclusively on the first

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Introduction

decades of the twentieth century, a period that has recently received the unwieldy designation “late Qing-early republican era.” The significance of this period, generally seen as stretching from about 1895 to the 1910s, deserves comment. During these years, under intense pressure from Western and Japanese imperialism, China began in earnest its transition from empire to nation-state, yet this transition was far from universally embraced or certain of completion. The second half of the nineteenth century presented nearly insurmountable challenges for the Qing dynasty: economic and environmental crises, a wave of internal rebellions (Taiping, Nian, and Muslim), and multiple wars with the great powers (the Second Opium War, the Sino-French War, the Sino-Japanese War). But these decades also saw the emergence of unprecedented social and economic developments, particularly in China’s coastal areas and treaty ports: the rapid growth of newspapers and printed mass media, especially in Shanghai; a gradual increase in the number of Chinese studying overseas; and the expansion of new technologies such as railroads, macadamized roads, electricity, and telegraphs. After its defeats in the first Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the foreign invasion occasioned by the Boxer uprising (1900), the Qing imperial state— burdened by enormous indemnities and a feeble international reputation— began instituting an unprecedented series of modernizing reforms: abolishing the civil service exam, modernizing military and police forces, supporting female education and banning foot binding, initiating provincial and constitutional assemblies, and more. As potentially radical as many of these reforms were, they served mainly to further weaken the imperial court’s hold on centralized power, and in 1911 a series of provincial secessionist revolts brought the collapse of the Qing empire and the establishment of the Republic of China—a republic that within a few short years spiraled into chaos and civil war that did not let up until the late 1920s. The historical significance of the 1911 revolution is far from agreed upon, which is why this awkward “late Qing-early republican” periodization has emerged. The idea of 1911 as a decisive break too easily smudges into the decades that sandwich it. The reform movements in the decade or so before the Qing’s 1911 collapse seem to set the stage for China’s transformation into a nation-state, yet in 1916, four years after the Qing’s fall, the president of the shattered republic, Yuan Shikai, attempted to make himself emperor, and clandestine

Introduction

groups of Qing loyalists continued to scheme to revive the empire into the 1920s. Thus, what makes these decades particularly fascinating and complex is that they can be read under neither the sign of the imperial system nor that of the nation-state, but must be seen in the light of both. The early 1900s are, in Chakrabarty’s words, a time that insists on being viewed as “irreducibly not-one.” It is precisely because these decades inhabit two overlapping and often incompatible systems, two diªerent and contending cosmologies, that Rebecca Karl and Wang Hui are drawn in their essays inexorably into questions of discourse. Any attempt at interpreting everyday phenomena and events requires us to study them in their context, and for the “late Qing-early republican era” the issue of context immediately raises the question, Which context? Which system of discursive meanings should guide our interpretation—the one by which the Chinese empire was organized or the one by which colonial modernity was managed? Karl highlights this discursive irreducibility by engaging the everyday as an analytical category with which to critique dominant historiography, applying it specifically to a reconsideration of Chinese women’s history in the early twentieth century. She notes that dominant historiography on Chinese women in this period seems repeatedly to tell a story of women’s being duped or trapped at the very moment of their supposed liberation. According to this narrative, Chinese reformers never embraced women’s individual autonomy as a goal in and for itself; rather, women gained access to education and public recognition only when they submitted themselves to serving national interests, especially by filling the roles of patriotic wife and mother or chaste, self-sacrificing heroine. As empirically justifiable and insightful as this dominant narrative might be, it tends toward a teleology in which Chinese women escaped from an imperial-centered Confucian patriarchy in 1911 only to be forced oª the political stage almost immediately by the modernizing patriarchies of the Guomindang (GMD, the Nationalist Party) and Chinese Communist Party states. Any possibility for a diªerent women’s history was foreclosed by this tragic teleology, in which one patriarchy simply replaced another. Karl argues that this account of Chinese women’s history is trapped in a reductive linear narrative about China’s transition from empire to nation-

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Introduction

state. She shows that if we look at writings from the early 1900s we find no teleology or even agreement about linear progress. Rather, we find contradictory temporalities. Using texts attacking foot binding as examples, she shows that while one radical reformer, Jin Yi, was attacking foot binding as a foul symptom of an outmoded dynastic system, his contemporary, Song Shu, was attacking it as a sign that the dynastic system had weakened and actually needed reviving and strengthening. Moreover, Karl argues that the concept of a change in the structure and experience of the everyday not only helps illuminate the historical forces that called gendered practices into question but also allows us to shed the teleological assumptions that have cramped our interpretations of history and agency during this era. For Karl, the emergence of the everyday as a problematic is signaled by the emergence of new discourses that take daily life practices as subjects to be interrogated and righted. Wang Hui, too, is interested in the changing discursive terrain of the early twentieth century, and his archaeological approach to the largely ignored role of the sciences in those decades casts the May Fourth New Culture movement (1915–23) in a new light. The May Fourth movement—often seen as the turning point at which Chinese intellectuals made the decisive switch from “traditional dynastic” to “modern nationalist” discourses—has always been viewed as based in the disciplines of the humanities and on calls for vernacular and revolutionary literature. In contrast, Wang argues that in fact science and scientific associations set the foundation for the era’s intellectual revolution. Discourses, for Wang, are first and foremost material things, and he begins his analysis by looking at precisely how scientific discourses were produced: in what publications, printed by whom and for whom, with what moneys, and in what formats of punctuation and grammar. It was not by chance that Hu Shi, the leader of the vernacular literature movement, published his first papers on the use of modern punctuation not in the famous humanities journal New Youth but in Science (Kexue) magazine, nor was it accidental that Science was the first Chinese journal to be printed in a fully punctuated, horizontal, left-to-right format. Only after establishing such facts in their context does Wang go on to trace the way scientific discourses spread to an ever-widening intellectual community—what he dubs “the community of scientific discourses”—

Introduction

reshaping intellectual agendas in the humanities and literature and eventually permeating people’s everyday cosmologies. Hence, a chapter that begins as a positivistic recounting of the details behind the publication of a single magazine unfolds to reinterpret the discursive foundations of the entirety of twentieth-century Chinese thought and experience, casting new light not only on the May Fourth movement but also on deeper continuities such as the appeal of scientific socialism and social engineering in China over the last century.

CONTENDING IDENTITIES: THE REPUBLICAN ERA (1920s–1930s) The fall of the Qing state in 1911 left an institutional vacuum that was filled only slowly and with fitful and violent eªort. Imperialist pressures and civil wars, first between warlord governments and later between the GMD center and its rivals, shaped an era characterized by fragmented state power—power that on the local level could be authoritarian and overbearing but on the national level was often feeble and ineªectual. Throughout the Nanjing decade (1927–37), the GMD central government could seldom extract taxes from its rural constituents, was generally passive in response to Japanese military incursions (ceding Manchuria in 1931 and other areas of North China to Japanese forces over the next six years), and exercised only nominal control over outlying provinces. Some of the most influential historical work on the republican period wrestles with this failure to create an eªective central government. Typically, China’s failure to develop a stronger nation-state is interpreted as confirmation of the assumption that republican-era Chinese modernity was somehow incomplete, that China somehow fell short of being truly modern. This line of thought has in fact produced some excellent scholarship. The 1980s debate over whether or not republican China developed a “public sphere” based on ideas of civil society and individual autonomy in part reflected this assumption.11 Studies of whether local and provincial identities acted as obstacles or catalysts in the forging of a modern national identity have derived from similar premises equating modernity and national identity.12 Indeed, one need only glance at the title of one of the finest recent edited volumes on the republican era, Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond,13 to see that the equation of national identity with modernity remains the guiding frame-

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Introduction

work for studies of that era. But as invaluable as many of these studies are, they still implicitly assume that modern identities must be nation centered, unified, and individual in the classically liberal Enlightenment sense. The essays on the republican era in this volume begin with the fundamentally revisionist premises that identities are formed through relations of difference and that modern identities, though often striving for unity and coherence, are always multiple, contradictory, and in tension with one another. For Brett Sheehan, who discusses the growing popularization of savings banks among urban Chinese between 1900 and 1937, the spread of modern banking and other Western-derived capitalist market institutions presented common people with a contradiction between two burgeoning identities: that of the capitalist consumer and that of the nationalistic “saver.” As an important segment of China’s population became urbanized during the republican era, economic success and financial stability took on new forms. For petty urbanites living in the new nuclear, or “small,” family, the economic bulwark of landownership was no longer a reasonable option, and dependence on the economic resources of the lineage became more limited. In the urban world of weekly wages and daily bombardment by advertisements selling consumer fantasies, day-to-day life was increasingly a struggle between spending and saving, and people searched for methods to achieve some economic security. Savings banks purported to oªer the solution, advertising themselves as educational tools to teach people the logic of daily budgeting and progressive accumulation through interest. Savings banks promoted these habits not merely as rational, reliable, and modern but also as crucial expressions of patriotism, everyday acts that contributed vitally to nation building. According to Sheehan, “the everyday practices of saving forced students, housewives, and other petty urbanites to view social welfare and patriotism in a new way, even as they confronted growing consumerism brought about by increased urbanization and contact with foreign patterns of consumption. Daily economic choices became linked to greater issues of citizenship, national strength, and capital accumulation.” Savings banks promoted themselves as modern citizens’ ideal, patriotic solution to the everyday conflict between their identities as savers and consumers. James Cook explores another set of conflicting identities in the republican era: the transnational and national identities at work in the business com-

Introduction

munity of returned overseas Chinese (huaqiao) in the city of Xiamen in Fujian Province. Despite the sincere dedication of Xiamen’s huaqiao to reconstructing their hometown ( jiu xiang) and revitalizing the nation—a dedication expressed through massive investments in Xiamen’s urban development and educational infrastructure—in the end their “transnational” identities, anchored to their experiences and interests in Southeast Asian trade, came into violent conflict with the interests of the GMD central government. Cook brings to light a complex ambivalence at the heart of the identity of Xiamen’s huaqiao and a fraught mutual dependency between them and the Nationalist government. As much as the huaqiao wholeheartedly regarded Xiamen and China to be their home, their vision of modernity had a “transnational nature [that] was ultimately at odds with the centralizing tendencies of the nationstate and brought with it a diªerent vision of China’s future.” The huaqiao’s vision of a modern nation—evinced in their economic and information networks—and, most interestingly, their vision of a modern urbanized Xiamen were oriented outward, toward a transnational Southeast Asian trade and culture. The Nationalist government in Nanjing was perfectly content to let Xiamen’s huaqiao take responsibility for building Xiamen into a model city, and prominent huaqiao invested millions in doing so. But when push came to shove, the huaqiao leadership would fight and eventually rebel against the GMD (in the 1933 Fujian Rebellion) to assert that their distinctive vision of and interests in the nation-building project should be indispensable and not subordinated to those advanced by Nanjing. The very architectural foundation of Xiamen’s modern urban design, the qilou, or “shop house,” was a material clue of the conflict to come. Styled after Southeast Asian architecture, built to accommodate businesses engaged in trade rather than industry, the qilou indicated the way in which the vision of nationalism of Xiamen’s huaqiao was inseparable from their identity as transnational commercial traders. Madeleine Yue Dong, through her interest in China Traveler magazine, explores the tensions of identity that lay at the heart of republican-era Shanghai’s famed cosmopolitanism. Her focus on the figure of “the Shanghai traveler” vacationing in China’s “hinterland” provides Dong with a critical perspective from which to interpret otherwise occluded aspects of the everyday experiences and identity of the Shanghai middle class. For the Shanghai traveler, tourism was a form of escape from the monotony of everyday urban life

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16

Introduction

and immersion in a workweek schedule. Through travel, people from Shanghai could imagine themselves just as cosmopolitan as Europeans and other international elites, consuming the Oriental object of China’s more “backward” rural areas, such as the Northwest and the Southeast. The Shanghai traveler relished having his or her cosmopolitanism a‹rmed by taking weekend jaunts to mountain resorts, boating on scenic lakes with Western tourists, and passing judgment on the quaint local customs of the hinterland. But Dong shows us that when the traveler left Shanghai, the tenuousness of his or her cosmopolitan identity was often laid bare, and the comfortable accommodation between being Chinese and being cosmopolitan that Shanghai residents imagined themselves to embody became problematical. Ironically, when Shanghai travelers actually interacted with other Chinese people they met during their travels, the “locals” often confirmed that the Shanghai residents were indeed cosmopolitan—so much so, in fact, that they were not recognizably Chinese at all, either culturally or politically. Such moments of being recognized as cosmopolitan but not Chinese proved profoundly discomforting for Shanghai travelers. All three of the essays in this section deal with aspects of national construction. In doing so, they point to an important trend during the republican period: the tendency of nonstate institutions to assume an ideological and often substantially material and economic role in the task of nation building. Sheehan’s bankers, Cook’s urban planners, and the publishers of China Traveler all saw themselves as participating directly in strengthening the nation, taking on responsibilities that the government ought, but was too weak, to handle. Although this handful of essays is too small to serve as the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of relations between state and society during the republican era, the fact that such a fundamental similarity existed in the ideological functioning of such disparate nonstate institutions might serve as a launching point for a new understanding of nationalism and state building in this period.

POSTSOCIALIST REVALUATIONS (1980s–PRESENT) With the last three essays of the volume we jump into the postreform era of the late twentieth century. Having elected to organize our project with an eye

Introduction

to thematic resonance rather than exhaustive chronological scope—everyday life in twentieth-century China obviously being far too extensive a topic to be covered comprehensively—we were compelled to focus more on some eras than on others. The years of the war in the Pacific and the civil war (1937–49) and the Mao years (1949–78) figure less centrally than more recent decades. But because all three essays in this section refer in some detail to the politicaleconomic systems and legacies of the socialist period, a brief sketch of how everyday urban economic life was organized at that time seems called for here. Daily life for urban residents during the Mao years was remarkably bureaucratized and decommercialized. Upon the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party adopted the five-year plan system of economic organization from the Soviet Union. By the end of the first five-year plan, in 1957, the state had eªectively transferred ownership of all major private enterprises and industries to the state and would, in less than a year, similarly transform all privately owned land in the countryside into state-run agricultural collectives. This near elimination of private property was accompanied by a drastic reduction in the number and scope of markets and the creation of state-managed production and allocation systems. From the late 1950s until well into the 1980s, the majority of day-to-day production and consumption activities of most urbanites were administered through their work units (danwei). Work units typically encompassed both residence and employment, with housing allocated as a noncommoditized welfare benefit. The distribution of housing benefits was formalized through a household registration system (hukou) that assigned people fixed status as residents of specified areas. Decommoditization extended to many other daily necessities as well, including food, clothing, other staples, water, and electricity, all of which were allocated through systems of rationing or coupons. In coordination with the household registration system, coupons were generally valid for use only in particular areas—in a specific city or a particular rural county. Because urban work units provided far more welfare benefits than did rural collectives, and because work units in China’s largest and most prosperous cities had access to more and higher-quality goods and services than those in smaller cities, a clear hierarchy of living standards emerged. In sum, the Chinese economy dur-

17

18

Introduction

ing the Mao years was predominantly decommoditized, with urban residents receiving a good deal more in the way of allocated goods and welfare benefits than their rural counterparts. The most cursory glance at China’s economy since 1978 attests that a titanic revaluation has aªected everything from apartments (urban rents that averaged a few yuan in the 1970s are in the thousands today) to eggplants (the price of a few fen per kilogram in the 1970s is a few yuan today). While there is no doubt that the economy of China now is far more dynamic in both productivity and consumption than that of three decades ago, the eªects of such monetization or recommoditization have gone largely unremarked by scholars. The contributors to this section, in detailing the assertion of market forces over everyday resources and habits, find that the crux of this transformation involves the integrated reorganization of state and market power, a confluence with tremendous potential for transforming social relations and equally fearsome potential for further disempowering vast social classes and groups. Of course urban incomes for many Chinese have risen dramatically, so that when viewed from a demographic distance, urban wages can be seen to have outpaced inflation, and consumption has risen almost as rapidly as gross domestic product. But on the level of daily life, each expansion of market forces to encompass a previously decommoditized sector (food, utilities, health care, housing, etc.) has jolted people’s life paths, employment choices, and family budgets in dramatic ways—sometimes profitable, sometime liberating, sometimes debilitating. Moreover, the processes of implementing these market revaluations have created new class and social inequalities and dramatically transformed the flow of and control over goods and resources. The authors in this section explore the theme of revaluation, emphasizing not only how China’s merging into the mainstream of global capitalism is changing daily economic activities and commoditizing a whole array of goods and services that previously were not for sale—empty plastic bottles, groundwater, domestic labor—but also how these economic revaluations are linked to profound changes in people’s social values and perceptions of self. In Althusserian terms, these essays approach the economic “transition” as a mobilization of a new set of ideological (state and market) apparatuses aimed at creating new subjectivities, especially in the form of “docile bodies,” to facilitate the increased extraction and lubricious flow of capital.

Introduction

Yan Hairong’s chapter is part of her more comprehensive project of looking at young female migrants (dagongmei), primarily from the hinterland of Anhui Province, who seek employment as domestic workers in Beijing. Elegantly weaving fieldwork interviews with psychoanalytically informed theories of subject formation, Yan provides a clear and emotionally moving description of the way domestic workers are subjected, both economically and psychologically, in their day-to-day working conditions to the extractive pressures of global capitalism. She delineates the way rural migrant women’s subjectivities—their everyday perceptions of themselves and their positions in society—are being reinscribed in relation to the priorities of global capital’s regime of flexible accumulation as mediated through various urban “gazes.” The pivotal construct through which Yan lays bare the linkage between these migrant women’s subjectivities and global capital is the discourse of suzhi, or “quality.” “When they exchange labor for wages in the market, migrant women are encouraged to produce suzhi as a kind of surplus value for their self-development and their transformation into new, modern subjects,” she writes. The discourse of suzhi is mobilized to justify the excessive exploitation—and self-exploitation—of migrant women, recasting selfexploitation as the rigors of self-development that will make them more marketable as laborers. In chapter 8, I too look at rural migrant laborers in Beijing, but at a group working under daily conditions quite diªerent from those of domestic workers: recyclers and trash pickers. The collection and resale of household and consumer waste materials have emerged as rapidly growing and profitable activities in China’s larger cities. In Beijing alone, more than 100,000 rural migrants engage in the dirty and grueling labor of collecting, sorting, and transporting (usually by bike cart) recyclable materials. I investigate the current framework of this new economy, the materials of which are by-products of a new form of everyday consumerism. In order to highlight and provisionally analyze these dramatic changes in an aspect of everyday life we typically ignore—the production and disposal of everyday waste—I attempt to locate the emerging economic regime of consumption and disposability in a longer history of reuse and recycling habits in China. Indeed, reuse and recycling were important features in both Beijing’s republican-era and socialist economies. But from a historical perspective, the particular loop of produc-

19

20

Introduction

tion, consumption, disposal, recycling, and secondary production that dominates in Beijing today is quite specific to the late socialist era. It holds interesting implications for the changing meanings of labor, of the environment, and of commodities themselves under the rising regime of governmentfacilitated global capitalism. The final essay in the book addresses what is destined to become one of the greatest crises in contemporary China: the distribution of water resources. Alana Boland approaches this issue from the perspective of the legal mechanisms being implemented in order to privatize, price, and attach new values to water resources. Her focus is on urban markets for water at both the regional and household levels. What will it mean for the public when the daily necessity of getting water is managed by municipal and private corporations? Who will decide how water will be distributed, and who will profit from its distribution? How accessible are the new systems of distribution and pricing to public scrutiny and legal regulation? Through sketches of specific cases of water trading and public contestation, Boland shows how urban residents attempt to use the law to gain control over their everyday resources and, conversely, how disputes over water fees and regulation are bringing the public into deeper interaction with China’s new legal mechanisms.

Introduction

NOTES The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Diªerence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 249. 1. Negri and Hardt have proposed that the term empire provides a far more apt description of our present agglomeration of systems and its trajectory. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) xi–xvii. 2. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Naoki Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” in Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 3. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 5. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 6. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 69. 7. Ibid., 55. 8. Ibid. 9. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97–114. 10. Ibid., 128–33. 11. Most exemplary was the debate in the journal Modern China, in an issue titled “‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil Society’ in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies, 3,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993). 12. For example, Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 13. Yeh Wen-hsin, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

21

1 Out of the Ordinary Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China

hanchao lu Trends in the field of modern Chinese history since the 1970s in the West might well be summarized by three Chinese idioms, each representing a major shift: cong wai dao li (from outside to inside), cong da dao xiao (from big to small), and cong shang dao xia (from top to bottom). During this time the field has moved significantly from the once dominating trend of research on foreign impacts, major diplomatic events, and big political episodes to the pursuit of historical dynamics inside China. This shift was recorded and analyzed in Paul Cohen’s 1984 monograph, Discovering History in China.1 Since then research into socioeconomic issues and, more recently, emphases on cultural studies have been the most noticeable trends in the field. These shifts all have good reasons. To state the most obvious: For the first shift, it requires little explanation that for a country as vast, complex, and rich in history as China, internal factors have been at least as decisive as external forces in shaping its modern fate and certainly more decisive than earlier Western scholarship suggested. As for the second shift, ever since G. William Skinner’s call for regional studies, there has been little doubt that microstudies of local places in China could yield meticulously detailed pictures and might therefore oªer glimpses of the nation as a whole.2 As for the third shift, few would challenge the notion that human history is first of all the history of the multitudes, and therefore the life of the ordinary people must be the base upon which is built an understanding of everything else about any given time and place. But these shifts have developed unevenly. Historical studies of grassroots Chinese society have barely stepped over the threshold. Of course we now

Out of the Ordinary

have a much better understanding of subjects such as popular movements, mass participation in big political events, local reactions to national upheavals, and working-class stratification than we did two decades ago. Yet we need to carry the inquiry further—to look at how ordinary people lived through the extraordinary changes in China’s modern history. In particular, we need to examine the warp and weft of their daily lives to discover how everyday things shaped their outlooks and experiences, which may have had greater eªects on Chinese politics than we previously recognized. In this essay I discuss a few seemingly ordinary, if not prosaic, matters in what might be called the material, everyday lives of the people—ranging from daily necessities such as piped water and electricity to usual attire and common food items such as peanuts, crabs, and tofu—to suggest that the daily lives of the common people deserve more scholarly attention than they have previously received. The study of this subject could create a vibrant subfield that might be called “sociocultural history,” which might provide China scholars working in other fields with clues, if not answers, to major questions.

SEEING THE POLITICAL SITUATION THROUGH THE BAMBOO FOOD BASKET Like many other widely used phrases, the term “common people” seems to be too obvious to require clarification. Yet in the field of modern Chinese history the common people have never been properly defined. Chinese oªers numerous words to describe them, such as limin (the multitude), shumin (commoners), pingmin (the common or average people), baixing (hundreds of surnames), qianshou (black heads), buyi (cotton clothes), and—the term used most frequently in the twentieth century—renmin (people).3 All of these refer to the common or ordinary people, yet few of them convey more than the simple idea that these people are “not o‹cials.” To promote the phrase from casual use to a more rigorous application in academic research, it is necessary to have some definitions. These should not derive solely from occupations or divisions of social class; they should be su‹ciently inclusive to encompass social types that might have conflicting interests but exclusive enough to distinguish the people in question from privileged social groups and the elites. Historically, the common people were, first, those who had to work to

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make a living, and their standard of living was about average at any given time. One criterion for “working for a living” is that a person’s daily working hours occupy most of his or her daily “energy hours” or “productive hours,” by which I mean the usual hours a person is able to work eªectively—say, eight hours a day. I do not take into account the diªerences between manual and mental work in this deliberation. Most of the so-called shangban zu (the “goto-work clan”), a recently coined phrase that refers mainly to urban whitecollar workers, are common people. By the same token, while one should be aware of the diªerence between employees and the self-employed (including business owners), one should not take this diªerence to be a decisive, defining measure of the common people. Many of the petty bourgeoisie of China were indeed common people. However, even today those who “eat other people’s rice” (chi renjia de fan), a Chinese expression for being employed by others, are not necessarily lower on the social scale than those who “eat one’s own rice” (chi ziji de fan). In the republican era, for example, an assistant manager who “ate other people’s rice” in a modern bank was almost certainly better oª and enjoyed greater social prestige than did a village landlord or a street-corner shopkeeper who “ate his own rice.” Second, the common people were those who possessed little or no political power over others. In this regard, the ringleader of a secret society or a political party organizer might not be seen as one of the common people, although he might have had to work for a living and his standard of living was not necessarily higher than average. Until recently, whether or not one possessed political power was of particular importance in distinguishing the common people from the elites in China. Maoist egalitarianism had made economic diªerences relatively insignificant but political status a prominent yardstick in distinguishing social groups. Such egalitarianism has faded dramatically in the money-hunting frenzy brought about by China’s recent reforms, but a person’s political status remains important in Chinese life. The institutionalized corruption centered on “trading power for money” (quan qian jiaoyi) indicates that Communist cadres continue to be a privileged class in contemporary China.4 Finally, a member of the common people usually had a limited social circle or network; he or she knew virtually everyone who knew of him or her. Celebrities of any type were not common people, even though a celebrity

Out of the Ordinary

might have had to work for a living and might have possessed no particular power over others. Thus, an actress such as Ruan Lingyu (1910–35), who came from a poor, working-class family, worked hard in her profession, and committed suicide under the shadow of social prejudice at the age of twentyfive, should not be regarded as a common person. Celebrities like Ruan were, as Lu Xun (1881–1936) put it, “weak and vulnerable,”5 but their fame set them decisively apart from the ranks of the common people. In my mind, people who met all three criteria in modern China were unquestionably “common people.” In looking at the daily lives of the common people, we encounter two closely related questions. First, how did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that took place in modern China? And second, how can one see the big picture of modern Chinese history through the eyes of the “little people”? The first question requires us to reconstruct in some detail the day-to-day material lives of the common people. The second leads us to look into their mentality—or, more specifically in regard to history, into their views or interpretations, based on their life experiences, of major historical developments such as modernity and revolution. The extraordinary reign of turmoil and catastrophe in twentieth-century China made subsistence the outstanding theme in the lives of the common people. Popular culture in China first of all reflected the ways ordinary people coped with the demands of daily life: how they overcame hardships, maximized the use of the materials available to them, sought joy in adversity, and so on. Many of the typical topics for the study of popular culture, such as dramas, movies, cartoons, and newspapers,6 may not be closely related enough to the daily lives of the common people to be considered truly “popular.” Take an ordinary factory worker’s family in republican Shanghai as an example: household spending on the category of “culture” was extremely limited. An average worker’s family in the late 1920s spent only 0.3 percent of its income for amusement, which included theatricals and movies.7 A 1929–30 survey of 305 workers’ families in Shanghai found that only 16 spent any money on newspapers. And although these families occasionally purchased a newspaper, none of them had a regular subscription. Average “education expenses” per family per year, which included tuition, books, newspapers, and station-

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ary, was $1.45 (silver dollar), less than the cost of a month’s subscription to a newspaper at that time.8 These workers’ families by no means occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. Many of them lived in the city’s lowermiddle-class neighborhoods and may well be seen as average Shanghai families. The workers of Shanghai also had an overall higher standard of living than their counterparts in other Chinese cities.9 If we add the fact that most of China’s rural population had a still lower standard of living, we can imagine the cultural expenses of ordinary families in other parts of China. In a way, the most important types of popular culture for the majority of the “little people” were not very “cultural,” for they were plainly unadorned and related only to the daily necessities of maintaining subsistence. But they were truly popular, and they were unquestionably part—perhaps the fundamental part—of the nation’s culture. “To see the [political] situation through the bamboo food basket” (cai lanzi li kan xingshi), as a popular saying goes,10 reflects a down-to-earth sensibility and a realistic attitude toward the politics behind artificially inflated political zeal. In the following account I aim to dissect part of twentieth-century Chinese culture by taking a close look at several basic realms of daily life: water and light, food and clothing.

THE SAGA OF PIPED WATER How can the use of water, a basic daily necessity, reflect processes of modernity and changes in the mentality of common people? Clean running water, readily available in the family kitchen, may seem to have unquestionable advantages over untreated water drawn manually by members of individual households from rivers and wells. Yet when piped water was first introduced to China, it was adopted sluggishly and often met more suspicion than welcome. There were economic reasons for this reaction: cities and towns lacked funds to build waterworks and underground pipes to distribute the water to common households. But this progressive change also faced cultural resistance. Shanghai was the first city in China to provide piped water to its residents, significantly earlier than most other cities in the country. For generations the Chinese in Shanghai had drawn water for daily use from the Huangpu River and its numerous branches. Community wells shared by neighbors also served as primary sources of water. Water coolies (shuifu) carried barrels of water on

Out of the Ordinary

shoulder poles or carts to neighborhood stores and common households. The river water was far from healthy—it could even be fishy and smelly when the seasonal ocean tides backed up in the Huangpu River. For drinking water, people used alum to get rid of sediment, and that was about the only treatment water received.11 A British-owned water company was founded in 1880 and began to supply running water on August 1, 1883. Shanghai residents, however, did not welcome this new service for a while. They were suspicious of water that came from iron pipes buried underground; it seemed to come from an unknown source and was therefore untrustworthy. Rumors were spread, such as one claiming that because the water pipes were close to gas pipes, gas might have penetrated into the water pipes and poisoned the water. Some people believed a superstition that there were two dragons fighting inside the pipes, and therefore it was unlucky to drink the water. The residents were in a way spontaneously boycotting piped water. The water company struggled to promote its obvious improvement in the supply of water. It gave free sample water to teahouses and “tiger stoves” (a type of neighborhood store providing hot water), hoping to reach the masses through these popular water suppliers.12 It also took out newspaper advertisements guaranteeing that the tap water was not poisoned. When people were still unconvinced, the water company appealed to the British consul general, who in turn asked the Chinese government for help. Finally, the local yamen (government o‹ce) issued an o‹cial statement in the newspaper Shenbao endorsing the safety of the water.13 Only then, about half a year after water was plumbed in, was the matter settled. It took nearly half a century for people in cities in the rest of the country to begin to consider piped water a daily necessity. The Nanjing decade (1928– 37) marked the beginning of a nationwide eªort to build waterworks in urban areas. In June 1928 the Nationalist government issued running water regulations that called for local initiatives and fund-raising in establishing waterworks at the city and county levels. In April 1929 the government again issued a document calling for establishing waterworks nationwide, and it allowed local authorities to issue bonds for that purpose. But even then piped water remained in its infancy throughout most of urban China. Take Hangzhou, for example. As late as 1930 this major Yangzi Delta city, located only seventy

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miles southwest of Shanghai, had no piped water at all. Its main water supply consisted of 4,842 wells that supplied more than a half-million residents, giving an average of twenty households, or 104 residents, sharing each well. Still, when the first waterworks opened in 1931, the government had to mobilize people to use piped water. For restaurants and teahouses located along the pipelines, using it was mandatory. The use of piped water in Hangzhou spread slowly. In 1950, two decades after the first service became available, only fifteen hundred households in the city were using piped water.14 The slow spread of piped water service in China was due, first, to economic limitations. Additionally, from the consumers’ point of view, water from rivers and wells had always been essentially free, whereas piped water had to be purchased. There were also cultural resistances to the innovation. I have already mentioned the case of Shanghai in the 1880s. Some seventy years later, a reaction to piped water in a residential neighborhood in Chengdu echoed the Shanghai case, leaving us an intriguing trace of the spread of modernity in the daily lives of the common people. Up to the 1950s, few households in Chengdu had running water. Instead, in an age-old service, men brought large pails of water from a nearby well and distributed the water to the neighborhood. One such man was Ma Laoer, who provided water to a neighborhood near downtown Chengdu.15 Ma was a stout fellow who every day drew water from a well in Yuelai Alley, next to Jinjiang Theater, and brought it in two pails on his shoulder pole—a burden of more than a hundred pounds—to Huaxing Street. There he went door-todoor, filling each household’s water vat, which was customarily placed in the kitchen next to the coal stove. After he provided five pailfuls of water for a household, he would pick up a coal cinder and write a five-stroke character, zheng, on the kitchen wall to signify the number—this was the bill by which he would collect his fee at the end of each month. Ma was pleased when electricity became available in the early 1950s and Huaxing Street was lit, because his work hours often started before dawn or lasted into the evening. Electric lights made his trips back and forth easier. Neighbors often saw Ma look up at the streetlights with childlike admiration and heard him praising “the people’s government” for bringing the “fire machine,” as electricity was called at the time, to benefit the people. But soon Ma faced another change that would aªect his livelihood. Workers

Out of the Ordinary

started to lay water pipes in Huaxing Street. Boys and girls in the neighborhood stood by to watch the roadside construction. It was exciting for them to know that soon they would have clean, piped water running directly into their homes and that using the water was just a matter of turning the taps. But this was an omen to Ma. Wu Xiaofei, one of the neighborhood boys, recalled that the next day he saw Ma sitting on a street corner trying to sell his shoulder pole and two wooden pails. Sympathetic neighbors came over to comfort him, saying that piped water had chemical powder in it—they would prefer sweet well water and still needed his service. Ma was touched by the good intentions and loyalty of his customers. In tears and with hands folded in front his breast, he made a deep bow to the crowd and promised to lower his price by half a penny per pail as a token of his appreciation. Meanwhile, rumors about piped water spread. One rumor had it that the “machine water” was actually from sewers and thus needed chemicals to clean it and bleach to make it look clear. There were even rumors that drinking the machine water caused diarrhea, sores, and skin ulcers. Naturally people were concerned and did not know what to believe. One old woman, Mrs. Zhang, even asked someone to write a letter to the government on her behalf (since she was illiterate), asking whether the machine water was drinkable. She got a reply from the government o‹ce saying that piped water was “a great leap in civilization” and a wonderful benefit that the Communists had bestowed on the people. Ma knew he could not compete with this “great leap” and left the neighborhood, carrying his old shoulder poles, but this time stuªed in the two pails were his clothes and bedding—his luggage. Except for a few old residents who, nostalgic for his many years of kind service, occasionally mentioned him, Ma was soon forgotten, along with his coal-cinder bills written on the kitchen walls, which were obliterated by new coats of “hygienic” lime wash. But Ma was seen to retreat to an outlying area between the city proper and the suburbs, where he continued his service. His “defense line” moved farther and farther away from the city proper as water pipes spread from downtown to the outskirts. Ma, or, more precisely, his calling, would survive for another few decades. The modernization of Chengdu was slow, just as it was elsewhere in the nation in Mao’s era. Up to the late 1970s, most people in suburban Chengdu still used water from rivers, wells, and even rice paddy fields. As late

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as 1987, after much eªort in building waterworks, only 47.7 percent of small towns in Chengdu municipality actually had piped water.16

THE REVOLUTION OF MODERN LIGHTING The introduction of modern lighting in Shanghai is a similar case in point. For centuries the Chinese used soybean or rapeseed oil for indoor lighting, and candles for outdoor and big occasions such as so-called red (wedding) and white (funeral) events. After the opening of Shanghai as a treaty port in 1843, Europeans brought kerosene lighting to the city. A kerosene lamp was four to five times brighter than a vegetable oil lamp of the same size and was not costly. By the 1870s kerosene had replaced cooking oil as the main source of artificial lighting in Shanghai. Meanwhile, gas lighting, starting from 1865, became the main source of street lighting in the city, earning Shanghai the nickname “the city without nights.”17 These changes were not without opposition. One main complaint about kerosene was that it was much more likely than vegetable oil to cause fires, and several fires were indeed caused by incidents related to kerosene lamps.18 For a time the Shanghai daotai (circuit superintendent) Liu Ruifeng o‹cially banned kerosene lights, although the ban was of little use, for people saw the obvious benefit of the devices and would not return to the old way.19 The gas that lit up street lamps was known as “earth fire” (dihuo) because the gas pipes were laid underground. Since it was seen as a kind of fire, many people believed that the streets where gas pipes were laid must be heated, and so thick shoes were needed when walking in those areas. For a while people detoured around North Tibet Road, where the gasworks was located, for they believed that the surface of that road was hot. It was even rumored that the heat transmitted from the ground into human feet had the accumulative eªect of causing fatal heart disease and that Shanghai’s barefoot coolies were particularly vulnerable.20 The revolution of electric lighting was introduced to Shanghai in 1882, and by the 1890s it had largely replaced gas lighting. At first the invention seemed beyond people’s imagination, and electric shocks were described as one’s being hit by a man-made thunderbolt. For a while the popular unrest over electricity seemed as if it might lead to rioting, and the Daotai delivered a note to

Out of the Ordinary

the Shanghai Municipal Council asking that electric lighting be suspended. He also issued a poster announcing the prohibition of electric lamps in Chineserun shops, saying that electricity would set houses afire and inflict bodily harm without any means of rescue.21 But the definite advantage of electric lighting over gas lighting (especially after the cost of the former was greatly reduced by the invention of the tungsten filament) made electric lighting not only a winner in the competition but also a symbol of Western civilization. Electric lamps were praised as “moon brighteners” (sai yueliang). Among numerous poems praising the new lighting was one that went: The Western ingenious and exquisite technologies are constantly changeable: Catching the flying thunder from the sky! Electricity transformed into glass lights, The dazzling beams are like an ocean of silver waves.22

From kerosene to gas and electricity, things Western worked their way into the realm of daily life in China. Modern China saw many similar cases: machine-made textiles replacing handicraft fabrics, automobiles replacing wheelbarrows, matches replacing flints, cigarettes replacing pipe tobacco, the Gregorian calendar replacing the lunar almanac, photographs replacing drawings, and so on. Hairstyles and attire were another domain in which the Chinese altered their lifestyle significantly in the twentieth century, in line with their image of Westerners. As a Chinese historian pointed out, Western material presence in China “was not as intimidating as a cannon, but it was more powerful than a cannon; it did not infect people’s thinking as much as an ideology, but it spread wider than ideology into everyone’s life. Once it had changed people’s life, it became a part of their life.”23 The ubiquitous material culture that originated in the West must have aªected people’s thinking and contributed to the widespread social mood in China known as “worshipping things foreign” (chongyang), which has lasted, intermittently but consistently, since the late nineteenth century. That such a general mood could coexist (and sometimes even be compatible) with a spirit of antiimperialism and, occasionally, anti-foreign sentiment is a matter of great complexity.

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THE POLITICS OF PLAYING WITH ONE’S FOOD Food is by far the most important necessity of daily life. The age-old Chinese saying “people see food as heaven” (min yi shi wei tian) reflects the vital importance of food in the formation of people’s political faith. During the Cultural Revolution years, when any human desire could be labeled bourgeois and therefore reactionary, this ancient adage was attributed to Mao to lend it legitimacy. Feeding the population has constantly been the primary task of the Chinese government, irrespective of historical period. Likewise, from the viewpoint of the people, the first criterion for judging the performance of a regime was whether or not it fed hungry mouths and fed them well. One of the most common pieces of propaganda in the People’s Republic of China, especially during Mao’s time, was to tell the people that “the situation is great, and getting better and better” (xingshi da hao, yue lai yue hao). But at a time when virtually all basic daily necessities were strictly rationed— many at a level below subsistence needs—such propaganda was no more than feeble political jargon, as one outspoken person uttered honestly: “To see whether the situation is good or not, I do not judge—as I won’t be able to judge—from anything other than the situation of my stomach. If my stomach is full, then the situation is great [da hao]; otherwise, the situation is no good [bu hao].”24 In a campaign called “Giving Your Heart to the Party” (xiang Dang jiao xin), one old teacher in Tianjin Number One High School was frank enough to say: “Since Liberation, we as intellectuals are often told there has been a great improvement in our lives. However, this is not what I feel. Before the New Year I went to a tofu [bean curd] store to buy the monthly tofu ration. I stayed in the line for two hours for only six cuts of tofu.”25 Given the popularity and availability of tofu-related food items in China throughout virtually all historical periods since bean curd was invented, the lack of such a common food in Mao’s time was particularly startling—and even oªensive—to the common people.26 In a country where meat and dairy products were not daily foods for most people most of the time, beans and bean products served as an important (and, for the poor, the primary) source of protein. So-called coolie food in China consisted mainly of bean products: bean sprouts, dried bean curds, soft bean curds, and so on.27 But tofu was also a delicacy favored by the elites, and it was not uncommon for it to

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appear on menus for the most luxurious banquets. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) once commented, “Tofu is the gem of food. It has all the benefits [nutrition] of meat but without the poisons [harm] of meat.”28 A highly publicized remark about tofu appeared in the essay “The Unnecessary Words” (Duoyu de hua), written by the Communist leader Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) as a brief autobiography while he was in a Nationalist jail in Zhuangzhou, Fujian, shortly before his execution. Qu, a prominent writer, knew this would be the last piece of writing in his life. He ended the essay with a figurative sign that seems totally unrelated to the political nature of the writing: “Chinese tofu is a delicious sustenance; it is number one in the world.”29 This confession-like essay, extremely elegant in style and honest in essence, has been controversial in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.30 Qu’s remark about tofu was criticized during the Cultural Revolution as a “petty bourgeois sentiment.”31 But what Qu tried to express before his execution, particularly in the tofu coda, was a complex feeling that combined a love of life with the spirit of, to apply a Chinese proverb, “looking upon death as going home” (shi si ru gui). Indeed, Qu was not alone in expressing such a lofty sentiment about life and death through image of the simple food tofu. Jin Shengtan (1608–61), one of China’s best-known literary critics, had treated tofu similarly some centuries earlier. Jin was involved in a student strike against corrupt local o‹cials in Suzhou and was unjustly sentenced to death. On the day of his execution he asked a prison guard to send a letter to his son. The guard suspected the letter might contain words oªensive to the government and so delivered it to his supervisor. It turned out that the letter had nothing to do with politics but contained only a single line: “Eating dry bean curds and peanuts together tastes like ham. I would have no regret in life if this recipe were disseminated to the world.”32 Jin was renowned for his eccentric and unrestrained personality, and his last note before death was consistent with his character. This anecdote was passed on into the twentieth century, and it would be no surprise if Qu Qiubai’s tofu remark had been inspired by Jin Shengtan. Qu’s hometown, Changzhou, was well known for its fine tofu and was an immediate neighbor of Jin’s hometown, Suzhou. Both men were products of the Jiangnan literati tradition. The popularity of tofu earned this food both a magnified name, China’s “national dish” (guocai), and a name matching its reality, China’s “vegetable

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meat” (zhiwurou).33 If such a common food—and bean products in general— became scarce under rationing, then political discontent would naturally follow. In the late 1950s a children’s folk rhyme that consisted of a conversation between grandparents and grandchildren could often be heard in the streets of Harbin: Grandma asks: “What are you eating?” “Steamed rice with stir-fry bean sprouts.” Grandpa asks: “Are they delicious?” “[Having such a meal] once in half a month, how can it not be delicious?”34

This ditty expressed an appreciation of food, but it could also be seen as a roundabout way of criticizing the shortage of food in the fertile Manchuria Plain, where Harbin is located. If steamed rice was a twice-a-month delicacy, then the staple foods the rest of the time must have been coarse grains such as maize and millet. Beans and bean products were also the most common foods for peasants. The writer Han Zi (1921–) recalled that in her hometown, Liyang, Jiangsu Province, bean curd and all kinds of bean products were the most common snacks.35 If bean sprouts were seen as a special treat in Manchuria— China’s major bean-growing area—then the rest of the story tells itself. Another folk song about food in Shanghai had a clearer political message, because it was adapted from a song for mass mobilization during the “Resist America and Aid Korea” campaign of the early 1950s. The musical composition remained the same, but the words were changed. The original song began: Whenever my motherland needs me, I pick up a rifle And rush to cross the Yalu River. Let’s defend our country and our homeland . . .

The adapted rhyme went: Whenever I am starving, I pick up a pair of chopsticks

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And rush into the kitchen. Let’s see what we have today. Oh. Again, green cabbage stir-fried with bean curd. How can I eat rice with dishes like these?36

Because this rhyme was adapted from a song of “patriotism and internationalism,” it was regarded as a “reactionary song,” although it occasioned no serious political trouble at the time. Indeed, adapting the words of revolutionary songs as popular ditties or rhymes was part of Chinese popular culture even during the radical Cultural Revolution era. The practice reflected the wit and sense of humor of the common people and gave vent to political complaints that otherwise could not easily have found an outlet. In Wuhan, for instance, one of the most popular songs during the Cultural Revolution, “I Love the Blue Sky of My Motherland,” which originally had lyrics supposedly sung by a pilot of the People’s Liberation Army, was adapted as a sort of home-loving rhyme that expressed nostalgia about a local food, “hot-dry noodles.” Here are the original lyrics: I love the blue sky of my motherland: Brilliant sunshine and endless serene air, The white clouds pave a thoroughfare, And the east winds send me flying forward. The golden sun is dancing and waving to me on my side, Underneath my feet there is the beautiful and flourishing land. Ah . . . ah . . . Seamen love oceans, cavalrymen love grasslands, If you ask what a pilot loves— I love the blue sky of my motherland!37

The adapted song was full of ridicule, but its focus was food: I love Wuhan’s hot-dry noodles: Ten cents and two liang of grain coupon [ for a bowl]. The dumplings of the Four Seasons [restaurant] are juicy and delicious, The bean curd of the Old Town [restaurant] is delicious and juicy.

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The Wangs’ sesame cakes are big and round: One bite takes away one side. Ah . . . ah . . . The Henan people love rice, the Hunan people love hot peppers. If you ask what a Wuhan person loves— I love Wuhan’s hot-dry noodles!38

What were Wuhan’s hot-dry noodles? According to an oral tradition, they were invented in the 1930s by a peddler nicknamed “Lump Li” because he had a big wart on his neck. His given name seems to have been forgotten. Li lived in Hankou near the Temple of Guandi, and every day he carried his bamboo shoulder pole and a drum-shaped rattle, selling noodle soup and bean jelly. One hot, humid summer day, business was slow, and at sunset Li still had a bundle of fresh noodles. Worrying that they would spoil overnight in such weather, he boiled them for a few minutes, then quickly took them out and dried them on a kneading board—a common way of preserving food before refrigeration was available. As he spread the noodles on the board, he accidentally knocked over a bottle of sesame oil. Frustrated, and not wanting to waste the precious oil, Li mixed it with the noodles and then dried them on the board overnight. The next day, instead of serving noodle soup, he put the sesame oil-soaked noodles in boiling water for a few seconds, scooped them out, added a spoonful of sesame paste, and then served them with minced spices such as ginger, green onions, hot peppers, and preserved vegetables. To Lump Li’s surprise, his customers were impressed by his little invention. Gobbling down a bowl of the noodles at the roadside stall, they asked him the name of the new dish. Never expecting that his accidental product would be such a hit, he quickly fabricated a name: “Well, this is called ‘hot and dry noodles’ [reganmian].”39 As one can see, making hot-dry noodles requires plenty of sesame oil, which during Mao’s era was a luxury. In most cities, sesame oil was a oncea-year ration for the Chinese New Year, in the amount of about 0.5–1.0 liang (1 liang = 1.76 ounces) per person, or 5 liang per household, depending on the locality. Sesame oil may not have been a daily necessity; the more serious problem was the general scarcity of cooking oil nationwide. The writer Zhang Xianliang (1936–), who spent two decades after 1957 on a state-run farm in

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northwest China, recalled his experience in a satirical tone that does not mask his sadness: The disaster of the nation was deep and grave. Then, what were China’s conscience and backbone—the intellectuals—doing? At that time, every two months the farm allocated only one liang (which was a sixteenth of a jin) [1.1 ounces] of cooking oil per person. Please think of this: if you were a single person, what kind of container would you use for an amount of cooking oil that is less than a mouthful of saliva? And how could you manage to have the oil evenly used in your daily cooking for sixty days? I’ll bet this is beyond your imagination. But I, a person with great wisdom, quickly found a solution: an eyedrop bottle! This way, I could squeeze a drop of cooking oil not only every day but even for every meal. The invention spread quickly to the whole farm— the only pity was that at that time no one had such a concept as intellectual property. Yes, this was where the Chinese intellectuals used their wisdom and intelligence. And yes, this is an important reason why to this day the overall national intelligence level of China still lags behind that of the developed nations.40

An accumulation of such sentiments can be explosive when the time is ripe, and consequently they can be decisive in making history. The success of Deng Xiaoping’s reform in the 1980s was rooted in overwhelming popular support for his renowned pragmatism. Such support was in a way an explosion of the discontents and frustrations accumulated in daily life during Mao’s “ration coupon age.” Many factors contributed to the success or failure of the major reforms in twentieth-century China, but ultimately it was whether or not a reform addressed the issues of the people’s livelihood that decided its fate.41 The Communists understood this well, and even Mao, who tended to emphasize the vital importance of ideology and spirit over material life, was aware of the weight of daily necessaries in politics. The Lushan Conference of 1959, which is now well known for its purge of Marshal Peng Dehuai (1898–1975), had originally been planned to correct some radical excesses of the Great Leap Forward. According to the senior Communist leader Bo Yibo (1908–), Mao told his colleagues at the meeting: “These five words, ‘clothing’ [yi], ‘food’ [shi], ‘housing’ [zhu], ‘articles for daily

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use’ [yong], and ‘transportation’ [xing], are the great issues related to the stability of 650 million people.”42 Unexpectedly, a personal letter to Mao from Peng Dehuai, which contained some negative assessments of the Great Leap Forward, enraged Mao, who then transformed the meeting into a political purge. This marked a major left turn in the policy of the Chinese Communist Party that eventually led to the disastrous Cultural Revolution.43 Periodically, during more pragmatic political interludes, the authorities have tried to respond to the real concerns of the people and have launched some programs under the broad umbrella of “Doing a Few Real Things for the People.” One such program in the 1980s was called the “Bamboo Food Basket Project” (cailanzi gongcheng), which aimed to improve food supplies in the cities.44 When Li Ruihuan (1934–) was the mayor of Tianjin, he made an explicit point that China’s “four modernizations” program could be achieved only by the people’s great enthusiasm for it, and people would have such enthusiasm only when their daily lives benefited from the reforms. In particular, as Li said in a public speech, the government should never expect to build a prosperous nation by “tightening ordinary people’s belts and squeezing their gums.”45 To Li, asking the people to tolerate food shortages for a promised future was a classic example of why governmental policy in the People’s Republic of China repeatedly failed and was potentially dangerous. This mayor (and later vice premier, member of the Standing Committee of the CCP Political Bureau, and national chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference), who rose from being an obscure carpenter, surely knew the lives of the ordinary people. Two more tales surrounding two common foods, peanuts and crabs, reveal some themes that are not easily seen in political headlines—though accumulations of such tales can eventually create the forces that make headlines. Before the 1949 revolution, a trolley-bus driver in Shanghai used to have fried peanuts with wine in the evening and on his days oª. This was a way of easing the stress of his job, which came from his daily manhandling of a bus in the city’s incredibly jammed tra‹c. According to him, virtually all of his colleagues indulged in the same habit. They also enjoyed other high-protein side dishes, such as spiced bean curd and stewed pork, but peanuts were the most common dish accompanying their wine. Fried peanuts were readily available in street-corner grocery stores and alleyway food stands all over the

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city. A funnel-shaped brown paper bag of two liang (one hundred grams) of fried peanuts cost only three to five copper coins in the late 1930s. “Even beggars and rickshaw men could aªord it,” the bus driver said.46 But during the Mao era (especially after the Great Leap Forward), partly because peanuts were a source of cooking oil and therefore belonged to the category of strategic materials (zhanlüe wuzi) subject to state monopoly, peanuts were constantly in short supply. By the 1960s and 1970s, only once a year— during the Chinese New Year season—could a family purchase peanuts, and then only one catty (five hundred grams) of raw peanuts. Peanuts became a luxury and rarely appeared as the driver’s evening refreshment. For more than a decade after the early 1960s he had to substitute soybeans for peanuts. But soybeans were not always available either. The driver and his wife had to go to the trouble of buying fresh soybeans in the summer and then air- or sun-drying them in order to preserve them for other seasons. An ideal alternative would have been any of a wide variety of bean products, which were high in protein, delicious, and inexpensive. Unfortunately, as we have seen, bean products (not including fresh soybeans) were always rationed. For more than two decades after 1960, residents were allowed to buy 0.04 yuan’s worth of bean products every three months—barely enough for one meal.47 Another item, meat (mainly pork), was out of the question for an evening snack, because meats of all kinds were expensive and were often rationed. During 1959–64, the ration was two hundred grams of pork per person per month; in later years, rationing continued oª and on.48 The driver felt he had to save “luxury” foods for his family. People believed that for the sake of health and comfort, wine should be accompanied by high-protein food, but the bus driver had run out of choices. If peanuts (and bean products) typified food shortages under Mao’s dogmatic socialism, then crabs were a token of social stratification under Deng’s pragmatic socialism (or rather, capitalism). Freshwater crabs from southern Jiangsu Province were a common seasonal food in most parts of the Jiangnan region. This delicacy (females and the hairy type were regarded as the best) was usually available from September to November, when crabs reached their maturity and swarmed in the rich lakes and waterways that crisscross the lower Yangzi Delta area like spiderwebs. In this area and much of South China, freshwater crabs always came into season with the chrysanthemum, the

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flower that emblematized moral purity and dignified aloofness. For centuries the shellfish and the flower have been a poetic pair in autumn scenes and a favorite topic in literature.49 But the crab (and chrysanthemum for that matter) was far from just an item in the literary tradition. It was first of all a common seasonal delicacy that could be aªorded and enjoyed by most people most of the time. As late as the mid-1970s, live crabs cost about 0.70 to 1.20 yuan per catty ( jin), depending on size.50 An average worker earned some forty-five to fifty yuan a month in Shanghai in the 1970s, which meant that a working class family could have crabs on its dining table at least occasionally. Interestingly, the coup of October 6, 1976, left a dramatic footnote on the availability of this common food at the time. When the news that the Gang of Four had been arrested was released to the public in late October and early November, it fell right into the crab season. In celebration, “liquor sales broke all records, and crab stocks were exhausted in feasting that made joyful wordplay on the wicked quartet.” 51 The expression “joyful wordplay” referred to idioms that compare the way crabs crawl with “running wild,” “riding roughshod,” or “playing the tyrant,” and the Gang of Four fit nicely. A typical order of “political crabs” on that occasion, in markets, restaurants, and homes, was three males and one female—to correspond to the gender composition of the Gang of Four. Since the early 1980s, however, crabs have become scarce.52 They have virtually disappeared from state-run food markets and are available only in the “free markets” (roadside farmer’s markets run by individual sellers). The price has skyrocketed: medium-size crabs (about three liang, or five to six ounces, per crab) were sold for at least 180 yuan per catty across the Jiangnan region in the early 1990s, and sometimes the price was as high as 300 yuan. In the mid-1990s the minimum monthly income floor set for qualifying for government aid (roughly the equivalent of the poverty line in the United States) was 200 yuan in Shanghai. This floor was among the highest in the country.53 The 1995 average per capita income in Shanghai was 6,822 yuan, or 568 yuan per month.54 This meant that a couple of live crabs could cost more than a worker’s entire monthly income. This once common food, therefore, has become an uncommon delicacy served only at extravagant banquets, most of which are staged as a means of building up useful “connections.” In other words, crabs have become a means

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of bribery and a symbol of corruption, leading to the saying that “those who buy crabs do not eat crabs; those who eat crabs do not buy crabs.” 55 What we see here is not just the usual up-and-down movement of the market price of a certain commodity but a hint of broader themes—how daily life is aªected by politics, how favoritism is built in subtle ways, and how one practices the art of wangling in a tightly controlled yet loophole-ridden system.

THE POLITICS OF ATTIRE In China, more than in most other countries, clothing is a domain that reflects the nation’s politics and culture. Historically, Chinese culture included, of course, some universal thinking and practices concerning clothing. For instance, the first criterion for judging the prosperity of any particular era in Chinese history was (and still is) whether or not the people enjoyed “abundant clothing and ample food” ( fengyi zushi). And as elsewhere in the world, the social and cultural functions of attire, such as its use as a symbol of status or as a component of etiquette, have always been readily evident everywhere in China. The common saying “A person is judged by his or her clothes, a horse by its saddle” (ren kao yishang ma kao an) reflects the popular awareness of, and indeed sensitivity to, the social role of clothing.56 Social norms for dressing properly in public were often rigid. Frequently, a little infringement of such norms could be met with a snobbish rebuª. A widely known case of “clothing snobbery” involved Wang Yeping, wife of President Jiang Zemin (hence the “First Lady” of China). Wang is known for always dressing simply. When Jiang was the mayor of Shanghai, Wang once visited a friend from Beijing who was staying in a hotel near her home. Probably because this was a short trip, she dressed in her usual outfit—a gray coat and dark blue trousers—and was pushing her grandson, Maotou, in a stroller. She was stopped at the entrance to the hotel because the doormen assumed that a person dressed like this would have no business in a hotel. The guards were astonished (and, one presumes, chagrined) to discover that this woman was none other than the wife of the mayor.57 But the importance of attire went far beyond questions of daily necessity, status, or etiquette. Twentieth-century China saw an extraordinary politics of attire in regard to ordinary people’s daily clothes, from the abandonment of

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traditional attire to the birth of the Zhongshan suit for men (in the 1910s) and the qipao for women (in the 1920s), from Jiang Jieshi’s “New Life Movement” of 1935 to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and from the advocacy of Jiang Qing’s lianshanqun (a type of women’s whole-body skirt) in the 1970s to the fashionable jeans craze in the post-Mao and post-Deng eras. It is hard to imagine any other country in the world where the clothing of the common people has had more to do with politics, modernity, and local and national identity.58 The most significant aspect of the politics of attire in modern China is that it reflects not only the determination of the state to penetrate people’s daily lives but also the wisdom of the people in coping with such intervention. Some details of how the Chinese authorities went after the people with regard to what they should wear may have caught even inveterate “Oriental despotism” theorists by surprise, but heavy-handed governmental interference in this realm reflects perhaps no more than the usual totalitarianism of Communist regimes. The more significant and really intriguing part of the drama is the countermeasures people took in dealing with the state’s intrusions, measures that were often spontaneous and did not involve serious antigovernment sentiment. The decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) oªers good examples of this two-way interaction between state and society, because during that period the Chinese government vigorously intervened in people’s everyday lives in the name of opposing capitalism. One of the subcampaigns of the Cultural Revolution was an attack on so-called bizarre dress and outlandish clothes (qizhuang yifu), which were regarded as symbols of the “decadent” capitalist lifestyle that was corrosive to the revolution. Although no written laws were promulgated in this regard, the radicals strictly regulated men’s and women’s clothing. For example, the bottom of a trouser leg was mandated to be not smaller than seven cun (1 cun = 1.3 inches) in width for men and six cun for women. The crotch of a pair of trousers was not to be shorter than eight cun (although this was less strictly enforced than the width of trouser legs; compromises were often permitted to accommodate individual physiques). The idea behind this regulation was that clothing should not reveal the outlines of the human body, lest it be sexually provocative. Oª and on—depending on the political subclimate in a given locality—“pickets” ( jiucha) patrolled the main streets of cities solely for this purpose. They often had a professional tailor as

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advisor. With tape measures and scissors in hand, they stopped pedestrians and measured their trousers. If the trousers did not meet the required specifications, the bottoms would be cut as a warning.59 Even under such totalitarian rule, however, individual desires did not bend entirely to the will of the state. They persisted, roiled, and frequently disclosed themselves, often in roundabout and discreet ways. The expression of such desires can be seen as a form of political resistance to the power of an intrusive state, but ultimately it was more the outpouring of the human desire for character and aesthetics than it was a question of politics. At a time when Western observers saw only a “vast ocean of gray” and monotonous Mao suits or, to mention a derogatory term, millions of “blue ants,”60 in fact some choices and even innovative designs existed in terms of the color, style, and material of clothing. Here are just a few examples: 1 A jacket with three or four buttons could be worn instead of a jacket with the standard five buttons. While the Western business suit was too obviously bourgeois and thus forbidden, the three- or four-button jacket served as a better-than-nothing remedy. For those who grew tired of the Maoist button-to-the-neck jacket, the casual jacket opened up a triangle under the neck, which conveyed a natural and unrestrained image. 2 Choice was also possible in the number of pockets. Unlike the Mao suit with its four standard pockets, the three-button jacket usually had two pockets on the bottom. Various modifications to the Mao suit were possible as well. This included removing the two upper pockets, removing the upper right pocket, changing the shape of the pocket covers, or simply removing the covers. 3 The neck styles of woolen sweaters conveyed various images. The V-neck sweater was conventional and formal, the polo neck gave an impression of comfort and abundance, the crew neck looked old-fashioned, and the turtleneck conveyed a cute and school-student-like image. 4 A woman’s fashion “statement” was to wear a light-colored shirt inside a three-button jacket and turn the collar of the shirt outside to overlap the

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jacket collar. This fashion seemed to be officially acknowledged. For a time all women interpreters, female officials, and wives of top leaders dressed in this way when they received foreign visitors. 5 Although miniskirts were banned and no skirt was supposed to rise above the knees, it was not considered improper for young women to wear shorts that revealed much of their legs. Shorts were common both in the cities and in the countryside, especially in the summer. 6 Imitations of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) uniform, known as the “casual military uniform” ( jun bianfu), were fashionable. Authentic PLA uniforms without badges (soldiers had to return their insignias when they were demobilized) were most desirable. But they were unavailable in the market; only those who had been in the PLA would have used uniforms at home. Thus, wearing a uniform was a declaration of a connection with the PLA, a status symbol most prominent during the Cultural Revolution. Faded army uniforms were especially popular, probably because they were symbols of seniority—presumably, someone who possessed such a uniform must have been in the army for years.61

Such nuances in clothing could be appreciated only by people who were essentially denied the freedom of choosing what to wear. For outsiders, they may seem trivial or even meaningless. Yet for those who lived through the Cultural Revolution, such innovations produced a cushioning of the stringent rules and gave expression to a desire for beauty and diversity. The intelligence and cleverness of the masses in coping with an intrusive regime in the realm of clothing should be of great significance in examining relations between state and society in the People’s Republic of China, but this potential has yet to be fully exploited.

CONCLUSION Studies of the lives of the common people are essential to an understanding of China and Chinese history. Such studies are like the bricks of a building:

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without them there is simply no structure at all. In addition to depicting common people’s material lives, researchers face the task of understanding their thoughts on big issues. Obviously, stories surrounding the material lives of ordinary people reflect their mentality. An “ideology of the everyday people” exists that is far richer and more complicated than is usually thought. There were (and still are) many “personal voices” to be recorded and researched.62 Such voices might help answer questions such as, How did ordinary people cope with the big ideologies that so frequently aªected their lives? What did they think about the Communist revolution? What was their view of imperialism? In an interview conducted before the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, a stevedore told me that he thought Jiang Zemin was humbling himself by going to Hong Kong to attend the handover ceremony. “In my view,” the sixty-five-year-old worker said with a sense of righteousness, “the ceremony should have been held in Beijing. Let the British come to our capital to hand back what they robbed. Or at least Nanjing, where the initial treaty was signed.” Should we hear more of this kind of voice at the grassroots level that may form the base of, in this case, Chinese nationalism? Is this kind of national pride a continuation of the age-old “great China” mentality or just a reaction to the current trend of “worshipping things foreign”? Is this kind of resentment an expression of a real and strong sense of national identity or a self-imposed psychological link with an “imagined nation”? 63 To find the answers will require us to go beyond the familiar haunts of library and archival research to conduct field studies. Sociological surveys and interviews and anthropological on-the-spot observations and investigations should be the great allies of historians of recent Chinese history.64 Studies of the lives of the common people can also be places where social history and cultural studies dovetail. As Michel de Certeau indicated, the study of common life is a “science of the ordinary.”65 Much of this essay falls clearly in the realm of social or socioeconomic history. Yet subjects such as these should also be seen as legitimate topics in the domain of cultural history, if we could but break up the general assumption that cultural history is largely about high culture and intellectual history or is literati-oriented, as well as the familiar notion that popular culture is mainly about entertainment, popular lit-

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erature, and leisure activities. The phrase “sociocultural history,” although seldom used in the English-speaking world, could be brought in to guide vigorous studies of the lives of the common people, as well as to provide an appropriate way of conveying the nature of this still relatively unfamiliar part of the “human sciences.”66

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NOTES Part of this chapter was previously published as research notes in the spring 2003 issue of China: An International Journal. I thank its editors for permission to reprint the materials in this article. 1. Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 2. G. William Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China,” 3 parts, Journal of Asian Studies 24, nos. 1–3 (1964–65): 33–44, 195–228, 363–99. See also G. William Skinner, “Introduction: Urban and Rural in Chinese Society,” in The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211–49. 3. Because the term renmin (people) has been favored by the Communists and is part of the o‹cial name of the People’s Republic of China, it has taken on a certain political flavor or connotation. Expressions such as minzhong (lit. “the people and the masses”) and dazhong (lit. “the great masses”) can be seen as old-fashioned equivalents of renmin. 4. The popular sayings collected in Li Jie, Laobaixing de zhihui [Wisdom of the common people] (Taipei: Maitian, 2000), ridicule today’s corrupt o‹cials of all sorts who use political power to gain economic advantages. 5. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji [The complete works of Lu Xun], vol. 6 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 333. 6. See for example, Chang-Tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 7. Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo chengdu de yige yanjiu [A study of the standard of living of Shanghai laborers] (Beijing: Shehui diaochasuo, 1930), 84. 8. Bureau of Social Aªairs, City Government of Greater Shanghai, comp., Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers (Shanghai: Chung Hwa Book Company, 1934), 158–59. 9. Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63–64, 275. 10. See Wang Dechun, Airen, tongzhi: Dalu suci quanshi [Lover, comrade: Annotations on the common sayings in the mainland] (Taipei: Shang wu yinshuguan, 1990), 61–63. 11. For drinking, the water had to be boiled. To this day piped water in China is still undrinkable without being boiled. 12. For information on tiger stoves, see Hanchao Lu, “Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 1 (1995): 92–123. 13. Shenbao [Shanghai Daily], February 15, 1884.

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Hanchao Lu 14. Li Tong, “Hangzhou zilaishuichang chuangban qianhou” [The establishment of the Hangzhou Waterworks], Hangzhou wenshi ziliao 8 (1987): 112–19. 15. The story of Ma Laoer comes from Zhang Xiande, Chengdu: Jin wushi nian de siren huiyi [Chengdu: Personal reminiscences over the past fifty years] (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1997), 37–38. 16. Chengdu nianjian 1988 [Chengdu yearbook 1988], 33; see also Chengdushi chengshi kexue weiyuanhui, ed., Chengdushi yanjiu [Research on Chengdu] (Chengdu, 1989), 172–73. 17. Xiong Yuezhi, ed., Shanghai tongshi [A history of Shanghai], vol. 5 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1999), 168–69. 18. Bo Run, comp., Songjiangfu xuzhi [The extended gazetteer of Songjiang Prefecture], vol. 5, Fengsu [customs] (Songjiang, 1884). 19. Shenbao, March 18, 1882. 20. Chen Boxi, ed., Shanghai yi shi da guan [Old Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000 [reprint of 1924 original]), 183. 21. Hu Xianghan, Shanghai xiaozhi [Minor records of Shanghai], vol. 2 (Shanghai, 1930). 22. Huang Shiquan, Songnan mengying lu [Records of dreamlike lives in Shanghai], vol. 4 (Shanghai, 1989 reprint; original date unknown). 23. Chen Xulu, Chen Xulu wenji [Collected works of Chen Xulu], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 371. 24. Xue Yanwen and Wang Tongli, comps., Piaozheng jiushi [Ration coupon reminiscences] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi, 1999), 11. 25. Ibid., 10–11. 26. The technology of tofu making is generally credited to Liu An (179–122 b.c.e.), the king of Huainan, who was a renowned gourmet and the grandson of Liu Bang (256–195 b.c.e.), the founding emperor of the Han dynasty. Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu [Encyclopedia of herbal medicines], vol. 2 (Beijing: Renmin weisheng, 1957), 1149. Archaeological discoveries have proved that at least by the Late Han period (25–220 c.e.), bean-curd making was an established technology. For example, a Late Han fresco discovered in 1960 in Mi County, Hehan, may show a picture of a tofu workshop. Wenwu [Cultural Relics] 10 (1972): 49–62, esp. illustration 11. 27. Shanghaishi shehuijiu, “Shanghai renlichefu shenghuo zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu” [Report of an investigation into the living conditions of Shanghai rickshaw men], part 2, 44–45; Emily Hahn, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (Philadelphia, n.d.), 9. 28. Lu Shiyi and Gao Fuliang, Zhongguo doufu cai jijing [A collection of Chinese bean curd foods] (N.p: Jiangsu kexue jishi chubanshe, 1993), 1.

Out of the Ordinary 29. Qu Qiubai, Qu Qiubai zizhuan [Autobiography of Qu Qiubai] (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 1996), 191. 30. The essay raised the question of Qu’s loyalty to the party and was taken as evidence against him during the Cultural Revolution. For a biography of Qu Qiubai, see Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch’u Ch’iu-pai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 31. Tang Zhenchang, Zhongguo yinshi wenhua sanlun [Essays on Chinese food culture] (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1999), 135–37. 32. Ye Lingfeng, Neng bu yi Jiangnan [How can one not be nostalgic about Jiangnan?] (Nanjing: Jiangsu gu ji chubanshe, 2000), 48; Tang Xianmao, Jin Shengtan pingzhuan [An analytical biography of Jin Shengtan] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 1998), 404. 33. Pan Jiangdong, Zhongguo canyinye zushiye yanjiu [Research on the origins of Chinese cuisines] (Taipei: Yangzhi wenhua shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 1999), 152. 34. From Liang Xiaosheng, Liang Xiaosheng huati [Liang Xiaosheng’s talking topics] (Beijing: Jiuzhou tushu, 1998), 133; see also Tong Zongsheng and Chen Erjing, eds., Mingren xuezhe yi muqing [Celebrities and scholars recalling their mothers] (Beijing: People’s University Press, 1991), 229–34. 35. Han Zi, “Kanxi” [Watching plays], Xinhua ribao, July 19, 1981. 36. Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights, 270. 37. Geming gequ dajia chang [Let’s sing revolutionary songs together] (mimeographed copy, courtesy of Li Xiaolin), 24. 38. Fang Fang, Wuhanren [Wuhan people] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1997), 42. 39. Ibid., 43–45; see also Tang, Zhongguo yinshi wenhua sanlun, 61. 40. Zhang Xianliang, Xiaoshuo Zhongguo ji qita [Novelistic China and others] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi, 1999), 320; Xue and Wang, Piaozheng jiushi, 51. The standard liang equals fifty grams in China, but in some hinterland regions the old weight system might still have been used, in which one liang was a sixteenth of five hundred grams. 41. For example, the failure of the Qing reform in the early twentieth century was due largely to its elite nature and its failure to respond to ordinary people’s concerns about their basic livelihood. This caused deep and widespread discontent with the reform among the masses and eventually contributed to the downfall of the Qing regime. See Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 117–23. 42. Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongda jueyi yu shijian de huigu [Some major resolutions and events in retrospect], vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhong gong zhong yang dang xiao chubanshe, 1993), 848–49. 43. For an account of the Lushan Conference, see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins

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Hanchao Lu of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chapter 10. For a political biography of Peng, see Jurgen Domes, Peng Te-huai: The Man and the Image (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985). 44. Shanghaishi chengshi shehui jingji diaochadui [Team for Investigating Social and Economic Conditions of Shanghai], ed., Shanghai chengshi shehui jingji diaocha baogaoji, 1990 [Reports on the social and economic conditions of Shanghai, 1990] (Shanghai, restricted publication), 59. 45. Li Ruihuan, Chengshi jianshe suitan [Speeches on urban reconstruction], vol. 1 (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexue yuan chubanshe, 1996), 51. 46. Interview with Huang Kuide (b. 1924), Shanghai, March 24, 1989. 47. The amount varied slightly by location. Until the early 1990s, more than a dozen diªerent types of bean products were rationed. See Li Xiangsun et al., eds., Teshu de niandai: Lao piaozheng [The special age: Old coupons], vol. 2 (Shenzhen: n.p., 1999), 28. 48. Shanghaishi Huangpuqu renmin zhengfu caizheng maoyi bangongshi, ed., Shanghaishi Huangpuqu shangyezhi [A gazetteer of commerce in Huangpu District of Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1995), 437–39. 49. See, for example, Tsao Hsueh-chin and Kao Ngo, A Dream of Red Mansions, translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978–80), chapter 38. 50. River crabs were always sold alive. Dead crabs were considered poisonous and only the very poor would eat them, which led to the allegorical saying, “A beggar eats dead crabs—each of which is delicious” (meaning that the beggar is unselective, easy to please). See Wang Zhongxian, Shanghai suyu tushuo [The Shanghai folk adages as illustrated by pictures] (Shanghai: Shehui chubanshe, 1935), 223; Xiong Yuezhi, ed., Lao Shanghai mingren mingshi mingwu daguan [A dictionary of the notable and famous things in old Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1997), 569. 51. Zhang Lijia and Calum MacLeod, China Remembers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 174. 52. This is because of increasing demand from overseas markets and the environmental problems that have reduced the numbers of wild river crabs in this region. 53. He Qinglian, Xiandaihua de xianjing: Dangdai Zhongguo de jingji shehui wenti [The pitfalls of modernization: The economic and social problems of contemporary China] (Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo, 1998), 226. 54. Nanfang zhoumo [Southern Weekend], May 10, 1996; Zhang Xingjie, ed., Kua shiji de youhuan: Yingxiang Zhongguo wending fazhan de zhuyao shehui wenti [Hardships across the centuries: Major social problems aªecting the stability and development of China] (Lanzhou: Lanzhou Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 147. 55. Xinmin wanbao [New People’s Evening News], November 21, 1994.

Out of the Ordinary 56. Ruthanne Lum McCunn, ed., Chinese Proverbs (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1991), 50. This saying also appears in the form of “A man is uplifted by his clothes, a Buddha by gilding” (ren kao yi zhuang, Fo kao jin zhuang). 57. See Shijie ribao [World Journal] (New York), October 31, 1997, 2. 58. For a discussion of politics and women’s attire (in particular, the qipao) in twentieth-century China, see Antonia Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear? A National Problem,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 99–131. 59. Interview with Wu Yutian (b. 1929), who served as a “picket” for three years during the Cultural Revolution, Nanjing, June 21, 1999. 60. See, for example, Robert Guillain, The Blue Ants: 600 Million Chinese under the Red Flag, translated by Mervyn Savill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957); Gyorgy PalocziHorvath, Mao Tse-Tung: Emperor of the Blue Ants (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963). 61. Yang Cuntian, Zhongguo fengsu gaiguan [A general survey of China’s folk customs] (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1994), 98–99; Hua Mei, Fushi qinghuai [Thoughts and feelings about dress and adorment] (Tianjin: Renmin meishu, 2000), 50–54. 62. Here I borrow from the title of Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter’s book, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). 63. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7–8. 64. As far as the common people’s lives and feelings are concerned, B. Michael Frolic’s Mao’s People is a more balanced firsthand account of the lives of the common people in the People’s Republic of China than are most of the historical writings on the Cultural Revolution. To me this is encouraging. If a Hong Kong-based interview project conducted in the late 1970s could produce a detailed, vivid, and insightful account of Chinese lives, then in today’s much improved research environment one could certainly expect more from scholars. 65. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 13. 66. Sociocultural is not a newly coined term. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the phrase passed into written English no later than 1928. It is noteworthy that in Chinese academe, the expression “sociocultural history” (shehui wenhua shi) has been as common as “socioeconomic history” (shehui jingji shi). For a recent discussion of the notion of sociocultural history, see Liu Zhiqing’s introduction in Liu Zhiqing, ed., Jindai Zhongguo shehui wenhua bianqian lu [Records of the sociocultural changes of modern China], 3 vols. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1998).

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2 The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China rebecca karl

Everyday life, a compound of insignificances united in this concept, responds and corresponds to modernity. —henri lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World

In the prefatory remarks to his famed 1903 pamphlet Nüjie zhong (A bell for the women’s world), the social critic Jin Yi commented, “There is not a place in today’s world where male domination of women has not triumphed; if they are not treated as playthings, then they are used as colonized territory [kou bu yiwei wanhao, zi yiwei zhimindi ye].”1 This remark eªectively introduced Jin’s withering attack on the congeries of social practices that he and many of his political sympathizers and contemporaries saw as shaping the benighted condition of women in late Qing China and the early twentieth-century world. Jin’s list of repressive social practices included those concerned with female morality and virtue (daode), the female disposition (pinxing), female abilities (nengli), educational methods ( jiaoyu zhi fangfa), disparities in social power and rights (quanli), women’s political participation, and marriage. This list is now familiar as a catalogue of ills, but it is well to remember that Jin was the first in China to collect these issues into a coherent outline of what was later to be named the “woman problem” ( funü wenti).2 Indeed, not only did his list enumerate all the issues for the first time, but the language he used set the tone and parameters for much subsequent usage. His summarizing comment e‹ciently combined various issues—women as playthings, colonization, and embodied (territorial) relations—that constituted the his-

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torical problematic from which his list emanated and to which it gave voice and shape in the context of his time. For a contrast to Jin’s tentative conceptualization of the problematic that China faced, we can consult a passage from a 1902 essay by the Wenzhou literati Song Shu (Song Pingzi).3 Song’s essay is an exhortation against foot binding written in colloquial Chinese; it was delivered as a speech by Song and then distributed in Wenzhou (southeastern China) to local leaders. It was clearly intended to provide arguments, from the perspective of a respected member of the traditional literati class, against various local social resistances to unbinding women’s feet and to the general, elite-led anti-foot-binding wave of the early twentieth century.4 Toward the end of the essay Song wrote at length about what he perceived as one of the most egregious aspects of social behavior linked to foot binding: the practice of roughhousing in the nuptial chamber at a wedding (nao dongfang, now more commonly called nao xinfang). He exhorted: Just think about it: what is nao dongfang other than rendering the bride of a decent family into a prostitute? After chasing away the [bride’s] female companion, men squeeze into the chamber until it is full; they then snicker and joke at will, they even go to the extent of fondling [her] hands and feet, of caressing [her] head and breast. . . . [But] the strangest thing of all is that upon entry into the nuptial chamber, the first thing out of their mouths is a question about the length of the feet; they lift their eyes to verify whether the feet are long or short, they raise their hands to feel whether the feet are big or small.5

As he pointed out farther along, the people of Wenzhou, originally from the North, carried with them to the South in the late Tang dynasty neither the custom of nao dongfang nor that of foot binding. But, as Song commented, “when women began to bind up their feet, men began to nao dongfang.” Song concluded that if people were genuinely worried about the socially and morally destabilizing eªects of unbinding women’s feet—which could include the blurring of boundaries between male and female and the potential looseness of female behavior—then the practice of nao dongfang, with its oªensive overstepping of the boundaries of propriety in the guise of play, must also be eradicated. According to Song, foot binding was an anachronistic and socially dangerous practice. Therefore, it was not a return to the former practices of

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not binding feet and not roughhousing that represented social danger or deviance from social propriety; rather, the continuation of the contemporary practices represented that deviation. It is no coincidence that both Jin Yi, a radical critic of sociopolitical structures in the late Qing dynasty (1890s-1911) whose object was to overthrow the dynastic system, and Song Shu, a traditionally educated classical scholar who lamented what he saw as the sociomoral decline of his era and whose object was to reform the dynastic principle of rule to emulate more closely the glory of its imagined past, both focused on play and women as playthings as major problems in late Qing social behavior. I want to frame my discussion with Jin’s notion of plaything—or, more specifically, its apposite invocation of the gendered violence of everyday practice—and the notion of play—or, more specifically, its apposite invocation of the violence done to socially reproductive practices of propriety. The general problem that concerns me is the massive, articulated emergence of gender concerns in the late Qing period and a linking of this emergence to that immanent totalization called modernity—structured in China by capitalist expansion in the form of imperialism and colonization6—as well as to what May Joseph has called a “performed site of personhood that instantiate[s] particular notions of participatory politics.”7 That is, I explore how the emergence of a gendered concern with routines of everyday life came to be linked inextricably to a newly discovered violence in the everyday in early twentieth-century China. I suggest that a growing conviction about the inherent violence of the everyday was intimately linked to gendered repositionings of “laboring subjects” within global, nationalist, and family-centered discourses of subjectivity formation. I take Jin Yi’s comment on the nexus among playthings, colonization, and embodied (territorial) social relations as an emblematic—though by far not a lone—statement of this conjunctural problematic. I take Song Shu’s articulated anxieties over nao dongfang and “play” as a discursive and material expression of this very conjuncture, albeit in a diªerent register. The discussion proceeds in four parts: a theoretical consideration of the everyday and its relationship to subjectivity; a consideration of labor and family as these were repositioned in late Qing political discourse and society; a consideration of the relationship between play, playthings, the family, and violence; and a consideration of temporality.

The Violence of the Everyday

THE EVERYDAY, LABOR, AND HISTORY Rey Chow, in her book Woman and Chinese Modernity, proposed that the problem of modern subjectivity was posed in early twentieth-century China as a product of the “obsession with China” or with “Chinese-ness,” an obsession that was part of a complex process in which one could find “the last residue of a protest against that inevitable dismemberment brought about by the imperialistic violence (‘castration’) of Westernization.”8 This “obsession with China,” she wrote, was a “sign of a belated consciousness and a representation,” which she called a fetish, a conceptualization derived from a particular reading of Althusser and Deleuze. I do not wish to go into Chow’s full argument (she was actually dealing with a rather diªerent dimension of the problem), but she concluded that the fetish was woman. That is, Chow, along with Deleuze, saw in the process of fetishism the possibility of an aesthetic, and this aesthetic was a form (not a language or discourse) to which, in disavowal, is given “the positive significance of the imagination.”9 Yet, contra Althusser, who retained an implicit belief in the imagination—called ideology—as a way of knowing and seeing based on language, for Deleuze, Chow, and, I would add, Slavoj ÆiØek, the fetish is best understood as an imaginary, for which there is no possibility of total symbolization. There is, hence, always an incompletion, which for Chow is woman, where woman then becomes the condition of possibility for modern subjectivity in China. Woman is the irreducible antagonism that is concealed, by necessity, in the very social order; indeed, it is that which the system requires in order to reproduce itself. In short, woman is what Chow called a systemic “technique of survival,” or a process of systemic translation. The theoretical problem I engage is much indebted to Chow’s analysis of the issue. However, what I find unsatisfactory in her account—as in ÆiØek’s account of ideology in its relationship via the dream form to the commodity form10—is the lingering question of why woman-as-fetish for Chow (or ideology for ÆiØek) takes the form it does. That is, Chow identifies woman as the way “to foreground politics of social and structural diªerence: as a means of formal analysis, woman deals not only with gender but also with the powerinvested processes of hierarchization and marginalization that are involved in readings of culture.”11 Here, Chow establishes at most a homological rela-

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tionship between woman and the politics of social and structural diªerence; she does not establish a historically necessary relationship (just as ÆiØek establishes at most a homological relationship between ideology as dream form and the commodity form). For my purposes, Chow’s emphasis on the “imperialistic violence” that renders the incompletion that she calls woman readable relegates nationalism to an apparent externality—an epiphenomenon—against whose grain woman can be posed and culturally read. Although her conclusion seems in many ways intuitively correct (and Chow’s readings of the novels and stories of China’s 1920s amply demonstrate why it seems correct), it still begs the question of the historical relationship. This is why I attempt to deal with my particular set of concerns through a historicized concept of the everyday as this concept came to be incipiently constructed and understood in the late Qing period. The everyday, according to Henri Lefebvre, is the philosophical concept that in theory and practice most closely corresponds to experiences of modernity.12 Indeed, as Harry Harootunian argued in his study of “everydayness” as a historical topos in early twentieth-century Japan, modernity is “always a doubling that imprint[s] the diªerence between the demands of capitalism and the received forms of history and culture . . . in the space of everyday life.”13 Harootunian went on to note that in the 1920s and 1930s, for many Japanese philosophers (not to mention Europeans such as Heidegger), “rather than being an inert experience of facts, everyday life was increasingly seen as the site that revealed symptoms of societies’ deepest conflicts and aspirations.”14 Various lines of inquiry are opened through this conceptualization of the everyday, though I would not argue that the everyday in turn-of-the-twentiethcentury China had yet been elevated to the level of a philosophical problem in the manner that either Harootunian or Lefebvre discussed for his historical situation. Rather than inquire into the everyday as a problem articulated philosophically (an inquiry that gains traction only in the 1920s), I inquire into how we might understand it through the emergence of the fraught relationship between the contested topoi of the nation and woman as intertwined problematics of modern China at the turn of the twentieth century, without reducing these either to unilinear functional components of one another or to settled essentialisms.15 Indeed, many discussions of Chinese women fall into the trap of con-

The Violence of the Everyday

ceptualizing the relationship between nationalism and gender in purely functional terms, in which the implicit point of comparison seems to be Western feminism, which is presumed to have been undertaken and worked out for no larger goal than that of the so-called autonomous (female) individual. And yet generations of political economists, Marxists, and many feminists have noted that the liberal bourgeois individual is hardly a value-neutral topos or ideology. As Dorothy Ko pointed out in this regard, the “individual” assumed by Western bourgeois ideology is a property-owning man. For Ko, this insight created opportunities to reconceptualize the female body in relation to the social practice of foot binding as a process of becoming.16 As I indicate later, such an insight can, more generally, break the logjam in contemporary (liberal) feminist assertions that the coming into being of Chinese female subjectivities was somehow incomplete because it was dependent upon something “larger.” It is precisely through a recognition of the everyday as an emergent concern at the time that we can avoid such reductions, and I propose that the unarticulated concept of labor, which, in feminist theorist Kathi Weeks’s words, “refers . . . to variable practices that are constitutive of ever-changing forms of existence and modes of subjectivity,”17 became one significant, tension-ridden point upon which an elite feminist consciousness—whether male or female—was incipiently established at the time in China. I postulate that elite Chinese feminism in the late Qing dynasty came to be discursively and socially construed in terms of laboring subjects, a new possibility that emanated from the emergence of and in turn helped to endow the everyday with “an immanent ontological dynamic,” a dynamic in which labor, again in Weeks’s words, “is a claim about existence, about the constitutive force of practices, rather than a claim about the essence of things.”18 This perspective renders subjectivity into a historically situated process rather than an essence waiting to be discovered, a perspective that might allow us to get beyond some of the theoretical and historical traps inherent in arguing in an objectivist fashion over whether nationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, modernization, capitalism, or socialism overrode, “liberated,” or “repressed” women (and men).19 It also helps focus our attention on the ways in which quotidian routines were being disorganized and incipiently reorganized around the everyday as an explicit topos of modernity.

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To take this proposition seriously, it is unnecessary to ignore the general discursive nexus, established in late Qing writings of most political persuasions, between women’s “liberation” ( jiefang) and the hoped-for revival of (ethno)national strength (qiangguo qiangzhong). The discursive nexus is ubiquitous, whether in the promotion of the development of nü guomin (female citizenship), the establishment of nüxue (female education), the encouragement of women as guomin zhi mu (mothers of citizens), or support for nannü pingdeng (male-female equality), nannü pingquan (male-female equal rights), or even nüquan (female rights; feminism). The nexus between women and nationalism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism is also noticeable in the eruption of concern over nüzi wei nuli (women as slaves) in relation to what was called the general “enslavement” of the Chinese people—whether the enslavement of China to Westerners and Japanese or that of the Han to the Manchus.20 A controversy immediately broke out over whether the “enslavement” should be dated from the Manchu takeover or from Western incursion.21 Taking these articulations at face value has, I believe, led to a theoretical dead end.22 It is true that, historically, it is hard to ignore that the deposing of the Qing dynasty in 1911 did lead to the “betrayal” of women by the new republican government. It successfully locked women (and most men, too) out of organized politics, despite impressive female, peasant, and worker organization during the revolutionary upheaval itself, and despite elite male revolutionary commitments—prior to the success of the deposing—to their female and lower-class co-revolutionists.23 On this evidence and much more, the betrayal of women by the nation-state seems a perfectly legitimate charge to make. Rendering the task of theoretical innovation even thornier, recent feminist scholars have increasingly noted the incomplete liberation of Chinese women by the formation, after 1949, of a strong state committed to a Maoist, productionist-socialist version of gender equality. These scholars have argued, from the evidence of outcomes, that the liberatory promise of gender equality, when yoked to “something larger”—even at its most radical—is inevitably betrayed. This betrayal, it is said, was facilitated by—or coerced out of—even the most radical feminists as women were (and are) repeatedly induced to subordinate their (particular) aspirations to the pursuit of national or socialist (universal) goals. Further, the vengeful resurgence of extreme gender inequal-

The Violence of the Everyday

ity in the post-Mao period, in apparently the same guises as its prerevolutionary forms, is now often attributed not only to the distortions of Maoist socialism but also, and even more pointedly, to culturalist essences: that is, to the purported imperviousness of Chinese culture to fundamental change, due to thousands of years of cultural patriarchy (usually called “feudalism” or “feudal remnants”). This culture, it is now said, was merely reinforced by Maoist practice, rather than uprooted, as the Maoists claimed. These formulations of the problem certainly point to issues of great importance and relevance. Yet they operate tautologically, reading symptoms from historical outcomes and leading to an almost insurmountable theoretical impasse. It might be more theoretically productive and more historically encompassing to look instead at the modes through which the premises of modern social and political change and modern feminist subjectivity were articulated at the moment of their emergence—thus, at the moment when they became historical problematics. In doing so, we might begin to see how those modes figured the very possibilities and concealments usually imputed to the meta-concepts of “nationalism,” “socialism,” “culture,” “capitalism,” and so forth. That is, gender concerns cannot be separated from the historical contexts in which they arise. This does not mean they are reducible to those other formulations, but it does mean that any attempted separation— heuristic or notional—violates the historicity of the emergence. Paying closer attention to the relationship that emerged between the everyday, violence, and laboring subjects in early twentieth-century China allows us to see how nationalism suªused gender concerns (discursively and otherwise), without, however, containing them. From this perspective, Jin’s revealing of the conflicts and aspirations of modernity through the intimacy of everyday life was not accidentally centered on a notion of the female body as plaything and colonized territory. Yet his focus becomes interesting not for its depiction of objective facts about the everyday lives of late Qing elite women but because it reveals how everyday practices came to be reconstrued, discursively and materially, as a historical problematic in the global context of China’s colonial modernity. By the same token, it was not accidental that Song Shu indicted social practices for a type of play that also centered on women’s bodies—or those bodies abstracted as

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feet. It was not because nao dongfang was new as a practice but because the practice now seemed to evoke an anxiety that was articulated, borrowing Klaus Theweleit’s words from a diªerent context, as a “potential for physical . . . dissolution.”24 That is, the anxiety marked a preoccupation with an everyday practice that was now seen to disrupt the smooth reproduction of a social system by potentially disrupting, through violence, a traditionalistic materialization of modernity.

LABOR AND THE FAMILY In the late Qing period, the primary site for the discovery of gendered laboring subjects and a gendered everyday was, not surprisingly, the (elite) family. This was not only because the family was the idealized repository of female virtue and livelihood and of socially reproductive virtues. More importantly, it was because the late Qing period presented an extended moment in which the analytical, theoretical, and practical lines between household production and labor and industrial production and labor were rapidly transformed through a new emphasis on the national economy and quasi-capitalist productivity.25 These lines between family-based and nation-based economies remained particularly blurred throughout this extended moment—a sort of blurring, Michael Perelman has argued in a diªerent context, that might be characteristic of most societies in which primitive accumulation has not yet created a fixed, capitalist social division of labor.26 We can put this problem in a more culturally specific way: the late Qing period might be seen as a moment when, to use Francesca Bray’s articulation for an earlier Chinese context, the state’s ideological and moral invocation to nügong (womanly work), a form of the production and reproduction of social virtue that in practice pertained primarily to elite women, came into particularly acute social, economic, and political tension with the everyday reality of nügong (woman’s work), a form of family-based economic production that pertained in large part to lower-class women.27 This acute tension—contradiction, even—exposed the family, primary site of both types of nügong (the social, virtuous, reproductive type and the economically necessary productive type) to new scrutiny and new pressures. This is particularly evident if we note that the family was being positioned in the late Qing dynasty in a new relationship to

The Violence of the Everyday

economic productivity and political unity in the face of imperialist-capitalist assault and restructuring (which included native Chinese industrialists’ attempts to come to terms with new productive demands) and in the face of a pervasive breakdown of the ideological-political system of dynastic rule. These new elements repositioned the family as a unit in crisis in relation to local, national, and global economic and political instability. In this context, it is not useful to understand labor merely as the process of proletarianization, although proletarianization was occurring in China by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.28 Labor is much broader than that process encompasses: indeed, Jin Yi named as one outstanding special characteristic of women their ability to undertake social labor, and he specifically pointed to the fact that the Russian movement “to go among the people” was primarily undertaken by women.29 Labor thus indicates a combination of practices—hitherto perhaps understood as merely quotidian or household related—that are newly felt as productive of both conflict and opportunity in the realm of the everyday, itself now seen as a major productive (rather than reflective or reproductive) principle of and obstacle to a new sociopolitical and economic order. These are practices and social forms, in short, that came to be recognized at this particular historical juncture as simultaneously incommensurate with new demands and constitutive of urgently sought new possibilities. This conceptualization gets us beyond the notion of labor as linked solely to sociologically and economically measurable processes of industrialization, which is but a reduction of the concept.30 By the 1920s and 1930s, labor had come to be specified in both radical and liberal analyses as publicly performed productive work, and thus it came to be split. For elite urban women it became a matter of opportunities to pursue a profession or career, whereas poor urban women were made into problems of the industrialized, wage-laboring process, and rural women, into slaves of agrarian production logics. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, these diªerentiations were not yet prevalent. Some of the discursive contours of this late Qing problematic can be observed through Jin Yi’s juxtaposition of women’s bodies as playthings and as colonized territory—or, in relation to an equally pervasive locution of the time, through the identification of women as simultaneously playthings and slaves (nuli wanhao).31 Particularly instructive are the variable uses to which the

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locution of gendered slavery was put at the time. For slavery was not merely— and not yet—an ahistorical depiction of female dependence upon men, or one meta-sign among others of an ahistorical woman victim embedded in an enduring culturalist patriarchy, as it was to become during the May Fourth period (1915–23).32 Rather, in the late Qing period, slavery signaled a provisional epistemological shift in the ways in which China was connected to the world. In one sense, as I have argued elsewhere, the notion of gendered slavery was intimately tied in the late Qing to a new conceptualization of the political, in which slavery was situated against and with citizenship ( guomin) discourses at the same time it was situated against and with practices and discourses of colonization.33 In this usage, not only were the global and national Chinese contexts completely intertwined, but citizenship could be understood as a politically inflected mode of public performance, and its antithesis, slavery, as characteristic of the repressed or suppressed politics of colonized spaces.34 In this version, the discourse of slavery made visible its politically utopian obverse, citizenship, although in gendered terms both remained substantially contained within the family as a rearticulated unit of performative politics and gendered subjectivity. In another sense, as Jin Yi made clear, slavery can be seen as a form of statist ideological hegemony based primarily on a type of textual learning that is culturally reinforced in political principles of rule. According to Jin, this textual tradition left women with only two options: to become lienü (traditional exemplary women) or cainu (slaves of talent, or talented slaves). The latter was a play on the word cainü (talented women), women who were formerly lauded as one version of an exemplary female type. By the late Qing period, that type was being dismantled as a parody of ideological complicity and unproductive sociopolitical behavior.35 In yet another sense, slavery was also an argument about labor, or about control over the disposition and positioning of the very practices that were productive of everyday life within the family, understood still as a sociocultural-economic unit. In this guise, the disposition of female labor—or the relationship between nü (female) and gong (work, labor)—was problematized.36 Qiu Jin, the famous late Qing female activist, most often utilized slavery in this fashion—for example, by equating the disposition of female labor in the family to African slavery.37 And it is in this guise that the violence of the quotid-

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ian or the everyday is best illumined, by making visible relationships within and to the family in the context of a large-scale, multilevel, sociopolitical crisis in which the problems of colonizing and playing, in their equation with slavery as a principle of laboring subjects, emerged as such powerful critiques of dynastic and global politics and economics and such powerful motivators of new forms of gendered subjectivity. Here, then, colonizing, playing, and slavery are not so much about an empirical sociology of everyday life, nor even about its material cultural conditions of possibility, as they are about making possible a historical restructuring of subjectivity that could be based on what Peter Osborne called “the promise of a concrete universality of relations at the level of society as a whole.”38

PLAYTHINGS AND PLAY AS FORMS OF VIOLENCE Let us return to playthings, then, and specifically to the relationship between playthings and the violence of the everyday. In early twentieth-century China, conflict and violence appeared in essays of all political persuasions in consistent allusions to the gathering social, political, and economic disruptions of the late Qing period. The contamination of life by external violence— banditry, war, natural disasters such as floods and typhoons, and man-made disasters of all types, not to mention gunboat diplomacy and the social conflicts it spawned—was now increasingly equated, not causally but discursively, with the contamination of and violence against women’s bodies through the practice of foot binding, among other things.39 In this specific sense, everyday life was increasingly construed as violent, particularly as it pertained to women. For example, Qiu Jin wrote frequently about the sullying of “snowwhite” (xuebai) feet and of “clear-white” (qingbai) female reputations through the violent psychic and physical displacement that was married life.40 A reversal was thus eªected: everyday play—or the seemingly quotidian pleasures and routines that had reproduced and perpetuated life—was transformed into a form of violence and so into the very condition of and reason for the failure and imminent obsolescence of quotidian life. At the same time, the new perception of violence in the socially perpetrated and culturally sanctioned practices of the everyday began to appear as a new type of recognition of the embodied self and correspondingly led to new hope for the future.41

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These new understandings are one reason gender issues in late Qing China plausibly came to be centered on female bodies (e.g., mutilated feet and the chastity cult) and female minds (or what the feminist theorist Dorothy Smith called “the brutal history of women’s silencing”).42 Let me take the example of foot binding further. Dorothy Ko has argued that foot binding can be represented as a particular type of embodiedness that can lead analytically to a set of historically and culturally specific notions of social exchange value.43 If this is so, then the literature that emanated from the flourishing late-Qing anti-foot-binding societies can be seen as representing foot binding as a diªerent type of embodiedness, one that emphasized an utterly diªerent version of exchange and even use value. That is, it emphasized the debilitating absence of surplus value in this form of female embodiment and (re)productivity. At one level, one need only note the ubiquitous opposition that emerged between “bound” and “natural” feet (chanzu and tianzu) to grasp how foot binding was construed as violence against nature.44 As Ko argued, throughout the history of foot binding in China, there remained a continual discursive and social tension between articulated Confucian ideals of bodily wholeness, inviolate in the regime of filiality, and the problem of altering female bodies through foot binding. This tension was decisively resolved in late Qing elite social discourse in favor of construing foot binding as bodily harm.45 Meanwhile, the appeals to “nature” and “wholeness” that this representation of harm referenced were being harnessed to the very modern project of yoking unbounded women’s bodies to new types of productivity— understood simultaneously as political, social, and economic productivity— and new regimes of value. This last is especially noticeable in the arguments of Liang Qichao, a major oppositional intellectual, and even of Zhang Zhidong, a leading dynastic o‹cial, both of whom advocated—albeit diªerently—the transformation of China into an industrialized society. Part of their visions for this transformation depended on moving women into factories and out of the household economy,46 or rendering women into producers of surplus value rather than merely exchange or use value. In such a light it is clear that, if foot binding had previously produced social and exchange value within and for the family (or clan), then unbinding feet would now produce economic and political surplus value through a new relationship of women to society, polity, and nation. This

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new value would be created not merely for the nation (in a functional sense) but, more ontologically, through a new relating of the gendered everyday as autonomous from but linked to the nation. Whereas in the late Ming dynasty, as Francesca Bray demonstrated, the economic value attached to (elite) women’s household production was displaced, through moralizing ideology, onto the realm of reproducing culture, by the late Qing period the relation of women to value was entering the realm of commodification and fetishism and thereby being placed in the realm of surplus value.47 By the late Qing, foot binding had come to be represented in radical and conservative commentary alike as a form of socially sanctioned, though nowcondemned, violence against woman’s bodies and souls, a practice that violated the very principles of the ancients and went against every tenet of the classics. It now appeared as a practice wholly incommensurate with the demands of a newly conceptualized everyday that emphasized new types of productivities. In conservative critiques, this new recognition was projected backward in time to argue for its radical incommensurability with any accurate notion of the past at all. Indeed, as Song Shu repeatedly stressed in his previously cited essay, one would search the classics in vain to find examples of beautiful and virtuous women who had bound feet: Those of you who have never read the Confucian classics or the commentaries would never know that of all of those famous virtuous and wealthy women you have grown up hearing about, all those women of talent and beauty, not one had bound feet. Instead, in everyday life you have been the recipients of wild and irresponsible images promoted by novelists, dramatists, and storytellers who make it appear as if prior to the Song dynasty all virtuous, wealthy, talented, and beautiful women had bound feet, and that moreover, their feet were all of the three-inch lotus type; this is the bitter deception that has been perpetrated upon those of you who never read the classics or saw the commentaries.48

Thus indicting popular culture for the spread of foot binding through the deceptive linking of the practice to the rich and famous, the talented and beautiful—that is, to social reproduction of family-based exchange values— Song goes on to narrate his own morality tale about the ostensible origins of

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foot binding with the government o‹cial Li Houzhu. In this story, foot binding, rather than conferring social value upon men, instead impeded men’s production and reproduction of social and political value, thus purportedly leading to the disastrous downfall of the dynasty Li served and the end of his oncepromising o‹cial career.49 (The rhetoric of lost value was also a prominent missionary one, in which foot binding and opium were construed as, respectively, female and male violences that disrupted the possibility for the e‹cient production of economic value. Yet the missionaries’ rhetoric, unlike Song Shu’s, was premised not on the reconfiguration of presumably ancient Chinese civilizational norms for modern times but on a relatively uncritical acceptance of modernizationism.) With this lesson in mind, Song lamented that men of status often complained that the issue of foot binding was of little consequence in the larger scheme of things and that it had little to do with men per se. He wrote: “This type of statement is hugely mistaken! Can it be that this widespread suªering, this hell-on-earth suªering, is a small matter?”50 Not content to leave his condemnation at the sentimental level of suªering humanity, Song also declared that the very fact of foot binding was to be blamed on men, not on women, for it was men who were the most vigorous promoters of the view that an untalented woman was the most virtuous (wucai bianshi de) and that it was this desired lack of talent that produced a surplus of virtue perfectly mirrored in the size of the feet. All of these concerns are cathartically collapsed at the end of Song’s essay in his aforementioned attack on playing, or nao dongfang, a practice of play that represented itself as a social guarantor of virtue but that must now be exposed as its violent violator. In Song’s account, then, foot binding appears not only as a symptom of the vile e‹cacy of popular cultural deception, which translates into indirect violence against the sociopolitical order; it also appears as a concrete form of brutality that translates into direct violence against the (re)production of a proper form of sociomoral value.51 Jin Yi, too, commented on the moribundity of the socially sanctioned reproduction of virtue (de): “I dare declare that corrupt Confucianists have no idea what virtue is. Revolving around in their brains are only the four characters wanhao zhimin [plaything, colony], by which they wish to monopolize and ritualize [virtue].”52 As he wrote later in the same section, political revo-

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lution itself would not cure the problem of plaything/colony, for after all, were not the French and Russian revolutions “games and dramas” (youxi) played to eradicate monarchical power and not struggles waged in the name of feminism (wei junquan geming er chu, fei wei nüquan geming er dou)?53 In fact, Jin commented, human beings each had only one life to give in the name of revolution, and this individual sacrifice could not go very far toward eradicating “slavish incestuousness” (nuli qinshou). Jin then listed the global colonial situations that were prominent in most late Qing reformist and revolutionary essays—India, Egypt, Ireland—to reinforce his point that slavery and colonial relations were not only inextricably linked but also, through the exercise of power and domination—which he calls “joyful” products or productivities (kuaile zhi wu)—absolutely tied to the “joy” of treating women as playthings.54 Ultimately, then, for Jin, the recovery of a socially productive concept of virtue (de) depended upon stripping the power, violence, and “joy” from everyday practices masquerading as play and replacing them with the production of lasting social value through a diªerent relation of rights (quanli) to social production. This new relationship would be derived from new subjectivities, understood not as individual sacrifices but as a process of inventing and bringing into being a new form of sociality itself. In these two examples—which could be multiplied endlessly—the reconfiguring of previously understood quotidian play as everyday violence is inextricable from the refiguring of previously understood legitimate rule (whether in daily life or through political power) as violent enslavement and colonization. And both of these reformulations were directly or indirectly related to an immanent ontological dynamic of labor—whether childbearing and family management, schooling, public activism, speechifying, or assassinations—as socially constitutive practices. Finally, crucial to the recognition and actualization of this immanent ontological dynamic was a changing sense of temporality, or of the violent confrontation experienced between past and present in the realm of everyday life.

TEMPORALITY AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE EVERYDAY The everyday in the late Qing period with which I am concerned was not yet a commodified urban everydayness, although this was indeed at issue and would

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become more insistently so by the 1920s, with the rise of the xin nüxing (new woman) in China’s urban areas and of a generalized modern urban culture in its treaty-port cities.55 It was not coincidental that the majority of the writers of the essays, pamphlets, and books I have discussed, from which late Qing feminism first emanated, were located in urban areas, nor was it coincidental that women, wives, and concubines were increasingly referred to as the commoditized objects of men, themselves often figured as consumers of women.56 Nevertheless, what I believe was more consistently produced in these essays was a materialized notion of the everyday that, in Harootunian’s words, demonstrated a “sensitivity to the distinctively modern experience rooted in the present [that] disclosed an awareness of the temporal dimensions of the present and its diªerences from the pasts that had preceded it.”57 In a general way, this temporal sensitivity was articulated in late Qing essays on gender issues as a constant critical invocation of “thousands of years” of female oppression—as an awareness that the routines of the past were incommensurate with the demands of the present. In contrast to the May Fourth period two decades later, when invocations of the unity of China’s past took on an almost hegemonic ideological significance, pointing to an irrevocable historical rupture,58 the late Qing awareness of temporality expressed a less definite notion of the past (as a unified concept) and thus a more tentative marking of the indeterminate present against which this past was to be thought. That is, the utter flattening of the past that began in May Fourth historiography had yet to take hold in the late Qing,59 when temporal indeterminacy gave rise both to ideas about global solidarity with other colonized peoples and to completely opposed notions of a global evolutionary teleology of strong statism and industrialization. What the past that weighed so heavily on the present was said to be was very diªerent for diªerent commentators. Some marked the past as having begun with the rise of the “Confucian wind” (ruzhe zhi feng),60 some considered it to have begun with the Qin and Han dynasties,61 and others dated it to the Manchu conquest 260 years earlier.62 Correspondingly, the causal factors involved in specifying how the everyday had become violent, or, rather, which practices were indeed violent, were also various—whether the cause was said to be ru (Confucian) patriarchy as a sociocultural issue, the Manchus as a political issue, agrarianism and family-based economics as a socioeconomic

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issue, or the eclipse of xia (knight-errantry) values in favor of social stability as a cultural issue.63 These various causes, though not mutually exclusive or even exhaustive of the possibilities, were articulated through diªerent readings of what the past referred to and thus where the sites and original sources of violence lay. The diªerent construals of the past at least partially account for a major split in gendered discourses on society and politics of the time. Some advocated that women must derive their “natural” rights and power from a reconfigured everydayness of the family and society (as represented, for example, by the unbound foot and the acquisition of knowledge)—advocacies that helped make popular the promotions of the “mother of citizens” and the even more conservative “good wives, wise mothers.” Others sought to suppress the everyday altogether by inventing new modes of being in the world—as heroic knights-errant, as Sofia Perovskaia-like activists, as revolutionary martyrs, and so on. Many commentators advocated multiple positions simultaneously, and this simultaneity concealed within its very formulations precisely the crisis of representation and temporality that most closely characterizes modernity as an immanent totalization. Complicating the task of understanding the temporality of the past in its relation to the present is a lack of clarity in the commentaries about whether China’s weakness at the time was due to gender oppression or whether gender oppression was an eªect of China’s weakness. For that matter, it was unclear whether commentators understood Europe’s strength as a cause or as an eªect of superior gender equality in their societies.64 With this confusion over how to understand both China’s and Europe’s pasts and the relationship of those pasts to their respective presents, the temporality of the present appeared, contradictorily, at once socially immanent and revolutionarily urgent. This confusion was in part a consequence of the growing impetus to view the late Qing present, in Peter Osborne’s words, “from the practical perspective of the radical openness of the historical process”65 and simultaneously from the perspective of the irrevocable tendencies and legacies of China’s past in the present. That is, again borrowing from Osborne, “as soon as the issue of change within the present is raised otherwise than as an extrapolation of developmental tendencies built into the relationship between pre-given struc-

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tural social types (‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’),” the relationship between the past and the present erupted as an acute social problem.66 The constitution of this problem is particularly noticeable in the many essays that cried for a “restitution” of women’s rights (huifu nüquan)—presumably rights lost somewhere along the line in the (variously dated) pasts—or that argued for the development of a consciousness of women’s rights that had never existed previously. In this confused situation, the resolution to the gender problem was articulated either in terms of an extrapolation from the (forgotten) past into the present or in terms of the need to revolutionarily create something new that had never existed. Most essayists straddled these positions. For example, the journalist Lian Shi (Yan Bin) wrote in her February 1907 essay “Nüquan pingyi” (Equalizing women’s rights) that a strictly evolutionary view of women’s low positions was not derivable from Darwinian natural selection. This was because natural selection dictated the elimination of the weakest, yet “over the thousands of years of human life, nature has not eliminated the one [men] or the other [women] but has basically ensured a proportional mix of both.”67 Therefore, she concluded, respect for men and prejudice against women (nanzong nüpi) could not be rooted in a view of natural determination (or of history as a natural extrapolation of the past in the present).68 In her next section, however, Lian wrote that the social problem of prejudice against women stemmed from the originary act of naming: “if ‘woman’ [nü] had been named ‘man’ [nan] and vice versa, the world would be a diªerent place.” Here Lian clearly drew upon the classical concept of “rectification of names” (zheng ming) to appeal to some inevitable correlation between social names and social reality, a correlation that was purported to be, in idealist philosophical terms, independent of historical temporality. On this latter view, Lian is left with no strong statement for why, historically, the naming came to represent the reality or the reality came to correspond to the name. Nor can she account for how either the reality or the name got transmitted into the present. And since the “name” cannot be revolutionarily changed, what course of action is left? Although Lian was clearly groping toward some notion of the “openness of the historical process”—looking for the origins of that openness in some version of the past that emphasized the metaphysics of naming practices—she

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was nevertheless trapped in an extrapolation from that past that completely contradicted the openness she wished to promote. In such temporal-social confusion, Lian had no clear way to call for something radically new, yet neither could she appeal to a past that corresponded in any way to the present she wished to fashion. In such incoherences one finds both the possibilities of and the limits to the historicist linking of gendered concerns to the incipient everyday in the late Qing dynasty. For although recognition of the everyday as a form, site, and temporality of violence and of conflict between the past and the present helped bring gendered subjectivity to visibility as a problematic in urgent need of redressing, the multiple and complex contradictions inherent in subjectivity formation as a historically situated ideological process could not be overcome, at that time or perhaps at any time later. Indeed, the successive recuperations and elaborations of the everyday from the late Qing through the May Fourth period, into the 1930s and the revolutionary era, and up until today have seen the everyday as the site of gendered subjectivity formation alternately, and contradictorily, entirely rejected, wholly embraced, thoroughly politicized, and wishfully depoliticized (sometimes all at once). The very fact that these recuperations and elaborations have continually problematized and reproblematized the intertwined relationships of labor, family, violence, nation, gender, and global processes alerts us to the insu‹ciency of positing subjectivity as an authentic realm of existence waiting to be revealed. But probably more important, it alerts us to the necessity of attending to the shifting relationship between symptomatic incompletions—fetishes, in Chow’s terms—and the historical reasons those incompletions take the forms they do as logics of systemic totalities. I have suggested that the new focus on the everyday helps explain those forms. For although certain everyday practices, such as foot binding, were clearly defeated, at least among elites, soon after the Qing dynasty fell, the everyday as a sphere of gendered practice was never wholly encapsulated by the “two cultures” of science and the humanities that came to define, after May Fourth, the parameters of modernity.69 That is, neither science nor the humanities was ever able to fully incorporate the everyday by erasing its uneven temporalities. Thus, as is clear in the case of Lian Shi, evolutionism was mobilized simultaneously as a scientific and as a cultural discourse on the relationship of the past to the present, yet when

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evolutionism—in either guise—could not serve Lian’s desire for a radical break in gendered practices, she was left with no clear solution to the very problem evolutionism had allowed her to name. In this light, we can appreciate that the temporal indeterminacies and materialities of the everyday are always incommensurable with proposed linearities of the historical, because they exceed and are not reducible to those linearities. Focusing on the late Qing redefinition of everyday practices as unproductive “play” or reproductive of disruptive violence helps illumine the particular historical moment when this problem became incipiently visible.

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NOTES 1. Nüjie zhong (Shanghai, 1903), 12. Jin Yi (1873–1947) was Jin Songcen; he also wrote under the names Jin Tianhe, Jin Tianyu, and Ai ziyou zhe, among others. He was the author of the first five chapters of Zeng Pu’s Niehai hua [Flower in the sea of retribution, 1905–7] and the translator from the Japanese in 1904 of a history of Western anarchism entitled Ziyou xue [Blood of freedom]. See Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 55, 87; also see Li Yuning, “Nüjie zhong yu zhonghua nüxing de xiandai hua,” in Jindai jiazu yu zhengzhi bijiao lishi lunwenji [An anthology of comparative histories of clans and politics] (Taipei: Academia Sinica Modern History Institute, 1992), 1055–82. 2. As the scholar Liu Jucai noted, Jin Yi’s pamphlet was “the first bourgeois Chinese monograph on the woman question.” Liu Jucai, Zhongguo jindai funü yundong shi [A history of the modern Chinese women’s movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1989), 153. 3. Song Shu (1862–1910) was from Zhejiang, Pingyang District. He was a‹liated with the Yongjia school of learning through his teachers and associates, one of whom was Sun Yirang, the famous Wenzhou scholar. By the late 1880s he had set himself up in Hangzhou and become interested in current events and the discussions over reform. In 1892 he submitted to Li Hongzhang an outline for his ideas on reform, entitled “Liuzhai bei yi” [Humble suggestions from Liuzhai] (Liuzhai being Song’s hao). Acquainted with Liang Qichao, Zhang Binglin, and other intellectuals of the post-1898 period, Song was a staunch supporter of both the monarchy and of political reform. 4. Unlike Jin’s broadside, which purported to address all women but in fact was aimed specifically at elite women, Song’s exhortation was addressed in a broader fashion, in the manner of a social superior to social inferiors, the former providing a model for the latter. 5. Song Shu, “Zunzhi wan qi quanyu jiefang funü jiaocan baihua,” in Song Shu ji [Collected works of Song Shu], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), 331–48, quoted passage on 344. 6. For an exploration of this point, see Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 7. May Joseph, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. 8. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 27. 9. Ibid., 125.

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Rebecca Karl 10. Slavoj ÆiØek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 11. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 52. 12. As Lefebvre noted, everydayness emerges as a modern topos when “the antithesis between the quotidian and the Festival—whether of labor or leisure—will no longer be a basis of society.” Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Transaction, 1999), 36–37. I am obviously not claiming that conflicts did not exist before the late Qing period, nor am I saying that gendered notions of everyday practice did not exist previously. They did. I am just noting that these conflicts came to the forefront of social analysis at the time in a way, with a weight, and in relationships that were very diªerent from those of previous discussions. 13. H. D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 111. 14. Ibid., 69. 15. For indications on this approach, see Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), chapter 3. 16. For Ko’s remarks, see Dorothy Ko, “Rethinking Sex, Female Agency, and Foot Binding,” Jindai zhongguo funüshi yanjiu [Research on Women in Modern Chinese History], no. 7 (August 1999), 75–105. 17. Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 122. 18. Ibid. As Weeks explains, this notion of labor is akin to Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, “an ontological category in the service of an experiment in rendering our lives—and being itself—intelligible in light of a specific historical problematic” (ibid., 21). One implication is that “subjectivity” is not a preexisting essence to be revealed but rather a historical dynamic, a perspective intended to move away from the idea that an authentic female subjectivity somehow predated historical practice and process and was suppressed prior to its full emergence. 19. For another essay premised upon moving discussions of Chinese feminism away from the various binary traps inherent in positing dualities between male and female and between China and the West, see Liu Renpeng (Liu Jen-peng), “‘Zhongguo de’ nüquan, fanyi de yuwang yu Ma Junwu nüquanshuo yijie” [‘China’s’ feminism, translation’s desire, and Ma Junwu’s translation of feminism], Jindai zhongguo funüshi yanjiu [Research on Women in Modern Chinese History], no. 7, (August 1999), 1–42. Liu summarized her objections: “The reappearance of so-called native feminism, if placed in the framework of the nation, creates the problem of ‘male’ origins (as in ‘Chinese feminism originates with male intellectuals’), yet placed in the framework of imperialist colonization, the origins are in ‘the West’ (as in ‘Chinese feminism originates in Western feminism’). That is to say that, if one wants to reconstruct a history of ‘native

The Violence of the Everyday feminism,’ then no matter whether in asking questions or posing answers, these inevitably must emanate from the ‘outside,’ no matter whether that ‘outside’ is construed as women opposed to men or as China opposed to the West” (ibid., 13). 20. For more on “enslavement” as a gendered articulation and its ties to globalism and to patriarchy, see Rebecca E. Karl, “‘Slavery,’ Citzenship, and Gender in China’s Late Qing Global Context,” in P. Zarrow and R. Karl, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reforms: Political and Cultural Change in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Publications, 2002), 212–44. 21. See, in particular, essays in Qingyi bao no. 69 (October 14, 1900) and no. 80 (May 28, 1901). The former, “Shuo nuli” (Discussing slavery), is by Mai Menghua (writing under his pen name, Shangxin ren). The latter, also entitled “Shuo nuli,” is by “Gongnuli Lishan” (Qin Lishan, styled as the “slave of o‹cials”) and is a refutation of Mai’s construction of the problem. 22. For a discussion of the theoretical problem, see Rebecca E. Karl, “History and Gender in China,” Radical History Review (Winter 2000): 142–56 23. Peasant and worker mobilization was not necessarily integral to the revolutionary movement, conceived narrowly as the accession to state power of Sun Zhongshan or Yuan Shikai. Wide-scale social disruptions—whether on the railways or in the villages— did, however, contribute to the overall revolutionary situation. 24. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987–89), 241. As Theweleit notes, this fear and desire is often a fear of and desire for incestuousness. The terror of incest is manifest in Song Shu’s account of nao dongfang, where his condemnation of the practice is solidified by noting that the new bride whose feet are being fondled and inspected could be the sister of any of the men engaging in the practice. Song, Song Shu ji, 343. 25. These mutual restructurings had of course happened before, as Kathy Le-Mons Walker, Hill Gates, and many other economic and feminist historians have noted. The new elements now were capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. 26. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), chapter 4. Although Perelman focused on the process of primitive accumulation in England and France, and particularly on how classical political economists such as Adam Smith obscured the process in their theorizations of the capitalist market, his insights into the relationship between the social division of labor and productive processes are useful here. The question of whether this blurring of boundaries—or primitive accumulation itself—was ever completely eradicated or accomplished in China or elsewhere is a diªerent topic requiring much further analysis. But as Philip Huang, Hill Gates, R. Bin Wong, and many other economic historians have argued for years, household labor, or

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Rebecca Karl the family economy, has remained a significant factor in the overall Chinese national economy, even during the Mao years, when it was most insistently attacked. 27. See Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), part 2. 28. Equally clearly, the increasing visibility of proletarianized and quasi-proletarianized women—in industrial complexes in either rural or urban areas; in Japan and other foreign places where Chinese intellectuals traveled or studied; in urban prostitution; and so on—was one factor in the emergence of “labor” as waged work to elite feminist consciousness. 29. Jin Yi, Nüjie zhong, 40. 30. This was a reduction that became widespread in China with the adoption of Marxist and other sociological categories of historical and contemporary social analysis in the 1920s. For this process, see, for example, Arif Dirlik, History and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 31. See, for example, the preface to Jin Yi’s pamphlet written by Ms. Huang Lingfang. Jin Yi, Nüjie zhong, 5. 32. Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994), 253–89. 33. See Karl, “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender.” 34. “Performativity” is, in Judith Butler’s terms, a theory that “emphasizes the way in which the social world is made—and new social possibilities emerge—at various levels of social action through a collaborative relation with power.” See Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj ÆiØek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 14. 35. Jin Yi, Nüjie zhong, 44. For the eclipse of cainü in the late Qing period, see Hu, Tales of Translation, 6–8. 36. In this sense, for example, the emergence of “violence” as a problem in the family in China is not analogous to its emergence as a social problem to be managed in the United States. In the United States, as Linda Gordon argued, the shift from patriarchal control over the disposition of labor within the family to bourgeois family norms had already problematized the notion of labor within the family. Therefore the initial policy designation “family violence” or “domestic violence” centered on children and their mistreatment. See Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), chapters 1 and 2. 37. See, for example, her “Jinggao zhongguo er wanwan nütongbao” [A warning to my 200 million Chinese women compatriots], in Qiu Jin Ji [Collected works of Qiu Jin]

The Violence of the Everyday (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1979; originally published in Baihua, no. 2, 1904), 5. (The two characters for “slave”—nuli—are not written in the essay but are signified as blanks; the line goes: wei shenma ba nüzi dangzuo feizhou de—yiyang kandai.” It is clear, because of common late Qing usage, that she intended the words nuli here.) 38. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (New York: Verso, 1995), 192. 39. For bodies and contamination in a very diªerent context (German fascism and the Freikorps), see Theweleit, Male Fantasies. 40. See, for example, Qiu Jin, “Jinggao zhongguo er wanwan nütongbao,” 5–6. 41. I would like to acknowledge, while distancing myself from, Tani Barlow’s rather mechanical argument on essential women (nüxing) and scientific or corporeal organicism. See Barlow, “Theorizing Women.” 42. Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987). The combination of feet and learning in Chinese essays promoting women’s issues of the time is ubiquitous and cannot be attributed merely to “Western impact” or the “truth” of liberal ideology. For a particularly clear example of this linkage, see Du Qingchi, “Nannü doushi yiyang” [Men and women are the same], Nüzi shijie 6 (June 14, 1904): 13–16, in which Du states that the two most important aspects for raising women’s status were unbinding feet and encouraging learning. Indeed, many of the charters for new women’s schools included a requirement for unbinding the feet, and most of the feminist songs printed in women’s journals also made the connection. It was even made in advertisements in newspapers and journals in the early 1900s for shoes designed for women whose feet were in various stages of being unbound. The ads claimed that the degree to which a foot was unbound was the degree to which the mind would be liberated. 43. Ko notes that the “transfer of value from the female body to the social position of her man (and then conferred back to the woman as her social honor by the dictum of Thrice Following) is the principal operative mode in Confucian culture, evident also in the chastity cult. The economy of exchange is body for power, or, to be exact, female body (either cut up, as in foot binding, or intact, as in chastity cult) for social position or elite status as public expression of male power.” Ko, “Rethinking Sex,” 97. 44. See, for example, Pei Gong, “Nannü pingdeng de jenli” [The truths of malefemale equality], Zhongguo xin nüjie 1 (February 5, 1907): 29–40. In this essay Pei wrote that although men and women were born diªerent, both were emotionally and physically human, and they married because of yin-yang complementarity, but nowhere was there a natural rationale for the one to be respected and the other despised (4). 45. Ko, “Rethinking Sex.” In this regard, Ko’s discussion of the issue can be seen as a rejoinder to Barlow’s discussion, previously referenced, of imported scientific or corporeal organicism. For a relatively early modern example of such a construction, see

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Rebecca Karl Zheng Guanying, “On Foot Binding” [1880], in Zheng Guan-ying ji [Collected works of Zheng Guanying], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1982), 163–64. 46. Zhang’s advocacy in this regard was even cited in the first issue of the Shanghaibased Tianzu hui bao [Journal of the Natural Foot Organization] in 1908. 47. The alteration in the goals and disposition of “value” or value-producing practices in the same measure informed the alteration in the term used to denote “women”— nüzi, funü, nüxing. 48. Song, “Zunzhi wan qi,” 331–32. 49. In Song’s account, Li’s besotted love of women and his consequent forsaking of his o‹cial duties in pursuit of foot-bound dancing women led to the fall of the Tang dynasty, the rise of the Song, and Li’s disgraceful humiliation. Song, “Zunzhi wan qi,” 332. 50. Ibid., 341. 51. Song even cited the fact that Li Hongzhang’s primary wife had unbound feet and also compared the members of the Manchu ruling house, whose women had unbound feet, with the common people, who believed that not binding feet was shameful: “Think for a moment: none of the important o‹cials of the Qing empire practices foot binding, and you still say that not binding feet is shameful? Could it really be that you peasants, handicraftsmen, merchants are loftier than the princes, dukes, and others?” Ibid., 333. 52. Jin Yi, Nüjie zhong, 52. 53. Ibid., 56. 54. Ibid., 57–58. 55. For more on this, see, for example, the essays by Kristine Harris, Andrew Field, and Zhang Yinjing in Zhang Yinjing, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 56. See Gail Herschatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in TwentiethCentury Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 57. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 3. 58. See Arif Dirlik’s discussion in Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chapter 1. 59. In other words, the essays I have discussed in this chapter were not formal interpretations of the past as history, as the historical debates in the 1920s and 1930s were to be. 60. [Ding] Chuwo, “Ai Nüzhong,” Nüzi shijie 6 (June 14, 1904): 3. 61. “Huang Nüshi qiansong Zeng Jiapei Nüshi dongyou xu” [Miss Huang’s remarks upon Miss Zeng Jiapei’s embarkation for the East (Japan)], Nüzi shijie, year 2, no. 1 (1905): 92–93.

The Violence of the Everyday 62. For example, Su Ying, “Susu nüxiao kaixue yanshuo” [Speech upon the opening of Susu women’s school], Nüzi shijie, no. 12 (December 1904): 11–13. 63. See, for example, Ding Chuwo, who promoted a “return” to the female bravery foresaken two thousand years in the past by counterposing the “female slave” of contemporary times [nüzi wei nuli] to the “knight-errant” [xia] figure of yore: “Knighterrantry yielded to Confucianism and thence to national weakness; this then yielded to slavery [nuli], which produced colonization [wangguo]. . . . If one is not a knight-errant, one is a slave.” Chuwo, “Ai Nüzhong,” 2, 3. 64. For example, when Sparta was cited as a positive example of women’s strength, commentators believed that Sparta’s strength derived from its women’s strength—the corollary being that China could not be strong if Chinese women were not made strong first. Other commentators, however, argued that female strength was contingent upon national strength, and not the other way around. For the latter position, see Lian Shi, “Nüquan pinyi” [Equalizing women’s rights], Zhongguo xin nüjie, no. 1 (February 5, 1907). 65. Osborne, Politics of Time, 2. 66. Ibid. 67. Yan Bin frequently wrote under the name Lian Shi. She was the editor-in-chief of the Tokyo-based journal Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi and a member of the Tongmeng hui (Revolutionary Alliance) from Henan Province. For biographical information, see Sun Shiyue, Zhongguo jindai nüzi liuxueshi [A history of modern Chinese women students abroad] (Beijing: Zhongguo heping chubanshe, 1995), 111. 68. Lian, “Nüquan pingyi,” 3. Also see Zhang Xiongxi, “Chuangli nüjie zili hui zhi guize” [Establishing the rules for the creation of Independence Society of the women’s world], Yunnan, no. 1 (1906): 87–90. Zhang noted—albeit without reference to Darwinism—that “the world is based upon yin/yang for material things, without prejudice; men and women each have their duties and each enjoys their rights” (1). 69. See Wang Hui’s chapter in this volume.

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3 Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories wang hui

The May Fourth New Culture movement emerged in the intellectual environment and process of institution building in China during the late Qing-early republican era. It was an expression of the profound changes taking place in regimes of knowledge and educational structures at the time. Old versus new, traditional versus modern, East versus West—these binary categories, central to the movement, were all constructed under new conditions of knowledge production and organization. Hence we would be mistaken to regard the May Fourth movement, which was shaped by this major historical transformation, as a self-generated movement, merely the product of a handful of scholars. When analyzing the shifting boundaries of the foregoing social categories in the context of the flourishing of intellectual thought at the time, the question arises: Given that the political ideas and social positions of intellectuals in the late Qing-early republican era were extremely varied, what forces led these people to see themselves overwhelmingly as members of a new, modern, Westernized social group? What, we might ask, made them perceive themselves as a movement? To answer this question we must examine two categories that emerged during the movement: the “two cultures” of science (kexue) and metaphysics (xuanxue). In this chapter I trace the genealogy of these categories, which were decisively, if somewhat erroneously, fixed in the famous 1923 debate between “science and metaphysics,” a debate that involved many of the era’s intellectual luminaries. Though the actual positions they argued varied, the debate has generally been simplified by intellectual critics and historians into a conflict between two sides: a more socially conservative school centered on

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the publication Science (Kexue) and a more socially radical contingent, primarily scholars of the humanities who published in the magazine New Youth (Xin qingnian).1 I intervene in this debate more critically later, but on the most immediate level the crux of the question was this: To what extent could and should science provide solutions to early twentieth-century China’s sociopolitical crisis, and to what extent did the push for modern change need to be moderated by nonscientific (i.e., traditional) cultural forces? I should note at the outset that the term metaphysics as science’s Other in this debate is not entirely appropriate; indeed, pro-science partisans at times used it derogatorily. Science’s Other in the debate corresponded more closely to the term renshengguan, which encompasses ideas such as the meaning of (human) life, view of life, and the humanities as fields of study and thought. I use this broader range of terms in the pages that follow. In any case, the construction of these “two cultures” was not merely a process of knowledge organization or a simple reflection of the composition of the intellectual communities. It was also a process of the reconfiguring of social relations. The distinction between the realms of science and the humanities not only separated the culture of science from other cultures but also lay in a specific temporal and discursive framework—first because the development of the natural sciences and the popularization of scientific thought played a key role in creating the binary of two cultures and, second, because science itself was pivotal in defining and delimiting the binaries new-old, modern-traditional, and Western-Eastern. Without studying the activities of the scientific community, attendant changes in conceptual categories, and the ways in which these served to reproduce distinct social and cultural spaces, we will be unable to understand the historical context of the May Fourth movement or grasp the conditions of knowledge and power under which its participants set out to accomplish their cultural mission. The impression that science represented objective knowledge masked the essential fact that it was institutionally and socially conditioned, and this aura of objectivity would eventually develop into a kind of general faith with immense and enduring eªects for twentieth-century China. This faith undoubtedly factored into the visions of cultural and social engineering that have figured so prominently in China’s modern history. I begin by sketching the social location of the intellectual community that

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participated in institutionalizing and popularizing scientific discourses at the outset of the republican era. I then trace out how this discursive community laid the basis for the vernacular movement, a central thread for the May Fourth movement that has long been narrowly interpreted as an exclusive development of the realm of the humanities. To understand how this sort of misconception could have been perpetuated down to today as historical commonsense, we must attend to the way science and the humanities came to be distinguished from each other during the 1910s and 1920s. In other words, we must look at the debates over the e‹cacy, scope, and power of science, which raised questions regarding its relation to philosophy, ethics, and evolutionism. In tracking these debates we find that many of the typical narratives of modernization—such as the Weberian notion that modernization involves the rationalization of society, the spreading application of science, and the delimitation of traditional culture—do not apply or even appear surprisingly inverted.

THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND THE COMMUNITY OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE The publication of modern science periodicals, the popularization of science education, and the formation of scientific communities were not only prerequisites for but also organic parts of the modern enlightenment movement in China. The emergence of periodicals dedicated to scientific topics, in concert with changes in the education system and the burgeoning of a scientific community, can be seen as authorizing a distinction between the sciences and the humanities and marking them as separate cultural realms in modern society. Indeed, the “enlightenment” so frequently proclaimed in this era can be seen as a historical process of the formation of the two cultures, and one could hardly claim familiarity with what enlightenment was without at least some rudimentary understanding of the various domains of specialized scientific study. Hence, to understand the enlightenment problematic as a historical transition, we must grapple with the role of scientific knowledge, institutions, and concepts—a matter that is commonly overlooked by Chinese intellectual historians, who overwhelmingly attribute the enlightenment movement to intellectuals trained in the humanities.

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In the tides of revolution and reform in the late Qing period, a great many specialized scientific periodicals emerged, complementing the mass of sociocultural publications, but with their own special characteristics. Science journals were published throughout the country, many of them founded by young students who returned from Europe, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. According to available records, from 1900 to 1919 more than 100 technical and scientific periodicals were published: 24 on natural sciences (9 general sciences, 9 mathematics, 2 geology, 2 biology, 2 meteorology), 73 on technology (13 general, 12 engineering, 5 hydraulic engineering, 14 transportation, 29 agricultural technology), and 29 on medicine. Such publications tripled in number in the seven years after the 1911 revolution. Aside from a handful of state-sponsored journals, they were all published by scientific associations, universities, or individuals. The most famous were the Association of Chinese Scientists’ Science (Kexue) and Zhan Tianyou’s Chinese Engineers Society’s Report of the Association of Chinese Engineers.2 Distinct from “cultural” magazines, but engaging in dialogue with them, the vast majority of these turn-ofthe-century scientific journals were more concerned with specific scientific and technological fields and with introducing and popularizing science and technology than with publishing the results of new and independent research. The Association of Chinese Scientists (ACS) was founded in 1915 and, in tandem with its monthly periodical, Science, constituted modern China’s longest-lasting and most influential organization and publication in this sphere. The ACS served as a model for a stream of scientific associations that came in its wake: the Association of Chinese Chemists, the Biology Society, the Botany Society, and many more.3 In China’s modern sociocultural discursive space, the formation of scientific institutions, societies, and publications and the popularization of scientific concepts were not isolated phenomena remote from other social domains and events. On the contrary, these phenomena in the scientific domain had a profoundly cultural quality and were planted firmly at the heart of social and cultural events. Precisely for this reason we must revise the notion of a clear, preexisting delineation between the sciences and the humanities, a delineation in which science journals primarily published articles regarding problems and knowledge that had no bearing on social issues. As I show later, the idea of a pre-

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existing split between the sciences and the humanities involves a projection of those categories backward onto a historical moment in which they were not so distinct. Such an interpretation neglects to take into account that the foundational concepts of modern thought in China were based on specialized scientific knowledge and that scientists and science boosters were quite selfconsciously using science to participate in shaping a new, modern value system. The specialization of knowledge valorized by modernity gave the sciences a particular cachet and authority to participate in more general public debates on all topics, from nature to culture and politics. Moreover, scientific debate is a product of specialized training through specific educational structures, disciplines, and training practices. In this sense the respect accorded to scientific authority is based on a kind of institutional power that deserves serious investigation. Weber claimed that the systemization of the natural sciences was a hallmark of the bureaucratization of knowledge and that the establishment and expansion of scientific institutions promoted an increasingly bureaucratized society. In other words, the formation and development of science systems has bearing on the question of the nation-state. The institutionalization of scientific study, and the ability of science to extend into and play a leading role in the sociocultural realm, depends on its relation to the state and other organizations. The ACS and Science, then, signal two seemingly contradictory trends in modern China. They manifested the birth of a community of scientists and a division of scientific from humanistic knowledge, but at the same time, scientific study and institutions were integrally related to the state and to social bodies that bestowed on science a special cultural authority, thereby promoting the spread of scientism into the realm of the humanities and everyday life. I must, therefore, introduce a concept distinct from that of the scientific community, one that complicates the idea of “two cultures”: the concept of a community of scientific discourse. A community of scientific discourse is a social formation that uses scientific discourses that are distinctly diªerent from the everyday language of its era. This discursive community originates in a core of science associations and publications, but through print culture, educational institutions, and other media, it spreads and expands to influence the whole of society. The process is dialectical: the regulated method of prov-

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ing truth claims that grounds scientific culture sets scientific activity apart from the realm of daily social life, but this separation also guarantees science’s profound influence on society and the humanities. On the one hand, the scientific community applies scientific concepts to important social and cultural issues—how science relates to ethics, social governance, the human condition, progress, and so forth—and participates directly in cultural debates. On the other hand, increasing numbers of nonscientists begin using scientific language and concepts to describe social issues unrelated to science, and this modeling of social, political, and cultural thought on science produces profound historical consequences. Together these processes created a new situation in modern China: the community of scientific discourse and social practices gradually formed a totalizing scientific worldview that spread to replace the cosmology based on the law of heaven and became the basis of the anti-traditional cultural practices of the era. The “community of scientific discourse” concept highlights the facts that the dissemination of scientific discourses is a complex social process and that scientific activity itself is an organic part of social practice. Scientists do not individually provide society with acceptable scientific concepts; only through specific social processes can the work of scientists be accepted by society. In the era I am considering, this involved not only scientists’ direct participation in enlightenment activities and debates but also, and even more importantly, the way in which scientific work became the model for other cultural work and the way intellectuals used scientific vocabulary to remold everyday language for their social and political purposes. In the language reform movement of the late Qing-early republican era, scientists, together with intellectuals, invented a scientific technical vocabulary, using punctuation marks and writing horizontally, that would later be systematized and put into use by state agencies and eventually accepted by society at large. Through such scientific discursive practices, modern Chinese literary and everyday language gradually took form, with the clear implication that the rationalistic mode of scientific development should serve as the ultimate model for cultural progress as well. The cultural debates of the era thus ultimately tended to return to questions of science and knowledge systems, and scientific theories consistently figured prominently in cultural debates.

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In this context, the membership of the community of scientific discourse included not only scientists themselves but also scientific publications and intellectuals in various other fields and their publications. The contributors to New Youth and Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), for instance, were for the most part not members of the scientific community, but the vast majority of them used scientific language to analyze cultural and social issues and thereby played a major role in expanding the community of scientific discourse. Du Yaquan, the editor of Eastern Miscellany during the May Fourth period, was also the founder of the earliest scientific journal, Yaquan zazhi. By the 1920s, as the “science versus metaphysics” debate raged, not only the supporters of science—Hu Shi, Ding Wenjiang, Wu Zhihui, and Chen Duxiu—functioned within and elaborated on this new discursive environment, but even their opponents (such as Liang Qichao) had no choice but to engage this language. We can trace the issues involved in the debate back to the early scientific magazines’ concerns over scientific and social problems. Indeed, I would assert that the May Fourth movement was the cultural movement of the community of scientific discourse. What enables us to consider this diverse array of cultural factions to have been a single movement is its using this specific, mutually comprehensible language and symbolic system. From the natural sciences to the social sciences and humanities, the various languages employed in modern Chinese academic disciplines were experimented with and constructed in this discursive community. On its periphery was a new generation of students, bureaucrats, and urbanites. Products of the new education and knowledge systems, they viewed familiarity with the sciences as necessary for correctly understanding the world. A basic understanding and acceptance of the sciences thus became a foundation for new modes of ethics and behavior and a key aspect shaping everyday life.

EARLY ACTIVITIES OF THE ACS: POLITICS AND SCIENTISTS The formation of a community of scientific discourse in China was not an isolated social development but part of an international phenomenon. The ACS was founded at Cornell University in the United States by a small group of Chinese students who engaged themselves in political debates in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Their interest in politics,

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however, led to their establishing a science journal. The ACS was only loosely structured, its initial objective being simply to create a science publication, “the main goal of which [was] to propound upon the essential meaning and utility of science without getting embroiled in abstruse political discussions.”4 Putting aside for the moment whether the magazine succeeded in avoiding politics, this explicit separation of science from politics already departed from the rhetoric, common during the late Qing period, of mingling science and politics, science and civilization, and science and history. These young scholars believed they possessed a unique scientific language that was utterly distinct from the sociopolitical yet possessed enormous potential to influence “people’s livelihood.” In other words, the very separateness of scientific language, methods, associations, and activities from society was precisely what qualified science to serve as a model of utility and a hallmark of spiritual change and progress at a historical moment when China was dominated by authoritarianism in both state and society. How did science and the scientific community gain this position of privilege, a privilege grounded in a paradoxical stance as both separate from and influential upon society? An analysis of the contents of scientific publications gives us an entry point to this question. I begin with the organization of the ACS. In 1920, it celebrated its fifth annual meeting in Nanjing with the opening of a new science library. ACS president Ren Hongjun delivered the inaugural speech: The criteria for evaluating the level of a country’s civilization should not be the broadness of its territory and large size of its population, or the strength of its army and weapons, but rather the level of its people’s knowledge, the completeness of its social organization, and the progressiveness of its life in general. The development and application of modern science is already changing the framework of human life, thought, and aspiration. A nation that lacks scientific study lacks complete knowledge; one that lacks scientific organizations lacks a complete social structure. One can well imagine the conditions of such a society. The ACS exists to fill these lacks. Hence, this celebration here of our fifth annual meeting and this library’s opening is a matter for great rejoicing.5

Ren Hongjun asserted in this speech not only that scientific progress would eventually lead to changes across the whole of society but also that sci-

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entific organizations should serve as social models, as yardsticks for measuring a nation’s cultural level. Expressing the view that knowledge, social organization, and progress in material life were the criteria for civilization, he showed a conviction that civilization could be explained according to natural laws. Apparently, once one accepts the authority of science, one has to accept the superiority of “scientific culture”—that is, Western culture. This explains why modern debates over civilization and culture in China are always closely related to the problem of “science.” Thus, while the professional aim of the ACS was scientific study, the ultimate meaning of its existence must be evaluated from the broader standpoint of its contribution toward perfecting the totality of society and knowledge. Although Ren did not use the Weberian concept of “rationality,” he obviously believed that it was the measure for modern societies and civilizations and that the development of modern science provided society with a concrete means for rationalization. In other words, systematized scientific research and the organization of scientific communities serve as the best models for modern society and the nation-state. Science’s relation to society is not direct; quite the opposite—scientific inquiry insists on maintaining a disinterested distance from political and social questions, and it is precisely this distance that underwrites the status of the scientific institution, making it the ideal social model. Befitting this vision, the ACS’s activities were also varied and extended beyond scientific research. In addition to publishing the professional journal Science, it published book collections, translations, theses (often in foreign languages), and the popularizing vehicle Science Pictorial. It also participated in international scholarly conferences and national educational activities, founded libraries and information o‹ces, and organized exhibitions and awards. Scientists thus acted in the larger social context of the community of scientific discourse, and this context intimately influenced the way they proceeded with their work and organization. Science workers undertook their activities in a spirit of promoting social progress and moral development. When the ACS was established, its executive and advisory boards appointed Hu Mingfu, Zou Bingwen, and Ren Hongjun to craft what became an elevenchapter, sixty-item set of bylaws that was approved only after formal discussion by the full membership, along with the election of members to various

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o‹ces (president, secretary, treasurer, etc.). From its very start the ACS demonstrated a reverence for democratization and procedure. Thus it embodied ideas about both organized scientific study and how such an organization should relate to national construction, especially the rationalization of social organization and life. In other words, science itself was the principle for social structure. Ren Hongjun recalled that the ACS was founded on the model of the Royal Society of Britain; in addition to introducing science to society, it paid attention to scientific research as well as public service.6 These motivations were further reflected in the makeup of the ACS membership, which included regular, lifetime, special, and honorary members. Members included not only scientists but also politicians such as Xu Shichang, Li Yuanhong, and Xiong Xiling, together with scholars and intellectuals including Cai Yuanpei, Ma Junwu, Thomas Edison, Hu Mingfu, Ding Wenjiang, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao. Involving a number of political figures in important positions underlined the strong links between the ACS and the construction of a modern nation-state and helped bring the organization stability during unstable times. In the tumult of the modern era, when few publications managed to survive for more than a few years, the staying power of Science and the ACS highlights the way science was seen, across the spectrum of political regimes, as a crucial pillar of modernization and progress. Funding is crucial to the survival of any publication, and ACS membership fees were far from su‹cient to fund Science. Most ACS funding came from contributions, and over the decades the organization relied on the support of its renowned members and allies. In a 1918 drive to raise fifty thousand yuan, Cai Yuanpei, along with other educators, wrote articles commending donations and arguing that it would be a national embarrassment of grave consequence to China’s development if China could not support even this single science association. Referring to investment in science by governments in Europe and the United States, Cai further appealed to his audience to donate to the ACS “to cleanse the humiliation of our countrymen’s indiªerence to science.”7 Fan Yuanlian added his voice: “Those nations who fail to develop science are doomed to be poor and weak.”8 Funding remained a crucial issue, and several years later Song Hanzhang, executive manager of the Bank of China, was named ACS president, in charge of managing the organization’s finances. By 1935 the ACS had more than forty

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thousand yuan, not counting the value of its Shanghai branch library. It deliberately recruited members with political and economic power. Again the complex, almost paradoxical position of the ACS in relation to society comes into stark profile: on the one hand, Science proclaimed itself and the process of scientific study to be devoid of political interests; on the other, it insisted and depended upon its decisive influence in society. In sum, the role of science as an element of social construction in China was built on a complex interplay between its claims to objective, specialized knowledge and its highly socially and politically invested institutional conditions. The administrative power of science did not operate directly through politics or force, but rather by constructing models and standards that compelled people’s obedience. On the surface, this power was based on science’s specialized knowledge, but more profoundly, its force derived from current social formations, especially the expansion of a capitalist world system that depended on the existence of nation-states for its growth and made scientific technology a basic condition for such national construction. The background I have been describing produced two contradictory and mutually constituting results. On the one hand, the social position of scientists was directly related to national construction, and their importance derived not just from their knowledge but from their interested position in an institutional structure. On the other hand, scientific knowledge came to be generally regarded as objective and essentially diªerent from other knowledges that made up the cultural pluralism of the moment. Science was said to be uniquely disinterested and engaged in the objective evaluation of other aspects of human life.

THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF LINGUISTIC PRACTICES AND THE CREATION OF GUOYU Scientists’ authority is expressed in their power to create new concepts and in their right to use them to name phenomena in the world. The scientific practices of the ACS profoundly influenced the linguistic developments of the era, and through its activities the Chinese language began to be technically reformed. The first stage of this process involved the creation of a precisely defined new vocabulary suited for technical concepts and operations, especially

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nouns exacting enough to guide scientific and technical inspection. As early as 1908 the Qing education ministry had assigned Yan Fu to oversee an o‹ce of terminology. In the 1910s responsibility for this work shifted from the hands of translators and scholars such as Yan Fu to the scientific community. In 1916 the ACS established a “Board for Discussion on Terminology,” whose determinations were published in Science. The members of the ACS considered the translation of nouns foundational: “In the translating arts the establishment of a precise nomenclature is most di‹cult, and in the sciences such new vocabularies are legion. Scientific work will be unreliable if terms are imprecise. In this magazine all the terms, even those that have been previously translated, have been reevaluated, while all new terms have been created through the exacting work of our translators.”9 In 1922 the ACS joined the Jiangsu Board of Education and the Chinese Medical Association in forming the Committee for Examining Terminology. Its annual meetings produced great compilations of new material. In 1934 the Nationalist government finally established a state Board of Translating and Editing, but the majority of the materials it collected had already been vetted by the ACS and other third parties.10 The translation of scientific terminology was not the same as that of new terms for general use, which on the whole took form through popular usage and retained multiple connotations. Scientific translation required expertise, strove for accurate denotation, and required the acceptance and approval of the national scientific community. Terms then had to be disseminated throughout the scientific discursive community, uniformly applied to primary and secondary school textbooks, and embraced by the publishing community. Therefore, the production of scientific discourse was integrally tied to the network of scientific and educational institutions, as well as the industry of print culture. The vast majority of terms used in Chinese today in biology, physics, geology, engineering, and other fields were developed by the ACS and similar organizations at this time. As these terms entered common usage, they carried with them the roots of a new conceptualization of the cosmos, forcing the gradual abandonment of the previous “natural language.” As new terms describing the cosmos, nature, and human physiology spread, belief in the ancient cosmic order gradually faded, and a more technocratic ordering came to dominate, not only in fields

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of science but also in the humanities. A large portion of the vocabulary of modern Chinese was created by conscious, linear design; these words were the products not of a natural process but of a technical one. Because of the strictly denotative and linear nature of this vocabulary, the world it expressed carried the same characteristics. The technical design of language satisfied the needs both of the scientific community and of a modernizing society and technocratic structure. This is evidenced, for instance, in the way Science in its early years itemized its contents. Its tables of contents listed not only sections such as biology, applied biology, and technical applications but also aesthetics and musicology. “Although these topics are outside the domain of science, they still have great importance in relation to our people’s national character and are sorely lacking in our country.”11 The inclusion of aesthetics and music demonstrates that in the early years China’s community of scientific discourse looked to science to organize human emotion and psychology as well as human knowledge. This conceptualization had an epistemological basis: in forming a totalizing, objective knowledge system at this time, members of the community of scientific discourse, while retaining a sense that diªerent cultural realms existed, made no assumption that those realms were fundamentally qualitatively distinct. The domains of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics were not yet strictly diªerentiated. Though the ACS and Science were specialized organizations with specific professional structures, they were part of a greater community of scientific discourse that used this language in an as-yetundiªerentiated domain of knowledges. The undiªerentiated nature of those knowledges was also expressed in the relationship between scientific language and other languages. Science was the first magazine to be printed horizontally, from left to right, because many of its articles included scientific formulas and tables that could not be printed in the typical Chinese vertical, unpunctuated format. As the magazine explained, it used “horizontal printing and Western linguistic punctuation to facilitate the inclusion of mathematical, physics, and chemical equations, and not simply as a novelty. We ask our readers’ understanding.”12 But this technical necessity came rapidly to be seen as the mode appropriate to modern language and as a breakthrough for the modern language movement. Scientific language was not seen as strictly distinct from everyday and literary language but rather

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was treated as the fount of new everyday language practices. In discussions about the Chinese language at this time, aside from the problem of a standard spoken Chinese, the most important issue debated was that of creating a modern Chinese grammar. Central to the grammar problem was the creation of uniform modes to regulate existing discourses, making them express meaning in a singular and clear way. The use of horizontal writing and punctuation became central, both as the content of and as the tools for modern linguistic study. In this sense, language was expected gradually to regress into a pure form and tool, which eventually would result in a broader process of linguistic standardization and rationalization. I stress here that the modern vernacular movement was rooted in the technologizing of language. Writing in the vernacular was far from a new creation; it dated back to the Tang dynasty, as evidenced in recent discoveries from Dunhuang. There were also Song pinghua (stories), Yuan zaju (dramas), and Ming novels, all of which used vernacular language. Hence, it was not the use of the vernacular per se but the technical regularizing of the language that marked the emergence of the modern vernacular movement. Hu Shi and others created a historical narrative of the vernacular movement that stressed its search for a historical rationale and ignored its connection to scientific discourse. Indeed, in 1916, well before New Youth proclaimed the “birth” of the vernacular movement, Science published Hu Shi’s essay “On Cadence and Punctuation Marks” and his two subsequent pieces, “On the Harmfulness of Not Using Quotation Marks” and “On the Use of the Hyphen.” These essays, printed in Science’s horizontal, punctuated format, were in many ways formal explanations precisely of the benefits of that format. They described the rules pertaining to ten diªerent kinds of punctuation and laid out the three greatest defects of the current, unpunctuated system: its lack of clarity made it easy to misread and misinterpret, it lacked indications of grammatical structures, and it hobbled attempts at popular literacy and education.13 Hu Shi’s interest in the question of a national language in 1915 was neither wholly unprecedented nor coincidental. In 1887 Huang Zunxian had already discussed reforming Chinese characters through a “method of simplification,” and in 1888 Qiu Tingliang had proclaimed the vernacular the “root of national rejuvenation.”14 Before the 1911 revolution, in the New Century, Wu Zhihui and others had discussed abandoning Chinese characters and using Esperanto

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and other Western writing methods. And Zhong Wenao, a student in the United States at the same time as Hu Shi, energetically boycotted the use of Chinese characters and sought to replace them with an alphabet to promote general literacy.15 Then, in 1915, overseas students in the northeastern United States formed the Institute of Arts and Sciences, in which Hu Shi was a delegate of the Literature Section. He and Zhao Yuanren proposed to adopt the problem of Chinese characters as the central issue for discussion for the year, and each published essays on the topic. Zhao wrote the essay “Can We Replace Our Writing with an Alphabet, and by What Process?” and would later become a leading figure in devising systems of Romanization.16 While they worked together, Hu wrote an essay in English, “How to Facilitate the Teaching of Chinese Literature,” in which he pondered the connection between characters and general education. He concluded that under current conditions, Chinese classical writing could not be dispensed with; the key question was how to transform Chinese into an eªective teaching tool. His answer was that the problem of teaching Chinese lay not in the characters but in inadequate teaching methods. Chinese was a “half-dead” language and could not be taught with the same methods used for fully living languages like vernacular or English. At this point Hu Shi did not yet feel that vernacular could wholly replace classical Chinese. Rather, Zhao and Hu proposed that the main ways by which Chinese could be made more modern and scientific was by establishing systems of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Although questions of everyday language were the first to be raised, by the summer of 1915 the discussion among Ren Hongjun, Yang Quan, Tang Yue, and Mei Guangdi had expanded to include Chinese literature. Within this group, Mei Guangdi was comparatively conservative, the only one who did not agree that classical Chinese was at least half-dead. Aside from Mei, these people were all founders and writers for Science. No one at the time doubted the appropriateness of using horizontal printing and punctuation for writing about science, but there was a strong prejudice against using these and vernacular methods to create a revolution in literary writing. Ren Hongjun had great faith in science but did not believe vernacular language could flourish aesthetically. He lampooned Hu Shi’s literary experiment, writing, “Literature is in revolution; it is singing its song for Mr. Hu.”17 The debate in 1916

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among Hu and his friends about whether “writing poetry is like writing an essay” was a prelude to the New Culture movement, the center of the debate being whether daily language could serve as literary written language. While on the surface this debate had nothing to do with scientific language, it actually already predicted the internal connection between literary and scientific language. We can see this debate reflected in Huang Zunxian’s famous statement, “My hand writes what my mouth speaks, not to be constrained by the classics.” Huang, responding to the constraints of classical poetry, advocated a vernacular language that could “fit the need of the contemporary and popular.” His goal was to “make all the peasants, craftsmen, merchants, women, and children literate.”18 By “vernacular,” Huang did not mean reproductions of regional dialects but rather a written language in contrast to literary language. In other words, vernacular meant another form of standard written language, not everyday spoken Chinese, for real spoken Chinese was not standard but composed of regionally diverse dialects. In spite of some early experiments at using regional dialects (for instance, the poetry of Liu Bannong and Liu Dabai), the far more basic trend was toward creating a uniform “national language,” for which pinyin, punctuation, and grammar formed the foundation. Thus, the problem of establishing a national language and the scientific recasting of language were intimately related, and the attempt to create a reformed and standard written language was the starting point. The debate was not only over classical or vernacular language but also over whether scientific language could be adapted to literature, especially poetry. Though the issues of debate were not explicitly formulated in this way, the mainstream of the May Fourth New Culture movement was already using scientific concepts to legitimate literary reform. By 1916 Hu Shi, in proposing that vernacular was the “evolution of classical writing,” that “single characters must evolve into compounds,” and that “unnatural grammar must evolve into natural grammar,” was essentially arguing that the distinction between the vernacular and the classical was tantamount to one between the natural and the unnatural. Such a distinction, I believe, was the result of comparing Chinese to Western languages under the influence of the scientific concept. The vernacular movement, then, started with a comparison of Chinese to Western languages and

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the appropriation of Western punctuation and grammatical systems, a process that began not in the humanities but in the sciences. Scientific language served as the model for daily language and a new literary language. My point, as in the previous discussion of social organizations, is that reforms in the scientific community served as models and starting points from which reforms spread into other domains. By the 1920s—with new trends in fiction writing and the growing publication of vernacular textbooks that encouraged the replacing of regional dialects and pronunciations with an increasingly standardized version of Chinese—it is fitting to say that scientific linguistic reform had spread not only to the humanities but also to everyday Chinese. Moreover, although I am not inquiring into May Fourth literature per se, it is worth noting that the standards valorized by modern literary production—precision, simplicity, realism—are also standards valorized in scientific activity. All this demonstrates that in the early years of Chinese modernity, scientific discourse was not the “Other” of the humanities but was, on the contrary, the foundation of humanities discourse. As I show in the remainder of this essay, the discursive split between the sciences and humanities really took form only in the 1923 debate between the sciences and “metaphysics.” The process of establishing diªerent discursive domains in early twentiethcentury China was dissimilar from that which occurred in Western philosophical thought. In the West, the clear delineation of separate discursive domains can be traced back to Kant, who strictly diªerentiated “pure reason” from “practical reason” and the “power of judgment.” Science, the product of pure reason, was applicable to the phenomenal and natural world but was incapable of resolving moral and aesthetic issues, which corresponded, respectively, to practical reason and judgment. A characteristic of early modern Chinese thought was the lack of such clear separation of discursive domains; all were first seen as part of a single (though not homogeneous) discursive domain under the sign of scientific modernization. At what historical moment, then, and through what process, was the scientific domain qualitatively divided into natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities? And in the Chinese discourse of modernity, why did the rebellion against the old world not produce a division between knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics? In the absence of such a division, how was a discussion of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge carried out? In addressing these

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questions, I also address the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: Why did these Chinese scientists believe that their scientific language—a language that had no relationship to daily language—could solve social problems and that their method of working—which had no connection to daily life— could serve as a model for society?

SCIENCE AS UNIVERSAL TRUTH AND ITS SOCIAL APPLICATION: SCIENTIFIC, ETHICAL, AND RATIONAL The relationship between science and ethics was a central concern for modern scientists and other intellectuals in China, as was expressed clearly in the 1923 debate over “science and metaphysics.” In the post-May Fourth period, scientists and intellectuals connected ethics directly to the irrational and the emotional via concepts such as Bergson’s intuitionism and Nietzsche’s “superman,” which focused on the agency of the individual. At the same time, they insisted that science had a role to play in solving human problems. Their diªerence from the moralists was not an indiªerence toward ethics but an insistence on objective standards for ethics—on criteria beyond individual experiences. In this sense, they, more than the moralists, insisted on the metaphysical quality of nature. The ACS had been founded during World War I, a time when European intellectuals were pondering the relationship between science and injustice. From the very beginning, the ACS’s propaganda on science carried an onus to prove that there was no causal connection between science and injustice. Its members believed deeply that science was not only usable knowledge but also the foundation of an ideal political, moral, and aesthetic order. To them, scientific knowledge was both a characteristic of Western civilization and a universal principle, both a tool and a model by which the whole world should organize itself. In China, critiques of science usually came from the perspective of ethics. Consequently, defenses for science needed to be developed from the same perspective. The optimism that prevailed among scientists in China at the time stood in sharp contrast to the pessimistic view of science among European intellectuals. Exactly when war had shattered many Europeans’ illusions of modernity, Chinese thinkers were trying to prove the rationality and necessity of science. On the one hand, Chinese scientists were situated in the Western

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discourse, were aware of the crisis of war and the pessimism that accompanied it, and sought to diagnose the crisis facing modern civilization. On the other hand, they were also situated in a dynamically changing Chinese intellectual and social discourse. Was the crisis of modern civilization one of science? If the core of this crisis was one of ethics, was it science or some other force that up-ended the possibility and legitimacy of ethics? Furthermore, what were the sources of the crisis of modern ethics? What role could science play in solving the moral crisis? In short, they had to explain the relationship between science and ethics before they could defend the legitimacy of science. The introduction to the first issue of Science clearly explicated a relationship between science, ethics, and religion: There is an inseparable connection between science and ethics. . . . People do not conduct evil deeds out of pleasure. They sometimes dare to conduct such deeds without a reason when they are shallow in their understanding of reason and confuse their interests with their disadvantages. People will distinguish right from wrong and good from bad when science develops and they understand the laws of nature and are able to examine human relations. People will not treat their neighbors as enemies if they understand economic principles and that hurting others will eventually hurt themselves. They will be kind to one another if they understand sociological principles and know that individuals cannot survive in isolation and humans need to help one another. As science develops and communication opens up, the whole world becomes one community. The sense that every small unit is connected to the whole is even stronger than in the past, and narrow-mindedness should disappear. Charity to other people will reach to animals; saving the wounded should reach to enemy land. Science should contribute to eternal peace among countries around the world.19

What human beings can count on for their lives can only be science! Science possesses this kind of moral force because scientific knowledges (such as economics and sociology) lay bare the relations of the universe. Such relations are a priori laws that precede any coincidental and untrue relations. In a special issue of Science on war, scientists directly faced the destructive role science played in wars, but their confidence was unshaken. They believed scientific

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research results could be used wrongly, but the metaphysical laws of science could not be destroyed. Individual or group subjective wills could lead to the abuse of science, but the foundation of science lay not in human wills or choices but in the objective laws of the universe. Misuse of science would be corrected eventually by the internal logic of science, as Yang Quan argued: “The principle of science follows the idea of Great Harmony. Modern civilization is a result of science, republicanism, and absence of war. Science brings people republicanism, which results in peace. . . . Science is the basis for peace among human beings.”20 Republicanism was based on science; in other words, republicanism was a natural system, expressing natural order and relations. The moral meaning of science was also approached through a discussion of the relationship between “public” and “private”: science is objective law, which is achieved by overcoming private opinions and prejudices. That is, the legitimacy of morality comes not from the subjectivity of individuals but from the overcoming of such subjectivity. This overcoming is expressed in the discovering and following of natural laws. In this sense, morality, as public principle, overcomes “the private”: both science and morality are the recognition of absolute knowledge. In his article “Science and Morality,” Tang Yue argued that science and ethics, despite belonging to diªerent realms, shared the same goal of recognizing facts and understanding natural laws. Science dealt with objective questions and was not influenced by politics or religion. The diªerences among scientific schools did not represent the ultimate goal of science; the terminal point of science was fact. This meant that scientific laws were universal to all human beings.21 According to this logic, science included moral laws for society, and the principles of science could also be applied to daily life: There is no distinction between natural law and moral principle. Positivism means reliance on scientific evidence. Through the discovery of the theory of evolution, humanity has learned that moral principles are natural laws. These laws are made neither by sages nor by God; rather, morality has a scientific basis. Only when it has a scientific basis can people follow it willingly. . . . This is [another] benefit of science to morality.22

The respect for science among members of the Chinese scientific community sprang from their respect for the idea of moral objectivity. Adherence to

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this idea allowed them to distinguish scientific principle from scientific practice. They believed that the crisis of modern civilization was a result of “private opinions,” the domination of the morality of modern society by subjectivity and emotionalism. This belief was never developed fully into a theory, but it was expressed clearly in their arguments. The a priori nature (xian yan xing) of principle (li) in particular was discussed in Ren Hongjun’s “On the Meaning of ‘Rationality,’” another article published in Science. He argued that following rationality was both a moral command and a scientific method; rationality did not mean subjective ideas but was the result of objective deduction that deciphered the one and only truth of any importance, “the relationship among things in the world,” or “the relationship between cause and eªect.”23 The connection between science and morality pervaded the relationships between science and politics, education, war (and peace), and metaphysics. Science was the demonstration of preexisting theorems, and the legitimacy of politics, education, and morality were all seen as grounded in such theorems. Thus, science provided a shortcut by which the other social realms could reach universal truth (gongli).

Science, Politics, Social Aªairs, and Education In his discussion of war, Yang Quan argued that science was the foundation of peace and equality among human groups because it was based on the Great Harmony. “With the development of science, the dream of the Great Harmony will be realized eventually.”24 Why did science have an inherent orientation toward peace? In his essay “Science and Peace,” He Lu argued that science was the gateway to morality. Science is the pursuit of truth, and those who seek truth need the capacity for judgment. The capability to judge transcends the commonsense of personal gain and makes one “sincere”: Only deep thinking and careful research can reveal the secrets of the world; these activities are also long lasting, because people [involved in these activities] do not care about shamelessly pursuing petty interests. . . . Where interests are involved, conflicts arise; where power is involved, people sabotage one another. These are all hindrances to peace among human groups. Where truth is involved, only there does everyone work together to explain

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it. Scientific associations are numerous in Europe and the United States, and they all enjoy high reputations. They are concerned about the whole of humanity, so the boundaries between classes and nations disappear. Human knowledge is limited, but the truth of the universe is limitless. Nothing can be achieved if we do not act accordingly.25

He Lu maintained that science had the function of improving the conditions of human existence and communication; science “makes it easier for human groups to communicate,” and this is the starting point for the Great Harmony. At the level of function, the contribution of science to peace comes from its revealing the laws of nature, which are also the principles of human morality, social interaction, and universal communication. “Real peace among nationalities can be created only by science! Science does not have national, racial, or ideological boundaries. Everything belongs to truth. When there is evidence, there is no conflict; when there is no conflict, there is peace.”26 Whereas relationships among nation-states lay at the core of the discussion of science and war, the relationship between science and republicanism was focused on tensions within the nation-state itself. Yang Quan translated the essay “Science and Republicanism,” by M. E. Haggery, of the University of Indiana. Haggery argued that both science and republicanism were based on constant progress. Science was not constrained by one established theory of the universe; similarly, republicanism rejected unchangeable laws.27 Science and republicanism shared common principles, and the development of science could prove that republicanism was the most rational system. But legitimating republicanism with scientific principles did not mean that a complete blueprint of a republican system could be drawn from scientific principles, because science could not be equated with ultimate knowledge but only with its pursuit. In this sense, science as the principle of republicanism was not a complete design for social systems and processes. Rather, it was at the level of social practice that science served as the foundation of republicanism, because science awakened people’s need for a moral life and called for a fair ordering of the world. The inaugural issue of Science argued, “The development of people’s rights and national power parallels a country’s level of scholarship.”28 It summarized the European experience: “After the Renaissance, the followers of Huxley and Spencer advocated that science was the key to edu-

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cation.” This was not only because science promoted knowledge but also because it was seen as crucial to the development of morality.29 At a time when science and conflicts between civilizations were being viewed as interconnected, China’s weakness predictably led scholars to rethink the international status of Chinese scholarship. Huang Changgu asserted that the reason for the underdevelopment of scholarship in China was the lack of scientific methods for pursuing knowledge and action, which led to an educational system that was likewise deficient.30 Huang claimed that China held an inferior position in both science and morality: “Why, since the communication between China and the West started, have the Chinese always been learning from the West, whether on the spiritual or the material [level]? . . . It is because we Chinese, from the young to the old, do not have the habit of taking action.”31 A discussion of the decline of Chinese society took place through an evaluation of the history of Chinese scholarship. In his “Chinese Scientific Thought,” Wang Jin analyzed historical changes in Chinese scholarship. In Wang’s opinion, many elements in classical Chinese thought resembled those of modern science, including aspects of Moism, Daoism, and, particularly, Song scholars’ observations and thoughts on natural phenomena. Wang believed the reason for the slow development of science in China was the autocratic political system’s repressive influence on scholarship: “In terms of autocracy in scholarship, none in the world can surpass China.” Wang traced such autocracy back through the “sage kings,” the Qin dynasty, the yin-yang theories of the Han dynasty, the ci and fu of the Tang and Song dynasties, and the stultifying orthodoxy of the eight-legged essay form in the Ming and Qing imperial exams. “In the past thousands of years, all the rises and falls and changes in scholarship in China have depended upon the imperial court.”32 The flip side of such denunciations of imperial autocracy’s hobbling of Chinese scholarship was advocacy of Western models of modern education. These included teaching children in elementary school the habit of observing nature and playing games; in high school, training teenagers to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly and to take action; and in college, teaching students “systematic theory and experiment and allowing them to pursue knowledge and action to train them in the habit of taking action.” Eventually, they would practice what they learned at school in society.33 Why should education focus on science instead of, more broadly, morality,

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aesthetics, and knowledge? Because, wrote Ren Hongjun, the scientific community commonly believed that the goal of science was “to develop human nature and explain the truth of the world, to enable people to be the masters of nature instead of its slaves. Thus, science is an intellectual matter, beyond material matters.” Not only did science directly influence society and individual behavior, “but it is also related to aesthetics. Arts are nothing but descriptions of natural phenomena with languages, letters, images, and sounds. The better we understand natural phenomena, the stronger we will feel about them.” The importance of science to education “is not material or specific knowledge, but the method of studying things. It is not only the method of studying things, but what this method lends to mental training.” If the essence of education is “learning about oneself and the world,” then science was the condition and method for both.34

The Science and Metaphysics Debate and the Thought of Yang Quan In February 1923, Peking University professor Zhang Junmai gave a lecture at Qinghua University that was later published in Qinghua Weekly under the title “On Metaphysics.” Zhang’s lecture inaugurated the debate over “science and metaphysics.” As we have seen, however, discussion related to this problematic had begun long before this debate started. The discursive scientific community shared the notion that science not only promoted knowledge and material development but also held decisive importance for restoring beliefs, morality, and aesthetics. “Those without scientific knowledge cannot solve life problems,” Ren Hongjun concluded in “Science and Education.”35 Yet despite the community’s shared faith in the power of science, its relatively radical questioning of this power also first arose in Science. In 1919 the journal published an article by Yang Quan, “Against ‘the Omnipresent Power of Science.’”36 On the one hand, Yang stressed that science did not solve all problems and that much was unknown to scientists. On the other hand, he insisted that science provided the possibility for such solutions. Serious doubts about the power of science were first raised by those who had been exposed to European and Russian anti-modern thought. In 1919, New Education published an article by Jiang Penglin on Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy, and Minxin Weekly published quotations from Tolstoy translated by Hu Xuan-

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ming and Nie Qijie. Tolstoy’s pacifist ideas and criticism of scientific civilization profoundly influenced Chinese intellectuals. Yang Quan published a long article, “Tolstoy and Science,” in Science, in which he found Tolstoy’s criticism of science understandable and defended science cautiously.37 He introduced Tolstoy’s major arguments, commenting on them one by one. Tolstoy’s first point was the most important: “Science cannot explain the meaning of life.” This point would also serve as the most important dividing line in the science-versus-metaphysics debate. As Yang summarized Tolstoy’s main argument: If there is a permanent will or soul that cannot be dissolved by death, then the explanatory power of science regarding the material world is inversely proportional to its power to explain the soul and the meaning of life. In other words, the exploration of causation and consequence by empirical study cannot explain human beings’ lives or actions. On this issue Yang’s answer shows obvious compromise, for he argued that when Tolstoy referred to life he meant spiritual life, which belonged properly to religion and philosophy and was not what science addressed. “The object of scientific study is limited to what people can sense; things beyond the human senses cannot be explained and proved by scientific method, and science acknowledges that it does not comprehend them.” Yang Quan clearly distinguished the boundary between science, religion, and philosophy; the spiritual and the material were separated into two realms. This compromise a‹rmed the empirical scientific concept by setting a limit to its application while leaving room for metaphysics. Yang met Tolstoy’s other main points with more direct refutations. Tolstoy had asserted that the goal of science was not the happiness of human beings as a whole, because scientists tended to study subjects of relevance primarily to the upper class, to which they themselves belonged. In this sense, he argued that “science for science’s sake” did not exist. Yang disagreed that the selection of topics for scientific study was determined by immediate class interests and, moreover, did not find science itself to be responsible for such bias. Yang separated the problems of political, social, and economic systems from the discoveries and applications of science, yet by arguing for such a separation he also had to concede that the logic of science could not automatically solve social, political, and economic problems. Tolstoy’s third point was that science resembled superstition, for, like

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superstition, scientific ideas acquired the status of truth only in specific historical eras. Yang countered that the most important trait of science was its methodology, and method must be distinguished from specific ideas or knowledge. “The key characteristic of science is in its methodology; scientific knowledge is simply conclusions drawn from adopting this methodology.”38 Consequently, scientific knowledge could change, but empirical methodology could not. Yang concluded: “Without scientific methodology, one cannot change superstition into science even with new knowledge. It is clear that the diªerence between superstition and science is not in the range of knowledge but in the presence or absence of methodology.”39 Yang ended his article by stressing the historical legitimacy of Tolstoy’s criticism of scientific civilization, concluding that Tolstoy’s stance was a response to the uneven development of material civilization and social morality in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, when morality had failed to keep pace with material progress. Yang found it admirable that Tolstoy tried to change this situation at any price. However, he wrote, our country still does not have science, and would not even dare to dream of material civilization. It is too early for us to be talking about the shortcomings of science and the problems of material civilization. In Europe and the United States, material power is concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, which causes social instability. This is something that we need to pay attention to so that the Tolstoys in the future will not be saddened about our country.40

In this essay Yang accepted from the outset that belief/morality and empirical science belonged to diªerent realms. If the meaning of life could not be tested by scientific methodology, then the function of science in cultural change was dubious, because it could neither prove nor disprove beliefs or moral concepts. According to this logic, Yang in fact agreed with Tolstoy’s judgment that Western scientific civilization had led to moral decay in the West; he modified it only by arguing that China did not face such a crisis because it was still in the middle of evolving a civilization. Probably recognizing that his analysis could not truly provide a moral foundation for science, Yang continued to ponder the meaning of a scientific worldview. In October 1921 he gave a speech in Nanjing titled “The Scientific

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View of Life” (Kexue de rensheng guan) that was later published in Science.41 In this article, Yang distinguished the scientific outlook from all others: religious, aesthetic, military, and practical. The main diªerence was that these other worldviews—which corresponded roughly to subjectivism, emotionalism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism, respectively—were all grounded in the subjective. The scientific worldview, on the other hand, transcended subjective needs and emotions and was built on objectivity. A religious philosophy such as Tolstoy’s was founded upon subjective belief. Aesthetic philosophies, such as those of Mathew Arnold and many Chinese scholars and poets, were established on emotion. When the fundamentally pragmatic logic of the theory of natural selection was applied to the human world by social Darwinians, it became a military philosophy. Nietzsche’s idea of the superman reflected a militaristic worldview as well, because it conceived of war as a crucial factor of human life, the absence of which would cause outstanding human beings to regress. Yang argued that the practical and utilitarian worldviews were obviously strongman philosophies grounded in the subjectivity of the strong. These strongman philosophies were popular with contemporary Chinese intellectuals, and thus Chinese scholarship was focused too heavily on political and social issues and rarely on purely natural phenomena. Hence, science in China remained underdeveloped. Unlike these other worldviews, Yang wrote, the scientific worldview did not establish itself on the basis of subjective will, belief, emotion, power, or interest but was based on the will and rules of the universe: The scientific worldview is objective, generous, diligent, and cautious. Why is it objective? One does not take one’s own opinion as the criterion for right and wrong but views everything with an objective attitude. Why is it generous? One shows sympathy to all kinds of diªerent things in the universe. . . . Why is it diligent? One takes pursuing the truth as his goal. There is no end to pursuing the truth, so scientists do not distinguish workdays and days for rest. . . . They only pursue the truth and do not consider practical interests. . . . Why is it cautious? One examines all the conditions and reasons for everything one hears of, instead of mindlessly taking in everything and carelessly saying things. Thus, scientists hold a questioning attitude toward everything, studying everything with great patience and never stopping until they reach their goals.42

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On the other hand, although the scientific worldview transcended practical interests, it also had a practical meaning, which was the historical task of saving China from crises: “We should know that military power can destroy a country but not the human character [renge]; but when scholarship is bankrupt, we will kill ourselves even before others eliminate us.”43 Yang claimed that he shared the scientific view of life with his audience because everyone had the will to save the country through scholarship. More importantly, this objective worldview was also a value choice. Yang argued that this worldview was naturally democratic in spirit because science distinguished right and wrong, not weak and strong. It disregarded religion, class, and country and considered only truth. The scientific worldview was the loftiest and most egalitarian because it held no class bias or vanity.44 Here, Yang understands both democracy and science as contributing to a great harmony, which is a universal principle. Though neither nationalism nor egalitarianism stands beyond history, nation, or class, Yang’s arguments demonstrate an eªort to make them so: he attempts to find a set of moral principles that is rational as well as absolutely just. These moral principles are universal and absolute, transcending all historical and cultural traditions, religious backgrounds, political orders, and moral structures, because they are based on the natural order of the universe. In other words, they are the natural order itself.

QUESTIONS OF EVOLUTIONISM AND DEBATES OVER MODERN CULTURE The paths of inquiry I have just discussed all led scholars of the scientific community, via diªerent routes, to assert the universality of science. A similar debate arose over the topic of evolutionism, though with somewhat diªerent results. Dating from the late Qing period, evolutionism provided a naturalscientific basis for progressive social concepts in Chinese intellectual circles. Evolutionism was the premise for the modern concept of change, whether political, moral, or cultural reform. Evolutionism pointed the direction to the future, positioned the present, and provided a framework for a critique of the past. In part, the moral foundations of science and evolutionism were mutually constituted, science being seen not merely as an expression of progress

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but as the ceaseless exploration of unknown worlds—the self-exposition of the spirit of evolution and progress. The concepts of “the new” and “the modern” provided a teleological framework and a value orientation for modern Chinese thought in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, and all this was based on a certain evolutionist view of nature. I need mention only a few of the magazines whose names included the word “new”—New Youth, New Tide—whose advocacy of science and democracy was their most appealing characteristic. The banners of both science and democracy hang on the pole of evolutionism as their natural and historical premise. Therefore, attitudes toward evolutionism, to some degree, determined Chinese intellectuals’ approach to modernity. Questioning modernity has become a central topic in contemporary scholarly discussions, but most scholars focus on the realm of the humanities, and few comment on the natural sciences. The examination of Chinese modernity, however, was always related to the scrutiny of science. The premise of such scrutiny was the polar division between the realms of nature and human culture. The criticism of evolutionism was first an event of science and only secondarily a cultural event. The many debates during the May Fourth period all had an overture, which was the examination of evolutionism by the Chinese scientific community. Indeed, that community held some reservations regarding evolutionism, although its members continually cited scientific thought, and especially evolutionism, as the foundation of their social concepts. From 1915 to 1923, at the same time Science was publishing articles introducing and applying evolutionism, it also published a large number of articles criticizing it. The fact of such contradictory attitudes toward evolutionism almost never draws attention. Why did the scientific community repeatedly ponder the shortcomings of evolutionism in the context of anti-traditionalism? Why did the community around Science and the one around New Youth hold such different attitudes toward this issue, despite their overlaps? What is the relationship between the scientists’ questioning of evolutionism and their attitude toward “the modern”? We should not forget that science and scientists, in the cultural context of the time, were synonymous with progress and the modern. The questioning of evolutionism in Science started with the article “New Interpretation of Evolutionism,” by Qian Chongshu. Qian quoted William Buteson, the British geneticist, and questioned evolutionism from a biolog-

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ical perspective, but he did not touch upon the meaning of evolutionism in other fields. The person who led the discussion into cultural and other fields was the botanist Hu Xiansu. Hu had been educated in the classics at an early age, then studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1913 to 1916 and at Harvard University from 1923 to 1925. As a botanist, Hu became a major member of the school associated with the journal Xueheng (Critical Review), the most conservative group involved in the science and metaphysics debate, and his criticism of the May Fourth New Culture movement was closely connected to his examination of evolutionism. Both Hu Xiansu and Hu Shi (soon to be a leader of the culturally radical New Youth group) published articles in Science on the topic of evolutionism before discussion of it spread into other publications. Hu Xiansu’s article, “The Position of Darwin’s Theory on Evolution in Today’s World,” published in two parts, examined Darwin’s theory in detail, aiming to critique the social Darwinians’ application of evolutionism to human societies. Hu pointed out that although criticism by scientists, especially in Germany, had not shaken the foundation of all of Darwin’s theories, the weakness of evolutionism had become obvious. He divided Darwin’s theories into Darwinism, organic evolution, and the theory of descent and argued that intellectuals erred in erasing the diªerences among the three. Darwinism had so influenced the psychology of intellectuals that they applied it uncritically to all the social sciences.45 Hu analyzed the relationships between evolution and theology, education, and sociology and reached a conclusion that challenged many of the sociological concepts then in vogue in China: “It has become trendy to study society with biological concepts since the establishment of Darwin’s theories. The problem, however, is that these scholars often do not understand biology. What sociologists build their theories on, such as genetics, natural selection, and the development of mutual aid, are all unsettled concepts in biology.”46 The key point of Hu’s criticism was that evolutionism was not a universal principle and could not be applied to social and cultural realms. In the 1920s this point became the foundation for the Xueheng school’s anti-radical and compromising approach toward solving cultural conflicts. In other words, Hu’s criticism of evolutionism was ultimately expressed as a refusal to treat history as a wholesale process of inevitable modernization.

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The questioning of evolutionism by members of the Euro-American and Chinese scientific communities unavoidably led to heated cultural debates. Although these debates originated in the eªort to prove evolutionism scientifically, they eventually became debates over the modern view of history as progress.47 The problem of evolutionism had to be solved not merely on the level of science but also on the level of culture, history, and society. It was in this context that Hu Shi, who later became one of the leaders of the New Culture movement, published “Evolutionism in the Classics” in Science in 1917. Hu presented ideas on evolution from Laozi (Lao-tzu), Confucius, Lie Zi, Zhuang Zi, Xun Qing, and Han Fei, and he argued for evolutionism as a universal principle abiding in both the humanities and history: Although there are diªerences among these scholars’ ideas of evolution, there was also a continuous thread connecting them. There was first Laozi’s idea of natural evolution, which broke free from the creation legends centered on the gods. From that moment the age of legends was over and the era of philosophy had arrived. Confucius’s concept of “change” started from this point. . . . Later, Lie Zi, Zhuang Zi, and Xun Zi all inherited this model of evolution “from the simple to the complex.” The scientific thought of Lie Zi’s and Zhuang Zi’s times was more advanced than that of Confucius’s time. Scientists in Mo Zi’s time knew very well geometry, mechanics, and optics. . . . Therefore, the ideas on evolution in Lie Zi and Zhuang Zi were closer to being scientific than that of Laozi. . . . Both of them treated evolution as a tianming [heavenly command] without gods and therefore developed their thoughts regarding relying on heaven, accepting fate, conservatism, and pessimism. This led to Xun Zi’s and Han Fei’s advocacy that “man’s determination will conquer heaven” to break superstition. . . . However, they never expected that their ideas would be pushed to the extreme by Li Si.48

From natural evolutionism to philosophical evolutionism and scientific evolutionism, the whole historical horizon, in Hu Shi’s view, could be encompassed by the concept of evolution, which also demonstrated that people should adopt an active attitude in life and history. In short, the scientific principle of evolutionism was entirely adaptable to understanding society, history, ethics, and politics.

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The discussion of evolutionism ultimately was an evaluation of modern civilization. This evaluation and the anxiety it caused were focused on the question, Did the historical experiences of the modern West and the models of modernization derived from those experiences lead to historical progress or to calamity? Should China follow such models? In January 1924, an editorial in Science responded to the debate over science and metaphysics, summing up the editors’ assessment of the question and describing the crux of the issue: The whole world was shocked when the world war erupted in Europe. When people try to trace the origin of the calamity, they mistakenly blame the overdevelopment of material civilization for the conflicts of international capitalism. As a result, nineteenth-century thinkers such as Tolstoy and Nietzsche, who criticized science, have become today’s messiahs. Those who worshiped science for developing material civilization now attack it because of the same material civilization. China has been unable to escape this trend, which explains why there is an anti-science movement at a time when China is witnessing a bleak situation in scholarship and a decline in people’s living conditions. In recent years, domestic aªairs have been seriously troubled; customs are becoming decadent; the economy is listless; morale is low; people are suspicious of any reform or new scholarship; religious and superstitious thinking is on the rise—these are the domestic causes behind the anti-science movement. Today’s anti-science movement originates partly from international influences and partly from domestic conditions, but its roots are in mistaking science for Western civilization. We cannot blame science if the West has enjoyed the benefits of material development and then fallen into disaster, nor can we blame it for China’s problems and humiliation. The reason science is science is that it has its own intrinsic value that does not change with diªerent cultures. Material civilization itself is only for benefiting the people with resources; it does not teach people to kill. In spite [of these misunderstandings], the anti-science movement is in some ways beneficial to science. It breaks the habit of following science blindly and elaborates the true spirit of science. It awakens the consciousness of the advocates of science, making them aware that empty talk does not help. These are all needed medicines for today’s scientists.49

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This argument, reflecting nearly a decade of discussion in the pages of Science, was oªered as a reflection of the general agreement reached within the scientific community by the mid-1920s. In sum, while the contributors to Science saw science—and thus themselves as scientists—as modern, rational, and humane cultural forces, their caution in applying evolutionism to the realms of society, culture, and history reflected a more conservative or delimited embrace of modernity than that found among the contributors to New Youth, for example. In the face of the questioning of evolutionism, scientific civilization, and modernity that had arisen among Western scientific communities and intellectuals because of World War I, it became hard to believe in a simplistically linear description of historical development. Hu Xiansu and others’ questioning of evolutionism was ultimately expressed as a conservative cultural attitude and practical strategy that fit with the conservative and reformist political attitude of the Chinese scientific community dating from the late Qing period. This cultural and political attitude was diªerent from that of the humanists of New Youth. On the one hand, the scientific community needed to defend the dignity and universal significance of science, but on the other hand it had to distinguish science from the cultural and political attitudes and strategies of other communities. A similar position had been staked out in an article published in Science in 1918—Ren Hongjun’s translation of a speech that Maynard M. Metcalf, a professor at Oberlin University, had given to the Chinese Students’ Association, titled “Science and Modern Civilization.”50 Metcalf used Newton’s third law, that every action has an equal reaction in mechanics, to explain all natural and social phenomena, claiming that the driving force for progress was a balance of forces in mechanics. The significance of this mechanical explanation of history was that it meant that the description of historical progress was no longer linear, but the result of two opposing forces—although this opposition itself did not change the basic direction of historical development. What were these opposing forces in the social realm? They are the conservative and the reformative; the former perpetuates old customs and maintains the stability of society, and the latter stresses new

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knowledge and makes society progress. If we look for proper names for the two forces, then the former is traditionalism and latter is scientific spirit. In a society, the conservative and reformative forces should each nourish itself and work on the other. If one is absent, a balance will be hard to achieve. In the dark medieval ages in Europe, conservatism was deeply rooted, which led to a static society. On the contrary, the French Revolution was a time of reform. The chaos was uncontrolled, and the result was unbridled destruction.51

Metcalf here makes a compromise between conservatism and radicalism, providing conservatives a scholarly foundation in the midst of political and cultural radicalism. The significance of conservatism is not only in perfecting the new in the struggle but also in protecting and promoting social stability. According to Metcalf, conservatism is composed of both “the rational” and the “irrational.” The “scientific spirit” necessarily includes this first form of “rational conservatism.”52 This argument—stressing the importance of a rational, conservative element in the stable development of scientific progress—contrasted dramatically with the perspective of modern cultural radicalism. Such radicalism emphasized individual independence and emancipation and stressed that individual freedom was the premise for the formation of modern society. Recall, however, that in the context of republican China, one key step in the development of modern Chinese society was believed to be the building of a modern nation-state, a process in which the total mobilization of society was more crucial than individual development. Metcalf ’s discussion of the relationship between the individual, society, and the state was thus expressed as a scientific defense of conservative cultural politics: “An independent spirit is what a society relies on. But individualism can be a disaster if it is overemphasized. Conservative and radical, society and individual, they oppose each other and reply to each other, creating energy.”53 China, however, was understood to have been under the control of conservatism for thousands of years. “The most urgent thing for China is to advocate scientific spirit, so that those whose thoughts are biased can be more balanced. Only then will progress be possible,” Metcalf said.54 He concluded: “There is nothing more important to

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the individual or the nation than the discovery of truth and the will to follow it. China’s restoration relies solely on this.”55 Hence, a progressive historical view, after some modification, could provide a scientific foundation for conservative culture and politics. But although it criticized the application of unbridled evolutionism to the social realm, the Chinese scientific community never developed a profound critique of modernity and its temporal concept, the notion of linear historical progress. Its questioning of evolutionism did, however, arm this community with a more cautious attitude toward social processes and reform than that possessed by other contemporary intellectuals.

THE MODERN WORLDVIEW AND A NATURAL, TOTALIZING CATEGORIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE After much discussion, and despite their diªerences, members of the discursive community of science in early twentieth-century China managed to form a common, “objective” knowledge system. Two factors contributed to the important, even decisive, influence of scientific concepts on modern Chinese thought: first, the community consciously abstracted a universal methodology from specific research fields, and second, it believed scientific methodology to be the criterion by which to measure everything in both form and content. Modern thinkers strove to reinterpret the entire experiential field by applying scientific methodology, and such a totalizing reinterpretation urgently required a unified knowledge system—by which I mean that all knowledge, whether about nature, social problems, or the human psyche, had to be grounded in the same principles. In this sense science equaled exactly the whole of knowledge; scientific, social, and moral practices could be seen as one and the same practice. Consequently, such a knowledge system would redefine not only the content of knowledge but also another, related concept—that of practice. The debates surrounding the relationships between science and metaphysics, science and modern civilization, and science and evolutionism demonstrated that scientific knowledge could become the one and only knowledge, and scientific practice the one and only practice, only when scientific knowledge could provide a moral foundation and historical goal, cri-

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teria for social justice through objective discussion, and explanations for the psychological activities of knowing subjects, particularly as those activities pertained to rights, ethics, and beliefs. In other words, the whole of scientific knowledge must prove that all other forms or realms of knowledge and practice—whether moral, religious, or aesthetic—did not exist, that they could all be subsumed under science. This meant not just interpreting the origin of the universe and ethics through modern scientific models but explaining the whole of human history with such models. Establishing such a historical understanding, however, demanded a mustering of knowledge to prove that fields that had been viewed as unbridgeable in both traditional Chinese and modern Western thought in fact followed the same natural laws, and therefore that people’s understandings of those diªerent fields was merely a reflection of their looking at diªerent levels of the same knowledge system. This conviction that all fields could be unified under science was first expressed in terms of the relationships between psychology, sociology, philosophy, and science through the problem of whether science and scientific methodology could explain human mentalities and beliefs. The inaugural issue of Science included Zhao Yuanren’s article “The Diªerences between Psychology and the Material Sciences.”56 Zhao argued that psychology was the study of the natural and direct aspects of experience, whereas material sciences involved studying indirect aspects of experience. Psychologists studied the aspects of experience directly related to the individual and his or her existence, and material scientists, aspects that were unrelated to the individual who experienced them but which existed by themselves. Sociology, in Zhao’s discussion, was a branch of science: “Sociology is science. People who study it cannot see it as philosophy, or literature, or history. . . . The development of sociology is a result of the development of biology.”57 In terms of the relationship between science and philosophy, the Chinese scientific community held no unique opinions; its arguments came from discussions of related issues in modern Western thought and generally supported the assertion that philosophy was the methodology of specific sciences. According to this logic, after the Renaissance, along with the separation of natural science from classical philosophy and theology, philosophy gradually lost its status as a realm overarching all knowledge and was subsumed as an

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element of each individual field of science. In this vein, Science published Tang Yue’s translation of “Classification of the Sciences,” chapter 4 of J. Arthur Thomson’s An Introduction to Science, which divided the sciences into two major categories: the abstract, formal, or methodological sciences and the concrete, descriptive, or experiential sciences.58 Thomson’s abstract sciences included mathematics, logic, and metaphysics. Mathematics was the foundation of abstract sciences, and metaphysics was their ultimate end. Concrete sciences included five basic divisions: sociology, psychology, biology, physics, and chemistry, and each basic division had branches, encompassing anthropology, political science, aesthetics, psycho-physics, eugenics, oceanography, and so on. In this classification Thomson listed sociology and psychology along with the three other natural sciences as the “five basic disciplines,” and he integrated metaphysics into science, thus changing the Renaissance intellectual structure that posed science against metaphysics. He repeatedly argued for the relatedness of and interaction between disciplines, from nature to humankind, from biology to history. The ultimate goal was to construct “a purely rational worldview.” Through scientific classification, the Chinese community of scientists eventually established a unified, consistent worldview, or “a complete body of truth.”59 From belief, psychology, sociology, and physiology to all kinds of natural phenomena, from the subjects to the objects of cognition, everything was organized into an axiom-based worldview with disciplinary distinctions. Although the scientists recognized diªerences between the human, the social, and the natural, those distinctions were not in principle but only in category. More importantly, by borrowing certain categories, methodologies, and forms of training, they asserted that humanity could understand the world, which included themselves in it; humanity thus became part of the objective world. In this unified worldview, pure subjective intuition did not exist. If the development of the world had a goal, then scientific practice itself was conceived of as an action that fit the goal, an activity that created meaning. This was precisely how the scientific classification system provided the intellectual foundation for the May Fourth enlightenment movement. In that movement, the cultural conflicts between East and West were understood as a struggle between Chinese civilization and objective laws, and conflicts between civilizations were viewed as conflicts between diªerent knowledges.

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It is only in this context of a notion of science as all encompassing, unified, and objective that we can properly position the debate over “science and worldview” or “science and metaphysics” in 1923. In that debate, the unified scientistic worldview was challenged: the metaphysics school demanded further divisions, just as in the West, modern European thought had demanded division and reconstruction of the previously unified religious worldview. Weber called this process one of “rationalization.” What was diªerent in China was that whereas Weber was referring to the separation of modern culture and society from a traditional worldview, the process of separation in China demanded the emancipation of belief, ethics, aesthetics, and values from the “complete body of truth” of a modern scientific worldview.

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NOTES 1. A third publication, Critical Review (Xueheng), is also commonly associated with this debate and was the hub of the most culturally conservative scholars involved in it, such as the neo-Confucianist Liang Shuming. By comparison, the Science group could be seen as tending toward the center of the debate. But for the purposes of this inquiry into the delimitation of science and the humanities, the distinction between the Science and New Youth groups is quite marked and of great historical consequence. 2. Zhang Xiaoping and Pan Yanming, “Zhongguo jindai keji qikan jianjie (1900– 1919),” in Xinhai geming shiqi qikan jieshao, vol. 4 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), 694. 3. Ren Hongjun, “Zhongguo kexue xueshe sheshi jianshu,” in Wenshi ziliao xuanji, vol. 15 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 2. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: G. Braziller, 1972), 4–5. 7. Cai Yuanpei, “Wei Kexueshe zhengji jijin qi,” quoted in Ren Hongjun, “Zhongguo kexue she sheshi jianshu,” 9. 8. Fan Yuanlian, “Wei Zhongguo kexueshe jinggao rexin gongyi zhujun,” in Wenshi ziliao xuanji, vol. 15, 9–10. 9. “Li Yan,” editorial in the inaugural issue of Science, Kexue 1, no. 1 (January 25, 1915): 2. 10. Ren, “Zhongguo kexue xueshe shi jianshu,” 21. 11. “Li Yan,” editorial, 2. 12. Ibid. 13. Wu Fuhui, ed., Hushi zizhuan (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 101. 14. Lun Baihua wei weixin zhi ben and Zhongwai dashi huiji (Beijing: Guayi shuju). 15. Zhong Wenao was strongly influenced by missionaries and the YMCA and was a Christian. He worked as a supervisor for Qinghua students in Washington, D.C., distributing monthly stipends to them. He included with the checks propaganda materials such as “Do Not Get Married before Thirty-five” and “Abandon Chinese Characters and Use Alphabets.” Hu Shi disagreed with Zhong’s opinions and criticized him for not understanding Chinese and being unqualified to discuss the reform of the language. Wu Fuhui, ed., Hu Shi zizhuan (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 97–98. 16. Ibid., 98. 17. Ibid., 102. 18. Huang Zunxian, Xueshu zhi er. Wenxue [1887], in Riben guo zhi, vol. 33 (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1974), 816.

Discursive Community 19. “Fakan ci,” Kexue 1, no. 1 (January 25, 1915): 5–6. 20. Yang Quan, “Zhanzheng yu kexue,” Kexue 1, no. 4 (April 25, 1915): 356–57. 21. Tang Yue, “Kexue yu dexing,” Kexue 3, no. 4 (April 25, 1917): 404–6. 22. Ibid., 407. 23. Ren Hongjun, “Shuo ‘heli’ de yisi,” Kexue 5, no. 1 (December 10, 1919): 3. 24. Yang, “Zhangzheng yu kexue,” 407. 25. He Lu, “Kexue yu heping,” Kexue 5, no. 2 (February 10, 1920): 123–24. 26. He Lu, “Kexue yu heping [continued],” Kexue 5, no. 4 (April 10, 1920): 328. 27. M. E. Haggery, “Kexue yu gonghe,” trans. Yang Quan, Kexue 2, no. 2 (February 25, 1916): 151. 28. “Fakan ci,” 3. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. Huang Changgu, “Kexue yu zhixing,” Kexue 5, no. 10 (1920): 962. 31. Ibid., 964. 32. Wang Jin, “Zhongguo zhi kexue sixiang,” Kexue 7, no. 10 (October 20, 1922): 1022–23. 33. Huang, “Kexue yu zhixing,” 965. 34. Ren Hongjun, “Kexue yu jiaoyu” [Science and education], Kexue 1, no. 12 (December 25, 1915) : 1343–52. 35. Ibid., 1344. 36. Yang Quan, “Fei ‘kexue wanneng,’” Kexue 5, no. 8 (August 10, 1920): 852. 37. Yang Quan, “Tolstoy yu kexue,” Kexue 5, no. 5 (May 10, 1920): 427. 38. Ibid., 427–34. 39. Ibid., 434. 40. Ibid., 436. 41. Yang Quan, “Kexue de rensheng guan,” Kexue 6, no. 11 (November 20, 1921): 1111–19. 42. Ibid., 1112–13. 43. Ibid., 1119. 44. Ibid., 1115–16. 45. Hu Xiansu, “Darwin tianyan xueshuo jinri zhi weizhi,” Kexue 1, no. 10 (October 25, 1915): 1161–62. 46. Hu Xiansu, “Darwin tianyan xueshuo jinri zhi weizhi—Meiguo Stanford daxue Kellogg jiaoshou zaolun,” Kexue 2, no. 7 (July 25, 1916): 780–81. 47. Aldous Huxley, “Tianyan xinshuo,” trans. Qian Tianhe, Kexue 4, no. 12 (November 1, 1919): 1209–14. 48. Hu Shi, “Xianqin zhuzi jinhua lun,” Kexue 3, no. 1 (January 25, 1917): 40–41.

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Wang Hui 49. Fo, “Kexue yu fan kexue,” Kexue 9, no. 1 (January 20, 1924): 1–2. 50. Maynard M. Metcalf, “Science and Modern Civilization [Kexue yu jinshi wenming],” trans. Ren Hongjun, Kexue 4, no. 4 (December 10, 1918): 307–12. 51. Ibid., 308 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 310. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 312. 56. Zhao Yuanren, “Xinlixue yu wuzhi kexue zhi qubie,” Kexue 1, no. 1 (January 25, 1915): 14–21. 57. Bing Zhi, “Shengwuxue yu shehuixie zhi guanxi,” Kexue 6, no. 10 (October 20, 1921): 977. 58. J. Arthur Thomson, “Classification of the Sciences” [Kexue de fenlei], trans. Tang Yue, Kexue 2, no. 9 (September 25, 1916): 964–77. 59. Ibid., 974.

4 The Modernity of Savings, 1900–1937 brett sheehan

People without thought of the future will worry about the present. . . . If one has a suitable plan for the future then [savings] will certainly be a help to one’s undertakings—outside of [unexpected] obstacles. In addition, savings can make small change into a large sum, useful for the construction of the nation and [representing] the citizens’ great contribution to the nation. —beiping normal university student, 1934

To go from frugality to extravagance is as easy as diving in the water. To go from extravagance to frugality is as di‹cult as climbing to heaven. —zeng guofan

Any economist familiar with contemporary China can attest to the importance of individual and household savings deposits, but the roots of the institutional framework for household savings reach back to the early twentieth century and have received little attention either inside or outside China.1 Small deposits by individuals in Chinese savings institutions grew from less than 1 million yuan in 1914 to over 400 million yuan in 1933, a remarkable increase that reflected new institutional structures, patterns of urbanization and cultural change, and, for at least a portion of the populace, new notions of the role of savings in national identity and new relationships among savings, space, and time.

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China had a long history of financial institutions that accepted deposits, such as the indigenous, or so-called native, banks, but the early twentieth century marked the beginning of savings deposit products directed specifically at small, individual depositors. These new small deposits even had their own name in Chinese (chuxu), to distinguish them from deposits in general (cunkuan). The diªerences between chuxu and cunkuan may be hard for contemporary readers to grasp, but in republican China those diªerences were enshrined culturally and institutionally. Many banks that accepted cunkuan deposits did not accept chuxu deposits, and vice versa. Some banks accepted both kinds of deposits, but they segregated chuxu from other deposits with separate accounting and even separate reserves. In this chapter I discuss the personal small savings accounts of individuals and households called chuxu, which I translate as “savings” or “savings deposits.” “Deposits” alone refers to the more generalized cunkuan, but they are not my main topic. The idea that average people could and should deposit money in financial institutions emerged in China in the first decades of the twentieth century and spread rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s. Before then, most financial institutions reserved their services for large or commercial customers. Average people who saved could deposit money at interest with local shops, participate in rotating credit societies, or lend their savings out themselves, but the world of financial institutions had previously been oª limits. Here I look at the development of savings and savings banks and their relationship to the changing identities of some individuals in China during the key formative period before the outbreak of World War II in 1937. I rely on magazines and newspapers, advertisements, published collections of bank archives, and other contemporaneous sources about savings in China. Two of these sources in particular deserve comment. In 1934 the Sin-hua Savings and Trust Bank published two books in honor of its twentieth anniversary.2 The first was a general history of the Chinese savings industry, and the second contained the results of an essay contest in which Chinese savers had been invited to submit their personal “savings plans.” These two sources oªer a particularly bank-centered vision of the development and role of savings in China, published at a time when the government proposed new regulations for the industry. Both show the same self-consciousness about the key role businesspeople played in building a “modern” China that can be seen

The Modernity of Savings

among James Cook’s overseas Chinese (this volume) and the activities of the Chinese Travel Service in Madeleine Yue Dong’s chapter (this volume). These sources also show that savers, like Dong’s travelers, perceived tensions in the images of modernity they confronted daily, but, again as for travelers and overseas Chinese, the place of China within a competing system of nationstates loomed large for savers. I also make use of some of the important work that has been done on savings elsewhere, especially in Great Britain, the United States, and Japan, because many Chinese savings institutions were patterned on foreign models. Moreover, the notion of “modernity” is inherently comparative, implying that certain modern phenomena share characteristics across space and sometimes across time. How did the development of savings and savings banks in China reflect changes in the economic, social, and political environment? Who saved, and why? How did savings reflect people’s apprehensions about changing identities and practices of everyday life? What was “modern” about savings in China? I attempt to answer these questions in three parts, though the nature of the sources makes some answers more complete than others. In the first section I show that two contrasting models of institutions—the savings bank and the lottery-type savings society—competed for dominance in the growing savings industry. Eventually, savings banks came to dominate, but they grew as an integral part of the commercial banking industry, unlike the philanthropic, mutual, and cooperative organizations that had developed a century earlier in Britain and the United States. The Chinese pattern of institutional development fit more closely with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concerns about state building, though in reality savings could contribute only a small part of the funds needed by the state.3 In the second section I show that the growth of savings reflected Chinese patterns of urbanization, including regional patterns of commercial development, the treaty port system, the rise of a salaried or wage-earning urban class, the appearance of a new consumer culture, and the flight of capital from countryside to cities. The rise of this urban culture included changing identities for students, housewives in nuclear families, and petty urbanites. The third section finds that savings and savings institutions in China developed in close engagement with Atlantic modernity, especially as manifested in

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a new system of competing nation-states, the growth of specialized knowledge about finance, and the spread of consumer culture. In addition, for at least some intellectuals, government o‹cials, bankers, and savers, savings became linked to space and time in new ways. On the one hand, the everyday practice of savings became linked to debates over the proper relationship between time and capital accumulation. On the other hand, it became drawn into the notion that China was engaged in a race to catch up with the “modern” countries of the world.

INSTITUTIONAL GROWTH AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE The republican-period Chinese savings industry developed primarily through three institutional frameworks: banks, lottery-type savings societies, and the postal savings system.4 Of these, banks and lottery-type savings societies competed directly for dominance of the savings industry, while the postal savings system remained small, though still important. Savings banks emerged in China during the first decade of the twentieth century, and from the outset many were linked to state initiatives. As early as 1905 the Tianjin Guan Yinhao, founded by Zhou Xuexi, began taking savings deposits as small as one yuan from individuals. Zhou ran this financial institution as part of his overall reform program to promote Chinese industry and the strength of the nation, and after a trip to Japan he wrote that the ability of a small country like Japan to become so strong depended heavily on the development of banks.5 Although savings was only one part of the services oªered by the Tianjin Guan Yinhao, the links between financial institutions and state building were clear. Later, several merchants established specialized savings banks, as did the Qing Finance Ministry in 1908 when it founded the Beijing Savings Bank. After the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the republic in 1912, savings banks grew along with—and usually as part of—the emerging modern commercial banking industry. Some of China’s largest banks identified themselves as “commercial and savings banks,” the prime example being the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank (parent company of the China Travel Service described in Dong’s chapter), founded in 1915 by Chen Guangfu, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. Other commercial banks developed subsidiaries

The Modernity of Savings

that served the savings market. Two state-sponsored banks, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications, together founded China’s largest savings bank, the Sin-hua Trust and Savings Bank, in 1914. In addition, in one of the most innovative organizational structures, four commercial banks banded together in 1923 to found the Four-Bank Savings Society. Later, in addition to these subsidiary operations, the Bank of China, the Bank of Communications, and the four banks involved in the Four-Bank Savings Society all started their own savings departments.6 Considerably more controversial than savings banks, lottery-type savings societies flourished before being outlawed in 1934. A group of French investors founded the first of these, the International Savings Society (Wanguo chuxu hui), in Shanghai in 1912. Depositors purchased tickets and then made payments of twelve yuan each month over a period of almost fourteen years, for a total of two thousand yuan. Less a›uent depositors could purchase half or quarter tickets. At year fifteen, the depositor would receive the two thousand yuan back, along with a small amount of interest. Over the course of the fourteen years, the society held drawings every month to award prizes, usually amounting to a few yuan, but a lucky few could win up to two thousand yuan, and a very few could win “special” prizes totaling tens of thousands of yuan. If, during the fourteen years, depositors found themselves unable to continue making payments, their money would be refunded without interest and with a substantial penalty deduction, depending on the number of years over which they had made payments. For example, a depositor who had made payments for five years, totaling 720 yuan, would receive only 442.70 if he or she decided to discontinue the program. From a base of a few hundred depositors in 1912, the International Savings Society grew to more than 130,000 depositors by the 1930s.7 Following its success, lottery-type savings societies sprouted like mushrooms after a rainstorm, many without adequate capital or supervision. Some operators disappeared with the money after only a couple of years. Not all lottery-type savings societies deceived their depositors, but only two of them survived into the 1930s. One was the venerable International Savings Society. A young woman in Anhui Province described her mother’s experience with a lottery-type savings society. When she was a child, she said, her mother faithfully sent three yuan each month to a lottery-type savings society in

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Shanghai. Her mother put the money away as a guarantee against future misfortune and as a chance at winning money. As her mother explained, “they draw tickets every month. If we are lucky enough to win a first prize—several thousand yuan—well then child, wouldn’t that be great?” A few years later, the girl’s father died suddenly, and her mother was unable to continue making deposits. When she wrote to the savings society to withdraw what should have been several hundred yuan, she discovered that she could not withdraw the funds and could borrow only forty yuan against her savings collateral.8 Even savings banks could not resist the attractions of oªering lottery-type savings. Sin-hua oªered them oª and on in the 1910s and 1920s.9 In general, however, savings banks saw lottery-type savings as unfair competition, in violation of the rules of proper finance. Bankers frequently expressed the view that depositors should earn their interest in a slow and steady manner, rather than by becoming rich through luck. A 1923 advertisement by the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank expressed it eloquently by promoting “real” savings, in which deposits of twelve yuan a month for fourteen years could, with interest, accumulate to 4,900 yuan, “as diªerent as heaven from earth compared with other types of savings [in which] . . . you only get 2,000” (see fig. 4.1). In 1925, when the Portuguese-run Far East (Yuandong) lottery savings society went bankrupt, leaving depositors high and dry, the Shanghai Bankers Association called for the banning of lottery savings.10 In 1934 bankers would get their wish: o‹cials in the Nationalist government banned lottery-type savings.11 The government’s most direct role promoting the savings industry came with the establishment of the postal savings system. During the first decade of the twentieth century the Qing government sent twenty students to study at a specialized postal and telegraph school in Austria to learn how to administer a postal savings system. The dynasty fell before the government had time to set up the system, and the idea was shelved during the early years of the republic. Finally, in 1918, when Cao Rulin served as Minister of Communications, he oversaw the establishment of a postal savings system. It grew rapidly throughout the 1920s, though it attracted somewhat smaller deposits on average than did savings banks. As a result, total savings in the postal system lagged far behind that of banks and lottery-type savings societies. In 1933 the postal system had more than 150,000 depositors but only about 6 percent of total savings deposits.12 By comparison, lottery-type savings

4.1 The text reads, from right to left, “True Savings. Deposit 12 yuan every month and by year fifteen [you] can get 4,900 yuan, with interest, as diªerent as heaven from earth compared with other types of savings [in which] at the end of fifteen years you get only 2,000 yuan. Those who want to know details, please enquire at No. 9 Ningbo Road. Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank.” The remaining text lists branch locations and the bank’s membership in the Shanghai Bankers’ Association. This advertisement appeared in Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) 20, no. 13 (July 10, 1923): 418.

societies held 16 percent of total savings deposits, and banks, almost all of the remainder (table 4.1). Unfortunately, no statistics for lottery-type savings societies exist for 1914, but it is likely that such figures would show lottery savings and banks about equal in terms of total deposits. Both savings banks and lottery-type savings societies were quite new at the time. Clearly, though, by the 1930s banks dominated the savings industry in China, with lottery-type savings societies a distant second place and postal savings an even more distant third. The dominance of banks attested to their ability to capitalize on their large branch net-

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Brett Sheehan Table 4.1

Savings Growth, 1914–1933, in Thousands of Yuan 1914 Type of Institution

Amount

1925 %

1933

Amount %

Amount

%

Postal savings

—

0

7,747

13

25,397

6

Lottery-type associations

—

0

13,140

23

65,800

16

940

100

36,668

63

323,025

77

670

1

5,214

1

Banks and bankrun associations Trust companies Total savings

—

0

940

100

58,225 100

419,436 100

source: Wang Zhihua, Chuxu yinhang shi, table following p. 377. note: Figures for 1914 do not include values for lottery-type savings associations, because those organizations did not publish statistics at that time. As a result, total savings is understated and the percentage of bank-managed savings is overstated for that year.

works, their ability to engender trust among the general public, especially in urban areas, and their political clout with the Nationalist state.13 This dominance of large, joint stock corporations in the development of savings institutions in China contrasts rather sharply with the more philanthropic orientation found in early savings organizations in the West. Savings institutions first developed in England and Scotland in the early nineteenth century and then spread to the United States about a hundred years before they were adopted, or adapted, in China. In much of the Atlantic world, savings banks and societies grew initially as solutions to the social ills of industrial society.14 Savings promised a solution to poverty because many reformers assumed that the causes of poverty could be found in “alcohol, idleness, extravagance, early marriage, gambling, pawnbrokers, prostitution, and charitable institutions which rewarded laziness.”15 As a result, “the establishment of savings banks ought to be celebrated as a great event in the world, no less than the introduction of the compass, or the invention of printing,” declared Willard Phillips. This Boston judge and economist believed that the invention of a thrift institution by his generation could eliminate the problem of urban poverty in the nineteenth century.16

The Modernity of Savings

In the Atlantic world, savings institutions directed at small, individual depositors emphasized philanthropy and self-help. These philanthropic roots contributed to the wide use of not-for-profit forms of organization for savings institutions, including mutual banks, friendly societies, and building and loans. China, too, had a tradition of philanthropic savings societies, many of them intended to pay burial expenses, but they failed to play a large role in the developing savings industry in the republican period.17 With few exceptions, savings in China became the purview of large, joint stock companies, often with concurrent commercial banking interests. Indeed, bank savings departments and bank-managed savings associations often loaned their funds to the commercial sides of the business for investment.18 In part, the forms of organizational development in China mirrored trends abroad. For example, in both the United States and Europe, momentum by this time had shifted from not-for-profit organizations to savings banks and commercial banks that accepted savings accounts. In addition, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, individual and household savings all over the world had been transformed from a cure for poverty to a source of funding for governments—albeit a relatively minor source. In 1875 the cashstarved Meiji regime introduced postal savings in Japan, modeled on systems recently introduced in England, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.19 World War I proved to be a particular turning point, because the countries involved promoted savings to fund the war eªort.20 Taking advantage of savings for state building proved a challenge for Chinese governments. The small size of China’s postal savings system limited the government’s ability to access savings directly, leaving regulation of the commercial banking and lottery-type sectors of the industry the best means of using savings for state building. The Qing government first issued a savings bank law in 1908; it remained the only one in force for more than ten years. In 1928, the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Finance put forth a proposal for a new law, the most controversial proposition of which was the requirement that savings banks use 30 percent of their deposits to purchase government bonds and then place those bonds in the safekeeping of the state’s central bank. This proposal was not new. In 1915, Yuan Shikai’s Beiyang government had proposed a similar requirement, but it was never passed into law.21

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This requirement and other parts of the proposed law created a “storm of protest” in Shanghai as bankers moved to limit government influence over savings.22 After several more proposals from the government and counterproposals from bankers, the savings law came into eªect in 1934. In the final law, the government bowed to pressure only a little, reducing the reserve requirement from 30 percent to 25 percent.23 With more than 400 million yuan in savings deposits, the 25–percent reserve requirement ensured that at least 100 million yuan in savings-institution investments would be in government bonds. The reserve law may have forced savings institutions to absorb a significant portion of the 144 million yuan in new debt issued by the Nationalist government in 1934, but it hardly solved the government’s long-term financial woes and likely had little eªect in financing the 460 million yuan in bonds issued the following year.24 The controversy over the 1934 law provided an occasion for explicit discussion of the role of savings in the Chinese state and for specific comparisons between Chinese and foreign state building. A Central University professor stated the argument for the government’s viewpoint in an article written at the height of the debate over the savings law: “Savings institutions were founded [in England] to encourage savings among workers, laborers, and sailors, etc. . . . Laws promulgated by states are intended to provide order and regulation to the running of savings banks. . . . This is all so the state can protect the blood and sweat of the people.25 In fact, the British government required that savings banks transfer all funds to the state “for investment in government securities.”26 Nonetheless, the professor’s comparison elided important diªerences. Because British savings banks were originally intended to help the poor overcome bad habits of waste, the English government subsidized high interest rates in order to convince the poor to save.27 Thus, the reference to early nineteenth-century regulation in Britain was anachronistic and less than accurate. The early nineteenth-century British government subsidized savings banks. In China, in contrast, the real purpose of the 1934 savings bank law was not so much to protect depositors as to increase government access to bank resources by pressuring bankers to purchase more government bonds.28 In response to the new law, Chinese bankers rushed to cloak savings banks in the rhetorical protection of patriotism and nationalism. It was no coinci-

The Modernity of Savings

dence that the Sin-hua Trust and Savings Bank used its twentieth anniversary, in the same year as the promulgation of the 1934 savings bank law, to publish the banking industry’s views of savings in China and defend savings banks’ commitments to the nation. The Sin-hua History of Chinese Savings Banks opens with no fewer than nine prefaces, written by China’s most distinguished commercial and savings bankers. Song Hanzhang, the respected manager of the Shanghai branch of the Bank of China, who had managed the Qing-period Beijing Savings Bank in his youth, set the tone with his opening sentence: “Society is the bringing together of individuals and the state is the bringing together of society. From any viewpoint, people are the workers, society is the institutions of allocation [of resources], and the state is the institution of general [administration].” He added, “The savings enterprise is society’s enterprise.” Chen Guangfu, president of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, used almost identical language in his preface: “The enterprise of savings is one of society’s enterprises.” Similar sentiments echo throughout the book.29 Bankers who had adopted the Western, for-profit, joint stock corporate form described their activities in terms more appropriate to the philanthropic savings societies of early Atlantic modernity. Nonetheless, savings banks played a clear role in both state and society, but that role was also shaped by processes of urbanization out of the control of either bankers or government o‹cials.

URBANIZATION, URBAN IDENTITIES, AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SAVINGS From the beginning, the geography of the growth of the savings industry in China reflected the twin influences of the traditional locations of wealth and the emerging importance of treaty ports. A 1933 map published in the Sin-hua anniversary history of savings shows the distribution of savings organization o‹ces in China, with o‹ces clustered in the lower Yangzi region, on the North China Plain, in Manchuria, and along the eastern seaboard (fig. 4.2). The concentration of o‹ces in southern Jiangsu is particularly striking. In addition, savings organizations first established o‹ces in China’s largest cities, especially treaty ports such as Shanghai and Tianjin, and then spread outward into smaller towns.30 Most rural people did not have ready access to

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4.2 Locations of the offices of savings organizations in China, 1933. Source: Wang Zhihua, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi [History of Chinese savings banks] (Shanghai: Xinhua xintuo chuxu yinhang, 1934), after p. 348.

savings institutions, as is attested by several of the prizewinning essays in the 1934 contest sponsored by Sin-hua. One young boy who lived in a village in southern Zhejiang expressed regret because there were no banks nearby, and a young woman in Henan sent her deposits to Shanghai through the mail.31 Most savers though, lived in urban or core areas, and their savings patterns grew out of the urban milieu in which they lived and worked.

The Modernity of Savings

Although Chinese savers were concentrated in urban and core areas, it is di‹cult to assess which sectors of the population tended to save. Economists have advocated various models of why and how individuals save. Most explanations rely on one of three models: precautionary saving, life-cycle saving, and target saving. Precautionary saving is done to “smooth consumption over short-term variations in income.” Life-cycle saving is saving for old age and is usually characterized by deposits when the saver is young and withdrawals (decumulation) when old. Target saving is the accumulation of funds for a specific purpose, such as a purchase of durable goods, education, or real estate.32 Studies of savings patterns in Japan and the West, however, have rarely shown any one of these models to su‹ciently explain savings motivations. Japan’s high savings rates, especially, seem to defy explanation. Though showing a pattern similar to life-cycle saving, elderly Japanese continue to save, rather than decumulate wealth as the model would predict.33 In a review of the literature, Mervyn King cautions us to avoid monocausal explanations of why people save: “Although further study is required, there does seem to be evidence that the population consists of groups with diªerent types of savings behaviour.”34 Some groups may save for old age while others save for specific purposes. For example, an analysis of savings accounts in mid-nineteenthcentury Philadelphia showed that men acted primarily as target savers, whereas women, especially household servants, acted as life-cycle savers.35 The kinds of detailed information about specific savings accounts used by scholars in the West are currently unavailable for republican-period China. Still, observations about the relationship between processes of urbanization and savings, along with the Chinese sources that are available, can provide clues to general patterns of savings. Martin Gorsky’s conclusions about the influence of urbanization on the development of savings institutions in early nineteenthcentury England are instructive. He showed that the growth of friendly societies was “not so much an aspect of industrialization but rather of urbanization. . . . Hence the impetus for friendly society growth may have come less from the higher wages associated with new modes of work organization than from the social and insurance needs of a migrant labour force.”36 The relationship between urbanization and savings in China, however, was very diªerent from the one Gorsky described for England. Republican-period Chinese cities and core areas indeed attracted large numbers of migrants, but

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the available evidence indicates that relatively few workers and laborers saved.37 Statistics for the postal savings system show that in 1933, workers and peasants made up only about 4 percent of all depositors. Since the postal savings system tended to draw smaller-than-average deposits, this figure likely represents the upper range of worker and peasant participation. Savings banks, with their larger-than-average deposits, are even less likely to have had a significant bluecollar clientele. In addition, the savings plan essays published by the Sin-hua Bank contain numerous references to average people’s feeling intimidated by savings banks. As one Fudan University student said: “Many bankers are too arrogant; when you deal with them they like to talk like government o‹cials and make [displeased] faces.”38 If a student at the elite Fudan University felt this way, then one can imagine how a worker or peasant might have felt. In contrast, the postal savings statistics show that 12 percent of savers worked for the government, 15 percent were professionals, and 19 percent were businesspeople.39 These figures are consistent with two other aspects of Chinese urbanization. On the one hand, many migrants to Chinese cities were landlords and businesspeople. The so-called flight of capital from the countryside to the cities in the 1930s is a well-known phenomenon, and the Sin-hua anniversary history noted it as a significant source of deposit growth in savings institutions.40 Thus, it is likely that large numbers of rural businesspeople, traders, and landlords contributed to the pool of savers in republican Chinese cities. On the other hand, republican-period Chinese cities witnessed substantial cultural and social changes, leading to new roles for savings banks and a new place for household savings in shaping urban identities. The essays published in the 1934 Sin-hua anniversary volume My Savings Plan provide some insight into the relationship between savings and urban processes in China. Before analyzing them in detail, it is necessary to recognize that the essays contain at least three levels of bias. First, the several thousand entrants in the essay contest self-selected themselves; it is likely that only people who had a certain level of confidence in their literacy and knowledge submitted essays. Second, the terms of the contest defined the kinds of people who could enter. Essayists could enter in only one of five categories: primary school students, middle and high school students, college students, employed persons, and housewives. Because three of the five categories were for students, the sample is skewed heavily toward youths. Third, the twenty-three prizewinning

The Modernity of Savings

essays chosen for publication were those that the bankers who edited the volume thought best illustrated the ideals and virtues of savings. The essays thus do not represent a cross section of Chinese savers. Instead, they portray interactions among newly emerging urban groups—especially students, petty urbanites, and nuclear families—and the ideals of bankers.41 The twenty-three prizewinning essays show savers who most likely lived in or near a big city, had attained or were aiming for at least a high school education, were youths or young adults, worked or desired to work in salaried jobs in education, health care, banking, railroading, or government, and enjoyed a higher-than-average standard of living. Residents of the lower Yangzi region made up more than half the prizewinners—a total of fourteen. Most of the essayists had grown up in urban areas or nearby, and most of those who had grown up in the countryside had migrated to cities for school or work. Most of the students revealed their families’ above-average economic status with plans to save from pocket money normally used to buy snacks or cosmetics. Of the eleven essays by adults (the rest are by students), four were by teachers, and the only adult who comes close to being a manual laborer worked at a university in an unidentified job. Four of them mention the costs of one or two servants in their household budgets. In addition, the adults were predominantly young, having just graduated from school or having small children. Interestingly, when gender is specified, men and women seem to be about equally represented, except, of course, in the housewife category. Not all savers came from upwardly mobile backgrounds, however. Several essays included stories of people who had come from better-than-average circumstances but had fallen on hard luck, often because of the death of a parent. The woman from Anhui mentioned earlier, whose mother had lost her savings in a lottery-type scheme, is a good example. In addition, a few prominent essays are by people who were obviously poor, or at least had lower-thanaverage economic status.42 Many of the essayists were thus either petty urbanites or students who aspired to the petty urbanite ideal, as described by Wen-hsin Yeh.43 For example, regardless of their current circumstances, virtually all the essayists portrayed themselves as on the path of upward mobility, and of course they intended to use savings to accomplish that goal. One young health-care worker in Henan wanted to save in order to open her own maternity clinic. A railroad

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employee in Tianjin planned to save in order to buy a business, and several orphans used savings to pay for their education.44 Indeed, education was the single most frequently mentioned goal for savings. The importance of education for the twelve student essayists is obvious, but even among the adults, most planned on saving to further educate themselves or to provide for the education of children and younger siblings. Like Yeh’s petty urbanites, the adult essayists had been “deprived of formal educational opportunities after only a few years in school.”45 Nevertheless, they aspired to do better. The path of upward mobility presented in the essays was focused on attaining more education, a better house, or security. The saver aspired to the physical comfort and education available to petty urbanites in republican-period China, not to riches. In the West, too, petty urbanites played an important role as savers. Although reformers in the Anglo-American world viewed savings institutions as a remedy for poverty, most savers did not come from the ranks of the poor. Fishlow, in his study of British savings banks, found that by far the largest group of depositors was servants. Small tradesmen, artisans, and otherwise unidentified women and children were also well represented among account holders, but few members of the industrial working class had accounts.46 Likewise, “in his examination of depositors [in New York savings banks, Alan] Olmstead found that despite the preponderance of servants and workers among account holders, many were members of the middle and upper classes who held substantial balances.”47 Chinese petty urbanites faced dramatic changes in the family that influenced their savings behavior. In China, many May Fourth intellectuals “traced the root of Western strength to the nuclear family, a form that they believed fostered individual independence and enterprise. . . . They predicated the ideal upon free marriage choice, economic independence, and spatial separation from the extended family.”48 The housewives who wrote essays for the 1934 Sin-hua contest had a clear awareness of the model of the “small,” or nuclear, family (xiao jiating), though the reality was more complex than the ideal. The first-prize winner began her essay with the statement that “in our current circumstances, we are a small family [xiao jiating] that has not completely separated itself from the big family [da jiating].” Another entrant titled an entire section of her essay “The Situation of Our Xiao Jiating.” A third recounted the story of how she and her husband left the big family of her in-

The Modernity of Savings

laws to establish their own xiao jiating after conflicts with her husband’s stepmother. She expressed regret over the decline in their standard of living that this separation had caused, illustrating the increased financial fragility of the small family.49 The rise of the nuclear family meant a decline in dependence on the extended family for financial security, providing motivation for turning to other forms of social security, such as savings. At the same time, the growth of an urban-centered consumer culture helped shape the direction of family development. As Wen-hsin Yeh stated: “New ideas about home were bound up with new ideas about work. While urban men were fashioned into o‹ce workers and business employees, urban women were transformed into household managers and keepers of domestic bliss.”50 In China in the 1920s and 1930s the managing housewife emerged as an important ideal, and that ideal was closely linked to frugality and the role of savings institutions. That housewives made up one of the five categories in the Sin-hua contest is telling; the housewife manager had clearly emerged as an identifiable group that the savings industry wished to extol and target. Popular magazines at the time continually reinforced ideas about women’s role in household management. For example, a 1934 article on savings in the family magazine The Ark (Fangzhou yuekan) noted that “the stability of the family relies on the housewife,” and “women are the primary consumers in the family.”51 The savings plan essays of housewives indicate that the ideal housewife had the ability to construct complex budgets and keep the account books necessary for establishing a good savings plan. If a housewife did not know how to keep such accounts, the women’s journals and family magazines of the time often included tips on budgeting. A 1936 issue of The Ark oªered housewives detailed instructions for keeping accounts, complete with examples of account book pages (fig. 4.3). The recommended budget of course included amounts set aside for savings.52 All the housewife essayists took their role as family money manager for granted. One young woman used her savings plan essay to show how she established her role in planning her family’s economic life. A newlywed, she had graduated from high school in Suzhou a year earlier. Working as an elementary school teacher in Jiaxing, she began planning for the future. Unfortunately, her husband liked to waste money, saying, “My love, we’re newlyweds and we should enjoy ourselves a little. Youth is so precious. We are both

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4.3 Sample account forms for housewives, published in the Chinese magazine The Ark, 1936.

working hard; what does it matter if we spend a little more money?” She eventually convinced her husband to save by saying, “When people suªer, it is usually because of financial di‹culties. If [in managing] our finances, we save a little bit of our extra money for savings, then we won’t lack anything materially, and spiritually we would certainly be happy too! Then our small family can be happy and harmonious for a long time.” Her husband finally

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agreed, and she began saving for their children’s education, her role in the family finances assured.53 In spite of this woman’s firm ideas about the need for savings, she remained equivocal about the relationship between consumption and savings. She noted, for example, that although she and her husband wasted money, it wasn’t all that much. In addition, much of the “waste” went for products such as clothing material, cosmetics, artworks, and reading materials—all elements of the emerging consumer culture for petty urbanites in nearby Shanghai. Indeed, some of her most treasured possessions were the books and magazines her husband brought home on weekends from his job in Shanghai. Those reading materials included Young Woman, Good Wife and Modern Parents, all of which surely contained descriptions of and advice for living the preferred urban life.54 The writer was caught, then, between the competing demands of managing her household by saving for the future and participating in an attractive pettyurban lifestyle, including consumer pleasures. Her economic plan sensibly included both, with money allocated to establishing the household and to savings.55 Savings provided both financial security in the absence of the extended family and a means to finance the petty-urbanite lifestyle. For some, pursuit of the elements of the petty-urbanite lifestyle— education, the nuclear family, and consumer goods—entailed balancing savings and consumption. Others viewed the demands of urban society more ambivalently, debating the relationship between savings and modernity and at the same time questioning the nature of that modernity itself.

SAVINGS AND MODERNITY The sources surveyed for this chapter reveal a variety of viewpoints about the modernity of savings. Some writers argued that savings was modern and new. A 1914 article in Eastern Miscellany opened with the idea that “primitive man” did not save and that the ability to save was a mark of the evolution of civilization. The author pointed to the savings patterns of Western countries as a key to their power and advancement.56 Wang Zhihua, in the Sin-hua history of savings, began his preface by saying, “The savings enterprise is a product of the modern era.”57 The Central University professor who wrote in defense of government regulation of the savings industry in 1933 summarized

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in one sentence the fact that people had been saving since ancient times and then launched into a history of savings banks beginning in Britain in 1778.58 The article in the family magazine The Ark noted that “the modern family [xiandaihua de jiating] promotes saving as a fundamental cure for waste.”59 At the same time, many of the writers looked to older, more traditional roots for savings. The two Sin-hua volumes are liberally sprinkled with sayings and quotations from the Chinese tradition. A special favorite was the nineteenth-century o‹cial Zeng Guofan. Several essayists in the savings plan volume repeated the quote from Zeng that heads this chapter, and the editors of the book displayed it prominently as a section divider. Elsewhere, a Yangzhou middle school student quoted another Zeng Guofan saying: “None of the diligent and thrifty will fail to thrive; none of the arrogant and extravagant will fail to lose.”60 The Ark went farther back into the Chinese past by quoting the History of the Latter Han: “Economize and save [chuxu] to prepare for disaster.”61 Finally, some sources saw discussion of savings as an arena for critiquing the ills of Chinese modernity. The 1934 article on savings in The Ark noted: “In recent years there are more and more consumer goods. The introduction of new luxury goods has reached a remarkable level.” The author goes on to say that “savings is the enemy of extravagance,” implying that savings could oªset the negative eªects of the rise of consumer culture.62 The irony that this message comes in a magazine founded for the purpose of selling wool knitting yarn, a consumer good, goes unremarked. Elsewhere, in her savings plan essay, the young woman from Anhui stated: “I have seen the ordinary ‘dissolute boys’ and ‘modern girls’ [ gongzi ge’er, modeng guniang]. They only know how to indulge in dissipation [huatian jiudi], seeking pleasure until the dawn, without thinking at all about di‹culties in the future.”63 She, however, planned to save for the future and avoid the fate of those who indulged in modern pleasures to the detriment of their character. Clearly, savings lay at the heart of many discussions in republican-period China about modernity, tradition, and the future, though there existed little agreement about exactly what these meant. For some, savings and savings banks represented one more important institution on the laundry list of “advanced or modern practices.” For others, it represented the extension of ancient, or neo-Confucian, virtues, though we must hold open the possibility

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that they simply resurrected this vocabulary to justify something new. For some, the careful balancing of savings and consumption represented the means to achieve the goals of consumer society. For others, savings provided an antidote to the excesses of modern consumerism. Regardless of people’s perspectives, the everyday practices of savings forced students, housewives, and other petty urbanites to view social welfare and patriotism in a new way, even as they confronted growing consumerism brought about by increased urbanization and contact with foreign patterns of consumption. Daily economic choices became linked to greater issues of citizenship, national strength, and capital accumulation. Modern or not, savings took an important place in selfreflective discussions about China’s modernity, its past, and its future. Recent academic approaches to modernity have been as varied as the republican-period sources about Chinese savings. Most scholars have rejected the idea that modernity is merely the end stage of development for all societies or that all societies will eventually converge as they modernize.64 Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser outlined a “family of theories” of modernization and modernity, noting that “within this family of theories there are significant diªerences about whether modernization involves continuity or discontinuity, whether the theorist is relatively optimistic or pessimistic, and whether the ‘modern’ phase of social development has given way to some other era.”65 They declined to oªer a definition of modernity, concluding only that “above and beyond these diªerent assessments there is general agreement that modernity involves both rapid and all-encompassing change and that the origins of this process go back several centuries.”66 “Rapid and all-encompassing change,” though, provides no specific standard by which to judge the nature and direction of that change. Charles Taylor has called for an appreciation of modernity that locates it in specific historical processes that originated in the Atlantic world and involved “its own specific understanding, for example of person, nature, the good, to be contrasted to all others, including its own predecessor civilization (with which it obviously also has a lot in common.)”67 Taylor’s definition, though, includes no mechanism for analyzing the engagement with Atlantic modernity that characterized much Chinese practice. More usefully here, Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden located modernity in a specific cultural setting, à la Taylor, but also provided more specifics about the types of elements involved. They

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wrote: “We treat modernity simply as the intertwined emergence of capitalism, the bureaucratic nation-states, and industrialism, which, initiating in the West but now operating on a global scale, has also entailed extraordinary transformations of space and time.”68 Savings of all kinds played an integral role in republican China in the capital accumulation necessary for the economic growth associated with capitalism and industrialism. Chuxu savings, however, represented less than 20 percent of all bank deposits, even by the mid-1930s. As a result, an economist’s evaluation of savings and economic growth is of little use or interest here. Nonetheless, capitalism in early twentieth-century China also involved the development of an urban-based consumer culture and the need for a special kind of knowledge associated with the savings industry. In China the young and upwardly mobile petty urbanite aspired to the ideal urban lifestyle but wanted to achieve it with a certain high moral ground intact. In fact, savings is not necessarily antithetical to consumerism. As Sheldon Garon noted, “We err in representing consumption as unrestrained expenditure—that is, as the antithesis of saving. In the case of the United States during the 1920s, the growth of mass consumption was accompanied by calls for prudent family budgeting and consumer education from prominent home economists. . . . Even more so in Japan, several leading advocates of Western-style consumption simultaneously lectured consumers on the need to save.”69 Garon’s point is well taken, though it is not necessary always to try to reconcile such contradictions. The young housewife in China who attempted to balance savings with her urban lifestyle might fall within the scope of Garon’s rationalized household management, but the young woman in Anhui does not fit so neatly. She decried the decadence of “modern boys and girls” without oªering any “rationalized” justification. For these savers and other commentators on savings in China in the early-twentieth century, the modern was disciplined, rational, and scientific. It was also decadent, extravagant, and irrational. For or against, the interaction of consumer culture and savings created a new space for debate about modernity, even when the vocabulary of the debate drew on older precedents. At the same time, this debate became inscribed in everyday practices of savings and consumption, materializing opinions about modernity in economic decisions.

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Even more important than this arena for debate is the observation that the growth of the savings bank industry presupposed a certain kind of knowledge about how financial institutions functioned in the modern world. Anthony Giddens suggested that practices such as saving in banks are among the defining characteristics of modernity: “Every time someone gets cash out of the bank or makes a deposit, casually turns on a light or a tap, sends a letter or makes a call on the telephone, she or he implicitly recognises the large areas of secure, coordinated actions and events that make modern social life possible.”70 Savings banks did not invent savings in the Chinese context; financial institutions and deposit accounts had existed for centuries. Yet the spread of interaction between financial institutions and individuals other than merchants and other elites created a newly defined space of expert knowledge that students and petty urbanites were expected to master. Many of the essayists in the Sin-hua savings plan volume obtained their knowledge of savings from school, reinforcing the identification between the individual, the state, and savings. One primary school boy, the only essayist who lived in a village as part of a peasant family, wrote, “I know that there are such things as banks. I have read about them and my teacher has told me about them.” He had never seen a bank but had learned enough about them in school to understand the concept and compose a prizewinning essay. A Yangzhou middle school student expressed a similar experience: “Our school authorities pay attention to the working spirit of students, promoting frugality and savings.” One of the adults remembered that she and some classmates at her high school in Kaifeng had organized a savings society for students and teachers. In addition, a Qinghua University student said that he had been reading about savings in textbooks since primary school.71 Banks cooperated in these eªorts. For example, the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank participated in a “Students’ Savings Discussion Society” and even opened branch o‹ces in some schools.72 The use of education to promote savings was common in Japan and the West as well. School savings programs date back to the late nineteenth century in Europe, the United States, and Japan, but really took oª during the government-sponsored savings drives of World War I. At that time, the United States began its savings stamp program for school children, in order to support the war eªort.73 In

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China, in addition to school, many of the student essayists said they had learned about savings from their parents, and as I showed earlier, popular magazines directed toward women often included detailed articles about savings. Finally, bank advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and flyers provided a source of information. The Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank put considerable thought into its advertising program, and it advised local branches to tailor ads to suit the class and social background of local residents.74 At times, savings banks took an even more active approach to advertising. In the north, the “Tianjin Youth Frugality Society” actually had its own o‹ce in the local Sin-hua Bank building.75 Regardless of sources of knowledge, the essays in the Sin-hua savings plan volume reveal their authors’ detailed understanding of the technical aspects of savings, including types of savings and compound interest. Chinese savings banks oªered a bewildering array of savings accounts, including demand deposit accounts and a series of certificates of deposit that allowed deposits over time and a lump-sum withdrawal, a lump-sum deposit and withdrawals over time, deposits over time and withdrawal of interest, and so forth. Most of the prizewinning essays demonstrate thorough knowledge of the various types of accounts, showing that the bankers who selected the winning essays considered this important information for people to know. A Beiping Normal University student demonstrated his knowledge of the diªerent kinds of deposit accounts in his essay. After graduation, he said, he planned to work for three years before going back to school. So he decided to open an account that would allow him to make deposits for three years and then withdraw a lump sum. Then he planned to deposit that sum in an account that would allow him to make regular withdrawals over time to support his education. In addition, he planned to have a demand deposit account for emergencies and also made plans for a lump-sum deposit that would allow him to withdraw interest.76 All the information he used for his calculations of interest came from tables published by savings banks, and the careful reader of his essay can see a young man who intends to impress the contest judges as much with his knowledge of savings as with the viability of his savings plan. His strategy worked: he received first prize in the university student category. Many of the other essayists demonstrated comparable knowledge. The savings tables these essayists used to compute the figures for their sav-

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ings plans demonstrate a particular kind of skill and knowledge inscribed within a world regulated by calendars and precise notions of time. Calendars, compound interest, and precise definitions of time were not new to China, but the idea that ordinary people’s lives might be ruled by the relationship between the calendar and the savings bank was. If savings bank A oªered X amount of interest for savings plan Y, then saver so-and-so could use bank-published tables to determine how much to save for a house, for a child’s tuition, for retirement, or perhaps for the small luxuries to which petty urbanites aspired. Savings banks reinforced the idea that life should be lived according to scientific principles, and those principles relied on the precise measurement of time. For some, like the housewife who criticized her husband’s extravagance yet longed for the cosmetics and fabrics he brought home from Shanghai, understanding the relationship between savings and time was the key to balancing the competing demands of modern society. For others, like the woman who despised “dissolute boys and modern girls,” understanding the relationship between time and savings was a means of maintaining a moral stance in a rapidly changing world. Even those who opened lottery-type accounts linked savings with precise, though unpredictable, notions of time. On the one hand, lottery-type savings required regular and precise payments over as many as fourteen years. Missing or skipping payments could jeopardize the entire process. On the other hand, good luck in the lottery drawing could warp that regularity of time by yielding sudden, potentially grand returns. The controversy over lottery-type savings societies shows that the relationship between time and savings followed no predetermined “modern” track. Savings bankers argued that people should earn interest slowly and steadily, with predictable outcomes. In contrast, the wild popularity of lottery-type savings—introduced by Europeans—shows that a significant portion of savers were attracted by the idea of quick riches, uncertain and unpredictable as they might be. In the end, the outcome of the competition between savings banks and lottery-type savings associations—between diªerent notions of the relationship between savings and time—was decided not by the demands of some sort of homogeneous modernity but by the specific power structures of republicanperiod China. The prohibition of lottery-type savings was a long-sought goal of the banking community, and businessmen had proposed such a measure

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to the Nationalist government as early as the 1928 National Economic Conference.77 The government banned lottery-type savings in 1934 because of pressure from bankers and the state’s desire to access savings bank resources, not because one idea of time was more modern than the other. Instead, modernity lay in the fact that notions of time came to be shaped by the patterns of institutional development and state policy that grew as part of China’s eªort to compete with Western states under the influence of an increasingly pervasive system of nation-states and capitalism. The repeated comparisons that Chinese bankers, intellectuals, and savers made between China and the West reveal that savings had become linked to yet another aspect of time: the time that framed the race for supremacy and survival among nations.78 Savings and savings institutions began to show up as topics of discussion in China in highbrow, reform-minded publications in the 1910s. From the beginning, intellectuals drew close links between savings and China’s position in the competing system of nation-states. A 1914 issue of Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi) included an article analyzing savings in foreign countries and its prospects in China. Like nineteenth-century elites in Britain and North America, the author decried waste and extravagance, but his criticism did not stem from worry about the impoverished classes. Instead, he portrayed waste as a threat to China’s survival, and savings as the path to China’s salvation as a nation: “Three years of waste would certainly be enough to build a railroad system for all of China. Ten years of waste would certainly be enough to build a navy equal to that of the leading European powers. Alas, the people of our nation are asleep as if drunk and have not yet awakened!”79 A few years later, Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi) reprinted a lecture given by the banker Nie Guanchen to a group of young women. Nie concentrated on the moral and financial benefits of savings: “Some spend their money on tobacco and wine, some on gambling and games. They don’t know that in America some of the most successful people started poor but succeeded through savings.”80 Although Nie did not refer directly to China’s competition with the West, his allusion to successful Americans shows that he and his readers were well aware of the underlying competition and the need to use savings to meet the moral and financial standard set by Atlantic modernity. Thinking such as this led the Chinese state to sponsor savings banks—as well as the postal savings system—and to regulate the savings industry.

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Across all five categories, the winning essays selected in Sin-hua’s 1934 contest show that the image of the savings bank as a social and patriotic good now pervaded at least some segments of the urban populace, including students, petty urbanites, and xiao jiating housewives. One college student put it aptly: “It is necessary first to acknowledge that savings banks are not entirely profit-making organizations. Serving society is their greatest responsibility.”81 Clearly, in the tense atmosphere of 1934, the bankers who selected this as a winning essay were willing to suppress their profit-making motives, at least rhetorically. At the same time, many of the essayists displayed a close identification with the space defined by the nation-state. One primary school student in Shanghai proposed a savings plan to help the government buy warplanes to defeat Japan. The Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932 had left a deep impression on him, and he suggested that Sin-hua establish a “children’s aviation savings department.” From a diªerent perspective, the Tianjin railroad employee decried the quantity of imports on which China relied and advocated using savings to increase domestic industry. The Wuxi housewife repeated this theme, saying that all countries relied on savings to provide business investment. “In a country as poor and weak as China, with a society as unstable as China’s, promoting the people’s savings is naturally even more important.”82 In a similar vein, a Beiping Normal University student declared in his savings plan essay that “material civilization has the most important role in the advancement of modern [ jindai] civilization. . . . Construction of a country requires a huge amount of money . . . and the only way [to accumulate it] is for [banks] to absorb deposits and increase the amount of circulating capital [in the country].”83 Individuals had saved in China for at least as long as recorded history, but the combined development of savings banks and the competing system of nationstates allowed the simple act of savings to imply a personal identification with the space of the nation-state, in line with the terms of competition among nation-states that grew out of engagement with Atlantic modernity.

CONCLUSION The Chinese savings industry developed in relation to three important kinds of spaces: the nation-state, the urban context, and the realm of technical knowl-

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edge associated with savings institutions. Of these, the importance of the nation-state looms large. Government o‹cials founded and regulated savings banks for the purposes of strengthening China and accessing resources for government use. In addition, intellectuals, o‹cials, bankers, students, and petty urbanites alike used savings to a‹rm their identification with the Chinese nation-state. They did so in what S. N. Eisenstadt, referring to the West, called “a social and cultural order characterized by a high degree of congruence between the cultural and political identities of the territorial population.”84 The congruence between the Chinese cultural and political spaces emulated that of Atlantic modernity while simultaneously reacting against and competing with the Other of that Atlantic modernity. As in the cases of Cook’s overseas Chinese and Dong’s travelers, the patriotism of Chinese savers did not simply imitate foreign models but grew in acute self-consciousness of China’s disadvantaged position in relation to Atlantic modernity. For them, modernity was inscribed in a time frame defined by the race for victory in the competition among nations. In this regard, the comparisons extended beyond the Atlantic world to include Japan as well. Dong’s traveler to Dalian had witnessed Japanese colonialism, and the boy who wanted his savings to help the government buy airplanes had witnessed the danger China faced during the 1932 Japanese attack on Shanghai. In addition to its relationship with the nation-state, the Chinese savings industry developed in close relation with urban spaces. These included, on the one hand, urban geographical spaces, defined by traditional locations of wealth in the lower Yangzi Delta and the flight of capital from the countryside to cities, and, on the other hand, urban intellectual spaces, encompassing the aspirations of petty urbanites and the rise of the housewife-managed xiao jiating. Many of the savers profiled in this chapter lived in the lower Yangzi region, near Shanghai, but Shanghai did not loom as large in their imaginations as it did for Dong’s travelers. Shanghai may have provided an important model, but the petty-urbanite, consumer lifestyle could be achieved in any of a number of cities. Attitudes toward consumer culture were not uniformly positive, however; some wanted to use savings as a balance for, or reaction against, the excesses of consumerism. Yet even when people called on rhetoric from the Chinese past to condemn consumerism, the need to take a stand

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forced that rhetoric into a modern context, a situation also present in the case of Cook’s national studies scholars. Finally, savings developed in close connection with a particular discursive space and time defined by technical knowledge of the workings of savings institutions. Like Dong’s well-informed traveler, students and petty-urbanite savers exhibited detailed technical knowledge that demonstrated the growth of a new realm of expertise created by the demands of modernity. The modernity of time was neither completely standard nor predetermined, however, and savers of all sorts made choices between the steady, regular time of savings banks and the variable time of lottery-type savings associations. In the end, the Chinese government banned lottery savings, limiting, in the name of consumer protection and for purposes of state building, the range of choices savers had in the relationship between time and savings. The modernity of savings in republican-period China reflected changes in what Charles Taylor would call “background understandings” of the individual’s role in political, economic, and cultural space, as well as of the relationship between savings and time. There existed no hint, however, that these changes involved individualism and the rise of a public sphere, which Taylor implied made up an integral part of Atlantic modernity.85 The institutional framework of the Chinese savings industry, government policies on savings, the neo-Confucian rhetoric called on in the debate over consumer society, patterns of urbanization, and China’s place in the competing system of nationstates all reflected China’s particular historical conditions. Those conditions in turn reflected China’s constant engagement with Atlantic (and Japanese) modernity. Government o‹cials and bankers founded savings banks that utilized the capitalist, joint-stock form and state-building purposes of foreign savings banks of the early twentieth century and then, somewhat disingenuously, justified and discussed those savings banks by making explicit comparisons to the philanthropic and cooperative savings institutions founded in the West almost a century earlier. Bankers fought, and eventually won, their battle with lottery-type savings associations—often run by foreign representatives of Atlantic modernity—over the “proper” structure and role for savings in China’s economy and society. The Chinese savings industry also developed under the influence of pat-

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terns of urbanization influenced by Atlantic modernity, especially in regard to the rise of consumer culture and the xiao jiating family organization. The relationship between savings and consumer culture and the growth of the xiao jiating in turn created vigorous debates over the modernity of savings and of China itself. That debate, and debates over the role of savings in society and the state, took place within the framework defined by perceptions of China’s disadvantaged place in the competition among nation-states. In the end, although the Chinese savings industry had grown in engagement with the modes of production, consumption, and state formation commonly associated with Atlantic modernity, the modernity of Chinese savings was not Atlantic modernity.

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NOTES This chapter was made possible by grants from the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. The epigraph is taken from Wang Zhihua, ed., Wode chuxu jihua [My savings plan] (Shanghai: Xinhua xintuo chuxu yinhang, 1934), 54, 55. 1. For an example of works on savings after 1949, see Xiaoming Li, “Consumption Demand, Saving Behavior and Rational Expectations: An Application of Disequilibrium Modeling to China, 1952–1992,” Applied Economics 29 (1997): 1411–24. 2. The two books were Wang Zhihua, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi [History of Chinese savings banks] (Shanghai: Xinhua xintuo chuxu yinhang, 1934), and Wang, Wode chuxu jihua. In this chapter I use standard Hanyu pinyin spelling for all Chinese words except bank names, for which I try to use the standard English name or the spelling used by the bank itself during the republican period. 3. Household savings began to play an important role in China’s economy only after the period discussed in this chapter. Even by the 1930s, savings deposits accounted for less than 20 percent of total deposits in Chinese banks (15 percent in 1932 and 18 percent in 1933). Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 388. 4. Department stores, shops, and trust companies also accepted savings deposits, but they represented such a small percentage of the total that I do not discuss them here. 5. Hao Qingyuan, Zhou Xuexi zhuan [A biography of Zhou Xuexi] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1991), 100–103. 6. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 1, 2, 52–53. 7. Ibid., 266–85. 8. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 111–24. 9. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 69. 10. Dagong Bao, April 30, 1925. 11. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 283–85. 12. Britain’s postal savings system also attracted smaller average deposits than those of savings banks. See Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90. 13. On trust, see Brett Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times: Money, Banks, and State-Society Relations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14. Albert Fishlow, “The Trustee Savings Banks, 1817–1861,” Journal of Economic History 21, no. 1 (March 1961): 26. 15. David M. Tucker, The Decline of Thrift in America: Our Cultural Shift from Saving to Spending (New York: Praeger, 1991), 43, quoting an 1818 report by the New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism.

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Brett Sheehan 16. Ibid., 39. 17. In China, the only large savings institution that had any characteristics of a notfor-profit organization was the Four-Bank Savings Society, which provided profit sharing for its depositors. Nonetheless, the society was clearly a profit-making enterprise. According to its rules, it distributed 60 percent of profits to depositors, 30 percent to the four banks, and 10 percent to employees. In addition, the four banks earned interest on their capital contributions. See Zhongguo renmin yinhang Shanghai fenhang jinrong yanjiu shi [Finance Research O‹ce of the Shanghai branch of the People’s Bank of China], ed., Jincheng yinhang shiliao [Historical materials on Jincheng Bank] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1983), 101. 18. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 1–11, 73, chart following 376, 391–96. On the Four-Bank Savings Society, see Zhongguo renmin yinhang, Jincheng yinhang shiliao, 97–100, 106–10. 19. Sheldon Garon, “Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift: Savings and Frugality Campaigns in Japan, 1900–1931,” in Sharon A. Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 314. 20. Tucker, Decline of Thrift, chapter 7. 21. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 321–33, 405–13. 22. Parks Coble dated the law and the bankers’ protest to 1934, but actually the process began several years earlier. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), 171. 23. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 452–62. Banks had always kept a portion of their deposits in government bonds, though, so this did not represent an entirely new phenomenon. In addition, because savings deposits accounted for only a small portion of total deposits, the contribution of savings institutions to state coªers had limits. 24. Statistics follow Coble, Shanghai Capitalists, 165. 25. Zhang Liangren, “Chuxu zhidu zhi yantao” [Discussion of savings systems], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany] 30, no. 21 (November 1933): 23. 26. Fishlow, “Trustee Savings Banks,” 27. 27. Ibid., 27–30. 28. Coble, Shanghai Capitalists, 171. 29. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 1–3. 30. Ibid., 341–67. 31. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 6, 108. 32. George Alter, Claudia Goldin, and Elyce Rotella, “The Savings of Ordinary

The Modernity of Savings Americans: The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 4 (December 1994): 737. 33. Fumio Hayashi has developed a complex model of Japanese savings based on a modified life-cycle model that considers the desire of Japanese to bequeath wealth to their heirs. See his Understanding Saving: Evidence from the United States and Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), especially chapter 12. 34. Mervyn King, “The Economics of Saving: A Survey of Recent Contributions,” in Kenneth J. Arrow and Seppo Honkapohja, eds., Frontiers of Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 227–94. 35. Alter, Goldin, and Rotella, “Savings of Ordinary Americans,” 738. 36. Martin Gorsky, “The Growth and Distribution of English Friendly Societies in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review 51, no. 3 (1998): 499. 37. For depictions of such migrants in Shanghai, see Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), especially chapter 1; and Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), passim. 38. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 71. 39. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 241. The remaining depositors were military, 7 percent; postal employees, 5 percent; and unidentified, 36 percent. 40. Ibid., 7. 41. The essays also show how these savers learned about savings and the content of their often detailed and technical knowledge. I deal with these aspects in the next section. 42. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, passim. 43. Wen-hsin Yeh, “Progressive Journalism and Shanghai’s Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Enterprise, 1926–1945,” in Frederic Wakeman and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), passim. 44. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 109, 95, 106, 168–69. 45. Yeh, “Progressive Journalism,” 194. 46. Fishlow, “Trustee Savings Banks,” 35–40. 47. Alter, Goldin, and Rotella, “Savings of Ordinary Americans,” 740. 48. Susan L. Glosser, “The Contest for Family and Nation in Republican China” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 7. 49. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 125, 150, 166. 50. Wen-hsin Yeh, “Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City,” China Quarterly (June 1977): 394. 51. Jin Ying, “Jiating yao bu yao chuxu ne?” [Should families save?], Fangzhou Yuekan [The Ark], no. 7 (December 1934): 21.

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Brett Sheehan 52. Zitai, “Jiating jizhang shu” [Household bookkeeping techniques], Fangzhou Yuekan [The Ark], no. 31 (December 1936): 22–25. 53. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 150–53. 54. Ibid., 152. 55. Ibid., 159. 56. Anonymous, “Lun woguo dang yangcheng jixu zhi feng” [On getting our nation to cultivate savings and accumulation], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany] 19, no. 9 (March 1914): 36. 57. Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, ninth preface, 1. 58. Zhang, “Chuxu zhidu zhi yantao,” 23. 59. Jin, “Jiating yao bu yao chuxu ne?” 22. 60. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 36. 61. Jin, “Jiating yao bu yao chuxu ne?” 21. 62. Ibid. 63. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 120. 64. For a discussion of changing academic views of modernity, see S. N. Eisenstadt, “Introduction,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Patterns of Modernity, vol. 1, The West (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 1–11. 65. Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, “Introduction,” in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 12. 66. Ibid., 14. 67. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Hastings Center Report 25, no. 2 (March-April 1995): 24. 68. Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, “NowHere: An Introduction,” in Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, eds., NowHere: Space Time and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2. 69. Garon, “Fashioning a Culture,” 323. 70. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 113. 71. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 5, 28, 106, 56. 72. Zhongguo renmin yinhang Shanghai fenhang jinrong yanjiusuo [Finance Research Institute of the Shanghai branch of the People’s Bank of China], ed., Shanghai shangye chuxu yinhang shiliao [Historical materials for the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1990), 114, 115. 73. Tucker, Decline of Thrift, chapter 7. 74. Zhongguo renmin yinhang, Shanghai shangye, 433. 75. Beiyang huabao [Beiyang Pictorial News], March 4, 1933, 3.

The Modernity of Savings 76. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 43–55. 77. The National Economic Conference proposal for savings banks is reprinted in Wang, Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi, 490–93. On the background of the conference, see Coble, Shanghai Capitalists, 49–51. 78. On this idea of time in the Chinese case, see Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 79. Anonymous, “Lun woguo,” 36–37. 80. Nie Guanchen, “Chuxu tan” [Speaking on savings], Funü zazhi 4, no. 6 (August 1918): 6. 81. Wang, Wode chuxu jihua, 70. 82. Ibid., 19–20, 97, 145. 83. Ibid., 54. 84. Eisenstadt, “Introduction,” 7. 85. Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” passim.

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5 Reimagining China Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and a Transnational Modernity

james a. cook In a February 1920 article titled “Twentieth-Century Overseas Chinese,” an overseas Chinese originally from the Fujian port city of Xiamen argued that what overseas Chinese (huaqiao) needed was to get away from the “falseness” of Western society.1 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the author claimed, overseas Chinese had turned the “wilderness of Southeast Asia [Nanyang]” into a “commercial paradise.” Since that time, owing to increasing contact with Western cultural forms and systems of education, many overseas Chinese had lost their cultural heritage and Chinese identity. The writer caustically commented: “We must return to the success of the values that have allowed us to achieve so much as overseas merchants.” The “splendid greatness” of Europe and the United States, evidenced by the Western colonial imprint on Southeast Asia, made it obvious that the Chinese people would need to understand Western science and technology. “However,” the author cautioned, “Chinese identity should not rush to embrace Western values.” What was needed, instead, was “a sense of Chineseness that would embrace China’s historic past and ancient cultural values while allowing us Chinese to continue to prosper in the modern world.” This identity would be constructed around the following values: Personal rectitude [zheng ji]—If we take the personal rectification of the individual as the most important goal, then the great dreams of overseas Chinese, like the wind and the rain, will travel far. Commercial success alone cannot make us good people. For a family to be well-oª, it must also have dreams.

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For one’s name to grow, one must avoid conceit. Thus, for the spirit of overseas Chinese to grow, we must rectify ourselves and then bring that spirit back home to China. Favoring the group [ hui qun]—People all live within a society. None of us alone are capable of producing our own food or clothing, and in our day-today lives we cannot avoid receiving the favor of the masses. Our nation’s public morality [ gong de] has been weak. . . . If we are to become leaders, we must focus on more than just ourselves, but on the society and world around us. Patriotism [ai guo]—The world of the twentieth century is made up of diªerent races in competition. . . . No one reason can account for the weakness of our Chinese nation and the cruelty and insults inflicted upon us. I would argue that the [main] cause of our weakness is a lack of a strong patriotism. Our nation is one of the earliest ever founded. Moreover, our land is rich, our history is civilized, and our culture is great in comparison with other nations of the world. If overseas Chinese really love their country they will work on investing to save the nation and revitalize industry for a strong China.2

The mixture of patriotism, philanthropy, and moral rectitude that composes the author’s view of a twentieth-century huaqiao provides an insight into a transnational Chinese identity that stood at the heart of the relationship between Xiamen and its overseas Chinese community. Xiamen’s returned huaqiao characterized themselves as “modernizers” (xiandai hua zhi ren) who sought to remake the city according to their own imaginings, which had been heavily influenced by time spent in the colonies of Southeast Asia. In time their experiences in Nanyang would be invoked as the basis of a distinctively transnational modernity that would, during the 1920s, increasingly tie the city of Xiamen to the outside world in new and diªerent ways.3 Located on China’s southeast coast, Xiamen (often called Amoy by local inhabitants) had long stood as one of the poles of the huaqiao universe. Local merchants had already developed a well-defined trading network by the thirteenth century, and more than 2 million people had departed the city for Southeast Asia since the mid-nineteenth century.4 The global scope of Xia-

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men’s merchants and their trading networks, the people’s historical roots in diaspora and international commerce, and the distinctive nature of huaqiao “Chineseness” combined to produce a narrative of community and development. In other words, by the republican era the process of leaving and returning that typified the sojourner experience of Xiamen’s huaqiao had become the foundation of a transnational and diasporic modernity that would flower throughout the region. While this vision of the future shared important similarities with the centralizing tendencies of the Guomindang (GMD) and the more Westernized concepts of modernity emanating from Shanghai, its transnational nature was ultimately at odds with the centralizing tendencies of the nation-state and brought with it a diªerent vision of China’s future.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSNATIONAL HUAQIAO IDENTITY During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rapidly modernizing cities of China’s southeast coast, such as Xiamen, became increasingly linked to the global forces of commerce and colonialism.5 Trade, imperialism, and the pull of opportunity in the colonial environs of Southeast Asia produced new tensions felt throughout the coastal cities of China. The eªect of these forces was particularly pronounced in Xiamen, a city whose entire structure had served as a conduit for international trade since its birth in the late fourteenth century as Yincheng, or City of Silver.6 By the twentieth century these linkages had given birth not only to an enormous and thriving trade and cultural network but also to specific huaqiao visions of “modernity” and the Chinese nation. These overseas Chinese images of “China” diªered significantly from the standard GMD trope of an increasingly centralizing nationstate wed to a continental ideal and Han ethnic purity.7 The transnational modernity of Xiamen’s huaqiao was ultimately based on the maritime and diasporic experience of the Hokkien (southern Fujianese) people, which had developed in a colonial Southeast Asian climate that was “modern” yet hostile to the overseas Chinese presence. William Safran has argued that because of their fundamentally transnational character, diasporas have resisted traditional conceptions of national identity through their fluidity and “their ability to link the local and the global to both the past and present.”8 In republican Xiamen, the evolving construc-

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tion of a transnational modernity incorporated the diasporic experience of the Hokkien as a mythic historic experience that could bind China to Southeast Asia, forging a transcendental culture for the entire region. This transnational imagery also influenced the city in more concrete ways: city planning, administration, and education all reflected the intense bond with the outside. In Xiamen, therefore, the emerging modernist imagery and discourse was directed outward, across the ocean toward the Asian Pacific Rim. This transnational huaqiao identity diªered in important ways from traditional national and ethnic identities that were more closely linked to the geographic entity of the Chinese nation-state. Indeed, its entire relationship with the homeland was ambiguous and tense with contradictions. Instead of attaching itself to a discrete piece of territory, huaqiao transnationalism was focused on movement and border crossing. It saw “China” not as a self-contained entity with the Yellow River as its ethno-cultural core but within a framework of coming and going that integrated China into a global vision that imagined the world as a sphere of increasing movement and interconnectedness. While this imagery dictated a more ambivalent relationship to the state and national territory than that found in typical models of nationalism, huaqiao transnationalism did not entirely forsake its relationship with a territorial entity.9 China—and Xiamen and Fujian Province in particular—remained a place of strong cultural, familial, and sentimental attachment, not to mention economic and political interest. More specifically, what were the elements of a transnational huaqiao identity? Huaqiao identity is an ethnic identity formed through the practice of movement in and out of China along with a self-conscious revision of Chinese and Fujian history and notions of cultural characteristics. Although many versions of provincialism circulated in China during the republican era, they tended to interact with the hegemonic story of Han purity arising from the Yellow River and to attach themselves to a discrete piece of territory (Guangdong, Shandong, Rehe, etc.).10 The huaqiao narrative was in many ways similar to other regionalist ethnic narratives that aimed to rearticulate Han chauvinism for their own purposes, but important characteristics distinguished the huaqiao version from these other forms of provincialism. These characteristics included a valorization of wanderlust, or a spirit of adventure, that permitted both a strong sentimental attachment to one’s homeland and

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a desire for exploration and maritime activity; the celebration of a commercial acumen wedded to a Confucian ethical core that saw mercantile activity as an honorable and desirable activity; and a historically and experientially formed savvy about trade, Westernization, and modernization that developed out of overseas Chinese experiences in Southeast Asia. These qualities stood in contrast to or redefined the hegemonic ethnic essentialisms typical of republicanera provincialisms and nationalisms. This transnational vision of modernity would play itself out in mid-1920s Xiamen in many diªerent ways. In the rest of this essay I examine not only the manufacturing of cultural and historical myths but also more concrete manifestations of huaqiao identity. For example, visions of that identity were particularly evident in Xiamen’s urban modernization—the rebuilding of a city that had been known in Western circles as the “dirtiest port in the world” into a vibrant commercial hub that could “move with the times.” In reviewing the diªerent manifestations of a transnational huaqiao modernity, it becomes increasingly apparent that the relationship between modernization eªorts and the national territorial entity of China was extremely complicated. Certainly there existed a degree of interdependence between the two and contestation over them. Overseas Chinese were not opposed to a strong territorial nation-state; indeed, they helped forge and support one. But when that state denied them the economic and territorial protection they wanted—when the state essentially asked them to sacrifice their interests in order to give it more time to consolidate its power in the face of Japanese imperialism—Xiamen’s overseas Chinese had an unbounded transnational network to fall back on. Although the GMD was happy to accommodate huaqiao transnational activities, a point existed at which those activities became counterposed to GMD control. Conflict was perhaps not inevitable, but it was clearly possible given the already fragmented regional politics of republican-era China. For example, local warlords mobilized regional identities when they felt a need to threaten the center with splitting. In Xiamen, this process exploded into the Fujian Rebellion of 1933. In many ways Xiamen’s huaqiao became “bridges to modernity” who moved into and out of China. Time spent in a modernizing Southeast Asia led many returned huaqiao to feel that they alone understood the process of modernization and the way to create a truly Chinese modernity. Ultimately, their

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new discourse of modernization was constructed around the commercial wealth of overseas Chinese merchant life and integrated with a revamped Confucianism and a newly discovered historical tradition. True, it was similar to other modernities in that it attempted to establish a state and an ideological structure that enabled a ruling class to ensure its domination over other parts of society. Yet we should not hasten to categorize it as just another brand of 1920s provincialism. Huaqiao merchants saw themselves, rather than Western missionaries, Chinese radicals, or the Nanjing government, as the “bringers of enlightenment,” and Xiamen as a model for a “new China.” “What we are accomplishing here,” noted Xiamen’s huaqiao mayor Xu Youchao (Eduardo Coseteng), “is building not just a Hokkien future but a future for all of the motherland.”11 Certainly the huaqiao used as their tools the instruments of Southeast Asian colonialism, but their goal vis-à-vis colonialism was ambivalent: to build a China that could stand against foreign imperialism at home while working in many ways as a colonial power in Nanyang. Today, as we see overseas connections begin to revive themselves across southeast coastal China, it becomes increasingly apparent that we must understand the nature of this original “southern wind” (nan feng) if we are to understand the contemporary changes aªecting this increasingly vital region.12

THE HOKKIEN NAN FENG (SOUTHERN WIND): THE CHINESE DIASPORA REACHES OUT The people of southern Fujian, the Hokkien, were the forerunners of the millions of Chinese who would settle in foreign lands over the centuries. Long before the New World gold rushes and the insatiable demand for coolies in the Americas in the 1850s, Hokkien had already established themselves throughout Southeast Asia. The traders of Xiamen had established bases in Singapore, Penang, Batavia, and Manila and were well prepared when the first Westerners began to call on their ports by the middle of the fifteenth century.13 Westerners discovered a well-established overseas Chinese mercantile community that commanded commerce throughout the region and had integrated commercial relations in the region around the China market. “Where one roams in these fair and beautiful isles,” noted a Spanish missionary in eighteenth-century Manila, “one is bound to find the Sangley.”14 Thus, by the time the Cantonese

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arrived in Canada and the United States to build railroads and pan for gold, the Hokkien had become the middlemen in the vast trade that was the engine behind the development of Southeast Asia.15 At first glance it might appear that the arrival of Western colonialism challenged Hokkien dominance of the Nanyang economy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It was not exactly the case, as the cliché has it, of the Europeans holding the cow while the Chinese milked her, but it is certainly true that as European colonial demands stimulated the exploitation and export of raw materials, and as the hinterlands were incorporated into the geographical framework of Southeast Asian colonialism, business burgeoned for Hokkien merchants. For example, in the Philippines, Hokkien traders were primarily responsible for the initial opening up of the Luzon countryside for Western merchants, leading to a tenfold increase in Philippine exports between 1855 and 1902.16 The arrival of colonialism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southeast Asia also meant the establishment of modern, colonial state structures and economies throughout the region. Many incisive analyses of the colonial state already document the massive reordering of native societies under European colonialism.17 European colonial regimes attempted to intervene in ways that had never been attempted by traditional rulers. For example, movement, production, and consumption were decentralized and commoditized in order to feed labor into the Southeast Asian plantation system, which became ubiquitous throughout the region during the first two decades of the twentieth century.18 The same desire for control and productivity manifested itself in the rebuilding of colonial metropolises. As Marx predicted in the Manifesto, “Whole populations were conjured out of the ground” in cities such as Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, and Saigon. Each labor center was characterized by the need for order: the creation of a system of regular, open streets for the movement of goods and people, and the institution of systems of public health and schooling for the development of a pliant source of labor. This new conception of power not only operated by setting limits on behavior and laying down channels of proper conduct but also attempted to introduce new disciplinary ideologies within native cultures. It is important to recognize that Xiamen’s merchants stood as a colonial middle class within this new social order. They were placed simultaneously in

Reimagining China

a position of subordination in their relations with colonial rulers and in a position of dominance vis-à-vis indigenous populations. It was in this political and economic middle ground that wealthy huaqiao began to construct the visions and practices of a new transnational modernity located between the foreigner and the native laborer, between China and Nanyang.19 Furthermore, by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, several factors had begun to spur a dramatic shift in the way overseas Chinese thought about their identity vis-à-vis China. These factors included revolutionary movements and the fall of the Qing dynasty, which made huaqiao participation in political leadership a possibility in a new Chinese republic; the important economic position that many huaqiao businessmen came to occupy during the Great War years; and the push of post-1919 Western racism, which mirrored the betrayal of Asian nationalists at Versailles. By 1919 many overseas merchants could be characterized, as Philip Kuhn has noted, as “partners in colonialism.”20 Yet they were far from equal partners. Stamford Ra›es, the famous British colonial administrator, described the overseas Chinese as “in all ages equally supple, venal, and crafty . . . a dangerous people, a pest to the country that we should eradicate.”21 Ra›es’s blatantly racist vision of overseas Chinese was also a critical prop in the moral justification of Western colonial control. Western administration was necessary not only to further economic exploitation but also to save the “native populations from the venality of the crafty Chinese.”22 Despite Western desires to eradicate overseas Chinese economic influence in Southeast Asia, however, colonialism continued to depend upon Hokkien merchants and laborers for the economic exploitation of the Southeast Asian countryside. The more interventionist European colonial state of the twentieth century was increasingly motivated by a desire to reverse the situation. This became increasingly evident after 1919, when the need to harness as much colonial profit as possible for the rebuilding of the European metropole became the stated goal of every colonial administration. At the same time, many administrators attempted to take advantage of the wealth of overseas Chinese merchants for their own benefit. “The Chinese merchant community,” noted one colonial o‹cial, “is like a ripe [rubber] tree ready to be tapped. All we need do is slice her open.”23 A weak Chinese government and a lack of legal status in their host countries meant that many overseas Chinese were vul-

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nerable to predatory behavior by local administrators. No wonder many huaqiao lamented this sudden turn of events: “I, for the people of China, have been able to endure the slights of [colonial o‹cials] for decades,” remarked the wealthy huaqiao merchant Huang Yizhu. “I have worked hard and endured many hardships in order to help my country and pay homage to my parents, yet even this is now being taken from me. As sojourners in a strange country we have long endured harsh laws in order to make our parents and country respected. Has this all been in vain? Am I not a real man?”24 Increasingly shut out of political power by European colonialism, overseas Chinese turned to leadership within Chinese social and cultural circles in order to develop political capital. Temple societies, clan societies, huiguan (native place societies), and schools became important arenas in which overseas Chinese could establish their reputations.25 Such activities garnered them fame and admiration in community circles, but many felt cheated over their inability to influence politics because of racist and exclusionary policies put into eªect by Western administrators. Racism, many Hokkien merchants felt, was a key factor in their exclusion from political power throughout Southeast Asia. “We labor for the white man,” complained one wealthy huaqiao, “yet he feels it is beneath him for us to keep his company.”26 By 1923 a wave of returnees had begun to pour back into China to escape this inhospitable colonial climate. Returnees were also attracted by the new opportunities for domestic investment and the wave of patriotism that developed in the wake of the May Fourth movement. At the same time, the many huaqiao organizations that had emerged since 1900 were experiencing great pressure to put China’s aªairs ahead of local concerns as a way of counteracting the attacks of colonial administrators. The most vocal of these associations were the Huaqiao Salvation Societies, which quickly became leading political forces throughout Southeast Asia Chinese communities during the 1920s.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF XIAMEN’S TRANSNATIONAL MODERNITY As overseas Chinese merchants found their position in Southeast Asia increasingly tenuous, a project arose among Hokkien intellectuals there and in

Reimagining China

Xiamen to “create a new past and present for China based upon the Nanyang experience.”27 This project was distinctly diasporic in that it centered the maritime experience of Xiamen’s émigré community as the founding myth of a new modernity rather than assigning it to the margins of “national” histories. It attempted to root a new Chinese modernity in a past of maritime exploration and trade while simultaneously revamping Confucianism to stand as a “complete system of culture” and ethics suitable for modern China, in contrast to Western materialism.28 Xiamen University’s Institute of Sinology (Guoxue Xueyuan) was one of the centers that took the lead in developing and propagating research critical to this intellectual project. Founded in 1926 and staªed by luminaries such as Lin Yutang and Gu Jiegang, Xiamen University’s Institute of Sinology was managed by the noted scholar Shen Jianshi. Shen, who had previously managed Peking University’s Institute of Sinology, assembled a group of scholars who pursued the “linguistic and historical origins of China’s national essence [guocui].”29 Working with the full support of the university’s largely huaqiao administration, Shen and his followers probed the origins of ancient Chinese culture, attempting to justify its significance in relation to China’s development in a modernizing world. The philosophical basis of the National Studies movement, in which Gu and Shen had long played a central role while at Peking University, was the reconstruction of China’s historical image. This was to be accomplished by getting away from one part of the past in order to associate the present with another. To build a new China also meant the construction of a new past. Xiamen University’s Institute of Sinology focused on rewriting Chinese history with an emphasis on maritime trade and exploration by moving the ancient trading cultures of Fujian to the center of Chinese history. More specifically, the Min tribes of the Zhou dynasty and the Yue kingdom of the Song dynasty were presented as focal points of an increasingly “vibrant and historically rich Hokkien culture.”30 While some scholars unearthed relics from the area’s Neolithic aboriginal culture, others studied the linguistic roots of the South Fujian dialect. What had previously been viewed as a “barbarian” variant of Chinese culture was now transformed into an equally valid historical tradition that could compete with both the Yellow River civilization of the northern plain and Western modernity. The eªorts of Xiamen University’s Institute of Sinology laid the ground-

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work for the imagining of a new historical tradition based on a heritage of maritime trade, “exploration,” and colonial expansion just as majestic as that of the West. According to this narrative of Chinese history, the earliest settlers practiced agriculture in the valleys of Fujian during the Neolithic period but quickly became attached to a maritime existence. This tradition soon became the basis for major diªerences between northern and southern cultures in China. Northern China had grown up around the central plain and had resisted foreign contact; southern China was much more cosmopolitan and open to international trade and contact. The disparity reached new heights during the Tang and the Song dynasties, when the bustling port and commercial center of Quanzhou attracted visitors from all over the globe and quickly became the capital of maritime China. Many of the institute’s first archaeological digs were conducted at Quanzhou and focused on establishing a past that could be seen as the historical antecedent to the huaqiao elites of contemporary Southeast Asia.31 The discovery of ancient ships and relics from the tenth century c.e. provided evidence of a new commercial economy that blossomed during the Song period and propelled Chinese merchants across Southeast Asia. Equally important was the study of the political institutions of the kingdom of Min during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Institute scholars argued that the weakness of the central government at the end of the Tang dynasty favored the reawakening of regional cultures and political units. The kingdom of Min in Fujian reached its nadir in the mid-tenth century. Its subsequent growth was powered through its maritime relations and its exporting of silks and ceramics manufactured in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Anhui. This commercial culture became the foundation of China’s own “voyages of exploration” more than three hundred years before Columbus sailed from Spain. The language of these newly documented histories was largely heroic: “Long before the voyages of discovery brought the nations of Portugal and Spain to the Asian region,” noted one analyst, “the voyages of Hokkien traders had already laid claim to Chinese Nanyang. . . . You must recall that the heroics of Min-Yue explorations came five centuries before Magellan arrived to discover Luzon or the Portuguese settled in Macau. Indeed, the true explorers of Southeast Asia were from Quanzhou, not Madrid.”32 Therefore, the Western colonies of Southeast Asia had been built upon “fraudulent claims of discovery.”33

Reimagining China

Southern Fujian (Minnan) was being reconstructed as the home of a cultural tradition that could validly serve as a foundational civilization. The southern Fujianese stressed that their language or dialect, Hokkien, or Southern Min, was superior because of its historical depth and linguistic conservatism.34 In fact, the Hokkien often referred to themselves as the “people of the Tang.” This linguistic pride was given a historical basis by Xiamen University sinologists. Because Fujian had been settled during the An Lushan disorders (755–63) by aristocratic families who moved south, the people of Minnan saw themselves as linked to Tang cosmopolitanism in commerce, poetry, and art.35 Indeed, Southern Min was reputed to be older and more beautiful than Mandarin: it was the language of China’s most cosmopolitan age and therefore had a more legitimate claim to be the national language of China than its northern counterpart. In other words, Southern Min was the true guoyu, or national dialect, of China.36

REBUILDING XIAMEN: THE PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSNATIONAL MODERNITY Alongside the creation of a new historical discourse, there stood in Xiamen more concrete manifestations of the new modernity. Indeed, another way to unravel the complexities of the transnational transformations taking place in republican Xiamen is to examine, against the economic and intellectual trends already outlined, how change aªected the physical layout of the city itself. New attitudes toward urban appearance, the planning and construction of roads, the design of places of residence and employment, and ideas about land and architecture aªected Xiamen’s landscape. How did these changes help transform Xiamen into a concrete assertion of a transnational huaqiao modernity? How were these changes indicative of the eªects of colonialism in both China and Asia? Between 1920 and 1932 Xiamen underwent a radical transformation as returned overseas Chinese teamed with local administrators to rebuild the city’s urban landscape. This eªort at reconstruction was partly an attempt by returned huaqiao and other local residents to control city space. In addition, explosive urban growth, strong rural-to-urban migration, mechanization, massive reorderings of the built environment, and the city’s spatial expansion

167

5.1 Xiamen in the 1920s.

(fig. 5.1) had unleashed new tensions into urban life throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Like people in many other urban centers, Xiamen’s residents transformed their municipality according to a vision that they themselves created, but their approaches to solving the problems of urban malaise were distinctive in their pervasive orientation toward colonial Southeast Asia and commercial and trade interests. Unlike the industrializing urban centers of Europe that produced goods, employment, and income, Xiamen was an agent rather than an actor in the process of production. The city had long served as a channel linking China to the global forces of commerce, culture, and colonialism. Exchanges in merchandise, images, ideas, and people themselves continued to define the city. Thus, when municipal leaders developed solutions to the city’s infrastructural crisis, their answer was not to transform Xiamen into a center of production but to reinforce its function as a commercial center, in much the same way the old colonial centers of Batavia, Semarang, Surabaya, Manila,

Reimagining China

Penang, and Singapore developed in the early twentieth century. Xiamen’s development took place at once with these colonial centers scattered across Southeast Asia. The engine behind this makeover was Chinese transnationalism, which had emerged and integrated the overseas Chinese settlements that mottled the Asian Pacific in the early part of the twentieth century. As merchants and laborers crisscrossed the South China Sea, they brought back images of the “modern” that were essentially colonial and Western. Upon their return, wealthy overseas merchants began to construct their own versions of colonial modernity in Xiamen. This eventually led to the flowering of a transnational vision of the modern in terms of a new urbanity based on the commercial, cosmopolitan, and Confucian nature of huaqiao cultural networks that connected China and Southeast Asia. In looking at urbanization in Xiamen, one is immediately struck by just how deeply the colonialist spatial planning of Southeast Asia influenced the organization and form of Xiamen’s development. During the 1920s, the city’s topography changed radically as planners and builders removed ponds and marshlands, leveled hills, and carved out mountains in their eªorts to reconfigure Xiamen spatially to “move with the times.”37 The fashioning of a modern urban landscape in Xiamen, however, was never viewed by its participants as a matter of wholesale Westernization but was always a product of careful negotiations by leading huaqiao and city administrators between the colonial and the modern and between the Chinese and the Western. Most overseas Chinese never fully accepted the validity of the intellectual and philosophical precepts of European Enlightenment thinking, and they were similarly ambivalent toward Enlightenment ideas about the urban environment in which they lived. What was the huaqiao vision of Xiamen’s future? By 1926 the city’s leadership was in the hands of the Xiamen Municipal Council (XMC), which was increasingly dominated by returned overseas Chinese. The election of Huang Yizhu as vice-chair of the XMC and the fall of warlord power in 1924 had signaled a new era of huaqiao leadership in municipal aªairs.38 Moreover, the vast amounts of overseas Chinese investment flowing into Xiamen during the mid-1920s reinforced the hold of huaqiao economic power over the local economy. By 1926, with Xiamen firmly in the hands of a friendly GMD regime, returned huaqiao began to turn to local reform. Their time overseas had

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impressed upon them a Southeast Asian vision of modernity in which commerce was king and the state was interventionist. Thus, a plan of development took form in Xiamen that diªered radically from those found in China’s interior cities, where industrialization and economic ties with hinterland areas were typically envisioned as driving progress. For Xiamen, the hinterland was Southeast Asia, and international trade drove development. Between 1927 and 1932, the overseas Chinese agenda in Xiamen called for the construction of a new city in which broad avenues and a modern port facilitated commerce and the exchange of merchandise, ideas, and people. Through massive land reclamation projects, the design and orientation of Xiamen’s landscape was to be altered radically into a modern space that overseas Chinese could claim as their own creation. The basic morphology of Xiamen was modeled on that of colonial entrepots throughout Southeast Asia: simple grids and grand boulevards, an emphasis on commerce, administration, and sanitation, and highly visible planning regulations regarding the construction of dwellings (fig. 5.2). Furthermore, as attested by the postWorld War I increase in shipping and the booming remittance trade, capital had become much more mobile. Production, sales, marketing, and particularly finance had much freer choices of location. In order for Xiamen to capture a larger portion of global capital, it had to oªer a mix of physical and social infrastructures that would be attractive to multinational capital. The city’s development was planned with this in mind. Once completed, the new city would stand as an example of a huaqiao vision of the future based on their transnational experiences at home and abroad. In redefining Xiamen’s urban landscape, however, it was not upon European or modernist architecture that the huaqiao modeled the city’s architectural future, but rather upon a form that pointed to the mercantile success of Xiamen’s overseas Chinese: the qilou, or “shop house.” Prominent in huaqiao communities throughout Southeast Asia, the qilou combined work and residence in a single unit. The bottom floor of this two-story structure contained the occupant’s business, while the top served as a residence. Befitting the region’s subtropical climate, the top story extended out over the bottom floor, acting as an overhang to protect pedestrians and customers from the sun and frequent rainstorms. Qilou were commonly built next to one another, in order to provide a continuous overhang for pedestrians. Thus, the building

5.2 Map of Xiamen in 1931.

5.3 Qilou, or “shop houses,” on Desheng Boulevard, Xiamen, 1927.

style’s most significant feature was its continuous line of facades along the street, each building adjoining the next, and all built exactly in line with their neighbors in relation to the sidewalk. Although small alleys at the rear of the qilou allowed people to deliver goods and store nightsoil for pickup, no front yards or courtyards of any kind separated the facades from the public outdoor space.39 Rather, their aligned facades are built flush with the sidewalk, their doorways giving out immediately onto the public street (fig. 5.3). A number of architectural elements, however, mediated the confrontation of public and private spaces, which traditionally had been separated by a courtyard or front yard. These elements, such as doors, windows, overhangs, and business signs, became much more significant to the pedestrian once the facades of the qilou were made flush with the sidewalk. They provided a means of direct visual, vocal, and even tactile communication between the two domains and engendered exchanges of conversation, food, service, and merchandise. This was a radical change from the privacy of the courtyard design that had previously dominated Xiamen’s architecture. Combined with the bulldozing of Xiamen’s old, curving streets and their replacement with wide, modern thoroughfares, the qilou style marked a reconceptualization of the

Reimagining China

separation between interior and exterior, public and private, house and street. It signaled a change in relations between the two domains of social life, even while increasing the variety of exchanges and passages between them. In many ways, the street now became part of the house. The qilou replaced the congeries of autonomous courtyard houses with a centrally planned urban design that accommodated modern infrastructure and motorized transport while recasting public-domestic spatial relations. Although it met the goals of most urban modernization movements, the qilou was not a carbon copy of Euro-American urban design but instead embodied the characteristics that made huaqiao modernity distinctive: the focus on merchant trade (as opposed to industrial production) and the adumbration of a Confucian commercial ethic. A street uniformly lined by qilou was a concrete manifestation of the huaqiao urban ideal. Here, it said, was a massive, organized, and e‹ciently modern society, the basic unit of which was the well-ordered family business. Unlike in most Euro-American industrial cities, where ideas of zoning, of clear separation of work space and domestic space, were literally written in stone and in law, in Xiamen the qilou enforced the ideal that family and business should operate as one wellordered unit. The qilou stood at the heart of Xiamen’s new urban identity. As overseas money poured into Xiamen’s real estate market, developers began to construct buildings that would be attractive to huaqiao tastes and capital. Naturally the qilou, a building that stood as a concrete representation of the mercantile success of Xiamen’s overseas brethren, was the design of choice. It symbolized the familial business practices that had propelled overseas Chinese to the forefront of Southeast Asia’s economic development. Within the city center, in area after area, Xiamen’s older homes were purchased by developers, demolished, and replaced by rows of qilou. This altered the entire nature of the city. Once characterized by its hodgepodge of discrete buildings and winding roads, Xiamen now oªered the standardized appearance of qilou and modern boulevards common throughout colonial Southeast Asia. It had truly become an international city. Fed by increasing overseas Chinese remittances and a booming real estate market, housing construction in Xiamen moved ahead at an incredible pace. Between 1928 and 1932, more than 5,300 new homes were built in the city

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Pace of Housing Construction in Xiamen, 1928–1932 Year

No. Houses

1928

430

1929

1,649

1930

1,506

1931

1,057

1932

707

Total

5,349

(table 5.1), and more than 90 percent of the units were funded in part by overseas Chinese capital.40 Whether the erection of Xiamen’s new homes occurred on newly opened land or at the expense of demolished older units, they represented a radical reconceptualization of city space. Within the city center, the varied look of old Xiamen was replaced by the standardized look of the qilou. Control of the form and function of construction by municipal authorities meant that municipal government not only had expanded in size and scope but also penetrated local life with an intensity that residents had never before experienced. Planning was to assume a position of unchallenged authority over the growth of the city. Moreover, it was intended to institute a new kind of order, one that would curtail the pernicious habits of the general population and produce a city geared toward the internationalized requirements of speed and ease of access. Xiamen had become a product of a commercial modernity.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUAQIAO STATE The establishment of the Nanjing regime in 1927 ushered in what was expected to be a new era of relations between China’s overseas emigrants and the Chinese state. Huaqiao had long been ardent supporters of both Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang. Before the Republican Revolution of 1911, Sun’s Tongmeng hui had been forced to operate and seek funding among overseas

Reimagining China

Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the United States. After the “Second Revolution” of 1913 and the establishment of Sun’s Canton government in 1920, the reorganized GMD continued to receive large amounts of funding and organizational support from Nanyang. The party paid special attention to overseas Chinese communities, initiating a range of institutional ties with huaqiao organizations throughout Southeast Asia.41 Overseas Chinese hoped that in return, the GMD regime would build a strong and powerful China that could protect huaqiao interests and stand up to foreign regimes, both Western and Japanese. Furthermore, Hokkien émigrés, through their financial, institutional, and personal support of the GMD, made it clear to the GMD leadership that they wanted control over the development of Xiamen and the entire southern portion of Fujian Province. Given the long-standing ties between the party and Xiamen’s huaqiao, the financial resources of the overseas community, and the pressing problems arising in other parts of China, the GMD was initially more than willing to grant Xiamen and southern Fujian a certain degree of autonomy. By 1927 control of Xiamen had fallen into the hands of a loose coalition of the city’s wealthiest huaqiao, local merchants and educators, and GMD naval forces. Aided by the talented municipal administrator Zhou Xingnan, the group guided the development and administration of the city over the next five years.42 Xiamen’s rapid development and unparalleled prosperity were a testament to the team’s ability in handling municipal aªairs. Its accomplishments were all the more evident in comparison with the rest of the province, where government had fallen to many of the same administrators who had served past warlord administrations.43 The situation in rural Fujian was even more desperate. Bandit forces, euphemistically called “people’s armies,” controlled large portions of the province as personal fiefdoms. Weak provincial administration and the lack of a strong party organization made it convenient for Nanjing to grant the region a certain degree of independence. Despite the advent of a new GMD government that was, in theory, to be responsible for national development, the modernity that Xiamen’s huaqiao constructed did not recede or contract into a merely localized turn of events. Xiamen’s huaqiao continued to see their distinctive modernizing vision as having national significance and scope. For example, when the opening congress of the premier overseas Chinese political organization, the China

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National Association (CNA; Zhongguo guomin xiehui), proclaimed that the organization’s goal of “saving the village” ( jiu xiang) was linked to China’s “increasing its international standing” via provincial development, it also claimed that this process was essential to “saving the nation” ( jiu guo). Although the CNA’s rhetoric displayed the depth of the ties that bound overseas Chinese to the nation, its political and developmental strategy was also the product of a distinctly huaqiao vision of the nation. Ultimately, the huaqiao leadership replicated certain aspects of Nanyang colonialism in Minnan. Though an elaboration of all these aspects is beyond the scope of this essay, there lay at the foundation of all huaqiao modernization eªorts a desire to integrate China into the international trade and globalization that were the products of Western colonial projects in Southeast Asia. As the economies of Nanyang colonies shifted from the production of luxury goods to the production of raw materials, huaqiao merchants, who had played a critical role in this process, hoped to replicate this course of development at home. Between 1927 and 1932, Xiamen’s huaqiao were given virtually a free hand in their pursuit of modernization in Fujian. Initiatives in urban development as well as programs in education, social services, and infrastructure construction pointed to radical changes in the pace and tone of both rural and urban life in and around Xiamen. During this six-year period, overseas Chinese attempted to rebuild southern Fujian into a mirror image of colonial Southeast Asia, but with one important diªerence: in Minnan, huaqiao were both the economic and the political masters of development. Many of these changes occurred with little supervision or financial support from Nanjing. Chiang Kai-shek had enjoyed a cozy relationship with the overseas Chinese community, but Nanjing’s pressing financial situation made it convenient for the GMD to allow huaqiao to develop the region using private rather than public capital. In 1932, however, relations between Nanjing and Xiamen began to sour over the issue of Chiang’s conduct of Chinese foreign policy. His decision to follow a strategy of nonresistance toward the Japanese conquest of Manchuria was tremendously unpopular both at home and abroad. The Xiamen educator Zhuang Xiquan’s Manila newspaper, Vanguard Daily (Qianqu ribao), adopted a strong anti-Japanese tone, employing inflam-

Reimagining China

matory rhetoric and racial slurs in its incessant criticism of Nanjing’s softness toward Japan.44 The Philippines National Salvation movement, headed by Li Qingquan, was especially critical of Chiang in the wake of the May 1932 truce that ended the Shanghai Incident. Chiang was increasingly perceived as weak, and his sudden shift to a policy of appeasement led many huaqiao to wonder if he might not knuckle under to Japanese pressures in other ways. Foremost in the minds of many huaqiao was the fierce economic rivalry between Chinese and Japanese firms over control of the Nanyang economy. There were even rumors circulating that Chiang was considering surrendering Chinese sovereignty over Fujian itself. The Japanese presence in Taiwan, just one hundred miles from Xiamen, loomed large, and Japanese desire for the control of Fujian was well known. As one huaqiao periodical noted: Now is the time for national salvation. Now is equally the time for village salvation. . . . Jinzhou is already in Japanese hands, while Zhang Xueliang is pursuing a policy of nonresistance in Manchuria. . . . Manchuria, Tianjin, Shanghai will fall into the whirlpool of Japanese domination. But our Fujian is in a far more dangerous situation. Fujian is only a short distance from Taiwan. . . . Japan’s construction of Gaoxiong since 1919 as a naval base was designed for the occupation of Fujian. . . . We must devote our eªort to the national salvation movement, but it is equally important that we assume the responsibility of saving Fujian.45

This articulation of a political role for overseas Chinese as the true defenders of Fujian and the nation against foreign aggression conveys the disappointment many huaqiao felt over Chiang’s policy of appeasement. It also points to a political quandary: huaqiao support of the GMD had been a result of the party’s willingness to stand up to foreign governments for its overseas brethren, but appeasement signaled the end of a “strong China” that was willing to protect huaqiao interests. Suddenly, overseas Chinese were faced not only with an economic battle over control of Southeast Asian markets but also with a military and political battle over their homeland. Japan had long been covetous of Minnan. Noting the area’s historical ties to Taiwan, Xiamen’s

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resurgence as an economic center, and the military value of the city’s deepwater port, Japanese o‹cials had begun designing plans for invasion as early as the turn of the century. By June 1932, many huaqiao leaders had become disappointed not only with Chiang’s handling of Japanese imperialism but also with the overall tone of the Nanjing government. The widespread corruption and malfeasance reminded Xiamen’s overseas Chinese of the Beijing regimes of the early republic, and many began to see the revolution of 1927 as a failure. Until 1932, overseas Chinese eªorts in investment and development had been largely limited to Xiamen and other southeast coastal cities, such as Chaozhou. Now, in the face of Nanjing’s failures, huaqiao leaders began to wonder whether their model of development and modernization, based on the group’s transnational ties to Southeast Asia, might not serve as the basis of a new China. Perhaps it was time for a new “southern wind” to blow over China. Overseas Chinese aspirations were strengthened when it was learned that Chiang had decided to transfer the famous anti-Japanese fighting force, the Nineteenth Route Army, to Fujian. Led by Generals Cai Dingkai and Jiang Guangnai, the Nineteenth Route Army had gained a reputation as the fiercest defender of Chinese territory in the battle for Shanghai.46 The peace agreements that ended the fighting in Shanghai had mandated the removal of the Nineteenth Route Army from the city, and Chiang Kai-shek, perhaps still smarting from criticism over his handling of the Shanghai Incident, had banished the force to the Communist suppression campaigns he was conducting in western Fujian. Shortly thereafter, as a result of local and overseas pressure, the central government appointed Cai and Jiang to leadership positions in the Fujian provincial government. Jiang became its new chairman, and Cai was appointed commander-in-chief of provincial military forces.47 Xiamen residents at home and abroad were ecstatic.48 The presence of a powerful military force with impeccable anti-Japanese credentials meant that south Fujian’s military situation was suddenly and dramatically improved. The arrival of the Nineteenth Route Army also presented the huaqiao leaders of Xiamen and the transnational pan-Hokkien movement with a crucial opportunity to challenge Chiang Kai-shek’s policies of appeasement. By wedding the transnational identity of overseas Chinese culture to the anti-Japanese outlook

Reimagining China

of the Nineteenth Route Army, Xiamen’s huaqiao now had the political and military resources to challenge Nanjing. Almost immediately, Nineteenth Route Army management of Fujian province won eªusive praise from Xiamen’s overseas Chinese. Under the slogan “Abolish all exploitative taxes, disband bandit-like provincial defense forces,” Cai and Jiang plunged into the reform of the province.49 By the end of 1932, Cai had already defeated several bandit armies, subjecting commanders to spectacular public executions in which local residents were first allowed to vent their hatred by physically abusing former leaders.50 Eªorts were also made to improve communications, eliminate arbitrary taxes, and institute greater political freedoms. These reforms all received high marks from Chinese associations abroad and local huaqiao organizations.51 Funds began to pour in from Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities to assist Fujian’s new rulers in their plans for reform. Xiamen would stand for a stronger Fujian and a stronger China. The Nineteenth Route Army’s control of Fujian also set oª a wave of political organization on the part of Fujian’s overseas Chinese community. On July 7, 1932, the “Congress of Fujian Overseas Mass Organizations” (Fujian haiwai minzhong jituan daibiao lianxi hui), attended by more than one hundred delegates representing Hokkien associations abroad, was held in Hong Kong to discuss the role of overseas Chinese in the new government. Attended by such luminaries as Huang Yizhu, Tan Kahkee, Li Qingquan, and Xu Youchao, the conference passed measures calling for the disbanding of all bandit armies, the dispatching of Fujian troops to military training centers, the removal of the GMD navy from the province, the institution of an anti-Japanese boycott, and a thorough reorganization of the provincial government. In the months that followed, overseas Chinese played a much larger role in provincial politics. In the past, Xiamen’s huaqiao had attempted to isolate the city from Fuzhou, the provincial capital, convinced that it and the northern part of the province were somehow diªerent from the southern part. Many argued that Xiamen’s huaqiao had the experience and fortitude to reform Fujian, in contrast to the “corrupt” northerners. One overseas Chinese remarked: Southern Fujian and northern Fujian are, when we come to cold facts, not one administratively or in their esprit de corps. . . . When Fujian was unified

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under one administration, as it was for brief periods of time in the first years of the republic and under the GMD regime, the only benefit that we southern Fujianese received were bands after bands of Fuzhou District magistrates, who sucked our blood with all the dignity of “gentlemen” and the overbearing manner of their “running dogs.”52

In a stunning reversal of provincial traditions, southerners began to trek north to assist in governing the province. Several prominent huaqiao, such as the Manila banking and lumber tycoon Li Qingquan, were invited by the new Nineteenth Route administration to play important roles in the new government. By the autumn of 1932, Nineteenth Route Army control of the province already had several notable achievements. Besides the execution of Fujian’s bandit chieftains, Jiang and Cai had abolished many illegal levies, suppressed poppy cultivation, and allowed free expression of anti-Japanese sentiment.53 The journal Overseas Chinese Monthly argued that only the overseas Chinese had the attributes to save Fujian: (1) Overseas Chinese do not belong to GMD factions and are not engaged in politics. . . . (2) The overseas Chinese from Taiwan and the Philippines represent over a quarter of the province’s population. . . . They are of one heart and one morality . . . and can be trusted to build the province. . . . (3) Overseas Chinese love their nation and have much in the way of economic resources. They can be trusted to employ them in an honest manner. (4) The glorious history of overseas Chinese can be used to help lead Fujian to a new future.54

Finally, it was their proven track record in the development of Xiamen that attracted the attention of Cai Dingkai. In a piece entitled “The Reform of Fujian and the Overseas Chinese,” Cai openly invited Xiamen’s huaqiao to utilize their talents to modernize their homeland in order to keep Fujian from falling into Japanese hands: “With the extermination of the bandits and the consequent pacification of the province, but with the impoverishment of the people at home, only the overseas Chinese who love their village and their province and are more honest and earnest . . . can help enrich and strengthen the nation and keep Fujian safe. Together, we can work for the glory of the vil-

Reimagining China

lage, province, and nation.”55 Cai’s play on anti-Japanese fears and overseas Chinese experiences was eªective. Overseas Chinese flocked to Xiamen and Fuzhou in late 1932 to work for the development of Fujian and rewarded the Nineteenth Route Army with massive monetary contributions.56

XU YOUCHAO AND XIAMEN’S FIRST HUAQIAO ADMINISTRATION By the end of 1932, Xiamen’s overseas Chinese had rebuilt the city’s topography, transforming it into one of China’s premier ports and residential districts. Where originally a cacophony of housing styles had stood amid swamps, ponds, and graveyards, now gleaming residential districts, new municipal buildings, institutes of higher education, parks, and a city library stood amid well-ordered residential and commercial districts. One commentator noted: The progress of this era is dependent upon the progress of the city. Earlier, Xiamen was a city of garbage and trash. Today, it has public roads, parks, theaters, amusement parks, etc., and what every city requires for greatness. This has transformed the people of Xiamen. Where previously one found simple-minded workers, shopkeepers, and ruffians, [now] one finds them transformed into intellectuals, capitalists, and notables. We owe much of this development to the money and fortitude of our overseas brothers, without whose help Xiamen would still be known as the dirtiest city in the world.57

The city, which had been the target of reform eªorts by returned overseas Chinese since the failure of Sun Yat-sen’s “Second Revolution” in 1913, had become a concrete symbol of huaqiao modernity. The new leader of the Xiamen municipal government was a young huaqiao from Manila. A leader of the overseas Chinese business community in the Philippines, Xu Youchao (Eduardo Co Seteng, 1900–62), was only thirty-two when Cai tapped him to lead the new administration. Xu had been born in one of the huaqiao villages outside Xiamen, the qiaoxiang of Longhu in Pujiang County, near Quanzhou. Like his fellow Pujiang denizen Li Qingquan, Xu had been summoned at a young age to Manila to assist his father in the family business. There he was placed in a Western-style school to study English,

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mathematics, and business. After graduating from an American-sponsored college in 1925, Xu began to manage his father’s lumber mill in Manila. He quickly earned a reputation for his international business acumen when he made a well-publicized trip to study how business was conducted throughout Southeast Asia in 1930. Pictures appeared in the Manila press showing Xu at o‹cial banquets and ceremonies at major ports in British Malaya, the Dutch Indies, French Indochina, and Thailand. Upon his return, he was immediately elected president of the Manila Lumber Association (Senshang shanghui), and the next year he became chairman of the prestigious Eastern Benefit Club (Dongfang gongji jule bu). In 1931 he was elected vice-chair of the Manila Chinese Chamber of Commerce (MCCOC; Manila zhonghua shanghui). A year later, at thirty-two, he was elected the youngest chair in the history of the MCCOC.58 On January 1, 1933, Generals Cai and Jiang, in a public ceremony in Xiamen’s Zhongshan Park attended by more than 20,000 people, announced the founding of preparatory committees to establish a huaqiao-controlled municipal government in Xiamen. In Manila, Xu Youchao called upon patriotic overseas Chinese residents to return to the city and aid in its development. In a speech to the MCCOC, he called for “a new era in huaqiao activism in Minnan.”59 Interweaving points regarding the historic role of overseas Chinese as the “mothers of the Chinese revolution” with pleas for help for one’s laoxiang (people from the same hometown), Xu wove a fabric of patriotism that pointedly viewed Minnan as the responsibility of China’s huaqiao. Noting that Xiamen’s current population had swelled to more than 230,000 persons while still lacking a proper city government, Xu openly pointed to the city as the “true gauge of our abilities as leaders.” He demanded that “men of talent and ability” accompany him “home” to participate in Xiamen’s new municipal government. The success or failure of their mission would reflect on the entire overseas Chinese community.60 Naturally, Xu’s new administration was littered with returned overseas Chinese. While police functions were the responsibility of Nineteenth Route Army o‹cers, Xu quickly enlisted a number of overseas Chinese, such as Huang Yizhu, Tan Kahkee, Lim Boonkeng, Hu Wenhu, and Li Qingquan, to take up key positions in the new government.61 A new Bureau of Construction,

Reimagining China

made up of Xiamen’s leading huaqiao, was established to work closely with Zhou Xingnan’s Public Works Department.62 As expected, huaqiao organizations in Xiamen were extremely supportive of Xu’s administration and promised cooperation on all fronts. Xu continued his calls for overseas Chinese groups to aid in the city’s development, noting that the new administration was the realization of “south Fujianese self-government” (Minnan difang zizhi) and “national and village salvation” ( jiu guo, jiu xiang).63

XIAMEN’S HUAQIAO, THE FUJIAN REBELLION, AND THE NATION As Xiamen’s overseas Chinese returned to Fujian, and as the rhetoric of a semiindependent Fujian increased, members of the Nineteenth Route Army began to travel to Southeast Asia to seek financial support from Hokkien communities abroad. In October 1932, General Chen Mingshu, the former commander of the Nineteenth Route Army, arrived in Manila.64 Chen was greeted by one of “the biggest Chinese crowds that had gathered at the pier in years.”65 Close on Chen’s heels came General Weng Zhaoyuan, famed defender of Shanghai’s Wusong Harbor. After receiving a hero’s welcome, Weng delivered a speech proclaiming that China’s resistance against Japan must never cease: “China today is not the China of centuries ago. She has long since awakened from her slumber and is now fighting for her rights as a nation.”66 Discussions between Weng and members of the Hokkien community in the Philippines continued over several days. Weng stressed the importance of huaqiao support of the new Fujian regime and called for overseas Chinese “to return to Fujian and help build the nation.”67 These events, however, were also indicative of storm clouds on the horizon. By the summer of 1933, disappointment over Chiang Kai-shek’s appeasement policies had reached a boiling point for Chinese communities abroad and Fujianese at home with the signing of the Tangku truce in May. The truce, which ended fighting between Chinese and Japanese units just north of the Great Wall that had threatened both Beijing and Tianjin, signaled the loss of yet another Chinese province to Japan. It was so unpopular with the Chinese public that even elements within the GMD began to call Chiang a traitor.68 The southern leadership of the GMD, located in Canton, began to threaten civil

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war in the face of the Japanese threat, and they naturally found allies in the Nineteenth Route Army. Outraged by Chiang’s policies of nonresistance and sensing an opportunity to gain political leverage, Canton and Fuzhou began to question Chiang’s ability to lead the nation. What China needed, the press in both provinces claimed, was a man with impeccable anti-Japanese credentials to lead the nation. Such a man certainly existed in Cai Dingkai. In April, the Southwest Political Council of the GMD, in a ceremonial move to generate anti-Japanese war fever, named Cai the southern commander of China’s anti-Japanese forces.69 By the summer and early autumn of 1933, Fujian and overseas Chinese newspapers were focusing constantly on Chiang’s “traitorous” leadership of China, which stood in contrast to the Nineteenth Route Army’s stand at Shanghai. Cai Dingkai’s own journal, Dingjin (Advance), which had become a leading voice in the anti-Japan, anti-Chiang movement, noted: “In last year’s commemoration of the Manchurian Incident, there was only the painful memory of the loss of the three northeastern provinces. In this year’s remembrance, we must add the loss of Rehe Province. A nation that possesses such a large percentage of the world’s population and occupies such a large territory is continually disgraced by a small island nation.”70 The Hokkien press overseas joined the chorus of voices calling for an all-out attack on Japan: “For years we supported the GMD in hope of a strong nation, but now we are the ones being sold out by the GMD to the Japanese. Are we to become the slaves of the Japanese dwarves? What will happen to our own Fujian? Who will make Chiang Kai-shek listen?”71 In the days that followed, Fujian became a base for those who sought resistance to Japan or who had scores to settle with Chiang. The most visible personality to arrive on the scene was Cai and Jiang’s former commanding o‹cer, Chen Mingshu. Others included members of the Third Party, a leftist organization made up of former members of the GMD who had opposed Chiang’s rightist tendencies, and Chen Mingshu’s political devotees, who were loosely organized into a Social Democratic party.72 By November 1933, Nanjing had become openly alarmed over the trouble brewing in Fujian. The GMD dispatched a native son and chairman of the Nationalist government, Lin Sen, to Fuzhou to smooth out relations.73 For its part, Nanjing began to view the growing coziness between Cai’s mil-

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itary forces and the overseas Chinese with increasing anxiety. Financial support for the Nineteenth Route Army from Xiamen’s huaqiao had reached several million yuan and included the recent delivery of several Americanmade warplanes to Xiamen.74 Moreover, Cai’s very public discussions with Xiamen’s huaqiao over the organization of a special administrative district throughout Minnan did not sit well with a Nanjing regime that was arguing for national unity behind Chiang and the GMD. Although the combined economic and military might of the huaqiao-Nineteenth Route Army coalition could never compete with the resources commanded by Nanjing, the political threat posed by the coalition could not be ignored. The rulers of Fujian suddenly oªered an alternative to the current path of national destiny symbolized by Chiang Kai-shek. The Nineteenth Route Army’s impeccable antiJapanese credentials and its development of Fujian, which relied heavily upon huaqiao funding and support, had suddenly established Xiamen as Nanjing’s rival. The showdown erupted on November 20, 1933. At a gathering of 20,000 to 30,000 supporters in Fuzhou, the Fujian leaders formally proclaimed their rebellion and the establishment of the People’s Revolutionary Government (Zhongguo renmin geming zhengfu). GMD flags were torn down and replaced, and Sun Yat-sen’s pictures were removed from all public buildings. Two days later, the structure of the new government was announced, with the Revolutionary Government Council (Geming zhengfu weiyuan hui) designated as the new government’s highest policy-making body. Chairman of the new government was Li Qishen, a veteran revolutionary with close ties to the Nineteenth Route Army, while Chen Mingshu, Jiang Guangnai, and Cai Dingkai all retained seats on the council.75 Xiamen’s mayor, Xu Youchao, immediately pledged support for the new regime and began to organize assistance among Fujian’s overseas Chinese. The Cantonese huaqiao Eugene Chen (Chen Youren) was named the new regime’s foreign minister.76 Chen cited Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of nonresistance and the Tangku truce as the motivating factors behind the rebellion: I can state categorically that there is no separatist movement in Fujian province. The action of the Nineteenth Route Army envisages the entire territory of the Chinese Republic as one and indivisible, its fundamental purpose

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being to save China, not to break up the nation. The movement aims at ending the power of Chiang Kai-shek and his ruling clique at Nanjing in order to dedicate the entire nation to the task of saving China and her vast material resources and manpower from the alien domination and control inherent in Nanjing’s pro-Japanese policy.77

Suddenly Chiang’s control of the nation was being challenged by an extremely dangerous coalition that had its own independent military and financial base. While there would be little doubt about his reaction, how would Xiamen and the overseas Chinese respond? It was obvious that the new regime expected huaqiao support. With leading members of the huaqiao business community, such as Xu Youchao and Li Qingquan, associated with the Fujian regime, and with the movement’s impeccable anti-Japanese credentials, many felt Xiamen’s huaqiao would flock to the rebels. On November 23, Xu Youchao sent telegrams to all the major huaqiao organizations throughout Nanyang requesting their support: Singapore’s Hu Wenhu, Tan Kahkee, and Xue Benmu, Cuba, Manila, Batavia, and Singapore Chinese Chambers of Commerce, every newspaper, organization, and overseas Chinese public institution: This revolution is being conducted under the Nineteenth Route Army’s spirit of Japanese resistance and to overthrow the pro-Japanese, defeatist Nanjing government. In conjunction with workers, peasants, students, shopkeepers, and soldiers, we are working together to reform the government and to revive the race by employing peaceful yet eªective methods. We wish that you will wholeheartedly protect the [new] government and ignore the propaganda of those who oppose us.78

Shortly thereafter, messages of support began to flow in from Singapore, Manila, Malaysia, Vietnam, Batavia, and Canada; one message from Jakarta even demanded Chiang Kai-shek’s execution.79 The events that led to Chiang’s quick defeat of the Fujian rebels have been analyzed by Lloyd Eastman and need not be reviewed in detail.80 After a promising start, the rebellion failed to gain support from the military leaders of Guangdong and Guangxi, and Chiang’s forces crushed it within two months. Cai Dingkai, Jiang Guangnai, Li Qishen, and Chen Mingshu fled to

Reimagining China

Hong Kong, and the remnants of the Nineteenth Route Army were either absorbed into the Guangdong army or reorganized into the Seventh Route Army. After a short exile in Hong Kong, Cai Dingkai would undertake a widely heralded trip around the world, to be greeted by enthusiastic crowds of huaqiao throughout Nanyang and the Americas.81 All four would continue their involvement in the anti-Chiang movement, play important roles in the Anti-Japanese War, and become important o‹cials in the post-1949 Communist regime.82

CONCLUSION Recently, the transnational modernity that stood at the heart of the forces that rebuilt Xiamen in the 1920s has been resurrected in South China. A number of scholars have argued that the collapse of the Maoist narrative of the nation has brought about the rise of a new nan feng, or “southern wind,” in China today. The “Great Han, anti-imperialist nationalism,” with its glorification of an “authentic peasant culture in the central plain that resisted foreign invasion and contamination,” wrote Edward Friedman, “has given way to a whole series of new nationalisms that challenge the centralist control of the Chinese state.”83 One of the most potent of these alternative readings has been a southern version that looks much like the huaqiao program of the 1920s—Confucianism, cosmopolitanism, and commerce—as the means by which southeastern coastal China expresses diªerence from the North. Moreover, this reconstituted transnational modernity has quickly found itself integrated into local identity. For example, history books in Xiamen and throughout South China now look to the cosmopolitan states of Chu and Min as the ancestors of South China in general and Fujian in particular, providing a historical basis for the ancient origins of a resurgent Minnan identity.84 Much of this “new” research owes an obvious debt to the political and historical research first conducted by Xiamen University’s Institute of Sinology in the 1920s. Obviously, the defeat of the Fujian Rebellion and the end of huaqiao administration of Xiamen in 1933 did not mean the death of an overseas Chinese view of modernity. Although interrupted by the Anti-Japanese War and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the rise of “Greater China” and the wave of huaqiao investment in today’s Xiamen clearly signal its resurgence. As

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China continues to open to the outside world and becomes integrated into the global economy, Xiamen’s transnational huaqiao are again being asked to help negotiate China’s future. The massive globalization that China began to experience in the late twentieth century has been the product, particularly since 1989, of overseas Chinese investment and commercial acumen. Today’s Xiamen is again the subject of much popular interest. The arrival of a tourist boat from the island of Jinmen in January 2001 marked the first legal, direct link between Taiwan and China since 1949. Although illegal trade and smuggling have taken place between the two sides for years, I believe this nonetheless represents another crucial step in the reconfiguration of Asian trade networks that has been going on since the opening of China in 1979. I also believe that what we are seeing is the return of important historical patterns and continuities that lay dormant during the Maoist age and have reemerged with the Open Door policies of the 1980s. These trends tell us that a resurgent transnational modernity was a defining relationship throughout the twentieth-century history of China. Obviously, the idea of a transnational modernity in China oªers both important similarities and diªerences with other forms of modernity moving about China during the 1920s. Although the emphasis of overseas Chinese on a progressive Confucianism as the ideological basis of a modern Chinese state stands in stark contrast with the iconoclastic tone of the May Fourth movement and the more Westernized version found in Shanghai, the huaqiao leadership continued to see the state as the hegemonic device that set the relationship between state and society. In Southeast Asia, colonial administrators, behind a strong state, redefined this relationship by introducing new forms of governance and discipline. Many overseas Chinese, despite their hatred of the racism of the colonial state, nonetheless admired its eªectiveness.

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NOTES 1. Xian Cao, “Ershi shiji zhi huaqiao” [Twentieth-century overseas Chinese], Huaqiao shangbao 1, no. 2 (February 25, 1920): 17–19. 2. Ibid., 18. 3. The term transnationalism has come into vogue recently and has generally defied definition. Borrowing heavily from works by Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini, and David Harvey, I define the term here as a degree of simultaneity. In other words, transnationalism involves, to a degree, a conscious attempt at integrating the cultural milieus of two separate places at the same time. 4. James A. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and Southeast Coastal Modernization, 1843–1937” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1998), 95, 283–84; Xiamen huaqiao zhi bianzuan weiyuan hui, Xiamen huaqiao zhi [Xiamen Overseas Chinese Gazetteer] (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1991), 25. 5. Much recent debate has centered on whether a linkage exists between the forces of colonialism and modernity. Tani Barlow contended that the two were “inseparable,” that the ideology of one justified the other, and that modernity could not be viewed as a thing in itself. See Tani Barlow, “Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity,’” in Tani Barlow, ed., Formation of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–7. 6. Xiamen zhi [Xiamen Gazetteer], vol. 1. See also Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” chapter 1. 7. Of course this trope of the nation-state was never static; it went through many changes. Prasenjit Duara has shown that it was challenged throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and only when it was wed to a linear conception of history was it able to repress alternative visions of the nation. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 202–3. 8. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homelands and Return,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991), 95. 9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983). 10. Duara, Rescuing History, 202–25. 11. Xu Youchao, “Xin Xiamen” [New Xiamen], Huaqiao shangbao 2, no. 3 (March 1932), 1. 12. This argument was also advanced by Edward Friedman, who noted in 1994 that there existed “a new national project that seems a palpable reality in a mobile south China that reaches out through the Chinese diaspora to the world.” Edward Friedman, “Reconstructing China’s Identity: A Southern Alternative to Mao-Era Anti-Imperialist Nationalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 85.

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James A. Cook 13. Dai Yifeng, Jindai luri huashang “Taiyi hao” yu dongya yanhai jiaoyi quan [Overseas Chinese merchant firm “Taiyi” and the East Asian coastal network] (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1994), 127–45, 299–331. 14. The term sangley comes from the southern Fukienese word sengli (shengli), or “trade.” John Bowring, A Visit to the Philippine Islands (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1859), 145. 15. For more on the experiences of Chinese overseas, see Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1951); G. William Skinner, The Chinese in Thailand (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957); Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962); Wang Gungwu, A Short History of the Nanyang Chinese (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1959); and Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha, 1990). 16. Robert E. Elson, “International Commerce, the State and Society: Economic and Social Change,” in Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142. 17. See, for example, Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 18. Elson, “International Commerce,” 131–57. 19. This position of middleness took on slightly diªerent forms throughout Southeast Asia. In many European colonies, wealthy Chinese were appointed to leadership roles that were formerly recognized by the colonial governments. Thus, the kapitan in the Dutch East Indies, the chef in French Indochina, and the headman in Singapore not only were the richest and most influential men in their communities but also had to get along with their colonial rulers. 20. Remarks made at the keynote address for the Conference on Maritime China, March 13–14, 1998, Center for East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 21. As quoted in Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, 408. 22. Ibid. 23. As quoted in consular correspondence, British Consulate, Amoy, October 22, 1921. 24. Zhou Xiuying, “Aiguo huaqiao qiyejia Huang Yizhu” [Patriotic overseas Chinese industrialist Huang Yizhu], Gulangyu wenshi ziliao 2 (March 1997): 27. 25. Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia, 1800– 1911 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986); Heng Pek Koon, Chinese Politics in Malaysia: A History of the Malaysian Chinese Association (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Reimagining China 26. Penang Gazette (Malaysia), July 21, 1889. 27. Lim Boonkeng, “Introductory Remarks,” Xiamen daxue xuebao 3, no. 7 (1928): 1. 28. Lim Boonkeng, “Our Enemies,” Straits Chinese Magazine 1, no. 2 (1897): 52–53. 29. As quoted in Huang Zongshi, Xiamen daxue xiaoshi ziliao, di yi ji, 1921–1937 [Collected documents of Xiamen University, vol. 1, 1921–1937] (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1987), 82. 30. Lim, “Introductory Remarks,” 3. 31. Zhuang Weiji, “Quanzhou fangzhi kao” [An examination of Quanzhou local history], Xiamen daxue xuebao 3, no. 7 (1924): 13–24. 32. Ibid., 21–22 33. It is interesting to note that Xiamen sinologists were guilty of many of the same historical wrongs that had been committed against them by Western sinologists— namely, their insistence on viewing the native peoples of Southeast Asia as ahistorical and lacking their own claim to Nanyang. 34. Such claims are still with us today. See Jean DeBernardi, “Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Southern Min,” Sino-Platonic Papers 25 (August 1991): 10. 35. There is a degree of truth to this assertion. As one contemporary scholar noted: “On the one hand, we find here numerous archaisms not preserved elsewhere, and on the other hand, a whole series of local innovations which are purely Min. . . . This group is, next to Mandarin, the most distinctive and easily characterized group of Chinese dialects.” Jerry Norman, Chinese (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 228. 36. Huang, Xiamen daxue xiaoshi ziliao, 140. 37. Fujian sheng danganguan, eds., “Chen Qingji guanyu Quanan qiche gongci chuanban sinian lai shouzhi qingkuang de baogao” [Mr. Chen Qingji’s report on four years of business of the Quan’an Transport Company], in Fujian huaqiao dangan shiliao (xia) (Fuzhou: Dangan chubanshe, 1990), 1016. 38. Guo Jingcun, “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen, 1926–1933” [Notes on the opening of new districts in Xiamen, 1926–1933], Xiamen wenshi ziliao 19 (August 1992): 72. 39. City regulations specifically stipulated that all nightsoil be left at the rear of the building rather than at the front, to avoid “oªending the general public with noxious odors.” 40. Xiamen shi fangdi chan zhi bianzhuan weiyuan hui, Xiamen shi fangdi chan zhi [Xiamen land gazetteer] (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1988), 16–17. 41. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 384–88. 42. Zhou Xingnan (1885–1968) originally hailed from Huiyang in eastern Guangdong. As a youth he had spent time in Batavia and Singapore before returning to China in 1911, in the aftermath of the revolution. Zhou’s name literally means “awaken the south.” His management of Huizhou and Shantou under the warlord Chen Jitong

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James A. Cook enhanced Chen’s reputation as an “enlightened” warlord and solidified Zhou’s reputation as a city builder. Zhou then followed Chen into southern Fujian in 1918 and became the general’s chief civil administrator at Zhangzhou in 1919. His modernization eªorts there were so successful that they drew praise even from the consulate in Amoy. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 236. 43. Putnam to U.S. Secretary of State, January 9, 1928, Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Aªairs of China, 1910–1929 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1960). 44. Xiamen huaqiao zhi, 133, 376–77. 45. Wu Bingmin, “Yu jiuguo tan dao jiuxiang” [From saving the nation to saving the village], Kangri zhuan kan 2 (February 27, 1932): 12. 46. Pictures of Cai Dingkai and Jiang Guangnai became ubiquitous throughout Southeast Asia and were often found hanging on the walls of Chinese shops next to Sun Yat-sen’s own portrait. 47. The control of the province by the army came at the expense of GMD naval control. Many of the naval commanders hailed from Fuzhou and were looked upon with great distrust by residents of southern Fujian. “Nineteenth Route Army in Control of Fujian,” China Weekly Review 63, no. 1 (December 3, 1932): 14. 48. Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 96–97. 49. Ibid., 97. 50. See reports in Nanyang shangbao (June 28–29, 1932). 51. “Shijiu lu jun junzheng Cai Dingkai di Xia yang qing,” Nanyang shangbao [South Seas Business Daily] (Singapore), July 28, 1932; “Jiang Guangnai ru Min yu gaizu Min zheng wenti,” Nanyang shangbao, September 30, 1932. 52. Lin Yu, “The P.I. Chinese and the National Defence of Fukien,” China Critic (November 24, 1932): 907. 53. Ibid., 1246. 54. Zhong, “Fujian sheng zhengfu yingyou huaqiao canjia zuzhi” [The Fujian provincial government welcomes overseas Chinese to participate in governing]; Huaqiao xun kan (November 11, 1932): 9. 55. Cai Dingkai, “Gaizhao Fujian yu huaqiao” [Reform in Fujian and the overseas Chinese], Feilubin minlila zhonghua shanghui sanshi zhounian jinian kan (Manila: Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 1936), jia 72. 56. Lin, “The P.I. Chinese,” 1246. 57. “Xin Xiamen de minzu xing” [The people’s character of new Xiamen], Xiamen zhoubao 155 (February 9, 1933).

Reimagining China 58. Biographical details on Xu Youchao are from entries under his name in the following: Xiamen huaqiao zhi, 386; Quanzhou shi huaqiao zhi, 414; Xiamen jingji tequ cidian, 599. 59. Huaqiao ribao [Overseas Chinese Daily] (Xiamen), January 18, 1933. 60. Ibid. 61. Huaqiao ribao, February 20, 1933; United States Department of State, China: Internal Aªairs, 1930–1939, Paul Kesaris, ed. (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984), Amoy 72. Hereafter, USDS, 1930–1939. 62. USDS, 1930–1939, Amoy 69. 63. Jiangsheng bao [River Voice Daily] (Fuzhou), February 12, 1933. 64. Chen Mingshu (1890–1965) had been Cai Dingkai and Jiang Guangnai’s commanding o‹cer in the 1920s. During the GMD-led Northern Expedition, Chen had gained nationwide notoriety for his brilliant victories over the forces of Wu Peifu in Hubei. He was later made commander of the Nineteenth Route Army, joining Cai and Jiang. In May 1931 he sided with Chiang Kai-shek in his battle with Canton and was rewarded with the designation commander of the anti-Communist forces in Jiangxi. During the Shanghai Incident, Chen shared in the glory of the Nineteenth Route Army’s stand against Japan because he was the commander of the force, though the actual fighting was directed by Cai and Jiang. For more on Chen, see Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 213–17. 65. The Tribune (Manila), October 27–28, 1932. 66. Ibid., November 8, 1932. 67. Ibid. 68. Hu Hanmin, the venerable leader of the GMD, stated that “if the one military person who completely controls the government [i.e., Chiang Kai-shek] is a traitor, then the Nanjing government must be traitorous and submit to Japan.” Quoted in Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 115. 69. Ibid., 131. 70. Chao Jinwen, “Renqing guoqu de cuowu jiuqiu jianglai de guangming” [Admitting past mistakes and calling for future accomplishments], Dingjin 3 (September 20, 1933): 9–12. 71. Qianqu ribao [Vanguard Daily] (Xiamen), September 13, 1933. 72. Eastman, Abortive Revolution, 86–96. 73. Ibid., 104. 74. Zeng Bingshan, “Zhuming aiguo huaquiao Li Qingquan xiansheng zhuanle”

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James A. Cook [The biography of famous patriotic overseas Chinese Mr. Li Qingquan], Fujian shi zhi 9 (1988): 39. 75. Li Qishen (1886–1959) also had long-standing ties to Chen Mingshu, Jiang Guangnai, and Cai Dingkai. Li had been Chen, Jiang, and Cai’s commanding o‹cer in 1925, when he was assigned control of the Fourth Army. He later served as governor of Guangdong and president of the Whampoa Military Academy, and in 1927 he was elected to the GMD Central Executive Committee. In 1929 Li got embroiled in a factional dispute between Chiang Kai-shek and the Guangxi clique and was detained and imprisoned. Upon his release in 1931 he was forced to retire to Hong Kong, until receiving the invitation to join his former subordinates in Fuzhou in November 1933. Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, 292–95. 76. Eugene Chen (1878–1944) was born in Trinidad in the British West Indies. After attending a Roman Catholic college, he became a barrister and practiced law until 1911, when he left the colony and traveled to London. There he met Sun Yat-sen, with whom he returned to China to serve as a legal advisor and as Sun’s English secretary. After Sun’s death in 1925, Chen edited the bilingual GMD newspaper Min bao. He became a noted anti-imperialist associated with the GMD left. In April 1927 he was forced to flee with Madame Sun Yat-sen for the Soviet Union. In February 1931 he returned to Hong Kong and became the foreign minister of the anti-Chiang government that was forming in Canton in May. He would travel to Fuzhou in November 1933. Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, 180–83. 77. Quoted in “The Nineteenth Route Army and the Fukien-Kiangsi Political Puzzle,” China Weekly Review, December 2, 1933, 9. 78. Quoted in Xiamen huaqiao zhi, 132. 79. Ibid. 80. See Eastman, Abortive Revolution, 85–139. 81. Cai Dingkai, Cai Dingkai zizhuan (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1982), 447–62. 82. See the various entries in Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary. 83. Edward Friedman, “A Failed Chinese Modernity,” Daedalus 122, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 12. 84. Edward Friedman, “Reconstructing China’s National Identity: A Southern Alternative to Mao-era Anti-imperialist Nationalism,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 65–91.

6 Shanghai’s China Traveler madeleine yue dong

Travel is important; it is not just for pleasure. —china traveler, June 1929

In an article published in the magazine China Traveler in 1933, Ye Qiuyuan enunciated the meaning of tourism in modern life. Words in Western languages flashed throughout the Chinese text: “I love traveling because I am a modern person. . . . And tourisme is an activity that belongs to modern people. . . . Modern people are mobile. They cannot transcend time and space, but the limits imposed on them by time and space are diminishing because they can travel.”1 Ye declared that “comfortable ships, sleeper cars, and airplanes” made traveling a pleasure, and one could experience “exoticism” through tourism. In his opinion, tourism had a universalizing eªect; it stood for a common taste shared among people similarly educated across national, racial, and class boundaries: A sense of Taste is involved in tourism. This Taste distinguishes the educated from the uneducated, and this Taste is usually consistent among educated people because it can be shared. . . . A traveler has no nationality. He has no prejudice—except his Taste. . . . Hatred among diªerent nations, discrimination among diªerent races, and separation between classes can all be given up by a traveler. It is only his Taste onto which he tenaciously holds.2

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In Ye’s argument, to claim a certain kind of relationship to space through travel establishes one’s identity as a modern subject who goes beyond his or her daily environment to explore the world and search for the exotic. This experience is not overtly qualified by nationality, race, or class, but transcends those demarcations. Such dreams for a modern form of tourism became a reality for people like Ye in 1923, when the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank set up a Travel Department, which it expanded into the China Travel Service (CTS) in 1927. In the same year the CTS began to publish a magazine, China Traveler (Luxing zazhi) (fig. 6.1). It ran uninterruptedly until 1952, even during the wars and political instabilities of those decades. It was distributed through the branch o‹ces of the CTS in many cities along major land and water transportation routes, including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xuzhou, Zhengzhou, Tianjin, Beiping, Fengtian, Hankou, Guangzhou, Chongqing, and Hong Kong. During its twenty-five years of publication the magazine reached all the provinces of China, as well as many places overseas, and by 1934 it had more than ten thousand subscribers. The Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, the CTS, and China Traveler together systematically promoted modern tourism in China and encouraged a new kind of spatial imagination. Although the layout of the magazine varied over the years, in most issues national and international travel accounts were interspersed. China Traveler’s readers toured the continents and civilizations of the globe. Accounts of European capitals and U.S. cities were regular features, and adventurers and businessmen described their encounters in lands from Japan to South Africa and Brazil. Several such international travelers were Chinese, but a great many accounts were translated from European languages. By far the majority of accounts in each issue described itineraries within China itself. The knowledge of the territory of China expressed in China Traveler is clearly constructed from a Shanghai perspective; the magazine in eªect proªered a geography of Shanghai’s China from the late 1920s through the 1940s. The majority of the trips described in its pages originated from Shanghai, and other regions of China were constantly compared with Shanghai, especially in terms of their lesser economic development.3 In these travel accounts, modern

6.1 A cover page from China Traveler.

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Chinese subjects, created in or identifying with Shanghai, travel through a “premodern” space called China, displaying a cosmopolitan lifestyle. A closer examination of the articles, however, reveals that the Shanghai traveler’s modern, cosmopolitan identity was not a priori but was actually established and confirmed through his connection to the rest of the country. A study of more than one hundred issues of China Traveler published from 1927 to 1937 shows that luxing (travel) referred to at least three, often overlapping, types of traveling: tourism as a form of consumption of time and space; trips of investigation with political motivations; and business travel. Diªerent regions served as the primary sites of these forms of travel at specific historical junctures, and either the cultural, the political, or the commercial significance of the region was emphasized. In other words, diªerent regions in China held different meanings for the Shanghai traveler as Shanghai’s geography of China changed along with the country’s international and national political conditions. Shanghai’s maps of China were drawn from specific perspectives at particular historical moments, at times overlapping, at times replacing each other. The Shanghai traveler’s desire for a Western-defined cosmopolitanism, his nationalist sentiment as a citizen of a semi-colony, and his restricted relationship to his own country’s national markets pulled him in diªerent directions and frustrated his dream for a stable, modern, cosmopolitan identity. I use cosmopolitanism in this chapter neither in the sense of an “idealist philosophy that designate[s] a normative horizon of world history” nor in the sense used in current debates over cosmopolitanism as an intellectual ideal and commitment, an alternative to nationalism.4 What Ye expressed in his discussion of tourism was a cosmopolitanism that was “an ideal of detachment opposing national attachment.”5 It was, however, historically realized “as exploitation on a world scale through the demonstration of political and construction of cultural superiority, as well as [through] international commerce and the establishment of a global model of production.”6 This cosmopolitanism, when expressed by the Shanghai bourgeoisie, was a romanticized desire for a universalism defined through a hierarchical international order that centralized Western values and provincialized the non-West.7 The extensive scholarship on Shanghai of the past two decades has covered a wide range of issues and subjects. In general, it sheds more light on what Shanghai meant for China than on what China meant for Shanghai, and it

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reconfirms the argument that Shanghai played a role more important than that of any other place in defining modernity in China.8 Basing this chapter on a close study of China Traveler from 1927 to 1937, I intend to read Shanghai’s modernity in the context of China as a whole and to question the possibility for defining that modernity without examining Shanghai’s relationship with the rest of China.

THE SHANGHAI COMMERCIAL AND SAVINGS BANK, THE CHINA TRAVEL SERVICE, AND CHINA TRAVELER The tourist industry in China grew out of the banking industry, the ideological aspects of which are discussed in greater detail by Brett Sheehan in chapter 4 of this volume.9 The expansive financial and service network required for a modern tourist industry is similar to the kind of political geography demanded and forged by modern banks. Both industries need security and predictability over a large geographical region, require considerable capital for their operation, and are dependent on the development of modern infrastructures. The two industries often share the same clientele. It is not surprising, then, that the China Travel Service was established under the direct suggestion of the president of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, Chen Guangfu (1881–1976). Chen, a native of Zhenjiang in Jiangsu Province who was educated at the University of Pennsylvania from 1904 to 1909, established the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank in 1915; within a decade it had grown into the most powerful private bank in China. Chen occupied many key positions in both the banking industry and the Nationalist government after 1927. In addition to serving on the boards of agents for the Central Bank, the Bank of China, and the Bank of Communications, he served on many of the Nationalist government’s key committees on trade and finance, such as the National Economic Committee. His eminence as an economic advisor to the Nationalist government continued throughout the years of war with Japan. In 1938 he obtained two major loans from the United States for the Nationalist government. In 1945 he represented the Nationalist government at the international trade conference in the United States, and he tried to encourage foreign investment in China after the war.10 Historians might never be able to learn what strings Chen pulled in the government over the years to help his own

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businesses, but to judge by the privileges and opportunities the CTS enjoyed, his eminence in the banking industry and the government almost certainly benefited the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and the CTS. The business of the CTS was extensive. Under its director, Chen Xiangtao, were seven departments responsible for, respectively, cargo, luggage, and clearing customs; land transportation and tickets; ship transportation and tickets; advertising and publishing; accounting and bookkeeping; issuing domestic and international traveler’s checks; and supervising and problem solving. A special agent was hired to attract advertisements for the magazine.11 In 1929 the CTS began working with the Tongjilong Company, making travel plans and reservations for international travelers.12 The position of the CTS inside the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank is clearly indicated in a strategic planning memo written in November 1935. It states that “in order to propagate the business of the bank,” the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank should “actively work with the CTS, assisting and supervising it to improve its services.” Moreover, the memo explains: The CTS is closely connected to the Bank; the quality of its service seriously aªects the reputation of the Bank. All the customers who are satisfied with the CTS will have a good impression of the Bank. . . . Since the public makes this connection between the Bank and the Travel Service, the two sectors should work closely internally. We should take the responsibility to improve the CTS. It will benefit the development of the Bank if the CTS acts as good propaganda for it.13

The same points were stressed again in September 1945 in a letter Chen Guangfu sent from New York to colleagues at the bank, discussing directions it should take after World War II. The bank would not add new sectors to those it currently had, but it would strengthen existing ones. The CTS was first on the list of priorities. Chen argued: “The CTS has been in operation for twenty years and enjoys a long-established good reputation. The government appreciates its service and welcomes it to regions all over the country. Recently, the government has asked the CTS to provide food and accommodation services to China Airlines.” The CTS was to play a central role in the bank’s postwar development. Chen planned for the travel service to sell tick-

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ets for railways in the recovered region of northeastern China, and he suggested that the CTS discuss with the government the possibility of taking over the Japanese chain Yamato Hotels. He predicted that after the war, the United States would develop airplane and airline industries with East Asia as a business target. The CTS, Chen proposed, should set up facilities to take advantage of the business opportunities that would be opened up by this development. He foresaw more foreign tourists coming to China than in the past, and these people would all be CTS’s future customers. “We not only have to maintain the good reputation of the CTS but also have to develop its international reputation. The significance of such a contribution is beyond the interest of the Bank’s own development.”14 It is di‹cult to gauge the extent to which the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank benefited financially from the operation of the CTS. But one indicator is the number of traveler’s checks it issued—it was the only bank in China that did so. By 1936 it had issued 1.03 million yuan in traveler’s checks.15 By way of comparison, the total capital of the Chinese Agricultural Bank (Zhongguo Nonggong Yinhang) was 1 million yuan in 1926.16 Branches of the bank and the CTS helped one another with business. For instance, the Beijing branch introduced to the CTS its customers who needed services in cargo freight and travel; the CTS introduced to the bank its customers who needed services in depositing and wiring money.17 This link between the bank and the CTS was displayed publicly at every opportunity. At the West Lake World Exhibition in Hangzhou in 1929, the names China Travel Service and Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank were put together on a highly visible clock on the building that housed both. The two names were also spelled out on the floor tiles at the building’s entrance.18 In 1927 and 1928 the CTS began publishing China Traveler magazine as a quarterly, upgrading it to a monthly in 1929. The magazine featured specially invited contributors such as Chu Minyi (who had studied in France and became the secretary-general of the Executive Yuan in 1934),19 Cao Yabo (a senior member of the Nationalist Party), and Zhou Shoujuan (an eminent writer). The magazine hired overseas correspondents in Japan, Great Britain, the United States, and France. It also featured staª writers and freelancers. Probably because of strong backing by the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, China Traveler was unaªected by the devaluation of silver that heavily damaged

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6.2 Advertisement in China Traveler for luggage shipment.

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the printing and publishing industries in China in the 1930s. During those years the magazine oªered a 30–percent discount to whole-year subscribers, and while most magazines tried to cut costs by using lower-quality paper, China Traveler switched to imported Swedish oª-white paper, “to show that the magazine was not just for profit.”20 This might indeed have been the case, since the likely objective of the bank and the CTS was not so much to profit from the magazine as to use it for public relations and advertising.

SHANGHAI VACATIONERS IN THE LOWER YANGZI REGION The numerous advertisements in China Traveler created the impression that every corner of the world was reachable from Shanghai. Marseilles was only thirty-two days away; London, thirty-eight.21 One could visit the Leiden or Chicago world expositions or book a ticket for the train Empire Builder from Seattle to New York. On that train, one could enjoy “green forests, sparkling rivers, and 60 miles along Glacier National Park” and experience “a thrilling ride through the new eight-mile electrified Cascade Tunnel, the longest in the Western world.”22 China Traveler and its advertisers attempted to create in readers the impression that Shanghai, closely connected to the outside world, was modern and cosmopolitan and that there was no limit to the spatial reach of the Shanghainese. An unlimited spatial imagination was, according to the magazine, a necessity for the residents of Shanghai. Many articles made the point that Shanghai was so modern that people needed to be able to escape it. And though overseas travel remained, in reality, a privilege for the rare few, what the typical Shanghai traveler could do was take trips within the lower Yangzi region. An advertisement in China Traveler by the Jing-Hu (Nanjing-Shanghai) and HuHang-Yong (Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo) Railway Company appealed to potential passengers: “After having worked hard for six days, you can take advantage of Sunday to relax. Take the Shanghai-Nanjing train in the morning to Suzhou or Wuxi to visit the mountains, waters, and famous scenic sites, and return on the evening train. We guarantee you a refreshed spirit.”23 This ad betrays the sense that the Shanghainese had become so thoroughly modern that they needed a break from the city—and the sense that other regional cities were, by contrast, latent suburbs.

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Several articles portrayed traveling as a refuge from the routine life and maddening crowds of Shanghai. One author grumbled that everything followed a schedule in daily life in Shanghai: in the o‹ce one faced the desk all day, listened to the calculating words of business, and squinted at the small letters on business documents. Every day one passed the same busy Nanjing Road and Jing’an Road. No quiet time was left outside of these routine activities; even eating and drinking often served the purpose of entertaining business partners. Except when one slept, one was controlled by forces other than oneself, with no time for reflection. In contrast, on a leisure trip, when the train pulled out of the station, one left the tall buildings behind and saw the land, trees, and creeks. Everything outside the city made the o‹ce buildings in Shanghai, even with their modern hygiene facilities, seem dingy and the paved Nanjing and Jing’an Roads seem like narrow alleys. Gazing at a farmer leaning on his plow and at cows slowly drinking from a stream was more enjoyable than being in the noisy dance halls.24 Yet making such leisure-time escapes to the Chinese countryside was not, according to the magazine, a traditionally Chinese habit. Repeatedly its pages highlighted the contrast between Europeans and Americans, who enjoyed traveling, and the Chinese, who tended to stay home. Zhao Junhao, the editor of the magazine, wrote: Europeans and Americans take great pleasure in traveling. They think about going away as soon as they have some free time. The luxury of their ships and trains and the comfort of their hotels are all very attractive. Either climbing a mountain or going to the beach, people enjoy traveling as a means of relaxation and self-cultivation. In our country, however, everyone considers traveling a form of hardship. . . . And traveling indeed is hardship in our country. The ships and trains are unimaginably dirty. The environment around the hotels is unbearably noisy. Except for the wealthiest people, who can aªord paying a large amount of money to enjoy exceptional comfort, ordinary people do not have access to the pleasure of travel.25

Yu Songhua, a reporter for the newspaper Shenbao, shared with the readers of China Traveler his impression of Germany: “Germans love music and travel. During spring and autumn and summer, men and women, young and old, all

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like to go outdoors or travel to faraway places. In comparison, people in our country like to drink and play mahjong to kill time. The German way is so much better. Travel and music are what we should advocate in China as respectable and beneficial forms of entertainment.”26 The habit of leisure travel was seen as a direct result of foreign influence.27 But the place to go for such vacations in the 1930s was the lower Yangzi region, Shanghai’s backyard. The development of Chinese tourism in the lower Yangzi coincided with the unification of China by the Nationalist government in 1926–27 and the establishment of Nanjing as the capital city in 1928. Under the Nationalist government’s firm control, the region became a safe haven for tourism, and tourism in turn boosted a sense that the security of the national space could be enjoyed. In early 1930, the North Station in Shanghai saw thirty-three trains come and go daily, ten of them between Shanghai and Nanjing.28 Taking a trip to Hangzhou during the weekend and returning to one’s o‹ce on Monday became both possible and fashionable.29 The most favored spots for weekend trips covered in China Traveler included Hangzhou, Wuxi, Zhenjiang, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Longhua in Shanghai’s suburbs. Every spring the CTS chartered a train to go to Hangzhou from Shanghai.30 The advertisement for the train highlighted four features: the train fit well with the pace of life in Shanghai; it was fast, comfortable, and pleasant; its timing matched the short vacation break that companies gave their employees during the Easter holiday; and it took only four hours to reach Hangzhou, nonstop. The CTS promised that facilities on the train would be first class, and the food, catered by the famous restaurant Yizhixiang in Shanghai, delicious. The atmosphere would be pleasant, because everyone on the train belonged to the same class and was going to the same place for a common purpose. When the train arrived in Hangzhou, it would stop at the platform closest to the station, so passengers would not even need to walk across the overpass that crossed the tracks, nor would they have to go through the checkpoint.31 Tickets for this chartered train sold out every year. Five hundred passengers made the trip in 1929. The Zonglan (Palm) Company distributed complimentary gifts to the passengers: soap, toothpaste, and baby powder. The CTS arranged for buses that waited for the passengers at the train station, ready to whisk them oª to their hotels. However, this careful arrangement, manipulated from Shanghai, had one hitch: the local rickshaw pullers in Hangzhou

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were angry because their business had been taken away. They created a minor riot at the train station in which a female passenger was hit on the head by a rock. The CTS’s response to the incident was swift and eªective, and China Traveler hastened to reassure future travelers that they were in expert hands. The magazine reported that Mayor Zhou of Hangzhou appeared in person at the station to pacify the situation; the director of the Hangzhou branch of the CTS provided a doctor to treat the woman; and the Bureau of Public Security and Highway Bureau both sent representatives to the hotel to apologize to the woman and promised her that the oªender would be seriously punished.32 Another type of tourism that became fashionable in Shanghai was the summer vacation (xiaoxia). The editor of China Traveler explained that Western men and women treated summer vacation as an important event and started planning for it in mid-spring. Advertisements related to summer vacations, according to the editor, were featured frequently in Western-language newspapers. Among the Chinese, “people who are wealthy and not constrained by their professions go to other places for the summer: as far as Qingdao, Beidaihe, and Weihaiwei, and as nearby as Guling.”33 Through the years, China Traveler regularly referred to Moganshan, Guling, Qingdao, and Beidaihe as China’s four summer vacation sites, and the CTS set up hotels and service centers at all four.34 In 1931 the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and the CTS jointly published ads for the Summer Vacation Agency for these four resorts. The bank opened checking accounts for vacationers, wired money, issued traveler’s checks, provided postal service, and helped with related business.35 In the summer of 1931, all four resorts were packed to full occupancy by vacationers. More than two thousand Westerners and Chinese stayed in the Lu Mountains in the summer. The magazine commented: “Recently, the Chinese interest in summer travel is no less strong than that of Westerners.”36 Moganshan, in Zhejiang Province, was particularly popular among summer vacationers from Shanghai because of its proximity to the city (fig. 6.3).37 Eight hours by train and bus from Shanghai, the mountain was famous for its mild temperatures and bamboo forest. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, several thousand people went to Moganshan every summer. The practice of spending the summer there had started with Western missionaries in the late 1870s. In 1899 a missionary purchased a piece of land at Moganshan in the name of the church, though such a purchase was in

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clear violation of treaties that forbade foreigners to own property outside of designated concessions. Still, Western property owners set up a small administration of their own after a large number of foreign nationals had acquired real estate there.38 A 1926 survey recorded eighty-one houses owned by Americans, twenty-eight by Britons, three by Germans, three by French people, and one by Russians. The Department of Public Works of Shanghai owned one public summerhouse, and thirty-two houses belonged to Chinese owners. There was also one funeral home and one Catholic and two Protestant churches in the town.39 Until 1929 the Chinese government remained unsuccessful in taking back administrative control over the area. In 1916 the government established a police station on the mountain, but not until after the establishment of the Nationalist government did the Zhejiang provincial government set up a bureau to manage the summer resort. The new administration repaired roads, installed streetlights, improved public hygiene, planted trees, established long-distance telephone service, and built a power plant.40 Guling was another popular site for summer vacations. Set in the Lushan, forty miles southeast of Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province, it was several days’ journey from Shanghai. The foreign communities in China set up boarding schools for their children at Guling, and some three to four thousand Westerners spent the summer there every year. Guling had “concessions” occupied exclusively by Westerners, and there, too, a missionary had purchased a piece of land in the late nineteenth century. Local residents, enraged by the sale, attacked the property, and local o‹cials tried to revoke the deal. But the Qing government, trying to avoid more conflict with foreign powers in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War, punished the residents and leased the land to the missionaries for ninety-nine years. Local people called the resort “SevenCountry Concession.” In addition, a concession in the southwestern part of the area had been obtained by a Russian missionary in 1898. Westerners administered their concessions, organized their own patrols, collected taxes, and built roads, churches, meeting halls, playgrounds, and swimming pools. These places “looked just like miniatures of the concessions in Shanghai.”41 Although sketching the histories of these two summer resorts and describing some of the tensions between Westerners and locals under the Qing dynasty, China Traveler never hinted that racial or political tensions at the

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6.3 Advertisement in China Traveler for a summer retreat in Moganshan.

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resorts were a contemporary problem. A reader gets an impression of the pleasant sharing of vacation sites by Westerners and Chinese. But behind the peaceful picture lay a hidden story: when the Chinese came to these vacation sites, the Westerners fled. Western vacationers soon abandoned Moganshan, and in a few years the number of Westerners also declined in Guling, although the Chinese continued to stay outside of the concessions.42 In his memoir of growing up in an American missionary family in Shanghai, John Espey recalled that his family sold its vacation home and never returned to Moganshan, “which was already losing favor with many persons.” He wrote: This general desertion of Mokanshan has always interested me. Our summers there were always peculiarly non-Chinese. The servants were there, but the rest could have been found almost anywhere. It would not have been as picturesque, perhaps, but Mokanshan was a fair imitation of any American summer resort. . . . If you asked anyone in later years why he had deserted Mokanshan and had started going to Kuling or Tsingtao, you never got a very satisfactory answer. If you tried to pin anyone down, he would wriggle a bit and compliment you on your new tie. Some persons mumble that Mokanshan was very hot, that they liked sea-bathing or golf better than the mountains. It was not until years [later] . . . that I penetrated the mystery and reached the truth. No, it was none of the excuses that were brought forward. . . . For a very dreadful thing had happened: the Chinese were beginning to intrude!43

It was not only racism that led to the Westerners’ flight. The Chinese administration of Moganshan that was established in 1929 set about quietly redressing the old treaty violations in the area by enforcing regulations banning Westerners from purchasing any more property on the mountain and by requiring any Westerners who sold property to sell it to a Chinese. As a result, the number of Chinese-owned properties increased quickly after 1929.44 In all its coverage of the resort, China Traveler omitted the entire conflict, mentioning neither the Westerners’ flight nor the role played by the Nationalist government in guaranteeing Shanghai travelers access to the summer resort. The magazine thus completely evaded the political questions (colonialism, racism, national sovereignty) that conditioned Chinese vacationers’ visits to Moganshan in the first place.

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Once out of the city, the relationship of the Shanghainese to their Shanghai identity shifted. No longer victims of an oppressive urban environment, travelers now saw their a‹liation with the city as a privilege that rightfully bestowed upon them a sense of superiority to other, “local” Chinese people. The Shanghai traveler prided himself on a cosmopolitan knowledge of how to appreciate the beauty of nature. When the writer Zhou Shoujuan went to the Fuchun River, his group of Shanghai vacationers shared a boat with two Americans, an encounter Zhou took pains to record in great detail, including everyone’s agreement that the scenery was “marvelous” (in English). The local hotel, although its accommodations could in no way compare to the “metal bed and silk comforter in Shanghai,” was tolerable. The food easily matched Shanghai standards. But the nightlife away from Shanghai was far too quiet, and the group called in a local singer for entertainment after dinner—who turned out to be a huge disappointment.45 The vacationers talked about local history but apparently found it ultimately unmemorable, for they took pictures only of themselves.46 In Zhou’s account, as in many others from the pages of China Traveler, the place visited was described exclusively from the vantage of a consumer. Place was transformed into a product to meet the delectation of the paying Shanghai customer. In contrast to more outlying regions of China—the Northwest, Southwest, and Northeast—in the lower Yangzi area the Shanghai tourist sought primarily comfort and beauty and did not venture into exoticism. The essays in China Traveler invariably list some complaints about hotels and food being dirty and local people being ignorant, but these are presented as problems of level of development, not as fundamental cultural diªerences. Locations in the lower Yangzi occupied a continuum of development that could be charted by cultural distance from Shanghai, but their unmodern aspects—the dirty, the tasteless, the superstitious, the unfashionable—though inconvenient, were harmless and perhaps even amusing. Women’s hairstyles served as one barometer of modernity: in Wuxi, local women were nicely dressed but had not cut their hair short,47 whereas in East Zhejiang, some women wore short hair, indicating exposure to modern trends.48 Zhang Chunfan related legends about the origin of names for Mao Mountain, but he immediately qualified his explanation: “Now, at a time when science has developed, we should not talk about these absurd things and should rid ourselves of superstitions. But this

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is how the mountain gained its names, so I have to mention it.”49 These unmodern trappings added flavor to the surroundings, making the Shanghai traveler’s experience as a consumer of the landscape that much more pleasant by confirming his modern superiority. In the eyes of local people, however, the Shanghai tourist’s identity could be a bit unclear. A man in Lushan asked a Shanghai tourist whether he was an American. In his essay, the Shanghai man commented on the local man’s ignorance with some dismay.50 As historians, how should we interpret this misrecognition? Perhaps the local man was being sarcastic, but perhaps not. Maybe he saw vacationers, aside from some details of hair, skin, and accent, as generally similar, whether they were Shanghainese or American. Certainly such inability to discern the diªerence would have been considered woefully unmodern. But regardless of whether the Lushan man was expressing sarcasm or ignorance, he in fact articulated a perception curiously in accord with Ye Qiuyuan’s fantasy of the cosmopolitan traveler. Far from confirming the Shanghai traveler’s sense of identity, however, this encounter disturbs it, for in this encounter with the “local,” cosmopolitanism, instead of superseding national identity, undermines its realization.

POLITICAL VERSUS COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NORTHEAST, SOUTHWEST, AND NORTHWEST It was obviously desirable for the whole country of China to be accessible for Shanghai tourism. In July 1937, prior to the full-scale Japanese invasion, China Traveler published a special issue introducing the mingsheng (famous scenic sites) from along all thirteen major railway lines in China, illustrated by a large number of photographs. The editor explained: Since the Nationalist government unified the whole country, it has paid special attention to transportation, especially the railroads. All the previous and current ministers of the railways have put in impressive eªorts and achieved much success. The conditions of the railways are very diªerent from before. Consequently, people have a much stronger interest in traveling than before. Tourists go to all the places reachable by railways. . . . Railways have an important impact on the development of mingsheng throughout the whole of China.51

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Of course, even well before the Japanese assault, barriers to travel had existed throughout the country. The lower Yangzi style of tourism was simply out of the question in most parts of China. Many places were not easily accessible because of poor transportation, political instability, and banditry. In many other places, traveling was made inconvenient by the territorial control of foreign powers. Except for accounts of excursions in and around Beiping, most of China Traveler’s accounts of trips beyond the Shanghai-Nanjing region were not of vacations but of government-related business trips or patriotic “investigations” carried out by private groups of students and intellectuals. The Northeast, Northwest, and Southwest were the usual destinations for such trips. Unlike the lighthearted accounts of lower Yangzi jaunts, the articles on travel to China’s inland and border regions were seldom embellished by classical poems and literary references. Instead, the geography of these parts of the country was described in terms of industrial capacity, conditions of transportation, and natural resources. In 1929, Zhang Qinshi took a fifty-day trip from Beiping to Sichuan to fill a position at the local YMCA. Zhang had worked for the YMCA in Beiping after returning to China from a trip to France in 1921. His work focused on education and university students, and because of the volatile politics of such activities, he volunteered to work in Sichuan to spend some time in a quiet place where he could think over his beliefs. He also wanted to see China: “Although European tourist sites are beautiful, this is my motherland and I want to see its beautiful land with rich natural resources.” But his descriptions of the beautiful landscape are peppered with accounts of unexpected incidents. When he traveled from Yichang to Chongqing on the Yangzi River, people tried to convince him to take a foreign ship because those were safe from banditry, being protected by gunboats. Zhang thought that as a Chinese, he should not seek protection from foreign gunboats, and he decided to take a Chinese ship. But he found that the ship he intended to take had indeed been robbed by bandits the previous day, and on the day he was supposed to board it, there was a dead body in the river. He eventually took another Chinese ship, sharing it with a large group of soldiers who were being moved to a new location. The captain complained that the soldiers were not there to protect the ship but had actually commandeered it for a free trip. The Chinese armies never protected ships, he claims; instead, they bullied Chinese crews and chased all the passengers to foreign ships.52

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The chaotic monetary situation was another problem for Zhang. On his way from Beiping to Sichuan, he passed through Shanghai, Hankou, Yichang, Wan County, Chongqing, and Chengdu, each of which had its own system of exchange. In Jianyang, six diªerent kinds of silver dollars were in circulation, including two types of “old” dollars (the Yuan Shikai silver dollar and the dragon dollar), two “new” dollars (one minted by a factory in Chengdu and the other being Yuan Shikai silver dollars made in 1921, which were considered “new” because Yuan was no longer alive then), and two denominations minted by the local militaries.53 The situation was similar for anyone traveling from Xinjiang to Shanghai: only local currencies were accepted in specific regions. Hunan currency was used in Xinjiang; Hadayang circulated around Manzhouli; and the Feng [tian] piao was accepted in Liaoning. Only Japanese yen could be used for trains belonging to the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu).54 This jigsaw of overlapping currency circulation was far from the sole manifestation of China’s fragmentation. Traveling to some parts of China could be almost like going to another country. In May 1929, the publishers of daily newspapers in Shanghai organized a delegation for a twenty-six-day observation trip to the Northeast that would circle through Qingdao, Dalian, Shenyang, Changchun, Harbin, Tianjin, Beiping, and Nanjing. Few of the members had ever been to the Northeast. They brought heavy winter coats, only to discover that Shenyang was just as warm as Shanghai in May. They also encountered the foreignness of their own country in a more threatening sense as they detected a strong sense of crisis along their route. The transportation system caused their first concern. They took the Japanese ship S.S. Sakaki Maru from Shanghai to Qingdao and noticed that every ship plying that route was Japanese owned. The trains from Dalian to Shenyang and Changchun were run by Mantetsu, and the train from Changchun to Harbin was managed by Russians. The members of the delegation were shocked: “It feels like being in a foreign country,” wrote one in China Traveler.55 They observed that Mantetsu was a powerful weapon for Japan’s ambitions in Manchuria and Mongolia. Its railways appeared to be single rail, but in fact double rails had been laid at all crucial locations, and the whole railroad could be easily transformed into a double track if needed. The author of the China Traveler article noticed that Mantetsu’s trains were much better than

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those in Japan, alerting the delegation to Japan’s goal of permanent occupation in the Northeast. The travelers became further alarmed when they arrived in Dalian and noticed how permanent the architecture at its port appeared. Such architecture, they feared, signaled that the Japanese intended to stay there forever. All the buildings were strong and grand—nothing like the wooden houses on the islands of Japan.56 If the Northeast in 1929 was technically Chinese territory that felt as if it were under foreign control, the Southwest was a part of China still so inaccessible that travel there from Shanghai involved passing through truly foreign countries: Hong Kong, under British control, and Vietnam (Haifang), under the French. From Vietnam one took the Vietnam-Yunnan train to reach Kunming. Zhang Yunfen went with her husband on a business trip via this route. She remarked that only drug dealers would travel the land route through China’s Southwestern provinces.57 Both the geographical coverage of China Traveler and the area of operation of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank faced new limitations in the mid-1930s because of Japanese incursions. The bank’s ambition to expand into the rest of China was now curtailed. While the bank adjusted its decisions according to business calculations, the magazine responded to the changing conditions through demonstrations of patriotism and national consciousness. Though the optimistic cosmopolitanism of the late 1920s and early 1930s continued, the magazine began to show more signs of that cosmopolitan dream’s being challenged and frustrated. In the midst of national agitation after the invasion of Manchuria, China Traveler began to pay particular attention to the Northeast, Northwest, and Southwest. In January 1932 it announced that it would focus on accounts of the border regions. That issue carried articles on Xinjiang, Mongolia, and the Northeast.58 Rong Jiefu, a reader of China Traveler, sent a letter to the editor later that year, saying, “Traveling is a pleasant thing to do. But under the conditions of today’s China, the ordinary people have little knowledge of our country and its natural resources. They cannot go investigate in person, so they do not know the value of our own land. When the incident in the Northeast occurred, many people in central and south China held an attitude that it was other people’s business.” He then cited the example of the youth travel groups in Italy advocated by Benito Mussolini; although the Italian

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model was unachievable in China just then, he believed that China Traveler, as the only magazine on travel, should do more to introduce to its readers the greatness of China, to make them love their country.59 In March 1932 the magazine’s editor wrote: “At a time of national crisis, and when people of the whole country are enraged, the readers of the magazine are not in a cheerful mood either. The pleasure of tourism does not seem fit at such a time.” Japanese airplanes were flying over Shanghai, and shots from Japanese cannons were rattling the windows of the printing factory. But, the editor declared, “we would not dare to stop publishing the magazine”; it was a collective work of like-minded people and had more than ten thousand subscribers to serve.60 Articles on the Northeast focused on sovereignty issues. Almost every piece about trips from Shanghai to the North commented on the exclusive Japanese ownership of ships. Japanese and Russian ownership of railways in the Northeast raised similar concerns,61 along with the fact that the best hotels in Qingdao and the Northeast were the Yamato Hotels, run by the Japanese.62 China Traveler refused to publish ads for Japanese businesses. It also refused to use Japanese terms for Chinese territories, to call Jilin “Yongji,” or to use the words Manchukuo or Mantetsu.63 If the magazine failed to be vigilant on such matters, its readers reminded the editors. A reader’s letter in September 1933 pointed out that the previous issue had used the Japanese name “Wuhe bin” (Beach of Dancing Cranes) for a place in Qingdao. China Traveler should avoid this kind of mistake, the writer said, and use the Chinese name, “Taiping lu.”64 Although from the late 1920s onward, China Traveler’s articles about the Northeast became increasingly nationalistic, the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank was making the opposite decision about the region: to give it up. In 1930 the bank considered expanding its business into the Northeast and Sichuan. Chen Guangfu sent Zi Yaohua, one of the bank’s most capable o‹cers, to Manchuria and Sichuan to investigate business potential. On the basis of Zi’s report, Chen gave up the idea of establishing branches in Manchuria, and the bank avoided losses following the September 18 Incident the following year. As a new strategy, it quickly developed branches in Sichuan, including those in Chongqing, Chengdu, and Zigong. Along with the branches of the bank, the CTS established o‹ces as well as clean, economical hostels

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in Chongqing and other towns in Sichuan. “They provided convenience to many who went to or through Sichuan and helped establish a reputation for the Bank.”65 As part of the eªort to expand the reach of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank in the Southwest, Chen Guangfu went to Hunan in 1933 and suggested investigating the possibility of developing transportation and shipping businesses there. Merchants usually went to Hunan via Shanghai, which, Chen noted, cost time and money. He wanted to explore the possibility of accessing Hunan through Guangdong. He discussed the plan with the director of the CTS, Chen Xiangtao, and they dispatched Hu Shiyuan and Li Jingtai, the director of the bank’s Hunan branch, to investigate the possibility of establishing branches of the bank and the CTS throughout Hunan. China Traveler published Hu and Li’s detailed report, which evaluated the conditions of the transportation system in the province literally mile by mile. They drew some important conclusions from the trip and proposed several moves for the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and the CTS. They reported that the local governments would all welcome such a development in the transportation system and would encourage travelers to go through their regions. But Hu and Li believed that the waterways between Shiping and Lechang were too dangerous, and too much responsibility and liability would be placed on the CTS if it established a shipping service. Once the highway in Guangdong reached Pingshi and was connected to highways in Hunan, the CTS could then find a proper spot to establish the service. What it could do at the moment was open a hostel at Hengshan to serve tourists. Hu and Li proposed that instead of developing large-scale businesses in Hunan, the CTS should establish a branch in Guangzhou. Guangzhou was one of the most important cities in China, with a population of more than 1.5 million. People going abroad from Guangzhou and Hong Kong all had to obtain their passports in Guangzhou. In addition, the Guangzhou-Shaoguan railroad would soon be extended to Lechang, and preparations for a Guangxi-HunanGuangdong shipping service were under way. The establishment of a Guangzhou branch of the CTS should not be delayed. This branch could book tickets for the Yue-Han, Guang-San, and Guang-Jiu railway lines, for the Taigu and Yihe ship companies, and for ship passengers between Hong Kong and Shanghai and those who were going overseas. In addition, it could take over

Shanghai’s China Traveler

the businesses of clearing customs and luggage service. The prospective profit in Guangzhou, Hu and Li predicted, would be greater than that of the Hong Kong branch.66 These were sound business decisions. All these preparations enabled the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank to shift its business focus to the South and Southwest, the only feasible direction for expansion after 1937. In 1938 the number of train tickets issued through the CTS decreased significantly, because of the war, but at the same time, shipping by sea and air increased. The CTS developed a cargo service to keep up with the changes and maintain its profit level. It established branches in Kunming, Guiyang, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Lanzhou. It ran hostels and dining halls, sold tickets, and shipped cargo for the Southwest and Northwest Highway Bureaus in Changsha, Kunming, Lanzhou, Baoji, Huajialing, Pingliang, Hanzhong, Tongzi, Yuanling, Huangxian, Hechi, Dushan, Pingyi, and other places. Meanwhile, CTS branches were in preparation in Haifang, Wuzhou, and Liuzhou.67 By this time the Northeast had faded from the pages of China Traveler. Depictions of the Northwest in the magazine also shifted considerably, according to the changing geopolitical tide. After Japan invaded the Northeast in 1931, the Nationalist government called on the country to “develop the Northwest” to “avoid all dying together in the Southeast.” China Traveler began to publish more articles on the Northwest and on key points along the Long-Hai railroad leading there: the port of Lianyungang, where the railroad began, and the cities of Luoyang and Xi’an.68 Even its attitude toward ethnic diªerences changed: severe criticism of Buddhism was replaced by a cultural respect bred of a spirit of unity in the face of national crisis. In a 1930 article, the Mongols had been criticized for their strong belief in Buddhism. The author suggested, “It would be more meaningful if they could put this spirit of sacrifice they feel for Buddhism to something useful.”69 In contrast, the author of a 1932 article about a visit to the Ta’er Temple in Qinghai showed only the greatest respect for the monks and for Buddhism. He called the area the “sacred land of Buddhism” and was concerned that few Chinese had ever heard of it, whereas Westerners had been investigating the area, collecting samples of natural resources, shooting films, and preaching Christianity.70 Patriotism from Shanghai’s commercial establishment, however, had limits. In the summer of 1932 the Long-Hai railway company organized a “North-

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west Investigation Delegation.” It invited Chen Guangfu to join, but Bian Wenjian, one of his assistants, went on his behalf. Most of the members of the delegation were scientists and scholars, and some were bankers. “Everyone was patriotic,” Bian wrote later in China Traveler.71 The mood on the day of departure was one of eager optimism. The accommodations were extremely generous. From the time the group gathered in Zhengzhou to the time it spent in Xi’an, a huge banquet was held every day (mei ri da chi da he), “from Chinese dishes to Western cuisine, from soft drinks to beer. A man with a weak stomach would have gotten sick.” The entertainment for the group ranged from wenming xi (new-style drama) to Beijing opera. Each delegate was also given one hundred yuan in cash as a gift. When the special train carrying them to Xi’an left Zhengzhou, provincial politicians, merchants, and students saw them oª. Yang Hucheng, the governor of Shaanxi Province, welcomed them at a banquet. All this was not enough to convince the investigators to commit to the Northwest. Bian Wenjian’s group surveyed fourteen counties. The cars and sedan chairs that transported them over the bumpy country roads no longer provided the comfort of the special train on the Long-Hai railroad. They found the food—millet porridge and steamed buns—unbearable. There was little to investigate in the way of industry or infrastructure. The team apparently took no interest in conversing with common folk and spoke only with county o‹cials. When the delegation arrived in Xi’an, students at the school where they had planned to stay declared that they were against these running dogs of capitalism and would treat the delegation as they had treated Dai Jitao when he had visited, beating him and burning his car. The delegates had to stay at hotels instead. Bian concluded from the trip that there was no commerce, industry, or forest in Shaanxi. The delegation’s optimism about investing in the Northwest had evaporated upon seeing it. If the exotic Southwest promised rich natural resources and business opportunities, the Northwest was alien in a way that was useless to the Shanghai traveler with business interests. The special treatment Shanghai vacationers enjoyed in Hangzhou was unimaginable in the Northwest, and Shanghai travelers found it impossible to identify with the local people. When a member of Bian’s delegation told an elementary school teacher in Sanyuan that they were from Shanghai, the teacher asked him, “Where is

Shanghai’s China Traveler

Shanghai?” The question was shocking: “He is so ignorant.”72 A group of journalists on a trip to the Northwest in 1933 had a hard time getting service at a local hotel: We were unable to find a place to stay when we arrived in Xining. Someone accompanied us to a small hotel called Minsheng. But because we were not Qinghai natives, and in addition, we were from the south, nobody greeted us. We went inside, and someone eventually came out and said to us, “There is no room.” We knew that he was rejecting us on purpose, so we suppressed our anger and tried to talk to him, to no avail. Minsheng in fact was a very dirty place; we would not even want to pass its door if we were in Shanghai. Eventually we found a hotel run by a Shaanxi man across the street from the post office. Our room was right next to the horse stable. A large number of animals lived there, covering the place in a thick layer of excrement. It was so filthy and noisy that it was impossible for us to sleep. But since we were the rejected Southerners, we did not have much room to express any objection as long as we had a place to stay.

When the group met a man from the South who was working in Xining, they immediately became like “brothers of one family” and “talked freely about everything.”73

CONCLUSION In the same article in which Ye Qiuyuan elaborated his dream for modern tourism, he recorded his experience upon reaching Dalian from Japan. He saw many Japanese women standing on the dock waiting for their men, waving Japanese flags. Even in third-class cabins he had seen no Chinese. “It looked like an emigrant ship—from the colonizing country to the colony. When we approached Dalian, even someone like me—who has a very weak sense of the state but (I believe) a strong sense of the nation—cannot help feeling that the country is being broken apart.” What Ye saw in Dalian worried him. “If Shanghai is a semi-colony because there are the concessions, Indian police, and foreign patrolmen, then Dalian is a true colony. Among all the places I have been, none has a clearer colonial appearance than Dalian.” Only Japanese

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money and stamps could be used in Dalian. There were trolley buses, but no Chinese rode them, nor did they ride rickshaws—although they pulled them— and the language used on the buses was Japanese. Few Chinese could be spotted in the large crowd on the beach.74 Reading Ye’s travel account today, the discrepancy between his dream of modern tourism and the harsh realities that contradicted his ideals seems obvious, but Ye himself seemed not to notice the contradiction. The idea of tourism, and the imagination of unlimited spatial access associated with it, came to China along with the imperialist and colonial systems, but it was represented as a politically neutral and modern form of cosmopolitanism. To the Shanghainese who dreamed of this modern, cosmopolitan lifestyle, however, it could be only an illusion built on ignoring their own victimization by Western racism while in turn constructing a hierarchical relationship with the rest of China. If the unification of the country under the GMD in the late 1920s created a brief moment of optimism that a cosmopolitan experience was perhaps attainable, at least in the lower Yangzi region, the constraints posed by national and regional crises demonstrated the impossibility of achieving that cosmopolitanism in a fragmented China. Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism was part of its semi-colonial modernity. The city was a semi-colony to the Western metropole, but at the same time the Shanghai traveler evinced the mentality of a semi-colonizer vis-à-vis the rest of China; cosmopolitan transcendence was hemmed in on both sides. In his discussion of Chinese translations of Western stage plays, Joseph Levenson pointed out: The Chinese bourgeoisie of Shanghai . . . seemed alien. It was not the cosmopolitanism in itself that made it so, but the fact that the cosmos was somebody else’s—the usual case near foreign enclaves in underdeveloped societies. The very cosmopolitanism of some Shanghai Chinese, looking out from China, seemed a provincial variant, at the end of the line, to men who were looking in. The coin wavers, one side with the face of sophistication, the other with the face of questing, diffident innocence.75

In short, “the bourgeoisie was still abroad at home.”76 Shanghai’s modernity influenced the rest of China in important ways, pro-

Shanghai’s China Traveler

voking both admiration and criticism. But it is important to recognize that Shanghai had to establish its modern cosmopolitanism relationally, not only through its relation to the West but also through its connection to the rest of China. It was not only that China needed Shanghai as a beacon of modernity but also that Shanghai needed China against which to construct its identity. A comment made by Sun Yat-sen on the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is worth quoting here. Sun argued that nationalism was the necessary basis of a genuine cosmopolitanism: [ Western colonial powers] are now advocating cosmopolitanism to inflame us, declaring that, as the civilization of the world advances and as mankind’s vision enlarges, nationalism becomes too narrow, unsuited to the present age, and hence that we should espouse cosmopolitanism. In recent years some of China’s youths, devotees of the new culture, have been opposing nationalism, led astray by this doctrine. But it is not a doctrine which wronged races should talk about. We . . . must first recover our position of national freedom and equality before we are fit to discuss cosmopolitanism. . . . We must understand that cosmopolitanism grows out of nationalism. . . . If nationalism cannot become strong, cosmopolitanism certainly cannot prosper.77

As demonstrated by the case of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and China Traveler, Shanghai’s status as a semi-colony gave it the opportunity to claim a form of cosmopolitanism that was absent in other regions of China. This cosmopolitanism, as expressed through tourism, could be realized only by connecting itself to the rest of China. Yet the China through which the Shanghai traveler hoped to realize his dream of cosmopolitanism did not exist. Instead, what Shanghai cosmopolitanism encountered was a nation that had been fragmented by domestic instabilities and invasions of foreign powers. China Traveler’s eªort to create a stable Shanghai cosmopolitanism failed, therefore, for the lack of a stable China. The Shanghai identity constructed through China Traveler was one caught between cosmopolitanism, a fragmented nation, and the commercial interests of specific companies. Its cosmopolitanism could be exercised only within a limited region, and once it was exercised, the “modern Shanghai identity” was

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questioned, as by the local man in Lushan and the school teacher in Shaanxi. China Traveler constructed a Shanghai perspective in its representation and construction of a geography of China. But because “China” was not a stable concept, neither was the Shanghai perspective; a fragmented “China” led to an inconsistent Shanghai perspective and identity. The diªerent and changing meanings each region represented for Shanghai reveal the deep dilemma inherent in a Shanghai identity that attempted to establish itself on cosmopolitanism and a hierarchical relationship with the rest of China.

Shanghai’s China Traveler

NOTES 1. Ye Qiuyuan, “Luxing zhi pianyi yu hua,” China Traveler 7, no. 11 (November 1933): 3–10. The italicized words in the passages quoted in this paragraph are in Western languages in the original Chinese text. “Travel,” “traveling,” and “tourism” are all translations of the Chinese word luxing. 2. Ibid., 3–4. 3. For an example of such a comparison, see Zhao Junhao, “Longhua xiangdao,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 35–37; Qin Lizhai, “Zhoumo luxing zhi Wuxi,” China Traveler 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 39–45. 4. The quotation is from Pheng Cheah, “Introduction, Part 2: The Cosmopolitical— Today,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 26. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. Ibid., 26. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–23. 8. See, for example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); David Strand, “A High Place Is as Good as a Low Place,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 98–136. 9. The connection between the China Travel Service and the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank reminds one of American Express and travel insurance, businesses that reflect the way tourism arose from business travel, which is always dependent on banking. 10. Beijing jinrong shiliao: Diandang, qianzhuang, piaohao, zhengquan pian [Historical documents on finance in Beijing: Pawnshops, money shops, exchange shops, stocks and bonds], vol. 1 (Beijing: Beijing shi renmin yinhang jinrong yanjiu suo, 1994), 13. 11. China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): n.p. 12. China Traveler 3, no. 5 (May 1929): n.p. 13. Beijing jinrong shiliao, vol. 1, 25. 14. Ibid., 54. 15. Ibid., 47. 16. Beijing jinrong shiliao: Diandang, qianzhuang, piaohao, zhengquan pian [Historical documents on finance in Beijing: Pawnshops, money shops, exchange shops, stocks and bonds], vol. 3 (Beijing: Beijing shi renmin yinhang jinrong yanjiu suo, 1994), 1–3. 17. Beijing jinrong shiliao, vol. 1, 21.

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Madeleine Yue Dong 18. “Xihu bolan hui zhong zhi Zhongguo luxing she,” China Traveler 3, no. 7 (July 1929): 52. 19. China Traveler 3, no. 11 (November 1929). 20. China Traveler 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 65, and no. 7 (July 1930). 21. China Traveler 4, no. 4 (April 1930): 62. 22. Advertisement in China Traveler 5, no. 10 (October 1931): n.p. 23. China Traveler 8, no. 4 (April 1934): n.p. 24. Gao Wuxuan, “Cunxin chen yuan hua ping zong,” China Traveler 6, no. 1 (January 1932): 1–8. 25. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 6, no. 5 (May 1932): n.p. 26. Yu Songhua, “Shengping zhi jianghu quwei,” China Traveler 8, no. 1 (January 1934): 2. The author was the chief editor of Shenbao. 27. Tu Zheyin, “Cong Shanghai dao Harbin,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 15–17. The magazine also published articles translated from Western-language magazines such as National Geographic and Asia, presenting to its readers Western tourists’ views of China. Examples are Lilian Grosvenor Coville’s “Zui jin de Harbin,” trans. Cheng Zhenyuan, China Traveler 7, no. 5 (May 1933): 47–55; James Arthur Muller’s “Kong ling ye sheng ji,” China Traveler 3, no. 3 (March 1929): 9–12 (translated from Asia 28, no. 2); and David MacDonald’s “Xizang de yi pie,” China Traveler 3, no. 6 (June 1929): 7–12 (translated from Asia 29, nos. 3–4). 28. China Traveler 4, no. 1 (January 1930): 61–62. 29. “Ben she mei yu,” China Traveler 8, no. 3 (March 1934): 1; Shu liu shan fang, “Weiyang you ji,” China Traveler 3, no. 3 (March 1929): 13–16. 30. Zhao Junhao, “Hang you zhuanche wangfan ji,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 109–10. 31. “You Hang zhuanche zhiqu,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 2. 32. “You hang zhuan che wang fan zhi,” China Traveler 3, no. 5 (May 1929): 35–36. 33. Shen Peigan, “Shanghai ren de xiao xia shenghuo,” China Traveler 3, no. 4 (April 1929): 55–58. 34. China Traveler 5, no. 6 (June 1930): n.p. 35. China Traveler 5, no. 9 (September 1931): n.p. 36. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 5, no. 9 (September 1931): n.p. 37. Ibid. 38. Qin Lizhai, “Moganshan you cheng,” China Traveler 3, no. 4 (April 1929): 59–62. 39. Zhongguo luxing she, Moganshan daoyou (Shanghai: Zhongguo luxing she, 1932), 3. 40. Qin, “Moganshan you cheng,” 59–62. 41. Tan Yufu, “Guling you cheng,” China Traveler 3, no. 4 (April 1929): 63–65.

Shanghai’s China Traveler 42. Ibid. 43. John J. Espey, Minor Heresies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 84. 44. Zhongguo luxing she, Moganshan daoyou, 3. 45. Zhou Shoujuan, “Fuchun jiang shang,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 15–21. 46. Jiang Weiqiao, “Huangshan ji you,” China Traveler 3, no. 1 (January 1929): 9–24. 47. Peng Shuye, “Dongting xishan you ji,” China Traveler 3, no. 6 (June 1929): 15. 48. Chen Wanli, “Zhedong youji,” China Traveler 3, no. 11 (November 1929): 21–27. 49. Zhang Chunfan, “Maoshan chun you huiyi,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 55. 50. Tan, “Guling you cheng,” 64. 51. Editor, “Yi yue yi tan,” China Traveler 11, no. 7 (July 1937): n.p. 52. Zhang Qinshi, “Lu Shu dao shang,” China Traveler 3, no. 1 (January 1929): 25–31. 53. Ibid. 54. Wu Shaolin, “Nangui zu ji,” China Traveler 4, no. 4 (April 1930): 15–25. 55. Zhao Junhao, “Dongbei jihen ji,” China Traveler 3, no. 7 (July 1929): 53–64. 56. Ibid. 57. Zhang Yunfen, “Cong Shanghai dao Yunnan fu,” China Traveler 8, no. 1 (January 1934): 59–67. 58. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 6, no. 1 (January 1932): n.p. 59. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 6, no. 8 (August 1932): n.p. 60. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 6, no. 3 (March 1932): n.p. 61. Tu Zheyin, “Cong Shanghai dao Harbin,” China Traveler 2 (Spring 1928): 15–17. 62. Zhao Gaowu, “Bei you xin yan,” China Traveler 2, Spring special number (1928): 7–13. 63. Zhe An, “Jilin hu,” China Traveler 6, no. 9 (September 1932): 61–62. 64. “Editor’s Words,” China Traveler 7, no. 9 (September 1933): n.p. 65. Beijing jinrong shiliao, vol. 1, 17. 66. Li Jingtao and Hu Shiyuan, “E Xiang Yue jiaotong kaocha ji—tielu gonglu shuicheng,” China Traveler 7, no. 8 (June 1933): 9–19. 67. Beijing jinrong shiliao, vol. 1, 55–56. 68. An Zhi, “Jin ri de Luoyang: Longhai lu luxing de yi duan jilue,” China Traveler 6, no. 7 (July 1932): 37–49; Xia Jianbai, “Longhai lu shicha ji,” China Traveler 8, no. 3 (March 1934): 21–32; Xiao Meixing, “Chang’an you ji,” China Traveler 6, no. 7 (July 1932): 51–53. 69. “Yige luxing de pianduan guocheng,” China Traveler 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 35–38. 70. Mu Jianye, “Ta’er si jiqi denghui,” China Traveler 6, no. 10 (October 1932): 29–33.

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7 Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value yan hairong

I had a realization: I should not be like what I was before. I began to have a kind of . . . self-consciousness, a consciousness that I should change myself. Before this, when I worked for employers’ families, it’s known among us [domestics] from the same native place that we practice embezzlement. For example, I would record 15 cents for vegetables that cost 10 cents. . . . The kind of suzhi [quality] that we had didn’t make us feel ashamed about what we did. On the contrary, it made us feel that that’s what we should do. —xiaohong, a young migrant woman, interviewed June 25, 1999, Beijing

Migrants encounter many problems, but the biggest enemy is still the self. —Young migrant woman speaking to a group of migrants, October 17, 1999, Beijing

How could Xiaohong—a migrant from Anhui who had worked as a domestic in Beijing for several years—have had the realization expressed in the first epigraph? How could she have experienced such a desire to enact in herself a change that would dislodge her from a practice that has, in recent ethnographic writing, been celebrated as “everyday resistance”? These questions lead me to explore the larger discursive context that enabled her to disavow her previous practice as a sign of her and her fellow domestics’ deficiency in suzhi (quality).1 In the time-space of flexible accumulation that conjoins state and capital in post-Mao China at the turn of the twenty-first century, a subaltern subjectivity such as hers is a specific sociohistorical formation.

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In this essay I argue that Xiaohong’s desire must be understood in relation to the discourse of ziwo fazhan (self-development) that is emerging in the reform era to forge a new laboring subject through a conscious “technology of modern selfhood” that aligns self with the logic of the market and development.2 This process represents a reorganization of the subject in comparison with the subjectivity of Maoist workers in state-owned enterprises, whose primary identity had stemmed from their relationship with the socialist state through the planned economy. In China’s postsocialist development, the production of new working subjects marked with high suzhi has a symbiotic relation to the market. When they exchange labor power for wages in the market, migrant women are encouraged to produce suzhi as a kind of surplus value for their self-development and their transformation into new, modern subjects. This practice of self-development is compelled by a threat inherent in the post-Mao culture of commodity disposability that Joshua Goldstein explores elsewhere in this volume; commodities that are disposable in the market logic include labor power. However, Xiaohong’s disengagement from her previous practices out of a desire to raise her suzhi does not automatically signify her as merely a frictionless instance of what Louis Althusser called the “interpellation” of the subject—the process by which an individual is called upon by discursive power to act as its subject.3 While throwing themselves into self-development, struggling to avoid becoming casualties of History and Time,4 Xiaohong and others are overdeterminedly in tension with the discourse of self-development. The tension comes from a constitutive contradiction within the discourse and its hegemony, and such women experience it not as an imposition from the outside but as their internal pain and frustration over their inability to cohere as modern subjects of development.

SUZHI AND THE SELF-DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW LABORING SUBJECT Numerous media reports and social science research papers in China have hailed the progress rural migrants have made, from seeking survival (qiu shengcun) in the early 1980s to seeking self-development (qiu fazhan) in the 1990s. Implicit in this celebration of the “progress” of the rural masses is a Malthusian loathing of “survival” as merely staying physically alive—a process outside of

Self-Development of Migrant Women

Progress, involving no modern consciousness of the self, in which an unproductive life cycle and struggle achieves a zero-sum outcome at best and, at worst, consumes away resources and detracts from national development.5 Such a notion of survival is development’s trope of self-authorization. An article about young rural women from Wuwei, a county in Anhui Province, appeared in 1996 in Half Monthly Forum (Ban yue tan), a Communist Party magazine circulated widely among cadres of all levels. Titled “Wuwei: Domestics Agency,” it celebrated the women’s transformation from working as domestics for urban families in Beijing to being entrepreneurs who traversed the rural-urban boundary. Accompanying their dramatic status transformation was an alteration of their very beings: Shortly after they left for the city, these smart and hardworking girls quickly became a generation of new beings combining the culture of the city and the country. When they walked out from the fields, they carried in their bodies a rustic air [tuqi] and physical strength [labor power, liqi]; when they return they not only bring back capital, information, technology, and market experience but also new ideas, new concepts, and the ability to explore the market economy, none of which folks at home have.6

According to the article, the important lesson their experiences demonstrated was this: “The outside world is broad and wide. Walking out of the narrow farmland, you can change everything. Getting rid of poverty and backwardness is up to your own struggles.” Ironically, this brings to mind Mao’s reverse call three decades earlier, urging urban youths to “go to the vast countryside to learn from peasants.” In comparison with migrants before the reform, who sought only the means of survival through wage labor in the city, post-Mao migrant women, according to the article, can break away from “traditional consciousness” and raise themselves, through self-development, from being low-paid hick laborers to being new entrepreneurs ready to play in the market. The city is “a vast classroom where rural girls receive training and tempering by the market economy.” Their identity, previously bound to the timeless physicality of the inert, backward countryside, is now a repository of qualities associated with mobile capital, information, and technology connected with the national or even international market.7

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In the self-authorizing historical narrative of the postsocialist era, Maoist China becomes a nightmarish “chronotope” (time-space) that led China astray from progress toward modernity and global capitalism. Steering China back “on track with the world” (read, the First World, yu shijie jiegui) is a total social engineering of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) that promises to free China from the Maoist past, invigorate in its people a desire for modernity, and gain it a rightful membership in the world of transnational capitalism.8 This vision both reorganizes the narrative of history and remaps the national territorial body. The opening of coastal areas to attract overseas capital and the quick transformation and integration of these areas into the global economy as local bases for transnational capital constitute the vast hinterland as an isolated, close-minded, inert field locked in a traditional consciousness.9 The vast yet “narrow” space of the countryside is thus construed as an anachronistic space, outside the temporal zone of modernity, the development of which depends on the magic touch of capital and the transformation of the population’s suzhi through tempering in the urban market.10 As one report reflected: “If [rural] people do not change, no change can be sustained. . . . For real change to take place, it will have to begin from reforming the [rural] people.”11 Regional and national development is thus crucially conditioned upon the formation of a subjectivity “through which people come to see themselves as developed and underdeveloped.”12 Ziwo fazhan (self-development) is a neologism derived from fazhan (development), as in the fazhan of a nation-state or a region. This connection of self-development and economic development reveals how the development of individuals is integral to the development of regions and the nation-state.13 One observes a similar evolution in the notion of suzhi, which arose in the early 1980s during the birth-planning project to curtail the size but improve the quality of the Chinese population. With the furthering of economic reform and development, the notion of suzhi increasingly both totalizes and individuates the populace and compels people to see themselves as simultaneously developed and underdeveloped in their adaptability to the market economy. In the discourse of the state and the educated elite, in which neoliberalism is dominant,14 markets and capital are the transformative agents that will inspire the national economy and reform the quality of the Chinese laboring population. Markets and capital, which were nothing but ideological in the

Self-Development of Migrant Women

Maoist era, are now anything but ideological in the writings of postsocialist economists. For young migrant women, the article in Half Monthly Forum portrayed the transaction in the market as a win-win situation, a more than equal exchange. Apart from the exchange of labor power for a wage, the transaction produces a desirable surplus value: it endows the laborer with modern suzhi. The market buys liqi, labor power, from the woman, and she receives training and tempering from the market, which will transform her into a modern subject with good suzhi: a disciplined and self-motivated worker, a “whitecollar” clerk, and—it is hoped, in the ideal form and spirit of the modern subject—an entrepreneur who embodies the mastery of market and capital. The entrepreneur’s success is attributed to her applying her market training to the market process. When invested in the market, the accumulated surplus value, suzhi, can produce the entrepreneur and her capital.15 Thus, the discourse of self-development calls for a technology of self in a neoliberalist mode of enterprising in the social field, with the corollary that “the individual producer-consumer is in a novel sense not just an enterprise, but the entrepreneur of himself or herself.”16 In the Half Monthly Forum article, the actual exchange of labor power for a wage is little mentioned; the imagined gain of surplus value in the exchange overtakes the significance of the wage and is fetishized. Thus, in the discourse of suzhi as exemplified in the article, the problem of migrants as a subaltern class of exploited and dominated wage laborers is erased. In the postsocialist development discourse, the terms “class” ( jieji) and “class consciousness” are signs that stand for the Maoist past, now held responsible for the waste of the people’s energy on unproductive and irrational political struggles. Class, signifying the presence of exploitation and domination, is now explained on the basis of a model of scarcity. The backward productive forces of the past drove constant struggles between the ruling class and the ruled over scant resources that could never have satisfied all. The well-known writer Liang Xiaosheng, self-identified as a plebeian intellectual, championed this line of argument in his popular book An Analysis of the Strata in Chinese Society.17 He celebrated China’s progress from having a backward productive force to having a more advanced one, and from having a socioeconomic organization based on classes to having one based on strata ( jieceng). The latter term emphasized the status mobility, functional coexistence, and civility

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aªorded by an increasing division of labor and complexity of social structure. For Liang, class consciousness was “a primitive consciousness of humanity, involving sensitive reactions and simple reasoning, resulting in violent and desperate actions,” and associated with Chinese peasant uprisings in the past.18 His description implies a “natural” connection between “peasant” and “rebellion”: the violence and physicality of the sign “uprising” bleeds into the sign “peasant,” and the primitiveness of the peasant mirrors the primitiveness of class struggle.19 Class thus comes to signify not just social antagonism but the specter of physical violence associated with peasants’ hungering bodies, eking out a bare subsistence. In postsocialist developmentalism, the primitive, violent structure of “class,” connected with survival, is to be displaced by the advanced and civil “strata,” associated with development. As I discuss later, the problem of class is further displaced by the notion of self-development, which relocates the site of social antagonism to the self. In 1998, a former dagongmei (young migrant woman) named Anzi, then a general manager running the “Sky of Anzi” club, with more than one hundred employees, emerged as a model from among tens of thousands of dagongmei in Shenzhen. Through China Central Television (CCTV), her story was made available to a national audience as a fable of dagongmei success, and she was recognized as one of “twenty distinguished figures in the twenty years of reform.” The introduction of these twenty distinguished figures to the masses through the national media was an important event in the 1998 grand national celebration of the twentieth anniversary of post-Mao reforms. The inclusion of Anzi as one of only two women among the twenty honorees, half of whom were entrepreneurs, was a political event authorizing the “new laboring subject” as playing a requisite role in China’s postsocialist modernization and development. The dagongmei as the new laboring subject signifies the new flexible terms of the labor relationship in China, which are profoundly diªerent from those of the Maoist mode of labor relations. “Flexible” means that the labor contract is stripped of the welfare benefits (housing, medical care, pension) and the guarantee of life-long employment once oªered by the Maoist danwei (work unit) mode of employment.20 Dagong “means ‘working for the boss,’ or ‘selling labor,’ connoting commodification and a capitalist exchange of labor for wages.”21

Self-Development of Migrant Women

The dagongmei does not stand alone in the discourse of the state in the 1990s; her emergence is coupled with the abjection of the laid-oª urban workers associated with moribund state enterprises and Maoist socialism. They are, in the eyes of the state and the elites, deeply enmeshed in a “dependency” on Maoist social welfare, which the post-Mao state is dismantling. Lisa Rofel, in her study of women workers in China’s state-owned enterprises, argued that whereas these workers might once have been recognized as heroes of socialist progress, they now signify “an internal lack, potentially hindering China from reaching modernity, because they bring the past into the present of their very existence.”22 This “othering” of urban workers, especially laid-oª ones, marks them as obstacles to development that postsocialist reforms must overcome. The new laboring subject favored by flexible accumulation is found in young male and female migrant workers of rural origin. The honor accorded to Anzi and the celebration of rural migrants from Wuwei by Half Monthly Forum were stately gestures that graced the new laboring subject in the symbolic-economic order of postsocialist development. The rural reforms of the late 1970s that dismantled the collective-based rural welfare system and established the household-based production responsibility system forced into existence self-reliant rural laborers.23 As rural migrants entered the urban labor market, they were excluded from urbanbased social welfare systems and therefore were forced to become self-sufficient laborers. One advocate for the self-development of migrant women told a group of young rural migrants: “You have a superior position in comparison with laid-oª urban workers, because they are used to eating state rice and are dependent. You are each a small boat and easy to turn around. You also have da hou fang [a big rearguard area], your native place.”24 In other words, with the erosion of welfare benefits in the urban sector and increased grumbling over the dismantling of the welfare structure, migrant workers are found to have a competitive edge over urban workers in the labor market. Having never benefited from urban welfare and never “eaten from one big pot”—a pot now blamed for having made urban workers lazy, ine‹cient, and dependent—rural migrants are tapped as a fresh labor source. Markets and capital, the two icons of postsocialist development that underpin the future of the Chinese nation, find a convenient connection with young rural laborers from the interior. Although deeply immured in “traditional con-

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sciousness,” they are found to be better fit for the “training and tempering” of the market and to have greater potential for self-development than urban workers, who seem hopelessly stuck in their Maoist welfare mentality. It is in this sense that individual migrants are construed as “small boats” that are easy to turn around, an advantage that can attract capital to them. What makes migrants even more desirable than urban workers is their connection with their da hou fang, their rural base. The phrase was born out of the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s of mobilizing the vast interior rural areas as the base of support from which the party would eventually take over the cities. The origin of the phrase lies worlds apart from its current use in the age of flexible accumulation, but its present invocation continues the strategy of situating the rural interior as the necessary base—this time for the postsocialist market “revolution.” The migrants’ connection with their base is supposed to make them more flexible laborers who spring from and retract to their native places eªortlessly and tirelessly in the ebb and flow of a capricious market. The desire to join the developed world through the catalyst of the market economy and transnational capital both enables and compels the state and its educated elites to evaluate Chinese labor as “cheap but undisciplined by modern standards of labor quality.”25 One is conscious of such a view in the large street signs in many Chinese cities that link the population’s level of civility (wenming) and the city’s image (chengshi xingxian) with the potential to attract capital. The evaluative perspective of transnational capital helps produce the discourses of suzhi and wenming, and through them the reorganization of postsocialist governmentality. In Beijing, the masses taking the subway daily in the city in 1999 were lectured, through subway announcements, on how to be “a wenming and modern [xiandai] person”: no shoving while getting on or oª the subway; no spitting; no talking loudly; no sitting cross-legged; no baring one’s chest (presumably addressed to men). The postsocialist state takes as its new objective the raising of its population’s suzhi and wenming by inspiring self-discipline in its citizens, making them fit for China’s entrance into the field of global capital. “No spitting” was particularly worth billboards at a time when Beijing was bidding to host the 2008 Olympic Games and China was trying to join the World Trade Organization. One sign says it all. Strategically located on the newly built boulevard run-

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ning from Yangzhou’s long-distance bus station into the heart of the city, it reads: “Everywhere is [part of ] the image of the city; everyone is [part of ] the environment for investment [chu chu shi chang shi xing xian; ren ren shi tou zi huan jing].” The transformation of China—previously staged under Maoist socialism as the triumph of the collective national will through the mass mobilization of human labor for public production—is now believed to be conditioned upon the enlivening power of capital. The disciplinary power of transnational capital both totalizes and individuates the citizenry and connects each person, through his or her elevated level of civility and internalized self-discipline, with the responsibility for the presence or absence of capital. When I traveled with my white American friend in Guizhou, an interior province with much less capital investment than the coastal areas, the middle-aged man who kindly directed us to the local post o‹ce asked me to urge my friend to bring investment to the area. Not only did he take it upon himself to bring up the request, but his earnest and beseeching look toward me—whom he assumed to be my friend’s translator—also obliged me and drew me into the eªort. I could not fully comprehend this encounter until the sign in Yangzhou brought home the point.

“EATING BITTERNESS” FOR SELF-DEVELOPMENT The elites of the Chinese state are aware that the training and tempering of the urban market does not necessarily produce suzhi in rural migrant women, nor does it automatically transform them into myriad replicas of Anzi. Cautionary tales and sensational stories of migrants who lose heart and turn to making quick money in dishonorable businesses inhabit newspapers, magazines, and tabloids as much as do success stories. The danger lurking behind these tales is workers’ failure to trade liqi (labor power) for suzhi, which not only hinders the creation of the subjects desired for development but also lowers the suzhi of the Chinese masses and threatens the postsocialist governmentality. One success story about a young migrant woman who eventually acquired a Beijing accent, permanent residency, and a Beijing husband described her as having achieved zhengguo (literally, “the right result”), a Buddhist notion denoting her arrival at an enlightened stage of being.26 The path of selfdevelopment, like the path to nirvana, is fraught with temptations, contra-

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dictions, and obstacles; only those who pursue it with perseverance and who have accumulated enough karma or suzhi will achieve it. But in order for this transformation to occur, what kinds of understandings must migrants accept about themselves, without which it is impossible to desire the surplus value in suzhi as a substitute for a fair wage? What sort of knowledge of the self has Xiaohong, in the first epigraph to this chapter, acquired that has enabled her to desire a change in herself ? With these questions we broach a technology of the self, a process in which the self is both the object and the subject of the change, both the object and the instrument of the exercise.27 The desire for change appears to be an expression of free will coming from within oneself, a will that internalizes discipline and takes the self as the “biggest enemy” to be fought, as the young woman in the second epigraph put it. When the self is recognized as the greatest enemy, potential demands for change are displaced by the need for change within the self; social antagonism is displaced by antagonism within the self. The agency of the migrant is to be channeled inward and exerted on the transformation of the self, in order to endow it with suzhi. This remolding and reorientation of agency is both testified to and facilitated by the reemerging popularity of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help in bookstores in China, where it is advertised as a second Bible that has changed the destinies of millions of poor people around the world. Since its first publication in 1859 in Britain, Self-Help has been widely circulated, instilling self-discipline, the habit of industry, and perseverance among the working classes in both Britain and its colonies.28 The cover design of the 1999 Chinese reprint includes a line from the “Internationale,” a song familiar to the Chinese masses in the Maoist era: “There has never been a savior; no faith have we in gods or emperors. To create happiness for humanity, it all depends on ourselves.”29 Self-Help and the “Internationale,” once worlds apart, are now only words apart, conjoined on the page. The social revolution called for by the “Internationale” is reoriented toward self-development.

Scene One: Encountering the Truth about the Self In the summer of 1999 I received permission to observe a brief lecture given to newly recruited migrants at a well-known recruitment agency for domestic

Self-Development of Migrant Women

labor in Beijing. This company had established connections with labor export agencies in counties in Henan, Sichuan, Anhui, and Gansu Provinces. Every Thursday the company received a group of fifty to one hundred new migrants, all from a single county. Since its establishment in the early 1980s, the company had recruited more than seventy thousand migrant women into domestic service. On this day, 130 rural women, most of them between seventeen and twenty-three, had arrived from Henan Province, straight from the train station. They got half an hour to wash their faces and eat the boiled eggs, buns, or instant noodles they had brought with them before a woman in her thirties, a vice-director of the company, showed up to address them. The next morning, all of them were to sit on benches in the meeting room, now a labor market, to wait for potential employers. Some of them had been in Beijing before as migrant workers, but 80 to 90 percent of them had come as first-timers. This lecture was to give them a quick introduction to the labor market and how they should position themselves in it. “Do you know what you will do here?” the vice-director asked the group rhetorically, in the language and accent of the capital city. Her voice conveyed the authority of her managerial position and her Beijing identity, making her a knowing cosmopolitan subject vis-à-vis these women. Her authoritative voice would impart to them the true knowledge about themselves. Some women made faces to each other, suggesting that the question seemed funny and the answer obvious. The manager continued: You know what you are here for. So I think when I talk, you should listen up. We planned to have sixty, but now you are many more than that. There are about 150 still waiting in the meeting room now for employers. It is not easy to find work now. . . . Whatever you are at home—a vagrant or a “young lady” [ xiaojie], whatever you have had previously at home, once here you have to relearn from the very beginning. Because you are new here and know nothing, you have to follow your employers. Don’t take it for granted just because you have children yourselves or you have taken care of your siblings before. You are here and you have to start anew from the beginning.

The manager also told the group that employers preferred young, unmarried migrants to married ones, and that they particularly valued new migrants

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who had no prior experience, because they were “simpler and purer [danchun] and more teachable.” Moreover, the labor of new migrants was some 30 to 50 percent less expensive than that of veteran migrants, according to the wage scale established by the company, at RMB 220 (US$27) a month for live-in housework and child care. But the women should not desire to do generally better-paid “hourly work” (zhongdian gong), because that kind of work was done by Beijingers who had better suzhi than they or by experienced migrants who had acquired good suzhi. In her speech, the vice-director constructed migrant women as repositories of invalid values and irrelevant identities in the eyes of the market. The knowledge and practices they had acquired from past experiences in child care at home had to be erased and forgotten. Their identities, whether as precious daughters or as vagrants, became irrelevant and had to be set aside when they entered the labor market.30 They must empty out their pasts so that they can become more teachable and be endowed with new practices and new values. The enabling condition for the exchange of labor for suzhi is that the women engage with this “truth” about themselves and be motivated to act upon themselves. The process might be painful, but, as the vice- manager urged them, “you’ve already shown your courage by coming, and now you need to apply it to your work.” Through the cosmopolitan subject of the vice-manager and the subaltern subject position of the migrant women, the discourse of postsocialist development deploys its power—but in very diªerent ways and with diªerent consequences for each. The development discourse that produces the material reality of the “developed” and “civil” coastal cities and the “isolated” and “backward” interior also produces the material forms of both cosmopolitan and migrant subject positions. Without such a discourse, which constructs the reality of post-Mao development in China, cosmopolitan subjects and migrant subalterns could not meet and enter into this historically specific relationship with each other. Through the negation and subordination of the practices and experience migrants have acquired at home, members of the Chinese urban middle class are a‹rmed as knowing, modern, cosmopolitan subjects at a time when post-Mao market reforms have violently destabilized old structures of class identity and security.

Self-Development of Migrant Women

Scene Two: Encountering the Truth of Self-Development She really made it just step by step. All the bitterness she had to eat she ate: she worked 14 hours a day as a typist to earn money; she studied accounting while half starving all the time; there were times when she worked for several months without pay and earned some money by selling her blood to a blood donation station, etc. It’s this kind of accumulation, this kind of training through eating bitterness, this kind of training through hardship on which she built the foundation for her success.

With these words, speaking at a meeting at the Home for Rural Migrant Women, Xie Lihua, chief editor of Rural Women Knowing All, a magazine targeting rural and migrant women, summarized the lesson given by Yang Feng, a woman from Gansu who, after working for some ten years in Beijing, now owned two beauty salons worth 1 million RMB (US$120,000). An audience of migrant women had come to the Home for Migrant Women to hear Yang speak. Wearing a stylish three-piece suit in rosy pink, lightly touched by jewelry and makeup and flanked by her two younger, fashionable-looking managers, Yang was illustrious in the meeting room. As she told her story of hardship and vicissitude, interrupting herself several times to weep, she was the living truth of the way self-development was ultimately rewarded with success. Xie Lihua’s remarks following Yang Feng’s talk drove home the theme of self-development through the trope of migrant women’s “eating bitterness” as a necessary foundation for success. Xie Lihua continued to draw out the lesson: So many of us cannot suªer through this kind of training. I have received many people here, including dagongmei, including rural girls. So many cannot eat this kind of bitterness. One time I received a girl from Shangdong. She was a high school graduate. She couldn’t find other jobs when she got here, so she went into domestic service. She complained to me, “In the employer’s home, none of them treat me like a person. Even the little 5–year-old boy in my charge could order me around, look down upon me.” She felt it really unjust. I told her, “Yes, you walk into the city and you expect the city to

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receive you with smiling faces? But it’s not like the city cannot function without you. Now that you have chosen dagong, you should have sufficient preparation and capacity to bear this kind of hardship and bitterness. Ah, if you don’t have this preparation and if you are a baobei [precious baby] at home, then you may as well go to back to be a baobei at home.”

Another lesson for the migrant woman was always to honor her profession ( jingye) by doing her work well. Xie explained the meaning of jingye: Whatever she does, she does it with the spirit of jingye. . . . Even ten days before her childbirth, she still works for others. You don’t think that you can play tricks or be lazy when you work for others. If you don’t cultivate good quality through this kind of training, it does you no good for self-development. If you set yourself up as a good example, all your people will follow you when you’re a boss someday. No matter what you do and for whom you do it, you should do it well and honor the contract.

A third point involved Yang Feng’s spirit of continuous self-development, which climaxed with her selling blood to subsidize her study of accounting. Whereas the Wuwei women described in the Half Monthly Forum article accrued suzhi by selling their bodily power (liqi), Yang Feng built the foundation for her suzhi by selling not just her liqi but even her bodily fluid. The economy of the body and the economy of suzhi were thus linked by the desire and will for self-development. Yang Feng’s story, delivered in a low-key but emotional and personal voice, brought the audience to the immediacy of the truth of self-development through eating bitterness. Her narrative performance of speaking bitterness, presented as the unmediated voice of a subaltern coming to recognize herself as a modern subject, was development speaking itself.31 Identifying her narrative as performance does not mean that she literally followed a prepared script. Instead, I identify her speech as belonging to a genre of practices called chiku (eating bitterness) and suku (speaking bitterness) that were used in revolutionary mobilization and education among peasants, workers, intellectuals, and students in the 1940s and 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Young intellectuals and students were mobilized to eat bitterness

Self-Development of Migrant Women

by living and working among peasants in the liberated rural base during the Yan’an period (1940s) and in poor and di‹cult rural areas during the Cultural Revolution. Only by infusing themselves with the bases of the revolution could these intellectual youths cultivate a true class feeling toward the masses and transform themselves from petty bourgeoisie into revolutionaries. For young urban intellectuals and students, eating bitterness was a way of embodying and materializing their revolutionary enthusiasm and of producing and proving themselves as subjects of the revolution.32 In the 1940s and 1950s, party cadres encouraged peasants and workers to publicly speak their bitterness against the old society. Doing so signified the speaker’s transformation from being subaltern in the old social order to becoming a subject of liberation in the new order of socialist China. Through speaking bitterness, the speaker learned to organize fragmented and inconsistent experiences into a coherent articulation and to map a new vision onto her subjectivity. By identifying, speaking, and denouncing bitterness and its causes, she positioned herself in opposition to the bitterness of the past and realigned herself with the present. Such an exercise “incite[d] desire by oªering a historical imagination of overcoming” and organized “the meaning not just of certain aspects of life but of life in its entirety.”33 It enabled the speaker to “speak” her way into the socialist nation-state as a cohered and liberated subject whose life in its entirety achieved belonging, integration, and extension in the unfolding of Time and History in the nation-state.34 Yang Feng’s speaking bitterness, too, was a story invoking the imagination and desire of overcoming, but it was performed at a time when failing stateowned enterprises had become morbid “problems” to be managed through structural readjustment, and when huge numbers of laid-oª workers from those enterprises had lost their privileged subjecthood to become marked by the discourse of postsocialist development as obstacles rather than contributors in the renewed race for development. In speaking bitterness, Yang Feng stitched her fragmented and indeterminate experiences into a coherent story that unfolded toward the telos of self-development. Unlike the bitterness spoken before, the bitterness experienced today was understood as being created by the market, which played the role of necessary evil or necessary good by testing and tempering the soul for the self ’s transformation. Thus, marketinduced bitterness should be taken in and absorbed as the necessary founda-

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tion on which the subaltern can build herself into a modern subject. In speaking bitterness, Yang Feng did not place herself in opposition to bitterness but spoke as its champion. She was a subaltern coming into her own through bitterness, the source and facilitator that transformed her and integrated her subjectivity with the logic of development. In championing Yang Feng’s speaking bitterness, Xie Lihua, playing the double role of state cadre and sponsor of a nongovernmental organization for migrant women, referred to another kind of speaking bitterness in order to suppress it and mark it as improper. The Shangdong woman who complained about being looked down upon by her employers spoke her bitterness to register it with the state cadre as a refusal. But to Xie, it was a speaking bitterness haunted by the specter of the Maoist past and therefore had to be exorcised. The discourse of postsocialist development cannot legitimate this kind of rejection of bitterness, because it questions the logic of the development discourse and raises the specter of social antagonism and class conflict. The Shangdong woman’s speaking bitterness could not be allowed under the logic of markets and development, as Xie lectured the audience: “Now that you have chosen dagong, you should have su‹cient preparation and capacity to bear this kind of hardship and bitterness.” If the young woman could not accept this logic, she would be punished by the market logic of exchange: she would be unwanted by the city and the market. Xie warned, “If you are a baby at home, then you may as well go back to be a baby at home.” If someone cannot bring herself into a proper relationship with bitterness (as determined by the discourse), but insists on speaking bitterness as its opposition, then she will not come into her own through market experience and will fall outside the space of the market and development—which the discourse designates as the central site for locating a modern identity. In this epistemic violence, in which the logic of the market and development prevails, the Shangdong woman cannot speak; she is silenced in the authorized narrative that Xie constructs. If she persists in her complaint, she will exist outside of the market and development as abjected excess, cast aside by the wheel of Time as History’s casualty or sacrifice. The young migrant women in scene one were told that their group exceeded the quota set up by the company by a significant number. It was reiterated in scene two that the city and market could do well without any one of them indi-

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vidually. It is no coincidence that in both scenes, migrant women were warned about their excessive numbers. Indeed, popular and o‹cial reports in the media as well as scholarly writing already have a term for China’s 100 million peasant migrants, nearly one-tenth of the national population: surplus laborer population (shengyu laodongli renkou). On the eve of China’s joining the World Trade Organization, it was predicted that a larger population of surplus laborers from the countryside would be produced when foreign agricultural produce began to march into China’s market, squeezing more peasants out of agricultural production. Dagongmei were called upon by the development discourse of the 1990s to strive to be subjects of development while living on the edge of becoming one more number among an abjected surplus. Such is the “materialist predication,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, of migrant subalterns in China’s postsocialist development.35 It is in the long, frustrating struggle between subjecthood and “abjecthood” (as in the story of Yang Feng and the Shangdong woman) that the acquisition of suzhi is made centrally important. Indeed, in the discourse of postsocialist development that defines the “material predication” of migrants’ subjectivity, disposability is already inscribed as a constitutive part of their consciousness, a part of their subjectivity that spurs them along the path of self-development. As a woman from Sichuan—a seventeen-year veteran of migrant life—sighed in front of other migrant women and me, “We are really afraid of being abandoned by this society [bei shehui paoqi].” The others shared her anxiety. It is in the imminent threat of the dagongmei’s falling into abjecthood and in her constant struggle between abjecthood and subjecthood—overdetermined by the discourse of postsocialist development—that governmentality, working through the discourse of suzhi and self-development, deploys its power. Yet it is also in the dagongmei’s struggle for self-development that she experiences being trapped in the struggle and in her subaltern class position, without hope of cohering successfully as a subject of development. The following analysis of Xiaohong’s work experiences as the hidden abode of suzhi production shows that it is in the struggle over their failure to cohere as subjects of development that dagongmei are in tension with the dominant discourse. Xiaohong begins with an awareness of her deficiency in suzhi and desires a change that will mark her oª from her cohort. At the end of her nar-

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rative, the specter of class unexpectedly returns and throws her back to the collective “we” from which she has tried to stand apart.

THE HIDDEN ABODE OF SUZHI PRODUCTION AND XIAOHONG’S DIALECTICAL RETURN TO “WE” Xiaohong’s learned desire for change and self-reformation must be understood in the discursive context of suzhi. Her reflection began with an inspired recognition of the low suzhi she shared with her cohort. Her separation from the collective, the “we,” was a process in which her individual “self ” gradually emerged in a triangulated relationship between herself, her employers, and her cohort. She spoke of her change as first disconnecting herself from her cohort: When I first came out here [at the age of seventeen], I looked after a child for a couple. The couple was rather good to me in the hope that I would in turn be good to their child. The child was only one year old. They had a nanny before me. She had just left for a family who gave her a slightly better salary, but she was still close by in the neighborhood. When I worked for that family, they [the previous nanny and her friends] often came to look me up— after the couple went to work, it’s only me at home—because I’m their laoxiang [someone from the same native place]. She [the previous nanny] is doing the kind of chuan [roving in between persons or places] among laoxiang. She told me how the couple was not good. But she’s double dealing, because later she was knitting a sweater for the couple’s child as a gift. I thought, she’s not good, and didn’t want to deal with her. . . . So I told the parents of the child that “she said bad things about you.” I myself was childish then. They [the couple] seemed to immediately see through her. They felt that I was good and that I was unlike them [the laoxiang] and did not chuan with them. So the child’s parents then were really good to me. Then several of them [her laoxiang], because I stopped interacting with them, became angry. Later, when I went out sometimes, they would stand in my way and wouldn’t let me through. Sometimes they also called me names. Actually, I didn’t fight with them, but just didn’t want to be with them. So they were angry. It became like they were opposing me and the child’s parents standing on my side. So it seemed that I had a closer relationship with the child’s

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parents. From then on, they [the laoxiang] were very displeased, because they saw that I was not with them. From then on I disconnected myself from them and devoted all my time to the child and teaching the child characters.36

Chuan is a verb or an active noun that urbanites often use in regard to domestic workers, naming the migrants’ habit of visiting each other and getting together. I use the word “naming” deliberately, as I make clear later. Chuan does not merely refer to the act of visiting each other but implies that the act is done stealthily or excessively; it may have crossed the line of legality or the code of civility. Because employers usually frown upon or directly forbid live-in domestic workers to gather in the neighborhood playground or to visit each other at their employers’ homes, the workers often have to meet stealthily in the absence of their employers. In the eyes of urban employers, domestic workers’ chuan is perhaps their number-one fault. It is seen as a manifestation of the workers’ low suzhi, lack of self-discipline, and inability to keep to themselves. What is lurking in employers’ anxiety is the fear that domestic workers will compare wages and work conditions and spread gossip about their employers. The increasingly desired privacy of the urban middle-class home becomes potentially porous as the figure of the peripatetic domestic worker annoyingly traverses the line between inside and outside, home and market. Employers are afraid, as it often happens, that their domestic workers might begin to hint for better wages as a result of the exchange of information with other domestic workers. Even worse, they might become discontented and centrifugal figures in employers’ homes, which, in the postsocialist market ideology, are supposed to be places of security, intimacy, and privacy.37 Xiaohong’s naming of her laoxiang’s visits as chuan and her developed distaste for chuan signified her recognition of chuan as it was objectified in discourse (literally, she talked to her employers about her cohort’s chuan). Drawing on Volosinov’s notion of signs as arising “only on interindividual territory,” Dorothy Smith has suggested that naming objects is a dialogic production of objects for discourse, and in naming objects “there is an alignment of the individual consciousness [with the discourse] via the utterance.”38 By signifying and acting out her consciousness of chuan to both her employers and her cohort, Xiaohong developed a position in a relational sequence of tri-

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angulated actions between her, her employers, and her cohort. Once she had talked to her employers about her cohort’s chuan, all three parties adjusted their actions in relation to each other. What I extrapolate from Smith’s proposal is the pivotal importance of Xiaohong’s “naming” of chuan for triggering a series of actions by her employers, her cohort, and herself that coordinated her consciousness with that of her employers and marked her oª from her cohort. Xiaohong’s transformation was not a solo performance but was produced through a series of actions and responses by all three parties that her new recognition of chuan set in motion. Stressing “the social” in the process of subject making, Smith emphasizes that this process is a dialogic and intersubjective coordination that involves multiple subjects. As such, subject making is not a determined and enclosed process of “citation” involving a singular subject.39 Rather, it opens up self-development as a problematic, open-ended, relational process relying on interplay between subjects. “Interplay” between subjects is a source of instability. Smith’s insight will be useful later in understanding the role played by other employers in the disruption of Xiaohong’s self-development. Looking back on her experiences years later, as she talked to me at her Beijing home at a time when she was unemployed, she included a smile and a reflexive negation of the “naming” she had done years earlier: “I was childish then.” Xiaohong’s consciousness of her low suzhi and her determination to reform herself congealed when, a year later, she had a chance to work in the home of a famous writer. She also recalled this experience in an essay she published in Rural Women Knowing All magazine.40 “I had already had that desire [to change] before I went to the writer’s home,” she told me.41 And she wrote in her essay about the emergence of a self in her process of self-development while working there: When I came to the writer’s home, I respected and admired writers and felt that they were saintlike. So I shouldn’t let them look down upon me. When the wife of the writer [zuojia furen] totaled up the bill with me after my first grocery shopping, it turned out that there was even one cent surplus. So zuojia furen and I looked each other in the eyes and smiled. From then on, she never checked the bills and trusted me very much. It felt so very good to be trusted! At this time, I slowly felt that a person who lives has a thing

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called renge [integrity, personhood, self ]. I xinshang [to gaze at an object, usually an artwork or a landscape, implying pleasure, enjoyment] my new ziwo [self ].42 Later, even though I left the writer’s home, I would never embezzle again, no matter whether others trusted me or not. For my ziwo [my self ] is always zhushi [to gaze with attentiveness and concern] at ziji [myself ],43 and I cannot do things that will make ziji look down upon ziji.44

Xiaohong’s narration of the emergence of her self begins with “I shouldn’t let them look down upon me” and ends with “I cannot do things that will make my self look down upon myself.” What began as an external disciplinary gaze—what Ann Anagnost has called “the evaluative gaze of global capital”— from “them” became an internalized disciplinary gaze coming from the newly formed “my self.”45 The emergence of “my self ” in Xiaohong enabled a relay of that disciplinary gaze from global capital to reach her subjectivity, refracted by the writer and his respectful wife (as icons of the Chinese elite) through the discourse of suzhi. When Xiaohong and the writer’s wife “looked each other in the eyes and smiled,” the mirroring of the gaze and the smile of recognition between them was a meeting of desire and principle and identified the two women with each other. In this meeting of gazes and smiles, the employer, who represents the disciplinary gaze, the reality principle, recognizes Xiaohong as a domestic worker of good suzhi, who deserves trust, and Xiaohong expresses her pleasure in such a recognition, which fulfills her desire. The Lacanian notion of desire as “a perpetual eªect of symbolic articulation” allows us to trace the itinerary of desire back to the discourse that incites it and disciplines it.46 When Xiaohong and the employer meet each other in the gaze and smile, desire and principle meet and identify with each other: desire embraces the reality principle, and principle fulfills desire. This moment of smiles and mirrored gazes is centrally significant for the consequent trust laid on Xiaohong and the birth of her “my self.” One might argue that the birth of her “my self,” which appears to be a new ego ideal that embraces and introduces the reality principle (the disciplinary gaze) onto her ego (myself ), involved a mechanism similar to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic formulation of the “mirror stage” in relation to the formation of a child’s ego. The mirror stage is a symbolic moment when a child takes a “jubilant assumption of his specular image.”47 The child (mis)recognizes his or her mirror

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image as a coherent and bounded self and reaches out to it as if about to cohere with it. The gaze and smile of the writer’s wife reflected back to Xiaohong an image that she had desired, with which it gave her pleasure to identify. The significance of this moment sank in gradually, until she finally felt the emergence of “my self,” which she gazed upon appreciatively, as if it were a piece of art. By demonstrating the formation of Xiaohong’s ego ideal, I am not suggesting that she remained childlike. I am suggesting that the formation of the ego ideal is an open-ended social process that goes beyond childhood. I also suggest that in Xiaohong’s case it was a historical process specific to China’s postsocialist development drive, which required and enabled the suzhi and self-development discourses and incited Xiaohong’s desire for what Lisa Rofel called “historical overcoming.” Xiaohong’s “my self ” was formed when her desire merged with the reality principle and was produced by that merger. The disciplinary gaze upon her was first attributed to the writer and his wife and later came from her “my self.” In her narrative, the reality principle (ascribed to the realm of the superego in Freudian psychoanalysis) and desire (ascribed to the realm of the ego) danced with each other, identified with each other, and melted away in “my self.” Xiaohong’s “my self,” her new ego ideal, was a source of both discipline and joy. “Myself ” gazed fondly upon “my self ” as a new artwork but also fell under the disciplinary gaze of “my self.” Freudian psychoanalysis posits only a rigid and oppositional relationship between ego and superego and between desire and reality principle. The interaction of ego and superego is said to incite unpleasure. In Xiaohong’s articulation, “myself ” and “my self ” are each other’s supplement, and this meeting of desire and principle incites pleasure. Xiaohong herself certainly does not maintain a clear boundary between ziwo (my self ) and ziji (myself ), as later she literally uses ziji to refer to both the self that disciplines and the self that is disciplined. From the gaze of the writer and his wife to the gaze emanating from “my self,” the hegemony of the discourse of suzhi and self-development produced in Xiaohong a new “structure of feelings” and incited complex sensations including desire and pleasure. In the moment of pleasurable locking of gazes between Xiaohong and the writer’s wife, exploitation seems to have vanished when Xiaohong joyfully (mis)recognizes and (mis)identifies with the image reflected back to her from

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her counterpart. This mirroring of gazes, like “naming objects,” entails an intersubjective recognition of Xiaohong’s coming to desire suzhi and thereby a‹rming the wife’s disciplinary authority. Yet Xiaohong was soon to be thrown into agony when her pleasurable identification with the mirrored self was violently disrupted. Her essay continues her reminiscence, which took a sharp turn at another significant smile from the writer’s wife: The reason I left the writer’s home was that there was too much work at this home. I was busy all day, like a work machine. After a day’s work, I was completely exhausted physically and mentally. I proposed to leave. Zuojia furen [the writer’s wife] told me to wait till they found a replacement. A week later, zuojia furen told me that they had found a new domestic and told me to leave that very day. While I was waiting for them to look for a replacement, I was foolishly working like before [without going out to look for another job]. In the end I myself was driven out without a place to go. On the face of zuojia furen was that consistent, kind, benevolent smile, which made me feel icy cold in the heart. Before I left, she said she wanted to check my luggage. She said this was the usual rule: whoever leaves has to be checked. She’s afraid that I might steal books from them. I was unwilling in my heart, but agreed to it on my lips. How I hated myself for being cowardly! Why did I dare not say “no!” For many years since [then] I have felt tragic about myself. We girls coming out from the countryside are too deeply poor, unknowing [wuzhi], and feeling inferior. We long for respect from society. But if we ourselves don’t stand up, whom can we depend on? We girls who worked as domestics have felt more deeply [about this] than those girls who are vegetable vendors or work in restaurants and stores. We enter into the basic cells of society [the family and the domestic scene], where civilization and benightedness between the city and the country, and beauty and ugliness between person and person, clash head on without any cover-up. From clashes to mergence is a process of pain and awakening.

The specter of exploitation appeared after Xiaohong found herself becoming “a work machine” ( ganhuo jiqi). She was no longer even a breathing human body producing labor power (the qi in liqi suggesting breath or life), but a

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machine. When Xiaohong’s “I” is transformed into “work machine,” when even the body seems to have been lost in the metaphorical transformation, where is the place for her subjectivity? The experiences of the body seem to be absent, or present only in exhaustion. Xiaohong had to leave. The experience of “eating bitterness” became an impossible foundation for her self-development because that very experience threatened the presence of her subjectivity. It was the same “kind, benevolent smile” of the writer’s wife, which had inaugurated Xiaohong’s bliss at her new, mirrored subjectivity, that now turned her “icy cold in the heart.” The smile that once recognized Xiaohong’s desire for good suzhi and drew her into a shared consciousness was now a sign of hegemony: with complete ease, the employer could drive her out with no notice and demand an inspection of her luggage. Xiaohong expressed her agonizing sense of irony at seeing “that consistent, kind, benevolent smile” that could perform seemingly opposite functions. The irony that Xiaohong sensed was that the two smiles were of same kind; they were consistent. Xiaohong could recognize the presence of the first smile in the second and could comprehend the first smile in light of the second. The second smile was the first smile’s double, sharing the same discursive conditioning. Drawing her in and throwing her out were both consistent with the logic of hegemony. The “heart,” the abode of consciousness and subjectivity, was turned icy cold by the smile. Between the two smiles, Xiaohong’s subjectivity on the path of selfdevelopment was derailed and was unable to cohere in relation to the mirrored image of the self. She opened the next paragraph with a tremendous sense of agony: “How I hated myself for being cowardly!” The wound refused to heal for many years, and “I have felt tragic about myself.” The final act of the smile and the luggage inspection threw Xiaohong back into her class position as her employer explained to her that it was business as usual. Xiaohong’s agonized reflection links her to young migrant women collectively. Working in the domestic intimacy of urban homes, domestics know more deeply about the violence of “clashes” and “the process of pain and awakening” than do dagongmei working for restaurants and stores. But clashes of what? And awakening to what? Xiaohong’s reflection in the essay remains at a vague and general level typical of the development and enlightenment language in the Chinese media, invoking the “civilization and benightedness” and the “beauty and ugliness” of general humanity. Yet not following

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the usual city-civilization and countryside-benightedness equation, Xiaohong subtly dislocates civilization and benightedness to a space between the city and the countryside. The relationship between a rural woman perceived as lacking in suzhi and the wife of a saintlike writer in the capital city is now conceived of as “beauty and ugliness between person and person.” The process of awaking is a process of intimate and painful knowledge of these clashes and a dialectical process of return to the collective. Her invoking “we” is Xiaohong’s negation of her previous negation of her fellow dagongmei, from whom she had tried to separate herself. Her dialectical return is not merely a matter of going back to her native-place-based cohort but of situating herself in the whole dagongmei collective, which shares her material and discursive predications in postsocialist development. Xiaohong ended her essay by imaging her hometown, Wuwei, as a hopeful space: My hometown, Wuwei, is far diªerent today from its yesterday. The old street leading from the small town [where Xiaohong was from] to the county seat [Wuwei County] used to be very narrow but has been turned into a broad street. The thatch-roofed houses belong to the history of the old days. Multistory houses are no longer a novelty. Peasants who have been isolated and enclosed for thousands of years finally have a chance to come to the outside world. Enduring difficulty and hardship, they have been trying to change their life. It has been proved by reality that we are right to have bravely come out.

Closing on this optimistic note, which resembles the tone of the Half Monthly Forum article about Wuwei women, Xiaohong seems to bring her painful experiences and bitterness to a closure as well. Yet if we read her essay in reverse order, her writing about her experiences raises the question, What has been happening since the peasants have bravely come out of the rural hinterland? Although Xiaohong envisions her hometown as a hopeful place, she does not make it an imaginary site of her future identity but ends by a‹rming an open-ended “coming out.” After sixteen years as a migrant, Xiaohong is still dislocated between Beijing and Wuwei. Her agony still penetrates the skin of closure and will have no social redress as long as “we ourselves don’t stand

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up.” The word “stand up” (zhanqilai) harks back obliquely to Mao’s 1949 proclamation that “Chinese people will from now on stand up!” But under postsocialist conditions of development, Xiaohong’s agony cannot allow her to stand above her predication to invoke the “Chinese people”; it compels her in her predication to invoke the dagongmei collective. On her visit to my temporary apartment in Beijing in the fall of 1999, Xiaohong told me and two other dagongmei that an employer had claimed that she, the employer, did not consider her domestic a domestic. “But will a domestic really cease to be a domestic simply because you don’t consider her as such?” Xiaohong asked rhetorically. “She still is!”48 With this question she points again to the material and discursive predication of domestic workers. And she leaves readers of her magazine essay—rural women and migrant women—with the question, How will “we” be able to “stand up”? I began this chapter with Xiaohong’s disavowal of what could have been celebrated as “everyday resistance,” and I analyzed this disavowal in relation to her desire to set herself oª from her cohort in the discursive context of postsocialist development, which incites desire for suzhi and self-development. The discourse of suzhi, emerging from the drive for modernization via capital and markets, evaluates and disciplines the Chinese population, especially rural migrants, whose mobile bodies, with their liqi (labor power) and tuqi (hickness), have become omnipresent signs of excess population in the neoMalthusian anxiety of the urban elites. The suzhi discourse construes suzhi as the determining foundation of agency in deciding whether or not the Chinese people can reach the goal of development and modernity. Postsocialist governmentality, organized through the discourse of suzhi, both totalizes and individuates the migrant population, which is marked as sorely lacking in suzhi. Suzhi, the defining quality of the modern subject, is to be acquired through conscious self-development. A form of technology of the self, selfdevelopment is to be carried out through “eating bitterness” as the migrant is tempered by the market, a tempering that will produce suzhi as surplus value. The Half Monthly Forum article celebrated migrants’ “progress” from seeking mere survival to seeking self-development and a‹rmed that their selfdevelopment was in keeping with Time. What distinguishes self-development from survival is the diªerent outcomes of market exchange. Survival is a mere exchange of liqi for subsistence, whereas self-development involves the pro-

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duction of suzhi as surplus value conditioned upon the migrants’ recognition of their lack and their incited desire and willingness to eat bitterness in the process of market tempering. Such a discourse often represents the exchange and production of suzhi in an abstract form, but it eclipses the problematic of the surplus value in the hidden abode of production. I have analyzed Xiaohong’s subjectivity as an open-ended social process in the hidden abode of surplus value production, an abode haunted by the specter of class, leaving Xiaohong with the traumatic impossibility of cohering with the mirrored self held up in the realm of the discursive imaginary. My critique of the self-development discourse is connected to two kinds of literature: the “everyday resistance” literature, on the one hand, and the literature surrounding Spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” problematic, on the other. Since James Scott’s critical work on everyday resistance as the weapon of the weak, “everyday resistance” has become an important terrain in which researchers seek and locate subaltern resistance and agency.49 However, much of the everyday resistance literature seems to posit autonomous and selfwilled individual subjects behind acts of resistance. In this kind of analytical exercise, where subaltern subjectivity seems to have an autonomous presence and responds to an “external” hegemony, we risk treating subaltern subjectivity less as “a social and cultural formation arising from processes” and more as “a thing.”50 Rosalind O’Hanlon, in her lucid review of the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, pointed out that in their project of restoring the “suppressed histories” of subalterns and retrieving the subalterns’ “own” distinctive histories and consciousness, the group seemed to call for an originary presence of the subaltern and risked smuggling the unitary subject through the backdoor.51 And can the subaltern speak? In her recent writing, Spivak has distinguished positivist speaking from discursive speaking. Subalterns can certainly speak, but can they speak discursively? What does Spivak mean by speaking, and what does it imply? She proposes that “all speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception. That is what speaking is.”52 Such a definition of speaking does not allow a transparent representation of the speaking subaltern through unquestioned mediation of the investigating subject and marks any representation and decipherment as interested and situated. Spivak criti-

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cizes Foucault for conflating “individual” and “subject,” and Deleuze for restoring the undivided sovereign subject in the name of desire, suggesting that each of them performs ventriloquism for the speaking subaltern. She writes that “the banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent.”53 The issue, as Spivak points out, is not to abstain from representation but to abstain from an “essentialist utopian politics” by means of representing subalterns as speaking, acting, and knowing for themselves and eªacing the itinerary of the subaltern subject.54 Xiaohong’s disavowal of what we might call an act of everyday resistance makes di‹cult an easy celebration of everyday resistance. Instead, it cautions us that in dealing with subjectivity and agency, we must be attentive to the way the power of discourse incites and disciplines at the same time, works its way through subjectivity and agency, and contains its own constitutive limits and contradictions. Subjectivity and agency are conditioned by their material and discursive predications. Analyzing predications of the subaltern subject and her overdetermined inability to cohere is where we can begin our critical representation.

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NOTES 1. Suzhi, a term used pervasively in everyday life and o‹cial discourse in China today, can be only insu‹ciently translated as “quality” in English. It refers to level of education, intellectual and psychological development, degree of self-discipline, and awareness of civility (wenming). It is widely used to evaluate individuals, social groups, and the whole population. Ann Anagnost perceptively discussed the notion of suzhi in China’s eugenics discourse, which problematizes the distending population in China’s renewed eªorts in modernization. Ann Anagnost, “A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of State in Post-Mao China,” in F. Ginsburg and R. Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: Local/Global Intersections in the Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 22–41; and Ann Anagnost, “Neo-Malthusian Fantasy and National Transcendence,” in National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997): 117–37. Because “quality” is inadequate to capture the denotative and connotative power of suzhi, I use the original word in this chapter. 2. Foucault spoke of technologies of the self as those which “permit individuals to eªect by their means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.” Michel Foucault, Technology of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18. Technologies of the self are closely linked with “governmentality,” which he defined as “this contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self ” (ibid., 19). 3. Althusser used an example to allegorize interpellation: When a pedestrian is hailed by a policeman, the pedestrian’s turning around 180 degrees to respond to the hailing signals him or her as a subject of power. For what Althusser called interpellation, see his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster, trans. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. 4. I capitalize History and Time to refer to the notions of history and time that are specific to the postsocialist discourse of development in China, even though they are posited as hyper-real, transcendental categories. 5. Catherine Gallagher carefully examined the notions of the body and the connections between the physical bodies of the masses and the social body (body of the society) in the works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew. The Victorian loathing of “mere life” is more a Mayhewian extension of Malthus’s logic. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in

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Yan Hairong C. Gallagher and T. Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 104. See also Anagnost, “Surfeit of Bodies,” for her insight into the angst over the size and quality (suzhi) of the Chinese national body in China’s post-Mao eugenics discourse. 6. Wang Shucheng and Li Renhu, “Wuwei: Baomu xiaoying,” Ban yue tan 6 (1996): 24. 7. Ibid., 23–25. 8. The notion of “opening toward the outside”—outside read as the West—as a new social-political project in postsocialist China erases the history of Maoist China’s opening to Third World countries. The shift in the direction of opening is logically connected to China’s changed national identity in the global order. The changed locus of identity produces a new regime of truth about what counts as “opening.” 9. Ann Anagnost, “Children and National Transcendence in China,” in K. Lieberthal, S. Lin, and E. Young, eds., Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997), 214. 10. To welcome the advent of capital to take advantage of resources in hinterland areas, banners often appear addressing potential investors: “You get to make money; we get to develop” (ni facai, wo fazhan). 11. Dong Yueling, “Chaidui Beijing” [Migrating to Beijing], Qingnian wenzhai [Youth Digest] 4 (1999): 3. 12. Arturo Escobar, “Imagining a Post-Development Era,” in Jonathan Crush, ed., Power of Development (London: Routledge, 1995), 12. 13. Brian Hammer’s critique of the discourse of poverty in China shows the repeated link between self-development, regional development, and national development as often stressed in o‹cial poverty-relief speeches. 14. In recent years, Friedrich Hayek has been immensely popular with Chinese intellectuals. 15. This parallels the win-win transaction between “you get to make money” and “I get to have development” described in note 10. 16. Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Eªect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–51. I thank Ann Anagnost for pointing me to this illuminating reference. Gordon’s analysis, blended with Foucault’s insight into modes of government rationality, pushes for an understanding (which one might call “epistemic”) of neoliberalism as a rationality, a form of governmentality, and a technology of the self. 17. Liang Xiaosheng, Zhongguo shehui ge jieceng fenxi (Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 1997). The title of Liang’s book explicitly invokes Mao Zedong’s well-known 1927 work Zhongguo shehui ge jieji fenxi (Analysis of the classes in Chinese society).

Self-Development of Migrant Women 18. Liang, Zhongguo shehui ge jieceng fenxi, 3. Although Liang does not touch on the Chinese Communist revolution, he implies that it is part of the past about which he has generalized. 19. Ibid. 20. To be sure, the danwei permitted little employment mobility. However, the postMao reforms introduced labor mobility by stripping workers of the welfare benefits associated with the danwei. Newly “freed” workers must take complete responsibility for the vagaries and violence of the market. 21. Pun Ngai, “Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls): The Politics of Identity and Diªerence in Reform China,” China Journal 42 (1999): 3. 22. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 106. 23. See Mobo C. F. Gao’s Gao Village (1999) for concrete descriptions of the collective-based welfare system in the countryside and the dismantling of the system during the rural reforms initiated in the post-Mao period. 24. Field notes, August 15, 1999. 25. Anagnost, “Children and National Transcendence,” 214. 26. “Jingjiao nonghu baomu qun” [A group of baomu serving rural households in a Beijing suburb], Beijing qingnian bao [Beijing Youth Daily], December 17, 1995. 27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 170. 28. For the influence of Self-Help in colonial Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 108–10. For the influence of Smiles’s book in China in the early decades of the twentieth century, see Paul Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 78, 199. I thank Ann Anagnost for pointing me to these references. 29. My translation is based on the Chinese verses of the song that appear on the cover of the book. The English translation of the original French is this: “No savior from on high delivers / No faith have we in prince or peer / Our own right hand the chains must shiver / Chains of hatred, greed, and fear” (http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/int/ internationale.html). 30. At times, however, their identities as filial daughters or caring sisters are invoked to encourage them to endure hardships. 31. My discussion of “speaking bitterness” was inspired by Anagnost,”NeoMalthusian Fantasy,” and Rofel, Other Modernities. Anagnost writes of “speaking bitterness” during the revolutionary mobilization as “history speaking itself ” through the embodied voice of the subaltern.

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Yan Hairong 32. See Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 231, note 20, for a discussion of tempering young people in the Maoist era. 33. Rofel, Other Modernities, 141. 34. While the Maoist state discourse of women’s liberation had indeed enabled many women workers to take on and identify with the subject position of “liberated woman,” the party state also appropriated and monopolized the representation of women and women’s liberation. See Tani E. Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese Woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family],” Genders 10 (1991): 132–60. 35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 164. 36. Field notes, June 25, 1999, Beijing. 37. See Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), for the constitution of domestic interiority in relation to the capricious market in nineteenth-century America. 38. Dorothy E. Smith, “Telling the Truth after Postmodernism,” Symbolic Interaction 19, no. 3 (1996): 186. 39. See Smith, “Telling the Truth,” 179–80, for her critique of Judith Butler’s “citation” and “performativity,” which reduce a social process of interpellation to a monist performance. 40. Min Xiaohong, “Chenzhong de huaji” [My heavy-hearted youth], Nongjianu baishi tong [Rural Women Knowing All] 2 (1999): 28–31. 41. Field notes, June 25, 1999. 42. The Chinese original is “wo xinshang zhe xin de ziwo.” 43. The Chinese original is “yinwei wode ziwo zhushi zhe wo ziji.” I translate “wode ziwo” as “my self ” and “ziji” as “myself.” 44. The Chinese original is “wo bu neng gan ziji kanbuqi ziji de shi.” Here she uses ziji as both the observer and the observed. As what precedes this is “because my self is always zhushi at myself,” it is my speculation that the first ziji, the observer, is “my self,” and the second ziji is “myself.” 45. Anagnost, “Children and National Transcendence,” 214. 46. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977), viii. Emphasis added. 47. Ibid., 2. 48. Field notes, September 1, 1999. 49. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 50. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 10–11.

Self-Development of Migrant Women 51. Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189–224. 52. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 109. 53. Ibid., 257. 54. Ibid., 259, 261.

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8 The Remains of the Everyday One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing

joshua goldstein An August 2001 article in the Southern Capital News titled “Suspecting his junk has been stolen, [man] brutally beats his fellow traveler” began: “While on a passenger train, Mr. Jia beat and critically injured his colleague [tonghang] Mr. Luo in a struggle over a single empty plastic spring-water bottle.”1 According to the report, two scavenging “trash hicks” (lajilao) clambered through the cabin windows of a train at a stop in Hunan. They soon came to blows, and Mr. Jia, in the end, made oª with a sack containing Mr. Luo’s entire day’s worth of gleanings. The journalist, in a tone mixing mockery and pity, highlighted both the drama and the pathetic pettiness of the incident by claiming that it was all for the sake of a single plastic bottle worth at most five fen (0.05 yuan), or half a cent in U.S. currency. The article’s sarcastic tone conveys a fairly typical urban condescension toward rural migrants and provides yet another glimpse of what Yan Hairong described in chapter 7 as “the discourse of suzhi,” albeit a more casual and blatantly degrading voicing of that discourse. My primary purpose here is not to analyze the discursive construction of China’s rural-urban divide, as profoundly important as that project is. Rather, I want to locate this incident and its journalistic coverage in a longer history of urban gleaning and recycling. The economics of collecting and processing junk and scrap in China have changed drastically over the last century, echoing, if not coinciding with, the political-economic periodization of republican (1911–49), socialist (1950–80) and postreform (1980–present) eras. An investigation into the shifting practices of recycling and reuse sheds light on some interesting changes in social and economic relations across these eras.

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People’s small, daily acts of recycling and waste disposal often carry profound implications about the regimes of economic development under which they live; indeed, we might even be able to chart a changing imaginary of citizenship, society, or nationhood through the changing daily-life habits and rhythms of recycling in urban China over the last century. Returning to Luo and Jia’s brawl on the train: in alleging that their fight was over something as trifling as a single plastic bottle, this news item functioned as yet another round of ammunition in an arsenal of character assassination directed at rural migrants. By slightly shifting the terms of its interpretation, however, we can use this slapstick tale of brutality to broach what is currently the ground of a massive political and economic contest in cities throughout China. Luo and Jia were not arguing merely over the possession of a single bottle; the real issue at stake was, Who has gleaning rights over this specific public space? In this case the space was a train compartment, but today, in every major Chinese city, thousands of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of rural migrants are in a heated contest over precisely this question of gleaning rights, and the public spaces at issue are as large as the cities themselves. In Beijing alone there were likely over 120,000 rural migrants who survived by one form or another of refuse scavenging in 2003.2 Tens of thousands of these, like Luo and Jia, daily comb the streets, apartment complex refuse bins, roadside waste heaps, and shopping mall trashcans looking for recyclable scrap and bottles. A few thousand climb and pick through the heaps of putrid tonnage that daily arrive at the city’s landfills. A hundred or so specialize in recovering recyclable wastes, especially fats, from sewers. The largest segment, maybe half of those laboring in the scrap collection trade, can be seen every evening pedaling bicycle-drawn carts (sanlunche), piled high with cardboard, plastic bottles, newspapers, and metal scrap, toward the outskirts of the city. Many of these carters have struck up informal contracts with shop owners or managers of residential compounds and have received “permission” to ply a daily route or to station themselves in a fixed location.3 Most of these carters first purchase waste items from area residents and businesses and then haul their payload to outlying collection markets for resale at a slightly higher price to dealers who specialize in specific categories of scrap: newspaper, cardboard, plastic, glass, iron, aluminum. In 1998 these collectors and

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trash pickers were responsible for the reclamation of around 800,000 tons of recyclable metals, paper, and plastics, generating over 900 million yuan, or well over U.S.$100 million in profits.4 For 2003 the quantity was estimated at 1.2 million tons, with profits closer to U.S.$150 million. With so much money at stake, it is hardly surprising that in the late 1990s management of municipal waste and recyclables suddenly became a vital concern of the Beijing municipal government. But governmental and public interest in the recycling sector quickly exceeded the pursuit of short-term economic gains. Urban administrators, fast on the heels of environmental activists, recognized that management of recycling practices could serve as an ideal vehicle both for reforming the quality of China’s urban environment and for shaping citizen consciousness. Especially with the 2008 Olympics fast approaching, regulating and sanitizing the recycling sector became an important element in the Beijing government’s U.S.$13–billion environmental cleanup blitzkrieg.5 Among mega-cities in the developing world, Beijing is hardly unique in attracting countless migrants who make the trek to the city with the intention of subsisting oª the garbage of more prosperous urbanites. The most notorious example in recent years has been Manila, where fifty-six garbage pickers were killed and their shanties flattened in a literal avalanche of postconsumer waste when a fifteen-meter-high mountain of garbage collapsed after a rainstorm in the summer of 2000.6 Though garbage picking has been a source of subsistence since the dawn of industrial urbanization, the phenomenon that led to the Manila tragedy was of an entirely diªerent magnitude from those of previous eras. The burgeoning production of garbage and the dependence of poor communities on it, especially in the developing world, are obvious by-products of the contemporary economic logic of globalization. Until the 1970s, many developing countries followed production-driven models of development that generally limited the importation of foreign commodities and geared economic development toward import substitution.7 National barriers to trade were crucial aspects of such programs, so consumption grew relatively sluggishly by today’s standards. Since the early 1980s, however, the reigning commonsense of neoliberalism has presented economic development as if it could take only one form: rapid growth funded through finance capital targeted at private firms that depend above all upon successfully

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meeting market demands for ever-increasing consumption. Consumption is the prime mover, the all-powerful stimulus and motor driving economic prosperity; all barriers to it, especially in the form of national restrictions on imports or exports, must be demolished. The monotonous incantation to consume ever faster and more conveniently has spawned an inevitable by-product, ingraining into the daily-life habits of people around the world assumptions of disposability that produce mountains of garbage-gold for the destitute to mine. In 2003, China became the global center of gravity for almost all major forms of recyclable scrap—including metals such as copper, iron, and stainless steel, PET plastic, and various types of paper—setting global prices. Scrap markets, in which buying local had been the overwhelming rule of thumb because transport costs had long been the most controllable and largest cost component, have been transformed into a global system in which importing across oceans and continents has become commonplace. Although the economics of trash picking and recycling in Beijing have become increasingly integrated into global consumer markets, these means of livelihood have a longer and distinctly local history as well. Poor, rural scavengers are not new to Beijing. Republican-era Beijing (1911–49) was home to a growing community of the dislocated and impoverished who daily eked out a living by wandering the streets and alleys collecting the discards of the city’s more prosperous residents. These people typically mended, patched, or creatively manipulated the goods they collected into handicraft products to be sold at market stalls throughout the city. In the Mao years (1949–78), Beijing’s recyclers did not disappear; the state recruited them, consolidating their informal networks into a state-managed system. They no longer wandered the city’s streets and alleys, but recycling hardly disappeared. On the contrary, in 1957 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) became one of the first governments in the world to institute recycling on a permanent, nationally administered basis through municipal-level Waste Goods Recycling Sections ( feipin huishou bu) overseen by the Bureau of Supply and Marketing. Recycling, which had been an integral part of Beijing’s handicraft and small-shop economy, was transformed in the Mao years into an important component of the industrial sector. In the postreform era of globalization (1978–present), Beijing’s economy is again being radically transformed. The rising wave of urban postconsumer

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waste has created a new, highly valuable, fiercely competitive, and volatile market. In an attempt to adjust to these new conditions, the state recycling bureaucracy reinvented itself in the 1990s in the form of loosely a‹liated companies. But when it came to wrestling over empty water bottles, the state-owned companies were hardly a match for the likes of Mr. Jia and Mr. Luo. Their account books filled with red ink; in 1998 Beijing’s recycling companies lost over 8 million yuan.8 Now, with the dawn of the new millennium, the state seems to be staging a comeback by adopting a new strategy: instead of competing with the other players over who gets the ball, why not become referee and take control of the field? Working closely with a host of municipal agencies, the stateowned companies are attempting to gain control over the recycling market by regulating and disciplining migrants’ use of and access to urban spaces. What can shifting practices of recycling and reuse tell us about changes in relations between state and society across these eras? In what follows, I draw a general sketch of Beijing’s recycling system for the republican, Maoist, and postsocialist eras, with attention to the following questions: Which items made up the category of feipin (waste goods) in each era? Who participated in the circulation of these items, and how were they socially positioned? Where did activities of recycling and scrap collection take place, and how were they managed? Answering these questions allows us to locate the recycling system of each era in relation to broader regimes of urban economic processes and, from there, to venture some interpretations about the changing social and cultural connotations of recycling for Beijing’s residents. Finally, we will look at the ideological and economic forces arrayed in the Olympian bottle battle under way in Beijing in 2005.

RECYCLING AND REUSE IN REPUBLICAN BEIJING Feipin—which means literally “waste goods” but which I often use here as “recyclables”— is a word that can cover a ragtag menagerie of objects ranging from “junk,” such as broken clocks, crumbling furniture, and ragged clothes, to scraps of metal, paper, and plastic. It is a liminal category, existing at a juncture between consumption and production, the public and the private, worth and worthlessness. The leftovers, by-products, and detritus of daily-life urban processes, feipin elude precise quantification and documentation as well as

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clear definitions of ownership and responsibility. The value of specific waste goods shifts radically depending on who is doing the evaluating and in what context: one person’s garbage is another person’s gold. The broad and blurring spectrum that comprises feipin is a rainbow refraction of society itself. Though the trade and circulation of secondhand goods and recyclables often elude historical records and tax roles, they have long been vital and thriving aspects of urban systems. In republican-era Beijing—wracked on one side by waves of war-beleaguered rural migrants and on the other by the pressures of imperialism and modernization—trade in recyclables sustained an ever growing segment of the city’s population. For them, recycling and reuse were pervasive and indispensable tactics of economic survival. Relatively few republican-era waste goods passed through what we think of today as “recycling” processes—the shredding, melting, or mashing of commodities, reducing them back into raw materials to be used for the manufacture of utterly new commodities. Rather, the majority of the republican-era trade in feipin was organized around processes we might more comfortably term reuse: the skillful mending or creative and frugal alteration of damaged goods.9 Clothing scraps, for instance, might be reborn as coat patches, mop heads, or shoe soles; a metal strip from an old tin container could be hammered and welded to bandage a leaky kettle. If what was broken could not be repaired, it might instead be used bricoleur fashion for some other purpose: a broken bowl might become a ladle. In any case, almost nothing was wasted. In her discussion of recycling and material culture in the nineteenth-century United States, Susan Strasser refers to such practices of reuse as constituting a “stewardship of objects.” Strasser shows that in the borderline industrial economy of nineteenth-century America, consumers had yet to acquire the habits of disposability that are second nature to us today. Whenever possible, homely ingenuity discovered an alternative use for things broken or worn. People regularly sold or bartered certain kinds of wastes, such as rags, bones, metal scraps, and cooking fats, to traveling merchants who supplied materials to craftsmen or small-scale factories. In the late nineteenth century, the trash of the landfill that urban Americans know so well today hardly existed.10 The situation in republican-era Beijing was similar, so if we wish to map the recycling and reuse patterns of that era as a system, we must cast our net broadly. A whole range of activities and crafts involving repair, mending,

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smithery, and so forth was integrally tied to an economic network of collecting, buying, selling, and bartering waste goods. Hundreds of stall owners dealt in used clothes, old books, and fake antiques, and thousands of independent craftspeople depended on a diverse army of waste-goods collectors for their supplies. Their ranks included “pole carriers,” “big basket toters,” “small drum beaters,” and “large drum beaters”—hawkers and gleaners all, who daily roamed neighborhood alleys calling residents to bring out their scrap and junk to barter or sell. Among the most destitute were the “match and soap women,” who traded matches or small cakes of soap for wastepaper, bits of cloth, or old shoes. On the high end of the junk world were the “old customers”: watch, jewelry, and trinket traders who often daylighted as fences for petty thieves and daily haunted the same teahouse or wine shop (hence their name), where they met with clients.11 The primary nexuses for the exchange of waste and secondhand goods were junk markets, the timing and placement of which harmonized a variety of necessities. Known as “dark markets,” “dawn markets,” and “dew markets,” these gatherings formed in the wee hours of the night and dispersed around dawn, the darkness being conducive to trade in stolen, counterfeit, and shoddy merchandise.12 Highly informal, these markets were nearly impossible to tax or police and were especially prone to sprout up along the edges of ponds or ditches—pits into which stolen items could be tossed if the police decided to pay a surprise visit. By dawn, craftsmen needed to be back at their shops, collectors back on their beats, and the markets dispersed. The authorities typically turned a blind eye to these markets, allowing several of them to become fairly well established and even active in broad daylight. By far the biggest and most famous of such markets was Tianqiao, home to hundreds of stalls, traders, entertainers, and snack sellers. Though Tianqiao became a lively fixture of Beijing culture, and even a tourist attraction, it also remained a hideout for all sorts of dealers in shady and used goods, and the municipal government never developed an eªective strategy to tax the businesses that thrived there. Amid the city’s thousands of used book, watch, and antique dealers, smiths, tailors, and handicraft stalls were approximately a thousand businesses that specialized in particular categories of recyclable raw materials. These dealers in all forms of iron, copper, rags, glass, and paper could be seen as the most direct ancestors of today’s recyclables traders.

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Their businesses rarely expanded beyond the most meager of mom-and-pop operations. Beijing’s “Copper King,” the biggest scrap-copper merchant in the capital, had a grand total of two nonfamily employees on his staª.13 The recycling and reuse network was woven together not only through economic exchange but also through a common vernacular culture. Merchants and collectors shared secret jargons and saw themselves as part of a broad and striated professional community: The secondhand goods business had its own ladder of success. The bigdrum-beaters, who collected paper and broken metal pieces, could, when successful, become small-drum-beaters, carrying baskets [ basket toters] and collecting clothes. One could then rise to become a “brief-carrying” small-drum-beater, collecting jewelry and antiques. One who got rich from drum-beating could then open a “hanging goods shop,” which could later be turned into an antique shop.14

That these trades were seen as steps on a professional continuum reinforces the notion that for the republican era we must interpret the category of feipin, and the recycling and reuse activities associated with it, as encompassing a wide range of objects and trades. Indeed, Madeleine Yue Dong argues that recycling and reuse pervaded the lives of republican-era Beijing residents, be they laborers, merchants, consumers, or visiting tourists. For Dong, recycling was an essential aspect of republican Beijing culture, entailing activities and experiences that crystallized many of the era’s economic and cultural predicaments: At the heart of the recycling process was the tension not only between the old and the new, but more fundamentally between agency and its lack. The recycling potential of the old commodities themselves was limited by the histories etched into them. Their past could be partly erased, mended, torn, or elaborated, but never eliminated—a product of recycling could only masquerade as new, and rarely convincingly.15

Dong argues that the urgent, sweat-stained creativity of reuse and recycling epitomized the experience of modernity in republican Beijing, imbuing the

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mundane matrix of workaday life with a deeply evocative “nostalgia for the present” that Beijing’s writers, from Lao She to Qi Rushan, strove to capture in their work.16 After comprehensively surveying republican Beijing’s market network, banking system, and municipal administration, Dong concludes that despite its many superficial resemblances to a premodern regime of handicraft production, the world of recycling and reuse in republican-era Beijing entailed a fundamentally modern encounter with society and the nation. Its rhythms of production moved to the daily pace of modern urban markets, as opposed to the cyclical rhythm of China’s rural marketing system; experiences of consumption in places like Tianqiao were imbued with a distinctly urban and alienating lack of trust and familiarity; and the social reflection that the world of recycling and urban poverty inspired in elite observers and sociologists engaged distinctly modern ideas of what proper republican citizenship should entail. This brief sketch of republican-era reuse and recycling makes possible a number of useful summary observations about recycling during this period. First, the recycling and reuse of waste goods in republican Beijing was not part of a regime of consumption and disposal but rather was part of a system of trade and craft activities best characterized as a “stewardship of objects.” Recycled or reused goods were not reduced into raw materials to be transformed into utterly new and dissimilar commodities. Rather, they circulated throughout the city, reemerging in the same urban milieu to be reused by other Beijing residents in forms that still retained traces of their previous incarnations. Therefore, activities of recycling and reuse in republican Beijing were legibly social or community processes. The processes of exchange themselves were personalized. Selling or bartering scrap to a drum beater or purchasing secondhand goods at a dawn market or street stall was far from being a depersonalized act of economic exchange. There were no price tags, quality guarantees, receipts, or anonymous sales clerks—all these exchanges involved a certain amount of what Beijing residents would describe as renqing, personal feeling. Moreover, one knew that the goods one was buying, selling, or bartering would continue to circulate and resurface—they were part of the city in which one lived. Whereas industrial commodities are purposely designed to be interchangeable, to bear no fingerprints, and to display no obvious evidence

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of individual labor (imperfections) or point of origin, the reused goods of the republican era could not but display the scuªmarks, bruises, and mended scars of exchange, wear, and craft labor. Second, the social realm of recycling and reuse should not be romanticized. The recycling world was strained by class antagonisms, hierarchies, exploitation, extortion, and violence. Although many of Beijing’s literary elites delighted in recording the colorful details of the recycling world, they almost invariably did so with the air of the aristocratic anthropologist. Even though thousands of scrap gleaners and used-goods merchants were recent migrants from the countryside, recyclers were rarely categorized as “outsiders” or “other,” and they were not excluded from Beijing’s resident communities. On the contrary, the recycling trades, and the thousands who lived by them, were seen as integral to, if not trademarks of, Beijing culture. The recycling world was in fact an eclectic mix of newly arrived migrants and oldtime residents. Whereas bartering over clothing scraps was something any peasant could do competently, working successfully in the antique or used-book business was a consummate example of Beijing cultural identity, requiring expertise in the arcana of Beijing history and culture. Yet both rag collectors and antique sellers were equally “insiders” in the junk trading community. Shopkeepers and clerks within this community also formed their own small guilds and occasionally participated in collective acts of petitioning and protest directed at the municipal government, suggesting their sense of urban citizenship. Protests in the republican era also frequently erupted on the streets themselves as urban space was contested and neither the police nor urban administrators could maintain an exclusive monopoly over it.17 Such explicit political acts of protest and organizing again highlight the fact that recyclers themselves, other Beijing residents, and the municipal government all recognized recyclers and urban gleaners as legitimate members of Beijing’s urban community. Third, reuse and recycling activities were centered in curbside night markets and open-air markets throughout the city, gathering at times and in places that the municipal authorities found extremely di‹cult to police and manage. In addition to these fixed markets, hawkers and collectors roamed the streets of the city, trickling into almost every alleyway like capillaries of a vast

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circulation network. The reuse and recycling network permeated the urban space of republican-era Beijing more thoroughly than almost any other system of commercial goods circulation.

THE MAO YEARS: INDUSTRIALIZATION WITHOUT CONSUMPTION A formalized municipal administration overseeing recycling in Beijing began to take shape in the 1950s. Though the o‹ces and work stations of the recycling system frequently shed their titles and shifted from one branch of the bureaucratic tree to another over the next forty years, the actual work on the ground was handled for the most part by the same group of familiar and aging faces, many of whom had begun laboring in the junk world back in the republican era. One such worker recorded his recollections after working for more than forty years in the recycling trades. His memoir describing how the government slowly incorporated republican Beijing’s scattered army of feipin collectors into a phalanx of o‹ces and work sites provides a starting point for understanding how the activities of reuse and recycling were transformed through Beijing’s transition into a state-socialist system. The recycling network was not immediately reformed after 1949, and many small shops even experienced a brief period of expansion in the early 1950s. Used paper shops had a brief heyday as the government began printing large quantities of newspapers.18 Specialists in old jewelry, watches, and the like were busy assisting the police in tracking down stolen goods or assessing the worth and origins of valuables that citizens, sometimes against their will, yielded to the state. The collectivization of this disparate group of laborers, shopkeeps, and hawkers began around 1953 with the government’s encouraging them to organize into discrete trade groups. It culminated during the 1956 collectivization movement, when more than seven thousand peddlers amassed to form the Beijing Municipal Scrap Recycling Company (Beijingshi feipin huishou gongsi). The total capital of the company in 1957 came to around 2 million yuan, all of it from the “donated” savings of recyclables collectors and shop owners. The city government contributed no funds directly, so Beijing’s entire recycling network was built from this nest egg. The workforce was soon expanded to include many street-level drum beaters, street sweepers, and the like, until it approached twenty thousand. It remained

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staªed almost exclusively by old-timers in the trade; only some 5 percent of new blood entered the company over the next three decades. With state collectivization, the highly integrated network of daily markets and crafts that had characterized the republican urban economy was digested into the new work-unit-centered urban economic system. As state socialism dawned, Beijing’s “dew markets” dried up, and the hawkers and collectors who had roamed the city steadily diminished in number. The consolidation of small markets and family-run handicrafts shops into larger, centralized collectives radically reduced the demand of these craft workers for recyclable and reusable materials. They were instead organized into collectivized craft shops that received raw materials in bulk from the state. Hence, by the 1960s the rowdy, bustling markets of places like Tianqiao had all but vanished. The recycling system took on a distinctly new form. State collectivization of the recycling and reuse trades drastically redefined what recycling meant as a network of economic practices. But this transformation was not like that which occurred in the United States, where industrial production created new consumption habits, displacing handicrafts and putting an end to the “stewardship of objects.” Socialist industrialization did not end such stewardship; urban householders continued to mend what they could, concoct novel uses for what could not be mended, and save all sorts of scraps. There were a host of practical reasons why, despite the emergence of industrialization, people continued to conserve objects throughout the socialist era; the economy, after all, was not geared toward consumerism. But a more ideological aspect deserves mention, especially because it contrasts starkly with the contemporary economic imaginary. The socialist state consistently preached that the source of all wealth was productive labor, and the fruits of that labor were material objects: wheat, steel, clothes, and so on. Money played a much smaller role in daily production and consumption and was decidedly not seen as a source of wealth or productivity in itself. Rather, value adhered in material goods, so material goods should never be wasted. Domestic habits toward conserving and preserving material objects changed little with the advent of socialist industrialization, but the manner in which practices of stewardship interfaced with the larger economic system was fundamentally altered. The netherworld of mended, patched, pawned, and traded

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objects that gathered nightly at the dew markets of the republican era had been banished. Rather, scraps that people could not mend for reuse themselves were sold, not to “basket toters” but to the municipal scrap company. In every neighborhood the Beijing Municipal Scrap and Recycling Company opened a small stall where paper, metal, rubber scraps, bones, and bottles could be sold for a few cents, to be shipped in bulk to increasingly large industrial factories where they would be recycled into utterly unrecognizable “new” products. Industrial recycling had emerged. The shift in the recycling bureau’s name, from Beijingshi feipin (old commodities) huishou gongsi to Beijingshi wuzi (resource) huishou gongsi (BRRC), in 1966 highlighted a change that had already occurred in material practice. For the BRRC, recycling was much more like we conceive of it today: the gathering of glass, paper, and metals in bulk to be reduced and reformed as new commodities.19 Recycling was no longer linked to handicrafts, secondhand goods, or mended objects. The BRRC further divided “resources” into two overarching categories, “industrial” and “residential” or “daily life” (shenghuo). Industrial materials, collected directly from state factories, consisted primarily of metals that were by far the most valued materials the BRRC handled. Daily-life materials were delivered from various o‹ces and nonindustrial work units, as well as brought in to BRRC neighborhood collection points by local residents. These materials included all sorts of paper, glass and rubber scraps, toothpaste tubes, and various small bits of metal. BRRC collection points were dispersed throughout the city, and residents avidly used their services. The small change the BRRC gave people for their “resources” was a valuable treat in a money-scarce economy. The very nature of recycling had changed—people’s involvement with the BRRC meant plugging their daily habits into an industrial economy—but the habits of stewardship had not vanished. A trip to the collection point was one habit in a daily regimen that involved the meticulous caretaking of objects. The Great Leap Forward (GLF), with its drives for backyard steel production, only highlighted this sense of connection between domestic habits, meticulous accounting for material as resources, and national industrialization. Though the ideological connections had been made earlier, with the GLF citizens began directly connecting their small acts of material conserva-

8.1 Poster promoting recycling, circa 1960s.

tion and recycling to the enormous picture of a triumphantly industrializing socialist nation-state. A powerful ideological homology existed between the ideal of dedicating one’s heart and soul as a citizen—and thereby becoming an indispensable “screw” in the glorious socialist experiment—and contributing every unused scrap of metal to be melted down to make new screws for the industrial machines of the new system. Participating in recycling in this way was just one act in a whole regimen of frugal and citizenly behaviors that were feverishly hyped during the GLF, when newspapers and magazines were deluged with composite statistics proclaiming how many trees could be planted, flies killed, or tons of steal produced if everyone did his or her small share. Every bit of material one delivered to the BRRC stall became another valuable drop in the sea of Chinese industry. After attending a special session on recycling ( feipin huishou) at the trade ministry’s 1958 conference in Guangdong, Zhou Enlai clearly articulated the ideology animating such daily practices:

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We should work and study in the direction of the new society and tightly grasp the key link of utilizing waste materials. We should realize the transformation of unused materials into useful materials and through expanded application of labor make the useful more useful, economize and conserve, and make the old and broken into the brand new. We must unite workers, peasants, merchants, students, and soldiers into one body and closely cooperate to completely develop this service to production. Through this task we diligently and thriftily build the nation and reform society.20

If, during the republican era, experiences in recycling were reminders of desperate social problems, recalling for many consumers the need to relieve the suªering of the nation’s laboring poor, then in the socialist period, participating in recycling was portrayed as a small but glorious act in the building of the new China. Recycling, though certainly driven by urban residents’ personal desires for a bit more pocket money, was above all a positive act of citizenship. It should also be noted that while both the republican and socialist experiences of recycling contained powerful social implications, they had little connection to the ideology of environmentalism that today dominates the recycling world. To summarize some major aspects of this era: First, goods being recycled were redefined more abstractly as resources. This change in nomenclature reflected a shift to industrial recycling wherein the scraps being reused emerged from production as new goods bearing no recognizable traces of their previous uses. The range of materials entering the recycling system narrowed considerably. The BRRC did not collect antiques, jewelry, furniture, or mendable clothing, and such items were no longer part of the same system as metal, paper, rubber, and glass scrap. Second, laborers of the recycling world were consolidated into an administrative system and became state workers. Their residency in Beijing was confirmed and made permanent, with the BRRC as their employer, and they received all the same benefits and subsidies for food, housing, health care, and education as other Beijing residents under the housing registration system. Jobs in this sector lacked prestige, and there was generally little fluidity in persons either entering or exiting the BRRC workforce. The shadiness of the recycling world and its subculture—the close relationship of the trades with

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rings of theft and fraudulent merchant activity—was for the most part eliminated, as were all guilds and other autonomous forms of professional or community organization. Third, markets and alley-plying hawkers and collectors were largely eliminated and replaced with an administrative network of thousands of small collection stalls, one in each neighborhood. As real estate became state property and could no longer be freely bought or sold, these collection stalls cost the BRRC little or nothing to maintain. They shipped the resources they collected to state-run factories, eliminating the need for intermediary markets.

THE POSTSOCIALIST ERA OF DISPOSABILITY The post-1978 reform era has seen yet another definitive change in what recycling means as a set of daily practices in China. Many systemic shifts have played into this transformation: the enormous expansion of markets for consumer goods and the attendant spread of a culture of disposability; the rapid monetization of the economy; changes in land uses and markets; government policies on internal migration; and a recent push for environmental protection and sustainable economic development. A thorough analysis of how all these changes specifically aªect the recycling economy and social subsystems would fill a book, if not a shelf. But a brief sketch of the way these changes in the urban spatial, economic, and political systems have aªected the world of recycling frames some preliminary observations regarding what contemporary practices of recycling imply about citizenship in Beijing today. China’s capital and its coastal cities have undergone a metamorphosis since 1978. Aside from the occasional historical monument and a few gems of socialist state architecture, Beijing has been veritably demolished and rebuilt, the shock waves of construction splashing outward, submerging the once rural suburbs out to the Fifth Ring Road and beyond. Boxy o‹ce towers of silvery glass and mammoth concrete apartment clusters spring from the ground at a pace that puts the seeded grass on the strips of planned “green space” to shame. Migrant garbage gleaners and collectors of recyclables have returned and again map the city through their labor, sorting and centralizing the haphazardly dispersed slough of urban consumption. What they collect— Coca-Cola, Sprite, and water bottles, boxes tattooed with foreign and domes-

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tic corporate logos—tells a story of changing consumption patterns. Who the collectors are tells a story of a new division of labor and citizenship rights. Where they go to collect and sell their goods illuminates a closely related story of changing models of urban management. Their bureaucratic and geographic steeplechase over the last two decades makes legible a complex story of Beijing’s changing land uses and land-rents and, above all, techniques for the management of urban space. The titanic transformation of Beijing’s physical environment is both a product of and an impetus for radical shifts in the rhythms and patterns of urban daily life. The ways in which residents experience and manage both space and time have been transformed. During the Mao years, people typically lived and worked within the relatively contained spaces of their work units. Transportation was primarily by bus, bicycle, or foot, and few people’s daily schedules took them far afield. Prices were lower and the economy was less monetized; staple goods such as food grains, oil, and cloth were part of subsidized rationing systems. Health care costs, school fees, and housing rents were minimal, employment and migration were tightly managed, and neither real estate nor businesses could be privately owned. All these sectors are now marketized and monetized. Alongside these economic changes, the trickle of migration into the cities that began in the mid-1980s has surged into an uncontrollable torrent that has forced the old housing registration system into an evolutionary struggle to adapt.21

Feipin in the Reform Era These tectonic demographic and economic shifts have had an enormous eªect on habits of urban consumption. As the rhythm and choreography of daily life quicken, “convenient” consumption becomes alluring, if not imperative: lightweight, transportable, sealed, serving-size commodities are tailor-made for Taylorized consumption in a high-velocity service economy. Convenience, by another name, is disposability. The city’s waste stream overfloweth, and recyclable packaging is a substantial part of the big spill. In terms of weight, Beijing’s waste stream grew at nearly the same rate as China’s gross domestic product during the 1990s, rising at around 8–10 percent a year, with the upper class clearly leading the way into conspicuous habits of disposal.

The Remains of the Everyday

Beijing’s waste stream was also fundamentally altered by a shift from coal burning to built-in gas heating and cooking. In 1990, most residential heating and cooking in Beijing depended on coal-burning technologies, and more than 50 percent of the city’s waste was composed of a single substance, coal ash. Li Jianxin, a grandfather of sixty-seven who began working in municipal waste management as a street cleaner, recalled, In the early days after liberation, street cleaners were employed under the Public Security Bureau. They gave us uniforms pretty much the same as the cops, and except for a small badge, no one could tell by looking at your clothes what your job was. . . . [W]e started sweeping the streets at twelve midnight, but when I say ‘sweep the street’ I really should say ‘sweep dust.’

What we consider to be typical urban trash was rare in the Mao years, and it was not until 1958 that the city began putting trash cans in tourist sites such as Tiananmen Square. Until the 1980s, garbage collectors and street sweepers typically called their work “moving dirt” (yun tu) or “dumping dirt” (cao tu).22 Today, heating and cooking with coal inside Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road is prohibited, and coal ash makes up less than 5 percent of the city’s refuse. At the same time, entirely new forms of household wastes began to proliferate, many of which were recyclable, with the wealthy leading the way in setting new consumption patterns. In 1991, paper, plastic, metal (cans), and glass made up more than 70 percent of the waste generated in upper-class residential areas but less than 11 percent of the waste in average-income neighborhoods.23 Today the figures are relatively even across economic classes. From 1990 to 1998, the proportion of waste paper in Beijing’s waste stream quadrupled (nearing 20 percent), and plastic nearly tripled (to more than 11 percent) (table 8.1). Indeed, the daily per capita waste produced by the average Beijing resident in 1999 exceeded that of the average U.S. consumer (table 8.2).24 In the new, more monetized economy of the 1980s and 1990s, lugging recyclables to the BRRC collection point became a nuisance. State recycling stands could not handle plastics or novel forms of packaging, and the few cents they paid for items was becoming worth less every day. Where trading a few bottles and an empty toothpaste tube could once buy a day at the movies, in the

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Joshua Goldstein Table 8.1

Refuse Constituents in Beijing, 1990–1998 Year

Food

1990

24.89

1995 1998

(Coal) Dust

Paper

Plastic

Glass

Metals

Other

53.22

4.56

5.08

3.10

0.09

10.06

35.96

10.92

16.18

36.12

5.64

17.89

10.35

10.20

2.96

13.43

11.35

10.70

3.34

14.34

source: Wang Weiping, “Zhongguo chengshi shenghuo laji duice yanjiu” [Research on solutions to domestic solid waste in cities in China], Ziran ziyuan xuebao ( Journal of Natural Resources) 15, no. 2 (2000): 128.

1980s one would have had to drag in pounds of paper and cans just to pocket enough change to buy a Popsicle. As the piles of postconsumer recyclables in people’s households mushroomed, most found it easier to toss them into the waste stream than to cart them to the recycling stand. It did not help that the BRRC was increasingly treating its neighborhood collection points themselves as disposable. With the land speculation binge that began in the late 1980s, the little plots that the BRRC used as collection points were quickly abandoned and scooped up for more profitable real estate investments. The state’s recycling net dissolved. In fifteen years the number of BRRC collection points in central Beijing fell from more than two thousand to just six in 1998.25 For most of those years the BRRC was unconcerned; it was too busy joining in the speculative fever, shifting its funds into real estate and taxi companies.26 Its strategy was clear: recycling industrial metals was its only high-profit, low-labor sector. “Daily life wastes” (shenghuo feipin) were not worth the trouble, neighborhood collection points were unprofitable, and the idea of setting up a proactive collection network was rarely raised. A BRRC experiment at providing separate bins for recyclables in Western City District in 1996 failed, and an attempt at door-to-door collection of recyclables in Fengtai District in 1999 proved far too expensive to be maintained.27 The BRRC simply could not compete with migrant collectors. BRRC workers demanded steady and relatively high salaries and were unwilling to do the degrading work of scrounging through trash. Most important from a budgetary standpoint, BRRC workers would only collect recyclables, not transport

The Remains of the Everyday Table 8.2

Residential Waste Production in Major World Cities, 1999 City

Pounds per Day per Capita

Beijing

2.764

Hong Kong

2.402

Singapore

1.984

Los Angeles

2.300*

New York

2.450

sources: Beijing Municipal Statistical Bureau, Beijing Statistical Yearbook, 1999 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 1999); Daniel Hoornweg, “What a Waste: Solid Waste Management in Asia” (New York: World Bank, Urban Development Sector Unit East Asia and Pacific Region, 1999), 9. *Figure

is for 1998.

them. The first and most labor-intensive stage in recycling is the gathering together of highly disaggregated materials into more centralized places of concentration, the transfer markets. Profits in the migrant recycling network derive largely from saved transport costs; tens of thousands of collectors buy scrap for a few cents per kilogram, then pedal their one-hundred-plus kilos of scrap across the city and sell it for a slightly higher price at the transfer market. The few cents they earn per kilo is the “reward” they reap for performing the energy-devouring task of reaggregating these disaggregated resources. The idea that BRRC workers should take on such exhausting labor was beyond imagining, and BRRC attempts to build a trucking network generated more red ink than profit. The irony of the BRRC’s contraction was that the flow of disposable recyclables was increasing as never before. In addition to ballooning rates of household consumption, all kinds of new businesses (restaurants, small stores, supermarkets, hotels) that catered to consumers also generated enormous quantities of recyclable waste. These businesses were part of an entirely new sector of the urban economy and had no established relationships with the BRRC, so rural migrants immediately entered the breach. As in residential neighborhoods, migrant bike-carters would buy recyclables from shop own-

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Joshua Goldstein Table 8.3

Prices in Yuan Paid for Recyclables, per Kilogram, by the Zhouji Company, Independent Collectors, and Stall Owners at Transfer Markets, Beijing, July 2001 Zhouji Co.

Collector

Stall Owner

Zhouji Co.

Buys from

Buys from

Buys from

Buys from

Resident

Resident

Collector

Employee

Newspaper

0.70–0.80

0.70 –0.90

0.90 –1.00

0.85–0.90

Cardboard

0.40–0.50

0.40 –0.50

0.60

0.55–0.60

1.00

0.90 –1.10

1.30

1.20

Scrap iron

0.50–0.70

0.40 –0.80

0.60 –1.20

0.70 –1.00

Copper

6.00–7.00

9.00

—

—

10.00–11.00

—

—

—

0.13–0.15

0.15

—

—

Plastic bottles

Aluminum Aluminum cans

sources: Company prices for Beijing Zhouji huanjing keji youxian gongsi; migrant buying and selling prices from interviews, Haidian District, July 2001.

ers at a low price (say, forty fen per kilo of cardboard), cart them to markets on the city’s outskirts, and resell them in bulk to stall owners (“little bosses”) at a 20 to 40 percent increase (say, sixty fen per kilo; table 8.3). In real money that meant (and still means) a profit of five to forty yuan a day (depending on size of load), with the average hovering near twenty yuan (U.S.$2.25). For the average recycler, this was su‹cient for survival and perhaps a yearly contribution to family members in the countryside, but it was rarely enough to move up the economic ladder. In the early 1990s the BRRC ignored the migrant domination of this laborintensive sector. It could aªord to do so because it was listing record profits in industrial and metal wastes, thanks to an overheated economy. But when the overheating came to its inevitable end under Zhu Rongji’s 1994 economic reforms, profits from industrial waste plummeted, and the BRRC began losing money—8 million yuan in 1998 alone. In 1997 the BRRC had only eight thousand employees on payroll, one-third of whom were laid oª and another third of whom worked in jobs related to the BRRC’s taxi, real estate, and other ventures.28

The Remains of the Everyday

Over these same years, the “garbage army” of nearly 100,000 rural migrants had created a recycling network that was e‹cient, profitable, and completely beyond municipal or BRRC control. Wang Weiping, an engineer and expert on Beijing’s waste and recycling systems, estimated that in 2001 the network handled over 1 million tons of materials, generating more than 1 billion yuan in profits. The Beijing government spends approximately 150 yuan for every ton of solid waste it disposes of, so the migrants saved the city upwards of 150 million yuan in 2001. And this 1.15 billion yuan in direct economic benefits does not even take into consideration the resources and energy conserved by using recyclables over virgin materials in production.29 As the migrant network expanded, the BRRC concentrated on maintaining its monopoly over iron, aluminum, and copper, where the big money in recycling was to be made. Licenses in the metals trade were available only to industry insiders with Beijing household registration (hukou); migrants were excluded. But many of the first migrants in the 1980s were fully aware that the primary opportunity for significant economic mobility lay in scrap metals, and most of those who managed to strike it rich “turning garbage into gold” might be described as alchemists who got their gold by processing less precious metals. Who were these migrant entrepreneurs, and how did they rise to prominence in the new community of recyclers?

Disposable People As postreform urban growth in the 1980s generated sweeping demands for cheap labor, companies recruited peasants for exploitative jobs that urban residents would never have tolerated. In the booming construction sector, work crews of predominantly male peasants were trucked to work sites where they labored bitterly without safety equipment or insurance. One of Beijing’s most successful pioneers in the recycling trade, a Mr. L, recalled first coming to Beijing from Henan’s Gushi county in 1985 to work at one such site, at the relatively high wage of 160 yuan (U.S.$20) a month. One day he saw a man pulling a handcart full of junk through the street and, striking up a conversation, discovered that the man was a trash picker who pocketed around fifty yuan per day gleaning metals from construction sites. The relentless urban construction (accompanied by relentless land speculation) generated

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heaps of shattered bricks and concrete dust, beneath which lay veins and nuggets of recyclable treasure—steel rebar, aluminum, and copper. Mr. L realized that culling scrap at work sites would be far more lucrative than laboring at them. The next day he arranged for his family to send him a telegram at work notifying him of the unfortunate death of his grandfather (who had actually died years earlier) and asking him to return to Henan immediately. Mr. L took his two months of emergency pay, bought a three-wheel bike-cart for two hundred yuan, and began collecting scrap. Being part of the first wave, he found that prime turf was there for the taking. He scoured the streets of Wang Fujing, the most opulent shopping and tourist district of the city, bagging from fifty to one hundred yuan in scrap and recyclables every day. Although construction-site scavenging was technically illegal, such scrap presumably being the property of the Bureau of Construction, little attention was paid to it, and Mr. L could always bribe someone on the crew to get access if necessary. After two years of dragging a cart, he had saved enough money (thirty thousand yuan) to become a “little boss” and open his own stall at a transfer market in Wopuqiao, north Beijing. He would never “drag a cart” again. Mr. L is an exemplar of success in the recycling trade, and a brief charting of his career illustrates the rungs of the Beijing recycling community’s economic hierarchy, which Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sociologists Tang Can and Feng Xiaoshuang analyzed through more than a year of fieldwork.30 Migrants who engage in the recycling trades are generally peasant farmers with few marketable skills who come from cash-poor counties of Henan, Sichuan, Anhui, and Hebei Provinces. Sichuan migrants dominate the dirtiest and often lowest-paying jobs of trash picking—literally going through garbage bins and raking through landfills. They have dominion over most garbage transfer points and landfills throughout the city. Recycling—the buying of recyclables from shops and residents for resale at transfer markets— is primarily the purview of approximately fifty thousand migrants from Henan (though of course migrants from other provinces are also involved). Among recyclers, the most common, least lucrative, and most strenuous job is that of collector. This group is divided into roving collectors (dengchezhe), who daily travel the city along regular or irregular routes, at times calling out to residents to bring out their scrap, and the slightly more profitable “building watchers” (kanlouzhe) who are regularly posted by an o‹ce building,

The Remains of the Everyday

shopping area, or apartment complex and have arranged informal contracts with the apartment or building managers. At day’s end, trash pickers and collectors go to transfer markets on the outskirts of Beijing to sell their gleanings to stall owners who specialize in specific materials. Likely upwards of twenty thousand migrants work at the dozens of transfer markets. The stall owners then sell their materials in bulk to truckers for transport to factories throughout Hebei Province. Stall owners are known in the trade as “little bosses” (xiaolaoban); there are probably a few thousand of them currently in Beijing, each of whom hires several assistants for a small monthly wage and housing, usually in the transfer market itself. At the top of the hierarchy is a handful of “big bosses” (dalaoban), who essentially run the transfer market. They make their profits by renting space to little bosses at 1,200–7,500 yuan per month, depending on the stall’s specialty.31 Mr. L parlayed his profits to open several stalls and eventually became a big boss. By 1998 he was running his own transfer market of more than thirty stalls. But Mr. L freely admitted that he would never have been able to accrue the capital necessary to become a big boss if he had restricted his trade to paper, plastic, and glass. The key to his success was finding a way into the lucrative, and illegal, metals trade. The BRRC carefully guarded the trade in metals and denied permits to migrants. Collectors who specialized in metals had to resort to bribing o‹cials for permits, and work-site managers for access to materials. In order to sell directly to factories, Mr. L also needed an industry insider with Beijing residency, a tiezhao in recycler lingo (literally, “iron license”), to front for him. Though illegal, such arrangements were profitable and e‹cient, both for migrant entrepreneurs and for the enterprises with which they did business. Indeed, without them it is likely that uncounted tons of metal scrap, left to the BRRC’s crumbling system, would never have been recycled. So profitable was Mr. L’s trade that when he was fined 300,000 yuan for buying stolen iron, he was able to pay the fine quickly in cash.32 The authorities constantly complain that the migrant recycling system is pervaded by this kind of corruption and theft. But a cursory analysis of the system reveals that a host of discriminatory regulations forced it to function illegally from the outset. By 1990 the migrant recycling system was established, e‹cient, successful, and an integral part of Beijing’s waste manage-

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ment; it was also essentially illegal in every respect. Migrant collectors and trash pickers were in violation of the housing registration laws and had no legal status in Beijing. Technically speaking, they should not have been permitted to live there, no less ply a trade. Recognizing, however, that migrants were far too numerous and useful to Beijing’s economy to be eliminated, administrators invented loopholes allowing them to purchase temporary residency and work permits. But such permits gave limited protection and were often ignored by police and other authorities. Until recently, migrants were regularly uprooted and deported without warning, or fined and jailed whether they had purchased the requisite permits or not. They still face a maze of regulations at every turn: three-wheeled carts require permits; metals collection requires a special license; migrants’ children must pay higher fees to attend schools, and when migrant communities open their own private schools they are often shut down. Most recently, a special health certificate has also been required of them. Since the late 1990s the housing registration system has been reformed, and it has become considerably easier to purchase temporary residency—but a series of new permits is now required. The average single migrant now needs four types of identification to work in Beijing legally: a national identity card (no fee); a temporary residence permit (issued by the Public Securities Bureau at about two hundred yuan per year); a work permit (issued by districts through neighborhood committees, also around two hundred yuan yearly); and a health card issued by an assigned hospital.33 As a migrant moves up the entrepreneurial ladder, the obstacles become more complex. Cell phones for migrants are more expensive than for Beijing residents, and trucks and cars are licensed only to urban residents, so migrant businessmen who require them must find Beijing residents to front for them. Land cannot be leased to migrants, so opening a transfer market involves complex machinations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the greatest profits to be made in bypassing the regulations were reaped by state entities themselves; migrant entrepreneurs would have been incapable of establishing their networks if stateowned enterprises (such as Beijing’s Number One Steel Factory) had not bought their materials. Many Beijing neighborhood administrations profit by renting land for migrant housing and recycling markets. But the discrimina-

The Remains of the Everyday

tory structure of the regulatory regime means that migrants are much more vulnerable to crackdowns on gray markets and urban police sweeps than Beijing residents or administrators. Economic reforms impelled the emergence of the new recycling system, and household registration regulations ordained that this system would be irregular and corrupt. Migrants live with the consequences. While migrant “bosses” at the top of the recycling ladder must finagle their way through a bureaucratic swamp, they are not nearly as vulnerable as the masses of less successful migrants whom they exploit. The average carter is far more vulnerable to daily harassment by the authorities—and to the predatory activities of gangs—as he roves the streets, while the truck loaders and other hires of little and big bosses are highly dependent upon and vulnerable to bullying and exploitation by their paternalistic bosses. Migrants have little choice but to live in jerry-built suburban slums near the recycling markets on which they depend, under the threat that their neighborhoods can be raided at any moment, or bulldozed with little warning and no compensation. On the streets, vigilance is required, but run-ins with the police are unpredictable. In such an environment, the emergence of gangs, serving both predatory and protective functions, is inevitable, and the line diªerentiating gang leaders from community leaders can become blurred. Many contract situations demand some form of community leadership. For instance, the gargantuan Jinguang Hotel and shopping center charges 8,000 to 10,000 yuan per day for access to its trash, and the more moderate-sized Kunlun Hotel sells its refuse for 2,000 yuan a day.34 Such large contracts are clearly beyond the reach of individual collectors, and some form of quasi-corporate structure is necessary to arrange them. Gangs also commonly exert their influence at transfer markets. For example, at a transfer market spilling over with sixty-odd stalls in Haidian District, the local gang extorted fifty yuan on every loaded truck leaving the area. Little bosses who tried to get out of paying this “fee” could rely on the local Public Security Bureau not to interfere when they were beaten up.35 But the same gang was the first to learn of the city’s plan to build the Fifth Ring Road right through the middle of the market, and it hunted down a new market where everyone could relocate—applying strong-arm tactics, of course, to prevent splitters.36 Most collectors and little bosses I interviewed complained

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more about Public Security Bureau harassment, complicity, and extortion than about the gangs. Many told stories of police ripping up their residence or work permits, demanding bribes, or detaining, deporting, or beating them. The urban administrative perception of migrants as being of “low quality” (suzhi di), disorderly, criminal, and uncultured is propounded through both o‹cial and uno‹cial articulations and is a crucial discursive component of discriminatory regulatory and political mechanisms. BRRC and government proposals regarding the migrant recycling network consistently deploy this “suzhi” discourse: In 1992, according to Bureau of Commerce statistics, 14,000 migrant recyclers had permits, while 18,000 were working without permits. . . . [O]n the one hand [they] really did patch up the problem as our recycling network was shriveling. . . . But on the other hand, these people’s suzhi is relatively low (80 percent are peasants), they are motivated by personal profit, and their unlawful and undisciplined [behavior] seriously disrupts the safety and economic order of our capital’s society. They urgently need to be guided from the root, put in order, and brought into line with organized management for the benefit of society.37

Other documents describe migrant recyclers as “persistently breaking laws and violating regulations. Tax evasion, bribery, theft, and destruction of public property . . . of every kind are plentiful.”38 Like an infestation, migrant recyclers make “even the Public Security and Commerce Departments feel helpless, for although they undertake cleanups three to four times every year, in the end, they do not decrease, but rather increase [in number].”39 One Haidian District proposal for recycling reform described “the tens of thousands of unlicensed, slovenly dressed collectors pushing their carts through the alleys” as “a type of population pollution [renkou wuran].”40 Perhaps the most ironic twist in this discursive construction is the claim that the recycling profession, since coming under the control of migrants, “has become synonymous with polluting profession.”41 Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the government’s pro-environment preachings, but rather than harnessing this environmentalist rhetoric to boost the social

The Remains of the Everyday

profile of migrant gleaners, the government has amplified accusations that they are anti-environment. In the late 1990s the urgency of China’s environmental problems began forcing itself onto policy makers’ agendas. The country faces several potential catastrophes, including an unrelenting drought, desertification, deforestation, extensive water and air pollution, and a severe shortage of arable land, all of which are exacerbated by overpopulation and hyperactive economic development. Confronting these di‹culties, the state has grown more interested in environmental issues, at least when measured by volume of rhetoric. China was a dedicated torchbearer of the Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development;42 “sustainable development” has risen to the status of an administrative buzzword and has even been inserted into the Constitution; and funds dedicated to environmental protection have risen steadily, reaching 1.5 percent of gross national product in 2000. Moreover, several environmental nongovernmental organizations (Global Village of Beijing, Friends of Nature) have been permitted to flourish, their energies dedicated to raising the media profile of environmental issues. In sum, the state increasingly features environmentalism as part of its reforms, and environmental awareness is becoming an ingredient in its prescription for responsible, “civilized” (wenming) national citizenship. The 2008 Olympics is, at present, the biggest coordinated environmental spectacle the state has yet attempted, with Beijing’s environment receiving treatment rivaling that of a fatally shot dignitary in an emergency intensive care unit. Over $13 billion will have been spent between 2001 and the day of opening ceremonies, on projects such as converting buses and taxis to natural gas and extending the subway system to reduce auto emissions; shutting down and upgrading polluting industries to improve air quality; building sewage treatment plants and cleansing Beijing’s water supply; and bringing the city’s landfills and public toilets up to international standards.43 Beijing o‹cials and public figures are disturbed that migrant recyclers are apparently not riding this green wave. Recyclables collectors are constantly criticized for being “driven purely by their desire for profit” rather than by altruistic motives to conserve resources and promote sustainable development (though as fig. 8.2 shows, some of the migrants disagree).44 Migrants are accused of always fudging the scales (quejin duanliang) when they weigh

287

8.2 The managers of a small migrant-run market responded to rhetoric attacking them as anti-environmental by posting this sign (partly obstructed by the truck) outside their market. It reads, “We are not in it for the money; we are in it to protect the nation’s environment.”

people’s scrap in order to cheat their customers, proving their lack of citizenly duty to others and the environment. To remedy this lack of environmental consciousness, Beijing’s Chaoyang District now requires that all migrants working at the recently opened state-run market receive “uniform training.” The courses include “environmental protection consciousness education, education on the duty of paying commercial fees and taxes and obeying the capital’s public security laws, education in how to behave as a qualified citizen of the capital, education on, professional morals, and education in the usefulness of and environmental conservation brought about through recycling resources.”45

The Remains of the Everyday

Monopolizing Markets The state-run markets in Chaoyang that impose these training courses were established in 1998 and were the first of their kind. The idea of replacing migrant-run transfer markets with state-managed markets was not the district’s initial strategy; its policy at first was simply to try to eliminate the markets root and branch. The BRRC characterized migrant markets as little more than centers for tra‹cking in stolen goods: [E]specially in suburban districts (Chaoyang, Fengtai, Haidian) [migrants] cluster together to form “junk piles.” The environs of these centers of trade are dirty, chaotic, and deficient, completely lacking in urban management. Migrant populations mingle here, giving rise to grave and despicable situations. The district authorities ceaselessly chase them away, and they ceaselessly reemerge. There are none who do not engage in casual theft (shunshou qianyang), deal in stolen goods (shou dao jiehe), conspire with insiders to rob factories, [etc.].46

In 1997, Chaoyang District banned more than one hundred recyclables transfer markets, with the result that even more, smaller-scale stalls proliferated in unobtrusive courtyards throughout the district.47 The report of the Chaoyang District Urban Environment and Renewal Association O‹ce on this failure conceded that simply abolishing the markets was impossible and admitted, perhaps for the first time, that these markets actually performed a necessary and profitable service that the BRRC was unable to provide.48 The report suggested a revised strategy: instead of simply eliminating migrantowned markets, why not, at the same time as banning them, establish stateowned markets in their stead? Chaoyang’s timing could not have been better. While the BRRC was hemorrhaging red ink, the Chinese government, and Beijing branches in particular, was shifting its attention to environmental initiatives, especially ones that could help spruce up Beijing for the 2000 Olympic bid. The Chaoyang program would cost 25 million yuan, a major financial commitment that the state could help underwrite while encouraging substantial shareholder investments.49 More importantly, the program would require the concerted eªort of Beijing’s public security, commerce,

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urban planning, supply cooperative, and finance bureaus, together with the cooperation of several municipal committees. The ideological consensus spurred by the new nationalist environmentalism centered on the Olympics was a key catalyst for a plan that would depend on such strenuous administrative collaboration. Reorganized under the name “Rejuvenation Waste Materials Recycling Company” (Zhongxing feijiu wuzi huishou gongsi), the Chaoyang BRRC returned to the business of residential waste recycling in 1998, taking on the mantle of “big boss” for itself. With its 25 million yuan the company constructed six new transfer markets, all located well outside the Fourth Ring Road. The 25 million went to pay for land-rents to neighborhood administrations and the construction costs of paving the market grounds and constructing uniform market stalls, housing areas for migrant workers, and o‹ces for the market management. Together the six markets encompass some 250 individual stalls that are rented to migrant little bosses. According to Ms. T, a manager of the company’s “model” market, the Rejuvenation Company paid oª its 25 million yuan investment in less than two years, entirely by collecting stall and housing rents.50 From the perspective of bikecart collectors and other gleaners, the company’s markets are somewhat less conveniently located than the former migrant-run sites (many of which had been located between the Third and Fourth Ring Roads), and Rejuvenation Company stall rents are slightly higher. So why are they thriving? Because with the ban on migrant markets being enforced by every bureau in the district government, migrant big bosses are finding it impossible to compete. Moreover, the state markets facilitate little bosses’ and their employees’ applications for housing, work, and health permits, using their bureaucratic connections to competitive advantage. Chaoyang’s paved and planned markets are unquestionably tidier and more organized than most migrant-run ones. Migrant-run markets and the gleaner communities that cluster around them are almost invariably squalid and depressing. Market grounds are unpaved, pitted, and trash strewn, spotted with ramshackle sheds, tottering fences, and fetid piles of feipin. These filthy conditions have little to do with innate migrant habits and much to do with economic rationality and administrative discrimination. Always on the run from the authorities, a big boss cannot aªord to invest millions of yuan in con-

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structing paved, graded markets with proper drainage, uniform stall spaces, and sturdy sheds with electricity and plumbing. Describing his ten years as a big boss, Mr. L talked of being continually forced to move his market. In August 2000 he was forced to close his longest-running one, a typically muddy mound holding more than twenty stalls; it had been operating for only eighteen months. Haidian District— which in tandem with Beijing’s other central urban districts began implementing the state-run market idea within months of Chaoyang’s trumpeted success—began heaping so many new taxes and regulations on Mr. L’s business that, despite his legally viable contracts, he could no longer aªord to stay open. Recognizing that the administrative climate made it impossible to open a market in Beijing, Mr. L, always a risk taker, moved with twenty-six little bosses and their workers more than ten miles west, to the suburb of Pingguoyuan. His new facility required an investment of 6 million yuan, and he pays 50,000 yuan a year for his business permit and 200,000 yearly in rent. Still, he considers this a bargain because, for the first time in his career, he has managed to negotiate a twenty-year contract for land-use rights. His Pingguoyuan market is systematically laid out and fully paved; stalls are of uniform size, and the little bosses’ stalls all have electricity, running water, and fire prevention equipment. Evidently the squalor of Mr. L’s previous markets was less a reflection of his rural mentality or ignorance of sanitation than it was a result of urban policies and economic necessity. Indeed, Mr. L’s Pingguoyuan market is far tidier than some BRRC facilities. For instance, the Haidian District BRRC, lacking up-front capital for market construction and expansion, simply annexed a migrant market of sixteen stalls in the summer of 2001 without in any way improving its dismal condition. By 2004 the city had developed ten more large recycling markets between the Fourth and Fifth Ring Roads, each consisting of sixty recycling stalls. A visit to one Haidian site in the summer of 2004 revealed a tidy, spacious, wellorganized market with partially roofed storage areas and parking facilities for trucks. Overall, the BRRC’s move to solve its budget crisis by collecting market land-rents has succeeded in creating cleaner, more organized markets. Bike-cart collectors and little bosses have few complaints. Education sessions are an irritating but common administrative tool to which most have become inured;

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regulations that market workers must all wear company-issued uniforms are ignored without consequence, primarily because the uniforms have not been issued; and the large scale of the BRRC markets might even be encouraging uniformity in prices.51 The only big losers in the migrant community have been the big bosses. But the BRRC’s appropriating the role of big boss has done little to solve the perceived problem of more than 100,000 unmanaged gleaners roaming Beijing’s streets, alleys, and landfills. “Our next goal,” announced the Chaoyang Rejuvenation Company early in 2000, “is to regulate and manage the more than 20,000 roaming collectors [in Chaoyang District], to arrive at having them use uniform vehicles, uniform scales, uniform work clothes, uniform service standards, and uniform collection of item-types, and thereby thoroughly eliminate the traditional ‘garbage king’ phenomenon.”52

Monopolizing Urban Space In 2001, East City District administrators were telling residents, “You will never have to worry about being cheated by petty merchant [collectors] again,” once the district’s new collection network was in place.53 According to the Beijing Municipal Commerce Committee: A unified citywide reusable waste collection network, being built by Beijing’s municipal government, will soon replace the wandering team of waste collectors. . . . The local government plans to establish 1,100 collection depots in the eight districts, servicing approximately 60 percent of the communities, by the end of 2002. These collection depots will be distinguishable by uniform logos, prices, and measurement instruments.54

In 2004, depots and “experimental neighborhoods” were still being established by various BRRC branches as well as by government-endorsed private companies. Each experiment was slightly diªerent from the others, and the results remain to be seen. Some programs aimed to completely eliminate the migrant presence. Haidian’s BRRC, for example, hoped to replace migrant collectors “primarily with laid-oª BRRC employees and excess workers from state industries, and secondarily [with] healthy and capable neighborhood residents [hired] as managers.”55 Personnel who worked on the ground at

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Haidian’s BRRC saw this goal as absurdly unrealistic and doubted that any Beijing residents would volunteer for such degrading and low-paying work.56 More feasible are experiments aimed at absorbing and drastically reducing the migrant network, a solution the engineer Wang Weiping described as “corporatizing” [gongsihua] the recycling world.57 Indeed, the Beijing Materials Recycling Professional Council (Beijingshi wuzi zaisheng hangye xiehui), a new administrative body made up of engineers and bureaucrats with decades of experience in the trade, is guiding Beijing’s municipal plan: “We believe the government should with all speed make its position on the recycling trade clear: the recycling trade should be steered to maximize professionalization, public benefit, and monopolization.”58 The municipal plan, approved by the city’s Commerce Committee, called for establishing a system of one recycling depot for every 1,000 to 1,500 households by the end of 2003 and eliminating nearly 50,000 migrants from the recycling system.59 The new forms of managerial intervention required by this system were to be tried out in “experimental neighborhoods.” According to Mr. C, manager of the Zhouji Environmental Technology Company in 2001, the success or failure of his company depended solely on whether it could enforce a leak-proof monopoly on waste goods in the experimental neighborhoods it oversaw.60 Zhouji went operational in November 2000 and contracted with the city to establish a reusable waste collection network in a section of Chaoyang District. As of the summer of 2001 the company employed more than ninety migrant collectors, all outfitted with uniforms and bike carts, and had erected a fresh-looking blue kiosk in a closed residential compound that the company served. The city had already issued Zhouji Company a bronze plaque declaring it a “civilizing” and “greening” influence on society. The economic logic of achieving a firm monopoly over the neighborhood was simple. Zhouji made its profits the same way una‹liated migrant collectors did, by seeing the minute diªerence between the buying and selling price of each kilogram of feipin (from five to forty fen per kilo; see table 8.3) multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over the year. Zhouji’s employees functioned just like uncorporatized collectors: each had his or her own turf, bought reusable wastes from residents, sold them at a higher price for bulk shipment to factories, and pocketed the diªerence. But there were crucial

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diªerences between Zhouji employees and independent migrants. Zhouji employees had standard carts, scales, and uniforms, worked regimented hours at assigned locations, and had to buy residents’ feipin at set company prices and sell their daily haul to the company buyers. The company’s profit lay in setting the prices and insisting that employees buy at below market prices and then sell to the company at slightly below market prices, so that Zhouji made a few fen from every kilo it traded on to factories at market price. Zhouji’s employees were acutely aware of where those fen were going. Mr. Z, who had worked for Zhouji since it opened, was a “building watcher” on the same turf for three years before becoming a Zhouji employee. He still worked that turf, but whereas in 2000 he returned to his home in Henan for Spring Festival with five thousand yuan for his family, in 2001 he said he would be lucky to have three thousand. I asked him why he joined the company at all: Did it give him greater legitimacy, make his work easier, or pay for his work and housing permits? No, he replied. The only reason he was a Zhouji employee was that he had no choice. Mr. Z’s turf was in a closed residential compound containing more than one hundred five-story apartment buildings, with only a few guarded gates for access. Zhouji, with the city’s support, had closed the compound to noncompany collectors. Mr. Z either joined Zhouji or lost his turf.61 When Zhouji started up in 2000, Mr. C had written a page of company regulations for employees to study during their obligatory “training session.” But creating a leak-proof monopoly proved more challenging than he had anticipated. By July the company’s “Provisional rules of rewards and punishments” had become a six-page list of thirty-six rules: I At work you must wear company uniform, arrive early and leave late, wear green vest, and display company ID badge. 1 If no badge, fine five yuan; if no uniform, fine ten yuan. 2 Employees may not work if clothes are not neat and clean, fine five-20 yuan; if you are detained by the authorities and miss work, you yourself are responsible, additional company fine of 50 yuan or higher. . . . IV

Taking or selling goods to the outside, fine 200–1000 yuan. Managers

who catch employees in the act, reward 100 yuan. Collectors who report on

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such activities, reward 200 yuan. On second infraction, fine 500–3000 yuan, and fired from company. . . . XII When collecting, hawking is not permitted. Violators will be fined five yuan the first time, 15 yuan the second time, and five yuan more each subsequent time. . . . XIX Arbitrarily setting prices, fine 50 yuan. If the incident undermines public trust in the company, employee must pay appropriate compensation. . . . XXVI It is forbidden to cooperate with freelance collectors. On discovering a noncompany collector inside the company’s service area, report it to the company immediately. If employee fails to report, employee will receive censure from management and be fined 50 yuan or more. Working together with independent collectors to sell goods, fine 500–3000 yuan.62

Mr. C admitted that most of the incidents listed in the new rules had actually transpired. The company already employed eight roving inspectors whose job was simply to enforce these rules.63 Zhouji employees complained that the rules were draconian: they had to show up for work regardless of weather or be fined; uniforms were oppressively hot in summer; the prices were unreasonably fixed; and so on. In order to compete against the informal migrant network, the state-endorsed, corporatized recycling system relies on its monopolization of space and the close surveillance of employees in order to record a profit. The Zhouji Company had been able to achieve these conditions only in closed residential and commercial compounds. In open residential and business neighborhoods, its rules had so far been unenforceable. The viability of companies such as Zhouji depends on the willingness of migrants to adhere to the companies’ enforcement of discipline that minimizes profits for the collectors, but docile obedience seems unlikely.64 In the grimy, strenuous, and degrading trade of trash picking and recycling, the one aspect that independent recyclers speak positively about is their freedom (hen ziyou)—the power to be your own boss, to make choices about where and when you work, what prices you charge, which little boss you sell to, and

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at what prices.65 Independent gleaners and collectors choose for themselves whether or not to glean on a rainy day, where they want to work, and whether they want to bike an extra kilometer to a market that oªers slightly better prices. Independent recyclers have broad discretion over their rate of selfexploitation and are highly sensitive to having this discretion limited, for such limitations directly aªect their incomes. But of perhaps greater importance, many migrant collectors experience this sort of control as a more general attack on their personal habits and autonomy. A comparison of collectors’ subjective experiences with those of the Anhui domestic workers studied by Hairong Yan in the previous chapter is highly revealing here. For both Anhui domestics and rural migrant recyclers, the state’s interests and those of globalization have converged in a discourse about civilized urbanism (wenming chengshi) and citizen “quality” (suzhi) that more or less directly results in the extraction of surplus labor from the migrant population. But whereas Anhui domestics labor in tightly contained spaces under the eyes of their employers, recyclers have built a trade network bent on evading the gaze of the authorities. Thus, while Yan finds that many Anhui domestics experience a great deal of pressure to internalize the state discourse on suzhi and strive to conform to its behavioral demands, recyclers often seem less powerfully aªected by it. They speak openly and angrily about the abuses they suªer, protest and evade regulations, and often reject or invert the suzhi discourse in the forms in which authorities present it to them (see fig. 8.2). When asked whether Beijing residents treat them rudely, most recyclers responded with a qualified yes. But, they often added, “Beijing people may look down on us, but really, I look down on them.”

RECYCLING, ECONOMIC IMAGINARIES, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF CITIZENSHIP The habits and implications of recycling in China have radically changed in the postreform era. Under socialism, urban residents saw their waste products channeled into a new industrial economy and experienced this transformation as contributing to national development. Yet they did not, and could not, consume and discard with abandon. Practicing thrift at home (the stewardship of objects) and selling the occasional household scrap to the state were linked

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behaviors; both bespoke a valuing of labor and the material goods that labor produced, and both activities connoted patriotic citizenship. The interconnections between these daily conserving practices reflected the particularities of a socialist economy that was industrial but not consumerist and a dominant ideology that stressed that value was inherent in labor and the goods labor produced and not solely in the abstraction of money. With the rise of postreform consumerism, the stewardship of objects began to be rapidly replaced by habits of disposability. Through disposability we treat material objects as literally worthless to us. Even the BRRC—the state bureau responsible for handling waste materials, whose very name supposedly signified the value of waste as a resource—treated “daily-life wastes” as though they were worthless during the 1980s and early 1990s, shutting down thousands of collection sites. But when the migrant recycling network revealed that sizable profits could be made from trash, businesses that produced large quantities of waste rose to the opportunity: hotels and shops began selling their garbage for profit. The postreform era had brought an inversion of the socialist experience of recycling: the valuation of waste as a material good had become the valuation of waste as money. Today, thrift is not the goal. Wasteful behavior is not to be avoided (hotels hardly ration their room service), and one need not try to squeeze uses out of aging objects. Indeed, the impetus today is to use things and dispose of them as quickly—but also as profitably—as possible. Disposability is about forgetting the materiality of objects after we have derived our pleasure from them. Waste goods today, unlike during the socialist period, are not valued as products of labor; they are utterly negligible as objects, valued only for their liquidation into tons of raw material, valued only for the minute diªerence between buying price and selling price—a sliver of small change, multiplied billions of times over. This, of course, is the logic of consumer-driven economic development, but a powerful countervailing voice can be heard today as well. The Chinese government is without question concerned about environmental issues and resource conservation and is seeking, at least rhetorically, to balance the short-term economic logic of high consumption with a longer-term perspective. The state and urban elites are increasingly articulating a critique of wastefulness as uncivilized and ignorant. The stewardship of objects, in the sense

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of saving and mending individual items, has all but died out,66 but it seems that a new stewardship of the environment is taking its place. Both private companies and state bureaus seem to have a growing awareness that the material world of resources has limits. They are drawing the conclusion that because resources are limited, they are valuable, and the hope is that this sort of consciousness will protect the environment from rampant destruction through overconsumption. With terms like sustainable development in the bureaucratic air, companies such as Zhouji Environmental Technology and the BRRC declare themselves “for profit and for the environment.” But there is a logical contradiction here, and perhaps even some self-deception. How can companies that profit from the trash produced by unlimited consumerism successfully promote limiting consumption without destroying their own source of profit? Stewardship of the environment without the stewardship of objects, in the long run, is nonsense. But more importantly, the way the Zhouji Company and the BRRC profit from the discriminatory regulation of migrant laborers and use their ability to monopolize urban spaces in order to gain a cut of the profits betrays much more directly what is missing from this version of environmental stewardship. The discourse of environmental stewardship as currently articulated in China purports the importance of being a good environmental citizen while discounting the need for people to be responsible citizens of society. Indeed, these moral values arise directly from the dominant imaginary of the source of economic value. In the economic logic of sustainable development as currently expressed, things derive their value from being more or less scarce. Recyclables have become valuable because they are made of raw materials that are increasingly limited. An alternative economic imaginary, which dominated during the socialist era but has now been discarded, is that value is derived from labor: value is a social product. The sense that value derives from labor was an intrinsic part of the recycling experiences of the republican and socialist eras. Today, in the age of disposability, the experience of recycling can produce a kind of environmental citizenship, but the social is missing. Recyclables represent to us just so much raw material or so much small change, but the sense that these objects embody labor, and that labor and the people who perform it are crucial to making the economy—and the environment—function, is absent.

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NOTES 1. “Guangzhou liang ‘lajilao’ wei zheng kuangquanshui ping yinfa guyi shang ren shijian,” Nanfang ribao, August 14, 2001. Italics in the original. 2. The most comprehensive survey of independent recycling laborers, conducted in 1998, estimated the work force at 84,000. The figure 120,000 is a conservative one based on estimates provided by bureaucrats in the Beijingshi wuzi huishou gongsi (Beijing Municipal Resource Recycling Company; BRRC) during interviews in 2003. 3. Many of these “fixed location” collectors pay regular monthly fees for the privilege of monopolizing a particular territory. For a wonderfully illuminating and detailed description of the various strata of employment and social status in Beijing’s migrant recycling community, see J. P. Beta, M. Bonnin, X. Feng, and C. Tang, “How Social Strata Come to Be Formed: Social Diªerentiation among the Migrant Peasants of Henan Village in Peking,” parts 1 and 2, China Perspectives, no. 23, pp. 28–41, and no. 24, pp. 44–55. 4. Wang Weiping, “Guanyu Beijingshi shenghuo laji ziyuan huishou liyong he xiangguan chanye wenti de diaoyan baogao” (Beijing Council of China’s Zhi Gong Dang, 1999), 3. 5. Philip P. Pan, “Beijing’s Olympic Dream-in-Progress: Social Issues, Facilities among Hurdles for 2008,” Washington Post, July 6, 2001. 6. “Mountain of Trash Collapses in Philippines,” Toronto Star, July 11, 2000. 7. In Mao’s China, the stringent limitation on consumer products was a result of this import-substitution logic, but consumption was further constrained by policies that grossly de-emphasized the production of consumer products, directed resources toward primary industrialization, and attacked consumption as bourgeois and even counterrevolutionary. 8. BRRC, “Guanyu zhenxing Beijingshi guoying zaisheng ziyuan hangye de jianyi,” BRRC circular (1999), 1. 9. Madeleine Yue Dong eloquently analyzed these processes of reuse in Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). She used the term recycling to highlight the fact that these activities were integrally modern and involved the movement of material goods between diªerent economic networks, or cycles, of circulation. I thoroughly concur with her thesis, but I use the term reuse here to more easily mark the diªerence between republican-era and post-1949 processes of feipin use. My assertion that reuse or recycling as an economic and cultural process is central to understanding daily life in republican Beijing is indebted to her work. 10. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 21–67.

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Joshua Goldstein 11. Personal memoir of BRRC employee, unpublished, 24. I thank Mr. Fu Hongjun of the Resource Recycling Council for making this memoir available to me. 12. Memoir, 28. One anecdote describes a waste-paper seller who often hid his dog inside the piles of paper in order to weight the scales. It is di‹cult to imagine such a trick working in broad daylight. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Dong, Republican Beijing, 139–40. 15. Ibid., 206. 16. Ibid., 246–95. 17. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 241–83. 18. Memoir, 25. 19. BRRC, “Guanyu zhengxing,” 5. 20. Wu Zhenfeng, “Zhili huanjing wuran kaifa liyong zaisheng ziyuan,” Beijing Supply Cooperative, Economics Institute, and Industrial Management Committee joint report (July 28, 1999), 2. 21. As of 2005, the housing registration system had atrophied to the point of becoming a vestigial administrative remnant. But in the 1980s and 1990s, hukou was one of the most powerful and important administrative tools in China’s political-economic kit and was hugely important in shaping the life paths and experiences of Chinese citizens. Although the system is now far less rigidly enforced, its influence is still everywhere implicated in today’s rural-urban inequalities. 22. Wang Huiming, “Jingcheng shenghuo laji de youhuan,” Beijing wanbao, January 24, 1999, 5. 23. Daniel Hoornweg, “What a Waste: Solid Waste Management in Asia,” World Bank Working Paper Series (New York: World Bank, Urban Development Sector Unit East Asia and Pacific Region, 1999), 11. 24. Shuk-wai Freda Fung, “Handling the Municipal Solid Waste in China: A Case Study of the Policies for ‘White Pollution’ in Beijing” (M.A. thesis, Lund University, 1999), 13–17. 25. Hou Yushan, “Tansuo shoudu feijiu wuzi huishou hangye fazhan de you xiao tujing,” Beijingshi feijiu jinshu huishou bangongshi (Municipal Scrap Metal Recycling O‹ce) circular, November 23, 1999. 26. Tan Can and Feng Xiaoshuang, “Feipin huishou: Yige burongyi hushi de hangye,” Zhongguo gaige, February 2000, 20–21. 27. “Laji fenlei chuli ji dai tuiguang,” Guangming Ribao, October 3, 1997; “Guoyou huishouye zai he fang,” Beijing ribao, May 11, 1999. 28. Hou, “Tansuo shoudu,” 2.

The Remains of the Everyday 29. Interview, Wang Weiping, June 8, 2001. 30. The information in this and the next two paragraphs is drawn from Tang Can and Feng Xiaoshuang, “Henancun liudong nongmin de fenhua” (unpublished manuscript, 1997), 2–5. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Interview, Mr. L, owner of transfer Haidian and Pingguoyuan markets, August 4, 2000. 33. Interview, Wang Zhangyi, bike-carter, July 20, 2000. 34. Interview, Wang Weiping, July 7, 2000. 35. Interview, Mr. C, stall owner at Shuangqinghe market, Haidian District, July 28, 2000. 36. Interview, Mr. C, after relocation to Chaoyang District, June 18, 2001. 37. Hou, “Tansuo shoudu,” 4–5. 38. Wu, “Zhili huanjing,” 4. 39. Hou, “Tansuo shoudu,” 4. 40. Ibid., 8. 41. Ding Renyuan, “Duiyu ‘jianshao ziyuan langfei he zhili huanjing wuran xu zhongzhen shichang feipin huishou’ de ji dian renshi he jianyi,” BRRC circular, May 28, 1998. 42. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the declaration, along with Agenda 21, in an attempt to lay out a comprehensive set of global environmental guidelines for sustainable development. 43. Julie Chao, “Beijing dyes grass, uproots people in bid to impress Olympic panel,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 25, 2001, 28. 44. The quotation is from Hou, “Tansuo shoudu,” 5. 45. Chaoyang District Rejuvenation Waste Materials Recycling Company (Chaoyang Rejuvenation Company), “Yi shichang xingshi jiaqiang dui feijiu wuzi huishouye de guanli,” Zhongguo ziyuan zonghe liyong xiehui tongxun 52 (February 18, 2000): 5. 46. Hou, “Tansuo shoudu,” 6. 47. Chaoyang District Urban Renewal O‹ce, “Guanyu qudi geti polanshi shiban guoying feijiu wuzi shichang de qingshi,” December 5, 1997, 1. 48. Ibid., 2. 49. Chaoyang Rejuvenation Company, “Yi shichang xingshi,” 5. In the event, the Chaoyang BRRC managed to raise its 25 million without any direct state investment. 50. Interview, Ms. T, August 9, 2000. Estimating roughly, this would put Rejuvenation Company housing rents at 150 yuan per room, and stall rents at an average of 8,000 yuan. Stall rents range widely depending on the type of feipin collected. At the Xiyuan market in Haidian, where stalls are somewhat smaller and rents lower than in

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Joshua Goldstein Chaoyang, rents by item in 2001 were as follows: cardboard, 2,400 yuan per month; newspaper, 2,700; plastic, 3,000; iron, copper, and aluminum, 7,750. 51. Interviews with migrant collectors and little bosses, summers of 2000 and 2001. 52. Chaoyang Rejuvenation Company, “Yi shichang xingshi,” 6. As of 2004 this kind of uniformity was not nearly instituted, but the number of carters on the streets in Chaoyang had drastically declined, because of the fairly strict enforcement of a tra‹c ban on three-wheeled carts in the district. 53. Jia Xiaoyan, “Beijingshi dongchenqu niannei jiang jian 65 ge luse huanbao zhan,” Beijing ribao, August 8, 2001. 54. China Daily, June 14, 2001. 55. Haidianqu wuzi huishou gongsi, “Guanyu jianli Haidianqu shequ zaisheng wuzi huisho wangluo shidian gongzuo de yijian,” December 2, 1999. 56. Interview, Xu Zhiping and Xie Longyun, assistant managers, Haidian BRRC, July 29, 2000. 57. Interview, Wang Weiping, June 8, 2001. 58. Ding, “Duiyu ‘jianshao,’” 2. 59. “Guanyu zujin he guifan Beijingshi shequ zaisheng ziyuan huishou tixi jianshe de shishi fang an,” Beijing Commerce Committee, Document 30, 2001. The goal of establishing depots had not been met as of the summer of 2004, but work was still in progress. 60. Interview, Mr. C, August 5, 2001. 61. Interview, Mr. Z, August 5, 2001. 62. Zhouji Company, “Jiangzheng zhexing guiding,” July 2001, 1–6. 63. Interview, Mr. C, August 5, 2001. 64. A field visit in the summer of 2004 revealed that the Zhouji Company was all but defunct. It apparently could not stop employees from trading outside its system. 65. Interviews with carters, summers of 2000 and 2001. 66. Nevertheless, a look at the life habits of Beijing’s older residents shows how deeply ingrained the stewardship of objects is for their generation.

9 From Provision to Exchange Legalizing the Market in China’s Urban Water Supply

alana boland The establishment of the “rule of law” has been a policy priority in China since the 1980s. In the transition from a planned to a market economy, the Chinese government has placed increasing emphasis on legal institutions in the regulation of economic and social life. This emphasis on rule of law is very much present in water resource management, where achievements are measured by the count of laws and regulations, and failures are cited as evidence of an inadequate legal framework. For urban water supplies, eªorts to “manage water in accordance with law” (yi fa zhi shui) have aªected production, distribution, and consumption. These changes in China’s urban water systems are no small matter. Water is perhaps the most crucial, threatened, and potentially scarce resource in China today, and the changing organization of its supply has profound eªects that resound in the everyday habits of city residents. Since economic reforms began, water supply in China’s cities has undergone a process of “domestication” as consumption by domestic users and commercial establishments—households, schools, and hospitals, for example—has increased rapidly and disproportionately. Nationally, the proportion of water flowing through municipal networks serving domestic needs increased from 26 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2002. Per capita consumption nearly doubled over the first two decades of economic reforms, increasing from approximately 120 liters per day in 1978 to 220 per day in 2000.1 The water flowing out of city taps has come from both surface and groundwater sources, with tremendous variation in the quantity and quality of available sources between regions. Constrained by local environmental conditions and facing growing demands for improved quality and increased

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quantity to meet domestic needs, city authorities have introduced radical changes in the organization of supply. While the saga of piped water as described by Hanchao Lu in chapter 1 was shaped in large part by technical innovations, the transformation of water supply in the reform era has been guided more by institutional innovations. Reflecting an ascendant legalism, some of the most fundamental innovations of the last decades have been ones that operated through law. In examining these innovations, I explore the ways in which legal institutions have responded to and in turn shaped water management reforms in China’s transition to a market economy. My purpose is not to provide an exegesis of the many laws related to water management in China. I am more interested in examining how, since the 1980s, the idea of a law-governed state, as a political symbol, has shaped changes in the social and economic character of water and its distribution. My analysis of law and water management draws on critical legal studies by focusing on the connections between ideology and law. As some legal scholars have stressed, specific ideological formations associated with law (e.g., public vs. private) are not unrelated to the more ubiquitous rule-of-law project.2 This project is more than just a state-centered or top-down engineered program. To understand how the rule of law operates, it is important to consider the normative image of law in society and how it can not only come to embody people’s material interests but also become an expression of social values. A specific focus on law as ideology opens up questions that help locate legal ideological formations in broader social and economic contexts. Approaching law as ideology is particularly important for understanding law’s eªects on those who are experiencing the so-called socialist transition.3 This is no less the case in China, where there has been much discussion about appropriate roles for the state, market, and rule of law in the country’s ongoing shift to a more market-based economy.4 As China’s policy makers forge ahead on some of the more intractable problems of transition, debates over the rule of law have a sense of political urgency that is arguably absent in advanced capitalist societies. These debates tend to be dominated by a condemnation of the planned economy and a celebration of the market.5 Under the banner of “legal modernization,” the rule of law has become an ideology itself that aªects everyday life as much as it does elite politics. And as most

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arenas of economic and social life are aªected by the shift to increasingly legalized modes of interaction, we see in the construction of new legal subjects and relational identities the symbol of law being used to signify and promote a departure from the socialist past. In answering the question “What is modern about law?” in post-Mao China, it is vital to examine this broader political and historical context of transition. If legalism is an explicitly political project, what do the “successes” of legal modernization represent? And what sorts of insights might the “failures” oªer into the tensions between law and other forms of social relations? Some scholars have already focused on the transformative potential and limitations of the post-Mao legal modernization project in China’s more rural contexts.6 In cities, where market-based institutions increasingly mediate social relations, the legal norms, discourses, and practices associated with marketization are establishing new social patterns and displacing old ones. As an analysis of water supply illustrates, the successes and failures of law in the urban setting reflect the contradictions inherent in the economic redefinition of people and things under reforms. I begin with a general discussion of the water laws and regulations that have been developed since the 1980s and then move to a more focused discussion of how legalism has influenced urban water’s economic and social character, including governing frameworks, the social relations of nature, and modes of public goods provisioning in cities. In these three contexts, what does it mean that water is being regulated through law? And with the rule of law understood largely in functional terms as serving to smooth the path of transition, how does the law address the environmental and social concerns central to reforms in urban water supply?

LEGAL FOUNDATIONS FOR WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT For urban water resources, a number of state bureaucracies exercise authority over some aspect of policymaking. This has led to the proliferation of many, sometimes overlapping laws and regulations. The accompanying list (see page 306) includes the fundamental national legal sources that are directly related to urban water supply. This is a greatly simplified picture, but it captures the influence of diªerent branches of government. A more complete pic-

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KEY NATIONAL REGULATIONS RELATED TO URBAN WATER SUPPLY (2002) Laws (falu) Water Pollution Prevention Law of the PRC (Zhonghua Renmin Gonghuguo shui wuran fangzhi fa), 1984, revised 1996 (NPC Standing Committee) Water Law of the PRC (Zhonghua Renmin Gonghuguo shui fa), 1988, revised 2002 (NPC Standing Committee)

State Council Administrative Regulations (xingzheng fagui) Urban Water Use Conservation Management Regulations (Chengshi jieyue yongshui guanli guiding), 1989 (State Council; drafted by Ministry of Construction) Measures for the Implementation of Water Withdrawal Permit System (Qu shui xuke zhidu shishe banfa), 1993 (State Council; drafted by Ministry of Water Resources) Urban Water Supply Regulations (Chengshi gongshui tiaoli), 1994 (State Council; drafted by Ministry of Construction)

State Council Ministerial Regulations (bumen guizhang) Measures for the Management of Water Tanks for Urban Indoor Flush Toilets (Chengshi fang bianqi shuixiang yingyong guanli banfa), 1992 (Ministry of Construction) Management Regulations for the Assets of Urban Water Supply Enterprise (Chengshi gongshui qiye zizhi guanli guiding), 1993 (Ministry of Construction) Management Regulations for the Development, Utilitization, and Protection of Urban Groundwater (Chengshi dixiashui kaifa liyong baohu guanli guiding), 1993 (Ministry of Construction) Measures for the Management of Supervision over Domestic Drinking Water Sanitation (Shenghuo yinyongshui weisheng jiandu guanli banfa), 1997 (Ministry of Construction and Ministry of Health) Measures for the Management of Urban Water Supply Price (Chengshi gongshui jiage guanli banfa), 1998 (Ministry of Construction and State Planning and Development) Urban Water Supply Water Quality Management Regulations (Chengshi gongshui shuizhi guanli guiding), 1999 (Ministry of Construction)

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ture would include laws and regulations originating at local levels as well as important national laws that have indirect but important eªects on water supply policies (e.g., the Contract Law [1999] and the Price Law [1998]). In his review of water legislation, Song Lanhe noted that for one city, Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province, he identified 140 diªerent laws and regulations related at some level to urban water supply.7 As other observers have noted, implementation of the many water laws and regulations has been hindered by inadequately defined jurisdictional boundaries for central as well as local ministries and bureaus.8 This is a common problem in many policy arenas, but because of the complex relationships linking society and water resources, establishing clear lines of authority for state agencies has been especially di‹cult.9 Moreover, many of China’s rules and regulations, particularly the higherlevel national laws ( falu and fagui), tend to be worded somewhat vaguely to allow for flexibility in the formulation of local-level regulations. In this way, regulations can be more sensitive to local diªerences while still being consistent with national legal enactments.10 But this approach to accommodating regional diªerences within a unitary state structure tends to exacerbate the problems associated with fragmented authority in China’s political organization.11 For urban water resources, groundwater management is one area that has been plagued by problems caused by these broken lines of authority. In one city, the water resources bureau might control groundwater, whereas in a neighboring city, groundwater falls under the authority of the city construction bureau. These diªerent arrangements can lead to local disputes over groundwater management that are di‹cult to resolve, even when the parties turn to higher levels of government. One final aspect of the legal framework worth noting is the uncertain boundary between policy and law. Because judicial interpretation has tended to play only a limited role in Chinese law, authority for interpreting a vague or indeterminate regulation has typically returned to the issuing body.12 Administrative interpretations issued by the State Council, national ministries, and commissions are intended to clarify a statute or to specify conditions of implementation. Documents such as ministerial “announcements,” “responses,” and “letters” have become important bases of legal interpretation, making the fuzzy boundary between policy and law di‹cult to clarify. For legal purists, this arrangement makes it hard to imagine how the ideal of “impartiality” might be

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achieved. Because China’s legal modernization is part of a larger political project to cleanse politics, this failure to achieve a form of legal closure has troubled many.13 In the first years of legal reforms, the relationship between “policy” and “law” favored the latter as an important means of injecting greater stability against the swings in Chinese politics.14 But even if the socalled party politics of an earlier era may now be less evident, law has yet to prevail over bureaucratic politics. A common, somewhat pragmatic view expressed by one water policy analyst is that no distinct line exists between national policy and law, because national policies are the basis from which the law is made.15 Nonetheless, though the distinction between policy and law is often blurred, it would be wrong to conclude that law does not matter. The shift to a lawbased approach, whether judged successful or not, changes the context in which social actors inside and outside of government authorize their actions. Because reforms are explicitly linked to a broader program of legal modernization, the redefinition of water and water supply to match the economic logic of the market requires more than just a rhetorical naming of a new reality. Changes need to be authorized by laws, and this can create challenges during periods of transition, in part because earlier regulatory institutions cannot support the new categories and relationships. In the remainder of the chapter, I address this transformative process. Namely, I discuss how the expansion and deepening of legal reforms has changed the nature and extent of the regulatory links between water reforms and economic policy and, at a more pedestrian level, how this process has aªected some of the social roles associated with urban water supply provision.

LEGAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF OWNERSHIP AND VALUE In a speech delivered at a 1996 national conference on urban water supply pricing, Lin Jianing, an o‹cial with the Chinese Ministry of Construction (MOC), described China’s socialist experiment in water supply: “In the period of the planned economy, tap water was not treated as a commodity. Water supply was carried out as a welfare service based on the belief that the lower the price, the better it reflected socialism’s superiority.”16 Lin went on in his speech to describe how the economic logic of urban water supply was under-

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going a fundamental transformation, away from a welfare model of provision and toward a market model of exchange. If “welfare” is all about universal entitlement, then the term aptly describes the general model adopted during the first decade of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), when improving access to tap water for household use was a priority for urban infrastructure. Although the basic technologies had been set up in many cities before 1949, only small percentages of residents normally had access to tap water. The period of socialist reconstruction changed this. Between 1949 and 1952, the serviced population nationwide grew threefold, from 6 million to 18 million, and by 1957 the figure was 34 million.17 Service levels increased through the addition of new public water stands, the expansion of pipe networks, and, in later years, the construction of independent systems that served residential areas within work units. In addition, water prices decreased over time in most cities. Per capita domestic water consumption in cities, however, did not increase much in the 1950s and 1960s beyond levels considered su‹cient to meet basic daily needs (approximately fifty to sixty liters per day).18 Consumption was kept in check not through pricing mechanisms but through “supply management” that saw infrastructure spending limited to levels necessary to secure basic needs. During this time, when subsidies were important sources of funding for municipal water companies, water pricing was largely unrelated to volume consumed and bore little relationship to a water supply company’s bottom line. This earlier approach to water provision contrasts starkly with the current model, in which water is increasingly viewed as a commodity, and its supply, as a commercial service. A detailed description of these changes appeared in September 1998 when the MOC and the State Development and Planning Commission issued regulations that for the first time provided a national framework for the pricing of urban water. This framework identified three priorities: cost recovery and reasonable profits to water supply companies (WSCs), water conservation, and the equitable distribution of social burdens. The promulgation of these regulations was at once the culmination of many years of research and consultation and the beginning of a new implementation process. The regulations were to serve as guidelines for WSCs and municipal governments in setting new water prices that would allow WSCs to become

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self-sustaining, profitable, and competitive in a market economy in which subsidies were becoming less relevant.19 Underlying this new pricing program were some dramatic changes in thinking about how water and its supply related to the economy. As water supply has become more integrated into market-based institutions, laws have been used to define the property rights that govern the objects of the market’s transactions.20 What “rights” are there in relation to water resources, and how have legal definitions of these rights and the value of water been changing?

WATER RIGHTS: WHO OWNS WHAT? According to Article 9 of the PRC Constitution, “all mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grasslands, unreclaimed land, beaches, and other natural resources are owned by the state, that is, by the whole people.” Judging from this statement, there would seem to be little question about the ownership of water resources in China. However, as with other resources such as land, forests, and grasslands, ownership of water has been an issue of tremendous uncertainty since reforms began. In the 1980s, legislators faced the challenge of assigning rights over resources to nonstate actors in a way that would encourage e‹cient use, even with uncertain and changing property relations. During these first years of reforms, they directed particular attention to water resource management in rural areas. Deviations from a pure notion of state ownership appeared in the 1988 Water Law, in which Article 3 states that “water within water ponds and reservoirs owned by agricultural economic collectives is the property of the collectives.” With this, rural economic collectives that had constructed water projects became the de jure owners of the water held within structures they had built. What might seem to be a contradiction in ownership principles between the Constitution (full state ownership) and the Water Law (state and collective ownership) aroused much debate in the drafting of the 1988 Water Law.21 The original draft took a position wholly consistent with the principle of state ownership, but upon reviewing the law, the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee pressed to have water ownership correspond more closely with the new property relations associated with agricultural land and water conservancy projects.22 Advocates of the collective ownership category argued

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that water held within built structures was no longer “natural” water, because it had been altered by human labor and therefore was no longer one of the items under “state ownership” as described in Article 9 of the Constitution. This distinction between natural and “man-made” water helped to create a legal basis for the principle that rural collectives could claim ownership of water flowing within rural irrigation and power generation projects. Interestingly, the NPC Standing Committee chose not to adopt a “bundleof-rights” approach in regard to water. The advantage of a bundle-of-rights approach is that it enables ownership of property to be broken down into constituent “powers and functions.” Indeed, China’s 1987 General Principles of Civil Law deployed this logic in creating four categories (possession, use, right to benefit, and disposition) as a strategy to enable use rights to devolve to lower levels of social organization (groups of households, households, or individuals) without challenging the state’s principle of public ownership.23 Variants of the bundle-of-rights approach were applied to both land resources and bodies of water (e.g., for nonconsumptive use of water in aquaculture).24 Yet despite such changes for other resources, the notion of “use rights” did not find its way into the 1988 Water Law, a factor that has led to a lack of legal clarity in negotiations surrounding water use agreements. Since the late 1990s, local-level o‹cials have been testing the legal limits of water ownership. A case that illustrates some of the legal headaches created by local “experiments” is that of the Yiwu-Dongyang water transfer. It involved the water supply for two cities, Yiwu and Dongyang, in Zhejiang Province. After many rounds of negotiations, the leaders of the two cities signed an agreement in November 2000 for the annual transfer of 49.99 million cubic meters of fresh water from Dongyang to Yiwu. The water to be transferred included some 30 million cubic meters that flowed out “unused” from Dongyang’s Hengjing Reservoir.25 Yiwu paid a one-time amount of 200 million yuan for use rights in perpetuity, plus an initial investment of 500 million to cover new construction costs (one yuan equals approximately U.S.$0.12).26 Yiwu also agreed to pay an ongoing management fee of 0.10 yuan per cubic meter of water. It is important to note that the water transfer was for consumptive use, as opposed to nonconsumptive uses such as power generation and transportation. News stories about the arrangement noted that it was the first trans-county

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water transfer not initiated by higher-level administrative units. Some celebrated it as evidence of the business acumen of the people of Yiwu; others feared it marked a return to an era of “waterlords,” with water distribution determined by economic power. The case not only brought “water (use) rights” (yongshuiquan) into the popular legal lexicon but also extended the debate over water ownership to include questions not considered in the 1980s, such as the legal standing of water rights trading under a system of state ownership. This transfer (or trade) of water rights between cities raised for many observers two fundamental questions: Exactly who was trading what? And was it legal? In the exchange of things “owned” by the state, the question of who is the legal agent that can claim rights to economic benefits has vexed policy design and implementation in many sectors of China’s economy since the reforms began.27 The general notion of state ownership oªers little protection from ministries’ or localities’ taking on the title of “state” to justify an ownership claim and thus sovereignty over water resources. In the Yiwu-Dongyang case, the two cities assumed sovereignty over the water they were trading, independent of higher levels of government and under the regulation of private law (i.e., formalized in an economic contract between two legal equals). During a newspaper interview, when asked about decision-making authority, the bureau chief of the Yiwu Water O‹ce replied, “City government is of course a level of government and should have responsibility over water resources in the district.” An opposing view was presented in an open (and much cited) letter to the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) written by a regional water resources o‹cial, Wu Guoping, who challenged this notion by arguing that in China’s unitary state system, state ownership meant that only the central government, and not local governments, could exercise such ownership rights.28 The categorical confusion over who may act upon state ownership was, in this case, closely related to the uncertainty over what was being exchanged. Was it the right of use? De facto ownership? The standard interpretation was that the Yiwu-Dongyang agreement was just a transfer of use rights.29 This interpretation was founded (somewhat prematurely) on a bundle-of-rights approach to ownership, which the 1988 Water Law did not explicitly permit. Many advocates of water trading, unfazed by the absence of legal foundation, believed that this contradiction was but another bump in the road leading toward legal

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modernization of water resource management and that the need for flexibility in water resource management warranted the experiment. Some went so far as to assert that “legality” in this case was a nonissue and that observers should not waste their time with questions regarding the issue of ownership and the law.30 The minister of water resources remarked in his published response to Wu Guoping’s letter that law follows practice, echoing earlier, 1980s ownership debates surrounding the country’s grandest experiment in reforms: the extralegal leasing of agricultural land.31 The critiques that suggested the trade deal went against the principle of state ownership were foreclosed by this invocation of a law-policy interface—with Chinese characteristics. Even if one accepts the view that the object traded was “use rights,” what remains unexplained is an important condition of the trade, namely, its time frame of “perpetuity.” Bemused, one water policy expert wondered how the purchase of use rights in perpetuity was any diªerent from purchase of ownership.32 It is important to highlight this condition, because it was the one condition that was non-negotiable.33 Yiwu City wanted to buy more than just water; it wanted to purchase a guaranteed supply of water. One Dongyang o‹cial noted that because land had a fifty- to seventy-year limit on use rights, he was unconvinced of the legality of a permanent rights transfer. Yiwu o‹cials sidestepped the issue by saying that they were essentially purchasing “stock” in Dongyang’s water reservoir system.34 The importance of this case cannot be overstated. Changes in the legal definition of water ownership may not directly aªect the distribution of water within cities, but they have profound implications for the distribution of water resources between cities and between urban and rural areas. With national legal codes unable to accommodate the forms of exchange involved in the Yiwu-Dongyang agreement, the case also served as a catalyst for debates over revisions of China’s water resources laws and regulations.35 The most fundamental of the water laws is the national Water Law, which was revised in 2002—against the backdrop of the debates over the YiwuDongyang agreement. An important change introduced in the revisions was the elimination of “collective ownership,” leaving all ownership of water resources with the state. Although this change may have helped clarify the issue of ownership, many observers argued that the final version of the new Water Law failed in its definition of rights. In an earlier revision draft, tabled in 2001, an

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attempt was made to introduce the notion of “use rights” (shiyongquan) as something independent of ownership, with transfer (i.e., trade) of these rights permitted in accordance with the law.36 Supported by the Ministry of Water Resources, the formulation of water rights in this early draft would have served as a basis for increasing trade in water between cities and regions. After multiple rounds of consultation, the final version of the Water Law passed by the NPC Standing Committee reflected a more conservative position on rights and water trading. The only rights recognized in the final version were those of ownership (suoyouquan) and extraction (qushuiquan), the latter being determined largely by administrative process (i.e., an entity enjoys these rights after it has made application and paid fees to the appropriate government agency). With respect to rights of transfer, some NPC representatives were reportedly unwilling to support such a dramatic shift toward more market-oriented water distribution—at least in 2002.37 Their reaction to the MWR’s draft wording on rights was not a repudiation of marketization per se, but reflected a general sense that it was still too early for China to introduce water markets. Central issues in the debates included how the initial distribution of water rights at the beginning of such a process might be decided, a particularly acute problem in regions where ongoing disputes existed over access. Some legislators were also concerned about the eªects of market pricing on rural and less developed areas. By calling for more research on these distributional issues, the representatives nonetheless signaled their general support for a shift to more market-based water management strategies. The question thus became not whether water trading would become legal in China, but how.

CREATING VALUE FOR WATER AND ITS SUPPLY Tap water in urban China has never formally been free. What has changed as valuation has been linked more directly to markets is the logic behind water pricing, who pays, and who collects such payments.38 Since the 1950s, water supply companies have been expected to collect some form of service fee from water users. Until the 1980s, these fees were collected primarily from state work units and tended to be based on a flat rate determined independently of the volume consumed (baofeizhi). The fees were low and in most cases underestimated the costs of production.39 In the early 1980s, reformers

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looked to break what has since been called the “big water pot” (daguoshui) and end the era of “welfare water” ( fulishui).40 The formulation of a pricing strategy in water-supply laws and regulations has since drawn on notions of selfsu‹ciency in industry and conservation of water resources. These principles found a material base in two types of fees: water fees (fees on per unit use of water to pay for production costs such as piping, reservoirs, and infrastructure) and water resources fees (fees based on the value of water in its “natural” state). For water fees, the first regulatory link between fees and price of production came with the 1980 Provisional Regulations for Urban Water Supply Work.41 Article 14 stipulated that water fees should be set to balance local conditions and costs of production in a way that was beneficial to water conservation. Cost pricing at this time was vaguely defined and, in reality, rarely realized, but beginning in the 1990s, as water supply companies (WSCs) were becoming commercial entities, the writers of water pricing regulations began to adopt a more commercial approach that matched the organizational changes. The 1994 Urban Water Supply Regulations, although thin on detail, were explicit in principle, noting that prices should guarantee that the basic needs of domestic users were met and that WSCs could cover their costs, while allowing for “reasonable profits.” Supporters of the regulations heralded them as the necessary legal basis ( falu yiju) for water price reform, which was seen as key to the successful transformation of water supply companies into commercial, profit-making enterprises.42 This new formula for water pricing was to mark the beginning of the end for government subsidies for urban water supply. Despite the new elements brought into price calculation, the basic concept of a water fee did not itself mark a radical change. In contrast, the idea of water resources fees represented a major shift in paradigm. In advanced capitalist economies, policy makers and economists may not be in complete agreement on the specifics of resource valuation, yet the idea that resources can be priced is a dominant view. In former socialist economies, resource fees are less commonsensical. The idea that a “natural” resource should have an assigned price value goes against the “labor theory of value” that is the basis of Marxist economic theory. Hence, establishing resource fees involves a debate not only over the proper formulas for determining such fees but also over the very premise of attaching values to raw natural resources themselves.

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A set of regulations issued in Shanghai in 1979 marked the first time a water resources fee was used in China’s urban water sector. O‹cials in Shanghai, a city with a history of serious problems due to excessive groundwater withdrawals, hoped that the fees would curtail the withdrawal of groundwater. They introduced fees on groundwater that were equal to the fees charged for city-supplied water, in order to stop work units from drilling their own wells to avoid paying for water. Following the enactment of this law, other cities introduced similar local regulations, initiating the commodification of water as a resource (in contrast to water supply, which, as a service that involved labor and human-built infrastructure, had been unproblematically treated as a commodity). These local experiments in groundwater fees served as a basis for Article 34 of the 1988 Water Law, which required that water resources fees be charged on water extracted in all urban areas. According to Ke Lidian, the original intention of Article 34, like that of the 1979 regulations issued in Shanghai, was to encourage the use of economic methods to improve groundwater management.43 The drafters of the Water Law assumed that only places with limited water resources would adopt the water resources fee system. By the mid-1990s, however, water resources fees had become common throughout the country and were not just for urban groundwater extraction. As water resources fees became ubiquitous, they also became even further removed from their original intent of encouraging water conservation; the fees assessed were very low and seemed not to discourage consumption. Like other fees, water resources fees had become an extra-budgetary source from which to raise local funds.44 Theoretically, water resources fees were to be more than just arbitrary fees; they were to be expressions of the value of the thing called water. As such, the principle of the water resources fee challenged the dominant theories in Chinese water resources economics of the 1980s. Water had been typically described as being one of three kinds: natural water, self-supplied water, and commodity water.45 Commodity water was the only kind to have an exchange value, based on the going fees for water supply. Natural water had use value but no monetary equivalent. “Self-supplied water” was that on which labor was performed but which was never exchanged (e.g., water drawn from underground for supply to members of a work unit, as described earlier

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in the Shanghai example). In theory, self-supplied water was not a commodity, because it had only use value, no exchange value. From the enactment of the 1979 groundwater regulations in Shanghai to the 1988 Water Law, as laws and regulations required fees to be charged on self-supplied, noncommodity water, a process of economic enclosure took place on unregulated, self-supplied water in most cities, in order to encourage conservation.46 What is key is that these water resources fees, though administratively set, were pegged to the prices of commodity water. The determination of water resources fees, and thus of the value of water (even water that was neither exchanged on the market nor processed and piped), was becoming enmeshed in the world of exchange value and commodity relations. Into the 1990s, this indirect form of commodity pricing of water (the thing) drew criticism from a newly trained cohort of resource economists well versed in the theories of neoclassical economics.47 They pointed to the failures of water resources fees, which had either become sources of extrabudgetary funds or, where they preserved a “value” content, tended to reflect the costs of production (they were usually set to match the WSCs’ prices or, in some cases, to cover the costs of managing water resources). Jiang Wenlai noted that whereas economic valuation techniques had been developed for many other resources (e.g., minerals, forests), agreement on valuation methods for water had been di‹cult to reach.48 Many Chinese economists still identify the ill-defined rights over water as a major obstacle to progress on pricing reforms. In light of this problem, advocates of water markets continue to pin their hopes on ongoing flirtations with tradable water rights in Zhejiang and other regions of the country. The expectation is that water laws will eventually reflect these local experiments, and with a legalization of water markets, water resources fees will be determined more directly by market relations. Once the exchange of water is validated through the redefinition of rights, the revaluation of water via market mechanisms can be legitimated by law.

SERVING THE PEOPLE OR CUSTOMER SERVICE? Making water into a commodity, and its supply into a commercial venture, does not end with the creation of legal texts that reflect these new catego-

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rizations. With law as a legitimating institution underpinning the transformation of water and its supply in China, the roles of and relationships between various social actors will inevitably change. What are some of the legal expressions of the new relations between city o‹cials, water companies, and urban residents? And what are the implications of social actors failing to learn their newly scripted roles? Rather than simply labeling these failures “transitional problems,” it is important to consider what they might reveal about the constructive, as well as destructive, potentials associated with legal modernization in a reforming China.

Contractual Relations In 1980, the first sector-specific regulations for urban water supply were established by the Department of Urban Construction.49 These provisional regulations served as the guiding document for over a decade. In ways that today may seem inappropriate for a regulatory document, the 1980 regulations were punctuated throughout with broad statements about the social importance of a public water supply for production activities and public health. Its successor, the 1994 Urban Water Supply Regulations, was much leaner, reading more as a list of imperatives and conditions. The “water users” of the 1980s had, in 1994, become the autonomous and diªerentiated “units and individuals who use water.” These newer regulations laid out relatively clear expectations. For the water companies, these included requirements such as twenty-four-hour notice for disruption of operation and compliance with national water quality standards. For the units and individuals who used water, the primary responsibility listed was the payment of fees. This more legalistic formulation of rules was intended to provide legal tools that water companies and residents alike could use to seek redress through formal channels.50 However, it is not entirely clear how eªective the changes have been. In many instances, urban residents still turn to city government o‹cials when they have problems involving water supply companies.51 This resistance to adopting a legal approach in handling disputes is often explained as a transitional eªect: the problem is that residents are unaware of specific laws and regulations, and more fundamentally, they are

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unaware that these carry with them a set of rights. The key question is thus thought to be how to make people more aware of the concept and content of rights in the supply of water. One approach adopted by some municipal o‹cials to help overcome this apparent lack of legal consciousness has been to popularize the use of formal contracts between water supply companies and urban residents. Such contracts first began appearing in 1999, following the passage of the Contract Law, which included a set of provisions for public utility contracts (Articles 176– 184). Soon after the passage of the Contract Law, the MOC joined with the State Bureau of Administration of Industry and Commerce to produce a model water supply contract (shifan wenben) that cities could use to design their own contracts.52 Some legal scholars have argued that this is an important step in city public utility reforms, and the best way for residents to learn how to handle their rights vis-à-vis utility companies is through the use of contracts.53 The shift, however, is more than just a matter of increased formality, because the adoption of a contract-based model raises important questions regarding the relationship between government, WSCs, and residents. Two such questions are which type of law (public or private) and which jurisdiction (administrative or civil) will define relations within a contract-based system. If water supply contracts are to be rooted firmly in the realm of civil law, as some have argued they should be, then water supply would be removed from the nexus of relationships as defined in public law (i.e., the state, citizens, etc.). As the legal scholars Yao Denian and Li Changcheng see it, these state-centered relationships should be relegated to the past: “Before, in the planned economy, people believed the government would not cheat them and would carry out work in accordance with the rules.”54 Yao and Li argue that there is little reason for such trust given the continuing reports of terrible service, arbitrary decisions, and lack of accountability on the part of China’s public utilities. They see in the classical, liberal version of the civil contract an equalizing instrument for resolving disputes between parties. Interestingly, the MOC and the State Bureau of Administration of Industry and Commerce, which created the original model water-supply contract, appear not to have shared Yao and Li’s unconditional support for formal

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contracts at this still early stage of reforms. Though local-level agencies were enthusiastic about the contracts and wanted to introduce them for all water users, the model contract drafted by the central authorities was actually explicit in its exclusion of household users. This exclusion suggests an awareness at the central level of the political complications associated with such a radical change in relations surrounding household water supply. The central government’s concerns over the introduction of contracts for residential water supply were not unfounded. Whereas a number of cities had quietly introduced water supply contracts for new (large) users, the Beijing WSC attracted national attention when it required all households to sign individual contracts beginning in May 2001.55 The program drew strong reactions from city residents and consumer advocate associations, who claimed that the WSC’s version of the contract was biased toward the water company and failed to oªer “legal action” as an option for dealing with disputes. The latter was required by the 1993 Law on Protecting Consumer Rights and Interests and was included in the model water-supply contract designed by the central authorities. More fundamentally, some observers wondered whether the use of contracts was appropriate for a social good such as water, given the monopolistic character of its supply. Responding to the uproar, and under pressure from the city government, the Beijing WSC cancelled the contracts. It later announced that it had not given up on the idea of contracts but was continuing to study the possibilities of a future program that would have more direct government oversight (e.g., a standardized contract designed in consultation with city government o‹cials). Although debate goes on over the particulars of the contract, momentum continues in the direction of a contract-based approach to household water supply.

Litigious Relations Courtrooms, too, have become arenas for the development of a more lawbased relationship between water supplier and water user. The construction of legal subjects in this context does not draw on the civil law model of economic rights. In the domain of administrative law, legal subjects have turned to litigation to assert rights that are of a more “public” nature. Under the PRC’s 1989 Administrative Litigation Law (ALL), citizens and organizations are per-

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mitted to bring lawsuits against state agencies to challenge their decisions or conduct. One case from 1998–99 involved a resident of Beijing who invoked the ALL in his fight with the city water supply company over fee payments. In this nationally celebrated case, Li Diansheng took Beijing’s Public Utilities Bureau (BJPUB) to court after the city water company disconnected him and his neighbors for not paying water fees.56 Li had been withholding water payments in protest of what he felt to be an unfair (and illegal) practice of burdening residents with the responsibility of collecting and turning in water fees for their apartment block. In what has been a common practice in Beijing and other large cities, households often share, on a rotating basis, the responsibility for water and electricity fee collection in their apartment block. The water company determines the fee owed, on the basis of a property’s main bulk meter, and the residents then divide it among themselves.57 Household water meters, though many have been installed, are mostly uncertified, so the company is not required by current national and local regulations to use household meter readings in calculating fees. Li asserted that no matter what the reason, the water company was actually reneging on its duty, as stated explicitly in the local regulations, to “measure volume used and collect fees from water users.” He and his neighbors were not “not paying fees”; the problem was that the water company was not coming by to read meters and collect the money owed. In the end, Beijing Xicheng District People’s Court ruled that the public utilities bureau was wrong to have refused water to Li’s apartment block. The court did not, however, make a decision about who was ultimately responsible for the collection of water fees, the company or the residents. One of the reasons this case drew tremendous media attention was that it became an example of how one individual could seek justice through the law. The media identified it as a model case of min gao guan (citizens suing the government), with heightened symbolic value owing to Li’s status as a retired veteran of the Sino-Japanese war. Yet for all the fanfare, the outcome points to some of the limitations of litigation as a tool in people’s struggles to redress their concerns over fairness. Li believed the water company should be responsible for collecting residents’ fees at the household level. If the company was deemed not to be responsible, then Li hoped for some sort of formal recognition that at least the residents should not be held legally liable for prob-

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lems associated with what was essentially their “volunteer work” for the WSC.58 The court’s avoidance of this broader issue of responsibility is not surprising, considering the general limitations of judicial interpretation in China’s legal system. In its current form, the ALL provides a limited basis on which citizens may challenge administrative decisions: judicial review may consider only the legality of concrete administrative decisions or actions, not the lawfulness or propriety of the underlying regulations.59 Furthermore, the wording of the relevant regulations (1994 Urban Water Supply Regulations and its local variants) oªers only a limited basis on which residents can challenge the actions of water companies and public utility bureaus. In these regulations, the water company is given authority to take direct action against residents (e.g., fines or disconnection for nonpayment of fees). For residents, however, the rules are explicit that noncompliance by water companies will be dealt with administratively, within the government. The water company’s failure to fulfill service requirements is not a basis for a legal case. All residents can do is appeal the basis of any decisions made against them. In this way, the courts were limited, in Li’s case, to interpreting the legality of the decision made to stop water service to his apartment block. Litigation thus failed to address the primary reason for Li Diansheng’s dispute with the water company. He was frustrated by the way the water company had become increasingly unsympathetic to the problems associated with residents’ collection of fees. In recent years, such problems have increased with changing social patterns in neighborhoods (e.g., neighbors no longer belong to the same work unit, and more apartments are being rented out short-term). In Li’s mind, he was helping the water company, but it seemed to him that this act had been elevated to a legal requirement without any form of legal protection. Taking cues from the company’s move to a more commercial and contractual relationship with residents, Li reciprocated in the way a good citizen in post-Mao China should: “I remember Jiang Zemin had said, ‘Yi fa zhi guo’ [govern the country in accordance with the law]. I also read about it in Lao nian bao [Elderly News]. So I decided to bring a suit [against the water company].”60 Although he failed to achieve his ultimate goal, Li Diansheng expressed some satisfaction in knowing that, if nothing else, he had brought attention

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to the problems faced by residents burdened with the collection of water fees. Before the case went to court, a Public Utilities Bureau o‹cial applauded Li’s eªorts as evidence of “increased legal consciousness in citizens.”61 Following the court’s decision, the water company and government o‹cials vowed that they would try to address his concerns, and in the year that followed, they increased their eªorts to install household meters. The May 2001 introduction of a contract system between the Beijing WSC and city residents was also, arguably, a move informed by the Li v. BJPUB case. The absence of a “litigation clause” in the water supply contracts introduced by the Beijing WSC suggests, however, that the company was not quite as enthusiastic about the judicial process as it maintained publicly. Bracketed by the o‹cial pre- and post-trial reactions to Li’s case, discussions of the source of the problem reveal much about the subtle but important changes taking place in the relationship between water companies and city residents. In television interviews after the case, a representative from the BJPUB pointed out that the main problem was that the regulatory framework did not reflect current technical capabilities.62 Because of this, he maintained, it was not yet possible to conduct the business of water supply on strictly commercial terms, and so there was a need for everyone to cooperate in working through the transition period.63 If residents were willing to sustain their “risktaking spirit” ( fengxian jingshen) and continue to collect fees, they could avoid the rate increase that would certainly follow if the WSC were immediately to internalize full costs of operation.64 As one person in the water industry observed: “Don’t we encourage a Lei Feng spirit of doing things? In this case, why not help out?—this is doing something basically for yourself !”65 Here the cooperative spirit is emptied of an earlier social meaning and is capitalized to meet the needs of economic and social changes that are driving relations in more contractual and litigious directions.

CONCLUSION One thing litigation and contracts share is the promise of a better model of regulation to support the changes taking place in China’s water supply industry. But they cannot be understood solely as the products of a water policy agenda; they are also born out of recent transformations of economic and

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social relations in reform-era China. Water provides a unique lens through which to examine the relationship between law and economy as it plays out in the terrain of the everyday. As a resource that is both ordinary and exceptional, water is being redefined through debates over such fundamental questions as, Who owns natural resources such as water? How are these resources valued? What is the role of the state in ensuring that all people have access to a basic supply of water? As illustrated by the examples presented in this chapter, the answers to these questions increasingly make use of a legal lexicon. This ascendancy of law in water policy reflects a desire for greater economic rationalization. And as a marker of modernity in post-Mao China, legalism also reflects a broader ideological imperative through its negation of the past. In the rapid shift toward a market economy, resistance to economic reductionism and legalism is increasingly perceived as a threat to a new economic order that sees e‹ciency as a fundamental measure of value. In this context, older “socialist” modes of social action become delegitimated in economic terms. What has prevailed resembles a neo-Hobbesian vision of social life, in which individuals associate through formal contracts that limit their social obligations to those that are legally rule-bound, and in which regulation is based less on social bonds and more on the authority of an impartial other— the rule of law. Rule of law is an ill-defined political principle endowed with a symbolic goodness that has led to its being appropriated by seemingly opposed groups.66 Acknowledging that the law’s pretense to objectivity can displace a commitment to the ideals the law distortedly symbolizes, critical legal scholars still recognize that it is the symbolic goodness associated with the rule of law that often gives individuals their only basis for appeals that challenge the authority of dominant political forces.67 But even while the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson’s description of the rule of law as an unqualified human good is often used as evidence of its universal appeal, it is important to heed the warnings of Vaclav Havel, who, in his defense of legalism as a weapon against totalitarianism, cautioned that “it is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one can imagine a life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied . . . Without a moral relationship to

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life, this struggle [for legality] will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics.”68 Zhu Suli expressed similar sentiments concerning the risks associated with the ways in which law in China is still often considered synonymous with legislation backed by state power.69 He noted that this may seem to be the most eªective way for making rules and reconstructing a society, particularly one being integrated into the global economy through institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The more instrumentalist readings of the relationship between law and social change in transitional economies tend to highlight the way a legal framework provides institutions for facilitating the workings of the market. I believe the relationship goes beyond this “rules of the game” economic interpretation. As illustrated by the legalization of urban water supply in China, it is important also to consider how legalism makes markets happen through legal discourses that restructure the ways people experience and understand social life.

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NOTES I thank Joshua Goldstein, Kusia Hreshchyshyn, Kam Wing Chan, Katharyne Mitchell, and Matt Sparke for their helpful suggestions on this chapter. I am also grateful to Donald Clarke for his advice on sources regarding Chinese law. The chapter is based largely on research completed with the generous support of the Committee for Scholarly Communications with China, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for the Study of World Politics. 1. Ministry of Construction (MOC), Zhongguo chengshi jianshe tongji nianbao [China Urban Construction Statistics Yearbook] (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2003). 2. See, for example, Nicholas Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (New York: Guilford Press, 1994); Robert Gordon, “Law and Ideology,” Tikkun 3, no. 1 (1988): 14–18; Allan Hutchinson and Patrick Monahan, “Introduction,” in The Rule of Law: Ideal or Ideology, eds. Allan Hutchinson and Patrick Monahan (Toronto: Carswell, 1987), ix–xiv. 3. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 221. 4. Many have written on the question of whether China’s legal reforms constitute a program of “rule of law” or “rule by law,” but my focus here is more on the different ideological formations associated with the legal system in reform-era China. For discussions of the development of the legal reforms in China, see Albert Chen, “The Developing Theory of Law and Market Economy in Contemporary China,” in Legal Developments in China: Market Economy and Law, eds. Wang Guiguo and Wei Zhenying (Hong Kong: Sweet and Maxwell, 1996), 3–20; Ronald Keith, China’s Struggle for Rule of Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); and Linda Chelan Li, “The ‘Rule of Law’ Policy in Guangdong: Continuity or Departure? Meaning, Significance and Processes,” China Quarterly 161 (2000): 199–220. 5. Chen, “Developing Theory,” 13. 6. Liang Zhiping, “Tradition and Change: Law and Order in a Pluralist Landscape,” Cultural Dynamics 11, no. 2 (1999): 215–36; Zhu Suli, “More on Avoidance of the Law,” Social Sciences in China (Winter 1998): 145–53. 7. Song Lanhe, “The Analysis of Laws and Policies Relating to Urban Water Management in China,” paper presented at the international seminar “Twenty-first Century Urban Water Management in China,” Beijing, 1999. 8. David Lampton, “Water: Challenge to a Fragmented Political System,” in Policy Implementation in Post-Mao China, ed. David Lampton (Berkeley: University of California

From Provision to Exchange Press, 1992), 157–89; James Nickum, “Is China Living on the Water Margin?” China Quarterly 156 (1998): 880–98; Jennifer Turner, “Authority Flowing Downwards? Local Government Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Water Sector” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1997). 9. This is of course not a problem unique to water policy in China. In the United States, for example, Rogers reported that ninety thousand federal employees worked on water problems in ten cabinet departments, two major agencies, and thirty-four smaller agencies. See Peter Rogers, America’s Water: Federal Roles and Responsibilities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 4. The situation in China is arguably more complex, because of the multiple sources of legislative power. See Perry Keller, “Sources of Order in Chinese Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 42 (1994): 733; and, on water, Alana Boland, “Transitional Flows: State and Market in China’s Urban Water Supply” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2001). 10. Keller, “Sources of Order,” 745. 11. Commonly referred to simply as the problem of tiao-kuai, fragmented authority is related to the fact that local-level administrative agencies are subordinate to local government (i.e., horizontal hierarchy as kuai) as well as to the higher-level ministerial agencies to whom they belong (i.e., vertical hierarchy as tiao). 12. Keller, “Sources of Order,” 758. 13. Some observers of legal modernization in China have argued that law is ultimately serving to sustain the legitimacy of the party-state. See, for example, Sujian Guo, “Post-Mao China: The Rule of Law?” Issues and Studies 35, no. 6 (1999): 80–118; and Pitman Potter, “The Chinese Legal System: Continuing Commitment to the Primacy of State Power,” China Quarterly 159 (1999): 673–83. Dowdle challenged such instrumentalist interpretations on the basis of the normative constitutionalism in China’s legal and political culture (i.e., the support for a notion of supremacy of law over other forms of political authority). See Michael Dowdle, “Heretical Laments: China and the Fallacies of ‘Rule of Law,’” Cultural Dynamics 11, no. 3 (1999): 283–314. 14. Keith, China’s Struggle for Rule of Law, 13. 15. Song, “Analysis of Laws.” 16. Lin Jianing, “Jianli kexue de shuijia jizhi shi fazhan chenshi gongshui shiye manzu chengshi yongshui zhi genben baozheng” [Establishing a scientific water price mechanism is a basic way to ensure urban water industry can meet urban water demands], Chengzhen gongshui [Urban Water Supply] 1 (1996): 5–9. 17. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Central Archives, 1953–1957 Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jingji dang’an ziliao xuanpian: Guding zichan touzi he jianzhuye juan [Selections of the PRC economic archive materials: Fixed assets investments and building industry volume, 1953–1957] (Beijing: Zhongguo wujia chubanshe, 1998).

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Alana Boland 18. Hou Jie, ed., 1996 Zhongguo chengxiang jianshe fazhan baogao [China urban and rural construction development report] (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1997), 343. 19. Wei Yan, “Urban Water Strategic Management in the Twenty-first Century,” paper presented at the international seminar “Twenty-first Century Urban Water Management in China,” Beijing, 1999. 20. Joseph Dellepenna, “The Importance of Getting Names Right: The Myth of Markets for Water,” William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review (Winter 2000): 317–77. 21. Ke Lidian, Zhongguo shuifa yu shui guanli [China water law and water management] (Beijing: Zhongguo shuili shuidian chubanshe, 1998). 22. The General Principles of Civil Law (1987) allowed for collective ownership of reservoirs and irrigation facilities (Article 74). Citizens and collectives could legally contract for use rights to water (Article 81). 23. Edward Epstein, “The Theoretical System of Property Rights in China’s General Principles of Civil Law: Theoretical Controversy in the Drafting Process and Beyond,” Law and Contemporary Problems 52, no. 2 (1989): 184. 24. “Dui ‘shuiquan’ deng jiben gainian de bianxi” [Analysis of ‘water rights’ and other basic concepts], Zhongguo shuili bao [China Water Resources News], May 10, 2001. 25. To ensure the annual volume sales to Yiwu, Dongyang planned to divert water from a diªerent river system—water that had flowed to another neighboring city to serve both agricultural and municipal needs. See “Zhejiang Dongyang mai shui Shengzhou bu man” [Zhejiang Dongyang sells water, Shengzhou is not pleased], Yangtze wanbao [Yangtze Evening News], April 30, 2001. 26. A large part of this money was to go toward the construction of the necessary infrastructure to transport the water. Construction was expected to be completed by the end of 2004. 27. On this problem in the context of natural resources, see Peter Ho, “The Clash over State and Collective Property: The Making of the Rangeland Law,” China Quarterly 161 (2000): 240–63; and Qian Kuo and Chen Shaozhi, Ziran ziyuan zichanhua guanli [Management of natural resources as assets] (Beijing: Jingji guanli chubanshe, 1996). 28. For the Yiwu Water Office quote, see “Shoulie shuiquan jiaoyi zhuangkai xin shichang” [First water rights exchange tries new market], 21 shiji jingji baodao [Twentyfirst century economic report]’ March 29, 2001. Regarding the response from Wu Guoping, see “Wang Shucheng jiu zhuanjia lai xin tan shuiquan zhuanrang” [Wang Shucheng discusses water rights transfer in response to expert’s letter], Zhongguo shuili bao [China Water Resources News], February 27, 2001. 29. For example: China Central Television (CCTV) International Network, “Zhejiang

From Provision to Exchange liang chengshi qianshu woguo shouxiang shuiquan jiaoyi” [Two cities of Zhejiang sign the country’s first water right exchange], February 2, 2001. 30. “Dui ‘Dongyang-Yiwu’ shuiquan zhuanrang de zai renshi” [Revisit DongyangYiwu water rights transfer], Zhongguo shuili bao, April 9, 2001. 31. Response in “Wang Shucheng.” On the legal status of early agricultural land leasing, see Perry Keller, “Legislation in the People’s Republic of China,” University of British Columbia Law Review 23 (1989): 658. 32. “Shoulie shuiquan.” 33. During negotiations, Dongyang first oªered to pay the construction costs for a pipe system to Yiwu, from which it would sell “commodity water” (shangpin shui). Yiwu o‹cials had no interest in this arrangement. “Shoulie shuiquan.” 34. Ibid. 35. Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) Development Research Center Economic Regulation O‹ce, “Guanyu Zhejiang ‘Dongyang-Yiwu’ shuiquan zhuanrang de diaoyan baogao” [Research report on the Dongyang-Yiwu (Zhejiang) water rights transfer] (Beijing: MWR, 2001). 36. The MWR released a copy of the draft revisions in the spring of 2001. See MWR, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shuifa (xiuding cao’an) [Water Law of the PRC, draft revision] (2001 [cited 14 May 2001]); available at http://www.mwr.gov.cn/zcfg_1/lfdt/dt3.htm. 37. See interview with Shen Zhujiang, an NPC representative, in Zhongguo shuili bao, September 3, 2002. 38. This is not to suggest that there is a market in water per se, but markets are involved in water pricing in a variety of ways. 39. Lester Ross, Environmental Policy in China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 96. 40. See, for example, Fang Guobin and Zhang Daojun, “Dui shuijia gaige de sikao,” [Thoughts on water price reform], Shuili jingji [Water Resources Economics], no. 2 (1999): 39–41. The term da guo shui is often used in water policy discussion papers as a critique of pre-reform modes of management. Like the more commonly used term, the “big rice bowl” (da guo fan), it had come to be a criticism of an earlier “misguided form of economic egalitarianism” in which individuals were (in theory) treated equally, regardless of their contribution to overall productivity. 41. MOC, Chengshi gongshui gongzuo zanxing guiding [Provisional regulations for urban water supply work], September 23, 1980. 42. “Relie qingzhu di yi bu ‘Chengshi gongshui tiaoli’ yansheng” [Enthusiastically celebrate the arrival of the first version of “Urban Water Supply Regulations”], Chengzhen gongshui 5 (1994): 9–11.

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Alana Boland 43. Ke, Zhongguo shuifa yu shui guanli, 249. 44. For example, Jennifer Turner described how, in Zhejiang, water resources fees ended up going toward education costs. See Turner, Authority Flowing Downwards? 147. Concern over this problem continued through the 1990s, as evidenced by Article 17 of the 1997 Water Industry Policy [Shuili chanye zhengce], which addressed the problem of fees being used in unrelated sectors. See Ke, Zhongguo shuifa yu shui guanli, 249. 45. Ke, Zhongguo shuifa yu shui guanli, n.p. 46. The 1994 Urban Water Supply Regulations continued this trend by requiring all work units within reach of a municipal water supply network to give up their “selfsupply” wells. See MOC, Chengshi gongshui tiaoli shiyi. Also see Jiang Wenlai, Shui ziyuan jiazhi lun [Water resources theory of value] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1999). 47. Fan Jun, “Shui jiage yu jieshui” [Water price and conservation], Chengshi wenti [Urban Problems] 86, no. 6 (1998): 47–48; Jiang, Shui ziyuan jiazhi lun; Qiang Wentao, “Gaige jingying jizhi, fazhan duozhong jingying” [Reform of management system, developing diversified operations], Chengzhen gongshui 2 (1993): 31–33. 48. Jiang, Shui ziyuan jiazhi lun, 45. 49. Department of Urban Construction, Chengshi gongshui gongzuo zanxing guiding [Provisional regulations for urban water supply work] (1980). The Department of Urban Construction was the administrative predecessor of the MOC. 50. Fang and Zhang, “Dui shuijia gaige de sikao,” 41. 51. Interview, municipal government o‹cial, Shanghai, October 1999. 52. MOC, Guanyu yinfa ‘chengshi gongyong shui hetong’, ‘chengshi gongyong qi hetong’, ‘chengshi gongyong reli hetong’, shifan wenben de tongzhi [Circular regarding the issue of model contracts for urban public water supply, natural gas supply, and heating], November 13, 1999. 53. Kong Dezhou, Gongyong dian, shui, qi, reli hetong [Contracts for public electricity, water, gas, and heating] (Beijing: Zhongguo fazhi chubanshe, 1999); Yao Denian and Li Changcheng, Gongyong dian, shui, qi, reli hetong (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 1999). 54. Yao and Li, Gongyong dian, 21. 55. See, for example, “Beijing yi jumin zhiyi gongshui hetong” [A Beijing resident questions the water supply contract], Beijing ribao [Beijing Daily], 26 May 2001; “Beijing xiaoxie zhiyi zilaishui gongsi gongshui hetong qinhai xiaofeizhe quanyi” [Beijing Consumer Assocation questions whether WSC water supply contracts encroach on consumers’ rights and interests], Beijing qingnian bao [Beijing Youth Daily], 16 May 2001. 56. The case was heard in March 1999 and was covered extensively in local and national media, including the CCTV news programs Dongfang shikong [Orient Horizon], broadcast on 1 December 1998, and a special program on CCTV-1, Min gao guan: zhe shi nian (Citizens suing o‹cials: The first decade), that was broadcast on 20 May 1999.

From Provision to Exchange 57. In theory the reading from the main meter should equal the total of all the household meter readings. In practice, due to either poor-quality meters or leakage in the pipe system, people often pay for much more water than they actually use. People can pay two to three times the normal rate (sometimes more) after dividing the payment for unaccounted-for water among all residents. 58. Often-reported problems include di‹culty in finding people at home and getting them to pay what they owe. Another, which happened to Li Diansheng, is that neighbors pay with counterfeit notes, so that volunteer fee collectors end up paying out of pocket. 59. See Pitman Potter, “The Administrative Litigation Law of the PRC: Judicial Review and Bureaucratic Reform,” in Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China, Pitman Potter, ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 270–304. For a recent discussion of continuing problems, see “Min gao guan nan zai nali” [Where are the problems with ‘citizens suing o‹cials’], Nanfang zhoumou [Southern Weekend], 31 May 2001. 60. CCTV, Min gao guan. 61. CCTV, Dongfang shikong, 1 December 1998. 62. Electricity and gas are much easier to retrofit with individual metering systems. 63. CCTV, Min gao guan. 64. CCTV, Dongfang shikong, 1 December 1998; “Jumin daishou shui dian fei, feishi feisiliang” [Residents collecting water and electricity fees: Much bother and much consideration], Fazhi ribao [Legal Daily], 25 March 2000. 65. “Jumin daishou.” 66. Hutchinson and Monahan, “Introduction,” ix. 67. See, for example, Patricia Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Restructuring Ideals from Reconstructed Rights,” Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review 24 (1987): 410–33. 68. Vaclav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Eastern Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 77. 69. Zhu Suli, “Xiandai hua jincheng zhong de Zhongguo fazhi” [Rule by law in China’s course of modernization], in Zhongguo xuewen [Ideas and problems of China], Zhao Tingyang et al., eds., 170–214 (Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 193.

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Contributors

Alana BOLAND is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban development and environmental governance in China since the 1950s. James A. COOK is an associate professor of history at Central Washington University. He specializes in the history of overseas Chinese, Fujian Province, and republican-era China. Madeleine Yue DONG is an associate professor of history and international studies at the University of Washington. Her most recent publications include Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, and she is a co-editor (with Tani Barlow, Uta Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Lynn Thomas, and Alys Weinbaum) of The Modern Girl around the World. Joshua GOLDSTEIN is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California. His areas of interest include Peking opera, urban economics, and environmental issues. He is the author of Drama Kings: The Nationalization of Peking Opera, 1870–1937. Rebecca KARL is an associate professor in the Departments of East Asian Studies and History at New York University. She is the author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and co-editor of

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several books, including (with Peter Zarrow) Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China. Hanchao LU is a professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century and Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars. Brett SHEEHAN is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and most recently the author of Trust in Troubled Times: Money, Banks, and State-Society Relations in Republican Tianjin. WANG Hui is a professor of modern Chinese literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His recent publications include China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition and Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi [ The rise of modern Chinese thought]. YAN Hairong is an assistant professor in the Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. She is the author of “Neo-liberal Governmentality and NewHumanism: Organizing Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Agencies” (Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4, 2003) and “Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China” (American Ethnologist 30, no. 4, 2003).

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.

A

lthusser, Louis, 18, 55, 228 Anagnost, Ann, 247 Analysis of the Strata in Chinese Society (Liang Xiaosheng), 231–32 Anzi: as model migrant woman, 232, 233, 235 The Ark (Fangzhou yuekan), 137, 138, 140 Association of Chinese Scientists (ACS), 88, 89; funding of, 89–90; and language reform, 90–92; organization of, 86–87, 88–89; and science as universal truth, 97; significance of, 83–84

Bamboo Food Basket Project (cailanzi gongcheng), 38 Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Yeh Wen-hsin), 13–14 Beijing, 234, 235; environmentalism in, 287–88; improving civility in, 234; litigation in, 321–23; markets in, 266–67, 269, 271, 275, 279, 280–86, 288–93; migrant female domestic workers in, 19, 227, 229, 237–39, 251, 252; recycling and reuse in, in Maoist era, 270–75; recycling and reuse in, in post-Mao era, 275–76,

277–98; recycling and reuse in, in Republican era, 265–70; regulation of recycling in, 262, 263–64, 269, 270–72, 274–75, 278–79, 288–91; water supply contracts in, 320, 323. See also Migrant laborers in Beijing Beijing Materials Recycling Professional Council (Beijing wuzi zaisheng hangye xiehui), 293 Beijing Municipal Scrap Recycling Company (Beijingshi wuzi huishou gongsi) (BRRC), 272, 283, 286, 292; in Chaoyang, 290, 292; collection points, 272–75, 277, 278; as employer, 274, 280; predecessor to, 270; versus rural migrants, 278–81, 289, 291, 298 Beijing Savings Bank, 124, 131 Bian Wenjian: and China Traveler, 218 Boden, Deidre: on modernity, 141–42 Bo Yibo: and Lushan Conference, 37 Bray, Francesca, 60, 65

C

ai Dingkai, 178, 179, 180–82, 184–87 Cai Yuanpei, 89 Cao Yabo: and China Traveler, 201 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 3, 6, 11 Chaoyang District, 288–92, 293 Chatterjee, Partha: on modernity, 4

336

Index Chen, Eugene (Chen Youren), 194n76; and Fujian Rebellion, 185–86 Chen Guangfu, 199; and banking, 131, 215, 216; and business travel, 218 Chen Mingshu, 183, 184; and Fujian Rebellion, 185, 186–87 Chen Xiangtao: and China Travel Service, 200, 201, 216 Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), 42; and overseas Chinese, 176–78, 183–87 China National Association (Zhongguo guomin xiehui), 175–76 China Traveler magazine (Luxing zazhi), 197, 202, 208; and business travel, 214, 216–19; and China Travel Service, 196; and Japanese incursion, 214–18; and leisure travel, 203–6, 207–9; and modern tourism, 195– 96; and political issues, 209; and Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, 196, 201, 203; and Shanghai cosmopolitanism, 15–16, 221–22; Shanghai perspective of, 196–98; and travel as consumption, 210–11; and travel as political investigation, 212–14 China Travel Service: and China Traveler, 196; and leisure travel, 205, 206; and Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, 200–201, 215–16, 223n9; shift in focus of, 216–17; and tourism, 196, 199, 206 Chinese Communist Party, 11, 17, 33, 38, 229, 234 Chow, Rey: Women and Chinese Modernity, 55–56, 71 Chu Minyi: and China Traveler, 201 Clothing: individualism in, 43–44; politics of, 41–43; “snobbery” about, 41 Cohen, Paul: Discovering History in China, 22

Common people: clothing of, 42; cultural expenses of, 25–26; definitions of, 23–25, 47n3; significance of studying, 44–45; and sociocultural history, 46 Community of scientific discourse, 12– 13, 103, 114; and Chinese language, 91–92; composition of, 86; definition of, 84–85; and May Fourth New Culture Movement, 86; and scientists, 88 Corruption, 40–41; in post-Mao China, 24 Cosmopolitanism, 15–16; changes in, 214; definition of, 198; evaluation of, 220–22; Shanghai and, 220–22; Sun Yat-sen on, 221 Cultural history: and bamboo food basket, 9, 26; and common people, 45 Cultural Revolution: clothing during, 42–44; and eating bitterness, 240–41; origins of, 38; and popular culture in songs, 35–36

Dagongmei (young migrant woman), 19, 232–33, 239, 243, 250, 251, 252. See also Migrant female domestic workers Danwei (work unit): in Maoist China, 17, 232, 257n20, 276 Darwin, Charles, 109 de Certeau, Michel, 4, 45 Deleuze, Gilles, 55, 254 Dingjin (Advance), 184 Discovering History in China (Cohen), 22 Dong, Madeleine Yue: on recycling and reuse, 267–68, 299n9 Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany), 86, 127 Du Yaquan, 86

E

astern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), 86, 127 Eastman, Lloyd: on Fujian Rebellion, 186 Eating bitterness (chiku) and speaking

Index bitterness (suku), 242, 253; history of, 240–41; self-development and, 239, 240, 241, 250 Eisenstadt, S. N., 148 Electric lighting: in Chengdu, 28; in Shanghai, 30–31 Environmentalism: 262, 275, 287, 289, 297–98 Espey, John, 209 Everyday life: and cultural history, 9; and labor, 61; and modernity, 4–6, 8, 31, 56, 59, 71; and recycling and reuse, 19; and sociocultural history, 23, 45; and studies of popular culture, 25; and subjectivity, 54, 57, 71–72; and violence, 54, 63–68, 71 Everydayness, 8–9, 11, 67; and dominant historiography, 11–12; and family, 69; and modernity, 8, 56, 74n12; new discourses of, 9, 11. See also Everyday life

Four-Bank Savings Society, 125, 152n17 Freud, Sigmund, 4 Friedland, Roger, 141–42 Friedman, Edward, 187 Fujian Rebellion of 1933, 15, 183–87, 160

G

aron, Sheldon, 142 Gender, 64, 71; equality of, 58–59, 69; and gendered slavery, 61–63; and labor, 60; and nationalism, 57, 59; and temporality, 68–69; and violence, 54 Giddens, Anthony, 143 Gorsky, Martin, 133 Great Leap Forward, 37, 272–73 Guomindang (Nationalist Party) (GMD) regime, 13, 27, 199, 205, 207, 211, 220; and Chinese women, 11; and Fujian Rebellion, 185–87; and overseas Chinese, 15, 160, 174–78, 183– 84; and savings law, 129–30

Family, 54, 71; business and qilou (shop Haferkamp, Hans: on modernity, 141 houses), 173; and foot binding, 64; and labor, 60–63; migrants’ position in, 249; modern, 140; nuclear (xiao jiating), 14, 136–37, 139, 148, 150; and savings, 16–39; and violence, 76n36 Feminism, 57–58, 76, 74n19 Feng Xiaoshuang: on Beijing recycling, 282 Fetish, 55, 71, 231; and fetishism, 65 Fishlow, Albert, 136 Food: Bamboo Food Basket Project, 36– 39; kinds of, 36–37, 38–41; Mao’s evaluation of, 37–38; shortages and rationing of, 34–36, 39; significance in China of, 32; tofu, 32–34, 48n26 Foot binding, 57, 71; banning of, 10; texts attacking, 53–54; as violence, 63–67. See also Jin Yi; Song Shu

Haggerty, M. E., 101 Half Monthly Forum magazine (Ban yue tan): on migrant women, 229, 231, 233, 240, 252 Harootunian, Harry, 56, 68; History’s Disquiet, 4–5 Havel, Vaclav, 324–25 He Lu, 100–101 History of Chinese Savings Banks (Zhongguo zhi chuxu yinhang shi) (Wang Zhihua), 122–23, 131, 132, 139, 140, 151n2 History’s Disquiet (Harootunian), 4–5 Hokkien people of south Fujian, 158, 183; and Guomindang regime, 178, 184; history of, 161–64; research on, 165–167 Huang Changgu: on science and morality, 102

337

338

Index Huang Yizhu: and returned overseas Chinese, 164, 169, 179, 182 Huang Zunxian: and language reform, 93, 95 Huaqiao. See Overseas Chinese Hu Shi: and evolutionism, 109, 110; and vernacular movement, 12, 93, 94, 95; writings of, 93, 94, 110 Hu Shiyuan: and China Traveler, 216–17 Hu Wenhu: and overseas Chinese, 182, 186 Hu Xiansu: on evolutionism, 109, 112

Jiang Guangnai: and Nineteenth Route Army in Fujian, 178–80, 182, 186–87 Jiang Wenlai: on water valuation, 317 Jin Yi, 73n1; and foot binding, 12; Nujie Zhong, 52–54, 59, 61, 62, 66–67 Joseph, May, 54

Ke Lidian: on Shanghai water regulations, 316 King, Mervyn: on savings patterns, 133 Ko, Dorothy: on foot binding, 57, 64 Kuhn, Philip, 163

Labor, 54, 57, 60–63, 67, 71, 74n18; conceptualization of, 57, 61 Lacan, Jacques, 247–48 Language reform: Association of Chinese Scientists and, 90–92; development of, 92–96; early history of, 91; and “national language,” 95; role of science in, 90–92, 96; and vernacular movement, 12, 82, 93, 95 Late Qing-early Republican era, 9–11, 80, 85 Law, 325; ascendancy in water policy, 324; bundle-of-rights approach to, 311, 312; as ideology, 304; and litiga-

tion, 320–23; 1989 Administrative Litigation Law (ALL), 320, 321, 322; ownership versus use rights in, 311– 14; and policy, 307–8, 313; rule of, 8, 303–4, 305, 324, 326n4; on urban water resources, 305–8; Water Law of the PRC, 306, 310, 311, 312, 313–14, 316, 317; and water supply contracts, 319–20, 323 Lefebvre, Henri, 4; on modernity and the everyday, 5, 6, 52, 56, 74n12 Levenson, Joseph, 220 Liang Qichao: and Association of Chinese Scientists, 89; and science versus metaphysics debate, 86; and vision of industrialization, 64 Liang Xiaosheng: Analysis of the Strata of Chinese Society, 231–32 Lian Shi (Yan Bin), 70–72, 79n67 Li Changcheng: on civil contracts, 319 Li Diansheng: and water fee litigation, 321–23 Li Houzhu: and foot binding, 65–66 Li Jianxin: on street sweepers, 277 Li Jingtai: and business travel, 216–17 Lin Jianning: on water supply models, 308–10 Lin Sen: and Fujian Rebellion, 184 Li Qingquan: and Fujian Rebellion, 186; and overseas Chinese, 177, 179, 180–82 Li Qishen: and Fujian Rebellion, 186–87, 194n75 Li Ruihuan: on food shortages, 38 Liu Ruifeng: and ban on kerosene lights, 30 Lottery-type savings societies, 128, 129; ban on, 145–46; as competitor to savings banks, 123, 126–27, 145, 149; history of, 124–25

Index Lump Li, 36 Lushan Conference, 37–38 Lu Xun, 25

Ma Laoer: and piped water in Chengdu, 28–29 Maoist China, 36, 188, 235, 276, 277; clothing in, 42–44; economic development in, 230–31; egalitarianism in, 24; food shortages and rationing in, 34, 36–37, 39; and gender equality, 58; labor relations in, 232–33; and Lushan Conference, 37–38; recycling and reuse in, 260, 263, 270– 75; urban and rural life in, 17–18; viewed by post-Mao China, 230, 231 Mao Zedong, 37–38, 229, 252 Marx, Karl, 4, 162 May Fourth New Culture Movement, 12, 68, 80, 188; and community of scientific discourse, 86; and evolutionism, 109; and gendered slavery, 62; intellectual content of, 80–83; and language reform, 82, 95; and modernization, 82; and overseas Chinese, 164; and scientific associations, 12–13, 80–81; and scientific classification system, 116 Mei Guangdi, 94 Metcalf, Maynard M., 112–14 Migrant female domestic workers: dagongmei (young migrant woman), 19, 232–33, 239, 243, 250–52; and eating bitterness, 239, 240, 241–42; as new laboring subject, 232, 233; orientation lecture for, 236–38; and post-Mao economy, 227–29, 231– 34; and self-development, 239–40; and Xiaohong, 244–52

Migrant laborers in Beijing: criticisms of, 261, 283, 286–87, 289; discrimination against, 284, 290, 298; as entrepreneurs, 281–83, 284; and gangs, 285–86; in post-Mao era, 275–76, 278–81, 281–98; and recycling and reuse, 19, 260–61, 269; recycling network of, 279, 281, 282–83, 286, 296, 297; regulation of, 284–85, 288–93, 296, 298; and municipal recycling, 278–81, 283 Ministry of Construction: and urban water resources, 306, 308, 309, 319 Modernity, 69, 70, 123; Chinese, 5, 54, 59, 60, 95, 188; Chinese versus Atlantic, 148, 149; and the everyday, 4–8, 52, 56, 57, 59, 71, 74n12; and evolutionism, 108, 114; and legalism, 324; and national identity, 13–14; in Paris, 7–8; and piped water, 26, 28; and post-Mao China, 230, 233; problems conceptualizing, 3–4; and recycling and reuse, 267–68; and savings, 123, 139–46, 149, 150; and science, 84, 96, 108; in Shanghai, 7–8, 188, 198–99, 220–21; and tourism, 195; and Western material culture, 31. See also Transnational modernity Modernization: and evolutionism, 109, 111; legal, 304–5, 308, 318; and May Fourth New Culture Movement, 82; and overseas Chinese identity, 160– 61, 176; post-Mao, 232; scientific, 96; and sushi (quality), 252; of water management, 312–13 Mussolini, Benito, 214 My Savings Plan (Wode chuxu jihua) (Wang Zhihua), 122–23, 132, 134–39, 140, 143, 144, 147, 151n2

339

340

Index

Nao dongfang or nao xinfang (roughhousing in the nuptial chamber), 53–54, 60, 66 Nationalist Party. See Guomindang regime National People’s Congress Standing Committee: and water laws, 310–11, 314 Nation building, 16 New Youth magazine (Xin qingnian), 12, 108, 112; contributors, 86; and May Fourth New Culture Movement, 81; and vernacular movement, 93 Nie Guanchen: on savings, 146 1911 Revolution, 10; women and, 11, 58 Nineteenth Route Army, 184; and Fujian politics, 178–80, 181; and Fujian Rebellion, 185–87; and overseas Chinese, 183; and Xiamen municipal government, 182

O

’Hanlon, Rosalind, 253 Olmstead, Alan, 136 Olympics: improving civility for, 234; and nationalist environmentalism, 287, 289–90; and regulation of recycling sector, 262 Osborne, Peter, 63, 69–70 Overseas Chinese (huaqiao): and Fujian Rebellion, 185–86; history of, 163– 64; identity of, 159–60, 178–79; and municipal government in Xiamen, 181–83, 187; political organizations of, 175–76, 179; and qilou (shop houses), 170, 172–74; and Republican era politics, 174–79, 183–85; and transnational modernity, 15, 157–58, 163, 176, 187–88; and Xiamen, 15, 156, 157–61, 167–74, 181, 187

P

eng Dehuai, 37–38 People’s Liberation Army, 44 Perelman, Michael: on division of labor, 60, 75n26 Piped water, 9, 23; in Chengdu, 28–30; in Hangzhou, 27–28; in Shanghai, 26–27 Popular culture, 45; and common people, 25–26; and foot binding, 65; and songs, 35 Postal savings system, 124, 128; depositors in, 134; history of, 126, 129; and modernity, 146; in savings industry, 127 Post-Mao China: consumerism in, 297; environmentalism in, 287–88; and gender inequality, 59; growth of waste in, 276–77, 278; labor relations in, 232, 257n20; and market revaluations, 18; migrants in, 229, 232–34, 275–76, 278–81, 284–89, 292–98; modernity and legalism in, 234; and overseas Chinese trade networks, 188; political status in, 24; recycling and reuse in, 260–62, 263–64, 275–85, 286–98; subjectivity and, 227–28; view of Maoist era, 230–31, 233. See also Urban water resources Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 4 Public Security Bureau: and migrants, 284–86; and temporary residence permits, 284

Q ian Chongshu, 108–9 Qilou (shop house), 170; significance of, 172–74 Qiu Jin: on married life, 63 Quality. See Suzhi Qu Qiubai, 33

Index

R

affles, Stamford, 163 Recycling and reuse: and citizenship, 268, 269, 274–76, 297; collectivization of, 270–71, 274–75; economic hierarchy in, 282–83; and feipin (waste goods), 264–65, 267, 270, 290, 293–94, 297; globalization of, 262–63; industrial, 272, 274, 278; in Maoist Beijing, 263, 270–75; and modernity, 267–68; and night and open-air markets, 266–67, 269; in post-Mao Beijing, 263–64, 275–85, 286–98; promotion of, 273; regulation of, 262, 263–64, 269, 270–72, 274–75, 286–92, 292–93; in Republican Beijing, 263, 265–70; significance of, 260–61; and state-run markets after Mao, 288–92; and transfer markets, 279, 280, 282–85. See also Migrant laborers in Beijing Ren Hongjun, 100, 112; and role of the Association of Chinese Scientists, 87–88, 89; on science and education, 103; on vernacular language and literature, 94 “Resist America and Aid Korea” campaign, 34 Revaluation: significance of, 18 Rofel, Lisa, 248; on women industrial workers, 233 Rong Jiefu: and China Traveler, 214–15 Ruan Lingyu: and concept of “common people,” 25 Rural Women Knowing All magazine, 239, 246

Safran, William: on diasporas, 158 Savings, 127; financial knowledge and, 143–45, 149; and modernity, 139–43, 145–46, 147, 149, 150; and nationstate, 146–48, 150; and notions of

time, 145–46, 149; patterns of, 133; and urbanization, 133–39 Savings banks, 8, 122, 128, 132, 149; and advertising, 144; development of, 124–25, 127; and financial knowledge, 143–45, 147–48; legislation governing, 129–31; and modernity, 140, 143; and nation-state, 146–47, 148; significance of, in Republican era, 14, 123; and urbanization, 134–39 Savings deposits (chuxu), 122, 127, 130; growth in, 121, 128; and modernity, 123–24, 142; and urbanization, 123, 134 Savings industry: Chinese and Western contrasted, 128–29, 130, 149; geography of, 131–32, 148; and housewife manager, 137–39; institutional development of, 124–28; and modernity, 142, 143, 146; and nation-state, 147–48 Science: and Chinese language reform, 90–92, 95, 96; and Chinese scholarship, 102; and community of scientific discourse, 85–86, 92; and education, 102–3; and ethics, 97– 100; and the everyday, 71; and evolutionism, 107–14; influential role of, 87–88; limitations of, 103–5; and May Fourth New Culture Movement, 12, 80–82; and metaphysics debate, 80–81, 86, 103, 109, 111, 117; and modernity, 84, 96, 108; and peace, 99, 100–101; and humanities, 83–84, 96; and republicanism, 101; as unified knowledge system, 114–17 Science (Kexue) magazine, 12, 92, 103; and critique of science, 103, 104; and ethics, 98, 99, 100; and evolutionism, 108, 109–10, 111, 112; importance of,

341

342

Index Science (Kexue) magazine (continued) 83, 89; inaugural issue of, 101–2, 115; and language reform, 91–92, 94; and May Fourth New Culture Movement, 80–81; and politics, 90; and scientific worldview, 106–7 Scientific periodicals, 82–83; and scientific discourse, 96 Scott, James: on everyday resistance, 253 Self-development (ziwo fazhan): and eating or speaking bitterness, 239, 240, 241; and economic development, 230–31, 232; and female migrant laborers, 228, 229, 243, 252; in postMao China, 252; and suzhi (quality), 235–36, 243; of Xiaohong, 244–47, 250–51 Self-Help (Smiles), 236 Shanghai: business travel from, 213–19; cultural expenses of common people in, 25–26; food in, 34, 38, 40; infrastructural changes in, 9; lighting in, 7, 30; and modernity, 7, 158, 188, 198–99, 203, 220–21; printed mass media in, 10; and Republican-era politics, 178, 184; and savings, 125– 26, 127, 131, 132, 139, 148; and tourism from, 15–16, 198, 203–11; water in, 26–27, 316. See also China Traveler magazine; Shanghai traveler Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, 124, 131; advertising by, 127, 144; and China Travel Service, 200– 201, 223n9; and education, 143; on interest-earning savings, 126, 127; and Japanese incursion, 215–16; shift in geographic focus of, 216–17; and tourism, 199, 206 Shanghai traveler: and business travel, 218; as consumer, 210–11; and Republican era cosmopolitanism, 15–16,

198; as semi-colonizer, 220–21; and summer vacation sites, 206–11 Shen Jianshi, 165 Shop house. See Qilou Simmel, Georg, 4 Sin-hua Savings and Trust Bank, 125, 144; and History of Chinese Savings Banks, 122, 131, 132, 139, 140, 151n2; and My Savings Plan, 122–23, 132, 134–40, 143, 144, 147, 151n2; publications of, 122, 151n2; and savings plan essay contest, 122, 125–26, 131–32, 134–39, 144, 147 Skinner, G. William, 22 Smelser, Neil J., 141 Smiles, Samuel: Self-Help, 236 Smith, Dorothy, 245–46 Sociocultural history, 23, 51n66; role of, 25 Song Hanzhang, 131 Song Lanhe: on water legislation, 307 Song Shu (Song Pingzi), 73n3; attacks on foot binding, 12, 53–54, 59–60, 65–66 Southern Capital News: on recyclers, 260 Spivak, Gayatri, 243, 253–54 Strasser, Susan, 265 Subaltern Studies Group, 253 Subjectivity: and the everyday, 54, 71; gendered, 57, 62, 71, 74n18; of migrant female domestic workers, 19, 227, 243; modern, 55, 59, 100; new, 67; and post-Mao China, 230; and speaking bitterness, 241, 242; of Xiaohong, 247, 250, 253, 254 Sun Yat-sen: on bean curd, 33; and Fujian Rebellion, 185; on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, 221; and overseas Chinese, 174–75 Suzhi (quality): definition of, 255n1; discourse of, 19, 260; and economic

Index development, 230–31, 234; low, 244– 45, 246, 286; and migrants, 286, 296; of migrant women laborers, 227–28, 238, 243; and post-Mao modernity, 230, 252; and self-development, 235– 36, 240, 247, 248, 252

Tang Can: and Beijing recycling community, 282 Tang Yue: and Science magazine, 99, 116 Tan Kahkee: and overseas Chinese, 179, 182, 186 Taylor, Charles, 141, 149 Theweleit, Klaus, 60 Thompson, E. P., 324 Thomson, J. Arthur: An Introduction to Science, 116 Tianjin Guan Yinhao, 124 Tianqiao, 266; demise of, 271; as modern urban market, 268 Tolstoy, Leo, 106; critique of science, 103–5, 111 Transnational modernity: current resurgence of, 187–88; origins of, 158– 63; and physical changes in Xiamen, 167–73; and Xiamen overseas Chinese, 15, 157–58, 160–61, 163, 165, 175–76, 178 Travel in China: business, 215–19; by Chinese versus Westerners, 204–5; as consumption, 210–11; leisure, 203–6; as political investigation, 212–14; and summer vacation sites, 206–9; and tourism, 195, 196–98, 199, 220

Urban water resources: “domestication” of, 303–4; fees for, 8, 20, 314–17, 318; issues, 20; legal and institutional framework of, 305–8, 318; and litigation, 320–23; ownership of, 310–13; and rule of law, 303–4, 324–25; and

water supply contracts, 319–20; welfare versus market models of provision of, 308–10; and Yiwu-Dongyang agreement, 311–13. See also Piped water

Violence: in the everyday, 54, 59, 63–68, 71; in the family, 76n36; foot binding as, 63–65; imperialistic, 56; sources of, 68–69

Wang Jin, 102 Wang Weiping: on Beijing’s waste and recycling systems, 281, 293 Wang Yeping (wife of Jiang Zemin), 41 Wang Zhihua: History of Chinese Savings Banks, 122–23, 131, 139, 140, 151n3; My Savings Plan, 122–23, 132, 134–40, 143, 144, 147, 151n2 Water. See Urban water resources; Piped water Weber, Max, 84, 88; on modernization, 82; on rationalization, 117 Weeks, Kathi: on feminist concept of labor, 57, 74n18 Weng Zhaoyuan: and overseas Chinese, 183 Women: clothing of, 42–44, 51n58; dominant historiography on, 11; foot binding and, 12, 53–54, 63; and labor, 57, 60–63; and national strength, 58; rights of, 70; and savings, 137–39, 142, 148; theoretical role of, 55–56, 59; violence against, 63–69; and the “woman problem” (funü wenti), 52–53. See also Dagongmei (young migrant woman); Migrant female domestic workers Women and Chinese Modernity (Chow), 55–56, 71 Work unit. See Danwei

343

344

Index Worshipping things foreign (chongyang), 31 Wu Guoping: on ownership of water resources, 312–13 Wu Zhihui: and language reform, 93–94

Xiamen, 168, 171; and historical discourse, 164–67; and Hokkien people, 161, 162; and overseas Chinese, 15, 156, 157–61, 167–74, 182–83, 187–88; and qilou (shop houses), 170, 172–74; and Republican era politics, 175–82, 185; urban modernization of, 160, 167–74, 176, 181 Xiamen University Institute of Sinology (Guoxue Xueyuan), 187; historical discourse and, 165–67; staff of, 165 Xiaohong, 227–28, 236, 253; selfdevelopment of, 244–51; work experiences of, 243–44, 252 Xie Lihua: on self-development of migrant women, 239–40; on speaking bitterness, 242 Xu Youchao (Eduardo Coseteng): early life of, 181–82; and Fujian Rebellion, 185–86; and overseas Chinese, 179; and Xiamen municipal government, 161, 182–83

Yan Fu, 89, 91 Yang Feng: and women migrants, 239– 40, 241–42, 243 Yang Quan, 99, 100, 101; writings of, 103, 104–7

Yao Denian: on civil contracts, 319 Yeh Wen-hsin, 135, 136; Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity, 13–14 Ye Qiuyuan: on Japanese in Dalian, 219– 20; on modern tourism, 195–96, 211 Young migrant woman. See Dagongmei Yuan Shikai, 10, 129, 213 Yu Songhua: and China Traveler, 204–5

Z

eng Guofan, 121, 140 Zhang Chunfan: and China Traveler, 210–11 Zhang Junmai, 103 Zhang Qinshi: and China Traveler, 212–13 Zhang Xianliang: on rationing, 356–37 Zhang Yufen: and China Traveler, 214 Zhang Zhidong, 64 Zhan Tianyou, 83 Zhao Junhao: and China Traveler, 204 Zhao Yuanren: writings of, 94, 115 Zhong Wenao: and language reform, 94, 118n15 Zhou Enlai, 273–74 Zhouji Environmental Technology Company, 293–95, 298 Zhou Shoujuan: and China Traveler, 201, 210 Zhou Xingnan, 191n42; and Xiamen municipal administration, 175, 183 Zhou Xuexi, 124 Zhuang Xiquan: and overseas Chinese, 176–77 Zhu Suli: on law in China, 325 Zi Yaohua, 215 ÆiØek, Slavoj, 55–56