Being Modern in China

A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today

Paul Willis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509538317, 9781509538300
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet.

Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience. In its closed walls and the inescapability of its 'scores', an astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old, with a tapestry of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs, secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies.

By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of society that it is today: a society that is obsessed with the future and at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.

1
The Chinese Scene

Development is of overriding importance.
Reform is the only way for China to develop its productive forces.

Deng Xiaoping

Where class struggle was the ruling ideology in Maoist times, economic development is the ruling ideology in China today. It is impossible to exaggerate the degree to which this single term, ‘development’, continues to permeate all official political discourse, often as well in casual conversations, about the state of China’s ‘progress’ – almost always framed in unilineal terms by way of comparison with the ‘West’. The ‘hard truths’ of development have been faced practically and ruthlessly and at all levels. Stagnation was ended with the thunderclap of ‘at-all-costs’ development with Deng’s ‘reform and opening up’ of 1978, implemented with full force in 1992. This has been followed by a hundredfold increase in the country’s GDP over the last thirty-five years, which has buried altogether the Maoist obsession with the destruction of feudal relics and the hunting down of ‘capitalist roaders’. World history has never seen such a colossal volte-face. You could say that China has heroically explored every nook and cranny and extreme of the human forms of social organization before stumbling on the ‘magic formula’ for success, or at least potent nostrums for achieving astounding economic growth. The astonishing economic growth of China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty, contributing no less than 70 per cent to the worldwide total of such advances in recent history.

Official narratives often conveniently package China’s surge into modernity as a specifically Chinese phenomenon, putting aside though still learning from and honouring past ‘errors’. The nostrums are, however, at bottom rather conventional and under different circumstances might have been tried much earlier: market freedoms, industrial production for world markets, wage labour instead of peasant subsistence, and urbanization with internal migration, albeit on a scale such as the world has never before seen. This huge social change is usually characterized not as a social process but as a matter of achieved results presented in quantified graphics and metrics of economic and technical progress. Statistical representation has driven out class representation. Class or class-related thinking does not figure in popular and official representations, even as Gini coefficients soar, and economic fate, whether market or Communist Party-mediated, or both, decisively settles very unequal social destinies. The ruling ideology of economic development in China is presented usually merely as a matter of common sense – always a sign of the presence of ideology. Deng had a number of folksy sayings to convey the earnest pragmatism of China’s early efforts at reform. The country and its leaders were ‘crossing the river by feeling for stones’. On the other side of Deng’s river, of course, lay the market economy. Indeed, Deng had another pithy little saying to cover any difficulties here: he didn’t ‘care if it is a white cat or a black cat. As long as it catches mice it is a good cat.’ Also he didn’t mind if ‘some people get rich first’ – with the emphasis very much on the last word, leaving a hanging promise for the masses.

This wholesale practical and ideological reordering is also a cultural reordering. In Maoist times workers were seen as the ‘leading class’ and their culture celebrated – incidentally, exams were abolished and proclaimed the enemy of the working class – and according to modern-day textbooks they continue to enjoy the same status, though in practice the cultures and the struggles of workers and migrants are ignored or looked upon as problems in need of correction. ‘The poor’ are a continuing policy focus and are addressed by successive five-year development plans. Much like its antecedents, the thirteenth five-year plan, unveiled in 2016, and pronouncements from the nineteenth Party Congress in 2017 highlight the party’s aim of lifting ever more people out of poverty through further urbanization and market liberalization. But, in esteem and popular cultural estimation, ‘the poor’ are ignored and have no recognition except as ‘losers’, or as fodder for sneering at. This is in total contrast to the Maoist-era view of poverty as imbued with a distinctly positive moral valence bearing intrinsic value, not least as an assumed vow of allegiance to the communist cause.

Although there are compulsory classes on Marxism in schools and universities, there is very little or no Chinese Marxist class analysis applied now, despite the blistering and obvious presence of the raw market relations which must produce unequal social class formation. Certainly in official announcements, but also still to an extent in popular belief, there is a strong view that China is different: it is a socialist not a class-based society. This firm vestigial belief still continues to provide a framework even for understanding modern times: China may be a market economy, but it is a socialist market economy. Yes, society is changing very rapidly, but along lines of advancing modernity, not along lines of exploitative class formation. Markets are simply tools to be used for the development of planned modernization, not for the rise of the bourgeoisie and private wealth. Though China is manifestly a market economy in most of its economic functions and relations, with according to the China Daily more billionaires than the United States,¹ there is a continuing belief emanating from the top, and still widely shared, that somehow its market economy is quite unlike Western models: markets can be deployed discretely for socialist development purposes and do not change the essence of society, which remains, despite many anomalies and social problems yet to be sorted out, essentially homogeneous in nature. This is part and parcel of a persistent and omnipresent theme of ‘harmoniousness’ in society, now increasingly glossed in Confucian as well as in socialist ‘core values’ ways. Official accounts highlight not the tumultuous revolutions but the continuities and special characteristics of Chinese history in its march to its own kind of historical destiny separate from, and certainly not mimicking, Western experience. A history orchestrated from above, and imaginatively rehabilitated, stresses the continuity of culture and the accumulated wisdom of 5000 years of civilization. A highly selectively embraced (neo-)Confucianism – formerly despised during the Maoist era – is also making a party-led comeback. The dominant narrative presents China as an ‘eternal culture’ now at last within sight of regaining its ‘proper’ and central place on the world stage. This ‘rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ was announced on his arrival at the top by President Xi Jinping as his signature policy and stamped the ‘Chinese Dream’, curiously but typically both flattering and menacing the USA.

As President Xi gathers strength, he reinforces and embellishes his signature messages. In 2016 the party added ‘core leader’ to Xi’s other titles, and in November 2017 the five-yearly National Congress of the Communist Party of China unanimously granted a further five years’ office to the president and prepared the ground for an unprecedented extension to his reign in five years’ time. It also voted to add Xi’s ‘thoughts’ to the constitution, the first leader since Mao to be so honoured with such a constitutional amendment while still alive. Deng Xiaoping’s ‘theory’ (ranked lower than ‘thoughts’ in China) was not inserted until after his death. In a speech to Congress lasting three and a half hours, President Xi proclaimed, ‘Government, military, society and schools – north, south, east and west – the party is leader of all.’ At the end of the Congress the official news agency, Xinhua, reported the spirit of the meeting and the logical destination and outcome of the Chinese ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘dream’ now in progress: ‘By 2050, two centuries after the opium wars, which plunged the “middle kingdom” into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and re-ascend to the top of the world.’ In his speech President Xi confidently presented ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as a ‘new choice’ for developing nations, so challenging the long-held and dominant orthodoxy, in the West at least, that ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’ go hand in hand. There is a different path and a different view of modernity presented now by the Chinese model. This is of a tech-savvy, strong one-party state confidently directing and presiding over an ample market flexibility which produces affluence and social direction, but without the setbacks, pitfalls and failures that so evident currently attend Western democracies.

Alongside this reimagining, disinfection and glorification of history at the super-structural level runs a very practical and widespread commodification of things past. With huge variation across such a vast country, there is a nevertheless a clear trend for historical types and traditional items to be repackaged in commercial simulacra. All over China, what are essentially artificially constructed ‘theme parks’ are being developed to display ‘peasant ways’, ‘traditional life’, ‘rural rituals’ and ‘folk dancing’, especially as associated with China’s fifty-six ‘glorious ethnic minority groups’. Likewise, guided tours of ‘authentic Beijing’ show tourists around ‘preserved’, rebuilt or, in some cases, newly built ‘hutongs’.² Actually most of the latter, as obstacles to ‘development’, have been cleared away to make space for skyscrapers but have now become an essential symbol of traditional China for purposes of tourist development.

The astonishing and recent rise of the new tourist industry is part of the continuing and dizzying pace of economic change, with China now entering into the so-called new normal³ – itself a telling phrase and window onto the Chinese enigma where the only norm that holds is that no norms hold. In the ‘new normal’ it is planned that there will still be medium-high growth, but ‘only’ of 6.5 to 7 per cent instead of more than 10 per cent, and an emphasis on services and consumption rather than on heavy industry, manufacturing and investment. Historical, ethnic and traditional sites, cultures and practices are packaged up, along with anything else which can be ‘commoditized’, in the rapidly expanding field of services and leisure options made available to the ‘workers’, who are now explicitly being invited to become ‘consumers’ as well as ‘producers’. The promotion of the ‘new normal’ is probably an ex post facto rationalization and justification of an already emerging reality on the ground, as the ‘Vietnam price’ nudges aside the ‘China price’ for cheap manufactures. In double quick time, historically speaking, China now has its own abandoned factories and ‘rust belts’ emerging, especially in the north east (another strange echo of the United States) – just such as they inflicted upon the West in still recent times. China has to move as massively towards consumption and services now as it once moved towards manufacturing in order to soak up displaced workers and continuing mass migration from the countryside.

Finding identity and understanding of place in modernizing China thus occurs upon the shifting sands of a stunning and unforgiving pace of continuous change. Relentlessly sustained over the last thirtyfive years, as I said a moment ago – and it bears repeating – this has made ‘fundamental change’ normal and ‘no change’ abnormal in China. Perhaps this is a kind of new human condition, certainly so on such a colossal scale and at such a pace of unremitting economic and technological change. By comparison, even after Brexit and the rise of Trumpism, the situation in the West looks rather boring and stagnant! China has seen several decades of double-digit growth in a nearly unimaginable population of 1.4 billion, with its fifty-six ethnic minorities alongside the majority Han (88 per cent) scattered across a continent. It has shifted from an agrarian to a now mostly urban/industrial (51 per cent) society in the wink of a historical eye. The different generations represent virtually different modes of production, often contained within single generations. England was the first country to industrialize and urbanize, but China is proceeding ten times faster and with a hundred times the population. So, to an English observer, China appears to be industrializing and urbanizing, hurtling towards the future at around 1000 times the velocity of the original English model!

To be clear, China is not an old English movie phenomenally sped up. China today is simply a new phenomenon. The time warps, enigmas and contradictions abound, led and framed by the macrovista of an all-powerful Communist Party, now tightening its grip, overseeing the world’s biggest-by-far capitalist market and industrial expansion. In public places, blatant large-scale adverts for Western luxury goods sit atop traditional slogans proclaiming ‘core socialist values’. That Mecca of sport built for the masses, the massive and impressive Workers’ Stadium in Sanlitun in the heart of Beijing, has embedded in its circling walls a series of glitzy showrooms for only top-end motors on prominent display: Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Lotus and Ferrari. Everyday life provides astonishing contiguities of the very old and the very new. Jumping a millennium, in the great coastal mega-cities, the fingers of peasant workers in factories and warehouses move around machinery and machine tools, and increasingly computer control panels, as if they were farmers’ ploughs and hoes, somehow all of a piece, both equally straightforward. Not hapless Charlie Chaplins wandering into the modern factory, causing havoc with carelessly dropped spanners, but peasant workers moving straight to their machines or computer screens, seamlessly with no disjunctions. At night, city-dwelling factory workers return to their living quarters, often cramped and overcrowded hell-holes, to move their fingers over screens again, but this time ordering consumer goods or booking train tickets months in advance for their annual pilgrimage home for the Chinese New Year Spring Festival. They want to return home for the Spring Festival because most of these workers are rural migrants to the city,⁴ often from very far away. They are subject to a caste-like system of household registration, Hukou, which links them administratively to the place of their birth. Despite some limited changes and ‘reforms’ in some cities, generally speaking migrant workers have no educational, property or social security rights in their adoptive cities. The same applies to the children they leave at home – the so-called left-behind children. This adds a compelling reason, of course, for the once a year return. These workers have no official presence in the mega-cities which their endless labours have produced and which figure so prominently in the Chinese miracle. Their annual pilgrimage in the Spring Festival, by which they lay such great store, is to their ancestral place of origin, which officials and city folk think is really their ‘home’, where they really belong, even though they are hardly ever there. There are many separating abodes of mind, body and place in China. There are 22,000 kilometres, expanding apace, of bullet-train track criss-crossing the country. At 300 kilometres an hour – shortly to be increased to 350 – the trains whistle over feudal-like strips of land, some still tilled as they have been for the last 200 years – by peasant hands holding hoes or gathering crops or straw. These are the individuals that remain after the flight to the city, though at night those same peasant hands also move across computer screens, ordering the same consumer goods as their city counterparts, both preparing for the great reunion at Spring Festival.

Not seen before, this troubled and contradictory modernity has seen worlds turned upside down three times in living memory. Generations can be strangers to each other in much of their daily lived experience. Within generations, too, huge gaps and incomprehension can be created by vast horizontal geographic as well as vertical mobility and stark contrasts and oppositions between city and village life, to say nothing of systemic market, commodity fetishistic and digital reorderings across the board. Sometimes I picture and understand this in a particularly English way, perhaps portentous but analytically sharp. We might see in all this a ‘dissociation of sensibility’. This term is taken from the world of literary critic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Preface
• Introduction and Theoretical Groundings
• 1 The Chinese Scene
• Part I Modernity’s Symbolic Order
• Part II Education’s Symbolic Order
• Part III The View from the Saved
• Part IV Closing Portraits
• Index
• End User License Agreement