Making Place

State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China

Stephan Feuchtwang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844720101
• eBook ISBN: 9781135393557
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures.

Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state.<br><br>

In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption.

The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

Part 1:
Urban Places

Chapter 2

Mapping ‘Chaos’: The Dong Xi Fo Feuds of Quanzhou, 1644–1839

Wang Mingming

Introduction

Not long ago, places were treated as locations of a space-time considered to be universal but accommodated in culturally specific representations and social experiences. Recently, a re-conceptualisation led some anthropologists to reverse this relationship. Contrary to the conception of local communities shaped as arenas of protest against expanding nations and the globe, the word ‘place’ was redefined and redeciphered as itself a forceful sensual and conceptual construction of attachment. The attachment is universally pervasive, not the premise either of universal or of globalised space and time (Feld and Basso (eds) 1996). To ‘bring places back in’ anthropologists have worked closely with cultural geographers and philosophers to give new qualities to place in which the universality of experience and structure of feeling in the body-place matrix weighs more than the materiality of local space-times (Casey 1996). While such studies of place can be compelling, they make me think of the different vision that sinological anthropologist Maurice Freedman a few decades ago tried to convey to us, in which a more historically informed sense of place is entailed.

In the early 1960s, Freedman had criticised village-place ethnographies of China for blinding us to the ‘entirety of Chinese society’ (1979a [1963]). A decade later, in 1974, he published another essay entitled ‘The politics of an old state’ in which he once again criticised ethnographies of Chinese communities. In it he expressed a fear that ‘in the next phase of the social anthropology of China the fieldworkers become again, as they were in the 1930s, so intoxicated with the present that they forget that China has a past’ (1979b [1974]: 350). Instead, sinological anthropologists should advance up to the limit of our competence as anthropologists and then ‘turn for enlightenment to historians’. By ‘history’ Freedman meant a perspective that transcended fieldwork in small places in order to capture the holistic complexity of Chinese society. On the other hand, his history had such a sociological emphasis that it lacked the more usual characteristics of events, processes, biographic references, and temporal locations. As I have argued elsewhere (Wang 1997: 66–111), in exposing the unity of diversities, Freedman showed his own limits in his neglect of temporal trajectories.

In spite of these critical points on which I still insist, I will open this chapter by paying a tribute to Freedman. In social anthropology in general, Freedman was the first – though so far unacknowledged by anthropologists of other regions – to regard ethnographic places as limiting the competence of the anthropologist and treated histories as opening our eyes to the worlds of culture. In his essay on the politics of an old state, quoting extensively from historians, Freedman urged us to become sensitive to how the different official and social topographies of places, regions, and organisations could be linked into an official map. In one of the final paragraphs, Freedman said:

… administrative maps drew their lines for marking out jurisdictions which might fit only roughly, if they fitted at all, with the conformation of communities and their groupings. The advent of a local militia system, based upon previous groupings of gentry and the local communities (lineages, villages, and aggregations of lineages and villages) to which they belonged, introduced the social map of China into the official map (1979b: 350).

For me this is a point of departure to raise further questions. Was there really one map that at once marked out the boundary and offered a linkage between the social and official imageries of place? If there was, then how, where, and by whom had it been drawn? Did the authors who brushed the map’s lines not have different perceptions about where different landmarks should be emphasised?¹ Can the state be spoken about in richer and more specific historical terms than the recent institution of gentry-led militia to which he referred in ‘The politics of an old state’? In what sense can we say that the anthropology of extensive networks and linkages has advantages over place-concerned ethnographies?

In proposing possible answers to these questions here I shall examine the historical and cultural interactions that occurred in a particular duration of time in a particular region where the people of Southeast China were making efforts to come to terms with themselves and others. In particular, I explore a phenomenon, a ‘customary practice’ (fengsu), widely reported in local official documents and historical literature, the perceived chaos (luan) of practices known as Dong Xi Fo xiedou (feuds between Eastern and Western Buddha alliances) in Quanzhou.

In Chinese luan has, through history, been defined by contrast and in relation to zhi (order). In the official historiography of both the dynasties and regions of China luan and zhi have been employed to account for the alternation of chaos and order. The ideal model is the apocalypse-like but cyclical replacement of zhi for luan. Whereas luan refers to political unrest, internal rivalries and external disturbances, zhi can mean order, ordering, governance, and pacification, in a word, the conquest of disorder. The linguistic interrelationship between luan and zhi has been perceived as dialectical. That is to say, for the Chinese, zhi has no meaning without the contrasting referent of luan. Also, strategically speaking, during certain historical times, luan could mean political measures to conquer chaos by inducing chaos. Throughout this chapter I seek to shed light on regional performances of this dialectic.

Specifically, my history has benefited greatly from two papers presented by a local scholar-official in responding to the call made by a newly arrived magistrate in 1839. The two papers explored the transformation of territorial feuds and sought to develop a political solution to the social problem they posed (Chen Buchan 1992a, 1992b [1839]; quoted also in Fu 1992: 149–55). In 1839, when the two papers were written, the feuds were dealt with as chaos. But in earlier episodes of history, they had been directly advocated and managed by the magistrates with the emperor’s permission. A simple sketch view of the story is this: Dong Xi Fo feuds in Quanzhou were part of a regional tradition of ‘receiving the gods in the contests of society’ or, simply, ‘conferences of gods’ (yingshen saihui). They were re-invented as festivals of contest by Lan Li, a magistrate who was keen to re-enliven the city with his art of geomancy. They became feuds when the involved parties gained independence from the office of the magistrate. Paradoxically, they became most powerfully autonomous when officials themselves were identified with the divided neighbourhoods and consequentially lost their efficacy as officials. By 1839, near the year of the Opium War with Britain in 1842, they had become a matter of great concern for the dynastic integrity of China.

I connect the above-mentioned papers with other data that I have amassed during the past decade concerning local elites, neighbourhoods, territorial cults, pilgrimages, and feuds in Quanzhou. With these materials, I intend to show how an analysis engaging events, life histories, process, and traditions can help illustrate the interrelationships between place and region and between region and the state. Situating my discussion of feuds in a sequence of historical changes in a specific regional context, I seek to answer the following specific questions: in different historical periods, how did the socio-logic of feuds fit into or contradict changing imperial politics and local society? Can the concept of an official map explain all the particular happenings in history? Should we simply say that all that happened was in line with the cosmological shape and propensity (xingshi) of the empire?

The chapter starts with an introduction to Quanzhou, its 1839 crisis, and the documents of feuds that provide a geographic and historical context for my inquiry. I will then relate the particular documents to other available historical sources on feuds to reconstruct the history of changing official attitudes to the feuds. I locate the two magistrates, Lan Li and Liu Yaochun, who went to govern Quanzhou in greatly different historical periods – respectively in the Kangxi Reign (the early 18th century) and the Daoguang Reign (1839) – at the core of a historical comparison.

Quanzhou 1839, Crisis and the Documents on Feuds

In early Qing, the city of Quanzhou changed from a location of Ming Chinese civilisation into a battlefield where the Manchu forces fought to incorporate Taiwan into the new empire of the Qing dynasty. For the whole of the 18th century, it was turned into a municipality commanding an extensive prefecture to which not only the old rural counties but also newly conquered Taiwan were attached. With all the ethnic and social confrontations prevalent at the time, Quanzhou became a place that was full of contradictory interactions among different social forces, including scholar-officials, officials, scholar-gentry, secret societies, smugglers, migrants, and brotherhood associations.

Quanzhou had become an early Qing frontier position. The expanding Western world system gave private traders and smugglers from Quanzhou new opportunities to grow in new ways. On the other hand, by the 1830s, the Qing court and some local social groups had become wary of the economic forms, culture, and military forces of the Far West. From 1836, opium trade in the coastal areas became a focal point of political debate that divided Qing ministers and regional magistrates into rival groups. After two years of court debate, the Throne received a moving memorial from a senior minister Huang Juezi who had probed into the seriousness of the situation.² A decision was reached in the court in Huang’s favour. But between then and the late 19th century, the emperors who ruled China oscillated between a hard-line and a soft-line attitude towards the foreigners.

Despite the fact that feuds had come to the attention of officialdom as early as the 16th century (Zheng 1998a), the most detailed reports and discussions were written and compiled in the 19th century (Lamley 1990). As I mentioned, the papers that I have found provide a thread linking other data on the same phenomenon into a clear historical perspective of Quanzhou’s feuds, but were themselves written in the year of 1839, a few months after Huang Juezi handed his memorial to the emperor. Written as policy recommendations for the new magistrate who sought to stop feuds, they reflected on feuds in Quanzhou in 1839 with reference to a long-term perspective of historical transformation.

The new leading official in Quanzhou was a man called Liu Yaochun, a man from the northern province of Shandong. A couple of months before Lin Zexu was appointed as Admiral to end the practice of opium trade, Liu had been sent to Quanzhou to take a new position, general commissioner of the military regions (dao) under the old prefecture (zhou) of Quanzhou.³ Obviously, Liu Yaochun was a senior official siding with the anti-opium faction in the imperial court. Like his senior colleague Admiral Lin Zexu, Liu Yaochun had internalised Confucian models of order and control. He believed in the enterprise of organising loosely dispersed local groups into organised brave local militia warriors (xiangyong) who could resist the challenge from the outside. But in the first few days of his stay in Quanzhou, it became apparent that the situation was more complex than he had imagined. When the ships of foreign merchant-military invaders⁴ anchored in the harbour of Xiamen, a garrison town and navy base under Quanzhou prefecture, small-scale confrontations between the Qing army and the British occurred. To Liu Yaochun, local groups would naturally join the Qing army to fight the foreigners. But in fact the presence of aggressive outsiders seemed not to yield the expected spontaneous gathering of insiders’ self-defence forces.

Quanzhou, the ‘emporium of the world’ (Schottenhammer (ed) 2001) famous for its maritime trade for many centuries, had been one of the homes of opium smugglers since the 18th century. By the early 19th century, smugglers, secret societies, and corrupt officials had grown notoriously. Now, while Lin Zexu and many patriotic officials were struggling against their rival political factions in the court for the sake of an anti-opium movement, many of these groups were enjoying the profits that they continued to gain from opium trade (Zhuang 1985: 294–303). What was worse, upon Liu Yaochun’s arrival, internal rivalries connected with the old binary divisions of feuding once again broke out. In the first few days (in the fifth lunar month) of his stay, the whole city of Quanzhou was divided into two rival factions. One was called Eastern Buddha (Dong Fo), and the other was called Western Buddha (Xi Fo). The feuds, or xiedou, which involved a hundred or so temple areas within the city and in the suburbs (especially in Nan’an and Jinjiang counties), were outcomes of social linkages that pulled different urban neighbourhoods and rural villages into factional conflicts.

These feuding neighbourhoods and groups were organised in the name of an official neighbourhood system pujing (wards and precincts). According to one of Liu’s forerunners Huaiyin Bu, who was the Qianlong Reign magistrate of Quanzhou, the system was initially devised to be one for local administration units operating under the government and its police force (Huaiyin Bu 1763: juan 3). Anti-opium campaigners had talked a lot about such neighbourhood entities as potential sources for trained xiangyong, or brave local militia warriors, which could be channelled into defending the ‘inside’ (nei, China) against the ‘outside’ (wai, Britain) (see Kuhn 1980 [1970]). But the networks named in the rival terms of the East and the West were not the sort of solidarity that Liu and his superiors desired. Instead, they were intra-prefectural divisions in which brotherhood associations brought neighbourhoods and their territorial cult organisations together to fight against their own kinds.⁵

China’s defeat in the Opium War pressed thinkers such as Wei Yuan, the author of Haiguo Tuzhi (The Cartographic Gazetteer of Ocean States), into the remapping of the world and its new military and political geography. As merely one of the many provincial governors who served the court during that difficult period of transition, Liu Yaochun did not have such a far-reaching vision. Wondering how he could bring feuds to an end quickly, he summoned all the local smart men to respond to the problem:

Feuds, illegal captures, and robberies are most serious in Quanzhou. How can we solve the problem when it has already been like this? How can we prevent them from happening when it is developing into something like this? Should we bring the troops together and make ext...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Notes on the contributors
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Urban Places
• Part 2: Rural Places
• Afterword
• Index