Popular Protest And Political Culture In Modern China

Second Edition

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, Elizabeth Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813320434
• eBook ISBN: 9780429974458
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique asiatique

This innovative and widely praised volume uses the dramatic occupation of Tiananmen Square as the foundation for rethinking the cultural dimensions of Chinese politics. Now in a revised and expanded second edition, the book includes enhanced coverage of key issues, such as the political dimensions of popular culture (addressed in a new chapter on Chinese rock-and-roll by Andrew Jones) and the struggle for control of public discourse in the post-1989 era (discussed in a new chapter by Tony Saich). Two especially valuable additions to the second edition are art historian Tsao Tsing-yuan's eyewitness account of the making of the Goddess of Democracy, and an exposition of Chinese understandings of the term ?revolution? contributed by Liu Xiaobo, one of China's most controversial dissident intellectuals. The volume also includes an analysis (by noted social theorist and historical sociologist Craig C. Calhoun) of the similarities and differences between the ?new? social movements of recent decades and the ?old? social movements of earlier eras.TEXT CONCLUSION: To facilitate classroom use, the volume has been reorganized into groups of interrelated essays. The editors introduce each section and offer a list of suggested readings that complement the material in that section.

Part One
General Frameworks

The two chapters in this thematic part were written by historians who share both an interest in the symbolic dimensions of Chinese politics and a common concern with the central role that appeals to the past can play in contemporary struggles for power. In their efforts to place the rhetoric and actions of 1989 in perspective, the authors introduce many historical events (such as the May Fourth Movement of 1919) and theoretical concepts (such as the notion of "civil society") that will figure prominently in later chapters by other contributors. The chapters in Part 1 also provide concrete illustrations that help to flesh out several of the general points raised in the preceding Introduction, including the suggestion that China specialists can learn a great deal from the approach to the study of political culture adopted by historians of the French Revolution. Young's discussion of the extent to which revolutionaries define their cause in opposition to an image of the "ancien régime" that they themselves have helped to craft fits in well with the arguments presented in some of the works on 1789 mentioned below in our list of supplementary materials, and the same is true of Esherick and Wasserstrom's discussion of political theater and political ritual.

Recommended Supplementary Materials for Classroom Use

Scholarship on China: Contemporary Politics

Bergere, Marie-Claire. "Tiananmen 1989: Background and Consequences." In Marta Dassu and Tony Saich, eds., The Reform Decade in China: From Hope to Dismay. London: Kegan Paul International, 1990, pp. 132-150. A brief summary of the social, cultural, economic, and political factors leading up to the protest and repression of 1989, by one of France's pre-eminent China specialists.

Pieke, Frank. "The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Life and Protest in the Reform Era" (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1991). A detailed participant-observer account, which emphasizes the ritualized aspects of mass action and the connections between patterns of protest and patterns of daily life.

Pye, Lucian. "Tiananmen and Chinese Political Culture: The Escalation of Confrontation from Moralizing to Rage." Asian Survey, vol. 30, no. 4 (1990), pp. 331-347. An assessment of the events leading up to the massacre of early June, by a leading China specialist whose approach to political culture is quite different than that which informs this volume (see the preceding Introduction).

Wagner, Rudolph. "Political Institutions, Discourse, and Imagination in China at Tiananmen." In Jon Manor, ed., Rethinking Third World Politics. London: Longman, 1991, pp. 121-144. A study of the symbolic dimensions of the events of 1989 by one of Germany's leading China specialists; parts of it complement the arguments presented here.

Zweig, David. "Peasants and Politics." World Policy Journal (Fall 1989), pp. 633-645. Zweig analyzes the impact that the urban protests of 1989 had on the inhabitants of the Chinese countryside and rural responses to the massacre.

Scholarship on China: Historical Perspectives

Huang, Philip C. C, et al. Symposium "Public Sphere"/"Civil Society" in China? A special issue of Modern China, vol. 19, no. 2 (1993). A series of interconnected essays by six social scientists and historians, each of whom advances a different view concerning the perils and possibilities of using the terms in question as lenses through which to examine China's past and present.

Israel, John. "Reflections on 'Reflections on the Modern Chinese Student Movement.'" In the first edition of Wasserstrom and Perry, Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, pp. 85-108. An analysis of China's long tradition of campus activism; ends with comments that place 1989 within the broad historical framework provided by the main body of the essay.

MacFarquhar, Roderick. "Epilogue: The Onus of Unity." In Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 15: The People's Republic of China, Part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 875-881. A concise effort to place the events of 1989 into a broad historical perspective, in which MacFarquhar focuses on the emphasis Chinese political leaders of different eras have placed on the need for national unity; he also highlights the contrasting leadership styles of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

Madsen, Richard. "The Countryside Under Communism." In Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 15: The People's Republic of China, Part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 619-681. Madsen surveys aspects of rural life, including the nature of village rituals, that have and have not changed since 1949; the work of a sociologist deeply concerned with cultural issues.

Nathan, Andrew J. Chinese Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1985. A survey of democratic thought and action from the late nineteenth century up through the Democracy Wall protests of the late 1970s.

Comparative Works and Case Studies of Other Countries

Davis, Natalie. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. A collection of essays by a leading figure associated with both the development of the "new" social history and the "new" cultural history; many of the pieces focus on the ritualized and theatrical aspects of riots and other types of collective action.

Furet, François, Keith Michael Baker, and Colin Lucas, eds. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Three Volumes. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987, 1988, and 1989. A collection of topical essays on everything from the changing meanings of specific terms (such as "ancien régime" and "revolution") to the evolution of key institutions (such as the National Assembly); the collection includes chapters by each of the co-editors and many other leading scholars of the French Revolution.

Hunt, Lynn. "The Sacred in the French Revolution." In Jeffrey Alexander, ed., Durk-heimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 25-43. A concise survey of the symbolic struggles and ritual acts that accompanied and helped shape the course of the French Revolution.

Lukes, Steven. "Political Ritual and Social Integration." Sociology, vol. 9, no. 2 (1975), pp. 289-308. A critical review of the literature on official ceremonials, which stresses the similarities between these events and acts of social protest.

Thompson, E. P. "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture." Journal of Social History, vol. 7, no. 4 (1974), pp. 382-405. Thompson discusses the efficacy and limitations of the hegemony of the eighteenth-century British gentry, which depended heavily upon theatrical displays of benevolence but was continually being challenged by a "counter theatre of threat and sedition."

Primary Sources

Barmé, Geremie, and Linda Jaivin, eds. New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (New York: Times Books, 1992), Section II: "Bindings," pp. 117-212. A selection of works of fiction and essays by Chinese dissidents, past and present, who highlight the negative impact that a variety of cultural practices and structures (ranging from the binding of women's feet in earlier times, to contemporary political arrangements that constrain individual creativity) have had on the people of China.

Mao Zedong. "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan." In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 42-47. Along with presenting a passionate defense of a specific uprising, Mao's essay paints a vivid picture of the oppressive nature of village life in pre-Communist China.

Su Xiaokang et al. Deathsong of the River: A Reader's Guide to the Chinese TV Series He-shang. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1991, edited by Richard W. Bodman and Pin P. Wan. The complete script of the influential miniseries of the late 1980s, which uses a variety of symbolic devices to suggest that many features of the ancien régime that the Communist Party claimed to have defeated in 1949 continue to plague contemporary China.

1
Imagining the Ancien Régime in the Deng Era

Ernest P. Young

Revolutionaries hasten to break eggs in order to make fresh omelets, we are told, whereas reformers favor less strenuous recipes for change, by which the ingredients are more gently and gradually introduced. The distinction strongly colors our ideas of political or social reform. It is with such vocabulary that we have marked the great turn taken by China after the death of Mao Zedong: from continuing the revolution to reformist modernization. Although both Mao and Deng Xiaoping have aspired to change China profoundly, under Deng the methods would minimize violence and hew to a practical gradualism, in contrast to the headlong ruthlessness of Mao's transformational mobilizations. One of the jarring aspects, then, of the brutal suppression of the Chinese protests of 1989 is the incongruity between the reformist character of Deng Xiaoping's regime since 1978 and its most unreformist attack on people who at least potentially were among reform's most enthusiastic constituents. In other words, why was the very embodiment of China's opening up, both to the outside and with respect to domestic economic and social organization, acting in a way that was so pernicious for the long-run success and development of those reforms? Why was the key player in the retreat from radicalism acting so recklessly? How could such a reformer be such a repressor?

The simplest explanation may be the best. One can argue that Deng's first priority had always been power and the perpetuation of the system that seemed to grant that power. He was willing to reform so far, but no further, and he always stopped when the reforms began to threaten the autocracy According to this argument, Deng has always been a pragmatist who would use ideological claims to gain support for his programs but never let ideology get in the way of a practical concern with maintaining existing power relations. This kind of argument carries a good deal of weight because spring 1989 was not, after all, the first time since Deng's ascendancy that a liberal oppositional voice had been silenced.

Despite its attractions arid a degree of fundamental validity, this explanation is problematic in two ways. First, it is so general that it applies to the behavior of political leaderships in many times and places. Second, it underestimates the continuing importance of ideological concerns within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The search for finer explanations must, therefore, go on. One useful way to particularize an analysis of June 4, 1989, is to locate the Deng era within China's broader modern experience.

I follow here the lead of Paul Cohen. He has argued that Deng Xiaoping's modernization program can be understood as the continuation of "a kind of mainstream Chinese reformism" that reaches back in the modern era to the Self-Strengtheners of the late nineteenth century.¹ Cohen wishes to persuade us that the regimes of the Empress Dowager Cixi (for the years 1898-1900), of President Yuan Shikai, and of President Chiang Kaishek in the Nanjing era were reformist in many of the same ways that Deng's has been. Deng's version of modernization, he says, has shared more, though certainly not every thing, with those unlikely predecessors than with the socially transformational or politically redistributive impulses of the Taiping rebels (1850-1864), the 1898 reform movement, the 1911 revolution, or the PRC in the early 1950s (not to mention the Maoist era of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution). The bent of his argument is not to affirm Deng's reformist credentials, about which there would be little disagreement. Rather, he tries to establish and define the reformist character of the programs of Cixi, Yuan Shikai, and Chiang Kaishek, so that placing Deng in their line of succession becomes plausible.

Having shown how autocrats of earlier decades shared the reformism of Deng, Cohen then turns around and notes how Deng shares their authoritarianism: "The fact is, Deng's reforms are guided by a very potent ideology—we may call it an ideology of 'authoritarian modernization'—and it is precisely this ideology that Deng shares with his non-Communist predecessors."² Although he recognizes the vast differences in international and domestic circumstances between pre-1949 China and that of the 1980s, Cohen was moved by his analysis to a degree of skepticism about the future of reform under Deng. In a 1988 publication, he argued the need for "institutionalized arrangements for genuine power sharing" and saw no sign that Deng and colleagues were "prepared to countenance such a far-reaching move."³ These remarks were underscored by events the following year.

Defining Deng's Ancien Régime

I should like to try a related but somewhat different approach to the relevance of China's history to Deng's reforms and to his decision to repress the protests of 1989. I hope it is an approach that illuminates not only Deng's behavior but also to some degree the character of the protest movement. The starting point is the question of the identity of the ancien régime.

We are accustomed to revolutions having an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• A Note to Teachers
• Introduction: Chinese Political Culture Revisited
• Part One: General Frameworks
• Part Two: Class, Gender, and Identity: 1989 as a Social Movement
• Part Three: Popular Culture and the Politics of Art
• Part Four: Cultural Dilemmas and Political Roles of the Intelligentsia
• Part Five: State Power and Legitimacy
• Part Six: Historical Narratives and Key Words Deconstructed
• About the Book
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index