Cooperation in Chinese Communities

Morality and Practice

Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd, Eona Bell, Charles Stafford, Ellen R. Judd, Eona Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350077188
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181548
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

When humans cooperate, what are the social and psychological mechanisms that enable them to do so successfully? Is cooperativeness something natural for humans, built in to our species over the course of evolution, or rather something that depends on cultural learning and social interaction? This book addresses these central questions concerning human nature and the nature of cooperation. The editors present a wide range of vivid anthropological case-studies focused on everyday cooperation in Chinese communities, for example, between children in Nanjing playing a ballgame; parents in Edinburgh organising a community school; villagers in Yunnan dealing with "common pool" resource problems; and families in Kinmen in Taiwan worshipping their dead together. On the one hand, these case studies illustrate some uniquely Chinese cultural factors, such as those related to kinship ideals and institutions that shape the experience and practice of cooperation. They also illustrate, on the other hand, how China's recent history, not least the rise and fall of collectivism in various forms, continues to shape the experience of cooperation for ordinary people in China today. Finally, they show that in spite of the cultural and historical particularity of Chinese cooperation, it does share some underlying features that would be familiar to people coming from radically different backgrounds.

CHAPTER ONE
Kin and non-kin cooperation in China

Charles Stafford

The fact that people in China (and elsewhere) cooperate in various senses with close kin – for example, that Chinese parents make sacrifices for their children with an eye on the future – is not surprising. From an evolutionary point of view, it could be said to make good sense. What is more surprising, one could say, is the fact that people in China (and elsewhere) cooperate so readily with non-kin and even with total strangers. To be clear, both of these facts – that is, the fact of cooperation with kin and the fact of cooperation with non-kin – are scientifically important and have been heavily studied and theorized, most famously in Hamilton’s Rule and subsequent contributions to kin selection theory (Hamilton 1964a, 1964b; Birch and Okasha 2015). There has also been a great deal of back and forth about what ‘cooperation’ actually consists of and how it might have evolved in humans and other species (West, Griffin and Gardner 2007; Amici 2015). But it has primarily been the second – if you like, more surprising – fact of cooperation with non-kin that has generated a huge amount of empirical and theoretical work across a wide range of disciplines in recent decades.

To give an example: experimental economists, inspired by game theoretic approaches, have investigated how individuals will behave when asked to divide money with a partner under a given set of rules (for a critical overview of this field, see Guala 2005). One broad finding is that humans are surprisingly ‘cooperative’ on average, in the sense that they will give resources to others even when the rules of a particular game allow them to be as selfish as they like. Notably, however, virtually all such research is about cooperation between non-kin; in fact, it is primarily about cooperation between strangers who do not even meet in person for the sake of the experimental task. To give another, very different, example: developmental psychologists, by means of an ingenious set of studies, have shown that human infants and children are readily disposed to cooperate with others (for a general introduction to such studies, see Tomasello 2009). More specifically, they have better skills and dispositions for cooperation, for example, when it comes to intention-reading, than do our close primate relatives. But, again, the bulk of such research examines cooperation between non-kin. For instance, psychologists have studied whether infants/children are disposed to ‘cooperatively’ share information with strangers by pointing things out to them in a helpful way (it seems that they are). Meanwhile, studies that focus on cooperation between infants/children who are actually related to one another, for example, between siblings or cousins, remain rare.¹

Why kinship has not been more central to recent work on human cooperation by experimental economists, developmental psychologists and others – notwithstanding its centrality to evolutionary theories of cooperation – is a complex question of intellectual history that is beyond the scope of this chapter. From the point of view of a social anthropologist, however, this seems an odd state of affairs for at least five reasons:

1. In the real world, a high proportion of human cooperation takes place between kin.
2. In the real world, the distinction between kin and non-kin is often very porous.
3. In the real world, the distinction between kin and non-kin cooperation is also often porous, and this has significant consequences for many (arguably all) forms of ‘non-kin’ cooperation.
4. In the real world, family life impinges heavily on the development of children’s knowledge, skills and dispositions for cooperation, for example, when they learn how to cooperate through interactions with siblings and then extend this to interactions with non-kin.
5. In the real world, cooperation with kin entails many, if not most, of the challenges faced in non-kin cooperation, which suggests the two things ought to be studied together.

Before going any further, let me pause briefly to illustrate these five points ethnographically. My first period of long-term fieldwork was conducted in the Taiwanese fishing community of Angang in the mid-to-late 1980s (Stafford 1995, 2000 b). The people I met there were quick to identify Angang as a relatively ‘traditional’ place. Certainly, local religious life proceeded along broadly traditional lines and was notably intense. Much of this centred around a large number of spirit mediums who communicated with gods on behalf of their local clients virtually every day of the week at domestic altars, communal temples and even on the village streets. This was also a place where kinship concerns were salient and absorbed a great deal of time and mental energy. Angang was not a classic single surname community of the kind to be found elsewhere in rural Taiwan and China, and there were no obvious signs of patrilineal organization such as lineage halls and ancestral temples. Still, there were identifiable surname clusters in the villages and there had also been a high (although declining) rate of local marriages over the years. As a result, the majority of people lived surrounded by many agnatic and affinal relatives. They sometimes told me that ‘everybody [here] is one family’ (dou yijia ren), although this was not strictly true (as I will discuss later).

Against this background, a number of general observations can be made about cooperation in Angang, ones that are consistent with the points already outlined earlier. As would be expected, there was a great deal of cooperation within households, including between spouses or between parents and their children. But there was also a great deal of cooperation between households that shared a kin connection of some kind. For example, adult siblings who lived in the same neighbourhood, or in adjacent villages, sometimes engaged in cooperative activities such as tending vegetable plots together or co-funding religious rituals to be held at their respective domestic altars. There existed some degree of coordination at the higher level of surname groups/clusters. I was told, for instance, that when it came to local elections people tended to vote along surname lines.

So one can say not only that kinship is pervasive in Angang but also that kin-based cooperation is pervasive (as per point 1, see also the findings in Henrich and Henrich 2007). Admittedly, this may sound like a statement of the obvious and the inevitable. With so many relatives in the same vicinity, the odds of cooperating with at least some of them presumably goes up. Who else is there? Beyond this, however, it is important to add that in Angang the boundary between kin and non-kin is very porous (as per point 2). Because there are many relatives around, and especially because there has been a high rate of local marriage, people often say that they are related to somebody else in Angang – and then find it hard to actually specify the connection. There is a quick fading out, in other words, from absolute claims of kinship (‘he is my brother’), to more complex but still firm claims of kinship (‘let me think, she is the daughter of my mother’s brother’), to claims of kinship that have little substance and, in many cases, little real-world significance (‘he is a Chen, like me, but I don’t know what the connection is, and I don’t have that much to do with him’). Affinal connections fade out in the same way. For example, because some Chens have married some Lis, a local Chen may feel that he is related, in a vague sense, to all the local Lis – but then not be able to say, in particular cases, what this relationship really consists of.

Then there is a deeper point about the porousness of the kin/nonkin boundary in Angang. In terms of traditional Chinese ideologies, one’s basic kinship identity is strictly determined by patrilineal descent and the facts of birth and marriage. You either are or are not kin. The reality, however, is that the lived system of Chinese kinship and relatedness is much more ‘fluid’ and ‘processual’ in practice than these ideologies suggest (Stafford 2000 a). On the one hand, kin who fail to live up to their moral and practical obligations, such as providing ‘nurturance’ (yang) to the elders, may become non-kin – or at least be treated as such for practical purposes. On the other hand, people who are non-kin may become kin – or at least be treated as such for practical purposes – by virtue of giving or receiving nurturance within cycles of reciprocity, for example, to children they have fostered. Moreover, these processes through which non-kin become kin are largely coterminous with the processes (such as providing care and sharing food) through which non-kin, including complete strangers, are transformed over time into friends and even quasi-relatives – while never quite actually becoming kin, as in the case of ‘sworn brothers’.

To put it simply, then: if people in Angang claim that they are one family, it is not only because the majority of them are (more or less) related, but also because many unrelated people in the community end up being treated as if they were.

Given the pervasiveness of kinship in Angang, and the porousness of kin identity, it is not surprising that kinship becomes a factor in virtually ‘everything’ – including what appear, on the surface, to be examples of non-kin cooperation (as per point 3). Take, for example, the local branch of the Fisherman’s Association, which is explicitly set up as a cooperative to promote the welfare and interests of its members. This association has nothing to do in formal terms with kinship. The reality, however, is that a fisherman from Angang who attended a meeting of this cooperative in the 1980s would likely have been surrounded by his relatives (close and distant), not to mention a number of kin-like friends. If the association did something to promote the interests of its members this would also, as a matter of definition, be something that benefited his close kin and his distant kin, as well as his kin-like friends. Moreover, considerations of kinship might affect how he votes for officers in the association, just as they might affect how he votes in local elections for government officials such as the township head.

Needless to say, if kinship permeates local life to the extent that it does in Angang, it is going to have some impact, and possibly a major impact, on local organizations such as the Fisherman’s Association. Again, this just seems inevitable. But I want to give two further, more extended, illustrations of this point in order to show that the ramifications of it can be non-obvious and anthropologically interesting. The first has to do with schooling.

School life in Angang, as elsewhere, involves a lot of cooperative activities: children play sports together, carry out projects together, go on outings together, and so on. Such activities are normally very structured and have a range of more or less explicit pedagogical aims in mind. As in most parts of the modern world, schools in Taiwan are organized nationally, and education in general is considered a major priority – something of political significance. More specifically, at the time of my fieldwork, Taiwan was governed by the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese nationalists), and schools were a central part of the long-term KMT agenda for turning China into a strong, modern nation. As I have explained elsewhere, one anxiety of the nationalists was the priority that most ordinary people gave to family loyalties – something that was viewed as a direct threat to nationalism and thus to the rise of a properly modern China (Stafford 1992, 1995). In an important sense, then, walking into (nationalist) schools was meant to be about leaving one’s family behind and learning to cooperate with children from other families as fellow students and, ultimately, as fellow citizens – that is, to put the nation above kinship. In a place like Angang, however, students entering the school grounds will inevitably start bumping into a number of their (close and distant) kin. Kin considerations thus routinely factor in school-based cooperation, for example, on the sports ground, much as they factor in the Fishermen’s Association, in local elections, and so on. Moreover, although some of the adults working in the schools – middle school teachers in particular – are recruited from outside, a good number of them are from Angang, and thus are also the students’ relatives.

Then there is the question of what happens outside of school hours and beyond the school gates. During my fieldwork, I came to know well the children in one ‘homework group’ comprised of several sisters, their one brother, and – from time to time – other children from the neighbourhood (these were usually relatives, too, in line with the kin-based clustering of residence). In the evenings, these children would sit in an upstairs room of their home and – between outbreaks of hilarity – help each other with their studies. This is a simple illustration of how a cooperative activity involving kin, doing homework together, may have consequences for life inside the (notionally non-kin-oriented) school, that is, given that the main function of this group was to enhance the children’s grasp of school-based knowledge. Of course, this might be felt to be a rather low-grade type of cooperation: the stakes were not especially high. And yet this was, as I witnessed, a complex activity in terms of its social/psychological/linguistic content and consequences. It gave these young children not only some help with their schoolwork but also repeated opportunities (as per point 4) to learn something about cooperation in general, such as the fact that outbreaks of hilarity sometimes make group activity not only more fun but also more productive, an insight they might later transfer to cooperation with non-kin.

Importantly, children’s outside-of-school life is typically observed by, and to some extent policed by, relatives. This particular children’s group was discretely supervised by the mother of the household and other neighbouring adults (normally kin) who occasionally stopped by for a quick look. Moreover, observant adults of this kind, in Angang, really do want their children to perform well in school. This relates to a broader point, which again is an obvious one for anthropologists: that cultural values and ideals prevailing outside of the school grounds, and to some extent policed by local adults, are bound to impinge on the process of school-based learning. As I have already explained above, entering KMT schools was – in theory – about leaving one’s family behind and not being motivated by family concerns but rather those of the nation. In practice, however, local adults in Angang saw schools as the sites par excellence where children could fulfil their kinship duties (Stafford 1992, 1995). By performing well academically, that is, they could (eventually) play their part in the cooperative family activity of achieving success and upward mobility – or, more modestly, at least discharge the basic filial duty of securing a job so as to support their parents in old age.

This brings me to the second illustration, which relates to economic life. Many of the shops in Angang were cooperative Chinese family enterprises of a classic kind. In one case I knew well, a woman and her energetic daughters ran a small (and very successful) food and provisions shop. This was essentially a convenience store in which local people bought goods such as beer, cigarettes, betel nuts, snack foods, newspapers and also everyday religious items such as incense and spirit money. From the mother’s point of view, running the shop with her daughters was not simply an economic activity – all kinds of family considerations came into it as well, as one might expect. Similarly, the effort her daughters put into this business, and all the forms of cooperation it entailed (for example, coordinating their separate plans for schooling and outside work so that someone was always in residence in Angang to help their mother), were not seen by them as work in the normal sense. It was their contribution to the family, to their mother’s well-being and happiness and to their own futures. This business was essentially a kinship thing.

But what about the customers? People from the surrounding neighbourhood visited the shop often, some of them multiple times in a single day, and it was unsurprisingly treated as a de facto social centre. Many locals also seemed deeply fond of the shopkeeper and her daughters: they were treated with great warmth and familiarity by customers and vice versa. Indeed, people from the neighbourhood often helped out with restocking shelves, rolling betel nets, making deliveries and other tasks. Beyond this, the women’s shop was, predictably, a place in which any given customer was likely to bump into his or her own relatives, as happened to fishermen when they walked into the Fishermen’s Association or to students when they walked into the local middle school. Thus one could say that kinship insinuated itself into this economic space – a local shop – both from the point of view of the owners (it was a family business) and from the point of view of the customers (it was located in a kin-permeated neighbourhood and was treated by many as this neighbourhood’s de facto community store).

Crucially, however, the woman and her daughters were not related to their customers. They were basically kin-like friends. And in spite of the points I have made about the porousness of the kin/non-kin boundary, these women remained non-kin. The mother was from elsewhere in Taiwan and had married a man who was also a migrant from outside. He was no longer normally resident in Angang, but together they had set up a business in this new place some years before. Their outsider status was thus clearly marked. You might well ask why local people did not just set up their own shop instead, that is, one in which kin could sell to kin, thus avoiding the potential pitfalls of doing business with strangers/outsiders. Various factors may have contributed to this, but when I asked it was explained to me that a person from Angang who opened a shop of this kind would soon find herself giving everything away – to kin – whereas for an outsider it was a little easier to make money and stay in business. The other shop that I came to know well was run on a similar basis: it was a family enterprise owned by outsiders who had become long-term residents.

This example, in addition to illustrating how kinship permeates ‘non-kin’ cooperation (as with the Fisherman’s Association, local elections and the local schools), thus illustrates a different kind of point. Of course it is true that economic interactions with nonkin – including strangers – carry the risk of being taken advantage of, but exactly the same can be said of economic interactions with kin. In other words, it’s not as if dealing with kin is intrinsically easy whereas dealing with non-kin is intrinsically difficult – in this particular case, the opposite was said to be true (see also Stafford 2006). This illustrates the broader point that kin-based cooperation can be difficult in ways that overlap significantly with the difficulties encountered in non-kin cooperation (as per point 5) – although, I would stress, this is not to say that they are the same.²

I do not think what I have touched on thus far in this chapter – concerning the important role played by kinship in hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Contributor biographies
• Preface: The morality of Chinese cooperation
• 1 Kin and non-kin cooperation in China
• 2 Playing ball: Cooperation and competition in two Chinese primary schools
• 3 The role of xiao in moral reputation management and cooperation in urban China and Taiwan
• 4 Harmony ideology in Chinese families: Cooperating despite unfairness
• 5 Cooperation in funerals in a patrilineal village in Jinmen (Taiwan)
• 6 Memory leaks: Local histories of cooperation as a solution to water-related cooperation problems
• 7 Care as bureaucratic lubricant: The role of female care workers in an old people’s home in rural China
• 8 Reputation, morality and power in an emigrant community (qiaoxiang) in Guangdong Province
• 9 Jiaoqing ethics and the sustainability of non-kin cooperation
• 10 Power, gender and ‘network-based cooperation’: A study of migrant workers in Shenzhen
• 11 Challenges to ethnic cooperation among Hong Kong Chinese in Scotland
• 12 Problems in the new cooperative movement: A window onto changing cooperation mechanisms
• 13 Cooperation, competition and care: Notes from China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical System
• Notes
• References
• Index