The Mirage of China

Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World

Xin Liu

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Today's world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China's immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People's Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification.

As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist years from the present age of the People's Republic, which appears on the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.

PART I

MORAL MATHEMATICS

Chapter One

THE MENTALITY OF GOVERNANCE

Today's “Morning Prayers”

“‘Reading the morning paper is a kind of realistic morning prayer.’ This remark by Hegel is often cited to illustrate how interests have changed in the modern age: our gaze has turned away from the invisible beyond and toward daily events…. Modern man's sole orison consists in reading the morning paper; for, being a realist, he deems the news to be the first object worthy of his attention at the moment when that attention is sharpest.”¹ It seems as though such a realistic attitude, having traveled a long distance from the time of Hegel (1770–1831), has nowadays regained its truest expression in the vast continent of the People's Republic, an enormous social world increasingly permeated by various kinds of contemporary media—particularly television. Yes, it is television—rather than newspapers—that has become the most common means for the modern attitude to express itself. Whether it is the morning or evening news—when one's attention is sharpest—the television will be on, and it is made to supply twenty-four hours of rolling stories and updates about what is happening in the entire world. It is the news, rather than the newspapers, that continues in its essential function of securing a realistic attitude toward life, albeit a new form of life, referred to as “petty affluence” (xiaokang) by the official church of development.

In the People's Republic today, this attitude, which is believed to be modern and rational, has brought about an excessive focus on the egoistic self, who constantly checks his appearance in the mirror of the modern Other. His life makes sense to himself only through a materialistic comparison with other people, related or not, near or distant. Television, with its vivid colors and animated images, has provided a far better presentation of the world in which our realist can find reliable and yet entertaining reference points. From a sociological point of view, it is an error to assume that the zeal for obtaining a new Panasonic simply expresses a materialistic impulse for consumption. It is also, and perhaps more so, a reflection of the psychic urge for seeing more clearly the world in its pictorial representation—in which one lives a life with and against other such lives. The rapid development of information technology industries and mass media in the People's Republic, encouraged by both official permission and popular support, has been a collective celebration of the realistic ideology of “petty affluence.” Such an attitude in life, its materiality, as shown on television as well as reported in newspapers, can be grasped only by a measurement of the distance of oneself to the modern Other. And this is the function of news, as a source of existential nutrition, as an assurance of one's knowledge of oneself in the world, as a means of situating one's place through a restless measurement of one's material distance from others in developmental terms. In the realistic mind of “petty affluence,” fortunately or not, a metaphysical lane of thought that used to separate realism from materialism and vice versa no longer exists. Thus, for a new generation of the People's Republic, what is real is material and what is material is real. A new meaning has been added to the old Hegelian observation: digitalized news now represents electronically a truly “real” picture of global materiality.

Once when I was interviewing an official from the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics, he told me about his new habit: as soon as he returned to his house, no matter the time of day or night, he would immediately switch on his television. He explained, with a big smile, “You know why? One has to know the world in order to act in it. This is a plain and immediate reason for watching television, in which you can get access to the real world, its material development in particular. I watch everything, but my favorite programs are news programs. The whole world is now on television, so one can and should know what is happening in every corner of the world. Don't you think so? If nothing is worthwhile watching, I always leave it on the CCTV's news channel, which continuously puts one in touch with the real world and vice versa.² A man of knowledge and education cannot afford to be ignorant of what is happening in our society and in the world. Television functions as an informational window for us to get access to the real world. Having access to the real world means being aware of new developments around the globe. Thus, we can compare ourselves, our economic development to that of other countries. This is a must for our government and for myself as a government employee.” This ethnographic encounter reveals a mind-set in which televised images of other people's lives, particularly those across the Pacific Ocean, have a direct impact on the everyday life of the People's Republic. On television, morning and evening “prayers” are read by beautifully attired anchormen and -women rather than being printed in the newspapers. And it is in one's bedroom, where the Panasonic typically resides, that the world will be baptized into the new faith of “petty affluence.”

In turning its attention to the material development of the world, the People's Republic moved away from an older set of ideological concerns. The government's positive embracement of a realistic attitude toward life suggests an implicit denial of the Maoist past, which is seen as historical madness from the viewpoint of “petty affluence.” A government statistician, the official in Shanghai whom I interviewed, reminded me of the emblematic slogan, popular in the early 1980s and favored by Deng, the paramount leader after Mao: “Reality Is the Only Measurement of Any Claims for Truth.” The farewell to the Maoist past, in its earlier phase, welcomed the homecoming of the pragmatic man. According to the new party doctrine, bearing the signature of Deng, “no matter whether it is a white or a black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.” The mouse is the reality, a material one, whereas the measurement of such a reality has nothing to do with, for example, the color of a cat. The true judgment of whether a cat is good or not, whether a system of ideas works or not, whether a theory of the world is sound or superfluous, whether one should stick to some moral stance or not—namely, whether a cat is useful or not, regardless of its color, its temper, its habit, and our feeling about it—this judgment of its value should and must be practical and utilitarian, that is, it must be based on whether it can catch the mouse or not. It is thus only against the reality of the mouse that a cat can be evaluated or judged. At the beginning of a new century, the official from Shanghai represented the maturity of a materialistic realist, whose principal school instruction had been the pragmatic lesson on how to catch the mouse.

In order to grasp the significance of televised news and Hegel's concept of morning (or evening) “prayers,” let us consider the ideology of the Maoist years. During that period, the role and function of the media and news were defined in an entirely different way. The Leninist doctrine, which was adopted by the People's Republic in its adolescence, stated that in order to convey the party's policies to the people, a national newspaper, directly controlled by the government, was necessary for a revolutionary society. By then, already a century after the death of Hegel, the newspaper remained an essential means for national communication. “Lenin, in his earliest major work on organization What Is to Be Done, devoted a long section to a discussion of the need for an all-Russian newspaper and states: ‘There is no other way of training strong political organization except through the medium of an all-Russian newspaper” (Schurmann 1966, 63; emphasis in original). Underlying this doctrine was the belief that ideologies or ideological doctrines should not be neutral or objective statements of reality; rather, they should contain a correct and corrective message for the society in order to facilitate change. In other words, reality should not be simply reported on in the news; it should be made by the news from the proper source—the party itself.

Franz Schurmann's work, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966), published during the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, is an exemplary study of the Maoist understanding of news and media. “All mass media, particularly newspapers, devote a considerable space to the publication of major policy speeches, policy directives, and explanatory articles relating to policy decisions. Dissemination of policy decisions ranges from those which are made at a national level to those made at a local level. As we shall indicate in our chapter on management, all organizations require the setting of policy, that is, the goals of organizational action. Since Communist China is an organizational society par excellence, policy statements of all varieties and implications are handed down all the time” (ibid., 63). In this mode of organization, what appeared to be the “news” was in fact policies and directives of the state. A chief function of the news and newspapers was to make reality subordinate to the more important problematic of what it ought to be. This is no longer the case: the current conviction is that the news, televised or written, should be a mirror of reality. In a sense, the relationship of is to ought has been reversed: in today's outlook, what ought to be can be knowable only by finding out what there is in reality. During the Maoist period, the morning and evening papers (“prayers”) were taken as an ideological invocation; in contrast, they are now viewed as a lens through which one might be able to see the world in a better perspective. One used to read newspapers to receive a message from the party, which often involved a personal consecration or sacrifice. It was a “religious” act in the sense that one's reading was a response to the call for a greater good—collective and future-oriented—that was represented by the party as its temporary agent. The morning paper was thus not a prayer in the morning; instead, it was a prayer for the morning light of seeing and believing. For the party or government, the newspapers functioned as a tool to mobilize the masses; for the masses, on the other hand, they were an essential means of suturing the visible to the invisible, the part to the whole, the personal to the social.

A new day has indeed arrived in the People's Republic. Televised news no longer contains the mysterious messages that used to appear in newsprint; rather, it aims to become purely a photograph of the world in words. Today's realistic reader is more likely to seek out news through digital technology, a medium that is far more sensational and sentimentalized and for which the pictorial presentation is essential. In the fast expansion of the CCTV news programs over the past decade, we have witnessed, among other aspects, a regularization of news reports on economic growth. More and more we have seen official statisticians invited to appear in a beautiful modern studio who speak to the audience about China's economic development. Guest spokespersons, including various kinds of experts, sociologists, and other types of scholars, have frequently been invited by the CCTV to appear on the programs, as have speakers from the National Bureau of Statistics. In addition to publishing statistical monthly or quarterly bulletins, government statisticians, in neat black suits and colorful ties, now appear regularly on national television programs, making statistical analyses or interpreting data to confirm or deny the truth of a matter. The use of statistical data as a form of evidence or a quantitative method for justification has induced a habit of reading that is quite different from the “morning prayer” of the Maoist man. Nothing could make one feel closer to the beating heart of the world than the screen of a Panasonic right in one's bedroom.

Alongside the change in the means of communication, a difference in the use of statistical data and analysis has also arrived. Let us examine the annual government report, a systematic announcement of its achievements, as an exemplification of this difference. By government reports, I mean the official documents first delivered by the Premier and later published by the national media such as the People's Daily or the CCTV. The economic life of the People's Republic has gone through a series of drastic changes. Two decades, the 1950s and the 1980s, can be singled out for comparison, as during both of these periods the state was concerned with the regularization and institutionalization of governmental statistics, although the models and inspirations for the concern sharply differed. Starting in the mid-1990s, the second round of official regularization and institutionalization of governmental statistics has more or less completed its mission, by which I mean that an ethical and epistemological equivalence of truth and facts with statistical data and analysis has more or less been established. As a consequence, forecasting or predicting future economic growth has become a new habit of thought for an entire generation that has grown up on the ruins of the Maoist revolution. Retrospectively, in the eyes of today's official statisticians, the Maoist past stands out as an era of madness and barbarism. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1959) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), statistical analysis, as well as the institutions of governmental statistics, suffered a great deal from its alleged pseudo-science status in the hands of the revolutionary masses led by the Maoist government. In an interview, a professor of economic statistics in Beijing told me, “Can you believe that when I first returned to work in the late 1970s, I found no records at all about our economic performance for the years 1966 to 1968? Because of the Cultural Revolution, no national economic data had been collected. It was really a disaster! Can you believe that nobody collected any data for those years? This should never happen to a country, but it did during the years of the Maoist revolution! Back then, the first thing we did was to repair the broken chain of economic data. Otherwise, there would be no way of applying regression analysis for future predictions. In a way, we had to make things up. Can you believe it? Crazy! During those damn years, people debated about their loyalty to the country, but the country did not even exist in statistical reports. The material world has to be produced, and such a product can be visible to our eyes only by means of statistical tabulation and classification. Is it not so? Is this not a naked truth?” His remarks are revealing, not simply with regard to the Maoist insanity but also because they reflect a new certainty achieved by means of rationality. It is into such a crevice between the past and the present, between insanity and scientificity, between the primitive and the modern, that a history of sentimentality may be written. The spectacle that would mark this fissure was the official demolishment of the national statistical observatory during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, a truly astonishing phenomenon of the Maoist years. However, it is not true that the Maoist government never made use of statistical data and analysis. The life of numbers as part of a history of sentimentality is far more intricate than it might appear to be today.

The Year 1954: A First Report on Government Work

The 1954 report opened its discourse, representative of the government style of the time in general,³ by announcing the country's achievements. It said that “We,” standing for the nation, the people, the party, and the government, had moved into a new stage of development by overcoming the severe poverty and underdevelopment that had been inherited from the “Old Society.”⁴ This opening statement carried a celebrative tone, suggesting that, as with political and military victories that had been attained, “We” would achieve a similar victory in economic development. The implicit parallel between yesterday's military successes and tomorrow's economic triumphs was thus drawn. Economic development, the 1954 report stated, should become a primary focus of the government's attention. Interesting to note is that the party, a most crucial political signifier, did not appear in this report. Instead, it employed terms such as “the central government” or “the state” to convey the sense of a strong, collective “We.”⁵

What follows in the report is an explanation of the government's developmental strategy, which emphasized the urgent need for the growth of heavy industries. Other economic sectors, such as agriculture and services, were thought of as secondary and dependent on the development of primary industries such as steel and iron. This developmental strategy, based on a particular reading of Karl Marx and on an understanding of the experience of the Soviet Union, placed its emphasis on the production of “the means of production,” seen as the genesis of productive energy for long-term economic prosperity. This developmental strategy was characteristic, in general, of all the socialist planning economies of the times, such as those in Eastern Europe, and its fate as “the economy of shortage” has been well documented (see, e.g., Kornai 1980).⁶ In the Chinese case, the need for a great economic triumph at the time was both psychological, speaking to the hurt caused by a series of defeats by the Western powers, starting with the Opium War (1839–1842), and political, responding to the Cold War divide between the socialist and capitalist camps. The report was delivered by then Premier Zhou, who was speaking to the assembly of the People's Congress. For the new government at the time, the question of how to develop involved the question of which sector of the economy should be prioritized. Premier Zhou rhetorically asked: “Which is better? Is it not a good idea for our people to bear some inconvenience and certain temporary difficulties in life at the present moment for the sake of achieving a great, long-lasting prosperity in the future? Or is it a good idea to consume everything we have now, but in the long run suffer from poverty as we have always suffered? We believe that you will agree with what we have decided to do. We must try to establish development that will lead to long-term prosperity.”.⁷ In retrospect, some would argue that this national economic strategy meant sacrificing life and convenience for a focus on the development of heavy industries, for which primary capital accumulation would have to come from agriculture and other likely sectors.

The main part of the report exploded into a powerful recitation of a series of facts and figures, as if Premier Zhou felt the need to demonstrate the details of how such a policy had worked. Through the enumeration and computation of national economic achievements, with facts and numbers cited for verification and proof, the success story of the People's Republic in its cradle years was heralded by a symphony of statistics. The tone of the report, utterly confident and optimistic, was reflected in the choice of three kinds of statistical indexes: growth rates, sum totals (of important products for national needs), and various kinds of ratios, such as the proportion or increase of state-owned enterprises in the total industrial growth. Three long paragraphs, full of figures and ratios, showed the purpose of their use. For example, there was a detailed analysis of statistical data on industrial growth, including both annual and accumulative figures. The annual industrial growth rate of 1953 was 33 percent. This was lower than the average growth rate in the previous three years, which came close to 37 percent annually. Of course, one needs to take into account the fact that prior to the establishment of the People's Republic, the civil war and other circumstances had dragged China's economy to an extremely low level. There was also a list of statistical figures of actual outputs for a number of major industrial products, such as coal, electricity, iron, and steel. These sum totals might not appear striking to the eyes of an observer in terms of their quantities, which is understandable given the primitive condition of the country's economy at the time. But in comparison to China's productivity prior to 1949, they do indicate a great achievement. Most importantly, the report included a series of ratios, carefully chosen and computed, such as the one showing a further increase of heavy industrial production in the total economy.

A patient reader of an old governmental report would have to be impressed by such a deft demonstration of statistical data and struck by the notional significance given to the idea of proportion reflected in the active use of various kinds of “ratio” explanations. This was indeed a most important tool of the official thinking at the time. What is proportion? What is ratio? What does it signify? How is it employed in and by official thinking? Plainly, it was an effective instrument for understanding and determining social reality in terms of the Maoist mode of reasoning. Without a market mechanism that allowed economic activities and social services to be adjusted by means of “an invisible hand,” the state, with its central planning economy, would have to be in charge of arranging those activities and services for a society whose health was judged by and thought of in terms of its proportional balance. As reflected in the voice of Premier Zhou and recorded in those written pages, the pulse of the government, whose thinking followed the logic of proportionality, can almost be felt by an observant reader. Put another way, the state, in its allocation and distributio...