Grassroots Charisma

Four Local Leaders in China

Stephan Feuchtwang, Wang Mingming

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136372162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book relates the stories of four leaders under very different political regimes: Colonial, Nationalist and Communist. The authors compare Chinese notions of respect and inspiration with their equivalents in other religious and political histories of colonial and post-colonial modernity, thereby producing a thorough re-working of the idea of charisma. The result is an intriguing study of the relationship between religious and political authority in a changing world.

1 Introduction

One of us, Stephan, spent seventeen months in 1966–8 doing fieldwork for his PhD dissertation on religious change in Shiding, a small town in northern Taiwan. Shiding had been settled in the nineteenth century by migrants from Anxi. By returning to Shiding and pairing it with the Anxi village of Meifa on the mainland, where the other one of us, Mingming, had already spent two months in 1992, we have been able to compare the use of similar cultural resources in what have become two quite different political systems.

Since Stephan’s fieldwork, many anthropologists have added their own field enquiries into popular Chinese religion. But our subject is the interrelationship of religious and political authority. After much discussion of the results of our fieldwork, we realised that, given our interest in the character and life stories of local leaders, the appropriate theoretical concept of this interrelationship was ‘charisma’. The next chapter will be a critical and introductory examination of that concept. Here we will introduce the book as a whole.

It is a book of stories from two villages in the large cultural region of southern Fujian, divided by the colonial and political history of China. Two life stories stand out, one from each village. From Meifa, the story is that of Chen Wansheng. As we have said in the Preface, it was meeting him and finding in him a kind of authority that stood outside official political positions that started us out on this project. The main story from Shiding is that of Gao Bineng. He is a leader who had been rather distant and was held in some awe by Stephan in the 1960s. At that time, Gao Bineng was about to reach the highest political office anyone from Shiding had reached. In the 1990s, although approaching his ninetieth birthday, he was still active though no longer in any political office. He had just overseen the rebuilding of Shiding’s local temple.

To these stories of two living men we have added the stories of two others, both of them from Shiding’s history, who led and managed earlier reconstructions of the temple. We have added them for two reasons. One is that it allows us to explore other aspects of charisma at this grassroots level. In one case it allows us to explore the related idea of inspiration and its politics in as great a comparative perspective as our initial review of charisma. Inspiration and this man’s story are the subjects of Chapter 7. The other reason is that through these men we can explore religious authority under a third kind of political regime, that of the Japanese colonial occupation of Taiwan.

From 1895 to 1945, the mainland was going through a republican revolution and then civil war between the forces of the Nationalist government and those of the Communist Party, until they united provisionally to resist Japanese invasion. During all this time, Taiwan was a colony of the Japanese empire and sealed away from Chinese politics. In 1945, after the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war, Taiwan came under Nationalist Chinese rule. For the next few years it was open to the civil war between Nationalists and Communists which had been on hold during the war with Japan. But in 1949 the full apparatus of the Nationalist government and its remaining army made the island its stronghold after defeat on the mainland. Taiwan was again sealed from the mainland, until the reopening in the 1980s of communications and cross-Straits investment, trade and political negotiations.

Chen Wansheng in Meifa began his political life as a youngster working for the People’s Liberation Army, rose to local prominence under the Maoist regime and is now a leader behind the scenes of the post-Mao regime of the 1980s and 1990s. Gao Bineng in Shiding is some twenty years older than Chen Wansheng. He began his political career as an administrator for the Japanese colonial government, was in his political prime under the Nationalist’s one-party garrison rule (a kind of military dictatorship) and remained a leader behind the scenes under the new civil and multi-party politics inaugurated in 1987.

We have come to know Gao Bineng as we did Chen Wansheng, through many interviews and meetings with him, from documents he provided, and from conversations with others about him and the events in which he was involved. In 1968 he was the most powerful man in Shiding according to the local doctor, Dr Gao, who claimed Gao Bineng as a distant kinsman and who could have introduced Stephan to him. But Stephan was more interested in public rituals, and in the lives of the people he met at them and in other immediately apparent centres of social life and gossip, one of which was Dr Gao’s surgery’s entrance and corridor. Gao Bineng’s social circuit was away from all of these. It was only when Stephan returned to Shiding for this project that he came to know him personally.

Gender and religious authority in China

All four of the stories upon which this book hinges are those of men. This is no accident. The leadership of temples, festivals and their rites is male. Despite the large number of female deities, the birthdays and procession festivals that celebrate both female and male deities are nevertheless occasions and spaces in which men possess the foreground. Women are in the background. As temple caretakers, in everyday obeisance and divination, in the sharing of food with gods on ordinary days, women play large roles. But in the home or in a public place they remain in the realm of nurturing the household of a family and the maintenance of reciprocal relations by the preparation and exchange of gifts.

Women are often powerful within their households and as strategists for family affairs, given their responsibility for making and maintaining relationships (Stafford 1995: 79–111; Chang 1999). When they are heads of households because they have survived their husbands, women enter the male domain of representation in registers of public authority. But even then, they only have something substantial to represent when the household has secured continuity in a male line. Chinese succession and inheritance is patrilineal. The female head of household stands in for a son. But in the background she can act powerfully as strategist, as the story of Lü Lin Wumu in Chapter 7 shows.

There is no such exclusion of women from the chanting of scriptures in Buddhist religious institutions and some syncretic Chinese religions. Some of the largest of the Buddhist foundations that have emerged since the 1970s in Taiwan are led by nuns. But in the local territorial public rituals and temples with which we are concerned, men occupy the public foreground. Since our focus is on leadership in this other non-state but still public and territorial foreground, all four stories at the core of this book are those of men.

Mingming and Stephan

Who is writing this book? The answer is the named authors, with the preceding help of the subjects of the stories whom we quote at length in translation. The two of us who bear responsibility for the final product have used our first names as well as the first person ‘we’. By so doing we convey the partial fiction that each is writing about the other when our first names are used. In fact, each of us has written through all the chapters, so even between us who is writing is not entirely decidable. Mingming wrote the first English drafts, Stephan the last. The book is written by us both. But we did conduct fieldwork separately, even for this joint project, and we do have different distances and perspectives.

While Stephan’s personal relationships in Shiding are from a great distance, and he has none in Meifa, Mingming’s in both Meifa and Shiding are geographically and culturally far closer. He is a native of the cultural region of Quanzhou, which historically includes both places.

As anthropologists, long involved with the study of festivals in Chinese villages, our subject is familiar for both of us, but we have sought to make it explicit and intelligible. Our collaboration has enabled us to reinforce the two effects of anthropological involvement, to learn that the strange is familiar and that the familiar is strange. But we brought with us different kinds of familiarity and distance. In addition to differences of native language, there is the difference of our personal and historical involvement in the life stories. To Mingming the story of Wansheng is part of the history of his own birth region, whereas for Stephan his story is part of a lifelong fascination with China’s politics and cultures, but not of a history in which he or his family have been personally affected. For Mingming the stories are as much a factual discovery of his own country’s rural history as they are an intriguing matter of self-presentation, whereas for Stephan they pose problems of interpretation from and comparison with his own European culture and history and its imperial spread.

Within these contexts, the four stories stand to some extent on their own. We have respected and retained the emphases in the stories as they were told to us, and they are told as factual narratives. Both of us want to allow them to stand as remarkable stories in themselves. So we have acted as historians, empirically checking and placing them in the contexts of what their tellers could take for granted, as well as asking their authors about their own reflections on the events in their stories. The drive to tell the stories for their own sake comes more from Mingming’s closer involvement than from Stephan, while the drive to enquire about the genres of self-presentation as an oral historian comes from Stephan’s more distant familiarisation. But neither of us want to treat them simply as examples of selective memory and the discursive manners of subjects in their own formation. They are stories of actual leadership in events that were observed and are verifiable. Another of our joint anthropological emphases is on the stories as examples of charismatic leadership. An important part of that emphasis is to enquire about the models and manners of leadership, and about what both our subjects and others in the same places find admirable and worth respect.

Stephan’s greater preoccupation with interpretation and comparison from the distance of an English-language and European cultural background has been the drive for the broadest setting of the stories. It brings out questions of the kinds of time and place these stories combine, into what senses of destiny, fortune and the making of history. But we share and respect each other’s preoccupations. Both of us received our higher university education, for master’s and doctoral degrees, in the UK. We share not only a topical interest but also an anthropological background.

One last difference worth noting is that Mingming’s academic life is in China, where it started, whereas Stephan’s remains in the UK. So Mingming’s involvement in the stories and politics of our joint work has sensitised the result to the personal implications of political events in ways which Stephan alone could not possibly have known and conveyed. The only advantage Stephan has over Mingming in this respect is his greater age. When Mingming was only four years old across the Straits, wakening as a pre-school boy to the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Stephan was conducting fieldwork in Shiding, wakening as a thirty-year-old to the strange politics of an economically developmental military dictatorship. He was also becoming acquainted with rural life for the first time, and learning about a Chinese culture as it is lived (as distinct from how it can be read and seen). Stephan learned about Chinese politics and culture as an adult while Mingming was absorbing them as a child. Stephan’s acquired knowledge took place over the same years as Mingming’s direct involvement and intuitive as well as informed understanding. We combine Stephan’s advantage of a longer span of notebooks, and a personal but European involvement in the politics of anti-imperialism, with Mingming’s advantages of biographically absorbed memory-knowledge of Chinese politics, and more recent notes (and videotapes).

The fact that our first field trips and the publications resulting from them were not about political leadership gives our current interest a background. It also reveals quite sharply that we can never pretend to offer a comprehensive portrait of the social life and history of the two places and their people. Each visit follows a limited number of directions of enquiry and curiosity. Our joint interest in festivals and temples does, however, feed directly into the topic of local leadership, since all four leaders were involved in re-shaping both the religious and the political landscape.

In Meifa the time-span between first visit and return for life-story research was rather short, only three years from 1992 to 1995. But Mingming, like Stephan, moved from mapping and a more general interest in festivals to the life story of a behind-the-scenes leader. For Shiding, Stephan’s original fieldwork records became part of the historical archive at our disposal. They included, for instance, information on local political factions. But it was only after Stephan’s return in 1992 and again in 1995, this time to prepare for Mingming to conduct his own fieldwork in Shiding, that we were able to establish a sound political history of the village and township. In part this is because in the 1960s key portions of Taiwanese history were still under strict censorship, whereas by the 1990s martial law had ended and recent history was itself a topic of open and contentious enquiry in what had become a multi-party democracy. But it was equally the result of Mingming’s greater proficiency in archival research in what is for him a native language.

The structure and content of the book

We have concentrated on a few life stories and their local contexts to give ourselves sufficient room to tell, interpret and understand their protagonists as makers of history. After this and the next introductory chapter, the book is divided into two parts, the first on Meifa and Wansheng, the second on Shiding and Gao Bineng and his predecessors. The final two chapters bring them together in a reconsideration of the concept of charisma.

Before the life stories in each part we provide contextual histories of Meifa and Shiding and their temples. They are based on our research previous to this project: survey, documentary and interview research on Meifa in 1992 and on Shiding in 1966–8.¹ They are necessarily histories of the temples, because these public buildings have been the focus of political leadership behind the scenes of governmental and elected office. Further details of political history are provided in the chapters on the life stories themselves.²

States and local histories

In writing these histories we have set the two places, as constructed through their temples and festivals, within changing polities and economies. They are local and in many ways errant and unassimilated histories within the encompassing histories of different national regimes.

Prasenjit Duara (1995) has questioned narratives of modern China and India by what he calls ‘bifurcations’ of the linear histories that are such vital parts of the formation of nations. We are adding further furcations to those he sees. But it remains important to note how all these alternative stories have to encounter the most powerful state-generated narratives. States archive, store and classify the resources for such histories. They sanctify a narrative in their projects of school curricula, local and central documentation and census-taking. Theirs is a politics of culture that makes pasts of these archives and turns the mass of their biographical subjects into constituencies for political representation. Their politics of history can always be questioned. But they are at the same time realities that can be avoided by no biography or errant history. Multiple versions, leading in different directions, can be recovered, but they still must reckon with the histories which states make.

Our protagonists are actors in the politics of states and in the formation of nations, but to some further degree their local histories contain alternative narratives which could be constituencies and subjects of directions which have not yet been taken. Readers will find that they contain constituencies of respect and authority that are not those of the political states and the administrative places in which they occur. They made things happen which have affected the histories of the places in which they acted. They were decidedly affected by their state’s political trajectory but they also had their own power and initiative.

Even though they are few in number, between them the four men lived through the whole gamut of states which have led or occupied China in the twentieth century. So we have been able to tell what we might call inside stories of several encompassing political histories. Political histories are one set of contexts for their life stories.

Because we are enquiring into the making and gaining of authority, we have also placed the stories of our main actors into the context of how they are described by others with whom they interacted. So there are stories within stories and contexts within contexts even as we tell the stories of each protagonist. But within these encrustations we retell their stories in a manner and with emphases that we have reason and evidence to believe they themselves use.

Retelling other people’s stories

We must, of course, acknowledge what all oral historians know and say: first, that simply by interviewing we create a novel and ordering context for subjects to tell us a story, and second, that in retelling the results of our interviews we have tidied them. We have tried to establish dates. We have excised repetitions and we have highlighted inconsistencies or contentious facts.³ But through quotations and through drawing attention to the order and genre of the way they told their stories, we have tried to give an idea of their own narration.

In the cases of the two earlier leaders in Shiding, we have been able to read and hear from their families and admirers their stories as they would present them. In the cases of Chen Wansheng and Gao Bineng, we have been able to hear their stories directly, as they themselves wish to present them. Of course, it is we who are telling these stories, not the protagonists whose lives we recount, and we tell them in English, not in southern Fujian speech or Chinese characters. We highlight Chinese terms, not for authenticity but because we think they are of particular interest. For the sake of simplicity and convenience most of them are homogenised into the standard Mandarin transliteration. To have included the original southern Fujian language every time it was used, along with the transliteration of standard Chinese (Mandarin) and of characters in written documents would have overburdened the flow of reading with overlong interruptions.

Authors acknowledge the help of many but at the same time clear them of any responsibility for what they have written. We have taken longer to describe our own responsibilities, but we must now add our debts to the pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Charisma
• 1 Meifa
• 2 Shiding
• 3 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index