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Eli Friedman, For Those Who Meet the Conditions

Is China abolishing the hukou? Since the PRC’s State Council announced a new guideline on public services on May 18, 2026 this question has led to an outpouring of commentary. For decades, analysts from a wide range of political orientations have called for ending the hukou. Has the moment arrived? Most economists have argued that hukou introduces labor market imperfections and suppresses domestic consumption. Socialists and other progressives, on the other hand, have critiqued the tiered citizenship regime and widely differentiated access to social servies enshrined by the hukou’s mobility controls, seeing these as certain to reproduce stark inequalities across generations. The past few weeks have seen a rising chorus of optimism that this relic of the command economy is finally falling.

The question of hukou’s demise, however, is as old as China’s capitalist reforms. In 1994, when mass rural-urban migration was only just beginning, South China Morning Post ran the headline “Registration System Set to Be Abolished” (Chan and Buckingham 2008, 583). It wasn’t, but six years later the State Development Planning Commission announced that, “…China aims to abolish the system over the next five years” (Xinhua 2001). Four years after that, The New York Times credulously reported, “China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces” (Kahn 2005). In response to this anthology of dashed hopes, misinterpretations, and some bad faith propaganda, Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham penned a landmark article in The China Quarterly in 2008 in which they answered definitively: no, the hukou may be changing but it is not going away.

In the nearly two decades since Chan and Buckingham’s article, the debate has not gone away. Notably, the central government announced a “new urbanization” plan in 2013 which called for hukou to be “based on a person’s place of residence and job” by 2020 (An 2013). As part of the effort to drum up support for the new plan, state media reported that Xi Jinping himself had argued in his 2001 dissertation that, “The historical trend points to the abolition of the hukou system” and that access to social services should be leveled out (China Daily 2014). Three decades after that SCMP headline proclaimed the demise of hukou, the Global Times—less confident than their late 20th century counterparts—wondered, “Is China’s Household Registration Disappearing?” (Global Times 2023)    

The above is merely a précis of the Groundhog Day-like reiteration of this hopeful, perhaps dewy-eyed, question over the decades. Why then, despite seeming consensus from the central state and its critics alike, did hukou persist? While it certainly has not been abolished, what has changed? What, if anything, makes this current moment different? And what might an actually liberatory hukou abolition look like?

***

The hukou is, above all, a tool for realizing enhanced exploitation of the rural population via mobility control. Based on the Soviet propiska internal passport system, the modern instantiation of hukou was implemented in 1958. This new system linked the provision of social goods to a specific place. Leaving one’s place of official hukou registration meant forsaking access to state-provided goods, including health care, education, pensions, and, at the time, food. The population was divided up into urban and rural populations, with the former enjoying greater access to services while the later enjoyed collective property rights in the countryside. Equally important, and often overlooked, is that people were pinned to a specific city or village; one could not move from a small provincial city in Shanxi to Beijing, just as they pleased, for example. The hierarchy among cities is often as important as that between rural and urban places. Finally, hukou was and remains a highly fragmented institution, as it is administered by the police at the prefectural level. The central government thus has limited control over how localities regulate local citizenship.  

The hukou-enforced mobility regime has taken on different contours amid China’s dramatic political economic shifts. Pinning the peasantry in place was essential for Mao-era primitive accumulation (Hung 2015), as the “price scissor” was used to extract value from the countryside to invest in heavy industry. But when coastal areas opened to private capital in the 1980s, this vast, cheap, and politically excluded “surplus labor” was designated as China’s comparative advantage in luring capital first to the SEZs and then more broadly. Until the early 2000s, police would harass and detain people they suspected of being illegal migrants, deporting them back to their rural holding pen if they could not produce a “temporary residence permit.” This system allowed cities to access rural labor in a “just-in-time” manner, absorbing energetic young people to labor in the city for their prime working years and expelling them back to village once their bodies or souls were broken. City governments colluded with transnational corporate behemoths to dredge billions from this politically repressed working class, while sloughing off the costs of education, maintenance, and elder care onto the countryside. In this sense, hukou and its attendant exploitation of the migrant working class was perhaps the key social institution undergirding the (now-bygone) generation of capital-centric Sino-American bonhomie. Whereas in the Mao era peasants were confined to the poverty of the countryside, in the era of capitalist transformation they were physically relocated to the city while laboring under the sign of disposability.

This extractive relationship to the hinterland was, and still is, reinforced by a highly decentralized system of social welfare. From the 1990s on, a growing share of the fiscal burden for service provision has fallen on local governments. The unsurprising consequence of this has been growing inequalities in the quality and scope of social goods. Beijing citizens enjoy access to good hospitals, relatively generous pensions, and preferential access to the country’s best schools and universities. On the other hand, their counterparts just across the border in Hebei Province face austerity so severe, that this past winter many could not afford to heat their homes (Howe 2026). In the protectionist-nativist accounting of many urban residents, each additional peasant allowed into the city is one less hospital bed for their parents, one less university seat for their children. Hukou abolition would dramatically alter the biopolitical calculus of the key nodes of power in Chinese society.

Here we have the material basis of urban nativism: exporters (and their supply chain overlords, a growing share of whom are Chinese rather than foreign) want cheap labor, and urban residents want preferential access to state-subsidized infrastructures of social reproduction. These are two of the most powerful groups in the country. A genuinely progressive abolition of hukou thus would mean not only allowing for people to move freely around the country—the narrow vision of freedom promoted by neoliberals—but a dramatic leveling up of social protections such that one need not live in a rich megacity to enjoy quality services. This would entail breaking open fiscally decentralized urban citadels and reorganizing systems of retirement, health insurance, and education from the national level on down. Rich-city privilege would be undermined in the service of national equality. The children of Beijing’s officials would face much sharper competition as they tried to get into Peking University and Tsinghua. Cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen would have to surrender control over hundreds of billions of yuan in their city’s pension funds. Such a project would be enormously expensive and would need to be funded by taxes on the rich and capital. It could also drive up the cost of business and undermine China’s (problematically) dominant export machine. It is precisely because deep hukou abolition entails profound fiscal and social reform that it has been quietly opposed, undermined, and diluted across the decades.

That said, China’s mobility regime has changed. Perhaps the single most important reform came in 2003 after migrant Sun Zhigang, unable to produce a residency permit, was taken into custody and beat to death by police in Guangzhou. When it was later discovered that Sun was a university graduate (and therefore not “merely” a migrant worker) it caused a public furor, leading directly to the elimination of the notorious system of “custody and repatriation.” Although hukou continues to be housed in and enforced by local police, cops lost the legal right to deport rural residents from the city—a major win for social justice.

In general, hukou has become less restrictive and a much higher percentage of people are eligible for urban hukou than was the case a generation ago (Economist 2026). Although there is unevenness in this highly fractured system, it has become easier for people within a given prefecture to switch from an agricultural to non-agricultural hukou, thereby granting access to social services. Particularly in small and medium sized cities, where much of the growth in urbanization has been seen in recent years, it has become much easier for rural people to secure local urban hukou. The mobility regime has become less violent and rigidly exclusionary.

While the urban/rural distinction has been relatively attenuated, transformation of the socio-spatial hierarchy has in fact produced new forms of inequality. Most importantly, the largest and wealthiest cities—not coincidentally, the places with the best social services by a huge margin—remain highly fortified bastions of privilege. It is no longer hard for a farmer to secure hukou in a county town in Henan, for example, but the odds of winning Beijing citizenship and all it entails remain vanishingly small. In fact, many farmers living in small cities want to keep their rural hukou because of its attendant land rights (Zhan 2017): having rights to land is better than the paltry upgrade in services they would receive by switching to a small town urban hukou.

Modeled on Canada’s citizenship regime, big cities have deployed “point based” hukou acquisition to filter the population, with property ownership being the most important metric for point accumulation. Similarly, many rich cities have deployed “human talent” (人才) programs that dangle the carrot of local citizenship for people possessing the right composition of human capital. The consequence of this reorganized socio-spatial hierarchy is what I’ve called the “inverted welfare state,” i.e. a system that funnels resources to the apex of the social structure and limits access to those nominally public resources to those who are already highly endowed with economic and cultural capital (Friedman 2022). Mao-era status distinctions served as the social division that freed up a dehumanized and exploitable chunk of the population to fuel the capitalist boom, and while those old status distinctions linger on in the socio-spatial hierarchy, however, class reproduction has been increasingly driven by market-based difference.

***

Much, but not all, of the recent “Implementation Opinion on Promoting Basic Public Service Provision at Place of Residence” (国务院关于推⾏常住地提供基本公共服务的实施意⻅) rehashes established rhetoric about incorporating non-hukou holders into social services. The Opinion states its core objective as promoting “places of residence providing basic public services and gradually eliminating the connection between public services and residence.” It must also be noted, however, that many positive phrases such as “equalization” (均等化) that appear in this document have been standard fare for twenty years already.

The most optimistic statements are with respect to social insurance (i.e. unemployment, parental leave, workplace injury insurance, health insurance, and pensions). In notably direct language, the Opinion calls to “comprehensively cancel” any restrictions on non-locals participating in social insurance in their place of residence. In my view, the single most interesting sentence in the Opinion is this: “Improve national-level pooling for basic employee pensions,” while suggesting provincial-level pooling for health, workplace injury, and unemployment insurance. Fiscal centralization could be the single most important step for the central government to equalize social services, although the fact that this is but a single sentence should temper our expectations.

The Opinion also addresses point-based residency or, “tiered public service provision.” This is a system which has allowed cities to grant access to public school and other services on a conditional basis, positively discriminating in favor of those who own property, have certain kinds of skills, and have paid local taxes for an extended time. While reaffirming that localities can still employ point-based metrics, they are enjoined to “gradually reduce the number of tiers… and to lower the bar of entry.” In some of the strongest language of the Opinion, localities are told they “Must not use highest degree, job title, or tax contributions as limiting factors,” (emphasis added) though the text is notably silent on home ownership.

There are, of course, some problems. The Opinion leaves the door open to migrant discrimination by strategically deploying the ominous phrase that social services should be available “for those who meet the conditions” (符合条件). This common term in education and social policy means that local governments can establish their own system for filtering access to services.  When it comes to one of the most contentious bastions of “tier 1” city privilege, the university entrance exam, the State Council gives cities a clear off ramp. Rather than stating unequivocally that locality will no longer matter for university admissions, the Opinion restates existing policy when it says that localities can allow migrant children who meet the conditions to take high school and university entrance exams. We can be certain there will be no liberalization of university admissions in Beijing, Shanghai, or other megacities with top tier universities. The language of “those who meet the conditions” is also used with reference to public rental units and employment assistance. In key respects, the central government has explicitly given local governments a green light to continue to treat social services as a privilege, not a right.

Perhaps the most confounding problem is that pensions, health care, and unemployment are mediated by employment at just this moment when irregular and precarious forms of employment have exploded. According to the government’s own estimate, 40 percent of all urban employment is in so-called “flexible labor” (i.e. without the protection of a labor contract), and therefore mostly or entirely outside the social welfare system. Migrants are, without a doubt, dramatically overrepresented in the most precarious segment of the labor market. The Opinion contains standard, and heretofore meaningless, rhetoric about including irregular workers into social insurance plans. On the question of irregular workers, the best the Opinion can muster is that there should be “research on policies for encouraging flexible workers [to participate in pensions].” This hardly inspires confidence.  While it cannot be articulated directly, the State Council’s rudderlessness on the critical issue of irregular labor reveals an intuition that the resolution to the problem of unequal social services is increasingly one of class power.

***

Despite some of the commentarial bombast of recent weeks, this Opinion represents the persistence of a marginalist, prodding approach to hukou reform. Given that powerful interests have derailed repeated calls to transcend hukou over the decades, are substantial changes more likely now than in the past?

On the one hand, there has never been a better time for China to build a status-neutral, national-level system of social service provision. China is richer than it has ever been, its cities in particular concentrate enormous wealth. For decades, urban Malthusians claimed that cities could not exceed their “carrying capacity,” and needed to keep filters in place. That argument is increasingly untenable when cities in particular face a precipitous drop in fertility and do not have enough children to fill the schools. With close to zero international migration and population decline nationally, China has never had such a promising ratio between wealth and people. China’s social spending per capita is well below that of other countries at a similar level of development (and far below that of OECD countries), so even catching up to the average would signal major progress.

While structural capacity is clearly in place, the broader political landscape has become more hostile to universalist social spending. Xi is personally quite allergic to social protections, arguing in a prominent 2021 speech: “Even if we become more developed and financially stronger in the future, we should not set excessively high goals and provide excessive guarantees, in order not to fall into the trap of ‘welfarism’ that encourages laziness.” (Caixin 2021) Imperial rivalry with the United States, and economic rivalry with many more countries, has emboldened the right wing of the state to demand increased spending on technology and war. The most recent Five-Year Plan from March 2026 has an overwhelming focus on supply chains, national security, and technology—AI was the most cited term in the report by a sizable margin (Hofman 2026). On the other hand, “Common Prosperity” was near the bottom, with its number of mentions more than halved from the previous Five-Year Plan. China’s vast resources are being funneled into developing marketable technologies, globe-spanning supply chain dominance, and military modernization and expansion. Not only are social protections a lower priority, Xi has made it clear the state wants to maintain the market to whip the masses. Finally, as long as local governments are made to bear the cost of social protection, a robust social welfare system will be impossible. Localities around the country are facing fiscal crisis due to the end of the real estate bubble, and many have already engaged in austerity cuts while some have failed to pay public employees on time. The Opinion makes no mention of new central government spending to support the increase in expenditures that hukou liberalization would necessarily entail. Without redistribution from the central government, localities will fiercely resist any new spending obligations. 

Realizing a genuinely progressive hukou abolition would require immense political force to overcome resistance from privileged urbanites and capitalists addicted to super-exploited labor. That force cannot come from society, as social movements, and labor movements in particular, are anathema to the Party. It is also clear, given the state’s dithering and continual failure to realize its own stated aims of hukou reform and of increased domestic consumption, that there is not yet an internal bloc powerful enough to force major change. To the contrary, the forces against such fundamental reform are huge. Yet hukou has changed and is beyond a doubt less central to social life than it was a generation ago. State-led gradualist reform has allowed a larger share of inequality to be structured by the market rather than hukou alone. Much as racial capitalism in the United States produces racist social outcomes without formal racial hierarchy, China is on a trajectory of ossifying social inequality but with diminished importance for the residual Maoist status hierarchy. In the context of contemporary China’s hyper-capitalist competition, hukou abolition is a necessary but increasingly insufficient step in securing the means to survive and flourish—without conditions.

References

An, Baijie. 2013. “Hukou Reforms Target 2020: Official.” China Daily, December 18.

Caixin. 2021. “Full Text: Xi Jinping’s Speech on Boosting Common Prosperity.” October 19.

Chan, Kam Wing, and Will Buckingham. 2008. “Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?” The China Quarterly 195: 582–606.

China Daily. 2014. “Xi Urged Hukou Reform in 2001 PhD Paper.” July 31.

Economist. 2026. “Without Fanfare, China Is Making Rural Migrants’ Lives Easier.” May 28.

Friedman, Eli. 2022. The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. New York: Columbia University Press.

Global Times. 2023. “Is China’s Household Registration Disappearing?” August 16.

Hofman, Bert. 2026. “Deciphering the 15th Five-Year Plan.” MERICS.

Howe, Colleen, Tingshu Wang, and Xiaoyu Yin. 2026. “Villagers Shiver in China’s North as Government Gas Subsidies Shrink.” Reuters, January 15.

Hung, Ho-fung. 2015. The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kahn, Joseph. 2005. “Chinese Peasants to Get More Rights.” The New York Times, November 2.

Xinhua. 2001. “China Reforms Residence Registration System.” October 31.

Zhan, Shaohua. 2017. “Hukou Reform and Land Politics in China: Rise of a Tripartite Alliance.” The China Journal 78 (1): 25–49.

Eli Friedman is  Professor of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University

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Adrian De Leon, Vicente L. Rafael (1956–2026), Historian of the Philippines and Scholar of Translation

This was originally written for and published in AHA Perspectives on History, and it is cross-posted with permission. We at positions also mourn the loss of Vince: he was a long-time member of, contributor to, and supporter of our journal and our project.

Vicente (Vince) Leuterio Rafael, eminent historian of the Philippines and scholar of translation, died on February 21, 2026.

Vicente L. Rafael

Vince was born in Manila in 1956, nine years before the election of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to the Philippine presidency and 14 years before the declaration of martial law, under which he would come of age as a young adult and budding scholar. Shaped by the emergence of authoritarianism and student protest within the dynamic and eclectic creative world of the city during the Cold War, he completed his BA in history and philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University in 1977.

In 1979, he began graduate studies at Cornell University, where he earned his MA in 1982 and his PhD in 1984. His dissertation would become his first monograph, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule(Ateneo de Manila Univ. Press and Cornell Univ. Press, 1988; repr., Duke Univ. Press, 1993). Writing for the journal Philippine Studies, Vince reflected on the book’s lukewarm reception upon its release. Initially the book was dismissed as irrelevant to the serious study of the Philippines and his prose as too dense and difficult. He resigned himself to the idea that his work would fall to the wayside of the emerging canon of Philippine scholarship. However, despite these early criticisms, Contracting Colonialism is now regarded as a classic in the critical study of language and translation, early modern Spanish empire, and, of course, Philippine and Southeast Asian studies.

Over the next four decades, Vince wrote prolifically across disciplines and geographies, particularly around the politics of language, vernaculars, and translation under global imperialism. In 2000, with Duke University Press (which would become his publisher of choice), he published another classic of Philippine and Filipino diasporic cultural studies, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. In White Love, through his signature methodological eclecticism and carefully selected historical ironies and ruptures, he eschewed the epic mode of historical writing in favor of the episodic historical essay. Praised by the political scientist John Sidel for its “style and nuance,” White Love won the National Book Award for History from the Manila Critics’ Circle.

Returning to the study of translation and empire, Vince published Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (Duke Univ. Press, 2016). Expanding on his close focus on philology and vernaculars in earlier works, Motherless Tongues scrutinized the politics of area studies through the genres of academic biographies, which, he argued, are also ways that scholars translate their lives into languages and epistemologies. It famously ends with an interview between himself and the translation scholar Siri Nergaard, in which he declared that, rather than simply a luxury or a profession, “translation is a compulsion, not simply a choice.”

His final book, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke Univ. Press, 2023), was a remarkable work of analytical courage and critical pessimism. Written alongside the unfolding of the presidency of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, who infamously waged the so-called War on Drugs against the urban poor and enemies of the state, The Sovereign Trickster is a cultural anthropology of the rhetoric of authoritarian rule, which examines the fraught rise of our contemporary political moment from the perspective of the Global South postcolony.

Vince’s scholarly career was as border-crossing as his work on translation. He held positions on faculty at the Ateneo de Manila University, the Department of History at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, as well as visiting appointments across the United States and Europe. At the time of his death, he was a professor of history and Southeast Asian studies and the Colonel Donald W. Wiethuechter USA Retired Faculty Fellow in Military History at the University of Washington in Seattle. Over a 23-year tenure at UW, he supervised generations of scholars in Philippine, Southeast Asian, and Asian American studies.

Vince will be missed for his care for the field of Philippine studies and his deep love for younger scholars, especially those whom he mentored around the world, both formally as an advisor and (most frequently) informally as a comrade. He is survived by his wife Lila Ramos Shahani, the scholar and former secretary-general of the Philippine National Commission for UNESCO.

Adrian De Leon
New York University, Department of History

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Zhang Chengzhi. “So long as a single breath remains in me, let me devote myself to justice.” 

Translator’s note:

The following reflection by the Hui Muslim contemporary Chinese writer Zhang Chengzhi was published on WeChat during the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampments of 2024 and later translated into English and read aloud at the encampments.

Two years after the brutal suppression of the Gaza solidarity encampments, student activism and academic discourse surrounding the liberation of Palestine remain repressed in the United States. Zhang Chengzhi’s statement invites continued reflection on the ebb and flow of internationalist movements across the long twentieth century, the interconnectedness of struggles for justice worldwide, and the enduring role of student movements in shaping history.

Zhang Chengzhi. “So long as a single breath remains in me, let me devote myself to justice.” (April 23, 2024)

Translated by Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown

Seventy-five years of Palestine’s tenacious, unyielding resistance, and seventy-five years of Israel’s occupation, terrorism, and massacre of Palestine, have culminated in this decisive struggle in Gaza. The world’s political leaders, who are appointed by Capital, have separated from people of the world, who are exploited by Capital.

The people of the West have defied their powerful governments. Like those in Gaza, they persist (with sumud) in protesting. This forces Capital, which seizes the world by its throat, to feel its crisis. It is flustered and desperate, prohibiting free speech and declaring all protests against the massacre in Gaza to be anti-Semitic. Particularly at Columbia University in the United States, Capital has cast aside democracy, deploying militarized police on campus, intimidating the president, and arresting students. Seven decades of propaganda, education, and brainwashing, which have reached extremes and been refined into a high art, are suddenly on the verge of collapsing in an instant.

In the past two days, Columbia has become the most infamous campus in the world. The university president had the audacity to invite the police onto campus – Alas, my life is too short, I can only admire mechanisms for university self-governance under which the military and police have no right to intrude. As for negative precedents that destroy this form of democratic university governance, I know of only one: In 1968, when Japanese Zenkyoto leftist students occupied the Yasuda Lecture Hall at the University of Tokyo, the president of the University allowed the mobile unit (riot police) to enter the campus and suppress dissent.

In the afternoon, students were arrested; by evening, scores of them poured into the protests. No one feared losing their enrolment status or their “future prospects.” It wasn’t only the students: teachers, whose vocation is to protect students, also bravely stood up at Columbia University. Wearing their academic robes as symbols of dignity, they held up signs and openly supported the students—unafraid that Capital, already deranged, would oust or even persecute them.

Perhaps, the following words of Mao Zedong have profound meaning: “Place great hopes in the American people.” In the United States, the great tradition of student movements has not been broken. Passion for justice will rapidly spread. Because the Palestinian people are endlessly tormented in the crucible of violence, because even babies have been pushed onto the altar of sacrifice, justice can tolerate it no more and has suddenly returned! What is happening at Columbia University in the United States is a revolution. It may fall back into a low tide, but it could also turn the world upside down.

“In 1936, the fascist military rebels attacked the Spanish Republic, angering progressive fighters around the world. Undaunted by bloodshed and misfortune, they took up their pens and guns, abandoning the comforts of the upper and middle classes to throw themselves into internationalist action worthy of remembrance in song. Participating in the Spanish War — this was a major event in modern world history. There were numerous people of renown among the fighters, including Hemingway, who wrote ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ “ (Excerpted from an earlier essay of mine, “Rereading Norman Bethune After Fifty Years”)

 Not only does it carry a red thread from the Spanish Civil War, it also picks up the baton from the “Sixties”, an era now passed that is being demonized by Capital. “Perhaps, this chain of justice, this stance of dedication to the other, this lineage of fiery passion, is another through-line in world history. It must be pointed out that what appears severed is actually connected. Without the people of 1936, there would be no people of 1968 — the global left-wing movement of the 1960s, which raised a banner of revolt against the unjust world in the 1960s, were their inheritors. Internationalism that opposes oppression and exploitation and strives for world justice will always be the unbreakable truth. It has not lost its enlightenment value nor its mobilizing power simply because of interference from Stalin or any other degenerated faction. Moreover, without today’s reality, people would not truly be able to see this truth clearly.” (Ibid.)

Gazing at it in my twilight years as I pass the age of seventy-five, I feel the excitement of an undying spirit. In 1966, we threw ourselves into the blaze of youth, but did not make dedicating our lives to the other our aim — this became the lasting regret of an entire generation. Today, the goals of the new generation in the United States are directed towards universal justice and address the suffering of others. This is the testament to humanity and the idealism of youth. So long as a single breath remains in me, my commitment to this cause will not cease. At this moment, though far away, I am present in Columbia’s quad; at this moment, I am with its brave teachers and students. My heart sets out again from its point of origin. Facing the trials and transformations of the century, we will not retreat.

 

Joanna SW Lee-Brown is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature and comparative literature at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University. Her dissertation explores the translation of Islam into China’s revolutionary contexts in the Mao and post-Mao eras.

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Afro-Asian Now: Global China in a Too-Late Capitalist World. Tianren Luo reviews Andrea Pollio, , Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital

Andrea Pollio, Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital, University of California Press: Los Angeles, 238 pp., 9780520413085

Amid the new rounds of imperial war against Iran, I can clearly sense the circulation of a certain Sinophilia among many of my US and European leftist friends—it seems as if we had almost suddenly arrived at a moment when people began to realize that everything might already be too late. For one example: “Yet people still continued to build the discursive scaffolding that has allowed this to happen. Democrats, liberals, feminists, leftists, anarchists, diasporic crusaders, anti-campists…the list of enablers sutured to the positionality of the genocidal West is long. … Thirty-six million people demonstrated against the war in Iraq in 2003, yet the war happened anyway. We should have started organizing against this long ago.”1 What follows such laments is a desperate recourse to “China” as “the last force of reason standing in the way of collective annihilation”—or, more precisely, the writer continues, “China” is “the last defense of a global village grounded not only in morality and public law, but also in an openness to the temporality of the future, rather than one founded on Nazism, colonialism, and the temporality of the tomb.”

This is not the first time Euro-Americans  have projected their hopes onto an elsewhere in moments of crisis, and we should hardly be surprised that the yearning for “a temporality of the future” becomes so thoroughly entangled with nostalgia—for the myth of the “Global Village,” and for a supposedly more benign form (in China) of neoliberal capitalism that it once seemed to promise. Yet beyond this familiar gesture of displacement, what deserves closer attention is the extent to which this discourse rehearses the not-so-new grammar of so-called “Sinofuturism”: above all, in its imaginary investment in a “neo-China arriving from the future,” and in the belief that China might embody a kind of “Modernity 2.0” capable of transcending the current impasse of “the West,” or America. Nevertheless, the fantasy of Sinofuturism—as many critics have already noted—is deeply problematic, insofar as it reproduces the  temporal structure of Orientalism, with its uneven distribution of time across geographic space.2 Such a structure deliberately produces a condition of non-contemporaneity between Europe/ America and their imagined “elsewhere”—a condition that, I would insist, must itself be undone.

It may be helpful to situate Andrea Pollio’s recently published book Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital both within and against this backdrop, as he intervenes in the recent debates and controversies—within and beyond academia—on “Global China,” Afro-Asian connections, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the widely perceived specter of Chinese “neocolonialism.” He traces in close detail “the encounter of an African city with Chinese ideas, experts, enterprises, start-ups, investors, platforms, business models and electrical equipment” (4). No doubt, Pollio writes with a certain enthusiasm for locating in digital Global China and its presence in Africa the possibility of “alternative futures for homegrown technologies” beyond what he terms “Silicon Valley techno-imperialism.” Yet, written as an ethnography of Chinese techno-capital in Nairobi, the book can also be read—so I would argue—not simply as a contribution to narratives about competing techno-futurities, but as a guide to the very situatedness of digital Global China and its techno-capitals in a postcolonial city, one that above all destabilizes the fragile ground of a falsely rendered geographical non-contemporaneity.

By situatedness, I mean to call attention to how Global China’s “experiments” with techno-diversity in Nairobi, and the “new” regimes of accumulation they facilitate, are grafted onto both the colonial legacy—from the violence of colonial urban planning to the sedimented racial formations of the British Empire—and the neocolonial–neoliberal institutions and enterprises, together with their local networks of operation, appropriating, mimicking, modifying and competing with them. Here, Global China should be understood beyond popular geopolitical narratives of China’s presence in Africa, and instead as designating a global political-economic and (post)colonial-imperial formation in which “only by understanding global capitalism can one understand China” and “only by understanding China can one understand global capitalism” (9). Pollio’s book directs our attention to the messy underside of these processes with its focus on the “capillary infrastructures” of Global China and its regimes of accumulation, where the distinctions between the “new” and the “old,” the future and the past, are increasingly blurred.

Pollio opens the first chapter by revisiting the concept of state capitalism, contending that earlier critiques of techno-capitalism have often failed to account for the role of the state in sustaining the plural modes of accumulation that underpin techno-capital. While heinvokes Yuk Hui’s notion of “techno-diversity” in the introduction—for whom the concept is framed in terms of “different moral and cosmological registers” of technicity—Pollio nevertheless avoids lapsing into a facile culturalism, as heis acutely aware that different modes of technological existence, or “technicity,” can never be disentangled from the divergent strategies of accumulation adopted by techno-capitals across regions, in which state power is exercised at multiple and varying levels. If the Silicon Valley version of techno-capitalism is driven, as critics have long observed, by the notorious “Californian Ideology,” —a fusion of techno-utopianism and libertarian political doctrine—the Silicon Savannah of Kenya, drawing inspiration from rising East Asian economies such as Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and China, invents a contrasting techno-optimistic myth of development. Here, intervention by what Pollio terms the “investor state” is deemed indispensable, and long-term planning, developmentalist policy implementation, and “an impassioned coalition of private sector representatives, civil society groups, academics, and government technocrats” (28) are celebrated as the preconditions for a new digital economy.

Pollio’s recounting of the Kenyan side of the story begins with the presidency of Mwai Kibaki, which marks the onset of what he calls the country’s “golden age” following decades of economic stagnation. Kibaki, we are told, “championed a non-aligned, state-planned, yet free-market economy” and prioritized “economic development” over redistributive agendas—a political project that became fully legible in his second term with the launch of Kenya Vision 2030. Modeled on Malaysia’s Wawasan 2020, the Kibaki plan revived an earlier techno-optimistic tradition in Kenya that placed faith in the deployment of “tools”—technocratic rule, rapid economic growth, and social engineering—to “lead” the nation onto “the path of modernization” (29).

Echoing this trajectory is the history of digital Global China, which Pollio traces back to the 1990s, when a crisis of overaccumulation pushed Chinese techno-capital to “go global” by first cultivating markets in the Global South and the former socialist world, an expansion that ultimately brought Chinese technology corporations to Nairobi. These two lineages, both strongly shaped by state policy and strategic decision-making, nevertheless cannot be understood apart from the intertwined post-colonial and post-socialist conditions. . On the one hand, Kenya’s developmentalist state and its promises remain deeply entangled with the colonial legacies of divide-and-rule and the extreme inequalities they produced, while the operations of Chinese techno-capital in Kenya and more broadly in Africa have benefited from the aftermath of structural adjustment, which privatized telecommunications and weakened public investment in infrastructure. On the other hand, closer attention to the post-socialist dimension reveals how earlier experiments in African socialism and state planning have been displaced by the investor state and its technocratic futurism, even as the legacies of Third-Worldism and the revolutionary ties once forged between China and African nations are increasingly appropriated by Chinese techno-capital in the service of its “global” projects.

But interestingly, Pollio turns from a discussion of “statecraft” to the everydayness of urban life in Nairobi in the following chapter, where social interactions and relations of exchange are increasingly mediated by cheap handsets from Chinese manufacturers, allowing what he calls “a diffused, capillary infrastructure” to take shape (47). Chinese mobile phones move to the center of focus not only as tangible objects—touched, transported, used and repaired in the everyday lives of Nairobi’s residents, and bearing intensive affective investments that structure their perceptions and imaginations of “Chineseness”—but, more important, they appear as devices that register the very frontiers, or “frontier markets,” of techno-capital’s expansion in Africa. Despite the persistence of a more classical “colonial” economic model, the frontiers of Chinese techno-capital in Africa must also be understood through the logistics of information circulation connecting cities like Nairobi to the headquarters of Chinese technology corporations in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, or Shanghai, through which screens become the medium by which the quotidian lives of local inhabitants are data-fied and monetized. Yet Pollio also cautions against simply translating this discussion of the data-fied market frontier into existing theoretical categories such as “digital colonialism,” which, in his view, overlook the extent to which “Africa is not simply a passive frontier of Global China’s techno-capital,” insofar as “Nairobi’s urban life has shaped the technological affordances of” the digital commodities produced by Chinese technology corporations. (55)

From this perspective, Pollio proposes conceptualizing Nairobi as “a test bed of mutating techno-capital that emerges from trials, negotiations, glitches, and adaptations” (64). What might need to be added here, is that the idea of the African continent as a “testing ground” or “site of experimentation” for new technologies and colonial-imperial sciences has a much longer history, dating back to the early twentieth century under British colonial rule, when strategies of diversification and localization were actively embraced by colonial authorities, always in tandem with an ongoing project of racialization. What would be worth pursuing further, then, is an inquiry into how this older practice is being remobilized in the neoliberal present under the banner of entrepreneurialism, and how existing colonial-imperial techniques are being appropriated and reshaped in the contemporary expansion of Chinese techno-capital in Africa. For, in the end, this isan expansion that does not simply replicate European colonialism, but continues and reinvents it in novel forms, as modes of accumulation shift and technological conditions evolve.

The capture, reorganization, and extraction of urban life under the digital platform become, in this sense, an effective means of monetizing and capitalizing the very precariousness of survival in a postcolonial African city. It is in this manner that the recognized political and infrastructural “failures” in Nairobi are reappropriated by Chinese techno-capital and transformed into key sites of accumulation. In the third  chapter, Pollio observes a shared pattern of accumulation across three businesses launched by a circle of Chinese entrepreneurs in Nairobi. This is —a pattern he calls “algorithmic suturing,” according to which digital platforms become the extractive apparatuses through which “many self-organized, informal, popular and private modes of service provision,” on which local Black communities in African cities have long relied amid the “physical and economic fragmentation” of Nairobi, are enrolled and reorganized (68). The “failures” of public service infrastructure in Nairobi clearly reproduce a geographic demarcation that attests to the uneven distribution of risk, precarity and development along the racial lines that continue to structure the city. Strategies of financing through failure bear the recognizable imprint of the Silicon Valley–Wall Street nexus, as Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander have argued, functioning as a mechanism that articulates techno-capital with finance capital and inaugurates a new regime of accumulation under which the condition of “failure” becomes permanent and indeed, habitual.3 Yet these strategies of accumulation are reshaped as they travel to Africa via China: not only are they directed toward informal social and economic formations as an “exteriority” awaiting platformization, but they also demand a redefinition of the very category of “failure” under a technocratic ethos characteristic of Chinese tech start-ups in Africa, where infrastructural breakdown is framed as a technical problem to be solved through the importation of digital platforms. In this sense, the narrative of technological solutionism reactivates, once again, the unfulfilled “promise” of development that accompanied earlier rounds of structural adjustment under IMF compulsion.

Yet such narratives obscure the deeper significance of these “failures” as registers of the persistence of coloniality in Nairobi and other post-colonial African cities, and of the indebtedness of Chinese techno-capital to the longue durée of European imperial–colonialism in Africa, which created the very conditions under the strategies of accumulation deployed by China operate. Pollio argues near the end of chapter three that, “on the one hand, it is easy to recognize these data-fied processes … enrolling … ‘vital platforms of techno-social reproductivity,’” while they at the same time are “experimenting [with] the pluralization of concerns … that shapes the making of techno-capital in Nairobi” (91). What I would add, here is that the dialectic he identifies between sameness—the logics of “reproducibility”—and pluralization must itself be situated within both a contemporary and a deeply historicized  form of inter-imperiality: contemporary, in the migration of strategies for techno-capitalist speculating on “failures” from Silicon Valley to Chinese start-ups in Shanghai and Beijing, and then to Nairobi; and historicized , in the reappropriation by Chinese techno-capital of “failure” as the sedimented legacy of earlier imperial-colonial formations.

Pollio goes on to  examine Chinese finance technology (fintech) start-ups that take Nairobi, as a “site of experiments” for investments in new modes of cross-border payment designed to bypass the sanctions and constraints of the “old” protocols of the neoliberal world of finance, such as SWIFT, thereby revealing a dialectical tension between emergent Chinese venture capital and existing neocolonial and neoliberal transnational institutions that complicates prevailing geopolitical narratives of an emerging “tech cold war” (94). Not unlike other forms of Chinese techno-capital operating in Nairobi, these fintech corporations target the informal networks of exchange and underregulated flows of money—often beginning with the Chinese diasporic community in the city—in order to compete with their Euro-American counterparts while, nevertheless, appropriating many of the latter’s repertoires of strategies of accumulation. Pollio theorizes this competition-in-mimicry in the term “micro-innovation.” Micro-innovation does not operate independently of pre-existing universal protocols but rather inflects and bends them, outlining what might be understood as a practical disposition—a method,—with implications that extend well beyond the mere production of duplicates. Such a process, therefore, does not constitute a rupture with neoliberalism and its project of world-making, rather, it actualizes its most radical promise: a mode of accumulation defined by plasticity. In this sense, Chinese fintech corporations in Nairobi push global capitalism further toward a point of deterritorialization, revealing once again that the expansion of capitalism’s frontiers toward an unconquered “outside” is consistently accompanied by the release of capital mobility from established institutional constraints.

The data-fication and monetization of the everyday lives of Nairobi’s residents, as Pollio observes, is was fuels this micro-innovation and creates linkages among what C.K. Lee has called “varieties of capital.” What emerges from this intricate map of interlocking forms of capital should force us to elaborate a new conceptual schema for understanding China’s expansion in Africa in relation to earlier European colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as in relation to neoliberalization and the imposition of structural adjustment. China’s expansion thus appears not as a rupture, but as a continuation, forming a new totality in which plural regimes of accumulation overlap and producing an overdetermination not only in space but also in time.The past sediments into the present while the “future” repeats the past, modifying its legacy to meet the shifting demands of worldwide accumulation as the gravitational center of capitalism moves toward East Asia.

There is one other underlying dimension of “Global China” and its techno-capital in Nairobi that points to the work of community-building, of care, cautious planning and calculation, or, in other words, to the involvement of reproductive labor. This is thelabor that sustains the regimes of accumulation of Chinese techno-capital in Nairobi while being discounted from the language of value, being both racialized and gendered in the making of the “Silicon Savannah” into an investible site. . The silicon elsewhere is simultaneously about the curation of narratives and imaginations concerning “an alternative relationship … between technology and capital at its purported peripheries” (141). While such narratives undoubtedly replicate and borrow from earlier settler-colonial “tales of belonging,” the sensorium cultivated by female Chinese diasporic investors in Nairobi ) to promote the city’s investibility is also shaped by their lived and embodied experiences of a different reality: their own feelings of precariousness associated with expatriation, border-crossing and the condition of being a “non-native” in Africa. The “alternative” imagination of Global China is thus deeply enmeshed in the everyday social life of a postcolonial city and in its affective landscape—just as xenophobia and anti-Black racism in China, and Sinophobia in parts of Africa, remain materially present, alongside persistent anxieties about surveillance and control by the Chinese party-state over start-ups and private capital. These tensions remind us, to borrow a formulation from Mingwei Huang, to attend to the “longer relational histories of Asian racialization” as part of the very context within and against which the curation of an alternative imagination of Global China takes place.4 The allegedly “new” vision of the relationship between technology and capital epitomized by Chinese techno-capital—along with the “collectives” it brings into being—cannot be generated without navigating the sedimented layers of older colonial-racial formations, which function, as we see throughout this book, as the very preconditions for the emergence of new regimes of accumulation when viewed through the opportunistic gaze of Chinese start-ups in Nairobi. It is precisely this entanglement between the old and the new that demands closer scrutiny, rather than being dissolved into the easy rhetoric of techno-optimism.

To be fair to Pollio, we should note that he treats techno-optimism not merely as an “ideology” to be taken as an object of critique. Throughout his writing, as he openly acknowledges, there is always a “compromise between critical distance and critical proximity”—that is, “a compromise made possible by methodological and analytical care, which, through the practice of ethnography, revealed how much my journey was embroiled in the trade of technological optimism itself” (161). As Pollio reminds us, then, the techno-optimism of Global China in Kenya, far from a naïve belief in technological solutionism as a response to all the challenges faced by a postcolonial city, is “nomadic and ephemeral in its appearances.” (155)— It is an unstable assemblage of discourses formed through encounters, negotiations, and on-site improvisations. Drawing inspiration from queer theory, Pollio insists that his reading of Chinese techno-optimism should not be treated as a critical project of “depth” in the conventional sense, but must instead proceed by gliding along a surface—a strategy Pollio adopts in order to break with what he identifies as overdetermined framings such as “the tech cold war,” the “Chinese century,” or “China’s data colonialism in Africa” (164).

But what if Chinese techno-capital and its “new” regimes of accumulation themselves operate precisely at the level of the surface, on which Pollio’s method of ethnography forms not a critique from without but a kind of mimicry from within? By surface, I do not mean a departure toward an almost Heideggerian “other beginning” beyond the neoliberal–neocolonial world order, as if inaugurating a project sui generis. Rather, I am pointing to how these regimes graft themselves onto existing structures and strategies of exploitation, dispossession and extraction, extending into the gaps and loopholes within their fabric by transforming them into new sources of monetization, while simultaneously seeking alliances both with the colonial-imperial legacies of Europe and with the PRC’s state-driven overseas investment policies. Rather than marking a rupture, Global China in Nairobi appears as a manifestation of the ethos of late capitalism par excellence: its style of collage without essence, its fixation on surfaces, its suspicion toward metaphysics, its rhetoric of self-entrepreneurship and empowerment, and its speculative disposition toward risk and opportunity. From this perspective, the question with which Pollio concludes his book—“Could alternatives emerge from the unequal global systems of the digital economy” (165)—should be reframed. The very language of “newness” surrounding Chinese techno-capital risks obscuring the historical inter-imperial dynamics and sedimentations through which US, European and Chinese forms of capital are entangled, , rendering the simple dichotomy between “change” and “mirror” increasingly untenable.

The notion of “Global China,” conceived as a theoretical antidote to Chinese exceptionalism, instead invites us to reread popular narratives about the rise of China within a broader spatio-temporal continuum of world capitalism and its imperial–racial–colonial matrix of power. This is a continuum that remains plastic, uneven and continually evolving. Popular discourses on China’s alleged neocolonialism in Africa often obscure the historical fact that the system named by Kwame Nkrumah much earlier as “neocolonialism” emerged first from the postwar projects of European and American power; yet acknowledging this genealogy does not mean that contemporary Chinese capital is itself not  reproducing analogous forms of domination. The power of Pollio’s work lies precisely in narrating capital in its lived proximity rather than from the safe distance of abstract critique, thereby opening, as he suggests, a space for theoretical renewal. What such an opening ultimately demands, then, is not the celebration of an “alternative future” promised by Chinese techno-capital in Africa but a sustained reckoning with the historical debts that condition that very futurity.

Tianren Luo is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Brown University whose work explores digital and racial capitalism, extractivism(s), and transnational resistance across postcolonial Afro-Asia. They are also an activist and filmmaker.

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Revolution, War, and Revenge in Maoist China. Covell Meyskens reviews Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life

Chen Jian, Zhou Enlai: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024)*

Chen Jian has written an impressive book. For decades to come, it will undoubtedly be the go-to text that scholars consult for questions related to Zhou Enlai. As Chen notes in the introduction, past scholarship on Zhou has tended to fall into two camps. The first group has stressed his political wisdom, moral integrity, and dedication to serving China and its people at home and abroad. This viewpoint has been especially widespread in China where the party-state has used Zhou’s exemplary character to craft a historical narrative that highlights the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) devotion to building China into a world power. A second group has taken a diametrically opposed stance and criticized Zhou, in Chen’s words “for his unfailing loyalty to Mao and Mao’s disastrous revolutionary programs” (Chen, 6). In this framing, Zhou is depicted not as the “moral example of the revolution” (Chen, 5). He is disparaged as a selfish hypocrite who prioritized his own self-protection.

In his monograph, Zhou Enlai: A Life, Chen seeks to produce an interpretation of Zhou’s life that does not fit into either of these frameworks. For Chen, it is too simplistic to just shower Zhou with praise or condemn his moral and political failings. Neither approach will lead to sufficient historical understanding of Zhou Enlai and the revolution to which he dedicated his life. Historians who engage in these moralistic readings miss the mark because, as Chen says, “a revolution is no sin” (Chen, 7), and revolutionary history cannot be reduced to morality. “Revolutions happen for a reason” (Chen, 7). For a historian such as Chen, the analytical task is to delve into source materials to determine what factors caused Zhou and others to take part in China’s revolution in all its complexity, from “the grand aim” of creating a new socialist human to committing “unspeakable violence against humanity” (Chen, 8).

According to Chen, only through a deep examination of available sources can historians “articulate the historical conditions…under which a revolution begins” (Chen, 9). Only then can we comprehend how Zhou and “his comrades made the revolution…[and] were remade by it,” and ultimately became “its prisoners” (Chen, 8). Only in this way can scholars “identify why, where, and how the revolution went wrong and ran counter to the goal of the revolutionaries— the liberation of the people” (Chen, 9). Chen thus immersed himself in Zhou-related source materials for two decades. This sustained engagement led him to conclude that “there exists no single or straightforward formula” that a historian can use to “tell and make sense of Zhou’s story” (Chen, 9). Rather, Chen realized that “Zhou’s life and career” epitomize “the dilemmas and tragedies of China’s revolutionary era” and embody “its deep paradoxes and enduring complexities” (Chen, 9).

To a certain extent, Chen’s empiricist approach is similar to much recent research on Maoist China which has placed a heavy emphasis on the contradictions, unintended consequences, and tensions between ideology and reality in Chinese revolutionary politics. Yet there is one huge difference between Chen’s book and most histories of socialist China published in the past decade or so. Most recent studies are firmly rooted in social, cultural, environmental, and economichistory. While they do not overlook high politics, it is not their primary focus. Their major analytical concern is the everyday problems, patterns, and prospects of different laborers, families, communities, officials, sexes, environments, and ethnic and religious groups.

This kind of interest in the complexity of social, political, cultural, and environmental dynamics is strikingly absent from Chen’s book. Although Chen does at different points discuss how party policies impacted large groups of people, he does so at a significant distance from the warp and woof of daily life. The only point of view he examines at length is the social world of political elites. Chen’s portrayal of CCP leaders, like many other histories of elites, makes it seem as if they spent nearly all their time on affairs of pressing political consequence and had little-to-no social or family life or interests outside of their work. By taking this analytical approach, Chen’s depiction of the social world of CCP leaders occludes the material support networks that went into maintaining their everyday lives of prestige, privilege, and power. While it may not be Chen’s intent, one consequence of his persistent concentration on the upper echelons of China’s party-state is that readers could easily come to think that party elites were the only people with agency in China’s revolution, and that everyone else in China was just a pawn in the plans, policies, and power games of the CCP leadership’s making.

Chen Jian is especially interested in the small group of elite men whose careers at the party-state’s apex were intimately entangled with Mao Zedong’s. This narrative focus certainly centers Zhou Enlai as the book’s core subject, but it seems at times that he also is not, and that occupying center stage instead is Mao himself, “buoyed by vast, unchecked, and unbalanced political power,” exercising his authority over Zhou and everyone else in China to fulfill his “utopian visions” of permanent revolution “fused with grand plans for political, social, and cultural transformation through prolonged mass mobilization campaigns” (Chen, 8).

This interpretation of Mao’s power over the Chinese revolution is emplotted in a revolution-as-disaster narrative. In Chen’s hands, this narrative functions as a literary motor pushing the story forward, giving meaning to the historical record and its significance. This plotline is so pronounced in the book that, in my view, it significantly undermines Chen Jian’s proclaimed intention to attend to the paradoxes and complexities of China’s revolution. The logic of this narrative frame is not at all complex, rather it is quite simple: China’s revolution was a catastrophe, and Mao’s political campaigns were a principal reason for this disaster. Reiterated at several junctures, frequently at the end of chapters, this argument often invokes two political campaigns launched as part of Mao’s continuous revolution – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

While the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution are undoubtedly momentous episodes in China’s revolutionary period, their repeated mention leaves the impression that they are the primary prism through which the revolution and Zhou Enlai’s life ought to be considered. Of course, there are many scholars and journalists who have argued that this interpretation is correct, and that evaluations of China’s revolution can and should be reduced to the devastations of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. And yet, we could ask: what does the revolution-as-disaster narrative obscure? This question emerged particularly for me in the early chapters, where I often wondered at the summing up of Zhou’s early decades by Chen’s referencing of later events. This struck me as an anachronistic way of reading the past.

Through this authorial sleight of hand, the future disaster becomes the all-consuming endpoint of the narrative, turning the book into a work not of history, but of sci-fi horror as ferocious ghosts from the future somehow mystically travel back in time and haunt the past not just once, but several times, seemingly through some sort of time loops that enable them to repeatedly venture into and terrorize previous eras. Setting aside the magical realism at play here in Chen’s story, this narrative trick makes it seem as if all of Zhou’s biography were leading to the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. When the revolution-as-disaster narrative is given such a central place in the book’s narrative arc, earlier periods in time lose their autonomy, agency, and comprehensibility on their own terms. It becomes hard to understand why Zhou and others might have supported the revolution in earlier phases or how revolutionary motivations were maintained over time. While the book takes up these issues, the revolution-as-disaster narrative often crowds out a more sustained examination.

To some extent, Chen Jian balances the revolution-as-disaster narrative by threading through the book another narrative common to histories of the People’s Republic of China: the “standing-up” story. This refers to Mao’s famous words at the PRC State’s foundation in 1949, “We, the Chinese, have stood up” (Chen, 281). This phrase is sprinkled throughout Chen’s text and thus also serves as a semantic engine. The standing-up narrative captures a powerful strain in Chinese nationalism and acts as a metonym for all the angst and anger of the Chinese population about foreign incursions and domestic turmoil in the century preceding 1949. It articulates the pride Chinese leaders and people had in finally relegating the troubled history of imperialist subordination to the past and establishing a new state-society nexus dedicated to rebuilding China on the world stage.

On the other hand, the standing-up narrative is perhaps too sweeping. Like the revolution-as-disaster narrative, this storyline obscures as much as it reveals. It amalgamates a huge chunk of time under a single banner while overlooking the wide variety of experiences that people of different ages and social backgrounds had of China’s Communist revolution. These experiences, as different scholars have documented, ranged from exhilaration, hope, and commitment to despair, resistance, compliance, and resignation.

Another historiographic tendency that Chen Jian shares with many other historians is placing revolution at the center of his narrative. Clearly the importance of revolution in the life of Zhou Enlai and other members of the twentieth-century Chinese elite should not be denied. However, it is arguable that war was as vitally important in their politics and life trajectories. Without a doubt, revolution and war were closely linked in twentieth-century China, as were war and the Chinese people’s drive to “stand-up.” Yet, when many historians of China narrate the last century, they tend to grant revolution center stage and relegate war to the background. This is in marked contrast to histories of twentieth century Europe or the United States which often foreground war in the making of nations, individuals, science, and other historical phenomena. In the past two decades, some historians of China – Rana Mitter, Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, for example – have focused on the weight of war in modern China’s history. Even so, revolution remains the more dominant explanatory framework.

It could be that we may better understand Zhou’s choices and the historical conditions he faced by making war instead of revolution more central to his life and times. By foregrounding war, the violence of the Mao era appears less as a unique attribute of the period and more as an enduring element in Chinese politics from the early twentieth century onwards. War allows the Cultural Revolution to look less like an all-encompassing disastrous endpoint and instead it becomes legible as part of a century-long trend in Chinese history in which stark friend-enemy distinctions, extreme violence, a militarist political economy, and militarized approaches to state-society relations and resolving disagreements were the norm, not the exception. Seen from this standpoint, violence appears less as a unique product of communist revolutionaries. It appears instead as a prominent feature of mid-twentieth century Chinese politics, from warlord battles and the Guomindang’s annihilation campaigns against the CCP to the party’s militant activities to survive, take power, and build a revolutionary China. In this vein, I would suggest that the Cultural Revolution could be read as the last civil war in a long series of civil wars stretching back into the advent of modern history in China.

The Great Leap famine also appears in a different light when it is seen alongside the wars of preceding decades, in which government actors used starvation and ecological destruction as tools of statecraft. Mass death was a recurrence; numbness to huge losses of life became prevalent; and finding a way to move on amidst widespread devastation was not an abnormal experience of only a few people, but a normative touchstone in a nation that was heavily militarized for decades. By drawing these connections, I do not mean to downplay the consequences of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. Rather, I aim to suggest ways to rethink China’s twentieth century as an era of domestic and foreign wars.

Another facet of Chen’s book with which I had disagreements was the claim that the essential reason Mao Zedong was able to stay in power for so long was that during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign from 1942-1945, Zhou Enlai and “his comrades had handed Mao total power to make and define the revolution’s legitimacy narrative” (Chen, 224). From that point on, “the lofty cause of the Chinese Communist Revolution became centered on a single person’s ‘greatness’ and the supposed brilliance of his ideas” (Chen, 224), and no other CCP leader could “come up with an alternative grand legitimacy narrative for the Chinese revolution” than Mao’s theory of “continuous revolution” which combined Mao’s “Communist utopian vision with Chinese patriotism and revolutionary nationalism” and made “‘we, the Chinese, have stood up’” (Chen, 538) into its motto.

While it is true that Mao had commanding power over discourse during his tenure as the CCP’s top leader, I am less certain that his role as master narrator was such a decisive factor in his political longevity. I am inclined to say that a second factor Chen Jian emphasizes was more important – the party leadership “created no institutions to check and balance” Mao’s power. Although Mao’s narrative authority mattered, his position at the fulcrum of all major institutions was just as crucial, if not more so. This position gave him supremacy over all levers of state power at both the central and provincial levels.

Mao’s power over institutions helps to explain his continued dominance even when the discourse behind his policies became contradictory and disjointed. For instance, when Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to suppress rebel factions during the Cultural Revolution, this policy shift went against his earlier decree to arm the students in precisely those factions. The Party’s propaganda apparatus engaged in semiotic gymnastics to paper over this contradiction. On the one hand, this shows that Mao’s role rendered narrative coherence less important in the production of Maoist ideology. What mattered more was how various narratives in Mao’s name were generated and how various factions mobilized Maoist discourse to advance competing and divergent interests of their own. On the other hand, one could argue that it was Mao’s power over the gun that mattered most in the suppression of Cultural Revolution factions, not his narrative hegemony. In addition, as many scholars have pointed out, including Chen Jian, the discursive contradictions and jumbles generated by policy shifts led many to lose faith in Mao and his closest advisors.  

According to Chen, Zhou played a crucial role in maintaining Mao’s leadership amid policy inconsistencies and the problems his tenure in power produced. As Chen illustrates, Zhou did not always agree with Mao and sometimes openly expressed disagreement. However, from very early on, Zhou decided to never challenge Mao’s supremacy. He genuflected partially because he lacked the “will and determination to rise to and maintain the position of the revolution’s supreme leader” (Chen, 72). Yet he also bent a knee because he determined after intense conflicts with Mao in the 1930s that the only way “to avoid another deadly clash” with a vengeful Mao was to embrace him “as the paramount leader” and never “pursue the party’s number two position” (Chen, 225). Zhou’s deference to Mao made him invaluable to the Chairman.

As a “man of action” (Chen, 92), Zhou was always there to take Mao’s ideas and turn them into concrete policies, to sense what direction Mao seemed to be moving and guide the ship of state in that direction. When Mao’s political campaigns generated conflict between different political factions, Zhou frequently stepped in, “demonstrated his prowess as a master compromiser” (Chen, 127), and worked to find common ground between competing interest groups. When Mao shifted quickly from one policy to another, Zhou did not dwell on the contradictions in Mao’s thinking or activities. Nor did he waver in his loyalty. He followed Mao’s orders, had state institutions implement them, and managed the consequences. Chen Jian asserts that “without Zhou” manning the essential levers of state machinery, “the big ship that was China, carrying hundreds of millions of passengers, might have sunk” (Chen, 589), especially during the Cultural Revolution.

In addition to claiming that Mao was the revolution’s master narrator, Chen also states several times that Mao was a master of party politics. Yet it is not entirely clear what counts as mastery. If the meaning of mastery is to survive a long time or stay at the party’s helm, then one could plausibly agree with this argument. Yet this is a low bar to evaluate mastery of the party-state. If one employs a different metric for mastery that places more stress on policy effectiveness, this claim stands on less firm ground. Chen’s evidence reinforces this latter view. In Chen’s telling, Mao appears not to be a strategic master. He looks much more like a political bumbler, as Neil Diamant has argued. Mao did not pass from one success to another. He implemented one policy after another in an ad hoc and often arbitrary manner.

Mao’s policies often generated unintended consequences, and so he stopped pursuing one policy and implemented another. This pulling of the party-state back and forth in a hodge-podge of policies appears to have led many people in China at the elite and grassroots level to experience Maoist governance not as masterful, but instead as inducing political whiplash, disorientation, and disillusionment. According to Chen Jian, Zhou was the key communist leader whose indefatigable work ethic and bureaucratic skill kept China’s ship of state afloat amid all the tumult caused by Mao’s policies. While this claim may be true, Chen does not offer enough evidence to back it up. I found myself wanting more information on how exactly Zhou kept institutions functioning on an everyday basis but also in troubled times. Chen keeps his narrative spotlight so narrowly focused on Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong that readers are offered relatively few insights into other party members Zhou interacted with, what sort of relationships they had, and how they worked together to put policies into practice and deal with problems.

One final narrative framework pivotal to Chen’s book is what I would call a revolution-as-revenge narrative. This framework is intimately connected with the revolution-as-disaster narrative that Chen weaves into the entire book. Chen asserts that Mao’s drive to undertake continuous revolution through huge political campaigns, especially the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, were critical factors behind China’s revolution resulting in calamity. In this telling, another major factor was Mao’s personality. Suspicious and resentful, Mao made revenge into a motor of Chinese revolutionary politics. In Chen’s analysis, rancor and retribution play such a driving role in Mao’s conduct that one is left with the impression that his propensity for revenge was a fundamental plank in his long-term dominance over Chinese party politics and China’s revolution.

As Chen details at length, Mao was full of bile and spite and was not inclined to forget how certain people had wronged him. He rarely buried the hatchet, granted forgiveness, or moved on. He held onto grudges and kept their malice hanging over his comrades’ heads like Damocles’ sword, ever inclined to lash out at others for what they did today, what they did decades ago, and what Mao worried they might one day do to the revolution and his legacy. Zhou’s fear of Mao’s animus was also, as stated above, a major reason for his absolute allegiance even in the worst of circumstances.

Clearly, Mao’s resentment over wrongs, both real and imagined, was an integral factor in the Chinese revolution’s course. However, resentment is granted such a paramount place in Chen’s book, that it appears sometimes that the only motivator behind Mao’s actions was the venting of his spleen. Ideology fades into the shadows in this historiographic light; avenging grievances was what mattered. From this perspective, it can seem as though the political battles between Mao and others over the revolution’s direction were not fueled by differing views on how to build socialism, but by political passions that were more personal, poisonous, and at times profoundly petty. Chen’s past work has asserted the centrality of ideology in understanding China’s revolution. His magnum opus on Zhou Enlai’s life instead seems to suggest that revenge was not only a more powerful driver of Maoism, but angst about Mao’s vengeance was an enduring engine of Zhou’s politics.

*An abridged version of this review will be published on H-Diplo as part of a roundtable.

Covell Meyskens is Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. He researches the geopolitical, social, and environmental dimensions of security and development in modern China. His first book, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He is currently writing his second book, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World.