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August 8, 2026August 15, 2026

William Marotti, Sovereignty and Nuclear Politics in 1968: the Visit of the USS Enterprise to Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture

Last year marked the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also marked a new era in nuclear dangers, with the imminent expiration of the last of the strategic nuclear weapons treaties (New START). While the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has no expiration date, the associated commitment to a moratorium on tests by the signatory nations appears to be at risk of faltering. The 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites by Israel and the United States further imperil nonproliferation efforts by making transparency a potential risk, a situation compounded in 2026 by rhetoric threatening civilization-level death and other signs of unpredictable judgment.¹

The memory of those atomic bombings eight decades ago has remained fraught in Japan, with survivors of the attacks—hibakusha—on the one hand facing discrimination, and on the other hand finding their perspectives caught up in national and international politics, appropriated for ends they do not support.² Meanwhile, even as worries about some country finally breaking the “nuclear taboo” have escalated, the Japanese government has refused to sign onto the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.³

The gap between the urgent “lessons” of this past’s nearly incommunicable experience and the realities of continuing nuclear politics detached from any such assessment becomes ever clearer when considered against the ways in which the Japanese and American security states have worked to suppress objections to nuclear dangers. The legacy of the two nuclear attacks is intertwined with constraints on the exercise of postwar democracy and decades of extensive American involvement—overt and covert—in Japanese domestic politics.⁴ I will consider the legacy of one major confrontation—protests against the arrival of the nuclear powered, and nuclear armed USS Enterprise in Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture in January 1968—as a moment deeply embedded within this longer history. Reframing this legacy against demands for popular sovereignty and political debate shifts the terms of discussion from a frozen moment of hellish attack to a long-deferred question of democratic accountability of states to their publics.

Discussions of wartime experiences necessarily involve questions inconvenient to state political objectives. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, discussions and representations of the atomic bombings were specifically subject to censorship, and even undercover police surveillance once the Korean War began.⁵ Commitments to promoting a vigorous postwar democracy were attenuated for strategic concerns, and by what political scientist and Occupation Government Section staffer John M. Maki described as the “identity of interest between the Occupation and the government,” a situation created by the “decision to act through [the existing] Japanese government.”⁶ Despite early purges of militarists, the postwar state managed to preserve major portions of the Imperial state and its personnel with the assistance of the Occupation, colluding so as to limit popular sovereignty.⁷

Nuclear and strategic policy maintained and obscured this political legacy. The end year of the Occupation in 1952 coincided with the first Hydrogen Bomb test, and the ongoing Korean War. Signed in 1951, the Peace Treaty ending the Occupation was coupled with a Security Treaty that put Japan squarely within American strategic planning, securing basing rights, transit, and continuing extensive support for America’s cold and hot wars—and thereby made Japan a potential target should nuclear warfare eventuate.⁸ In contrast to Japanese national governmental acquiescence and accommodation, successive Hiroshima City mayors from 1947 would issue Peace Declarations on the anniversary of the August 6, 1945 bombing, and, beginning in September of 1968, would write directly to countries conducting nuclear tests to convey their opposition.⁹

Although the postwar constitution “renounced war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” daily life after the Allied Occupation was closely bound to Asian wars: war procurements during both the Korean and ongoing Vietnam Wars were crucial in inaugurating economic recovery and high growth, in turn supporting the U.S.-favored ruling party.¹⁰ The Korean War and Vietnam War also involved Japan directly, via two large naval bases, six air bases, and over 140 smaller bases, logistic depots, hospitals, and communication facilities. Another 80 were on Okinawa, which had remained under American governance; the first troops dispatched to Vietnam came directly from Okinawa, with Kadena Air Force Base going from sporadic use to full bombing sorties beginning in February of 1968.¹¹ Strategic technology transfers and other support boosted the growing electronics industry.¹² Hot and Cold Wars alike link present-day security with the recent imperial past: American Occupation planning sought to return Japan to economic regional preeminence similar to that of its wartime Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a goal finally realized in the 1960s through Vietnam-era economic involvements.¹³

The gulf between popular support for peace and denuclearization and a daily life deeply tied to war would come to the fore with the January 1968 visit of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Enterprise to the naval base US Fleet Activities Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture. For years, American strategists had expressed frustration with the troublesome resistance of the Japanese public to nuclear warfare, sometimes described as their curious “nuclear allergy,” and annoyance with the limits such opinions had on deployments involving bases in Japan.¹⁴ To promote compliance, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku had begun a multiyear campaign to increase public “defense consciousness,” but continuing wars and threats made such goals fraught at best.

A Department of State declassified memo on the visit made the intertwined objectives for the Enterprise visit explicitly clear:

The longer range political reason for the visit is our desire to involve Japan increasingly in our Far East defense posture… we also see some advantage in conditioning the Japanese to military nuclear matters since a solution to the Okinawa problem may well entail returning the island to Japanese administration while continuing to store nuclear weapons at our bases.¹⁵

Prime Minister Satō had publicly called for the reversion of Okinawa to Japan while campaigning in 1964, and in a highly-publicized visit to Okinawa in 1965 declared that Japan’s postwar era would not be over until Okinawa was restored.¹⁶ Expectations were thus raised following his November 1967 visit to Washington D.C. and meeting with President Johnson that progress to reversion might soon be seen.¹⁷ Protests at Haneda Airport sought to impede his departure, and to somehow ignite the underlying and potentially explosive issues involved, including active warmaking from American bases and especially of the assumed but scrupulously unacknowledged presence of nuclear weapons.¹⁸ The upcoming visit of the Enterprise in turn raised these stakes significantly.

The Japanese government had long maintained a declared policy of prohibiting the “introduction” of nuclear weapons, producing public suspicions over the improbability that, for example, American ships docking at Japanese bases would have been purged of such weapons. The negotiations for the return of Okinawa raised the issue anew, as reversion would, according to Satō, make it “on par with the mainland,” thereby begging the question again as to the nature of those arrangements.¹⁹ In the context of the government’s push to increase the public’s “defense consciousness,” and possible Okinawan reversion, the visit of the USS Enterprise “had given visit [the] character of [a] deliberate effort by Sato government to overcome Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy,’” according to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, U. Alexis Johnson, that is, to get the public to tacitly accede to nuclear weapons in both mainland ports and post-reversion Okinawa.²⁰

A number of groups planned to oppose the visit of the Enterprise with a large demonstration at the naval base in Sasebo, again in the hopes of triggering a broader public opposition—to nuclear weapons, to the Security Treaty (up for renewal again in 1970), and to the deep involvement of Japan in hot and cold wars and the consequent threat of a conflagration. Japanese and U.S. officials were however sanguine about the situation. Prior confrontations such as in November of 1967 had met with public disapproval, while earlier regular visits of nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) since 1964 had apparently been successful in desensitizing the public.²¹ The Mayor of Sasebo, Tsuji Ichizō, had visited Ambassador Johnson and had promised that “his police and most of the townspeople were prepared to give the [student protesters] a warm welcome,” and asked for 48 hours’ notice to assist in billeting the “several thousand police reserves that he plans to mobilize.”²²

Most of Ambassador Johnson’s January 17 telegram to the Secretary of State was dictated prior to protester-police confrontations. He expresses concern that “sensational press treatment that may well be given to accounts of violence instigated by a very small handful of extremist students who enjoy no substantial support…” He added, “[the] fact that they have obtained little or no popular or press support of any kind has encouraged police to take a harder line with them. [The Government of Japan] has mobilized in Sasebo several thousand riot police from all over Japan…”²³

Ambassador Johnson’s chief concern was instead over the possibility of a “fluke”: “If even one American navy ‘defector’ fell into clutches of Beheiren (anti-Viet peace group) [sic] and started sounding off about presence [of] nuclear weapons on Enterprise, a situation would be created that, depending on its exploitation by opposition, could do considerable harm.”²⁴ This group, the “Peace in Vietnam!” Citizens’ Federation,” Beheiren, had achieved growing prominence the previous Fall in part by facilitating the defection of four sailors from the USS Intrepid out of Japan to the Soviet Union and then to Sweden. The group and its contacts were among many that had been put under surveillance prior to the visit, with details shared with U.S. officials.²⁵

Despite (or perhaps because of) the meticulous planning, it was in fact police overreaction that provoked a national outcry. On January 17, two days before the delayed Enterprise arrived, police exercised their “increased authority” in a spectacular manner.²⁶ As the Embassy reported,

As hundreds of reporters and cameramen looked on, about 375 plastic-helmeted, stave carrying and rock-throwing Sampa Rengo students charged about four times as many riot policemen at a bridge directly in front of the US naval base… the police responded with their own billyclub charge, supported by tear gas and water cannon. The peak of the clash coincided perfectly with the noon television news and millions of television viewers were permitted to see the full force of the police counteroffensive…

[The American Consulate in Fukuoka] also reported …a curious shift in the Sasebo citizens’ attitudes occurred. “The initial mood of apprehension and annoyance at the invasion of trouble-making students was replaced by sympathy and even grudging admiration”… Judging from the press, similar shifts of attitude seemed to be taking place throughout the country.²⁷

The riot police had in fact effectively enacted a spectacular police riot, beating and gassing not only protesters but also citizen onlookers and members of the press, chasing them onto the grounds of the Sasebo Citizens’ Hospital and beating them with their meter-long truncheons despite their lack of resistance. Citizens reportedly intervened too as police dragged injured students from the hospital, or witnessed other acts of excessive police violence.²⁸ The Mayor himself was reportedly shocked by the results of this “warm welcome” and issued a public apology to gassed hospital patients and injured bystanders; police too were ordered to pay courtesy calls to injured citizens.²⁹

Rather than somehow finalizing a homeopathic treatment of the longstanding “nuclear allergy,” or easing negotiations over Okinawa and over the 1970 renewal of the Security Treaty with the U.S., the visit made the Enterprise an icon for nuclear weapons within an inflamed public discourse. The police violence raised the larger question of why, given the likelihood of confrontations, it was necessary to stage this visit—and pay such a price—for a ship only two weeks out of port.³⁰ In the context of Satō’s vague call for “defense consciousness,” Ambassador Johnson observed, it

raised old fears of resurgent militarism and newer fears of nuclear armament. The Enterprise visit is widely interpreted as U.S. collusion with Sato’s scheming to overcome Japan’s ‘nuclear allergy’ (read nuclear weapons allergy). This becomes related to current speculation about U.S. insistence on nuclear bases on Okinawa is price for reversion and Sato’s willingness to pay that price.³¹

The Government of Japan “had crawled out on a long limb insisting that there could not repeat not have been nukes on Enterprise because U.S. government did not ask for prior consultations.”³² In the wake of the Enterprise’s visit, some Diet members and even Foreign Minister Miki Takeo went on record explicitly denying the presence of nuclear weapons aboard the Enterprise, causing real concern for the U.S. State Department.³³

In Japan, the visit was a political watershed: on the one hand, in the face of popular outrage, police were instructed to shift to a defensive position from their posture of aggressive response. On the other, that aggressive response had inaugurated a debate about the government’s violence against its own citizens in support of war. The consequent combination of self-restraint on the part of the previously activist police and augmented public attention made possible the flourishing of new forms of mass political activism in Japan, particularly through non-sectarian and non-party organizations such as Beheiren and the All-Campus Joint Struggle Committees [Zenkyōtō]: their ranks rapidly swelled through the involvement of “ordinary” people and students without prior political experience.³⁴ A “1968” experience in Japan was thus enabled through the unintended consequences of this nuclear politics, and the contradictions between strategic arrangements and popular sovereignty.³⁵

While Prime Minister Satō’s 1965 declaration that the “postwar era” would not be over until Okinawa was returned echoed and antedated other similar statements asserting an end to “postwar,” it shifted the metric for this recurring declaration from economic recovery to a recompletion of the national territory.³⁶ Nonetheless, the suppressed issues around nuclear politics pointed to something more fundamental than economics or territorial integrity: a “postwar” that marked a democracy shot through with unexamined histories and compromises, and a persisting relation to wars old and ongoing. The notion of a restored national unit likewise willfully obscured the thin lines between Okinawan incorporation and the colonial expansions and wars involved in establishing the nation-state of Japan. That long history had been deeply connected to the Asia-Pacific War, with the Pacific theater conflicts fought between imperial powers largely on colonial and semi-colonial territories, and with the post-WWII warfare that followed the “Japanese interregnum” displacing colonial rule, including in Indochina.³⁷ The repeated demands to “end” that “postwar,” that is, that ceaseless relation to war, amounted to a demand to forget the aporetic legacy and embrace a sanitized recovered memory of its history. Okinawan reversion was held out as promising to restore national sovereignty, but the conditions for those negotiations, like all prior strategic negotiations, demanded a short-circuiting of popular sovereignty by secret compromises with the United States, as well as a truncated understanding of nuclear politics in the one country ever subjected to nuclear attack.

The continued entanglements in America’s ongoing wars—Vietnam, and possibly Korea again (the Pueblo incident in 1968 threatened to ignite a second Korean War)—marked a shared relation to warmaking that fundamentally disregarded public scrutiny in the name of national security. Participation in American wars was likewise underwritten by secrecy and manipulations of the public, and even state violence and propaganda, in defiance of democratic debate. Revelations of obscured histories, outright falsehoods and illegal government actions in the wake of the Vietnam War and contemporaneous protests would occasion myriad attempts in the United States to reign in the out of control national security state, from the War Powers Resolution of November 7, 1973 to multiple congressional committee hearings, including the creation of the Church and Pike Committees, and subsequently the establishment of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.³⁸ In Japan, disclosures confirming the long-rumored CIA station and its role in facilitating and supporting the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, actions and propaganda against the left, and of the secret agreements regarding transit and storage of nuclear weapons, would be years in coming.³⁹

The conflict at Sasebo in January of 1968 arose from the attempt by the U.S. and Japanese governments to facilitate nuclear involvements in regional warfare, to desensitize perceptions and obscure historical recollections over the atomic logics linking the two states together at a time in which ongoing conflicts, sustained by bad reasoning and misrepresentations, threatened further escalations and conflagrations. The police violence brought to bear upon the protests instead underlined for many the ways in which their government was committed to collusion and participation in warfare. If it led the way for a “1968” in Japan, its legacy also points to the link between official secrecy, the sidelining of popular sovereignty, and the likelihood of military misadventure—and even of a breaking of the nuclear taboo. While voices across the political spectrum have blamed some version of 1968 for our contemporary woes—from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to Slavoj Zizek—the actuality of that global moment was grounded in solidarity, in improbable recognitions across ostensibly incommensurate local scenes of struggle, equating all of the myriad forms of domination against the singularity of demands for liberation, equality, and voice.⁴⁰ The present moment, with the spread of rightist governments, jingoistic, bigoted scapegoating rhetorics, and extralegal state violence, with oligarchs discussing the human race as disposable “biological bootloaders” while talking about “Navigating World War Three” and “Bring Back Nuclear,” all point to a moment in which humanity’s fate is again at stake.⁴¹ Who will decide our destiny this time?

William Marotti is Professor in the Department of History at UCLA.

Further Reading (in English):

For those interested in a deeper dive into some of the topics considered above, please consider the following.

The literature on the atomic bombings is massive; here are just a few selections in English: On Hiroshima’s expansion to global status and the making of “Hiroshima” memories, see Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima traces: time, space, and the dialectics of memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On the “postmemory” generations in relation to official memoration, see Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: history, memory, and Japan’s unending postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʿi Press, 2017). On the relative occlusion of Nagasaki and its specifics see Chad Diehl, Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). A monument commemorating the thousands of Korean victims of the atomic bombing was finally moved within the Hiroshima Peace Park in 1999 (see Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb, accessed August 12, 2025). While twelve American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, some three thousand American citizens of Japanese descent, largely children of 1^st generation issei who could not naturalize, also became victims: see Thousands of Japanese Americans Were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The US Government Still Won’t Recognize Them. – Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment, accessed August 12, 2025.

Historian Eiji Takemae notes that the nascent peace movement was seen as “communist inspired,” rather like most forms of dissent during the late Occupation and its Red Purges. See Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, translated and adapted by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (New York: Continuum, 2003), 506. On public discussions and state surveillance of the Maruki’s work see Yoshida Yoshie, “With the Hiroshima Panels on My Back,” trans. Mabuchi Kanako, National Center for Art Research, Japan, posted July 9, 2024, https://artplatform.go.jp/resources/readings/R202306. The Hiroshima Panels themselves are featured on the Maruki Gallery’s online page, The Hiroshima Panels | Maruki Gallery For The Hiroshima Panels.

Covert involvements involved manifold CIA payoffs supporting (and indeed helping to create) the Liberal Democratic Party which has dominated Japanese politics for decades. See JPRI Working Paper No. 11: July 1995 Chalmers Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction”; Norbert A. Schlei, “Japan’s “M-Fund” Memorandum, January 7, 1991,” and Michael Schaller, “America’s Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S. Japan Relations,” Working-Paper-11.pdf; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Democracy’s Porous Borders: Espionage, Smuggling and the Making of Japan’s Transwar Regime (Part I),” Japan Focus 12 (40), 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1557466014028009.

Foreign Minister (and Liberal Democratic Party President) Kōno Yōhei made a direct request to Ambassador Walter Mondale in 1995 that the US not release documents detailing CIA funding for the LDP in its formative years. The Ambassador, Embassy, and CIA station joined to urge suppression of the existence of the CIA station entirely. Embassy to Director, CIA, Telegram Tokyo 24344, “Eyes Only – For C/EA/J – Official Acknowledgement of Tokyo Station,” March 26, 1996, 2, Secret, Eyes Only. National Archives, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records, 2025 Release, Doc ID: 104-10326-10050. The Foreign Relations series would retrospectively acknowledge “in the 1958-1968 decade, the U.S. Government approved four covert programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political life” in 2006. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXIX, Part 2, Japan, ed. Karen L. Gatz (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2006), Editorial Note 1. Available online: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v29p2/d1. The debates over those disclosures are elaborated in William B. McAllister, Joshua Botts, Peter Cozzens, and Aaron W. Marrs, Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable”: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2015), chapter 12. Available online: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus-history/chapter-12.

The revision and adoption of the 1951 Security Treaty into the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan occasioned huge protests throughout Japan between late 1959 and the spring of 1960. See Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2001); George Packard III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, N.J., 1966); Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines; Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

On the crucial role of a militarized Okinawa in the production of the mainland economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s, see Jon Mitchell, Why Are We in Okinawa?: A History of Violence (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). As Christopher Nelson observes, the enduring connections to war in the supposed “postwar” led photographer Higa Toyomitsu to call 2010 “year sixty-five of the Battle of Okinawa”; novelist and critic Medoruma Shun refers to the present as “year zero of the postwar,” in Nelson’s words “an unending duration of war, a peace yet to begin.” Christopher T. Nelson, When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060970

Departing Sasebo, the USS Enterprise was caught up with the seizure of the USS Pueblo, a SIGINT ship gathering intelligence off the coast of North Korea. On January 23, 1968, North Korean vessels fired upon and captured the ship and its crew, sparking an incident that raised fears of a second Korean War. The Enterprise, then en route to the Gulf of Tonkin, was rerouted to a position in the Sea of Japan. This fear is explicitly discussed in Airgram A-1098, 15 (see above), even before the Pueblo incident had been reported. The incident had followed close upon the “Blue House” raid of January 21, in which a North Korean team had attempted to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee. The attack was to press South Korea to withdraw its troops participating in the Vietnam War. See Steven Lee, “The Korean Armistice and the End of Peace: The US-UN Coalition and the Dynamics of War-Making in Korea, 1953-76,” Journal of Korean Studies 18 (2): 196-7. The Enterprise finally reached Yankee Station on February 21, three weeks after the start of the Tet Offensive, and commenced attacks on North Vietnam two days later. USS ENTERPRISE (CVAN-65) NARRATIVE COMMAND HISTORY 1968, unpaginated, available at: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-command-operation-reports/e/enterprise-cvn-65-viii/pdf/1968.pdf

On COINTELPRO and other covert abuses of power in the United States: the House Select Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were both created after a burglary of an FBI field office revealed COINTELPRO and massive, illegal surveillance and counterinsurgency acts by the FBI, CIA, military and other security entities. Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes that the 1997 report from the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy cited Max Weber’s discussion of secrecy and bureaucracy at length: the invention of “official secrets” by bureaucracy, the hiding of its knowledge and action, and its struggle against parliamentary inquiry—and hopes for a “poorly informed and hence powerless parliament.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: the American experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 143.

On Okinawan reversion and nuclear weapons, and the Japanese government’s posture: Norris, Arkin and Burr describe Okinawa as “chock-a-block full of nuclear weapons of all types until 1972.” Norris, R. S., Arkin, W. M., & Burr, W., “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 55(6), 1999: 79. https://doi.org/10.2968/055006011. Bombs with removable capsules were helpful for politically sensitive allies, including Japan but also France. Ibid, 29. The National Intelligence Estimate of February 17, 1969 would anticipate that Satō “will feel compelled to press hard for the exclusion from Okinawa of the nuclear weapons which virtually all Japanese believe are stored there.“ Document 3. National Intelligence Estimate NIE 41–69, Washington, February 17, 1969, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XIX, Part 2, Japan, 1969-1972 (U.S. Department of State: 2022), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v19p2, emphasis mine. In December of 1967 Prime Minister Satō was pressed on the intertwined issues of defense and nuclear weapons in relation to Okinawa; he attempted to shift the discourse from a debate about defense to that of “security,” asserting that protection under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was compatible with calling for an abolition of nuclear arms, with the Peace Constitution, and with Japan’s averred three nuclear principles—neither possessing nor manufacturing, and not introducing, nuclear weapons into Japan. 57th Diet, House of Representatives, Budget Committee, No. 2, December 11, 1967, 022,https://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/txt/105705261X00219671211/22.

As I wrote elsewhere, “These [three] high-minded principles, which were part of the reason why Satō was chosen to share the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, were actually an exercise in dissimulation, and perhaps willful misunderstanding, that even today is incompletely detailed within the declassified archival record. By way of secret agreements to the Security Treaty in 1960, Japan explicitly permitted such transits… Satō’s three principles were in effect a doctrine of implausible deniability, sufficing nonetheless to deflect direct accusations of violation from the arrival of any particular ship—even a fully provisioned aircraft carrier heading for a combat station in proximity to Vietnam.” Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 112-13. On the nuclear weapons stored in the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands—also part of these negotiations—see the National Security Archive “Companion Page to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists January /February 2000 Issue,” U.S. Nuclear Weapons on Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima, accessed August 15, 2025. The islands were returned in 1968 with a secret provision that the U.S. could store nuclear weapons there in the event of an emergency.

Also in 1974, in October, Mayor Tsuji of Sasebo would join Tokyo Governor Ryokichi Minobe and Yokohama Mayor Ichiro Asukata in demanding the closure of Japan’s ports to US warships until the U.S. explicitly gives assurances that no nuclear weapons were being brought into Japan. See chronology, Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, Part I, 1960-1976 | National Security Archive (accessed August 15, 2025).

August 4, 2026August 10, 2026

Tejaswini Niranjana, The Dream-Work of Boredom: Remembering Ackbar Abbas (1942-2026)

When the news came that Ackbar Abbas was no more, I was shocked that someone who never seemed to grow old could have left us, just like that. I first met him in 2017 at his talk at the University of Hong Kong on fake news in the age of Trump. The talk was a brilliant but brief provocation on the false, the fake and the posthumous. All three terms would develop, as the years went by, his own unique spin. They would persist in his thinking as he used them to illuminate not just the contemporary world of late capitalism but also post-socialist societies, like the China in which he lived for part of the year. “Critique is always one revolution behind”, he pronounced in his customary gnomic fashion, as the audience full of PhDs struggled to grasp the arguments of the Laoshi (lo si in Cantonese), the master, who had never bothered to acquire a doctoral degree.

I had heard that the master, after years of living in the United States on retiring from HKU Comparative Literature, would not mind spending more time in Hong Kong, where he had family, and which was not too far from Beijing, where his wife Liu Sola (writer, composer, vocalist) lived. Hesitantly, I went up to speak to him and asked if he would consider visiting us at Lingnan University. My senior colleague Stephen Chan and I went to meet him at a café in Kennedy Town to discuss the details, and things moved quickly afterwards. Ackbar began to spend a few weeks every year as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies where Stephen and I worked. Each year, we planned a series of activities around his presence, starting with the Lingnan 50^th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture he gave to a packed audience at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on October 23, 2017. Chatting with the attendees, I realised that a large number of them were his former Comp Lit students. They listened raptly to their Laoshi working his magic again, turning ordinary words into something that could shed light on major contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Here he re-introduced his concept of the posthumous, this time adding the term ‘socialism’ before it to describe present-day China, suggesting that China was neither capitalist or post-socialist in any simple way. Rather, the socialist past had a strong after-life, and might appear even more vibrant than before.

Here is the link to the lecture.

In my undergraduate core course at Lingnan on Culture and the Modern World, one of the first readings the students encountered was a chapter from Ackbar’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. In this prescient book, which came out in 1997 at the time of the Handover to China, Ackbar introduced the concept of ‘disappearance’, the one concept with which he is most associated, on which he is most extensively quoted. He initially used it to tackle the elusive and fugitive nature of culture in the former British colony. He argued that it was precisely at the intense moment caused by imminent disappearance that something like a ‘Hong Kong culture’ emerged.

He agreed very kindly to come and visit my class and talk to the students, who were struggling with the ideas of deja disparu and reverse hallucination. Perhaps it was not the right venue or the right audience for Ackbar, but at least I came away with a better understanding what this thinker, who always said he was born, brought up and corrupted in Hong Kong, was trying to articulate. And with a better understanding of Hong Kong too: how the rapidity of change in Hong Kong made one constantly battle with an anticipatory nostalgia, and with reverse hallucination, not seeing what is indeed there. Disappearance is connected to speed and the over-saturation of space with signs and images, leading to a kind of abstraction that is ‘ungraspable’. In this landmark book, Ackbar dwelt on cinema, architecture and literature, prefiguring his main preoccupations for the coming years. It was not that he set out to write about a film, an auteur, or an architect. These rich examples became for him a way of entering a thought-space and setting out concepts prompted by the material in front of him, concepts that could travel far beyond the film or the book. Although prompted by classic Western theorists like Kracauer, Benjamin, Virilio, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, et al, Ackbar’s agile thinking was constantly framing and reframing the world around him.

These moves were very much in evidence in a masterclass on ‘documenting Hong Kong’ at Lingnan, part of the Performing Archive series curated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, professor of practice that year. The series involved a docuthon, where three large screens showed Hong Kong documentaries in a loop for an entire day, followed by an engagement between Ackbar and Lingnan faculty and graduate students, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive. Ackbar picked up the terms put forward by his interlocutors in addressing the Hong Kong situation and gave his own glosses. ‘Failure as resistance’, he said, was not a romanticization of failure; instead, it should be seen as referring to new political models coming out of specific contexts. “If I don’t try too hard”, he said, “I’ll succeed in everything I do”. So one needs to fail. Failure is when you work with new impediments and with the unpredictable present. ‘Disappearance’ in the Hong Kong context was not part of a series including appear, reappear, disappear – all these were taking place at the same time.

Ackbar emphasized that we could not take the term ‘local’ literally (referring to the mini-film ‘Local Egg’ which is part of the 2015 Hong Kong fiction anthology ‘Ten Years’). Local cannot refer to a real, empirical entity, since the local is always dis-located. Just as Hong Kong can never be a nation; it’s a hyphenation. Another key term, ‘dependency’, was often used in the Hong Kong context, referring to Britain and/or China. But, said Ackbar, this was not like dependency in South America. In Hong Kong, dependency is turned into a fine art. It refers to arbitrage, to turn a profit. Ackbar also took up the concept of ‘demonstration’, which could be (a) a political gesture, and (b) a reference to what was being shown in the act, what critiques of the present emerged there, what sort of working through the archives it would involve. Just as in his response to the 1990s situation, Ackbar cast a critical eye on political developments post-Umbrella Movement, not denouncing or celebrating but trying to think through the complexity. The one thing he emphatically denounced, however, was sentimentality, whether emotional, cultural, or political.

Reading some of his unpublished essays now, and watching the recorded videos of his Lingnan lectures, we are struck by how certain ideas and tropes kept haunting the master. One of these is the ‘real’. “We are no longer in the real”, said Ackbar in his response to the Lingnan docuthon. “We are, to quote Baudrillard, in the desert of the real”. He began his commentary by invoking one of his favourite figures, Dziga Vertov, the Soviet film-maker who invented the ‘kino-eye’. Vertov’s ‘man with a movie camera’ overcomes, says Ackbar, the prejudice of the humanistic eye as it interrogates the ‘real’. While watching the Hong Kong documentaries for several hours at a stretch, Ackbar said he began to feel a certain boredom. Through the dream-work enabled by boredom he sought to analyse what documentary does. It’s no longer the lie that lies, he now thought. It’s the truth that lies. In a world where facts have become factoids and ‘reality’ is actually reality-TV, we see that the real exists as simulation. And when the real is simulation, what do you document? One can only indulge in nostalgia for the real. Akbar ended his masterclass remarks by claiming that documentary, like translation, is always impossible, “hence always a betrayal”. He proffered a different starting point, a challenge to the filmmaker: “Start with the fact of betrayal, and with the betrayal of fact”. This could become the new basis for documentary.

We did not see Ackbar again after 2020 and the breaking out of COVID, except for his gracious presence online at co-organised events between his home institution, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Centre for Cultural Research and Development (CCRD) at Lingnan Cultural Studies. Here is a link to his comments during our virtual research workshop on digital humanities during the pandemic, The Ghost in the (Twittering) Machine, Oct 24, 2020.

Starting with The Twittering Machine, a painting by Paul Klee, and a reference to the social media platform Twitter, Ackbar suggests that digital media is a ‘super-spreader’ of information and disinformation, or media-as-virus, and that the notion of the digital humanities might, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, actually produce monsters.

The last time we listened to Ackbar in a formal setting was during the 2021 research workshop, organised by UCHRI, CCRD and a newly-established Centre for Inter-Asia Research at Ahmedabad University, where I had just moved from Lingnan. After a discussion with Ackbar, and with the UCHRI Director, David Theo Goldberg, who had been a key presence in our collaboration, we decided the theme would be Racism by other Means. As we said in the workshop announcement: ‘Which are the novel (sociotechnical) ways through which racism(s) replicate, spread, infect, mutate, and travel? As forms of domination have changed, so do forms of resistance and compliance. This research training workshop aims to generate a multi-vocal conversation to understand how algorithmic racism may define new kinds of bio-politics, and how experiences and analyses of race/racism in one place can inform similar experiences and analyses in another place.’ You can view Ackbar’s short but sharp presentation at this link:

Ackbar spoke about the doxic as toxic, referring to the beliefs or doxa about race and races. He drew on three films, or as he put it, a single detail in each film, to point to the parodic doubling (another recurring theme in Ackbar’s work) in the production of commonsense. He began by saying that racism persists in posthumous form, not referring to its afterlife but its persistence in the form of hysteria (the symptoms of racism becoming arbitrary). Ackbar pointed to the larger social ecology in which racism existed, since it could not be enforced in isolation. His first example was from the Bruce Lee film Fists of Fury (1972), made in Hong Kong but set in the Shanghai of 1910 that faced various forms of foreign domination. The hero sees a signboard saying ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed’, and kicks the sign to pieces. The audience is meant to read this as an anti-racist moment. However, in the park where the sign is displayed is an Indian gatekeeper dressed in an exotic costume. Here the film’s protest against racism is occurring through the racist act of portraying the Indian, hence the parodic doubling of racism and anti-racism. Ackbar pointed to similar moves in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), where toleration could end up becoming the double of bigotry, and in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), where a fugitive woman fleeing gangsters is protected by a small town which subsequently turns against her. Three grim reminders of the doxic as toxic, and of racism by other means.

***

Among my cherished memories of Ackbar is a chance meeting with him on the Mid-Levels escalator one afternoon in Hong Kong, the same escalator that features so prominently in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express. This was in 2019, in the semester Ackbar, Stephen Chan and Ashish Rajadhyaksha taught a course at Lingnan on Wong Kar-Wai. He often came over to Ashish’s and my flat in Yuen Long for dinner, and enjoyed chatting with the postgrad students and other faculty who sometimes were there too. Although Ackbar was fond of taking taxis, he came with us on the MTR many times, always insisting that he would not sit down, chatting in the same measured tones in which he gave a lecture as we clung to the overhead straps.

Having been grounded in the US by the pandemic, Ackbar was trying all kinds of strategies to be able to travel to China to be with his wife Liu Sola. We last spoke on Zoom some time before he headed back to Beijing. You will be greatly missed, Ackbar.

Writing this short piece gave me the opportunity to recollect the many wonderful occasions on which we interacted with Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. For making those occasions richer, and for their company during the Lingnan years, my warmest thanks to Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Kin Chi Lau, Lisa Leung, Anjeline de Dios, Soo Ryon Yoon, Roberto Castillo, Toto Eunsoo Lee and Kelvin Wu.

Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Director, Cente for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India. She is the author, most recently, of Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconsciousand the co-editor, with Ritty Lukose, of Digital Intimacy: Young Women, Gendered Modernities, and Aspirations in Inter-Asia.

August 3, 2026August 3, 2026

Fluttering Battle Banners: A Maoist Comic Book on Palestine

Introduction:
The Politics of Internationalist Children’s Literature in the Cultural Revolution

By: Brian W. L. (a student)
Edited by: Rebecca Karl

Maoist China had a rich legacy of support for national liberation movements in literature and art. Fluttering Battle Banners (1971, 战旗飘飘) is a 20-page-long picture book about Palestine intended for children. Two others of the same genre are two-page long short serial picture books (连环画) published in the Children’s magazine Little Red Guard (红小兵): “Palestinian Little Hero named ‘Happiness’” (1970, 巴勒斯坦小英雄——幸福) and “Two Little Heroes” (1969, 两个小英雄). ³¹ They conveyed Third World struggles in a “domesticated” way via themes already familiar to Chinese children. Compared to “Internationalist” children’s literature published in the capitalist world, these works depict children as political agents active in armed struggles instead of innocent, pure beings capable of fostering transnational understandings and empathies. The theme of guerrilla warfare in foreign lands developed the simultaneity of struggles across borders and summoned children to the “continuous revolution.” In other words, the deliberate choice of familiar themes made internationalism “domesticated” in China.

The three works on the Palestinian struggle bore characteristics of the Cultural Revolution period’s children’s literature. They emphasized glorifying outstanding heroes and conveying political messages, but paid less attention to the storytelling medium and limited the particularity and complexity of characters. ⁴² During the Cultural Revolution, children’s education, in which children’s literature played a big role, stressed children’s role as successors to the revolution and agents in the class and national liberation struggles, rather than as pure, innocent subjects with potential to lead mutual understanding and sympathy in the adult world.⁴³ In children’s literature, children were portrayed as guerrilla warfare fighters in different times and spaces. They were in the Chinese civil war, the Anti-Japanese War, the Palestinian national liberation, and so on. The frequent choice of the guerrilla warfare theme is a deliberate one. Guerrilla warfare includes struggles between powers of unbalanced strength. Children who couldn’t match adults in physical strength could exert their distinct influence “behind the enemy line” (敌后战场), often in logistics and espionage, by their intelligence instead of physical power. Thus, as Little Soldier Zhang Ka (1964) and “Sparkling Red Star” (1974) show, the emphasis on children’s political roles doesn’t necessarily mean their roles and expectations are completely the same as adults. Rather, the construction of revolutionary figures with child-like dispositions won them success.

Internationally, guerrilla warfare was the method of armed struggle that Mao exported to the Third World. Mao said in a conversation in 1965 with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Delegation to China:

There were two methods; you fight your way and I’ll fight my way. Whatever the military logic, it can be reduced simply to these two sentences. What is you fight your way? He seeks me out to fight but cannot find me, thus ending abortively. What is I’ll fight my way? We concentrate a few army divisions and brigades, and eat him up. ⁴⁴

Domestically, guerrilla warfare themes in internationalist children’s literature, besides giving readers “essential political knowledge about the decolonizing history of the Third World”, developed a “sense of temporal simultaneity and spatial situatedness within a global revolutionary community” ⁴⁵ and “intended to perpetuate continuous revolutions against feudalism, revisionism, and imperialism.” ⁴⁶

In the Cultural Revolution, the mission to “bring up successors to the proletarian revolution” became more urgent.⁴⁷ Children’s literature had to fulfill this mission by presenting child revolutionary heroes to them, including the Palestinian child guerrillas. The political message was that revolution is not a finished project, but a continuing process. Its activity in parts of the Third World still dominated by imperialism justified its continuous presence domestically. Children were summoned to follow not only the revolution of their parents’ generation but also the revolution of their fellow children and adolescents in the Third World. Such political summoning defined children’s literature in the Cultural Revolution, whether internationalist or not. Instead of being cherished and protected in families and schools, children, adolescents, and youths were called out to the praxis of production and politics. Of course, they could not be physically summoned to the hills and deserts of Palestine to practice internationalism, but the simultaneity developed by internationalist literature taught them that their present, mission, and future were tightly linked to those of the Palestinian children.

Title: Fluttering Battle Banners

Quotation from Chairman Mao
People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!

Title: Fluttering Battle Banners

Guangdong People’s Publishing House
January 1971

September 30, 1969.

It’s September 30, 1969. Today is the birthday of Talat, a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy.

When Talat heard that his father and the guerrilla fighters were going to a fight, he was overjoyed. He earnestly asked to go with them and celebrate his birthday by taking part in the battle. He said, “This will be the first time I set foot on my own homeland. Please grant my request!”

The guerrilla leader and Talat’s father looked at the lively young Talat and felt deeply excited and encouraged. Theyfinally accepted his request.

So little Talat happily followed the guerrilla fighters and joined the fight to wipe out the Israeli invaders. He felt immensely proud and honored.

This was a battle on a tremendous scale. On a frontline stretching dozens of li, the heroic Palestinian guerrilla fighters launched an all-out offensive, beating the enemy so badly that they abandoned their weapons and fled. The guerrillas won a big victory.

The fighters attacked in groups. The task of the group Talat joined was to assault one of the enemy’s strongly defended positions. The fire from the enemy machine guns blocked their advance.

The guerrilla fighters opened fire on the enemy with rockets, machine guns, and grenades. At last, they silenced the enemy machine guns and swiftly seized the enemy’s main position.

The guerrilla fighters decided to raise the Palestinian flag over the position.

Talat bravely took on this task. At this moment, enemies in other positions were still firing in this direction. Fearlessly, Talat pressed forward. Through a hail of bullets, he nimbly climbed the flagpole and raised the Palestinian flag.

The Palestinian flag fluttered in the sky above Palestine’s soil. Talat gazed intently up at the flag, his face shining with the joy of victory.

The heroes returned in triumph. Talat said excitedly, “This is the finest birthday gift that I have longed for day and night!”

Fluttering Battle Banners
Compiled by the publisher
Publisher: Guangdong People’s Publishing House

July 28, 2026

Get Sophon Suratitthamrong, Letter from Prison: Democratic Consciousness in Thailand

On 24 June 1932, the People’s Party, a civilian-military coalition, fomented a transformation from absolute monarchy to a constitutional regime in Thailand. In the ninety-four years since then, there has been a constant struggle by supporters of democracy to make the promise of the transformation real. The transformation remained fundamentally incomplete and the position of the monarchy in the polity permanently unclear. The most recent attempt was the series of protests for democracy and reform of the monarchy in 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people across the country went into the streets to call for change. For a time, it seemed as though those who held power would hear and accede to their demands. Instead, this possibility was crushed, or at least put on hold, with a wave of arrests.

This included at least 292 people being accused of violation of Article 112, the provision of the Criminal Code which stipulates that, “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent shall be punished with three-to-fifteen years imprisonment.” Once a person is accused of violation of the law, innocent verdicts are rare.

Get Sophon Suratitthamrong, a 28-year-old radiologic medical student activist from Navamindradhiraj University is one of those accused. He has been prosecuted and convicted in four Article 112 cases and is currently serving a total sentence of ten years and six months. Since the conviction in his first case, on 24 August 2023, he has been incarcerated in the Bangkok Remand Prison.

The location of Get’s critique of the status quo has shifted from the streets to essays he pens and sends out from prison. Across topics ranging from reflections on political movements past and present in and beyond Thailand, solidarity and more, he is building an analysis of democracy, sovereignty, and political participation. The basis for Get’s analysis is his own experience of both struggle and repression. He writes under conditions of significant restriction, including limited access to writing materials and books.

In his latest essay, originally disseminated in Thai by Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, the primary organizing documenting and defending civil and political rights, he reflects on the 94th anniversary of the 1932 transformation. He assesses what obstacles to and possibilities of democracy are latent in the seemingly quiescent present.

Tyrell Haberkorn, translator.

Tyrell Haberkorn is Plaenert-Bascom Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at University of Wisconsin- Madison. She researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She is the author, among others, of Dictatorship on Trial: Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand (Stanford UP 2024).

After the transformation of rule in 1932, there were attempts to usurp power such as the Boworadet Rebellion. But the royals were unable to legitimate absolutism and so were forced to adapt. They had to find a way to once again possess hegemony in the name of democracy.

Conservative royalists often argue that Thailand is not a full-fledged democracy because the People’s Party was premature. Rama 7 had prepared a constitution that merely had not yet been promulgated. The People’s Party seized power before it could be promulgated. However, that constitution was not democratic in any way.

Even right-wing academics agree on this point. The aforementioned draft constitution was “An Outline of Changes in the Form of Government,” by Raymond B. Stevens, a former member of Congress and advisor to the U.S. State Department. Sovereignty over administration, legislation, and the judiciary still remained fully with the king. The Outline simply organized the absolute monarchy into a system.

“Thailand is like no other nation. If there must be democracy, it must be adapted to be Thai-style democracy.” This sentence features often in speeches by conservatives. “Thai-style democracy” is democracy with the king as head of state. This style of democracy was born in the 1949 Constitution, promulgated after the 8 November 1947 coup. The monarchy’s popularity was extensively promoted during the military dictatorships of Sarit Thanarat and Thanom Kittikachorn from 1957 onwards.

In other words, “democracy with the king as head of state” was not the original intention of the transformation in 1932. It would be a bit much to say that this kind of democracy is a Thai tradition.

Ninety-four years have passed. There has been a steady stream of new governments. But have the rulers of Thai society really changed? Today, the problems discussed in the People’s Party Declaration remain. The elite still exist above the law. The Thai ruling class has built an expansive, deep-rooted patronage network. Their apparatus spans from high-level bureaucrats to capitalists. A person’s worth is determined entirely by to whom they belong.

Low-level bureaucrats have no voice. Without connections, one cannot advance. Promotions go to nepo babies. Graft is rampant and in plain sight. From bribery in construction to corruption in government procurement, the backs of the common people remain a fertile site for the powerful to extract resources.

While the economy is in the dumps and people are living hand to mouth, the ruling class floats happily buoyed by the peoples’ taxes. When we try to speak out to demand fairness, they do not merely refuse to listen to us. They attempt to suppress and lock us up in the name of security. For whom is such security? At present, for whom do the government and state agencies work?

The reason that democracy does not flourish in our country is not because the demands were made at the wrong place or the wrong time. The ruling class is full of power and privilege and has secured an abundance of wealth by plundering public resources. Why would they want to distribute such wealth to society? Why would they relinquish their status and power? They refuse no matter when we call on them. The reason that the tree of democracy does not flourish in Thailand is not because the seeds are not suited for the soil. We do not need to genetically modify it and alter its identity.

After all, the definition of democracy is easy to understand. The country does not belong to any one person, but to all of the people. The principles of allocating resources and setting social policy must be in accordance with the public interest, not for the benefit of an individual or specific groups or factions.

To build a fully democratic society, I think that singling out the elite for attack is insufficient. Those working in the movement should turn to foster a democratic consciousness among the masses as well. Are we willing to accept monopolies or the passing down of power through hereditary lines or particular cliques, or not? There is nothing strange about using the resources that one has obtained fair and square as one wishes. But are we willing to accept the use of tax revenue to indulge in reckless extravagance, or not?

The answers to the above questions are one indicator of the presence or absence of democratic consciousness. When democratic consciousness is rooted among the masses, building democratic social and political structures becomes possible. Examples exist in democratic societies. For example, in South Korea, when there was a coup, the people and their representatives immediately came out to oppose it. Or, in the United States, a vast swath of the people have come out to protest the illegitimate governance of the president.

The struggle of the People’s Party has ended. The creation of democracy did not succeed within one generation. Even the struggle for ideals did not bear fruit in their generation. But their sacrifices fuel our journey. Those who hold power may obstruct freedom or truth for a given time. But they cannot change the truth. And they cannot hold onto power forever.

Those who hold power may think that the suppression of the people is the ultimate demonstration that they are able to do whatever they wish. But in another register, their suppression, whether it is the attempt to censor writing or the arrest of people, reflects their fear. They fear the truth. They fear freedom. They fear that when democracy blooms, their power will wither.

June 2, 2026June 26, 2026

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 20^th 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

[A Chinese translation of this article is available at 無國界社運 BORDERLESS MOVEMENT]

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