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Dhruv Jain, Alessandro Russo’s Egalitarian Experiments on the Stage of the Cultural Revolution (book review)

Russo, Alessandro and Longobardi, Andrea Piazzaroli (eds.) (2020). The Conclusive Scene: Mao Zedong’s Last Meeting with the Red Guards, July 28th 1968. Beijing University. Helsinki: Rab-Rab Press.

Russo, Alessandro (2020). Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Alessandro Russo’s Introduction to The Conclusive Scene, which accompanies Andrea Longobardi’s annotated translation of the transcript of the meeting between Mao Zedong and the Red Guards, and his monograph, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, are unique contributions to Cultural Revolution studies because they examine the effects political and cultural debates had on historical sequences for “new egalitarian mass politics” and revolutionary subjectivities. Russo offers an intellectual history, not of individuals or social groups, but of concepts and the ‘thinking of politics.’ The political stakes of this endeavour are enormous: “The present volume … studies the Chinese events of the 1960s and 1970s as a possible resource for rebuilding an intellectual horizon of egalitarian politics” (3).

Methodology and Structure

Russo does not study these egalitarian experiments using conventional sociological categories. While Russo agrees with Yiching Wu that the existing political and cultural structures of the post-revolution Chinese State were unable to deal with the theoretical and political obstacles that had emerged, he disagrees that the Cultural Revolution’s failure pivoted on the need for a new class analysis. Russo contends that “concepts such as “class” and even “working class” were used to hinder and suppress ongoing political experimentation” (6). Instead, Russo posits that “we need categories appropriate to its singularity, many of which must be built during the analysis itself” (3-4). Russo does this using declarations made by the protagonists as “units of analysis” (4). The book thus proceeds through an analysis of historical sequences of theoretical and political conjunctures, which “constitute the stages of an immense political laboratory” in which there is a “peculiar confrontation of the new political subjectivities involved in the experimentation and the framework of political cultural available to the revolutionaries” (4).

However, Russo’s critique of sociological accounts is unconvincing and tautological. For example, Russo provides little explanation why the Red Guard’s desired to seize power besides that the Communist party was the nexus of a series of historical-political concepts that included the seizure of power. Andrew Walder, on the other hand, convincingly argues that repeated attempts to seize power by Red Guard factions were motivated by wide-ranging social pressures, including the need to destroy “incriminating materials” from their political files (Walder: 11). Similarly, Yiching Wu’s work on marginalized social groups provides another compelling account for Red Guard group pluralization. Russo wants ideology to do too much work.

The book is structured into four parts that examine different “key passages of the decade.” Part I focuses on the controversy about Wu Han’s historical play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, and Yao Weyuan’s 1965 polemic against it. Part 2 deals with two significant theoretical problems that Mao perceived and responded to by initiating the Cultural Revolution, “the likelihood of the revolution ending in imminent defeat and a critique of revisionism” (91). Russo employs a short Cultural Revolution narrative consisting of two phases: “the core from late spring 1966 to summer 1968 … and a long coda or “tail” that lasted until autumn 1976” (148). Part 3 studies the initial or “core” phase with a particular focus on debates among students/the Red Guards, workers, and finally between Mao and the Red Guard leaders. Part 4 examines the ‘long coda’ of the 1970s where Mao’s attempted to analyze and overcome the impasse from the failure of the initial phase.

Part 1

In Chapter 1, Russo rejects the existing scholarship by analyzing Wu Han’s play and the “political nature of this prologue” (11-12). Russo identifies in Yao’s polemics three criticisms of the play: 1) on the topos of political subjectivity Wu diminishes the capacities of the peasantry as political subjects (19); 2) historical accuracies (20); and 3) given the didactic function of the play Wu’s Hai Rui “reversed unjust verdicts,” thus begging the question which contemporary “unjust verdicts” needed to be reversed, which was fraught given the on-going debates about collectivization and the people’s communes (22-23). Despite Russo dismissing Tom Fisher’s article about the play as lacking “any particular analysis of the play” (286n12), Russo does not surpass Fisher’s analysis and fails to locate the play within post-1949 theatrical history. Fisher convincingly argues that Wu’s play was not novel and belonged to the ‘new historical plays’ genre that had emerged in the 1950s (Fisher, 22-25).

Chapter 2 analyses Mao’s debate with Peng Dehuai at the Lushan Conference about collectivization (26). Indeed, what was at stake was the “peasant’s political existence” which was indexed to peasants’ political capacity. Russo explores this theme through an analysis of Jian Bozan’s intervention into the Hai Rui controversy because his “concessions theory” argued that peasants were not a “progressive class” because they did not represent new productive forces capable of overturning previously existing relations of production (40). In early 1966, Qi Benyu criticized Jian’s theory, but Qi’s own analysis shared many of the same limitations because they shared the same aporia within historical materialism about the role of peasants (45).

Russo examines the different responses that Yao’s polemic elicited in chapter 3. His attentiveness to the politics of the distribution and circulation of texts is a particularly important as Russo points out that Yao’s polemic was published in an important Shanghai newspaper, but “despite Mao’s support, the text could not be published directly in Beijing, where the power of the cultural authorities was concentrated” (49). The publication of the criticism split intellectual circles and widened the debate (50). Russo describes the various interventions as “parliamentarian” because “[the] point was to keep the dispute within the terms of a controversy among historiographical ideologies” (63). By January 1966 the debate had reached a stalemate. The radicals’ solution to overcome the impasse was to designate Wu as “anti-party,” but Peng Zhen and the Group of Five circumscribed the debate by establishing guidelines for further polemics called “the February Outline” (78-82). Russo concludes however that, “[it] failed to recompose the conceptual void that it had revealed in historical materialism (87).”

Part 2

Chapter 4 analyzes Mao’s concern about the existential threat that Chinese socialism faced through an overview of Mao’s relationship to Soviet ideology. At a May 1966 meeting between Mao and the Albanian Workers’ Party, Mao raised these concerns and introduced the term: anxiety. Russo writes, “At the heart of Mao’s political “anxiety” … was surely his probable defeat. Yet his more immediate concern was how to find the momentum to turn the insight of the impending end of an entire political and cultural era into a set of positive political prescriptions” (93). Mao also rejected the idea that political stability was victory, rather it too was a source of anxiety (96). Thus, Mao called for a “radical reappraisal of that entire political endeavour” both at the “theoretical” and “organizational” levels, and the Cultural Revolution was to be the laboratory in which a mass movement could perform this appraisal (98). Effectively, Mao called for a “study theory” campaign to analyze and combat revisionism. ‘Anti-revisionism,’ Russo contends, helped Mao identify aporias in Soviet theory and practice. However, this attempt was opposed by the party apparatus, which is why Mao insisted that the “main obstacle within communism was its own organizing principle,” the party leadership (103)

Chapter 5 traces Mao’s involvement in the Hai Rui debate from him reading Yao’s draft polemic, to his speech at the 1966 work conference of the Central Committee entitled “Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui” that raised the question of “dismissal” at the Lushan conference, to the machinations that caused the February Outline to be reconsidered, to Mao writing and circulating the “Circular of May 16” (107-119). Through this process, Mao expanded his criticism from that of the cultural apparatus to the whole party-state (120-121). However, Russo to discern two aporias in Mao’s thought: first, the relationship between philosophy and politics because “it wavered between a properly philosophical thesis and one that “saturated” together philosophy and politics” (124-125). Mao could not proceed past Stalin as “the category of class struggle fuses together philosophy, politics, and history in an inextricable web” (125). Second, the relationship between destruction and construction. Given the crises facing China, Mao “wanted to promote new forms of thought and political organization capable of confronting [it],” and in turn allows for “new possibilities of egalitarian politics” (126-127).

Part 3

In Chapter 6 focuses on the debate about revolutionary culture initiated by the publication of the first dazibao on May 25, 1966. Russo contends that Mao neither appealed to the students nor had confidence that they could stop revisionism, rather, students independently rose due to the same “mobilizing anxiety” about defeat and revisionism (142-143). Russo deploys the themes of “dismissal” and “pluralization” to study the Red Guard movement during the initial phase. Having rejected Max Weber’s definition of politics as a vocation, Russo unconventionally defines pluralization as the diversity of “immanent forms” of politics especially “egalitarian inventions.” Russo defines “dismissal” however in Weberian terms as “the subjective automatism that is omnipresent in every course of action that results in overthrowing …those who govern the life of others from their positions of authority at every level” (145). The Red Guards were one such egalitarian invention. Russo examines how the Red Guards debated their independence from the Communist Party (148) and class origins (154-158), however, he notes that by Summer 1967 they had reached an impasse because of their focus on the “seizure of power” (158).

Chapter 7 turns to the arrival of the workers onto the political stage. Workers differed from the students because it was unclear whether they were allowed to form independent worker organizations (168-171), thus culminating in a new form of organization, the industrial danwei (173-177) and lead to the January storm (177-180). This was of course opposed by the Shanghai party authorities who were deploying loyalist worker factions to obstruct the rebel worker groups (171-173, 177). Russo argues that Mao introduced the concept of the seizure of power, thus enmeshing the novel experimentation underway into a pre-existing revolutionary culture and network of concepts (180-197). Russo approves of Mao’s decision to abandon the “commune” because it was enmeshed within a revolutionary culture based on seizing power. By shifting to revolutionary committees, rebels were able to “downsize” the seizure of power, and through widespread debate experiment with a different form of government (189) and avoid degenerating into factional struggles (199-203).

Chapter 8 turns to the “‘closing scene’ of the mass-movement phase,” the demobilization of the Red Guards through a study of the transcript of the meeting between Mao, the Cultural Revolution Group and several Red Guard leaders on July 28, 1968 (204-205). Russo points to the transcript’s theatrical form because it allows him to suggest that “the discussion was carried out in an atmosphere much more egalitarian than could be expected given the differences in the hierarchal position” (212). Mao during this meeting addresses the issues that the Red Guards were contending with, including freedom of speech and political thought, treatment of other factions, increasing factionalization, and the future of the universities. By the meeting’s end the Red Guards had experienced “self-defeat” as “revolutionary culture responded in the most rigid, stereotypical, and, in the end, most self-destructive reaction to the ongoing political experimentation,” the dismissal of the Red Guards (232-234).

Interregnum

Russo and his advisee, Andrea Longobardi, return to this transcript between Mao and the Red Guards leaders in The Conclusive Scene: Mao Zedong’s Last Meeting with the Red Guards, 28 June 1968, Beijing University. Russo provides a new Introduction and reprints large sections of Chapter 8 as the Afterword. Longobardi translates the entire transcript and provides biographical and contextual annotations. In his Introduction, Russo explains that besides the political significance of the document, there is also a theatrical aspect which he alludes to in Chapter 8. Russo recounts a series of rehearsals of the transcript that were held by Gianfranco Rimondi, artistic director of Bologna’s Teatro dei Dispersi / Accademia 96, which brought “questions primarily with concerned the subjective essence of the situation” and allowed the actors to understand the text as subjective or political (4-5). This is not achieved however through an over-identification with the characters, rather “Rimondi’s direction emphasized the indispensable ‘distance’ of the actors from the ‘characters,’ reinforced by the uniformity of the black suits, and instead conveyed the entire scenic tension by the intertwining of the different political traditions” (5). The other significance of this staging is that it is after only after it that Russo started to study the Hai Rui Dismissed controversy that starts the book and the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, for Russo the Cultural Revolution begins and ends on the stage.

Part 4

Russo sidesteps the 9th Congress and the Lin Biao incident, although he does acknowledge the effect that it had on discrediting the 1966-1967 pluralization phase (241). Instead Chapter 9 focuses on attempts to rethink the concepts of historical materialism during the Criticize Confucius campaign; Mao’s study of the socialist state and his attempts to surpass conventional Leninist positions about destroying the state (242-249); and the further experiments with the industrial danwei system in 1975, especially the establishment of “study theory” groups in several factories (250-253) that resulted in two experiments: workers’ universities and workers’ theoretical contingents (254). Workers’ universities were set up in 1968 and expanded in 1973-1974 to reduce hierarchal divisions in the workplace, whereas the workers’ theoretical contingents believed that workers should also be involved in theoretical labour and were set up during the Criticize Confucius campaign (254). However, Russo is critical of these experiments because of their focus on the relationship between private property and class to the State, instead insisting that the State should be studied in relation to authority (258-261).

Chapter 10 deals with Deng Xiaoping’s reform strategy and the debates it caused in 1975-1976. Deng and his think tank argued in the 1975 debate about the socialist for a “thorough negation” of the Cultural Revolution experience, instead emphasizing the need for order, discipline and economic growth (264-273).  Deng’s reforms included the increase in piece-work wage labour, which helped initiate the widespread commodification that Chinese labour underwent in the 1990s, while simultaneously rhetorically tying the Chinese working class to the Chinese party (279-281). This is why Russo prefers to abandon a language of class for an emphasis on egalitarianism (278) While the book lacks a formal conclusion, Russo provides a tentative one when he identifies two crossroads that need to be surpassed: the study of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese politics  (283-284).

While not all will find Russo’s work convincing, especially those who favour sociological explanations for social movements, it cannot be denied that his intellectual history of debates during the Cultural Revolution and their impact on mass movements is an important addition to the existing literature. Russo’s work builds a fascinating theoretical laboratory to produce new concepts through which to analyze the Cultural Revolution as a political laboratory, but also as a stage. The applicability and usefulness of Russo’s concepts will surely be the grist of much future debate, and only time will tell whether they and his account will help rebuilding the “communist hypothesis” in the twenty-first century.

References

Fisher, Tom (1982). “`The Play’s the Thing’: Wu Han and Hai Rui Revisited,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs No 7: pp. 1-35.

Walder, Andrew (2009). Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wu, Yiching (2014). The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis.          Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Critical China Scholars, Statement on Taiwan and the US-PRC Conflict

Originally published on the CCS website https://criticalchinascholars.org/interventions/

September 22, 2022

Critical China Scholars (CCS) stands in solidarity with the people of Taiwan in their struggle for self-determination, caught in the middle of the growing conflict between the PRC and the US.  

We write this at a time of heightened tensions provoked by Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, but we recognize that the larger crisis is the product of much deeper and more complex historical processes. Those processes need to be understood and addressed if there is hope for true justice and peace in the region.

First is the legacy of imperialism. Taiwan has a long and multi-layered history of imperialist subjugation: a frontier region of the Qing empire, it was ceded to an expansionist Japan in 1895, and at the fall of the Japanese empire in 1945 was entrusted to the KMT-ruled Republic of China–all without consideration for the rights or wishes of the people living there. The Democratic Progessive Party (DPP) owes its current power to the courageous efforts of social movements against authoritarianism and imperialism over the past four decades, but its increasing fomentation of nationalist ideology does not do justice to Taiwanese people’s diverse and complex social identities. Although we cannot expect them to speak with one voice, Taiwan’s own social movements are the best sources of knowledge about empire and identity in Taiwan.

Second is the legacy of the Cold War, which is also in many ways an imperialist legacy. Following the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, Taiwan became a crucial piece of the “arc of containment” constructed by the US government in its efforts to combat communism and strengthen the US’s own empire in Asia. This Cold War history was vividly evoked in Nancy Pelosi’s tour of Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan–all key nodes of that old “arc” of Cold War US power. While we by no means condone the PRC’s military response, which was reckless and utterly without justification, we cannot fail to recognize the threatening nature of Pelosi’s trip as a whole, crowned by the knowingly provocative inclusion of Taiwan, especially in the context of US state rhetoric and policies that are increasingly hostile to the PRC. We do not see it as realistic or morally defensible for the US to seek to maintain a favorable military balance on the other side of the globe indefinitely.

Third is the legacy of neoliberalism. In recent decades, it appeared to some that global capitalism would succeed in knitting together the interests of power-holders in China, Taiwan, and the US, and so secure the peace despite persistent ambiguity over the future of Taiwan’s political identity. Opponents of capitalism found some cause for optimism in expressions of labor solidarity that recognized the threats to workers in both Taiwan and the PRC brought by integration of the national economies. As neoliberalism has increasingly come apart at the seams, it is not surprising that these nation-states are no longer willing to paper over the differences in their geopolitical interests. While CCS will not mourn the death of neoliberalism, we recognize that its unraveling is producing extremely negative consequences: any solution to the conflict over Taiwan must be founded on a more just and sustainable set of economic relationships.

These complex historical legacies have produced a situation that is both highly dangerous and also highly challenging to resolve. For many of us, as opponents of empire mostly based in the West, our first responsibility is to recognize the damaging effects of US imperialism, and to call on the US and its allies to  cease the ramping-up of militarist activities in Asia and the Pacific. As China scholars, we also have a responsibility to correct the inaccuracies of much rhetoric of the international left, which too often portrays the US government’s “One China Policy” (which acknowledges without recognizing the PRC’s claim that Taiwan is a part of China) as reflecting sacred truth rather than necessary fiction, and which fails to recognize the legitimacy of the anti-imperialist struggles of the people of Taiwan. By and large, the Taiwan public opposes unification with the Chinese mainland, and the international left should not ignore this fact.

Until China ceases its aggressive military actions in the Strait, Taiwanese people will continue to pursue US protection; and until the US ceases military buildup in the region, China will continue to feel justifiably threatened. Durable peace in Taiwan must be built upon commitments from both the PRC and the US to de-escalate and fully reject the use of military force to resolve the conflict.

In the face of very daunting forces, speaking not for the interests of any government but as critical China scholars and members of global movements for justice, we support the right of the people of Taiwan to cease being pawns of the PRC, US, or any other empire–and to determine their own identities and their own future.

 

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Maggie Clinton reviews Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Among the vignettes that bookend the six chapters of Victor Seow’s deft Carbon Technocracy is a recollection of the 1932 Pingdingshan massacre. On Sept 16 of that year, soldiers with Japan’s Kwantung Army—the garrison force that had policed Japanese railway concessions in Manchuria since 1906 and now formed the backbone of occupied Manchukuo—murdered some three thousand Chinese civilians ostensibly in retaliation for acts of resistance at the nearby Fushun colliery. Seow observes that the massacre was exceptional in its cruelty yet consistent with the “systematic violence of both the imperial project and the energy regime of carbon technocracy” (163). By World War II this energy regime reached its militarized apogee, relying on forced labor to mine the “treasure house” of Manchurian coal and fuel the expansion of Japan’s Asia-Pacific empire. Seow makes clear that, following Japan’s defeat in 1945, Chinese Nationalist and Communist inheritors of the Fushun mines readily continued technocratic practices of carbon extraction established by the Japanese. This legacy of Japanese imperialism, Seow suggests, remains apparent in present-day Chinese and Japanese approaches to fossil fuel extraction and therefore is a force to reckon with as we try to imagine a global transition from carbon-based energy.

In Carbon Technocracy, Seow weaves a stunning range of research conducted in China, Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere into a narrative of the development of East Asia’s largest open-pit coal mine at Fushun, in China’s northeast. More broadly he makes a case for what he calls “carbon technocracy,” engaging with the work of Timothy Mitchell, in particular Mitchell’s 2011 Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.[1] Where Mitchell highlighted how “the flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners [in northern Europe and the U.S.] to those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored,” Seow seeks to show how such demands and connections were precluded in northeast Asia amid the development of scientistic approaches to coal extraction.[2] For Seow, carbon technocracy constitutes a non-democratic “technopolitical system grounded in the idealization of extensive fossil fuel exploitation through mechanical and managerial means” (8). It also “describe[s] a historical process that is concurrently an alternative account of state formation in modern East Asia and a transnational history of technology” (8). Although, as I elaborate below, Seow’s concept of “carbon technocracy” at times glosses over important political distinctions, his book as a whole provides the most comprehensive picture to date of the conditions by which Japanese and Chinese states became dependent on fossil fuels during the twentieth century. It foregrounds the inseparability of fossil fuel dependency from imperialist violence as well as the contingent relationship between carbon extraction and political forms. Scholars working on any aspect of twentieth-century East Asian history will have much to learn from Seow’s work, as will scholars and activists addressing fossil fuels in other parts of the globe. It joins a growing list of humanistic studies of East Asia’s fossil fuel history that help us understand how China and Japan are currently among the world’s top consumers of coal and oil (and China among the top producers of both), and to evaluate the prospects for a post-carbon future.[3]   

Chapters one through four move chronologically and thematically from late-nineteenth-century Meiji Japanese excursions into the Qing empire’s Manchurian territory through the end of the Second World War. The cleverly titled chapter 1, “Vertical Natures,” guides readers through legal rationales deployed by Japanese imperialists in the wake of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War to dispossess Chinese mine owners of their Russian-invested holdings. We learn how Japanese engineers affiliated with the South Manchuria Railway Company (“Mantetsu”) after 1907 began to develop the Fushun colliery with cutting-edge technology and access to a Chinese labor force made vulnerable by the dislocations of the Qing empire’s demise. Chapter two, “Technological Enterprise,” takes readers into mine mechanization during the 1910s and 20s and the aspirations of Mantetsu managers to render labor as redundant as possible through such mechanization. Seow details labor management techniques including wage increases, reduced working hours, and the construction of leisure facilities aimed at maximizing productivity that simultaneously forestalled the kinds of worker empowerment and democratic participation indicated by Mitchell (101). As in chapter one, Seow underscores the racialized hierarchy of Mantetsu’s Fushun enterprise: Chinese laborers were subjected to surveillance practices including fingerprinting, drug testing, and draconian policing. Japanese managers consistently paid Chinese workers less than their Japanese counterparts; the latter also performed more dangerous work and lived in segregated housing far inferior to Japanese neighborhoods (113). In his highlighting of the racialization of labor, Seow shows how Fushun emerged during the 1910s and 1920s as East Asia’s largest coal mine through concerted applications of technology and the calibrated exploitation of Chinese workers.  

Chapter three turns to metropolitan Japan during the interwar years, looking closely at the influential “Fuel Society” and the mounting anxieties among government-affiliated intellectuals that Japan lacked the fossil fuel resources (coal and increasingly petroleum) enjoyed by other imperialist powers, particularly the United States. This competitive impulse, which invariably implied expanded Japanese claims to overseas colonies and leaseholds, was matched, Seow indicates, by anxieties among domestic coal producers that gluts of Fushun coal were driving their own prices down. Chapter four addresses how fossil fuel anxieties propelled Japan’s wartime militarism and how Fushun coal functioned both within the managed economy of Manchukuo after 1932 and in the expanding Japanese empire writ large. Here, Seow productively coins the term “warscapes of intensification,” after historian Christopher Jones’ “landscapes of intensification,” capturing the way “aggressor states were…motivated to expand further for access to even more resources and to mine presently held deposits with greater ferocity” (187).[4] This intensification not only relied on the gross exploitation of colonized labor forces but rendered the empire’s energy supply routes vulnerable to counterattack (187-88). By war’s end, Fushun was “but a shadow of its former self, exhausted by the demands of wartime mobilization and the limits of carbon technocracy” (204).         

Chapters five and six document the transfer of the Fushun mines to Chinese control following Japan’s 1945 defeat, first to the Nationalist Party and then, by 1948, to the victorious Communist Party. Seow details how the Nationalist Party had been struggling, with limited financial resources and against multiple obstacles, since the 1920s to uncover and develop China’s coal and oil deposits. After full-scale war broke out against Japan in 1937, the powerful, technocrat-dominated National Resources Commission took charge of this endeavor and assumed control over Fushun once the Soviets retreated from Manchuria. Rendering the mines productive again after their wartime hyper-exploitation would have been difficult enough, but the Nationalists faced the added complication that the Soviets had plundered relevant machinery during their brief occupation. (As Seow explains, the CCP awkwardly navigated this plunder during the 1950s heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation, 262). Despite the Nationalists’ inability to revitalize the mines, Seow concludes, “if we were to use the textbook definition of ‘technocracy’ as a ‘government of engineers,’ the [Nationalist] Chinese state actually appears to have come closer to that ideal than its Japanese counterpart” (254). Moreover, Seow argues in chapter six that the Communists took up this technocratic legacy with fervor in their management of Fushun. With a production-first ethos, the CCP employed Japanese engineers to help restore the mines to their prewar capacities, as had the Nationalists (pp. 263-269).[5] Following Lenin in regarding coal as the “grain of industry,” CCP leaders regarded ever-increasing extraction as key to socialist modernization, from the mechanization of food production to the development of urban transport and housing (270). According to Seow, Communist efforts to overturn inherited hierarchies of expertise made little headway at Fushun, where the idea was enshrined instead that “useful knowledge, be it from formally trained engineers or experienced workers, was that which helped further production for the advancement of the state.” (282). Among other things, the 1958 Great Leap Forward and ensuing catastrophic famine revealed the disastrous consequences of relentless coal-fired productivism. Carbon Technocracy’s thoughtful epilogue brings the story up to the present, highlighting Fushun’s “exhausted limits” as well as the deepened dependency of both China and Japan on fossil fuels during the past sixty years.

Ultimately, what does Seow’s concept of “carbon technocracy” help us to better understand? There are too many insights to adequately summarize here. Among them is how Japanese imperialists developed the coal mines in a manner that sharply limited Chinese workers’ organizing capacities both within and beyond the Fushun colliery. Their emphasis on technological refinement to maximize worker productivity (whether in terms of fingerprinting workers or improving pumping systems) inscribed racialized hierarchies and precluded civic actions on workers’ part. Seow carefully situates these developments amid rivalries between imperialist powers that commonly regarded “machines as the measure of men” and natural resource control as key to national survival.[6] Seow’s emphasis on the ways that inter-imperialist competition spurred technocratic impulses helpfully takes us away from culturalist explanations of technocracy’s appeal in East Asia (19). Further, Seow’s descriptions of mine operations show the entwinement of technological advances and fantasies of limitless carbon extraction. From this we see how groups as politically opposed as Mantetsu, the KMT, and the CCP all shared the desire to maximally extract fossil fuels and thereby created and perpetuated the logics of “carbon technocracy.” Among the tragedies of this commonality, as Seow underscores in the epilogue, is that the biosphere is indifferent to the political leanings of whoever is extracting and burning the fossil fuels. The impact of this extraction and burning also lands much more heavily on disenfranchised populations around the world. [7]

As might be expected, in identifying a thread that connects regimes that fought devastating wars against one another, important differences between these regimes recede from view. If “carbon technocracy” entails “marshalling science and technology toward the exploitation of fossil fuels for statist ends,” future historians will want to bring the differing politics of the states in question back into the picture (4). For instance, even if the biosphere is indifferent, as Seow indicates throughout it surely matters to other aspects of human wellbeing that Chinese Communists in the 1950s were mining coal to build up a socialist society rather than to racially dominate and plunder the Asia-Pacific region as per the wartime Japanese state. In this vein, when comparing the “technocracy” aspect of “carbon technocracy” across these varied regimes, we also need to consider how they differently conceptualized labor within the social hierarchy and what the application of scientific and technological expertise was supposed to do for it. Seow addresses questions of technology and labor most directly in the chapters on Japanese control of the Manchurian mines. If space had allowed, it might have been helpful to consider claims, based on postwar interviews conducted with female former mineworkers in metropolitan Japan, that the availability of an exploitable female labor force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries disincentivized colliery mechanization there.[8] Likewise, to include discussion in chapter five not just of Sun Yat-sen’s industrial development plans for China but of Sun’s (and his Nationalist followers’) thinking about the role of workers in these plans, which sharply contrasted with the roles Communists envisaged.[9] To be sure, Seow attends to how coal miners actually fared under Nationalist rule, and especially under the exhausting demands of CCP productivism in the 1950s. But efforts to change the social status of workers, to determine whether profits from extraction would be privately accumulated or publicly redistributed, to decide whether buildings would house nurseries for workers’ children or exist as segregated spaces for management (as Seow discusses on p. 283), doubtless also spelled differing types of expert rule with their own internal conflicts. Might any of these have pointed, at least potentially, to a world beyond relentless fossil fuel extraction? Could these pasts supply any alternative resources with which to help mend a planet beset by heatwaves, droughts, and catastrophic storms?

Seow’s book arrives as the climatic effects of fossil fuel consumption have become alarmingly apparent everywhere. Recent floods in Pakistan exacerbated by melting glaciers, drought and unrelenting heat in China, Europe, the U.S., and all around the globe bespeak the urgency of understanding the history that Seow traces. While Carbon Technocracy does not give much cause for optimism that a transition to renewable forms of energy in China will be any less technocratic than the exploitation of fossil fuels has been, it is an insightful and engaging book that should shape conversations about East Asia and energy for years to come.    

NOTES

[1]Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso 2011). Seow’s approach to technocracy also draws from Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002)

[2]Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 21

[3]Among these are Li Hou, Building for Oil: Daqing and the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018); Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands (University of Chicago Press, 2018); Grace Yen Shen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Wu Lingjun, Meifu shiyou gongsi zai Zhongguo, 1870-1933 (Daoxiang chubanshe, 2001); Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015)

[4]Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2016).

[5]This emphasis aligns with recent work including Koji Hirata, “Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China,” The American Historical Review, vol. 126 no. 3 (2021): 1072-1101; and Amy King, “Reconstructing China: Japanese Technicians and Industrialization in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50 no 1 (2016): 141-174

[6]Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989)  

[7] Thank you to Jia-Ching Chen for emphasizing this point in conversation about the book.

[8]W. Donald Burton, Coal Mining Women in Japan: Heavy Burdens (Routledge, 2014)

[9] Brian Tsui, China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).  

 

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Brian Hioe, Can Chinese Nationalists (or Their Apologists) Please Shut Up about Zhonghua?

Brian Hioe, a writer and activist in Taiwan, has written a critique of the piece by Mark McConnaghy recently published on positionspolitics.org/praxis. We are linking Brian’s piece here (with his permission, for the link and this preface) because we believe that having a conversation within the left on complex issues – such as Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which we all condemn – is important. Brian takes issue with Mark’s piece and we recognize these critiques as important substantive discussion points. We powerfully object, however, to Brian’s tone, which we read as contemptuous and condescending. There are many ways to have a conversation, although in these times, people seem to wish to shout at one another instead. In publishing Mark’s piece, we were not signaling our agreement with everything in it; however, we did hope that we could host a vigorous discussion about how to analyze, interpret, and write about Taiwan from a position that does not take mainstream discourses as its sole premise and point of departure. Mark’s piece does that, in our view; and Brian’s engagement, despite the tone, substantively does that too.
https://newbloommag.net/2022/08/18/pelosi-positions-critique/   

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AhnKim JeongAe, “Comfort Women” for the US Military in Korea Fight for Justice

Translated by Suzy Kim

Translator’s Introduction

The March 9, 2022 South Korean presidential election was narrowly won by the conservative People Power Party candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol, with just 0.73 percent more votes—the closest margin ever in South Korean electoral history. The decisive factor seems to have been younger voters in their 20s, whose votes overwhelmingly split along gender lines, with roughly 60 percent of women voting for Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung and 60 percent of men voting for Yoon. Yoon had rallied his base on an anti-feminist platform that denied systemic gender inequality and pledged to abolish gender quotas in ministerial appointments and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Given that mandatory military service for men is often touted as an example of “reverse discrimination,” regardless of how dubious such claims are, the history of militarisms in the region is essential for understanding contemporary politics and the urgent calls for justice.

On this anniversary of the end of the Asia Pacific War (August 15), it is worth remembering the multiple ways in which the war’s legacies remain. Despite continuous grass-roots efforts to overcome so-called “historical problems” across East Asia, the military alliances under US hegemony continue to supersede national sovereignty or people’s welfare. The “comfort women” issue discussed in AhnKim JoengAe’s translated piece below is a case in point. The translation has been lightly edited and the original Korean follows the translation.

 

“I don’t want to live an abandoned existence in the country where I was born, but to be a dignified woman of this land.” 
–Plaintiff Ms. Park’s court statement

“Comfort women” as a euphemism usually refers to the hundreds of thousands of women and girls forced into a system of military sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia Pacific War. Less well known is the fact that “comfort women” were also used by the US occupying forces in Korea and Japan after the end of the war, a practice which continued into the Korean War and thereafter.

In that sense, the “comfort women” system, whether under the Japanese, American, or Korean militaries, occurred in the context of militarism as the foundation for sexual violence against women. As part of the post-World War II order, US forces occupied Korea on September 8, 1945, south of the 38th parallel, building “camp towns,” or kijich’on, around the military bases. The founding of the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) in 1948 marked the beginning of the military security paradigm, which has remained, unchanged, as the root of the ROK-US alliance since the Korean War, when the US Army Forces in Korea (USAFIK) became a permanent presence on the peninsula. When the “Nixon Doctrine” threatened to withdraw US forces from Korea in 1968, the ROK government established and implemented a “camp town purification campaign” under the pretext of national security to justify and promote prostitution, despite its prohibition by law. The South Korean government ostensibly regarded the “comfort women” in the camp towns as “industrial workers,” “civil diplomats,” and “patriots,” but in effect controlled and managed their bodies for the US forces in Korea. The state had turned into a pimp. The policy was in direct violation of the state’s duty to protect its citizens as mandated by the constitution, since states are obligated to protect human rights, even when individuals fail to do so.

National security maintained through the silence of victims is meaningless. The 122 survivors of the USAFIK “comfort women” system resolved not to remain silent any longer, and on June 25, 2014, filed a compensation lawsuit against the South Korean government with the help of the newly formed Solidarity for USAFIK Comfort Women’s Human Rights organization. Launched on August 31, 2012, Solidarity is a coalition of local organizations such as My Sister’s Place (Durebang) and Sunlit Sisters’ Center (Haetsal) founded by US “comfort women” survivors and joined by scholars and lawyers from advocacy groups such as the National Campaign for Eradication of Crimes by US Troops in Korea, Lawyers for a Democratic Society and its Committee on US Military Problems. In its inaugural statement, the coalition declared its “main purpose was to restore the human rights of the camp town comfort women,” and “to oppose all violence against women and the structures through which such violence is reproduced, including prostitution and sexual violence due to the presence of the US military.” It further explained its aim to work toward “a society that can ultimately overcome differences in race, gender, and class, while publicizing the problems of the current US military camp towns as an international prostitution and marriage market.” Specific actions proposed included (1) filing a compensation lawsuit against the ROK and US governments, (2) enacting special laws for fact-finding and support of US military comfort women, (3) gathering and publishing the life history of the survivors, (4) promoting international solidarity with organizations in other countries with US military bases, and (5) publicity campaigns to educate the public.

For the first time in the history of the Republic of Korea, surviving women directly testified in court, supported by testimonies from clinical doctors, public officials, and scholars. On January 20, 2017, after two years and seven months of deliberations, the court officially confirmed and acknowledged that the state had perpetrated violence against the women and had violated their human rights. The verdict acknowledged that the state had failed in its obligation to protect its citizens and had created and maintained the camp towns at the request of the US military and US government, installing detention facilities and forcing victims into sexual slavery.

On February 8, 2018, the Court of Appeals went beyond acknowledging the verdict of the first trial and ruled in favor of all the plaintiffs, ordering that they be fully compensated for the violation of their human rights and dignity. The verdict held the state accountable for proactively operating and managing the camp towns through “patriotic” campaigns and the “violent management and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases by illegal means.”

However, eight years since the lawsuit was first launched, the Supreme Court has not yet reached a final decision. In the meantime, some of the 122 plaintiffs have died; three have passed away in just the last three months, and the current number of plaintiffs has been reduced to 111. In June 2019, the plaintiffs petitioned the court for a prompt ruling, requesting that “the difficult lawsuit be put to an end.” In November 2020, April 2021, and June 2022, Solidarity for USAFIK Comfort Women’s Human Rights also repeatedly urged the court for its decision, but so far the court has not issued its final judgment, offering no explanation for the delay. Delaying the ruling on such a women’s rights case disregards the plaintiff women whose rights should be protected by the judiciary; it amounts to negligence of the court’s civic duties, as it is supported by public taxes.

On April 29, 2020, the Gyeonggi Provincial Assembly passed the Ordinance in Support of Camp Town Women in Gyeonggi Province through the steadfast efforts of local groups over the past ten years. Gyeonggi Province, north of Seoul, is home to numerous US military bases and borders the De-Militarized Zone. On June 22, 2020, a similar ordinance was also passed by the Paju City Council in Gyeonggi. However, the relevant administrative department of Gyeonggi Province in charge of enforcing the above ordinance was able to cite the lack of a Supreme Court decision and thus nullify the work of the Camp Town Women’s Support Committee, which had been legally established by the Ordinance. This is why a prompt Supreme Court decision is necessary.

The Act on Fact-Finding and Support of Victims of the US Military Comfort Women Issue was submitted to the Standing Committee for Gender Equality and Family during the 19th National Assembly and has been pending ever since. The 21stAssembly is currently in session, but the subcommittee to review the bill has yet to convene because the ruling and opposition parties have not been able to reach an agreement. Furthermore, the future of the bill is uncertain due to the controversy over the existence of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family under the new Yoon Seok-yeol administration, which had campaigned on a platform to abolish it. The National Assembly has also cited the absence of a Supreme Court decision as a factor in its legislative delay. This is yet another reason why we need a prompt Supreme Court decision.

We, women, question the rationale for the state’s existence. Most of the plaintiffs are elderly, in their 70s and 80s, and they are in very poor health physically, mentally, and economically due to the long years of harm as “comfort women” for the US military. In addition to these plaintiffs, numerous US military “comfort women” scattered across the country are currently dying due to hardship and illness.

‘Delayed justice’ is not justice. The many survivors of the US military camp towns, living in the militarized and divided Korean peninsula, want justice. The delayed decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Korea must be made now.

 

 

AhnKim JeongAe is Co-Representative of the organization Solidarity for USAFIK Comfort Women’s Human Rights. She is a former member of the Presidential Truth Commission on Deaths in the Military, charged with investigating suspicious deaths in the South Korean military from 1948 to 2018. She also served as investigator in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea, which investigated state crimes against citizens committed by the military and the police, during the period from the Korean War through the authoritarian military rule of the 1980s.

 

한국정부를 상대로 한 미군위안부 국가배상소송 최종판결 지연과 문제점

안김정애 (기지촌여성인권연대 공동대표)

“나는 내가 태어난 나라에서 ‘버려진’ 존재로서가 아니라 이 땅에서 ‘당당  한’ 한 여성인격체로 살아가기를 원합니다.”
–원고 박00의 법정진술

한반도에서의 미군위안부 문제는 군사주의에 기반한 여성에 대한 성폭력이라는 측면에서 일본군위안부, 한국군위안부 문제와 동일한 맥락을 갖는다. 2차 세계대전 전후 처리 일환으로 1945년 9월 8일에 한반도 38선 이남에  진주한 주한미군은 주둔지 주변에 기지촌을 만들었다. 한국전쟁 발발 이후 현재까지 지속되고 있는 한미동맹을 근간으로 하는 군사안보 패러다임은 바뀌지  않고 있고, 특히 1968년 닉슨 독트린 발표 이후 주한미군 철수가 가시화되자  한국정부는 국가안보의 미명 하에 ‘기지촌 정화대책’을 수립· 실행하여 법률상  금지된 성매매를 정당화· 조장하는 불법행위를 자행하였다. 한국정부는 기지촌  미군 위안부 여성들을 표면상으로는 ‘산업역군,’ ‘민간외교관,’ ‘애국자’로 치켜  세우면서, 실질적으로 주한미군을 위해 이들의 몸을 직접 통제· 관리하였다. 국가가 포주였다. 이는 헌법상 명시된 국민을 보호할 의무를 국가가 저버린 행위였다. 설사 개인이 포기하더라도 국가가 지켜주어야 하는 것이 인권이다.

 

피해자의 침묵으로 유지되는 국가안보는 무의미하다. 122명의 피해 생존 여성들은 더 이상 침묵하지 않겠다고 결의하고, 2012년에 결성된 기지촌여성인권연대와 함께 2014년 6월 25일에 한국정부를 상대로 ‘기지촌 미군위안부국가배상청구소송’을 시작하였다. 2012년 8월 31일 출범한 기지촌여성인권연대는 미군위안부 생존자들이 활동하고 있는 두레방, 햇살사회복지 회 등 현장단체들과 주한미군범죄근절운동본부, 민주사회를위한변호사모임 미군문제연구위 원회, 관련주제 연구자와 학자들의 연대체로 구성되었다. 출범 선언문에서 “연대는 기지촌 미군위안부들의 인권회복을 주목적”으로 함을 천명하고, “미군 주둔으로 인한 성매매와 성폭력을 포함한 여성에 대한모든 폭력과, 폭력이 재생산되는 구조에 반대”하며, “국제적인 성매매 공간이자 결혼시장으로 변모하 고 있는 현재의 주한미군 기지촌의 문제를 공론화하면서 궁극적으로 인종· 성별· 계급의 차이를 극복 할 수 있는 사회를 추구”한다고 출범 이유를 밝히고 있다. 구체적인 행동으로 (1) 한·미정부를 상대로  한 국가배상소송 제기, (2) 미군위안부 문제의 진상규명 및 지원 등을 위한 특별법과 조례 제정, (3)생존 자 생애사 수집 정리 출간, (4)미군기지주둔국가 단체들과의 국제연대 도모, (5)대국민 홍보실시 등을  제시하였다.

 

대한민국 역사상 처음으로 생존 피해여성들의 법정에서의  직접증언이 이루어졌고, 이들의 증언을 뒷받침하는보건소 의사, 공무원, 학자들의 증언이 이어졌다. 1심 재판부는 2년 7개월 만인 2017년 1월 20일에 국가에 의한 폭력과 인권침해 사실을 공식적으로 확인· 인정하였는데, 국가가 국민 보호 의무를 포기하고, 주한미군과 미국 정부의 요청에 따라 기지촌 조성과 관리를 주도하였으며, 구체적으로 낙검자 강제수용소 설치 등 피해여성들을 미군 성노예로 내몰았음을 인정하는 판결이었다.

 

2018년 2월 8일, 항소심 재판부는 1심 판결을 인정하는 데서 나아가 ‘애국교육 실시,’ ‘위법한 절차에 따른 조직적· 폭력적 성병치료와 성병 관리,’ 등 피고인 국가가 적극적· 능동적으로 기지촌을 운영· 관리한 주체로, 원고들의 인격권과 인간의 존엄성을 침해하였음을 인정하여 원고 전원에게 손해배상 위자료를 지급할 것을 판결하였다.

 

그러나 소송이 시작된 지 8년이 지난 현재까지 대법원 최종판결이 나오지 않고 있다. 그동안 122명의 원고 중 일부가 사망했고, 최근 3개월 사이에도 3 명이 유명을 달리하셔서 현재 원고는 총 111명으로 줄어 들었다. 2019년 6월에는 원고들이 “지난한 소송에 마침표를 찍어 달라”는 취지로 작성한 조속한 대법원 판결 요구 탄원서가 제출하였고, 같은 취지로 기지촌여성인권연대 이름으로 2020년 11월과 2021년 4월, 2022년 6월, 세 차례에 걸쳐 대법원에 공문을 접수시키기도 했으나 현재까지 대법원은 아무런 해명없이 최종판결을 내놓지 않고 있다. 대법원이여성인권문제에 대한 판결을 지체하는 것은 사법부로부터 인권을 보호받아야 할 원고여성들에 대한 무시이며, 국민의 혈세를 받는 공무원으로서 직무유기에 해당한다.

 

지난 10년 간 현장단체들의 꾸준한 노력으로 2020년 4월 29일에 경기도 의회에서 ‘경기도 기지촌여성 지원 등에관한 조례’가 통과되었고, 이어서 6월 22일에는 파주시 의회에서도 유사 조례가 통과된 바 있다. 하지만 위 조례를 시행할 의무가 있는 경기도 행정담당 부서는 대법원 판결이 없다는 이유를 들어 조례에 근거하여 합법적으로출범한 ‘기지촌여성지원위원회’의 지원 관련 결정안을 무력화시키고 있다. 대법 판결이 조속히 이루어져야 할 이유이다. 그리고 19대와 20대에 이어 현재 21대 국회에서는 ‘미군위안부 문제에 대한 진상규명 및 피해자 지원 등에 관한 법률안’이 여성가족상임위에 상정되어 있지만 여야합의가 이루어지지 않아 법안심사소위도 개최되지못하고 있고, 윤석열 행정부 하에서 여가부 존폐 논쟁으로 법안의 앞날이 불투명한 상태이다. 국회 역시 대법원판결 부재를 입법 지체의 한 요인으로 꼽고 있는데, 이런 이유로도 대법원 판결은 조속히 이루어져야 한다.

 

우리 여성들은 국가의 존재 이유를 묻는다. 현재 원고들은 대부분 70∼80 대 고령의 나이로, 오랜 세월 미군위안부피해로 인해 신체적· 정신적· 경제적으로 매우 열악한 상태에 놓여 있다. 이들 원고들 뿐만 아니라 전국 각 지역에산재해 있는 수많은 미군위안부들이 생활고와 질병 등으로 이 시각, 생을 마감하고 있다.

 

‘지체된 정의’는 정의가 아니다. 지금 이 땅, 군사화되고 분단된 한반도의 현재를 살아가는 수많은 기지촌 미군위안부 생존자들은 조속한 정의가 실현되기를 바라고 있다. 지체되고 있는 대한민국 대법원 판결이 하루빨리 이루어져야 한다.

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