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Christopher Connery, Dynamic Zero: A Quarantine (and Post-Quarantine) Diary

For an idea of what’s happened in Shanghai during COVID, have a look at these pictures https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LERIZQgIL_H8Uw4PlBVTfA (sorry that they’re sideways; head rotation required for viewing) . They’re mostly self-explanatory.  There are some pictures of workers who couldn’t get home, and who had to live in tents or in makeshift shelter; many of the quarantine halls where people who had tested positive had to stay until they were cleared; some of the construction of partitions and other neighbourhood modifications.  It’s been serious.

Arrival

In years past, when the plane approached the gate at Pudong Airport in Shanghai, flight attendants had to tell overly eager passengers to sit back down, to not retrieve their luggage, to wait for the announcement.  The announcement this time said that the Chinese health authorities had specified that de-boarding would take place by rows, and that no one was to move until their row numbers had been called.  People kept quiet and still, and exited quietly and by the rules.  It was pretty eery, and we hadn’t yet left the plane. We were met at the top of the ramp by the first of many Persons in White, 大白 or Big White—a full body white plastic suit, sealed at the seams, with wrap around tape where the suits met the plastic gloves and plastic-covered shoes—there are many of them in that photo collection linked above.  This first one wanted to check that our phones showed the QR code linking to the Health Declaration Certificate we had downloaded and filled out before boarding in San Francisco.   Through the spacious but spartan hall that had once led to the immigration control station, the QR codes were checked again.  The way into the immigration control hall was blocked off by a temporary wall, and we were directed down a smaller flight of stairs into a series of temporarily constructed passageways that led out of and back into the building several times.  This part of the airport had been reconfigured by a circuitous assemblage of passageways and platforms, exiting and entering at odd points, something like a high school auditorium repurposed as a haunted house or holiday maze. We had an infrared temperature check, and at the next stage were directed by persons in white to the testing stations, booths where another person in white, after warning that this would be uncomfortable, scanned our QR codes and did a thorough nasal swab.  The passageway took us back into the immigration hall where passports would be checked, after first passing through another temperature check, where we were directed to look into the ceiling camera for a photograph.    The line to the immigration control counter was short.  I was worried to see that a foreigner ahead of me had been asked for his invitation letter; I didn’t know if I could find mine.  In the end the customs officer was warmer and kinder than any immigration officer I’d ever encountered, taking great pains to calm me down.  All went smoothly, and she didn’t ask for my invitation letter.

The huge baggage claim hall was nearly empty.  Near and far were persons in white with disinfectant canisters on their backs, spraying into the air as they passed through.  I got my bags out of baggage claim and was directed down what had once been the passage that took arrived passengers to the buses, subway, parking, and the Maglev train, now repurposed as the hall of quarantine embarkation stations—one for each of the city’s sixteen districts.  Our health declaration forms had listed which districts we were going to, and we reported accordingly to our district’s station, where the QR code was scanned again and we were told to wait for the next bus.  Mine, to Putuo, where I’d made a hotel reservation, was in 90 minutes.  It had taken about three hours to reach the embarkation station, and I settled in.   A few people were walking from station to station, trying to game the system in some way—Could one choose one’s quarantine hotel? Was there a way to switch districts?  No, and no.  There was a sign at the Xuhui district embarkation point saying that only residents of Xuhui could quarantine there.  I’d almost booked a hotel in Xuhui—it was the district I knew best.  Another complication avoided.  The stations were staffed by police or civil servants from the districts.  Some stations were kind of homey.   People had hung up the white plastic suits of transferred colleagues, which all of the co-workers had signed.  Some had decorations, like the red paper-cut designs for the Fengxian station, which also had a hand-written “Welcome Home” sign.   Mine had a basket of rolls, wrapped in plastic, for people who were hungry.  The guy in white at my station was very friendly too, and when people came over for bread from other stations he was happy to let them have some.  At 8:30 PM, the three of us waiting for the Putuo transport were motioned to follow a few persons in white, and we were led through another recently constructed passageway to a curb in a 50-yard long section of the parking structure that had been sealed off by temporary walls, with swinging doors at each end.  The doors at one end opened, a bus pulled up, and the three of us, sitting behind the translucent plastic shielded section where the driver sat, were on our way. On the ride into the city—we went under the Huangpu River via the Xiangyin Rd. Tunnel and took the Middle Ring Road past Wujiachang—everything looked as it always had. 

In the hotel lobby, all door handles and fixtures were covered in plastic. The normal accoutrements of a hotel lobby—wall hangings, furniture, flowers, table and chairs—had been cleared out long ago, except for a large banner on one wall about winning the war on the virus.  A person in white with a disinfectant backpack canister came and sprayed our luggage.  At registration, our QR codes were scanned and we were given a sheet with more QR codes for us to scan, installing WeChat apps on our phones with more forms to fill out, plus a few sheets of instructions.  We were accompanied to our rooms by persons in white.  Outside each door—the handles and key swipe were covered in plastic– was a blue plastic stool. I thought it was where the person administering our morning tests would sit, but it turned out to be where meals would be left.  As the rules explained, if we left the room, or opened the doors for reasons other than retrieving meals, leaving out bags of garbage, or letting in the person in white who came to administer our PCR tests every morning, the quarantine period could be lengthened, and we would be subject to “punishment by police” on release.  I was required to take my temperature daily at 9AM and 4PM with a mercury thermometer provided by the hotel and report the results on a document accessed with a QR code.

The room was spacious and well-furnished.  The weather was perfect.  I was on the eleventh floor of a south-facing room.  Changfeng Park was nearby, and through its trees I could see a small patch of the Suzhou Creek, on whose banks some friends and I have had a walking project for a few years, aiming to walk the length of the river (about 150 miles) without straying more than 15 feet from its banks. Below my window was a community of early 1980s housing—the typical six stories, with dormered roofs and small recessed balconies, plus a group of two or three-story buildings that were once factories, made of that rough and friable 1970s concrete, now stained with years of rain flow.  Beyond them were high-rise office and residential buildings more typical of this century, including one apartment building that is a copy of, or the source for, a building I once lived in in another district (building designs are re-used sometimes).  The lightshows that Shanghai likes to project on their more luxurious office building walls appeared on a few of the newer ones. 

Shanghai is a city of songbirds, and when I woke at 6 after my first night in quarantine they were all I heard, gradually replaced by the more typical city sounds—distant traffic, jack and other hammers, the pulling apart of metal, and the scraping of shovels on asphalt.  By noon, and after a lot of time on the phone, I’d solved two of my anxiety-producing problems: getting my Chinese phone reactivated, and getting my  “Health QR Code” app installed on it; this is something everyone is required to have and to show on demand.  The Health QR Code can be green, yellow, or red.  Green means free passage; yellow means go test at once; red means quarantine.  Having your code turn red causes considerable dread. In my quarantine, though, it was always green.

Some Shanghai friends were incredulous that I’d come to this.  A few of them texted me news of what had happened two days earlier at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.  Some students in a few of the dorms had been identified as 密接“close contacts” or 次密接“secondary contacts” (these are two items from the new COVID lexicon, which I’ve been busy learning) , so a couple of thousand students had to suit up in plastic and get bussed to buildings (not hotels like mine) throughout the city and beyond that had been repurposed as quarantine centers.  During my quarantine, and since, there have been scattered lockdowns throughout the city—not of whole districts this time, but rather of whole apartment buildings.  Most schools are closed again, and university students and faculty members can’t leave their campuses if they are in residence.  This was said to be due to a confluence of a slight uptick in case numbers, numbers so low that they wouldn’t be noticed in a smallish American town, as well as the Party Congress.   A friend texted that it felt like big changes were in the air.  What kind of changes, I asked?  Maybe nothing will change, she answered, and that would be big too.

In Quarantine

A few days into the quarantine I re-read Tony Hoagland’s poem “Crazy Motherfucker Weather”. From the middle of it:

Am I entering the season of tantrums and denunciations?

My crazy motherfucker weather?
Will I be yelling at strangers on the plane,

begging the radio for mercy,
hammering the video rental machine
to get my money back?

Knowing it a sin to waste
even a smidgen of this life
under the blue authentic glory of the sky;

wondering whether a third choice exists
between resignation and
going around the bend—

I downloaded an “Official Account” on WeChat called 上海本地宝 （Shanghai Local）, a kind of information hub that gives daily updates on quarantine conditions.   For most of my quarantine, I read the Local and other WeChat posts, and heard a lot from friends. 

A friend passed this on (I’ve translated it).  It was a screenshot of a text message.  The text message would have been removed from the server soon after posting; that’s why she didn’t forward the message itself directly. Many people read this kind of news this way.  Another friend here has long been in the habit of staying up late at night, downloading posts during the few hours before they’re removed by the authorities.

We’re residents of Lane 635 Fahuazhen Rd.  When the official municipal COVID policy updates were released, our community* was nowhere on the list. But at around 4PM on October 6, the persons in white came to our doors and told us (orally) that our community’s aerosol levels (nb: by which it has been determined that the virus could be transmitted) were too high, and that we were ordered to report to the Ruitai Hotel on 555 Shuicheng Rd. for quarantine.  Two days after we got to the hotel our Health QR Codes all turned red.  The problem is that none of us was even a “secondary contact”.  What standards did they use?

There were no documents, there were no phone messages with epidemiological findings regarding close contact or secondary contact status (nb: see above for these terms; one is commonly notified by phone of a status change of this kind). This whole evacuation program is a problem. There were no records or documents confirming the aerosol level either.

There’s more to this story.  Between October 6 and October 14, some residents of the community didn’t heed the evacuation orders and had stayed at home. The residential committee kept on distributing supplies to them as usual (nb: these would have been delivery items ordered by the residents).  Then we got a call, telling us that our quarantine would be extended to October 17th. Lots of excuses and buck-passing, but we weren’t allowed to go home.  And of course this was delivered orally; there were no documents or official accounts explaining the extended quarantine.   If you come from abroad you quarantine for seven days in a hotel and three days at home.  This continual escalation that we’re facing, with no documentary or official justification, makes getting home more and more grueling.

It turned out that a good friend of mine had been one of the holdouts.  After I got out she played a recording of her doorstep conversation with the policeman who was trying to persuade her to go the quarantine hotel.  He was patient and earnest, and spent a lot longer with her than any US policeman would have.  Another friend told me that in recent months, after the citywide lockdown, police were a lot more sympathetic, after having had to enforce a lockdown that many had thought was excessive.  I asked my friend the reason for her lockdown.  She said that rumors said that a New Zealander who had just come out of his ten days of quarantine had tested positive.  I said that given what you had to go through before entering the country and after arriving, I didn’t see how that was possible.  Later, I thought that perhaps, like Financial Times reporter Thomas Hale, he went to the wrong bar on getting out and ended up in a long stay in a portacabin (his record of his time is worth reading: https://www.ft.com/content/77622627-9433-445a-a763-a547b77b58ed; paywall).  She laughed.  She’s always thought of me as a naïve and romantic leftist who didn’t understand the lengths to which the party state could go. 

Here’s an excerpt from the Shanghai Local:

Latest News of the Epidemic in Shanghai (Updated Daily)

Summary: The Shanghai Municipal Health Condition Reports:  On October 14 (midnight to midnight) there were 4 confirmed new local cases and 38 confirmed asymptomatic local cases. 20 areas were classified as Mid-Level Risk. Details follow:

Case 1. Resident of Qingpu district. Had returned to Shanghai from outside the city. The routine PCR test revealed abnormalities.  After re-testing by the municipal and district Epidemic Control stations, results proved to be positive. References to the subject’s medical history, bedside diagnoses, further lab testing, and imaging tests confirmed the positive diagnosis (information released October 14).

Case 2 and Case 3 are residents of Minhang District. Case 4 is a resident of Songjiang District. All of them were close contacts of infected persons who had returned to Shanghai, as previously reported by the municipal authorities.  Tests administered during their quarantine period revealed abnormalities, and further testing at the Epidemic Control station proved positive.  References to the subjects’ medical histories, bedside diagnoses, further lab testing, and imaging tests confirmed the positive diagnoses.

The next two sections (untranslated here) gave similar details about the asymptomatic cases. That’s followed by a section detailing (community by community) the newly designated Medium Risk Zones. Then this:

Shanghai Community Policy: “Two Tests a Week” and “Three Tests for Three Days” for those coming to or returning to Shanghai

At the present, when epidemic related threats of all kinds remain present, in order to consolidate our successes in epidemic control and in order to identify and control outbreaks as early as possible, each community is requested to conscientiously organize routine measures for testing, to follow the directive of “two tests a week”, and to ensure that services are not interrupted.

All residents should follow district and community arrangements for orderly testing and examinations.  When specimens are collected, please take self-protective measures, maintain appropriate distance, and wear a mask.

In addition, all of those coming to or returning to Shanghai must follow the “three days three tests regime”.  A PCR test must be taken every 24 hours, or the Health Code will turn yellow. All of those coming to or returning to Shanghai from high risk areas must take tests and examination according to regulations.

This section was followed by a bar with advertisements:  “Are Dental Implants Good or Not?”; What Are the Best Strategies for Renovating an Older Home”, “Converted Shipping Containers for Sale”, “Yoga Classes”,  “How to Tell if Your Child Has a Low IQ”, and others.  The company behind the Shanghai Local is contracted by municipal governments, and is allowed to post ads.  Below the ads are summaries of earlier days’ reports.  If you were wondering, when reading that first-person account of the evacuation of Lane 635, why the writer focused so much on the lack or written documentation, consider that there’s often a LOT of documentation available, so its absence is salient. 

Forwarded WeChat or Weibo posts, long texts from local friends, there was a lot of mediated communication about what was going on. My unmediated experience of quarantine was, as you might expect, limited to the four walls of my hotel room, and when I heard something outside in the hall I’d look through the fisheye lens in the door to see.  A few times a day a person in blue walked the hall spraying disinfectant.  Meals came three times a day, delivered by a person in blue pushing a cart.  There were deliveries of special order items every day at around four.  From the front desk, I’d ordered more bottled water and a refill of my medical waste disposal bags that we had to use for all of our garbage (I didn’t eat much of the plentiful food they sent so I generated a lot of waste).  You could get outside deliveries too, as long as the value was under 300RMB and contents passed inspection, though I never did.  When I opened my door to get meals or deposit garbage, I saw piles of delivery boxes in front of other doors.

Not being able to go outside, walk around, and take bike rides or night walks made jet lag last much longer than usual.  I’d go to bed by 8:30 or 9:00 and wake up at 4:30 or 5:00.  One night I was awakened at 11:30 by noise next door, and on reaching consciousness realized it was a couple having a fight (married couples are allowed to quarantine in the same room).  Soon after it seemed to get violent, with thrown objects, screaming, maybe blows.  I called the front desk and said that there was loud violence in the room next door.  She said they’d send someone up.  Then I heard the woman screaming “救命！救命！（Save my life!）.  I called again and said that the woman was screaming “Save my life!”.  The staff person seemed to register how serious it was, and told me that someone would be up in five minutes. “Five minutes! This is a dangerous situation. Somebody needs to come right away.”   “They have to put on their quarantine suit”, she told me.   Then the phone in the room next door rang. It rang for a long time and I couldn’t hear if it was finally answered or not.  Shortly after that I got a call from the front desk. “Are they still fighting”?  “I haven’t heard anything since you called them, but I still think someone should come up.”  “OK”.  I didn’t hear evidence of anyone coming up. The room was quiet the next day. 

I texted a few local friends about this.  They hadn’t known that couples could quarantine together.  They also said that domestic violence had exploded since the whole-city lockdown last spring, as it did in the US and many other places during COVID lockdowns, and that it was almost never prosecuted.  I also shared “Crazy Motherfucker Weather” with some local friends.  They liked that term; they thought it fit.    

Outside

I thought I’d wait until I’d walked enough, talked enough, and soaked up the scene enough before updating the quarantine diary with News from Outside, as several friends had requested.   Three days after getting out, as my dinner guest had entered the third hour of her lockdown narrative (volunteering to give PCR tests in her community in March with nothing but the state’s word about how bad things were out there; growing realization that it was a total shitshow, alienation from former friends turned policy-boosters, checking neighbors to make sure that they all had enough food during the two-month shutdown, the planning and performance of her 35-minute dance based on the lockdown emotional rollercoaster), I understood that my field observations might have entered a new stage.  None of it was uninteresting.  But it would be a long haul…  The day before I’d hosted a party at my favorite Shanghainese food restaurant (inside; still a weird experience given my California habits)  with a group of old friends.  The talk was mostly lockdown and post-lockdown, including a long-ish argument about how this period should be registered and recorded for posterity.  One friend said that a simple compendium of everyone’s troubles would be meaningless; the important thing to get to arrive at a common understanding, without which it would just fade away into nothing.  It would fade away, insisted others, everything fades away.  No, these records are important; all of them.  It was so hard to get a word in edgewise that soon enough it became a joke: “the host isn’t allowed to talk!”   One friend—we’d talked before about how it was nearly the only topic of conversation—channeled his inner Garcin, from No Exit, opining every so often, “Oh well, let’s keep at it…”    There’s a lot more to say about April and May.

The Rise of the Health Engineers

One thing that keeps the trauma in its active state, with no end in sight for the working through, is the routinization of dynamic zero, the sense that this might just go on for ever, the feeling that, especially after the 20th Party Congress, the leaders don’t even care that much about damage to the economy;  plus the sense that the state is digging in for the long haul.  I went out to Fuxing Island one afternoon to pick up some stuff I’d stored, and just outside the window workers were laying the foundation for a 3000-unit “portacabin” (方舱) complex。As my friends said, the foundations were very solid, meant to last a long time.  I’ve been getting my PCR tests at a place around the corner where there are almost never lines; the whole thing takes under a minute, from scanning my health code to sample collecting. Every day I’d noticed nearby between fifty and a hundred people milling around focused on a some folded up sheets of paper they’d brought.  I asked one guy if he was cramming for an exam.   He answered yes, for a  “Health Engineer Certificate”.  This would allow him to become one of the Big Whites, those people in white plastic protective suits who collect and process samples, work the neighborhoods, etc., or to work in some other pandemic  related capacity.    If everyone that week passed the exam—probably a pretty high ratio since the cram sheets are lists of all possible questions and answers, easily found online—from what I’d seen the state had probably added a thousand or so to the Big Whites’ ranks in that week alone.   Mastery of the new regime is encouraged.  A friend sent me a screenshot of a page of her daughter’s homework.  It was a picture of the healthcode that we all carry around on our phones, and the questions were designed to ascertain that the kid understood what everything on the screen meant. The last two questions asked for a narrative about what information the healthcode contained, and a list of places where one is required to show the healthcode. 

Maybe the kids will be persuaded.  Many grownups aren’t.  I’ve heard surprising levels of anti-science.  The vaccines don’t work; the vaccines have bad side effects (they don’t). I’ve heard the line “My doctor told me not to get vaccinated” from ten different people.  The PCR tests are all for show; the statistics are just made up.  “Chris believes in vaccinations, and he thinks that the epidemic is serious”, is a line I’ve been ridiculed with more than once; I can count on a laugh when I hold up the five fingers of my hand showing how many times I’ve been vaccinated. 

The main thing, though, is the sense that one random occurrence—and the common perception now is that this will bring a severe or baseless overreaction on the part of the state—will cause major disruptions in daily life.  One positive case in a housing community locks down the whole community for ten days, with daily PCR tests for everyone.  A red or yellow healthcode appears on a school kid’s phone—“close contact” or “secondary close contact”– and the school gets shut down.  A friend with a car notices a testing station with no line and pulls over for an overdue test, happy to have gamed the system. It turns out that everyone who had been in that area that day got a yellow code, meaning daily testing for the next three days.  When samples are collected at the PCR stations, five or more swabs are collected in each test tube and they’re screened together.  One positive means everyone turns red, and must report immediately for further testing.  I wondered sometimes if people who saw me getting tested worried about having their swabs in the same tube as mine.  People who travel further than a bike-ride’s distance from home (the bikes would be those public bikes you unlock with a phone app) usually carry a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and maybe a book, in case they have to stay in place for an extra day, or three, or seven. 

The End of Rhizomatic Shanghai

For almost all my time in Shanghai, I’ve lived in a 5 square mile area known as the “French Concession”.  Most of the buildings are pre-war, and the streets are lined with thick and arching wutong trees (French plane trees) that form magical tunnels of green shade.  I know this area like the back of my hand, and know especially well the small alleys that wind through the housing communities, bricolaged spaces where the inside outside distinctions are blurred, allowing a mole’s route through the neighborhoods.   That rhizomatic counter-geography is no more.  Alley wandering depends on open gates, and in dynamic zero (动态清零—the state’s name for its epidemic policy) all of a community’s gates but one are permanently locked.  A few days after my release, I found that one of those alleys near my place—a pretty important psychogeographic route that allowed for a crucial passage between Yongjia Rd and Shaoxing Rd without a detour onto the busier streets—still allowed through passage.  I take it more often than I need to. 

The area gets its bourgeois or hipster reputation from the bars, restaurants, boutiques and cafes that were scattered through it, quite concentrated on certain streets.   Most of the spots I used to frequent are gone.  A lot of the places that remain are well-capitalized spots with multiple locations. And then there are the cafes  There are more cafes than ever—tiny places with three or four tables opened up by kids of rich families; kids who can’t go abroad to study, from families with fewer opportunities for capital export.  Probably a quarter or a third of former storefronts are closed. In the past they’d be replaced pretty quickly by something new, which might last six months or a few years.  Now it’s not clear.  People say that a lot of shops have closed because of ubiquitous home delivery.  The bike lanes are full of the electric scooters of the delivery drivers from Meituan and Eleme, two of the main delivery services. They get around 8RMB per order, so need many orders a day in order for it to pay.  You aim for at least 1100 orders a month, I’ve been told.  You sleep in a small flat with five or six others for which you pay around 1000RMB per month, and food is another 1200 or so. In a good month you can send 7000 or 8000RMB home to the family. There’s a fair amount of downtime, though, waiting for the orders to be brought out, and they’re usually happy to talk—about the economics of delivery, where they sleep, where they’re from, how to get the most orders into a day…

Hallowe’en has become a big holiday for Generation Z, and this year the streets and bars around here were filled with twenty-somethings in costumes.  There had been notices spread on social media that officials would not tolerate anyone dressed as a Big White. A few did anyway. One friend sent a picture of someone dressed with a Red Healthcode.  There probably weren’t many students among the costumed hipsters, though; students living in university dorms haven’t been able to leave their campuses for weeks.  Is the state worried about student protest?  Hard to say.  For a short time, a petition from a group of Tongji University students circulated on social media. One dormful of students had been told that due to a positive diagnosis in the neighboring dorm they would all be sent to portacabins. The petition protested the decision, adding that under no circumstances did they want to end up in portacabins.  Getting into a campus poses its own challenges. For a meeting with faculty and grad students in Cultural Studies to discuss David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism, I had to start daily PCR testing three days out. The day before the meeting I had to upload to the university’s Visitor Application site the three days’ PCR test results, plus a picture of my “Travel Card”, which prior to this process I hadn’t known I had.  It’s a record of my movements over the past seven days.  A friend told me where to find it on the same app where my Healthcode is stored. I found it, and it showed a green circle with a green arrow in the middle. That meant I hadn’t been in any high or medium risk areas. Below that was the record of everywhere I’d been:   Shanghai, it read. That’s right.

Notes

* A “community” is an official designation.  Normally it is a group of apartment buildings surrounded by walls with several entrances from the outside that can be, and during quarantine often were, locked.  Communities might have from 50 to 1000 or so people.

 

Christopher Connery is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz

 

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Harriet Evans, Xi’s Yes Men: The Absence of Women at the 20th Party Congress

(This piece was originally published on “China Dialogues,” the online platform of the London School of Economics https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/cff/2022/11/07/xis-yes-men-the-absence-of-women-at-the-20th-party-congress/) 

  • For the first time in decades, there will be not one single woman sitting on the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo. But it is no surprise to see the almost total absence of women from the rituals of the 20th Party Congress.
  • The complete exclusion of women from China’s leading positions stems from a political system in which there has been little active encouragement to women at local levels to become politically active.
  • Whilst a new generation of feminist and LGBTQI activists in China are contesting these practices, they are hampered by censorship and the re-assertion of a powerful ideology of hierarchical gender relations that celebrate China’s “national” Confucian traditions.

The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) opened on October 16th 2022, and ended a week later. As anticipated, one of its main achievements was to confirm President Xi Jinping in his third term, breaking with established practice of a two-term rule. Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era is now written into the new constitution, using a term that to date has only been used to refer to Mao Zedong Thought.

Xi Jinping’s three posts as General Secretary of the CCP, Chairperson of the CCP’s Central Military Commission and President of the People’s Republic of China, give him unprecedented controls of the party, military and state. His position is widely hailed as that of China’s paramount leader upholding national unity at a time of international turmoil and increasing domestic difficulties. One dimension of this has been the systematic crackdown on dissidents to prevent any disruption to the Congress proceedings.

While the choreography of the Congress was apparently and predictably seamless, audiences were surprised to watch as former President Hu Jintao was unceremoniously and apparently unwillingly led out of the closing ceremony. Hu’s former political allies, including former Premier Li Keqiang, were all replaced by Xi’s people.

Spectators of the rituals of China’s Party and National Congresses have long been accustomed to the spectacle of serried ranks of identically besuited men clapping in unison to the speeches of their leader. It was therefore no surprise to see the almost total absence of women from the rituals of this political stage. Aged seventy-two, Sun Chunlan, the only remaining woman on the twenty-five member Politburo—the decision-making body of the CCP—resigned from her position. Given her age she was expected to retire. Expectations were that Shen Yiqin, Secretary of Guizhou Provincial Party Committee would be appointed. However, this did not happen, meaning that the 20th Congress is confirmed for the next five years as the first time in decades that there has been not one single woman in the CCP’s Poliburo.

Figures for CCP membership in December 2021 indicate that of 96.71 million members, 28.43 (just over a third) were women. Following the decisions at the recent Party Congress, just eleven out of 205 members on the Central Committee are women.

The main images of women that emerged from the recent Congress were of young women, all dressed in identical tailored red skirt suits, large white hot water flasks in hand, moving in unison along the empty rows of delegates’ seats to fill up the teacups prior to the commencement of proceedings.

We all know that the presence of leading female politicians does not in itself signify advances for women. So, would the presence of a woman in a leading political position in China have any substantive meaning for Chinese women’s lives?

The question may be easier to answer if approached from a different angle. In China, the complete exclusion of women from leading positions, now presumably a matter of deliberate choice by Xi Jinping, stems from a political system, particularly in the past four decades, in which there has been little active encouragement to women at local levels to become politically active. On the contrary, evidence widely suggests considerable opposition from local to top levels of the political hierarchy to nominating women for political posts. One result is a dearth of female political participation at local levels. Without such participation at local levels, women are effectively prevented from rising to higher positions.

For his part, Xi Jinping presumably has little incentive to encourage women’s political participation. On the contrary, his revival of Confucian values as the moral standard of the nation has been accompanied by encouragement to women to put their energies into having more babies and upholding “traditional values.” Classes in how to become a “virtuous wife and good mother” are now available to girls and young women in largely private neo-Confucian academies across the country.

Savvy social media celebrities have chosen to put their energies into advising women on how to make the best of their lot. This is nowhere better illuminated than in the figure of Yang Bingyang, whose self-styled status as relationship guru under the name Ayawawa has brought her millions of online followers, interviews and considerable wealth. She taps into a conservative gender agenda that prioritises marriage as the foundation of women’s stable future, advising women that their best option for securing a stable marriage is to buy into money rather than looks. According to Wang Qianning, a Beijing based commentator on gender issues, “Yang symbolizes a retrenchment of traditional male-female power relations according to a strongly consumerist model.”

The absence of women from the Party’s recent Congress alongside the failure to reappoint a woman to the Politburo speaks more powerfully for the current leadership’s view of women than do its official statements about upholding women’s rights.  This was inversely highlighted by the presence at the opening ceremony of the Congress of former vice-premier, Zhang Gaoli, the powerful official accused of sexual harassment by the tennis star Peng Shuai. He was never brought to account for Peng Shuai’s allegations. On the contrary, official statements denounced Peng’s allegations as “malicious rumour.” What more powerful symbolism could there be, then, of the Party’s top-level silencing of women than Zhang’s presence alongside the exclusion of women?

This leads us to recent clampdowns of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism.  Arguably the best internationally known event was the arrest of the Feminist Five, a group of feminist activists who after several years of public activity, were arrested in March 2015 for challenging male privilege by staging street performance protests. Following widespread international and domestic protest, including accusations against the Chinese government for failing to provide adequate medical treatment for Wu Rongrong who was suffering from hepatitis B, the five were eventually released after thirty-seven days on April 13, 2015.

Activists have also brought complaints of sexual harassment against employers in a range of operations, including the precision electronics giant, Foxconn. Migrant workers and undocumented workers also raised their voices, and in 2017, the journalist Huang Xueqin went public with her denunciation of workplace harassment. After conducting a survey of mainland women journalists on the extent of sexual harassment, she started up an online platform to share relevant information, using the hashtag #WoYeShi (a direct translation of #MeToo). In 2019 her passport was confiscated after a trip abroad. Then, having been awarded a place to study in the UK’s University of Sussex, she and labour activist Wang Jianbing went missing on September 19th, 2021, accused of “inciting subversion of state power.” To date, the appeals of international human rights organisations and academics have gone unheeded and Huang Xueqin’s situation remains unclear.

None of this is to ignore the very real benefits that the marketisation of the economy has brought to millions of women’s lives. Xi’s zero-Covid policy has also achieved undeniable successes in keeping excess deaths low, in comparison with, for example, the US and the UK. However, this policy has also produced unintended consequences, some of which have particular relevance for women. The depressed economy and reduction in personal incomes has led to a significant decrease in the number of marriages. Despite official attempts to encourage women to have more children by relaxing the birth control policy, the numbers of births between November and December 2020 were down by 55% on levels five years earlier. As elsewhere, including here in the UK, lockdowns have added to women’s burdens of childcare and housework.

The CCP’s gender policies have had an uneven but persistent ride in China over the past long half century. While from one perspective, it is reasonable to situate the increasing gender inequalities since the early 1990s within the privatising impulse of the commercialised political economy, the conditions for its resurgence were grounded in understandings and practices of gender difference and gender relations that could not escape the hegemonic pull of earlier policies that prioritised women’s participation in social labour but overlooked their domestic role.

Policies of women’s liberation in the Mao years certainly did constitute a transformative experience for countless women, yet the ideologically and historically mediated constraints on including the domestic realm within the sphere of policy debate left relatively untouched certain basic assumptions. Backed by a notion of biological essentialism in defining gender difference, policies of gender equality forged a clear line between productive and reproductive issues, reducing the latter to a silenced area of women’s lives and experiences. They just got on with the task of birthing babies, nurturing children and taking on the emotional as well as physical labour of domestic care work.

Now, however, in a social and cultural environment that grants access to online connectivity and travel, a new generation of feminist and LGBTQI activists in China are contesting these practices and relations in ways that signify a qualitative departure from the feminisms of their forebears. Yet, the reach of their views is hampered by censorship and the re-assertion of a powerful ideology of gender relations that celebrate China’s “national” Confucian traditions. It remains for future analysis to assess the impact of their struggle against the deep embeddedness of male privilege as a system of institutionalised patriarchal power and subordination operative in all aspects of public, political and domestic life.

 

Harriet Evans is Professor Emerita of Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster) and Visiting Professor of Anthropology (LSE). She has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexuality in China, and on visual culture of the Mao era. Her third monograph, Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China, co-edited with Michael Rowlands, and based on a Leverhulme Trust funded research project was published in 2021 by Lexington Books. She is now working on a new multidisciplinary collective project on the legacies of Chinese migration to Latin America since the mid-nineteenth century.

 

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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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