Chongqing–China’s New Experiment: Editor’s Foreword
The Modern Chinese Family: In Light of Economic and Legal History
Philip C. C. Huang<br />Sep 1, 2011; 37:459-497<br />
Politics at the Boundary: Mixed Signals and the Chinese State
In this conceptual essay, the authors argue that one way to understand the Chinese state is to view it from below, from the perspective of people advocating change. The authors’ “state reflected in society” approach is illustrated with accounts of Chinese lawyers, journalists, and NGO leaders who operate at the boundary of the acceptable and are attentive to signals about what the authorities will tolerate. Their experiences suggest that mixed signals about the limits of the permissible is a key feature of the Chinese state. Beyond a number of well-patrolled “forbidden zones,” the Chinese state speaks with many voices and its bottom line is often unclear. At the border of the uncontroversial and the unacceptable, the Chinese state is both a high-capacity juggernaut capable of demarcating no-go zones and a hodgepodge of disparate actors ambivalent about what types of activism it can live with. Whether mixed signals are deliberate or accidental is hard to determine, but they do offer the authorities certain advantages by providing a low-cost way to contain dissent, gather information, and keep options open.
A Brief Comment on Ivan Szelenyi’s Comment
Ivan Szelenyi argues that no third way alternatives to capitalist market economy and socialist planned economy are possible, a conclusion he reached after his own searches for such dating back to the 1980s. My comment responds to his two main points, about a “real estate bubble,” and hence the non-sustainability of Chongqing’s third finance, and the historical failures of third ways in Eastern Europe and Russia, and hence the likelihood of the same failure in Chongqing and in China.
Political Ideology, the Party, and Politicking: Justice System Reform in China
Susan Trevaskes<br />May 1, 2011; 37:315-344<br />
The Modern Chinese Family: In Light of Economic and Legal History
Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s.
The Modern Chinese Family: In Light of Economic and Legal History
Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s.
Gender and Grammar in Chinese: With Implications for Language Universals
Catherine S. Farris<br />Jul 1, 1988; 14:277-308<br />Article
Piecing Together the Past: The Notion of Recovery in Fiction and Film from Taiwan
Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government–imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the public the events of the White Terror and to consider how guilt for the atrocities should be affixed. Wan Jen’s (Wan Ren) 1995 feature film Super Citizen Ko explores possibilities for memorialization and the notion of victimhood in its recovery of the Nationalist repression of progressive political movements and its impact on a former political prisoner and his family. Finally, Tseng Wen-Chen (Zeng Wenzhen) in her documentary Spring: The Story of Xu Jinyu offers a portrait of a woman White Terror survivor turned political activist living in an era when the White Terror has been commemorated but remains poorly understood by the younger generation.
Quality, Development Discourse, and Minority Subjectivity in Contemporary Xinjiang
The government discourse that describes poverty in a minority nationality county in northern Xinjiang follows specific patterns. The term “quality” (suzhi) is used to attribute the roots of poverty to residents themselves as well as to legitimate official poverty-alleviation and market-development strategies. This official use of suzhi discourse attempts to constitute a particular kind of subjectivity within China’s market economy but obscures local forms of exclu sion and adaptation to market reform. Indeed, suzhi discourse often refers to adaptations that, rather than holding back local residents from development, are survival strategies. Thus, local agency can be seen in counter-discourses that attribute poverty not simply to their suzhi but to their lack of wage-paying employment.
