Between Party, Parents and Peers: the quandaries of two young Chinese Party members in Beijing

Abstract

This article explores the lived contradictions entailed in being a young member of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) today. The focus is on how political and existential issues intersect. It explores party membership as a strategy for personal mobility among Beijing elite university students by providing an ethnographic account of the quandaries of two young ccp members. Even though one student is of rural origin and the other has an urban elite background, in both cases party membership has been pursued as a strategy for opening paths to the future and tied to a quest for self-development rather than a matter of wishing to make sacrifices for the country. The article focuses on how the two students' efforts play out differently. At the same time it is argued that a sense of moral and existential ambiguity goes hand in hand with both of their party membership strategies, leading to an experience of division.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Ayo Wahlberg and Ravinder Kaur for bringing together participants from the ‘governing difference’ workshop under the Asian Dynamics Conference (adi) held in Copenhagen in 2010. I also wish to warmly thank my colleagues at the ‘political bodies’ research group at the Institute of Anthropology for fruitful comments, as well as my colleagues at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen for support.

Notes

1 S Thøgersen, ‘Parasites or civilisers: the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in rural areas', in KE Brødsgaard and Zheng Yongnian (eds) Bringing the Party Back In: How China is Governed, London etc: Eastern Universities Press, 2004, pp 192–216.

2 In order to protect the anonymity of informants I have used pseudonyms.

3 MH Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No 28, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958.

4 For an analysis of the Manchester School, see ibid. For overviews of the Manchester School, see TMS Evans & Don Handelman, The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, New York: Berghan Books, 2006; and B Kapferer & L Meinert (eds), special issue of Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice, 54(3), 2010.

5 M Jackson, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects, New York: Berghan Books, 2005. Jackson, among other things, draws on Hannah Arendt's distinction between vita activa and vita contempletiva, or the difference between life as it is chaotically lived and the explanations we generate post hoc about the events that befall us. Arendt identified diminishing human agency and political freedom in terms of the paradox that, as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions. H Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

6 According to Andrew Kipnis, while the term suzhi used to be associated with inborn characteristics and eugenics, it has increasingly become linked with social and moral characteristics that are the result of child-rearing and education. Since the 1970s the term has undergone a transformation. Suzhi () is a compound of the characters su and zhi . Zhi means ‘nature, character, or matter’, whereas su has many meanings, including ‘unadorned, plain, white and essence’. Suzhi no longer connotes the natural in a nature/nurture dichotomy, but refers to individually embodied human qualities. A Kipnis, ‘Suzhi: a keyword approach’, China Quarterly, 186, 2006, pp 295–313. See also Kipnis, ‘Neoliberalism reified: suzhi discourse and tropes of neoliberalism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 2007, pp 383–400.

7 A Anagnost, ‘The corporeal politics of quality (Suzhi)’, Public Culture, 16(2), 2004, pp 189–208.

8 Andrew Kipnis argues that, while a neoliberal approach masks hidden differences by ‘blaming the victim’, suzhi discourse rather reifies differences. He sees ‘blame the victim’ discourses as a critique of the neoliberal welfare policies articulated in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. This style of discourse works by denying that, for instance, ‘welfare moms’ are victims at all. It denies the relevance of structural factors to the explanation of their disadvantages and argues that, if welfare moms cannot get off welfare, they are just not trying hard enough. Kipnis, ‘Neoliberalism reified’.

9 D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; G Sigley, ‘Chinese governmentalities: government, governance and the socialist market economy’, Economy and Society, 35(4), 2006, pp 487–508; and A Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

10 FN Pieke, The Good Communist: Elite Training and State Building in Today's China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

11 Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society, Oxford: Berg, 2009; and M Halskov Hansen & R Svarverud (eds), iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society, Copenhagen: nias Press, 2010.

12 A Kleinman, Y Yan, J Jun, S Lee, E Zhang, P Tianshu, W Fei & G Jinhua (eds), Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person—What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell us about China Today, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011, p 23.

13 Ibid.

14 See Wang Fei-Ling, Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005 for a discussion of how the same test results give urban students access to better universities than is the case for students from China's rural areas.

15 See Lei Guang, ‘Rural taste, urban fashions: the cultural politics of rural/urban difference in contemporary China’, Positions, 11(3), 2003, pp 613–646 for a discussion of the close affinity between state practices and popular urban discourses creating a view of migrants as lacking in distinction and value.

16 TE Woronov, ‘Chinese children, American education: globalizing child rearing in contemporary China’, in J Cole & D Durham (eds), Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007, pp 29–52.

17 Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. For a more detailed description of the concept of hukou, see Jesper Zeuthen's article in this issue.

18 Kleinman et al, Deep China, p 285.

19 About one-fifth of Chinese university students are members of the party (as opposed to three per cent of the general Chinese population), which gives an indication of its elitist character.

20 See Anagnost, ‘The corporeal politics of quality (Suzhi)’; Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; and L Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

21 The term invokes the idea that being from Beijng (Bei jing), being a man (nan shi) and being a member of the party (dang yuan), a person is in a position of social status or mobility. Shenyang is close to Beijing and being from there gives more or less the same entitlements as does being a person from the capital itself.

22 S Feuchtwang, ‘Remnants of revolution in China’, in CM Hann (ed), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, London: Routledge, 1992, pp 196–197.

23 Stanley Rosen has analysed issues of party recruitment from the perspective of those being recruited and found that China's youth cohort see party membership as an avenue to opportunities within a competitive job market. Rosen, ‘The state of youth/youth and the state in early 21st century China: the triumph of the urban rich?’, in P Hays Gries & S Rosen (eds), State and Society in 21st Century China: Crisis, Contention and Legitimation, London: Routledge, 2004, ch 8.

24 Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘double-bind’ to characterise the situation faced by a person who is receiving contradictory messages from another powerful person. The classic example is that of a child who is confronted with a parent who communicates withdrawal and coldness when the child approaches, but then reaches out towards the child with simulated love when he or she pulls back from the coldness. The child is then caught in a double-bind. No course of action can possibly prove satisfactory. Bateson felt that this kind of mixed communication may underlie the development of autism and schizophrenia. G Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp 271–279. However, it is necessary for my purpose to clearly separate the notion of a double-bind from any clinical content of this sort. I see double-binds as conveying the experience of being torn in two directions and as tied to existential dilemmas that have no definite answer.

25 See also V Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One Child Policy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

26 Si Lian, The Ant Tribe: Between Hope and Reality, Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2008.

27 Michael Jackson calls these dilemmas aporias, which literally means ‘lacking a path (a- poros), a path that is impassable. However, whereas the classical Greek aporia was primarily a logical puzzle that was to be resolved through rational ingenuity, Jackson here refers to dilemmas between self and other, as well as between moral ideals and lived experience that define the human condition. M Jackson Excursions, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; and Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Although both Kleinman et al and Michael Jackson are inspired by the phenomenology of William James and RD Laing, Jackson's work places less emphasis on the role of culture and rather makes universalist claims about the human condition.

28 On vita activa and the human condition, see Arendt, The Human Condition, pp 1–12.