Risky Work, Fateful Play: Chinese Customs Inspectors and the Compossibility of Fortune

ABSTRACT

This article examines how customs inspectors in contemporary China manage the ongoing suspicions of their bureau and their own moral careers through two distinct models for dealing with uncertainty: risk management and fortunetelling. While risk management has become a key sign of the ‘modernising’ professional ethos of the Chinese Customs Administration since the early 2000s, curiously fortunetelling has also emerged as a popular pastime among many officials eager to grasp the cosmic signs of mis/fortune in their midst. By attending to the distinctive chronopolitics and calculative logics at play in models of risk management and fate calculation, I analyse the ways in which customs inspectors try to hone an ethics of timely response in a globalising world imagined as irreducibly opaque and polyrhythmic in its patterns. This is a world especially open to compossible renderings of ‘fortune’ as a cosmo-economic force that resonates across systems of speculation.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• customs inspection
• risk
• divination
• chronopolitics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In fact, in Fuzhou the local Customs bureau was widely seen as one of the wealthiest civil service departments – a perception bolstered by their relocation into luxurious new headquarters as well as by a nationwide public expenditure report in 2011 that placed Chinese Customs Administration at #2 in the use of state resources.

2 This was evident by the kinds of anti-corruption operations that culminated in the Xiamen smuggling case as well as by a growing system of external audit involving not only higher state authorities but also international organizations like the WTO and the World Bank interested in the performance of Chinese Customs vis-a-vis their counterparts in other countries. For instance, see the World Bank’s report ‘Connecting to Compete’ on the ‘logistics performance index’ for comparing Customs agencies (Arvis et al. 2010).

3 Fuzhou Customs itself has grown 10-fold since the launch of Post-Mao reforms from less than a hundred workers to more than a thousand strong.

4 For instance, risk management techniques can be traced back to 1986 when the bureau adopted the now standard system of red and green channels for the self-declaration of dutiable goods. However, it was not until 1999 that the concept of risk management was formally adopted by the World Customs Organization with its passage of the Kyoto Convention, which required all contracting parties of the WCO, including China, to integrate the principle of risk management into all their Customs control programs.

5 The release time of goods is a standard Customs performance indicator which the WCO has promoted and provided technical consultation for its members since 1994 (Zhang 2009; WCO 2011).

6 The fact that risk management exceeds rational calculation and the technologies of statistical intervention has been noted in several fields such as finance and security in recent years (Taleb 2007; Appadurai 2011; Ewald 2011; Amoore 2013) not to mention by sociologists of modernity arguing for the runaway incalculable hazards of risk technologies themselves (Beck 1992). Also see Daston (1995) on the moral relationship of probability to risk, which she argues only stabilized with the rise of Western bourgeois arguments for distinguishing the sober rational ethos of insurance from the immoral passions of gambling.

7 On timing of the gift versus bribery in China, see Smart (1993), Yang (1994) and Hsing (1996).

8 In comparison, a randomized national survey in 2007 showed that 44% of the population had engaged in some sort of ritual practice including fortunetelling and fengshui while 49% claimed belief in some kind of supernatural existence (Ning 2010). Another survey in 2005 of 10,000 adults across 21 of China’s provinces and municipalities found that among a dozen occupational groups, Communist Party officials and government employees were the most interested in accessing information about religion with 33% reported interest. The next most interested groups were teachers/professors and retirees tied at 24% (Grim 2008).

9 In addition to computer science and mathematics, the I-Ching has been variously claimed in both China and overseas as a scientific forerunner or resonant form of technical expertise in such fields as physics (Capra 2010), medicine (Farquhar 1996; Zhang 2007), psychotherapy (Jung 2010), operations research and systems theory (Churchman 1971), and business management (Cheng 2013). Also see Smith (2012) for a discussion of ‘Yijing Fever’ and its ‘scientific’ emphasis in China in the 1980s and 1990s.

10 Anthropologists like Marriot (1976), Strathern (1990), Gell (1998) and Sahlins (2013) have also discussed ‘dividual’ or ‘distributive’ forms of personhood, although not directly in relation to the logics of information.

11 I borrow this question from Charles Stafford’s insightful work (2007) on fortunetelling in Taiwan and China.

12 This paradoxical relation of uncertainty to statistical calculation has been noted similarly by Daston (1995) in her study of classical models of probability during the Enlightenment and by Amoore (2013) in her recent discussion of post-probability models of risk management since 9/11.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation of International Scholarly Exchange and the National Science Foundation's Programs in Cultural Anthropology and in Law and Social Sciences.