“My dad is Li Gang!” or seeing the state: transgressive mobility, collective visibility, and playful corruption in contemporary urban China

Abstract

This article examines transgressive mobility in contemporary urban China to argue that traffic does not just provide an analogy for inequality and abuse of power, but that it is through street spectacle that people see power enacted. While state power (à la Virilio) seeks to control the circulation of people, things, and ideas, state officials and their kin exhibit their power through transgressing this control. Examination of the “My dad is Li Gang!” case – where the son of a district police chief claimed immunity from prosecution after a hit-and-run accident because of his father’s position – as well as participant observation of street crossing in the city of Kunming, illustrate that people use collective observation, language and action to critique the transgressive mobility of officials and their kin. Yet, at the same time, a rising upper middle class who can now legally purchase their own cars aspire to the luxurious lifestyles of officials and their kin by “playing at corruption” through their own transgressive mobility of elite drag racing.

Keywords:

• mobility
• cars
• street
• state
• China

Acknowledgments

Preliminary thoughts were presented on the panel “Getting Around: Mobility as a Framework for Understanding Power” at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco in 2012 – thank you to panel organizers Nicole Fabricant and Kristin Monroe. Thank you to the Anthropology Department at the University of Bergen, Norway for inviting me to present an early version of this paper in 2013 and for encouraging me to develop it further. I am also grateful to Michelle Bigenho, Julie Hemment, Joshua H. Roth and Barbara Yngvesson for their extensive comments on a manuscript draft, as well as to two anonymous reviewers for their questions and comments. Any errors remain my own.

Notes

1. 有本事你们告去，我爸是李刚. For some reports of the incident, see for example Wang 2010; Wines 2010a, 2010b.

2. The US is still high at 32,367 traffic fatalities in 2011 (NHTSA 2012) but with more than twice the number of cars as China (Kennedy 2014).

3. The first finding from the China Household Finance Survey of 2013 is that: “Inequality of household income and assets in China is much more serious than previously thought” (Li 2013, 10).

4. Virilio ([1977] 1986, 18). Of course Virilio is not the only one to have observed that mobility is not coterminous with freedom (see Lutz and Fernandez 2010; Seiler 2008), but he makes his point in a way that is particularly ironic for late/post-socialist contexts.

5. Kristen Monroe (2011, 2016) points to a similar phenomenon in Beirut, looking at economic elites, not necessarily officials and state kin.

6. Allison Truitt (2008) describes how in Ho Chi Minh City, consumption of motorbikes has allowed a growing middle class to taste the good life and indulge in transgressive mobility. However, in some 200 Chinese cities, motorbikes have been banned or restricted (Nesbitt 2014), presumably to try to manage traffic congestion.

7. This combination of emerging middle-class rage and desire is not unique to China but is found in other developing countries. Writing about middle-class protests in Brazil, Surowiecki (2013, 32) refers to the “revolts of rising expectations.”

8. For a discussion of other pre-liberation cartoons see Notar (2014).

9. In her excellent review of the literature on corruption, Janine R. Wedel (2012) reminds us that “corruption” can have different meanings in different contexts and cautions us against assuming certain ideas about “public” and “private” from the US and European contexts. For a discussion of changing ideas of “public” and “private” in China see Notar (2014).

10. In 1953, officials were ranked into 26 grades that determined not only pay, but also the kinds of privileges – such as a chauffeured car – to which an official had access (Chang 1991, 181).

11. There were exceptions. A colleague from Shanghai tells me that a father’s friend, a US-trained engineer, was able to keep his private car until the start of the Cultural Revolution, around 1966.

12. Drifting is a form of racing where “the driver used the throttle, brakes, clutch, gear shifting, and steering input to keep the car in a state of oversteer while maneuvering from turn to turn” (“What is Drifting” n.d.; see also Layton n.d.). It was popularized by the Japanese manga and television series, Intial D [头文字D].

13. This is based on a June 2012 exchange rate of 6.363RMB to the dollar. According to the China Household Finance Survey of 2013, the median disposable household income in urban China is ¥37,500 (¥3,125 per month) and in rural China, ¥19,619 (¥1,635 per month); see Li 2013, 17. I do not know whether Ms. Li is married.

14. Article 47 of the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Road Traffic Safety” stipulates that: “A motor vehicle shall slow down when passing a crosswalk; or shall stop to give way when a pedestrian is passing the crosswalk” (“Law” 2005; also KPSB 2012). See Vanderbilt (2008, 32) for a comparative discussion of avoiding eye contact in Mexico City.

15. As Alena Ledenva (2006) has pointed out in the contemporary Russian context, sometimes it is the unwritten rules that are just as, if not more important than the written rules.

16. Parts of Huang Weikai’s 2009 documentary Disorder [现实是过去的未来] captures, in gritty black and white footage, the character of contemporary Chinese traffic and the difficulties of street crossing.

17. Cave (2013) notes a similar lack of road rage in Mexico City.

18. Xinhua News reports the seizures of thousands of counterfeit license plates marked with official military vehicle designations (Xinhua News Agency 2009).

19. See Jain (2004) for a discussion of the ironies of automobility with regard to “bystanders.” See also Jain (2006).

20. Bruner (1997, 139) uses this expression to describe James Joyce’s style of “narrative invention;” I think it applies well here.

21. Like Lloyd Bentsen’s famous 1988 quip to Dan Quayle: “You are no Jack Kennedy.”.

22. For a period of time, one of China’s online English newspapers, The Global Times, kept track of high-end car crashes and the public response to them. When I last checked, this site was unavailable. See “High-end Car: an Increasingly Notorious Killer in China” (2012).

23. See Fan (2012); According to some reports, this crash and its cover-up might have figured in the jockeying for political power at China’s highest echelons (Ansfield 2012).

24. See Uretsky (2008) for a description of this kind of work.

25. Janine R. Wedel (2012) has provided an excellent review of the social science literature on corruption, which she argues, in recent years, has come to be dominated by an economic perspective. For a working bibliography on corruption see Michael Johnston’s web page: http://people.colgate.edu/mjohnston/personal.htm. It includes a list of public interest and other organizations that monitor corruption around the world, although, as Wedel (2012) points out, there are problems in how “corruption” is defined and measured. For a history of corruption as related to the Chinese Communist Party see Lü (2000); For a discussion of corruption and political legitimacy see Hsu (2001), and “corruption” in relation to building connections [关系] see Osburg (2013), Smart and Hsu (2007), and Uretsky (2008).

26. Thank you to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this as a course for future research.