From resistance to collective action in a shanghai socialist "model community": From the Late 1940S to early 1970s

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2006, Pages

  Ho, Wing Chung ^a,b  

^a HONG KONG POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY   (Hong Kong)

^b School of Professional Education and Executive Development   (Hong Kong)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749264983     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0083     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. This essay draws on data gathered through eleven months of during 2000-2001, which were to explore how the residents of Cucumber Lane, Shanghai are making sense of and coping with the changes they have encountered in the past over half century.
2. Michael F. Brown, "On Resisting Resistance," American Anthropologist, 98:4 (1996), 729-735, esp. 729.
3. See also Robert Fletcher, "What are We Fighting For? Rethinking Resistance in a Pewenche Community in Chile." The Journal of Peasant Studies, 28:3 (2001, April), 37-66.
4. James C. Scott, "Introduction." In Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-east. Asia, edited by James C. Scott and Benjamin J. Tria Kerkvliet (London, 1986), 1.
5. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1987), 424.
6. Arturo Escobar, "Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movement," Critique of Anthropology, 12:4 (1992):395-432.
7. See also his "Culture, Economics, and Politics in Latin American Social Movements: Theory and Research," in The Malting of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategies, and Democracy, edited by Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, CO, 1992), 62-88;
8. and Orin Starn, "I Dreamed of Foxes and Hawks: Reflections on Peasants on Peasant Protext, New Social Movements, and the Rondas Campesinas of Northern Peru," in The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategies, and Democracy, edited by Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, CO, 1992), 89-111.
9. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, "Toward an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution," in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, edited by Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne), 142-171;
10. see also, Peter Vandergeest, "Constructing Thailand: Regulation, Everyday Resistance, and Citizenship," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35:1 (January, 1993), 133-158.
11. For instance, seeking to understand contemporary Third World social movements, Escobar has suggested that in engaging in collective action, people do not mimic dominant ideological models (e.g., the Marxist cannons), but "appropriate them and remodel them into their own distinctive system" (Escobar, "Culture, Practice and Politics," 413). He suggested that collective "identities are constructed through processes of articulation that start out of a submerged network of meanings, proceed through cultural innovation in the domain of everyday life, and may result in visible and sizable forms collective action for the control of historicity" (Ibid., 420).
12. To McAdam et al, it is the emergence of "contentious politics" that makes claims for collective social movements. Social movements are "contentious" in nature and oriented towards structural change in a political configuration with more democracy (McAdam et al, "Toward an Integrated Perspective").
13. See also Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, (eds.) The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategies, and Democracy (Boulder, CO, 1992);
14. and Sidney G. Tarrow, Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 1998).
15. My archival research showed that according to the Xinwen Evening News (Xinwen wanbo) the first batch of residents moved into the new flats on 15th July 1964.
16. Anonymous, Cucumber Lane (fangua nong), (Shanghai, Shanghai Municipal Zhabei District Tian Mu Xi Lu Street Office, 1997), 3.
17. An unpublished official document at the Zhabei District Archives.
18. Wing Chung Ho, "Negotiating Subalternity in a Former Socialist 'Model Community' in Shanghai: From 'Model Proletarians' to 'Society People,' The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 6:2 (2005), 159-180.
19. See Ann Anagnost, National Past-time: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. (Durham & London, 1997), 1-44;
20. Richard H.Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley, 1971), 195-199;
21. and Martin King Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley, 1974), 31.
22. Wing Chung Ho, "The (Un-)Making of the Shanghai Socialist 'Model Community': From the Monolithic to Heterogeneous Appropriation(s) of the Past," Journal of Asian and African Studies, 39:5(2004), 379-405.
23. Wakeman, "Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History," The Journal of Asian Studies, 36:2 (Feb. 1977), 201-237, esp. 225.
24. For example, Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley, 1984)
25. and Ku Hok-bun, Moral Politics in a South Chinese Village: Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Resistance (Lanham, 2003);
26. see also Liu Xin, In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-reform Rural China (Berkeley, 2000), 157-179.
27. Morality and Power, 3.
28. "Moral discourse" refers to a tangle of notions "handed down from the past. . . but were constantly woven by (inevitably self-interested) villagers to fit new situations in the present." (Morality and Power, Ibid., 8)
29. The two competing leaders, Longyang and Qingfa, held two moral visions that represent, respectively, the vision of "the village as a big family," and "the village as a federation of families linked together by the flavor of human feeling." (Morality and Power, Ibid., 99)
30. Morality and Power, Ibid., 54. Madsen concluded that "in such a particularistic configuration, the nature of one's moral obligations to another depended on the precise nature of one's relationship to the other," while Western morality held a "universal" orientation, meaning that "[o]ne's moral obligations toward another are defined by general norms equally applicable to all persons of a particular category." (Ibid., 54-57)
31. Ku, Moral Politics, 16.
32. Ku, Moral Politics, Ibid., xix.
33. Ku, Moral Politics, Ibid., 17.
34. Baker observed that the natural leaders of the traditional Chinese village were the men of that lineage most senior in generation and age. Huge D. R. Baker, Chinese Family and Kinship (New York, 1979), 49.
35. For example, Madsen, Morality and Power, 11-12;
36. and Ku, Moral Politics, 17 & 50fn23.
37. Craig Calhoun, "The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language," American Journal of Sociology, 88:5 (1983):886-914, esp. 895.
38. Lu Han Chao, "Creating Urban Outcasts: Shantytowns in Shanghai, 1920-1950," Journal of Urban History, 21:5 (July, 1995):563-597, esp. 575.
39. Yeh Wen-hsin, "Prologue: Shanghai Besieged, 1937-45." In Wartime Shanghai', edited by Yeh Wen-hsin (London and New York, 1998), 1-17.
40. Honig has specified that floods, droughts, or other natural disasters were the most important reasons why people were forced to leave Subei in the first half of the twentieth century. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (Stanford, CA, 1986), 67. For instance, the flood of 1931 forced nearly 80,000 Subei refugees to flock into Shanghai.
41. (Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980 [New Haven, 1992]), 41.
42. Lu, "Creating Urban Outcasts, 576. Statistical figures show that Zhabei was very popular area for migrants to reside in before 1949. In 1947, for instance, 97.19 percent of the population in Zhabei was non-native, while non-natives made up 83.96 percent of the general population of Shanghai. Among other districts, Zhabei held the highest proportion of non-natives in 1947.
43. Luo Su Wen and Song Jian You, Shanghai History (Shanghai tongshi), volume 9 (Shanghai, 1999), 306-307.
44. OSHG [Office of Shanghai History Gazette] (ed.) Zhabei District History Gazette (Zhabei qu zhi) (Shanghai, 1998), 1289-1290.
45. Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity, 20.
46. For instance, I was once told by an elderly informant from Yangzhou that she sometimes had difficulty communicating with some elderly residents from Jiangdu. This is the case in spite of the fact that both native places are in Subei, and Jiangdu is geographically close to and in the present shares the same local authority with Yangzhou. But, the two native-place-specific dialects might not be mutually comprehensible if one possessed too strong a "native-place accent" (xiangyin) in everyday conversation.
47. Honig, Sisters, 82.
48. When the Sino-Japanese war broke out in Shanghai in August 1937, Japanese troops controlled all parts of the metropolis except the International Settlement and the French Concession. The period between this date and December 1941, when the Japanese army invaded the International Settlement, was known as the "lone island" (gudao) period. During this period, apart from the military attacks in the Chinese-controlled areas, the concession zones had experienced an anomalous economic boom due to its relative safety and the influx of refugees (rich and poor), which augmented both market demand and labor supply. But as the Japanese captured the concession zones after December 1941, life became increasingly difficult. One can understand the gravity of the problem by examining the change of the living cost index (in brackets) from 1936 to 1945: Year 1936 (100); 1937 (119); 1938 (151); 1939(198); 1940(428); 1941 (827); 1942 (1,994); 1943 (7,226); 1944 (47,750); 1945 (6,058,103). See Federic F. Wakeman, "Urban Controls in Wartime Shanghai," in Wartime Shanghai, edited by Yeh Wen-hsin (London and New York, 1998), 133-156, esp. 134.
49. Ms. H told me, "When the Japanese bombed this place [the Zhabei District], my whole family moved to the 'south of Suzhou River' [binnan; literally, 'south of the creek']. We were still sleeping on the street. The weather was just freezing [in winter 1937] and my second son died of starvation and exposure ... In a word, it was just inhuman to live as a 'slave of a country that has perished!' [wangguonu!]"
50. The baojia system made the "chief of the bao" (baozhang) responsible for enforcing public order and for the payment of taxes by the community, roughly consisting a thousand households. In Cucumber Lane, the chief of the bao was called Tang Guoru, whose appointment began and ended with the period of Japanese occupation (1941-45).
51. A "tiger stove" was a place for selling hot water for drinking and bathing. Subei natives also treated "tiger stoves" as teahouses. See Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, CA, 1993), 24.
52. 1 dou = 10 liters.
53. OSHG, Zhabei, 1292.
54. In traditional Chinese culture, the God of Wealth (caishen) was believed to have the ability to bestow wealth on his devotees throughout the year if he was venerated in the Spring Festival (the beginning of the year). This belief caused people to dress up like the God of Wealth, or simply to give a note of good words to others in order to ask for money in return. Those who refused to give money would be considered disrespectful to the God of Wealth and could not have his blessing. This practice was a welcomed tradition for children who asked for the "red pocket" containing money, but in the case of Cucumber Lane, it became a way for hoodlums to extort money from the poor residents.
55. Perry, Shanghai on Strike;
56. Honig, Sisters;
57. and Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghaii (Berkeley, CA, 1997).
58. Based on his observations of a village in the lower Yangzi delta, Fei remarked that the network of personal relations that defined the sphere of one's closest loyalties was highly "elastic." Fei Xiao Tong, Chinese Village Close-up (Beijing, 1983), 211. Drawing from Fei's argument, Madsen suggested that such "elasticity" of personal relations could be highly related to one's living conditions. Madsen wrote, "A wealthy, powerful person may include in his family anyone who is related in any way. But with a reversal of fortune, one's family could shrink to a very small group."
59. Madsen, Morality and Power, 55.
60. "Household rice" was a quota system for distributing rice in Shanghai after the Japanese had completely taken over the city in 1941. The system formed part of the Japanese-backed Chinese puppet government's efforts to control the supply of rice in society. Pan Jun Xiang and Wang Yang Qing (eds), Shanghai History (Shanghai tongshi), volume 8 (Shanghai), 413-416.
61. It should be noted that the residents were familiar with the baojia system, which also operated in the rural areas, before they migrated to Shanghai. In the 1930s, baojia seemed to function mainly as a village military organization, or village-based police in - the rural areas, whereas the functions of civil welfare and administration in a village were still strongly linked with the local gentry. Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Second edition, enlarged (Berkeley, 1970), 404-431, 559;
62. and Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 (Stanford), 38.
63. The rural gentries constituted a privileged and politically powerful group, whose power over the peasants rested in land ownership. According to Fei's observations, the gentries - a minority who lived on rent collected from the peasants - lived in big houses in which a large number of kin co-resided. Fei, Chinese Village, 124-126.
64. Fei wrote, "The peasants, when pressed by rent or tax or other crises, have to sell their rice to the stores in town [owned by the rural gentry] at a low price. At the time when their reserves are eaten up, they come to the stores to buy at a high price. The rice stores are therefore similar in nature to the pawnshops." Fei, Chinese Village, Ibid., 135-136.
65. Ralph Thaxton, "The World Turned Downside Up: Three Orders of Meaning in the Peasants' Traditional Political World," Modern China, 3:3 (April, 1977):185-228, esp. 190.
66. Ralph Thaxton, "The World Turned Downside Up: Three Orders of Meaning in the Peasants' Traditional Political World," Modern China, Ibid., 198.
67. In his classic study The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yango Delta, 1350-1988, Huang attributed the communists' relatively unsuccessful experience of mobilizing peasants for long-term concerted action in the Yangtze delta to the "weak community organization but highly stable common-descent groupings" in the village organizations there (315). 1 deem that Huang's comment could also help to explain the low propensity of the residents of Cucumber Lane to engage in community-based collective actions, as most of them were from villages in the Yangtze delta.
68. All of these problems were directly or indirectly related to the aftermath of the civil war and to an economy destroyed by the abortive currency reform of August 1948. Richard Gaulton, "Political Mobilization in Shanghai: 1949-1951," in Shanghai: Revolution and Development in a Asian Metropolis, edited by Christopher Barry Howe (Cambridge, 1981), 38.
69. For instance, I was told that there was a rumor saying that when the CCP came, they would "make people share the properties of others and [also] make people share the wives of others" [gongchan gongqi]. It meant that two men would be matched with one woman. Another rumor held that young girls would be made to marry old men. One said that every "lane/alley" [lilong] would be surrounded by a wooden fence, and that people would not be allowed to either enter or leave. See Ho, "Negotiating Subalternity."
70. For a critical discussion of the painful trajectory that the CCP took in mass mobilization in rural areas from the Jiangxi period (1927-34) to the Yanan period (1935-45), see Schurmann, Ideology, 415-417. Schurmann concluded that only until the Yanan period could the communists penetrate deeply into the social fabric of the natural village rather than tearing up pre-existing social relationships and replacing them with a new organization imposed from outside. It then became a model strategy for mass mobilization in subsequent years. Ho, "Negotiating Subalternity. Ibid., 416.
71. In 1954, the Residents' Committee Organization Law was enacted to legalize and standardize neighborhood-based organizations in the form of Residents' Committees. - James R. Townsend, Political Participation in Communist China (Berkeley, 1967).
72. Ho, "Negotiating Subalternity."
73. See endnote 52.
74. Schurmann, Ideology, 416.
75. As memory fades with age, no residents seemed to clearly remember the details of the election, including the voting rates, the format of the election (e.g., I am not sure whether a resident only indicated his/her agreement or disagreement with a whole list of "resident representatives," just chose his/her favorite candidates from the list, or whether another method of election was used), or the criteria that determined who won the election (e.g., whether a "resident representative" won a seat by having a simple majority of the total votes cast, or by other criteria). However, I could ascertain at least three points. First, the election was an emotionally charged event in the community, as the elderly residents were pleased with the voting rights they possessed. Very often, they considered this as evidence of "having a new life in the political realm" (zai zhengzhi shang fanshen). Second, the oral histories solicited from my elderly informants indicated that the candidates had already been selected by the higher authorities, so that the residents could not appoint their own favorite residents as candidates. Third, the election was publicized among the populace through the press, as it was reported in an article entitled "A Cherished Moment in History," published in Wenhui Daily (Wenhubao) on 23rd August 1953.
76. No informant, including Ms. Q who had been elected the first Chief of the Residents' Committee, was able to tell with certainty the exact year when the first election of the Residents' Committee took place. Some informants said, "1954," some, "1955," and a couple said, "1956." Ms. Q told me without much uncertainty that, "It should be 1954."
77. The number of Residents' Committee members mentioned here was an estimate provided by the now 84-year-old Ms. Q, the first elected Chief of the Residents' Committee.
78. In fact, Schurmann has pinpointed that the initial unpopularity of the Residents' Committee in urban China as a whole under Mao's rule was probably due to the "strong female representation among the cadres of the resident committee." He suggested that such a make-up made the Residents' Committee "difficult to operate in a society in which to make equality of men and women had only recently been proclaimed." Schurmann, Ideology, 377.
79. Cf. Baker, Chinese Family, 49.
80. Madsen has pointed out that throughout rural China, the villagers customarily addressed each other as if they were kinfolk, even when the subjects were at best only very distantly related. Madsen, Morality and Power, 58.
81. Madsen, Morality and Power, Ibid.
82. See endnote 58.
83. The activities listed are not meant to be exhaustive. Indeed, the figures concerning the number of participants involved in different campaigns may vary greatly from informant to informant, according to his/her own memory and sources of information. These informants may themselves have been either participants, or witnesses, or had merely received their information from others who had been direct participants or witnesses. Incomplete and inaccurate as the information might be, it serves to indicate the variety of purposes involved in each mass campaign, the scale of the campaigns, and the frequency with which they were launched across the period concerned.
84. During the course of my fieldwork, the Institute of Sociology of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences was undertaking a study concerning the historical development of the Residents' Committee in Cucumber Lane. Mr. V, being a retired secondary school teacher and a friend of Ms. Q, was asked by the Institute to conduct interviews with Ms. Q on their behalf concerning the work of Residents' Committee during the Maoist period. Since I could not conduct long chats with Ms. Q due to her poor health, my interviews with Mr. V, one of my key elderly informants, supplemented my understanding of Ms. Q's work during the period when she was the Chief of Residents' Committee and Party branch secretary.
85. Regarding the prevalence of this view, Ms. H told me a story of a former active "old mother" called Ms. Feng Meiying who passed away years ago. Ms. Fang's mother-in-law had once expressed strong discontent with Ms. Fang's active involvement in community activities. As Ms. H recalled, the mother-in-law once put it cogently to her neighbors, "How awkward it looks to see a woman running here and there outside whole day long! ? [yige nüren zhengtian zai waibian daochu pao xiang shenma?!]"
86. Wang Gung Wu, "Power, Rights and Duties in Chinese History," The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 3 (Jan, 1980), 1-26, esp. 7.
87. Cf. Ku, Moral Politics.
88. The oral evidence shows that many residents visited the "old mothers" regularly in groups to ask them to arrange jobs for them. Apart from their collective spirit engendered by their past experiences, I also identify two additional reasons from the oral histories that augmented the collective momentum. First, the setting up of mess halls in the community in 1958 effectively freed many women from the substantial burden of doing domestic chores. Under this situation, participating in collective activities became a fruitful pastime for them. Second, unlike the Steel-making Campaign, most jobs arranged in the name of the "Release of Women Labor Force Campaign" offered monetary rewards to the participants, although the amount of reward was meager. For instance, one day's work in the "paper box making factory" (See Table 1) earned a person one to two cents, which amounted to two to four yuan per month; while working in the state-owned factories earned a person about thirty to forty yuan per month (comprehensive benefits not included).
89. Apart from Ms. Q, I also find from the same album the photo of another "old mother," the deceased Ms. Feng Mei-ying, who held the hoe and dug the ground in similar manner.
90. Today, at the age of eighty-four, she is about five feet eight inches in height. Back in the 1950s, still in her thirties, Ms. Q was a very tall and strong woman by the standards of eastern China.
91. Since 1954, Cucumber Lane was frequently awarded the Sanitary Advanced Unit at the both district and municipal levels. OSHG, Zhabei, 1292.
92. According to Luo and Song, within a week after its commencement, the Big Arrest had detained 8,359 alleged counterrevolutionaries; and in the following week, the number of political criminals that had been caught reached 9,010. (Shanghai History 9, 46)
93. Shanghai History, Ibid., 4.
94. Ho, "Negotiating Subalternity."
95. For instance, the oral histories indicate that residents who did not know each other would chat as if they had been acquainted for a long time, simply by exchanging with each other basic information about which flat (with block number and floor level) one was living in.
96. Madsen, Morality and Power, 62-63.
97. Cf. Madsen, Morality and Power, ibid., 58.
98. Such leadership style - being popular but stem, like an authoritarian patriarch was in many ways similar to a dominant style of charismatic leadership in the traditional Chinese community. For example, see the village leader, Longyang, in Madsen, Morality and Power, esp. 63, and the community leader of a lineage village in Fujian province, Dunglin, as portrayed in
99. Lin Yueh Hwa, Golden Wing (London, 1998, original 1948), esp. 51.
100. Ho, "The (Un-)Making."
101. On this problematic, Elizabeth Perry pursued in another direction by arguing the critical role of emotional engagement played in fueling political campaigns in communist China. See her "Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Revolution," Mobilization: An International Journal, 7:2(2002), 111-128.
102. Asef Bayat, "Un-civil Society: The Politics of the 'Informal People," Third World Quarterly, 18:1 (1997), 53-72, esp. 57.
103. Scott, Weapons, 348.
104. See Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York, 1961);
105. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, translated by Ian Cunnison (New York, 1967);
106. and Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York, 1972). For the anthropological discussion of Chinese reciprocity
107. see Yang Mayfair Mei Hui, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, N. Y., 1994);
108. and Yan Yunxiang, The Flow of Gift: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford, CA, 1996).
109. Calhoun, "The Radicalism," 890.
110. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (New York, 1968)