Suzhi, the body, and the fortunes of technoscientific reasoning in contemporary China

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Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 537-566

  Sigley, Gary ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 75849146757     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-2009-014     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
2. While there is an emerging body of work exploring the various relations between race, citizen, and modernity in early modern China there is nothing specifically devoted to the study of "quality" in the sense that it is examined here. Nonetheless, two books that serve as good points of departure are Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1992), and John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). B0rge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) provides a detailed introduction to notions of "quality" and "technocratism" in the People's Republic prior to the development of the socialist market economy. A more recent overview can be found in Andrew Kipnis, "Suzhi: A Keyword Approach," China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295-313
3. Lydia He Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity - China, 1900-1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995)
4. One of the classic texts in this regard is Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (London: Eyre Mathuen, 1973). For a more recent overview of China's demographic transition over the last three hundred years
5. see James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
6. As Ruth Rogaski reveals in Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty- Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), during the first half of the twentieth century, the term weisheng (variously translated as "hygeine," "sanitation," etc.) appears to cover many of the areas of concern now found within the purview of suzhi
7. Xia Xiaohong, ed., Liang Qichao Wenxuan: Shang (Selected Works of Liang Qichao), vol. 1(1902; reprint, Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1992), 151
8. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), i39
9. Stuart R. Shram, ed., The Political Thought of Mao Tse- tung (1917; reprint, New York: Prae- ger, 1963), 152-54
10. Indeed in this text, Mao Zedong outlines what would later become in the People's Republic, especially during the reform period, the link between "morality, knowledge, and the body" captured in the Chinese phrase de zhi ti
11. Jiang Xiangqing, Renti celiangxue (The Study of Bodily Measurement) (Shanghai: Qinfen shuju, i935), i. For more on physical education during this period see Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For a discussion of the gender dimensions of the body in the Chinese context, especially with regard to physical culture and masculinity, see Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
12. Rachel Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: 'Population Quality' Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education," China Quarterly 177 (March 2004): i4, reports that a school textbook used in Jiangxi Province in the i990s provided average heights for rural and urban children and instructed pupils to compare their height to the average
13. Most readers will be familiar with the historical significance for the Chinese nation-state of the years i949 and 1979. The year 1992, while not as obviously momentous, is just as important in terms of the ideological transformation that it witnessed. In the spring of 1992 Deng Xiaoping made a widely publicized "southern tour" (nanxun) of China's "special economic zones" and Shanghai, thus putting to an end the vacillation and uncertainty over further "reform and openness" since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. In the same year, at the Fourteenth Party Congress, the Party Secretary-General Jiang Zemin affirmed Deng's vision by declaring that the goal of the Party was to create a "socialist market economy." The market was now raised to the unprecedented position of "goal" within Party ideology. It was from this point forward that the Party-state's efforts to open the Chinese economy and "get on track with the world" gathered pace
14. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (1978; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104
15. See Gary Sigley, "Chinese Governmentalities: Government, Governance and the Socialist Market Economy," Economy and Society 35 (2006): 499-501
16. A political rationality is a form of government rationality (governmentality) insofar as it is concerned with shaping and influencing human conduct, but it is also distinct insofar as it intersects with a desire to shape political activity and the broader concerns of more conventional forms of political reasoning
17. In John Gray and G. W. Smith, eds., J. S. Mill on Liberty in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991), 128. Emphasis in original
18. A great deal has been written on the discourse of developmentalism. The vast bulk of this work, however, only considers developmentalism as a product of the conditions of postwar Europe and the Marshall Plan (which produced, inter alia, "modernization theory"). In this scheme of things, "developmentalism" is a Cold War program developed by the so-called Free World. It was also something imposed on or gained by the "Third World" through decolonization, and a bit later, seen as a means of ensuring the "security" of developing societies and keeping the forces of communism at bay. For an overview see Wendy Larner and William Walters, "The Political Rationality of 'New Regionalism': Toward a Genealogy of the Region," Theory and Society 31 (2002): 391-432. By contrast, not much attention has been given to "Soviet"-inspired " developmentalism" of the kind found in socialist nation-states such as the People's Republic of China
19. Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 61. In this book, Barlow discussed the conflation of "production" and "reproduction" in pre-1949 Chinese "scientific socialism." Barlow reminds us that it was through so-called "scientific physiology" that gender difference was rendered material (and therefore "natural" and indisputable): "People are in literal fact material because their organic reproductive capacity makes them like animals."
20. Ma Yinchu, Xin renkou lun (A New Population Theory) (1957; reprint, Changchun: Jilin ren- minchubanshe, I997). The title is a clear reference to Thomas Malthus's controversial text An Essay on the Principle of Population, which in Chinese is generally rendered as Renkou lun
21. The subtleties captured in the Chinese terms need some explanation. Renkou literally translates as "person mouth." "Mouth" is a typical way to measure individuals (as is the use of " head" in English) but in this context it also carries the connotation of a consumer. By contrast, renshou literally translates as "person hand." The connotation here is that the person is primarily a producer rather than a consumer
22. Mao Tsetung, "Bankruptcy of Idealist Conception of History," in Selected Works of Mao Tse- tung, vol. 4 (1949; reprint, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, i96i), 454
23. Another way of approaching this is through an analysis of the "slave/master" discourse. This was also prominent in early modern Chinese discussions on citizenship. Liang Qichao and others also made frequent references to the "slave-like" status of both the Chinese people and nation. See Sung-chiao Shen, "Discourse on Guomin ("the Citizen") in Late Qing China, 1895-1911," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7 (2006): 6-8
24. The only text of any significance from this period is Ma Yinchu's (1959) essay on "Why it is necessary to raise the quality [zhiliang] of the population," but this text, although it foreshadows many of the arguments that emerge in the late i970s, is primarily engaged in a polemical debate with the aforementioned theory of renshou lun. Ma Yinchu argues that a large population is not necessarily a good thing and examines the relationship between the amount of resources and the population (capital accumulation), and the level of labor productivity (the ratio between the size of the population and the overall level of output). See Ma Yinchu, Xin renkou lun
25. Physical education was an important feature in this drive to create healthy bodies and a healthy nation. For more on the development of physical education and sport in the People's Republic see Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
26. Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Dührings Revolution in Science (1894; reprint, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 324-25
27. Elsewhere Engels refers to "the government of persons."
28. Engels, Anti-Duhring, 295. Emphasis added
29. Cited in Ronald L. Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb: Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engels Dealing with the Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1971), 120
30. Cited in Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, i989), i59. To assume that this process of "dehumanization" and "objectification" only applies to socialist political rationalities would be seriously misguided. Larner and Walters ("The Political Rationality," 405), writing on the emergence of the discourse of developmentalism and the formation of the post-i945 nation-state, argue that international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund "were explicit about the need to move away from the " 'politi- cization' " of territorial imperatives, with an emphasis on social, economic, and technical processes." In so doing, they cite a statement from Peter B. Harris on the decline of the political authority of the British Empire, which is eerily reminiscent of Engels's visions of a future socialism: "The Commonwealth [as the process of decolonization continues] will move from the 'politics' of man to the administration of 'things.' " See Peter B. Harris, The Commonwealth (London: Longman, 1975), 129. That is, the political elites will now monopolize "politics" (the day-to-day contestation over political rule), while the vestiges of Commonwealth authority will be reduced to mundane and technical forms of cooperation in trade and development between sovereign nation-states. By describing this as indicative of a move away from "politicization" and "politics," Larner and Walters, and to a lesser extent Harris, are drawing our attention to the technoscientific dimensions of the nation- state, its institutions, experts, and bureaucracy. Those who govern (in the technical sense), whether they belong to a state agency, international institution, or nongovernment organization, understand "themselves as above or outside the fray of state-to-state politics." See Larner and Walters, "The Political Rationality," 405
31. For instance, see Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar, "Dynamic Economy, Declining Party-State," in The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms, ed. Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
32. David Sham- baugh, "The Chinese State in the Post-Mao Era," in The Modern Chinese State, ed. David Shambaugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
33. I have argued this point elsewhere. See "From 'Jihua' to 'Guihua': A Preliminary Critique of Approaches to Understanding 'Governance' in the Chinese Context" (paper delivered to the 16th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Wollongong, Australia, June 26-29, 2006 (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/ 2006/Sigley-Gary-ASAA2006.pdf)
34. Qian Xuesen and Wu Jiapei, "Zuzhi guanli shehuizhuyi jianshe de jishu: Shehui gongcheng" ("The technique of organizational management in socialist construction: Social engineering"), Jingji Guanli (Economic Management) i (1979): 6
35. The Chinese translation reads: "Shehui shengchan neibu de wuzhengfu zhuangtai jiang wei you jihua de zijue de zuzhi suo daiti." Jihua ("to plan") is "systematic" in the English translation
36. For instance, in an otherwise important piece of work, Yan Hairong ("Neoliberal Gov- ernmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value through Labor Recruitment Networks," Cultural Anthropology i8, no. 4 [2003]: 493-523), in my opinion, highlights the obvious connections between the emergence of suzhi in post-1978 China and the unfolding "neoliberal restructuring" of the economy and society. However, as I have been at pains to point out here, the tendencies toward technoscientific reasoning and objectification have important, and perhaps foundational, origins in the rationalities associated with the socialist plan of the Maoist period. There is a growing critical literature on the rise of neoliberal- ism. As would be expected of such a contentious area of thought and reflection, there are a wide variety of positions on what constitutes neoliberalism. For the purposes of this essay I have found the recent work of Aihwa Ong particularly refreshing: see "Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32 no. 1 (2007), 3-8, and Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)
37. Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), n. 14, 288. It is worthwhile noting that in the aforementioned text, Ma Yinchu argues for the need to "increase the quality" of the population and labor productivity with reference to the future of war. War of the future, Ma states, will be significantly high-tech and depend on highly trained personnel. This suggests a closer conceptual link to the notion of "people as the most precious" and that of "people's war." In both cases it was to be a large number of ideologically driven bodies that would achieve victory on the fronts of production and warfare. It does not take much imagination to see how suzhi, once it emerges as part of the critique in military writing of Maoist "people's war," makes its way into the rekindled debates about the size of the population and national development
38. Ann Anagnost supposes that the emerging discourse of suzhi during the reform period "represents a shift in state policy focus from regulating births to raising the quality of the population as a whole; in other words, a shift from quantity to quality" ("The Corporeal Politics of Quality [Suzhi]," Public Culture 16 [2004]: 190). On the contrary, both "quantity" and "quality" are key tasks of the population policy
39. Improving the suzhi of the population is divided among a number of government agencies, notably the separate Ministries of Culture, Education, and Health. By contrast, controlling the quantity of the population is the sole province of the State Family Planning Commission (SFPC), established by the State Council in I98I. The duties and responsibilities of the SFPC, announced by the Office of the State Council in March 1983, all relate specifically to the field of population planning. See Peng Peiyun, ed., Zhongguo jihua shengyu quanshu (The China Birth Planning Compendium) (Beijing: Zhongguo renkou chubanshe, 1997), 70
40. Susan Greenhalgh, "Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: 'Population' in the Making of Chinese Modernity," American Ethnologist 30 (2003): 202
41. On the various manifestations of resistance to state-sponsored birth control see Tyrene White, "Domination, Resistance and Accommodation in China's One-Child Campaign," in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2000), 183-203
42. It is also worth noting that some aspects of the socialist plan find new life as 'key performance indicators' within the system of cadre management and responsibility contracts
43. See Maria Edin, "Remaking the Communist Party-state: The Cadre Responsibility System at Local Level in China," China: An International Journal I (2003): 1-15
44. Liang Jimin, ed., Jihua shengyu cidian (Birth Planning Dictionary) (Beijing: Zhongguo kexue jishu chubanshe, I99I), 7
45. On the emergence of globalization within Chinese official and scholarly writing and debates see Nick Knight, "Reflecting on the Paradox of Globalization: China's Search for Cultural Identity and Coherence," China: An International Journal 4 (2006): I-3I
46. Zeng Xiangxin cited in Dan Peiyong, Guomin Suzhi Lun (The Theory of Citizen Quality) (Zhengzhou: Henan yike daxue chubanshe, I997), 6
47. Which are also captured in Chinese discourse as the development of the "moral, intellectual, and physical" (de zhi ti) capacities of individuals
48. Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),' I90
49. Yan, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism," 494
50. Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," I93
51. In justifying this bold move to present a new theory and field of study Gao Cheng also defers to none other than Frederick Engels
52. Gao Cheng, Renpin zhiliangxue: Ren de zhiliang lilun yu diaokong fangfa (Human Quality Studies: The Theory of Human Quality and Control Methods) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chu- banshe, I996), I
53. Yan Qin, "Nachu chedi de weiwuzhuyi yongqi lai, chongchu 'renkou weiji de luoxuan" (Bring Forth the Courage of Materialism: Break Out of the "Population Crisis"), in Zhong- guo Gaige Jianyi Da Jiangsai Jicui (The Best Essays of the China Reform Suggestion Competition), ed. Zhongguo Gaige Jianyi Da Jiangsai Zuweihui (China Reform Suggestion Competition Committee) (Beijing: Gaige chubanshe, I994), 363
54. Zhu Quantao and Wang Xinwang, "Do We Still Need Birth Planning? Managing China's Birth Control in the Process of Market Reforms," China Week, www.china-week.com (accessed August 2006)
55. Susan Greenhalgh, "Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China's One-Child Policy," China Quarterly (2005): 253-76
56. Aurelio Peccei, The Human Quality (Oxford: Pergamon Press, I977)
57. And it is that objective which overrides all else. Indeed, Peccei sees the nation-state as an obstacle and calls for the "disovereignization of the national state" (164)
58. Interestingly, Peccei has little to say about the role of democracy and political participation in this process. Within his writing there is a definite trace of "Western spiritual decline" - of a need for spiritual rejuvenation - and a sense of dissatisfaction with the notions of "progress" and "development."