Cultivating citizens: Suzhi (Quality) discourse in the PRC

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Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 523-535

  Jacka, Tamara ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 75949105536     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-2009-013     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. The constitution of the All China Women's Federation stipulates that its first two responsibilities are (1) "To unite and mobilize women to throw themselves into reform and the construction of socialist modernization, and further economic development and social progress" and (2) "To educate and lead women to foster a spirit of self-respect, self-confidence, self-reliance and self-strength, raise their overall suzhi and further overall development." See www.women.org.cn/zhuanti/9da/dhwj/ zhangchengzongze.htm
2. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 103-5
3. Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk,NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006)
4. Rachel Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: 'Population Quality' Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education," China Quarterly 177 (2004): 2
5. Gary Sigley, "Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning in Contemporary China," this volume
6. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
7. Andrew Kipnis, "Suzhi: A Keyword Approach," China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295-313
8. One indication of the importance of suzhi in contemporary China is the dramatic increase in the term's usage in the media. In the People's Daily, for example, the number of times suzhi was mentioned jumped from 7 in 1970 to 102 in 1980, 1,066 in 1990, and 2,486 in 2000 (Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China, 288). A search conducted in the China Academic Journals Electronic Database (Zhongguo Qikan Quanwen Juku, www.cnki.net) found that the number of journal articles that include the word suzhi in their title increased from only 14 for the entire period before 1980 to a total of 2,589 for the 1980s. The 1990s saw a massive increase, to just under 31,000. For the period 2000-2007, the database lists 64,000 articles with suzhi in the title
9. Williams, Keywords, 11-26
10. See, for example, Dan Peiyong, Guomin suzhi lun (The Theory of Citizen Quality) (Zheng-zhou: Henan yike daxue chubanshe, 1997)
11. 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 chubanshe, 1996)
12. Sha Lianxiang, Zhongguoren suzhi yanjiu (Chinese Quality Research) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2001)
13. There are exceptions, however. For example, Gao Xiaoxian is highly critical of the emphasis on raising suzhi in the discourse of the All China Women's Federation. See Gao Xiaoxian, "Shehui xingbie fenxi" ("Gender Analysis"), in Shehuixingbie fenxi: Pinkun yu nongcun fazhan (Gender Analysis: Poverty and Rural Development), ed. Xu Wu, Xu Ping, Bao Xiaolan, and Gao Xiaoxian (Chengdu: Sichuan Renmin Chubanshe, 2000), 398-99
14. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 75-97, 117-37
15. Ann Anagnost, "Children and National Transcendence in China," in Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics, ed. Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen -fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 195-222
16. Ann Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," Public Culture 16 (2004): 189-208
17. Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),' 190
18. Yan Hairong, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow Through Labor Recruitment Networks," Cultural Anthropology 18 (2003): 493-523
19. Yan Hairong, "Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China," American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 1-19. For other studies highlighting the importance of suzhi in discourses relating to rural migrants, see Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China, and Wanning, "Suzhi on the Move," this volume
20. Yan, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism"; Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)."
21. Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," 195
22. Andrew Kipnis, "Dissecting Homo Neoliberalis: Suzhi Discourse and (Non-)Neoliberalism in the PRC" (n.d.)
23. The greatest degree of inequality in China is between rural and urban citizens. Far from being ameliorated by market growth or improvements in the suzhi of peasants and migrant workers, this inequality has increased markedly over the last several years. Today, the ratio of urban to rural incomes in China is about 3 to 1 - much higher than before market-oriented reforms began in 1978 and higher than the rural/urban inequality in almost any other country in the world (Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China, 42). See also Azizur Khan and Carl Riskin, "China's Household Income and Its Distribution, 1995 and 2002," China Quarterly 182 (2005): 221-53
24. Yan, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism," 493; Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," I93-94
25. Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing Chinas Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). For critiques of the way in which neoliberalism is discussed in the work of Anagnost, Yan, and Greenhalgh and Winckler, see Andrew Kipnis, "Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People's Republic of China," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007), 383-400
26. Tamara Jacka, "Population Governance in the PRC: Political, Historical, and Anthropological Perspectives," China Journal 58 (2007): 111-26
27. Of the approximately 64,000 articles with suzhi in their title listed in the China Academic Journals Electronic Database for the period 2000-2007, 48 percent discussed suzhi jiaoyu
28. Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens"
29. Andrew Kipnis, "The Disturbing Educational Discipline of 'Peasants,' " China Journal 46 (2001): 1-24
30. Terry Woronov, "Transforming the Future: 'Quality' Children and the Chinese Nation" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003); Kipnis, "Suzhi"
31. Ellen Judd, The Chinese Women's Movement: Between State and Market (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)
32. Tamara Jacka, "Approaches to Women and Development in Rural China," Journal of Contemporary China 15, no. 49 (2006): 585-602
33. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 237-47
34. Maris Boyd Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
35. BOørge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51-75
36. Kipnis, "Suzhi." See also Anagnost, National Past-Times, 75-97, II7-37
37. Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China, 3I-58; Sigley, this volume
38. Judd, The Chinese Women's Movement, 19-32; Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens," 2; Kipnis, "Suzhi, " 307
39. Kipnis, "Suzhi," 307
40. Sara L. Friedman, "Civilizing the Masses: The Productive Power of Cultural Reform Efforts in Late Republican-Era Fujian," in Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920-1970, ed. Terry Bodenhorn (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), 152
41. Cf. Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 243-86
42. Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Ong theorizes neoliberalism in terms of "zoning technologies" and "graduated citizenship." See Tomba, this volume, for a brief, critical dis cussion of the relevance of Ong's theorization for an understanding of the multiple govern- mentalities shaped by suzhi in contemporary China