Andrew Kipnis

Suzhi : A Keyword Approach

The word suzhi has become central to contemporary China governance and society. Reference to suzhi justifies social and political hierarchies of all sorts, with those of “high” suzhi being seen as deserving more income, power and status than those of “low” suzhi . This article examines the rise of the words popularity during the reform era, the ways in which its meaning has been transformed, and the relationships of the word to earlier discourses. It proceeds through three sections: a linguistic history, a genealogy of related discourses and an analysis of the contemporary sociopolitical context. The historical section focuses on the spread of the word across various political and social contexts during the reform era. It examines the ways in which the word operates semantically and the challenges to translation these semantic structures pose. The genealogical section explores the historical antecedents of the meanings of the word in earlier political and social discourses both in and out of China. Finally, the sociopolitical section examines the uses to which the word is put and asks what the rise of suzhi discourse tells us about contemporary Chinas governance, culture and society.

Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese Nation-Building

This essay examines the importance of Chinese nation-building in the contemporary era. Defining nation-building in terms of processes that help to bridge local differences especially but not only when also distinguishing China from the rest the world, I argue that a focus on globalization has masked the importance of Chinese nation-building to contemporary social change. I analyze three very different societal arenas in which national forms of commonality are being constructed: the consolidation of the education system, the expansion of the urban built environment, and the spread of the Chinese Internet. Though each arena illustrates a very different aspect of the nation-building process, they all result in an increased degree of commonality in lived experience and communicative practice across China.

Subjectification and education for quality in China

Education reform is perhaps the arena of discourse in which Foucauldian themes of subjectification are most explicit. Questions of what type of adult (citizen/subject) the education system should produce are directly articulated. From the point of view of social analysis, however, the actual production of subjectivities in schools remains a relatively opaque matter. Not only do many contradictory strands of political discourse exist side by side, but, even more importantly, the impact of these discourses on actual pedagogic practice is not direct. Moreover, it is doubtful that any pedagogic practice has the subjectifying effects that educators imagine. This paper examines educational rhetoric and practice in Chinas ‘education for quality’ (suzhi jiaoyu) reforms. It finds a contradictory mix of subjectifying rhetoric and practice in Chinas classrooms and suggests that discerning the types of subjects that are being produced in Chinas classrooms is far from an easy task.

Anthropology and the Theorisation of Citizenship

In this paper I argue for the importance of theorising citizenship as an independent axis of social inequality in the contemporary world. As a foil, I take two intertwined tendencies within anthropological writings on migration. First is the historical trend of anthropology as a discipline to theorise against the grain of the nation-state. Second is the tendency within anthropological studies of transnationalism and migration to theorise their subject in terms of Marxian understandings of class and exploitation or in terms of the intersecting dimensions of race, class and gender (but not citizenship). The result of these approaches is to elide the role of national boundaries and citizenship as significant theoretical objects in themselves. To build my approach, I contrast the production of migrant ‘illegality’ in three national contexts: the United States, China and Australia.

Within and against peasantness: backwardness and filiality in rural China

Economically the contradiction between town and country is an extremely antagonistic one both in capitalist society, where under the rule of the bourgeoisie the towns ruthlessly plunder the countryside, and in the Kuomingtang areas in China, where under the rule of foreign imperialism and the Chinese big compradore bourgeoisie the towns most rapaciously plunder the countryside. But in a socialist country and in our own revolutionary base areas, this antagonistic contraction has changed into one that is non-antagonistic; and when communist society is reached it will be abolished. [Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 1937:345]

Agency between humanism and posthumanism: Latour and his opponents

Two articles in the special section on knot-work in this journal (Hau 2014, volume 4, issue 3) take issue with the “posthumanism” of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). Arguing that Latour’s conception of agency undermines critical attitudes toward capitalism, they insist on an all-or-nothing, accept or reject attitude toward Latour’s work. In this article, I sketch an alternative vantage on questions of nonhuman agency and Latour’s oeuvre, which, though critical, is much less polemic. While proposing an intermediate stance for framing a theorization of agency, I conclude that it is not ANT’s theorization of agency that inhibits critical ethnographers of capitalism but rather habits in its application that derive, in part, from ANT’s insistence on painstaking ethnographic research.

Is Chinese education underfunded

Scholarship on education in China has correctly emphasized the massive inequalities in reform era educational funding. In describing these inequalities, however, scholars have made dubious claims about the supposedly low level of funding for education in China in relation to other countries. In this article, we examine the statistics on which this claim is based and detail the ways in which education is funded in China that do not get counted in the statistics. We conclude that though funding for education in China is unequal, the total level of such funding may not be low. Moreover, the official statistics are not a reliable guide to comparative discussions of educational funding.

Criminality and the Policing of Migrant Workers

Migrant workers (in this essay meaning rural people who enter Chinese cities to find work) are targeted by restrictive government policies. The number of rural people working and living outside their original communities has reached enormous proportions, and the surge of migrants into the cities has led to all sorts of complaints from the urban populace. The problems allegedly caused by migration can be grouped into two types: increased pressure on public services, especially on housing, transportation, and water and electricity supplies; and a perceived rise in criminality. During the 1980s and early 1990s concerns focused on the former, but since then the focus has shifted to the latter, and controlling migrants has been high on the policy agendas of city governments. This essay outlines several investigations that I helped to conduct into the regulation of migrants in urban areas. This research discovered that even though the problem of migrant criminality has received much attention, most of the previous appraisals of it have been blatantly biased. The most important shortcoming of the current regime of regulating migrants in the cities is an overemphasis on crime prevention and constricting migration and a lack of emphasis on providing services. As shall be seen, improper behaviour on the part of law enforcement personnel and unreasonable policy design often themselves become factors in causing migrant crime.

Modernity and the Chinese Moral Crisis

These two fine books, released within months of each other, use differing terms but resonating conceptual apparatuses to explore the “moral crisis” of contemporary China. For both authors, this crisis is a reality, and both of them offer prescriptions for its partial resolution. Both authors ground their perspectives in disciplines of the humanities—literary criticism for Haiyan Lee and philosophy for Jiwei Ci—and each takes what I would call a modernist perspective vis-a-vis China’s moral crisis. That is, they see the practices and dynamics of moral reasoning associated with traditional China as inadequate for a China that has modernized rapidly over the past 35 years. Moreover, each author sees the Maoist decades as having reinforced certain aspects of traditional moral reasoning and perceives the current regime’s reliance on remnants of Maoist/Leninist processes of governing as inimical to the development of healthier modes of moral reasoning. Their positing of an overlap between traditionalism and Maoism could be summed up by the title of Andrew G. Walder’s classic book, Communist Neo-Traditionalism. Finally, each author focuses on questions of selfhood and processes of developing the type of self that is able to reason morally.

Private Lessons and national Formations: National Heirarchy and the Individual Psyche in the Marketing of Chinese Educational Programs

In Zouping, the rapidly urbanizing, rural county where I have been conducting research for over two decades, there has recently been a rather sudden increase in the number of private educational businesses. Though a few services had been available since the late 1990s, the number of businesses mushroomed after 2008, when the Shandong provincial educational bureau banned mandatory weekend and after school study halls at junior middle and senior middle schools. These bans spurred on an industry that had been slowly expanding anyway, prompting many national chains to open branches in the rapidly growing county seat, many individuals to open their own tutoring businesses, and some medium-size companies to open branches in towns outside the county seat.