Michael Dutton

Policing Chinese Politics: A History

Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. “Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution,” wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of revolutionary China, he argues, is largely framed by the attempts of Mao and the Party to harness these passions. The economic reform period that followed Mao Zedong’s rule contained a hint as to how the magic spell of political faith and commitment could be broken, but the cost of such disenchantment was considerable. This detailed, empirical tale of Chinese socialist policing is, therefore, more than simply a police story. It is a parable that offers a cogent analysis of Chinese politics generally while radically redrafting our understanding of what politics is all about. Breaking away from the traditional elite modes of political analysis that focus on personalities, factions, and betrayals, and from “rational” accounts of politics and government, Dutton provides a highly original understanding of the far-reaching consequences of acts of faith and commitment in the realm of politics.

The Basic Character of Crime in Contemporary China

The basic character of crime in contemporary China by the Ministry of Public Security Research Unit Number Five1 offers what must be the most comprehensive picture to date of crime in contemporary China. Written by the unit in charge of criminal investigation this authoritative article offers figures and analysis rarely seen outside the Ministry. Almost by definition it was never meant for open publication. It was designed for Chinese specialists within the Ministry to help them come to terms with, and to gain some understanding of, the nature of crime in the China of economic reform. The overall volume from which this article comes was one of three internally published by the Ministry between 1989 and 1993. The first two volumes are collections of articles from throughout the country, and the final volume (published in 1993) was a summary of major criminal trends and an update on the situation. The decision to publish these books followed a specialist conference convened by the Ministry in 1989 and held in Hebei for specialists in the area. The significance of the series is testified by the fact that the then Deputy Minister of Public Security, Yu Lie, was made editor-in-chief of the whole series.

Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred

On 15 March 1666, Louis XIV conducted his first military review. Several years later, a medal was struck depicting the scene (Foucault 1979a: 188). In the spatial layout of this medallion, which showed lines of disciplined soldiers sharing equal space with their sovereign (see fig. 1, above), Michel Foucault would find the first and quite tentative sign of a subtle but utterly crucial shift in the way power was depicted and deployed. The arrangement of the troops; their placement in relation to their king; their movement and how it was ordered, planned, and disciplined by a series of intersecting lines at their feet—all these small, almost indiscernible signs were to cast a shadow over what appears to be a straightforward, ostentatious display of Louis XIV’s famous motto, l’etat c’est moi.1

New Asian Marxisms

Contributors. Tani Barlow, Michael Dutton, D. R. Howland, Dai Jinhua, Marshall Johnson, Liu Kang, Sugiyama Mitsunobu, You-me Park, William Pietz, Claudia Pozzana, Alessandro Russo, Sanjay Seth, Gi-Wook Shin, Jing Wang

The paradoxical after-life of colonial governmentality

Employing the emergency number 911 as a device to open onto two continents of governance – one ‘hot’ the other ‘cold’, one binary, the other the disaggregation of the binary – this paper shows that colonial governmentality is marked by a paradoxical combination of the two. Moreover, it argues that colonial governmentality is the progenitor of this form of governance which today, more than ever, stalks the landscape of liberal democracy and characterises its predominate political form.

911: The after-life of colonial governmentality1

In dialling 911, the US emergency number, the paper connects the terrorism of New York to the backstreet infections of Mong Kok, Hong Kong. New York and Hong Kong lead back to the binary political forms of Carl Schmitt and also the complications added by Michel Foucaults notion of governmentality. In a highly condensed argument, Dutton outlines the contours of power that govern this two-sided contemporary Western notion of the political. He argues that it is characterised less by a shift, in the language of Foucault, from sovereign to disciplinary power than to a wedding of the two and it is on a bed of colonial governmentality that this was consummated. Here is a form of government and power that combines notions of ‘betterment’ (registered through concerns about the health, wealth and education of the ‘native’ population) with brute force. It is a sign of the rifle lying hidden by the side of the ‘force of the better argument’ and herein lies the political form that the number 911 reveals.

The gift of the political

ABSTRACT What produces the ability within us to face the possibility of dying for a cause to which we adhere? Such political commitment backs onto the issue of sacrifice, which, in turn, inhabits the world of a gift economy. The gift of the political opens onto a series of questions tied to different traditions of the sacred and of the clan. From biblical parables through to Confucian rites, the paper traces the various pathways enabling the emergence of the gift of the political.

Spaces of the political

ABSTRACT In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss’ Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century’s Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways ‘modernity’ has encountered and dealt with the telluric.

Cultural Revolution as Method

This paper treats the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means by which to open on to a more affective approach to the question of the political. It examines one piece of art-technology of that period and shows the way it intuitively worked within the fluidity of power to produce political intensity. This one technology is a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution notion of the political that was built around an attempt to channel and harness affective power towards revolutionary ends. Both because it attempts to direct the political through the affective dimension and because its methods of doing so resembled contemporary art practices, this paper opens on to the possibilities of a method based on an art rather than a science of the political.

Das Regiment der Gewalt: Polizieren des Politischen in der Volksrepublik China

In den spaten 1980er und fruhen 1990er Jahren begann die Forschungsabteilung des Ministeriums fur offentliche Sicherheit in China mit einem umfangreichen historisch-ethnographischen Forschungsprogramm. Die Provinzbehorden sollten die Archive durchforsten und historisches Material zu Fragen der offentlichen Sicherheit zusammenstellen. Polizeiverordnungen und andere Anordnungen, aber auch Parteiberichte wurden gesammelt, hinzu kamen Reden und Auserungen der lokalen Partei- und Polizeigewaltigen. Auserdem kontaktierte man ehemalige Mitglieder der Behorden und Parteistellen und ermunterte sie, ihre Erinnerungen aufzuschreiben oder zu erzahlen. Solche Erinnerungstexte wurden vorliegenden Biographien angefugt – das unsystematische Tagebuch, das daraus entstand, war der Grundstock fur das umfassende Archiv der Polizei und des polizeilichen Handelns im revolutionaren China.