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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Institute Inc.
One afternoon in June, 1997, Sheng Lanying and I walked together down Big Leatheryard Street in the city of Xi'an's old Muslim district (Huiminfang). I had gone to visit Sheng at her father's house, where she, with her younger sister, mother, and (less dependably) two sisters-in-law, ran the Sheng family's noodle business (Sheng Jia Liang Pi). Sheng started work between six and seven in the morning and usually finished selling the day's noodles by five in the afternoon. After she and I became friends, I regularly dropped by the home-cumstorefront near closing time, and Sheng allowed me to help to clean up a little. That particular day Sheng and her husband and two sons were expecting me for dinner, so she and I walked together down Big Leatheryard Street to her (marital) home.: As we traversed that familiar route, it occurred to me to ask Sheng about a wall we were passing on the right side of the road. The wall was large, about twelve feet tall, and made of gray stone, with a decorative molding. It looked old and important to me, as if it were in front of some special place. The wall was near the Big Leatheryard Street Mosque but was not part of the mosque complex. Gesturing in the wall's direction, I asked Sheng, "What is that (ha shi shemne)?'"
"That's a portrait of Mao Zedong," Sheng replied. "There's a huge one across from our house (the Sheng home) too, covering the entire wall. The people with bad class labels, the cow ghosts and snake spirits (niugui sheshen), used to gather there every morning to receive their instructions for the day's activities (zao qingshi), and they returned to report every evening (wan huibao). Other people came to put fresh flowers in front of Mao's portrait, as a way of expressing their feelings for him."
I was taken aback. "That wasn't what I meant," I said. "I didn't know there was a portrait of Mao there." "Oh," she replied, "I thought you were looking at the traces of red paint still on the wall." I didn't see any red paint, but said nothing as she continued. "The government puts those there," she said, "and the big dumpster in front of our house (the Sheng home) too." I realized that she was talking about the nine or ten trash cans lining the front of the wall. "Both of those buildings are state-owned (gongfang). Otherwise they (the government) would never be able to put the trash containers there. Nobody wants to have the garbage near their home, it is so dirty and smelly. The big bin in front of our house, the government moves it each week: one week it's across from our door, and the next it's across from the neighbor's. They (the government) do that because it's so dirty, nobody wants to look at it. No one would ever let them (the government) put it in front of their private home."
Nodding, I explained that I had been asking about the decorated wall, and wondered if something special were behind it. Sheng replied that "in the old society" (a state-sponsored shorthand for China before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949), the walls had belonged to officials. They were zhaobi, deflecting walls that blocked the entrances to housing complexes. Zhaobi shielded the house's inhabitants from evil spirits and the gazes of casual passers-by." (2) Now there is nothing special behind them," Sheng said. "The one by our (the Sheng) home is in front of a work unit which belongs to a bank, but no one lives there anymore, there are only a few offices. (3) State-owned housing is behind this one. The wall blocks the people living there from the trash." With this remark we arrived at Sheng's (marital) home and the conversation ended. Later that evening Sheng reminisced for a long time about her girlhood experiences during the collective era and Cultural Revolution, catalyzed by the afternoon's conversation and fueled by my interest.
When I recorded this brief interaction between Sheng and me that night, I was struck by the irony of her remarks. As she described it, a site where citizens working to build socialism had once gathered to report to and express their feelings for the Great Helmsman in his iconic presence was now an ugly, smelly garbage dump. As I thought about Sheng's words, I felt that her comments captured some important differences between socialism and capitalism, and were a metaphor for China's history during her lifetime. "The passing of an era," I wrote in my notes. "Great opener for a story." Later, I was intrigued by the gap between what I had seen and what Sheng saw. I was an American anthropologist returning to her field site for the second time since long-term immersion. Despite my research experience and professional training, I had (still) fallen for the allure of what Malinowski (1965: 462) called "the dramatic, exceptional and sensational," in this case, an old, decorated wall. My attention was directed by my attraction to "traditional culture" and a non-western past that made the wall noticeable to me. The garbage bins were obvious, but I had not seen them, or rather, had seen and dismissed them, since I took trash cans to be "ordinary" or "normal" accouterment in cities. (4)
Yet, was what Sheng saw more apparent than what I saw? I had walked and ridden my bicycle by the wall near the mosque many times, and had held conversations with local residents in front of it, but had never seen Mao's portrait or any remnants of red paint. I had spent many hours seated across from the wall in front of the Sheng family's noodle business (a wall that neither one of us could see as we walked toward Sheng's marital home) and had emptied trash in the bin in front of it, but seen no image of Mao. My question to Sheng was open, and my gesture merely indicated a direction. Sheng could have talked about other things that we could see: the neighboring stores, the telephone pole and wires and the large tree near the wall, the dusty ground, the litter near the trash bins, the piles of gravel for private construction, or the enormous pothole in front of the wall, to give a few examples. (5) Looking in that direction could have prompted Sheng to speak about different people and institutions, such as her neighbors who put their trash there, the local children who played in front of the cans, the "outsiders" (non-resident low-level municipal employees) who came to empty the garbage receptacles, the bicyclists and taxi-drivers who whizzed by the wall, the patrons visiting nearby shops who had parked their bicycles there, or the religious students who passed the wall on their way to the mosque. Sheng saw and thought about a very particular set of objects, people, and activities. Why was Mao's portrait so present for Sheng?
What is often referred to in contemporary Chinese studies as "state-society relations" has received a great deal of attention over the past 15 years. (6) Scholars have examined the party-state's policies and their consequences in particular communities and on a national level (see, e.g., Huang 1989; Yan 1992, 1996, 2000; Gold 1993; Jankowiak 1993; Jing 1996, 1998; Davis 1999; Rofel 1999; Wang 1998; Dai 1999; Litzinger 2000; Schein 2000; Mueggler 2001; Harrell 2001). A focus of this research has been the consequences of Deng Xiaoping's marketization and privatization policies and the dismantling of China's centralized "command" economy and political system. Some scholars have suggested that the post-Mao Chinese state has "withdrawn" from intimate involvement with and intervention in the daily practices of Chinese citizens, and that the market has opened a "neutral zone" for the expression of private identities (e.g., Davis 1989, 1999; Gold 1993; Rofel 1994; and several of the articles in Davis 1999). Others have pointed out that marketization, privatization, and consumerism are state-promoted and state-regulated activities. To "plunge into the market" or xia hai (the Chinese term intimates risk), to engage in private entrepreneurship and to spend money, is to comply with state goals (see Anagnost 1997; Dai 1999; Gillette 2000; Schein 2000; Wang 1999; Yan 2000). Ci (1994), Yan (2000) and others have argued that the Chinese Communist Party has promoted consumerism and hedonism to combat the failure of the Maoist agenda and citizens' loss of faith in the goals of socialism. The party has legitimated its continued political control and deflected liberal-democratic activism since the 1989 protests by raising living standards and encouraging consumption (Ci 1994; Wang 1998; Yan 2000). At the same time, marketization has made China more vulnerable to the organizational imperatives of late capitalism (Anagnost 1997; Wang 1998; Schein 2000). China's economic planners and top officials have had to manage foreign investment, labor organization, economic stratification, inflation, market competition and the loss or transformation of local industries, rising fuel and power requirements, construction, environmental degradation, and increased access to information. These forces are transforming "state-society" relations.
According to some scholars, China's officially defined minority groups or "minority nationalities" (shaoshu minzu) have increased their consumption and expanded their ties to the party-state during the reform period, including through political activism. Gladney, working with the Hui nationality, the minority group to which Sheng belonged, saw a broadening and deepening of Hui reliance on the state in the 1980s and 1990s (Gladney 1991, 1998). He attributes the change to the Deng-era reinvention of affirmative action-style policies that had been initiated during the 1950s and abandoned during the 1960s and 1970s. These policies, intended to rectify past discrimination against those considered non-Chinese and facilitate the modernization (and eventual assimilation) of these groups, included economic benefits (for example, food subsidies, monetary assistance for minority education), educational support (recruitment of Hui students, lower examination scores for college entrance), political advantages (disproportionately high political representation, special political organizations, such as the Islamic Association, to mediate between the state and local religious institutions), and a number of acts aimed at "cultural protection" (writing "concise histories" of minority groups, institutionalizing "nationality holidays" for minorities). Such measures have caused a national-level "Hui nationality" identity to coalesce (Gladney 1991), and had analogous effects on other minorities (see, for example, Harrell 1995, 1996, 2001; Gladney 1990; Litzinger 2000; Brown 1996).
Reform-era "nationality" policies have caused some Hui to regard the national government as the guardian of Hui cultural, political, and economic claims. During the 1980s and 1990s, members of the Hui nationality asked the state to protect their interests and act on their behalf, and the state often came through. One example is Gladney's account (1998) of how the government has encouraged and supported Hui entrepreneurship, said to be a Hui "nationality characteristic." Another is his description of a 1989 protest in which Muslim students at the Nationalities Institute in Beijing successfully persuaded the Chinese leadership to ban a book that the students deemed China's equivalent of Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES (1991: 1-7). (7) During the mid-1990s, residents of Sheng's neighborhood also manifested this attitude. For example, Gillette writes that residents of this neighborhood had high levels of trust in the state concerning the projected redevelopment...
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