To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power by Vivienne Shue & Patricia M. Thornton & Vivienne Shue & Patricia M. Thornton

Author:Vivienne Shue & Patricia M. Thornton & Vivienne Shue & Patricia M. Thornton [Shue, Vivienne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Comparisons

Contemporary China is by no means the only place where governance with a blind eye plays an important role. To some extent, it occurs everywhere, as implied by the prostitution example I mentioned above. Just as I have argued for China, anti-prostitution laws tend to declare a moral stance rather than an intention to enforce a set of rules. And just as in China, they carry a mode of repression that can appear arbitrary, but whose deeper purpose is to show where the line of tolerance lies at the moment rather than to create a social reality that actually accords with the law.

Taiwan under its long colonial (1895–1945) and authoritarian (1945–1987) periods saw some adaptations that resemble the situation I have described for China, especially for religion. The annual festival to appease ghosts during the seventh lunar month, Pudu (普度), for example, typically attracted large crowds in the late Qing Dynasty, who sometimes became unruly. The worst moment was when people were allowed to climb tall poles, at the top of which were platforms of offerings and some flags, all of which would bring people good luck for the coming year. The ensuing chaos often led to injury. The Japanese colonial government was never friendly toward Taiwanese temple religion, and it was unhappy about the large crowds and this annual near-riot. They thus made the pole-climbing ritual illegal. In Sanhsia, the town where I first did fieldwork in Taiwan, the people responded by avowing their willingness to obey the law. In fact, they explained to the officials, they would instead promote strong and healthy imperial subjects through physical competition. That is, during the Pudu festival, they would stage a pole-climbing contest for food and flags at the tops of the poles. It might look identical to what they were doing before, but it was, they assured the government, really about physical education.

Something very similar happened early during the Republican period. The new KMT government in Taiwan was also unfriendly toward temple religion, and tried to discourage what they considered its most wasteful and unsanitary practices. One of these was offering enormously fattened pigs to local gods on their birthdays and other major occasions. The KMT in the early 1950s campaigned strenuously to discourage the practice. Once again, the people of Sanhsia agreed completely. Instead, they introduced an agricultural competition to encourage the best pig-raising practices, and would display the winning pigs in the temple plaza on the god’s birthday. In other words, they changed nothing except what they were telling the state.33

It is tempting to interpret these activities as a “hidden transcript,” a kind of smirking resistance taking place beyond the limits of authoritarian control, which is in fact an argument I made when I first wrote on this. Yet it is important to realize that the rulers, at least the local ones, understood exactly what was going on. The township offices in Sanhsia are just down the street from the temple plaza where these activities took place, and most of the officials were locals.

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