Cultures of belief and politics after orientalism: thinking Illiberally about China, via Wukan

Abstract

Rather than demystifying Chinese politics as always lacking ‘normal’ or liberal (‘Western” or ‘modern’) norms we need to begin again by examining ‘cultures of political belief’ in China. This will require a theoretical turn to “discourse” in a strong sense (via Michel Foucault or Louis Althusser) and a renewed attention to the politics of knowledge. It is also to work on politics in the manner of a reflexive anthropologist who studies the beliefs or cultures of belief (e.g. religion) in outside or foreign contexts. In sum, we must see politics as constituted by discourse/knowledge and not objective truths, even for terms like “democracy” and “freedom” and so on. What this means, for the purpose of this essay, is that there is more than one legitimate or valid, as well as ‘democratic’ or productive model of citizenship and political development. To help make this case I analyze the rise and alleged fall of “Wukan” i.e. the protest movement in Southern Guangdong province that captured the world’s attention in 2011, and that even the ‘Aljazeera’ media network covered extensively as late as July, 2013. Wukan was not only a long-running global media event but, in a limited yet significant sense, a victory for the protestors and residents there. There are a number of lessons that one might draw from Wukan. But chiefly it seemed to enact a different model of citizenship and governance within China than what should have happened according to conventional political theorizing about democracy and citizenship and modernization. Wukan helps us ‘provincialize’ liberal-universal theories of politics and participation, of political community and political belief. Wukan can be understood as indicative of a still prevalent and neo-Confucian model of politics/protest and citizenship. But it is also a very modern one, and one that also indexes a culture of belief about the PRC and the Party-state system. Namely its striking legitimacy as a result of the long Chinese revolution, including in theory its democratic and communal basis. All of this militates against the allegedly universal aspects of political liberalism, especially the latter’s focus on the individual and his or her natural rights and freedoms from the state and others. At the same time Wukan also shows us how important the global and not just ‘Chinese’ context is, for without the global coverage of the event – which itself became a part of the protests and official responses -- it may well have played out differently. So too the continuing difficulties of political and economic development in Wukan and Guangdong, the alleged Fall of the same protests, also speaks to the need for global political and economic solutions to even powerfully Chinese cultures of belief and protest.