Peasant resistance to NGO-based governmentality : a case from post-quake reconstruction in Sichuan

Abstract

While much of the scholarly work on the development of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in China focuses on the roles of NGOs and NGO-state relations, this thesis adopts a qualitative research approach to explore previously understudied peasant-NGO relations through the lens of a post-earthquake recovery programme at the village level in Sichuan, China. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and secondary data collection, the findings reveal that peasant-NGO relations can be pragmatic, unfriendly and even confrontational because of their inconsistent aspirations and pursuits of interests. Through locating the theory of governmentality at the grassroots level, the thesis constructs the concept of “NGO-based governmentality” to explore the NGO’s rationalities and technologies for governing the target population as well as investigate the process of the conventional state power deploying its political agenda to improve the village’s post-disaster recovery and long-term development through the NGO at a distance. It demonstrates that the NGO’s development programme aims to create conditions to nurture certain dispositions, habits, rationalities and life-orientations of peasants. To construct a new peasantry with a capacity for collective self-government, the NGO-based governmentality has to devalue the “selfish” peasantry constructed by market-based governmentality. Consequently, the clash between these two forms of governmentality emerges when they act on the same target population simultaneously through different rationalities and technologies. This clash further leads to several types of gaps between the NGO and villagers, including gaps between the villagers’ immediate needs and the NGO’s long-term development plan, the villagers’ pragmatic concerns and the campaign for Building the New Socialist Countryside, and the private economy and the collective economy. This study also examines a new form of peasant resistance nested in peasant-NGO interactions. Although the various strategies and actions taken by different “strategic groups” were ordinary, the reasons, motivations and “hidden subscripts” for these seemingly familiar acts of resistance were distinctive. Peasants won official support in almost every battle against the NGO through militant and radical strategies of resistance that were previously constrained and even prohibited by state power. Some conventional “weapons of weak”, such as foot-dragging, pilfering and sabotage moved from offstage to onstage with new meanings. The findings offer an alternative view on the theory of “everyday forms of resistance”. Moreover, the examination of peasants’ reasoning for their resistance to charity and their tolerance for corruption provides new insights on moral problems in the Chinese countryside. For one thing, the conventional belief that everyone could take advantage of public resources and the rise of an egotistic culture in rural society contribute to peasants’ inaction toward corrupt insiders; for another, the moral authority and rationale of the NGO’s development programme have been challenged and threatened due to the peasants’ victim identity, the NGO’s status of “stranger” and the original source of the donation. This thesis argues that a better understanding of the real world of NGOs, rural society and rural development in contemporary China can be achieved by combining theories of governmentality and resistance.