Campaign nostalgia in the Chinese countryside

Abstract

Campaign nostalgia is an indicator of frustration and unmet expectations. Its origins trace to an unwillingness on the part of the Party leadership to rely on mass mobilization to check cadre corruption. Under Mao, political campaigns at least occasionally afforded ordinary Chinese opportunities to hold grassroots leaders who transgressed regime norms accountable. Nowadays, some villagers chafe at the lack of such opportunities. They see electoral reforms, potentially beneficial policies (such as limits on peasant burdens), and laws that grant them rights (such as the Administration Litigation Law and the Villagers' Committee Law) ignored or undermined somewhere in the hierarchy. These individuals long for a romanticized version of the rectifications of old and dismiss clean government drives and bureaucratic supervision as feeble replacements for centrally sponsored, direct struggle against wrongdoers. Particularly in places where 'local emperors' lord it over them and anti-corruption efforts sputter without much effect, nostalgic villagers fondly remember the days when work teams swept in and malfeasant cadres shook with fear. Although one may question whether nostalgics have underestimated the downside of mass movements while conjuring up an idyllic era of official probity, it is more difficult to fault their assessment of the current anti-corruption struggle. Compared with those who express unbounded confidence in legal remedies, nostalgics are sober realists. They understand that relying on propaganda and cadre education is a non-starter and that law in China, such as it is, is not the rule of law. They know that many laws and policies are poorly implemented and that, in a pinch, political exigency can trump nearly anything. Nostalgic villagers and like-minded intellectuals have recognized that treating legal punishment, Party discipline, and mass reports as cure-alls is equivalent to acquiescing to a high level of corruption. Will campaign nostalgia wane with time? Perhaps. Where villagers' committee elections are run well and economic growth benefits the majority of villagers, nostalgia will not find a receptive climate in which to grow. Where lodging complaints or filing lawsuits check corruption and the imposition of illicit fees, villagers may gradually build up confidence in rule by law and find mass mobilization unnecessary. As today's nostalgics age, younger generations may find little to recommend in a form of inclusion characteristic of their elders. Even increasing mobility and the growth of a rural middle class may gradually shift the locus of political conflict away from the village.