Resistance, Chaos and Control in China
Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen
Robert P. Weller
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994
Chapter 6
Precipitation and Institution: The Taiping Rises Up
The late 1840s utterly transformed the God Worshipers’ movement, from the arrival of its two founders with their odd religious ideas in 1844, to the proofs of God’s power in temple destruction and curing a few years later, and finally to the charismatic chaos at the end of the decade. In 1850 the movement suddenly crystallized into a rebellion waiting to rebel, with both new social patterns and a new self-identification as rebels settling out from the multiple possibilities that had flooded them the year before. Calling their scattered following together in the town of Jintian, the group encamped in the gender-segregated units that would characterize them for the next several years; they realized their communal economy through the creation of a Celestial Treasury; they created a full range of military and political titles; they developed official dress and ceremonies, including a yellow imperial robe for Hong Xiuquan; and by no means least important, they put a forceful end to uncontrolled possessions and recaptured control over interpretation. Only at this point did they dub themselves the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tianguo), a political entity for the first time. Within a year they were occupying their first city, publishing texts and perfecting their new state apparatus.
The transition from uncontrolled spirit possession, with all its creativity and all its fragmentation, required constructing new interpretive communities – an enterprise that is just as much institutional as ideological. Pulling a single dominant interpretation from such a powerfully complex and mixed set of possibilities challenged the movement leaders with the extraordinary task of quickly building the social means to control meaning. They succeeded by drastically limiting spirit possession, creating clearer institutions of political and military authority, and by agreeing on a single master interpretation of the movement as a rebellion. They forged their cannons and their canons at the same time.
While Taiping records on the early competing voices I discussed in Chapter 5 are hazy, much clearer evidence shows how the eventual leaders took control of the movement. As usual for the victors, they documented their own accomplishments better than they remembered their rivals’. Before I turn to that evidence, however, I want to return again to a comparative analysis of similar movements elsewhere in the world. The God Worshipers resembled many other possession movements, both in the problems that too many divine voices created and in the possible solutions. A general understanding of the dynamics of such movements suggests useful ways of looking at the Taiping transformation. At the same time, the Taiping case adds an important instance to the general theory, as one of the few where the movement retained and controlled spirit possession over the long term. The complex and indeterminate nature of such movements everywhere typically spawns very similar crises, and allows for only a few potential resolutions.
POTENTIAL PRECIPITATIONS
The qualities that give uncontrolled possession trance cults such a powerful potential to become social movements – the aesthetic appeal, the transcendence of conventional social boundaries, and the creation of new cultural and political ideas through direct divine inspiration – gravely endanger the consolidation and organization of the movements. In fact the great majority of possession cults never attempt any wide political organization.
A few manage to continue as apolitical, unofficial cults often centered around curing; they are what Lewis (1971) calls amoral marginal cults. Horton (1969) gives a clear example of such a group among the Kalabari of Nigeria, who had a female-centered curing cult based on worship of amoral water spirits. This sect existed alongside, and sometimes challenged, a generally male and politically central cult based on ancestral and community heroes. The early Greek Dionysian cult may have been a similar institution. It was a popular movement that even slaves could join, in contrast to the state-controlled Apollonian cult (including the Delphic oracle) (Dodds, 1951:76-77).
From the very beginning, however, the God Worshipers demanded a greater role than these cults played. Amoral marginal cults cede the political and religious center to others. The God Worshipers ceded nothing, but instead put their God directly up against the most powerful popular gods, and thus up against the definition of community itself. Their mediums spoke with the voices of the most powerful beings, and their statements thus carried more serious consequences.
Collapse and Repression
Possession cults that do develop into social movements usually collapse in fairly short order; long-lived movements like the Taiping rebellion arise only rarely. The frequent collapses stem from the impossibility of maintaining political discipline when anyone can speak with the authority of the gods. Attempts to create central political organization out of mass possession thus frequently shatter into a number of small sects. Even when the natural divisiveness of these movements does not cause their direct internal collapse, it makes them easy prey to outside repression.
Just a small twitch of colonial military muscle, for example, crushed the millenial Watchtower movement in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) after World War I before it could develop any very large political organization (Fields 1982). Based on the American Watchtower movement (now Jehovah’s Witnesses), the sect taught that when the End came, only those baptized in the movement would survive, and whites (including the deceitful, not-Watch-tower missionaries) would be enslaved or driven away. Until the great cataclysm, however, adherents were to offer only passive resistance – they had no immediate political agenda.
The movement shared many of the features I have been discussing. Converts held nightly prayer meetings with a powerful aesthetic appeal: preachers proselytized loud and long, while drumming, hymn-singing and speaking in tongues lasted well into the night. The real political threat, at least as the local chiefs and colonial authorities saw it, lay partly in the movement’s passive resistance; they refused, for example, to take part in wage labor. Yet the danger also lay equally in possession by the Holy Ghost; possession had been a tool of traditional political authority (just as it had been for the community hero cult among the Kalabari), and the Watchtower followers had usurped this critical symbol of the chiefs’ authority. Their mediums thus resembled the God Worshipers in speaking directly in the voice of the highest authorities. The movement peaked in 1919 with the forcible suppression by fully armed police of a New Jerusalem built on a hill.
In suffering an early demise, the Zambian Watchtower movement typified many possession cults whose cultural innovation and crossing of conventional boundaries themselves created enough of a threat that the extant powers took steps to repress them. At the same time, the constant creation of new leaders through possession discouraged Watchtower organization on a scale large enough to stand up against any kind of organized repression. Marginal cults survive only because their political and social innovations are limited, and they stick to an established, marginal position in their societies. The Zambian Watchtower overstepped these lines in the turmoil after World War I, but could not overcome the weakness of its organizational base in mass possession.
Internal collapse is as common as successful repression among possession groups attempting their own new social organization. Another group of Christian millenialists, this time the Apostolics of the Yucatan, provide a clear example. The Apostolics had grown dramatically under the charismatic leadership of their village preacher in 1970 (Goodman, 1973). A wave of speaking in tongues overtook the group, and they saw clear signs of the Second Coming in the immediate future – the Devil had appeared to a local prisoner, the Holy Spirit had given a vision of dirty churches that had to be cleaned before Christ arrived, and so on. Many people fell into trances, often not recovering for several days.
The movement included the charismatic power and aesthetic appeal of mass possessions, cultural creativity as possessed followers prescribed new forms of dress and ritual, and social innovation as many followers moved into the church. Yet the Apostolics fell into a total shambles when different individuals began to give apparently equally holy, but contradictory ritual commands – exactly the pressure point that also threatened the God Worshipers with disintegration. Followers of the movement began to accuse each other’s trances of being Satanic. They finally collapsed into chaos, claiming in retrospect that the entire event had been a test from Satan. Here, the inherently indeterminate and multivocalic nature of mass possession prevented the movement from developing very far, quickly undercut the leadership position of the preacher, and blocked the development of any effective organization. Like most such movements, they never reached the necessary activation energy to create new social institutions of interpretation that would have allowed the movement to consolidate the gains from its period of mass possession.43
The chaos that overtook the God Worshipers by 1849 thus closely resembled similar movements. I will discuss later the numerous attempts to silence competing voices within the movement. The situation grew so bad that the followers asked Hong to differentiate true and false possessions, and to judge “the spirits according to the truth of the doctrine” (Hamberg, 1854:46). Only he could see through the conflicting claims to divine truth. The really remarkable thing was their ability to overcome the dissension without falling completely apart. Possession cults that attain any long-term political organization must always eliminate the dangers of too many voices. They desaturate mass possession by creating and controlling new interpretive communities. Yet while overcoming the disadvantages of free possession, they often also lose the advantages.
Gaining Control
One possibility is to ban possession entirely, controlling interpretation instead through a priesthood or other institution that can keep religion under the control of the movement leadership. For example, the Palau Modekngei leaders – a case I have already cited for the success of their mass possession – stopped acting as spirit mediums after the initial organizational period (Leonard, 1973). Instead they interpreted whistling sounds made by their dead founder. With a monopoly on access to the sounds, the leaders could freely interpret these whistles however they preferred. The new form of communication with the founder immediately gave the leadership an effective means to control interpretation, even if it lost the excitement of spirit possession.
The Catholic Church of the fifth century apparently went through a similar process. By this time, the Church was the prosperous and official religion of the Holy Roman Empire. Its theologians reinterpreted their chiliastic texts as spiritual allegory, saw the Millennium already realized in the Church itself, and discouraged any further direct divine inspiration (Cohn, 1957:13-14).
The Taborite heresy experienced a comparable transformation in the early fifteenth century. Inspired by possession, prophets preached the imminence of the millennium, leading to the usual cultural innovations and transcended social boundaries. Their followers abandoned their home communities for a new life where traditional norms and laws would no longer govern their behavior, and all goods were held in common. Yet as soon as this new society began to take concrete form at Tabor, inspired prophecy began to give way to institutionalized control over religious interpretation:
The ideology of the movement – chiliasm – could not become the ideology of a society, and when Tabor began to come to terms with the facts of ordinary life in the world, she began to move away from the chiliast inspiration. Thus, almost as soon as the Taborites returned to South Bohemia, after the defense of Prague in the summer of 1420, we find evidence of what may be called a party of order, which promoted ideas and institutions of stability against the chiliast insistence on tension, enthusiasm, and total dynamism (Kaminsky, 1962:171).
Like the Palauans, the Taborites settled the divisive problems of multiple voices by ending spirit possession. And like the Taiping, they accomplished it hand in hand with a radical transformation of their social organization.
Each of these movements gave up the powerful appeal of possession as a means to recruit and retain the enthusiasm of followers. They substituted conventional means of political control over a civil population for the inspired enthusiasm of a prophet-led following. Other movements have instead restrained and controlled possession rather than eliminating it entirely. They hoped to channel its powerful appeal, while not falling victim to its dangers of collapsing under the weight of too many alternate prophets.
Many African and Pacific societies have controlled possession cults with direct political influence, where the mediums’ power ties directly to the chiefs.44 Some ancient states also helped maintain legitimacy with the help of possessed mediums. The best known case is the Delphic oracle. Here, the masters of the cult controlled interpretation by keeping people from direct access to the medium. People communicated with the oracle and received interpreted responses only through the intercession of the Prophetes and Hosioi (Dodds, 1951:72-73). Limited and controlled as it was, the Delphic oracle could not have held the broad appeal of cults featuring mass festivals of possession and prophecy, but it must have retained some of the charisma of possession for those privileged to address it.
The ancient Chinese state also relied on apparently possessed mediums. Direct access to heaven was an important proof of legitimacy, and the Shang Dynasty king was the chief medium (Chang, 1983:45). Shang oracles existed primarily at the court, and relied on the use of bronze ritual objects. Bronze was a crucial form of wealth monopolized by the court, and the king thus held tight control over mediumistic contact with spirits (Chang, 1983:97). The Guoyu, a fourth-century BC text, has a possible reference to the concentration of the right to communicate with the spirits in the hands of the kings, at a time (supposedly the twenty-sixth century BC) when “virtue was in disorder”:
Men and spirits became intermingled, with each household indiscriminately performing for itself the religious observances which had hitherto been conducted by the shamans. As a consequence, men lost their reverence for the spirits, the spirits violated the rules of men, and natural calamities arose. Hence the successor of [the current emperor] charged Ch’ung, Governor of the South, to handle the affairs of heaven in order to determine the proper place of the spirits, and Li, Governor of Fire, to handle the affairs of Earth in order to determine the proper places of men. And such is what is meant by cutting the communication between heaven and earth (Bodde, 1961, quoted in Chang, 1983:44-45).
From this point on, only the imperial court controlled access to heaven. Here again, central political control required limiting the independent power of mediums, sacrificing the enthusiastic support that possession cults can create for the stability that state control required. Much like the Taiping several millennia later, the social transformations of state formation accompanied a new kind of control over possession – thinning and defanging the dangers of too many possessed voices.
The American Shakers offer one of the few cases where we can see in action the political consolidation of the right to interpret by blunting the dangers of spirit possession. While still in England, Ann Lee rose to the leadership of a small millenial sect called Shakers because of their frequent trances. Her claim to authority rested on powerful visions she had received while in prison for “profaning the Sabbath;” she had realized that only souls who had freed themselves from “the works of natural generation” and the “gratifications of lust” could follow Christ in the world to come (Desroche, 1971:29). Another vision in 1774 (and probably conflicts within the movement over her new direction) led to Mother Ann’s emigration to the colonies with eight followers, where they created a radically new social life.
The trances of Mother Ann and her followers helped form the distinctive social and cultural patterns of this celibate and communal sect. Not surprisingly, each period of Shaker revival saw an increase in possession trance alongside an increase in followers. Yet the Shaker leadership already frowned on trance by the end of the eighteenth century. They replaced their thickly saturated and charismatic trance dancing with far thinner dancing in formal patterns. This occurred just over a decade after the sect had gathered into its communal form, again showing the close ties between interpretive control and social transformation (Desroche, 1971:117). By 1794, the Shakers felt that the period of inspiration had ended, and that they had entered a new phase (Desroche, 1971:115).
One reason for the reaction against possession trance must have been the competing divinely sanctioned claims to inherit Shaker leadership (Desroche, 1971:218); the new leadership moved to prevent this problem of too many authoritative voices from recurring. Some possession did continue through this time, however, and threatened the central leadership again in the Great Revival of 1837-1847. Revelations supported various sides in internal disputes, including an especially bitter one over vegetarianism. Yet the central leadership already had enough control that they held the potential threat within bounds. Conveniently enough, the leaders took control by validating “a revelation from Mother Ann in which the founder declared that she would have no ‘gift for any of her children except those who lived in perfect union with the ministry and the elders. The clever trick was, of course, to draw out of prophecy itself a means of neutralizing its own effect on the believers” (Desroche, 1971:106). Finally, “gifts” of revelations ceased entirely in the group.
Possession cults thus have an internal dynamic that leads them into new forms, which in turn have new dynamics. The very qualities that give them a powerful potential to become social movements make the consolidation and organization of these movements truly precarious. As they move to resolve their problems by institutionalizing or prohibiting possession, they create new kinds of limits on their organizational prospects and political structures. In every case, social transformation, political consolidation and religious interpretation are inseparable. Each case also makes clear just how difficult the transition to new interpretive communities always is. The few movements that did not simply collapse underwent drastic changes in organization as they sacrificed the excitement of mass possession. Hammering a dominant interpretation out of multivocalic enthusiasm poses a major political, social, and cultural challenge. Let me return now to the God Worshipers, who had to face these problems squarely by the end of 1849. The God Worshipers were unusual both because they succeeded in building a strong political movement out of such a shifting base, and because they continued to use spirit possession, but in an entirely new way.
BUILDING A STATE AND PRECIPITATING AN INTERPRETATION
The God Worshipers’ spirit possessions, for all their thick appeal, threatened to tear the movement apart in 1849 through the “disorder and dissension” that Hamberg described (1854:45). Hong’s return to the area in 1849 and the local request to cull the true from the false gods, at last began to resolve the internal dissension. At this point Hong made one of the most crucial steps in the movement’s development – he limited all future possessions only to Yang Xiuqing as God and Xiao Chaogui as Jesus. Only their possessions had been genuinely divine; all the others were false or inspired by imps and devils. From this time on, the leadership assumed increasing political control over possession, continuing to affirm Yang as the only true vehicle for possessions from God, and Xiao as the only one for Jesus.
In some ways. Hong Xiuquan’s (and presumably Feng Yunshan’s) affirmation of possession seems surprising. Spirit possession, after all, had no part in Hong’s initial ideology. When he returned in 1849, he had recently spent several months with Issachar Roberts in Canton. While Roberts himself, with his revivalist background, surely accepted possession by the Holy Ghost, such performances apparently had no part in his Canton mission (Wagner, 1982:11-17). Furthermore, Hong was embracing a very local form of possession that must have been rather foreign to someone with his background, and embracing as well two local leaders with little education from poor families – men very different from hopeful scholars like Hong, Feng and the other original converts. Most important of all, he was acceding to the particular reading of the God Worshipers that Yang and Xiao had promoted, a reading that explicitly pushed the movement toward rebellion. Out of the saturated mess that the local people had made of his original Christianity, Hong now accepted a new line of precipitation that redirected the movement from his initial concern with religion alone to political change and the overthrow of the dynasty. Why did Hong choose this course that cast the die of revolt?
For several years the concrete events involving the God Worshipers had made their self-interpretation as rebellion increasingly reasonable, even though rebellion had not yet become the dominant interpretation. In part, the early successes of nearby rebels must have emphasized the weakness of the state and made revolt look plausible to the followers. Beginning in 1847, just after Feng’s arrest and the first mass possessions, major uprisings shook several parts of east-central Guangxi. Chen Agui took control over the area between the Xun and Qian rivers, and Zhang Jiaxiang had united numerous Triad groups in a major uprising in Hengzhou (Li, 1981:139).
At the same time, the God Worshipers increasingly discovered that purely religious acts nevertheless brought political consequences. Their destruction of popular temples in 1846-1847 had angered a number of people, including some members of the local elite, particularly a local degree-holder named Wang Zuoxin. After the God Worshipers foiled his attempt to arrest Feng with the local militia in 1847, Wang petitioned the district officials early the next year, asking them to charge Feng with planning a rebellion. There is no evidence for actual plans to rebel at this stage; instead Wang used a standard technique for bringing the state in on his side – he accused his enemies of political heterodoxy. The magistrate refused to act at the time, but Feng was finally imprisoned for a while later that year with the help of Wang’s militia. Wang Zuoxin continued to harass the God Worshipers from that point on. Thus even from 1847, outside forces had begun to define the God Worshipers as a political movement. This external definition of the group as an opposition helped shape them into one, especially as they found one of their top leaders in jail. In spite of themselves, they had little option but to respond politically by opposing the local militia and its elite leadership.
At some point in 1848, the idea of Hong assuming the imperial throne began to float in the movement, receiving a kind of support from the possessions of Yang and Xiao. Late in 1848 three followers petitioned Jesus (possessing Xiao) for permission for Hong to assume the Golden Dragon Throne. The idea apparently took Jesus by surprise, because he stalled and told the three to return later and ask God (Yang). Unfortunately, we have no record of God’s response, but in numerous possessions afterwards, Jesus clearly said that Hong could not yet assume imperial trappings (Wang, 1985:202-203). Jesus certainly promoted the idea that Hong would be an emperor; the timing of the claim was the only question. At roughly the same time, Jesus began to talk about who the generals would be when the Taiping era began (Wang, 1985:193). These were among Xiao’s earliest possessions, and Jesus thus interpreted the movement as a nascent rebellion right from the beginning. At the time, however, his voice remained only one among many in the jumble of possessed interpretations.
This particular line of interpretation must have appealed to Hong in several ways, in spite of the departures from his original expectations for the movement. First, the move to politics could still be consistent with Hong’s original Christianity. Both the millenial streak in Christianity and Hong’s vision could support the idea that a new Kingdom of God on earth would have to accompany the religious transformation of China. The re-reading of imps and devils from false icons and false gods to the Manchu government required only a small step. Imps and devils, whether human or supernatural, stood in the way of a Christian China. Second, Hong apparently enjoyed the idea of being a real king. In 1849 he often asked Jesus if the time had yet come when he could wear the dragon robe (Wang, 1985:203). Finally, both Yang and Xiao had created sizable personal followings within the movement by using their local ties and their charismatic possessions. As Hong moved to end the chaos threatening the movement by the end of 1849, he could not afford to alienate such large factions.
The most important key to Hong’s settling on a single interpretation was the dissension and chaos that threaten all such possession movements. By the end of 1849, Hong either had to force a precipitation or accept the collapse of the movement. Faced with such a decision. Hong bowed to the many influences that combined to make rebellion the most plausible potential line of interpretation, and asserted a radically new kind of control over meaning. As uncontrolled possession lost its mandate, and as Yang and Xiao gained their monopoly on divine interpretation, the entire movement underwent a complete metamorphosis as it created a new interpretive community.
Consolidating Interpretive Control
Merely announcing new lines of interpretation did not automatically create control: that would also require a new social organization. The reorganization of the God Worshipers into the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom required working through a newly forged ideology, creating new social structures, and silencing alternative interpretations by force. Spirit possession records from late 1849 and 1850 show a sudden surge in attacks on alternative mediums. The leaders forced the first alternate medium out of the congregation shortly after Hong granted interpretive control to Yang and Xiao (Hamberg, 1854:46). They could act on such a condemnation only after Hong had sorted the divine possessions from the impish ones.
Jesus, speaking through Xiao, exposed many cases of evil possessions. Late in 1849, Jesus descended to earth because “the following did not share a single heart.” Hong said to him, “Various celestial spirits are descending, and always aid the imps with their false hearts. Those who aid imps are themselves imps. Heavenly Elder Brother, the Heavenly Father sent you as the Savior Lord of all nations, and you are also my own blood brother. Please forward this petition to my Heavenly Father do not let the celestial spirits speak.” The same day, Wei Changhui (another top leader) again asked Jesus to intercede to stop celestial imps in one of the local villages. Jesus agreed to both requests (Wang, 1985:201). A similar case from the same period involved a woman named Huang Ermei, who came into Xiao’s presence followed by a demon whom Xiao vanquished in a fight (Wang, 1985:200-201).
In 1850, Jesus also acted several times to control “lies” (luanyen) spread by some of the followers. The “lies” could well have been alternative possessed voices like the celestial spirits, but were in any case competing interpretations of the movement. In some cases the perpetrators suffered beatings of a thousand strokes and other fatal punishments (Wang, 1985:218). In other cases a threat sufficed, as when Jesus promised the death sentence to a medium if the “demon” who possessed him ever returned (Wang, 1985:201). Interpretive control meant silencing other voices by any means necessary.
Yang and Xiao consolidated their personal positions at the same time as they solidified control over interpretation. A number of their early possessions seemed quite transparently self-serving. For example, when Xiao demanded that Hong Xiuquan recognize him as Jesus during one of his earliest possessions, he was already creating the grounds for Hong’s final valorization of Xiao and Yang a year later (Wang, 1985:192). In addition, when Xiao/Jesus first spoke of rebellion in late 1848, he named only himself, Yang, and Feng Yunshan as top generals, clearly serving his own possession faction at the expense of other leaders like Wei Changhui or Shi Dakai (Wang, 1985:193).46
God acted much like Jesus in this, although we have many fewer records of Yang’s earliest possessions. In early 1851, for example, God again demanded recognition of his genuine presence through Yang’s body, and reaffirmed the new Taiping authority structure:
The Heavenly Father instructed the multitude, saying, “Do you all truly recognize your Heavenly Father and your Heavenly Elder Brother?” The multitude replied, “We truly recognize the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Elder Brother.” The Heavenly Father again said, “Do you all truly recognize your Sovereign [Hong Xiuquan]?” The multitude replied, “We truly recognize our Sovereign.” The Heavenly Father said, “I have sent your Sovereign down into the world to become the T’ien Wang [Heavenly King], and every word he utters is a heavenly command. You must be obedient” (Tianming Zhaozhishu, in Michael, 1966-1971:99).
Yang and Xiao did not hesitate to consolidate their own positions, and simultaneously the new institutions of interpretation, by criticizing even other recognized leaders. In 1850, Jesus had prevented Feng Yunshan and Wei Changhui from carrying out one of their plans, scolding them for making Him bother with things no more important than fingernails (Wang 1985:195).
The ability to expose criminals and traitors further reinforced the divine authority of the two mediums and strengthened the new interpretive institutions. These miraculous exposures also began around 1850, just as the movement transformed itself. I have already mentioned God’s exposure of the Triad bandit and faithless ally Big-head Goat (Tianqing Daoli Shu, in Michael, 1966-1971:375). The best documented case occurred in late 1851, when God suddenly exposed a follower named Zhou Xineng as a traitorous demon (Tianfu Xiafan Zhaoshu, in Michael, 1966-1971:87-97). The Taiping leaders were on the verge of promoting Zhou to office when God dramatically appeared to order his arrest. Zhou had brought a group of 190 followers to join the main Taiping camp, but had to enroll all but three in the enemy camp as a subterfuge. God exposed him instead as a turncoat and spy, first suggesting that the loss of the followers to the enemy was surrender not subterfuge, and then revealing details of spying that only an omniscient being could know. God knew all, from secret meetings to reconnaissance of Taiping defenses and assassination plans. The Taiping executed Zhou, his wife and son, and his demon accomplices.
Jesus had performed a similar coup a few months earlier, exposing a friend of Luo Dagang who had stolen some jewelry from Luo’s wife after she died. He also received a death sentence, although Jesus allowed him to appeal the sentence to God (Wang, 1985:218-219). The dynastic camp reported another case from late in 1851, when the Taiping occupied its first city, Yongan, and was besieged by the Qing armies. Yao Ying, who was Judicial Commissioner of Guangxi (but would be demoted to hardship duty in Taiwan for failing to stop the Taiping), wrote in a letter that
“Commander Wu sent the bandit leaders a letter that concealed an explosive charge. The bandits realized that the letter was rather heavy, saw through the plot, and threw the letter far off, where it exploded. The bandits cunningly claimed that the Heavenly Father had descended, warning of the explosive. Otherwise how could they have known? The followers believe this deeply, taking it as truth” (Yao, 1867, juan 1:23-24).
These powerful reaffirmations of God’s and Jesus’s power continued on occasion as long as the two mediums lived (e.g., Tianqing Daoli Shu, in Michael, 1966-1971:385). In concert with the new Taiping transformation of the social world after 1849, God and Jesus also interceded directly in family life. In late 1849, Jesus had sentenced an adulterous couple to 140 strokes for the man and 100 strokes for the “lascivious wife” (Wang, 1985:219). Jesus also gave frequent lectures to various people on proper family behavior. In 1850 He grilled someone named Li Dali about why he did not look after his wife better. When Hong’s family arrived from Guangdong later that year, Jesus individually instructed all the women on proper and obedient behavior (Wang, 1985:220-221).
Within a very short period of time the Taiping had consolidated powerful control over religious interpretation, precipitating new social relations of interpretation along with new dogma. The transformation had created order from chaos. Yet the change also went far beyond the personal positions of Yang and Xiao. While the dangers of uncontrolled possession provided a key catalyst, once the new interpretive control began it cascaded into all aspects of the movement, creating a newly detailed ideology and drawing clear lines of social power that would strive to keep the new ideas in control while it pursued a rebellion.
State-Building and Institutional Control
Once the Taiping created itself as a rebellion, some earlier acts lost their complex ambiguity, just as spirit possession had lost its multiple possibilities. For example, the Taiping resumed destroying temples in 1850, after a hiatus of over two years. The earlier attacks had concentrated on morally questionable temples, at least from Hong’s point of view, and had been satisfied when the defeated god recognized God’s greater power. Now, however, the group attacked the core community temples – the Three Generations temples – that they had carefully avoided in the past, and then began utterly destroying every temple they found (Guangxi Shifan Xueyuan …, 1981:273). The destruction of major Three Generations temples in Xinxu and Caicun in 1850 made unambiguously political claims. The earlier attacks had allowed multiple interpretations: Christian iconoclasm for some, a test of God’s might for others, an attack on immorality for still others, and a political act for only a few. Yet now they attacked a clearly moral god in the most important community temple, which housed the local militia; this was a religious rebellion. From then on, local witnesses would lament the Taiping’s apparently blind destruction of all temples they encountered.
At the same time, the Taiping solidified its newly unified interpretations with a massive publishing program. They controlled the dissemination of knowledge by publishing only carefully selected and edited texts, just as they controlled divine inspiration by commandeering possession for the top leaders. Although handwritten copies of Hong’s writings apparently circulated in Xunzhou (Jian, 1958:1744), the first printing of Taiping texts occurred only with the capture of Yongan in 1851 and the official organization of a Taiping state. Yang and Xiao, often speaking with their divine voices, played a crucial role in editing even the most key texts, including Hong’s own description and interpretation of his original dream vision. Indeed, Taiping descriptions of this seminal event seem to have changed several times. Wang Qingcheng (1985:213-214) describes several sessions in 1848 where the possessed Xiao supplied details of the dream that Hong had supposedly forgotten.
The new publishing program began to chisel Taiping religious ideas in stone (or at least to carve them in woodblocks). In 1852, for example, they published a set of fill-in-the-blank official prayer forms. Communication with Heaven had thus thinned by this time from the uncontrolled enthusiasms of mass possession to formalized repetition of standardized prayer. By publishing everything from educational texts to travel passes to the Bible (complete with Hong’s annotations) in the next few years, the Taiping attempted to exercise full control over information and interpretation, ending the interpretive free-for-all of the late 1840s.
This rationalizing ordering of the movement covered all areas. In 1850, as part of the ongoing transformation, the leaders announced and began to use an elaborate structure of official titles, flags, robes and offices (Jian, 1973:45; Mao et al., 1980:43-44). Hong Xiuquan already had a yellow imperial robe in 1850, although Jesus would still not let him wear it in public (Mao, 1989:33-34). His robe was just the tip of a vast bureaucratic iceberg, however. The elaborate military system that suddenly crystallized in 1850 spelled out every detail. For example: “A corps general commands five colonels; altogether he commands 13,125 men. His flag is four and one-half feet in length and width” (Taiping Junmu, in Michael, 1966-1971:133). The system got its final polish during the long occupation of Yongan in 1851-1852, when the major leaders (including Yang and Xiao) received their official ranks as kings. The elaborate system of titles published in 1852 included details like:
From colonel to sergeant, all are commanders of troops; therefore their sons shall be addressed as Sons of the Commanders; they are also clean and undefiled; therefore their daughters shall be addressed as Snow, for snow is clean, white in color, and lovely to look upon. Chancelloresses, women senior secretaries, women commanders, and women generals shall be addressed as Chaste Person, because chastity in a woman is most honorable … When one royal father-in-law addresses another royal father-in-law, they shall address each other according to their precedence of birth, and call each other Royally Related Elder Brother, or Royally Related Younger Brother (Taiping Lizhi, slightly revised from Michael, 1966-1971:126-127).
The detail goes on and on, as pompous bureaucracy replaced uncontrolled possession. All of this systematizing formed part of a total social reorganization in 1850. The Taiping actually began to use these ranks and titles at the same time as they resettled their followers in sex-segregated camps in the town of Jintian.
This chapter began with the God Worshipers facing an interpretive problem – the great multiplicity of competing voices formed an irresolvable mass of indeterminate meanings, and threatened to tear the movement apart. The answer could not lie simply in coming up with the right interpretation, or in convincing through the power of logical reasoning. The very nature of such overloaded situations undercuts such answers. Instead, the Taiping had to erect an entirely new social system, creating institutions of interpretation, from controlled spirit possession to military hierarchy, that could allow them to impose a single dominant interpretation. Unlike many comparable movements, the Taiping actually succeeded. The result was a transformation in 1850 every bit as radical as the real chemical change from saturation to precipitation. Spirit possession had made the new social organization possible, and the new social organization in turn utterly transformed spirit possession.
The change happened quickly, but not easily. It required an enormous range of action, from creating a monopoly over critical knowledge (by publishing texts and controlling communication with Heaven), to a complete social redefinition (in the creation of new ranks and titles, and in physical resettlement on the ground), to a full range of punishment of dissenting voices (where God and Jesus met alternative interpretations with humiliation, beatings, or executions). In the middle of 1849, the Taiping had been a wild hodge-podge of possessed voices. Just over a year later, they were a powerful rebellion with dear leaders, a new religious orthodoxy, and a sharply defined social and military organization. This new unification could only occur with the social transformations that created new interpretive communities and institutions.
NEW POWERS AND NEW PROBLEMS
Part of the power of the new system lay in its local roots. In contrast to the ideas Hong had brought to Guangxi in 1844, the new Taiping of 1850 had become sensible in local terms. God now spoke to local issues of power, ethnicity, curing and spirit possession. Even more importantly, the new control over interpretation itself brought major benefits to the Taiping movement. Above all, the change removed the immediate danger of internal collapse, even as it added the eventual dangers of rebellion. In doing so, the movement developed a structure of authority that would allow it to make decisions and undertake actions effectively.
Yang’s ability to speak for God, and to determine correct interpretations of those speeches, helped the Taiping to make strategic decisions quickly and confidently. The possessed Yang, for example, exhorted the troops to break out of the siege of Yongan, and led to the stunningly successful drive through central China to Nanjing (Tianming Zhaozhi Shu, in Michael, 1966-1971:109). God, speaking through Yang, often issued direct military orders, providing an unquestionable line of authority that did not exist before Yang and Xiao monopolized possession. Just as the early mass possession episodes had helped build a popular following for the God Worshipers in Guangxi, centralized control over possession gave the Taiping stronger possibilities for coordinated action and ended the dissension that typifies movements based on broader opportunities for possession.
Yet even though they had created the essential prerequisites for political action, the transformed movement also experienced a new dynamic, whose problems would prove just as serious as the earlier chaos. The continued use of spirit possession itself posed one of the greatest difficulties, even though the early possessions had given the God Worshipers enormous advantages in recruiting, and the new monopoly on possession had created a strong structure of authority. As the movement expanded out of its backwater base in Guangxi, its heavy reliance on very local possession traditions became a fetter. Spirit possession itself probably found a more skeptical audience in the sophisticated population of the lower Yangzi valley core around Nanjing. Strongly local traditions like leading other souls up to Heaven would have had even less appeal. In so far as people outside the leadership had contact with Taiping possession in the later years (and they did not have much), the practice could have provided very little legitimacy for the movement. The loss of possession as a popular organizing tool. and the inability of the movement to adopt and adapt local traditions the way it had in Guangxi, help explain the general lack of a true mass base after the Taiping left Guangxi. The Taiping borrowing of aboriginal techniques of possession, and its plausibility in an area used to very odd deities, doomed its potential religious appeal outside Guangxi.
As the movement developed over the next decade, dominating central areas of China under Yang’s de facto leadership, the nature of possession continued to change. Xiao had died in battle in 1852, silencing Jesus’s voice forever. Yang, however, continued to speak for God up until his murder by other Taiping leaders in 1856. With his monopoly on the voice of God, Yang’s possessions gradually lost many of the radical ideals of the early God Worshipers while their Confucian content increased. Even though the earlier Taiping had banned Confucian texts. God in 1854 affirmed that the classics had many positive points, expounding on “the True Way of filial piety toward relatives and loyalty toward rulers” (Wang, 1985:215-216). The more Yang institutionalized his power, the more the Taiping began to resemble just another dynasty.
Yang also began to communicate with God in ways that totally sacrificed the charisma of possession, but that left interpretation even more firmly in his own hands. In particular, he began to have dream visions in Nanjing, which he could interpret at his leisure and according to his own whims. Yang thus came to dominate communication with Heaven through techniques that no longer involved large numbers of followers or any of the enthusiasm of possession, but that allowed him to claim final authority on any issue (Xing, 1981; Wang, 1985:222-223).
At the same time, Yang’s possessed pronouncements grew more and more obviously self-serving. In an infamous case in 1853, after the Taiping capital had already been established at Nanjing, God publicly berated Hong for mistreating women officials and being too lenient with his son. He sentenced Hong to forty blows, although Hong was so contrite that God agreed not to carry out the punishment.
Yang’s final act of possessed hubris came in 1856, when God announced that Yang should be addressed as wansui (Ten Thousand Years), a term that had been reserved for Hong and that traditionally had honored the Emperor alone. When asked how Hong should now be addressed. God lightly suggested a ludicrous neologism, One Hundred Million Years (Jian, 1973:290). The subordinate Taiping kings, quite possibly in consultation with Hong, saw this as the beginning of a coup. They killed Yang, his household and his bodyguard, leaving thousands of corpses and a badly torn movement. Although the Taiping hung on in Nanjing for eight more years after this slaughter, it never really recovered from the internal decimation. Just as the early movement could not tolerate too many voices of God, the later movement found that it could not tolerate the structural split in its leadership – between Hong, who was himself God’s son, and Yang, who spoke with God’s voice and authority. While Yang as man remained subordinate to Hong, Yang as God stood supreme.
By centralizing and controlling communication with Heaven, the Taiping sacrificed popular participation in the ecstatic charisma of the large trance episodes that had characterized the early years of the movement. The immediate reality of the spirits for followers, and the convincing legitimacy offered by actually witnessing such ceremonies, had been lost to the movement, even as possession became a powerful (and eventually self-destructive) political tool for Yang Xiuqing. By the time the Taiping settled in Nanjing, spirit possession had become Yang’s personal tool for consolidating power among the leadership. His increasing reliance on dreams and his monopoly on possession opened him to the accusation that tends to accompany professional mediums anywhere – faking. His murder resulted in part from the loss of legitimacy of his spirit possessions, which had become a problem from the moment the Taiping centralized control over possession. The very act of institutionalizing control over possessed interpretation created the possibility that the possessions were mere artifice. While even believers agree that some possessions can be faked, the public possession of many people carries a kind of convincing charisma that Yang Xiuqing’s monopoly sacrificed. Accusing Yang of faking undermined the entire movement, while accusing a single medium among many makes little difference. The routinization of other aspects of the early movement similarly diluted their power. The concentration of all the early miraculous cures onto Yang as the Redeemer of Sickness, for instance, simply removed such cures from the daily repertoire of the movement. While the title appeared over and over again after the movement left Guangxi, no evidence points to any actual curing. A direct proof of God’s power had devolved into a mere formalism.
The other major early proof of God’s power – temple destruction -continued unabated throughout the movement, but it also lost its original potency. What once appeared as God’s challenge to the local gods simply became an act of military destruction. Attacks on temples no longer formed part of an effort to make a positive claim for Christianity; they were just attacks on temples. The new religion itself saw very little propagation on the ground after the Guangxi period (Li and Liu, 1989:1-36). The failure of the Taiping as a religious movement outside of Guangxi also helps to explain why no trace of the religion remained after the military destruction of the rebellion, in great contrast to the White Lotus ideology that no military victory ever managed to stamp out.
CONCLUSION
In some ways, the Taiping pursued a Weberian path of rationalizing authority, at least from a situation with very little established authority to a clear case of charismatic authority. Any form of authority had largely broken down during the period of the uncontrolled spirit possessions. By the 1850s, however, they had imposed a new order. Like Weber’s ideal type, the Taiping had charismatic leadership with supernatural properties, followers who lived in a communal order under the leader, and an economy based on gifts and booty more than pursuit of a regular income (Weber, 1978:242-245). They had the succession problems that Weber would have expected in the struggle with Yang Xiuqing. While a few areas grew more routinized, especially military and official ranks, the system remained primarily charismatic. Weber did not directly discuss this kind of transformation from no authority to charismatic authority, but it seems broadly consistent with his general push from less to more “rational” authority.
Yet for all Weber’s insights, a focus only on an evolution toward more rational authority bypasses some of the most critical dynamics of the early God Worshipers. In fact, one of the movement’s most crucial prerequisites was the initial move away from rational authority as the people of Xunzhou made Hong’s ideas their own, changing them fundamentally in the process. Running Weber in reverse, they took over Hong’s original religion, overwhelming it with new interpretive directions based on their own lives. By its nature, such overloading also undercut existing authority by leaving meaning up for grabs. The possessions of 1849 reached the zenith of anti-rationalization, where each new voice suggested a new ultimate meaning, but the multitude of competing voices thwarted any single unification by undercutting all authoritative institutions of interpretation.
While reading Weber quite properly suggests the organizational disadvantages of such a situation, it also leads us to underplay the advantages of saturation, which had been at the core of the God Worshipers’ success. That initial hijacking of Hong’s Christianity built the movement through legitimizing and emotionally powerful trance performances, by transcending conventional social and cultural boundaries in direct speech from the gods, and in the ability to make God sensible locally through curing and competition with other gods. The surfeit of meaning and inevitable breakdown of authority that accompanied it made the Taiping rebellion possible; the effervescent energy of overflowing meanings pulled followers to the movement. At the same time, of course, the situation planted the seeds of its own destruction in divisiveness and resistance to any new structures of authority.
More than just a push toward greater rationalization, a constant tension between overloading meaning and rationalizing simplification drove the system. As meaning became more heavily loaded and social relations of interpretation weakened throughout the 1840s, the threat to the survival of the movement created a powerful incentive for imposing a single dominant view, even as new followers flocked in. The Taiping surmounted this first level of difficulty by channeling interpretation through the mouths of two top leaders. Yet this thinned-out resolution soon showed its own new limitations, shackling the movement to a religious ideology with little appeal outside of its base area, and finally contributing to insoluble dissension among the Taiping leaders.
Perhaps most important of all, the Taiping experience suggests that the very process of centralizing interpretive authority creates new free space for alternative interpretations.47 As interpretation united around a single voice, systematically impoverishing the rich and noisy mixture of possible interpretations in order to establish control, it also threw away the power and conviction of the earlier situation. Personal experience made the possessions and cures of the early God Worshipers convincingly legitimate. As soon as those wild early scenes paled into Yang’s distant interpretations of his own dreams and formal enfeoffment as Redeemer of Sickness, official Taiping interpretation became open to doubt.
Centralization of meaning inevitably accompanied centralization of authority as it created new social relations of interpretation. Yet that process itself created twin problems: thin and formalized interpretations lost their inherent power to convince, and the clear ties between political institution and official interpretation opened the possibility that leaders simply acted for their own benefit. These two problems killed Yang Xiuqing, as his speaking for God no longer convinced anyone, even among the original leaders, and his motives thus appeared cavalierly self-serving. New followers continued to join in great numbers after the movement was formalized, but we no longer see any evidence of religious enthusiasm, or even much basic understanding of Taiping religious principle among these newcomers. The complete disappearance of Taiping beliefs after their military defeat confirmed their inability to make imposed interpretations into the powerful recruiting tool that saturation had been.
The Taiping movement thus suggests that the chaotic meaning and the move away from rational authority in the 1840s had important benefits as well as causing organizational problems, and that the later unification caused new problems even as it rationalized authority. The Taiping did not progress simply to better forms of organization. Instead it pushed and pulled against competing pressures to complicate and simplify interpretation. Each new phase created the conditions for the next transformation, and each transformation brought its own history that differentiated it from any earlier phase. Hong’s original ideology of 1844 differed dramatically from the new one in 1850, in ways that tied in detail to the very local experience of the movement. Yet each saturation contained the seeds of a new precipitation and each precipitation opened new free spaces for saturation.
The Taiping also suggests that overloading and simplifying meaning may occur through different processes. The multiplication of meanings can occur through a slow dissolution, much as Hong’s original Christianity gradually merged with local ideas in several steps over a number of years. The inevitable free space, where interpretive communities are weak, allows the continuous addition of new lines of interpretation and the possibility of leaving things uninterpreted. Unification around a single dominant interpretation, however, requires a massive investment of energy and may take place as a sudden transformation. Taiping metamorphosis into an elaborate ideology clearly articulated as rebellion was no simple cultural reinterpretation. Reinterpretation by enforcing a single reading required thorough social transformation as the new leadership forcefully silenced opposition and forged new social relations of interpretive (and social) control.
The Taiping rebellion fits anyone’s definition of resistance. Yet this conclusion, which is so obvious in the clear vision of hindsight, should not mislead us into reading resistance into its earliest roots. The early God Worshipers in fact bring us directly back to the arguments about accommodation and resistance, to the complex realities of interpretation and institution, with which I began. From Hong’s original vision through most of the 1840s, the God Worshipers may have exemplified cultural difference, but resistance was only one of many potential readings. The Xunzhou region of Guangxi offered an extraordinarily free space for alternative interpretations in the 1840s, with a weak state, plentiful bandits, ethnic strife, a strong tradition of spirit possession, and generally weak religious interpretive communities. Such massively free space created interpretive opportunities of all kinds, deluging the local world with a flood of possibilities by no means limited to active resistance. Even though Taiping claims about God and the brotherhood of all questioned social boundaries, and therefore made a political interpretation plausible, it still remained only one possibility.
That single reading as resistance became louder as Yang and Xiao expanded their influence in the late 1840s, but it could not dominate the movement until the multiple voices of spirit possession were silenced. The key transformations occurred very quickly in late 1849 and 1850 with a massive mobilization of interpretive authority and social reorganization under the influence of looming internal chaos and external pressure. With the new interpretive authority, real resistance could begin.
The early God Worshiper movement did not simply presage massive rural unrest. Its beginnings quite fundamentally resembled other centers of complexly indeterminate meaning around the world, whose so-called cultural resistance never erupted into a movement of any kind. The Taiping movement’s differences from other such cases lay less in the content of that early mixture than in its ability to resolve the competing voices into a single chorus by forging new social relations of interpretation.
As I now turn from the Taiping to a contemporary Taiwanese ghost temple, I will again begin with free space, multiple meanings, and centers of possible alternative interpretations. The apparently enormous differences between the two cases – one a shattering rebellion and the other a politically quiescent religious oddity -should not disguise the fundamental similarity of the processes in both cases. For Taiwan, however, hindsight provides no benefits. In spite of many attempts to force a unified interpretation there, the solution still remains saturated, and any potential political resistance remains unrealized. If the similarities help to reveal the nature of indeterminate meanings, the contrasts clarify the great difficulties of achieving interpretive control.
Chapter 12
Irony, Cynicism, and Potential Resistance
Both recent theories of socialism and the evidence from China thus suggest that totalizing institutions never have complete control. The resulting free space has always been there, but has grown increasingly obvious in China over the last decade, as the reforms have encouraged departures from strict state control. Such alternative social relations guarantee that cultural domination can never be total, because the institutions of official interpretation themselves have inherent limits. This chapter will follow how the space created by reciprocal ties, family life, and even political small groups has fostered ambiguous interpretations and refusals to interpret that deflect and deform the campaign for a unified, official reading of Tiananmen.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL DOMINATION
Official socialist language rests on claims of science; it is impersonal, passive, universalizing and explicit. It offers History, not histories (Lefort, 1986:222). Such thin interpretation is far easier to control than overloaded symbolism, but it is also far less powerful. In addition, it leaves itself open to question in ways that messier meaning does not. As any real bureaucrat knows, there is safety in ambiguity, no matter what the Weberian pressures to rationalize. Clear statements allow for dear criticisms.
Thin, official language immediately generates its own problems. Real social experience, after all, creates many histories that can never fully match History. The anonymous and universal truth of science also contradicts the real divisions in the society, especially between the leadership and the masses. Individuals thus experience an abstract discourse about the identity of all the People, yet also place the origins of such language in the centers of real power that the discourse itself denies (Lefort, 1986:220-222).74 In practice, the system has created a deep distrust of official language, and a reaction that undercuts the goals of official interpretation. The reaction does not directly oppose the line – censorship largely prevents alternative precipitations that would constitute open resistance. Instead, it overloads meaning in a constant search for alternative messages, or a refusal to see any explicit message. As people themselves feel the need to communicate between the lines, they begin to read all language the same way, with a cynical view toward the hidden significances. Seeing ostensibly scientific discourse as allegory immediately vitiates its power.
Distrust of the thin discourse of control, for example, leads people to personalize all information according to the trustworthiness of the source, and thus undercuts its claimed anonymity (Schopflin, 1991:13). Schopflin argues further that eastern European samizdat literature developed techniques of inference and allegory to the point that genuine communication suffered: “Intended to side-step the problem of censorship and self-censorship in the Kadar period, the language of the Hungarian opposition was as convoluted as that of officialdom. Czech and Polish patterns were not that different” (Schopflin, 1991:8). These convolutions were crucially important, because they pushed all reading toward the search for multiple meanings, sapping the strength of any official language.
In Poland in the 1980s, where the split between people and state had torn wide apart, official language underwent a systematic but subtle transformation in unofficial talk, forming what Wierzbicka calls an anti-totalitarian language (Wierzbicka, 1990). Uninflected acronyms in official language grew inflections and sometimes changed gender in popular discourse. Bits of Russian – a language that everyone studied but no one learned – also appeared in ironically altered forms in daily speech (Wierzbicka, 1990:6). Nothing directly resisted, but the added nuances undermined the dominating simplicity of official, controlled discourse.
Thom sees a similar process leading to a refusal of all interpretation in the Soviet Union. What she calls the “wooden language” of Soviet officialdom provoked a general distrust of all language. “This instinctive rejection of the deceitful word is the origin of what one might call ‘lyrical consciousness.’ The search for a reality beyond words involves an act of empathy towards things, especially towards nature. Often it takes the form of a longing for friendly speechless human contacts” (Thom, 1989:144). Here the reaction repudiates all explicit interpretation.
This process typifies repressive language anywhere; it responds to cultural domination generally, rather than to socialism in particular. Such uses of irony and allegory simply carry to an extreme the fate of the official language in Taiwan that I have already discussed. Studies of non-socialist authoritarian or Fascist regimes show very similar developments. In Fascist Italy, “One can detect, in the absence of freedom of expression, an increased propensity to grasp double meanings. One need only scan the newspapers of the Fascist period to note the recurrence of so-called puns – plainly silly and almost meaningless remarks which suggest that the general repression had turned everything into a laughing matter” (Passerini, 1987:86).
Two retired textile workers related a comparable story from Portugal under Salazar, where the Minister of Education had been speaking to a crowd of workers. As he was promising all the wonders that the government would do for the workers, someone loudly sighed in the back, “Oh, if only it were so!” The offender was hustled out of the meeting, but not before his comment had brought the entire ceremony to a grinding end (Ingerson, 1984:7). Typical irony, the statement allowed multiple interpretations. Even many years after the fact, the two old workers still could not agree on an interpretation. One insisted on a reading as sarcasm, but the other felt it could have been sympathy (Ingerson, 1984:7-8). Multivocality is key to surviving censorship. While the inherent ambiguities of saturation make for only ambiguous resistance, they also perform the crucial function of forcing all official language to be read for its own ambiguities, ironies, and multiple meanings. As irony becomes the way of writing, cynicism becomes the way of reading. The dominating power of thin, official, “rational” discourse thus finds itself undercut from the beginning, even in the absence of any direct resistance.
Anthropologists dedicated to fieldwork tend to scoff at China watchers who read entire political movements out of which official stands where in photographs of a public ceremony. My attitude toward such data changed, however, when I lived in China and realized that many Chinese were staring at those same photographs and drawing the same kinds of conclusions from them. China had always valued messages delivered between the lines, but life under the current regime has perfected the art. All official language claims to be transparently thin, yet all of it is combed for hidden possibilities. Perhaps only in China could a historical play (Hai Rui Dismissed from Office) have touched off the Cultural Revolution, with arguments raging over its proper allegorical reading as a possible criticism of Mao.75
More than forty years of Chinese experience with mercurially changing political winds have deepened the cynicism greeting any new campaign. Especially after the Cultural Revolution, people have perfected strategies for survival. They know exactly how to manipulate small group sessions to minimize damage.76 The result has been an array of irony, cynicism and anomie that has powerfully deflected the current campaign without ever resisting it directly. The transparence and frailty of official Chinese language, like all very controlled discourse, make it vulnerable to the accretion of new meanings where institutional domination is weaker.
The very nature of this process, however, makes evidence problematic and difficult to interpret. Successful irony, like sighing “if only it were so,” always leaves one unsure of actual intention. After so many decades of campaigns, Chinese are quick studies of the new line, and will speak it immediately. People certainly offer a great deal of surface cooperation to the current post-Tiananmen campaigns. Suggestions of alternatives come primarily in the dissident and foreign press, which generally promote readings as resistance whenever possible. Nevertheless, a great deal of evidence suggests the very marginal success of this campaign, in spite of superficial appearances. Unofficial levels of meaning churn beneath the surface, although very little actually boils up as identifiable resistance.
In the least successful such cases, a hidden alternative meaning clearly constitutes resistance. The best known example in China recently was the poem that appeared in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily (20 March 1991). It appeared to be a wistful and sentimental bit of patriotic nostalgia, penned by an overseas student longing for his homeland. Word quickly spread, however, that the Chinese characters could also be read along the diagonal to render up a denunciation of Li Peng. Such secret messages are neither ironic nor really saturated. For those who know the trick the true meaning can be identified in a moment. The government, of course, could also identify the true meaning and fired the responsible editor (New York Times, 30 April 1991)
A more subtle attempt at subversion occurred on national television during the demonstrations themselves. The official news readers on CCTV read the announcement of martial law dressed in black and spoke as if delivering a funeral eulogy for a fallen leader (Esherick and Wasserstrom, 1990:841). Here again the death symbolism allowed many strands of interpretation from mourning for Hu Yaobang, to sympathy for the students, to protest against martial law. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence that they wore black that day. Yet once again the government found the irony not subtle enough. Apparently feeling that the performance veiled a hidden message of protest, the government fired the two news readers (New York Times, 18 November 1990: A23).
More successful attempts would have to be more difficult to interpret. Newspaper headlines, even in the ultimately official People’s Daily, offered several good examples. For instance, on 22 May 1989, just two days after martial law had been declared, the paper carried a front page report on the prime minister of Hungary, who said troops should never be used to solve a political crisis, and criticized Stalin for using troops for internal political suppression (Yi and Thompson, 1989:139). A few days after the bloody end of the demonstrations, the overseas edition of the People’s Daily reported Kim Dae-jung’s comments on the Kwangju uprising in Korea under the headline, “Punish by Law the Arch-Criminals Who Have Suppressed the People’s Uprising” (Yi and Thompson 1989:140). A few days later, the national edition similarly carried a headline reading “The North Korea Labor News Criticizes Roh Tai Woo’s Fascist Regime, Which Indiscriminately Kills Innocent Students and Bystanders” (New York Times, 22 June 1989: A10). These are perfectly correct, politically acceptable stories for the official press, and I know of no heads that rolled on their account. Yet given the timing no one needed secret instructions about diagonal readings to wonder if extra meanings might lie beneath the surface. The ambiguity was total; no one will ever determine the “true” meaning of these headlines.
Even apparently clear acts of resistance could grow muddled enough to avoid retribution. An old peasant in a suburban Beijing commune disabled a tank that got stuck in the mud. When security officers later tracked him down villagers claimed the man was somewhat mentally retarded, and he was finally released (Chance and Engst, 1991:181). Stupidity has always been a good veil for passive workplace resistance, and served its function just as well here. Perhaps, after all, he really was retarded.
Music and the other arts provided ample opportunities for multiple interpretations, not always intended by the artist. In Kunming, for example, the audience was watching a historical movie about the revolutionary period, which fit the campaign of nostalgia for old cadres. Yet the first time Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek], the old arch-enemy, appeared on the screen, the crowd broke into spontaneous applause (New York Times, 22 September 1989: A4).
In quite another use of film, a large group of students at a Fuzhou university tramped around their campus late one night in 1990, banging on pots and pans and singing a lyric from the film Red Sorghum at the top of their lungs: “Little sister, boldly go forward, go forward! Don’t turn back!” (Shang, 1990:104). This performance left several interpretations open. Perhaps the students were just singing a song they liked. The lyrics sounded officially acceptable, but perhaps they referred to the Tiananmen demonstrators. The carnivalesque fanfare overwhelmed official performance, but no proper interpretation was clear.
Another musical case centered on a Beijing man who played funeral dirges – the sort of thing heard on the radio when a top leader dies – as loud as his stereo could manage. The neighbors yelled out the windows, asking who died, and the man answered “Not Deng Xiaoping, and not Li Peng either! Just a distant grand-uncle.” The police came to investigate, and the man insisted he just liked dirges the way other people like pop music. He kept playing his record, every day (Yu, 1991). Here was still more overloaded funeral saturation. Like the other cases, it contained too many possible meanings, which the government found impossible to sort out.
The most famous musical case is Cui Jian, a sort of unofficial poet of the student movement. His song “The Last Gunshot” never mentions the events of 4 June, but audiences draw their own conclusions. During a performance of the song in Guangzhou many members of the audience lit and waved cigarette lighters. Audiences also wave red doth during another song “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Xian, 1991), reminiscent of the tangled possibilities of the red flags at Tiananmen. While most of his audiences might argue that the interpretation as protest is clear in context, enough official meaning still remains for Cui Jian’s lyrics consistently to evade the censors as he releases new recordings (Peters 1991).
Rather than proposing alternative meanings, people can denature official meanings through too much enthusiasm. This has been a problem for the current nostalgia campaign, as a recent T-shirt craze showed. Some T-shirts bore radical Maoist slogans from the Cultural Revolution days. Quotes from Mao included “Never forget class struggle,” “A single spark can start a prairie fire,” and “Sweep away all vermin” (South China Morning Post, 2 July 1991; Barone, 1991). Strongly recalling the days when Lei Feng first became an official campaigns the sudden resurgence of Mao seems meekly appropriate. Yet both the unorthodox medium and the current context encourage alternative readings as either ridicule of the campaign or as calls to resistance. Again, the students wearing these shirts may intend protest, but the explicit form always allows them to deny any such intent
In a similarly two-edged memory of the Cultural Revolution, middle-aged urban workers and cadres have been returning in droves to the rural villages they lived in when they were sent down to the countryside during the campaigns of twenty years ago (Ouyang, 1990). At the same time, cassettes of Cultural Revolution songs set to a pop beat have become runaway bestsellers (New York Times, 2 June 1992). Nothing here indicates resistance to the government, yet the shirts, the village visits, and the music entail entirely too much cooperation in nostalgia, commemorating the wrong things. By using the exact language of previous campaigns, the T-shirts especially called all slogans and all campaigns into question.
Rather than smothering the campaign with too much cooperative meaning one can also suffocate it with a lack of any interpretation. Like a work-to-rule labor action, where minimal compliance to the absolute letter of the law disrupts work campaigns can be met with great ennui underneath a surface of minimal cooperation. Other T-shirts show this pattern, with a kind of celebration of apathy:
“Really exhausted,” “I’m depressed! Leave me alone!”, “Bored” (South China Morning Post, 2 July 1991). In a hopeless attempt to stop this sort of thing, the government has made “unhealthy” slogans on T-shirts illegal New York Times, 29 July 1991: A4). In practice, however, they simply cannot control every medium for expressing inappropriate messages. A similar craze for signs on dormitory doors swept college campuses at the same time. They ranged from “Love Nest” to “Hall of Boredom” to “Small Appliances Repaired” (Wang, 1991).
This is less irony than a refusal to engage in the first place. Anomie, in fact, seems to be the most widespread response to the entire situation. Purely pro forma mutual self-criticism now makes political study groups a matter of bored routine, even in the military (e.g., Shi, 1990:19; Li, 1990). A questionnaire administered by Beijing University’s graduate student association to their members showed a consistent depressed boredom with everything. When asked what feelings were on campus, a plurality answered that no one felt like doing anything; the next most popular answer described everyone as depressed. The plurality said the greatest current interest on campus was fun, without regard to the consequences. The only enthusiasm at all was for finding a way to go abroad. A majority even claimed that they just would not care if a new student movement began (“Beijing…”, 1990).
Such an attitude refuses to embrace any kind of interpretation. It poses no alternatives to the official version of things, but it makes equally clear that acceptance of the official version is only for convenience. The dissident press, from which many of these examples come, often sees them as evidence of resistance. Beneath the ennui or the nostalgic returns to the countryside, they imply, lies a counter-ideology awaiting its opportunity to come above ground. Yet such a view, like seeing Taiwanese pigs as champions of ethnicity, forces an explicit interpretation where none exists for most people.
Aside from the rare acrostic poem or actual act of sabotage, the official campaign falters not against a rock of resistance, but by drowning in a sea of wider meanings. People accept the campaign, conduct their political study, and perform self-criticisms. Yet they also manipulate the system for their own survival, and sit quietly by as others do the same. By recycling bits of old campaigns in T-shirt slogans, trips to the old Cultural Revolution countryside, and loud funeral music, people also add a questioning subtext to the claims of the new campaign. The universal socialist truths claimed in the latest campaign stumble across the detritus of old ones, never quite sufficiently forgotten. Anomie itself undercuts official meaning, which requires enthusiastic participation from everyone, not just passive acceptance. None of this constitutes an explicit oppositional ideology. If such a reading ever becomes clear enough, it will be crushed, as happened to the fired newspaper editor and news readers. The anomie is real; so is the nostalgia, and so, for that matter, is the obedient following of the campaign.
The language of official meaning is always explicit, orderly and rationalized. Yet every time language approaches such a stiff monotone, a new process of accretion adds meaning outside the institutions of control. The very transparency of official language encourages questioning its motives and claims of universality. Just such a process transformed many Taiping leaders’ view of Yang Xiuqing from the voice of God, who had to be followed, to a self-aggrandizing fake, who had to be killed. Yang’s monopoly on power at the end allowed new interpretations to undermine his claim to divine inspiration. Similarly, official ideology in Taiwan faded fast after the political relaxation of the mid-1980s. Exactly the same disintegration of meaning is occurring with the current campaign in the People’s Republic, in spite of the powerful institutions of interpretation. The form of official language itself creates its own reaction.
IDENTITY AND THE SELFLESS SELF
The system of campaigns and small group political study in part tries to accomplish the atomization of individuals that totalitarian theory expects, linking each unit directly to the state as a cog in the machine of the People as a whole. Campaigns starring heroes like Lei Feng and Lai Ning particularly aim to create a proper sense of the selfless self, dedicated to the common good over any personal or personalistic interests. The People as state leave no room for separate institutions of civil society, at least in principle. Yet in practice, as we have seen, socialist society leaves enormous territories of free space, and issues of identity become especially problematic.
Several studies of socialist and fascist states have shown how the effort to atomize individuals and to create institutions of control can rebound against its intended purposes. Istvan Rev, for example, wrote about the advantages of being atomized in socialist Hungary:
“Since complete coercion can be maintained only by granting power to individuals at all points of the system, the individuals are not completely powerless … Although the individual’s power is but part of the structure of the system – it was delegated to him in order to guard the existing power relations – and there is no other ground of resistance but the ground created by the same system, still, resistance even on the terms of the system may be fateful for the political structure” (Rev, 1987347). Writing two years before the velvet revolution, he would soon be proved right. An analysis of Italian fascism similarly concluded that the very organizations intended to suppress class conflict forced the regime to respond to public opinion (De Grazia, 1981:226, 233).
The challenge to socialist identity shows up clearly in images of the body. Lefort describes the totalitarian body as a series of synecdoches where the head represents and merges with the body as a whole. The proletariat is the head of the whole people and stands for the people as a whole. In just the same way, the Party heads the proletariat, the leadership heads the Party, and the “egocrat” heads the leadership as the ultimate embodiment of the people (Lefort, 1986:299). Every individual both reproduces and constitutes the body of the People, each contributing to its health anonymously and identically. This kind of attempt in China peaked during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao embodied the People. Presentation of self became a monotone, not because a uniform was required, but because socialist workers have a certain look. Their clothes are cheap but durable, their haircuts are practical, and their eyes shine with enthusiasm. They have no interest in creating themselves as unique individuals or members of other groups through makeup or unique dress; they are dedicated to the common cause of the People. The Lei Feng campaign tried to epitomize and enforce this selfless self during the Cultural Revolution. His revitalization now indicates how far the state feels identity in practice has escaped from its control.
Even during the Cultural Revolution, none of this fully worked. One heard, for example, that looking at the feet let you distinguish rank even when cadres wore the same workers’ clothes as everyone else. The quality of the shoes indicated the importance of the wearer. While alternative versions of identity always snuck through the cracks, the economic reforms of the 1980s consciously brought a great relaxation in direct attempts to control personal identity, as long as no clear threats to the state appeared. Household decoration in the 1980s, for example, increasingly abandoned state symbolism like portraits of Mao in favor of the traces of family history. The furnishings reflected family structure and interests, and the dominant decorations were photographs of children, important family occasions, and recent ancestors (Davis, 1989:95-96).
Dress and personal decoration have emphasized the new freedom to express a self apart from the body of the whole People. Dress had become strikingly more varied by 1985 than it had been in 1980. Far more than just a reaction to more easily available consumer goods, dress has become a vehicle to show a self beyond Lei Feng. Young women now often prefer frilly dresses and curled hair. The image of the proletarian is gone, even for actual workers. Many women now transform their faces through a cosmetics fad (New York Times, 6 May 1990,1:16); young men do the same with sunglasses. Raised heels, equally popular with men and women, change how people move. Clothing for children particularly expresses both individuality and conspicuous consumption. They gleam with bright colors and cute hats; children still unable to walk often wear leather shoes that their parents cannot afford for themselves. Clothing and personal decoration have opened up an enormous new range for the expression of new kinds of identity, from eccentric individuality to affiliation with new kinds of groups. All depart from the uniformity of the totalitarian body.
Names and titles form another quick marker of identity that has been in flux. In naming babies, for example, the old politically correct names have given way to new kinds of identity. Names in the People’s Republic have typically denoted the baby as a carrier of socialist political value; for instance, the most common character in Cultural Revolution names was Hong (red). In the last decade, however, names have grown far less political, often speaking to values of wealth or cultural sophistication (New York Times, 30 November 1990: Al). Names no longer mark dedication to the shared ideals of the single People.
Titles of address have undergone an even clearer transformation. Since the Revolution, “comrade” has supported the official leveling of everyone: the term is anonymous, egalitarian, and appropriate to everyone on any occasion. In the early years, other terms clearly marked workers (the true “people”) from the less desirable bourgeoisie. Shifu (master craftsman) marked even more respect than “comrade,” but could only be used for workers and peasants (Ju, 1991). The bourgeoisie were stuck with the old terms, suddenly seen as embarrassing in the first years after the revolution: xiansheng (literally, first-born) for men and xiaojie (literally, little elder sister) for women. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, the division had become less relevant; anyone could be a “master craftsman” and no one had to be a xiansheng.
By the time I lived in China in the mid-1980s, however, all of this was in flux. “Comrade” had become a slightly rude way of getting attention from a stranger on the street. Its only other regular use was the formulaic address of top leaders, like calling Deng “Comrade Xiaoping.” Its slow death has continued since, as any sense of the totalitarian body it really addressed has decreased. By 1990, even official television newscasters had abandoned the standard opening of “comrades, hello” for “viewers, hello” (New York Times, 18 November 1990: A23). While “master craftsman” still holds its own as a more polite alternative to “comrade,” especially for people like servants or janitors, the strongest trend has been toward a revival of the prerevolutionary usage still thriving in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Xiansheng and xiaojie, along with other terms for older people, distinguish gender, age and rank in ways that “comrade” had attempted to dissolve. Of course, those distinctions had continued to exist all along – socialist China is very hierarchical under the surface. Yet the change in address terms indicates an undermining of that official ideology of the totalitarian body. Without ever denying the official line, all of these changes in identity created a host of new possibilities.
The current qigong exercise craze offers a striking alternative to the totalitarian body. Qigong develops techniques for manipulating the body’s flow of qi, the vital force that motivates the entire world. Qi flows through everything in its various forms. We can see it most easily flowing in the sinuous mountain ranges and sudden peaks that Chinese landscape artists love, and in the old, twisted trees and rocks that may become objects of popular worship. Daoist medita- tion manipulated qi within the body to form a healthy balance, and the soft forms of martial arts relied on qi to create power. Qigong exercise routines resemble the slow movements of taijiquan, but without the martial aspects. Groups typically exercise under the guidance of a master, sometimes filling large sports stadiums every morning.
Chinese authorities estimate about 60 million regular followers now (New York Times, 4 September 1990; Ouyang, 1990). Adepts can direct their flow of qi through the hands to accomplish feats like lighting light bulbs or emitting heat rays. Beyond general exercise and health, the most important function is curing by laying on of hands. The sessions can become quite dramatic. When the exercises begin to take effect and the flow of qi in the body suddenly changes, new adepts may fa qi (release qi), writhing or shaking in uncontrollable fits strongly reminiscent of spirit possession. Here a sort of Daoist body has replaced the totalitarian body, overwhelming it with its tangible demonstration of power in curing and released qi, much as the initial God Worshiper curings and mass possessions had demonstrated their power. This body is a microcosm of the forces that make up the entire universe, not just the body politic. It also allows the possibility of tremendous individual power to anyone, inherent in their own bodies, and very different from the single body of the People. Qigong challenges the state’s power to mold identity, and the state has moved to discourage it.
The enormous resurgence of religion in the last decade also suggests a relocation of identity. While the great interest in Christianity still affects only a small portion of the population, the revitalization of Chinese popular religion strikes one everywhere. I arrived in Guiping County to work on the Taiping on Guanyin’s birthday. A major local temple to Guanyin, rebuilt after the Cultural Revolution, stood on a hill near the county seat. Worshipers covered the hill, and incense and paper money adorned every tree and rock on the path up to the temple. I have already mentioned the local cadres’ tales of powerful spirit mediums. Even more striking were the numbers of newly constructed neighborhood Earth God (She Gong, called Tudi Gong in other areas) temples everywhere. Such temples are by far the most common new religious construction throughout south China. As I rode the bus through the countryside on the annual grave-sweeping day (Qingming), I could see people everywhere taking care of their ancestors. Ancestor worship at home has also again grown commonplace. The fastest growing sides of popular ritual thus appear to be the most local (Earth Gods) and the most family-oriented. Worship of higher gods, with their implied bureaucratic hierarchy and national loyalties, lags behind. The revival of religion not only slaps at official scientific socialism, but it highlights strictly local and family loyalties at the expense of the state. The revival clearly ties most closely to those economic, social, and kinship institutions that avoid total control (Anagnost, 1987).
Mao himself has been one of the liveliest figures in the renewal of popular ritual. Areas of central China flooded in 1991 suddenly sold out of more than 100,000 copies of Mao’s portrait just before the lunar new year in 1992. People were pasting him to their front doors, just as they used to put up a new image of the Wealth God each year in the old days (South China Morning Post, 7 February 1992). Little Maos also hang from rear-view mirrors in cars all over China, much as amulets from the Eighteen Lords temple do in Taiwan (New York Times, 2 June 1992). This usurpation of the rights to Mao’s legacy forms part of the new revival of religion, and also part of the nostalgia craze that both follows and abuses the government’s official campaigns.
While I have argued that all of these reactions lie inherent in the nature of cultural control in China, the state has also allowed them to become far more openly expressed in the last decade by promising people more personal space. Yet the government has also been surprised and dismayed by the result. Even before the Tiananmen events, the government had been trying to reassert cultural control through a campaign against spiritual pollution, a socialist education campaign, and less systematic attacks on particularly upsetting changes. Along the same lines, they have banned “unhealthy” T-shirts, placed limits on qigong assemblies and accused some masters of just taking money from the gullible (identical to their attacks on spirit mediums), and lobbied for the use of “comrade” (New York Times, 4 September 1990,18 November 1990). A self-proclaimed Buddha of the future in central Guangxi, leading his followers to the new age, had been executed for fomenting rebellion shortly before I got to Guangxi.78 Yet none of this has had much effect, because too many institutions out of their control provide a free space for alternatives to the old drone of Lei Feng and his selfless self, and their ambiguous messages never resist explicitly.
ORGANIZATION AND RESISTANCE
Let me again pose my usual question: in what sense is any of this resistance? The actual demonstrations and demands in Tiananmen in 1989 clearly constituted the beginnings of resistance. For a few weeks, at least, the head ceased to stand for the entire body, and instead stood opposed to the body. In spite of their ambiguities and inconsistencies, the demonstrators still shared a demand for change. The general saturation left the type of change completely unclear – some implied revolution, others evolution, and others simply patchwork reforms. The broad symbolism of white mourning and red revolution left room for all kinds of interpretation. Like the early God Worshipers, the very messiness of interpretation widened and empowered the appeal of the movement. Unlike the Taiping, however, they were crushed before they could develop the lasting institutions that might have created long-term pressure to change. The situation is far less clear for the kinds of ironic language and shifting identity that characterized the period after that eventful spring. The literature on socialism tends to show the usual splits between people who see mostly cultural domination and those who instead see mostly cultural resistance, just as I have discussed for other contexts. Some emphasize the absolute hegemony of the official discourse, and treat the messy ambiguities of anything else as evidence for the success of cultural control (e.g.. Thom, 1989; Schopflin, 1991). Others instead find a hidden but fully fledged discourse of resistance in such language (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1990). Much the same argument has taken place over the religious revival in China. Some emphasize religion as anti-hegemonic resistance, while others see the revival primarily as “new interpretations of tradition under the powerful influence of the Marxist state” (Siu, 1989a:ll; see also Anagnost, 1987; Siu, 1989b:135 no.3).
The arguments, as usual, have no resolution because they stem from an insistence on reading a single, clear interpretation as resistance or acquiescence where none need exist. The potential to develop organized and explicit resistance clearly lies within the multiple possibilities of these ironies, ambiguities, and refusals to interpret. The key questions for resistance lie less in finding some deeper level of meaning, than in understanding the chances for forging that critical combination of institution and interpretation that might support an active movement. The Taiping succeeded in this project, Taiwanese ghosts will probably never manage it, and Tiananmen was crushed before the process went very far.
Classic totalitarian theory was very pessimistic about the possibilities for internal change of such systems. They saw the mechanisms of cultural control as ultimately effective: “the population of a Communist country is on balance inclined to fight for its unfreedom against those who wish to free it” (Zinoviev, 1984:257). Hannah Arendt wrote in a largely similar tone about totalitarianism, although she left a small opening for external change in the antisocial nature of such regimes (Arendt, 1958:478). Yet the obvious evidence from eastern Europe in 1989 clarified just how shallow totalizing control can be. External changes in the Soviet Union may have been a necessary precursor to the east European changes, but they can never explain the speed and power of the flight from socialism.
I have argued that the totalizing project never succeeds completely. Through its own action it creates personal networks, family ties, and social organizations that lie outside of its direct power. The question for internal resistance centers on how much these institutions can organize new kinds of interpretations as opposition. In some cases, religion has been the natural organ, where states allowed it to continue for tactical reasons. The Catholic Church played such a role in Poland, and the Protestant churches to a lesser extent in East Germany. Islam under the tightly controlling (but not at all socialist) regime of the Shah of Iran played a similar role, offering a free space for alternative interpretations which eventually crystallized into direct opposition. The union movement also took on such a role in Poland, against all odds. In many non-socialist regimes that nevertheless exerted powerful pressures toward cultural domination, the relative independence of the economic sector has allowed organization toward reform to thrive – the recent examples of Argentina, Chile and Taiwan come to mind, along with many others.
Yet China resembles Czechoslovakia or Hungary much more than it does Poland. It has neither a Solidarity nor an independently organized Church. Unlike Christianity in Europe, Chinese popular religion has never had nation-wide or even regional organization that could make it an obvious political actor. China has been scrupulous in crushing or coopting every kind of competing organization on any large scale. Only the very local and weakly organized phenomena I have been discussing remain – neighborhood and family religion, unofficial linguistic usage, overly solidary small groups, new signs of personal identity, and so on. Yet these mini-institutions in fact riddle the apparently omnipotent structure of control with holes lying beyond its control. The denial of histories for History, the hiding of real distinctions as shared identity, the empowerment of individuals and small groups by setting them to watch each other, and even the very transparency of official language conspire to create these gaps. The bits of alternative social structure deflect cultural domination by offering free spaces away from official interpretation.
The Chinese state has successfully inhibited any developments that might have fostered the precipitation of an organized ideology of resistance. The initial shock of the Tiananmen demonstrations, after all, was that the government allowed them to develop as far as they did. Yet far from cementing their ideological dominance, the system of control has instead created an overloaded quicksand. The omnipresent pockets of free space nourish all kinds of alternative interpretations, and also protect the possibility of no interpretation, which so many people express through the growing anomie. The state prevents any newly organized alternative interpretation from thriving, but the same mechanisms prevent it from successfully propagating its own.
The disorganized indeterminacy of these areas beyond direct control determines both their greatest weakness and their greatest strength. Their ambiguous interpretation and organizational weakness make it very difficult to imagine how they could develop the institutional base to become straightforward resistance. In addition, if the opportunity to develop something new ever comes, they will find it very difficult to come to any quick agreement on what to do. The events in Tiananmen showed the dangers, as unanimous positions became increasingly untenable. Much of the current political crisis in east Europe similarly rests on the impossibility of developing any unity, beyond a shared sense of opposition, under the old regime.
Yet these areas also manage both to defuse attempts at official control and to breed a bounty of new possibilities. As in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, they make the cultural base of the regime far weaker than at first appears. Their disorganization and ambiguity prevent them from becoming targets; irony survives censorship precisely because meaning cannot be pinned down. They form islands of potential creativity, ready to yield up their treasures when the opportunity comes.
CONCLUSION
Post-structuralist theory has honed the tools to deconstruct systematic structures of interpretation, shaking them to bits along hidden fault lines, and leaving behind tangled scraps of inconsistent meaning. Its vision of surplus meaning hiding everywhere in the cracks of ideology, ready to burst things asunder, has allowed important reconsideration of canons of all sorts (including post-structuralism itself, at least in more sophisticated hands). By challenging the right of both internal authorities and external analysts to claim a true and final reading, it has also sparked the questions of resistance and interpretation that inform this book.
Yet by tearing meaning from its social contexts, such an approach risks losing sight of the real social power of interpretation. Meaning in actual social life is not homogeneously messy, in spite of our facile ability to deconstruct any claim of systematic meaning. In practice, some areas of life indeed allow people to revel in multiple, inconsistent, half-interpreted meanings. Other areas, however, are dominated by strict rationality and explicit control over a single truth. Most crucially, real institutions back up these claims, creating the social mechanisms to propagate and enforce them. Under certain social relations of interpretation people thus do, in fact, share single meanings. It matters very little that an intellectual somewhere can yank the facade away, exposing the hidden illusions and blemishes of the ideas. The institutional structure of power itself has to be challenged before such an exposure makes much difference.
A broad tension between claims to a single true interpretation and the uncontrolled multiplication of interpretive possibility characterizes each of the cases I have discussed, and surely runs through much of social life anywhere. Organizations like the state work to consolidate their areas of interpretive control, and even individuals at times feel a push to rationalize. Hong Xiuquan was dearly such a thinker, and much of Max Weber’s work on the beginnings of capitalism concerns the point at which large groups felt an internal drive to precipitate new sets of explicit meanings, ranging from how they dealt with God to how they kept track of their money. Yet at the same time, other areas rest in a free space away from institutional attempts to control interpretation, and may actively push on official meaning, deflecting its thin interpretations and adding fresh complications.
The interaction between these two ways of making meaning bears crucial consequences for resistance movements. Saturation allows a potential to resist, but only along with many other potential interpretations. The mass spirit possessions of the early God Worshipers, the complicated possibilities of the Eighteen Lords, and the refusal of interpretation in China’s current epidemic of anomie allowed for many kinds of interpretation. Just as those Taiwanese pigs that started this book could suddenly become patriotic icons, collaborative interpretations sit alongside the possibilities for explicit resistance. Of the cases I have discussed here, only the Taiping, at least so far, managed to unify and institutionalize an ideology of resistance.
The rich ambiguities of meaning in these free spaces resist only in the sense that they skew and divert official interpretation. Analysis that reduces all such space either to clear cultural resistance or to a mere restatement of dominant culture, misses both the power and weakness of indeterminate meaning. It guarantees a creative fund of possible innovation and change, resilient against even thorough attempts at control. Yet it also undercuts any form of organization that might actively promote change. The chaotic mass spirit possessions of the God Worshipers nearly destroyed the movement before it began, just as the multivocality of the Eighteen Lords and the ironies and apathies of the People’s Republic pose serious obstades to organized movements for change.
Resistance in the stronger sense of self-consdously trying to change the system must be wrenched from the hoard of potential interpretations. That act in itself creates a new, increasingly systematic set of ideas, realized through a new social organization of meaning. The Taiping genius was in achieving that transformation around 1850. The depth and difficulty of their social metamorphosis, along with the failure to achieve anything similar in the other two cases I have discussed, indicates ]ust how challenging the process is. In an irony of its own, saturated space becomes explicit resistance only by losing its indeterminacy, and the free spaces that so effectively evaded official institutional control must themselves try to impose an interpretation. The Taiping thus recreated many features of the state they fought against, and the Tiananmen demonstrators had taken steps in the same direction.
The genesis of the Taiping Rebellion after 1849, like the creation of socialist institutions of interpretation a century later, expanded the explicitly and officially organized realm of Chinese society. Yet no case of interpretive domination completely succeeds. Taiping ideas were increasingly compromised as the movement wore on, and none of the attempts to unify a meaning of Taiwanese ghosts ever made much headway. Even the totalizing institutions of the People’s Republic leave enormous gaps, as they create alternative social organizations of meaning through their own action. The drone of the thin and repressive discourse of control breeds resentment, cynicism and irony, as people always have other sources of meaning. Saturated space alone will overthrow no oppression, but it also keeps oppression from succeeding entirely.
Attempts at control everywhere have engendered their own reactions. In early modern Europe, for example, state suppression of alternate interpretation created a system of dissimulation “so extensive that it was like a submerged continent in … religious, intellectual and social life” (Zagorin, 1990:14). The interplay between saturation and precipitation never allows the final victory of one form of interpretation over the other.
It is tempting to concentrate analysis on explicit meaning, where a clear underlying interpretation can unite the complexities of actual speech and symbol. We tend to belittle the chaotic excesses of the possessed God Worshipers, to dismiss the apparently frivolous incoherence of Taiwanese ghosts in the face of real change, and to deplore the inconsistencies and ambiguities of the students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. The process of what Weber called “rationalization” indeed vitalizes change, as ideas become explicitly worked out calls to action. Yet it also demands a social organization of interpretation that can maintain such a precipitated meaning. Both active resistance movements and institutions of control must rely on similar mobilizations of power over meaning.
At the same time, the opposite process of complicating and confusing meaning continues to play a crucial role. The God Worshipers expanded so quickly because Hong’s original ideas disintegrated into the local mix, making them both innovative and locally intelligible, instead of just crazy. Both Taiwanese ghosts and Tiananmen democracy benefited from a similar multiplicity of meaning. Above all, that free space that always presses against rationalized meaning harbors a cache of possible alternatives that may someday come to light. While it undercuts organization of any type, that messy pile of inconsistent meanings holds a well of creativity, sapping any form of interpretive domination and control without resisting any official interpretation directly.