SOCIAL SUFFERING AND POLITICAL CONFESSION Suku in Modern China
Peking University Series on Sociology and Anthropology (ISSN: 2335-657X) Series Editor: Xie Lizhong (Peking University, China) Published Vol. 1 Forthcoming Vol. 2 Social Suffering and Political Confession: Suku in Modern China by Sun Feiyu De-politicization of Ethnic Questions in China edited by Xie Lizhong
Peking University Series on Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 1 SOCIAL SUFFERING AND POLITICAL CONFESSION Suku in Modern China Sun Feiyu Peking University, China World Scientific NEW JERSEY LONDON SINGAPORE BEIJING SHANGHAI HONG KONG TAIPEI CHENNAI
Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Yu Tianxiu Fund of Peking University provided funding for the translation of this book series. We are grateful to Mrs. Helen Woo, the founder of the Yu Tianxiu Fund, for her financial support. Peking University Series on Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 1 SOCIAL SUFFERING AND POLITICAL CONFESSION Suku in Modern China Copyright 2013 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN 978-981-4407-29-8 In-house Editor: Zheng Dan Jun Printed in Singapore.
For My Parents
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Editor in Chief Xie Lizhong Peking University Series on Sociology and Anthropology Editorial Committee Deputy Editor in Chief Zhu Xiaoyang Peking University, China Peking University, China Editorial Committee Members David A. Kelly China Policy, China Michael Heng Siam-Heng Independent Researcher Laurence Roulleau Berger Lyon University, France Han Sang-Jin Seoul National University, Korea vii
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Foreword by Paul Antze In a century of ubiquitous social change, few transformations have been more dramatic and less well understood than the one that seized China in the years immediately following the victory of Communist forces in 1949. In a few scant years a centuries-old feudal order was swept away, replaced by a new egalitarian conception of the people and a new focus of veneration and authority in the form of the Communist Party. Social scientists are accustomed to seeing change of this kind as difficult and typically marked by frequent reversals. Why was China s case different? How did the Communist Party s teachings gain such a swift and deep purchase on the attitudes and conduct of ordinary Chinese? In this path-breaking work Feiyu Sun argues that one key to the answer lies in the special confessional practice of Suku, or speaking one s bitterness, first employed by the People s Liberation Army in mobilizing the peasantry during the war years and later replicated across the country as part of the new regime s program of land reform. Feiyu s book is remarkable not only for examining this critical element in China s recent history (which has thusfar escaped serious attention by social scientists), but for the range and subtlety of its approach. In contrast to other scholars who have pigeonholed Suku as a technique of persuasion or political indoctrination, Feiyu sees it as a far more variegated and instructive phenomenon, one that demands and richly repays analysis from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Thanks in part to his training at York University s interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, Feiyu is particularly well-equipped for this undertaking. As readers will find, his book moves with confidence and authority among the works of some very disparate western thinkers Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur using each to reveal yet another dimension of Suku and its transformative impact on Chinese society. While the discussion of these perspectives is fascinating in its own right, its ix
x Social Suffering and Political Confession real payoff comes in the book s final chapter, where Feiyu brings together insights gleaned along the way to formulate his own view of how Suku as a confessional practice laid the groundwork for a new experience of collective political identity. Most important of all, Feiyu shows that, far from being a mere relic of history, the encounter with Suku remains an enduring force in China s political culture today. For anyone interested in understanding the structures of authority underlying that culture, this book is essential reading. Paul Antze Professor of Department of Social Sciences York University Toronto, Canada November 2012
Foreword by Lesley Jacobs When political transition and regime change occurs, in particular when the move has been a revolutionary overthrow of the existing social and political arrangements, the historical legacy of the previous regime often includes gross injustices, large-scale violations of human rights, and sometimes, indeed, crimes against humanity. The idea of transitional justice is at its core grounded in the belief that there is a need to address that historical legacy rather than just ignore it. This need to take transitional justice seriously stems from its importance for the political stability and legitimacy of the new regime. The most common metaphor is a medical one healing past wounds before moving on to meet future challenges. Measures designed to address concerns with transitional justice are not an especially new phenomenon but, in the twentieth century, they became a centerpiece of what constitutes revolutionary change. It was, in particular, during the post-wwii period in Western Europe that transitional justice began to receive careful scrutiny. Two dominant models of transitional justice have received most of the attention of academics. One model involves utilizing an adversarial trial approach designed to secure the prosecution of individuals who perpetuated the injustices in the previous regime. The other model is some sort of truth and reconciliation commission designed to make transparent the injustices of the previous regime. The model of the adversarial trial has its greatest currency in Western Europe. The most familiar example is the Nuremberg trials of 1946, where some individuals from the Nazi Germany were held accountable for their actions. Those trials were formal and presented as legalistic, conforming to the historic norms of fundamental justice. This was personified by the U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, who was a judge on leave from the Supreme Court of the U.S. Subsequent efforts by the State of Israel to prosecute architects and agents of the Holocaust, most notably the trail of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, are also very familiar. It is also reasonable to view the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague xi
xii Social Suffering and Political Confession in 2002, which secured its first conviction only in 2012, as following this model of transitional justice. The model of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gained currency much later than the adversarial trial model. This is a reflection of the profound influence of post-apartheid South Africa s handling of transitional justice in the 1990s. Instead of pursuing high-profile criminal trials, the new President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, initiated legislation that established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995. The broad mandate of the commission was to help heal the country from racial injustices and bring about a reconciliation of its people by uncovering the truth about violations of human rights that had occurred during the period of apartheid from 1960 to 1994. The emphasis of the commission was on gathering evidence and uncovering information from both victims and perpetrators and not on prosecuting individuals for past crimes, which differentiated it from the Nuremberg trials. Other developing countries have subsequently also adopted similar types of commissions to deal with transitional justice. Even in developed countries such as Canada, this model has been adopted for addressing issues of injustice relating to aboriginal peoples. Despite the obvious differences between the adversarial trial model of transitional justice and the truth and reconciliation model of transitional justice, it is important to also appreciate the features that share in common. Two of these are especially noteworthy. The first is that both are grounded in the rule of law. They treat the pursuit of transitional justice as an exercise bound, and indeed motivated, by the norms and values of the rule of law. These norms and values include fundamental ideals of procedural fairness. The second feature shared by these two models is the formality of the process. Achieving transitional justice in both models involves complying with a formal process of giving evidence, testimonials, and opportunities to express opposing views and offer differing interpretations of events. In his new and highly original book, Social Suffering and Political Confession: Suku in Modern China, Feiyu Sun, a junior professor of sociology at Peking University in Beijing, offers us a different approach to transitional justice. The context for his book is provided by the efforts to address transitional justice in the People s Republic of China after 1949. Like in many other post-revolutionary contexts, the new regime in China faced the task of dealing with the gross injustices, large-scale violations of human rights, and crimes against humanity of the previous regime. Moreover, it needed to do so in a manner that furthered the ideals of the
Foreword by Lesley Jacobs xiii communist revolutionaries, reinforced social stability, and provided moral legitimacy to the new regime. As Sun shows, the new government of Mao supported a practice of Suku, which involved many millions of people telling their stories in public places such as village squares about the pain and suffering they had experienced during the previous regime and under Japanese occupation with a view to showing how much better off they were under the new communist regime. Suku was closely tied to property reform in the Chinese countryside and involved the close cooperation of the army. Unlike in the case of tribunals in Nuremberg or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, in the People s Republic of China, neither the ideal of the rule of law nor lawyers played any role in its scheme of transitional justice. Moreover, the process was not formal, although as Sun shows that the army did provide written guidelines on how to practice Suku. The deeper issue that Feiyu Sun also addresses concerns the idea of healing that all models of transitional justice aspire to. Much of our thinking about healing is deeply individualistic. Yet, transitional justice is about a nation, country or people healing. The rule of law is not necessarily well suited for promoting healing at this sort of collective legal, even though our dominant models of transitional justice operate in the shadow of the rule of law. Does the example of Suku offer us insight into an alternative way to better achieve transitional justice? This question and others are for the reader some of the important more abstract ones that Feiyu Sun in his book offers guidance. Dr. Lesley Jacobs Professor of Law & Society and Political Science York University, Toronto, Canada July 2012
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Preface This book endeavors to closely examine one relatively small but significant political phenomenon that has been largely neglected in the Western world until now. This political phenomenon is called Suku. It runs like a thread through the fabric of a series of political movements and events in China, from the Land Reform Movement of the 1940s and 1950s to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum. In Chinese the term Suku means to tell of one s suffering, or to pour out one s bitterness, in public. Su means to tell, to speak, to pour out, or to confess, while the term Ku means bitterness, pain, and suffering. Suku was invented and used as a political instrument by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an integral component of the Land Reform Movement, Cultural Revolution and other socio-political campaigns directly affecting the lives and identity of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants. This book first provides the necessary descriptive outline of the social, political and historical context of the Suku Movement, following which the Suku phenomenon is reflected on and interpreted through a matrix of the western social theories espoused by the eminent thinkers Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, and Ricoeur. By interpreting Suku from the joint perspectives of political identity and subjective psychological identity, this book aims to postulate a new paradigm for discussing social suffering: collective confession in a political context and the subjective individual suffering in narration. This is an analysis of the transformation of identities from the traditional to the modern, of both individual peasants and the state of China. It is argued that the use of Suku on the micro level, to forge a new individual identity by weaving together the public Freudian personal experiences of confessional narration with the ideological narration of the state, also functioned on a macro level for the masses and for Chinese xv
xvi Social Suffering and Political Confession society as a whole. In conclusion, this book states that it is possible to synthesize a theory of China s modern identity through an understanding of the Suku practice, and the Suku phenomenon provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the problems of identity confronted by modern China in an increasingly globalized world.
Contents Editorial Committee vii Foreword by Paul Antze ix Foreword by Lesley Jacobs xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. When Revolution Met Rural China 11 Chapter 2. Suku: Beyond a Political Instrument 43 Chapter 3. On Social Neurosis 81 Chapter 4. On Social Suffering 113 Chapter 5. Suku and Power 139 Chapter 6. Suku, Modern China, and Beyond 165 Bibliography 185 Index 195 xvii
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Acknowledgments This book, as a product of reflection on China s revolution and modernization as well as my own identity, would not be possible without the help of many people. I would like to first appreciate my family for their unwavering love and support in helping me find my own way in life. Since coming to the Social and Political Thought program at York University in 2005, my professors, colleagues, and friends have been helping me on every aspect of my life and study, and I would like to thank them for their support. For the last five years, it has been my great honor and pleasure to work with my professors John O Neill, Lesley Jacobs, and Paul Antze. My supervisor, John O Neill, has been a marvelous inspiration throughout my course work and research. John actually helped me on the very fundamental direction of my study and introduced me into the world of socio-political thought. I cannot forget your parenthood, John and Susan. I am also indebted to Lesley Jacobs for great help in life and work. It is great happiness for me to be a part of your big lovely family. Special thanks are due to Paul Antze for giving me an intellectual guide and valuable reviews on my studies. Your insightful comments helped sharpen my analysis. In all the five years of my study at York University, the program assistant of SPTH, Judith Hawley, has been extremely kind and helpful during my research. I wish to thank Professor Jay Goulding for the help and inspiration along the way and Leo Jacobs for help on my writing and revisions. All of my friends and colleagues in China, U.S., and Canada are appreciated for their support. Special thanks are due to my wife Feifei, who helped me greatly in both my work and my life. Last but also most important, I must show my appreciation and respect to all of my professors in Peking University, especially Professor Yang Shanhua, to whom I am greatly indebted to for everything. Finally, my thanks also go to those friends and colleagues who directly or indirectly helped me complete this book. xix