Part Four
Power and Identity in Communities

Eight
Everyday Power Relations: Changes in a North China Village

Yun-xiang Yan

In assessing the political consequences of departures from central planning, a key concern is the impact of market-oriented reforms on power relations within socialist redistributive systems. Iván Szelényi's work (1978, 1988) on social stratification in Hungary implies that the power and privilege of socialist redistributors will be undermined by the introduction of market mechanisms. Inspired by Szelényi's insight, Victor Nee (1989) developed a theory of market transition. The core of Nee's theory is that the increased scope of market allocation reduces the scope of bureaucratic redistribution, eroding the power and privilege of officials, who lose their monopoly over resources. This theory has, however, encountered much contrary evidence of the continuing influence of communist cadres at all levels. Jean Oi has proposed an alternative account that emphasizes the cadres' economic role in industrializing villages as the main root of both corruption and their legal power and privilege. She maintains that market allocation in an unreformed political system creates new opportunities for patronage and corruption, altering, but not diminishing, the power and privilege of officials who deal regularly with ordinary citizens (Oi 1989a, 1989b).

Focusing on everyday power relations in a north China village, the present study addresses the same issue, but offers a perspective different from either of the two abovementioned theories. According to Max Weber, power is "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis

on which this probability rests" (Weber 1947, 152). Following this definition, I examine how people influence the conduct of others in daily life within the boundaries of peasant communities. Changes in power relations are seen as the result of interactions between cadres and ordinary villagers,^[1] and attention is thus paid equally to both cadres and ordinary villagers as political actors.

From the perspective of social-exchange theory, I start with a discussion of how rural economic reforms generated a dynamic of change in power relations. Then I examine the political outcomes of these changes in two ways—namely, the altered behavior patterns among the grass-root cadres and the political mentality and actions of the villagers. To conclude the essay, I relate this village study to the general impact of reforms on cadre power, an issue raised by the two aforementioned theories.

Xiajia village, where I conducted my fieldwork from February to August 1991, is located on the southern edge of Heilongjiang Province. It is a farming community with a population of 1,564, growing mostly maize and soybeans. Owing to its poor transport links, there was no rural industry in the village during the collective era, and only a few grain-processing mills exist now, all of them family businesses. According to my survey in 1991, the average net income per capita was 616 yuan in 1990 (the national average was 623 yuan), which places Xiajia at the midpoint economically among Chinese farming communities. In other words, Xiajia will never be designated a government showcase of rural development. It is an ordinary place in every sense except for one thing: I lived in the village for seven years (1971–78) during the collective era and thus know most of its residents' life histories. I revisited Xiajia and carried out a field survey during the spring of 1989, which made it possible to discern the most recent changes when I went back yet again in 1991.

Like most rural communities in China, Xiajia has undergone dramatic social changes over the past four decades. In addition to the influences of the larger social environment, the village's fate was also closely associated

[1] In this chapter I mainly discuss power relations between the village cadres and peasants. There is no doubt that peasant communities, especially after the reforms, are not isolated universes, and residents have to be involved in power relations with people outside their villages in both economic and social as well as political terms. But these are different kinds of power relations, involving hierarchy and inequality between rural and urban sectors. Moreover, the village cadres are usually treated like ordinary villagers when they go beyond the village boundary, because they are also "rural potatoes" in the eyes of those who are living within the system of state distribution and social welfare. Analytically, it is necessary to distinguish village cadres who do not belong to the state bureaucratic system from cadres in local government or other state organs. Hereafter, by cadre I mean village cadres, and I use the term state officials to describe the cadres within the state bureaucratic system, which begins at the "township" (xiang ), the administrative level immediately above the village.

with its leadership. Radical local leadership during the first decade of socialism subjected Xiajia to most, if not all, of the irrational social experiments of the Great Leap Forward. Despite these experiments and the devastation of the 1959–61 famine, by the late 1960s Xiajia had become relatively successful in collective agriculture, and it remained so throughout the 1970s. One of the key factors in the village's achievements, according to many informants, was good management by brigade and team leaders. The collectives in Xiajia were dismantled at the end of 1983.^[2] Consequently, the number of cadres at the village level decreased from thirteen to five, including the party secretary, village head, deputy party secretary, village accountant, and head of public security. More important, as shown below, after 1983, these cadres began to play a different role in village politics.

The Bases of Cadre Power in the Collective Economy

To examine the dynamics of current changes in power relations in village life, we must first understand the structural basis of cadre power prior to the reforms and then see what has happened to this basis since then. In this connection, social-exchange theory provides an instructive perspective.

From a social-exchange point of view, power can be seen as "the ability of persons or groups to impose their will on others despite resistance through deterrence either in the form of withholding regularly supplied rewards or in the form of punishment, inasmuch as the former as well as the latter constitute, in effect, a negative sanction" (Blau 1964, 117). Here the availability and control of resources are crucial for establishing power in social interactions. According to Richard Emerson (1962, 1972), exchange relationships are based on the predicated dependence of two parties upon each other's resources. To the extent that A is unwilling voluntarily to surrender a resource desired by B and able to use this resource to force, coerce, or induce compliance by B, A is said to have power over B. Moreover, if A can monopolize all the resources B needs, B will be dependent on A. Unless B can furnish other kinds of benefits to A as an exchange, this dependence compels B to comply with A's requests. Hence an unbalanced power relationship is established between A and B.

In his analysis of "power-dependence" relations, Emerson presented four ways for a given individual to avoid becoming involved in a power-dependence relationship. When one needs a service another has to offer, one can (a) supply him with another. service; (b) obtain the service elsewhere; (c) force him to provide the service; or (d) give up the original

[2] Heilongjiang was the last province in China to dismantle the commune system, and the main reason, according to Luo Xiaopeng and others, was the relative success of collective farming. See Luo et al. 1985. For a detailed introduction to Xiajia village, see Yan 1993, 17—39.

demand. If the former is not able to choose any of the four alternatives, he has to become dependent on the latter and accept the latter's power (Emerson 1962, 31–41). Peter Blau reformulated Emerson's schema and applied it further to specify the conditions of social independence, the requirements of power, and their structural implications. According to Blau, the conditions of independence include strategic resources (like money) for starting an exchange relationship, the available ways to escape the other's power, coercive force to compel others, and self-reduction of demands. Being complementary to the conditions of independence, the basic strategies to attain and sustain power are indifference to what others offer, monopoly over what others need, law and order, and support of a value system (Blau 1964, 118–24).

Applying this approach to examine the previous structure of power relations in Xiajia, it is evident that because cadres were able to control almost all resources in the collective economy, villagers were left no other choice but to subject themselves to cadre power. Cadre power in the prereform era was based on four main conditions.

First, collectivization provided cadres with the most efficient way to monopolize resources, from the basic means of livelihood to opportunities for upward mobility. In the collectives, Xiajia peasants worked in groups under the supervision of cadres, and their basic needs were distributed annually by the collectives. They had no right to decide what activities they would engage in. During the more radical periods, for all social activities outside the collectives, such as visiting relatives or going to nearby marketplaces, peasants also needed the formal permission of cadres. Complaints about cadres or about state policies were severely punished, and the complainants were often accused of counterrevolutionary activities. In short, peasants were deprived of all rights to basic economic, social-cultural, and political resources (see Oi 1989a, 131–55; Parish and Whyte 1978, 96–114; Zweig 1989).

Second, their loyalty to the party state helped prevent cadres from being seduced by bribery or other forms of corruption, and thus increased their overall ability to exercise power. Owing to the emphasis on political correctness and class origin in cadre recruitment, only those who closely followed the party line and their superiors' instructions could stay in power, and their political loyalty was consistently tested in numerous political campaigns. Political rewards from higher levels of government served to raise their social and political status, bringing psychological rewards and reinforcing their political loyalty. Compared to the current situation, economic corruption was not a serious problem among cadres in the collectives. Many cadres lived in conditions similar to those of ordinary villagers, and the main material privileges they enjoyed were better meals and less manual labor. The

revolutionary, honest cadre was a generally accepted ideal. This probity in turn strengthened cadres' capacity to exercise power over team members (see Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992, 26–30; Huang Shu-min 1989, 105–28; Potter and Potter 1990, 283–95).

Third, state penetration into village society established the legitimacy of cadre authority, and "mass dictatorship" provided a coercive force to compel peasants. Commune officials supervised all village work and always supported village cadres when conflicts occurred between cadres and villagers. Political struggle sessions and the use of village militia are the most common forms of mass dictatorship, and in many cases village cadres took advantage of these means to attack their personal foes (see Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 1991; Hinton 1983, 169–261; Oi 1989a; Siu 1989, 189–243).

A fourth source of cadre power was the hegemony of communist ideology. Cadres could enforce their authority by claiming that they represented the party's political line, and their correctness thus could not be questioned by the masses. By resorting to the official ideology, cadres were also able to justify actions that proved to be against the private interests of the peasants, such as eliminating any life chances outside the collectives. "Revolutionary ideologies, which define the progress of a radical movement as inherently valuable for its members, bestow power on the movement's leadership" (Blau 1964, 122). Moreover, the domination of communist ideology made villagers pliant to the dictates of political campaigns that empowered only the movement leaders (see Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992; Potter and Potter 1990, 270–82; Zweig 1989).

For analytic purposes, the conditions needed for villagers to avoid cadre power are: (1) freedom of physical mobility; (2) a supply of strategic resources able to undermine cadre power; (3) personal ability to resist, or the use of protective networks; and (4) indifference to ideological mobilization. Obviously, none of these conditions existed during the collective era. There was no alternative available to villagers. The household registration system, the ban on rural-urban migration, and the requirement of official certificates to travel, all imprisoned villagers within the boundaries of the collectives (see Potter 1983, 465–99). They had little to offer cadres except bodily service, and what they did have all came from the collectives, which were run by the cadres. Under the totalitarian rulership of the CCP, personal resistance to cadre power or to ideological mobilization was virtually impossible. It would have resulted in grave political trouble.

The Dynamics of Change and Market-Oriented Reform

The rural reforms brought fundamental changes to this seemingly immutable power structure by creating alternative resources and opportunities

outside the bureaucratic redistributive system, and by attenuating the conditions that made villagers dependent upon cadres. There have been four key components of this process of change.

First, decollectivization has undermined the most important basis of cadre power: monopoly over resources. This is mainly because of the distribution of land to families and the shift to household farming. In the eyes of Xiajia residents, the most significant aspect of rural reform was the distribution of land. They always refer to the date of land distribution when discussing recent changes in village life. Farmland in Xiajia was divided into two categories: ration land (kouliang tian ) and contract land (chengbao tian ). Every person in the village (regardless of age or sex) was entitled to have two mu of ration land, and every adult male laborer received ten mu of contract land. Peasants' obligations to provide the state with cheap requisitioned grain and taxes only applied to contract land. The effective duration of land distribution was fifteen years, and within that period no further adjustment would take place.

For ordinary farmers in Xiajia, land is not merely a fundamental means of production; it is the most reliable source of social welfare. Control over land is nothing less than controlling one's fate. From the first day that villagers could make their own decisions about what to plant on their land and how to use the surplus, the very basis of cadre power began to crumble. It was common for villagers to express their feelings about decollectivization with a modern term: freedom (ziyou ),^[3] and they then added a footnote to it by quoting an old popular saying: "People have to obey the person who controls their rice bowls" (duan shui de wan, fu shui guan ). An old villager once told me: "With a piece of land, you have a rice bowl of your own. It is not the iron bowl that urban people have, but you don't need to beg anybody for a bowl of rice—you dig it up from your own land."

The significance of this change is best illustrated by the simple but profound fact that more than 90 percent of the adult males in Xiajia village now have their own private seals (or "name chops"). In the past this was a privilege enjoyed only by the cadres who ran collectives. Nowadays the peasants need private seals for signing a wide variety of contracts with companies and with local government agencies. The immediate consequence of the departure from collective farming is that they have gained the status of independent legal persons.

Second, as many economists have noted, agricultural productivity surged suddenly after the switch to household farming, and living standards in rural China have generally improved to a remarkable extent. One of the most important consequences of the improvement in villagers' economic

[3] It is interesting that peasants in other places, such as Anhui province, also used the word freedom to describe their new experience as independent farmers (see Chen 1990, 31).

circumstances has been the eclipse of the previous social hierarchy by new patterns of economic and social stratification. This is suggested by a household survey of family incomes that I conducted during the spring of 1989 (see table 8. 1).

Table 8.1 suggests that while village cadres have taken advantage of the reforms to accumulate private wealth and have become prosperous, a number of ordinary peasants, including some of the formerly disadvantaged, have also benefited both economically and socially. In particular, peasant households of former "middle-peasant" origins have done extremely well. As a result, the previous socialist hierarchy is being replaced by a dual system of social stratification that is characterized by the coexistence of bureaucratic rank with a market-based class order. The emergence of this new structure of social stratification, which echoes what Szelényi (1988) found in rural Hungary, has contributed a great deal to a new pattern of power relations, which was quite visible when I conducted my second field survey of Xiajia in 1991.

The rise of a new group of rich peasants presented a challenge to cadre power in two ways. Many peasants, especially those who have become relatively affluent, suddenly came to possess the strategic resources (money or goods) for social exchange. According to social-exchange theory, "a person

who has all the resources required as effective inducements for others to furnish him with the services and benefits he needs is protected against becoming dependent on anyone" (Blau 1964, 119). The shift in control of resources to peasant households constitutes a decline in villagers' dependence on cadres. The rise of peasants' economic well-being further broke the superiority of cadres in the previous social order and made cadres susceptible to material inducements offered by villagers (I shall return to this point later).

The third dynamic factor generated by the reforms is that the party state has begun to retreat from rural society, and mass dictatorship as a means for controlling society has gradually dissipated. A similar indicator of this change is that the village militia has disappeared—although it still exists on paper, the position of militia head has been eliminated. Everyone is so busy trying to advance their economic status that even state officials are no longer interested in monitoring villagers' behavior. In 1991, few state officials came to the village to supervise policy implementation or other work, since the local government's primary concerns were now grain procurement and tax collection.

In contrast to the retreat of the state, social networks made up of connections—referred to in Chinese as guanxi —have become increasingly important in village life. It is true that network-building persisted during the collective era, despite the state's efforts to transform traditional patterns of interpersonal relations in China (see Gold 1985; Oi 1989a; Walder 1986). However, since the reforms, the social scope of personal networks has expanded remarkably, involving not only kinship ties but also friends and partners both within and outside the village. As a result, gift exchange, the traditional method of cultivating personal ties, has intensified over the past decade. My survey shows that in 1990, 202 households in Xiajia village (54 percent of the total) spent more than 500 yuan apiece on gifts, with the highest reaching 2,650 yuan. Most of the gift-giving activities took place in the context of institutionalized rituals, such as weddings and funerals. If we take 500 yuan as the average expenditure, this means that most households spent nearly 20 percent of their annual incomes to maintain and expand their social networks (for a detailed account of this change, see Yan 1993).

This recent rise in network-building results from newly emerged demands for cooperation, self-protection, and self-realization among peasants, who have now become independent producers. Today, peasants have to deal with all kinds of problems in agricultural production, from purchasing seeds to selling grain. Mutual assistance during the busy season, financial aid from private loan sources, and social connections outside the village are thus all vital to the peasants' pursuit of a better life. Moreover, a larger web of personal relations provides a stronger protective network for peasants

when they come in conflict with village cadres or agents of the local government.

Finally, it is widely recognized that communist ideology no longer provides a compelling basis for the legitimacy of the party state or normative values for organizing society. At the village level, the end of communist ideology is reflected clearly in peasants' cynical attitude toward politics and the state, as well as toward cadre power. They have become indifferent to political campaigns (such as the recent one called "socialist education") and suspicious of cadres' corruption. Paralleling the decline of communist ideology, many new ideas and values have been introduced into rural China, and they play an important role in changing peasant mentalities. Indeed, the flow of information into rural areas today merits much more attention than it currently receives.

Television is one important example. One evening in 1978, I joined several young Xiajia villagers in a five-mile walk to another village in order to watch the first TV set in the area. By 1991, there were 135 TV sets in Xiajia alone, including eight color sets, which translates into one set for every three households. While it is true that the TV stations are under state control, one should note that since the reforms, television programs have changed greatly. In addition to the conventional propaganda, there are many other programs introducing new values and new ideas. For instance, I found myself watching the American TV police series "Hunter" in Xiajia village, the same show having been broadcast in Boston several months before. As a consequence of such programs, during my fieldwork, I was asked to explain such things as how the U.S. Supreme Court works, why an American state governor has no right to control a district judge, and who was fighting for justice in the Gulf War.

In table 8.2, I have summarized the main points discussed above. All the dynamics of change resulted directly or indirectly from rural economic reforms, especially the radical departure from central planning—namely, decollectivization and the restoration of household farming. Each of the dynamics may influence the previous order of social relations in general and thus have structural implications in a broader sense. For instance, household farming may lead to a market economy and privatization, economic development may cause social differentiation, the rapid expansion of personal networks indicates the rise of a social force, and if all these are the case, a postcommunist political culture may well be on its way.^[4] Although it is

[4] In an earlier essay Gordon White 1987 discusses the new patterns of power and new axes of political conflict and cooperation generated by the economic reforms. He suggests that a possible political consequence of these changes might be the emergence of a new political process in rural China.

hard to predict the long-term consequences of these changes, the current political outcomes can be seen clearly in two aspects of village life: changes in the interests and behavior of cadres and the new political mentalities and actions of villagers.

"Play the Game Wisely": Changing Patterns of Cadre Behavior

Two questions are crucial in assessing changes in village cadres' interests and behavior. What is the criterion of a successful village cadre —political reward from the party state or personal achievement in the family economy? And what is the locus of cadres' legitimacy—the trust of their superiors or the support of the masses? Prior to the rural reforms, neither of these two questions was significant for cadres, because the former answers were the only real choices. During the collective era, the Xiajia leadership was characterized by its strong commitment to the public good, an imperious and despotic style of work, and (for much of the time) relatively successful management of collective agriculture. While enjoying various privileges, including higher work points, most cadres considered political rewards most desirable, and many cadre families were financially on a par with ordinary villagers. The reforms have changed this, however, because alternative resources and opportunities were created outside the bureaucratic system as the collectives were dismantled. Gradually, cadres changed their

interests and behavior. The differences among the three party secretaries in charge of Xiajia during various periods are the best example of this.

The party secretary from 1952 to 1960 was considered the worst leader by my informants, because he was extremely loyal to higher-level officials. He endeavored to implement all the irrational policies of the Great Leap Forward, thus making Xiajia residents suffer more than their neighbors during the 1959–61 famine. Relying on the full support of his superiors and the coercive force of the village militia, he controlled Xiajia tyrannically, acquiring the nickname "Big Wolf." An example frequently cited by my informants was that he had ordered a villager tied up and beaten badly just because he had missed a meal in the collective meal hall and complained about it. While the villagers struggled with the threat of hunger in 1959, this party secretary climbed to the highest point in his political career—he was selected as a model grass-roots cadre and invited to participate in an official ceremony at the National Day celebration in Beijing. When I interviewed him about the Great Leap, he was still immersed in happy memories of his glorious past. He went into minute detail, telling me how many cities he had visited during that tour, how happy he was when he met Marshal Zhu De, chairman of the National People's Congress, and how he learned to use flush toilets in fancy hotels. Back home, however, he lived in the same conditions as the village poor, and he was widely recognized as an honest cadre, free of corruption. It seems obvious that he believed in what the party said and worked wholeheartedly for the state, which, by its ideological definition, should also have conformed with the interests of the Xiajia people. For this reason, many villagers have an ambivalent attitude toward this man: on the one hand, they hate him for inflicting famine and poverty on the village; on the other, they respect him for his commitment to public duty and his selfless character.

The party secretary from 1978 to 1987 oversaw the most dramatic turn of events: the dismantling of collectives. Xiajia's collective economy achieved great progress under his leadership during the early 1980s; in the best year (1980), the value of ten work points reached 2.50 yuan. As did his predecessor, he also resorted to coercion to exercise his power and tightly controlled the social life of villagers. He confessed to me that he could not remember how many people he had beaten during his ten-year reign as party secretary. Given this patriarchical tradition among village cadres, it was natural that he and his colleagues first resisted decollectivization and then encountered tremendous difficulties dealing with villagers who were no longer dependent on the cadres' management of production. He told me that after decollectivization, "doing thought work"^[5] was no longer effective,

[5] The term thought work can be applied to many means of controlling people, from personal persuasion, informal interrogation, and study workshops to public struggle sessions. The ultimate goal of doing thought work is to make the subject comply to the authority of cadres.

and people did not respect the authority of cadres any more. He tried to organize villagers to carry out such projects as opening a collective enterprise and transforming a dry field into an irrigated rice paddy, but people did not respond to his call. Worse, the party did not appear to appreciate cadres' political achievements, and higher-level state officials withdrew their support of village cadres when the latter needed it most. The most upsetting incident for him was when he became involved in a public conflict with a villager in 1987. Rather than supporting him, the township government pretended to know nothing about it. "It is meaningless to be a cadre now," he said when he explained to me why he had resigned after that incident. Obviously, as a figure mediating two periods, he could not adapt to the new type of power relationships after the reforms and thus had to retreat.

The decline of appreciation for "revolutionary cadres" did not bother the next party secretary, because he simply did not care about political rewards. During one of my interviews in 1989, he gave an interesting explanation of his motives: "Society has changed now. Who cares about the party and the state? Even the top leaders in Beijing are only interested in getting rich, otherwise they should first educate their own children. Why am I doing this job? Simple—for money. I was not interested in the title of party secretary, but I do like the salary of 3,000 yuan per year. In other words, I am working for my children, not for the party." Two years later, I was told that the same cadre had designed his strategy in terms of three "nos": saying nothing, doing nothing, and offending nobody. When I checked this with him myself, he did not hesitate to admit it. His "three-nos" strategy is best illustrated by the way he dealt with a dispute between the village vice head and a peasant, in which the latter blamed and then cursed the former in the village office, where all five cadres were present for a meeting about population control. As I was an invited visitor at the meeting, I witnessed the whole affair and was surprised when the party secretary kept silent until the end. I also found that he did not use the local phrase "sitting on the throne" (zuo yi di ) to describe his position, even though it was the popular term used by both cadres and villagers for the act of taking the top position in the village. However, he does have something to be proud of: he has advanced his family from one of the poorest to one of the richest in Xiajia, and his two sons' families also moved to the top of the "rich list" in the past two years. This advancement, many informants suggested, was because he was party secretary.

It is clear, in short, that economic benefits have replaced political rewards as the key object of cadres' careers, and these benefits are generated within

the village, not granted by political superiors. Even the party has realized that money now speaks louder than political slogans, and has adopted a market mechanism as a means of maintaining its political control over local cadres. According to Xiajia cadres, the township government has divided their salaries, which draw on local taxes paid by villagers, into a basic salary and bonuses. The bonuses make up four-fifths of their entire incomes, and are linked to the completion of specific tasks. For instance, if they accomplish the work of supervising spring plowing, they may earn one-fifteenth of their annual salaries as a reward, and if they fail they lose the same amount as punishment. Ironically, this method has not raised the cadres' motivation, because many feel manipulated by their party superiors and have thus lost their last vestige of political loyalty. As a cadre commented, "We are treated by our own party as circus dogs — you play a little game well, you get some food in return. Play it one more time, you get another tiny reward."

The locus of cadre legitimacy has also changed remarkably. During the collective era, although in theory village cadres should have been elected by the masses, few attained their positions through such means. No one could stay in power without the trust and support of higher levels of government, and unpopular leaders, like Xiajia's party secretary during the 1950s, were able to hold power as long as they were appreciated by their superiors. Therefore it was out of the question for cadres to put the support of the masses ahead of the demands of their superiors. There was only one known exception in the recent history of Xiajia. Immediately after the fall of the first party secretary in 1960, in an attempt to protect themselves, villagers (through party members) elected a demobilized soldier as the party secretary. He was a well-known anti-authoritarian character and was afraid of no one. This man stayed in power for only a couple of months and was removed from office after he made his first serious effort to resist the orders of the commune party committee. This incident might be seen as failed resistance from below, but it also demonstrates that the authority of village cadres during the collective era depended completely on higher-level officials, and the villagers could do little to affect the power structure in their village.

After the reforms, however, village cadres have gradually come to depend more on support from below than recognition from above. As a result of the reform effort to separate the party committee from government and the polity from the economy, along with the end of political campaigns, village cadres receive fewer administrative instructions and less political support. The recent reform effort to establish "autonomous village committees" based on mass elections also constituted a potential threat to their power base (see Wang 1992). One attempt at free elections was made in 1983 in Xiajia, resulting in the village head being voted out of power by the villagers. That incident scared the cadres so much that they have stifled any kind of election since then.

In addition to the changes in the broader environment, a new feeling of being salaried public servants is also affecting cadres' behavior, because their salaries draw on the money collected from peasant households in the name of "public funding." The cadres, who can no longer claim they are working for the party, feel indebted to the local people, especially when the latter repeatedly make reference to this sensitive subject during public disputes. Moreover, to carry out unpleasant tasks like collecting taxes and grain, or supervising birth control, cadres need the cooperation of their subordinates. As the current party secretary in Xiajia said, "I know that the villagers hate to feed cadres. I would too, if I were them. Collecting grain and money, forcing women to submit to sterilization, all the jobs I do are awful. The most important thing is to play the game wisely. Who knows what is going to happen after you fall out of power?"

Being aware of their newly developed dependence on their subordinates' support, village cadres have lost the incentive to enforce unpopular policies and have instead begun to play a role of mediator or middleman when the state's policies are in direct conflict with local interests, such as in the case of population control. It has long been recognized that the one-child policy causes widespread resentment among peasants. Nonetheless, it should be noted that a broad gap has always existed between this policy and its implementation. From the very beginning, the implementation of the one-child policy encountered resistance from the peasants. In the mid 1980s, the state seemed to retreat silently by allowing couples whose first child was a daughter to have another child in hopes that it would be a boy.

In Xiajia village, the implementation of the single-child policy started at the same time that the rural reforms began. Those who had a second child after April 1980 were fined 700 yuan by the commune government. Fortunately, the village office (the production brigade at that time) showed sympathy to those whose first child was a daughter by giving them a 500 yuan allowance, which meant that the fine was reduced to only 200 yuan, an amount the peasants could afford. But things soon went sour, because the local policy changed in February 1983, and the fine was raised to 1,200 yuan. In the same year, the collectives were also dismantled. Consequently, allowances were no longer available, and those who violated the one-child policy had to pay the entire amount for their second baby. This situation lasted for only one year before state policy changed again. In 1984, women who were over 29 and had a daughter as their first child were permitted to have a second child. To help villagers who wished to have sons, the village cadres had always tried to avoid asking women who had only daughters to submit to sterilization, sometimes by submitting false reports to the government.

To explain the cadres' dilemma, the head of Xiajia village said, "We are peasants, and we know exactly how painful it is for a man to have no son. We

don't want to stop anybody's bloodline. This is something that could destroy our own fortune and merit. But we are also cadres, and we have to do our job. So the only way is to have one eye open and another closed [zheng yi yan, bi yi yan ], to cheat the state while coaxing the villagers.^[6] And the current party secretary told me that the secret of doing work now is yi tuo er bian, which means to deal with any order or policy from above, one needs first to delay implementation and then to alter it, turning the policy to the interests of the village if possible.^[7] As a result of resistance by ordinary peasants and a slowdown by village cadres, the 1990 census in Xiajia village shows that none of the villagers were really affected by the one-child policy during any period. The only difference is that some of them paid for extra children and some did not.

Indeed, the cadres' double-role strategy is well reflected in the phrase "cheating the state and coaxing the villagers" (pian shangbian, hong xiabian ). Because of increasing demand to protect private interests, cadres have deceived the state in recent years more often than in the earlier 1980s. Moreover, the phenomenon of cheating the state is by no means confined to village cadres; state officials at both township and county levels share the same mentality and strategy — otherwise, many of the village cadres' efforts could not possibly succeed. For instance, in the spring of 1991, the county government required all villages to finish corn planting before April 20. But, as Xiajia village land is located on lower ground, the ground temperature was not warm enough for planting by that date. To meet the deadline, the township cadres indicated that Xiajia cadres had completed the task in time. Although everyone knew that the work could not start until two weeks beyond the deadline, the cadres at the county level were satisfied with the report and dealt with their superiors at the provincial level in the same manner. The cadres at township and village levels were happy too, because they completed their bureaucratic duties without bothering the peasants at all. The group that benefited the most, however, were the peasants, and they did not even know what had happened.

This change can best be demonstrated in a comparison with the collective period. The implementation of government policies in the 1950s and 1960s resembled an inflation process. Cadres at every level would add their own efforts to state policies, because they had only one purpose — to be

[6] This kind of mentality is quite common among village cadres in other parts of China. Huang Shu-min reports an interesting story in which the party secretary in a South China village employed a sophisticated strategy to protect some women from abortion, meanwhile meeting the requirements of the upper-level government. See Huang 1989, 185–90.

[7] This constitutes a sharp contrast to the attitude of the former party secretary during the 1950s, who told me, "When I was ruling the village [he used precisely the term ruling, i.e., zuo tianxia in local terms], if the party leader said to do one thing, I would try to complete two, or even three. We believed that if we failed, the landlords would return and take our land away."

appreciated by superiors. A good example of this was the false reports on grain yields among rural cadres during the Great Leap Forward, which eventually caused high procurement of grain and the famine of 1959–61 (see Bernstein 1984). Nowadays, cadres pay much more attention to the reactions from below, and thus policy implementation has become a process of deflation. As rural cadres passively and partially carry out orders from above, central government policies lose their original meaning. This has been captured in a popular saying, "Villages cheat towns, towns cheat counties; it's cheating straight up to the State Council" (cun pian xiang, xiang pian xian, yizhi pian dao guowuyuan ). In a sense, the new pattern of political behavior among the rural cadres might create an informal mechanism to counterbalance and resist state control of society and the negative effects of central policy.

Another interesting outcome of changes in power relations is that village cadres found themselves involved in more resistance, bargaining, and compromise in the process of exerting their power. While passively carrying out unpopular policies from above, they have become much softer when they have to interfere with the private interests of peasants, in order to avoid open resistance from the latter. A simple indicator is that incidents of cadres beating villagers have declined rapidly since decollectivization; instead, more conflicts have ended up in the reverse: cadres being beaten up by villagers. Imposing fines became the only powerful weapon left in the cadres' hands, and it was applied to almost everything the cadres carried out. However, its efficacy has diminished, because some villagers refused to pay their fines, which again led to direct confrontation between cadres and villagers.

All cadres agreed that compared to neighboring villages, Xiajia was by no means a troublesome place, and in recent years, to get a beating was not the worst of fates for cadres. In neighboring villages, cadres' houses have been set afire by peasants, and at least one cadre was killed by two outraged village youths taking revenge. In many cases, violent conflicts were caused by insignificant incidents that would not have been contemplated if the cadres had still held the same power as during the collective era. While I was doing my fieldwork in Xiajia, two cases of arson occurred, and the victims were both cadres. It seems that the local government could do little to protect the village cadres, except to compensate them economically. After the two arson cases, the township government proposed to raise the local taxes paid by villagers and use the money to buy personal insurance for village cadres, in the hope that this would make the villagers reluctant to attack the cadres' property.

In addition to the loss of their monopoly over resources, economic corruption has weakened village cadres' ability to exercise power. In one case I witnessed, a villager's application for a loan to buy chemical fertilizer was

rejected by the village cadres, because funds for agricultural loans had already been diverted to pay the debts of the village. Misappropriation of state funds was nothing unusual at the village level, and the rejection of this personal application would ordinarily have been viewed as a small incident. To the surprise of all, the villager was outraged and started a public dispute with the party secretary on the street. When many people gathered to watch their dispute, the villager suddenly said that he knew where the agricultural loan had gone — it had been lent out as usury by the son of the party secretary. He also accused the village office of collecting extra taxes over the previous year and threatened to report the case to the county government. The party secretary left the spot without saying a word to defend himself. A few days later, I learned that the villager had been allowed to borrow some money from the village office, which was actually a gift to him, because both sides knew the loan would probably never be returned.

Interestingly enough, the same cadre was well known for both his bad temper toward villagers and his commitment to central policy when he was a team leader during the 1970s. People often said that, for this cadre, to curse or beat someone was as normal as eating a bowl of noodles. Despite all complaints, the villagers still supported him and recognized his authority, because he was also responsible for improving the management of the collective. During its successful period of collective farming, most cadres in Xiajia were this type of "iron fist." They ran the village in the style in which a tyrannical father controlled his family in traditional China, and their brutality was justified by their sincere devotion to central policy. Today none of the five current cadres (all of whom were in power before the reform) can boast of being "corruption free," and it is no accident that they have all improved their tempers to a remarkable extent.^[8]

It is true that cadre corruption, which surged markedly after the reforms (Gold 1985; Meaney 1991), reveals that cadres still control resources in many ways and can thereby impose their wills on their subordinates (Oi 1989b; Rocca 1992). Nevertheless, the current rise of cadre corruption does not necessarily strengthen cadre power, for two reasons. First, economic corruption should be distinguished from political corruption. As Gong Xiaoxia writes: "It is after the reforms that cadre corruption began to appear more and more in economic forms…. Since China was a highly politicized society prior to the reforms, cadre corruption during that time

[8] In their follow-up research, the authors of Chen Village found a similar trend of character change among the cadres. For instance, Chen Longyong, once a tyrannical party secretary who controlled the villagers' life tightly, turned himself into a private entrepreneur and "had softened with the years" (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992, 315). His successor, the current party secretary, Baodai, "is fully aware that a leader's power to exact cowed compliance from the peasantry is a thing of the past, and he generally intrudes on the affairs of his neighbors only when mediation is called for" (1992, 320).

presented itself mainly in political forms" (Gong 1992, 52). In the case of Xiajia, many cadres during the collective era were free of economic corruption, but they abused the villagers in more obvious ways than the current cadres. Economic corruption may increase cadres' personal wealth, but it does not allow them to compel obedience from their subordinates.

Second, corruption based on exchange of resources should be distinguished from that based on distributing resources. Because people involved in social exchange need to observe the norm of reciprocity (see Gouldner 1960), the recipient of a gift or a favor is reduced to a position inferior to the donor until the "debt" is repaid (see Mauss 1967). This is well captured in a Chinese proverb: "Eating from others, one's mouth becomes soft; taking from others, one's hands become short" (chi ren zui ruan; na ren shou duan ). It is obvious that when a cadre receives gifts from his subordinates, his superiority is weakened, because such exchanges reduce the recipient to a position of mutual dependence. Moreover, the obligation of reciprocity implies that corruption based on exchange of resources will benefit both sides: the giver as well as the recipient. This is something quite different from transactions based on the more one-sided dependence of the collective era, when cadres distributed resources to villagers who had no real alternatives.

"Leave Me Alone": Political Mentality and Action Among Villagers

The village power game is played out by both cadres and ordinary villagers. These days village cadres must play the game more wisely, because as indicated above, the economic reforms have broken the previous pattern of dependence and raised the position of villagers. More important, market reforms have changed the villagers' mentality as well as their living standard. New attitudes toward cadre power and authority, the rise of individualism, and an emerging conception of personal rights have also served to redefine the power game in Xiajia.

The most dramatic change is in villagers' perception of cadre power and authority. As I have explained elsewhere (Yan 1992), social life in Xiajia was previously far from "egalitarian": the collectives were perhaps no less hierarchical than the prerevolutionary community. When the cadres stood on the top of the social pyramid, fear dominated popular perceptions of cadre power. Nevertheless, villagers still placed their hopes on good leadership and respected those who led the collective to prosperity. Because cadres controlled all resources and opportunities, they represented the only hope for collective betterment. This is well captured in a popular saying of the collective era: "It's better to have a good team leader than to have a good father" (you ge hao baba, bu ru you ge hao duizhang ).

Villagers' fear and respect of cadre power came to an end when the collectives were dismantled in 1983. By the time I conducted my first field survey in early 1989, anger and discontent over cadre corruption had reached a peak. Complaints about various kinds of local taxes and accusations of cadre misconduct were common subjects during my interviews with villagers. To my knowledge, at least two anonymous letters have been sent to the county government in an attempt to bring corrupt cadres into court. Conflicts between cadres and villagers occurred frequently when the latter felt unfairly treated, and quite often a conflict ended in violence. One such public fight in 1987, as noted above, forced the party secretary to resign. This vividly symbolizes the collapse of the authority and power of all village cadres. At that time, many villagers started showing disrespect by refusing to present gifts to cadres in ritual situations, such as weddings or funerals. The village office lost its prestige in the eyes of ordinary farmers, and the focus of public life has gradually moved from the brigade headquarters to the village retail store (for more details see Yan 1992, 15–16; Yan 1993, 167–78).

Obviously, the major reason for the sudden eruption of dissatisfaction with cadre behavior resulted from the advent of family farming, which allows villagers to control their own livelihood. A further reason is that in recent years, the diversification of life chances has raised villagers' sense of individualism and thus changed their views of cadre authority.^[9] A widely cited saying in both urban and rural China is now: "A fish has its way, and a shrimp has its way, too" (yu you yu lu, xia you xia lu ). Here, "way," lu in Chinese, may indicate back doors, social connections, personal skills, and so on — all the means needed to make oneself affluent. During my fieldwork, I heard both rich and poor villagers quoting this popular saying when talking about somebody who had done well economically. In Xiajia, many capable individuals have found a way to make money, such as growing cash crops, developing family sidelines, or working in the cities. One of the best chances for financial advancement in the past two years was created by the establishment of a milk-products factory owned jointly by the local government and the Nestlé company of Switzerland. Five people in the village found jobs in the factory and earned a high salary (300 yuan per month versus an average annual income of 616 yuan per capita). Several dozen villagers responded to the new demand for milk by raising dairy cows and have subsequently gained considerable benefits.

In the place of fear and respect, the villagers began to view the cadres' credibility critically, and few still trust leaders unconditionally. In the eyes of my informants, the good cadre has become a myth. When the story of Baogong, an upright and honest official of the Song dynasty, was shown on

[9] For an instructive study of public perceptions about life chances and the political implications for China, see Whyte 1985.

TV, many commented cynically that Baogong could not survive in today's environment, because his honesty would hurt the interests of other cadres, and he would thus soon be removed from power or forced into corruption.

The suspicion of cadres is so strong that it sometimes causes unnecessary trouble. In a case I witnessed during my fieldwork, three men came to Xiajia to purchase pigs and cheated villagers by using a platform scale rigged to reduce the weight. Their cheating was discovered, but the villagers did not dare to claim compensation, because these three men came in a military truck and stated that they were soldiers. Finally, the village head intervened in the name of the village office and made the three cheaters return the money to the pig farmers. The villagers were not satisfied with this solution and demanded that the cheaters be punished. When the three men left, I was surprised to see some villagers accuse the village head of making a secret deal. They insisted that the village head must have accepted a bribe from the culprits.

When I asked the accusers why they were so critical of the village head, who deserved some credit for handling the problem, I was told that it was his job to resolve problems like this. After all, they said, he earned 2,600 yuan a year, and his salary was extracted from their incomes. "He is fed by us," one said. Here the practice of paying various local taxes in a direct and open way has given the peasants a new perspective from which to view their relationship with cadres. As I indicated earlier, such an awareness of themselves as tax payers not only diminishes villagers' fear of cadres, but also results in cadres realizing that they are, in fact, employed by the villagers.

In 1991, I also found an increasing cynicism about cadre behavior. While some villagers still complained and even directly confronted cadres if their private interests were challenged, their words of discontent rarely turned into action. Most villagers were tired of complaining about cadre corruption and did not even care about the size of cadre salaries. In response to my inquiries about this newly found complacency, I was frequently met with the popular saying, "It is not proper to refuse paying the taxes and procured grain; you cart them away, and leave me my freedom" (huang liang guo shui, bu jiao bu dui; ni na ti liu, gei wo zi you ). Indeed, the typical view among Xiajia residents was put into three words by an informant: "Leave me alone" (bie guan wo ). And the most common strategy adopted by them was to fulfill their prescribed obligations to the state and local government without question and then to protect their personal interests against any additional levies.

In the early stages of my fieldwork, I took this "Leave me alone" mentality as the villagers' passive reaction to the social problems they encountered, and as a sign of their indifference to village politics, including cadre behavion After a few months of observation, however, I became convinced that this posture concealed other meanings. "Leave me alone" conveyed a

strong message — namely, awareness of personal rights and an intention to protect them. Given the heritage of patriarchal authority in Chinese culture and the influence of totalitarian rule under the party, it is not easy for the peasants to tell cadres, "Leave me alone." It could not possibly have happened during the collective period, when the only acceptable demand a peasant could make was for better leadership, and a refusal to accept cadre leadership could lead to accusations of the most serious crime — counter-revolution. It could not have happened immediately after the decollectivization either, because the peasants were still living under the shadow of socialist culture, which conferred patriarchal status on cadres. Such an expression itself symbolizes the development of a consciousness of independence and the rise of political self-confidence among the villagers.

In this regard, the increasing flow of information through TV programs and other means has, as noted above, provided the villagers with new conceptions of economic and political rights and thus encouraged them to resist the imposing power of cadres should their interests be violated. This is best illustrated in their confrontations with state officials from the township government, which usually require more courage and strength. For example, in a case of conflict with the township officials, a villager was detained by the township policemen for a few days. He was so angry that he finally refused to leave the detention room when the township cadres grew tired of him and wanted to send him away. He accused the local policemen of "violating the law and human rights" because they did not have an arrest warrant. I met him in the county seat where he was demanding justice from the county government. He showed me a booklet about the criminal law, and we also talked about the American TV detective Hunter.

It should be noted that rural cadres generally do not welcome the diffusion of political information, especially about personal rights. A state official in the township government, who was a village cadre a few years ago, complained to me that the "education of legal knowledge" was a stupid campaign launched by the state. "From ancient times, the policemen have had the right to beat people," he said. "This is the way it works. The ordinary people are just slaves, pigs. They can be ruled only by whips. Look at what is happening now. Everyone wants to have his rights, and the law protects the tough guys. The result is that these tricky people never commit crimes, but they never stop making trouble either. It just annoys the police department to death, and puts the court on the spot" (da cuo bu fan, xiao cuo bu duan; qi si gong an ju, nan si fa yuan ).

In another interesting case I witnessed, a widow was suspected of stealing public trees. When two local policemen tried to confiscate a motorcycle from her family as a fine, a physical confrontation occurred between the two parties. The widow accused the policemen of beating her and threatened to use her personal connections in the county police department to punish

the offenders. Although no one knew whether she had relatives in power or not, the local policemen decided not to risk offending higher authorities and encouraged the Xiajia village office to give the widow 50 yuan in compensation. The policemen did not, however, want to lose face in the village; and so two weeks later they detained the widow's son on a four-month old charge of gambling, and asked the widow to pay a fine of 300 yuan to free her son. Everyone, including me, thought the widow was defeated when she paid up; but, to the surprise of all, she went to the county seat and came back with a note from somebody in the county government requesting that the local police department return her money.

Many studies of the guanxi complex in China have focused on the instrumental function of these personal connections (see e.g., Gold 1985; Huang Kwang-kuo 1987; King 1991). The Xiajia case demonstrates that the recent expansion of guanxi networks may have something to do with changes in power relations and, in some circumstances, personal networks may give peasants a way to impose their will on cadres. This parallels Mayfair Yang's argument that the gift economy and personal networks have created a distribution channel outside of the bureaucratic distribution system, and thus constitute a counterforce to the power of the state (see Yang 1989; Yan 1993).

Along with their altered perception of cadre power and newly developed political self-confidence, Xiajia residents' attitudes toward the authority of the party state have also changed. They attribute all social problems, such as inflation, cadre corruption, and public disorder, to high-level state leaders. The best example is perhaps their reaction to the campaign of socialist education launched nationwide in 1990 and 1991 in rural areas. The purpose of this campaign was to clear up problems of village finance and to reeducate peasants about socialism. Xiajia was selected as one of the first villages to launch this campaign, and, as during the collective era, a work team was sent down from the county seat. When I arrived in the spring of 1991, the campaign had been under way for several months, but nothing had happened except that some slogans and posters had been placed on the walls of the village office. Not even a single meeting had been held for the campaign. When I discussed this unusually quiet campaign with my informants, they regarded it as a joke. They maintained that it was a trick by the top leaders to put the masses in the hot seat and thereby hide the serious mistakes made in Beijing. One villager put it this way: "When the people at the top fall sick, they force those at the bottom to take medicine" (shang bian de bing, gei xia bian chi yao ). We did nothing wrong. Why do they always want to educate us?"

This attitude constitutes a sharp contrast to the ways peasants reacted to state campaigns during the collective period. At that time they told themselves: "The scriptures [state policies] were good, but the monks [the cadres

at lower levels] are reciting them wrongly" (jing dou shi haojing, xia bian de heshang gei nian wai le ). As some informants recalled, even during the famine of 1959–61, few people doubted the correctness of policies from above, and they directed all their discontent toward the village cadres. When relief grain was finally allocated to the villagers, who had suffered from hunger for several months, their first reaction was to thank the party state and Chairman Mao. In their own terms, they once had "good feelings" (gan qing ) toward the state, but these feelings are now gone.

Concluding Remarks

Now let me return to the issue raised in the beginning of this chapter: how shall we understand and assess the impact of reforms on cadre power in Xiajia, and how does the Xiajia case relate to current debates about this issue? According to Nee's theory of market transition, if the allocation of goods and services is shifted to marketplaces rather than monopolized by the cadres in the socialist redistributive system, power "becomes more diffused in the economy and society" (Nee 1991, 267). "Therefore, the transition from redistribution to markets involves a transfer of power favoring direct producers relative to redistributors" (Nee 1989, 666). This theory is based on survey data of peasant income collected in 1985, and Nee's key argument relies on the discovery that "current cadre status, following a shift to marketlike conditions, has no effect on a household's chances of being in the top income quintile, nor in its avoidance of poverty, nor in the rate of increase of household income" (Nee 1991, 280).

It is at this point, however, that Oi (1989b) found evidence demonstrating that cadres did take advantage of the reforms by exercising their remaining power. Focusing on the policy context in which the reforms were implemented, Oi conducted a structural analysis of cadre corruption and abuse of power, and offered an instructive counterinterpretation to what Nee proposed: "The most obvious conclusion is that a freer market environment does not necessarily lead to the end of bureaucratic control nor the demise of cadre power" (Oi 1989b, 233). Oi also noted that postreform rural politics remained clientelist in nature (ibid., 231).

It seems to me that in addition to their different conclusions, Nee and Oi also differ from each other in the ways they examine the issue. While defining power as "control over resources" and equating relative income with relative power, Nee emphasizes personal income as the criterion by which to evaluate gain and loss among cadres. In contrast, Oi pays more attention to the institutional aspect of power, with a focus on cadre corruption, and takes the extent to which cadres abuse their power in pursuing personal interest as the standard by which to measure the role of cadres after the reforms.

Applying these perspectives to Xiajia, both seem to have a basis in fact, but neither is sufficient to explain the tremendous changes in power relations. As indicated above, the power of Xiajia cadres has declined to a great extent, and they have lost much of their superiority in social and political terms. But my survey in 1989 also demonstrated that 54 percent of the cadres who were in power on the eve of decollectivization have become affluent, while only 9 percent of the villagers became rich (see table 8.1). This suggests a correlation between cadres' status and their postreform economic achievements. Furthermore, this indicates that neither income nor corruption can be employed as the definitive index of cadre power in the postreform era.

A third criterion, which may be more useful in examining this issue, is the degree of peasant dependence or, to put it another way, the degree of control cadres have over resources. In studies of state socialism, it has long been recognized that the party state's power and authority are based on its monopoly over resources and opportunities, which is maintained and reinforced by the new ruling class of officials (Djilas 1957; Szelényi 1978). Such a monopoly leads to citizen dependence upon officials for the satisfaction of material needs and social mobility, a social phenomena characterized as a form of "organized dependence" by Andrew Walder (1983, 1986). In the context of village society, the fundamental feature of cadre power was villagers' dependence on cadres for the resources under their control. "Men are powerful when many want what they, the few, are able to supply or many fear what they, the few, are able to withhold," George Homans notes (1974, 197). Among many other things, the resources of living, working, resting, socializing, and self-expression are the basic needs of everyday life. These basic resources were, until the reform era, tightly controlled by village cadres, in a situation where villagers were highly dependent. It follows that by examining what happened to these control mechanisms and the degree to which ordinary peasants depend on resources controlled by cadres, one can obtain a better understanding of recent changes in power relations.

My findings from Xiajia lead me to conclude that market reforms have changed the previous balance of villagers' dependence on their leaders and, in some respects, have made cadres dependent on villagers for their incomes. The reforms have eroded cadres' previous power and privilege by breaking their monopoly over resources and by creating new income opportunities that make the accumulation of personal wealth more attractive than the political rewards offered by the party state. Their political role in village society has also changed from that of the tyrannical "local emperor" ruling the village as the agent of the party state to prudent middlemen who negotiate between the state and village society. For villagers, the reforms have ended their dependence on the collectives and the cadres who ran them,

and have thereby to a great extent freed them from cadre domination. While cadres have benefited economically from the reforms, villagers have gained much more in social and political terms — that is, they have attained new individual rights (the right to work, rest, move away, and speak out). Even though the ratio of rich households to ordinary villagers is lower than that to cadres, the reforms have opened the way for the former to compete with the latter in the same market order. In short, the most significant change in power relations has been the erosion of cadres' former monopolized superiority in village life.

The Xiajia case, however, has particularities that speak to important issues of regional variation. Xiajia was and still is a farming community, with an economy characterized by agricultural production. Peasant income still derives mainly from farming and family sidelines. Unlike parts of southeastern China, the trend of marketization and commercialization has yet to play an influential role in the Xiajia economy. Nevertheless, as everyone in farming relies on similar resources, and as land — the primary means of production — was distributed evenly among villagers at the time of decollectivization, the reforms may have produced a more profound political impact on Xiajia than on other industrial or more prosperous areas where a diversified commercial economy has emerged since the reforms. As Ákos Róna-Tas has observed in the case of Hungary, a shift to a market economy tends to have a more egalitarian effect in household farming than in larger enterprises, because agricultural production requires less political and social capital (1990, 205–7). Had there been collective enterprises in Xiajia, or if the majority of its residents had engaged in nonagricultural business, the village cadres would probably have had more resources on hand, and thus might have been able to compel or induce the villagers to respond to their power (see Oi 1990). This contradicts the prediction that the significant weakening of cadre power should coincide with a rather mature development of market transactions (see Nee 1989, 1991).

Among the various dynamics contributing to this fundamental change in power relations in Xiajia, decollectivization and the cessation of mass dictatorship have been the most crucial. As this chapter has shown, collectivization was the key institution through which cadres monopolized all economic, social, and political resources and thus controlled the life of villagers. Mass dictatorship, supported by the state and communist ideology, provided the most powerful instrument for cadres to maintain their monopoly of resources and suppress any resistance. These two mechanisms existed everywhere in rural China prior to the reforms and have subsequently eroded. I therefore regard the Xiajia case as illustrative of recent events in rural communities in China and believe that my study has implications that go well beyond Xiajia's boundaries.

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Nine
Economy and Ethnicity: The Revitalization of a Muslim Minority in Southeastern China

Dru Gladney

One of the unexpected consequences of economic reforms in China has been ethnic revitalization.^[1] Economic reforms initiated in minority areas were designed to improve the living conditions of minorities and hasten their general development, thereby encouraging their integration into the Chinese Han majority mainstream.^[2] Marxist theories have long held that socioeconomic development leads to the erosion, and eventual disappearance, of class differences, as well as national and ethnic loyalties. Economic reforms, by stimulating growth in the economies of state-identified, minority groups, were therefore expected to promote the assimilation of minorities into the broader Han majority culture. In China, not unlike the former Soviet Union, the opposite has occurred: as minorities developed economically, so did their ethnic consciousness.

[1] This study is based on three years of field research between 1982 and 1986 in the People's Republic of China, with brief return visits in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, and 1994, funded by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren foundation, UNESCO, and the East-West Center, and with sponsorship from the Central Institute of Nationalities, the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences, the Fujian Academy of Social Sciences, and Xiamen University. While the data for this study derive from earlier field research and appear at greater length in Gladney 1991, this chapter more specifically addresses the unintended social and political consequences of economic reform among Hui in the community under study.

[2] According to the 1990 census, there are fifty-six official "nationalities" (minzu ) in China, with the Han majority nationality comprising 92 percent of the population, and minorities 8 percent, totaling 91.2 million in population. The Hui nationality, with which this chapter is primarily concerned, is the second largest minority nationality (after the Zhuang), and the most numerous of the so-called "Muslim" nationalities. There are ten nationalities whose main religion is Islam, the Hui, Uygur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tatar, Salar, Dongxiang, Baoan, and Tadjik, altogether numbering about 20 million (17.5 million accordingto the 1990 census; see Gladney 1991, 1993; Heberer 1989; Pillsbury 1981).

Until the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was generally thought by Soviet and Western scholars that minority peoples were gradually "modernizing" and becoming more "Russian" (on "Russification," see Allworth 1980; Dunlop 1983; Olcott 1987). In China, it has been widely believed that minority peoples were inexorably becoming assimilated to the Han Chinese (on "Sinification," see Ch'en 1966; Lai 1988). If economic reforms in minority areas are in fact contributing to ethnic revitalization, this may have important implications for China's continued national unity. By examining economic reform in one southeastern lineage community, I examine the ways in which economic liberalization contributes to ethnic (and in this case even religious) resurgence.

Unintended Consequences of Economic Reforms in Minority Areas

Ding Yongwei beeped me. On a February 1994 visit to Quanzhou city in southern Fujian province, Ding called me from his private car on his cellular phone. I received the call on a beeper (bi pi ji ) he had lent me (and had to show me how to use, since I had never used one before).^[3] When I first met Ding in 1984, I had just begun to study the collection of villages where the people surnamed Ding, officially recognized as members of the Hui minority nationality in 1979 (see Gladney 1991, 290–95), resided. The villagers at that time still depended primarily on agriculture and aquaculture for their living, and they had only just begun to experience the rapid rise in income that would lead to Ding Yongwei lending me his beeper just ten years later. In a formal interview, Liu Zhengqing, the vice-mayor of Chendai township, told me that the Ding villagers were so wealthy that in one village of 600 households, there were 700 telephones, most of them cellular. When I asked my old friend Ding Yongwei if he was doing well, he held out his cellular phone and declared: "If I weren't wealthy, could I be holding this?" (bu fu de hua, zheige nadeqi ma? ). He later explained that the government's decision to recognize the Ding community as members of the Hui minority in 1979 was primarily responsible, not only for their newfound economic prosperity, but also for a tremendous subsequent fascination with their ethnic and religious roots. In this case, the Ding claim to be descended from foreign Muslim traders who settled in Quanzhou in the ninth century. When I first began learning about this area in the early 1980s, these Hui

[3] The visit was owing to participation in a UNESCO-sponsored conference, "Contributions of Islamic Culture on China's Maritime Silk Route," Quanzhou, Fujian, February 21–26, 1994. The conference was hosted by the Fujian Academy of Social Sciences and the Fujian Maritime Museum. I thank Chen Dasheng and the museum's director, Wang Lianmao, for inviting me to the conference, and the East-West Center for providing travel support.

were known, not only as among the least developed people in southern Fujian, but also as those most assimilated into the local Han Chinese culture (Zhuang 1993).

Recent travelers to northwestern China have also been surprised to discover that although the overall significance of the ancient Silk Road for East-West trade has declined since its zenith during the Han dynasty, one can still find many of the indigenous peoples along its routes engaging in activities strikingly similar to those of their forebears. From Kashgar to Xi'an, and even from Shanghai to Guangzhou, Muslim and other minority traders are flourishing in local marketplaces, often dominating village and township economies to a degree disproportionate to their relatively low numbers vis-à-vis the Han majority.^[4] This flourishing of traditional ethnic economies reverses an earlier trend under Stalinist economic planning in which the scope of private enterprise and other forms of local economic autonomy were severely limited (see Stark and Nee 1989). In this chapter, I argue that a closer examination of specific changes in economic policies toward the Hui nationality will reveal that this departure from central planning led specifically to ethnic revitalization. The rise of ethnic consciousness stimulated by these new economic policies has local ethnic groups asserting themselves in what I have termed a "new politics of difference" in China (Gladney 1994b).

From the early period of the People's Republic, the communists made good on promises made to groups encountered during the Long March and in Yan'an to provide assistance to them and reward them for supporting the revolution. These promises required first that minorities be identified according to Stalinist criteria. Out of over 400 applicant groups in the early 1950s, China's preeminent anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong, informs us that a total of 55 minority nationalities were eventually recognized (Fei 1981, 60). Minorities were then accorded the following entitlements: greater flexibility in local economic practices, increased state funding for local development projects, disproportional access to political office, priority in educational advancement, exemption for most minorities from birth-planning restrictions, and more local control over distribution of tax revenues in "autonomous" minority areas (Dreyer 1976). In many cases, these "privileges" were often token in nature and often honored only in the breach. More important, the entitlements were meant to be temporary, until minority development

[4] The Han are the majority nationality in every frontier minority region except Tibet, with the following Han percentages in border areas: Heilongjiang, 85 percent; Inner Mongolia, 83 percent; Ningxia, 68 percent; Guangxi, 61 percent; Guangdong, 58 percent; Liaoning, 52 percent; Xinjiang, 49 percent; Yunnan, 48 percent; Qinghai, 46 percent (Renmin ribao, November 14, 1990, 3; see also Heberer 1989, 44).

could reach that of the Han, and were rarely extended to more "developed" minorities, such as the Koreans and Manchu.

During times of political conservatism, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–58) and Cultural Revolution (1966–76), these privileges were often rescinded as "ethnic" (minzu ), and "local nationalisms" (difang minzu zhuyi ) were thought to be "feudal remnants" with no place in the "new China." People were often afraid to admit their minority background, or reluctant to take advantage of the entitlement programs. After 1978, however, under Deng Xiaoping's economic and political liberalization, these entitlements once again took on increased importance in minority regions. Minorities quickly took advantage of the economic reforms to press for further economic and political opportunities on the basis of their ethnic status. Minorities were in fact among the first to take advantage of the economic reforms and to benefit from them. As token privileges led to real economic growth, political clout, and larger families in minority areas, other groups began to claim ethnic minority status and the corresponding entitlements. One notable consequence of this dramatic change was the rapid growth of the minority population, which increased 35 percent between the 1982 and 1990 censuses, whereas the Han majority grew only 10 percent (Gladney 1991, 222). This was owing not only to their having more children than the Han but also to the dramatic increase in those previously classified as "Han" who successfully had themselves reclassified as members of minority groups, indicating the increasing desirability of minority status. I shall show that for at least one community in southeastern China, changes in the economy — new opportunities for entrepreneurship, increased international sources of investment, and the revival of private trade — both contributed to and benefited from changes in government policy toward their ethnic status.

Departures from central planning have set in motion important processes of social and political change in minority areas. First, there is increased economic as well as political autonomy, because local cadres have much to gain from supporting local minority interests, often at the expense of the state. By politically identifying the minorities as "nationalities" in the early 1950s, with "autonomous" regions, provinces, counties, and even villages, the state set in motion a process of legitimate political activity, no matter how token initially, that was later difficult to limit. As a result, subsequent economic participation of minorities in the marketplace, in their autonomous districts, and in their own areas of specialization was legitimized by their state-assigned political status. Such participation could be exercised more easily during more politically "open" or reform periods, and although not immune, was less subject to repression during conservative periods.

Secondly, there has been a growing enrichment of certain minorities, often at the expense of the majority, even to the point of surpassing Han neighbors in some regions. This may be a result of the preferential policies outlined above, which were originally designed to spur economic development and "national unity." In some regions, this preferential treatment has led to increased jealousy on the part of Han neighbors, ethnic rivalry, and even conflicts with the state, as well as growing numbers of Han people who wish to claim minority status.

Third, cultural and educational programs designed to hasten the unification of China's minorities with the Han majority have led to a revitalization of ethnic and religious heritages, trade, household economies, and even religious resurgence (e.g., Islamic revitalization, Tibetan Buddhist assertiveness, and Mongol interest in Genghis Khan). Through the teaching of minority history, dance, music, and cultural practices in the schools and by public media, China has encouraged "cultural nationalism" despite its eventual goal of assimilating minorities into the Han mainstream (see Gladney 1994a).

Fourth, the state's increasing international trade with Middle Eastern nations has stimulated further religious and economic resurgence among China's Muslims in particular, while limiting the state's ability to repress Islamic movements and Muslim separatism. This is a quite different situation than that of Tibet, where China has little to lose in real economic and political terms on the international front from repressive measures. No foreign nation, including India and Nepal, has curtailed trade with China over the Tibetan issue. China has to be much more careful, however, in terms of the treatment of its nearly twenty million Muslims. The increasing importance of the Middle East for the export of cheap Chinese labor, low-grade weaponry, and agricultural produce, coupled with a growing reliance on Middle Eastern oil, has led to a corresponding increase in the importance of China's domestic policy toward its Muslim population (see Gladney 1994c). If China treats its Muslim minority peoples too severely, it might jeopardize key trade relations with several Middle Eastern governments, who have often expressed concern about the treatment of China's Muslims. At the same time, the growing participation of China's Muslims, collectively and individually, in international trade relations with Middle Eastern governments, has contributed to a validation of Islamic identity and the economic power of Islam.

Fifth, encouraging minorities to exploit their ethnic identities in the local and national political economy has led to increasing transnational connections between ethnic groups within China and their relatives abroad. This "globalization of local identity," to quote Arjun Appadurai, has led to strengthened connections among ethnic groups in China and their kinsmen, primarily in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. These networks become

sources of funds, capital investment, and institutional alliances that lie well outside the centrally planned economy.

Finally, the minority nationality identification and preferential treatment program has led to similar political and economic demands within the Han majority . As such, growing Han nationalisms, such as among the Cantonese, Hakka, Subei, and other peoples previously thought of as Han, with only regional differences, can be seen as an unintended consequence of the state's departure from its original economic development program, initiated to stimulate integration, not economic and ethnic decentralization.

Nationality, Society, and State

Having one foot in the Muslim world and another well planted in Chinese civilization, the Hui Muslim nationality (now numbering 8.4 million according to the 1990 census) were traditionally well situated to serve as cultural and economic mediators within Chinese society, as well as between the Han Chinese majority and other non-Han minorities in Chinese society. This traditional role was severely curtailed, and in some cases completely eliminated, after the collectivization and religious reform campaigns in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the relaxation of restrictions on private enterprise and ethnic expression in the early 1980s, the state was not prepared for, nor did it envision, the speed and vitality with which Muslims returned to their ethnoreligious roots and exploited opportunities to advance themselves and their community.

This point was made to me first when I was traveling in Tibet in February 1985. At any given time of the year, there were on average 10–20,000 Hui merchants from northwestern China temporarily residing in Tibet, trading small manufactured goods such as carpets, plastic articles, and shoes for television sets, radios, watches, and other luxury items brought in from India through Nepal. At any other port of entry in China, Hui and often Uygur Muslims can be seen engaged in this kind of barter-trade.^[5] Local Tibetan cadres explained to me that "free trade" was encouraged around the Jokhang temple in order to "fill the cracks of socialism" and improve the lot of Tibet's "majority" people, the Tibetans (who are over 90 percent of the population). They thus made extra efforts to assist local Tibetan and Hui Muslim businesses at the expense of the Han Chinese, in what David Wank in chapter 6 describes as a "symbiotic clientelism" between entrepreneurs and local officials against the state and broader society. The liberalization

[5] Hui Muslim traders in Tibet are vividly and somewhat derogatorily portrayed in the 1985 Tian Zhuangzhuang film Horsethief (Dao ma zei ). This chapter primarily addresses the role of the Hui as economic middlemen; more extensive discussion of the Uygur and their trading practices is to be found in Gladney 1990, 1992.

of state policy with regard to private enterprise and the expression of minority national identity gave the Hui a unique opportunity to engage in a traditional activity that has long historical and cultural roots, roots that Hui in Fujian are only beginning to discover. As Jean Oi has argued elsewhere (Oi 1989), this alliance between local officials and entrepreneurs has allowed patronage and corruption, but in forms that avoid prosecution precisely because of the general assistance policies directed toward minorities, as well as cadre fear of stirring up minority anti-Han sentiment.

Hui Muslims have been known throughout Chinese history as specialists in such areas as transport, the wool trade, jewelry, and vending food from small stands. Specializations ranged widely in scale and varied regionally according to the socioeconomic position of the Hui in urban or rural settings. Before 1949, "Hui" referred to any person claiming to be Muslim or of Muslim descent. At Yan'an and later during the first Chinese census in 1953, it came to designate one "nationality" (minzu ), which distinguished the Hui from the nine other identified Muslim nationalities in China (Uygur, Kazakh, Kirghiz, etc.), as well as from the Han majority and fifty-four other minority "nationalities." Chairman Mao and the early Yan'an communists eventually only promised autonomy, and not the possibility of secession, to the minority regions who submitted to state authority (see Gladney 1991, 87–93; Heberer 1989, 40–46). "The Communist government of China may be said to have inherited a policy of trying to facilitate the demise of nationality identities through granting self-government to minorities," June Dreyer has noted (1976, 17). Economic reforms have increased the autonomy of these peoples and made it increasingly difficult to carry out an "inherited" policy intended to assimilate them.

Hui Muslim traditional specializations were virtually lost after the 1955 collectivization reforms but have rapidly returned since the 1978 economic liberalization policy. Here we see an important shift in economic institutions. Prior to 1979, one could rarely find a Hui-run private enterprise, restaurant, or shop in China, although that was what they were known for prior to 1949. The centrally planned economy drove Hui out of private business into factory work in the cities, and into farming in the countryside. Although Hui engaged in these activities prior to 1949, they were primarily known for small business, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurialism, which disappeared under Mao. Under Deng, not only in the ancient Silk Road maritime port of Quanzhou, where this chapter begins, but throughout the villages and towns where Muslims now live, Hui have prospered at a rapid rate through strong participation in small private businesses and industry — in many places far surpassing their Han neighbors.

While Western theorists have often regarded "ethnic entrepreneurialism" as either detrimental to free enterprise or counterproductive to economic development in the larger economy (Bonacich 1973; Piore 1973),

recent studies have argued that ethnic-based enterprises often exploit non-economic resources and are ideally suited to small and medium-sized urban and small-town economies (Waldinger 1983; Wong 1987; Zenner 1991). In his survey of "middlemen minorities," Walter Zenner (1991, 24) argues that minorities often play an important role in bridging diverse communities through cultural and economic brokering. These groups often develop communal solidarities, according to Zenner (1991, 19–20), banning out-group marriage, residing in closed communities, using kin ties for capital investment, following ethnic occupational specializations, establishing language and cultural schools for children, participating in nonmajority religious rites, avoiding local politics that are not important to their ethnic group, and maintaining formal ethnic community organizations, often with ties to groups beyond national boundaries.

These characteristics reflected much of Hui Muslim life before the late 1950s. Hui lived in what one frequent traveler to Muslim areas throughout China described as "little Muslim worlds," in almost total isolation from the non-Muslims among whom they lived. Since the major migrations of Muslims in the fourteenth century, Muslim communities throughout China had maintained their own self-sufficient villages and ethnic enclaves, with schools, restaurants, and mosques, meeting non-Muslims primarily in the marketplace. Following the late 1950s collectivization campaigns in the countryside and Socialist Reconstruction of Industry campaigns in urban areas, Hui villages were often redistricted to be included in larger multi-ethnic collectives. In the urban areas, Hui were assigned residence according to workplace, thus dispersing the community to a large degree. Now that post-1979 reforms and market liberalizations have been promoted for the sake of economic development, Hui communities are once again beginning to reflect the characteristics Zenner (1991) describes, returning to their traditional ethnic lifestyles. This will be illustrated by an examination of one Hui community in Fujian.

Economic Prosperity and Muslim Minority Identity in a Fujianese Lineage Community

In May 1984, when I first sought to visit the Hui lineage community on the outskirts of Quanzhou city in southern Fujian, I was told by local officials that the area was economically too "backward" (luohou ), and that it would be "inconvenient" (bu fangbian ) for me to visit their homes in Chendai township. Instead, members of the Hui lineage who shared the single surname Ding arranged to visit me in Quanzhou city. They were eager to tell me how it was that in 1979 they had been recognized as members of the Hui minority nationality, and that their community was beginning to change as a result. I was told that if I had been allowed to visit their coastal villages, I

would have found communities that still derived most of their income from farming, fishing, and coastal clam cultivation. In the summer of 1986, I spent two months in Quanzhou, and on frequent visits to Chendai, I noticed that while the farming and fishing were still present, small factories were beginning to spring up, producing plastic shoes, bags, and containers, as well as medicine and other sundries. I also noticed the large, recently refurbished lineage hall, shrines to local deities, and numerous pigs scavenging for food.

By February 1991, I saw little evidence of fishing or farming; rather, the township was characterized by many new factories and huge three- and four-storey houses, and there was an almost complete absence of pigs! Adjacent to the lineage hall, a new mosque had just been opened to accommodate a growing local community of believers. In 1994, these changes, both economic and religious, were even more dramatic. These dramatic transformations are owing to economic reforms that have made the Chendai Hui begin to resemble their, Muslim ancestors of ancient Quanzhou.

Near what is now Quanzhou city, there existed an ancient Silk Road maritime port known as "Zaitun," which Marco Polo called "one of the largest and most commodious ports in the world." At the southern entrance to the ancient harbor, there are thirteen villages with the single surname Ding, whose inhabitants, numbering over sixteen thousand and called the wan ren Ding (ten thousand Ding), claim descent from the earliest Muslim traders who settled on China's southeastern coast. However, since the descendants of Muslim ancestors in Quanzhou had begun to assimilate to southern Fujianese culture as early as the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the vast majority of the Ding now follow local folk religious observances in their daily rituals and health care, no longer practicing Islam or Muslim dietary restrictions. Absent Islamic Hui culture, they were not recognized as members of the Hui nationality.

I have documented the process of identification whereby several Hui descent groups in Quanzhou maneuvered politically to be recognized as members of the Hui minority elsewhere (Gladney 1991, 286–90). It is important to note here that these Hui provided the perfect example of Chinese Stalinist nationality policy: they thought of themselves as Hui ethnically, but were not Muslim in religion. Because these Hui did not fit the cultural criteria established elsewhere in China, where Hui are often devout or at least titular Muslims and generally abstain from pork, they had difficulty justifying their claim to Hui nationality status. The state only recognized them when proof of their Muslim ancestry was found in local family genealogies, and a well-organized grass-roots association pressed the local government for recognition. It was economic and political liberalization under Deng that provided the impetus for their group mobilization. "We knew that if we were going to take advantage of the new economic reforms,"

one Ding lineage member told me in 1985, "we had to get recognized as Hui." This is not to deny the ethnic feeling for their ancestry the Ding shared prior to 1979. Rather, it only indicates that in 1979 it became possible and important enough for them to press for recognition of that ancestry.

The state did not, however, envision that recognizing the Ding and other groups as Hui would lead, not only to economic prosperity, but to a revitalized interest in Islam and ethnoreligious expression. Although this community still maintains a lineage hall and might be described anthropologically as a single-surname lineage community, there are now other Ding in southeastern China, as well as thousands of others claiming descent from Muslim ancestors, perhaps due to local awareness of the Ding's prosperity.

The Ding have lived in Chendai since the Wanli period of the Ming dynasty (1573–1620), supposedly having fled there from Quanzhou to avoid persecution. Since that time, they have been known for their specialized aquacultural economy. The town of Chendai is on the Fujian coast and well suited for cultivating the razor clams for which the Ding lineage are famous. Before 1949, they were not only engaged in this industry, but also produced opium and had many small factories that made woven bags and sundry goods. These goods were exported extensively and led to the migration of many Ding Hui to Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in their business endeavors. After 1955, when private industries were collectivized in China, these small factories were either curtailed or transferred to the larger commune, of which the Ding lineage constituted seven brigades.

Since 1979, and the implementation of the economic reform policies in the countryside, the Ding have been recognized as members of the Hui nationality, and have once again begun operating small private factories producing athletic shoes and plastic goods, like the brightly colored plastic sandals, rugs, and other sundries found in most Chinese department stores. Of the 3,350 households in the seven villages (former brigades) in Chendai (which are 92 percent Hui), over 60 ran small factories in 1991. By 1994, the majority of all households derived their primary incomes from these "sideline" enterprises. In the larger factories, there may be over a hundred workers; in smaller ones, often only ten or so. Workers can work as long as they wish, which is usually eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week.

As a result of these many factories and their hard work, the Ding have begun to do extremely well. Several Ding families have registered as wanyuanhu (10,000-yuan families). One family banked at least 100,000 yuan (U.S. $33,000) in 1986. That was an extraordinary amount then, but in 1994 it became commonplace. The average annual income in the predominately Hui Chendai township in 1983 was 611 yuan per person, whereas in the larger, Han-dominated Jinjiang county, it was only 402 yuan in 1982 (People's Republic of China 1987, 175). By 1984, Chendai income

reached 837 yuan per person for the town, while the Hui within Chendai averaged 1,100 yuan. Their income increased 33 percent in 1985. By 1989, the entire township's income had jumped to an average annual income of 1,000 yuan per person (Ding 1990, 3). This indicates a substantial increase in local Hui income over Han income in the county as well as the township. It is clear that the economic success was not limited to the Hui, as Han in Fujian also prospered during this period. Income from factories and industrial enterprises increased in the entire township from 1.4 million yuan in 1979 to 620 million yuan in 1993 (see table 9.1).^[6]

The argument here is that economic reforms allowed minorities to assert their access to certain privileges, also encouraged under the economic reforms, which enabled them to prosper relatively faster than the Han. The increase of Hui over Han income was mainly owing to the encouragement of Hui-owned businesses, the permitted political mobilization of the Hui community, and the reestablishment of Hui overseas family connections, all of which were still being discouraged among the Han in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These activities became commonplace along the southeastern coast in the late 1980s, but my informants said that Han cadres in Jinjiang county were reluctant to encourage such practices among the Han until the Hui proved successful with them without political repercussions.

Finally, income from sideline enterprises in agriculture and small industry has also grown at an incredibly rapid rate (see table 9.2). Although the Hui only constitute one-seventh of the town's population, they account for over one-third of the income (township records). In 1984, Chendai was the first town in Fujian province to become a yiyuan zhen (100,000,000-yuan town). Color television sets are owned by almost every household, and there were over 550 motorcycles in the seven all-Hui villages in 1991. Over half of the Hui in the town have their own two- to four-level homes, paid for with cash from their savings. Many of the multi-level homes that I visited had small piecework factories on the first level (making tennis shoe soles here, the linings there, laces elsewhere, and so on), while the various stem family branches lived on the other levels. For example, Ding Yongwei, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, has two sons. On the first level of his four-storey stone-block home, he has a small factory that produces the stretchy fabric that is used to line the insides of athletic shoes. He obtains the materials from a distant relative in the Philippines. His youngest son and wife live on the second floor. His oldest son, wife, and two children live on the third floor (as a Hui, Ding's son is allowed to have two children). Ding Yongwei and his wife occupy the top floor.

It is clear that during this period, economic reorganization occurred as a

[6] Note that the 1989 figures are based on Ding 1990, whereas the 1979–93 records are derived from my field notes and township records.

result of the economic reforms. Prior to 1978, the majority of the labor force (69.9 percent) in Chendai were engaged in agriculture, and only 30 percent were involved in industry. By 1992, this had shifted dramatically, with 93 percent of the labor force engaged in industry (table 9.3). Income from sideline enterprises has increased eight times over 1979. The Ding believe that this was because of their recognition as Hui. Whatever the reason, it is clear that economic reforms and their skill in turning their ethnicity to their own advantage led to dramatic changes in the political economy of the area.

Ethnic Politics and Economic Prosperity

Ding Hui do not attribute their prosperity to industriousness alone. When they were recognized as part of the Hui nationality in 1979, they became eligible for assistance as members of an underprivileged minority. They have received several government subsidies that have spurred their economy. Between 1980 and 1984, the government gave over 200,000 yuan to the seven Hui teams, which they spent on a running-water system, ponds for raising fish, and expansion of their razor-clam industry. The Ministry of Education has given 40,000 yuan to build a middle school, and 33,000 yuan for a primary school. As a minority nationality the Hui also receive preference in high school and college admission, and they are allowed to have one more child per family than the Han. Hui representation in the local government is also disproportionately higher than their percentage of the population. Two of the ten party committee representatives (changwei ) were surnamed Ding in 1985, as was the town's party secretary.

Perhaps more important, the Ding have exploited their transnational connections to relatives abroad, and started to do so earlier than the Han in their area, leading to increased sources of capital investment. Over 50 percent of the Ding lineage members have overseas relatives, mainly in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore — a higher proportion than their

Han neighbors (see Li 1990, 337–46). They have reestablished communications with these relatives and have been assisted by frequent remittances. One of the reasons Hui and Han alike are eager to exploit overseas connections is that joint ventures are not subject to the same government taxes as other private industries. With both their minority status and overseas connections, the Hui are in a much stronger position to exploit these favorable conditions than the Han.

This outside income is an important factor in the rapid economic development of the seven Ding villages. All seven Hui villages have elementary schools, thanks to donations from overseas relatives averaging 20,000 yuan each. Neighboring Han villages have one elementary school for every three or four villages. The Ding say that their close and frequent contact with overseas relatives is a result of their strong feeling of ethnic identity, which they say surpasses that of neighboring Han lineages, with their overseas relations. It is interesting, however, that one wealthy village family that maintained extensive overseas relations revealed that overseas relatives are often reluctant to admit their Islamic heritage! While it is not true of all Ding, in this case, it is clear that many villagers and their overseas relatives are exploiting a favorable minority nationality policy even when they may not share strong ethnic feelings about their past.

These government subsidies and special benefits are important factors in the Ding Hui claim to ethnic minority status. The manipulation of ethnic identity for special favored treatment has been well documented by anthropologists as an example of "situational" ethnicity, where ethnic groups frequently maneuver and reposition themselves for political and economic advantages (Barth 1969; Wallerstein 1987). This is certainly an important factor in understanding why the Ding lineage's ethnic identity has become even more relevant under Deng's economic reforms. Changes in socio-economic conditions and the local political economy are conducive to rapid ethnic change. Even before such policies were promulgated, however, Ding Hui occupied a distinct ecological and commercial niche, which they had maintained for generations.

This indicates that for the Ding, their ethnic attachment to certain economic practices is not merely situational, but belongs to a more deeply ingrained identity, which has been part of their collective memory for generations (Geertz 1973; Keyes 1981). Even when they have been prevented from openly expressing those traditions, they have been preserved privately through family and communal ritual. It is significant that in ancestor worship, where pork is the most highly prized of all ancestral offerings, the Ding did not offer pork to their ancestors precisely because they remembered them to be Muslim, even though they themselves for the most part are no longer Muslim and include pork in their diet. Part of the jipin (requirements of remembrance) stipulated in their genealogy was the offering of

razor clams to their ancestors (Ding Clan Genealogy 1980, 30). This indicates that ethnic specialization of labor was maintained in southern Fujian, where Hui are known to have been involved in specific aquacultural industries. These specializations were interrupted by PRC collectivist policies but have reappeared with the economic reforms.

Economic reforms encouraged private enterprise and dismantling of centrally planned economies, allowing for the rise of local associations and ethnic mobilization for economic goals. These associations in turn led to increased ethnic and even religious revitalization in this community, as well as the reestablishment of international networks. Central-state policy accords special economic and political privileges to these recently recognized Hui along the southeastern coast and encourages their interaction with foreign Muslim governments. This has had a significant impact on their ethnic identity. Fujian provincial and local municipal publications proudly proclaim Quanzhou to be the site of the third most important Islamic holy grave and the fifth most important mosque in the world.^[7] Religious and government representatives from over thirty Muslim nations were escorted to Muslim sites in Quanzhou as part of a state-sponsored delegation in spring 1986. The successful promotion of Quanzhou's place on the ancient Silk Route and in Islamic history led to two UNESCO-sponsored conferences in 1991 and 1994, with substantial international participation, as part of UNESCO's ongoing study of the Silk Route as a medium of intercultural exchange.

In February 1991, the UNESCO-sponsored Silk Roads Expedition arrived in Quanzhou, which became its main port of entry on China's "Maritime Silk Route," virtually bypassing the traditional stopping-place, Guangzhou. During the four-day conference and Silk Road festivities, in which I participated, foreign guests and Muslim dignitaries were brought to a Chendai Ding village as part of their orientation in order to highlight the recent economic prosperity and government support for the modern descendants of the ancient Muslim maritime traders. At the 1994 conference, not only were academic papers presented, but participants were offered the possibility of paying to go on a tour of "Islamic Maritime Sites" following the

[7] The tombs are said to hold the remains of Imam Sayid and Imam Waggas from Medina, two reputed cousins of the Prophet Muhammad, sent to China by the Prophet with two other missionaries, Wahb Abu Kabcha, who is said to be buried in Guangzhou's bell tomb, and another saint, buried in Yangzhou. According to He Qiaoyuan's 1629 history of Fujian (the Minshu ), these four missionary saints visited China during the Wu De period of the Tang emperor Gao Zu (A.D. 618–26), which is hardly possible, since Islam dates to Muhammad's famous Hijra (or "journey") from Mecca to Medina in 622 and the Prophet died in 632. For the debate over the authenticity of the tombs, and the 1009–10 dating of the Quanzhou mosque, see Chen 1984, 95–101. For the claim that Quanzhou is an Islamic pilgrimage site, see Yang 1985.

conference, including visits to mosques and Muslim cemeteries in Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, Xi'an, and Beijing. During the 1994 conference in Quanzhou, on the fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year, participants were taken to several Hui-run factories, as well as to the Ding lineage's cemetery, where Ding elders remembered their ancestors by performing such rites as burning incense, bowing three times, reading portions of the genealogy, and, in a newly "invented" tradition, presenting flowers to their ancestors' graves. In reflection of their ancestors' Islamic heritage, the Ding invited their local imam to read a passage of the Quran in front of the graves. Afterward, he invited the few foreign and local Muslims to join him in a Quranic recitation. The ceremony was followed by statements by local officials, including a strong expression of support from Hei Boli, the former chairman of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and current vice-chairman of the People's Political Consultative Congress. Foreign Muslims, including the director of the UNESCO project and officials and scholars from Iran, Kuwait, Turkey, and Malaysia also made public statements of support.

Partly as a result of these and earlier official and international Islamic contacts, construction of the Xiamen international airport was completely underwritten by a low-interest loan from the government of Kuwait in the mid 1980s. The Kuwaitis also assisted in the building of a large hydroelectric dam project along the Min River outside Fuzhou. A Jordanian businessman visiting in spring 1986 offered to donate U.S. $1.5 million to rebuild the Qingjing mosque in Quanzhou, established in the year 1009. China claims that the many Islamic relics in Quanzhou are evidence of a long history of friendly exchanges between China and the Muslim world. As a result of China's growing trade with Third World Muslim nations, it is only natural that these historical treasures should be displayed and made available to foreign Muslim visitors. It is also not surprising that the descendants of these early foreign Muslim residents in Quanzhou — the Ding, Guo, Huang, Jin, and other Hui lineages — are interested in further interaction with distant foreign Muslim relations.

International Islamic attention has had an impact upon the self-perception of the Ding lineage as Hui descendants. It has also led to a kind of ethnic revitalization and rediscovery of their Muslim heritage. In 1984, construction of a mosque was proposed in Chendai so that the Hui there could begin to learn more about Islam. The Quanzhou mosque is too far from Chendai (fifteen kilometers) to be of practical use to them, and it is now without a resident imam. When the new mosque was completed in Chendai in 1990, it attracted many villagers interested in learning more about Islam. Quranic study courses have been conducted, and some villagers have begun to learn Arabic. In 1991, they invited an imam from Inner Mongolia, and eighteen students from the Ding lineage have gone to

Huhehot to study with the Chendai imam's teacher in order to become future imams, including two women. There are four other mosques in Fujian, which formerly had imams from Ningxia and Gansu, who came at the invitation of the provincial Islamic Association between 1982 and 1989, but they all eventually returned to their more familiar homes in the Islamic northwest, and now Chendai is the only mosque with an imam in all of Fujian province. This is particularly ironic, since the mosque in Chendai is the newest mosque in Fujian, established among villagers who have only recently begun to practice the Islamic faith.

In November 1984, a grass-roots organization of Ding Hui leaders was recognized by the government as the "Jinjiang County Chendai Town Commission for Hui Affairs." This is quite significant, in that formal voluntary associations outside of initial government sponsorship are generally considered illegal in China, and in this case the state recognized the organization well after it was established. One of the commission's first acts was to establish a small museum in the ancestral hall, which now displays articles substantiating their foreign Muslim ancestry, their recognition as members of the Hui nationality in 1979, their recent economic success, and the visits of foreign Muslims and foreign dignitaries, including a picture of the author's 1986 visit! The ancestral hall museum possesses the usual ritual objects and ancestral tablets on the domestic altar, as do other southern Fujianese temples, but the hall is no longer used in the worship of ancestors. Locals affirmed that daily rituals of the domestic cult, lighting incense on a daily basis, and providing special offerings on festivals and feast days, were similar to those of other Fujianese families. The main difference here is that no pork was admitted into the ancestral hall. Ding members told me that they often rinsed their mouths with tea before making offerings to their ancestors, as a way of cleansing pork residue that might be offensive to them. Perhaps more important, this ancestral hall received special township-level support and approval. Ancestral halls are now allowed in China but are generally not patronized by the state. The township provided some funding for the ancestral hall, reasoning that it also contained a historical museum of the history of the Hui, and thus of foreign relations in China. I have never seen another ancestral hall containing a museum, and it was the nicest hall that I visited in Fujian.^[8]

[8] In 1990, the commission sponsored and completed construction of an "Islamic prayer hall" (qingzhen libaitang ) adjacent to the lineage village. This "prayer hall" was built exactly like a mosque, with a qibla (niche identifying orientation toward Mecca) and worship area, in Arab architecture style. The commission was not officially allowed at the time to call it a mosque (qingzhensi or masjdid ), however, as the China Islamic Association had not approved its construction. In Beijing, I was told by representatives of the association in 1991 that they were uncomfortable about giving their imprimatur to a mosque situated in a village of Hui who were not entirely Islamic and practiced Minnan folk religion. Nevertheless, a growing number of Hui villagers attend the mosque for regular prayer and Quranic study. In late 1991, they invited the imam to come to the prayer hall, and now it is officially recognized as a mosque (qingzhensi ).

The Ding Hui commission has also asked that Jinjiang county be recognized as an autonomous minority county, but this has not worked out, according to one official, because of "redistricting difficulties." Other Hui have told me the state would never risk recognizing an autonomous Hui county that was not Islamic for fear of antagonizing conservative national and international Muslim opinion. The community apparently celebrated the Ramadan fast in 1989 and 1990 by giving up pork for the month. This possible creation of a new Islamic identity for the Hui in Chendai is important to watch as it becomes increasingly relevant for them in their altered social context. It is also important to note that the reforms and prosperity that have come to Ding villagers as a result of their pressing for recognition as members of the Hui nationality and descendants of the ancient Silk Road Muslim traders have not been restricted to the Muslim Hui Ding; they have benefited the entire township. Chendai township not only has a substantial Han population, but there are also many among the Ding who do not believe in Islam, including folk religionists, and even about eighty households of Christians, who were nevertheless registered as members of the so-called Hui "Muslim" nationality! These Ding converted in the 1930s under the influence of a Western Protestant missionary, and they too have recently rebuilt their church, possibly because the local government allowed the construction of the Islamic prayer hall.

Prosperity has come to the Ding lineage partly as a result of government minority assistance, through tax breaks, development incentives, and permission to engage in small business, and partly as a result of the local Hui taking aggressive advantage of opportunities for collective action, economic enterprise, and increased contacts with overseas relatives. As noted above, although the Ding lineage only constitutes one-seventh of the town's population, it accounts for over one-third of the entire area's annual income. Economic prosperity has been accompanied by ethnic and even religious revival. These lineages have always maintained a Hui identity that in conjunction with recent events is only now beginning to take on a decidedly Islamic commitment, something quite unforeseen when the state chose to institute economic reforms in the late 1970s. It is clear that the Ding pressed for recognition as members of the Hui nationality just at the time of Deng's economic liberalization policies, and then quickly took advantage of them as an ethnic minority — a minority whose main cultural trait was defined as "entrepreneurialism." Here, ethnic revitalization can be seen as a direct consequence of shifts in economic policy. The earlier centrally planned

economy prevented ethnic specialization, entrepreneurialism, and exploitation of individual and corporate overseas ties. Now that economic planning has been decentralized, it will be very difficult to put these revitalized aspects of Ding ethnicity back in the box.

Muslim Traders, Chinese State

This chapter has demonstrated that the Hui have dramatically resurrected entrepreneurial traditions handed down to them from their Muslim ancestors. The Chinese state has played an important role in allowing these traditions to flourish, as in the past decade, or in restricting them, as during the two decades from 1958 to 1978. Nevertheless, while the state can restrict or support trade, it cannot control the consequences of its economic policies, which have a direct influence on nationality policy and ethnic identity. The Hui, Uygur, and other Muslim communities bring to their economic engagements an interest in trading and a desire to maximize their opportunities for advancement. Whether their motivations be personal enrichment, religious enhancement, or strengthening community solidarity, their marginalized position in Chinese society has put them in a position where trade and mediation are important skills needed for survival and self-strengthening, developed over years of relative isolation among the Chinese majority or in opposition to a non-Muslim state. Economic reforms have not only allowed the reestablishment of these "ethnic" traditions but have directly stimulated them.

This is particularly true of the Hui, whose "cultural makeup" is said to predispose them to entrepreneurialism. The recognition of the unique contribution Hui entrepreneurial abilities might make to economic development represents a dramatic shift from past criticisms of these characteristics as capitalistic and feudal. Perhaps to seek historical support for this state policy, Lai Cunli, in his 312-page survey of Hui economic history, commissioned by the China Minority Nationality Research Office of the State Commission for Nationality Affairs, argues, after a detailed historical review of the entrepreneurial role Hui have played throughout Chinese history, that their "minority culture" is uniquely entrepreneurial compared to those of other nationalities in China, and that this "business culture" has been responsible for making major contributions to the development of China's economy (Lai 1988, 3, 283). "One can see," he concludes, "that the business activity of the early Hui ancestors was an extremely great influence on the formation of the Hui nationality" (ibid., 276). Similarly, the well-known Hui historian Ma Tong argues that the fact that the early ancestors of the Hui were primarily traders, businessmen, and soldiers had a profound influence on their later formation as a nationality:

Based on the analysis of historical records, Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and other foreign businessmen, soldiers, officials, and missionaries who believed in Islam and came to China were the ancestors of the Hui nationality; since they resided in China and even married Han women, they gradually formed into the Hui nationality, and [it] became an important member of our country's great multinational family…. From the very earliest period, the vast majority of Islamic disciples in China were engaged in trade and business activity. (Ma [1981] 1983, 86, 87)

Although the state has sought to exploit entrepreneurial traditions among the Hui to encourage economic development in rural and urban areas, as well as to make use of an "Islamic card" in its international relations, it has not been able to prevent the full expression of Hui ethnoreligious identity, which is inextricably linked to Islam. With economic privatization has come ethnoreligious revitalization and a growing awareness of Muslim links to the outside Islamic world. Just as the state has encouraged and courted investment from foreign Muslim governments in China, only to find that foreign Muslims have generally preferred to build mosques rather than factories, so among the Hui, the state has not been able to divorce national from religious interests, or economic development from Islamic awareness.

I have argued elsewhere that prior to the founding of the PRC, Hui identity, like the term "Hui," was ill defined at best. To be Hui meant to be Muslim, and it bore little connection to ethnic or nationality status. A foreign Muslim was a Hui, as well as a Uygur, Kazakh, or Chinese-speaking Muslim — a policy still maintained in Taiwan, which does not recognize the Hui as a separate nationality, only as a religious group (Pillsbury 1981, 35). With the identification of the Hui as a nationality (minzu ) by the early Chinese communists in Yan'an and then officially in 1953, Muslims had legitimate economic and political incentives to define themselves as members of the Hui or other Muslim minorities. These economic and political privileges that the early communists held out to their early Muslim supporters led directly to the rise of their collective identity as a nationality. The Hui nationality experienced a "crystallization" and even, perhaps, invention of national identity that has had far-reaching consequences for their development. Not only are Hui in Fujian rediscovering their Islamic roots, but Hui throughout China are exploiting every potential privilege attached to their minority nationality status. Economic prosperity has only served to support these tendencies — developments that the early Chinese communists could never have envisioned. For the Hui in Quanzhou, recognition in 1979 as Hui did not cause their economic prosperity, but it certainly helped it. By the same token, potential economic prosperity was not the only reason for their reassertion of ethnicity, but it certainly was an important incentive. It is

clear from this study, however, that economic reforms had much to do with the ethnic transformations in the Quanzhou countryside.

The Legitimization of Ethnicity in China

This chapter has not yet established why it is that the sight of ethnic and religious nationalism rapidly expanding along with the economy in minority, especially Muslim, areas has not led the PRC to reverse its policy. If the Chinese communist state is aware, as it clearly must be, that "a quiet revolution from below" (Szelényi 1988) contributed to the Hungarian communists' fall from power, why does it not simply rescind its recognition of minority nationality identity and declare that national differences, like class differences, have been eradicated in China? Since economic reforms have not only stimulated the local economy in minority regions, as intended, but have also inadvertently led to ethnic and religious revitalization, continued economic growth might very well lead to increased ethnic separatism and religious conflict. Why tie economic and other privileges to ethnicity in China, rather than just repudiating ethnic and religious differences altogether? This was certainly done during the Cultural Revolution and earlier radical periods. Yet it has not occurred under Deng Xiaoping, who has allowed, if not encouraged, ethnicity and religion through a liberalized economy. Why do leaders listen to interest groups and their demands? Why not ignore them?

By linking entrepreneurialism and privatization with nationality status, ethnicity in China has gained an increased legitimacy and legality. In state socialist societies, identity is not just something you maintain about yourself, which is open to debate, self-definition, and other-definition; rather, it is a right you possess, legislated and enforced by the state, marked in your passport, and determined at birth (or at nationality registration in the case of mixed parentage). Nationality becomes a registered, public association, to which one belongs by law, unlike other voluntary associations, which may be severely restricted in such societies. In this way, one sees a legalization and essentialization of ethnicity, a state-sponsored primordialization, to use Edward Shils's (1957) term, by giving ethnicity state authority, legality, and the aura of legitimacy. This both diminishes the power of the state (i.e., local cadres, who cannot object to ethnic assertions of interest) and at the same time legitimates the state's power to define which groups constitute nationalities and which groups do not (see Kornai 1992, 52). The state does derive benefits from permitting entrepreneurialism among minority nationalities, particularly through gaining wider ethnic support, as well as the "symbolic capital" China enjoys in the international arena through portraying itself as multinational, with the Han in the vanguard of national socio-economic development and modernity. The state also establishes itself as

a benefactor and teacher of the "backward" minority peoples, who should eventually "evolve" and assimilate, with appropriate support and leadership provided by the Communist party.

There are many consequences of this legitimation of decentralized economic reforms and entrepreneurialism among national minorities in socialist states. First, there is a clear devolving downward of power and authority, from the state and majority nationality to the ethnic minority leaders and their followers. Second, in the other direction, there is an enhanced ability of minorities to influence government officials, as well as a reluctance on the part of those officials to interfere with minority "rights." Third, there is a relative decline in the authority of local officials to enforce central policy, especially in areas where minorities constitute large population concentrations. Fourth, and perhaps most important, there is an increase in collective self-identities as minzu (nationalities), a rise in the numbers of those who wish to be considered as such, and perhaps even a desire among the Han majority to exploit cultural differences for personal gain. For example, minority art and romanticization of ethnic "primitivity" is growing in popularity among the broader populace (see Gladney 1994a). The 1990 census revealed that in China, fewer people want to be known as Han. We now find that even among the majority Han population, increasing numbers of "sub-Han" peoples, such as the Cantonese (self-proclaimed "Wu" and "Tang" peoples), Sichuanese, Hakka, and Fujianese, are beginning to assert their distinctiveness, maintaining local languages, and even claiming ethnic difference from the Han majority.

Fifth, identity becomes further linked economically to nationality. One cannot get a job in the formal sector or enter school without registering one's nationality. And, finally, there are now new types of political and economic competition that are often ethnic and subethnic, whereas before ethnicity was not arguably the main divide for political conflict (in official dogma, it was class), or at least it was more restricted by the state, which believed ethnicity to be transitory and superstructural. While ethnicity is certainly much more than a state-recognized categorization, in state socialist societies, the power and authority of ethnicity becomes sanctioned, indeed legalized, by the state, and is stimulated and legitimated by economic reforms. Unlike corruption, ethnic revitalization that results from economic liberalization cannot be restricted or criminalized.

Events in Yugoslavia and Romania (Kligman 1990) suggest that the categories of nationality established under state socialism, while in some cases helping to undermine that very system, have nevertheless gained a power and legitimacy of their own, which is not easily denied once attained. This chapter has shown how such an identity, given by the state to one lineage in southern Fujian through its recognition as one of fifty-five official minority nationalities, has allowed its emergence as a vibrant ethnic group, which

is now asserting itself in the economic and political sphere, both domestically and internationally. Economic reforms under Deng have served to strengthen and enhance ethnic differences. Although minority recognition was part of the original Leninist-Stalinist-inspired central plan, the state (and perhaps the minorities themselves) never imagined what they would become, where the state would take them, or they the state.

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