MCLC: feudal answers for modern problems

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: feudal answers for modern problems
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (4/10/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/opinion/yu-in-china-feudal-answers-for-mo
dern-problems.html

OP-ED GUEST COLUMNIST
In China, Feudal Answers for Modern Problems
By YU HUA

After Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China in 1949, the Communist Party began to get rid of all the vestiges of
the “feudal” society that had preceded it.

This process culminated during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) with the
campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds”: old thought, culture, customs and
habits. Cultural relics and temples were feudal, and so, too, were
traditional celebrations, like the springtime Qingming (tomb sweeping) and
Dragon Boat Festivals and the Mid-Autumn Festival.

In Beijing, restaurant names like Donglaishun (East Come Smoothly) and
Quanjude (Consummate Virtue) were written off as feudal, and Tongren
(Equal Kindness) Hospital and Xiehe (Assisting Harmony) Hospital were
renamed Worker-Peasant-Soldier Hospital and Anti-Revisionism Hospital,
respectively. In a little town between Shanghai and Hangzhou, the street I
lived on as a child, Yang Family Alley, became Sunnyside Alley.

With Mao’s death in 1976 and the onset of market reforms under Deng
Xiaoping, the four olds, so long vilified, all of a sudden became jewels
of traditional culture. Donglaishun’s poached mutton and Quanjude’s roast
duck are now culinary highlights in Beijing. Heritage sites everywhere are
being protected and restored (though not always faithfully), while temples
and monasteries are once more crowded with worshipers. Traditional
festivals have become official public holidays. Soothsayers and
fortunetellers, once forced into hiding, are now a dime a dozen. The
Sunnyside Alley of my boyhood has reverted to being Yang Family Alley.
Most strikingly, practices that used to be criticized as feudal have
become, in the hands of some shrewd Communist officials, favored
management techniques.

The corruption, income inequality and environmental degradation that have
accompanied China’s breakneck economic development over the last 30 years
have provoked social unrest. In 2010, China had 180,000 “mass incidents,”
the official euphemism for protests — a fourfold increase over the
previous decade. Methods of social control that once worked like charms
are now losing their efficacy. So the Central Party School and its
provincial subsidiaries, which train China’s leaders, are revamping
curriculums. Each year they send student-officials to Harvard to study
Western management.

But they are often finding that it’s the old feudal customs, so repugnant
to Mao, that help them keep a grip on society.

A district chief in a southern Chinese city told me this story: Heavy
rains had triggered a flood that swept away over a thousand graves,
affecting more than 10,000 people. The Chinese have a deep-seated belief
that the state of one’s ancestors’ graves determines one’s own fate. To
accommodate urbanization, these thousand-odd graves, originally dispersed
over a variety of locations, had been shifted and placed next to one
another — a process that was itself contradictory, because according to
tradition, graves are not to be moved, lest later generations suffer some
calamity.

If a deluge had dislodged the graves from their original burial places,
people would have seen that as a natural disaster, but since the
government had been responsible for relocating the graves, infuriated
residents blamed the authorities for putting their ancestors in harm’s way.

Instead of mobilizing the police, however, the canny district chief
summoned a dozen or so practitioners of feng shui. They calmed the
protesters, assuring them that when the graves were swept away it
signified a fortune in the making. As folk wisdom has it, water is wealth
— and an encounter with water means you will get rich. The protesters
didn’t trust the government, but they did trust the feng shui masters.

Here’s another story, told to me by a former county official in Hunan
Province, in central China. Consignments of timber, concrete and
reinforcing rods were piled on a vacant lot to prepare for the building of
a government office block. Every evening, local residents would sneak over
and help themselves to construction materials, planning to use them for
their own projects. In their eyes, stealing property from the government
didn’t count as theft, unlike, say, stealing from your neighbor. County
officials proposed security measures: a perimeter wall topped by an
electrified fence, and regular police patrols.

No need for any of that, the county leader told them. His solution: wooden
signs posted on all four sides. “For temple construction,” the signs read.
This did the trick: when the locals saw that the timber, steel and
concrete were going to be used to build a Buddhist temple, not only did
they stop their pilfering, but under cover of darkness they even returned
the loot they had carted home. Theft of temple property, superstition told
them, would incur terrible retribution.

A Canadian reporter once asked me: “How much longer will Mao’s portrait
hang on Tiananmen?”

“If Mao knew his China would be reduced to this,” I replied, “he’d insist
that his portrait be taken down right away.”

Yu Hua, the author of “China in Ten Words,” is a guest columnist. This
column was translated by Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.