Professional Documents
Culture Documents
OF SELF-HELP MOVEMENTS
IN EAST ASIA
Edited by
TOM CLIFF
TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI
SHUGE WEI
The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements
in East Asia
Tom Cliff • Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Shuge Wei
Editors
Shuge Wei
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
study of this phenomenon in East Asia and beyond. The cases we have
studied pose important questions about our understanding of the very
meaning of “politics” itself. Our aim, in responding to those questions, is
to open up space for a wider reimagining of the meaning of political life in
the twenty-first-century world.
The editors and authors express their deep gratitude to the Australian
Research Council, which has supported this research through its Laureate
Fellowship program (project FL120100155—Informal Life Politics in the
Remaking of Northeast Asia: From Cold War to post-Cold War). We also
warmly thank our fellow project members Eun Jeong Soh and Robert
Winstanley-Chesters, who have contributed greatly to the development of
our ideas about informal life politics in the region, and express particular
thanks to the project’s research assistant and administrator, Hanbyol Lee.
This research, of course, would not have been possible without the kind-
ness and cooperation of many people in Beijing, South Korea, Inner
Mongolia, Okinawa and other parts of Japan, and Taiwan, who generously
shared their time, experiences, and ideas with us. We express our gratitude
to all of them, and to our partners and families who have shared this jour-
ney of discovery with us.
Contents
Part I Citizenships 15
vii
viii CONTENTS
Bibliography 219
Index 235
List of Figures
ix
x LIST OF FIGURES
Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shuge Wei
ous and ethically virtuous life. The many and diverse strands of Confucian,
Neo-Confucian, and Daoist thought that emerged in China—and were
then taken up and reworked in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere—shared a
concern with the creation of a harmonious and virtuous society. Though
Confucian ideas are often seen as emphasising hierarchical order and obe-
dience to the ruler, many currents of East Asian thought in fact gave ordi-
nary people a vital part in the creation of the good society.4 There is,
indeed, a recurrent motif in East Asian political thought which sees politi-
cal virtue, harmony, and happiness as being created in the everyday lives of
the population:
Someone said to Confucius, Why are you not in government? The Master
said, The Shu says, “Be filial toward your parents, be friendly toward your
brothers, and you will contribute to the government.” This too, then, is
being in government. Why should you speak of being “in government?”5
Ideas in Motion
These debates about politics and subpolitics, ideology and post-ideology
are profoundly relevant to our discussion of informal life politics. But their
broad-brush abstractions fail to come to grips with some of the most
intriguing and puzzling features of our age. One problem is that the
debates outlined so far set up a dichotomy between (on the one hand)
ideology and antagonistic/agonistic politics and (on the other) post-
ideology and consensus; but events of recent years complicate this dichot-
omy. The global rise of populism challenges the established schema of
“right versus left,” and even raises questions about the very meaning of
“ideology” itself. The populist “reality TV politics” of figures like Duterte
or Trump are certainly antagonistic, but do they involve “ideology” in the
sense that this word was used by political thinkers like Carl Schmitt or
(from a very different perspective) Antonio Gramschi? The difficulties
inherent in a sharp dichotomy between ideology and post-ideology also
become very clear when we consider cases of grassroots actions like the
ones presented in this book.
The groups that we are studying here are not necessarily “ideological”
in the sense of embracing any of the major political traditions outlined by
Bronner. But that does not mean that they are devoid of political ideas.
Many are eclectic, borrowing ideas from a diverse range of sources, and
embracing participants with varying views of the world. In this sense,
obviously, they need to create some degree of internal consensus (however
incomplete) in order to do anything at all. But to be politically eclectic is
a very different matter from embracing a post-political consensus. In their
relationship to the wider world, most groups which seek to bring about
INTRODUCTION: LIVING POLITICS—SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES… 7
Structure and Outline
To highlight some key features of informal life politics, the book is struc-
tured in three sections, each focused on a core theme. Each section begins
with a “concept essay,” analysing a particular element crucial to under-
standing the processes of living politics. This is followed by two chapters
that offer sustained analyses of particular examples of informal life politics,
highlighting the section’s core theme. The core themes are: citizenship
and the attention-seeking state, informal social networks, and alternative
value systems.
Part I, “Citizenships,” draws attention to the relationship between indi-
viduals and the nation-state. In the concept essay, Tom Cliff posits that
ignoring state rules or expectations is a condition of informal life politics.
Then, in Chapter 3, Cliff and Wang demonstrate the complex relationship
between survival and citizenship by examining the daily activities of a rural
migrant workers’ NGO in peri-urban Beijing. Unable to access social welfare
INTRODUCTION: LIVING POLITICS—SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES… 11
and educational resources available for city residents, the workers’ NGO
chooses to “ignore” the state, and to “enact” citizenship by fostering a cul-
tural and political aesthetic parallel to the mainstream ideal. In Chapter 4,
Yonjae Paik emphasises the importance of communal self-help in creating an
autonomous space against the state’s threat to personal and community life.
Paik points out that the rise of chemical farming in South Korea since the
1960s is not purely an economic matter, to increase food production, but
a political process to strengthen the state’s control of farming and rural
society: part of a long East Asian tradition of building a “rich country and
strong military.” In tracing the international origins of the organic farming
movement in the 1920s, including the Danish rural movement, he explores
the way in which local communities have developed and adapted ideas from
a wide range of sources, and shows how these grassroots efforts served to
protect local citizenship from erosion by state ideologies.
Part II, “Networks,” moves the focus to informal networks. Uchralt
Otede highlights the crucial role that networking between external groups
and the local community plays in the dynamics of living politics. The
exchange of information and resources through informal networks is illus-
trated by his study of the efforts of the herders from Eastern Ujimchin
Banner in Inner Mongolia to protect their land and water from pollution
by a paper mill. He identifies three networks as vitally important to these
efforts. The first links Inner Mongolian herders with former “Educated
Youth,” young people who were sent to Eastern Ujimchin grassland from
urban areas for re-education during the 1960s and 1970s; the second con-
nects former “Educated Youth” themselves; and the third is a loosely
structured group linked by a shared concern for the grassland environ-
ment. In Chapter 7, Shinnosuke Takahashi challenges the view that activ-
ists are motivated and united by homogenous identity and ideology. By
analysing daily practices and social networks in Takae, a rural Okinawan
community whose life is disrupted by the construction of a US military
base, Takahashi shows how multiple forms of place-based consciousness
come together to provide the basis for collected action. Both Inner
Mongolia and Okinawa are “ethnic minority” areas from the perspective of
the nation state, but both Uchralt Otede’s and Takahashi’s analyses, while
acknowledging distinctive regional histories and cultures, go beyond exist-
ing analyses that frame the regions’ living politics in strictly “ethnic” terms.
Part III, “Alternatives,” centres on experiments in alternative value cre-
ation. Shuge Wei suggests that non-market exchange pursued by local com-
munities in rural areas is not merely a complement to the market system,
12 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI AND S. WEI
but an act of resistance against it. Behind the different exchange systems are
different value systems: while the market focuses on maximising profits,
local non-market exchanges value mutuality and balance. She examines the
social experiment of non-market exchange by investigating a local com-
munity’s efforts to revive rice terrace farming in the Gongliao district of
Taiwan. This story shows how intellectuals and farmers cooperate to redis-
cover and re-invent the local farming tradition as a challenge to the domi-
nant market system. In Chapter 10, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how living
politics may start from action rather than ideology. Drawing on the history
of the Mayu alternative currency scheme in the Japanese regional city of
Ueda, she suggests that the very act of being apparently “apolitical” can be
seen as a way of reshaping the meaning of politics.
The Epilogue brings together the key themes of the book and suggests
avenues for future research and action. The formal political landscape of
East Asia is very diverse, but the examples of informal life politics explored
in the book’s chapters show that, within this diversity, local communities
face common challenges as they struggle to pursue their own visions of the
“good life” in the twenty-first-century world. At the same time, the exam-
ples of living politics highlighted in the following chapters suggest ideas,
hopes, and practices which may provide inspiration to others engaged in
similar quests, not only around the East Asian region but also worldwide.
Notes
1. See, for example, John M. Cooper, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship,”
in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, eds. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety
(Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 65–90.
2. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History
Beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3. See, for example, Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good
Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African
Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
4. See, for example, Dorothy Ko, “Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in
Imperial China,” in Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, eds. Jörn Rüsen,
Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger (Oxford and New York: Berghahn
Books), 98–103; Jacqueline Dutton, “‘Non-Western’ Utopian Traditions,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 223–258.
5. 或谓孔子曰:“子奚不为政?“子曰:“《书》云:‘孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟,施于有
政。‘是亦为政,奚其为为政?” See Analects 2:21.
INTRODUCTION: LIVING POLITICS—SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES… 13
6. In Japan, 73% of eligible voters voted in the 1990 general election, com-
pared with 53% in the 2014 election; in South Korea, voter participation
in the 1992 presidential election was more than 70%, compared with
53% in the 2012 presidential election; in Taiwan, more than 80% of the
electorate voted in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, compared
with 62% in the 2016 election. See the online data published by the
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, accessed December
15, 2016, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=114, www.idea.int/
vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=KR, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.
cfm?CountryCode=TW
7. Globescan, “New Poll Shows UK Voters Disillusioned With Political
System,” 26 March 2015, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.glob-
escan.com/101-press-releases-2015/347-uk-voters-disillusioned-
with-political-system.html
8. Gary W. Reichard, Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics since
1968 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
9. For example, Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of
Promising Spaces. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Ruth
Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
10. For example, John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press,
2010); James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces in Autonomy,
Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2012); Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s
Transformative Movements (Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
2014).
11. For example, Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the
Middle East (2nd edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
12. Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth
Century (Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 9.
13. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 317.
14. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 323.
15. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 10.
16. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right.
17. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 44.
18. Giddens, The Third Way, 45.
19. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 95–96.
20. Beck, World at Risk, 95.
21. Beck, World at Risk, 97.
22. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 10.
14 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI AND S. WEI
Citizenships
CHAPTER 2
Tom Cliff
The implicit demand voiced by the state is to pay attention to it. The other
side of the state’s demand for attention is, of course, the urge to ignore the
state. But what does it mean for the state to demand attention, or for any-
one to ignore the state? In this essay, I parse some examples that support
my opening statement, and explore some of the possible empirical and
theoretical consequences. My aim is to pose some guiding questions for a
research agenda into civil movements—and “non-movements”1—that
takes the state’s demand for attention as an object of analysis in and of
itself.
Ignoring the state, in one area of life or another, is a condition of infor-
mal life politics. Informal life politics actions are informal precisely because
they do not “seek redress” for wrongs or relief from threats to their
existence through appeal to the state, or “higher” political power.2 Even if
the state chooses to ignore them, or crush their protest, vertically-oriented
appeals reaffirm the hierarchical relationship between ruler and ruled. Self-
help actions are horizontal. They effectively ignore the state by disengag-
ing from what Thomas Hobbes termed the “covenant” that requires the
state to protect—and in some polities, provide.3
T. Cliff (*)
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Legacies
The strenuous arguments put forward by some prominent “libertarian”
political philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century themselves constitute
evidence of the state’s demand for attention. A germane starting point is
the English social theorist Herbert Spencer, who pushed the principles of
individualism to their fullest extent with an 1851 essay titled “The Right
to Ignore the State.”4 If Spencer had not felt that the citizen’s (his) ability
to ignore the state was somehow constrained, he would surely not have
seen the need to spend his energy asserting this as an inalienable right.
The foundation of Spencer’s political philosophy was “that every man
has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man.” He called this “the law of equal freedom.”5
Using the emergence and legitimation of Protestantism in England as an
example of how the right to ignore the official state religion—which meant
the right to refuse allegiance to Catholicism and not pay taxes to the
Catholic Church—became widely accepted by both state and social actors,
Spencer proceeded to extend this liberty to every aspect of life. “Civil and
religious liberty … are parts of the same whole and cannot philosophically
be separated.” “Liberty of action” was to him as much “a point of con-
science” as was liberty of belief.6
Spencer does not broach the important question of whether England’s
sixteenth-century break with Catholicism would ever have been permit-
ted without the support of the reigning monarch. This omission is cer-
tainly critical: the English Reformation was driven by the monarch Henry
VIII and the merchant classes for political and personal reasons, not
“matters of [religious] conscience.” Henry wanted to be rid of papal
authority, and to assert his own authority over both the clergy and the
populace within his realm.7 That is to say, whatever freedom of religious
choice existed in nineteenth-century England did not come about
CONCEPT ESSAY ONE: IGNORING THE ATTENTION-SEEKING STATE 19
through any individual’s insistence on moral law, but rather through the
sovereign’s insistence on absolute authority, over and above even that of
the supra-state authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This was essen-
tially a competition between two statist organisations for the right to
demand popular attention.
Henry David Thoreau was an American contemporary of Spencer’s,
and their views overlapped considerably, but while the radically individu-
alistic Spencer framed his approach as passive, Thoreau advocated an active
stance that was explicitly concerned with the citizenship rights of a broader
public.8 Arguing that civil disobedience was an obligation when one’s own
government is doing wrong, he criticised those who “hesitate, and …
regret, and sometimes … petition; but … do nothing in earnest.” He said
that “They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they
may no longer have it to regret.”9 The evil that Thoreau was talking about
was the American government’s Mexican War of 1846–47, and the com-
plicity of that same government in the slavery that was ongoing in the
southern states. He argued that Americans who did not actively oppose
the government were supporting it both financially and morally, even if
they professed to be against the Mexican War and against slavery.
Anthropomorphising the state in the form of the tax collector—“the only
mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it”—Thoreau
describes how the state says, “Recognize me.” The only time in the whole
essay that he articulates the direct voice of the state, it is as a demand for
attention. Concurring with Spencer’s assertion that “to refuse to be taxed,
is to cut all connection with the state,” Thoreau says that “the simplest,
the most effectual, and … the indispensablest [sic] mode of treating with
it on this head … is to deny it then.”10 Like Spencer, he takes offence at
the state’s demand for attention, and asserts the right to ignore it. Unlike
Spencer, he affirms “ignoring” as something that transcends the individual
and which is, in fact, a most vigorous resistance: “Let your life be a
counter-friction to stop the machine.”11
Welcome to the Machine
The idea that the state is a “machine” or an entity that “demands atten-
tion,” suggesting something that has a logic of its own and stands apart
from human will, is merely a conceptual tool: when taking account of state
actions, it is safe to say that the human desire for power is always involved.
With that in mind, I turn now to a brief discussion of the emergence and
transformation of the state form.
20 T. CLIFF
The evidence is that … The majority of modern states are demanding more
and more while offering less and less. … Possibly by way of compensating
for their growing impotence, many states have also developed a disturbing
habit of meddling in the most minute detail of people’s lives. 19
Turkmens … see [the state as] a paternalistic organ, which displays father-
like care for them, … makes them happy and provides them with a free life.
This is the reason, why the Turkmen people adore with devotion the state
and its President, believe in it, support it and are willing to defend it even
laying down their lives.22
Exchange is what the structure of world history has always been all
about, according to Karatani, and it is difficult to disagree with him. If
ruled populations got absolutely nothing, including safety, out of submit-
ting material and/or symbolic tribute to a given entity that claimed ruling
status, then there would be little cause for them to do so. The political
community would not come to be. Turning this around, all political com-
munities depend on some form of exchange between ruler and ruled.
More generally, Karatani’s broad definition of exchange makes a polity in
which no form of exchange can be discerned all-but impossible. What
interests me here is the specific nature of that exchange in the context of
different sorts of political community. To put this in question form: What
is the relationship between the nature of the political community and the
nature of the symbolic capital, safety guarantees, and material goods
exchanged between ruler and ruled? Is the tribute being submitted to the
rulers by the ruled population primarily symbolic or primarily economic?
More specifically, under what circumstances is symbolic tribute the primary
concern of the state?
A Mirror
Within any given polity, many different spaces of freedom and unfreedom
exist; these spaces are rarely if ever total in either respect, and are them-
selves in a continual state of flux. One recent illustration of this hails from
CONCEPT ESSAY ONE: IGNORING THE ATTENTION-SEEKING STATE 23
Active Citizenship
Citizenship lies in a complex, even uneasy, relationship with the claim to a
right to ignore the state. The complexity arises because, being constituted
of rights and responsibilities in relation to a particular polity or political
24 T. CLIFF
* * *
establish their own school, and begin to propagate their “own culture,”
local and municipal authorities become increasingly attentive and unfriendly.
The second case study complements the first by examining the practices
and religiously-inspired origins of the South Korean organic farming
movement. Like the migrant workers, the pioneer organic farmers were
initially viewed with suspicion by the communities around them, and seen
as threatening by the authoritarian regime in power at the time. Both
workers and farmers were driven by the pragmatic needs of their own situ-
ation, by a sense of what is “right,” and by intellectual influences both
local and international. Paik’s chapter details how Christian nationalism
combined with the traditions of the Danish rural movement of the 1920s
to provide the organic farming movement with alternative economic and
moral bases to the government’s Green Revolution. Alternate Christian
ideals arising out of the Korean and Japanese non-church movements also
directly influenced the development of organic farming in Northeast Asia.
Although both the migrant workers’ and the farmers’ movements were
(are) inherently political, neither began with rebellious or revolutionary
aims. Their political action was and is not directed at regime change but
rather at improving their own lives and those of people around them. The
following case studies explicate these active expressions of citizenship.
Notes
1. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
2. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Politics,” Humanities Australia (2013), 8.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-
Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (McMaster University Archive of the
History of Economic Thought, 1998 [1651]), 82.
4. Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” The Best of the Online
Library of Liberty No. 22, (1851 [2013]), accessed April 28, 2016, http://
oll.libertyfund.org/pages/spencer-the-right-to-ignore-the-state-1851.
5. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 3.
6. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 6–7.
7. Terence Allen Morris, Europe and England in the Sixteenth Century
(London: Routledge, 1998), 172; Christopher Haigh, English
Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 89–106. Haigh describes how Henry put
together a “divorce think-tank” to gather documents supporting the
annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, in order that he could
26 T. CLIFF
19. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, 410.
20. Chris Monday, “Family Rule as the Highest Stage of Communism,” Asian
Survey, Vol. 51, No. 5 (2011).
21. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic
Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 155.
22. Quoted in Slavomir Horak, “The ideology of the Turkmenbashy regime,”
Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2005), 1.
23. Wendy McElroy, Henry Thoreau and ‘Civil Disobedience’, September 8,
2009, Iowa State University, accessed April 28, 2016, http://thoreau.
eserver.org/wendy.html
24. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.
25. Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2004); James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship:
Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); Rivke Jaffe, “The Hybrid State: Crime and
Citizenship in Urban Jamaica,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 40, No. 4
(2013).
Tom Cliff and Kan Wang
Chinese rural peoples’ migration to the city is motivated first and foremost
by the urge to survive. The first verse of “All Workers Are One Family”
(Tianxia dagong shi yi jia 天下打工是一家) by New Workers Art Troupe
links survival with collective action.1
and recreational facilities. These services were rudimentary at best, but the
Zhejiang migrants succeeded in forming an urban community with politi-
cal significance:
small and informal as a city district ruled over by a gang lord (Jaffe), or as
large and formally-constituted as a nation. Attempts to create citizens
through education are thus attempts to create a particular sense of com-
munity—a consciousness of shared interests or commonality. In East Asia,
one particularly prevalent example of this is state-driven nationalism, but,
as can be seen in this book, smaller-scale and informal examples abound.
“Political groups,” a term borrowed from the late Qing-era scholar Yan
Fu, are a form of community with a high level of political potency. “Those
who form groups will survive while those who do not form groups will
perish,” wrote Yan.10 He defined “political groups” as those that were
held together with what he called “citizenship consciousness,” rather than
the obligations of localism or familialism. Yan saw the traditional loyalties
of native place and kin as burdens on Chinese society, arguing that they
discouraged horizontal ties between autonomous individuals from differ-
ent social groups, and thus the formation of a politically-engaged and
influential citizenry. His concept of a truly civil society was in this way
close to the Habermasian ideal.
The historic, collective effort to survive by the Zhejiang migrants
played an important role in opening socio-political space for rural migrant
workers in urban China. Their construction of alternative social services
and infrastructure (both very much the realm of the state in China at the
time) laid the groundwork for a later generation of migrants to assert the
validity of a culture that was distinct from that of mainstream, urban, stat-
ist China. This chapter focuses on the activities of a group of that later
generation. In both cases, the migrants were in some respects ignored by
the state, and in some respects attacked by state actors. In response, both
groups of outsiders took collected self-help actions (mutual assistance
within the group) with the aim of perpetuating their own survival. They
were, in other words, practising informal life politics.
“Informal” actions—those that do not directly appeal to or engage
with state actors—are only a part of what groups practising informal life
politics do. Formal engagement with state actors, be that explicitly politi-
cal or otherwise, still makes up the greater part of these groups’ actions.
Informal life politics actions rarely stand alone in China, tending instead
to be nested within a suite of governmentally-oriented responses to exog-
enous threats. The societal actors may, in the terms of my foregoing con-
cept essay, ignore the state in some respects whilst simultaneously paying
attention to the state and its declarations in various other ways. The aim of
the social researcher, then, is not to identify conceptually-pure examples of
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 33
informal life politics, but to see what role informal life politics actions play
in political life and interactions more broadly.
This chapter explores a multifaceted attempt to generate citizenship
consciousness in others, showing how survival efforts can lead to inadver-
tent or transient expressions of citizenship that have important political
effects. I call this phenomenon “oblique activism,” and would like to sug-
gest that it has an important role to play in social change, especially in
more heavily-repressive situations where the potential cost of activism is
high. Both the Zhejiang Village case and the two-part case study below
highlight the resounding political effect of direct actions that are not
directly contentious. The following section illustrates these processes with
a focus on the crucial role of education. I then reflect on the relationship
between citizenship and survival, and end the chapter by briefly illustrat-
ing the slide between indirect action and direct political contention.
Survival Politics
In a light industrial village on the outskirts of Beijing there is a non-state
primary school for children of migrant workers (Fig. 3.1). It is known as
the Tongxin (“Of One Heart”) school, after the fact that it is run by
Fig. 3.1 Industrial alleyway in Picun Village. Photograph © Tom Cliff 2013
34 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
migrant workers for migrant workers and their children. The conditions
and facilities fall short of even the most basic state-funded schools in the
area. Although Chinese law provides for universal and compulsory basic
education for nine years, in practice it is only available in the location of
the parents’ hukou.11 The exclusion of rural children from urban schools
has prompted the establishment of many private schools for out-of-area
children, in places with sizeable migrant populations. Since it is almost
impossible for the schools to abide by every single regulation, they are
officially illegal, and subject to the constant threat of arbitrary demolition.
The Tongxin migrant primary school is one such school, but Tongxin
distinguishes itself in two very important ways. First, the Tongxin school
is not an enterprise with a profit motive, as most migrant schools are, and
as the services that made Zhejiang Village all were. The school fees are
roughly 30% lower than similar schools in surrounding villages, and yet
the school manages to sustain its operations solely through fees received.
At end 2013, they had about 750 students, but estimated that only 250
students are required to break even. External donations (which it does get,
from private corporations and philanthropic individuals) are a bonus.
Second, the Tongxin school is the most important political asset of a
labour NGO called “Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers” (Gongyou zhi
jia). The three main leaders of Spiritual Home are musicians, and their
first foray into labour politics was travelling from place to place playing
their own rousing music for migrant workers. In 2002 they set up Spiritual
Home, but were shut down and moved on twice in three years due to local
government pressure on the (profit-oriented) migrant schools that they
had set up alongside. When, in 2005, they got a recording contract based
on the popularity of their song “All Workers Are One Family,”12 they
invested the entire 75,000 Chinese Yuan in establishing the Tongxin
school. Having control of “their own” school meant that they would have
direct access to workers (the childrens’ parents), and, since they them-
selves were the school leaders, they would not be thrown out if the politi-
cal heat was turned up. At worst, the school and the NGO would go down
together. Moreover, even if all external funding ceased, the small surplus
made by the school would be enough to sustain their NGO, and allow
them to continue to tour factories and places with heavy concentrations of
migrant workers to spread their messages—Unite! Raise your head! Claim
your dignity!
Spiritual Home relies also upon a combination of formal and informal
ties to a wide variety of societal and governmental actors for political sur-
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 35
vival. Apart from those migrant workers who are involved with the organ-
isation, Spiritual Home has a substantial body of university student
volunteers and strong links with certain influential academics, media per-
sonalities, and government officials. Mainly through the medium of social
media, staff of Spiritual Home spend a great deal of energy reaching out
to the urban middle class and the mainstream media. The main front-man
and political leader of Spiritual Home, Sun Heng, said, “if you are
involved in labour organisation, you must construct extensive social net-
works [for protection]. Otherwise, you are so vulnerable.” The opera-
tional elements of this survival strategy will be outlined in the latter part
of this chapter.
Spiritual Home is now one of the largest and most influential labour
NGOs in China. It has branches in a number of other large and mid-sized
cities in China, including Suzhou, Xi’an, and Shenzhen, and it is c onnected
in a looser way to more than 30 labour NGOs nationwide. Sun Heng
regularly visits these “partner organisations” to oversee and assist in their
development. All of them are considerably smaller than Spiritual Home
itself: they range in size from 3 to 10 staff, while Spiritual Home has more
than 80 paid employees, including 40 teachers at the school. “Taking out”
Spiritual Home would render the many other smaller labour NGOs in its
nationwide network both demoralised and politically vulnerable. The
migrant childrens’ primary school can thus be said to play a key role in
protecting—enabling the survival of—a significant chunk of labour-
oriented civil society in China.
the city at a time when the cost of living is rising more quickly than their
wages, and also operate as informal meeting points for the local migrant
population.
Another example of how Spiritual Home merges social and environ-
mental benefit with economic benefit is what they call the “women work-
ers’ cooperative.” It is basically a sewing room in the primary school
compound, where migrant mothers can do some productive work making
small items out of donated materials that cannot be sold as is in the op
shop. At the same time, they can look after their children, including
younger ones who do not yet attend school. The piece work is low value,
and even those who do it full time earn only about 1500 renminbi per
month, but if their family commitments preclude them from taking on
full-time work elsewhere, it is at least something. Most importantly, some
of the participants told me, the interaction with other mothers helps to
reduce the feelings of isolation that they may otherwise have and provides
a much-needed psychological support network.
The community centre is where the organisation is based, a couple of
hundred metres away from the Tongxin school on the outskirts of Beijing.
It hosts a museum, a cinema, a library, a theatre (Fig. 3.2), and an open
area for recreation. All of the functions of the centre, including the salaries
of the leaders and paid employees, are funded primarily by Oxfam Hong
Kong. Across the road from the community centre is another compound
where the key staff of the organisation live. After work and on weekends,
and especially when a film or theatre production is being staged, the centre
serves as a gathering place for locally-resident migrant workers. The aim is
to provide a space for the migrant workers to relax in and feel ownership
of (since they feel highly unwelcome in many other public spaces of the
city) and to promote a common identity among them. The community
life that the centre fosters feeds into the most immediate organisational
objective—education. Education, in the broadest sense, has long been
seen as elemental to creating citizens out of a passive and/or an ignorant
populace.
Education and Citizenship
The poem “My Child, I am Sorry”—said to be written by a rural migrant
mother living in Beijing without the right hukou—speaks directly to the
links between education and citizenship. The distraught mother equates
urban citizenship with national citizenship: she feels that only urban citi-
zens can really claim to belong to the nation, and her family’s lack of
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 37
Fig. 3.2 The New Workers’ Theatre in Picun Village. Photograph © Tom Cliff
2013
My child
I am sorry
Looking at your inquisitive eyes
I am disheartened and ashamed …
How do I dare tell you
Tell you that this city won’t let you to go to school
What kind of scene is this?
What should I do?
I have been choking on my words for days
How do I explain to you,
Explain that this country is not ours
Or rather, that we are not of this country …
Excerpt from the poem “My Child, I am Sorry” (emphasis added)13
38 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
will and ability to hold the state to account.19 These two objectives can be
conceived in the abstract as strengthening vertical ties (of belonging in
terms of loyalty) between the people and the state, and strengthening hori-
zontal ties (of belonging in terms of commonality) between different social
groups, respectively.
Commonality among people and between different social groups is the
basis for contesting the terms of citizenship, both directly and indirectly.
Ivan Francescini notes how early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) labour
“agitators” did not raise the idea of proletarian revolution with the work-
ers who they sought to mobilise, because “they would have been fright-
ened away.” Instead, organisers sought first to build close personal
ties—commonality—with the workers.20 Education in Communist ideol-
ogy, recruitment to unions, and direct action followed.21 Non-cohesive
communities are unlikely to initiate horizontal self-help (meaning mutual
assistance) actions; social cohesion is a necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for indirectly contesting the state terms of citizenship. Self-help can
lead to some degree of self-reliance, and communities that do not rely on
the state for their own survival are better-equipped to resist state attempts
at social mobilisation and social control.22
Now, China has 100 million of these young people between 18 and 25. If a
country has so many young people who have lost hope, how can this coun-
try develop? … We set up Workers’ University with the idea that it would be
a social support structure, and to give them an opportunity to study.
Secondly, we hope that it will make them unite—like the workers at
Honda, who go on strike and negotiate with their employers. The Foxconn
workers don’t do this—they just lose hope and commit suicide. [To be able
to unite], they need to change their way of thinking; workers need to change
how they look at society. This is the message of Workers’ University.
and concentrated in urban centres that are key to the political and eco-
nomic functioning of the country. Labour movements have been
instrumental in driving many of the most significant socio-political trans-
formations of the past two centuries in Europe, Russia, and China. The
CCP itself built its early power base among urban workers.25 This combi-
nation of factors has caused many observers and activists to pin a great deal
of hope on Chinese migrant workers becoming a force for positive socio-
political change.26 For their part, the current leaders of China are wary of
any form of organised social group that could pose a challenge to their
rule. And perhaps there is something especially fearful in the thought of
having their legitimacy questioned by the very proletariat that they long
claimed to be the basis of their legitimacy.
On the other hand, labour mobilisation is not easy to do, rarely suc-
cessful, and (to date) never sustained. Migrant labour is not a signifi-
cant social and political force in China at present because it is highly
fragmented. Veteran scholars of labour activism in China, CK Lee and
Yuan Shen, argued convincingly that Chinese labour organisations’
focus on asserting workers’ individual rights, rather than their collec-
tive rights, undermines workers’ solidarity.27 Individual rights covered
under Chinese labour law include the right to compensation for work
injury, pension contributions made by the employer, and certain mini-
mum working conditions; in Marshall’s terms, these are elements of
social citizenship. Collective rights—the rights of civil citizenship—are
not inscribed in Chinese law. Collective rights include the right to
form unions, the right to bargain collectively with employers and the
state, and the right to strike.28 Individual rights claims operate on an
exclusive vertical vector. Collective rights claims also operate on a ver-
tical vector, but not an exclusive one, because they are underpinned by
a horizontal sense of commonality among the claimants. Lee and Shen
show that Chinese labour NGOs’ practice of referring only to the
existing and individualistic legal framework discursively affirms the
vertical relationship between individual and state. Horizontal ties
among workers and between groups of workers remain weak.29 Labour
activism in China is high-risk, and high-risk activism is a “strong tie”
phenomenon.30 Nevertheless, the potential socio- political power of
this imagined political group—Chinese rural migrant labourers—cre-
ates hope in some and anxiety in others, and actual or impending con-
flict between them.
42 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
Sun Heng described the lifestyle elements that I witnessed over three
months of fieldwork at the NGO:
For example, we can sing our own songs, we can have our own new way of
living—here, we have a collective lifestyle. We can change things starting
from ourselves—like setting up a school for migrant children, opening a
second hand shop for affordable clothing, and establishing a community
union. I think that these are all ways of changing oneself.
On entering the city, the first lesson is that there is no place for you, because
you are a migrant. You are barely a second-class citizen. No educational
facilities, bad labour conditions, and so on. Some workers stand up and
fight, but they only fight for themselves. Some labour activists stand up and
fight, but they achieve little.
I think the reason for this is that the culture of the society, along with the
workers’ culture, is not created by us, but by those who have money and
power. The rich and powerful use their resources to create this culture and
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 43
exert it upon the workers. Internalising this, the workers long for urban
lives, and are ready to work longer and harder to achieve their urban dreams.
This culture is poison. It undermines the workers’ solidarity.31
Faced with this, I say that we must change the way we think. We must have
our own culture. With our culture, we can seize the power of expression
from the hands of capital and the state. This power of expression doesn’t
belong to anyone. But, it is currently in the hands of the rich and powerful,
and they don’t want to give the workers any chance. Once we have our cul-
ture, we will unite and take the power back.
44 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
This is the first museum to record New Workers’ history. Of course, there are
museums set up by the authorities, but we don’t identify with (rentong) these
because they don’t look at history from workers’ position, they look at it from
the government’s position, or from the position of economic development.
If a person does not have their own history, this person is unable to enter
history. They will be forgotten by people, and the contributions that they
make will not be seen by people.
We rarely hear about China’s New Workers—their lives, their thoughts
and perspectives, their futures—nobody takes any notice. I am one of these
workers. This is our own thing. If the government will not do it, and other
people don’t do it, then we will do it. So this is the thought behind the
museum. The same applies to my motive for singing for the workers.
well as “across” to other New Workers is consistent with the New Left
scholars’ notion of class renewal.
The musical and cultural activities of Spiritual Home appear in many
ways to be similar to the mainstream culture that they feel excluded from.
They try to look the same, use similar syntax and discourse (“labour is
glorious”), and even run events in parallel to the mainstream events in
which they see themselves invisible. The classic example of this politico-
aesthetic parallelism is the migrants’ version of the most-watched single
event on Chinese television, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. For Spring
Festival 2012, a number of labour NGOs got together to organise a
Workers’ Spring Festival Gala. The format was exactly the same as the
Spring Festival Gala that it was competing with, with the important differ-
ence that the performers were migrant workers and all of the original
pieces were written by migrant workers. The words of the songs and
sketches reflected the concerns of migrant workers: left behind children,
hard living and working conditions, discrimination from urban residents,
and so on. They told their own story in the mainstream aesthetic lan-
guage. Employees at Spiritual Home explained that, for cultural propa-
ganda to be successful, it needs to be acceptable to the target audience: “It
is no use producing something that carries your message if nobody is will-
ing to watch it or listen to it.”
Far from nobody being willing to watch it, the 2012 Workers’ Spring
Festival Gala attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and was a
resounding success. The success was due to the social networks of the
labour NGOs involved. Each of these organisations has direct and online
contact with a diverse group of migrant workers, who have contact with
other migrant workers, so the information could spread quickly and
widely. The upcoming event also got good coverage in the mainstream
media before being broadcast live on the Internet. As a result, the news of
the Workers’ Gala ranked among the top five on key websites like Tencent-
owned qq.com and Sina.com. After the Gala, public donations to the
Tongxin school increased to almost ten times the level of the previous
year.
The implicit message from the government was “you cannot mobilize
a lot of people; you cannot form a social coalition,” but it was precisely
the social coalition that saved Spiritual Home and the migrant childrens’
primary school. Spiritual Home organised parents to sign a petition to
the education bureau, and used social media to mobilise the public to
oppose the demolition of the school. Teachers from other schools also
sent their own petitions. The CCTV host Cui Yongyuan organised a peti-
tion that was signed by more than 20 high-profile Leftist scholars and
public figures. When the village government cut off the electricity and
water supply to the school and sent in the bulldozers, urban workers and
university students from central Beijing turned up to blockade the school
and donate cases of bottled water.38 The stand-off lasted four days, and
was the turning point. After 40 days of protest and resistance, Spiritual
Home and its supporters prevailed. Faced with cross-sectoral opposition
to their plans to close the school and the NGO, the Beijing Municipal
Government contacted Spiritual Home to explain that it was “a misun-
derstanding.” The city district government was told to stop trying to
close the school.
The locally-spectacular failure of the village and city district authori-
ties’ attempt to close down the Tongxin school caused loss of face for
the authorities and intensified their resentment towards those involved
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 49
with Spiritual Home and the school. The village constructed gates across
key alleyways leading to the school. The gates were painted in exactly
the same blue and white as used by the police, indicating a securitisation
of the area immediately around the school, and enabling the possibility
of isolating the school from the community centre. In the terms of my
foregoing concept essay, this was a signal to the local population that
authority was watching, and hence a demand for attention by that
authority.
The scholars, government officials, and NGO activists who we inter-
viewed for this chapter all asserted that the 2012 attempt to close down
the school was only one battle in an ongoing war. Most observers and
participants were also aware of the inevitable “urban renewal”—demoli-
tion, reconstruction, and gentrification—of this area of outer Beijing. The
whole area is being turned into parkland and gated communities.
Notes
1. The New Workers Art Troupe band members are the founders and leaders
of the NGO “Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers,” the focus of this
chapter.
2. Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant
Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 275.
3. NET Bible, Matthew 4, The Temptation of Jesus, 2016, Biblical Studies
Press, accessed April 30, 2016, http://biblehub.com/net/matthew/4.
htm
4. See, inter alia, Kam Wing Chan and Li Zhang, “The Hukou System and
Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes,” The China
Quarterly, Vol. 160, December (1999); Alan Smart and Josephine Smart,
“Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform Urban/Rural Status, and Exclusion in
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 51
10. Zehua Liu and Jianqing Liu, “Civic Associations, Political Parties, and the
Cultivation of Citizenship Consciousness in Modern China,” in Joshua
A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (eds), Imagining the people: Chinese intel-
lectuals and the concept of citizenship, 1890–1920 (Armonk, NY: ME
Sharpe, 1997), 42.
11. The quality of education—in terms of how good it is, but also in terms of
what it is and what sort of citizen it teaches the child to be—differs from
place to place. Children in urban areas are, relatively speaking, encouraged
to be creative and individual, while rural schools focus almost exclusively
on rigid rote learning in preparation for exams. See Andrew Kipnis, “The
Disturbing Educational Discipline of ‘Peasants’,” The China Journal, Vol.
46 (2001); Andrew Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics,
and Schooling in China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
12. Sun Heng, Lyrics: Tianxia dagong shi yi jia (All Workers are One Family),
accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.kuwo.cn/yinyue/3970588/
13. Peng Yuanwen, “Haizi, duibuqi” (“My Child, I am Sorry”), August 8,
2014, accessed November 22, 2014, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/
08/migrant-mothers-poem-child-sorry/
14. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 16.
15. Zarrow, “Citizenship in China and the West,” 5.
16. The concept of “political community” can be traced back to the earliest
lines of Aristotle’s Politics (Book I, chapter 1). See Christopher Shields
(ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
201. For a translation, see Barker, Aristotle: Politics.
17. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 25; Zarrow, “Citizenship in China
and the West,” 23.
18. Nationalistic discourses are the largest of “large-scale stories” in this
respect. Edward Bruner describes Abrahams’ concept of “large-scale sto-
ries” as “the dominant narratives of particular historical eras, in the sense
that during these periods they were most frequently told, served as guiding
paradigms or metaphors, were the accepted wisdom of that time, and
tended to be taken for granted.” See Edward Bruner, “Experience and Its
Expressions,” in Victor Turner and Edward M Bruner (eds), The
Anthropology of Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 18.
19. See Susan Trevaskas and Elisa Nesossi, “The Sword of Discipline and
the Dagger of Justice,” in Geremie R. Barmé, Jeremy Goldkorn and
Linda Jaivin (eds), Shared Destiny: China Story Yearbook 2014 (Canberra,
Australia: Australian National University Press, 2015), 270–83;
Zhiyong Xu, A Free Soul Imprisoned: Citizen Xu Zhiyong’s Statement for
Second-Instance Trial, April 2, 2014, Human Rights in China, accessed
November 9, 2015, http://www.hrichina.org/en/citizens-square/
free-soul-imprisoned-citizen-xu-zhiyongs-statement-second-instance-trial
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 53
20. The quote comes from Zhang Guotao, in Ivan Franceschini, “Labour
NGOs in China: A Real Force for Political Change?,” The China Quarterly,
Vol. 218 (2014), 474.
21. Tony Saich, The Chinese Communist Party during the Era of the Comintern
(1919–1943), accessed December 1, 2016, https://www.hks.harvard.
edu/fs/asaich/chinese-communisty-party-during-comintern.pdf
22. Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-society Relations and
State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988). See also Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The
Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
23. Sun Heng was not exaggerating. A report by Tianjin University put the
figure at a staggering 300 villages per day average between the year 2000
and the year 2010. A significant proportion of the villages represented by
the Tianjin University figure have disappeared only in an administrative
sense, but that still leaves plenty of scope for village destruction, relocation,
and desertion. On village loss, see Ian Johnson, In China, ‘Once the Villages
Are Gone, the Culture Is Gone’, February 1, 2014, New York Times,
accessed February 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/
world/asia/once-the-villages-are-gone-the-culture-is-gone.html. On
Premier Li Keqiang’s urbanisation drive, see Ian Johnson, Pitfalls Abound
in China’s Push From Farm to City, July 13, 2013, accessed July 15, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/world/asia/pitfalls-abound-in-
chinas-push-from-farm-to-city.html; Tom Holland, China’s Urbanisation
Push Runs into Trouble Before its Start, 2013, South China Morning Post,
accessed August 16, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/business/article/
1296548/tomchinas-urbanisation-push-runs-trouble-its-start
24. The late Qing-era reformer Liang Qichao argued that “the public good
involved state building, which in turn required the leadership of a progres-
sive elite to usher the masses out of ignorance and superstition, to educate
them in citizenship.” Writing half a century later in the United Kingdom,
TH Marshall concluded that formal education is “a personal right com-
bined with a public duty to exercise the right,” and argued that “the duty
to improve and civilize oneself is … a social duty, and not merely a personal
one, because the social health of a society depends upon the civilisation of
its members.” See Zarrow, “Citizenship in China and the West,” 17;
Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 16.
25. Franceschini, “Labour NGOs in China: A Real Force For Political
Change?.”
26. Ching Kwan Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent
Labor Unrest in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 75, No. 2
(2016).
54 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
38. The urban workers could not give money donations because the school is
not registered as a school, it is registered under Spiritual Home, which is
registered as a profit-making business with the Industrial and Commercial
Bureau. Only non-profit organisations can accept donations, so taking
money would have given the government another excuse to shut them
down.
Yon Jae Paik
While a nation state protects its people from other nation states, what
protects the people from their own nation state? In raising this question,
I have in mind contemporary East Asian societies where rivalry among
nation states is used to justify the people’s sacrifices for the nation. I
highlight the fact that the East Asian nation states have repressed the
spontaneous creation of grassroots communities, and I argue that
building small-scale self-help communities is the key for people to regain
autonomy and cope with threats caused by national politics. I illustrate
this with the case of the organic farming movement in South Korea.
The practice of communal self-help in South Korea’s organic farming
movement started in 1976 with the creation of Chŏngnonghoe, an
association of “righteous farmers.” Since its beginning under the
military government of the 1970s, the organic farming movement has
been an effort to seek rural autonomy—an ideal conceived by Christian
nationalists in the colonial period of the 1920s. The 1920s Christian
nationalism combined with the Danish model of rural movement based
on cooperatives and adult education provided the early organic farmers
with an alternative path of modernisation to deviate from the
government’s state-oriented model. In this way, the movement aimed to
create a communal space autonomous from the state’s rural control.
In the East Asian historical context, where the state’s social mobilisa-
tion has been strong, the mode of exchange highlights the underlying
conflict between small communities and the capitalist nation state in both
normative (e.g. norms and values) and institutional (e.g. economic and
legal) spheres. Furthermore, the trajectory Karatani describes of each
social formation and its dominant mode of exchange corresponds to the
trajectory of the East Asian nation-building process, in which the nation
states formed on the basis of RCSM and developed their national econo-
mies by actively tapping into the global capitalist market.
Communal self-help is not overtly political, as its primary goal does not
lie in changing the government. However, self-help communities based
on communal reciprocity can create a space that is autonomous (or partly
autonomous) from the capitalist nation state. In the context of the politics
of RCSM in East Asian countries, where the state regards people as a
means to build the nation’s prosperity, a self-help community is a space of
alternative politics where people can protect their livelihood from the
state’s constant enforcement of the national (and capitalist) norms.
from the state. This tradition was not confined to South Korea, but rather
developed within a transnational network where people sought similar
communal autonomy.
ugly crops. Even worse, having given up pesticides, the commune mem-
bers had to watch even those scanty crops being destroyed by rampant
disease and swarming insects. And of course, the farming process was
more laborious because the farmers had to manually remove weeds and
sometimes even insects. Wŏn’s farm suffered losses of five million won in
the first year, another three million won in the second year, and only began
to break even from the third year as the soil and the farmers’ techniques
improved. At least, at P’ulmuwŏn, the farmers were resolute in their com-
mitment to organic farming, and the owner, Wŏn, could afford the signifi-
cant financial losses; however, at the individual farms of other
Chŏngnonghoe members, the situation was even more difficult.
Meanwhile, general consumers did not appreciate that organic produce
cost more than non-organic produce due to lower yields and greater labour
inputs. Not only was the organic produce worm-eaten and less regular in
shape than conventional produce, but the general view of urban consum-
ers in the 1970s was that crops grown by chemical farming were healthier;
they were regarded as more hygienic—for example, free from parasite
eggs. On the other hand, the price of organic produce was two or three
times higher than non-organic produce, not because organic farmers tar-
geted premium consumers, but because otherwise they could not meet
their costs. However, few consumers were ready to pay two or three times
more for organic produce in the 1970s, and it was only in the mid-1980s
that environmentally-conscious urban consumers began to seek organic
products as premium goods.
Despite its commercial disadvantages, organic farming gradually
became a viable option for self-sufficient farms. Over time, the use of com-
post and other organic fertilisers made the productivity comparable to that
of chemical farming. Organic methods also reduced input costs, as agricul-
tural chemicals were relatively expensive. More importantly, organic farm-
ing had some significant advantages for small-scale farmers who subsisted
on their own produce. First, it relieved farmers from pesticide poisoning
which was prevalent at the time, claiming many farmers’ lives every year.
Second, organic farmers saw the superior taste of organic produce as a
reflection of its healthiness. Finally, organic farming enabled the farmers to
feel proud of growing wholesome crops and supporting the healthy lives
of the consumers.
Still, the number of organic farmers in South Korea did not grow sig-
nificantly over the next decade. Several organisations were created to study
organic farming and share farming techniques with farmers,29 but organic
66 Y.J. PAIK
The story of rice farming in the 1970s shows how thoroughly the gov-
ernment controlled the farming processes as well as sales and distribution.
Although the intervention of the government was not as intense for other
crops, the established production increase system run by the government
offices, the NACF, and the RDA functioned in the same manner. Thus the
domination of state-led chemical farming reduced the farmers’ role from
that of the principal agents of farming to passive labourers. The farmers’
own experience, discretion, and judgement were replaced by nationally
uniform, planned processes, leaving the farmers dependent on the govern-
ment and its programmes.
As the government gained significant control over the farming process,
the social order in rural villages inevitably changed. In particular, the role
of the NVM, which started in 1970, was critical in this process. Under the
slogan of “Let’s get on with a better life,” the government launched a
nationwide Rural NVM campaign in 1972. Guided by the New Village
Spirit as defined by three virtues that every Korean should attain—dili-
gence, self-help, and cooperation43—people were urged to join the move-
ment to modernise the nation based on the principles of economic
developmentalism and anti-communism.44 The NVM had its own
nationwide organisational structure that went from the central govern-
ment down to the lowest local offices.45 Each village had its own NVM
committee, which included five leaders from the village.46 Furthermore,
the NVM offices closely cooperated with the RDA and the NACF by link-
ing chemical farming with the NVM’s campaign to increase rural income.
The NVM brought at least three major changes to rural villages. First,
it created a new group of leaders within the villages. While the previous
village leaders had been the elders of the influential clans, a younger gen-
eration of leaders emerged to oversee the modernisation of rural villages
with new farming technology and a new mindset. Second, resistance
against the NVM by the village people, including the previous village lead-
ers, was effectively circumvented by a competition system. The govern-
ment rewarded not only individual NVM leaders by designating some as
role models, but also high-performing villages by categorising villages as
basic, self-helping, or self-sufficient. While self-helping and self-sufficient
villages received assistance from the government, the underperforming
villages were disgraced as being lazy and dependent on others.47
Consequently, no village could avoid participating in the competition to
achieve the goals set by the government. Lastly, the NVM’s emphasis on a
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 71
However, despite their belief that the government was the main cause
of the problems, changing government policies was not these farmers’
primary goal. Chŏngnonghoe was not a group of dissident farmers in the
guise of a religious organisation, as the government suspected. The leaders
of Chŏngnonghoe deliberately distanced themselves from any direct
opposition to the government, even when they were criticised by organ-
ised farmers’ movements for their lack of participation in the anti-
government campaigns for farmers’ rights.52 They took this position
because the early members believed that their religious ideals could not be
realised by secular movements pursuing certain ideologies or economic
interests, and therefore, participation in organised struggles would only
undermine the integrity of their movement. Their mission statement gen-
erally emphasised the importance of spiritual awakening, and even the
clauses related to Chŏngnonghoe’s social contributions53 showed the
group’s aim of enlightening rural societies without referring to the gov-
ernment’s rural development. Instead, they considered the rural problem
as universal in the modern world54 and tried to deal with it by creating a
communal network of organic farmers.
What makes Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming movement political is
its efforts to create a communal space that would be autonomous of the
state’s rural control. While the dominance of the state in economic and
ideological domains made it difficult for farmers to engage in national
politics, what emerged instead was politics at a communal level in which
everyday activities for livelihood (such as farming) were governed by com-
munal norms rather than national norms. The pursuit of autonomy did
entail a process of becoming free from state politics, but it also required an
alternative economic and moral foundation. As such, the conflict between
communal autonomy and national control became central to the political
nature of Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming movement. The following
sections describe the origins of Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming move-
ment in the Christian rural ideal village movement of the 1920s and dis-
cuss the historical continuity of the conflict between communal autonomy
and national control in rural Korea.
The pursuit of social change through farming was the defining character-
istic of the Protestant networks that founded Chŏngnonghoe. Knowledge
of farming was essential to their project of inculcating alternative norms
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 73
and values in the farming life. Organic farming was a practice aimed at
building a model village in real life rather than a religious ritual for indi-
vidual members’ salvation. The members of Chŏngnonghoe were farmers,
which differentiated them from the rural ministers of the mainstream
churches. In general, the rural ministries were filled by pastors from the
cities who knew little about farming, and therefore, their missionary work
was not very different from that in the urban churches.55 Meanwhile, the
members of Chŏngnonghoe sought a Christianity for rural people to prac-
tice in their farming life.
The sense of communal autonomy advocated by Chŏngnonghoe was
inherited from two intertwined groups of Christian leaders from an earlier
generation. The first group consisted of intellectuals who studied or taught
at the Osan School, a renowned Christian nationalist school in Chŏngju,
North P’yŏngan province (now in North Korea) during the Japanese
colonial period.56 The Osan School, unlike other modern schools which
were founded in major cities by Western missionaries,57 was created in a
rural town to provide modern education to rural people in 1898 and only
later became a Christian school, in 1910.58 The second group, which over-
lapped with the first, came from the Korean Non-church Movement, the
Korean branch of a Japanese Protestant sect founded by the well-known
Japanese Christian thinker Uchimura Kanzō , who advocated churches for
believers outside of church organisations. The Non-church Movement
group in Korea was very small, but it included some highly influential
intellectuals critical of mainstream society. These two groups were closely
related, as the Osan School became a Non-church Movement school in
the late 1920s.
One of the key intellectuals linking the Osan School with the Non-
church Movement, and thence Chŏngnonghoe, was Ham Sŏk-hŏn. Ham
studied (1921–1923) and taught (1928–1938) at the Osan School, and
became a Non-church Movement believer after attending Uchimura
Kanzō ’s Bible study group in Kashiwagi, Tokyo (1925–1928).59 After the
division of North and South Korea, he defected from North Korea and
worked actively as a journalist and critical thinker in South Korea.60 He
had particular interest in the future of Korean rural areas and became a
farmer himself. In 1957, he opened his own farm, Ssial-nongjang, in
Ch’ŏnan on land contributed by a benefactor. Inspired by Gandhi’s
Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, he made Ssial-nongjang a collective farm
where young farmers studied and worked with him.61
Ham Sŏk-hŏn directly influenced two key people in Chŏngnonghoe:
Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, who initiated Chŏngnonghoe, and O Chae-kil, who led
74 Y.J. PAIK
the P’ulmu School when he was first invited to visit Korea by Wŏn
Kyŏng-sŏn in 1975, and the cooperation over organic farming between
the P’ulmu School and the Ainō School/Ainōkai started in 1977.70
The most important role of the P’ulmu School for Chŏngnonghoe was
as a reservoir of the ideal of autonomous rural villages. This was the legacy
that the P’ulmu School had inherited from the Osan School, as well as the
shared ideal of Korean and Japanese farmers in the Non-church Movement.
In the 1920s, the Osan School was actively engaged in building an ideal
rural village where people led a communal life centred on the school and
the church. In Chŏngju, where the Osan School was located, the school
provided education in the knowledge and skills needed to modernise the
rural village, while the church guided people spiritually.
The model of rural development in the P’ulmu School and in the Ainō
School was profoundly influenced by a movement on the other side of
the world—in Denmark, where a strong rural development movement
based on cooperatives and “folk high schools” emerged in the nineteenth
century.71 Uchimura Kanzō introduced the Danish movement’s ideals to
Japan in 191172 and shared it as a model of Christian rural development
within the Non-church Movement.73 Alongside other European models
of cooperatives and credit unions that provided alternatives to capitalism,
the Danish model was particularly appealing to Christian groups because
of its strong religious basis. In Japan, the Danish tradition was sum-
marised in the “Three Love Spirit”74—love for God, love for neighbours,
and love for country.75 In the 1920s, Uchimura’s Korean students
brought it to the Osan School,76 from whence it passed down to the
P’ulmu School.
For the P’ulmu School, the Danish tradition suggested a way of enlight-
ening and empowering common people, whom they called p’yŏngmin.77
In the P’ulmu School, p’yŏngmin referred to common, ordinary people
who do not have wealth or power, rather than a specific social class or
nationality. However, p’yŏngmin also meant an enlightened being—a cul-
tured person with religious faith and the ability to make a living.78 As such,
the P’ulmu School, under the school motto of “the great p’yŏngmin,”
endeavoured to nurture “enlightened” farmers who would remain in the
local area and work for their villages. At the same time, the school created
various cooperatives not only to support the economic self-reliance of the
school and the village, but also to foster the communal spirit of the village
people.79
76 Y.J. PAIK
and sports days for spiritual uplift and cultural enlightenment. As in the
Danish folk high schools, the school focused not on producing elites, but
on nurturing future farmers with the Korean national spirit. Therefore,
Korean language and history were taught with as much emphasis as practi-
cal modern knowledge.
Education did not stop within the school but extended to the village
with a community association called Chamyŏnhoe (which means “a group
of voluntarily diligent people”). Chamyŏnhoe was created in the late 1900s
as a self-governing body to improve village life and enlighten the people,
sharing the same principles as Osan School—diligence, cleanliness, and
responsibility. One male and one female secretary were selected from the
village people and arranged weekly meetings to discuss village affairs.
Initially, the village people were taught how to hold discussions in a meet-
ing, such as how to listen to others and speak in order. Then, village affairs,
especially related to hygiene, public morals, and collective farming, were
discussed. For example, the village people were encouraged to clean their
houses (e.g. toilets, bedding, kitchens, and wells) and their neighbour-
hoods, quit smoking and drinking alcohol, do away with superstition and
attend church regularly, and help each other in ploughing and harvesting.
A hygiene inspector from the Osan School inspected each household
weekly. To improve the village economy, Chamyŏnhoe created a commu-
nity credit union by encouraging everyone to save a spoonful of rice from
each meal and contribute the money thus saved to the credit union; it then
lent money to the village people at a low interest rate.101 The credit union
supported various cooperative activities for farmland improvement, fuel
improvement, collective production/purchases, and a farm products fair.102
In doing so, Chamyŏnhoe created various affiliated village a ssociations of
youths, wives, students, and heads of household, with the youth and stu-
dent associations playing leading roles in the activities overall.
Chamyŏnhoe’s activities built the communal spirit in Yongdong village,
and the Osan School and the church were the centre of the community.
The students were actively involved in the projects to create a modern vil-
lage, while the village people supported the students by providing room
and board. At the same time, Chamyŏnhoe’s activities helped minimise
interference from the colonial government’s military police and police
offices, which had previously been drawn into village affairs by issues of
poor hygiene, quarrels, and disputes. Chamyŏnhoe’s activities helped the
people to create an autonomous space of a modern rural village without
the interference of the colonial government.
80 Y.J. PAIK
From the ideal village movement of the 1920s to the organic farming
movement of the 1970s, the role of Christianity in creating an autono-
mous space highlights the conflictual relationship of national and com-
munal politics in rural Korea. The anti-statist and communal elements in
their Christianity led these movements to reject state-oriented national-
ism. In the Osan School’s ideal village movement, the Non-church
Movement fitted very well with the school’s pursuit of Korean people’s
autonomy,103 because the union of nationalism and Christianity found no
contradiction in the Non-church Movement. Originally, Uchimura Kanzō
advocated the Non-church Movement as a way of serving “two Js”—Jesus
and Japan. He separated Western-centrism within church institutions from
Christianity and stressed Christianity from the Japanese people’s point of
view.104 As Western-centrism was also prevalent in the Korean churches,
Uchimura’s Korean students deeply sympathised with the Non-church
Movement’s combination of Christianity and nationalism, and they intro-
duced the Non-church Movement to Korea as a Christianity for Korean
people.105
Christianity combined with Korean nationalism provided an alternative
identity to that of a loyal Japanese subject, and this was critical to the sur-
vival of the Osan School’s legacy through the period of wartime mobilisa-
tion. In the 1920s, there were other religious groups such as the YMCA,
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 81
the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church that actively engaged
in the ideal village movement based on the Danish model.106 Their objec-
tives were similar to those of the Osan School: raising national and reli-
gious spirituality, improving education, and reviving the rural economy.
However, Korean nationalism was not as significant in these groups as in
the Osan School, and their movements were limited to lawful activities.
They vanished as the colonial government discouraged the first two objec-
tives, and even the third one was soon replaced by the Rural Development
Movement of the colonial government.107 Meanwhile, the Osan School’s
Christian nationalism was succeeded in the 1970s by the organic farming
movement and the P’ulmu School’s p’yŏngmin education. Inheriting the
legacy of the Osan School’s resistance to the Japanese colonial govern-
ment, the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe believed in the moral supe-
riority of their Christian nationalism over the state-oriented nationalism of
the 1970s military government, enabling their deviation from the national
educational and national farming programmes.
In addition, the Non-church Movement and the Danish model of rural
development emphasised the local as an autonomous subject rather than a
subject of control by a central authority. The Non-church Movement’s
ideal of offering an ecclesial community to Christians who did not belong
to a church was suitable for small autonomous communities rather than
big organisations. Moreover, the Danish model’s combination of
Christianity, folk high schools, and cooperatives provided an economic
and social foundation suitable for a small autonomous community. The
use of cooperatives helped the local economy to effectively adapt to the
developing capitalist economy in the 1920s without being preyed on by
the colonial government and large capital. For the Osan School and
Chŏngnonghoe/P’ulmu School, it was an alternative model of rural
development by local people, which would modernise Korea into a small
but strong nation like Denmark.
Conclusion
In this chapter of the organic farming movement in South Korea in the
1970s, I have shown that it inherited the tradition of the Osan School’s
ideal village movement in the 1920s. Yet although the farmers consid-
ered the state as the main cause of threats to their livelihood, their
actions did not aim to change state politics directly. I therefore suggest
that while the Korean government politicised farming, the political
82 Y.J. PAIK
Notes
1. This term is shared across East Asian countries; it is written in Chinese
characters as 富國强兵 and read as fukoku kyōhei in Japanese, pukuk
kangpyŏng in Korean, and fùguó qiángbı̄ng in Chinese.
2. See Meredith Woo-Cumings, “Introduction: Chalmers Johnson and the
Politics of Nationalism and Development,” in The Developmental State,
ed. by Meredith Woo-Cumings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999), 6–10.
3. Woo-Cumings, “Introduction: Chalmers Johnson and the Politics of
Nationalism and Development,” 8.
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 83
Adding KRW 1996 of related costs, the government’s loss for each gama
was KRW 4766. The loss-to-selling price ratio was 11% in 1972, but
increased to 25%–27% from 1974 to 1984. http://www.archives.go.kr/
next/search/listSubjectDescription.do?id=003693
43. http://www.saemaul.com/aboutUs/ideology
44. The New Village Movement expanded its rural focus to include the
“Factory NVM” in 1974 and the “Urban NVM” in 1976. http://theme.
archives.go.kr/next/semaul/semaul01.do
45. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was at the apex of the national NVM
hierarchy, which consisted of five levels stretching from the central gov-
ernment to the village level (the central government, province, county,
township, and village). The top level NVM committee included the heads
of 20 government departments and the mayors of Seoul and Pusan, and
the more local level committees included the personnel in charge of con-
struction, postal services, broadcasting, police, reserve forces, as well as
the RDA, the NACF, and local agricultural high schools. The NVM was
a mechanism to mobilise every possible resource. Han’guk Nongch’on
Kyŏngje Yŏn’guwŏn, Han’guk nongjŏng 50nyŏnsa (Seoul, Korea:
Nongrimbu, 1999), 2090.
46. Naemubu (The Ministry of Home Affairs), Saemaŭrundong: Shijak esŏ
Onŭl kkaji (1973), 37, cited by Hwang Yŏn-su, “Nongch’on
Saemaŭrundong ŭi Chaejomyŏng,” Nongŏpsayŏn’gu 5.2 (2006), 17–53.
47. Kim, Hyung-A., Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee (New York,
NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 134.
48. Wŏn also described Chŏngnonghoe as the only farmers’ association that
pursued self-sacrifice, rather than production increase. Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn,
“Chŏngnonghoe Kangnyŏng Haesŏl,” Chŏngnonghoebo 1 (1978), 14–19.
49. Baal was the name of the supreme god worshipped in ancient Canaan and
Phoenicia.
50. For example, at Chŏngnonghoe’s 1982 annual meeting, the organisa-
tion’s first president, O Chae-kil, referred specifically to the government’s
Fifth Economic Development Five-Year Plan when he described the chal-
lenges that Korean farmers faced. According to O, the Five-Year Plan (1)
calculated agricultural products solely in monetary terms, (2) treated the
agricultural sector as a necessary nuisance in the push for rapid economic
growth, (3) showed the government’s lack of will to further the country’s
food self-sufficiency, (4) failed to address soaring farming household
debts, and (5) failed to address the serious energy and environmental
issues brought on by the country’s rapid industrialisation. O Chae-kil,
“Kaehoesa,” Chŏngnonghoebo 4 (1983), 3–14.
51. Wŏn, “Chŏngnonghoe Kangnyŏng Haesŏl,” 15.
88 Y.J. PAIK
68. A P’ulmu is a bellows used in forging metal; it is also a metaphor for mak-
ing people useful to society through education and training. Wŏn Kyŏng-
sŏn, “Na ŭi Iryŏksŏ 10,” Han’gugilbo (26 September 2003).
69. Three Non-church Movement schools in Japan had sisterhood relation-
ships with the P’ulmu School, but Ainō was the only agricultural school,
which made the relationship between these two schools particularly close.
70. One of the P’ulmu School’s teachers, Ch’oe Sŏng-pong, introduced the
Ainō Agricultural School to the P’ulmu School in 1971, before either
school started organic farming. P’ulmugyoyuk 50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’
ujinwiwŏnhoe, P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn—Tashi Saenal i Kŭriwŏ, vol. 1
(Hongsŏng, Korea: P’ulmugyoyuk 50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe,
2008), 124. Their cooperation over organic farming started in 1977
when the P’ulmu School sent one of its graduates, Chu Chŏng-pae, to
Ainōkai to learn organic farming. (Ainōkai’s archive contains reference
letters from the P’ulmu School’s principal and other official documents
related to this exchange.)
71. The Danish rural development movement, led by a Danish pastor, scholar,
and politician, Nikolay Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), was an
effort to reconstruct Denmark after its defeat in the second Schleswig
War in 1864. Nationalist education through the folk high schools (folke-
højskole in Danish; “high school” meant today’s university) emphasised
the importance of Danish culture and language, and cooperatives origi-
nating with the folk high schools sought to bring economic self-reliance
to rural villages. For a detailed history, see Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen,
“Grundtvig as a Danish Contribution to World Culture,” Grundtvig-
Studier 48.1 (1997), 72–101; and Jarka Chloupková, “European
Cooperative Movement: Background and Common Denominators,”
Unit of Economics Working Papers 2004/4 (Copenhagen, Denmark: The
Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, 2002).
72. Uchimura Kanzō became interested in rural development when he went
to the Sapporo Agricultural School (where he converted to Christianity)
in 1877. Sŭjŭk’i Norihisa, Mugyohoejuŭija Uch’imura Kanjo (Seoul:
Sohwa, 1995), 18. He was among the earliest of the intellectuals who
introduced the Danish rural development model to Japan. He gave a
lecture on Denmark at Kashiwagi on 22 October 1911, which was pub-
lished in the journal Seisho no Kenkyū (聖書之硏究) later the same year,
and as a booklet in 1913. Uchimura Kanzō, Kōsei e no saidai
ibutsu・Denmaruku koku no hanashi (後世への最大遺物・デンマルク
国の話) (Tokyo, Japan: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 99.
73. The Non-church Movement’s rural development movement created sev-
eral agricultural schools in Japan. For example, Uchimura Kanzō was
actively involved in the creation of Kōnō Gakuen (興農學園) (est. 1929)
in Shizuoka Prefecture, which succeeded the rural educational work of
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 91
86. The main focus of the experiments was to find a variety with high respon-
siveness to and tolerance of chemical fertilisers.
87. From 1926, the colonial government provided low interest loans for agri-
cultural improvement, and over 80% of each loan was for purchasing fer-
tilisers. The amount of the loans reached JPY 49 million by 1939, and the
use of chemical fertilisers increased more than ten times between 1926
and 1940. Hŏ Su-yŏl, Kaebal Ŏmnŭn Kaebal: Ilche ha, Chosŏn’gyŏngjegaebal
ŭi Hyŏnsang kwa Ponjil (Seoul: Ŭnhaengnamu, 2011), 54–55, 84;
Tatsushi Fujihara, Ine no daitōakyōeiken: teikoku Nippon no「midori no
kakumei」 (Tokyo, Japan: Yoshikawakōbunkan, 2012).
88. Fujihara, “Japanese Rice Varieties,” 82.
89. Kim Tae-ho, “‘T’ong’ilbyŏ’ wa 1970nyŏndae Ssal Chŭngsanch’eje ŭi
Hyŏngsŏng,” 68; Utsumi Aiko and Murai Yoshinori, Chŏkto e Much’ida:
Tongnib’yŏng’ung Hokŭn Chŏnbŏm i Toen Chosŏnindŭl Iyagi (Seoul:
Yŏksabip’yŏngsa, 2012).
90. The Irrigation Association was created in 1906 by law, but only began
to play a significant role after 1917. The association was composed of
landowners, and because the large landowners had more power, the irri-
gation improvements tended to benefit them rather than the tenant
farmers and small landowners. Consequently, large protests of small
landowners against the Irrigation Association were prevalent in rural
areas during the 1920s and early 1930s. Pak Su-hyŏn, “Singminji Shidae
Surijohap Pandae undong,” Chungangsaron 7 (1991), 157–202, and
“1920-30nyŏndae Surijohap Saŏp e Taehan Chŏhang kwa Chudogyech’ŭng,”
Han’guktongnibundongsayŏn’gu 20 (2003), 245–270.
91. Hŏ Su-yŏl, Kaebal Ŏmnŭn Kaebal, 111.
92. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae Ilche ŭi Chibangjibaejŏngch’aek kwa Kŭ
Sŏnggyŏk—Myŏn haengjŏngjedo wa “Mobŏmburak’ Chŏngch’aek ŭl
Chungshim ŭro,” Han’guksayŏn’gu 93 (1996), 147–176 (164).
93. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae,” 165–168.
94. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae,” 165–168.
95. As of November 1933, the number of village development committees
was 29,383, and the number of members was 1,036,287. The number of
committees had increased to approximately 60,000 by October 1940.
Chi Su-kŏl, “Ilche ŭi Kun’gukchuŭi P’ashijŭm kwa Chosŏnnongch’onjin
hŭngundong,” Yŏksabip’yŏng 47 (1999), 16–36 (26–27).
96. Another goal of improving economic conditions in the rural areas was to
prevent the spread of socialism with the growing proletarianisation of the
rural population. Chang Kyu-sik, “1920-30nyŏndae YMCA
Nongch’onsaŏb ŭi Chŏn’gae wa Kŭ Sŏnggyŏk,” Han’gukkidokkyowa
Yŏksa 4 (1995), 207–261.
97. Chi Su-kŏl, “Ilche ŭi Kun’gukchuŭi P’ashijŭm kwa Chosŏnnongch’onjin
hŭngundong,” 21.
94 Y.J. PAIK
Yon Jae Paik is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. He has an
academic background in Chemistry (BA), Environmental Studies (MA), Business
(MSc), and Asian Studies (MA), and a professional background in commercial
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 95
banking. Yon Jae’s primary research interest is the history of communal politics in
South Korea. He has written on female factory workers’ small group (somoim)
activities under Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship, demonstrating the signifi-
cance of informal organisational modes in Korea’s influential labour union move-
ment of the 1970s.
PART II
Networks
CHAPTER 5
Uchralt Otede
The term “informal networks” has been used within diverse disciplines,
but here I will use it in the context of survival politics. “Survival politics”
refers to a range of informal and non-governmental activities conducted in
defence of the life, livelihood, or cultural survival of a group of people, and
to their search for a “good (or at least better) life.”1 Survival politics is
based on people’s responses to socio-environmental crises, rather than any
political ideology. With this as a starting point, I will discuss informal net-
works as an effective way to engage in survival politics.
Formal networks are understood as networks where individuals connect
to each other based on formally prescribed ties, such as organizational
charts, job descriptions, and/or hierarchical authority structures, while
informal networks are loosely structured, based on friendship or trust.2
Arshad has defined “informal social networks” as follows:
U. Otede (*)
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Here I will discuss three types of informal networks. Type one is the
personal network, made up of people from the relatives, friends, and
neighbourhood. Type two is the issue-specific network such as an
informal flood-relief network, a makeshift storm recovery centre, or a
citizen’s radioactivity measuring station. Type three is the Internet-
based information exchange network, which might be exemplified by
an online informal flood data collection system or local river protection
network.
Personal Networks
Compared to NGOs and other social organizations, informal networks
show a high degree of flexibility in form. For example, in China, NGOs
have to fulfil a number of requirements. They must register with the
authorities and have full-time staff and a fixed office space. As Spires et al.
point out, in China NGOs need either to find a government department
to be their “supervisory agency” or to be “under another registered orga-
nization.” Although, in some parts of China, NGOs can gain political
support through personal relationships, in a city like Beijing “illegal groups
have little space to survive.”4 Even some international NGOs practise self-
censorship to avoid violating China’s state policies.5
Informal networks have more freedom, because they are not bound by
these rules and regulations. Personal networks such as family, relatives,
and friends are unable to be registered and controlled, yet are everywhere.
Focusing on China’s environmental movements, Shi Fayong, for example,
shows how effective informal networks can be in grassroots activities. Shi
reported on a green protection movement in a small community in south-
ern China using informal networks to play a crucial role in mobilizing
human resources as well as getting support from governments.6 In Shi’s
case study, residents leveraged their personal networks of friends, class-
mates, and neighbours to informally link nine formal residents’ commit-
tees together to confront a government-driven community development
project which would only have benefit a small number of retired party
cadres.7 Such informal networks are fluid, becoming active when a specific
goal comes to the fore, and enter a hibernation state with the achievement
of the goal. For example, a number of informal networks were formed
during the anti-Nujiang dam movements in China.8 But such networks
then disbanded quickly once their objectives were realized.
CONCEPT ESSAY TWO: LEVERAGING INFORMAL NETWORKS FOR SURVIVAL… 101
Issue-Specific Networks
Issue-specific networks may, and typically do, extend beyond the immedi-
ate bounds of friends, family, and neighbourhood. Research on disaster
responses and grassroots environmental struggles in particular shows that
informal networks are one of the most important resources on which peo-
ple rely in a survival situation. Informal networks can effectively help peo-
ple to survive, both mentally and materially, when a sudden natural disaster
such as hurricane, flood, or earthquake strikes. For example, in 2005,
when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, networks of relatives and
friends, and also of unknown others, provided critical resources such as
boats, shelter, food, and clothing.9
In a similar vein, Roasa points out how local self-help activists acted to
more effectively supplement government function when floods hit
Thailand in 2011:
Left with little official help, residents here—along with hundreds of thou-
sands of people in other flood-struck parts of Bangkok—sprang into action.
They quickly improvised a series of informal networks, and repurposed
existing ones, to perform the vital tasks normally carried out by the govern-
ment in emergencies.10
Notes
1. Tessa, “Invisible Politics,” Humanities Australia, no. 5 (2014), 58.
2. Kathy J. Kuipers, “Formal and Informal Network Coupling and Its
Relationship to Workplace Attachments,” Sociological Perspectives, no. 4
(2009), 456–479.
3. Imran Arshad “It’s Not What You Know It’s Who You Know That Counts:
The Interplay between Informal Social Networks and Formal Organization
in Connecting Newcomers to Canada,” Policy Horizons Canada (2011), 6,
accessed on November 5, 2016, http://www.horizons.gc.ca/en/file/583
4. Anthony J. Spires, Lin Tao and Kin-man Chan, “Societal Support for
China’s Grass-Roots NGOs: Evidence from Yuannan, Guangdong and
Beijing,” The China Journal, no. 70 (2014), 76–77.
CONCEPT ESSAY TWO: LEVERAGING INFORMAL NETWORKS FOR SURVIVAL… 105
5. Joseph Y. S. Cheng, kinglun Ngok and Wenjia Zhuang, “The Survival and
Development Space for China’s Labor NGOs: Informal Politics and Its
Uncertainty,” Asian Survey, Vol. 50, no. 6 (2010), 1097.
6. Shi Fayong, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui
Yundong: Yige Jiequ Huanbao Yundong Ge’an Weili,” Shehuixue Renleixue
Zhongguowang, March 4, 2007, accessed on November 10, 2016, https://
translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sachina.edu.cn%2FHtmldata%2Farticle%2F2006%2
F04%2F965.html&anno=2
7. Shi, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui Yundong,” 8.
8. Tong Zhifeng, “Dongyuan Jiegou yu Ziran Baoyu Yundong de Fazhan: Yi
Nujiang Fanba Yundong Weili,” Zhongguo Huanjing Shehuixue, Vol. 01
(2014), 192.
9. Sharon G. Heilmann and Yira Y. Muse, “The Use of Informal Networks to
Resolve Logistics Related Issues in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster
Response: A Content Analysis Perspective,” Journal of Business and
Educational Leadership, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2013), 67.
10. Dustin Roasa, “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan: How Informal Networks Batteld
Bankok’s Worst Flood,” The Informal City Dialogues, no. 1 (2013), 1,
accessed on November 9, 2016, https://nextcity.org/features/view/
the-diy-disaster-plan
11. Roasa. “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan,” 5.
12. Sakurayi Tsuneya and Ito Atsuko, “Shinsai Fukkō o Meguru Komuniti
keisei to Sono Kadai,” Chiyiki Seisaku Kenkyu Takasaki Daigaku Chiyiki
Seisaku Kenkyukai, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2013), 43.
13. Fujibayashi Yasushi, “Jumin Undō Saikō: Seikatsushi no Naka no
Yigimōshidate Kominiti no keisei to Tenkai,” 21 Seiki Shakai Dezayin
Kenkyu, no. 7 (2008).
14. Tong, “Dongyuan Jegou yu Ziran bayou Yundong de Fazhan,”
185–191.
15. Heilmann and Muse, “The Use of Informal Networks to Resolve Logistics-
Related Issues in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response,” 67.
16. Roasa, “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan,” 6.
17. Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Politics,” 60.
18. Shi, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui Yundong:
Yige Jiequ Huanbao Yundong Ge’an Weili,” 13.
19. Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Politics,” 60.
20. Zhongguo Shuiweiji Duli Diaocha, accessed on December 10, 2016, http://
blog.163.com/special/0012646O/underearthpollution.html
21. Margherita Viviani, “Chinese Independent Documentary Films: Alternative
Media, Public Spheres and the Emergence of the Citizen Activist,” Asian
Studies Review, 38, no. 1 (2014), 115.
106 U. OTEDE
Uchralt Otede
U. Otede (*)
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
herein includes the official verdict of the Eastern Ujimchin paper mill pol-
lution dispute, news reports, and information provided online by several
environmental NGOs based in Beijing.
The following section provides background information of pollution in
the herders’ community in Eastern Ujimchin and on the formal environ-
mental protection system. The third section describes and analyses the
three different informal networks outlined above: the informal Beijing liai-
son office, Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth network, and the grassland
protection network. The conclusion discusses these informal networks and
analyses their possibilities and limitations.
protect their rights, the local government warned them not to pursue their
complaint because the paper mill made a great contribution to the local
economy. In the end, the herdsmen sued the paper mill. Standing on the
side of the paper mill against the local herders, the local government ille-
gally changed the land ownership title of the herders’ grassland from
collective-owned to state-owned. The Government stated that the owner-
ship contract for this land, which had been drawn up in 1997, was inac-
curate and needed to be corrected. It subsequently claimed that the
grassland used and polluted by the mill was state-owned land and that the
local herdsmen were not entitled to its use.
Although Eastern Ujimchin banner has an environment protection
bureau, this formal system failed to meet its obligation due to banner
government intervention. This lax enforcement is not a phenomenon
unique to Eastern Ujimchin, but may be observed everywhere in China.
It is a structural defect of the current Chinese formal environmental pro-
tection system.7 One study of China’s environmental policy summarizes
the formal situation as follows: “As the competent environmental protec-
tion administration under the State Council, the State Environmental
Protection Administration is responsible for overall supervision and
administration of the country’s environmental protection. The people’s
governments at the provincial, city and county levels have also established
environmental protection departments to carry out overall supervision
and administration of the environmental protection work in their
localities.”8
But in practice, the government’s environmental protection agencies
encounter many difficulties, some of which originate from problem of
management structure. The rights to appoint and promote personnel, and
to determine wages and social welfare provisions for employees of the local
environmental protection bureau are all vested in the local government.
Therefore, it is very difficult for the local environmental protection depart-
ments to check and oppose highly polluting industrial development proj-
ects if these projects are welcomed and supported by the local government.9
In some regions, the environmental protection bureaux take the initiative
to protect highly polluting enterprises and factories in order to help local
government raise local GDP.10 For example, one Chinese scholar, Zhang
Yulin, has pointed out that in many cases local governments protect pol-
luting enterprises rather than pollution victims because local governments
and the polluting enterprises share common interests.11 Given the inef-
fectiveness of the formal environmental protection system, people started
to seek solutions in informal ways.
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 111
Chen’s first encounter with Inner Mongolia took place during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution late in the 1960s. In 1967, he was a student
at the Fine Art School affiliated to the China Central Academy of Fine
Arts, but the school was closed because of the Cultural Revolution. At the
end of the year, the Revolutionary Committee of Beijing, Dongcheng
District, called on all students who had no classes to go to Inner Mongolia.12
Soon after that, in November 1967, Chen and 400 other students volun-
tarily responded to the call and went to the Xilingol League in Inner
Mongolia.13 One hundred and twenty students, Chen among them, were
assigned to the Mandahbulag pasture in Eastern Ujimchin banner (Image
6.1). It was a cold winter and, because the students had arrived unexpect-
edly, the local herders’ community could not provide enough yurts for
them. Female students were housed four to a yurt while male students
lived in herders’ homes. Thus Chen’s life in the grassland started. The
young students had to do the same hard work as the local herders, and
soon came to realize that life on the grasslands was not as romantic as they
thought. They had no holiday at all, and most of the students went back
to their homes only once every three to five years.
from the Central Government. One of the drafters of the appeal was Yuan
Guoqing, a former Educated Youth who was a director at the Ministry of
Public Security at that time. Coincidentally, the head of the Ministry of
Environmental Protection, Xie Zhenhua, had been Yuan’s classmate when
they studied at the Party School of the Central Committee. Therefore,
Yuan handed the appeal directly to Xie, who immediately sent a written
instruction to the director of the Environmental Monitoring Agency to let
the seven get involved.
Chen Jiqun told me during my interview with him that is would have
been impossible to submit the appeal directly to the head of the Ministry
of Environmental Protection without this personal relationship. For the
same reason, after receiving instructions from Xie, the director of
Environmental Monitoring Agency was particularly careful to handle this
matter himself. The director together with his pollution investigation
team went to Eastern Ujimchin grassland twice to investigate industrial
pollution in the region. In May 2005, the Ministry of Environmental
Protection held a press conference informing the public that three pollut-
ing enterprises in Eastern Ujimchin grassland, including the paper mill,
were on the list of the nine most serious environmental pollution law cases
of that year in China. Thus the personal relationship between the former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth and the head of Ministry of
Environmental Protection played a major role in this case.
Second, thanks to the active role of the informal network of Eastern
Ujimchin Educated Youth, the issue gained attention and coverage from
some of the most influential news media, such as China Youth Daily and
Guangming Daily. The China Youth Daily is an official newspaper of the
Central Committee of Communist Youth League of China. One of its
reporters is Jiang Fei whose husband is a former Educated Youth. In 2003,
Jiang heard of the severe pollution in the Eastern Ujimchin grassland from
her husband and, subsequently, went to Eastern Ujimchin to interview
pollution victims, heads of polluting factories, and local government offi-
cials. Shortly after her July trip, Jiang published a detailed 8000-word
report in the China Youth Daily.14 Another influential newspaper, the
Guangming Daily, is under the leadership of the Publicity Department of
the CPC Central Committee. A reporter for that paper, Wu Litian, is a
younger sister of a former Educated Youth. Wu Litian was active in grass-
land protection and frequently reported on pollution in Eastern Ujimchin
in the Guangming Daily and other news media.15 It is unlikely that indus-
trial pollution affecting the Eastern Ujimchin grassland would have been
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 117
so widely reported were it not for the very close personal relationship
between former Educated Youth and media staff in key positions.
Third, through the efforts of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth, the pollution in Eastern Ujimchin grassland was reported
on China Central Television in 2003 to mark the “Two Meetings”—the
National People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), that con-
vene in March each year.16 The NPC is the highest state organ, with
nominal responsibility for 15 of the most important aspects of the nation’s
operation, including the election of the President of People’s Republic of
China. The main constituent bodies of NPC are the Standing Committee
and special committees such as a legal committee and an environmental
and resource protection committee. At that time, one of the former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth, Chu Shitong, was a deputy director of
the legal committee. He was particularly concerned about pollution by a
paper mill in his “second home,” Enkezargalang village in Eastern
Ujimchin banner, so he told his colleague Qu Geping, the Director of
Environment and Resources Protection Committee, about it. This
Committee is responsible for national environmental legislation and envi-
ronmental impact assessment law. Qu, in turn, contacted China Central
Television to arrange a special programme on issues of national environ-
mental legislation to mark the Two Meetings. Qu played an important
role in the programme as a special guest by pointing out that not only
polluting enterprises but also local government should be held account-
able. Once again the informal network of former Educated Youth played
a key role to push contamination cases in Eastern Ujimchin grassland to
the state level.
Fourth, the intervention of former Educated Youth did not only help
pollution victims seek change from formal government agencies but also
helped them to better their situation through other channels. Specifically,
Educated Youth helped the herders to get legal assistance from a famous
law firm in Beijing, resulting in a favourable outcome for them in a signifi-
cant environmental pollution trial. The sequence of events leading to this
win was as follows. In 2002, four pollution victims of the paper mill went
to Chen Jiqun’s informal Beijing liaison office to seek help. After several
days of comprehensive discussion with Chen, the herders made a decision
to resist pollution and protect their interests through legal means, so Chen
began looking for a suitable law firm. Chen knew a former Educated
Youth, Xie Xiaoqin, whose wife, Wang Li, was the director of Beijing De
118 U. OTEDE
Heng Law Firm. The law firm is one of the largest comprehensive law
firms in China, with strong governmental connections. The law firm
describes itself as a “national team of legal services,” because it provides
legal services to many large national projects, and has also served as legal
adviser for several national ministries such as the Ministry of Finance and
the Ministry of Health.17 Chen told me during our interview that there
were two reasons why he introduced the pollution victims to the De Heng
law firm: first, the firm has a very strong ties to the central government,
which are sometimes more important than the law itself; second, Chen
could trust the director of the law firm because she was a wife of a former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth. Chen took herders to De Heng Law
Firm’s office and let them talk directly to Wang Li, the director of the law
firm. The two sides then signed a contract and agreed on some specific
issues and conditions.
The Beijing De Heng Law Firm was the sole agent for the case and
pursued a lawsuit in the Intermediate People’s Court of Xilingol city to
get compensation from the paper mill and the Eastern Ujimchin govern-
ment for environmental pollution suffered by the victims. In March 2004,
the court decided in favour of pollution victims, awarding compensation
for certain economic losses; however, the pollution victims refused to
accept the decision because they believed that the amount of compensa-
tion was too little and the issue of heavily contaminated land was not yet
resolved. They appealed to the Higher People’s Court of Inner Mongolia
and, in August, the Court handed the victims another win, emphasizing
again the important role of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth.
I have provided four examples in this section which demonstrate the
dynamic involvement of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth in successful moves to compensate herders for pollution
of Inner Mongolian grassland. As shown in Fig. 6.1, the Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth is the core of this loosely structured informal network.
For those Educated Youth, the Eastern Ujimchin grassland is their “sec-
ond home,” and they view the herders as their families. Furthermore, the
former Educated Youth in Beijing can mobilize their extensive network of
family members, classmates, and colleagues in influential positions to pro-
vide help to herders, and help prevent or punish enterprises polluting the
Eastern Ujimchin grassland. The fact that the Eastern Ujimchin Educated
Youth Network has a strong regional character, being concerned with
Eastern Ujimchin grassland, but not elsewhere, is a key ingredient for the
network’s solidarity, making their activities more targeted.
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 119
Classmates:
The head of the Ministry of
Environment Protection was the Families:
classmate of an Educated Youth
A reporter of Guangming Daily
was a sister of an Educated
Youth, and a reporter of China
Second Home: Youth Daily was a wife of an
Educated Youth
Eastern Ujimchin
herders are like Eastern Ujimchin Educated
family members Youth Colleagues:
to Educated The director of Environment
Youth and Resources Protection
Committee of NPC was a
colleague of an Educated
Families: Youth
The director of De Heng Law office
was a wife of an Educated Youth
branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. The registration requires the
website to be identified either as commercial or public welfare. Chen’s is a
public welfare website in nature, so he is not required to pay tax, only to
pay the hosting fees. After completion of all formalities, the Public Security
Bureau provided a registration number which has to appear in the lower
right corner of the website.18
Chen named his website “Echoing Steppe” and started to upload infor-
mation related to grassland protection. The name came from a joint art-
ists’ exhibition of the same name held in 1999. Chen said that at that time
the Internet was just emerging in China and almost no sites existed specifi-
cally for grassland protection, so soon after it was established the Echoing
Steppe website started to attract visits from many individuals and organi-
zations. Due to the openness of the website, the people who made contact
with Chen were diverse in terms of occupation, ethnicity, and nationality,
including herders, urban white collar workers, professional translators,
lawyers, and university students and professors; among them were ethnic
Mongolians, Han Chinese, and foreigners. Many well-known environ-
mental NGOs, such as Greener Beijing19 and Friends of Nature,20 also
made contact with Chen through the Echoing Steppe website. As they
established a cooperative relationship with Chen and jointly implemented
projects to protect the grasslands, a loosely structured, informal grassland
protection network gradually emerged, connected through Chen’s site.
The network is characterized by concern for grassland protection and sus-
tainable development, and is made up of multiple diverse entities that
were, in many cases, previously unconnected. Below, I expand on each of
these three characteristics.
First, the parties to the network share a relatively vague concept—
namely grassland, caoyuan in Chinese. Broadly speaking, the concept of
grassland has no particular geographical limitation; it allows many
interpretations. Although everyone connected with the network talks
about grassland, there is no clear definition of what this means. Chen, as a
founder of Echoing Steppe website, uses a concept that encompasses a
vast area. He says that the main concern of the Echoing Steppe website is
the Steppe. On Chen’s website, the Steppe is described as “a belt of grass-
land that extends some 5000 miles (8000 kilometres) from Hungary in
the west through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria in the east.”21
The Mongolian steppe plateau is located in the eastern part of the
steppe. Chen also emphasizes that it is necessary to understand the grass-
land as a place where nature and humans coexist. He says that the grassland
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 121
occurred every spring in Inner Mongolia and carried dust to South Korea
and Japan, causing widespread concern in these East Asian societies.
Environmental activist and researchers visited Chen in Beijing and con-
ducted research on the causes of grassland desertification in both Inner
Mongolia and Outer Mongolia, with the idea to propose
countermeasures.
Second, the grassland protection network has potential for sustainable
development. The Echoing Steppe website attracts many individuals and
organizations and has, over time, contributed to the emergence of a loosely
structured grassland protection network—a new and broadened platform
for grassland protection. “Human and Steppe” is a platform developed by
the Advisory Centre for Education attached to the e nvironmental NGO
Tianxiaxi.25 Its main purpose is to attract more people to join the grass-
land protection network. The centre was established in 2003 to promote
environmental education. Its founder, Hao Bing, has many years of experi-
ence working with Chen. Tianxiaxi and Echoing Steppe jointly imple-
mented a number of projects, such as publishing an environmental
education book and organizing an environmental education camp.
Tianxiaxi’s priority areas are natural, rural, and civic education. They have
a Grassland Projects Team under the category of natural education. The
team runs several projects such as a tour to experience grassland and herd-
ers’ life, telling the story of grassland and of human and grassland. Their
expectations for the Human and Steppe Network are as follows:
Friends of
Grassland Friends of Nature:
Echoing Steppe
website 'protecting existing
grassland' project
Tianxiaxi Advisory
Centre for Education:
'human and grassland'
Greener Beijing: project
'save grassland'
project
Conclusion
The image of rural pollution victims presented in this chapter is different
from the one commonly presented in the literature on environmental soci-
ology in China. Pollution victims in Eastern Ujimchin grassland are no
longer isolated and helpless, because they connect to the outside worlds
through several informal networks. Some of these informal networks (such
as Informal Beijing Liaison Office and Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth
Network) have historical roots that go back to the 1960s to 1970s. These
networks are personalized, closed, and have a strong regional character,
with a focus on the Eastern Ujimchin grassland. Some of the networks are
relatively newly formed and issue-focused, and are still growing, and some
link the issues of Eastern Ujimchin into broader concerns about a cross-
border steppe ecosystem. They bring together people from a wide range
of backgrounds, including the herders who live on the grasslands, those
who have spent part of their time in grassland areas but now live else-
where, and others from around China and beyond who bring their own
distinctive knowledge and perceptions to the network. In showing how
positive changes can be made to rural pollution victims’ otherwise isolated
and helpless situation, this case study has highlighted the crucial impor-
tance of leveraging existing personal networks and using these as a basis to
exert political influence.
Notes
1. Educated Youth is a historical term in China. According to Pan, “the
movement of ‘going up to the mountains and down to the countryside’”
(shangshan xiaxiang) in the early 1950s to 1980 sent more than 17 million
urban middle-school graduates to become peasants and farm workers, and
millions more, who were from peasant households, to return to the vil-
lages. These people are referred to as Zhishi qingnian (“Educated Youth”),
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 127
Shinnosuke Takahashi
S. Takahashi (*)
Kobe University, Kobe, Japan
of Okinawa Island has been called Yanbaru, which is written with a com-
bination of two Chinese characters of “mountain” and “field.” By the time
we arrived in Takae, the sun had already risen and was blazing in the sky.
This chapter explores the social formation of Okinawa’s anti-US base
community by focusing on the diversity of protest identity and the cultural
and affective factors that sustain solidarity within the community. The
“Okinawa struggle,” which started in the late 1940s, is known for its per-
sistent action against militarism, military violence, and Okinawa’s still sub-
ordinate political and social status under the US–Japan security system
over a period of nearly 70 years.1 Although academic research has increased
since the mass protest campaign in the aftermath of the rape of a local
schoolgirl by three US military personnel in 1995, the dynamics of the
Okinawa struggle, particularly in relation to complex social, political, and
cultural identities, need further scrutiny. Foregoing research has been
insufficient for understanding the various modes of social formation and
cooperation which are constitutive of the development of the Okinawa
struggle. In particular, views of the local protest movement as homoge-
nous in ideology and identity hinder us from understanding political activ-
ities which are not necessarily motivated, practiced, and represented by the
mainstream discourses of “Okinawa identity.” The anti-helipad construc-
tion movement in Takae demonstrates how the local residents transformed
their everyday life—place, practice, and cultural activities—into a political
space to struggle against the imposition of state power.
The historical narrative of the Okinawa struggle has been under scru-
tiny since the early 2000s. Particularly, ethnography has become an impor-
tant research method among the scholars of Okinawan activism.2 The
ethnography of the anti-base activism was not only a new method to study
the local movement, but also involved criticism toward text-based analy-
ses, which had previously been predominant. While the text-based analy-
ses emphasize some particular local experiences such as the war and the
US military occupation as the core elements of social formation, ethno-
graphic inquiries have enabled us to see the more diverse nature of the
local activism, including complex relations among different groups.
Diversity within the local movement was a significant finding. This view
allows us to understand different interests, motivations, and social identi-
ties of activists, which were previously overshadowed by the mainstream
narrative of the local struggle. It uncovered the personalized voices and
experiences, and the variety of “protest community” hidden underneath
the mainstream narratives. For example, Miyume Tanji pointed out that
the swift response from Okinawan feminists after the rape incident in 1995
was emblematic of the fact that underrepresented groups can lead mass
mobilizations that unsettle the Japan–US alliance.
Yet, the concept of “protest community” also faces difficulties in
explaining the fluid nature of these communities. Protest communities are
never isolated from one another. Groups and individuals are always net-
working among themselves: a process which involves exchanges of people,
information, and many other things. In other words, there is what
Gurminder K. Bhambra calls a “perceived ‘gap’ between general catego-
ries and particular experiences.”3 One of the methodological difficulties of
the protest community approach, or what Bhambra calls the “standpoint
approach,” is that this gap between category and particular local context
is not entirely overcome, and because of this problem, the protest com-
munities can easily be misrepresented by the researchers. What she sug-
gests instead is that we consider “connected histories,” so that we can
“recognize politics and intellectual engagement as ‘conjunctural phenom-
enon’” in a systemic manner, while still acknowledging critical social and
cultural practices without privileging certain voices and ideas as prerequi-
site.4 Taking her critical argument seriously, in the rest of this chapter, I
will analyze the case of the local protest movement in Takae to discuss
connectivity for better understanding the actuality of the social formation
in the Okinawa struggle.
134 S. TAKAHASHI
In May 2007, the mayor of the village, Ijū Morihisa, suddenly decided
to withdraw from the protest. Although other local assembly members
criticized Ijū for his sudden change, it did not change his mind. The may-
or’s decision to accept the helipads was influenced by the Okinawa Defense
Bureau which announced the commencement of the base construction
project. Following the withdrawal of Higashi Village’s support, the
campaign by the Broccoli Association also ceased. From that moment on,
the local families who stood up to take direct action had to continue their
protest without the official support of the local political body. The local
residents were thrown into direct confrontation with the Japanese govern-
ment and its base politics. This is how the Takae grassroots protest com-
munity called No Helipad Takae Residents Society was born in August
2007 (Image 7.1).
Image 7.1 Local residents and supporters barricading a gate to Yanbaru Forest
with cars, tents, and net to block the officers from Okinawa Defense Bureau (white
helmets, right hand side of image). Police officers (dark clothing, left hand side of
image) also monitored protesters with video cameras. Photograph © Shinnosuke
Takahashi
FOREST, MUSIC, AND FARMING: THE TAKAE ANTI-HELIPAD MOVEMENT... 137
Even today as you’re reading this, sit-in protest is taking place in Takae. This
area of great nature has become the forefront for the nation heading towards
warfare potential, Japan. This is not a particular issue of Takae; the same
situation might occur at any time anywhere in Japan and in other parts of
the world… So, if only to enable us to guard the future of our children, and
to ensure a peaceful future for all, we request your kind attention to this
issue!12
“Who are the people in the Takae Residents’ Society?” After staying for
some time in Takae, I found myself asking this question. This question
arose in my mind because I noticed that the Takae Residents’ Society was
such a different community in many respects from many other anti-base
groups and communities in Okinawa. First of all, while many protest com-
munities in Okinawa are led by people with gray hair, most of the people
in the Takae Residents’ Society were younger than their mid-50s when I
first visited in 2011. Second, although some community members speak
with a strong Okinawan accent, some speak a kind of pidgin language of
the local dialect and standard Japanese, and a good many residents have
no dialectical inflection whatsoever.
This demographic diversity within Takae’s protest community reflects
the fact that the majority of them were born outside Okinawa. Although
the actual number is still uncertain, a large number of residents involved
in the Takae struggle are from mainland Japan. To my knowledge, a man
called Miyagi Katsumi is one of the few people who was born and spent
most of his life in Takae. The co-founders of the Takae Residents’ Society,
Ashimine Gentatsu and Isa Masatsugu, are both native Okinawans, but
their spouses who also play crucial roles in the community are both from
elsewhere in mainland Japan. One of the residents in the community, Higa
Masato, also has Okinawan parents but was born and raised in Nagoya in
Aichi Prefecture as a second-generation Okinawan migrant. Apart from
them, most of the community members originally came from many differ-
ent parts of mainland Japan.
FOREST, MUSIC, AND FARMING: THE TAKAE ANTI-HELIPAD MOVEMENT... 141
The diversity of the Takae Residents’ Society includes not only the
members’ places of origin but also their life experiences. In terms of occu-
pation, they are farmers, teachers, public servants, and artists. Most of
them came from elsewhere to live in this rural place, attracted by the
Yanbaru forest and other aspects of this rich natural environment. Ashimine
Gentatsu is one of the earliest people in the community to move into
Takae with his family in the early-2000s. Ashimine was born and raised in
Naha in the early 1960s. After graduating from a local elementary school,
he stopped going to classes in his early teenage years. With “only a gradu-
ate certificate from elementary school” (to use his own words), Ashimine
started working as a carpenter in his hometown.14 As he became older,
Ashimine moved to mainland Japan and lived in Tokyo for several years
working as a house builder. After coming back to Okinawa, he lived in
various parts of Okinawa including remote islands. In 2002, he relocated
with his wife and their children from Kadena to Takae, where they started
organic farming. When they first visited Takae, Ashimine was mesmerized
by the forest, which also used to exist in his hometown, Naha, in his child-
hood. Particularly, his favorite spot was near the headwaters of Arakawa
Creek. Fortunately, he could afford to buy an abandoned farm for an
“extremely cheap price.” While living in a van, Ashimine built his house
and café near the creek in the middle of the deep Yanbaru forest. The café
was named “Yamagame,” which means a “water jar in the mountain.”
This name shows his attachment to Yanbaru, which is one of the main
sources of water for the rest of Okinawa. When the residents established
the No Helipad Takae Residents’ Society in 2007, Ashimine participated
as a founding member. His participation was based on a very simple rea-
son. He felt that this place of dreams embraced by the rich forest would
disappear once construction started. Without any experience of social
activism, this was how his life as a “protesting local resident” (jimoto
hantai jyūmin) began.
Another senior figure of the community, Morioka Kō ji, is also running
an organic farm. He was born and raised in downtown Tokyo in the late
1970s. While he lived in Tokyo, he was known as an experienced guitarist
in the indie music scene. After working in many different kinds of jobs to
continue his career as a musician, Morioka suddenly quit all previous jobs
including music and left Tokyo. He said he was caught up in financial
problems with “troublesome people.” After travelling to various countries
in Asia, he came back to Japan, and he met his future wife, who studied
natural farming under a pioneer of the “natural farming method,” Fukuoka
142 S. TAKAHASHI
for an outsider like him. So he left Takae with ambivalent feelings of affec-
tion for its community and embarrassment to be involved in internal com-
munal matters. Takahashi came back to Takae a year later in 2009.
However, he still does not feel comfortable to act as director. Although he
is clearly trusted by the community, he often describes himself as “yoso-
mono (outsider).”
Takahashi’s self-recognition as “outsider” is actually a key term which
characterizes the unique membership of the Takae Residents’ Society.
Many of the Takae’s protest community members are “yosomono,” in that
they came from elsewhere in Japan. Individual and group participants who
are called “supporters (shiensha)” are also outsiders who regularly or irreg-
ularly visit Takae to participate in sit-ins. Although their level of commit-
ment varies depending on the people and their circumstances, some of the
non-resident participants from mainland Japan stay in Takae for several
months. In such mixed environment of participants, the mainstream
Okinawan activist identity cannot really encompass the nature of this
movement in Takae. On the contrary, careless use of the conventional
activist discourse can create tension within the community. In order to re-
examine the commonality that connects the diversity of Takae’s movement,
we need to consider alternative frameworks based on the subtle balance of
locality and extra-locality.18
The discourse of “yosomono” or “outsider” is important not only to
highlight the diversity of the membership. It also characterizes the Takae
Residents’ Society in relation to other residents in Takae who do not par-
ticipate in the protest movement. In fact, the term is often used by other
local Takae residents to differentiate themselves from the protest commu-
nity members. Although the demography of Higashi Village has been
changing dynamically since the beginning of the modern period, there is
a clear line separating the local villagers who are involved with the protest
movement and those who are not. This line is drawn by use of the notion
of “insider” versus “outsider.”19 Locals who disagree with the protest
community use the term “old residents” (furui jūmin) to refer to them-
selves and “new residents” (atarashı̄ jūmin) for those who join the sit-in
movement. The terms “old” and “new” are not merely a temporal classi-
fication; the terms also differentiate people who know the history of the
difficult environment of Takae from those who are newly settled in the
village. For “old residents,” newcomers are people who do not understand
the experiences and the history of the village from the days when the locals
still made their living mainly by forestry and by cultivating new fields.
144 S. TAKAHASHI
This division between old and new residents is also related to inter-
actions between the local residents and US military, such as the case
where an old woman was shot by US soldiers when she was walking in
the Yanbaru forest. Also, there was a case where a house was burnt
without any apparent reason by Americans. However, as journalist
Mikami Chie notes, some villagers think that the relationship between
the locals and Americans was one of “give-and-take.” Therefore, while
there are long-term local residents who are involved with the protest
movement, such as Miyagi Katsumi, the Takae Residents’ Society does
not represent the majority of residents who have lived in Takae for
decades.20
The notion of “yosomono” or “outsider” is a key to address the ele-
ments that create Takae’s protest community. It is not only “Okinawans”
or “Okinawan identity” which matters to the local protest community,
but also attachment to a specific locale within Okinawa. As Masamichi
S. Inoue reveals by examining the case of the local protest movement
in Henoko, so too in Takae the notion of “Okinawan identity” alone
has limits in effectively mobilizing people and resources.21 Therefore,
we need to consider alternative concepts which can be more appropri-
ate to frame the identity of a local protest community. While the dis-
course of “outsiders” is often used to separate Okinawans from the
mainland Japanese in the mainstream narrative of the Okinawa strug-
gle, in the case of Takae, the term also includes newly settled residents
who do not share the local history as their own experience. In this
sense, new residents from Okinawa such as Ashimine, and from main-
land Japan such as Takahashi and Morioka, are all “outsiders” for the
majority of Takae residents who do not participate in the movement.
Although lack of effective support from the majority of other villagers
is a problem because of their nature as marginal within the peripheral
village, it shows rather clearly why this small communal movement by
Takae’s new residents attracts many participants from all over Japan
and elsewhere and how their relatively inclusive and network-based
community was created. Most of the shiensha or supporters who visit
and stay in Takae are informed of the local protest community through
their social and cultural networks. In other words, one of the key fac-
tors that develop Takae’s protest community is the pre-existing per-
sonal networks that those “outsiders” established before they moved
into Takae (Image 7.2).
FOREST, MUSIC, AND FARMING: THE TAKAE ANTI-HELIPAD MOVEMENT... 145
Image 7.2 Local resident Miyagi Katsumi (left) and a supporter who is a rock
musician from Kyoto Prefecture (right). The musician brought a banner with sup-
portive messages from his fellow rock musicians and fans as a symbol of solidarity
with Takae people. Photograph © Shinnosuke Takahashi
Affective Community
If the protest community in Takae is built on a subtle balance of two dif-
ferent senses of “insider” and “outsider,” and if history and memories of
WWII and the American occupation only partially explain the culture of
the protest community in the Takae’s struggle, what are the other ele-
ments that explain communal values in the struggle? Sociologist Abe
Kosuzu recently presented an important analysis in this regard. Through
long-term participation as an activist as well as researcher, she focuses
upon subcultural elements as key components for making Takae’s struggle
community. While Okinawa’s distinctive historical experiences reinforce
the local identity as “uchinaanchu” (Okinawans), a focus on subcultures
provides us with a microscope to see other layers of social cooperation
146 S. TAKAHASHI
Conclusion
A microscopic view of the local protest community highlights that varied
personal experience, the convergence of diverse social and political net-
works, and a common place-based consciousness that foments a deep
empathy for the local ecology are key factors in creating Takae’s distinctive
communal life. An investigation of the processes by which a protest com-
munity has been created in today’s Okinawa serves not merely to refute
the myth of social homogeneity but also to understand social formation in
such a highly diverse environment as in the Takae Residents’ Society. The
personal context and the development of the protest community offer
significant clues to identifying the collective characteristics of the commu-
nity and hence reformulating the ways in which we see the protest com-
munity and the broader anti-base movement in Okinawa. Humans,
148 S. TAKAHASHI
information, ideas, and other material and immaterial flows across cultural
and geographical boundaries allow us to consider to what extent hetero-
geneity is constitutive in making and sustaining the creative local activism
for the Okinawa’s anti-base movement, and how the collectivity of the
local community can be imagined dynamically. Moreover, the implications
of my findings go well beyond Okinawa and can be applied to the study of
social movements globally.
Diversity and heterogeneity themselves present new challenges to our
conceptualization of the communal, including the protest groups of the
Okinawan anti-base movement. In this sense, Takae’s experience is instruc-
tive because it demonstrates an alternative possible way of re-evaluating
“who” really belongs to a group and how the communal can be made, not
merely through a homogenous cultural or social identity, but also through
various actors and their cultural practices. Affect as an essential component
of the communal is only possible when we focus on the social dynamics at
the grassroots level. In Okinawa, where the memory and experiences of
war and occupation remained unhealed, various human activities at the
grassroots level, including private commemoration and remembrance, are
particularly important to understand the actuality of social formation and
the signs of social changes. While finding the source of solidarity is a cru-
cial part of research on social movements, the case of Takae suggests that
a perspectival shift can contribute to understanding what it means to be
“communal” today.
Notes
1. See, for example, Laure Hein and Mark Selden, eds. Islands of Discontent:
Okinawa Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003).
2. Some seminal ethnographic research in relation to the Okinawa’s anti-base
struggle include Masamichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military:
Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), and Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in
Okinawa (New York; London: Routledge, 2009).
3. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the
Sociological Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 30.
4. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, 31.
5. Higashi-son-shi Henshū Iinkai, eds. Higashi-son-shi, Vol. 1 (Higashi-son:
Higashi-son Yakuba, 1987), 212.
FOREST, MUSIC, AND FARMING: THE TAKAE ANTI-HELIPAD MOVEMENT... 149
Disposal, the warriors who did not own their lands moved to Yanbaru to
develop the area. This movement was encouraged by Okinawa Prefecture
from the 1890s until the early twentieth century. Having an intention to
increase the population of the region, the Okinawa government provided
financial support for those who moved to the northern part of the island.
These early settlers were mostly engaged in the forestry industry. The sec-
ond mass movement of people to Yanbaru region occurred during the
Battle of Okinawa. They were refugees who fled to the northern Yanbaru
from south and central parts of Okinawa such as Naha and Yomitan Village.
The exact number is still uncertain. However, the local official history
introduced an account by a war survivor who considered that nearly
100,000 people came from the South. During the final stages of the war,
most of these refugees and the local residents were kept in the camps such
as Taira by the Allied Powers. However, there were a number of people
who experienced the end of the war in the forest.
20. Taku Morizumi and Chie Mikami, Okinawa Takae Yanbaru de Ikiru
(Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2014), 127–128.
21. Masamichi S. Inoue, “’We Are Okinawans but of Different Kind’: New/
Old Social Movements and the U.S. Military in Okinawa,” Current
Anthropology 45(1), 85–104.
22. Kosuzu Abe, “Kurikaeshi Kawaru: Okinawa ni okeru Chokusetu Kōdō no
Genzai Shinkōkei” (2011), 68.
23. Abe, “Kurikaeshi Kawaru,” 80–90.
Alternatives
CHAPTER 8
Shuge Wei and Tessa Morris-Suzuki
The forms of living politics explored in this book are quests for alternative
values: both alternative values in the ethical sense and different ways of think-
ing about economic value. On the surface, these quests may look like mere
nostalgia or attempts to return to imagined, and economically unrealistic,
“good old days;” but a closer look suggests a more fundamental questioning
of a particular economic and ethical regime: a regime that is all too often taken
for granted. French pioneer of research on social memory Maurice Halbwachs,
many decades ago, highlighted the limitations of the mechanical explanation
of economic value in terms of laws of supply and demand. Demand itself is a
product of memory, history, and custom. The relative values that we attach to
things are the (often unconscious) product of centuries of social negotiation
and conflict over the meaning of human happiness and prosperity and the
proper way of organizing society.1 So value is inescapably built on values.
Tradition as Innovation
The endless expansion of the market is a deeply ambivalent process. As its
advocates proclaim, it has indeed created enormously increased material
wealth. With this have come many undeniable benefits—throughout vast
regions of the world, infant death rates have fallen dramatically and life
expectancy has been prolonged. Even if it were possible, few of us would
seriously choose to go back in toto to the lifestyles of our ancestors in the
eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In many ways, indeed, the choice of a
return to past ways of life is itself foreclosed, for we have become inescap-
ably dependent on the material systems created by the corporate market
economy. These systems sustain a human population far greater than any
that has existed before. The world population today is about 10 times
156 S. WEI AND T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
greater than it was at the start of the eighteenth century. Most people in
richer countries of the world have become utterly dependent upon the
systems of transport, communications, and commerce created by the cor-
porate market, and many people in poorer countries genuinely aspire to
share in the material life created by those systems.
Despite our dependence on the system though, we remain able to see
how that ever-deepening dependence on the commodity market erodes
freedom and damages human health and happiness. At the same time, we
are forced to confront a problem so large that it threatens to overwhelm
our powers of choice and decision, leaving us feeling disempowered and
politically numb. Can the growth of the market be tamed, channelled, or
brought to a gradual end in a way that does not produce global catastro-
phe? If so, how? Where can those who suffer the injuries of the market’s
relentless growth start to intervene to gain some control over this process?
These are questions that underlie many experiments in living politics,
including the experiments that we will explore in this section.
The dichotomy between commodity and humanity reflects the funda-
mental difference in how the world should be perceived: whether the
development of human society should be seen as a process to maximize
profit, or a way to achieve a balance; whether human relationships are
defined by competition, against one another and against nature, or by
shared responsibility and mutually connected interests. The market
emphasizes the former group of values. As E.F. Schumacher argued, the
market “is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility.
Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.”9 The
atomization of individuals pushes for the drive to maximize one’s own
interest at the cost of others. Alternative economies, like those examined
in the chapters that follow, serve to return individuals to the community
and create new ways of exchange that strive to achieve balance within
communities and with nature.
Robert Weller points out that all economies require social capital to
function; they cannot afford to erase all ties that are larger than the indi-
vidual but smaller than the state.10 The alternative value systems explored
here draw on and deepen resources of social capital, combining the
exchange of goods and services with the strengthening of other forms of
human interconnection. The natural environment and non-human spe-
cies, which are excluded from the calculations of the dominant market
system, are included in their consideration of cost and gain. They
emphasize cycle and balance, and consider them as defining mode of
CONCEPT ESSAY THREE: ALTERNATIVE VALUE CREATION 157
always correlate with each other. As we saw in Chapter 4 and will see again
in the following chapter, a person who has no history in the local area may
in some respects be more committed to the local order of things than
those who are born there but do not care; and the very meaning of “the
local way” may be understood in multiple ways by various “locals”
themselves.
Incomers to a local community who commit themselves to local issues
may be seen as “embedded outsiders.” They may not meet the physical
requirement of being an insider, in the sense of being born and raised in
the local place or registered as a local villager, and yet feel strongly com-
mitted to the local value systems because of their long-time engagement
with the local community or deep connection to them.
In the chapters that follow, we explore two further examples of alterna-
tive value creation in two contrasted social settings. “The Dilemmas of
Peach Blossom Valley” examines the efforts of a group of intellectuals and
farmers in Gongliao district, Taiwan, to challenge the dominant and
monolithic market system. This case shows how urban intellectuals are
drawn into the local value systems and work with locals to preserve and
revitalize their alternative values. Instead of waiting for society to change,
they start to create a living space governed by values which they derive
from local tradition. This is a battle of mutuality versus competition; qual-
ity of life versus quantity of products; the sense of limit versus infinite
maximization; and the attitude of respecting nature versus the desire to
harness it. While issues of rural development are often analysed through
the framework of class struggle12 or in terms of the political relationship
between central and local government,13 this case study instead focuses on
the way that a struggle of values and ideas is conducted by and within an
informal life politics network.
The second example, discussed in “The Neverending Story,” moves the
focus to the semi-rural, semi-urban setting of the small regional city of
Ueda, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture. In this case, a group made up of locals
and “incomers,” who have moved to the region in search of a better way of
life, mobilize imported ideas to revitalize community relationships and
practices. In Ueda, an alternative currency and exchange system has become
the core of a broader array of social activities which are centred on core
shared values, but which still allow for a diversity of personal opinions
within the group. The experimental, open-ended approach of the Ueda
group may indeed be described as an effort to experiment with the “politics
of the apolitical.” Both these cases raise questions about the way in which
160 S. WEI AND T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
ideas and practices are transmitted from one generation to another, and
about the way in which we assess the success or failure of informal life poli-
tics: questions to which we shall return in the book’s concluding chapter.
Notes
1. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1950), 153–159.
2. Kojin Karatani, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, The structure of World
History: from Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2014), 18. The book was originally pub-
lished in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 2010.
3. Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London,
Verso, 2002), 193.
4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). The book was originally pub-
lished by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944 and reprinted in 1957 and 2001 by
Beacon Press.
5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 272.
6. Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Revised edition) (Ringwood and
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 47.
7. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
8. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in George Simmel, ed.
Donald N. Levine, On Individual and Social Forms (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1971), 327. The chapter is a reprint from Social Sciences
III Selections and Selected Readings, Vol. 2, 14th ed. (University of
Chicago, 1948). Translated by Edward A. Shils. It was originally published
as “Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben,” in Die Grosstadt. Jahrbuch der
Gehe-Stiftung 9 (1903).
9. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
(London: Vintage Books, 1993), 29.
10. Robert Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 9.
11. Ghassan Hage, ‘Insiders and Outsiders’ in Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan
(eds.), Sociology: Place, Time and Division (Melbourne: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 342.
CONCEPT ESSAY THREE: ALTERNATIVE VALUE CREATION 161
12. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Benedict
J. Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations
in a Central Luzon Village (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
1990).
13. Huanyin Li, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005).
Shuge Wei
Introduction
“During the Taiyuan era of the Jin Dynasty, there was a man from Wuling
who made his living as a fisherman. While following a stream, he forgot
how far he had gone. He suddenly came to a grove, with peach trees on
both banks and petals of the dazzling blossoms falling in profusion…”1
The verses of this “Legend of the Peach Blossom Spring” ran through my
mind as we drove on a winding mountain road. Having forgotten how far
I had gone and lost my sense of direction in the deep mountains, I won-
dered what sort of legend I would encounter at the destination called
“peach blossom valley.” The car stopped at an open area toward the top of
a hill. A picturesque scene of rice terraces was in front of me. A coiling line
ran from the foot of the mountain, dividing the slope into layers of water
glittering in the sun. Water buffalos were roaming along the ridges and
farmers were bending forward toward the field, transplanting seedlings by
hand. While machines had come to dominate farms and tourist villas were
a common spectacle in this rural part of northeastern Taiwan, the village
S. Wei (*)
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
had maintained its own pace of life, as if time had frozen here and the
hustle and bustle of the outside world had left this place unaffected. As I
was marveling at the internal strength of the village to resist external influ-
ences, my friend commented on the vulnerability of the village: “many of
the rice terraces were rehabilitated after decades of desertion. The sur-
rounding woods used to be paddy fields too. Now they have been deserted
for very long.” I began to wonder what the local farmers had experienced
over the last decades; what motivated them to revive rice-terrace farming?
As my inquiry went deeper, a local story began to unfold (Image 9.1).
This chapter seeks to shed light on the efforts of a local community to
preserve an alternative value system as a challenge to the monolithic mar-
ket rules. It explores the process of agricultural decline since the 1950s
and the recent attempts of local farmers as well as NGO workers to
overcome this decline through self-organized and self-designed coopera-
tive programs. The remote location and the small scale of land have
enabled local farmers to preserve a traditional attitude toward nature and
daily life that differs from dominant commercial values. Hehe, a local
NGO, has sought to protect local values by creating a new way of trading
that reconnects consumers and producers, humans and nature. However,
its efforts are caught in a dilemma between the desire to cater for the older
generations’ pursuit of social respect for the traditional way of farming and
the younger generations’ practical need for financial security. Faced with
the ubiquitous force of capitalism, the Hehe program has struggled to find
a way to survive.
A Forgotten Farmland
Gongliao district is located in the northeastern corner of Taiwan. The
local aboriginal tribe Ketagalan originally referred to the region as “Kona,”
meaning the hut next to a hunting trap. After landing in the region in
1895, Japanese colonizers named the region Kō r yō and set up a village
governed under the government of Kı̄run district in the 1920s. The
Nationalist government led by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) pre-
served the name and local governance structure of the village after it took
over the region from the Japanese in 1945. A Chinese version of the
name—Gongliao—was adopted, and Gongliao Township was established
and attached to Taipei County in 1946.2
Gongliao farmers have been a forgotten group in the region. The
region is known for fishing and mining, and farmers mainly live in the vil-
lage of Jilin with its arable fields scattered deep in the mountains. The
village currently has about 500 registered residents, but the real number
of people living there is considerably smaller.3 Local fishermen in fishing
communities on the coast had little idea that there were people practicing
farming in the mountains.4 “Remote” (pianpi 偏僻) was the word local
farmers frequently used to refer to their own land. For generations, they
quietly ploughed the fields, collected their harvests, and traded rice and
vegetables in nearby markets. Because of the high altitude in the moun-
tainous area and the moist climate closer to the sea, the land only yielded
one crop every year. Compared to farmers in flat areas who could harvest
at least twice annually, Gongliao farmers barely had anything to trade after
meeting their own needs and paying taxes. Their constant absence from
markets made this group even more invisible in the local region.
Small-scale farms also limited the agricultural production of house-
holds. The KMT government carried out land reform shortly after it
established power on the island. Determined to liberate the peasantry and
remove the class of local landed gentry with whom they had no political
connections, the government reduced land rent from over 50% of the crop
yield during Japanese rule to 37.5%. In 1953, a “land-to-tiller” program
was introduced. Apart from retaining three chia (about 2.9 hectare) for
166 S. WEI
took turns to till each other’s land, and the host would cook a big meal by
the end of the day to thank the neighbors for their contribution. Children
would frolic in the fields while adults chatted and drank.
In the following decades, the fourth nuclear power plant continued to
absorb local workers for low-paid service jobs, such as cleaning and gar-
dening. Many who left the land at a young age never returned to farming.
Since the late 1980s, the local anti-nuclear movement had brought
Gongliao to the public attention. For the first time, Gongliao people
became heavily involved in partisan politics. They gained national promi-
nence because the mainstream media portrayed them as a “violent mob”.14
The antinuclear agenda dominated the public’s understanding of daily life
in the local region, and particularly obscured the existence of the local
farming community in the mountains, who were much less vocal than
fishermen living next to the power plant. Despite the limelight Gongliao
people received from the media, the local farming community was an
eclipsed group even more invisible and thus forgotten in the eyes of out-
siders, much in accordance with what Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann has
called the “spiral of silence.”15
Local Values
Being small and forgotten nevertheless provided the local farmers, par-
ticularly the elder generation, with some space to preserve certain tradi-
tional values that stood in contrast to the capitalist culture of the
mainstream. Exchange for them was not exclusively between producers
and customers. Neither was it restricted to human societies. Instead,
exchange involved human and nonhuman species. Money was not the sole
currency valid in this exchange. The process involved a wider range of
non-quantifiable values, including human feelings, loyalty, trust, and a
sense of responsibility.
To know the limits of the environment and obey orders from heaven
(zhi tianming 知天命) was an unwritten contract between farmers and the
land. “Not to ask too much from heaven” and to “get your rightful share”
had almost become unstated mottos for the farmers.16 Instead of seeing
their rice production as a pure economic game to achieve growth and to
maximize profit, they considered their farming activity part of the biologi-
cal balance. Mutual dependence and reciprocity was more important than
the sum of individual egoisms. They did not view the world as a linear
path to growth, competition, and maximizing personal desires, but as a
system to achieve a balance. There was, for example, this commonly
170 S. WEI
shared view among the local community that it was unethical to weed the
land more than three times in one growing season, since farmers were
responsible for sharing the land with nature, rather than eradicating every-
thing that affected the growth of their desired product. What is more,
gains would always come at a cost. A local farmer, Lin Shizhong, had
refused to register his idle land with the government to receive subsidies:
“I still weed and plough the land to make it fit for farming, but I do not
take money for it. My friends and I all believe that the more you receive
government subsidies, the less your children perform filial duties to
you.”17 Lin could not specify the logical correlation between the two. Yet
this almost superstitious thinking that there was a cost for being greedy
was indicative of the strong belief among local farmers in moral
reciprocity.
Trust and loyalty were also important currencies that the local com-
munity relied on in contracts and exchanges. Having worked in the field
his whole life, Zhang Xinyi, also known as “Uncle Tree” (Shu Bo 樹伯),
was still a tenant farmer. While most of the tenants had acquired their
own piece of land during the land reform of the 1950s, Uncle Tree did
not relinguish his position as a tenant. Deeply touched by his landlord’s
great care for him and his family, he considered it ungrateful to claim
land from his landlord.18 Indeed, beyond the formal exchange system
based on legal contract and monetary payment, Uncle Tree valued infor-
mal agreements based on mutual trust, personal feelings, and loyalty.
This informal currency was strong enough to resist external economic
turbulences, including inflation or deflation, so long as the exchanging
partners were mutually committed to it. Yet Uncle Tree did not expect
the currency to be short-changed. It expired when the landlord’s son,
who did not have the same commitment to Uncle Tree’s family, decided
to terminate the tenancy after his father passed away. This eventually
forced Uncle Tree to face his landlord’s family in court to defend his
tenant rights.
In the village, diligence was the norm. It determined the social respect
one received from the community. “One thing that distinguishes the
mountain people (farmers) from seaside people (fishermen),” as local
teacher Jing’e observed, “is that few mountain people gamble as a pas-
time. They are not used to the idea of making gains through luck as
opposed to hard work.”19 Indeed, dedication to farming was an important
element in increasing one’s social respect. Farmer Lin had spent years
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 171
xing the local irrigation channel, with half of his annual income thrown
fi
into the project every year. He acknowledged that family members and
neighbors found him “foolish” and “weird,” but insisted that the “weird”
way was how a farmer was supposed to be.20
Yet this ought not to suggest that local villagers were too idealistic to
ignore the rules of competition. For them, the ultimate attraction of farm-
ing lay in personal autonomy, participation in an unbroken chain of pro-
duction, and the sense of reward developed through farming. But they
were fully aware that the commitment to farming and the traditional way
of life attached to it were exclusive to their generation. Most of the farmers
acknowledged that small-scale farming was not a “realistic” job for the
younger generations who had the heavy burden of supporting their fami-
lies. Ironically, their value systems, which emphasized the importance of
balance and sustainability, were considered as unsustainable by the younger
generations. Having been encouraged to leave farming and to prepare for
wage labor in the city from an early age, the younger people found that
the local idea of sharing and limiting personal desires ran contrary to what
they had been trained to believe: growth, development, and the optimiza-
tion of profit.
Awakening of the Village
The old generation of Gongliao farmers were quietly aging. As young
people continued to leave the land, more and more hectares of fields
turned from active farms to fallow land, and eventually became deserted.
No one openly expressed concerns for the dying village. Farmers who had
followed the “orders from the heaven” their whole lifetime seemed to
have once again accepted their fate and let the village take its own course,
whatever that was.
But the silence was broken by another expropriation plan. In March
2010, word was leaked from the Ministry of Interior, possibly by whistle
blowers, that the government would expropriate about 700 hectares of
land along the seaside in the Gongliao region. The farmland would be
converted to commercial and residential areas and sold to developers to
build hotels. Affected villagers were to be relocated to Tianliaoyang (田寮
洋), a piece of farmland close to the terraced fields in the mountains.21 The
development plan was not released to the public until August that year,
and according to the plan, expropriation was to be activated in November.
172 S. WEI
The news stirred the quiet village. People were genuinely shocked by the
ruthless manner in which the government treated the local villagers:
Tianliaoyang was a piece of wetland that frequently became flooded dur-
ing the typhoon season. Farming was already difficult there, let alone
building houses for daily living. Furthermore, the notion of losing their
land was devastating for many villagers who had worked and lived on their
farm their entire life. It would deprive them of the resources for living,
disqualify them from receiving social welfare as farmers, and force them to
completely change their lifestyle. A sense of injustice and mistreatment
permeated the village.
Our family have lived here for generations. How come the government will
take away our land simply because big merchants like the seaside view? Does
it mean that only rich people are entitled to the view but not poor locals like
us?22
Concerned about the future of their life and the community, local vil-
lagers organized themselves at local centers to rally protests against the
expropriation.
While the local peasants lacked the political channels to defend their
homeland, a bird-watching group mobilized their political resources to
protect Gongliao. Although Gongliao, particularly Tianliaoyang, was
unknown to most of the people outside the region, it was a “secret gar-
den” for bird-watching societies. The wetland environment diversified the
local biological system. Varieties of insects provided abundant food for
birds. Hidden among woods and mountains, the land became a popular
habitat for birds on their migration journeys. It was recorded that over
three hundred varieties of birds had appeared at Tianliaoyang, two thirds
of the total number of bird species in Taiwan. Bird watching became pop-
ular in Taiwan in the 1970s. As early as 1973, some American scientists
together with US-trained academics and public servants established the
Taiwan Bird Watcher’s Group (TBWG).23 Through regular bird-watching
trips, the group brought together environmentalists with a shared desire
to get close to nature. The seemingly unassuming group had a strong pool
of social capital. Some members had connections to key political resources
and were effective in advocating environment-related policies. Founder of
the TBWG, Yu Hanting, for example, helped the promotion of the
National Park Law; and the TBWG took credit for the establishment of
Guandu National Park in the 1990s.24
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 173
Faced with the acquisition order, bird watchers released the news to
newspapers and social media. A local land expropriation case soon
became a warning call for the loss of an important habitat for birds. The
resistance of the locals and the external bird watchers eventually forced
the Ministry of Interior to drop the development plan. Yet it should be
noted that bird watchers and Gongliao farmers did not always get along.
The food that bird watchers left in the field attracted too many birds. As
a result local farming was often disrupted. In return, some farmers
increased the dose of pesticides, which posed a threat to the life of
birds.25 It was the spontaneous resistance against the state acquisition
that united the two.
Yet the alliance triggered a larger program that led to the resurgence
of local farming. Concerned that the Ministry of Interior would reacti-
vate the expropriation plan in the future, Lin Huaqing, a senior specialist
at the Habitat Management Division of the Forestry Bureau, initiated a
five-year program to revive terrace land farming. Gongliao was chosen as
one of the sites to implement the program. Lin was not a member of the
bird-watching group himself but had many friends and university alumni
who belonged to it. He not only shared the group’s concern with the
preservation of birds, but also saw the value of wetland environment in
maintaining biodiversity and water quality. Another hidden intention,
however, was to create a project within the bureau system as an obstacle
to deter any future expropriation plan initiated by other government
departments. Coming from the official system, Lin also clearly under-
stood the limits of having this program run by government agencies: a
top-down manner of ideological imposition would be hard to avoid. He
therefore planned to delegate the program to an environmental NGO
and approached an old university friend, Lin Wencui, who had lived in
Gongliao for over 15 years, for advice. Lin recommended the Renhe
Environmental Ethics Foundation of Taiwan (Renhe huanjing lunli
fazhan jijin hui 人禾環境倫理發展基金會), whose key member Fang
Yunru was Lin’s colleague at a student society when they pursued degrees
at National Taiwan University.26 As Robert Weller points out, Chinese
civil society is composed of horizontal ties linked through friendship,
community membership, and educational experience.27 The establish-
ment of Renhe’s connection with the Forestry bureau testified to the
power of such a horizontal network.
The Renhe foundation was established in 2007 by a group of middle-
aged elites who were eager to seek alternative values in society. A s tatement
174 S. WEI
on the front page of their website revealed the shared anxiety that initially
brought these people together:
Image 9.2 Display of local farming tools at the Hehe stone room
farming and seldom openly expressed their concern for the shrinking of
farmland, they were genuinely pleased to see the return of the younger
generations, and their dedication to passing on the traditional farming
skills. It occurred to them that one thing worse than the pain for not being
able to recover the past was the loss of desire to long for what was lost.
The efforts of Hehe members awakened farmers’ hope and desire to revive
the farming community, rather than letting it take its course to an irrevers-
ible decline. Farmer Liu’s son recalled that for a while his father kept mur-
muring “how stupid of these people (Hehe members) trying to do this!”31
Yet he knew this was his father’s way of showing appreciation and approval
of Hehe’s efforts to save the local farming culture. After years of opera-
tion, Hehe started to gain local trust. In 2011, seven households with 2.4
hectares of land joined the program. In 2015, the number increased to
nine households with 7 hectares.32
and acknowledges their significance through the PES scheme. The scheme
is also intended as a capital buffer for farmers to deal with the agricultural
loss caused by extreme weather conditions.
Hehe has also expanded the educational value of the terraced rice fields.
Cultivating consciousness of the environment and attachment to the land
among the young generations of Gongliao people was one of its key objec-
tives. Believing that intimate contact with the biological environment in
the local area was an effective measure to cultivate emotional ties to the
locality, it had invited local kindergarten, primary, and secondary
school students to visit the fields and taught them to recognize plants and
insects that were unique to the local wetland. The main idea Hehe tried to
deliver was that nature includes a variety of agencies that are not exclu-
sively human. As they are part of an ecosystem, humans should share the
resources rather than conquer and dominate them. The environmental
educational program had been integrated into the regular curriculum of
local schools (Image 9.3).
Another aspiration of Hehe was to re-establish a mutual assistance sys-
tem in Gongliao. Traditionally, labor exchange took place mainly among
family members and neighbors. What Hehe had aimed to create is a wider
exchange network that connected urban and rural communities. It there-
fore maintained connections with various urban-based clubs of agricul-
tural volunteers. During busy seasons, volunteers were organized to visit
Gongliao and assist farmers. Since 2013, Hehe began to organize small-
scale tourism, inviting urban people to visit the local area. Visitors sup-
ported the local environment through their purchases and membership
fees. Local farmers in return were responsible for taking good care of the
land and water resources.
The Hehe program was inspired by local traditions, including the sense
of mutuality and attachment to the land. Yet the program was not limited
to them. It sought to create a new space between the village and urban
communities, where the broken chains between producers and consumers
could be fixed and local knowledge and wisdom appreciated. The new
community which Hehe tried to cultivate was nevertheless a relatively
exclusive one. The local farmland and Hehe’s activities were only open to
a small group of urban volunteers and sponsors. Although the tourism
programs were open to the general public, the activities were designed and
scheduled under the condition that the local daily life must not be dis-
turbed. Hehe members therefore strictly limited the size of the tour
groups and the length of their visits. There were no tours during busy
farming seasons, nor in winter when the land and the nonhuman species
needed a proper rest.36
As Hehe’s program began to acquire a reputation, its members started
to feel external pressures pulling the program in different directions.
The local tranquility was disturbed by curious urban visitors. Farmers
who were usually shy of cameras found it unsettling to have their daily
lives becoming the subject of the “gaze” of uninvited visitors. Some visi-
tors even aimed their cameras at them and sent orders such as “slow
down” or “do it again,” disregarding the fact that the farmers were car-
rying dozens of kilos of rice on their shoulders.37 The condescending
manner betrayed their lack of respect for the local community. It eroded
local morale and constituted a form of “soft violence.” And yet it was
exactly this sort of violence from which Hehe tried to insulate the local
farmers.
Pressure also came from the local government, pushing Hehe to expand
tourism so as to increase local income and visibility. While Hehe consid-
ered commercial activities as the means to preserve environmental biodi-
versity, local officials believed that generating profits was a priority in
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 181
attracting young people back into the community. They prioritised the
value of the Hehe program as a tourism site, believing the program should
focus on tourism-related services rather than from the non-profitable yet
labor-intensive farming activities.38 Coming from an environmental stud-
ies background, the head of Gongliao district commended Hehe for its
environmental ideas, but disagreed with its exclusive feature. He tried to
explore its tourism value by endorsing Hehe as a licensed program for
environmental education. But this support was regarded as a burden by
Hehe members. They were concerned that the overflow of visitors could
easily destroy the existing balance between human and nature and disturb
the quiet life of the local farmers. For them, the value of farming went far
beyond what a monolithic market-based economy could quantify. Hasty
commercialization would only erode the local traditional values and even-
tually destroy them.
Keeping a slow and gradual pace of development was regarded by Hehe
members as the best way to preserve the local biodiversity and way of life,
but the vision was constantly challenged by the ubiquitous capitalist values
which pushed Hehe to expand its scale. Rumors started to disseminate in
the organic farming markets that Hehe leaders were trying to monopolize
local resources for personal gains. There were also whispers that Hehe
members, who were led by outsiders, were making decisions on behalf of
the villagers.39
Meanwhile, the younger generation of Gongliao farmers also raised
concerns about the lack of financial return from joining this program.
Farmer Yang withdrew from the Hehe program after the first year. As a
middle-aged man with the burden of supporting a family, he disagreed
with the lack of commercial vision in Hehe’s plan. After leaving the Hehe
program, Yang started his own tourist farming business, which, in contrast
to Hehe, was much more open to media exposure and tourists. For
outsiders, Yang’s farm was too easily regarded as part of Hehe. The differ-
ent attitudes toward visitors sometimes caused confusion among outsiders
about Hehe’s principles.
Disagreements also came from other NGO colleagues. The Taiwan
Ecological Engineering Development Foundation (EEF), another group
affiliated with Renhe, supervised the revival of the rice-terrace fields in
Bayan, Jinshan District. Considering Hehe’s model as lacking a long-term
plan for the livelihood of the locals, the EEF’s Bayan program sought to
revive terrace farming for tourism purposes. Yet in the eyes of Hehe mem-
bers, the Bayan program had subordinated the local villagers’ daily life to
182 S. WEI
commercial ends while the scale of tourism had far exceeded what the local
resources could carry.40 The program led to much criticism from villagers
after the EEF left the region. Villagers complained that local life and the
environment, instead of benefiting from the Bayan program, were sub-
jected to “bullying” by environmental NGOs, visitors, and the media.41
They ended up draining the water from fields that the EEF rented from
local farmers as a protest.
Hehe members were fully aware of the limits of their program. They
acknowledged that they were more effective in persuading existing farm-
ers to reclaim rice terraces than attracting younger generations to start a
farming career.42 Indeed, they had been agonizing for years about the
right pace to take in protecting local values and addressing commercial
profits, and about the appropriate level of compromise with capitalism. To
them the existence of the local way mattered greatly. And their goal was to
“maintain it,”43 so as to remind the future generations of “a way back
home,”44 even though no one knew what the future would hold.
Conclusion
Gongliao farmers were able to preserve the traditional way of farming
because of their small-scale farmland and the mountainous landscape.
Large machines could not be used on the rice terraces. Small-sized land
for each household only produced enough rice for family consumption.
This allowed local farmers to resist external market influences and to
preserve the traditional way of farming, including the selection of seeds
and weeding plans. This also explained why local farmers agreed to join
the cooperative, even though such a decision meant more labor without
much higher financial returns. For them, the traditional way of life,
together with the value systems attached to it, had become what
Bourdieu called a “habitus” that shaped their choices and behavior. The
desire to maintain the local habitus was especially strong among the
elders. Having been liberated from the constraints imposed by family,
profession, and active existence in society, the elder farmers developed
the capacity to revisit their past and retrieve a system and social order
that defined who they were.
The urban intellectuals who established the Hehe cooperative in the
village were able to introduce a mode of exchange based on mutuality
because of the small size of the group with whom they engaged. The small
scale allowed the cooperative to be flexible and innovative. It also enabled
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 183
land without pesticides and herbicides, and banning heavy machines were
devised through long-term observation and careful assessment of the local
capacities. The Satoyama Initiative was chosen as the guiding principle of
Hehe and Renhe, because the focus on mutuality and ecological balance
fit well with the local values of Gongliao village. It served more as a prag-
matic discourse that linked the local cooperative with the international
environmental movement, and thus elevated the significance of the local
efforts. It translated the local alternative value systems into a language that
appealed to the urban intellectuals and policy makers. Yet the villagers did
not need a foreign-introduced concept to guide their daily activities. What
motivated them was the drive to revive what had been lost in their mem-
ory, a dialogue with the past, a longing for the return to the order they felt
most at home with, and the urge for social recognition that had been
denied to them for decades.
On leaving Gongliao, the Peach Blossom Legend came to my mind
again. In the legend, the Wuling fisherman had never been able to trace
the route back to the Peach Blossom Land, neither had others who made
the same attempt.45 I began to wonder whether I was going to see the
same peach blossom valley again; whether the local way of life would be
maintained after the end of the five-year program of the Forestry Bureau;
or whether the young generations would carry on the local way of farming
like their parents and ancestors have done. Only time will tell. Yet I did see
the seeds of alternative values becoming planted in the minds of those who
care about the village. They hold the embryonic promise of political
change in the heart of everyday life.
Notes
1. Original text: “晉太元中,武陵人,捕魚為業,緣溪行,忘路之遠近;忽逢桃花林,
夾岸數百步,中無雜樹,芳草鮮美, 落英繽紛.” From Tao Qian, The Legend of
the Peach Blossom Spring.
2. Tang Yu, Gongliao xiang zhi (Gazzetteer of Gongliao) (Taiwan: Taipei
xian Gongliao xiang gongsuo, 2004), 126.
3. See Gongliao district government’s introduction about Jilin village,
http://www.gongliao.ntpc.gov.tw/content/?parent_id=10032&type_
id=10008, accessed November 1, 2017.
4. Interview Wang Jing’e, September 24, 2015.
5. Irene Bain, Agriculture Reform in Taiwan (Hong Kong: The Chinese
University Press, 1993), 34–35.
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 185
26. Zhu Jiaying and Li Minshan, “Shouhu shui titian cong ziji zuo qi,”
Shengmingli Xinwen, accessed on September 8, 2017, https://vita.
tw/%E5%AE%88%E8%AD%B7%E8%B2%A2%E5%AF%AE%E6%B0%B
4%E6%A2%AF%E7%94%B0-%E5%BE%9E%E8%87%AA%E5%B7%B1%E5%
81%9A%E8%B5%B7-fe4110bb97f2.
27. Robert Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 35.
28. Interview with Lin Wencui, September 22, 2015.
29. Satoyama Initiative concept, the International Partnership for the Satoyama
Initiative, accessed September 8, 2017, http://satoyama-initiative.org/
en/about/.
30. Lin Wencui’s lecture for visitors from Friends of Nature in Beijing,
September 16, 2015.
31. Interview Enhao, September 20, 2015.
32. Fang Yunru, et al., “Yi nongye huodong cucheng ziyuan baoyu hezuo de
anli: yi Gongliao shui titian weili” (Facilitating biological resource conser-
vation by agricultural activities: the case of Gongliao Hehe terraced pad-
dies fields), conference proceedings of Yu ziran hexie gongsheng de nongcun
fazhan (September 2015), 3. Accessed September 8, 2017, https://drive.
google.com/file/d/0B7LBBI_ho0zIODNnNlUtV2dacms/view.
33. Interview Lin Wencui, September 16, 2015.
34. Poster of Hehe rice, http://monghoho.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/
blog-post_98.html, accessed September 8, 2017.
35. Interview Fang Yunru, September 16, 2015.
36. Hehe’s blog, http://monghoho.blogspot.tw/p/blog-page_22.html; Hehe’s
facebook notice, accessed Septemer 8, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/
monghoho2013/photos/a.165129636995752.
1073741825.165126086996107/462057810636265/?type=3&theater,
accessed September 8, 2017.
37. Renhe and Lihehe, Shui titian: Gongliao shancun de gushi (Taipei: Wuxian
chuban, 2013), 80.
38. Interview Chen Wenjun, head of Gongliao district, September 21, 2015.
39. Interview Lu Yanjun, September 20, 2015.
40. Account of an informant, September 24, 2015.
41. “Bayan de meili aichou” facebook of the Bayan community, accessed
September 8, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_
fbid=560704527404270&id=317109651763760&substor y_
index=0#sthash.IOY1ngnw.dpuf.
42. Interview Fang Yunru, September 16, 2015.
43. Lai Qingsong, “Preface,” Shui titian, 8.
44. Li Taosheng, “Preface,” Shui titian, 8.
45. Tao Qian, The Legend of the Peach Blossom Spring.
THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 187
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
In 1978, the year before the publication of his best-seller The Neverending
Story, German writer Michael Ende was invited to take part in a confer-
ence in Switzerland run by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. The choice
of Ende as a speaker at the conference was a little surprising. The Institute’s
mission is to conduct “scientific research in the social and economic
fields,” and many of the participants in the 1978 meeting were prominent
economists or businessmen. Ende, by contrast, was one of Germany’s
most famous writers of children’s fantasy literature. After a day spent dis-
cussing the future of the global economy, the conference delegates
gathered for a dinner at which Ende presented his address. He began by
lamenting the fact that the past century had produced “not one single
positive utopia.” He then challenged the conference participants to extend
their predictions about the future of the economy into the realms of hope
and imagination: “let us,” he said, “all place ourselves together on a big
flying carpet, and fly one hundred years into the future. Now, each of us
should say what sort of world he wishes to see at that time.”
T. Morris-Suzuki (*)
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
of the thinkers who had inspired him, creating Ende’s Last Testament in an
effort to share the social ideas which the German writer had hoped to
communicate to a Japanese audience.
Unexpectedly, this TV programme inspired the creation of hundreds of
grassroots social movements all over Japan. Michael Ende is best known
for his children’s fantasy novels Momo and The Neverending Story (the lat-
ter turned into a Hollywood hit movie which Ende himself reportedly
loathed), and as far as I know, Japan is the only country in which Ende’s
work has become the inspiration for grassroots social action. Many of the
Japanese groups created in response to the broadcast of Ende’s Last
Testament were short-lived, but some survive to the present day, and one
of the most successful of these is the Santo Club Ma~yu.
As the episode sketched at the beginning of this chapter reminds us,
Michael Ende was a passionate advocate of utopian thinking—a profound
believer in the power of imagination as a political force. The narrative of
The Neverending Story can, indeed, be interpreted as a metaphor of its
author’s belief that it is possible, in small ways, to bring elements of fantasy
or imagination back into the real, political world to help us find ways out
of the “circle of hell” in which we are trapped. The novel’s hero Bastian is
drawn into the storybook which he is reading, and moves from the real
world of his school attic into a series of adventures in the magical realm of
Fantastica: a realm whose survival is threatened by the expanding force of
the Nothing, a dark force that devours and destroys hope and turns the
people of Fantastica into “nameless servants of power.” After his predict-
able victory over evil and return to the world of reality, Bastian encounters
Mr. Coreander, the old bookseller from whom he originally obtained the
magical storybook:
There are people who can never go to Fantastica,” (says Mr. Coreander)
“and others who can, but who stay there forever. And there are just a few
who go to Fantastica and come back. Like you. And they make both worlds
well again.11
Santo Club Ma~yu is a system which links people to the local region through
use of a local currency. It gives rise to new connections between person and
person; It allows you to rediscover your talents; It revitalises people, and so
invigorates the local region.
But the particular circumstances of life in Ueda, and the “try and see”
attitude of the group’s founders, resulted in a currency scheme with some
distinctive features. The Ma~yu scheme operates through passbooks,
which resemble the passbooks which most Japanese people use with their
everyday bank accounts. Every member pays an annual fee of 1200 yen
(around US$12), and in return receives a passbook entry of 1200 Ma~yu,
which he or she can spend to buy goods or services from other members.
Members can then earn more Ma~yu by selling goods and services within
the group network, with each transaction being recorded in the passbook
of buyer and seller. As in many other local currency schemes, running into
debt is not regarded as a problem, and accumulating large amounts of
credit is not seen as a virtue (Image 10.1).
A monthly Ma~yu market provides one opportunity for members to
exchange goods and ideas, but much trading also takes place elsewhere,
with the group’s regular newsletter providing a useful forum where
buyers and sellers can share information about items that they would
like to trade. Prices of goods and services are set by negotiation, and
trades can be made in a mixture of Ma~yu and yen. All new members
are given a nickname, by which they are generally known within the
group—just one of several small rituals used to create a sense of com-
munity. Another is the custom that buyer and seller shake hands when a
deal is struck—a small gesture which acquires significance because hand-
shaking is rare in Japan, where people normally bow when greeting or
thanking one another.
198 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
Image 10.1 Ma~yu members, with passbooks in hand, trading goods at the
monthly market. Photograph © Tessa Morris-Suzuki
As these rituals suggest, for the members of Santo Club Ma~yu, the
local currency trading network is simply one part of a larger project, which
might be defined as an effort to create a locally-based but open commu-
nity centred on broadly shared values. These values cannot be defined with
any precision, because they are deliberately left malleable and implicit.
This allows a diverse range of people to participate in the group even
though their more narrowly defined political positions (e.g., their voting
THE NEVERENDING STORY: ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGE AND LIVING... 199
activities. Yasui Keiko observes that the group, whose members are dispro-
portionately in the over-fifties age group, found it easier to recruit younger
members following the 2011 disaster.21
For the most part, the Santo Club Ma~yu has avoided dependence on
outside funding, believing that it is better to rely on the group’s own
resources. But an exception was made for one major group project initi-
ated in 2013. Between 2011 and 2013 Ma~yu had run a series of work-
shops and other events on sustainable regionalism, which included the
2012 National Fiesta. At the end of this two-year project, the group
decided to embark on their own initiative in sustainable regionalism, and
one member offered them a tangible focus for this initiative: an old rural
house which was abandoned and falling into disrepair. Under the leader-
ship of a Ma~yu member who is also a professional architect, the group
successfully applied for a three-year local government grant of two million
yen (around $20,000), and then rallied their own diverse resources of
skills and labour to convert the ruined hall into a community centre incor-
porating various elements of environmentally sustainable design.22
This project turned specific economic problems of the region to advan-
tage. Like many rural or semi-rural areas of Japan, the Ueda region has a
serious and much-discussed problem of akiya: empty houses and other
buildings left to decay as the local population declines: hence Ma~yu’s
ability to obtain the use of the village hall easily and almost free of charge.
Ma~yu’s restoration project was completed in 2015, and the building—
christened Everybody’s House [Mina no Ie]—has become a centre for the
group’s trading markets and other gatherings, as well as for events organ-
ised by other local residents (Image 10.2).
Everybody’s House was more than a mere restoration project. It was an
experiment in collective learning, where participants shared and acquired
skills and worked out solutions to technical problems by trial and (some-
times time-consuming) error. Rice chaff, for example, was used as an envi-
ronmentally sustainable insulation material, but very quickly attracted rats,
requiring new solutions to seal the roof against rodent invasions.23 But the
house is a social as much as a technical experiment. Given the loose struc-
ture of the Ma~yu group, Everybody’s House raises complex issues which
only time and experience will resolve: who constitutes the “everybody”
who can use the house, and according to what rules? Who is responsible
for its maintenance? Who pays the taxes?
The upper floor of Everybody’s House provides a home for the Ma~yu
group’s kurukuru ichi [revolving market]. Here members deposit unwanted
THE NEVERENDING STORY: ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGE AND LIVING... 201
Image 10.3 Old houses line a street on the fringe of Ueda City. Photograph ©
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
are retired and have scope to enjoy the slower, human-centred sense of
time embodied in the idealistic visions of local currency schemes. Younger
members are often people who have chosen to move away from the fre-
netic life of the metropolis and create an alternative lifestyle in mountain-
ous Nagano Prefecture.
The self-introductions of new members published in the Ma~yu news-
letter are full of stories like these:
leading members were imprisoned, while others retreated into silence. But
after Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, survivors of the prewar experi-
ments re-emerged to create new social education and regional community-
building schemes. One symbol of this local continuity of thought and
action is the work of Kobayashi Tatsue (1896–2001), a prewar White
Birch Teacher who lived to the age of 104 and remained a central figure in
social activism in his native Saku City until the end of the twentieth
century.33
Members of the Ma~yu group do not relate their own activities directly
to earlier generations of social activism like Ueda Free University and the
work of the White Birch Teachers. But indirect connections are clearly vis-
ible. The humanism and localism that lies at the core of alternative cur-
rency schemes strongly echoes elements of the utopian socialism of
thinkers like Morris and Tolstoy, which so inspired the earlier generation
of Chikuma Valley visionaries. The White Birch Teachers’ search for peace
is also reflected in aspects of the activities of Ma~yu (discussed below).
The human network also becomes apparent when we look at the relation-
ship between Ma~yu and groups like the Miyamoto School (Miyamoto
Juku), established in the small town of Mochizuki (administratively part of
Saku City) in 1989.
The Miyamoto School is a group of local people who gather once a
month to discuss issues of sustainable endogenous development under the
guidance of eminent environmental economist and former Osaka
University professor Miyamoto Kenichi. Many of its most active members
are also people who, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, gathered
around and were inspired by former White Birch Teacher Kobayashi
Tatsue, and Kobayashi himself (at the age of 97) led the Miyamoto
School’s 1997 study session on their region’s early twentieth-century his-
tory.34 Even after his death, Kobayashi and the ideas of the White Birch
Teachers are a constant presence at the Miyamoto School, because the
School meets in the Kobayashi Tatsue Peace and Handicraft Folk Arts
Hall [Kobayashi Tatsue Heiwa to Teshigoto Mingeikan], a small building
constructed in Kobayashi’s honour and filled with his collection of local
craft works and photographs and portraits of the thinkers who inspired
him.
The Ma~yu group is linked to and exchanges ideas with the Miyamoto
School, and is thus indirectly connected to Kobayashi Tatsue and the
White Birch Teachers. Some Ma~yu members are participants in the
Miyamoto School: for example, Nakajima Kunio, one of the first people
206 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
It’s quite possible to predict that the issues of who owns Everybody’s House,
who owns the land, who the occupant is etc. will become a problem in terms
of the existing property tax system… Everybody’s House is really still in the
making. Both in terms of the “hard” and “soft” side of the project, there are
a mass of things that we won’t understand until we’ve tried doing them. We
can’t predict the ongoing struggles that we will have: struggles both with
existing institutions (including the tax issue that I have just mentioned) and
with the preconceived ideas that exist within ourselves. But fortunately,
“political” discourses and grand rhetoric from “on high” are completely
useless. It’s best to just create your own “place and time” by focusing firmly
on protecting and enriching your own life.
and suggests that the group needs to revive the notion of iriai to make
Everybody’s House a place of shared activity for themselves and for the
broader surrounding community.
We’ll always keep in mind that Everybody’s House is for “us,” which
includes all the local people, and that we are creating and running it as an
“iriai place” [iriai no ba] for everyone. For that reason, I want to take part
in as many parts of the process as possible, and so enrich my life and my
sense of awareness.40
messages was unwelcome and disturbing. For others, though, the Ma~yu
community provided a crucial network through which they could share
news and information about the security law issue which was largely excluded
from Japan’s overwhelmingly conservative mainstream national media.
The events surrounding the passing of the new security laws highlight
dilemmas of informal life politics to which there are no simple solutions.
Through its everyday actions, Ma~yu implicitly (and sometimes explicitly)
complicates and plays with the boundaries of what we term “the political.”
In architectural terms, the notion of “fluid terrain” (widely used after the
devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina) describes an environ-
ment where the boundary between land and water is constantly chang-
ing.43 In the living politics of Ma~yu, what is, and what is not, “political”
is constantly being negotiated and redefined in process of daily action,
even as the nature of the “everyday utopia” that is being constructed is
itself being shaped through trial and error.
Conclusions
Japan-based writer Michael Hoffman reflects a widespread sense of disen-
chantment with the Japanese political scene when he writes that “seventy
years of democracy have not enriched the meaning of that word here
beyond its most prosaic sense of the right to mind your private affairs
more or less free from government interference. Its more inspiring signif-
icance—‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’—reso-
nates feebly.”44 Sporadic upsurges of public protest—against nuclear
power in 2011–2012 and against the new security laws in 2015—evoked
predictions of a new era of political dynamism. But maintaining momen-
tum and turning it into a force that can shift mainstream politics remains
an unresolved challenge.
Yet, in this landscape of political inertia, small local pockets of action
like Ma~yu create space where other ways of being political can be
explored. Ma~yu is neither ideological nor post-ideological; it is driven
neither by agonistic politics nor by political consensus. It deploys impro-
visation and imagination in reshaping life from a very local perspective,
and so challenges the meaning and boundaries of the political itself. By its
very nature it is a work in progress, a matter of trial and error in which final
success is unassured. It is part of a long local history of politics as experi-
ment and as a process of becoming. This is a history full of setbacks and
reversals of fortune, and Ma~yu will surely face those too.
210 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
Notes
1. Michael Ende, Erhard Eppler and Hanne Tächl, Phantasie/Kutlur/Politik
(Munich: Hockebooks GMBH, 2014).
2. Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
3. Paul Chatterton and Jenny Pickerill, “Everyday Activism and Transitions
Towards Post-Capitalist Worlds.” Transactions of the British Institute of
Geographers 35:4 (2010), 476; Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically
(Leeds: Anti-Thesis, 2000).
4. Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2.
5. See Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
6. See, for example, E. Bruce Reynolds ed. Japan in the Fascist Era (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific
War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power (London and
New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect:
Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
7. For debates on the nature (and extent) of Japan’s contemporary democ-
racy, see, for example, Roger Bowen, Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy:
The Liberal Democratic Party and Structural Corruption (Armonk, NJ:
M. E. Sharpe, 2003); Yoshiaki Kobayashi, Malfunctioning Democracy in
Japan: Quantitative Analysis in a Civil Society (Lanham, NJ: Lexington
Books, 2012); and Alice Mary Haddad, Building Democracy in Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
8. Frank J. Schwartz and Susan Pharr (eds), The State of Civil Society in Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Akihiro Ogawa, Failure
THE NEVERENDING STORY: ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGE AND LIVING... 211
of Civil Society? The Third Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan
(New York: SUNY Press, 2009).
9. See, for example, Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society
and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010).
10. The Japanese word for cocoon would normally be romanised “mayu.” The
tilde mark in the middle of the word, which also appears in the Japanese
hiragana version of the name, was devised by a member of the Ma~yu
group and adopted because it gives the word a softer feel and creates an
unmistakably distinctive group title.
11. See Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim (London:
Penguin Books, 1984), 444.
12. “Ueda Shi Tōkei,” Ueda Shi. 2015, accessed November 25, 2015, http://
www.city.ueda.nagano.jp/joho/shise/toke/toke/index.html#data.
13. Izumi Rui, “Nihon ni okeru chiiki tsūka seido: Sono tenkai to shōrai,”
in Chiiki tsūka, ed. Nishibe Makoto (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2013),
237.
14. Chun Kyunghee, “Kankoku kyōdōtai tsūhei undō no genjō,” in Chiiki
tsūka, ed. Nishibe Makoto (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2013), 167–177.
15. See Lewis D. Solomon, Rethinking Our Centralized Monetary System: The
Case for a System of Local Currencies (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing, 1996), 43–50; Thomas Greco, Money: Understanding and
Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. (White River Junction VT: Chelsea
Green Publishing, 2001), 184–191.
16. Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative
Currency Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
17. North, Money and Liberation, Chapter 5.
18. North, Money and Liberation, Chapters 5 and 7.
19. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiuuVmoqPWI; Yasui Keiko,
“Santo Kurabu Ma~yu no ayumi” in Nōsonhatsu jūmin hakusho Vol. 2:
Tomo ni ikiru, ed. Shinshū Miyamoto Kai Juku Sewanin Kai (Saku City:
Shinshū Miyamoto Juku, 2013), 86–91.
20. Santo Kurabu Ma~yu, “Santo Kurabu Ma~yu katsudō naiyō,” Santo
Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō. 88 (8 August 2015), 1.
21. Yasui Keiko, interview by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, audio-recording, Ueda
City, Japan, 28 May 2015.
22. Takeuchi Hideo interview by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, audio-recording, Ueda
City, Japan, 28 May 2015.
23. Takeuchi Hideo interview.
24. Cooper, Everyday Utopias, 130.
25. LETSLINK UK, “UK Local Exchange Trading and Complementary
Currencies Development Agency,” accessed November 28, 2015, http://
www.letslinkuk.net/.
212 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
39. See Takemasa Andō, Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society
(London: Routledge, 2013), 4–7.
40. Miyazaki Shōgo, “‘Mina no Ie’ wa mina no mono ka: Iriai to iu shisō.”
Santo Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō, 81 (30 August 2014), 30.
41. Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens, 171.
42. Yasui Keiko, “‘Kenpō’ kafe hajimemashita,” Santo Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō,
88 (8 August 2015), 7.
43. See, for example, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, “Negotiating a
Fluid Terrain,” in Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from
Hurricane Katrina, eds. Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter
(Pittsburg: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 34–46.
44. Michael Hoffman, “A Political Turning Point for Japan’s Youth,” Japan
Times, August 1, 2015, accessed November 26, 2015, http://www.japan-
times.co.jp/news/2015/08/01/national/media-national/political-turn-
ing-point-japans-youth/#.VlqmdGQrLx5.
45. Hasegawa Mebae, “Ma~yu to watashi ga deatta koto.” Santo Kurabu
Ma~yu kaihō, 38 (18 November 2007), 9.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shuge Wei
In all of the stories examined here, networks play a vital role because they
bring together people with diverse skills and experiences in a non-
hierarchical space. The Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers, examined in
Chapter 3, links the practical life experiences of migrants from rural areas
with the media and artistic skills of city-based participants. The Korean
organic farming movement Chŏngnonghoe draws on the educational and
religious, as well as the agricultural, know-how of its diverse members.
The grasslands protection movement which addresses the pollution of
herders’ lands in Inner Mongolia would be impossible without the con-
nections forged between the herders themselves and supportive commu-
nicators, activists, scientists, and others elsewhere. In Takae, Gongliao,
and Ueda, it is the combination of skills and perspectives provided by
local-born people and more recent “incomers” that provides the energy
which drives informal life politics.
The networks often extend across national, as well as across regional
and social, boundaries. Korean organic farmers exchange ideas with their
Japanese counterparts, and both derive inspiration from the Danish coop-
erative and Folk School movements. The Inner Mongolian grasslands
protection movement has links that extend to Korea, Japan, and else-
where. The Takae community uses its electronic network to rally interna-
tional support, and the activities of the Ueda Ma~yu group draw on and
resonate with actions and ideas of the worldwide alternative currency
movement.
Informal life politics, as we have seen here, is not a separate realm insu-
lated from the realities of government action. There are many points
where the formal and the informal intersect. Groups like the Inner
Mongolia grasslands protection network or the Takae community develop
innovative ways to try to influence government policy, even as they simul-
taneously create their own self-help approaches in response to challenges
to their physical and cultural survival. The governmental context in which
they operate influences and sometimes constrains the actions of these
groups. It has clearly been more challenging for groups in China (and in
South Korea prior to democratization) to “ignore the state” than it is for
groups in Taiwan or Japan today. Yet to a surprising degree the diverse
communities we have examined use similar flexible strategies to carve out
a space for autonomous action.
As the examples studied here show, the networking process is neither
simple nor necessarily harmonious. Contrasting and sometimes conflicting
views emerge: for example, between those whose idealism leads to a rejec-
tion of conventional market values and those who seek a pragmatic com-
promise between alternative ideals and mainstream economic values. Such
conflicts may lead to tension and division, but at the same time, the open
and flexible structure of these small-scale experiments, with their scope for
improvisation and face-to-face interaction, often makes it relatively easy
for difference to be accommodated and for the gap between contrasting
approaches bridged (as we saw in the cases of Takae and of Ueda). What
emerges is not so much consensus, but rather a continuing and dynamic
interplay of diversity.
Does living politics make a difference? Have the small actions explored
in the chapters of this book really had any lasting effect? Clearly, they have
not changed the world, nor have they sought to do so. Many have had
minor successes—the Workers’ Spring Festival organized by the Spiritual
Home for Workers, the Inner Mongolian grassland protection move-
ment’s success in disseminating legal knowledge among herders, or the
creation of Everybody’s House by the Ueda Ma~yu group (Chapter 10),
among others. These achievements, though, have generally touched the
lives only of small groups of people and remain generally unknown to the
wider national or international community. From this point of view, these
EPILOGUE: IMPROVISING THE FUTURE 217
another. When members of one network disperse, they may join other
groups, carrying with them the knowledge they have gathered along the
way. Thus, the ideas of the Osan School in Korea germinated again in new
ways in the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe; the prewar experiences of
the White Birch Teachers and the Ueda Free University resonate in the
work of the Ueda Ma~yu group; and so on. This process of diffusion can
be likened to the process by which the seed head of a dandelion scatters its
seeds in the wind: the seed head disappears, but the seeds of future life
take root elsewhere. In this sense, working alongside a myriad other simi-
lar networks in East Asia and beyond, the groups we have encountered in
this book are indeed quietly reshaping the future of the region.
Cheng, Joseph Y. S., Kinglun Ngok and Wenjia Zhuang. “The Survival and
Development Space for China’s Labor NGOs: Informal Politics and Its
Uncertainty,” Asian Survey, Vol. 50, no. 6 (2010): 1082–1106.
Chi Su-kŏl, “Ilche ŭi kun’gukchuŭi p’ashijŭm kwa chosŏnnongch’onjinhŭngundong”,
Yŏksabip’yŏng 47 (1999): 16–36.
Chinen Chuji. Taiga no nagare to tomoni. Okinawa, Minamihaebaru: Akebono
Shuppan, 2008.
Chloupková, Jarka. “European Cooperative Movement: Background and
Common Denominators.” In Unit of Economics Working Papers 2004/4.
1–43. Copenhagen, Denmark: The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural
University, 2002.
Ch’oe Pyŏng-ch’il. Han’guk ŭi yuginong’ŏb undong e kwanhan yŏn’gu. PhD
dissertation, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, 1988.
Chŏng Sang-muk. “Kaehoesa”, Chŏngnonghoebo 21 (December 1999): 4–11.
Chu Ok-ro. “Ch’ang’ŏb ŭi malssŭm”, Pulkkot 30 (1968): 3.
Chun Kyunghee. “Kankoku kyōdōtai tsūhei undō no genjō”. In Chiiki tsūka.
Edited by Nishibe Makoto. 167–177. Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2013.
Clastres, Pierre. Kukka e taehanghanŭn sahoe: Chŏngch’iillyuhak non’go. Translated
by Hong Sŏng-hŭp. Seoul: Ihaksa, 2005.
Cleaver, Harry. Reading Capital Politically. Leeds: Anti-Thesis, 2000.
Cliff, Tom. “Schrödinger’s Politics: The Problem of “Collapse” in the Question of
“What Is Political?”” (unpublished ms., 2015).
Cooper, Davina. Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces.
Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Cooper, John M. “Political Animals and Civic Friendship.” In Aristotle’s Politics:
Critical Essays. Edited by Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety. 65–90. Lanham
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
Damulinzhabu, Manglai. Bate-er yu dong wuzhumuqinqi dianhua jiangbanchang.
Accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.lawyee.org/Case/Case_Display.asp?
ChannelID=2010100&RID=108114&keyword
Dixon, Chris. Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014.
“Dongbeijiao quduan zhengshou kaifa an.” Gongliaoren, 1 August 2010.
Dutton, Jacqueline. “‘Non-Western’ Utopian Traditions.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Utopian Literature. Edited by Gregory Claeys. 223–258.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Eckert, Carter J. Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism,
1866–1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.
Ende, Michael. The Neverending Story. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London:
Penguin Books, 1984.
Ende, Michael, Erhardt Eppler, and Hanne Tächl. Phantasie/Kutlur/Politik.
Munich: Hockebooks GMBH, 2014.
222 Bibliography
Johnson, Ian. “Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City.” New York
Times, July 14, 2013. Accessed July 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/07/14/world/asia/pitfalls-abound-in-chinas-push-from-farm-
to-city.html
Karatani, Kojin. Segyegonghwaguk ŭro. Translated by Cho Yŏng-il. Seoul: Pi, 2007.
Karatani, Kojin. “Beyond Capital-Nation-State”, Rethinking Marxism 20.4
(2008): 569–595.
Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003.
Karatani, Kojin. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes
of Exchange. Duke University Press, 2014.
Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations
in a Central Luzon Village. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
1990.
Kim Chun-kwŏn. “Chŏndoja ro salgo ship’ŏttŏn Wŏn Gyŏngsŏn sŏnsaengnim”,
Ssiarŭisori 226 (2013): 29–43.
Kim Hyŏng-mi. “Hongsŏng jiyŏk saenghyŏbundong ŭi chŏnt’ong k’yoyuk kwa
hyŏptongjohab ŭl t’onghan isangch’on kŏnsŏl ŭi isang kwa kŭ kyesŭng” in
Han’guk saenghwalhyŏptongjohabundong ŭi kiwŏn kwa chŏn’gae. Edited by
Kim Hyŏng-mi, Yŏm Ch’an-hŭi, Yi Mi-yŏn, Chŏng Wŏn-kak, and Chŏng
Ŭn-mi. 117–135. P’aju, Korea: P’urŭnnamu, 2012.
Kim Ik-han. “1920nyŏndae ilche ŭi chibangjibaejŏngch’aek kwa kŭ sŏnggyŏk –
Myŏn haengjŏngjedo wa “mobŏmburak’ chŏngch’aek ŭl chungshim ŭro”,
Han’guksayŏn’gu 93 (1996): 147–176.
Kim In-hwan. Han’guk ŭi noksaek hyŏngmyŏng: Pyŏ sinp’umjong ŭi kaebal kwa
pogŭp. Suwŏn, Korea: Nongch’onjinhŭngch’ŏng, 1978.
Kim Ki-sŏk. Namgang Yi Sŭng-hun. Seoul: Hyŏndaegyoyukch’ongsŏ, 1964.
Kim Tae-ho. T’ong’ilbyŏ wa 1970nyŏndae ssal chŭngsanch’eje ŭi hyŏngsŏng. PhD
dissertation, Seoul National University, Seoul, 2009.
Kim, Hyung-A. Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee. New York, NY:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Kipnis, Andrew. “The Disturbing Educational Discipline of “Peasants”.” The
China Journal 46 (2001): 1–24.
Kipnis, Andrew. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in
China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Ko, Dorothy. “Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in Imperial China.” In
Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds. Edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr,
and Thomas W. Rieger. 89–103. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books,
2005.
Kobayashi Tatsue. “‘Shiraba’ no koro”. In Heiwa to teshigoto: Kobayashi Tatsue
104-sai no tabi, Edited by Kobayashi Tatsue no Hon Henshū Iinkai. 16–33.
Tokyo: Fukunotō Shobō, 2001.
226 Bibliography
Liu Yi. “Caoyuan, ruhe liuzhu zhepian lü.” Renminwang, April 4, 2003. Accessed
November 14, 2016, http://www.people.com.cn/GB/huanbao/57/2003
0404/962700.html
Liu Mansheng, and Dai Shidan. “Lianghui tebie baodao zhi liu.” CCTV.com
Winwen, March 14, 2003. Accessed November 14, 2016, http://www.cctv.
com/program/lawtoday/20030314/100560.shtml
Liu, Zehua, and Jianqing Liu. “Civic Associations, Political Parties, and the
Cultivation of Citizenship Consciousness in Modern China.” In Imagining the
People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920. Edited
by Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow. 39–60. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe,
1997.
Lü Tu, ed. Zhongguo xin gongren: Mishi yu jueqi. Beijing: Falü Chubanshe, 2012.
Lundgreen-Nielsen, Flemming. “Grundtvig as a Danish Contribution to World
Culture”, Grundtvig-Studier 48.1 (1997): 72–101.
Ma Chuansong. “Kunjing yu chulu: dui woguo huanjing baohu zhong daocaoren
xianxiang de shehuixue toushi,” Sichuan Environment, 26 (2007): 122–126.
Manier, Bénédicte. Paekman’gae ŭi choyonghan hyŏngmyŏng. Translated by Yi
So-yŏng. Seoul: Ch’aeksesang, 2014.
Marshall, T. H. Citizenship and Social Class. Edited by Tom Bottomore London:
Pluto Press, 1992 [1950].
Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach us about Politics. Durham NC and London:
Duke University Press, 2014.
Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip da Cunha. “Negotiating a Fluid Terrain”. In
Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.
Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter. 34–46. Pittsburg: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
McAdam, Doug. “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom
Summer.” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 1 (1986): 64–90.
McCormack, Gavan, and Satoko Oka Norimatsu. Resistant Islands: Okinawa
Confronts Japan and the United States. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
McElroy, Wendy. “Henry Thoreau and ‘Civil Disobedience’,” Iowa State
University, (2009). Accessed April 28, 2016, http://thoreau.eserver.org/
wendy.html
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante: Rêve s’il en Fût
Jamais. Paris: Lepetit Jeune et Girard, 1800.
Miao, Li. Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the
Urban Underclass. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Migdal, Joel. Strong Societies and Weak States: State-society Relations and State
Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002.
Miyazaki Shōgo. “‘Mina no Ie’ wa mina no mono ka: Iriai to iu shisō.” Santo
Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō, 81. 30 (2015).
228 Bibliography
Monday, Chris. “Family Rule as the Highest Stage of Communism.” Asian Survey
51, no. 5 (2011): 812–843.
Morizumi Taku, and Chie Mikami. Okinawa Takae Yanbaru de ikiru. Tokyo:
Kōbunken, 2014.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. “Invisible Politics”, Humanities Australia 5 (2014): 53–64.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. “A Century of Social Alternatives in a Japanese Mountain
Community”. In New Worlds from Below: Informal Life Politics and Grassroots
Action in Twenty-First Century Northeast Asia. Edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki
and Eun Jeong Soh. 51–76. Canberra: ANU Press, 2017.
Morris, Terence Allen. Europe and England in the Sixteenth Century. London:
Routledge, 1998.
Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2005.
Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking Press, 1992.
Nagano Daigaku, ed. Ueda Jiyū Daigaku to sono shūhen. Matsumoto: Kyōdo
Shuppansha, 2006.
Nakajima Kunio. “Miyamoto Juku to chiiki tsūka Ma~yu kara manande”. In
Nōsonhatsu jūmin hakusho, dai-2 shū: Tomo ni ikiru. Edited by Shinshū
Miyamoto Juku Sewanin Kai. 85–86. Saku City: Shinshū Miyamoto Juku, 2013.
Namazu shi meiji shiryōkan, Kōnō gakuen–Mikan mura to denmāku kyōiku.
Shizuoka, Namazu shi meiji shiryōkan, 2000.
NET Bible, “Matthew 4, The Temptation of Jesus,” Biblical Studies Press, (2016).
Accessed April 30, 2016, http://biblehub.com/net/matthew/4.htm
Niihori Kuniji, Kim Gyosin ŭi sinang kwa chŏhang: Han’guk mugyohoejuŭija ŭi
chŏnt’ujŏk saeng’ae. P’aju, Korea: Iktusŭ, 2012.
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
North, Peter. Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency
Movements. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
O Chae-kil. “Kaehoesa.” Chŏngnonghoebo 4 (1983): 3–14.
O’Connor, James. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.
Obana Kiyoshi. “Yi Ch’an-kap, ilbon tohang susukkekki rŭl palkhinda.” In
P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn – Tashi saenal i kŭriwŏ, Vol. 2. Edited by
P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe. 83–91. Hongsŏng,
Korea: P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe, 2008.
Ochieng, Omedi. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics
at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy. London and
New York: Routledge, 2017.
Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Edited by John Keane. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1984.
Ogawa, Akihito. Failure of Civil Society? The Third Sector and the State in
Contemporary Japan. New York: SUNY Press, 2009.
Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective
Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Bibliography
229
Renhe and Lihehe, eds. Shui titian: Gongliao shancun de gushi. Taipei: Wuxian
Chuban, 2013.
Reynolds, Bruce E., ed. Japan in the Fascist Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004.
Roasa, Dustin. “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan: How Informal Networks Battled
Bangkok’s Worst Flood.” The Informal City Dialogues, no. 1 (2013). Accessed
November 9, 2016, https://nextcity.org/features/view/the-diy-disaster-plan
Rural Development Administration. “Kigwansogae”, Rural Development
Administration. Accessed August 18, 2017, http://www.rda.go.kr/board/
board.do?mode=html&prgId=ogi_hstyQuer y&html_page=ogi_
hstyQuery05#wrap
Ryu Ho-chin. “Tenmak’ŭshik ŭro salgi”, Yŏksamunjeyŏn’gu 33 (2015): 335–378.
Ryu Talyŏng. “Pigŭk ŭi 5·16 i chun i nara yŏksa ŭi kyohun”, Tongailbo (May 15,
1965).
Saemaŭrundongjunganghoe. “Inyŏm gwa chŏngshin”, Saemaŭrundongjunganghoe.
Accessed August 18, 2017, https://www.saemaul.or.kr/sub/saemaul/ideology.
php
Saich, Tony. “The Chinese Communist Party during the Era of the Comintern
(1919–1943).” Accessed December 1, 2016, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/
fs/asaich/chinese-communisty-party-during-comintern.pdf
Sakaguchi Mitsukuni. “‘Ni-Yon Jiken’ to Nagano Ken kyōiku: ‘Kyōiku Ken
Nagano’ ni shūshifu o utta ‘Ni-Yon Danatsu Jiken’”. Heiwa to teshigoto. 18
(2013): 144–160.
Sakurai Tsuneya and Itō Atsuko. “Shinsai fukkō o meguru Komunyuti keisei to
sono kadai,” Chiiki seisaku kenkyū Takasaki Daigaku chiiki seisaku kenkyūkai,
Vol.15, no.3 (2013): 41–65.
Samāddāra, Raṇabīra. The Nation Form: Essays on Indian Nationalism. New Delhi,
India: Sage, 2012.
Santo Kurabu Ma~yu. “Hajimemashite, shinkain desu,” Santo Kurabu Ma~yu
kaihō . 42 (2008): 15–16.
Santo Kurabu Ma~yu. “Yoroshiku, shinkain desu”. Santo Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō.
48 (2009): 15–17.
Santo Kurabu Ma~yu. “Santo Kurabu Ma~yu katsudō naiyō,” Santo Kurabu
Ma~yu kaihō. 88 (2015): 1.
Satoyama Initiative. “Concept of the Satoyama Initiative.” Accessed November 4,
2017, http://satoyama-initiative.org/en/about/
Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London:
Vintage Books, 1993.
Schwartz, Frank J. and Susan Pharr, eds. The State of Civil Society in Japan.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.
Bibliography
231
Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces in Autonomy, Dignity
and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.
Selden, Mark, “Economic Nationalism and Regionalism in Contemporary East
Asia”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 43.2 (October 2012). Accessed
August 19, 2017, http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/3848/article.pdf
Sharon G. Heilmann and Yira Y. Muse, “The Use of Informal Networks to Resolve
Logistics Related Issues in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response: A
Content Analysis Perspective,” Journal of Business and Educational Leadership,
Vol.4, no.1 (2013), 66–78.
Shi Fayong, “Guanxi wangluo yu dangdai Zhongguo jiceng shehui yundong: Yige
jiequ huanbao yundong ge’an weili.” Shehuixue renleixue Zhongguo wang,
March 4, 2007. Accessed November 10, 2016, https://translate.google.com.
au/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sachina.edu.
cn%2FHtmldata%2Farticle%2F2006%2F04%2F965.html&anno=2
Shi Guiping. “Neimenggu duolunxian wei Beijing aoyun gouzhu lüse pingzhang.”
Renminwang, December 29, 2001. Accessed November 14, 2016, http://
www.people.com.cn/GB/huanbao/20011229/638334.html
Shields, Christopher, ed. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Georg Simmel On
Individual and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. 324–339. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Sin Myŏng-chik, “Hyŏptong kongdongch’e wa p’olk’ehoisŭk’olle”, Sŏktangnonch’ong
53 (2012): 83–127.
Smart, Alan, and Josephine Smart. “Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform, Urban/
Rural Status, and Exclusion in China.” Environment and Planning A 33
(2001): 1853–1869.
Sŏ Koeng-il, “1920nyŏndae sahoeundong kwa namgang.” In Namgang Yi
Sŭnghun kwa minjok undong. Edited by Namgangmunhwajaedan. Seoul:
Namgangmunhwajaedanch’ulp’anbu, 1988: 243–289.
Solinger, Dorothy J. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the
State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999.
Solomon, Lewis D. Rethinking Our Centralized Monetary System: The Case for a
System of Local Currencies.Westport Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 1996.
South African History Online. “Mahatma Gandhi leaves the Tolstoy Farm 1913.”
South African History Online. Accessed August 18, 2017, http://www.sahis-
tory.org.za/dated-event/mahatma-gandhi-leaves-tolstoy-farm-1913
Spencer, Herbert. “The Right to Ignore the State.” The Best of the Online Library
of Liberty, (1851 [2013]). Accessed April 28, 2016, http://oll.libertyfund.
org/pages/spencer-the-right-to-ignore-the-state-1851.
232 Bibliography
Spires, Anthony J., Lin Tao, and Kin-man Chan. “Societal Support for China’s
Grass-roots NGOs: Evidence from Yuannan, Guangdong and Beijing.” The
China Journal, no.71 (2014): 65–90.
Stubbs, Richard. “What Ever Happened to the East Asian Developmental State?
The Unfolding Debate.” The Pacific Review 22.1 (2009): 1–22.
Sun Heng. “Lyrics: Tianxia dagong shi yi jia (All Workers are One Family).”
Accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.kuwo.cn/yinyue/3970588/
Suzuki, Norihisa. Mugyohoejuŭija Uch’imura Kanjo. Seoul: Sohwa, 1995.
Swider, Sarah. “Reshaping China’s Urban Citizenship: Street Vendors, Chengguan
and Struggles over the Right to the City.” Critical Sociology, Vol. 41, no. 4–5,
(2014): 701–716.
Takae Residents’ Society. “Voice of Takae.” Yambaru Higashi-son Takae no Genjō.
Accessed November 4, 2017, http://nohelipadtakae.org/files/VOT-
english2013Oct.pdf
Tang, Yu. Gongliao xiang zhi. Taipei: Taipei xian Gongliao xiang gongsuo, 2004.
Tanji, Miyume. Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa. New York: Routledge,
2009.
Taosheng, Li. “Preface.” Shui titian: Gongliao shancun de gushi. Edited by Renhe
and Lihehe. 8. Taipei: Wuxian Chuban, 2013.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience,” Iowa State University, (1849
[2009]). Accessed April 28, 2016, http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html
“Tianliaoyang shidi, dongbeijiao shang niao shengdi.” United Press, 9 August
2010: A11.
Tong Zhifeng. “Dongyuan jiegou yu ziran baoyu yundong de fazhan: Yi nujiang
fanba yundong weili.” Zhongguo huanjing shehuixue, Vol. 01 (2014):
185–205.
Trevaskas, Susan, and Elisa Nesossi. “The Sword of Discipline and the Dagger of
Justice.” Chap. 6 In Shared Destiny: China Story Yearbook 2014. Edited by
Geremie R Barmé, Jeremy Goldkorn and Linda Jaivin, 261–283. Canberra,
Australia: Australian National University Press, 2015.
Uchimura Kanzō, Kōsei e no saidai ibutsu・Denmaruku koku no hanashi. Tokyo,
Japan: Iwanami Shoten, 1991.
Utsumi Aiko, and Murai Yoshinori. Chŏkto e much’ida: Tongnib’yŏng’ung hokŭn
chŏnbŏm i toen chosŏnindŭliyagi. Seoul: Yŏksabip’yŏngsa, 2012.
Van Creveld, Martin. The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Viviani, Margherita. “Chinese Independent Documentary Films: Alternative
Media, Public Spheres and the Emergence of the Citizen Activist.” Asian
Studies Review 38, 1, (2014): 107–123.
Vlassopoulos, Kostas. Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History Beyond
Eurocentrism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Walder, Andrew. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese
Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Bibliography
233
Aristotle, 1, 31 Centralisation
Artistic expression, 215 economic, 67
See also Music; Poetry; Visual art political, 67
Asen, Robert, 27n25, 31, 51n7 Change, constant, see Impermanence
Attention-seeking state, 10, 17–27 China, 2, 23–24, 29–55, 58, 100,
Authoritarian/ism 103, 142, 191, 216
in East Asia, 21–25, 30, 62 as Inner Mongolia, 11, 103–104,
relationship to economic 107–129, 215–216
development, 11, 58–59, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 23,
107–109, 174 39, 41, 53n21, 54n32
Autonomy Chŏngnonghoe, 57, 62–67, 69,
communal autonomy, 59–61, 63, 71–76, 81, 85n28, 85n30,
72, 73, 80–82 85n31, 87n48, 87n50, 88n52,
local autonomy, 60 88n54, 89n67, 215, 217, 218
Chongshai, 176
Christianity or Christian, 25, 54n31,
B 57, 62–64, 67, 71–76, 81,
Balance, 12, 143, 145, 156, 157, 169, 85n30, 88n55, 88n57, 94n106
171, 178, 181, 184, 196 Citizenship
Bayan, 181, 182 education in, 36–39
Beck, Ulrich, 5–7, 13n18–20 enactments of, 30, 31, 46, 49
Bell, Daniel, 4 passive versus active conceptions of,
Belonging, 31, 37–39 31, 38
See also Commonality relationship to survival, 10, 30, 33,
Berlin Wall, 2 50
Bhambra, Gurminder K., 133, 148n3, responsibilities of, 23, 51n9
148n4 rights of, 19, 23–25, 30, 31, 36, 38,
Bottici, Chiara, 8, 14n26, 41
14n27 TH Marshall’s taxonomy of, 38
Brexit (Britain), 2 Civil society, 32, 35, 38, 48, 54n37,
Bronner, Stephen Eric, 4, 6, 7, 61, 122, 173, 191
13n11–13 See also Activism; NGO; Social
Brother Xiao, 168 movements
Bureaucracy, 3 Clastres, Pierre, 60, 84n20
Bureau of Food and Supply, 167 Collective, 24, 29, 32, 41, 42, 50,
53n22, 62, 66, 73, 79, 84n24,
107, 108, 121, 137, 147, 191,
C 200
Capitalism, 8, 43, 59, 61, 75, 165, See also Community
169, 182 Colonialism, post-colonialism, 4,
Catholic Church, 18, 19, 21 54n32
INDEX
237
Formal networks H
formal life-sustaining networks and Habitat Management Division, 173
institutions, 102 Habitus, 158, 182, 183
formal residents’ committees, 100 Hage, Ghassan, 158, 160n11
registered organization, 100 Halbwachs, Maurice, 153, 160n1
Formal politics, 3, 9, 12, 103, 104, Happiness, 2, 21, 153, 156
105n5, 115, 119, 157, 207 Harmony, 2, 21, 157, 174, 199
Francescini, Ivan, 39 Hazzard, Shirley, 155, 160n6
Freedom, 18, 22, 31, 54n30, 83n10, Hehe Cooperative, 178, 182
100, 132, 156, 191 Henoko, 135, 139, 144
unfreedom, 22 Henry VIII, 18
Friendship, 1, 12n1, 99, 115, 146, Herbicide, 66, 168, 178, 184
173, 175 Hierarchy, 9, 87n45, 124
Higashi village, 134–136, 138, 143,
149n19
G Higher People’s Court of Inner
Gandhi, 73, 89n61 Mongolia, 118
Generation Historical influences on informal life
older, 164, 183 politics, 1, 9, 11–12, 44, 52n18,
younger, 70, 165, 166, 171, 177, 72, 77–82, 88, 119, 126,
181–183 132–133, 145, 147, 155, 159,
Gentry, local, 165 191, 195, 204–205, 209
Giddens, Anthony, 4–6, 13n14–17 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 20, 25n3
Globalisation, 4, 5, 43, 59, 61 Holston, James, 27n25, 31, 51n7
economic, 59, 61 Hŏ, Mun-hoe, 68
Gongliao, 12, 159, 163–187, 215, 217 Hope, v, 7, 12, 39–41, 108, 115,
Good life, 1, 12, 12n3 175, 177, 189, 190, 192, 193,
Gramschi, Antonio, 6 202
Grassland Protection Network, 102, huangong, 176
107–129
Grassroots social movements, examples
of, 29, 57, 107, 131, 163, 189 I
environmental, 101, 111 Ideals, 39–43
labour, 193 communal, 59, 75, 76, 80
rights protection, 193, 204 ideal village movement, 72, 77, 78,
Great East Japan Earthquake, 11 80–82
March 2011, 199 national, 76
Greek polis, 1, 12n2 Ideas
Greener Beijing, 120, 123, 125, 128n19 relationship with action, 3–7
Green Revolution, 25, 67, 69, 71, spread of, 217 (see also Historical
86n37 influences on informal life
Guandu National Park, 172 politics)
240 INDEX