Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2017. x, 231 pp. (Maps, B&W photos., illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-0753-7.
Many may be impressed by the Chinese government’s ability to manage crises in recent years. Although frequent, natural and man-made crises ultimately have had little politically destabilizing effect, but rather have been showcases of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) legitimacy and capacity. While scholars studying cases elsewhere have sought explanations for successful or clumsy crisis management from various tangible aspects of politics, like policies and their distributional outcomes, different actors’ stakes and strategies, etc., Christian Sorace’s new book, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, with rich empirical and historical details as well as illuminating analytical perspectives, directs readers to reflect on the ontological and aesthetic dimensions of China’s political system, in which enormous energies are mobilized to support government discourse and image. It reminds us that China’s official discourse is not empty propaganda; rather, “Communist Party utopianism persists in the production of dreamlike images around which reality is organized” (105).
As students of Chinese politics have long scattered their attention across specific populations, areas and issues, we need research like Sorace’s that examines the fundamental logic of how the whole system works. While this study is macro in its argumentation, it is also a granular and thorough report on the post-2008 Sichuan earthquake reconstruction. In the first three chapters, Sorace elaborates how: 1) the Communist Party’s “discursive path dependence” works; 2) Leninist and Maoist ethical norms—“Party spirit”—are embodied in cadre behaviour; and 3) the Party’s economic planning discourse works as “utopian pronouncements of the future to come” (15). These form the epistemological legacies and macro socio-economic context of the post-earthquake reconstruction projects. In the remaining chapters, Sorace conducts micro-level analyses of three reconstruction cases: the urban-rural integration plan in Dujiangyan (chapter 4); the tourism development in Yingxiu (chapter 5); and the massive attempts to make Qingchuan green (chapter 6).
Although the powerful state apparatus can turn political discourse into heavy-handed world-making activity, it often fails to use those processes to produce expected results. In the case of Dujiangyan, the Party sketched a blueprint for urban planning but the local socio-economic system did not work as intended. The Yingxiu residents indeed took the Party discourse seriously, using it as “the normative criteria through which they perceived the reconstruction as a failure of the Communist Party’s political and moral obligations” (122). In Qingchuan, “the ideology and discourse of ecological civilization is not powerful enough on its own to resolve” a series of contradictions inherent in the socio-economic structure (147). Frequently, observing the gap between the Party’s words and actions, even those who place genuine expectations in the Party’s promises might in the long run doubt all official accounts. In this way, by making directives to control discourse, the Party only creates traps for itself. It can only defend its narratives and “absorb shocks that shake its authority” by “silencing key voices that tell a different story through what are often Draconian measures” (151).
Recording the CCP’s extensive methods for responding to crises that shake its authority, the author does not make explicit predictions regarding where the CCP’s “discursive path dependence” is heading. However, he does ask, “Imagine a leadership visit where nothing is concealed. Would Yingxiu’s future be different?” (123) This is insightful, shedding light on the fundamental logic of the Chinese political system: even when “the hall of mirrors is smashed” (123), the Party will keep “performing a repertoire of legitimating narratives” (152) “through continuous transfusions, emergency interventions, diagnoses, and experimental treatments” (79–80).
The key question is how sustainable such governing approaches could be. Nowadays, we increasingly witness the Chinese government making rough and illogical “clarifications” after man-made catastrophes, taking the stance of “believe it or not, this is what we can tell you.” The recent official response to the Beijing kindergarten abuse scandal and the campaign to evict Beijing’s migrant workers are telling examples. If the convincing and preaching effects on the people of official accounts are continuously declining, and even the government itself becomes unserious about its language since it knows what really matters is the mechanism of violent suppression of different voices, then we may need to re-examine the precise mechanisms through which political discourse operates in the material world.
Notably, Sorace’s work provides important empirical correctives to several prevalent hypotheses of socio-political change in China after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. One is the “emergence of civil society” hypothesis. Sorace’s illustration of the top-down reconstruction process shows that (post)disaster management hardly created opportunities for a substantive expansion of civic participation, but rather was regarded by the leadership as a perfect opportunity for demonstrating Party strength. This is the general pattern of crisis management in China. The second hypothesis is that “the Chinese government is increasingly adroit and effective at managing crises.” Again, Christian’s careful case studies of the effects of reconstruction processes on the lives of low-level cadre and the people call this hypothesis into question; the prima facie success of the ruling party coexisted with many subtle and profound difficulties for individual cadre and citizens. The third hypothesis is the state-civil society paradigm, premised on state-phobic assumptions. Christian presents evidence that ordinary citizens did not complain about but rather requested Party intervention in their lives.
Methodologically, as sensitive as the subject of the earthquake (and disasters in general) can be, Sorace has demonstrated how to adroitly cope with such obstacles during fieldwork. By examining discourse nuances, he captures information from diverse sources ranging from various textual materials to daily conversations and behaviour, allowing highly flexible data collection strategies.
A book focusing on discourse and largely descriptive analysis can easily go shallow, but Sorace’s work offers profound insights into how power works in China by grounding abstract Party discourse in concrete state practices. The author demonstrates how to conduct a good discourse analysis study by analyzing texts in their contexts, which requires extensive knowledge of the socio-historical background of the data and a deep understanding of the theories revolving around the theme under study.
Yi Kang
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR, China