Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. xiii, 237 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0336-3.
Bin Xu’s book, The Politics of Compassion, provides an analytical account of the grassroots civic engagement in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. Following the disaster, a massive number of Chinese citizens voluntarily gathered together to provide services and assist with relief efforts. The unprecedented scale and scope of this self-organized post-earthquake volunteering, as Xu argues, was not to be interpreted simply as “a natural outpouring of compassion” (11) or a turning point for a stronger and more autonomous civil society; rather, this huge wave of public participation was conditioned and constrained by political context and situational features, and is therefore, far more complicated than a liberal interpretation of the case. Drawing on rich ethnographic data as well as textual materials, Xu reveals the complexity and multivocality of grassroots engagement through foregrounding participants’ experiences and their understanding of the meanings of their actions in China’s specific sociopolitical context.
The book consists of four chapters, each of which is structured to flesh out the social political conditions, actual actions on the ground, and the ways people made meaning of their actions. Xu starts the story by presenting a puzzle: What enabled such large-scale grassroots volunteering in an authoritarian state, which was absent in all previous post-disaster relief efforts? Xu argues that features of the disaster interacted with China’s social and political structure to produce a “consensus crisis,” characterized by “the challenges to the state’s administrative capacity; the need for civil society’s services; the moral politics involved in disaster response; and a consensus about goals and priorities” (37–39). Some governmental constraints on grassroots associations were weakened, allowing strangers across social, geographical, political, and group boundaries to engage in relief services through networks of grassroots associations.
Xu then investigates the unprecedented national mourning ritual for the earthquake victims, which should not be dismissed as a state-organized event, but rather as a case of civic engagement. He distinctly shows that the mourning was indeed resultant of the interplay of the long-term development of the Chinese public sphere along with situational factors including the open public sphere in the aftermath of the earthquake, and the need for the state to maintain a moral image. This specific context empowered public intellectuals and citizens to advocate for a public “mourning for the ordinary” and facilitated the state’s acceptance of the proposal.
Nevertheless, as Xu’s story unfolds, the state’s receptive attitude towards civil society actors quickly shifted to one of caution and restriction during the recovery period, as rebooting the economy and maintaining social stability became its priority. A state-business alliance was formed, constricting the operational space for civic associations with few resources or connections. With changes in the political context, “the rare political opportunity for public participation was significantly narrowed to that of quiet, non-political service delivery” (126). In the face of the sensitive school collapse issue—while a small network of activists such as Weiwei Ai and Zuoren Tan engaged in high-risk commemorative activities to remember student victims and uncover the causes behind school collapses—many volunteers tended to perform self-censorship and “mobilize various rhetorical devices” to rationalize or avoid talking about the issue (136).
Yet Xu does not attach a normative and democratic understanding of civic engagement to the post-earthquake volunteering in China. Instead, he treats civic engagement as “a form of practice and a discourse” (200) and focuses on how people interpreted their own voluntary actions. He found that most people did not turn to liberal ideas of democracy or the state’s official discourses to make sense of their volunteering experience. In effect, people resorted to a wide array of cultural ideas such as nationalism, individualism, or religion when talking about their participation. These interpretations, regardless of their multivocality and plurality, all expressed “compassion for the suffering” in the early emergency response period; however, such feelings of compassion mostly failed to turn into “open deliberation and public action to address the causes of the suffering” (199). Rather than envisioning a more strengthened Chinese civil society, Xu maintains that the large-scale grassroots volunteering following the earthquake “did not bring about the expected changes in structural state-society relations” (134) and that “civil society became even more fragmented” (192).
Xu argues that the apathy or quiescence volunteers showed towards the school collapse issue is mainly a result of political repression in China. He shows how the activists who identified themselves with liberal democratic values paid a high price for their name-collecting activism, and the consequent repression evoked a sense of fear in volunteers and NGO practitioners. What is missing from this interpretation, however, are economic and political factors that also contributed to the apathy and indifference Xu observed. For instance, the civil society sector is increasingly co-opted by global market forces and the pervasive market ideology, making discourses about political participation unimaginable. Market logic reduces the role of civil society actors to one of service deliverers and allows little room for political activism and participation. These factors might have also shaped people’s cultural ideas and the way they made sense of their actions during the recovery period.
The Politics of Compassion is an important contribution to a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of civil society in an authoritarian state. Xu challenges the neo-Tocquevillian assumption of a causal relationships between civil society and democratic transition, and demonstrates how civic engagement is contingent upon the interplay of a variety of structural and situational factors. His attention to the cultural aspect of civic engagement provides great insight regarding how compassion is a sociopolitical act shaped by both structural relations between the civil society and the state, and by the meanings and goals people give to their actions. Therefore, the book is a valuable read for scholars seeking to understand civil society and volunteerism in China, as well as those working on social movements and disaster response.
Shijing Zhang
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA