Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2022. xi, 269 pp. US$43.95, cloth. ISBN 9781501761270.
This is the rare scholarly monograph that can be accurately judged by its cover art: a repurposed bit of red-coloured Mao era propaganda overlaid with a mild profanity printed in bolded black text. It is designed to grab your attention while also making you chuckle uncomfortably. (Pity those who only see library copies that have been shorn of this cover!) Diamant’s provocative arguments, sharp prose style, and thoughtful close reading of previously unused historical documentation amply delivers on the promise of his book’s arresting cover and transgressive title.
The author’s purpose is to explore the social and cultural understandings of constitutionalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Instead of framing this as an exercise in political science or legal studies, he defines it as a form of “constitutional anthropology” (23) that seeks to elucidate the meanings that Chinese people attached to the political processes, institutions, symbols, and rhetoric of the newly founded communist state. His specific focus is on a nationwide campaign, conducted in the summer of 1954, in which ordinary people from across the country were invited (or cajoled, or compelled) to join cadre-led focus groups to discuss a draft of the PRC’s first constitution. The finalized constitution, ratified that September, differed only slightly from this draft. So, what was the point of the discussions? More importantly, given that neither this nor any subsequent constitution can be said to provide much of a guide for understanding China’s government, what was the point of writing one at all?
Drawing on the insights of philosopher Harry Frankfurt (author of the 2005 polemic On Bullshit), Diamant argues that, rather than contorting ourselves to conceptualize PRC constitutionalism as an exercise in constructing institutional “modernity” or building political “legitimacy” (5–10), we should recognize it as bullshit. “Bullshit,” in this line of thinking, is a particular type of speech that is indifferent to the truth and made with the intent to confuse or confound listeners. Diamant discerns a particularly pernicious form of bullshit at work in early PRC constitutional processes that aimed to frighten and divide a population that lived uneasily under communist rule.
Diamant illustrates his thesis with compelling evidence drawn from records of the summer 1954 public discussions. These discussions generated an immense number of documents, a substantial amount of which still exists, albeit scattered between different archives, various periodicals, and a unique multi-volume collection held at the National Library of China. They have been only rarely used in previous scholarship. To bring order to this mass of evidence, Diamant structures each chapter to focus either on communities, such as local officials (chapter 1), businesspeople (chapter 2) and non-elite “casual readers” amongst the general public (chapter 3), or on issues, such as rights and duties (chapter 4), and religious groups and ethnic minorities (chapter 5). In these body chapters, Diamant utilizes an “inductive approach” (3–4) based in part on the insights of several literary theorists (14–18) to uncover the precise ways in which the entire enterprise was bullshit that aimed to coerce and intimidate.
This method can be illustrated with a single example: Diamant’s analysis of public discussion of Article 90 of the 1954 Constitution, which guaranteed (among other things) Chinese citizens the right to move freely (113–117). This “right” was manifestly moot—by 1954, the central government had already laid the basis for the hukou household registration system, which sharply limited population mobility. Participants in the public discussions knew that they could not move freely and said so openly. Thus, the point of the article, Diamant avers, was to generate “a mixture of bewilderment and memory-induced anxiety and fear” (115) and act as a “sticky-note reminder that the state had the power to deny [this freedom]” (116).
Diamant ends his study with an exploration of the “after lives” of the 1954 experience (chapter 6). This includes brief discussions of the (much less documented) public discussions surrounding ratification of the three subsequent Chinese constitutions of 1975, 1977, and 1982 (171–184), as well as the flurry of intellectual debates over constitutionalism in 2012 to 2013 (187–189). Throughout, “bullshit” is identified as a continuous feature of Chinese constitutionalism. In a concluding chapter, Diamant draws comparisons with other socialist nations, particularly the Soviet Union and Vietnam. These two countries seem to have had surprisingly “un-bullshity” (my term) constitutional experiences (196–202) in Diamant’s account.
Useful Bullshit is an important and provocative intervention in long-standing debates about what could be termed Chinese “political culture” (although this is not a term Diamant uses). Readers—even those who admire his skills at research and rhetoric—can gain much by thinking through, and arguing with, Diamant’s concepts and frameworks. As a historian, I see some limitations to his approach. To return to Article 90’s guarantee of a “right to move,” I’d argue that it is significant that nearly every previous Chinese constitution (and there were a number written between 1911 and 1954, counting both national and provincial levels) also had a version of this right, often using the same character formulations. Certainly, as Diamant argues, Article 90 was bullshit in the context of 1950s China. Yet the repeated invocation of this right surely suggests something else was also at work.
Even for readers inclined to accept Diamant’s framework, many questions remain unanswered: Is “bullshit” the right term for the rather sinister process Diamant articulates? Who was the “bullshit artist” responsible for the 1954 Constitution? (Mao? The Chinese Communist Party? Chinese political culture in some sort of diffuse sense?) Is China’s constitutional process uniquely bullshit? (If so, what does he make of Taiwan’s constitutional history? The governing document there is still the 1946 Kuomintang-drafted constitution, albeit in modified form; that constitution, too, would have fit Diamant’s conception of bullshit when enacted.)
Diamant’s book should be simultaneously read and argued with. It will spark fascinating discussions in history and political science classrooms, both at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels. At the very least, students will enjoy repeating the book’s title as they discuss!
Ohio University, Athens