The Story of Wukan

A fishing village on the march. Their banners are traditional, evoking fishing pennants, traditional celebrations and the heroes of Chinese literature, who often battled corrupt officials. But the writing is a simplified form that was invented since the beginning of the People's Republic, and the organisers wear semi-official red armbands like community neighbourhood-watch volunteers. They also sport red baseball caps, like tour-guides. The marchers keep to one side of the road to avoid giving the impression of 乱 [chaos] and triggering judicial violence from the authorities. There is a plethora of slogans, and the march is as well-organised as a marketing or promotional campaign, and carefully orchestrated not to appear threatening.

A more threatening side to the villagers' resistance, but one taken from an angle which many Chinese who spend time online will recognise. The camera, possibly a mobile phone, peeps out from between the shoulders of an aggrieved and disempowered populace confronts the power of the state, denoted by the rows of riot police in the distance. The angle, among the stick-wielding locals, simultaneously suggests great anger (power in potentia) and great powerlessness, because the view is limited and troubled from this perspective. This Twitter-like posting will draw sympathy from ordinary Chinese, and get through the wall of censorship which surrounded this rebellion in the state-run media. The username translates as "essence of chicken" which is supposed to help with energy! The metaphor of the road is suggested here: the road to Wukan. It may also subliminally suggest the word 公道 which means justice, but could suggest a public road, or highway.

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"Return our ancestral farmland." The word 祖 [ancestral] carries the most emotive force here. Chinese identity is constructed to  such an extent on the ancestral homeland, a specific town or village where the land around is inhabited by the ancestral dead, that families will maintain ties with their 故乡 [hometown] for generations after they have moved overseas and their children have become foreign nationals. Your hometown dictates the language you use to speak to your nearest kin, sometimes your surname, the food you like to eat and the temperament you have. To take away access to the ancestral lands is profoundly disorienting and a wrong against the ancestral bloodline. Wrongs, as Chinese heroic literature and martial arts movies tell us, must be righted, either by revenge or by justice - some sort of official redress, in which history is set right.  

The rebellion reaches a new level of energy with the death of a village representative in police custody. This cinematic close-up of Xue Jinbo's grief-stricken daughter strikes all the same chords it would in the West, but with additional nuances. Xue Jianwan comes from a town that worships the sea-goddess Mazu, who, when she was a mortal young woman, saved her father and brothers from drowning at sea. This background of filial piety, of the love of a daughter for a father, enacted in many Chinese stories including the one popularised by Disney as Mulan, will become the emotional driver of the rebellion, bringing additional impetus and a new narrative to the movement, which had already had several unsuccessful visits to higher levels of government, and might well have lost momentum, like many others before it. 

Many rebellions start in mourning in China. Here, the funeral portrait of Xue Jinbo takes centre stage, alongside the huge characters 悼 [mourning] and 冤 [injustice]. Calligraphy is an important part of public statement, public identity, and political power. Note that the yuan character is dripping, as if with blood, but it's red, ie Communist, and therefore politically correct. The multiplicity of slogan has gone, and people are quietly united in front of the image of the dead man. The dead man has now by definition become an ancestor, which lends much greater weight to their collective and family narratives about their protest. The broad cultural principle compelling Wukan people to make things right for their village and for their ancestral line, has taken on a new immediacy. Strangely, the claim of needing to make a living doesn't come close to the driving force exerted by the dead in Chinese protest, unlike the conventional dramas of European revolution, where the people's cry is for bread.

Here, the camera angle lifts to take in a confident march within the besieged village. At this stage, journalists have begun to get into the village, and the villagers by their own video camera on the Chinese equivalent of eBay and make their own documentary. This picture says in the language of Chinese symbolism, 龙 [dragon]. The people are the dragon, because they are Chinese, and carry the life-force of China. This image also references a popular protest song, the Descendants of the Dragon, by a Taiwanese songwriter, which was sung by students on Tiananmen Square during the protests of 1989. 

The shrine to the departed spirit of Xue Jinbo, with incense, funerary offerings and possibly figurines of deities - there is a seated figure on the left which might indicate a figurine of Matsu. This is the process by which a person becomes an ancestor, but there is something missing: the body. The police have refused to return Xue's body to the family, thereby withholding its right to return to the ancestral lands and obstructing his progress to the next world, which should happen to a body, not just to a spirit. Police often snatch the bodies of those who have died in suspicious circumstances. The official autopsy said Xue's death was due to a heart attack, but his daughter saw his body covered in bruises and disputes the reported time of death in a documentary interview. This shrine, then, has a sort of emergency of the spirit about it. It is set up on the Matsu temple platform which was the focus for all the Wukan rallies and political campaigning that followed.

Lin Zuluan, a retired Communist Party member and trusted member of the community, comes to the forefront of the Wukan rebellion, striking all the right notes. His Party status and age are on his side, as is his use of language, which comes from "within the system." His physical appearance recalls hard-working village Party secretaries in Communist Party-approved movies about China's recent past. The cameras are already focusing respectfully on him at this stage, as the authorities send teams to negotiate with the Wukan villagers. Foreign journalists, particularly those from Hong Kong, have unleashed a torrent of good-looking coverage on the world by this stage, and the authorities want it to stop. Lin later goes on to be appointed village Party secretary, while the younger, more populist protest leaders fight a local election for places on his committee. In the background, many villagers are wearing "grass hats" which give the movement a cinematic, nostalgic, down-home feel, evoking strong emotions in people who view it. Some of the more daring Chinese media organisations are also beginning to cover Wukan by this stage.

A documentary film crew arrives in Wukan from Guangzhou and starts to film observationally. The first words we hear in the film are the words of this Party official from the nearby city of Lufeng, who has got the mood of Wukan badly wrong. Here, the subtitle reads: "Eventually we will be forced to arrest even more people." He is trying to frighten the village into submission, but the political situation in the province won't allow for a bloodbath in Wukan, possibly because of the high political ambitions of the Guangdong Party chief, Wang Yang. Here, the official is pictured on a television being viewed by Wukan villagers. He is made to look ugly, hard-line and out-of-touch; the epitome of the satirical pig-official cartoons that were soon to make the rounds of the Chinese Internet.

Polling day arrives. The happy ending. The ballot paper - usually bright pink - here is a marital red. The man's toothy grin is used by Western media to imply that the Chinese would be happy if only they had a democratic form of government, and by official Chinese media to imply that the system is 'back to normal,' that it functions basically well for the people, and that corruption is being stamped out. The only reason such a low-level election process would make the headlines at all, is its rarity value. The people have grasped political power, and it's still red.

The number of votes for the village committee members are finally counted in a tallying system that forms the character 正 [rightness, things the right way up, not crooked, justice and fairness.] This photo is used in the English-language China Daily to denote a happy ending to the Wukan story. The official candidates field few votes, while those who were active in the protest, notably imprisoned representative Zhang Jiancheng, who gave tireless interviews to the media, are the most popular.

Looking back in nostalgia. History reasserts itself with a series of photos of Wukan taken during a follow-up visit by a Chinese blogger. Here, the gaze is retrospective, monochrome, denoting a longing for the past and a passage connecting modern China with its ancestors, but also evoking the quiet after months of unrest. 

Comment posted to Dolores O'Brien's blog:

I deeply appreciate this blog in its attempt to get to grips with both Giegerich and the interface between Islam and the West. However, I notice some (probably unconscious) Orientalist tendencies in the some of the things you write or quote ("fanatical", "frenzy", "untempered by/beyond the bounds of the rational", "naive", "participation mystique", "primal", Hamas "lacking a clear political goal") and in many of Giegerich's ideas, although I appreciate his attempt to get away from the numinous and to deal with the concrete and the particular. But if you are going to come down from the peaks into the marketplace, you need a little knowledge of the local lingo, I feel, and that would mean an awareness of some contemporary political scholarship on these matters, and of the nuances of the various strands of argument among Muslims. As I have argued previously (although I think perhaps my comment didn't successfully appear on your blog), there is a multiplicity of discourse here about which one really needs to know something before one attempts to 'see through' it. I'm not sure I'm up to this task, but I know enough Muslims in contemporary Britain to know that many holes could be picked in some of your most basic statements (and Giegerich's). This has the unfortunate effect of diminishing what is a very important thinking effort among depth psychologists. Actually, neither Giegerich, nor you, nor me, are qualified to speak about the Muslim's experience, or the Islamic terrorist's experience precisely because the West has been so successful at separating itself from itself and overcoming itself. Western thinking is profoundly colonial (to paraphrase Edward Said), and, I believe, lacks a discourse with which to engage the excluded Other. Can we have (and I am no longer referring just to your blog, or addressing only you) more Islamic voices, or more voices who have at least been schooled in this massive problem, in this debate?

The Saturn/Kronos image reminds me of Hillman's point about Oedipus; that infanticide, psychologically speaking, is the killing of the second sense; the metaphorical and imagistic richness - a triumph, possibly, of tekne over onta. One of the responses to this shift is the revenge wreaked by Dionysus on Thebes. One might add here that it represents the killing of the second sense in public life, or in the world, with, as Giegerich rightly comments, the second sense denied being in linear, historical time, and relegated to the inner life of the individual. The result, of course, is a literalist social discourse and a politics of literalism. Does Giegerich's assertion that Muslims are in a different time suffer from such a splitting off? The colonialist anthropologists were often keen to deny the historicity of colonised peoples, relegating them to primitive and romanticised 'mythic time'. Giegerich, too, has denied the history of modern pagan practice, relegating it to anachronism. It seems that the charge of 'anachronism', used as a means of wiping out other experiences, is laden with the assumptions of a power-hungry God. In my view, linear, historical time is like a natural resource, a valuable perspective among many, which should be available to many peoples, rather than a timestream monopolised by the Yahwist West.

Comment on Dolores O'Brien's blog.

Lily Pad wrote: "Being works-in-progress, liberated women create themselves as they go along, negotiating between duty and vision, forging, out of the old, their new selves."

My comment: Very eloquent; thank you. Is this something like a shift from PowerOver/PowerUnder duality to Power With? Are con-sciousness (withknowing) and re-cognition (rethinking)some of the hallmarks of Power With?

I have always been struck by the analysis in Process Work and World Work of the aspects of rank (privilege). That those lacking monetary privilege have access to a moral/spiritual rank that is denied the mainstream. Is your reference to the abuse of activist women by activist men an attempt by those men to appropriate that spiritual rank? The more dispossessed, the higher the spiritual rank, and the greater the fear generated in the privileged. Psychologically (unfortunately), fear cuts off higher brain functions like cognition, preventing (physiologically) re-cognition and con-sciousness from developing. Ironically, such a vicious circle is often only broken by com-passion (withfeeling) in the underprivileged person, because the fear suppressed in the hearts/minds of the privileged has cut them off from it. This surely ends up exacerbating the divide between them, as the underprivileged become more and more identified with their spiritual rank, and the privileged with their material rank.

The answer seems to lie in the territory of the heart, which somehow manages to tolerate great contradiction...

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I watched Jia Zhangke's "Platform" last night.

The things that had me writhing in nostalgic appreciation were the songs. Teresa Teng's one about coffee (when coffee was just getting trendy in Taipei), Zhang Mingmin's "My Chinese Heart", the disco lights, the piliwu (breakdancing), Genghis Khan. Other Eighties giveaways: the stonewashed jeans, the long hair, the outrageous jumpers, anti Bourgeois-Liberalism, cassette players, the obsession with Guangzhou, and the emergence of a new form of language and of dialogue. Men and women wouldn't have been so physically free with each other only a few years before, and the new-found physical freedom brought a linguistic freedom from the sloganeering of the Cult. Rev. era. Women especially said things they would never have said before. The other scene which will remain forever in my memory, because it happened to me several times, is thinking you're off for a night of fun and passion with your beloved, and ending up getting told off in a police station while you're trying to work out what your other half is telling them in the room next door. We discovered that telling them you're engaged to be married lessened the length and tedium of the bollocking, and made them think twice before sending anyone to labour camp...

It's sad, though, too, a bitter-sweet look at the hopes and aspirations of the "New Generation of the 1980s". If it wasn't a retro thing, they would have caught that train in the valley when the iconic blue-painted kache got stuck. Cui (funny he's a short, gnomish rock-and-roller - how many Cui Jians were there who never made it and wound up sleeping oafishly in an armchair somewhere in Shanxi?) lights a fire - but in the middle of nowhere. There's a lot of waiting around and smoking, something I remember from the eighties but not the nineties. Those tuan (troupes) were also a phenomenon peculiar to a time when the drive for novelty and profit hadn't yet split up the strong communities that had formed through decades of hardship.

Some people have complained that it is long and slow, and that's true, but I suppose you had to be there. I wish we could have more Eighties China retro experiences. Those crowds of people who flock to Qi Qin concerts in Shanghai nowadays; they are probably my contemporaries, my long-lost tongzhimen. I salute them!

That the world is perhaps no longer charged with the grandeur of God is the aftermath of a religion which appropriated all possible grandeurs as the property of Yahweh. Stolen treasure doesn't disappear when the arch-magician who has been hoarding it is caught and dispensed with. Even the arch-magician himself isn't gone: he simply dissipates into the board-room to take up residence in another form. What this whole debate forgets is that not all cultures are in the same place. The world in all its human and non-human diversity isn't locked in to a single form of discourse -- yet. Giegerich is right; if we do get locked in, it'll be by Microsoft, not God. "Where do you want to go today?" Well, Bill, it doesn't matter because all places have become the same now. But this is an illusion that doesn't have to happen, although it well could. Changes of attention in individuals at crucial moments can tip the balance. Ask most Brits about Bush and the war on Iraq and their sentiments are fairly clearly anti. But they are constantly distracted by their mortgages. I think that this is what G. is getting at; that the big stuff is making us irrelevant. The mistake is to subscribe to the belief that it always had to be that way; that we never had a choice. That's the Yahwistic fallacy. It's also literalist in the extreme. Individual awareness of unfolding process in self and world (no different, I agree) is the key. Knowing how it could have fallen out some other way and realising that one has CHOSEN not to make that happen in one's individual life is a bitter and necessary experience, and that's what I suspect he's getting at. I also suspect him of inflating his own aesthetic preferences (bitterness after all has its own beauty) to the level of a universal truth when he's really addressing a group of mid-life to elderly folk in the Western world about a set of prejudices specific to their chosen profession. To reply to him on the level of universal truth, I suspect, is also to fall into the same trap of identification.

Comment posted to Dolores O'Brien's blog

Dream: Aug. 4 '06

I am trying to explain to someone what sort of therapist I will be. I have had a moment of insight in which I realise that what I will offer won't be a traditional form of analysis, but something slightly different.Perhaps more workaday and everyday. More dynamic, less cerebral and rarefied."You're just like Giegerich!" replies the person, an IGAP sort of person.

I've spent a long time struggling with Giegerich and I'm not really struggling any more. I'm not yet sure what this dream is getting at, but it looks paradoxical. "Less cerebral and rarefied"? Ahem... Certainly I have a strong sense of frustration with the confinement of analysis to the consulting room, and of experience/soul to the individual human subject.

My main beef with Giegerich is an Orientalist one. He speaks from within one possible history among many. His history isn't shared by most people on the planet, by other lives, and non-human realities. His use of Jung's District Commissioner is an apt image to represent this colonial tendency in some of his work. No-one has critiqued him from this point of view yet, but to me, reversing into depth psychology from career Sinology and social anthropology, Giegerich points beyond the opus parvum but lacks the tools to tell us where to go. He's like a man who blows up most of his fellow prisoners by mistake while trying to get through the last few inches of an escape tunnel. While Arnold Mindell makes the leap across the individual/collective fault-line (as does Hillman in a different way), Giegerich takes us to the chasm and then retreats, somewhat dumping us in it.

As a pagan, I don't really take much notice of his rather sketchy evidence of the death of Anima Mundi. Just because Chaucer said it very well in the Middle Ages doesn't mean it's true, or true for all time. And Christians have imposed their very separate concept of spirit on other cultures, proving only that this perspective is indeed incapable of grasping them with the spirit of the intellect. My dreams often respond strongly to my animistic/shamanic work, giving the sense that something is listening and wants to unfold. For me the experience of that dialogue is essential, and I don't really care if someone thinks it's opus parvum or magnum. To me, with a background in Chinese culture and philosophy, the fault-line is there at times, but never too strongly delineated. My logic is more concerned with a phenomenology of the niche, an eco/psycho-logic that deals in immediate unfolding experience, and in phenomena shaded in all their subtlety by what is close and adjacent to them, not by what stands in crucifying opposition. Necessities which refine themselves against, rather than define themselves against, sibling realities. It borrows for its metaphors from ecology and other sciences of complexity which describe folded curved spaces and infinitudes (like the coastline of Britain) contained within a finite place/space. It's a limited way of being/thinking that describes itself fractally, by means of a simple set of rules of relationship which unfold and complexify from within. A bit like our biosphere, which supports all these ruminations (as long as they don't upset the ecosystem of which they are a part).

I am in sympathy with Giegerich's intuition about the need for psychology to be in the world, but I don't want to go in his escape tunnel. I am not sure about understanding being the main thing on offer from an analysis. What about the skills with which to better facilitate what wants to unfold? Mostly what unfolds in my experience outpaces my capacity to understand, because it is experience itself which under-stands me, gives sub-stance. A working, fluid understanding; a way of being, is more useful to me than a distillation, unless it's to get drunk again and to fall back in the river.

๑۩۞۩๑ GHeTTo ReVoLuTioN ๑۩۞۩๑: Ernest Renan 1823-1892 : Le racisme fait autorit

RENAN, Ernest.
Correspondance de trois LAS [à Emile Littré].

Paris, 1871-1876. 3 pages in-8. "L'empereur du Brésil m'a fait prier de vous transmettre le vif désir qu'il aurait de vous voir et de causer un peu avec vous"... "M. Joaquin Nabuco, jeune brésilien très distingué, désire vivement vous rendre ses devoirs."... "M. Zeffirino Falcioni, l'un de mes meilleurs amis, esprit fort élevé et qui partage nos idées philosophiques, a un vif désir de vous présenter ses devoirs".

Interesting to come across this critique of the contribution made by Ernest Renan to racist ideologies and an anthropology supportive of colonialism. Puts a little shade into this venerated elder of European political/cultural thought, post-"Enlightenment", and reminds us that Hitler arose in Europe, however much we may disidentify with him. Mind our shadows, we must! And all the themes still working themselves out to this day...