Blockchain Papers

Prayote Songklin

No abstract is available for this record.

K. C. Wong

In the rise of authoritarianism, what can ordinary people do to resist the seemingly irreversible tide of state autocratization? The story of Hong Kong provides a global case for this question. In 2019, I stayed in a Hong Kong hotel interviewing “active” participants of street protests. Characterized by the ethos of “no big organization,” participants saw themselves as autonomous, spontaneous citizens rather than followers of a particular leader organization. Their coordination was based on online communication technology grounded in a decade-long fear of authoritarian encroachment. Ming-sho Ho’s extraordinary new book, Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests, examines and analyzes the fluid coordination of this anti-authoritarian resistance, aptly captured by Bruce Lee’s famous maxim, “Be Water.” The phrase—popularized by the Hong Kong-born martial-arts legend and Hollywood star—came to symbolize the protesters’ ethos of flexibility and resilience in confronting state power. With the assistance of a rigorous research team, Ho collected and analyzed an extensive dataset of 1,770 protest events, printed materials, 189 interviews, and both online and offline observations. Drawing on this rich material, he develops the concept of collective improvisation to explain how decentralized yet highly coordinated activism emerged without formal leadership or organizational hierarchy. Moving beyond journalistic romanticized portrayals of spontaneity, Ho argues that Hong Kong’s protesters exhibited an improvised rationality—a capacity to adapt, invent, and synchronize tactics under extreme repression.

Mentre, Gilles

The dissertation aims to demonstrate that direct democracy is the new stage of democracy. Direct democracy has never been taken seriously. Most authors deem it unrealistic given space and time constraints and stress the risk that the ignorance of the masses could pose. Since democracy is the search for a legitimate and efficient system producing increased equality and respecting individual and minority rights, direct democracy seems, to many, a dead-end. In section 1, I analyze how direct democracy, theoretically, can answer these objections. Legitimacy is grounded in intersubjective and institutional trust. Distrust is not only targeted against the government but also toward others, fueled by and fueling polarization. Direct political participation in deliberating and voting is not only a solid human desire and condition of fulfillment but also a vector of renewed institutional trust, echoing a broader movement for more horizontal power. The efficiency of direct democracy is more debated. An increasing number of voters prefer decisions driven by experts over the crowd. Direct democracy must only prove that it is at least as efficient as experts or that experts are fallible. Given the epistemological value of non-experts, the private character of expertise, and the dynamic and inclusive aspect of pluralistic intelligence, this minimal test is passed. Direct democracy is, therefore, a powerful tool to solve the compromise/consensus conundrum. While consensus has turned into that of a particular elite, compromise is impracticable in a polarized context. Direct democracy creates new majorities based on projects rather than programs. The condition is that minority rights stay off-limits and that individual rights are treated through qualified majoritarianism. In section 2, I empirically test direct democracy's adaptability and margin of uncertainty. Direct democracy, in the 24 American States that allow it, leads to results closer to the majority opinion than legislatures. Initiatives present no constant political trend in their results and prove resistant to polarization. In recent popular votes on abortion, voters did not align with their parties on critical issues. In Taiwan, direct democracy helps re-unite on specific topics a divided nation, powered by online debate and decentralized fact-checking tools. In Estonia, citizens have had the possibility to vote via the Internet since 2005, a system that has increased turnout and overhauled the generational digital divide. The Swiss used internet voting for twenty years until it was halted in 2020. Security issues around e-voting still need to be solved regarding identification, devices, and verifiability. Nevertheless, both examples prove that, once these difficulties are solved or in contexts with higher trust or lower stakes, e-voting fosters participation, flexibility, and security. It enables direct democracy to self-institutionalize itself. In section 3, I make concrete propositions for a "digital direct democracy". The referendum is subject to criticism. Renewed fact-checking and tracking are needed, although fake news is no excuse for inaction. Citizens' assemblies can be helpful to deliberative and controlling tools if their recommendations are submitted for a referendum. Referendums always risk becoming plebiscites unless they are citizen-led. Multiple-choice voting, multi-stage referendums, or open questions need to be experimented with through e-voting. What does the future hold? Efficiency needs to be reconsidered with AI, potentially leading to "datatorship". Reversely, the development of e-voting has the potential to allow for a fully direct democracy. This model of "pancracy" could be powered by communities in a society with multiple individual affiliations. Decentralized autonomous organizations already provide an experimental framework. "Datatorship" and "Pancracy" are processual utopias. They allow us to understand the conditions of a true democracy.

Jun Kajima

No abstract is available for this record.

Stuart R. Schram, Nancy J. Hodes

For the consideration of party branches at all levels, and of all comrades throughout the country and overseas: Ever since the time when the former Director General was still alive, we observe that revolution has had a long but unsuccessful history. When it was resolutely decided to reorganize our party, already at that time there were a band of good-for-nothing rightist party members who wanted to avoid genuine revolution, for they knew that reorganization and renovation were not advantageous for thieving idlers, monopolists, and those who seek office in order to enrich themselves. They obstructed it in every possible way, and after the First National Congress decided on revolutionary tactics, people of that ilk, knowing that obstruction could not in the end prevail, openly rebelled. Feng Ziyou, Ma Su, and others colluded with Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin, and formed a group urging them on. 1 After Yang Ximin and Liu 264 Zhenhuan had colluded with British imperialism to cause trouble in the rear, 2 Liang Hongkai, Zheng Runqi, Mo Xiong, Zhu Zhuowen, and others acted even more ruthlessly in savagely assassinating our brave Comrade Liao Zhongkai. 3 Thus they sought to overturn the Guangzhou revolutionary base at a single stroke. At this juncture, when the existence or ruin, the disappearance or survival of our party are at stake, we cannot but take the sternest measures against those party members who have betrayed the party, in order to preserve our party’s revolutionary position. Fortunately, we can rely on the prestige of the former Director General’s revolutionary spirit, 4 and on the resolute and courageous efforts of all the comrades. In June of this year, we swept away Yang and Liu, and in September we eliminated 5 all the traitors of the Liao affair. Thus the Guangzhou base was returned from danger to security, and the cause of revolution, after a detour, returned to its old course. Thus our unity was tempered, and further advances could be expected. We did not provide for the fact that those people, with their unspeakably evil hearts, would once again collude with Xiong Kewu in an attempt to take Guangzhou from north of the river, attacking from three directions, together with Chen Jiongming and Deng Benyin, under the 265 command of British imperialism, in the hope of destroying our revolutionary forces. 6 Once again, thanks to our comrades’ united efforts, within two months these obstinate enemies approaching from three sides were eliminated and the forces of revolution were strengthened. At this time, a small number of comrades in Beijing once again announced the convening of the Fourth Plenum of the Central Executive Committee. 7 Now it would appear that, in accordance with the decision reiterated at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee on May 21 and May 23, the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee can only be held in Guangzhou. For it has long been decided that the Second National Congress should meet in Guangzhou, and also that a Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee should be held to prepare resolutions for the Congress. On October 30, the Central Committee decided that the Fourth Plenum should be convened three weeks before the national Congress. This being the case, and Guangzhou being our party’s revolutionary base, whereas Beijing is a place where warlords and counterrevolutionaries gather and exert great pressure, and given that the Congress is public in nature, how can we reject Guangzhou and go to Beijing? 8 Manifestly, a band of party members who oppose the party has seized a fraudulent occasion and is egging on a minority of Central Committee members whose revolutionary convictions are wavering, with a view to actions that are not in the interest of our party. One of them is Zou Lu. Now we observe that in our party, from its reorganization to the present, reactionary party members from Feng Ziyou to Zou Lu have consistently attacked our party and its government; they have uttered accusations such as “Communism,” “uniting with Russia,” “accepting Communist elements,” “supporting Communism” and so on. This is a tactic used by the imperialists and the warlords to sow dissension within the alliance of all the classes for the national revolution. Since our comrades have no affinity with the imperialists and the warlords, they should not aid their propaganda , 9 thereby causing confusion in the national consciousness. Moreover, facts are facts, and these rumors cannot survive for long. For uniting with Russia, and accepting Communists, are important tactics of our party in pursuing the goal of victory in the revolution. The late Director General was the first to decide on them, and after they were adopted at the First National Congress, they had an objective basis and a profound justification. Now, today’s revolution is an episode in the final decisive struggle between the 266 two great forces of revolution and counterrevolution in the world. It is different in nature from all other revolutions in history. Consequently, the progress of the revolution is naturally different as regards its tactics. Today imperialism has long since banded together to exercise pressure on our party. If our party’s revolutionary strategy does not take as its starting point union with Soviet Russia; if it does not secure the great masses of the worker and peasant classes as its foundation; if it does not accept the Communists, who advocate the interests of the peasants and workers; then the revolutionary forces will sink into isolation, and the revolution will not be able to succeed. The reason our party could not achieve victory in the 1911 Revolution is that at the time, the counterrevolutionary forces were united on an international basis, whereas the revolutionary forces of our party as yet belonged to no international union. Moreover, within our country, a great mass basis had not yet been called into being, and we were reduced to isolation and therefore were obliged to accept compromises, which ultimately led to defeat. Things having reached the point where they are today, how can we follow along in the same old track? Those imperialists and militarists are truly terrified lest we adopt revolutionary tactics, and they seek on every hand to sow dissension and to sabotage us, with the aim of making our party lose all its friends and allies inside and outside the country, and of placing us once more in our previous isolated situation. Thus the cause of revolution could never triumph, and those people would finally realize their dream of ruling China forever. Their scheme is truly as venemous as this. A small group of our comrades, making inadequate observations, has always been fooled by these divisive policies. Most of the disruption within the party over the years originates with this. We must recognize that in today’s situation, he who is not for the revolution is for counterrevolution. There is absolutely no neutral ground in the middle. But if you want revolution, you must unite with all revolutionary factions internationally and within the country. Only if you unite as one can you fight the decisive battle against counterrevolution without being defeated. Otherwise, there is no way you can avoid defeat. Not only will you be defeated, but you yourself might fall into the danger of sinking into counterrevolution. The cases of all those party members who have betrayed the party, from Feng Ziyou to Zou Lu, are proof of this. The matter of this meeting in Beijing has already been the subject of a severe warning from this committee, 10 and it has moreover been decided that the Second Congress will meet on January 1 of next year. On December 11 of this year, the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee will meet in Guangzhou. We have already telegraphed to all members of the committee in Beijing and Shanghai urging them to come south on that day to participate in the meeting. The majority of the committee members are of the same mind, so originally there was no problem at all. Recently, however, rumors have been rife inside and outside the 267 party, many of them arising from failure to understand our party’s policy. Consequently, we are sending this circular telegram to comrades everywhere throughout the country, regarding the process of struggle with counterrevolution since reorganization and the revolutionary principles adopted by the former Director General. We hope that every comrade will support the Director General’s views and will not be misled by heterodox doctrines . 11 The future of the revolution depends unequivocally on this. The present announcement is sent to make this known to you.

Litao Zhao, Ling Li, Chen Huang

The tension between mobilizing resources to meet education-related growth targets and regularizing educational funding for a more stable and sustainable growth is structurally rooted in China’s educational system, which features growth-oriented, centralized mandates and county-based, decentralized financing. It was manifested in 2012, when China experienced a ‘great leap’ in educational expenditure. Based on interviews and school-level data from a province in western China, this article suggests that the ‘great leap’ was real rather than fabricated. Local governments have demonstrated remarkable capacity in resource mobilization involving both formal and informal strategies. It also shows the scarring effects of too much mobilization. The ‘great leap’ has clearly stressed and strained local governments to the extent that there is clear evidence of policy non-compliance and greater irregularity in government funding for education in the aftermath.

Judith Farquhar

Previous articleNext article FreeYou Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese DreamJudith FarquharJudith FarquharPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen I arrived in Beijing in July 2014, a friend who works at a university there told me that, a few days before, a high official in the Communist Party (CCP) headquarters had denounced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), apparently for being too leftist. My friend said, "We all think this is some kind of black humor on their part." This invocation of black humor—the phrase was in English—instantly made sense to me. Understanding both why the Communist Party needed to be taken quite seriously and why its funniness was also patent, we laughed. But why? How did a dark threat issuing from party headquarters translate into a shared laugh for academics belonging to two different continents and relying at times on a "foreign" language?Much of this essay will be devoted to this kind of question about the translatability of humor, and it will suggest that much more than a punchline is funny.1 Though my friend's remark about party central's attitude toward the left deviations of some social researchers was not exactly a joke, it was certainly a form of levity. The pleasure we felt in our shared ability to appreciate the tortuous (il)logic of an official pronouncement was made possible by a complex shared knowledge of modern Chinese history and institutions and considerable experience of the everyday life of Chinese mass media. It was not only a fieldwork moment for an ethnographer; it was also an expression of a certain moment in Beijing, one that is now past or passing. To get the joke, you had to have been there, and you had to have been then.Anthropologists often remark that jokes are especially untranslatable; some have told me that they seldom really really laugh in the field, experiencing a return to Chicago or New York or their family culture or English language television as a "return to laughter."2 It is as if we never can educate our gut—the place belly laughs come from—to live comfortably either with other people's sober proprieties or with their violations of them. When obligatory and thickly nested local frames are both invoked and exploded in a joke, much of the point is lost on those of us who are not entirely there and then.3 As visitors, we are usually relative newcomers to the world thus framed and thus transgressed, so we don't even see what proprieties and commitments might be at stake. Shouldn't criticism of a research institute issuing from party headquarters in Zhongnanhai be taken seriously? Presumably this news is bad, or black, because the party configures and supports the institutional structures allowing some people to live as intellectuals. If this CCP policy maker is serious, lives and jobs might be at stake. Why is it also possible to see this denunciation as comical? Presumably because some representative of the party has failed to notice that the intellectuals reporting to him have been doing exactly as directed, keeping the Chinese communist dream alive, helping him and his government do their job in a one-party state where all academic institutions are publicly governed. As the audience of this (by now not very funny) joke, I find myself simultaneously worrying about the dark implications of a high cadre's outburst and laughing at the way the weapon has been turned on its user, showing up the fault lines in the party apparatus in a not quite typical example of socialist black humor.4We anthropologists—at our best—are thoroughly relativist in our efforts to appreciate distance and difference; we pride ourselves on being experts at cultural displacement and even transgression.5 Even so, the classic work in anthropology tends to have no sense of humor. When we translate joking behavior from our field sites the humor tends to be read through to find those enframing structures or invariant principles that might be challenged or reinforced (or both at once) by a play on words, a ludic pratfall, or a paradoxical contretemps. Jokes tend to be thought of as a light-hearted text that indexes a very serious context,6 and when they are analyzed to reveal their architecture and foundations, anthropologists and their readers are in danger of becoming numb to all possible pleasure in the moment itself.A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published the classic treatment of joking relationships as two essays in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society. His treatment of a disrespectful or teasing practice, which he found distributed around the world in correlation with certain forms of lineage politics, was markedly scientific and sober. In the two essays, there is one joke described and that only in part:There is space for only one illustrative point. A very common form of joke in this connection is for the grandchild to pretend that he wishes to marry the grandfather's wife, or that he intends to do so when his grandfather dies, or to treat her as already being his wife. Alternatively the grandfather may pretend that the wife of his grandchild is, or might be, his wife. The point of the joke is the pretense at ignoring the difference of age between the grandparent and the grandchild.7In reporting this instance of humorous behavior, Radcliffe-Brown was not trying to suggest that bawdy grandmas and disrespectful youngsters are a universal formation in society. His comparative science worked at another level: once we understand why standards of propriety are relaxed between individuals occupying particular positions in a rigid kinship structure, he argued, we can look for similar transgressions in those other societies that share the same kinship structures. In other words, humor functions as "the means of establishing and maintaining social equilibrium in a type of structural situation that results in many societies from marriage."8 Analysis of "joking behavior" in the hands of the anthropologist reveals little more than the dead-serious structural imperatives that constrain and give meaning to social action. Of course there are many problems with Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalist privileging of stability, "equilibrium," and systems.9 But though he seldom felt it worth his while to actually present a joke in translation, he does appear to have considered jokes to be translatable once they were understood in context. He presumed that actions that at first appear odd—describing a new policy statement as black humor, for example—should be legible as quite rational and normal, once we understand (soberly, of course) the whole "structural" situation.10In this essay I will continue some parts of this anthropological tradition by presenting some exchanges that had me laughing—really really laughing—with others, in the field.11 On one hand, I follow Radcliffe-Brown's example in showing that locations in space and time, gatherings of place and history, and conventional formalities and proprieties are the irreducible field of the funny. Insofar as joking transgresses the normal givenness of its world, it is thoroughly situated; it behooves us to understand both Rabelais and his world.12 But, on the other hand, I also want to dwell on the joke itself before reading through it to the social field in which it plays and from which its humor may or may not be translatable. I will thus touch only lightly on the contemporary Chinese political terrain across which joking walks and talks. The etymologies of translate and transgress suggest wordplay and fancy footwork, and I want to appreciate these leaps and bounds. At the same time, I will show that joking is done by fully embodied people whose lives are specific to histories and localities and thus difficult to understand in isolation.So let's reconsider the black humor of a Communist Party functionary. What could be humorous about the central governing structure of the Communist Party turning against China's most elite social researchers? Statements like this from CCP headquarters at the time were greeted in the US academy with a very bleak outlook. American China studies specialists expressed fear that we would all be denied visas and our Chinese colleagues would be silenced on every matter of social and political concern. (These fears continue and are intensifying as I write in late 2015, as new anticorruption policies and information disciplines begin to have an impact.) Many of us expected our Chinese academic friends to be sunk in despair. Instead, we have found them sharing hilariously plausible conspiracy theories over convivial meals and speculating about who is the funniest comedian among senior cadres in CCP headquarters, as well as whether anyone in the party compound of Zhongnanhai actually gets the joke.I think you had to have been there, up to your neck in Chinese academic politics for a long time, to see the black humor in the situation. You would have to have known in your own practice that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is the party's kept think tank. You had to be accustomed to CASS's looming presence in the knowledge industry—huge and long-standing and heavily funded by the government. You would have been aware of a large number of prominent intellectuals—philosophers, historians, sociologists, Marxist theorists, social theorists, area studies experts, humanists—whose careers were entirely attached to CASS. You would have known that the leadership in CCP headquarters had often involved CASS intellectuals in the policy process through formal consultation and collection of their research results. And complaints about CASS's internal research funding competitions, in which the aim is to design and propose valid research that answers the questions posed by the state, would be fresh in your mind.The critic who attacked CASS in June 2014 argued, apparently, that too many researchers at CASS are being "corrupted" by their involvement with transnational NGOs and other "civil society" organizations. There was also the suggestion that CASS theorists are too allied with the Chinese New Left, which is well known for its critical stance that favors some old Maoist and socialist values and opposes many of the newer business-friendly neoliberal policies that encourage privatization and market freedoms. My particular friends who were "laughing at [the CCP] Leviathan"13 also knew that a large part of the CASS charge during the last two years or so has been to research "the Chinese dream."14The Chinese dream has been ubiquitous in the PRC mediascape since about 2013; one sees "public service" posters everywhere featuring drawings of fat happy children, assuring us that the Chinese dream is "my dream," or "the people's dream." A very interesting Wikipedia article notes that "according to the party's theoretical journal Qiushi, the Chinese Dream is about Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism and national glory" (among other things, but see the joking conversation reported below). These ideological labels are rather vast and vague, and turning such propaganda categories into socially useful alliances of actors takes creative social research. This is part of CASS's job, but the task has frustrated many in Chinese research units over the last couple of years.15If you had been there, then, the ridiculousness of this CCP leader's criticism might have been quite clear. His was a paradoxical critique: the Communist Party suddenly found its kept intellectuals, its policy mouthpieces, to be too darn socialist. And this was a charge by communists against communists, disvaluing the earnest labor of perhaps the only group of intellectuals in the twenty-first century who were still trying to make a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist social theory a plausible guide for the people of a modern nation. The unsettling message of the joke is: "All critics of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'—otherwise known as neoliberal laissez-faire market piracy—Beware!" Some Communist Party leader might tar you with the brush of "civil society," revoke your research funding, and make it nearly impossible for you to make the Chinese dream your own. Especially if some people fail to realize that he must have been joking.But what about the Chinese dream; is it a joke all by itself? This was the subject of the jolly conversation to which I want to devote the remainder of this discussion, partly reporting what was said and partly sketching the explicit and implicit elephants in the room as we talked. (An elephant in the room is a pretty good joke in itself, with its juxtaposition of large and small, wild and domestic, lovable and terrifying, and undeniably visible yet totally ignored.)Later in July 2014: My collaborator Lili Lai and I are in Kunming, Yunnan, which is rather far from Beijing and the CCP headquarters at Zhongnanhai, at a university where I gave a talk. We went to a department-sponsored lunch, in a restaurant's private room, with five college teachers. I asked them, what is this Chinese dream I see all over the billboards and on TV? What is included in it?The charming senior professor at the table, Professor He, said "I haven't got a clue, I'm no Communist. Ask a Communist! Teacher Li here is a party member, ask her."Teacher Li admitted, however, that she also wasn't sure, but she hazarded a guess: "Freedom? Justice? Equality?" Teacher Chen, another colleague, followed up with a reference to last year's big propaganda category: "Surely it also includes a 'Harmonious Society'!"This remark broke everyone up, especially Teacher Chen himself, whose face split into a huge grin with a giant belly laugh. In a place like Yunnan, more multiethnic, rural, and subject to borderland conflicts than many Chinese provinces, these intellectuals were understandably sardonic about the party's multiyear (and now not very evident) harmonious society campaign. By 2014, none of us were seeing public slogans about social harmony any more. Moreover, the harmonious society had not, we guessed, been subsumed within the newly ubiquitous Chinese dream. Propaganda history doesn't seem to work that way. So Teacher Chen's joke, in a few words, dredged up a bit of arguably "tragic" history—the harmonious society had never really been achieved, after all—to suggest that the Chinese dream was bringing it back as farce. The logic of the Eighteenth Brumaire is never far from contemporary Chinese senses of history—or senses of humor.As we continued to talk about the "meaning" of the Chinese dream, everyone realized that they had no idea what this ubiquitous term the Chinese dream was supposed to include. Not only was the referent lost, nobody present had—up to this point—cared at all what it was. And this was the cause of a lot more laughter. Unforced, uncynical, trusting laughter, unafraid of seeming childish. Our amusement (or in this case I should perhaps say their amusement) stemmed from a shared awareness that we were not properly receptive subjects of the propaganda state. After all, it is the party-state that talks of the Chinese dream, so it seemed like we ought to care. And know what all the fuss was about.I said, it sounds like there's nothing especially Chinese about this Chinese dream. Is it different from the American dream? So our group went to work trying to the American dream. Teacher has in on the of individuals their way up to and through and but I told her I thought it was than the American dream is that every can get this I was a much Chinese state the state that a few can get first everyone will get or at The of an American dream with the Chinese dream, we could would place on a neoliberal terrain that at the logic of more or to the but we had not the of what the specific of the Chinese dream might thought it was that they be of it but they also of propaganda language with and a sense of My at that are specialists in words, after all, and they found it that there's a whole of language that been them, even though it is got her and the Chinese once in a while would ask her if found a and she would say with an of no has of she said, but none of it Teacher party her and this would have the Chinese dream in she knew the The Chinese dream, she said, an of the values of national national and among the social The was a little that to this this kind of knowledge is the of official Professor He said she must have thought we were a on her or her a whole group of official information from a How is situation was it actually was we were on Teacher very sober and already Even as our she seemed serious on the subject of the Chinese dream, Professor He that she a joke was being on We could all understand the "I not of the who thought she might be the of a The of all this wordplay were the but Teacher would have had to have been there to see everyone as a party Teacher Li had through of political since the Chinese dream was by the Propaganda in These are to everyone in a leadership get the language of policy understand its and think through to and the in this the Chinese are one of the that institutions of government and give them But they are also where everyone is a little and the are even in for the to up and the and for those in to look the other way. not as if Teacher Li had these some new and even at times thought about the implications of principles like for her work at a university in Kunming, in that was being by our joking however, was a perhaps especially because we are all academics in like of our work the social that (or the of even as we realize that everyday life everywhere and such Though we don't it much in our shared field at that the work of a between life and between and words, is what we and This labor of to a world is what we as social are all So this of good before at the was an to notice little or really about the in which we We the and jokes that all the of modern over and the I have a and reading of Chinese state propaganda from the Maoist This from the rather of some experts on the Chinese of the Maoist and I that propaganda like the now the Chinese dream, are a form of even though they do not in a of that the and one in the classic and especially their happy were in the present of Chinese lives and But these happy socialist were not to be a news they were not to they were a more than the of the contemporary Chinese to with the people's toward a The of a socialist propaganda is its of an situation that can be read as being within the of its a little more and collective good should they all the that up to a everyday can be like that, I don't know whether the of the Chinese dream on to the for of for my But it was that no one the as state A dream possible I contemporary my colleagues would to the being for them by the state Propaganda is not to suggest that academics in China are by the state. To make their relative distance from the (or of a little I want to another joke that up at that same all, and not to too much of the on our friends on the proprieties of with A few had to be however, so at one point Lili to me in a to our colleagues at the I followed with a of my I them good my own Professor He I should have said I was them "my own He told a very joke, he said, in this a a of a and who while a in Beijing actually in the The official got all not what one to the leader in the He you actually to the your own He analyzed this He said everyone this because the is a and a it partly the presumed of even the most in this so far from Beijing, the of (and of much dark And of course it a on the part of who they are being by who are in senses of the But it also a to see the national leadership as made of and rather than and and In some then, this joke about in the was the same one that had been our academics in to other that they have no of the meaning of state on The referent of all the has not only for intellectuals but even for government can the and the attached to the that the of state really is made of has not even serious they are to be about official At they have the college really jokes there so different that transgressions in one appear only as in the there within some that an at its but that appear only as or in another Is state propaganda a joke or are there or that appreciate its the of The joking I have in this essay to such some in which a whole situation in contemporary China is into a specific After all, those of us at were all Chinese world of contemporary At that none of us felt especially to the black humor New sociologists, issuing from party headquarters at The we had as we to the Chinese dream can be in the world that we had in and some of the we when it was history, like the can get policy of the be taken for among We shared a so some did not to be there was an in this a of pleasure in sharing our to laugh at and to make of official and of the time, the values of socialism and the Chinese dream are part of the we while we our life and work in Chinese But the by joking conversation a distance between even when these are is to it was only because we could laugh at the central state propaganda that we knew we were to at a from the state could be the other to our we laughing for different or in as we worked to the Chinese dream? this a case of same different any maker of jokes really know if those present are laughing with him or at There may have been some of at that in But that we all knew from and with in embodied practice, that jokes are not supposed to translate it that we all found a way to really really laugh about research state and the of those a it must be that we were not really laughing about such we were laughing within them. This was more than a collection of critical in paradoxical or we were not sharing or If our had been about politics, the of that all would have been more there, for could much more knowledge about academic life in a Chinese than I have so there were certainly I And there may have been among these colleagues the and convivial of our conversation that even as a could not but that may have everyone There is much that we did not have in yet our of the and both and The that we so with so much is the that we were all there and all then, the big joke of state for from within the in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus get the they see the of the situation in which values are as a shared dream for The is that they do they are not in a structural to share the of the in the is not to the is it would not do for him do to in wordplay or paradoxical The that modern of do are different from but not than those of or be an of the of in Jokes up at all in the everyday life of state in as they do in other modern

Edmund W. Cheng, Chan Wai Yin

This paper examines the antecedent and contingent causes sparking the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Spurred by two contingent events generating pre-emptive and backlash mobilization, the movement is a spontaneous transformation of the staged Occupy Central campaign. Based on an onsite survey (n = 1681) and in-depth interviews (n = 18), this paper demonstrates how protest experience and social media networked and rallied autonomous individuals from diverse backgrounds to occupy the physical spaces, thereby sustaining a self-mobilized, horizontal and resilient movement. Spontaneity, however, did not come out of nowhere. As an integral part of Hong Kong’s bottom-up activism and ecology, this spontaneous episode encapsulates antecedent events diffusing stalwart actors, decentralized organization and transgressive repertories. This paper situates spontaneity in temporal, spatial and emotional contexts to understand the uncompromising claims and participatory practices of the spectacular occupation.

Xiaobo Lü

Elites often use social policies to garner political support and ensure regime survival, but social policies are not a silver bullet. Using two waves of Chinese national surveys, I find that a recent policy of abolishing school fees has significantly increased citizens’ demand for greater government responsibility in financing compulsory education. I argue that policy awareness, rather than policy benefits, drives citizens’ demand. Finally, I show that policy awareness has enhanced citizens’ trust in China's central government, but not in local governments. This asymmetry in regime support has two sources—the decentralization of education provision and biased media reporting—which induce citizens to credit the central government for good policy outcomes. Given that citizens’ responses are primarily influenced by policy awareness that is promoted by the state media, this study casts doubt on the use of social policies to sustain long-term political support.

Wei Cui

The high degree of centralization of tax legislative power in China has produced frequent controversies in practice, and is also fundamentally inconsistent with certain basic principles of public finance and the rule of law. However, this arrangement is commonly assumed as a given for the contemporary Chinese policy. This article challenges this prevalent view. It argues that the centralization of tax legislative power began only in 1977, and was by no means a fixed institution before that time. Moreover, such centralization strengthened between 1977 and 1993, which was a period regarded as the golden age of fiscal decentralization. Thus there was a sharp contrast at the time between the distribution of tax legislative power and the predominance of fiscal decentralization. The article argues that this contrast could not be explained by the lack of importance of law during the period. “Taxation according to law” was a core idea in the development of the tax system, and this was inevitable due to the need to have a consistent set of tax rules for everyone to follow, to give these rules the backing of the force of the state, and to ensure that such rules were known to the public. The high degree of tax legislative centralization in China is thus historically contingent, and cries out for explanations as to its causes.

Lun King Ngok, Kin Keung Chan David

No abstract is available for this record.

Yan Ding

The financial reform of compulsory education in China since 1985 was characterized by fiscal decentralization and resource diversification. It has brought important benefits but did contribute to growing disparities in the quality of education across regions and to inadequate public financing of education in poor areas. This suggests that in the future, more effort needs to be put into the establishment and development of a substantial and regularized scheme of intergovernmental grants. This study, based on 1997 and 1999 county level data, attempts to document the utilization of education resources and disparities in per student spending in late 1990s. Then the study goes further to review the international experience regarding the role of intergovernmental grants in a decentralized system of financing, and finally examines the issues involved in establishing a regularized and substantial system of intergovernmental grants in compulsory education in China.

Ka Ho Mok

No abstract is available for this record.

Le-Yin Zhang

The Chinese central-provincial fiscal relationship of the reform era has been at the centre of academic attention in the last few years. It is rapidly becoming one of the most researched areas regarding China. Despite numerous publications, however, there are still some crucial issues that have not been sufficiently elucidated. First, the emphasis of discussions so far has been on formal budgetary relations, particularly the distributive pattern of revenue collection. In reality, the scope and impact of the Chinese budget are very much smaller than those elsewhere and the pattern of revenue collection is only one aspect of the multi-faceted central-provincial fiscal relationship. An appreciation of these aspects and their implications requires a better understanding of the full range of arenas in which the Chinese central government interacts with the provinces over public finance than is currently available. Secondly, it is generally accepted that the Chinese central-provincial fiscal relationship has been decentralized during the reform era, and that this change has underpinned the growing strength of the provinces and the decline in central power. However, the change in the relationship is actually more complex than one-dimensional decentralization would suggest, and the link between fiscal decentralization and political decentralization is less straightforward from a comparative perspective. Thirdly, it is widely accepted that there has been a fiscal decline in China and that the revenue-sharing system – implemented up to 1993 – was the cause of this decline. From this understanding, erroneous conclusions have been drawn. On the one hand, some scholars suggest that this decline signifies a limit on the Chinese state in its relation to the economy, and it is this factor that has underpinned the success of the Chinese economy during the reform. On the other, this decline is considered to epitomize the emergence of a “weak centre, strong localities” situation in China that may eventually lead to the disintegration of the Chinese political system. But it is far from established that there has indeed been a fiscal decline in the true sense of the term. The same can be said on the question of this decline, if it exists, representing the limiting of the Chinese state in relation to the economy or the decline of the central power relative to that of the provinces. Fourthly, in 1994 the Chinese government launched important reforms to the central-provincial fiscal relationship, aiming to replace the previous revenue-sharing system with a tax-sharing system (TSS, or fenshuizhi ), and ultimately to stem so-called fiscal decline. Despite earlier reported problems, recent official reports have claimed substantial success of this reform in terms of improvement in the so-called “two ratios” – the ratio of budgetary revenue to GDP, and the ratio of central budgetary revenue to total budgetary revenue. What do these two ratios signify? How should we interpret such success? Does the success on the one hand confirm the allegation that the revenue-sharing system was the cause of the Chinese fiscal decline? And does it on the other hand indicate a strengthening in the centre's power relative to the provinces'?

Jean C. Robinson

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark Winokur

History as Ghetto. One crucial question posed by contemporary cultural theoreticians from Louis Althusser to Fredric Jameson has to do with the specific relation of cultural artifact to historical truth. How is one to account for the disparity between history and its representation, or between history and its lack of representation by hegemonic groups that have a stake in maintaining an official story? More pertinent for film scholars, how do the events on the film screen explicate-how are they explicated by-events on the larger, cultural stage, when both arenas are as much defined in the gap as in the praxis? Jameson states the problem and its necessity in its most accessible form: It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.' When speaking about the cultural role of the ethnic, historians derive a number of possible, practical consequences of the problematics of political nonrepresentability. For some, the absence of ethnic or subculture representation in history and criticism is lamentable, but correctable (Lary May's Screening Out the Past). For others, the absence of overt subculture representation is proof of either the sterility of the mainstream culture (Michel Foucault), or the impotence and final incommensurability of ethnic cultures (John Cuddihy's Ordeal of Civility), depending on the critic's allegiance or particular neurosis. When addressing American film, it is possible to make a different kind of assertion: the absence of direct, proportional representation of the immigrant as complex character and lead player, and the substitution instead of ethnic stereotypes, is interesting when one takes into account that the medium is to a great extent dominated by immigrants and children of immigrants. The consensus among most historians of American film, from Louis Jacobs to Lary May, is that the number of immigrants-and their children, America's new ethnics-who worked in Hollywood in creative, technical, and economic capacities has been and continues to be extremely disproportionate.2 Of the thirteen founders of the Big Eight studios, for example, eleven were born outside the United States. The last two, Harry Cohn and Jesse Lasky, were the son and grandson, respectively, of immigrants.3 Add to this the fact that by