Some weeks ago, I was listening to Ching Kwan Lee make some arguments about Chinese Capitalism in the last three decades and urging skepticism towards the application of certain current models to trying to understand the last thirty years of the history of China in the world. I understood her argument to be that while many of those who apply such models appeal to a universalising instinct, or shall I say the Kantian imperative, it is the case that those models emerge out of particular historical and geographical contexts and the uncritical application of those models to contexts different from their originary ones is not particularly useful. She sought to direct attention away from neoliberalism, the Beijing consensus, developmental state and such like to some parameters by which she argued a better understanding of contemporary China could be reached: Communist Party policies and strategies, particularly the interactions between central and local government; elite politics and developments within the Communist Party; bottom-up civic responses to policies and elite politics; two-tier citizen system arising from the household registration regime and how that influences labour dynamics and the interactions between urban and rural economies. I agree with her about the use of models. However, I also feel one needs to account for those cases where influential actors within the context that one is studying, rightly or wrongly, use the very models one wishes to discount in their decision-making so that those models are still significant in that they influence the choices of significant actors and consequently overall outcomes. I think that Ching Kwan Lee herself also made this point. The positive thing about applying, shall I say, etic models is that for comparative purposes, they can be used to sharpen contrast, helping to identify differences between the originary context of the model and the context where there is a lack of fit. To all this and what has gone before,for me, the only thing to add is that it then becomes important to give attention to models developed within non-western contexts as they no more or no less harmful, no more or no less useful than models that emerge out of western contexts which enjoy widespread application. Indeed, when Ching Kwan Lee touched on Chinese citizenship rights, as they are structured by household registration, my mind had immediately gone to Mahmood Mamdanis Citizen and Subject which is iconoclastic in its use of apartheid as the model for explicating the African colonial experience, and central to his model is the two-tier, urban citizen and rural subject system. Was I then surprised when Ching Kwan Lee, later in her talk, brought up comparisons between China and South Africa in the period before 1994 and alluded to an existing body of work by China scholars that analogise the Chinese and South African experiences? Mamdanis book draws heavily on the experience of South Africa. I came away from Ching Kwan Lee with a desire to reread Citizen and Subject, understand better the critiques of that book found in the body of African political literature, particularly the line of criticism advanced by the likes of Insa Nolte (along these lines and as an aside my metacritique of Mamdanis critique of what he refers to as history by analogy derives from my need to account for cases in which influential actors within the context that one is studying, rightly or wrongly, use the very models one wishes to discount in their decision-making), and to immerse myself in empirical studies of China. I doubt very much that beyond the conceptual level and a few specific ideas about how asymmetries of power tend to function across socio-economic stratification as well as similarities between individual and collective strategies for grappling with social inequality, and the legacies of historical linkages between Asia and South Africa thered be anything more to this, but the point, for me, is how interesting all of this is. Modupe Yusuf Benson Eluma Jimmy Amenechi Emeka Ugwu Wale Dada
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 06:32:01 +0000
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