Göran Aijmer - Leadership on the China Coast

First published in 1984

by Curzon Press Ltd

This edition first published in 2019 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1984 Gran Aijmer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LCCN: 84207381

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-61628-1 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-003-10575-6 (ebk)

SCANDINAVIAN INSTITUTE OF ASIAN STUDIES

Kejsergade 2, DK-1155 Copenhagen K

First published 1984

Curzon Press Ltd: London and Malm

SIAS Copenhagen 1984

ISBN

0 7007 0162 1

ISSN

0142 6028

Preface

1 Introduction

Gran Aijmer

2 Rural Leadership in the Hong Kong Region: Village autonomy in a traditional setting

James W. Hayes

3 Leaders, Factions and Ethnicity in Sai Kung

C. Fred Blake

4 Macao: Legal Fiction and Gunboat Diplomacy

Anthony R. Dicks

5 The Dilemma of Political Middlemen:Leadership in a rural commune during socialist transformations

Helen F. Siu

References

Gran Aijmer was born and educated in Stockholm. He received his fil.kand., fil.lic., and fil.dr. degrees from the University of Stockholm, and joined this university as a docent of Comparative Ethnography in 1964. Since 1971 he has held the chair of Social Anthropology in the University of Gothenburg. In 1975 he was Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Aijmer has conducted extensive field-work in Hong Kong and Macao.

C. Fred Blake received his M.A. from the Washington University at St. Louis and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At present he is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. His fieldwork was conducted in rural Hong Kong, but his experience includes also a period in the U.S. Peace Corps in Micronesia.

Anthony R. Dicks was educated at Westminster School and at the University of Cambridge where he studied History and Law. After further Law education in the Temple (London) he joined the Institute of Current World Affairs, New York, as a research fellow. Based in Hong Kong, he has conducted research into traditional Chinese law as well as legal procedures in the Peoples Republic of China. After a few years as a lecturer of law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and of Chinese Law in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, he returned to Hong Kong where he now practises as a barrister.

James W. Hayes has been a member of the Administrative Branch, Hong Kong Civil Service, since 1956. Much of his service has been spent in the New Territories, where since 1975 his latest appointment has been Town Manager and District Officer, Tsuen Wan. He has bachelors, masters and doctors degrees in history from the University of London.

Helen F. Siu is a native of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Stanford University in 1981. In the years 197680 she was Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She took up the position as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Williams College, Massachusetts, and since 1982 she has joined the Department of Anthropology at the Yale University. From 197681 she has conducted periodic fieldwork in rural Guangdong, PRC.

This book brings together four independent empirical studies of leadership exercised on Chinas southern coastland. There was originally nothing to link these four efforts and the authors come from different academic disciplines - one is an historian, one a lawyer, and two are anthropologists by profession. The four of us had met on one pleasant occasion in 1978 in a Hong Kong flat but at that stage I had only conceptualized in a preliminary fashion a publication on leadership under various conditions in traditional and modern eras. That preliminary suggestion has now materialized into what follows. The essays offered were written in different contexts and for varying purposes. But in all this difference there is a clear convergence of interests in a common fascination for the Chinese ways of constructing authority and political dominance. The reader will also find the contributors united in a common love of descriptive detail. I believe that in fifty years time when no one will be particularly interested in the theoretical issues of todays debate, scholars may gain insights through the study of the careful reporting which forms the basis of this book. To introduce the four essays I have attempted to formulate some more general musings on the character and foundations of leadership in China, thoughts which I have nourished during several years of residence on the China coast.

One aim of a book like the present one is to focus attention on one particular systematic field in Chinese ethnography while at the same time pointing to the many things we ought to know more about. It is in the nature of ethnographic description that such intentions are not always explicit, but we do lack information not only with regard to the always desirable richer detail, but also to many broader themes. The present studies are leaning towards the more informal handling of power relations but there is obviously more to be said on this theme and, again, on informal politics as a process integrated with formal bureaucratic administrations in which idiosyncratic leadership operates on all levels under shared ideological and legal constraints. Another area which is largely neglected here is that of the potential value derived from a close examination of political language, both in the sense of formal rhetoric for public occasions and as it occurs in everyday discourse involving leader types. However, it is our shared hope that the effort of putting these four studies together will stimulate others to use a comparative approach should they feel curiosity at Chinese leadership and power relations.