Frank N Pieke - The Ordinary & The Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese Reform and the 1989 Peoples movement in Beijing

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THE ORDINARY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY

THE ORDINARY AND
THE EXTRAORDINARY

An Anthropological Study of Chinese Reform
and the 1989 Peoples Movement in Beijing

FRANK N. PIEKE

First published in 1996 by

Kegan Paul International

This edition first published in 2010 by

Routledge

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

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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

Frank N. Pieke 1996

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.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0540-0 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0540-4 (hbk)

Publisher's 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. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

For Alka

CONTENTS

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

PREFACE

Although I alone am responsible for any errors which may have slipped through despite several rereadings of the manuscript, this book could not have been completed without the advice and help of many others. Most importantly, without the cooperation and hospitality of my informants in Beijing I would never have been able to understand life in Beijing as I do now. Of the colleagues at my host institution in Beijing, the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, I am especially grateful to Shen Chonglin, Ye Xiannian, Chen Ying-ying, Shen Yuan and Sheng Xuewen for their dedication to make this project succeed and I feel honoured to call them my friends. The doctoral thesis on which this book is based could not have been written without the inspiration and encouragement my supervisor John Gumperz provided throughout my graduate work. I am indebted to him and to Hill Gates, Thomas Gold, Aihwa Ong, Ton Robben and Jeffrey Wasserstrom for their critical reading of the manuscript. My wife, Alka Shah, and my parents, Anna and Rene Nagel and Klaas Pieke, I want to thank for their continuing support and for never questioning my insistence to study anthropology and things Chinese.

An earlier version of appeared in Issues & Studies 30, 1 (1994). I am grateful to the editors for their permission to publish the articles here.

To readers who are not familiar with the Chinese language or the Peoples Republic the following information may be useful. First, at the time of my fieldwork the official exchange rate of the Chinese currency, the renminbi which is measured in yuan , was approximately 3.7 yuan to one American dollar. The black market exchange rate, a more realistic measure of the dollars purchasing power as far as ordinary Chinese were concerned, was about 7 yuan for a dollar. Second, for the transcription of Chinese words I have used the official hanyu pinyin romanization. As a consession to my native Beijing informants I have often retained the final r which is a distinctive characteristic of Beijing dialect. The direct quotes from interviews which appear throughout the text have been translated in such a way that they keep as close as possible to the original Chinese, often at the cost of elegance.

Frank Pieke
Leiden
July 1994

1
THE CONSTRUCTION OF A FIELDWORK PROJECT IN THE PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA

1. BACKGROUND

This study is the outcome of eight-months fieldwork in Beijing, the capital of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), from 8 November 1988 to 17 June 1989. During my stay, the political situation in China could hardly be called stable. Between 15 April and 4 June 1989 Beijing saw the upsurge of the largest and most momentous political movement since the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Witnessing the extraordinary Peoples Movement and its bloody suppression threw a whole new light on the fieldwork which I had carried out in the months preceding it.

The original purpose of the fieldwork had been to acquire a grass-roots perspective on the dynamics of Chinese state socialist society under the impact of ten years of reform. I interviewed workers, lower level state cadres, and private entrepreneurs on what I would like to call the ordinary strategies of Chinese life: their experiences of and opinions on such phenomena as corruption, the use of kinship and friendship networks, relations with superiors and colleagues at work, the rapidly increasing use of money for legal and illegal purposes, and the like. By approaching the problem from the perspective of the common Beijing citizen, I came to understand the dynamic interaction between the fabric of daily life and the course taken by the reforms.

After my return to the Netherlands, I found it utterly nonsensical to write about my fieldwork as if the Peoples Movement had not happened. Conversely, my fieldwork had taught me things about Beijing society which enabled me to understand the movement from the perspective of the people who had participated in it. To me, the story of the movement and of the daily life of Beijings citizens cannot be separated. The central questions this book therefore tries to answer are: how can these two different fieldwork experiences be reconciled with each other, and what do they tell us about the dynamics of Chinese culture and society?

From my perspective the Peoples Movement was an accident. I could never have predicted it and my study of it was largely a matter of improvisation. Yet, my ideas about the nature of anthropological fieldwork and my experiences during my earlier, ordinary fieldwork in Beijing had prepared me to respond to such accidents. My reconstruction of life under the reforms and the story of the Peoples Movement were an intensely personal experience of trying to construct a fieldwork project in Beijing. In this chapter I will narrate this experience and show how my ideas of what anthropological fieldwork ought to be helped me to negotiate the constraints and make the most of the opportunities.

Postmodern anthropology conceives of fieldwork as prolonged and active interaction between the fieldworker and the people studied. The knowledge which results from such fieldwork is the product of systematic and personal experience of other peoples lives. Since such fieldwork is a dialogical process with its own dynamics, its course cannot completely be predetermined by formal research procedures.

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