Organizer: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
Chair: Marc Blecher, Oberlin College
National Development and Individual Trauma: "Wushan Yunyu" (Wu Mountain Clouds and Rain)
Nick Kaldis, Ohio State University
The Three Gorges Dam project continues to generate debate among scholars, journalists, government officials, developers, and others. But to date, one of the only artistic treatments of the issue is director Zhang Ming’s "Wushan Yunyu" (1996).
In this film, large-scale development is shown to be completely obliterating the lived environment of many citizens whose lives it is ostensibly improving. More specifically, the film explores how such a colossal national public works project might be experienced by individual subjects. It portrays a situation in which an individual’s existential environment is suddenly nullified, literally on the verge of being engulfed by water. In the shadow of (or more aptly, below the waterline of) development on such an unimaginable, surrealistically massive scale, life suddenly loses much, if not all, recognizable meaning. Subsequently, the subject is unable to comprehend or adjust to the overwhelming impact of this imminent obliteration of its surroundings. Nevertheless, it still attempts to sustain some sense of agency and self-determination (with regards to livelihood, establishing and maintaining friendships, sexual experiences, e.g.) within that stressful environment. Under such pressures, the film shows, the psyche is traumatized in specific ways. It becomes wholly alienated from its own being and environment, resulting in a confusion of real and imagined relations to both that environment and to other people.
Finally, I conclude by emphasizing that "Wushan Yunyu" cannot be analyzed as an objective, scientifically-grounded analysis of the devastation of economic modernization. Rather, it represents an artistic attempt to come to grips with the less visible and less tangible—but no less devastating—effects of developmental change on the individual subject and his/her psyche.
The River Runs Dry: Negotiating Water Scarcity and Systemic Reforms in the Yellow River Basin
Eric Zusman, University of California, Los Angeles
The consequences of China’s post-Mao reforms have been examined extensively in recent years, revealing numerous cases of environmental degradation. Severe water shortages in the Yellow River basin, the birthplace of Chinese civilization and the current home to nearly 98 million inhabitants, are seemingly another side-effect of introducing political-economic reforms while maintaining a centrally planned natural resource management system. A condition known as duanliu, meaning to "cutoff the flow," has struck the basin’s lower reaches in recent years, illustrating vividly the growing scarcity of water in the region. In nine out of ten of the past summers, the Yellow River has ceased to flow further and further from its mouth for longer and longer periods of time. During 1997, the sight of the riverbed parched from over 60 days without water prompted a Chinese river manager to question aloud whether "the mother [river] will have milk for her children in the future."
To deal with water scarcity and to respond to this question, Chinese river managers typically choose one of two approaches: supply-side measures or demand-side measures. Supply-side measures denote constructing dams, reservoirs, water diversions and other kinds of physical infrastructure to increase water storage capacity. In contrast, demand-side measures refer to adopting pricing policies and other disincentives to reduce consumer water (over)use. While supply-side measures have been more popular in China than demand-side measures, the merits of a third approach to the basin’s resource problems, implementing systemic basin-wide water management reforms, have been undervalued.
Introducing management reforms would mean restructuring water distribution policy to form a coherent, unified basin-wide water management system. Currently, the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, the unit primarily responsible for basin-wide water management, lacks the legitimacy to coordinate the basin’s industrial, agricultural, municipal and hydropower water users as well as competing bureaucratic and regional interests. Instead, allocations are often informally negotiated among stakeholders. This paper will identify specific water management reforms that could reduce the severity of the current dilemmas and argue that the debate over supply-side measures and demand-measures has obscured deep-seated, systemic problems in basin-wide water management.
* Research for this project was supported in part by an Area Studies Social Sciences Concepts Grant from the Ford Foundation and funding from The University of Texas at Austin’s National Security Educational Program Institutional Grant (through the Texas Fund for the Training of Foreign Policy Professionals).
Reform, State, and Healthcare Provision in Rural China
Yanzhong Huang, University of Chicago
In contrast to the health problems faced by many post-communist states during their transition to a market economy, the reformist China has not witnessed a measurable decline in people’s health care standards. Why? Using the case of rural healthcare system transition, this study seeks to understand the major forces at work leading to the rising health care standards in reformist China. Both intuitive reasoning and existing socioeconomic hypotheses attribute the increasing health care standards to the rapid economic growth during the reform era. My preliminary inquiry, however, suggests that the trickle-down effect of economic development alone does not tell the whole story. This led me to focus on political-institutional factors. Without suggesting any simple, single-factor explanation, my alternative hypothesis is that during the reform era, the Chinese state remained capable of sustaining, even strengthening its commitment to rural health care, and this state commitment is an independent and crucial factor in explaining the rising health care standards in rural China. Both statistical and historical analyses are employed to identify the causes and causal mechanisms of rising health care standards in rural China. The study may further our understanding of the evolving Chinese political system, and shed some light on health care reforms in other countries.
The Mixed Blessings of Filial Sons: China’s Rural Elders
Eric Miller, University of Pittsburgh
Contrary to expectations, at least some of China’s aged are eager to embrace lives which offer greater independence from their children, In the village in Zouping County, Shandong Province, where I conducted an ethnographic study of China’s rural aged, this situation has resulted from a shift of power to the younger generation. Most people assume that the young have more needs than the old, and that households should be run accordingly. Multi-generation families and the concept of filial piety which once benefited the aged continue to be the primary means of support in old age, but now serve to both decrease the autonomy of the aged and to minimize the amount of support they receive. Given limited economic and housing options available to them, the aged use several approaches to try to balance the desire for greater independence with the need for support from children, which is especially important in the event of serious illness. In this context, it is not surprising that most of the aged interviewed support plans for the creation of group housing for the aged within the village, and generally prefer to remain in the village if children move to the city. Interestingly, the aged in wealthier, less agricultural villages in the same county hold a more positive outlook towards multi-generation households and filial support. These findings raise important questions about the implications of smaller household sizes and smaller families for the rapidly growing population of the aged in rural China.
Praying Together: Practicing Catholicism in Postsocialist Rural China
Eriberto P. Lozada Jr., Harvard University
The rapid penetration of transnational processes into the People’s Republic of China since the opening of China’s global frontiers during the post-Mao era has resulted in the re-definition and creation of new social structures and cultural forms. For rural Chinese communities, this entails a re-examination of what it means to be local. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1993 and 1997, this dissertation focuses on the re-surfacing of a Catholic Church in a Hakka village in Jiaoling County, Guangdong to ethnographically analyze how transnational processes affect what it means to be part of a global and modern rural community in China. This village developed into a rural Catholic stronghold in the late Qing period under the French Mission Etrangeres de Paris missionaries and during the Republican period under the American Maryknollers. Catholic villagers in the Hakka homeland, after surviving various campaigns of persecution during the Maoist period, later incorporated their village church into the state administrative religious structure during the postsocialist period while remaining faithful to their Catholic traditions. In this paper, I will examine how their everyday practice of Catholicism illustrates how a multiplicity of national and transnational processes—the privatization of local sectors of the socialist economy, the global movement of people as workers, students, and tourists, the rapid modernization of Chinese production and consumption—coalesce as part of a social narrative that creates locality. Catholicism has simultaneously defined deterritorialized local community boundaries while connecting people to the global world.