This book's extensive analysis of how the ideology and discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined the official decisions and responses to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake sends a message to China watchers of various denominations. More specifically, their current preoccupation with “performance legitimacy” (p. 60) and other political economic dimensions must take the CCP's political concepts, discourses, and vocabularies seriously, if not accurately, to analyse contemporary Chinese politics and society in terms of the CCP's legitimacy-generating mechanisms and sources. The author is a political scientist who crosses over between comparative politics and political theory to contend that the enduring ideology and discourse from the revolutionary leaders, such as Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, still constitute the soul of the now ruling Party and the most fundamental criteria for its political legitimacy.
According to Sorace, the substance of the aforementioned Party's ideology and discourse boils down to the Party's benevolence as the “saviour” of the suffering mass and source of “miracles” in every possible circumstance, in particular, at times of national emergency, such as natural disasters like the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In this context, “[t]he reconstruction would transform Sichuan into a showcase of Party benevolence and state capacity” (p. 12) to realize the ideal of the all mighty party-state, that “[w]ithout the Party organization, I would not be alive,” (p. 3) revitalizing the foremost propaganda of the revolutionary spirit, that “[w]ithout the Communist Party, there is no new China (meiyou gongchandang, meiyou xin Zhongguo).” This type of ideological discourse, if not framing, which is not based on the official ideology of Marxism, but more likely on the pre-modern ideology of Mandate of Heaven (tianming), defines the benevolently omnipotent Party's policies and ensued consequences for its ordinary citizens with hundred surnames (laobaixing). “The dismissal of CCP discourse and ideology as hollow” (p. 63), henceforth, does not make sense because this regime's surprising resilience, at least partly, stems from its very ability to weave together ideology, organization and daily life.
This set of arguments is empirically “tested” through discourse analysis of the Party archival data and three case studies on the reconstruction politics in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The author's creative linkages between the dicta of Mao and other leaders and the CCP's various propagandist slogans in the disaster-hit Sichuan areas, such as Wenchuan county, during the post-earthquake reconstruction periods are convincing, but still seem to be conjecture in the absence of substantial empirical evidence. The empirical analysis, which is based on 18 months of painstaking ethnographic fieldwork in the disaster-hit region, is not strong enough to support the author's hypothesis that ideology and discourse are the primary engines for the CCP's sustainable legitimacy. This is, however, admittedly a daunting task to accomplish even with a complete set of both qualitative and quantitative data analyses.
The three case studies, respectively on reconstruction through urbanization, economic development via tourism, and ecological development of the disaster-hit regions (Dujiangyan municipality, Yinxiu township and Qingchuan county), still nonetheless deliver enough on the empirical dynamics between the Party's ideological discourse of “benevolence” and the grassroots-level politics that revolves around the ostentatious but hollow reconstruction processes. The author's narration tries to untangle the diverse interactions – among the national plans of political economy, the everyday lives of the victims, their mostly corrupt and career-oriented Party officials, and the aforementioned CCP's legitimizing discourses – within the post-earthquake reconstruction in those regions.
In addition, one of the critical ironies in the CCP's benevolent saviour discourse and resultant policies for the victims is the logic of “the unwanted present” as presented in these case studies. The quote from a “sincere” local official, “If I gave you a present, but it didn't suit you, you didn't need it, and you didn't even want it, but I was adamant about giving it to you, would it still count as a present?” (p. 17), illustrates that the CCP had imposed macro-benevolent reconstruction policies without tailor-making to the victims’ real micro-needs and that this had in turn created a large number of secondary victims among the disaster victims. Such ill-suited acts of “salvation” by the CCP accompanied a complementary form of governing action practiced by this authoritarian regime – repression – to silence the grumbling victims who would have otherwise raised questions about the CCP's obligatory benevolence to the people, and accordingly, its shaken discursive legitimacy, or authority. This pattern of the CCP's policies to define the interactions between state–society relations and political economy in contemporary China is, not surprisingly, widely found in the established literature.
This book would interest China scholars across the board, students of disaster politics, humanitarian NGO workers, and the informed public interested in China's West. Sorace's provoking research questions and detailed discourse analysis, along with the ethnographic case studies, contribute to the field of Chinese studies and political science by raising questions as to the shallowness of the dominant “it's the economy, stupid” credo that had allegedly killed the ideology and political discourse, despite its indispensability to any complete analysis of contemporary Chinese politics. Nevertheless, even after reading this book, many will remain suspicious of the relevance of the author's bold statements along such lines as, “[U]nder Xi Jinping, China has appeared to reverse direction” from “politics and ideology are dead, long live the economy!” (p. 59).
