In the immediate aftermath of the 12 May 2008 Wenchuan 汶川 earthquake, encouraging signs emerged of media openness and transparency, unprecedented civil society participation, and regime promises for democratic-based reconstruction. According to Jessica Teets, the rescue and relief effort had the potential to “create a model of local state–civil society co-operation that could be followed again in the future.”Footnote 1 Shawn Shieh and Guosheng Deng went further to argue that the earthquake relief campaign provided “an unprecedented opportunity and public stage for NGOs to mobilize, network and demonstrate their worth,”Footnote 2 which seems to confirm also Guobin Yang's early prognostication in June 2008 that China was witnessing an “unprecedented … civic effervescence.”Footnote 3 While these authors are correct that a voluntarily mobilized citizenry and NGO community began to take shape during the rescue and relief phase (kang zhen jiuzai 抗震救灾), the situation changed dramatically during the reconstruction phase (zai hou huifu chongjian jieduan 灾后恢复重建阶段).Footnote 4 As the initial emergency measures ended, the organizing potential of civil society and the promise of democratic participation were overshadowedFootnote 5 by a massive state-led effort to pursue national development plans as the core principles of reconstruction.
This article hopes to fill in a gap in the literature on the long-term implications of the Wenchuan earthquake and explains how several distinct patterns of disaster reconstruction political economy have backfired as ham-fisted implementation has met with grassroots-level resistance. I identify four aspects of the reconstruction-development process that spring directly from the national plans for reconstruction with development: (1) the transformation and semi-urbanization of rural space; (2) the expansion of domestic demand; (3) the modernization of infrastructure; and (4) the transformation of rural residents into new urban citizens (xin shimin jianshe 新市民建设). Each of the reconstruction patterns (separately and taken as a whole) has particular and meaningful implications for how we understand the political and social status of “peasants,” and rural politics and state–society relations in China more broadly. More specifically, the reconstruction/development efforts paradoxically reveal a state whose capacity to mobilize resources is as impressive and spectacular as its failure to listen to and understand the needs of its citizens.
The state was unwilling to relinquish control over such a high profile and politically sensitive process as the reconstruction and redevelopment of the Wenchuan area after the earthquake. Officials at every level of government viewed the process as a test of state power and the Party's international and domestic image. Consequently, social actors and NGOs were marginalized in the reconstruction decision-making process. The views of the state were aptly summarized in an internal publication, Gaige neican juece ban 改革内参决策版 (Reform Decision-Making):
Ultimately, [the reconstruction] will be used to evaluate the sustainability of China's current political, economic and social system; it will be used to verify and measure the governing capacity of the Communist Party and the leadership ability of the social elite. The process of post-disaster reconstruction is like a prism, reflecting both the superior advantages and profound abuses (biduan 弊端) of China's current political system… Everyone expects the earthquake area to become a model example (weida dianxing 伟大典型) for the future of China's economic, social, cultural, political and ecological construction.Footnote 6
Within this critical juncture, the political imperative of turning Sichuan into a showcase of state power trumped alternative possibilities for expanding and institutionalizing local participation and, in certain cases, even considerations of economic feasibility.
In order to link reconstruction with development goals, the central government issued a set of “administrative regulatory documents”Footnote 7 and policy guidelines giving the local state the discretion to expand its powers in order to meet these targets.Footnote 8 This flexible policy environment encouraged the different state agents involved to seek access to newly available resources (mainly capital for reconstruction/development projects)Footnote 9 and find opportunities to display their political achievements. The provincial assistance partners viewed reconstruction primarily as a means of constructing “business cards illustrating assistance achievement”Footnote 10 and sought to complete the process as soon as possible in order to return home quickly with their impressive political achievement records.Footnote 11 Local prefectural, county, town and village governments in Sichuan's disaster areas understood the reconstruction process as a once-in-a-career opportunity to access desperately needed funds and modernize the areas under their jurisdiction. Finally, individual cadres from all departments and localities involved in the process were aware that if they met, or at least appeared to meet, the developmental goals articulated by the central state, they would be prime candidates for career promotion.Footnote 12 The institutional incentives for the expansion of state power made political reform an unpalatable option. This confirmed concerns expressed in another article in Reform Decision-Making: “The earthquake reconstruction contains the possibility of a concealed tendency: the unlimited expansion (wuxian kuozhan 无限扩展) of the scope of state power to represent public authority and control allocation of resources.”Footnote 13
Deepening the tendency towards top-down state-imposed reconstruction and development, in August 2008, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao 温家宝, announced that the three-year reconstruction plan had to be completed within two years.Footnote 14 The condensed timeframe intensified the pressure on local state cadres to accomplish their project targets and the political atmosphere became increasingly hostile to democratic consultation.Footnote 15 According to Zhu Jiangang 朱健刚 and Hu Ming胡明:
Although the Post-Wenchuan Earthquake Disaster Reconstruction Regulations required the drafting of post-earthquake reconstruction plans to “incorporate related governmental departments, experts, and fully listen to the opinions of the masses of disaster victims,” the fact that reconstruction plans were drafted within three months simplified many complicated issues, which were left by the wayside, or disappeared under the bird's-eye view of higher-level officials. It was nearly impossible for the people to participate in the planning process.Footnote 16
The state pursued the implementation of national developmental goals at breakneck speed without pausing to consider their practical relevance or economic sustainability for the disaster victims who would have to inhabit these newly reconstructed physical, economic and social spaces. A negative consequence of this is that many people, especially rural residents who were relocated to peri-urban areas, have had a difficult time adapting to their new circumstances and finding suitable employment.
The villagers' alienation from the state and reconstruction process is further compounded by the conviction shared by many local cadres and intellectuals that soliciting villagers' opinions would be detrimental to the reconstruction effort. A political science professor mocked my inquiry into the existence of participatory channels and bluntly retorted: “What participatory channels? Do you think any of this could have been accomplished in three years if the state had to sit down and listen to everyone's opinion?”Footnote 17 This attitude is representative of the contemptuous attitude shown by many local cadres towards villagers who are often characterized as suffering from a mentality of “waiting, depending, and demanding” (deng, kao, yao 等,靠,要) and looking only for short-term benefits.
Regardless of whether or not this perception is true, it structured the ways in which cadres interacted, or failed to interact, with local villagers, fraying the bonds of political communication and trust between state and society. According to the head of an NGO from Guangdong province, who established a branch in Wenchuan county following the earthquake, the leaders from the Guangdong Provincial Assistance Partnership Command Centre (Guangdong dui kou zhiyuan zhihui bu 广东对口支援指挥部) only solicited the help of his organization after they realized that numerous obstacles and contradictions were being caused by the reconstruction: “The government never asked villagers what they wanted or to participate in the reconstruction. So, most villagers had the attitude: ‘since it is not up to us, what business is it of ours?’ and would sit idly and complain. The leaders of the Guangdong provincial partnership assistance program were extremely worried about this and asked us to come and help smooth over the contradictions.”Footnote 18 Thus, the limited role played by NGOs in the earthquake reconstruction process was transformed from auguring a new era of civil society to managing social contractions.
The growing dissatisfaction among locals has not gone unnoticed by state officials. Many local governments have launched “gratitude education campaigns” (gan'en jiaoyu 感恩教育) in order to frame dissent as a sign of moral shortcoming and a lack of proper emotional attitudes. According to this explanatory framework, local residents' low evaluation of the post-earthquake reconstruction is directed away from the state's failure to address their needs adequately and reframed as a personal failure to adapt to, and be grateful for, the new conditions the state has provided. Instead of civil society, a new form of Maoist biopolitics is emerging in which so-called unruly rural residents are being trained in how to become good, obedient and grateful citizens.
This article is based on data gathered during fieldwork conducted in Sichuan between February 2012 and February 2013. I undertook ethnographic observations, survey questionnaires and more than 100 interviews in villages subordinate to the following county and municipal governments: Wenchuan 汶川 county, Beichuan 北川 county, Mao 茂 county, Mianzhu 绵竹 city, Mianyang 绵阳 city, Dujiangyan 都江堰 city, and Chengdu city. I interviewed local residents, high-level government officials, village-level Communist Party secretaries, rank and file cadres, NGO workers, and academics. Additionally, I draw on an already dense and expanding Chinese academic literature on the topic, including, but not limited to, macro-analyses, village-level monographs, internal government documents and interview transcripts.
Let a Hundred Development Projects Bloom: Viewing Post-Earthquake Reconstruction as a Developmental Opportunity
The regime's strategy of transforming a crisis into an opportunity should not come as a surprise. According to Dali Yang, upheaval has often served as the “midwife of reform.”Footnote 19 Contrary to Yang, Patricia Thornton has argued that crises can contribute to the weakening of reform by creating “the political space for extraordinary mobilizations of recourses to overcome challenges” such as “bureaucratic immobilism or local intransigence.”Footnote 20 From Thornton's perspective, crisis governance centralizes decision-making and often undermines routine politics.Footnote 21 The post-earthquake reconstruction of Sichuan confirms Thornton's perspective and illustrates a new type of crisis governance in which the state seeks not only to resolve a crisis but also to pursue a radical Maoist-style social transformation.
The extensive damage caused by the earthquake and the daunting reconstruction task that followed provided the Chinese regime with a perfect experimental laboratoryFootnote 22 in which multiple national development plans converged in one massive reconstruction campaign effort. As soon as the reconstruction was identified as a test of China's political system as well as a unique developmental opportunity in which ordinary constraints to large-scale social and economic transformation were removed,Footnote 23 the conditions necessary for the emergence of civil society were lost. There was too much at stake for the state to trust its citizens and share decision-making power with them. According to a 2011 publication by the Sichuan Academy of Social Science, “The Sichuan model demonstrates that disaster reconstruction is no longer only reconstruction, but rather is imbued with the enriched meanings of ‘expanding domestic demand,’ ‘developing the west,’ ‘comprehensive urban–rural development,’ and ‘construction of the new countryside’ policies.”Footnote 24 In the same spirit, an internal report published by the Dujiangyan Municipal Party School in 2009 urged cadres to “tightly grasp the three opportunities of post-disaster reconstruction, expanding domestic demand, and comprehensive urban–rural development.”Footnote 25 In its most succinct and clear formulation, the regime perspective was that “grasping reconstruction is identical to grasping development.”Footnote 26 The contagion of development spread to lower-level grassroots cadres who detected in reconstruction an opportunity to meet political performance targets and advance their careers: “Some village cadres hold that now that we are carrying out the new countryside programme, it is a good opportunity to implement the programme by allocating house sites again after houses collapsed.”Footnote 27 The stakes involved in post-disaster reconstruction were therefore much higher than simply restoring the homes and previous livelihoods of the earthquake victims; instead, the reconstruction plan contained multiple convergent visions for the future of China and was widely understood within government circles as a test of regime legitimacy.Footnote 28 Within months of the earthquake, concerns were raised at various levels of government and by academics over the potentially negative repercussions of viewing post-earthquake reconstruction as a panacea for China's problems.
On 3 July 2008, at the Post-Disaster Planning Mutual Support Work Conference, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, Qiu Baoxing 仇保兴, warned against “excessively attaching importance to the short-term production of images,”Footnote 29 “blindly pursuing the new”Footnote 30 and naively hoping to “relieve poverty in one step” via reconstruction work. He specifically admonished cadres who arbitrarily demolished their own townships and villages in order to construct new semi-urban, spatially concentrated settlements without first determining whether or not the maintenance and repair of the old townships would have been sufficient. However, the “general requirements” and “basic principles” of the “Overall state plan for post-Wenchuan earthquake restoration and reconstruction” (Guojia Wenchuan dizhen hou huifu chongjian zongti guihua 国家汶川地震后恢复重建总体规划)Footnote 31 encouraged local state actors to: “Meet the needs of future development by looking ahead properly, advancing new industrialization, urbanization, and the construction of new villages,”Footnote 32 and provided them with decentralized authority to “adapt to local conditions” (yin di zhi yi 因地制宜). In this discretionary policy environment, there were no legally binding forces or incentives to heed the warnings such as those issued by Qiu.
The problems foreseen by Deputy Minister Qiu were confirmed two years later in a report on the legal issues raised during the reconstruction:
First, the reconstructed planning is confused with long-term development planning. To combine post-disaster reconstruction planning properly with local long-term development planning is certainly reasonable to some extent. But in making reconstruction plans, some regions in Mianzhu unrealistically emphasize the promotion of urbanization, industrialization and construction of socialist new villages, and attempt to “reach the goal with one stride,” which has increased the burden of post-disaster reconstruction and aroused social dissatisfaction.Footnote 33
Many Sichuan academics also lamented that the incentives provided within the political system combined with the pressure to complete housing reconstruction within two years had reduced the ambitious urban–rural integration programme to merely a series of “image/face projects” (xingxiang gongcheng/mianzi gongcheng形象工程,面子工程),Footnote 34 defined as the construction of impressive modern urban-style exteriors, which would impress higher-level authorities and assure political promotion but which did not substantively achieve the objective of developing the countryside. My research confirms the suspicions that the central state's ambitious reconstruction plans contained in the very conditions of their implementation a path-dependent tendency towards privileging political-aesthetics over other competing logics and values. However, it would be a mistake to interpret this only as a typical case of principal-agent power games; in fact, many local cadres were rewarded for their performance during the reconstruction with promotions indicating central state approval of their developmental experiments which, it must be stressed, conformed to national priorities. The problem was much more systemic and ideological in nature and resides in the Leninist conviction that the role of the state is to modernize the backward rural masses.Footnote 35 Nothing summarizes the reconstruction process more aptly than a phrase I often heard in the field: “good intentions that produce bad results” (haoxin ban huaishi 好心办坏事).Footnote 36
Urban–Rural Integration
Linking post-earthquake reconstruction to the national project of urban–rural integration resulted in an emphasis on rebuilding many disaster areas as semi-urban spaces by centralizing residential sites and optimizing farmland. Despite widely varying local geographical, historical and cultural conditions in the disaster areas,Footnote 37 the choice of self-construction in remote rural areas and the possibility of repair and maintenance for houses that were not severely damaged, the predominant emphasis of government-led reconstruction housing projects followed a model of newly centralized residential towns. The phenomenon of peri-urbanization was most evident in those disaster areas in close proximity to the Chengdu metropole, such as Pengzhou 彭州 and Dujiangyan, and villages subordinate to major cities like Deyang 德阳, Mianzhu and Mianyang – areas in which urbanization trends were already underway prior to the earthquake. On a lesser scale, the reconstruction project also “extended the periurban zone deep into what were quite recently remote and inaccessible valleys.”Footnote 38
The fact that the central government only issued guiding regulations and policy papers concerning the post-earthquake reconstruction and disaster victim resettlement process created an environment of legal indeterminancy and non-institutionalization. This flexible policy implementation space allowed county and township-level governments to opt for relocated, concentrated resettlement, even if it were possible simply to repair the original homes.Footnote 39 The political incentives for relocated, concentrated resettlement were too tempting to resist: increased central government subsidies and the opportunity to achieve an excellent political performance record by urbanizing one's locality.Footnote 40 While this did not happen as a rule in each locality, it was common for villagers' homes to be demolished while they were living in temporary shelters and before there was a chance to evaluate the damage and possibility of repair properly.Footnote 41
Just two weeks after the earthquake, the local government had already begun to demolish damaged homes in one village in Dujiangyan municipality when it published a “demolition notice” in the local newspaper on 27 May 2008 that warned villagers sternly that it was illegal to re-enter their homes in the demolition zone. This not only precluded any objective appraisal of whether or not the homes could be salvaged, as stipulated in chapter 4 of the “Overall state plan for post-Wenchuan earthquake restoration and reconstruction,”Footnote 42 but also deprived villagers of any chance to retrieve their personal belongings. One year later, the villagers lodged a collective appeal:
Last year, after the 5.12 earthquake, we were living with relatives or friends, or the government moved us into temporary shelters in the suburbs; even if we could have stayed in Dujiangyan, we did not dare enter our homes because we were afraid of aftershocks. When the majority of home owners had no knowledge of the situation, the government illegally demolished our private residences and illegally sold-off the property inside of them, causing us to suffer tremendous property losses.Footnote 43
These aggrieved villagers not only highlighted a major source of discontent but also showed impressive competence at formulating their claims in the officially sanctioned language of legal institutionalization and rights protection.Footnote 44 Indeed, in another case, one villager similarly complained:
I told the village head, you never consulted us before forcing us to relinquish our home, now you are asking me to sign a document, for what? It was clearly your decision to relocate and resettle us, not the decision of us common people. We wanted to rebuild on our own but you would not let us and now you want me to sign my name admitting that I moved voluntarily? You are lying, I am simply going through the motions.Footnote 45
To be fair, some localities had no other “choice” but to relocate residents to high density housing owing to the earthquake's destruction of available land. The earthquake razed the entire county town of Beichuan to the ground. Instead of rebuilding on Beichuan's original site, the government decided to preserve the earthquake ruins as a memorial and rebuild a new Beichuan town 40 minutes drive away in An 安 county. Wenchuan county's Yingxiu 映秀 township, the epicentre of the earthquake, also faced the nightmarish logistical problems of relocating residents of its peripheral villages whose land had been entirely destroyed. According to local villagers, the government initially considered merging them with a village in the nearby municipality of Dujiangyan. However, according to their account, the receiving village in Dujiangyan vetoed this plan on the grounds that they were afraid of incorporating the village's small Tibetan population (it should be noted that two months before the earthquake, on 14 March 2008, violent anti-Han riots in Lhasa made national headlines). Finally, the local government requisitioned land owned by the Zipingpu 紫坪铺 Hydro-Electric Dam that was intended to serve as a barrier in case the Min river 岷江 flooded. Many villagers I interviewed, who now live precipitously adjacent to the river, voiced fears about their vulnerability in the event of a future catastrophe.Footnote 46
In other cases, semi-urban spatial transformation was already underway prior to the earthquake. As early as 2003, Dujiangyan municipality was incorporated into Chengdu's “Urban–rural socio-economic development plan to promote urban–rural integration,” and in 2007, became the first “experimental site” for the “reform of the village property rights system.”Footnote 47 On the day of the earthquake, Chengdu municipal Party secretary, Li Chuncheng 李春城,Footnote 48 was in fact en route to Dujiangyan to convene a meeting on the “pilot experiment for comprehensive urban–rural integration.”Footnote 49 The disaster hardly caused a glitch to existing plans. In the words of Dujiangyan municipal Party secretary, Liu Junlin 刘俊林, “after earnest consideration, we decided that even after the earthquake, not only would we not stop the reforms of the village property rights system, we would accelerate [them]. Why? By incorporating the reform of the village property rights system into the core of reconstruction, we can resolve the problem of where the money for reconstruction is going to come from.”Footnote 50 As a result of the “opportunity” provided by reconstruction, “after completing re-settlement construction, new concentrated settlements incorporated over 50 per cent of Dujiangyan's total rural population.”Footnote 51
This process of accelerated “townization”Footnote 52 is a sharp departure from the traditional spatial organization of the Sichuan countryside. The objective of the state officials, Party cadres and urban planners was to transform a “disorderly, unstructured usage of space into its intensive rationalization.”Footnote 53 From the perspective of many local villagers, however, it was a serious disruption to, and impairment of, their traditional ways of life and modes of production.
There were instances where urban–rural integration resulted in superficial improvements to the facades of houses, while neglecting other, more costly, structural problems. An example of cosmetic urbanization is the New Beichuan county seat. Despite its beautiful ethnic Qiang-style architecture, New Beichuan is virtually deserted as many of its residents have migrated to “real” cities in order to find work.Footnote 54 With little opportunity to earn the income needed to support the increased costs of urban living, Beichuan's residents have little choice.Footnote 55 For these reasons, a local NGO worker remarked that, “Beichuan might look like a city, but you know, it is still a village in reality.”Footnote 56
Urban-planning and design mistakes have also plagued New Beichuan. The initial reconstruction plan did not incorporate disabled accessibility in a city of disaster survivors – a problem now being addressed through costly renovations. Moreover, houses were designed and assembled by construction teams from Shandong province as part of the provincial mutual assistance plan. These teams built structures with flat roofs – perfect for the temperate and dry conditions of north China, but completely unsuited to Sichuan's wet and rainy climate where roofs traditionally incorporate broad eaves to facilitate drainage. The duress of having to complete the reconstruction process within two years precluded the ability to solicit and integrate local viewpoints and design approaches that may have been able to prevent such regrettable mistakes.
Despite playing a marginal role in the planning and decision-making process, many NGOs have assumed the role of humanitarian social work organizations and end up managing unanticipated social consequences produced by the reconstruction process. For example, prior to the 2011 Spring Festival, the reconstruction of Yingxiu township in Wenchuan county was still incomplete, and although housing structures were finished, the Dongguan Partnership Reconstruction team still needed a few more months to address basic infrastructural issues. Despite the incompleteness of the project, the Yingxiu government decided to re-locate villagers to their new homes in time for Spring Festival. The political and aesthetic value and symbolic significance of the propaganda opportunity took precedence over the more mundane concern of whether or not the houses were ready for occupation. Consequently, the local government was inundated with complaints by angry villagers whose new homes suffered from leaky pipes and other infrastructural problems. To address this problem, the government enlisted a local NGO to conduct household surveys, identify the specific problems, and organize villager repair teams to resolve the issues.Footnote 57
Expanding Domestic Demand
The urbanization of villagers was in theory supposed to open up surplus agricultural land for outside investment and transform previously asset-rich villagers into cash-rich market actors.Footnote 58 The capitalization of land-based assets in the countryside would lead to an increase in domestic demand. However, many villagers, terrified of losing their land-use rights, have resisted the state's efforts: “Farmers are unwilling to circulate their land [as assets on the market]. They view the land as their lifeline. Although the revenue from commercial activities is high, there are risks, and they are worried their commercial enterprises will lose money. Based on their experiences of being cheated and swindled as migrant labourers, although the benefit of farming is minimal, they still consider it a way to guarantee their survival.”Footnote 59
Their fears are not entirely groundless. Without adequate economic development, reconstruction can degenerate into little more than “face projects,” in which increasingly worried and desperate famers inhabit beautiful buildings for which they have no use.Footnote 60 The fear of urbanization without economic development already has become a reality in some localities. In Dujianyan “too many [newly constructed] towns lack supporting industry. It is extremely difficult to provide job opportunities and guarantee the livelihoods of rural residents who have been relocated to towns.”Footnote 61 In a similarly harsh indictment of the planning process, the Urban Construction Theory Research journal reported that: “the main shortcoming of the plan to concentrate villagers spatially is that it failed to consider villagers' employment needs satisfactorily … The reconstruction plan did not devote much consideration to villagers' production and lifestyle needs.”Footnote 62 Even more disturbing is that these are reports about the situation in Dujiangyan, which should be a positive model of urban–rural integration given its early experimental start, relatively robust tourism industry and proximity to Chengdu.
In other localities such as Yingxiu township, villagers' economic livelihoods are even more precarious. Owing to a lack of viable land and a decade of de-industrialization,Footnote 63 the local township government based their reconstruction plans on turning Yingxiu into an “earthquake tourism brand name.” However, despite the growing number of tourists visiting Yingxiu each week, tourism has failed to stimulate Yingxiu's local economy and help local residents earn a living. Instead of eating in local restaurants or staying overnight in the home-stays that have multiplied since the earthquake, most tourists arrive on the bus from Chengdu, visit the earthquake ruins and memorial museum, then leave Yingxiu with barely any contact with local residents. According to a professor of tourism and consultant to the Wenchuan county government: “They didn't consider the people's needs during the planning process. Yingxiu is a state planning disaster.”Footnote 64 Local residents who were living in temporary shelters or staying with friends and family in nearby Dujiangyan and Chengdu were not given any opportunity to have their say on the reconstruction planning process.
Many other earthquake zones which do not share Yingxiu's advantageous location abutting the Du-Wen highway and fame as the epicentre of the earthquake have also decided to develop tourism in a desperate attempt to compensate for the absence of industry and capital shortages. One professor from Hong Kong, who conducted social work in Wenchuan county during the reconstruction, pessimistically described tourism as a “dream palliative” for failed economic development.Footnote 65 Local governments' attempts to make their respective townships and villages tourist-friendly by improving infrastructure and sanitation and promoting local cultural heritage and/or scenic attractions have run aground owing to the fact that few people want to visit these locations. These small villages cannot compete with popular scenic spots in Sichuan such as Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟and cultural heritage sites like Dujiangyan's ancient irrigation system in attracting tourists. Furthermore, they are often in remote, mountainous areas, and despite vast improvements in transportation infrastructure, are still difficult to access. Finally, many urban tourists complain that the basic service and sanitation standards in some areas are woefully inadequate.Footnote 66 Similar to the process of transforming rural residents into urban citizens, developing a sustainable tourism industry requires a long-term process of maturation and cannot be accomplished overnight. The state's misplaced hope that reconstruction would solve problems of rural development has resulted in a micro-level disequilibrium of reform in which the way forward, as one Yingxiu villager lamented, remains “vague and distant” (miaomang 渺茫).Footnote 67
Owing to the lack of economic development, job opportunities and adequate wages to sustain urban living costs, many villagers are often unable or unwilling to pay for the fees associated with their new semi-urban housing, such as water, electricity, gas, property management fees and loans. The majority of the hundred-plus local villagers I interviewed from different Sichuan counties displayed a palpable mixture of distress and resignation over their future prospects. One visibly anxious village Party secretary told me that “although the houses look good from the outside, villagers are unable repay their loans. They put it off for as long as they can, and in the meantime, the inside of their houses remain empty.”Footnote 68
According to a report published in the Journal of Anhui Agricultural Science based on data from 192 surveys collected from seven different Sichuan counties, 40.62 per cent of farmers expressed dissatisfaction with the government's reconstruction plan of urban–rural integration.Footnote 69 A small survey I conducted in a Mianzhu township (with a population of roughly 6,000) revealed similar findings, with 29 out of 35 randomly selected respondents expressing discontent with their new living conditions.Footnote 70 Respondents cited four reasons for their discontent: (1) they had no space to raise livestock or store their farm tools; (2) they often had to walk long distances to reach their farmland; (3) they felt cramped by the confined living space; and (4) they had to adapt to a monetized way of life, needing to pay urban management fees, electricity, gas and water fees, and in some cases, repayment loans for the cost of new housing that exceeded government subsidies.Footnote 71 As one Dujiangyan villager explained:
The government's “integrated programme” has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage of moving to this location is it is more convenient for transportation. The disadvantages are living in these multi-story homes. Water, electricity, gas and food all require money. In the past, I didn't need to pay money in order to burn firewood; we also grew our food, and extracted our own oil. Now we cannot raise pigs and we are far away from our land, to get there is at least half an hour walk. If they let us repair our old houses and build a courtyard-style house where we could raise pigs and chickens, that would be ideal. If I had a choice between this integrated programme plan and rebuilding my old home on my own, I would choose the latter.Footnote 72
According to the head of a Chengdu-based NGO engaged in reconstruction work, officials in a few Dujiangyan localities were handling these problems informally by allowing relocated farmers to maintain their previous rural residences in the mountains, as long as they signed a document officially “confirming” that these had been demolished.Footnote 73
NGOs have taken on the role of helping residents cope with the transition to their new lifestyles. I interviewed members of two different NGOs operating in Dujiangyan whose projects over the past five years have included, amongst other things, helping residents to cope with the transition from rural to urban life (xin jumin jianshe 新居民建设); civility training (for example, not to litter public spaces); fire-prevention training; job-skills training; organizing community activities; civil dispute mediation; psychological assistance; orphan care; and facilitating cultural integration (Dujiangyan has a sizable and diverse ethnic population).Footnote 74 Their willingness to participate in these projects of out-sourced governance and public management can be explained by the fact that funding and political toleration continue to be predominately dependent on local government bureaus. In addition, many tasks are seen as necessary from a social development perspective.
Infrastructure Modernization under the “Open up the West” Campaign
For the reconstruction plan to meet its objectives of accelerating urban–rural integration and expanding domestic demand, it was necessary to build a modern infrastructure and provide public services to local residents. By 30 September 2011, the state had constructed 2,978 schools and 1,362 hospitals, paved six national highways, built 4,625 kilometres of main roads, and repaired 1,222 damaged water reservoirs.Footnote 75 It has also mandated the establishment of nursing homes, orphanages, and cultural activity and job training centres in townships and villages – most of which have been bought by the government and are run by NGOs (zhengfu goumai fuwu 政府购买服务).Footnote 76 Considering the sheer scale of the project and the mountainous geography of many of the earthquake zones, there is certainly reason for the Chinese government to be proud of the achievements of the “open up the west” development programme. However, these projects have done little to create new opportunities for the local residents.
The infrastructure modernization programme has been plagued by problems of quality. Under pressure to complete “three years of reconstruction work in two,” as emphasized in a speech by Wen Jiabao, local governments in certain localities sacrificed quality for speed. A media report published in January 2011 highlighted such problems in Jia Ba 家坝 village, which falls under the jurisdiction of Shang De 尚德 township in Gansu province's Wen 文 county:
After the reconstruction started, 44 village households were moved into concentrated resettlements under the directive of the township government. During the reconstruction process, because of insufficient and careless work in terms of land placement, design, construction, monitoring and housing allocation, serious problems in construction quality emerged. When the villagers were supposed to move in, many “contradictions” and “disputes” arose, which affected their ability to immediately occupy their new homes.Footnote 77
The report goes on to list the names and positions of fairly high-ranking cadres who were fined, demoted or suspended for their involvement in the project. The 2011 Sichuan Provincial Audit Report cites other cases of slipshod construction work undermining basic infrastructure needs, for example “In Sichuan province, Guangyuan 广元 city, Chao Tian 朝天 district, Yang Mu 羊木 township, during the construction of the primary school, part of the construction site hardened creating an uneven surface. In many places, water has begun to accumulate, resulting in cracks in the school's foundations.”Footnote 78 There have been similar problems in elementary schools in Beichuan and elsewhere. My own fieldwork also uncovered many disputes over quality. In a small village in Wenchuan county, an angry farmer took me on a tour of the main village road, exclaiming, “The central state donated a lot of money so that Guangdong province could come and assist in the reconstruction, but look at this […] road, it is uneven and full of cracks!”Footnote 79 The lack of oversight was a systemic consequence of the ambiguous legal relationship between provincial assistance partners and local governments in Sichuan. In an interview, an official from the provincial assistance general command headquarters in X city, Zhejiang province, informed me that, “we wanted to complete the project and return home as soon as possible. The local governments wanted to increase their access to reconstruction funds. If we interfered with their projects, they would obstruct our efforts to complete our mission. We turned a blind eye to what local officials were doing. They used our money, but we had no authority to supervise them (jiandu 监督).”Footnote 80
In addition to the problems of poor quality infrastructure, many local residents were upset over what they viewed as the wasteful expenditure of money on projects that cosmetically improved their environment but failed to improve their living conditions. One villager of Qiang ethnicity dismissed the government's claim that it was protecting the Qiang identity during the reconstruction as rubbish: “if leaders visit a place, it will be protected and restored. But it is fake, it is only empty, boastful talk.”Footnote 81 The main cause of his anger was that the government spent money on erecting a brand new Qiang stone tower that is visible from the road leading to the village. They ignored the villagers' demands to restore the original Qiang stone tower which suffered structural damage from the earthquake and is in danger of collapsing. From the local state's perspective, the villagers should be happy with their new tower; however, from the opposite perspective of villagers, the new tower is a fake and devoid of the sacred symbolism and history of the original. As of May 2012, the villagers were still engaged in a prolonged dispute with the Wenchuan County Cultural Relics Office over funding to restore the original tower. I did not share with the Qiang villager my knowledge that a local Party secretary in another county was shocked at the news that his office had received funds for the refurbishment of traditional Qiang stone towers because his village, he privately admitted, did not have a single Qiang resident, let alone tower.Footnote 82 Behind this seemingly irrational waste of money lies the political incentive for local governments to maximize access to reconstruction funds, regardless of their practical utility. Without transparency, citizen monitoring and consultation, such practices are sadly inevitable.
Certain examples of wasteful infrastructure projects have assumed ludicrous proportions. In May 2012, the Mianyang municipal government demolished the Mianyang Bauhinia Ethnic Secondary School that was rebuilt after the earthquake with a donation of HK$3.65 million from the Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers and an HKSAR government trust fund.Footnote 83 The school had only opened in March 2010, but its location obstructed the plans for a commercial development project. In response to the HKSAR government's threats to withdraw their funds, the Sichuan provincial government issued an official apology and promised it would not happen again.
Demolished schools, fake ethnic monuments, uneven roads and leaking pipes in school buildings all point to why the regime's post-earthquake reconstruction plan has failed to win the hearts and minds of local residents and improve state–society relations. As local villagers witnessed the massive expenditures of money that at best incrementally improved their material conditions and at worst increased their sense of precarity, their fundamental trust in the state to serve their interests broke down. In the words of one villager who was forced to demolish her home and move into a government-constructed apartment complex, “we used to do whatever the government told us. Now we do not trust anything they say.”Footnote 84
Turning Unruly Rural Peasants into Grateful Urban Subjects
The underlying political reason for this deterioration in state–society relations is that state actors viewed villagers as problems to be solved rather than as constituents who must be consulted. When villagers' demands and desires were at odds with the design of the reconstruction plan, the regime's logic was not to modify the plan, but to reform the villagers themselves. The political economy of disaster reconstruction had to be underwritten by a biopolitical campaign to “liberate the thinking” (jiefang sixiang 解放思想) of newly urbanized villagers.
When asked to identify the major obstacles to completing reconstruction, a village Party secretary from Wenchuan county immediately pointed to the peasant mentality of “waiting, depending, and demanding”Footnote 85 on government support. This phrase has been in circulation in China since the 1970s, but is commonly used in today's lexicon to describe the remaining subjective obstacles to reform.Footnote 86 In a similarly disparaging tone, an internal report published by the Dujiangyan Municipality Party School instructs cadres that in order to achieve urban–rural integration, the “collective irrationality” and “remnants of feudal mentality” among villagers must be overcome.Footnote 87 The same report laments that, “peasants think that the maintenance of public areas is the duty of the state. They do not want to pay the fees for property management, water, electricity and gas.” There is no consideration of the fact that cash-strapped villagers may be unable to meet these new debt obligations.
When villagers do complain about the reconstruction process, their discontent is often interpreted as a deficiency in their moral character. When asked if the local villagers were unhappy with any aspect of the reconstruction, a Party secretary from a small village in Beichuan county firmly responded: “They cannot have any demands because the government has already provided them with excellent help.”Footnote 88 Internalizing this sentiment, many villagers do not dare express their grievances out of fear that others will label them as selfish and greedy and socially ostracize them. When I questioned a Communist Party cadre in Yingxiu township about villager discontent, he explained that it was a problem of human nature: “people are unable to be satisfied, their desires are too large. For some people, no matter what you do, nothing will satisfy their demands.”Footnote 89
Even if villagers do frequently bombard the local state with impossible demands, the above examples illustrate that local government officials and Party cadres view villagers as problems to be solved rather than as political constituents. To paraphrase French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, even if a paranoid husband who always suspects his wife of cheating finds proof of her infidelity, his jealousy is still pathological because of his investment in it.Footnote 90 The ways in which state actors regard their citizens will directly influence their policy decisions and choice of governance techniques.
The view that “peasants” are stubbornly attached to traditional and outdated ways of thinking is encapsulated by Dujiangyan Municipal Party School documents that emphasize the need to “energetically train and guide the transformation of rural consciousness from that of a feudal-subject to that of a citizen.”Footnote 91 This final “immaterial” phase of reconstruction was aimed at remoulding the rural subject. “After the centralized relocation of peasants, their identity status has become that of city residents and their houses are modernized – but their way of thinking and life-style still needs to undergo a process of change.”Footnote 92 In short, the state did its job of providing a modern infrastructure and houses and all that remained was the (re)construction of residents who would then appreciate their new environment.Footnote 93
In order to transform rural subjects into good citizens, the regime dispatched cadres and mobilized government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) as well as NGOs to help villagers adapt to their new circumstances. Educational pamphlets instructing residents on daily routines such as how to dispose of rubbish properly and how to handle disputes with neighbours in a civil fashion were distributed.Footnote 94 “Gratitude education” campaigns have also been launched in the disaster areas to cultivate a sense of gratitude among villagers for the help they received during the reconstruction. According to a speech given by Wenchuan county's Party secretary, Qing Lidong 青理东, at a meeting of the county-level Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, cultivating gratitude was a necessary remedy for the social contradictions produced during the reconstruction process:
Deeply layered contradictions are becoming more prominent. We confront new contradictions, problems and challenges. The people's awareness is not completely unified to the extent of perhaps being opposite. At this time, we need to promote a culture of gratitude and use this culture of gratitude to eliminate socially discordant elements (xiaochu shehui bu hexie de yinsu 消除社会不和谐的因素) and increase society's sense of happiness by making people's agitated, blind, and impractical attitudes return to reason (rang zaodong, mangmu, buqie-shiji de xintai dedao lixing de huigui 让躁动,盲目,不切实际的心态得到理性的回归). We must use a culture of gratitude to increase people's affective interactions and promote harmonious contact between people and thereby progressively unifying the thinking at each level of society.Footnote 95
The discursive tone and ideological implications of Qing's speech are clear: dissatisfied villagers lack the correct emotions and thus need to be trained in how to become grateful citizens and “return to reason.” Space for the legitimate articulation of complaint is individualized, pathologized and negated.
Educational institutions have been quick to hop on the bandwagon and follow the spirit of the Party's directives. One middle school in Wang Cang 旺苍 county launched a “gratitude education campaign” in December 2010 that is scheduled to last until March 2014. Their website explains the campaign as follows: “First, we need to start with the reality in front of us and allow students to experience personally the 700,000 helping hands extended by Party members from all over the country to help us repair our school. We should use our actions to repay the Party's kindness.”Footnote 96 These education campaigns are extensions of the sentiment of written slogans that are plastered across the earthquake zones that exhort the reader to: “Be grateful to the mighty Party for the new roads, bridges, and houses”Footnote 97 and “Reconstructing the homeland in the aftermath of disaster. When you drink water, remember its source: be grateful to the Party.”Footnote 98 There have been reports that in certain localities cadres' political evaluations will assess how they display and teach gratitude to others. However, the effectiveness of this campaign and the gratitude propaganda remains dubious. One sceptical Sichuan Provincial Party School professor acerbically remarked that it is a “performance [Party members] give for themselves.”Footnote 99 If local cadres continue to explain away villager discontent as a symptom of the stubborn character of rural residents, the real lessons of the post-earthquake reconstruction – that people-oriented development requires participationFootnote 100 – will remain unlearned.
Conclusion
Previous inquiries into the post-Wenchuan earthquake relief and reconstruction process have been over optimistic in their assessments of an emerging civil society and the state's willingness to reform and open itself up to democratic participation. These inquiries overlooked two points. Most importantly, they underestimated the power of the Leninist ideological conviction that the Party is solely responsible for developmental decisions, especially in an emergency situation when the very image of the state is what is being reconstructed. Second, a major impediment to the emergence of civil society – or at the very least, improved state–society relations and political communication mechanisms – is the dismissive attitude shown by many local cadres towards their citizens. As long as the state remains wedded ideologically and in practice to the belief that the people cannot be trusted to participate in decisions that impact their future, citizens will remain the objects of biopolitical experimentation and not political constituents.
The local state used the opportunity presented by the disaster to implement an array of national development plans designed to transform the spatial, economic, infrastructure and human contours of the Sichuan countryside. Owing to their top-down Leninist-style implementation and their lack of citizen participation, these measures often backfired and resulted in “a large gap between government relief and the needs of the victims.”Footnote 101 The gap was not created by sheer incompetence or corruption, but by a more systemic logic of state failure to listen to the masses and investigate their needs. Without grassroots participation and input, “development” disappears into its own aesthetic representation, or, as one elderly villager in Wenchuan county aptly described it, “government officials only ‘ride on horseback while looking at flowers’” (zou ma guan hua 走马观花, a Chinese expression meaning superficial knowledge based on cursory observation).Footnote 102 Consequently, the apparent paradox that the “miracle” of Sichuan's post-earthquake reconstruction/development has produced a deterioration in state–society relations at the local level can be resolved by grasping that both accounts are correct, according to their own separate logic. In terms of the political-aesthetic logic of the state, the reconstruction impressively modernized the physical infrastructure and appearance of the disaster areas by condensing 20 to 50 years of development (accounts vary) into two years. Conversely, when viewed from the perspective of local residents whose ability to earn money in an increasingly monetized economy has not improved, they are fully justified in asking the question: for whom did the state spend all of this money? In its most distilled formulation, this paradox reveals the impressive mobilizational capacity of the regime alongside its impoverished ability to understand and listen to the needs of its citizens. What should be a terrifying and potentially illuminating experience for Chinese officials, depending on how it is interpreted and the lessons drawn from it, is precisely the fact that both accounts are valid (i.e. what is good for the state politically might not be beneficial for its citizens). The urgent question for the future of Chinese politics is how to suture the gap separating the state from society.
The fact that the state devoted a tremendous amount of financial, material and human resources to the reconstruction process does not necessarily mean that it did so on behalf of the people who were the ostensible beneficiaries and who are now being taught how to be grateful subjects. When I asked a municipal vice-secretary why villagers were unhappy with the reconstruction process, he replied with a question of his own: “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, does it still count as a present?”Footnote 103
