Guo Yuhua, "Original Intentions"

“Original Intentions Start with the People”[1]
Guo Yuhua
 
Translation and Introduction by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Guo Yuhua (b. 1956) is a well-known sociologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  Academically, she is perhaps best known for her project, carried out with fellow Tsinghua sociologist Sun Liping 孙立平 (b. 1955) and others on “communist civilization 共产主义文明.”  The project, launched in the mid-1990s used an oral history approach to tell the story of life in village China, beginning with collectivization and land reform and continuing, in some cases, through the beginning of the reform and opening era.  Several villages were chosen in north and south China, and teams of scholars and students spent many months with the peasants over the years, building relationships and collecting data.  Guo worked in Ji village in northern Shaanxi (陕北骥村), and the results of her work were eventually published in her 2013 volume, The Narrative of Those Who Suffer:  The History of Ji Village and the Logic of a Civilization 受苦人的歷史：驥村歷史與一種文明的邏輯 (published by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong).  As the title suggests, Guo’s work reflects her embrace of “the people” and her engagement with Western theorists such as James Scott. 
 
Guo’s embrace of the people has made her a trenchant critic of China’s authorities, as reflected in this 2018 New York Review of Books interview with journalist Ian Johnson.   This critical stance has ultimately limited the diffusion of her work and hence her influence.  Her book is banned in China (friends and colleagues “smuggle” in copies for her from Hong Kong) and her posts on social media are frequently taken down by authorities.
 
The text translated here is one of Guo’s recent social media posts which, like many others, was quickly removed from the internet.  The post was prompted by the decision by Beijing municipal authorities to remove a significant part of Beijing’s “low-end population 低端人口” (i.e., migrant workers) as part of a city clean-up campaign in late 2017, a campaign which made headlines outside of China as well.  Guo used this “campaign” as part of a broader criticism of the heavy-handed, top-down style of political leadership which, she insists, has changed little over the years, despite four decades of “reform and opening.”  Her use of the notion of “original intention” in the title and elsewhere in the post is meant to be ironic.  Party authorities use the term to suggest (among other things) affinities between Party rule and Confucian benevolence, both of which are grounded in “the people.”[2]  Guo’s text thus also serves as an example of what can no longer be said in China (aside from the mention of the “Nazi overtones” of the removal of Beijing’s “low-end population,” Guo’s text is not particularly radical).
 
In the context of our Reading the China Dream project, we sought out Guo in the hopes of beginning to correct the gender imbalance of the world that we study.  The vast majority of public intellectuals in China—and particularly public intellectuals who publish in high-profile venues—are men.    We may deplore this, but at present it appears to be a sociological fact, even if the reasons for the imbalance are not immediately clear.  Tim Cheek and I met with Guo at Tsinghua in early December of 2018, and when we asked her to explain the male domination of China’s public intellectual world, she replied with a wry smile that “systems are gendered, too.”  In any event, we plan to work with Guo to identify a body of women public intellectuals whose work we will translate and add to the web site over the coming months and years. 
 
Translation
 
It was at the end of 2017, the closing of a day at the beginning of winter.  Triggered by a fire in the Daxing 大兴 district on November 18, the entire city of Beijing plunged itself into a 40-day long special exercise to root out and clean up hidden safety problems.  The clean-up work naturally linked up with efforts to phase out non-municipal functions 疏解非首都功能[3] and reduce the population of migrant workers.  According to the previously announced upper population limits in each district and the number of people to be relocated, Beijing would need to deal with more than 3,000,000 outsiders.  A movement aimed at cleaning up the “low-end population 低端人口” quickly kicked into high gear, and even if the term was quickly dropped because of its Nazi overtones, the clean-up work continued to move forward like a thunderstorm. 
 
The results of the campaign were immediately obvious:  some migrant workers left with their families, others moved to even more marginal areas of the city, while a few lost souls wandered around the cold night streets.  Beijing landlords suffered heavy losses as their renters vacated their buildings, and outside merchants who had catered to the migrants lost their shirts.  Rents shot up on all grades of housing [as the affected population struggled to relocate].  Beijing residents also suffered:  shops in the neighborhood closed down [as migrant workers left], which made buying groceries, shopping and eating out difficult, especially for old people.  Nannies who suddenly found themselves without housing had to go back to their villages.  Taxi drivers couldn’t find a place to eat.  Many white-collar workers living in mid-level or low-level housing were anxious, fearing night raids by the police.  A Tsinghua Ph.D., who was already teaching in a university had to find new housing overnight because his rental unit was caught up in the clean-up.
 
The 40-day clean-up had hardly begun when another campaign began with the call to bring forth a beautiful “skyline” by destroying signs and billboards.  There was heavy equipment all over Beijing, and billboards, building signs and work unit identification plaques all came falling down.  This was even the case of well-known organizations like China National Geography [magazine], China International Broadcasting Station, the Baidu Building, the China Grain Reserve Management Company, China Agricultural University, the Shangdi Office Center, the Zhongguancun Enterprise Building, the National Open University, the Zhongguancun Kemao Electronic City…all of these signs disappeared.  
 
According to the plan, there were some 27,000 illegal advertisements that were to be torn down before the end of the year.  It didn’t take long for people to feel that destruction was proceeding at a dizzying pace, [and people asked one another] “do you still know the way home (or to work)?”  I heard that the reasoning behind the destruction of signs was the following:  the roofs of the skyscrapers and the billboards come together to make up what called the “skyline 天际线,” the city’s calling card, as well as an important organized part of the city’s landscape.  Crafting a more beautiful landscape for Beijing required new regulations, in order to accelerate the legal clean-up activities targeting the illegal signs.
 
We have to wonder if this is really a legal campaign to remove illegal signage, or if the goal is rather to create a beautiful skyline?  These are not the same thing.  First, where is the campaign’s legitimacy?  When the signs were put up, did they not follow regulations?  Who decides what is illegal and what is not?  Next, what is the “legitimacy” of the beautiful skyline?  The signage may be obscuring the skyline but the skyscrapers are much taller than the billboards…Aren’t they obscuring the skyline too?  Will removing the obstacles reveal a beautiful skyline?  Will uniformity be beautiful?  Is empty beautiful?  Are the cities of the world, full of all sorts of signage, ugly?  Should the government decide what is beautiful and what is not?  Massive destruction leads to commercial losses, the waste of vast amounts of capital and resources, inconvenience for the citizens, and huge amounts of garbage.  Who is finally benefiting from this?  To my mind, this is not at all clear.
 
The third year-end misery was the changeover from heating with coal to heating with natural gas or electricity 煤改气（电）.  This was something meant to benefit the people and protect the environment, and we cannot say that the original intention 初衷was not good.  The government agencies responsible for the change certainly worked hard at it, but they too attacked the problem campaign-style, ruthlessly promoting it throughout North China, establishing “coal free areas” and promoting the “switch from coal to natural gas.”  In some areas they went to far as to threaten coercion, warning that “whoever sells coal will be arrested; whoever burns coal will be arrested.”
 
To control smog, reduce fine particulate matter, and preserve the blue skies of Beijing and Tianjin, government agencies certainly went all out, but did policy makers ever stop to consider what the negative consequences of the campaign might be?  Especially for people in rural villages who for many years have been burning coal and straw for heating and to cook their food?  Are their heaters and pipes properly installed to handle the change?  Is the supply of natural gas timely and adequate? Is the state supplement offered to those making the changeover sufficient to pay for the work that needs to be done?  Are they sure that natural gas is safe?  What might be the effects of the changeover on different regions, climates, and popular habits?  This is a process that impacts a large number of systems, and attacking it campaign-style is sure to produce lots of problems.  Some places had given up coal only to find that gas wasn’t available or wasn’t sufficient; many companies and enterprises were compelled to stop or limit production for this reason.  Some peasant households made the changeover only to find that the heating didn’t work and they had to endure the cold.  This was particularly hard on the elderly and the children.  There were even primary schools in some villages that were reduced to holding classes outside in the sun, and the children ran around trying to stay warm. 
 
Only after the complaints of the shivering people filled the streets, after the houses had been knocked down, the heaters shut down, the billboards, signs and placards torn down, production stopped, stores closed, the daily routines of the people upturned, only then did the Environment Ministry issue its “letter concerning properly carrying out the work of coal management and ensuring that the masses comfortably get through the winter,” pointing out that “in the case of projects or areas where the work is not yet completed, they have the choice of continuing to heat with coal or changing to alternative methods.”  It was only at this point that the leadership began talking about “paying attention to cultural activities and human society,” and “warming the people’s hearts.”  It was only at this point that mainstream media began to insist that “we must not use extreme work methods that leave the masses’ homes or hearts cold.”  Might this have been a bit tardy? 
 
The three things I just discussed—population, signage and heating (environment) —are in fact one thing:  they all have to do with the city, they all involve management through campaigns, and the underlying thought pattern is that of a planned economy.  Obviously, the existence of a city is as complicated as a natural ecology, city ecologies have always been pluralistic, based on mutual give and take and cooperation.  People of different social classes live together in cities, and make demands on one another in the course of economic and social life, and this mutual work and play constitute the ecology of city life.  No one can live alone in a city, no matter what “level” he or she occupies, and when you clear away the “low-level population,” the influence will be felt by the mid-levels and the higher-levels, as I argued above.  Such changes in a city’s ecology are bad for everyone.
 
Managing the diverse life of a city ecology through the mentality of a planned economy cannot work.  As in the case of economic activity, even the most intelligent mind or think-tank cannot understand everything, adjust everything, control everything.  This is mission impossible.  The function of government is not to manage and control everything, but rather is to protect the legitimate rights of enterprises and individuals through law, regulations and procedures, and to provide the public commodities and services required by city life.  For example, to manage the problem of urban smog, the government should scientifically establish and publicize standards, and any enterprise, government body, or region that is not ready to make the changeover from coal to gas (or electricity) can autonomously manage its transformation, achieving a balance between meeting the standards and coping with its capacities, making progress in a gradual fashion.
 
Given the complexity of city management, a one-size-fits-all, petal-to-the-metal approach cannot work.  In fact, we are still managing in a “Great Leap Forward” campaign style, a management tradition that China continues to employ.  By campaign style, I mean an all-out effort that ignores concrete details, non-institutional and unscientific methods that ignore unfortunate consequences, all of which goes against standard procedure.  We’ve seen this over and over again in campaigns in our lifetime, which in practice caused huge disasters, proving that this approach does not work.  The reason that we keep doing this in China is because the mechanism is one of top-heavy coercion, with each level of government only paying attention to the top, rather to the bottom, to say nothing of being responsible to the people.
 
The basic logic of campaign-style governance is:  first, bureaucratic logic, with its emphasis on results and achievements; second, the logic of pleasing the ruler 楚王好细腰, which means extreme enthusiasm for the policy and competition to carry it out, which means that going too far is preferable to not doing enough; and third, the logic of great unity 大一统, meaning unified planning that ignores differences in terms of regions, situations, professions, and demands uniformity.
 
From this it is clear that, in terms of city development and governance, the problem is not that of “going too fast,” or “going too far,” or “lacking methodology.”  The problem is the basic thought patterns behind management thinking.
 
Another important problem created by the three urban initiatives discussed above has to do with considerations of the people’s lives and the people’s hearts.  What is the point of a city?  For whom is a city built?  For whom does it develop?  This looks like a simple question, something that goes without saying.  Isn’t the point of a city for people to live in it?  Isn’t the point of city management to make the people living there happy?  But in actual practice it is precisely on this point that things have gone off the tracks, and we have forgotten our original intention.  After the Nineteenth Party Congress [in October 2017], the Party and the government frequently brought up the notion of “original intention,” and someone provided eight examples of the meaning of the expression to help the people understand it.[4]  To my mind, the most important and most basic of them all is number six: “Persist in your original intention, continue to believe that the basis of the Party is the people, cling to the idea that everything is for the people, everything relies on the people.  Fully develop the positive spirit, the initiative, and the creativity of the masses, and unstintingly develop undertakings that create happiness for the people.”
 
The common people might wonder what the original intention actually was.  Clearly, if we turn our backs on the original intention, then no matter how good it was at the outset, the result we produce will be a disaster.  Smart people know that all under heaven is the people’s all under heaven, the city is the city dwellers’ city.  If there were no people, why would we need a government, and if we pay no attention to the people’s lives, then what’s the point of the capital?  City management must be based on the people.  If the basis is not the life and heart of the people, then all governance plans, management measures and concrete policies will miss their mark, and wind up producing negative or even disastrous consequences.  If the people are crawling on the ground, women and children sobbing and weeping, what a responsible government should do is surely clear as day.
 
Notes
 
[1] 郭于华, “初心所在 以人为本,” originally published on her blog Dec 8, 2017, the post was subsequently removed and the blog closed by authorities.
[2] See for example Jiang Shigong’s discussion of “original intentions” in https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html  .
[3] Translator’s note :  This is part of Xi Jinping’s campaign to remake Beijing city so that it will be among the world’s great capitals, in part by relocating “non-municipal functions” such as manufacturing, logistics, and wholesale markets to districts outside Beijing.  See “Beijing to continue phasing out non-capital functions in the next five years.”
[4] Below is a simplified version of “not forgetting original intentions:”
1.  Never forget original intentions:  persist in Marxism-Leninism.
2.  Never forget original intentions:  struggle for communism and socialism.
3.  Never forget original intentions:  persist in the four self-confidences of socialism with Chinese characteristics, persist in the Party’s basic line.
4.  Never forget original intentions:  promote the strategic arrangement of “the overall plan for promoting economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological progress” and the “four comprehensives,” promote the overall construction of a moderately prosperous society.
5.  Never forget original intentions:  do not swerve from reform and opening.
6.  Never forget original intentions:  rely on the people for all things, progress toward the goal of creating happiness for the people.
7.  Never forget original intentions:  follow the path of peaceful development.
8.  Never forget original intentions:  preserve the progressive nature and the purity of the party.