Guo Yuhua, "Original Intentions"

Guo Yuhua, “Original Intentions Start with the People”

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.
 
N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
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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.