Zhou An'an and Wu Jing on "Like a Flowing River"

Zhou An’an and Wu Jing, "The whole country is working hard, and I'm just one of those workers"[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction
 
The text translated here should be read together with the longer piece on the Industrial Party available on this site, as both illustrate efforts by scholars to fashion online ideology into coherent political discourse, in this instance in the hopes of shaping historical narratives embraced by popular culture.  It sounds a bit convoluted, I know.
 
Zhou An’an and Wu Jing are both attached to the Institute of New Media and Communication at Peking University, and the institute is known to be supportive of the ideology of the Industrial Party, an online nationalist group that supports industrialism and technocracy and disdains liberals and anything “touchy-feely.”  Both the Institute and the Industrial Party hope to salvage some elements of the Maoist era, including state-planning and state-owned enterprises, as these are conducive to preserving and expanding China’s industrial base.
 
Despite the Industrial Party’s disdain for anything touchy-feely, the article by Zhou and Wu is a positive critique of a Chinese television series, Like a Flowing River 大江大河, which began airing in 2018.  You can watch the series on Youtube here, although the subtitles are not always very accurate.  The television series is based on an online novel by written by Anai 阿耐, based in turn on her considerable experience as an entrepreneur.  Thus the novel—and the series—is rich in details concerning the ins and outs of economic life in China during reform and opening.
 
For Zhou An’an and Wu Jing, the great virtue of Flowing like a River is that offers a narrative of the period of reform and opening that is not grounded in heroic stories of individual entrepreneurs or migrant workers, but instead focuses on the fate of state-owned industries and village collectives.  Thus, as in the case of the longer piece on the Industrial Party, we find ourselves face to face with the question of China’s “two thirty years” and whether the Mao era and the Deng era should be seen as continuous or discontinous.  Zhou and Wu vote for “continuous” and hence praise the television series for rescuing state-owned enterprises and village collectives from the dustbin of history.
 
I confess to have been slightly puzzled by this piece.  I understand the importance of historical narrative in popular culture, as well as the fact that popular media surely shape those narratives, but have a hard time seeing how Zhou and Wu, as scholars, hope to have an impact in the process.  The novelist Anan surely writes for her fans, and the fans watch the television series in large measure because of the celebrities starring in it.  How does the authors’ praise of the narrative enter into the picture?

In any event, it tells us something about what young, nationalistic intellectuals are thinking about these days, as well as about the forces shaping popular culture.
 
Translation

Retelling the History of Reform and Opening: "Like a Flowing River’s” Breakthrough 
 
With the help of a certain historical distance, China’s experience of reform and opening in the 1980s and 1990s is becoming the focus of attention yet again.  Since 2018, we have seen increasing numbers of works in the field of popular culture that narrate the experience of reform and opening, aiming for a re-understanding of the experience, and one of the most typical and rewarding of these works is the television tribute drama 献礼剧, “Like a Flowing River 大江大河.” Taking the process of the restructuring of China's economic production methods as its main narrative thread, the drama has gained both popularity and success, becoming a work of art that has been enthusiastically viewed, discussed, and praised by the audience in general, and especially by the younger generation.
 
As work that sounds major propaganda themes 主旋律, Like a Flowing River breaks through the limitations of similar past works in depicting China's development path on two basic levels: the first breakthrough is that the narrative is no longer limited to revolutionary history and the historical exploits of heroic figures, but instead positively describes the experience of China's social and economic construction in the new era; the second breakthrough is that, at the level of popular culture, it goes beyond the narrative paradigm of China's reform and opening by viewing large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as the mainstay of China's industrialization process in this period, and by seeing rural development as part of the construction of a collective economy, thus breaking with the past practice of telling the history of reform and opening through stories of individualistic entrepreneurs, the spread of advanced Western management experience, and the changing fate of migrant workers in southern export factories.

Today, the public agenda of the worlds of production and life in China has changed: in terms of production, the place of large SOEs in the global high-tech industry has become the most important public issue; in terms of life, the importance of localities, small towns and rural areas as ethical communities is highlighted. Like a Flowing River’s retelling of China's experience in the 1980s and 1990s focuses on these two aspects as well.
 
Large SOEs as the Engine of Technological Development
 
In previous film and television works dealing with commercial battles and the workplace, the image of SOEs was obscured by the halo of heroic narratives of newly emerging economic sectors and entrepreneurial ventures, usually as a flickering backdrop for the survival of low-end productivity and workers who were shunted aside and forgotten. On the other hand, in some art films that go in for historical nostalgia or that dig a little deeper,  the decline of SOEs, the hardships and dilemmas of the working class, and the historical betrayal suffered by this class are the central messages conveyed.

For a long time, reporting on SOEs has been largely absent from narratives of China's economic development, technological progress, and industrial upgrading in public media. In fact, SOEs laid a solid foundation for China's autonomous industrialization and achievement of national energy, technology, and military security during the early years of socialism, and have played a major role in infrastructure development, core technological innovation, and the creation of China as a manufacturing powerhouse since reform and opening. The narrative tradition treating the first three decades of China’s development has consolidated into a mainstream view of that period, but the same cannot be said for the second thirty years.

Since the U.S.-China trade war and the coronavirus epidemic, China's core technological capabilities and manufacturing resilience in the fields of electricity, transportation, communications, aerospace, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals have been abundantly praised in the mass media, leading to a cognitive gap between the perceptions provided by cultural works and the reality of the phenomenon.
 
The script of Like a Flowing River fills this cognitive gap. The first part of the drama tells the story of how old Chinese SOEs imported Western technology, modernized their management style, and reformed themselves for the market economy in the 1980s—without touching the issue of ownership reform.  The second part has the introduction of technology and the promotion of joint ventures in a newly built chemical plant as the main story line, and depicts China's path in the early 1990s from a state of technological isolation to surfing the wave of the global technological revolution and thus finding the resources needed to develop itself.  By narrating the three technological transformations engineered by the technically-oriented cadre Song Yunhui, Like a Flowing River illustrates the general logic, methods, and problems of the development, operation, and technological upgrading of socialist enterprises.
 
The first technical transformation was launched by Song Yunhui in his capacity as a grassroots worker. As a college student majoring in chemical engineering and newly assigned to the factory, Song Yunhui, who loves technology, developed a real passion for working on all the processes, operations and maintenance of the plant's equipment after being unexpectedly assigned to work the shift system.

On this basis, he comprehensively recorded and calculated the waste of raw materials and energy and the decrease in production capacity caused by equipment "leakage," and proposed to the factory leaders a temporary suspension of production that would allow the maintenance section to fully repair the equipment before resuming production, finally winning the approval of workers and managers. In this process, the plant's implementation of and adherence to the logic of technology overcame the challenges posed by bureaucratic thinking and the workers' culture, illustrating that under the ownership of state-owned enterprises, process optimization does not actually conflict with the rights and interests of workers and the performance of leaders.

Technical transformation, maintenance and upgrading of equipment, meticulousness and excellence in work are inherent requirements of socialist corporate rationality and corporate culture under certain conditions. However, the unity of the factory community slowly began to crack during reform and opening and marketization due to the multiplication of actors with different interests, which gradually ate away at production. This led Song Yunhui to his next technical transformation, full of twists and turns as well as conflicts.
 
The second technical transformation had to do with a debate over which technical path to follow:  the path of "simply expanding production" versus that of "updating cutting-edge technology." When the factory debate was submitted to the Beijing ministry, Song Yunhui challenged the ministry's "big picture view" of simply improving the supply of domestic textile consumer goods, and proposed instead to focus on the latest breakthroughs in international chemical technology and market prospects, which the domestic chemical industry had not yet dealt with at the time. 

Both sides of the debate had seemingly reasonable strategies. In this instance, instead of sticking to the stereotypical language of technology upgrades and static consumer demand planning, Song Yunhui introduced the idea of dynamic market and technology changes into the daily management thinking of state-owned enterprises by linking technology assessment to dynamic market needs. His goal was to use the consumption level of the most advanced industrial countries to envision and serve China's emerging buyers' market and the rising tide of technological innovation, with an eye toward making enterprise-building into a technology leader. 

In his book Change at the Speed of Light 光变,[2] Lu Feng 路风[3] singles out "pursuit of technology" and "self-reliance" as the two main spiritual tools 精神法宝employed by Chinese technology SOEs to achieve technological upgrading.  In Like a Flowing River, we get a sense of the unique characteristics and practical methodology of a similar socialist SOE.  Even if technological upgrading in Like a Flowing River relies chiefly on the "import of advanced foreign equipment," the entire process is “China-centered,” and insists on digesting and absorbing the new equipment and technology, mastering the technical principles involved, integrating them with the original equipment on this basis, and conducting R&D and development for the Chinese market.

The third struggle over which line of  technological innovation to choose took place in the newly planned Donghai Chemical Plant. After Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992, international capital began to actively seek to enter China, and Chinese SOEs began to explore further ways to cooperate internationally. The new struggle involved a controversy over the very nature of the enterprise: should the Donghai plant simply bring in advanced foreign equipment while retaining the traditional "national capital 全国资"[4] form; or should it instead pay for new equipment by selling equity, using the attractiveness of the Chinese market and Donghai's excellent infrastructure to attract the most advanced international companies, production lines, and management resources?

The director of the ministry, Mr. Lu, who had supported Song Yunhui all along, disagreed with him at this juncture.  Song Yunhui argued that the company should absolutely take advantage of international capital’s positive view of China, bargaining from a posture of maximum flexibility and making necessary concessions, all in order to raise the capacity of Chinese chemical enterprises in terms of technology, production, management and R&D as quickly as possible, creating a virtuous cycle of independent development, which would allow the company to compete with advanced international chemical enterprises on an equal footing. 

By contrast, Director Lu pointed out that, as China opens up rapidly, she should pay attetion not only to the opportunities offered by international capital, but also international capital’s use of its overwhelming advantages in industry standards, intellectual property rights, and baseline logic to crowd out and suppress third world enterprises, "otherwise the third world will no longer be the third world." Director Lu argued that in a situation in which global chemical enterprises have already created a "Big Mac" model of vertical integration and supply chain control, and in which Chinese enterprises—part of the era of the planned economy—are divided between different localities and ministries and had no experience in dealing with the international market, simply allowing everyone to do what they wish will readily result in a situation of duplication of construction and internal consumption of production capacity. 

Therefore, Lu continued, we should first complete industry integration, and then compete with international rivals. If foreign investment leads to changes in the nature of Chinese enterprises, international capital interference will likely be added to the existing obstruction of domestic interest groups. In the end, Song Yunhui was convinced by Director Lu’s political logic. Having witnessed the US-China trade and technology wars since 2018, the audience will surely have a deeper understanding of the stakes of this technological choice.
 
The Path of Industrialization for China’s Villages:  Collectivization 
 
The narrative in popular culture concerning the survival and development of peasants and small producers in the history of reform and opening up is dominated by two plot lines: "the responsibility system" and "trading chicken feathers for candy 鸡毛换糖[5] [i.e., bartering and eventually trading for any possible commodity]." The common feature of these two narratives is that they emphasize the role played by individuals and families as basic economic units in the market exchange system once collective agriculture was abandoned, and individual struggles and family conflicts are the main driving force of the story lines.

In contrast to these two narrative models, Like a Flowing River takes the township enterprises that flourished in the rural areas of southern Jiangsu in the 1980s as the main narrative line, emphasizing the importance of the collective as a form of economic and life organization in the structure of Chinese society. The story of the gradual development of the collective enterprise in Lei Dongbao's village is not a history of a business following the commercial logic of individual struggle, but instead a history of the lives of Chinese peasants, still deeply embedded in family and place; and the process of the villagers' participation in collective production in Little Lei Family Village is a process of dealing with various social and ethical relations in their own life world.
 
The story of the establishment of a township enterprise in Little Lei Family Village unfolds along two main lines.  The first concerns the social relations within the village, which tells the story of the village as a whole under the leadership of Lei Dongbao, the village head, who deals with the complex human relations in the process of reform and unites the villagers so that they can function as a collective, despite the changing interests of individual peasants. 

The second narrative thread deals with how Lei's village, as the most grassroots administrative unit, interacts with the local government at the township and county levels in the process of development, so that the development of the village manages to maintain the flexibility and elasticity needed for grassroots exploration, without abandoning general policy as fixed by the center.
 
As an ancient civilization founded on agriculture, the question of how to cope with the vulnerability of the traditional social structure, dominated by agricultural production, in the face of the impact of industrial society, has been central to the preoccupations of Chinese intellectuals when thinking about the village in modern times. In the early period of reform and opening, Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910-2005)[6] suggested that township enterprises could be “a path of industrialization with Chinese characteristics. This would be different from the path of early Western capitalist industrialization in that it would not have a destructive effect on agriculture, and it would not leave the peasants impoverished.”

What made the establishment of township enterprises possible—outside of local geographical considerations—were the organizational achievements of socialist revolutionary collectivization: "When the family contract responsibility system was implemented in the countryside, the peasants in southern Jiangsu did not divide up the industries belonging to the communes, but preserved the collective economic entities…The industrialization of the rural areas of southern Jiangsu was launched by the commune system, and the start-up capital came from the peasants' collective accumulation." Thirty years later, looking back on the development of rural areas in different regions of China, we can also see that this development took different paths after the implementation of the household contract responsibility system, and the ability to form an internally generated system of collective industry was a key factor in these differences.
 
In the past, most village stories were ethical dramas, and the audience's understanding of rural life was always rather static, meaning that they were unable to connect the changes in human ethics in the vast countryside with the drastic changes in production and lifestyle over the past forty years. Like a Flowing River goes in the opposite direction, developing the personalities of the characters in the collective production process. The most vivid character in the series is Lei Dongbao, the village head of Little Lei Family Village, and the richness of his character grows out of his commitment to leading the people of the village out of poverty and toward common prosperity. 

In this process, he cannot let any of the older villagers fall behind and miss the train, nor can he let the newly emerging “dynamos” use the collective assets for their individual interests. This collective concept is the inner motivation that keeps Lei Dongbao moving forward, and is also the value standard he quite naturally clings to when negotiating between different interests. As a village leader, Lei Dongbao displays a certain recklessness, but his firm belief in the collective reins in his risk-taking and self-importance, allowing him to make overall plans, so that his seeming roughness in fact conceals considerable subtlety—which is the proper temperament for a village leader. 

In terms of narrative detail, Like a Flowing River is focused on the integrated relationship between township enterprises and village communities. On the one hand, the profits earned by the township enterprises are shared by the village community; on the other, the enterprises are organized based on the social networks and interpersonal relationships in the village, and receive administrative support during the policy transition because of the strength of the identity of the village community.
 
Another major set of relationships portrayed in the plot line concerning Little Lei Family Village is the relationship between the village collective and the Party leadership team at the county level. In the storyline addressing the two low points in the life of village leader Lei Dongbao, the focus of the conflict is on the role of county and township leadership.

Here, the rural grassroots and the state are shown to have a benign relationship in the process of market-led industrialization: at a time when the rules of the market economy were not yet clear, the relationship between the local government and the township enterprises was one of mutual assistance—the township enterprises boldly sought their way, and by setting up model experiments, the government confirmed the relationship between grassroots experimentation and the general policy of the state; when market rules gradually became clearer and some of the business practices in the grassroots experiments began to cross the line, the grassroots government, while applying the principle of the rule of law, also had a management relationship with the village collectives which went beyond clarifying property rights.
 
Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893-1988)[7] once used the metaphor of the "iron hook and beancurd 铁钩与豆腐" to illustrate the tension between the modern state and rural agriculture in the process of industrialization in modern China. For China, which was based on a small-peasant economy, many construction projects championed by the bureaucracy came to be like "iron hooks" eviscerating "bean curd," which eventually degenerated into "wasting money and manpower” and “exorbitant taxes and levies." Liang Shuming is often regarded as the representative figure of the "nation-building through agriculture" school in the Republican period, but he actually attached great importance to industrialization, and especially to how China could conceive of a path that avoided the abnormal urban-rural relationship produced under capitalist-style industrialization.

The tension between "iron hooks" and "bean curd" has always appeared in different historical periods after the establishment of New China and under different industrialization conditions. By contrast, Flowing like a River  focuses on presenting a kind of local industrialization that follows Liang Shuming’s ideal of  "taking care of both body and mind," something that would transcend previous narratives of rural industrialization that frequently evoked themes such as “the liberation of the individualistic peasant” versus “the poor peasant who is unable to resist the market.”

Mainstream Film and Television Works as Historical Narrators
 
The third part of Flowing like a River will be released in 2022, and the narrative time period covered will likely be from the period after Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour to China's accession to the World Trade Organization, covering a time span of some 20 years. This epic approach to everyday life provides Chinese audiences, who have been living in a constant state of conceptual change, with a long-term perspective on their own lives, providing a panoramic view of the fate of three groups—workers, peasants, and businessmen—in the process of industrialization. In addition to the history of the development of large state-owned chemical enterprises and township enterprises, which is the focus of this article, beginning with part two, the role of a third male character, Yang Xun, who represents businessmen (private entrepreneurs), also gradually comes to the fore.

Overall, this series, with its panoramic historical presentation and its precise and dispassionate audiovisual presentation, organically combines emotion and reality, developmental path and developmental experience, thus coming together as a logical and self-consistent narrative universe in terms of both form and content. 
 
Popular culture has presented of the history of reform and opening in two basic ways: one is to show the improvement of material living standards of ordinary people achieved through personal struggle;  and the other is to show the erosive effects of of materialism on people's minds from a perspective of critical realism. Both of these narratives ignore the changes in the technological production process, the changes in labor patterns and the interaction between the ways of the world and popular mentalities. Flowing like a River is groundbreaking in this respect, in that it shows the daily labor of ordinary people in an industrialized society and the accompanying changes in social life.

The reason that the depiction of the three technical upgrades experienced by Song Yunhui strikes a chord with the audience is in large measure because because this accords with the work experience of a generation of young students graduating from technical colleges:  they join the world of work having embraced technical ideals, then gradually find where their technical capabilities fit in with different stakeholders and different strategic goals within the complex organizational culture of large-scale bureaucratic enterprises. In a discussion with the county party cadres, Lei Dongbao talks about what he perceived as the characteristics of the villagers of Little Lei Family Village: "most ordinary people think a bit more about themselves and a bit less about others, but they want to live the good life without taking anything from anyone else.”  

It is also just such ordinary people who they have the energy to organize and complete the collectivization of industry, so that the village collective does not become a small peasant with no bargaining power in the globalized world. These are the most positive experiences of cultural change in industrial society over the last forty years, as presented by the series.
 
In attempting to present a panoramic view of history, the narrative of the series leaves some things out. The "industrialization of large SOEs" represented by the part of the series focused on Song Yunhui emphasizes how SOEs have developed a path of technological innovation in research and production, avoiding sensitive issues such as personnel management and restructuring. In the part devoted to Little Lei Family Village, the focus is on the organization of the village collective and beyond, and the environmental problems caused by industrialization at the grassroots level are merely hinted at, while the personal characteristics of Lei Dongbao as a manager are used to avoid discussion of the institutional controversies that occurred in township enterprises after the restructuring of property rights in 1993. 

But it is also because of such choices that the strong points and shortcomings of Flowing like a River took on the contemporary significance that it did. What makes the drama so moving is also its attempt to re-structure the received historical narratives:  the experiences they chose are not just technical transplants from overseas films and television, nor are they merely the heartfelt expressions of a handful of people, but stand out as something that can reach the hearts and minds of most ordinary viewers. The forty years of reform and opening represents a period of the Chinese historical experience that has yet to be sorted out and summarized, and Flowing like a River offers a possible attempt at such at the level of popular culture. 
 
Notes

[1]周安安, 吴靖, “整个国家都在努力, 而我不过是其中一份子,” published on the site of Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横  on June 1, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Published in 2016, At the Speed of Light “is a history of [Chinese electronic components producer] BOE's re-launch. It chronicles BOE's epic rise in a global high technology industry. By telling this true story - the real performance of a real team in a real world - the dynamics of China's economic development are explained,” according to introductory paragraphs of the Baidu entry on the book. 

[3]Translator’s note:  Lu Feng is a professor at Peking University’s School of Government, and a long-time chronicler of China’s technology industries.

[4]Translator’s note:  I presume this means that all capital will be financed by the Chinese state, or from Chinese sources.

[5]Translator’s note:  The concrete reference is to the specific case of Yiwu 义乌, in central Zhejiang, a poor region with few resources, where peasants made brown sugar-ginger candy which they then traded for chicken feathers, useful among other things as fertilizer.  Yiwu’s tradition goes back to at least the Ming dynasty, and under reform and opening, Yiwu has become a major domestic and international center for commodity trading.  More broadly, “trading chicken feathers for candy” means scraping the bottom of the barrel to commercialize anything available.

[6]Fei Xiaotong is recognized as the founding father of Chinese sociology and anthropology.

[7]Translator’s note:  Liang Shuming (1893-1988) was a famous philosopher and “rural reformer” during the Republican period, who famously quarreled with Mao Zedong in the early 1950s.
​