Abstract
The Politics of Compassion is an emotionally and intellectually engaging book. Drawing on extensive in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, news articles and other reports, Xu tells a compelling story of how, after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, civically-minded individuals and organizations in China reached out to the victims and their families, participated in public rituals of mourning, interacted with state bureaucrats in these efforts, and, in so doing, navigated in drastically different ways the boundaries between the state and civil society. Xu documents the ‘consensus crisis’ brought about by the earthquake, analyzing how it temporarily destabilized the priorities of state agencies and NGOs and manufactured a social space by their cooperation in rescue-and-relief efforts. Meanwhile, the author’s analysis shows that these collaborative moments, in the long run, did not result in cultural consolidation or political transformation. Individual volunteers interpreted their actions in diverse ways, drawing upon values of nationalism, communist altruism, individualism, religion, and so on. State actors reasserted control over the narratives about the tragedy, while most citizens – with the exception of what Xu calls the tiny public constituted by intellectuals and the liberal media – responded with a concerted political apathy. In the end, Xu concludes, the tightly patrolled boundaries between civil society and the polity remain unchallenged.
As an empirical account, the pages of Politics of Compassion provide invaluable details about the cultural and political developments surrounding the Sichuan Earthquake. In particular, having worked as a volunteer in Sichuan, Xu presents stories capturing rich and complex emotions that different social groups in China developed toward both the Earthquake and its interpretations.
As a theoretically informed analysis, this book contributes to the growing literature on Chinese civil society in unique ways. Here I highlight one. By attending to the intricate connections between institutional practices and cultural meanings, Xu offers an original and nuanced argument about both the potential and limitations of the types of civic engagements in China. Xu’s analysis illustrates that the admittedly very limited autonomy of NGO-actors constitutes a first line of defense against the monopoly of power by the state. For example, volunteers deviated from the official ideology in their articulations of multi-vocal messages about the meanings of their activities. At the same time, Xu cautions against romanticizing the political potential of this multi-vocality. One of the most original arguments in the book is about the intentional political apathy displayed by volunteers, as the state proceeded to sanction investigations into or discussions about the shoddy constructions of the schools that collapsed during the Earthquake. They ‘directly interacted with people with grievances but . . . chose to convince themselves not to care about things outside of their immediate responsibility’ (p. 145; emphasis mine). Xu shows that it is not just state oppression, but also this ‘habit of the heart’, that serve to limit how much political transformation can be expected from the emergent Chinese civil society. As such, Xu sheds important lights on what is possible or forbidden in a nascent civil society under an authoritarian state.
The book concludes with the suggestion that the way forward lies in the development of a robust political society, such as ‘parties, elections, electoral rules, political leadership, interparty alliances, and legislative bodies’ (p. 201). Returning to what he calls the ‘real’ Tocqueville, Xu argues that it is not in civil society, but in the polity, where we find the institutional arrangements that protect and encourage political debates and decision-makings among citizens.
I think Xu’s discussion of the tiny public – a key exception to most volunteers’ intentional political apathy – can be further strengthened by being explicitly connected to this conclusion. Xu shows how, challenging the grandiose official narratives commemorating the Earthquake, the intellectuals in the tiny public kept ordinary people at the center of their narratives. Conceding that readers might ‘reject the tiny public’s oppositional memory as one-sided,’ Xu defends this oppositional memory by its moral value, positing that a balanced account is ‘the job of a historian or a social scientist’ (p. 184). But it does not have to be. If the oppositional voices can be protected in an established political society and, accordingly, the public is no longer preoccupied with challenging official state discourses, the public can be expected to facilitate multiple perspectives grounded in diverse lived experiences. In other words, if these intellectuals were to be freed from the onerous task of deconstructing the state’s moral authority, perhaps they would be available to develop pluralistic narratives about an event like the Earthquake, argue amongst themselves, and by so doing, strengthen their social reflexivity, namely, the capacity to reflect on their own positionality, blind-spots, potential gender or ethnic biases, and so forth. This observation, however, is an invitation for future discussion rather than a criticism of the current analysis. The Politics of Compassion is a rich and sophisticated book that will be much appreciated by sociologists and China scholars alike.