A VIP (Very Important Pig)

In addition to working in the fields, Yuan-tsung helped in the office of Red Flag Village’s Party secretary, Old Xu, who eventually took her into his confidence. He let her in on an almost comical attempt to smuggle a fat pig past starving peasants, so that the Party bigwigs could feast on it. It opened her eyes to the corruption and shenanigans of village politics, which mirrored the state of affairs nationwide. Meanwhile it brought her close to the victims and she became their friend. One of them, Lotus Boy, talented and gentle, would soon die of starvation and political persecution.

Party Adaptation Strategies for Provincial Standing Committees in Post-Mao China

The Chinese Communist Party has been surprisingly successful in carrying out its plans in the face of various challenges in the post-Mao era. Compared to their central counterparts, the operating patterns of local institutions in tackling such difficulties have been less examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the party’s management of provincial standing committees (PSCs). As the highest level of local collective leadership, the PSC essentially sets the agenda for the province. Using a new database of PSC members from 1980 to 2016, this study provides a systematic illustration of the historical composition of provincial collective leadership. Instead of making drastic changes, the party has subtly shifted the roles of provincial leaders: it has redefined the role of the vice party secretary, adjusted the number of posts in the provincial government, and raised the level of professionalism.

Enter the Army

This chapter examines how, when the People's Armed Department (PAD) took control of Feng County, factional rivalries in the county were still ill defined, and rebels competed to be the loudest and most militant in denouncing the party secretary and other top county leaders. After the PAD deposed the county's civilian leaders, local rebels began to align themselves for and against the PAD, sharpening the tensions between Paolian and the PAD. The intervention of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops dispatched from Xuzhou sharpened and broadened the emerging factional divisions, making them even more difficult to resolve. The PLA's growing support for Paolian and formation of a “great alliance committee” brought two rebel groups of junior county cadres into an alliance while excluding the vociferously anti-Paolian cadre rebels. This drove a wedge between the two groups of county-level cadres, one that deepened when Paolian later merged with supportive cadre rebels in a large new rebel alliance under PLA protection. Senior county officials also split, with most of them forming an affiliation with either Paolian or Liansi. Whatever the personal motives for their choice of factions, it clearly had the effect of offering protection from attacks by the other mass factions. Cadres in rural communes, however, almost uniformly stood on the side of Liansi.

Factions

This chapter begins by discussing how Feng County's leaders established a Cultural Revolution committee. The first party secretary, Gao Ying, was the head, and the vice-heads were Shao Wen and one other party standing committee member. The county leadership was able to maintain top-down control of the campaign for almost half a year. Not until the end of December 1966, several months after such events in China's large cities, did Red Guard and rebel groups begin to target Feng County's party leadership. The rebellion of students and others was very slow to develop, but the first stirrings were in the county seat, at Feng County Middle School. Feng County's rebel movement was so small, and so late in developing, that there were no factional divisions of the kind that emerged in China's large cities early in the autumn of 1966. The chapter then looks at the formation of the first broad alliance of local rebels, one that would play a key role in the county's factional conflicts over the next decade. The alliance became one of the county's two large factions, henceforth known by its abbreviated name, Paolian.

Epilogue

This short epilogue restates and emphasizes the importance of an anthropological approach to contested presence in state-led development efforts with reference to the post-protest Olympic campaigns in Rebgong, as well as the renewed military crackdown on Tibetans’ self-immolation protests, in the summer of 2008 and beyond. The author does this by looking at Rebgong Tibetans’ counter-uses of the new Drolma Square in front of Rongbo Monastery that was planned and built in 2006 by the prefecture party secretary to attract tourists. Tibetans however transformed it into a pilgrimage site, which set the stage for its most tragic transformation in 2012, as the site of Tibetans’ self-immolation protests in the wake of new state-led efforts at cultural and linguistic repression, land expropriation and resource extraction.

The Mountain Deity and the State

Set during the early years of the Develop the West campaign (2000-2007), this chapter introduces readers to the battle for fortune as a fundamental struggle over types of moral persons and their relationships to land and territory in an affluent and urbanizing lowland village. Taking the village’s Tibetan Communist party secretary and its mountain deity medium to be commensurate subjects in a village conflict over temple construction and state-led land appropriation, the chapter explores the dilemmas facing local state officials and deity mediums amidst overlapping divine and state administrative geographies. The chapter thus sets the stage for the intensifying battle for fortune in Rebgong under new post-Mao development efforts that played out especially in the spectacles and silences of top-down urbanization.

Introduction

After establishing the main arguments and stakes of the overall project, the introduction lays out the evolving power structures of Communist East Germany to explain who was responsible for the destruction of the University Church and why. Rejecting the common monolithic explanation that only SED party secretary Walter Ulbricht and local power player Paul Fröhlich destroyed the intact Gothic church, it reveals that a much larger mechanism of compliance and even enthusiasm was necessary to bring about this act of cultural barbarism, from city authorities, the university, and urban planners whose often banal motives (the desire for modern facilities, the dream of building the modern city, etc.) played just as important a role. After looking to Stasi collaboration and the grayness in individual biographies, it identifies the engaged public, the diverse populace that opposed the demolition with great verve to the end.