Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (review)

Reviews 581 A few final comments. The quality oftranslation in Running Wildis generally very good, though some stories exhibit more than others the flare ofa skilled and literary hand. Jeanne Tai's translation of"One Kind ofReality," for example, brings out nicely the ironic effect ofrecounting atrocities in the language ofa "barren narration," and the translators of"Running Wild" evoke something ofSu Tong's exuberant use oflanguage. The collection contains quite a few typographical errors that careful editing should easily have detected. Finally, the quality of the stories themselves is rather uneven, or it may be that the styles represented vary so greatly that one is left with the impression of contemporary Chinese literature as an incoherent salmagundi. But this is no doubt precisely what David Wang and Jeanne Tai were interested in achieving, and the bad taste it leaves me with is perhaps a product ofmy own anachronistic desire for the comforting unity of some modernist metanarrative. Kirk A. Denton Ohio State University Robert P. Weiler. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: TaipingRebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen. Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1994. vii, 255 pp. Hardcover $49.50. Robert Weiler (associate professor of anthropology, Boston University) has produced a tour de force ofinterpretative scholarship that should go a long way toward educating general readers and China scholars alike about some ofthe ingrained biases in the field ofSinology. The core ofthis study is based on the author's original fieldwork in Taiwan in the 1980s, when he became interested in the phenomenon ofghost worship that was then peaking in the northern part of the island. The main interpretative point of the book, however, is to compare this craze to the Taiping movement of the nineteenth century and to the Tiananmen movement of 1989. Though claiming to admire and incorporate much from the schools ofthought he criticizes, Weller's critique oflarge bodies of scholarship on the right and left ofacademic politics is nonetheless incisive and even devastating. „ ,„~~ , rr ¦ To many readers it will be clear from the outset, long before Weiler states his© 1995 by University' ° ofHawai'iPresscase exPuciuym me conclusion, thathe is taking on the totalitarian model, a model too long dominant in the China field and still insufficiently challenged after the fall ofLeninist regimes around the world. Against those who claim that the 582 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 traditional Chinese autocratic state and its modern Leninist variant have maintained total control of society and managed to stifle all potentially heterodox ideas and movements, Weiler convincingly demonstrates that there are always areas of "free space" for ideas and movements outside official control that can potentially provide the basis for resistance. The prime example he cites is the Taiping rebellion of the nineteenth century, which developed out of the quasiChristian "God Worshipping Society" founded by Hong Xiuquan in Guangxi in the 1840s. Though the movement was at first "overloaded" with many possible meanings, once its leaders managed to impose an official interpretation of events and sorted out the various cases of spirit possession into the officially approved and discredited, the Taipings turned toward open rebellion, not just against the Manchu regime, but against the ideology and structure of the two-thousand-yearold Confucian bureaucratic empire. Despite the value of demonstrating the limits oftotalitarianism as applied to China, Weiler makes clear throughout his study that the Taiping case of open rebellion was extremely rare and, by its nature, self-defeating. Thus his interpretation is also aimed at correcting the view oftoo many neo-Marxist and/or poststructuralist scholars (perhaps dominant in his own field of anthropology), who tend to see resistance in almost every movement outside of direct government control. Early in this study, for example, in an account of a Taiwanese village ritual where pigs were fattened and then offered up whole to community gods, Weiler shows how at times, to paraphrase Freud on cigars, a pig is just a pig. Even while agreeing with earlier commentators that such rituals often seemed to imply an assertion ofnative Taiwanese ethnicity and "quiet political resistance" (p. 7) to the mainlander-dominated Nationalist Party government, Weiler faces up to the blatant contradiction to this interpretation that he saw firsthand...