Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life ed. by Everett Zhang, Arthur Kleinman, Tu Weiming (review)

In this well-conceived collection of essays, the anthropologist Everett Zhang and his colleagues—several anthropologists, a legal scholar, a public health specialist, a medical sociologist, a historian, a political scientist, and a philosopher—trace the changing modalities of state power and concomitant changes to the perceptions of human life in China from the Mao years to the present period. As Arthur Kleinman points out in his foreword, in the 1970s the Communist Party-State acted “as if its subjects owed it their very lives” (xiv), while today it takes the well-being of China’s citizens as its central concern. This shift in state power has created the conditions for a growing number of Chinese to imagine and pursue an “adequate life,” which according to Everett Zhang in his introduction “entails elevation from merely living a life to living a better life, from insuring biological being to insuring wellbeing” (8).

The book comprises twelve substantive chapters, a foreword, an introduction, and an epilogue. In his introduction, Zhang draws on Foucault’s contrast between “sovereignty,” a mode of power in which the king rules in order to ensure his own reign, and “governmentality,” in which the purpose of governance is the security and well-being of the population. To these he adds a third mode of power, “communist revolution,” a combination of dictatorship, mass mobilization, radical egalitarianism, and utopianism that contained elements of governmentality but tended to emphasize sacrifice of the people’s current well-being, or even lives, in the name of sovereign power and utopian ideals. Zhang thus argues that while governmentality has never been entirely absent in the People’s Republic, in earlier decades it was frequently marginalized by a combination of sovereign power and communist revolution. Similarly, while the scope of governmentality has steadily deepened during the reform years beginning in 1978, the two other modes of power are still present and have at different moments come to the fore. Zhang’s subtle, clear, and thought-provoking discussion of the relationship between modes of power provides a useful framework for reading the substantive chapters, which are divided into four parts.

Food is fundamental not only to survival but to any pursuit of an adequate life, as has long been understood in Chinese political philosophy and popular culture. It is therefore fitting that the chapters in the first part address the experience of food and famine during and in the wake of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). Zhang’s chapter explores contradictions in the central government’s attitude toward human life at the height of the Great Leap famine. Examining why the central government sought to be informed about the famine while also stemming the flow of information to the center, Zhang usefully moves beyond analyses focusing on Mao’s personality to explore this conundrum in the light of the three modes of power outlined in his introduction. James L. Watson’s chapter on the public mess hall campaign during the Great Leap draws on decades of documentary research and interviews. He argues that the campaign to force rural people to eat in the public mess halls, ostensibly to free up the productive labor of women, constituted “an attack on the family as a central institution of life” (42) and was the pinnacle of an attempt by the state to penetrate the daily lives of China’s farmers. Watson’s account of what he calls the “coercive commensality” of the mess halls, involving a brief euphoria followed by severe suffering and the dismantling of collective eating, lays bare the depths and limits of social engineering in Mao’s China. It is also a useful corrective to anthropologists’ typically romantic notions of commensality. Stephan Feuchtwang draws on his collaborative research with the anthropologist Wang Mingming on memories of the famine in Fujian to discuss some...