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HANS STEINM
¨
ULLER
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Communities of complicity:
Notes on state formation and local sociality in rural China
ABSTRACT
In this article, I deal with the tension in rural China
between vernacular practice in local sociality and
official representations related to processes of state
formation and with the ways in which this tension is
revealed and concealed through gestures of
embarrassment, irony, and cynicism. Such gestures
point toward a space of intimate self-knowledge
that I call a “community of complicity,” a concept
derived from Michael Herzfeld’s outline of “cultural
intimacy.” I illustrate how such communities are
constituted with examples involving Chinese
geomancy (fengshui), funerary rituals, and
corruption. I contrast this approach with arguments
made about “state involution” in China. [rural China,
state formation, state involution, cultural intimacy,
fengshui, corruption]
People do not fight for abstract perfection but for the intimacies that lie
behind it.
—Michael Herzfeld
T
he inauguration of a newly built house is a rather important event
in rural China. In the past, it was celebrated as shang liang: the
raising of the r idge pole. Where I did fieldwork in 2006–07 in
Zhongba village in the Enshi region of Hubei province,
1
a lot of
construction activity and, hence, a lot of these celebrations were
taking place. The roofs of new houses are no longer built of lumber but
of bricks and concrete, so the celebration is no longer called “raising the
ridge pole” but “pouring the concrete” (E. dao ban’r
2
). But, just as in former
times, relatives, neighbors, and friends are invited for the event, where they
are supposed to eat a meal and give small gifts of cash to the homeowner.
The celebration for the pouring of the concrete roof of Pan Dejun’s new
house was set for early August 2006. Over time, I had become a regular visi-
tor at the Pan household, which was just a five-minute walk from the village
administration building where I was living. Pan Dong, the family’s 14-year-
old son, had informed me well before the event that I should come to the
new house on day so and so for the inauguration. At the celebration, I rarely
saw his father, Pan Dejun, and when I did see him, he looked rather grim
and nervous. His arm was bandaged: He had broken it when he fell from
the scaffolding at the construction site. After dinner, the guests went to the
side rooms of the house to play mahjong, and I was dragged along as well
to sit down and play. We played until late in the night; only then did I real-
ize that the concrete for the roof would not be poured until midnight. Pan
Dejun had hired a contractor to do it, and he arrived with a team of ten
workers at 11 p.m. They prepared their machines and started to carry the
concrete in buckets on shoulder poles up onto the formwork for the second
floor. I found it incomprehensible that they would start this work under the
light of their headlamps at midnight, the most inconvenient time one could
think of. When I asked Pan Dejun to explain, he told me that the workers
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 539–549, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425.
C
2010 by the Amer ican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01271.x
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American Ethnologist
Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
had had another job during the day. But later, his son and
an uncle told me in passing that the time was chosen be-
cause the geomancer they had consulted had told them
they should do it at exactly this hour. It is still general prac-
tice in the village to have a geomancer determine the ex-
act hour for starting this work, to ensure astrological conso-
nance and future prosperity.
The accident in which Pan Dejun had broken his arm
was, in this context, extremely significant. Pan was wor-
ried that it could have been an ominous sign, and this had
made him even more anxious to take ritual precaution. The
day after the inauguration, Pan Dong told me that the ge-
omancer (fengshui xiansheng) and a Daoist priest (daoshi)
had performed several incantations and rituals in the new
house, of which Pan Dong did not understand much. He
just remembered that the Daoist priest had killed a rooster
and then sprayed its blood around the new house. Pan Dong
understood that this was meant to protect the new house
against evil influences and ghosts. He added, “The people
here believe quite a lot of superstitions (mixin).”
Pan Dong is a very bright boy and had just started
higher middle school when I left Zhongba in 2007. In
December 2006, I had gone with him to the New Year
show staged by the middle school of Bashan township.
He had been given the main part in a comedy sketch, of
which he was very proud. The sketch that followed his was
about a sick old man who believes that a healer–geomancer
(yinyang xiansheng) can cure his illness. Against the advice
of his children, who know that the healer is really a charla-
tan, the old man entrusts himself to the healer’s treatment.
In the end, the old man dies from the treatment. Performed
by teenagers, the whole piece was supposed to be comical,
and, in fact, the audience burst into laughter throughout
it. Its obvious intent was to mock the credulity of people
who hire healers and geomancers. One teacher explained
to me that the moral was to warn children and their par-
ents against the dangers of “feudal superstition” (fengjian
mixin), of which such charlatans and geomancers are prime
representatives.
∗∗∗
This article is about what it means to live a local social-
ity if a good part of this sociality is continuously devalued
in official discourse. In it, I attempt to explain why someone
would admit that “people here believe in superstition” and
why such statements are often uttered as asides, stealthily,
sometimes with overtones of embarrassment, cynicism, or
irony.
The differences between official and vernacular, cen-
ter and periphery, and public and private are crucially im-
portant in any social space and, so, are not unique to con-
temporary rural China. I start with my impression that the
contradictions between official representation and vernac-
ular practice sometimes assume extreme proportions, as
exemplified in the story of Pan Dong. What one hears in the
news, what one is taught in school, and what is said in gov-
ernment announcements are generally quite different from,
and sometimes diametrically opposed to, what people say
and do at home. This is perhaps most apparent in connec-
tion with those things that fall in the category of “supersti-
tion,” such as the rituals of Daoist priests or the activities of
Chinese popular geomancy (fengshui). Similar ambiguities
characterize family celebrations such as funerals and wed-
dings and the relationships between officials and ordinary
people.
These ambiguities appear particularly salient when
people are confronted with an outsider who wants to in-
quire about just such things. Covertness, embarrassment,
cynicism, and irony are communicative strategies that
make it possible for them to acknowledge both sides of
the contradiction, to avoid confrontation, and to maintain
communication. They are ways of doing “face-work,” as de-
scribed by Erving Goffman (1955): actions that help one
avoid inconsistencies between the face one presents—the
positively attributed representation of a social person—and
what one actually does. Doing ethnography implies learn-
ing how to do face-work, that is, learning the conventional
ways of concealing and revealing such inconsistencies. In
my fieldwork, this meant, for instance, my learning how
to talk about such issues as geomancy, family celebrations,
and corruption. Countless awkward situations produced
by my foolish questions and clumsy behavior assisted this
learning process.
Yet the communicative strategies people employed to
deal with the ambiguities in outside representations of local
sociality point toward something beyond the awkwardness
of doing ethnography, something that I describe by refer-
ence to Michael Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy.”
Herzfeld defines “cultural intimacy” as “the recognition of
those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a
source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless
provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality”
(2005:3).
A “coded tension” exists between official representa-
tions, generally linked to nation and state, and vernac-
ular forms in face-to-face communities; this tension ex-
presses itself locally in embarrassment, cynicism, or irony.
Such are the reactions when “cultural intimacy” is exposed,
and they can both confirm the official representation and
satirize it. Inasmuch as these expressions are shared and
common, they bind people together in intimate spaces of
self-knowledge.
The distinction between official and vernacular does
not coincide with social or political inequality: The power-
ful as well as those without power have a sense of cultural
intimacy. Ethnographic and anecdotal accounts show how
shared metaphors of “the state” and “the people” are strate-
gically used by both bureaucrats and ordinary citizens.
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Communities of complicity
American Ethnologist
These “practical essentialisms” employed in social inter-
action exemplify what Herzfeld means by “social poetics,”
people’s creative deployment of allegedly stereotypical cul-
tural attributes to achieve specific effects.
With this concept, Herzfeld draws heavily on the
study of rhetoric and semiotics, and so one might wonder
whether the social poetics based on cultural intimacy are
not “merely” symbolic. At least one reviewer of Herzfeld’s
construct submits this predictable cr iticism: It focuses on
cultural and symbolic representation of state and nation,
but “is that enough? Are there no ‘objective-correlatives’? If
there are, how on earth do we find them? Where nation and
state coincide, the answer may be, ‘in the objective power of
the state’” (Cohen 1998:8). In other words, the gap between
official representations and local sociality that is character-
istic of cultural intimacy might be a consequence of pro-
cesses of state formation that increase the “objective power
of the state.”
Now, power is rather difficult to measure “objectively.”
Political scientists have attempted to do so by focusing
on the efficiency of state power and assessing “good” and
“bad” governance. In the case of the modern Chinese state,
various observers have phrased the problems of state power
and government efficiency in terms of “state involution”
(Duara 1987; L
¨
u 2000; Murphy 2007; Siu 1989a, 1989b; Wang
1991). These observers deal with different periods of state
making in modern Chinese history and reach slightly dif-
ferent conclusions. But they all share a basic line of argu-
ment: Efforts toward the formation of a modern state from
the republican era onward have not resulted in an efficient,
formal bureaucracy and a transparent state machine but,
rather, have reproduced and reinforced traditional modes
of operation and patrimonialism. Although, on the outside,
a shiny fac¸ade of formal rationality is constructed, inside a
personalistic cancer is growing. In all of these accounts, the
state or society is somewhere it actually should not be. To
argue in this vein necessitates a vantage point from which
one actually knows where each should be, and this vantage
point is usually a Eurocentric concept of the nation-state.
Most of these approaches are inspired by Clifford
Geertz’s (1963) description of “agricultural involution” in In-
donesia. The concept of “involution” has also been widely
used in the economic history of China (Elvin 1973; Huang
1990). In her outline of an alternative history of the “rice
economies” of East Asia, the historian Francesca Bray calls
for approaches that go beyond the “language of failure”
implicit in concepts such as “involution” or “growth with-
out development” (Elvin 1973). Both notions imply either
an attribution of essential Otherness or a negative ac-
count of Chinese history, measured in terms of what was
not achieved when compared with European history (Bray
1994:xiv). I take as a point of caution that concepts of “invo-
lution,” when applied to the state, might lead to the analyt-
ical pitfalls of Eurocentrism and orientalism.
In fact, the condemnation of traditionalist and person-
alistic ties is not only characteristic of state-involution ap-
proaches but it is also the most common public represen-
tation of corruption in the People’s Republic. Toward the
end of this article, I argue that the ways in which this invo-
lutionary cancer is o fficially denigrated and locally recog-
nized are just as productive of shared commonality as are
practices related to “superstition” and fengshui. Those who
share a sense of the same intimacies form what might be
aptly called a “community of complicity.”
These communities of complicity cut across the
boundaries of state and society. The involution approaches
all emphasize that state and society are deeply entangled; I
go one step fur ther and envision an intimate state, one that
is “a constitutive force at the heart of the social world,” in
Eric Mueggler’s words (2001:5). Instead of correlating this
sense of intimacy with the “objective power of the state,”
I try to relate it to a history of state formation in everyday
lives. My examples are stori es told about fengshui, about a
Confucian discourse of “manners and etiquette” (li) at a fu-
neral, and about putatively corrupt local officials.
Fengshui
Fengshui is the traditional Chinese practice of geomancy,
a popular cosmology that connects astrological signs and
cosmological elements with the shape of the lived land-
scape. Interpreting the particular fengshui of a place aims
to take advantage of and to adjust its positive “energy.” Most
laypeople hire an expert geomancer (fengshui xiansheng or
yinyang xiansheng) for this work. Although the practice has
long been suppressed by Chinese governments as “feudal
superstition” (fengjian mixin), it has remained immensely
popular, especially in the countryside. In Zhongba, as of
2007, almost everyone who prepared to build a new house
or a tomb consulted a geomancer, who helped to situate the
house or grave according to the fengshui of its site.
Fengshui is closely linked to the fate (mingyun) of a
family and a household, but sometimes it is extended and
linked to a lineage, a hamlet, or even an entire township.
One of the main aims in Chinese geomancy and divination
is to influence and manipulate, to some extent, the cosmo-
logical forces at work in people’s lives. The knowledge of
fengshui can, thus, be instrumentalized by the powerful to
impinge on the aspirations of others. In what follows, I re-
count three stories about powerful representatives of the
state who used fengshui. These stories take place right at
the interface of official and vernacular discourses and ex-
emplify the ambiguities of the state and its representatives
in local society.
The first story is about the fengshui of a small val-
ley that opens into the northwestern side of the triangular
Bashan plain. Over the centuries, the stream in this valley
has formed a deep meandering channel between rugged
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American Ethnologist
Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010
hills and rocks. Where one enters the valley, coming from
the plain, one passes the Chicken Branch hill on the left
side. People say that, long ago, this hill was much higher,
that it had rocks on top, and that it provided the valley be-
low it with very good fengshui. The Gong family lived in sev-
eral hamlets in the valley and was said to prosper because
of its good fengshui. Talent and ability (rencai) abounded
in the valley, the sons of the Gong family became high of-
ficials, and the Gong family altogether was very wealthy. At
the time of the Qianlong emperor, the prosperity and suc-
cess of the family aroused the envy of a mandarin in the
capital of the prefecture, Shinan (now Enshi). Hence, he had
his henchmen demolish the rocks on top of Chicken Branch
anddigahole(quekou) into the summit of the hill. There-
after, no member of the Gong family succeeded in the im-
perial exams, and the family declined.
The story of the Gong family might have been told in al-
most the same way in imperial China. In fact, many stories
of this kind have been documented in southeastern China
and Taiwan. They generally speak of the ambiguous rela-
tionship between center and periphery, as an outside power
destroys the cosmological order of a locality. Yet, at the same
time, local levels of “civilization” and ancestral wealth are
presented in terms of the center, that is, success in the im-
perial examinations.
Like other stories about the distant past, the story of the
Gong family was told to me with a certain folkloristic fla-
vor: It did not really matter how truthful this story was, and
I could not sense that it had much connection with the cur-
rent state of the G ong family. Because such stories were sit-
uated in the distant past, no one found them embarrassing
in any sense.
The style and tone of narration change very much when
a story comes closer to the concerns of the present. An ap-
parently true story about the same valley is somewhat simi-
lar to the legend of the Gong family. In the past, after strong
rainfalls, the stream in this valley often flooded the fields
that bordered it. During one campaign of the Cultural Revo-
lution,
3
the cadres of two production brigades had the idea
of opening several tunnels into the area’s rock formations,
so that the stream would flow in a straight line and the
fields would remain dry. With the help of dynamite deto-
nations, three long tunnels were opened through the rocks,
and the river left its old bed and flowed through them. Lo-
cals initially opposed the tunnel project, arguing that it was
not worth the effort. But the most serious disadvantage, in
their view, was that it would destroy the fengshui of the val-
ley.
4
Yet no one ever directly admitted this to me. During
the spring festival period in 2006, I accompanied a family
from Zhongba on a visit to relatives in the Gong family. We
spent all afternoon in conversation, and one man related in
much detail the story of the three tunnels. Everyone agreed
that their excavation had been a waste of manpower and re-
sources, but no one spoke about the negative influence the
project might have had on the fengshui of the valley. Only
one elderly uncle quietly mentioned that “in the past they
said that it might have destroyed the fengshui.” I asked fur-
ther and got the answer that “back in those days, they ob-
viously could not have said that.” Later on, the friend I was
with confirmed to me that many old people in the valley are
convinced that their bad luck comes from the bad fengshui
of the valley. A minor official in his thirties, he talked about
these beliefs in a rather disapproving way, half condemning
such “superstition,” half mocking it.
The ambiguities of fengshui have a long history. In fact,
local governments in imperial times were often suspicious
of popular cosmologies, potential heterodoxies, and here-
sies (Bruun 2003:ch. 2). Yet the imper ial state almost never
went so far as to directly intervene in local practices; in-
stead, it favored gentle guidance by “correction” and “exem-
plar” (Hamilton 1989). Since the beginning of the 20th cen-
tury, practices like fengshui have been broadly devalued by
educated elites, but they have remained common among
ordinary people. In the Maoist era, local “superstition” was
fervently denounced and systematically attacked.
The legend about the malicious mandarin who de-
stroyed the fengshui of the Gong family hamlets exempli-
fies the common assumption that the powerful and wealthy
tried to manipulate fengshui and the belief that they ac-
tually must have done so rather successfully—“if not, how
could they have become powerful and wealthy in the first
place?” This kind of circular argument sometimes assumed
ironic or even grotesque proportions: Repeatedly, older
peasants told me that the power and success of Mao Zedong
and other leaders was really due to their intimate knowl-
edge and versatile manipulation of fengshui. One famous
story relates that during the civil war between Nationalists
and Communists, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Na-
tionalist Party, tried to find the tomb of Mao Zedong’s father
so that he could dig out the remains and demolish the tomb.
In this way, he could destroy the fengshui of the Mao family
and ensure the future misfortune of Mao Zedong in partic-
ular. But when the neighbors of the Mao family heard about
the plan, they removed the name badges from the tombs
in the village so that Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers could not
find the tomb. In anger, the soldiers wildly destroyed several
tombs in the village, a most outrageous and horrible action,
as devastating a family tomb equals destroying the integrity
and prosperity of a family line altogether. The fengshui sur-
rounding the tombs of the Mao family, however, was pre-
served and continued to provide excellent fortune for the
family. By contrast, the infamy of digging out the graves of
innocent families led to misfortune for, and the eventual de-
feat of, Chiang and the Nationalists.
In recent years, fengshui has become a respected ob-
ject of study for architects, historians, and even design-
ers in m ainland China. Many books and experts have tried
to prove that fengshui is really “scientific” (kexue) and,
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Communities of complicity
American Ethnologist
therefore, does not contradict the scientistic worldview pro-
mulgated by party and state. Yet, in the countryside, peo-
ple never publicly make references to fengshui and related
practices like astrology and divination. They speak about
them only in private and almost always with a somewhat
ironic undertone. In the Maoist era, exposing the fengshui
practices of others would have amounted to serious de-
nouncement, and many people still relate to them in secre-
tive, partly embarrassed, ways.
Another practice that was severely controlled and
partly forbidden under Maoism was staging huge banquets
for family celebrations, in particular, weddings and funer-
als. These events are closely linked to geomantic practices.
At a wedding, the bowing of a couple in front of the ances-
tral tablets in the main room of the bridegroom’s house con-
firmed and reenacted the central axis of the house, which,
ideally, was adjusted to the fengshui of its surroundings. At
a funeral, the coffin was placed along this central axis, and
the tomb was also located according to fengshui. Everything
people did on these ritual occasions, from eating at the ban-
quet tables to offering presents of goods and cash to the
hosts, was supposed to conform to the rules of propriety
and etiquette, which Confucian texts call “li.” The propriety
of li, however, is nowadays sometimes just as embarrassing
as fengshui.
The embarrassment of li
One of the first terms that I lear ned in the local dialect
was chijiu, pronounced “qi jiu,” which literally means “to
eat wine,” that is, to attend a banquet. More specifically, it
means to attend another’s family celebration, like a wed-
ding, a funeral, a housewarming party, the birth of a child,
a birthday, or a celebration for passing the entry examina-
tions to the university or the army. Of these, the most impor-
tant life-cycle events are weddings and funerals, called “red
and white celebrations” (hongbai xishi), according to the
symbolic colors for happiness (red) and mourning (white).
Such celebrations are held at the house of the host family
or, for families in the market town of Bashan or in the city
of Enshi, in a restaurant. Attending a banquet implies not
only sharing an abundant meal but also offering the host a
present, which nowadays is usually cash. The family that is
“hosting the wine” (E. zhengjiu) has to prepare well in ad-
vance. Generally, the day of the celebration is chosen with
the help of a diviner, who calculates the most propitious
date and hour, according to the “eight characters” (ba zi) of
the year, month, day, and hour of the births of the main par-
ticipants. Before the celebration, the host invites neighbors
and friends to “help” (bang mang) in hosting the event.
All these actions necessitate proper behavior and for-
mality. The established rules (guiju) and etiquette (liyi or
lijie) at such occasions are particular forms of li, or ritual.
Similar to the difficulty of defining ritual, li eludes easy
definition. In contemporary Chinese, li can mean many
things. It is part of the expressions for politeness (limao),
etiquette and custom (liyi, lijie, or lisu), worship (libai), and
gift (liwu). In the popular expression “courtesy demands
reciprocity” (lishang wanglai), li means also the propriety
inherent in reciprocal relationships. Just like the practices
of fengshui, the expressions of li are characterized by ambi-
guities. Here I give an example related to the funeral of the
father of a high official.
Sun Jundong was one of the most successful officials in
Bashan township. After three years as the party secretary of
the township, he was elevated to vice party secretary in a
neighboring county, the next higher rank in the hierarchy of
party and government. In the spring of 2007, I had the op-
portunity to attend the funeral of his father. Two neighbors
in Zhongba told me that they would play the shawm (suona)
and drums in a funeral band and asked me if I wanted to
join them.
The home of the Sun family is in one of the most re-
mote villages of Bashan township, about two-hours drive by
car into the mountains from the market of Bashan. On the
dirt road, we saw numerous sport utility vehicles and the
black Audis and Volkswagens that are used by government
officials and businessmen. We attended the last night of the
funeral, and from the moment we arrived at 5 p.m. until
late in the evening, the popping noise of firecrackers did not
cease for a single moment. According to local custom, about
three-dozen neighbors and relatives help prepare the food
and host the guests at a funeral. At this funeral, however,
there were about one hundred helpers, who all had their
names listed on a beautiful painted poster on one wall of the
house. On another wall, a program was posted detailing the
performances and rituals for the evening, all written in fine
calligraphy. According to local tradition, the coffin is laid out
in the central room of the house, which is called the “hall
of filial piety” (xiaotang) during the funerary period. The
hall in this case was richly ornamented with carved bam-
boo sticks and colored paper, various paintings, and sev-
eral huge tablets that described the life of the deceased in
poems. All this was the work of teacher Lei, a well-known
“man of culture” (wenren) and former head of the “office for
culture” in a neighboring township. He also led the perfor-
mances and rituals in the evening, which included speeches
in classical Chinese; a mourning ceremony, during which 24
music bands marched and played; songs and couplets sung
to all close relatives and important guests; mourning songs
for the deceased and his family; mourning dances around
the coffin; and lion dances.
This was by far the biggest and most lavish funeral that
I had seen dur ing my time in Bashan. It was also a huge
show of power and money. Normally at a Chinese funeral,
the guests give presents and money to the host, and these
gifts are listed in a red book. People always stress the impor-
tance of reciprocity in these exchanges: When donors host
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