|
|
|
FROM RESISTANCE TO COLLECTIVE ACTION IN A SHANGHAI SOCIALIST "MODEL COMMUNITY": FROM THE LATE 1940S TO EARLY 1970s
| By Wing Chung Ho |
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| Drawing on intensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on a Chinese community, this essay attempts to explore the trajectory through which a group of self-interested inhabitants became enthusiastic participants in a series of state-led collective campaigns in the larger cause of building socialism.1 |
1
|
|
The past decade or so has witnessed a burgeoning literature on "resistance studies"—a paradigm so influential and ubiquitous in social sciences that prompted Brown to call it, quite heavy-handedly, a "theoretical hegemony."2 Pointing to the inertia of subordinate people in initiating collective, open defiance against exploitative patronage, and their failure to do so, Scott explicitly focused on the "everyday forms of resistance" of Malayan peasants who engage in a vast and relatively unexplored "middle-ground" politics "between passivity and open collective defiance."3 These forms of resistance are individually based; require little or no coordination or planning; and are not intended "to overthrow and transform a system of domination but rather to survive—today, this week, this season, within it."4 Scott's formulation, however, has been increasingly criticized on grounds of important empirical findings that people do occasionally possess high internal cohesion and feel the need to act collectively for a wider social cause. For instance, Escobar criticized Scott for not pushing "the question of resistance towards one of its possible logical conclusions, namely, that point at which resistance gives way to more organized forms of collective action or social movement."5 Also, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly criticized Scott's paradigm as having "provided little purchase on the question of when these low-level resentments would lead to mobilization and collective action and when they would remain at the level of individual resentment."6 While various critics have offered their own explanations for the rise of collective action using different theoretical and empirical grounds,7 this essay aims to explore the dynamics between individual resistance and collective action with respect to the unique historical trajectory of a micro-context in Shanghai—a residential community called Cucumber Lane. But, it should be noted that the nature of the collective actions to be examined differs from many previous discussions on social movements on at least two grounds. First, at issue are not collective struggles with explicit, specific, and immediate "enemies" to fight. Second, they are not "contentious" in nature as they are not collective efforts towards a structural political re-configuration that would, at least potentially, lead to more democracy. Rather, this essay focuses on the emergence of the collective momentum in a peasant migrant community in which the collectivist spirit had once been so fervent that it was able to sustain a series of mass campaigns for more than a decade with a high level of internal cohesion among the resident participants. |
2
|
| |
|
|
. . . |
There are about 16199 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
