Suspension, Mobility and Order: How Oxford Professor Xiang Biao Reads the Age We Live In

“Equal participation in an increasingly unequal socioeconomic process”

Evicted was written by Princeton sociology professor Matthew Desmond; it lays bare the slum conditions and mass evictions in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. “Have life without owning it!” On the afternoon of December 14, 2018, after a lecture on urban governance at the auditorium of Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management, Xiang Biao, professor of anthropology at Oxford, was asked to sign a copy of Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun, the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing that a “fan” had handed him, and he wrote that same line on the title page.

One “fan” quickly recognized it. It is the last sentence of the introduction Xiang wrote for the Chinese edition of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: “To dare not to own, to enjoy life without owning, to live every day in high spirits — this may be the greatest revolution of our era.”

Evicted was written by Princeton sociology professor Matthew Desmond; it lays bare the slum conditions and mass evictions in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize.

Xiang Biao took his master's degree at Peking University's Department of Sociology in 1998. Transcending Boundaries was his thesis, and it drew wide attention in Chinese academia at the time. A Wenzhou native, he had started fieldwork in the “Zhejiang Village” of Beijing's Nanyuan district in his second year of college, tracing how this unusual community of migrants formed, grew and changed.

After he went to Oxford for a doctorate in anthropology, Xiang widened his focus to global migration and labor: Indian workers, in Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry; population movement in Southeast Asia; and, most recently, labor export from Northeast China.

Xiang arrived in Beijing half a month ago and was immediately invited to give a run of lectures. Besides the one on urban governance, on the 13th he spoke at Tsinghua's School of Journalism and Communication on “Suspension: Mobility, Expectation and Social Growth,” setting out a “suspended” state of mind he sees everywhere in China; on the 20th, in a lecture series at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, he gave “Working Abroad: Commercialization, Bureaucratization and the ‘Person of Society,’” using the workers and brokers who send labor abroad from the Northeast to show how “people of society” are brought into order.

QDaily has gathered the sharpest material from the series. It touches on questions like these: why is a “suspended” state of mind so common among Chinese people? How has the dispersal of Beijing's migrant population changed from one period to the next? And what process of ordering hides behind society's fast, seemingly chaotic movement?

The “Suspended” Chinese: Every Bus Is the Last Bus

What is “suspension”? Xiang gave a simple definition: everyone is busy working, busy chasing a future. The present, meanwhile, is left hanging in the air, with no meaning except as a tool pointed at that future. People work hard not because they like the work, but usually to save enough money that they never have to do it again.

He offered a range of examples.

A taxi driver treats his health as something to deal with later; right now he has to make money fast.

In Dongguan in 1994, migrant workers changed jobs as often as hummingbirds move between flowers. Job-hopping became their only way of dealing with fights in the dorm and on the line, with dull work, with exhaustion. Under the logic of “hop fast, earn fast, save as much as you can so you never have to be a migrant worker again,” almost nobody faced the problems directly or tried to change how coworkers got along or how the factory was run.

In the Northeast, a man who went abroad for work was cheated out of more than 60,000 yuan in broker fees. People from his village and his own friends laughed at him; nobody offered to go argue with the broker on his behalf. Everyone has absorbed the same logic — you have to make money fast, and if you didn't make it, you weren't good enough. They can even see the broker's side: he was only trying to make money too. “If you got cheated, it means you were no match for the broker.”

Today a junior university lecturer — a “green pepper,” in campus slang for young faculty under constant pressure to publish — may know perfectly well that the paper he is writing means nothing, and still grind out the publication he is required to produce, telling himself: “In five years I'll do research that actually matters. For now, don't ask too many questions.” University teaching was supposed to be the most secure job of all, the one with the most room to think calmly about the present — to think for oneself and on behalf of others as well. Now it too moves with the crowd, impatient to suspend its own present.

Xiang also offered the image of a “work hole”: everyone is in a hurry to reach the future; the job you are in has no meaning, but you have to work at it hard so you can climb out as fast as possible.

The “future” people picture is vague, and in a way self-deceiving. People do not give up the present because they are pursuing some future. They first decide the present is meaningless, then tell themselves that what they are doing now is for the future. What that future actually consists of matters little — or rather, it has to stay blurry.

In China today, in political-economic terms, the gap between different groups is widening. But at the level of meaning, different classes seem to share one world of language and one emotional structure.

“Before anxiety, everyone is equal,” Xiang observed. “The richer people are, the more anxious they may be, more than low-income groups. For the middle class especially, anxiety seems to be the theme of daily life.”

So why is nearly everyone suspended? It has to be understood through two dimensions that look contradictory — what Xiang calls “equal participation in an increasingly unequal socioeconomic process.”

After the first three decades of socialist practice, the resources Chinese people held were, broadly, fairly equal. Then came reform and opening up, and above all the sweeping privatization of the early 1990s, and with it a general competitive mindset: ideologically, everyone felt the same as everyone else, everyone believed they had the ability and the chance to enter the game of primitive accumulation, and nobody who lost accepted the loss.

At the same time, as inequality sharpened, huge anxiety and fear built up, and people scrambled to “get on the bus” — every bus that passed felt like the last one.

Suspension is also bound up with a linear picture of history: the belief that history is bound to keep improving, and that “progress” is where the meaning of existence comes from. In the socialist period the whole society pushed forward together, talking of catching up and overtaking. That picture is still here today, but it has been thoroughly individualized: historical progress has turned into personal material improvement.

Because of suspension, a paradox is playing out in China.

On one side, China has an enormous number of active, energetic individuals. In their economic behavior — working hard, arranging their finances — people show tremendous agency, and the ways we live have changed a great deal, becoming much richer and more complicated.

On the other side, most of that change comes from technologies that arrived more or less by accident, such as the spread of WeChat and Alipay. Society's own spontaneous power has been hollowed out. Everyone is busy solving the problem immediately in front of them, busy looking ahead, and structural change is rarely set off.

To some degree this even bears out Thatcher's line: “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.”

A new conservatism is rising as well. Behind ways of life that look ever more varied and open, Chinese people have grown steadily more conservative in recent years about gender, marriage and family.

Xiang brought up the matchmaking corners in parks across China's big cities: “When I was a student this would have been unimaginable. You'd have thought that having your parents set you up was too humiliating.”

Equally unimaginable then: that so many graduates today would make the civil service or a state-owned enterprise their first choice of job. “It's as if a single unified order has taken shape, and it has had a large effect on how we plan our lives.”

Some odd phenomena have appeared recently, of course — the “Sanhe gods” of Shenzhen, who work one day and rest three, and the “sang” culture of listlessness and resignation among the young. As Xiang sees it, these groups, which the various press accounts treat more or less as a “serious hidden danger,” may in fact be mounting a kind of reaction against suspension, a challenge to the existing order. But he stressed that the conclusion needs fieldwork to confirm it.

Suspension is not a stable structure; it belongs to a particular historical stage, Xiang added. He put it forward as an image-like, relatively loose analytical concept, hoping it could become a tool anyone can pick up to rethink their own life.

What Has Changed in Migration and Urban Governance

Besides suspension, the other core word is mobility. It is the question Xiang has followed all along, from his early work on “Zhejiang Village” to his global research on migration and labor.

Since last year “Zhejiang Village” has drawn intense public attention. This was the first time Xiang gave his own view of the dispersal of the migrant population there in a public lecture. Some popular readings hold that it reflects discriminatory policy rooted in the household registration system, or that it is the Chinese urban version of global “gentrification.” He does not entirely agree.

Based on his early fieldwork, Xiang believes that once “Zhejiang Village” and its garment cluster had taken shape in the Dahongmen area, a gentrification trend did indeed begin — in 1995. That year, alongside a large-scale dispersal of migrants, Daxing County and Fengtai District announced a new development plan for Dahongmen, and the government jointly invested in building the “Dahongmen Garment City.”

The migrants came straight back and went to work in the standardized garment market the government had built. But inside these physically formalized “buildings,” business still ran on sole proprietorships and informal commercial relationships, with family workshops behind them.

That phase of dispersal was, in substance, a way for local government to shift assets and accumulate capital. Once migrants had brought a place to life, the government would use dispersal to turn an informal market into a formal one, and could then collect rent and other returns. So dispersal ran in cycles: clearing people out with one hand, recruiting tenants with the other, and the population only grew.

As the market formalized, small workshops kept moving outward. People from Anhui, Hebei and elsewhere, who had first worked for the Wenzhou natives of Zhejiang Village and later began taking small production contracts themselves, spread out around its edges.

This differed from the early “Zhejiang Village” model, in which residents built their own compounds, supplied community services and took safety into account. Under a model of informal economy inside a formal shell, migrants could no longer provide public services for themselves and had to move into formally built blocks. Those blocks went up ever denser, mixing homes and businesses; crowding and safety hazards grew; and that finally produced last year's disaster.

“If the dispersals from 1995 to 2017 were gentrification — build a formal, handsome market, then invite the merchants in — then this time is completely different.”

Xiang put forward an important claim: the new phase of dispersal that began last year is in substance an attempt to reverse the previous one, the logic of accumulating capital through dispersal that had held since 1995.

In a survey he launched himself, he found that ordinary residents — even most of the migrants who were pushed out — say that rationally they can accept what the government did. They share certain words with the government: “the big picture,” “upgrading,” “elimination.”

“If you don't eliminate the low end, there's no room for high-end development. Eliminate whom? Us, obviously.” Those forced to leave certainly do not welcome it, but they do not think there is anything wrong with the logic either.

His survey also showed that doubts about the dispersal were voiced more plainly by grassroots officials, because it changed the government's own command over resources.

In Beijing's recent master plan he found some interesting phrasing — “quiet,” for instance, has been written into the plan. Beijing intends to build a central government district inside the Third Ring Road as a platform for displaying an international image, so space, greenery and quiet have become important.

“It seems we have a new understanding of the capital,” Xiang said in the lecture. “Old Beijing, centered on the Forbidden City, will become a central government district with no spontaneous social life of its own. It is a wholly new, modern imagining of central power — like the computerized control center of an airport.”

But as an anthropologist he cares more about actual social effects. One fact cannot be ignored: as central power draws inward, the public's moral expectations of the state and the central government keep rising.

Take the Wenzhou merchants of “Zhejiang Village.” Many of them went out to do business at the very start of reform and opening up, or before it. Many held few moral expectations of the government at all. They were simply happy with the economic freedom reform had brought, happy that they could go out and do things themselves. There was a chaotic, unsustainable side to it, but they expected little of the central government.

As for the public reaction to this round of dispersal, most people back the government's action and accept the logic of formalization, because if the government takes charge, life may well feel more comfortable. The problem is that once power draws inward, expectations necessarily rise, and if they cannot be met, moral legitimacy takes the blow.

“What happens if something goes wrong? Is it worth imagining a more decentralized model?” Xiang asked.

High-Speed Mobility and the Ordering Behind It

Mobility makes people think of disorder and chaos, but Xiang argues that hidden behind the fast movement of the past several decades is precisely a process of ordering.

Consider the dormitory system in the Pearl River Delta factories where workers hopped jobs like hummingbirds. Dormitories were often built by local government and provided free, to attract investment from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Workers therefore stayed inside the factory 24 hours a day, and owners controlled not just production but the reproduction of the workforce. Yet for exactly that reason, worker mobility rose enormously: it was easy to move to the next factory dormitory, carrying nothing but a change of clothes.

It looks like a benefit, and here is the paradox. The factories did not exploit workers through direct physical control. They did it by keeping workers moving fast, by supplying them with speed, and that was what extracted their labor most efficiently. Once the use of labor power and its reproduction had in practice been split apart, coastal cities and factory owners no longer needed to provide any long-term welfare.

Another case comes from the overseas laborers of Northeast China, who are called, and call themselves, “shehuiren” — people of society.

“Peppa Pig tattooed on your skin, give it up for the ‘shehuiren.' I never expected Peppa Pig to become a badge of self-identification for ‘shehuiren.' The term carries a bit of rebellion, a bit of looking down on others, and a bit of resignation…” Xiang's use of the catchphrase brought the hall down.

In everyday Chinese the word tends to be pejorative: it means people at the margins, outside the system and outside order. The Northeastern “shehuiren” Xiang surveyed mostly come from the countryside, reached the city after finishing high school, and have no fixed work unit and no steady income. They are the city's new poor, but their way of life is no different from that of other young people — just as polished on the surface, and full of expectation about the future.

In the West it is often people like this who, in this century, take to the streets, join Occupy-style movements and demand social change. In China these seemingly unstable “shehuiren,” who look capable of causing chaos, are in fact remarkably well-behaved.

By studying the procedures “shehuiren” pass through to work abroad, Xiang laid out the process of ordering that channels their desires and adjusts their conduct.

Going abroad means passing through a long chain of brokers: from the “legs” scattered across the villages, to brokers with fixed offices in the townships, to what is called the “window” — a broker with a formal state license, qualified to sign international contracts with foreign employers.

Every link in the chain is room for profit, and the profit comes from the broker fee these workers hand over, around 60,000 yuan.

How should that fee be understood? Xiang argues it is not the “commodification” of the chance to go abroad, since a visa cannot be traded or circulated. It is a “commercialized” form of rent-seeking: the broker uses a certain relationship of power and control to collect rent from labor.

Brokers are not state bodies, yet paradoxically the relationship between broker and worker turns out to be quasi-administrative and hierarchical, handed down layer by layer all the way to the village. A “joint guarantee system” for controlling workers has even appeared: if several workers from the same village are employed by the same foreign boss, then to stop them running off, the employer works down through the layers of brokers to the village and presses each family with the threat of collective punishment by deportation — if one runs, all are sent home.

Xiang sums it up as “making money from making order.” The layered brokerage produces a graded legitimacy. Brokers keep insisting on their own legitimacy; even the way staff at a “window” company talk when handling business imitates civil servants. The brokers keep presenting the image of the state as the symbol of legitimacy.

So workers come to see the state as the guarantor of their rights. When something goes wrong they “go to the state” rather than to the law. A pattern recurs: workers use legal documents and legal language to petition, asking the central government to punish local authorities and order them to pay compensation.

Seen this way, disorder and order seem to coexist in our lives paradoxically.

If order means predictability, then disorder means all kinds of things happening without warning; the bottom of Chinese society really is fairly disordered, as in hard-to-explain episodes like the RYB Education kindergarten abuse case or the “skyline” campaign that stripped signs off Beijing's rooftops.

On the other hand, Chinese society also seems to have gone through a process of intense ordering, and one important measure of it is convenience — people can now buy anything without leaving home.

Convenience is in fact a political question, Xiang pointed out sharply. It is also a form of suspension, behavior continuing without a second thought, and it is what makes “our lives frictionless.”

Behind convenience lies exactly this ordering, because convenience needs a powerful external authority to protect it. Chinese people do not trust the people around them all that much, but they place enormous trust in abstract external systems.

Ying Xing, a professor at Tsinghua, noted in his response that unlike the Western idea of civil society, in China the energy of free individual movement has been released on a huge scale, even accelerated, and yet people remain like atoms, never spontaneously forming a “society” with propulsive energy of its own.

This may be an urgent problem. Over the past forty years everyone has been moving fast, suspended in the chase toward the future; life has been full of opportunism and thoroughly commercialized. People have given up on facing and directly changing the problems in front of them, and have neglected the bonds between one another, while growing steadily more dependent on order imposed from outside — and, above all, widely holding strong moral expectations of the government and the state.

Under these conditions, what can scholars and intellectuals do?

“How to turn the public's moral expectations into a clear language, and from that create an institution that can guarantee the government's moral commitments — that may be one thing we can do,” Xiang said at the end of one lecture. “We cannot win freedom by fleeing the government; freedom has to be built on active, direct interaction with it. We should at least know how to make demands, and in what language to put them. Rights matter more than freedom.”

The cover image and banner image are Liu Xiaodong's oil painting Man and Bird, from Liu Xiaodong 1990–2000, CAFA Art Museum.