The Chinese Style Weapons of the Weak: A Think Piece of Shanghai Tai Chi

After three decades of economic reform along with relatively lessening of political control and ideological restraint, the Chinese government in recent years has tightened the party-state grip. From the second decade of the 21st century on, the pendulum of Chinese politics has swung from moderately relaxed back toward a Maoist type of party control. Although the Xi regime has not been able to restore Maoist governance, the intent or inclination to do so is quite obvious and real.  About 10 years ago, when I had started to work on a book about everyday defiance in Mao’s China, I treated it purely as a history subject. However, when the book, Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2023, I found the subject matter to be more than just historical. It has a strong contemporary implication. The book’s relevance to present day China is perhaps a blessing to the author and the publisher from the marketing point of view — it might have broader appeal — but the relevance is an unfortunate reality we all have to face.

Mao’s regime was one of the most contentious in history. One may argue that its accomplishments were remarkable. For the first time since the mid-19th century, it effectively unified mainland China, which had been torn apart by constant warfare, political turmoil, and natural disaster. The revolution instilled in the Chinese people a sense of unity and national rejuvenation. Life expectancy at birth grew from 35–40 years when the Communists took power to 65.5 years by the end of the Mao era, one of the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.¹ The regime also presided over what has been described as “perhaps the single greatest educational effort in human history.”² In 1949, China’s illiteracy rate stood at roughly 85–90%. By 1979, this figure had dropped to about 25%.³

On the other side of the ledger, Mao’s China was one of the most repressive and disaster-ridden regimes in the world. Acting according to the principles of communism, the state seized all land and largely eliminated private property. The CCP apparatus was established in every village, urban workplace and neighborhood, policing every aspect of people’s lives to a level unprecedented in history. It was the only country that had tens of millions of people who starved to death — caused not by war or natural disaster, but by government policy failures during the Great Leap Forward.⁴ It purged hundreds of thousands of intellectuals during the Anti-Rightist campaign, and condemned many so-called rightists and their families to decades in “labor reform” camps. Nearly 20 million urban youths were involuntarily sent to border regions and barren rural areas to be “re-educated” by “poor and lower-middle peasants,” causing tremendous hardship and countless tragedies to both urban and rural populations.⁵ Finally, in the last 10 years of Mao’s rule, the Cultural Revolution brought catastrophic destruction of culture and social values, placing the country on the verge of collapse and bequeathing a legacy of destruction and violence to generations of Chinese to come. 

Looking at the Weberian tripartite classification of political authority — rational-legal, charismatic, and traditional — it is clear the Mao regime successfully rolled the first two into one but failed to encompass the third.⁶ The establishment of the PRC provided the Communists legal-constitutional authority that throughout Mao’s time (and indeed to this day) met no effective challenge. Mao excelled at what Daniel Leese has called “charismatic mobilization” as a way either to implement the party’s policies or to circumvent the party as an institution by appealing directly to the masses.⁷ His extraordinary qualities and personality cult accounted for his charismatic authority. Mao’s revolution attempted to challenge and ultimately eliminate traditional authority (i.e., one where power derives from long-established culture, customs, and social structures), but in the end largely failed.⁸

The Maoist party line condemned anything and everything that did not meet its “proletarian” values as “bourgeois” or “feudal.” Such “reactionary” remnants were to be attacked, purged, and eliminated. The political and ideological goal, especially in the last decade of the Mao era, was to spark “a revolution deep in one’s soul,” with the impossible mission of ridding human nature of “selfishness.”⁹ But the standards were arbitrary, often rendering the political climate of a given time contradictory with that of other times. This kind of contradiction was not acknowledged as an error or insistency, but rather was rationalized as in line with “Marxist dialectical materialism.” Maoist ideology became a conglomeration of terms and symbols which were wielded as a weapon in factional infighting, spouted as a testament to loyalty, and manipulated by individuals scrambling to get ahead. On the ground, competent party cadres skirted ideological rigidity to cut and fit party policies to suit diverse situations and individuals.

Scholars have pointed out that in their daily operations CCP cadres had become bureaucratic technocrats who attempted to modify or change the “structure,” which is “broadly defined to refer to everything that lies outside a political actor and sets limits to what is politically possible at any particular time through dynamic manipulations.”¹⁰ In such manipulations, as Aminda Smith has noted, cadres and officials recognized “the limits of simplistic solutions to complex social problems, and the frequently meditated on the tensions between the theory and the practice of ideological remolding.”¹¹ Sociologist Erving Goffman called this type of maneuvering “a working understanding.”¹² As this study has revealed, even when purges and “class struggle” were most severe, there were local cadres who commiserated with people who had been politically condemned, obeyed age-old cultural enactments, followed common sense, or blended party policies with old values and practices. In other words, functionaries at various levels of the party-state apparatus found ways to practice political tai chi, so to speak.

The most formidable force opposing Maoist ideology, however, was not something that was organized or confrontational. Rather, it was the sheer indifference of the people. The tai chi type of circuitousness and wangling was more commonly found among ordinary people at the grassroots level than in officialdom. It was not carefully planned but extemporaneous. The Shanghai way of coping with communism depicted in this study had no established ideology, no perceptible organization, no given agenda. At one level it was a spontaneous struggle for survival; at another, it was a clever and persistent pursuit of comfort and pleasure. Either way, it constituted a pattern of unintended and also informal resistance against Maoist heavy-handed interference in everyday life. “The general pattern of life is important,” sociologist William Foote Whyte once wrote, “but it can be constructed only through observing the individuals whose actions make up that pattern.”¹³ What my book has provided is precisely such observations of individual actions and behaviors that constituted that pattern. To borrow James Scott’s concept, we may call the pattern “Chinese-style weapons of the weak.”¹⁴

As we have seen in the book, Mao’s era was marked by a constant shortage of virtually every daily necessity. To get by, people devised ways to put extremely limited resources to best use. In an age of material scarcity, creativity and ingenuity were often reflected in trivial ways, ways that might be thought to be insignificant and might be easily overlooked. But as Georg Hegel said, “The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.”¹⁵ It would take effort to discern fashion in a time when every inch of fabric was rationed, to know how fine food could be when every drop of cooking oil was controlled, to appreciate a little flowerpot culture when aesthetics were condemned as bourgeois — in short, it would require an attentive eye to see colors and individualities in the vast ocean of monotony and uniformity and to recognize the significance of the insignificant.¹⁶

These small manifestations of individuality reveal a type of everyday resistance to party-dictated norms in private life. At the private level, Shanghainese, from the old rich and best minds to common people living in crowded back alleyways, struggled to keep their lifestyle intact as much as possible, using the party’s own policies and programs to maintain a way of life that the party might well condemn as “bourgeois decadence.” The essence of such a lifestyle – for some it was no more than the pursuit of a simple pleasure – never died out during Mao’s time, but instead became a powerful undercurrent beneath the surface of Communist asceticism. There were colors among the humdrum and monotony, interests that diverged from official doctrine, and individuality hidden in uniformity.

Elizabeth J. Perry has pointed out that central to Maoist mass mobilization was “the role of cultural positioning, or the strategic deployment of a range of symbolic resources (religion, ritual, rhetoric, dress, drama, art, and so on) for purposes of political persuasion.”¹⁷ There was another side of cultural positioning as well, one in which people were apathetic toward official mobilization while in subtle and savvy ways they circumvented Maoist norms and, in daily life, “positioned” themselves with their own deep-seated cultural norms. This was done informally, in the way that “people employ various forms of action that are not premade” but are created ad hoc to “make the most of the possibilities in given circumstances.”¹⁸

The tai chi type of resistance that this study explores found fertile ground in Shanghai largely because it could be enacted in everyday life where “being informal” was the order of the day. If there is a “tyranny of informality,” as a social theory on contemporary cultural practices has argued, then the power of informality applies perfectly to daily life in Shanghai in the time of Maoist tyranny.¹⁹ As we have seen in this study, the power of informality was typically executed quietly and often invisibly. It was like “an underground movement of secret freedom fighters, each acting individually and independently to ignore, evade, resist, and thwart the increasingly heavy hand of government power.”²⁰ The informality and invisibility exerted a subtle but sure influence on one’s character without one being consciously aware of the influence. In silence, people crafted an insurgence to defend the city’s character.

By the end of the Mao era, the legacy of the city’s capitalist spirit and its associated bourgeois lifestyle survived just below the surface of Maoist socialism. A percipient observer could almost smell the remains of the past after decades of revolution. Historian Ross Terrill, who visited China in 1974, exclaimed, “It is amazing how often socialist Shanghai talks about capitalism, how insistently a visit to Shanghai evokes thought about the bitch-goddess of capitalism. Twenty-five years of Liberation, yet not quite liberated from this specter. You see no sign of capitalism, but it remains a psychic dragon, to be looked in the eye and slain.”²¹

Shanghai was not alone in preserving old values and practices that undermined the Maoist dictatorship and cultural positioning. Scholars have noted that a “second society,” underground and mostly invisible, existed nationwide by the end of Mao’s rule.²² Mao famously proclaimed that in the struggle for communism, “Either the East Wind [communism] prevails over the West Wind [capitalism] or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind; and there can be no compromise.”²³ Mao apparently was too categorical in his claim. Even in the most radical years of Mao’s revolution — in what Michael Dutton described as “the years that burned” — the wind did not always blow in one direction.²⁴ At the end of Mao’s era, anthropologist James L. Watson rightly pointed out: “There is often a discrepancy between the expressed goals of political campaigns and the practical consequences of social engineering. In this China is by no means unique.”²⁵ In numerous more recent research, scholars have noted that “heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tension between official and unofficial cultures were persistent features of grassroots society during the Mao years.”²⁶ In that regard, Shanghai was not a unique case of deviation and resistance.

As mentioned earlier, to this day, Maoism has never died. It only faded away, incompletely. While it is uncertain if Maoist governance will come back to China someday in some form or to some extent, we can be certain that the tai chi type of meandering resistances, involuntary accommodation, silent deviation, and spontaneous manipulations — in short, the art of being ruled — will be there in the society and particularly at the grassroots level in coping with autocracy, in the way that is not always readily visible but tenaciously effective and, to ruler’s dismay, ultimately powerful.