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Introduction

Beginning in the 1990s, both scholars and central officials repeatedly suggested that taxes and fees imposed on peasants¹ by local governments were the biggest source of discontent and protest in China.² Although higher levels of the Chinese government frequently urged lower levels to “reduce peasant burdens,” little changed in the countryside until the central government rolled out tax-for-fee reforms (TFR), first in Anhui province in 2000 and then throughout most of the rest of the country in 2002.³ TFR was a program designed by the central government to reduce and rationalize local governments’ extraction from peasants by replacing a wide range of taxes and fees that officials abused with one low agricultural tax. Going even further, the central government mandated that local governments phase out even this agricultural tax completely by 2006.⁴ Over a period of a few years this freed China’s peasants from a tax they had paid for over two millennia. Yet, despite this decrease in what was likely the largest source of unrest, the number of protests (euphemistically termed “mass incidents”) increased dramatically (Graph 1) during this period and probably since, although no official data has been released since the mid-2000s. While a wide variety of factors are surely at play, the simplest explanation is that officials in rural areas continued to rely on rural residents as their primary source of revenue. Specifically, rural governments shifted from taxing rural residents to taking their land. We demonstrate this by showing that in this period the number of administrative lawsuits related to taxation decreased while the number of land cases increased dramatically.

Graph 1: Number of “Mass Incidents” in China 1993-2009⁵

While this shift may seem dated in a country changing as rapidly as the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it illuminates an underlying dilemma that has still not been solved by the central Chinese state: the lack of an appropriate funding mechanism for poorer local governments (still not resolved even after the 2015 fiscal reforms) and the resulting Hobson’s choice for local officials of imposing a heavy and unfair tax burden on residents of poorer areas or simply underfunding services and development. Our results suggest that if the central government insists on unfunded social spending mandates for programs such as rural health insurance, subsistence income subsidies (the dibaoprogram), and basic retirement pensions, officials in poorer areas will continue to grab resources from poorer and less politically connected residents via whatever means available.⁶ These actions are the local officials’ attempt to square a circle and therefore occur regardless of how many circulars the central government distributes prohibiting the conduct or how often the central leadership harangues local officials to discontinue extraction from residents. This pressure dynamic is the fundamental driver of continuing unrest in rural areas and contributes to migration to China’s cities.

1. Background

Our point of departure is the 2005 agricultural tax reform structure. When the central government eliminated the tax, the shortfall was supposed to be made up for by a combination of more efficient local government spending and transfers from the central government. In most cases, however, this combination proved insufficient to compensate for the loss of revenue. Officials pursued various strategies: finding alternate sources of revenues, reducing the provision of services, and the borrowing that has put local governments in their current perilous financial state, with debts exceeding US$2.5 trillion.⁷ Here we present data to show that one of the major responses was simply switching the basis of extraction from taxing rural residents to the less-sustainable practice of appropriating and repurposing their land.

Tax reforms seem to have been a way for the central officials to have their cake and eat it too. By eliminating widely disliked taxes and fees, Beijing could appear to be doing its best on behalf of disadvantaged peasants, force local governments to use funds more responsibly, and only have to foot a relatively small portion of the bill. Without larger fiscal transfers, however, many local governments have been left in a tenuous funding situation – particularly the governments that relied most heavily on agricultural and other ancillary taxes. Evidence also suggests that these reductions in income have resulted in skyrocketing local government debt, with township governments facing dire budget deficits and debt amounting to twice their annual income.⁸ Yet the central government seems reluctant to increase taxes on China’s wealthier populations and implement the massive transfers that would fully fund their reforms and help address the country’s widening rural-urban income gap. This again echoes the problems of imperial China, when efforts to pacify the gentry by exempting them from taxes ended up bankrupting the Ming government.

Existing qualitative research already suggests that many localities made up for the loss of the agricultural tax by appropriating land previously allocated to peasants. Takeuchi’s ethnographic work found that township officials explicitly considered and then implemented a shift from tax to land extraction. Yep also notes this likely change in local government extraction practices, and Oi and Zhao found in interviews with township officials that, after the tax and fee reforms, many considered turning to illegal land sales.

It is relatively easy for local governments to seize peasants’ land because it is allocated to peasants for 30-year terms rather than owned outright. While many peasants were unwilling to give up land they had been allocated during post-Mao decollectivization, in most cases officials did not even wait until the 30-year terms were up. Instead, they used a variety of tactics to pressure peasants into signing over their land-use-rights for relatively minimal compensation that often never materialized. One common tactics in more extreme cases was for officials, often working with the future developers of the land, to bulldoze peasants’ farms and homes, leaving them with few reasons or resources to continue to resist. Land takings became common in the reform era, but evidence suggests that they gained prominence in the early 2000s. A 2005 survey found that land takings had grown by a factor of 15 in a decade.⁹ The land can be used to make up for budget shortfalls by selling it to developers, “re-contracting” collective agricultural land to non-villagers, and/or creating a tax base via the development of commercial agriculture or industry, yet all end in the expropriation of farmers’ land and meagre compensation.

Whatever the ultimate use of the land, cash-strapped officials often attempt to minimize the compensation paid to peasants for their land, both for reasons of corruption and to maximize the amount of money available to meet other spending priorities. “Villagers complained about low compensation when local governments expropriated their land for building an industrial zone or a freeway. They also complained that local governments then sold the confiscated land to developers at a much higher price, so that local cadres could cover the funding shortage.”¹⁰ Cadres sometimes employ harsh methods not only to force holdouts to leave their land, but also to pressure farmers to reduce the value of their land (by cutting down fruit trees, for example), and hence the required compensation. Village collectives receive and keep the largest portion of compensation with farmers getting a small fraction of market value. Not only are peasants generally dissatisfied with the amount of compensation, but such payments may leave farmers without a livelihood once the money runs out or fails to materialize.¹¹ This has continued in spite of increasingly strident instructions from the central government to ensure proper compensation is paid for land takings.

The harsh tactics, while generating significant revenue, unsurprisingly stoke peasant unrest. Evidence strongly suggests that the importance of land seizures has increased dramatically since the mid 2000s. Yu Jianrong, an expert on mass incidents with access to privileged data, claimed that by 2009, at least 65 percent of mass incidents were related to land problems. A report for the Cato Institute sets the figure even higher: “[i]n the first nine months of 2006, China reported a total of 17,900 cases of “massive rural incidents” in which a total of 385,000 farmers protested against the government. Approximately 80 per cent of these incidents were related to illegal land-takings.”

This shift from agricultural tax to land takings is generally accepted among China scholars. Perhaps due to a lack of data, however, no one has attempted to demonstrate how and when this shift happened on a nationwide scale. In order to do so, we analyze data on administrative litigation, the system through which average Chinese can challenge the actions of local governments in courts. We view administrative cases as a good measure of potential causes of unrest because 1) they are costly in terms of time, money, and effort, 2) they are the most formal means of challenging the local state, and 3) no other mode of contention produces publicly available annual statistics disaggregated by grievance type and province. As localities shifted their extraction from taxes and fees to land expropriation we would expect the number of administrative cases related to taxes will fall and those related to land would rise. Less extraction in the form of taxes means less dissatisfaction with taxes, which means fewer administrative tax cases. Correspondingly, more extraction in the form of land expropriation means more dissatisfaction with land expropriation, which leads to more administrative land cases.

1. Data

To analyze whether the proposed trend was evident at the national level we gathered data on tax and administrative lawsuits from the China Statistical Yearbook. Administrative lawsuits are broken down by type and we have isolated the change over time in land and tax cases in Graph 2. The graph clearly shows that tax administrative lawsuits have declined dramatically over this period while land cases have increased. From 1998-2000 administrative courts heard approximately 2,000 tax cases a year, but this begins to drop in 2000, the year tax-for-fee reforms are launched in Anhui, reaching a plateau of around 300 in 2006-2009. The increase in land cases starts more slowly, but 2006-2009 shows a level of land litigation that is approximately a quarter higher than in 1998-2000. The fact that tax cases fall relatively quickly and land cases react more slowly makes sense. While tax litigation would begin to peter out almost immediately once officials dropped onerous taxes and fees, it would take some time for local governments to begin the process of expropriating land and then have peasants file cases against them. The difference in absolute number of land and tax suits results from the fact that peasants’ tax disputes often involve only hundreds of renminbi (RMB) as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands for land cases. Additionally, the loss of land can render a family suddenly destitute in a way that unjust taxation would not.

Official data published by the Chinese government are justifiably treated with scepticism, and data on litigation are no exception. Empirical research has suggested that courts exaggerate the true number of cases to make themselves look more productive and this is primarily true of less-busy courts in poorer areas.¹² For our purposes in this analysis, however, it is extremely unlikely that the relationship we identify between land and tax cases is the product of doctored statistics. From the local courts to the provincial and national governments, no part of the Chinese state has an incentive to provide false evidence of this negative correlation between land and tax cases. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which statistics on administrative litigation relating to land were manipulated upward at the same time that numbers for tax cases were falsified downward.

Graph 2: Total numbers of Administrative Land, Tax and Health Cases 1998-2010

Source: China Statistical Yearbook (中国统计年鉴) various years.

While this summary data is only suggestive, it does provide prima facie evidence of the shift from agricultural tax to land appropriation. To further determine whether representative empirical support exists for our hypothesis, we also examined data on administrative cases at the provincial level. Unfortunately, such data is published only occasionally or not at all for most provinces. The data used here was found in provincial statistical yearbooks or provincial legal yearbooks. After an exhaustive search through these sources, we used every province for which data was available for 2001-2007 to compile a data set consisting of a reasonably representative subset of five provinces plus a sixth case we created by using the national data minus those five provinces. These provinces run the gamut from rich coastal provinces (Guangdong) to poor inland ones (Anhui). It includes an agriculturally important province, Henan, and a provincial level municipality with relatively little farmland, Tianjin. Below is Graph 3, which shows the land versus tax administrative case frequency comparison of these select cases from 2001-2007. While our choice of years was limited by the available data, this period seems suitable as it begins one year before nationwide tax-for-fee reforms and ends one year after the phasing out of the agricultural tax was complete.

Graph 3:¹³Administrative Tax and Law Cases for 6 Cases 2001-2007¹⁴

The provincial data displays a more differentiated experience than is suggested by the national level graph, but still follows the basic contour of our argument. In most provinces, tax cases peaked around 2003 and then declined dramatically afterward, suggesting that the rural tax-for-fee reforms were successful at reducing excessive taxation. The spikes in tax cases visible between 2002 and 2004 in all six cases (though small in Hebei) suggest that the new regulations initially provided a basis for additional litigation resisting newly illegal taxes, but quickly diminished as officials began to reduce taxes and fees to comply with the reforms.

The pattern in the number of land cases is less settled but in all instances land cases went up after 2003, suggesting an inverse relationship with tax cases. Tianjin, Guangdong, and the national data minus the five provinces more or less followed the pattern displayed in the national data. We see the largest absolute number and decline in tax cases and rise in land cases in Henan, which makes sense considering it is one of the provinces mentioned by Bernstein¹⁵ as a hotbed for tax-related protest. While Anhui was also one of the key sites of tax unrest, the tax-for-fee reforms there were initiated before our data set begins, so it is not surprising that the number of tax cases would already be low. Overall, while untidy, the provincial data lends support to the shift from tax-based to land-based extraction.

Elsewhere, we also conducted a simple panel regression using the provincial data that, for reasons of space, are omitted here but are available on the authors’ website. While results should be interpreted with some caution, given the highly limited nature of the data set, they are supportive of our hypothesis and robust. The overall picture, including the existent literature and summary data, strongly suggests that during tax-for-fee reforms and the phasing out of the agricultural tax, land cases increased significantly while tax cases fell dramatically. This is as we predicted, given the spending pressures on local officials and the limited sources of revenue available to them due to the tax-for-fee reforms.

Conclusion

Previous qualitative research demonstrated that because of the abolition of rural taxation, local cadres began to use a strategy of land expropriation to fund government expenditures. Here we test and confirm this theory at the national and provincial levels by showing the link between a decline in administrative litigation over tax issues and a rise in land cases. This analysis suggests that unrest in rural China is an ongoing problem, deeply rooted in the structure of the modern Chinese state and closely related to China’s inadequate fiscal transfer system. This supports the idea that eliminating fees and taxes without sufficient funding simply pushed local governments into increased land seizures that, if anything, created even greater unrest. In the short term, tax reforms may have made the central government look good at the expense of local governments. Ultimately, however, the central government will be forced to deal with the underlying causes of unrest and local government debt or face a serious challenge to its legitimacy and stability.

The systematic underfunding of rural governments not only leads to officials appropriating and repurposing land from rural residents, it is also a major cause of the huge, rapidly increasing, and unsustainable debts of local governments. This debt crisis will likely intensify as local governments run out of farm land to appropriate and sell. Furthermore, underfunded rural localities exacerbate inequality as they fail to stimulate development or even invest in their population through basic services such as education and healthcare. This, in combination with losing their land, pushes more rural residents into the floating population of more than 250 million underserved Chinese in urban areas, a potential source of unrest on a regime-threatening scale.

It is possible that as rising prices in cities push development into rural areas and China continues to urbanize, the CPC’s US$200 billion internal security budget will be enough to keep control despite the problems resulting from underfunded rural governments. But if Beijing really wants to tackle rising inequality, ballooning local government debt, and the unrest these can engender, its safest bet would be to increase cash transfers from China’s booming coast and cities to its struggling rural areas. If it does not, the historical pattern demonstrated here will surely repeat itself as officials continue to face the unsolvable dilemma created by the central government.

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The Fall of a Great Power

During the reign of Zhu Di, who became Yongle, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty in 1402, the sphere of Chinese culture and influence expanded far beyond its traditional territories.  Although Zhu Di’s tactics were often ruthless, his reign is considered one of the most brilliant in Chinese history.  He moved the capital permanently to Beijing from Nanjing, reconstructing the 2,000-mile Grand Canal to transport grain from the fertile Yangtze River valley in the south to Beijing and building the majestic monuments known to most tourists visiting China today, including the imperial palace of the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the palatial Ming Tombs.  Zhu Di personally led five successful military campaigns north of the Great Wall against the Mongols, who had ruled China for the century preceding Ming rule under the Yuan Dynasty beginning under Kublai Khan.  He fought the Mongols his entire life as they continued to be the greatest threat to Ming rule.

One of the premier achievements of his reign was the expansion of the Ming naval fleet under admiral Zheng He and the historic maritime empire created through Zheng’s expeditions.  Ironically, Zheng He was the son of a devout Muslim of Mongol extraction who was killed in battle while fighting with Mongol rebels against the Ming army. The Ming soldiers captured the 10-year-old Zheng, castrated him, and gave him as a servant to Zhu Di, a prince and prominent young army officer at the time.  Although eunuchs had not often been trusted with political or military assignments during the reigns of Zhu Di’s predecessors, Zheng became a valued confidante to Zhu throughout his military campaigns, including the rebellion Zhu led to take the throne from his nephew not long after the death of Zhu Di’s father, emperor Hong Wu.  Shortly after becoming emperor, Zhu Di placed Zheng in charge of the Chinese naval fleet.

Chinese vessels and sea charts had led the world for several centuries, but Zheng He expanded the capacity and reach of China’s navy exponentially.  His lead vessels, called “treasure ships,” were enormous for the age (at least five times the size of the vessels sailed by Christopher Columbus 90 years later). Each of these ships, which numbered more than 60 on the first voyage, carried at least 500 sailors and treasures of Chinese porcelain, silk goods, iron implements, and silver coins. The entire fleet of more than 300 assorted ships carried horses, weaponry, grain, and a crew of around 28,000 men.

From 1405 to 1433, Zheng led seven voyages, lasting two years each, to more than 30 countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  His plan under Zhu Di’s direction was to chart the entire world carrying thousands of tons of treasure and a military force to promote the power and influence of the Ming dynasty and build a great empire through gifts, trade, and foreign domination.  Using his military and diplomatic skills, Zheng founded numerous colonies during these voyages and brought many of the kingdoms he visited within the Chinese tribute system.  Zheng spread Chinese culture and influence throughout the regions he traveled, which can be traced centuries after his expeditions ended, as temples were constructed in his honor.

After Zhu Di died in 1424, the imperial power and influence of the Chinese navy soon ended.  Much like President Trump’s abandonment of the international trading system created and maintained by his predecessors for seven decades since the Second World War, the emperors who succeeded Zhu Di failed to see value in maintaining alliances beyond its borders.

Subsequent Ming ruler allowed its ocean going vessels to deteriorate and withdrew behind the Great Wall in the grand sanctity of the “Middle Kingdom.”  In an ancient version of “China First” policies, the kingdom closed its ports to foreign ships, which succeeding rulers believed only carried barbarians, in their xenophobic view of the outside world.  This policy continued into the Qing dynasty and ultimately led to disastrous, humiliating consequences in the last century of the empire.  In the nineteenth century, the Opium Wars, the territorial concessions taken by the Western powers, and the ravaging abuses inflicted by Japanese militarism have all instilled a lasting national resentment that plays a significant role in Chinese policy to this day.

A Great Rejuvenation

The current leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, who has become the most powerful Chinese ruler at least since Deng Xiaoping (and likely will become the most powerful since Mao Zedong now that Xi’s term is unlimited), invoked the slogan, the “Chinese Dream,” as the guiding creed for his regime soon after he became president of the People’s Republic of China in 2012.  At first, many observers likened the phrase to a meaning similar to the “American dream” of individual economic prosperity, especially in view of the rising wealth of China as much of its population emerged from poverty under the economic reforms implemented during Deng’s rule.  But Xi’s use of the slogan offered a much broader theme: the dream he proposed was a nationalistic call for “a great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Frankly, the message could be made into an American baseball cap with the slogan, “Make China Great Again.”  But unlike the Trump slogan, Xi’s includes a well-crafted strategy of revival and a true reference point to a time when China actually fell from a pedestal as the single most powerful nation on Earth.

President Xi cited the Chinese dream for a national rejuvenation in a speech given at the National Museum of China commending an exhibition called “Road to Revival,” which juxtaposed the achievements of ancient imperial China in the permanent exhibit against the spectacle of national humiliation that followed the penetration of European imperialists into the isolated Middle Kingdom and ended with what the Chinese call the “Second Sino-Japanese War” from 1931 to 1945. The exhibition presented a sanitized version of the progress made since the Communist “liberation” of China in 1949 on the road to the current “socialist market economy,” or what Deng Xiaoping called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  Of course, the exhibits gave no hint of the 1989 massacre that occurred in front of the museum on Tiananmen Square, downplayed the chaotic destruction of the Cultural Revolution, and largely ignored China’s other self-inflicted disasters occurring during the rule of the charismatic Mao Zedong.  It was against this backdrop that Xi urged national unity in the effort to revive the pride and greatness of China.

The memory of Zheng’s powerful navy was revived in the early twentieth century as the new Chinese republic began building a navy to defend against the imperial Japanese incursions.  More recently in the current century his diplomatic successes are being honored by recalling his exploits as a national hero and by imitation, especially in the use of soft power to extend Chinese influence.  As China has risen to become the second largest economy in the world behind the United States, President Xi has taken modern version of treasure ships abroad to welcoming countries and invested in infrastructure and established trade relationships.

While fulfilling the “Chinese dream of a great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Xi’s plans include the construction of a land-based Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road tying Asia to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (known in a characteristically Chinese expression as “One Belt, One Road”) running along the path of the historic Silk Road and the maritime voyages of admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century. The One Belt, One Road project is not just a transportation project. China says it is committing more than $1 trillion for infrastructure projects in over 60 countries, spreading its soft power to win friends and expand its orbit of influence, presumably to “Make China Great Again.”

On November 15, 2016, a week after the U.S. presidential election, the Chinese government’s English language newspaper, China Daily USA, ran a large editorial cartoon depicting President Barrack Obama diving off the bow of a large container ship, named “TPP” (for Obama’s 11-nation trade agreement initiative, the Trans-Pacific Partnership), depicted stuck in the desert surrounded by cacti, sand dunes, and cattle skulls.  A long editorial described Beijing’s relief that “TPP is looking ever less likely to materialize by the day. After all, the trade grouping has been essentially . . . meant to counter China’s economic influence in the Asia-Pacific.”  The piece described Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump’s phone call exchanging good wishes for the “Trump era.”

Strategically, President Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP three days after his inauguration was a major win for President Xi in reaching his goal to make China great again.  As President Trump withdraws the United States from world leadership roles built over the last century (including his expressed desire to abandon the World Trade Organization), he gives an assist to President Xi as China attempts to transform into a global leader based on a strong economy, transformational infrastructure projects, a strong defense, and extensive international application of soft power projects.

Trump Retreats to Mercantilism and Trade Wars

Like the Ming emperors who withdrew behind the Great Wall and let their great ships rot in the docks to keep barbarians from entering the Middle Kingdom, President Trump is trying to build tariff walls (not to mention the campaign border wall) to withstand intrusion by foreign barbarians while withdrawing from world leadership under the illusion of America First economic nationalism. Three days before the Trump inauguration, President Xi appeared for the first time to reach out to the global elites with a free-trade message at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as if to offer himself in a debut role as the unlikely new champion of the liberal world economic order.

From the outset of his entry in public affairs, President Trump has revealed a dangerous degree of naiveté, to put it kindly, on international trade policy.  He thinks, for example, that unilaterally raising tariffs to trade war levels will force China to protect U.S. intellectual property rights and eliminate the trade deficit.  Before taking office, Trump’s ignorance of the U.S.-China bilateral history seriously undermined the relationship, as he threatened to terminate the all-important “One China” policy and proposed to give U.S. debt obligations to China a “haircut,” as if these debts deserved no more respect than a fee owed to one of his obsequious lawyers.  Now in his second year in office, the president has begun a full out trade war with China, America’s single largest trading partner, using Art of the Deal bully tactics, apparently thinking that he has leverage to bluff his way to victory.  It is a war he wages in the face of opposition from a majority of the American business community, at least a plurality of Congress, and growing public sentiment.  To date, the Chinese are not only refusing to capitulate, they are refusing to come back to the table.

With its large import market, the United States has some economic leverage, but China’s exports to the United States represent only four percent of its GDP, which continues to grow at six-point-six percent per year.  President Xi, who is trying to convert the Chinese economy away from being export driven now has an unlimited term of office, may be putting more stock in his political leverage, as he strives for a return to the greatness of China.  Meanwhile, President Trump’s political stock is down.

This trade war will likely have no winners in the short run, but may determine which leader’s slogan prevails in the long run.  President Xi has the obvious edge.

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Leng Feng, the Chinese special ops soldier played by Wu, has since become China’s new favorite action hero. Leng follows his own honor code, gulps maotai liquor, flirts with his boss, and leaves behind piles of enemy bodies. The enemies are merciless drug dealers plaguing China’s southern border, pirates at sea, foreign mercenaries, and African insurgents. But Leng is always smarter. He is also cooler, dodging kicks, arrows, bullets, grenades, and tanks. And he magically recovers from an Ebola-like virus overnight, becoming fit to fight again.

Chinese audiences have fervently embraced these two thrilling action flicks. If Leng’s heroism appears too clichéd and implausible, the director and star suggested, one should blame Hollywood. “In Hollywood, the hero can take on a whole army. Why can’t my character take on a dozen mercenaries?” Wu said in an interview with NPR.² On his controversial use of the Chinese national flag in Wolf Warriors II, he argued, “American movies can raise the flag, but if my character does it, I’m Red China. Why?”³Wolf Warriors II was China’s official submission to the Academy Awards in 2017. It is deeply ironic that a Chinese variation of the white savior trope was sent to Hollywood for approval. In Wu’s version, the hero single-handedly saves Chinese and African civilians as well as a Chinese-speaking American woman in a fictional African country plagued by an epidemic and a civil war.

Wu’s movies are neither subtle nor apologetic in expressing patriotism. The ancient Chinese phrase “Whoever offends China will be wiped out no matter how far away” is articulated several times, conveying an increased level of confidence in China’s military prowess. One of the last utterances of Leng’s nemesis (played by Scott Adkins) in Wolf Warriors is: “The Chinese army is not as lame as I have thought.” In Wolf Warriors II, Big Daddy (played by Frank Grillo) dies only after Leng reclaims agency in history. “People like you will always be beaten by people like me. Get used to it. Get fucking used to it!” Big Daddy hollers, pressing a sharp dagger on Leng’s throat. A furious Leng lunges back, grabs the dagger, and kills Big Daddy in a frenzy of stabs, before he has the final words, “That’s fucking history!”

For decades the patriotic feelings expressed in Chinese cinema have taken on the forms of victimhood and anxiety. The humiliation of the Opium Wars in the 1840s has been imprinted in the Chinese public mentality. Many films portray Japan’s brutal occupation of China during WWII. The legitimacy of the Chinese government partly depends upon fomenting this type of resentment. The Wolf Warriors films, refreshingly, capture “a new, muscular iteration of China’s self-narrative.”⁴ The films construct China as not only militarily capable but also diplomatically prevailing. “Stand down! We are Chinese! China and Africa are friends!” China’s ambassador to the African country where Wolf Warriors II takes place calmly declares to a crowd of red-scarfed rebels pointing guns at them. The crowd then reluctantly retreats. “China is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and I need them on my side if I’m to take political power,” the rebel leader cries later on in the film, scolding his mercenaries for having killed a Chinese doctor in a China-bonded hospital in his country. Plenty of dialogue in the films evokes the feeling of being given a lecture about China’s greatness.

“China has never seen such a moment, when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one,” New Yorker writer Evan Osnos points out in explaining why some Chinese audiences gave Wolf Warriors II standing ovations and sang the national anthem after the screenings.⁵Rachel, the Chinese-speaking doctor whom Leng rescues in Wolf Warriors II, tries to call the U.S. consulate for help after bloodthirsty rebels have occupied the hospital. “We are sorry. We are currently closed!” is the voice message she receives. To Osnos, it is not coincidental that the films became a hit in China during an age of “America First,” when Trump withdrew from the TPP and reduced U.S. contributions to the U.N. while China’s Belt and Road initiative has expanded the country’s global impact to an unprecedented extent. With a fatter budget, Wolf Warriors II drives home its thinly disguised political message even more effectively in a new-colonial context. The film prominently sentimentalizes China’s economic and humanitarian presence in Africa while, as some have critiqued, portraying  African lives as disposable through numerous sensational scenes of massacre and epidemic outbreak against the exotic African landscape. An African boy called Tundu, Leng’s godson, begs Leng to rescue his mother, who is stuck in a China-sponsored factory taken over by rebels. Leng promises to get her back safely in 18 hours. Leng has to complete the mission alone because the Chinese Navy has to get U.N. approval before they can take action. The message is clear. China is a powerful player that strictly abides by international law and executes only perfectly moral actions. A Chinese viewer’s words best summarize the intended response: “It feels good to be on the side of justice.”⁶

The hybrid of Rambo-style heroism, John Woo-style sentimental violence, and Chinese mainstream-style nationalism reaches its peak at the end of Wolf Warriors II. Leng wraps a Chinese flag around his arms and leads wounded Chinese and African citizens through an active war zone. The film closes with the shot of a Chinese passport, poignantly captioned with the announcement, “To the citizens of the People’s Republic of China: When you find yourself in danger in a foreign country, never give up hope. China’s strength will always support you.”

“The patriotic kindling in people’s hearts has been dried as far as it can be, and I, Wu Jing, have taken a small match or spark and dropped it on, lighting up all of you,” the director said in an interview with a Chinese website.⁷ The metaphor of a single spark igniting a prairie fire dates back to a Confucian classic but has been most widely known through Mao’s letter in 1930 intending to boost the morale of the Red Army.

The Wolf Warriors films have provided a model to combine patriotic spectacle and box office miracle. The first movie cost $12 million and took in $90 million in China. The second, with a worldwide gross of more than $870 million, is not only China’s highest-earning film but also the “only non-Hollywood movie to crack the world’s 100 highest-grossing movies of all time.”⁸For decades many Chinese audiences, the movie market on track to be the world’s largest, have preferred Hollywood over domestic productions. Thanks to Wolf Warriors II, domestic films “for the first time prevailed over foreign imports in terms of combined box-office receipts,” reaching almost 55 percent of the total gross in 2017.⁹

Having risen to be a superstar, Wu has gained the political capital to build his Wolf Warriors franchise. Chinese government-sponsored cultural offices, film associations, and film research institutions have hosted symposiums to study Wu’s success, in the hope of replicating the box office miracle, using films to promote the “Chinese Dream,” and boosting China’s global soft power. More than 500 reports, interviews, essays, and articles on the films have been published in China. Collaboration between film producers and military bases—the first Wolf Warriors film was sponsored by the Nanjing Military Base, where Wu shadowed for 18 months—has been identified as a new model of producing breathtaking blockbusters with military themes.¹⁰ It is reported that the script of Wolf Warriors III has been submitted for approval.

Can the Wolf Warriors films be considered “a turning point for China’s movies to go global?”¹¹ While Wolf Warriors II ticket sales were overwhelmingly from China and overseas Chinese communities, Wu does not reject the idea of making films for global audiences. Wolf Warriors II employed prominent Hollywood talent, including Joe and Anthony Russo as consultants, Sam Hargrave (“Captain America: Civil War”) as stunt director, and Joseph Trapanese (“Tron: Legacy”) as composer.¹² “As Americans working in the China market, you have to be really respectful of their storytelling,” Joe Russo said.¹³ Evidently Wu knows how to make his Chinese audiences “feel good.” And he believes action movies can transcend linguistic and cultural barriers and become universally appealing. In October 2017, Wu met Vin Diesel (“Fast and Furious”) who later uploaded a Facebook video with himself beside Wu. “So the world, I want you to say hello to my friend,” Diesel wrote.¹⁴ To really be a friend, Wu will have to work hard to make his Western audiences “feel good” too. The practical question is whether he can actually do so without losing his Chinese base in the era of tariffs and threatened trade wars. The existential question is whether he is still himself if he makes Western audiences feel good.

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At the outset I admit that I have studiously avoided other reviews of this movie because I wanted to approach the experience with freedom to create my own interpretation. That said, it has been impossible to escape hearing in the news media about some casting issues that dovetail with current Hollywood film discourse about “white-washing.” The minimum that can be said (with relief) is that the male lead, Henry Golding, is unmistakably not Anglo in appearance, despite his unmistakably Anglo name. His terrific acting also makes moot other angles in this discourse.

I’d love my language students to see this movie just for the soundtrack as all of the songs are in non-subtitled Mandarin Chinese. Included are at least two hits by the queen of classic Chinese ballads, Theresa Teng (Deng Lijun), as well as other Chinese language renditions of some famous rock and roll party classics. The more challenging task is for students to dissect the complexity of Chinese culture presented here, particularly in light of the intersections of non-Chinese ideology, religion, politics, geography, and history. There is a lot of historical baggage to examine outside the movie theater that is thankfully only hinted at within. This will make great fodder for classroom debate. For example, after an initial scene set in the childhood of the male lead, our introduction to the Young family matriarch, played by Michelle Yeoh (star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000]), is set during a Bible study session at her mansion in Singapore, which she of course leads in reading. What is the role of Christianity in Asia, after all? This example merely hints at the idiosyncrasy of a film whose wealthy characters are international and cosmopolitan. However, we “commoners” with Western cultural backgrounds are set to readily identify with “commoners” throughout East Asia in mutual recognition of the eye-popping luxury and privilege presented among these crazy rich people.

So is this an Asian movie? A Chinese movie? A Chinese American movie? A Chinese diaspora movie? To whom is this movie directed? The British-accented English beautifully spoken by all the main characters (except the Chinese American female lead played by Constance Wu) neatly parallels the Western obsession with royalty expressed by interest in royal marriages, the television series Downton Abbey, and the spurious assumptions regarding the assumedly higher intelligence of speakers of the Queen’s English. It is all about perspective, right? Rich people must be really intelligent, so they speak that way, right? Intelligence aside, what commoner or aristocrat of any nationality wouldn’t identify with the comeuppance of the London luxury hotel staff who discriminate against the Youngs, only to find the hotel bought by the matriarch (Michelle Yeoh) minutes later as revenge?

Why is this movie set in Singapore? The wealthy family (and extended family) are generally the product of British boarding schools, “old money” emigrated from pre-revolutionary China. This timing nicely sidesteps the issue of a hundred years of politics of the twentieth century, and also sidesteps the wealthy Taiwan as Chinese issue, as well as the fact of new money in the PRC today, which hosts the second-highest number of billionaires by nationality, a fact that would argue for titling the film “Crazy Rich Chinese.” But could this be a “Chinese movie,” given that the major tension of the movie runs along a class conflict motif presented by the already yearlong relationship between Rachel Chu, the New York-raised, working class, brilliant NYU game theory professor, and Nick Young, the scion of Singapore’s leading family (unbeknown to her)? The title “Crazy Rich People” might be more appropriate as viewers watch Rachel and Nick return together for Nick’s best friend’s wedding, and Rachel is thrown into the lion pit of class conflict. The story then becomes how she either sinks or swims regardless of nationality.

The film portrays a cast of hot Chinese women with Baywatch bodies and men who are strong, ripped and stripped down in Bruce Lee style. They play in the idealized manner of really rich people anywhere, as depicted in the parallel bachelor and bachelorette parties. But the primary “love triangle” so to speak between Nick and Rachel, and matriarch Mrs. Young demonstrates the tension of traditional Chinese cultural norms of pre-May Fourth Movement (1919) gentry, whose parents must approve of suitably class-appropriate marriage partners. Who schools whom in this multigenerational game of romance presents the case for how to achieve “free [choice of] love,” a revolutionary goal sought after with zeal for a hundred years since May Fourth era. Some things never change.

There is texture even among the rich. In addition to the stand-up performances by the leads, three excellent supporting actors demonstrate this variation. The first of these performances is found in the endearing new money comic role of Rachel’s Singapore-native college friend, the semblance of a punk rocker type who name is Peik Lin. Equally endearing is the Young family coordinator, Oliver, who – with his insider knowledge of the various family dramas – is sympathetic to Rachel. Both these roles add a touch of realism as they widen the circle of relationships portrayed in this great game. The third stellar supporting performance is given by Astrid, Nick’s closest female cousin who, in her tragic subplot, connects across class boundaries with Rachel as she herself valiantly struggles with the disintegration of her own “free love” marriage. These comic and tragic characters provide depth in their plot lines to demonstrate that despite the super wealth of these rich people, nothing is free.

The Singapore setting is spectacular, with fabulous architecture shot with production values that alone make the movie worth seeing, even if it comes off as a fantastic tourist infomercial. The food at the night market is appealing and multinational, with mouthwatering curry and other dishes portrayed lightly in a style reminiscent of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). And although the film is in English, the audience is treated to a menagerie of languages, from mostly Mandarin to Cantonese and perhaps some Hakka, generally with subtitles in English except for the songs.

All in all, the film has many nicely choreographed dichotomies, such as tradition versus modernity, new versus old money, as well a variety of supporting character types.  The “healthy” love across class divide portrayed by Rachel and Nick stands as a critique of people whose self-image is virtually defined by their obsession with money and image. Crazy Rich Asians shows how a romantic comedy can address superficial culturally “universal” issues and stay out of thorny political and historical divides. That’s the feel-good dimension, and what is left unaddressed are the political-economic foundations that make the crazy richness possible. Students of China on the rise should be crazy curious about these deeper-level dynamics, although this fun rom-com rightfully sidesteps these issues. Crazy Rich Asians demonstrates that regardless of our nationality or social class, we know that we “all” share similar dreams of such idealized riches, for better or worse. Perhaps this is the metaphorical lesson of Rachel’s game theory lesson – the American Dream, the Chinese Dream, the Chinese American Dream, the Asian Dream – we all share the color green.

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This interview is based on a discussion in person and by email between Dr. Penelope Prime, the managing editor of China Currents, and Dr. Davis. The text has been edited for length and clarity.

Dr. Davis, welcome to Atlanta.  We are delighted to have you here and to learn from your expertise. We want to know how a sociologist sees what is going on in China today. The topic of urbanization runs throughout your work. What drew you to this topic and what have been the big takeaways?

I like cities, and I like living in cities. Perhaps if I had grown up on a farm, I would have the same emotional attachment to rural as to urban living; but in my case, cities draw me in. My first job after I graduated from Wellesley was at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and after two years, I became even more attached to high-density living and the cultural variety of urban, public life.  Subsequently at Harvard’s East Asian master’s program, I organized a reading group led by Alex Woodside to explore varieties of city life in East and Southeast Asia. In the mid-1970s when Americans couldn’t live in China, I interviewed PRC migrants in Hong Kong for my doctoral thesis. As a family of three we lived in a tiny 100 square meter apartment overlooking a busy street, and we thrived on the energy and diversity of the city. When I finally could do fieldwork in China in 1979, the Chinese government so severely restricted our geographic movements that we couldn’t even exit the final stop on the Beijing subway. One result was to turn my attention to analyzing the spaces and everyday life in the urban core.

Then after these early restrictions were lifted and Chinese and American scholars developed ongoing partnerships, professional and personal networks reinforced my initial focus on densely settled cities, and in particular on Shanghai. I first went to Shanghai in 1981 and then returned almost every summer between 1984 and 1995, following 125 households whom I first interviewed in 1986 and 1988. Over these 10 years, China took the first steps toward a rapid expansion of the urban population that by 2010 had created 160 cities with more than one million residents.

You have also studied marriage. Is that urban marriage or just marriage generally?

In my first book “Long Lives,” the core question was how the Communist revolution had impacted the elderly and their relations to their families in both rural and urban China. Previously many had assumed that collectivization of the economy and political campaigns against ancestor veneration had destroyed family solidarity.  Drawing on documents and household interviews, I argued that the economic, legal, and health initiatives of the CCP between 1950 and 1976 had actually strengthened family connections because they promoted higher levels of marriage among all social classes, and more sustained interdependence between elders and their surviving sons and daughters than had been the norm during the three decades of war and dislocation before 1949.

What are the big takeaways that you have found over these decades of studying marriage and cities and family relations?

First, I would stress that as a fieldworker focused as often on dynamics of daily life as on broad demographic and structural trends, I rarely can muster big takeaways. That is not to say I never generalize, but the level of generalization tends to be modest and contingent. For example, over the past decade I have focused on how the one-child policy, commodification of property relations, and enforcement of a new marriage law that reduced barriers to divorce have “privatized” the institution of marriage. But simultaneously, I have used focus groups and extended family interviews to probe the refined moral logics by which siblings and divorcing spouses divide domestic property as the party-state has granted individuals more privacy in how they conduct their intimate relationships. By listening to individual voices and placing these conversations within larger institutional spaces, sociologists work to understand both social process and personal agency.

Do you have any observation of youth in China these days?

As you know, currently I’m a visiting professor at Fudan University, and this year I will return for my third faculty appointment at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  In these two university settings, as well as in interactions with newly arrived PRC students in the U.S., I get a glimpse into the ambitions and fears of those in their late teens and early 20s. Fifteen years ago, acceptance to university guaranteed a good job upon graduation.  Now after rapid expansion of the tertiary sector, 30 percent of 18- year-old men and women continue their education beyond senior high school. Consequently, the value of a bachelor’s degree has fallen and competition to enter specific majors in elite colleges has greatly intensified. China not only has the largest number of college and university students in the world, but it also has one of the highest percentages of secondary school graduates continuing to tertiary education.  Higher education has become highly stratified, and the pressure on teens and their families is far more intense than for those only 15 years their senior. Therefore, the first thing I would say about “youth” in China today is that most teens in urban centers live in a pressure cooker, and the sorting process begins in the last years of primary school. Those who succeed in these academic competitions and whom I have taught at Fudan, Tsinghua, and Yale are extremely accomplished and ambitious; but even they worry intensely about their future. However, I would also stress that talent stretches across the whole country, and it is not concentrated in one or two megacities. China has no single metropole.

But that is a good thing.

Yes, overall such drive and ambition are good for this cohort and good for China and there is not a single province where one cannot find talent and drive.

You have done a lot of research on the ground over these years.  How have those opportunities and methodologies changed, or not?

Indeed.  When I first went to China in 1979 Chinese officials had no experience with foreign social scientists. Working with the U.N., the government had committed to making the 1982 census meet global standards, but virtually no officials who supervised foreign visitors championed random samples. As a result, until well into the 1980s, sociologists did a kind of “piecework” or what we more formally term “triangulation.” We gathered every shard of evidence from as many sources and angles as possible, operationalized variables in multiple ways, and when the results aligned into a coherent pattern, confirmed or rejected our hypotheses. Today, we still need to “triangulate,” but the methodologies in the study of Chinese society closely resemble those in the study of American society.

I drew my first random sample in 1986, when the Shanghai City Union sponsored me to write about the family life of newly retired textile workers. This project was negotiated at the local level. They had never heard of a random sample, but they wanted scientific methods. Over the next 18 years I went back eight times to that research site. Many of the original respondents had died or moved away. Yet in 2004 I was able to contact family members in 70% of the original 125 households.

The years between 1996 and 2016 represented a golden age. Excellent census data was publicly available, digitized statistical materials were accessible via the internet, and most importantly, many PRC born sociologists were leading research teams. The Chinese census is one of the best in the world and almost every Chinese academic journal can be searched online.  In one day, scholars working from the United States can gather trend data and run regressions that 20 years ago would have taken months to complete.  For example, in 2005 when I wanted to discuss how the government had understood and used the role of consumers after 1949, I spent a few hours with keyword searches of People’s Daily to create the numerical trend and then a week to read all the articles in which the word “consumer” had been linked to discussion of “waste” between 1949 and 2003. To complete such an analysis 10 years earlier, I would have needed to travel to the rare library with a complete run of People’s Daily, lifted every bound set, and spent hours to identify every article which discussed both consumption and waste. It would have taken months and would not have produced results that were as accurate.

What advice would you give to young scholars these days who are interested in studying China?

I am not one to easily give advice, but I would note that the support and recognition for scholarship of contemporary China varies by discipline. Not so very long ago, donors to Yale had raised money to hire an economist who worked on the Chinese economy. Nevertheless, the economics department did not launch a search because most faculty believed that there was no suitable data on China to support frontier research in economics. Clearly, we no longer face the same data restrictions today, but some disciplines still provide more opportunities than others.

So what is your next project?

Currently my primary research focus is a multi-year study of how rapid growth of megacities and the inclusion of 400 million rural residents into urban settlements have impacted family life. I also will extend a 2015-2016 project that studied wedding ritual to understand changing urban kinship ties.

Congratulations! So from your vantage point, just to wrap up our discussion of this wonderful career that you’ve had, what is your sense of U.S.-China relations today?

We are challenged. Short statement.  We are challenged.  But we’ve been challenged before, and I think that the talent and the diverse players on both sides of the Pacific who are committed to the long term give me confidence that the future will be brighter.

So you are overall optimistic?

You have to be. What’s the alternative?  There are many reasons to be pessimistic but there is too much at stake, too many shared interests, to see only the dark side.

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