The Bishan Plan is Not Elitist

Is an intellectual automatically elitist? How should a scholar engage in activism and should he or she analyze, categorize and conceptualize? What if some critique that the very conceptualization of activism creates economic inequality?

One of Ou's presentation inside the bar

In Harvard sociology PhD Ms. Zhou Yun's critique, Ms. Zhou wrote that the Bishan Project in its current shape and form is an elitist one for several reasons. This claim occurred last month, in which I wrote a thought-piece acknowledging aspects of both sides of the argument. This post will target the specific issue of the language Ou Ning used when explaining the execution of the Bishan Plan. Ms. Zhou pointed to several instances in which Ou Ning distanced himself from "the people," such as conducting the presentations in a bar. Ou Ning explained that the size of the audiences required that venue. He presented the talk in the bar for pragmatic reasons rather than aiming for a bourgeois affect. Zhou Yun also critiqued Ou Ning's conceptual words such as "civil society." To quote the Chinese text,"介绍理念PPT是全英文的，满是civil society、social engineering、party politics等等大词." Zhou Yun also sees this symbolic boundary between the intellectuals and the Bishan people, which recreates economic inequalities.

The latter claim that cultural boundaries recreating economic inequality cannot be substantiated in this particular case due to the lack data. This post aims to tackle the issue of the "elitist" language allegedly used by Ou Ning during Zhou's short visit organized by Nanjing University. In the presentation Ms. Zhou heard, where Ou used words such as "civil society," he was speaking to a group of out-of-town observers and scholars, not the "people of Bishan." He also explained that he did not see the need to update the English Powerpoint he used for NYU a while ago.

I believe that while some intellectuals spend a lot of time conceptualizing rather than action (which is often portrayed as the opposite of social change), using concepts during activism and projects should be encouraged rather than labeled as "elitist." Zhou is calling for what Gayatri Spivak would term as "clamoring for anti-intellectualism, a sort of complete monosyllabification of one’s vocabulary within academic enclosures." This quote is from the interview titled "The problem of self representation" collected in The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.

Here is the excerpt from the illuminating exchange between Dr. Spivak and Dr. Walter Adamson. While Spivak calls for intellectuals' unlearning for better communication, she cautions us of anti-intellectualism. I think provides a comprehensive defense of Ou Ning and other intellectuals wishing for social engagement with the peasants or subaltern, while also using big, "fancy" concepts depending on the situation. 

Spivak: ... There is an impulse among literary critics and other kinds of intellectuals to save the masses, speak for the masses, describe the masses. On the other hand, how about attempting to learn to speak in such a way that the masses will not regard as bullshit. When I think of the masses, I think of a woman belonging to that 84% of women’s work in India, which is unorganized peasant labour. Now if I could speak in such a way that such a person would actually listen to me and not dismiss me as yet another of those many colonial missionaries, that would embody the project of unlearning. ... What can the intellectual do toward the texts of the oppressed? Represent them and analyze them, disclosing one’s own positionality for other communities in power. ... 

Adamson: Does speaking to marginalized groups and yet not “deskilling” oneself mean anything about the kinds of texts that one ought to speak about?

Spivak: When I said that one shouldn’t invite people to de-skill themselves, I was talking about a kind of anti-intellectualism that exists among academics and counter-academics. One ought not to patronize the oppressed. And that’s where the line leaves us. Unlearning one’s privileged discourse so that, in fact, one can be heard by people who are not within the academy is very different from clamoring for anti-intellectualism, a sort of complete monosyllabification of one’s vocabulary within academic enclosures. And it seems to me that one’s practice is very dependent upon one’s positionality, one’s situation. I come from a state where the illiterate--not the functionally illiterate, but the real illiterate, who can't tell the difference between one letter and another--are still possessed of a great deal of political sophistication, and are certainly not against learning a few things. I'm constantly struck by the anti-intellectualism within the most opulent university systems in the world. So that's where I was speaking about de-skilling. 

Spivak continues to explain that literary analyses of subaltern voices also depend on the situation even if she is read as "giving a voice" to the subaltern subject of study. Granted, Ou is not a literary scholar, but I find this issue very common among circles of intellectuals aiming for social change. While the flow of information and proscribed norms have been predominantly controlled by the intellectuals and distributed to the subaltern, should all efforts to communicate ideals be criticized? I think not; intervention of this flow of information, as Spivak aptly put it, depends on circumstances. The Bishan Plan may pander to the urban / bourgeoisie aesthetics in its execution, but the specific act of explaining the project in academic terms does not make it "elitist" in the sense that creates more inequalities.

Leftist Projects and Subaltern Silence | 碧山计划

A lively and important discussion started by Harvard sociology PhD Ms. Zhou Yun critique of the Bishan Jihua (碧山计划) has come to my attention. The Bishan program's initiator Ou Ning (​欧宁) is a rather big name as an art curator and intellectual. Based on what the discussions, it is Ou Ning’s effort to revitalize the village and help them become livelier through civil society. Specific goals elude me as well as the online discussion, but Ou Ning's vision of the ideal village (Bishan) focuses more on the cultural aspect of the locality than the model CCP village development program would. As a result of the program, Bishan village now has a bookstore, a hip bar, and reoccurring cultural + crafts festivals. (The one time I met esteemed sociologist Dr. Yu Jianrong  于建嵘 at a discussion about NGOs, he talked very enthusiastically about his own version of Bishan in Guizhou’s 黔西南).

Bishan Bookstore (碧山书局)
Photo Credits: Ou Ning

Zhou Yun makes some very good points about how the liberal-elite discourse perpetuates the inequality between rural (farmers) and urban elites. She also points that while tourism seems to commodify the rural areas, many residents in rural areas like Bishan with rich cultural endowment would prefer tourism. But I also share the concern of some of the comments below that think 1) she is thinking ahead of herself--if the arrangement of capital doesn't change and farmer continue to be “at the bottom of the economic food chain,” analyzing discourse may not be the best recourse. 2) She is exaggerating the lack of consensus between the locals and Ou Ning based on some impressions. (I would presume that Ou Ning would know more about villages than a hypothetical foreign NGO, such as depicted in Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China.) Even if some Bishan residents have no opinion regarding Ou Ning's ambition, she does not acknowledge the existence of local supporters.

One of the sobering comments below (emphasis added):

"Of course, capital and power might destroy the village cultural and ecosystem. But before capital has even reached the village, if one starts to worry about whether [a project] is 'elitist' or 'nativist,' it seems to be akin to worrying about whether the sky will fall. 
Dr. Fei (Hsiao-tung)'s Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley still has much relevance today. Because even after one hundred years (since he wrote it), China still is a maiban country: foreigners print money to exploit the (Chinese) city, the city exploits the rural villages, the villages exploit the environment, and the environment cannot speak so it can only be exploited (without question). Right now the question is how to empower the two weakest in along the food chain--the village and environment. There are many ways in regards to how to empower them, and some forms are terrible indeed if viewed from certain angles."

“诚然，资本和权力可能对乡村文化生态可能会带来毁灭性的影响。但在资本没有到位之前，就开始焦虑精英主义还是自然主义，岂不杞人忧天。  费老的《江村经济》在今天依然有现实意义，正是因为一百年后的中国今天依然是买办大国，洋人印钞抢城市，城市抢乡村，乡村抢环境，环境不会说话， 只有被抢。当下如何反哺处于权力链条上最底端的乡村和环境才是重点。如何反哺当然会有各种形式，有些形式可能从某个角度来看可以说是极为糟糕。” 

The larger question presented here is--if the Chinese government does allow for more organizing from the bottom-up (here, “bottom” includes elites such as Ou Ning), are the locals and the public open to leftist / utopian projects such as the the Bishan Jihua? Ou Ning definitely sees a possibility. Then again, I would anticipate a Marxist response being that the rural areas will still have to rely to some extent on consumers from the urban areas, which clearly does not shield them from capitalism (I recall a U-Madison graduate student's point about certain Laos rubber plants’ different modes of production seem to provide good alternatives for their lives, but from a Marxist perspective they still have to function under the same global capitalist system and respond to the global rubber price).  Still, a cultural revival of the rural areas in the popular imagination will definitely benefit the image and subsequently the material conditions of some villages.

It’s also interesting how many participants in this discussion accept the de facto “nongcun” (rural) v. “chengshi” (urban) dual categorizations for people. Politically, these categories are designated by the government; culturally many discussion participants also  distinguish between the two, with the urban is "modernized," while the rural is the "backward" or "marginalized." In reality I think 1) a significant amount of people fall between the two, such as the migrant hair stylists of Fujian or college students with rural backgrounds / hukous, both types which successfully emulate urban sensibilities. 2) There are many different kinds of vested interests and cultural identity within the “urban” or “rural.” 3) The Urban v. Rural category carries both feudal and modern weights, since the hukou system extends beyond the CCP but has been reemphasized and evolved since the CCP. 4) Ethnic minorities would complicate the dualistic picture. I wonder if Zhou Yun would maintain a similar stance regarding the lack of subaltern voices if she were writing about a village in Xinjiang or Tibet. 

All in all, I am glad that this discussion is open and receiving media attention; it seems that at least some Chinese netizens are willing to imagine a more bottom-up approach and aware of leftist projects such as the Bishan Jihua.