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""New" "Asian Marxisms" brilliantly dramatizes how contemporary scholars have remembered Marxism in Asia of an earlier time and how this 'afterlife' today calls into question the amnesia of Western Marxism and its own complicity with exclusions identified with the culturalist claims of a 'unified' West. While the essays in this volume are all concerned with a particular place and time, they also remind us of what so often is forgotten--that Marxism is at home only in the world."--Harry Harootunian, New York University

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NEW ASIAN MARXISMS

Duke University Press

Contents

Tani E. Barlow Preface: Everything Diverges..................................................................................................................viiWilliam Pietz Introduction: Decency and Debasement...........................................................................................................1Michael Dutton Dreaming of Better Times: "Repetition with a Difference" and Community Policing in China......................................................21D. R. Howland Constructing Perry's "Chinaman" in the Context of Adorno and Benjamin..........................................................................53Dai Jinhua Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in the 1990s........................................................................................89Marshall Johnson Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality.............................................................................105Liu Kang Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism......................................................................................................................173Sugiyama Mitsunobu The World Conception of Japanese Social Science: The Koza Faction, the Otsuka School, and the Uno School of Economics.....................205You-me Park "And They Would Start Again": Women and Struggle in Korean Nationalist Literature................................................................247Claudia Pozzana Spring, Temporality, and History in Li Dazhao................................................................................................269Li Dazhao Spring.............................................................................................................................................291Alessandro Russo The Probable Defeat: Preliminary Notes on the Chinese Cultural Revolution...................................................................311Sanjay Seth Interpreting Revolutionary Excess: The Naxalite Movement in India, 1967-1971.....................................................................333Gi-Wook Shin Marxism, Anti-Americanism, and Democracy in South Korea: An Examination of Nationalist Intellectual Discourse...................................359Jing Wang "Who Am I?"-Questions of Voluntarism in the Paradigm of Socialist Alienation.......................................................................385Contributors..................................................................................................................................................417Index.........................................................................................................................................................419

Chapter One

Dreaming of Better Times: "Repetition with a Difference" and Community Policing in China

Zi Zhang asks: "Can one know what the future will hold in ten dynasties' time?" Confucius responds: "The Yin dynasty inherited the notion of propriety from the Xia. Therefore we can know what has been added and subtracted. The Zhou dynasty inherited their notion of propriety from the Yin, and from this we can know what has been added and what has been subtracted. Others may continue to use this notion of propriety as inherited from the Zhou. Therefore, even in one hundred dynasties' time, we can still know." -Confucius, Analects (emphasis added)

* Can one be so certain of the past, let alone of the future, as the great sage? On this, I think, more recent events in China have their own story to tell....

The time is 1994; the city, Beijing.

As one rides through the streets of this city as it commemorates the centennial of the birth of the "Great Helmsman," one is struck by the number of vehicles that display a double-sided portrait of his face. On the one side, there is the young, fresh-faced revolutionary Mao, on the other, a more benevolent and aging father figure. There is nothing added to nor subtracted from these double-sided portraits save for the compulsory beautifications made possible by the airbrush. The power of such a portrait, however, lies not in its physical beauty and accuracy but in the symbolic renewal it connotes. It is in the "additions" or "subtractions" in memory formation that the picture of Mao becomes less a form of remembrance than a potent and very contemporary political symbol. The recognition of this point leads us to a very different set of propositions to those advanced by the great sage, Confucius.

How are we to account for the popularity of this double-sided portrait? Is it Party propaganda, superstition, or a faded remembrance of more stable times that leads to this double-sided portrait being purchased and displayed? Which side of this "Maoist coin" is favored in the act of display, or is the very "double-sidedness" itself a tactic, designed deliberately to capture the widest possible constituency? On the one side, there is a young rebel Mao for the "Cui Jian" generation, while on the other there is an aging statesman for those who crave more stable times. There is, it appears, a Mao for all. Yet this multiplication of Mao images to the extent that there is indeed a "Mao for all" leads to irony. It undermines the unity of what He stands for and replaces it with a multiplicity of possible meanings. This, in turn, shifts the spotlight from the (real) Mao to the uses of Mao or, more accurately, to the uses and politics of memory and its redeployment.

It is the way in which memory is played on through this double-sided portrayal of Mao that takes us beyond the face and the figure. This "double-sided form of remembrance" focuses attention on the ambiguity and multiplicity of things remembered. It puts a focus and a face on the politics of the act of remembering. Moreover, it offers a form of remembrance which, though ambivalent in meaning, is nevertheless visible, focused, conscious, and celebrated. If this reedification of Mao offers something of the venerated and visible side of remembering Mao, a more unconscious side is captured, not in the photographic image but in the actions of the Chinese public security forces. Here one finds the "double-sidedness" of Mao remembered in another way.

In contemporary policing, one discovers many of the tactics and technologies of Maoism "remembered" and redeployed as mechanisms through which public order can be maintained in times of economic and social reform. Remembrance for the public security forces differs in kind from the double-sided Mao portraits. There is little that is conscious about their process of remembrance. Hence, the "remembered technologies" of contemporary policing are not celebrated as Maoist procedures but reappear almost unnoticed and largely unannounced as mundane practices of everyday policing. Nevertheless, by silently reinforcing a continuity with the past they also fortify the idea of these procedures as natural. Furthermore, by redeploying Maoist tactics in new domains and for new ends they also operate to bring forth change. The Janus-faced nature of these redeployed Maoist tactics and technologies has been made possible only because such devices have successfully secreted themselves in everyday life. It is through this process of secretion that they derive their symbolic power, while their utilitarian strength is derived from the fact that they are not repetitions of the "same" but "repetitions with a difference." The symbolic strength of "repetition" combined...