Over the course of his career, Thomas Heberer has taken up an impressively broad range of topics in Chinese politics, from regime legitimacy to national minority policy, always with insight and rich documentation. His latest monograph is no exception. In Social Disciplining and Civilising Processes in China, Heberer turns his gaze to the intersection of modernization, disciplining and social disciplining, both in China and elsewhere. He begins by questioning “whether theoretical concepts of analysis developed for European notions of modernisation can simply be transferred to concepts of modernisation in societies with a different historical and cultural background” (p. 13), such as the PRC. Interrogating the contributions of Weber, Elias, Foucault and Oestreich, Heberer finds that in Western European traditions, disciplining as a social process that originates in external coercion but shifts towards the internalization of restraints has been seen as indispensable to social order (p. 19). In the Chinese case, social disciplining efforts – generally referred to as “civilizing” – have also “permeated the entire modernisation process” in the effort to require its citizens to become “people who act in a modern way”; however, unlike in the West European context, China's central state has remained the originator and key promulgator of this process (p. 22).
The volume then examines key disciplining concepts in Chinese history, including those associated with Confucianism, Legalism, Daoism, Mohism and Buddhism, and explores indigenous concepts of state and society. It also explains how the relationships between the two are to be regulated, particularly in view of Chinese traditional political culture (p. 57). Central to this process is the state's construction of itself as a moral agent characterized by benevolence, compassion and rectitude. This differs markedly from the Western European tradition, Heberer notes, in which “the state was primarily responsible for law and its enforcement, and the church for morality” (p. 64). Yet the moral agency of the developmental state was persistently manifested in Chinese, and then in PRC, history, in an iterative series of civilizing missions. Kang Youwei, for example, undertook efforts to transform Confucianism – which he saw as “a prophetic doctrine of modernity” (p. 74) – into a formal religion that would support the state's modernizing aims. Likewise, Chiang Kai-shek's New Life Movement in the 1930s and Mao's mass campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s can be read as vast state exercises in social disciplining, a practice that has continued during the era of market reform with national projects aimed at cultivating spiritual civilization, ecological civilization and internet civilization.
The penultimate chapter offers four case studies of state-led civilizing projects in the post-Mao era: the effort to create a new social morality that was institutionalized from the 1990s onward under the “Spiritual Civilization Guidance Committee” and created codes of civilized conduct for both urban and rural citizens; the vast anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping; the still-emerging “social credit system” that aims to build social trust enterprises, social organizations and individuals; and various civilizational efforts carried out among non-Han peoples in China. Of these, Heberer highlights the role of the state as the initiator and chief implementer, the close connection between urbanization and social discipline efforts, and concludes with a short but informative section on “lying flat” as a form of passive resistance to the state's social disciplining efforts.
Heberer's volume is comprehensive and synthetic, and of particular interest to those working on state–society relations, the “civilizing process” in China and issues around the social credit system. He refrains from offering any single theoretical approach or model, opting instead for a broad historical overview and a comparative perspective, which makes this volume useful as a comprehensive introduction to the topic.
