Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T03:17:07.361Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Civil Governance of Death: The Making of Chinese Political Subjects at the End of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

Huwy-Min Lucia Liu Open the ORCID record for Huwy-Min Lucia Liu [Opens in a new window]
Huwy-Min Lucia Liu*
Affiliation:
Huwy-min Lucia Liu (hliu27@gmu.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University.
Get access

Abstract

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

Keywords

ChinaShanghaideathfuneral ritualgovernanceselffuneral reform
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 49 - 71
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Ahern, Emily Martin. 1973. Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bergère, Marie-Claire. 2009. Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice, and Parry, Jonathan P.. 1982. “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life.” In Death and the Regeneration of Life, eds. Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan P., 1–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cousins, Mark. 2004. “The Asian Aesthetic.” Prospect Magazine, November 21. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/theasianaesthetic (accessed August 11, 2020).Google Scholar
Ebrey, Patricia. 1990. “Cremation in Sung China.” American Historical Review 95 (2): 406–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gladney, Dru. 1996. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.Google Scholar
Goossaert, Vincent, and Palmer, David. 2011. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henriot, Christian. 2016. Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hertz, Robert. (1907) 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.Google Scholar
Ikels, Charlotte. 2004. “Serving the Ancestors, Serving the State: Filial Piety and Death Ritual in Contemporary Guangzhou.” In Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia, ed. Ikels, Charlotte, 88–105. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Liu, Huwy-min Lucia. 2015. “Dying Socialist in Capitalist Shanghai: Ritual, Governance, and Subject Formation in Urban China's Modern Funeral Industry.” PhD diss., Boston University.Google Scholar
Moskowitz, Marc L., dir. 2011. Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan. Columbia, S.C.: Daunting Head Productions.Google Scholar
Nedostup, Rebecca. 2017. “Burying, Repatriating, and Leaving the Dead in Wartime and Postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955.” Journal of Chinese History 1 (1): 111–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oxfeld, Ellen. 2010. Drink Water, but Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida. 1988. “A Historian's Approach to Chinese Death Ritual.” In Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds. Watson, James L. and Rawski, Evelyn, 20–36. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rogaski, Ruth. 2014. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. California: University of California.Google Scholar
Schmalzer, Sigrid. 2016. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinn, Elizabeth. 2003. Power and Charity: A Chinese Merchant Elite in Colonial Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar
Skinner, G. William. 1977. “Introduction: Urban Social Structure in Ch'ing China.” In The City in Late Imperial China, ed. Skinner, G. W., 521–54. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Hikaru. 2000. The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Toulson, Ruth E. 2012. “Necessary Mistakes: Reconciling the Unsettled Dead and the Imagined State in Singapore.” In Power: Southeast Asia Perspectives, eds. Chua, Liana, Cook, Joanna, Long, Nick and Wilson, Lee, 93–106. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Watson, James L. 1988. “The Structure of Chinese Funeral Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance.” In Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds. Watson, James L. and Rawski, Evelyn, 3–19. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Watson, James L., and Rawski, Evelyn S., eds. 1988. Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Xiang, Mingsheng. 1992. Binzang xisu zhinan [Funeral customs guide]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe.Google Scholar
Yang, Ching Kun. 1961. Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of their Historical Factors. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar