The Chinese Communist Party's Nervous System: Affective Governance from Mao to Xi

Abstract

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people's affects. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization of gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang's short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; and the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party's sovereignty stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

Untitled

“…If it is a natural disaster, the party appears as the saviour; human-made catastrophes, on the other hand, raise questions about responsibility and point to broader systemic issues. Party legitimation turns on this distinction (Sorace 2017(Sorace , 2018(Sorace , 2020(Sorace , 2021. The same rationality applies to the pandemic.…”

Citizens’ strategic responses to affective governance in China

“…27 In fact, the party-state's utilization of affective governance may elicit unexpected emotional responses. For instance, recent gratitude education among the Wuhan citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic stirred not appreciation, but a massive outpouring of anger, 28 leading to online activists voicing dissent against the local government. Top-down affective governance may not just generate compliance or discourage collective actions; it might also arouse citizens' emotional responses and facilitate further actions.…”

“…3 Recently, affective governance (情感治理) in China, referring to the party-state mobilizing, manipulating, and regulating citizens' emotions to gain legitimacy, has received growing scholarly attention. 4 Scholars have found that the party-state's control of the 'nervous system' (as theorized by Michael Taussig), a practice inherited from the revolutionary era, can continuously contribute to social stability and build a positive state image in times of criticism or crisis, 5 and eliminate (or at least reduce) citizens negative feelings and grievances. 6 The extant literature has either adopted a state-centric perspective that assumes citizens' minds are exclusively subject to the state's influences, or a bottom-up perspective that investigates how emotion becomes a tool used by citizens to express discontent and social mobilization in realizing their goals.…”

Global China as Method

“…One such example is the language of 'gratitude'. As Christian Sorace (2021) has highlighted, the Party-State in Xinjiang is enacting 'gratitude education campaigns' as a direct instrument of control within the re-education camps, where, to prove that they are rehabilitated, detainees must convincingly demonstrate their absolute loyalty and gratitude to China, the Communist Party, and Xi Jinping himself. Besides testimonies of 'graduates' from the camp presented by Chinese state media, Sorace quotes a campaign launched in early 2017 in Ürümqi under the name of 'three gratitudes, three wishes'that is, 'gratitude to General Party Secretary Xi Jinping', 'gratitude to the Communist Party, 'gratitude to the mighty motherland', 'wishing General Party Secretary a healthy life', 'wishing the mighty motherland glory and prosperity', and 'wishing for ethnic harmony'.…”