China
Out of context: Reply #534
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- yuekit0
As the Qing dynasty began its slow collapse, thousands of peasants were funneled into port cities to staff the bustling docks and sweatshops fueled by foreign silver. When these migrants died from the grueling work and casual violence of life in the treaty ports, their families often spent the sum of their remittances to ship the bodies home in a practice known as “transporting a corpse over a thousand li” (qian li xing shi), otherwise the souls would be lost and misfortune could befall the entire lineage.
The logistics of this ceremony were complex. After blessings and reanimation rituals by a Taoist priest, “corpse drivers” would string the dead upright in single file along bamboo poles, shouldering the bamboo at either end so that, when they walked, the stiff bodies strung between them would appear to hop of their own accord.
Traveling only at night, the corpse drivers would ring bells to warn off the living, since the sight of the dead migrants was thought to bring bad luck. Though itself somewhat apocryphal, new myths grew out of the practice, as the hopping corpses were transformed into jiangshi, vampire-like creatures driven to feed on the life force of others. Their own blood siphoned out of them by the docks and factories, these migrant workers were transformed into monsters befitting a new reality—one of crumbling empires, civil wars and the insatiable expansion of commodities.
Such death rituals and the myths that surround them have long played a central role in the cultures of the East Asian mainland. Funerals were not a ceremony in which the lost were sealed into their own dismal past, but instead one in which the dead became constituent parts of a history forged in the present. Through extensive rites and careful observances, dead generations were transformed into the roots of the living.
Today, China itself has become such a wandering specter. The rural world is dying, yet hundreds of millions of workers still seem stuck between their peasant past and a future that fails to arrive. Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles have left a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines.
While the elite children of the country’s financial and administrative centers collect sports cars and foreign degrees, the children of today’s migrants are guaranteed little more than the fleeting chance to become yet another corpse crushed to pulp in the factory.
This is the character of the present moment, and it is here that we begin. Chuang is a collective of communists who consider the “China question” to be of central relevance to the contradictions of the world’s economic system and the potentials for its overcoming. Our interest has little to do with the professed socialism of a country run by a “Communist Party” left over from the peasant wars of last century. Instead, the question raised by China is founded in the present. As a lynchpin in global production networks, Chinese crises threaten the capitalist system in a way that crises elsewhere do not. A bottoming-out in China would signal a truly systemic crisis in which the overcoming of capitalism may again become the horizon of popular struggles.
- This is a really interesting read, an "alternative history" of China by anti-CCP Chinese leftists.yuekit