HEGEMONY AND THE IMPROVISATION OF RESISTANCE: POLITICAL CULTURE AND POPULAR PRACTICE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA (FOLK RELIGION, PEASANTS, IDEOLOGY)

In post-Liberation China, the Party has long taken an active role in the creation of a "socialist spiritual civilization" for which it provides moral and cultural leadership as well as political leadership. In so doing, the state draws heavily on history as one of the most important sources of its authority. The re-creation of the bitter past through local history writing demonstrates the superiority of the Party's leadership in the present.;The state imposes its own language on these expressive domains to restructure the meanings embodied within them. Folk ritual is therefore redefined as "feudal superstition," the gift is redefined as material waste (or as "economic crime"), and certain commodities are defined as unhealthy ("spiritual pollution"). The presence of fraudulent practices is attributed by the state to economic backwardness, ignorance and the persistence of a "small producer's mentality" in the Chinese countryside.;By representing them in this way, to what extent does the state further empower these areas of social life to become expressive of oppositional sentiments? Do they in fact provide the elements used to create powerful "cross-representations" of the state which are made by ordinary people in the form of folk emperors and bogus officials? These areas of popular practice provide an illuminating perspective on the nature of state hegemony in contemporary Chinese society.;The socialist state, in its claim to a moral hegemony, also claims for itself the popular voice. This means that by default all other expressions of popular sentiment are defined as fraudulent. However the structure of power inherent in any state organization almost guarantees the expression of popular sentiment outside an officially defined order of things. In China these sentiments may be expressed in non-linguistic ways by taking such forms as: commodities in the marketplace, folk ritual, and the exchange of gifts. In texts that the state produces to comment on what it considers to be problems in the spiritual realm, it is just these non-linguistic expresssions of popular sentiment which provide the targets for state concern.