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Tom Cliff
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THE LIVING POLITICS
OF SELF-HELP MOVEMENTS
IN EAST ASIA
Edited by
TOM CLIFF
TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI
SHUGE WEI
The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements
in East Asia
Tom Cliff • Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Shuge Wei
Editors
The Living Politics of

Self-Help Movements
in East Asia
Editors
Tom Cliff Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Australian National University Australian National University
Canberra, Australia Canberra, Australia
Shuge Wei
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
ISBN 978-981-10-6336-7 ISBN 978-981-10-6337-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6337-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958003
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Preface and Acknowledgements
Since 2013, our research group, based at the Australian National

University, has been exploring the quiet ways in which groups of ordinary
people across East Asia are addressing social problems and improving their
lives through self-help action. Members of the team have traveled to com-
munities in Inner and Outer Mongolia, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South
Korea, meeting a remarkable range of people who are experimenting with
their own forms of everyday politics. Some of the participants in these
local experiments have also joined international workshops or conferences
that we have run here in Australia, and through our website and confer-
ences, we are seeking to create networks that will help the practitioners of
informal life politics across the region to learn about and from one another.
Our research has made us conscious of common patterns that link these
informal life politics actions, even though the participants are based in
communities far distant from one another and are citizens of countries
with radically divergent formal political systems. In this book, we explore
these common threads, painting a picture of a form of political action
which is often ignored by scholars, but which, we argue, is having a pro-
found impact on the life of the region. The cases we explore here are not
simple success stories. Many of the groups whose work is discussed in the
chapters that follow have faced, and continue to face, external and internal
challenges. But their persistence, creativity, and imagination, we argue,
offer inspiration for others and hope for the future.
This book links case study chapters with a series of “concept essays,”
which draw out key themes for understanding the processes of living poli-
tics. We hope that these will contribute to wider future discussion and
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
study of this phenomenon in East Asia and beyond. The cases we have
studied pose important questions about our understanding of the very
meaning of “politics” itself. Our aim, in responding to those questions, is
to open up space for a wider reimagining of the meaning of political life in
the twenty-first-century world.
The editors and authors express their deep gratitude to the Australian
Research Council, which has supported this research through its Laureate
Fellowship program (project FL120100155—Informal Life Politics in the
Remaking of Northeast Asia: From Cold War to post-Cold War). We also
warmly thank our fellow project members Eun Jeong Soh and Robert
Winstanley-Chesters, who have contributed greatly to the development of
our ideas about informal life politics in the region, and express particular
thanks to the project’s research assistant and administrator, Hanbyol Lee.
This research, of course, would not have been possible without the kind-
ness and cooperation of many people in Beijing, South Korea, Inner
Mongolia, Okinawa and other parts of Japan, and Taiwan, who generously
shared their time, experiences, and ideas with us. We express our gratitude
to all of them, and to our partners and families who have shared this jour-
ney of discovery with us.
Contents
1 Introduction: Living Politics—Social Alternatives and

the Crisis of Democracy 1
Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shuge Wei
Part I Citizenships 15
2 Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-Seeking State 17

Tom Cliff
3 Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival?

Imagined and Transient Political Groups in Urban China 29
Tom Cliff and Kan Wang
4 Self-Help Is Political: How Organic Farming Creates

an Autonomous Space Within the South Korean
Nation State 57
Yon Jae Paik
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Networks 97
5 Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal Networks

for Survival Politics 99
Uchralt Otede
6 Informal Grassland Protection Networks in Inner

Mongolia 107
Uchralt Otede
7 Forest, Music, and Farming: The Takae Anti-Helipad

Movement and Everyday Life as Political Space 131
Shinnosuke Takahashi
Part III Alternatives 151
8 Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation 153

Shuge Wei and Tessa Morris-Suzuki
9 The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley: The Resurgence

of Rice-Terrace Farming in Gongliao District, Taiwan 163
Shuge Wei
10 The Neverending Story: Alternative Exchange and

Living Politics in a Japanese Regional Community 189
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
11 Epilogue: Improvising the Future 215

Bibliography 219
Index 235
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Industrial alleyway in Picun Village. Photograph

© Tom Cliff 2013 33
Fig. 3.2 The New Workers’ Theatre in Picun Village. Photograph
© Tom Cliff 2013 37
Image 6.1 Landscape of Mandahbulag pasture during the winter.
Photograph © Uchralt Otede 112
Fig. 6.1 Informal network of Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth 119
Image 6.2 Well-water sampling on the grassland. Photograph
© Uchralt Otede 125
Fig. 6.2 The informal grassland protection network 125
Image 7.1 Local residents and supporters barricading a gate to
Yanbaru Forest with cars, tents, and net to block the
officers from Okinawa Defense Bureau (white helmets,
right hand side of image). Police officers (dark clothing,
left hand side of image) also monitored protesters with
video cameras. Photograph © Shinnosuke Takahashi 136
Image 7.2 Local resident Miyagi Katsumi (left) and a supporter who
is a rock musician from Kyoto Prefecture (right). The
musician brought a banner with supportive messages
from his fellow rock musicians and fans as a symbol of
solidarity with Takae people. Photograph © Shinnosuke
Takahashi145
Image 9.1 Rice-terrace farming, Gongliao 164
Image 9.2 Display of local farming tools at the Hehe stone room 177
Image 9.3 Children play in the Hehe rice paddies 179
ix
x LIST OF FIGURES
Image 10.1 Ma~yu members, with passbooks in hand, trading goods

at the monthly market. Photograph © Tessa Morris-Suzuki 198
Image 10.2 Ma~yu members gather in front of Everybody’s House.
Photograph © Tessa Morris-Suzuki 201
Image 10.3 Old houses line a street on the fringe of Ueda City.
Photograph © Tessa Morris-Suzuki 203
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Living Politics—Social

Alternatives and the Crisis of Democracy
What is politics? This seemingly simple question has become pressingly

important in an age when some of the world’s oldest democracies face
radical and unsettling challenges.
The word “politics” is, of course, derived from the ideals and practices
of the Greek polis. Aristotelian ideas about the polis lay at the core of
European political philosophies which were then taken up and developed
in many other parts of the world. For Aristotle, “the end and purpose of
the polis is the good life,” by which he meant not simply a physically sus-
taining existence but above all an ethically good, fulfilling, and meaningful
life. Central to this good life were the notions of philia—civic friendship—
and reciprocity.1 Modern reinterpreters of these ideas have often used
ancient Greek ideas loosely and flexibly, in ways that have little connection
to the real world in which Aristotle lived2; yet the search for “the good
life” remains central to political debate today.3
In East Asia, political ideas are shaped both by this exogenous tradition,
which begins in Greece and Rome and flows through Western Europe and
America, and by a long history of endogenous debates about virtue, pros-
perity, and social order. Central to these, too, are notions of the prosper-
T. Morris-Suzuki (*) • S. Wei

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
© The Author(s) 2018 1

T. Cliff et al. (eds.), The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in
East Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6337-4_1
2 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI AND S. WEI
ous and ethically virtuous life. The many and diverse strands of Confucian,
Neo-Confucian, and Daoist thought that emerged in China—and were
then taken up and reworked in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere—shared a
concern with the creation of a harmonious and virtuous society. Though
Confucian ideas are often seen as emphasising hierarchical order and obe-
dience to the ruler, many currents of East Asian thought in fact gave ordi-
nary people a vital part in the creation of the good society.4 There is,
indeed, a recurrent motif in East Asian political thought which sees politi-
cal virtue, harmony, and happiness as being created in the everyday lives of
the population:
Someone said to Confucius, Why are you not in government? The Master
said, The Shu says, “Be filial toward your parents, be friendly toward your
brothers, and you will contribute to the government.” This too, then, is
being in government. Why should you speak of being “in government?”5
In the twenty-first century, though, politics as it is generally practiced

and understood seems far removed indeed from these dreams of philia and
meaningful existence. In common parlance, “politics” is generally seen as
referring to formal institutions and processes of government that occur at
the national or regional level, and one of the most pervasive topics of
recent political debate has been widespread public disenchantment with
and alienation from these institutions and processes. In the decades that
followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, ideological convergence between
mainstream parties in the leading democracies was accompanied, in many
places, by declining voter participation and increasing political apathy. In
East Asia’s major parliamentary democracies—Japan, South Korea, and
Taiwan—voter participation rates showed a marked downward trend from
the 1990s to the mid-2010s.6 An opinion poll held in Britain in 2015
found that 73% of respondents believed that their country was “not gov-
erned by the will of the people”7; and when, in 2016, one senior American
scholar chose to entitle his survey of US politics from 1968 to the present
day Deadlock and Disillusionment,8 the title provoked barely a murmur of
doubt or dissent.
It was against this background that 2015 and 2016 saw a dramatic
upsurge of populism in many counties of the world, marked by events
such as growing support for far right-wing parties in a number of European
countries, the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in
June 2016, the British Brexit vote of the same month, and the election of
INTRODUCTION: LIVING POLITICS—SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES… 3
Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016. This

unstable and rapidly changing political landscape has prompted diverse
responses, one of which has been a questioning of the very meaning and
scope of politics itself. Writers and activists from a variety of backgrounds
have sought to broaden and deepen the scope of our understanding of
“the political,” by directing attention to the many ways in which the search
for a better social order and a more physically and psychologically sustain-
ing way of life may be pursued, not just in the formal arenas of parlia-
ments, party congresses, bureaucracies, etc., but also in small local
communities and in everyday human life. Some of these efforts to
rediscover the meaning of politics in unexpected corners of life have drawn
on traditions of utopian thought and action9; others on anarchism or anti-
authoritarianism10; others again avoid ideological labels and focus primar-
ily on the practical ways in which people enact social and political agency
in everyday life.11
The chapters that follow contribute to this search for the hidden faces
of politics in daily life, and aim particularly to develop new ways of perceiv-
ing and understanding the process of “living politics.” The notion of “liv-
ing politics” begins with a focus on actions: the small grassroots self-help
actions that are examined in this book are responses to tangible, everyday
problems. Such problems range from land dispossession to socio-economic
exclusion, and from environmental disaster to the slow disintegration of
rural social fabric. The defining characteristic of these small-scale quests
for a better life is their informality: rather than lobbying states or formal
political institutions to solve their problems through policy change, these
groups address problems through direct self-help action—informal life
politics. Understanding the process of living politics, therefore, involves a
rethinking of the relationship between ideas and action. In this
Introduction, we outline some starting points for that rethinking, before
going on to sketch the trajectory of the volume as a whole.
Ideology, Post-ideology, and Beyond

Politics is generally assumed to be about ideology in the broad sense of the
word. The political realm is occupied by contests between differing sets of
ideas about the desirable state of the community, the nation, or the world.
In modern pluralist systems, political parties have conventionally been
seen as spread out across an ideological spectrum between left and right.
Autocratic systems that allow no political debate, too, have typically been
classified according to their ideological orientation, as right-wing or left-

wing dictatorships.
Stephen Eric Bronner, in his survey of twentieth-century politics, clas-
sifies the political landscape of the past century according to traditions:
democratic, liberal, communitarian, conservative, anarchist, socialist, fas-
cist, communist. Traditions (in Bronner’s sense of the word) are “forged
from a given complex of ideas and goals, material interests and institu-
tional strategies, as well as divergent styles and constituencies.” Tradition
is “inherently informed by a project, an expressly political commitment, to
turn ideas into reality.”12
Bronner emphasises that traditions often overlap. He highlights the
debates that go on within each tradition, and the way that each has
changed over time. Though the constellations of ideas which he terms
“traditions” remain the drivers of political action, he also observes how
these longer-standing political traditions have been joined by others, par-
ticularly associated with the “new social movements” of the 1960s and
after: environmentalism, feminism, post-colonialism, and so on. But from
Bronner’s point of view, these new traditions have serious limitations as
bases for political action. New social movements, which work across class
lines, focus on “particular interests” as opposed to the “generalizable
interests” of more traditional ideological groupings.13 From this point of
view, in order to build a radical politics for the future we need to go back
to some of the core political traditions: “it is necessary to highlight the
liberal and socialist values underpinning any creative reconstruction of
progressive politics.”14
Others, on the contrary, have welcomed the declining influence of tra-
ditions such as liberalism, socialism, or Marxism. Anthony Giddens, like
Stephen Bronner, sought a path to a revitalised “radicalism”—a politics
concerned with questions of social justice and equality. But unlike Bronner,
he saw the cross-cutting identities of environmentalism, feminism, etc.,
not as a threat to this revived radicalism, but as its foundation. In his 1994
book Beyond Left and Right, Giddens (like Daniel Bell at the start of the
1960s, though from a different starting point) identified a key feature of
the political landscape as being “the exhaustion of received political ide-
ologies.”15 Giddens saw this exhaustion as the result of a new conjunction
of historical forces: the end of the Cold War, the uncertainties of globalisa-
tion and environmental crisis, and the rise of a “reflexive society,” where
individuals were impelled to make their own choices based on personal
assessments of complex information.16
In this environment, according to Giddens, the conventional right–left

divide in democratic politics had lost much of its significance as new iden-
tities came to the fore. The old battles between left and right were battles
of “emancipatory politics” (concerned with “life chances”), but these had
increasingly given way to a new “life politics” (concerning “choice, iden-
tity, and mutuality”).17 This, he suggested, provided the basis for a new
type of “bottom-up” radical politics capable of building alliances across
conventional dividing lines: “tackling environmental problems, for
instance, certainly often demands a radical outlook, but that radicalism can
in principle command widespread consensus.”18
Giddens’ view of politics is in some respects close to that of Ulrich
Beck, who also emphasised the decisive shift caused by environmental cri-
sis, globalisation, and an increasingly reflexive society. Beck in particular
pointed to the crucial role of “subpolitics”: the “decoupling of politics
from government.” This notion implies that politics is possible “beyond
the representative institutions of the nation state.” Beck’s subpolitics is
much broader, and therefore also much vaguer, than the notion of infor-
mal life politics discussed in this book. It embraces self-organisation and
action by multinational corporations, international agencies, and terrorist
networks as well as by social movements.19 The growing significance of
subpolitics, Beck hastens to add, does not imply a “depoliticisation” of the
world, but rather makes it possible to “forge new transborder political alli-
ances in order to implement highly legitimate civic goals.”20 The new poli-
tics that it creates, though, does not “fit into the traditional spectrum of
party-political differences,” and often becomes a “politics without oppo-
nents or opposing forces, a kind of ‘enemyless politics’.”21
Giddens’ Third Way and Beck’s vision of subpolitics have in turn been
strenuously challenged by critics who question some of their core assump-
tions. A particularly eloquent critique comes from political theorist
Chantal Mouffe, who rejects what she sees as the “post-political” vision of
Giddens and Beck. For Mouffe (as for Carl Schmitt in the mid-twentieth
century) “politics without opponents or opposing forces” is a contradic-
tion in terms, for the struggle between “us” and “them” is fundamental to
the very meaning of the word “political.” “Properly political questions
always involve decisions which make a choice between conflicting alterna-
tives.”22 But conflict can take varied forms. Mouffe distinguishes between
antagonistic “we/they” relationships, where the other is not recognised as
having a legitimate right to existence, and agonistic relationships, where
the legitimacy of the other is recognised, even though the dispute with the
Other cannot be reconciled simply by rational discussion. The task of

democracy, she proposes, is to “transform antagonism into agonism.”23
Mouffe agrees with Giddens and Beck that grassroots movements have
become increasingly important in the contemporary political landscape,
and she also recognises the “importance of enlarging the domain of poli-
tics” to encompass these movements. But she firmly rejects the vision of
the “sub-political” as a basis for new forms of post-ideological political
compromise. On the contrary, she argues, it is crucial to find new ways of
linking grassroots movements together in the struggle to defeat their
hegemonic adversary: the capitalist state.24
Ideas in Motion
These debates about politics and subpolitics, ideology and post-ideology
are profoundly relevant to our discussion of informal life politics. But their
broad-brush abstractions fail to come to grips with some of the most
intriguing and puzzling features of our age. One problem is that the
debates outlined so far set up a dichotomy between (on the one hand)
ideology and antagonistic/agonistic politics and (on the other) post-
ideology and consensus; but events of recent years complicate this dichot-
omy. The global rise of populism challenges the established schema of
“right versus left,” and even raises questions about the very meaning of
“ideology” itself. The populist “reality TV politics” of figures like Duterte
or Trump are certainly antagonistic, but do they involve “ideology” in the
sense that this word was used by political thinkers like Carl Schmitt or
(from a very different perspective) Antonio Gramschi? The difficulties
inherent in a sharp dichotomy between ideology and post-ideology also
become very clear when we consider cases of grassroots actions like the
ones presented in this book.
The groups that we are studying here are not necessarily “ideological”
in the sense of embracing any of the major political traditions outlined by
Bronner. But that does not mean that they are devoid of political ideas.
Many are eclectic, borrowing ideas from a diverse range of sources, and
embracing participants with varying views of the world. In this sense,
obviously, they need to create some degree of internal consensus (however
incomplete) in order to do anything at all. But to be politically eclectic is
a very different matter from embracing a post-political consensus. In their
relationship to the wider world, most groups which seek to bring about
change have an “Other” against which they struggle. This “Other” is

often expressed as a lifestyle or set of values which they reject and seek to
change, but it may also at times take the more specific form (for example)
of particular state or corporate projects which they resist. The flexibility
and diversity of “subpolitical” ideas highlighted by writers like Beck should
not be mistaken for political consensus, which is a very different matter.
The study of informal life politics also makes it particularly important to
pay close attention to the fine-grained detail of the complex relationship
between ideas and action. The key participants in the debates around ide-
ology and subpolitics which we have just discussed generally recognise
that political ideas and everyday practice are deeply intertwined. Mundane
practices and experiences, as well as engagement in political activism,
shape people’s identities and ideas, just as much as ideas and identities
impel people to engage in particular forms of political action. So Bronner’s
image of tradition as a “project … to turn ideas into reality” captures only
one side of an ongoing inter-relationship. On the other side of the rela-
tionship, reality is constantly being turned into ideas.
In the complex world of living politics, and in an age when the con-
ventional “right–left” divide has decreasing hold on the political imagi-
nation, the nexus between ideas and action becomes more central than
ever, and needs to be conceptualised in new ways. The small grassroots
actions that we are studying are responses to tangible, everyday life
problems. The responses may sometimes be sparked by chance encoun-
ters with ideas that come into the community from outside, but often
the flow of cause and effect works in the opposite direction: as they
devise and enact their own response to pressing local problems, partici-
pants in informal life politics go in search of ideas which can justify and
guide their actions. Action may lead to ideas rather than the other way
around. The ideas that are sought out may come from far afield: global
information networks make it increasingly easy to pursue this search. But
ideas may also come from within the local community, as those engaged
in living politics absorb local tradition and reinterpret it in the light of
new circumstances. This bricolage of ideas and constant movement back
and forth between ideas and action—as Davina Cooper puts it, the
“oscillating movement between imagining and actualization”—consti-
tutes the world of living politics.25 Our exploration of informal life poli-
tics in the pages that follow can, we hope, open up an awareness of new
ways of being political in the twenty-first-century world.
Core Elements of Informal Life Politics

The oscillation between mental concepts and embodied action is a dynamic
process, through which both ideas and actions endlessly change over time.
In the cases that we are studying, two forces in particular—improvisation
and imagination—seem central to these dynamics. Empirically, informal
life politics actions can also be characterised as being small scale and
non-violent.
Improvisation—Defined as the “margin of manoeuvre,” the “power of
variation,” improvisation is singled out by philosopher Brian Massumi as a
crucial and neglected force in political life.26 Improvisation allows groups
of people, in responding to political and economic challenges, to “try, and
see what happens.” Informal life politics actions, being responses to specific
local challenges, are inherently unique. There is never a perfect model to
be followed, so a willingness to “try and see” is essential to political action.
Improvisation may be impelled by necessity, but it can also be a source
of strength. The world of living politics—small scale, grounded in every-
day life, flexible, and often ephemeral—provides scope for a wide diversity
of experiments. It allows for the multiplicity of ideas and practices that is
lacking from the mental monocultures of institutional politics. And, even
more importantly perhaps, it allows room for failure without triggering
catastrophe. Improvisation is a characteristic both of action and of the
absorption and adaptation of ideas. The bricolage of ideas is a product of
improvisation. Ideas are explored and discussed in reading and study
groups and “tried on for size,” and through this process are then aban-
doned or (in part at least) absorbed and adapted.
Imagination—All forms of politics, in one way or another, may be said
to involve the exercise of the imagination, but critical ideas that seek to
change reality require a particular ability to extend the bounds of our
imaginings.27 As Chiara Bottici argues, the need to re-examine the well-
springs of political imagination is particularly pressing in an age when,
paradoxically, a superabundance of images threatens to swamp and stultify
the subversive power of imagining.28 The contemporary absence of clear
radical alternatives to an all-encompassing global capitalist system has
evoked a longing for visions of otherness. This is reflected (amongst other
things) in a revival of studies of utopianism—for imagination lies at the
core of utopia.29
Improvisation is spontaneous, rapid, and embodied, but imagining is a
slower, sustained, and conceptual process. Many of the examples of infor-
mal life politics discussed in this book can be seen as pursuits of “everyday
utopias,” or as small-scale attempts (in Ruth Levitas’ words) “not just to

imagine, but to make, the world otherwise.”30 Unlike the purely concep-
tual “no places”—outopias—exemplified by Campanella’s The City of the
Sun or Mercier’s world in the year 2440, in other words, they are closer to
the image proposed by Lewis Mumford in the 1920s of “a concrete euto-
pia [good place] which shall rise out of the real facts of the everyday
environment and, at the same time, turn upon them and mould them
creatively a little nearer the heart’s desire.”31
Small Scale—While formal political practices, guided by the principle of
majority rule, emphasise the ability to attract as many supporters as pos-
sible, informal life politics activities are focused on small-scale activities.
The small scale, as indicated by several examples in this book, may not
necessarily be caused by the groups’ inability to expand: often it reflects a
deliberate choice of members to keep the group flat and independent.
Smallness of scale allows members of the group to look after each other
better (it is more personal), to avoid the burden of hierarchy typical of
large organisations (it can be more efficient on many occasions), and to
experiment with new ideas without the risk of catastrophe in case of failure
(it is more resilient and creative). “From bigness comes impersonality,
insensitivity, and a lust to concentrate abstract power,” as Theodore
Roszak has pointed out.32 Keeping the scale small is local activists’ strategy
to remain independent and to uphold their ideals.
Informal life politics groups are small but connected. The connection
transcends the boundaries of geography and time. They are not only con-
nected with contemporary groups through cooperation and personal
exchange, but also connected to groups in history, drawing on the past for
ideas and the design of activities. This intermingling of ideas and actions
from the locality and the wider world, and from past and present, is not a
simple matter of “borrowing” or even of “adaptation,” but rather a matter
of “resonance.” As grassroots groups attempt to enact political change in
everyday life, their members often encounter or seek out histories and
philosophies that “strike a chord”—instances where others have faced
similar problems, or have generated ideas that the group can use to make
sense of their own dilemmas. Thus connections with external networks
remain loose and flexible. The barriers to entry and costs of exit are low,
and each group maintains a high level of autonomy during the process.
Non-violence—Informal life politics, as defined here, deals with vari-
ous forms of physical and symbolic violence through non-violent strate-
gies. It is usually a reaction to an external threat imposed by a powerful
entity, such as a state or a dominant ideology. The goal is to defend life
and livelihood and to maintain a space free from external intervention,

coercion, and dominance. Informal life politics activities are about cre-
ation and construction, challenging the constrained circumstances
through introducing alternative norms and practices to a community.
They are therefore less about visible conflicts than about local communi-
ties’ attempts to seek alternative ways of living in daily life. Such activities
tend to be inward-looking and self-regulated, rather than actively seeking
to expand and convert others to the cause. This echoes Gandhi’s words:
“as human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake
the world—that is the myth of the ‘atomic age’—as in being able to
remake ourselves.”
Defensive as the informal life politics groups tend to be, they are not
passive. Instead of letting the situation take its own course, the groups
seek to enact their ideas in spite of odds. Their desire for change is embed-
ded in the skill and stamina to connect with people who are implicated or
sympathetic, and to carry through connected acts that circumvent current
circumstances or erode the current order piecemeal. The power of the
informal life politics groups lies in the sustained presence of their political
resistance, in the form of non-compliance, lack of cooperation, or deliber-
ate disregard for existing orders or laws. This is an expression of “active
citizenry,” which claims rights and fulfils responsibilities, while also creat-
ing a space where alternative ideas and norms are produced and enacted.33
Structure and Outline

To highlight some key features of informal life politics, the book is struc-
tured in three sections, each focused on a core theme. Each section begins
with a “concept essay,” analysing a particular element crucial to under-
standing the processes of living politics. This is followed by two chapters
that offer sustained analyses of particular examples of informal life politics,
highlighting the section’s core theme. The core themes are: citizenship
and the attention-seeking state, informal social networks, and alternative
value systems.
Part I, “Citizenships,” draws attention to the relationship between indi-
viduals and the nation-state. In the concept essay, Tom Cliff posits that
ignoring state rules or expectations is a condition of informal life politics.
Then, in Chapter 3, Cliff and Wang demonstrate the complex relationship
between survival and citizenship by examining the daily activities of a rural
migrant workers’ NGO in peri-urban Beijing. Unable to access social welfare
and educational resources available for city residents, the workers’ NGO
chooses to “ignore” the state, and to “enact” citizenship by fostering a cul-
tural and political aesthetic parallel to the mainstream ideal. In Chapter 4,
Yonjae Paik emphasises the importance of communal self-help in creating an
autonomous space against the state’s threat to personal and community life.
Paik points out that the rise of chemical farming in South Korea since the
1960s is not purely an economic matter, to increase food production, but
a political process to strengthen the state’s control of farming and rural
society: part of a long East Asian tradition of building a “rich country and
strong military.” In tracing the international origins of the organic farming
movement in the 1920s, including the Danish rural movement, he explores
the way in which local communities have developed and adapted ideas from
a wide range of sources, and shows how these grassroots efforts served to
protect local citizenship from erosion by state ideologies.
Part II, “Networks,” moves the focus to informal networks. Uchralt
Otede highlights the crucial role that networking between external groups
and the local community plays in the dynamics of living politics. The
exchange of information and resources through informal networks is illus-
trated by his study of the efforts of the herders from Eastern Ujimchin
Banner in Inner Mongolia to protect their land and water from pollution
by a paper mill. He identifies three networks as vitally important to these
efforts. The first links Inner Mongolian herders with former “Educated
Youth,” young people who were sent to Eastern Ujimchin grassland from
urban areas for re-education during the 1960s and 1970s; the second con-
nects former “Educated Youth” themselves; and the third is a loosely
structured group linked by a shared concern for the grassland environ-
ment. In Chapter 7, Shinnosuke Takahashi challenges the view that activ-
ists are motivated and united by homogenous identity and ideology. By
analysing daily practices and social networks in Takae, a rural Okinawan
community whose life is disrupted by the construction of a US military
base, Takahashi shows how multiple forms of place-based consciousness
come together to provide the basis for collected action. Both Inner
Mongolia and Okinawa are “ethnic minority” areas from the perspective of
the nation state, but both Uchralt Otede’s and Takahashi’s analyses, while
acknowledging distinctive regional histories and cultures, go beyond exist-
ing analyses that frame the regions’ living politics in strictly “ethnic” terms.
Part III, “Alternatives,” centres on experiments in alternative value cre-
ation. Shuge Wei suggests that non-market exchange pursued by local com-
munities in rural areas is not merely a complement to the market system,
but an act of resistance against it. Behind the different exchange systems are
different value systems: while the market focuses on maximising profits,
local non-market exchanges value mutuality and balance. She examines the
social experiment of non-market exchange by investigating a local com-
munity’s efforts to revive rice terrace farming in the Gongliao district of
Taiwan. This story shows how intellectuals and farmers cooperate to redis-
cover and re-invent the local farming tradition as a challenge to the domi-
nant market system. In Chapter 10, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how living
politics may start from action rather than ideology. Drawing on the history
of the Mayu alternative currency scheme in the Japanese regional city of
Ueda, she suggests that the very act of being apparently “apolitical” can be
seen as a way of reshaping the meaning of politics.
The Epilogue brings together the key themes of the book and suggests
avenues for future research and action. The formal political landscape of
East Asia is very diverse, but the examples of informal life politics explored
in the book’s chapters show that, within this diversity, local communities
face common challenges as they struggle to pursue their own visions of the
“good life” in the twenty-first-century world. At the same time, the exam-
ples of living politics highlighted in the following chapters suggest ideas,
hopes, and practices which may provide inspiration to others engaged in
similar quests, not only around the East Asian region but also worldwide.
Notes
1. See, for example, John M. Cooper, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship,”
in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, eds. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety
(Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 65–90.
2. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History
Beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3. See, for example, Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good
Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African
Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
4. See, for example, Dorothy Ko, “Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in
Imperial China,” in Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, eds. Jörn Rüsen,
Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger (Oxford and New York: Berghahn
Books), 98–103; Jacqueline Dutton, “‘Non-Western’ Utopian Traditions,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 223–258.
5. 或谓孔子曰:“子奚不为政?“子曰:“《书》云:‘孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟,施于有
政。‘是亦为政,奚其为为政?” See Analects 2:21.
6. In Japan, 73% of eligible voters voted in the 1990 general election, com-
pared with 53% in the 2014 election; in South Korea, voter participation
in the 1992 presidential election was more than 70%, compared with
53% in the 2012 presidential election; in Taiwan, more than 80% of the
electorate voted in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, compared
with 62% in the 2016 election. See the online data published by the
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, accessed December
15, 2016, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=114, www.idea.int/
vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=KR, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.
cfm?CountryCode=TW
7. Globescan, “New Poll Shows UK Voters Disillusioned With Political
System,” 26 March 2015, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.glob-
escan.com/101-press-releases-2015/347-uk-voters-disillusioned-
with-political-system.html
8. Gary W. Reichard, Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics since
1968 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
9. For example, Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of
Promising Spaces. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Ruth
Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
10. For example, John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press,
2010); James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces in Autonomy,
Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2012); Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s
Transformative Movements (Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
2014).
11. For example, Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the
Middle East (2nd edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
12. Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth
Century (Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 9.
13. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 317.
14. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 323.
15. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 10.
16. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right.
17. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 44.
18. Giddens, The Third Way, 45.
19. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 95–96.
20. Beck, World at Risk, 95.
21. Beck, World at Risk, 97.
22. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 10.
23. Mouffe, On the Political, 20.

24. Mouffe, On the Political, 53.
25. Cooper, Everyday Utopias, 11.
26. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach us about Politics (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 2014), 12–13.
27. See, for example, Raymond Geuss. “Preface,” in Politics and the
Imagination, ed. R. Geuss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010),
i–viii; Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the
Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
28. Bottici, Imaginal Politics.
29. For example, Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford and Bern: Peter
Lang, 2010); Levitas, Utopia as Method; Cooper, Everyday Utopias.
30. Levitas, Utopia as Method, xiii.
31. Lewis Mumford, Lewis, The Story of Utopias (New York: Viking Press,
1922), 113; see also Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical
Dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese
Sea Captain, his Guest (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009, originally
published in 1629); Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1800. L’An Deux Mille
Quatre Cent Quarante: Rêve s’il en Fût Jamais (Paris: Lepetit Jeune et
Girard, 1800, originally published in 1771).
32. E.F. Shumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New
York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973), 4.
33. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics, 249.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is a Distinguished Professor and Australian Research

Council Laureate Fellow, Australian National University. She is the 2013 Fukuoka
Prize winner for contributions to Asian Studies, and the author of 13 monographs,
including: Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (1998); The Past Within Us:
Media, Memory, History (2005); and Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s
Cold War (2007).
Shuge Wei is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University. She is

the author of News under Fire: China’s Propaganda War against Japan in the
English-Language Press, 1928–1941 (2017). Her research interests include grass-
roots movements in Taiwan and China, China’s media history, and Sino-Japanese
War and memory.
PART I
Citizenships
CHAPTER 2
Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-

Seeking State
Tom Cliff
The implicit demand voiced by the state is to pay attention to it. The other
side of the state’s demand for attention is, of course, the urge to ignore the
state. But what does it mean for the state to demand attention, or for any-
one to ignore the state? In this essay, I parse some examples that support
my opening statement, and explore some of the possible empirical and
theoretical consequences. My aim is to pose some guiding questions for a
research agenda into civil movements—and “non-movements”1—that
takes the state’s demand for attention as an object of analysis in and of
itself.
Ignoring the state, in one area of life or another, is a condition of infor-
mal life politics. Informal life politics actions are informal precisely because
they do not “seek redress” for wrongs or relief from threats to their
existence through appeal to the state, or “higher” political power.2 Even if
the state chooses to ignore them, or crush their protest, vertically-oriented
appeals reaffirm the hierarchical relationship between ruler and ruled. Self-
help actions are horizontal. They effectively ignore the state by disengag-
ing from what Thomas Hobbes termed the “covenant” that requires the
state to protect—and in some polities, provide.3
T. Cliff (*)

18 T. CLIFF
The vagaries and variations of the “covenant,” or social contract

between state and society, in different polities at different times make it
crucial to consider the degree and nature of ignoring (or attention-
demanding), as well as the specific context in which it is observed. While
some (e.g. Herbert Spencer, see below) have argued for the right to com-
pletely ignore the state in every respect, and theoretically-perfect totalitar-
ian states do not brook ignoring in any respect, all actually-existing state
forms sit somewhere in between. The two main types of attention, or
tribute, that are demanded by the state are symbolic and material.
Legacies
The strenuous arguments put forward by some prominent “libertarian”
political philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century themselves constitute
evidence of the state’s demand for attention. A germane starting point is
the English social theorist Herbert Spencer, who pushed the principles of
individualism to their fullest extent with an 1851 essay titled “The Right
to Ignore the State.”4 If Spencer had not felt that the citizen’s (his) ability
to ignore the state was somehow constrained, he would surely not have
seen the need to spend his energy asserting this as an inalienable right.
The foundation of Spencer’s political philosophy was “that every man
has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man.” He called this “the law of equal freedom.”5
Using the emergence and legitimation of Protestantism in England as an
example of how the right to ignore the official state religion—which meant
the right to refuse allegiance to Catholicism and not pay taxes to the
Catholic Church—became widely accepted by both state and social actors,
Spencer proceeded to extend this liberty to every aspect of life. “Civil and
religious liberty … are parts of the same whole and cannot philosophically
be separated.” “Liberty of action” was to him as much “a point of con-
science” as was liberty of belief.6
Spencer does not broach the important question of whether England’s
sixteenth-century break with Catholicism would ever have been permit-
ted without the support of the reigning monarch. This omission is cer-
tainly critical: the English Reformation was driven by the monarch Henry
VIII and the merchant classes for political and personal reasons, not
“matters of [religious] conscience.” Henry wanted to be rid of papal
authority, and to assert his own authority over both the clergy and the
populace within his realm.7 That is to say, whatever freedom of religious
choice existed in nineteenth-century England did not come about
CONCEPT ESSAY ONE: IGNORING THE ATTENTION-SEEKING STATE 19
through any individual’s insistence on moral law, but rather through the
sovereign’s insistence on absolute authority, over and above even that of
the supra-state authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This was essen-
tially a competition between two statist organisations for the right to
demand popular attention.
Henry David Thoreau was an American contemporary of Spencer’s,
and their views overlapped considerably, but while the radically individu-
alistic Spencer framed his approach as passive, Thoreau advocated an active
stance that was explicitly concerned with the citizenship rights of a broader
public.8 Arguing that civil disobedience was an obligation when one’s own
government is doing wrong, he criticised those who “hesitate, and …
regret, and sometimes … petition; but … do nothing in earnest.” He said
that “They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they
may no longer have it to regret.”9 The evil that Thoreau was talking about
was the American government’s Mexican War of 1846–47, and the com-
plicity of that same government in the slavery that was ongoing in the
southern states. He argued that Americans who did not actively oppose
the government were supporting it both financially and morally, even if
they professed to be against the Mexican War and against slavery.
Anthropomorphising the state in the form of the tax collector—“the only
mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it”—Thoreau
describes how the state says, “Recognize me.” The only time in the whole
essay that he articulates the direct voice of the state, it is as a demand for
attention. Concurring with Spencer’s assertion that “to refuse to be taxed,
is to cut all connection with the state,” Thoreau says that “the simplest,
the most effectual, and … the indispensablest [sic] mode of treating with
it on this head … is to deny it then.”10 Like Spencer, he takes offence at
the state’s demand for attention, and asserts the right to ignore it. Unlike
Spencer, he affirms “ignoring” as something that transcends the individual
and which is, in fact, a most vigorous resistance: “Let your life be a
counter-friction to stop the machine.”11
Welcome to the Machine

The idea that the state is a “machine” or an entity that “demands atten-
tion,” suggesting something that has a logic of its own and stands apart
from human will, is merely a conceptual tool: when taking account of state
actions, it is safe to say that the human desire for power is always involved.
With that in mind, I turn now to a brief discussion of the emergence and
transformation of the state form.
20 T. CLIFF
Pre-state social forms demonstrate that the demand for attention is by

no means unique to the state. Attention-seeking which privileges symbolic
over material tribute—pure attention-seeking—appears to have been prev-
alent in many societies of the past. The chief demanded gifts and obedi-
ence from his tribe, but he paid for it in full with regular public displays of
generosity and waste, as in the potlatch. “Failure to do so would cause him
to lose his position,” explains Kojin Karatani. “It is precisely this generos-
ity in giving that causes the chief to lose his wealth. In the end, privileged
positions never survive for long.”12 Since his right to demand attention
was based on, and directly proportional to, the value of the gifts he gave
out, Karatani argues that the norms of reciprocity prevented the chief of a
clan society from assuming absolutist power, and hence forming a state.
A predominantly material form of attention-seeking characterises the
classic state form as described by Thomas Hobbes. The “machine” in this
case is firmly under the control of the individual or group in power, and
they use it to extract taxes from the ruled population. This is not simply
plunder, however. Thomas Hobbes maintained that the relationship
between the rulers and the ruled was governed by a “social contract.”
Hobbes termed this social contract a “covenant extorted by fear,” but
insisted that the covenant remains valid because in return for some pay-
ment to the ruler, the ruled party “receiveth the benefit of life.” Essentially,
this means protection by the more powerful ruling party. Such protection
may be from the threat of destruction by the ruling party itself (as “protec-
tion money” paid by shopkeepers to gang members) or by a third party (a
neighbouring gang). In his analysis of Hobbes, Kojin Karatani insists that
the latter is less common, in other words that the threat comes mainly
from the state (the local gang) itself.13 The guarantee of safety from the
state (or gang) is nevertheless binding, and it is valuable if not essential to
the survival of the ruled party (or shopkeepers). Regardless of whether
one accepts Hobbes’ assertion that the ruled party (the shopkeepers) “vol-
untarily” agree “to submit” to the ruling party (gang), it is clear that the
interaction takes the form of an exchange and that this interaction
acknowledges the hierarchical relationship between them. Karatani sums
up thus: “The state is established through the transformation of plunder
and violent compulsion into a mode of exchange.”14
Attention in a symbolic sense was written back into the social contract
under the absolute monarchies in Western Europe, and perfected some
400 years later in the post-WWII era. The sixteenth-century sovereign,
having dispensed with the deputised control mechanisms of feudalism and
sidelined the Catholic Church, introduced welfarist social policies to bol-

ster the vertical relationship between himself and the people, via the
bureaucratic elite that ran the kingdom. “Against the dangerous aspira-
tions of the privileged status groups, [patrimonial] patriarchalism plays out
the masses who everywhere have been its natural following,” says Max
Weber.15 The patriarch received “good will” in return, and this translated
into the right to tax the population, to mobilise them in times of war, and
above all to be thought of as their king. Writing in early twentieth-century
Europe, Weber draws a line back to the absolute monarchies: “The ‘wel-
fare state’ is the legend of patrimonialism, deriving not from the free
camaraderie of solemnly promised fealty, but from the authoritarian rela-
tionship of father and children.”16
The welfare state reached its zenith in Northern and Western Europe,
Australia, and Canada after WWII, as states sought to sustain national
cohesion without the external threat of war.17 But, to keep the capitalist
welfare state together, the state needed to direct fiscal expenditure towards
supporting private industry (thus encouraging capital accumulation), as
well as supporting the population through the welfare system (thus
encouraging “social harmony”); state expenditures increased at a higher
rate than state revenues, resulting in what James O’Connor famously
termed “The fiscal crisis of the state.”18 Under these straitened economic
and political conditions, the Western European state shifted tack again. In
a book titled The Rise and Decline of the State, Martin Van Creveld writes:
The evidence is that … The majority of modern states are demanding more
and more while offering less and less. … Possibly by way of compensating
for their growing impotence, many states have also developed a disturbing
habit of meddling in the most minute detail of people’s lives. 19
What are such interventions, if not repeated demands for attention?

Patrimonial paternalism exists in an even stronger form in the post-
Communist states.20 North Korea and Turkmenistan are exemplars of the
“family state” ideology and attention-demanding taken to an extreme.
Orders from the state take the form of assertions about what the people
feel. A song composed for Kim Il Sung’s 60th birthday went in part:
To the single purpose of bringing us happiness,

Our Supreme Leader dedicated his entire life.
…
22 T. CLIFF
We shall follow you to the end of the heaven and earth.

We shall serve you until the day that the sun and the moon disappear.
Keeping our indebtedness to you for generations and generations,
We shall be loyal to you in one single heart.21
The now-dead former dictator of Turkmenistan adopted the title

“Turkmenbashy,” which means “father of the Turkmen.” While still alive,
he explained for a Western audience that
Turkmens … see [the state as] a paternalistic organ, which displays father-
like care for them, … makes them happy and provides them with a free life.
This is the reason, why the Turkmen people adore with devotion the state
and its President, believe in it, support it and are willing to defend it even
laying down their lives.22
Exchange is what the structure of world history has always been all
about, according to Karatani, and it is difficult to disagree with him. If
ruled populations got absolutely nothing, including safety, out of submit-
ting material and/or symbolic tribute to a given entity that claimed ruling
status, then there would be little cause for them to do so. The political
community would not come to be. Turning this around, all political com-
munities depend on some form of exchange between ruler and ruled.
More generally, Karatani’s broad definition of exchange makes a polity in
which no form of exchange can be discerned all-but impossible. What
interests me here is the specific nature of that exchange in the context of
different sorts of political community. To put this in question form: What
is the relationship between the nature of the political community and the
nature of the symbolic capital, safety guarantees, and material goods
exchanged between ruler and ruled? Is the tribute being submitted to the
rulers by the ruled population primarily symbolic or primarily economic?
More specifically, under what circumstances is symbolic tribute the primary
concern of the state?
A Mirror
Within any given polity, many different spaces of freedom and unfreedom
exist; these spaces are rarely if ever total in either respect, and are them-
selves in a continual state of flux. One recent illustration of this hails from
China. A group of urbanites who renounced the socio-economic struc-

tures of family, marriage, and property to live together in an idyllic loca-
tion in rural Yunnan lasted over four years before the local government set
about evicting them from the land that they had bought and constructed
a community on. Given that their children were not attending state
schools, that unmarried men and women were cohabiting, and that they
held political and philosophical views which directly conflicted with the
Chinese Communist Party’s nationalistic authoritarianism, I consider it
remarkable that they went relatively un-harassed for so long.
The situation in China, not to mention Turkmenistan and North Korea,
is certainly very different to that which Henry David Thoreau confronted
in nineteenth-century America, where all the state wanted off him was his
poll tax. He refused because the poll tax imputed legitimacy to the slave
trade and the war on Mexico. For this principled stance, he was thrown in
jail for one night, and would have been there longer had not a relative of
his paid the tax on his behalf.23 This intervention annoyed Thoreau
because, as he wrote, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also a prison. … [Prison is] the only house
in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.” The condition
of not being in jail, which was of course the condition of most of the
population, was tantamount to supporting the state, its slavery, and its
war. In advocating being “put out and locked out of the state by her own
act,”24 Thoreau was affirming that jail was the only place where a person
could actively ignore the state.
Thoreau’s protest-through-ignoring challenges a passive notion of citizen-
ship. Claiming the right to ignore the state’s tax collector is secondary. His
primary assertion is that reflecting on one’s own privilege and acting on the
conclusions drawn from that reflection (however uncomfortable) are core
responsibilities of citizenship. What would Thoreau conclude about twenty-
first-century America, Australia, China, North Korea, or the United Kingdom?
In this age of growing inequality and accelerated exploitation of the natural
world, surely the responsibilities of citizenship are no less imperative?
Active Citizenship
Citizenship lies in a complex, even uneasy, relationship with the claim to a
right to ignore the state. The complexity arises because, being constituted
of rights and responsibilities in relation to a particular polity or political
24 T. CLIFF
community, citizenship necessitates engagement. Claiming citizenship is

thus in itself an act of attention-giving by the individual to the political
community. In a world in which highly-visible, media-consequential poli-
tics is conducted by the representatives of nation-states, the state is widely
conceived to be the only political community that an individual’s
citizenship could or does exist in relation to. If this were the case, com-
pletely ignoring the state in all respects would entail ceasing to claim or
enact citizenship. But it is not the case: scholars of citizenship have shown
that equating “political community” with “state” is false in both theory
and practice.25 Political communities may exist within or across the bound-
aries of nation-states; these political communities may overlap each other,
be contiguous, or have no contact at all. Living Politics describes in detail
how political communities can form around concepts other than the state.
This book shows that an individual can claim and/or enact citizenship
of one political community whilst claiming a right to ignore (or indeed
actively ignoring) another political community. For example, an individual
may accept and embrace rights and responsibilities to other members of
their village or lineage—including the authority of that collective to make
binding decisions on behalf of and governing all members—yet reject the
authority (moral, legislative, or otherwise) of the state that claims that vil-
lage within its territory or those lineage members within its population.
Thus they would ignore that state.
Alternatively or simultaneously, and far more likely in practice, an indi-
vidual or group may choose to ignore certain state directives or expecta-
tions while at the same time enacting their own citizenship of the nation
and territory governed by that state. Ignoring can be, and usually is, par-
tial and selective.
* * *
What follows is a case study of Chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers liv-

ing politics on the urban fringe. They are “fringe” in a geographic sense,
but also in a socio-political sense: they are “put out and locked out” of
urban China by state regulation and popular disdain. It is a form of selec-
tive ignoring: state authorities ignore the migrant workers’ needs for
schooling, healthcare, and decent living and working conditions; much of
the urban population ignores their plight and ignores them as humans
when they meet on the street or in the subway. Yet when a small group of
these migrant workers turn their backs on the state which ignores them,
establish their own school, and begin to propagate their “own culture,”
local and municipal authorities become increasingly attentive and unfriendly.
The second case study complements the first by examining the practices
and religiously-inspired origins of the South Korean organic farming
movement. Like the migrant workers, the pioneer organic farmers were
initially viewed with suspicion by the communities around them, and seen
as threatening by the authoritarian regime in power at the time. Both
workers and farmers were driven by the pragmatic needs of their own situ-
ation, by a sense of what is “right,” and by intellectual influences both
local and international. Paik’s chapter details how Christian nationalism
combined with the traditions of the Danish rural movement of the 1920s
to provide the organic farming movement with alternative economic and
moral bases to the government’s Green Revolution. Alternate Christian
ideals arising out of the Korean and Japanese non-church movements also
directly influenced the development of organic farming in Northeast Asia.
Although both the migrant workers’ and the farmers’ movements were
(are) inherently political, neither began with rebellious or revolutionary
aims. Their political action was and is not directed at regime change but
rather at improving their own lives and those of people around them. The
following case studies explicate these active expressions of citizenship.
Notes
1. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
2. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Politics,” Humanities Australia (2013), 8.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-
Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (McMaster University Archive of the
History of Economic Thought, 1998 [1651]), 82.
4. Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” The Best of the Online
Library of Liberty No. 22, (1851 [2013]), accessed April 28, 2016, http://
oll.libertyfund.org/pages/spencer-the-right-to-ignore-the-state-1851.
5. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 3.
6. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 6–7.
7. Terence Allen Morris, Europe and England in the Sixteenth Century
(London: Routledge, 1998), 172; Christopher Haigh, English
Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 89–106. Haigh describes how Henry put
together a “divorce think-tank” to gather documents supporting the
annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, in order that he could
26 T. CLIFF
marry Anne Boleyn. Some of Henry’s allies in this project—all of whom

seem to have been driven solely by political, rather than also carnal, desire—
“proposed to ignore [the Pope’s decree that the marriage may not be
annulled] and seek a dissolution from an English court under Parliamentary
authority” (emphasis added).
8. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 3; Michael J Frederick,
“Transcendental Ethos: A Study of Thoreau’s Social Philosophy and Its
Consistency in Relation to Antebellum Reform,” Master of Liberal Arts in
Extension Studies, Harvard University, 1998.
9. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, September 8, 1849 [2009],
Iowa State University, accessed April 28, 2016, http://thoreau.eserver.
org/civil.html
10. Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State,” 5; Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.
11. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience. Little wonder, then, that Henry David
Thoreau’s writings resonated with resistance groups, rebels, and revolu-
tionaries through the twentieth century. Civil Disobedience was a
touchstone for the Danish resistance in WWII, for the Indian anti-colonial
independence movement, and for the American civil rights movement, as
well as for those who stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist
witch hunt in 1950s America, apartheid in South Africa, and the Vietnam
War. See Richard Lenat, The Thoreau Reader—Civil Disobedience,
September 8, 2009, Iowa State University, accessed April 28, 2016,
http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html
12. Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to
Modes of Exchange (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,
2014), 72.
13. Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to
Modes of Exchange, 66–67.
14. Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to
Modes of Exchange, 68.
15. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology.
Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), 1106–07, cited in Karatani, The Structure of World
History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, 76.
16. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 1107,
cited in Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production
to Modes of Exchange, 76.
17. Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 54–56, 345.
18. James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1973). For an application of this thesis to the welfare state specifi-
cally, see also Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. Edited by
John Keane, 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
19. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, 410.
20. Chris Monday, “Family Rule as the Highest Stage of Communism,” Asian
Survey, Vol. 51, No. 5 (2011).
21. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic
Politics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 155.
22. Quoted in Slavomir Horak, “The ideology of the Turkmenbashy regime,”
Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2005), 1.
23. Wendy McElroy, Henry Thoreau and ‘Civil Disobedience’, September 8,
2009, Iowa State University, accessed April 28, 2016, http://thoreau.
eserver.org/wendy.html
24. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.
25. Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2004); James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship:
Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); Rivke Jaffe, “The Hybrid State: Crime and
Citizenship in Urban Jamaica,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 40, No. 4
(2013).
Tom Cliff is an economic anthropologist and research fellow at the Australian

National University. His current research examines the role of informal kin and
business network institutions in responding to economic uncertainty and the age-
ing population in China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Xinjiang, and
is the author of Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang (Chicago 2016).
CHAPTER 3
Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship

as Survival? Imagined and Transient Political
Groups in Urban China
Tom Cliff and Kan Wang
Chinese rural peoples’ migration to the city is motivated first and foremost
by the urge to survive. The first verse of “All Workers Are One Family”
(Tianxia dagong shi yi jia 天下打工是一家) by New Workers Art Troupe
links survival with collective action.1
You do construction, I do domestic work

You do small business, he does service work
Regardless of what trade we do
In the search for survival, we walk together!
Rural migrant workers’ migration to the city becomes a matter of citi-

zenship in the course of their daily struggle to survive. In her 1999 book,
Contesting Citizenship in Urban China, Dorothy Solinger details how the
Beijing city authorities’ deliberate denial of basic utilities and services to
migrant settlements prompted migrant entrepreneurs in “Zhejiang
Village” to establish localised sewage and electricity networks, postal and
transportation services, medical clinics, day care centres, kindergartens,
T. Cliff (*) • K. Wang


30 T. CLIFF AND K. WANG
and recreational facilities. These services were rudimentary at best, but the
Zhejiang migrants succeeded in forming an urban community with politi-
cal significance:
Theirs was a brand of citizenship that the government would eventually

have to acknowledge … More so than migrants living in any other form of
polity, sojourners living in autonomous villages posed a most palpable chal-
lenge to a state with authoritarian pretensions, a state that had for years
anchored its authority in its monopoly of supplying all needs, and control-
ling all activities, in the city.2
In establishing facilities and services parallel to the state, the Zhejiang

migrants were seeking simply to survive on the urban fringe. They cer-
tainly did not set out initially to “contest citizenship.” Hence the framing
question of this chapter: Is it the quest for survival, rather than the quest
for citizenship per se, that drives enactments of citizenship or attempts to
create citizens? The complex relationship between survival and citizenship
is examined here through a case study of the ideologies, individuals, and
political interactions associated with a rural migrant workers’ NGO in
peri-urban Beijing.
“Survival” can mean the basic material survival referred to by Solinger,
but is not limited to that. The notion of survival that I adopt here includes
cultural survival, political survival, and psychological survival: “man does
not live by bread alone.”3 Although survival is often conceived of in the
negative—as just getting by, or as something not happening, such as a
threat not turning into a disaster—I suggest that it is a mistake to think of
survival as merely an absence of demise, or a continuation of the status
quo. Survival is a state of being, not an outcome. If cultural survival means
that a group of people who claim a distinct culture are able to resist their
culture being overrun by another more dominant culture, this does not
mean that their culture remains static. Development and change are essen-
tial elements of true cultural survival.
“Citizenship,” too, is a relational concept. Since Solinger’s book,
there has been a continuous stream of scholarship that focusses on the
nature and degree of Chinese rural migrant workers’ citizenship in the
urban context.4 Many of these authors consider rural migrants’ citizen-
ship in relation to the state-bestowed rights enjoyed by urban residents
with full “non-agricultural” household registration status (the so-called
urban hukou 户口). Rural migrant workers (people holding agricultural
SURVIVAL AS CITIZENSHIP, OR CITIZENSHIP AS SURVIVAL? IMAGINED… 31
hukou from elsewhere) are cast as “non-citizens” or “semi-citizens” in

the urban context because they are denied access to many basic social
rights, such as schooling and healthcare, that urban residents are typi-
cally entitled to.5 It is important to note that I am comparing China
with China. In the terms of TH Marshall’s classic work, even urban
Chinese are denied, by law, the basic rights of full citizenship: an
“urban” hukou does not entail the right to vote for leaders above the
village or community level (political citizenship), nor the right to form
unions (freedom of association, a key part of civil citizenship), nor even
“the right to live a fulfilling life according to the standards prevailing in
the society” (the essence of social citizenship).6 De facto exclusions
from the franchise, legal recourse, and social well-being add yet more
barriers to full citizenship. The focus on state-bestowed benefits, espe-
cially those connected with the hukou system, reinforces an impression
that citizenship is passive, something granted or denied, in full or in
part, by the state.
A growing body of scholarship, notably that grounded in locations
other than China, has put forward a view of citizenship as something that
depends on individuals’ agency. In this view, citizenship can be even in the
absence of state recognition. These authors have focused on citizenship as
embodied in “practices” (Holston), “participation” (Jaffe), or “enact-
ment” (Asen).7 The citizen is seen as somebody who engages in particular
actions. The tension between the passive and active conceptions of citizen-
ship is central to citizenship as it is understood and enacted in contempo-
rary times. Inspired by Robert Asen, I take the line that it is possible to
enact citizenship (claim rights, take on responsibilities, make choices)
without necessarily being granted full and equal citizenship by the ruling
state. Of these, only enactments of citizenship could (but do not necessar-
ily) constitute ignoring the state in any respect, and thus only enactments
of citizenship could (but do not necessarily) constitute informal life poli-
tics actions.
The essential thing about citizenship is that it is neither simply an action
nor simply a status, but rather a relationship between an individual and a
particular community. In a wide-ranging survey of intellectual thought on
citizenship in China and the West, Peter Zarrow asserts that a “sense of
community … lies behind citizenship.”8 Aristotle made this explicit with
his use of the Greek word koino’nia—“a sharing”—that is now translated
into English as “partnership” or “community.”9 Enactments of citizenship
are statements of belonging to a community. The community may be as
small and informal as a city district ruled over by a gang lord (Jaffe), or as
large and formally-constituted as a nation. Attempts to create citizens
through education are thus attempts to create a particular sense of com-
munity—a consciousness of shared interests or commonality. In East Asia,
one particularly prevalent example of this is state-driven nationalism, but,
as can be seen in this book, smaller-scale and informal examples abound.
“Political groups,” a term borrowed from the late Qing-era scholar Yan
Fu, are a form of community with a high level of political potency. “Those
who form groups will survive while those who do not form groups will
perish,” wrote Yan.10 He defined “political groups” as those that were
held together with what he called “citizenship consciousness,” rather than
the obligations of localism or familialism. Yan saw the traditional loyalties
of native place and kin as burdens on Chinese society, arguing that they
discouraged horizontal ties between autonomous individuals from differ-
ent social groups, and thus the formation of a politically-engaged and
influential citizenry. His concept of a truly civil society was in this way
close to the Habermasian ideal.
The historic, collective effort to survive by the Zhejiang migrants
played an important role in opening socio-political space for rural migrant
workers in urban China. Their construction of alternative social services
and infrastructure (both very much the realm of the state in China at the
time) laid the groundwork for a later generation of migrants to assert the
validity of a culture that was distinct from that of mainstream, urban, stat-
ist China. This chapter focuses on the activities of a group of that later
generation. In both cases, the migrants were in some respects ignored by
the state, and in some respects attacked by state actors. In response, both
groups of outsiders took collected self-help actions (mutual assistance
within the group) with the aim of perpetuating their own survival. They
were, in other words, practising informal life politics.
“Informal” actions—those that do not directly appeal to or engage
with state actors—are only a part of what groups practising informal life
politics do. Formal engagement with state actors, be that explicitly politi-
cal or otherwise, still makes up the greater part of these groups’ actions.
Informal life politics actions rarely stand alone in China, tending instead
to be nested within a suite of governmentally-oriented responses to exog-
enous threats. The societal actors may, in the terms of my foregoing con-
cept essay, ignore the state in some respects whilst simultaneously paying
attention to the state and its declarations in various other ways. The aim of
the social researcher, then, is not to identify conceptually-pure examples of
informal life politics, but to see what role informal life politics actions play
in political life and interactions more broadly.
This chapter explores a multifaceted attempt to generate citizenship
consciousness in others, showing how survival efforts can lead to inadver-
tent or transient expressions of citizenship that have important political
effects. I call this phenomenon “oblique activism,” and would like to sug-
gest that it has an important role to play in social change, especially in
more heavily-repressive situations where the potential cost of activism is
high. Both the Zhejiang Village case and the two-part case study below
highlight the resounding political effect of direct actions that are not
directly contentious. The following section illustrates these processes with
a focus on the crucial role of education. I then reflect on the relationship
between citizenship and survival, and end the chapter by briefly illustrat-
ing the slide between indirect action and direct political contention.
Survival Politics
In a light industrial village on the outskirts of Beijing there is a non-state
primary school for children of migrant workers (Fig. 3.1). It is known as
the Tongxin (“Of One Heart”) school, after the fact that it is run by
Fig. 3.1 Industrial alleyway in Picun Village. Photograph © Tom Cliff 2013
migrant workers for migrant workers and their children. The conditions
and facilities fall short of even the most basic state-funded schools in the
area. Although Chinese law provides for universal and compulsory basic
education for nine years, in practice it is only available in the location of
the parents’ hukou.11 The exclusion of rural children from urban schools
has prompted the establishment of many private schools for out-of-area
children, in places with sizeable migrant populations. Since it is almost
impossible for the schools to abide by every single regulation, they are
officially illegal, and subject to the constant threat of arbitrary demolition.
The Tongxin migrant primary school is one such school, but Tongxin
distinguishes itself in two very important ways. First, the Tongxin school
is not an enterprise with a profit motive, as most migrant schools are, and
as the services that made Zhejiang Village all were. The school fees are
roughly 30% lower than similar schools in surrounding villages, and yet
the school manages to sustain its operations solely through fees received.
At end 2013, they had about 750 students, but estimated that only 250
students are required to break even. External donations (which it does get,
from private corporations and philanthropic individuals) are a bonus.
Second, the Tongxin school is the most important political asset of a
labour NGO called “Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers” (Gongyou zhi
jia). The three main leaders of Spiritual Home are musicians, and their
first foray into labour politics was travelling from place to place playing
their own rousing music for migrant workers. In 2002 they set up Spiritual
Home, but were shut down and moved on twice in three years due to local
government pressure on the (profit-oriented) migrant schools that they
had set up alongside. When, in 2005, they got a recording contract based
on the popularity of their song “All Workers Are One Family,”12 they
invested the entire 75,000 Chinese Yuan in establishing the Tongxin
school. Having control of “their own” school meant that they would have
direct access to workers (the childrens’ parents), and, since they them-
selves were the school leaders, they would not be thrown out if the politi-
cal heat was turned up. At worst, the school and the NGO would go down
together. Moreover, even if all external funding ceased, the small surplus
made by the school would be enough to sustain their NGO, and allow
them to continue to tour factories and places with heavy concentrations of
migrant workers to spread their messages—Unite! Raise your head! Claim
your dignity!
Spiritual Home relies also upon a combination of formal and informal
ties to a wide variety of societal and governmental actors for political sur-
vival. Apart from those migrant workers who are involved with the organ-
isation, Spiritual Home has a substantial body of university student
volunteers and strong links with certain influential academics, media per-
sonalities, and government officials. Mainly through the medium of social
media, staff of Spiritual Home spend a great deal of energy reaching out
to the urban middle class and the mainstream media. The main front-man
and political leader of Spiritual Home, Sun Heng, said, “if you are
involved in labour organisation, you must construct extensive social net-
works [for protection]. Otherwise, you are so vulnerable.” The opera-
tional elements of this survival strategy will be outlined in the latter part
of this chapter.
Spiritual Home is now one of the largest and most influential labour
NGOs in China. It has branches in a number of other large and mid-sized
cities in China, including Suzhou, Xi’an, and Shenzhen, and it is c onnected
in a looser way to more than 30 labour NGOs nationwide. Sun Heng
regularly visits these “partner organisations” to oversee and assist in their
development. All of them are considerably smaller than Spiritual Home
itself: they range in size from 3 to 10 staff, while Spiritual Home has more
than 80 paid employees, including 40 teachers at the school. “Taking out”
Spiritual Home would render the many other smaller labour NGOs in its
nationwide network both demoralised and politically vulnerable. The
migrant childrens’ primary school can thus be said to play a key role in
protecting—enabling the survival of—a significant chunk of labour-
oriented civil society in China.
Spiritual Home’s Local Activities

The Beijing operations of Spiritual Home include the Tongxin school, a
network of “op shop” type stores, and a community centre (shequ
huodong zhongxin). There is also a basic technical college called “Workers’
University” and a small farm about 40 km away on the outskirts of the
Beijing urban area. The op shop network is financially self-sustaining and
employs more than 40 migrant workers in collecting, cleaning, and
cheaply reselling donated clothing, toys, and other items in migrant set-
tlement areas. Much of the collection work is done on a voluntary basis
by student groups from Beijing universities, and is donated by private
enterprises, urban residents, and the students themselves. Sun Heng says
that the op shop network aims to “mobilize the unused resources of
society.” The 14 shops of the network help migrant families to survive in
the city at a time when the cost of living is rising more quickly than their
wages, and also operate as informal meeting points for the local migrant
population.
Another example of how Spiritual Home merges social and environ-
mental benefit with economic benefit is what they call the “women work-
ers’ cooperative.” It is basically a sewing room in the primary school
compound, where migrant mothers can do some productive work making
small items out of donated materials that cannot be sold as is in the op
shop. At the same time, they can look after their children, including
younger ones who do not yet attend school. The piece work is low value,
and even those who do it full time earn only about 1500 renminbi per
month, but if their family commitments preclude them from taking on
full-time work elsewhere, it is at least something. Most importantly, some
of the participants told me, the interaction with other mothers helps to
reduce the feelings of isolation that they may otherwise have and provides
a much-needed psychological support network.
The community centre is where the organisation is based, a couple of
hundred metres away from the Tongxin school on the outskirts of Beijing.
It hosts a museum, a cinema, a library, a theatre (Fig. 3.2), and an open
area for recreation. All of the functions of the centre, including the salaries
of the leaders and paid employees, are funded primarily by Oxfam Hong
Kong. Across the road from the community centre is another compound
where the key staff of the organisation live. After work and on weekends,
and especially when a film or theatre production is being staged, the centre
serves as a gathering place for locally-resident migrant workers. The aim is
to provide a space for the migrant workers to relax in and feel ownership
of (since they feel highly unwelcome in many other public spaces of the
city) and to promote a common identity among them. The community
life that the centre fosters feeds into the most immediate organisational
objective—education. Education, in the broadest sense, has long been
seen as elemental to creating citizens out of a passive and/or an ignorant
populace.
Education and Citizenship

The poem “My Child, I am Sorry”—said to be written by a rural migrant
mother living in Beijing without the right hukou—speaks directly to the
links between education and citizenship. The distraught mother equates
urban citizenship with national citizenship: she feels that only urban citi-
zens can really claim to belong to the nation, and her family’s lack of
Fig. 3.2 The New Workers’ Theatre in Picun Village. Photograph © Tom Cliff
2013
belonging manifests in the denial of her child’s rights to elementary edu-

cation. For her family and millions like them, social mobility is severely
constrained because educational level is both cause and effect in the life
course: parental social status affects educational level, and educational
level influences attained social status. Formal education therefore also
impacts directly on both material (socio-economic) and cultural survival.
My child
I am sorry
Looking at your inquisitive eyes
I am disheartened and ashamed …
How do I dare tell you
Tell you that this city won’t let you to go to school
What kind of scene is this?
What should I do?
I have been choking on my words for days
How do I explain to you,
Explain that this country is not ours
Or rather, that we are not of this country …
Excerpt from the poem “My Child, I am Sorry” (emphasis added)13
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Rasutovi oli tyytyväinen, niin tyytyväinen kuin ikävää pelkäävä
ihminen voi olla päästyänsä viihtymyksen riemuun.
Ja nämä kolme samoja matoja käsitellyttä ja niiden äärellä

elämäänsä tutkiskellutta miestä joutuivat vielä samana iltana yhteen,
ja heistä heijastui kaikista selvästi päivän sisällys.
Rasutovi kutsutti Ristianin ja Juoneksen luoksensa ja maksoi heille

kuuluvan palkan, maksoi hyväntahtoisesti hymyillen ja puhua
pälpätellen. Ristian sieppasi setelinsä iloisesti, kumarteli ja kiitteli ja
vastaili Rasutovin puheisiin aina myötäsukaan. Juones upotti
setelinsä jurona kukkaroonsa ja seisoskeli äänettömänä, liu’utellen
katsettansa seinäkuvioitten säännöllisillä riveillä. Rasutovi toi ukoille
vielä tukevat ryypyt, toivotteli vastaan heidän hyvästeihinsä, kulki
heidän jäljessänsä ulko-ovelle asti ja jäi seisomaan sen pieleen,
edessänsä iltainen näky.
Karjatytöt tulivat sinkkisiä maitosaaveja kantaen hevoskatoksen

läpi läävältä ja puhelivat vilkkaasti keskenänsä. Puutarhuri imi
ansarin rapuilla iltapiippuansa ja napsutteli suostutellen sormiansa
kartanokoiralle, joka nuuhki läheistä nurkkaa. Ristian korjaili
renkituvan edessä lasten hajoittelemia leikkivehkeitä näkymättömiin.
Kyyhkyslakan kierteellä nukkuivat linnut harmaina höyhenkerinä.
Läheisten nummien petäjäpilaristojen läpi näkyi iltataivaan hillitty
värileikki. Ilmassa tuoksui juuri kihoavan kasteen raikkaus. Rasutovi
katseli, päätänsä huomaamatta nyykytellen, pihansa iltanäkyjä ja
kertaili vielä myöhemmin jo samovaarin juurella istuessaan samat
nyykytykset kuin ovenpartaalla seistessään.
Sama ilta seisotti toistakin miestä…

Juones seisoi veräjällänsä, sormi viiksen kiemurassa. Joskus hän
näki pienen peltopälvensä ja sitä pohjustavan tylyn metsäjyleikön
sammuvan päivän kuultavassa hämärässä; joskus hän taas näki
sellaista, mitä ei ollutkaan silmänottaman sisällä.
Ja kesäilta joudutti kaikkine voiminensa lämpimän, uneliaan yön

tuloa.
Kyläkujasilla loilotti vielä myöhäinen ajomies…
VIII.
Järvituitun petäjiköissä kiirivät tattivenäläisten huudot: elettiin

syyskesän kirkkaita ja korkeita päiviä.
Rasutovilaiset olivat juuri palanneet tattiretkeltä kaksin hevosin ja

purkivat hälisten rattailta täyteläisyyttänsä narahtelevia vasuja.
Pehmeissä sammalikoissa tallustelleet lapset kävelivät harvakseen
jalkojansa jäykistellen pihalla ja ihmettelivät keskenänsä maan
kovuutta. Kartanokoira purki äänekkääksi haukuksi jälleennäkemisen
ilon. Ristian ja Juones riisuivat hevosia.
Äkkiä kartanokoira rähähti raivokkaaksi ja kiskaisi vitjansa kireälle.

Nummenlaen porteilta laski aseman poliisi huimaa vauhtia
polkupyörällä pihalle ja seisautti puuhailuissaan hätkähtäneiden
ihmisten luokse. Hän viittasi Rasutovia hieman syrjempään, näytti
tälle jotakin paperia, osoitti kellotaulustansa erään numeron, sipaisi
kätensä lakinreunaan ja lähti pyöräänsä taluttaen tiehensä.
Rasutovi viittasi taas puolestansa Ristianin ja Juoneksen

luoksensa ja käski heidän lähteä päivemmällä asemalle hevosten
keralla. Asema-aukealla kuului olevan kolmelta kylän hevosten
tarkastus, jossa vahvajalkaisimmat ja leveäryntäisimmät ostettiin
sotaväen tarpeisiin. Joka hevosen piti olla saapuvilla.
Ristianilta ja Juonekselta valahtivat kasvot ihmetteleviin ilmeisiin,

ja heidän lävitsensä välähti sama tunto, joka piinasi heitä kerran
ojanlaidalla nokkospehkojen äärellä. Ristianin valtasi epämääräinen
hätä ja Juones taas tunsi merkillistä tyytyväisyyttä, mutta hänen
omatuntonsa alkoi samalla kovistella häntä pahansuopuudesta.
Ja Järvituitusta keräytyi sinä päivänä valtatielle alakuloisia,

hidasvauhtisia ajuriryhmiä, jotka havaitsivat ensikertaa tuon
tuhannesti ajetun tienmitan harmaitten aitojen saartamaksi; ennen oli
silmä seurannut vain maisemanrannan juoksua ja nähnyt kasvun ja
kukinnan väriä.
Kapakalla seisautettiin. Tuonoin niin useaa riemunhetkeä

ympäröineet seinät varjostivat nyt tuumailuihinsa apeutuneita ukkoja.
Teelasit seisoivat jäähtyneinä pöydillä.
Juones ja Ristian pistäytyivät myöskin kapakassa ja huusivat teetä

eteensä. Juones pälysi ahnain silmin kapakkahuonetta, hervahti
muisteluihin ja hätkähti todellisuuteen kapakkavaimon tuodessa
kalisevat lasit ja nenärikot kannut pöytään ja kysähtäessä Juoneksen
kuulumisia. Siinä teetä härppiessään Juones tunsi, miten kapakka
uhosi vierasta, kylmää tunnelmaa, ja hän keräsi tästä tunnosta
ruokaa ajatuksillensa.
Kapakan kello löi kiihkeästi kolmannen tuntinsa. Ukot lähtivät

katokseen, hönkyivät äkäisinä hevosillensa ja laskettelivat tuimasti
asema-aukealle.
Sinne oli keräytynyt jo yläkyliltä tunkioukkojen takkuisia hevosia,
huvilaherrojen isoja, äkäisiä juoksijaoriita ja joitakin ajurihepoja.
Asemahuoneista ilmestyi parvi sinelliherroja kirjat ja paperit

kainalossa, perässänsä palvelijoiden ja sotilaitten lauma. He
saapuivat asema-aukeallee yht'aikaa kapakalta ajavan saaton kera.
Sotilaat hajautuivat järjestelemään hevosia riviin, ja he huutelivat

ukoille ohjeitansa. Pian alkoivat rinnustimet pamahdella auki,
vempeleiden kaaret laukeilivat jännityksistään ja aisat romahtelivat
maahan. Palvelijat riisuivat upseereilta sinellit ja lähtivät takaisin
asemahuoneeseen. Poliisi saapui, nöyrästi selkäänsä köyristellen,
upseerien luokse, jätti heille manauslistansa ja siirtyi komennoimaan
hevosten rintamaa.
Yksitellen talutettiin hevoset upseerien ryhmän editse, moneen

kertaan. Useimmat ukot saivat valjastaa heti hevosensa, kun
korttelimittaa hoitava sotilas potkaisi hevosta alamittaisuuden
merkiksi. Siinä sai käydä jokainen Järvituitun ukkokin
syynäysseurueen edessä ja tehdä tiliä niinestänsä sekä hevosensa
iästä. Toisilta otettiin hevonen käsistä pois, annettiin vastineeksi
piissarin raapustelema maksuosoitus ja käskettiin hävitä näkyvistä.
Moni ukko sai vetää itse kärrit kapakalle ja tuntea jalkamiehen
vähäisyyttä. Mutta maksuseteleillä luvattiin Pietarista rahaa, ja se
hiukan kirvoitti apeita mieliä.
Yläkylien tunkio-ukot ajoivat järjestään takaisin kopukoillansa ja

naureskelivat kärrejä vetäville miehille.
Ristian ja Juones jäivät toisesta hevosestansa ja ajoivat kaksin

rattain metsä järvelle, tuumaillen omiansa ja joskus muistutellen
hevosensa menettäneitä miehiä.
Ja kun sinä iltana kapakassa ryypättiin, oli se viimeinen
yhteisjuominki pitkän ja uljaan ajurikauden vaiheissa. Tätä ei kukaan
tohtinut lausua sanoiksi, mutta se vaaksahti jokaisen äijän otsaan
kipeästi nakuttelevaksi aavistukseksi.
*****
Syvällä syksyn tihusateissa huomattiin Järvituitussa, että kuluneen

kesän muisto oli laimea. Sen muiston turvissa jouduttiin sitten talven
syviin lumiin. Entinen yltäkylläinen elämä alkoi niukistella. Odoteltiin
taas ajojen alkamista. Hevosensa syksyllä menettäneet ukot
pistäytyivät, rahansa noudettuaan, tuon tuosta uudestaan Pietarissa,
oppivat livahtamaan kantamuksinensa kettuina rajan yli, alkoivat
pitää salakauppiaan pälyilevää ammattia ja möivät sokeria, kahvia,
valkeita jauhoja ja viinaa. Ja vasta kesän kynnyksellä heillä oli määrä
ostaa ajokit ja aloittaa entinen rahti.
Huolestuneina seurasivat Järvituitun kylävanhimmat äkillistä

yhteiselämän repeämistä ja odottelivat aavistellen kuka mitäkin.
Kyläkapakka tuli entistä meluisammaksi. Elämän epävarmuus

ajatti ukkoja yhä tiheämpään kapakalle, jossa pöytien lähistöillä
luihuili viinakauppiaiksi rätistyneitä nuorukaisia.
*****
Melkein vuosi elettiin kuluttavassa epävarmuudessa; tuhon merkit

lisääntyivät jatkuvasti.
Eräänä syksypäivänä laski Järvituitun kasakkaleirin hevospaimen

alaniityillä hevoslaumansa kaurapeltoihin. Paimenpojat juoksuttivat
henki kurkussa sanan kylään, ja ukot hiipivät yksitellen niityille,
ottivat paimenkasakan tylyihin kouriinsa, purkivat aitaan leveän raon,
työnsivät kasakan pään siihen ja tiivistivät aidan, jonka loukkuun
kaulastansa jäänyt kasakka hakattiin henkiheitoksi. Senjälkeen
julmistuneet ukot pieksivät liekajalkoina könkkyävät hevoslaumat
hajalleen metsiin ja kaartelivat kiertopolkuja takaisin tuvillensa.
Kun sitten kasakat, päiväkaupalla ratsujansa etsittyään, palasivat

metsistä, hevosiensa kupeissa paksut lyöntimakkarat, vannoivat he
kamalan koston teon tehneille.
Suuri osa Järvituitun ukoista muutti nyt metsäsuon sammallatoihin,

ja he pidättivät paimenpojilla vahtia kylänlaidassa. Kerran juoksivat
jo ukot ladoista kauas karpalomättäiden turviin, mutta metsään
ratsastaneella kasakkaparvella oli muu mielessä.
*****
Ristian lakaisi parhaillaan keltaisia lehtiä kasoihin Rasutovin

pihamaalla. Kartanokoira hyppi hulluna vitjanpidättämässä, ja Ristian
käännähti katsomaan nummille. Häneltä mätkähti luuta maahan.
Nummenlaen portilla seisoi kasakkaparvi. Mustat huopakauhtanat

valuivat alas hevosten kupeille. Ristianista näytti ensi vilauksessa,
niinkuin portilla olisi seisonut lauma mustia jättiläisiä. Hän juoksi
kiireesti palvelijarakennukseen ja hätisti karjatytöt ja puutarhurit
kartanolle.
Kasakat tyhjensivät Rasutovin läävän ja ajoivat mölisevän karjan

leirillensä. Iltanuotioilla keitettiin sitten isoissa padoissa lihakeittoa,
tanssittiin hurjia tikaritansseja huopaviittojen päällä hulmuavassa
tulenhohteessa ja laulettiin hurjia lauluja. Järvituittu vapisi.
Ristian itki karjatyttöjen keralla tyhjässä läävässä ja päivitteli
maailman mullistusta.
———
Juones kävi edelleen Rasutovin töissä ja kuljetteli aina

nummistoon tullessaan kylän ämmien eväsnyyttejä sammallatojen
miehille. Rasutovi puuhaili Pietarissa akkiloimassa tavaroitansa ja
rahojansa ja pistäytyi väliin kiireesti Järvituitussa neuvomassa
Ristiania ja Juonesta, joiden hoteisiin hän uskoi nummistonsa.
Juones ja Ristian joutuivat rinnakkain katsomaan uusien päivien

yhä yltyvää nurinkyntöä elämänmenossa. He katselivat samasta
kylänlaidasta ja tunsivat kipeästi sen, mitä ympärillä tapahtui.
Rasutovi ei ollut käynyt pitkään aikaan kartanollansa, ja Ristian

joutui vähän kerrallaan isännän saappaisiin. Puutarhurit ja karjatytöt
odottelivat aikansa maksamattomia palkkoja, riipaisivat mukaansa
minkä mitäkin ja katosivat teille tietymättömille. Ristian enää eleli
perheineen isossa rakennusrykelmässä. Hän uitti tuon tuosta
paksuniskaisia lohia haaviinsa ja vei Lovissalle, väliin hän teilasi
kanatornista poikakukkoja paistinvartaaseen ja käveli jäykkänä
isäntänä autioituneella mäellä.
Uudenvuoden lumet eristivät metsäjärven nummiasutuksen

täydellisesti omiin oloihinsa. Juoneksenkin työt olivat ehtyneet, ja
hän puuhaili tuvallansa näkymättömissä. Koko Järvituittu eli
ahdistavaa päiväjonoa, jossa ei näkynyt muuta kuin kuoppaisia,
syviä raitioita.
Oli hiljainen, pilvikatteista vähin erin kirkastuva sunnuntai-aamu.

Lumiseen maisemaan oli ihminen uurtanut mitättömän pieniä vakoja
taloryhmän ovien väleihin. Ristian käveli parhaillaan näiden lumeen
puhkottujen syvien tievakojen pohjissa, käveli ja tähysteli kylmien
nummien hiljaisuutta. Palokärjen kiivaankumea kolkutus oli ainoa
vauras aistimien saalis koko aamusta.
Ristianilla oli ikävä. Lumi oli eristänyt hänet kylästä, ja aina yhtä
hiljaisina alkaneet päivät olivat uuvuttaneet hänet makailuun ja
laiskaan kääntelehtimiseen. Nekin reenjäljet olivat jo hävinneet
lumikatteisiin, jotka vielä viikko sitten kertoivat kartanolta lähteneistä
täyteläisistä kuormista ja eräästä arvoituksesta, jota Ristian oli
miettinyt monta päivää: muutamat Järvituitun syksyllä hevosensa
menettäneet miehet olivat pyssyt olalla tulleet nummistoon ja
sanoneet heillä olevan luvan viedä mitä tahtoivat; ja veivätkin,
Rasutovin hevosella ja reellä omiensa lisäksi vielä, usuttivatpa
Ristianiakin mukaansa muka uuteen elämään kerrassaan. Mutta
isännyyden ja lohien makuun päässyt Ristian jäi entisekseen
nummien saarrokseen muistelemaan Rasutovia ja kaikkea, mitä
hänelle oli tapahtunut haaraparran tultua Järvituittuun.
Ristian käveli ja teki tuttua kierrostansa: ovelta ovelle. Hän aukoi

pakkasen kangistamia lukkoja, vilkaisi kylmänviilakoita suojia ja
raaputteli lumia kynnysten harjoilta. Jäätyneen ansarin edessä oli
kellarimökki valkeana lumikumpuna, jonka niskalta sujui lasten
suksien jälkiä kartanolle. Ristian pysähtyi aprikoimaan, mitähän
kellarissa mahtaisi olla. Hän muisti sen olevan lukittuna ja avaimen
tietymättömissä. Ristian haki leveän lumilapion ja puhkoi vanan
kellarille. Ovella riippui vahvakaarteinen lukko. Ristian potkaisi ovea
ja sai katonliepeestä lunta niskaansa. Ristian alkoi innostua; hän
keksi jotakin tekemistä ja samalla salaperäistä monipäiväiseen
yksitoikkoisuuteen. Hän haki tupansa naulasta päärakennuksen
avaimen ja käveli pian liukastelevin huovikkain salien korkkimatoilla.
Kylmissä huoneissa eli äänetön alakuloisuus ja esineisiin
kahleutuneiden muistojen salamyhkäisyys. Ristian käveli
huonesokkeloissa ja tähysteli seiniä. Eräästä pitkästä käytävästä
hän tapasi avainlaudan ja äkkäsi heti kellarinlukkoa vastaavan
avaimen.
Ulos tultuaan Ristian katsahti ympärilleen, vaikka tiesikin, ettei

kukaan vieras nähnyt hänen puuhiansa, ja alkoi sährätä kellarin
ovea auki. Vastaanhangoitteleva ovi äännähti viimein ilkeästi
voihkaisten ja aukeni mustaksi kidaksi valkoiseen lumeen. Ristian oli
tuokion näkymättömissä. Kun hän ilmestyi jälleen kartanolle, oli
hänellä melkoinen vauhti tupaan mennessään. Pian hän juoksi
takaisin kellariin, kädessänsä vahvaleukaiset hohtimet, ja oli
kadoksissa puolta pitemmän tuokion kuin äsken. Kun hän taas
ympärillensä pälyillen ilmestyi pihan hiljaisuuteen, oli hänellä
kummassakin kainalossa silkkipapereista hartioitansa nostava pullo.
Ristian komennoi tupaan tultuaan lapset mäkeen ja avasi toisen

pullon. Sieltä hän lorautti makeaa, punaista nestettä lasiin ja tunsi
sitä maisteltuaan niinkuin hänen ruumistansa olisi alkanut hyväillä
lempeä ja lämmin käsi. Ristian istui pöydän ääressä, katseli
nummien valkeita kaarteita ja nauraa hörähteli itseksensä. Lovissan
äkäilyn Ristian nitisti pian loppuun kysymällä, kuka oli talon isäntä ja
herra: se olikin nyt Kristian Petrovits!
Ristian madalsi toisen pullon nestepatsaan pian pohjakupukan

tasalle ja oli jo valmiina tekoihin. Hän siristeli silmiänsä, haristeli
sormiansa ja koukisteli käsiänsä kuin lentoon lähteäkseen. Osan
intoansa hän purki toisen pullon avaamiseen, mutta sitten hän
hätkähti. Hän muisti eräät sanat, jotka tuntuivat niinkuin juuri korvaan
huudetuilta:
— A kuin on elämäsi nyt, Kristian Petrovits! A kuin tulet juttuun?
Ristian seisoi hetkisen liikahtamattomana, sitten hän vetäisi

kädellänsä rennon kaaren ilmaan ja huudahti:
— Ahaa, Rasutovi, trastui! Haroossi on nyt, oikein haroossi! A on

oma talo, on oma mäki, on oma järvi, a mikäs on olla! Päivällä
liepuskaa leivon, yöllä maatuskaa silitän, oikein on haroossi! A
ennen: oikein surullista oli, oikein salkka oli. Syödä piti mikä ei
pakoon juossut nenän alta, vähän sai vielä uristakin, syödä piti vaan!
A nyt: kukkoja syön, Rasutovi, munia syön, syön lohia! Paljon oli
minulla karjaa, ylen paljon, on vieläkin, katsohan, kyyhkyläiseni.
Ja Ristian töhnäsi ulos ja alkoi pitää mökyä hiljaisessa aamussa:
— Pasmatrii — tuolla on läävä, sata oli lehmää, kaikki vei piru. Ei

pysynyt piru kahleissa, keikkumaan läksi, kaikki vei läävästä, sonnat
minkä jätti! Tuolla on pahna, ylen on suuri pahna. Rutto tuli,
nälkärutto, pois vei!
Ristian yltyi leikissään, viittilöi näkymätöntä vierastansa mukaansa

ja toikkaroi lumivalleja nuohoten kanatornille.
Kartanorakennuksen akkunassa vahti Lovissan hätäinen naama.
Ristian ryntäsi torniin ja alkoi laipioitten rautalankaverkkoja

soitellen pitää puhettansa:
— A vot, Rasutovi, tässä on minulla karja — ei vie piru eikä tapa

tauti. Hyvä on karja: munan laittaa, valkean, makean munan. Ja
kukot ovat minulla kuin nuoret heinät, niin, Rasutovi: kuin nuoret
heinät — niin ovat pehmeät ja makeat. Yhen annan sinullekin,
lahjaksi annan!
Omasta puheestansa heltyneenä Ristian törmäsi kukonpoikien
pilttuuseen ja alkoi tavoitella niitä mairitellen syliinsä. Mutta silloin
nousi kopissa hirveä metakka, johon yhtyivät tornin kaikki kurkut.
Kiikatus ja kaakatus ja siipien räiske karkoittivat Ristianin pian
takaisin kartanolle.
— Niin olivat kuin nuoret heinät! Allas on minulla vielä, Rasutovi,

rannassa on, kaloja täynnä, sinne menemme!
Ristian otti katoksesta haavin ja tallusteli rantapolulle. Jyrkkä rinne

vei hänet keränä rantaan. Ristian nousi tyynesti lumihetteestä, meni
uimahuoneelle ja puhkaisi haavin nenällä varhain puhdistamansa
avannon riitteen.
— Täällä on minulla karja, rakas on karja! Kesällä kaiket päivät

syötän, matossa itse makaan rinnalla, vehnästä syötän, talveksi pois
otan paleltumasta; kylmää pelkäävät, jäätyvät raukat.
Ja Ristian pulahdutti haavin avantoon ja hämmenteli mustaa,

pulpahtelevaa vettä. Pian nytkähti haavin varsi ja Ristian sinkosi
lumelle kalan kuin hopeisen kaaren; se pieksi itsensä lumipilveen.
Ristian otti kalan syliinsä ja pärpätti:
— Sinulle annan, ota, ota koko kala, muista minun antaneen, vai
otanko tupaan ja paistan sinulle? Ylen on rasvainen kala, on kuin
juhannuslahna, rasvainen ja selästä pehmeä.
Kala sylissänsä Ristian kiipesi kartanolle.
— Ja sähköt olivat minulla, sammuivat! Niin olivat kuin auringot

taivaalla, kuin Jumalan tähdet, pois sammuivat. Ja kartano on
minulla komia — katsohan, Rasutovi, kuin on komia.
Ristian vetäisi kädellänsä rakennuksia kokoavan kaaren ja katseli
silmät killillään lumeen uponneita seiniä.
— Valkeaksi maalautin kaikki, katsohan kuin valkeaksi! Ja talli on

minulla. Piru vei hevoset; hännät solmisi ja solmusta nosti, pois
kantoi!
Märkä kala kylmäsi sormia, ja Ristian vetäytyi tupaan.
— A niinkuin näit, Rasutovi, mikä on eläessä, oma on talo, kaikkia

on, omaa on! Piru vain peloittaa. Tulee ja kahmaisee ja sanoo: lupa
on viedä, Kristian Petrovits, tule pois, tule perässä, uusi on siellä
elämä, tule, Kristian Petrovits!
Lovissa tuli kamarista ja alkoi taas sättiä ukkoansa, nykäisi kalan

hänen käsistänsä ja lakaisi huovikkaista karisseen lumen
lattiamatoista. Ristian viittaili rennosti vain vastaan ja tarrautui äsken
avaamaansa pulloon.
Samana aamuna Juones päätti pistäytyä nummistossa Ristiania

katsomassa. Hän varusti ukkovainaansa aikuiset leveät metsäsukset
seinävierelle ja veti pitkävartiset huovikkaat jalkoihinsa. Syötyänsä ja
hetkisen pihalla tähysteltyänsä Juones alkoi nousta Jumikieppien
harjoitse metsäjärvelle. Kulku oli hitaasti edistyvää.
Juones saapui nummenlaen porteille vasta silloin, kun Ristian jo

nukkui suu auki Lovissan hoitelemana. Hän katseli hetkisen lasten
liukasta sujua erään töyrään kaarteella ja laski itse kepeillänsä
latusyrjää piirrätellen kartanolle.
Lovissa huomasi Juoneksen tulon, korjasi kiireenvilkkaa pullot

näkymättömiin ja töykki Ristianin hereille.
Ristian nousi humalaunensa hölmeessä juuri sängynlaidalle
istumaan, kun Juones astui tupaan päivän hyvyyttä toivotellen.
Ristian oli vielä aamullisessa tunnelmassa eikä elänyt tupansa
maailmassa ensinkään.
— Ahaa, Rasutovi, trastui, päivää päivää!
Juones hetkahti nauruun, ja Lovissa pakeni käsi suullansa

kamariin.
Vähin erin Ristian kuitenkin erkani hölmeestänsä ja tunsi Juoneksen.
Lovissa sai kerralla uskottavan käskyn kiidättää pöytään sen, mikä
siitä oli hävinnyt, ja ukot miehittivät pöydänpäät.
Ja pyhäinen päivä aleni huomaamatta viimeisille tutkaimillensa.

Miesten välissä seisoi tyhjä pullo muistopatsaan vakavana. Akkunan
liikahtamaton maisema himmeni himmenemistään.
Ukot vetivät jo puheitansa loppusolmuille.
— Saat nähdä, Ristian, että tämä talvi se repäisee elämän niinkuin

salama pilvet. Eikä tähänastisesta jää kuin mieltäkirpova muisto.
Kylä on taas ollut hiljainen, ja ämmät pilkistelevät ovien rakoloissa.
Ukot ja hevoset vietiin viime viikolla sotamiehiä vedättämään ja siellä
missä lienevätkin vielä toisessa päässä jälkiänsä. Nuoret miehet
ovat häviksissä. Elämä on kuin rikkinäisen kaulakellon rälkätystä!
— Mutta jos nyt jäivät herrat tulematta, niin kyllä kuollaan kuin
torakat kuivaan uuninraviin. Mistä otat silloin ruplan ja ruuan?
— Voi näyttää siltä, mutta voi toisellakin. Ampui tuo sama hätä
minunkin lävitseni silloin, kun liitti sänkyyn läsimään. Minä katselin
silloin asiat niin, että tällä ruoskalla ärsytetyllä vauhdilla ajetaan pian
notkoon, ellei muutosta tule. Ja ainahan ihmiset pelkäävät mustia
pilvenkiukamia, niin kauan kuin ne roikkuvat niskan päällä, mutta
sitten sateen mentyä katsovat ympärillensä kuin uutta maailmaa.
Minusta ei ole enää siivo eläjäksi, sillä en näillä ramaantuneilla
käsillä mahda maalle mitään, mutta jos nyt alkaisi ajella pellonselkiä
yhtä ahkerasti ja rapsakasti kuin maantien raiteita, niin itsestään
joutuisi uuteen elämään.
— Älä hyvä raiska haasta tuolla tavalla. Oikein sydänmunaa

kurtistelee ruttuun, kun ajattelenkin, että minun pitäisi taas muuttaa
kylänlaidan köyhyyteen.
— Sinusta on jo pulskistunut tupatirhakka, mutta vielä sitä sinäkin

puhkot ojareikää kyläukkojen pelloilla. Tähän se taitaa kutistua
Rasutovinkin elämä.
— A vot en tiedä, mutta varjele Jumala!
— Mistäs sen tietää, kun ei edellepäin ole silmiä!
Juones oli jo lykkinyt itsensä nummenlaen ylitse, kun Ristian vielä

toljotti kartanolla seisten hänen latujensa tuskin enää näkyviä juovia.
Ristian puistalti harteitansa karistaakseen outojen ajatusten
kylmyyttä. Ympärilläseisovat rakennukset tuntuivat kolkoilta kuin
paarihuoneet. Hämärä oli valloittanut jo takimmaiset töyräät ja hiipi
Ristiania kohden puu puulta, kunnes yllätti hänet ja syöksähti
samalla harmaana laineena yli koko nummiston. Kaukaiselle
taivaankolkalle tuikahti tähti palamaan. Ristian havahtui
tuumailuistaan vasta Lovissan kutsuun.
Pihalta tultuansa Ristian seurasi hetken iltapöydässä äänekkäästi

lohenkiduksia imeskeleviä lapsiansa ja nöyrrytti heidät hiljaisiksi ja
suurisilmäisiksi:
— Nyt sille meidän köyhyydellemme taidetaan taas panna kohta

silmukka kaulaan ja taluttaa metsästä takaisin tupaan!
IX.
Järvituitun huvilat seisoivat tyhjinä ja akkunaluukkujen jäykistäminä

kesänvihreissä puutarhoissa. Ihmiset liikuskelivat alakuloisina ja
hiljaisina, niinkuin näkymätön vihmasade olisi pieksänyt heitä terävin
vesipiikein yhtä mittaa ja turruttanut ilmeettömään
välinpitämättömyyteen. Aurinko paistoi, taivaankannen alle levittäytyi
vihreä näky, mutta Järvituittu oli vielä keväisessä yökirteessä.
Herrat jäivät tulematta. Siihen kiintyi koko Järvituitun huomio. Oli

tapahtunut paljon melskeistäkin talven vaiheissa, järvituittulaisia oli
joutunut kesken ikiänsä hautakuoppien pohjille, mutta sellainen
hätkähdytti vain ensi kokemalta ja kuulemalta. Pitkä, masentava
tietoisuus elämän kertakaikkisesta käännähtämisestä jäyti avuttomin
elein liikkuvia ihmisiä.
Ukot kävelivät päät riipuksissa huviloittensa vehmaissa

pensaikoissa, katselivat ovien liikahtamattomuutta ja kattojen
harmaantumista. Rappeutumisen ensimmäiset, tuskin huomattavat
viivat alkoivat näkyä jo selvemmin vihreää taustaa vastaan kuin
ennen, jolloin ovet hulmahtelivat auki yhtämittaa, akkunoissa näkyi
ohitse vilahtelevia vartaloita ja hiekkateillä soi lasten ilo ja aikuisten
riemu kesäpäivien helakoimpina kukkina. Tuvilla naiset kolusivat
tyhjiä paikkoja ja voivottelivat kaiken loppumista. Pienet perunamaat
vaottiin entisekseen harjakkeilleen, ja peltotilkut ahdettiin
kaurankasvuun ryhevien ojapajukkojen turviin.
Kaura nousi pian hentona vihreänä utuna pellokkeille. Ukot

istuskelivat katoksissa, tähystelivät lakiriukujen välitse sijaa
kärreillensä ja vielä muille nurkkiin jääneille ajokaluillensa. Mutta
kärrienkatselu viekoitteli valjastamaan hevoset, ja niin ukot ajelivat
taas vanhasta tottumuksestansa päivittäin asemalle entiseen
valtakuntaansa riitelemään kymmenin miehin parista
maksuatinkivästä kauppamatkustajarahjuksesta, jotka laihoin salkuin
tulivat vielä noudattelemaan entisien riistamaittensa polkuja.
Hiljaisin, mietteliäin ohjasottein ajettiin tiesuonta myöten köyhyyttä
irvistelevälle kapakkatorille. Sitä saartavat kaupat olivat tyhjiä ja
alastomia. Niiden pölyisissä akkunoissa roikkuivat vielä iankaikkiset
karttuunihuivit ja läkkiastiat, mutta ovien takana paistoivat hyllyt kuin
hampaattomat ikenet.
Kapakassa miehitettiin entisekseen vahakangasrikkoisia pöytiä ja

juotiin teetä imeskellen suut irvissä tahmeita karamelleja, joita
purettiin likaisten paperien sisästä sokeriastioista. Kaskut eivät
tahtoneet sujua millään naurunremakkaan asti, eikä piiskaryyppyjä
saanut itkemälläkään.
Toiset ukot kirosivat ja manasivat katkerasti niitä

seteliruplanippuja, joita he olivat kasvatelleet leveäselkäisiksi
huikeina ajokesinä; toiset taas hyvittelivät kirstujensa sopukkoihin
keräämiänsä hopearuplapinoja, joita kylän kauppa-apulaiset etsivät
nyt ostonhimokkaina jokaisesta tuvasta. Ja Järvituitun ukot
pirstaantuivat kahteen, toisiansa kateillen katsovaan nurkkaryhmään
kapakassa.
Tuutija-Mikko huusi ukot aina arpaan, mutta muinoinen kiihoittava
pelijännitys laukesi hervottomaksi ja eleettömäksi rahannostoksi,
jolle jo melkein hymähdettiin.
Pari Järvituitun resuisinta ukkoa ajeli monet päivät merkillisessä

humalantihkussa; he repivät ohjasperissä ollessaan hevosensa
rennoiksi ja hulluiksi, nauroivat päin silmiä kaikille ja heltyivät viimein
kamalassa pohmelossaan kapakalla kertomaan monipäiväisen
humalansa syyn: he olivat voidelleet leipäviipaleille paksulti
kenkävoidetta, syöneet sitten ne ja juoneet päälle hapanta kaljaa
sekä saaneet sisuksistansa nousemaan päähänsä oudon humalan,
joka itketti ja nauratti ja pani tiet luikertelemaan kuin elävät madot.
Asemalla oli ajuripuomin hevosrintama riippupäinen ja päivä

päivältä lyhenevä. Napitetut valjaat retkottivat rangoiksi laihtuneiden
hevosten selissä väljinä ja nahkaa kaluavina. Junat kolisivat sivuitse
tyhjinä kuin akkojen jauhovakat, ja pöly tuskin kiehui enää kotiansa
ajavien ukkojen kärrien vanassa. Junista ihmiset naureskelivat
asemalla seisovaa hevosrivin tynkää, mutta Tuutija-Mikko arvotti
edelleen naurusta välittämättä kapakan pihalla sorminluettavaa
miesrykelmää ja toi sen aina säännöllisessä jonossa puomille
odottelemaan niitä kahta, kolmea, jotka joskus eksyivät
pudottautumaan asemalle ja halusivat jonnekin tienmutkien taakse.
Ojavieriltä alkoi verkkaisesti nousta maan tielle vihertäviä

ruohonnukkaisia kielekkeitä. Varikset keinuilivat rauhassa
aidanseipäitten nenissä.
Ja vähin erin, sitä mukaa kuin ajurijono asemalla kutistui, alkoi

Järvituitun katoksissa jyrinä ja melske. Ukot nostelivat ajorattaitansa
ja kukkaperärekiänsä ylisille sekä laskivat maahan vastapainoksi
vanhoja risuäkeitä, lapioita ja kuokkia. Ja ylisillä seistessään ukot
katselivat seinänräppänöistä alaniittyjen laakeata maisemaa, jossa
kaartuilivat pajupehkojen pyöreät latvaviivat, ja hakivat niiden
aarniosta omat niittysuikaleensa. Pieniltä, masentavan pieniltä ne
näyttivät katosten ylisille, mutta ylisien hämärään nostetut rattaat ja
reet näyttivät vielä avuttomammilta ja tyhjäsylisemmiltä kuin vihreät,
elämää lupaavat maanpinnan muodot. Ja pitkät tuokiot tähysteltyään
ja mietiskeltyään ukot laskeutuivat maahan ja alkoivat käännellä
työasujansa ja pohtia rynnäkköä pelloillensa.
Juones seurasi kylänlaidasta maantien yhä pienentyviä pölypilviä

ja ukkojen kiivasta liikehtimistä pihoillansa, ja hän tunsi taas monesta
aikaa elämänhalua ja osuutta uuden päivän sisällykseen. Juones
alkoi viilailla kuokkansa pyöreää kärkeä kuten muutkin Järvituitun
ukot.
Eräänä iltana oli Hiopin katokseen keräytynyt monta toistensa

tulosta tietämätöntä ukkoa tahkokiven äärelle ojalapioitansa
teroittamaan. Vuoronperään he pyörittelivät tahkon kampia ja
painoivat lapioitansa kiekkona pyörivään kiveen silmissänsä
vesipoimun notkistelu sähisevällä lapionterällä. Ukot puhuivat
monesta aikaa maistansa ja töistänsä, ja Juones innostui joukosta
kaikkein viittilöivimpään ja kiivaimpaan puhumiseen:
— Vanhat ihmiset sanoivat ennen, että likimmäinen on aina

ensimmäinen. Ja mikäs meitä on sitten likempänä kuin
jalansijamme. Sen kun kynnämme nurin ja annamme työntää
viljanterää, niin elämme kuin elämmekin, vaikka hiljaisemmin ja
äänettömämmin kuin ennen! Ja maa — se on aina ensimmäinen:
sanotaan laiva — missä sen luulette rakentuvan ellei maalla? Eivät
suinkaan sitä aalloilla läjään hakkaa — maalla se naputetaan
vedenkyntöön. Ja lentokone: maasta se lähtee ja maahan palaa, p—

The Living Politics of Self Help Movements in East Asia 1St Edition Tom Cliff Full Chapter

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The Living Politics of Self Help Movements in East Asia 1St Edition Tom Cliff Full Chapter

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The Living Politics of Self-Help

Movements in East Asia 1st Edition

The Living Politics of

ISBN 978-981-10-6336-7 ISBN 978-981-10-6337-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958003

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: LockieCurrie

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Since 2013, our research group, based at the Australian National

1 Introduction: Living Politics—Social Alternatives and

2 Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-­Seeking State 17

3 Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival?

4 Self-Help Is Political: How Organic Farming Creates

5 Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal Networks

6 Informal Grassland Protection Networks in Inner

7 Forest, Music, and Farming: The Takae Anti-­Helipad

Part III Alternatives 151

8 Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation 153

9 The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley: The Resurgence

10 The Neverending Story: Alternative Exchange and

11 Epilogue: Improvising the Future 215

Fig. 3.1 Industrial alleyway in Picun Village. Photograph

Image 10.1 Ma~yu members, with passbooks in hand, trading goods

Introduction: Living Politics—Social

Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Shuge Wei

What is politics? This seemingly simple question has become pressingly

T. Morris-Suzuki (*) • S. Wei

© The Author(s) 2018 1

In the twenty-first century, though, politics as it is generally practiced

Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016. This

Ideology, Post-ideology, and Beyond

classified according to their ideological orientation, as right-wing or left-­

In this environment, according to Giddens, the conventional right–left

Other cannot be reconciled simply by rational discussion. The task of

change have an “Other” against which they struggle. This “Other” is

Core Elements of Informal Life Politics

utopias,” or as small-scale attempts (in Ruth Levitas’ words) “not just to

and livelihood and to maintain a space free from external intervention,

Structure and Outline

23. Mouffe, On the Political, 20.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is a Distinguished Professor and Australian Research

Shuge Wei is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University. She is

Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-­

© The Author(s) 2018 17

The vagaries and variations of the “covenant,” or social contract

Welcome to the Machine

Pre-state social forms demonstrate that the demand for attention is by

sidelined the Catholic Church, introduced welfarist social policies to bol-

What are such interventions, if not repeated demands for attention?

To the single purpose of bringing us happiness,

We shall follow you to the end of the heaven and earth.

The now-dead former dictator of Turkmenistan adopted the title

China. A group of urbanites who renounced the socio-economic struc-

community, citizenship necessitates engagement. Claiming citizenship is

What follows is a case study of Chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers liv-

marry Anne Boleyn. Some of Henry’s allies in this project—all of whom

Tom Cliff is an economic anthropologist and research fellow at the Australian

Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship

Tom Cliff and Kan Wang

You do construction, I do domestic work

Rural migrant workers’ migration to the city becomes a matter of citi-

T. Cliff (*) • K. Wang

1 Introduction: Living Politics—Social Alternatives and

2 Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-Seeking State 17

3 Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival?

4 Self-Help Is Political: How Organic Farming Creates

5 Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal Networks

6 Informal Grassland Protection Networks in Inner

7 Forest, Music, and Farming: The Takae Anti-Helipad

Part III Alternatives 151

8 Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation 153

9 The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley: The Resurgence

10 The Neverending Story: Alternative Exchange and

11 Epilogue: Improvising the Future 215

classified according to their ideological orientation, as right-wing or left-

Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-