About one hundred years ago, Lu Xun penned his searing critique of China as a society that “eats people.” Ako, though she does not refer to Lu, echoes that indictment in the title of her book. This work, which is essentially an extended reflection on the author's 15 years of work with some of the poorest groups in Chinese society, seeks to alert Japanese readers to the immense social strains under which their giant neighbour labours.
Ako is anxious to distinguish her approach from that of much Japanese analysis of China, which she sees as falling into two categories – one emphasizing China's “threat” to its neighbours, and another predicting the country's collapse. Disavowing any political agenda, she emphasizes her identity as an ethnographic scholar, while noting the difficulties involved for a “foreigner” in gaining trust and acceptance in the communities she wishes to study, and the ethical dilemmas this can throw up.
It is clear that Ako has an extraordinary gift for gaining such trust and acceptance – or rather for friendship, since one of her main themes here is a critique of the instrumentalism that, in her view, poisons interpersonal relationships in contemporary China. Her own sympathy for her subjects – who include migrant workers from Inner Mongolia, AIDS sufferers and activists from Henan, and inhabitants of a Hubei village riven by disputes over land – is evident throughout. She maintains contact with many of them, is invited back to participate in key family and communal ceremonies, and is often involved in their problems as a fellow-activist, rather than just as an observer. At one point she is arrested, interrogated and detained overnight in Inner Mongolia, while the eve of the Beijing Olympics finds her sharing a accommodation with AIDS sufferers in a down-at-heel hotel in the depths of Henan. The depth and range of her experience of China's “lower depths” is breathtaking – one suspects that no Caucasian scholar, sticking out like a sore thumb amongst his Chinese associates, could hope to match this.
This is, however, much more than the stream of journalistic reportage that it could easily have become. Ako combines anecdote with considered analysis of a number of issues that epitomize the plight of those, a majority of the population, who remain on the margins of the country's recent economic bonanza. The case of Henan's AIDS villages is thus represented as one appalling instance of the pervasive commodification of human relationships. The corruption of hospitals and local officials is analyzed in the context of the system for recording the “performance” of cadres, which magnifies the incentive to cover up mistakes, and indeed to criminalize those who try to report them. She follows sufferers and activists to Beijing, where they try to petition the central authorities – but only a very few with special connections stand the remotest chance of success.
Rural poverty was a key factor in driving many Henan peasants to sell their blood in the 1990s, and Ako discusses how the hukou system, combined with regressive changes to the taxation system in the 1990s, contributed to exacerbating rural deprivation and urban-rural inequality. The 2006 abolition of the rural land tax has reduced the burden on rural residents, but overall taxation still hits them harder than their urban counterparts, and the decline in revenue has driven many rural local authorities in deeper into debt. One consequence is that essential local services are neglected – in the village Ako visits in Hubei's Sha Yang county, maintenance of the irrigation system has become a matter for families rather than the whole community. This contributes, she argues, both to less efficient agricultural production, and to the erosion of a sense of the village as a community – a phenomenon she illustrates with an account (plus photo) of the village head digging a personal irrigation ditch right across the main public access road.
The relative impoverishment of rural communities is also a spur to migration to China's cities. This phenomenon in turn raises questions over the right to the use of land that, in some cases, may be left uncultivated when all active members of a family migrate in search of non-agricultural employment. Some observers, including many economists, have argued for the introduction of stronger individual property rights over rural land, so that peasants can freely buy and sell their real estate, or use it as security for loans. However, Ako cautions strongly against this, pointing out that, in the absence of a properly functioning rural welfare system, land is the one security that peasants can fall back on. Allowing peasants to sell their land outright would in most cases not yield enough money for them to gain any kind of foothold in the urban property market, and would render them even more vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous officials and property developers. Meanwhile, China's vast “floating population” would be deprived of any sort of anchor, and social stability would be further undermined.
Allowing migrants to transfer their residency more easily to urban areas would in theory enable them to access the better public services and welfare provision on offer in the cities. However, Ako shows that recent reforms to the system have in fact been aimed not at easing the plight of rural migrants, but rather at facilitating mobility for a wealthy minority. Nor does she embrace the prospect of more sweeping and immediate reform to the hukou system – once again, she fears the potential cost in terms of broader instability.
Their relative lack of access to decent education both contributes to peasants' vulnerability to exploitation, and is further reinforced by it. Reforms already announced to the hukou system are supposed to enable migrant workers in many areas to send their children to urban schools on the same basis as urban residents, but a bureaucratic obstacle course in practice still generally prevents this. Poorly-educated peasants meanwhile have neither the time, energy, knowledge or connections to fight effectively for their rights. Meanwhile, the breakneck expansion of higher education, the marketization of provision especially from high school level upwards (with the rampant charging of so-called “school choice” fees), and an intense competition for “elite” education at every level (exacerbated by the effects of the one-child policy), produce a system that increasingly disadvantages the already disadvantaged, and has psychologically damaging effects on students, parents and society in general.
Recalling her initial visits to rural China in the mid-1990s, Ako asserts that – irrespective of any rises in notional per capita GDP – the plight of those at the bottom of the social pile has worsened rather than improved in the succeeding 15 years. Against this backdrop, she observes that it is hardly surprising to find signs in many rural communities of growing nostalgia for the pre-Reform Maoist past. The increasing interconnectedness of urban and rural life, she argues, has brought the poor face-to-face with spiralling inequality, while the erosion of rural institutions feeds a vicious cycle of community decay. However, Ako seems to see the fundamental source of social malaise as moral or cultural, rather than institutional – she calls for China to be more faithful to its ethical traditions, and for humans to be treated as humans, rather than as means to material ends.
In the course of her analysis, Ako suggests that the influence of global capitalism has contributed to the moral decay and decline of collective values that she laments. It is largely in this respect that she sees China as offering a “warning” for Japan – where the influence on public policy of global neoliberal trends has been blamed by many on the left for increasing social stratification. In both cases, though, the fundamental causes of any spiritual crisis would seem to be more domestic than global. The credibility of a collectivist ethos in China was critically undermined in key sections of society by the very extremism with which collectivism was pursued under Mao. In Japan, meanwhile, neoliberal ideology has provided a convenient rationalization for policies that reinforce and reproduce already widening social stratification, in a context where the cosy corporatism of preceding decades was already crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
Ako is far from alone amongst Japanese observers in trying to compare her own country's experience with that of China, with the aim of deriving lessons for one or the other, or both. Japan's rapid period of post-war growth was accompanied, as she notes, by increasing social equality rather than inequality. Sonoda and Shimbo make the same observation as they look at the role of education in overcoming, or exacerbating, social inequality. Setting their analysis of this issue in a long-range historical context, they begin with a discussion of the keju examinations of the imperial period. They argue that this history, and the consequently more deeply-ingrained belief in the fairness of formal academic qualifications as a means for apportioning employment opportunities, largely explains why Chinese respondents appear more accepting than their Japanese counterparts of the implications of rampant credentialism for social inequality.
Sonoda and Shimbo also look at educational dimensions of Chinese social inequality that are not discussed by Ako. These include the phenomenon of overseas study, which offers extensive opportunities for those at the top end of the social scale to entrench family and class privilege – here official aspirations to create a “great power of talent” confront the aim of redressing gaping social divisions. Another aspect they discuss is the place of minorities, and the way in which efforts to bring material improvement to some (not all) “minority” groups, such as Tibetans, have increasingly involved, in the field of education, programmes of cultural “Sinification.” Curricular diversification has meanwhile allowed more “advanced” regions to extend their advantage over more “backward” areas, while a curricular emphasis on “patriotic” themes (generally involving celebration of Han culture and history) supplies a social adhesive with possibly dubious side-effects, including the further alienation of groups within society who do not see themselves as Han.
The inculcation of a state-centred, ethno-centric brand of patriotism is something with which these Japanese authors and their readers are intimately familiar. In the case of Japan – at least until the 1990s – official messages to the effect that “we are all in this together” did at least seem partially substantiated by economic and educational policies that distributed opportunity relatively evenly throughout society, even if this social contract has since become somewhat frayed. The same cannot be said for contemporary China, despite the comparisons frequently made between its current economic boom and that of post-war Japan. Viewed from Japan, this spectacle evokes both moral unease and concern over the implications for China itself, and for its neighbours, of prolonged social instability. Once privilege and disadvantage have become as deeply entrenched as they have in China over the past 20 years, there are – as these works acknowledge – no easy solutions. However, as Sonoda and Shimbo conclude, at least part of the solution to educational inequality must ultimately be institutional, and must involve a reform of the structure of educational financing far more drastic than anything yet envisaged. Educational reform on its own may not be a cure-all for China's social ills, but there is little prospect of reversing the trend towards ever-greater inequality without hefty further increases in public spending on schooling, targeted progressively at the most under-privileged communities and regions, and involving substantial incentives for well-qualified teachers to go and work there.
