With the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake occurring in May 2018, Bin Xu's book The Politics of Compassion is a must-read. His work offers insight not only into the dynamics of the post-earthquake volunteering, but also into the broader relationship between state and society in contemporary China.
In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, an unprecedented series of events occurred: waves of volunteers arrived in the earthquake zone and were welcomed by the party-state. As Xu puts it, it was “the largest collective action since the Tiananmen incident in 1989” (p. 9). Even more surprisingly, in response to the advocacy of public intellectuals, the state held a three-day national mourning period for the earthquake victims—the first ever in Chinese history to mourn the deaths of ordinary people. For a tenuous moment, the public sphere seemed to dilate and glimmer with the prospect of change. As Xu meticulously tracks the changing political environment from the initial moments of crisis and recovery to the politicized phase of post-disaster reconstruction, he convincingly demonstrates how the “enthusiastic optimism about the future of civil society was wishful thinking” (p. 14).
Xu does a remarkable job tracing the shift in macro-level processes from recovery to reconstruction at a level of fine-grained detail based on his own experience volunteering in the earthquake zone and conducting fieldwork in Sichuan and Shanghai. According to Xu, the immediate aftermath of the earthquake resulted in a “consensus crisis” in which the state needed to mobilize all the resources it could muster, including those of civic organizations. During the rescue period, in which seconds could mean life or death for those trapped under the rubble, the state, NGOs, and individual volunteers shared the same goals: to save lives and make sure the survivors were safely in emergency shelters with access to food and water. After the emergency subsided, the party-state reasserted its control over the reconstruction process, and civil society groups’ “access to the political opportunity structure gradually narrowed and, for those focused on advocacy and activism, vanished altogether” (p. 134).
Xu's book also addresses an important question: what motivated people to volunteer? Although state discourse coded the volunteering as Communist Party–led “solidarity” and nationalist sentiment, Xu describes a “multivocal compassion” (p. 67), that is, a wide range of cultural frames through which people made sense of their actions. Xu's interviewees include liberal intellectuals who understood volunteering as a form of “civic engagement,” first-time volunteers who were seemingly enamored with their own “goodness” and described volunteering according to a “me-centered” narrative, groups that saw themselves in terms of increasing “public welfare,” religious groups, and so on. These textured accounts of volunteering after the Sichuan earthquake provide a fascinating window into a pluralistic China that operates under the same set of political constraints.
A refreshing aspect of Xu's book resides in the fact that he does not shy away from the political dilemmas and moral quandaries posed by the earthquake. Readers of this journal are probably already familiar with the tragic collapse of shoddily built schools during the earthquake, which led to the death of over five thousand children. Xu not only discusses the “citizen investigations” of artist Ai Weiwei and activist Tan Zuoren, both of whom (unrelatedly) set out to collect and memorialize the names of the dead children, and in doing so, encountered the repressive arm of the state; he also offers a powerful account of how most volunteers in the earthquake zone did not want to reflect on, or talk about, the school collapses even in private conversations. “Many failed to turn compassion for suffering into a serious political discussion and actions that addressed the causes of the suffering” (p. 192). Instead, they focused on individual accounts of doing good and helping others. Xu does not blame them. He understands that in order to survive, they have to look away. He shows how censorship, repression, and fear require internal compartmentalization and constant rationalization. But he also asks others, as well as himself, and all of us: what are the costs of these silences?
After describing his own initial feeling of moral goodness as a volunteer in the earthquake zone, Xu critically reflects on “the condescending, feeling-good compassion, and the guilt of being unable to change the situation” (p. 28). The Chinese party-state can welcome what Hegel referred to as “beautiful souls” who require suffering to display their own compassion and goodness. What they cannot tolerate, however, is critical reflection on the meaning of life and death, and the fact that some deaths weigh less than a feather.
