Hughes and Wacker called their volume *China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward* for two reasons. Te frst was to highlight a belief among Chinese politicians that information and communication technologies could allow China to 'leapfrog' stages of national development. Te second was to emphasize the historical continuity of such eforts by hinting at Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward' (1). Scholarship has continued to read China's politics of digitization against the background of a historical efort to leapfrog development (Damm and Tomas 2006: 2, Damm 2007: 279–280, Liu 2011: 41–43). Apart from a historical desire to supercharge and rapidly speed up development generally, China's strategic interest in digital development can be traced back to writers such as Alvin Tofer and his notion of the 'Tird Wave' (Dai 2003: 8). Te American futurologist's work was well-received in China in the 1980s (Damm 2007: 279). Tofer, among other sources of infuence, popularized the idea that so-called developing countries could leapfrog past the industrial stage of development to a third stage characterized by advanced informatization. Starting in the 1980s, Chinese eforts to modernize the nation state thus began to rely heavily on informatization.

Beijing's Zhongguancun technology district, where I conducted research during thirteen months of feldwork between 2013 and 2015, was the product of a digital development strategy of this sort. It was also an example of the comparative dimensions of China's nationalist project of modernization. Narratives of 'catching up with the West' discursively reinforce the unity of the nation state as a comparative unit. In addition, these narratives also reveal a global history of exchange spanning national boundaries. Zhongguancun, to borrow a concept from Peter van der Veer, is an example of an 'interactional history' (2001: 12) linking China and the United States, the outcome of a series of Chinese reimaginations and reproductions of Silicon Valley. Te area acquired a strategic focus to emulate Silicon Valley-style technological entrepreneurship and, as such, highlights how imaginaries of the Chinese nation state emerged in the process of global exchange.

Having visited the United States shortly after the reform and openingup policy of 1978, Chen Chunxian, a researcher and professor with the Chinese Academy of Science, returned convinced that Zhongguancun, with its high density of research institutes and universities, had the potential to become a similar environment for technological entrepreneurship (Tzeng 2010: 114). Te area in Beijing's north-west became an experimental zone for high technology in 1988 precisely because it was seen to share certain characteristics with Silicon Valley, most importantly its proximity to several institutions of higher education (ibid.). Tus, not unlike China's moon landing, the existence of Beijing's technology district is evidence of a desire to emulate what is perceived as 'Western' progress. It highlights a comparative nationalist project that is rooted in a teleological understanding of modernity, one in which 'catching up' is a prerequisite for national strength.

Tis drive to catch up with Western powers is an exercise in comparative nationalism. Like the moon landing, Chinese experiments in fostering a tech industry are set in a strongly expressed comparative national framework, in which development is framed as a national race for superiority. It exemplifes how 'nationalism and the nation-state are not singular phenomena', as van der Veer (2013: 660) has argued, 'but emerged during a process of European expansion and the creation of a worldsystem of economies and states'. Within such an emerging world-system, China's traumatic encounter with colonial powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a desire to become a 'modern' nation state. Te gap in development between China and Western colonial powers and 'the specter of China's exclusion', as Lisa Rofel (1999: 8) phrases it, brought out a strong Chinese desire for modernization. Tis desire led to an at once highly comparative and competitive nationalism in which the ambition to catch up with foreign powers shaped Chinese modernist imaginaries and, ultimately, gave rise to projects of digital development.

Tis interactional history of technological entrepreneurship and its place in national strategies of digital development eforts were consequential. Even in the wake of the global fnancial crisis of 2007 and 2008, China's digital economy continued to boom. Domestic Internet companies and their digital platforms, it suddenly seemed, had not just caught up with the West but exceeded it. Giving voice to this notion, a *New York Times* headline read: 'China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech' (Mozur 2016). During my feldwork, one event in particular appeared to confrm this view. In September 2014, the Alibaba Group entered the New York Stock Exchange. Te outcome was sensational: Alibaba raised \$25 billion, making it the highest initial public ofering in history (Noble and Bullock 2014). Whereas China's eforts in space travel were still a matter of drawing even with other global powers, the e-commerce giant's success signalled that the country was already at the forefront of the world's 'digital revolution'. Sustaining hopeful visions of Chinese modernity at a time of economic slowdown, the digital economy, and digital technologies more generally, are at the heart of contemporary Chinese aspirations.

### **Digital Flattening**

Te digital economy is playing an increasingly central role in China's efort to catch up and eventually overtake the 'West'. As production numbers fell following the world fnancial crisis of 2007 and 2008, China's booming digital economy became a key site of national ambition. Just as importantly, it became an important site of personal aspirations. As such, the digital economy supports a discourse of national development in which governmental and popular desires are aligned. Te digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state employ an aesthetics of connectivity, access and participation. Tey draw on prevalent understandings of digital platforms as economically decentralizing and democratizing. In addition to censorship and online nationalist discourse, scholarship must consider how conceptions of the digital inform imaginaries of the nation state. Chinese discourse on the meaning of digital platforms is crucial to understanding their political signifcance. To this end, a closer look at China's digital economy as a space of national imaginations is in order.

As techno-cultural formations, digital platforms make apparent this discourse of national strength and personal opportunity. Alibaba is a particularly clear example of this narrative of mutual beneft. Its success often appears an expression of China's swift modernization and growing power. However, just before the Alibaba Group went on to claim the highest initial public ofering (IPO) in history, CEO Jack Ma explained that it was the company's mission to support ordinary Chinese that was guiding the development of Alibaba's platform ecosystem (A Ke Si Jinrong 2014). Ahead of Alibaba's listing, Jack Ma explained the company vision in a video. Te clip, which I frst encountered on a blog called 'grassroots dream'4 (2014), begins by explaining that the dream of Alibaba's founders had been to support small businesses. 'At Alibaba', Ma asserts, 'we fght for the little guy' (2014). Towards the end of the clip, he proclaims that they are proud to 'help entrepreneurs fulfll their dreams' (2014). It is this overlap between the digital ambitions of the Chinese nation state and the personal aspirations of the individual that is crucial to understanding China's digital politics. Te trope of the digital platform allows the Chinese government to present digital development as a participatory project.

In 2013, China saw a boom in Internet entrepreneurship as growing numbers of entrepreneurs sought to create their own Internet start-ups and businesses. Picking up on this trend, the Chinese government introduced a 'Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation'5 (State Council 2015) policy aimed at incorporating the booming feld of digital entrepreneurship into a national development strategy. One specifc aim of the policy was to channel the eforts of early-stage or grassroots entrepreneurs into national innovation and growth. At the heart of this new policy was the notion that informatization had lowered the threshold for entrepreneurial endeavours benefting China's so-called masses (State Council 2015), making them an increasingly important resource in a project of national innovation. Te national ambition expressed in this policy presents a very diferent narrative than that describing China's space exploration. In this tale of digital development, Chinese citizens are not merely its spectators, as users, costumers and entrepreneurs they occupy a leading role in it.

Te embrace of Internet users by the Chinese government is a limited one. Te Chinese government has continuously sought to maintain control of its national online sphere. Online liberties are granted by the Chinese government, and the administrative and physical control of the Internet remains frmly in the government's hands (Herold 2011: 1–2). While a frewall restricts access to a range of news and social media outside China, contentious keywords are blocked and 'ofending' content quickly removed on the Chinese Internet. Much of this work of controlling online media is outsourced to online service providers who selfcensor to avoid the anger of the government. Tese techniques and technologies of censorship are augmented by more subtle forms of control, in particular eforts aimed at 'public opinion channeling' (Gang and Bandurski 2010: 56). Of particular note in this regard is the employment of paid Internet commentators referred to as the 'fve cent army' or *wu mao dang* (Shirk 2010: 14). While online debate defnitely exists on the Chinese Internet (e.g. see Yang 2009, Yang and Calhoun 2008), these measures to control China's online sphere highlight the government's eforts to establish a tightly regulated national digital sphere.

Te rise of the digital economy in China points to a governmental politics of limiting freedom of expression online while striving to create a more 'open' and 'creative' economic environment. In China's digital economy, the creative potential of digital media—one heavily regulated, as the government tries to ban memes, censor social media and blacklist keywords—reappears as a source of economic development. Despite the apparent success of China's digital economy, this vision of popular creativity highlights the government's balancing act of encouraging innovation through digital media while censoring expression online. What must be noted here is how this approach politicizes the digital on two levels. In addition to the government targeting the content of digital media, it is the meaning of digital platforms itself that becomes a site of politics. Tus, along with the issues of censorship and the control of online media, it is necessary to explore what Brian Larkin has described as the 'systemic eforts of governments to stabilize the symbolic logic of infrastructure' (2008: 3). Digital platforms are not just politically signifcant because of how they are used—their perceived signifcance is a matter of politics.

An article posted as an explanatory policy discussion on the Chinese State Council's ofcial website cited Premier Li Keqiang as proclaiming: 'We say that the world is becoming fatter; a very important reason for this is the birth of the Internet'6 (Guangmingwang 2014). Tis narrative, which is also prevalent in Chinese start-up culture, articulates a promise that digitization will allow China's population to participate and access opportunities. Li's statement is signifcant as part of the government's broader eforts to present the Internet as an equalizing force. Importantly, both the Chinese Government and start-up entrepreneurs discuss the Internet in terms of its ability to connect all grassroots entrepreneurs and thus fatten the social, cultural and economic landscape.

Alibaba and other big Chinese Internet companies are inspiring examples of success through the Internet, so are the life stories of their founders and CEOs. Perhaps like no other, Jack Ma embodies dreams of entrepreneurial success. His life and work are studied and discussed extensively. 'Jack Ma is a feature article in the great story of the "China dream"',7 Wang Chuantao (Wang 2014) argued in an online news article. For many of my informants, he embodied a truth about every entrepreneur's digital potential for near unlimited success, however unlikely or difcult to achieve it may be. Jack Ma, the popular discourse maintains, had the right idea at the right moment in history, anticipating the potential of a Chinese digital economy, and was thus able to go from being a schoolteacher to becoming the founder and CEO of a multi-billion empire. His example charges the Internet's fat topography with imagined potential, which is often framed as a connection between what is seen to be the fat, horizontal and distributed nature of the Internet on the one hand and visions of nearly unlimited entrepreneurial success on the other. Tis digital narrative, I argue, has become a crucial element in the production of the Chinese nation as a unitary space.

### **Digital Unifcation**

In the Alibaba video clip discussed in the previous section, Jack Ma recounts the beginnings of Alibaba and his founding dream of building up a company to serve millions of small businesses. Today, he explains, this vision remains the same, as they continue their mission 'to make it easy to do business anywhere' (A Ke Si Jinrong 2014). During this last statement, the clip cuts from what looks like a clothing business led by women to a group of young men in sports clothes, huddled around smartphones on a hillside against the backdrop of a mountain range. Additional personal success stories feature a female art student in Shanghai who likes to shop on Alibaba's Taobao platform and who proclaims that 'Alibaba is a lifestyle' (2014). Another scene shows a painter with a physical disability in a rural town in Sichuan province who found hope after selling her work on Taobao. 'Without it', she asks, 'how would I sell my work in this little town?' A Tibetan shop owner in Qinghai remembers how isolated he felt before Taobao. 'A physical shop can only reach local customers', he refects, 'but a Taobao shop is open to customers around the world' (all quotes from A Ke Si Jinrong 2014).

Alibaba's clip presents a China united by the company's platform ecosystem. In it, class, gender and ethnicity do not appear to challenge the unity of the nation, nor does the rural-urban divide, despite being exacerbated by decades of marketization and economic reform. Te idea that digitization will dissolve regional diferences and inequalities is not entirely new. Beyond fuelling visions of international competitiveness, China's digital development strategies have long held out a promise of temporal and spatial unity. Te Chinese government, Karsten Giese has argued, believed that its informatization strategy could not only raise international competitiveness but also help overcome 'interregional development gaps' (2003: 30) in China itself. Alibaba's video clip, although produced by a private corporation, resonates strongly with government accounts of national unity achieved through the digital. Its framing of Internet entrepreneurship as a unifying and universally accessible vehicle for success is closely aligned with government discourse around the same issue.

Mediations of digital entrepreneurship and consumption such as Alibaba's clip present a particular mode of narrating the nation as a unitary subject. Of course, regional diferences and inequalities of various kinds have existed and exist in China, despite growing numbers of Internet users. 'Te nation-space', Anagnost has argued, 'is never unitary but multiple within itself' (Anagnost 1997: 4). Te fact that the Internet has not simply brought an end to such multiplicity, but in some ways exacerbated it, was most evident when, following riots in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Chinese central government cut the region's access to the Internet between summer 2009 and May 2010 (Herold 2011: 2). More recently, accounts of the internment and digital surveillance of Uyghurs has shed light on how mobile technologies sustain a vast apparatus of control targeting China's Muslim minority (Byler 2019). It is because of such ruptures and inequalities within the space of the nation, according to Anagnost, that nation states must continuously narrate and perform their own unity. Te impossibility of such unity makes this an ongoing efort aimed at bridging temporal and spatial gaps.

Alibaba's discourse about its own platform ecosystem, alongside government strategies of digital modernization, envisions a unifed national space. Diference does not disappear in Alibaba's video clip. Rather, the video presents a world in which digital platforms make regional, ethnic and class diferences irrelevant. In it, the unifcation of national space stems from equal access to a capitalist and digitally mediated modernity. While many people in China will experience a reality that contrasts strongly with this audiovisual narrative, everyday experiences of connectivity and access do give some traction to promises of a digitally mediated and participatory Chinese modernity. Tis became evident to me during dinner with Bai Hang and his ex-girlfriend, Yu Ling, when the conversation turned to cofee. Yu Ling, who worked for an online company selling paintings and frames, had become interested in drinking good cofee ever since gaining access to a cofee machine at her workplace. When she asked me if I could recommend a good brand of cofee, the only one that came to my mind was one I had a habit of buying when I lived in Switzerland. I was convinced that it was not available in China and told her so. When she asked me to search for the brand's name on her iPad Air, it turned out that the product, cofee beans roasted in Switzerland, was for sale on Taobao for 60 Yuan Renminbi.

My point is not to say that Bai Hang and Yu Ling completely accepted the notion of a digitally united nation. Rather, this episode supports the case about the participatory nature of Alibaba's pioneering success in global modernity. As opposed to the moon landing, the company's triumph on the New York Stock Exchange suggested that Chinese Internet users were already part of and contributing to a strong and modern China. If only through consumption, Alibaba made them part of a capitalist space of global modernity. If only for that moment, the gap between China and a perhaps loosely envisioned 'Western modernity' closed down. China caught up not through a symbolic technological achievement far removed from their lives, but in the mundane yet pleasurable moments readily aforded to them by digital platforms. 'Not only does the nation mark its impossible unity in relation to time', Anagnost has argued, 'but also in space' (Anagnost 1997: 4). Te signifcance of Bai Hang and Yu Ling's use of Taobao is that it afected how they experienced China both spatially and temporally.

Te government's eforts to stabilize the meaning of digital platforms draw on everyday experiences and seek to connect them to a national project. Its claims about the potential for national unity and strength through digitization gain purchase in relation to the everyday experiences of a global digital modernity. Alibaba's narrative of a unifed national space draws on a familiarity with its services that anyone in China who has used Taobao to shop for goods would have. Such consumption is an intimate part of people's lives, a personal experience that provides a crucial foundation to claims that the Internet facilitates access, participation and connection across China. Experiences of the spaces and temporalities of global capitalist modernity on digital platforms like Alibaba's Taobao inform understandings of the digital as a connective force. Such participatory experiences of technological development are a crucial experiential foundation on which digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state gain purchase. In the following section, I consider the relationship between experiences of the digital and digital imaginaries of the nation state.

### **Digital Experience**

To understand the power of the digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state, I argue that scholarship needs to consider how corporeal experiences of digital platforms support the narrative production of the nation as a unifed space. Benedict Anderson (2006: 37–46) famously pointed to the role of print capitalism and the creation of new spheres of communication as a central factor in the creation of 'national consciousness' and imagined communities. It is only a small step to extend his discussion to the Internet in China and ask how digital media support national imaginaries. However, as I have argued, a critical analysis has to move beyond an analysis of discourse to consider the corporeal experiences of digital platforms.

Te digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state gain power in relation to bodily experiences of digital platforms. What makes this emphasis on the corporeal important is the question of how imaginaries fnd traction in people's lives. To address this issue, I draw on Birgit Meyer's (2009) critique of Anderson's emphasis on imagination in the formation of communities. Her intervention seeks to shift our conceptual gaze from the mind, imagination and judgement to the senses, experience and the body. My discussion of digital platforms and national imaginaries similarly tries to highlight the crucial role of corporeal experience in sustaining national imaginations.

A consideration of the corporeal experiences enabled by digital platforms, I contend, is crucial to understanding how digital imaginaries of the nation state fnd traction in people's lives. Meyer (2009: 3–5) argues that Anderson's concept of the imagined community fails to consider suffciently how communities materialize. For this purpose, she introduces the concept of 'aesthetic formations', through which (2009: 6) she hopes to shed light not only on the 'modes though which imaginations materialize through media', but also on how such materializations produce sensibilities 'that vest these imaginations with a sense of truth'. By giving more room to materiality and sensation, Meyer hopes to broaden Anderson's argument while holding on to his focus on media and mediation.

In previous sections, I have highlighted the important role played by discourses around digital platforms. Such discourses, however, must fnd purchase in people's lives. How, then, does the discourse of the participatory and unifying potential of digital platforms become an experiential truth? Imaginations, Meyer argues, are invested and become matters of truth by becoming 'tangible outside the realm of the mind, by creating a social environment that materializes through the structuring of space, architecture, ritual performance, and by inducing bodily sensations' (ibid.: 5). Her argument is directed against 'a representational stance that privileges the symbolic above other modes of experience, and tends to neglect the reality efect of cultural forms' (ibid.: 6). Drawing on her discussion, I argue that corporeal experiences of digital platforms as participatory and unifying can invest digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state with a sense of truth.

Tis very truth of digitally mediated communities has been questioned in scholarship, which considers afective experience an insufcient basis for real communities. In online spaces such as blogs, social networks, twitter and video platforms, Jodi Dean (2013: 95) argues, afect is 'a binding technique' that is produced through refexive communication: 'Every little tweet or comment, every forwarded image or petition, accrues a tiny afective nugget, a little surplus enjoyment, a smidgen of attention that attaches to it, making it stand out from the larger fow before it blends back in'. Such afective links, however, she argues, do not result in 'actual communities' but 'produce feelings of community'. Her argument appears to suggest that online communities aren't quite real.

However, as with any other kind of community, what matters is that digital communities are experienced as true. Like national communities in general, digitally mediated communities, national or otherwise, become very 'real' when they are experienced as such. Te more important question, therefore, is how digital platforms invest feelings of community with a sense of truth. Instead of questioning the actuality of China's online community, I suggest, we should investigate how uses of digital platforms and the afective experiences they aford support the digital imaginaries of the nation. Crucially, this mediation draws on a digital aesthetics of access and participation. How China's online community is experienced is therefore central to the production of digital imaginaries of the nation.

Beyond simply facilitating a national online sphere and a national digital economy, digitality can invest the imaginaries of a participatory Chinese modernity and a unifed nation state with a sense of truth. Eforts to unify a wide range of experiences within the framework of the nation state seek to control the meaning and political signifcance of digital platforms. Tis stabilization of the meaning of the digital, however, takes place in relation to corporeal experiences, specifcally in relation to experiences of digital platforms as participatory. Digital platforms provide a grammar through which a strong and unifed China can be envisioned. Tey also aford the experiences in relation to which digital imaginaries gain purchase. Accordingly, the digital narration of the nation cannot be reduced to the imagination of a mind, but also needs to include bodily experience and the work performed on digital platforms, including online environments such as Taobao.

Digital experiences aren't homogenous in China, and promises of digital participation and ultimately unifcation certainly won't convince everyone. However, those who experience digital platforms as a positive force in their lives are more likely to fnd the promise of a participatory Chinese modernity and a unifed nation state convincing. Te widespread use of the Internet in China thus provides legitimacy to depictions of a nation that is spatially and temporally unifed. To understand the power of digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state, scholarship must consider how digital platforms aford experiences of access and participation, as well as show how such experiences are in turn used by the Chinese government as evidence of a digitally fattened and unifed national space.

### **Conclusion**

In some ways, China's moon landing and Alibaba's platform ecosystem could not be more diferent. Te moon landing is an extraordinary event and a relatively rare display of technological skill. Meanwhile, Alibaba's platforms are used by Chinese citizens daily in countless routine transactions. However, what I have shown in this chapter is that, like the moon landing, digital platforms are important elements in a comparative and competitive nationalism that sees China as being in a global race for technological development. By beginning a discussion of the digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state with an anecdote of China's moon landing, I have aimed to ask a question about the power of digital imaginaries.

I have argued that we must consider the participatory nature of the digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state. Like the moon landing, digital technologies inform narratives of national development that frame technological innovation as a global competition between nation states. As opposed to space technology, however, digital platforms are an intimate part of people's lives. Like the politics of Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward', China's 'Digital Leap Forward' claims to be a mass movement—not the sole achievement of an exclusive and remote research laboratory, but a collective achievement involving its over 700 million Internet users.

Chinese digital innovation strategies such as Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation speak to such participatory visions of national innovation and technological development. Ultimately, despite the persistence of profound divisions in China, imaginaries of digital unifcation fuel comparative and competitive nationalism in the country, for it is the vast number of Chinese Internet users that currently makes possible the size of its digital economy and the success of its digital platforms. It is also this collective of Internet users that fuels Chinese aspirations to become a digital superpower. In my research, it was this participatory dimension, however limited, that made the success of companies like Alibaba nationally signifcant.

My discussion of Alibaba has shown how the success of Chinese digital platforms echoes and reproduces imaginaries of the Chinese nation state in which users play a central role as actors in Chinese modernization. In such narratives, connectivity comes to signify the inclusion of China's population as a whole. Alibaba's narration of its platform ecosystem as a unifying technology is neatly aligned with a government discourse proclaiming digitization as a means to overcome the diferences and divisions contained within the space of the nation. To challenge such digital imaginaries, it is important to consider the divisions and inequalities that continue to make up China's digital politics. In some instances, digital experiences of access and participation may give validity to the government discourse of digital unifcation; in others, however, experiences of disenfranchisement, persecution and inequality will far outweigh them.

At the same time, stories of digital innovation as participatory cannot be reduced to governmental or corporate discourse in China. Te Chinese government's promise of digital development draws on a popular and widespread belief in the decentralizing and inclusive efect of digital technologies and incorporates them into its nationalist frameworks. It utilizes widespread enthusiasm for technologies that have often been perceived as the very source of new ideas and possibilities in recent decades. New online venues of exchange, participation and consumption have changed the spatial and temporal experiences of a large part of China's population, providing digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state with a crucial experiential foundation. To assess the digital imaginaries of the Chinese nation state critically as involving a participatory modernity, we need to consider how government discourses draw on existing experiences and understandings of the digital as an equalizing force.

**Acknowledgements** For their helpful insights, I would like to thank all the participants of the conference 'Religion and Nationalism' held at Utrecht University in June 2019 for the fruitful discussion. I am indebted to Peter van der Veer for his guidance during my PhD studies and for providing me with an opportunity to research China's digital politics. In addition, I want to extend my gratitude to Jarrett Zigon for providing me with an intellectual home at the University of Virginia in which to develop my argument.

### **Notes**

the concept of digital imaginaries to highlight the importance of digital technologies in shared imaginaries of Chinese modernity.

### **References**

Era of Transition. In *Changing Media, Changing China*, ed. Susan L. Shirk, 38–76. New York: Oxford University Press.

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阿克斯金融. 2014. 阿里巴巴上市路演宣传片曝光 马云全英文推介. 阿 克斯金融. Accessed June 27, 2017. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?\_\_biz=M jM5NDQ3MTMyNA==&mid=202859391&idx=1&sn=96ef8b34204b 8c02024e37449c387c90&scene=4#wechat\_redirect.

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## **9**

## **Moral Labour, the Nation and the State in Contemporary China**

**Xiao He**

Since economic liberalization and the opening-up policy of the early 1980s, China has become more connected to the global market. With the food of foreign commodities and increasing global competition, the concerns over and search for national dignity, spirit and tradition have also been on the rise since the 1980s. Within China, the developing market economy has brought many rural people into the cities and connected them with an extended national space. Scholars of nationalism have long noted its connection with modern capitalist development. As Gellner notes (1983), industrial development requires a mobile workforce oriented towards a standardized, efectively shared medium of national culture. Anderson (1983) also notes how colonial ofcials' common career trajectories made them pioneers of nationalism, thereby enabling imagined national communities. In the spirit of Peter van der Veer, whose work situates nationalism in a global encounter and investigates how societies forge their national imaginations in specifc contexts, this

X. He (\*)

Fudan University, Shanghai, China e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
chapter investigates how modern labour organization and the market economy are related to the nation's formation in contemporary China. I address this issue with reference to rural migrants in Shanghai with whom I conducted ethnographic research in 2013. I also made multiple followup trips until 2019.

Rural-urban migration in China developed in parallel with the decollectivization of the rural economy and economic liberalization in the early 1980s as the state has gradually lifted its limits on the free movement of people. However, the household registration system (*hu kou* 户 口), a particular institutional legacy of Maoist socialism, still controls the distribution of important welfare goods (education and health insurance, for instance). While any person can move from a rural area to work in any city in China, their children still have to go back to their hometown where the household is registered to attend high school and take the national college examination. Tey thus form something of a 'foating population' and are excluded from urban citizenship. Te state maintains a highly unequal distribution of public goods between urban and rural citizens, and openly classifes rural migrants as a 'weak group', thereby recognizing their disadvantages and their need for protection (Holbig and Neckel 2016). Rural migrants are included in the national community not through legal citizenship but through their hard work, sufering and sacrifce—a kind of moral labour. Te socialist state elevates working people's labour as a symbol of the nation. Although the national ideology of hard work provides a language for building a positive public identity beyond social inequality, it also highlights the paradox of egalitarian expectations and increasing social inequality.

While migrants perform the public identity of the hard worker, they also cultivate an alternative imagination of the nation through emerging markets. Money mediates the imagination of the nation, yet it also contests the value of labour and highlights the social inequalities between rural and urban citizens, the rich and the common people (*laobaixing* 老 百姓).1 Money-making events that combine a hyper-inclusive market with an opaque state often enable rural migrants to imagine their inclusion in the nation.

In this chapter, I frst contextualize the socialist ideology of hard work since Mao's era. Te second part examines rural migrants' ambivalent attitudes towards hard work. Te third part analyses how labour is devalued through the dynamics of money, creating social disjunctions within the nation. Te fnal section examines how rural migrants imagine their inclusion in the nation through various forms of small-scale investment.

### **The State, Labour and the Socialist Utopia**

Responding to Western and Japanese imperialism, 'Saving the nation' has been an important slogan in China since the early twentieth century. Margherita Zanasi (2006) has noted that, in the frst half of the twentieth century, the Chinese nation was often envisioned as being composed of producers united by their common goal of increasing production and thereby saving the nation.

After the communist revolution,2 the socialist state was less concerned with saving the nation than with creating a new communist society. Socialist revolution and socialist production were taken as bridges to the future society. Labour was encouraged more than consumption. Te new socialist state claimed that the new socialist person was created through labour. Unlike in capitalist societies, in the new socialist society, one's social position was determined by one's work and ability, rather than one's social origins and property. Work was not a shameful burden but a glorious and courageous activity. Mao criticized Confucius for slighting labour. Te new state expected people to develop comradeship through collective working, comradeship that could be extended to one's fellow countrymen and even to working people all over the world.

However, the Maoist state institutionalized the distinctions between rural and urban, peasant and worker through its strict regulation of mobility. It also promised that the diferences between peasants and workers, the rural and the urban, manual and mental labour would be erased in the future communist society with the development of socialist productivity and the transition to communism. Mao encouraged civil servants, artists and intellectuals to participate in physical labour, urging that education should also be connected with production. At the same time, workers were encouraged to learn the theories of Marxism and Maoism and become experts in them. Te state media extolled the heroic achievement of model workers and the glory of labour, thus emphasizing the virtues of physical and productive labour.

We can see a tension here between the material and spiritual dimensions of labour. In the period of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), the *People's Daily* had to argue that 'socialist hard labour', to be performed for the whole of society and thus become a source of happiness, was different from the exploitative 'capitalist hard labour', which was a form of slavery. Te slogan of this period was 'bitterness frst, sweetness later'. Around the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the utopian mobilization of hard work during the Great Leap Forward was criticized as smacking of utility and selfshness; the radical Maoist leadership attempted to channel the nation's energy into class politics and revolution instead. Daring to endure hard work was glorifed as a form of revolutionary sacrifce for the people.

Te socialist state recognized the material interests of workers who received compensation and benefts based on the quantity and value of their labour. Te state also expected people not to consider the material benefts. Tere was a tension between selfess sacrifce for the collective and nation, and the concern for material distribution. As noted by van der Veer, the high socialist experiment is full of contradiction and paradox: 'it is a combination of the ascetic rejection of materialism and a utopia of material abundance; despite the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao's charismatic leadership still kept the revolutionary momentum' (van der Veer 2013: 134).

In the post-Mao era, the realization of communism has been postponed, material incentives have been reintroduced and the state has reoriented itself to economic development. Hard work is used to justify wealth: those who are capable of working hard will become rich frst. In the aftermath of the reform of state enterprises in the earlier 1990s, the *People's Daily* published some stories about how laid-of workers had become entrepreneurs through their hard work. Te post-Mao state continues to promote a spirit of heroic labour in which model workers dare to work hard and sacrifce for the nation, treating their own health and kinship ties lightly.

Te post-Mao state also has to confront two forms of inequality. First, the market economy inevitably creates a gap between rich and poor. Te state tries to create a national community in which everyone works hard and those who become rich frst help those of their co-nationals who have been left behind. Te recent state-led poverty-alleviation campaign aims to eradicate absolute poverty and establish a 'moderately prosperous society' by 2020 (*BBC* 2021). Te communist dream is to articulate a national community in which people help each other. Second, though the socialist state still exalts hard work as a national virtue, it also realizes that its labour-intensive economy is of low quality in the global hierarchy of production: the words 'knocked up in China' almost becomes a national embarrassment. Te state attempts to foster high-quality development and highlights the importance of technological innovation and creativity beyond visible labour.

Economic growth connects hard work to the national spirit and rejuvenation. Hard work and frugality are afrmed as traditional and revolutionary virtues. Dedication to work is one of China's Present Xi Jinping's core socialist values (prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship). Te moral codes of citizenship also require citizens to love the country, the people, labour, science and socialism. Xi defnes 'hard work' as the key spirit of the nation. In his 2015 Labour Day speech, he said, 'the Chinese nation is a hard-working nation. Te quality of a labourer is very important for the development of the nation and state' (Xi 2015). He extolled the virtues of labour as making history and the nation: labour is the source of wealth and happiness, the path to the realization of the Chinese dream, namely national rejuvenation, which depends on people's honest and diligent work.

With the arrival of economic development and material abundance, however, concerns have been raised about the declining spirit of hard work, especially among the younger generation, in the family, the schools and society at large. Labour education has been re-emphasized in school programmes. Te Ministry of Education even issued a Labour Education Opinion in 2015 (Ministry of Education 2015), encouraging schools to develop a labour curriculum and extra-curricular labour education. Students are encouraged to plant trees, repair electronic appliances, do interior decoration and even raise animals.

### **The Rural-Urban Divide, Hard Work, Inclusion and Exclusion**

Post-Mao economic development entails labour mobility, on which the state has slowly lifted restrictions. However, the household registration system (*hu kou* 户口), a particular institutional legacy of Maoist socialism that controls the provision of social welfare and the movement of people, still marks one's social status and has efects on one's employment. Migration and contacts often reinforce the rural-urban divide.

For example there is a discursive distinction between local Shanghainese (*shanghai ren* 上海人) and outsiders to the city (*waidi ren* 外地人) both at work and beyond. In the peri-urban village of Shanghai, rural migrants rent housing from local Shanghainese, who, former peasants turned landlords, now live of migrants' rents. Most local Shanghainese have moved out of their homes and live in gated communities elsewhere, only returning to enjoy their leisure time with old friends. Rural migrants often say that local Shanghaineses' wealth was not earned through their hard work but came from the state's welfare assistance or real-estate developers' compensation payments for relocation. When migrant workers compare their hard labour to the 'laziness' of local Shanghainese and the ways in which the urban rich efortlessly obtain money from the state, they are demanding a kind of recognition that goes beyond legal defnitions of citizenship.

Without urban citizenship and educational degrees, my informants often told me that they were willing to work hard. Job advertisements still include this as a condition of employment. Among migrant workers, one's ability to work hard and to 'eat bitterness' (enduring hard work) is also judged by family members, friends, neighbours and employers. One's inability to endure bitterness—refected, inter alia, in idleness—would often cause harsh judgements to be voiced behind one another's backs. Migrants in an urban village often judge each other in terms of whether a person is capable of 'eating bitterness'. When migrants form temporary work teams to carry out subcontracting work, they often include acquaintances who are prepared to work hard.

Bosses also use the popular discourse of 'eating bitterness' to discipline workers. Some even participate in labouring themselves, thereby personalizing the spirit of hard work. Teir attitude towards bitterness is at the very least ambiguous. Teir hopes for their children are that they will attend university and fnd better occupations, thus allowing them to escape from hard work.

Te capacity to work hard is less an ideal virtue than a performative quality. During feldwork I often heard migrants from a particular region saying that they were more capable of working hard than migrants from other regions, thus claiming that they were better candidates for employment. Tey often showcased their ability to work hard in front of outsiders. In doing so, they aimed for market gain and a positive identity beyond legal citizenship.

Within intimate circles of friends and family, people would nonetheless admire the cunning of avoiding hard labour while on the job. My informants were happy to share stories with me in which they fooled their bosses rather than working hard for them. Some proudly told me that they were good at 'loitering' while working, which requires cultivating a good relationship with your boss rather than working hard.

Working too hard for a boss is in fact a source of other's suspicions. One day Luo came to me to complain about his friend Mao Jie's excessive work ethic. Mao Jie was famous among his acquaintances for being extremely capable of eating bitterness. Luo usually praised his ethic of hard work and considered it a sacrifce for his four sons. On that day, however, Mao Jie asked Luo to work with him for a boss. At 12:50, lunch had still not arrived, and Luo was growing both hungry and impatient. Te boss said he was not hungry. Luo said, 'He was not doing the work, so of course he was not hungry'. He blamed the late lunch on his friend Mao Jie: 'He was too devoted to work and to the boss. Te boss might give him several thousand yuan. But you should not let your workers feel hungry.' On that occasion, Luo saw his friend Mao Jie's habit of working hard as selling himself out.

While my informants often recognized the importance of hard work when making public statements, they also acknowledged that their achievements were constrained by their low educational credentials, nonlocal status and the precarious moral economy of personal connections. Within the work place, the employer-employee relationship was also often mediated by personal relationships. In light of the lack of open and efcient enforcement of the law, my informants rarely invoked the legal protection of employment rights. To protect their autonomy and benefts at work from being violated by the arbitrary exercise of power, they often had to resort to personal connections instead.

Some justifed their interest in cultivating connections with reference to Chinese tradition. Tey claimed that, unlike foreigners, the Chinese emphasize human connections (*guan xi* 关系): cultivating proper human ties is an important element of Chinese ritual. Te national tradition also allows hard work and personal connections to co-exist. One street promoter told me that he was reading the Chinese classics. He hoped to cultivate relations of trust with potential clients through his own gradual but sustained eforts. For him, the Chinese classics can provide eternal rather than ephemeral inspiration for everyday conduct.

Te reference to supposed national characteristics sometimes leads to criticism. Many informants would complain that success in Chinese society relied on personal connections rather than on hard work. One 55-year-old male migrant expressed a sense of nostalgia for the supposedly honest labour of Mao's period and a sense of grievance towards some entrepreneurs who had taken advantage of privatization in the post-Mao reform period. He continued, 'Teir money is earned without efort. Tey did not experience any bitterness in getting the money. Tey got it from high up.' Te hard work migrants did give them a moral advantage in criticizing the rich.

In his ethnography of a Chinese village, Hans Steinmuller (2013) has identifed a gap between the state-promoted discourses of hard work and the many lived experiences of success and failure. In her ethnographic work on rural Sichuan, Anna Lora-Wainwright (2013) also dwells on the ambivalence about hard work among her informants, especially the younger generation. On the one hand, aware that less strenuous alternatives to making a living are available to those with better social networks and education, villagers resented the continued necessity for hard work. On the other hand, they also recognized that hard work played a key role in reproducing family and community relations. Te socialist state promotes a national spirit of hard work in trying to create a labour-based national community. Paradoxically, the national ideology of hard work provides a vantage point from which to criticize the social inequality and corruption brought about by dubious state institutions and personal networks.

### **Labour, Money and the Nation**

Te socialist experiment in Mao's period aimed to turn labour into the ultimate source of value and restrict the circulation of money. In the People's Communes of that period, the value of labour and its remuneration was based on a work points system. Peasants in rural communes rarely received cash, their everyday livelihoods mainly being provided through redistribution by the state. Te restricted use of money did not eradicate social or economic inequality but rather perpetuated the hierarchy between rural and urban, socialist industrial workers and peasants. Wages and welfare of all kinds provided great security for people in urban areas. Wages were once seen as a privilege of government ofcials and urban citizens; only those working in the state sector would receive a regular wage and various supplementary payments in both money and kind.

Te market development and labour migration of the post-Mao period, by contrast, has provided many rural people with an opportunity to access waged employment in the cities that is paid in cash. Many informants claimed that government ofcials, medical doctors and teachers in the state sector, once thought of as occupying superior positions outside the 'society' of ordinary people, now also work for money and even take 'gifts of money' (i.e. bribes) from ordinary people. Tere is no moral hierarchy in term of occupation. Some informants even exaggerated the efect of money in negating the power of any state institution, arguing that money could fx everything. My informants often celebrated money's freedom-giving potential.

Te state's household registration system defned my informants as rural citizens whose welfare benefts were connected to their villages. In the 1990s, lacking urban citizenship, their children were not allowed to enter the urban public schools sponsored by the government. Since 2010, migrants' children have been allowed to attend urban public primary and junior high schools, but they still have to transfer to high schools in their rural hometowns for the college entrance examinations. Moreover, despite this progressive policy, migrants' children still had to meet complicated requirements for enrolment in urban public schools. After a few days' futile search for a primary school for his children, one migrant asked: 'If we all use the same RMB (Chinese currency), why can't my children attend the same primary school here?' When facing rural-urban discrimination in their everyday lives, my informants would ask the rhetorical question: 'Does RMB make distinction?'

While the state still maintains a distinction between rural and urban citizens, the fow of money criss-crosses the boundary between them. Rural migrants participate not only in the national labour market but also in a national consumer market. Tey also point to the newly built house, new furniture and appliances and marvel at how far rural livelihoods are now integrated into the national market. In the harvest season, one return migrant told me: 'You see how much change has happened here. I do not know what life will look like in the next few years. In the city, now nearly every family has a car. We also have many cars in our village. In the future, every rural family will have a car too.'

Post-Mao labour migration has coincided with the expansion of the market and the money economy. Here it is not equal legal citizenship that mediates the nation, but money and currency. Te Renminbi, China's ofcial currency, literally means 'people's money'. Currency mediates the imagination of a common national space and serves as the symbol of national unity. My informants often extended the metaphor of money in order to understand 'Chinese society' at large in the context of the expanding money economy and migration. Money provides a vantage point from which an enlarged national space can be imagined.

Even as money mediates national unity, it also highlights social diferences. As rural migrants are remunerated in money, the value hierarchy of labour is immediately evident. Ying, now the owner of several woodfooring manufacturers, frst came to Shanghai in 1992. One Shanghainese friend helped him fnd a job in a food workshop owned by Wenzhou merchants. 'I worked there for seven days, from early morning until late at night. I then asked how much I could earn. Te boss said I could earn six yuan on average every day. At that time Shanghai was a very xenophobic city. I was treated as a country bumpkin. What are country bumpkins? Tey are of low quality, cheap, and they cannot get a proper wage. I was such a strong labourer, yet I was only paid six yuan a day, the same as a female worker received.' He only worked there for seven days before deciding to set up his own small business.

Money also connects rural migrants' labour immediately to everyday livelihoods through a growing consumer market. I often heard my informants say: 'You do not have food if you stop working'. Teir everyday subsistence and livelihoods had to be arranged through money and the market. Tey often highlighted the fact that they had to spend money on vegetables, water and housing. Besides, living expenses in Shanghai have also tremendously shot up. My informants never failed to keep track of the ever-increasing food and housing prices and the other living costs. However, despite occasional nostalgia for the non-commercial subsistence of life in rural areas, my informants told me, with a sense of surprise, that they now have to buy food in their rural hometowns, the prices of which are nearly the same as in the cities. Stranded in both rural and urban areas, my informants found themselves budgeting against rising expenditure in both areas.

Many migrants originally had a kind of romantic imagination of their hometown as providing security—a community away from the insecure market and society at large, the home to which they could return after a period of urban employment. Every time they went back to their home town, they took with them the cash they had earned, and saved it in a hometown bank. As the banks only paid very low interest rates, their savings also declined. As they observed, the rich, who did not have to rely on jobs and wages, could take advantage of the low interest rates in investing in the housing market and thereby earn money from money. Given the rising consumption in their hometowns and the devaluation of their savings, migrants were now faced with constantly postponing their original plan to return. Sometimes, even a return visit was too expensive.

During a short visit to his hometown, one migrant told me: 'We do not plant crops any more. We have to buy rice. If we stay at home, we have to "'eat" our old savings and could not sustain ourselves for very long. Now the state has devalued our money. Toothpaste originally cost three yuan; now it costs six: the extra three yuan goes on tax. Petrol now sells at six yuan per litre. Te government says that our oil price is linked to the global oil price. We produce 60% of our oil in our country, so why should we link our petrol price to the global market?' As migration and the money economy connected his hometown to a wider national and international world, he claimed his hometown had become a lifeless place abandoned by recent developments. He continued: 'Tere are no job opportunities. Nothing is worth money here. We are not close to any big cities. We rely purely on money from the outside. When we are short of money, we go out to work, or the local government goes to the higher government to beg for some more. Ten we spend it.' He imagined a bleak future for his hometown when the young people had all left and the state provided the last care: 'We are the last men in the village. Te state will cover our healthcare and clothing.'

Te state is therefore still expected to protect people's livelihoods as a guarantee of its legitimacy. Every Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), government leaders pay a symbolic visit to food market. Te price of everyday necessities is expected to be stable. Complaining about the infation of living costs often enabled strangers to initiate a conversation. Tese complaints often connected the rise in living costs to the state's manipulative policy, greedy businessmen and increasing social inequality. Teir complaints also fostered a sense of belonging to a group of common people (*lao bai xing* 老百姓).

Against the infated living costs, my informants often complained, their wages were stagnating, while the urban middle class and elites could participate in diferent forms of investment, such as the stock market and real estate, and associate themselves with economic growth. Tere was widespread criticism that the privileged were acquiring their wealth not through labour but through invisible and dubious speculation and corruption. My informants often aspired to leave labour behind and become entrepreneurs to lift them out of unequal employment and stagnant wages and give them a sense of a progressive career.

Zhi Guo, a thirty-year-old migrant from rural Jiangsu, worked for a company installing the internet in clients' home. While doing that work, he had many opportunities to meet relatively rich house-owners. Tese encounters often enhanced his sense of being discriminated against by city-dwellers, causing him to launch into a moral critique of recent economic developments. He told me about a couple he had met while working in their house: 'Tey do nothing at home. Tey just invest in calligraphy work.' He often criticized the rich people he encountered for having earned their wealth through speculation rather than labour and for lacking moral integrity. In his view, contrary to Deng Xiaoping's national ideal of common prosperity, the rich despised the poor rather than helped them.

Since I met Zhi Guo for the frst time, he has been considering starting his own business. He saw his current job as transitional in his employment trajectory. His wages only gave him enough for the family to survive; his work experience and expertise were not valued. Once the main internet-restructuring project had come to an end, he discovered that he could not obtain as many assignments as before and earned less money. He eventually left this job and went to stay in his hometown for two years, unable to work up any enthusiasm for his next job.

He often discussed with me the possibility of setting up an agricultural business, an attempt to link his entrepreneurial aspirations to rural development. His aspirations also overlapped with the state's rural vitalization project as part of its policy of national rejuvenation. He explained why he still insisted on pursuing entrepreneurship all those years: 'It is not only about large sums of money.  If you can make a proft, you can also distribute resources equally. I do not want to earn a million alone. Instead, I want to lead a team of ten persons, each of whom could earn 100,000 each.' He stressed the moral superiority of his entrepreneurial dream: it was not intended for speculation, but for the well-being of ordinary people, especially for those in rural areas.

Very much interested in Chinese history, Zhi Guo was highly critical of the country's current development model. He said that technology was still controlled by foreign countries and that the Chinese only produced it, a model that had cost China resources and health. He increasingly extolled the virtues of rural life, since it was rural people who had sacrifced themselves for the republic from the very beginning. He imagined an alternative view of rural development, a future when the boundary between the city and the village would disappear because of technological development and 'you can work anywhere'. He hoped that China could devise a particular development, one that was diferent from the current Chinese and foreign models. Tough he was highly critical of the state's development policy, he believed that only this, coupled with wise leaders and anti-corruption initiatives, could bridge the gap between rural and urban, thus turning rural areas into a land of hope.

My informants often extended the metaphor of money to understand 'Chinese society' at large in the context of the expanding money economy and migration. Money provides a vantage point from which to imagine an enlarged national space. Paper money, as a fat currency, symbolizes pure trust in the state and the national community (cf. Nakhimovsky 2011). As Peter van der Veer has noted,

Indeed the welfare of the nation as well as the efectiveness of the state depends on monetary value. Infation, devaluation, revaluation, exchange value, the value of one's labour, all are signs of the health of the polity and the trustworthiness of political leaders. Te state guarantees the value of its money, and people hold a strong belief in that invisible power of the state when they hold visible coinage in their hands. Te state is held accountable for the functioning of the market, and this is in efect more important for people's political judgment than most other felds of political action. Nevertheless, the value of money depends on invisible market forces that are not controlled or only partly controlled by the nation-state. (2016: 55)

While money mediates national unity, it also creates disjunctions between devalued labour, infated living costs and stagnant wages. For my informants, the assumption is that the state can control the market, or even overtly manipulate it. Te state is imagined as a machine for printing money and controlling prices; it is responsible for the devaluation of labour and price infation. Te failure to protect the value of labour and the livelihoods of people enables my informants to criticize the state's and elites' lack of care for the people, as well as to anticipate the state's interventions. Against such a powerful and manipulative state, rural migrants have a sense of belonging to the 'common people' or the grassroots of the 'nation'.

### **The Nation as a Utopia of Investors**

It was the 2010 Shanghai Expo that frst brought me to the urban village where I fnally did my feldwork. Te shabby urban village where the rural migrants were living was just three subway stops away from the Expo pavilion complex. Despite aggressive eviction by urban management ofcers, during this nation-staging event, migrants in the village were busy selling fake Expo souvenirs around the pavilion complex. When I returned to the urban village in 2013, I constantly heard rumours about its second coming, even though the large area of the complex had been torn down and redeveloped. Pointing to a red car parked in the road, one migrant told me that its owner was a former neighbour of his, whose family had made 400,000 yuan out of a souvenir wholesale business during the Expo. He said that he hoped another big fair would come along again. As an important national event, the Expo attracted people from all around the country and, for my informants, it materialized the nation as a market. Te Expo souvenir business had only a low entry barrier and thus was very inclusive; nearly everyone in the urban village could participate with just a little start-up capital.

Tis shows how rural migrants can turn a national event into an entrepreneurial opportunity on the fringe. Tey also need investment opportunities in order to be included in the nation. As Ellen Hertz (1998) demonstrates in her ethnography of the Shanghai stock market in 1992, recently introduced by the state, this stock market attracted investors from all walks of life and launched a general investment fever, with many scattered players (*san hu* 散户) joining in. However, this is not all about making money. Investors see the stock market as one of the few truly egalitarian forums for making money. Te stock market fever created a strong sense of bottom-up egalitarianism.

While market investment, gambling and lotteries were strictly forbidden by the state in Mao's era, they fourish in contemporary China. Since the 1980s, the socialist state has been running a lottery in the name of helping the elderly, the disabled, orphans and the poor. Diferent forms of get-richquick Ponzi schemes—scams ofering high returns to early investors compensated with funds obtained from later investors—have arisen in China in the 1990s, a period concurrent with the rapid migration and market reform. Tey were also widely present among my informants.

Cui, a 33-year-old house decorator, was a regular buyer of lottery tickets. Tough the lottery is legal, it is still morally ambiguous. Buyers of lottery tickets were often criticized for dreaming about unearned wealth. Cui always stressed that he was not addicted to the lottery; he just played it and kept calm. In contrast to his fellow decorators, he argued, who often squandered money on gambling and eating afterwards, his enthusiasm for the lottery was more in the nature of a productive investment.

He recognized the importance of hard work but often regretted that the golden year of opportunity in his trade had already passed. He once said that the lottery provided more opportunities than his trade did. But he rarely won anything. He mainly attributed his failure to the manipulation of the state:

When you purchase a lottery ticket, the state keeps a record. Tere is a computer in the headquarters of the lottery. Every day the computer registers all the numbers people have chosen. Te staf count and see which numbers people have not chosen. OK, that is the winning number. Of course, they sometimes let you win a prize, encouraging you to continue buying.

Despite the suspicion of corruption, he always encouraged me to fgure out the pattern of winning numbers. After another loss, Cui said that he would go to a bigger lottery shop next time because it had big chart showing all past winning numbers. He also held that it would be good to have software to analyse each number's chances of winning.

It did not matter whether or not Cui had won a prize; buying a lottery ticket could at least help him demonstrate his own potential for nearly making it. To rationalize his buying of tickets, he often told me that only one number was wrong or missing. Even if he did not win, he claimed, buying a lottery ticket was his small contribution to national welfare.

Compared to the lottery, Ponzi schemes were criticized more harshly by my informants as an immoral and frantic way of gaining wealth without labour. In public, they would often connect Ponzi schemes to the moral corruption of Chinese society—people cheat each other and want to earn money without doing honest labour. However, many of my informants were involved in various Ponzi schemes. It is through investment in these schemes that they imagine themselves being part of a national project, one that promises them upward mobility and equality.

Li Hai was a young migrant whose construction materials business had failed, so he began working in a factory. Not an enthusiast of the lottery, he still cited both the lottery and the stock market as examples of a new economic model—the virtual economy. A friend asked him to join a virtualeconomy investment project, telling him that this was now the main sector in foreign countries and that it would soon become the main trend in China. I expressed my doubts and told him that I had read some reports about dubious Ponzi schemes representing themselves as belonging to the virtual economy. Li Hai explained to me: 'My idea is like this. After joining the WTO, our country now faces great international competition. Te government now also notices the problem of pollution. Is it possible that the state will initiate a new policy of virtual economy?' He also felt that social inequality was increasing: the common people lacked a good platform for investment and were becoming even poorer. Now only rich people can invest. Tis project was said to be a platform provided by the state: common people could participate in investing and get their share with a small amount of money. Te state also planned to initiate the project frst in Shanghai and then extend it to the less developed provinces. Despite the fact that he had once been invited to join a Ponzi scheme and his fear that this might be another one, he still did not want to miss taking up such a good opportunity. In the end, though, it did indeed turn out to be a Ponzi scheme.

Sometimes it is difcult to tell whether an investment scheme is a Ponzi scheme or a real investment opportunity. Direct sales companies also ask existing salespersons to recruit more distributors 'downline', a form of multilevel marketing that sometimes turns into a Ponzi scheme. I was invited to attend a direct sales company's multilevel-marketing training section by a young woman migrant. My informants often had an ambivalent attitude towards the company, but doubted whether it was in fact a Ponzi scheme. Te training was organized in a salesperson's home. It started by expressing gratitude to the woman hosting the meeting and praising their highest leader, an overseas Chinese. It was said that the leader's father had left China, but he was asked to return to do business in China. Te company wanted to save money in China and open Chinese schools abroad. Te most important activity was encouraging newcomers like me to join their team. We were promised the opportunity to travel to attend the company's meetings in Guangzhou and Macao that summer. A sixty-something laid-of Shanghainese women told me the excitement she experienced when she attended the meeting last year: 'You did not experience the Cultural Revolution, right? You could only experience this in the Cultural Revolution. When you enter into our company's meeting hall, you just see a sea of people. Tose successful salespersons shared their experiences. Tey just looked like you, but they had made it. You felt you could make it too.'

Te young woman migrant told me that multilevel marketing provided her with a platform for experimenting with entrepreneurship besides her secretary's job. Tis opportunity is just like any other marketing opportunity except that it is even better. It provides a 'genuine' and inclusive community that is diferent from the ambiguous 'society' in which they are living. It brings together two groups of people who are otherwise hostile towards each other: laid-of Shanghainese and migrants. It highlights mutual help and provides a sense of communal intimacy that is often lost in cities. Most importantly, it claims to provide a transparent and equal platform. First, everyone starts equally: no matter when you join the team, you have the same chance to succeed. Secondly, the wage incentive is transparent, and the results are equal. Tere are said to be two satellites monitoring the sales on earth, so everyone will receive their fair reward. Tirdly, there is a world of unlimited opportunities: you can always recruit new members, and their sales can add to your performance. Your income does not have to rely solely on your own labour.

In contrast to their highly competitive and unequal type of employment, entrepreneurship, the lottery and various forms of Ponzi scheme provide a utopian space of equality and mobility, as well as accessible routes to an inclusive national community. Tese small-scale investments also turn national projects such as nation-branding Expo, national welfare and national development into money-making opportunities. Te state plays a mystical role in the construction of these investment opportunities. State agents control the fringes of the Expo complex randomly, manipulate the lottery system and devise opaque development policies. It is in their engagement and competition with the mystical state that my informants imagine themselves being part of the nation.

### **Conclusion**

Te 'nation' as a collective identity is always ambivalent and incomplete (Giesen and Seyfert 2016). Drawing on a patchwork of socialist ideology, Chinese tradition and the Communist Party's revolutionary tradition, the socialist state has attempted to elevate the labour of working people to the status of a national symbol. Post-Mao economic development requires a mobile work force. Te state encourages market development and mobility, but restricts migrants' access to public goods and equal citizenship. Te organization of labour is always conditioned by the state's categorization of the rural and urban citizen. With the fows of money and people between village and city, an imagination of national space emerges through the expanding market and money economy. In the absence of the provision of welfare schemes for all, a secure livelihood, inclusive citizenship and an equal political community, rural migrants have to make a living in a competitive 'society' mediated by precarious personal connections and money. Te national ideology of hard work paradoxically highlights social inequality and disjuncture. Labour is devalued with reference to particularistic networks and the money market, and thus cannot provide an anchor for the construction of the nation. My informants can only imagine their inclusion in the nation by grasping investment opportunities that are tightly controlled by the state.

However, while the state is often accused of creating social inequality, its intervention in combating social inequality is also anticipated. It is through both criticism and anticipation of the opaque state that the nation is imagined. As Peter van der Veer has noted, though the idea of the nation is produced in the global encounter, societies forge their national imaginations in specifc contexts. Tough the nation's formation often relies on xenophobia, it can also take shape in the form of internal diferentiation and disruption (Surak 2012). With reference to China, van der Veer notes that the opposition between literate elites and the illiterate popular masses is deeply ingrained in the nation-making project (2013: 125), a project that is still incomplete in contemporary China. State- and elite-sponsored nation-making projects often highlight social inequality and disjunction. Its failure to solve the paradox of egalitarian expectations and great social inequality often leads to diferent forms of grassroots nation-making. Te nation cannot be built directly by the state, and often has to be built against the opacity of the state. Te hyphen between nation and state should not obscure from us the indirect and complex relationship between the two.

### **Notes**

### **References**

———. 2016. *Te value of comparison*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Xi, Jinping. 2015, April 28. Speech at an Event to Celebrate the International Labor Day. http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2015/0428/c1024-26919455. htmlZanasi.

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## **Part IV**

**South Africa and the Middle East**

# **10**

## **Race, Animal Bodies and Religion: Sacrifce, Sensory Politics and Public Space in South Africa**

**Shaheed Tayob**

### **Suspicions of Sacrifce: Crowds, Race and Animal Bodies**

On Saturday 14 October 2017, a Muslim family held their son's seventh birthday party in a public park in Woodstock, a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood close to the centre of Cape Town. Re-zoned as a Coloured residential area during apartheid, the neighbourhood had subsequently become a racially mixed area comprising Malay Muslims, Coloured Christians, Jews and Portuguese.1 Woodstock is very close to the now mostly vacant garment factories in Salt River, once a major locus of economic activity. In the 1990s, low-cost Chinese imports dealt a blow to the economy of the area. However, Woodstock is a short drive from Cape Town's Central Business District and the famous Atlantic Seaboard. During the 2000s, the neighbourhood became a target for gentrifcation as young couples and investors from predominantly white middle-class

S. Tayob (\*)

Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
backgrounds found opportunities in redeveloping the sometimes decrepit, poorly maintained Victorian-style houses in the area.

A day before the birthday party, the family had obtained a permit from the local municipal authority to set up a petting zoo for their son and his friends and family. Te young boy was passionate about animals and had aspirations to become a veterinarian. On the day of the party, a group of friends and family were celebrating in the park, accompanied by 'chickens, roosters, birds, rabbits, a tortoise and a dwarf goat'. During the party, a local white resident of the area, Mary Wallace,2 was out walking her dog. In an interview I conducted with her, she explained that, approaching the park, she noticed 'that the children's section of the park was really full of people' and that her dog was becoming agitated.

So we were unsure about [whether] to go or not, we hadn't had a good look at what was going on. Te park was extremely full, and there was a goat tied to one of the poles of the swings with a very short rope [motions with her hands to indicate the rope was shorter than from her hand to elbow] and the goat was screaming. I saw the goat, said to my husband 'there's a goat tied to a pole with a very short rope', and my husband said to me, 'Let's get the dogs out of here, they're gonna freak out completely'.

She described herself as a concerned animal rights activist, who made the decision to share a post on the neighbourhood's Facebook page, this being a safe space where she might fnd advice and support. She rushed online and posted the following:

Help! Tere is a goat tied to a pole in the children's park in Queens Park. Huge crowd of people. Goat is screaming what to do? Help.

She recounted being hysterical and overcome with horror at what she perceived as the ill treatment of the 'screaming' goat. She contacted the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) to inform it that there was a goat in the park being held on a very short rope. Fellow residents advised her to alert the police as well. Te police enquired as to whether the goat had in fact committed a crime.

#### **10 Race, Animal Bodies and Religion: Sacrifce, Sensory Politics…**

As the furore unfolded, it was clear that her concern for the well-being of the now anthropomorphized goat had evolved into a racially charged discussion about the possible horrors in the park. Concerned residents, all white, rushed in with advice and support that clearly drew on tropes of racialized, barbaric otherness. Wallace exclaimed that she 'ran away' from the scene. In a comment of support, another woman explained that she too had ventured nearby, noticed the huge group and left. However, she was there long enough to note the 'strong smell of braai' (barbeque). Others chimed in with suspicions of bestiality, and assertions that slaughter could be the only possible explanation: 'What would they want with a goat?  Wallace did step in to calm down the chorus of suspicion and accusations with a 'more rational' approach by doubting whether 'it would be possible to slaughter, skin and prepare an animal in that space of time'. However, during the early exchange there was no awareness that the tropes through which the accusations, suspicion and horror were being articulated actually drew on a long history of racial and colonial typecasting and denigration.

As the discussion, concern and fear circulated, it was brought to the attention of a prominent Muslim social media 'infuencer' called Aisha Baker. Present at the birthday party, Baker tweeted about the incident, drawing attention to the automatic association between crowds, animals and fear that had transpired. From then on, the issue went viral and appeared in several newspapers. Te responses of the general public were a mixture of humour and exasperation that another instance of racial profling had raised its head among the South African public. Te father of the boy later turned to social media with a humorous response about having seen 'suspicious Caucasians' lurking in the park and ofered advice to Wallace that 'it would have been prudent to approach us and enquire'. He specifcally cast a critical eye on those who consider themselves 'saviours to humanity', by which he meant the 'previously (and currently) advantaged Cape Town elitists'. In his response, it was clear that he was treating the incident as indicative of the nation's need to overcome its racial divisions and the necessity for white liberals to move beyond the paternalist mentality of the saviour.3

Te event signalled the increasing fragility of the South African public sphere, in which race has resurfaced as a topic of debate, controversy and political currency. Emerging from the concerns of a committed animal activist and vegan was a racially charged debate on questions of transformation, paternalism and access to and control of public space. Te Facebook group discussion clearly revealed the normative assumptions about animals, race and public spaces evident in the embodied responses of the white liberal middle-class participants in the Facebook group. Te divergent responses between suspicious online commentators and those at the party illuminates the split nature of South Africa's publics, here not around questions of language (Rajgopal 2001) but about the right to access and use public space. In speculating about what was taking place in the park and the motives of the family arranging the party, the discussants in the neighbourhood Facebook group, like many neighbourhood watch groups around the country, spoke as concerned residents and property owners of a particular neighbourhood (Dixon 2018), not concerned citizens. Alluding to the possibility of the goat being sacrifced, the hysteria reveals the explosive potential of animal sacrifce to expose entrenched normativities and assumptions about particular kinds of people and particular kinds of religious practice in public spaces in South Africa.

### **Skaapgate: Sacrifce, Ancestors and Exorcizing Racism**

On 23 December 2018 at 8 pm, a private security company, Professional Protection Alternatives (PPA), shut down a popular public beach at Clifton, along the famous Atlantic Seaboard. Present during the security operation was the Western Cape Provincial Secretary of the African National Congress (ANC), Faiez Jacobs, as well as a prominent lawyer and director of the Women's Legal Resource Centre, Seeham Samaai. Jacobs and Samaai were out celebrating an annual family picnic. Just before 8 pm they were approached and asked to leave the beach. Jacobs and Samaai recognized that the enforcers were a private security company and took to Twitter to publicize what they considered an incursion of private interests into a public space. Te closure of the beach was viewed as a return to apartheid practice where the presence of non-white people in a public space was regulated through police-imposed curfews. Te activity of PPA on the beach was read as another instance of the way in which neoliberal privatization was reproducing many of the old inequalities of access (Wagner 2015; Schneider 2010; Comarof and Comarof 2017).

In response to the public outrage, both the city of Cape Town and the PPA were asked to explain the incident. Initially, the PPA claimed that they had not closed the beach; instead, they had been assisting the City's law enforcement ofcers in a security operation after two teenagers had allegedly been raped. 'Two 15-year-old girls … had been raped and were waiting on SAPS. Tis was why Law Enforcement closed the beach. [Every] other night it has been open to anyone that complies with the by-laws which Law Enforcement enforces' (Maphanga 2018). Describing the chaos on the beach and the need for control, the statement claimed that the PPA had both closed the beach in aid of the police and not closed the beach. Contradicting the PPA's statement, the spokesperson for the South African Police Force (SAPS) released a statement saying that 'Preliminary fndings of the SAPS investigation indicate that no rape was registered at Camps Bay SAPS' (Evans 2018). She did confrm that a report of sexual assault had been investigated the day before the PPA incident at Clifton. Finally, fve days after the event on 28 December 2018, the City of Cape Town's mayor, Dan Plato, released an ofcial statement to clarify the city's relationship with PPA and to attack what had since then developed into a racialized and politicized uproar in the national newspapers and on social media. According to Plato, the PPA was not in fact operating under the auspices of the city and had no authority to conduct security operations on a public beach. However, he also added that the incident could not possibly be considered racist because 'they asked people of all races to leave and did not single out any race groups' (Chambers 2018). Two months later the PPA and the city both presented their cases to a Portfolio Committee on Environmental Afairs, along with eye witnesses, where they both maintained once again that the beach had not in fact been closed on that day and that the beachgoers were advised rather than forced to leave (Gerber 2019).

As the event unfolded, it was clear that another public incident regarding race and access to public space had reared its head in South Africa. Competing political parties vied with one another to establish their version of events, either as proof of the continuation of apartheid practice or as an unfortunate incident that was about public safety and order rather than race. Te fumbling statements by the police and the city, and the highly politicized arguments of opposition political parties took place a mere fve months before the national elections. Te city of Cape Town and the province of Western Cape were controlled by the main opposition party in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance. Te incident thus provided ripe fodder and political mileage for the ANC and other parties in the elections.

However, the widespread public anger that the incident had unleashed exceeded the interests of the political parties. Indeed, for many, the way in which false claims of rape were used to justify the imposition of public order was clearly indicative of racial policing. Te notion of an unruly and violent black crowd, together with claims and fears of sexual violence and a general lack of order, is a racial and colonial trope that has been powerful in authorizing violence against black South Africans (Rauch and Storey 1998; Shefer and Ratele 2011). Immediately a group of activists, politicians, academics and NGOs came together to form the Black People's National Crisis Committee (BPNCC). Many who joined the group had spearheaded the Rhodes Must Fall campaign of 2015, which eventually led to the removal of Cecil John Rhodes' Statue from its prominent position at the University of Cape Town. Included among the group and leading the event was Maxwele Chumani, famous for throwing faeces on Rhodes' statue as part of a politics of disgust designed to awaken South Africans to the country's continuing economic inequalities and the need for radical change. Continuing in that vein, Xolani, an organizer of the BPNCC whom I interviewed, stated that the crisis was a crisis of racism. He argued that the incident highlighted the continuation of racism in South Africa: 'I know how these people are when they see a congregation of black people in a space. All their irrational attitudes and presuppositions of black people come to the fore … and they always want to police in a manner that seems to reproduce notions of apartheid.' For the Committee, the incident was linked to an ongoing crisis in the country, in which racism has been ofcially abandoned as state policy but lingers on in everyday life, spatial politics and neoliberal security action.

After much deliberation, the BPNCC decided to sacrifce a sheep on the very beach that had been at the centre of the controversy. On 28 December 2019, very much to the interest of the media and animal rights groups, the organizers arrived on Clifton beach to slaughter a sheep. Immediately following the slaughter, a divided public again emerged, with predominantly black commentators celebrating the act as the assertion of black selfhood in South Africa, while the dominant response from mostly white middle-class South Africans was one of shock and horror at a barbaric act they felt was detrimental to the very cause of the anti-racist protests. Tis time, however, Wallace supported of the slaughter. She said she had made a choice between siding with 'black outrage and the claiming of the space and the slaughtering of the sheep' and 'white privilege that efectively told black people that "You can't do this on our beaches"'.

Unlike the previous incident in Woodstock, this time an animal was in fact sacrifced. In Woodstock the presence of black bodies in a public space, Wallace's horror, anxiety and concern, and the clearly racist posts by the neighbourhood Facebook group combined to provoke public outrage and debate over the insidious ways in which race and access to public space are mediated and controlled. In Clifton, however, a security incident which bore the ghostly traces of a colonial and apartheid past was challenged by a group of activists, scholars and politicians. Tis time the act of sacrifce was a way of claiming space and challenging the privatization and re-racialization of beaches in South Africa. As we shall see, the exact form the sacrifce took speaks to a legacy of African traditional religion, sensory politics and particular kinds of public space in South Africa.

### **Religious Nationalism in a Post-apartheid Neoliberal Moment**

Peter van der Veer's seminal contribution to the analysis of religious nationalism in India challenged Eurocentric assumptions about the inherent secularity of modern nation-state formation as a break from the traditional identities, world-views and practices of a pre-modern past. For van der Veer, religious discourses and practices are constitutive of the changing social identities that are invested in the formation of national identities (van der Veer 1994: ix). Importantly 'these identities are not primordial attachments … but specifc products of changings forms of religious organization and communication' that articulate 'discourse on religious community and discourse on the nation' (van der Veer 1994: x). Van der Veer thus argued for attention to be paid to the 'fundamental orienting conceptions for the world and of personhood' (van der Veer 1994: 8) that are invested in the formation of the modern nation-state. In religious nationalism practitioners from competing religious traditions clash over diferent conceptions of the way religion, ethical values, personhood and human-animal relations are calibrated. For example, Gandhi's claims regarding 'an all-embracing Indian spirituality' centred on his appropriation of the Hindu discourse of non-violence (*ahimsa*) and support for cow protection that alienated Muslims, who 'had their own discourse on universal religion' and animal sacrifce (van der Veer 1994: 95–96). Given that the 'public sphere is not an empty space for carrying out debates' but is 'constituted by the sensibilities—memories and aspirations, fears and hopes—of speakers and listeners' (Asad 2003: 185), it follows that diferent sensibilities informed by diferent religious traditions may lead to conficts over the proper place and practice of religion that are also conficts over the shape and future of the nation.

In South Africa, apartheid entailed the forceful denigration of people and religion. Te post-racial and post-mono-religious state thus authorizes the fourishing of religion in both state and private afairs in surprising and unexpected ways in an attempt to 'turn diversity from an obstacle to nationalism into a national resource, seeking not uniformity but unity' (Chidester 2012: 2). Te outcome is a tension between 'political secularism and … a proliferation of religious representations' that are authorized in public life (Tayob 2018). For example, in constitutional court hearings over the practice of minority (non-Christian) religious observance in schools, school and parent-teacher bodies' attempts to mobilize particular Christian defnitions of religion are rejected by the court as contravening the constitutional right to religious freedom (Tayob 2017). Te South African constitution aims to accommodate not just the diversity of religious beliefs, but also the diversity of religious practice. As we saw in the case of the sheep sacrifce on Clifton beach, the South African state and national police were unwilling to sanction the act as a contravention of public health and safety ordinances, deferring to the constitutional right to practice religious freedom instead.

For David Chidester, the state formation of religion in the postapartheid state reveals the contested dynamics of the sacred in the production of what he calls 'wild religion'. Wild, for Chidester (2012: 3), refers both to the 'untamed, undomesticated, uncultivated, unrestrained, unruly and dangerous', as well as the 'dynamic, natural, extraordinary, enthusiastic, ecstatic, invigorating'. Chidester's invocation of the 'wild', sequestered from a colonial and contemporary politics of Otherness, fails to appreciate the political and philosophical entanglements of religion with colonial and apartheid-era discourse (Chidester 1996). Articulating the wild as good and bad reduces these categories to descriptive markers rather than deeply embedded moral and political judgements with signifcant normative power. It misses the way in which religious practice is closely tied to normative assumptions and sensibilities on the kinds of behaviour and practice that are acceptable in public life. And while I agree with Chidester that African traditional religion must be understood as an open set of resources that are always embedded within the world, wherein sacrifce, ancestor veneration and initiation are variously confgured, it is important not to lose sight of the potential for expressions of a sensory politics within it. As we shall see, the BPNCC appropriated a 'traditional' African traditional religious practice of animal sacrifce for a political end in an attempt to contest the historically embedded racialized assumptions about African traditional religion and the contemporary politics of privatization that excludes the majority of black South Africans from certain kinds of elite spaces. Using religion, they challenged a contemporary politics of racial and religious exclusion, in the process imagining the inclusive national space to come.

I therefore argue for attention to be paid to the sensory politics contained within competing discourses and practices of religion in public spaces. Much as the post-apartheid state sought to link its authority and heritage claims to sensory calibration (Jethro 2020), the emerging radical politics around student protest movements and against neoliberalism have also entailed a sensory contestation.

Tis chapter thus treats the examples described above as instances of competing ethical and political claims to selfhood, sensory propriety and the nation. Te post-apartheid state, with its deep commitment to plurality, together with the increasing power of private interests and the emphasis on private property and self-organization in the contemporary neoliberal environment, are important in understanding the fraught contestations over race, religion and public space in South Africa today. As scholars have argued, neoliberal policies that champion neutral ideas of the free market and the fourishing individual very often reproduce and facilitate the re-emergence of race and caste as markers of diference (Pinto 2006). Across the world, housing market booms, gentrifcation and privatization is accompanying the resurgence of old class and race identities, now under the guise of 'brightening' an area or 'community upliftment' (Hyra 2017). Under these conditions, the practice of religion in public spaces becomes linked to a politics of self and community that establishes and challenges norms of religious practice, sensory propriety and access to and use of public spaces beyond the purview of the state. Tis chapter therefore calls attention to the limits of a state-centric approach to anthropology in South Africa remaining alert to the power of private actors as they articulate a link between religious practice, public space, private property, sensory propriety and the fourishing individual.

Animal sacrifce is a perfect practice for understanding the competing normative assumptions about religion and racial Others as they relate to the politics of religion and public spaces in South Africa. Sacrifce is a powerful means for the production of sacred politics as a 'religious ritual of political sovereignty' (Chidester 2012: 181) that is central to the foundational myths of nationalism (Anderson 1983). However, animal sacrifce as a trope of racial and barbaric Otherness has deep colonial roots that linger in normative assumptions about a hierarchy that places proper spiritual religions over primitive material religions (van der Veer 2011). In a brilliant analysis of the interplay between the anthropology and philosophy of sacrifce, Denis Keenan identifes 'Christo-centric evolutionism' and the construction of 'worldwide typologies' as central to 'numerous late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century theories of sacrifce' (Keenan 2005: 10). According to the evolutionary view, the sacrifce of Jesus as God himself signals the highest form of sacrifce, bringing an end to sacrifces of transaction in favour of the symbolic commemorative sacrifce of communion. In this view, religions that continue animal sacrifce are primitive and barbaric, being ranked according to a classifcation of worldwide typologies of religion from supposedly savage, animist and fetish religions to higher forms of moral and spiritual religion (Chidester 1996). Te hierarchy of religions was of course one of the many hierarchies of civilization and people that marked nineteenthcentury social theory. It is therefore no coincidence to fnd Africans being interpreted as the bearers of a lack of civilization, racial degradation and primitive religious mentalities. In South Africa, this confuence is all the more striking given the long history of settler colonialism and apartheid's racial state policies, with their intimate links to Calvinist Christianity and theories of racial and civilizational diference (Dubow 1992). I argue that the post-apartheid state's desire to insert animal sacrifce at the centre of rituals of national belonging, which Chidester highlights, must also be understood as a response to the history of the denigration of African religious practices, now asserted from a position of power that is no longer subject to a Eurocentric hierarchy of value. Viewed from the long history of colonialism and apartheid, animal sacrifce in public entails a sensory politics of selfhood and an assertion of African subjectivity.

Te furore that emerged around Wallace's seemingly innocent concern in the park at Woodstock and the decision of a group of activists to respond to the security action on Clifton beach with an animal sacrifce must be read as emerging from this contested space of religion, race and private property interests in South Africa. In these moments, we fnd that articulations and redeployments of religious practice in public spaces reveal the competing desires, normative assumptions and sensory politics of private individuals competing over the use and access to public spaces in South Africa.

### **The Return to Race in South Africa: From Rainbow Nation to Racial Politics**

After apartheid, South Africa was celebrated as a poster-case for the peaceful transformation to a post-racial and multi-racial society, a 'rainbow' nation (Niehaus 2014). Te frst parliament was established as a 'government of national unity' designed to grant cabinet representation to all parties that had won above 10 per cent of the national vote. Te aim was to ensure a smooth and inclusive transition. Central to the politics of transition was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), tasked with collecting testimonies of individual apartheid-era atrocities in exchange for an amnesty for the perpetrators and reparation for the victims. Aiming for confessional, restorative justice, the TRC was central to the post-apartheid state's desire to forge a nation of multiple communities united under constitutional law. However, for Mahmood Mamdani, the TRC 'reduced apartheid from a relationship between the state and entire communities to one between the state and individuals' (Mamdani 2002: 34). Te individualization evident in the TRC process points to the way in which a neoliberal politics of state and consumer-citizen relations had started to take hold.

For critics of the 'rainbow nation', it became increasingly clear that the imperative of liberation during apartheid had been compromised by the now global imperative towards liberalization. Sociologists argued that the balancing act had in fact contributed to 'greater inequality in the distribution of incomes in society as a whole', as well as 'employment losses' (Nattrass and Seekings 2001: 484). By 2018, it had become clear that inequalities were still highly racialized, with white incomes increasing more rapidly than those of other races (Friedmand 2015: 47). Steven Friedmand argues that one of the reasons for the continuity of inequality is the maintenance of 'cultural assumptions' relating to the superiority of Western values and lifestyles, which were previously the exclusive domain of white liberals, but were now shared by the new black elite (Friedmand 2015: 50; also see Turner 1972). Neoliberal aspirations to become 'world class' produced a desire to emulate Northern patterns of lifestyle and livelihood, rather than devise means to combat local urgencies of inequality, unemployment and a lack of access to education (Friedmand 2005).

#### **10 Race, Animal Bodies and Religion: Sacrifce, Sensory Politics…**

In the end, those who beneft most from neoliberal economic policies are the relatively advantaged white and Indian-origin middle classes. Te widening inequalities and persistence of everyday racism set the scene for the re-irruption of an ordinary politics of race. Tis was most forcefully articulated by student protest movements such as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which achieved international fame through its calls to decolonize education, transform institutions of higher education and combat insidious, everyday forms of racial exclusion. As already noted, this protest began when Chumani Maxwele threw faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes in a 'visceral material act of disgust' that 'actualised a growing mood of discontent among South Africans' (Pillay 2016: 156). Te protests brought together critical race theory, South African Black Consciousness philosophy and critiques of neoliberalism to attack both the state and the university system (Naidoo 2016). Feeding of critical scholarship, the activists argued that 'the zeitgeist of Nelson Mandela's post-1994 government disabled radical activism by foregrounding narratives of peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, and unity'. Te movement opted instead for 'foregrounding exclusion, poverty, broken political promises, and privilege' (Pillay 2016: 156). Clearly, the politics of animals, race, sacrifce and access to public spaces must be understood in the context of increasing racial inequality and the return of racial consciousness in South Africa's public sphere.

### **Sacrifce as Politics: Cleansing Cape Town and Attacking the Nerve Centre of Racism**

For the organizers of the public sacrifce, the racist excuses and behaviour of the private security guards, in conjunction with the area's residents and the cover-ups by the City of Cape Town, required immediate action. After much deliberation, they decided that an animal sacrifce should be performed. In an interview I conducted with Xolani, a BPNCC member, he explained that the committee had experience of the power of animal sacrifce as a tool of disruption during the Fees Must Fall protests, when, in the middle of extensive private security brutality, the group decided to slaughter a sheep on the University of Cape Town campus—'and we did it, and the animal rights people went crazy, so we already knew they were going to go crazy'. Given the BPNCC's awareness of the power of public sacrifce to create shock, concern and hysteria amongst their mainly white middle-class opposition, it was decided that slaughter was the appropriate response. However, the decision to perform a public sacrifce was not only inspired by a politics of disgust and disruption, but also by a desire to deploy a version of African traditional religious practice in a public space. As we will see, the organizers intentionally curated and adjusted an African traditional ritual practice at the intersection of cultural and religious assertion and the politics of race and inequality in South Africa.

Sacrifcing a sheep was therefore considered a powerful political response rather than an authentic replication of an African traditional religious practice. Xolani and Tato, who were active in the BPNCC organizing committee, described sacrifce as a practice that 'connects us with the other world, the world of the ancestors'. Te spilling of blood was thus deemed a way 'to show that we are sacrifcing this beast in order to start a conversation with the ancestors … to invoke them, to make them see that we are young people, we might not know everything, but we know that they must come to our rescue'. Te sacrifce was thus staged as an invocation of the ancestral spirit of Makhanda Nxele, a well-known anti-colonial warrior in the Xhosa community and once a prisoner on Robben Island who is believed to have escaped imprisonment by swimming to the Cape in a bid to liberate his people. However, he did not make the journey, and memories of his failed rescue continue to resonate in everyday speech as a trope of endless waiting, as well as an ordinary reminder of the history of loss through colonialism (Wells 2012).4

Invoking the spirit of a famous warrior as an ancestor represents a creative appropriation and re-articulation of an established ritual practice. Usually, in African traditional religious practice, the ancestors are invoked as a link to the homestead and household and are called upon for protection from potential misfortune and strife (Chidester 2012: 27). Retaining the importance of animal sacrifce as a source of protection and power, in Clifton the family and homestead were extended to include all previously disadvantaged and oppressed black South Africans and anti-colonial heroes in the political and economic struggle against racism and inequality. Te BPNCC was aware of the creative appropriation and redeployment of sacrifce for political ends, and anxious not to cause ofence to black South Africans.  Tey also eschewed what they considered the pacifying infuence of African religious leaders and the Council of Traditional Healers, who they thought would conduct a 'purely cultural ceremony' marked by minute ritual concerns, yet free from any 'fre' and political currency. Te sacrifce thus drew on powerful symbols of African traditional religion, recalibrated in crucial ways so as not to cause ofence to fellow black South Africans, and to mark the moment as a political claim against the privatization of public space.

In staging the sacrifce, the sheep was frst made to drink the sea water at Clifton beach in order to imbibe the spirit of Makhanda Nxele, who had drowned in that very ocean

so that the spirit of Makhanda can enter us, and we will consume it and it will cleanse us, and it will enter us and strengthen us in order to fght the racists. So, it was a two-pronged situation where we are saying we are exorcising racism and racist attitudes in the white community and also strengthening ourselves against the racists, to not just be victims of racism but to be proactive in fnding solutions to a problem which we never created. (interview with Xolani and Tato conducted by the author)

Te sacrifce was therefore clearly articulated as part of a political programme that required the power of the African ancestors, the interpretive realm of which was extended to include all the heroes of the anti-colonial struggle, as well as symbols of independence, including Shaka Zulu and Nehanda.5 Te goal of this political deployment of sacrifce was to disturb what Xolani called the 'nerve centre' of racism in South Africa, a symbolically charged, historically informed, material and metaphoric evocation that ties the history of colonialism in South Africa to spatial apartheid, neoliberal gentrifcation and the politics of animal sacrifce and Otherness:

Cape Town in the South African imagination seems to be a colony. Cape Town operates diferently than the other cities. Cape Town's spatial planning is very aggressive in demarcating spaces. So, when we say it's the *nerve centre*, in a sense we mean that colonial settlement fnds its hydraulics here, how it operates, it's just in the everyday. So, Cape Town is the nerve centre of South African racism. Cape Town is the microcosm of the vision of racists of what they would want South Africa to be like. Te ideas of colonial settlement and the ideas more importantly of colonial expansion are eminent in this place. And also, all the apartheid intellectuals, some of them come from Stellenbosch. Tose who incubated the idea of apartheid and nurtured it, so Cape Town then becomes the laboratory of South African racism.

Treating Cape Town as the nerve centre of racism draws attention to the history of the frst colonial settlement, the aggressive spatial segregation that many argue continues in the post-apartheid context, and to the fact that some of the most infuential architects of apartheid stem from the region. Explaining the latter, Xolani was clear to diferentiate the 'subtle' and 'sophisticated' racism of Cape Town from the aggressive racism of right-wing groups like the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). Te signifcance of the Atlantic Seaboard was further emphasized as a space that, through 'neoliberalism' and privatization, has resisted transformation, while maintaining the poster-card image of the beauty of the Cape. Finally, the metaphor of the nerve centre was extended to the outrage expected by animal rights activists and 'white liberals' who were surely 'going to be up in arms' over the sacrifce. Tis, for Xolani, was evidence 'that actually they don't want black people to practice their cultural practices'. Te sacrifce was thus a carefully calibrated and staged event that sought to call on the spirit of the ancestors of anti-colonial resistance and black African power while simultaneously drawing attention to the continued perpetuation of racism in South Africa. Since acts of sacrifce are very common in the public spaces of black South African townships, this specifc act was not merely about claiming public space; rather, it was about drawing attention to the perpetuation of racist attitudes and practices in predominantly white upper-class spaces in the city. In doing so, the protestors activated a long history of anti-colonial resistance. As early as the 1830s, the very rituals that were considered evidence of barbaric Otherness and 'sensory disorganization' were 'intentionally deployed by indigenous ritual specialists in opposition to colonial domination'. Tese included 'loud drumming and chanting' outside the colonial settlements to frighten settlers (Chidester 2012: 193).

Te event was also a rejection of liberal paternalism, which they understood as central to the dominant white middle-class condemnation of animal sacrifces. Tis was specifcally articulated in response to animal rights activists and vegans who attended the event in an attempt to convince them to 'practice our traditions without harming the animals'. For Xolani, this assertion was nonsensical and paternalist:

What gave them the gall that we can't practice our traditional [customs] and our traditional customs are harming animals? Are they the spokespeople of animals? Because we have been doing this since time immemorial, right? You can't just wake up and you are 21 and you tell us that all of black people are wrong in slaughtering because you have just come to some vegan consciousness. Haibo! [an expression of surprise]

Rejecting the association of animal welfare with the ending of sacrifce was not a rejection of ethical relations with animals but rather an assertion of an independent subjectivity and a critique of liberal paternalism:

veganism must be taken away from racist discourse, we must have radical black people who will reintroduce us to veganism in a better radical way, in a manner that respects our customs and ambitions and enriches them. Te veganism that we need will take into consideration that black people are black people who slaughter. Won't force its logic and collapse everything. If you come with the conclusion that as black people, we must stop slaughtering it must come from us.

Here we fnd Xolani and Wallace coming together in agreement that the paternalism in certain strands of veganism that is intolerant of other cultures and which sidelines issues of racism in favour of animal welfare is untenable. In the South African context, where African traditional religion deserves recognition and value, there need to be more nuanced and sensitive discussions about ethics, animals and access to public space. Performing animal sacrifce in this context is a powerful symbolic and material articulation that pushes back against long-held colonial stereotypes, as well as more insidious and everyday forms of contemporary racism and marginalization. Te public sacrifce performed a powerful Fanonian moment, whereby the activists appropriated a denigrated practice as a material and visceral force for the assertion of selfhood, community and dignity aimed at a new life and a new set of values not subsumed into European and colonial hierarchies of race, development and civilization (Gibson 2016).6 Here, the very object of Otherness as viewed from the dominant colonial frame is appropriated and used as a weapon of political and ethical claim-making. Te issue is not simply about the question of animal life as an isolated ethical issue, but about the way in which animal sacrifce has been central to the history of racism, colonialism and taken for granted assumptions of African Otherness. For the organizers and supporters, animal sacrifce was intimately tied to imagining a future and a radically transformed nation.

Te practice of sacrifcing animals in public spaces as a political act aimed at forging a new claim to such spaces was facilitated by the South African state's professed accommodation of diverse religious practice. Te deputy provincial police commissioner, Hendrick Burger, was on Clifton beach on the day of the sacrifce. He had been contacted earlier by Cape Town City's mayor, Dan Plato, regarding the South African Police Service's plans to stop the slaughter. Te mayor agreed that some of the city's by-laws were being violated but remained unclear regarding the exact ofence. Furthermore, Burger confrmed that private charges had been laid for contraventions of the Animal Cruelty Act and Meat Safety Act. Having attended the event, he told the parliamentary committee that no evidence of animal sufering was noted, and that the Meat Safety Act did not apply to slaughter for private consumption or for cultural or religious purposes (Makinana 2019). Refraining from judgement, the South African state authorized the sacrifce, revealing the complexities of the dispute between political secularism and religious freedom in South Africa.

### **Conclusion**

Te controversy over the goat at the birthday party in the Woodstock park and the carefully calibrated animal sacrifce on Clifton beach bring to the fore the deeply divisive politics of race, religion and access to public spaces in South Africa. Given the long legacy of racial segregation, the post-apartheid state is cautious about legislating on religions or culture. Tis means that claims to regulate religious practice according to universal laws concerning the use of public space or the slaughter of animals are often ruled in favour of religious and cultural rights. As we saw, the provincial commissioner was unwilling to enforce a universal law concerning animal cruelty and slaughter when taking the religious rights of the sacrifce community into account.

In contemporary South Africa, debates over the state of the nation and its future turn on questions of property and land redistribution (Levin and Weiner 2008), and the increasing privatization of public space (McDonald and Smith 2004). Central to these contestations is a sensory politics that links particular kinds of bodies and substances to diferent discursive and material formations of religion. Private actors bring their own political and religious values into the public arena in a bid to control urban space as landowners and rate-payers. In this contested terrain, the political articulation of an African traditional religious practice is both a means of asserting its value and dignity and of contesting the long history of the marginalization and stigmatization of African traditional religion, culture and people.

Te politics of holding animal sacrifces in public spaces reveals a sensory concern over the proper place of certain bodies, substances and practices. As contestation over religious practice in public spaces is articulated in terms of private property rights, land ownership and neighbourhood access, we need to pay attention to the sensory politics of religion that is expressed therein. Tis chapter therefore argues for more research on the practice of religion in public spaces that consciously challenge prevailing notions of religious and sensory propriety. In particular we should recognize how marginalized groups around the world deploy religious practice as a sensory challenge through which to assert a distinct subjectivity, selfhood and inclusive citizenship in imagining a nation to come.

### **Notes**

## **References**

———. 2015. Te Janus Face of the Past: Preserving and Resisting South African Path Dependence. In *Te Colour of Our Future: Does Race Matter in Post-apartheid South Africa?* ed. Xolela Mangcu, 45–63. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

———. 2011. Spirit. *Material Religion* 7: 124–131.

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

Te images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **11**

## **The Rivalry Between Secular and Religious Nationalisms: On the Split in Iranian National Identity**

**Mahmoud Alinejad**

### **Introduction**

Tis chapter is an exercise in interpreting Iran's modern history through the lens of nationalism. It demonstrates how the rivalry of secular and religious nationalisms have driven two revolutionary movements in the country, one in the early, the other in the late twentieth century. It is informed by lived experiences related by countless ordinary Iranians, as well as a range of writings and speeches by academics, journalists and political protagonists.

Te rival claims to modern Iranian nationalism have drawn on two major cultural wellsprings (Lotf 2004). While the secular nationalism of the 1905–1911 constitutional revolution dreamed of a glorious ancient pre-Islamic past, the religious nationalism of the 1978–1979 Islamic revolution was rooted in the magnifcence of the Islamic heritage, and particularly its devotion to Shiite faith and culture. Whether in secular or

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religious guise, these nationalist ideologies were used by revolutionary leaders to legitimize post-revolutionary regimes.

Te narratives peddled by these two forms of nationalism displayed what Cliford Geertz (1973: 225–310) referred to as the political resilience of 'primordial bonds'.  Both ofered triumphal narratives of national history that challenged the political status quo with a moral focus on creating a sense of collective belonging, security, dignity and authenticity. No matter how inaccurate, fawed or inventive these narratives were, they built upon selective political understandings of aspects of an ethnic or religious past (Smith 1996: 371–388).

I have used the term 'secular nationalism' to refer to the outcome of centuries of painful experimentation and innovation within the Christian tradition in Europe and the United States, a process whereby religion informed the separation of church and state and infuenced in the evolution of modern national identities. Te term 'religious nationalism', on the other hand, is used here to denote the political appropriation of religion in the postcolonial era in order to inspire a sense of native belonging in opposition to secular nationalism, seen as a vestige of earlier Western hegemony. Following Mark Juergensmeyer (1993: 1–2, 31), I view religious nationalism as the rival ideology of a political order which purports to provide national life with an underlying meaning.

I use the epithet 'Islamist' here to signify Muslim political activists who advocate the use of state power to enforce public and political conformity with Islamic principles. I also use the term 'populism' to denote political appeals to an aggrieved public consisting of exaggerated but unrealizable promises made in a bid to capture or retain political power.

Te rest of this chapter consists of seven sections. Following the introductory remarks, I provide an account of secular nationalism as the main driver of the 1905 constitutional revolution. Te third section demonstrates how secular nationalism was placed at the service of a modern state-building project under the Pahlavi monarchy but failed to create a modern nation characterized by grassroots loyalty to that state. Te following three sections ofer an account of the rise and consolidation of religious nationalism in Iran in opposition to secular nationalism. Te last section ofers a discussion of the limitations of the incumbent religious nationalism in Iran.

### **Early Modern Iranian Nationalism and the Constitutional Revolution**