workers’ experiences and subjectivities of practising care for their terminally ill parents. Findings highlight three major discourses that migrant peasant workers employed to make sense of their care experiences: the burden of care for migrant peasant workers and filial piety’s mediating role; a discourse of parental sacrifice; and the intertwined discourse of parental sacrifice and forgetting. Based on the similarities between Foucauldian discourse and Chinese philosophy, chapter nine revisits the mechanism migrant peasant workers deployed to interact with filial discourse in the face of socio-economic transitions. The final chapter recapitulates the research questions, the main findings and their research significance. The author also proposes recommendations for future research and policies to improve migrant peasant workers’ care conditions and support their filial care practices. As the convention of family-based elderly care provision is under pressure from modernization and rural-to-urban migration, an extensive examination on how filial discourse is subjectively (re)constructed and perceived in China’s changing social context bears great interest for both academic researchers and policymakers. An account of discursive analysis on the lived experiences and subjectivities of elderly care by migrant peasant workers, such as this book provides, certainly enriches our understanding of the reflexive discursive constructions of filial piety and caregiving in China. Additionally, the methodological design of this research makes a significant contribution to theoretical explorations that seek ways to localize Western methodology in the Chinese context. It will be a valuable and essential source of reference for researchers interested in population ageing, Chinese philosophy, family care and welfare issues faced by the rural elderly in China. Meanwhile, there are also a few issues, related primarily to my own concerns, that are beyond the scope of discussion in this book. A better understanding regarding how rural migrants experience and perceive elderly care and filial piety is inseparable from discussions about the rural–urban structural divide in China. More research is needed to understand the gaps and inequalities in social welfare provision between rural and urban areas, as these also profoundly shape the way rural dwellers value and perceive filial care. Another problem is that too much attention has been paid to migrant caregivers’ voices and subjectivities. It would be interesting to hear how elderly people experience family care and perceive filial piety during China’s socio-economic transitions.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsPolicing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest, by Suzanne E. Scoggins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. ix+186 pp. US$39.99 (cloth).Michael DuttonMichael DuttonBeijing Capital Normal University and University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 87January 2022 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716991 Views: 62Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss' Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century's Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways modernity' has encountered and dealt with the telluric.

This is a paper about the architecture of a concept: the concept of the political. Through the built environment, we come to re-imagine the concept of the political not as a set of institutions, or as an array of governmental forms, or even a series of rational choices, but in terms of affective energy flows. It is in interrogating this that I will turn to the built environment and analyse two ways of regulating the cadence of affective flows in relation to the political, through two machines: Britain's nineteenth century Crystal Palace and the Landlord Manor House Museum of Liu Wencai. If Liu Wencai's Manor House Museum turned affective energy flows into political intensities that could drive the Maoist revolution, the Crystal Palace dissipated these same energy flows by turning them into commodity desires that would drive market growth. With the Crystal Palace, our attention is focused on how the channelling of energy into dissipated market desires produced a dispersal that, in turn, contributed to a political quietism. Such political quietism appeared as, at best, a ‘side-effect’ of an economic relation but, in placing this machine next to the Maoist Manor House Museum, we realise the centrality of this ‘side-effect’ in the formation of the political. The built environment, therefore, offers a set of heuristic devices that, read alongside each other, reveal two quite distinct modes of being political. Despite their radical differences, these two machines share a ‘family resem-blance’ insofar as they exemplify how the built environment contributes to political discourse through the disciplining of social subjects. What these two sets of machinery open onto is a new understanding of the discursive field of modernity and the treatment of affective elements within any modern concept of the political.

What produces the ability within us to face the possibility of dying for a cause to which we adhere? Such political commitment backs onto the issue of sacrifice, which, in turn, inhabits the world of a gift economy. The gift of the political opens onto a series of questions tied to different traditions of the sacred and of the clan. From biblical parables through to Confucian rites, the paper traces the various pathways enabling the emergence of the gift of the political.

This paper treats the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means by which to open on to a more affective approach to the question of the political. It examines one piece of art-technology of that period and shows the way it intuitively worked within the fluidity of power to produce political intensity. This one technology is a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution notion of the political that was built around an attempt to channel and harness affective power towards revolutionary ends. Both because it attempts to direct the political through the affective dimension and because its methods of doing so resembled contemporary art practices, this paper opens on to the possibilities of a method based on an art rather than a science of the political.

Is a governmentality approach useful for the analysis of government in contemporary China and is there a 'Chinese' form of governmentality? Michael Dutton and Barry Hindess address these questions by noting how governmentality emerged as an object of study coincident with a 'crisis of Marxism' in Western Europe and in China. They argue that the shift of focus to new mentalities of government in Europe and China resulted in different conceptions of 'frugal government'. In the west, it led to an art of 'the least possible government', while in China it would grow out of Maoist notions of self-reliance.

Peter Williams was an Editorial Board member (and later Advisory Board member) of Southern Review, which became Communication, Politics & Culture.Despite blindness from the late 1990s, Peter continued to teach until November 2014, and was an active researcher until his death, co-writing a book on media and the government of populations (Palgrave, forthcoming).

This article is concerned with the relationship between political intensity and the commodified world. How has that which could be and has been lived so intensely been transformed, marginalized, and disaggregated? What is the cost of this process of taming? Through three monuments to modernity (the Eiffel Tower, the Ferris Wheel, and Tatlin's unbuilt Monument to the Third International), the article traces the path of modernity as a road leading to political de-intensification. These various monumental efforts of modernism stand in sharp contrast to the political modernism of the Mao era, captured (again monumentally) in the figure of the Rent Collection Courtyard, a large sculptural diorama unveiled in 1965 and recreated in 1999 by the artist Cai Guoqiang for the Venice Biennale. Back-engineered, this is the story of Chinese transition and economic reform, but read more directly, it is the tale of how we dispose of political wonder.

I begin this work with a simple question. Why is it impossible to imagine, much less write, a work like Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish within Asian area studies? The impossibility I am referring to is not of content but of form. It is not just about writing such a text but about having it read as something more than a description; having it read for its theoretical significance more generally. That is to say, it is about the impossibility of writing a work that is principally of a theoretical nature but that is empirically and geographically grounded in Asia rather than in Europe or America. Why is it that, when it comes to Asian area studies, whenever “theory” is invoked, it is invariably understood to mean “applied theory” and assumed to be of value only insofar as it helps tell the story of the “real” in a more compelling way? To some extent, what follows is an attempt to explain historically how Western area studies on Asia came to appreciate theory in this limited and limiting way. At the same time, as I began to investigate the history and prehistory of this diaphanous field, I began to recognize the possibilities of a very different form of area studies that could have emerged had different sets of pressures pushed it in a slightly different direction. This essay is therefore an attempt to recuperate these now forgotten possibilities and to build on them in order to produce a different way of seeing, writing, and theorizing Asian area studies.

In den späten 1980er und frühen 1990er Jahren begann die Forschungsabteilung des Ministeriums für öffentliche Sicherheit in China mit einem umfangreichen historisch-ethnographischen Forschungsprogramm. Die Provinzbehörden sollten die Archive durchforsten und historisches Material zu Fragen der öffentlichen Sicherheit zusammenstellen. Polizeiverordnungen und andere Anordnungen, aber auch Parteiberichte wurden gesammelt, hinzu kamen Reden und Äußerungen der lokalen Partei- und Polizeigewaltigen. Außerdem kontaktierte man ehemalige Mitglieder der Behörden und Parteistellen und ermunterte sie, ihre Erinnerungen aufzuschreiben oder zu erzählen. Solche Erinnerungstexte wurden vorliegenden Biographien angefügt – das unsystematische Tagebuch, das daraus entstand, war der Grundstock für das umfassende Archiv der Polizei und des polizeilichen Handelns im revolutionären China.

Employing the emergency number 911 as a device to open onto two continents of governance - one 'hot' the other 'cold', one binary, the other the disaggregation of the binary - this paper shows that colonial governmentality is marked by a paradoxical combination of the two. Moreover, it argues that colonial governmentality is the progenitor of this form of governance which today, more than ever, stalks the landscape of liberal democracy and characterises its predominate political form.

In dialling 911, the US emergency number, the paper connects the terrorism of New York to the backstreet infections of Mong Kok, Hong Kong. New York and Hong Kong lead back to the binary political forms of Carl Schmitt and also the complications added by Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. In a highly condensed argument, Dutton outlines the contours of power that govern this two-sided contemporary Western notion of the political. He argues that it is characterised less by a shift, in the language of Foucault, from sovereign to disciplinary power than to a wedding of the two and it is on a bed of colonial governmentality that this was consummated. Here is a form of government and power that combines notions of ‘betterment’ (registered through concerns about the health, wealth and education of the ‘native’ population) with brute force. It is a sign of the rifle lying hidden by the side of the ‘force of the better argument’ and herein lies the political form that the number 911 reveals.