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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

coercion, and dominance. Informal life politics activities are about cre-
ation and construction, challenging the constrained circumstances
through introducing alternative norms and practices to a community.
They are therefore less about visible conflicts than about local communi-
ties’ attempts to seek alternative ways of living in daily life. Such activities
tend to be inward-looking and self-regulated, rather than actively seeking
to expand and convert others to the cause. This echoes Gandhi’s words:
“as human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake
the world—that is the myth of the ‘atomic age’—as in being able to
remake ourselves.”
Defensive as the informal life politics groups tend to be, they are not
passive. Instead of letting the situation take its own course, the groups
seek to enact their ideas in spite of odds. Their desire for change is embed-
ded in the skill and stamina to connect with people who are implicated or
sympathetic, and to carry through connected acts that circumvent current
circumstances or erode the current order piecemeal. The power of the
informal life politics groups lies in the sustained presence of their political
resistance, in the form of non-compliance, lack of cooperation, or deliber-
ate disregard for existing orders or laws. This is an expression of “active
citizenry,” which claims rights and fulfils responsibilities, while also creat-
ing a space where alternative ideas and norms are produced and enacted.33
Structure and Outline
To highlight some key features of informal life politics, the book is struc-
tured in three sections, each focused on a core theme. Each section begins
with a “concept essay,” analysing a particular element crucial to under-
standing the processes of living politics. This is followed by two chapters
that offer sustained analyses of particular examples of informal life politics,
highlighting the section’s core theme. The core themes are: citizenship
and the attention-seeking state, informal social networks, and alternative
value systems.
Part I, “Citizenships,” draws attention to the relationship between indi-
viduals and the nation-state. In the concept essay, Tom Cliff posits that
ignoring state rules or expectations is a condition of informal life politics.
Then, in Chapter 3, Cliff and Wang demonstrate the complex relationship
between survival and citizenship by examining the daily activities of a rural
migrant workers’ NGO in peri-urban Beijing. Unable to access social welfare
and educational resources available for city residents, the workers’ NGO
chooses to “ignore” the state, and to “enact” citizenship by fostering a cul-
tural and political aesthetic parallel to the mainstream ideal. In Chapter 4,
Yonjae Paik emphasises the importance of communal self-help in creating an
autonomous space against the state’s threat to personal and community life.
Paik points out that the rise of chemical farming in South Korea since the
1960s is not purely an economic matter, to increase food production, but
a political process to strengthen the state’s control of farming and rural
society: part of a long East Asian tradition of building a “rich country and
strong military.” In tracing the international origins of the organic farming
movement in the 1920s, including the Danish rural movement, he explores
the way in which local communities have developed and adapted ideas from
a wide range of sources, and shows how these grassroots efforts served to
protect local citizenship from erosion by state ideologies.
Part II, “Networks,” moves the focus to informal networks. Uchralt
Otede highlights the crucial role that networking between external groups
and the local community plays in the dynamics of living politics. The
exchange of information and resources through informal networks is illus-
trated by his study of the efforts of the herders from Eastern Ujimchin
Banner in Inner Mongolia to protect their land and water from pollution
by a paper mill. He identifies three networks as vitally important to these
efforts. The first links Inner Mongolian herders with former “Educated
Youth,” young people who were sent to Eastern Ujimchin grassland from
urban areas for re-education during the 1960s and 1970s; the second con-
nects former “Educated Youth” themselves; and the third is a loosely
structured group linked by a shared concern for the grassland environ-
ment. In Chapter 7, Shinnosuke Takahashi challenges the view that activ-
ists are motivated and united by homogenous identity and ideology. By
analysing daily practices and social networks in Takae, a rural Okinawan
community whose life is disrupted by the construction of a US military
base, Takahashi shows how multiple forms of place-based consciousness
come together to provide the basis for collected action. Both Inner
Mongolia and Okinawa are “ethnic minority” areas from the perspective of
the nation state, but both Uchralt Otede’s and Takahashi’s analyses, while
acknowledging distinctive regional histories and cultures, go beyond exist-
ing analyses that frame the regions’ living politics in strictly “ethnic” terms.
Part III, “Alternatives,” centres on experiments in alternative value cre-
ation. Shuge Wei suggests that non-market exchange pursued by local com-
munities in rural areas is not merely a complement to the market system,
but an act of resistance against it. Behind the different exchange systems are
different value systems: while the market focuses on maximising profits,
local non-market exchanges value mutuality and balance. She examines the
social experiment of non-market exchange by investigating a local com-
munity’s efforts to revive rice terrace farming in the Gongliao district of
Taiwan. This story shows how intellectuals and farmers cooperate to redis-
cover and re-invent the local farming tradition as a challenge to the domi-
nant market system. In Chapter 10, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how living
politics may start from action rather than ideology. Drawing on the history
of the Mayu alternative currency scheme in the Japanese regional city of
Ueda, she suggests that the very act of being apparently “apolitical” can be
seen as a way of reshaping the meaning of politics.
The Epilogue brings together the key themes of the book and suggests
avenues for future research and action. The formal political landscape of
East Asia is very diverse, but the examples of informal life politics explored
in the book’s chapters show that, within this diversity, local communities
face common challenges as they struggle to pursue their own visions of the
“good life” in the twenty-first-century world. At the same time, the exam-
ples of living politics highlighted in the following chapters suggest ideas,
hopes, and practices which may provide inspiration to others engaged in
similar quests, not only around the East Asian region but also worldwide.
Notes
1. See, for example, John M. Cooper, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship,”
in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, eds. Richard Kraut and Steven Skultety
(Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 65–90.
2. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History
Beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3. See, for example, Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good
Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African
Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
4. See, for example, Dorothy Ko, “Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in
Imperial China,” in Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, eds. Jörn Rüsen,
Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger (Oxford and New York: Berghahn
Books), 98–103; Jacqueline Dutton, “‘Non-Western’ Utopian Traditions,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 223–258.
5. 或谓孔子曰:“子奚不为政?“子曰:“《书》云:‘孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟,施于有
政。‘是亦为政,奚其为为政?” See Analects 2:21.
6. In Japan, 73% of eligible voters voted in the 1990 general election, com-
pared with 53% in the 2014 election; in South Korea, voter participation
in the 1992 presidential election was more than 70%, compared with
53% in the 2012 presidential election; in Taiwan, more than 80% of the
electorate voted in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, compared
with 62% in the 2016 election. See the online data published by the
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, accessed December
15, 2016, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=114, www.idea.int/
vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=KR, www.idea.int/vt/countryview.
cfm?CountryCode=TW
7. Globescan, “New Poll Shows UK Voters Disillusioned With Political
System,” 26 March 2015, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.glob-
escan.com/101-press-releases-2015/347-uk-voters-disillusioned-
with-political-system.html
8. Gary W. Reichard, Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics since
1968 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
9. For example, Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of
Promising Spaces. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Ruth
Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
10. For example, John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press,
2010); James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces in Autonomy,
Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2012); Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s
Transformative Movements (Oakland, CA: University of California Press,
2014).
11. For example, Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the
Middle East (2nd edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
12. Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth
Century (Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 9.
13. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 317.
14. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 323.
15. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 10.
16. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right.
17. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 44.
18. Giddens, The Third Way, 45.
19. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 95–96.
20. Beck, World at Risk, 95.
21. Beck, World at Risk, 97.
22. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 10.
23. Mouffe, On the Political, 20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

The Beijing operations of Spiritual Home include the Tongxin school, a
network of “op shop” type stores, and a community centre (shequ
huodong zhongxin). There is also a basic technical college called “Workers’
University” and a small farm about 40 km away on the outskirts of the
Beijing urban area. The op shop network is financially self-sustaining and
employs more than 40 migrant workers in collecting, cleaning, and
cheaply reselling donated clothing, toys, and other items in migrant set-
tlement areas. Much of the collection work is done on a voluntary basis
by student groups from Beijing universities, and is donated by private
enterprises, urban residents, and the students themselves. Sun Heng says
that the op shop network aims to “mobilize the unused resources of
society.” The 14 shops of the network help migrant families to survive in
the city at a time when the cost of living is rising more quickly than their
wages, and also operate as informal meeting points for the local migrant
population.
Another example of how Spiritual Home merges social and environ-
mental benefit with economic benefit is what they call the “women work-
ers’ cooperative.” It is basically a sewing room in the primary school
compound, where migrant mothers can do some productive work making
small items out of donated materials that cannot be sold as is in the op
shop. At the same time, they can look after their children, including
younger ones who do not yet attend school. The piece work is low value,
and even those who do it full time earn only about 1500 renminbi per
month, but if their family commitments preclude them from taking on
full-time work elsewhere, it is at least something. Most importantly, some
of the participants told me, the interaction with other mothers helps to
reduce the feelings of isolation that they may otherwise have and provides
a much-needed psychological support network.
The community centre is where the organisation is based, a couple of
hundred metres away from the Tongxin school on the outskirts of Beijing.
It hosts a museum, a cinema, a library, a theatre (Fig. 3.2), and an open
area for recreation. All of the functions of the centre, including the salaries
of the leaders and paid employees, are funded primarily by Oxfam Hong
Kong. Across the road from the community centre is another compound
where the key staff of the organisation live. After work and on weekends,
and especially when a film or theatre production is being staged, the centre
serves as a gathering place for locally-resident migrant workers. The aim is
to provide a space for the migrant workers to relax in and feel ownership
of (since they feel highly unwelcome in many other public spaces of the
city) and to promote a common identity among them. The community
life that the centre fosters feeds into the most immediate organisational
objective—education. Education, in the broadest sense, has long been
seen as elemental to creating citizens out of a passive and/or an ignorant
populace.
Education and Citizenship
The poem “My Child, I am Sorry”—said to be written by a rural migrant
mother living in Beijing without the right hukou—speaks directly to the
links between education and citizenship. The distraught mother equates
urban citizenship with national citizenship: she feels that only urban citi-
zens can really claim to belong to the nation, and her family’s lack of
Fig. 3.2 The New Workers’ Theatre in Picun Village. Photograph © Tom Cliff
2013
belonging manifests in the denial of her child’s rights to elementary edu-

cation. For her family and millions like them, social mobility is severely
constrained because educational level is both cause and effect in the life
course: parental social status affects educational level, and educational
level influences attained social status. Formal education therefore also
impacts directly on both material (socio-economic) and cultural survival.
My child
I am sorry
Looking at your inquisitive eyes
I am disheartened and ashamed …
How do I dare tell you
Tell you that this city won’t let you to go to school
What kind of scene is this?
What should I do?
I have been choking on my words for days
How do I explain to you,
Explain that this country is not ours
Or rather, that we are not of this country …
Excerpt from the poem “My Child, I am Sorry” (emphasis added)13
In TH Marshall’s taxonomy of citizenship, basic formal education—

schooling—is a social right of citizenship, but it is also a way of enhancing
or discouraging particular qualities in the citizenry. “The education of
children has a direct bearing on citizenship, and, when the state guaran-
tees that all children shall be educated, it has the requirements and the
nature of citizenship definitely in mind. It is trying to stimulate the growth
of citizens in the making,” wrote Marshall in 1950.14 From the perspective
of the state, education raises the literacy and skills base of the population,
who are then more able to contribute to building the nation (economi-
cally), but also better equipped to successfully make claims on the system.
Thus, education in late nineteenth-century China “served simultaneously
to reinforce and challenge the position of the educated elite.”15 These
historical examples from the developmental period of citizenship demon-
strate that the passive and active conceptions of citizenship that I outlined
earlier interact closely in the realm of formal education. Moreover, books-
and-learning type education almost invariably carries along with it, but can
be distinguished from, a form of pedagogical action that is undertaken
with at least as much vigour outside of the classroom—civic education.
Civic education refers to active tutelage in the rights and duties associ-
ated with membership of a particular political community,16 and thus par-
ticipation in that community. In other words, civic education is about
raising the consciousness of the population. Civic education is purposive,
and hence is not equivalent to socialisation, but the people being “edu-
cated” need not be aware of their participation. Propaganda can be civic
education—the ubiquitous “public good advertisements” (gongyi guang-
gao) of the state media and public spaces in China is one notable form.
Indeed, civic education relies heavily on the mass media for dissemination,
and the mass media have been among the most important tools with
which (new) citizens are “created.”17 The first step of any such civic educa-
tion program is to establish, among the target population, a sense of
belonging to a certain community.18
In twenty-first-century China, all manner of civil society actors, intel-
lectuals, and state agents share the belief that the Chinese people are in
urgent need of civic education. However, the reasons for advocating or
undertaking such civic education differ as much as they did in the
nineteenth century. While some people in China (like Xi Jinping and the
party leadership) go about building the nation by reinforcing the current
state system and centralising control, others (like lawyer and civil rights
activist Xu Zhiyong) wish to build the nation by reinforcing the people’s
will and ability to hold the state to account.19 These two objectives can be
conceived in the abstract as strengthening vertical ties (of belonging in
terms of loyalty) between the people and the state, and strengthening hori-
zontal ties (of belonging in terms of commonality) between different social
groups, respectively.
Commonality among people and between different social groups is the
basis for contesting the terms of citizenship, both directly and indirectly.
Ivan Francescini notes how early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) labour
“agitators” did not raise the idea of proletarian revolution with the work-
ers who they sought to mobilise, because “they would have been fright-
ened away.” Instead, organisers sought first to build close personal
ties—commonality—with the workers.20 Education in Communist ideol-
ogy, recruitment to unions, and direct action followed.21 Non-cohesive
communities are unlikely to initiate horizontal self-help (meaning mutual
assistance) actions; social cohesion is a necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for indirectly contesting the state terms of citizenship. Self-help can
lead to some degree of self-reliance, and communities that do not rely on
the state for their own survival are better-equipped to resist state attempts
at social mobilisation and social control.22
Educating an Imagined Political Group for Survival

Spiritual Home engages in education on at least three distinct levels—for-
mal education at the local level, and civic education at both the local and
national levels. Their formal education activities include the migrant chil-
drens’ primary school and “Workers’ University,” as well as occasional
information sessions directed at migrant workers already living in the local
area. In addition to building technical proficiency (formal education), all
of these activities aim to shape a particular consciousness (civic education).
Nationally, civic education is pursued through the regular and extensive
musical tours that Spiritual Home’s band makes of migrant workplaces
across China. Music and performance, always with a political message,
form the core of the NGO’s activities. The two main elements of Spiritual
Home’s civic education activities are promoting group unity and reorient-
ing cultural practices.
Based locally, but drawing students from across its network of “part-
ner” NGOs, Workers’ University makes civic education part of the for-
mal educational curriculum. Sun Heng hopes to educate young rural
migrant workers to become particular types of citizen, such as labour
NGO workers and factory floor organisers, by instilling in them a sense

that they are entitled to certain rights and that “unity is strength.”
Workers’ University was set up in 2009 and is located in an area where
there are very few migrant workers, well outside Beijing, in an attempt
to avoid political pressure. Sun Heng told me that they decided to set it
up “because the young workers can’t and don’t want to go back to the
country. 100 villages disappear in China each day.”23 “This is a social
problem,” he went on, “these young people have no job opportunities
[and] have lost hope in life.” Sun Heng then slipped into the discourse
of nation-building through popular education that is so often employed
by those who want to make citizens of others:24
Now, China has 100 million of these young people between 18 and 25. If a
country has so many young people who have lost hope, how can this coun-
try develop? … We set up Workers’ University with the idea that it would be
a social support structure, and to give them an opportunity to study.
Secondly, we hope that it will make them unite—like the workers at
Honda, who go on strike and negotiate with their employers. The Foxconn
workers don’t do this—they just lose hope and commit suicide. [To be able
to unite], they need to change their way of thinking; workers need to change
how they look at society. This is the message of Workers’ University.
At present, the extent to which Workers’ University succeeds in cre-

ating new citizens is at best limited. Graduates do not go out into the
world with great confidence or technical skills that mark them out from
others. They learn very basic computing and administrative skills from
teachers who are barely older or more educated than themselves. They
spend a great deal of time socialising and being socialised—for example,
playing primary school-type games that promote cooperation. They are
treated, and often act, like small children. About 50% of the graduates
become staff members of one or other of the labour NGOs in Spiritual
Home’s nationwide network. Sun Heng insisted that because Workers’
University does not organise workers to go on strike and is a small
operation, it is not politically sensitive. Beijing municipal government
officials interviewed in the course of this research did not agree with
this sentiment. The point is, however, that the arena of contestation is
ideational.
Migrant workers are an imagined political group. On the one hand,
they are numerous, relatively young and strong, often with little to lose,
and concentrated in urban centres that are key to the political and eco-
nomic functioning of the country. Labour movements have been
instrumental in driving many of the most significant socio-political trans-
formations of the past two centuries in Europe, Russia, and China. The
CCP itself built its early power base among urban workers.25 This combi-
nation of factors has caused many observers and activists to pin a great deal
of hope on Chinese migrant workers becoming a force for positive socio-
political change.26 For their part, the current leaders of China are wary of
any form of organised social group that could pose a challenge to their
rule. And perhaps there is something especially fearful in the thought of
having their legitimacy questioned by the very proletariat that they long
claimed to be the basis of their legitimacy.
On the other hand, labour mobilisation is not easy to do, rarely suc-
cessful, and (to date) never sustained. Migrant labour is not a signifi-
cant social and political force in China at present because it is highly
fragmented. Veteran scholars of labour activism in China, CK Lee and
Yuan Shen, argued convincingly that Chinese labour organisations’
focus on asserting workers’ individual rights, rather than their collec-
tive rights, undermines workers’ solidarity.27 Individual rights covered
under Chinese labour law include the right to compensation for work
injury, pension contributions made by the employer, and certain mini-
mum working conditions; in Marshall’s terms, these are elements of
social citizenship. Collective rights—the rights of civil citizenship—are
not inscribed in Chinese law. Collective rights include the right to
form unions, the right to bargain collectively with employers and the
state, and the right to strike.28 Individual rights claims operate on an
exclusive vertical vector. Collective rights claims also operate on a ver-
tical vector, but not an exclusive one, because they are underpinned by
a horizontal sense of commonality among the claimants. Lee and Shen
show that Chinese labour NGOs’ practice of referring only to the
existing and individualistic legal framework discursively affirms the
vertical relationship between individual and state. Horizontal ties
among workers and between groups of workers remain weak.29 Labour
activism in China is high-risk, and high-risk activism is a “strong tie”
phenomenon.30 Nevertheless, the potential socio- political power of
this imagined political group—Chinese rural migrant labourers—cre-
ates hope in some and anxiety in others, and actual or impending con-
flict between them.
Living Politics on the Edge of Contention

In and around the community centre and the Tongxin school, people
quietly live politics in their practice of everyday life. While many of the
activities around Spiritual Home—like the museum, Workers’ University,
and the musical tours—have an explicit political edge, others are banal.
Migrants setting up their own services, playing ping-pong, and sewing
together may be odious to the authorities, but these activities are not
directly contentious. The aim of all this, according to Sun Heng, is to
reorient individual and small group cultural practices, and hence raise or
change consciousness in the wider society.
The consciousness that we refer to is an individual’s holistic developmental

consciousness (yi ge ren de quanmian fazhan yishi). This consciousness is a
lifestyle consciousness, it is about how to change oneself. This is something
that we are able to do. Changing society is very difficult. If I want to change
you, it’s very difficult. But I can change myself, and through changing
myself I can influence other people.
Sun Heng described the lifestyle elements that I witnessed over three
months of fieldwork at the NGO:
For example, we can sing our own songs, we can have our own new way of
living—here, we have a collective lifestyle. We can change things starting
from ourselves—like setting up a school for migrant children, opening a
second hand shop for affordable clothing, and establishing a community
union. I think that these are all ways of changing oneself.
On a national level, Spiritual Home is trying to raise the collective con-

dition of migrant workers by reorienting their aspirations. The leader of
the community union, Wang Dezhi, lamented that workers and labour
activists have been ineffective at resisting repression. He said:
On entering the city, the first lesson is that there is no place for you, because
you are a migrant. You are barely a second-class citizen. No educational
facilities, bad labour conditions, and so on. Some workers stand up and
fight, but they only fight for themselves. Some labour activists stand up and
fight, but they achieve little.
I think the reason for this is that the culture of the society, along with the
workers’ culture, is not created by us, but by those who have money and
power. The rich and powerful use their resources to create this culture and
exert it upon the workers. Internalising this, the workers long for urban
lives, and are ready to work longer and harder to achieve their urban dreams.
This culture is poison. It undermines the workers’ solidarity.31
Showing me around their facilities, Sun Heng expressed a similar antip-

athy to the mainstream culture of urban China, in even more strident
terms. He criticised rural migrant workers who strive to become like full
urban residents: “There are 130 million of us—we can’t all be like that! Is
just not possible!” The political and strategic stance he was taking was
formed in collaboration with key intellectuals who are associated with the
movement known as the “New Left.”32 These intellectuals have had a
significant influence on the activities, ideological direction, and survival
strategies of Spiritual Home. Sun Heng’s point was that, being deprived
of “urban citizenship,” China’s rural migrant workers in China today—a
group that he refers to as “New Workers”—need to create a new idea of
citizenship.
In the introduction to a volume of essays titled New Workers in China:
Adrift and Ascending,33 New Leftist scholar Lü Tu explains that “new citi-
zenship” is distinct from the “old citizenship,” which, in the socialist era,
was held by the urban workers or those working in state-owned enter-
prises. Following marketisation and privatisation, the old working class has
demised. New citizenship is associated with the New Workers, whose class
formation is a result of capitalist globalisation. New citizenship does not
mean the New Workers should act as the old working class, who were
cooperative under the “organized dependency” labour regime.34 Instead,
new citizenship awakens class consciousness among the most vigorous
workers to challenge the political economy of capitalist globalisation.
Lü Tu holds that independent and self-organised workers’ organisa-
tions like Spiritual Home and other labour NGOs play an essential role in
educating and mobilising the New Workers. In order to unite the New
Workers, the labour activists in China and the world need to build up a
new culture, and thus a new sense of community, or “we-feeling,” among
the workers. Wang Dezhi continued:
Faced with this, I say that we must change the way we think. We must have
our own culture. With our culture, we can seize the power of expression
from the hands of capital and the state. This power of expression doesn’t
belong to anyone. But, it is currently in the hands of the rich and powerful,
and they don’t want to give the workers any chance. Once we have our cul-
ture, we will unite and take the power back.
Cultural Survival Strategies

Spiritual Home’s cultural survival strategies reflect its primary ideological
and aesthetic influences—the international labour movement, the New
Left in China, and the state itself.
The Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers aims to record the
history and culture of China’s “New Workers” from their own perspective.
Sun Heng explained that:
This is the first museum to record New Workers’ history. Of course, there are
museums set up by the authorities, but we don’t identify with (rentong) these
because they don’t look at history from workers’ position, they look at it from
the government’s position, or from the position of economic development.
If a person does not have their own history, this person is unable to enter
history. They will be forgotten by people, and the contributions that they
make will not be seen by people.
We rarely hear about China’s New Workers—their lives, their thoughts
and perspectives, their futures—nobody takes any notice. I am one of these
workers. This is our own thing. If the government will not do it, and other
people don’t do it, then we will do it. So this is the thought behind the
museum. The same applies to my motive for singing for the workers.
The museum is explicitly pedagogical. It does not, however, simply

involve “those who know” telling something to “those who do not know.”
Rural migrant workers are the producers of the knowledge showcased in
the museum. Many of the stories being told by the museum would not be
new to labour scholars, but they are important stories, and are told in
striking ways: graphic X-rays of severed fingers; a claustrophobic model of
a typical room (6 m2) that would house a migrant family of two or three
people; a collage of photographs by migrant workers of their urban envi-
ronment, taken within a given radius of their living quarters. Perhaps most
overtly contentious is a display of official eviction notices sent to the
Tongxin school through late 2011 and 2012, which accompanies photo-
graphs of other migrant schools during and after demolition by the
authorities. This is a very direct reference to the tenuous existence of such
schools and the migrant populations that they serve. With this display,
Spiritual Home thumbs its nose at the city and city district governments
who sought unsuccessfully to close it down. (I outline this incident at the
end of this chapter.) The way in which New Workers represent their own
culture and history, and thus teach “up” to relatively privileged groups as
well as “across” to other New Workers is consistent with the New Left
scholars’ notion of class renewal.
The musical and cultural activities of Spiritual Home appear in many
ways to be similar to the mainstream culture that they feel excluded from.
They try to look the same, use similar syntax and discourse (“labour is
glorious”), and even run events in parallel to the mainstream events in
which they see themselves invisible. The classic example of this politico-
aesthetic parallelism is the migrants’ version of the most-watched single
event on Chinese television, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. For Spring
Festival 2012, a number of labour NGOs got together to organise a
Workers’ Spring Festival Gala. The format was exactly the same as the
Spring Festival Gala that it was competing with, with the important differ-
ence that the performers were migrant workers and all of the original
pieces were written by migrant workers. The words of the songs and
sketches reflected the concerns of migrant workers: left behind children,
hard living and working conditions, discrimination from urban residents,
and so on. They told their own story in the mainstream aesthetic lan-
guage. Employees at Spiritual Home explained that, for cultural propa-
ganda to be successful, it needs to be acceptable to the target audience: “It
is no use producing something that carries your message if nobody is will-
ing to watch it or listen to it.”
Far from nobody being willing to watch it, the 2012 Workers’ Spring
Festival Gala attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and was a
resounding success. The success was due to the social networks of the
labour NGOs involved. Each of these organisations has direct and online
contact with a diverse group of migrant workers, who have contact with
other migrant workers, so the information could spread quickly and
widely. The upcoming event also got good coverage in the mainstream
media before being broadcast live on the Internet. As a result, the news of
the Workers’ Gala ranked among the top five on key websites like Tencent-
owned qq.com and Sina.com. After the Gala, public donations to the
Tongxin school increased to almost ten times the level of the previous
year.
Interactions of Survival and Citizenship

Spiritual Home is trying to form a political group constituted of migrant
workers across China. The common consciousness of group unity and a
New Workers’ culture is to hold this group together and enable their
articulation of civil (industrial) rights on a national scale. Such citizenship

is seen as a condition of New Workers’ survival. This big picture, which is
still only an idea, sees citizenship as a means to survival.
At the smallest scale also, Spiritual Home is constituted of the collected
attempts of many individuals to survive. Each participant is involved for
slightly different reasons, but they all seek a better life for themselves.
Some are involved simply because it gives them access to a school for their
kids, a place to sew and meet, some basic training, or a meaningful role to
play in the community. Others dream of being rock stars, stage queens,
technocrats, and leaders of men. Spiritual Home provides a forum for
them to pursue those dreams: they work as volunteers or part-time paid
employees of the community centre, variously organising, leading, and
performing in educational day trips, regular theatrical productions, film
nights, and information sessions. Each of these roles requires and
attracts people with quite different personal characteristics. Given Spiritual
Home’s focus on culture and musical performance, most of the active
workers and regular volunteers over the period that I visited (September
2013–May 2014) were involved in putting on the twice-monthly workers’
performance night.35 One woman in her late 20s had aspirations to be an
arts administrator; she worked as the production manager and was often
one of the MCs on the night itself. A man in his early 30s told me hesi-
tantly that he wanted to sing for a living, and to be able to travel and see
the distant parts of China and the world; he was the other MC, and his
covers of popular rock anthems, replete with arms and fingers outstretched,
were a regular feature on the program. In contrast, the person who was
responsible for giving legal advice was a sombre, even rather despondent,
man who was extremely critical of the frivolity of his younger colleagues.
His despondency was perhaps justified: by the time I met him in September
2013, Spiritual Home was trying to avoid direct conflict with state author-
ity, and was hence advising workers who needed legal assistance to look
elsewhere. For each of these people, their own individual survival interests
led them to be involved in Spiritual Home’s attempt to make Chinese
migrant workers into a viable political force. To the extent that their mes-
sages of unity, cultural pride, and rights defence were sincere, they were
being political.
Sun Heng himself is the paramount example of survival efforts shap-
ing enactments of citizenship. Sun Heng first went to Beijing with a
view to making a living as a musician. It was only when that dream
failed, and he was forced to resort to manual labour to survive, that he
and two colleagues became volunteers at the long-established rural

migrant women’s NGO Dagongmei zhi jia. Through this NGO, they
were introduced in 2001 to the then-small circle of “New Leftists” in
Beijing. Sun Heng shared with the New Left a belief that culture is impor-
tant if you want to renew the working class. In 2002, Sun Heng and his
colleagues set up Spiritual Home, and key New Left figures sat on the
Board of Directors. Through their connections with international agen-
cies such as Oxfam Hong Kong and the Ford Foundation, these New Left
academics organised funding for Spiritual Home. Now in its third incarna-
tion, Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers is the vehicle through which
Sun Heng has pursued, and attained, his dream to be a rock star. His
dream is now for his music and activities to change society. Spiritual
Home’s very existence, therefore, can be seen as a collateral effect of the
initial failure of Sun Heng’s first dream. Sun Heng’s dream influenced his
own personal survival strategy, and this led him to ally with the New Left
to attempt to create citizens of migrant workers.
Sun Heng’s reliance on the New Left scholars to mobilise political and
economic resources brought about a shift in his ideological position.
When he first set up Spiritual Home in 2002, his politics drew on both the
New Left and the liberal “Rightists,”36 and Sun Heng was not entirely
committed to either. But over time his political allegiances shifted towards
the Left, as his connections with those scholars paid the greatest divi-
dends. Political and material survival thus played a central role in shaping
the citizenship articulated by Spiritual Home, and the process that the
NGO and its leaders now advocate to attain it. Moreover, it was Sun
Heng’s connections with the New Left that helped to determine where
Spiritual Home’s branch organisations were set up. Apart from a concen-
tration of either migrant (Suzhou, Shenzhen) or urban industrial (Xi’an)
workers, the place had to have a mature network of left-wing scholars to
provide elite support to the NGO. For people like Sun Heng and organ-
isations like Spiritual Home, survival is the first consideration and the final
word.
The 2012 Attempt to Close Down the School

Spiritual Home’s activities and political importance made it a target. The
village-level authorities had been trying to close down the school since at
least the middle of 2011, but following the success of the 2012 Workers’
Spring Festival Gala, Beijing Municipal Government decided that Spiritual
Home was “a high-ranked potential risk,” and determined to shut down

the school. Lower levels of government effectively got the go-ahead to be
more forthright: officials told the NGO leaders that they had violated the
land use contract, and terminated their leases on the school and commu-
nity centre compounds.
A member of the Social Management Leading Group of the Beijing
Government explained in an interview that Spiritual Home was targeted
because:
1. The NGO has diversified domestic and international sources of

funding. The school is the foundation of the autonomy of the NGO,
so the school has to be dealt with.
2. The NGO has strong international connections.
3. The NGO is influential in civil society.
4. The NGO is becoming more assertive in criticising the government.37
The implicit message from the government was “you cannot mobilize
a lot of people; you cannot form a social coalition,” but it was precisely
the social coalition that saved Spiritual Home and the migrant childrens’
primary school. Spiritual Home organised parents to sign a petition to
the education bureau, and used social media to mobilise the public to
oppose the demolition of the school. Teachers from other schools also
sent their own petitions. The CCTV host Cui Yongyuan organised a peti-
tion that was signed by more than 20 high-profile Leftist scholars and
public figures. When the village government cut off the electricity and
water supply to the school and sent in the bulldozers, urban workers and
university students from central Beijing turned up to blockade the school
and donate cases of bottled water.38 The stand-off lasted four days, and
was the turning point. After 40 days of protest and resistance, Spiritual
Home and its supporters prevailed. Faced with cross-sectoral opposition
to their plans to close the school and the NGO, the Beijing Municipal
Government contacted Spiritual Home to explain that it was “a misun-
derstanding.” The city district government was told to stop trying to
close the school.
The locally-spectacular failure of the village and city district authori-
ties’ attempt to close down the Tongxin school caused loss of face for
the authorities and intensified their resentment towards those involved
with Spiritual Home and the school. The village constructed gates across
key alleyways leading to the school. The gates were painted in exactly
the same blue and white as used by the police, indicating a securitisation
of the area immediately around the school, and enabling the possibility
of isolating the school from the community centre. In the terms of my
foregoing concept essay, this was a signal to the local population that
authority was watching, and hence a demand for attention by that
authority.
The scholars, government officials, and NGO activists who we inter-
viewed for this chapter all asserted that the 2012 attempt to close down
the school was only one battle in an ongoing war. Most observers and
participants were also aware of the inevitable “urban renewal”—demoli-
tion, reconstruction, and gentrification—of this area of outer Beijing. The
whole area is being turned into parkland and gated communities.
Oblique Activism and Political Group Formation

The activities of the people involved with Spiritual Home were politi-
cised by state action against them. Even those activities which might
once have been considered informal life politics, and not directly conten-
tious, were suddenly contentious. Thereafter, informal life politics ceased
to exist.
When it came to the crunch, the government’s attempt to close the
school, the people who could best help Spiritual Home were not the
objects of the NGO’s citizen-making efforts—that is, the many millions of
migrant workers across China. The people in the best position to help
were people on the other side of China’s urban citizenship divide. In the
final, directly contentious, event, Spiritual Home’s long-practised survival
strategy of making a broad social coalition provoked enactments of
citizenship from the various parties of that coalition—elites, urban resi-
dents, students, migrant workers, and activists.
The involvement of many different social groups in the campaign to
defend the Tongxin migrant children’s school was a particularly significant
enactment of citizenship. Many of these people went beyond their natural
loyalty groups to assert migrant children’s right to education, thus
momentarily bringing the various loyalty groups together into a true
“political group” in Yan Fu’s terms. Being willing to expose oneself to
political pressure on others’ behalf demonstrates, at the very least, a com-

mitment to some common ideal. (In this case, it was no coincidence that
this educational ideal was a mainstay of state discourse about its own
achievements and aspirations.) For those most committed to the migrants’
cause, the New Left academics and public figures, equal access to educa-
tion was just one element of a much broader ideological agenda. However,
not all the members of this broad social coalition were fully aware that
they were also defending Spiritual Home’s more explicitly political actions.
Their enactment of citizenship-by-extension-of-citizenship-to-others was,
in effect, support for migrants’ civil rights (the right to form political
groups), not only their social rights (such as the right to schooling), and
hence of greater significance than some members of the social coalition
themselves realised.
A complex and yet constant relationship exists between survival and
citizenship. Individual and collective drives to survive—in cultural, eco-
nomic, and psychological terms—led to conscious efforts to enact citizen-
ship or attempts to create citizens of others. These actions themselves put
the migrant activists of Spiritual Home at political risk, and they responded
by broadening their social base (itself a survival action). When the indirect
contention turned to direct contention, threatening the NGO’s survival,
members of that “social coalition” defended the school, and in doing so
created an enlarged political group. Once survival was no longer under
immediate threat, this political group once again ceased to exist. Citizenship
(as a state of being) is often transient, and survival is always “for-now.”
Notes
1. The New Workers Art Troupe band members are the founders and leaders
of the NGO “Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers,” the focus of this
chapter.
2. Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant
Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 275.
3. NET Bible, Matthew 4, The Temptation of Jesus, 2016, Biblical Studies
Press, accessed April 30, 2016, http://biblehub.com/net/matthew/4.
htm
4. See, inter alia, Kam Wing Chan and Li Zhang, “The Hukou System and
Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes,” The China
Quarterly, Vol. 160, December (1999); Alan Smart and Josephine Smart,
“Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform Urban/Rural Status, and Exclusion in
China,” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 33 (2001); Li Zhang,

“Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China,” Public Culture
Vol. 14, No. 2 (2002); C. Cindy Fan, “The Elite, the Natives, and the
Outsiders: Migration and Labor Market Segmentation in Urban China,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 92, No. 1 (2002);
Bingqin Li, “Floating Population or Urban Citizens? Status, Social
Provision and Circumstances of Rural–Urban Migrants in China,” Social
Policy and Administration, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2006). More recent works
include Sarah Swider, “Reshaping China’s Urban Citizenship: Street
Vendors, Chengguan and Struggles over the Right to the City,” Critical
Sociology (2014); Li Miao, Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in
China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (New York: Routledge, 2015).
5. Kam Wing Chan, in particular, has done extensive work on the hukou sys-
tem. See, among many others, Kam Wing Chan, Cities with Invisible Walls:
Reinterpreting Urbanization in post-1949 China (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Kam Wing Chan, “The Global Financial Crisis
and Migrant Workers in China: ‘There is No Future as a Labourer;
Returning to the Village has No Meaning’,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2010); Kam Wing Chan,
“The Household Registration System and Migrant Labour in China:
Notes on a Debate,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 36, No. 2
(2010). For background, see Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, “The
Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System,” The China
Quarterly, No. 139 (1994), 644.
6. See T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, ed. Tom Bottomore
(London: Pluto Press, 1992 [1950]).
7. See Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal
of Speech, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2004); James Holston, Insurgent citizenship:
Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); Rivke Jaffe, “The Hybrid State: Crime and
Citizenship in Urban Jamaica,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 40, No. 4
(2013).
8. Peter G. Zarrow, “Citizenship in China and the West,” in Joshua A. Fogel
and Peter G. Zarrow (eds), Imagining the people: Chinese intellectuals and
the concept of citizenship, 1890–1920 (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1997), 7.
9. See, inter alia, Ralph Harrington, Aristotle and Citizenship: The
Responsibilities of the Citizen in the Politics 2005, accessed November
16, 2015, http://www.artificialhorizon.org/essays/pdf/aristotle.pdf;
Eduard Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, Vol. II (London:
Longmans, Green & co, 1897), 233–4; Ernest Barker [trans.], Aristotle:
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 318.
10. Zehua Liu and Jianqing Liu, “Civic Associations, Political Parties, and the
Cultivation of Citizenship Consciousness in Modern China,” in Joshua
A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (eds), Imagining the people: Chinese intel-
lectuals and the concept of citizenship, 1890–1920 (Armonk, NY: ME
Sharpe, 1997), 42.
11. The quality of education—in terms of how good it is, but also in terms of
what it is and what sort of citizen it teaches the child to be—differs from
place to place. Children in urban areas are, relatively speaking, encouraged
to be creative and individual, while rural schools focus almost exclusively
on rigid rote learning in preparation for exams. See Andrew Kipnis, “The
Disturbing Educational Discipline of ‘Peasants’,” The China Journal, Vol.
46 (2001); Andrew Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics,
and Schooling in China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
12. Sun Heng, Lyrics: Tianxia dagong shi yi jia (All Workers are One Family),
accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.kuwo.cn/yinyue/3970588/
13. Peng Yuanwen, “Haizi, duibuqi” (“My Child, I am Sorry”), August 8,
2014, accessed November 22, 2014, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/
08/migrant-mothers-poem-child-sorry/
14. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 16.
15. Zarrow, “Citizenship in China and the West,” 5.
16. The concept of “political community” can be traced back to the earliest
lines of Aristotle’s Politics (Book I, chapter 1). See Christopher Shields
(ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
201. For a translation, see Barker, Aristotle: Politics.
17. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 25; Zarrow, “Citizenship in China
and the West,” 23.
18. Nationalistic discourses are the largest of “large-scale stories” in this
respect. Edward Bruner describes Abrahams’ concept of “large-scale sto-
ries” as “the dominant narratives of particular historical eras, in the sense
that during these periods they were most frequently told, served as guiding
paradigms or metaphors, were the accepted wisdom of that time, and
tended to be taken for granted.” See Edward Bruner, “Experience and Its
Expressions,” in Victor Turner and Edward M Bruner (eds), The
Anthropology of Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 18.
19. See Susan Trevaskas and Elisa Nesossi, “The Sword of Discipline and
the Dagger of Justice,” in Geremie R. Barmé, Jeremy Goldkorn and
Linda Jaivin (eds), Shared Destiny: China Story Yearbook 2014 (Canberra,
Australia: Australian National University Press, 2015), 270–83;
Zhiyong Xu, A Free Soul Imprisoned: Citizen Xu Zhiyong’s Statement for
Second-Instance Trial, April 2, 2014, Human Rights in China, accessed
November 9, 2015, http://www.hrichina.org/en/citizens-square/
free-soul-imprisoned-citizen-xu-zhiyongs-statement-second-instance-trial
20. The quote comes from Zhang Guotao, in Ivan Franceschini, “Labour
NGOs in China: A Real Force for Political Change?,” The China Quarterly,
Vol. 218 (2014), 474.
21. Tony Saich, The Chinese Communist Party during the Era of the Comintern
(1919–1943), accessed December 1, 2016, https://www.hks.harvard.
edu/fs/asaich/chinese-communisty-party-during-comintern.pdf
22. Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-society Relations and
State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988). See also Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The
Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
23. Sun Heng was not exaggerating. A report by Tianjin University put the
figure at a staggering 300 villages per day average between the year 2000
and the year 2010. A significant proportion of the villages represented by
the Tianjin University figure have disappeared only in an administrative
sense, but that still leaves plenty of scope for village destruction, relocation,
and desertion. On village loss, see Ian Johnson, In China, ‘Once the Villages
Are Gone, the Culture Is Gone’, February 1, 2014, New York Times,
accessed February 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/
world/asia/once-the-villages-are-gone-the-culture-is-gone.html. On
Premier Li Keqiang’s urbanisation drive, see Ian Johnson, Pitfalls Abound
in China’s Push From Farm to City, July 13, 2013, accessed July 15, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/world/asia/pitfalls-abound-in-
chinas-push-from-farm-to-city.html; Tom Holland, China’s Urbanisation
Push Runs into Trouble Before its Start, 2013, South China Morning Post,
accessed August 16, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/business/article/
1296548/tomchinas-urbanisation-push-runs-trouble-its-start
24. The late Qing-era reformer Liang Qichao argued that “the public good
involved state building, which in turn required the leadership of a progres-
sive elite to usher the masses out of ignorance and superstition, to educate
them in citizenship.” Writing half a century later in the United Kingdom,
TH Marshall concluded that formal education is “a personal right com-
bined with a public duty to exercise the right,” and argued that “the duty
to improve and civilize oneself is … a social duty, and not merely a personal
one, because the social health of a society depends upon the civilisation of
its members.” See Zarrow, “Citizenship in China and the West,” 17;
Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, 16.
25. Franceschini, “Labour NGOs in China: A Real Force For Political
Change?.”
26. Ching Kwan Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent
Labor Unrest in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 75, No. 2
(2016).
27. Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor

Unrest in China.”; Ching Kwan Lee and Yuan Shen, “The Anti-Solidarity
Machine?: Labor Nongovernmental Organizations in China,” From Iron
Rice Bowl to Informalization (Cornell University Press, 2011).
28. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class.
29. Lee and Shen, “The Anti-Solidarity Machine?: Labor Nongovernmental
Organizations in China.”
30. Doug McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of
Freedom Summer,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 92, No. 1 (1986).
31. A comparable situation is described in Yonjae Paik’s work on the Korean
labour movement of the 1970s: the “industrial missionaries” (Christian
labour organisers) were frustrated with the desire among female factory
workers to accumulate brand-name goods and emulate the elite popula-
tion, who the organisers considered workers’ structural enemies. See Yon
Jae Paik, “Informal Life Politics in the Female Workers’ Struggles in South
Korea: 1970–1979” Informal Life Politics Workshop, March 2014
(Maloney’s Beach: 2014).
32. The New Left emerged in the mid-1990s, a loose group of intellectuals
concerned with the “loss of humanistic spirit” that came along with China’s
economic reforms. They criticised the increasing social stratification, cor-
ruption, and marginalisation of peasants and workers, using ideas adopted
and adapted from the West—including neo-Marxism, post-colonialism,
post-structuralism, and cultural studies. The New Left does not generally
oppose the continuation of one-party rule by the CCP, but they advocate
“economic democracy” within production units, to give workers a greater
say, combined with state-financed welfare schemes to counteract the nega-
tive effects of economic (neo-)liberalisation. See Merle Goldman, Political
Rights in Post-Mao China (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies,
2007), 29–34.
33. Lü Tu (ed), Zhongguo xin gongren: mishi yu jueqi (New Workers in China:
Adrift and Ascending) (Beijing: Falü Chubanshe (Legal Press), 2012).
34. For “organized dependency,” see Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-
Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986).
35. Although the idea was for the workers themselves to be up on stage, most
of them preferred to watch, and the task of entertaining fell to the staff of
Spiritual Home.
36. “Rightists” or “liberals” would like to get rid of the CCP, or at least change
the structure of the political system.
37. “The Changing State-NGO Relations and Development of Social Media
Strategies of Labor NGOs,” Chinese Government Civil Society Research
Agency ed., Vol. 33 (2012).
38. The urban workers could not give money donations because the school is
not registered as a school, it is registered under Spiritual Home, which is
registered as a profit-making business with the Industrial and Commercial
Bureau. Only non-profit organisations can accept donations, so taking
money would have given the government another excuse to shut them
down.
Tom Cliff is an economic anthropologist and research fellow at the Australian

National University. His current research examines the role of informal kin and
business network institutions in responding to economic uncertainty and the age-
ing population in China. Tom has conducted long-term fieldwork in Xinjiang, and
is the author of Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang (Chicago 2016).
Kan Wang is an assistant professor at the China University of Labor Relations in

Beijing, and an associate editor of the journal Employee Relations (U.K.). He was
China Programme Officer of Oxfam, and currently serves on the board of direc-
tors of a labour NGO in China. His research interests include labour relations,
labour law, collective action, and civil society.
CHAPTER 4
Self-Help Is Political: How Organic Farming

Creates an Autonomous Space Within
the South Korean Nation State
Yon Jae Paik
While a nation state protects its people from other nation states, what
protects the people from their own nation state? In raising this question,
I have in mind contemporary East Asian societies where rivalry among
nation states is used to justify the people’s sacrifices for the nation. I
highlight the fact that the East Asian nation states have repressed the
spontaneous creation of grassroots communities, and I argue that
building small-scale self-help communities is the key for people to regain
autonomy and cope with threats caused by national politics. I illustrate
this with the case of the organic farming movement in South Korea.
The practice of communal self-help in South Korea’s organic farming
movement started in 1976 with the creation of Chŏngnonghoe, an
association of “righteous farmers.” Since its beginning under the
military government of the 1970s, the organic farming movement has
been an effort to seek rural autonomy—an ideal conceived by Christian
nationalists in the colonial period of the 1920s. The 1920s Christian
nationalism combined with the Danish model of rural movement based
on cooperatives and adult education provided the early organic farmers
with an alternative path of modernisation to deviate from the
government’s state-oriented model. In this way, the movement aimed to
create a communal space autonomous from the state’s rural control.
Y.J. Paik (*)

Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

58 Y.J. PAIK
The Tradition of “Rich Country and Strong

Military” in East Asian Politics
The example of self-help politics which we shall explore in this chapter has
taken shape against the background of a distinctive pattern of the state-
centred development. Since the late nineteenth century, the principle of
“rich country and strong military” (hereafter, RCSM)1 has been the key
rationale of nation-building in East Asia, which has allowed states such as
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and more recently, China, to effectively
mobilise their populations. The combination of national defense and eco-
nomic development is an essential element in explanations of the East
Asian political economy and has been widely discussed in the East Asian
“developmental state” literature.2 Focusing on Japan as the forerunner,
Chalmers Johnson characterises the developmental state as a form of war-
time social mobilisation “that never demobilised during the peacetime.”3
Taking a historical perspective, Carter Eckert shows that the social mobili-
sation that accompanied South Korea’s industrialisation under Park Chung
Hee in the 1970s originated in Imperial Japan’s total war system of the
1930s.4
The principle of RCSM created a system where it was legitimate for a
nation state to demand individual people’s sacrifice of their health, wealth,
and well-being in the national interest. The state regards the people, as a
nation, as an “end” but individual people as a “means,” thus systematically
creating those whom the Japanese social activist Tanaka Shō zō called
“expendable people” subject to “untimely death.”5 The rapid economic
growth of East Asian countries in the post-war period cannot be explained
without the ethos of RCSM that allowed the state to swiftly implement
development policies without properly compensating people for their sac-
rifices—for example, residents who were evicted from their homes when
their land was expropriated to build highways and airports, factory work-
ers who were forced to endure low wages and inhumane working condi-
tions, farmers who were poisoned by pesticides to produce more and
cheaper farm products, and fishermen who lost their fisheries due to the
government’s neglect of industrial pollution.6 All of these people became
subject to what we may call “the politics of untimely death.”
In contemporary East Asian countries, the principle of RCSM has been
weakened, but still remains significant. Although the model of state-led
economic development has more or less disappeared,7 continuing geopo-
litical tensions among countries keep economic nationalism strong and
maintain competition among states to protect their national interests.8
SELF-HELP IS POLITICAL: HOW ORGANIC FARMING CREATES… 59
Domestically, the institutions and informal practices that became

entrenched during the developmental state period are still in place in the
government and the economy.9 While economic nationalism upholds eco-
nomic growth as a national imperative, the state’s ongoing neglect of
people’s welfare, the environment, and other human rights issues amplifies
the detrimental effects of economic globalisation.
National Politics Versus Communal Politics

The term “politics of untimely death” does not solely pertain to cases
where the state’s direct actions threaten people’s livelihoods, but also
highlights the competitive relationship between small communities and
the capitalist nation-state system. In other words, the state becomes
responsible for crises of people’s livelihood because the nation-state sys-
tem constantly and systematically represses and restricts the autonomy of
small communities.10
The state’s restrictions on people’s autonomy in making communal
efforts to support their livelihood can be explained by using Karatani
Kojin’s concept of mode of exchange. According to Karatani, while each
social formation has its own dominant mode of exchange, modern soci-
ety—the capitalist nation state—can be defined by the complementary
union of three modes of exchange.11 Karatani explains this triple mode
of exchange as the culmination of a historical process that began with
plunder and redistribution, the mode of feudalism and absolute monar-
chies. In principle, the state plundered the people within its territory
(e.g. by exacting levies), but it also had to redistribute some of the
wealth to maintain the people’s capacity to produce. The second mode,
commodity exchange, emerged from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
onwards through the rise of capitalism and its transformed relationship
with the state. It was based on mutual consent, but embodied profound
inequalities. A third mode of exchange, expanded reciprocity, implies
both consent and equality. The concept of expanded reciprocity became
an important ideal from the French Revolution onwards in Europe. It
expands the forms of reciprocal exchange which traditionally exist in
many small, non-state communities to the entire nation.12 In this his-
torical process, the capitalist nation state regulated communal auton-
omy by enforcing its mode of exchange and the norms and values
embedded in it.13 Hence, reciprocity within a community is replaced by
reciprocity within a nation—an imagined community tied to imagined
relationships.14
60 Y.J. PAIK
In the East Asian historical context, where the state’s social mobilisa-
tion has been strong, the mode of exchange highlights the underlying
conflict between small communities and the capitalist nation state in both
normative (e.g. norms and values) and institutional (e.g. economic and
legal) spheres. Furthermore, the trajectory Karatani describes of each
social formation and its dominant mode of exchange corresponds to the
trajectory of the East Asian nation-building process, in which the nation
states formed on the basis of RCSM and developed their national econo-
mies by actively tapping into the global capitalist market.
Self-Help as Politics: The Making of Communal

Autonomy
If the restriction of local autonomy is inherent in the politics of RCSM,
how can people regain local autonomy and save themselves? According to
conventional views of politics, regaining local autonomy involves a certain
kind of tug-of-war between the state and people who engage in organised
social movements or public protests.15 However, Tessa Morris-Suzuki sug-
gests a different kind of politics using the concept of non-governmental
politics. In contrast to governmental politics, where the main purpose is to
influence the government machinery to achieve social change, in non-
governmental politics, people bring about social changes through self-
help activities without relying on the government.16
When the goal of social change is to protect one’s own livelihood, self-
help can create an autonomous space for such change. Karatani’s idea that
a mode of exchange has the power to bring about changes to the norms
and values within a society17 suggests that creating a communal self-help
community means not only replacing the dominant mode of exchange,
but also developing alternative norms and values embedded in the prac-
tices of economic exchange. Such a community can be understood as a
form of Karatani’s “association”—a term that he derived from Marx’s and
Proudhon’s “association” as a hypothetical social formation counteractive
to a capitalist nation state, which can only appear “after a society once
passes through the capitalist market economy.”18 Unlike James Scott’s
“moral economy”19 or Pierre Clastres’ “society against the state,”20 which
also address the competition between small communities and a nation
state, the norms and values of Karatani’s association do not necessarily aim
to restore traditional communities. Instead, what an association pursues is
an alternative modern society that corrects the faults of the capitalist
nation-state system.
Communal self-help is not overtly political, as its primary goal does not
lie in changing the government. However, self-help communities based
on communal reciprocity can create a space that is autonomous (or partly
autonomous) from the capitalist nation state. In the context of the politics
of RCSM in East Asian countries, where the state regards people as a
means to build the nation’s prosperity, a self-help community is a space of
alternative politics where people can protect their livelihood from the
state’s constant enforcement of the national (and capitalist) norms.
The Significance of Self-Help Politics

Communal self-help is not new, but recognising self-help politics demands
of us that we broaden our political imagination beyond the business of
government. While the literature on social movements and civil society is
mostly concerned with people’s activities to change the government,21
from the people’s point of view, having recourse to the state is only one of
the many ways that they might choose to resolve the challenges of liveli-
hood. The reasons people choose not to engage in governmental politics
have as much political significance as the reasons they do choose to do so.
Self-help politics becomes important for people when national politics
are less relevant in solving the problems of livelihood. When the politics of
RCSM is in place, the autonomy of small communities continues to be
suppressed even when organised movements or public protests are suc-
cessful. Struggles against the government may create a legitimate space in
national politics; however, such social movements cannot break the state’s
monopoly as the sole legitimate polity. Therefore, the domination of the
nation state and the capitalist market over people remains intact regardless
of the outcome of national politics. Furthermore, economic globalisation
intensifies the competition among nation states over economic growth,
which does not necessarily improve people’s welfare.22 Competitive rela-
tionships among nation states in the global capitalist market feed the poli-
tics of RCSM, making it harder for any one nation state to discard such
politics.23
The more critical limitation of governmental politics is that it has very
little to offer to those people who face the imminent threat of unnatural
death. Generally, solving a problem through bringing change to the
government is prohibitively unaffordable for people whose everyday life is
precarious. Experience shows, for example, that even when protests
against environmental crimes or the use of coercive state power succeed in
gaining public support, it can take several decades to remedy the problem.
62 Y.J. PAIK
Moreover, organising a campaign to engage in governmental politics

requires political and economic resources to run the organisation; this
may require alliances with local or outside elites, but support from elites is
not always available. And even when a group of elites supports a move-
ment, it is not rare to witness the division of elite activists and local people
(as well as among the local people themselves) in setting priorities for the
movement’s goals.
Overall, these limits of governmental politics under the politics of
RCSM make non-governmental politics important as a means of sur-
vival for people at risk. More specifically, small and self-help communi-
ties provide more direct aid when little can be expected from the
government or market transactions.24 The self-help form can be advan-
tageous, because it can minimise organisational costs by relying on small
and informal networks based on personal acquaintance. A dearth of
resources can be overcome by sharing the responsibilities of leadership
and relying on members’ voluntary cooperation based on reciprocity.
Reciprocity among members is encouraged by the moral ethos of mutual
help rather than by calls for collective solidarity. Also, less-organised
structures are less visible to the government’s monitoring. This is par-
ticularly important under an authoritarian regime where people try to
create a politically autonomous space by focusing on ostensibly apoliti-
cal economic activities.
In this context, self-help politics is a process of reducing people’s depen-
dence for their livelihood on the government and the market, and, more
importantly, of carving out people’s political autonomy, which is confined
in representative politics. Self-help politics speaks for the g rowing popula-
tion who already manage their livelihood by themselves through collective
efforts, and it suggests that building a community based on reciprocity can
be a solution to solve problems of livelihood within the capitalist nation-state
system. In the following section, I introduce the case of South Korea’s
organic farming movement as a practice of communal self-help that cre-
ated a rural space autonomous from the state’s nationalism and the state-
controlled economy. The movement started in 1976 with the creation of
Chŏngnonghoe, an association of Christian farmers who have spread
organic farming following their Christian faith. I first discuss the founding
of Chŏngnonghoe, then explore the genealogy of Chŏngnonghoe’s ideal
of organic farming, showing how this represents the tradition of a commu-
nity-based social movement that sought an alternative space autonomous
from the state. This tradition was not confined to South Korea, but rather
developed within a transnational network where people sought similar
communal autonomy.
Chŏngnonghoe and the Beginning of the Organic

Farming Movement
The organic farming movement in South Korea started in January 1976 in
the small suburban town of Puch’ŏn with the creation of Chŏngnonghoe
(正農會, which means “the association of righteous farming”). The cre-
ation of Chŏngnonghoe was directly influenced by the visit of a Japanese
educator, evangelist, and farmer, Kotani Junichi, who had founded an
organic farming organisation, Ainō kai,25 and an agricultural school, Ainō
Agricultural High School in Japan.26 One year before (in 1975), Kotani
had been invited to South Korea by a Korean Christian farmer and evan-
gelist, Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, to preach about the importance of organic farm-
ing to South Korean farmers. Kotani travelled around the Korean
countryside for ten days, warning Korean farmers against chemical farm-
ing, specifically the use of pesticides. In front of the congregation, Kotani
started his sermons with a sincere apology from his Christian conscience
for what Japan had done to Korea during its era of colonial rule over the
Korean Peninsula (1910–1945). He then went on to tell them that his
guilty conscience would be lightened if Korean farmers stopped chemical
farming and escaped from the influence of Japanese farming. Specifically,
using Japanese cases as an illustration, he explained the harm caused by
chemical pesticides and cautioned that using pesticides was an act of indi-
rect murder, and therefore, against God’s will. Shocked by the facts and
shamed by their religious conscience, a group of the Korean farmers
decided to create Chŏngnonghoe and to start the organic farming
movement.
A photo taken on the day of Chŏngnonghoe’s inauguration in 1976
shows the faces of 43 members, mostly male. They were Christian farmers
from various Protestant sects, who had attended or heard about Kotani’s
sermons in 1975. They mostly owned small- or medium-size farms in dif-
ferent parts of Korea, growing various crops such as rice, vegetables, and
fruit, and raising livestock such as poultry, pigs, and cows. Wŏn Kyŏng-
sŏn, who had invited Kotani to Korea in 1975, played an important role
in bringing these farmers together. He was an influential figure in a minor
64 Y.J. PAIK
Protestant sect called Kidoktongsinhoe,27 based on a Japanese branch of

the Plymouth Brethren, and he had broad networks with farmers and
social workers in other Protestant sects. His network of Christian farmers
began to develop in 1955, after he closed his business and started a farm-
ing commune called P’ulmuwŏn to help war orphans and homeless peo-
ple. He was inspired by the ideal of the Christian rural village, which was
shared by a network that included the Korean YMCA and the P’ulmu
Agricultural School. P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe maintained a
close relationship, as some of the school’s teachers and board members
joined Chŏngnonghoe from the beginning. Also, after Kotani’s visit to the
school in 1975, the P’ulmu School started organic farming education
from 1978 onwards. The relationship between P’ulmu School and
Chŏngnonghoe became more official (like the relationship between
Ainō kai and Ainō School) as P’ulmu School began to send trainees to
Chŏngnonghoe members’ farms regularly, and more P’ulmu graduates
joined Chŏngnonghoe.
“Compelled by the Holy Spirit” was the most frequently-mentioned
reason that members of Chŏngnonghoe gave when I asked them why
they started their organic farming movement. Although chemical farming
has been widespread in South Korea only since the late 1960s, it quickly
became the mainstream method of farming under a national campaign to
maximise food production. Apart from the government’s encouragement
of chemical farming, the immediate effects of agricultural chemicals con-
vinced farmers of modern farming’s superiority. By 1976, when members
of Chŏngnonghoe first began organic farming, they had little idea
whether farming without relying on agricultural chemicals would be
practicable or not.28 Nor did they know where they could market their
produce even if they succeeded in growing it. In a word, they seemed to
consider nothing except for their religious conviction that organic farm-
ing was the right thing to do. Chŏngnonghoe demanded that its mem-
bers be ready to endure hardships; the third clause of its mission statement
is: “We wake up to the spirit of righteous farming and submit ourselves to
all the hardships.”
“Righteous farming” proved to be extremely difficult for those who
attempted to practice it, especially for the first few years. In 1976, when
Wŏn moved his P’ulmuwŏn Farm to a more rural area in Yangju to start
an organic farming commune, only eight people dared to follow him.
Initially, the new farm’s soil was already conditioned by the previous use
of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and produced only sparse, small, and
ugly crops. Even worse, having given up pesticides, the commune mem-
bers had to watch even those scanty crops being destroyed by rampant
disease and swarming insects. And of course, the farming process was
more laborious because the farmers had to manually remove weeds and
sometimes even insects. Wŏn’s farm suffered losses of five million won in
the first year, another three million won in the second year, and only began
to break even from the third year as the soil and the farmers’ techniques
improved. At least, at P’ulmuwŏn, the farmers were resolute in their com-
mitment to organic farming, and the owner, Wŏn, could afford the signifi-
cant financial losses; however, at the individual farms of other
Chŏngnonghoe members, the situation was even more difficult.
Meanwhile, general consumers did not appreciate that organic produce
cost more than non-organic produce due to lower yields and greater labour
inputs. Not only was the organic produce worm-eaten and less regular in
shape than conventional produce, but the general view of urban consum-
ers in the 1970s was that crops grown by chemical farming were healthier;
they were regarded as more hygienic—for example, free from parasite
eggs. On the other hand, the price of organic produce was two or three
times higher than non-organic produce, not because organic farmers tar-
geted premium consumers, but because otherwise they could not meet
their costs. However, few consumers were ready to pay two or three times
more for organic produce in the 1970s, and it was only in the mid-1980s
that environmentally-conscious urban consumers began to seek organic
products as premium goods.
Despite its commercial disadvantages, organic farming gradually
became a viable option for self-sufficient farms. Over time, the use of com-
post and other organic fertilisers made the productivity comparable to that
of chemical farming. Organic methods also reduced input costs, as agricul-
tural chemicals were relatively expensive. More importantly, organic farm-
ing had some significant advantages for small-scale farmers who subsisted
on their own produce. First, it relieved farmers from pesticide poisoning
which was prevalent at the time, claiming many farmers’ lives every year.
Second, organic farmers saw the superior taste of organic produce as a
reflection of its healthiness. Finally, organic farming enabled the farmers to
feel proud of growing wholesome crops and supporting the healthy lives
of the consumers.
Still, the number of organic farmers in South Korea did not grow sig-
nificantly over the next decade. Several organisations were created to study
organic farming and share farming techniques with farmers,29 but organic
66 Y.J. PAIK
farming remained more a subject of research and experimentation than a

general farming practice. In Chŏngnonghoe, only around 70 members
were still practicing organic farming by the early 1990s (although the
membership including inactive members was about 300). This was partly
attributable to Chŏngnonghoe’s religious ethos30 and the lack of estab-
lished markets for organic products. However, in the 1970s there were
also other specific conditions that made organic farming difficult even for
self-sufficient farms.
My interviews with early Chŏngnonghoe members revealed that the
obstacles to converting to organic farming went beyond economic mat-
ters. The economic hardships, grave as they were, were more or less fore-
seen. However, the price for abiding by their religious conscience was
much higher than they had expected because of the social and political
implications of organic farming in the 1970s in South Korea. Since the
late 1960s, the military government had done its best to maximise food
production by promoting chemical farming. Consequently, chemical
farming was considered the modern, conventional, and legitimate way of
farming for Korean farmers. Under such circumstances, the government
did not simply regard Chŏngnonghoe as an eccentric religious group
whose rejection of chemical farming was an isolated act, but suspected it
of being a dissident or pro-North Korean group.31
The government was not the only source of antagonism. At the vil-
lage level, other farmers often derided the organic farmers as “weed
growers,” pointing to their grassier fields that were not neatened by her-
bicides. Some neighbouring farmers complained that their farms were
infested because organic farmers did not kill insect pests. Because some
farmers in their villages ignored them as peculiar people and others ridi-
culed them as lunatics, the organic farmers were marginalised in their local
communities. Also, Chŏngnonghoe took a passive attitude towards strug-
gles for farmers’ rights, drawing the criticism of organised farmers’ move-
ments which considered Chŏngnonghoe’s members to be reactionaries
who served rich people’s interests by growing food that ordinary people
could not afford.
The foregoing account of Chŏngnonghoe’s early years shows individ-
ual farmers’ religious motivations for practicing organic farming in spite of
economic and social difficulties, but it is the collective features of
Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming that explain it as a social movement.
They mainly appear in the farmers’ collective efforts to overcome the con-
flict between the group’s religious faith and the national values attached to
farming. The political nature of the organic farming movement resides on

Chŏngnonghoe’s pursuit of a rural commune autonomous from the
state’s political and economic control. In the following sections, I discuss
the politicisation of farming through the national campaigns of the Green
Revolution and the New Village Movement (NVM), and explain what
organic farming meant in the 1970s political context. I then go back in
time to show the link between the organic farming movement and the
Christian rural movements of the 1920s to show the ideological origin of
the organic farming movement.
The Politicisation of Farming in 1970s South Korea

The politicisation of farming by South Korea’s military government in the
1970s is best explained by the changing nature of farming as it went from
a means of livelihood to the business of nation-building. The economic
and political centralisation of rural Korea took place through two main
projects: the Green Revolution-inspired implementation of a state-
controlled farming system, and the New Village Movement (NVM;
Saemaŭl Undong). The Green Revolution brought fundamental reforms
to the rural economy as the state began to deeply intervene in the nation’s
agricultural economy. Factory-manufactured chemicals were central to the
state’s strategies to maximise national food production. Meanwhile, the
NVM emphasised the economic self-reliance of individual farmers as well
as individual rural villages, and propagated new moral principles for farm-
ers as members of the modern nation state.
In the 1970s, maximising food production was a vital task for the gov-
ernment’s survival. The government urged farmers to achieve self-reliance,
which meant that farmers should deal with their economic difficulties
without seeking government support. This emphasis on self-reliance was
intended to lessen the government’s burden in dealing with rural poverty
and to prevent the spread of communism in rural areas. The improvement
of living conditions in rural areas was also expected to bring political sup-
port to the ruling party. Moreover, the survival of the nation was predi-
cated on the success of heavy and chemical industrialisation, which was
expected to bring not only economic prosperity but also victory in the
arms race against North Korea; to push forward with industrialisation, it
was critical to keep labour costs down, which in turn depended on keeping
food prices low.
68 Y.J. PAIK
Economic and administrative agencies were established to control the

entire farming process. The government’s control of rice production is a
classic example of how the state directly intervened in each step of the
farming process. Increasing production was the first priority, because rice
was Korea’s staple crop. The government supplied capital, seeds of high-
yield and fertiliser-tolerant rice varieties, and agricultural chemicals. In
autumn, the government purchased the harvest of the high-yield variety
rice through a procurement programme. The National Agricultural
Cooperative Federation (NACF) carried out all the economic activities,32
while the Rural Development Administration (RDA) administered the
government programmes in cooperation with local authorities and NVM
offices. By 1975, government agricultural instructors were on the spot to
supervise the implementation of chemical farming as the RDA established
offices in every town or township.33
The political nature of chemical farming in the 1970s is clearly cap-
tured by the example of the government’s development of a high-yield
rice variety.34 The key requirement for the high-yield variety was that it
should be both responsive to and tolerant of chemical fertilisers. Until
large chemical fertiliser factories began to be built in South Korea in the
1960s, farmers had relied on their own compost instead of using expen-
sive chemical fertiliser—what they called “kŭmbi” (金肥, commercial
fertiliser). Even when mass production made chemical fertiliser more
widely available, this often either did not lead to higher yields or actually
damaged the plants. Accordingly, Korean government researchers,
bureaucrats, and even the intelligence agency35 became involved in
developing new rice varieties.
The first successful variety, IR667, was developed in 1965–1966 by a
Korean researcher, Hŏ Mun-hoe, while he was working at the International
Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. IR667’s high sensitivity to and
tolerance of chemical fertiliser increased its yield up to 50% compared to
existing varieties. Both the government and the public media praised the
development of IR667, which was dubbed “Unification” (統一, t’ong’il)
rice by the government. The following development of IR1317 solved the
biggest disadvantage of Unification rice, its poor taste, and was named
“Yusin” (維新) rice, after President Park Chung Hee’s “Yusin regime.”
The government had high expectations for the political contribution of
the new rice varieties and encouraged farmers to plant them with political
slogans, such as “Unify (South and North Koreas) by planting Unification
rice, and revolutionise by planting Yusin rice!”36 Until 1977, Unification

rice and its derivative varieties accounted for the planting of 54% of total
rice-growing area and led to record-breaking crop yields.37
The military government had a lot riding on the success or failure of its
Green Revolution project, and it therefore began to control farming just
as if it were a military operation. The RDA drafted a plan called “The
Operation for Surpassing Rice Production of 30 Million Sŏk,”38 which
divided the farming process into seven stages including planting, pest con-
trol, weeding, harvesting, and sowing barley as a second crop to grow
during the winter. Each stage was assigned specific starting and ending
dates, and the RDA, the NACF, and local administration offices operated
in concert with one another to enforce the plan.
As in a military operation, the government’s chemical farming incurred
casualties—victims of pesticide poisoning. The use of pesticide surged,
because the high-yield varieties were prone to pests and diseases. To pro-
tect the crops, the government advised farmers to spray chemical pesti-
cides supplied by the NACF. In a process which vividly exemplified the
“politics of untimely death,” the heavy use of pesticides inevitably caused
pesticide poisoning of farmers, claiming numerous lives each year.39 At the
same time, soil contamination by heavy metals and organochlorines
became a serious environmental issue. However, the government was
focused on production and could not afford to take care of safety and
environmental issues. Although farmers began to experience the harm of
pesticides, converting to organic farming, as Chŏngnonghoe members
learned, was difficult. The only way for farmers to reduce their risk of pes-
ticide poisoning was to grow the crops for their own consumption with-
out pesticides.
The final element in the government’s rice production scheme was
the purchase of the harvest, which provided farmers with the economic
motivation to follow the government’s chemical farming policy.
Originally, the government purchasing system was developed to manage
the supply of staple crops like rice and barley. However, in 1972, the
government began to use it to promote the new high-yield rice varieties
by preferential purchasing.40 In 1973, a “double price system”41 by
which the government subsidised the rice farmers who grew the high-
yield rice was introduced.42 Until it was discontinued in 1992, the dou-
ble-price system gave farmers strong economic motivations to voluntarily
grow the new varieties.
70 Y.J. PAIK
The story of rice farming in the 1970s shows how thoroughly the gov-
ernment controlled the farming processes as well as sales and distribution.
Although the intervention of the government was not as intense for other
crops, the established production increase system run by the government
offices, the NACF, and the RDA functioned in the same manner. Thus the
domination of state-led chemical farming reduced the farmers’ role from
that of the principal agents of farming to passive labourers. The farmers’
own experience, discretion, and judgement were replaced by nationally
uniform, planned processes, leaving the farmers dependent on the govern-
ment and its programmes.
As the government gained significant control over the farming process,
the social order in rural villages inevitably changed. In particular, the role
of the NVM, which started in 1970, was critical in this process. Under the
slogan of “Let’s get on with a better life,” the government launched a
nationwide Rural NVM campaign in 1972. Guided by the New Village
Spirit as defined by three virtues that every Korean should attain—dili-
gence, self-help, and cooperation43—people were urged to join the move-
ment to modernise the nation based on the principles of economic
developmentalism and anti-communism.44 The NVM had its own
nationwide organisational structure that went from the central govern-
ment down to the lowest local offices.45 Each village had its own NVM
committee, which included five leaders from the village.46 Furthermore,
the NVM offices closely cooperated with the RDA and the NACF by link-
ing chemical farming with the NVM’s campaign to increase rural income.
The NVM brought at least three major changes to rural villages. First,
it created a new group of leaders within the villages. While the previous
village leaders had been the elders of the influential clans, a younger gen-
eration of leaders emerged to oversee the modernisation of rural villages
with new farming technology and a new mindset. Second, resistance
against the NVM by the village people, including the previous village lead-
ers, was effectively circumvented by a competition system. The govern-
ment rewarded not only individual NVM leaders by designating some as
role models, but also high-performing villages by categorising villages as
basic, self-helping, or self-sufficient. While self-helping and self-sufficient
villages received assistance from the government, the underperforming
villages were disgraced as being lazy and dependent on others.47
Consequently, no village could avoid participating in the competition to
achieve the goals set by the government. Lastly, the NVM’s emphasis on a
prosperous life implanted an economic mindset in which money-making

became the main mission of farmers, while the government procurement
system expanded the monetary economy in rural areas.
To summarise, the politicisation of farming in 1970s South Korea can
be characterised as the state taking direct and effective control of the farm-
ing process and rural society. Chemical farming was an integral part of the
government’s political project of building a modern and strong nation,
and it was combined with the NVM’s goals as a key element of patriotism
and national morality for farmers. In other words, domestic political sup-
port, successful industrialisation, and the upper hand in the competition
with North Korea—all these rested upon the success of chemical farming.
The government mobilised every possible resource to give farmers eco-
nomic incentives through government finance projects and NACF subsi-
dies, while the state-led modernisation campaigns dominated the
ideological domain in rural areas.
The Politics of the Organic Farming Movement

At a time when the regime was staking its survival on the success of the
NVM and the Green Revolution, practicing organic farming meant deviat-
ing from the government’s nation-building process. Moreover,
Chŏngnonghoe’s activities did not happen within a closed religious society
or a research group, but involved non-Christian farmers and university
professors. Chŏngnonghoe members shared a clear that the military gov-
ernment was causing various rural problems through the NVM and the
Green Revolution. Chŏngnong means “righteous farming,” which could
be taken to mean that they considered organic farming to be God’s way of
farming, but at the same time could be taken to imply that chemical farm-
ing and those who practice it (including the government) were morally
wrong. The government’s economic incentives to increase rural household
incomes through chemical farming were not welcomed by Chŏngnonghoe.
Quite the opposite: the members were urged to gladly sacrifice themselves
and overcome the temptation to make more money through chemical
farming.48 Chemical farming promoted by the government was regarded
as the worship of Baal, or materialism in this context.49 The early members
sometimes directly criticised the government’s p olicies50 and preached that
“organic farming is a service of Christian farmers who are ready to endure
every hardship to save mankind from apocalypse.”51
72 Y.J. PAIK
However, despite their belief that the government was the main cause
of the problems, changing government policies was not these farmers’
primary goal. Chŏngnonghoe was not a group of dissident farmers in the
guise of a religious organisation, as the government suspected. The leaders
of Chŏngnonghoe deliberately distanced themselves from any direct
opposition to the government, even when they were criticised by organ-
ised farmers’ movements for their lack of participation in the anti-
government campaigns for farmers’ rights.52 They took this position
because the early members believed that their religious ideals could not be
realised by secular movements pursuing certain ideologies or economic
interests, and therefore, participation in organised struggles would only
undermine the integrity of their movement. Their mission statement gen-
erally emphasised the importance of spiritual awakening, and even the
clauses related to Chŏngnonghoe’s social contributions53 showed the
group’s aim of enlightening rural societies without referring to the gov-
ernment’s rural development. Instead, they considered the rural problem
as universal in the modern world54 and tried to deal with it by creating a
communal network of organic farmers.
What makes Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming movement political is
its efforts to create a communal space that would be autonomous of the
state’s rural control. While the dominance of the state in economic and
ideological domains made it difficult for farmers to engage in national
politics, what emerged instead was politics at a communal level in which
everyday activities for livelihood (such as farming) were governed by com-
munal norms rather than national norms. The pursuit of autonomy did
entail a process of becoming free from state politics, but it also required an
alternative economic and moral foundation. As such, the conflict between
communal autonomy and national control became central to the political
nature of Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming movement. The following
sections describe the origins of Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming move-
ment in the Christian rural ideal village movement of the 1920s and dis-
cuss the historical continuity of the conflict between communal autonomy
and national control in rural Korea.
The Tradition of Rural Autonomy

̆ gnonghoe’s Organic Farming Movement
in Chon
The pursuit of social change through farming was the defining character-
istic of the Protestant networks that founded Chŏngnonghoe. Knowledge
of farming was essential to their project of inculcating alternative norms
and values in the farming life. Organic farming was a practice aimed at
building a model village in real life rather than a religious ritual for indi-
vidual members’ salvation. The members of Chŏngnonghoe were farmers,
which differentiated them from the rural ministers of the mainstream
churches. In general, the rural ministries were filled by pastors from the
cities who knew little about farming, and therefore, their missionary work
was not very different from that in the urban churches.55 Meanwhile, the
members of Chŏngnonghoe sought a Christianity for rural people to prac-
tice in their farming life.
The sense of communal autonomy advocated by Chŏngnonghoe was
inherited from two intertwined groups of Christian leaders from an earlier
generation. The first group consisted of intellectuals who studied or taught
at the Osan School, a renowned Christian nationalist school in Chŏngju,
North P’yŏngan province (now in North Korea) during the Japanese
colonial period.56 The Osan School, unlike other modern schools which
were founded in major cities by Western missionaries,57 was created in a
rural town to provide modern education to rural people in 1898 and only
later became a Christian school, in 1910.58 The second group, which over-
lapped with the first, came from the Korean Non-church Movement, the
Korean branch of a Japanese Protestant sect founded by the well-known
Japanese Christian thinker Uchimura Kanzō , who advocated churches for
believers outside of church organisations. The Non-church Movement
group in Korea was very small, but it included some highly influential
intellectuals critical of mainstream society. These two groups were closely
related, as the Osan School became a Non-church Movement school in
the late 1920s.
One of the key intellectuals linking the Osan School with the Non-
church Movement, and thence Chŏngnonghoe, was Ham Sŏk-hŏn. Ham
studied (1921–1923) and taught (1928–1938) at the Osan School, and
became a Non-church Movement believer after attending Uchimura
Kanzō ’s Bible study group in Kashiwagi, Tokyo (1925–1928).59 After the
division of North and South Korea, he defected from North Korea and
worked actively as a journalist and critical thinker in South Korea.60 He
had particular interest in the future of Korean rural areas and became a
farmer himself. In 1957, he opened his own farm, Ssial-nongjang, in
Ch’ŏnan on land contributed by a benefactor. Inspired by Gandhi’s
Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, he made Ssial-nongjang a collective farm
where young farmers studied and worked with him.61
Ham Sŏk-hŏn directly influenced two key people in Chŏngnonghoe:
Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, who initiated Chŏngnonghoe, and O Chae-kil, who led
74 Y.J. PAIK
Chŏngnonghoe from 1975 to 1990 as the first president. According to

O’s recollections, it was at a lecture by Ham Sŏk-hŏn at the Seoul YMCA62
that he decided to be a farmer.63 At the time, he was a chemist, which
guaranteed him an economically-comfortable life. However, Ham’s mes-
sage that farming is the most virtuous vocation for a man completely
changed his view of life, and in 1961, he started farming as a novice at the
age of 41 in pursuit of an honest life.
Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn and Ham Sŏk-hŏn shared common views on farming
and Christianity from the beginning. Wŏn first met Ham at Kim Gyo-sin’s
home around 1936, when Wŏn was 22.64 At that time, Kim was the chief
editor of the Non-church Movement magazine Sŏngsŏjosŏn, published by
seven Korean students of Uchimura Kanzō , including Kim and Ham. Wŏn
often used to visit Kim to ask about true faith. Although Wŏn and Ham
did not belong to the same Protestant sect, their churches had egalitarian
characteristics in common, such as denying the authority of organised
church hierarchies and transcending the divisions among different sects.
As Wŏn remembered, while Ham had a significant intellectual and
philosophical influence on Wŏn,65 it was Wŏn who gave advice on farming
to Ham.66
The P’ulmu School was another important intersection between the
Osan School and the Non-church Movement. The P’ulmu School was
founded in 1958 by Yi Ch’an-kap, a nephew of the Osan School’s founder,
Yi Sŭng-hun, to succeed the Osan School’s Christian nationalist educa-
tion. P’ulmu inherited the Osan School’s goal of building ideal rural vil-
lages based on farming and Christianity. In the early period, the
organisational exchange between the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe
was limited to sending trainees to Chŏngnonghoe members’ farms,67 but
this facilitated significant intellectual exchange. For example, Yi Ch’an-
kap, the founder, and Chu Ok-ro, the first principal, had close relation-
ships with Ham Sŏk-hŏn and Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, while Wŏn and other
Chŏngnonghoe members were board members at the P’ulmu School.
Also, Wŏn’s P’ulmu Farm took its name from the P’ulmu School.68
The P’ulmu School also strengthened the ties between Ainōkai and
Chŏngnonghoe. Kotani Junichi, the founder of Ainōkai and the Ainō
Agricultural School, was also a Non-church Movement believer, and
the Ainō Agricultural School and the P’ulmu School had a sisterhood
relationship prior to the creation of Chŏngnonghoe.69 Kotani visited
the P’ulmu School when he was first invited to visit Korea by Wŏn
Kyŏng-sŏn in 1975, and the cooperation over organic farming between
the P’ulmu School and the Ainō School/Ainōkai started in 1977.70
The most important role of the P’ulmu School for Chŏngnonghoe was
as a reservoir of the ideal of autonomous rural villages. This was the legacy
that the P’ulmu School had inherited from the Osan School, as well as the
shared ideal of Korean and Japanese farmers in the Non-church Movement.
In the 1920s, the Osan School was actively engaged in building an ideal
rural village where people led a communal life centred on the school and
the church. In Chŏngju, where the Osan School was located, the school
provided education in the knowledge and skills needed to modernise the
rural village, while the church guided people spiritually.
The model of rural development in the P’ulmu School and in the Ainō
School was profoundly influenced by a movement on the other side of
the world—in Denmark, where a strong rural development movement
based on cooperatives and “folk high schools” emerged in the nineteenth
century.71 Uchimura Kanzō introduced the Danish movement’s ideals to
Japan in 191172 and shared it as a model of Christian rural development
within the Non-church Movement.73 Alongside other European models
of cooperatives and credit unions that provided alternatives to capitalism,
the Danish model was particularly appealing to Christian groups because
of its strong religious basis. In Japan, the Danish tradition was sum-
marised in the “Three Love Spirit”74—love for God, love for neighbours,
and love for country.75 In the 1920s, Uchimura’s Korean students
brought it to the Osan School,76 from whence it passed down to the
P’ulmu School.
For the P’ulmu School, the Danish tradition suggested a way of enlight-
ening and empowering common people, whom they called p’yŏngmin.77
In the P’ulmu School, p’yŏngmin referred to common, ordinary people
who do not have wealth or power, rather than a specific social class or
nationality. However, p’yŏngmin also meant an enlightened being—a cul-
tured person with religious faith and the ability to make a living.78 As such,
the P’ulmu School, under the school motto of “the great p’yŏngmin,”
endeavoured to nurture “enlightened” farmers who would remain in the
local area and work for their villages. At the same time, the school created
various cooperatives not only to support the economic self-reliance of the
school and the village, but also to foster the communal spirit of the village
people.79
76 Y.J. PAIK
Despite the P’ulmu School’s faithful emulation of the Danish educa-

tion model, the nature of autonomy in the P’ulmu School’s ideal village
and the Danish rural development movement had one crucial difference.
While the Danish folk high schools were institutionalised as a part of
Denmark’s national education system, the P’ulmu School had little com-
mon ground with the Korean education system.80 In Korea, the govern-
ment had promulgated a Charter of National Education in 1968, which
advocated state-oriented nationalism.81 The Yusin regime emphasised the
national spirit, and public schools focused on producing patriotic kungmin
(國民)—members of the nation. Although the P’ulmu School’s coopera-
tive movement and education for self-reliance did not conflict with the
government’s education policy, its p’yŏngmin-oriented education was a
clear deviation from the national education system.
As a result, the P’ulmu School had to endure alienation from the gov-
ernment and the local society. Although the school had strong domestic
and overseas Christian networks82 that ordinary schools did not have, the
school’s non-accredited status and non-elitist objectives of educating local
p’yŏngmin made it very unpopular among the local families. The early
generation of P’ulmu School students often remembered that their school
was derided as “ttongt’ong hakkyo” (“the manure tub school”).83
P’ulmu’s ideal of the autonomous village was not understood in the local
community, few less accepted, causing further isolation of the school in
the local community. Chu Ok-ro, the first principal of the school,
bemoaned that people accused him of being a communist, or a commer-
cialist, or even an opportunist who coveted the chance to be elected as the
oppositional party’s member of the National Assembly.84
Overall, both the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe sought to cre-
ate an autonomous space where they could achieve a communal lifestyle
based on self-reliance and morality. In the Korean context, this was a
dual task of escaping from the state’s governmental reality as well as cre-
ating an alternative. Chŏngnonghoe’s organic farming movement and
the P’ulmu School’s organic farming education had to be more than just
morally correct; they had to be morally superior to the national norms
and values to justify their deviation. Chŏngnonghoe members in the
1970s and the intellectuals around the Osan School in the 1920s shared
a confidence in the superiority of their religious nationalism to statist
nationalism. In the following section, I trace the origin of this sense of
the moral superiority of their communal ideals to the national ideals.
The 1920s and the 1970s: Repeating History

Osan School’s ideal village movement in the 1920s and the organic farm-
ing movement in the 1970s unfolded in quite similar political situations in
terms of the state’s rural mobilisation. Behind the Osan School’s efforts
were the colonial government’s rural development projects to increase
food production and to control rural society. After conducting land cadas-
tral surveys in the 1910s, the colonial government launched rural develop-
ment programmes in the 1920s. The primary goal was to increase rice
production in Korea, which was an extension of the Japanese govern-
ment’s countermeasures to a 1918 rice crisis in Japan. Accordingly, from
1920, five-year rice production increase plans were implemented in Korea.
This scheme included developing and distributing high-yield rice varieties
and increasing the input of chemical fertilisers. Originally, the colonial
government introduced Japanese rice varieties to Korea, but after 1926, it
established the Agricultural Experimental Station85 in Suwŏn to develop
rice varieties suitable for the Korean soil and climate.86 With the govern-
ment subsidies, the use of fertiliser rapidly increased after 1930, especially
after a nitrogen fertiliser factory was constructed in Hŭngnam.87 With the
increased use of chemical fertilisers, the new varieties began to produce
bigger harvests.
In spite of the increased rice production, the livelihood of ordinary
Korean farmers worsened.88 The main beneficiaries of the production
increase were large landowners who gained an opportunity to accumulate
capital with the expansion of rice exports to Japan. Meanwhile, Korean
people’s consumption of rice actually decreased during the 1920s and
1930s due to the increased volume of rice exports.89 Further, capital-
intensive farming relying on expensive chemical fertilisers was more advan-
tageous to large landowners who could access the government subsidies
more easily. The improvement of irrigation systems led by the colonial
government again benefited large land owners while creating a heavy eco-
nomic burden for small farm owners.90 The concentration of landowner-
ship was intensified during this period, creating more tenant farmers in
Korea.91
To facilitate more effective rural mobilisation, the colonial government
implemented rural reform schemes as well. From the early 1920s, the gov-
ernment implemented a “Model Village” policy (Mobŏmburakchŏngch’aek)
to support its production increase schemes. It started by designating a
model rice-growing village, a model sericulture village, and a model
78 Y.J. PAIK
composting village to enhance productivity.92 After 1927, the scheme was

further developed to select high-performing model villages and reward
them with subsidies.93 In this process, the colonial government created
new village organisations comprised of the more cooperative village lead-
ers, which took over village management.94 This scheme became more
comprehensive with the launch of the Rural Development Movement
(Nongch’onjinhŭngundong) in 1932. The scope of supervision was
expanded to all of Korea’s approximately 75,000 villages, and village
development committees made up of officials and village leaders super-
vised individual households’ living conditions and financial rehabilita-
tion.95 Initially, the movement emphasised the economic self-reliance of
the rural villages as a reaction to the impact of the Great Depression at the
end of the 1920s.96 However, with the rising tension of the imminent war,
the movement came to focus more on assimilating Korea as a loyal subject
of the Japanese Empire and maximising production to support the Imperial
Army.97
Under these circumstances, the Osan School’s ideal village movement
in the 1920s grew out of the school’s existing aims of achieving Korea’s
independence. Originally, Yi Sŭng-hun, as a founding member of
Sinminhoe—a secret independence movement association—founded the
Osan School to educate young nationalists to revive the country. For him,
fighting in battlefields was the old way of opposing an enemy, while edu-
cating young people would be the new way. According to his thinking,
opening a primary school was like training an army platoon, and opening
a middle school was like training a regiment. At the same time, making the
Yongdong area a Korean people’s autonomous village was the first priority
to build a foothold for the independence movement in Korea. This idea
was shared within Sinminhoe, and from the 1910s to the 1930s, its mem-
bers carried out plans to build Korean people’s autonomous villages in
Southern Manchuria and the Maritime Territory of Russia as the bases for
a militarised independence movement.98 Initially limited to Yongdong vil-
lage, the Osan School’s ideal village movement aspired to provide a model
for the whole country under Japanese rule.99
The Danish model that suggested the means to materialise the vision.
Consumer cooperatives and credit unions supported the village economy,
and community facilities such as a hospital, public bath, and public barber-
shop were built and opened to the village people.100 Night schools were
run to promote literacy, and the village people were invited to the school’s
cultural events, such as public lectures, music performances, theatricals,
and sports days for spiritual uplift and cultural enlightenment. As in the
Danish folk high schools, the school focused not on producing elites, but
on nurturing future farmers with the Korean national spirit. Therefore,
Korean language and history were taught with as much emphasis as practi-
cal modern knowledge.
Education did not stop within the school but extended to the village
with a community association called Chamyŏnhoe (which means “a group
of voluntarily diligent people”). Chamyŏnhoe was created in the late 1900s
as a self-governing body to improve village life and enlighten the people,
sharing the same principles as Osan School—diligence, cleanliness, and
responsibility. One male and one female secretary were selected from the
village people and arranged weekly meetings to discuss village affairs.
Initially, the village people were taught how to hold discussions in a meet-
ing, such as how to listen to others and speak in order. Then, village affairs,
especially related to hygiene, public morals, and collective farming, were
discussed. For example, the village people were encouraged to clean their
houses (e.g. toilets, bedding, kitchens, and wells) and their neighbour-
hoods, quit smoking and drinking alcohol, do away with superstition and
attend church regularly, and help each other in ploughing and harvesting.
A hygiene inspector from the Osan School inspected each household
weekly. To improve the village economy, Chamyŏnhoe created a commu-
nity credit union by encouraging everyone to save a spoonful of rice from
each meal and contribute the money thus saved to the credit union; it then
lent money to the village people at a low interest rate.101 The credit union
supported various cooperative activities for farmland improvement, fuel
improvement, collective production/purchases, and a farm products fair.102
In doing so, Chamyŏnhoe created various affiliated village a ssociations of
youths, wives, students, and heads of household, with the youth and stu-
dent associations playing leading roles in the activities overall.
Chamyŏnhoe’s activities built the communal spirit in Yongdong village,
and the Osan School and the church were the centre of the community.
The students were actively involved in the projects to create a modern vil-
lage, while the village people supported the students by providing room
and board. At the same time, Chamyŏnhoe’s activities helped minimise
interference from the colonial government’s military police and police
offices, which had previously been drawn into village affairs by issues of
poor hygiene, quarrels, and disputes. Chamyŏnhoe’s activities helped the
people to create an autonomous space of a modern rural village without
the interference of the colonial government.
80 Y.J. PAIK
Overall, the similarities between the political situations in rural Korea in

the 1920s and the 1970s explain why the thought and practices of the
1920s intellectuals were particularly influential in the organic farming
movement of the 1970s. The 1920s was when the state’s economic and
political mobilisation began to rapidly increase, without reaching the state
of wartime mobilisation that prevailed from the mid-1930s until the post-
war recovery period of the late 1950s. In the pre-wartime situation, peo-
ple still had a certain amount of room to reject national politics and
manoeuver for their autonomy. Then, the Osan School’s ideal village
movement developed the sense that their communal model was morally
superior to the government’s national model village. The autonomous
space they created was possible both because they rejected the influence of
national politics and because they established alternative moral and eco-
nomic structures that could replace those of the state.
Religion in the Making of Communal Autonomy

in Korea
From the ideal village movement of the 1920s to the organic farming
movement of the 1970s, the role of Christianity in creating an autono-
mous space highlights the conflictual relationship of national and com-
munal politics in rural Korea. The anti-statist and communal elements in
their Christianity led these movements to reject state-oriented national-
ism. In the Osan School’s ideal village movement, the Non-church
Movement fitted very well with the school’s pursuit of Korean people’s
autonomy,103 because the union of nationalism and Christianity found no
contradiction in the Non-church Movement. Originally, Uchimura Kanzō
advocated the Non-church Movement as a way of serving “two Js”—Jesus
and Japan. He separated Western-centrism within church institutions from
Christianity and stressed Christianity from the Japanese people’s point of
view.104 As Western-centrism was also prevalent in the Korean churches,
Uchimura’s Korean students deeply sympathised with the Non-church
Movement’s combination of Christianity and nationalism, and they intro-
duced the Non-church Movement to Korea as a Christianity for Korean
people.105
Christianity combined with Korean nationalism provided an alternative
identity to that of a loyal Japanese subject, and this was critical to the sur-
vival of the Osan School’s legacy through the period of wartime mobilisa-
tion. In the 1920s, there were other religious groups such as the YMCA,
the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church that actively engaged
in the ideal village movement based on the Danish model.106 Their objec-
tives were similar to those of the Osan School: raising national and reli-
gious spirituality, improving education, and reviving the rural economy.
However, Korean nationalism was not as significant in these groups as in
the Osan School, and their movements were limited to lawful activities.
They vanished as the colonial government discouraged the first two objec-
tives, and even the third one was soon replaced by the Rural Development
Movement of the colonial government.107 Meanwhile, the Osan School’s
Christian nationalism was succeeded in the 1970s by the organic farming
movement and the P’ulmu School’s p’yŏngmin education. Inheriting the
legacy of the Osan School’s resistance to the Japanese colonial govern-
ment, the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe believed in the moral supe-
riority of their Christian nationalism over the state-oriented nationalism of
the 1970s military government, enabling their deviation from the national
educational and national farming programmes.
In addition, the Non-church Movement and the Danish model of rural
development emphasised the local as an autonomous subject rather than a
subject of control by a central authority. The Non-church Movement’s
ideal of offering an ecclesial community to Christians who did not belong
to a church was suitable for small autonomous communities rather than
big organisations. Moreover, the Danish model’s combination of
Christianity, folk high schools, and cooperatives provided an economic
and social foundation suitable for a small autonomous community. The
use of cooperatives helped the local economy to effectively adapt to the
developing capitalist economy in the 1920s without being preyed on by
the colonial government and large capital. For the Osan School and
Chŏngnonghoe/P’ulmu School, it was an alternative model of rural
development by local people, which would modernise Korea into a small
but strong nation like Denmark.
Conclusion
In this chapter of the organic farming movement in South Korea in the
1970s, I have shown that it inherited the tradition of the Osan School’s
ideal village movement in the 1920s. Yet although the farmers consid-
ered the state as the main cause of threats to their livelihood, their
actions did not aim to change state politics directly. I therefore suggest
that while the Korean government politicised farming, the political
82 Y.J. PAIK
nature of the organic farming movement lies in its pursuit of autonomy

based on communal self-help.
Although the organic farming movement of the 1970s did not have
such overt anti-establishment characteristics as the Osan School’s ideal vil-
lage movement did, the dominance of the state in rural society at the time
meant that creating an autonomous space inevitably entailed fending off
the state’s influence. Here, the role of Christianity was important as an
alternative moral and economic value system. In the organic farming
movement, religious morality combined with Korean nationalism gave the
organic farmers the moral high ground compared to the state-oriented
nationalism of the military government. In addition, the Danish model of
rural development based on cooperatives provided a communal model of
modernisation to compete with the state-led modernisation campaigns.
All in all, what the history of the organic farming movement in South
Korea shows is the action of communal self-help as a way of overcoming
the challenges of the nation state and the state-controlled economy. Large-
scale and organised social movements have undoubtedly made enormous
contributions to social progress and the expansion of people’s autono-
mous space in South Korea. There are always people who are put at risk of
“unnatural death” but do not have the resources to create an organised
movement. Yet local small-scale and self-help activities (especially in rural
areas) are often trivialised, not only by state politics but also by organised
movements, because the different nature of how things work on a small
scale is neither seen nor understood by large-scale national politics.108
Considering the growing economic hardship and decline of organised
movements in South Korea, this is the right time to think of small-scale
communal activities as an important form of alternative social movement.
Notes
1. This term is shared across East Asian countries; it is written in Chinese
characters as 富國强兵 and read as fukoku kyōhei in Japanese, pukuk
kangpyŏng in Korean, and fùguó qiángbı̄ng in Chinese.
2. See Meredith Woo-Cumings, “Introduction: Chalmers Johnson and the
Politics of Nationalism and Development,” in The Developmental State,
ed. by Meredith Woo-Cumings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999), 6–10.
3. Woo-Cumings, “Introduction: Chalmers Johnson and the Politics of
Nationalism and Development,” 8.
4. As Eckert explains, national defense became inseparable from economic

development under the total war system, and for Park Chung Hee, this
became “one of the hallmarks of his Yusin regime in the 1970s” (213).
Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of
Militarism, 1866–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).
5. The term is a translation of the Chinese characters 非命 (pimyŏng in
Korean, himei in Japanese, and fēimìng in Chinese). In East Asian coun-
tries where Chinese characters are used, the term is commonly under-
stood as “unnatural or premature death.” My employment of the term
in what I call the “politics of untimely death” is inspired by Tanaka
Shōzō, a Japanese politician in Meiji Japan who actively advocated for
the victims of Ashio Copper Mine pollution. He criticised the govern-
ment and the mining industry for threatening the lives of local people in
the reckless pursuit of economic interests, protesting that the govern-
ment was driving the people to 非命の死 (himei no shi), which has the
same meaning as 非命.
6. Of course, the role of the state in these countries’ economic success was
paramount, and the developmental efficacy of “the East Asian model” has
been highly praised as the “developmental state” in the 1980s and again
as the “Beijing Consensus” in the 2000s with the rise of Chinese eco-
nomic power.
7. Linda Weiss, “Developmental States in Transition: Adapting, Dismantling,
Innovating, Not ‘Normalizing’,” The Pacific Review 13.1 (2000), 21–55.
8. Mark Selden, “Economic Nationalism and Regionalism in Contemporary
East Asia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 43.2 (October 2012).
http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/3848/article.pdf
9. Richard Stubbs, “What Ever Happened to the East Asian Developmental
State? The Unfolding Debate,” The Pacific Review 22.1 (2009), 1–22.
10. I follow Raṇabı̄ra Samāddāra’s definition of autonomy as practices that
enable people to exist outside governmental realities (235). Autonomy
does not simply mean freedom, but also “self-regulation, self-direction,
and self-governance” (243). Raṇabı̄ra Samāddāra, The Nation Form:
Essays on Indian Nationalism (New Delhi, India: Sage, 2012).
11. Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production
to Modes of Exchange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 27.
12. Kojin Karatani, “Beyond Capital-Nation-State,” Rethinking Marxism
20.4 (2008), 569–595.
13. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 11.
14. Karatani, “Beyond Capital-Nation-State,” 585.
15. Benedict J. T. Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and
Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002), 8.
84 Y.J. PAIK
16. While governmental politics is performed through “the formal machinery

of government,” non-governmental politics occurs when “people decide
to seek a particular social goal not through demanding action by govern-
ment institutions, but through their own efforts”; Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
“Invisible Politics,” Humanities Australia 5 (2014), 57.
17. Karatani, The Structure of World History, 11.
18. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 13.
19. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and
Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1976).
20. Pierre Clastres, Kukka e Taehanghanŭn Sahoe: Chŏngch’iillyuhak Non’go,
translated by Hong Sŏng-hŭp (Seoul: Ihaksa, 2005).
21. Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible Politics,” 58.
22. See Philip G. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics
of Political Globalization,” Government and Opposition 32.2 (1997),
251–274.
23. See Kojin Karatani, Segyegonghwaguk ŭro, translated by Cho Yŏng-il
(Seoul: Pi, 2007), 63. Although this view is more relevant to what hap-
pened in the nineteenth century in East Asia, I suggest that the politics of
RCSM continues to exist because the geopolitical conditions in terms of
the military tension in the region remain unchanged.
24. The French journalist Bénédicte Manier, in her book A Million Silent
Revolutions (Un Million de Revolutions Tranquilles), describes collective
and cooperative efforts at the community level in various spheres of life.
Marginalised from the government and private businesses, and without
the help of NGOs and philanthropic foundations, these are cases of local
people who have come up with alternative social economy models, such
as cooperatives or collective resource management, to solve local issues of
housing, education, healthcare, and finance. Manier suggests that these
“silent revolutions” are widespread, but their small scale and diverse
forms make them less visible to the macroscopic view of conventional
politics. Bénédicte Manier, Paekman’gae ŭi Choyonghan Hyŏngmyŏng,
translated by Yi So-yŏng (Seoul: Ch’aeksesang, 2014).
25. Ainōkai (愛農会) means “the association of people who love farming.” In
1946, Kotani founded Ainōkai at his home in Wakayama Prefecture and
began to publish its magazine, Ainō. Ainōkai began to practice organic
farming in the early 1970s. Kotani Junichi, Nongbu ŭi Kil: Ilbon
Aenonghoe Kodani Chunich’i ŭi Hanŭl In’gan Ttang Sarang transla
ted by Hong Sun-myŏng (Hongsŏng, Korea: Kŭmulk’o, 2006), 221.
26. The Ainō Agricultural School was founded in Wakayama Prefecture, in
1964, and converted to organic farming in 1972. Kotani, Nongbu ŭi Kil,
222.
27. Kidoktongsinhoe (基督同信會) was introduced to Korea by a Japanese

missionary, Norimatsu Masayasu, in 1900. Han Su-sin, Ilche ha
Ilbon’gidokkyo ŭi Han’guk chŏndoron Yŏn’gu (Masters thesis, Yonsei
University, Seoul, 2001).
28. One of the elder members recollected that it took three years for him to
decide to join Chŏngnonghoe, although he witnessed and agreed with
Chŏngnonghoe’s movement from its creation: “Once I joined, then I
should perform the duties as a member for the rest of my life. But, the life
of a Chŏngnonghoe member seemed a cursed one to me. I felt rebellious
because I could not imagine myself farming for the rest of my life without
using agricultural chemicals.” Chŏng Sang-muk, “Kaehoesa,”
Chŏngnonghoebo 21 (December 1999), 4–11.
29. For example, Han’guk yugijayŏnnong’ŏb yŏn’guhoe (Korean Research
Institute of Organic and Natural Farming) was created in July 1978,
when several small groups of experts decided to merge after a discussion
in the Chŏn’guk nong’ŏp kisulcha hyŏp’oe (National Agricultural
Technicians Society) about the development of organic farming tech-
niques. These scholars, researchers, and farmers formed a management
committee and focused on research, distribution, and international
exchanges. They released their first organic vegetables to the market on
26 June 1979 at Shinsegae Department Store, but the store had to dis-
continue sales due to short supplies. The group achieved success in rice
farming and vermistabilisation. As of September 1979, there were 48
members. Ch’oe Pyŏng-ch’il, Han’guk ŭi Yuginong’ŏb undong e Kwanhan
Yŏn’gu (doctoral thesis, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, 1988), 44.
30. However, Chŏngnonghoe was not an exclusive or closed group, and some
members were non-believers. New members were accepted on the recom-
mendations of existing members and were encouraged to have Christian
faith. However, non-believers, if they were comfortable with the Christian
ceremonies held at their meetings, were also welcome to join.
31. “Some call us ‘reds’ because we don’t use pesticides. They ask why we
decrease the national production, while all others try to increase it.” Wŏn
Kyŏng-sŏn, “Minnŭnja rŭl Pogennŭnya,” Chŏngnonghoebo 5 (1983), 9–18.
32. In 1973, the NACF had 1567 local units at the town (ŭp) or township
(myŏn) level with 1393 members per local unit on average. http://nhre-
cruit.tistory.com/17
33. http://www.rda.go.kr/board/board.do?mode=html&prgId=ogi_
hstyQuery&html_page=ogi_hstyQuery05#wrap
34. Kim Tae-ho named the administrative and social schemes around rice
production a “technological system of rice production” (增産體制; liter-
ally, “production increase system”). Kim Tae-ho, “‘T’ong’ilbyŏ’ wa
1970nyŏndae Ssal Chŭngsanch’eje ŭi Hyŏngsŏng” (doctoral thesis,
Seoul National University, Seoul, 2009), i–ii.
86 Y.J. PAIK
35. In 1964, Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) agents smuggled a

Japonica rice variety called “Nahda” from Egypt to South Korea.
President Park Chung Hee personally named the variety “Hee-nong”
(with “Hee” from the second part of his given name), setting high expec-
tations. Despite Park’s expectations and the researchers’ dedicated efforts,
Hee-nong was found to be inappropriate for the Korean climate. Kim
Tae-ho, “‘T’ong’ilbyŏ’ wa 1970nyŏndae Ssal Chŭngsanch’eje ŭi
Hyŏngsŏng,” 91–95.
36. Han’gyŏr yesinmun (13 July 2012).
37. Satisfied with the success of the 1977 crop, Park Chung Hee declared
that the Green Revolution was achieved. Kim Tae-ho, “‘T’ong’ilbyŏ’ wa
1970nyŏndae Ssal Chŭngsanch’eje ŭi Hyŏngsŏng,” 208.
38. The sŏk is a Korean unit of volume/weight. One sŏk of rice is equal to
approximately 144 kg. The seven phases of “The Operation for Surpassing
Rice Production of 30 Million Sŏk” were as follows:
Phase 1: Operation for farming preparation, 1 March–20 April
Phase 2: Operation for rice seedbeds, 10 April–20 May
Phase 3: Operation for rice planting, 20 May–30 June
Phase 4: Operation for exterminating pests, 1 June–20 September
Phase 5: Operation for mowing, 20 July–30 September
Phase 6: Operation for rice harvesting, 1 October–20 October
Phase 7: Operation for sowing barley, 10 October–10 November.
Kim In-hwan, Han’guk ŭi Noksaek hyŏngmyŏng: Pyŏ Sinp’umjong ŭi
Kaebal kwa Pogŭp (Suwŏn, Korea: Nongch’onjinhŭngch’ŏng, 1978),
125.
39. According to the Economic Planning Board’s annual report on the causes
of death statistics, the number of pesticide poisoning fatalities was 1186 in
1982, and varied from 954 to 1561 annually until 1987 (Han’gyŏr yesinmun,
28 February 1989). The gravity of the issue was also demonstrated by
various surveys from 1975 to 1982, which showed that 33% to 82% of
Korean farmers had suffered some degree of pesticide poisoning.
40. The government’s rice purchase was below 10% of total domestic rice
production before 1970, but it exceeded 10% from 1971 on, reaching
23.4% in 1977–1979, when the cultivation of the Unification series
of rice varieties peaked. http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/Index?
contents_id=E0057817
41. The original “double grain price system” was introduced for rice and
barley in 1969. Its purpose was twofold—supporting farmers and stabilis-
ing grain prices. The government directly purchased crops at a relatively
high price and released them to consumers at a relatively low price.
42. For example, in 1975, the government’s purchase price for one gama
(80 kg) of rice was KRW 19,500, but the selling price was KRW 16,730.
Adding KRW 1996 of related costs, the government’s loss for each gama
was KRW 4766. The loss-to-selling price ratio was 11% in 1972, but
increased to 25%–27% from 1974 to 1984. http://www.archives.go.kr/
next/search/listSubjectDescription.do?id=003693
43. http://www.saemaul.com/aboutUs/ideology
44. The New Village Movement expanded its rural focus to include the
“Factory NVM” in 1974 and the “Urban NVM” in 1976. http://theme.
archives.go.kr/next/semaul/semaul01.do
45. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was at the apex of the national NVM
hierarchy, which consisted of five levels stretching from the central gov-
ernment to the village level (the central government, province, county,
township, and village). The top level NVM committee included the heads
of 20 government departments and the mayors of Seoul and Pusan, and
the more local level committees included the personnel in charge of con-
struction, postal services, broadcasting, police, reserve forces, as well as
the RDA, the NACF, and local agricultural high schools. The NVM was
a mechanism to mobilise every possible resource. Han’guk Nongch’on
Kyŏngje Yŏn’guwŏn, Han’guk nongjŏng 50nyŏnsa (Seoul, Korea:
Nongrimbu, 1999), 2090.
46. Naemubu (The Ministry of Home Affairs), Saemaŭrundong: Shijak esŏ
Onŭl kkaji (1973), 37, cited by Hwang Yŏn-su, “Nongch’on
Saemaŭrundong ŭi Chaejomyŏng,” Nongŏpsayŏn’gu 5.2 (2006), 17–53.
47. Kim, Hyung-A., Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee (New York,
NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 134.
48. Wŏn also described Chŏngnonghoe as the only farmers’ association that
pursued self-sacrifice, rather than production increase. Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn,
“Chŏngnonghoe Kangnyŏng Haesŏl,” Chŏngnonghoebo 1 (1978), 14–19.
49. Baal was the name of the supreme god worshipped in ancient Canaan and
Phoenicia.
50. For example, at Chŏngnonghoe’s 1982 annual meeting, the organisa-
tion’s first president, O Chae-kil, referred specifically to the government’s
Fifth Economic Development Five-Year Plan when he described the chal-
lenges that Korean farmers faced. According to O, the Five-Year Plan (1)
calculated agricultural products solely in monetary terms, (2) treated the
agricultural sector as a necessary nuisance in the push for rapid economic
growth, (3) showed the government’s lack of will to further the country’s
food self-sufficiency, (4) failed to address soaring farming household
debts, and (5) failed to address the serious energy and environmental
issues brought on by the country’s rapid industrialisation. O Chae-kil,
“Kaehoesa,” Chŏngnonghoebo 4 (1983), 3–14.
51. Wŏn, “Chŏngnonghoe Kangnyŏng Haesŏl,” 15.
88 Y.J. PAIK
52. For instance, when the Korean Peasants League (全國農民會總聯盟,

KPL) was created in 1990 to consolidate various farmers’ organisations,
some members of Chŏngnonghoe suggested that Chŏngnonghoe should
take part in the organised struggles for farmers’ rights. Chŏngnonghoe’s
elders rejected the suggestion, asserting that struggles against the govern-
ment were beyond the scope of Chŏngnonghoe’s activities. Interview
with Kim Chun-kwŏn (2014), Chung-li, Pochŭn, South Korea.
53. “We improve rural society by educating youth in righteous farming”
(fourth clause) and “We lay a foundation for human society by building
ideal rural villages with love and cooperation” (fifth clause).
54. Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn recollected arguing that Chŏngnonghoe should leave
demonstrations and fights for rights to other people and concentrate on
its own movement. Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, “Na ŭi Iryŏksŏ 19” Han’gugilbo (9
October 2003).
55. The pastors’ lack of farming experience was the greatest challenge faced
by the rural ministries of the mainstream Christian churches. The pastors
found it difficult to communicate with farmers, and even more impor-
tantly, they found it difficult to live in rural areas for long-term missionary
work.
56. People in northern provinces like P’yŏngan and Hamkyŏng were more
active in accepting Christianity and modern education in general.
Although Chŏngju was a small area, it was one of the educational hubs in
the northern provinces. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status
in the Emergence of Modern Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005), 260–264.
57. The history of modern Christian schools in Korea started with the arrival
of the first Western Protestant missionaries in 1884. As modern educa-
tional institutions, Christian schools like Kyŏngsin (1886), Paejae (1885),
and Ihwa (1886) were established by American missionaries, such as
H.G. Underwood, H.G. Appenzeller, and M.F. Scranton. Pak Sang-chin,
“Ch’ogi Han’gukkyohoe ŭi Hakkyo Sŏllip kwa Chiwŏnch’eje Yŏn’gu,”
in Kidokkyohakkyo Yŏksa e Kil ŭl Mutta, ed. by Pak Sang-chin, Paek Sŭng-
chong, Im Hŭi-kuk, Kang Yŏng-t’aek, and Han Kyu-wŏn (Seoul: Yeyŏng
K’ŏmyunik’eisyŏn, 2013), 12.
58. The annexation of Korea by Japan was the direct motivation for the
founder of the Osan School, Yi Sŭng-hun, to turn to Christianity.
Accordingly, the Osan School became a Christian school. Originally, Yi
belonged to the Presbyterian Church. Yi Man-yŏl, “Namgang Yisŭnghun
ŭi Sin’ang,” in Namgang Yisŭnghun kwa Minjok undong, ed. by
Namgangmunhwajaedan (Seoul: Namgangmunhwajaedanch’ulp’anbu,
1988), 290–334 (303–306).
59. Ham Sŏk-hŏn, “Naega Anŭn Uch’imura Kanjo Sŏnsaeng,” Ssialmadang

6 (1995). http://ssialsori.net/bbs/board.php?bo_table=0308&wr_
id=24&ckattempt=1
60. He joined the writing staff of Sasanggye, an influential magazine that led
public opinion among intellectuals. His article, “What Is Korean
Christianity Doing Now?” publicly exposed the misdeeds of the main-
stream Korean churches and created a great sensation. Ham Sŏk-hŏn,
“Han’guk ŭi Kidokkyo nŭn Muŏt ŭl Hago Innŭn’ga,” Sasanggye 30
(1956). http://ssialsori.net/bbs/board.php?bo_table=0204&wr_
id=10&page=3. He also extensively criticised the government’s lack of
legitimacy. He argued that the ultimate source of morality was the life of
ordinary Korean people, which religion and politics should regard as the
most important value.
61. From 1910 to 1915, M.K. Gandhi ran the Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg
as a form of non-violent resistance against the racial discrimination of the
South African government. http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/
mahatma-gandhi-leaves-tolstoy-farm-1913
62. Ham Sŏk-hŏn started Sunday Bible Studies at the YMCA in 1947, the
year he defected from North Korea. Ham did not restrict himself to the
Non-church Movement group, but associated with people from various
religions.
63. Pak Myŏng-ch’ŏl, “Uri Chayu harira Uri Chŏngnong harira,”
Kidokkyosasang 48 (2004), 6–15 (8).
64. Kim Chun-kwŏn, “Chŏndoja ro Salgo Ship’ŏttŏn Wŏn’gyŏngsŏn
Sŏnsaengnim,” Ssiarŭisori 226 (2013), 29–43.
65. In later life, Wŏn had a plan to create an organic farming commune in the
Maritime Territory of Russia, which would be peopled by Korean expatri-
ates in China and Russia as well as people from both North and South
Korea. Kyŏnghyangsinmun, “P’ulmuwŏn Wŏnjang Wŏn gyŏngsŏn-12”
(26 May 1998). His dream of reuniting Korean people divided by
national borders seems to have been influenced by Ham Sŏk-hŏn.
66. Wŏn also remembered that Ham’s farm lacked skills, and therefore, strug-
gled economically. Wŏn Kyŏng-sŏn, “Na ŭi Iryŏksŏ 15,” Han’gugilbo (3
October 2003).
67. As mentioned earlier, the organisational relationship became stronger as
the P’ulmu School’s graduates joined Chŏngnonghoe. Also, the P’ulmu
School’s organic farming education in the local Hongsŏng area over 20
years changed the area, turning it into the centre of organic farming in
South Korea. Hence, Chŏngnonghoe’s office moved to a site near the
P’ulmu School. The current president of Chŏngnonghoe, Chu Hyŏng-ro,
is a P’ulmu School graduate.
90 Y.J. PAIK
68. A P’ulmu is a bellows used in forging metal; it is also a metaphor for mak-
ing people useful to society through education and training. Wŏn Kyŏng-
sŏn, “Na ŭi Iryŏksŏ 10,” Han’gugilbo (26 September 2003).
69. Three Non-church Movement schools in Japan had sisterhood relation-
ships with the P’ulmu School, but Ainō was the only agricultural school,
which made the relationship between these two schools particularly close.
70. One of the P’ulmu School’s teachers, Ch’oe Sŏng-pong, introduced the
Ainō Agricultural School to the P’ulmu School in 1971, before either
school started organic farming. P’ulmugyoyuk 50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’
ujinwiwŏnhoe, P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn—Tashi Saenal i Kŭriwŏ, vol. 1
(Hongsŏng, Korea: P’ulmugyoyuk 50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe,
2008), 124. Their cooperation over organic farming started in 1977
when the P’ulmu School sent one of its graduates, Chu Chŏng-pae, to
Ainōkai to learn organic farming. (Ainōkai’s archive contains reference
letters from the P’ulmu School’s principal and other official documents
related to this exchange.)
71. The Danish rural development movement, led by a Danish pastor, scholar,
and politician, Nikolay Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), was an
effort to reconstruct Denmark after its defeat in the second Schleswig
War in 1864. Nationalist education through the folk high schools (folke-
højskole in Danish; “high school” meant today’s university) emphasised
the importance of Danish culture and language, and cooperatives origi-
nating with the folk high schools sought to bring economic self-reliance
to rural villages. For a detailed history, see Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen,
“Grundtvig as a Danish Contribution to World Culture,” Grundtvig-
Studier 48.1 (1997), 72–101; and Jarka Chloupková, “European
Cooperative Movement: Background and Common Denominators,”
Unit of Economics Working Papers 2004/4 (Copenhagen, Denmark: The
Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, 2002).
72. Uchimura Kanzō became interested in rural development when he went
to the Sapporo Agricultural School (where he converted to Christianity)
in 1877. Sŭjŭk’i Norihisa, Mugyohoejuŭija Uch’imura Kanjo (Seoul:
Sohwa, 1995), 18. He was among the earliest of the intellectuals who
introduced the Danish rural development model to Japan. He gave a
lecture on Denmark at Kashiwagi on 22 October 1911, which was pub-
lished in the journal Seisho no Kenkyū (聖書之硏究) later the same year,
and as a booklet in 1913. Uchimura Kanzō, Kōsei e no saidai
ibutsu・Denmaruku koku no hanashi (後世への最大遺物・デンマルク
国の話) (Tokyo, Japan: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 99.
73. The Non-church Movement’s rural development movement created sev-
eral agricultural schools in Japan. For example, Uchimura Kanzō was
actively involved in the creation of Kōnō Gakuen (興農學園) (est. 1929)
in Shizuoka Prefecture, which succeeded the rural educational work of
Watase Torajiro (1859–1926), one of Uchimura’s seniors at the Sapporo

Agricultural School. Kōnō Gakuen was renamed Kuzure Kokumin Gakkō
(久連国民高等學校) in 1932. Namazu Shi Meiji Shiryōkan, Kōnō
Gakuen—Mikan mura to Denmāku kyōiku (Shizuoka, Namazu Shi Meiji
Shiryōkan, 2000). Yi Ch’an-kap, the founder of the P’ulmu School,
attended Kuzure Kokumin Gakkō in 1939 to learn about the Danish folk
high schools. Obana Kiyoshi, “Yi Ch’an-kap, Ilbon Tohang Susukkekki
rŭl Palkhinda,” in P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe,
P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn—Tashi Saenal i Kŭriwŏ, vol. 2 (Hongsŏng, Korea:
P’ulmugyoyuk50nyŏn Kinyŏmsaŏpch’ujinwiwŏnhoe, 2008), 83–91.
74. Sanai seishin (三愛精神) in Japanese.
75. The “country,” when it was visualised as the territory, was also inter-
preted in Japan as land (especially land for farming). Sin Myŏng-chik,
“Hyŏptong Kongdongch’e wa P’olk’e Hoisŭ K’olle,” Sŏktangnonch’ong
53 (2012), 83–127.
76. Yi Sŭng-hun, the founder of the Osan School, first learned about the
Danish model around 1926, before Uchimura’s students came back to
Korea. He was a strong supporter of the Danish model and tried to
spread it to other schools. Yi Sŭng-hun also began promulgating the idea
of introducing cooperatives within the school and the village in 1924.
Kim Ki-sŏk, Namgang Yi Sŭng-hun (Seoul: Hyŏndaegyoyukch’ongsŏ,
1964), 246–256. In the mid-1920s, the rural development movement
inspired by the Danish model was also an important trend among the
Protestant and Ch’ŏndogyo groups in Korea. For detailed information,
see Chapter 5 of Albert L. Park, Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion,
Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea (Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press, 2015).
77. P’yŏngmin is the Korean pronunciation of 平民. The word “folk” in
Denmark’s “folk high school” was translated as p’yŏngmin, which had a
different meaning from平民 as used among anarchists in the early twen-
tieth century. P’yŏngmin has almost the same meaning as ssial, a word
coined by Ham Sŏk-hŏn later. Paek Sŭng-chong, Kŭ Nara ŭi Yŏksa wa
Mal: Ilche Shigi Han P’yŏngmin Chishigin ŭi Segyegwan (Seoul: Kungni,
2002), 333.
78. Paek, Kŭ Nara ŭi Yŏksa wa Mal, 343.
79. The P’ulmu School’s cooperative movement started in 1959, one year
after the school was founded. The school made a profound contribution
to the local economy by launching numerous cooperatives including a
cooperative bookshop, a consumer cooperative, a soap-manufacturing
cooperative, and a food processing cooperative. Kim Hyŏng-mi,
“Hongsŏng jiyŏk Saenghyŏbundong ŭi Chŏnt’ong k’yoyuk kwa
Hyŏptongjohab ŭl T’onghan Isangch’on Kŏnsŏl ŭi Isang kwa Kŭ
Kyesŭng” in Han’guk Saenghwalhyŏptongjohabundong ŭi Kiwŏn kwa
92 Y.J. PAIK
Chŏn’gae, ed. by Kim Hyŏng-mi, Yŏm Ch’an-hŭi, Yi Mi-yŏn, Chŏng

Wŏn-kak, and Chŏng Ŭn-mi (P’aju, Korea: P’urŭnnamu, 2012), 117–
135 (132). Today, cooperatives form a considerable part of Hongdong’s
local economy.
80. In the early 1960s, Park Chung Hee’s government tried to use the Danish
model as its model for rural development by creating a national organisa-
tion, the National Reconstruction Movement Headquarters (NRMH,
Chaegŏn Kungmin Undong Ponbu). However, the movement lost
momentum after the government changed its economic policy in the
early 1970s to focus on exports and the heavy and chemical industries.
Ryu Ho-chin, “Tenmak’ŭshik ŭro Salgi,” Yŏksamunjeyŏn’gu 33 (2015),
335–378. Ryu Tal-yŏng, a student of Kim Gyo-sin and professor of agri-
culture at Seoul National University, was appointed in 1961 to chair
NRMH, with the government’s promise that it would not intervene but
leave NRMH a civilian initiative. However, Ryu’s idea of what consti-
tuted a civilian initiative fundamentally conflicted with that of the statists
in the government. The government’s promise was not kept and Ryu had
to retire in 1963. Later, Ryu publicly criticised the government and the
government-led rural development movement. Ryu Tal-yŏng, “Pigŭk ŭi
5·16 i Chun I Nara Yŏksa ŭi Kyohun,” Tongailbo (15 May 1965).
81. http://www.archives.go.kr/next/search/listSubjectDescription.
do?id=003143
82. For example, as of October 1973, the list of affiliated organisations
included Korea-Japan Christian Fellowship of Reconciliation (韓日基督
者友和會), Volunteers in Asia, Inc., the Tokyo Non-church Movement
Bible Study Meeting, the Dokuritsu School, the Ainō Agricultural School,
and Hongdong People’s Association in Seoul. P’ulmuhagwŏn, “P’ulmu
ŭi Kongdongch’e,” Saebyŏkpyŏl 73 (1973), 28.
83. “I often hear that the kids from the nearby primary school or even my
eight-year-old nephew laugh at my school as the manure tub school. I
don’t care about what kids say, but I feel really embarrassed when they do
it in front of others, especially girl students that I know … My school got
this nickname because it is fundamentally different from others … But, I
know that manure is perfect as the base fertiliser. People don’t know it yet
(and prefer chemical fertilisers). Ah. Let us be manure. Like the green
barley that grows through the frozen soil, let us be manure to sprout
justice in this country frozen by corruptions.” Yi Pŏn-yŏng,
“Ttongt’onghakkyo,” Pulkkot 6.1 (1963), 1.
84. Chu Ok-ro, “Ch’ang’ŏb ŭi Malssŭm,” Pulkkot 30 (1968), 3.
85. English translation of 農事試験場 (Nōji shikenjō), following the transla-
tion of Tatsushi Fujihara, “Japanese Rice Varieties in Colonial Korea:
From the View of Nagai Isaburô,” Shakaikagaku 40.3 (2010), 81–93.
86. The main focus of the experiments was to find a variety with high respon-
siveness to and tolerance of chemical fertilisers.
87. From 1926, the colonial government provided low interest loans for agri-
cultural improvement, and over 80% of each loan was for purchasing fer-
tilisers. The amount of the loans reached JPY 49 million by 1939, and the
use of chemical fertilisers increased more than ten times between 1926
and 1940. Hŏ Su-yŏl, Kaebal Ŏmnŭn Kaebal: Ilche ha, Chosŏn’gyŏngjegaebal
ŭi Hyŏnsang kwa Ponjil (Seoul: Ŭnhaengnamu, 2011), 54–55, 84;
Tatsushi Fujihara, Ine no daitōakyōeiken: teikoku Nippon no「midori no
kakumei」 (Tokyo, Japan: Yoshikawakōbunkan, 2012).
88. Fujihara, “Japanese Rice Varieties,” 82.
89. Kim Tae-ho, “‘T’ong’ilbyŏ’ wa 1970nyŏndae Ssal Chŭngsanch’eje ŭi
Hyŏngsŏng,” 68; Utsumi Aiko and Murai Yoshinori, Chŏkto e Much’ida:
Tongnib’yŏng’ung Hokŭn Chŏnbŏm i Toen Chosŏnindŭl Iyagi (Seoul:
Yŏksabip’yŏngsa, 2012).
90. The Irrigation Association was created in 1906 by law, but only began
to play a significant role after 1917. The association was composed of
landowners, and because the large landowners had more power, the irri-
gation improvements tended to benefit them rather than the tenant
farmers and small landowners. Consequently, large protests of small
landowners against the Irrigation Association were prevalent in rural
areas during the 1920s and early 1930s. Pak Su-hyŏn, “Singminji Shidae
Surijohap Pandae undong,” Chungangsaron 7 (1991), 157–202, and
“1920-30nyŏndae Surijohap Saŏp e Taehan Chŏhang kwa Chudogyech’ŭng,”
Han’guktongnibundongsayŏn’gu 20 (2003), 245–270.
91. Hŏ Su-yŏl, Kaebal Ŏmnŭn Kaebal, 111.
92. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae Ilche ŭi Chibangjibaejŏngch’aek kwa Kŭ
Sŏnggyŏk—Myŏn haengjŏngjedo wa “Mobŏmburak’ Chŏngch’aek ŭl
Chungshim ŭro,” Han’guksayŏn’gu 93 (1996), 147–176 (164).
93. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae,” 165–168.
94. Kim Ik-han, “1920nyŏndae,” 165–168.
95. As of November 1933, the number of village development committees
was 29,383, and the number of members was 1,036,287. The number of
committees had increased to approximately 60,000 by October 1940.
Chi Su-kŏl, “Ilche ŭi Kun’gukchuŭi P’ashijŭm kwa Chosŏnnongch’onjin
hŭngundong,” Yŏksabip’yŏng 47 (1999), 16–36 (26–27).
96. Another goal of improving economic conditions in the rural areas was to
prevent the spread of socialism with the growing proletarianisation of the
rural population. Chang Kyu-sik, “1920-30nyŏndae YMCA
Nongch’onsaŏb ŭi Chŏn’gae wa Kŭ Sŏnggyŏk,” Han’gukkidokkyowa
Yŏksa 4 (1995), 207–261.
97. Chi Su-kŏl, “Ilche ŭi Kun’gukchuŭi P’ashijŭm kwa Chosŏnnongch’onjin
hŭngundong,” 21.
94 Y.J. PAIK
98. Yi Myŏng-hwa, “Tosan Anch’angho ŭi Isangch’onundong e Kwanhan

Yŏn’gu,” Han’guksahakpo 8 (2000), 121–182; Chang Se-yun,
“1920nyŏndae Isangch’on Kŏnsŏrundong kwa Anch’angho,”
Tosanhakyŏn’gu 10 (2004), 65–102.
99. Kim Ki-sŏk, Namgang Yi Sŭng-hun, 287.
100. Paek Sŭng-chong, Kŭ Nara ŭi Yŏksa wa Mal, 132–134.
101. Kim Ki-sŏk, Namgang Yi Sŭng-hun, 283–285.
102. Sŏ Koeng-il, “1920nyŏndae Sahoeundong kwa Namgang,” in Namgang
Yisŭnghun kwa Minjok undong, ed. by Namgangmunhwajaedan (Seoul:
Namgangmunhwajaedanch’ulp’anbu, 1988), 243–289 (285).
103. Yi Sŭng-hun’s exchanges with Uchimura’s students, such as Ham Sŏk-
hŏn, Yang In-sŏng, and Kim Gyo-sin, as well as the Korean mainstream
church’s submission to the colonial government’s pressure, led Yi Sŭng-
hun to convert to the Non-church Movement in the late 1920s. Kim
Ki-sŏk, Namgang Yi Sŭng-hun, 327.
104. Sŭjŭk’i Norihisa, Mugyohoejuŭija Uch’imura Kanjo, 98–101.
105. The Japanese origin of the Non-church Movement raised the animosity
of some Korean Christians, and some people accused its Korean believers
of being a pro-Japanese group. For example, Kim In-sŏ of the Korean
Presbyterian Church regarded the spread of the Non-church Movement
in Korea as Uchimura’s spiritual imperialism. Niihori Kuniji, Kimgyosin
ŭi Sinang kwa Chŏhang: Han’guk Mugyohoejuŭija ŭi Chŏnt’ujŏk Saengae
(P’aju, Korea: Iktusŭ, 2012), 61–62. However, such accusations were not
generally accepted because people like Kim Gyo-sin, Ham Sŏk-hŏn, and
Yi Sŭng-hun were so active in demanding Korea’s independence.
106. From the early 1920s, the Christian churches in Korea were criticised for
neglecting living conditions in rural areas and concentrating on evange-
lism. Responding to these criticisms, these groups formed rural move-
ments to contest colonial modernity. The Danish model of rural
development was the central element in their efforts to institutionalise an
alternative moral economy. Albert L. Park, Building a Heaven on Earth.
107. Pak Hŭi-chun, “1920~1930nyŏndae Han’gukkyohoe Chidojadŭl ŭi
Tenmak’ŭ Nongch’onundong Ihae,” Han’gukkidokkyoyŏksayŏn’gusososhik
105 (2014), 23–26.
108. Tom Cliff, “Schrödinger’s Politics: The Problem of ‘Collapse’ in the
Question of ‘What Is Political?’” (unpublished ms, 2015).
Yon Jae Paik is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. He has an
academic background in Chemistry (BA), Environmental Studies (MA), Business
(MSc), and Asian Studies (MA), and a professional background in commercial
banking. Yon Jae’s primary research interest is the history of communal politics in
South Korea. He has written on female factory workers’ small group (somoim)
activities under Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship, demonstrating the signifi-
cance of informal organisational modes in Korea’s influential labour union move-
ment of the 1970s.
PART II
Networks
CHAPTER 5
Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal

Networks for Survival Politics
Uchralt Otede
The term “informal networks” has been used within diverse disciplines,
but here I will use it in the context of survival politics. “Survival politics”
refers to a range of informal and non-governmental activities conducted in
defence of the life, livelihood, or cultural survival of a group of people, and
to their search for a “good (or at least better) life.”1 Survival politics is
based on people’s responses to socio-environmental crises, rather than any
political ideology. With this as a starting point, I will discuss informal net-
works as an effective way to engage in survival politics.
Formal networks are understood as networks where individuals connect
to each other based on formally prescribed ties, such as organizational
charts, job descriptions, and/or hierarchical authority structures, while
informal networks are loosely structured, based on friendship or trust.2
Arshad has defined “informal social networks” as follows:
Informal social networks can generally be defined as a set of relationships or

linkages among individuals, each of which has a varying degree of signifi-
cance to the wider networks. Each individual is linked to a set of other
individuals, and a number of individuals within one set may be linked to
networks of people in other sets, and so on.3
U. Otede (*)

100 U. OTEDE
Here I will discuss three types of informal networks. Type one is the
personal network, made up of people from the relatives, friends, and
neighbourhood. Type two is the issue-specific network such as an
informal flood-relief network, a makeshift storm recovery centre, or a
citizen’s radioactivity measuring station. Type three is the Internet-
based information exchange network, which might be exemplified by
an online informal flood data collection system or local river protection
network.
Personal Networks
Compared to NGOs and other social organizations, informal networks
show a high degree of flexibility in form. For example, in China, NGOs
have to fulfil a number of requirements. They must register with the
authorities and have full-time staff and a fixed office space. As Spires et al.
point out, in China NGOs need either to find a government department
to be their “supervisory agency” or to be “under another registered orga-
nization.” Although, in some parts of China, NGOs can gain political
support through personal relationships, in a city like Beijing “illegal groups
have little space to survive.”4 Even some international NGOs practise self-
censorship to avoid violating China’s state policies.5
Informal networks have more freedom, because they are not bound by
these rules and regulations. Personal networks such as family, relatives,
and friends are unable to be registered and controlled, yet are everywhere.
Focusing on China’s environmental movements, Shi Fayong, for example,
shows how effective informal networks can be in grassroots activities. Shi
reported on a green protection movement in a small community in south-
ern China using informal networks to play a crucial role in mobilizing
human resources as well as getting support from governments.6 In Shi’s
case study, residents leveraged their personal networks of friends, class-
mates, and neighbours to informally link nine formal residents’ commit-
tees together to confront a government-driven community development
project which would only have benefit a small number of retired party
cadres.7 Such informal networks are fluid, becoming active when a specific
goal comes to the fore, and enter a hibernation state with the achievement
of the goal. For example, a number of informal networks were formed
during the anti-Nujiang dam movements in China.8 But such networks
then disbanded quickly once their objectives were realized.
CONCEPT ESSAY TWO: LEVERAGING INFORMAL NETWORKS FOR SURVIVAL… 101
Issue-Specific Networks
Issue-specific networks may, and typically do, extend beyond the immedi-
ate bounds of friends, family, and neighbourhood. Research on disaster
responses and grassroots environmental struggles in particular shows that
informal networks are one of the most important resources on which peo-
ple rely in a survival situation. Informal networks can effectively help peo-
ple to survive, both mentally and materially, when a sudden natural disaster
such as hurricane, flood, or earthquake strikes. For example, in 2005,
when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, networks of relatives and
friends, and also of unknown others, provided critical resources such as
boats, shelter, food, and clothing.9
In a similar vein, Roasa points out how local self-help activists acted to
more effectively supplement government function when floods hit
Thailand in 2011:
Left with little official help, residents here—along with hundreds of thou-
sands of people in other flood-struck parts of Bangkok—sprang into action.
They quickly improvised a series of informal networks, and repurposed
existing ones, to perform the vital tasks normally carried out by the govern-
ment in emergencies.10
These informal networks played a role as critical lifelines: “with minimal

help from the government, the neighbourhood survived the worst disaster
ever to hit Thailand.”11 And, when the massive Hanshin-Awaji earthquake
hit cities in the Kansai region of Japan in 1995, most people were rescued
by their families or neighbours rather than the official rescue teams.12
Studies emphasized that before and after disasters, the power of local com-
munities and their networks needs to be taken into account so that resi-
dents’ self-help capabilities can be further improved.
In a struggle against human-generated environmental pollution, infor-
mal networks play an important role as well. For example, Fujibayashi
points out that the informal network was an important strategy for resi-
dents’ movements in Japan between the 1960s and 1980s. His case study
focused on residents’ movements against the Date City coal-fired power
plant. He found that, through their informal networks, people very effec-
tively carried out many important activities, such as connecting and
informing people in other regions, implementing independent surveys on
pollution, and sustaining anti-pollution activities.13
102 U. OTEDE
Virtual (Internet-Based) Networks

Informal networks can also exist in virtual space. For instance, a website
called Nu River Protection Network was co-founded by a number of
NGOs to provide a communication platform for people who care about
the Nu River. There is no fixed-focus organization in the network, and
there is a loose and equal partnership between the participants. Common
activities organized through the network range from issuing joint propos-
als to holding online forums and meetings.14 The online grassland protec-
tion network discussed in Chapter 6 and the Internet outreach activities
created by the Takae community (discussed in Chapter 7) are good exam-
ples of the expanding role of these virtual networks.
Informal Networks and the State

Why do people make use of informal networks when they are facing a
natural or man-made disaster? One simple reason is that formal life-
sustaining networks and institutions often cease to function when a mas-
sive disaster destroys basic infrastructure such as communication towers,
electrical power lines, roads, and bridges. In the case of Hurricane Katrina,
for example, Heilmann and Muse write that disaster victims found infor-
mal networks to be invaluable because the established infrastructure (e.g.,
communication, roads, airports, access to food, water, and shelter) became
unavailable when flooding forced agencies to relocate to other cities.15
There are also broader reasons related to people’s negative view of gov-
ernments and their formal networks. For example, Roasa points out that
informal networks are well developed in Thailand because ordinary people
have low expectations of governments and their services. They have no
illusions about the government services, so they more actively consider
self-help.16
A similar phenomenon can be found in Japan. Mistrust of formal insti-
tutions as a spur to self-help efforts was evident following the triple disas-
ter—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown—which affected
Northeastern Japan in 2011. Morris-Suzuki describes the role played by a
loosely linked network of citizens’ radioactivity measuring stations in
obtaining accurate independent information about radiation levels follow-
ing this disaster. She cites a citizen who remarks that “loss of public confi-
dence in government authorities” was the main reason for seeking
independent data.17
Informal networks are not necessarily wholly divorced from state

institutions, though. Sometimes people using informal networks develop
a good relationship with government officials in order to obtain valuable
information or resources that they cannot acquire through formal chan-
nels. In Shi’s case study of environmental struggle in China, activists
within the community were confronting local government on a formal
level, but their informal networks of friends or classmates extended into
formal institutions like the local police station and the urban construc-
tion bureau, providing the activists with the information and advice
they needs to sustain their protests. For example, residents were able to
obtain an official plan of their district, so they were able to discover that
a developer’s project violated the official plan, thus acquiring a sound basis
to challenge the project.18 A similar process is discussed in Chapter 6,
where we trace the way in which informal networks gave marginalized
herder communities links into the core of the Chinese political system.
Informal networks can also act as supplements to formal governmental
assistance, functioning better for rescue when huge natural disasters hap-
pen. On the other hand, informal issue-specific networks often demon-
strate competitive relationships with formal politics. Typical cases are
networks for citizens’ independent investigation of natural disasters or
man-made pollution, such as Japan’s Citizen Radioactivity Measuring
Stations in Fukushima and surrounding areas19 and China’s indepen-
dent investigation of water crisis. The activities of water investigation
were initiated by a social activist, Deng Fei, and his supporters in
February 2013. This was a time when Deng returned from Beijing to
his home to celebrate the Chinese spring holiday with his family; he
discovered that deep underground water in his hometown was seriously
polluted due to illegal discharge of industrial waste water. He was pro-
foundly shocked and made an immediate response together with other
environmental activists, human rights lawyers, pollution victims, envi-
ronmental scientists, university students, and journalists. The group car-
ried out a variety of activities to promote citizens’ independent
investigations of water pollution, not only in Deng’s hometown in
Shandong province, but also in many other places, such as Beijing and
Inner Mongolia.20
These informal networks have several features in common: they do not
rely on the government; they are not satisfied with the official information
provided by the formal systems; and the citizens use them to try to obtain
trustworthy information through their own efforts.
104 U. OTEDE
Data generated by citizens’ independent investigations can be comple-

mentary to information held by governments. For example, informal
issue-specific networks can play an alternative role when the formal politics
cannot fulfil citizens’ specific requirements due to shortage of funding or
human resources. On the other hand, sometimes informal issue-specific
networks will lead to a competitive or antagonistic relationship with the
official politics by generating information which challenges or contradicts
the “official version” presented by the state. For example, after the 2008
Sichuan earthquake, citizens’ independent investigations relating to earth-
quake victims were considered to be “inciting subversion of state power”
by the Chinese government and key figures were sentenced to prison.21
The following two chapters, which are case studies of grassland protec-
tion movements in China and anti-helipad movements in Japan, empiri-
cally demonstrate how informal social networks are critical elements of
grassroots survival politics movements. In Chapter 6, we explore one clus-
ter of networks which has emerged around the issue of protecting the
Inner Mongolian grasslands from environmental pollution. The chapter
shows that networks often extend in multiple directions. The cluster of
networks explored here creates links to formal politics in one direction,
but in the other seeks to create a new space for understanding and
protecting grassland ecology through education, consciousness transfor-
mation, and bottom-up action. Chapter 7 shows how the small Okinawan
community of Takae, in resisting plans for the construction of US military
helipads in the surrounding forest, created and relied on an informal net-
work of support linking the village to a range of other groups in Okinawa,
other parts of Japan, and the wider world.
Notes
1. Tessa, “Invisible Politics,” Humanities Australia, no. 5 (2014), 58.
2. Kathy J. Kuipers, “Formal and Informal Network Coupling and Its
Relationship to Workplace Attachments,” Sociological Perspectives, no. 4
(2009), 456–479.
3. Imran Arshad “It’s Not What You Know It’s Who You Know That Counts:
The Interplay between Informal Social Networks and Formal Organization
in Connecting Newcomers to Canada,” Policy Horizons Canada (2011), 6,
accessed on November 5, 2016, http://www.horizons.gc.ca/en/file/583
4. Anthony J. Spires, Lin Tao and Kin-man Chan, “Societal Support for
China’s Grass-Roots NGOs: Evidence from Yuannan, Guangdong and
Beijing,” The China Journal, no. 70 (2014), 76–77.
5. Joseph Y. S. Cheng, kinglun Ngok and Wenjia Zhuang, “The Survival and
Development Space for China’s Labor NGOs: Informal Politics and Its
Uncertainty,” Asian Survey, Vol. 50, no. 6 (2010), 1097.
6. Shi Fayong, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui
Yundong: Yige Jiequ Huanbao Yundong Ge’an Weili,” Shehuixue Renleixue
Zhongguowang, March 4, 2007, accessed on November 10, 2016, https://
translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sachina.edu.cn%2FHtmldata%2Farticle%2F2006%2
F04%2F965.html&anno=2
7. Shi, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui Yundong,” 8.
8. Tong Zhifeng, “Dongyuan Jiegou yu Ziran Baoyu Yundong de Fazhan: Yi
Nujiang Fanba Yundong Weili,” Zhongguo Huanjing Shehuixue, Vol. 01
(2014), 192.
9. Sharon G. Heilmann and Yira Y. Muse, “The Use of Informal Networks to
Resolve Logistics Related Issues in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster
Response: A Content Analysis Perspective,” Journal of Business and
Educational Leadership, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2013), 67.
10. Dustin Roasa, “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan: How Informal Networks Batteld
Bankok’s Worst Flood,” The Informal City Dialogues, no. 1 (2013), 1,
accessed on November 9, 2016, https://nextcity.org/features/view/
the-diy-disaster-plan
11. Roasa. “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan,” 5.
12. Sakurayi Tsuneya and Ito Atsuko, “Shinsai Fukkō o Meguru Komuniti
keisei to Sono Kadai,” Chiyiki Seisaku Kenkyu Takasaki Daigaku Chiyiki
Seisaku Kenkyukai, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2013), 43.
13. Fujibayashi Yasushi, “Jumin Undō Saikō: Seikatsushi no Naka no
Yigimōshidate Kominiti no keisei to Tenkai,” 21 Seiki Shakai Dezayin
Kenkyu, no. 7 (2008).
14. Tong, “Dongyuan Jegou yu Ziran bayou Yundong de Fazhan,”
185–191.
15. Heilmann and Muse, “The Use of Informal Networks to Resolve Logistics-
Related Issues in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response,” 67.
16. Roasa, “The D.I.Y Disaster Plan,” 6.
18. Shi, “Guanxi Wangluo yu Dangdai Zhongguo Jiceng Shehui Yundong:
Yige Jiequ Huanbao Yundong Ge’an Weili,” 13.
20. Zhongguo Shuiweiji Duli Diaocha, accessed on December 10, 2016, http://
blog.163.com/special/0012646O/underearthpollution.html
21. Margherita Viviani, “Chinese Independent Documentary Films: Alternative
Media, Public Spheres and the Emergence of the Citizen Activist,” Asian
Studies Review, 38, no. 1 (2014), 115.
106 U. OTEDE
Uchralt Otede is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture, History and

Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. His research is focused on issues
of environmental pollution and grassroots actions in Mongolia, China, and Japan.
Recent publications include “Shared air, shared destiny,” in China Story Yearbook
2014: Shared Destiny (2015) and “Uchi mongoru no kankyo kō sō undō ” (Anti-
pollution Movement in Inner Mongolia), in Sō gen to Kō seki:mongoru to chibetto ni
okeru shigen kaihatsu to kankyō mondai (Grassland and Ore: Resource Development
and Environmental Change in Mongolia and Tibet) (2015).
CHAPTER 6
Informal Grassland Protection Networks

in Inner Mongolia
Uchralt Otede
Over the past two decades, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of

People’s Republic of China (hereafter referred to as Inner Mongolia) has
experienced rapid economic growth and industrialization. However,
accompanying such growth, environmental pollution has begun to pose a
serious threat to the everyday life of the region’s herdsmen. In some areas,
highly polluting industries have permanently damaged the grasslands,
threatening the herdsmen’s health and that of their livestock. In order to
protect the grasslands, a range of collective activities have been under-
taken by grassroots groups, made up of herdsmen and local village cadres
as well as former “Educated Youth,”1 intellectuals, students, and lawyers
countrywide. These activities have gradually given rise to a variety of infor-
mal grassland protection networks formed through their activities. The
aim of this chapter is to examine and describe the formation, activities, and
features of informal grassland protection networks through an ethno-
graphic case study conducted in Inner Mongolia and Beijing.
In the literature of environmental sociology in China, pollution victims
in rural villages tend to be portrayed as isolated and helpless. Villagers are
under pressure not only from polluting enterprises but also from local
U. Otede (*)

108 U. OTEDE
governments.2 They either remain silent, or fight against the polluters

through direct violence. These villagers have sympathizers in the intellec-
tual elites and middle classes, but, in contrast to the close alliance of politi-
cal and economic elites, the ties between the intellectual elite and rural
villagers are very weak. “For their own safety, the intellectual elite lack
awareness, courage and motivation to resist pollution together with the
rural villagers.”3 In addition, most of the environmental non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) in China focus on natural resource conservation.
They carry out activities on environmental education, rescuing endan-
gered birds, rivers, forests, wetlands, and so on. But, until very recently
there was no alliance between environmental NGOs and rural environ-
mental protest movements.4
In this chapter, I tell a more hopeful story through a case study of infor-
mal grassland protection networks. The case study shows that there is a
possibility to change the rural pollution victims’ isolated and helpless situ-
ation by leveraging informal networks. In the Eastern Ujimchin Banner of
Inner Mongolia, rural herders who have become victims of pollution are
connected to the outside world, including intellectual elites, political elites,
and members of environmental NGOs through personal networks and
informal issue-specific networks. These connections enable diverse forms
of direct and indirect collective action against polluting enterprises in the
grassland. Three specific informal networks play a crucial role in changing
the rural herders’ isolated situation. The first network is based on long-
standing personal relationships between Inner Mongolian herders and a
former Educated Youth Chen Jiqun, who now lives in Beijing. Because
Chen’s home functions as an information centre for the herders, local
herders call it the Informal Beijing Liaison Office. The second network was
formed by group of former Educated Youth who went to Eastern Ujimchin
grassland together between 1960s and 1970s. In China, they are known as
the Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth. The third network is loosely struc-
tured and open, and centres on a shared concern for grassland.
This chapter draws on three fieldwork visits conducted between 2014
and 2015. Data was gathered by intensive interviewing. In Eastern
Ujimchin banner, I interviewed herders who are victims of industrial pol-
lution. I lived in the home of a herder named Damrin for about a month
while conducting my fieldwork; Damrin used to be a local leader of anti-
paper mill activities in Eastern Ujimchin. I also interviewed several Eastern
Ujimchin Educated Youth in Beijing. A key person, Chen Jiqun, provided
me with many detailed stories and original documents. Textual data used
INFORMAL GRASSLAND PROTECTION NETWORKS IN INNER MONGOLIA 109
herein includes the official verdict of the Eastern Ujimchin paper mill pol-
lution dispute, news reports, and information provided online by several
environmental NGOs based in Beijing.
The following section provides background information of pollution in
the herders’ community in Eastern Ujimchin and on the formal environ-
mental protection system. The third section describes and analyses the
three different informal networks outlined above: the informal Beijing liai-
son office, Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth network, and the grassland
protection network. The conclusion discusses these informal networks and
analyses their possibilities and limitations.
Eastern Ujimchin Banner: The Failure of the Formal

Environmental Protection System
The case examined in this chapter arises from industrial pollution in
Eastern Ujimchin banner and the failure of the formal environmental pro-
tection system. Under the policy of “attracting external capital and devel-
oping local industries,” a highly polluting paper mill was invited by the
Xilingol city government to set up a factory in Eastern Ujimchin Banner
in 2000.5 Soon after its establishment, with the local government’s sup-
port but without the permission of the local residents, the paper mill occu-
pied a large patch of grassland to build a wastewater pit. A few months
later the waste water overflowed from the pit into areas which constituted
seven herdsmen’s grasslands and contaminated their grass and under-
ground water. As a result, livestock on the ground were poisoned and
large numbers died. The surrounding environment was further devastated
by highly polluted air, and local herdsmen started to show symptoms of
dizziness and nausea.6
This tragedy appeared to be caused by the paper mill, but the ultimate
culprit may be said to be the local government, who played a crucial role
in the whole process. The Eastern Ujimchin government invited the paper
mill to the region, arranging for the highly polluting factory to be estab-
lished on local herdsmens’ grassland, then obstructed the activities of
herders when they demanded their rights. In 2000, when the local gov-
ernment invited the paper mill to operate in its territory, it promised to
provide enough land for the factory to discharge its wastewater. To fulfil
this commitment, the government provided the factory with local herders’
grassland without the herders’ consent. Later, when the herdsmen orga-
nized a petition on this case to a higher level of government in order to
110 U. OTEDE
protect their rights, the local government warned them not to pursue their
complaint because the paper mill made a great contribution to the local
economy. In the end, the herdsmen sued the paper mill. Standing on the
side of the paper mill against the local herders, the local government ille-
gally changed the land ownership title of the herders’ grassland from
collective-owned to state-owned. The Government stated that the owner-
ship contract for this land, which had been drawn up in 1997, was inac-
curate and needed to be corrected. It subsequently claimed that the
grassland used and polluted by the mill was state-owned land and that the
local herdsmen were not entitled to its use.
Although Eastern Ujimchin banner has an environment protection
bureau, this formal system failed to meet its obligation due to banner
government intervention. This lax enforcement is not a phenomenon
unique to Eastern Ujimchin, but may be observed everywhere in China.
It is a structural defect of the current Chinese formal environmental pro-
tection system.7 One study of China’s environmental policy summarizes
the formal situation as follows: “As the competent environmental protec-
tion administration under the State Council, the State Environmental
Protection Administration is responsible for overall supervision and
administration of the country’s environmental protection. The people’s
governments at the provincial, city and county levels have also established
environmental protection departments to carry out overall supervision
and administration of the environmental protection work in their
localities.”8
But in practice, the government’s environmental protection agencies
encounter many difficulties, some of which originate from problem of
management structure. The rights to appoint and promote personnel, and
to determine wages and social welfare provisions for employees of the local
environmental protection bureau are all vested in the local government.
Therefore, it is very difficult for the local environmental protection depart-
ments to check and oppose highly polluting industrial development proj-
ects if these projects are welcomed and supported by the local government.9
In some regions, the environmental protection bureaux take the initiative
to protect highly polluting enterprises and factories in order to help local
government raise local GDP.10 For example, one Chinese scholar, Zhang
Yulin, has pointed out that in many cases local governments protect pol-
luting enterprises rather than pollution victims because local governments
and the polluting enterprises share common interests.11 Given the inef-
fectiveness of the formal environmental protection system, people started
to seek solutions in informal ways.
Informal Beijing Liaison Office

In the context of environmental degradation in Eastern Ujimchin banner
in the late 1990s, grassroots environmental protection activities have
gradually emerged and developed. These activities include the formation
of an informal grassland protection network, which expanded slowly to
fight against industrial pollution in the Eastern Ujimchin grasslands, as
well as to protect grasslands more generally. This is an open network which
involves people from diverse walks of life, such as local herdsmen, Educated
Youth from Beijing, young ethnic Mongolians living in cities, professors,
and people from environmental NGOs and law firms. The networks play
an important role in linking grassland protection activities in diverse forms
and various locations.
My encounter with this network began in May 2014, when I visited
Chen Jiqun in Beijing. Chen is a painter focusing on life in and landscapes
of the Inner Mongolian grasslands. He is a former Educated Youth, who
went to live in herder communities in Eastern Ujimchin for more than
decade during the Cultural Revolution. He is also an environmental activ-
ist, running a website named Echoing Steppe to promote awareness of the
need for grassland protection in Inner Mongolia. Since the late 1990s, he
has focused on environmental pollution in Inner Mongolia, and actively
involves himself with anti-pollution movements in the region. Chen’s net-
working practices demonstrate the flexible and yet strategic way in which
informal networks emerge and are sustained.
Chen is a cautious person, so when we first met he looked at my pass-
port carefully to make sure my nationality was Chinese. He told me that,
as a grassroots environmental activist, it is an essential to act carefully to
survive in China. He tries to avoid relations with foreign nationals, espe-
cially strangers of whom little is known. However, after a short conversa-
tion, we found that Chen was very familiar with two of my relatives in
Inner Mongolia. This established ties between us, so we felt less apprehen-
sive and were able to speak freely to each other. I told him that the main
purpose of my trip was to conduct research on grassroots environmental
activities in Inner Mongolia. “You came to the right place!” Chen said
half-jokingly and went on to explain to me that his home has become a
sort of informal Beijing liaison office for the Inner Mongolian grasslands.
Herders from Inner Mongolia visit him when they come to Beijing, and
people in Beijing or from outside also visit when they want to make con-
tact with Inner Mongolian people.
112 U. OTEDE
Chen’s first encounter with Inner Mongolia took place during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution late in the 1960s. In 1967, he was a student
at the Fine Art School affiliated to the China Central Academy of Fine
Arts, but the school was closed because of the Cultural Revolution. At the
end of the year, the Revolutionary Committee of Beijing, Dongcheng
District, called on all students who had no classes to go to Inner Mongolia.12
Soon after that, in November 1967, Chen and 400 other students volun-
tarily responded to the call and went to the Xilingol League in Inner
Mongolia.13 One hundred and twenty students, Chen among them, were
assigned to the Mandahbulag pasture in Eastern Ujimchin banner (Image
6.1). It was a cold winter and, because the students had arrived unexpect-
edly, the local herders’ community could not provide enough yurts for
them. Female students were housed four to a yurt while male students
lived in herders’ homes. Thus Chen’s life in the grassland started. The
young students had to do the same hard work as the local herders, and
soon came to realize that life on the grasslands was not as romantic as they
thought. They had no holiday at all, and most of the students went back
to their homes only once every three to five years.
Image 6.1 Landscape of Mandahbulag pasture during the winter. Photograph ©

Uchralt Otede
By 1972 the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution had eased slightly, so

that gradually the students returned to Beijing for the university entrance
exams or to take up jobs in factories. However, Chen and several other
male students were not so lucky. They were unable to return to Beijing
until 1980. In the end, Chen spent 13 years in Eastern Ujimchin, and dur-
ing this period he married a local Mongolian girl. “Eastern Ujimchin’s
grassland is my second home,” Chen said to me. After returning to Beijing,
he continued visiting the grasslands many times each year, always staying
at herders’ homes. For them Chen is just one of their family members. The
herders visit Chen’s home in Beijing too when their children go to the
university there or when a family member has to travel to Beijing for medi-
cal treatment. The herders also come to Chen to seek advice and discuss
ways to approach the central government when they are facing environ-
mental disputes at home that cannot be resolved at the local level. That is
why Chen calls his home the “informal Beijing liaison office” for Inner
Mongolian grasslands.
Since 2000, Chen has also been running a public environmental web-
site to promote grassland protection activities. His work for grassland pro-
tection covers not only the Eastern Ujimchin grasslands but also other
places in Inner and even Outer Mongolia. Thus, victims of environmental
pollution in Inner Mongolia, environmental NGOs, journalists, academics
in Beijing, and people from abroad who care about the Inner Mongolian
grasslands come to him for advice and information.
Chen’s role as a network “hub” is enhanced by his skills in using the
latest communication tools. He regularly uses WeChat (a mobile text and
voice messaging communication service developed in China), as well as
having two email addresses and three mobile phones. At the time of our
conversation, two herders from Inner Mongolia called him; one was there
to consult him about grassland protection laws, while another had come
to discuss how to negotiate with polluting factories. Chen speaks
Mongolian to the herders most of time, changing to Chinese only when
he needs to confirm some legal terms or other key words. A journalist
from the United States of America also contacted Chen to ask him to act
as a guide to a grassland polluting factory in Inner Mongolia. However,
Chen rejected the journalist’s request. He told me he was afraid of getting
into trouble for guiding a foreign journalist to a place that the Chinese
government does not want the outside world to see.
Chen’s work place for environmental activities is simple but multi-
functional. He rents an apartment on the outskirts of Beijing that has
114 U. OTEDE
three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. His

house has one bedroom for himself, one bedroom for his stored paint-
ings, and another bedroom for herders when they come to Beijing.
Sometimes he organizes environmental protection training classes for as
many as a dozen or more herders. The living room is his main office
area. There is a wall panel on the right hand side of the entrance. At the
top of the panel are listed the words “Echoing Steppe” and three key
concepts written in large green font: rule of law, empowerment, and
environmental protection. Chen believes that the most important thing
is that the herders use the law to protect their own interests. Therefore,
in the past 20 years, he has published more than 20 legal books in
Mongolian language and distributed them to herder communities in
Inner Mongolia.
Beneath the words on the panel are photographs showing Chen’s col-
laborative activities with Inner Mongolian herders, Chinese environmental
NGOs, and international academic institutions from Mongolia and South
Korea. Two desks, two computers, and a printer are located near to a big
window in living room. Three well-stocked book shelves are in the living
room and in Chen’s bedroom. An electric retractable screen is installed on
a wall of the living room, so Chen can change his living room into a class-
room easily by pulling down the screen and turning on a projector. He is
running his Echoing Steppe website alone, with no assistant or regular
volunteers, and even the website hosting annual fee comes from his own
pocket.
And yet Chen is not alone, for he is actively engaged in two invisible
and loose collaborative networks. One is made up of former Eastern
Ujimchin Educated Youth who shared similar life experiences in the grass-
lands in the past, and are now working to protect the grasslands where
they lived during the Cultural Revolution. Another network is gradually
being formed around Chen’s activities reported on the Echoing Steppe
website and involves journalists, students, and people from environmental
NGOs. Chen says that these two informal networks are important
resources for him to carry out activities for grassland protection. He can
unite and mobilize people from both the government and social organiza-
tions through these informal networks to help implement his projects.
The following sections describe the form and operations of the Eastern
Ujimchin Educated Youth Network and the grassland protection network
in detail.
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth Network

Most of the Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth—young students from
Beijing who went to the Eastern Ujimchin grassland to work and live with
local herders in the 1960s and 1970s during the Cultural Revolution—
returned to Beijing or other cities in the late 1970s. They maintained
contact and their friendship with each other because of their shared expe-
riences in the Eastern Ujimchin grasslands.
From the late 1990s, many polluting industries moved into the Eastern
Ujimchin grassland, contaminating pastures and threatening the survival
of herders as well as their livestock. The industrial pollution of the grass-
lands and the plight of local herdsmen aroused the attention and sympathy
of the Educated Youth. When they saw the beautiful grasslands where they
had lived being polluted, and their old friends and local herdsmen suffer-
ing from these changes, many Educated Youth stood up and involved
themselves in grassland protection activities. Their unusual experiences,
which had made them both “outsiders” and “insiders” to the life of the
grasslands, thus facilitated their key networking role. Their environmental
campaign succeeded in preventing a number of pollution cases, such as
silver contamination in Zainbulag village, iron and zinc metal mining pol-
lution in Mandahbulag village, and paper mill pollution in Enkezaraglang
village. In this section, I focus on anti-paper mill pollution movements,
because they demonstrate the dynamics of informal networks among for-
mer Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth. As mentioned in the foregoing
concept essay, such networks may have multiple dimensions, creating
informal channels into the formal political system while also providing
platforms for self-help actions which extend beyond the bounds of formal
politics. Here I start by giving a few examples to show how the personal
relationships of former Educated Youth linked state administration, the
legal system, and influential media, and directly or indirectly influenced
formal politics at the central state level, providing active support for anti-
pollution movements in Eastern Ujimchin.
First, by leveraging their personal networks, the former Educated Youth
directly communicated their own and the herders’ concerns about severe
industrial pollution in the Eastern Ujimchin grassland to the Minster of
Environmental Protection of the PRC. In 2001, seven people—three
herders, three former Educated Youth, and a spouse of one of the Educated
Youth—drafted a joint appeal on the issue in the hope of getting attention
116 U. OTEDE
from the Central Government. One of the drafters of the appeal was Yuan
Guoqing, a former Educated Youth who was a director at the Ministry of
Public Security at that time. Coincidentally, the head of the Ministry of
Environmental Protection, Xie Zhenhua, had been Yuan’s classmate when
they studied at the Party School of the Central Committee. Therefore,
Yuan handed the appeal directly to Xie, who immediately sent a written
instruction to the director of the Environmental Monitoring Agency to let
the seven get involved.
Chen Jiqun told me during my interview with him that is would have
been impossible to submit the appeal directly to the head of the Ministry
of Environmental Protection without this personal relationship. For the
same reason, after receiving instructions from Xie, the director of
Environmental Monitoring Agency was particularly careful to handle this
matter himself. The director together with his pollution investigation
team went to Eastern Ujimchin grassland twice to investigate industrial
pollution in the region. In May 2005, the Ministry of Environmental
Protection held a press conference informing the public that three pollut-
ing enterprises in Eastern Ujimchin grassland, including the paper mill,
were on the list of the nine most serious environmental pollution law cases
of that year in China. Thus the personal relationship between the former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth and the head of Ministry of
Environmental Protection played a major role in this case.
Second, thanks to the active role of the informal network of Eastern
Ujimchin Educated Youth, the issue gained attention and coverage from
some of the most influential news media, such as China Youth Daily and
Guangming Daily. The China Youth Daily is an official newspaper of the
Central Committee of Communist Youth League of China. One of its
reporters is Jiang Fei whose husband is a former Educated Youth. In 2003,
Jiang heard of the severe pollution in the Eastern Ujimchin grassland from
her husband and, subsequently, went to Eastern Ujimchin to interview
pollution victims, heads of polluting factories, and local government offi-
cials. Shortly after her July trip, Jiang published a detailed 8000-word
report in the China Youth Daily.14 Another influential newspaper, the
Guangming Daily, is under the leadership of the Publicity Department of
the CPC Central Committee. A reporter for that paper, Wu Litian, is a
younger sister of a former Educated Youth. Wu Litian was active in grass-
land protection and frequently reported on pollution in Eastern Ujimchin
in the Guangming Daily and other news media.15 It is unlikely that indus-
trial pollution affecting the Eastern Ujimchin grassland would have been
so widely reported were it not for the very close personal relationship
between former Educated Youth and media staff in key positions.
Third, through the efforts of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth, the pollution in Eastern Ujimchin grassland was reported
on China Central Television in 2003 to mark the “Two Meetings”—the
National People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), that con-
vene in March each year.16 The NPC is the highest state organ, with
nominal responsibility for 15 of the most important aspects of the nation’s
operation, including the election of the President of People’s Republic of
China. The main constituent bodies of NPC are the Standing Committee
and special committees such as a legal committee and an environmental
and resource protection committee. At that time, one of the former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth, Chu Shitong, was a deputy director of
the legal committee. He was particularly concerned about pollution by a
paper mill in his “second home,” Enkezargalang village in Eastern
Ujimchin banner, so he told his colleague Qu Geping, the Director of
Environment and Resources Protection Committee, about it. This
Committee is responsible for national environmental legislation and envi-
ronmental impact assessment law. Qu, in turn, contacted China Central
Television to arrange a special programme on issues of national environ-
mental legislation to mark the Two Meetings. Qu played an important
role in the programme as a special guest by pointing out that not only
polluting enterprises but also local government should be held account-
able. Once again the informal network of former Educated Youth played
a key role to push contamination cases in Eastern Ujimchin grassland to
the state level.
Fourth, the intervention of former Educated Youth did not only help
pollution victims seek change from formal government agencies but also
helped them to better their situation through other channels. Specifically,
Educated Youth helped the herders to get legal assistance from a famous
law firm in Beijing, resulting in a favourable outcome for them in a signifi-
cant environmental pollution trial. The sequence of events leading to this
win was as follows. In 2002, four pollution victims of the paper mill went
to Chen Jiqun’s informal Beijing liaison office to seek help. After several
days of comprehensive discussion with Chen, the herders made a decision
to resist pollution and protect their interests through legal means, so Chen
began looking for a suitable law firm. Chen knew a former Educated
Youth, Xie Xiaoqin, whose wife, Wang Li, was the director of Beijing De
118 U. OTEDE
Heng Law Firm. The law firm is one of the largest comprehensive law
firms in China, with strong governmental connections. The law firm
describes itself as a “national team of legal services,” because it provides
legal services to many large national projects, and has also served as legal
adviser for several national ministries such as the Ministry of Finance and
the Ministry of Health.17 Chen told me during our interview that there
were two reasons why he introduced the pollution victims to the De Heng
law firm: first, the firm has a very strong ties to the central government,
which are sometimes more important than the law itself; second, Chen
could trust the director of the law firm because she was a wife of a former
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth. Chen took herders to De Heng Law
Firm’s office and let them talk directly to Wang Li, the director of the law
firm. The two sides then signed a contract and agreed on some specific
issues and conditions.
The Beijing De Heng Law Firm was the sole agent for the case and
pursued a lawsuit in the Intermediate People’s Court of Xilingol city to
get compensation from the paper mill and the Eastern Ujimchin govern-
ment for environmental pollution suffered by the victims. In March 2004,
the court decided in favour of pollution victims, awarding compensation
for certain economic losses; however, the pollution victims refused to
accept the decision because they believed that the amount of compensa-
tion was too little and the issue of heavily contaminated land was not yet
resolved. They appealed to the Higher People’s Court of Inner Mongolia
and, in August, the Court handed the victims another win, emphasizing
again the important role of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth.
I have provided four examples in this section which demonstrate the
dynamic involvement of the informal network of Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth in successful moves to compensate herders for pollution
of Inner Mongolian grassland. As shown in Fig. 6.1, the Eastern Ujimchin
Educated Youth is the core of this loosely structured informal network.
For those Educated Youth, the Eastern Ujimchin grassland is their “sec-
ond home,” and they view the herders as their families. Furthermore, the
former Educated Youth in Beijing can mobilize their extensive network of
family members, classmates, and colleagues in influential positions to pro-
vide help to herders, and help prevent or punish enterprises polluting the
Eastern Ujimchin grassland. The fact that the Eastern Ujimchin Educated
Youth Network has a strong regional character, being concerned with
Eastern Ujimchin grassland, but not elsewhere, is a key ingredient for the
network’s solidarity, making their activities more targeted.
Classmates:
The head of the Ministry of
Environment Protection was the Families:
classmate of an Educated Youth
A reporter of Guangming Daily
was a sister of an Educated
Youth, and a reporter of China
Second Home: Youth Daily was a wife of an
Educated Youth
Eastern Ujimchin
herders are like Eastern Ujimchin Educated
family members Youth Colleagues:
to Educated The director of Environment
Youth and Resources Protection
Committee of NPC was a
colleague of an Educated
Families: Youth
The director of De Heng Law office
was a wife of an Educated Youth
Fig. 6.1 Informal network of Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth
The Informal Grassland Protection Network

The two dimensions of the network considered so far link herders and
those concerned with grassland protection to the institutions of formal
politics and to the justice system, thereby enabling effective resistance to
the pressures of the formal political and bureaucratic order. A third dimen-
sion of the network operates differently, creating a free and loosely struc-
tured space for new forms of ecological understanding, and thus new
approaches to grassland protection. The informal grassland protection
network is an open network, so theoretically it has many entry points
which allow us to understand it. But from a practical perspective, I will
choose as an entry point Chen’s website “Echoing Steppe.” The history of
Echoing Steppe goes back to the 1990s when Chen was selling his artwork
in France with a help of a Malaysian Chinese dealer who was conducting
his international business mainly through the Internet. It was then that
Chen realized the potential of the Internet for faster and more convenient
communication. After returning to Beijing, Chen went to the China
Central Post Office to ask how to set up an Internet site.
In China, setting up a website required two steps: first you must regis-
ter a domain name, then register the URL (web address) with that name
at the Public Security Bureau. Once the web address has been registered,
it allows one to upload text, image, and video clips. Chen successfully got
the domain name 163art.com and registered it at the Xicheng District
120 U. OTEDE
branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. The registration requires the
website to be identified either as commercial or public welfare. Chen’s is a
public welfare website in nature, so he is not required to pay tax, only to
pay the hosting fees. After completion of all formalities, the Public Security
Bureau provided a registration number which has to appear in the lower
right corner of the website.18
Chen named his website “Echoing Steppe” and started to upload infor-
mation related to grassland protection. The name came from a joint art-
ists’ exhibition of the same name held in 1999. Chen said that at that time
the Internet was just emerging in China and almost no sites existed specifi-
cally for grassland protection, so soon after it was established the Echoing
Steppe website started to attract visits from many individuals and organi-
zations. Due to the openness of the website, the people who made contact
with Chen were diverse in terms of occupation, ethnicity, and nationality,
including herders, urban white collar workers, professional translators,
lawyers, and university students and professors; among them were ethnic
Mongolians, Han Chinese, and foreigners. Many well-known environ-
mental NGOs, such as Greener Beijing19 and Friends of Nature,20 also
made contact with Chen through the Echoing Steppe website. As they
established a cooperative relationship with Chen and jointly implemented
projects to protect the grasslands, a loosely structured, informal grassland
protection network gradually emerged, connected through Chen’s site.
The network is characterized by concern for grassland protection and sus-
tainable development, and is made up of multiple diverse entities that
were, in many cases, previously unconnected. Below, I expand on each of
these three characteristics.
First, the parties to the network share a relatively vague concept—
namely grassland, caoyuan in Chinese. Broadly speaking, the concept of
grassland has no particular geographical limitation; it allows many
interpretations. Although everyone connected with the network talks

about grassland, there is no clear definition of what this means. Chen, as a
founder of Echoing Steppe website, uses a concept that encompasses a
vast area. He says that the main concern of the Echoing Steppe website is
the Steppe. On Chen’s website, the Steppe is described as “a belt of grass-
land that extends some 5000 miles (8000 kilometres) from Hungary in
the west through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria in the east.”21
The Mongolian steppe plateau is located in the eastern part of the
steppe. Chen also emphasizes that it is necessary to understand the grass-
land as a place where nature and humans coexist. He says that the grassland
is an organic combination of pastures, livestock, and herders.22 Thus, pro-

tecting the grassland means protecting this organic combination as an eco-
cultural system, not simply protecting the grass and cutting off the herders
from their homeland.
Chen strongly argues that land ownership is the key point for grassland
protection in Inner Mongolia. In other words, government should pro-
vide institutional protection for herders’ collective ownership of grass-
land.23 Chen recommends that, from a legal perspective, every county-level
local government of Inner Mongolia should issue Collective Land
Ownership Certificates to all villages in accordance with national policies
of land ownership. Based on this view, Chen has been actively working
together with herders from Inner Mongolia and Mongolian intellectuals
in Beijing to promoting collective land ownership in Inner Mongolia.
From the late 1990s, Chen and his supporters have been popularizing the
idea of “National Land Management Law” and “Grassland law” among
herders, as well as actively monitoring the status of collective land owner-
ship in Inner Mongolia.
Not every individual or environmental NGO has such a deep knowl-
edge of the grassland as Chen. Some environmental NGOs in Beijing want
grassland protected in Inner Mongolia because they argue that it creates a
“green barrier” for Beijing.24 However, most of these NGOs are unfamil-
iar with Inner Mongolian grassland both geographically and culturally.
They do not understand the Mongolian language and have no connec-
tions to herders’ communities in Inner Mongolia. Thus, the Echoing
Steppe website functions as a window for those people who have little
knowledge of grassland issues in Inner Mongolia, and a channel of com-
munication between herder communities and those elsewhere concerned
with grassland protection.
Environmental NGOs, such as Green Beijing and Friends of Nature,
have built relationships with Chen through the website. Some Mongolian
people living in Beijing and working in universities, research institutes,
government departments, and enterprises became friendly with Chen.
Chen says that they became volunteers for Chen’s grassland protection
projects because they see the grassland as their spiritual home. Some of
them in turn have set up their own websites, such as the Friends of
Grassland website, and are actively engaged in grassland protection move-
ments. Even some overseas organizations in South Korea and Japan, con-
cerned about grassland desertification in Inner Mongolia, are part of this
network. Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, huge sandstorms
122 U. OTEDE
occurred every spring in Inner Mongolia and carried dust to South Korea
and Japan, causing widespread concern in these East Asian societies.
Environmental activist and researchers visited Chen in Beijing and con-
ducted research on the causes of grassland desertification in both Inner
Mongolia and Outer Mongolia, with the idea to propose
countermeasures.
Second, the grassland protection network has potential for sustainable
development. The Echoing Steppe website attracts many individuals and
organizations and has, over time, contributed to the emergence of a loosely
structured grassland protection network—a new and broadened platform
for grassland protection. “Human and Steppe” is a platform developed by
the Advisory Centre for Education attached to the e nvironmental NGO
Tianxiaxi.25 Its main purpose is to attract more people to join the grass-
land protection network. The centre was established in 2003 to promote
environmental education. Its founder, Hao Bing, has many years of experi-
ence working with Chen. Tianxiaxi and Echoing Steppe jointly imple-
mented a number of projects, such as publishing an environmental
education book and organizing an environmental education camp.
Tianxiaxi’s priority areas are natural, rural, and civic education. They have
a Grassland Projects Team under the category of natural education. The
team runs several projects such as a tour to experience grassland and herd-
ers’ life, telling the story of grassland and of human and grassland. Their
expectations for the Human and Steppe Network are as follows:
We established an open and pluralistic platform for an interactive practice

school to promote a multi-angled interpretation of the grassland focusing
on the herders’ livelihood and ecological protection barrier (for Beijing). It
will bring together government, civil society organizations, farmers, and
herders, as well as journalists to explore the collaborative ways for grassland
protection and development.26
Their project started in 2006 when they launched a range of activities

through their educational systems, such as the Grassland Salon, the
Grassland Information Centre, and a forum and elective course “Humans
and Grassland.” Between 2008 and 2009, the environmental NGO
Tianxiaxi delivered this latter course at Beijing University, Renmin
University of China, Capital Normal University, and Inner Mongolia
University. They invited 14 scholars with connections to the grassland
protection network to give lectures for the course from the perspectives of
ecology, economy, politics, and management. Altogether, 35 graduate and

150 undergraduate students enrolled in the course. Some of the students
stayed connected with the grassland protection network even after the
course finished.
The grassland protection network also plays an important role in the
anti-pollution movement by attracting the attention of society. In 2000,
Chen released many messages to the online platform Greener Beijing to
expose industrial pollution in the Eastern Ujimchin grassland. This
online platform is similar to a website as it is in cyberspace; however, a
big difference is that the platform allows visitors to release messages and
interact to each other, whereas a website does not. Chen says online
platforms are just like small communities, each of them has their own
themes. Media professionals, university professors, and student volun-
teers all read and post on Greaner Beijing. Chen stresses that such con-
nections are precious resources for environmental activists. Chen’s post
on Greaner Beijing put him in direct contact with likeminded people,
and together they began a project named “Save the Grassland” which
aimed to engage in anti-pollution movements in Eastern Ujimchin grass-
land. Scholars, journalists, and volunteers gathered together as an infor-
mal pollution investigation group and went to Eastern Ujimchin
grassland where they investigated polluting enterprises such as the highly
polluting paper mill. One significant result of the investigation was that
they collected their own data on the pollution sites and reported them
directly to the Minister of the Environmental Protection Bureau. The
data produced by the informal investigation team provided public access
to knowledge about the pollution in Inner Mongolia—an alternative to
the information that the local government had publicized through their
formal channels. In 2003, Greener Beijing organized a conference in
Beijing on the topic of industrial development and Eastern Ujimchin
grassland protection. As part of the conference, all the participants
signed a letter advocating grassland protection.
In 2004, Greener Beijing launched a large touring exhibition titled
“Behind the Grassland.” They invited scholars, government officials,
herders, former Educated Youths, representatives of environmental
NGOs, and students’ associations to the launch ceremony, and the exhibi-
tion visited 19 universities in Beijing. At the same time, Greener Beijing
provided an online exhibition on their website. The exhibition attracted
both university students and ordinary Beijing residents. During the exhi-
bition, many people made contact with Greener Beijing by telephone,
124 U. OTEDE
email, and online platforms to show their willingness to contribute to

grassland protection. Chen says it is very important to raise people’s
awareness of industrial pollution in grasslands: through such exhibitions,
the grassland protection network can expand its influence over public
opinion in the fight against industrial pollution.
Third, loose partnerships between different individuals and diverse
organizations are a structural characteristic of the grassland protection
network. The network involves people of different occupations, places,
ethnic groups, and nations, as well as diverse environmental organizations
or groups such as officially registered environmental NGOs and unregis-
tered small groups. However, there is no form of hierarchy in the network.
They work together in highly flexible ways. A joint grassland protection
project—the well-water testing project—provides a good example of the
network’s structure. This project was implemented between 2014 and
2017 through the joint efforts of diverse groups of people: herders, uni-
versity students and lecturers in Inner Mongolia, environmental NGO
members in Beijing, water environmental scientists in Japan, and a social
scientist in Australia. The project was proposed by one party in the net-
work, and enthusiastically taken up by other parties. It should be empha-
sized that all the parties in the project enjoy a complementary relationship.
Because of that, joint projects are able to succeed where a single party
could not. The herders in rural Inner Mongolia are concerned about the
contamination of well water, but lack the scientific knowledge and facili-
ties to test it. A social scientist of Inner Mongolian origin in Australia who
was doing fieldwork in the herders’ community became an intermediary,
bringing the herders’ concerns to the attention of water environmental
scientists in Japan. The network of Beijing-based environmental NGO
members, who have rich experience in both domestic and international
collaborative projects in Inner Mongolia, joined the well-water testing as
local coordinators. Students and lecturers from a university in Inner
Mongolia also began to participate in the well-water project as part of
their service learning course work. The team does not belong to any single
organization; it is a loosely connected network, or community of practice,
for grassland protection (Image 6.2).
To sum up, as shown in Fig. 6.2, the Grassland Protection Network is
loosely structured and open. At the centre of the network is a shared con-
cern for the grasslands. Individuals and environmental groups post their
concerns on websites or platforms, which provide opportunities for people
to exchange information or carry out grassland protection activities. The
Echoing Steppe website is typical of these platforms, forming the basis for
Image 6.2 Well-water sampling on the grassland. Photograph © Uchralt Otede
Friends of
Grassland Friends of Nature:
Echoing Steppe
website 'protecting existing
grassland' project
Shared key phrase:

protecting the grassland
Tianxiaxi Advisory
Centre for Education:
'human and grassland'
Greener Beijing: project
'save grassland'
project
Fig. 6.2 The informal grassland protection network

126 U. OTEDE
grassland protection networking. People joining the network can release

information there or plan an event, and they can disconnect at any point.
Many participants connect to the network for short periods only. Important
activities of the network are in the social dimension, such as promoting
communication between city people and herders, grassland eco-tourism,
citizen’s independent research on grassland, as well as publishing grassland-
friendly books and catalogues, and holding exhibitions.
Conclusion
The image of rural pollution victims presented in this chapter is different
from the one commonly presented in the literature on environmental soci-
ology in China. Pollution victims in Eastern Ujimchin grassland are no
longer isolated and helpless, because they connect to the outside worlds
through several informal networks. Some of these informal networks (such
as Informal Beijing Liaison Office and Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth
Network) have historical roots that go back to the 1960s to 1970s. These
networks are personalized, closed, and have a strong regional character,
with a focus on the Eastern Ujimchin grassland. Some of the networks are
relatively newly formed and issue-focused, and are still growing, and some
link the issues of Eastern Ujimchin into broader concerns about a cross-
border steppe ecosystem. They bring together people from a wide range
of backgrounds, including the herders who live on the grasslands, those
who have spent part of their time in grassland areas but now live else-
where, and others from around China and beyond who bring their own
distinctive knowledge and perceptions to the network. In showing how
positive changes can be made to rural pollution victims’ otherwise isolated
and helpless situation, this case study has highlighted the crucial impor-
tance of leveraging existing personal networks and using these as a basis to
exert political influence.
Notes
1. Educated Youth is a historical term in China. According to Pan, “the
movement of ‘going up to the mountains and down to the countryside’”
(shangshan xiaxiang) in the early 1950s to 1980 sent more than 17 million
urban middle-school graduates to become peasants and farm workers, and
millions more, who were from peasant households, to return to the vil-
lages. These people are referred to as Zhishi qingnian (“Educated Youth”),
or Zhiqing in abbreviation. Yihong Pan, Book Reviews of Ding Yizhuang,

Zhongguo Zhiqingshi:Chulan, 1953–1968 (A History of the Chinese
Educated Youth: The Early Waves, 1953–1968) and Liu Xiaomeng,
Zhongguo Zhiqingshi: Dachao, 1966–1980 (A History of the Chinese
Educated Youth: the Great Waves, 1966–1980) in The Journal of Asian
Studies, Vol. 58, no. 1 (1999), 1.
2. Zhang Yulin, “Zhongguo Nongcun Huanjing Ehua yu Chongtu Jiaju de
Dongli Jizhi,” Zhongguo Huanjing Shehuixue, no. 1 (2014), 154.
3. Zhang, “Zhongguo Nongcun Huanjing Ehua yu Chongtu Jiaju de Dongli
Jizhi,” 154.
4. Tong Zhifeng, “Dongyuan Jiegou yu Ziran Baoyu Yundong de Fazhan: Yi
Nujiang Fanba Yundong Weili,” Zhongguo Huanjing Shehuixue, no. 1
(2014), 185.
5. Liu Yi, “Caoyuan, Ruhe Liuzhu Zhepian Lü,” Ren Min Wang, April 4,
2003, accessed November 14, 2016, http://www.people.com.cn/GB/
huanbao/57/20030404/962700.html.
6. Damulinzhabu, Manglai, Bate-er yu dong wuzhumuqinqi dianhua jiang-
banchang, accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.lawyee.org/Case/
Case_Display.asp?ChannelID=2010100&RID=108114&keyword=.
Jizhi,” 143.
8. Jiahua Pan, Xingshu Zhao and San Feng, “Environmental Target and
Policies in China: Effectiveness and Challenges,” Canadian Foreign Policy,
13, no. 2 (2006), 137.
9. Ma Chuansong, “Kunjing yu Chulu: dui Woguo Huanjing Baohu zhong
Daocaoren Xianxiang de Shehuixue Toushi,” Sichuan Environment, 26
(2007). Naiqin Ge, “Cong Zhifa Lidu Shenshi Huanbao Bumen Zhifa
Kunjing,” Journal of Wuxi Institute of Technology, 5 (2011).
Jizhi,” 143.
Jizhi,” 152.
12. Li Miaoran, Xibu Minzu Diqu Huanjing Baohu Feizhengfu Zuzhi Yanjiu:
Jiyu Zhili Lilun de Shijiao (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe,
2011), 200.
13. According to Chen, 400 students came to Eastern Ujimchin in 1967, after
that 2000 students in 1968 and 5000 students in 1969 came to Eastern
Ujimchin. Interview with Chen, May 17, 2015.
14. Jiang Fei, “Caoyuan Chupinghu,” Zhongguo Qingnianbao, August 20,
2003, accessed November 14, 2016, http://zqb.cyol.com/con-
tent/2003-08/20/content_718482.htm.
128 U. OTEDE
15. Wu Litian, “Caoyuan Shengtaizhan Gaoxiao Xiongzhan,” Guangming

Ribao. October 22, 2004, accessed November 14, 2016, http://www.
gmw.cn/01gmrb/2004-10/22/content_118508.htm.
16. Liu Mansheng and Dai Shidan, “Lianghui Tebie Baodao zhi Liu,”CCTV.
com Winwen, March 14, 2003, accessed November 14, 2016, http://
www.cctv.com/program/lawtoday/20030314/100560.shtml.
17. More information about De Heng Law office is available at following site,
http://www.dhl.com.cn/english/AboutUs.php.
18. For more information, please visit Echoing Steppe website at :http://
cyngo.net/.
19. “Greener Beijing Volunteers is an environmental NGO and NPO in China,
which is originated on the Internet. Volunteers gather at Greener Beijing
and work together for the deteriorating environment. Greener Beijing has
now distinguished itself as the first and most active Internet-based environ-
mental volunteer NGO in China, with more than 2000 volunteers spread
all over China.” For more information, see the following link: http://
www.envirolink.org/resource.html?itemid=200305190023320.143422&
catid=5.
20. Friends of Nature, ziran zhiyou in Chinese, the first officially registered
environmental NGO in China. For more information, see the following
link: http://www.fon.org.cn/.
21. See the following link: http://cyngo.net/index_Steppe.html.
22. Not only Chen, but also many Mongolian scholars, agrees with the idea of
a coexisting system of grassland, herders, and livestock. See, for example,
Aorenqi and Eerdenwuritu, Muqu Zhidu yu Zhengce Yanjiu:Yi Caoyuan
Xumuye Shengchan Fangshi Bianqian Wei Zhuxian (Hohhot: Neimenggu
Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2009).
23. Wang argues that “rural land ownership is one of the most important issues
that should be prescribed by the law.” See Liming Wang, “Rural Land
Ownership Reform in China’s Property Law,” Frontiers of Law in China,
no. 3 (2006), 312.
24. Not only environmental NGOs but also the central and local governments
support the idea of using Inner Mongolia as a green barrier for Beijing by
protecting grassland and planting trees in Inner Mongolia. See, for exam-
ple, Guiping Shi “Neimenggu Duolunxian Wei Beijing Aoyun Gouzhu
Lüse Pingzhang” Renminwang, December 29, 2001, accessed November
14, 2016, http://www.people.com.cn/GB/huanbao/20011229/
638334.html.
25. More information about NGO Tianxiaxi is available at: http://blog.sina.
com.cn/talanutuge.
26. “Ren yu Caoyuan Xiangmu Lichen,” Ren yu Caoyuan de Boke. Xinlang
Boke, accessed November 14, 2016, http://blog.sina.com.cn/talanutuge.
Uchralt Otede is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture, History and

Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. His research is focused on issues
of environmental pollution and grassroots actions in Mongolia, China, and Japan.
Recent publications include “Shared air, shared destiny,” in China Story Yearbook
2014: Shared Destiny (2015), and “Uchi mongoru no kankyo kō sō undō ” (Anti-
pollution Movement in Inner Mongolia), in Sō gen to Kō seki:mongoru to chibetto ni
okeru shigen kaihatsu to kankyō mondai (Grassland and Ore: Resource Development
and Environmental Change in Mongolia and Tibet) (2015).
CHAPTER 7
Forest, Music, and Farming: The Takae Anti-

Helipad Movement and Everyday Life
as Political Space
Shinnosuke Takahashi
Early one morning in November 2011, I first drove to Takae, a commu-

nity in the northeastern part of Okinawa Island. I was going to conduct
field research on a local protest group, called the No Helipad Takae
Residents’ Society (Helipaddo Iranai Takae Jūmin-no-kai; hereafter the
Takae Residents’ Society) which was running an anti-military base con-
struction campaign in their community. While most mainland Japanese see
Okinawa as an “exotic” place that is different from “us,” and the Okinawan
anti-US base movement (or the so-called “Okinawa struggle”) as internally
homogenous, the protest group in Takae was known for its highly com-
plex nature in terms of social formation. I was intrigued to know who they
are, and how the Takae people maintain their political community.
Departing from Naha, the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture, at dawn, it
took us a few hours to reach Nago, the border city between the middle
and northern regions on Okinawa Island. After passing Nago, a landscape
different from the urban south unfurled before us: over 34,000 hectares of
stunning mountains and forests. This is the reason why the northern part
S. Takahashi (*)
Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

132 S. TAKAHASHI
of Okinawa Island has been called Yanbaru, which is written with a com-
bination of two Chinese characters of “mountain” and “field.” By the time
we arrived in Takae, the sun had already risen and was blazing in the sky.
This chapter explores the social formation of Okinawa’s anti-US base
community by focusing on the diversity of protest identity and the cultural
and affective factors that sustain solidarity within the community. The
“Okinawa struggle,” which started in the late 1940s, is known for its per-
sistent action against militarism, military violence, and Okinawa’s still sub-
ordinate political and social status under the US–Japan security system
over a period of nearly 70 years.1 Although academic research has increased
since the mass protest campaign in the aftermath of the rape of a local
schoolgirl by three US military personnel in 1995, the dynamics of the
Okinawa struggle, particularly in relation to complex social, political, and
cultural identities, need further scrutiny. Foregoing research has been
insufficient for understanding the various modes of social formation and
cooperation which are constitutive of the development of the Okinawa
struggle. In particular, views of the local protest movement as homoge-
nous in ideology and identity hinder us from understanding political activ-
ities which are not necessarily motivated, practiced, and represented by the
mainstream discourses of “Okinawa identity.” The anti-helipad construc-
tion movement in Takae demonstrates how the local residents transformed
their everyday life—place, practice, and cultural activities—into a political
space to struggle against the imposition of state power.
The Okinawa Struggle and Questions

of Representation
The Okinawa struggle (Okinawa tō sō in Japanese) is an ambiguous con-

cept, and its meaning has been much discussed by scholars and activists
over the past half a century. The fundamentals that constitute the main-
stream historical narrative of the Okinawa struggle are the memory and
experience of the war, with the loss of over 100,000 lives, as a “sacrificial
altar” for Japan, and the militaristic regime under the US occupation, in
which Okinawa’s external sovereignty was hardly recognized. The
Okinawa struggle thus has been articulated by many as a concept not
only to describe actions but also to represent history and spirit of social
justice and freedom from any military violence and subjugation by exter-
nal forces.
FOREST, MUSIC, AND FARMING: THE TAKAE ANTI-HELIPAD MOVEMENT... 133
The historical narrative of the Okinawa struggle has been under scru-
tiny since the early 2000s. Particularly, ethnography has become an impor-
tant research method among the scholars of Okinawan activism.2 The
ethnography of the anti-base activism was not only a new method to study
the local movement, but also involved criticism toward text-based analy-
ses, which had previously been predominant. While the text-based analy-
ses emphasize some particular local experiences such as the war and the
US military occupation as the core elements of social formation, ethno-
graphic inquiries have enabled us to see the more diverse nature of the
local activism, including complex relations among different groups.
Diversity within the local movement was a significant finding. This view
allows us to understand different interests, motivations, and social identi-
ties of activists, which were previously overshadowed by the mainstream
narrative of the local struggle. It uncovered the personalized voices and
experiences, and the variety of “protest community” hidden underneath
the mainstream narratives. For example, Miyume Tanji pointed out that
the swift response from Okinawan feminists after the rape incident in 1995
was emblematic of the fact that underrepresented groups can lead mass
mobilizations that unsettle the Japan–US alliance.
Yet, the concept of “protest community” also faces difficulties in
explaining the fluid nature of these communities. Protest communities are
never isolated from one another. Groups and individuals are always net-
working among themselves: a process which involves exchanges of people,
information, and many other things. In other words, there is what
Gurminder K. Bhambra calls a “perceived ‘gap’ between general catego-
ries and particular experiences.”3 One of the methodological difficulties of
the protest community approach, or what Bhambra calls the “standpoint
approach,” is that this gap between category and particular local context
is not entirely overcome, and because of this problem, the protest com-
munities can easily be misrepresented by the researchers. What she sug-
gests instead is that we consider “connected histories,” so that we can
“recognize politics and intellectual engagement as ‘conjunctural phenom-
enon’” in a systemic manner, while still acknowledging critical social and
cultural practices without privileging certain voices and ideas as prerequi-
site.4 Taking her critical argument seriously, in the rest of this chapter, I
will analyze the case of the local protest movement in Takae to discuss
connectivity for better understanding the actuality of the social formation
in the Okinawa struggle.
134 S. TAKAHASHI
The Village Embraced by the US Military Helipads

The Yanbaru region is not an administrative territory. It is the historical
name of the northern half of Okinawa Island used by the local people.
Compared with Nago and the southern cities, many of the towns, villages,
and communities in this northern area are not prosperous. Higashi Village,
which consists of six small communities, including Takae, has been seen as
one of the most peripheral areas in the whole of Okinawa Island. There is
a line in a Ryūkyūan classic poem about Takae which reads “Even places
such as Takē [Takae] and Arakā [Arakawa], if I was together with you,
would be like a heaven of flowers.”5
The problems of the marginalized in Okinawa are not only economic.
Being an economically vulnerable community in Okinawa means the area
is likely to become a target for the site of the military bases. In this sense,
the Higashi Village region—particularly Takae—is no exception. In
October 1957, the US military government began to use a large part of
the forest as a training center. This area—the Northern Training Center
(NTC) or Camp Gonsalves—has been used by soldiers from the US
Marine Corps to conduct simulations of jungle battles. The training center
played a particularly crucial role during the Vietnam War period. Local
residents from surrounding suburbs including Takae were mobilized by
the United States for training purposes. In a simulated village called “the
Third World Village,” the Okinawan villagers were required to play the
roles of locals in Vietnam.6 In 2013, the size of the NTC is estimated as
7824 hectares of Yanbaru Forest. This includes part of the territory of two
northern villages—Kunigami and Higashi. Although the size of the train-
ing center diminished after Okinawa’s return to Japan, the local residents
are still not allowed to use most of Yanbaru forest as the territory is owned
and administered by the Japanese government as a state forest.
In the final report of the Special Action Committee of Okinawa
(SACO), jointly established by the Japanese and the US governments in
the mid-1990s after the island-wide protest campaign over the rape inci-
dent, both governments agreed “to lighten the burden (futan keigen)” of
the US military bases for citizens in Okinawa. One of the main decisions
made by the leaders of the United States and Japan was the closure of
Futenma Airbase. However, this did not mean removal (tekkyo) of the US
bases. Rather, it was a plan to “relocate (isetsu)” American military func-
tions to other places within Okinawa’s territory. The Japanese government
sought possible locations to build new military facilities for the US mili-
tary forces in Japan. On the east coast of mainland Okinawa, Henoko

district in Nago City was designated to be one of the alternative locations
for the construction of an offshore aircraft-landing zone.
The other proposal for the reduction of the American military facilities
was the partial return to Japan of the land used for the NTC in the Yanbaru
Region. Although the NTC occupies approximately 7824 hectares,
according to the SACO report, the United States agreed to return about
3987 hectares. Yet there was one condition, which was the relocation of
seven helipads which existed in the area to be returned. At that time, there
were in total 22 helipads scattered around the NTC. Many of them were
located within Higashi Village and its neighboring Kunigami Village.
After about ten years of “contemplation” at the governmental level, most
of the training area in Kunigami Village was designated for return to
Japan. This was how Higashi Village, especially Takae, has turned into a
“targeted village.”7 On the northern side of Takae, two helicopter-landing
zones (called N-1A and N-1B) were to be constructed; on the eastern
side, another two helipads called G and H; and in the southern part of
Takae, another two helipads (N-4A and N-4B) were to be constructed.8
Among them, the two helipads in the N-4 zone are located only 400
meters away from the residential area. In other words, the Takae residents
were concerned at some possible risks which could threaten their liveli-
hood space, including noise, crime, and accidents due to the installation of
these new helipads.
When this plan was made public by the Japanese government in late
2006, the local community members and political assembly of Higashi
Village decided to oppose this helipad construction plan by organizing a
village-wide protest campaign. The campaign was led by a group called
“the Association for Protection of the Broccoli Forest (Burokkorı̄ no Mori
wo Mamoru-kai).” It was named after the landscape of Yanbaru forest,
where trees seem like bunches of broccoli. As scholar Abe Kosuzu explains,
the name has another implication, symbolizing the intention of the local
residents to differentiate themselves from existing progressive activist
communities. Therefore, instead of using popular activist terms such as
“to fight (tatakau)” and “to prevent (soshisuru)” in their name, the local
citizens used the term “protection” and referred to the broccoli forest,
which evokes the unique natural environment of Yanbaru forest.9 When
Higashi Village took up the protest campaign, the assembly of Higashi
Village recognized certain local families as the civic representatives of this
village-wide protest action.
136 S. TAKAHASHI
In May 2007, the mayor of the village, Ijū Morihisa, suddenly decided
to withdraw from the protest. Although other local assembly members
criticized Ijū for his sudden change, it did not change his mind. The may-
or’s decision to accept the helipads was influenced by the Okinawa Defense
Bureau which announced the commencement of the base construction
project. Following the withdrawal of Higashi Village’s support, the
campaign by the Broccoli Association also ceased. From that moment on,
the local families who stood up to take direct action had to continue their
protest without the official support of the local political body. The local
residents were thrown into direct confrontation with the Japanese govern-
ment and its base politics. This is how the Takae grassroots protest com-
munity called No Helipad Takae Residents Society was born in August
2007 (Image 7.1).
Image 7.1 Local residents and supporters barricading a gate to Yanbaru Forest
with cars, tents, and net to block the officers from Okinawa Defense Bureau (white
helmets, right hand side of image). Police officers (dark clothing, left hand side of
image) also monitored protesters with video cameras. Photograph © Shinnosuke
Takahashi
“We Need Everyone’s Attention!”: Social Networks

of the Takae Residents’ Society
While the local anti-base movement involves various kinds of actors,

philosophies, and styles of social activism, local protest movements can
nevertheless be divided into two general categories: activism led by the
national political parties and their affiliated groups on the one hand,
and that led by grassroots civic groups or individuals on the other. In
Okinawa, the party-led movements are generally coordinated by two
major progressive parties—the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and
Japan Social Democratic Party (JSDP). As the influence and mobiliza-
tion of these formed political forces declined after Okinawa’s return to
Japan in 1972, individual citizens emerged to become the leading
forces of the anti-base movement. The individuals in non-institutional-
ized civic movements often distance themselves from the hierarchical
collective action led by political parties or unions because of the latter’s
structural inflexibility. Although the civic groups have difficulty in
mobilizing participants, they implement a diverse range of anti-base
activities that are not restricted by a top-down order. Also, in many
cases the civic groups and individuals are loosely connected to each
other. Prior to the 2000 Okinawa G8 Summit, the Okinawa Citizens’
Network for Peace (OCNP or Okinawa Heiwa Shimin Renrakukai in
Japanese) was established in August 1999 as the umbrella network that
mediates the diverse interests of activist groups with the participation
of 33 non-partisan civic activist groups and individual participants in
Okinawa. This network connects widely diverse social problems such as
gender, ecology, local economy, and so forth.
The Takae Residents’ Society receives support and assistance from both
institutional and non-institutional civic networks. The JCP has supported
their activism since the Takae protest group was formed. Also, its affiliated
organizations such as the Japan Peace Committee, Association of
Democratic Medical Doctors, and Co-op are involved. Along with the
JCP and affiliated groups, the JSDP and related groups such as the
Okinawa Peace Movement Center are also involved with Takae’s struggle,
sending supporters to join sit-ins. From the non-partisan side, the OCNP
regularly transports people who wish to join the sit-in from Naha. Retired
people and housewives who are concerned with Takae’s ongoing struggle
provide free pick-up services for those who do not have cars.
138 S. TAKAHASHI
One of the distinctive characteristics of Takae’s struggle is the partici-

pation of young people who come to Takae via various subcultural back-
grounds and networks. These people are usually informed of the local
protest movement through channels other than mainstream activist net-
works. One of the main social networks is that of organic farmers from
all over Okinawa. There are quite a few members of Takae’s protest
community who are running organic farms in Higashi Village. These
farmers have their own networks inside and outside Okinawa. Together
with the organic farmers’ network, social networks of local musicians
contribute to making Takae’s protest distinct. This is also derived from
the fact that some community members are experienced musicians.
They actively incorporated music as an important part of their protest
culture and started a band called Suwarokkāzu, which is the combina-
tion of two Japanese words: “let’s sit!” (suwarou) and “rock musicians”
(rokkāzu). By organizing and participating in concerts in Takae,
Okinawa, and other parts of Japan, the musicians’ networks help to
publicize Takae’s struggle to audiences who are not necessarily familiar
with the local anti-base movement.10 Apart from the networks of farm-
ers and musicians, individual participants come to Takae through differ-
ent routes. Concerned surfers and divers come to join from coastal areas
of Okinawa. Along with them, backpackers and students coming from
outside Okinawa also play an important part in participation. Also,
retired business men and women, former school teachers, house wives,
and others come to participate in the sitting in protest from the rest of
Okinawa and Japan.
The Internet is an essential tool to develop social networks between
the Takae community and the external world. Effective use of cyberspace,
including websites, e-mail lists, online broadcasting, and electronic pam-
phlets, is a key method to publicize the latest situation of the local protest
campaign. The Takae Residents’ Society always updates the current situ-
ation on a weblog called “Yanbaru Takae Now (Yanbaru Takae no
Genjō ).”11 This weblog has a subscription function for interested people
to register their e-mail accounts. Once registered, any information on
updates of the weblog is delivered to the designated inbox. Also, with the
help of external media such as the Independent Web Journal (IWJ),
actual confrontations with government officials and construction workers
are streamed online. Furthermore, an electronic brochure called “Voice
of Takae (VOT)” provides basic information in English and Japanese
with respect to the helipad construction plan in Takae as well as related
problems. Saying “We Need Everyone’s Attention!” the brochure calls

for further help:
Even today as you’re reading this, sit-in protest is taking place in Takae. This
area of great nature has become the forefront for the nation heading towards
warfare potential, Japan. This is not a particular issue of Takae; the same
situation might occur at any time anywhere in Japan and in other parts of
the world… So, if only to enable us to guard the future of our children, and
to ensure a peaceful future for all, we request your kind attention to this
issue!12
These stories demonstrate some distinctive characteristics of the social

formation of the local protest community in Takae. The integration of local
and extra-local resources, the uses of natural environment to justify their
social struggle, and involvement of sub-cultural networks among youths
are crucial components for their activism. The Takae Residents’ Society is,
however, not the first case in this regard. These resources were also actively
mobilized in the anti-offshore base construction movement in Henoko,
with which Takae’s protest community has many overlapping aspects in
terms of their social formation, members, and activism strategy. In other
words, what we need to understand in Henoko and Takae is the concept of
place, not just as a single identity of the protest community but as an inte-
gral symbol that connects many different social identities. The local nature
matters not only because of environmental concerns among the commu-
nity members but because it is the site of struggle to protect their everyday
life. While sea and coastal life are vital components for place-based identity
in Henoko, the massive forest that involves landscape, local habitat, and the
people’s attachment to the forest are the fundamental reasons why the
Takae Residents’ Society take direct action. In this sense, we may recall
Arturo Escobar’s discussion on place, in which he argues that:
Place is, of course, constituted by sedimented social structures and cultural

practices. Sensing and moving are not presocial; the lived body is the result
of habitual cultural and social processes…This means recognizing that place,
body, and environment integrate with each other; that places gather things,
thoughts, and memories in particular configurations; and that place, more
an event than a thing, is characterized by openness rather than by a unitary
self-identity…This also means that people are not only “local”; we are all
indissolubly linked to both local and extralocal places through what might
be called networks.13
140 S. TAKAHASHI
This remark can be applied to consider the local and extra-local

dimensions of Takae’s struggle. While the abundant nature of the
Yanbaru Forest and the rich history of pacifism in the Okinawa struggle
are important factors that shape the “local” aspect of their struggle, it
is also noteworthy that Takae’s struggle is conducted openly by net-
working outside the community. In this sense, the local struggle uses
extra-local elements as a useful means to serve its own purposes.
Furthermore, and as the following section discusses, the “local” resi-
dents who started Takae’s struggle include many residents with a “non-
local” background.
Who Are the Locals? Rural Community

and “Outsiders”
“Who are the people in the Takae Residents’ Society?” After staying for
some time in Takae, I found myself asking this question. This question
arose in my mind because I noticed that the Takae Residents’ Society was
such a different community in many respects from many other anti-base
groups and communities in Okinawa. First of all, while many protest com-
munities in Okinawa are led by people with gray hair, most of the people
in the Takae Residents’ Society were younger than their mid-50s when I
first visited in 2011. Second, although some community members speak
with a strong Okinawan accent, some speak a kind of pidgin language of
the local dialect and standard Japanese, and a good many residents have
no dialectical inflection whatsoever.
This demographic diversity within Takae’s protest community reflects
the fact that the majority of them were born outside Okinawa. Although
the actual number is still uncertain, a large number of residents involved
in the Takae struggle are from mainland Japan. To my knowledge, a man
called Miyagi Katsumi is one of the few people who was born and spent
most of his life in Takae. The co-founders of the Takae Residents’ Society,
Ashimine Gentatsu and Isa Masatsugu, are both native Okinawans, but
their spouses who also play crucial roles in the community are both from
elsewhere in mainland Japan. One of the residents in the community, Higa
Masato, also has Okinawan parents but was born and raised in Nagoya in
Aichi Prefecture as a second-generation Okinawan migrant. Apart from
them, most of the community members originally came from many differ-
ent parts of mainland Japan.
The diversity of the Takae Residents’ Society includes not only the
members’ places of origin but also their life experiences. In terms of occu-
pation, they are farmers, teachers, public servants, and artists. Most of
them came from elsewhere to live in this rural place, attracted by the
Yanbaru forest and other aspects of this rich natural environment. Ashimine
Gentatsu is one of the earliest people in the community to move into
Takae with his family in the early-2000s. Ashimine was born and raised in
Naha in the early 1960s. After graduating from a local elementary school,
he stopped going to classes in his early teenage years. With “only a gradu-
ate certificate from elementary school” (to use his own words), Ashimine
started working as a carpenter in his hometown.14 As he became older,
Ashimine moved to mainland Japan and lived in Tokyo for several years
working as a house builder. After coming back to Okinawa, he lived in
various parts of Okinawa including remote islands. In 2002, he relocated
with his wife and their children from Kadena to Takae, where they started
organic farming. When they first visited Takae, Ashimine was mesmerized
by the forest, which also used to exist in his hometown, Naha, in his child-
hood. Particularly, his favorite spot was near the headwaters of Arakawa
Creek. Fortunately, he could afford to buy an abandoned farm for an
“extremely cheap price.” While living in a van, Ashimine built his house
and café near the creek in the middle of the deep Yanbaru forest. The café
was named “Yamagame,” which means a “water jar in the mountain.”
This name shows his attachment to Yanbaru, which is one of the main
sources of water for the rest of Okinawa. When the residents established
the No Helipad Takae Residents’ Society in 2007, Ashimine participated
as a founding member. His participation was based on a very simple rea-
son. He felt that this place of dreams embraced by the rich forest would
disappear once construction started. Without any experience of social
activism, this was how his life as a “protesting local resident” (jimoto
hantai jyūmin) began.
Another senior figure of the community, Morioka Kō ji, is also running
an organic farm. He was born and raised in downtown Tokyo in the late
1970s. While he lived in Tokyo, he was known as an experienced guitarist
in the indie music scene. After working in many different kinds of jobs to
continue his career as a musician, Morioka suddenly quit all previous jobs
including music and left Tokyo. He said he was caught up in financial
problems with “troublesome people.” After travelling to various countries
in Asia, he came back to Japan, and he met his future wife, who studied
natural farming under a pioneer of the “natural farming method,” Fukuoka
142 S. TAKAHASHI
Masanobu.15 They moved together to Takae in the early 2000s. Despite

the great environment, living by natural farming in Takae was not easy.
The problem was the poor quality of the soil for raising vegetables: “when
I first started farming here, it was stony, so almost no one expected that I
could succeed in producing crops.”16 Yet, after years of experience,
Morioka’s farmland began to grow produce such as potatoes, cabbages,
lettuce, radishes, and so on. This story was well known in the village and
impressed other community dwellers. They said Morioka’s farm made
tomatoes out of stones.
Among the younger members, Shimizu Akira is a unique character in
the community. He was born in Tokyo to a family of medical doctors.
His brothers were all educated in order to follow their father’s career. It
was only Shimizu who refused to walk the same path as his other family
members. Instead, he chose to study painting at an art college. His rejec-
tion of family tradition was so determined that he left the family house
and chose to live as a homeless person in various places including by a
riverside in Tokyo. One day, Shimizu learnt the story of Takae from his
friend. So he took a trip to visit the community in the late 2000s, and he
somehow began to settle in. He has been acting as a child-minder in the
community. While other members are working on farms, he takes care of
their children. He is also the manager of the accommodation for the
visitors.
The director of the No Helipad Takae Residents’ Society (as of 2011),
Takahashi Masahiro, is one of the younger members of the community.
Although Takahashi is relatively young, he has been in this position as
director since 2010. Born and raised in the northern part of Japan, in
Sendai City, Takahashi withdrew from high school after attending only a
few months. When I asked him why he chose to leave school, he quietly
said “I only aimed to pass the exam and enter that prestigious high-school.
I liked their school culture. But once I entered, I lost my interest in that
school.”17 After working in his local town for a few years, he travelled
around China and mainland Southeast Asian countries. His encounter
with Takae community was coincidental. He was travelling around Okinawa
to learn its traditional string-musical instrument, called sanshin. With his
modest and mature personality, he did not take long to become popular
among other community members. When the protest movement heated
up in the late 2000s, Takahashi was asked by Ashimine to stay in Takae
longer and also to work for the Residents’ Society as the director. However,
he refused Ashimine’s offer at first. He felt that the job was too responsible
for an outsider like him. So he left Takae with ambivalent feelings of affec-
tion for its community and embarrassment to be involved in internal com-
munal matters. Takahashi came back to Takae a year later in 2009.
However, he still does not feel comfortable to act as director. Although he
is clearly trusted by the community, he often describes himself as “yoso-
mono (outsider).”
Takahashi’s self-recognition as “outsider” is actually a key term which
characterizes the unique membership of the Takae Residents’ Society.
Many of the Takae’s protest community members are “yosomono,” in that
they came from elsewhere in Japan. Individual and group participants who
are called “supporters (shiensha)” are also outsiders who regularly or irreg-
ularly visit Takae to participate in sit-ins. Although their level of commit-
ment varies depending on the people and their circumstances, some of the
non-resident participants from mainland Japan stay in Takae for several
months. In such mixed environment of participants, the mainstream
Okinawan activist identity cannot really encompass the nature of this
movement in Takae. On the contrary, careless use of the conventional
activist discourse can create tension within the community. In order to re-
examine the commonality that connects the diversity of Takae’s movement,
we need to consider alternative frameworks based on the subtle balance of
locality and extra-locality.18
The discourse of “yosomono” or “outsider” is important not only to
highlight the diversity of the membership. It also characterizes the Takae
Residents’ Society in relation to other residents in Takae who do not par-
ticipate in the protest movement. In fact, the term is often used by other
local Takae residents to differentiate themselves from the protest commu-
nity members. Although the demography of Higashi Village has been
changing dynamically since the beginning of the modern period, there is
a clear line separating the local villagers who are involved with the protest
movement and those who are not. This line is drawn by use of the notion
of “insider” versus “outsider.”19 Locals who disagree with the protest
community use the term “old residents” (furui jūmin) to refer to them-
selves and “new residents” (atarashı̄ jūmin) for those who join the sit-in
movement. The terms “old” and “new” are not merely a temporal classi-
fication; the terms also differentiate people who know the history of the
difficult environment of Takae from those who are newly settled in the
village. For “old residents,” newcomers are people who do not understand
the experiences and the history of the village from the days when the locals
still made their living mainly by forestry and by cultivating new fields.
144 S. TAKAHASHI
This division between old and new residents is also related to inter-
actions between the local residents and US military, such as the case
where an old woman was shot by US soldiers when she was walking in
the Yanbaru forest. Also, there was a case where a house was burnt
without any apparent reason by Americans. However, as journalist
Mikami Chie notes, some villagers think that the relationship between
the locals and Americans was one of “give-and-take.” Therefore, while
there are long-term local residents who are involved with the protest
movement, such as Miyagi Katsumi, the Takae Residents’ Society does
not represent the majority of residents who have lived in Takae for
decades.20
The notion of “yosomono” or “outsider” is a key to address the ele-
ments that create Takae’s protest community. It is not only “Okinawans”
or “Okinawan identity” which matters to the local protest community,
but also attachment to a specific locale within Okinawa. As Masamichi
S. Inoue reveals by examining the case of the local protest movement
in Henoko, so too in Takae the notion of “Okinawan identity” alone
has limits in effectively mobilizing people and resources.21 Therefore,
we need to consider alternative concepts which can be more appropri-
ate to frame the identity of a local protest community. While the dis-
course of “outsiders” is often used to separate Okinawans from the
mainland Japanese in the mainstream narrative of the Okinawa strug-
gle, in the case of Takae, the term also includes newly settled residents
who do not share the local history as their own experience. In this
sense, new residents from Okinawa such as Ashimine, and from main-
land Japan such as Takahashi and Morioka, are all “outsiders” for the
majority of Takae residents who do not participate in the movement.
Although lack of effective support from the majority of other villagers
is a problem because of their nature as marginal within the peripheral
village, it shows rather clearly why this small communal movement by
Takae’s new residents attracts many participants from all over Japan
and elsewhere and how their relatively inclusive and network-based
community was created. Most of the shiensha or supporters who visit
and stay in Takae are informed of the local protest community through
their social and cultural networks. In other words, one of the key fac-
tors that develop Takae’s protest community is the pre-existing per-
sonal networks that those “outsiders” established before they moved
into Takae (Image 7.2).
Image 7.2 Local resident Miyagi Katsumi (left) and a supporter who is a rock
musician from Kyoto Prefecture (right). The musician brought a banner with sup-
portive messages from his fellow rock musicians and fans as a symbol of solidarity
with Takae people. Photograph © Shinnosuke Takahashi
Affective Community
If the protest community in Takae is built on a subtle balance of two dif-
ferent senses of “insider” and “outsider,” and if history and memories of
WWII and the American occupation only partially explain the culture of
the protest community in the Takae’s struggle, what are the other ele-
ments that explain communal values in the struggle? Sociologist Abe
Kosuzu recently presented an important analysis in this regard. Through
long-term participation as an activist as well as researcher, she focuses
upon subcultural elements as key components for making Takae’s struggle
community. While Okinawa’s distinctive historical experiences reinforce
the local identity as “uchinaanchu” (Okinawans), a focus on subcultures
provides us with a microscope to see other layers of social cooperation
146 S. TAKAHASHI
among community members. Abe raises the examples of shared subcul-

tures in Takae such as music and naturalism (e.g. Do It Yourself, organic
farming, and refusal of consumerism and chemical products in everyday
life). While these ideas and practices often play a central role in environ-
mental movements, they have not been much discussed in relation to the
Okinawa struggle. Nevertheless, these individually-practiced life politics
are surely important in understanding the intimacy of Takae’s protest
community. Raising these affective elements, Abe emphasizes the intimate
relationships of friendship.22
In the earlier part of this chapter, I mentioned some examples of the
local practices of intimacy. A senior community member, Ashimine, is one
of the practitioners of DIY culture. With his skills as a house builder, he
has built his house, motels, and a café around Takae by himself. Morioka
is another person who built his own house once he settled in Takae. One
of the co-representatives of the Takae Residents’ Society, Isa Masatsugu, is
an also good example. He is one of the few remaining artisans who profes-
sionally make traditional Okinawan spiritual tablets called tō tō me. But
besides this work, Isa built his own studio near his house after he settled
in this new environment. Nevertheless, I do not intend to merely intro-
duce people who make their own living place. The important point is that
their DIY culture is closely associated with their ecological philosophy and
avoidance of modern consumeristic lifestyle. For example, most houses in
Takae are not connected to a sewage system. They are designed to only
store waste water underground or leak water through drains. In either
cases, the waste water is most likely to be absorbed to the ground.
Therefore, it is harmful for the surrounding natural environment if the
local residents use chemical products such as synthetic detergent or mass-
produced shampoos. When I asked what they use for washing, for exam-
ple, Ashimine said that he and his family use additive-free soap made of
rice bran.
It is also important to remind ourselves of the fact that the community
is not totally removed from modern material culture. The Takae commu-
nity offers synthetic detergent and other popular daily products for visitors
and uses various kinds of electric products. However, the important point
is to focus on their critical consciousness with industrialized popular life-
style. As shown in some of the personal episodes earlier, most of the com-
munity members were previously city dwellers at some stage of their lives,
but experienced discomfort with a highly industrialized ways of life. From
this perspective, it is fair to argue that their discomfort with urban life was
derived from their personal experiences of an excessively fabricated state of

production and consumption. Instead, what they wanted was immediate
or intimate relationships with their life-world, including economic activity
such as production, exchange, and consumption. It is those affective
aspects that connect Takae’s protest community members. In this sense,
what really matters to understand the core of the Takae Residents’ Society
is the attention to their place and the indigenous ecology in Yanbaru
forest.
Yet, the meaning of “place” for Takae’s protest community also includes
a wider geographical and social space, Okinawa. By joining in the sit-in
and facing the local police, construction workers, and the Okinawa
Defense Bureau, the participants learn and re-learn the history and histori-
cal consciousness of the Okinawa’s anti-base struggle regardless of their
origin. While exchanging ideas with experienced Okinawan activists, the
participants in sit-in protests also learn Okinawa’s conventional way of
peaceful and persistent direct action. These social practices induce the pro-
testers to imagine the voices of Okinawa’s past.23 Therefore, while incor-
porating some new elements of social activism such as DIY culture, it is
equally important to remind ourselves that Takae’s anti-base movement is
not separate from other anti-base struggles in Okinawa. From this per-
spective, it is evident that the conventional narrative of the Okinawa strug-
gle still plays a vital role. In other words, the narratives and experiences of
the Okinawan people in the past are embedded and actualized in the com-
munity members through their direct experiences of sit-in protest.
Conclusion
A microscopic view of the local protest community highlights that varied
personal experience, the convergence of diverse social and political net-
works, and a common place-based consciousness that foments a deep
empathy for the local ecology are key factors in creating Takae’s distinctive
communal life. An investigation of the processes by which a protest com-
munity has been created in today’s Okinawa serves not merely to refute
the myth of social homogeneity but also to understand social formation in
such a highly diverse environment as in the Takae Residents’ Society. The
personal context and the development of the protest community offer
significant clues to identifying the collective characteristics of the commu-
nity and hence reformulating the ways in which we see the protest com-
munity and the broader anti-base movement in Okinawa. Humans,
148 S. TAKAHASHI
information, ideas, and other material and immaterial flows across cultural
and geographical boundaries allow us to consider to what extent hetero-
geneity is constitutive in making and sustaining the creative local activism
for the Okinawa’s anti-base movement, and how the collectivity of the
local community can be imagined dynamically. Moreover, the implications
of my findings go well beyond Okinawa and can be applied to the study of
social movements globally.
Diversity and heterogeneity themselves present new challenges to our
conceptualization of the communal, including the protest groups of the
Okinawan anti-base movement. In this sense, Takae’s experience is instruc-
tive because it demonstrates an alternative possible way of re-evaluating
“who” really belongs to a group and how the communal can be made, not
merely through a homogenous cultural or social identity, but also through
various actors and their cultural practices. Affect as an essential component
of the communal is only possible when we focus on the social dynamics at
the grassroots level. In Okinawa, where the memory and experiences of
war and occupation remained unhealed, various human activities at the
grassroots level, including private commemoration and remembrance, are
particularly important to understand the actuality of social formation and
the signs of social changes. While finding the source of solidarity is a cru-
cial part of research on social movements, the case of Takae suggests that
a perspectival shift can contribute to understanding what it means to be
“communal” today.
Notes
1. See, for example, Laure Hein and Mark Selden, eds. Islands of Discontent:
Okinawa Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003).
2. Some seminal ethnographic research in relation to the Okinawa’s anti-base
struggle include Masamichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military:
Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), and Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in
Okinawa (New York; London: Routledge, 2009).
3. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the
Sociological Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 30.
4. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, 31.
5. Higashi-son-shi Henshū Iinkai, eds. Higashi-son-shi, Vol. 1 (Higashi-son:
Higashi-son Yakuba, 1987), 212.
6. Chuji Chinen, Taiga No Nagare to Tomoni (Minamihaebaru: Akebono

Shuppan, 2008).
7. Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa
Confronts Japan and the United States (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2012), 167–168.
8. Okinawa Defense Bureau is a regional division under the Japanese Ministry
of Defense, which is in charge of providing facilities to the local US mili-
tary including preparation of the helipad construction.
9. Kosuzu Abe, “Kurikaeshi Kawaru: Okinawa ni okeru Chokusetu Kōdō no
Genzai Shinkōkei,” Seisaku Kagaku, Kokusai-kankeironshu, Vol. 13
(2011), 61–90.
10. For example, around the time when Takae’s protest movement was formed,
a music festival called “Yanbaru Peace Music Festival in Takae” was orga-
nized in 2006.
11. The official blog of the Takae Residents’ Society is: http://takae.ti-da.
net/. The latest information of Takae and its anti-base movement are
updated on this blog. Also, other advertisements for local cultural events
are provided through this blog.
12. The Takae Residents’ Society, “Voice of Takae,” 4.
13. Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and
Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20 (2001), 143.
14. Interview with Ashimine Gentsu, January 28, 2012.
15. Fukuoka Masanobu (1913–2008) is one of the earliest advocates of “natu-
ral farming,” a type of organic farming method. Fukuoka’s natural farming
is characterized by four principles, which are “no cultivation of farmland,”
“no fertilization,” “no pesticide,” and “no weeding.” One of the main
inventions of Fukuoka is a ball of soil mixed with various different types of
seeds and clay called nendo bōru or seed ball. In fact, this seed ball contains
a small amount of non-chemical fertilizer. He planted this ball in desig-
nated areas and let some of the seeds grow. As his farming method relies
largely on the power of the soil and minimum human intervention, it was
called natural farming to distinguish it from other organic farming meth-
ods. Fukuoka’s seed ball was later adopted in various countries to restore
natural environment in deforested areas.
16. Interview with Morioka Kōji, January 28, 2012.
17. Interview with Takahashi Masahiro, January 28, 2012.
18. Abe “Kurikaeshi Kawaru: Okinawa ni okeru Chokusetu Kōdō no Genzai
Shinkōkei” (2011).
19. According to the official history of the village, Higashi Village experienced
mass mobility of people several times. The first mass settlement of people
in this region occurred in the nineteenth century. After the Ryūkyū
150 S. TAKAHASHI
Disposal, the warriors who did not own their lands moved to Yanbaru to
develop the area. This movement was encouraged by Okinawa Prefecture
from the 1890s until the early twentieth century. Having an intention to
increase the population of the region, the Okinawa government provided
financial support for those who moved to the northern part of the island.
These early settlers were mostly engaged in the forestry industry. The sec-
ond mass movement of people to Yanbaru region occurred during the
Battle of Okinawa. They were refugees who fled to the northern Yanbaru
from south and central parts of Okinawa such as Naha and Yomitan Village.
The exact number is still uncertain. However, the local official history
introduced an account by a war survivor who considered that nearly
100,000 people came from the South. During the final stages of the war,
most of these refugees and the local residents were kept in the camps such
as Taira by the Allied Powers. However, there were a number of people
who experienced the end of the war in the forest.
20. Taku Morizumi and Chie Mikami, Okinawa Takae Yanbaru de Ikiru
(Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2014), 127–128.
21. Masamichi S. Inoue, “’We Are Okinawans but of Different Kind’: New/
Old Social Movements and the U.S. Military in Okinawa,” Current
Anthropology 45(1), 85–104.
22. Kosuzu Abe, “Kurikaeshi Kawaru: Okinawa ni okeru Chokusetu Kōdō no
Genzai Shinkōkei” (2011), 68.
23. Abe, “Kurikaeshi Kawaru,” 80–90.
Shinnosuke Takahashi is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Global Human

Sciences, Kobe University. After he obtained BA and MA in Policy Studies at Chuo
University in Tokyo, he moved to Canberra to start his doctoral program at the
School of Culture, History, and Language, the Australian National University. He
received a PhD in December 2016 with his doctoral dissertation on the recent
development of anti-US base activism in Okinawa by focusing on localization and
regionalization of the civic activism.
PART III
Alternatives
CHAPTER 8
Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value

Creation
Shuge Wei and Tessa Morris-Suzuki
The forms of living politics explored in this book are quests for alternative
values: both alternative values in the ethical sense and different ways of think-
ing about economic value. On the surface, these quests may look like mere
nostalgia or attempts to return to imagined, and economically unrealistic,
“good old days;” but a closer look suggests a more fundamental questioning
of a particular economic and ethical regime: a regime that is all too often taken
for granted. French pioneer of research on social memory Maurice Halbwachs,
many decades ago, highlighted the limitations of the mechanical explanation
of economic value in terms of laws of supply and demand. Demand itself is a
product of memory, history, and custom. The relative values that we attach to
things are the (often unconscious) product of centuries of social negotiation
and conflict over the meaning of human happiness and prosperity and the
proper way of organizing society.1 So value is inescapably built on values.
Exchange Beyond Profit Seeking

Ever-expanding commercial exchange has come to dominate people’s
economic life and imagination of social relationships globally. Yet a multi-
tude of other forms of exchange still exist and play a crucial role in many
S. Wei (*) • T. Morris-Suzuki


154 S. WEI AND T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
communities, particularly (though not exclusively) in rural areas. Behind

many efforts to preserve and create alternative exchange systems lie local
communities’ resistance to a corporate market ideology that reduces com-
plex social relations in quantifiable figures.
If one adopts a different way of performing the calculation and defining
values, it becomes clear that what is commonly regarded as “market effi-
ciency” may be a source of massive social “deficiency” or even catastrophe.
Waste products, pollution, crime, and violence generated by certain modes
of production, for example, are not factored into cost.2 Long-term effects
on human relationships, community ties, and local environment are
neglected.
What is commonly called “the market economy” in contemporary dis-
course is (as Karl Polanyi, Karatani Kojin, and others have observed) in
fact just one kind of market economy: a form of market that relies on the
relentless conversion of life into commodities, in order to generate profits
that fuel endless expansion. What is distinctive about the dominant eco-
nomic system is not the fact that it is based on market exchange, but rather
“its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expan-
sion.”3 Underlying this expansion, Polanyi argued, is the process of subor-
dinating labour and land to the market: turning them into commodities.
But labour and land are only “fictitious commodities,” because they are
created by forces outside the logic of the commodity economy.
Conscripting these unique dimensions of nature and human life into the
commodity system, and assuming that they behave in the same way as real
commodities, is ultimately a recipe for social and environmental disaster.4
This market, based on the commodification of human work and the
natural environment, pursues its unending search for profit, not just by
expanding outwards geographically, but also by expanding inwards, into
areas of health, child care, aged care, human and national security, and
even the genetic make-up of the body. This inward expansion is the pro-
cess that Hardt and Negri call “intensification.” As geographical limits are
reached, “capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and
its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive.”5 Contemporary
intensification is just the latest phase in a very long process that goes back
at least to the commercial and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth to
nineteenth centuries. With the rise of the commodity economy, people
came to rely on the market for a growing share of the goods they had
once produced at home. During the twentieth century, the market
extended still further into daily life. Not only were more and more goods
CONCEPT ESSAY THREE: ALTERNATIVE VALUE CREATION 155
commercially exchanged, corporations now also created a growing range

of entirely new commodities for which they had to create a need. The new
science of marketing was used to stimulate demand for this range of prod-
ucts—things like radios, refrigerators, automobiles, hair dryers, televi-
sions, computers, mobile phones, and so on. In the words of novelist
Shirley Hazzard, “invention was the mother of necessity.”6 As Timothy
Mitchell points out, the market is a cultural construction: not simply a
reflection of the real necessity, but an artefact strongly influenced by the
culture of consumption.7 More recently, technologies such as genetic
engineering and artificial intelligence have taken the process of intensifica-
tion one step further, blurring the distinction between machine and living
organism, and deepening the commodification of nature, life, and the
human mind. So the expanding commodity economy reaches ever more
deeply into all areas of everyday life, with profound consequences for our
social relationships and our sense of self.
Urbanization, by separating people from land and nature, helps to sub-
jugate humanity to the rule of market. German sociologist Georg Simmel
described modern, urbanized life as a world of relentless calculation. He
attributed this mentality to the concentration of commercial transactions
in large cities and believed that the growth of the metropolis fostered the
development of an impersonal rationality at the expense of the emotional
ties of life in the countryside and small towns. In smaller circles, he argued,
knowledge of individual characteristics and an emotional tone in conduct
are inevitable, since human interactions go “beyond the mere objective
weighing of tasks performed and payments made.” 8
Tradition as Innovation
The endless expansion of the market is a deeply ambivalent process. As its
advocates proclaim, it has indeed created enormously increased material
wealth. With this have come many undeniable benefits—throughout vast
regions of the world, infant death rates have fallen dramatically and life
expectancy has been prolonged. Even if it were possible, few of us would
seriously choose to go back in toto to the lifestyles of our ancestors in the
eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In many ways, indeed, the choice of a
return to past ways of life is itself foreclosed, for we have become inescap-
ably dependent on the material systems created by the corporate market
economy. These systems sustain a human population far greater than any
that has existed before. The world population today is about 10 times
greater than it was at the start of the eighteenth century. Most people in
richer countries of the world have become utterly dependent upon the
systems of transport, communications, and commerce created by the cor-
porate market, and many people in poorer countries genuinely aspire to
share in the material life created by those systems.
Despite our dependence on the system though, we remain able to see
how that ever-deepening dependence on the commodity market erodes
freedom and damages human health and happiness. At the same time, we
are forced to confront a problem so large that it threatens to overwhelm
our powers of choice and decision, leaving us feeling disempowered and
politically numb. Can the growth of the market be tamed, channelled, or
brought to a gradual end in a way that does not produce global catastro-
phe? If so, how? Where can those who suffer the injuries of the market’s
relentless growth start to intervene to gain some control over this process?
These are questions that underlie many experiments in living politics,
including the experiments that we will explore in this section.
The dichotomy between commodity and humanity reflects the funda-
mental difference in how the world should be perceived: whether the
development of human society should be seen as a process to maximize
profit, or a way to achieve a balance; whether human relationships are
defined by competition, against one another and against nature, or by
shared responsibility and mutually connected interests. The market
emphasizes the former group of values. As E.F. Schumacher argued, the
market “is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility.
Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.”9 The
atomization of individuals pushes for the drive to maximize one’s own
interest at the cost of others. Alternative economies, like those examined
in the chapters that follow, serve to return individuals to the community
and create new ways of exchange that strive to achieve balance within
communities and with nature.
Robert Weller points out that all economies require social capital to
function; they cannot afford to erase all ties that are larger than the indi-
vidual but smaller than the state.10 The alternative value systems explored
here draw on and deepen resources of social capital, combining the
exchange of goods and services with the strengthening of other forms of
human interconnection. The natural environment and non-human spe-
cies, which are excluded from the calculations of the dominant market
system, are included in their consideration of cost and gain. They
emphasize cycle and balance, and consider them as defining mode of
social relations. Therefore, instead of perceiving the individual as an

atomized entity in a society, participants in these communities tend to
perceive themselves as part of a small-scale cosmos integrating nature
and social community. The ultimate goal is not to maximize, but to
achieve a long-term balance. Producers are responsible not only for
themselves, but also for the local ecology. Cooperation rather than com-
petition is the norm that defines one’s social relationship.
Although tensions and conflicts do, of course, occur in these communi-
ties, the desire for social harmony and consensus is strong especially for a
small community linked by a shared commitment to a place. Behind their
efforts is their impulse to resist rule by numbers, to preserve values sup-
pressed by the dominant capitalist culture, and to return meaning to
human aspects of social life that do not easily fit into the calculation of
profits. It is essentially a struggle for a different world view, an effort to
free human and nature from the bondage of profit seeking.
The Networks of Value Creation

In the previous section of this book, we examined the crucial role that
networks play in informal life politics. These networks often span regional
and social divisions, bringing together people from town and countryside,
and from very diverse occupations. The traditional lenses of class and ide-
ology which have formed the core of political analysis provide little guid-
ance in understanding the way these networks form, function, and grow.
Practitioners of informal life politics are often flexible in terms of how
people link with each other. While traditional relationships such as kinship,
social relations in schools, work place, and neighbourhood may still play
important roles, networks of informal life politics are much broader, and
generally much looser, than formal political movements.
In his book The Structure of World History, Karatani Kojin analyses the
development of human society from the perspective of exchange rather
than production. He suggests four modes of exchange: mode A is based
on the principle of reciprocity; mode B is established through plunder and
redistribution; mode C focuses on commodity exchange; and mode D,
which includes multiple social formations, is a return of mode A in a higher
dimension. All modes of exchange coexist in contemporary society, yet
only one is in a dominant position which determines the political
systems and power distributions. Karatani identifies a resonance between
exchange modes A and D, which suggest people’s recognition of the

importance of reciprocity as well as the moral values it represents.
The two chapters in this section explore examples which illustrate the
way in which people from varied social backgrounds—some from urban
areas and some from rural communities—find common ground in the
search for a type of “exchange mode D” that goes beyond the dominance
of the commodity form. The participants in this quest share a common
understanding of the importance of resisting the power of the expansion-
ist market and acknowledging values beyond market calculation; but they
acquire this common understanding through different life experiences.
While the rural people tend to identify themselves with traditional values
as a result of bodily engagement with a local environment and long-term
immersion in a local cultural context, participants from urban backgrounds
develop an attachment to alternative values through frustration with the
commercial culture they have experienced. When locals lack the confi-
dence to express traditional values, considering them as “backward” or
“outdated” ideas, urban people who rediscover and reinvent “traditional”
values after experiencing “advanced” modes of exchange and life style can
offer new understandings of the local ways. Their attention and engage-
ment in local affairs therefore help boost locals’ confidence in their way of
life.
However, it is not easy for the urban intellectuals to gain local trust.
The search for alternative values as an antidote to the ills of the expanding
commodity economy does not mean an accurate replication of ancient
local traditions. It is often a revision or re-invention, which involves com-
promise as well as creations. This creative process can also generate its own
new tensions.
Chapter 7 has highlighted the way in which the division between
“insider” and “outsider” may come to the fore in defining the motivations
or authority of individual participants in the network. An insider, accord-
ing to Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage, is someone who “belongs”
and is mentally and physically attuned to a specific socio-cultural space;
someone whose mental and physical dispositions—habitus—have been
acquired within and thus fit into a specific space; and someone who identi-
fies with the “order of things” within such a space, regardless of whether
this “order” takes the form of a formal set of laws or an informal “the way
things are done around here.”11 Two dimensions are involved in consider-
ing one’s identity with the locality: physical affiliation and mental
commitment. Although the two are mutually inclusive, they may not
always correlate with each other. As we saw in Chapter 4 and will see again
in the following chapter, a person who has no history in the local area may
in some respects be more committed to the local order of things than
those who are born there but do not care; and the very meaning of “the
local way” may be understood in multiple ways by various “locals”
themselves.
Incomers to a local community who commit themselves to local issues
may be seen as “embedded outsiders.” They may not meet the physical
requirement of being an insider, in the sense of being born and raised in
the local place or registered as a local villager, and yet feel strongly com-
mitted to the local value systems because of their long-time engagement
with the local community or deep connection to them.
In the chapters that follow, we explore two further examples of alterna-
tive value creation in two contrasted social settings. “The Dilemmas of
Peach Blossom Valley” examines the efforts of a group of intellectuals and
farmers in Gongliao district, Taiwan, to challenge the dominant and
monolithic market system. This case shows how urban intellectuals are
drawn into the local value systems and work with locals to preserve and
revitalize their alternative values. Instead of waiting for society to change,
they start to create a living space governed by values which they derive
from local tradition. This is a battle of mutuality versus competition; qual-
ity of life versus quantity of products; the sense of limit versus infinite
maximization; and the attitude of respecting nature versus the desire to
harness it. While issues of rural development are often analysed through
the framework of class struggle12 or in terms of the political relationship
between central and local government,13 this case study instead focuses on
the way that a struggle of values and ideas is conducted by and within an
informal life politics network.
The second example, discussed in “The Neverending Story,” moves the
focus to the semi-rural, semi-urban setting of the small regional city of
Ueda, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture. In this case, a group made up of locals
and “incomers,” who have moved to the region in search of a better way of
life, mobilize imported ideas to revitalize community relationships and
practices. In Ueda, an alternative currency and exchange system has become
the core of a broader array of social activities which are centred on core
shared values, but which still allow for a diversity of personal opinions
within the group. The experimental, open-ended approach of the Ueda
group may indeed be described as an effort to experiment with the “politics
of the apolitical.” Both these cases raise questions about the way in which
ideas and practices are transmitted from one generation to another, and
about the way in which we assess the success or failure of informal life poli-
tics: questions to which we shall return in the book’s concluding chapter.
Notes
1. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1950), 153–159.
2. Kojin Karatani, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, The structure of World
History: from Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2014), 18. The book was originally pub-
lished in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 2010.
3. Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London,
Verso, 2002), 193.
4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). The book was originally pub-
lished by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944 and reprinted in 1957 and 2001 by
Beacon Press.
5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 272.
6. Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Revised edition) (Ringwood and
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 47.
7. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
8. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in George Simmel, ed.
Donald N. Levine, On Individual and Social Forms (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1971), 327. The chapter is a reprint from Social Sciences
III Selections and Selected Readings, Vol. 2, 14th ed. (University of
Chicago, 1948). Translated by Edward A. Shils. It was originally published
as “Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben,” in Die Grosstadt. Jahrbuch der
Gehe-Stiftung 9 (1903).
9. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
(London: Vintage Books, 1993), 29.
10. Robert Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 9.
11. Ghassan Hage, ‘Insiders and Outsiders’ in Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan
(eds.), Sociology: Place, Time and Division (Melbourne: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 342.
12. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Benedict
J. Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations
in a Central Luzon Village (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
1990).
13. Huanyin Li, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005).
Shuge Wei is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University. Shuge

is the author of News under Fire: China’s Propaganda War against Japan in the
War and memory.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Distinguished Professor and Australian Research Council

Laureate Fellow, Australian National University. Tessa is the 2013 Fukuoka Prize
winner for contributions to Asian Studies and the author of 13 monographs,
Media, Memory, History (2005); Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s
Cold War (2007).
CHAPTER 9
The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley:

The Resurgence of Rice-Terrace Farming
in Gongliao District, Taiwan
Shuge Wei
Introduction
“During the Taiyuan era of the Jin Dynasty, there was a man from Wuling
who made his living as a fisherman. While following a stream, he forgot
how far he had gone. He suddenly came to a grove, with peach trees on
both banks and petals of the dazzling blossoms falling in profusion…”1
The verses of this “Legend of the Peach Blossom Spring” ran through my
mind as we drove on a winding mountain road. Having forgotten how far
I had gone and lost my sense of direction in the deep mountains, I won-
dered what sort of legend I would encounter at the destination called
“peach blossom valley.” The car stopped at an open area toward the top of
a hill. A picturesque scene of rice terraces was in front of me. A coiling line
ran from the foot of the mountain, dividing the slope into layers of water
glittering in the sun. Water buffalos were roaming along the ridges and
farmers were bending forward toward the field, transplanting seedlings by
hand. While machines had come to dominate farms and tourist villas were
a common spectacle in this rural part of northeastern Taiwan, the village
S. Wei (*)

164 S. WEI
had maintained its own pace of life, as if time had frozen here and the
hustle and bustle of the outside world had left this place unaffected. As I
was marveling at the internal strength of the village to resist external influ-
ences, my friend commented on the vulnerability of the village: “many of
the rice terraces were rehabilitated after decades of desertion. The sur-
rounding woods used to be paddy fields too. Now they have been deserted
for very long.” I began to wonder what the local farmers had experienced
over the last decades; what motivated them to revive rice-terrace farming?
As my inquiry went deeper, a local story began to unfold (Image 9.1).
This chapter seeks to shed light on the efforts of a local community to
preserve an alternative value system as a challenge to the monolithic mar-
ket rules. It explores the process of agricultural decline since the 1950s
and the recent attempts of local farmers as well as NGO workers to
overcome this decline through self-organized and self-designed coopera-
tive programs. The remote location and the small scale of land have
enabled local farmers to preserve a traditional attitude toward nature and
daily life that differs from dominant commercial values. Hehe, a local
NGO, has sought to protect local values by creating a new way of trading
that reconnects consumers and producers, humans and nature. However,
its efforts are caught in a dilemma between the desire to cater for the older
Image 9.1 Rice-terrace farming, Gongliao

THE DILEMMAS OF PEACH BLOSSOM VALLEY: THE RESURGENCE... 165
generations’ pursuit of social respect for the traditional way of farming and
the younger generations’ practical need for financial security. Faced with
the ubiquitous force of capitalism, the Hehe program has struggled to find
a way to survive.
A Forgotten Farmland
Gongliao district is located in the northeastern corner of Taiwan. The
local aboriginal tribe Ketagalan originally referred to the region as “Kona,”
meaning the hut next to a hunting trap. After landing in the region in
1895, Japanese colonizers named the region Kō r yō and set up a village
governed under the government of Kı̄run district in the 1920s. The
Nationalist government led by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) pre-
served the name and local governance structure of the village after it took
over the region from the Japanese in 1945. A Chinese version of the
name—Gongliao—was adopted, and Gongliao Township was established
and attached to Taipei County in 1946.2
Gongliao farmers have been a forgotten group in the region. The
region is known for fishing and mining, and farmers mainly live in the vil-
lage of Jilin with its arable fields scattered deep in the mountains. The
village currently has about 500 registered residents, but the real number
of people living there is considerably smaller.3 Local fishermen in fishing
communities on the coast had little idea that there were people practicing
farming in the mountains.4 “Remote” (pianpi 偏僻) was the word local
farmers frequently used to refer to their own land. For generations, they
quietly ploughed the fields, collected their harvests, and traded rice and
vegetables in nearby markets. Because of the high altitude in the moun-
tainous area and the moist climate closer to the sea, the land only yielded
one crop every year. Compared to farmers in flat areas who could harvest
at least twice annually, Gongliao farmers barely had anything to trade after
meeting their own needs and paying taxes. Their constant absence from
markets made this group even more invisible in the local region.
Small-scale farms also limited the agricultural production of house-
holds. The KMT government carried out land reform shortly after it
established power on the island. Determined to liberate the peasantry and
remove the class of local landed gentry with whom they had no political
connections, the government reduced land rent from over 50% of the crop
yield during Japanese rule to 37.5%. In 1953, a “land-to-tiller” program
was introduced. Apart from retaining three chia (about 2.9 hectare) for
166 S. WEI
each landowner, the government expropriated the surplus and redistrib-

uted the land to tenants. By 1955, 73% of the 790,000 landowners owned
less than one chia, 18% between one and two chia, 5% between two to
three chia, and only 4% more than three chia.5 The nationwide reform,
nevertheless, had little effect on the village. The farmland reclaimed along
the hillside was small and dispersed by nature. Small-scale farming was a
common practice in the village well before the land reform was activated.
The small size landholdings and the single crop yield per year made it dif-
ficult for villagers to rely solely on farming for their livelihood. Most of
them took part-time jobs elsewhere as miners or craftsmen to compensate
for the shortage of agricultural income. The constant shift back and forth
between working in the fields and selling their labor on the market blurred
their social status and further diluted their identity as farmers in the eyes
of outsiders.
The process of industrialization and urbanization at a national scale
transformed peasants’ views about the land. Taiwanese peasantry had
become a disoriented group, caught in a dilemma between attachment to
land and the quest for profits. Like all farmers in a traditional agricultural
society, they had strong bonds to the land, regarding farming as some-
thing that defined the purpose of life. Yet market exchange also taught
them to treat land as a commodity whose value was to be determined by
the profits it yielded.6 This ambiguous view also changed their aspirations
for the younger generations: on the one hand, they considered land as
sacred property of the household, hoping their children would keep it as a
token of connection to the ancestors; on the other, they wished that their
offspring would leave the land and obtain more dignified off-farm jobs.
Hard labor and financial insecurity were the reason villagers frequently
cited for dissuading younger generations from pursuing a farming career.7
While the government considered small farm size as the bottle-neck to
agricultural development, farmers commonly believed that the low agri-
cultural prices because of state policy were the major cause of their eco-
nomic difficulties.8 Indeed, villagers often found that the rice produced by
their months of hard work was sold at a humiliatingly low price. Under the
national policy of “nurturing industry with agriculture” (yi nong yang
gong 以農養工), rural areas became a source of cheap raw material and
labor for urban-based industrial centers. This also instilled the idea in peo-
ple’s minds that farming was a backward skill, secondary to industrial
production.
Although tenant farmers acquired their own land through a series of

land reforms in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they soon realized that
land ownership did not increase their bargaining power in the market. The
Farmers’ Association, which had been integrated into the Bureau of Food
and Supply after the war, acted as the sole retailer of public grain and an
agent of grain–fertilizer exchange. With a national priority to develop
industry, farmers were heavily taxed through exchange with the Farmers’
Association for seeds and fertilizers. Meanwhile, the Farmers’ Association
also lost its autonomy and became more drawn into the “international
food regime” upon being closely monitored by the “Sino-American Joint
Commission of Rural Reconstruction” (JCRR). Established in Nanjing in
1948 and later moved to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war, the JCRR was
a US aid program that advocated institutional reforms for the technologi-
cal and social advancement of farmers. It acted not only as an agent of
agricultural revitalization, but also an executive broker of American
postwar policy in Taiwan to cultivate the consumption of American agri-
cultural exports.9
Under the supervision of the JCRR, farmers found their traditional agri-
cultural skills “obsolete.” Indeed, agricultural production and education in
Taiwan experienced a transition from valuing locally tested knowledge to
favoring US-introduced technical treatment of farmland. While Japanese
colonial institutes had focused on research based on locally embodied expe-
riences, American aid through the JCRR was keen to transplant agricultural
production models from the USA, including heavy reliance on petrochemi-
cals and large machinery.10 By belittling local knowledge, the state dissolved
the existing social structure in the local areas. It undermined the authority
of experienced farmers and enhanced the influence of centralized state insti-
tutions that could provide “advanced” farming techniques and resources.
However, the local geographical condition in Gongliao enabled the vil-
lagers to preserve their traditional way of farming that avoided the erosion
of chemicals and machines. Small-scale production with sufficient labor
supply from family members, or exchanges of labor in the neighborhood,
rendered the use of pesticide unnecessary, at least in the first decade when
it was introduced to Taiwan. Farmers working on level fields could con-
gregate their land and hire contract farmers with machines to plow it on a
large scale, but Gongliao farmers in the mountains did not have this
option. The hilly landscape as well as the narrow and fragile ridges made it
difficult to operate large machines on the rice terraces. The traditional way
of cultivation by hand with the help of animals and light equipment still
168 S. WEI
dominated local production. Their “forced” daily physical engagement at

every step of farming continued to sustain their intimacy with the land.
Much as the farmers desired to preserve their traditional way of farming
and to keep pesticides out of their land and water, the continuous loss of
farm labor to urban areas forced them to compromise. Farming was a pro-
fession bound up with the images of poverty and the lack of a promising
future (meichuxi 沒出息). The decline of rice farming became almost inev-
itable because of the industrialization, the dietary changes of the Taiwanese
consumers since the 1980s, and the invovlement of Taiwanese economy
into the global market. From the 1970s, young people with encourage-
ment of their parents left home to seek employment in cities. As a local
farmer, Brother Xiao, recalled, when he was in his first year of Jilin primary
school in the early 1970s, there were over 200 students in the school.
When he graduated after year six, the number of students had reduced to
140. The completion of the Coastal Highway in 1978 continued to draw
young labor to the cities.11 Faced with a lack of manpower, farmers started
to rely on pesticides and herbicides to reduce their workload. In 1997, the
government further encouraged farmers to leave their land fallow, so as to
prepare for Taiwan joining the World Trade Organization in 2002 by cut-
ting its own grain production and allowing an influx of imported staple
foods.12 Subsidy was provided to those who set aside their land but weeded
it regularly so that the land remained arable. Yet this policy, which intended
to preserve unploughed soil, led to the massive use of herbicide before
inspections by government officials. As herbicides were even more poison-
ous than pesticides, the soil quality deteriorated drastically.
The nuclear power plant that was constructed in Gongliao further
weakened the local farming community. During the early 1980s, Gongliao
was chosen as the location for Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant.
Farmers whose lands were within the area of the planned power plant
compound had to move out. They were forced to exchange their low-
priced farmland for the equivalent value of high-priced housing land.
Most of the farmers lost their farmland and had to take up employment
with the power plant. Few farmers dared to challenge the policy during a
time when martial law was still in force. Local factional elites who had
backdoor deals with the government took the initiative to follow the
expropriation order, which added to the pressure on small farmers who
were reluctant to give up farming. Wang Jing’e was a local teacher whose
parents lost their land during the expropriation. She commented that her
parents were never as “alive” as during the time they were farmers.13 She
still favorably remembered the time when neighbors in the community
took turns to till each other’s land, and the host would cook a big meal by
the end of the day to thank the neighbors for their contribution. Children
would frolic in the fields while adults chatted and drank.
In the following decades, the fourth nuclear power plant continued to
absorb local workers for low-paid service jobs, such as cleaning and gar-
dening. Many who left the land at a young age never returned to farming.
Since the late 1980s, the local anti-nuclear movement had brought
Gongliao to the public attention. For the first time, Gongliao people
became heavily involved in partisan politics. They gained national promi-
nence because the mainstream media portrayed them as a “violent mob”.14
The antinuclear agenda dominated the public’s understanding of daily life
in the local region, and particularly obscured the existence of the local
farming community in the mountains, who were much less vocal than
fishermen living next to the power plant. Despite the limelight Gongliao
people received from the media, the local farming community was an
eclipsed group even more invisible and thus forgotten in the eyes of out-
siders, much in accordance with what Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann has
called the “spiral of silence.”15
Local Values
Being small and forgotten nevertheless provided the local farmers, par-
ticularly the elder generation, with some space to preserve certain tradi-
tional values that stood in contrast to the capitalist culture of the
mainstream. Exchange for them was not exclusively between producers
and customers. Neither was it restricted to human societies. Instead,
exchange involved human and nonhuman species. Money was not the sole
currency valid in this exchange. The process involved a wider range of
non-quantifiable values, including human feelings, loyalty, trust, and a
sense of responsibility.
To know the limits of the environment and obey orders from heaven
(zhi tianming 知天命) was an unwritten contract between farmers and the
land. “Not to ask too much from heaven” and to “get your rightful share”
had almost become unstated mottos for the farmers.16 Instead of seeing
their rice production as a pure economic game to achieve growth and to
maximize profit, they considered their farming activity part of the biologi-
cal balance. Mutual dependence and reciprocity was more important than
the sum of individual egoisms. They did not view the world as a linear
path to growth, competition, and maximizing personal desires, but as a
system to achieve a balance. There was, for example, this commonly
170 S. WEI
shared view among the local community that it was unethical to weed the
land more than three times in one growing season, since farmers were
responsible for sharing the land with nature, rather than eradicating every-
thing that affected the growth of their desired product. What is more,
gains would always come at a cost. A local farmer, Lin Shizhong, had
refused to register his idle land with the government to receive subsidies:
“I still weed and plough the land to make it fit for farming, but I do not
take money for it. My friends and I all believe that the more you receive
government subsidies, the less your children perform filial duties to
you.”17 Lin could not specify the logical correlation between the two. Yet
this almost superstitious thinking that there was a cost for being greedy
was indicative of the strong belief among local farmers in moral
reciprocity.
Trust and loyalty were also important currencies that the local com-
munity relied on in contracts and exchanges. Having worked in the field
his whole life, Zhang Xinyi, also known as “Uncle Tree” (Shu Bo 樹伯),
was still a tenant farmer. While most of the tenants had acquired their
own piece of land during the land reform of the 1950s, Uncle Tree did
not relinguish his position as a tenant. Deeply touched by his landlord’s
great care for him and his family, he considered it ungrateful to claim
land from his landlord.18 Indeed, beyond the formal exchange system
based on legal contract and monetary payment, Uncle Tree valued infor-
mal agreements based on mutual trust, personal feelings, and loyalty.
This informal currency was strong enough to resist external economic
turbulences, including inflation or deflation, so long as the exchanging
partners were mutually committed to it. Yet Uncle Tree did not expect
the currency to be short-changed. It expired when the landlord’s son,
who did not have the same commitment to Uncle Tree’s family, decided
to terminate the tenancy after his father passed away. This eventually
forced Uncle Tree to face his landlord’s family in court to defend his
tenant rights.
In the village, diligence was the norm. It determined the social respect
one received from the community. “One thing that distinguishes the
mountain people (farmers) from seaside people (fishermen),” as local
teacher Jing’e observed, “is that few mountain people gamble as a pas-
time. They are not used to the idea of making gains through luck as
opposed to hard work.”19 Indeed, dedication to farming was an important
element in increasing one’s social respect. Farmer Lin had spent years
xing the local irrigation channel, with half of his annual income thrown
fi
into the project every year. He acknowledged that family members and
neighbors found him “foolish” and “weird,” but insisted that the “weird”
way was how a farmer was supposed to be.20
Yet this ought not to suggest that local villagers were too idealistic to
ignore the rules of competition. For them, the ultimate attraction of farm-
ing lay in personal autonomy, participation in an unbroken chain of pro-
duction, and the sense of reward developed through farming. But they
were fully aware that the commitment to farming and the traditional way
of life attached to it were exclusive to their generation. Most of the farmers
acknowledged that small-scale farming was not a “realistic” job for the
younger generations who had the heavy burden of supporting their fami-
lies. Ironically, their value systems, which emphasized the importance of
balance and sustainability, were considered as unsustainable by the younger
generations. Having been encouraged to leave farming and to prepare for
wage labor in the city from an early age, the younger people found that
the local idea of sharing and limiting personal desires ran contrary to what
they had been trained to believe: growth, development, and the optimiza-
tion of profit.
Awakening of the Village
The old generation of Gongliao farmers were quietly aging. As young
people continued to leave the land, more and more hectares of fields
turned from active farms to fallow land, and eventually became deserted.
No one openly expressed concerns for the dying village. Farmers who had
followed the “orders from the heaven” their whole lifetime seemed to
have once again accepted their fate and let the village take its own course,
whatever that was.
But the silence was broken by another expropriation plan. In March
2010, word was leaked from the Ministry of Interior, possibly by whistle
blowers, that the government would expropriate about 700 hectares of
land along the seaside in the Gongliao region. The farmland would be
converted to commercial and residential areas and sold to developers to
build hotels. Affected villagers were to be relocated to Tianliaoyang (田寮
洋), a piece of farmland close to the terraced fields in the mountains.21 The
development plan was not released to the public until August that year,
and according to the plan, expropriation was to be activated in November.
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The news stirred the quiet village. People were genuinely shocked by the
ruthless manner in which the government treated the local villagers:
Tianliaoyang was a piece of wetland that frequently became flooded dur-
ing the typhoon season. Farming was already difficult there, let alone
building houses for daily living. Furthermore, the notion of losing their
land was devastating for many villagers who had worked and lived on their
farm their entire life. It would deprive them of the resources for living,
disqualify them from receiving social welfare as farmers, and force them to
completely change their lifestyle. A sense of injustice and mistreatment
permeated the village.
Our family have lived here for generations. How come the government will
take away our land simply because big merchants like the seaside view? Does
it mean that only rich people are entitled to the view but not poor locals like
us?22
Concerned about the future of their life and the community, local vil-
lagers organized themselves at local centers to rally protests against the
expropriation.
While the local peasants lacked the political channels to defend their
homeland, a bird-watching group mobilized their political resources to
protect Gongliao. Although Gongliao, particularly Tianliaoyang, was
unknown to most of the people outside the region, it was a “secret gar-
den” for bird-watching societies. The wetland environment diversified the
local biological system. Varieties of insects provided abundant food for
birds. Hidden among woods and mountains, the land became a popular
habitat for birds on their migration journeys. It was recorded that over
three hundred varieties of birds had appeared at Tianliaoyang, two thirds
of the total number of bird species in Taiwan. Bird watching became pop-
ular in Taiwan in the 1970s. As early as 1973, some American scientists
together with US-trained academics and public servants established the
Taiwan Bird Watcher’s Group (TBWG).23 Through regular bird-watching
trips, the group brought together environmentalists with a shared desire
to get close to nature. The seemingly unassuming group had a strong pool
of social capital. Some members had connections to key political resources
and were effective in advocating environment-related policies. Founder of
the TBWG, Yu Hanting, for example, helped the promotion of the
National Park Law; and the TBWG took credit for the establishment of
Guandu National Park in the 1990s.24
Faced with the acquisition order, bird watchers released the news to
newspapers and social media. A local land expropriation case soon
became a warning call for the loss of an important habitat for birds. The
resistance of the locals and the external bird watchers eventually forced
the Ministry of Interior to drop the development plan. Yet it should be
noted that bird watchers and Gongliao farmers did not always get along.
The food that bird watchers left in the field attracted too many birds. As
a result local farming was often disrupted. In return, some farmers
increased the dose of pesticides, which posed a threat to the life of
birds.25 It was the spontaneous resistance against the state acquisition
that united the two.
Yet the alliance triggered a larger program that led to the resurgence
of local farming. Concerned that the Ministry of Interior would reacti-
vate the expropriation plan in the future, Lin Huaqing, a senior specialist
at the Habitat Management Division of the Forestry Bureau, initiated a
five-year program to revive terrace land farming. Gongliao was chosen as
one of the sites to implement the program. Lin was not a member of the
bird-watching group himself but had many friends and university alumni
who belonged to it. He not only shared the group’s concern with the
preservation of birds, but also saw the value of wetland environment in
maintaining biodiversity and water quality. Another hidden intention,
however, was to create a project within the bureau system as an obstacle
to deter any future expropriation plan initiated by other government
departments. Coming from the official system, Lin also clearly under-
stood the limits of having this program run by government agencies: a
top-down manner of ideological imposition would be hard to avoid. He
therefore planned to delegate the program to an environmental NGO
and approached an old university friend, Lin Wencui, who had lived in
Gongliao for over 15 years, for advice. Lin recommended the Renhe
Environmental Ethics Foundation of Taiwan (Renhe huanjing lunli
fazhan jijin hui 人禾環境倫理發展基金會), whose key member Fang
Yunru was Lin’s colleague at a student society when they pursued degrees
at National Taiwan University.26 As Robert Weller points out, Chinese
civil society is composed of horizontal ties linked through friendship,
community membership, and educational experience.27 The establish-
ment of Renhe’s connection with the Forestry bureau testified to the
power of such a horizontal network.
The Renhe foundation was established in 2007 by a group of middle-
aged elites who were eager to seek alternative values in society. A s tatement
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on the front page of their website revealed the shared anxiety that initially
brought these people together:
We have witnessed the development of Taiwanese society.

We have heard many stories about the economic legends.
We have watched the politics developing from an authoritarian rule to
ferocious battles between ideologies.
We have lived in a society with a strong consuming power but a high rate
of suicide.
We are in this endless race of competition.
Yet we still do not know what the real purpose of life is.28
One of the keys to answering this inquiry, according to Renhe, was to

reconnect humans with nature. It borrowed the Japanese Satoyama
Initiative (里山倡議) as the guiding principle of the foundation. This ini-
tiative advocates a building of societies in harmony with nature through
conservation and the advancement of socio-ecological production.29 It
was initially raised as a joint proposal by the Ministry of the Environment
of Japan and the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced
Study of Sustainability. The initiative echoed the Renhe members’ similar
concern about a mode of development that neglected human feelings and
dignity. It criticized the human-centric view and sought to re-embed
human activities in a larger natural cycle. By connecting to global environ-
mentalist ideas, Renhe was equipped with the language and rationale to
step out of the frame of state development, but to carry a universal value
supported by an international community.
Much as the urban-based Renhe members were committed to the
Satoyama Initiative, this foreign-introduced discourse was not always
effective in attracting locals. When Renhe members first introduced the
Forestry Bureau’s program to revive terrace rice farming, farmers
responded with their customary silence and disinterested smiles. The
smile reflected a combination of distrust of the government’s intentions,
doubt over its practicability, and a degree of sympathy for the Renhe
members who became involved in this “too-ideal-to-be-true” program.
They simply did not understand why the same government that almost
took their land away months ago would now suddenly come with the plan
to revive local farming. Indeed, political tensions within different minis-
tries were too complex for them to conceive, yet their suspicion toward
the state’s intentions and commitments to local farming was justified. For
decades, farming had been considered “inferior” to industrial develop-

ment. “Redundancy” and “inefficiency” had been long-term labels associ-
ated with farmers. Those labels deeply eroded the local farmers’ self-esteem.
It occurred to the Renhe members that the route to farming revival should
start from restoring the confidence among the community.
Fang Yunru therefore approached Lin Wencui, then an editor of the
local newspaper Gongliaoren (Gongliao People), as a local contact. A
cooperative was established to manage the operation of the local program.
Lin named the cooperative “Hehe” (和禾). This indicated (from the
composition of the Chinese characters) a connection of rice field (禾) and
rice product (禾) via the human mouth (口). The name suggested the
cooperative’s goal of reconnecting rural and urban communities with a
new way of purchasing and consuming. Hehe did not have a formal orga-
nization. The cooperative was mostly composed of local farmers, their
relatives, and urban volunteers. Among its members, those who were
good at communication received visitors, while those who preferred to
work in the field remained undisturbed. Lin is the linchpin of all the Hehe
members, responsible for daily management of the Hehe community,
including collecting and distributing cooperative funds, receiving guests,
and updating websites. Major decisions were made collectively through
cooperative meetings.
Lin used to work at the Gongliao primary school. Her initial friendship
with the farmers was established through this teacher–parent relationship.
Having graduated from the Department of Agronomy at the National
University of Taiwan, Lin found that the rural way of life appealed to her
much more strongly than the hustle and bustle of the city. A shy person by
nature, she began to watch birds as a hobby, which further cultivated her
attitude to life—close to nature, patient, and non-intrusive. Yet the deeper
she engaged with the local environment and the farming community, the
more she identified herself as one of them. Concerned about the decline
of the village, she was eager to find a way out for the locals. Inspired by
Wu Wentong, a local anti-nuclear leader, she co-established the local
newspaper Gongliaoren in the hope of rediscovering the local strength and
values. Lin’s commitment to local affairs won her respect among the
villagers.
However, the personal respect was not strong enough to attract the
farmers to the program. Many farmers initially considered Hehe as a gov-
ernment agency. Having been freed from dealing with state agencies,
including the local Farmer’s Association, villagers were reluctant to give
176 S. WEI
up their autonomy. Lin understood that to engage farmers in the pro-

gram, she needed to communicate with them in their own language, and
to attract them with the “local currencies” that were coined with human
feelings, trust, and shared values. She first approached the parents of her
former students. Although she had left teaching in 2001, farmers still
addressed her as “teacher” with great respect. Mutual amity did not end
when a work contract expired. Once formed, it was a long-lasting relation-
ship bound by the sense of loyalty and trust. “They would not have listened
to me,” stated Lin, “if they had not known me since I was a local school
teacher.”30 But Lin also understood that in order to win the deeper trust
of the farmers, she needed to dilute the division of social status and become
one of them.
Together with some of the other Hehe members, Lin started to
work in the fields alongside the farmers, learning from them how to
plough, cultivate seedlings, weed grass, and fix the local water chan-
nels. In the field, the gap between Lin, a member of the external elite
group, and local farmers began to dissolve. Status was redefined by
everyone’s ability to cooperate with each other and to follow the laws
of nature. Farmers became the experts and their traditional farming
skills, which had long been viewed as “inefficient,” “obsolete,” and
“old-fashioned,” became highly evaluated by Lin and other Hehe vol-
unteers. Hehe members were keen to revive indigenous pest-control
skills. From investigation of agricultural archives, they rediscovered the
record of the local pest-repellent, thang-hia (Chongshai 蟲篩). They
widely consulted villagers and finally found a farmer who could make it
based on his childhood memory. After half a century, thang-hia reap-
peared in the fields. Knowing that farmers had problems gathering
family members to help during a busy season, Hehe members orga-
nized volunteer groups from Taipei to help with planting and collect-
ing harvest. They sought to promote the idea of labor exchange
(huangong 換工): urban volunteers provided their labor in exchange
for local food and the opportunity to learn and practice local farming
skills (Image 9.2).
The Hehe members’ passion for the land and commitment to farming,
as well as their respect to local wisdom, stuck a chord with the local farm-
ers. For a long time, farmers had not felt their old knowledge being appre-
ciated. Neither had they seen so many young people working in the fields
during harvest season. It was a lost scenery that only existed in their mem-
ory. Although farmers rarely encouraged their own children to engage in
Image 9.2 Display of local farming tools at the Hehe stone room
farming and seldom openly expressed their concern for the shrinking of
farmland, they were genuinely pleased to see the return of the younger
generations, and their dedication to passing on the traditional farming
skills. It occurred to them that one thing worse than the pain for not being
able to recover the past was the loss of desire to long for what was lost.
The efforts of Hehe members awakened farmers’ hope and desire to revive
the farming community, rather than letting it take its course to an irrevers-
ible decline. Farmer Liu’s son recalled that for a while his father kept mur-
muring “how stupid of these people (Hehe members) trying to do this!”31
Yet he knew this was his father’s way of showing appreciation and approval
of Hehe’s efforts to save the local farming culture. After years of opera-
tion, Hehe started to gain local trust. In 2011, seven households with 2.4
hectares of land joined the program. In 2015, the number increased to
nine households with 7 hectares.32
Revival of the Farming Community

While conventional farming techniques prioritized efficiency, the Hehe
program sought to expand the idea of mutuality and sharing. “Do not ask
too much from the heaven” was a guiding principle of the program.
178 S. WEI
Farmers were required to abandon the use of pesticides and herbicides so

as not to poison other co-existing species. Fields should be filled with
water throughout the year, although the land would not grow crops
during winter. The program advocated “shallow ploughing”: it banned
heavy machinery on the farm but encouraged the use of small equipment
with the help of buffalos. They believed the slow speed and gentle way of
treating the land would reduce the harm to animals and insects during the
farming process. As Hehe members commented, all these conditions
seemed to be torturous for local farmers, pulling them away from modern
farming technologies, yet they were actually devised from long-term
observation of the “local way” and careful assessment of the local farmers’
capacity.33
Although Hehe resisted the ideology of the conventional market, it did
not exclude market from its program. Rice selling was an important task
of the cooperative. The exchange was not arranged as a purely commercial
activity, but a process that sought to strengthen connections between local
farmers and urban consumers. On the label of the rice bag, for example,
Hehe printed not only cartoon images of the animals and insects that were
protected because of the program, but also names and images of the pro-
ducers. Purchasing the rice, as interpreted by Hehe, was as much an appre-
ciation of the Gongliao farmer’s labor as an effort to preserve the local
environment and water resources.34
The organic features of the produce and the embedded local environ-
mental values raised the price of the local rice. Before, local rice was sold
at 28 NT per jin (half a kilo). Merchants and agricultural associations were
reluctant to purchase Gongliao rice because the grains were smaller than
those produced in lowland areas. Now the Hehe cooperative purchases
the local rice at the market rate for organic rice (around 120–150 NTD
per jin). This price increase greatly boosted the confidence of local farm-
ers. But the income from rice selling was still far from enough to support
the daily life of local farmers. As Lin commented, “with the same amount
of work, people up in the mountains only produce half of what farmers
from the plain areas harvest.”35 The price also failed to reflect the signifi-
cant role farming played in the preservation of the biological balance and
water resources. Hehe therefore introduced the Pay for Ecosystem Service
(PES) as a complement to the market system. The PES is a form of subsidy
to reward farmers for their care of local biodiversity and water resources.
While nonhuman species were excluded from the consideration of state
policy makers, Hehe considers them as part of the reality in daily farming
and acknowledges their significance through the PES scheme. The scheme
is also intended as a capital buffer for farmers to deal with the agricultural
loss caused by extreme weather conditions.
Hehe has also expanded the educational value of the terraced rice fields.
Cultivating consciousness of the environment and attachment to the land
among the young generations of Gongliao people was one of its key objec-
tives. Believing that intimate contact with the biological environment in
the local area was an effective measure to cultivate emotional ties to the
locality, it had invited local kindergarten, primary, and secondary
school students to visit the fields and taught them to recognize plants and
insects that were unique to the local wetland. The main idea Hehe tried to
deliver was that nature includes a variety of agencies that are not exclu-
sively human. As they are part of an ecosystem, humans should share the
resources rather than conquer and dominate them. The environmental
educational program had been integrated into the regular curriculum of
local schools (Image 9.3).
Another aspiration of Hehe was to re-establish a mutual assistance sys-
tem in Gongliao. Traditionally, labor exchange took place mainly among
Image 9.3 Children play in the Hehe rice paddies

180 S. WEI
family members and neighbors. What Hehe had aimed to create is a wider
exchange network that connected urban and rural communities. It there-
fore maintained connections with various urban-based clubs of agricul-
tural volunteers. During busy seasons, volunteers were organized to visit
Gongliao and assist farmers. Since 2013, Hehe began to organize small-
scale tourism, inviting urban people to visit the local area. Visitors sup-
ported the local environment through their purchases and membership
fees. Local farmers in return were responsible for taking good care of the
land and water resources.
The Hehe program was inspired by local traditions, including the sense
of mutuality and attachment to the land. Yet the program was not limited
to them. It sought to create a new space between the village and urban
communities, where the broken chains between producers and consumers
could be fixed and local knowledge and wisdom appreciated. The new
community which Hehe tried to cultivate was nevertheless a relatively
exclusive one. The local farmland and Hehe’s activities were only open to
a small group of urban volunteers and sponsors. Although the tourism
programs were open to the general public, the activities were designed and
scheduled under the condition that the local daily life must not be dis-
turbed. Hehe members therefore strictly limited the size of the tour
groups and the length of their visits. There were no tours during busy
farming seasons, nor in winter when the land and the nonhuman species
needed a proper rest.36
As Hehe’s program began to acquire a reputation, its members started
to feel external pressures pulling the program in different directions.
The local tranquility was disturbed by curious urban visitors. Farmers
who were usually shy of cameras found it unsettling to have their daily
lives becoming the subject of the “gaze” of uninvited visitors. Some visi-
tors even aimed their cameras at them and sent orders such as “slow
down” or “do it again,” disregarding the fact that the farmers were car-
rying dozens of kilos of rice on their shoulders.37 The condescending
manner betrayed their lack of respect for the local community. It eroded
local morale and constituted a form of “soft violence.” And yet it was
exactly this sort of violence from which Hehe tried to insulate the local
farmers.
Pressure also came from the local government, pushing Hehe to expand
tourism so as to increase local income and visibility. While Hehe consid-
ered commercial activities as the means to preserve environmental biodi-
versity, local officials believed that generating profits was a priority in
attracting young people back into the community. They prioritised the
value of the Hehe program as a tourism site, believing the program should
focus on tourism-related services rather than from the non-profitable yet
labor-intensive farming activities.38 Coming from an environmental stud-
ies background, the head of Gongliao district commended Hehe for its
environmental ideas, but disagreed with its exclusive feature. He tried to
explore its tourism value by endorsing Hehe as a licensed program for
environmental education. But this support was regarded as a burden by
Hehe members. They were concerned that the overflow of visitors could
easily destroy the existing balance between human and nature and disturb
the quiet life of the local farmers. For them, the value of farming went far
beyond what a monolithic market-based economy could quantify. Hasty
commercialization would only erode the local traditional values and even-
tually destroy them.
Keeping a slow and gradual pace of development was regarded by Hehe
members as the best way to preserve the local biodiversity and way of life,
but the vision was constantly challenged by the ubiquitous capitalist values
which pushed Hehe to expand its scale. Rumors started to disseminate in
the organic farming markets that Hehe leaders were trying to monopolize
local resources for personal gains. There were also whispers that Hehe
members, who were led by outsiders, were making decisions on behalf of
the villagers.39
Meanwhile, the younger generation of Gongliao farmers also raised
concerns about the lack of financial return from joining this program.
Farmer Yang withdrew from the Hehe program after the first year. As a
middle-aged man with the burden of supporting a family, he disagreed
with the lack of commercial vision in Hehe’s plan. After leaving the Hehe
program, Yang started his own tourist farming business, which, in contrast
to Hehe, was much more open to media exposure and tourists. For
outsiders, Yang’s farm was too easily regarded as part of Hehe. The differ-
ent attitudes toward visitors sometimes caused confusion among outsiders
about Hehe’s principles.
Disagreements also came from other NGO colleagues. The Taiwan
Ecological Engineering Development Foundation (EEF), another group
affiliated with Renhe, supervised the revival of the rice-terrace fields in
Bayan, Jinshan District. Considering Hehe’s model as lacking a long-term
plan for the livelihood of the locals, the EEF’s Bayan program sought to
revive terrace farming for tourism purposes. Yet in the eyes of Hehe mem-
bers, the Bayan program had subordinated the local villagers’ daily life to
182 S. WEI
commercial ends while the scale of tourism had far exceeded what the local
resources could carry.40 The program led to much criticism from villagers
after the EEF left the region. Villagers complained that local life and the
environment, instead of benefiting from the Bayan program, were sub-
jected to “bullying” by environmental NGOs, visitors, and the media.41
They ended up draining the water from fields that the EEF rented from
local farmers as a protest.
Hehe members were fully aware of the limits of their program. They
acknowledged that they were more effective in persuading existing farm-
ers to reclaim rice terraces than attracting younger generations to start a
farming career.42 Indeed, they had been agonizing for years about the
right pace to take in protecting local values and addressing commercial
profits, and about the appropriate level of compromise with capitalism. To
them the existence of the local way mattered greatly. And their goal was to
“maintain it,”43 so as to remind the future generations of “a way back
home,”44 even though no one knew what the future would hold.
Conclusion
Gongliao farmers were able to preserve the traditional way of farming
because of their small-scale farmland and the mountainous landscape.
Large machines could not be used on the rice terraces. Small-sized land
for each household only produced enough rice for family consumption.
This allowed local farmers to resist external market influences and to
preserve the traditional way of farming, including the selection of seeds
and weeding plans. This also explained why local farmers agreed to join
the cooperative, even though such a decision meant more labor without
much higher financial returns. For them, the traditional way of life,
together with the value systems attached to it, had become what
Bourdieu called a “habitus” that shaped their choices and behavior. The
desire to maintain the local habitus was especially strong among the
elders. Having been liberated from the constraints imposed by family,
profession, and active existence in society, the elder farmers developed
the capacity to revisit their past and retrieve a system and social order
that defined who they were.
The urban intellectuals who established the Hehe cooperative in the
village were able to introduce a mode of exchange based on mutuality
because of the small size of the group with whom they engaged. The small
scale allowed the cooperative to be flexible and innovative. It also enabled
it to maintain a flat structure, rendering a hierarchical administration

redundant. However, like all small-scale entities, it faced the pressure of
the ubiquitous market ideologies to “go big.” Hehe was pushed to expand
its tourism farming, as if a large number of tourists and the wealth gener-
ated out of it were the sole yardsticks of its success. If largeness were the
nemesis of autonomy, and from largeness came impersonality, irresponsi-
bility, and a drive to acquire power, then the road toward expansion ran
counter to Hehe’s interests.
The pressure to go big nevertheless also came from within. As a grass-
roots cooperative, Hehe relied on the local farmers for the support of
labor and land resources. Most of the local farmers who were active in the
cooperative were over 70 years old. They ploughed a small plot of land all
their lives, and their reduced desire for material gains in old age also
allowed them to resist the temptation of profit which was often generated
at the cost of the local environment and way of life. Being small suited the
habitus of the older generations. Yet small scale was not attractive to the
younger generations, most of whom had left home for waged job in big
cities. Having been separated from farming for a long time, their attach-
ment to the farmland, local community, and nature was much more tenu-
ous than that of the elder generations. Farmland was a means of production
for them. Its value was best realized when optimized to generate the most
profit. When the older generations’ nostalgic desire met with the younger
generations’ aspiration for financial security, Hehe was caught in the mid-
dle, struggling to work out a way to sustain the program.
Hehe’s relationship with the locals merits careful analysis. The “insider”
and “outsider” division, in the form of questioning whether one is a
Gongliaoren (a Gongliao villager) or not, has been frequently cited to
define motivations or question the authority of participants in the program.
Some farmers and officials who had a different view on how the rice-terrace
program should run questioned the identity of Hehe’s leader, Lin Wencui.
In their eyes, Lin’s almost 20 years of residence in the village still did not
qualify her as a Gongliaoren (villager of Gongliao). However, there were
others who defended her as more qualified to be a Gongliaoren than most
others who were merely born and raised in the village. The split views of
her identity reflected the hidden tensions among the villagers themselves.
The Hehe and Renhe members were embedded outsiders in the village.
The principle of Hehe’s program was based on the existing local way of
life and thinking rather than on an idea borrowed from the outside. Their
policies, such as filling the land with water throughout the year, tilling the
184 S. WEI
land without pesticides and herbicides, and banning heavy machines were
devised through long-term observation and careful assessment of the local
capacities. The Satoyama Initiative was chosen as the guiding principle of
Hehe and Renhe, because the focus on mutuality and ecological balance
fit well with the local values of Gongliao village. It served more as a prag-
matic discourse that linked the local cooperative with the international
environmental movement, and thus elevated the significance of the local
efforts. It translated the local alternative value systems into a language that
appealed to the urban intellectuals and policy makers. Yet the villagers did
not need a foreign-introduced concept to guide their daily activities. What
motivated them was the drive to revive what had been lost in their mem-
ory, a dialogue with the past, a longing for the return to the order they felt
most at home with, and the urge for social recognition that had been
denied to them for decades.
On leaving Gongliao, the Peach Blossom Legend came to my mind
again. In the legend, the Wuling fisherman had never been able to trace
the route back to the Peach Blossom Land, neither had others who made
the same attempt.45 I began to wonder whether I was going to see the
same peach blossom valley again; whether the local way of life would be
maintained after the end of the five-year program of the Forestry Bureau;
or whether the young generations would carry on the local way of farming
like their parents and ancestors have done. Only time will tell. Yet I did see
the seeds of alternative values becoming planted in the minds of those who
care about the village. They hold the embryonic promise of political
change in the heart of everyday life.
Notes
1. Original text: “晉太元中,武陵人,捕魚為業,緣溪行,忘路之遠近;忽逢桃花林,
夾岸數百步,中無雜樹,芳草鮮美, 落英繽紛.” From Tao Qian, The Legend of
the Peach Blossom Spring.
2. Tang Yu, Gongliao xiang zhi (Gazzetteer of Gongliao) (Taiwan: Taipei
xian Gongliao xiang gongsuo, 2004), 126.
3. See Gongliao district government’s introduction about Jilin village,
http://www.gongliao.ntpc.gov.tw/content/?parent_id=10032&type_
id=10008, accessed November 1, 2017.
4. Interview Wang Jing’e, September 24, 2015.
5. Irene Bain, Agriculture Reform in Taiwan (Hong Kong: The Chinese
University Press, 1993), 34–35.
6. Liao Zhenghong, Huang Junjie Zhanhou Taiwan nongmin jiazhi quxiang

de zhuanbian (The transformation of value orientation of Taiwan peasants
after WWII) (Taipei: Jinglian chubanshe, 1992), 40–44.
7. Interview second brother of Xiao family, September 23, 2015.
8. Irene Bain, Agriculture Reform in Taiwan, 23.
9. Yi-tze Lee, “Divided Dreams on Limited Land: Cultural Experiences of
Agricultural Bio-Energy Project and Organic Farming Transition in
Taiwan” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2013), 61.
10. Shu-min Huang, “Taiwan youji nonye fazhan jiqi xianzhi: yige jishu zhuan-
bian jian shi” (The Development of Organic Farming in Taiwan: A History
of Scientific Paradigm Shifts), Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 11, no.
1 (2013): 19–20; Yi-tze Lee, “Divided Dreams on Limited Land,” 50–53.
11. Yang Fuyi, “Chongxian xiaoshizhong dijing—shui titian,” Taiwan
Panorama, December 11, 2011, 42. http://paper.udn.com/udnpaper/
POE0014/207944/web/, accessed September 8, 2017.
12. Jiun-Jiun Ferng, “Effects of food consumption patterns on paddy field use
in Taiwan,” Land Use Policy, Vol. 26, no. 3 (July 2009), 772.
13. Interview Chao Rui-chang and Chen Shi-nan, Gongliao, December 16,
2014.
14. Shuge Wei, “Recovery from ‘Betrayal’: Local Anti-Nuclear Movements
and Party Politics in Taiwan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 14, no. 8
(April 2016). http://apjjf.org/2016/08/Wei.html.
15. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our
Social Skin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
16. Interview Lin Wencui, December 18, 2014.
17. Interview Lin Shizhong, September 24, 2015.
18. Interview Zhang Xinyi, September 24, 2015.
19. Interview Wang Jing’e, September 26, 2015.
20. Interview Lin shizhong, September 24, 2015.
21. “Tianliaoyang shidi, dongbeijiao shang niao shengdi,” United Press,
August 9, 2010, A11; “Dongbeijiao quduan zhengshou kaifa an,”
Gongliaoren, August 1, 2010, 1.
22. “Dongbeijiao quduan zhengshou kaifa an,” Gongliaoren, August 1, 2010, 4.
23. Wild Bird Society of Taipei (http://www.wbst.org.tw/about-wbst/wbst-
intro.html), accessed November 1, 2017.
24. Robert Weller, Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental
Culture in China and Taiwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 70.
25. Minutes of the conference on management of natural resources (huhui
huzhu de ziran ziyuan jingying—lishan jingshen de shijian), November
2012.
186 S. WEI
26. Zhu Jiaying and Li Minshan, “Shouhu shui titian cong ziji zuo qi,”
Shengmingli Xinwen, accessed on September 8, 2017, https://vita.
tw/%E5%AE%88%E8%AD%B7%E8%B2%A2%E5%AF%AE%E6%B0%B
4%E6%A2%AF%E7%94%B0-%E5%BE%9E%E8%87%AA%E5%B7%B1%E5%
81%9A%E8%B5%B7-fe4110bb97f2.
27. Robert Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 35.
28. Interview with Lin Wencui, September 22, 2015.
29. Satoyama Initiative concept, the International Partnership for the Satoyama
Initiative, accessed September 8, 2017, http://satoyama-initiative.org/
en/about/.
30. Lin Wencui’s lecture for visitors from Friends of Nature in Beijing,
September 16, 2015.
31. Interview Enhao, September 20, 2015.
32. Fang Yunru, et al., “Yi nongye huodong cucheng ziyuan baoyu hezuo de
anli: yi Gongliao shui titian weili” (Facilitating biological resource conser-
vation by agricultural activities: the case of Gongliao Hehe terraced pad-
dies fields), conference proceedings of Yu ziran hexie gongsheng de nongcun
fazhan (September 2015), 3. Accessed September 8, 2017, https://drive.
google.com/file/d/0B7LBBI_ho0zIODNnNlUtV2dacms/view.
33. Interview Lin Wencui, September 16, 2015.
34. Poster of Hehe rice, http://monghoho.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/
blog-post_98.html, accessed September 8, 2017.
35. Interview Fang Yunru, September 16, 2015.
36. Hehe’s blog, http://monghoho.blogspot.tw/p/blog-page_22.html; Hehe’s
facebook notice, accessed Septemer 8, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/
monghoho2013/photos/a.165129636995752.
1073741825.165126086996107/462057810636265/?type=3&theater,
accessed September 8, 2017.
37. Renhe and Lihehe, Shui titian: Gongliao shancun de gushi (Taipei: Wuxian
chuban, 2013), 80.
38. Interview Chen Wenjun, head of Gongliao district, September 21, 2015.
39. Interview Lu Yanjun, September 20, 2015.
40. Account of an informant, September 24, 2015.
41. “Bayan de meili aichou” facebook of the Bayan community, accessed
September 8, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_
fbid=560704527404270&id=317109651763760&substor y_
index=0#sthash.IOY1ngnw.dpuf.
42. Interview Fang Yunru, September 16, 2015.
43. Lai Qingsong, “Preface,” Shui titian, 8.
44. Li Taosheng, “Preface,” Shui titian, 8.
45. Tao Qian, The Legend of the Peach Blossom Spring.

War and memory.
CHAPTER 10
The Neverending Story: Alternative

Exchange and Living Politics in a Japanese
Regional Community
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
In 1978, the year before the publication of his best-seller The Neverending
Story, German writer Michael Ende was invited to take part in a confer-
ence in Switzerland run by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. The choice
of Ende as a speaker at the conference was a little surprising. The Institute’s
mission is to conduct “scientific research in the social and economic
fields,” and many of the participants in the 1978 meeting were prominent
economists or businessmen. Ende, by contrast, was one of Germany’s
most famous writers of children’s fantasy literature. After a day spent dis-
cussing the future of the global economy, the conference delegates
gathered for a dinner at which Ende presented his address. He began by
lamenting the fact that the past century had produced “not one single
positive utopia.” He then challenged the conference participants to extend
their predictions about the future of the economy into the realms of hope
and imagination: “let us,” he said, “all place ourselves together on a big
flying carpet, and fly one hundred years into the future. Now, each of us
should say what sort of world he wishes to see at that time.”
T. Morris-Suzuki (*)

190 T. MORRIS-SUZUKI
After five minutes of “painful silence,” one of the participants rose to

protest at being asked to undertake such a nonsensical task. Looking back
on this moment, Ende concluded that not only the minds of the partici-
pants in the conference, but also the minds of many other people around
the world today are trapped in a “circle of hell” from which they cannot
escape: “We can see no future, we can find no utopia. It seems to me vital,
vital for survival, that—whether in the realms of politics or culture or
economy—one should be able to create a positive picture of the world in
which one can live.”1 In recent decades, others too have lamented this
apparent withering of the social imagination. Our political systems, with
their orientation to short-term results, and our knowledge systems, which
fragment rather than integrating understanding, often seem to leave us
bereft of ways to imagine other ways of doing things. The global order is
so complex, and penetrates so deeply into to lives of almost all people, that
it becomes extraordinarily difficult to comprehend its inner workings, let
alone to envisage any life outside its all-encompassing embrace. The disci-
pline of futurology, which flourished in the 1960s, languishes today; for,
as Ruth Levitas observes, “the future appears only as an extrapolation of
the present.”2
Yet by the early twenty-first century there were also signs of a reaction
to this claustrophobic intellectual environment: a new hunger for imagina-
tion and experimentation, expressed in a revived interest in utopianism
and in the alternative spaces that exist within the apparently bland,
homogenised surfaces of contemporary society. Recent research has
mapped “autonomous geographies”—spaces in the everyday life of nation
states “where we can see ‘futures in the present’.”3 Some scholars draw
attention to the quiet persistence of “everyday utopias,” where people
work to create the transformations they hope for, in the process “building
and forging new ways of experiencing social and political life.”4 The chap-
ters in this book aim to contribute to that quest by exploring small-scale
experiments in the transformation of life from the ground up. In the pages
which follow, I explore an experiment which took shape in the mountains
of central Japan, but which was (as we shall see) a direct response to
Michael Ende’s challenge.
Such searches for alternatives remind us that we all live, not only (as
Thomas Picketty points out) in mixed economies, but also in mixed poli-
ties.5 Even at the height of the Cold War, our world was never really neatly
divisible into good constitutional democracies and bad dictatorships.
Today, the complex intermingling of political forms is more visible than
THE NEVERENDING STORY: ALTERNATIVE EXCHANGE AND LIVING... 191
ever. The opening of the economies of former “communist bloc” nations

like Russia, Belarus, China, and Vietnam did not lead to their transforma-
tion into idealised liberal democracies, but rather generated a multiplicity
of political forms where elements of freedom and repression combine in
complex and varied ways. Though the patterns are configured in very
many different ways, every country in the world today contains at least
some corners where ordinary people make their own collective choices
through reasoned debate, and every country contains at least some cor-
ners where power is arbitrary and unaccountable.
Japan is a mixed polity par excellence. It had adopted a modern consti-
tution by 1890, and by 1925 had universal manhood suffrage, but com-
bined these with restrictions on freedom of speech and thought which
have created continuing debate as to whether or not prewar Japan can be
described as having been “democratic.” In the 1930s, though the consti-
tutional form survived, it was penetrated from within by increasingly
repressive and militarised elements whose history has generated further
unresolved searches for suitable labels. Was Japan from the 1930s to 1945
a militarist state, a fascist state, or something entirely sui generis? The
question has provided food for endless and unresolved debate amongst
scholars.6 The reforms introduced during the postwar occupation era
(1945–1952) at first seemed to have resolved the ambiguities surrounding
Japan’s political status. The new 1947 constitution was resolutely demo-
cratic, enshrining full universal suffrage, freedom of belief and speech, and
the separation of powers. But, contrary to the expectations of many, Japan
never became a fully-fledged two-party democracy. With the exception of
two brief interregnums between 1993 and 1996 and between 2009 and
2012, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated
the political landscape from its formation in 1955 to the present day.
Perhaps the most striking feature of contemporary Japan’s political land-
scape is the absence of visible alternatives to LDP rule.7
At the same time, though, throughout Japan’s modern history, and
particularly in the period since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, the country
has been home to a wide range of small-scale local forms of everyday poli-
tics, addressing everything from industrial pollution to the commemora-
tion of history. Studies of civil society in Japan, focusing mainly on
metropolitan areas and on formally organised social movements, have
tended to neglect the significance of these local actions.8 In the wake of
economic crisis and recent disasters, though, there has been growing
interest in the tradition of citizen’s action in which ordinary people,
confronted by unresolved public challenges, respond by “taking things

into their own hands.”9 The Santo Club Ma~yu [Santo Kurabu Ma~yu],
a local currency scheme based in the city of Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, is a
good example of this quiet autonomous action.
Fantasy, Vision, and Grassroots Action in a Mixed

Polity
The “Santo” in the group’s title is a common local nickname for Ueda
City. Meaning “silk cocoon capital,” it refers to the city’s history as a
once-thriving centre of Japanese silk production. The name Ma~yu,
which the group has given to the local currency it has created, is also
derived from the Japanese word for cocoon.10 The group, with a mem-
bership of around 200 people, is little known outside its immediate
locality. But it can be placed in three dimensions which help us to under-
stand some important aspects of the flows and confluences of action and
ideas that constitute the living politics of the community. First, the
Ma~yu group can be understood as part of a worldwide alternative cur-
rency movement which flourished from the late 1980s onwards. In this
context, we can see how ideas from far afield resonated with the needs
and hopes of the local community, and how they were “riffed” into dis-
tinctive local variations on a globalised theme. Second, the activities of
Ma~yu can be seen as part of a long history of alternative social action
within the local region. This helps us to understand how networks of
informal life politics develop, fluctuate, and sustain themselves over time.
Third, we can consider how a group like Ma~yu relates to the world of
formal, institutional Japanese politics. This may offer some insights into
the potential and limitations of informal life politics in the broader con-
text of the political world as a whole.
The origins of the Santo Club Ma~yu are somewhat unusual. They go
back to the broadcast of a Japanese TV documentary about the life and
ideas of Michael Ende. In 1999, the Japanese national broadcaster NHK
showed Ende’s Last Testament [Ende no Yuigon], a programme based on
audio recordings of a discussion with Ende made five years earlier by NHK
journalists. NHK had hoped to make a documentary with Ende, but soon
after the discussions, he succumbed to cancer, and the plan remained
unfulfilled. Some years after his death, the documentary’s producer put
together audio from the 1994 recordings with visual images of Ende and
of the thinkers who had inspired him, creating Ende’s Last Testament in an
effort to share the social ideas which the German writer had hoped to
communicate to a Japanese audience.
Unexpectedly, this TV programme inspired the creation of hundreds of
grassroots social movements all over Japan. Michael Ende is best known
for his children’s fantasy novels Momo and The Neverending Story (the lat-
ter turned into a Hollywood hit movie which Ende himself reportedly
loathed), and as far as I know, Japan is the only country in which Ende’s
work has become the inspiration for grassroots social action. Many of the
Japanese groups created in response to the broadcast of Ende’s Last
Testament were short-lived, but some survive to the present day, and one
of the most successful of these is the Santo Club Ma~yu.
As the episode sketched at the beginning of this chapter reminds us,
Michael Ende was a passionate advocate of utopian thinking—a profound
believer in the power of imagination as a political force. The narrative of
The Neverending Story can, indeed, be interpreted as a metaphor of its
author’s belief that it is possible, in small ways, to bring elements of fantasy
or imagination back into the real, political world to help us find ways out
of the “circle of hell” in which we are trapped. The novel’s hero Bastian is
drawn into the storybook which he is reading, and moves from the real
world of his school attic into a series of adventures in the magical realm of
Fantastica: a realm whose survival is threatened by the expanding force of
the Nothing, a dark force that devours and destroys hope and turns the
people of Fantastica into “nameless servants of power.” After his predict-
able victory over evil and return to the world of reality, Bastian encounters
Mr. Coreander, the old bookseller from whom he originally obtained the
magical storybook:
There are people who can never go to Fantastica,” (says Mr. Coreander)
“and others who can, but who stay there forever. And there are just a few
who go to Fantastica and come back. Like you. And they make both worlds
well again.11
A particular focus of the NHK documentary Ende’s Last Testament was

the German author’s deep interest in the real-world problem of money.
Ende saw the dual role of money—which is (on the one hand) a medium
of exchange and (on the other) the driver of an ever-expanding capitalist
system—as a source of the troubles that plague the contemporary world.
Taking these ideas as a starting point, the documentary Ende’s Last
Testament introduced the ideas of the German critical theorist of money

Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), whose work profoundly influenced Ende, and
a range of projects which have tried to implement Gesell’s ideas through
the creation of local currencies. These include a famous but short-lived
1930s’ local currency scheme in the Austrian town of Wörgl, and the
“Ithaca Hour,” created in the upstate New York city of Ithaca in 1991 and
now the largest and longest lasting local currency scheme in the USA. The
programme also included comments from a range of other economic and
social thinkers including German environmental architect Margrit
Kennedy and Japanese critical economist Uchihashi Katsuto.
Ende’s Last Testament was particularly influential (I think) because it
used the fantasies of Michael Ende, which are immensely popular in Japan,
as a kind of “magical doorway” giving viewers access to a range of social
and economic ideas about time, money, and alternative exchange systems.
Ende himself had a longstanding (and, it could be argued, somewhat ori-
entalist) fascination with Japan which had grown into a close personal
connection following his marriage to his Japanese translator, Satō Mariko,
in 1989. Many Japanese people who would never have tuned in to a sol-
emn educational programme about the economic theories of Gesell or
Uchihashi were drawn to, and inspired by, these ideas because they were
presented through the medium of Michael Ende’s much-loved fantasy
writing.
These ideas resonated with local concerns in several ways. In 1999,
Japan was reaching the end of its so-called “lost decade,” ten years of eco-
nomic stagnation which were in fact to extend well into the new century.
Regional cities like Ueda in particular were facing the challenges of age-
ing, declining population, and limited employment opportunities. Ueda’s
population fell from around 164,000 in 2005 to around 156,000 in 2015,
and the fall is expected to continue over coming decades.12 But the solu-
tions put forward by local and national governments to address these
problems often involved large-scale construction or industrial develop-
ment projects which brought with them the destruction of local environ-
ments and damage to the quality of life. In the context of their own
longing for a different approach to economic and social revival, many
viewers found the alternative uses of money explored in Ende’s Last
Testament intriguing and appealing.
Ma~yu founder Yasui Keiko, a middle-aged woman who had lived most
of her life in Ueda, first watched the documentary when it was rebroadcast
by NHK in 2001, and was enthralled at the way that it expanded the social
imagination by revealing the possibility of alternative forms of exchange

independent from the global monetary economy: “When I watched that
program, I felt, well, until now I’d just taken the existence of money for
granted. I’d never even dreamed we could actually create it by ourselves.
That was really amazing… We didn’t precisely understand everything they
explained in the program, but we thought, let’s try it for ourselves.” (Yasui
Keiko interview) So improvisation—“let’s try it for ourselves”—was built
into the very foundations of Ma~yu.
In November 2001, Yasui was one of a group of around 30 Ueda resi-
dents who gathered to launch their own local currency scheme. By this
time, over 50 regional currency [chiiki tsūka] schemes had already
appeared all over Japan, nearly all of them established in the two years
from 1999 to 2001. According to one study, the number of local curren-
cies in Japan rose from 11 in 1999 to a peak of 306 in 2005, but then fell,
as some of those established in the boom years failed to thrive. By 2008,
the total was down to 259.13 Though that number has continued to
decline since, some movements survived and flourished, and creative new
schemes were still being established even as many of those created in the
heady days of the turn of the century disappeared. The local currency
boom in Japan was almost exactly paralleled by trends in South Korea,
where the 1997 financial crisis led to a proliferation of local currency
schemes (more commonly referred to in Korea as “community
currencies”—jiyeog tonghwa), of which one of the most successful was
Daejeon’s Hanbat Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS).14
Ma~yu and the Worldwide Local Currency

Movement
Santo Club Ma~yu is a small part of a long worldwide history of the use of
alternative currencies to serve diverse political visions. Most contemporary
alternative currency movements draw inspiration from the economic ideas
of Silvio Gesell, and many are also influenced by the work of British-born
social entrepreneur Michael Linton. Gesell approached the problem of
currency from the perspective of early twentieth-century concerns about
under-consumption. He argued that the existing currency system creates
a structural tendency for people to hoard money rather than use it, and
that this encourages under-consumption and reduces human prosperity.
Unlike other items which are traded on the market, money does not decay
when stored for long periods of time: indeed, through the mechanism of
interest, it grows. These characteristics encourage the hoarding of money.

Gesell therefore imagined alternative forms of money which might be cre-
ated to lubricate economic exchange. More recent alternative currency
schemes, on the other hand, have been driven less by a desire to promote
consumption than by an urge to create more environmentally and socially
sustainable systems of exchange, removing at least part of human life from
the grip of the ever-expanding corporate market system.
One alternative, of which the Ithaca Hours scheme is a good example,
is to base money around labour value, and particularly around the concept
that each person’s work is of equal value. Each unit of currency is designed
to represent one hour of work. Ithaca Hours are paper notes issued by an
organising group centred on a local newspaper: Hour Town. People can
earn notes by providing goods or services, and use them to buy goods and
services from participating individuals or businesses.15 Other alternative
currencies, like the LETS created by Michael Linton, are linked, not to
hours of labour, but to the existing mainstream currency system (with one
unit of the alternative currency, for example, equalling one dollar of “ordi-
nary” money). These currencies are in some ways more flexible and easier
to operate. LETS currencies are “virtual” and work through computerised
systems which keep track of all participants’ accounts.16 One core differ-
ence between LETS currencies and mainstream money, though, is that the
former cannot accrue interest.
Some community currency schemes, meanwhile, like the coupon-based
systems which appeared on a very large scale in Argentina after the 1997
financial meltdown, are emergency survival responses to economic and
social crisis. Others (like the Ueda scheme) address the challenges of less
drastic, but nonetheless debilitating, economic stagnation or decline,
while also trying to reshape social and economic life by changing people’s
sense of economic values, strengthening community relationships and
encouraging more ecologically sustainable lifestyles.
As British scholar Peter North points out, the underlying motives that
drive the creation of such schemes are very varied. Even within the same
local currency scheme, participants may have a range of approaches, which
North places in a spectrum. At one end are “transformers,” who simply
see the schemes as an apolitical means of expanding and revitalising local
economies. In the middle are the “humanizers,” who move away from
Gesell’s focus on prosperity through consumption by seeking to create “a
more balanced economy that values the affective, emotional and coopera-
tive as well as efficiency, organisation and the achievement of goals,” and
the “greeners” who seek to localise the economy in order to reduce

resource use and environmental damage; while at the most radical end are
“green anarchists”: heterotopians who seek to create a life outside the
capitalist economy.17 In practice (as in the case of Ma~yu), these four posi-
tions often overlap and entwine in complex ways.18
The vision of a local currency as a means to humanise and localise eco-
nomic life resonated deeply with the founders of the Ma~yu group. Their
manifesto, emblazoned on the front of every issue of their regular newslet-
ter, reads as follows:
Santo Club Ma~yu is a system which links people to the local region through
use of a local currency. It gives rise to new connections between person and
person; It allows you to rediscover your talents; It revitalises people, and so
invigorates the local region.
But the particular circumstances of life in Ueda, and the “try and see”
attitude of the group’s founders, resulted in a currency scheme with some
distinctive features. The Ma~yu scheme operates through passbooks,
which resemble the passbooks which most Japanese people use with their
everyday bank accounts. Every member pays an annual fee of 1200 yen
(around US$12), and in return receives a passbook entry of 1200 Ma~yu,
which he or she can spend to buy goods or services from other members.
Members can then earn more Ma~yu by selling goods and services within
the group network, with each transaction being recorded in the passbook
of buyer and seller. As in many other local currency schemes, running into
debt is not regarded as a problem, and accumulating large amounts of
credit is not seen as a virtue (Image 10.1).
A monthly Ma~yu market provides one opportunity for members to
exchange goods and ideas, but much trading also takes place elsewhere,
with the group’s regular newsletter providing a useful forum where
buyers and sellers can share information about items that they would
like to trade. Prices of goods and services are set by negotiation, and
trades can be made in a mixture of Ma~yu and yen. All new members
are given a nickname, by which they are generally known within the
group—just one of several small rituals used to create a sense of com-
munity. Another is the custom that buyer and seller shake hands when a
deal is struck—a small gesture which acquires significance because hand-
shaking is rare in Japan, where people normally bow when greeting or
thanking one another.
Image 10.1 Ma~yu members, with passbooks in hand, trading goods at the
monthly market. Photograph © Tessa Morris-Suzuki
As these rituals suggest, for the members of Santo Club Ma~yu, the
local currency trading network is simply one part of a larger project, which
might be defined as an effort to create a locally-based but open commu-
nity centred on broadly shared values. These values cannot be defined with
any precision, because they are deliberately left malleable and implicit.
This allows a diverse range of people to participate in the group even
though their more narrowly defined political positions (e.g., their voting
choices in elections) may be poles apart. But a diffuse connecting ethos

can be inferred from the wide range of projects that the group has devel-
oped around its local currency trading activities.
These are referred to as kono yubi tomare projects: an essentially untrans-
latable title which echoes a Japanese phrase used by children when gather-
ing together a group of friends to embark on a game of their own devising.
In the context of Ma~yu, kono yubi tomare means that anyone in the group
can initiate a project, but that it is then the initiator’s responsibility to find
participants and carry the project through to completion. The multitudi-
nous kono yubi tomare projects have included collaboratively growing and
processing organic food (e.g., making miso paste made from soy beans
which group members grew in a rented field); cultivating shared vegetable
gardens; running classes on subjects ranging from bread-making to local
historical buildings to the politics of East Timor; showing films on topics
such as the Fukushima disaster and the problems of nuclear power; and (in
2012) organising a “National Fiesta of Sustainable Regionalism” [Jizoku
Kanō na Chiikizukuri Zenkoku Fesuta] which attracted participants from
around the country.19 In other words, environmental sustainability, human
health, economic decentralisation, and protection of regional heritage are
common threads, as are peace and anti-militarisation (topics I shall return
to later).
Between 2001 and 2011, the Ma~yu group’s membership expanded
from 30 to 180, and since then it has continued to grow by around 10–15
members per year. Core members of the group attribute this relative suc-
cess to Ma~yu’s very flexible structure. Unlike many other Japanese local
currency schemes, the group does not have a single specific goal (such as
environmental protection or promoting local businesses). The administra-
tive structure is simple and minimal: a managers’ committee [sewaninkai]
meets monthly, and anyone can volunteer to become a committee mem-
ber.20 Financial accounts and details of group activities are published in the
Ma~yu newsletter, and the group also runs a blog and a very active email
group. As I shall explain later, this flexibility does not necessarily ensure
constant harmony, but it does seem to have made the group a focus of
activities in which many people can participate with varying degrees of
commitment.
The group’s expansion has been driven by external as well as internal
factors. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of March 2011 cre-
ated widespread concern about environmental and health issues in Japan,
and attracted attention to the Ma~yu group’s sustainable development
activities. Yasui Keiko observes that the group, whose members are dispro-
portionately in the over-fifties age group, found it easier to recruit younger
members following the 2011 disaster.21
For the most part, the Santo Club Ma~yu has avoided dependence on
outside funding, believing that it is better to rely on the group’s own
resources. But an exception was made for one major group project initi-
ated in 2013. Between 2011 and 2013 Ma~yu had run a series of work-
shops and other events on sustainable regionalism, which included the
2012 National Fiesta. At the end of this two-year project, the group
decided to embark on their own initiative in sustainable regionalism, and
one member offered them a tangible focus for this initiative: an old rural
house which was abandoned and falling into disrepair. Under the leader-
ship of a Ma~yu member who is also a professional architect, the group
successfully applied for a three-year local government grant of two million
yen (around $20,000), and then rallied their own diverse resources of
skills and labour to convert the ruined hall into a community centre incor-
porating various elements of environmentally sustainable design.22
This project turned specific economic problems of the region to advan-
tage. Like many rural or semi-rural areas of Japan, the Ueda region has a
serious and much-discussed problem of akiya: empty houses and other
buildings left to decay as the local population declines: hence Ma~yu’s
ability to obtain the use of the village hall easily and almost free of charge.
Ma~yu’s restoration project was completed in 2015, and the building—
christened Everybody’s House [Mina no Ie]—has become a centre for the
group’s trading markets and other gatherings, as well as for events organ-
ised by other local residents (Image 10.2).
Everybody’s House was more than a mere restoration project. It was an
experiment in collective learning, where participants shared and acquired
skills and worked out solutions to technical problems by trial and (some-
times time-consuming) error. Rice chaff, for example, was used as an envi-
ronmentally sustainable insulation material, but very quickly attracted rats,
requiring new solutions to seal the roof against rodent invasions.23 But the
house is a social as much as a technical experiment. Given the loose struc-
ture of the Ma~yu group, Everybody’s House raises complex issues which
only time and experience will resolve: who constitutes the “everybody”
who can use the house, and according to what rules? Who is responsible
for its maintenance? Who pays the taxes?
The upper floor of Everybody’s House provides a home for the Ma~yu
group’s kurukuru ichi [revolving market]. Here members deposit unwanted
Image 10.2 Ma~yu members gather in front of Everybody’s House. Photograph

© Tessa Morris-Suzuki
but usable possessions—piles of second-hand clothing, old kimonos, crock-

ery, hats, ornamental dolls, and garden tools which themselves form a rich
record of the material life of the region—and all members are free to help
themselves to the items they need.
Peace in the Valley: Ma~yu in Its Regional Setting

Davina Cooper suggests that Britain’s LETS “exemplify the notion of an
everyday utopia, of quotidian practices performed in an organised, ambi-
tiously counter hegemonic manner.”24 Yet the story she tells is largely one
of failure. The LETS which boomed in Britain in the 1990s receded in the
twenty-first century. According to the official UK LETS website, about
40,000 people were involved in some 450 schemes in the mid-1990s, but
by 2015 the number of schemes had fallen to around 300, and a search of
the local sites listed on the website shows that some of these were virtually
moribund.25
Cooper’s explanation for the retreat of the LETS vision in Britain

focuses on the conflict between two radically different ways of valuing
time. Many of the idealists who embarked on creating local exchange
schemes hoped that these schemes would undermine the capitalist logic of
time, with its relentless ethos of speed, its constant pressure to work and
consume as rapidly as possible, and its inflexible and inhuman time sched-
ules. For them, local currency schemes were all about creating a slower
and more human world, where exchange was not simply a mechanism for
profit and accumulation, but was instead a social act replete with empathy
and shared meaning. But at the same time, Cooper argues, the British
LETS also included many people who saw the projects simply as a way of
revitalising the local economy, and who therefore continued to live and act
according to the standard capitalist logic of time.
The clash between these “discordant temporalities,” Cooper suggests,
was one of the main reasons why the schemes failed to maintain their early
growth and in many places atrophied.26 Focusing on the case of the
Manchester LETS, which was founded in 1992 and closed down in 2005,
Peter North also observes that the project was weakened by the diver-
gence of views about its purpose, as well as by a simple lack of goods and
services that could be traded using the Manchester local currency.27 In
Japan too, as we have seen, many local currency schemes were short-lived,
so the relatively long survival and recent growth of the Ma~yu group
needs some explanation.
Ma~yu’s distinctive approach, which treats the local currency as just
one element in a wider range of community-creating activities, provides
part of the answer to the puzzle of its continuing expansion. But other
answers seem to lie in the nature of the regional society in which the
Ma~yu group is embedded. Peter North’s study of local currency schemes
shows that success depends partly on social environment: while the
Manchester scheme struggled to survive, for example, LETS flourished in
the northern part of New Zealand’s South Island, a “relatively isolated
part of New Zealand characterised by low wages but a very benign climate
and beautiful scenery,” which “consequently had a strong downshifting
flavor.”28 The rather similar social characteristics of Ueda seem to provide
a strong base for the creation of such heterotopias (Image 10.3).
Ueda’s relatively small and ageing population is ironically a source of
strength for the Ma~yu project. The small size of the city makes it easy for
people to meet, and means that there is farmland nearby which can be
used for community farming and gardening. Many members of the group
Image 10.3 Old houses line a street on the fringe of Ueda City. Photograph ©
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
are retired and have scope to enjoy the slower, human-centred sense of
time embodied in the idealistic visions of local currency schemes. Younger
members are often people who have chosen to move away from the fre-
netic life of the metropolis and create an alternative lifestyle in mountain-
ous Nagano Prefecture.
The self-introductions of new members published in the Ma~yu news-
letter are full of stories like these:
We moved from Tokyo to Ueda in December last year, because we want to

live as self-sufficient a life as possible.
I want to try my hand at agriculture, so I’d like to help out in the fields
at weekends.
Since just before my grandchild was born, I’ve been doing chemical free
and organic vegetable growing in my back garden to try to provide healthy
food.
I really like a tranquil and spacious environment. If I can stand under the
open sky amid mountains and fields, I feel truly at ease. I just wandered into
Ma~yu because it exuded that kind of atmosphere.29
Another feature of the local social landscape is also important. Studies

of local currency schemes elsewhere have tended to focus on the schemes
themselves, paying little attention to their network of connections to other
local grassroots movements, but Ma~yu’s experiences suggest that this
network is crucial. Ueda lies in the valley of the Chikuma River, which
flows northwestwards through Nagano Prefecture into Niigata Prefecture
(where it becomes the Shinano River). The area extending from Ueda
upstream along the Chikuma River valley to the town of Komoro and to
Saku City has a particularly rich history of grassroots social action extend-
ing back as far as the late nineteenth century. One source of that history
lies in the area’s educational traditions. In the Edo Period (1603–1868),
this part of Japan was divided into a large number of small domains, each
with its own domain school for samurai, and the regional also an excep-
tionally large number of the “temple schools” [teragoya] which provided
education for commoners.30 The Ma~yu group evokes this tradition by
organising its educational activities under the banner of Ma~yu Teragoya.
The rapid growth of Ueda’s silk trade following Japan’s opening to the
West created direct links between the region and the outside world, and
the combination of high educational levels with openness to foreign influ-
ence helps to explain the emergence of a series of remarkable local educa-
tional experiments in the region from the start of the twentieth century to
the 1930s. One of these was Ueda Free University, created by local resi-
dents of the silk farming village of Kangawa (now part of Ueda City) in
1920, with help and support from prominent intellectuals from Kyoto.
The university, which survived for ten years, taught intensive classes in
subjects including philosophy and literature to local farmers during the
agricultural off-season, aiming to equip them with the critical skills to
become active and independent-minded citizens.31
Another educational movement was created by the so-called White
Birch Teachers [Shirakabaha Kyō in], a group of local schoolteachers who
were inspired by the humanist ideas of the White Birch Group
[Shirakabaha]—a famous coterie of early twentieth-century Japanese nov-
elists, artists, and social reformers. Drawing on radical and utopian ideas
from the work of William Blake, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Leo
Tolstoy (amongst others), these teachers attempted to transform the cur-
riculum to reflect their belief in “personalist education” [jinkakushugi
kyō iku]. Their core principles were to “nurture the self, respect individual-
ity, love beauty and seek peace.”32 With the rise of militarism in Japan from
the late 1920s onwards, these movements were suppressed. Some of the
leading members were imprisoned, while others retreated into silence. But
after Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, survivors of the prewar experi-
ments re-emerged to create new social education and regional community-
building schemes. One symbol of this local continuity of thought and
action is the work of Kobayashi Tatsue (1896–2001), a prewar White
Birch Teacher who lived to the age of 104 and remained a central figure in
social activism in his native Saku City until the end of the twentieth
century.33
Members of the Ma~yu group do not relate their own activities directly
to earlier generations of social activism like Ueda Free University and the
work of the White Birch Teachers. But indirect connections are clearly vis-
ible. The humanism and localism that lies at the core of alternative cur-
rency schemes strongly echoes elements of the utopian socialism of
thinkers like Morris and Tolstoy, which so inspired the earlier generation
of Chikuma Valley visionaries. The White Birch Teachers’ search for peace
is also reflected in aspects of the activities of Ma~yu (discussed below).
The human network also becomes apparent when we look at the relation-
ship between Ma~yu and groups like the Miyamoto School (Miyamoto
Juku), established in the small town of Mochizuki (administratively part of
Saku City) in 1989.
The Miyamoto School is a group of local people who gather once a
month to discuss issues of sustainable endogenous development under the
guidance of eminent environmental economist and former Osaka
University professor Miyamoto Kenichi. Many of its most active members
are also people who, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, gathered
around and were inspired by former White Birch Teacher Kobayashi
Tatsue, and Kobayashi himself (at the age of 97) led the Miyamoto
School’s 1997 study session on their region’s early twentieth-century his-
tory.34 Even after his death, Kobayashi and the ideas of the White Birch
Teachers are a constant presence at the Miyamoto School, because the
School meets in the Kobayashi Tatsue Peace and Handicraft Folk Arts
Hall [Kobayashi Tatsue Heiwa to Teshigoto Mingeikan], a small building
constructed in Kobayashi’s honour and filled with his collection of local
craft works and photographs and portraits of the thinkers who inspired
him.
The Ma~yu group is linked to and exchanges ideas with the Miyamoto
School, and is thus indirectly connected to Kobayashi Tatsue and the
White Birch Teachers. Some Ma~yu members are participants in the
Miyamoto School: for example, Nakajima Kunio, one of the first people
to join Ma~yu in 2001, had already been a participant in the Miyamoto

School for some years and was profoundly influenced by its vision of
small-scale ecologically sustainable endogenous development.35 Ma~yu
founding member Yasui Keiko has also shared ideas with Miyamoto
School and contributed a chapter to the School’s “White Paper,” pub-
lished in 2013.36
The Miyamoto School is just one of a wide range of loosely networked
grassroots groups in the area concerned with issue of sustainable local
development. Beyond the limits of its valley setting, the group also draws
on connections to a wide range of local currency and sustainable regional-
ism projects in other parts of the country, which have been developed
through exchange visits and through events like the 2012 Fiesta of
Sustainable Regionalism. Opportunities to link to and cooperate with
these groups are vital to the success of Ma~yu. The regional heritage of
grassroots action may also help to explain why this local currency scheme
came into being in the first place. The ideas of Michael Ende, Silvio Gesell,
and others resonated with the Ueda community, not simply because of
local economic and social circumstances, but also because of a pre-existing
heritage of alternative educational and social ideas with deep roots in local
history.
Fluid Terrain: The Politics of Being Apolitical

The Ma~yu group proclaims its apolitical nature. This means that any-
one is free to join, regardless of ideological or party affiliation. If they
wish to, people may create kono yubi tomare activities which have a rec-
ognisably political content—for example by showing films with an anti-
nuclear message—but no one is obliged to take part in these activities or
to express agreement with their objectives. In this sense, Ma~yu’s stance
might seem to fit Peter North’s description of the cautious “transformer”
approach, which views local currency schemes as “an apolitical innova-
tion” attempting to “maximise participation from as diverse a group as
possible in order to build a robust trading network with as many resources
as possible.”37 But a closer look at the group’s activities suggests some-
thing different. In practice, Ma~yu’s actions are carried out in a complex
and fluid terrain where the boundaries of the political are constantly
redefined. Images of the subpolitical realm as being consensual or “post-
political” (see Introduction) oversimplify and fail to do justice to this
complexity and fluidity.
In Japan, the notion of “being political” carries particularly heavy bag-

gage. Sixty years of almost uninterrupted one-party rule and a long tradi-
tion of political pork-barrelling have created a widespread sense of
alienation from formal politics. Voter turnout was below 60% in the gen-
eral elections of 2012 and 2014. In 2014, barely over half of registered
voters bothered to cast their ballot.38 But if mainstream politics evokes
little popular enthusiasm, oppositional acts of protest are also often viewed
with wariness. This is, in part, an unintended legacy of the 1960s’ student
protest movement, and of the very negative media coverage it received,
particularly in its later stages, when it tended to descend into sectarian
violence. Japanese words like sayoku [left-wing] and katsudō ka [activist]
have strongly negative nuances in everyday speech, conjuring up images of
dour and narrow dogmatism.39
The Ma~yu group differentiates itself from these realms of formal insti-
tutional politics and protest by focusing on activities, not ideologies, and
on the sense of local action as playful, enjoyable, and convivial. Many of its
events—mystery tours to local scenic attractions, African dance lessons, or
organising and participating in a draught beer festival—centre on the sim-
ple sharing of pleasurable activity. But, as mentioned earlier, broad strands
of shared social ethos run through most of these events; and in an ironic
sense, the act of being apolitical and of “trying it for ourselves” is in itself
a political statement, or more precisely (perhaps) a critical statement about
what politics might be. This is most clearly articulated in the words of
Ma~yu member Miyazaki Shō go, who writes about the process of build-
ing Everybody’s House:
It’s quite possible to predict that the issues of who owns Everybody’s House,
who owns the land, who the occupant is etc. will become a problem in terms
of the existing property tax system… Everybody’s House is really still in the
making. Both in terms of the “hard” and “soft” side of the project, there are
a mass of things that we won’t understand until we’ve tried doing them. We
can’t predict the ongoing struggles that we will have: struggles both with
existing institutions (including the tax issue that I have just mentioned) and
with the preconceived ideas that exist within ourselves. But fortunately,
“political” discourses and grand rhetoric from “on high” are completely
useless. It’s best to just create your own “place and time” by focusing firmly
on protecting and enriching your own life.
Miyazaki goes on to evoke the traditional Japanese system of commu-

nally defined rules for the maintenance of the commons, known as iriai,
and suggests that the group needs to revive the notion of iriai to make
Everybody’s House a place of shared activity for themselves and for the
broader surrounding community.
We’ll always keep in mind that Everybody’s House is for “us,” which
includes all the local people, and that we are creating and running it as an
“iriai place” [iriai no ba] for everyone. For that reason, I want to take part
in as many parts of the process as possible, and so enrich my life and my
sense of awareness.40
This distinctive perception of building life from below grows out of

Miyazaki’s long experience as an important participant in Japan’s environ-
mental movement, where he developed (as Simon Avenell has noted) a
radical localism inspired in part by the ideas of Franz Fanon, locating “the
foundation of all universalisms in a non locally egoistic localism.”41 The
very nature of Ma~yu means that Miyazaki’s view of the group’s aims is
just one perspective amongst many and cannot be taken as a representative
statement for the whole group as a whole. But Miyazaki’s dismissal of
political rhetoric from on high as “useless,” and his emphasis on creating
your own time and place, seem to capture a perspective implicitly shared
by many Ma~yu members: a politics of being apolitical.
The open and flexible structure of Ma~yu also means that it cannot
(and does not seek to) seal itself off from wider political problems. This
became very evident, for example, in the second half of 2015 when new
security laws were debated and passed by the Japanese parliament, allow-
ing Japan for the first time since 1945 to send its troops overseas to par-
ticipate in armed conflicts (a move which many commentators saw as
being in conflict with the peace clause of the postwar Japanese constitu-
tion). As the debate surrounding the laws heated up, Ma~yu members
began to organise kono yubi tomare events opposing the laws and support-
ing the peace clause. In July 2015, Yasui Keiko established a “Constitution
Cafe” [Kenpō Kafe]—a gathering where people could discuss the consti-
tution “comfortably, at leisure and thoroughly,” and the August issue of
the Ma~yu newsletter was a special issue dedicated to the theme of peace.42
The Ma~yu mailing list soon began to be filled with messages advertising
protest meetings and demonstrations about the new security laws, and
arranging car sharing and transport to these events. Not everyone in the
group felt comfortable about these developments. For some, who had joined
Ma~yu as an apolitical space for conviviality, the deluge of overtly political
messages was unwelcome and disturbing. For others, though, the Ma~yu
community provided a crucial network through which they could share
news and information about the security law issue which was largely excluded
from Japan’s overwhelmingly conservative mainstream national media.
The events surrounding the passing of the new security laws highlight
dilemmas of informal life politics to which there are no simple solutions.
Through its everyday actions, Ma~yu implicitly (and sometimes explicitly)
complicates and plays with the boundaries of what we term “the political.”
In architectural terms, the notion of “fluid terrain” (widely used after the
devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina) describes an environ-
ment where the boundary between land and water is constantly chang-
ing.43 In the living politics of Ma~yu, what is, and what is not, “political”
is constantly being negotiated and redefined in process of daily action,
even as the nature of the “everyday utopia” that is being constructed is
itself being shaped through trial and error.
Conclusions
Japan-based writer Michael Hoffman reflects a widespread sense of disen-
chantment with the Japanese political scene when he writes that “seventy
years of democracy have not enriched the meaning of that word here
beyond its most prosaic sense of the right to mind your private affairs
more or less free from government interference. Its more inspiring signif-
icance—‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’—reso-
nates feebly.”44 Sporadic upsurges of public protest—against nuclear
power in 2011–2012 and against the new security laws in 2015—evoked
predictions of a new era of political dynamism. But maintaining momen-
tum and turning it into a force that can shift mainstream politics remains
an unresolved challenge.
Yet, in this landscape of political inertia, small local pockets of action
like Ma~yu create space where other ways of being political can be
explored. Ma~yu is neither ideological nor post-ideological; it is driven
neither by agonistic politics nor by political consensus. It deploys impro-
visation and imagination in reshaping life from a very local perspective,
and so challenges the meaning and boundaries of the political itself. By its
very nature it is a work in progress, a matter of trial and error in which final
success is unassured. It is part of a long local history of politics as experi-
ment and as a process of becoming. This is a history full of setbacks and
reversals of fortune, and Ma~yu will surely face those too.
Indeed, its success is in a sense unimaginable. What would success for

Ma~yu look like? The group has no specific agenda to achieve. The act of
“trying it for ourselves” is its driving force, and perhaps the best measure
of its success is its capacity to go on provoking improvisation and imagin-
ing. As one member puts it, capturing both a core element of the group’s
philosophy and its intrinsic dilemma: “nowadays I’m a member who does
nothing more than read the [Ma~yu] newsletter. But maybe this really fits
the goals of Ma~yu. I just get on with my life thinking: it’s OK to be a
member who only reads the newsletter. And then again, my Ma~yu cur-
rency account is in minus, and there’s no real prospect of its going into the
black… I just want to go on participating in Ma~yu activities at my own
pace. Cheers!”45
Notes
1. Michael Ende, Erhard Eppler and Hanne Tächl, Phantasie/Kutlur/Politik
(Munich: Hockebooks GMBH, 2014).
2. Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
3. Paul Chatterton and Jenny Pickerill, “Everyday Activism and Transitions
Towards Post-Capitalist Worlds.” Transactions of the British Institute of
Geographers 35:4 (2010), 476; Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically
(Leeds: Anti-Thesis, 2000).
4. Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2.
5. See Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
6. See, for example, E. Bruce Reynolds ed. Japan in the Fascist Era (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Williams, Defending Japan’s Pacific
War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power (London and
New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect:
Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
7. For debates on the nature (and extent) of Japan’s contemporary democ-
racy, see, for example, Roger Bowen, Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy:
The Liberal Democratic Party and Structural Corruption (Armonk, NJ:
M. E. Sharpe, 2003); Yoshiaki Kobayashi, Malfunctioning Democracy in
Japan: Quantitative Analysis in a Civil Society (Lanham, NJ: Lexington
Books, 2012); and Alice Mary Haddad, Building Democracy in Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
8. Frank J. Schwartz and Susan Pharr (eds), The State of Civil Society in Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Akihiro Ogawa, Failure
of Civil Society? The Third Sector and the State in Contemporary Japan
(New York: SUNY Press, 2009).
9. See, for example, Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society
and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010).
10. The Japanese word for cocoon would normally be romanised “mayu.” The
tilde mark in the middle of the word, which also appears in the Japanese
hiragana version of the name, was devised by a member of the Ma~yu
group and adopted because it gives the word a softer feel and creates an
unmistakably distinctive group title.
11. See Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim (London:
Penguin Books, 1984), 444.
12. “Ueda Shi Tōkei,” Ueda Shi. 2015, accessed November 25, 2015, http://
www.city.ueda.nagano.jp/joho/shise/toke/toke/index.html#data.
13. Izumi Rui, “Nihon ni okeru chiiki tsūka seido: Sono tenkai to shōrai,”
in Chiiki tsūka, ed. Nishibe Makoto (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2013),
237.
14. Chun Kyunghee, “Kankoku kyōdōtai tsūhei undō no genjō,” in Chiiki
tsūka, ed. Nishibe Makoto (Tokyo: Mineruba Shobō, 2013), 167–177.
15. See Lewis D. Solomon, Rethinking Our Centralized Monetary System: The
Case for a System of Local Currencies (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing, 1996), 43–50; Thomas Greco, Money: Understanding and
Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. (White River Junction VT: Chelsea
Green Publishing, 2001), 184–191.
16. Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative
Currency Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
17. North, Money and Liberation, Chapter 5.
18. North, Money and Liberation, Chapters 5 and 7.
19. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiuuVmoqPWI; Yasui Keiko,
“Santo Kurabu Ma~yu no ayumi” in Nōsonhatsu jūmin hakusho Vol. 2:
Tomo ni ikiru, ed. Shinshū Miyamoto Kai Juku Sewanin Kai (Saku City:
Shinshū Miyamoto Juku, 2013), 86–91.
20. Santo Kurabu Ma~yu, “Santo Kurabu Ma~yu katsudō naiyō,” Santo
Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō. 88 (8 August 2015), 1.
21. Yasui Keiko, interview by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, audio-recording, Ueda
City, Japan, 28 May 2015.
22. Takeuchi Hideo interview by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, audio-recording, Ueda
City, Japan, 28 May 2015.
23. Takeuchi Hideo interview.
24. Cooper, Everyday Utopias, 130.
25. LETSLINK UK, “UK Local Exchange Trading and Complementary
Currencies Development Agency,” accessed November 28, 2015, http://
www.letslinkuk.net/.
26. Cooper, Everyday Utopias, Chapter 6.

27. North, Money and Liberation, Chapter 5.
28. North, Money and Liberation.
29. Santo Kurabu Ma~yu, “Hajimemashite, shinkain desu,” Santo Kurabu
Ma~yu kaihō, 42 (2008), 15–16; Santo Kurabu Ma~yu, “Yoroshiku,
shinkain desu.” Santo Kurabu Ma~yu kaihō, 48 (2009), 15–17.
30. Sakaguchi Mitsukuni,“‘Ni-Yon Jiken’ to Nagano Ken kyōiku: ‘Kyōiku Ken
Nagano’ ni shūshifu o utta ‘Ni-Yon Danatsu Jiken’,” Heiwa to teshigoto 18
(2013), 144–160, citation from 146.
31. See, for example, Nagano Daigaku ed. Ueda Jiyū Daigaku to sono shūhen
(Matsumoto: Kyōdo Shuppansha, 2006); Yoneyama Mitsunori, “Ueda
Jiyū Daigaku no rinen to genjitsu,” Keiō Gijuku Daigaku daigakuin
shakaigaku kenkyūka kiyo, 21 (1981) 11–19; Kobayashi Toshimichi, Nihon
kindaishi no chika suimyaku o saguru: Shinshū Ueda Jiyū Daigaku e no
keifu, (Tokyo: Nashi no Ki Sha, 2000); Kodaira Chifumi, Nakano Akira
and Murayama Takashi, Ueda Jiyū Daigaku to chiiki no seinen, (Ueda:
Ueda Chiisagata Kingendaishi Kenkyūkai, 2004).
32. Kobayashi Tatsue, “‘Shiraba’ no koro” in Heiwa to teshigoto: Kobayashi
Tatsue 104-sai no tabi, ed. Kobayashi Tatsue no Hon Henshū Iinkai
(Tokyo: Fukunotō Shobō, 2001), 16–33; Yoshikawa Tōru, “Heiwa to tes-
higoto o kataritsuzuketa kyōikusha Kobayashi Tatsue” in Saku no senjin -
Kentō jigyō, ed. Saku no Senjin Kentō Iinkai / Saku-Shi Kyōiku Iinkai
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Mountain Community,” in New Worlds from Below: Informal Life Politics
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34. Yoshikawa Tōru, “Miyamoto Juku no 20-nen,” in Nōsonhatsu jūmin
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Kai (Saku City: Shinshū Miyamoto Juku, 2013), 193–196.
35. Nakajima Kunio, “Miyamoto Juku to chiiki tsūka Ma~yu kara manande” in
Nōsonhatsu jūmin hakusho, Dai-2 Shū: Tomo ni ikiru, ed. Shinshū
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Cold War (2007).
CHAPTER 11
Epilogue: Improvising the Future
In all of the stories examined here, networks play a vital role because they
bring together people with diverse skills and experiences in a non-
hierarchical space. The Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers, examined in
Chapter 3, links the practical life experiences of migrants from rural areas
with the media and artistic skills of city-based participants. The Korean
organic farming movement Chŏngnonghoe draws on the educational and
religious, as well as the agricultural, know-how of its diverse members.
The grasslands protection movement which addresses the pollution of
herders’ lands in Inner Mongolia would be impossible without the con-
nections forged between the herders themselves and supportive commu-
nicators, activists, scientists, and others elsewhere. In Takae, Gongliao,
and Ueda, it is the combination of skills and perspectives provided by
local-born people and more recent “incomers” that provides the energy
which drives informal life politics.
The networks often extend across national, as well as across regional
and social, boundaries. Korean organic farmers exchange ideas with their
Japanese counterparts, and both derive inspiration from the Danish coop-
erative and Folk School movements. The Inner Mongolian grasslands
protection movement has links that extend to Korea, Japan, and else-
T. Morris-Suzuki (*) • S. Wei


where. The Takae community uses its electronic network to rally interna-
tional support, and the activities of the Ueda Ma~yu group draw on and
resonate with actions and ideas of the worldwide alternative currency
movement.
Informal life politics, as we have seen here, is not a separate realm insu-
lated from the realities of government action. There are many points
where the formal and the informal intersect. Groups like the Inner
Mongolia grasslands protection network or the Takae community develop
innovative ways to try to influence government policy, even as they simul-
taneously create their own self-help approaches in response to challenges
to their physical and cultural survival. The governmental context in which
they operate influences and sometimes constrains the actions of these
groups. It has clearly been more challenging for groups in China (and in
South Korea prior to democratization) to “ignore the state” than it is for
groups in Taiwan or Japan today. Yet to a surprising degree the diverse
communities we have examined use similar flexible strategies to carve out
a space for autonomous action.
As the examples studied here show, the networking process is neither
simple nor necessarily harmonious. Contrasting and sometimes conflicting
views emerge: for example, between those whose idealism leads to a rejec-
tion of conventional market values and those who seek a pragmatic com-
promise between alternative ideals and mainstream economic values. Such
conflicts may lead to tension and division, but at the same time, the open
and flexible structure of these small-scale experiments, with their scope for
improvisation and face-to-face interaction, often makes it relatively easy
for difference to be accommodated and for the gap between contrasting
approaches bridged (as we saw in the cases of Takae and of Ueda). What
emerges is not so much consensus, but rather a continuing and dynamic
interplay of diversity.
Does living politics make a difference? Have the small actions explored
in the chapters of this book really had any lasting effect? Clearly, they have
not changed the world, nor have they sought to do so. Many have had
minor successes—the Workers’ Spring Festival organized by the Spiritual
Home for Workers, the Inner Mongolian grassland protection move-
ment’s success in disseminating legal knowledge among herders, or the
creation of Everybody’s House by the Ueda Ma~yu group (Chapter 10),
among others. These achievements, though, have generally touched the
lives only of small groups of people and remain generally unknown to the
wider national or international community. From this point of view, these
EPILOGUE: IMPROVISING THE FUTURE 217
stories might indeed be dismissed as peripheral to the realities of political

life in contemporary East Asia.
But a core argument of this book is that the significance of this informal
life politics lies not so much in the tangible outcomes of specific local
actions, but in the way that—taken as a whole—it transforms and deepens
the very meaning of politics itself. For the members of Chŏngnonghoe,
the residents of Takae and Gongliao, and others whose stories we have
traced here, “politics” is not something external to their lives, which they
seek to influence by occasional forays to the ballot box or to a street pro-
test. It is something that they live every day, in the human relationships
they form, the way they create their own means of subsistence, and the
values that they espouse and express through the practical actions of
existence.
If we accept this view, then it makes little sense to apply the standard
criteria of political success or failure to the experience of living politics. In
conventional terms, political achievement is often judged in numerical
terms—success in winning majorities at elections or gaining good ratings
in the opinion polls; or in the number of items from a policy platform that
a government is able to put into practice. But in the world of living poli-
tics, success surely lies in the act of living in self-determined, unexpected
ways. What it contributes to the world is creativity and adaptability: it cre-
ates a space to practice and protect alternative values, to reduce the social
harm created by capitalist development or political coercion, and to
expand the imagination beyond the existing social order. Living politics is
an on-going process. Its achievement lies in the ability to leave traces into
the future: traces which inspire others to question the social and economic
constraints that shape our existence, to imagine other ways of beings, and
(to some extent at least) to live them.
The small size of these groups means that they are often also relatively
short-lived. Members come and go; communities change shape and may
dissolve when the issues which brought the community together are
resolved or become less salient. But a crucial lesson of the stories we have
traced here is that the disappearance of a specific group is not necessarily a
sign of failure. Indeed, the significance of living politics is not a matter of
the expansion of a particular group, but the spread of ideas and actions.
Ideas and actions inspired and practiced thus become enhanced through
various living political activities which usually transcend the physical limits
of the groups. They resonate across time as well as across space, and the
experiences of living politics are often transferred from one network to
another. When members of one network disperse, they may join other
groups, carrying with them the knowledge they have gathered along the
way. Thus, the ideas of the Osan School in Korea germinated again in new
ways in the P’ulmu School and Chŏngnonghoe; the prewar experiences of
the White Birch Teachers and the Ueda Free University resonate in the
work of the Ueda Ma~yu group; and so on. This process of diffusion can
be likened to the process by which the seed head of a dandelion scatters its
seeds in the wind: the seed head disappears, but the seeds of future life
take root elsewhere. In this sense, working alongside a myriad other simi-
lar networks in East Asia and beyond, the groups we have encountered in
this book are indeed quietly reshaping the future of the region.

Cold War (2007).

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Index1
A of individuals or non-state actors, 31

Abe, Kosuzu, 135, 145, 146, 149n9, international agencies, 5, 47
149n18, 150n22, 150n23, supervisory agency, 100
212n38 Agriculture, 92n80, 166, 203
Acquisition, land, 173 land reform, 165–167
See also Land, expropriation See also Organic farming
Action Alternative
action research, 12 currencies, 169–170 (see also Local
relationship with ideas, 3, Currency schemes)
169–179, 12 economies, 154–156, 158, 189–191
Activism exchange systems, 154, 156–157,
environmental, 63, 67, 71, 103, 159, 194
111, 122, 123 modern society, 60
labour, 41–43 path of modernisation, 57
rights, 37–38, 40–41, 46, 50, 72, political systems, 157, 190
103, 109 values, 7, 11, 60, 73, 153–161, 164,
Advertising, 208 173, 184, 217
See also Propaganda Anarchism, 3, 4, 13n9, 91n77
Affective community, 145–147 Ancestor, 155, 166, 184
See also Friendship Anti-base protests, Okinawa, 137,
Agency 138, 140, 147, 148
economic and administrative, 68 Anxiety, 41, 174
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

1

East Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6337-4
236 INDEX
Aristotle, 1, 31 Centralisation
Artistic expression, 215 economic, 67
See also Music; Poetry; Visual art political, 67
Asen, Robert, 27n25, 31, 51n7 Change, constant, see Impermanence
Attention-seeking state, 10, 17–27 China, 2, 23–24, 29–55, 58, 100,
Authoritarian/ism 103, 142, 191, 216
in East Asia, 21–25, 30, 62 as Inner Mongolia, 11, 103–104,
relationship to economic 107–129, 215–216
development, 11, 58–59, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 23,
107–109, 174 39, 41, 53n21, 54n32
Autonomy Chŏngnonghoe, 57, 62–67, 69,
communal autonomy, 59–61, 63, 71–76, 81, 85n28, 85n30,
72, 73, 80–82 85n31, 87n48, 87n50, 88n52,
local autonomy, 60 88n54, 89n67, 215, 217, 218
Chongshai, 176
Christianity or Christian, 25, 54n31,
B 57, 62–64, 67, 71–76, 81,
Balance, 12, 143, 145, 156, 157, 169, 85n30, 88n55, 88n57, 94n106
171, 178, 181, 184, 196 Citizenship
Bayan, 181, 182 education in, 36–39
Beck, Ulrich, 5–7, 13n18–20 enactments of, 30, 31, 46, 49
Bell, Daniel, 4 passive versus active conceptions of,
Belonging, 31, 37–39 31, 38
See also Commonality relationship to survival, 10, 30, 33,
Berlin Wall, 2 50
Bhambra, Gurminder K., 133, 148n3, responsibilities of, 23, 51n9
148n4 rights of, 19, 23–25, 30, 31, 36, 38,
Bottici, Chiara, 8, 14n26, 41
14n27 TH Marshall’s taxonomy of, 38
Brexit (Britain), 2 Civil society, 32, 35, 38, 48, 54n37,
Bronner, Stephen Eric, 4, 6, 7, 61, 122, 173, 191
13n11–13 See also Activism; NGO; Social
Brother Xiao, 168 movements
Bureaucracy, 3 Clastres, Pierre, 60, 84n20
Bureau of Food and Supply, 167 Collective, 24, 29, 32, 41, 42, 50,
53n22, 62, 66, 73, 79, 84n24,
107, 108, 121, 137, 147, 191,
C 200
Capitalism, 8, 43, 59, 61, 75, 165, See also Community
169, 182 Colonialism, post-colonialism, 4,
Catholic Church, 18, 19, 21 54n32
INDEX
237
Commercial values, 164 migrant workers, 44

Commodity See also Artistic expression
commodity exchange, 59, 157, Currency, informal, 170
166
economy, 154, 155, 158
fictitious commodity, 154 D
Commonality, 32, 39, 41, 143 Daoism, 2
Community Democracy, 1–14, 190, 191, 209, 210n7
commune, 64, 65, 67, 89n65 Despair (as loss of hope), 40, 190, 193
imagined community, 59, 148 Development
local community, 3, 7, 10–12, 66, developmentalism, 70
76, 101, 135, 148, 154, 159, developmental state, 58, 59, 82n2,
164, 170, 180, 183, 192 83n6
political community, 22, 24, 38, economic, 44, 58, 83n4
52n16, 131 endogenous, 205, 206
self-help community, 57, 60–62 rural, 68, 72, 75–78, 81, 82,
See also Collective; Commonality 90n71–73, 91n76, 92n80,
Confucius or Confucianism, 2 94n106, 159
Consensus, 5–7, 83n6, 157, 206, 209, state-led, 58, 82
216 Dictatorship, 4, 95, 190
Consumption, 69, 77, 147, 155, 167, Dissent, 2
182, 196 Division
Control, 11, 20, 30, 34, 38, 39, 57, between insiders and outsiders, 143,
67–72, 77, 81, 156 158–159, 183
Cooperative, 36, 43, 57, 75, 76, 78, between rural and urban areas, 158,
79, 81, 84n24, 90n71, 91n76, 175
91n79, 120, 164, 175, 178, DIY culture, 146, 147
182–184, 196, 215 Duterte, Rodrigo, 2, 6
Cooper, Davina, 7, 13n8, 201, 202,
210n4
Corporation, 5, 34, 155 E
Crisis, 1–14, 51n5, 77, 103, 191, 195, Ecological Engineering Development
196 Foundation (EEF), 181, 182
of people’s livelihood, 59 Economy
Cui, Yongyuan, 48 moral, 60, 84n19, 94n107
Cultural Revolution (China), state-controlled, 82
111–115 Ecosystem, 126, 178, 179
Culture Educated Youth, 11, 107–109, 111,
alternative, 155, 158 114–119, 123, 126, 126n1
capitalist, 43, 157, 169 in Eastern Ujimchin, 108, 109,
mainstream, 32, 43, 45, 169 114–119, 126
238 INDEX
Education small-scale exchange systems, 12,

about capitalism, 75 154, 159, 170, 194
about nature, 38, 76, 179 Exclusion, 3, 31, 34, 50n4
about organic farming, 63, 64, 76, See also Inequality
89n67
about rights, 38, 40–41, 46, 50, 72,
103, 109 F
about self-help, 3, 11, 39, 115 Fang, Yunru, 173, 175, 186n32,
adult education (folk high school), 186n35, 186n42
35, 57 Farmers’ Association of Taiwan, 167
civic education (about citizenship), Farmer, tenant, 77, 93n90, 167, 170
38, 39, 122 Farming,
Danish education, 76 capital-intensive, 77
formal education, 37–39, 53 chemical farming, 11, 63–66,
nationalist education, 74, 90n71 68–71
personalist education, 204 conventional, 66, 177
p’yŏngmin-oriented, 76 legitimate, 66
Teragoya, 204 modern, 64, 178
Egoism, 169 national, 66, 81
Elites organic farming, 11, 25, 57–95,
intellectual elites, 43, 108 141, 146, 149n15, 181,
links to grassroots movements, 6, 185n9, 185n10, 215
204 politicisation of, 67–71
local elites, 62, 168 righteous farming, 63, 64, 71,
political and economic elites, 21, 43, 88n53
108 self-sufficient, 65, 66
Emotion, 155, 179, 196 state-controlled, 67, 82
See also Feeling traditional, 175–177
Entrepreneurs, 29, 195 Feeling, 36, 143, 156, 169, 170, 174,
Environmental movements 176
anti-Nujiang dam, 100 Feminism, 4
anti-paper mill activities, 108 Flexibility, 7, 100, 137, 199
green protection movement, 100 Folk School movement, 215
rural, 108 Forestry Bureau, Taiwan, 173, 174,
Escobar, Arturo, 139, 149n13 184
Eutopia, 9 Formal and informal
Exchange networks, 11, 33–35, 39–43,
commodity, 59, 157 46–50, 62, 99–106, 108, 109,
economic, 60, 196 111, 114–119, 126
labour, 167 politics, 103, 104, 105n5, 115, 119,
modes of exchange, 20, 22, 59, 60, 207
182 systems of exchange, 196
INDEX
239
Formal networks H
formal life-sustaining networks and Habitat Management Division, 173
institutions, 102 Habitus, 158, 182, 183
formal residents’ committees, 100 Hage, Ghassan, 158, 160n11
registered organization, 100 Halbwachs, Maurice, 153, 160n1
Formal politics, 3, 9, 12, 103, 104, Happiness, 2, 21, 153, 156
105n5, 115, 119, 157, 207 Harmony, 2, 21, 157, 174, 199
Francescini, Ivan, 39 Hazzard, Shirley, 155, 160n6
Freedom, 18, 22, 31, 54n30, 83n10, Hehe Cooperative, 178, 182
100, 132, 156, 191 Henoko, 135, 139, 144
unfreedom, 22 Henry VIII, 18
Friendship, 1, 12n1, 99, 115, 146, Herbicide, 66, 168, 178, 184
173, 175 Hierarchy, 9, 87n45, 124
Higashi village, 134–136, 138, 143,
149n19
G Higher People’s Court of Inner
Gandhi, 73, 89n61 Mongolia, 118
Generation Historical influences on informal life
older, 164, 183 politics, 1, 9, 11–12, 44, 52n18,
younger, 70, 165, 166, 171, 177, 72, 77–82, 88, 119, 126,
181–183 132–133, 145, 147, 155, 159,
Gentry, local, 165 191, 195, 204–205, 209
Giddens, Anthony, 4–6, 13n14–17 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 20, 25n3
Globalisation, 4, 5, 43, 59, 61 Holston, James, 27n25, 31, 51n7
economic, 59, 61 Hŏ, Mun-hoe, 68
Gongliao, 12, 159, 163–187, 215, 217 Hope, v, 7, 12, 39–41, 108, 115,
Good life, 1, 12, 12n3 175, 177, 189, 190, 192, 193,
Gramschi, Antonio, 6 202
Grassland Protection Network, 102, huangong, 176
107–129
Grassroots social movements, examples
of, 29, 57, 107, 131, 163, 189 I
environmental, 101, 111 Ideals, 39–43
labour, 193 communal, 59, 75, 76, 80
rights protection, 193, 204 ideal village movement, 72, 77, 78,
Great East Japan Earthquake, 11 80–82
March 2011, 199 national, 76
Greek polis, 1, 12n2 Ideas
Greener Beijing, 120, 123, 125, 128n19 relationship with action, 3–7
Green Revolution, 25, 67, 69, 71, spread of, 217 (see also Historical
86n37 influences on informal life
Guandu National Park, 172 politics)
240 INDEX
Identity informal social networks, 10, 99,

alternative, 80, 144, 158 104, 104n3
national, 7 internet-based information exchange
Ideology networks, 100
anti-communism, 70 loosely-connected network, 124
communism, v, 39 personal relationships as a political
post-ideology, 3–6 asset, 39, 46–47, 49–50,
Ignoring, 10, 17–27, 31 100, 108, 138–139,
as a political action, 25 198 - 200
Illegality, 34, 100, 103 Injustice, 172
Imagination, v, 7, 8, 61, 153, 189, Inner Mongolia, vi, 11, 103, 104,
190, 193, 195, 209, 217 107–128, 215, 216
Impermanence Innovation, 155–157, 206
informal life politics, 217 Insider, see Networks, insider/outsider
Neverending Story, 210 Institute for the Advanced Study of
survival “for now,” 50 Sustainability, United Nations
transient citizenship, 50 University, 174
Improvisation, 8, 195, 209, 210, 216 Institution, 2, 3, 5, 59, 80, 84n16,
Independent 88n57, 102, 103, 114, 119, 167,
citizen’s independent investigation, 207
103, 104 Intensification, 154, 155
independent data, 102, 104 Intermediate People’s Court of
Industrialization, 33, 58, 67, 71, Xilingol City, 118
87n50, 107, 166, 168 Internet, 45, 102, 119, 120, 128n19,
Inequality, 23, 34, 59 138
Informal life politics
concept and definition, 3, 6–10, 17,
31–32, 49, 157, 160, 192, 209, J
215–217 Jaffe, Rivke, 27n25, 31, 32, 51n7
Informal networks Jail, 23
Caring for Nu River Network, 102 Japan, 2, 12, 25, 58, 63–64, 73, 75,
citizens’ radioactivity measuring 77–81, 101–104, 121–124,
stations, 100 131–150, 159, 165, 167, 174,
Eastern Ujimchin Educated Youth 189–213, 215–216
Network, 109, 114–118, 126
informal Beijing liaison office, 108,
109, 111, 114, 126 K
informal grassland protection Karatani, Kojin, 20, 22, 26n12–16,
network, 107–128 59, 60, 83n11–14, 84n18,
informal issue-specific networks, 84n23, 154, 157, 160n2
100, 101, 103, 104, 108 Kennedy, Margrit, 194
INDEX
241
Kim, Gyo-sin, 74, 92n80, 94n103, M

94n105 Market, 11, 12, 51n4, 60–62, 64, 66,
Kim, Il Sung, 21 85n29, 154–156, 158, 159,
Knowledge, 44, 72, 75, 79, 121, 123, 164–168, 178, 181–183,
124, 126, 140, 155, 176, 190, 195–198, 200, 216
216, 218 Marshall, T. H., 31, 38, 41, 51n6,
local knowledge, 167, 180 52n17, 53n24
Kobayashi, Tatsue, 205, 212n32 Martial Law, 168
Kotani, Junichi, 63, 64, 74, 84n25, Marx, Karl, 60, 84n18
84n26 Massumi, Brian, 8, 14n25
Kuomintang (KMT), 165 Ma~yu Local Currency Scheme, 192,
See also Nationalist Party 196, 197, 199, 202, 204, 206
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 9, 14n30
Migration
L of ideas, 11, 35, 43, 72–82,
Land 117–126, 141–143, 147, 160,
commercialization of, 49, 149, 181 172, 192–197, 215–216
expropriation, 40, 173 migrant workers, 29ff, 51n4
landlord, 170 of people, 29ff, 141
land ownership, 110, 121, 128n23, Ministry of Environmental Protection,
167, 207 China, 116
reform, 165–167, 170 Ministry of Interior, Taiwan, 173
Landlord, 170 Ministry of Public Security, China, 116
Land-to-tiller program, 165 Ministry of the Environment, Japan,
Lee, C. K., 41, 53n26, 54n27, 54n29 174
Levitas, Ruth, 9, 13n8, 14n28, 190, Mitchell, Timothy, 155, 160n7
210n2 Mixed polities, 190–195
Lin, Huaqing, 173 Miyamoto School, 205, 206
Lin, Shizhong, 170, 185n17, 185n20 Miyazaki, Shō go, 207, 208, 213n40
Linton, Michael, 195, 196 Mobilising
Lin Wencui, 173, 175, 183, 185n16, mobilising people, 41, 49, 100,
186n28, 186n30, 186n33 114, 144
Livelihood, 10, 59–62, 67, 72, 77, 81, support from governments, 100
99, 122, 135, 166, 181 wartime social mobilisation, 58
threats to, 81 Modernisation, 57, 70, 71, 82
Local currency schemes, 192, Money, 20, 42, 55, 71, 79, 169, 170,
194–197, 199, 202–204, 206 193–196
Local Exchange Trading Schemes See also Local Currency Schemes
(LETS), 195, 196, 202 Mongolia (Outer), 113, 123
Loyalty, 32, 39, 49, 169, 170, 176 Mongolia (Inner), 11, 103–104,
Lü, Tu, 43, 54n33 107–129, 215–216
242 INDEX
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 1, 12, 25n2, horizontal/vertical, 17, 21, 32, 39,

25n7, 60, 84n16, 102, 105n19, 41, 173
153, 189, 198, 201, 203–205, insider/outsider, 115, 158
211n21, 211n22, 212n33, 215 network “hub,” 113
Mouffe, Chantal, 5, 6, 13n21–23 open network, 111, 119
Mumford, Lewis, 9, 14n30 transnational or trans-regional
Music, 34, 39, 47, 78, 131–150 network, 63
Mutual assistance, 32, 39, 179 types of, 35, 100
usages of, 102
Neverending Story (novel and movie),
N 159, 189–213
Nagano Prefecture, Japan, 159, 204 New Left (China), 43–45, 47, 50,
Nakajima, Kunio, 205, 212 54n32
Nation New social movement, 4
capitalist nation-state system, 59, New Workers, 37, 43–46
60, 62 New Workers’ Art Troupe, 29, 50n1
modern, 59, 67, 71 New Zealand, 202
nation-building, 40, 58, 60, 67, 71 local currency schemes, 202
nation-state, 5, 10, 11, 24, 57–94, NGO
190 environmental, 100, 108, 109, 111,
National Committee of the Chinese 113, 114, 120–124, 128n19,
People’s Political Consultative 128n24, 173, 182
Conference (CPPCC), 117 grassroots movements, 121, 122
National Fiesta of Sustainable labour, 34, 35, 40, 41, 43, 45
Regionalism, Japan, 199 rights protection, 37–38, 40–41,
Nationalism 46, 50, 72, 88n53, 88n54,
Christian nationalism, 25, 57, 81 103, 109
economic nationalism, 58, 59 See also Civil society; Social
statist nationalism, 76 movements
Nationalist Party, 165 NHK Broadcasting, Japan, 192
National Park Law, 172 Non-government activities, 99
National People’s Congress (NPC), 117 Non-movement, 17
Natural disasters, 103 Non-state space, 33, 59
disaster responses, 101 Non-violence, 9
Neo-Confucianism, 2 Northern Training Center (NTC),
Networks 134, 135
collaborative networks, 114 North Korea (Democratic People’s
communal, 43, 63, 72 Republic of Korea), 21, 23, 67,
development and origins of, 72, 68, 71, 73, 89n62
100, 120, 122, 157 North, Peter, 196, 202, 206, 211n16
formal versus informal, 35, 99, 102, Nostalgia, 153
103 Nuclear power plant, 168, 169
INDEX
243
O Poetry, 36, 134

O, Chae-kil, 73, 87n50 Polanyi, Karl, 154, 160n4
O’Connor, James, 21, 26n18 Political action, 4, 7, 8, 25, 50
Okinawa, vi, 11, 104, 131–138, recognised and alternate forms of, 5
140–148, 149n8, 150n19 See also Activism; Dissent; Social
Okinawa Defense Bureau, 136, 147, mobilisation; Social movements
149n8 Political group, 29–55
Okinawa struggle, 131–133, 140, 144, Politics
146, 147 agonistic, 6, 43, 209
Opinion poll, 2, 217 antagonistic, 6, 47–49, 104
Organic farming, 11, 25, 57–94, 141, communal, 59–61, 80
146, 149n15, 181, 215 conceptions of, 59
Osan School, 73–82, 88n58, 91n76, consensus, 6, 7, 209
218 contentious, 49
Outopias, 9 enemyless, 5
Outsider, see Networks, insider/ of expendable people, 58
outsider of rich country and strong military,
Oxfam Hong Kong, 36, 47 58–59
governmental, 32, 34, 60–62,
84n16, 103
P indirectly contentious, 33, 42, 49
Park, Chung Hee, 58, 68, 83n4, national, 59–61, 72, 80, 82, 121,
86n35, 86n37, 92n80 137, 166
Partnership, 31, 102, 124 non-governmental, 60, 62, 84n16,
Paternalism, 21 99
Pay for Ecosystem Service (PES), 178, representative, 5, 24, 62
179 state, 72, 81, 82
Peach Blossom Legend, 184 of untimely death, 58, 59, 69,
Peach Blossom Spring, 163 83n5
Peach blossom valley, 159, 163–186 unwittingly contentious, 44
Peasant, 54n32, 88n52, 126n1, 166, Pollution
172 anti-pollution activities, 101
See also Farmer, tenant environmental pollution, 101, 104,
Pesticide, 58, 63–65, 69, 86n39, 167, 107, 111, 113, 116–118
168, 173, 178, 184 human-generated environmental
Philia [civic friendship], 1, 2 pollution, 101
Picketty, Thomas, 190, 210n5 industrial pollution, 58, 108, 109,
Place, 2, 9, 23, 32, 34, 36, 42, 46, 47, 111, 115, 116, 123, 124, 191
52n11, 59, 61, 67, 103, 112, 113, pollution victims, 103, 107, 108,
120, 124, 131, 132, 134, 139, 141, 110, 116–118, 126
142, 146, 147, 157, 159, 164, 179, water pollution, 103
189, 196, 197, 202, 206, 208 Populism, 2, 6
244 INDEX
Power Renhe Environmental Ethics

types of, 8, 20, 156 Foundation, 173
Pragmatism, 25, 184, 216 Resistance, 10, 12, 19, 26n11, 48, 70,
Profit, 12, 34, 153–157, 166, 169, 81, 89n61, 119, 154, 173
171, 180, 182, 183, 202 Responsibilities
Propaganda, 38, 45 of citizenship, 23
See also Ideas, Spread of of informal life politics group
Property members, 9, 10
common property, 35–39, 207 Rights
private property, 23 of citizenship, 19, 38
sacred property, 166 human rights, 59, 103
state property, 166 indigenous rights, 147, 176
Prosperity, 1, 61, 67, 153, 195, 196 to urban residency, 30, 31
Protest Roasa, Dustin, 101, 102, 105n10,
peaceful, 147 105n11, 105n16
protest community, 133, 136,
138–140, 143–147
violent, 207 S
Protestant, 63, 64, 72–74, 88n57, Saku City, Japan, 204, 205
91n76 Santo Club Ma~yu, see Ma~yu Local
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 60 Currency Scheme
P’ulmu School, 64, 74–76, 81, 89n67, Satoyama Initiative, 174, 184, 186n29
90n69, 90n70, 91n73, 91n79, Schmitt, Carl, 5, 6
218 Schools, 23, 25, 33–37, 39, 42, 44–50,
52n11, 55n38, 63, 64, 73–82,
87n45, 88n57, 88n58, 89n67,
Q 90n69, 90n70, 90n71, 90n72,
Qu, Geping, 117 90n73, 91n76, 91n77, 91n79,
92n82, 92n83, 112, 116, 122,
138, 141, 142, 157, 168, 175,
R 176, 179, 193, 204–206, 215, 218
Radicalism, 4, 5 See also Education
Reciprocity Schumacher, E. F., 156, 160n9
expanded reciprocity, 59 Scott, James, 13n9, 60, 84n19,
Reflexive society, 4, 5 161n12
Regime Self-help
authoritarian, 25, 62, 68, 71, 76 local self-help activities, 101
ethical, 153 as a political action, 3, 17, 32, 42–47,
Regional currency, see Local Currency 57–94, 101, 115, 169, 195
Schemes self-help community, 60–62
Religion self-reliance, 39
as mobilising force, 63, 71, 80, 159 Shen, Yuan, 41, 54n27, 54n29
as repressive force, 66, 82, 191 Shi, Fayong, 105n6
INDEX
245
Silk farming, 204 Survival,

Simmel, Georg, 155, 160n8 critical lifelines, 101, 115
Sino-American Joint Commission of impermanence of, 50
Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), 167 as political action, 32–45, 71, 99
Slavery, 19, 23 relationship to citizenship, 29–31,
Small-scale, 3, 9, 57, 65, 82, 157, 45–47, 67
165–167, 169, 171, 180–183, survival situation, 101
190, 191, 206, 216 types of survival, 30
Social capital, 156, 172 Sustainability, 171, 199
Social contract, 18, 20
Social formation
association, 60 T
capitalist nation-state, 59 Taiwan, 2, 12, 58, 159, 163–187, 216
feudalism, absolute monarchy, 59 Taiwan Bird Watcher’s Group
Social mobilisation, 39, 58, 60 (TBWG), 172
See also Activism; Non-movement; Takae, 11, 102, 104, 131–150,
Protest; Social movements 215–217
Social mobility, 37 Takae Residents’ Society, 131,
See also Hierarchy; Inequality 137–144, 146, 147
Social movements Tanaka, Shō zō , 58, 83n5
community-based, 63 Tax, 18–21, 23, 120, 165, 167, 200,
new social movements, 4 207
organic farming movement, 66 Tenant, 77, 93n90, 166, 167, 170
Social services, 32 thang-hia, see Chongshai
Social stratification, see Inequality Third Way, 5
Socio-environmental crises, 99 Thoreau, Henry David, 19, 23, 26n9,
Solinger, Dorothy J., 29, 30, 50n2 26n11, 27n24
South Korea, 2, 11, 25, 57–95, 114, Tianliaoyang, 171, 172
121–122, 194, 216 Tianxiaxi, 122
Sovereignty, 132 Tongxin (“Of One Heart”) School,
Spencer, Herbert, 18, 19, 25n4–6, 33–36, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49
26n8, 26n10 Tourism, 180–183
Spiritual Home for Migrant Workers Tradition
(Gongyou zhi jia), 34, 47, 50n1, political traditions, 4, 6
215 Tribute, 18, 20, 22
State, the Trump, Donald, 3, 6
attention-seeking, 10, 17–27 Turkmenistan, 21–23
authoritarian, 21, 23, 30
democratic, 191
Strong tie, 41, 118 U
Subpolitics, 5–7 Uchihashi, Katsuto, 194
Sun, Heng, 35, 39, 40, 42–44, 46, 47, Uchimura, Kanzō , 73–75, 80, 90n72,
52n12, 53n23 90n73
246 INDEX
Ueda City, Japan, 12, 159, 192, W

194–197, 200, 202–204, 206, Wang, Dezhi, 42, 43
215, 216 Wang, Jing, 168, 170, 184n4,
Ueda Free University, 204, 205, 218 185n19
Ueda Ma~yu group, 216, 218 Wang, Li, 117, 118
Uncle Tree, 170 Weber, Max, 21, 26n15, 26n16
Unity, 39, 45, 46 Welfare state, 21, 26n18
Urbanization, 155, 166 Weller, Robert, 156, 160n10, 173,
Urban/rural divide, 11, 24, 29, 30, 185n24, 186n27
32, 43 White Birch Teachers, 204, 205, 218
US-Japan security system, 132 Wŏn, Kyŏng-sŏn, 63, 73–75, 85n31,
US military occupation, 132, 133 87n48, 88n54, 89n66
Utopia, 8, 190, 201 Wörgl currency scheme, 194
Worker’s University, 35, 39, 40, 42
World Trade Organization, 168
V Wu, Litian, 116, 128n15
Value, 4, 7, 10–12, 20, 26, 59, 60, Wu, Wentong, 175
66, 73, 76, 82, 89n60, 145,
153–161, 164, 166, 168–171,
173–176, 178, 179, 181–184, X
185n6, 196, 198, 216, 217 Xie, Xiaoqin, 117
system, 10, 12, 82, 156, 159, 164, Xie, Zhenhua, 116
182, 184 Xi, Jinping, 38
See also Alternative, values; Xu, Zhiyong, 38
Commercial value
Van Creveld, Martin, 21, 26n17, 27n19
Violence, 9, 108, 132, 154, 207 Y
soft, 180 Yanbaru, 132, 134–136, 138, 140,
See also Protest, violent; Non-violence 141, 144, 147, 150n19
Virtual space Yan, Fu, 32, 49
the Echoing Steppe website, 113, Yasui, Keiko, 194, 195, 200, 206,
114, 119–122, 124 208, 211n19, 211n21, 213n42
internet outreach activities, 102 Yi, Ch’an-kap, 74, 91n73
online grassland protection network, Yi, Sŭng-hun, 94n103
102, 107–128 Yuan, Guoqing, 116
online platforms, 123, 124 Yu, Hanting, 172
public environmental website, 113
Virtue, 1, 70, 197
virtuous society, 2 Z
Visual art, 192 Zarrow, Peter G., 31, 51n8, 52n10,
Volunteer, 35, 46, 47, 92n82, 114, 121, 52n15, 52n17
123, 128n19, 175, 176, 180, 199 Zhejiang Village, 29, 33, 34

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THE LIVING POLITICS

The Living Politics of

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

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958003

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

Cover illustration: LockieCurrie

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

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

1 Introduction: Living Politics—Social Alternatives and

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

3 Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival?

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

Part II Networks 97

5 Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal Networks

6 Informal Grassland Protection Networks in Inner

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

Part III Alternatives 151

8 Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation 153

9 The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley: The Resurgence

10 The Neverending Story: Alternative Exchange and

11 Epilogue: Improvising the Future 215

Fig. 3.1 Industrial alleyway in Picun Village. Photograph

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

Introduction: Living Politics—Social

What is politics? This seemingly simple question has become pressingly

T. Morris-Suzuki (*) • S. Wei

© The Author(s) 2018 1

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

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

Ideology, Post-ideology, and Beyond

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

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

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

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

Core Elements of Informal Life Politics

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

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

23. Mouffe, On the Political, 20.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is a Distinguished Professor and Australian Research

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

Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-­

© The Author(s) 2018 17

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

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

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

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

To the single purpose of bringing us happiness,

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

The now-dead former dictator of Turkmenistan adopted the title

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

community, citizenship necessitates engagement. Claiming citizenship is

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

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

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

Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship

You do construction, I do domestic work

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

T. Cliff (*) • K. Wang

© The Author(s) 2018 29

Theirs was a brand of citizenship that the government would eventually

In establishing facilities and services parallel to the state, the Zhejiang

hukou from elsewhere) are cast as “non-citizens” or “semi-citizens” in

1 Introduction: Living Politics—Social Alternatives and

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

3 Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival?

4 Self-Help Is Political: How Organic Farming Creates

Part II Networks 97

5 Concept Essay Two: Leveraging Informal Networks

6 Informal Grassland Protection Networks in Inner

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

Part III Alternatives 151

8 Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation 153

9 The Dilemmas of Peach Blossom Valley: The Resurgence

10 The Neverending Story: Alternative Exchange and

11 Epilogue: Improvising the Future 215

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

Concept Essay One: Ignoring the Attention-

and two colleagues became volunteers at the long-established rural