Dutton, Schmitt & Sino-cops

At the bidding of my supervisor, I’ve been dipping into Michael Dutton’s award-winning Policing Chinese Politics: A History from 2005. I can see why it was recommended to me. It’s going to take some work to get its insights all lined up with my direct area of research, but the results will be worth that effort.

His fundamental insights come from drawing together Mao's writings, empirical work on Chinese policing, archive work on Chinese political and policing history and theory from Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault. He begins with the opening line from a 1926 Mao article: "Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution." Anyone with the slightest understanding of Schmitt will instantly see here the connection: friends and enemies as the fulcrum of politics.

And so Dutton presses on, outlining his project: "For nigh on fifty years this deadly division between friend and enemy framed revolutionary politics and life in socialist China. This division would take a variety of names (class struggle, contradictions, etc.) and forms (psychic, social, governmental) but it would always remain the central question of the Chinese revolutionary movement." (p3). This question of friend and enemy, he notes, is both the birth of the revolution and its epitaph -- 1926 and 1976, "these two dates demarcate the chapter conventionally marked out as revolutionary in Chinese history. In its revolutionary phase, the nation operated almost entirely on the basis of this binary divide. It was a divide that carved out a revolutionary path and paved that path with endless empirical exemplifications and permutations of this politico-philosophic distinction. Through the figure of public security, this book traces the life cycle of this distinction in China." (p4)

And yet the book is more than this.

It offers, in effect, the tale of the political told empirically through the re-telling of the concrete story of Chinese policing. It is the tale of this binary division as it develops and takes on organisational forms. It is the story of what happens when the binary of politics saturates the lifeworld to become its doxa -- when every facet of life turns on knowing who the enemy is and acting against that figure. It is at that moment that we arrive at the point where society and life itself become fused in politics. (p4)

This names something I'm currently trying to work out in my PhD work: the system and lifeworld distinction, as Habermas has it, of Soviet Communism. More pointedly, the way this distinction under Communism is collapsed to 'invade' the private (and psychic) space of the subject. (Always subject, never citizen -- as Heller puts it.) This is where Dictatorship Over Needs has been so useful, but I think Policing Chinese Politics could be just as instructive. More on it another day...