ABSTRACT
The past three decades (from the end of the 1970s to the end of the 2000s) in China have witnessed tremendous changes, primarily as a result of the shift of the focus of the state from class struggle to economic development. China soon eliminated the threat of famine and the rationing of food in the first decade of the reform. The average annual GDP growth rate during the same period was about three times the world average.1 Between 1981 and 2004 China had the largest poverty reduction in human history (World Bank 2008). Along with rapid economic development, there has been, in official discourse, an abandonment of the ethos of sacrificing life for the revolutionary cause, and an emerging appeal for valuing life. This change, which is perhaps among the most significant in the transformation of contemporary China, has enormous bearings on the question “what is an adequate life in China now?” “What is an adequate life in China?,” a question raised by Arthur Kleinman, was the title of the conference held at Harvard in May, 2006. The concern with “what an adequate life is” has been central to the long career of two of the three co-editors of this volume. Arthur Kleinman has been exploring the issue of “who we are,” “how to live a moral life,” “what moral experience entails,” and “what really matters in life” (Kleinman 1999, 2006). Tu Weiming has been exploring the issue of “how to learn to be human,” “what the Confucian self is and what value it has for today’s China and the world,” “how being human is an ethicoreligious question,” and “how human beings can flourish as human beings” (Tu 1985, 1989; de Bary and Tu 1998). Conversations in this conference among scholars from a variety of fields-anthropology, Chinese philosophy, sociology, political science, history, economics, studies of law, psychiatry, and public health-offered many insights into the issue of “an adequate life.” One of the most important insights concerns how the change in people’s relationship with state power over the past three decades has affected what constitutes an adequate life. The official abandonment of the ethos of sacrificing life for the revolutionary cause constitutes the crucial part of the changing relationship. Among various ways to conceptualize this change, I draw on the notion of “governmentality” raised by Michel Foucault three decades ago at the same time as China’s reform was just about to start. “Governmentality” is both a mode of power and a rationale for the use of power under modernity. My main argument
is that the change in the relationship people have with the state in China has a lot to do with the deepening of governmentality, seen in the changing governance of life, and, to a large degree, the deepening in governmentality accounts for China’s rise over the past decades. The purpose of making inquiries into the governance of life is to push life beyond the survival of living beings to a level of adequacy and human flourishing.2
