Everyday Social Classification: How Neighbors Turned Against Each Other in China

• In Event: New Concepts, New Classifications and New Data in China, Russia and Beyond

Abstract

Group and social identification, including those associated with class, ethnicity, religion, and race, once institutionalized, can induce competition and conflict (Lieberman and Singh 2012, 2017; Ravi Bhavnani 2014). The reason is that, prejudice is more likely to be perceived, practiced, and mobilized for conflict and violence along the lines of these social identifications. However, the specific process of institutionalization and internalization of social classification and the inter-group tension that evolves around it remains underexplored. Following Brubaker and Cooper (2000), we consider the reification of identity a social process. To understand how social classification induces group conflict, we seek to understand the process and mechanisms through which an external identity imposed by the state becomes powerful everyday reality. Empirically, this study examines the social identification process in China before the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) was characterized as, among other things, an unprecedented mass movement with violent conflicts among people from different political categories. Why did neighbours and even family members turn violently against each other along new class and political labels only 15 years after their adoption? Complementing the existing explanation for violence during the Cultural Revolution that focus on government order or prior community conflict, we highlight a socialization process of opposing identities. Based on systematic examination of local policing practices collected from People’s Police, a periodical published by the Ministry of Public Security, we show how the re-categorization of population and construction of “enemies” gradually became routinized in people’s everyday life, not only through apportioning census and indoctrinating political propaganda, but more importantly through mundane social service provision. When small details of community activities such as routine fire and theft prevention were “elevated” into larger political action of preventing certain class categories from sabotaging the whole community, politics and everyday lives became intertwined and class categories percolated into the public consciousness. This study contributes to the scholarship of group conflict by probing into the process through which social classification enables opposing group identities that are subject to appropriation by political elites.

Author

• Juan Wang, McGill University