Jie Yang (Anthropology, Simon Frasier University)
The dang’an ‘personal dossier’
This paper analyzes China’s dang’an (personal dossier) system and its recent transformation in order to examine China’s post-Mao governmentality. Every Chinese employee has a dang’an, papers enclosed in an envelope documenting personal information on education, job history, family background, political activities, achievements, mistakes, and so on. By entextualizing people’s everyday existence into the dang’an and lacing it with the rest of the bureaucratic system, the ruling party deploys this coded system for various purposes such as job transfers, promotions, gaining party membership, getting passports, etc., in order to control the mobility, welfare and social ranking of the urban population. The secret, undemocratic nature of the dang’an becomes the source of considerable anxiety and uncertainty. And it demonstrates the subjective and psychic dimension of power and governance – the subjective dynamic that sustains the state as a powerful and inescapable social reality (Zizek 1994; Butler 1997; Tie 2004).
With China’s market reform since the late 1970s, many elements of Maoist socialism have been decomposed, and the dang’an as one of the socialist defining features has also been transformed from mainly a mode of totalizing control into a mechanism for enacting market economy. But the dang’an as a form of ghostly and persecutory power still haunts those who grew up in Mao’s era and prevents them from fully embracing market ideologies. Contextualizing the analysis of the dang’an in the privatization of a state-own enterprise in Beijing, this paper examines various forms of spectral incorporation – to revise (negate) the dang’an as an object of fear and (psychic) violence by the state and relax its haunting and interpellation of individuals. Through revising the dang’an system, both socialism and its pillar, the working class are spectralized (Derrida 1995) and become reduced and derivative categories for neoliberal market economy. Also, the transformation of the dang’an has given rise to new forms of spatialization, through which workers’ consciousness of time is spatialized. Since class consciousness is above all a consciousness of time (Domarchi 1948; Lukacs 1968; Gross 1981), such spatialization tends to reduce workers’ class consciousness and the chance of organized resistance, therefore sustaining stability.
Jie Yang received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2006. She is an assistant professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her research interests include contemporary China, language, gender/sexuality, ideology/power, postsocialism, neoliberalism, and mental health. She is now working on two projects: a monograph titled The State of Fear and Suspicion: Unemployment, Mental Illness and Stability in post-Mao China and an edited volume titled Affects and Markets in Contemporary East Asia.
With China’s market reform since the late 1970s, many elements of Maoist socialism have been decomposed, and the dang’an as one of the socialist defining features has also been transformed from mainly a mode of totalizing control into a mechanism for enacting market economy. But the dang’an as a form of ghostly and persecutory power still haunts those who grew up in Mao’s era and prevents them from fully embracing market ideologies. Contextualizing the analysis of the dang’an in the privatization of a state-own enterprise in Beijing, this paper examines various forms of spectral incorporation – to revise (negate) the dang’an as an object of fear and (psychic) violence by the state and relax its haunting and interpellation of individuals. Through revising the dang’an system, both socialism and its pillar, the working class are spectralized (Derrida 1995) and become reduced and derivative categories for neoliberal market economy. Also, the transformation of the dang’an has given rise to new forms of spatialization, through which workers’ consciousness of time is spatialized. Since class consciousness is above all a consciousness of time (Domarchi 1948; Lukacs 1968; Gross 1981), such spatialization tends to reduce workers’ class consciousness and the chance of organized resistance, therefore sustaining stability.
Jie Yang received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2006. She is an assistant professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her research interests include contemporary China, language, gender/sexuality, ideology/power, postsocialism, neoliberalism, and mental health. She is now working on two projects: a monograph titled The State of Fear and Suspicion: Unemployment, Mental Illness and Stability in post-Mao China and an edited volume titled Affects and Markets in Contemporary East Asia.
