From Socialist Ideology to Cultural Heritage: The Changing Basis of Legitimacy in the People’s Republic of China

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies hosts Richard Madsen as part of the Chinese Religions Seminar.

Speaker:
Richard Madsen, University of California, San Diego

Over the past generation, the moral basis of legitimacy in the Chinese state has transformed. At the grassroots level, the Marxist legitimation is dead. Now more than ever, the legitimacy appeal is to the virtues of everyday life. The Chinese Communist Party no longer even pretends to be about communism and increasingly presents itself as protector of China’s “non-material cultural heritage” –the rituals and myths and sought-after virtues that link everyday life to an imagined 5,000 years of glorious Chinese tradition. But what part of that heritage? The state’s notion of what part of “traditional culture” should be acknowledged, promoted, and celebrated is not necessarily what is meaningful to many ordinary people. “Heritage” is not easy to control. Once the state acknowledges the value of some of the rituals, myths, festivals, and professed virtues that pattern the texture of ordinary life, it is hard to shut the door on the others. Then the people themselves can fashion their own accounts of what constitutes their heritage, and they can use such accounts to justify their own social status and fashion their own forms of community–which could range from more to much less compatible with the state’s interests.

Richard Madsen is professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He received an MA in Asian studies and  a PhD in sociology from Harvard University. Professor Madsen was a codirector of a Ford Foundation project to help revive the academic discipline of sociology in China. His areas of specialization are sociology of ideas/culture, sociology of religion, comparative sociology, Chinese society, and “moral anthropology.” His books on China include Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (2007); Chen Village under Mao and Deng, coauthored with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger (1992); China and the American Dream (1994); China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (1998); and Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, coedited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz (2002).