The politics ofPai Ma Pi: flattery as empty signifiers and social control in a Chinese workplace

AbstractThis article analyzes the practice of pai ma pi in a Chinese workplace in order to examine the recent transformation of subject formation and the political economy in China. Pai ma pi refers to any benevolent practice a subordinate directs toward his or her superiors to seek favor, protection, or other benefits. More than flattery or brownnosing, pai ma pi in a socialist workplace serves as an empty signifier; workers use it to combat the void created by their uncertainty about their position in relation to the disproportionate power of the all-encompassing, autocratic system, a power crystallized in the need for workers to maintain a clean record in their classified dang'an (personal dossier) to survive. However, the gradual breakdown of the socialist work unit system caused by neoliberal economic restructuring appears to diminish the practice of pai ma pi. The article, nevertheless, illustrates that pai ma pi both nurtures and challenges the neoliberal economy. As a strategic form of praise, pai ma pi, by aggrandizing higher-ups, intensifies the social hierarchy, and bureaucratic authority; meanwhile, it advances self-interest, which resonates with some of the neoliberal pillars in China, such as “freedom” and “self-enterprising.”Keywords: Chinaflatteryneoliberalismempty signifiersemiotic controlpersonal dossier Notes on contributorJie Yang is assistant professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests focus on emerging forms of inequality in China. She has done research on privatization and neoliberal restructuring and recently started a new project on mental health and psychotherapy in China. She has published articles in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Language, Ethnography, and Language and Communication. She is finishing an edited volume titled The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary East Asia and a monograph titled Unknotting the Heart: Gender, Unemployment and Psychotherapy in China. Notes1. An earlier version of this article was read by Hy Van Luong, Bonnie McElhinny, Monica Heller, and Marguerite Pigeon. I thank them for their guidance and insightful comments. The final version of this essay greatly benefits from the penetrating comments of the two anonymous reviewers. The data used for this analysis are drawn from my doctoral dissertation research funded by Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.2. For this essay, I drew from data collected during field research I conducted between 2002 and 2003 on the privatization of a watch factory in Changping, Beijing. I returned to this site again in the summers of 2007–2011. The data include about 300 hours of audio/video-recorded interviews with more than 120 workers, enterprise managers, and reemployment, and poverty-relief program managers. The research is also based on 14 months spent conducting participant-observation in the watch factory between 2002 and 2003. Factory management assigned me to be part of the team responsible for transporting watch parts between workshops. I also took notes and recorded for management at meetings; I was allowed to keep copies of these notes and tapes. These experiences afforded me contact with a wide range of individuals, including management and workers. To maintain confidentiality, all the names used in this article are fictional. I did all the translations.3. A work unit (workplace) was the main provider of welfare and social security for urbanites in China; the life chances of workers were determined not by his or her position in the market but bounded by their residence and employment status. A work unit regulated both the work and nonwork activities of its employees. Labor relations were characterized by worker dependence and managerial paternalism (Walder Citation1984; Xiaobo and Perry Citation1997).4. According to some sources, in (Inner) Mongolia, even ordinary people had several horses, and the culture took pride in raising good-quality horses. In everyday interactions, people usually patted the butt of others’ horses and complimented them in order to make the owners happy. Over time, this matter-of-fact praise took on a social function, turning into flattery, regardless of the quality of the horse. Since a horse is a symbol of, particularly, the power, status, and identity of military officials, the best compliment a subordinate could give their superiors was to pat their superiors' horses and flatter them in this way. After Mongolians took over the kingdom and established the Yuan Dynasty, the practice of pai ma pi infiltrated the Han culture, becoming popular throughout China until today (see the original Chinese explanation of pai ma pi at baike.baidu.com/view/26474.htm).5. Face, in Chinese, is translated as lian or mianzi. Andrew Kipnis (1995, 127) suggests that the difference between lian and mianzi lies in their orders of visibility; while lian – the front part of the head – is basic, mianzi, referring to a surface, involves a second-order visibility. Everyone has lian, but only those with social standing have mianzi. Mianzi connotes social power and influence.6. Since the 1980s, talent centers have been established to transform the socialist employment system into a market-oriented employment system. Talent centers celebrate mutual choice and freedom from the state. The relaxed control of dang'an and its relocation from the state sector to talent centers is key to this process. This has revitalized the flow of labor power to facilitate the new labor market. See Hoffman (Citation2006) for a more-detailed discussion of talent centers and their functions for subject formation and post-Mao governmentality.7. Tedeschi and Melburg (Citation1984, 38–40), for example, identify four ingratiation strategies: (1) speaking in front of a superior to enhance oneself; (2) complimenting or flattering one's superior; (3) making statements indicating similarities in belief or attitude with one's superior; and (4) doing favors for a superior. Practices of pai ma pi in Changping resonate with all but the first of these. I often saw people speak in a self-denying rather than self-enhancing manner in front of a superior.8. Pai ma pi enhances the flatterer in the guise of aggrandizing the person being flattered (i.e., his or her status, feeling of influence, or sense of entitlement). It does not have to reflect the flatterer's real feelings or intentions. As Stengel (Citation2000) writes: “It may be inflated or exaggerated or it may be accurate and truthful, but it is praise that seeks some result, whether it be increased liking or an office with a window. It is a kind of manipulation of reality that uses the enhancement of another for our own self-advantage. (15)9. Ideally, pai ma pi is performed with artistic hanxu – being indirect or reserved; that is, pai ma pi presents no direct association with what it signifies (the real purpose). It respects those being flattered because they are treated not as a target for pai ma pi but as a person with emotions who deserves sincere respect. Indeed, hanxu is the pivotal feature of esthetic suggestiveness in Chinese thought (Gu Citation2003). When combined with the practice of pai ma pi, being hanxu establishes a hegemonic discursive mechanism that conceals the mode of the exercise of power.10. The dang'an system is believed to have been established in the 1950s; however, the party's record-keeping system started the rural revolutionary bases in the 1920s.11. For 14 years, one Chinese worker could not find a decent job because of a page in his dang'an documenting that he was fired from his former workplace due to theft. The truth is that he was fired because of his disobedience toward his superiors (Shanghai Daily, May 23, 2003).12. Up to the mid-1990s, China's urban-economic restructuring (downscaling and privatizing the state sector and expanding the private sector) had displaced over 35 million workers from the state sector and transformed 12–15 million of them into the new urban poor (Kernan and Rocca Citation2000). Other types of urban poor include migrant workers and those who never entered the socialist work unit system to begin with (Cho Citation2006).13. The population working without dang'an in Beijing has recently been rising. The number of people in Beijing whose dang'an is separate from their workplaces increased from 94,000 in 1997 to 291,000 in 2003. At least 1 in 10 people now works without their dang'an in their current workplace (Beijing Laodong Jiuye Bao, May 25, 2003, 14).