Prisonscape: Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

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Prisonscape

Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

Serena De Marchi

Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Languages and Cultures at Stockholm University to be publicly defended on Saturday 19 September 2020 at 10.00 in aulan, hus 4, Kräftriket, Roslagsvägen 101.

Abstract

This study focuses on the prison writings from and about modern China (from the Mao era to the present day). It builds on previous research on Chinese prison camp literature as well as on sociological and historical studies of the evolution of punishments, both within the Chinese context and from a more global perspective. Theoretically and methodologically, the subject is approached through the conceptual model of the prisonscape. Informed by Arjun Appadurai’s theories on global interactions and by Edward Soja’s notion of “thirdspace,” this model is employed to explore the ways in which prison, through literature, is re-mapped as an “imagined world."

The aim of this work is twofold: on the one hand, it seeks to characterize prison writings as a global literary genre and to position Chinese prison literature within a national literary system and in relation to a “world literary space” (Casanova).

On the other hand, the literary analysis aims at illuminating key aspects of the imagined world of the Chinese prison.

The textual analysis is organized around two main thematic explorations that focus, in turn, on a spatial and a corporeal dimension. Through the literary investigation of carceral spaces and carceral bodies, this study ultimately aims to contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of the Chinese prisonscape.

Keywords: Prison, China, Prison Literature, Space, Body.

Stockholm 2020

http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-183521

ISBN 978-91-7911-168-7 ISBN 978-91-7911-169-4

Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies

Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm

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PRISONSCAPE

Serena De Marchi

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Prisonscape

Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

Serena De Marchi

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©Serena De Marchi, Stockholm University 2020 ISBN print 978-91-7911-168-7

ISBN PDF 978-91-7911-169-4

Cover illustration: collage by Serena De Marchi, images from unsplash.com Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2019

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To Paolo

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Acknowledgments

Writing this dissertation has been a challenging yet exciting process. Here is where I would like to express my thanks to the many people who have helped and supported me during this journey.

To my supervisor Irmy Schweiger, who has provided me with constant encouragement and invaluable guidance. This work would not have been possible without her.

To my co-supervisor Monika Gänssbauer, who jumped in when this project had already started. Her advice has contributed to make my research more focused and coherent.

To Shuangyi Li for his brilliant comments and acute questions, and for making my final seminar an experience of academic growth.

To Shu-mei Shi and Daniel Roux, who have helped me look at my own work from multiple perspectives.

To the Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien, the Wallenbergsstiftelsens fond, the Stockholm University donation scholarships, the Rhodin fund and the Håkansson fund, for generously allowing me to travel to present my research.

To Olivier Höhn and all the staff at the Stockholm University library for helping me get all the books and material I needed.

To my wonderful colleagues at the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Turkish Studies, who during these five years have given continuous support and advice. To Astrid Ottosson al-Bitar and Ewa Machotka for attentively reading and assessing my work. To Hailin Wang and Ingela Jin for checking my Chinese translations. To Johan Fresk and Maria Ehnhage, for helping me with the headache-inducing bureaucracy. To Marja Kaikkonen for lending me her house and her books. To Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström for the book chats and the technical assistance. To my friends and fellow PhD students at the department:

Ekaterina, Andreas, Erik, Iain, Ida, Kim, Seren, with whom I shared doubts, joys and many fikas.

To Niklas Hallstedt, for helping me with the Swedish language.

To Elena Pollacchi, for the long walks and the inspiring talks.

To my family in Italy: mom, dad, Silvia, Chiara and grandma.

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And finally, to Paolo, passionate historian, patient listener, and love of my life, for always being by my side.

Stockholm, July 2020 Serena De Marchi

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Note on Conventions

Romanization of Chinese is given using Hanyu pinyin , except for a few names or terms better known with other transcriptions. Chinese words in pinyin are followed by characters the first time they are used. Both fanti (traditional form) and jianti (simplified form) have been employed throughout this work, in accordance with the authors’

usage.

All translations from Chinese, Italian, French and Spanish are mine, unless otherwise specified. Chinese book titles are referred to in my English translation. Where an official English translation also exists, it has been indicated.

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Introduction

With trembling hand, I wrote on a piece of paper the following opening line:

‘The re-education compound is the most unique scenery and history of this country. It is like a scar on an old tree, which eventually becomes an eye through which we see the world’.

That is how my book, “The Old Course,” begins.

Yan Lianke – The Four Books

‘ ’

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The re-education compound is the fictional carceral space where Yan Lianke ’s novel, The Four Books (2011), unfolds. The diegetic setting is in fact a narrative re- imagination of the labor camp, which is the historical expression of punishment that emerged in China starting from the 1950s, and which is ideologically based on the concepts of re- education and reform.

Yan Lianke emblematically describes the Chinese carceral experience as a wound.

Prison is, in fact, first and foremost a radically corporeal experience; it is lived and perceived through the body, which carries its visible and invisible marks. The scar is that carceral memory, a bodily reminder of that traumatic event. But the scar, at some point, “becomes an eye,” that is, an observational point of view, a perspective that shapes and models a certain understanding of reality. In other words, we see the present through the wound of the past.

And writing is a powerful means through which this transformation becomes tangible. It is a process of reconfiguration; the way through which the scar becomes the eye.

This dissertation is interested precisely in this corporeal and symbolic metamorphosis.

Its object of investigation is the literary reconfiguration of the modern Chinese experience of the prison, which, in Yan’s view, constitutes the “most unique scenery” of the country; a scenery that is a perceptual spatial entity, a landscape of some sort. The spatial dimension will, in fact, constitute an essential explorational framework for my analysis of prison narratives.

To put it differently, this research investigates the carceral texts that have emerged from

1 Yan Lianke , Si shu (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 2011), 235.

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experiences of incarceration in the Mao and post-Mao China (1950s to early 2010s), approaching them from a perspective that takes into account the unique relationship between spaces and bodies. This spatial and corporeal exploration is based on a broader theoretical model, which I call the prisonscape. The prisonscape, as I am going to illustrate in this work, is a landscape of literary reconfiguration, a theoretical and methodological cartography of narrative carceral worlds. It is made of both lived and imagined realities of prison that in this study will be investigated within a historico-geographical context that is primarily local (Chinese), but which is also necessarily inscribed within and intertwined with a global dimension.

In terms of typology, prison writing is not an unambiguous denomination, and in fact, part of this dissertation is interested in discussing a critical categorization of this literary expression, by taking the Chinese corpus as a case study. In order to do so, my discussion necessarily needs to depart from previous sketches and classifications, taking into account the cultural, social and historical specificities of the subject of this investigation.

Since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese history has been shaped by a number of turbulent political movements that aimed at identifying and casting out political enemies. As a result, many activists, writers, and intellectuals were accused of deviating from Communist Party orthodoxy, and ended up spending long years in detention centers, prisons, and labor camps (laogai and laojiao ). With the end of the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming , 1966-1976), some of these people were rehabilitated and started to write about their experiences. By the mid-1980s the literary corpus was large enough to earn a classificatory name. Big Wall Literature (Daqiang wenxue

) indicated works set within the walls of prison camps, and included the writings of Cong Weixi , Zhang Xianliang 「 , and Liu Binyan .² These texts, even when not explicitly autobiographical in form, are still heavily informed by the authors’ personal (and often decades-long) experiences of imprisonment.

Memoirs and novels about carceral experiences continued to appear during the Deng and Jiang era (late 1980s and 1990s), both within and outside the mainland. Many works were

2 Li Qian , Teding shiqi de daqiang wenxue (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue chubanshe, 1988), 156.

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in fact penned by exiled writers and activists who offered their prison experiences to testify to the brutality of the Chinese labor camp system. Among them are: Harry Wu, Nien Cheng

, Wumingshi , and others. During the years 2000s and 2010s, quite a few prison memoirs focused on the experiences of incarcerated activists and intellectuals as a consequence of their involvement with the Tian’anmen student movement in 1989, like Liao Yiwu 、 ’s, Wang Dan ’s, and Jiang Qisheng ’s works.

Generally speaking, the Chinese prison literature corpus is vast and varied. In order to discuss this literary category, this dissertation examines 16 prison texts (that will be presented in detail in chapter two), which I believe is a sufficient number to sustain my observations and reflections. My selection of the textual sources was informed, most crucially, by one criterion, which has to do with the subject of writing: prison. In other words, all the texts revolve around prison experiences referring to the People’s Republic of China of the Mao and post- Mao period, that is, from the 1950s until the present day. In terms of publication history, the oldest text was published in 1969, the most recent one in 2016. From a language perspective, I have chosen texts that, in their original versions, were written both in Chinese and English.

Finally, the literary genre. As mentioned, the issue is a crucial concern of this thesis, and it will be discussed in chapter two. However, following a traditionally recognized literary classification, these texts belong to different genres, which encompass both non-fiction and fiction, including: autobiography, memoir, reportage, novel, and novella.

Aims of the Study

My investigation of Chinese prison literature essentially moves along two tracks.

On the one hand, I am interested in discussing a possible definition of “prison writing”

as a literary genre. Defining genre has certainly to do with setting limitations. Jacques Derrida saw genre as subject to a law that requires purity, which in practice is never realized, because no text ever fits perfectly this or that genre, no text purely conforms to that law.³ The relationship of texts with genre is, according to Derrida, one of “participation without

3 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7 no. 1 (1980).

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belonging.”⁴ Therefore, when categorizing a text around a concept of genre, we need to pay attention to its ontological “impurity.”

In the construction of prison literature as a genre, my idea is not to create a mere classificatory tool, but to outline a category of participation based on an impure conception of prison as a global literary subject. In other words, I focus primarily on the subject “prison” as an essentially transcultural literary category. Drawing from the works of other prison scholars, this thesis seeks therefore to elaborate a global “prison poetics,”⁵ which I intend as aesthetical representation, experiential reconfiguration and (trans)cultural imagination. The 16 Chinese texts constitute the literary sources upon which this discussion on the prison genre is based.

Put differently, this thesis seeks to characterize and analyze Chinese prison literature in its specific particularities as well as in relation to a wider corpus of prison literature and therefore from a world literature perspective.

On the other hand, this study is interested in the literary aesthetics, the expressive tropes and the carceral imaginaries that prison writings construct. Through a comparative literary analysis, this work aims to investigate the different ways in which the Chinese prison is reconstructed, represented and reconfigured in the literary works. The analysis starts from a spatial dimension, which is recognized as a crucial characterizing aspect of the prison experience. As will be shown in the following chapters, the essential premise this exploration is based upon is that the carceral space is a lived space. That is why the second necessary focus of the literary analysis is on the carceral body. Body and space constitute the two conceptual approaches that will guide the literary exploration of the Chinese prison.

Theoretical Approaches

This work engages with a number of different theoretical and conceptual approaches, which are discussed and developed throughout this thesis. Let me briefly present them here.

The first essential theoretical inspiration is constituted by Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of “-scapes,” described as a way of understanding the global interactions

4 Ibid., 59.

5 Doran Larson, “Toward a Prison Poetics,” College Literature 37 no. 3 (Summer 2010).

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and exchanges that constitute the world we live in.⁶ Appadurai’s fluid theorizations allowed for a framing of prison as a global phenomenon, at the same time providing a tool, or a model, for my conceptualization of prisonscape, which will be explained in the following chapters.

The second major influence on this work is Edward Soja’s elaboration of “thirdspace,”

which was essential in broadening and better defining the space of enquiry, that is, prison.⁷ Through the formulation of the prisonscape as, essentially, an articulation of thirdspace, this work is able to frame the different interpretations of the literary prison as part of a collective global reality and imagination.

In my analysis of carceral spaces, I engage with Michel Foucault’s concept of

“heterotopia,”⁸ as well as with Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of “abject,”⁹ which I interpret in relation to the prison-space. In doing so, I refer to the concept of the “abject womb”

as articulated by Barbara Creed,¹⁰ and the interpretation of prison as a “uterine space” by Michael Fiddler.¹¹ The prison border (or boundary), a key element of prison architecture, has been explored following Jennifer Turner’s idea of “patchwork,”¹² and the notions of prison as claustrotopia and agoratopia have been further discussed. Finally, carceral space has been considered in relation to ideas of time, in an attempt to characterize a prison chronotope, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation.¹³

Following the spatial analysis is the exploration of that which inhabits the space, namely the prisoner’s body. In the investigation of the corporeal, I rely on the phenomenological perspective that looks at the body as a “vehicle,”¹⁴ integrating Merleau- Ponty’s theorizations with key aspects specific to a certain Chinese traditional interpretation of the human body. The phenomenological approach has been further complicated (or

6 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

7 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

8 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité 5 (October 1984).

9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

10 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Films, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

11 Michael Fiddler, “Projecting the Prison: The Depiction of the Uncanny in The Shawshank Redemption,”

Crime Media Culture 3 no. 2 (August 2007).

12 Jennifer Turner, The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

13 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981).

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2012 [1945]).

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complemented) through the adoption of a sensory perspective, as has been recently synthesized by David Howes.¹⁵ Furthermore, considering, as I will explain in the second chapter, the Chinese prison text as the embodiment of a certain historical necessity to bear witness, the carceral body has been looked at, in accordance with what was described by Howard Choy, as “the locus of historical writing.”¹⁶

Going back to Foucault, the carceral body that emerges from Chinese prison texts is interpreted in relation to his idea of “docile bodies,”¹⁷ and compared with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.”¹⁸ The gender dimension is also added to the discussion, including the necessary specification that the vast majority of the carceral bodies represented in these literary texts are male.

The Chinese carceral body is then analyzed following three main lines of inquiry. The first one investigates the hurting bodies; here the theoretical approach draws from conceptual discussions about the relationship between pain and language, starting from Elaine Scarry,¹⁹ and the way the former can or cannot be expressed through the latter. The second area of interest focuses on bodies as elicitors of disgust; in this case, Carloyn Korsmeyer’s proposition of a disgust aesthetics is discussed, together with other theories that deal with disgust as an emotion and as a sensory experience.²⁰ Finally, the third category of investigation delves into hungry bodies. This part relies on theories related to the discourse on eating, in the literal, that is sensory, and metaphorical senses. As regards the Chinese experience, I have been inspired by Gang Yue’s discussion which started from a semiotic analysis of the character chi (eat).²¹

To sum up, this work has been informed mostly by spatial theories, which were the ones that helped me come to a systematic understanding of the literary material. Theories on the

15 David Howes, ed., Senses and Sensations: Critical and Primary Sources, 4 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

16 Howard Choy, Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979-1997 (Leiden, Brill, 2008), 186.

17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (New York: Random House, 1977).

18 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 2005).

19 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

20 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011).

21 Gang Yue, The Mouth that Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1999).

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different aspects of the corporeal experience came at a second stage, and sensitively enriched the discussion by adding a lived dimension to the spatial one. Generally speaking, the different theories, concepts, and approaches that have been adopted throughout this thesis reflect a kind of creative and fluid engagement with the subject, which I believe is what makes the analysis more grounded, profound, and possibly more interesting.

Methodology and Demarcations

This work is concerned with defining prison as a transnational, transcultural – in other words, worldly - literary subject. To this purpose, the analysis of the Chinese texts is conducted from a comparative perspective, which is that of world literature. Prison is a global institution, though it is operated and experienced in many different local articulations. A worldly approach is therefore particularly appropriate (and is perhaps the only possible one) to investigate the ways in which such experiences are reconfigured in writing.

This research is not aimed at mere anthologizing. Nor is it guided by an obsession with categorization for the sole sake of order. On the contrary, my idea is to open up a space of reflection about prison as a universal literary category. That is why in this thesis the literary analyses employ a comparative methodology, on two levels. From a genre perspective, Chinese texts are discussed in reference to what Pascale Casanova called a “world literary space.”²² Where do Chinese prison texts support or challenge a worldly organization of prison literature?

On the level of close reading, the comparative methodology has been employed in the literary analysis of the carceral imagery that these texts construct. That is, the different issues pertaining to the literary representations of the space and the body have been organized following a thematic categorization. The analysis focuses not so much on plot, but rather on metaphors, or literary images, that reconfigure key aspects of the prison experience, with a bifocal attention to ideas of spaces and bodies.

22 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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From a narratological perspective, I believe, following Gérard Genette, in discerning between the different diegetic levels, thus distinguishing between the different voices that construct the narrative: the author (extradiegetic level), the narrator (intradiegetic level), the narratee (intra- and metadiegetic level).²³ This is especially interesting given the claim of identicalness between author and narrator that is traditionally recognized in autobiographical writing.²⁴ An attention to this distinction will allow me to work on the literary texts by taking into account both aesthetical and ethical aspects, which the sensitivity of the subject requires.

The primary sources, that is, the prison texts, have been chosen according to set spatio- temporal coordinates. All the texts originate, directly or indirectly, from mainland China. As explained above, this does not mean that all the works were written or published in the People’s Republic (in fact, the majority of them were published abroad), nor that the language used is exclusively Chinese (quite a few texts were originally published in English). However, because they still refer to and focus on events and experiences that took place within the mainland, in a period between the 1950s and the present day, I consider China as the fundamental cultural origin.

The reason behind this choice of spatial and temporal coordinates has to do with contextual coherence, which facilitates the comparative analysis. In fact, this historico- geographical delimitation is consistent with a conception and practice of punishments that is essentially comparable, though certain differences can be recognized with reference to specific historical periods and geographical locations.

This introduction precedes the first chapter that initiates the investigation by presenting a review of the historical and theoretical sources focusing on the evolution of punishments (which culminated in the invention of the penitentiary), starting from a European and Western perspective (from Michel Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish), and proceeding by including historical studies focused on non-Western prison systems, thus outlining a global history of the prison. The second part of the chapter provides a historical background for the analysis of the literary texts. That is, it presents an overview of the evolution of the Chinese penal system from a historical point of view, with a special focus on the prison reform period and, of course, on the prison system implemented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

23 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 212-62.

24 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1975]).

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Chapter two contemplates prison writings as a genre. It begins with some considerations on the prison memoir as personal autobiography but also as a possible medium through which to convey collective testimony, through an approach that always intertwines a global dimension with one that is specifically Chinese. The chapter develops the discussion around truth claims that characterize testimonial literature, and negotiates their relation to my definition of the prison literary genre. Finally, the chapter analyses the Chinese texts in relation to this definition and argues why and how these need to be framed in a world literature perspective.

Departing from the discussion on genre, the third chapter is dedicated to my theoretical exploration of the prisonscape, which will introduce the literary analysis from a spatial perspective. The chapter proceeds with the analysis of the carceral space in Chinese prison texts, and is organized following a thematic order, by grouping together carceral representations that are informed by a similar iconography, symbolism or rationale.

The natural continuation of a discussion on carceral spaces is one that focuses on what is to be found inside the space, namely the body of the prisoner. The fourth chapter begins with some considerations about theoretical approaches to bodies in general and carceral bodies in particular, and then presents the literary texts in a similar fashion to that of the previous chapter. As mentioned above, the literary analysis of bodies in prison is divided into three parts: the first part is dedicated to hurting bodies, with a focus on the representation of pain; the second part focuses on disgusting bodies, analyzing a certain disgust aesthetics employed to portray carceral bodies; the third and last part consists of an exploration of hungry bodies, and also presents some reflections around the eating discourse in China and looks at various meanings and representations of hunger.

Finally, a concluding note ends this exploration of Chinese prison literature, which synthesizes the main findings and characterizes the prisonscape as a conceptual model for literary exploration, pointing out the limitations and possible opportunities for future research.

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CHAPTER ONE. The Chinese Prison: A Historical Overview Prison Histories Around the World: A Review

The process of modernization of prison as a penal institution started in Europe in the 18th century, under the progressive impetus of the Enlightenment. Briefly, the various spectacularized types of corporal punishments (like public execution, to name one example), were gradually being replaced with incarceration, which was thought to be a more humane form of punishment, and which also relied, ideologically, on a belief that criminals could be reformed. In his 1975 seminal work, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault suggested that the reasons that contributed to the birth of prison did not solely have to do with humanitarian beliefs brought about by the Enlightenment. Rather, Foucault argued that prison reformers, who belonged to the bourgeois class, were motivated by a desire to strip power from the hands of an absolutist monarch and redistribute it (or disperse it) among a number of actors and institutions. Prison was one of these institutions, and it exercised a “microphysics of power”²⁵ through continued surveillance, which in turn was enacted through the Panopticon, whose ideal design allowed for the prisoners to be constantly observed by virtually a single guard, without them knowing whether or when they were being watched. This mechanism ensured the internalization of discipline, so that the prisoners would eventually become

“docile bodies.”²⁶ Because his philosophical enquiries into the institution of prison offer a broader reflection on how power is distributed and exercised in the modern society, Foucault’s work was truly revolutionary.

Before Foucault, Erving Goffman’s work had also been very influential in the study of deviant behavior and the institutions entrusted with containing it. Asylums, published in 1961, famously and controversially described the mental hospital as an example of a “total institution” (that included orphanages, nursing homes, sanitariums, boarding schools, work camps, monasteries and cloisters, and of course, prison), in which rigid discipline

25 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 24-30.

26 Ibid., 135-169.

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encompassed all aspects of patients’ everyday life.²⁷ The encompassing, or “total” character of total institutions, according to Goffman, “is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors.”²⁸ In short, Goffman concluded that the fundamental role of total institutions was to provide a secure space for deviant individuals, through their rigid separation from outside society. In these institutions, inmates would ideally learn to acknowledge their social role, something that they failed to interiorize in the outside context of regulated sociality, and in which they were no longer able to adapt.

More or less in conjunction with the publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, two other major studies contributed to the growing corpus of research on Western penal institutions; they are David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum and Michael Ignatieff’s A Just Measure of Pain. Rothman’s book, published four years before Discipline and Punish, identifies the Jacksonian Era (1820s-1840s) as the moment in which, in the United States, the power apparatus started to “construct and support institutions for deviant and dependent members of the community.”²⁹ Rothman posited that, before the American Revolution, the colonists thought that deviant people simply had to be assimilated into society, as they were considered to be a natural occurrence within the context of social life. Of course some extremely troublesome cases were dealt with using banishment or execution but, in general, deviant or dependent individuals were not considered a threat to the integrity of the community. However, Rothman posits, with the beginning of the Jacksonian Era, a radical shift in attitudes toward deviancy was registered. Population growth and a generally improved living situation seemed to have influenced Americans to adopt a less deterministic vision of the human being; everyone could actually be rehabilitated. This renewed approach toward deviance and crime fueled the construction of penitentiaries, asylums, and other places of rehabilitation. At this point, one could very well raise the question as to what, exactly, prompted this radical change in America’s attitudes toward its deviant people. Rothman

27 Erving Goffman, Asylums: An Essay of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (London:

Penguin, 1991 [1961]).

28 Ibid., 15-16.

29 David Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), xiii.

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suggests that the newly founded American nation actually feared instability; therefore, deviancy was no longer interpreted as a mere social disruption, but represented a threat to the republic.

Ignatieff’s A Just Measure of Pain, in a similar manner to Rothman, investigates the historical contingencies that brought about the emergence, between 1750 and 1850, of the English penitentiary. In the case of England, the shift toward a more benevolent form of punishment was triggered by the Enlightenment and, especially, by the Protestant religion.

Ignatieff argues that religious nonconformists embraced “the idea of the penitentiary because, as a system of authority and as a machine for the remaking of men, it reflected some of their deepest political, psychological, and religious assumptions.”³⁰ The Pentonville Penitentiary, which opened in 1882, based on the Philadelphia model,³¹ adopted isolation as a way to encourage a process of thought and behavior reform.

As observed in an article by Mary Gibson, Foucault, Rothman, and Ignatieff all date the birth of the prison to between 1760 and 1840.³² Furthermore, all three scholars express suspicion toward the reformers’ self-proclaimed humanitarian motives as being the basis for the birth of prison (with Foucault being the most skeptical). In fact, all three studies revealed the de-humanizing side of modern penitentiaries, and concluded that the reformers’ main agenda was to facilitate their access to power.³³

After Discipline and Punish, a number of scholars responded to Foucault, criticizing some of his arguments. Most note-worthy was the volume L’impossible prison, edited by Michelle Perrot, in which a number of French historians famously counteracted Foucault’s main theses. The book opens with a review of Discipline and Punish authored by Jacques Léonard, who stated that, while Foucault’s conceptualization of disciplinary techniques was certainly innovative and commendable, he had remarkably failed to acknowledge other types of punishment that coexisted with the modern prison, for example, the old-regime bagnes, or

30 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (New York: Penguin, 1978), 79.

31 Also known as “cellular” or “separate” system, this form of imprisonment practice was based on the Eastern State Penitentiary of Philadelphia (active from 1829), which was based on the physical separation of inmates.

32 Mary Gibson, “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” American Historical Review 116 no. 4 (October 2011): 1044.

33 Ibid.

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the labor camps.³⁴ However, the most concerning issue for these scholars was perhaps the fact that Foucault did not explicitly locate the origin of the disciplinary power, which he instead exemplified as a “microphysics” that unevenly and fragmentedly permeated society.

A further contribution to the field of prison studies focused on uncovering key aspects that the above-mentioned canonic works had only partially dealt with or completely left out, such as the issues of gender and race. Most notably, Patricia O’Brien’s The Promise of Punishment presents a study of the development of the modern French prison considering and comparing both men’s and women’s experiences of imprisonment.³⁵ In the following years, further researches into US systems followed, such as Estelle Freedman’s Their Sisters’

Keepers and Nicole Hahn Rafter’s Partial Justice, the latter being particularly revealing of the disparity in the experience of imprisonment among black and white women.³⁶

Another critique of the Foucauldian theorization of the development of punishments came from scholars whose work was focused on penal systems that existed prior to the prison reform movement. Among them, most famously, was Pieter Spierenburg, who based his study on a great number of archival sources from Republican Amsterdam, documenting more than 2000 public executions.³⁷ Spierenburg built on Norbert Elias’ argument of the “civilizing process,”³⁸ which interested Europe in the early modern period, and which explained how European elites gradually became more sensitive toward the brutality of public punishments.

For Spierenburg, this explained the gradual, rather than abrupt, shift toward a less spectacular and more humane system of punishment, which was concomitant with the birth of nation- states in replacement to feudal institutions.

Understanding the complexity behind different concepts of punishment and arguing for the necessity to approach them from a plurality of theoretical frameworks, David Garland

34 Jacques Léonard, “L’historien et le philosophe, a propos de: Surveiller et Punir: naissance de la prison,” in L’impossible prison: recherches sur le système pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle, ed. Michelle Perrot (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980).

35 Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

36 Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1984); Nichole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (New York: Routledge, 1990).

37 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

38 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000 [1978]).

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elaborates on theories of punishment from a cultural and sociological perspective.³⁹ The American scholar argues that the study of punishment should be at the center of a broader discussion on social theory, and it should be considered a social institution in the same way as family, religion, and education.

Besides Garland’s theoretical study, the 1990s saw the publication of two other major volumes that consolidated the importance of prison history as a prominent scholarly field of research. The first volume is Institutions of Confinement, edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, and it focuses mainly on Germany.⁴⁰ The other one is The Oxford History of the Prison, edited by Norval Morris and David Rothman; an essential read for every student of prison history, the volume summarized much of the literature produced until the time of publication, 1995.⁴¹

Between the 1990s and 2000s, a number of studies that mapped prison histories from non-Western worlds contributed to opening up the field of prison studies in a global perspective by significantly expanding the discussion around issues of race and colonialism.

Among these publications is Peter Zinoman’s work, in which the author suggests that, in the case of Vietnam, the modern prison represented the legacy of colonial powers, which had exported it as part of their civilizing mission.⁴² Other contributions followed, covering the history of African, Latin-American and Asian penal systems.⁴³ Finally, a volume that put together a number of essays on prison history of the three continents was Cultures of Confinement, edited by Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, published in 2007.⁴⁴

39 David Garland, Punishment and the Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).

40 Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, eds., Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

41 Norval Morris and David Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

42 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001).

43 For Africa see Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth:

Heinemann, 2003); for Latin America see Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830-1940 (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1995) and Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their World: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); for Japan see Daniel Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); for India see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

44 Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds., Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (London: Hurst & Co., 2007).

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Frank Dikötter is also the author of a remarkable volume that traces the origins of the Chinese penal system, based, like all Dikötter’s scholarly works, on an impressive number of archival sources. Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China has been a valuable resource in the writing of this thesis.⁴⁵ Ten years before Dikötter’s study, Michael Dutton’s Policing and Punishment in China was published. The book is theoretically heavily influenced by Foucauldian theory, which is evident in its inclusion of a chapter on “the spread of the carceral” into the social sphere. In general, the volume seeks to explore and explain how “the traditional collectivist power of a patriarchalist state has been rearticulated to empower socialist discourse.”⁴⁶ Another important contribution to the study of China’s penal history is Klaus Mühlhahn’s Criminal Justice in China, which expands Dikötter and Dutton’s works to include a chapter on the reform-through-labor system.⁴⁷ But one of the first groundbreaking and comprehensive studies of the laogai system was published in the early 1990s in France. This was Jean-Luc Domenach’s Chine: L’archipel oublié, a massive inquiry into the forgotten (at that time) archipelago that was the Chinese penal system during the communist era.⁴⁸ Concomitantly with the publication of Domenach’s volume was Harry Wu’s Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, which is a work that is partially informed by the author’s own nineteen-year, first-hand experience of the laogai.⁴⁹ James Seymour and Richard Anderson are the authors of New Ghost Old Ghost: Prison and Labour Reform Camps in China, a volume that is based exclusively on archival sources from the northwestern provinces of Gansu, Xinjiang and Qinghai, and from Chinese published statistics on prison population and prison economy.⁵⁰

Among Chinese sources, I found Yang Ximei ’s Zhongguo jianyu shi

[The Chinese history of the prison] extremely useful; it provides a general but exhaustive outline of prison history in China from an orthodox perspective, given that Yang is a professor at the Central Institute for Correctional Police in Baoding, the only college under

45 Frank Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (London: Hurst & Co., 2002).

46 Michael Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to ‘The People’ (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), 15.

47 Klaus Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

48 Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine, l’archipel oublié (Paris: Fayard, 1992).

49 Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).

50 James Seymour and Richard Anderson, New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (London: Routledge, 2015 [1998]).

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the Chinese Ministry of Justice.⁵¹ From a completely opposite perspective, another important contribution to the discussion on the development of the reform-through-labor system from an ideological point of view is Hu Ping’s Ren de xunhua, duobi yu fanpan

, which has been translated into English by Philip Williams and Yenna Wu as The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State.⁵²

I will conclude this overview of the global history of the prison by mentioning the two volumes on China’s prison camp world, both authored by Williams and Wu, that have been invaluable sources for the compilation of this thesis. The first one is The Great Wall of Confinement, in which the authors provide a reconstructed account of the remold-through- labor system⁵³ through the analysis of political prison memoirs. They argue that such testimonial texts do not engage in a simple act of “mirroring” or “reflecting” of reality. These terms are but “vulgar distortions of the concept of mimesis, which refers to the approximate imitation of reality rather than the supposed duplication or ‘replacement’ of reality.”⁵⁴ In other words, the literary non-fictional texts are considered in terms of their historical and human value; together they construct a landscape of human suffering and resilience, offering the readers a glimpse into the unsettling world of China’s camp system.

The second work edited by Williams and Wu is Remolding and Resistance among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp, which is more inherently literary, inasmuch it offers an analysis of Chinese prison writings (including fiction and non-fiction), from a historical and comparative perspective.⁵⁵

51 Yang, Ximei , Zhongguo jianyu shi (n.p.: Falü chubanshe, 2016).

52 Hu, Ping, Ren de xunhua, duobi de fanpan (Hong Kong: Yazhou kexue chubanshe, 1999). English translation:

The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State, trans. Philip Williams and Yenna Wu (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

53 The authors prefer to render gaizao with the English “remold” rather than the more commonly used

“reform.” See the discussion on page 27.

54 Philip Williams and Yenna Wu, The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Emphasis in the original.

55 Philip Williams and Yenna Wu, eds., Remolding and Resistance Among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp:

Disciplined and Published (London: Routledge, 2006).

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A Global Approach to Prison History

The summary of the most relevant literature on the world history of the prison outlined above was in part motivated by my desire to provide a framework for understanding where and how my thesis can hopefully contribute to the development of the field. In addition, the historical outline testifies to the incredible development, in quantity and quality, of the research on prison history, which is evidently proceeding in a global direction. Gibson, for instance, in the article mentioned above, consistently advocates the adoption of a global perspective for the study of prison history, strengthening her argument by citing the emergence of a corpus of literature on the history of prison, of which I have given a few examples. All these works, she concludes, “point the way toward a global history of punishment that emphasizes the circulation of discourses and practices among continents and within regions.”⁵⁶

But understanding prison from a global point of view does not imply neglecting the different ways in which it has been interpreted locally. This aspect is clearly articulated in the above-quoted Cultures of Confinement. In the introduction, authored by Dikötter, the editor seems almost to argue against a global perspective on the study of prison. He clearly states that

[r]ather than interpreting its popularity everywhere as the predictable result of ‘globalization’, this book underlines the fact that prison – like all institutions – was never simply imposed or copied, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its flexibility.⁵⁷

The advent of the modern prison was motivated by a general ideological shift in what was believed to be the scope of punishment; retribution through corporal castigation was famously substituted with incapacitation through confinement, which had to include, most importantly, a process of reformation. Clearly, the practical ways in which this was accomplished differed from nation to nation. Furthermore, penologists and prison experts today agree that, in the majority of cases, these reforms remained on the theoretical level, whereas the actual situation

56 Gibson, “Global Perspectives,” 1062.

57 Dikötter, introduction to Cultures of Confinement, 1.

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inside modern prisons offers a much more disappointing picture. In short, the project of the modern prison failed to deliver what it promised; prison was never able to actually reform the criminals, and it mostly remained “an enclave of violence, producing caged misery at worst, enforced lethargy at best.”⁵⁸

In a way, a global approach to the study of prison means acknowledging the existence of different experiences of incarceration that in many cases question or confute certain theories that have been developed based on European or American experiences. Therefore, whereas the questioning of euro- or Western-centrism, when it comes to major sociological and cultural theorizations, is always welcome, this is not the only reason why we should engage in a study of the global prison. Let me explain why.

Among the criticisms addressed to Foucault about his theorization of prison, was the fact that he had completely neglected to look at what was actually going on inside; he proposed a conceptualization of the disciplined body as if it were an object without agency, that just passively accepted the disciplining power of the authority. Had he looked at the actual bodies in prison, he would have found a whole underworld of resistance. Prisoners are active subjectivities, capable of organizing and even resisting the oppressing carceral power.

This, I believe, is why the global perspective on prison is worth employing. As more prison histories and prison experiences from around the world emerge and enrich our knowledge of the global institution, the more we are able to connect them, look at them from a comparative perspective, and possibly understand or uncover some aspects that previously were hidden, or overlooked. And this is precisely what this thesis seeks to achieve. By exploring and comparing the ways in which Chinese literary texts represent and reconstruct specific contested, resisting spaces, and examining how they have been appropriated by their inhabitants, this work seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of prison as a global experience.

58 Ibid., 3.

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The Chinese Penal System

As some of the above-mentioned studies have shown, in China, prison reform was the result of a substantial desire for modernization, which inevitably had to include a rethinking of the penal system. But how did the modernization process begin? And how does the modern system differ from the old one?

In this section, I will try to answer these questions by providing a historical outline of the development of the Chinese penal system, directing special attention to the core ideological concepts of the punitive and reformation processes, and the way they have developed over the years.

I believe that providing a historical background to the analysis of literary sources will ground my work in a reliable, objective frame, allowing me to present arguments and draw conclusions that can be historically verified or contested. Nonetheless, as I will argue in more detail in the next chapter, my analysis considers the textual, i.e. literary dimension of the primary sources, which does not necessarily imply the denial tout court of their representational and historical significance.

In what follows, I will provide a concise reconstruction of the main ideological and practical aspects of the Chinese system of punishment, starting from the early dynasties but mostly focusing on the development in the modern sense, a process that was initiated during the late Qing period and developed during the Republican and, to some extent, during the communist period. But let us start from the very beginning; let us commence this exploration of the history of the Chinese system of punishment with the ways in which it was conceived and practiced in pre-modern China.

Pre-modern China

The surprising amount of historical records produced in pre-modern China, many of which belong to a consistent corpus of legal documents, has allowed researchers and historians to paint a rather clear picture of what the legal system of early China looked like, and how it has mutated through the centuries. The system of laws and regulations of traditional China has been described by Geoffrey MacCormack as Legalist in form and Confucian in spirit,

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although some other elements not ascribable to either Legalism or Confucianism are certainly present.⁵⁹ In broad terms, the penal system of ancient China did not distinguish between criminal and civil law, nor between public and private law.

The Chinese, the ancient term for punishment is xing which is composed of the radical dao (knife) on the right and the jing as a phonetic component on the left. In the Shuowen Jiezi , the Later Han (25-220 AD) dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , xing is associated with the meaning of “cutting the throat.”⁶⁰ Another crucial term with a juridical connotation was introduced with Confucius, who, living in the turbulent period of the Spring and Autumn (771-476 BCE), was very preoccupied with the restoration of peace and social justice. He famously believed that a righteous government had to rule with li , i.e.

social rites, and thought that a just government would have to exercise power through moral examples rather than with the threat of punishments.⁶¹

Early written records of punishments can be found in the Book of Documents (772-476 BCE). In the book, a section, denominated Lü xing [Punishments of Lü], is the record of an order promulgated by the king of Western Zhou (1046-771 BCE) to a minister, who instructed him to create a system of punishments. In particular, this document references the famous “five punishments” (wu xing ), and has them descending from the Miao people, at the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor. The punishments were already considered excessively severe at the time, and were described in these terms:

Among the people of Miao, they did not use the power of goodness, but the restraint of punishments. They made the five punishments engines of oppression, calling them the laws. They slaughtered the innocent, and were the first also to go to excess in cutting off the nose, cutting off the ears, castration, and branding.⁶²

Besides corporal punishments, evidence of the existence of hard labor (tuyi or tuxing ) employed as punishment for felons dates back to the Spring and Autumn period, as well as conscript labor (yi or yaoyi ) that is believed to be precedent even to that date.

59 Geoffrey MacCormack, The Spirit of Traditional Chinese Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 1.

60 Chinese Text Project, Xu Shen , Shuowen Jiezi , “dao” section.

61 Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China, 16-17.

62 Chinese Text Project, Shangshu , “Lü xing” , sect. 2.

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State-run convict labor allowed the realization of major infrastructure projects, including, for instance, the sixth-century Grand Canal and the Great Wall itself.⁶³

When Qin Shi Huang , founder of the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE), unified China in 221 BCE. The penal laws he imposed derived from the Legalist school mentioned above (fajia ). This school, whose principal proponents were Shang Yang and Han Feizi , significantly stressed political and government practice over Confucian principles of self-cultivation and moral education, which were, as a result, almost completely dismissed. One of the main tenets of the Legalist school postulated that, if minor offenses were met with severe punishment, in the long run, people would be dissuaded from engaging in malfeasance altogether, so that finally punishment itself would become unnecessary. In accordance with this principle, the legal code of Qin included only penal laws that implemented particularly severe punishments meant to strictly regulate society in order to maintain the stability of the empire.

With the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 AD), the penal system underwent a process that saw the progressive incorporation of elements of the Confucian doctrine, culminating with the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), when the “Confucianization of the law” was completed.

Confucian philosophy (later reformulated in the form of Neo-Confucianism) practically constituted a continued source of inspiration in the institutionalization of penal codes throughout the Song (960-1279 AD), Ming (1368-1644 AD) and Qing (1644-1911 AD) dynasties.⁶⁴

Prison Reform Movement (Late Qing Period)

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, in the late Qing period, many Chinese officials and independent researchers were instructed to travel abroad and study the carceral systems of Europe and Japan. During this period, as we have seen, a process of modernization of the penal system was already happening in Europe, which functioned as an important catalyst for the development of the Chinese system as well. Having visited the clean and efficient prisons of Europe, many scholars started to campaign for a reform of the penal system in China,

63 Williams and Wu, Great Wall, 17.

64 MacCormack, Traditional Chinese Law, 3.

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particularly focusing on providing offenders with education and vocational training. As argued by Dikötter, the articulation of the modern Chinese prison was part of a global movement toward the reform of punishments and “a local reconfiguration of a more traditional faith in the transformative capacity of education.”⁶⁵

The reformation movement argued for a thorough rethinking of the whole correctional process; the emphasis had to be on education rather than on punishment, and criminals had to be supported throughout this process with the help of the benevolent governor.

Shen Jiaben (1840-1913) was one of the most committed reformers, and a key figure in the actual implementation of a modern penal system. In particular, he condemned and managed to bring to abolition the use of particularly cruel traditional punitive practices, such as the dismemberment of the body (lingchi ), the beheading of the corpse (lushi

), and the display of heads in public (xiaoshou ).⁶⁶ Shen combined the idea of modern prison with the ancient concept of ganhua , whose meaning, as explained again by Dikötter, “referred to moral reformation by an emotional appeal to the feelings of a criminal.”⁶⁷ This term appears in the very ancient texts of the Later Han period (25-220 AD), though its use continued into the late Qing period, possibly with varied connotations. In any case, gan is commonly used as a verb to mean “to feel”, whereas the character hua indicates a transformation, usually for the better. In short, reformers appropriated the term ganhua and modified its meaning in a modern sense, so that it now acquired a moral connotation.

Ultimately, the term ganhua “anticipated repentance and moral reformation: to affect (gandong) a criminal and obtain change (zhuanhua) by exemplary words or acts, to admonish and guide by providing a model, to ‘change by persuasion.’”⁶⁸

Put differently, criminals were now considered capable of reforming themselves, and punishments were meant to have a clear educative function, which was always intended to have a moral dimension; prisoners had to be taught the correct ethics and norms of behavior.⁶⁹ Prisons were now conceived not only as confined spaces in which criminals were deprived of their liberty, but also, and more importantly, as places where they would undergo a process of

65 Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison, 8.

66 Ibid., 47.

67 Ibid., 48.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., 13.

Prisonscape: Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

Prisonscape

Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

Serena De Marchi

Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies

PRISONSCAPE

Serena De Marchi

Prisonscape

Literary Reconfigurations of the Real and Imagined Worlds of the Chinese Prison

Serena De Marchi

To Paolo

Acknowledgments

Contents

Note on Conventions

Introduction

Aims of the Study

Theoretical Approaches

Methodology and Demarcations

CHAPTER ONE. The Chinese Prison: A Historical Overview Prison Histories Around the World: A Review

A Global Approach to Prison History

The Chinese Penal System

Pre-modern China

Prison Reform Movement (Late Qing Period)