Tradition as governmental instrument for a “safer” China

Xi Qu As A Starting Point

Abstract

Tradition plays an important part in China’s daily life and is the representative mark of the Chinese nation. As tradition has emerged more and more artistically in Chinese society, its political purposes seem to be tacitly omitted. Tradition, according to its appearance, presents itself sub-structurally as a political instrument, or rather, a governmental one. The issue of “governmental technology” or “the art of government” concerning modern western civil society addressed by Michel Foucault, along with his concept of biopolitics, is considered a post-1970s new paradigm for analyzing modern political governmental art, which puts its focus on the population as a whole, according a normalized biological process to achieve a sort of “governementability” based on a rationally optimized mechanism. We take this paradigm as a worthwhile approach to address the issue of “tradition” in contemporary China, particularly its function as a social surveillance mechanism with potential resemblance to governmental technology in Western society. We will primarily focus on the role of traditional Chinese aesthetics in Chinese society and then try to demonstrate a tradition-based mechanism that helps maintain the sovereign power in China.