Foucault and China

“What’s surprising,” French philosopher Michel Foucault asks in Discipline and Punish, “is prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

This is damningly true in China, where factory workers suffer in bonded servitude, regimented classrooms are too often led by teachers who beat their students into line, and hospitals condone assembly-line organ harvesting. Yet according to Foucault, such problems are about much more than institutional abuse.

In 1757 Robert-François Damiens stabbed King Louis XV in the chest. The king survived, but Damiens was taken to Place de Grève, where the royal executioner peeled off his flesh, poured lead over his wounds, pulled his limbs apart and threw his screaming torso onto a fire. The story goes that when his Conciergerie jailers came for him that morning, Damiens said, “La journée sera rude” – the day will be hard.

Gruesome though it sounds, spectators reveled in the gore like an audience at the Grand Guignol; Casanova himself rented out a flat in order to watch the spectacle for hours with his friends. But after describing Damiens’ torture, Foucault contrasts its gruesome theatricality with the methodical daily routine of the Mettray Penal Colony, which came into operation less than a century later.

He argues that the modern prison wasn’t an expression of humanitarian reforms but an evolution in the organization of power. Public torture had been a ceremonial reassertion of power, designed to instill fear in the public, but it was sloppy, potentially allowing the public to sympathize with the victim and resent the executioner (he notes that public executions sometimes led to riots). How to precisely control the public was therefore a problem, until large-scale regulatory bodies such as factories, schools, hospitals and prisons came along.

China too had its period during which grisly torture was not uncommon. For instance, lingchi or “death by a thousand cuts,” was a method used until 1905 whereby a net was tightly drawn over the victim’s body so that skin protruded and could be easily cut away. The executioner’s job was to remove a thousand such pieces without killing the victim; if he failed, he himself might face punishment.

Yet like France, China too has moved from such draconian measures to a system of large-scale regulation. One could even argue that its factories and schools play a far more aggressive role in the regulation not only of public behavior, but thought.

When Roger-Pol Droit of the New York Times interviewed Foucault in 1975, Foucault spoke in terms reminiscent of modern China, noting a “society of generalized surveillance” and describing how old France had been bogged down with rules that “masses of people ignored.”

“In the second half of the 18th century this system of tolerance changed,” Foucault continued. “New economic conditions and the political fear of popular movements … demanded a different social arrangement. The exercise of power had to become more refined, more clear-cut and between the centralized decision-making apparatus and the individual as continuous a connection as possible had to be formed. This occasioned the appearance of the police force, the administrative hierarchy, the bureaucratic pyramid of the Napoleonic state.”

This neatly describes China’s economic reforms, the current government’s fear of activism and its centralized control of public opinion. China criminalizes even the most mundane behaviors – a citizen expressing their opinion, a lawyer defending the law, an artist making art – not only because it worries that these behaviors may threaten state security, but because it throws the widest possible net over human behavior, allowing them to arrest, detain, or otherwise control the public.

It’s slavery by other means. Torture is still practiced in China; it’s simply been moved indoors where it can be denied. Meanwhile its instruments have become so refined that they’re now capable of capturing not just human limbs, but human minds.

As Foucault asserts, in the discourse of the ideologues the mind becomes “a surface of inscription for power.” After all, the “central control of ideas” forces the body into submission through a system “much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture.”

Consider how extensive this system is, for example. Many Chinese are perfectly content with their newfound wealth and elevated quality of life, so much so that few raise even a whisper against the state’s human rights violations, and many more either don’t know or don’t even care. Life is good, and that’s enough. Or is it? For Foucault, the problem is so deeply-rooted that even human rights efforts miss the big picture.

“It seems to me,” he observed, “that whether the prisoners get an extra chocolate bar on Christmas … is not the real political issue. What we have to denounce is not so much the ‘human’ side of life in prison but rather their real social function – that is, to serve as the instrument that creates a criminal milieu that the ruling classes can control.”