An Exercise for the People’s Republic: Order and Discipline in the Morning Ritual of a Chinese Primary School

This paper examines the exercise of state control (and failure thereof) through institutionalized enforcement of the radio gymnastic exercise at a primary school in rural China. Based on ethnographic data collected from observation and interviews, I analyze how the exercise ritual sponsors the socialization of disciplined and responsible Chinese nationals. I argue that the subjectivation mechanism operates at the dimension of ritual form and practice. Suggesting a shift of the analytical point of departure from meaning and ideology to form and context, I hope to illustrate how practice theory and ritual studies can enhance our understanding of the state and its subjectivation instruments. This paper analyzes the discursive construction of the “ritual subjunctive ” (Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon 2008) in which children participate in the radio-gymnastic exercise as if they are healthy, disciplined, and collective-minded individuals in the modern Chinese nation. Underneath the expressive narratives of “training your body for your own good, ” however, is a subjectivation mechanism that operates primarily with repetitions and the performative. It is the repeated bodily movement and ritualistic enactment of the exercise that inculcate participants with a state- induced body culture. Ritual practice, which is by nature ambiguous and indeterminate, opens up the space for recreating social order. On the one hand, ritual allows the public display of power and the reaffirmation of hierarchy. On the other hand, unintended failures and purposeful resistance could undermine the ritual order and give rise to potentials of social change. I hope that this study would contribute to the scholarly understanding of the politicized body and its relationship to the state.