Contribution short abstract:

This paper investigates how a group of agents on the ground of the Chinese Party-state engages ideology work. I argue that they form a "community of complicity", grounded in a communal ethics of not taking work seriously, and in so doing turn political rituals into something intimate and playful.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, I explore an ethics of not taking ideology work seriously in the everyday life of a group of community workers—employed by the Party-state to work at the bottom-level governance institution known as community (shequ)—in an eastern Chinese city. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2023 and 2024, I start with the examination of the keyword hu (糊) and an uncommon analogy, “Community work is like papering the wall with rice paste”, as repeatedly articulated by my interlocuters. I propose that this emic expression nicely encapsulates a shared understanding among my interlocuters: Like papering the wall, community work entails repetitive and mundane labor aimed at covering something up, and as the usage of rice paste suggests, it is done in a somewhat careless and makeshift manner. I further illustrate, with two ethnographic examples, how this shared understanding translates into everyday practice and informs decision-making. I argue that it is not due to inertia or negligence that they did not take ideology work seriously; rather, it involved ethical judgement of what is good for themselves and the communality, and through the formation of a "community of complicity" they redescribe official stipulations, imbuing them with new meanings and reassimilating them into something communal, intimate and playful. I propose that for complicity to have potentials, it does not have to be associated with a weaponized imaginary of actual and potential resistance; here, complicity itself can be read as a critique of ideology.