a story that recontextualizes the question of charisma and the relationships between a key player and their dependents/supporters.

yesterday, i took a cab from tianmian to shuiwei new village. as usual i sat in the front seat and chatted with the driver, who had come from wuhan a little over a year ago.

i asked why he had come.

for the opportunities, he replied.

i commented that hankou had a long history of commerce. he agreed, but pointed out that was in the past. today, he finds wuhan to be dirty, crowded, and not improving as quickly as the rest of the country.

but isn’t wuhan reforming, i asked.

the cabbie then explained that the quality of reform depended on the abilities of a specific leader. so far i was following; i had heard this argument before. but then the conversation swerved.

what i hate most, he said, was when corrupt officials took money even when the people were poor.

i agreed they were lacking a conscious.

he continued, if everyone’s rich, then those officials should have something extra.

i laughed. he laughed with me and added, commoners aren’t going to quibble over a few bribes if everyone is living well. that’s what we want; a home, a job, a chance to send our kids to school. chinese people simply want to live their lives (过日子), but these officials, they only care about living well. it’s when the situation gets like that that i become angry.

by this time, we had arrived a my destination and i got out of the cab. i wished him a happy dragon boat day. he waved and drove off.

i am not sure if he was referring to any particular official, or if some recent incident had annoyed him because our conversation had remained at the level of generalities. what interested me was his conviction, shared with a group of beijing thespians, that for historic transformation to take place a synergy had to develop between a key player and their dependents/supporters. the difference between the two positions was how the relationship between the key player and the dependents/supports was to be cultivated. for the cabbie, this relationship went unquestioned. he did not seem to question the need for and existance of the government. the quality of the commoners’ everyday lives provided the standard for determining an official’s legitimacy. this begs the question, how much anger before an official falls? in contrast, the beijing thespians assumed that charisma determined pride of place in a group. when the ability to maintain an audience waned, so did the key player’s legitimacy; s/he had proven to be “incompetant”.

shenzhen