Review of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965. Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54.3-4 (2024): 160-162 (original) (raw)
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positions: asia critique, 2014
This collection of mostly ethnographic studies of rural China, with some contributions from the rather different discourse world of Chinese anthropology, seeks to bring into visibility the heterogeneity of life in the countryside. They argue that rural China must first and foremost be understood as socially and culturally heterogeneous. On the other hand, there is much resonance in the details among all these articles, reminding us that ethnography in contemporary China can accumulate to give us an anthropology or sociology of the state as it is seen from the point of view of its relatively denigrated or subaltern peripheries, that is, rural China. Many dilemmas and challenges facing the people described in these articles are held in common, and together they allow us to see a broad vision of contemporary China beyond the cities and the dominant mass media. Being rather ethnographic/descriptive, the articles gathered here show that good and attentive description, under some conditio...
This article explores how constructions of national identity took the Chinese discourse on industrialization in the 1930s beyond mere economics. During this period, Chinese intellectuals' attempt to define China's identity and its position among the world powers led to the creation of two competing tropes. On one hand, the treaty ports came to represent a China integrated in the world and pursuing a Western-style path toward modernization. The rural village, on the other hand, came to be perceived as the locus of a pristine Chinese identity, uncontaminated by foreign imperialism. It was in this context that the prominent economist Fang Xianting-the focus here-came to devise a model for village-based industrialization that aimed at projecting China to the forefront of modernity while preserving what he believed to be its intrinsic rural nature.
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China’s history has always intrigued readers inside and outside the huge country. Dong Guoqiang and Andrew Walter propose a first and in-depth analysis of political conflict during the Cultural Revolution in a rural Chinese county, Feng County, which, according to the authors, “suffered from deep and enduring factional divisions and violent civil strife” (p. ix). The methodology the authors followed in their quest for reliable information includes purposefully identified contacts from existing networks of retired former activists, local officials, and soldiers. It also brings together data gathered from local collectors of Cultural Revolution memorabilia, and various documentary sources; for example, directives and notices from authorities in Beijing, similar types of documents from Jiangsu provincial authorities in Nanjing, prefectural authorities in Xuzhou, Feng County authorities, and internal bulletins and documents issued by the county’s interim authorities when Feng County remained under some form of military control between March 1967 and September 1969.
A Chinese economic revolution: rural entrepreneurship in the twentieth century
Choice Reviews Online, 2007
urbanism, modernity, and nationalism in China. For instance, while Carroll emphasizes that modernity in Suzhou was necessarily local, he also modifies it at various points with adjectives likè`u rban,''``colonial,''``relative,'' and``Chinese,'' which in the end leaves the reader to wonder: Was modernity in Suzhou essentially the same or different from that found in Shanghai, Calcutta, Tokyo, or Paris? If it was different (and thereby implying multiple modernities), what factors and processes distinguished modernity in Suzhou from that of other places? Was modernity dependent on or independent of the development of the urban autonomy and consciousness discussed by William Rowe in his study of late-imperial Hankow? 1 Or, as Prasenjit Duara has suggested, was the emergence of modernity in China related to the absence of direct colonial rule and of a vibrant religious domain from which elites could criticize modernist state-building? 2 Moreover, though Carroll mentions Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey and their respective ideas about space as a``social product'' and place as a``relational product'' in his introduction (and their and David Harvey's influence can be seen in later chapters), he does not directly grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas or with their central arguments about the role of capitalism in creating modern spaces and places. Finally, for a book that stresses the importance of place and the use of space in historical analysis, Carroll should have included more and better-quality diagrams and maps. The reader is only shown two contemporary diagrams and one small, poorly reproduced late-Qing map of Suzhou that does not include the horse road, the commercial area around Chang Gate, the Japanese concession, or the railroad station. Other quibbles include the misnumbering of footnotes in the Introduction, the mistaken romanization of``national essence'' in Japanese (it should be kokusui not kokusai), and a few minor typographical and wording errors. These criticisms aside, Between Heaven and Modernity is a model of how to combine both spatial and historical analyses. Through detailed examinations of urban planning, historical preservation, and architectural history, Carroll shows how seemingly abstract ideas about national identity and modern life took concrete form in Suzhou and linked the city to the nation and the world beyond. Moreover, by drawing on a variety of source materials, he ably contextualizes in the streets and temples of Suzhou his arguments about urbanism, nationalism, and modernity ± all important issues in the study of nineteenth-and twentieth-century China and Asia.
Rural politics in contemporary China
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013
Much news about today's China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the PRC's 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50%, the result of a remarkably rapid "great urban transformation" (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics, and ideologies that link, transgress, and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003; Davis 2004; McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world. This special issue addresses China's rural politics, broadly construed as the powerinflected processes and struggles that shape access to and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies, and discourses that shape those processes and struggles. Though scholarship on agrarian politics in China has taken off over the past three decades, the literature has tended to appear in area studies journals, or disciplinary outlets in which questions central to a single field are placed front and center. Our intention here is different. In commissioning a set of review essays on themes in critical agrarian-environmental studies, we sought to bring what China experts have uncovered into conversation with the China's rise has been fueled by more than 250 million migrant workers, members of the "floating population" (liudong renkou), whose labor in export processing zones, cities, and better-off villages has turned China into "the world's factory." The "household registration" (hukou) system, which has tied citizens to their place of birth since the 1950s, was relaxed in 1984 to allow peasants to move to urban areas. As the township and village enterprises that spurred economic growth and absorbed rural labor after "opening up and reform" (gaige kaifang) went bankrupt or were privatized in the late 1980s, the flow of migrant laborers increased. To this day, however, the hukou system denies "peasant workers" (nongmin gong) state services, such as access to education, health care and housing, which are reserved for urban citizens. 2 In addition, migrants continue to be looked down upon by urban residents, blamed for crimes, paid salaries late or not at all, and discriminated against (Solinger 1999; Yan 2003; Zhang 2002; Ngai 2005). As migration exploded in the 1990s, and the countryside was emptied of working age men and women, so too did a national ideology that valorized the urban and denigrated the rural, positing cities as the primary site of political, cultural, and economic worth (Bulag 2002, Cartier 2002, 2003, Ma 2005, Yeh 2013a). Cities became metonyms for development, and urbanization became a top goal of China's modernization strategy. Along with this, city dwellers were deemed to be of higher quality, or suzhi, than rural residents (O'Brien and Li 1993-94; Bakken 2000; Anagnost 2004; Murphy 2004; Kipnis 2006). This privileging of the urban and disparaging of the rural led to what has been called the "spectralization" (Yan 2003) of agriculture and the countryside, as villages became ghostly reminders of the past, a wasteland inhabited only by the 2 Note, however, that this varies by city, with some municipal governments (for example, Shanghai and Chengdu) providing more services than others (for example, Beijing). Thanks to Alexsia Chan, and her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, for this point.