Tracing China : a forty-year ethnographic journey 9789888313396, 9888313398

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Tracing China

A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey

Helen F. Siu

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This publication has been generously supported by the T. H. Chan Publication Fund and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2016 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8083-73-2 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: China as Process

vii viii

Part 1: Tracing Meaningful Life-Worlds 1. Reflections on Historical Anthropology 2. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China

1 9 30

Part 2: Moving Targets 3. Images: Prologue to Agents and Victims in South China 4. China’s Century: Fast Forward with Historical Baggage

49 51 59

Part 3: Structuring and Human Agency 5. Socialist Peddlers and Princes in a Chinese Market Town 6. Recycling Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China 7. Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China

67 73 95 111

Part 4: Culturing Power 8. Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China 9. Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China 10. The Grounding of Cosmopolitans: Merchants and Local Cultures in South China

133

Part 5: History between the Lines 11. Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China 12. Social Responsibility and Self-Expression: Introduction to Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State

217

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137 163 187

221 244

vi

Contents

Part 6: Place-Making: Locality and Translocality 13. Subverting Lineage Power: Local Bosses and Territorial Control in the 1940s 14. The Cultural Landscape of Luxury Housing in South China: A Regional History 15. Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants” 16. Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Post-Reform South China

273

Part 7: Historical Global and the Asian Postmodern 17. Hong Kong: Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape 18. Women of Influence: Gendered Charisma 19. Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong

383 387 401

Glossary Bibliography Index

455 461 504

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277 297 319 353

430

Acknowledgments

The idea of putting together a volume of my papers came from several close colleagues, David Faure, May Bo Ching, Liu Zhiwei, and Kwok-leung Yu. To make that happen has taken years. When the world pushes impatiently forward, looking back to reflect is a luxury. The essays in this volume are reworked and grouped under specific conceptual themes to highlight such self-reflection. Several Yale colleagues of thirty-three years are complicit in this intellectual venture. I have expected no less. To my pleasant surprise, some analytical views I presented three decades ago have gained academic salience rather than been forgotten. I am also dismayed to discover a trail of editorial errors I made in past publications. Nonetheless, I hope all is forgiven and that the superb skills and meticulous efforts of my copyeditor, Gershom Tse, have more than compensated for previous lack of attention. I have every reason to thank Gershom for his artistry and devotion to quality. As an experienced editor, Kwok-leung Yu has kindly helped me organize my thoughts and plan the logistics of the book project. I also thank him and Yan Lijun for patiently tracking down numerous publishers for rights and permissions, Xie Shi, Isabelle Lewis and Yukiko Tonoike for preparing the map, and Steven Moore for compiling the index. As always, I appreciate the competent support provided by the staff at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong  Kong, Yvonne Chan and Zhang Xueqian in particular, and the allocation of funds by the Institute’s director, Angela Leung, to support publication. Past and present colleagues at the Hong Kong University Press have encouraged the project all along. I am grateful to Michael Duckworth, Chris Munn, Malcolm Litchfield, Yuet Sang Leung, and Sherlon Ip for their faith in the endeavor. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their concise and sharp commentaries. I did, per their advice, reinvent the title. Lastly, I thank my sisters, Olivia and Esther, for being a constant source of love and care. To have kept faith in such a determined little sister is far beyond what I could ever ask for.

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Map 1 The Pearl River Delta This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Introduction China as Process

This volume of essays captures my forty years of explorations in the field. It is a personal and an intellectual journey. South China has existed as an ever changing empirical experience, a kaleidoscope of events, institutions, lives, meanings and power play. Every major political turn has reconfigured it. Theoretical paradigms that have deeply shaped my thinking have also met new challenges. My efforts to engage theory with ethnography have inspired critical reflections and dialogue. Over the decades, I have picked various analytical lenses to understand research subjects, fine-tune methodologies, and affirm social and political commitments. My  teaching has triangulated with these changing consciousness and realities, a  process I  term “practice.” Looking into historical resources human subjects have drawn on, and reaching forward to their hopes, I uncover, scrutinize, and interpret the constraining structures and, most importantly, the differing meanings that have made up people’s lives, strategies, and narratives. Such practice has continued to shape my scholarly sensibilities. “China as Process,” a unifying theme for this volume, is intended to use ethnographic encounters in a regional construct to challenge the static, positivist dichotomous categories that dominated 20th-century social sciences and my early education. Inspired by European cultural historians (Marc Bloch, Jacque Le Goff, George Duby), British Marxists (E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm), and an interpretative, Weberian turn in anthropology (Clifford Geertz), I have come to believe that cultures, societies, polities, populations, places, etc. are not entities with innate, pre-existing hard boundaries. Instead, they are constructed through human actions, nuanced meanings and moral imagination, and laced with economic and political interests. However, these entities have often been essentialized as bounded conceptual categories. For me to stress “process” and “practice” is to capture the humanist flux in social life that is full of agentive surprises. The issue is how to devise analytical tools to view fluidity as constant. I am mindful of the limits to movement and contingency. To understand “structuring” is to appreciate that, at certain historical junctures, elements of these processes present themselves as powerful institutional structures with lasting significance, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

ix

and often internalized. Social life should be appropriately contextualized in these moments of entanglement and domination so that we can appreciate the ordering frames that human actions have generated and given relevant meanings. My anthropological intuitions are often triggered by such appreciation for historical precision. Essays in this volume, written over a period of twenty-five years, are grouped under analytical concepts that illuminate a processual perspective: texts and meaningful life-worlds, moving targets, structuring and human agency, culturing power, reading history between the lines, making locality with translocality, and juxtaposing the historical global and the Asian postmodern. They highlight my attempts to bridge my interests in history and anthropology. The essays address a shared goal of the two disciplines to treat micro social dynamics in time and space as embedded in an assemblage of macro/structural processes. By stressing the making of local society with translocal imaginaries and meanings, the essays explore the distinguishing character of unity and diversity in China’s long cultural history of state-making. Moreover, I use historical sensibilities to scrutinize linear perspectives of change prevalent in the social sciences. I bring “the past” back into the ethnographic present as core to analysis rather than treat past happenings as historical background. By asking how the past has been selectively remembered, interpreted, and practiced, the essays uncover discursive strategies in both ethnographic and historical texts. These critical tools make me rethink subjectivities and institutional categories (such as geographies and social groupings) that have been asserted by research subjects and naturalized in our own conceptual schemas. My research topics have included historical constructions of lineage, community, and ethnicity, the politics of popular rituals, and the cultural language of power in the Ming and Qing. For the 20th century, topics cover Republican social turmoil, Maoist rural transformations, post-reform urban dynamics, and China’s global reach. One needs to appreciate forces that set energies “in motion.” One also needs to understand the accumulated structural constraints in peoples’ life-worlds. I hope to organize these diverse topics into a coherent narrative to capture the agency of situated human subjects and its nuances. Colleagues have characterized my academic orientation as eclectic if not outright subversive. It is hard to pin down her intellectual roots, they say. Students also find my cultural ambiguity quite disconcerting. The response is straightforward: why should we be concerned with roots? Creative energies come from the ability to appreciate multiple reference points, to see through ordering frames, to de-center established categories, to cross set boundaries, and to synthesize seemingly unrelated and contingent elements. My academic training has not been conventional. I spent early years in an American liberal arts college exploring South Asian history, American sociology, and English literature. Paul Riesman, an Africanist anthropologist trained in the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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European tradition and my teacher at Carleton College, taught me to respect knowledge and sentiment. When I started graduate studies at Stanford University, I worked with John Gurley, a monetary theorist turned political economist. However much I admired Gurley as a teacher, I decided at the end that Economics as a discipline did not satisfy my curiosity in the nuanced complexities of human life. I eventually chose anthropology under the guidance of G. William Skinner and Arthur Wolf. Professor Skinner himself was never a conventional scholar. His interests span macro and micro perspectives, and covered demography, geography, history, economics, politics, sociology, and anthropology. I have always leaned towards his analytical perspectives to cross intellectual boundaries. It is understandable that Arthur Wolf once complained that I had not learned much from him for all the years spent at Stanford! I have crossed other boundaries. A few years back, an interviewer asked whether I considered myself a “native anthropologist,” and how that had affected my work. The answer was: I enjoy my ambiguous cultural identity. The British education system and social environment that nurtured my early years in Hong Kong were not quite “China.” I professionally matured in a Euro-American environment. Both Chinese and American colleagues see me as “other,” but if one finds oneself at the margins, one has autonomous space, gets away with irreverence, and can pursue unusual dreams. Such opportunities came early. I was personally exposed to radical student movements in North America and Europe during college. As an Asian, canvassing anti-war sentiments in rural Minnesota in the early 1970s was no small feat. Studying world communism and meeting Han Suyin in London were also an eye-opener. I had by then forgotten the riots on the streets of Hong Kong in 1967, when the violence of the Cultural Revolution spilled across the border from Guangdong. I was politically eager to see how Marxist thought could be practiced in agrarian China. Looking from afar, the Chinese revolution appeared relevant for societies experiencing the pains of postcolonial development. As “an overseas compatriot” I was among the first to conduct fieldwork in China in the 1970s. It did not take long for me to read between the lines of ethnographic encounters to realize what revolution was about. I spent the next forty years reflecting on why I had been so “blind.” No one could deny that the subjects of research, my moving targets, have changed with remarkable speed and human drama. Post-Mao reforms have been as tumultuous as the decades of social and political upheavals before. In the 1970s, I strolled through villages in the Pearl River Delta to understand the reach of the Maoist state. In the 1980s, I watched communes being dismantled and market towns reconstructed. In the 1990s, I felt the explosive energies unleashed by the privatization of the urban economy and the massive “floating population” as China once again became a “world factory.” Today, to appreciate China’s worldly embrace, I track the volatile emotions This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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xi

and cultural styles of a rising Chinese middle class and the paths of transnational entrepreneurs to the Middle East and Africa. Every significant historical juncture I observed has brought different human agents onto the stage who deserve analytical attention. The historical baggage they carry, their conspicuous display of ambition and resolve, the subtle institutional constraints they face, and the cultural resources they continue to reinvent present a kaleidoscope of possibilities to any researcher. I have been eager to develop an institutional framework and platform with a clear interdisciplinary intellectual agenda to capture phenomena “in motion.” It is ironic that four decades ago, I went to China asking how the village world experienced modern, socialist transformation in the 20th century. What I found was neither village nor revolution. Instead, my research subjects were socially and politically grounded, and stripped down to a bare existence. Although the rural communities I encountered were situated in a historically commercialized and culturally rich Pearl River Delta, they seemed cellular and isolated in the 1970s. The lives of their inhabitants were one-dimensionally dictated by a weighty political bureaucracy and incarcerated in rural marginality quite contradictory to the official rhetoric. My observations led me to conclude that “everything was red, but life was colorless.” I could not apply the analytical tools I had prepared for studying traditional villages that had been embedded in dynamic layers of marketing, lineage structures, translocal community networks, religious and popular rituals. My “revolutionary” sensibilities were also severely tested. By the first decade of the 21st century, I have moved on. I have been studying the rapidly transformed urban landscape of Guangzhou but found neither urbanity nor market. I have been drawn to the chengzhongcun, village enclaves at the margins and the heart of expanding municipalities in South China—socially explosive areas in the post-reform era. Maoist boundaries of rural and urban and the cultural meanings attached to these categories are being pulled in different directions by insensitive policies, official vanities and maneuvers of villagers and hundreds of thousands of migrants. Although village life is made volatile by global financial markets, and original inhabitants can acquire unimaginable real estate income, the villagers are structurally and discursively grounded, feeling marginal and displaced. They face the incongruities of everyday life with a curious mix of shrewdness, resignation, and an undeniable desperation. Some would say, “We may be rich, but our children have no future.” The grueling circumstances of those attempting to bridge the rural-urban divide are vividly portrayed in a film entitled Bamboo Shoots (2009). Although director Jian Yi has not produced it as a documentary film about his native place in Jiangxi, all the characters are played by villagers themselves to create a surreal sense of a historical moment they find themselves in. In the new century, as I observe energized This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

xii

Introduction

African traders in the village enclaves of Guangzhou, or follow the ever expanding footprints of ambitious Chinese investors in the Middle East and Africa, I see new state spaces intertwined with amoral market impulses. A serious rethinking of analytical categories and cultural empathies is necessary to appreciate how our research subjects move towards modern riches in fast-forward mode with remarkable historical baggage. I have presented some of these self-reflections (Siu 2001) before and elaborated on the issue of positioning oneself in relation to research subjects and to the yujing, a larger context (Siu, Bol et al. 2007). I stress that decades of doing ethnographic fieldwork in China comprise processes that intertwine—what I, as researcher, am going through, what my research subjects are experiencing, and how our interactions and narratives are shaped by the changing circumstances of the larger society and polity. We need a comprehensive conceptual framework that takes into account the mutually constitutive processes that result in our respective positioning. Rather than using categories and labels with which our research subjects identify themselves, or uncritically employ our own conceptual categories we bring to the field to frame our research questions, we understand them as social and discursive products to be deciphered. To use critical literary language, it is an exercise in deconstruction. Allow me to quote at length from a monograph I wrote twenty-five years ago, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (Siu 1989a). It illustrates how I analytically chased after moving targets. In writing this ethnography, I do not pretend to present every aspect of this complex region. In my ten years of fieldwork, I have been classified as student, compatriot, professor, party agent, as well as friend and sympathizer. What I absorbed were responses to my presence in the commune, shaped as much by the painful unraveling of ideological assumptions as the semiconscious efforts of friends to balance what I should know and what I was politically obliged to know. But the changing nature of our interaction over the years provided the meaning I was looking for. I came to know elderly villagers such as Uncle Liang and his friends, who insisted that the land in their communities was owned by the lineages of He the Minister and Mo the Eunuch. I made friends with old cadres such as Xu Decheng, who admitted that “the three red flags of Mao” swept him off his feet, Lin Qing, who declared that the grain procurement quotas were “utterly damnable,” and Chen Sheyuan, who remembered the Cultural Revolution as “the drama of the absurd.” I sympathized with Huang Youfen, who had participated in earnest in the loyalty dances for Mao during the Cultural Revolution and came to the conclusion a dozen years later that he and the socialist system had nothing left to offer each other. I sensed the hopefulness of the young party secretary, Yuan Dewei, who spoke proudly of the embankment and the wide motor-road in Huicheng as goals for modernization in the 1980s. At the same time, I appreciated the subtle nostalgia of the elderly historians who showed me around the county capital and pointed to the invisible line of ancestral halls at the southern gate of This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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xiii

the city that had long ago succumbed to the forces of socialism. Their stories and those of many others form the narrative of the people who were both agents and victims, accomplices in a process of change they named revolution. (p. 301)

My own part in the process was obvious, as I have said in the Prologue of the book. “In a sense, I went to South China with Marxist hopes, but I left with Max Weber’s worst fears. Writing this ethnography is a self-reflective endeavor” (p. xxii). Sustained fieldwork in China was difficult at the time due to the uncertain political environment in the wake of the Mao era. The interactive style of writing ethnography was also not mainstream. Of the numerous book reviews that followed, only one colleague noticed its “postmodern” touch! My point is that, wherever one chooses to spend intellectual energy, it is both personal and structural. One interacts with one’s social, cultural and political environments: in the research questions one looks for answers, in the analytical tools and assumptions that shape one’s priorities, and in the political, human dramas that capture the hearts and minds of generations. I hope I have plunged in with a healthy dose of self-reflection. Over the decades since writing the monograph, I have continued to deepen my Weberian turn in anthropology and history. Intellectual curiosity seldom ends with retirement. Nonetheless, as I am approaching that stage of my career, it seems timely to take stock of the various landscapes I have traversed. There have been clearly highs and lows in this journey, and I have not been alone. I did start in the 1970s as a solitary anthropologist testing the field in village China, but by the 1980s, David Faure, Liu Zhiwei and Chen Chunsheng had offered companionship in the archives and in fieldwork. In the 1990s, Ching May Bo, Zhao Shiyu, Zheng Zhenman, Zhang Xiaojun and Choi Chi-cheung, among others, generously offered their commitment to our shared research and teaching goals. Colleagues have occasionally labeled us the “South China Gang” (Huanan bang 華南 幫) although we never subscribe to that identity (Siu 2014). Nevertheless, it is gratifying to see that our collective pursuits have acquired a modest institutional presence. As in China, I have found critical intellectual companionship among colleagues at Yale University, my professional home for the past thirty-three years. Back in 1982, William Kelly, a Japan anthropologist, and I had our feet in the rice fields. This was a legacy of our positivist social science education in the 1970s. The Yale environment enabled us to start a faculty reading group with the intention to reduce the pile of unread books on our desks. James Scott in Political Science, Deborah Davis and Matt Hamabata in Sociology, Jean Agnew in American Studies, Keith Luria in French History, Susanne Wofford in Shakespearean Literature, Bridget Murnaghan in Classics were among those who joined us. For almost ten years when the reading group stayed together, we shared an appreciation for critical social theories and literary poetics as much as ethnography and historical nuances. I must have tested the Yale tenure system by compiling two volumes in literature and history when I should This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:28:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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have devoted attention to writing ethnography. Bonding among the group was strong. It led James Scott to declare in one of his books that if he had barked up the wrong tree, we were in it together! This reading adventure evolved into the Agrarian Studies program, a significant feature of inter-disciplinary dialogue at Yale, mischievous and irreverent at times, and exemplary in its sustained subversive intentions. Sharing this spirit was Jack Goody, a close friend, mentor, and fellow traveler along an extraordinary trajectory in anthropology. His broad historical imagination, infectious curiosity, and meticulous observation of the everyday during our search for the culture of flowers in New England, France, South China and Hong Kong have had a lasting impact on me. Without these colleagues, my intellectual development would not have taken such shape and direction. I have also put ideals to practice. When I chaired the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale in the 1990s, and with help from my able assistants, Bee Lay Tan and Waichi Ho, I actively raised endowed funds for a broadly defined and sustainable program in Chinese Studies. In 2001, I established the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong with the generous support of friends and colleagues across the globe. I have keenly felt that Asian Studies has been gravitating to a re-networked Asia, and we highlight an inter-disciplinary and interAsia agenda. Through the Institute’s activities, we share the excitement of unconventional crossing of intellectual boundaries. A few names should be mentioned for their remarkable faith in this academic venture: Elizabeth Perry, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Richard Wong, Paul Tam, Angela Leung, David Faure, Elizabeth Sinn, May Bo Ching, Liu Zhiwei, Chen Chunsheng, William Kelly, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Deborah Davis, Eric Tagliacozzo, Lu Hanlong, Zhang Jishun, Kwok-leung Yu, Sun Wenbin, Emily Ip, Joan Cheng, Yan Lijun, Venus Lee, and Yvonne Chan. We now have a platform for a critical community of scholars who engage in quality inter-disciplinary research and collegiality. What follows is a truly collective testimony.

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Part 1 Tracing Meaningful Life-Worlds

In 2009, I was asked by two close colleagues, David Faure and Liu Zhiwei, to clarify our research agenda on South China. It became “Reflections on Historical Anthropology,” published in Chinese by the Journal of History and Anthropology (2009a). I use a slightly revised version here. Tracing our intellectual roots from the classic traditions of Durkheim, Marx and Weber to critical social theories, European social and cultural history, the essay shows how we have attempted to synergize decades of methodological reflections in history and anthropology. It explores the construction of texts and meaningful life-worlds shared by the two disciplines. We sleuth archival sources and ethnographic encounters for divergent meanings within hegemonic frames of mind and matter, and we attempt to highlight the concepts of culture, history, power, and place in processual and non-binary terms. The themes in the essay frame the organization of this volume. A section of the essay was delivered at a meeting of the East Asian Section of the American Anthropological Association in memory of my teacher G. William Skinner (Siu 2010a). I highlight the theme “Unity and Diversity” as key to understanding the evolution of Chinese culture and society. It captures the interface of local society and translocal environments by stressing the diverse strategies of human agents who were grounded in regional political economies. These local initiatives, symbolic and instrumental, dovetailed with late-imperial state-making impulses at crucial historical moments to generate a unifying cultural nexus of power. The second essay extends the theme of unity and diversity into the late 20th century. It adds ethnographic nuance from South China to substantiate my conception of “Chineseness” as meaningful processes. Published in 1991/1993, it focuses on the remaking of cultural identity on the eve of Hong Kong’s change of sovereign status. I see the term as a malleable assemblage of primordial, historical and political qualifiers: ethnic and linguistic attributes, places of origin, cultural styles and entitlements. At crucial times, political regimes have highlighted particular attributes to define certain populations as subjects/citizens and to claim their allegiance. Local actors have actively negotiated with these state acts. Almost twenty years since the changeover, emotions attached to being Chinese or Hong Konger remain contentious. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Tracing China

The “Umbrella Movement” on the streets of Hong Kong in late 2014 is highly illustrative. The essay argues against analytical frameworks that essentialize culture and identity and perceive social/historical changes as linear progressions. My treatment of history, culture and politics reflects decades of explorations in social theories and in fieldwork. To supplement the two selected essays, I list below concepts and works that have inspired my encounters with ethnographic and textual materials. In the 1970s, I was caught up in student movements worldwide. Marxist learning was in vogue. By the time I entered Stanford University as a graduate student, I was introduced to European Neo-Marxist theories of the state and cultural production (Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams). Equally exciting were World Systems Theories (Immanuel Wallerstein), Dependent Theories on Latin America (Andre Gunder Frank), and postcolonial critiques (Frantz Fanon, Edward Said). While Hemingway and Orwell remained my favorite authors, I struggled with rudimentary French to read Sartre and Camus. In the intense political debates on American involvement in Vietnam, teachers and fellow students questioned the fundamental assumptions of modernization models based on Eurocentric experiences. To reevaluate the power relationships between the urban industrial economies and agrarian ones undergoing fitful transformations in the 20th century, we tried to go beyond linear models of development. We saw the sources of “backwardness” not rooted in the cultures of tribal or agrarian societies. Instead, we explored how centuries of colonial and postcolonial relationships had shaped their structural vulnerabilities. The fates of the industrial West and those of the ethnic/economic/political “other” were long intertwined. Intent on uncovering the agency of the marginalized and the voices of those silenced in historical records, we experimented with critical reading, turning over cultural/ethnographic and historical texts to cut through the accumulated structures of power and knowledge. Anthropology and history, like literary studies, underwent critical reflections in these unsettling decades. Expanding on classic theorists on social change (Marx, Durkheim and Weber), the works of Anthony Giddens (1979), Pierre Bourdieu (1972/1977), and Philip Abrams (1982) have since made me appreciate the mutual constitution of human subjectivities, contingent actions and social structure. Using the term “structuring,” Abrams highlights the paradox of human agency in historical change—purposeful, meaningful human actions, and unintended structural consequences. Culture as a concept and an empirical reality is a major concern of anthropology and Clifford Geertz (1973) has made it an interpretative exercise. He sees human action as suspended in webs of meaning and stresses culture’s malleable, negotiated qualities. The structuring process is further clarified by Sherry Ortner’s masterful summary of anthropological theories (1984) and later expositions in Dirks, Eley This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing Meaningful Life-Worlds

3

and Ortner (1994). Ortner uses the term “practice” to intertwine contingent human thoughts and actions with structures of power and economic interests. She sees human subjectivities as neither entirely lodged in the mind with essentialized meanings, nor empirically quantifiable in material objects and deduced from static institutional structures. The question is how to analytically capture their formation and transformation as historically grounded processes. Renowned historian William Sewell Jr., in  a recent work, similarly argues for the appreciation of “historicity of all social forms” and the necessity to combine “historians’ nuanced sense of social temporalities, anthropologists’ recognition of the power and complexity of culture, and sociologists’ commitment to explanatory rigor” (2005, p. ix). Numerous works in the European tradition have taught me how to identify culturally significant moments in history. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1944/1957) argued for appreciating social and cultural substance embedded in the operations of economic life. Even an emerging capitalist market economy, such as that of England in the 18th century, was forged with state interventions, ideologies, institutional rules and moral imaginations. My early forays into the anthropologically oriented work of Marc Bloch and Georges Duby led me further into cultural history. Jacques Le Goff, a major figure in the “New History” movement, highlights meanings of time and work in the Middle Ages. Fellow cultural historians would not view the personal motivations of “great men” as drivers of historical events, and turn to popular customs, folk tales, beliefs, rituals, and interpretations of historical experiences produced by those marginalized in historical records. They pay attention to the historiography of the everyday (Burke 1992). Montaillou and Carnival of Romans by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie are fine examples of extrapolating totalizing community structure and mindsets from ground-level economic details. Similarly, Carlo Ginsburg in The Cheese and the Worms outlines the intense religious contestations at the time of the Reformation by focusing on the radical philosophical claims of an Italian miller. In describing the rampage of exploited apprentices in a Paris neighborhood to exterminate its cats, Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre almost predicts the fate of the aristocrats forty years later. Even if conventional materials such as court and family records are used, as in the works of Natalie Davis on early modern France (1975, 1987), she decodes underlying meanings of gender, self, family, and faith that ordinary people used to construct their social and moral worlds. English social historians such as E. P. Thompson (1963), Eric Hobsbawm (1960), Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (1982) have enlightened my understanding of how cultural meaning is intertwined with historically specific class conflict and political dissent. E. P. Thompson turns to the experiences of laboring families in 18th- and 19th-century England to write “history from below.” He examines cultural forms of “class struggle” between gentry charity and riotous plebian crowds, and how their conservative cultural strategies were gradually replaced by new class This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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experiences in the 19th century (1974). Although Thompson is deeply involved in a Marxist scholarly tradition, he moves the definition of class formation from static structural categories arising from production relations to a process rich with conflicting cultural symbolisms and moral contingencies. The idea that cultural traditions are malleable to support class actions leads to another inspirational work, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger. The Invention of Tradition (1983) shows how a sense of the past and associated ceremonial symbolisms have been shrewdly deployed to confirm identity and to justify ideological positions. “Cultural tradition” is a process that can be essentialized and reinvented. Continuing the theme of culture and power, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985), both students of Philip Abrams, have produced a brilliant rendition of English state-making, synthesizing the essence of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Elias and Foucault. They are attentive to cultural forms naturalized in everyday life to produce complicit political subjects over the centuries. Similar studies on the mutual constitution of culture and state as historical processes have moved to a global arena, challenging the analytical boundaries of nationstates, oceans and continents. Benedict Anderson shows how nationalisms originating from the Americas were spread to Europe, Asia and Africa via social movements and institutional powers (1983/1991). His essay “Census, Maps and Museums” decodes the ordering frame of rule and generation of political subjectivities. Census demarcates a population; maps mark territory; and museums create claims to cultural heritage. They are infrastructural elements in making nation-states. Bernard Cohn pursues a similar analytical theme in the construction of empire. His classic work Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1996) unveils how Orientalist interests helped generate linguistic expertise, photographic images, antiquarian collections, historical archives and colonial records in and of India. He argues that the codification of information and cultural imagination, together with the more administrative means in revenue collection and law, secured British colonial hegemony. Another inspiring work, Castes of Mind by Nicholas Dirks (2001), traces how British colonial authorities in the late 19th century, for convenience of administering a large and seemingly unintelligible sub-continent, drew together fragmented notions of “caste” and social hierarchy. Subsequently reinvented even by postcolonial nationalists in the 20th century, “caste” has been firmly established as almost the timeless, cultural essence of the Indian civilization. Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), has provided similarly brilliant arguments against timeless perceptions of culture and politics in modern India, and stresses their historically contingent, invented nature. Some of these themes on culture, power and world history are scrutinized closer to my intellectual home in anthropology. Just as historians were exploring the multi-scalar factors in economy, society and culture that underlay the unfolding of This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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historical events, anthropologists were moving away from evolutionary, functional or structuralist views of culture. Their analytical lenses on the interpretive and historically contingent nature of culture, power, and place extend from individual human agents to non-Eurocentric world systems (Siu 2014). Eric Wolf (1982), Sidney Mintz (1985), Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) each challenges the Euro-centric view of world cultures and histories. Similarly, Jack Goody’s synthesizing approach to history and anthropology and specifically to Eurasia connections has been most inspiring (Goody 1991, 1996; Pallares-Burke 2002, pp. 8–30). They all stress the circulation of commodities and inter-cultural connections through the centuries, and reconfigure familiar conceptual categories of the ethnic and cultural other, capitalist transformations, colonial subjugation, and East-West dichotomies. They also rejuvenate cross-disciplinary dialogue among historians and ethnographers and open new ways of synthesizing local life-worlds and global processes. Their conceptual reterritorialization makes us look deeper to uncover obscured empirical data and to rethink our research subject, site, and voice. If conventional categories of populations, societies, cultures, identities, and polities have been made by historical processes of global scales loaded with power implications, how do we delineate the spatial boundaries of our analytical units (Gupta and Ferguson 1992/1997, pp. 33–51)? The meaning and materiality of power can be nuanced. James Scott’s influence on my thinking about “culturing power” has been immense. From his early work, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) exploring why peasants rebel, to influential works such as Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Art of Resistance (1990), he has moved from a Marxist notion of power to a Weberian one. He argues that Southeast Asian peasants rebelled not entirely based on the sheer quantity of grain extracted from their harvests but on when their subsistence ethic was violated. He thus shifts our analytical attention of class conflict from structural relations of production to victims’ subjective perceptions of their plight. Both he and William Kelly (1985) stress the “hidden transcripts” of defiance in public gestures of deference when peasant communities, facing the overwhelming interventions of imperial authorities in Tokugawa Japan or modern developmental states in Southeast Asia, negotiated their precarious existence. The elites, on the other hand, were more vulnerable than they appeared in the public rituals of displaying power. How rights and legitimacy of rule are represented, performed and contested is therefore brought into sharp focus. Moreover, reading between the lines, one is sensitized to narrative strategies in historical texts, be they county gazetteers, official edicts, or lineage genealogies. Similarly, ethnographic encounters, ritual practices, ceremonies, festivals and other public events can be given interpretative readings to uncover embedded meanings. Application of power has spatial dimensions. Scott’s other important works deal with the fluid relationships between centers of political power and those “at the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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margins.” Seeing Like a State (1998) outlines the efforts of political regimes to simplify and codify complex social realities in order to make legible the subjects to be governed. More often than not, and even with best intentions, these efforts are adopted, compromised, and subverted by local agency. This line of thinking parallels that of my South China colleagues. Giving more weight to local initiatives, Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Faure and Siu 1995) highlights processes in the Ming, Qing and early 20th century, whereby indigenous populations used instrumental and symbolic means to position themselves. State-making efforts from the “center” to absorb regional society dovetailed with maneuvers of resourceful local groups to make themselves part of the empire at various historical moments. These complex and dynamic processes are brilliantly captured by David Faure’s analyses on lineage building in South China (1986) and by James Watson on the cult of Tianhou (Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski 1985, pp. 292–324). In Emperor and Ancestor (2007), Faure takes the research topics far beyond kinship and descent. Settlement histories, taxation regimes, land reclamations and tenure, and maturing commercial capital and literati power were intertwined with a language of lineage and coded in ritual practices to create translocal identities and imperial authority (Faure and Liu 2000). The mutual constitution of state and local society over centuries resulted in distinctive regional cultures juxtaposed with intense identification with a real and imaginary center. The Art of NOT Being Governed (Scott 2009) returns to challenge dichotomous concepts of center and margins, of civilized societies and the ethnic other, and linear models of social change. “Zomia,” a concept introduced by historian Willem Van Schendel (2002), explores sanctuary-like ecological environments that have allowed populations in the borderlands of China, India and highland Southeast Asia to escape state control. Scott argues that, far from being “remnants” of a primitive past, these populations opted for autonomous distance from state institutions by turning “raw.” “Center” and “periphery” as mutually constituted processes is the organizing theme of a volume that engages Scott. Empire at the Margins (Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006) examines culture, ethnicity and frontier in the Ming-Qing transition. The broader question for the authors is: in historical moments when the cultural identities of imperial “centers” appeared contingent, where was the “periphery,” and how should one analytically position the ethnic other in physical and discursive landscapes? These questions quite naturally lead to issues of place making, identity formation, and the social and political fluidities involved. Henri Lefebvre’s classic work, The Production of Space (1974/1991), immediately comes to mind. Rather than seeing space as a natural physical receptacle of various scales of human activities, a new generation of human geographers has since treated space as constructed with multiple meanings, sociality and political priorities. How the world has been re-territorialized This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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with technological innovations and emergent regimes of capital and labor is a central concern of David Harvey when he outlines time-space compressions as conditions of modernity and postmodernity in Europe (1990). Equally influential for my thinking are Saskia Sassen’s analyses of world finance hubs and implications for global assemblages of economies, legal frameworks and citizenship (2006). As James Holston and Arjun Appadurai indicate (Holston 1999), the relationship of globally connected cities with their national spaces is fraught with tensions. In the past decade, new theoretical explorations on human/material entanglement have continued earlier efforts to replace static and dichotomous spatial ontologies. Capturing the unstable and assembled qualities of their subjects, they engage topics ranging from archaeology to postmodern urbanity, STS and bioethics. Their processual and relational approach to social-material life is evidenced by the works of Neil Brenner (2013), Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (2005), Ignacio Farias and Thomas Bender (2009), and Ian Hodder (2012), to name a few. Driving these theories are the philosophical works of Nicholas Rose on subjectivity and political power (1989) and Actor-Network Theory of Bruno Latour (2005). On the issue of connectedness, historians have long explored world systems models before capitalist expansions and global finance. The travels of Marco Polo and Ibn  Battuta to Asia, and Zheng He’s fleets that reached Africa from coastal South  China revealed an energized world of traders, officials, scribes, jurists, religious pilgrims, soldiers and sailors with diverse ethnicities, linguistic skills, goods and institutions to share and exchange. In the Tang and Song periods, the Silk Road spanned continents and civilizations, linking East and South Asia to West Asia and Europe. It was lined with oasis towns, caves and grottos with monumental Buddhist statues, trade and military outposts frequented by nomadic caravans (Hansen 2012). Moving to oceanic circulations up to the 18th century, K. N. Chaudhuri (1985) provides details of multicultural encounters in the emporia trade and great port towns along the Indian Ocean routes against the background of empires and emerging nation-states. Reading six paintings by Vermeer based in Delft, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Timothy Brook (2008) portrays the almost taken-for-granted cultural fusion in everyday life, tastes and perceptions. While Takeshi Hamashita (2008) maps the complicated circuits of tributary trade between the Chinese empire and its Asian partners/competitors at the time of European ascendance from the 18th century on, Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) pushes the temporal boundaries backwards in time by adding crucial Islamic connections in the 13th century. A visit to the “China Trade” collection of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, makes me appreciate quality commodities such as tea and ivory, fine China, silverware, wallpaper and wood furniture. They were made by craftspeople in 18th-century Guangzhou for royalty and wealthy clients in Europe, North America, and the Arab world. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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What concerns me most has been the conceptual mapping of Asia in the world. I have teamed up with like-minded colleagues to produce a three-volume set of “Asia Inside Out” (Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue 2015a, 2015b) with the explicit aim to rethink territory-based concepts. Allow me to end this introduction with two interesting works that have guided my crossing of regional boundaries. Jack Goody, in The Theft of History (2007), challenges the deeply Eurocentric assumptions of Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, Moses Finlay, and Perry Anderson, scholars whom he also admires. Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, in The Myth of Continents (1997), take a closer look at oceanic systems and their littoral landscapes that should not be treated as margins to land masses. Their works confront linear conceptual frameworks and rigid continental divides. Wigen observes that: A great number of empirical puzzles, epistemological challenges, and littleexplored landscapes await those who engage with this quest for a global maritime geography. To the extent that geographers become interested not just in specific oceanic connections but more fundamentally in reimagining the globe by entertaining novel spatial configurations and regional schemes, both area studies and geography may find new sources of revitalization. (Lewis and Wigen 1999, p. 168)

In sum, I am committed to locating research subjects as components of world assemblages forged in historical junctures with diverse cultural meanings and fields of power. Synergizing the insights of the numerous generations of scholars in history and anthropology, my colleagues and I who work on South China have tried to combine critical social theories with careful scrutiny of ethnographic encounters and archival texts. Highlighting human agency and structural contingency in these processes, I hope to question static, binary analytical categories that have long been naturalized in our conceptual universe.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

1 Reflections on Historical Anthropology

This essay targets a Chinese scholarly audience, who deserves a coherent presentation of the analytical themes that my South China colleagues and I have been concerned with. One cannot ignore history when one studies the unifying and diversifying cultural processes in an entity one terms “China.” Years of field research in South China has made one appreciate the contexts when regional cultures and histories were made, and how they were represented in relation to real and imaginary political centers. Collectively, we have strived to be empirically grounded as well as informed by critical social theories. Key concepts highlighted in this essay are: analytical pursuit of moving targets, structuring, human agency, social practice, the cultural language of power, locality and translocality, and inter-Asian connectivity. We explore selfreflective field methods and apply critical reading to historical texts and cultural events. We might have started our intellectual journeys from South China, but our concerns have taken us far beyond, connecting oceans and landmasses across the globe in multi-disciplinary terms. We avoid essentializing mindsets by viewing significant events in history as made by purposeful human actions that carry specific cultural, social, and political meanings. Whether we “read” historical materials or observe social life, we are mindful of layers of local and translocal processes in which they were constructed. We walk the field to analytically understand these contexts as structures and to appreciate the nuances in the life worlds of our informants. This, we believe, is a productive way to connect humanities and social sciences. As summarized in the introduction of this section, history is an established academic discipline in Europe and North America. Its key concerns have ranged from political history (fortunes of dynasties and individual political figures), to history of long-term, overarching economic structures (e.g., Annales School; representative figures Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel) and to social histories that try to uncover voices of the marginalized (e.g., E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm). There have been efforts to integrate structural analyses in social sciences with the narrative mode in telling histories (Lawrence Stone 1979; Geoff Eley 2005). By the time historians such as Jacque Le Goff, Carlo Ginsburg and Natalie Davis This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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highlight cultural meanings and fields of power behind social practice of historical actors, the discipline has moved much closer to anthropology. Anthropology has also undergone intellectual turning points. In the late 19th century, it started with evolutionary conceptual schemes to turn cultural differences observed in spatial terms into development stages in linear time (e.g., Lewis H. Morgan, Henry Maine). Reactions against such pseudo-historical approaches were variations of structural-functionalist perspectives that dominated British anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. Among the notables were Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown although they might not have self-identified with the branding. French structuralism was powerfully represented by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used innate logical structures in the mind to understand almost infinite complexities of social organizations on the ground. None of these scholarly traditions engaged deeply with historical sensibilities and inquiries. Challenged by critical social theories from Europe, anthropology since the 1970s has undergone deep soul searching (Ortner 1984). It has turned away from the static categories of defining culture and society, and instead shares concerns with history and literary studies when analyzing the “other.” It attempts to uncover meaningful practices of social actors. It highlights the narrative structures and power play that are embedded in archival documents and ethnographic accounts. This is a significant Weberian turn (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994; Keyes 2002). Culture is no longer timeless, quantifiable and empirically “out there” to be recorded through material objects and practices. History, likewise, is seen as selectively remembered, recorded, and interpreted by human agents who act from different positions of power and vulnerability. Power can be exercised by political machineries and their institutional representatives, but in Foucauldian terms, power can also be internalized and located in our bodies, language, and forms of knowledge. Space and place, concepts seemingly innocuous and often taken for granted as material receptacles of human life, can be imagined, negotiated and constructed with nuanced meanings and ambivalent emotions at different historical junctures. Good research begins with asking questions with the right mix of analytical intuitions and may not always produce clear-cut answers.

Structuring Social scientists in the past century often start with sharply defined categories—structures in time and place that provide guiding principles for explaining human behavior. However, influenced by anthropology’s soul searching, I have avoided viewing China as a bounded land mass, a receptacle of a population with timeless culture and identity. It is easy for scholars to use terms such as “Confucian China,” or “the Chinese,” as if these entities share generalized cultural or political characteristics. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Even if these categories are empirically relevant, it is important to understand how they have come to be so. To frame research questions, I have since moved away from static concepts of structure and sociality to process. Moreover, using process to enrich structure is not enough, because these two concepts can be taken as dichotomous. I have found the concept of “structuring ” more useful (in the tradition of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu and Philip Abrams). Abrams stresses the contingent, interactive qualities of the subject and object. Every structure has embedded processes, and every process contains structure and agency. What makes Abrams attractive is that he grounds the concept of structuring in the social theory traditions of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. All three have distinct perspectives on social structure and change, with varying degrees of emphasis on the human agent. In Durkheim, I appreciate individual actors and their experiences integral to social structure. I turn to Marx to view social relationships as not integrated by a functional division of labor or an appreciation of difference. They are sustained and challenged by class-based interests and institutional power. With Weber, I see purposeful human actions and moral imaginations (such as bureaucratic rationality, legitimacy, or religious panic) that may lead to unintended structural transformations. Inspired by such thinking, my South China colleagues and I embrace an analytical framework that assumes social life in constant flux, narrated and interpreted by economically interested, politically shrewd, and culturally creative subjects. It is up to a historian and ethnographer to pinpoint the conjunctures when particular processes gain lasting significance and definitive power. How do social phenomena such as nations, states, ethnicities, communities, lineages and religions come to shape material life, mark identities and confirm commitment? Through what means are boundaries hardened or blurred? Whose voices prevail, and whose memories are highlighted or erased from historical or cultural memories? A point in time, a site in space, an institutional feature, are embedded in processes that sustain them, and given instrumental and symbolic meanings by subjects who engage them. Liu Zhiwei, in summarizing our explorations in the field together, has written an insightful article in Lishi yanjiu (2003) on how we apply the concept of structuring to historical and ethnographic work in South China. Uncovering these processes in the flux of social life and the fields of power requires patient sleuthing.

The Individual Actor If process and structure are dialectically linked to human action, how should we conceptualize the difference between an individual actor and the human agent? I have gained insight from conversations with Richard Wong, a Chicago-trained economist and colleague, who shares with me how European intellectual history relates This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to modern social science analyses. Allow me to paraphrase his ideas below. For a market-oriented economist whose basic unit of analysis is the atomistic, self-interested actor, Wong traces the evolution of the concept of the individual through the centuries (Lukes 1973). He starts with medieval Europe, when the church dichotomously viewed the world as separated by the forces of darkness (for pagans) and light (for believers of the Christian faith). However, towards the end of the Middle Ages, minds, if not hearts, were changing. Some historians found it hard to fit the classical ages in their moral and religious imagination that were framed dichotomously. The Greeks and Romans had had remarkable achievements in their philosophies, economies and political systems although they were seen as non-believers. By recognizing these achievements, the historians were beginning to stress that people, not God, could be the originator of their own actions. This complicated the opposition between a life of sin and salvation and allowed an appreciation for the creativity of men in everyday material life. Religious individualism was ushered in when Martin Luther unveiled his 95 Theses in 1517 and initiated the Protestant Reformation. His religious action, circumscribed at the time, subsequently transformed Western civilization. In his challenge to the authority of the pope and the church clergy, he redefined the process of salvation, stressing the individual believer’s faithful relationship with God. Wong asserts that political individualism surfaced in the 17th century. Philosophers challenged the moral and institutional powers of old regimes and debated on the sovereign rights of individuals. They stressed rational, self-interested, and contractual relationships with new forms of governance, the rule of law, and the political basis for personal liberty (e.g., Thomas Hobbes, John Locke). Later scholars coined the complex historical processes The Enlightenment. The concept of the sovereign rights of individuals is also a cornerstone for modern Western legal thought. One is born with natural rights. These rights are not given by governments. Instead, it is the responsibility of states and their constitutions to protect the rights. Economic individualism closely followed in Wong’s view. Based on accumulated intellectual debates in which the individual as a subject was step by step released from layers of social contextualization, one can almost anticipate Adam Smith’s construction of the market and pricing mechanisms in the 18th century. Although Adam Smith was mindful of the balance between market, state and the moral sentiments embedded in human actions, the idea of utility and self-regulated market was highlighted by later scholars. Economic individualism captured the atomistic, self-interested actors, rationally calculating means and ends, coming into contractual arrangements in market transactions, and structuring supply and demand. Individual good dovetailed with the good of society. The invisible hand of the market replaced regulations by the state and the moral principles in society. If every actor was similarly unencumbered, human action would be quantifiable and comparable for statistical This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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analysis. This concept gained tremendous significance in social sciences paradigms in the 20th century for economists, sociologists and political scientists. Anthropologists might have been the exception.

Social Practice and Human Agency Fortunately for sociologists and anthropologists, the three classic social theorists in the 19th century, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, offered counterweight to the conceptual atomization of the human self. In various ways, they put the individual back into different structural, historical, and moral contexts. Emile Durkheim believed that individuals were social beings. Different economic formations necessitated solidarities and moralities for individuals to relate to the collective. In societies with little division of labor, society was held together by repressive laws and rituals to induce commitment. He termed it mechanical solidarity. As economies advance, increasing division of labor enabled individual parts to contribute to the whole in structurally differentiated but functionally integrative ways. Collective consciousness was based on mutual appreciation of difference. He termed it organic solidarity. The source of alienation was traced to the individual’s unbalanced relationship with society, either by being suddenly detached from one’s social environment in times of rapid social change, or overly engaged with a particular social ideology (such as nationalism) in which collective goals overwhelm an individual’s sense of self. His book Suicide used French data to argue that self-destruction was a socio-structural issue. Durkheim’s functionalist assumptions, however, had prevented him from examining inequalities, conflicts, and power play embedded in social relations and mainstream (collective) moralities. Marx captured social turmoil in his class analysis. Social differentiation came with private property. Owners of productive forces exercised power over the organization of work and the terms of distribution. These social relationships were not neutral but full of power, domination, and contestations. Each class had its progressive historical roles and exploitative powers that were eventually challenged. This was the essence of class contradictions and struggles, and reflected not only at the economic base but also political institutions, ideologies and other class-based cultural forms. European Marxists have focused a great deal more on the superstructure and stress the autonomous power of state apparatus to exert political and cultural hegemony (representatives include Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams). In Foucault, power becomes even more intangible and diffusive, in the constitution of the body, language and thought. Their critical revisions of Marxist concepts are rich and complex, but I would not be able to detail them here. The human agent exercising purposeful action is central to a Weberian perspective. In the pursuit of meaningful lives, individuals intentionally or unintentionally make This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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society, history, and themselves. As mentioned earlier in this essay, Philip Abrams calls this human-focused process of change “structuring.” Human intentions and actions may not be firmly rooted in a particular type of social structure (as Durkheim would see them), nor are they single-mindedly class-based (as Marx might view them). One can appreciate the historical paradox of human action in Weber’s work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Members of a Protestant sect, anxious about salvation and God’s grace, worked hard to convince themselves that they were the chosen group. This work ethic dovetailed with the historical conditions of Europe to create a new class of capitalist entrepreneurs with tremendous structural consequences. The Weberian treatment of purposeful human action and its unintentional results makes one appreciate historical change as diverse, rich, and multi-directional. My South China colleagues and I have stressed this dialectical relationship between individual selves and structure, of intentional action and unintended structural consequences. Conceptually different from the atomistic individual, human agents create webs of material and symbolic significance that become ordering frames for further actions. In the introduction of Agents and Victims in South China, I highlight the paradox of agency in Chinese peasants by downplaying the conceptual dichotomy of power and resistance (as in James Scott’s work). Instead, I stress “complicity.” Social change must be seen as the working and reworking of culture and political economy through the creative, conscious actions of human beings. Human behavior is neither entirely programmed by an infinite variety of cultural rules, nor compelled by externalized political and economic forces. If it were, literature would have great difficulty in sustaining a sense of tragedy . . . By focusing on the dilemmas of political agents who maneuvered within structures that they had helped to create, my account raises a general question in the study of peasants. In complex agrarian societies where distinct hierarchies of power and ideological domination exist, to what extent have peasants contributed to making their world and to shaping its historical process? Were they mere spectators watching political dramas unfold from afar, or were they inevitably drawn into these dramas to become part of their unfolding? What follows are the stories of some Chinese peasants in the 20th century, who, as Richard Madsen says (1984, p. 30), have made themselves as they made history. (Siu 1989a, pp. 13–14)

In a volume entitled Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State, I parallel the complicity of peasants and intellectuals in making the Chinese Communist movement. This anthology focuses on the changing images of peasants created by writers from the 1930s to the 1980s who consciously used the peasantry to condemn or support the political authorities . . . Whether objects of abuse in traditional society or objects of transformation in the decades of socialism, the peasants have been, in the eyes of these writers, as much a political and moral metaphor as living, suffering, and functioning human beings. However unreal these literary images This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of peasants may be, they reveal the evolution of the writers’ fitful, ambivalent, but compelling relationships with the peasantry on the one hand and with statebuilding efforts on the other hand. In a sense, this anthology uses literature on the peasants to describe the odyssey of modern Chinese intellectuals, an odyssey that illustrates the larger processes of cultural, historical, and political changes to whose creation intellectuals and peasants have contributed with a desperate energy. (Siu 1990c)

I have argued that in the 1930s, the writers chose to write about peasants. By the 1970s and 1980s, they had no choice but to write about peasants. In face of a political movement that was determined to include them, intellectuals and peasants gave it compliance, and at times, commitment and complicity. On looking back, so many felt victimized by the structures and processes made significant by their very actions. Today, 200 million rural residents are on the move to search for better livelihoods in cities although they face tremendous institutional and cultural barriers. Intellectuals find new spaces to express defiance and ambivalence, but cynicism abounds. A young generation is restless, instrumental, and volatile in their emotions. Sensing a cultural and moral vacuum, the government urges them to stand proudly behind their nation and give more to society. A major state agenda to induce “social harmony” (hexie) is to mobilize educated urban youths to serve in poor rural regions whose residents were politically, economically, and physically incarcerated for decades under the Maoist regime. One wonders if there is a sense of déjà vu? In sum, our perspective on practice contains social structure in Durkheim, power in Marx, and purposeful agency in Weber. The ensuing issue is to locate social practice in the appropriate historical moments from which it arises and for which it has lasting albeit unintentional impact.

Deconstructing History Anthropology has long set its goal to understand the cultural other, just as historian David Lowenthal raises the parallel issue of uncovering the historical other (1985). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson put the two together by highlighting the historically generated politics of difference (Gupta and Ferguson 1992/1997). Boundary making is an “othering” process, be that national, cultural, ethnic, or social. They cogently illustrate how the cultural other, subject of almost a century of anthropological scrutiny, has been embedded in historical junctures of colonialism, modern state-making, socialist revolutions, neo-liberal transformations, and contemporary contestations. Although the use of history in cultural analysis is important, anthropologists have not been fully engaged with it. Many who study contemporary topics often ignore it. Some pay tribute in the beginning as historical background, and then proceed to the ethnographic present. Others use historical documents (e.g., local gazetteers, lineage This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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genealogies) to glean empirical “facts.” A few use critically deconstructed historical materials to unveil the definitive/structuring processes underlying the ethnographic present. This is the way I see history and anthropology intersect. How does one critically read history? For sure history is not just events that happened in the past. There are no necessary linear connections in time between events. Nor can we claim that history is “tradition.” Every phenomenon (or material object) is made by people in spatial and temporal contexts that are culturally defined. What is considered significant to be remembered as an event is a selective process. How an event is preserved and later reread involves more interpretations. Many happenings, voices and experiences are simply deemed unimportant, forgotten, or deliberately silenced. These critical views of history have long characterized the works of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Natalie Davis, James Scott, Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, Ann Stoler, and David Faure. As researchers, we bring our own discriminating gaze. We locate a site, find relevant informants, survey social landscapes, and watch events unfold. We uncover historical materials such as stone stele, local gazetteers and lineage genealogies. Not only must we treat them as constructed objects, but we should also be aware of the conceptual tools we bring to ask pertinent questions, to glean what we consider to be relevant data, to critically “read” the “texts” and to eventually pose our interpretations against competing ones. Let me illustrate this point with a Hong Kong story. In recent decades before and after Britain returned the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, social and political protests have intertwined with nationalistic parades orchestrated by proChina forces. Each camp has its own version of what Hong Kong was, is, and should be. In a speech I gave on the eve of the political changeover, I addressed a debate among the public with my own narrative on Hong Kong’s history. In fewer than 24 hours, Hong Kong will be reunited with China. The notion “One country, two systems” is a unique one. “One country” refers to sovereignty. “Two systems” on the other hand involves complex histories and contradictory emotions. In contrast to China’s nationalist narrative, the Hong Kong experience has been neither entirely colonial/Western nor narrowly territorial. The territory’s residents have acquired overlapping identities of Hong Konger, Cantonese, Chinese and global citizen. They are attached to a territory without clear boundaries. It constitutes fluid layers of social meaning, economic interests, and political preferences and has grown global without losing its Chinese bearing. . . . From the Ming dynasty to the end of the 20th century, local population have been quite beyond the reach of formal state apparatus and have foiled any serious imposition of rigid labeling. Interacting with various state efforts, merchants, professionals, revolutionaries, refugees, post-war baby boomers, and new immigrants have displayed tremendous ingenuity to accommodate, to maneuver, and to absorb. Every turn of political event has triggered a remarkable churning This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of such diverse energies. Over time, the process has created a phenomenon we call Hong Kong. To respect “two systems” in the political formula is to appreciate these energies. . . . Wherever we choose to place our analyses or faith, I hope that this story can be testimony to the open society of Hong Kong, where public forums are vibrant and different voices respected. Maybe we should not build anything at all in the future reunification plaza—let it be that open, tolerant and “public space” representing what is truly a Hong Kong experience. (Hamilton 1999, pp. 110–11)

Understandably, my version of the Hong Kong story is one among many. I have embedded a particular reading of society and politics in my thick descriptions of Hong Kong’s history against one that builds on stark images contrasting patriotism with colonialism. My task as a social scientist is to demonstrate that my reading meets a high standard of analytical scrutiny.

Culture and the Language of Power Culture is a major subject of inquiry for anthropology. Before Clifford Geertz and the publication of his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures, the term had an essentialized quality. It was treated as the accumulated wisdoms of generations that had become the basis of worldviews, moralities, and the guiding principles of actions and judgments for societies. Artifacts and texts were collected as material culture and displayed in museums. So were architectural forms preserved as cultural heritage. They were given significance as embodiment of a population’s life worlds. Culture, in the minds of the layperson, was timeless, encompassing, and uncontested. It could be uncovered, quantified, and recorded as empirical realities. Critical theory since the 1960s has led to a less tangible view of culture that focuses on its constructed and negotiated nature. Rules, values, styles and judgments are naturalized, improvised, and reinforced by social practice both in public and private life (Ortner 1984; Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994). Pierre Bourdieu terms it habitus. Engagement with these material and ritual complexes frames a population’s sense of identity, locality, history, and entitlement. Anthropologists who observe life worlds on the ground should go beyond the timeless façade of “culture” and highlight crucial historical moments charged with power implications (state-making, colonial encounters, imperial expansions and the like) in which culture is used as spatial, temporal, and social markers to differentiate “us” from “them” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992/1997). Over the years since I started fieldwork in the 1970s, my concept of culture has become softer, more interpretative, and infused with conflicting meanings and power. To trace it is an exercise in deconstruction. A light-hearted exchange with a historian colleague at Yale illustrates the difference in approach to the treatment of culture and its material representations. My colleague has deep knowledge of oasis towns along This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the Silk Road in the Tang and Song. She deals with rare material artifacts—stone stele, documents, unearthed burial objects, religious statues, and paintings in caves and grottos. She often complains that anthropologists just “make up data as they go,” whereas she and her archaeologist colleagues have solid, tangible, material objects in their hands. I caution her that historians are in a far worse situation than anthropologists. “At least we are fully aware of how we construct our data,” I claim, “but historians have to deal with other people’s constructions.” Nothing from the past exists as objectively untouched by human intentions and social practice. It is interesting to observe how an essentialized “Confucianism” has been actively promoted by the Chinese government in recent years. After decades of deliberate social engineering to erase it, the post-reform state is investing heavily in its resurrection. Confucian institutes are given the mission to uplift the Chinese cultural essence in tune with China’s rise in the new global order. Even in the Olympics opening ceremony in 2008, the timeless essences of “a Chinese civilization” were performed with unprecedented fervor to capture the world’s imagination. For an anthropologist’s analytical eye, it was a remarkable theater of power and spectacle—demonstrating what the organizers considered to be the rightful place of empire, nation, and global player in the 21st century. An important focus of my colleagues to study culture and history has been rituals associated with family and marriage, lineage formations, community festivals, and popular religion. One early example is my article on the chrysanthemum festivals in Xiaolan (see chapter 8 of this volume), which traces the evolution of the festival from the late 18th to the late 20th century. Every sixty years the festival was staged. One saw different casts of characters rising to the occasion. Many were local elites representing lineage and merchant institutions, cultivating literati themes to stress affiliation with the imperial order, and competing with one another on the lavishness of the displays. These events illuminated the making of local society with cultural imaginations that dovetailed with the expansion of imperial rule during the Ming and Qing. The town’s elites in the Republican, the socialist and post-reform eras continued to recycle the festivals and imposed their priorities while claiming that they were celebrating “tradition.” The festivals were visibly grand cultural spectacles to confirm a changing nexus of power in the Pearl River Delta. Using thick description gleaned from historical archives and ethnographic data, I have offered my interpretations of how a region and its creative populations used symbolic and instrumental means to become part of the imperial empire, and in the ensuing centuries, of a nation in turmoil, a socialist revolution, and a late-socialist state. In another article, I turn to delayed transfer marriage (buluojia) in the Pearl River Delta during the Qing. “Where were the women?” (1990b) questions buluojia as being part of a “marriage resistance” complex tied to women’s engagement with the silk industry in the late 19th century. I trace the evolution of that marriage practice This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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as the regional norm long before the arrival of the silk industry. I critically “read between the lines” of local documents and highlight the agency of indigenous populations (women included) who established their respective places in an advancing empire by using local customs on their own terms. This leads us to ask, “Who exactly were the inhabitants in South China” who, for centuries, claimed that their ancestors had migrated from the Central Plains (Zhongyuan)? If these populations were indigenous, why did they shed almost all local cultural markers but retained certain features of their marriage customs? Why and how did they employ the cultural strategies to establish identities in the open “frontiers” of the delta at the time and claim settlement rights? Although I start the article on women and marriage practices, the way I approach the topic leads me to offer a new reading of a regional political economy and ethnicity in the making. In a similar vein, Liu Zhiwei analyzes “lineage on the sands” in the Pearl River Delta during the Qing. In his chapter published in Down to Earth (Faure and Siu 1995), he combines the emerging institutions of lineage, the cult of a deity Beidi, and their associated rituals to solidify cultural languages of power. Emergent social groups accumulated wealth from the reclamation of the sands, compiled genealogies, established corporate trusts, built ornate ancestral halls, claimed ancestry and literati connections with surnames from the Central Plains, and drew hard lines against those without such constructed lineage pedigree and denied them settlement rights. In this cultural complex, the destitute might not be the familiar Marxist categories of poor, landless peasants, but a non-lineage member, a non-villager, and those culturally excluded and labeled “ethnic.” Using a similar line of argument, Liu and I explore the changing “ethnic” lines drawn between farmers and fishermen in the maturing Pearl River Delta in the Qing. In “Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan” (see chapter 9 of this volume), we do not start our research with static “ethnic” categories. Instead, we see them as labels used by established settlers to exclude potential competitors in the open political fields of the sands. Cultural labels hardened precisely when social and economic circumstances were fluid and social hierarchies transgressed. In times of peace, fisher-folk were seen as boat masters, transport functionaries, and merchants. In times of dynastic decline, they were discriminated as Dan and accused of piracy. Nonetheless, the nature of sands reclamation enabled those who were excluded to find upward mobility. Once “landed,” they built ancestral estates, farmed the rich alluvial fields, performed rituals, and compiled genealogies according to what was considered proper cultural strategies. They also imposed discriminating labels on those who came behind them. Ethnicity, in our conceptual schema, is anything but static. It is a historical process full of economic meanings and power play. David Faure sums up these cultural processes of lineage and ethnic formation and places them in crucial historical moments. His book Emperor and Ancestor (2007) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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provides ethnographic sensibilities and archival depth. In a review of his book in China Quarterly, I relate his views as follows: Lingnan in the Ming and Qing found legitimate engagement with the center not only in household registration or religious orthopraxy, but also through the language of lineage. Lineage formations, long associated with South China in anthropological literature as cultural essence and functional necessity were, in Faure’s narrative, produced by a conjuncture of historical events that tied village to state. This argument enriches and revises Maurice Freedman’s seminal works. It begins with Faure’s study of the New Territories of Hong Kong between the 16th and 18th century. The present work focuses on specific lineage formations— territorial communities tracing common descent, displaying written genealogies, literati pretensions, landed corporate trusts, elaborate ancestral halls and rituals. These magnate lineages emerged in the Pearl River Delta in the Ming and Qing alongside highly capitalized reclamation of the sands, ethnic self-differentiation through household registration and tax collection, the Great Rituals Controversy and court politics, gentrified local leadership, and the proliferation (and improvisation) of lineage and community rituals. As Faure states, “At different times in Chinese history, the interface between local society and the imperial state was characterized by different modes of verbal expressions, manners, and administrative styles and beliefs, the combination of which is summed up in the shorthand that serves as a name given to an institution. The ‘lineage’ of South China was such a shorthand.” (2007b)

The book is a masterpiece in historical anthropology. Historical Anthropology as a conceptual framework does not limit its topics to happenings in the past, as shown by my own ethnographic work on the socialist and post-reform periods. When the imperial state was a symbolic resource, the manipulation of cultural meanings and identities gave local regions and populations a great deal of room for maneuver. Such state-society relationship fundamentally changed in the 20th century. Rural society (and the inhabitants) was politically and discursively “othered” by new regimes. The othering reached its peak in the Maoist era, when the hard structures of a state machinery became unmediated. Local society was stripped of its cultural resources and social nexus and economically cellularized (Siu 1989a). Since the 1990s, I have used a rather Foucauldian concept of power to question a dichotomous view of state and society. In “Socialist Peddlers and Princes in a Chinese Market Town” (chapter 5 in this volume), I observe the entrenchment of state power even in people’s most entrepreneurial maneuvers. Residents of the market town that I studied tried hard to put the Maoist revolution behind them, just as the state professed to liberalize its control over the economy and society. However, with generations having internalized the institutional and ideological power of the state, their purposeful actions ironically reproduced such intrusive power in their everyday pursuits. I term this process “state involution.” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In subsequent articles on family practices, popular rituals, the rural-urban divide, and urban village enclaves, I analyze how the hard and soft powers of an authoritarian state (both institutional and discursive) have continued to extend themselves with the unselfconscious complicity of the general population to produce the social dynamics and cultural forms in the post-reform era. In my review of three books on post-reform China (2006), I raise the issue as follows. China is hot. The global media has named this century ‘The China Century.’ . . . All contribute to an image of a country energized, on the move towards real and imaginary markets, and almost desperately in a fast forward mode. Looking beyond economic data and media sensation, anthropologists ask how the rhetoric of reform and the real force of market in late-socialist China translate into the lives of ordinary people . . . Not unlike those in many developing countries, their lives weave together stories of pride and unbound aspirations as well as ambivalence and sadness . . . Everyone is intensely engaged with processes of becoming. What is the historical baggage that this energized population carries in its efforts to move ahead? What is the lingering impact of a Maoist revolution that so many would only wish to forget? Emotions have been volatile . . . [But] there is certain one-dimensionality in people’s mind-sets, imaginings and strategies. It is as if every individual is an eager operator but with minimal cultural resource or social mediation. How does one conceptually link these instrumental actions with the institutional structures people find themselves in? As in the earlier periods, can these human agents be victims of the very circumstances their actions have made significant?

Locality and Translocality, Unity, and Diversity One clearly cannot treat Chinese culture as timeless and bounded. The question is how to appreciate its infinite diversity and intense unity in the past, and why it appears starkly one-dimensional today. Philosophers may see the continuity of a cultural core, and political scientists may stress integrative administrative mechanisms. Anthropologists and historians, on the other hand, find dynamic life-worlds linking villagers to translocal complexes of power, interest, and authority. Agrarian empires have reached their subjects through these layered interactive processes. A focus on the cultural interface between political center and local society naturally leads to the classic works of G. William Skinner, Maurice Freedman, Arthur Wolf, Barbara Ward, Myron Cohen and James Watson. To understand a state agrarian society with historical depth and spatial spread, these scholars have provided different conceptual frameworks. Each has his or her own theoretical take on explaining the juxtaposition of unity and diversity in Chinese culture and society. Skinner’s “spatial” framework views Chinese dynastic history as constituted by regional cycles of growth and decline. His concept of regional systems in the late This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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imperial period is built upon Durkheimian functionalism and neo-classical economic assumptions. It begins with a hierarchy of rural marketing structures created over time by exchange activities based on farmers’ calculations of transport costs. The hierarchy of nodes and their periodic marketing schedules, structurally differentiated but functionally integrated, allowed maximum circulation of goods, people and information (1964). The social world of villagers could be quite discreet and homogeneous at one level but would be cross-cut by the next level of economic exchange. Skinner adds a temporal dimension to the spatial structure by arguing that the economic, social and normative mapping of the peasant world softened and hardened with the pulsating rhythms of periodic markets and dynastic fortunes (1971). As goods, people, information and cultural norms moved up and down the hierarchy of nested systems, rural life was exposed to city life and the imperial enterprise. Communities were porous in times of dynastic heyday, and turned inward only in times of political decline and endemic disorder. Interactions with the state machinery took place at higher-level marketing nodes, where economic functions intertwined with administrative ones (Skinner 1977). The significant methodological point in the Skinnerian framework is how to locate one’s research site in the dynamic spatial and temporal contexts. Counter-intuitively, his model turns anthropological attention from a physically bounded “village” to a standard marketing community as the most basic unit for understanding Chinese rural society. At a macro regional level of analysis, the growth and decline of these pulsating, nested hierarchies of marketing communities had shaped the course of dynastic histories (Skinner 1985a). Maurice Freedman starts with cultural principles—that of kinship and descent. Using a structural-functional perspective, Freedman maintains that rich rice agriculture and the need for irrigation and defense created the conditions for the emergence of lineage communities with landed properties in Southeastern China. His insight on the unity and diversity of Chinese culture and society parallels Skinner’s. Corporate kin groups stressed their unique identities reinforced by written genealogies, landed wealth, ornate ancestral halls, elaborate rituals, and even belligerent political behavior against local competitors. But they were linked to higher-order kin organizations (real or fictive) that extended far beyond local society, and they subscribed to a common Confucian culture of the political center. David Faure has been influenced by the Weberian orientation of Barbara Ward’s work (1985) in the New Territories of Hong Kong. He moves away from the functionalist argument of Freedman by giving lineage formation a historical grounding. Rather than seeing lineage principles as a cultural ideal made possible by the conditions of a rich river delta, Faure goes far beyond kinship and descent to stress the contestation of settlement rights in a frontier region and how that dovetailed with particular political and moral debates emanating from the imperial center (1986). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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It was during the Ming and Qing, when the empire was expanding into a developing Pearl River Delta with particular state-making agendas, local populations claimed settlement rights and established landed estates in the river marshes. These estates, together with their ornate lineage halls and elaborate rituals, became the backbone of a particular type of lineage formation in South China. Affiliation with literati pedigree (real or fabricated) and migration charters in lineage genealogies all pointed to translocal elements in the making of localized groups. Such language of lineage was a powerful means for local populations to differentiate into settlers and farming groups who paid taxes against the mobile, the ethnic and the excluded, who did not. A “site” comprising lineages, full of meaningful cultural markers, is a historically grounded conscious construct by those involved in its making (Faure and Siu 1995). We term this process “the original translocal society” (Faure and Siu 2003). Clearly following Barbara Ward’s conscious model and the importance of an imaginary “center” in local self-fashioning, David Faure and I generally view a region as a construct, a product of human agency. Identities, statuses, institutions, and alliances are remade and negotiated, and in flux with instrumental intentions, meaningful manipulations and power play. But things do come together to produce lasting impact, and it is that conjuncture of historical processes that produce significant structures. Our major difference from a Skinnerian perspective is that Skinner (1985a) uses cyclical structures of growth and decline in regions to illuminate dynastic histories. Instead, we use historical processes to understand how certain structures emerged to be selectively remembered as guiding principles for action and identity. An inspiring work along a similar line of thinking is The Age of Wild Ghosts by Erik Muggler (2001). Another major nexus of state-society interface has involved popular religion. Arthur Wolf (1974), Stephan Feuchtwang (1992) and James Watson (Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski 1985, pp. 292–324) each in his own way stresses the percolation of the imperial metaphor and political etiquette to everyday popular religious beliefs and rituals, historically and now. Generations of peasants might have never left their villagers, but through ritual practices, they have learned (and earned) their respective places in the imperial order and navigated the authoritative workings of government bureaucracies. This cultural nexus of power linking center to locality would not be complete if we leave out the formal operations of the civil service examination system and its lasting impact. According to intellectual historian Benjamin Elman (1991), it intertwined and reproduced the economic power of land holding, the social power of education, and the political power of officialdom over the centuries. The imperial system was resilient because local populations were able to endorse it on their own diverse terms. It appeared to be an imposing political machinery only in times of crisis (Watson 2004). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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On the integrative mechanisms of cultural practice, be they formal educational institutions based on classical scholarship, or the vernacular stories and theater pieces in popular circulation, they helped construct identity and define membership. On this, a literary scholar Cyril Birch argues that Chinese popular stories and novels, “read by children or by the semi-educated, orally presented by storytellers or transferred to the dramatic stage . . . confirmed cultural identity just as surely as the dazzling beauty of the cathedral told the European peasant he was a Christian” (Plaks 1977, p. xi). What, then, is the modern fate of the original translocal society? This is an important question for any social scientist who needs to contextualize his or her “site” of research. I should illustrate with an example. When I started fieldwork in the 1970s in Guangdong, Vivienne Shue, a political scientist, went to north China to conduct hers. We were both exploring how much and through what means the Maoist state had penetrated rural society, and we came to divergent conclusions. I do not think it was a matter of regional difference between north and south. Instead, it was a difference in how we have perceived “villages.” I see traditional Chinese villages as very “translocal” from the start, as described by Skinner, Wolf, Freedman, and others. But from the 1950s to the 1970s, the hierarchy of marketing systems had been replaced by state channels of supply and procurement. Complex lineages alliances were diminished together with the demise of ancestral estates, halls, rituals and their managers. Community festivals were erased from public memory. Popular religion and rituals that used to display the pantheon of the gods were no longer available for villages to engage and imagine. In a word, diverse forms of cultural authority were step by step marginalized and destroyed. What was left was a cellularized village with a drastically shrunk social world and a cultural vacuum, left bare by three decades of intense political transformation under Mao. If I did not have a long historical understanding of how villages were constructed over the centuries with translocal resources, I would not have appreciated how they were stripped down to a bare existence under Mao. I used my monograph Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (1989a), to illustrate such processes. In the post-reform period, I turned to another kind of “locality,” this time village enclaves at the margins of every major Chinese city. As I described in my article “Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Postreform South China” (2007a), I apply similar historical arguments to seemingly “postmodern” developments in present-day China. I would only highlight two points here. First, residents in these urban village enclaves (chengzhongcun) are not rural remains of a previous era. They are post-reform creations where residents are juggling with major phases of China’s development at the present: a deep and hard rural-urban divide that has grounded villagers in a collective land regime, a lingering socialist bureaucracy that no longer values labor, an unbridled, amoral market (mostly distorted by state policies and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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entrenched interests), and a government eager to promote linear development and national pride. These are villagers who shrewdly game big-time real estate based on the unexpected rise in the value of their collective land, migrant workers who subject themselves to substandard housing in return for low rent, and local officials who reap unimaginable profits from real estate deals and who bank on erecting landmarks to fulfill their ambition and vanity. They are all major stakeholders in China’s fastforward move to be world factory and modern global player. Second, I argue that the villagers, however rich they have become, and their migrant renters, however mobile they seem, are experiencing intense social, cultural, and political incarceration. They have been grounded by decades of institutional discrimination against their rural status despite a revolution conducted in their name. These Zomia-like enclaves are physical sites of conscious, localized rurality as much as they are dynamic discursive fields when village finally meets urban tsunami in the 21st century. China’s “urban revolution” has drawn intense academic interest (Zhang 2010; Hsing 2010). In appreciating its citizen’s feverish march towards urban postmodernity, it seems all the more important to acknowledge layers of the Maoist past in the process (Siu 2012).

Inter-Asian Connectivity: Rethinking Global, National and Regional Space If defining a locality is crucial to anthropological theory and method, how does one apply a processual framework to understand an interconnected Asia? What if regional constructs are not land based and state centered but traversing oceans and polities over centuries? Henri Lefebvre has certainly inspired me to think about social space as both mental and material. Manuel Castells confirms in my mind that space is a concrete expression of each historical ensemble in which a society is specified and signified. Marc Augé and David Harvey have highlighted for us the shifting temporal-spatial parameters, scales, associated subjectivities and references as the world experienced modernity, postmodernity, or super-modernity. Today the world has become “small.” Institutionally, nation-state boundaries can become blurry, and citizenship contingent. We can cross time zones and vast continents in hours. In cyberspace, it takes seconds to have billions transferred. Global flows have made it difficult for anthropologists. They can no longer assume that they will discover the cultural other in fieldwork. Those studying African traders easily find their ethnographic subjects appear on their doorstep in New York City or Guangzhou. But material resources, people, cultures, images and meanings seldom travel “whole,” nor are their flows smooth (Ferguson 2006, Tsing 2005). Fragments circulate and multiply in the hands (and imaginations) of creative human agents at different historical times. Some are reinterpreted and highlighted. Others are This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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abandoned, forgotten, silenced. These selective processes are lived experiences that anthropologists like to explore. Critical social theorists in the late 20th century have re-oriented certain Eurocentric paradigms about these historical processes. The list is long. Jack Goody, in The Theft of History, shifts our attention to “civilizing processes” in Eurasia that had tremendous impact on the unfolding of modern European history (2007). Dimitri Gutas alerts us to the massive Arab translations of Greek classics in Baghdad during the 6th to 9th centuries, which might have found their ways into Latin translations in the Italian Renaissance (1998). However, de-centering Europe, if politically or morally framed, can easily lead us back into a parallel mindset of re-orientalizing Asia. An inspiring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004–05, entitled “China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 A.D.,” showed the extensive flows of trade goods and the cultural fusion among multi-ethnic populations that stretched from Europe through Central Asia to north China. These processes contributed greatly to the making of “China” centuries past, from the late Han to the Tang dynasty. At the Asian end of intercontinental dynamism, Mark Lewis portrays the Tang dynasty as the “cosmopolitan empire” where commerce and cultural florescence illuminated a geographically extensive polity that engaged with regions from Korea to the Persian Gulf (2009). Furthermore, Janet Abu-Lughod extends the world systems by tracking shared commercial institutions in the 13th century linking Europe and Asia via the Mideast Heartland and the Indian Ocean (1989). A crucial analytical lesson is to look for the historical and cultural linkages missing in our frameworks, and to understand how essentialized, land-based categories came to dominate academic thinking (Lewis and Wigen 1997). For the later centuries, Timothy Mitchell (2000) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) argue that the European-centered cartography of a singular, universalizing modernity is problematic. They stress the simultaneous appearance and articulation of particular forms of politics, sensibility, temporality, and selfhood in locations ranging from the Caribbean in early imperial expansion, to 19th-century Bengal, and contemporary Morocco. Bernard Cohn (1996) is particularly astute to unveil the forms of colonial knowledge and language of command in India. Benedict Anderson, in exploring the relationship between print culture and the rise of nations as imagined communities, explains how census, maps and museums have defined populations, territories and cultural traditions (1983/1991). In Empire at the Margins: Culture, Frontier and Ethnicity in Early Modern China, my co-editors and I rethink empirical categories of frontier and ethnicity when “center” was contingent (Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006). In these moments of critical self-reflection on the representation of historical “facts,” and on academic categories we have taken as natural starting points (empires and nation-states), how should we conceptualize Asia—East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and beyond? How have these regional spaces been defined? How have This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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research questions on their cultures, populations, economies and polities built upon particular configurations? One should question how established scholarship has relied on ordering frames that are largely land based and state centered. Anthropologists have their habit of locating research on tangible, bounded sites where they can immerse themselves and have their feet well-grounded. If they detect movements, they see diaspora, always assuming a solid center and home base for “migrants” to move from. It was also self-representation, as Mark Lewis, in his book The Construction of Space in Early China (2006), delineates the meticulous spatial ordering frame of the imperial textual enterprise, privileging a particular kind of political center and marginalizing “regions” and “local customs.” The merchants, although dynamic, multi-ethnic, multicultural, and cross-regional, had no place in the imperial imagination. In the eyes of many economic historians who are deeply interested in the adventures of the court eunuch and imperial official Zheng He in the 15th century, who sailed seven times with his fleet from coastal China all the way to Africa, the trips were often viewed as political trips to track down a royal competitor of the Ming emperor, or at best, “foreign trade” at the margins of empire. Nonetheless, ocean-based scholarly traditions focusing on trade and markets are not lacking: Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean (1966/1996), K. N. Chaudhuri on the Indian Ocean (1991), and Takeshi Hamashita on the East China Sea (2008), not to mention Leonard Blussé on Canton (Guangzhou), Nagasaki and Batavia (2008); Janet Abu-Lughod on the Middle East, Islam and the Indian Ocean (1989); Philip  Curtin (1984), Timothy Brook (2008), and Amitav Ghosh (1993, 2011) on inter-cultural trade; Sugata Bose (2006), Thomas Metcalf (2007), and Enseng Ho (2006) on inter-regional political and militaristic networks. Each tradition has taken an ocean and its immediate coastal land as a “region.” If our analytical attention is refocused on the fluidities and connections along ocean-based trade routes, cultural fusion and sedimentation in the well-positioned port cities with resourceful inhabitants, the substance of these scholarly traditions could be treated as more interactive. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) gave the rights of discovery of the New World to the Spaniards on the west of the line of demarcation, and gave the rights to the Portuguese to the east of the line. However, the two trading empires fought it out again in the broad “Asian” region, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific until the Dutch, the British, and the Americans appeared on the scene. The result of these globally linked historical processes is, conceptually, “an Asia inside out” (Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue 2015a, 2015b). From the experiences of the populations involved in its making, the region is a very different kind of “space” from the views of those at the center of empires or nations. The three-volume set reveals dynamic processes that have linked regions of a large continent. The first volume highlights moments of connection that might not have been deemed historically This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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significant but in fact became structurally relevant for what followed. The second volume uncovers sites of connection that have captured transregional flows across physical and political boundaries. The third, forthcoming volume focuses on peoples and institutions of connection. To illuminate our shared commitment in challenging conventional geopolitical categories and linear histories, I quote from the introduction of Asia Inside Out: Connected Places: This volume thus highlights the conjuncture of historical circumstances in the making of connected places—the (macro) political forces, the (micro) strategies of personalities, the translocal institutional resources deployed, the meanings negotiated, and the structuring consequences of all of the above. We use the concept “spatial moments” in a broadly defined Asia to capture the dynamics of time-place analysis in both material and discursive forms . . . Place-making in Asia, in our view, has involved multi-scalar processes. They are malleable structural assemblages, created by human agency and accumulated over the centuries. (Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue 2015b, p. 25)

I can illuminate these multi-layered histories from my vantage point in southern China. It is a “region” always seen as marginal and subversive in the imperial construction of space, politically suspect during the socialist period, but has now assumed center stage in the reform era in the last few decades when China embarks on its worldly venture. If one takes this “Asian” region historically connected by trade and cultural fusion, it is not analytically surprising to find a dark-skinned, bearded “South Asian” being worshiped in the Temple for the God of South Seas (Nanhaishen Miao) outside of Guangzhou, accepted as part of local folklore. The historical mosques and Islamic cemeteries in Quanzhou and Guangzhou also testify to the presence of large Arabic populations in centuries past. One would also not be surprised to find the popular Mexican silver dollar being used regularly and unselfconsciously as donations to a Hongsheng Temple in Chaolian xiang on the western edge of the Pearl River Delta during the Qing (Siu and Liu 2015, pp. 64–97). By the 19th and early 20th centuries, port cities in southern China such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Jiangmen and Siyi, known to be the land of emigrants to the Americas and Southeast Asia, were shaped by European-style merchant houses and business districts. These architectural forms also dominated the cityscapes of colonial cities such as Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) and other port cities in the Gulf region. “Asia” as a regional construct was core to historically worldly cultures and markets. How these politically ambiguous port cities and their ethnically diverse populations relate to their respective “national” spaces is an issue for serious rethinking. The connections and fluid processes were phenomena I would not term “diaspora” (Siu 2009b). By stressing the empirical significance of the historical and contemporary global, we may finally put the state-centered analytical paradigms (which have dominated 20th-century social sciences) back in their historically appropriate places. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In sum, I hope to have used this essay to clarify some of the major research themes and conceptual tools that my South China colleagues and I have explored over the years. We have used them to define historical anthropology and to guide our research in the archives and in the field. No doubt we will continue to fine-tune field methodologies and critical reading to understand historical and cultural texts. The process hopefully allows us to test analytical frameworks and address theoretical debates that center on structuring, human agency, social practice, and power. Our intellectual journey in South China has connected us to oceans and landmasses across the globe in empirical and disciplinary terms. Space considerations do not allow me to include a list of Chinese references. The references I have used in the essay are largely English-language sources.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2 Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China

The term “China” presents many faces and meanings. The wealth of differentiating experiences beneath the surface of an enduring, naturalizing uniformity encompassed by the term has intrigued scholars, prompting them to call for analytical tools that illuminate the paradox at various historical junctures.1 A basic assumption is required, which forms the basis of this paper: “Chineseness” is not an immutable set of beliefs and practices but a process that captures a wide range of emotions and states of being. It is a civilization, a place, a polity, a history, and a people who acquire identities through association with these characteristics.2 I will highlight crucial moments in the construction of cultural identities in a region loosely termed South China (Huanan), where different meanings of being Chinese are selectively pursued. Instead of presenting reified, objectively identifiable traits and boundaries imposed on a population, I stress their fluid and negotiated qualities as perceived by those asserting them. However circumstantial the contestations, and however duplicitous these identities may have seemed, their emergence is also rooted in particular social, political, and economic relationships.3 In view of the deadly ethnic strife in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the post-reform era, one may wonder if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will also lose its mandate or ability to rule. Is China going to fall apart as a polity? Will local power groups assert their autonomy based on cultural, religious, and historical differences, and challenge the authority of Beijing? This applies not only to those classified as “national minorities” but also to deep-rooted regional particularisms among those who consider themselves “Han.” The question is not confined to post-socialist regimes. Its general relevance is illustrated by the painful restructuring of local societies following the withdrawal of colonial authorities. One may argue that when a political boundary is imposed upon diverse cultural groups and when connection with the center is largely administrative, disintegration is inevitable in the event of a power vacuum. The question is whether the same logic can be applied to China, where cultural identification with the political center is so diffused in social life that periodic assertion of diversity has often contributed to the enrichment of the imagined community one calls the Chinese nation-state. In other words, can one argue This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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that “being Chinese” is simultaneously an integrating and differentiating experience, and that when a nationalist master narrative erodes under whatever circumstances, a new one replaces it?4 If that is the case, what are the analytical implications for cultural autonomy and criticism? To address these issues, I focus on a region within the geopolitical boundary of China which, in the hierarchical territorial map of power holders in Beijing, has always been one of the most distant from the center.5 For centuries, the inhabitants of this southernmost region were believed to live in rugged mountains and unhealthy swamps. It was where disgraced imperial bureaucrats were exiled. In recent history, it acquired a more “civilized” image, but officials remain uneasy about the region. Its population has been ethnically diverse. Although they speak a distinctive dialect (yue), they maintain a range of territorial reference points relative to the political center and among themselves. The cultural loading of these reference points has also shifted over time.6 In the last few centuries, its regional core, linked by the Pearl River system, has been commercialized and urbanized. It has extensive contacts with the world through trading with Arabs, South Asians, and Europeans as well as through waves of emigration to Southeast Asia and the Americas. The local population is distinguished by an enterprising ethos, a lifestyle, and political thinking considered unorthodox by Beijing standards. These images were illuminated by the activities of Qing guild merchants whose hong (trade monopolies granted by the Qing government) stood majestically at the western edge of Guangzhou (Canton), the region’s leading metropolis. At the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, one finds colorful displays of the goods and art work produced in Guangzhou for the Euro-American market in the 18th and 19th centuries (Crossman 1991). Since the post-Mao reforms, foreign and Hong Kong enterprises have employed millions of workers in the region’s special economic zones, bringing unprecedented prosperity that challenges the basic tenets of the socialist government. Young entrepreneurs imitate the lifestyles presented in Hong Kong television dramas. One expects that South China has the potential to break away (Murray 1991).7 The natural question to pursue is whether the Chinese government has been able to maintain control in this relatively open geopolitical region. The blatantly disrespectful maneuvers of Party cadres illustrate the problem. Although their positions of wealth and power in the post-Mao era continue to rely on connection with the Party hierarchy, heads of the prosperous market towns in the delta would eagerly demote their own administrative status. They feel that ties to the government can only mean unnecessary interference.8 Dressed in Western-style suits tailored in Hong Kong, they are chauffeured in Toyota Crowns and Mercedes-Benzes, while giving brash orders on their cellular phones. For those who have sacrificed in the Maoist period but do not have the personal or political means to ride the uncertain times in the reform era, cynicism prevails.9 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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A young generation of workers feels particularly adrift. The alarming rates of drug addiction, gambling, and violent crimes in the booming towns and cities profile a society in flux where opportunities and frustrating restrictions are equally compelling in everyday life.10 It may be premature to conclude that ten years of post-Mao liberalization have spun this southern region out of Beijing’s control. There is definite commitment toward the larger polity, enough for local residents to feel pained and concerned about the region’s future. Reactions from intellectuals, village cadres, farmers, and workers in the wake of June 4, 1989 were astoundingly intense. Tearful and angry, many huddled in front of a TV set watching feeds from Hong Kong channels, and agonized about what should be and could be done. The mood can be captured in a gnawing statement frequently heard, “Our country (guojia) is in such turmoil. It is so difficult to be Chinese.” These sentiments highlight the tension between a strong cultural identity, an assumed political commitment toward a government that claims to represent that identity and that aggressively appropriates allegiance, and an unorthodox political-economic environment in South China. The tension has historically engendered a multi-layered and engaging political narrative in which three elements intertwine but are individually pursued: minzu, a cultural definition of being Chinese; guojia, the idea of legitimate governance with binding obligations for a population; and zhengfu, the apparatus of governance. Myron Cohen makes an eloquent summary in his article in Dædalus: For much of China’s population, being Chinese is culturally much easier today than it ever was in the past, for this identification no longer involves commonly accepted cultural standards. Existentially, however, being Chinese is far more problematic, for now it is as much a quest as it is a condition. (1991)

I would like to elaborate on this tension in South China and argue that, in historical circumstances, being Chinese has involved diverse groups in continuous negotiation of their cultural identity and history in order to establish a legitimate position in a volatile but all-encompassing state order. When the state was but a cultural idea, the very “pretense” of identifying with the center has been a shrewd strategy for asserting ultimate room for maneuver. Nation-building in the 20th century has transformed this cultural idea into an organized administrative machinery that increasingly dictates the terms of negotiation. The recent developments in South China have complicated these terms, but have they also changed the tension in South China?

The Historical Roots of Culture in South China In the early 1950s, the Provincial Committee for National Minorities Affairs in Guangdong conducted a survey on the ethnic compositions in the province. Apart This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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from the farmers who called themselves Han Chinese, there were several major ethnic groups, for example, the Zhuang and the Yao in the mountains and the Dan who lived on boats in the delta. These broad classifications are problematic. Historical evidence of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties shows that those who claimed to be Han Chinese were largely the upwardly mobile part of an indigenous population who became Han as they actively acquired the cultural symbols of the larger polity. The results of the 1950s surveys remained classified. It was said that the authorities were worried that, if the local Han population knew about the findings, they might reverse their cultural strategy, trace their historical ethnic roots, and claim political autonomy, a status Beijing had granted to other territories where large ethnic minorities lived.11 The worries of the central authorities were quite unwarranted. Judging from historical experience, few southern Chinese would eagerly claim an ethnic minority status. Non-Han labels were used for centuries by local elites to push the rest of the indigenous population to regional peripheries. From the Song dynasty (960–1279) onward, the population in Guangdong that claimed to have a common cultural ancestry with those in the north had created myths and regional historiographies, compiled genealogies, and built ornate ancestral halls with literati pretensions. These were shrewd strategies to create an important niche in the evolving “Chinese” history and polity for themselves. Those marginalized had demeaning labels heaped upon them. In making a highly stratified local society, local elites helped consolidate an authoritarian empire with a distinct cultural-territorial hierarchy.12 Actively drawing themselves toward the Chinese imperial center has not led to the eradication of cultural or political differences. In fact, given the geographical distance, South China developed on its own terms and at its own pace into a diverse, affluent, open, and vibrant region. By cultural origins, most of the major lineages in the Pearl River Delta claimed that their ancestors had come from zhongyuan (the Central Plains). They had migrated south when nomads from the north threatened the Han settlements. Many even linked their genealogies with royal families and prominent literati figures who fled south. It is not difficult to detect traces of fabrications and inconsistencies in these lineage histories.13 But in the open frontier of the delta during the Ming and Qing periods, where the accumulation of material wealth was almost unlimited due to the intensified reclamation of the river marshes,14 association by lineage was at once proof of cultural identity and a shrewd strategy for strength in numbers. It was membership for social mobility and political legitimacy. As Oxford historian David Faure has noted in his studies of Guangdong, a non-villager or non-lineage member without settlement rights, as defined by the dominant cultural norms, was more likely than a tenant farmer to be destitute (Faure 1989a). Even if lineage identity is an all-encompassing cultural marker used by those who call themselves respectable members of the Confucian order, lineage organizations This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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have varied greatly over time and space. Subject to intense local improvisations, they provide a wide range of meanings and experiences. Scholars have wondered whether lineages based on the genealogical mode, commonly found in North China, are a different social form altogether from those based on the associational mode, found in the south (Cohen 1990). Within Guangdong, the variations are remarkable. David Faure argues that localized lineages in the Pearl River Delta, with their landed estates and ornate ancestral halls and rituals, were products of particular historical junctures of state-making in the Ming and Qing dynasties (Faure 1989b). Moreover, in the older part of the delta where the late Oxford anthropologist Maurice Freedman based his observations, lineages with limited land for expansion were vastly different operations from the super-lineages built on extensive estates in the sands during late Qing. Lineage building in the open “frontier” of the delta was intimately tied to market towns and regional cities that mushroomed at about the same time. In fact, unlimited expansion in the sands and the wealth it brought proceeded with intense specialization in urban places. Merchants owning vast corporate estates in the Pearl River Delta extended the trading of local cash crops to the entire country through powerful organizations that were buttressed by academic titles and official posts they acquired. The Fan Palm Guild (Kuishan Huiguan) in Xinhui county and the Minglun Tang of Dongguan county were established examples (Mann 1987). They were tied to the regional and ultimately to the central power apparatus through overlapping membership with academies, and, after the mid-19th century, with the self-defense corps. The development of the sands was an agrarian revolution in which a unique rural-urban nexus created its own multi-layered, pluralistic cultural spectacle reaching an apical peak at political metropolises. The imperial bureaucracy had to meander through complex structures of native place and charitable associations, corporate trusts, guilds, and temples to reach both urban and rural society. The merchants’ practices and their literati pretensions penetrated deeply into the countryside, as villages were linked by an increasingly dense network of river ports, marketing and financial centers (Faure 1990). Regional cities such as Shantou (for embroidery), Foshan (for iron products and pottery), and Zhaoqing and Jiangmen (for goods from the upper reaches of the Xi River system) were urban terrains where owners of native industries and banks, pawnshops, brokers, and imperial bureaucracies traversed.15 Guangdong’s contact with the world had also developed over the centuries, and it was not limited to the trading of luxury goods. The region started importing foreign rice in mid-Qing because its agriculture was specialized in cash crops, and water transport along the coast was cheaper and easier than over the mountains that separated the province from the north (Ye and Tan 1984). Many of its crops and handicraft products (tea, silk and ceramics) were sold to foreign traders in Guangzhou. Just as Arab and South Asian travelers were sinicized in popular religion (Long 1985), silver This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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trade dollars were used in temple renovations. By the late 19th century, the region was exporting labor to Southeast Asia and the Americas. In the first half of the 20th century, this unique urban cultural process developed at an accelerated pace. Leading merchants and overseas Chinese industrialists contributed to a new infrastructure in the form of ports, railroads, and modern schools. They introduced technologies and conducted an extensive trade with the world outside of China through a network of county and prefectural capitals (Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing, Shiqi, Daliang, and Shantou). The focal point of these commercial networks was Guangzhou and eventually Hong Kong. During this golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Guangdong printed its own money and used it side by side with Hong Kong currency.16 Given the unique paths of development in South China, was there a wide and visible North-South divide? Historian Sun Lung-kee quoted an editorial in Dongfang zazhi which points to the numerous arguments and justifications Chinese scholars and politicians have subscribed to in the late Qing: The dispute between north and south today is an unprecedented disaster  .  .  . [T]he differences between north and south are transformed into that between Han and Manchu, between those behind the empress and the young emperor. In the realm of foreign relations, it is between supporters for Russia or Japan. And for political programs, it is between the reformers and the conservatives. (1992)

Sun also summarizes mutual prejudices in cultural and literary circles. Scholars in Beijing considered themselves legitimate heirs of the May Fourth tradition while they saw those in the south as irrational romantics and ruffians. Many southern scholars, on the other hand, equated the north with enclosure, chaos, and backwardness (1992, p. 17). The issue here is not what had caused the differences in attitudes and temperaments or the nature of mutual prejudices. If the rift was so visible for all concerned, what have been the bases for their commitment to the cultural and political “center” and their continual engagement? The circumstances for South China are not an exception to the general experience of dynastic empires. As Benedict Anderson has noted, diverse populations in these empires were administered by those who were often ethnically and linguistically different (1983/1991). This had not necessarily been a source of conflict between ruler and ruled. Benjamin Schwartz has also marveled at the awesome historical absorptive capacities of “the Chinese civilization,” that even conflict seemed highly centripetal (comments made during a conference in September of 1992). In fact, different dynasties centered in Beijing tolerated unorthodox regional diversity and benefited from the wealth it generated. Local elites did not aggressively advocate political autonomy. In the early 20th century, China was literally carved by regional warlords. They declared independence from the Manchu empire, but they were not interested in maintaining control merely over their territories. They wanted This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the whole of China.17 For South China, what worried Beijing was not whether the region wanted to break away but when local elites took their Chineseness too seriously and competed to control the political center. They had, in fact, challenged the legitimacy of the Beijing regimes many times in the name of revitalizing the Mandate of Heaven for the rulers or of building a modern nation-state. It is not difficult to see that regimes in Beijing were ambivalent towards South China. They have taken for granted that the region was historically incorporated into the Middle Kingdom and therefore would naturally be a part of the modern nationstate. At the same time, however, they needed to keep its unorthodox influences at a distance. For the locals, the China complex has been equally strong. It is best for the powers in Beijing to leave them alone, but they have also used all the cultural pretensions of the dynastic order to make their prosperity legitimate. At times, they have even seriously acted on their acquired Chineseness to engage in vigorous political dialogue. With the rising importance of political and economic centers in the south during the late imperial and modern era and the corresponding shifting of cultural reference points, the tension has deepened. In evaluating these dynamic intellectual and political economic processes in history, the question is not whether they represented orthodoxy or heterodoxy from the standpoint of regimes in Beijing, but rather, were these processes an integral part of modern China in the making? If Beijing does not occupy the privileged position as the center of Chinese history, that cultural distance from it does not mean marginality or anomaly; then the entire process of becoming Chinese needs to be seen as involving a much wider range of players and voices. Instead of upholding the prevailing image of a reified China enshrouded with primordial sentiments, one may see how advocates at different ends of the spectrum have negotiated their respective positions to generate a complex, open cultural process.18 The issue has comparative relevance in contemporary times. It is well known that regimes use their interpretations of national history to legitimize their powerful positions and to claim the allegiance of those associated with that history. But the tensions generated are different between the imperial and modern periods. The Chinese imperial state was more a malleable cultural idea than a tightly organized structural entity. Its administrative presence was remote, but its moral authority was pervasive. Under the all-encompassing symbolisms of tianxia (all under heaven), local improvisations thrived. Modern nation-states, especially Marxist-Leninist regimes, wielded much more organized power. Katherine Verdery’s study of Eastern Europe points to this nationalist strategy of socialist regimes by which Marxist-Leninist parties promote the reading of history as an inevitable, one-directional social movement based on class struggles (1991). Brandishing their assumed vanguard position in the movement, they justify the persecution of those in the way. Among the Chinese Communists, the ideas of building socialism and a strong China are often intertwined. In fact, many This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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peasants and intellectuals who became Communists in the early years were motivated by their anger over the Nationalists’ inability to stop foreign aggression. After the Communist regime came to power in 1949, it used the nationalist agenda repeatedly. Those who did not conform to the socialist programs were “traitors,” “foreign subversives,” “enemies of the people,” as well as “counter-revolutionaries.” Their voices were systematically purged in political campaigns. The party-state’s eagerness to register the population under its administrative control within a marked boundary, coupled with its inability to tolerate internal differences, has created unprecedented tensions among its own true believers, and between center and locality. It is interesting to note that nearly every major political campaign in post-1949 China was triggered by committed intellectuals voicing opinion, and that before the central government launched a major campaign, the commanders of the military regions were often reshuffled.

The Guangzhou–Hong Kong Nexus The emergence of Hong Kong as a significant player in the shaping of the regional complex in South China further complicated the issue of cultural identity and nationality, of the ambiguity of “being Chinese” and “being part of the China polity.” It  unleashed a historical and cultural dynamics in its own right. Ceded to Britain in 1842 after the Opium War, Hong Kong’s social and cultural ties to the mainland had remained strong. Home to some fishing villages, it was first used as a resting place where ships moored for repair. Merchant houses such as Jardine, Matheson & Co., and Butterfield and Swire established themselves with warehouses and business networks. A multi-racial merchant culture developed with close ties to India, London, and Guangzhou.19 Agricultural communities, thriving market towns, and large lineages that traced their ancestry to Guangdong were added to the social map when the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898. But until the first half of the 20th century, Hong Kong was marginal in the regional political economy. The population was largely Cantonese speaking, with family and business ties in both Hong Kong and Guangdong. Relationships between the two places were mobile and fluid: goods, money, and people crossed the political boundary as if Hong Kong were no different from any other foreign concession within China.20 Large lineages with ornate ancestral halls and estates continued to be built on the plains. Members negotiated with colonial officials as much as they used the cultural symbolisms of Chinese imperial power to maintain dominance and to feud with neighbors. The works of Maurice Freedman, Hugh Baker, James and Rubie Watson, David Faure, and James Hayes on these communities are well-known.21 In the urban neighborhoods adjacent to the colonial establishment, a burgeoning merchant class became the second government of Hong Kong through their management of temples and charity organizations. The Man Mo Temple (Wen Wu Miao), built on Hollywood This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Road in 1854, was their ritual headquarters as well as a refuge for sojourning traders and laborers.22 As late as during World War II, one hundred years after the beginning of British rule, Hong Kong residents maintained close ties with the mainland. When parts of China were occupied by the Japanese military, many southern Chinese fled to Hong  Kong, and when Hong Kong in turn was occupied, many sought refuge in northern Guangdong and Guangxi. There are tales of loyal servants who carried food by boat and on foot to feed families in the occupied zones, and of families separated and later reunited. A Chinese cultural identity, however composite it might have seemed, continued to induce political commitment toward China and Guangzhou. This assumed identification was expressed in the sympathy strikes by workers and merchants in Hong Kong against foreign aggression on the Chinese mainland during the turbulent decades of the Republican era. A British education and administrative system did gradually exert its naturalizing presence among the Hong Kong population.23 Until the late 1940s, the major political players constituting public sentiments were an alliance of British and East Indian civil servants, British-trained Chinese and Eurasian professionals, prominent merchant families with their charity organizations, guilds and temples, and heads of powerful lineages in the rural area which continued to be recorded in unofficial documents as being part of Pao’an (Baoan) county in Guangdong province. It would be naïve to judge Hong Kong society as being more or less “authentically Chinese” (Rey Chow 1990). For over a century and a half, its population was racially and culturally composite. Many took for granted their political place in the British empire. They would solemnly salute the British flag and rise to the tune of “God Save the Queen,” but they felt patriotic to the Chinese “motherland” as well. Their political concern with the Chinese mainland is reinforced by their social connectedness with it. Over the decades, generations of native-born Hong Kong residents blended in with waves of immigrants from across the border. The continuous process of disembeddedness and reintegration created a cultural kaleidoscope that resettled into a new pattern after each political turn. Social life might seem transient and momentous, but “Chinese traditions,” “colonial legacies,” and their accompanying symbolisms have been vital ingredients that are constituting and meaningful in everyday life. The pervasive influence of the colonial experience, for example, can be detected even in the Cantonese dialect. The Guangzhou version (shengcheng hua), spoken in the dominant merchant communities of the early 20th century, has given way to a deeply anglicized version with Western professional concepts and romanized terms (Liang Tao 1992). From 1949 to the 1990s, the colony underwent drastic transformations. The Communist Revolution in 1949 forced it to assume new economic and political roles. The sudden influx of capital, refugees, and skills helped its painful transition from an entrepôt to a manufacturing and financial hub for East and Southeast Asia. The This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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government embarked on a massive building of a new economic and political infrastructure. By the time China reopened its doors in 1980, Hong Kong had become a prosperous world metropolis with six million people. It has surpassed many cities in the Chinese mainland in its cosmopolitan openness, but has also developed an irreverence for nationalistic authority.24 It will be naïve to assume that Hong Kong has spun off from the China orbit. Its population fluctuated due partly to uneven waves of refugees fleeing from and to China during various political crises. Before the Japanese occupation in 1942, there were 1.5 million residents. By 1945, only a little over half a million remained. But 1949 brought many refugees from various parts of China, particularly Shanghainese entrepreneurs (Wong Siu-lun 1988). By 1953, when the revolutionary dust had settled, the population in Hong Kong had swelled to 2.5 million.25 In the wake of the famine in the early 1960s, when an estimated 15 million died of famine-related diseases in China, hundreds of thousands crossed the border. After the reign of the Maoist radicals in the late 1970s, another half a million or more slipped through. By 1980, one out of twelve residents had not lived in Hong Kong for more than three years.26 Scholars and politicians have marveled at the resilience of the immigrants. Some attribute it to the age-old “Chinese” cultural tradition. Others credit the laissezfaire attitudes of the Hong Kong government. Taken in a historical view, however, the issue is complicated. In the early 1950s, the refugees brought with them capital, skills, and urban outlooks, which dovetailed with the needs of postwar transformations in Hong Kong. By the late 1970s, a visibly cosmopolitan Hong Kong with its Westerneducated generations was firmly in place. The wave of immigrants in the 1980s was largely unskilled youths from rural Guangdong. Leaping desperately from their cellularized existence in the villages, they found the composite cultural sentiments and the fast pace of city life extremely disorientating. Even the Cantonese dialect they share with Hong Kong residents seems to convey vastly different meanings. Their eventual absorption, painful also to the host community, created new cultural currents and social conflicts. To homegrown residents, Hong Kong has also become uncomfortably unfamiliar.27

Renegotiating Cultural Identity in the 1990s What is the social ethos of Hong Kong (and indirectly South China) in the 1990s, when the fast-moving urban society now faces the claims of a power whose authority rests on the assumed rights of an ageless, primordial origin? One observes intensified partisan emotions in the public sphere, a visible mixture of skepticism and panic with reference to political leadership, low morale and self-censorship in the arts and media, and a pervasive feeling that the social fabric is rapidly eroding at home, school, and work. The political landmark of 1997 deeply punctuates Hong Kong This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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society. The belief in its inevitable return to China triggers a wide range of interests, hopes, and anxieties. These sentiments are complicated by the fact that, in the last few decades, the pulsations of life in Hong Kong have been fueled by its miraculous globalization. The process has resulted in an ever-dynamic cultural kaleidoscope—open, unorthodox, brash, and luxurious—which Beijing is both envious of and uncomfortable with.28 The tension has long entered the popular consciousness through a dense media complex.29 There are many unexplored questions: how do the images of Hong Kong as a world metropolis and as part of China juxtapose each other? What is happening to the cultural identity of its inhabitants and the related political implications? With an ever-accelerating influx of refugees from southern China and the exodus of Westerntrained professionals, how is cultural identity reconfigured? What is the dynamic interplay between the Chinese tradition, the colonial infrastructure, and the uncertain socialist future in a multi-ethnic land of immigrants, foreign workers, emigrants, and returnees? Would the rapid turnover of its population and their resources create a global middle class? All these questions require the definition of “culture.” Its analytical coherence is made increasingly ambiguous by the accelerated movement of people, technologies, images, and commodities across the globe.30 What Hong Kong is undergoing dramatizes the century-old cultural tension between “center” and “periphery.” More importantly, the kaleidoscopic quality of its experiences directly confronts the efforts to define China according to a self-contained population, a place, a polity, a shared history or culture. In the post-Mao era, major political players are reconfiguring another set of public sentiments. Despite the disembedded orientations of Hong Kong’s population, leaders in Beijing feel that it can count on the loyalty from the older émigrés toward “their motherland” and their hometowns in South China. This “politics of native roots” works to an extent. The regime plays up the assumed connection between cultural identity and political commitment. “Patriotic” overseas investors are pursued as sources of capital, technology, and market. More importantly, the Chinese leaders estimate that their investments pave the way to eventually integrate Hong Kong and Macau back into the China mainland. The claims are based on primordial sentiments and in the name of national unity, territorial bond, and family pride. Ironically, what the Chinese government can count on are the efforts of recent refugees at the grassroots level. Although they fled China for various reasons, many have found a profitable niche as brokers for small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs who are relatives and who eagerly invest in the booming market towns of the Pearl River Delta. There are no patriotic sentiments or grand political schemes. What drive the feverish energies are quick windfall profits where personal connections easily bend political guidelines. In Guangdong they say, “mountains are high and the emperor is far away” (shangao huangdi yuan). The sector of the population This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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that Beijing cannot count on is Hong Kong’s affluent middle class who are not as “immersed” in the mainland. The backbone of Hong Kong’s prosperity, they are a jet-setting generation of local-born, Western-educated professionals in international trade and finance. Postwar baby boomers, they are now the movers and shakers who are more committed to Hong Kong than their parents are (McGee et al. 1993). Their social and emotional ties to China are relatively weak; their Chinese cultural identity is only partial, and their political idealism is influenced by Western criteria. They are skeptical of the claim of an inevitable place in history by Marxist-Leninist parties. Given the nature of Chinese politics, they are painfully aware of the uncertainty lying ahead. They know they have everything to lose. To add to their anxiety, their success story is in sharp contrast to the newest wave of refugees from rural China who now fill the lowest jobs in the local economy and who find the rhythm and texture of social life in Hong Kong perplexing and frustrating as the global city speeds toward the next century. The politics of difference is blatant. The tension is expressed in a host of cultural images. For the first time, unflattering remarks are heaped upon recent immigrants. There is a deliberate drawing of boundaries as “locals” and “aliens.” In the last five years, the middle class who are already nervous over their future are made more insecure by what they perceive as predatory acts of both officials and criminal elements from China. For months in 1988–89, consumers in Hong Kong were plagued by vegetables from the border town of Shenzhen, where farmers had dosed them with dangerous amounts of pesticides to increase marketability. Violent robberies involving gun battles in broad daylight with semi-automatic weapons and Chinese-made grenades have been blamed on illegal immigrants working as mercenaries. Hong Kong also loses several thousand luxury cars through smuggling every year, and many of the cars find their way to official circles in Guangdong. This has strained the relationship between Hong Kong’s marine police and Chinese border guards, even turning it violent and confrontational at times. Outgunned, outpaced, and outnumbered, the law enforcement forces in Hong Kong are utterly demoralized.31 Western-trained professionals, executives, and civil servants have the most to lose and the most painful choices to make. But many step up their plans for the future and “vote with their feet.” A scenario based on government estimates foresees the total emigration from 1990 to 1997 to be between 550,000 and 700,000.32 The exodus of this generation will have an impact, as severe shortages of qualified personnel are showing in the business communities, hospitals, and schools. In a study of emigration by occupation, it is shown that in 1987 and 1988, half of the emigrants were economically active, and 49.8 percent of the emigrants were professionals and administrative or managerial staff.33 In desperation, the government planned to increase its support for higher education several fold with the hope to retain at least a percentage of the graduates.34 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The outflow of capital is also staggering. Business Week had a special article (“Hong Kong Hustle Is Heating up Canada,” 1991) on the situation for Canada. The amount each investor-immigrant takes to Canada is US$1.5 million. Since 1984, 110,000 immigrants have landed in Canada, a group largely composed of professionals and investors. The number hit a record high of 29,000 in 1990 and an estimated 200,000 more will land by 1997. Capital flowing from Hong Kong to Canada averages $2–4 billion per year. The Pacific has become Canada’s largest trade partner, superseding the United States.35 The émigrés are not refugees looking for menial work. As new immigrants to Canada, they constitute 3 percent of the country’s population but make up 10 percent of Canadian households with assets over $200,000.36 Beijing accuses these emigrants of shirking responsibility, of draining the Hong  Kong economy and creating instability, of showing a lack of confidence in their motherland. In sum, they have “betrayed” their cultural roots. But the politics of native roots does not have a convincing argument. For those who see a separation between cultural roots and citizenship, a Hong Kong identity does not naturally lead to support for regimes in Beijing. China’s demand on their patriotism is as absurd as for the Queen of England to expect every Anglo-American to be loyal to the Crown. In the recent war of words between China and Britain over Governor Chris Patten’s political proposals and the polarization of the Hong Kong population into the proChina and pro-democracy factions, cultural identity and patriotism have underlined the most heated issues. To the dismay of the Chinese leaders, 46.9 percent of the Hong Kong population in a recent survey continued to give Patten their support despite vociferous and stinging attacks on Patten and the British business interests in the Chinese media which easily parallel the xenophobic tone and intensity of political rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution (Braude 1992; Doreen Cheung 1992). Many who choose to stay in Hong Kong have been concerned enough with the affairs of China to become politically active.37 The dramatic reactions in 1989 are an indicator of this activity. Hong Kong citizens raised $1.5 million in a matter of days for the students during “Beijing Spring.” When East Central China was literally under water in the summer of 1991, it was a similar group of pro-democracy professionals as well as celebrities who raised $75 million overnight for the flood victims, a “patriotism” Beijing has swallowed not without ambivalence. Moreover, the debate about democratizing the Hong Kong government before it becomes a part of China in 1997 has gathered momentum. In the 1991 elections for the Legislative Council, the liberal democrats won sixteen out of eighteen seats allocated for direct election.38 In the eyes of seasoned politicians, the campaign messages might seem naïve and the candidates inexperienced. But the election results are interpreted as a strong statement from the increasingly anxious and organized middle class: convergence with the Basic Law is important, but there will be no more unquestioning deference to China for stability. The ironic point is that most This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the elected legislators are not politicians but union leaders, doctors, teachers, and lawyers. Martin Lee, a British-trained lawyer, gained the highest number of votes. Soft-spoken in his Queen’s English, he appears to have a stubborn conviction to play his traditional role as a concerned Chinese intellectual. His message is clear: he wants democracy and a degree of autonomy for Hong Kong as a safeguard against the inevitable encroachment of a regime that he considers self-righteous and unpredictable. His views are shared by younger professionals newly appointed or elected to the Legislative Council who now claim a share of the political limelight. In her speech to the Legislative Council backing Patten’s political blueprint, the British-educated lawyer-company director Christine Loh demolished “the myth” behind convergence (Eager 1992). In response to China’s recent threat to ignore the Sino-British agreements and to form its own legislative council and judicial organizations, Jacqueline Leong QC, chair of the influential Hong Kong Bar Association, publicly condemned Beijing’s interference because she believes that Hong Kong’s prosperity rests on judiciary independence and the rule of law (Course 1993). To Beijing, these professionals are subversives precisely because they are committed to Hong Kong’s future and are taking their Chineseness seriously. Worse still for Beijing is the paradox of integration. China’s intention to bring Hong Kong back into the Guangdong orbit has produced unexpected effects. Guangdong and in particular the Pearl River Delta are assuming disproportional significance in the national economy. According to a report on the economic development of the region, Guangdong, with 5.6 percent of the nation’s population, produced 9.2 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) in 1990. In 1991, Guangdong exported 32 percent of national exports, of which the Pearl River Delta was responsible for 74 percent. Foreign investment in the province and the delta respectively made up 50 percent and 40 percent of the national total (Liu Pak-wai et al. 1992). At the same time, Guangdong is detached from the rest of China by the powerful draw, via Hong Kong, of Western capitalist enterprises, of consumer culture and the freer intellectual linkages with the rest of the world. The mood in Guangdong during the spring and summer of 1989 was revealing. Cultural identity and political commitment to China, potentially problematic in history, made tenuous by the decade of reforms, were traumatically called into question by the events on the streets of Beijing. It might have shocked policymakers in Beijing to realize that, in the wake of June 4, 1989, they had to send special envoys to Guangdong to negotiate with the army. There was talk of civil war. The popular provincial head, Ye Xuanping, was eventually “promoted” to a position in Beijing, but he continued to operate in Guangzhou. In  reporting the June events, some China-owned newspapers in Hong  Kong revolted, leading to the dismissal of a prominent editor of Wen Wei Po (Wenhui bao), followed by the eventual defection of the former head of the New China News Agency to the United States. When the Bank of China tried to cool the overheated economy This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing China

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by tightening money supply for unruly township enterprises in Guangdong, local managers stepped up their effort to woo relatives overseas. For the first time, there was the hint of an integrated Guangdong–Hong Kong region declaring autonomous political status. As in the past, the negotiation of cultural identity and the politics of difference in the 1990s are sustained by tensions in both the public and private spheres. South China continues to be unsettling for all concerned. From the way economic and political changes have progressed, it will be difficult for hardliners in Beijing to choke off South China. The region has even captured the imagination of the political patriarch Deng Xiaoping during his recent trip. Although the Maoist revolution destroyed many cultural assumptions, the Beijing regime today recycles the old cultural identity in an effort to appropriate political allegiance from a region growing increasingly distant from it. Facing the encroachment, a rapidly liberalizing South China and Hong Kong are trying to redefine political expectations on a composite cultural terrain. Patriots and subversives are often the same group of people. When they flee, the political center cries traitor. When they turn around and act concerned, it cries subversive. Ironically, this exchange continues to lock the population of this region and Beijing over the affairs of China as a nation. How the tension is sustained or resolved depends on the regions’ continual globalization as much as on the transformation of the Chinese polity. Whatever the outcome, it will not simply be an issue of an assertive regionalism breaking away from a political center, nor will it guarantee a standardizing cultural narrative. China as an experience will continue to have its many faces and meanings. *This is a reprint from Dædalus 122 (Spring 1993), MIT Press, pp. 19–43, with slight revisions. The paper started as a presentation at a faculty dinner organized by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in 1989. I thank James Scott, Deborah Davis, and William Kelly for their comments and their theoretical inspiration. I also appreciate the comments from the participants at the authors’ conference in September 1992. One might expect that many issues raised twenty-five years ago are now passé. However, the intense social and political turmoil in Hong Kong today illuminates familiar tensions.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

See chapter 8 of this volume, Rossabi (1981), Crossley (1990), and Gladney (1990). The idea of culture as a process, or as a moving target subject to constant reinvention, as Professor Robert Smith puts it, has become conventional wisdom in anthropology. See Moore (1978), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), and Ortner (1984). See Gladney (1990), chapter 2, Fox (1990), Ward’s “Varieties of the Conscious Model” in Benton (1965), pp. 113–37, Blake (1981), and Faure and Siu (1995). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

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For similar observations and questions about a North-South dialogue in China, see Edward Friedman (1992). See also Apter (1993). South China refers to “Huanan,” a region roughly within the provincial boundary of Guangdong. This is a point raised by Myron Cohen. See also Faure and Siu (1995). See also “The Fifth Tiger is on China’s Coast” (1992), and Lam (1991), and “China’s Renegade Province? Guangdong” (1992). In a November 1992 survey by the South China Morning Post, more people in Guangdong knew of Governor Chris Patten than their own provincial leaders. I have conducted fieldwork in the delta since 1974, spent a year in a market town in Zhongshan county in 1986, and have returned every year to other market towns. See “He Preaches Free Markets, Not Mao” (1992). I was not surprised to hear the following statement by a former Party youth league leader turned private entrepreneur: “Chairman Mao once said that the scriptures are good, only that from time to time they had been recited by monks with crooked mouths. I wonder about the scriptures, it seems that they have distorted the mouths instead.” See Siu (1989a), chapter 13. These observations are echoed by Jonathan Unger, who did fieldwork in towns in the eastern part of the Pearl River Delta. Some of the criminal activities have spilled over the border to Hong Kong. Shootouts between Chinese mercenaries and Hong Kong police in the crowded streets of Hong Kong have become commonplace. See South China Morning Post, December 1992 and January 1993. The provincial government of Guangdong has periodically conducted mass public trials and executions of criminals. The most recent execution of forty-five criminals and the sentencing of over 1,100 were reported by Yangcheng Evening News and related in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, January 11, 1993. The Cold War atmosphere at the time probably gave the authorities plenty to worry about. The region was too close to the potentially “subversive” areas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, which were under heavy Anglo-American and French influence. Administrative autonomy was unthinkable. According to Pan Xiong, a former lecturer at Sun Yat-sen (formerly Zhongshan) University who participated in the surveys, much of the raw data remained classified. It is hard to verify his claims, but other scholars in China have confirmed the existence of raw data on a large number of minority groups. Volumes based on some of these data have been published in the recent decade. See Guangdongsheng renminzhengfu minzushiwu weiyuanhui (1953). See the Introduction of Faure and Siu (1995) for an analysis of that transformation. There is a vast anthropological literature on the symbolics of power associated with the position of being center. See Geertz’s “Center, Kings, and Charisma” in Geertz (1983), pp. 124–46. See Liu’s “Lineage on the Sands” in Faure and Siu (1995). See Nishikawa (1981/1985). In the reign of Qianlong, officials attempted to slow down the reclamation because it was causing flooding at the higher reaches of the Pearl River system. See Faure (1990). For comparisons, see Rowe (1989). For the 20th century, see Strand (1989) and Edward Rhoads’s “Merchant Association in Canton, 1895–1911” in Elvin and Skinner (1974), pp. 97–118. Despite their “modernizing” outlook, the overseas merchants had contributed much to what has been considered “traditional” cultural institutions such as ancestral estates and halls, village temples, communal granaries, and charity houses. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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17. James Scott and Myron Cohen put this point to me as an observation and a question. 18. For differing voices even under the most totalizing ideologies, see the theoretical works of James Scott (1990). 19. Some of these British companies were pushing commodities into China. Some were large opium traders. See Pope-Hennessy (1969). 20. For movements across the border and the effects on a rural community, see Patrick Hase, “Eastern Peace,” in Faure and Siu (1995). Shatoukok, the border town between China and Hong Kong, was literally cut into two halves by the new political boundary in 1898. 21. See Freedman (1958 and 1966), James Watson (1975), Rubie Watson (1985), Faure (1986), and Hayes (1977). 22. See a study of these merchants by Elizabeth Sinn (1989). At a back room of the temple on Tai Ping Shan Street, thousands of tablets belonging to sojourners who had died were stacked. To the dismay of David Faure and me, during a visit in 1991, we found that the temple caretaker had thrown away all the old tablets and replaced them with pieces of paper bearing only the names. 23. In the late 19th century, many of the leading Cantonese agents for foreign companies in China were educated in British missionary schools in Hong Kong. The University of Hong Kong was established in 1911. 24. See contrasting versions of what Hong Kong has accomplished. The annual Hong Kong Report promotes mainstream government views. The Other Hong Kong Report published by The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, reveals hidden agendas and unintended results. 25. See Lau (1982) on population movements. See the section of the annual Hong Kong Report on population and immigration for yearly figures. 26. See Nelson Chow (1980) and Li Ming-kun (1980), pp. 59–60. For famine figures for the Great Leap Forward, see Mu (1984). 27. See Siu (1986/1988a) on the experiences of some of these new immigrants. See also Nelson Chow (1987) for general transformations of Hong Kong society. See debates on this new rising “middle class” between Cheung Ping-leung (1987) and Lui (1987). 28. In 1990, the per capita GNP was approximately $12,000, approaching that of Australia and New Zealand. See Hong Kong Annual Report 1991 (Hong Kong: Government Information Service); see also an article on what the governor, Lord Wilson, achieved in his five years in Hong Kong, by Bernard Fong, “Governor Trapped by Troubled Times” (South China Morning Post 1991). 29. People in Hong Kong are exposed to a concentrated dose of media through television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. On popular culture in Hong Kong, see Chow Wa-shan (1990), Lo Kwai-cheung (1990) and Cheung Kin-ting (1992). 30. See Gupta and Ferguson’s “Beyond ‘Culture’” in Gupta and Ferguson (1992/1997), pp. 33–51. See also Appadurai (1990). 31. These episodes have been played up in both English and Chinese language newspapers in the last two years (1991–92). See South China Morning Post, The Hong Kong Standard, Ming Pao, and Sing Tao Daily. The frequent armed robberies appeared in newspaper headlines starting as early as 1984. See also Lo Tit-wing’s “Law and Order” (pp. 127–48) and Claudia Mo’s “Disciplinary Forces” (pp. 405–24) in Cheng and Kwong (1992). 32. See Kwong’s “Emigration and Manpower Shortage” in Wong and Cheng (1990), pp. 297– 337. See also Li Ming-kun (1988). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:34 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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33. See Kwong in Wong and Cheng (1990), p. 303, quoting a study done by Pak-wai Liu and Stephen Tang. 34. Emigration figures are between 40,000 and 60,000 per year. There was a jump after June 4, 1989. See MacGregor (1991). See also the Hong Kong Annual Report 1991 on the goals of the University and Polytechnic Grants Committee to increase tertiary education. 35. For the close ties between Hong Kong and Canada, see Lary’s “Canada in Hong Kong” in Cheng and Kwong (1992), pp. 95–109. 36. “Hong Kong Hustle Is Heating up Canada” (1991). 37. See the changing political dynamic as described by Lau (1988). 38. See Tsang (1991) and local newspaper reports in September and October 1991. See also a report by Barbara Basler, “Democracy Backers in Hong Kong Win Election Landslide” in the New York Times (1991).

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Part 2 Moving Targets

The two essays in this section were written almost two decades apart. Published in 1989, the first essay puts in context my experience of rural China at the end of the Maoist era. At the time of fieldwork in 1977, I expected to find positive developments in thirty years of rural revolution. Instead, I saw what remained of traditional villages, stripped of the layers of sociality that had given them diverse livelihoods, translocal exposure, and cultural richness. Village life looked bare and colorless, weighed down by the omnipotent presence of an ideology-driven bureaucracy. Wherever I turned, I found slogans on village walls extolling hard work and loyalty to the party, boards scribbled with official notices allocating production quotas and work tasks, and directives for family planning. The hustle and bustle of periodic markets was gone. Religious, lineage and community rituals accompanied by brass bands, gongs, drums, and folk operas were reduced to vague memories. Even the mobile Dan fishermen in the Pearl River Delta, who for centuries had escaped the reach of the imperial state, were grounded. I felt the penetrating power of the Maoist revolution then and wondered how it was realized and experienced. In the following ten years, I turned to the villagers whom I saw as both agents and victims in a revolutionary process. I observed how they reworked memories of the past and took strategic steps towards an uncertain future. As I watched the human dramas of market reform rapidly unfolding, I also shifted my positioning. The subsequent ethnographic narrative was distilled from interactive layers of moving subjects. The second essay, published in 2006, reviews three books that have tried to capture a China on the move. Thirty years of post-Mao reforms seem to have produced new energies and aspirations. The “China Century” is in a fast-forward mode. People in all walks of life seem determined to push ahead without looking back. Yet, in the individualistic pursuit of love and happiness, in the aggressive maneuvers of urban youths to catch up with the world, and in rural migrants’ desperate sojourn to gain livelihoods and self-worth, I observe heavy baggage from the Maoist era. “China” is not only a physical “place” but a process marked by an assemblage of accumulated transformations in people’s lives and mindsets. In the 1970s, I saw the structural impact of rural revolution in the villages. In the 1980s, as Maoist ideology This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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somewhat faded, I chose to watch how market towns were to be revived. Although I saw the potential of market town enterprises becoming China’s new private sector, I felt the lingering language of the state framing even the most entrepreneurial interests. By the early 1990s, China’s urban landscape was rapidly restructured by the privatization of housing, industry, services and consumption. As China’s role as world factory triggered massive rural to urban migration, I refocused my research attention to the margins of growing cities where social displacement and entrenchment were intertwined. In the past decade, China reaches out to the world with rising confidence. I have followed the footprints of its adventurous investors abroad. Yet alongside explosive market impulses, new state spaces are created by officials who lavishly use statist positions to reap unimaginable wealth and power. Transformations in south China in the late 1970s were as tumultuous as what we observe today. Every political turn has churned kaleidoscopic energies and reactions, as different generations are drawn into fitful and compelling experiments. As a researcher, I have watched these moving targets with intense curiosity and have maintained an intellectual humility to understand processes of social change that have been anything but linear. The past in the present remains an important theme in my ethnographic writings. My study of contemporary Chinese society stresses a historical perspective that does not take for granted benchmark dates tied to grand policy narratives. I examine the dynamics of post-reforms by putting the structural impact of the Maoist revolution as core to my analysis rather than treating major political turns as analytical starting points.

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3 Images Prologue to Agents and Victims in South China

It was an unusually wet spring in April 1977. I was among ten university teachers from Hong Kong invited by the Chinese authorities to survey various rural communes in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province. On the last leg of our journey we reached Huicheng, the county capital of Xinhui, known for its scenic beauty and historical interest at the western edge of the delta. It had rained for three days. I sensed the anxiety behind the civility of our hosts, who arranged for our immediate departure. It seemed that crossing the swollen Xijiang (West River, a major tributary of the Zhujiang, Pearl River) was quite risky, but being stranded was not a pleasant alternative either. Travel facilities were tight, and everyone speculated about when we would reach the provincial capital, Guangzhou (Canton), 110 kilometers away. The atmosphere was tense and uncertain, as were many political careers at the time.1 When we were ferried across the river, buildings at the pier were half-submerged, and fields that were still quite bare pushed against the currents of the Xijiang. Only the lush green fan palms stood out on the dikes against the dismal horizon. We hurried off, but I looked back. For the following ten years I would return to that part of the delta many times to do research. The land and the people with whom I made friends eventually formed a social landscape that continued to excite my curiosity and capture my imagination. I looked back in time to the history and tradition that elderly villagers relied upon, and I tried to reach beyond present realities to understand their hopes. It may be helpful to the reader if I explain why I chose to study Huancheng commune of Xinhui county. In fact, my hosts were often intrigued by the same question. “We are but peasants,” they said. “What is it that interests you?” I paid my initial visit to rural China in 1974, influenced by ideological preferences to which I hoped to attach academic dignity. I shared the sense of outrage of many modern Chinese intellectuals at how peasants in the first half of the 20th century had been abused by successive regimes. Naïvely assuming that the Communists had come to power with popular support, I began to ask how the party used its ideological and organizational means to build a modern economy and state and to provide a degree of social equality for the vast peasantry. Having been subjects for as long as the Chinese dynasties had been in power, the peasants, I thought, might finally acquire the status of citizens. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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I was initially concerned with a central theme in China’s development strategy: rural industrialization. Since late 1958, the regime had promoted small-scale enterprises at the commune and brigade levels of administration. These were to provide the communities with income, employment, services for agriculture, and industrial skills. By mobilizing local initiative for self-reliant development, the regime hoped to avoid an exodus from the villages to cities, the social and political consequences of which have continued to plague many agrarian societies in the transition to a modern economy. What interested me most were the regime’s political objectives. These small-scale enterprises were operated by communes and brigades. With their accumulated industrial resources, communes maintained two sets of institutional ties. They contracted with state industries to secure supplies and markets; these economic connections in turn enhanced their leverage over subordinate brigades and teams. In fact, communes were expected to use their resources politically, in a way that narrowed disparities among brigades; the same was expected of brigades in relation to their teams. My political attitudes at the time made me eager to learn how the development of these enterprises facilitated what I believed to be a gradual, benign integration of the vast countryside into a modern socialist state, and how parochial concerns of family and community might eventually be transformed to identifications with party and nation. The Chinese road to socialism, I thought, might become a model for agrarian societies undergoing the pains of modern development. I chose to study Huancheng Commune because its diversified economy, based on rice, fan palm, fruits, sugarcane, and vegetables, provided ample research materials for my interest in rural enterprises. Historically, the area was known for its palm handicrafts; if one believed that post-revolutionary development bore the stamp of the past, it would be worth examining how the traditional handicrafts and their associated economic arrangements made the transition to new institutional contexts. As I looked ahead, the commune’s enterprises both meshed with industries at Huicheng at its northern boundary and served agriculture through its 29 brigades comprising 190 production teams. The enterprises were intended to be instrumental in narrowing the disparities among the commune’s subordinate units, a step believed to be necessary before the level of accounting could be raised from the team to a higher one within the commune. Both processes were aimed at facilitating the commune’s eventual incorporation into the state sector.2 What better site and moment could there be to indulge my political enthusiasm and academic curiosity? I began the research for my dissertation in 1977. The political atmosphere was tense as cadres at all levels watched the ambiguous signals from the party center. I was not able to conduct the conventional yearlong field research expected of anthropologists. Instead, I made do with numerous trips of a few weeks or so.3 Being an overseas Chinese helped, especially when my mother had a sister in Xinhui county. Such status This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Images: Prologue to Agents and Victims in South China

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nonetheless created its own problems. My villager friends were somewhat baffled that I did not visit my cousins until near the end of my research. My hosts, cadres in the commune, exerted their share of pressure. They generally expected ethnic Chinese to agree with the nation’s political priorities and were quite dismayed that I did not seem to be concerned with my native roots. From the spring of 1977 to the summer of 1980, I paid a series of visits to Huancheng Commune and cities such as Huicheng, Jiangmen, and Guangzhou. I interviewed cadres at various levels of the administration. I visited commune and brigade enterprises and made friends with junior cadres and workers. Over tea and fruit, we exchanged ideas and shared observations until late in the night. Occasionally, I followed them to the villages, sat inside dilapidated ancestral halls then used as administrative headquarters,4 and listened to elderly villagers reconstruct a history that they felt they had had a part in.5 Despite my preoccupation with rural enterprises, I was catching glimpses of a disturbing reality in the course of my field research, which would change my views about the nature of modern state-building under Mao. The commune and its brigades in fact had little autonomy in what was officially termed self-reliant development. Unlike small-scale industries in Hong Kong or Taiwan, the operations of those in Huancheng Commune fluctuated sharply with national political currents rather than with local or regional market conditions. In the early 1970s, for example, a profitable machine-tool contract with a county factory was revoked by the county administration on the grounds that it would divert the attention of the commune factory from aiding agriculture. Old village cadres were chosen to head industrial enterprises not for their technical competence but for their presumed political loyalties. Managers hoarded surplus raw materials so that they could use them for political leverage. A vegetable-processing factory proposed by the commune was abandoned because county-level cadres condemned the project as “capitalistic.” A brigade could not build a much-needed road because its quota of cement from the county government was small and nothing else was available in rural markets. Accusations of corruption were rampant: cadres had used their leverage to recruit relatives and friends for industrial jobs, which paid higher wages and were sought after by young laborers who wanted to avoid back-breaking work in the fields. Even more alarming were the wasteful projects that the county government obliged the commune to carry out. One such project was the construction of a highway-dike in 1975. To create a set of canals, which later turned out to be an ecological disaster, the commune drained its treasury of funds accumulated over ten years. Several brigades in the commune found their valuable farmland reduced in size, and team members lost their fruit trees on the dikes. To top it all, the county government never delivered the water pumps or the electricity that it had promised. When asked why they conducted such a project, cadres in the commune and brigades uniformly replied, “What choice did we have when our county party secretaries wanted to follow the spirit of Dazhai?”6 Peasants This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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resented the waste but grudgingly complied. Most felt that they had to go along with the cadres. As it was put to me, “objections were voiced; reports were made to the higher-ups; and we dragged our feet. But we dug the canals, did we not?” Ironically, such fearful paralysis prevailed precisely during the 1970s, when socialist ideals were professed most ardently by national party leaders. As a brigade cadre aptly described their predicament, “We may occasionally ride political storms, but we cannot prevent them from coming.” The party has exercised authority in the name of revolution and socialism. How was it held accountable to the people it supposedly served? The mandate of heaven has been changed to a mandate of the people, but to what extent were villagers treated as citizens instead of subjects?7 Granted that one should approach ideological professions with caution and that China’s political tradition could not be expected to change overnight, it is intriguing to explore the predicament of rural society when a regime summoned unprecedented determination to transform it with a different claim to authority. The commune’s apparent lack of political initiative led my attention to rural cadres who were responsible for implementing policies. It is worth comparing their situation with that of the local gentry in imperial China and of political brokers of other state agrarian societies. What is the nature of their power or the lack of it, given the fact that the preeminence of state authority is assumed in Chinese culture and that the post-revolutionary state has amassed a remarkable concentration of economic resources and political leverage?8 In the course of my research from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, I made friends with three of the commune’s leading cadres, whose life experiences intertwined to form a continuous political thread in the transformation of the commune, specifically, the step-by-step consolidation of a powerful rural bureaucracy and its inherent paradoxes. Xu Wenqing was from a family of urban intellectuals. A college graduate working in the provincial government, he responded to the party’s call in 1954 to settle in the countryside. His move to Huancheng was a mixed blessing from his point of view. On the one hand, he entertained idealistic notions about his part in the young regime’s effort to build socialism; on the other hand, his family’s “bourgeois” background made him politically suspect in the eyes of some party leaders. He saw no choice but to make the extra effort to show his commitment. For twenty-five years he lived in a small house in the commune, married a local woman, raised a family, participated in menial work, and helped Huancheng’s semiliterate party secretaries handle voluminous documents. When I met him in 1977, he was director of the office of the commune government, but he did not hold a leadership position in the party committee. A soft-spoken man with a slight build, he was very reserved. However, when I traveled with him to the villages, I was pleasantly surprised by his detailed knowledge of agricultural This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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production. Peasants and brigade cadres greeted him eagerly and pleaded with him to speak for them on various policy matters. He was their “Bao Qing Tian,” a legendary official who helped ordinary folks by challenging injustice and bureaucratic abuse. I once asked him what I could contribute to the commune’s effort to modernize, and he answered, “Bring us dictionaries. If we are to face the outside world, we need to start from the basics. The problem with our country is that we have relied too much on faith.” I was away when he fell seriously ill in the summer of 1979. Nevertheless, he struggled to instruct my research assistant as to whom I should work with after he was gone. He passed away two days later at the age of fifty-three. It was sadly ironic that his death came at the end of an era of radical politics during which a generation of intellectuals who were eager to construct their country’s future were treated with suspicion because of class labels fixed upon them. Chen Mingfa was the cadre named by Xu Wenqing to help me. They were close friends, though their backgrounds and careers could not have been more different. A peasant activist with a primary school education, Chen was recruited into the party in the early 1950s and had subsequently risen in the party ranks as the area’s “peasant theoretician.” He spent twenty years in his native village as party secretary until he was transferred to the commune enterprise office in 1971. He admitted later that he hated the job because he felt incompetent and did not adjust easily to industrial schedules. However, loyalties to his background in the peasant class mattered most at the time, and the commune entrusted him with the task of preventing the enterprises from neglecting agriculture. He was the head of the office when I met him in 1977. His dark, weather-beaten complexion and awkward manners gave him a “peasant” appearance most incongruous with the thick pair of glasses on his face. My respect for him grew through the years as he revealed the commune economy and officialdom to me sensitively and sensibly. In an unassuming manner he also exposed me to the web of social relationships in which he served skillfully as mediator. To my surprise, he  was dismissed from office in 1982 after being implicated in a corruption case involving one of his subordinates. His downfall was unexpected among his peers. A sincere man, he was not disliked by other workers. Unfortunately, his career paralleled too closely the reign of Maoist politics. He might have protected his subordinate out of kindness, but higher officials attuned to party politics were too eager for political scapegoats at a time of ideological redefinition. My third contact, Chen Sheyuan, came from the same village as Chen Mingfa. Also a local activist made party cadre in the 1950s, he had worked as an accountant and headmaster of a primary school. He was assigned to the commune government office in the late 1950s and became its director after Xu Wenqing’s death in 1979. Though he could not live up to Xu’s legacy, he commanded respect in his own way. After all, he was more “educated” than many of the commune party secretaries. His straightforward style made him approachable in the eyes of local peasants. I once This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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watched him jump off our van to remove two 50-catty baskets of grain blocking the way, embarrassing junior cadres who expected villagers to respond to our driver’s honking. “During the Cultural Revolution, the tabloids I wrote for the commune would cover all of Huicheng,” he often announced with a broad smile, “but now, economic energies have livened up to the same degree as politics had then.” We met again in March 1986, and I was not surprised to learn that he had not been forced into retirement as a matter of policy in the post-Mao era. A low-key cadre who toed ideological lines carefully, he has been a survivor. Through the maze of human networks introduced by the three cadres, I came to know many characters—ordinary villagers, team and brigade cadres, old party secretaries, young workers in the commune and brigade enterprises. There was the party secretary whom people fearfully referred to as “the occupant of the gray-brick mansion.” Others included brigade cadres known to have enjoyed “helicopter rides,” because they had risen precipitously during the Cultural Revolution. Between toothless old villagers, who could count every ancestral hall in the village and recall details of folk festivals during the lunar year, and young ones, who could only relate to the anti-Confucian campaigns, I experienced the cultural consequence of the revolution. Recent political liberalization has brought with it the revival of popular rituals, and I found that it is no longer uncommon for young people to participate in religious pilgrimages or to subject themselves to the demands of traditional wedding ceremonies. However, when questioned about the wider cultural meanings behind the activities, they responded with perplexed looks that bespoke the problems of a cultural vacuum. More blatant was the ideological vacuum displayed. I could understand why former landlords and their children held grudges against the regime for having reduced them to a caste of untouchables for more than three decades. However, among a generation of young workers who were relatively literate and articulate, I also detected a disturbing sense of cynicism. Though raised on the socialist ideals promoted by the new regime, they keenly felt the discriminations against their rural status. They also saw careers and hopes shattered by decades of political vicissitudes. The lives of these people were often controlled by political forces quite out of their reach. They collaborated and conflicted to make the best of circumstances. How they perceived their predicaments and pursued their interests and hopes made up the social political dynamics of the commune. They actively used the resources within their means to cope with a state determined to include them. They gave it compliance and, at times, complicity. Yet so many felt victimized by the very structures and processes to which their actions had given significance. I am not sure when I began to confront my own disillusionment, but my growing unease in the 1980s precipitated an intellectual urge to analyze the source of the problems in the system, not that I look back to the Maoist days with nostalgia or that This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Images: Prologue to Agents and Victims in South China

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I regard the recent reforms as a second liberation. Few of my informants do. Ironically, amid their anxious efforts to shed their political past and to get ahead economically, a familiar paralysis lurks behind their strategies. It seems to me that, despite efforts to reform itself, a weighty bureaucracy representing the party-state continues to reach the most private corners of people’s lives. Like the dynasties before it, it is rather selfrighteous and arbitrary. Yet unlike many dynasties in the past, it wields tremendous organizational power. What my peasant friends could not articulate is captured in a novella by Liu Xinwu entitled “Overpass.” Though the story develops around bureaucratic bottlenecks that have led to agonizing overcrowding and desperate maneuvering for a family in Beijing, its political and philosophical messages have a wider relevance. In the foreword to an anthology of post-Mao literature in translation (Siu and Stern 1983, vi), Jonathan Spence writes with regard to “Overpass”: “There is extraordinary agreement among these writers about the loss of dignity that afflicts all Chinese denied privacy, in housing as in thought, forced forever to jostle and bargain and plead until the shouts become cries and the cries blows.” In a sense, I went to China with Marxist hopes, but I left with Max Weber’s worst fears. Writing this ethnography has been a self-reflective endeavor. *“Prologue” is reprinted from Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). I have added minor revisions. The names of most individuals, except for prominent historical figures, have been changed to protect their identity.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

This was only a few months after the radical followers of Mao Zedong were removed from power in the national government. The commune had a three-tiered structure of collective ownership. The teams (basically small villages) received their income from the land they were given to work on. The brigades and commune ran small-scale enterprises. The government planned to gradually raise the level of accounting from team to brigade and commune in order to reduce differences. See my essay, “Doing Fieldwork in Rural Guangdong,” in Thurston and Pasternak (1983), 143–61. The Pearl River Delta was dotted with single-surname communities whose wealthy members had built halls for the collective worship of ancestors. There were halls (citang) dedicated to the founders of specific lineage segments in a particular community and used by their members. There were also the apical ancestral halls (dazongci), dedicated to a remote founder of a senior line. These halls were often established in cities, and membership and contributors to its estate were not restricted to demonstrated genealogical links. More on lineage organizations in chapter 3 of Agents and Victims in South China (Siu 1989a). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:29:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

58 5.

6. 7.

8.

Tracing China When I started fieldwork in the Huancheng area, I relied for information on people to whom I was introduced by the commune cadres. It was clear that these were “safe informants”; one of them belonged to a household chosen for outsiders to visit (kaifang hu). However, as years went by, I developed my own network of friends and steered away from official connections. The cadres’ initial reserve toward me also wore off. A more relaxed political atmosphere in the 1980s made the cadres less selective about the people they chose for me to interview. Though I found the content of our conversations somewhat restricted for the post-revolutionary era, the narratives about life in the Republican era or during the Japanese occupation rarely adhered to the official line. Eventually, I was invited to dinners and birthday or wedding banquets, where people were too absorbed in the occasion to develop a conscious political distance. Dazhai is a brigade in north China promoted in the early 1960s by Mao as a model for self-reliant development and egalitarianism. Reinhart Bendix notes that the making of nation-states involved a restructuring of authority from religious sanctions of kingship to authority in the name of popular sovereignty. However, the shift has not always involved popular participation. See a discussion of the relevance of this idea in 19th-century Japan by William Kelly (1985). Unlike traditional elites who enjoyed multiple bases of power and authority granted by the imperial states and local communities, rural cadres were more directly dependent on party affiliations. Their predicaments and their changing relationships with fellow villagers showed how the party-state had transformed rural communities as it consolidated its control over societal resources and ideology.

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4 China’s Century Fast Forward with Historical Baggage

Books reviewed in this essay: Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999, by Yan Yunxiang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 289 pp. Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy, by Vanessa Fong. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 242 pp. On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 355 pp. China is hot. The global media has named this century “The China Century.” The sustained double-digit growth, the massive infrastructural developments, the everexpanding cities that “swallow” entire villages, the rural-to-urban migration of laborers in tens of millions, and the worldwide consumption of China’s products all contribute to an image of a country energized, on the move toward real and imaginary markets, and almost desperately in a fast-forward mode. Looking beyond economic data and media sensation, anthropologists ask how the rhetoric of reform and the real force of market in late-socialist China translate into the lives of ordinary people. The 2003 premiere of Sue Williams’s documentary, China in the Red, brings home to us vivid images of those who have chosen to take bold steps to engage with the market and those who have been dragged down by noncompetitive state industries and a government that simply lets go (Williams 2003). Not unlike those in many developing countries, their lives weave together stories of pride and unbound aspirations as well as ambivalence and sadness. From the details of everyday life, one feels the depth of human drama at this juncture of China’s feverish march toward modernity. Everyone is intensely engaged with processes of becoming. What is the historical baggage that this energized population carries in its efforts to move ahead? What is the lingering impact of a Maoist revolution that so many would only wish to forget? Emotions have been volatile. One sees them explode among nationalistic students who have yet to find a language to relate to the world. One is This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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faced with daily social strife among the city rich, the predatory officials, the migrant workers who fill foreign-owned factories (Lee 1998, Pun 2005), and the urban poor who dig their heels in and refuse eviction. Whether indulging in stock fever (Hertz 1998), in religious revival (Yang 2004), in a consumption craze for luxury cars, private housing (Jing Wang 2005, pp. 72–93), and ethnic tourism (Friedman 2004; Schein 2000), or bearing the abuses of migrancy (Solinger 1999, Zhang 2001b), a generation of Chinese appears single-mindedly anxious to push ahead (Chen et al. 2001, Davis 2000, Solinger 2006). If these individuals are agents who negotiate their ways through roller-coaster rides from plan to market, how does one conceptualize the context of their agency? There is one-dimensionality in their mindsets, imaginings, and strategies. It is as if every individual is an eager operator but one with minimal cultural resource or social mediation. How does one conceptually link these instrumental actions with the institutional structures people find themselves in? As in the earlier periods, can these human agents be victims of the very circumstances their actions have made significant (Siu 1989a and chapter 5 of this volume)? The three books under review provide vivid ethnographic accounts of the fluidities. One may find parallels in Caroline Humphrey’s The Unmaking of Soviet Life (2002). Substantively similar to Humphrey’s treatment of post-socialist Russia, the books focus on the partial disintegration of socialist-statist structures in China that have given meaning to people’s lives for several generations. One sees desperate maneuvers to find new opportunities, to catch up for lost time, or merely to cope with unbearable uncertainty. Not unlike Lila Abu-Lughod’s description of contemporary Egypt (Mitchell ed. 2000, pp. 87–114), many Chinese juggle their lives and aspirations with three realisms: a lingering socialist realism in which labor is no longer prized, an unmediated capitalist realism justifying survival of the fittest, and a development realism stressing modernization and nationalist pride. Conceptually, the books use ethnographic encounters to address issues about agency and the nature of power in everyday life (Dirks et al. 1994). From their respective angles, they provide critical readings of the human endeavors as they unfold, sustained fieldwork now being very possible in China. Moreover, they generally address current anthropological concerns, especially on engagement with modernity, and on conceptual frameworks highlighting process and contingency (Knauf 2002; Mitchell 2000; Taylor 2004). Their focus on individual strategies and subjectivities is in tune with the Weberian turn in anthropology over the past few decades (Keyes 2002). The ethnography by Yunxiang Yan, Private Life Under Socialism (2003), is particularly perceptive. In the 1990s, he returned to Xiajia Village in Heilongjiang province of northeastern China. Villagers had generously taken him in during the harsh, hungry days of his youth. Old friends opened their hearts to him, enabling him to explore intimate moments in their lives. His long association with the village also allows him to compare generational experiences in their layered subtleties and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to appreciate the compelling changes. Conceptually, he wishes to take the study of Chinese family beyond established models of corporate structures, economic organization, and political hierarchy. Instead, he explores its personal and emotional aspects, focusing, as he says, on “the moral experiences of individuals, whose concerns about privacy, intimacy, emotionality, and individual rights are as important as economic gains” (p. xii). In the recent decades of reforms, he asks, how is the moral fabric in the family being rewoven, and who are the major stakeholders? Amid anxieties that have arisen from severe transgressions of institutional parameters long taken for granted, how is family life put on a course that is nothing less than revolutionary? Yan begins his narrative of the privatization of the family by arguing that decades of socialist policies in the political economy of the village fundamentally eroded the corporate and hierarchical structures of family relationships in gender and generational terms. Collectivization and associated changes in rewarding labor collapsed patriarchic power. Parents lost control over inheritance, marriage transactions, and family formation. Moreover, traditional family values were often under direct and organized ideological attack by the socialist state. In the decades from 1949 to 1979, younger generations have grown up with new ideas about personal entitlement. Post-Mao market liberalizations have given them partial exposure to ideas of romantic love and conjugal intimacy, and driven them further away from the concerns of the larger familial unit and toward individualistic pursuits. Unlike in the past when generational priorities often overruled conjugal intimacy, and when children were groomed to support parents in their old age, young villagers today have asserted their voices in the organization of their private desires. They refuse arranged marriages, freely engage in premarital sex, live apart from parents the moment they are married, press hard on family division, spend precious resources on their conjugal homes, and migrate to cities looking for opportunities. Parents are often bitter and confused in what Yan terms a “crisis of filial piety,” often trapped in their cellularized villages as much as in a cultural and emotional vacuum. They feel betrayed by the government and abandoned by their children. Yan largely shares their concerns that a family held together not by intergenerational reciprocity but by shrewd market calculations would breed egoistic, uncivil individuals with no concern for the public good. The government not relinquishing its control over public life adds to the problem, as a younger generation grows up with no appreciation for or experience with civic associations. The questions are as follows: Can we conceptualize the changes as an unavoidable move from collective to individualistic modes of development, as a linear trend similarly experienced by other industrializing countries in the past? Or, is the atomistic, uncivil, intensely individualistic aspect of family life that Yan describes a phenomenon unique to late-socialist rural China? If it is, has Yan successfully incorporated this historical experience in his analysis? This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Building on the richness of Yan’s ethnography and his insightful treatment of Chinese family life, I would like to raise the following for further exploration. First, what was the nature of family life in the pre-1949 periods? It may be true that emotional expressivity is much more direct today than in the past, but one cannot assume a prior lack of private emotions or individual agency. Historians have challenged established models of the Chinese family with countless examples of intimacy and illicit passion, of intense individual maneuvers and desires, even under the most restrictive social circumstances and cultural norms. Love and romance were not lacking as themes in traditional folklore and other popular art forms. Parental anxieties arising from unfilial children were also not uncommon. If these emotions existed in pre-revolutionary days and were allowed to be expressed (albeit in different ways), what conceptual tools must we employ to appreciate them in order not to succumb to the pitfalls of the corporate and economic models of the traditional Chinese family? Moreover, a longer historical exploration allows us to reassess some unique changes in the socialist period and enrich Yan’s argument with regard to today’s intense privatization of family life. In an earlier article on inter-generational family dynamics (Davis and Harrell 1993, pp. 165–88), I argued that desperate maneuvers to secure dowry and bride price among Chinese families in the 1990s were indicative of how fundamentally “the family” had been stripped down and redefined by the socialist revolution and how parents and children were actively involved in its “reconstitution” in the post-reform era. The intensely conjugal pursuits of the 1990s involved both generations coping with the prior destruction of layers of relevant social relationships and ritual resource that had made up larger familial processes. The traditional embeddedness of familial processes provided diverse means for security and recourse beyond the conjugal unit, reinforced by a nuanced moral fabric that wove together the private and the collective, and that channeled its members’ individual expressivity in multiple ways. Few such channels remain today. If one appreciates the historical complexities contributing to family forms in pre-Mao and post-Mao periods, one would not conceptualize the situation as a linear movement from corporate forms to individualized strategies. Yan has described the lack of public life in the village today as a result of the withdrawal of the state in the organization of community events as well as its lingering political control. The larger question remains as to why there is such cultural paralysis in the public realm. A fuller treatment of the embeddedness of the family process in the past and the nature of its atomization and ironic entrenchment in the socialist and post-reform periods may enlighten us on how the villagers will be empowered (or handicapped) to exert their agency in the future. In Only Hope (Fong 2004), a similar lack of alternatives seems to dictate the lives of “singletons” in today’s urban China. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1997 and 2002 in Dalian, a thriving coastal city in the northeast, Vanessa Fong details the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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focused energies of teenagers from various family circumstances and those of their equally anxious parents. “What is it like to grow up as a singleton in a society used to large families?” (p. 4), Fong asks. The upside is that one gets almost anything one wants from doting parents. The downside is that these “little emperors” are pushed over the edge to perform what Fong terms the “cultural model of modernization” (p.  13). Because of lingering ideas about filial piety, coupled with uncertainty in employment and the withdrawal of state benefits, parents in Dalian face uncertain prospects. They regard their children as prized commodities. In this accelerated demographic transition triggered by China’s one-child policy, parents invest heavily to cultivate their “only hope,” loading their children with unrealistic expectations. Amid public perception of the young generation being spoiled rotten because of the attention showered on them, many singletons crack under pressure. A sadly comical scene in the documentary film China in the Red illuminates the central theme of Fong’s book. Teenage students gathered at the gate of a higher education entrance examination hall. Anxious parents were wiping sweat and tears, and sheltering their children from the sun with umbrellas. Vendors with huge oxygen containers lined the street. Candidates sat next to them with tubes pressed against their nostrils, taking in the last dose before charging into “examination hell.” The ethnographic details can sometimes be excruciating. In one instance, Fong was told of teenage suicides in an elite high school. To her horror, her ninth-grade informant displayed not sadness but a calculating coolness, commenting that “I hope even more high school students commit suicide. . . . That way, there will be fewer people competing to get into good high schools, colleges, and jobs” (p. 87). The problem is the gap between First World ideals and Third World realities, Fong argues. There are ideals for upward mobility in modern industrial societies. Families are known to push their children to succeed. But the peculiar demographic transition in China and the economic downturn in Dalian because of the collapse of state-owned enterprises make it particularly difficult for the families involved. Moreover, the urban consumer revolution, fueled by new desires cut and pasted from the Internet, tempt and taunt these teenagers almost instantly. Tensions in the family are high, as Fong devotes a chapter on fierce exchanges between parents and children over filial piety and calculated reciprocity. The emotions expressed are painfully direct, nothing short of Sartre’s No Exit (1946). Gnawing questions remain: How does one explain the mentality of pushing through a fast track with no alternative imaginings? For a sizable city economy such as Dalian’s, are mobility opportunities so single-tracked and one-dimensional for teenagers and their parents? Not unlike the villagers in Yan’s ethnography, these urbanites are feverish in maneuvering to advance their private selves, but there seems to be little cultural resource to think or reach beyond the interlocking three realisms. Between their private selves and the language of the state (be it socialism, market This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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reforms, or national modernity), there is little public space to explore. Posed against the works of historians and anthropologists on the vibrant, multilayered city life before socialist transformations (G. William Skinner, William Rowe, David Strand, and Gail Hershatter, to name a few), the stark uniformity of life in late-socialist cities must be more fully explained. Only then may we better appreciate the frustrations of the singletons and their parents with regard to the compelling structure of opportunities they face. The cellularized worlds of villagers and urbanites, a product of Maoist politics since the late 1950s, are physically bridged by the restructuring of market towns (Faure and Liu 2002, pp. 233–49) and the movement of rural migrants to cities in the recent decades. No matter how migrants are defined, the number is massive, ranging upward of 100 million (Gaetano and Jacka 2004, p. 1). In the migrants’ home villages and the cities where they work, the volatility triggered by such movement is profound. It has touched not only gender relationships and family life but also the development of entire regions and the associated cultural discourses. The volume On the Move (Gaetano and Jacka 2004) focuses on dagongmei (working maidens). The authors argue that the pattern of migration has been highly gendered. Because of a history of draconian household registration and repatriation policies in the decades after 1949, rural migrants today suffer severe discriminations as outsiders. The uncertainties of the state sector have also made urbanites defensive, and they single out migrants for blame. Moreover, from a feminist perspective, lingering gender biases compound sexual exploitation and abuse of women workers. The authors also note that most of these young women are negotiating their identity shifts from youth to adulthood, thus complicating the already volatile situations. The ethnographic accounts, supplemented by personal stories, are rich and varied. They involve factory workers, marriage migrants, domestic helpers, and hostesses in karaoke bars. As the editors have noted, the chapters provide “insights into rural women’s motivations for out migration, their experiences of work and life in the city, the strategies they employ to negotiate or overcome their inferior status in the eyes of urbanites, their social networks and ties to home, the ways they try to shape a future for themselves, and the long-term implications of migration for themselves, their families, and their village communities” (p. 4). What ties these diverse topics together is the authors’ endeavor “to understand the interconnections and interactions among migrant women’s subjectivity, selfrepresentation, and agency on the one hand, and broader structures, institutions, and sociopolitical discourses on the other” (p. 5). Fighting against the “controlling gaze” of the state media demanding “modern qualities” (Sun) or of popular consumption expecting filial daughters and docile sexual objects, the “agency” of these women migrants is complicated and at times contradictory (Gaetano). Tiantian Zheng suggests in her chapter that her hostess This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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informants play into men’s stereotypes and fantasies about rural female bodies and appropriate such consumption discourses for their own material and social gain. The question to ask, as Gaetano highlights, is whether one celebrates their performances as empowerment and resistance, or as acts of desperation by victims who see few alternatives. Their sojourn can be summed up by haunting images of the migrant returnee in Fruit Chan’s film, Durian, Durian (2000). The main character travels to Hong Kong to be a sex worker, subjecting herself to inhumane conditions. She returns to her hometown, where family and friends shower her with attention for her “accomplishments” as a businesswoman and make demands on her savings. She watches her life fall apart under the pressure of collective pretense. Her only solace is a durian fruit sent to her from Hong Kong by a young illegal immigrant girl whom she has befriended, who is as much a fugitive as she is, in every sense of the word. Be they Yan’s villagers, Fong’s teenage singletons, or female migrants, the historical baggage they carry is heavy. Yet they feel compelled to move on in a fast-forward mode. To what extent is this agency; to what extent is it complicity? *Reprinted with minor revisions from the original article in American Anthropologist 108, 2 (June 2006).

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Part 3 Structuring and Human Agency

When I wrote my first ethnography, I was just beginning to explore the two concepts—structuring and human agency. Agents and Victims in South China (1989a) focuses on how the Maoist rural revolution transformed a highly commercialized Pearl River delta. I have argued against a static and a historical view of peasant life common in the social sciences, that villages represent isolated, rural residue of the past waiting to be stirred by modern reforms or revolution. A careful reading of documents of the late imperial period shows that South China villages were embedded in nested hierarchies of dynamic market exchange, territorial lineage organizations, vibrant popular rituals and translocal identities. What I saw in the 1970s in Guangdong were, by contrast, intensely inward-looking “rural” cells. The first six chapters of the monograph describe the pre-revolutionary cultural layers and the nexus of power and interest in which the villages were situated. The rest of the book describes how socialist campaigns in twenty-five Maoist years reduced village life to a bare and colorless existence. The language of class and revolution eventually defined the identities and prospects of every individual. I believed that the Maoist transformations were possible only with serious collaboration from villagers and local cadres. I tried to capture the nuanced expressions and complex emotions in between compliance and resistance—that of acquiescence, collusion, negotiation. Disagreeing somewhat with my colleague James Scott, I highlighted complicity. Villagers in Huancheng Commune were not passively watching the revolutionary drama unfolding from afar but were partners in its performance. Intentional or not, they were accomplices in a political process their actions had given significance. I used their fitful relationships with rural revolution to illuminate issues of structuring and human agency. In 1986, I spent a year in Xiaolan, a market town in the heart of the Pearl River Delta. I had a few analytical issues in mind: the lingering rural-urban divide in social life, and the creation of new state spaces during liberal reforms. I appreciated the multiple channels in traditional China that had drawn villages, towns and cities into a shared cultural world. Kinship and descent (Freedman), popular religion and rituals (Wolf and Watson), or civil service examinations (Elman), and nested marketing This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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communities (G. William Skinner) had provided crucial integrating ingredients in the making of regional systems. These institutions bridged agriculture and trade and blurred the cultural boundaries between rural and urban, locality and center. Marketing pulsations shaped the openness and closure of local communities, which were integral to regional cycles of growth and decline and were intertwined with imperial administrative nodes. During fieldwork in the 1970s, I discovered instead sharp social, economic and spatial disconnect. I asked myself how much such disconnect continued to dominate mindsets and strategies in the reform era. Rather than putting the Maoist transformations behind us and looking for a fresh analytical start benchmarked by a political turn, I use the paradoxical agency of the town residents to argue that we should place the naturalized impact of Maoist socialism at the center of post-Mao analysis. In this historically commercialized region in South China, I had originally intended to study the development of small-scale township enterprises, which I  believed would generate private entrepreneurial energies when the reforms gave them room for maneuver. But as I walked the narrow streets of the town lined with remnants of ancestral halls, temples and shrines, I could appreciate the ritual complexes that had been remade time and again by residents who skillfully positioned themselves in the historically expansive delta. Local historians were eager to share with me the town’s treasure trove of literary and lineage documents that had survived various political campaigns. I was fortunate to be with superb historians David  Faure and Liu Zhiwei. We listened, copied and photographed as fast as we could to capture the fading cultural landscape and truncated memories. Intuitively we knew that whatever the Cultural Revolution had not destroyed would soon succumb to market-driven compulsions. Xiaolan town at the height of its past glory was perched on the edge of reclaimed river marshes. It straddled the worlds of mobile Dan fishermen, tenant farmers, large lineage estates, and merchant capital. Its elites used instrumental and symbolic means to claim cultural origins from centers of political and moral authority in the north, and displayed concentrated economic wealth, lineage pedigree, and ritual richness. The chrysanthemum festival, a community event that showed off local resourcefulness and translocal connections, was lavishly orchestrated every sixty years based on a cosmic calendar. In the late Qing and early Republican eras, the town was a node in a nexus of power and political economy that extended from the river marshes to regional cities like Foshan, Guangzhou, Macau, and later Hong Kong (see chapter 8). The town’s rich histories sharpened my understanding of the town’s eventual cellularization as it moved through the tumultuous 20th century, and in particular, during the Maoist period. One cannot solely blame the socialist era for having disturbed village life. The uprooting of traditional institutions started early in the 20th century. Town residents This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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watched the maneuvers of warlords, the modernizing impulses of Republican politicians, and the entrepreneurial energies of overseas merchants. The Japanese occupation and ensuing civil war disrupted trade and increased lawlessness. By the time the Communists arrived with their revolutionary agenda in late 1949, the town’s traditional elites had long been displaced by militaristic local bosses. Known in popular parlance as datianer and Xiaolan gong, they ruled with their guns. Xiaolan’s demise in the Maoist era was similar to those of other market towns in the Pearl River Delta. Trade and markets were replaced by state cooperatives. Lineage estates were redistributed and ancestral halls abandoned if not demolished. What remained standing became neighborhood offices for the new government or were turned into nurseries and schools. Lineage elders and estate managers were long disgraced in political campaigns. Temples, shrines, and traditional community festivals had met similar fates. The town’s economy relied on a few dozen workshops and state agents that ate crumbs off county-level factories. Nonetheless, the town government and its residents guarded their bare existence against real and imaginary encroachment of surrounding communes. Being reduced to a “peasant” status could have been far worse. A crucial year for Xiaolan town was 1986. With reforms on the agenda, both county and municipality authorities were in a process of merging the town (an urban commune), yet again, with surrounding rural communes. Town residents were apprehensive. They vividly remembered the previous political campaigns when ancestral halls and temples were dismantled, and quality stones, bricks and lumber were surrendered to the surrounding communes for infrastructural projects. They had no confidence that the town’s leaders could protect them. A popular saying was poignant: the town cadres were like “an earthen Buddha wading across a river: it could hardly save itself ” (nipusa guojiang: zishen nanbao). All they could hold onto was a town residence status allowing them cheap state rations and meager, uncertain livelihoods. The first of the three essays in this section, “Socialist Peddlers and Princes,” tries to capture the town residents’ desperate energies to grab entrepreneurial opportunities, and their ambivalence towards a lingering rural-urban divide that was economic, social and cultural. Having internalized the power of the Maoist socialist systems, they unintentionally reproduced the very structures of power that their endeavors tried hard to circumvent. The town government also used its weight to capture the most lucrative business ventures. Market liberalizations, rather than signaling the retreat of the party-state, reinforced and enriched it. Expanding on Clifford Geertz’s descriptions of baroque-like patterns of development in colonial Java, and Prasenjit Duara’s analysis of administrative elaborations in Republican China, I use Duara’s term “state involution” to characterize the post-Mao reforms. The article indicates my decisive turn from a Marxist conception of power-embedded state machineries to a more nuanced one of Bourdieu and Foucault. In appreciating human agency and the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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structuring of social life, I have relied on a Weberian notion of the conscious acts of human agents and their unintended structural consequences. In the 1980s and 1990s, I continued to see state involution in other aspects of life in Xiaolan: marriage and family formation, weddings and funeral rituals, and in community festivals. A Maoist state bureaucracy with its language of class, revolution, and socialist transformation had long resulted in it being a powerful ordering frame for subjectivity and social, emotive behavior. Coupled with the deliberate destruction of past institutions and cultural resources over past decades, everyday living was devoid of diverse cultural content and historical memories. My focus was on the means that town residents and villagers used to pursue opportunities when market reforms were haphazardly introduced in a field of power quite beyond their control. The second essay, on funeral and wedding rituals, is based on what I observed in the 1990s. I argued against those who viewed the enthusiastic staging of life cycle rituals in the reform period as “revival of tradition.” I would not assume that these cultural activities were hidden and frozen during the Maoist period and only bounced back with a vengeance when the political lid was removed. Instead, these acts and the beliefs that fueled them were cultural fragments reconstituted by a new cast of characters, and given practical meanings that were distinctly different from those of the original ritual complexes. In the third essay, I focused on dowry and brideprice in the 1990s. I watched parents who loudly complained about ruinous payments but who continued to invest heavily into a conjugal fund for their children with the expectation that they would be supported in old age. Their investments deviated substantially from traditional meanings of marriage payments that signified hierarchy and exchange between two extended kin groups. In my views, the “nuclear” family carried very different meanings from past family processes. The almost desperate attempts to reinforce the conjugal unit by parents and young couples indicated how much family life had been disembedded from past kin networks and their well-understood moral expectations. Beyond life-cycle rituals, the reinvention of tradition was brashly displayed in community festivals. In an article included in the following section, I highlight the much-transformed meaning and function of Xiaolan’s once-in-sixty-year chrysanthemum festival in 1994. Fifteen years into the reforms, the major stakeholders were not societal organizations (such as lineages, merchant and temple groups as in the past) but town cadres, administrative and neighborhood units they controlled. They planned, financed, and staged the events in order to draw overseas investors to the town’s new infrastructural and industrial enterprises. Rallying behind policy directives on modernization and reform, local cadres shrewdly used what they imagined to be “traditional” community festivities to play the politics of native roots. Their agency was unabashed. They were to show overseas Chinese investors that the town had abandoned radical politics in earnest and that past cultural resources would This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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not be condemned as “feudal.” The town residents, to my surprise, were but passive observers, watching with mild bewilderment the much-transformed symbolisms in the floral displays and parades, the Canto-pop and banquets, and the line of luxury sedans serving targeted businessmen from Macau and Hong Kong. Nonetheless, they participated in the structuring moment, sensing that they could not have been left alone.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

5 Socialist Peddlers and Princes in a Chinese Market Town

The problems of economic liberalization in a market town in south China raise theoretical and empirical questions concerning the role of the state at the local level, both in the past and in the present. The failure of the party-state to disengage itself from society today is due to an administrative history to the unfolding of which the town residents have contributed their efforts. In an era of entrepreneurial vigor that is promoted officially, social life and economic choices continue to be guided by manipulations of and around bureaucratic power. State and local society have interpenetrated each other in ways that are overlooked by binary conceptual schemes that emphasize their mechanical opposition. What we have here is an example of “state involution,” of their inextricable interlocking. [rural China, socialist transformation, market revival, political culture, state involution, social change]

In the mid-1980s, an interdisciplinary group of scholars published a collection of papers centering on the conceptual need “to bring the state back in” in social and cultural analysis (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). Instead of assuming the separation of the public and private spheres, of state and society, of the formal and informal aspects of power and authority, they emphasize their interpenetration. The state, they argue, as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors, permeates cultural perceptions and intertwines with social practice to a degree far more than has been acknowledged. The issue has parallel relevance in anthropological theory. There is a tradition of analyzing how the essential elements of rule are diffused in the social structures of non-Western preindustrial societies where the formal instruments of government are detected only at a distance.1 New developments in state-making and nation-building in the postcolonial era have led analytic attention to the close historical linkages between the world system of power, the bureaucracies of central governments, the contesting political symbolisms, and local-level politics.2 Furthermore, in asking how systems of domination are reproduced and changed, scholars increasingly replace the conceptual separation of structure and process with the notion of structuring (Abrams 1982, Bourdieu 1972/1977, Giddens 1984). At  the center of this schema are individual actors whose economic and political actions are calculating and at the same time culturally and historically informed. To use Max Weber’s term, Herrschaft This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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is institutionalized by meaningful social action. The reproduction of power and ideology takes place in everyday social living in which human subjects are both agents and victims (Comaroff 1985, Donham 1999, Gilsenan 1986, Siu 1989a). The general issue raised by Evans et al., and the new directions in anthropological theory are most pertinent to the study of Chinese culture and society. The question of how the state reaches rural society to demand compliance and to invoke commitment has preoccupied scholars of both imperial and contemporary China.3 It is generally recognized that, although the administrative powers of the late imperial state varied, the cultural traditions of lineage, community and rural commerce had maintained a symbiotic relationship with it. In the economic sphere, G. William Skinner (1977) views the dynamic growth and decline of regional systems as a result of the economic strategies of society responding to the varying capacities of an administrative apparatus. The complicity of local society in sustaining the imperial order was reflected in popular religion, in which the supernatural categories of gods, ghosts and ancestors replicated the bureaucracy, strangers in the community, and kin (Wolf 1974, pp. 131–82). James Watson further analyzes how local society actively negotiated in the ritual arena with the priorities of the larger polity and created a Chinese culture that was diverse but intensely unifying.4 The last half a century saw a socialist regime engineering resources with unprecedented determination in order to transform a rural society steeped in tradition: whether or not it had a local mandate to do so has been much discussed. Substantive debates on the reach of the state arise from how the issues are conceptualized. In contrast to the scholars mentioned above, analysts of contemporary China have often assumed a dichotomous view of state and society. Society is seen as relying on a resilient cultural repertoire to respond to the repeated thrusts of the socialist state.5 Mechanical opposition of state and society runs the risk of reifying both political power and cultural tradition. The problem shows itself most clearly in the analysis of the post-Mao reforms.6 Positive economic results are attributed to the revival of market competition, social networks and native entrepreneurial wisdom, whereas intermittent ideological tightening is perceived as the reaction of an insecure but entrenched party bureaucracy.7 The question of whether traditional China is springing back to life after being suppressed for thirty years has serious implications. If the revolutionary regime that imposed its presence so powerfully on the rural landscape is disappearing so rapidly, to what extent had it touched society? The repudiation of Maoism today has led to a more subtle presence of the state in the regulation of economic and social life as well as in ideological discourse. However, if one argues, as is implied in much of the Western media, that Chinese socialism is “going capitalist,” is one ignoring a political history that might have significantly shaped social institutions to the extent that it defines and constrains the ways local actors today identify their respective interests?8 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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This essay uses an account of the contradictions in the post-Mao reforms in a market town in south China to propose a conceptual framework that is closer to the anthropological theories described earlier.9 I would argue that the operations of the party-state cannot be seen as mechanically opposed to the interests of society as though it were an external force. Nor can one treat local society as the repository of a suppressed cultural tradition. Instead, the power of the socialist state, if not its ideology, has been internalized and diffused in everyday life in the last three decades to the point that negotiating and maneuvering around it has become almost a cultural given.10 If the party-state is reproduced in the perceptions and strategies of its citizens, how does the process affect the regime’s recent attempts to liberalize? Are we observing a phenomenon that we can term “state involution?” Clifford Geertz has used the term “involution” to describe the process of baroque-like elaborations within the traditional cultural ecology of Javanese wet-rice agriculture. Although it absorbed the population explosion in Java created by the history of Western intrusion, it eventually became a self-defeating process, he argues, because the rigidity created by this “inward overelaboration of detail” made modern transformations much more painful.11 The concept was creatively adopted by Prasenjit Duara to describe the failure of modern state-making in Republican China (1911–49). Calling the process “state-involution,” Duara describes how “state organizations expand . . . through the replication, extension, and elaboration of an inherited pattern of state society relations” (1987, p. 135). The ironic twist in contemporary China is that state involution may have assumed new and varied guises. Granted that Chinese socialism might have been shaped by past cultural factors such as bureaucratism and informal politics, it is also important to recognize new forms of domination associated with the consolidation of the party-state in the Maoist years. If local society today unintentionally continues to subscribe to this authoritative political culture even when it is encouraged to embark on new entrepreneurial endeavors, would this be undermining economic liberalization, a situation that parallels what Geertz has posed as the problem for Indonesia?12

The Transformation of Nanxi Zhen (a Pseudonym) This study focuses on a market town because it is a node where the socialist government interacts with sub-county society through local state agents. Like that of market towns in the historically commercialized river deltas, Nanxi zhen’s encapsulation within the contemporary state has had exhilarating and fitful moments. It was drastically transformed in the 1950s when the government severed most of the existing linkages between the rural and urban economies. Livelihoods in the town were divorced from agriculture and tied to industries in the higher-level urban centers.13 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Today reintegration with agriculture through market competition and entrepreneurial energies is an obvious feature in the town’s proposed revival.14 Its predicament highlights the tension between central control and local initiative, and sheds light on the theoretical discussions concerning the reach of the state. In the early 20th century, Nanxi zhen was the largest market town and the administrative headquarters of the third district in Dagang county (a pseudonym).15 Its 20,000 or so residents were made up of small traders, handicraft workers, landlords and merchants who managed vast corporate estates in the delta and who controlled a prosperous trade in grain and mulberry leaves. The historical concentration of wealth in the town was revealed by the presence of rows of grey-brick mansions, of lineage genealogies that displayed a dazzling array of imperial degree holders, of the 393 ancestral halls and 139 temples the residents had built. Its prosperity contrasted sharply with the dispersed village settlements in the surrounding river marshes known as the sands. The term refers to the sandbanks in the Pearl River Delta that have been reclaimed for cultivation through the Ming and Qing. They were settled by migrant tenants labeled as Dan, the coastal boat people whose ecological niches were shrunk by the expansion of the delta, and who were looked down upon by town residents as poor and uncultured. Social interaction between the town residents and the tenant farmers in the sands was minimal. Population movements were confined to the out-migration of poor males who joined tenants and bandits in the sands, and the migration of women into the town as second wives, concubines and maids. The revolution and land reform of 1951 signaled the end of the traditional elites, whose wealth was channeled to an urban collective economy. A town government was established in 1952 to administer residents who had no claims to agricultural land. They were employed in collectivized commercial and industrial enterprises. No one wished to join villagers, who became increasingly immobile in the sands due to policies stipulating household registration and grain procurement, and restricting rural marketing and migration. Disparities between the town and the villages were not limited to the provision of schools, medical care and other amenities, but more fundamentally in income and life chances.16 Such inequalities were piled on top of traditional cultural exclusions to the point that town residents today continue to dissociate themselves from “those out there in the sands.” Despite the town’s administrative separation from its rural hinterland, the two were entangled in multiple ways. The presence of a few thousand nonagricultural residents in the peri-urban neighborhoods created constant conflicts over territorial rights and responsibilities. During the height of the political mobilization in 1958, Nanxi zhen was merged with twenty-four villages to form a large commune but was once again made into a separate urban collective in 1962. The administrative merging and splitting were disorienting for many who remembered how trees were cut and large houses were taken apart and transported to the rural area, all directed This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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by ideologically motivated cadres. To the residents, the split-up in 1962 was a relief though it created personal problems for some leading cadres, in particular, for the husband and wife team in the Party Committee of Nanxi commune. The husband was assigned the post of principal party secretary for the rural commune and his wife became head of the town. According to their former colleagues, the household never had a peaceful dinner thereafter. From 1963 to 1978, the town’s population grew from 24,138 to 27,415, an average of 0.9 percent a year. Moreover, there was little in-migration. On the contrary, since the late 1960s every household had fearfully anticipated the footsteps of their neighborhood committee directors who sought out educated youths to be sent to the surrounding sands.17 From 1968 to 1972, a total of 1,234 were dispatched. Some enthusiastic young students volunteered when the program started. But over the years, their enthusiasm was reduced to a lingering cynicism. A significant increase in the town’s population since 1978 was partly due to the return of these young people who took advantage of the more relaxed political atmosphere after the death of Mao. In accordance with the programs of de-collectivization laid out in a series of party documents in 1984–86, the government allowed an influx of 394 migrant households who had immediate family members in town, who did not depend on state grain rations, and who had secured employment.18 There were times when the town residents wished they had a rural status. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, when urban educated youths were sent to settle in the sands, they envied their rural counterparts on the other side of the narrow waterway that separated the town from the rural commune. Ironically, some households in recent years have tried to acquire a rural status because birth control quotas have been more relaxed for villagers.19 Personal maneuvering aside, the presence of the Nanxi rural commune encircling the town locked the leaders of the two in fierce competition. For decades past, the enterprises in the rural commune could not compete with those of the town because they were constantly under political pressure to aid agriculture. However, during the post-Mao reforms, rural enterprises were promoted. The resulting surge of entrepreneurial energies threatened the town enterprises, which had been limping along complacently. The fact that the headquarters of the rural commune stood right by the side of the office of the town government aggravated the animosity between them. The fleet of silver Toyota sedan “taxis” on display in the rural commune headquarters20 was a cause of envy among the town cadres, who only had two 14-seater vans and a 1970 Mercedes-Benz that they had bought secondhand from the office of an army general.21 In sum, there was intense competition among the cadres over what resources they controlled and were held responsible for. As for ordinary residents, their life chances shifted with changes in the administrative divisions defined by a political power beyond their reach. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The irony is that, in the 1980s, when the state was consciously trying to revive market towns, residents and cadres found themselves stuck in uncomfortable positions.22 As an urban commune where economic functions were not differentiated from political and social ones, the leverage wielded by the political leaders and the privileges they monopolize were remarkable. Even if political agents could be replaced, was it possible that this structure of state power, built on and benefiting from the very collective economy of the town, could be relied upon to “liberalize” and thus to undermine its very political capital? More important, was it realistic to expect initiative and challenge from a populace that had participated in the same process of socialist transformation and, for the past three decades, had given its compliance and complicity? Structural relationships are constructed and changed by complementary and conflicting actions of human agents who are faced with choices and dilemmas. A micro study helps to illuminate how state power in the 1980s was perceived, felt, manipulated and reproduced by its agents and victims. If the regime had significantly diminished its influence in local society, how had the process redefined economic choices and social hierarchies? If its priorities continued to dictate development strategies, how was its presence understood in the midst of entrepreneurial vigor?

The Plight of Nanxi Zhen in the Age of Reform Before the reforms, the market town economy was made up of enterprises administered by three major modes of ownership. The town’s department stores, tea houses and wholesale supply and marketing of commodities (from fuel to industrial materials and daily necessities) were managed by the State Commercial Station. Though it pays lip service to the political leadership of the town, it reported to the Commercial Bureau in the county capital some thirty kilometers away. Its five hundred employees were targets of envy for their job security, higher wages and other benefits associated with state-sector jobs. A second component of commerce consisted of private enterprises and service trades that were collectivized in the 1950s. Its three hundred members were administered by the Cooperative Commerce Station, which reported directly to the Number Two Commercial Bureau (cooperative commerce) in the county capital. A handful of street peddlers who were not assigned a unit of employment were organized under the Small Peddlers Association (in the early 1980s renamed Office for Administering Industry and Commerce). Their number was small and the scale of their operations was considered marginal. The town’s fifty-odd factories employed 8,430 workers, the bulk of Nanxi’s working population in 1978. Decollectivization in the agricultural sector and the proposed revival of entrepreneurial competition triggered energies that took town residents by surprise. Taking advantage of the liberalizing atmosphere in the early 1980s, the town government This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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entered the commercial sphere. It established two restaurants jointly financed with businessmen from Hong Kong, three guest houses, and a few trading enterprises employing a total of 872 workers. The town continued to rely heavily on its industrial strength. Some of its factories have grown to a considerable size since the reforms. The major ones include an electronic factory employing 550 workers in 1985, a metal lock factory with 415 workers, and a factory making hinges and chains, with 400 workers. Figure 1 presents a simplified structure of the various administrative systems associated with Nanxi zhen and the place of the collective economy in it.23 From 1978 to 1985, Nanxi zhen’s industrial production presented a mixed picture (see Table 1). In its output and net income as shown in the accounts, the percentage rise was impressive, especially from 1982 to 1985. However, much of it was due to “padding” in the accounts. For example, the jump from 1984 to 1985 resulted from including the full value of the products given to the electronic factory for additional processing. This increase meant that the town had to pay more taxes, but a good performance record, including tax contributions, was seen by the new leadership in 1984 as the necessary basis for claiming political credit. Moreover, although the number of workers in the previous eight years remained between eight and nine thousand and showed little overall expansion, compared with a 20 percent increase in population, one must take into account that the factories were hiring more contract workers, whose numbers have not been included in the books.24 Table 5.1 Performance of Nanxi zhen’s industrial enterprises Year 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

Total Population 26,950 26,874 27,415 28,448 28,899 29,450 29,896 30,194 30,641 32,278

Number of Workers 8,301 8,384 8,430 8,257 9,420 8,127 8,767 9,045 9,117 8,946

Output (Yuan) 33,261,000 38,646,000 41,580,000 39,137,000 37,711,000 49,215,000 58,557,600 61,780,400 83,531,400 138,249,000

Profits (Yuan) 2,417,000 2,934,000 2,752,000 2,085,100 3,478,800 3,989,800 4,404,800 3,562,600 5,372,000 2,638,000

Average Monthly Wage (Yuan) 41.49 42.24 NA 82 100 145

Source: statistical records from the town government 1 US dollar = 3.6 yuan approximately

The apparent success shown in the economic statistics contrasted sharply with the evaluations the cadres and residents made of their own prospects. Interviews with factory managers showed that some major enterprises faced considerable problems. The biggest loser was the electronic factory, which imported parts from Macau to This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Amalgamated Corporations

Industrial Enterprises (plus a few commercial enterprises)

Figure 5.1 Administrative structure 1985

Private Entrepreneurs (under the Office for Administering Industry and Commerce)

Cooperative Commerce

State Commerce

Party Committee

Nanxi Zhen (market town)

District and Neighborhood Committees (residential, with a few street industries)

Town Government

Dagang Municipality (equivalent to a county)

cun (former teams, or villages)

xiang (former brigades, or townships)

Nanxi Qu (former rural commune, renamed rural district in 1983)

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assemble cassette recorders and calculators for a medium-range domestic market. The calculators had a bad name due to their poor quality. The managers had also miscalculated the affluence and sophistication of consumers in the Pearl River Delta, who wanted prestigious brands such as Sony. Buyers from less affluent provinces would have been satisfied with these products, but they have dwindled in number when banks were ordered to limit consumer credit in 1985. Production at the electric fan factory stalled due to a saturated domestic market. It was acknowledged that if the nationally famous electric fans produced in Shunde had done badly, Nanxi zhen’s imitations could not possibly do better. The factory making hinges and chains had a few good years up to 1982, but in 1983 and 1984 it incurred a loss totaling 300,000 yuan.25 In 1985 it barely broke even. Some other factories operated at only partial capacity, and workers who were on piece rates complained that they were not making enough to cope with the high cost of living equal to that of the provincial capital, Guangzhou. It could even be higher: the price of an egg in Nanxi zhen was 20 fen, a catty of pears 1.20 yuan, and a catty of chicken 2.30 yuan. The average daily wage was 5 to 6 yuan including bonus.26 The town enterprises also faced an increasingly aggressive state commercial sector. With secure channels of supplies, the state commercial enterprises held onto their monopoly in the wholesale and retail trades by adjusting to market prices and improving services. The state-run tea houses and department stores were centrally located with a secure clientele. The manager of the state commercial sector assessed its situation hopefully: We only lose the young workers and the nouveaux riches who want fancy Hong Kong–style services. The other customers stay with us. Not many people can afford a banquet of thirty tables costing 150 yuan each, which is a standard price at the restaurant in the joint-venture hotel complex. Moreover, ordinary customers are not sure of the privately owned shops. Their prices may be lower, but customers feel that they may cheat on quality. Also, to make our shops acquire the attractive Hong Kong look, we have asked for a loan of a million yuan from the state bank to do renovations. How can others compete with us? Our “old man” is bigger than theirs.

Despite the skepticism of this manager, there were success stories among the private entrepreneurs. From 1979 to 1985, 821 licenses were issued for private enterprises, reflecting the tremendous energies triggered by the reforms. The proprietor of a private construction firm earned 30,000 yuan a month after taxes. The owner of a shoe factory, whose brother had a shop in Hong Kong, expanded his workshop to accommodate eighty-five workers. The year before, he paid 70,000 yuan in taxes to the government. The family who started a factory for small metal parts had built their third house, this time for their son who, at the young age of twenty-one, had recently taken a wife. The marriage involved 15,000 yuan spent by the groom’s family This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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on brideprice and on sixty banquet tables. Such conspicuous consumption was also reflected in other rituals. A young entrepreneur single-handedly financed the funeral of his grandfather, providing forty banquet tables for the mourners. According to friends, this generation-skipping in funeral finance was a brash and unconventional act, but good for business. In the eyes of the average town resident, these entrepreneurs had “guts” (danse) as well as the “connections” (guanxi) with political leaders. Sadly, they did not have either. Their interests had been tied to the town collective economy based on the pursuit of party policies in the past. Today their livelihoods were threatened by competition and their future uncertain because the political benefactor had changed priorities. The responses of a random sample of three hundred interviews I conducted in Nanxi zhen in 1986 showed an overwhelming preference for jobs in the state sector because of the security respondents believed these jobs offered. The privileges of an individual entrepreneur were reserved for those who had the connections to venture out as well as the ability to protect themselves from the arbitrary decisions of political cadres. Employment in the town enterprises was ranked as the lowest choice. Older workers who had lost the prospect of retirement benefits because the town government decided to close down unprofitable businesses were just as disgruntled as young ones who felt they had few prospects to start with. Toward the end of 1986, the collective town enterprises sank further down the pecking order. A few technicians were lured away by high wages offered by the rural enterprises that had proliferated in neighboring communes. Young workers who had little job seniority began to join them. Mostly filled by migrant laborers from the neighboring provinces of Guangxi and Hunan, these jobs had been looked upon as seasonal and low status. When asked why they did not stay with the town enterprises, young workers generally felt that the town cadres and the managers were only looking out for themselves. They had also heard about the impending administrative merger between the town and the rural commune (renamed rural district (qu) in 1983). It was a policy promoted nationwide to recreate productive rural-urban linkages in the past. Many felt that they should try their luck in the less monitored village enterprises before the administrative net reached them.27 If there were sentiments left for the ideologically driven practice of the Maoist era, it was more skepticism towards them than confidence or respect.

Unequal Competition The cadres in the town government insisted on an administrative explanation for their unattractive prospects. The reforms had put Nanxi zhen in an impossible position, they claimed. Their enterprises were losing out to the village competitors because the higher authorities had given preferential subsidies and tax exemptions This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to the latter. Administrative encouragement had led to a burgeoning of small-scale enterprises. The forty-seven operated by the rural district and the 275 run by its peri-urban neighborhoods and villages achieved a total output of 142,507,000 yuan in 1985, compared to an output of 138,240,000 yuan from Nanxi’s fifty-two enterprises.28 The rural enterprises duplicated those in the town—small metal parts, printing, molded products, clothes, food processing. They took away the town’s market share and lured away technicians by offering wages several times what the town enterprises could offer. In February 1986, eight technicians left the town’s printing shop to start individual contract work in the nearby villages. They took with them contracts worth several hundred thousand yuan. The exodus of the technicians hurt the town factory at the time when the management had imported high-quality color printing equipment to start a new line of production. Town cadres complained to their patrons in the municipal government that competition had been unfair. They reckoned the rural district enjoyed more room for maneuver in finance and management. Moreover, most of the enterprises were new and were therefore entitled to tax exemptions for up to three years. Joint ventures with village collectives were also given special considerations. These small-scale enterprises seldom had established accounts and were difficult to audit for tax purposes. Furthermore, it was said that rural cadres obtained shares in the ventures and used their power to obtain cheap sites, supplies, low-interest credits and tax shelters. It was difficult to substantiate such accusations. However, nearly every village cadre whom I came across in the area had a mansion built within the last three years, a fact that speaks for itself.29 Tax responsibilities for the rural enterprises were set very indirectly. Based on an estimate of performances in the previous three years, the branch of the tax bureau at the municipal government worked out a quota for the rural district. The taxes were then disaggregated to the enterprises. Since the tax base was low in the past, while the output of the enterprises increased at a tremendous rate during the last three years, the rural district had a rather light tax quota for its subordinate units. The cadres estimated that the taxes levied on the enterprises in the rural district averaged 20 percent of net income. The town enterprises were locked into a different tax schedule. The cadres skeptically termed the strategy one of “whipping the faster ox.” Until 1985, its enterprises were taxed strictly according to the schedule for state enterprises. Sales tax (a flat rate of 3 percent included as costs) and income tax amounted to around 40 to 50 percent of net income taken together. Since 1985, the Dagang Municipal Tax Bureau set the responsibilities for the town as a whole, similar to what it had done for the rural district. However, town cadres complained that the estimates based on the performance of the past three years were high because their enterprises were well established. What room they had above and beyond the levies to maneuver was not as significant as what cadres in the rural district could command. Moreover, the production facilities This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the older town enterprises were in need of upgrading and simultaneously burdened with a retiring workforce. Being in the collective sector, the town was never entitled to a state budget. Operating with an annual state subsidy of 70,000 yuan for town improvement, a sum that had not increased for ten years, Nanxi had the choice of taxing its enterprises heavily or not improving its infrastructure at all. Cadres recognized that the lack of funds was serious because their enterprises needed to overhaul themselves now to meet new competition from all sides. In 1985, Nanxi zhen had a net income before taxes of about 11,000,000 yuan. After paying taxes to the municipal government and bonuses to the workers, it was left with a net income of 2,638,000 yuan. The town government took less than a million yuan for the administrative budget; the rest had to support the investment needs of over fifty enterprises. The dilemma of the town’s pride—the Number Two Lock Factory—was illustrative of the structural problem. It had a steady contract with the Guangdong Export Corporation. The factory often had more orders than it could handle, and that turned the party secretary complacent. Younger technicians had urged the management to conduct an overhaul. In 1985, the head technician left with a few co-workers to start a new factory in a nearby village. These young entrepreneurs sought technical advice from Guangzhou. The nervous town cadres were deadlocked over the future of the factory. The innovating faction wanted to invest heavily to overhaul production capacity to beat potential competitors. They recognized that state agencies in the reform era relied less on personal connections and calculated harder on profits and losses. The political goodwill that the managers of the lock factory had enjoyed might be lost to factories with better designs and greater production efficiency. The conservative faction, on the other hand, was worried that the factory might be risking their already meager resources. They anxiously held onto the belief that the connections they had cultivated with political patrons would mean most when problems arose. Both sides felt caught in a dilemma caused by administrative decisions beyond their reach. Nanxi zhen was awkwardly placed, they claimed, being neither rural nor urban, neither a collective nor a state sector unit. The way out was either for the municipal government to raise the town to a higher administrative status or to provide tax benefits similar to those of the rural district. It was obvious that the cadres blamed their economic difficulties on the lack of judgment of their political superiors and suggested administrative maneuvers to resolve problems arising from competition.

The Problem of the Cadres Alarmed at Nanxi zhen’s troubles, municipal officials accused the town leadership of not having the ability “to come to terms with modernization.” Political expediency This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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was obvious to all in this statement, but there were grounds for such a judgment. Since a town party committee was established in 1957, nine party secretaries had gone through the musical chairs as the result of major political campaigns.30 Natives of the county who had joined the party in the 1950s continued to dominate town leadership with the help of veteran army cadres. The break came at the end of 1983. Reluctantly responding to the call to reduce the presence of the party in government administration and to liberalize the economy, the town leadership was restructured. Municipal government directives insisted that leading cadres should be age forty-five or younger. Subsequently, the old party committee was relocated to a new unit named the Amalgamated Corporation for Agriculture, Industry and Commerce. The move meant that they now managed all the town’s enterprises and enjoyed the reputation of being the town’s god of fortune (caishen). They nonetheless resented the young cadres who took their place in the party committee. The latter, however, felt that their political power was eclipsed by the old cadres in the corporation and by the town government. The town government office in turn was most vulnerable because it was politically overshadowed by the town party committee and was dependent on the corporation for an annual “donation” to work out a government budget. Political legacy continued to give the party committee most authority. However, the composition of its members did not inspire confidence. The party secretary, a former head of the town’s river patrol, had only a primary school education, but he was a hero in the 1979 war with Vietnam. The deputy party secretary and head of the town government was in his mid-thirties. He had joined the army after spending several years in the countryside as an educated youth, and had since returned to the town as a military cadre. He earned a senior high school certificate and had joined an external degree program offered by a college in Guangzhou. As he had never been a professional soldier, he was looked down upon by his older colleagues. The deputy head for finance and trade in the government was a woman in her early thirties who, as a member of a martyr’s family, was working as a cadre in the Office for Birth Control. The deputy head for political work was a young man who had refused to be sent away to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution but then made a name for himself in various political study groups in the Mao era. He became secretary of the Party Youth League in the Office for Environmental Services (that is, garbage collection) and was a member of the town’s party committee in the mid-1970s. Some even alleged that he was elected to his present post through personal relationships with the new party secretary. The cadre for propaganda was a primary school teacher who had also been active in the party youth league since the 1970s. The sevenmember party committee included the head of the town’s enterprises and a cadre representing the armed forces. The latter was a former comrade-in-arms of the new party secretary. In the eyes of the public, the new leadership consisted of a mixture of uneducated military men and inexperienced cadres of the Mao generation, who came This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of age during the Cultural Revolution, who hardly qualified to act as a modernized leadership. Older cadres resented the age rule, claiming that it was unrealistic to “pull young shoots up to help them grow.” The political shadow of the old guard was not easy to shake off. The young cadres were patronized by the retiring cadres, who, as commonly found at all levels of the Chinese bureaucracy, maintained their influence as “advisors” long after their retirement. In the following three years, the burden was on the new leadership to prove itself. Personal intrigues aside, the new leadership was doomed from the start in the face of the built-in conflict among the town enterprises, the party committee and the government office. In 1986, the committee faced another dilemma. Municipal officials had been instructed by the provincial government to consolidate the economies of the market town with their rural hinterland. When the proposal was made, both the cadres in the town and the rural district were apprehensive, not only because of the long history of merging and splitting that had infringed on notions of territory but also because of the vicious competition that had marked the fluid situation of the past few years. The two sets of cadres were hardly on speaking terms even though their offices were within a stone’s throw of each other. The rural cadres did not hide their fear that the town would “drag them down.” The most objectionable suggestion was that a chunk of the merged unit would be made into a new town. The new unit was to be centered at Xialong (a pseudonym), a market at the southeastern tip of the rural district, and would include the surrounding villages. It was a rice-growing area that was considered poor and “very rural.” Nicknamed “chicken coop,” the proposed new town was situated in the middle of nowhere between Nanxi zhen and the municipal capital. The question remained as to who would staff the new town’s administration. As state cadres, both groups of leaders were subject to assignment by their party superiors. But to be assigned there would mean exile, because one had to literally start from scratch. Fear of such an impending transfer generated very conservative strategies among the town leaders because the smallest failure in a venture could determine their future. The elaborate plans for improving the road and river ways and for creating a centralized industrial area to minimize pollution remained at the stage of planning committees and investigative trips. Meanwhile, traffic continued to be chaotic. Unregulated factories turned the waterways into serious health hazards. The town haphazardly widened the embankment for through-town traffic and patched up some sewage canals. However, after the new administrative postings were announced by the municipal officials in December 1986, the town cadres hurriedly embarked on building a new aqueduct and a swimming pool complex. It spent 300,000 yuan on widening the embankment, 600,000 yuan on the swimming pool complex, and 400,000 yuan on improving the water works. It seemed to have been a desperate move to spend the funds before others could get their hands on them. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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What the municipal officials saw as problematic leadership stemmed from a weighty and non-competitive political system that had produced the cadres in the first place, and that largely shaped their strategies. The town cadres were placed in an untenable position. If they had shown a lack of enthusiasm toward the reforms, they would become political scapegoats for their political higher-ups; if they had followed through with the policies, the collective economy for which they were held responsible would be undermined. They would lose out either way. Not without ingenuity, some used their positions of power to pursue private gains and to prepare for their inevitable “exit” from power. Some made use of the lingering “awe” of town residents to obtain shares in private enterprises. They rapidly “sold” government property and distributed the profits among themselves as yearend bonuses. They also helped relatives and friends to obtain licenses and supplies, which normally involved bureaucratic delays. In doing so, they imposed market distortions. The fact that they were able to squander the collective resources as a result of self-interested political moves made the town economy all the more unattractive to those who wanted to explore entrepreneurial opportunities. The mutual accusations presented a text of divergent but entangled political agendas. The interesting point is that while market reforms were ideologically acknowledged and promoted, economic problems were seen as caused by administrative errors and their solution sought through administrative means.

The Ambivalence of the Average Workers One might have expected the party cadres to seek administrative answers to economic problems in the reform period, but alternative modes of thinking among the populace were lacking. When the question of how to get Nanxi zhen out of its present impasse was broached, the average resident generally asserted that the answer was part of the bureaucrats’ job, not his. Dependence on state directives had so thoroughly permeated social life that it was perfectly normal to read a public notice at the town’s post office which began, “In accordance with directives from the higher authorities, melon seeds can now be mail-ordered for new year festivities.” At times, it was more than a matter of melon seeds. In the mid-1980s, town residents continued to be caught in the web of political maneuvers associated with economic reform. The situation could be triggered by the most personal issues. Some workers were faced with a dilemma when they had a second child. The Office of Birth Control stipulated that violators were subject to punishment spread over ten years: an initial payment, a cut in salary, a freeze in promotion, and no bonuses. These workers had little choice but to leave their units. Factory managers who needed the service of these workers protested against such inflexibility because these workers would be driven to competitors. On the other hand, cadres in the Office of Birth This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Control claimed that they had to be firm to keep their own jobs during ideologically uncertain times. More frequently, workers in the state or collective enterprises were prevented from leaving their units. If they were to insist, they would be barred from starting their own private businesses. A licensed baker in a state-owned restaurant, for example, decided to open his own bakery in 1986. The restaurant management insisted that he pay back 2,400 yuan for the years he had spent training on the job. Despite this threat, he left, but the restaurant put pressure on the Office of Administering Industry and Commerce not to issue him a license. So he entered into a partnership with a friend who lived in the rural district and who applied for a license. The office delayed the process on the grounds that health requirements had not been met. The dispute dragged on while the man remained unemployed. To be able to work within the structure of bureaucratic power, most workers chose to place themselves between the collective and the private sectors. They were too uncertain about the political environment to make a firm commitment to private enterprises. It was true that workers at both ends of the economic hierarchy in town left for the rural enterprises or started on their own. But the silent majority had neither the intention nor the means. Among the thousands of migrant workers who have been employed by the enterprises in the peri-urban neighborhoods in 1986, only 400 came from the town. The reason was that those who had joined the town’s workforce before the 1980s were assured job security and a steady income, which had a special meaning since most had lived through the fear of being sent down to the sands. Those who had accumulated years of seniority counted on obtaining retirement benefits.31 Though they harbored numerous complaints about how poorly the economy was run, and though many admitted that they envied the high wages of factories across the narrow waterway, the gulf was too wide for them to cross. Immobility seemed to have been partly self-imposed. Nevertheless, they took on individual assignments on an ad hoc basis, hoping to make some extra cash on the side without taking on full entrepreneurial risks, a style of moonlighting that was known locally as chaogeng. Those who became private entrepreneurs concentrated in several lines of business: setting up a food stand, selling fashion clothes imported from Hong Kong and Macau in the free market, subcontracting additional processing work at home, repairing bicycles and radios, and, if one had a little more capital, opening small beauty salons.32 These enterprises were seldom in conflict with state or collective sectors because the volume of trade was small. They also required little technical skill or capital. Returns were quick and often substantial. Tax evasion was easy. They were the most adaptable to changes in the political winds. Many of these strategies are no doubt common among small-scale entrepreneurs in all developing societies. But in Nanxi zhen they were also ways of coming to terms with what was perceived as arbitrary bureaucratic power.33 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Socialist Peddlers and Princes At this low level of the urban hierarchy, the reforms in the 1980s have released tremendous energies and fluidity. Nanxi zhen’s difficulties might very well be a transitory phenomenon rather than an indication of a longer-term trend. Those who doubt whether the market town economy will ever have a chance within a socialist political structure may have been surprised by the apparent market competition and entrepreneurship even if these energies require administrative redefinition. The problems of Nanxi zhen stem precisely from its inability to face up to entrepreneurial competition from surrounding villages that are eroding its complacent monopoly. Moreover, the political factors behind Nanxi zhen’s predicament deserve closer attention. The dynamics of change are not solely the result of market forces but are mediated through the perceptions and maneuvers of the town residents and cadres who have long taken for granted the power of the party-state and its privileges. Nanxi zhen has been caught in the worst of both worlds. A political leadership drags its feet to come to terms with unequal market competition imposed upon it but still musters enough power to defend itself. The average town residents find themselves caught in policies initiated by an unaccountable state system. They have learned to find an uneasy niche within it though the strategy may not always work to their long-term interest. Together, their ambivalent actions have created the fitful complexities of economic liberalization in Nanxi zhen, where the dominance of the state apparatus continues to be reproduced. How to evaluate the success and failure of economic liberalization in Nanxi zhen hinges on how one conceptualizes the ways in which politics interacts with economy and society at this juncture of change. The authors in Perry and Wong (1985) are correct in pointing out how haphazard reform efforts have led to negative consequences which ripple down the administrative hierarchy.34 However, it would be naïve to expect local wisdom and entrepreneurship to flourish if and when contradictory policies are removed. Such expectation would deny Nanxi zhen’s own history of socialist transformation and political legacy. The structure of bureaucratic power has become a central component in people’s lives despite ambivalence toward it, and the associated privileges and securities are still sought after and effectively defended. In a way, the average town residents are just as implicated as the cadres in continuing the legacy. Contemporary China presents us with a phenomenon of “state involution.” Its recent decade of economic reforms is based on improvisations within administrative definitions that remain weighty due to the maneuvers of numerous strategists who are “socialist peddlers and princes.” The images come from the two patterns of economic behavior vividly portrayed by Clifford Geertz. There has been a “provisional, in-between, ‘no man’s land’ quality” in the economic and social life of two Indonesian towns, stranded between past loyalties and future possibilities (Geertz This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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1963b, pp.  16–17). The peddlers in the bazaars of Modjukuto remind me of the emerging small-scale private entrepreneurs in Nanxi zhen. In Tabanan, a Balinese court town with its firm economy built upon traditional aristocratic authority, the motive force behind princely organizations parallels that of Nanxi zhen’s collective enterprises. Holding onto the operations of the party-state, the town cadres maneuver to defend the inevitable diminution of their status and authority. Although the peddlers and princes as described by Geertz represent two separate patterns of behavior in Indonesia, the fate of their socialist counterparts in China are interlocked, creating the ineluctable dilemmas in the 1980s. I see market reforms and state institutions interpenetrating each other through individual perceptions and strategic agency, and I hope to correct the unintentional distortions of analysts who see China as a test case for a stark capitalism-socialism dichotomy. At this point in the “revival” of the Chinese market town, it may be too early to hail the retreat of the state and the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit. *This chapter is reprinted with slight revisions from American Ethnologist 16, 2 (May 1989), pp. 195–212. Field research was conducted in south China from January to December 1986. Subsequent trips were made in 1987 and 1988. The project was supported by a grant from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, National Academy of Sciences. The author wishes to thank Jack Goody, Nicholas Lardy, William Kelly, William Parish, and Mark Selden for their comments. China’s reforms have moved forward in remarkable ways since this essay was published in 1989. Nonetheless, the main conceptual argument I raised remain quite relevant. Today, “state involution” seems ever more pronounced in many aspects of Chinese society, culture, and economy.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

See the works of Balandier (1970), Leach (1954), Mair (1962), Maquet (1971), and a useful collection of articles edited by Middleton and Cohen (1967). See also the works of French Marxists such as Claude Meillassoux, Pierre-Philippe Rey, and Georges Dupré on the lineage mode of production (Seddon 1978). See Asad (1973), Bailey (1969), Abner Cohen (1974), Swartz (1969), Terray (1972), Eric Wolf (1982), and Worsley (1984) among numerous others. See Ortner (1984) for a summary of anthropological theory since the 1960s. See Vincent (1978) on a summary of actor-oriented theories in political anthropology. The state I understand as a system of power and authority and its associated interests, as a bureaucratic elite, and as an arena of political conflict. For definitions of power and authority, see Lukes’s “Power and Authority” in Bottomore and Nisbet (1978), pp. 633–76. See James Watson’s “Standardizing the Gods” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski (1985), pp. 292–324, and Watson and Rawski (1988). A similar conceptual theme is expressed in a work on the historical evolution of lineage organizations in South China by David Faure This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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(subsequently published as Emperor and Ancestor, 2007). See a parallel study subsequently published (see chapter 8 of this volume) on the evolution of social identity and historical consciousness in which notions of state, community and lineage were expressed in a series of popular festivals in south China. See the classic studies of compliance cycles proposed by Skinner and Winckler in “Compliance Succession in Rural Communist China” (Etzioni 1969, pp. 410–38), and Schurmann (1968) on the ideological and organizational means of the Chinese Communist Party. The death of Mao Zedong and the fall of his radical followers in 1976 set in motion a series of decisive changes in party policies. The third plenum of the Party Central Committee in December 1978 marked the official beginning of “economic liberalization.” Step by step, rural communes were decollectivized, markets were revived, market towns promoted and labor mobility allowed. This was followed by reforms in the state industrial sector and the party organization. See Peck’s “Revolution versus Modernization and Revisionism” in Nee and Peck (1973), pp. 57–217 for a critique of neoclassical economic assumptions that pose politics against economics. See Nee and Mozingo (1983) on studies that treat state and society as opposing analytical categories. See Christine Wong (1988) for a general evaluation of the reforms on rural industries, their departures from and continuities with the Maoist past. Studies in the 1980s have debated the issue of the impact of traditional culture and society on contemporary politics. Shue (1988) argues that local society has been able to maneuver within the dominant state structures; Walder (1986) maintains that the authority structure in China is a product of post-1949 socialist politics rather than traditional culture. Whereas Shue emphasizes how traditional society shapes socialist politics, my own concern is on how Maoist politics has left a heavy imprint on local society. I continued to visit the town in the 1990s after the publication of this essay. On the question of whether there was any Maoist ideology left in the 1980s, I argued that a younger generation who received the strongest dose of Maoist ideology had turned cynical (Siu and Stern 1983). In a subsequently published monograph titled Agents and Victims in South China (1989a), I analyze how the power of the socialist state touched peasant lives through the maneuvers of rural cadres, which turned their complicity into nothing more than grudging compliance. Geertz (1963a), pp. 80–82. See a reevaluation of the article on involution by Geertz himself twenty years after (1984). The anonymous reviewers of this paper have helped me pose the questions in the introduction much more sharply. I am most grateful for their thoughtful comments, which I have paraphrased in a few places. See Whyte and Parish (1984) on the conscious efforts of the socialist government to develop the national urban sector. See also the observations of the cellularization of rural society after 1949 by Parish and Whyte (1978), Shue (1988), and Siu (1989a). See Siu (1988b) on the administrative history of the village-town divide in Nanxi zhen. In 1958, the population control act combined with household registration and strict grain rationing increasingly kept the peasants in the rural areas. See the introduction in Whyte and Parish (1984) on the consequent rural-urban dichotomy. For documentary source, see Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) (1986, 1987). The nonagricultural population in Nanxi zhen is employed by urban collective enterprises. The Yangzi and Pearl River deltas of southeastern China where, before the revolution, numerous towns This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

Tracing China had been centers for ties based on trade, lineage, community and religious organizations, are now quoted in the official press as among contemporary success stories, See Document Number 1, 1984 of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On the history of state policies on commerce in general, see Solinger’s “Marxism and Market in Socialist China” in Nee and Mozingo (1983), pp. 194–219, and Shangyebu shangye jingji yanjiusuo (1984). Some studies in the 1980s on the revival of rural markets, on rural cadres and the reforms include Skinner (1985b), Zweig (1986), Oi (1986), Perry and Wong (1985), Christine Wong (1988) and Du (1985). For official and scholarly accounts of the successes and problems, see Zhujiang sanjiaozhou jingjikaifangqu touzi zhinan bianji weiyuanhui (1986) and Xu Xueqiang (1987) for the Pearl River Delta; Fei (1985), Jiangsusheng xiaochengzhen yanjiu ketizu (1986), Zweig (1988) and Shen (1987) for the Yangzi River Delta. The third district was a subcounty administrative division in the Republican era. It included the town proper, the peri-urban neighborhoods and village clusters known as xiang (township). The area covered about seventy-two square kilometers. By 1978, the average annual income per worker in Nanxi zhen was 518 yuan, whereas that of a peasant in the rural commune was 171 yuan. This was part of a Maoist program to narrow rural-urban disparities. Between 1968 and 1976, urban youths who were neither in school nor employed were sent away, presumably to settle in villages for life. Families I interviewed in 1986 described in agonizing detail the unfair treatment of those with bad class labels and the ways cadre families used their power to get around the rules. Earlier, the restrictions against private trade in grain and the strict grain rationing in town meant that illegal migrants found it difficult to sustain themselves for extended periods. In 1984, special migrant households were allowed to buy from the grain stations at a negotiated price ( yijia), about 85 percent higher than the amount ordinary town residents paid for their grain. It was still 56 percent cheaper than the small amount of grain then available in rural markets. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese government stepped up its birth control program. The one-child campaign created turmoil in families as well as between them. Cadres were assigned to impose the quota. Since 1976, both the town and the rural commune had made use of the relaxed political atmosphere to appeal to their overseas compatriots. These cars were obtained from rich businessmen in Hong Kong and Macau. The vans were nicknamed daban che (big-boss car) by the rural cadres. The term was also a pun for “cheaply share-a-ride.” Its experiences were not unique because many large market towns in the river deltas that were not county capitals found themselves in such an administrative category. They were jianzhi zhen (incorporated market towns). Because they were included in the subcounty level of administration and not in the state sector, they were often considered “rural.” Confusion arose when they were analytically treated in the same category as the nonagricultural settlements that were the headquarters of rural communes and brigades. The latter were part of rural communes that were greatly affected by agricultural policies, whereas these towns were oriented more to the urban state sector. In the decade of reforms the two had very different prospects. For general administrative reorganization in the decade of reforms, see Crook (1986). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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24. Before the reforms, factory jobs were very secure. Once workers were recruited, they were in the system for life. Their positions could even be inherited by their children, a system known as dingti (substitution). Since 1984, Nanxi zhen followed the national industrial reforms by only hiring young workers on a contract basis. In the factories that did additional processing work for overseas clients (for example, the factories for clothes and plastic goods), over 20 percent of their workforce consisted of temporary workers from the rural district as well as from the neighboring provinces of Hunan and Guangxi. 25. Considering that the entire operating budget for the town was about one million yuan, such a loss in one of its factories was serious. 26. One yuan (Chinese dollar) has 100 fen (cents). It was difficult to obtain information about bonuses. They varied among enterprises and among types of work, but on the average added 50 to 75 percent to basic wages. For piece rate, bonuses were sometimes added after a certain amount of work had been completed. However, for factories operating at partial capacity, workers complained that there was not enough work to go around. 27. Enterprises in the peri-urban neighborhoods of the rural district had experienced a boom in the past few years. They were mainly ancillary industries under contract to overseas merchants to produce small metal parts, plastic products, clothes and shoes. Work was seasonal, based on piece rate and required little skill. A migrant worker received an average monthly wage of 90 to 150 yuan but was given no fringe benefits or job security. In the more established enterprises, such as the electric switch factory run by the rural district, the average monthly wage of its 1,200 workers was 300 yuan. A technician could easily earn over 800 yuan. Its deputy manager for the overseas section was receiving 60,000 yuan a year on the books. In 1987, 10,000 rural migrants registered with the newly merged town and rural district, out of which 3,000 had joined the prosperous Yongding xiang (a pseudonym) on the western edge of the town. The average earnings of a town worker, on the other hand, were around 200 yuan. 28. The fifty-two included small-scale enterprises run by the neighborhood committees. In  1985, the town industries employed 9,117 workers; the rural district had 15,247 workers. 29. However, I also observed that many town cadres had built themselves similar mansions. See Oi (1986) for the methods rural cadres in many parts of China used to control commercial and industrial channels in the reforms. 30. In China, parallel party organizations have always dominated government offices. Party secretaries are the most powerful political leaders at every level of administration. A few leading cadres came with the work teams for the Siqing Campaigns (the Four Cleanups) in 1964. This was a campaign initiated by the party Central Committee to look into the corruption of cadres, but it became a tool for factional fights within the party leadership. See Baum (1975) for a detailed description. 31. The dilemmas of this silent majority are described in more detail in Siu (1988b). 32. Out of 821 licenses for private entrepreneurs in Nanxi zhen, 218 were listed as small-scale industrial workshops, 1 was in construction, 413 in trading, 88 in food, 43 in repair services, 57 in other services, and 1 unidentified. I obtained the information from the Office of Administering Industry and Commerce in Nanxi zhen. 33. The public knew that town cadres had cut off the electricity supplies of those whom they considered violators of public policy. A town cadre acknowledged that it was one of their weapons to discipline those who had acted out of line. During my stay in Nanxi zhen, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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I saw members of street committees cutting off electricity supplies of households who had refused to follow the birth control policy. 34. The reasons included the irrational allocation of resources, duplication based on erroneous calculations of comparative advantage, and a general cellularization or encystment of the entire economic system that worked against the open, competitive market principles that the regime had intended to promote.

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6 Recycling Rituals Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China

Conceptualizing Popular Thought and Rituals Scholars who observed the lack of color in rural social life in the Maoist era have also witnessed and marveled at the liberalizing energies released by the recent decade of reforms. Unprecedented movements of goods, capital, and people across the rural landscape have been accompanied by a flourishing of popular rituals. The phenomenon poses interesting questions about culture change. Has Maoist politics ironically preserved the popular culture of peasant communities to the extent that, once the party-state attempted to retreat from society, popular culture regained its former momentum to influence the process of modernization? Or, has peasant culture been so touched by the Maoist programs that what we observe today are new reconstitutions of tradition for coping with contemporary existence defined by the socialist state, rather than cultural remnants that survived the encounter with that state? On  the basis of fieldwork carried out in 1986 in Nanxi zhen (a pseudonym), a market town in the heart of the Pearl River Delta known for the intensity of popular ritual activities in the past and the present, I will examine a set of rituals, especially those for funerals and weddings, and the meanings that practitioners attribute to them in order to address the issue of cultural continuity and change in rural China today.1 At the methodological level, this chapter raises an issue pertaining to the interaction of culture, state, and society over time. Chinese anthropologists have long recognized that traditional popular culture in general fitted in with the imperial paradigm although at times it was also used to subvert state ideology. But the major thrust was toward integration. It had always been the intention of the imperial state to co-opt potential threats from local society, both institutionally and ideologically, as is clearly indicated in its bestowal of imperial titles upon popular deities that had gathered substantial followings. Community and domestic rituals also showed that local society actively cultivated, rather than opposed, a symbiotic relationship with state culture.2 While past interpenetration between state and society in the realm of Chinese popular culture is readily assumed by scholars, the treatment of popular rituals in the post-revolutionary period lacks this perspective. Instead, the relentless efforts This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the socialist government to suppress popular thought and rituals are posed in a mechanical fashion against their preservation and recent renaissance. Viewed as inherently anti-state and anti-hegemonic, popular culture is presumed to have survived the onslaught of Maoist politics only to come back in full force to plague the reformers today.3 There is ample evidence that what appear to be traditional ritual practices have re-emerged in China, especially in the rural areas.4 In the year I spent in Nanxi, I was struck by the ritual intensity that was displayed. Eight years into the reforms, one would not have been surprised if the market town, traditionally known for its 393 ancestral halls, 139 temples, and monasteries that had been the scenes of rituals throughout the years, had resumed at least some of its customary ways.5 Such usual religious items as paper money and incense were sold not only in the markets by peddlers but also in individually owned shops that conducted prosperous business. Moreover, contrary to observations elsewhere that public rituals were lacking,6 community temples and secular festivals that were linked to the interests of overseas compatriots were actively promoted by the town government. When the residents eagerly pursued rituals related to the life cycle of individuals, there was also an aggressive touch of public display that acknowledged the limits set by officials. The primacy of performance in these rituals, similarly observed by James Watson in those of the late imperial period, is significant here. If the socialist government today actively appropriates tradition to make cultural communications suit its political priorities, and if local society actively pursues them with such understanding, will the consequence be a unifying culture of “reritualization,” to use Watson’s term,7 in which the state and society continue to give each other recognition? Instead of arguing that traditional practices are being revived and are challenging the socialist ideology, this essay maintains that the rituals today are reconstituted by a different cast of performers and that the process reproduces a much-transformed rural society in which the power of the socialist state has long been taken for granted. The ritual revitalization involves the complicity of both the socialist state and the rural practitioners, and provides an important window on the changing meanings of rituals that highlights new perceptions of power and commitment in contemporary rural society. In this way, the effects of the thirty years of administrative history emerge as core to the analysis of popular culture in rural China today.

Traditional Rituals in Nanxi Major works in Chinese anthropology suggest that rituals, as cultural performances, reflect the ways in which practitioners order their sociopolitical reality, both symbolically and instrumentally.8 To interpret what they mean to practitioners in Nanxi today, one needs to understand how rituals before the revolution created a compelling This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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moral fabric for social living and how the transformation of the traditional order gave rise to new contexts for ritual acts. Since the 18th century, landlords and grain merchants who resided in Nanxi controlled the surrounding sands, which were vast areas of reclaimed alluvial land rented out to migrant tenant farmers. The rise to power of these landlords and merchants in the regional economy was accompanied by intense ritual activities. Apart from compiling elaborate lineage genealogies9 that dazzled the eye with the names of imperial degree-holders, members of the three largest surnames of the town, He, Li, and Mai, put great energies into the ceremonies of their numerous ancestral halls as well as into the periodic community festivals centering on the major temples of which they were principal patrons. The year-round rituals helped to make explicit social connections and political distinctions. Family members participated in domestic rituals but were linked to a wider range of kin through the male members, who took their respective places in the complex of public rituals at lineage halls and family graves. Another network was constructed by their participation in the rituals of neighborhood shrines that delineated communal boundaries. At the same time, the neighborhoods that centered on a shrine known as she were the building blocks for larger-scale religious events. Residents made monetary and material contributions and provided organized human resources for temple festivals. The lineage and temple networks partly merged in community-wide festivities that centered on the five large temples and major ancestral halls in the town. Through taking part in the rituals, the inhabitants sought affiliations that confirmed status and differentiated access to resources, claimed rights of settlement and tenure, forged political alliances, arbitrated conflicts, and secured social mobility.10 The chrysanthemum festivals organized periodically by the literati members of major lineages are particularly noteworthy. Participants mimicked the civil service examinations by competing with poetry and flowers. The activities nonetheless involved intense manipulation of cultural symbols—lineage aggrandizement, community exclusiveness, wealth, and literati connections to political office. Together, these festivals delineated the changing configurations of power among local elites as the regional economy centering on the town developed. The wealth and scholarship flaunted by the elites and the social networks that organizers employed revealed political agendas by which the language of imperial authority percolated downward and negotiated with local initiatives at the ritual arena. The process reproduced the values of kin, community, class, and authority among the town residents to guide social life in both the domestic and public realms (see chapter 8 in this volume).

Rituals and the Socialist Revolution The socialist revolution of 1949 attacked popular rituals severely, destroyed most of their social bases, and replaced their political functions. In accordance with This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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official ideology—that popular rituals were feudal superstitions linked to the peasants’ support of the imperial order—the town government carried out campaigns to destroy and discredit them. The public rituals were first to be suppressed. As early as the land reform from 1950 to 1952, landed estates on which ancestral halls and temples depended to finance activities were confiscated. The buildings were converted to schools, factories, and administrative offices. Managers of these estates were publicly humiliated and some were killed for their “class crimes.” At the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, ancestral halls were dismantled and the bricks and stones transported to surrounding villages under the party slogan to aid agricultural production. Notions of kin continued to exist but were weakened when the material presence and the instrumentality of lineage solidarity were replaced by the priorities of the socialist government. In the late 1950s, old trees that stood above neighborhood shrines were also cut down to fuel backyard furnaces; the disappearance of the physical symbols of she coincided with their reorganization under fifteen neighborhood committees. By implementing the political directives of the town government in the management of the neighborhoods, the committee directors institutionalized the power of the new state in everyday social living. The temples were spared at the time because they were physically rather small-scale compared to the ancestral halls. By the 1960s even these remnants of local tradition were destroyed. During the Cultural Revolution, young students were mobilized to attack “the four olds,” or traditional customs and habits; classic texts and genealogies were burned, and the images of deities were smashed. A former Daoist priest recalled that, out of fear, he voluntarily took most of his ritual texts and tools to the brigade headquarters to be burned and promised not to recruit apprentices for his trade. However, he managed to hide some of the ritual scrolls and a geomancy compass, and preserved a large copper bowl used for funeral rites by storing pig feed in it. The Buddhist monastery and the two convents in the area were closed down. The monks were sent away and the building converted into private living quarters. The nuns were made to return to secular life. Because religious specialists were prohibited from their trades, the annual communal exorcism and the temple festivals that were tied to the agricultural cycle, together with the more personal funeral rituals, gradually faded from people’s memories. Though there were rumors that the destroyers of the Chenghuang Temple had turned mad, which preserved the fear of the gods among the elderly, young skeptics who could not tell one deity from another regarded these tales as hearsay. The suppression of popular rituals extended to the domestic realm as well. As a result of the demise of ancestral halls and the prohibition of burial, rituals related to individual life cycles such as births, weddings, funerals, and memorial rites to ancestors were stripped of their wider social linkages and increasingly confined within the household. During the Cultural Revolution, not only was cremation strictly enforced, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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but also the large mound on the edge of the town that had served as the community’s graveyard for centuries was put to agricultural use. Villagers grew crops in the midst of the tombstones. Most often, graves were dug up and the land converted to fish ponds and vegetable gardens. In the land-scarce villages close to the town, memories of the hungry years in the early 1960s lingered, and many villagers valued garden plots above other people’s ancestors.11 “In the political confusion of the period,” an elderly friend added, “those who were daring did not care where their ancestors were placed, and those who cared dared not raise the issue.” Furthermore, every street committee saw to the burning of domestic altars and ancestral tablets, fueled in part by the efforts of young students who were mobilized by the radical faction in the town government. Elderly residents in Nanxi hung onto their ritual practices in the “privacy of their bedrooms,” but lament that what was passed on to their children was fragmentary at best. I was told of a sadly comical episode that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. The eldest son of a man who had died was given the task of performing mai shui.12 For this he had to fetch some water from the river. Traditionally, that water was used to wash the body of the deceased, but more importantly, the ritual had to be performed under the watchful eyes of kin and neighbors, as it indicated important rights and obligations in inheritance. The basin in which the water was collected was to be lowered evenly into the river to allow it to be filled from all sides to signify recognition of equal status of the sons in property division. As the chief mourner and heir, he must see to it that everything was done properly. However, political circumstances at the time presented real problems. Instead, the son slipped out alone one night, scooped some water from the river and rushed home. Unfortunately, he ran into a young cadre who asked why he was carrying a basin of river water in the middle of the night. After mumbling some excuses in fear, he got away, but spilt most of the water by the time he reached home. The incident revealed that, for the younger generation, popular rituals had become a secretive, domestic affair because they were not linked to the wider social meanings of the rituals pertaining to lineage or community. It seems that the overarching ideological structure signified by the gods, ghosts, and ancestors, which residents of Nanxi represented symbolically with rituals, associated themselves with, negotiated with, and followed as guidance for practical action as well as spiritual needs were no longer dependable. Instead, that structure remained only in fragments, broken by the priorities of an interfering political power. The plight of the rituals in the Maoist era reflected the social and political relationships in the corporeal world.13 Since the 1950s, the livelihoods of the town residents became divorced from those of the surrounding villages. Resources confiscated from ancestral estates were distributed to former tenants in the sands, and those of the merchants were converted into collective enterprises linked to the state sector as ancillary industries. Diverse paths for economic and political advancement shrank, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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as people’s lives were bureaucratized under the concerted efforts of their work units and neighborhood committees. The town government was staffed by local party cadres whose power over town residents was total. But unlike the local elites before them, they were cogs in a national political machinery that was highly organized. Their positions gave them less room for maneuver as far as implementing party policies was concerned. When political pressure from their superiors was applied, they transmitted it down to their constituents. To bolster its own power, the socialist government introduced a new set of rituals that the town cadres eagerly pursued. The public struggle-meetings against former landlords and lineage estate managers during the land reform, the regimented euphoria of the Great Leap Forward and the communization movement, the influx of the poor peasant cadres from the sands during the Four Cleanups campaigns, the daily tabloids, Mao quotations, loyalty parades, and factional fights among students and factory workers during the Cultural Revolution each in its own way reinforced symbolic and practical statements of political authority to the residents of Nanxi in the decades after 1949.

An Intensified Ritual Landscape In this first decade of reforms, the ancestral halls in town remain closed. Cadres in the town government are adamant that “superstitious practices” in this former “fortress of feudalism” should not be publicly condoned or revived. Nevertheless, they allowed the He lineage association from Hong Kong, whose membership is made up of powerful businessmen and industrialists, to claim back their ancestral halls, which had been occupied by factories and government offices. But these halls are cultural artifacts because lineage rituals are not activated.14 However, practically every household has restored its domestic altar. Several leading cadres have also installed altars in their own homes. In the central part of the sitting room, the tablet that used to represent the nine popular deities has been replaced by a large word shen (deity) written in gold against a red background. Though its exaggerated presence is no longer balanced by the simple, one-line ancestral tablet on its left, nor the small tablet for the household god (menkou tudi) at the doorway, the trio is recognized as essential for the welfare of members of the household. The old carpenter who makes these tablets is now taking in apprentices. The street where his shop is located, known as Coffin Street because it is the area where trades catering to funerals used to congregate, is experiencing a new lease on life. Funerals, like weddings, have been conducted with ever-increasing extravagance to the point that some of the old literati in the town complain about their vulgarization. Gifts of condolence accompany the shiny wood coffins that are taken in procession through the main street, and passersby, instead of avoiding them as they customarily would have in the past, eagerly stand around to comment on the number of wreaths and the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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size of the funeral bands. For families who have thrived in the decade of reforms or who have overseas connections, funerals are followed by a dinner of up to thirty or more banquet tables. Some even hire Daoist priests and nuns to perform the funeral rites that extend for seven weeks. Taken together, the expenses easily amount to 10,000 yuan or more. For a market town where the average worker earns 200 yuan a month, the sum is remarkable. A similar extravagance prevails over weddings. What appear to be traditional ceremonies have once more become popular. The red bridal gowns with embroidered flowers and phoenix are rented for 10 yuan; hiring a ritual specialist to accompany the bride costs another 25 yuan. There are two days of elaborate gift exchanges between the families of the bride and groom that involve up to 5,000 yuan, plus the thirty or so banquet tables for relatives and friends that cost 150 yuan each. While parents in town complain that marrying off a daughter is ruinous because of expensive dowry items such as a refrigerator, a washing machine, electric fans, and even a hi-fi system, those in nearby villages protest against the runaway inflation of bridal gifts provided by the groom. Subscribing to the ceremonies is expensive and difficult, especially when ritual specialists do not operate altogether publicly. They are nonetheless eagerly pursued.15 One may expect that the older generation is delighted with the turn of events. To my surprise, some of my friends are most vocal against what they term “the vulgarization of tradition.” Their complaints are curiously juxtaposed with the uncharacteristic fervor of the young, who are taking an active part both in organizing and financing the rituals. In the past, there was much knowledge about the rituals even though the young had not reached the stage in life to become deeply involved. The revolution has eliminated a great deal of that knowledge, which leads to the question: What fuels their enthusiasm today? Young entrepreneurs are most concerned about geomancy, about which they know little, and are diligent in their offerings to Guandi (regarded as the god of fortune). A  majority of those young people I interviewed had taken pilgrimage trips with friends and coworkers to the Longmu Temple up the Xi River. Their personal appeals to the deity range from passing examinations to gaining a fortune and finding a spouse.16 One can also see old trees covered with pieces of red paper on which names of young children are connected to tree spirits believed to be efficacious. At neighborhood entrances and street corners one finds a variety of offerings to small stone slabs. The indiscriminate fervor makes one wonder about the meanings that popular rituals have for their practitioners today. Furthermore, a singularly talismanic concern underlying the ritual behavior of the younger generation was brought home to me most vividly on a visit to a major Buddhist temple that has been reopened for tourists. In late 1986, I took a trip there with several former nuns to perform a yankou ceremony for their religious master This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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who had died during the Cultural Revolution. For three days, I stayed at the temple to watch the rituals after the temple closed its doors to the public. During the quiet chilling nights in the mountain, they chanted with the monks to reach out to their deceased religious master. They wept quietly, communicating their regret that they had yielded to adverse political realities and had not come to relieve their master sooner. The world these nuns unveiled to me could not have been more different from that of the young visitors who occupied the temple during the busy hours of the day. The latter came in hordes, indiscriminating in the ways they placed incense and in their awkward ritual routines. They swamped the gift shops looking for an efficacious souvenir and patronized the temple canteen for a vegetarian meal. After posing for pictures at the grand entrance of the temple, they hurried off as noisily as they had come. They and the old nuns shared the same physical space, but they seemed worlds apart. Granted that rituals mean different things to different people, the divergent meanings they have assumed today are noteworthy. The prevalent attitude toward rituals for the younger generation is the following: make offerings and go through the ceremonies when one has the free time. Who cares if there are spirits or not, but one should cast a wide net just in case. If there are spirits, it is too easy to offend one unknowingly, which may lead to misfortune. If the spirits in one’s path are happy, they may even bring pleasant surprises.

Funerals and Weddings Let us take a closer look at funeral and wedding rituals in Nanxi in order to evaluate the extent to which the content and the underlying popular perceptions about political and social relationships have changed during three decades of socialist revolution. As suggested earlier, these changes can be particularly revealing because they carry personal and domestic dimensions. At the same time they are rituals performed publicly, involving wider networks of neighborhoods, friends, community leaders and local officials. Both dimensions were severely attacked by the Maoist regime. Wedding celebrations were not seen as private, familial affairs and condemned as wasteful. Explicit rules restricted the number of banquet tables. Behind the opposition to ritual expenses were political motives. Appeals to deities were relatively individualized. But weddings and funerals often gathered large networks of lineage members and friends in a community whose organizing principles could challenge the party’s authority and priorities. Yet the recent decade of reforms has brought about remarkable intensity and lavishness in these rituals. Are they coming back at a vengeance to haunt the cadres? Every day at noon, one cannot miss the funeral processions that proceed along the main road of Nanxi before turning into Coffin Street. At the end of the street friends and relatives disperse while members of the deceased’s family continue This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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on to the burial mound behind the town. The mourning dresses, the wreaths and the “longevity cloth” on display, the playing of the funeral band, and the coffin carried by eight peasants from nearby villages are unfamiliar to those under twenty-five years of age. However, knowledgeable elders in town also find the processions quite unrecognizable. Many features have been simplified, they claim. In pre-revolutionary days, the route for the town’s funeral processions would pass through three neighborhood shrines (guo sanshe) in order for female mourners to notify the spirit of the shrines (shetou gong) and symbolically bid farewell to the community for the deceased.17 Furthermore, it avoided routes where major surnames had their private roads and ancestral halls. Today it takes the most direct route to the main street because most of the halls and shrines no longer exist. Even if the halls continue to stand, the once cohesive surname groups that owned them have long lost their power to interfere. At the head of Coffin Street, a small temple was erected in the last century by a member of the local gentry of the He surname in honor of his housekeeper and tutor. Known as the Sheren Miao, the temple had been a stopping point for the funeral procession to distinguish friends from close kin. Friends were given sweets and a packet of small change before they dispersed, while relatives followed to the end of the street where a bridge divided the town from the neighboring settlement of Yongding (a pseudonym). From then on, only sons of the deceased attended the actual burial at the mound. This tiered dispersal of the funeral procession symbolically revealed individual social distance and obligations from participants toward the deceased. It showed the degree of death pollution to which the participants were exposed. The complex meanings are no longer adhered to. In the first place, the temple is now a dilapidated building used as a hostel for homeless elderly people. Hardly anyone will recognize its historical significance. Most turn back at the bridge, but female members of the family now join the men at the burial site, because the gendered taboo at burial sites is viewed as less relevant.18 The demise of ancestral estates and halls has led to a less hierarchical, male-oriented lineage culture. Family members are drawn closer together based on their individual contributions to the household economy. A similar flattening of hierarchy and differentiation based on kin and gender is seen in the mourning dresses. Formerly, a sharp-eyed bystander could immediately tell how many sons, daughters, in-laws, nephews, and nieces the deceased had from the type of fabric the mourning dresses were made of, the layers of cloth worn, the style of the headgear, and the canes mourners carried.19 But today most of the mourners either wrap a white sash around their waists, if they are close relatives, or wear a black armband, in the case of distant relatives and close friends. Although there has been a telescoping of mourning categories, concerns of kin and descent have not entirely faded in the community. Local residents have shrewdly allied themselves with surname associations overseas in an attempt to restore ancestral halls. There was even a recent case in which segments of a lineage came to blows This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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at the gravesite of an ancestor, each accusing the other of illegitimate descent. What is happening is obvious. During the Maoist period, valuable properties were confiscated. Overseas owners had an interest in some of them. The liberal united front policies that aim to attract overseas investment allow many to reclaim such properties. Their relatives in Nanxi stand to gain. “Cast your kin net wide and you will find a big catch” is a saying that has become quite popular among the young and ambitious. But older residents lament that cousins do not know one another. Neither do they know the etiquette for greeting or conflict resolution. Although practical concerns underlying the traditional claims of kinship affiliation are historically recognized, these claims have become more blatantly instrumental for personal gain. I see the trend as a result of the fracturing of moral imaginations, which had mediated kin, community, and class interests before the socialist revolution. Today, many are operators in a cultural vacuum. What most annoy my elderly friends are features in the funeral ceremonies that seem more appropriate for festivities. The plastic wreaths with their multicolor designs are uncharacteristically cheerful. They present a sharp difference from the days when only white and yellow chrysanthemums were used.20 Young female mourners often wear their brightest holiday clothes. Even if they do not intend to show their best in such an occasion, they are dressed for the evening banquet.21 In pre-revolutionary days, a small number of relatives and helpers were given dinner at the end of the day. Now this token of thanks from the mourners has turned into an elaborate banquet for a wide network of people who have only slight connections with the deceased. According to my elderly friends, this feasting is a result of two recent trends. More unrelated people now contribute to the funeral ceremonies by sending shouzhang (longevity cloth), wreaths and a token shoujin (longevity money). The contributors are then invited to the evening banquet, making up an unlikely crowd of coworkers of sons and grandsons of the deceased, of neighbors and street-committee directors, and of overseas business contacts. Funerals today have become a special networking event. It is as if everyone is eagerly contributing to it for socializing purposes. Attending to the dead and those in mourning is just an excuse. Moreover, the dinner for the mourners now includes the shang gao ceremony, which should normally take place a hundred days to a year after burial. It involves thanksgiving at the family altar, signifying that the deceased has now joined the ranks of the ancestors. To have such a celebration take place before the corpse turns cold in the grave gives the occasion a strangely disquieting character. Why mourners collapse the two occasions into one has its social logic. When burials were banned in the 1960s and 1970s, the ashes of the deceased were brought home and put at the family altar hidden in bedrooms. Funeral mourning and the ceremony of joining the ancestors took place almost simultaneously with little fanfare. Today, the two continue to be merged, but the ceremony is fueled by new wealth and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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new energies for networking, producing an incongruent lavishness that the town’s elderly people consider “grotesque.” In 1986, the talk of the town involved two elaborate occasions of this kind. The first was the funeral banquet of forty tables staged for the wife of a prominent man, formerly a landlord-merchant of the He surname, who, through the help of overseas relatives, has claimed back numerous properties from the town government. The other was financed single-handedly by the grandson of a deceased man who has become a successful private entrepreneur. The generationskipping in the financing of the second funeral was quite unusual, but the young man was praised by friends for his shrewd business instincts. The complicity of relatives was also understandable, because the networking could be beneficial at a time when alternative networking mechanisms were not yet in place. Wedding ceremonies today are embraced by a younger generation and display similar changes in meaning. An obvious example is the organization of huiyou. It used to be a brotherhood composed of a few lifelong friends who helped the bridegroom through the wedding and other important occasions in his life. The modern brotherhood has grown more extensive and includes a few dozen people from the immediate circle of the bridegroom’s friends, coworkers, and cousins, who disperse once the wedding is over. The ego-centered way in which the huiyou is formed and the transient nature of its functions mean that young men find themselves serving as members of huiyou for different friends during a busy season. They complain about the severe drain on their financial resources, as they are expected to contribute more than the normal standards of a wedding gift on account of a special relationship with the groom. Nevertheless, most are honored to be asked and feel compelled to participate. This act of networking is necessary for short- and long-term operations in this day and age, they claim. The utilitarian mode of the huiyou serves the groom in immediate ways. He can depend on the brotherhood to collect banquet tables and chairs, to secure foreign wines and cigarettes, and, most important of all, to supply minibuses and “taxis” for the bride and relatives. These items are expensive and hard to come by, and acquiring them necessitates the right connections. Despite the overtly pragmatic nature of the ceremonies, the symbolic aspects of the ritual are still important. The head of the brotherhood must be an older male, married, with living parents, and preferably have a son. The groom is expected to benefit from his good fortunes by association with him. However, one wonders if the practitioners subscribe to the traditional values associated with these rituals. They are ignorant of the surrounding myths and legends, but they do not seem to care. None of the young married couples I interviewed in 1986 knew enough of the legends of the white tiger and the golden rooster to understand why an umbrella is an essential item for the protection of the bride. For them, it engenders talismanic effects similar to the pair of sugar cane and the head of lettuce that accompany the bride to the groom’s house.22 When asked about the meaning of these practices, respondents often gave vague This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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answers. One friend after another told me, “I do not understand these rituals, nor can I explain or expect when they do or do not work. One supernatural power is just as good as another so long as it delivers. Everyone now practices these rituals. I feel I should do the same so that I am not left behind. One does not lose anything by doing what others do. If the gods choose to fancy your offerings, count yourself fortunate.”

Recycling Rituals If one does not wish to insist that the funeral and wedding rituals in Nanxi in this decade of reforms are mere revivals of tradition, one may at least argue that they are part of a secularizing trend experienced by town residents. This assumes that changes in beliefs and ritual behavior correspond to particular transformations in political economies. But these processes in Taiwan and Hong Kong are accompanied by industrial work, westernized education, overall political liberalization, and functional differentiation in economic activities. In contrast, Nanxi and the surrounding villages underwent severe cellularization of their social and economic worlds, which were dominated by a party-state based on patronage and on unequal access to privilege. Social life and values have been bureaucratized without the modernity that had concerned social theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Instead, the socialist state apparatus has been characterized by the personalization of the authority of political leaders which can be abusive and arbitrary. Although the recent wave of reforms shows the attempts of national leaders to diminish state interference in the economy and social life in general, its omnipotent presence has long been internalized by generations. For ethnic Chinese populations in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the rhythms of a modern, internationally involved market economy have engendered different cultural attitudes and social experiences. If one observes a diluting of popular ritual practices in these Chinese communities in the postwar decades, the underlying causes may have been different. The dilution in Taiwan and Hong Kong is partly due to the secularizing force of the market and global exposure, whereas that in China has been due to the intervention of an ideologically driven state apparatus. Those who are optimistic about the reforms in the 1980s may argue that rural China is finally exposed to market forces, and this process has led to a proliferation of instrumental and ego-centric behavior, including ritual practices. The proposed withdrawal of the state is certainly liberalizing for individual entrepreneurs, especially those from the young generation who are desperately eager to make the best of their chances before another turn of the political wheel. It nevertheless leaves them with a great deal of uncertainty about the present and future. Traditional networks of social mobility have long disappeared with past political vicissitudes. To break out of the cellular existence dominated by a lingering party-state requires new social and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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professional networks. But formal organizational means remain subject to the scrutiny of a state bureaucracy known for its arbitrary and vindictive power. Informal networking, therefore, is preferred over other means that may be seen to threaten a political party already insecure in an era of ideological redefinition. Because popular rituals are now politically tolerated, especially if they involve overseas patrons, they become the surest channels for new networking. In fact, the town government itself has played a part in bringing about the recent renaissance of rituals. The explicitly political rituals of the Maoist era are a thing of the past. But the town government continues to monopolize the community-wide rituals. When the town government staged a series of chrysanthemum festivals beginning in 1979, during the course of which they hosted overseas emigrants to feasts in the name of the town, their agenda was promoted in an unabashed fashion. Their effort to show that they are liberalizing in earnest has successfully tapped new investment. In the age of market reforms, they are able to claim credit from their political superiors. When the town’s aspiring entrepreneurs follow these strategies with their own lavish feasts in weddings and funerals, the cadres cannot deny their usefulness even if they remain ideologically ambivalent. The practitioners of these rituals are not entirely utilitarian. Certain talismanic qualities of the rituals are particularly appealing to the young, who are uncharacteristically eager about practicing and financing the rituals. They believe that the umbrella, the sugar cane, and the lettuce in a wedding are objects invoking efficacy by association, but these views differ fundamentally from those of their elders, who appreciate the legends concerning the power of the spiritual forces in the form of the white tiger and the potential harm of the golden rooster. The intellectual justifications for these rituals by the Daoist priest according to the contradiction embedded in the forces of nature are even less relevant for the young.23 A similar assumption lies behind their pilgrimages to deities about whose legendary power they are largely ignorant but with whom they nevertheless are eager to associate. It appears that when traditional hierarchies of power are no longer relevant and when the socialist power structure that replaced them ceases to inspire confidence, social as well as moral existence becomes very much in flux. The ideological crisis of the socialist system affects the younger generation more so than the older, because they have no alternative worldview for comparison. In three decades of political vicissitudes under Mao, neither the gods, about whom they know little, nor many of the party leaders, whose power they know all too well, have been able to save themselves. The random ritual maneuvers of the young unveil to me a generation actively and desperately trying to anchor itself in a supernatural and a corporeal world they have little faith in. In sum, I have tried to compare popular rituals in life-cycle rituals before and after the socialist revolution, in order to explore the underlying social bases and meanings. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Rituals in the pre-revolutionary period communicated meanings related to a hierarchy of supernatural power closely tied to an accepted structure of sociality and morality. The repeated efforts of the party-state in the Maoist decades changed both drastically.24 In today’s ritual landscape, revitalized with an unusual intensity, some basic features of traditional weddings and funerals and their cultural assumptions remain. But practitioners are most concerned with the mundane affairs of everyday social living where the power of the socialist state has long been internalized. The resurgence of these rituals with transformed meanings and forms represents cultural fragments recycled under new circumstances. In arguing that these are reconstitutions of tradition, this chapter tries to make meaningful connections between cultural change and political economy. The ritual expressions today highlight my observations that the power of the socialist has reached deeply into society. Its proposed retreat triggers new anxieties as well as energies. To cope with this uncertainty, residents in Nanxi shrewdly reconstitute ritual fragments to interact with the encapsulating political structure, reproducing, improvising, and changing their cultural meanings. *The original article was published in 1989 in Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic, edited by Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz. This chapter is a slightly revised version of the original.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in the Pearl River Delta in 1986 and 1987, and published in 1989. I have kept the narrative in the present tense although twenty-five years have since passed. I am grateful to the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, National Academy of Sciences, for financing the year of research in 1986. I also thank the participants in the conference on popular thought at San Diego, California, in October 1987, and professors Jack Goody and Rubie Watson for their comments. One can start with the article “Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors” by Arthur Wolf, in Wolf (1974), pp. 131–82: Wolf describes major categories of popular religion as reflections of social relationships in the corporeal world. In Ahern (1981), she analyzes how the integrations of popular and state cultures actually take place when notions about power and the etiquette of dealing with power are learned through ritual practices. On the issue of how cultural unity has been maintained through the centuries as a result of the attempts of the imperial state to standardize ritual performances, see Watson’s “Standardizing the Gods” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski (1985), pp. 292–324. With regard to funeral rituals, see the introduction and chapter 5 of Watson and Rawski (1988). For statements about the anti-hegemonic nature of popular rituals in imperial as well as modern China, see a symposium of papers in Modern China, vol. 13, no. 1 (January 1987), organized by Hill Gates and Robert Weller; for socialist China, see Anagnost (1987). See Parish and Whyte (1978) on traditional ways of life that lingered despite the efforts of the new government to change them. In a paper presented at the Conference on the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

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Social Consequences of China’s Economic Reforms, at Harvard University, May 1988, Vivienne Shue posed popular culture against the socialist ideology by emphasizing the paradoxical preservation of the former in the Maoist era. For some opposing views, see Madsen (1984); and Siu (1989a) on how new socialist ideology and rituals intertwined with everyday social practice in the villages since the 1960s. See the paper by Martin Whyte in Watson and Rawski (1988). Watson has similar observations in his fieldwork in rural Guangdong in 1985. A manuscript written by He Yanggao (1946), which I was shown during my fieldwork, lists the local temples, the lineage halls, and some of the neighborhood shrines. A draft of the Nanxi zhen gazetteer compiled by a group of local historians (1984) contains similar information. For lineage history, see the genealogies of the He, Li, and Mai surname groups in Nanxi. See Whyte in Watson and Rawski (1988). James Watson’s “Introduction” to Watson and Rawski (1988). See “Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors” in Wolf (1974), Ahern (1981), and Sangren (1987). See descriptions of the importance of neighborhood shrines in Taiwan by Schipper in “Neighborhood Cult Associations in Traditional Tainan,” in Skinner (1977), pp. 651–76. The connection between notions of community and the rituals of community exorcism ( jiao) is described vividly by scholars who worked in Hong Kong. See the works of David Faure, James Hayes, and Tanaka Issei. Most of this land was divided into private plots for the villagers. A few whom I interviewed admitted that they were apprehensive in the beginning but that plots were valuable for supplementing the meager collective income and for adding variety in their diet. After a few years, they thought little of the graves. I saw that most of those standing in the fields today were marked by small stone slabs with nothing inscribed on them. Some families confronted with misfortune have tried to locate graves with the aim of appeasing their ancestors; their attempts are largely unsuccessful. For an analysis of mai shui, see Watson’s “Of Flesh and Bones” in Block and Parry (1982), pp. 155–86. Also see Ahern (1973). For the transformation of the political economy of Nanxi, see chapter 5 of this volume. Several of the halls were simply locked up after the factories moved out. In my travels in the Pearl River Delta, I came across other ancestral halls being restored. When asked about installing the ancestral tablets, the caretakers were not sure when and how it would take place. I interviewed a sixty-eight-year-old Daoist priest who was told to give up his practices during the Four Cleanups movement in 1964. He resumed his trade in the 1980s but said that he would only perform rituals privately because he was still unsure of the political winds. The temple used to be popular among local residents not only for personal appeal but also because it was an important center where rituals were performed for calming the flood waters of the Xi River. Today, the town provides a special bus service that leaves once a week to make the ten-hour trip. One can also take an overnight boat up the river to the town of Yuecheng, where the temple stands. Important events in one’s life cycle, such as birth, wedding, death, are marked by offerings to the shrines. The spirit who resides in the shrine supposedly watches over daily living and is notified of these events. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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18. James Watson, in chapter 5 of Watson and Rawski (1988), mentions other reasons given by his Cantonese informants for not allowing women at the burial sites. 19. For a description of the elaborate differentiations in mourning dress in Taiwan, see Arthur Wolf ’s “Chinese Kinship and Mourning Dress” in Freedman (1970), pp. 189–207. See also Ahern (1973). 20. The symbolisms of flowers are deep-rooted in Chinese culture. Flowers are used for public rituals to communicate well-understood meanings. 21. In several cases, I saw helpers in the front part of funeral processions carrying an entire roast pig that was used for worship after the burial and distributed that evening. 22. The length of the cane symbolizes a lasting marriage; the lettuce (shengcai) is a pun on “fertility and fortune.” The two sound very similar. As to the story behind the golden rooster and the white tiger, elderly friends explain that the umbrella and rice carried by the wedding procession are to protect the bride from the golden rooster on the way to the bridegroom’s house; the coat thrown over the bed after the bride enters the house is to distract the white tiger lurking in the bedroom that would have harmed the bridegroom. According to the Daoist priest, these ritual acts had arisen from a battle between two mythical figures in popular belief, Zhou Gong and Taohua Nü. 23. Responses to these rituals differ among the people I interviewed. As mentioned, the Daoist priest was the only one who could provide an intellectual justification from Daoist texts with regard to the tension in cosmic forces symbolized by the battle between the two mythical figures. My older friends said that the supernatural powers would listen and would bestow their powers when the rituals were performed. The young couples, on the other hand, seldom believed in these powers. Instead, power is invoked by the objects themselves (such as having an umbrella), as if efficacy came from direct association with them. 24. Traditional rituals always had their practical and talismanic qualities, but the overarching ideological structure also provided checks and balances. This chapter focuses on the changes in their meaning when the restraints have been partly replaced by a different political power.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

7 Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China

The decade of reforms in the 1980s brought drastic changes to Nanxi zhen (a pseudonym), a market town with a rural hinterland.1 Situated at the heart of the Pearl River Delta, connected by easy road and water transport to Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong, it has enjoyed an unprecedented boom.2 Rows of new houses have mushroomed on the landscape. Some are funded by relatives living in Hong Kong and Macau. Many are built by local entrepreneurs themselves. There is also the evergrowing number of rural enterprises employing young migrant workers on the town’s outskirts, accompanied by the bustling businesses on the roads and in shops and restaurants, by the common sight of color television sets, washing machines, hi-fi and video systems in private homes, and by lavish rituals at funerals and weddings.3 Family dynamics have taken a sudden turn. Nearly everyone I have encountered in town with grown children complain that the young people of today are drunk with the new wealth. They are desperately energetic, but they are also said to be brash, uncaring for their parents, vulgar in their conspicuous lifestyles, and lacking moral restraint. Surprisingly, the young people who show little knowledge of the Chinese cultural tradition eagerly participate in lavish funeral and wedding rituals and shoulder most of the expenses themselves.4 Town residents also complained that the escalating dowries, some reaching over 10,000 yuan, are ruining those who have daughters to marry off, and that sons and daughters keep most of their wages and bonuses for their own future homes instead of paying for their keep. Earning an average monthly income of 200–300 yuan, young workers give at the most 40–80 yuan per month to their parents. Although bridal payments from the groom’s side average 1,000 yuan in cash, the demand on the groom’s family to provide a new house for the young couple puts a considerable strain on relationships within the family and leads to intricate maneuvers with town cadres to obtain building sites and materials.5 In the villages surrounding the town, which represented an impoverished area in the prerevolutionary and Maoist periods, a similar lavishness is now displayed in the provision of new houses by the groom’s side and large banquets.6 Dowry from the bride’s family remains small compared with that of the town, but contributions from This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the groom’s side have increased several times, reaching an average of 2,000 yuan. Economically disadvantaged males are said to have resorted to taking in migrant women from Guangxi province because the amount demanded for marriage to local women has become unaffordable.7 Have the terms of marriage gotten out of reach and out of control during the recent decade of prosperity? Why do people feel compelled to pursue these ends? What do marital transfers today tell us about family strategies four decades after the revolution? In addition, the different emphasis on contributions from the bride’s and groom’s sides in town and village is striking and requires our analytic attention. In pursuing these questions, I aim in this chapter to address theoretical debates in anthropology with regard to marital exchanges, and to use the debates to highlight the complexity of family dynamics and cultural exigencies as several generations of local residents experienced major transformations in the region’s political economy during the last half-century. Most scholars who work on dowry and brideprice would agree that marital transfers affect and reflect relationships between the generations and between families. Jack Goody starts out arguing that dowry, which establishes a conjugal fund, is a form of “diverging devolution” common to complex stratified societies in Europe and Asia. For purposes of maintaining economic standing, families find it important to advance the status of daughters as well as sons, and so to allocate them a share in the parental estate. He contrasts dowry with bridewealth, a circulating fund common in classless societies. Bridewealth is an exchange among senior men to establish future marriages, especially for the sibling of the bride. Wealth goes one way, and rights over women another.8 In Chinese studies (as elsewhere in Europe and Asia), the term “brideprice” applies to that portion of marital transfers provided by the groom’s kin. It is usually part of a wider set of transactions that includes the dowry, the contributions made by the family of the bride and normally destined for the daughter or the married couple. Goody suggests an alternative phrase, “indirect dowry.”9 Here the term “brideprice” is retained for transfers from the groom’s side, whatever their destination. What usually changes is the different weight given to one element as against the other, higher status groups tending to stress direct dowry and lower ones brideprice, or indirect dowry.l0 Stressing prestige building rather than status maintenance, Harrell and Dickey refine Goody’s original formulation by underscoring the social meaning of dowry (1985). They expect dowry to be a prominent feature of socially differentiated but openly competitive societies with urban commercial wealth. While recognizing that dowry also involves an economic transaction between families that reflects how women’s labor is calculated and valued, it is more important as part of a cultural, symbolic complex, a social statement for the upwardly mobile classes. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Before the Maoist revolution, marriage transfers in rural China largely consisted of indirect dowry. The groom’s family made a contribution, which was returned with the bride as part of the dowry. Only among the very disadvantaged would it be retained by her kin (Parish and Whyte 1978). Maurice Freedman suggests that brideprice payments signify the superiority of the groom’s family vis-à-vis the bride’s, while Patricia Ebrey sees dowries in historical times as used by the upwardly mobile for purposes of status enhancement (Freedman 1966, p. 55; Ebrey and Watson 1986, pp. 16–61). Both claims are true in specific circumstances, but dowry is used in a much wider range of situations than social mobility alone, and brideprice is used for more purposes than affecting superiority, since they are elements in virtually all marriages. This point is made by Goody in his book, where he refines his earlier analysis by arguing that, in traditional China, the incorporation of women by their husbands’ families was never abrupt or complete. She and her natal family maintained multiple ties through life. He sees only a limited role for marital transfers as a payment for the right to women’s labor in the strict sense but allows analytical room for the role of dowry as a means of prestige-building. In the economics of status maintenance, he stresses the cultural and social importance of a woman to both her natal and her affinal kin in providing for “the continuation of the house,” to which process the creation of conjugal funds was central. This was evident in China, where most scholars intuitively assumed otherwise. Both families contributed to this fund. Direct dowry was the main instrument used by high-status families to endow the new conjugal units, and indirect dowry (or brideprice in the wider sense) by lower-status families for similar purposes (Goody 1990). This theoretical material is useful for understanding the nature of marital transfers in Nanxi zhen and their recent developments. Local historians are eager to point out that the differences in marriage between Nanxi and surrounding villages had existed over several centuries: The town elites used dowries to enhance their status, whereas the disadvantaged tenants in the villages “sell” their daughters to finance their sons’ marriages by asking for a large brideprice. This view is of course debatable, but if it were true, it would confirm the analyses of Harrell and Dickey on a general level, and the China-specific formulations of Freedman. The issue is complicated, however, by the question of whether a similar set of factors can be used to explain the differences in the decade of the 1980s. Are the divergent terms of marriage observed today similar to those in the prerevolutionary period, revived after a hiatus of forty years? Or, does the explosion of energies in the 1980s indicate how fundamentally family relationships had been changed by the Maoist state in the decades before, and how the post-Mao reforms have further restructured family life in both town and village? Emphasizing again the social prestige-building element in marriage transfer, as Harrell and Dickey would, one may This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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argue that the escalations of dowry in town today are due to a sudden prosperity combined with a largely untouched cultural tradition. Revived by liberalized policies in the 1980s, the ideal forms of transfer may finally become a reality for the majority of people. In the town, new wealth generates competitive display; parents want to provide for their children in their new households in order to confirm the family’s social statuses. One may assume that it is the same with the younger generation. Nanxi zhen consists of a large number of young workers, private entrepreneurs, and cadres whose fortunes have exploded in the decade of reforms and who are eager to flaunt their newly acquired wealth for social networking purposes. Large dowries and at times equivalent contributions from the groom’s side are ways to reinforce status. It is also shrewd business strategy, as with the financing of other rituals. This analytical position assumes that the socialist interlude in the past forty years has done little to change cultural expectations or strategies for the perpetuation of family wealth and status. If one stresses the rights to women’s labor in marriage transfer, analytical attention is drawn to the escalating brideprice in the villages and their relationship to labor needs among farming families. Could the increased pace of economic activities in the 1980s have exacerbated these needs, which are reflected in the ways families strategize and negotiate marriage payments? Social statuses in the villages are changing with increased mobility and rapid out-migration. Because of an acute labor shortage, it seems logical to assume that families are paying a high brideprice in order to secure the rights of women to augment long-term field labor. That was a concern in the past, and it remains one today. This position regarding the role of marital transfers assumes that the traditional village-town divide as well as the gender and generational division of labor continues to structure the area’s ongoing development in much the same way as before. Observing the divergent terms of marriage in Nanxi zhen and the surrounding villages in the 1980s, I would caution against viewing these terms as representing two different political economies with their own cultural logic, which have sprung back to haunt the socialist government. On the surface, town dwellers’ putting emphasis on dowry and villagers’ on brideprice seems to indicate that the strategies for building prestige and recruiting women labor have prevailed in different sectors. But I suggest that these marital transfers have arisen in a single culturally constructed political economy, which underwent drastic transformations in the Maoist period at one level and persisted at another. At the level of change, one can view the extravagant dowries in town today as public statements and shrewd networking in an era of entrepreneurial vigor; the peculiar form such vigor takes is based on the popular assumption that the partystate can exert its power against any formal civic organization. I would also show that in both town and village today the marital transfers involve not so much the exchange This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of material goods and prestige between the families of the bride and groom as the intense and rapid devolution of property to the conjugal couple at the time of marriage itself. This trend represents a very different intergenerational and interfamilial dynamics in the context of a much-changed political economy. On the issue of persistence, I shall argue that the involvement of women in “the continuation of the house” remains intact in both town and village after forty years of socialism. The peasants who face the rapid emigration of both sons and daughters can probably make sharecropping arrangements with migrant laborers. Instead, they choose to pay high brideprices with the aim to anchor much-valued family commitments in the village. Could it be that, rather than merely surviving the Maoist interlude, a family’s importance may have been intensified in the last few decades by Maoist politics to the point that older family members, confronted by a decreasing commitment from their children, are now pursuing family strategies with inexplicable fervor? Goody’s analytical views on the importance of the conjugal fund may seem applicable in these circumstances. Therefore, while appreciating the major roles of both cultural tradition and economic logic in shaping marriage transfers, I suggest that four decades of socialist politics have greatly impacted marriage and family formation, changing their cultural expectations, restructuring economic needs, and at the same time reinforcing certain generational dependencies.11 This essay focuses on how much and in what ways family relationships have been transformed in the Maoist decades, and uses such history as analytical core to understand marital transfers in Nanxi zhen in the reform era. In 1986, I conducted a random sample survey of three hundred households in the town, and made subsequent trips in 1987 and 1989. I explored the reconstitution of brideprice and dowry in Nanxi zhen and surrounding villages as their residents, with substantial historical baggage, embarked on an uncertain course of decollectivization and market reform.12

Prerevolutionary Marital Transfers in Nanxi zhen The Pearl River Delta is a complex, ever-expanding social landscape. Over the centuries, the river had continued to flow along a southeastern direction and formed marshes at its lower reaches. It attracted migrants who came to settle from different parts of South China. This long historical process gave rise to communities with vastly different economic resources and cultural configurations. In late imperial times, Nanxi zhen was one of a line of market towns situated between a well-populated part of the delta and vast river marshes. Known locally as sands (sha), the river marshes were reclaimed and converted to rice fields by lineage and merchant estates based in the town. In this way, Nanxi zhen grew from an outpost in the sands during the Ming to a dominating center of wealth, power, and ritual by the late 18th century. At the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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turn of the present century, the residents consisted of a dynamic commercial class, and its functionaries who controlled the landed estates in the sands and the trading of grain, mulberry, silk cocoons, wine, fruit, and vegetables (see chapter 8 of this volume). Although the economies of Nanxi zhen and the villages were interlocked, they were worlds apart. The inhabitants of the sands were mobile, boat-dwelling farmers and fishers who were shunned by town dwellers. Generally referred to as the Dan, the sands people worked as hired hands and tenants when lineages reclaimed river marshes, and they engaged in the meaner trades, such as carrying coffins and digging graves. Prejudice against them was reinforced during the years of bad harvests, when they fled the area in their boats with whatever they could glean from the fields. When they had gathered strength in numbers, they were labeled as bandits and pirates.13 Until the 1940s there were seldom any sizable villages. The occasional straw huts on the dikes were in sharp contrast to the 393 ancestral halls and the 139 temples in the town. In the beginning of the post-Mao reforms, there were only sparsely populated villages with extensive fields and waterways stretching as far as the eye could see. Nanxi zhen was a place of residence for an unusual concentration of the wealthy and upwardly mobile until the land reform in the early 1950s. An official document in 1971 showed that the town had 482 persons labeled as landlords and 57 as rich peasants. Most of them belonged to the town’s four major lineages, whose members married one another. Before 1949, these lineage members constituted a significant social group among the town’s some 12,000 residents. For the women in these wealthy lineages, there was little extra domestic employment and no need for it. In fact, a married daughter of the wealthy might not touch the food of her husband’s household for at least a year, being supplied with foodstuffs from her natal home. The women were also provided with lavish dowries, which might include elaborate jewelry, double sets of suanzhi furniture, delicate porcelain dishes and vases, silverware, together with annual provisions of grain and large tracts of river marshes.l4 Brideprice was negligible. In 1986, older women whom I interviewed generally agreed that, before the war, the brideprice for a “respectable family” was about a hundred silver dollars, a few hundred wedding cakes, and banquet food. Whatever was received was largely consumed in the wedding feast. The bride’s and groom’s families would hold dinners for friends and relatives, each making up ten or more banquet tables. They insisted that, except for the very disadvantaged, families accepted whatever the bridegroom’s family would offer. That custom remains unchanged today. Negotiating brideprice would have been a tremendous loss of face. “Only the sands people would act in such a manner,” I was told. To emphasize dowry as a strategy for status acquisition among rich families is to neglect the low brideprice in relation to dowry. The practice was embraced by ordinary town families as well. Granted that the lifestyles of wealthy lineage members and what they provided for their daughters represented an eagerly followed cultural This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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ideal in the region,15 minimal brideprice might be related to the historical practice of buluojia, the delayed transfer of the bride to her husband’s house.16 The richer the families, the longer their daughters stayed at home before settling down with their husbands. Ties with a married daughter continued to be important in various ways. As long as she remained at her home, the fruits of her labor were shared with her natal family. The significant break with her parents came when she was about to have a child, not when wedding gifts were negotiated and exchanged. When she joined her husband, provisions for continuing support were often made. If brideprice was used at all for acquiring the rights to a woman’s labor, the custom of buluojia would have kept the payment low. Town residents, rich or poor, insisted that their terms of marriage and those of the sands were very different. The inhabitants of the sands did not practice buluojia; a woman settled with her husband’s family immediately after the wedding. Among the fishers, the mobility of their boat dwellings made it difficult to do otherwise, since it was not a question of husband and wife being in adjacent villages. At the same time, their dowries were modest, consisting of several sets of clothes, a blanket, a mosquito net, washbasins, bowls, and plates; but the brideprice was large, usually twice that of the town. In my 1986 interviews I came across old men in Zhixi, a village in the sands, who had been married in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They quoted brideprice amounts of one hundred to two hundred silver dollars, which seemed extraordinarily high given the standard of living in the sands at the time. One part of the brideprice consisted of banquet food for the relatives and friends of the bride. In the town only selected members of households and close relatives were invited to attend wedding banquets, but in the sands such occasions involved every acquaintance far and near, young and old. Feasting lasted for three whole days. Meals were served for those guests who had moored their boats the night before. They feasted again on the wedding day, and on the third day meals were served before they left the area. As in Africa, the remainder of the brideprice was often used as a marriage fund for brothers,17 a use that was scorned by town residents, who asserted that the sands people were “shamelessly aggressive” in negotiating brideprice and that “they had to marry off a daughter in order to get a daughter-in-law.”18 It seems that their strategy for coping with life at the bottom of a social hierarchy was regarded as a stigma in the eyes of the townsfolk, who used it as a way of dissociating themselves from the people of the sands.

The War Interlude The domination of the town over the sands in the Ming and Qing continued through the Republican period until the decade of the 1940s, when war and endemic disorder finally broke the power of the town-based ancestral trusts. Many tenant farmers in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the sands were able to acquire land from their landlords by manipulating cash rents, grain prices, and taxes. In addition, local militiamen, who rose to the height of their power during the Japanese occupation, took over vast estates by force.19 Although houses were built with straw and river mud, small villages with more permanent dwellings mushroomed in those places where local strongmen set up their territorial bases.20 Interviews suggested that marriage strategies changed with the shift in power. Rising households in the villages started to arrange marriages with elite families in town whose fortunes had declined during years of war. In doing so, they adopted the prestigious custom of buluojia and displayed lavish dowries. My interviews show that several local strongmen succeeded in marrying their daughters to the families of merchants and rich peasants in neighborhoods adjacent to the town.21 As for the ordinary people of the sands, their circumstances changed little. In 1986 I interviewed a dozen of the old residents in the village of Zhixi in the sands. Although it was difficult for the villagers to name ancestors beyond their grandfather’s generation, they claimed that their families had originated from the older part of the delta where the ancestral halls stood. They insisted that as long as they could remember, they had practiced buluojia. They also disassociated themselves from the boat-dwelling inhabitants of the more recent river marshes further southeast, an area they termed xia sha (the lower sands).22 But data from my survey contradicted their claims. Their families at the time demanded extraordinarily high brideprices in the region of one hundred to three hundred silver dollars. Families of the bride and groom both provided banquets that lasted for several days. Dowries were far below what was given by elite families in town and consisted of kitchen utensils and bedding although in some cases a set of table and chairs and a chest were added. During the eight years of war with Japan, Nanxi zhen was ruled by an uneasy alliance of local bosses with the Japanese troops stationed nearby. Everything was scarce owing to the blockades imposed by the Japanese military and by what remained of the Nationalist government. The fortunes of landowning families and merchant houses in town declined rapidly, their estates sold off to military bosses. The ideal marital payments were hard to come by. As for ordinary households, the ideal was even harder to imagine. Old women I interviewed claimed that there was little dowry to speak of. Brides settled immediately with their husbands because family members had scattered or perished. The most the couple got was enough food for a dinner with close relatives and some basic furniture items. Those who were refugees from other counties were grateful to have a shelter.23 Brideprice, if given, was often in the form of baskets of rice, ranging from one to ten dan. Except for local bosses who had risen rapidly during the war, families in town found the embarrassment of asking for a brideprice a necessity. In other words, the dislocations of war and the reversals of fortune for the area’s elite families had eroded the traditional terms of marriage before the Communists arrived on the scene. It is This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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this period that provides a realistic baseline for an evaluation of the relationship between the local terms of marriage and the transformed social hierarchy after 1949.

Socialist Transformations Since family continuation, social prestige, the devolution of wealth, and the labor needs for households were important factors in marital transfers, family strategies were bound to change during the Maoist period from the 1950s to the late 1970s because the consolidating party-state had made a serious attempt to redefine ideological principles and to restructure both the political economy and social hierarchy. In Nanxi zhen the step-by-step transformation started immediately after the Communists took power. During the land reform of 1952, the former elites of the town—managers of lineage estates, merchants, administrators of the Nationalist government, and local bosses who came to power in the 1940s—were killed, imprisoned, or had their properties confiscated. Those who had set the standards of wealth and power were then reduced to a caste of untouchables. Material means were no longer available for continuing their former lifestyles. Moreover, the policy of overturning the hegemony of “tradition” was actively pursued during political campaigns, when activists were brought in from outside the community. Those activists who had often been poor tenant farmers in the sands set about destroying ancestral halls and important public buildings and carted the materials off to the villages. The political fervor extended to social life itself. Through the 1950s and 1960s, lavish dowries and wedding feasts were periodically stigmatized as “feudal extravagance.” Brideprice was condemned as “buying and selling in marriage,” and large payments were prohibited. But the uneven ebb and flow of politics meant that local cadres were sometimes compromising and permissive. The uneven pattern of policy implementation was quite similar to what Parish and Whyte found in other parts of rural Guangdong. People interviewed in the late 1980s repeatedly expressed resignation toward the stripping down of traditional practices in Nanxi zhen in the Maoist decades. The ideals of traditional marriage payment lingered on after the land reform. It was impossible for town residents to afford the lavish transfers of the former elites, but dowries did consist of moderate provisions of household furniture, utensils, and jewelry. People recalled carrying brides on sedan chairs and attending wedding feasts. At the beginning, agriculture and commerce had recovered somewhat from the war. Family fortunes and private property were inheritable. But the subsequent collectivization of town enterprises followed by the famine years of 1958–61 left little for wedding festivities. My informants remembered how they sent their children around the neighborhood streets to gather leaves for fuel, and how fried dough wrapped in banana leaves became a delicacy. When the economy recovered in the early 1960s, local cadres had to brace themselves for the siqing campaigns.24 For fear of corruption charges made by This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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work teams sent from outside the region, local cadres asked families to behave with moderation. Guests could attend wedding dinners only in small groups because the town leadership explicitly limited the number of banquet tables to four per gathering. The Cultural Revolution tried to kill off whatever remained of the old practices in town, giving rise to severe factional disputes among the town’s leadership. Although actual violence was limited, groups of Red Guards were organized. Cadres were challenged by activists recruited from the sands. Former landlords were paraded around town, and ancestral tablets burned. The official model for wedding celebrations was to hold tea receptions instead of dinner banquets. Interviews show that, because of the concentration of cadres, Party members, union workers, and teachers in town, the official line for simple wedding rituals was imposed more effectively than in the villages. Furthermore, the concentration of ancestral and merchant estates there in the prerevolutionary period meant that there were many families with bad class labels. Reduced to being a group of untouchables, members of these families had to marry among themselves or else “marry down” to whomever would take them. In the latter case the husbands were mostly economically disadvantaged petty traders who could hardly afford marriage prestations. By the mid-1970s, those who survived the political vicissitudes were too afraid to express cultural sentiments they held close to their hearts. A new generation came of age under the shadow of Maoist ideological purity and denied an appreciation for cultural depth and historical sensitivity. In the eyes of their parents, they had little sympathy for tradition. Nevertheless, despite economic hardships and the government’s explicit restrictions, dowry and brideprice remained important for some local residents. The highest sum for brideprice quoted to me was about 100 yuan, balanced by a few dowry items, such as bedding, household utensils, chairs, and a table. Such payments were not substantial enough to be viewed as means for prestige-building or as shrewd calculations to obtain a woman’s labor. But their persistence did reflect the continual importance of family commitments in everyday life under difficult socioeconomic conditions.25 The economy of Nanxi zhen was drastically restructured and delinked from the rural sector. It was no longer a place of residence for landlords who used to live off grain rent from the sands. Town residents were employed in collective enterprises, which were increasingly subcontracted with state factories and commercial units at the county capital. Private resources were stripped away, wages in the collective factories were low, and the security or social services offered could not be compared with employment in the state sector. Nevertheless, town residents anxiously held onto their meager earnings and unflattering status, hoping that the government would not look for an excuse to send them to the sands and demote them to the status of peasants. Their fear of such arbitrary political reversals was not unjustified. Their This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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status as town dwellers had been redefined when the adjacent rural commune was administratively merged with the town between 1958 and 1963. Ironically, it was their urban status that also led their children to be sent off to the sands in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Factory employment meant that a younger generation worked with collective town enterprises rather than with their families. Because of wage employment, young workers might be expected to develop more individualized marriage strategies highlighting the concerns of the conjugal pair. But because of the relatively stagnant town economy and the post-1949 wage structure favoring seniority and the practice of dingti, young workers continued to be dependent on their parents and were expected to contribute to the family budget.26 In the collective town enterprises workers received far fewer social services than those in the state sector, and their families continued to provide important support. My survey shows that single-generation families were rare. Many households consisted of the parents, a married son and his children, and unmarried children. Because of the continued practice of buluojia, it was not unusual for a married daughter to have her meals at home. In other words, intergenerational and sibling ties remained strong despite wage employment outside the home and despite government efforts to replace loyalty to the family with loyalty to the party and state.27 Indeed, families relied increasingly on an informal network of relatives, because many traditional societal organizations had been destroyed.28 This dependence was compounded by a general bureaucratization of life, for example, in the allocation of housing, for the establishment of quotas in various neighborhoods to send educated youths to the sands, or for the recruitment of soldiers and students based on class background.29 Maneuvering around the power of the state became a feature of everyday life. It showed even in household registration: married children delayed the registration of their new household until it was strategic to do so. A paradox existed for the town residents: while they relied heavily on the family for services not available through state channels, coping with the power of the state had become a cultural given in domestic decisions. The terms of marital exchange were negotiated within the framework of this politicized environment. Maoist politics brought about drastic economic transformations in the sands as well as in the town. Nevertheless, marriage transfers continued to be significant for the local population. Instead of mooring their boats along a wide network of rivers, the inhabitants of the sands were made to settle on land, where they were increasingly confined to their cellularized villages.30 But under the policy of the Maoist period, settlement rights had strings attached. An exclusively grain-growing economy tightly controlled under the state pricing system kept their incomes low and their lives isolated from towns and cities. Their daughters, whose children would automatically be assigned rural status, were no longer an attractive choice as marriage partners This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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for those outside the sands. By the late 1950s, the traditional strategy of achieving upward mobility by marrying into town mainly as second wives was closed off. Despite government claims to the contrary, the social gap between rural and urban residents widened.31 Brideprice negotiations continued in the Maoist era. Rural women described the marriage market and the transfer of payments at that time as unpredictable. Families with daughters were fortunate to get them married off and had to choose from whoever was available in the village. At times, they took whatever brideprice was offered. In other villages men complained that there were not enough women around even when their families offered a good brideprice. A big change came about when people took wives from within the village. Daughters naturally remained nearby even after marriage, and they continued to help out at home. When a family was short of labor, daughters stayed longer at home, like the town people. The collectivization of the economy of the sands and the corresponding cellularization of rural communities paradoxically intensified interdependence among members of a family and between local families. Villagers in Zhixi, Yongding, and Jiuji celebrated their weddings with banquets of a dozen or so tables throughout the 1950s until the late 1970s, except for the very lean years between 1958 and 1962 and during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, when officials explicitly demanded ritual simplicity.32 Still, a brideprice of 100 yuan plus wedding cakes was not uncommon. As for dowry, it was not until the 1970s when “the three treasures,” a bicycle, a watch, and a sewing machine, were added to the ideal dowry list. They were largely “luxuries” reserved for families of rural cadres.

The Reconstitution of Dowry and Brideprice in the 1980s Is the renaissance today a reinstatement of earlier practices spurred on by new prosperity? Not entirely. If both the terms of marriage and the political economy on which they were based were redefined by the state, their expansion today is further shaped by the new forms of entrepreneurial energies in town and in the sands. In two earlier papers, I interpreted the upsurge of seemingly “traditional” ritual practices not a revival but a reconstitution as a result of policies in the socialist period. A similar argument can be applied to dowry and brideprice. In Nanxi zhen, a decade of economic liberalization has brought much prosperity. Two categories of residents have made remarkable fortunes. First, party cadres have used official connections to make business deals and to facilitate those transactions. As “insiders,” they have anticipated new policies of privatization, moving ahead of others to catch the best resources for their families. The large modern villas that have sprung up in the town are mostly theirs. Second, there are the entrepreneurs whose interests conflicted with the monopolizing powers of local officials but who This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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have colluded with them to gain a share of the profits. Many inhabitants of Nanxi zhen have also been able to make contact with relatives in Hong Kong and Macau who helped them build new houses, bought imported consumer goods, or invested in joint ventures. These residents are known as having “a southern window” (nanfeng chuang). Gradually, the successful local entrepreneurs are moving on with confidence. This assertion of independence is particularly prevalent among the younger entrepreneurs. Their new lifestyles and preferences, together with those of the local cadres, have become targets of envy and emulation. The marriage transfers for these privileged families are elaborate. In the town, brideprice demands are still not explicitly made, but new calls are made on the groom’s family, and the expenses involved are substantial. It is essential for the groom to provide a new house for his bride.33 A shortage of building sites in town has jacked up the cost of a square meter of land to about 180 yuan. When one adds the costs of building materials, decorating, and labor, a standard house can easily cost 70,000 yuan. Cadre families are particularly under pressure to make such contributions because, as one has said, “People expect us to use administrative means to secure the prime sites, the imported tiles, and the color televisions. When we take the lead, others eagerly follow, claiming that present policies allow everyone to be prosperous.”34 According to another cadre, such transactions assure people that wealth is politically acceptable. They can also show others that they are still in control in a period of ideological redefinition. Similar pressure was felt by the nouveaux riches, because to spread the impression that “they have the means” is necessary for business. These families are now ignoring the official norms for marriage age. In one case, a marriage was contracted and a house built for a twenty-one-year-old, the only son in the family. The parents, who were former landlords and who had migrated to Macau a few years earlier, were anxious to have male progeny to inherit the family’s new wealth.35 Besides the expenses of the house, the groom’s family pays a substantial brideprice, which has reached a norm of 800 to 1,000 yuan. The sum is mainly used to help pay for the wedding feast at the bride’s natal home.36 The standard in town is now at least thirty banquet tables at the local restaurant, at a cost of about 6,000 to 9,000 yuan.37 Of course, the wealthy give more. The parents of a groom offered 1,200 yuan as brideprice, another 50 yuan as lucky money for the bride’s brother, together with the cost of thirty-two banquet tables for the bride’s family, who resided in a village on the outskirts of town.38 They also provided thirty banquet tables on the wedding day for their own friends and relatives. The banquet menu included imported beer and soft drinks from Hong Kong, expensive dried mushroom, squid, scallop, pork and chicken, and six hundred wedding cakes.39 It is difficult to insist that these prosperous families are attempting to “compensate” for the bride’s labor. More appropriately, it has become a strategy for the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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upwardly mobile to win a bride of appropriate background, to acquire prestige in the local community, and to strengthen personal networks in a volatile system where formal organizational ties are still unreliable. For the common folk, the new standard is making it hard for their sons because they have neither the wealth nor the political means to meet these expectations and would have to wait until the wealthy households have chosen their brides. One might argue that this state of affairs is no different from the old days. But in the past, no disadvantaged household would have competed with a wealthy one for spouse. The popular saying “Bamboo door matches bamboo door, and wooden door matches wooden door” was the reality. It is a tougher game when the woman one fancies in the workplace decides to marry a coworker whose family has the “southern window” and who can provide a house and thirty banquet tables for the marriage. A new social hierarchy is being defined through marriage and marital transfers. The expenses for the bride’s family can be just as high if not higher. Among the wealthy, dowry items include modern furniture, a bicycle, electric fans, a sewing machine, imported color television, a washing machine, and a hi-fi system, totaling over 15,000 yuan. It seems natural to argue that there are many upwardly mobile families created by the sudden opening up of economic opportunities in this area, who use the marriage of sons and daughters to make an impression in town. However, there is an added dimension. Even for the very rich families, both the bride and groom contribute to the sum by saving up over the preceding few years. The couple is no longer entirely dependent upon their parents. The objects will be publicly transported and displayed on the wedding day when they go to fill the new house of the young married couple.40 Dowry may still consist partly of the inheritance due a daughter, but it increasingly takes on the meaning of a conjugal fund created by the newlyweds for themselves. Among the young workers, technicians and private entrepreneurs, who now earn a great deal more than their parents because of bonuses and shared dividends, the creation of their own independent conjugal fund is both possible and preferred.41 Their eagerness to start the union in a new house symbolizes this concern. They take great care and pride in building and decorating their houses according to styles promoted to them on television programs from Hong Kong and in magazines on home living.42 Although young couples in Nanxi zhen have taken the initiative to build their own conjugal funds, parents who have the means eagerly contribute, for both sons and daughters. It is not difficult to see the logic behind their effort. Old age security has become an important concern when the changing political winds and subsequent competition from private entrepreneurs have shaken the town’s collective economy. In fact, the town’s enterprises are faced with a great deal of uncertainty due to fierce competition from the burgeoning industries in nearby villages. When some folded, workers were laid off with little prospect of a pension. Retirees also This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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find their pensions too meager to catch up with the severe inflation. It is reasonable to expect that those with the means would contribute to reinforce their children’s marriages with the hope that some measure of intergenerational dependence can be maintained. In one case, two retired teachers saved up enough to buy a color television for their married son, who had taken a job in a research unit in Hunan. When the young couple had a baby, the grandmother went to Hunan for several months to take care of the newborn, leaving her husband behind with an unmarried son. She eventually brought her grandson back to Nanxi zhen. I asked why she did all that, knowing well that their resources and energies were stretched. Her reply was straightforward: she would maintain a good relationship with her sons in the hope that they would reciprocate when she needs them. Whether her strategy works or not remains to be seen. The sands have also been rapidly transformed in the last decade. Wedding banquets have grown even more elaborate, and it is common to have thirty or more tables. According to town residents, the sands people have adopted the custom of the town by sitting around tables and having courses brought to them one by one. This differs from their habit of serving food in large bowls all at once, the guests squatting around to help themselves. New houses are provided by the groom’s family for the newlyweds, but these are mainly cadre families. If marriage practices were only mainly a means for families to work their way up the social hierarchy, one would expect the people in the sands to reduce their demand for brideprice, inasmuch as this has been such a stigma in the eyes of the town residents. Surprisingly, dowry remains moderate, but the monetary demands for brideprice have escalated sharply, reaching an average of 2,000 yuan, twice that of the town and more than the annual income of an adult worker in the villages. To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to trace the history of the socialist transformation in the sands. Today wedding festivities provide a sharp contrast to the normally quiet life in the villages. These rural areas are devoid of young workers, either men or women, only old men and women doing light farm work while carrying grandchildren on their backs. Most of the younger ones have migrated to the peri-urban neighborhoods, women to work in factories, men on construction sites. Farm labor is in such short supply that farmers increasingly make share-cropping arrangements with migrant farmers from Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Hunan provinces. Sometimes they hire workers outright by giving them room and board plus 80 to 100 yuan a month during the busy season. Not all of the migrant workers are good farmers. In 1986, the municipality where Nanxi zhen was situated turned back 20,000 illegal migrants because, according to a municipal cadre, the region had suffered poor harvests for the last few years as a result of low-quality migrant labor. One wonders why many families continue to contract large areas of land for rice cultivation despite such acute labor shortages. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The reason may be that grain prices are high in the open markets, often over 100 yuan per dan, in contrast to the negotiated state price of about 25 to 30 yuan. The high price is due either to a decline in supply because many families have switched to the growing of lawn turf, fruit, and sugarcane, or because young adults have migrated to the towns and cities for factory work.43 Rural households have to buy grain in the market in order to fill the delivery quotas contracted by the government. Moreover, the out-migration of the young sharpens a historical attachment to land in the sands. Older farmer and fishers I have interviewed repeatedly express an anxiety to maintain a base in the village because of a history of their being denied settlement rights. It took centuries for the relatively mobile inhabitants of the sands to be recognized as permanent settlers on the land. However, in the Maoist period, attachment to land was seen as a burden that tied families to rural poverty, and some balked at the government’s suggestion that they build permanent brick houses to form “villages.” When land again became a valuable resource during the reforms in the 1980s, these farmer and fishers began to defend their settlement rights, which entitled their sons to build homes in the villages. New arrivals to the sands are now excluded: migrant workers from Yangjiang, Guangxi, and Hunan have become the new underclass of the sands. Verdicts on criminal cases that have come before the people’s courts in the last few years show that they are victims of extortion, robbery, rape, and murder. History appears to repeat itself. The increased mobility of the rural population in general has created a dilemma for the earlier families who want to maintain their rights in the sands. They complain that it is increasingly difficult to find brides for their sons because local women, just like the men, prefer factory employment near Nanxi zhen, with the added intention of finding spouses there. Families are reluctant to let their grown daughters be married off too soon, and when they take in a daughter-in-law with an ever-increasing brideprice, they try to keep her at home. It is true that where there is ample land and where agriculture continues to rely on manual labor, labor becomes a prized commodity. The crucial issue is why, given the availability of cheap migrant labor, families in the sands choose to pay high brideprices in an effort to keep their children in the villages. Today settlement rights in the sands are highly valued, especially for the older generation, who feel that they have finally gained a productive foothold. The “continuation of the house,” as Goody describes it, made possible by commitments from the parent’s generation toward the new conjugal units, is the culturally acknowledged basis for claiming these settlement rights and entitlement to village land. It also secures for the family the much-needed long-term farm labor. Furthermore, the demand for a high brideprice distinguishes these families from the new underclass of migrant workers, who cannot afford such payments and would not be able to make such a demand. As before, marital strategies This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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seem to serve a political function by excluding those at the lowest end of the social hierarchy.

Conclusion The analysis of marital payments in Nanxi zhen highlights a history of the town’s ambivalent relationships with its rural hinterland. The resources available to families in the town and in the sands, and the ways they have chosen to maneuver within the constraints, are intertwined with this political history. In the late 19th century and the early 20th, these transfers took place in a highly stratified socioeconomic context. A lavish dowry in town was a strategy for building prestige among the elites. For ordinary folks, it was a way to distinguish themselves from the mobile inhabitants in the delta. Hard lines were drawn against the latter precisely because the lives of these two social groups were connected in multiple and unequal ways in an evolving regional ecology. There were fierce contestations in material and symbolic terms. As in contestations concerning lineage membership, community boundaries, and ethnicity, terms of marital transfer were statements to assert settlement rights and political-cultural status. They were means of exclusion, differentiation, and acculturation among the local population as they sought their respective places in the emergent delta society. The Maoist regime managed to reduce inequality among town families after landlord and merchant families were reduced to a caste of untouchables. This process might have explained the drastic drop in the value of dowries in town. But the life chances of town residents and villagers in the sands continued to diverge. Unlike urban families in large cities with state sector employment as described by Martin Whyte,44 the town families in Nanxi zhen were dependent on a shaky collective economy at the lowest end of an urban hierarchy. But town residents used numerous cultural strategies to distinguish themselves from the villagers and fishers whom they considered worse off. At the micro level, families found themselves almost “incarcerated” in their collectivized work units and cellularized villages (Siu 1989a). Although family property was reduced to simple household goods and multigenerational dwellings, the family remained an important social unit for work allocation, remuneration, and political representation. Interdependence among family members remained strong if not intensified in this period for both town dwellers and villagers, hence the continual negotiation of marital payments despite government attempts to restrict and undercut them. As a household responsibility system was reintroduced in the early 1980s, the family has once again become a focal point of social and economic life. I argue that family dynamics and the related terms of marriage today cannot be seen as a This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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restoration of what had been put on hold since the late 1950s. Instead, as Martin Whyte observed in Chengdu, they resulted from several contradictory trends that had diluted the meaning of family at one level and reinforced it at another. At the level of the institution of family vis-à-vis the larger society and the state, crucial social and economic institutions in which family processes had been embedded were redefined, restructured, or simply stripped away. The economic opportunities of today, which have been created by a decade of liberalization, pose a new social reality for the residents in Nanxi zhen as well as for those in the sands. The opportunities allow young urbanites to create viable conjugal funds on their own initiative by means of exaggerated dowries and brideprices, largely self-accumulated. Their efforts dovetail those of their parents, who are eager to gain old age security in a time of uncertainty by contributing to the fund. Rural youths, both men and women, are anxious to shed their peasant status and eagerly fill the gaps at the lower end of the town’s employment hierarchy, an opportunity that was denied them for over three decades. For the older generation, because of the drastic loss of the labor power of their children at a time when agriculture becomes profitable, settlement rights reemerge as an important issue. Their concern is often not shared by their children. Mustering the cultural resources at their disposal, they try to control marriages for reproduction and for continued commitment to the family. By maneuvering marriage payments, they hope to tie women to the household economy. This new concern increases the demand for a large brideprice in the sands. With those productive links between rural generations broken by migration and urban employment, and those in town by increased entrepreneurial opportunities for the young, generational conflicts are explicit and inevitable. In sum, factors leading to different payments of brideprice and dowry are complex. They involve intergenerational dependencies within the family as well as the fortunes of individual family members in relation to turbulent transformations of an entire century. Three crucial political turning points—the war interlude, the Maoist era, and the post-Mao reforms—have continued to create different life chances for the residents of the town and the sands and have triggered divergent strategies. In analyzing the terms of marital transfer in Nanxi zhen and the sands, I hope to provide a historically grounded and meaning-focused account of the ways transformations of political economy intertwine with cultural, symbolic resources that people use to make sense of their lives. *This essay is based on fieldwork conducted periodically from 1986 to 1990, funded by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China and Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am grateful for the comments from Deborah Davis, Jack Goody, Stevan Harrell, and participants in the conference on Family Strategies in Post-Mao China, June 12–17, 1990, Roche Harbor This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Resort, San Juan Island. The essay was published as a chapter in Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era, edited by Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 165–88). It is reprinted here with slight revisions. To avoid complicated editing, I have kept the narrative in the ethnographic present.

Notes All the local place names in this chapter are pseudonyms. Nanxi zhen went through a few administrative changes after the revolution. It was an administrative town after 1923, headquarters for the third district of Dagang county. It maintained a market-town status in the 1950s. In 1963 it was made into the Nanxi zhen Commune. In 1987 it merged with the surrounding Nanxi Rural Commune to become a town (zhen) again. 2. This prosperity has been partly brought about by investments from natives who emigrated to Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century and who have become successful entrepreneurs and industrialists. The particularly successful counties in the delta are Nanhai, Panyu, Shunde, Dongguan, and Zhongshan. 3. See chapter 5 in this volume for the economic changes. 4. See chapter 6 of this volume for the analysis of reasons young people are actively engaged in ritual activities. 5. In this area, where properties belonging to emigrants had been confiscated in the Maoist era, one strategy today is for the emigrants to claim the properties back for their relatives. Cadres in Nanxi zhen have expressed concern for such a trend because the town government has no resources either to compensate for these properties or to relocate those who are made to vacate. 6. See also the chapter on marriage practices in a rural community in the eastern part of the Pearl River Delta in Potter and Potter (1990). 7. In the 1980s, Nanxi zhen hired thousands of migrant laborers from other provinces, especially Jiangxi, Guangxi, and Hunan. They filled the lowest-level jobs in the town factories, and they became sharecroppers in the villages. Employment peaked in 1988 at over 15,000. For the pattern of migration, see Siu’s “The Politics of Migration in a Market Town” in Davis and Vogel (1990), pp. 61–82. 8. The term “brideprice” is used to cover two different types of marital transfer. In Africa, it refers to the transaction that passed from the family of the groom to that of the bride. The sum is then available for the marriage of her brothers or other male kin. The term is generally abandoned in favor of “bridewealth,” since nothing like “price” in the usual sense of the word is involved. 9. Whether the former gifts are passed on to the daughter or used in the marriage festivities themselves, they constitute even less of a “price” than African bridewealth. However, among some lower-status groups, part or even all of these transfers may be retained by the bride’s kin, possibly in compensation for the gift they have provided, possibly as a reserve on which the daughter can draw, and possibly for their own use. See Goody and Tambiah (1973). 10. Although I have sometimes indicated the element of endowment, it is essential to recognize the above complications and bear in mind that “brideprice” in the wider sense is rarely an alternative to direct dowry but rather a counterpart. 1.

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11. This is close to the observations of Parish and Whyte for the postrevolutionary period up to the late 1970s. For North China, see Kay Johnson (1983), pp. 208–14. 12. The survey covers all fifteen of the town’s residential neighborhoods and three villages at different distances from the town. 13. See Dian Murray (1987). See Siu (1989a) chapters 2 and 3 on the historical development of the sands in the Pearl River Delta. 14. I refer to those that controlled the development of the sands from the Ming dynasty on. See the genealogies of the Zhao of Sanjiang in Xinhui county, the Long and Luo of Shunde county, the Huo of Foshan. See chapter 11 of this volume for details of marriage customs in the area. 15. The same was true for Shawan in Panyu county, another center of wealth and power on the edge of the sands. A large percentage of the town households in Shawan literally lived off the focal ancestral estate, Liugeng Tang, which owned 60,000 mu of the sands. As in Nanxi zhen, women learned sewing and helped with family chores until they settled with their husbands. For the historical evolution of lineages in Shawan, see Liu’s “Lineage on the Sands” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 24–43, a paper originally presented at the panel “Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China,” annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, April 1990. 16. Historical documents through the Qing recorded it as common in parts of the Pearl River Delta both among the elites and commoners. It involved women marrying at an early age but continuing for a few years to reside at their natal home. They would briefly visit their husband’s home for important ritual occasions and festivals, but not until they were about to give birth to their first child would they settle there permanently. See chapter 11 in this volume for a summary of the relevant literature. 17. See Goody and Tambiah (1973) on the functions of brideprice and dowry in African and Indian societies. A circulating fund increases interdependence among siblings and between generations within a family. 18. The demand of high brideprices in the sands was told to me by many old women in town and confirmed by a marriage ritual specialist who attended many weddings in the area. 19. For the rise and fall of local bosses, see Siu (1989a), chapter 5. For Nanxi, see chapter 13 of this volume, a paper originally presented in the panel “Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China,” AAS meetings, April 1990. 20. A richer household might have a tile roof. These houses are known as shan ding wa (wooden beams and bark holding up tiles). 21. For example, the Liu family of Zhixi village married a daughter into a prosperous Mai family of Yongding in the late 1940s. A great deal of jewelry was given as dowry. The father of the bride was the most powerful local boss in the village. 22. Some of the residents of Zhixi might have been poor urbanites who migrated to the villages. They attended the lineage ceremonies in the ancestral halls in town and continued to observe town customs. 23. In my household survey of 1986, I found many heads of households, men and women, who had come from other counties in Guangdong during the war and who settled in Nanxi zhen afterward. 24. “The four clean-ups” campaigns preceded the Cultural Revolution. The major targets of attack were village cadres who had risen with the party bureaucracy.

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25. The reinforcement of family and patriarchy by socialist transformation has been dealt with by Stacey (1983), Margery Wolf (1985), and Honig and Hershatter (1988). See also the works of Kay Johnson and Elizabeth Croll. See also Davis and Harrell (1993). 26. Dingti is a system of job assignment in which a retiring person’s job can be taken over by his or her children. 27. On age cohorts and structured life chances, see Davis (1991), chapter 8, (1985), and (1988b); on dependent relationships in the urban industrial structure, see Davis (1988a). 28. I refer to marketing networks, temple and credit associations, neighborhood shrines, and ritual specialists, For example, residents relied more on their relatives for funerals when ritual specialists and coffin-bearers were not readily available. 29. For the bureaucratization of urban life, see Whyte and Parish (1984), Unger (1962), and Henderson (1984). 30. Cadres in the sands of Nanxi zhen complained that it was difficult to make the sands people settle in houses clustered in a village, which was achieved only in the 1970s. See Siu (1989a) on the step-by-step cellularization of rural communities in south China. 31. On the village-town divide, see Siu’s “The Politics of Migration in a Market Town” in Davis and Vogel (1990), pp. 61–82. 32. Yongding, a village adjacent to Nanxi zhen, is a rural settlement older than Nanxi zhen itself and containing established lineages. Jiuji, three kilometers southwest of Nanxi zhen, was a sizable village by the late Qing. Zhixi became a permanent settlement in the Republican period. Traditional customs in the villages did not disappear until the late 1950s. A village cadre in Zhixi said that, when his daughter married in 1953, she was carried in a sedan chair. 33. The provision of a house for the married couple illustrates what Jack Goody speaks of as “indirect dowry,” which is generally stressed by more disadvantaged families, whereas direct dowry is stressed by richer social groups (such as the former landlord and merchant families). 34. The price for building land shot up in the town as well as in the villages adjacent to the town. In 1988, the price reached 200 yuan per square meter, compared with about 80 yuan for the villages farther away. The head of Nanxi zhen was notorious for having secured some prime sites cheaply for his children and friends because he was in control of town planning and construction. A modern five-bedroom villa in town was 40,000 yuan in 1986 and rose to 150,000 yuan in 1989. 35. I attended the wedding of this young man, who had two older married sisters. He seemed not to know what he was doing throughout the entire affair. Earlier, I had interviewed him in my random sample survey as the head of a household. 36. The sum is about four to five times the average wage of a young worker. 37. In 1986, a standard wedding gift from friends was 5 yuan. In 1989, I was told to give 25 yuan whenever I was invited to a wedding. 38. The family used to work on bamboo handicrafts. In the 1980s, the head of the household worked as a manager for foreign trade in the largest factory in Nanxi zhen. His annual salary and benefits easily reached 60,000 yuan, according to friends. One of the sons opened a small factory for metal parts and had a prosperous business. In the previous three years, the family had built two three-story houses, costing over 100,000 yuan each.

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39. In traditional marriages, wedding cakes and banquet food were listed together with the brideprice and other items and presented to the bride’s family before the wedding. 40. The huiyou, close companions of the groom, often collectively give large decorative mirrors for the new couple to hang in their own house. In the case of the successful entrepreneur mentioned earlier, the groom asked the bride’s family to buy whatever dowry items it wanted and then have them billed to his family. When asked why they did that, the answer was the concern for “face.” 41. I am not sure how far these attitudes are due to the impact of the television and media of Hong Kong, which promote the individualistic energies of young entrepreneurs. In fact, young people in Nanxi zhen copy the Hong Kong lifestyle; for example, they buy imported clothes and electrical goods, smoke American cigarettes, drink Hong Kong beer, and use vocabulary popular on Hong Kong television programs. 42. Two of my good friends, both young entrepreneurs with a good education and contacts in Hong Kong, live apart from their parents although the latter come to care for their infant daughters. The interior design of their houses, each of which is equipped with a color television, a hi-fi system, and video, matches that of upper-middle-class families in Hong Kong. 43. In the villages closer to Nanxi zhen, turf is grown to supply the offices and hotels in the coastal cities and in Hong Kong. In the farther corners of the sands, banana plantations are common. They also produce for both internal and export markets. 44. See Martin Whyte’s “Wedding Behavior and Family Strategies in Chengdu,” in Davis and Harrell (1993), pp. 189–218.

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Part 4 Culturing Power

My interest in the reinvention of tradition and state involution in the post-Mao era is related to deeper theoretical explorations into cultural construction, hard and soft forms of power, historically specific representations, and the human agency involved. The three articles in this section were written in a period of sixteen years, but the central concerns are similar. A key theme concerns “the cultural nexus of power.” The term was highlighted by Prasenjit Duara (1988) to describe rural north China in the Republican period almost at the same time as I used it for late imperial South China to understand nuances of state-society relations and forms of governance (Siu 1989a). My basic questions are: How did imperial governments that lacked elaborate technologies and organizational capacities exert control over vast empires and maintain the legitimacy of their positions? Through what means did they secure compliance of regional groups and local societies, and generate the moral imagination and political commitment of their subjects? Eight years ago, I teamed up with historians in a book entitled Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006). We see the relationship between a political center and its peripheries as relational and mutually constitutive. This is probably contrary to historical documents that, in a one-directional way, extend the empire’s civilizing mission to regions it considers “raw,” culturally alien if not inferior, and to be politically and militarily “pacified.” This is a power relationship and a powerful narrative. Our book asks a key question: During the Ming-Qing transition, when the ethnicities of ruling elites and those they attempted to exert authority over were ambiguous and uncertain, how was “periphery” defined and constructed? Who was seen as culturally alien when the powerful at the center is considered “ethnic”? In fact, these are questions that David Faure, Chen Chunsheng, Liu Zhiwei and I have often asked. Looking from the margins, we are critical of the narrative strategies of historical documents compiled by literati scholars who had a hierarchical view on groups and regions at various “distances” from an assumed center. As mentioned in the introduction of this volume, we were initially inspired by the anthropologically oriented work of French cultural historians. They stress meaningful life-worlds in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the writing and understanding of history, and they connect micro dynamics on the ground with macro structures of political economy. We are particularly focused on the discursive aspects of such relationships, i.e., how meanings are used in symbolic and instrumental ways, by elites at the center, and by local subjects “at the margins” who might not see themselves as marginal at all. China’s long cultural, political history is characterized by intense identification with a “center” but with deep-rooted regional diversity of cultural practices and values. We acknowledge the overall impact of a political center with a civilizing mission, but we also view the pre-modern state as a malleable cultural idea from the ground up—through the lenses of popular religious rituals, lineage-building narratives, community festivals, and other “soft” arenas as the imperial metaphor percolated downwards and upwards and circulated across conscious regional constructs. We highlight local initiatives and cultural inventions that dovetailed with imperial prerogatives at crucial historical junctures when local inhabitants in the South China region became the empire’s culturally acceptable subjects (min), whether they were labeled “Han” or ethnic. These were processes of synergy and fusion rather than stark oppositions. We stress fluidity and ambiguity rather than hard boundaries and static conceptual categories (Faure and Siu 1995, Faure 2007). An associated theme is that of unity and diversity in Chinese culture as mentioned in earlier sections of this volume. This distinguishing characteristic of Chinese culture and society has been addressed by leading China anthropologists, in particular, Maurice Freedman, G. William Skinner, Arthur Wolf, Fei Xiaotong, Myron Cohen, and James Watson. While they show the interface of a unifying Chinese civilization and diversifying regional practices, we move beyond economic and functional definitions to highlight the meaningful agency of local society. From a critical “reading” of their “migration charters,” the lineage and communal institutions they built, the rituals they performed, the local gazetteers they wrote, the festivals they staged, and the literati pretensions in the language they used to distance themselves from those they labeled the “indigenous other,” we can delineate a cultural nexus of power in an evolving regional landscape. Moreover, the process dovetailed with the downward percolation of imperial institutions at crucial historical moments. Take the example of Guangdong and Fujian. Whenever members of the South China group visited sites in Fujian, we looked in vain for ancestral halls of reputable size and wealth. Likewise, when our Fujianese colleague visited Guangdong, they were equally disappointed at the modest-looking temples. Such a difference might very well be due to the fact that it was during the Song when Fujian was incorporated into the empire in a serious way, and the religious elements in the center were intensely deployed for making local society. Guangdong, on the other hand, was deeply transformed during the Ming and Qing. By then, blood kinship was a priority of the court. These This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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priorities were imagined and adopted by local inhabitants to establish their respective places in the empire for centuries that followed. This section starts with “Recycling Tradition: Culture, History and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China,” an article I published in 1990. It is a thick description of a community festival being recycled every sixty years by a different cast of characters in Xiaolan zhen. Lineages, merchant groups, and town cadres who organized the festivities from the early 19th to the late 20th centuries used different symbolisms of chrysanthemum to display an evolving identity. In the essay, I outline the intense cultural strategies of local residents to link communitybuilding with crucial moments in the reclamation of the sands, coupled with the rise of merchant elites and late imperial state-making. In contrast, the festivals from 1949 on have revealed a drastically changed state-society relationship. The symbolisms, timing and organizational structures have been dominated by the shifting priorities of a powerful party-state at the expense of local initiatives. The second article, “Lineage, Market, Pirate and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China,” attempts to read between the lines of historical documents to understand what it meant to be ethnically “Dan” in the shifting political ecology of the river marshes. Liu Zhiwei and I would not use “Dan” or “Han” as terms to categorize pre-existing ethnic and mainstream groups. Instead, we treat “Dan” as a label imposed by upwardly mobile groups of similar indigenous origins who drew hard lines against potential competitors. It was a shifting language of exclusion. We focus on the discursive means by which established farmers tapped a cultural repertoire of the imperial system to give their positions moral and political authority. We therefore argue that ethnicity was a fluid happening in the delta ecology. Hard ethnic labels were imposed by the powerful precisely when physical mobility was the norm, opportunities were diverse, social boundaries were easily transgressed, and identities remade. In the pursuit of upward mobility by diverse groups, a unifying cultural nexus of power was reproduced. In a word, the concrete institutions of the state could be absent in the open frontier of a delta, but the powerful language of the empire was everywhere to define ethnic and social hierarchies and to mark political alliances and conflicts. The third article turns attention to the nature of merchants in late imperial and early Republican South China. It engages the views of William Rowe, Susan Mann and David Faure on how merchants conducted their businesses with various cultural strategies. Faure argues that powerful merchants in Foshan owned vast landed estates and embraced literati traditions rather than developing an independent ideology to challenge these traditions. The merchants in Xinhui developed broad operational bases across rural and urban spaces that bridged state and local society. However, these organic processes were eroded by the late 19th century. I do not see “the golden This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:30:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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age of the Chinese bourgeoisie” with the fall of the Qing dynasty. Instead, I highlight the collapse of merchant groups, as their rural bases of authority were taken over by militaristic local bosses and their literati pretenses could no longer enforce contracts or facilitate business negotiations. Such a view goes against a dichotomous view of state and commerce. I treat merchants not as a distinct group of actors but a fluid process of becoming that linked imperial authority, rural institutions and commercial interests. The process intertwined political economies, emergent and residue institutions, and cultural languages of authority shrewdly used by local players.

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8 Recycling Tradition Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China

In the mid-19th century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir: Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong’s reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.1

The narrative continued: Age twenty-seven, the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong’s reign [1791], the chrysanthemum festival of that year was more elaborate than before. Age fifty, the nineteenth year of the reign of Jiaqing [1814], the town held another community-wide celebration. The staging of chrysanthemum operas the year before prompted the lineages to conduct a third festival. It has been twentyfour years since the last gathering. The He surname group provided two sets [of floral displays], the Li surname one set, all at their focal ancestral halls. Our own lineage mounted a display at the hall for an ancestor of the sixth generation. The weisuo [military colony] set up its own in front of the Guandi temple.2 The Xiao surname mounted their display at the hall for their focal ancestor. The Xitu [a neighborhood division] gave a display at the Zhong ancestral hall. A Li lineage also had its own display, as did the Liang of Luoyong and the Shifu temple.

In Xiaolan zhen, a market town in the heart of the Pearl River Delta of south China, the chrysanthemum has historically informed popular consciousness in crucial ways. It was believed that original settlers were attracted to the area by the yellow flower seven centuries ago.3 The local scholars used it in their writings, as had members of the literati4 in the cities. Documents of major lineages in town also proudly described the role of their prominent members in the staging of the chrysanthemum festivals, where, amid drink, poetry, and operas, they mimicked the imperial examinations by competing with elegant floral displays.5 The town’s aspiring scholars initiated a major chrysanthemum festival in the late 18th century. It continued to be held in the 20th century although the power This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of military adventurers associated with the warlords in the Republican period had replaced the authority of the literati. Surprisingly, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party after the Revolution of 1949, the town government continued what it branded as a “feudal” custom. Between 1959 and 1979, the town staged the festival three times, the last one involving an elaborate feast attended by overseas compatriots targeted as potential investors in an age of economic reform. Since the 1980s, local residents have taken for granted that the officials have given Xiaolan the alias “Chrysanthemum Town.” A hotel and the major state department store also carry the name. Town bakeries advertise their chrysanthemum-flavored egg rolls for export. Party officials—the very same cadres who in the past denounced the cultivation of chrysanthemums as a decadent pursuit of the leisure class—have searched hard for former landlords and their descendants to revive the art. That the community-wide chrysanthemum festival has continued to be actively pursued over 200 years, despite dramatic changes in their environment, triggers analytical questions: one can assume that, as with other rituals practiced over long periods, an active, continuous cultural tradition is at work that is improvised by diverse needs. But why has the chrysanthemum festival assumed such significance in the popular understanding of history and social identity in Xiaolan? During the last five centuries, the sands of the Pearl River Delta developed into an elaborate social landscape with prosperous villages and towns. Had the staging of the festivals in Xiaolan formed an integral part in the building of lineage and community, and of the regional political economy? In other words, did the local inhabitants, elites and commoners, actively use symbolic and instrumental means to become part of the Chinese culture and polity? If they did, how was this cultural symbol recycled and diffused in everyday social living to create new meanings and to reinforce new political interests when the imperial order disintegrated in the 20th century? By examining the ways the festival’s various expressions form a unifying thread in the transformation of the relationship between local society and the centers of power, I hope to highlight the process allowing the development of a region that was autonomous and diverse but bore the unifying imprint of the larger state culture. The evolution of the Chinese civilization is composed of an infinite differentiation into local cultures and economies, and an intense identification with the larger state system. This characteristic of Chinese culture has long been recognized by scholars although few offer full accounts of the acculturation process. For the past few decades, three paradigms in Chinese anthropology have addressed the issue from different angles. G. William Skinner argues that Chinese history is structured by cycles of regional growth and decline (1985a). He divides China into macro-regions linked to the central polity, each having its hierarchy of marketing systems. The component parts of this hierarchy, the marketing communities, are discrete, culturally homogeneous units at one level but interactive at the next higher level (1964). He emphasizes This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the rhythms in the opening and closure of these communities in relation to dynastic changes (1971). The unfolding of these functionally differentiated but structurally integrated systems rests on the logic of market exchange and calculations of cost-distance. The Chinese peasant is a rational maximizer responding to changing administrative environments. Skinner’s analysis of the marketing hierarchy gives a conceptual coherence to social life in time and space, but politics, culture, and social institutions are given analytical weight only after the economic skeleton is in place. The seminal works of the late Maurice Freedman (1958, 1966) on lineage, a dominant social organization in south China, became enduring influences on sinological anthropology. Coming from the structural-functionalist tradition in British Social Anthropology, he highlighted certain principles of kinship as unifying features of Chinese culture and examined how these principles found their niche in the river deltas of southeastern China. The wondrous range of lineage communities, made explicit by collective properties and elaborate public rituals, give their members a shared consciousness about cultural identity. Arthur Wolf examines the relationship between state and society through popular religion and ritual (Wolf 1974, pp. 131–82). He characterizes the major interactive categories in peasant folk religion—gods, ghosts, and ancestors—as projections of peasant perceptions of the imperial bureaucracy, the village stranger, and kin in the material world. The tension between collective representations and differentiated social structure can be traced to a Durkheimian tradition. Since the 1960s, theoretical constructs on which these sinological paradigms are based have been scrutinized by new generations of scholars.6 Formalist notions of marginal utility serving as the dynamic force in human behavior have long been confronted by political economic approaches emphasizing limits in choice due to dependence and to unequal access to power.7 Sensitivity to rapid and drastic social change after the postwar era has forced scholars to acknowledge process in social systems formerly conceptualized as a state of functional, timeless equilibrium. Moreover, the examination of social structure incorporating cumulative changes has been strengthened by attempts to see how the past informs the present through a subjective, selective use of history (Rosaldo 1980, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Critical theorists on ideological domination debate about inversion, subversion, and containment in cultural discourse.8 Rituals are increasingly seen not only as exerting symbolic meaning to reflect society but also as cultural performances to create new meanings (Moore and Myerhoff 1977; Geertz 1983, pp. 121–46). Their symbolic and instrumental aspects encompass multiple, dialogical, and often contradictory voices. Many of the new theoretical constructs assume human actors are neither totally programmed by cultural rules nor compelled by economic forces. In the creation of cultural meaning, the concepts of agency and structuring become central.9 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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These theoretical developments are reflected in studies in Chinese anthropology. Emily Ahern (1981) analyzes ritual as a means to learn about politics and power. Using the French structuralist theory as a starting point, Steven Sangren (1987) offers new views on the reproduction of social structure and cultural meaning in a Taiwanese community. James Watson adopts a historical approach to lineage institutions (1982; with Ebrey 1986). He also examines how the standardization of rituals through time has allowed the creation of a unifying cultural identity that gives room for diverse beliefs (Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski 1985, pp. 292–324; Watson and Rawski 1988). Myron L. Cohen argues that cultural discourse in China, dependent on rituals as much as shared consciousness, arises from the flux of social life and is subject to the state’s manipulation (1989). This article is in line with the spirit of the above scholars in bringing studies of Chinese culture, society, and history closer to the mainstream of contemporary social theory. By analyzing the community-wide festivals in Xiaolan from the late 18th century to the present and by explicating how the nature, meaning, and dynamics of these cultural expressions intertwined with the evolution of the regional political economy, this essay suggests how one may build upon the rich body of historical materials and rethink the analytical tools. Xiaolan was situated on the dividing line between the old and the new alluvial plains of the Pearl River Delta (see Map 1). Since the Ming dynasty, managers of ancestral trusts, commercial enterprises, and para-political associations based in the towns and cities in the older part of the delta had financed and organized the reclamation of river marshes. Known locally as sha, or sands, they were formed as the Pearl River continued its southeastward flow into the sea. Similar to other deltas and marshes around China’s lakes, the sands reclaimed in the late imperial period were not ordinary frontiers.10 From the very start, their projects had involved largescale capital investment and planning to induce sedimentation, and to build dikes and polders. Using the informal political networks of members who had acquired academic degrees and official posts in the imperial bureaucracy, lineage trusts and guilds in the cities secured vast areas from the county magistrates and negotiated tax exemptions for a long period by promising to turn the river marshes into productive fields. They hired functionaries to organize local laborers for these reclamation projects. Referred to as Dan, the boat-dwelling laborers have been considered a sub-ethnic group by land-based agriculturalists. The two maintained different social customs and seldom intermarried.11 The dwellings found on the initial dikes in the sands were temporary straw huts built by laborers who later became tenants. This was partly due to the sheer scale of reclamation,12 but it was also because landlords explicitly forbade the construction of permanent houses in order to claim the area as “unsettled,” a way to avoid taxes. Each outpost the functionaries set up consisted This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of a granary, a house for the overseers, quarters for the laborers and crop-watching forces, and a fleet of boats for grain transportation. Xiaolan was probably one such outpost. Local strongmen arose to become the area’s tenant-contractors. Known as baodian, they paid a cash rent to the landlords in the cities and collected the harvest in kind from their own tenants. To secure the grain was an event in itself. It was not uncommon for the farmers to “cut the green ears” of their crops (geheqing) and then flee the area in their boats. An 18th-century observer (Qu 1700) recorded that local strongmen countered these acts by force. They organized boatloads of armed men, brandishing flags and weapons, and descended upon the fields to “force harvest” (qiangge). Many used the occasion to encroach upon the land and crops of those whose property boundaries were unclear because of the unpredictable flow of the river. The grain was temporarily stored at the outpost and then transported directly to wholesale merchants in county capitals and cities such as Shiqi, Shunde, Foshan and Guangzhou. The open “frontier,” however, allowed multiple ways of accumulating wealth for the local population because there was a limit to how far the managers of the citybased ancestral trusts and guilds could reach. In time, the local functionaries of these estates established their own bases of operations in the outposts. The upwardly mobile acquired academic degrees, built ancestral halls, and used similar cultural claims embodied in the lineage organizations to challenge the rights of their former patrons. From the east to the west of the delta, one can see a line of such outposts that have grown into supercenters of wealth and power in the last three centuries, separating the older part of the delta from the sands that continued to be reclaimed. Although the sands were economically an integral part of the town’s operations, the two were distinctly different worlds. The people of the sands have been, up to recent decades, considered poor, migrant, ethnically inferior, and lacking in social grace.13 This system of domination was made up of two nexuses. Between the laborertenants and the local strongmen there existed a relationship based on a blatant display of force. The tenants were treated as socially and culturally marginal. However, there was an arena for dialogue and negotiation based on some common cultural vocabulary between the landlords in town and their functionaries who could be powerful tenant-contractors. When disputes arose over land rights or when protection was sought against encroachment, patrons and kin in the county capitals and towns were called upon to arbitrate. Xiaolan had grown from an outpost in the sands in the Ming dynasty (1348–1644) to a prosperous market town in the late 19th century. It was nominally administered by the Xiangshan county magistrate, the lowest seat of the imperial government based in Shiqi, some twenty-seven kilometers away. Xiaolan’s social life and politics were dominated by the three major lineages of He, Li, and Mai, whose leading members This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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controlled grain production, trade, and the reclamation of the sands. These lineages had elaborate genealogies showing a dazzling array of academic degree holders and imperial officials from centuries past.14 Their focal ancestral halls, often dedicated to an original founder of the lineage, were built at the end of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century and renovated through the Qing dynasty. Numerous halls for subsequent ancestors were built in the 19th century. Extensive in size (consisting of three rows of halls and two courtyards), supported by hardwood beams from Indochina, with curved roofs and carved stone slabs indicating honor and upward mobility in the imperial bureaucracy, these halls served as centers for kinship rituals performed at least biannually. The activities helped the lineages to exert an imposing collective presence on the rural landscape. The 393 ancestral halls in the town, which in the mid-20th century had fewer than 20,000 residents (including those in Dalan, a district adjoining the town), represented a phenomenal proliferation of wealth under the shadow of ancestors.15 The lineage ideal might have originated from the cultural centers of north China and adapted to the “frontiers” of south China, as Freedman envisioned, but local concerns in Xiaolan also worked themselves into the features of the larger society. The extreme proliferation of small ancestral trusts and the uncharacteristic importance of the focal ancestral halls of the He, Li, and Mai lineages are cases in point. The multiple sources of income in the sands had allowed individual families to accumulate substantial wealth in order to set up their own ancestral trusts. In a sense, the process of rapid fission of lineage branches can be viewed as a “devolution” of the lineage ideal. However, the scale of the reclamation and the need to flex political muscle against encroachment led to constant appeals for consolidation and alliance in the name of focal ancestors, an organizational means culturally accepted and politically tolerated by the imperial state. The focal ancestor halls of the He, Li, and Mai lineages in Xiaolan were moderately endowed with estates.16 More important, they had served as useful political umbrellas. As centers of lineage and other ritual activities, they operated schools and granaries, collected rent from the sands and particular neighborhoods in town, contributed to community temples, local defense, and flood control, and dealt with the tax assessors and collectors for the estates of their lineage branches when settlement rights were involved. In fact, each operated as much as a community as a kinship institution.17 As with lineages in other parts of China, those in Xiaolan actively sought connections to the imperial bureaucracy. The focal ancestral halls were named after particular members of the respective lineages who had acquired the highest academic or official ranks. For example, the Li lineage named theirs Li Shangshu Da Zongci (The Senior Focal Ancestor Hall of Li the Minister). One of the two major He lineages named their hall He Neige Da Zongci (The Senior Focal Ancestral Hall of He in the Imperial Cabinet). The other He lineage named theirs He Taiqing Da Zongci (The This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Senior Focal Ancestral Hall of He the Chief Minister). During the height of their power in 1873, these two lineages jointly built an ancestral hall for the “grandfather” of their focal ancestors, a high-ranking imperial official in the Song court, and named it after his title. Connections between lineage power and the literati culture were also made by funding scholars aspiring to sit for the imperial examinations, being patrons to local academies, compiling genealogies to show an impressive record of literati pedigree, establishing their voice in the town covenant, and, last, by actively organizing community rituals.18 This affluent town hosted an intense ritual complex of which the ancestral halls and their wealth formed an integral part.19 Managers of ancestral trusts, patrons of the town’s 139 temples, monasteries, and numerous neighborhood shrines (known as she), all contributed to their festivals and renovations. The rituals created religious, social, and political meanings for participants. To be entitled to a portion of the ritual pork at lineage ceremonies meant having rights to tenure on ancestral estates and free education in lineage schools, settlement in particular villages and neighborhoods, and protection by the elite members of the lineages against encroachment, official and otherwise. Two temples for the city god (Chenghuang) were set up by local elites, and they established linkages to the larger political environment. Such temples were unusual for a place like Xiaolan, whose administrative status was below that of a county capital. The temples obliged visiting imperial officials to pay their respects. In so doing, the officials acknowledged that they interacted in a common political-moral arena with the local notables who built them. Based on an annual cosmic cycle, the ancestral rites and local temple festivals mobilized overlapping groups of patrons and participants. The high point of this ritual complex occurred in midyear. Known as the jiao, communal exorcism took place on the seventh month of the lunar year. Platforms for operas were erected in front of the biggest community temple. Buddhist monks and Daoist priests were hired to perform services for several days to cleanse the community of evil spirits. For three days, deities from the five major temples of the town and adjacent neighborhoods were paraded along the small river encircling the town, forming a line of a dozen or so boats. Each day, the deities of one temple led the parade.20 Rice would be thrown into the river to feed the “hungry ghosts.” In return for the annual cleansing and bestowing of fortune, households in these neighborhoods prepared offerings to the deities when the images were paraded past their doors. Amid fireworks, the deities were followed by sets of decorations depicting well-known historical episodes and tales, and children dressed in costumes of legendary figures and skillfully propped up by metal and wooden stands. The displays were known as se ban. Whether the sponsors were lineages, neighborhoods centering on an earth shrine, or trade guilds, there was a degree of competition to put on the most elaborate display.21 In Durkheimian This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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terms, they conveyed the atmosphere of rejoicing in unison. They also confirmed certain epistemological notions about the cosmic forces of conflict and harmony, yin and yang, and the spiritual essences that have become longstanding features of the Chinese cultural repertoire. At the same time, the ceremonies differentiated social status according to gender, age, kin, wealth, and territorial boundaries in a changeable world of human affairs. The rituals reinforced positions of power shrewdly pursued by the locally wealthy at its apex. Despite the patronage of the lineages, the jiao ceremonies were constructed along non-kin lines. The organizational units were temples that accepted donations from ancestral halls, guilds, and neighborhoods.22 Furthermore, the town residents who were active participants of the parades, making offers and feasting at the conclusion of the jiao, distinguished themselves from the inhabitants of the sands who were onlookers at most. The terms “us over here” and “those out there” continued to be used, the latter referring to farmers and fishermen from outside of town, who were considered poor and uncultured, living on embankments where no sizable community, lineage, or temple existed. Exclusion continued well into the mid-20th century. When local bosses in the village of Jiuzhouji three kilometers west of Xiaolan rose to power in the late 1940s and decided to hold a jiao ceremony of their own, the inhabitants of Xiaolan were delighted that a storm washed out the festivities, thus “putting the usurpers in their place.”23 The significance of the ceremonies as a dynamic part of local cultural and political discourses seemed poignant to all.

The Chrysanthemum Festivals Since the beginning of the Qing dynasty (AD 1644), the activities of local scholars took a very visible form. Unlike the jiao ritual, the center of activities rotated around the major ancestral halls and the headquarters of the township covenant (Lanxiang Gongyue), poetry associations, and private academies (such as the Congwen and the Lanshan academies).24 The first event related to chrysanthemums, recorded in 1736, was not in the form of a community-wide festival. Jushi, as the event was named, took place in front of the ancestral hall of a member of the Li lineage who had once acquired the position of minister of rites at the Ming court in Nanjing.25 Five years later, it was followed by another ceremony in front of the ancestral hall of a member of the He lineage, who was also a senior member of the imperial academy and a minister at the southern Ming court.26 According to He Lizai, who wrote Lanxie, a book in the 1870s (He Dazuo 1870s) about local customs and history, the center of the display ground in both cases was taken up by a platform for operas, with stands on both sides for potted chrysanthemums. Participants followed specific requirements for floral entries based on type, color, and title, as if they were essays presented for the imperial examinations. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Then, professional opera troupes from Guangzhou performed for several days in front of the ancestral halls, paralleling temple festivals in which operas were performed for the gods. Although these early displays seem to have disappeared, another form of chrysanthemum-related activities flourished in later years. Identified as jushe, these events were organized by literary associations and involved floral displays, but their main purpose was to have aspiring scholars gather from far and near to drink, and recite poetry in connection with the flowers. These events were often held once a year, depending on resources of the patrons. The diffusion of this scholarly event into the wider community started with a chrysanthemum festival called juhua hui in 1782—the one the gentleman named Mai recorded. Unlike popular religious festivals, with their regular and predictable schedules and forms, the chrysanthemum events were staged in an ad hoc manner. Nine years lapsed between the first and the second festivals. The third festival, which took place twenty-four years later, was prompted by a political event the previous year. A dispute had arisen between a certain Liang Chiyu and the township notables over contributions to the local work on flood control. The magistrate intervened and arrested Liang. The major lineages therefore arranged for operas to be staged in front of a temple as a way of acknowledging the supernatural forces behind the magistrate’s judgment. It was autumn, and chrysanthemums were blossoming. As a consequence, the theatrical performances were named the chrysanthemum operas. Because the event triggered complaints that it had been a long time since the festivals themselves had been staged, the major lineages planned one the following year, the year of Jiashu (1814). According to an essay written by a local scholar on that occasion, the festival was conducted in a grand style unmatched by any other. The deliberate purpose was explicit—to revive a historical happening that Xiaolan residents could claim as their own. As Luyun shanfang jushi wrote ([1814]/1936): In Landu [Xiaolan and Dalan] . . . local residents are experts in the art of cultivating chrysanthemums; . . . Occasionally they have organized events for them . . . named huanghua hui. For an area of many miles, the golden colors shine, the air is filled with the songs of operas, the music of stringed instruments, and the chanting of poetry. . . . Yet the occasions have been infrequent; from the Xinhai year of Qianlong to now, there were only two, so that the event becomes nothing but hearsay in people’s minds, or are believed to be an occasional act of the flower deity. Recently, friends and kinsmen from the provincial capital and neighboring counties would enquire about the event whenever they meet natives of Landu, who are at a loss as to what to say. . . . But they find that in the gardens, the flowers are just about to blossom. This has led to the idea of another festival.

It is worth noting that the focal ancestral halls where operas were performed were the centers of the festival. Moreover, the opera troupes specialized in a style This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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connected with the kun qu. Popular among higher literati in metropolitan centers, the style was an extra status symbol for the organizers.27 That the festival was held in the year of Jiashu was not insignificant. A similar year of Jiashu eight centuries ago was identified by the lineages as the time when their founding ancestors initiated the move from northern Guangdong to the delta. It was suggested that the festival be put on a regular basis, to take place every sixty years, in order to link the initial migration with the cycle of cosmic time. In so doing, the historical and cultural consciousness of the mortals projected the significance of their arrival to the realm of divine forces.28 Why was the initial arrival of settlers so important to the local elites? It is useful to examine this issue with relation to other activities around the time of the 1814 festival. Large lineages in the older part of the delta, particularly in the county capitals where the seat of the imperial government was in place, had claimed vast areas of the sands. Original claimants who petitioned for their reclamation were entitled to tax exemptions and to a fee paid by the cultivators known as the “skeletal fee” (sha gu). In addition, they received rents in kind that formed the bulk of a prosperous grain trade in the area. If these rights were contested, establishing the timing of the initial migration and settlement of the lineages in Xiaolan would have been very important. It seems logical to assume that the festival was shrewdly used by elites at the time to give a historical depth to their presence even though the legitimacy of their claim was questionable. Amid the floral displays and drink, there were poetry competitions. The winning pieces were hung in front of the focal ancestral halls of the lineages hosting the events. These poetry couplets centered on Tao Yuanming, a 4th-century official who retired to the life of a hermit in his chrysanthemum gardens because he refused to serve another master at a time of rapid dynastic transition. The idea of retirement from official life seemed to go against the general interest of a period when local elites were just about to reach the height of their achievements as literati in the Qing court and when loyalist feelings for the former Ming dynasty, if they had ever existed at all, were long abandoned as a result of new social mobility. Granted that there was a history of anti-Manchu sentiments among individual scholars connected with the Ming court, their descendants in Xiaolan in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were entrenched in the bureaucracy.29 The genealogies of the major lineages, compiled and revised during these centuries, flaunted their literati members. The play on the symbolisms of chrysanthemum and Tao Yuanming obviously had other references that only became clear in the context of the larger state culture and the developing regional economy. The chrysanthemum, together with plum, orchid, and bamboo, was a popular topic of artistic representation among scholars in Xiaolan and elsewhere. Since the Song period, the flower was seen as expressing the ideals of the hermit, the elevated distance of the scholar from mundane political affairs. However, retreat continued to affirm attachment to the imperial order. Participation in the literati culture, even at a This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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distance from the court, was an important asset in local politics, where authority of the imperial bureaucracy was often brought to bear. In fact, conflicting parties have striven to attach themselves to lineage and community members who had attained the highest academic degrees or political ranks in order to influence the local magistrate’s decisions. Furthermore, notions of retreat from the Manchu court of the Qing dynasty carried with them a benign nostalgia toward the imperial lines in the previous dynasties of the Song and the Ming, both overrun by non-Han groups. Such a connection with the past in the early 19th century was no longer politically threatening to incur official wrath from the Qing court, but the literati pedigree suggested by such sentiments alluded to a long history of settlement and growth of the major lineages. All this might very well come up against similar claims by competitors in neighboring counties for rights in the sands. Fragmented historical materials do not allow us to conjecture about the expansionist motives of the elites in Xiaolan at the time, and it is difficult to link the festivals directly with subsequent economic gains by the lineages. However, one at least notes that the festivities provided the setting in which a long history of settlement, lineage power, and literati pretentions were explicitly interlocked. The created nexus was important. Having collectively appropriated the status symbols of a state culture and thus its political connections, aspiring elites in Xiaolan aggressively claimed the sands from county magistrates in the name of their lineages and developed them into productive farmland. The economic bases of these elites diversified. Some were managers of estates, native bankers, and merchants, but their wealth continued to be firmly tied to the reclamation of the sands, the rent collected from lineage and private estates, and the control of the grain trade, while it was legitimized by their active participation in the cultural discourse of the imperial state. The history of the He lineage in the 19th century shows this trend. He Yanggao (1964), who documents in detail the accelerated pace by which the He lineage acquired land, academic and official titles, and built ancestral halls during that century, concludes that the lineage had reached the height of its power. The community as a whole was also gaining attention. The 1827 edition of the Xiangshan county gazetteer recorded that the number of literati in Landu matched that of the rest of the county. It also had one of the two community academies in Xiangshan. In a charitable donation recorded in the same gazetteer, the major lineages (He, Li, Mai), the military colonies (San Weisuo), and the Xitu (six lesser surnames) each held shares in the endeavor.30 The collective ambitions of the local elites in Xiaolan appeared less subtle to their neighbors and to officials sixty years later, when another generation staged the chrysanthemum festival. As before, the centers of activities were the focal ancestral halls. It is not coincidental that the most senior focal ancestral hall of the He lineage, commemorating the grandfather of the two He brothers who settled in Xiaolan, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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was built the year before. This time, the festivities of the halls were coordinated with those of the major temples patronized by merchants, guilds and neighborhoods. They unified the participants under a large communal umbrella. The documents recording this festival repeatedly stressed the territorial identity of the town as being made up of the major lineages and community temples. Furthermore, local notables congregated in the Lanshan Academy for a town-wide poetry competition and feast. The theme of the poetry competition centered on Zhang Jiuling, a native of northern Guangdong, a prime minister in the Tang dynasty (618–907). He was remembered for his effort to upgrade a route through the mountain pass separating Guangdong from the Central Plains, where all the major lineages claimed their ancestors used to migrate to some years later.31 By insisting that their ancestors belonged to prominent families in the Central Plains who had migrated southward with the Song court, the local elites in Xiaolan on the one hand made every pretense to dissociate themselves from aboriginal roots and, on the other, predated their literati pedigree by a few additional centuries.32 There were nevertheless a few setbacks to the 1874 festival. A storm destroyed many of the flowers displayed, but more importantly the festival triggered a political storm that had been brewing for some time. The former governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, a native by the name of He Jing, who happened to be in the area that year, had specifically warned against theatrical performances. His stated reasons were that Emperor Tongzhi’s death earlier in the year made such festivities inappropriate and that the entire country, wracked by peasant revolts for over a decade, should have time for recuperation, not extravagance.33 He Jing seemed to attempt to temper parochial interests by a moral dialogue in which local elites were obliged to engage, but he had a hidden agenda. The opera troupes in Foshan, a regional city to the northeast, had a wide appeal in the Pearl River Delta. Organized under a guild and managed by the Jiqing Gongsuo (the guild’s contractor office), the troupes traveled in large red boats to various towns and villages in order to perform in temple festivals. Working under harsh conditions and officially discriminated against (they were barred from taking the imperial examinations), the actors congregated with other low-status groups. A few members of the theatrical troupes in Foshan had become leaders in the Red Turban rebellion.34 From 1854, when the rebellion began, to 1861, when it was stamped out by the government troops, local society was militarized and polarized. The government’s general policy of dealing with the widespread peasant rebellions in the mid-19th century was to militarize local society for self-defense, led by local gentry.35 Sometimes the lineages and their leaders took sides either with the government or with the rebels, and feuded among themselves over land and property. In Xiaolan, those who sided with the rebels (who were stationed in the center of town for months) perished under the government troops when the latter regained control. The Xiao lineage of This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Dalan, whose influence had been dwarfed by the rise of the He lineage in Xiaolan, seized the opportunity provided by the political turnover to acquire the estates of the Mai lineage.36 The theatrical troupes in the rebellion lost their guild. The Qionghua Huiguan in Foshan was razed to the ground. Performances in the Pearl River Delta were also forbidden until 1867. By the time the Xiaolan elites proposed a new festival, seven years had passed since the prohibition order was lifted. Nevertheless, local officials appeared to have been apprehensive, because the chrysanthemum festival might very well turn into a subversive platform against the imperial order if lineages feuding over land rights rose to the occasion. From the officials’ point of view, it was probably a political situation too volatile to allow taking chances. Xiaolan elites supposedly complied with the prohibition on the operas, though allegorical statements about the difficulties faced by Zhang Jiuling in the Tang court were loudly expressed in the poems chosen as winners in the poetry competition.37 Moreover, documents recorded that couplets were hung in front of theatrical platforms, indicating performances were planned and probably given.38 The fears of the officials were not entirely ungrounded. From the mid-19th century on, an alliance of local elites in the county capital, Shiqi, were known to have disputed fiercely with established lineages in the older parts of the delta, such as the Luo and the Long of Shunde county, over the sands bordering the two counties.39 The position of the elites in Xiaolan was ambiguous. The town was situated next to the disputed area. Administratively, the elites of Shiqi operated in the social and political circles of the provincial capital (Guangzhou) quite unfamiliar to the elites of Xiaolan, who nonetheless identified with the county. Socially, they were closer to the inhabitants of Shunde. Apart from being business and marriage partners, they shared the same local dialect. There is little documentary evidence that the elites in Xiaolan took sides, but one may assume that any officials sensitive to the issue might have hesitated about encouraging a community-wide festival with invited guests from both areas. Lineages continued to be component parts in the chrysanthemum festival in Xiaolan, but elite organizations based on territorial bonds were emerging as a vital force, as highlighted by the festival in 1874. The festival marked a phase of new development in the regional economy centering on the sands of southern Shunde and northern Xiangshan, where Xiaolan established itself as a major cultural and marketing center. The second half of the 19th century saw an accelerated accumulation of wealth by merchants based on mechanized grain milling, wine making, pig rearing, and cloth and silk trading. Farmers converted rice fields surrounding town to mulberry dikes in order to feed an expanding silk-cocoon industry. The leaves and cocoons were sold in specialized markets in Xiaolan and in Rongqi of Shunde.40 Lineage trusts gradually shifted their rent collection in kind to cash rents and reinvested them in commercial enterprises in both counties. In cultural tastes This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and lifestyles, Xiaolan elites moved closer to those of Shunde and the older part of the delta although their economic base required continued control over the sands. A well-known example of cultural affinity between Xiaolan and Shunde is the custom of delayed transfer marriage and later of the “marriage resistance” (zishunü). In fact, as early as in the 1827 edition of the Xiangshan county gazetteer (Huang Peifang 1827), the compiler reported that the northern part of the county had acquired the custom of Shunde and that women who married often remained in their natal home for years. Large dowries, often in the form of land or large provisions of grain, were also given by elite families in both areas.41 However, the economy became vulnerable to the volatile world market and the political crisis in the early decades of the 20th century. The imperial order was crumbling. The Qing government was defeated by the Japanese in 1894 and again by an alliance of eight foreign countries during the Boxer Rebellion in 1898. In 1905, the imperial examination system was abolished, meaning that the normal channels of mobility for the literati were truncated. In 1911, a group of civil and military strongmen overthrew the dynasty. A republic was set up under Sun Yat-sen, but the country was immediately fragmented by warlords supported by foreign powers. It was not until 1927 that the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek maintained a shaky unity based in Nanjing. However, the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and by late 1930s overran most of the country. The major cities of Guangdong were occupied by the Japanese military from 1938 to 1945.42 Locked into long-term cash rent agreements with their tenant-contractors, who were often local strongmen in the sands, the managers of the lineage estates were ruined by the monetary crises arising from the disintegration of the imperial order.43 Many ancestral trusts were unable to finance the elaborate lineage ceremonies and stopped the distribution of ritual pork to its members. Local newspapers reported numerous disputes among kinsmen over ancestral land being parceled out and sold.44 In areas away from the coast and major cities, local military bosses carved out their own territories and ruled with their guns.45 The linkages among those controlling the vast sands, lineage power, and the authority of state culture, built up in the last few centuries and expressed in and reinforced by the previous chrysanthemum festivals, were broken in crucial ways. Under such circumstances, one may wonder why another chrysanthemum festival was proposed in the early 1930s. In fact, the heads of the major lineages were ambivalent. To use a metaphor, theatrical performances became meaningless when the stage had fallen into disrepair and the actors were unsure of their roles. Nevertheless, the festival was staged in 1934. There was a clear shift not only in the content of the festival but also in the centers of activities and in the social bases of the leading organizers. Under the directorship of a committee, the town was divided into several neighborhood districts in which festivities were organized. The defining units were no longer focal This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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ancestral halls. Instead, community temples, which served as public security offices of neighborhoods and were heavily patronized by local military bosses, overshadowed the ancestral halls. They put on elaborate displays of flowers, hired operas from Foshan and Guangzhou, sponsored community exorcism ceremonies, and paraded images of deities along the canal encircling Xiaolan. The latter two activities carried the religious overtone of temple festivals absent in previous chrysanthemum festivals. According to the accounts of local newspapers and from interviews of participants in this festival, the opening ceremonies were officially conducted under the auspices of native place associations in Guangzhou and Hong Kong46 at two unusual locations. In the morning, the entire organizing committee and their guests met at the Kentang Shushi, a private memorial hall of a Liu family. Events in the afternoon were held at an open ground on the western edge of town, where the largest platform for operas was constructed. The opera troupes were no longer performing the traditional kun qu. Instead, the more parochial Cantonese versions catering to popular taste were given. The head of the organizing committee, He Fangtan, was a formal degree holder and a merchant who had also served in the government of the provincial warlords.47 Prominent overseas merchants and the head of the administrative district that encompassed Xiaolan (a certain Liang Bingyun) made their respective speeches, followed by a selection of the town’s senior residents. Those chosen, 240 in all, were later feasted by a merchant of the Li surname, who had returned from Hong Kong. There was also an exhibition, sponsored by the merchants and town government, of modern machineries for silk and grain production. The troops of the military bosses, whose normal duty was to collect fees from tenants in the sands, were stationed in town supposedly to maintain order. During the half month of activities, thousands of visitors came, some from as far as Guangzhou and Hong Kong. They were easy prey to the troops, who extracted protection fees from them as they had from opera troupes, temples, opium dens, and peddlers of all kinds conducting business at the festival.48 The three major lineages also displayed floral sets at their focal ancestral halls, but the talk of the town were the independently rich households, which joined in with their own lavishness. One such notable site was Rong Yuan, a garden jointly owned by a certain Liu Rongjie and a Gan Hanchen, both speculators in gold and commodities with financial bases in Guangzhou and Shanghai. An interview with a formal gardener of Liu Rongjie reveals that Liu sold a shop in Guangzhou in order to finance his floral displays and his feasting of over a hundred friends and relatives who came from different parts of the delta. On the whole, the festival in 1934 reflected the disintegration of a core leadership in town, which used to be bolstered by lineage power based on landed wealth and literati prestige. It nevertheless pointed to the rise of a heterogeneous group of local strongmen and overseas merchants who had linked up with provincial warlords and whose organizational bases were community temples and neighborhood associations. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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These emergent interest groups imposed their own preferences in the 1934 festival. It was their idea to stage the festival. Activities were organized around their power bases and not those of the ancestral halls. From the selection of operas and exhibitions to the collection of fees and profits, it was clear to all that the carriers of the state literati culture had been overshadowed by commercial and militaristic elites whose tastes were shaped by a regional popular culture. They had emerged during the early 1930s, when military bosses all over China carved out their spheres of control from the contenders after the fall of the Qing dynasty and for the ensuing two decades, replaced what remained of a central government in face of the Japanese advances. The local bosses in Xiaolan reached the height of their power during this period, using community temples and public security offices that had been the centers of activities in the 1934 festival as their tax-collection and military headquarters.49 The socialist revolution brought drastic changes to Xiaolan and its rural hinterland. The Land Reform conducted in 1951 confiscated all the ancestral estates and divided them among the tenant-farmers in the sands. Many of the landlords, estate managers, merchants, and local bosses were killed or severely persecuted. In the 1950s, collectivization and the imposition of state control over prices and marketing shrank the social and economic world of local residents.50 Despite its protestations against feudal customs, and actual prohibitions of lineage and temple activities, the socialist town government did not wait another sixty years to conduct a chrysanthemum festival. In fact, the festival was staged three times under different political circumstances. The first took place in 1959 in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The second one was quietly put on during an ebb in the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution period. A much grander festival was staged in 1979 as economic reform and political liberalization were gearing up. It attracted national and overseas attention.51 The schedule of the festival in 1959 was obviously accelerated to fit an important political event of the new government. The festival in 1973 took place in a time of political uncertainty. In the end phase of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party remained extremely factionalized as cadres had hardly recovered from the nationwide political witch hunt. A group of Taiwanese merchants decided to organize an exhibition of chrysanthemums in Hong Kong. In response, the town government hurriedly staged its own in an attempt to claim back its community symbol. However, a floral display in the shape of “the fairy maiden showering flowers” (xiannü sanhua), a symbol of traditional culture, led to a heated debate between factions in the party concerning the proper “political line” (zhengzhi luxian). Although the provincial chairman, Chen Yu, who happened to be traveling in the area, gave the go-ahead to the fairy maiden, a floral design in the form of the revolutionary soldier Lei Feng was finally erected to appease the radical Maoists. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The festival in 1979 was organized by the town government with a different order of magnitude. The decision of the national party to reverse the Maoist politics of the previous decades was confirmed only the year before. The cadres in Xiaolan felt that staging the chrysanthemum festival was useful and appropriate as an event to show potential overseas Chinese investors in the new era of economic reforms that the government was liberalizing in earnest. Addressing the festival largely to both regional and lineage associations overseas, the organizers shrewdly played the “politics of native roots.” The festival was unmistakably a government event, organized by an ad hoc committee set up by the town’s party committee. Assignments for cultivating the flowers, coordinating the boat races, and inviting opera troupes from Guangzhou and Foshan were given to various branches of the government, factories, neighborhood committees, and schools. As mentioned earlier, the party leaders sought out former landlords and “literati types” who had known the art of cultivating chrysanthemums and made them train apprentices. National and provincial broadcasting networks were invited to cover the events, emphasizing the party leaders’ intentions for reform. The town government also invited merchants and the heads of native place associations from Hong Kong and Macau to a feast. Forty thousand visitors came for the opening ceremonies. Another hundred thousand followed. The town ran out of food on the first day despite efforts to mobilize every individual food peddler it could round up. Traffic blocked the badly paved roads for days. However, the trouble seemed to have paid off for most of the residents. Business contracts poured in afterward. The town received enough donations from overseas compatriots to build, for example, a modern hospital, a secondary school, two Hong Kong–style restaurant discos, and a six-story hotel named Chrysanthemum Town, an identity Xiaolan and its residents have quickly assumed.52

Rethinking Chinese Anthropology The fact that little justification is needed to adopt a regional approach to Chinese history and society is largely due to G. William Skinner. His regional systems analysis proposes that the political history of dynastic events must be seen as mediated by the rhythms of human interaction deriving from economic transactions on the ground. He argues that regional systems in late imperial China were functionally integrated by exchange relationships. Their growth and decline depended on how people made use of the material environment, a given technology based on cost-distance calculations and a government providing different degrees of administrative efficiency. At the subcounty level, where formal state apparatus had not reached, the dynamics of local society were governed by strategies of rural marketing. It was upon this economic skeleton that social communities, para-political and culture-bearing units were built. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In examining the evolution of a region in which Xiaolan was a part, communitybuilding involved more than what is suggested by a Skinnerian approach. The initial settlement of the sands was shaped by the operational logic of the social institutions already well entrenched in the regional core. Local society in the making undoubtedly had involved shrewd economic calculations, but only in the context of social differentiation, unequal access to power, and cultural exclusion. The development of Xiaolan into a super center of wealth and culture and a major marketing center was based on how much its local strongmen were able to maneuver with resources in the larger society in order to exploit and sustain these relationships. The ritual complex, in which the chrysanthemum festivals were an integral part, reflected and advanced these motivations. Skinner may have provided an economic skeleton for viewing the formation of regional marketing systems in historical China, but if we are to understand the dynamic aspects of the body politic, we must factor in the social cells and the cultural tissues representing power and domination as much as providing room for maneuver. They must be seen not as colorful frills decorating the description of a historical process but as an integral part of the analysis of its unfolding. To debate whether a Skinnerian analysis can be applied to other parts of China or whether macro-regions were discrete or integrative misses the point.53 To appreciate a history structured by the cycles of regional development, we should take into account the cultural dynamics underlying the very construction of the regional systems themselves.54 At a level of society where the formal apparatus of the state was largely absent, it is useful to examine Xiaolan’s social organizations in order to understand the nucleus of power the elites in town exerted over the sands. Domination was seldom based on direct coercion. The question is how power was institutionalized in the everyday social living in Xiaolan.55 Because the major actors in Xiaolan’s ritual complex were the powerful lineages, Maurice Freedman’s lineage model may have provided the missing element in Skinner’s analysis. He focused on the lineage community, a nucleated settlement of agnates tracing unilineal descent from a focal ancestor, tied together by ancestral trusts, and expressing their solidarities through periodic rituals at the ancestral graves and halls. The imposing presence of the lineage communities was reinforced by their educated members, who compiled genealogies that claimed descent from imperial officials from centuries past and showed off numerous literati among the ranks of their contemporaries. Freedman also observed that asymmetrical segmentation took place in the development of these lineages. Lines without descendants or estates eventually dropped out of sight in the records. His basic assumptions were that lineage formation in south China depended on several factors: a frontier with a need for protection, a river delta requiring organization of large-scale irrigation projects, and rice cultivation offering substantial accumulation of wealth for selected This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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members. This functionalist assumption has taken for granted the a priori existence of a cultural ideal highlighting kinship and descent. It has also led some later scholars to suggest the extreme—that a lineage without corporate property was no lineage at all.56 Initially, it may be difficult to doubt that the three major lineages in Xiaolan constituted dominant communities whose focal ancestors had carried with them the Chinese cultural ideals that found favorable niches in the sands. Almost as a corollary, the realization of the kinship ideal was a useful means for aggressive expansion on the rural landscape, but the process is historically specific. David Faure argues that the political privileges of shared status with the literati during the Ming dynasty concurred with the flourishing of elaborate estates and ancestral halls, their founders tracing origin to leading scholar-officials (1989b). Moreover, the open and rapid accumulation of wealth through the reclamation of the sands around Xiaolan, unlike the environment for lineage building of the more recognized kind in the older parts of the Pearl River Delta, allowed a proliferation of ancestral estates and halls. The streets of Xiaolan were lined with ancestral halls of the study chamber kind, built by wealthy individuals to commemorate immediate family members. While in theory every lineage member began a new descent line and every estate started a lineage organization in which descendants claimed a share in the property, the proliferation of these estates led to an actual “devolution” of the lineage structure in Xiaolan. This ran counter to the need for a collective umbrella with official blessings in order to maintain control of the sands. The structural tension was relieved by a rich ritual complex. The wealthy in Xiaolan did not lack rituals to make their presence felt in the local environment. There were the community rituals based on local temples and the kinship rituals of the focal ancestral and private memorial halls. By late imperial times, literati input was prominent in local cultural dialogue. The activities surrounding the chrysanthemum could very well have been the crucial integrating factor for the various local interests and concerns. In other words, the festivals presented a visible public culture and a coordinated theater of power. If lineage building on the sands was fraught with internal contradictions and required extra cultural inputs in the form of the festivals, one should reexamine the functionalist assumption in Freedman’s process of lineage formation. To approach the problem historically, Freedman’s model is useful for understanding the materials of Xiaolan if one assumes that the inhabitants in south China took the Han culture tradition for granted. All genealogies of the major lineages in Xiaolan (and in the delta) claimed that their ancestors had migrated from the Central Plains, where the Chinese civilization was well established, but it is known that historically native populations were inhabiting the area long before any massive land migrations. A recent paper written by David Faure (1989b) triggers my suspicions of the origin of the cultural This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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bearers in Xiaolan. He argues that it was in response to a certain tax in the Ming dynasty that the local populations of Guangdong differentiated themselves into the Yao and the Han Chinese, depending whether they paid the tax or not. Subsequently, the sedentary agriculturalists acquired the cultural priorities of the expanding Chinese state in the plains, whereas the Yao retained the tribal organizations in the hills of northern Guangdong. It also seems more than coincidental that the major lineages in Xiaolan practiced delayed transfer marriage (buluojia), with its close parallels to the marriage customs of the hill tribes from southwest to southeastern China.57 They also insisted that they were Han precisely because of the marriage custom, whereas the Dan, referred to as an inferior group, did not practice it. The question is: Did the powerful lineages in Xiaolan originate in the upwardly mobile strata of the native populations who had separated themselves from a marginalized population they referred to as the “Dan out there in the sands?” If that was the case, can one interpret the unusually aggressive institutions of lineage and the rich ritual complex in Xiaolan not entirely as established cultural ends that the economy of the sands had made possible but as a means through which the local populations excluded others in the process of incorporating themselves into the larger Chinese polity? One does not have to deny Freedman’s assumption that lineage building has arisen from functional human propensities, but one should allow room for the history of cultural fusion in which the moral prerogatives of the imperial state were improvised by various social strata to shape the unfolding of the local society.58 In sum, the language of the Chinese lineage should be historically contextualized. By stressing cultural discourse as central to state-society relationships in Xiaolan, I can build upon the vast literature on Chinese rituals. Wolf has described the supernatural categories of gods, ghosts, and ancestors in Chinese popular religion as replicating the imperial bureaucracy, the village vagabond, and the senior members of one’s line of descent. Underlying these categories and their associated rituals are the peasants’ view of the relationships of power, social distance, and affinity. If one accepts the notion that societies are seldom in a state of timeless equilibrium, then how are the meanings embodied in rituals created, maintained, and changed to inform a shared cultural consciousness? To appreciate the nuances embodied in the inherent complexities of any social situation, it is important to ground the ritual activities in the cultural histories of local communities. If power is at stake, who competes for it? On what basis do participants put forth their claim? For what purposes do they attempt to seize or contest power? How do they make their hidden agendas understood, and what are the means of containment and subversion? By sensitizing oneself to these questions, one may improve on a mechanical “culture as reflection of society” approach on the one hand and, on the other, avoid the danger of improvising on seemingly eternal epistemological and symbolic categories. Instead, one can conceptually integrate cultural dialogue with the evolution of the regional political This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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economy and ask: At the end of the long acculturation process from which a complex state agrarian society emerges, when is a local society most able, on its own terms, to adopt and penetrate an encroaching state culture? The festivals in Xiaolan did form a unifying thread in the transformation of the relationship between local society and the centers of power. The festivals had created for the participants specific social identities and historical consciousness to which successive generations have attached their own self-interested readings. Strongmen ascending onto the local political stage in the Ming and Qing dynasties actively appropriated the cultural symbols of the larger polity to anchor themselves. When the imperial order became shaky in its foundations in the early 20th century, a new stratum of local elites rose to the occasion. They too formed groups and recycled available cultural resources. Competition became multifaceted, with authority and its material gains “up for grabs.” Local initiative was given full reign. In the postrevolutionary period, the relationship has been reversed. A powerful socialist state recycled what had become a local tradition of festivals to serve its political goals. In sum, the three sets of local elites contributed to a continuing tradition and a process of change. In establishing themselves, they facilitated the downward percolation of a state culture to make local society. In an effort to understand how and why the chrysanthemum has informed cultural identity in Xiaolan, past and present, I supplement Skinner’s structured history with notions of culture and power. I put Freedman’s language of lineage in the context of a history of acculturation and add political nuances to Wolf ’s ritual representations. I have tried to present a meaning-centered and historically grounded account of cultural change that captures the breadth of lived experience in rural south China. In  complex agrarian societies, where hierarchies of power and diverse bases of authority exist and are often contested, stability rests on the ways local elites anchor themselves in relation to the community and to the larger state order. In late imperial China, the literati culture, lineage and community institutions, popular religion, all served to legitimize the state and the peoples’ respective places in relation to it. The percolation of these values to everyday life was an important aspect of state-making; through the centuries, the state became an administrative machinery as much as a cultural idea. Elites and commoners engaged themselves in numerous arenas and discourses to shape this process. The chrysanthemum festivals of Xiaolan are such arenas. Using them to highlight the junctures of meaning, interest, and power, I stress the point that historical processes are constructed by culturally creative human agents. Together, their actions form the flux of social life that continues to inform and structure experience. *This essay is based on research conducted in South China in 1986, funded by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China. The This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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author thanked the following: Jack Goody, Raymond Grew, William Kelly, Frederic Wakeman, the anonymous reader, colleagues in the Anthropology Department at Yale University, and members of the Ethnohistory Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, for their thoughtful comments. The present version contains slight revisions from the original published by Comparative Studies in Society and History in 1990.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Mai (1948; this author’s translation) quoted from a diary of his great-grandfather, Mai Pingde, who lived from the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century. During the early Ming period, soldiers were discharged and assigned with their families to settle in frontier areas. They held military household registrations ( jun ji) and formed colonies with headquarters often at Guandi temples (the god of war). In Xiaolan and vicinity, there were eighteen colonies, each centered at a Guandi temple. In 1986, I discovered a stone tablet at the site of a former Beidi temple (the headquarters of all of these colonies) listing them. The color yellow symbolizes prosperity, longevity, and imperial mandate. I define literati as scholars who acquired academic degrees in the state examination system in imperial China. After the Song dynasty (960–1279), administrators of the empire were mostly recruited through a system of civil service examinations. Candidates were required to submit essays which were judged by the education administrators. Based on these evaluations, the candidates were given academic degrees. Examinations were conducted every two or three years at the levels of county, province, and the imperial capital. Graduates of the metropolitan examinations, who acquired the degree of jinshi, were eligible for official assignments. Those who gained academic titles or official posts were listed prominently in lineage genealogies and county gazetteers. See Ortner (1984) for a summary of anthropology theories since the 1960s. See Eric Wolf (1982) and Seddon (1978) for a summary of the works of the French Marxists; for a critical summary, see Donham (1999). See the works of Foucault on power (for example, 1977) and Gramsci (1971) on hegemony, Evans et al. (1985) on the crucial role of the state. For voices of subversion and their containment, see the works of Davis (1975), Thompson (1978), Le Roy Ladurie (1979), and Stallybrass and White (1986) on Bakhtin. See Abrams (1982) and Bourdieu (1972/1977); see also Ortner (1984) on the theory of practice. See Perdue (1982) on the building of polders around Lake Dongting. For studies of the Dan fishermen in south China, see Ward’s “Varieties of the Conscious Model” in Ward (1985), pp. 41–60, Chen Xujing (1946), and Murray (1987). The basic unit for the measurement of land in the sands was qing, a hundred mu. One mu is approximately one-sixth of an acre. The houses in the sands were made of straw and mud. During the land reform in the early 1950s, the households identified as landlords had nothing more than a tiled roof over their straw huts. Cadres reported to me in 1986 that they were not able to make the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

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peasants in the sands build brick houses and form more nucleated settlements until the 1970s. According to He (1946, 1964), the major lineages in Xiaolan started gaining titles in the Ming dynasty, but the majority were acquired after mid-Qing, reaching a height in the mid-19th century. He actually compiled the biographies of everyone who, to his knowledge, gained a title. The most notable ones, Li Sunchen and He Wuzhou, whose biographies can also be found in the county gazetteers of Xiangshan, attained the post of ministers near the end of the Ming dynasty. The local historian, He Yanggao, traces his origin to Xiwan Tang, the focal ancestral hall of a He lineage in Xiaolan. The He supposedly descended from two brothers who settled in Xiaolan. Xiwan Tang is the hall for the younger brother. The lineage is larger than the one descended from the older brother, whose hall was named Liuqing Tang. He Yanggao is able to count eleven other ancestral halls built by different generations under the Xiwan Tang that he can claim direct descent and benefits from. The Liuqing Tang had only about three qing of land. The Xiwan Tang had over ten qing. There is a vast literature on how lineage ideals find their expressions in southern China and their relationship with corporate property. See the works of Maurice Freedman (1958, 1966) and scholars who more or less use his paradigm, such as James Watson (1977, 1982), Rubie Watson (1985), Potter’s “Land and Lineage in Traditional China” in Freedman (1970), pp. 121–38, Baker (1966, 1968), and Strauch (1983). Faure (1986) on the other hand stresses the issues of community and settlement rights intertwined with the lineage ideal, and offers a revision of the Freedman paradigm. Studies of such connections in other parts of China and in other periods of history are numerous. See Dennerline (1981), Ebrey and Watson (1986), Beattie (1979), Rowe (1985), and Hymes (1986). However, they should be contrasted with the area of the Pearl River Delta where lineage and literati power were built literally “on the sands” and reached their peak in the late 19th century. Their development should also be contrasted with the shifting of control to more fluid local power bases in the early 20th century as described by Rankin (1986), Duara (1988), and Philip Huang (1985). As will be shown later, the extremely prominent role of these lineages in community affairs should be contrasted with those in north China, as analyzed by Duara (1988) and Cohen (1989), and in the older parts of the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong, as described by Freedman (1958, 1966). The five major temples as identified by the residents are the Guanyin temple of Xitu neighborhood in the southwest, the Beidi temple of Jiaokou neighborhood in the east, the Miaoling Gong of Dalan district in the northwest, the Beidi temple of Jitou village in the southeast, and Shifu temple in the northeastern part of town. Chu se, as the processions are generally termed, is a common festivity among communities in the Pearl River Delta. Among the famous ones are the Qiu se (Autumn varieties) of Foshan, the Piao se (Floating varieties) of Shawan, and the Shui se (Water varieties) of Xiaolan. Many neighborhoods were often made up of a single surname, but the Xitu neighborhood was inhabited by six surnames centering on the Guanyin temple. The Beidi temple of Jiaokou, once the headquarters of the military colonies in the Ming dynasty, and the Guandi temples in town were patronized by residents registered as military households. Older residents of Xiaolan can recite the rhythms used to ridicule the jiao at Jiuzhouji. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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24. Lanxiang Gongyue was established by the town’s three major lineages in the reign of Qianlong (1736–96) for the purpose of civil and political arbitrations. A detailed description can be found in a manuscript by a local historian, He Yanggao (1964). The Lanshan Academy, established by the county magistrate in 1740 to promote local education, was financed by the three major lineages and the military colonies in 1749. In 1756 and 1815, the county magistrate assigned to it additional river marshes in the southeast. The academy was supervised by imperial degree holders. See He Yanggao (1984). See also the genealogies of the He, Li, and Mai lineages for their degree holders. There were only a few for the Ming dynasty, but by mid-Qing there were many who were graduates of the metropolitan examinations. 25. See He (1946). Li Sunchen was a member of the eleventh generation of the Li Guang military colony. After he became a member of the imperial academy (Hanlin) and later assumed the post of minister in Nanjing, the status of the colony was converted to a civil one. The focal ancestral hall of the Li lineage, built during the reign of Qianlong in the 18th century, was named after him as Li Shangshu Da Zongci. The Taining Daoguo Tang, a temple exclusively used by the Li lineage members who traced their place of origin from Taining, was another center of activity for the Li lineage in Xiaolan. 26. See He Wuzhou in Xu Xu (1984). See also the He lineage genealogies of Xiaolan, He xiwantang chongxiu zupu (1907). He Wuzhou belonged to the thirteenth generation of the lineage of the younger brother (Xiwan Tang) and was a contemporary of Li Sunchen and Wu Ruilong, both high-ranking officials of the late Ming. They were members of a literary club in Xiaolan known as the Wenhong She. The reason for He’s death was not known, but it was believed that he was killed in Guangzhou when the Qing army overwhelmed the last of the southern Ming emperors. His ancestral hall was named He Neige Da Zongci. 27. See Lingnan gujinlu (Xu Xu 1984) for the different types of Cantonese operas. See also the works of Tanaka Issei (1981; and “The Social and Historical Context of MingCh’ing Chinese Local Drama,” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski (1985), pp. 143–60) and Ward’s “Regional Opera and Their Audiences” in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski (1985), pp. 161–87, on the religious operas in Guangdong. 28. In Chinese culture, the sixty years signifies the completion of a full circle of human affairs in accordance with cosmic forces. 29. He Yuechao, a local poet and son of He Wuzhou, was murdered by his own kinsmen for expressing anti-Manchu sentiments in his poetry (n.d.). 30. I thank Dr. Choi Chi-cheung for sharing historical insights on Xiaolan and Dalan with me (1987), and Anthony Siu for a family division document of the Xiao in Dalan, dated 1877. 31. A rare manuscript map drawn by a European missionary in the 1860s on the Bei River of northern Guangdong actually located the sites through which Zhang Jiuling supposedly had traveled. See Eberhard (1962) on the myths of settlement; see also the lineage genealogies from He (He xiwantang chongxiu zupu 1907, He 1925), Li et al. (1914) and Mai (1893), among others, which reported similar myths. Such a claim was not limited to the lineages in Xiaolan but to many others in the Pearl River Delta. 32. It is a common practice of the compilers of lineage genealogies to search backward in time to locate relationships with prominent “ancestors,” however tenuously linked, in order to boost lineage status. Claims before the Song dynasty are not reliable. Historical documents since the Tang had described the residents of Lingnan, that is, most of Guangdong and Guangxi, as Yao, Zhuang, Dan fishermen, and Han migrants. Also there are descriptions This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

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of political brokers known as the haoli (local bosses). See Tsang (1973), Wang Shixing (1981), and Qu Dajun ([1700]/1985). He was referring to the Taipings and the Red Turbans in the 1850s. See He (1964) on He Jing. See Xiaolan zhenzhi (1984) on the occupation of the town by the Red Turbans. See articles on Cantonese operas and Li Wenmu in Foshan wenshi ziliao, volumes 2, 3, and 4. See Kuhn (1971) on the formation of local defense corps led by the gentry. See also Wakeman (1966). See a 19th-century collection of the land deeds of the Xiao lineage of Dalan being compiled by Anthony Siu (n.d.). The allegorical style is a convention in Chinese literati writing. See Zhongshan lanzhen juhuahui wenyi gailan (1936). See Siu (1989a), chapter 2, on the disputes on Donghai Shiliusha. The dispute lasted fifty years and cumulated in the government making a decision in favor of the Shunde elites who organized the region’s bureau for the protection of the sands (a tax and surcharge collection agency). See also Nishikawa (1981/1985), Matsuda (1981) and Katayama (1982) on gentry power in the sands. See Dongguan xianzhi (1922) on disputes involving Wanqingsha to the east of Xiaolan. There were two mulberry markets (sangshi) in Xiaolan and a cocoon market ( jianshi) in Rongqi. See analyses of this custom in Topley’s “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung” in Wolf and Witke (1975), pp. 67–88, Stockard (1989) and chapter 11 of this volume. See Qin (1983) on the financial crisis of Guangdong from 1911 to 1949. In the Republican period, many of the local strongmen were tenant-contractors and tax farmers. They secured the rental of land from the ancestral estates by paying advanced cash rent and sizeable rent deposits and then extracted rent and surcharges in kind from their own tenants. Traditionally, ancestral estates were forbidden to be sold. For reports of these legal disputes, see Zhongshan guomin ribao 中山國民日報 [Zhongshan daily] in the 1930s and 1940s. For a general description of the local bosses, see Alitto’s “Rural Elites in Transition” in Mann (1979), pp. 218–75. For north China in the 1930s, see Duara (1988) and Philip Huang (1985). For the Pearl River Delta, see Siu (1989a), chapter 5. These associations were formed by emigrants overseas who used a surname or a place of origin as organizational bases. Their functions are generally social, such as mutual help and charity. They can also become political in defending the interests of their members against the pressures from the host society and supporting particular regimes in China. See a short biography of him written by He Yanggao (1987). The local bosses reached the height of their power during the Japanese occupation in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. Yuan Dai and Qu Renze were two such local bosses linked to the provincial warlords. In some cases, they stationed troops in the smaller ancestral halls. They could have forcibly acquired the halls from the owners, but they could also be members of a lineage who colluded with hall managers. I could not find out how many ancestral halls were taken apart and building materials sold, but in Shawan, a similar town in the sands of the neighboring Panyu county, many halls were dismantled by local bosses during the Japanese occupation. See chapter 13 of this volume. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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50. For a history of the transformation of the town, see chapter 5 in this volume; for the restrictions on popular rituals, see chapter 6 of this volume. For a longer study of the western part of the Pearl River Delta, see Siu (1989a). 51. Subsequent festivals of even grander scales were organized, e.g. that in 1994 which coincided with the once in sixty years cosmic cycle; see Siu’s “Redefining the Market Town through Festivals in South China” in Faure and Liu (2002), pp. 233–49. 52. The name was invented by the media during the 1959 festival. 53 See the debate between Sands and Myers (1986) and Little and Esherick (1989) in the Journal of Asian Studies. 54. As previously shown by the study of Prasenjit Duara for north China, one needs to rethink the logic of rural marketing and community organization if we argue that culture and power have significant roles to play. 55. For comparative purposes, see Steven Lukes’s “Power and Authority” in Bottomore and Nisbet (1978), pp. 633–76, for a summary of the concepts of power and authority. See Clifford Geertz in Geertz (1983) and Michael Gilsenan (1986) for Weberian applications. While Geertz takes off in a culturalist direction to examine the symbolic processes of making authority, Gilsenan points to their political economic bases. In Skinner’s construction of the regional systems, these conceptual elements are missing. 56. See Potter in Freedman (1970) and a counter argument by Strauch (1983); see a summary of different views by Watson (1982). 57. In the delayed transfer marriage, the marrying couples are often very young. After the first night, the women return to their natal homes and only visit the husbands’ household periodically. Not until they are about to give birth to their first child do they settle permanently in their husbands’ home. See Topley in Wolf and Witke (1975), Stockard (1989) and chapter 11 of this volume on issues for debate. 58. See chapter 3 in Agents and Victims in South China (Siu 1989a) and chapter 11 in this volume for a full treatment of this issue.

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9 Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China

Chaolian xiang is a community on an island off the coast of the regional city of Jiangmen, on the western edge of the Pearl River Delta (see Map 1). Chaolian xiangzhi (Lu 1946) describes its settlement history in a familiar scenario: it was an isolated island in Xijiang (the Xi River). The early inhabitants were indigenous peoples (tuzhu) and fishermen of numerous surnames. They eventually disappeared without a trace. The present residents claim that their ancestors migrated from Zhujixiang in Nanxiong subprefecture in northern Guangdong. Local gazetteers of the delta area recorded similar narratives. On a stone stele celebrating the renovation of the Tianhou temple in the market of Yuan Long (1938, New Territories, Hong Kong), the author alleged that, a few hundred years ago, there was the Danjia Wan to the west of the tree and the Danjia Pu on the east side. Fishermen who had periodically taken shelter there set up a temple. Farmers turned the area into productive fields for cultivation and founded a market (Ke et al. 1986, p. 535). The narratives leave intriguing questions with regard to the identities of these populations: Were the fishermen the original inhabitants? Under what circumstances did they (and the indigenous peoples) “disappear without a trace”? Who were the farmers who eventually settled in the area? How did their settlement history relate to those of the fishermen? Historical documents in the late imperial period, written largely by the literati, had identified the fisherfolk as Dan, a cultural and ethnic stock different from farmers who claimed Han ancestry in the Central Plains (Zhongyuan). In Lingwai daida (Song dynasty), Zhou Qufei noted, “[They] use boats as homes, treat water as if it were land, make a living off the sea, these are the Dan” (Zhou Qufei 1983, p. 413). In Guangdong tongzhi (1601/1992), Guo Fei had similar observations: “Dan households fish, dwell on boats or in straw huts by the water” (70: 44b). Even the Yongzheng emperor observed, in his 1729 edict on the Dan, “In Guangdong, aside from the ordinary people [simin], there is a kind of people known as Dan hu. Uncivilized like the Yao, they make their homes on boats, and earn their keep by fishing. Their boats are found in all the waterways throughout the province. The population is so large that it cannot be counted.”1 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Many historians of southern China have assumed that farmers and Dan fishermen in the delta were divided by occupation as well as by culture and ancestry. Speculating on the origins of the Dan, some trace their roots to the tribal populations known as Yue. Yue (or Baiyue) was a term used by ancient historians to describe Neolithic populations who had occupied numerous ecological niches in the hills and river ways in South China.2 Local Han legends added to the cultural divide by highlighting the Dan as mythical, alien, and physically unsavory. Qu Dajun, a traveler-scholar of the 17th century well known for his “ethnographic” descriptions of Guangdong, had the following to say: “All Dan women are known to eat raw fish and swim under water. In the past, they were seen as belonging to the family of dragons. It was because they dived into water with tattooed bodies in order to look like the offspring of dragons. They could move in water for thirty, forty li without difficulty. Today they are called Tajia. The women are seen as sea otters and the men as dragons. They are really nonhuman.”3 However, it is clear that when examined in the light of historical evidence, membership and occupation among the South China populations then by no means appear rigidly divided. Historical sources indicate that, over the centuries, some water-based populations became farmers and vice versa.4 These processes were especially evident in the maturing Pearl River Delta during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when those branded as Dan were increasingly involved in the reclamation of extensive river marshes, known as the sands (sha), and eventually became cultivators. This phenomenon was recorded in local gazetteers of Panyu and Shunde counties.5 Qu Dajun (1700/1985) also recorded that “there were Dan who settled into villages, such as those in Zhoudun and Lindun, neighborhoods on the west of Guangcheng” (p. 486). Moreover, a careful scrutiny of the genealogies of major lineages reveals telling traces of former water-based livelihoods. The Chen of Tianma xiang in Xinhui county compiled a notable example of such a genealogy in 1923.6 Modern scholarship captured such ambiguity despite the researchers’ assumption that the Dan were a separate cultural and ethnic category from the Han farmers. The Nationalist government in Guangzhou during the 1920s maintained detailed records of populations under their jurisdiction whom they considered to be Dan, but official reports showed discrepancies in the number counted. Although one may blame unreliable methods of collecting data and the unwillingness of those referred to as Dan to come forward for government reports, a possible cause for the differences could be the problem of defining who the Dan really were.7 Classic works of the same period, written by scholarly investigators from Lingnan University (Guangzhou) on the Dan of Shanan and Sanshui, were equally sure that their subjects were a distinct ethnic group (Wu Ruilin 1971, Chen Xujing 1946, Lingnandaxue shehui yanjiusuo 1934). However, the difficulty of defining their research subjects was evident. Chen Xujing, a leading scholar on the Dan, struggled This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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with the issue when he looked into their literacy levels. He commented on the census data for four districts in Guangzhou where the floating population congregated: For the Dan to receive any education is an extremely fortunate matter, not to speak of middle to higher education. . . . In this census chart [for the districts], the total population investigated included both land and boat dwellers. It is questionable that those who have a middle-level education and who live on land are Dan. Our guess is that the two residents of Huadi district who participated in the civil service examinations in the late Qing could not be Dan. It is because in the Qing, the Dan did not have the right to sit for the examinations. (1946, p. 80)

A comprehensive report by the Committee on Ethnic Affairs in the Guangdong Provincial Government (Guangdongsheng renminzhengfu minzushiwu weiyuanhui 1953) continued to use the existing categories although investigators noted ambiguity in the ways local populations identified themselves. The report also pointed to the ways they covered up their humble origins after moving up the social ladder. In a recent work, Huang Xinmei (1990), a physical anthropologist at Zhongshan University, tries to differentiate the physical features of those she identified as Dan from those of the Han. But she concludes that the distinguishing features are few. Our ethnographic experiences in the delta alert us to problems as well. The contrast between labels imposed by others and self-identification is striking (Benton 1965, pp.  113–37). In Chaolian xiang of Jiangmen municipality, residents of established lineage communities assert repeatedly that a lineage community at the southern edge of the island is of Dan origin. When asked, the latter vehemently deny such categorization. They point to the fisherfolk further down the river instead. We encounter similar situations covering a wide area in the delta: in Xiaolan zhen of Zhongshan municipality, Shawan zhen of Panyu municipality, and Dazhou island of Huidong county (Zheng and Chen 2003, pp. 415–43, and chapter 13 of this volume). The ambiguities in livelihood and status trigger a different set of questions: Could the farmers and fishermen have come from the same indigenous stock? If membership remained fluid, how were differentiating labels such as Han or Dan forged over centuries of settlement and justified by the written records of the literati? What instrumental means were employed by the locally powerful to circumscribe ambiguous social boundaries with rigid identities that eventually assumed a primordial significance? In addition, what were the cultural strategies for the objects of discrimination to get around the barriers and acquire a different identity? Had the imperial institutions provided negotiable space? Moreover, did the historical development of an ecology of river marshes (sands) provide unique environments for local populations to refashion themselves? If cultural strategies were pursued, how did the late imperial state and its civilizing agendas legitimize social positions and enforce authority? If tracing ancestry from the Central Plains, forming territorial lineages, owning land, and participating This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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in the imperial examinations were vehicles for gaining respectable places in a Handominated political hierarchy, to what extent did the locally powerful and the imperial enterprise influence one another to establish these criteria? If one doubts the sinicization model for empire-building in China, one does not start an analysis with the notion that the dynasties actively and deliberately spread from the center to frontiers, either by cultural persuasion or by conquest. In this chapter, we offer an alternative perspective by suggesting that the imperial state was but a cultural idea, that its authoritative metaphors permeated frontier society in the South, not through laws and edicts imposed from above, but through the efforts of aspiring local populations. We examine the possibility that they adopted notions from the political center in particular historical moments and applied them as imperial order in the process of making local society. If we pursue the issue of ethnicity and identity by treating local agenda on their own terms, we would not assume that there was significant population migration from the Central Plains, nor should we argue that migrants were largely responsible for disseminating Han cultural institutions to the southern frontier. In understanding how local society was created and how ethnic boundaries were drawn, it is not enough to chase after “migrants” whose migration histories were questionable. Instead, we focus on the cultural strategies of indigenous populations in their efforts to link with a real or imaginary “center.” Through these processes of upward mobility, they might have eventually acquired what was then considered mainstream cultural markers and claimed their respective identities. Viewed in this manner, ethnic labels are the end products of complicated historical process involving shrewd maneuvering of cultural resources and power play. Out of this process arose reified categories for identifying and differentiating local populations. Certain voices prevailed, while others disappeared from historical records. Direct administrative influence from the political center could be minimal and fragmentary. The question is how administrative agendas interacted with local social processes at particular moments to create identities with lasting significance. Behind identity politics is a larger analytical issue of state-making. Rather than treating “frontiers” as an open space at the receiving end of institutional expansion, we pay due attention to the creative and complicit efforts of local populations to give themselves identities and gainful places in an expanding polity. Historical records tell us that many institutions in the Pearl River Delta were initially objectionable to officials but were accepted in due course. Territorial lineages and their ancestral halls proliferated in the Ming, but they were not condoned by any imperial edict. Prominent court officials from Guangdong sided with the Jiajing emperor on the Great Rituals Controversy and gave credence to the worship of blood ancestors. Only through generations of efforts were these social forms taken for granted. In the process, territorial lineages acquired meanings far beyond the notion This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of kinship and family. They became significant building blocks of the imperial order in South China (Faure 2007).

Lineage, Ethnicity, and the State David Faure, Liu Zhiwei, and I have long argued that, contrary to the settlement histories of major lineages in the Pearl River Delta, most of the farmers were not migrants from the Central Plains. Instead, in different historical periods, certain segments of the local populations had appropriated what they considered to be symbols of state power, added their own input, and converted themselves into “legitimate” members of the imperial order. By calling themselves Han, they distinguished themselves from indigenous populations in the area. In this process of self-differentiation during the Ming and Qing, single-surnamed communities arose in the Pearl River Delta. They acquired vast areas of river marshes, controlled markets and temples, and flaunted literati connections. What were seen as orthodox notions of Chinese culture and markers of identity were improvised by the upwardly mobile to create a language of exclusion that was eventually shared by state officials and the locally powerful. The narrative involving migration from Zhujixiang in Nanxiong sub-prefecture during the Song dynasty was repeatedly used by local populations to trace primordial ties to Han populations in North China and to claim settlement rights in the expanding river delta. These “major lineages” emphasized their agricultural occupation on land (wuben) and their subscription to a state culture emphasizing proper ritual practices, literati achievements, and lineage pedigree. They reinforced their claims with written genealogies and ornate ancestral halls. The rise of the He lineage in Shawan in Panyu county centered on their ancestral hall, the Liugeng Tang. Their history was a classic example of a magnate lineage built on the sands. The basis of their power during the Qing was the aggressive acquisition of nearly sixty thousand mu of river marshes, their conversion into nominally taxable land, and a monopolistic control over community rituals in the Beidi cult.8 Boundaries were drawn and reinforced, by rituals as much as by a demonstration of force. Those excluded as “outsiders” (kaibian ren) were branded “floating twigs” (shuiliu chai) and denied settlement rights. The language of lineage and propriety intertwined with an ethnic and cultural hierarchy. It singled out two major categories of local people as the ethnic other: the tribal Yao in the mountain regions, and the boat-dwelling Dan in the river marshes. They were considered culturally and socially inferior. In times of dynastic unrest, these populations were regarded as threatening the well-being of settled agricultural communities, akin to pirates and bandits (Qu 1700/1985, p. 250). Local attitudes toward the Yao and Dan might have dovetailed with state priorities but instead developed in divergent ways. In the official discourse on race, ethnicity, and the potential of those on the edges of empire for acculturation, the ability for This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the state to register farming households for taxation was a crucial issue.9 The imperial state had always treated the tribal populations in the mountain regions of South China as the ethnic other rather than as its subjects. Their economies were isolated from the settlers in the flood plains, and tension between the two was minimal. These tribal populations were encouraged by the state to pay tribute and were rewarded with titles and gifts. A separate bureaucracy administered their affairs. If they were not organized to pose a security threat, they were often left alone. There was also the category of the Liang Yao. Like the She described by Chan Wing-hoi,10 these tribal populations had become acculturated. As long as they farmed and paid taxes, barriers to converting their identity to Han were not rigid.11 A late Qing case in Fujian illustrates the interpretation of local officials. During the twentyfourth year of the Guangxu emperor’s reign (1898), some inhabitants in a mountainous region of Fujian challenged being characterized as She. The official who observed the situation supported their claims. Quoting the Yongzheng emperor’s sympathetic edict of 1729 on the Dan, the official argued that even the Dan were no longer barred from being legitimate subjects. Therefore, these mountain people, since they paid taxes and took the civil service examinations, should definitely be seen as commoners. Suggestions were nonetheless made that they should change their style of dress in order to be better integrated into the local community.12 If measured by cultural affinity, those referred to as Dan were in every way closer to the landed populations than those regarded as Yao or She in the hills. From food, marriage customs, and household layout to rituals, they operated within a shared cultural repertoire. With regard to popular beliefs, they maintained a common pantheon of deities, such as Tianhou, Hongsheng, Beidi, and Guanyin. They spoke the dialect of the Guangzhou prefecture. The Dan also occupied a different position within the state’s civilizing agenda. They were hardly seen as the ethnic other. Registered as a special category of household under the Ming and required to pay a fish tax, they were nonetheless barred from receiving education and taking the imperial examinations, on the grounds that they did not live or work on land. However, an edict of the Yongzheng emperor in 1729 recognized that the Dan households in the riverways of Guangdong were numerous, and guaranteed their rights to live on shore. The edict stated: People in Guangdong regard the Dan households as lowly and do not allow them to live on land. The Dan also dare not resist the impositions. Instead they huddle in their boats, denied a settled livelihood. Their plight is worth some sympathy. The Dan should belong to the category of orderly people not to be discriminated against. They pay the fish tax just like other subjects. However, local customs forcibly differentiate them, and banish them to a livelihood without anchor. I hereby urge my officials to promote my edict. For those Dan without means, let them remain in their boats. If they have the means to build their own shelter on land, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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allow them to live in settlements by the water and be assigned household registration like commoners for the convenience of supervision. Local strongmen must not find excuses to bully or repulse them. Local officials should persuade the Dan households to reclaim wasteland and be engaged in settled agriculture. This will be in accordance with my intention to treat them equally as subjects. (Da Qing huidian shili n.d., p. 1008)

However, local abuses toward the Dan remained severe. The Yongzheng emperor’s edict in 1729 did not alleviate their plight. Those with better means did integrate into commoner communities by registering under powerful families. But integration could only be partial, since most were forbidden to build dwellings on the land, even when they were tenants farming the newly reclaimed sands. A legal precedent of 1825 included in the Yuedong cheng’an chubian (First compilation of precedent cases in Guangdong) involved a third-generation descendent of a Dan household who had lived onshore. When he tried to purchase a title under false pretenses and was found out, the basis of his severe punishment was that his sisters remained married to Dan and the change of occupation had not been reported to the authorities. In the eyes of society and state, he remained Dan and had not integrated (Zhu 1832, 31: 16a–17b). It is interesting to note the dynamic tension. The commercialized political economy of the delta allowed large numbers of inhabitants in the sands to be drawn into an organic, functioning agricultural ecology involving layers of maturing sands and land ownership. The easy accumulation of economic wealth through land reclamation and subsequent grain trade provided rapid turnover of social status and a degree of fluidity in group membership. When ownership of vast areas of the sands and their potential to be turned into profitable estates were at stake, legitimate status for settlement was aggressively sought after. The language of the state with regard to this status was often pursued to the extreme by the locally powerful in order to exclude latecomers and disenfranchise competitors, discriminating ethnic labels rigidified over the centuries. The drawing of boundaries in the formation of an ethnic hierarchy involved dynamic tensions between settlement rights in the sands and state agenda. We need first to appreciate the state rhetoric establishing the claim to bianhu qimin (create imperial subjects by legitimate household registration). Underlying the language of the state was the concern to “ground” populations in order to secure a social base for tax revenue and corvée. Second, we must evaluate how such state concerns dovetailed with those of local groups to convert the sands into cultivable land for settlement, and what cultural strategies were pursued by the upwardly mobile in order to gain a “legitimate” status in the evolving imperial order. Third, we must examine how the language of lineage, settlement rights, and land ownership—some of the most significant cultural symbols to emerge in the delta during the Ming—essentialized an ethnic hierarchy between farmers who called themselves Han and the “floating” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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population referred to as Dan. Fourth, if inhabitants in the sands did manage to change from water-based living to farming, and established themselves as respectable lineage communities in the Pearl River Delta, we must closely examine the means that had allowed them to get around cultural stigma and political barriers to become landed. A vigorous historical anthropology approach is to delineate how the reclamation of the sands in crucial junctures of state-making contributed to the peculiar tensions of cultural negotiation on the ground.

The Registration of Households The registration of households was implemented by various imperial regimes with the purposes of taxation and public security. It carried a political as well as cultural agenda, as expressed in Guangdong tongzhi chugao ( juan 22, 1535): During the reign of Hongwu, the southern frontier was pacified. An edict outlined the registration of households. Those with corvée responsibilities are registered as such. Ten households make one jia. Ten jia make one tu. A cluster of tu form a li, and a cluster of li make the xian . . . They are reviewed every ten years, when births and deaths are recorded . . . to register the population as such, and tying it to corvée. This is the grave concern of the state to control its people and to transform local customs.

On the edges of empire, this measure of registration transformed identities from alien ( yi) to commoner. By becoming taxable imperial subjects, one gained the rights to own land, to participate in the civil service examinations, and to gain officialdom, all being “legitimate” channels of social mobility. However, in times of dynastic crisis, it was not uncommon to find households abandoning their registered status to avoid taxes and conscription. They became bandits, pirates, and aliens in official records. In other words, cultural identities could be faked, claimed, imposed, or avoided, depending on the means to obtain an officially recognized mobility strategy. In South China, crucial historical moments concerning household registration and the dynamics of ethnic relations occurred in the mid-Ming. David Faure argued in an earlier publication that particular tax policies in the Ming triggered instrumental responses from the local populations in the province. Those who paid the tax were registered as commoners. Officials regarded those who remained unregistered as tribal Yao (or Mo Yao, no tax) (Faure 1989b). During the early Ming, after Guangdong had been pacified, the imperial government also attempted to register a large number of the floating population. There were two main channels. Guangdong tongzhi ( juan 68, 1561/1977) documented the registration of households into a Dan category administered by the Prefect for Riverways (hebo suo). They were required to pay a fish tax and were subject to security measures This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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different from those for commoner farming households. However, records were lost over time and many households escaped registration, as illustrated by the county gazetteer of Dongguan: The Ming established the Prefect for Riverways in order to manage the Dan. Those along the coast were grouped into twelve she and registered as tax account units for the collection of the fish tax. They were similar to the county’s neighborhoods. Later the prefect office was abolished and the tax collection of the she was put under county administration. But the atmosphere along the coast worsened. The Dan who were tough joined the bandits, and the compliant ones moved onto land. The twelve she units became nonexistent. (Dongguan xianzhi 1689/1994, 2: 74a)

A large number of fisherfolk were also registered as military households and eventually settled in frontier colonies as farmers, as Ming taizu shilu (1383) stated: In the third month of the fifteenth year of Hongwu, [the emperor] ordered Zhao Yong, the lord of Nanxiong, to register ten thousand Dan in Guangzhou into the navy. At the time, the Dan moored around islands and bays without a fixed dwelling. Some became bandits. They therefore needed to be registered and put to service.

Although no one would claim that the prominent He lineage of Xiaolan in Xiangshan county was of Dan origin, He Hanming, a member of the sixth generation of the Jiulang segment, was probably registered this way. Their genealogy recorded the following: “In the fourteenth year of Hongwu, the yellow registration was initiated. Our venerable ancestor was registered as the lizhang of the first tuan of Dalan du. In the sixteenth year, he was recruited into the military, as part of a hundred households of the Zhennan colony of Nanjing” (He Chaogan 1925, 1: 24a). Once the Dan were put into the service of the state, they became military households and their status as Dan was dropped. Over time, some used various means to convert into civilian status. Others obtained honors in the civil service examinations and rose high in the imperial bureaucracy. Those who claimed to be descendants of these officials became prominent lineages in the area. They subscribed to the charter myth of Zhujixiang, compiled genealogies, and built ancestral halls (Liu 1999). The experience of the Li lineage of Xiaolan zhen is illustrative. Again, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the Li, but the scenario was familiar. When early settlers moved to the Xiaolan area to reclaim the sands, they formed eighteen military colonies (weisuo) using Guandi and Beidi temples as headquarters. The Li family was a military household in one of the colonies. A member of the Li family obtained imperial degrees and eventually became a leading official in the late Ming court. Ancestral halls were built and genealogies compiled. The military registration of his lineage was converted to a civilian one. The Li became one of the three major surnames in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Xiaolan, displaying scores of ancestral halls, owning thousands of mu of the sands, and becoming active participants in lineage and community rituals (see chapter 8 of this volume). There were also other ways of being registered. Panyu xianzhi of the Kangxi period (juan 20, 1686) recorded incidents of Dan households who obtained “legitimate” registration by attaching themselves to commoner households as bond servants. Others, according to Sihui xianzhi, “became wealthy and bribed local residents of the same surname in order to be registered under their households” (1896, 1: 98b). The Yongzheng emperor’s edict was intended to change the status of the Dan through household registration. Local gazetteers and magistrates’ judgments acknowledged it. However, given the dynamics of the region, the process was not as straightforward as the edict would have implied.

Academic Honors and Officialdom Participation in the civil service examinations was both a means and an end for officialdom and social mobility in late imperial China. Emperor Yongzheng’s edict opened the way for the Dan to participate. Nevertheless, historians documented earlier exceptions. Huang Zuo, a well-respected scholar-official and the compiler of Guangdong tongzhi (1561/1977), provided an entry about some Dan “who by affinity became educated,” and “who successfully obtained academic degrees” (68: 48b). The career of a prominent military figure of the late Ming court, Yuan Chonghuan, presents a classic case. Generations of Yuan’s family transported lumber along the Xi  River. His “native home” was by the waters of Dong River, but he was not recognized by the Yuan lineages in the area. In order to participate in the civil service examinations, he traveled to Teng county of Guangxi province and took the examinations under a fake household registration. His family eventually built a Sanjie temple (related to the worship of snakes by water-based groups) by the Dong River, where a large floating population congregated. All of these facts pointed to his possible “Dan” origin. However, after he gained the jinshi degree (metropolitan graduate) and rose from the posting of county magistrate to minister of war, his humble family background was forgotten.13 His case highlighted the importance as well as the possibility for the lowly to acquire academic degrees in order to convert ethnic labels and social status. The Chen of Tianma xiang in Xinhui county provide another illuminating example (Siu 1989a, chapter 3). Today they continue to be looked down upon by neighbors as “Chen the Danjia”; Tianma residents deny such a reference. They have had thirtyfive ancestral halls built by various branches of the lineage. They also allege that their focal ancestral hall, the Wuben Tang, has existed since the Ming. Members of the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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lineage also received imperial degrees. However, their lineage genealogy is revealing. It was compiled in 1923 by a branch of the lineage whose ancestor (a member of the seventh generation from Tianma) gained an academic degree and moved to the county seat, Huicheng. The origin myth points to their “Dan” origins. It claimed that generations of the Chen had lived by the waters. The mother of the founding ancestor was pregnant when her husband was drowned during a dispute. Fearing further persecution, her family entrusted her to a friend, a fisherman named Guo. They fled Jiangmen (an area where a floating population congregated) and took shelter in the sands near Tianma. She bore a son and the family multiplied. The family eventually drove out the original inhabitants, settled in the area, and prospered. The Chen continued to pay respect to the graves of the founder’s mother (known as bopo) and fisherman Guo in the hills behind the village.

Water-Based Commerce: Market and Transport An article by Mitsuo Suzuki on the fishermen of Zhejiang in the contemporary period offers interesting parallels to our questions on historical Guangdong. First, unlike the local cadres who hosted him, the fisherfolk spoke a “cosmopolitan” dialect, indicating their wide network of contacts in the river systems. Second, he confirms the notion that in the past the water-based culture spanned a range of ecological environments, from mountain regions at the highest reaches of the river to the turbulent waters along the Fujian coast, and that over the centuries local people had crossed from one niche to another (Suzuki 1992, pp. 128–40). Ye Xian’en, in his book Guangdong hangyun shi (1989), illustrates the crucial functions of the floating population in river and coastal transport in a highly commercialized regional economy. The chuanhu (boat masters) of Zhanglin in eastern Guangdong were wealthy merchants. Although they built elaborate residences and warehouses in the seaport, they could also be involved in organized smuggling and piracy. Both were venues for the accumulation of wealth and power (Ye 1989). Although Ye belabors the point that the Dan were exploited as hired hands and poor fishermen by Han wholesalers, moneylenders, and boat masters, his findings reveal the self-differentiation of the floating population within a powerful occupational monopoly.14 David Faure’s study of the boat people in the New Territories of Hong Kong corroborates the supposition that some Dan fishermen were wealthy and had contributed heavily to temple festivals staged in regional markets (Faure, Hayes, and Birch 1984, pp. 24–42). Is it possible that the Dan moved onshore as prosperous merchants before becoming part of a landed elite? If they did, one may need to reexamine the roles of merchants, boat masters, and river markets in the building of lineage community and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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ethnic hierarchy. Furthermore, did the expanding river marshes of the Pearl River Delta, beyond the reach of officials and established lineages, perhaps provide easier channels for mobility? The accelerated reclamation of the sands in the Pearl River Delta during the Ming and Qing was probably a crucial historical juncture that reinforced the rigid ethnic classifications while allowing rapid membership turnover between categories. Territorial-based groups, tracing descent through a focal ancestor, acquired large tracts of river marshes with tax exemptions from officials, and reclaimed them over long periods. The reclamation projects required the flexing of political muscle and large-scale organization of capital and labor that spanned decades. The reclaimed polders eventually became prized agricultural land for grain and cash crops, while rights to the sands that formed on their edges continued to be fiercely contested. Historical studies show that a new social order emerged in the delta with the language of lineage, settlement rights, and literati achievements. These processes combined with rapid commercialization and the rise of market towns of different sizes in the delta. These towns thrived on the reclamation of the sands and the subsequent grain trade centering on Guangzhou and Foshan. Transportation networks matured, drawing the floating populations into an increasingly organic system of agricultural production, trade, and industry. Opportunities for change of occupation and status abounded in this expanded “space.” From the western edge of the delta to the vast sands in the Southeast, the involvement of the Dan in the commercial networks lasted until recent history. It was noted in an investigative report on the floating population in Shiqi of Zhongshan county by the Guangdong Provincial Government (1953) that: According to elderly Dan residents, they mostly came from Jiangmen of Xinhui [county], Chencun of Shunde, and Sanbu of Siyi. We understand from this fact that the above three places were the center of Dan activities in the Pearl River Delta in the past (roughly before the Opium War) . . . and these were important commercial centers of the delta as well. The need for transportation attracted and sustained a large number of Dan. (Guangdongsheng renminzhengfu minzushiwu weiyuanhui 1953, p. 9)

From the Ming to the early 20th century, the delta could be seen as a constantly reconfiguring social ecology. Small clusters of straw huts and outposts for guards (weiguan) along the dikes grew into populated villages, as wealth was gained from a prosperous grain trade and related cash crops near market towns. Furthermore, some households abandoned fishing to devote all their time to transporting agricultural commodities. The prosperous ones owned their boats and started to trade goods as well. Some became merchants in newly established markets. The fluidity of occupation, operational space, and status in the ecology of the sands created unprecedented opportunities for the floating population. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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However, even for the most prosperous merchants, creating a “native place” and tracing primordial connections to it were instrumental for establishing legitimate status in the maturing sands. Smaller market towns were often dominated by entrenched lineages that effectively excluded new settlers. In our investigation of Shawan in Panyu, we observed a stone tablet erected in 1885 by a local alliance of the four major lineages in Shawan forbidding former “servants” to build an ancestral hall and claim settlement rights: In our town a clear distinction is maintained between master [zhu] and servant [pu]. Servants who are able to redeem themselves by custom should move far away. If they stay in town, their descendants must continue to observe their status as servants in ceremonies of capping, marriage, funeral, and sacrifice, in the way they build their houses, and in their style of clothing. They must never build an ancestral hall, large or small. (Faure and Siu 1995, p. 14)

However, lineages in larger market towns and regional cities were unable to maintain a monopoly. Large-scale commercial centers such as Foshan, Jiangmen, Xiaolan, and Rongqi had fewer restrictions against “outsiders.” In Foshan zhongyi xiangzhi it was reported that “in Guangdong people are proud of their lineage pedigree. New immigrants are often rejected. But our township does not have such bad practices. Prominent lineages, humble families, and waves of immigrants live side by side without suspicion. Lineages prosper on their own merits” (1753, 6: 9a). The history of the family of Huo Tao in Foshan is illustrative. Foshan, considered one of the four most remarkable market towns (ming zhen) of late imperial China, was known for its pottery kilns, iron implements, and cloth and paper-making industries. It was also home to the delta’s magnate lineages with vast holdings in the sands and a dazzling array of literati figures. Huo Tao’s career was a creative fusion of these interests.15 His grandfather’s generation supposedly started as duck farmers in the river marshes (thus likely to be Dan by local definitions). In time, they entered the iron forging business and operated lumber farms and pottery kilns in Foshan. During Huo Tao’s rise through the imperial bureaucracy to become minister of rites in the Jiajing reign of the Ming, his family amassed vast areas of the sands. These processes of social mobility intertwined to create a thriving regional culture and society. Biographical references to Huo Tao hardly ever mention his family’s humble origins in the river marshes. On the other hand, the study by Luo Yixing on Lubao market in Sanshui county (north of Foshan) from the Ming to the Republican period shows the tortuous paths to social mobility and the constant renegotiations among fishermen, transport brokers, merchants, local bosses, and the surrounding lineages. One sees the demeaning ethnic labels reserved for the Dan (such as shuiliu chai, floating twigs) and the rituals of exclusion repeatedly used against “newcomers” and merchants who had not firmly established local roots (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 44–64). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Banditry and Piracy Commercial environments were inherently unstable. The presence of mobile populations who were subjected to local abuses, together with price fluctuations and the frequent shifting of tax burdens onto newcomers by the locally powerful often led to social unrest.16 Historical records point to the frequent use of force, when merchants, boat masters, hired hands, and bond servants drifted into piracy and banditry. There was the rebellion of Huang Xiaoyang in the Ming. Those of Zhou Yu and Li Rong in Jiangmen were triggered by the coastal evacuation and closure in the reign of Kangxi (1662–69). Equally familiar to local folklore were the legendary exploits of Zheng Yi Sao and Zhang Bao (also based in Jiangmen) during the Jiaqing years in the late 18th century. They all added ambiguity to the status of the upwardly mobile among the Dan. In the late Qing, the magistrate of Xinhui county, Nie Erkang, had the following comments on the interwoven and interchangeable status of tenants, hired hands, landowners, and pirates in the sands: According to my investigations in the sands, banditry and extortions are frequent. Tenants and hired hands can very well be bandits themselves. It is because only bandits can work with one another, and only bandits can offer effective defense against bandits. Landowners use them in various ways, some for defense, others for sharing the loot. With the landowners’ backing, bandits make a pretense of hard work. When opportunities arise, they rob. Other times, they farm. These polders are full of hidden filth and crime, and the landowners are patrons. (1867)

At times local Dan bosses were given military responsibilities by the state to reinforce coastal defense. The more followers they amassed, the higher the titles given. They at times acquired notoriety as bandits when they looted landed communities and battled with imperial troops (Murray 1987). Only a thin line existed among officials, local bosses, and bandits. The classic Ming novel Water Margin was not mere fiction. The use of force on the part of either officials ( guan) or bandits ( fei) could be another way of getting “landed.” An early article by David Faure on the Tang of Kam Tin in Bao’an county (later Hong Kong) is illuminating. The established Tang lineages were in disarray during the coastal evacuations. While some managed to stay on through bribery and connection with local bosses, those driven off the land either perished or turned to banditry (Faure, Hayes, and Birch 1984, pp. 24–42). The height of piracy during the Jiaqing period, and the widespread disturbances surrounding the Red Turbans in the reign of Daoguang and Xianfeng (mid-19th century) created power vacuums, destruction of villages, and land seizures to a degree similar to the coastal evacuation. From the Ming to the Republican period, violent incidents involving settlement disputes could be uncovered in the genealogies of lineages that subsequently prospered.

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The development of the He lineage in Shawan of Panyu county centering on the Liugeng Tang was a case in point. The He lineage genealogy specifically noted the eventful dynastic transitions from the Ming to the Qing. Bond servants rebelled; ancestral properties were destroyed and lineage members killed (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 21–43, 188–208). A He lineage document (Liugeng tang kao) describes the He lineage in disintegration during those turbulent times: In the winter of the bingxu year of Yongli [1646], the smell of blood began in the Nanling [Southern Mountain], and disaster followed in our village. The bond servants who had belonged to various surnames turned upon their masters and caused much disturbance. Fierce young men in seven villages followed them, set up camps and walled compounds, robbed, and could not be controlled . . . such that not even chickens and dogs were left in peace. Every family departed from the village to escape from their wrath.

The account continued: [They] plundered our houses, slew our kin, burned our ancestral halls, and turned our pavilions into ashes. They were offensive and ungrateful to their masters. (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 30–31)

Although the riots eventually subsided and members of the He lineage tried to rebuild their focal ancestral hall in 1663, they were immediately caught up in the coastal evacuation ordered by the Kangxi emperor. It was noted by the He lineage document that residents did not return to Shawan until 1669 and the Liugeng Tang was rebuilt in 1688, becoming one of the most prominent symbols of lineage solidarity and prestige in Guangdong. But in the final analysis, it is difficult to ascertain the identities of those who eventually reoccupied the area and rebuilt the lineage. It was claimed by the compiler of the lineage history that “relatives in nearby Weichong village to the northwest of Shawan came forward with ancestral tablets that they had—defying danger—saved from the Liugeng Tang and placed on their own ancestral altars. This small group of kinsmen was therefore looked upon as having done a great service to the lineage, and as a gesture of gratitude the lineage rewarded each of them with eight mu [1.3 acres] of land” (p. 31).

A Genealogical History of Zhigang (Tsai Kong) The general observations on the Pearl River Delta sensitize us to the range of options for upward mobility faced by inhabitants in the open frontier of the sands as it rapidly developed agriculture and commerce. The second half of this chapter uses fragments of history from Zhigang village to illustrate the processes by which those labeled as Dan established a lineage community on their own terms. They improved

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their status by controlling commerce and transportation and by making use of opportunities amid social unrest related to particular state policies in the region. The village (referred to as Zhiwei [Tsai Mei] in Chaolian xiangzhi) is located on the southern tip of Chaolian Island in one of the major tributaries of the Xi River.17 Through the centuries, its inhabitants, mostly surnamed Ou, were perceived as Dan by the more established lineages in the northern and central parts of the island (the Chen, Lu, Ou, and Pan). The established lineage settlements produced genealogies, ornate ancestral halls, and an array of literati figures. Families of bondservants were attached to them. They were held together ritually by the cult of the Hongsheng temple located next to the focal ancestral hall of the Ou lineage in Fugang. The Ou of Zhigang were completely excluded, even after they built their own ancestral halls. The prominent Ou lineage insisted that those in Zhigang were not related, pointing out that their surnames were written differently. Moreover, in the annual parade of the Hongsheng deity, those in Zhigang had a very minor role, and the deity toured the village only briefly. Although residents in Zhigang claimed that the Hongsheng deity first landed at Zhigang, no one outside Zhigang ever acknowledged that there was once a Hongsheng temple at the southern end of the island. Contrary to the impressions of the established lineages that Zhigang had been a rather “uncivilized” place with mixed surnames, the village in fact had been a prosperous regional market for the communities along the river. An Ou surname lineage did establish itself, building seven ancestral halls.18 By the eighteenth year of Daoguang (1837), it was able to put together a genealogy. The original inhabitants shared a small Tianhou temple with other surnames (Zhu, He, Li, Liang, and Lin).19 They built mud houses clustering at the foot of a hill at the southern edge of the island. At the site of the market near the water landing was a longpai (imperial placard) and a temple for the Hongsheng deity. Although Chaolian xiangzhi (compiled by Lu Zijun, a scholar of the Lu lineage, in 1946) did not mention either, local villagers insisted that the community had a part in the annual parade of Hongsheng, whose temple was located at Fugang. The parade, involving all the established lineages of the island, stopped at the longpai. The site served as a ritual center for the floating population of the region, who patronized the market and contributed heavily to the event in the form of huichang (festive trusts). Local residents went on to say that, when Hongsheng was initially brought to Chaolian Island during the Jiajing reign in the Ming, it landed at the longpai site before being moved to the northern part of the island, where a powerful land-owning Ou lineage was based. In our field visits to Zhigang, we were able to discover the small temple near the market, probably built during mid-Qing. Although Zhigang is now referred to as a lineage community of the Ou, local residents point out that Qishan she (the neighborhood closest to the river landing) has been shared by families with various surnames (zaxing).20 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Xinhui xianzhi (Xinhui county gazetteer) listed the biographies of two literati figures of the late Ming whose native place was traced to a neighborhood in Chaolian named Shibanli. In the Ou lineage document compiled in 1837, the genealogy seems clearly delineated.21 Its origins were traced to a distant ancestor, Linshi (shared by all the Ou of Guangdong), who moved from Zhejiang province to Nanhai county in the Pearl River Delta. Seven generations later, an ancestor moved to Zhujixiang to avoid the coastal pirates. Fuzhen, a member of the fifteenth generation, moved to Xinhui and was considered the founding ancestor of the Ou in Zhigang. The genealogical narrative went on to describe Zhaoji, a grandson of Fuzhen, who supposedly lived in Shunde county. During a trip with a friend surnamed Hu to Chaolian, he decided to settle in Zhigang.22 The present Ou lineage traces their ancestry to Banfeng, Zhaoji’s great-grandson, who lived in the early Ming. Two of the oldest ancestral halls in the community, the Yuehu zu and the Gusong zu, were built for the grandsons of Banfeng. According to old villagers we interviewed, there were seven brothers in Yuehu’s generation. They were responsible for building the focal ancestral hall at the end of the Ming, with expensive tongkin wood.23 However, the focal ancestral hall had very little land, as did the halls built in the names of Yuehu and Gusong.24 One of the brothers, Juyi, did not have a hall. However, his two great-grandsons, Yingqi and Zhiyuan, received juren degrees and were assigned official posts in the Ming. At a much later time, an ancestral hall was built for Yingqi’s grandfather, Weidong, the founder of the most populated and the largest landholding branch of the Ou lineage. Three segment halls of Weidong were built later.25 Together, they occupied an area formerly inhabited by a Liang surname, and owned part of Techeng sha (which, according to Longxi zhilüe, emerged after the Jiaqing period),26 and sands in Fenzhou and Hengsha. The hall also distributed the largest amount of ritual pork to its descendants. In these prosperous times, the Ou had bondservants known locally as “xiashi” (ha sei). Surnamed Chen, Li, Zhang, Lu, and Hou, they served different segment halls.27 Despite the relative clarity of the genealogical connections, the language and substance of the document are full of ambiguities. It appears that the compiler copied materials from different genealogies and gazetteers in order to fill in historical gaps in the narrative. This technique of reinventing tradition is not unfamiliar, but two inconsistencies in the Ou lineage document are worth mentioning. The story of the migration from Zhujixiang is vague. The personalities involved do not include Fuzhen, and the name of the migrant referred to as the father of Fuzhen (Yizhen) does not match the name in the genealogical chart (Dajing, or Yuechang). If one compares the myth with that of the powerful Ou lineage in Fugang on Chaolian to whom the Ou of Zhigang claimed they were related, the personalities involved were two generations apart. It seems that while the Chen of Tianma did not even pretend that their ancestors came from Zhujixiang, the Ou of Zhigang tried but were not able This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to present plausible evidence. These unsuccessful attempts to “match” ancestors are frequent in lineage genealogies in Guangdong.

Violence and Social Unrest Other entries cast further doubt on the identity of the Ou of Zhigang. One may wonder if those who compiled the document were really related to the people on the genealogical chart. The document mentions two incidents that drove the residents from Zhigang. The first was the coastal evacuations. The document claims that “only some returned. From then on, [their] descendants dispersed in different directions and settled in other counties” (Ou 1838, p. 52). It is unclear who filled the local social vacuum. The second entry is equally intriguing. Lingxiao xianyuan leipu (凌霄仙源 類譜) describes another social crisis: “In the Renchen year of Daoguang’s reign, [the community] was attacked by renegade lineage members who collaborated with bandits. . . . Over half died of disease, trees were uprooted, houses and ancestral halls destroyed” (Ou 1838, p. 53). The author of the entry continued, “Rui saw that there was never a lineage genealogy and would like to compile one; now that we are exiled as a result of the disastrous event, and have sworn never to return, it is difficult to forget our ancestry, and I am writing this as testimony.” Questions remain. If the entry depicts a historical event in which residents of Zhigang were again dispersed by violence and social unrest, who replaced them? What were the motivations of the latecomers when they compiled a written lineage genealogy in 1837 out of fragments of historical materials?28 The social disruptions of the coastal evacuations in the Kangxi period were well known. The military adventures of Dan leaders Zhou Yu and Li Rong in Jiangmen were recorded in detail.29 Zhigang, at the tip of Chaolian Island across from Jiangmen, could not possibly be spared. The Ou genealogy itself recorded dispersions to Yangjiang, Jiuzhouji in Xiangshan, Leliu in Shunde, and Foshan. Could the “pirates” and “rebels” who congregated near Jiangmen and who were supposedly driven to rebellion by the imperial edict be the eventual settlers of Zhigang? After pacification, could they have claimed the tax accounts and household registrations of former residents who had perished? An interesting side story involved a branch under Yuehu zu, who had migrated to Yangjiang and were engaged in fishing. In time, they grew numerous and established an ancestral hall. When one member acquired a juren degree, they contacted the Ou of Zhigang with the intention of linking up. However, the Zhigang residents showed no interest and the matter was dropped. A similar scenario could have taken place in the Daoguang and Xianfeng periods, when widespread social unrest built up to the conflicts involving the Red Turbans. In two historical chronicles of the bloody battles near the county seat of Jiangmen and Xinhui (Huicheng), different bands of rebels fought gentry-led local defense corps This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and imperial troops on land and water. Numerous rebels named in the records were Chaolian natives, and one of them, Chen Songnian of Gangtou, became a commander of thousands of rebels who besieged Jiangmen and Huicheng numerous times before his capture and execution. Zhigang appeared in the records as being among villages looted during the conflicts.30 Although the social unrest occurred after the Ou lineage genealogy was compiled, the story provides some indication of the fluidity of settlement histories in the area, combined with massive violence, dislocation, and gaps in memory. This is quite contrary to the image of genealogical depth depicted in the lineage documents.

Commerce and Water Transport Zhigang’s location, which made it vulnerable in times of unrest, was an asset in times of peace and commercial development. A description of its market in Chaolian xiangzhi acknowledged its significance in the regional economy up to the turn of the century: Zhiwei xu, situated near the river at Zhiwei. Numerous sails gathered on the horizon. There were scores of shops. The market met on the first, fourth, and seventh day every ten days of the month. Buyers and sellers congregated at dawn, with animals, vegetables, and a wide range of other goods. There were public scales, and scale fees were collected from traders. They belonged to the village school [shexue] of Chaolian, and the annual income was substantial. From the end of Guangxu’s reign when commercial activities moved to Jiangmen, the market in Zhiwei declined into insignificance. (Lu 1946, p. 80).

These descriptions are probably no exaggeration and are corroborated by interviews with elderly villagers whose families engaged in large-scale processing of the agricultural goods being marketed. Ou Wumao (who was eighty-five years old in 1991) and Ou Jinyao (seventy-five in 1991) asserted that, in the time of their greatgrandfathers (in the Jiaqing period), there were twelve public scales auctioned out to established lineages. The Ou of Fugang and the Lu of Lubian controlled the scales and collected the fees. The Ou in Zhigang participated as partners in the auctions.31 Large factories were built near Shengping she around the market. Many, dominated by merchants from Guangxi, produced building materials from oyster shells dug in the shallow waters. There were factories producing thick twine for tugging boats. Most important of all, there were large quantities of chongcai (a root crop), collected from various xiangs (Hetang, Chaolian, and Guzhen) in the Xi River system, that were sun-dried and salted at factories in Zhigang that employed hundreds of women. Dan fisherfolk transported these products to places as far away as Chencun in Shunde county, Guangzhou, Foshan, and, later in the 19th century, to Hong Kong and Singapore. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The great-grandfather of Ou Jinyao and a brother operated two large factories, known as the Shangchang and Xiachang. They also “traded” salt needed for processing the vegetables. The volume of chongcai marketed exceeded ten thousand dan (a hundred catties per dan) annually. Brokers came from as far away as Taishan county, beyond the western edge of the delta. Although the Ou family did not engage in farming, the great-grandfather was able to build a house for himself and a sizable one for his son when the latter married. The bride was from a rich family in the neighboring village of Hetang, and had bound feet. Prosperity lasted several generations. The family finally closed one factory in the late Qing, when the wholesale markets in Jiangmen replaced those in Zhigang. The second factory folded in the early years of the Republic because some members of Weidong zu accused it of smuggling salt. It was only then that the family went into farming. The owners of two unusually large houses in Shengping she belonged to cousins of Jinyao’s great-grandfather (brothers Shengjin and Shengyan) in Yuehu zu. They prospered in Zhigang processing chongcai and trading grain. The family donated grain for charity and bought titles around the time of the Tongzhi emperor (in the 1860s), and later set up gold and jewelry shops in Hong Kong and Singapore. Ou Wumao’s family also engaged in a variety of trades. His great-grandfather was a buyer in the wholesale grain market in Jiangmen. His grandfather manufactured twine and traded it up the Xi River to Wuzhou. His father took up sericulture in Zhigang, trading cocoons in Rongqi in Shunde county. Family fortunes had declined in the 1930s and especially during the Japanese occupation, when he rented land from local ancestral halls and Chen-surnamed landlords from Zhishan (also in Chaolian) to grow grain. It is ironic that his family came to farming in a roundabout way, after other options had been closed. Zhigang’s market declined in the second half of the 19th century due to the rise of Jiangmen as a more competitive wholesale vegetable market. For some families, upward mobility strategies in Zhigang changed with the acquisition of large tracts of sands. Even when this conventional strategy was pursued, the ability of Dan bosses to mobilize threatening fleets of followers was essential for acquiring land or defending property rights.

Participation in Community Rituals On the ritual front, the established lineages of Chaolian used every opportunity to ridicule the residents of Zhigang. There was a local saying: “Zhiwei fellows, grow wrong whiskers, / Build a platform, but stage no opera.” The sentiment expressed was familiar among members of established lineages in the delta, who poked fun at floating populations in the sands who had settled into communities and tried to stage operas as part of their community festivities.32 However, contrary to these popular This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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sayings, Zhigang did have its share of religious and ritual activities. Even Chaolian xiangzhi, with its expected biases, includes Zhigang in its descriptions of the annual parade of the Hongsheng deity. Although the local gazetteer did not list any literati item displayed in the Ou ancestral halls during the parade (as was the custom in other established ancestral halls), it did mention the deity being carried to “Zhishan and its neighboring Zhiwei” on the third day. Zhigang also staged one of the seven sets of operas on the island. Local residents corroborated some observations and added others. They claimed that the activities of the Hongsheng parade in Zhigang centered at the longpai near the market and river landing. Although the deity came through Zhishan during the day and did not stay for the night, there were several days of operas. A large stage extended all the way to the river, and the operas were performed facing the land. Hundreds of boats congregated for the occasion, including large boats from Guangzhou and Hong Kong. The boat people contributed to festival funds (huichang), managed by the Ou in the community. The factories also contributed generously. The deity received audiences at the focal ancestral hall and the hall in Weidong although it “sat” longer at the market near the river. After the market declined at the turn of the century, the festivities and contributions diminished. Old residents recalled that, in the 1940s, the operas were performed in front of the focal ancestral hall rather than at the market. Precious paintings and calligraphy were displayed. The classics scholar Chen Yinke has a famous opinion on the definition of ethnic groups in Chinese history: he insists that the difference between Han and non-Han is marked more by culture than by blood. This criterion is crucial, he argues, to prevent unnecessary academic disputes (1982). Contemporary scholars in China would most likely accept this view, but they have approached it from the angle of acculturation, or even sinicization. We have attempted to use a historical study to explore the Pearl River Delta, known for Dan and Han identities separated by strong languages of literati achievements and lineage commitments. This chapter has focused on the twin issues of ethnicity and orthodoxy. Intertwined with them are larger conceptual issues concerning empire and frontier. For centuries, cultural boundaries in the sands of the delta have been fluid and often reworked under different circumstances of state and local society formation. We do not assume that essential qualities of a Han cultural complex propagated from the political center through population migration, nor do we stress assertions of ethnicity at the frontier. Instead, we have tried to illuminate complex processes of creating state and local society, out of which emerged dichotomous notions of Han and Dan, village and sands, farming and commerce, commoners and bandits. The reworking of an ethnic hierarchy in Zhigang had a great deal to do with state policies that provided options for or imposed restrictions of mobility on a water-based population. However, local circumstances in the development of the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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sands have allowed a great deal of room for maneuver. Although limited historical materials do not allow us to delineate clearly the origins of various segments of the Ou lineage in Zhigang, it is not difficult to detect the range of options provided by a commercializing regional political economy. As merchants, boat masters, minor military officials, smugglers, and pirates, many labeled Dan became “landed” at various historical junctures in the late imperial period. They contributed to the making of community on their own terms and at the same time subscribed to the language of orthodoxy. Although there were hardly state institutions in the sands of the delta, the agency of local populations invoked the totalizing language of the imperial order. The expansion of empire involved tremendous complicity and creativity of local agents who would not have considered themselves frontier or ethnic populations. *The research on Chaolian was supported by a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by faculty research grants from the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. We would like to thank May Bo Ching for helping with the preparation of the manuscript. This chapter is a slightly edited version of the one published in Empire at the Margins, edited by Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Notes Qing shizong shilu (1986), 81: 79, the renshen day, the fifth month, the seventh year of Yongzheng 1729. 2. On the Yue origin of the Dan, see Luo Xianglin (1955). 3. Qu ([1700]/1985), p. 486. Qu Dajun came from a literati family, but his contemporaries considered him unconventional. The book focused on his observations, during his travels, of a wide range of local customs. 4. See Anderson (1970). He argues that, in times of unrest, especially during the 19th century, many land people fled to the waters. 5. See Panyu xianzhi (1686), juan 20; Shunde xianzhi (1853), juan 6. 6. See Chenzu shipu (1923); see also Siu (1989a), chapter 3, for the history of the Chen of Tianma. 7. See Chen Xujing (1946), chapter 3. He pointed to the discrepancies in the figures compiled by the Guangzhoushi gong’an ju [Municipal Public Security Bureau] and those by the Guangzhoushi shuishang jingcha si fenju [the Four Branches of the Bureau of the River Police of the Guangzhou Municipality]. 8. See Faure (1989b), chapter 8 of this volume, and Liu, “Lineage on the Sands,” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 24–43. Counties were converted to municipalities in the late 1980s. 9. See Wing-hoi Chan’s chapter in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton (2006), pp. 255–84. 10. Ibid. 11. Cultural distance became a problem only when those using its label turned into organized forces menacing settled communities. See the chapters by David Faure and Wing-hoi Chan in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton (2006). 1.

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12. This was pointed out to me by Wing-hoi Chan. The entry is taken from Zhongguo shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha ziliao congkan fujiansheng bianjizu (1986), p. 364. 13. Dongguanxian wenhuaju (1984), particularly pp. 9–25, 35–56. 14. See also Guangdongsheng renminzhengfu minzushiwu weiyuanhui (1953). 15. See chapter 10 in this volume. On Huo Tao and Foshan, see Faure (1990), Luo Yixing, and Tan and Ye in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985). 16. Wing-hoi Chan pointed out to us the relationship between commercial instability and social unrest. He detects similar dynamics along the commercial routes in the mountainous areas of northern Guangdong, southern Jiangxi, and western Fujian. 17. The local pronunciation for Zhigang is “tsai kong,” meaning a barren hill where animals are. Tsai is the radical for the word animal. Mei is the word for tail, or end. The place name is quite derogatory. 18. Chaolian xiangzhi listed only six. See Lu (1946). 19. The temple is also known to the locals as Shibao miao. Shibao was an administrative district comprising part of Zhishan (Chen surname) and other lesser surnames that did not have ancestral halls. 20. The five neighborhoods are Shibanli, Liangbian she, Linan she, Shengping she, Qishan she. 21. See Ou (1838); Ou Wumao and Ou Jinyao, two elderly villagers in Zhigang, compiled a new version in 1985, entitled Zhigang oushi zupu. 22. In local folklore, he was a hired hand who looked after ducks and later settled (ruzhu) in the area (interview with Ou Wumao and Ou Jinyao in December 1992). In fact, Wumao asserted that the Ou family was already rich, “who became Dan when they migrated from Nanxiong.” The places of origin mentioned in the genealogy, such as coastal Zhejiang province, Shunde county of Guangdong, were where Dan fishermen congregated. 23. However, the hall did not have much land, and old villagers lamented that “there was not enough to buy burning oil,” and that they had to contribute to have ritual pork (interview, December 1992). 24. Interestingly, Ou Wumao said that Yuehu hall used to have land, but by the fourteenth or fifteenth generation, the land had been mortgaged for the business and lost. Gusong’s land was sold during the Republican era due to famine during the war. 25. The names of two of them, Xiangxi and Shisan, were listed in Chaolian xiangzhi; the other, Guoer, was given by our informants Ou Wumao and Ou Jinyao, who compiled the genealogy in 1985. 26. Xinhui Longxi zhilüe was originally compiled by Chen Juchi of Waihai (1972), who described a battle off the coast of Waihai, where a boat of the pirate Zhang Bao was sunk during the Jiaqing period. Sands gathered around the sunken boat and eventually formed a river marsh known as Techeng sha. 27. According to local residents, Yuehu zu was served by the Zhang surname, Gusong zu by the Hou surname, and Weidong zu by the Chen surname. 28. Ou Wumao, who belonged to Gusong zu, asserted that, in the Daoguang-Xianfeng period, people from Weidong zu bullied members of his segment. Some fled to Foshan and vowed never to return. They became prosperous merchants in Foshan, including one referred to as Ou “Shiwan” for his wealth. Wumao, in his recent investigations, was able to locate where the descendants were, but the latter had no intention of contacting those in Zhigang. 29. See, for example, Lu (1946), copied from earlier historical documents. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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30. See Tan (1960) and Chen Dianlan (Chen Xiangpu 1855). It is difficult to situate Tianma in this conflict, since both government troops and rebels had stationed there. 31. By the early Republican years, only two scales were left. Chaolian xiangzhi recorded that the Chaolian shexue (in Fugang) collected the fees. 32. These tunes were common in Xiaolan zhen of Xiangshan, directed toward the residents of Jiuzhouji, a nearby community formed in the sands. The residents there were often regarded as Dan.

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10 The Grounding of Cosmopolitans Merchants and Local Cultures in South China

Where Were the Merchants? In his study of Hankou merchants in the 18th century, William Rowe points to their institutional significance as an autonomous social force in dialogue with the late imperial state. Their physical presence matured well before the forces of modernization, which were associated with the coming of the West (1985). David Faure, however, stresses the lack of an independent identity for mercantile groups. His study of Foshan focuses on the literati concerns shrewdly pursued by a range of town-based elite a century earlier. There might have been powerful mercantile interests, but he sees no conscious cultural identity apart from state ideology (1990). Scholars have debated about mercantile groups, their trade organizations, family institutions, lifestyles, outlooks, and networking with literati and state. The maturing of marketing systems from the Song dynasty onward is well demonstrated by studies on Shanxi, Huizhou, Fujian, and Jiangnan.1 Cycles of commercial growth and decline were interwoven with dynastic fortunes. They also contributed to a regional renaissance of the arts and culture, family institutions, and popular religion.2 Despite the material and cultural impact of mercantile groups, their identities remained as ambiguous in historical records as in the minds of analysts. The ambiguity has much to do with the fact that successful merchants cultivated a great deal more than their trades. Huizhou merchants during the Ming invested in academies and literati pursuits. Those in Jiangnan excelled in the craft of garden building and fine arts.3 In Fujian, they built elaborate temples (Dean and Zheng 1995). In Guangdong, they acquired and developed vast river marshes (sha) in the name of ancestral estates. These estates were the backbone of the evolution of an elaborate lineage complex (Faure 1989b). If those engaging in mercantile activities subscribed to the cultural forms of the literati and contributed significantly to the making of local society, we should not assume that merchants were extraneous to agrarian institutions and threatening to state orthodoxy. However, such an assumption often frames research questions and historical explanations: the difference between the studies by William Rowe and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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David Faure thus becomes one of historical time and place. The Foshan elites would be seen as having emerged from a rural political economy and having borrowed state ideologies to legitimize their operations. The Hankou merchants had another century to develop private urban institutions and regional networks in order to “collude, negotiate, and conflict” with the state on their own terms. The assumed totalizing impact of the imperial order and its hostility to commercial activities continue to shape scholarly imagination for the Republican period. Chinese historians have agonized over the Qing’s failure to modernize China’s economy. To them, the culprit was state orthodoxy as much as Western imperialism. In their view, when imperial prerogatives weakened, the new Chinese bourgeoisie emerged from under the shadow of the decaying Qing state. They thrived when the preoccupation of Western powers in Europe during the First World War created competitive opportunities for indigenous businesses. Labeled compradors (maiban), capitalists, and national bourgeoisie, depending on the side of the political spectrum they were cast, these groups were seen to have reached a golden age in an emerging metropolitan landscape of treaty ports and coastal cities (Bergère 1989; Huang Yifeng 1990). A similar analytical logic is extended to the Chinese diaspora. Wang Gungwu maintains that overseas Chinese merchants thrived due to their distance from imperial control and to their skillful adaptation to colonial and local states in Southeast Asia.4 Liu Kwang-ching observes the privatization of mercantile activities as reflected in guilds and native-place associations. He chronicles how late Qing compradors used their intimate knowledge of Western institutions to promote new practical philosophies on state and society (1988, 1990). New business interests in the early 20th century were seen as continuing this maneuver between the legacy of tradition and modern Western challenges. Scholarly attention focuses on processes of nation-state building, where an assertive cosmopolitan elite assumed an autonomous identity and public space.5 Riding on their “marginality,” select entrepreneurial groups in Republican Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou conspicuously positioned themselves as national politics became decentered. However, one cannot ignore the demise of mercantile groups in other regional cities and towns. The decline of the Huizhou merchants started in the early 19th century, when the monopolistic powers of state licenses were eroded. Many hong merchants in the Canton Trade System in Guangzhou were bankrupted before the system was finally abolished. The devastation of the long-distance traders of agricultural products in Guangdong in the early 20th century also stood in sharp contrast to the fortunes of the new militarized bosses in the same region. It remains difficult to pinpoint the predicaments of the range of entrepreneurs in Chinese history, their membership, the nature of their business, their lifestyles and outlooks, their shifting alliances with power, and their national impact. If the term merchant defies definition as a distinct social category vis-à-vis the state in the Ming This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and Qing, merchants’ differing fortunes in the Republican era are also hard to categorize. It may be more fruitful to treat these mercantile experiences as multilayered processes that intertwined with the making of cultural, economic, and political institutions in particular historical junctures. Granted that there are always winners and losers in history, a discussion of what contributed to the fate of mercantile groups in relation to the fluctuating fortunes of state and local society will sharpen our focus on their identities. Instead of subscribing to mechanical dichotomies such as state versus market, urban versus rural, elite against popular, and public-private, we may focus on the creative linkages forged by merchants in their efforts to excel in the circumstances in which they found themselves. As a result of those efforts, they changed the terms for dialogue and invented new cultural arenas, which integrated local society, the larger political order, and their own identities. Once local agency and its historical complexities are analyzed, state institutions and agendas appear to have been nuanced and amorphous rather than restrictive and bureaucratic. At a discursive level, the state could be a fluid cultural idea subject to manipulation and contest. In previous articles, I have argued for a decentered view of the Chinese state. Such a view allows us to appreciate more fully the input from various social groups positioned in different parts of the empire. These groups had emulated what they perceived as literati values of the political center. In the process, they contributed to the creative making of regional society as well as the authoritative language of the state. What became recognized as cultural orthodoxy had much to do with the local resourcefulness of these agents, intentional or otherwise (see chapters 8 and 11 of this volume; Humphreys 1997, pp. 139–86). The ambiguous nature of merchants and their cultural efforts also allows us to rethink the terms of debate on “civil society” in historical and contemporary China. In a study of contemporary urban China, Elizabeth Perry aptly summarizes such rethinking: “Our Western social science habit of viewing state-society relations as a zero-sum game, in which society’s gain is the state’s loss, does not shed much light on a China where private ties, public associations, and state agents are so thoroughly intertwined” (Perry 1994; Davis et al. 1995, pp. 297–301; Philip Huang 1993). What follows is an exploratory essay, a rethinking of historical and ethnographic materials on the Pearl River Delta that I have collected over the years. The maneuvers of mercantile groups in the late imperial period will be contrasted with those in the early 20th century. There are visible gaps in the data and a conscious rereading of it, because my research has not been focused on mercantile experiences or the Republican period. I draw upon the works of historians and, in particular, colleagues who have worked on Guangdong. In the past few years, we have tried to fine-tune issues in historical anthropology, reset basic parameters on which the map of Chinese culture was drawn, and uncover voices in crucial moments of history that might not have been given the attention they deserve.6 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Merchants in the Making: Of the late Imperial State and Society If we do not analytically pose state orthodoxy and agrarian institutions against merchant interests, how do we assess the historical efforts of mercantile groups in bridging state and local identities? Scholars often assume that literati were more important than merchants in creating ideological commitment to the state (Hsiao 1960, Wakeman Jr. and Grant 1975). They may acknowledge that gentry and merchants often overlapped in membership in the commercial regions during the Ming and Qing, but they seldom give merchants a leading cultural voice.7 However, Yu Ying-shih in a recent article presents ample evidence, from the 16th century on, that merchants were able to create cultural space on their own terms while making every attempt to emulate orthodoxy. In the process, they changed the overall philosophical orientation of Chinese tradition itself.8 To give due attention to this interactive process, Susan Mann argues that, “like all agrarian societies, China offered merchants ideological sanctions and organizational roles that legitimized their status, incorporating them fully into the workings of the body politic . . . The Qing call to ‘make people content and facilitate the activities of merchants’ (anmin tongshang) recognized the integral relationship between a state agrarian order and a regular flow of commerce” (1987, pp. 27–28). Her study minimizes the assumed incompatibility of state orthodoxy and merchant interests, and focuses on liturgical leadership and market town development made possible by a state that recognized the merits of commerce. David Faure brings attention to another side of the merchants’ bridging functions: their initiative in making local rural society, the cultural foundation of which was shared, if not synonymous, with the Confucian state. He addresses the problem by highlighting new dimensions of being a merchant and making lineage. Stressing that mercantile activities permeated many social arenas, he observes, “Historians of China recognize that, in the Ming and the Qing, merchants contributed to their lineages and drew from them resources that they put into their business activities. While this view of the lineage gives it a place in business history, it nevertheless characterizes lineage institutions as being extraneous to the world of business. In this short note, I wish to argue that the distinction between lineage and business activities can often be misleading, and that the development of the lineage as an institution must be recognized as an intrinsic element in the history of Chinese business” (Faure 1989c, 1991). In a political system where commercial law did not exist, Faure argues, patronage was actively sought to ensure business security. From the Ming dynasty on, the territorially based lineages that rose to dominate the landscape of the towns and villages of south China, with their corporate estates, ornate ancestral halls for ritual and worship, and array of literati members, were consciously cultivated to provide the necessary patronage networks for the fledgling commercial interests (Faure 1989b, 1990). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Faure’s analytical point is relevant in other aspects of social life as well. Materials from the Pearl River Delta in the Ming and Qing periods largely support the view that corporate lineage estates in the sands, popular religious beliefs and practices, academies, and strong territorial bonds based on settlement rights in the expanding delta grew with the region’s commercialization. Although these cultural features were long recognized as major components of a state agrarian society, their making could not have been possible without crucial input from and impact on mercantile interests (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 1–20). Historical records from Foshan illustrate the point. Foshan was one of the four prominent market towns (zhen) of China. Since the Ming, it had been famous for iron-implements industries, pottery kilns, and dyed cloth and papermaking businesses. Moreover, it was home to the delta’s powerful lineages surnamed Xian, Li, Chen, and Huo. From the 1400s to the 1800s, these lineages produced a dazzling array of literati figures and owned extensive river marshes, kilns, lumber farms, ironworks, pawnshops, markets, and river landings. They had mobilized effectively for community defense, especially against the rebellion by Huang Xiaoyang in 1450. They were also promoters of a cult of the ancestral temple (zu miao) in Foshan with elaborate annual rituals. The career of a prominent native of Nanhai county, in which Foshan was located, illustrates a creative fusion of these multiple interests and experiences. Huo Tao’s ancestors supposedly started as duck farmers in the river marshes. They later operated iron-casting businesses, pottery kilns, and lumber farms. Huo Tao succeeded in the literati route. In his rise through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy in the Ming, his family accumulated vast properties in the sands, which formed the backbone of corporate lineages that David Faure describes. As minister for the board of rites in the Jiajing reign (1522–66), Huo Tao sided with the emperor against a majority of the ministers in the Great Rituals Controversy (da liyi) during the 1520s. According to Faure, the debate was one of the most emotionally charged and divisive in the Ming court. By supporting the emperor’s wish to give ritual superiority to his blood ancestor rather than to the person from whom he inherited the throne, Huo sided with two other senior officials of Guangdong to stress the primacy of primordial ties. It was not entirely coincidental that, in 1525, Huo built a hall to honor founding ancestors of his lineage in his native village, Shitou xiang near Foshan. After that, Guangdong saw a proliferation of territorially based lineage formations that stressed blood ties to the focal ancestor, literati achievements, written genealogies, and landed estates (McDermott 1999, pp. 267–98). Faure’s observations may lead one to credit Huo Tao with the creation of a literati form of cultural orthodoxy in Guangdong. However, Huo was also known to promote overseas commerce when the Ming court was advocating exclusion. He opposed the court’s policy of suppressing sea trade (haijin), noting that trade with Southeast This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Asia could be mutually beneficial and that China should not commit self-imposed closure (zikun) by rejecting traders from those areas.9 The Foshan materials show that mercantile activities, the development of the sands, the rise of corporate lineages, and literati achievements intertwined to create a thriving regional culture and society. Mercantile activities did not appear to constitute a social force that arose from a previously undifferentiated rural society, nor did merchants eventually develop autonomous voices challenging the state. Instead, merchants seemed to function best during the heyday of imperial fortunes and orthodoxy and when rural society was intimately linked to merchant operations. Mercantile interests and their cultural maneuvers had allowed local, regional, and state identities to complement and penetrate one another. This historical process is summarized by two Chinese economic historians, Tan Dihua and Ye Xian’en. Although framed in Marxist language, the message is clear (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, pp. 144–64): Foshan zhen prospered during mid-Ming when iron and pottery works developed under the general conditions of an increasing social division of labor and commodity production. However, feudal power privileging descent rose with Foshan’s economic prosperity and strengthened its control over and interference in the economy. When prominent merchants continued to become feudal gentry, and when lineages invested in scholarly talents with lineage properties, cultivating droves of feudal bureaucrats, Foshan became filled with these literati types, expanding forever the consuming and parasitic population. A productive city gradually became a place of consumption; a specialized industrial and commercial city ended up being a fortress of feudalism. (p. 163)

Social pluralism, competent self-management, a coherent prosperity, and alliance with officials stressing morality and restraint are themes noted by historians in the characterization of merchant-state relationships in the Ming and Qing in many areas of China.10 Moreover, as the Foshan materials show, the merchants’ intrinsic role in local society was by no means a matter of passive accommodation of a lack of alternative investment opportunities. The security of their urban operations depended on the active cultivation of rural bases and the associated cultural repertoire, which the imperial dynasties had promoted as their own civilizing agenda.11

Comparative Materials on Huizhou Merchants The parallels between Foshan and Huizhou merchants are striking. Despite the span of historical time and space between Anhui province where Huizhou lies, and the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, which is home to Foshan, some comparisons can be made (Ye 1983, Zhang and Wang 1985, Liu Shen 1987). First, owners of large private lands in Huizhou were rare. Ye Xian’en observes in his book on the Huizhou merchants in the Ming-Qing period that few private landlords owned over This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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100 mu of land (1983, p. 43). This form of investment in land was small in proportion to the enormous wealth accumulated in commerce. However, merchant contributions to ancestral estates were substantial, amounting sometimes to thousands of mu in wooded hilly land.12 Many of the estates were rented out long term to rich households who contracted bond servants (dianpu) to manage the wooded lands.13 These operations assured merchants of a steady supply of products (such as lumber, bamboo, and tea) for their trade, and profits accumulated were often turned into loans for interest collection. The vast sandy land in the Pearl River Delta auctioned out by town-based ancestral trusts to tenant contractors for long-term development quite paralleled the cultivation of woods for lumber in the hills of Huizhou (Siu 1989a, chapter 4). Furthermore, in Guangdong, it was common to find entire villages of particular surnames that were bond servants to established lineages. However numerous their members were, they were treated by their patrons as mixed surnames (za xing), that is, as members of lineages without ancestral halls and subject to numerous ritual restrictions.14 Economic functions aside, the estates in both Huizhou and Guangdong and the rituals they financed had a cultural-political dimension. They were set up in the name of founding ancestors. With due recognition by state officials, local populations claimed native roots and the associated rights of settlement and use. Furthermore, the estates were managed by those linked to the town merchants with particular social bonds and obligations. Many of the functionaries had become prosperous entrepreneurs themselves, but cultural rules demarcating status remained strong.15 The merchants’ contribution to the estates legitimized their membership in the community despite their prolonged residence in towns and cities. Harriet Zurndorfer’s examination of the Fan lineage estates reveals generations of land and other investments by lineage segments whose members became prosperous in commerce.16 In a word, lineages were more than kinship and rituals: they were cultural inventions with significant economic and political impact (Faure 1989b and chapter 8 of this volume). In an emerging status hierarchy of which lineage became a significant component, a merchant could profit as kin and patron. Cultural strategies extended beyond the local community. Historical materials on Huizhou merchants point to the elaborate political networking created by the merchants’ support of education (Ye 1983, chapters 3–5). The six counties of Huizhou boasted fifty-one academies of varying sizes and visibility, most of them built during the Ming and early Qing, when the Huizhou merchants were enjoying great prosperity. From village schools to county academies, merchants’ support not only prepared their kin for officialdom, but the academies also became the arena for activities other than schooling. At times built on territorial bonds and at times based on kinship, these institutions were where local leaders, merchants, and officials improvised on a literati language to do practical politicking. The numbers of graduates were staggering. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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During the Ming, Huizhou produced 298 juren (provincial graduates) and 392 jinshi (metropolitan graduates). In the Qing, it produced 698 juren and 226  jinshi.17 The importance of the Xin’an school of thought (Xin’an xuepai), brandishing leading neoConfucians as its native sons, can be seen as part of such a process.18 It may be useful to view the late imperial state as a totalizing cultural idea rather than as political machinery, and as such it allowed local agents to maneuver shrewdly from within.19 The Huizhou merchants were also distinguished by their conspicuous elaboration of literati lifestyles, regional drama, and the arts. Major Huizhou opera troupes (Si da hui bang) had prominent merchant patrons.20 It would be difficult to dismiss their actions as unsophisticated acquisition of “superfluous things.”21 Ironically, in the merchants’ eager emulation of the literati and in their subscription to what they perceived as state orthodoxy, they created new social and cultural space within the imperial order that linked city to country. In a word, judging from the development in Huizhou, merchants could be central to the very cultural processes of state-making and of incorporation of local society into the imperial order. Their liturgical role during the high Qing was very visible. G. William Skinner’s work on the hierarchy of markets confirms the importance of economic nodes for cultural integration. The economic importance of the Huizhou merchants in the Yangzi River system was reflected in a saying that “one cannot claim to have a market if there are no Huizhou merchants” (Ye 1983, p. 78). Moreover, their influence on mainstream cultural pursuits could hardly be discounted. It is worth noting that out of the four persons who, at the request of Emperor Qianlong, donated over five hundred types of books and manuscripts to the imperial library (Si ku quan shu guan), three were merchants of Huizhou origin.22

Crises in the Late Qing: A Balance Disturbed While merchant groups were able to maintain integrative links with both regional society and metropolitan politics during the dynastic heyday in the Ming and Qing, the balance was fundamentally disturbed as the 19th century wore on. Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann attribute the late Qing crisis to the intensified attempts by the state to reach society directly, after the growth of regional militaristic interests in the wake of mid-century rebellions. The capacity for merchant groups to meet an increasingly interventionist state depended greatly on how rooted the merchants were in the local community. This is illustrated by Mann’s description of reactions by merchant groups in Huicheng (Xinhui county capital) and neighboring Jiangmen city to the imposition of the transit tax (lijin) in the mid-19th century. The Xinhui merchants, represented by a locally entrenched fan palm guild and regionally powerful lineage formations, successfully resisted the tax. The Jiangmen merchants, many being transport brokers (and I suspect they had been Dan fisherfolk in origin with no local roots), avoided This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the tax by leaving the area. (The Dan were a floating population of tenant-farmers, fisherfolk, and transport functionaries.) The historian Luo Yixing observes a similar fate of prosperous merchants a few decades later in Lubao, a river market north of Foshan that had thrived on being a distribution center of regional goods. The merchants met stiff competition from rising local bosses in the surrounding countryside, who used the label shuiliu chai (floating twigs, a term for the Dan, who often were not given settlement rights in local communities) to disenfranchise them (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 44–64). These labels, imposed on the less rooted by landed groups, were a powerful cultural means of exclusion and of defining social hierarchy in the late imperial order. Paradoxically, merchants also suffered when the state faced its own crisis of legitimacy. Problems began to surface in the early 19th century in different guises. When the power of the state to grant trading monopolies diminished, Huizhou merchants rapidly declined (Ye 1983, 3:6). So did the Fu-Rong salt-yard elite lineages in Sichuan at the end of the century, when the structure of state authority governing salt production could no longer sustain profitability. Merchants in the regional cities and market towns of the Pearl River Delta did not depend on state licenses. They thrived for another few decades in the 19th century by maintaining their own local monopolies and regional networks. With the influx of overseas Chinese capital after the 1911 revolution, fan palm and citrus peel merchants in fact reached the height of their prosperity. However, the fact that the state lost its authoritative presence eventually caught up with them. They had less to draw on to enforce the terms of their trade in the local and regional environments. There were fewer means to redress contractual and credit arrangements that had been broken, and they were vulnerable to encroachment by marginal groups. They experienced tremendous hardships when they lost territorial control in the rural hinterland to local bosses who did not respect the moral authority and the power play embodied in literati etiquette or communal rituals. In Xinhui county, many large enterprises in the trading of grain, fan palm, and citrus peel closed down. Properties owned by guilds, academies and town-based ancestral estates were forcibly taken and sold by local strongmen who rose from the regional fringes. Their troops often occupied communal temples that were made into tax collection stations. At times, when negotiations with local bosses broke down, heads of merchant organizations were held ransom. The demise of the merchants accelerated during the war with Japan, when central authority completely eroded. In Xiaolan of Zhongshan county, over a hundred of the town’s 393 ancestral halls were dismantled by local bosses who maintained a tense truce with the Japanese military and the Nationalist generals. The merchants’ difficulties were partly due to the general disruptions of war and political turmoil that brought great destruction to both villages and cities. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Philip Huang has argued that, in rural north China, commercialized areas suffered greatly, especially those where warlord armies trampled (1985). Prasenjit Duara stresses the intrusions of the Nationalist state via local agents in regional and county governments (1987, 1988). The merchants in the county capitals and market towns of the Pearl River Delta, whose businesses provided crucial links between rural and urban areas, were caught at both ends. Some businesses survived, but others declined (Guangzhou gongshangjingji shiliao 1986). While appreciating what Joseph Esherick and Mary Rankin describe as the broad range of strategies available to local elites for maintaining dominance, one wonders if the rise of new power holders in the Republican era could have been a catalyst for the demise of those who had prospered through traditional means. Mercantile groups in general did not face a common enemy—an imperial state clinging to “feudal” traditions. Instead, they were drawn to the political center and local society in vastly different but equally intense ways. New power holders in the early 20th century, mercantile or militaristic, were able to make a new language of the nation and create alternative territorial bonds that attached local regions to the Republican state. Those who depended on the language of the imperial state and its shared cultural assumptions in local community fell by the wayside. In the sections that follow, I focus on a less explored factor in the demise of the merchants in the Pearl River Delta during the Republican period: their inability to maintain ties to the rural community due to the rise of militaristic local bosses (Siu 1989a, chapters 4 and 5). The cultural resources with which merchants adorned themselves, and which had dovetailed with the imperial order’s civilizing enterprise, had been crucial to their social identity and economic prowess in the regional cities and towns during a large part of the late 19th century. It seems that the loss of a rural base eroded their claim to a legitimate place in the state patronage networks. This correspondingly closed off the arenas for practical networking and political negotiation based on shared assumptions. Moreover, unlike their counterparts in Guangzhou or Shanghai, these merchants were not close enough to the new political centers to develop any alternative cultural arenas to maintain the necessary political dialogue. When the state became less a malleable cultural idea and more a predatory military power, the predicaments of commercial groups seemed to have become progressively grim. This upset the delicate balance between compliance and resistance that David Strand perceptively describes as the “embrace and foil of state agents” by commercial groups (Esherick and Rankin 1990, p. 218). If we follow this scenario, we must ask different questions: What kind of mercantile groups were major players in the Republican period? How do we disaggregate their access to economic resources and cultural strategies? With regard to partnership in building a modern nation-state and cultural identity, whose golden age was it? How do we evaluate the fate of the traditional merchant institutions and arenas in the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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face of the rise of the new merchant-industrialist groups? Until we remark on their differing local bases and their complicity with imperial orthodoxy or with modern state institutions, it may be difficult to characterize the age of the Chinese bourgeoisie and its part in the restructuring of region, state, and nation, then and now.

Guangdong Merchants To understand how the Guangdong merchants lost to militaristic bosses from the regional fringes, one needs to examine the rural bases that the merchants had cultivated. The Pearl River Delta is made up of the West (Xi), North (Bei), and East (Dong) River systems.23 From the Ming to late Qing, this part of the delta underwent rapid commercialization (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, pp. 57–97; Tan 1993a, pp. 81–98). Marketing networks intensified among the towns and villages from the edge of the sands to county capitals. Regional cities emerged as production and distribution centers for local and long-distance trade in agricultural and handicraft products. As  described earlier in this essay, the distinguished products in Foshan were iron implements, pottery, dyed cloth, and paper (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, pp. 75–116; Tan 1993a, pp. 225–42). In Xinhui, the commodities were grain, citrus peel, and fan palm. Over centuries of settlement, identities were constructed with elaborate ritual complexes that allowed local inhabitants to claim significant affiliations with the expanding Chinese imperial order—as migrants from the Central Plains, and as descendants of royal kin and officials. These processes of cultural construction were marked by important turns in local political economy.

The Development of the Sands How did merchants in the towns and regional cities anchor themselves in the delta? One cannot ignore the development of the sands, the associated cultural dynamics, and the power relationships that arose. Various elite interests in the towns were intimately tied to the conversion of vast areas of river marshes into cultivable farmland. They also controlled the harvests for a grain trade that grew in importance as the delta became commercialized. Settlers in Xinhui started to reclaim land on the western edge of the delta from the late Song on.24 Extensive river marshes matured further southeast during the Ming.25 The reclamation of the sands accelerated to such an extent that officials in the 18th century had to intervene due to massive flooding in the upper reaches of the river delta (Nishikawa 1981/1985; Tan 1993a, pp. 81–98). Much of the sands was reclaimed in the name of town-based lineage estates during the Ming and Qing. Merchant groups in county capitals and market towns often financed these highly capitalized projects. They acquired river marshes measured in units of qing and donated them to ancestral estates (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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pp. 187–236). Major tenant contractors for long-term rental of these ancestral estates were often estate managers themselves. They parceled out the land to give short-term leases to farmers. Being a tenant contractor of an ancestral trust could be an exclusive business. To qualify for the auctioning of the leases from the ancestral trusts, bidders were required to pay large deposits (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, pp. 22–64). From the start, merchant wealth was intimately tied to land development and the subsequent grain trade.

The Language of Lineage and Ethnic Hierarchy Investment in ancestral estates was profitable, and it enabled merchants to speak the language of territorial community based on patrilineal descent. The language also marked a clear political geography with an ethnic hierarchy. Town residents on the edge of the sands claimed lineage pedigrees, flaunted wealth and literati connections, and put up severe barriers against those they referred to as Dan, an ethnic “other.” This lineage complex was an effective tool for claiming settlement rights, mobilizing large capital investment for the reclamation of the marshes, often excluding potential challengers, and assuring business terms. Magnate lineages in the Foshan area that rose in Xiaolan town and Shunde county capital in the 18th and 19th centuries and in Shawan xiang in the late Qing were remarkable examples.26 Disputes over the boundaries of properties as they changed with the meandering of the rivers were frequent. They were resolved with cultural strategies to demonstrate authority and power. Force was also exerted by semi-official militia organizations and bureaus set up by an alliance of officials, merchants, and lineage trusts in the urban nodes.27 However, the dominance of the merchant-gentry alliances was not assured. The remoteness of the sands allowed rapid social mobility among even those most discriminated against. Local functionaries accumulated enough of their own resources and forcibly negotiated with their former patrons. They eventually acquired the necessary cultural symbols to establish themselves against a new layer of tenant farmers and Dan fisherfolk farther out in the expanding marshes. Who could start an ancestral hall in a settled area became a most contentious issue in local life, and led to bloodshed, feuds, and lawsuits among competing surname groups. Underlying the intense struggle over the cultural symbol of lineage were shrewd economic claims for rights to control the sands. Community and lineage halls, temples, and academies were public arenas for flexing political muscles. Closer to the county capitals, where one found official bureaus and magistrates, literati institutions and etiquette framed the terms of conflict and negotiation. As one ventured farther into the sands, control depended on the display of sheer physical might. In  these areas, where gentrified rituals ceased to matter and the corresponding political leverage faded, the language of control was mixed with those of popular religious cults, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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brotherhood, and the outlaw. Liu Zhiwei and I argue that identities were fluid. In times of peace, some of the floating population who engaged in transport and commerce accumulated enough resources to become respectably “landed.” In times of disorder, those who remained in the regional fringes were branded as pirates (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 21–43; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006, pp. 285–310).

Coastal Trade The historical circumstances of Guangzhou as a government-designated trading port since the Ming had also encouraged extensive sea-trading networks with Southeast Asia and beyond.28 The impact of foreign trade along the coast and in the delta was profound. Local agricultural and handicraft production were stimulated by tastes and demands outside of the empire. Foreign silver used in trade also entered into popular consciousness as temple contributions.29 Even before the massive import of opium from the late 18th century on, foreign trade created powerful merchant gangs with armed fleets, culturally ambiguous brokers, and sophisticated marketing networks linked to river ports and market towns.30 The tremendous wealth created was quite beyond the government’s capacity to supervise. As in the inland rivers, these trading gangs sometimes maintained an appearance of respectability as merchants. In times of dynastic closure, they were labeled as crafty barbarians, local bosses, pirates, and smugglers (Guangdong lishi xuehui 1985, pp. 313–48). In sum, the political ecology of the sands and the coast allowed (and necessitated) the intertwining of dazzling commercial and landed wealth, the juxtaposition of territorial lineage groups, elaborate rituals, literati pretensions, outlaw imagery, and the blurring of boundaries with unorthodox and overseas interests. These had characterized mercantile life in Guangdong from the Ming through the early 20th century. Questions remain. What caused the dramatic reversal of fortunes in the first few decades of the Republican era? Why were the merchants no longer able to perform their integrative functions to bridge state, literati, and rural community, which they had done well since the Ming? I would like to use historical materials centering on Huicheng to explore the questions.

19th-Century Huicheng, Xinhui Huicheng had been a sizable county capital since the Ming.31 The four largest lineages in town, the He, Liu, Xu, and Mo, held ownership rights to extensive sands in the south and southeast of the county. The He lineage, numbering over three thousand in population, was particularly powerful because of He Xiongxiang, a minister of revenue in Nanjing during the Wanli reign in the Ming. His family moved from a village at the southern edge of the county capital to the town center at Shangshu Fang, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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a neighborhood named after his official position. During his long retirement, he “mingled in the market with fishermen and peddlers,” but he emerged to exert great influence whenever local circumstances required.32 The other lineages also had ancestral halls clustering at the southern gate of the city, where merchants’ quarters and grain wharves stood. They were connected by numerous waterways to other market towns and county capitals in the delta.33 Their fortunes were periodically disrupted and local populations dislocated. During the Ming, there were widespread revolts by bond servants against their lineage masters in the delta. The coastal evacuations imposed by Emperor Kangxi in the early Qing caused tremendous hardships.34 New immigrants eventually resettled in the area. They grew into territorial lineages themselves with demonstrated claims to settlement rights and eventual literati status.35 As mentioned, reclaiming the sands became a commercial undertaking requiring long-term investment of labor and capital and the flexing of political muscles. Merchants in Huicheng and Jiangmen continued to invest in the sands in the 19th century in the form of trusts and estates. For example, He Bingru Gong Tang, an ancestral estate, operated the Zhihe grain shop in the Daoguang period and later opened the Hecheng native bank in Jiangmen. It acquired 140 mu of sands (Tan 1993b, p. 79). Another record describes a Li surname whose lineage claimed that they once had an ancestral hall at the western gate of the county capital. At the end of the Qing, a site was located at the center of Huicheng. Some members loaned and donated cash for the “rebuilding” of a hall in order to deposit their ancestral tablets. The managers spent 73,000 taels of silver for the building and used the remaining 24,000 taels to acquire river marshes between Xinhui and Xiangshan counties to create an ancestral estate (“Zhiqing zuci luocheng gongding cigui fu zhengxinlu” 1901). Vast areas of sands were thus tied to the town through a hierarchy of tenant contractors and functionaries acting as clients and kin. Grain from the sands was marketed in Huicheng and other towns in the delta. Another dominant commodity for long-distance trading was fan palm. The commodity linked the rural areas to Huicheng in multiple ways. A local historian estimated that, by the late 19th century, over 250 qing of the county’s diked fields were devoted to palm growing. The growers were large, some having twenty or so qing of palm fields, and many dried the leaves for processing as well.36 Another group of enterprises made the fans. The large-scale ones took up long-distance trading. Merchant organizations in Huicheng commanded a powerful presence in the surrounding area. Growers, fan processors, and traders belonged to various guilds, which oversaw an elaborate division of labor, credit arrangements, trading etiquette, and shrewd politicking. The overarching organization for the fan palm trade was the Fan Palm Guild (Kuishan Huiguan), its management body the Yuqing Tang.37 Smaller guilds further divided the trade based on the particular grades of fans to be produced, the location of the workshops, and the region to which they transported their goods.38 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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A major concern of the trade organization was control of the supply. Unregistered selling of the fan palm by growers caused prices to fluctuate and made it difficult for traders to maintain the standard of products (“Jimeitang huiguibu” n.d.). The long-distance traders (chu jiang bang) depended on networks of native-place and guild associations, reaching scores of regional cities such as Hankou, Chongqing, Suzhou, Zhenjiang, and Changsha. They returned to Xinhui with a variety of products from other provinces (such as herbal medicine from Sichuan and cotton cloth and jute from Hunan, Hubei, and the Yangzi River Delta) to be sold in the surrounding regions (Guan 1983). Since the 19th century, water transport through Jiangmen was a convenient channel for reaching Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Sometimes foreign steamboats were employed. At the turn of the century, those of Butterfield and Swire, a British company, carried an average of two to three hundred tons of fan palm per boat to northern China, among other local agricultural products such as sugar and citrus fruits (Mo Yinggui 1985). Trades organizations had existed before the formal establishment of the Fan Palm Guild in Huicheng in 1848. With the guild, the production and trading of fan palm became more institutionalized. The guild grew into the most formidable political and economic power by the late 19th century. It held only a few hundred mu of land, the income of which was used for ritual and politicking purposes. More important, it wielded monopolistic power over the growing, financing, processing, and marketing of the fan palm. Yuqing Tang, the management body of the guild, consisted of elected representatives from the various organized neighborhoods ( jia) representing the different stages of producing the fans. With membership dues and income from its landed estate, the guild at the time boasted an annual income of about 30,000 taels of silver. It gave 1,000 taels to each of two local degree holders, who were entrusted to perform the necessary etiquette with officials. It maintained a militia for the collection of rent and surcharges and for the securing of the supply of fans from delinquent contractors.39 When Nie Erkang was county magistrate in the 1860s, the traders in the guild were led by Liang Chunrong, a member of the Gangzhou public bureau. As Susan Mann observes in her reading of magistrate Nie’s public announcements, the guild effectively fended off the magistrate’s numerous efforts to impose the lijin tax (Mann 1987, chapter 7; Nie 1863). Prosperity continued for the dominant members of the guild for at least two decades into the 20th century. A few of the major fan palm enterprises also traded citrus peel, an equally important commodity produced locally for long-distance trading. Among the enterprises were Lin Hengji and Liu Yiji. Both were family businesses that lasted generations and held landed estates. They monopolized the markets in Chongqing and later Shanghai.40 Solidarity of the town merchants was made visible by rituals in the guilds and by the celebrations and parades of the deities at Dilin Tang, a communal temple in the commercial district at the southern edge of town. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Apart from the networks of relationships based on ancestral estates, temples, and guilds, an important arena in which local gentry, merchants, and officials mingled was the county academies.41 These academies were organized on a territorial basis. According to a Xinhui county gazetteer (1840), Gangzhou shuyuan (academy) was set up by a county magistrate who allocated to the academy 1,100 mu of land in 1752. Local elites in Huicheng and some nearby townships took over its administration in 1806. A magistrate in 1760 established the Jingxian shuyuan in Jiangmen. He granted to the academy some river marshes that had been the subject of a lawsuit. Xi’nan shuyuan was set up in 1845 by eight degree holders of different surname groups. Its estate was built through contributions from patrons in two sub-county districts in the southwestern part of the county. The academy forged an alliance of gentry and merchant interests who claimed ties to that region. Although the academies had explicit goals of promoting education and literati values, their agendas included far more than Confucian schooling. Each of the academies owned between 600 and 1,000 mu of river marshes. Rituals for the birthday of Confucius were performed in keeping with the state’s explicit educational goals. Grants were given to aspiring scholars. However, literati aspirations were linked to territory and kin. The beneficiaries were members of the home areas represented by the academies. The lineage ideal was reinforced, as patrons from a range of surnames from a particular region donated land to build up the academy’s estate; the academy reciprocated by putting up tablets of their ancestors for worship. In turn, the legitimizing concern of ties to land and agriculture (wuben) was confirmed in the claims of origin. The question remains: To what extent were these academies reflections of state orthodoxy for social control, and to what extent were they local inventions? The process of mutual appropriation is worth exploring. I see the academies as visible urban arenas where local non-officials and, in particular, a growing community of merchants whose economic interests were intertwined with the development of the rural hinterlands shrewdly defined spheres of influence and control by improvising on a repertoire of literati symbols. To borrow Prasenjit Duara’s idea for North China, these merchant-gentry institutions were nodes in a visible cultural nexus of power that bridged rural-urban distances, delineated social boundaries, defined statuses and identities, exerted control, and ultimately gave every participant his respective place in an evolving imperial order (see chapter 8 of this volume). The academies became centers for political mobilization in times of crisis. In the mid-1850s, local rebels associated with the Red Turbans sacked the county capitals of Shunde, Heshan, Jiangmen zhen, and besieged Huicheng for two months. They also ravaged the surrounding townships. The Xinhui county magistrate and a handful of local notables made every effort to assemble community leaders at the various academies to coordinate defense.42 A meeting was first called at Gangzhou shuyuan. When Jiangmen was threatened, members met at Jingxian shuyuan. Public This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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bureaus ( gongju) were formed within the context of the academies. Contributions were solicited from prominent merchants, while lineages in the surrounding townships provided volunteers. However, the leaders were constantly frustrated by unrest within their own camps from “unworthy members” of various surnames as much as by the reluctance of wealthy families to be involved. Most fled the county capital, and those who remained in the city stayed away from the public bureaus. The Fan Palm Guild, a symbol of mercantile interest in Huicheng, was in fact taken over by rebel troops for a short period.43 As in other parts of China, the disturbances in the delta changed the power relationships that merchants and landed elites had cultivated in the countryside. The century that began with the Red Turbans in 1854 and ended with the Communists in 1949 saw general militarism in the region. Both state officials and merchant-gentry organizations in the county capital seemed increasingly unable to mediate or supervise local militia units. The militarized bosses at the regional fringes took matters into their own hands. Various sands protection associations (husha) rose under their leadership with the explicit aim to collect taxes and protection dues. The notorious Dongnanju (renamed Dongnan Gongyue after the public bureaus were abolished) was led by local bosses of three townships in the southeast of the county.44 It used armed fleets in the sands to smuggle salt, to force harvest, and to extract taxes and surcharges. The county magistrate Nie Erkang could only express indignation when gentry members of Xi’nan shuyuan reported to him that farmers within the academy’s jurisdiction were arrested, beaten, and jailed by the Dongnan Gongyue’s militia. When the magistrate’s men caught the smugglers, the militia claimed them back. In one case, armed guards from the bureau came with a signed statement from their leaders. They forcibly took the boats carrying the seized goods and sailed away.45 By the late 19th century, the merchants’ participation in Huicheng’s sociopolitical life shifted to a new institution and arena—the charitable associations (shantang). Individual charitable acts by merchants were historically well known, and they were rewarded with academic and official titles. However, large-scale organizations for philanthropy and relief for the poor mushroomed only during the last decades of the Qing dynasty. They involved visible merchant participation in local society that focused on social problems arising from a changing urban landscape.46 Their functions ranged from providing relief for the poor in the form of free food, medical care, coffins, and burials to maintaining public calm in times of crisis. In Huicheng, the board members of charitable associations were native bankers and leading traders of grain, fan palm, and citrus peel. The limited focus of this chapter does not allow a detailed exploration of this new institutional form of merchant involvement in local society during the late Qing. My observation is that, in practice, these associations became urban in orientation although the charitable acts continued to draw moral authority shrouded in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Confucian terms.47 Future research will determine whether the shift of attention to relief for urban poor was a cause or a consequence of the town-based merchants’ loss of moral authority, which they used to share with those in the countryside.

Winners and Losers in the Republican Era When the imperial order faded into the background, social groups attached to particular institutions rose and fell with the political turbulence at the national, regional, and local levels. In the towns and cities of the Pearl River Delta, merchants’ fortunes seemed to be intimately tied to the structures of power and influence encompassed in the territorial bond—relationships and resources centering on lineage organizations, market hierarchies, popular religion, and political patronage. As the Qing fell, the languages of local dominance and state authority were reworked.

The Demise of Town-Based Ancestral Estates In an essay focused on the Republican period, I compare the sharply different ways local strongmen in three townships transformed lineage institutions from within (see chapter 13 of this volume). In Tianma xiang a few miles south of Huicheng, tenant contractors of lineage estates based in the county capital thrived by taking over the land of their patrons and then building ancestral halls in the village to claim settlement rights. The demise of the town-based estates had to do with the structure of land tenancy, rent collection, and the payment of taxes. Cash rents collected from tenant contractors on a long-term basis became worthless in the financial upheavals of the Republican decades. However, the estates were obligated to pay numerous taxes and surcharges imposed on land by local and regional state officials. The tax farmers (who collected taxes for the government but kept any amount they collected beyond the government’s quota) happened to be local bosses themselves and often forced or colluded with managers of the estates to “sell” land cheaply. During nearly a decade of war with Japan (1937–45), grain became a precious commodity. The bosses, many of whom sided with the Japanese military that occupied Huicheng, took over palm and citrus fields and grew grain instead. They collected rent in kind from farmers and deposited the grain in the grain mills at Huicheng for speculation. The changing relationship between the Chens of Tianma and the established lineages based in Huicheng was highlighted in an episode in 1948. At that time, there was a civil war on a national scale. Locally, the political vacuum provided opportunities and triggered economic fluidity. The Mo lineage, landlords with large holdings and merchants in Huicheng, claimed that its ancestors had been settled in the area since the Ming and maintained elaborate ancestral halls. In the first few decades of the 20th century, local bosses from Tianma, some of whom had been tenant contractors This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and functionaries of the Mo, had numerous conflicts in and out of court over control of the Mo estates in the sands. In the 1940s, it happened that a landowning family of the Mo lineage in Huicheng ran a county newspaper. The editor, Mo Chaoxiong, was a lawyer and county politician. He published an article written by his father ridiculing the humble cultural origins of the Chens (who were known locally as Dan). When mediation by other politicians failed, local bosses at Tianma mobilized over a hundred villagers to march to the newspaper office in Huicheng with the intention of beating up Mo Chaoxiong. Mo managed to escape, but they destroyed his office. The county government officials, having been bribed by the Chens, did little to stop the mob and did not legally charge the offenders (Lun Haibin 1983). The ancestral estates of major lineages in Xiaolan zhen of the neighboring Zhongshan county had a slightly different fate. Since the 18th century, the town had been dominated by an alliance of landed interests and grain traders from four major surnames whose ancestral estates held vast areas in the sands. For a town of a few thousand residents, the 393 ancestral halls had a towering presence. However, by the 1930s, they too were losing to the military bosses. Local strongmen from the sands did not build ancestral halls in the sands because there was no sizable village. Instead, they moved into town, took over the temples, and dismantled many of the ancestral halls. In the most important community event for the town in 1934, the chrysanthemum festival—which was held once in sixty years—the surviving ancestral trusts were barely able to keep up appearances. Instead, the active participants were members of mixed surnames who had speculated on financial markets in Shanghai. Their allies were local military officials who were political clients of warlords in Guangzhou.48 When the Japanese military occupied the area later in 1939, local bosses in town maintained an uneasy truce with the Japanese unit stationed in Shiqi (the capital of Zhongshan county). Over a hundred of the town’s 393 ancestral halls were torn down. A social club, known as the Siyou Tang, was set up by the head of the town, in which the different bosses could socialize and work out conflicts of interests. They formed “companies” to collect grain and taxes in the sands, very often by a blatant show of force.49 Their patron was Yuan Dai, former captain of a crop-protection force and current commander of the third regiment under the Nationalist government. His deputy and cousin, Qu Renze, kept troops in the town, while seven of his captains were stationed in the sands.50 In Shawan of Panyu county, a smaller market town further southeast toward the sands, a He lineage had accumulated 60,000 mu of reclaimed river marshes. Members of this lineage, together with smaller surnames such as Li, Lai, and Huang, had built 116 ancestral halls. Annual rituals involving the founding ancestral hall, the Liugeng Tang, and the local Beidi temple were formidable spectacles.51 Residents in town lived off the grain rent. The collection of rent had depended on powerful tenant contractors who were lineage members themselves. In the turbulent decades of the Republican This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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era, auctioning off the land and collecting rent necessitated a show of force. Estate managers and tenant contractors, who were the major participants in these auctions, were escorted by their own entourage of armed guards. The assets of Liugeng Tang, the positions of its managers, and the vast power networks it commanded became the center of contention. Identification with the ancestral estate continued to be reinforced because of the intense competition. But local residents clearly distinguished the more “legitimate” managers and tenant contractors from the new local bosses, who, like their Zhongshan counterparts, organized collection companies out in the sands to extract protection fees, and who preyed on the rich and poor alike.52 In sum, a new generation of local strongmen rose from the regional fringes. Their power was not culturally recognized, but they were able to accumulate vast assets at the expense of the town-based lineages. They sidestepped traditional arenas of negotiation by linking themselves directly to new regional military figures in a volatile network of patronage and intimidation. A different language of power prevailed over the cultural nexus that had been cultivated by the gentry-merchants for centuries. As rural communities were drawn into the personal orbit of territorial bosses, the authoritative presence of the imperial order became increasingly remote in the daily lives of the villagers.53 Militarists in Guangdong and elsewhere did take on various literati trappings and activities, such as building their own ancestral halls, patronizing schools, running for county government offices, and financing community rituals. However, these ritual efforts to gain legitimacy were diluted by the rapidly deepening crisis in the larger political order.54

The Degentrification of Merchants in Huicheng Commerce was rapidly “degentrified” in the early 20th century due to rapid changes in the larger political environment. After the 1911 revolution, overseas Chinese investment was sought by warlord regimes. The influx of capital reached its height during the rule of the warlord Chen Jitang, who held power in Guangdong from 1931 to 1936. His regime made great effort in building an industrial and trading infrastructure centering on Hong Kong and Guangzhou.55 Although located at the western edge of the delta, Huicheng was the capital of a county known for its emigrants to Hong Kong and the United States decades earlier. The calls for nation-building and modernization presented opportunities and challenges. Huicheng saw an influx of newcomers in the trading of fan palm and citrus peel, which began to break the monopoly of the elite merchant groups (Guan 1983). Yuqing Tang changed its leadership structure in 1922. The body of representatives from the various jia (neighborhoods where fan palm enterprises were located) was renamed lishi hui (executive committee). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Until the late 1930s, literati figures connected to the former Gangzhou public bureau continued to play a role in the politics of the guild.56 But real power was concentrated in the hands of Lu Zuonan, who became chair of the executive committee. His career illuminated the political fluidity of the times faced by merchant leaders and the maneuvers they made in order to thrive. Lu entered the fan-drying trade in 1918 through his former profession as a charcoal merchant. He rapidly expanded into fan making and became an upstart in the long-distance trade group. He represented a neighborhood of fan makers in the Fan Palm Guild. He was appointed a board member of the Xinhui Chamber of Commerce (formed in 1908) soon after. In 1922, when Yuqing Tang reorganized, he assumed headship. Two years after, he also took over chairmanship of the chamber of commerce; its armed militia he transferred to the Fan Palm Guild. The shangtuan (merchants’ militia) was first organized in the wake of a massive looting of the merchants’ quarters in Huicheng by bandits (Mai and Huang 1965). It grew rapidly, expanding from five small bands in 1919 to eleven bands with nearly five hundred men and eight hundred rifles. Lu himself headed the band based in Sanya, where his enterprise was. He fought and colluded with local bosses who had taken over palm fields and who often sold their fans to the highest bidder rather than to contractors in town.57 As a member of the executive committee of the Xinhui branch of the Nationalist Party, he used the same militia, which had been renamed mintuan, to put down a workers’ strike in the late 1920s. He was also chief organizer for the parade of deities at Dilin Tang in 1930, an event organized once in ten years. His role during the Japanese occupation was not recorded, but his business empire survived into the 1940s. However, none of his networking with the local community saved his life. Branded as a local bully, he was tried in public and shot by the Communists during the land reform. Similar episodes showed the precarious position of the town merchants, who were sandwiched between the local bosses and new regional military commanders.58 Soon after the Qing fell, regional warlords rapidly sold government properties in Guangdong. Huicheng was no exception. A group of merchants of the Yu surname from neighboring Taishan county had a higher-order ancestral hall next to the old magistrate’s office in Huicheng. They offered to buy the property in a secret deal with some officials linked to the warlord Long Jiguang in Guangzhou. A group of local notables learned of the deal and decided to challenge the bid. To claim the property back, they mobilized an odd alliance comprising members of the three public bureaus in Huicheng, the chamber of commerce, and a handful of overseas merchants. They activated political networks in Guangzhou and finally bought the property with the backing of He Jintang, a banker and head of the Xinhui Chamber of Commerce in Guangzhou. The group was keenly aware of the need for broader alliances in politically volatile times, hence the idea of an academy for the entire county. The This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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project stressed the solidarity (hequn) of the three regionally based groups of gentrymerchants in a spirit of “self-government” (zizhi). It took thirteen years, from 1915 to 1928, for the academy to be built. Copying the organization of older academies, patrons contributed shares in order to place their ancestral tablets in the new hall. A sum of 634,000 taels of silver was quickly collected for the purpose, and the academy was formally established in 1923. However, the resources dazzled the eyes of regional commanders, one of whom in the same year demanded a protection fee of 10,000 taels. Several major gentry-merchants, including the banker He Jintang, were held by the commander until ransom was paid.59 The merchants did not subject themselves to the encroachment of the military commanders and the new state officials without a fight. There was the tax resistance incident in 1923. The merchants’ quarters in Huicheng were built along a waterway outside the south gate of the city. Over the years, some shops were built on the dikes. In 1923, during the wave of reassessing government properties by regional warlords in Guangdong, the county government imposed tax surcharges on temples and shops. The shopkeepers were moved to strike when their shops were boarded up by tax collectors. After mediation by the county head, a sum was negotiated, and the government promised never to make another assessment. Yet the bureau for the development of the sands overruled the decision and imposed new taxes. It took repeated petitioning to the provincial government by an alliance of leading merchants in Huicheng before the original decision was upheld (Xinhui cheng yuanhe shanghu weichituan 1924). However, other efforts by the merchants were not as united. When the old city wall was slated to be dismantled so that a new road could be built, four successive county heads had to maneuver skillfully through competing groups of old and new entrepreneurs for two decades. As it was a lucrative channel for extracting contributions, bribes, and surcharges, there were endless debates as to whether it should be a government project (guanban), a joint government-merchant enterprise (guanshang heban), or a private project (minban). The project was only partially finished when the Communists arrived in 1949 (Mo and Xu 1964). New energies from Chinese merchants overseas boosted the local transformations of power. This had to do with the gradual shifting of political and economic energies to southern China after the imperial order was dismantled. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, himself a native of Guangdong, relied greatly on overseas Chinese in Hong Kong and the United States (where emigrants from the four counties to the west of the Pearl River Delta [Siyi] had established themselves). In the name of modernization and nationalism, overseas merchants sought opportunities to reconstruct their “home bases,” real or imaginary. Warlords linked with a new generation of self-styled politicians at the provincial and county capitals also tapped merchants abroad for support through charity organizations, chambers of commerce, and native-place and lineage associations. This trend reached a high point when Chen Jitang controlled Guangdong in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the early 1930s. There were several years of stability, which saw active government investment in infrastructure, industry, and commerce. A few cases in Xinhui illuminate these energies. The idea of a “native place” remained strong. David Faure has reported the reconstruction of an entire lineage community of the Ruan surname in Tangang (southwest of Huicheng) after its destruction by feuds with other surnames in 1919. The efforts lasted for more than two decades, the 1920s and 1930s, with a board of directors in Hong Kong hiring local managers for the rebuilding. After gleaning information from an archive of the correspondences between the manager in Huicheng and the board of directors in Hong Kong, Faure points to the continuous frustrations of the board and its ultimate failure to build a lineage community according to the books. A language of authority that the merchants had taken for granted no longer guided local actions. Political dynamics on the ground were quite beyond their imagination (Faure and Siu 1995, pp. 161–87). The port of Gangzhou was a much more elaborate project involving overseas commercial interests. The port was to be located on the southwestern edge of Huicheng. According to the charter drawn up by the initiators, the alliance was broad and forward-looking rather than narrowly territorial. Merchant patrons from other counties and especially Hong Kong were actively invited to the joint venture. It started in 1910 with a few leading merchants in Hong Kong who, through the efforts of the chamber of commerce for Xinhui merchants in Hong Kong, assembled to plan a port. A charter was drawn up, and in the following month the organizers held a meeting with interested merchants in the Minglun Tang (Confucian temple) in Huicheng. A few months later, seventy board members were recruited from Hong Kong, and funds committed. Architectural plans for the shops were drawn, and a fort on the opposite side of the river was planned. The merchants went ahead even though provincial officials refused to grant a subsidy for the fort project. I could not find other documents to explore further, but the building of the port seemed to have stalled afterward.60 About the same time, a similar project to develop the port of Xiangzhou at the tip of Zhongshan county in fact proceeded beyond the blueprints. Roads and shops were built, and some merchants started settling in. They banked on the idea that the provincial authorities would grant the port tax-free status. Migrant fisherfolk along the coast of eastern Guangdong began to congregate to fill transport and other labor demands. However, provincial officials never granted the port tax-free status. The merchants finally cut their losses and left the area. Local bosses took over what remained of the facilities and turned Xiangzhou into a thriving place for wartime smuggling (He Zhiyi 1985). The last of the grand projects involved the building of the Xinning-Jiangmen railway. Again, the initiative came from an overseas merchant, Chen Yixi, a Taishan native who had emigrated to the United States. However, the building of the railroad was blocked by unlikely alliances of local gentry, merchants, and military bosses This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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along its planned routes. The project, begun in 1907, was completed in fourteen years, but not without desperate networking and negotiating with regional government offices and military commanders. Numerous conflicts with local militia included the kidnapping of engineers and the beating of workers. The railroad was never very profitable, as roads and new bus lines posed increasing competition. The railroad was bombed by the Japanese military during the war, and the remains were dismantled by various local parties (Liu Bogao 1983, Zheng and Cheng 1991).

Lingering Questions The Pearl River Delta during the late imperial and Republican periods saw a drastic reconfiguration of power and authority that had been the bases for “merchant” identities. With their own historical specificity, leading mercantile groups in the Ming and Qing were able to create vigorous dialogues with the state by engaging in a language of orthodoxy. The dialogues took place in the local arenas of lineage, temple, guild, and academy.61 After the imperial metaphor receded into the background of political discourse, traditional mercantile groups suffered, as illustrated by those in Huicheng. Militaristic bosses colluded with precarious warlord governments and brandished a volatile language of power. As predatory datianer carved out territories for control with their guns, the new business arena was far from cosmopolitan.62 The demise of local merchants extended somewhat to overseas Chinese groups whose repeated attempts to re-create their home bases in the delta largely failed to materialize because they too had grown marginal within local power configurations. Cultural strategies that had enabled merchant interests to merge with landed groups and rural community while sharing the moral authority of the imperial state had faded from the public arenas long before the Communists made their direct attack in 1949. Although the local bosses were hounded out during the land reform in the early 1950s, new arenas for mercantile activities did not materialize. Instead, as I have argued in previous publications, the Maoist regime virtually eliminated all private commerce. Market towns in the delta shrank drastically in size and impact as villages increasingly became cell-like units, their links to the outside severed. One saw the destruction of traditional hierarchies of marketing, lineage, and popular religion, and their associated cultural meanings. These relationships had functioned to creatively link villagers to region and state and had given local agents in late imperial Guangdong a relatively prosperous and pluralistic arena to maneuver.63 The analytical assumptions that fuel the debates about the Republican period are relevant to the present period. Can one assume that the post-Mao era signifies a struggle between state and market, and between the weighty bureaucracy and new entrepreneurial interests? Or, must we find a less dichotomous framework in order This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to interpret commercial energies that are given relatively free rein all over China? Moreover, how do we take into account the decades of Maoist politics that might have fundamentally changed social institutions and cultural values?64 The Pearl River Delta in particular is bustling with mercantile activities. The question remains as to who these “merchants” are. The prosperous operations are often dominated by a new generation of local cadres who have captured the market through their positions in the state system. A new authoritarianism comes hand in hand with dazzling wealth.65 Market-town officials now stage community rituals and pursue the language of native place with unprecedented zeal and scale. This is to give a new grounding to overseas capital and business connections (Lo, Pepper, and Tsui 1995, pp. 1–17). The politics of native roots has been played up in local festivals and lavish banquets. They are theaters of power and influence. Such politics attracts investments for factories, sports stadiums, and schools. In an era when the central government promotes modernization and cautious exposure to Western ways, local officials and residents seize the opportunity to negotiate the status of being China’s new middle class (Faure and Liu 2002, pp. 233–49). The “local bosses” of the 1990s are cadres who clog the roads with their Mercedes-Benzes, who use their cellular phones to call public security officers in order to get out of traffic jams, and who install karaoke bars in their grossly extravagant villas to entertain business friends and mistresses. In Guangdong as in other coastal provinces, new urban landscapes have emerged with new consumption patterns and political networking. But there are lingering questions for contemplation and further research. In the county capitals (and municipalities) of the Pearl River Delta, where the dominance of local government cannot be discounted, and where state and commercial interests had been so consciously opposed during the previous decades of Maoist politics, what are the nature and identity of these new commercial bosses? Do we assume that mercantile agendas were only repressed in the previous era and are now exploding with a vengeance after the state decided to recede? Or, should we expect local officials, armed with state mandate, on the one hand, and strategic control of local resources, on the other, to blossom into new modernizing elites? Using their entrenched power bases, they negotiate with, compete with, and accommodate state authority as much as they reinvent local traditions. Is this their way of being “Chinese” and “modern” when the central government struggles to define a new “socialism with Chinese characteristics?” If that is the case, what must we learn from previous generations of mercantile experience in order to appreciate the ways that the agendas of the larger polity, state agents, entrepreneurs, and localities are energized and reconstituted? *This is a slightly revised version of the original article published in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, edited by Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

See the works of the Chinese economic historian Fu Yiling on Ming-Qing merchant capital; Ye Xian’en and Harriet Zurndorfer on Huizhou; and Yoshinobu Shiba on Jiangnan, among others. For late imperial China, the cycles of regional systems are presented in the works of G. William Skinner. For family institutions and women, see the works of Patricia Ebrey and Dorothy Ko. For popular religion, see those of Atsutoshi Hamashima, Valerie Hansen, and Richard Von Glahn. See the works of Joanna Handlin-Smith, Craig Clunas, and Timothy Brook on Ming commerce and culture. See Wang Gungwu (1990). He argues that overseas Chinese merchants thrived within their own culture when they were free from bureaucratic restraints. See Rankin (1986), Schoppa (1982), essays by Schoppa, Barkan, and Strand in the volume edited by Esherick and Rankin (1990); see also Mann’s “Merchant Investment, Commercialization, and Social Change in the Ningpo Area” in Cohen and Schrecker (1976), pp. 41–48, Fensmith (1983), Godley’s “Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurs as Reformers” in Cohen and Schrecker (1976), pp. 49–62, and Hao (1970). For the materials on Xinhui county, Guangdong, refer to chapters 3–5 of Siu (1989a). For a sample of historical essays on Guangdong produced by our research group, see Faure and Siu (1995). Boundaries were blurred. Merchants emulated literati lifestyles, and unsuccessful literati turned themselves into prosperous entrepreneurs. See historical materials on Huizhou and Shiba, “Ningpo and Its Hinterland,” in Skinner (1977), pp. 391–440. See Clunas (1991) and Brook (1998) on the deeply felt impact of commercial wealth on culture and society during the Ming. See the insightful essay “Business Culture and Chinese Traditions” by Yu in Wang and Wong (1997), pp. 1–84. On the industries and lineages of Foshan, see a series of articles in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985), in particular, the essays by Luo, Ye and Tan, Cao and Tan, Tan and Ye, and Zheng. See also Guangdongsheng foshanshi bowuguan (1987). See also Faure (2007) for a comprehensive analysis of Guangdong’s lineage development in the Ming and Qing. For Jiangnan, see the works of Yoshinobu Shiba, Susan Mann, and Mark Elvin, among others. The magnificent mansions of the Huizhou merchants, their lineage organizations, and their academies were public testimonies. In order to secure a solid grounding for their mercantile operations, merchants had tried to cultivate patronage and territorial bonds through native associations, trade guilds, charity, the buying of degrees, and support of popular religion. See the works of Ye Xian’en, Tan Dihua and Luo Yi-xing in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985). For the relationship between popular religion and commercialization, see Hansen (1990) and Von Glahn (1991); see also Hamashima (1991). For the late Qing, see Zelin’s “The Rise and Fall of the Fu-Rong Salt-Yard Elite” in Esherick and Rankin (1990), pp. 82–112; see also Lynda Bell’s “From Comprador to County Magnate” in the same volume, pp. 113–39. See Ye (1983), pp. 42–56 on the small amount of privately owned land and the vast lineage estates in Huizhou. See Zurndorfer (1989); see also essays in Liu Shen (1987). Ye asserts that, apart from bond servants, migrant-laborers, known locally as the shed people ( pengmin), were also a This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

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source of labor in the lumber, salt, and tea enterprises for which the Huizhou merchants were known (1983, pp. 84–85, 110–16). The Yuan village (Yuanjia cun) next to Chakang, the native village of Liang Qichao in Xinhui, was one such village of bond servants. In Chaolian, an island off the coast of Jiangmen, the established lineages all had bond servants. See also Tan Dihua’s “Mingqingshiqi zhujiang sanjiaozhou de shipu” in Tan (1993a), pp. 45–72. Ye (1983); see also Fu Yiling’s work on Fujian, where there had been numerous challenges and conflicts over former bond servants who became prosperous and who tried to establish their own ancestral halls. For similar cases in the Pearl River Delta, see Liu’s “Shawan of Panyu County” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 21–43. Her study focuses on the Fan lineage of Xiuning county in Huizhou prefecture. Xiuning and Xi counties are the two regions that produced numerous literati and merchants. See Zurndorfer’s “Local Lineages and Local Development” in Zurndorfer (1989). She argues that the investments in lineage land and charity might not be large, but through financing the compilation of lineage genealogies and occasional charity, merchants were able to confirm their native roots and maintain ties in Xiuning. She uses the example of a Fan Huo, who lived lavishly as a salt merchant in Yangzhou. During serious floods and famine (in 1539 and 1542), he gave huge donations to the victims. However, Zurndorfer argues that these were public acts with political and commercial agendas, just like his giving expensive gifts to friends and officials. He showed no interest in relieving the everyday needs of his kin. See Ye (1983), pp. 187–92. It is important to note that some of the degree holders had had urban residences for generations but claimed various rural counties in Huizhou as their places of origin. The neo-Confucians Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi were claimed to be natives of Xi county, one of the six counties within the Huizhou prefecture (also known as Xin’an). See Ye (1983), chapter 5. This runs counter to a top-down approach on state ideology and political control by Hsiao Kung-chuan. For example, the grandson of Zheng Jinglian, a salt merchant who resided in Yangzhou, and Jiang Heting were famous patrons of these operas. See Ye (1983), p. 227. See ibid., chapter 5 on Huizhou. On the elaborate gardens in Jiangnan in the late Ming where interests of merchants and literati mingled, see Handlin-Smith (1992). See Keith Hazelton’s “Mingqing huizhou de zongzu yu shehui liudong sheng” in Liu Shen (1987), pp. 76–96, fn. 27 (translated by Liu Zhiwei and Chen Chunsheng). The original reference can be found in Yong Rong et al., Siku quanshu zongmu, vol. 1, Shengyu (Imperial edicts) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), p. 2. Our sites were Huicheng (Xinhui county capital) and Jiangmen on the Xi River system at the western edge of the delta, Xiaolan town of Xiangshan county, the settlements (xiang) of Shawan in Panyu county further southeast. There are also Foshan City, and Lubao of Sanshui county where North River joined the delta. See Zhao (1937), which owned extensive diked fields to its southeast, claimed to have descended from the entourage of the last Song emperor, who was defeated by the Mongols in the area. Another record involved the Chens of Waihai xiang south of Jiangmen City, where a Chen Xiang claimed 40 qing of sands that yielded a rent of 9,600 shi of grain. See Tan (1993b), p. 76. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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25. The sands reclaimed were situated in the eastern part of Xinhui county, the northern part of Xiangshan (after 1925 renamed Zhongshan) county, and the southern part of Panyu county. These sands were eventually known as the Xihai shiba sha, Donghai shiliu sha, and Wanqing sha. 26. See Faure and Siu (1995) on the evolution of the lineage complex in the Pearl River Delta. 27. See the works of Nishikawa on the local bureau for protecting the sands in Shunde county (1988); see also Tan Dihua’s “Xiangzu dizhu dui zhujiangsanjiaozhou diqu de kongzhi yu husha de yuanhui” in Tan (1993a), pp. 155–74. 28. The prohibition of sea trade (haijin) was relaxed in 1685, but the Qing government in 1757 closed the coastal ports, except Guangzhou, to foreign trade. See Huang et al. (1993); see also Li Longqian’s “Mingqing guangdong duiwai maoyi ji qi dui shehuijingji de yingxiang” in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985), pp. 279–312. 29. On the circulation of silver in Guangdong during the Ming-Qing period, see Chen Chunsheng in Mingqing Guangdongsheng shehui jingji yanjiu hui (1987), pp. 206–36. 30. For comparison, see Fu (1956) on the sea trading groups from Fujian, and Ye (1989) on the merchant groups from the port of Zhanglin near Shantou in eastern Guangdong. 31. Some material on Huicheng is drawn from Siu (1989a), chapters 2–5. When the chapters were written, they were not focused on the issues I am now exploring. I have also done a conscious rereading of the research materials for this essay. 32. See Tan Dihua (1993a), p. 95. Also, according to a local saying, He Xiongxiang accumulated 350 qing of sands in his lifetime, which he divided among his sons before his death. Jiuzisha, a strip of river marshes he nonchalantly gave to his newborn ninth son after he had divided his estate, grew in value to 6,000 mu. While other properties were taken over or sold over the centuries, Jiuzisha remained the property of the ancestral estate He Wenyi Gong tang until the 20th century. It was a testimony to the power of the He lineage in Huicheng. See He Zhuojian (1963). 33. There were the Tan lineage in Chengnan, the Mo of Nanmen, and the Xu of Nanbiantang. According to a document on the rules for the Xu lineage, the author lamented that, “for a hundred years or so after the founding ancestor moved from Kaiping to Xinhui, the lineage was prosperous, with literati honors and commercial achievements; but in the last few decades, the lineage has sadly declined.” See “Xinhui xiancheng Nanbiantang Xuxing zugang” (1936). In the late 1970s, the ancestral halls of the Mo lineage at the southern edge of Huicheng were still standing. 34. For example, two lineage genealogies in the area recorded these events: Xinhui sanjiang zhaoshi zupu (Zhao 1937), and the Chaolian lubian lushi zupu (Lu 1947). A Liang lineage genealogy in the neighboring Zhongshan county also recorded similar hardships. See Kangxi liangshi zupu (1927), 5a–5b, “Qianmu zupu xu,” written in the 12th year of Kangxi (1673). 35. For example, the founders of a Chen surname group settled in Tianma village (xiang) a few miles south of Huicheng during the Ming. A member of a seventh generation who was a degree holder moved to Wufuli, a neighborhood outside the southern gate of Huicheng. An ancestral hall was built for him in the fifteenth year of Jiaqing’s reign (1711) in Wufuli. In the 19th century, his tablet was deposited in the Xi’nan shuyuan (academy) of Huicheng and in the higher-order lineage hall of the Chens at Xiguan, the merchants’ quarter in Guangzhou. See Chenzu shipu (1923). 36. Guan Xiekuang estimated that the fifteen largest grower-dryers of fan palms monopolized about 90 percent of the business; see Guan (1983). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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37. Under it were these guilds: the Lianxing gongzhan for the growers, Lianxing tang for the palm-drying fields, Tongren tang for fan-making shops, and Guangshun tang for the long-distance traders. 38. According to a document of Jimei Tang, a guild for palm-drying and fan-making businesses, 693 signed on as members between 1713 and 1845. 39. Members often advanced credit for growers with the expectation of a specific supply of fans at a set price. It was difficult to collect during harvest, when growers were tempted to sell to higher bidders. 40. See Guan (1983); Lin Hengji folded before the Japanese war, and Liu Yiji continued into the early years of the People’s Republic. Land reform documents from the Xinhui Records Office (dang’an guan) reveal vast estates owned by Liu Yiji. Members of these enterprises were powerful representatives in the guild and later in the Xinhui Chamber of Commerce; for the citrus peel enterprises, see He Zhuojian (1965). 41. For more detailed descriptions of the academies, see Siu (1989a), chapter 4. 42. The Red Turbans disturbance broke out in 1854 and spread to various parts of the Pearl River Delta in 1855. The group was put down in the 1860s. 43. For a general documentary history of the Red Turbans in Guangdong, see Guangdongsheng wenshi yanjiu guan (1992). For events about Huicheng, see Chen Xiangpu (1855), and Tan Zu’en (1960). A record in Tan’s accounts mentioned that the Fan Palm Guild was taken over by some rebel troops for a moment. 44. The three townships were Chaolian (with established lineages of the Lu, Chen, Ou, and Pan surnames), Hetang (with the Rang and Li surnames), and Waihai (the Chens). Some notorious rebel leaders during the Red Turbans attacks also came from these townships. 45. See Tan Dihua (1993a), pp. 155–74, who quoted from “Yan chi dongnan gongyue geshen lun” [On putting the gentry of the Dongnan alliance under strict order] in Gangzhou gongdu by Nie Ergang. 46. In Guangzhou, for example, there were the jiu da shantang [Nine great charitable associations]. Apart from offering the usual relief for the poor, they diversified quickly into promoting new technologies, women’s education, training for local self-government (difang zizhi), and maintaining public order. See Tang Yusheng (1909). For a detailed analysis of the cultural and political impact of merchants in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century, see a study of the Tung Wah Hospital by Elizabeth Sinn (1989). A summary of her argument is found in Sinn’s “Philanthropy and the Business World” in Wang and Wong (1997), pp. 230–52. 47. See “Xinhui cheng Tongshan Shantang Renji Yihui Taoze Yihui Jiqun Yihui xizi shicha zhimai baigu ershiwu qi zhengxinlu” (1936). 48. The opening ceremonies of the festival were officiated by Liang Bingyun, head of the third district and an appointee of the Nationalist government, and He Naizhong, a local resident and onetime advisor to the warlord Feng Yuxiang. A trade fair was organized in Hefeng Shuyuan (academy), which had been built by lesser surnames in town to compete with the established lineages. 49. See Zhongshan wenshi ziliao, vols. 1–3, for descriptions of the local bosses in the sands of Zhongshan county. The most powerful companies were the Minsheng gongsi (company), based in Xiaolan, and the Minli gongsi, based in Minzong, an outpost in the sands. 50. He Yanggao, formerly a large landlord in Xiaolan and a local historian, estimated that, in Sisha, a strip of sands southwest of Xiaolan, the area held by these bosses increased from 400 mu to about 7,500 after the war (personal interview, 1986). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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51. On a detailed analysis of the rise of the He lineage in Shawan, see Liu Zhiwei’s “Lineage on the Sands” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 21–43. Beidi was a popular deity in south China. In Shawan, local inhabitants had made it to symbolize the authority of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. His temple, together with the Liugeng tang of the He lineage, was the cultural and political center of Shawan. 52. The former were referred to as “female guns.” They used force for defense. The latter were branded as “male guns.” They supposedly used force to prey on others. 53. I see this as the beginning of the cellularization of the villages in the 20th century. The process reached its height in the Maoist period, when the administrative machinery of the Communist Party reigned supreme. See Siu (1989a). 54. Ibid., chapter 5. See also chapter 13 of this volume on the reworking of the lineage tradition in three communities in the Pearl River Delta. For the ritual efforts of militarists in other areas, see McCord (1993). 55. See Nantian suiyue (1987) on the warlord Chen Jitang in Guangdong during the 1930s. 56. There was Liang Hongye, whose father was a juror and who himself bought a minor degree. The other gentry leader was from the old He family of Huicheng, a He Ruoshan, who was head of the Xinhui Chamber of Commerce. 57. A document in 1948 listed members of the guild and their contracted growers. Among the growers were known local bosses. The documents also showed that many growers did not deliver the contracted amount to the traders. See Xinhui xian Kuishan Shangye Tongye Gonghui (1948). 58. See Siu (1989a), chapters 4–5. See also Xinhui Shuyuan dongshi licaiyuan (1927) and “Xinhui shuyuan gongding changji ji guanli zhangcheng” (1927). 59. See “Xingjian Xinhui Shuyuan de jingguo” (1964), compiled by the journal’s editors. 60. See Guangdong gangzhou shangbu zhangcheng quanjuan (1911). See also an account of the planning of the port in Zhongguo shangye xinshi (n.d.), pp. 178–82. 61. In Faure and Siu (1995), the contributors argue that local society in the delta was integrated into the Chinese imperial order through constant redefinitions of lineage, territory, ethnic identity, and religious rituals. They focus on the symbolic and instrumental means used by local inhabitants to position themselves within an evolving Chinese culture and polity. 62. The term datianer came from the Chinese domino game. It was used locally to describe local bosses who exerted dominance over a territory. 63. This is the main argument in Siu (1989a), a historical account based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Xinhui. 64. I have tried to deal with this question in previous publications: see “The Politics of Migration in a Market Town,” in Davis and Vogel (1990), pp. 61–82, and chapters 5 and 7 of this volume. 65. There may be conflicts of interest among levels of government and between center and region, but the connections with the state bureaucracy remain important for good business. See Perry (1993) and Solinger (1993); see also Oi (1995) on local state corporatism.

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Part 5 History between the Lines

My academic interests have been diverse. Apart from a monograph based on ethnographic explorations, I have co-edited several volumes in literature, cultural and regional history, and contemporary political economy. I foresee more to come, focusing on trading empires in an interconnected Asia, and tracking China’s 21st-century engagement with Africa. The challenge is to show appreciation for the analytical themes underlying these subjects. My partnership with historians and literary scholars has not been intentional. In 1985, I came to then Zhongshan University with a yearlong fieldwork project on the revival of market towns. Liu Zhiwei and Chen Chunsheng were asked by their teachers, Professors Ye Xianen and Tang Mingrui, to  accompany me. As we “walked” the decades, our initial inquisitiveness towards historical nuance and social theories matured into deeper reflections. Our enthusiasm to cross disciplinary boundaries gradually developed into an intellectual agenda to bridge the humanities and social sciences. “Reflections on Historical Anthropology” points to our shared analytical and methodological concerns. Anthropologists immerse themselves in micro environments, a community, a family, and social events. Historians focus on historical points in time. Both disciplines strive to locate micro research topics in macro processes, be they structural or temporal. My generation of anthropologists has been fortunate. When we pursued graduate studies in the 1970s and 1980s, historical social science paradigms were challenged intellectually and ideologically. We began to redefine the ethnic-cultural other in a world history of power and differentiation. I brought such critical perspectives to my fieldwork in Guangdong and gained the attention of my historian companions. Liu Zhiwei and I spent a great deal of time in the field together. He devoted his time seeking textual materials from old villagers—lineage genealogies, stone stele, anything with writings on it. But he was often intrigued that I continued to nag villagers with repeated questions. He finally understood that what they said, how they presented the information, and what they withheld were equally significant to the material objects we had secured. Over the years, Liu Zhiwei and I have come to share the conviction that, if we are to appreciate human agency, we need to understand This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the nuances in the voices of our research subjects and in the contexts they find themselves. “Walking the field” is to appreciate the material and discursive environments that have produced historical documents, folktales, rituals, and other popular narratives. We see their narration as languages of power and contestation for various social strata to position themselves in a conscious regional construct. There is a story behind the article “Where Were the Women?” In 1986, I spent the year studying the revival of a market town in the Pearl River Delta. When I accompanied Liu Zhiwei to search for local historical materials, older women repeatedly mentioned a marriage custom they and previous generations had practiced. Women in the region waited at least a year or two after marriage before settling with their husbands. I had assumed that the custom, known as buluojia (delayed transfer marriage) was a compromised version of the spinsterhoods in the neighboring county of Shunde, where income from silk factories had allowed women in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries to avoid marriage altogether. A trip to the municipal library in Guangzhou changed my mind. Chen Chunsheng and I were examining various county gazetteers. They were written by literati men recording local accomplishments and espousing Confucian moralities. In a Xiangshan county gazetteer, certain entries on “exemplary women” caught my eye. On the surface, the entries looked standard, but a careful reading indicated that some women only returned to “serve their husbands” when the latter were on their death beds. Even more remarkable was that their returning home was deemed worthy enough to be entered into the county gazetteers as fulfilling Confucian ideals. I began to wonder if the buluojia custom was the local norm. If it were, what would have been the ethnic background of these farmers who considered themselves Han, and who claimed in their genealogies that their ancestors had come from the Central Plains? The lesson in critical reading was that, between the lines of narration framed by literati pretentions, one could detect a different cultural process in becoming respectable subjects of the late imperial empire. Asking “where were the women” has allowed me to rethink the “settlement history” of a region and the ways it dovetailed with state-making in late imperial South China. Ethnographic, historical and literary concerns came together early in my career. Influenced by the emergent reflexivity in anthropology fieldwork, I compiled Mao’s Harvest (Siu and Stern 1983). I was motivated to capture the hearts and minds of a generation whose lives were truncated by every political campaign one could have imagined in the Mao era. Moods were changing in the early 1980s. As cultural czars in Beijing started to loosen their grip, young authors surged forward to express ambivalence in a socialist tradition that had long demanded commitment and sacrifice. As my colleague Jonathan Spence wrote in the foreword of the volume: If sentiments that surface in these passages often seem maudlin, and the preoccupations localized, they may well be because modes of expression in China have This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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been crimped for so long that a great deal needs to be said afresh . . . And there is extraordinary agreement among these writers about the loss of dignity that afflicts all Chinese denied privacy, in housing as in thought, forced forever to jostle and bargain and plead until the shouts become cries and the cries blows. (p. vi)

In 1984, I had the opportunity to be a Mellon Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The center was a gathering place for scholars who had crossed disciplinary boundaries in significant ways. Some became long-term friends— Jack Goody, David Apter, Alan Trachtenberg, and Peter Brooks. Others, such as Natalie Davis, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Carlo Ginsburg and Geoffrey Hartman, provided the inspiration for me to cultivate sensibilities about power, representation and hermeneutics. Meanwhile, several close friends with similar cross-disciplinary interests decided that we should have a reading group, if for no other reason than pushing one another to discuss works we would otherwise not read by ourselves. We  have since developed an appreciation for critical social theories and literary poetics, as much as ethnographic and historical nuances. The introduction to Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State (see chapter 12 of this volume), uses the politics of representation to understand China’s turbulent 20th  century. In the 1930s and 1940s, progressive-minded intellectuals chose to present the sorrowful plight of the peasants in order to condemn abusive regimes under the Nationalists and later the Japanese military. But their voices were gradually silenced by the very Communist ideology they supported. In the end, they had little choice but write about peasants, their works restricted by revolutionary formulas. The authors were often condemned in political campaigns not only for what they wrote but also for what they were, as bourgeois intellectuals with unreliable class backgrounds. The changing images of the Chinese peasant under their pen revealed the tenuous, ambivalent, and often tumultuous relationships among idealistic intellectuals, the peasants they chose to represent, and a party-state that changed their lives with unprecedented determination and power. I draw close parallel between this edited volume of literature and my monograph about rural transformation (Siu 1989a). The intellectuals and the Chinese peasants were both agents and victims, accomplices in a tumultuous process of social, political change they named “revolution.” Between the lines of historical and literary texts, I was trying to appreciate the often tragic complexity of human agency.

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11 Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China

As I read the section on “Honorable Women” in the 1923 edition of the Xiangshan county local gazetteer, I was struck by this particular entry: Woman Zhou, wife of Wu Yulin. Age 20. Had not consummated marriage. On hearing husband was near death, rushed to the Wu family. Cared for him for over a dozen days. Grieved loudly when husband died . . . (Xiangshan xianzhi xubian 1923, juan 13, “Honorable Women”)

The ambiguity in language concerning the marital status of the young woman leads to the question of where she should have been at the time. One may argue that it was not uncommon for county local histories to list young women who, though unmarried, devoted themselves to the family of their betrothed. The above could be one such case, which explained why Woman Zhou had not yet settled in the Wu household. However, there is other evidence that allows a different reading. My suspicion is raised by two similarly ambiguous entries in the same local history. One described a woman of twenty-three (old enough to have been married) “betrothed” to a man (pinqi), who returned to her husband’s home on the news of his death. The other was recorded as follows: “Woman Li, wife of Wu Peigui. Peigui left home without a trace. At age thirty, Woman Li settled in her husband’s home to show her devotion.”1 Adding to the complexity of the circumstances was an entry in a much earlier edition of the Xiangshan xianzhi, which stated that “the townships of Huangpu, Xiaolan, and Haizhou were slightly tinted with the custom of Shunde, and many married women had not settled with their husbands.”2 Although stories like these from the pens of scholarly authors are couched in ambiguous phraseology, suggesting Confucian chaste widowhood, they may more properly be placed in the context of marriage customs identified variously as “marriage resistance” or “delayed transfer marriage.” The cases portrayed in the Xiangshan county local history were not unique. Scholars have described a variety of marriage forms in the Pearl River Delta (see Map 1), and have offered various explanations for their rise and disappearance. Marjorie Topley, for example, focuses her attention on the zishunü in Shunde county, where some women ritually pinned up their own hair, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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formed sisterhoods and took elaborate vows not to marry. Many lived in independent houses where they and other unmarried girls congregated. She terms these activities “marriage resistance,” and associates them with the booming silk industry of the 19th century which gave women workers economic independence. When the silk industry collapsed in the 1920s, she claims, so did the movement.3 Topley also links the spinsterhoods and sericulture of Shunde with buluojia, a custom she identifies as wives not cohabiting with husbands, in neighboring Nanhai and Panyu counties. A woman would go through the elaborate ceremonies as in any Confucian major marriage. But after spending the wedding night with her husband, she would return to her natal home. There she remained and visited her husband at the birthdays and death anniversaries of her parents-in-law and for important festivals. Not until she was about to give birth to a child would she settle permanently in her husband’s home. Many tried to stay out until they passed childbearing age. Although Topley’s argument rests largely on the economics of sericulture, she does pay attention to cultural and ideological factors. She is concerned with how locally unique anti-marital attitudes combined with economic independence to give the area’s “unmarried” women room for maneuver. Her study raises two interesting points that deserve closer examination. First, “resistance” was sustained by the complicity of the women’s households, which stood to gain from their earnings. Second, underlying “resistance” was a conflict of cultural values: the ideologically motivated Confucian authorities severely criticized a complex of local customs and beliefs. Chen et al. (1964) and Alvin So (1985) have taken the economic basis of resistance for granted and have classified these marriage strategies along a scale, the spinsterhoods representing a higher form of marriage resistance and the delayed cohabitation as a compromise, depending on the economic resources the women could muster.4 Giving the term “delayed transfer marriage” to buluojia, Janice Stockard (1989) emphasizes that it was part of an original cultural complex in the area. Such marriages were accepted in certain communities as proper for Chinese rather than a deviant form at odds with Confucian norms. But she continues Topley’s structural and economic argument by describing how local women combined this cultural resource with the economic independence provided by the silk industry and worked out different strategies of resistance. One of these was to compensate the husbands with a sum of money to take in concubines, so that the women themselves could maintain as celibates the status and ritual commitment given to married women. In time, these strategies were tolerated by society at large. As to how delayed transfer marriage came to be the cultural norm in the area, Stockard has not gone beyond Topley’s intuitive suggestion except to point briefly to similar practices of ethnic minorities in Guangxi and Fujian provinces.5 My assumption has been that in Xiangshan (renamed Zhongshan in 1925) county, an area of exceptional affluence in the late imperial period, where ties to the literati This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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culture were readily displayed by the locally wealthy, the prevalent marriage form would be the major form practiced by the Han Chinese in which virilocal residence was required. This would have been an expected consequence of migration and acculturation. In fact, most of the marriage rituals identified as Confucian were performed—the betrothal, the elaborate exchange of gifts, wedding ceremonies, worshipping ancestors, and feasting relatives and friends. What surprises me, however, is that in local historical records the women did not follow the practice of virilocal residence immediately after the wedding. I find it equally intriguing that for some of them to rush home only just before their husbands died and for Woman Li to settle at age thirty were considered honorable acts worthy of public praise. More remarkably, the local elites who were commissioned by the county magistrate to compile county local histories seemed to have taken that fact for granted. Was the ambiguity in the language of the entries in Xiangshan xianzhi a way for the compilers of the documents to embed this sentiment in Confucian terms? Assuming that local records and lineage genealogies were documents constructed by particular social groups in their ideological and material interests, what were the motivations and the historical circumstances behind the endeavor of praising these “chaste” women in these terms? I have encountered similar ambiguity in ethnographic fieldwork.6 Even within a localized area of Xiangshan county, there are striking differences in how people interpret the marriage custom. The elderly women I interviewed in Xiaolan, a prosperous market town in Xiangshan county, insisted that they, their mothers, and grandmothers stayed in their natal homes for three to five years as a rule and only joined their husbands when their husbands’ family made plans to take a concubine. If one belonged to a literati family in a prominent lineage, they claimed, one stayed out longer and was supported by a substantial dowry; but no respectable family would negotiate a brideprice. They added that, on the contrary, the poor inhabitants of the sands surrounding the market town did not practice delayed transfer of brides, provided little dowry, and demanded “embarrassingly large” brideprices. Furthermore, since the socialist revolution, delayed transfer marriage has been considered “feudal,” and young people in town no longer favor it. The farmers in the sands have continued to ask for high brideprices but, increasingly, have also insisted on delayed transfer of their daughters.7 In 1989, I found similar answers in Shawan, a  market town in southern Panyu county, situated, as Xiaolan has been, on a line dividing an older part of the delta matured in early Ming and the river marshes reclaimed in the late Qing. I have difficulty approaching the issues of localized representation and ambiguity with the general structural explanations offered by the literature summarized earlier. In varying degrees they carry problematic notions of Chinese marriage and as a result leave several analytical issues about local society unresolved. First, except in the case of Stockard, there is the implicit assumption that, before and after the impact This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of sericulture, the common practice for the population in the Xiangshan-Shunde area had been the major marriage form. This notion has already been contradicted by historical records. The Xiangshan xianzhi of 1827 described the custom of delayed transfer as prevalent in Xiangshan and Shunde counties at the southern edge of the Pearl River Delta. Furthermore, Panyu county further southeast had similar customs as early as the Kanxi period (Chen et al. 1964, p. 173). David Faure brings to my attention a publication of a Jian lineage in Panyu. The biography of a member who sat for the township examinations in the forty-fourth year of Qianlong’s reign, entitled “Panyu Xiaozhou xi Xieyun gong,” states, “his village was allied with twenty-four others, named Benshe. Women in the villages had the bad practice of not returning to the husband’s home. If forced, they would return to die. The women’s families sued, implicating many people. He therefore led the people of Benshe to collectively appeal to the officials. A stone tablet was established forbidding the accusations. The bad custom was gradually eliminated” (Jianshi zongsheng 1955). Second, if sericulture is seen by these scholars as having provided local women room for maneuver, its various income-producing activities that shaped local economy and women’s position in households in varying ways need to be further differentiated for analytical purposes. The sands were vast river marshes. Between them and the older part of the delta stood a line of prosperous market towns such as Xiaolan, Shunde, and Shawan. The inhabitants of the sands, who were tenant farmers for vast lineage estates established in the towns, have historically been put down as culturally and economically inferior by town-dwelling elites. A more detailed exploration of the social ecology of the area allows us to uncover not only what productive activities were pursued but also the associated power relationships among communities and social groups. These relationships continued to redefine cultural norms and family dynamics. The aim of this paper is to use historical ethnographic materials on South China to understand the intertwining of culture and political economy through time. By uncovering how different populations sustained and reinterpreted the meaning of local marriage practices, one may be able to delineate a broader process of social change in the Pearl River Delta. Marriage practices of the area show that, through the late imperial period to the present, upwardly mobile groups in different communities have improvised with cultural resources of their own and those of an encroaching polity to create a vibrant symbolic complex and a differentiated social landscape layered with ethnic, economic, and political nuances.

Marriage Practices, Xiangshan and Shunde The area surrounding the market town of Xiaolan in Xiangshan county, where delayed transfer marriage was common, had emerged from the river marshes to become a This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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prosperous commercialized area in the late 18th century.8 A large proportion of town residents belonged to rich landlord and merchant households living comfortably off the income from vast lineage estates in the sands. They were seldom engaged in silk production. Their daughters were married off with distinguished dowries and stayed in natal homes for long periods. Residents of villages immediately surrounding the town followed similar marriage practices. They grew mulberry and raised silkworms for cocoons sold in Shunde. It was not until the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and 1940s when a large number of silk workers migrated from Shunde due to food shortages that local strongmen in Xiaolan set up silk factories. Many periurban households also maintained vast rice fields in the sands and occasionally hired field hands who were stigmatized as Dan. As mentioned earlier, these boat-dwelling farmers did not practice delayed transfer marriage. They gave little dowry but negotiated large brideprices. Their women occasionally became maids and concubines for the townspeople. One may, therefore, expect that the various productive activities in and around Xiaolan tied women to their family, marriage, property, and community in ways different from those maintained by women workers in the mechanized silk factories of Shunde. Moreover, in Xiaolan, the custom of buying a concubine for one’s husband, a marriage resistance strategy identified by Stockard for the late 19th century, predated the mechanized production of silk. The 1827 local history reports that a Woman He of Xiaolan, married into a Yang family at age nineteen, used her dowry to buy a concubine for her husband. The entry is ambiguous as to when she used the money to do so, raising the possibility that she had stayed away from her husband’s home and as a result did not bear any children. This was long before mechanized silk production drastically changed the livelihood of the women in the area. Moreover, the He of Xiaolan were rich and powerful in the 19th century, and Woman He was well dowered and likely not a labor worker. In fact, poor working women often became second wives and concubines who settled immediately with their husbands.9 Further, my own interviews and archival investigations agree with some of the evidence presented by Topley and Stockard, that the cooperation of family members, whether they belonged to elite or commoner households, was involved in sustaining both the spinsterhoods in Shunde and the delayed transfer marriage in Xiangshan. It cannot be assumed that the experience was traumatic for women in the way Margery Wolf has described for Taiwan (1972; Wolf and Witke 1975, pp. 111–42), or that they were taking advantage of economic circumstances to act against a structure of subjugation. The women were not acting on their own. The case of zishunü illustrates the complicity of family and community members. The role of these women was recognized. Young girls were allowed to congregate in the “spinster houses” and to participate in their collective activities.10 One may argue that this form of spinsterhood was socially controversial and only tolerated after the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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fact, but in certain households toleration went a long way. Spinsters were sometimes given properties and treated as respected permanent members of their natal households. Scholars cite numerous examples in the Republican era of rich families setting up independent houses and incomes for their daughters who pinned up their hair. One was none other than the most powerful literati family in Shunde, the Long who occupied the Qinghui Gardens. The other was Li Chaomin of Changjiao township in Shunde, who was director of customs in Fujian during the late Qing and whose son became director of civil affairs in the early republican government of Hu Hanmin in Guangdong. Li set up a large mansion in Guangzhou for his daughter Xiancu when she became a zishunü. When spinsterhood vows were respected by families, a dinner was arranged equivalent to a marriage banquet for a son, marking the occasion a happy and important one (Chen et al. 1964, pp. 176, 184). In less wealthy families, these women were important to their brothers. Local histories from the Qing cite numerous examples of unmarried women who chose to remain in their natal home in order to care for parents and siblings. My interviews with older women in Xiaolan provide similar evidence for the 20th century. They alleged that, especially if their brothers were young, they were obliged by their families to remain unmarried, with the expectation that their nephews would eventually take care of them. In the late 1940s, Mai You left her single-surnamed village in the township of Dalan at the western edge of Xiaolan. She and several cousins worked as maids in Hong Kong. Four decades later, she built a house in Dalan with her savings. Naming it the Mai Mansion, she today allows the household of one of her brother’s sons to occupy it but maintains her own room.11 The properties of spinsters were often inherited by their brothers. However, it was not uncommon for wealthy spinsters to leave properties to the junior members of their sisterhoods who had committed themselves to perform the rituals of mourning and worship after the zishunü died (Chen et al. 1964, p. 185). Delayed transfer marriage involved the cooperation of the wider kin and community even more than the spinsterhoods did, and cases of such cooperation were recorded a long time back. A genealogy from Shunde describes an incident from as early as mid-Ming in which the tablet of a woman, who acquired fifteen mu of land from her lifetime savings and who had not settled with her husband, was set up in a chamber next to the ancestral hall of her natal family for worship.12 Officials were involved in another case. The genealogy of a branch of the Hu lineage in Shunde recorded a court case in the early 19th century in which a woman, who had stayed away from her husband but who had returned after his death, was given the status of first wife. The decision went against the will of the members of her husband’s household, who had tried to give that status to the second wife.13 In Xiangshan county, the bridegroom’s family went through elaborate rituals of inviting the new bride back to the house at festive occasions when she joined her This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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husband only for a short time. Each time, in elite families, the bride was accompanied by her own maids and expected to eat only the food prepared by her natal family. This practice could last as long as a year and was considered quite proper by both sides. Large dowries and other provisions were set aside for the continual support of married daughters. In a document of 1877 on property division among the Xiao of Dalan, a substantial amount of grain was set aside for a daughter, who could use it upon her returning home after marriage. The amount, four dan, was enough for one person for a year.14 Such provisions were also popular among rich families in the Republican period. Mai You (interview 1986) recalled that the woman who married one of her uncles was from a rich family. Whenever her mother-in-law offended her, she would retort by saying that she only drank the family’s water, as she brought her own rice. Provisions sometimes involved land. A woman who was given such property could draw on the income in her lifetime. Three people confirmed this practice (interviews 1986, 1987). One was He Yanggao, Xiaolan’s largest landlord before the revolution. As head of the He household, he gave fifty mu of land to his younger sister when she married in the late 1940s. The land deed, together with jewelry and the rest of the dowry, was paraded through the town escorted by armed guards. Mai You and Mei Fong (a woman in her seventies who has been working as a maid in Hong Kong) both asserted that the deeds were either framed or put in one of the wedding boxes, and that at times land was given permanently to a daughter and passed on to her children.15 The maintenance of landed properties under the woman’s name called for long-term interactions among affines. The rituals surrounding the delayed transfer of the bride created networks among and between the female household members of both the bride and the bridegroom. The above evidence gives an unambiguous impression that, from the mid-Qing through the Republican era, the wider community had a major part in upholding the custom of delayed transfer marriage. My elderly friends claimed, “People shamed you if you settled with your husband too soon, accusing you of bad breeding.” In light of such statements, it seems appropriate to examine these customs in their wider cultural-historical context and to evaluate in what ways they constituted cultural norms and how they became strategies of marriage resistance.

Rethinking Marriage Resistance If we see local marriage forms as symbolic practices used by contenders for status within the delta’s complex and constantly changing culture, “marriage resistance” for the women labor workers in the early 20th century was probably one of several expressions in its historical development triggered by the mechanized silk industry in Shunde. But if one claims that the complicity of the women’s households was due to the high value of women’s labor in a commercialized rural economy, it would be This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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difficult to explain why the practice was popular for over a century in elite households, where the labor of women was least needed. If sustaining these marriage strategies was not directly triggered by economic considerations, what are the alternative explanations? It is difficult to determine where this custom originated. It is nonetheless pertinent to examine how and by whom the cultural practice was maintained and changed in the course of the late imperial and modern periods corresponding to a developing regional political economy.16 What do the various appearances of delayed transfer marriage tell us about major processes of socio-cultural transformation in South China? In these processes, what was the part played by men and women in their intimate world of marriage and family, and how was this relatively “private” realm of interaction linked to the larger concerns of cultural identity and social exclusion among the upwardly mobile groups as the Pearl River Delta came to be a conscious regional construct for its inhabitants?

The Ethnic Connection: A Cultural Argument It is tempting to see the delayed transfer marriage of Xiaolan in the context of its practice by historically identified non-Han groups in an area that stretches from southeast to southwest China. Variations of this practice are still common among the She of Fujian, the Yao of Guangdong, the Li of Hainan Island, the Zhuang of Guangxi and the Miao of Guizhou.17 An investigation into the massive number of suicides of women in Huian county of Fujian in the early 1950s led the late Lin Huixiang to argue that the custom in Huian represented the remnant of an earlier matriarchic society. On the one hand, he correlated the long-term residence of wives in natal homes with such practices as the couvade, the ritual raiding of brides, and the ganbiao or baitongnian (seeking pre-marital mates), considered to be characteristic of societies in transition from a matriarchic to a patriarchic form. On the other hand, he argued that centuries of Han influence in Huian county had turned buluojia into an oppressive custom for women, hence leading to the suicides of many brides.18 Lin’s thesis concerning social transformation draws upon outdated hypotheses about the relation between social institutions and overall changes in systems of descent. But it is precisely the contrasts in meaning between the customs in Huian and those of historical and contemporary ethnic groups that are analytically important. As in Xiaolan, the Huian custom requires extreme sexual restraint, whereas those identified with the non-Han groups are distinguished by sexual freedoms.19 On Hainan Island, a Li woman’s family provides her with a separate hut. She may use it to mingle with sexual partners. It may also allow her future husband to live and work with her family until the time she settles with him.20 The fangliao (open house) among non-Han groups in South China so affronted Confucian morality that This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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it was frequently mentioned with disapproval in official and unofficial writings.21 Furthermore, while it is crucial in Xiaolan and Huian that the women give birth at their husbands’ house with the purpose of establishing genealogical rights and statuses,22 the time of permanent settlement for the non-Han groups takes place when the fertility of the woman is assured; that is, when she has given birth to a child whose biological paternity is often not an issue.23 The similarities and differences in the meaning of marriage practices between the supposedly Han Chinese residents of Xiaolan and Shunde and the ethnic minorities are particularly revealing. The adaptation and creative fusion of particular marriage forms in the delta may be seen as a cultural strategy of social mobility for some and of exclusion for others; the varying meanings outline a history of migration, settlement, cultural integration and conflict. By unbraiding the consequent mixed heritage of the peoples in South China, one may establish significant historical links between the groups categorized as ethnic minorities and the agricultural inhabitants who claimed to be Han. This may clarify the nature and dynamics of an acculturation process by which indigenous populations improvised on the symbolic complex of an encroaching polity and came to occupy different positions within it. A central issue in this cultural-historical perspective is: Who made up the large Han lineages and communities in the delta? It is important to analyze critically the written genealogies and local histories. In the Qing dynasty, the major lineages in the Pearl River Delta asserted that their ancestors had come to Guangdong at the time of the southward migrations during the Song dynasty (AD 960–1127). After stopping in the Nanxiong sub-prefecture of northern Guangdong, they eventually moved to the delta. The migrants from the Central Plains were thought to have brought with them what their descendants later identified as the moral ideals of Chinese civilization: the lineage principles, the ancestral halls and written genealogies, and the practice of major marriage.24 But it is well known from archaeological and historical evidence that South China, including Guangdong, was inhabited long before the Song dynasty. Scholars today continue to debate the composition of these populations. From linguistic and other cultural traits, one may “deconstruct” the process by which migrants from the north became one with the indigenous “southern Chinese.” The late Luo Xianglin, a noted cultural historian, argued that prehistoric China was inhabited by five distinctive groups. The Xia (belonging to the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family) consisted of two branches. One branch extended from the Han and Wei River systems in Shaanxi to Shanxi and Henan. Another branch, which was distributed over a wide area in the south and southwest regions, later became identified as the Yue (Luo 1953, p. 4). Although they appeared later on the landscape, their linguistic diversity meant that they could not have originated in a single source from the north. The sophisticated Neolithic fishermen and farmers along the southeast coast were This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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related to the early cultures around Lake Tai (lower Yangtze), and there are suggestions that they were Austronesian speaking (Huang Shih-chang 1985). At prehistoric times, they migrated westward and southward as well as into Taiwan and the south seas.25 Whatever the origin of the Yue, subsequent dynasties incorporated them into their political boundaries.26 Known in historical documents through the centuries as the Yue (Baiyue), the Pu (Baipu), the Liliao, the Nanman and by other names, the inhabitants of South China were differentiated among themselves but also shared some cultural features. Unlike the Han Chinese in North China, they “cut their hair short and tattooed their bodies,” “performed tooth extraction and cliff burial,” “made geometric designs on pottery,” “built pile foundations for houses,” and “practised uxorilocal and delayed transfer marriages.”27 The area they inhabited was vast, extending from southern Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian through Hunan to Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and Hainan Island. The issues concerning their internal differentiation and their relationship with the encroaching Han culture from the central plains are far from settled. Scholars who emphasize independent and separate developments among these groups question the pertinence of equating the Baiyue with the Baipu in the southwestern regions. They use physical, cultural and linguistic differences to suggest that the Baiyue were water-based, skilled in navigation, and fair in complexion, whereas the Baipu lived in uplands and were physically closer to the darker Southeast Asian groups.28 The debates around the Baiyue are relevant to the character of the indigenous inhabitants of Guangdong and to their cultural interactions with the Han state system. Although many of these theories depend upon sparse archaeological and linguistic clues and should be treated with extreme caution, one may see them in the context of the general conclusions of recent archaeological studies in South China, in order to get some idea of the complex historical process of differentiation and migration. First, the indigenous populations in Guangdong were probably closer, both physically and culturally, to the Baiyue who originated in Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian than to the Baipu of the southwest (Guizhou, southwest Guangxi, southwest Guangdong, Hainan Island). Some might have migrated from Zhejiang to northern Guangdong by way of Jiangxi Province and the Bei River, a major tributary of the Pearl River system. War and conquest in the central plains could have scattered these groups, who moved west through the river systems in Hunan to mix with the Sino-Tibetan speaking groups in Hunan, Sichuan, Guizhou and northeastern Guangxi. In later centuries, especially after the Tang dynasty, their descendants migrated down the Xi River, another major tributary of the Pearl River in western Guangdong, to the delta.29 Their historical experience differed from the Baipu in that they already had greater exposure to the political and cultural influence of the Han Chinese from North China, and many had, from the Han to the Tang dynasties (from 200 BC to AD 900), been actively This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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acculturated by the administrators of the empire (Wang Ningsheng 1986, Hou 1985, Pan 1986). Although many continued to be water-based, which led the late Liang Zhaotao (1986) to argue that they were to become known as the Dan in the delta, the bulk of the landed population in the northern borders of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangxi were called Yao.30 Their relationship with the encroaching Han state system was dynamic if not turbulent. Very often, political turmoil in the central plains triggered regional militarism and massive southward migration. The end of the Qin dynasty (206 BC) saw the rise of Zhao Tuo, an official of the court who established the kingdom of Nanyue in western Guangdong.31 His armies of over 100,000 eventually mingled with the local inhabitants. The process allowed the fusion of the Han and Yue cultures in significant ways, as shown by the artifacts recently unearthed from the tomb of his grandson in Guangzhou.32 In fact, his alleged adaptations to local customs led the Qing scholar Qu Dajun to write with expected moral indignation that “although Tuo was not one of their kind, he abandoned his civilized attire, acted against his nature, and reduced himself to competing with other native chiefs. This delayed the incorporation of Nanyue into the civilization of the central kingdom until seventy years into the Han dynasty. Tuo should be held responsible for such a crime” (1700/1985, p. 32). At the end of the Han dynasty (AD 220), the carving up of the empire by warlords, together with the threat from nomadic groups in the north, triggered another round of population movement. According to Luo Xianglin, these migrants were known as the liuren (wandering people). Many were single men who eventually married indigenous women, settled in local society, and acquired some indigenous customs. The third wave of migration came at the end of the Tang dynasty (AD 907). Troops had been stationed in Guangxi and Sichuan provinces to block the threat of the kingdom of Nanshao in Yunnan. A rebellion of these troops in Guilin (Guangxi) was joined by local groups, which triggered a movement of population and the eventual mixture of cultures (Luo 1953, pp. 19–21). Official documents written by Confucian moralists often lumped together “untamed natives,” bandits and resisters of imperial taxes. In Guangdong, major military campaigns were conducted in the reign of Wanli in the Ming (AD 1573–1620) in which the less acculturated inhabitants were either taxed and ruled through appointed local strongmen (tusi), or driven into the most mountainous terrains.33 According to Qu Dajun, the marginal elements of the Han population joined these groups in the hills and river gorges of Guangdong. They raided village settlements on the plains and threatened the empire with their rebellions.34 The “shandao” (mountain bandits) along the borders of Xinhui and Xinning (Taishan) on the western edge of the delta were most notorious. The “shuidao” (water bandits) in their small boats, termed by official and unofficial historiography as Dan, plagued traders and peasants by hiding in the vast river marshes (1700/1985, pp. 236, 246–50). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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On the other hand, from the Song dynasty onward, imperial officials not only had troops stationed in military outposts but helped set up schools, propagated Confucian morality, and allowed aspiring scholars to sit civil service examinations.35 The combined process incorporated South China into the Han state system in an administrative and a cultural sense. The bulk of the local population mixed with migrants and military colonies through the centuries and became increasingly acculturated.36 But historical documents of the Ming and Qing dynasties continued to use the term Yao to refer to the inhabitants of the hills of northern Guangdong and Yao or Dan for residents of the lower reaches of the Pearl River Delta, where vast river marshes were gradually reclaimed for cultivation. The sand people of these marshes became functionaries and tenants of established landlords and merchants in older parts of the delta. They were seldom allowed to settle. Instead, they moored their boats along waterways or built temporary straw huts on dikes. This lasted until the 1930s and 1940s, when local strongmen arose to anchor themselves in more permanent communities in the sands and carved out spheres of power with their guns (Siu 1989a, chapters 2 and 5). As mentioned earlier, the settlement myths of the major lineages in the delta insisted that their ancestors had come from the Central Plains and stopped at Nanxiong in northern Guangdong. The myth added that, in AD 1014, thirty-five surnames made their way southward to the delta, aided by local inhabitants.37 In light of the historical clues presented earlier, one should question the extent of this migration. Could the majority of the “settlers” of the delta have been the local inhabitants of South China, termed Yao or Dan in official historiography, who acquired the economic resources and the cultural symbols of the encroaching state culture and eventually incorporated themselves into an evolving “Chinese” civilization? The claims concerning ethnic identity in the historiography on Guangdong, as on other parts of China, should be treated with caution. Ethnic classifications were often strategies used by the literate elites as a means of social exclusion. Ethnic labels were applied to those whom the established communities in the plains considered marginal elements.38 A social hierarchy can be discerned among the indigenous populations of South China. As they differentiated themselves in relation to the encroaching state system through the late imperial period, those who became established as Han referred to the less acculturated in the hills as Yao and termed the boat people Dan. These groups adjusted to new environments and pressures, redefining their marriage practices and cultural identities in the process.39 Even if one accepts the argument that the practice of delayed transfer marriage originated from the historical non-Han groups, the work of Lin Huixiang and my own fieldwork in Xiaolan present interesting comparisons.40 The women of Huian county in Fujian today, easily identified by their colorful attire and by the custom of delayed transfer marriage, have resided in areas where river marshes merge with the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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South China Sea. They are both fisherfolk and farmers.41 While it is possible to see the isolated Huian group as having maintained some of their indigenous customs distinctive from those of the Han Chinese, it is harder to claim the same for the inhabitants in and around Xiaolan, whose elites had acquired every conceivable symbol of what one would call the Chinese way of life. If the people in the Xiaolan area had actively shed their indigenous past, why did they continue with this peculiar marriage practice in the face of the complex of major marriage rituals and Confucian values in the 19th and 20th centuries? To address this question, a sociological perspective is relevant.

The Intimate World of the Family: A Sociological Perspective It is easy to accept the notion that the Han state system and its associated patriarchic culture had intruded upon local society through men carrying on their scholarly pursuits, economic activities and moral dialogues with officialdom. There were numerous examples of scholar-officials from the metropolitan centers who actively tried to moralize local social life in South China. There were also individuals of non-Han origin noted in literati documents for their distinguished Confucian deeds.42 But men were also emotionally and socially tied to women through the multiple roles of brother, husband, son, father, provider and dependent; tensions and achievements in their public lives would seep into these interlocking roles at home. Could the curious mixture of the rituals of the Han major marriage and the local practice of delayed transfer marriage have been a consequence of the mutual mediation between public expectations and private sentiments through a long period of interaction between the Han and indigenous populations? If we pursue this line of thinking, we can approach the issue on two fronts. The first is a methodological one. Historians in the past have relied heavily on official documentary sources which leave out the powerless, the non-literate, and those without a voice in the public aspects of social life. Now, cultural historians and ethnographers are more inclined to combine oral traditions with unconventional sources such as literature, private diaries, and letters, which illustrate the complexities of less formal social experience. The thirteen volumes of Qingbai leichao (Qing, compiled by Xu Ke and reprinted in 1984) and Guangdong xinyu (Qu 1700/1985) provide some valuable material in this respect.43 By exploring these sources in the construction of local culture, I find that the timeless and normative picture of the Confucian skeleton looks smaller than it has been portrayed, and needs to be fleshed out with the creative flux of daily life that makes up the social cells and cultural tissues in local society. The second is substantive. New ethnographic and historical evidence has allowed us to revise what has been portrayed as the lonely, subjugated predicament of women in a major marriage. The supportive network of matrilateral kin (Gallin 1966, Strauch 1983), the generous provisions of dowry in elite families (Ebrey in Ebrey and Watson This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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1986, Siu fieldnotes), the provision for widows (Dennerline in Ebrey and Watson 1986), the interdependence among siblings (Xu Ke 1984, pp. 2497–523; Siu fieldnotes 1986), and the sentiments between husband and wife (Xu Ke 1984, pp. 2024–44), suggest that Chinese women had more room for maneuver than we have been led to believe.44 These studies reveal a position for women as more than mere social pawns. Posed against such a background, one may suggest that, even if the upwardly mobile men of the Pearl River Delta would have liked to impose the Confucian values they felt obliged to adopt, it was not entirely up to them. Their womenfolk, whose life until the socialist period had been least touched by state culture, contributed their part in shaping marital expectations and the content of the accompanying rituals. Furthermore, instead of assuming the prevalence of an officially recognized major marriage that men adopted and women resisted, one has to see cultural process as a series of local improvisations that embodied both tendencies and that became vital components of a larger whole to which men and women, elite and commoner subscribed. In the sections of Guangdong xinyu termed “Renyu” (on people), “Nüyu” (on women), “Shiyu” (on events), “Shenyu” (on deities), Qu Dajun observed a bewildering range of customs in the local communities through which he traveled (1770/1985). Some affronted his Confucian values to such an extent that he suggested their prohibition, although similar efforts by other literati and officials had not proven very successful.45 In Shunde county and Xiaolan, the complicity of the family and the women themselves in upholding what they saw as the prevalent forms of marriage could have been part of this process of resistance in a wider sense. But family dynamics and its function of cultural transmission cannot be separated from the larger community of which the families are the parts. Myron L. Cohen points to the differences in family dynamics as a result of different community and lineage compositions. He suggests that large lineage communities with corporate landholdings display distinct patterns of “family organization, residence, marriage, adoption, and general social interaction” (1985/1992, p. 211). Within these lineage communities, the social life of elite families is more independent from the collective than that of commoner households. Their affinal ties are also more prominent. To pursue this social-structural perspective, one must examine the marriage strategies in the communities of Shunde county and in Xiaolan, in the context of the evolution of the delta’s political economy.

Regional Culture and Political Economy There are obvious reasons for me to focus on the Shunde-Xiaolan area. Assuming that there had been unevenness of cultural contact and social differentiation among the indigenous populations of Guangdong, which may have led to the existence of pockets of non-Han marriage customs on the social landscape, one still needs to ask: This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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How did this practice come to be identified with and sustained by, first, the upwardly mobile families of distinctive territorial entities such as Xiaolan and Shunde, and later in the 19th century, by women laborers engaged in the silk industry? Furthermore, it  is interesting to note that, today, residents of Xiaolan market town distinguish themselves from surrounding village communities by claiming that “our brides today settle immediately; only the peasants out in the sands have the feudal custom of delayed transfer.”46 I suggest that one puts the evolution of this cultural practice in the context of a developing regional political economy. For centuries, the Pearl River Delta has expanded in a southeastern direction. The inhabitants of the older parts of the delta first reclaimed river marshes for cultivation. By the late imperial period, the major landlords were corporate trusts (ancestral, merchant, academies) with headquarters in Guangzhou, Foshan, as well as in the county capitals of Nanhai, Shunde, Xinhui, Dongguan, and Xiangshan. The sands were inhabited by a population marginalized by the established landed communities and referred to as “Yao” or “Dan.” Functionaries employed by town-based estates set up outposts in the sands. They oversaw the reclamation projects, maintained dikes, collected rent from tenants who lived on boats or who built temporary straw huts on the dikes, and guarded the transportation of crops. In time, they accumulated their own resources from the vast frontier, often usurping the power of their patrons. In another paper, I argue that Xiaolan was one such outpost in the sands (see chapter 8 of this volume). Its local strongmen, at times treated by residents of the older part of the delta as “Yao” or “Dan,” rose to the height of their power in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their rise involved the acquiring of academic degrees and literati connections, the accumulation of their own ancestral estates in the more recent sands, the compiling of elaborate genealogies tracing native origin to the Central Plains, the building of ornate ancestral halls, and heavy investments in communal rituals, all of which involved distinct cultural symbols of power.47 During this time of upward mobility from mid- to late Qing, local marriage customs were creatively fused with Confucian practices, first in the elite families, and then diffused to the commoner households. The class of poor laborers and fishermen pushed to the sands were referred to by town residents as Dan. The Dan eventually adjusted to a different marriage pattern that involved direct settlement after marriage, small dowry, and large brideprice. With economic, political and cultural means recognized by the imperial state, these nouveaux riches competed with elites in neighboring counties throughout the entire 19th century in order to carve out their territories of control in the sands.48 On  the other hand, they built unmistakable cultural barriers against their boatdwelling tenants. This underclass in the sands was joined by poor males who could not find a viable livelihood in more developed parts of the delta.49 They were not This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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allowed to build permanent houses in the sands. Villages were small, and temples or communal shrines were few. The delayed transfer marriage and the accompanying large dowries, which successive generations of rich families in Xiaolan had proudly sustained, were distinguished from the marriage customs of their humble neighbors. Elderly women who were from rich families in Xiaolan indicated to me that they were given “double dowries.” This was their families’ way of flaunting wealth and status. I came across the dowry list (in the form of a printed booklet of thirty pages) of a Woman Mai who married in the early 1940s. Although she insisted that it was not elaborate, it consisted of an impressive range of jewelry, porcelain, silverware and two sets of suanzhi furniture.50 By the 1930s and 1940s, it was evident that upwardly mobile villagers living around Xiaolan who were formerly considered Dan had also adopted delayed transfer marriage. This was especially true among the new local bosses in the sands. The marriage of Mai Yonggan (a pseudonym), a cousin of Mai You from Dalan, is illustrative. In the mid-1940s, he had just returned from Guangzhou after a year of college. His father was a prosperous peasant. The family owned land in the sands, produced silk and cocoons, and operated a wine factory. Despite his objections, his family accepted a proposal that he marry the daughter of a local boss of the Liu surname who had become very powerful in the sands during the Japanese occupation. The dowry of his bride consisted of expensive jewelry and land deeds kept in red boxes. His sister remembered clearly that, for an entire year after the wedding, she and some women friends periodically visited the new wife in her natal home at an outlying village, brought her gifts and invited her back to the house. The new wife would come with her own maid and food. Just as marriage strategy was used by the upwardly mobile elites in Xiaolan as a means of social exclusion in the late Qing, there was no reason to doubt that it was improvised further by the women laborers in the booming silk industry in Shunde to resist marriage at the turn of the century. The resistance movement left its legacy in Xiaolan. Elderly women I interviewed in 1986 recalled how they and their “sisters” tightly wrapped their bodies with cloth in order to frustrate sexual advances during wedding nights, and how they “escaped” back to their natal homes before dawn, after periodic visits to their husband’s home. I recorded several cases in which husbands and their “cousins” ambushed the women and carried them home. At least in one case, it did not work. Mai You related what she was told of the adventure of her grandfather’s sister. She was a very strong woman; being the only girl, she was allowed to learn martial arts together with her brothers. When her husband and a cousin tried to drag her onto a boat, she struggled free and knocked them both into the river. There were more civil encounters. A woman who barely saw her husband’s face on the wedding night was thoroughly embarrassed when she unknowingly sold vegetables This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to him when he posed as a customer in the market. Another “escaped” from her married home, lost her way in the dark, and was directed back to the house by a man whom she did not recognize as her husband.51 If the marriage resistance movement had allowed women in Xiaolan room for maneuver during the late Qing and the Republican periods, the ultimate irony came after the socialist revolution. Until the recent decade of reforms, villagers in the sands were strictly confined in rural collectives. In the decade of the 1970s, many left their boats and moved to nucleated village settlements. But these villages remained poor and isolated from the towns. The town residents were given a great deal more by the state in provisions of food, education, medical care and industrial work. Ironically, the “grounding” of boat-dwelling inhabitants in the sands led to more families there adopting delayed transfer marriage. Perhaps due to isolation, they persisted in the preliberation view that adopting the marriage form was fashionable, now made possible by their physical immobility. But town residents continued to scoff at their small dowries, their demand for a large brideprice and, ironically, for adhering to a “backward marriage custom.”52

Culture, Society and History When I initially asked “Where were the women?” several issues were involved. There was the interpretation of what actually took place in this particular area of the Pearl River Delta. Did the women settle with their husbands? When did the marriage strategies originate? Who adopted them and for what reasons? Were they displays of marriage resistance? By arguing that the practice was popular among elite households long before the silk industry, and that the complicity of the women, their families and communities were involved, I hope to add a cultural-historical dimension to an economic explanation for the rise and disappearance of these practices. I suggest that the marriage strategies have been sustained and at the same time changed by different groups in various economic and political circumstances through the centuries: the “literati” lineages in their acts of territorial expansion and cultural exclusion in the late imperial period, those women labor workers who used their economic independence in the turn of the century to resist marriage, and contemporary residents of Xiaolan who aspire to join the urban working class and who eagerly distance themselves from peasant neighbors. Each of these territorially based groups has given the local marriage custom a self-interested reading. Together, they have perpetuated the cultural assumptions and the historical legacies of an emerging larger polity to which they have attached themselves. The polity was highly stratified, but social mobility in the expanding delta was attainable. An integral part of this process of growth involved the invention and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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reinterpretation of cultural (and ethnic) categories, which expanded the horizons and options of some while limiting those of others. The efforts of the indigenous populations of the Pearl River Delta to claim respective places in the larger state system by using local resources resulted in the evolution of a conscious regional construct that was internally diverse but that also bore the unifying imprint of Chinese culture and history. The large lineages in the Pearl River Delta insisted that they were Han because they claimed that their ancestors came from the Central Plains through Nanxiong, that they built ancestral halls, compiled genealogies, and practiced major marriage. Elites in 19th-century Xiaolan claimed that they were Han because, unlike the sands people, they belonged to major lineages with literati connections, and they practiced delayed transfer marriage.53 The farmers in the sands today, referred to by the residents of Xiaolan as Dan, say that they are Chinese because they also practice delayed transfer marriage. By raising the issue of marriage resistance, one is led to wonder who the inhabitants of the delta have been, and one further confronts the issue of how the evolution of Chinese culture should be conceptualized. Using ethnographic materials from Guangdong, I have tried to link culture, history and political economy with two questions. First, in complex, literate, state societies where the symbolic order of the ruling elites dominated the etiquette of political and social dialogue, to what extent did local society and those without a literate and political voice contribute to the making of themselves and of the larger historical process? Second, how must one incorporate this process in cultural analysis? If culture is a field of argument, then the Pearl River Delta provides the fertile soil for overlapping arguments.54 Participation in a “local” custom has depended on the encroaching state structure as much as local configurations in relation to it. Until a fuller ethno-historical map is reconstructed, what one can offer at best is a plausible reading of the historical processes and their cultural implications. While this study may account for how and why delayed transfer marriage has been sustained in the Xiaolan area, I cannot explain why in other areas the custom has disappeared totally.55 To obtain a full-scale explanation of the occurrence, reproduction and disappearance of the variety of marriage customs in South China, one needs numerous historical studies of local societies in the context of evolving regional and state cultures. The materials may allow us to compare and contrast their differing processes of sinicization pointing to a more systematic theoretical conclusion. To work toward such a goal, we need a genuine marriage of history and anthropology. *This article is based on fieldwork conducted in 1986 and funded by the CSCPRC, and on a paper given at the panel “Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China” for the Association of Asian Studies, Washington, DC, March 17–19, 1989. I would like to thank Myron L. Cohen, Deborah Davis, David Faure, Charlotte Furth, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Jack  Goody, Liu Zhiwei, Frederic Wakeman, Rubie Watson, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. This is a slightly revised version of the original published in Late Imperial China 11, no. 2 (1990): 32–62.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

Xiangshan xianzhi xubian (1923), juan 13, “Honorable Women.” From the age of Woman Zhou, the case should have taken place before the 1870s. Xiangshan xianzhi (1827), juan 2, “Local Customs.” These are settlements in the northern part of Xiangshan county bordering Shunde county, an area composed of reclaimed river marshes known at that time as the sands (sha). The reference also implied that the practice of not settling with the husband was prevalent in Shunde. See Topley’s “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung” in Wolf and Witke (1975), pp. 67–88. Many women workers subsequently migrated to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to become domestic servants. They maintained mutual support networks, some of which survive to today. Others have made such connections. See Xu (1984) and Jin (1935). She says in her book that this is not an issue her research allows her to pursue. In 1986, I spent nearly a year in Xiaolan and the surrounding rural communities. Between September and December, I conducted a random sample survey of three hundred households where I interviewed mostly men and women over sixty years old. In the late imperial period, the sands around Xiaolan were inhabited by a boat-dwelling underclass of tenant farmers who were named “Dan” or “sand people” (shamin) by town residents. The two groups maintained different marriage customs and seldom mixed socially. For a summary of the evolution of marriage exchanges in Xiaolan and the sands, see chapter 7 of this volume. For more information on the rise of major lineages in the town of Xiaolan and their relationship with the inhabitants of the sands, see chapter 8 of this volume. Second wives (tian fang) enjoyed a higher status than concubines (qie) and, depending on the terms of marriage, they might stay out for a short while. My interviews with zishunü in Hong Kong and Zhongshan show that the young girls gained much knowledge of their rituals by socializing in these houses and doing errands for them. These houses are not to be confused with the girls’ houses described by Stockard. Mai You is a zishunü who worked for my family when I was young. When I interviewed her in the 1980s, she said that she had not gone through the rituals due to the special circumstances at the time, but she tied her hair up just the same. She was fifty-five years old in 1989. My family’s other domestic helper came from Panyu. An unmarried women herself, she invested in a house in her native village near Guangzhou for her brother’s household. She even went so far as to adopt one of his teenage sons and help him emigrate to Hong Kong. In the 1990s, she lived with him in her own apartment. See Shunde Guizhou hushi liufangpu (1899), 11b. This reference was provided by David Faure. See Guizhou hufuchuntang jiapu (1937), pp. 15–16. The case took place around the time of the husband’s death, which was 1835. This was provided by David Faure. The same genealogy recorded a woman of the eighth generation who, together with other “gupo” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Tracing China (spinsters or unattached elder women) in the lineage, set up a house behind the ancestral hall to live, because her husband’s family properties “had been squandered.” The information is taken from a family division document owned by Anthony Siu, whose family originated in Dalan, a village adjacent to Xiaolan. Mei Fong’s father was a rich merchant from Longshan of Shunde. Her husband’s family, the Long of Shunde, was wealthy and well connected. Mai You was from a rich peasant family in Dalan. Dr. Choi Chi-cheung has surveyed many genealogies and local gazetteers in the delta and observes an interesting correlation between the Nanxiong myth of origin, the authors’ claim that they differed from the Dan by having double toenails, and the provision of large and often landed dowry for their daughters. According to Chen et al. (1964), p. 173, southern Panyu, which lies within the sands, is another area with high incidence of spinsterhoods and delayed transfer marriages. An investigation of Dalong village in southern Panyu revealed that, out of 20,028 women residents, 245 were vowed spinsters. In Shalang village of Zhongshan, forty-six practiced delayed transfer marriage (Chen et al. 1964, p. 173). In Fujian, Lin (“Lun changzhu niangjia fengsu de qiyuan ji muxizhi dao fuxizhi de guodu” in Lin (1962/1981), pp. 254–88) and Jiang (1985) have found a large number of delayed transfer marriages despite the government’s explicit prohibition. See Xu Ke, Qingbai leichao, juan 5 on the marriage customs of many ethnic minorities. The delayed transfer marriage was mentioned in these Qing documents among the southwestern groups. There was a case where an official was ridiculed by the local population when he insisted that the married couples among the Miao should stay together (2014– 15). See also Wu Cunhao (1986). See Lin Huixiang in Lin (1962/1981) and Jiang (1985) on buluojia in Fujian. Stockard (1989) also mentions a connection with the marriage custom of the ethnic minorities. This argument was made explicit in Jiang (1985). I thank Huang Shumin for bringing my attention to this article. See Qingbai leichao, juan 5 for documentation during the Qing of sexual freedom among ethnic minorities in the south and southwest. See also Zhongguo renleixue hui (1987) and Wu (1986) for the modern period. Though these huts might appear to parallel the maiden houses in Shunde, the motives behind their establishment and the way they function are dissimilar. See descriptions of girl houses in Stockard (1989). Myron L. Cohen (1985/1992) suggests that the “maiden houses” and the “bachelor houses” in the Pearl River Delta are connected with strong lineage communities where the family’s control over its members is weak. See Lizu jianshi bianxiezu (1982), p. 25. Historians in China have related variations of such a custom to the transition from uxorilocal to virilocal residence. See Zhu (1986), p. 33. For Huian, see Jiang (1985), p. 112. For Guangdong, see Chen et al. (1964). Han officials through the centuries had also commented on the impropriety of these customs. See Zhu (1986) and Guizhou tongzhi. See also Qingbai leichao (Xu Ke 1984) on such documentations in the Qing, Li Mo (1986) and Huang et al. (1984) for historical Guangdong. See Eberhard (1962) on this myth of origin among the lineages in Guangdong. See Chang (1985), Huang Shih-chang (1985), and Pearson (1985) for linkages between Taiwan and southeast coastal populations. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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26. Historical documents identified a kingdom of Yue in Huiqi during the period of the Warring States, which was conquered by the kingdom of Chu. 27. See Jiang et al. (1988). See also the articles in Zhongnan minzu xueyuan yuebao (中南 民族學院學報, Journal of South-Central University for Nationalities) published in 1986. 28. It is interesting to note from an article written in the Republican period (Jin 1935) which noted the short and dark “hengtang po” in Nanning (Guangxi) who practiced delayed transfer marriage, who spoke a different language, and who were sexually less restrained than the Han. 29. This probably explains why the Yao in Guangdong are linguistically divided into two broad categories. See Hu et al. (1985) about their differences. 30. Li Mo, a noted scholar of the Yao of Guangdong, meticulously mapped their movements in the region through historical sources (Huang et al. 1984). 31. See Liang Tingnan’s writing on the Nanyue kingdom (republished in 1982). 32. The artifacts of the Nanyue kingdom are revealing in this respect. The tomb of Zhao Tuo’s grandson was recently unearthed in Guangzhou. Musical instruments and utensils which had their origins from North China were mixed with shapes and designs (such as snakes and frogs) popular among the southern cultures. The most striking item in the exhibition is a metal cauldron engraved with scenes of battle in which figures dressed in straw skirts and feathered headgear held severed heads and stood on long, curved boats. 33. See the Yao of Dayoshan in Guangxi. The authors in the volume by Hu et al. (1985) assert that these Yao groups came from different places and were driven into the mountains by a hundred years of war and conquest by the Ming authorities. 34. See also Li Mo (1986). 35. See the biographies of notable scholars allegedly of Yao ancestry recorded in the historiography of the late imperial times (Huang et al. 1984). 36. The township of Xiaolan was formed out of eighteen military colonies, each with their headquarters in a Guandi temple. I found a stone tablet at the site of the original Beidi temple in Xiaolan, which was their supreme headquarters. The tablet commemorated a temple renovation in the late 19th century; patrons from the colonies were listed. A minister of the Ming court, Li Sunchen, was descended from one member of Xiaolan’s military colonies. His household registration was transferred to a civil one because of his high office. By the late 19th century, it was difficult to distinguish the two groups. 37. See Eberhard (1962), also chapters 2 and 3 of Siu (1989a); see Zhujiang sanjiaozhou nongyezhi (1976) on archaeological evidence. 38. See Ye (1989) on the organization of water transport and the discrimination against the Dan during the Qing. Dian Murray (1987) made the same point when she came across the historical categorization of Dan pirates in South China. David Faure expresses similar caution. 39. David Faure (1989b) reinforces these suggestions. He argues that, upon the imposition of a tax by the Ming authorities, the local populations of Guangdong went through a resorting of ethnic identities. Those who paid the tax claimed to be Han, and those who did not pay were labeled Yao. See also documents from the Yao such as Guoshanbang (n.d.). 40. I spent a short time in southern Fujian during the summer of 1987. Guangdong television recently produced a program entitled “Huian” (nü) focusing on these women. 41. In fact, some of these fisherfolk/farmers have migrated along the southeast coast to eastern Guangdong (Hailufeng area) and Hong Kong. They speak a southern Fujian dialect and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

Tracing China are identified as the “Hokklo.” Those in the Pearl River Delta and along the southern coast of Guangdong speak a Cantonese dialect. Dian Murray classifies them as the “Hokklo Dan” and the “Guangdong Dan” respectively. See Huang et al. (1984) on the biographies of noted individuals. Qingbai leichao is problematic in that the excerpts were copied from diaries and unofficial sources and compiled out of context. One is not sure of the original authors’ point of reference. A possible way of cross-checking is to refer to Guangdong wenzheng zuozhe kao by Wu Daorong, which discusses the authors in Guangdong wenzheng. Work by many of them was included in Qingbai leichao. See also Xian Yuqing (1965), Lanxie written probably in the 1870s by He Dazuo, Yuedong wenjian lu by Zhang Qu (1738/1990), and Nanyue youji by Chen Huiyan (1850/1990). See also the muyüshu that expressed sentiments between men and women. These were particularly popular among the women. See other aspects of social life in Republican Guangdong in Zhou Kangxie (1972) where excerpts are reprinted from Minsu, a journal of ethnology published in the 1920s. See also Huang et al. (1984) and excerpts in Qingbai leichao, juan 5. The sharp social divisions between the residents of the market town of Xiaolan and of the sands are distinguished by the terms “us over here” and “those out there.” In a field trip to Panyu (February 1989), I was intrigued to find the same categorization for the town residents of Shawan in Panyu and the surrounding villages in the sands. See chapter 8 of this volume. For the particular history of the He lineage of Xiaolan, the largest and most powerful surname whose members were beginning to acquire degrees in the Ming, see a manuscript by He Yanggao (1964). The disputes between the elites of Xiangshan with those of Shunde over Donghai Shiliusha, and those between them and the elites of Dongguan over Wanqingsha were vivid examples. See Guangzhou xiangshan gonghui (1912a and 1912b) and the 1922 edition of Dongguan xianzhi. See a summary of the movements of people between the town of Xiaolan and the sands in Siu’s “The Politics of Migration in a Market Town” in Davis and Vogel (1990), pp. 61–82. A double set of furniture for the sitting room and bed chamber is considered most prestigious. These stories were related to me during interviews in 1986 and 1987. I suspect that they were well known in the area and have become standard comments on local marriage customs. See chapter 7 of this volume. The differences in dowry and brideprice between those in the town and those in the sands had been maintained. In the mid-1980s, a standard package of wedding expenses for the bridegroom’s family in Xiaolan included separate living quarters for the newlyweds, a wedding feast, and at most, a contribution of eight hundred yuan toward the feast of the bride’s family. The dowry amounted to five or six thousand yuan, which had led some families to complain that marrying off a daughter was as ruinous as ever. By contrast, villagers in the sands in this period provided little dowry for their daughters. Instead, they asked for a large brideprice of several thousand yuan in order to hold wedding feasts that last for several days. Some of it was allegedly channeled into the family budget to provide for the marriage of the sons. The Dan in Hong Kong, according to the late Barbara Ward, considered themselves Chinese because their widows remarried. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:31:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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54. The idea that culture is a field of argument comes from William Kelly. The idea was again suggested to me by Muriel Bell. 55. Myron L. Cohen put the question to me during the Modern China Seminar, Columbia University, April 13, 1989.

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12 Social Responsibility and Self-Expression Introduction to Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State

To the world I am ever a stranger. I do not speak its language; it does not appreciate my reticence. Our encounter is virtual nonchalance, parted by a mirror. To myself I am ever a stranger. I fear darkness, but I let my body get in the way of light. The shadow I make is my lover. The heart inside is my foe. —Bei Dao, “Wuti” 無題 [Untitled] (1988)†

The literary scene in China during the 1980s was, at least until June 1988, lively, and puzzling. The official concern about “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalism” revealed a prevailing lack of faith among intellectuals (of which writers are a subset) in Marxism and in the party.1 Although party leaders have tolerated more divergent political views since the early 1980s, they continue to expect unconditional commitment to the country. But the reluctance of writers to engage in this dialogue, as expressed in Bei Dao’s poem, poses a unique problem for the party. Engineers of ideologies find it difficult to mold ideas and opinions when the mind itself refuses to conform. Even more interesting has been the rumbling among the writers themselves. “Obscure poetry” (menglongshi), a style represented by the above poem by Bei Dao, is attacked by established poets as unintelligible and an unjustified deviation from the rhetorical conventions of Chinese poetry.2 Moreover, its poignant sentiments are said to show a lack of appreciation for the larger cultural forces that permeate poetic sensitivities. The moral message in the artistic squabble is clear to all: new-style poets are indulging in a subjectivity that This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Figure 12.1 “A Searcher in the Capital,” 1976. Photograph by Li  Xiaobin. Printed in Dazhong sheying, August 1986. Reproduced by permission of Li Xiaobin.

cannot transcend personal experiences, and hence their poetry is devoid of social commitment or effectiveness. Writers of fiction feel similar tensions. Experiments with new techniques and emerging themes that dwell on individual psychology and feelings of estrangement have become intensely controversial.3 As with the new poetry, complaints about the new style and content of fiction are morally charged. To many modern Chinese writers, the May Fourth Movement of 1919 symbolizes Chinese intellectuals’ passionate involvement in cultural criticism and political regeneration. That awakening in thought brought with it a strong sense of mission (shiming gan), a deep commitment to society. To turn one’s back on the world is seen as an affront to an enduring intellectual tradition. Liu Binyan, a forthright writer-journalist and a severe critic of the Chinese Communist Party, believes that writers should assume responsibility for society’s troubles. Social responsibility sustains a writer’s identity and inspires artistic creativity. Liu asserts that, because contemporary politics has stamped its presence on social life, the urgent task facing writers today is to expose political contradictions as a means of working toward their solution. Divorcing politics from literature is unrealistic because it alienates writers further from the true nature of their subject matter.4 Moreover, many Chinese intellectuals have suffered because of their convictions. Their indulgence in individualism today is seen as a moral betrayal. It demeans what they have fought for and what they have preserved in face of terrible political persecutions.5 Many wonder, as they reflect upon their role along the path of a torturing Chinese revolution, if in their eagerness to abolish tradition by political means they may have inadvertently damaged a deeper cultural ethos. They also ask whether This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the subsequent cultural estrangement and the political alienation of a younger generation of writers are precipitating further intellectual toxins.6 A revealing series of articles in 1988 in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily mixed patronizing attitudes with bruised feelings.7 One essay was written by Liu Xinwu, a writer in his forties noted for his concern for the younger generation.8 Another is a dialogue between Li Zehou, a liberal-minded philosopher, and Liu Zaifu, a daring literary critic. The tone is mild; the authors insist that they understand and respect what the young writers have gone through. But the message is clear: the young writers are unwilling to face the test of their times and are shirking their responsibilities. Liu Xinwu’s comments are typical: In the past, things were too closed off, too calcified. Once a window is opened and lively exploration becomes possible, one is shocked and saddened; the world outside seems to have become unreachable—even if one surges forward at full speed, it is impossible to narrow the distance. Anxiety, restlessness, and impatience prevail. This mood naturally makes one eager to find an easy way out. (1988)

What is surprising to me is the attitude of these critics. The critics are young by Chinese standards, and they are hardly party hacks. They have opposed the party line on literature, they don’t identify with the party’s cultural czars, and in the recent decade of reforms they broadened their horizons by foreign travels. In February 1989, Li Zehou joined thirty-two other top Chinese intellectuals in signing a letter to the central authorities urging amnesty for those who were imprisoned for their involvement in the democracy movement of the late 1970s (subsequently another forty-two scientists and forty-three young and middle-aged intellectuals put their names on similar petitions).9 Ironically, given their criticism of younger writers, the petitioners’ focus on the well-known dissident Wei Jingsheng was triggered by sympathies from the poet Bei Dao. If these critics’ disagreements with the younger writers are not entirely ideological, what is at issue? The critics seem unable to accept an art that has become cynical and detached, and they are reasserting a sense of involvement that they expect the younger writers to be proud of.10 The dispute arises from differing views on the cultural identity of modern Chinese intellectuals and the political activism attributed to them. It forces the protagonists to rethink how they relate their art to society and the state in an era of revolutionary change, and to consider where they should direct their critical energies under a party-state that firmly and often mercilessly asserts its power. In fact, the new-style writers range widely in their degree of detachment from political reality. Bei Dao’s part in the amnesty campaign brought him closer to the position of the politically committed writers than may be apparent in his art. His preference is detachment, but at times he finds this difficult. After the government tried to discredit the amnesty campaign he initiated, he wrote, “I am a poet. Politics does not interest me very much. I am tired of being a celebrity. I originally intended to retire This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to my desk and to the world of my imagination after the publication of the petition. But if China, vast as it is, cannot accommodate a desk, I certainly cannot choose to be silent” (Li Yi 1989a, 1989b; Qi 1989a, 1989b). The ambivalence of the new-style writers toward their culturally expected roles is complex. Most of them came of age during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and are painfully aware of their own political baptism. They witnessed the upheavals of the late 1960s and spent years of soul searching in the countryside as educated youths who were “sent down.”11 Xie Mian, editor of the poetry journal Shikan, puts their anguish in context: in the past five decades, the literary scene experienced little flourishing of thought and emotions; the young writers matured under this stifling reality.12 It has become clear to them that political criticism is not a right and that commitment to society has been twisted to serve dehumanizing political ends.13 They see how a sense of mission has compelled generations of intellectuals to mold themselves to ideologies that “devour” them, just as the traditional morality—which early 20th-century novelist Lu Xun wrote about—devoured the Chinese people.14 That it is a crime to work with the mind instead of with the hands was made explicit in the Maoist era. During that time, intellectuals were assigned to labor in the fields. In confronting the state, they were as helpless as the peasants for whom they had intended to speak. The young writers may appreciate that some of their elders faced their plight with the quiet sense of dignity revealed in Yang Jiang’s Six Chapters of My Life “Down-under” (Ganxiao liuji). Yet the complicity involved in victimization has made them cynical about the culture and society in which they find themselves. The poet Gu Cheng, for example, treats the Jialing Jiang (Jialing River), traditionally portrayed as a source of sustenance, as malevolent:15 All crumbling has ceased. A giant—carved in the gorge—watches on: Sailboats, in doleful procession, Dressed in mournful colors, Dragging behind them—unfurling— A pearly burial cloth.

His anguish is clear: My shadow is a mutilated carcass. My body is a figure carved in a cave My voice echoes the rasps of a glacier. My gaze, alone, is a liberated spirit . . .†

Some young writers have embarked on superficial and self-serving experiments in order to gain quick recognition in a rapidly commercializing world.16 Others have plunged into “pure art,” to defy a political ideology distasteful to them. But many This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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are ambivalent about a socially involved art because they personally understand the tragedy of their parents’ generation. This feeling was expressed, solemnly but compassionately, by the writer Ah Cheng when his father, a film critic condemned as a “rightist” for twenty years, received notification on a night in 1979 of his rehabilitation. From the standpoint of a friend, Ah Cheng spoke the words of a son: If I were overjoyed tonight, my past thirty years would be reduced to nothing. As a person, you have already affirmed yourself. There is no need for others to judge you. The power of such judgment lies within the hands of others; these hands may well support you today and deny you tomorrow. Therefore, in my view, your rehabilitation has no real significance outside of mere technical convenience. Moreover, the political vicissitudes that have afflicted you are not without blessings. They have forced me to rely on my own efforts to acquire confidence in life, although for you these twenty years must have been brutal. (Ah Cheng 1988, p. 12)

Seventy years ago, Lu Xun portrayed the human condition of his time as mired in tradition: “an iron house having not a single window, and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation.” Although he wondered whether it was fair to wake up the few light sleepers only for them “to suffer the agony of irrevocable death,” he did pick up his pen and face up to his predicament (Schwarcz 1986, p. 13). As contributors to the book Lu Xun and His Legacy convincingly argue, the fearless originality of his art is based on his uncompromising conviction that he must not only unveil the irrational powers that enforce social life but also ruthlessly scrutinize his own compulsions. The sardonic wit that permeates his prose reveals an introspective spirit as full of anguish over external enemies as over his own inner ghosts, an anguish rooted in a culture and history of which he felt himself an integral part. In this way, “he gave artistic form to the experience of being a modern Chinese intellectual” (Lee 1985, pp. xiii, 31). On the issue of the “agony of wisdom,” Ah Cheng and his father were probably in agreement.17 The difference is that, whereas some older writers continue to feel committed to working toward a better world, some younger writers wonder if they have not constructed a new iron house through their very attempts at emancipation. They question the revolutionary movement and dispute its sense of mission. Is it the latter part of an “eternal” cultural repertoire, or does it bear the unique imprint of the political contingencies of the 20th century? Are the defenders of this sense of mission so preoccupied with fighting the external powers of the world that they are unaware of their own inner compulsions and the political consequences of their acts? Some among the younger generation drawn into the eventful journey have come to appreciate it as a point of awakening and departure. In consciously disengaging themselves from what is politically expected of intellectuals, are they examining their cultural baggage more introspectively? If they refuse to be captive spirits now, how will they This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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break new ground? According to Ah Cheng, the way lies through critical cultural reflection. To him, it is tempting to forget one’s past, but in fact the past is hard to dismiss: If we acknowledge that the prerequisite for freedom of creativity is the freedom to explore our own consciousness, just imagine how little freedom we would have if we were not aware of the forces of our culture or world culture . . . The older generation of writers has often assumed a negative stance when they represent the national tradition. The younger writers have started to assume a positive stance . . . in order to illustrate the new direction of a Chinese literature built on a critical [approach to] cultural inheritance and development.18

Political Authority and Cultural Critique Disengagement as a means of cultural reflection, the proposal of the new-style writers, is disorienting both for party officials and for their fellow artists. The controversy speaks to the delicate yet entrenched position of intellectuals in the system of authority in 20th-century China.19 Traditionally, to be Chinese has meant a commitment to and an identification with the evolution of Chinese culture, society, and polity, a historical process heavily informed by the interpenetration of moral and political authority and anchored in the power of the written word. To understand why scholars have felt compelled to attach themselves to moral and political authority, and to appreciate the profound effect of their writing on society, some knowledge of the historical sources of literacy in China and the vitality it has generated is necessary. “The Chinese” have diverse racial, linguistic, and cultural origins; their identity as Chinese has rested on the written language, which dates to around 2000 to 1500 BC (Cheng 1987; Mote 1971, p. 5; Chang Kwang-chih 1983). The state culture was recorded first by shamans and scribes in the early dynasties and then by court historians and literati during the institutionalization of the imperial bureaucracy in subsequent dynasties. The ethical and intellectual principles of the written tradition were created by generations of scholars, who shared as well as contested its substance. Through the written record, the debates among the ancient sages left an enduring imprint on the culture (Mote 1971, p. v). Until this century, to be Chinese meant sharing a cosmos and participating in a way of life that bound an individual to kin, community, and state. Everyone had a place in an ordered universe. The confirmation of this way of life was intricately tied to manipulations of the symbols of power. The virtual monopoly of scholarly writing by a group of administrative specialists constituted the core of this symbolic complex, which had become firmly diffused in everyday life by the 11th and 12th centuries (Balazs 1964; Chang Chung-li 1955; Chang Kwang-chih 1983; Ho 1962). What was at stake when control of the written tradition was contested in the political arena was This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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not only the fate of the ruler but also the object of the government’s ever-expanding “civilizing” process—the land, the people, the historical memories, the very moral and cultural dialogue.20 The process of a written state culture percolating downward was not limited to official writings. In each dynasty, a distinctive repertoire of popular artistic cultures interacted with the official culture. Literary scholar Cyril Birch (Foreword to Chinese Narrative, Plaks 1977) argues that Chinese stories and novels no doubt belonged to a minor tradition rather than to the central elite culture of historiography, philosophical prose, and lyric verse. But the divergence can easily be exaggerated. The long early cycles that seem to have grown like coral reefs by processes of accretion ended by enshrining the moral values and philosophical bases of an entire civilization .  .  . Read by the children of the semi-educated, orally presented by storytellers or transferred to the dramatic stage, the great masterpieces of fiction confirmed cultural identity just as surely as the dazzling beauty of the cathedral told the European peasant he was a Christian. (pp. x–xi)

The written tradition as civilizer of the polity readily became part of popular consciousness, and scholars saw themselves as agents indispensable to this process. Precisely because political authority was so directly involved in the construction of society and its ethics, China lacked the trappings of a modern nation-state until the 20th century. The term tianxia (all under heaven) was replaced by guojia (nationstate) only in the modern era. The realization that the vast empire was held together more by a shared cultural heritage and less by military might or legalistic-political administration led the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the sociologist Robert Park, both visitors to China in the Republican period, to comment that “the Chinese polity is a cultural phenomenon.”21 China, however, has never lacked despots who obtain compliance by force. To deny their power is unrealistic, but the issue here is the nature and the bases of that power and the means by which they exercise it. The ancient philosophies, revised through the centuries, have become a state culture that consumes rulers and the ruled alike. At the core of this culture is a set of rites and mutual obligations within the cardinal social relationships (ruler-ruled, parent-child, husband-wife, older sibling–younger sibling, friend-friend). Human fulfillment comes with the realization of these relationships through moral self-cultivation and social practice. Cultural vitality emerges from this inner force and extends outward to order family, society, and universe. Heaven bestows the mandate to rule on a political leader who has proved himself worthy by behaving morally (in Confucian terminology, neisheng waiwang). In imperial times, benevolent government was expected, and the failings of the ruler were chastised by the literati, who represented this system of values. More seriously, the ruler’s shortcomings justified peasant rebellions, whose leaders claimed that the ruler This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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had violated Heaven’s mandate. Although the opposite was more often true—military rulers claimed their dominant position was an indication of their mandate to rule, and they forced court philosophers and historians to affirm their de facto status in the value system—the significant fact is that they felt obliged to do so. Whereas peasants rebelled against imperial excesses in order to force a restoration of the moral and political order, their leaders, often displaced gentry and militarists, claimed to act according to the Way of Heaven (titian xingdao). The literati, on the other hand, could choose between two different but related courses of action. They could actively intervene on behalf of society (weimin qingming) by castigating the ruler ( jian). Or, they could retreat from the political whirlpool, live the life of a hermit (yin), and refuse to serve an illegitimate power until order was reinstated. Both acts appealed to a moral paradigm to which the literati remained committed. Such acts may have been infrequent, but they were imprinted on the historical consciousness that was a major part of the symbolic repertoire in the literati culture and the popular mind.22 Given the cultural expectations, the position of the literati was never very easy. They occupied the highest places in the societal complex and were privileged by education and access to political office and wealth. They used their writings to propagate a system of morality (wen yi zai dao) that legitimized the political order as well as their place in it. “Those who excel in scholarship serve the state” (xue er you ze shi) was a motto for scholars, and this attitude bound some of the best minds to the imperial court. But another principle made them answerable to society. Criticism of political excesses was a moral privilege and a social responsibility. If few scholar-officials exercised this principle of action against imperial power, their acts nevertheless gained significance in the historical consciousness as exemplary behavior. They were thus a necessary thorn in the side of the power holders, whose legitimacy depended on the system of values they represented. Despite drastic transformations in substance and meaning through the centuries, this precarious marriage between scholarship and power continues to be taken for granted.23 In the early 20th century, the educated elites were heavily influenced by Western thought, especially by the ideals of progress, scientific rationalism, and democracy in a modern nation-state led by a dynamic, autonomous, urban-based cultural elite. Both Chinese and Western scholars have regarded the Chinese enlightenment— as the May Fourth Movement has been termed (Schwarcz 1986)—as the epitome of a passionate attempt to criticize the primordial sentiments of an agrarian state. The success of these efforts is subject to debate, but urban intellectuals did sever kin and communal loyalties to the countryside, the same loyalties that had once supported imperial and bureaucratic power. In so doing, they redefined their position in the system of government. Instead of using tradition to serve political ends, they claimed the authority to create a new political and moral order. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Modern intellectuals were sincere in examining their own roles and assumptions. In the preface to The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan Spence eloquently sums up their painful involvement in society: The Chinese whose thoughts, words, and actions constitute the heart of this book were all intellectuals in some form or other, yet though they could not speak at first hand for workers or peasants, they were far from being mere spectators. At their more strident or ineffective moments, certainly, one can see them as being in some senses parallel to the members of the chorus in a Greek play, watching in horror and fascination the tragic working out on center stage of a conflict between mortals and gods, the end of which has been long foretold. Yet though the cultured voices of these Chinese may seem at times too piercing, and their gestures too ritualized, they still possess the essential power—denied to the traditional chorus—of leaving their apparently allotted space and marching to the center of the stage. It is often true that those who do this die earlier than the others—“before their time,” to use a simple phrase—but one cannot deny that they often show a startling wisdom, the wisdom of those who have seen the hidden directions of this particular play, who have understood that this is not the kind of drama in which those who stay on the periphery will be left in peace. (1981, pp. xiv–xv)

Paradoxically, the fateful drama of revolution, cultural pride, and human dignity, which the protagonists in the historical narrative unveiled in their lives, illuminated the stubborn vitality of a structure of values that continued to bind writers to a polity and its changing bases of authority. Certain forward-looking attempts to build a modern nation-state were heavily informed by what remained of the literati tradition. Tu Wei-Ming maintains that, although anti-traditional in content, the intellectual culture followed tradition in being epistemologically authoritarian (quanwei xing). Leo Lee stresses that “modernism” in China differs considerably from the antiestablishment orientations of European modernism. During the May Fourth period, the belief prevailed that an urban, “bourgeois,” intellectual elite would lead China in building a new establishment, a strong nation-state.24 Moreover, not unlike their predecessors, intellectuals struggled to represent an autonomous ethical system with the intent of chastising power holders for their failings. They expected to be the leading agents in the creation of a new political culture. The partnership between cultural iconoclasm and an emotional commitment to building a nation-state was tense.25 The first aimed at critical self-reflection; the second threatened that spirit. How did the patriotic momentum unintentionally prevent a deeper examination of the authoritarian assumptions of the state as well as the participants’ own motives and roles? Such “external” factors as political constraints obviously tied people’s hands, but “internal” factors, embedded in cultural expectations, permeated the heart and rigidified the mind.

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In their eagerness to deliver the country from an unprecedented crisis, modern Chinese intellectuals immersed themselves in state-building, which, initially at least, seemed to offer solutions. This prevented them from attaining a crucial level of cultural reflection—not on the material or institutional changes themselves but on the epistemological values that informed them. This lack of self-scrutiny distorted evaluations of the Chinese cultural tradition in face of pressures to modernize and led to a moral and an analytical impasse.26 The protagonists mechanically opposed either tradition or modernization and did not question their own positions and commitments. Consequently, they could not fully appreciate the changing nature of their role. They were wedged uncomfortably between moral and political authorities, whose positions were themselves increasingly undermined by war and revolution. This powerful but unfinished process of reflection shaped their predicament, especially their relations to the Communist movement (and after 1949 to the Marxist-Leninist state) and to the laboring population, the vast majority of whom were peasants.27 The tension between morality and power intensified during the 20th century. The efforts at a thoroughgoing critique of tradition were an acute reaction to a pervasive political crisis. When the Qing empire faltered under the aggressive expansion of Western powers and Japan, economic and political paralysis led to a crisis of confidence in the moral foundations of the culture. The May Fourth Movement and the decades of intellectual activity that followed attest to the depth of the problem and the intense commitment to find solutions. Throughout this process, relationship between moral authority and political power has been redefined through the participation of intellectuals with a heightened sense of mission. The dilemmas the intellectuals faced were obvious. Confronted by the challenge from the West and by the impoverishment of the peasantry, many concluded after nearly a century of soul searching that China needed the apparatus of a modern nation-state. In the mid-19th century, some high-ranking Qing administrators advocated the adoption of Western technology for the practical purpose of defending the empire against foreign aggression.28 When the empire suffered humiliating defeats in the 1890s, the constitutional monarchists suggested reforms in political institutions to solve the country’s problems. Both movements were attempts to preserve the imperial order by a limited adoption of Western technology and institutions. But the failure of the movement known as the Hundred Days Reform (1898) and the persecution of its advocates by conservative forces at court finally led some literati to join the movement to overthrow the monarchy. In 1912 a republic was set up, but the ambitions of regional warlords shattered liberal hopes for a democratic and unified polity. Instead of providing a means to improve national livelihood, the military adventurers, backed by competing foreign interests, became a major source of disorder. For those who participated in the anti-government demonstrations in Beijing on This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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May 4, 1919, all of Chinese civilization, material and spiritual, was at stake. Whether nationalism rallied energies to fight for survival or to console a badly bruised cultural pride, it  became almost an obsession. But the nature of the proposed new polity, guojia, which attracted the educated elite’s commitment and nurtured their hopes, had only begun to be explored. A dazzling array of ideologies for nation-building was adopted by the warlord regimes, by the Nationalists, and by the Communists, but the ill-defined relationship between moral authority and political power made the position of the educated elite increasingly precarious. In contrast, the semi-literate militarists who arose after the fall of the Qing dynasty were too preoccupied with struggling for spoils to seriously seek legitimacy from traditional morality. New bases of authority were invented, but their blatant violations revealed the superficiality of the effort.29 After 1927, the delicate facade of national unity under the Nationalists generated some enthusiasm among the liberal-minded, but survivors of the “White terror” conducted by Chiang Kai-shek against leftists were fearful of his moves. The ineffectiveness of the Nationalists in blocking the advances of the Japanese in the 1930s disappointed many patriots. Their lingering hopes were dashed when they witnessed the Nationalist government’s acts of terror against dissidents in the cities and its army’s mistreatment of peasants in the villages. The peasantry has often been a symbol of the life force of Chinese culture and polity. Their well-being justifies the power holder’s Mandate of Heaven; their abuse discredits it. In the early 20th century, writers were divorced from peasant life, but enraged and horrified, they produced a literature obsessed with images of brute force exercised on an innocent peasantry—war, rape, indiscriminate killing—the way of the beast in which morality and authority were no longer respected. Images of peasants being ruthlessly abused, however unrealistic, were used as symbols to condemn various regimes. Mao Dun, whose work “Mud” (Nining) begins this volume, and a few others such as Ye Shengtao, Xu Dishan, Ba Jin, and Ding Ling, whose works were published by the Shanghai literary journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short story monthly; 1921–31) remained true to the realism popularized in the 1920s. Their humanist concern and their eagerness to absorb Western thought gave their works a cosmopolitan outlook. Wu Zuxiang, whose short story “A Certain Day” (Mouri) is included here and who is recognized as one of the best left-wing writers on rural themes of the 1930s, skillfully combined humanism with the techniques of realism. But this urbane focus became less evident among writers later drawn to revolutionary romanticism.30 Many fell early in their journey. The Five Martyrs, as Lu Xun sadly remembered the young writers killed for their Marxist sympathies, were probably noted more for their political convictions than for their literary abilities. Yet behind the martyrdoms were often moments of painful self-scrutiny, as revealed in Qu Qiubai’s “Superfluous Words” (Duoyu de hua), written in jail shortly before he was executed in 1935. At the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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age of thirty-six, he was an established Marxist literary critic and theoretician, and for a brief period in 1927–28, he was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1934, when the majority of party leaders headed for Yan’an in northwestern China, he remained behind and was captured by Nationalist troops. Knowing his end was near (he was also dying of tuberculosis), he dissected the layers of romantic optimism that he had wrapped around himself for the preceding fifteen years and concluded that his political life had been untruthful, that he was nothing but a “petty bourgeois,” superfluous to the very movement he had helped to build. The essay was a controversial one. His comrades largely denied its authenticity, claiming that the Nationalists had fabricated it to show the futility of urban intellectuals serving the Communist cause. Pragmatists concluded that it was Qu’s effort to make a confession in order to save his neck. His motive for writing it, if he did write it, was probably a complex one. To insist on one or another reason would undermine the anguish shared by many modern Chinese intellectuals.31 The disenchanted who joined the Communists in Yan’an also undertook a long ideological scrutiny, a process that was exhilarating at times, painful at others, but in the end compelling. Those who had entertained the idea that the Communists represented the vanguard of an urban proletariat must have been disappointed. The Chinese Communists had made major adjustments in Marxism as early as the 1920s. Li Dazhao, a founder of the Communist party and a professor at Peking University, argued for a revolution in China that involved the peasantry. In Li’s conceptual scheme, China was “a proletarian nation” exploited by foreign imperialism. His revolutionary strategy called for a broad united front of workers, national bourgeoisie, and peasants, whom he believed to have an innate spirit of nationalism (Meisner 1969; Johnson 1962). Although Li was captured by the Beijing warlord government and shot in 1926, his ideas on the Chinese peasantry were adopted by Mao Zedong. After the Communists were driven to rural areas by the armies of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, who assumed leadership of the party in the mid-1930s, directed its energies toward the peasantry.32 Hampered by both the Nationalists and the Japanese, the Communist movement turned increasingly rural and patriotic. Communist documents and leftist literature identified the Japanese as a direct foreign aggressor and disparaged the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek as ineffectual in defending China against foreign aggression. The emerging political language referred to collaborators (hanjian), together with military officers, petty government functionaries, the landlords, and the comprador bourgeoisie, as enemies of the revolution. National salvation colored literary language in the mid-1930s. Fiction was couched increasingly in sinicized terms.33 In the cultural arena, writers debated the application of Marxist philosophy to literary criticism, discussed the development of a more rustic style and a literature for national defense, and raised questions on This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the nature of the new Chinese polity, the identity of its allies and enemies, and the conduct proper to participants in the movement. One decisive debate among leftist writers centered on the direction of literature during the War of Resistance against the Japanese. Those who joined Lu Xun argued for an uncompromising critique of Chinese tradition and politics. Those who had chosen the political pragmatism of the Communists and were grouped around the literary theorist Zhou Yang promoted a literature for national defense (guofang wenxue). They rejected Western rationalism and literary techniques in favor of Chinese roots, with the intention of tapping energies across a broad united front.34 The writers who congregated in Yan’an had different motives and assumptions, but they were basically concerned with national salvation, a goal to which the Communists seemed committed at the time. The historian of modern Chinese literature C. T. Hsia points particularly to literature’s “obsession with China,” its patriotic passion, which arose from “a burden of moral contemplation.” Coupled with this was a vague sense of class justice.35 The two dovetailed with the traditional belief that educated elites should show a social commitment by rejuvenating the political and moral order— a belief shared by the leaders and the led. To some extent, the Communists subscribed to the belief that the vast scope of state power rested on a shared moral consensus, but the party was to be the leading agent and vanguard in defining and fighting for that morality. Influenced by Stalin, Communist leaders in the 1930s had additional items on their political agenda, and they demanded a commitment to that agenda from all those within their grasp, peasants and intellectuals alike. To them, to have ideological unity in the revolution meant to embrace the Leninist and Stalinist strategies of partybuilding. Mao in particular warned fellow revolutionaries against “feudal” beliefs of the Chinese peasantry and “petty-bourgeois” tendencies of Westernized intellectuals, both of which stemmed from value systems different from that of the party. Although Mao believed in the ultimate revolutionary potential of the peasantry, he had less sympathy for the articulate, urbane, and independent-minded intellectuals. To generate revolutionary changes, Mao required of his comrades a worldview that served the party’s political ends, not one that stood independent of them. Criticism was possible only after the language of discourse had been so defined. In a speech at the 1942 Yan’an Forum on the arts and literature, Mao held writers responsible for ideological engineering, thus making the political straitjacket explicit.36 The speech inaugurated a three-year party rectification movement during which Mao’s ideological authority was imposed. It also put an end to a year of grumbling and confusion among the artists themselves. Four years into the war, the patriotism the urban intellectuals had brought with them had been worn down by the harshness of life in the caves of Shaanxi that housed the party in exile. More important, the political realities of a growing party bureaucracy gnawed into their revolutionary This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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romanticism. They would accept their circumstances only after a struggle. Luo Feng, for example, insisted that the satirical tradition of Lu Xun be continued. In an article entitled “Thoughts on March 8” (Sanbajie yougan), Ding Ling poignantly revealed the difficulties of women in Yan’an, where the traditional hierarchy of male dominance continued to be assumed. Xiao Jun lamented that the pragmatism of cadre work killed moral vigor. However, Mao demanded that realism recognize the progress made under Communist leadership and that sympathy be offered only to class allies and satire be directed only against class enemies. Ding Ling and a host of others who voiced their discontent were persuaded to change their petty-bourgeois views after a severe public attack from Mao (Birch 1963, p. 232). A more serious confrontation occurred between party hard-liners (such as Chen Boda, Mao’s secretary) and Wang Shiwei, a radical urban intellectual. Born in 1907 to a literati family whose fortunes had declined, Wang enrolled in the English Department of Peking University in 1925 and joined the party in 1926. He was a gifted translator. His interest in Marxist theory led him to translate major works of Lenin and Trotsky. He left his family in Hunan and made his way to Yan’an in late 1937. But in April 1943, a year after his essay “Wild Lilies” (Ye baihehua), which attacked corruption and privileges among party cadres in Yan’an, appeared in Jiefang ribao (March 13 and 23, 1942), he was jailed. In his defense against those who accused him of promoting absolute egalitarianism, he justified his complaints by warning against a mechanical view of historical progress that ignored errors of the revolutionary vanguard itself.37 The tense public debates over his behavior and the harsh disciplinary action taken later came to be known as the Wang Shiwei Incident. His sympathies for Trotsky were branded as counter-revolutionary. A chilling account of his last years in Yan’an and of his execution in 1947 highlights the tensions between emerging Stalinists in the party and their military commanders on the one hand, and the independent-minded urban intellectuals on the other hand.38 Spring 1947, Shaanxi. The wind swept over the rolling hills, blowing dust through every gap in the tightly sewn clothes. The Qingming Festival had passed, yet there was not a touch of green. Xing Xian: a small and dilapidated town. It was the capital of the Jinsui Base Area; but the only signs were the little flags hanging from the windows of a few cave-like houses. There was fighting at the western bank of the river hundreds of li away. The dusk here was tranquil. Caijia Cave, the headquarters of the public security office of the Jinsui Base Area Administration. A young man with a heavy sword in his hand, who appeared to be a cadre, went into a cave. He dragged out another, middle-aged man of similar appearance and took him to a remote hillside. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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258 The heavy sword was raised . . . Bright red blood spilled over the hardened yellow earth.

The executed: Wang Shiwei. Crime: Trotskyist, Nationalist agent, member of a counter-revolutionary group. There was no verdict, no appeal, no denial. The only basis for the execution was a report approved by some authorities. (Dai 1988, p. 23)

This account of Wang’s execution forms an ironic contrast to that of Qu Qiubai. Despite Qu’s doubts about his own role in the revolution, his execution, brutal as it was, was debated among the highest echelons of the Nationalist leadership. His martyrdom was witnessed and given a degree of respect. The order for Wang’s execution came secretly from someone higher up in the party who felt challenged by Wang’s revolutionary enthusiasm.39 In retrospect, however bleak his end, it was but a rehearsal for worse to come. The confrontations between leftist writers and the party during the 1930s and 1940s illustrate an important fact—that the intellectuals in Yan’an put up a struggle for autonomy of thought, and that party leaders were not yet established enough to monopolize opinion. It is also clear that Chinese writers acted from the apex of a cultural nexus of authority, only to condemn the very social and political codes that gave them the position to voice such opinions. The leftists who joined the Communists found themselves compelled to promote the cause of a political power that increasingly negated their right to speak their mind. In the years to come, the mission and conscience of the scholar changed. Instead of challenging a power that had deviated from truthful and moral behavior, it became a struggle against a power that claimed to dictate truth. A gnawing question remains: Why did these intellectuals stay with the Communists? Conditions in war-torn cities were no less harsh than those in Shaanxi. Furthermore, at the time, the party could not have prevented those who were disenchanted from leaving. What was behind their conclusion that there was no turning back? By the time the Communists firmly established their power in the 1950s, the ideological impositions on writers had come down with full force. Issues involved in the struggle were complex. Although dissident voices had become muted since the days of Yan’an, party ideologues were concerned with curbing the “bourgeois liberalism” of leftist intellectuals who remained unconvinced. More important, party leaders confronted mounting challenges from a younger generation of committed Marxists, many of them party members, who questioned the political orthodoxy of the leaders. The tradition of the intellectual’s mission and conscience continued to be invoked, but it was reconstituted on a new political stage where power relationships between the protagonists and their ideological assumptions had changed considerably. The battles were fought within a Marxist-Leninist paradigm that was increasingly taken for This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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granted. The legitimacy of the party was not questioned although the definition of party orthodoxy was fiercely debated. Such tensions were revealed in the mid-1950s persecution of a leading Marxist literary critic, Hu Feng, who had staunchly opposed party dogma since the 1930s.40 Hu Feng continued his stubborn independence in the early 1950s by contradicting Maoist orthodoxy. In a long article entitled “The Five Blades” (Wuba daozi), he charged that party dogma had strangled artistic sensitivities. His views were subsequently branded “petty-bourgeois liberalism” and, more seriously, “counter-revolutionary,” a crime that led to his long imprisonment. Many of his friends were made to criticize him, including Lu Xun’s widow, Xu Guangping, who wrote that Hu had “betrayed” them. The novelist Ba Jin later recalled the rudeness of the party cadres who asked him to denounce Hu Feng.41 The liberal Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956–57 and the subsequent Antirightist Campaign revealed the uncomfortable marriage between the sincere belief of these intellectuals in an independent authority based on enlightened critical thought and their faith in a revolution based on patriotism and Marxism. The end result seemed like total capitulation. In 1957, those who had been bold enough to speak out against the party bore the brunt of persecution. The new political classification given their “crime” is important. Huang Qiuyun, Gao Xiaosheng, and Fang Zhi, among many others whose works are included in this volume, were labeled “rightists” of various degrees. They became enemies of the party to be banished to labor camps for “re-education.” Ru Zhijuan, whose 1958 short story “Lilies on a Comforter” (Baihehua) brought a breath of freshness to the literary world, looked back in 1980 and admitted that, if it hadn’t been for a moment of “numbness” toward the political currents at the time, when she gained some space and distance, she would not have produced the story. One wonders whether the young Marxist writers were too committed and too naïve to reckon the political price of their acts. In fact, that was very much in the mind of Ba Jin when the twenty-six-year-old Fang Zhi came to him with his plans to form the “Explorers” (Tanqiuzhe). I met Comrade Fang Zhi once at the beginning of the Anti-rightist Campaign. I can no longer recall his face. I only remember that he and Comrade Lu Wenfu came to discuss their plans for organizing the Explorers . . . They said that they had already discussed the matter with a comrade and were encouraged. I understood them. We had given much thought to similar attempts in the 1930s. The two young men were trying to pursue some creative ends. They had ideals and convictions. I sympathized with them, but I was also concerned. Feeling the changing climate, I thought they were too naïve. I tried to persuade them not to organize the Explorers or the Tongren zazhi [Colleagues’ journal], and to give up their plans for “exploration.” I cannot now remember whether they had already issued the manifesto of the Explorers or whether they did it afterward. But I am certain This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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If there was room for reflection and debate in the 1950s and for critical reassessment in the early 1960s, it was obliviated by the nationwide witch hunt of the Cultural Revolution: no one was spared. In an atmosphere of feverish ideological confrontations, silence and retreat were no longer viable options. Old “rightists” were dragged out and humbled and humiliated alongside party patrons accused of having followed the wrong political line. To stay in the middle of the road required a precarious balancing act. In the eyes of the competing political factions, it was a life-and-death struggle. The intense factionalism forcibly polarized the already fragmented intellectual circles. During moments of ideological extremes, even the writer Hao Ran, who followed the Maoist line closely and who rose high in the decade of radical politics, was criticized for not having expressed enough faith in the party. The definition of artistic positions and orientation had become the monopoly of party officials. In retrospect, in the 1980s survivors insist that they had no choice but to drone on (Morse 1983, pp. 121–37). Their reasons are unclear. One can understand that peasants, who had no livelihood outside the collectives controlled by local party cadres, had to comply with the dictates of the party. One might even argue that, by the mid-1960s, the Chinese Communist Party’s successful monopoly of the representation of moral and political authority left intellectuals little ground for independent judgment. The only viable course of action left, if they were to survive, was to transform themselves under the party’s ideological dictates and to continue to believe in the possibility of reducing its excesses. But was it entirely a matter of survival? Why did many writers who prided themselves on belonging to an intellectual tradition of protesting illegitimate power, and who had courageously faced the deadly consequences of doing so decades before, feel a lack of choice in the post-revolutionary era? This is the central issue disputed among writers today. To what extent was the lack of choice self-imposed? Many leftist writers of the 1930s retreated to the background after the Communist revolution, but did Marxist writers from the 1950s to the 1970s reconstitute the legacy of modern Chinese intellectuals and make it into their own “iron house”? Ba Jin, in his memoirs, boldly admitted that, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he remained faithful to the need for ideological transformation as dictated by the party.43 Moreover, what was the basis of the commitment of Liu Binyan, who remained loyal to the party despite being condemned for twentytwo years and expelled in 1987? When he portrays the attempt of the protagonist in “A Second Kind of Loyalty” (Dierzhong zhongcheng) to right a wrong committed years ago by a party cadre, is he speaking about himself? Today many writers claim the humanist ideal and a renewed sense of mission as their sources of strength against an engulfing political power, but the issues behind their spirit of resistance assume new meanings because of the much-transformed This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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nature of the polity. For some, “social responsibility” is a disguised effort on the part of writers to achieve self-expression at a time when the brutal denial of intellectuals’ right to define and represent moral authority is still vividly remembered. For those who remain faithful to Marxist-Leninist ideals and to the party’s basic assumptions, it is time for a revival of protest against political excesses. The call in early 1989 for amnesty of political prisoners is one example of courage and faith.44 But the question remains: Why, despite their unhappy experiences, do intellectuals remain committed to the national state? What is behind their agitation at the new-style writers’ decision to abandon the accepted vocabulary in order to begin a new dialogue? The literary works of the 1980s display a quiet empathy with the peasants. Together with the Yellow River, the peasantry has always symbolized the life force of Chinese culture and society, with which the literate elites have historically claimed affiliation. Today, there is an added dimension of compassion, perhaps because years of exile in the countryside have given writers a more realistic understanding of the peasants. Also, both have been subjected to the abusive power of a state determined to transform them. Out of these experiences arose a bridge between the social and cultural distance separating writer and peasant, as expressed in the postscript to Li Zhun’s two-volume The Yellow River Rushes On (Huanghe dongliu qu). Critical realism again flourished, as illustrated by the writings of Gao Xiaosheng, Gu Hua, and Li Rui presented in this volume. But this is not enough for the new generation of writers. Today, many of them have decided that, as long as the party-state dictates moral authority, they will disengage themselves from ideological dialogue altogether. They turn to the private sentiments of peasants, which parallel their own, as painfully described by Ah Cheng’s story “Chimney Smoke” (Chuiyan) in this anthology.45 The peasant’s burden arises from the insensitive, entrenched structure of the state; the writers’ baggage, however, comes partly from the system of values on which their social mission is based. What they would like to explore is the motive force underlying their sentiments as well as those of the peasants. They believe that it is buried deep in the national culture, uncontaminated by ideology. Chen Cun, a literary critic, sees a parallel between the concerns of these writers and those of Gabriel García Márquez: they focus on a life force that extends beyond the struggle between good and evil, illusion and reality, joy and anger, but creates a world filled with these sentiments.46 In view of their effort to free themselves from contemporary politics in order to excavate the culture that has shaped their lives and thoughts, can one justifiably dismiss these writers as indulgent individuals with no sense of social responsibility? In April 1989, tens of thousands of students in Beijing marched to Tiananmen Square to criticize the government. In response to an official condemnation, they returned to the streets to insist on the patriotism of their behavior. Moreover, the citizens of Beijing turned out en masse to support the students’ claim. The atmosphere This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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was peculiarly familiar. There was a heightened sense of mission and self-sacrifice, euphoria over the power of idealism and goodwill, all in the name of cleaning up a morally bankrupt government and getting the country back on an honorable course. The students were naïve, but their intentions were considered noble and their sentiments were shared: this was what a Chinese of good conscience would do. For its part, the regime insisted that the democracy movement was nothing but a counterrevolutionary disturbance instigated by subversive foreign elements. It could not be equated with the patriotism of the May Fourth Movement of seventy years before. In its eyes, the students were un-Chinese. Once again, “Chineseness” was being renegotiated. Implicated in the process were the moral choices, the social discipline, the economic initiative, and political compulsions of an educated sector increasingly drawn into a diverse and volatile modern world. Even those young enough to have escaped the vicissitudes of the Cultural Revolution realized that they too were not spared in wake of the brutal repression of the student movement. Can there be lingering hopes of merely removing the excesses of the party-state? Writers on both sides of the literary dispute were relatively silent as the events unfolded.47 Those who deeply mourn the many fallen, gunned down by the very government they—the fallen—believed in, what do they—the mourners—now think of the authoritarianism unintentionally created by their own commitment only a few decades earlier? To be human is neither to be entirely programmed by cultural principles nor be simply driven by economic necessities. It is precisely the human involvement in the creation of a compelling political process that heightens the sense of tragedy. Scholarly works on modern Chinese intellectuals have often emphasized the involuntary nature of their involvement in contemporary political currents, but this view ignores their active role in the making of a political culture centered on a heightened sense of social responsibility. Deprived of an institutional base by the abolition of the imperial examinations in 1905 and especially by the fall of the Qing in 1911, the educated elites made their transition to the 20th century by adhering to an increased sense of mission. Whether this was a desperate attempt to retain their right to self-expression under the new moral order or a shrewd move to assert a self-assumed importance as new institutions were making them superfluous,48 the traditional assumptions of responsibility to the state and to society were recycled to fit new political realities. This assertion of responsibility allowed a displaced educated elite to redefine a social identity and to acquire a unifying symbol of community and a political platform, both of which are ultimate forms of self-expression.49 Social and political criticism based on a commitment to an entire civilization remains, even today, a cultural given in the eyes of the general public and a special calling for many intellectuals.50 But it also dovetails with interests of power holders. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, has seldom challenged the sense of mission that engages the intellectuals This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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in a dialogue with the polity. The party is concerned, however, with controlling the power to define the terms of the dialogue. The question is: Once the Communist party succeeded in doing so by disregarding the human costs, did the intellectuals and their cultural roles become even more superfluous? Ten years into the post-Mao reforms, “cultural tradition” is a term no longer taboo; it is now in vogue. A revived interest in neo-Confucianism has led to international conferences, and writers have traveled far into the rural fringes in hope of understanding those cultural roots, untouched by revolutionary politics, that continue to inform contemporary consciousness. Others have begun to explore how China’s particular national culture nurtured Maoist extremes. After the long interlude since Lu Xun scrutinized tradition in his “Diary of a Madman” in 1918, tradition is being examined instead of being categorically dismissed (Lee 1986; Ji 1986). The question of complicity in the reproduction of cultural hegemony, a concern that fueled the selfscrutiny of Lu Xun, underlies discussions of the sense of mission today. The debate forces protagonists to examine their assumptions about the written word’s power to give privilege, the philosophical bases of their commitment to a state with humanist concerns for its subjects, and consequently their ambiguous relationships with those in power. When young writers dwell on artistic issues, for example, and claim that creativity can blossom only when both authors and the subject of their art are not tied together by political and moral obligations, are they redefining the self-image of the educated elite in modern China, an image embedded on the one hand in a structure of values originating deep in Chinese culture and on the other hand in a “recycling” of that tradition to cope with the political realities of the 20th century?51 The controversy over the nature of artistic expression and writers’ pursuits seems to have initiated a long-overdue cultural criticism.52 In fact, the need for a critical self-reflection has also been made explicit by China’s most senior writer, Ba Jin, after a lifelong devotion to the revolution. In a postscript to five volumes of collected essays published in the 1980s, he writes: With so much to say, I do not know where to begin. There are 150 essays about the joy, anger, and sorrow of ordinary characters. I call them “whimpers.” In fact they are mostly bloody pus that oozes out of unhealed wounds. I squeeze them out not to kill time, but to lighten my own pain. When I began with Random Thoughts [Suixiang lu], my pen was not weighty. In the process of writing, I continued to explore and to know myself. In order to know myself, I cannot but dissect myself. With the aim of lightening pain, I thought the dissecting would be an easy task. But when I used the pen as a surgical knife to cut into my heart, I appeared clumsy. I could not press it in because I felt violent pain. I always reminded myself that I should demand a lot of myself. Yet I weakened when I needed to use a knife to gouge at my heart. I dared not dig deeply. Every page of the five volumes is stained with bloody pus. But This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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there is more of it in a ten-year wound. I know that if I do not clean it out, it will poison the body. I also know: the wounds of many people, like mine, are oozing out bloody pus. We have shared experiences and a similar fate. I do not worry. Whatever I do not accomplish, others will. If I have not dug deep enough, there will be another who overtakes me and, without fearing pain, mercilessly gouges out his own heart.  .  .  . To clean up the garbage, and to purify the air, it is not enough to demand only of myself. We are all responsible. We must find out the source of the problem, in myself, in others . . . Gouge then. (1988, pp. 212–15)

This anthology does not pretend to answer the questions it poses. It serves more to illustrate issues for contemplation than to explain. By tracing the intellectuals’ deliberate rupture with tradition at one level and their reconstitution of it at another, I hope to reveal the tension underlying their artistic work and to capture the vitality of a conviction that lies behind the tragic and puzzling predicament of the modern Chinese intellectual.

Furrows Both intellectuals and peasants have played vital roles in the political arena of 20thcentury China. The short stories that follow focus on peasant life and were written by leading literary figures from the 1930s to the 1980s. In my introduction to each part, I try to point to the structure of values that guided intellectual thought and actions and to demonstrate the cultural mechanisms that tied writers to subjects in a political order rapidly being transformed by their often unintended efforts. A major issue in the literature on peasants is that a literate elite is writing about an inarticulate peasantry whose world is far from their own but whose lives are interlocked with theirs in multiple ways. In the wake of the May Fourth period, writers indicted the old cultural tradition and the political order by describing what it had meant for peasants to be victimized. But in treating the unawakened populace as objects of social engineering and themselves as the providers of that engineering, the intellectuals failed to bridge the distance between themselves and the peasants. By reifying tradition as an object of attack, they prevented themselves from reflecting on the roots of their claims to authority. I have selected works by those who chose to write about peasants as a way of exposing the frailty of power, peasants as objects of abuse. Most of these images of peasants should not be treated as “real.” Rather, they disclose the authors’ naïveté about village life and popular culture and their distance from rural reality. But they do reveal the authors’ sense of outrage toward an entire social order. The works illumine how the underlying political assumptions of these writers guided their efforts to participate in a new political culture, a significant historical narrative in its own right. Critical realism, a literary form popularized during the 1920s, depicted the soul searching of the writers and their peasant subjects. Mao Dun, Wu Zuxiang, and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Xiao Hong, whose works are included in this anthology, are among the best-known realist writers. I have juxtaposed these works with those by authors who, having joined the Communist Party, devoted most of their efforts to writing about peasants.53 Driven by the force of a dogma effectively imposed by a political movement that later became a highly organized party-state, the act of writing came to assume very different meanings; so too did perceptions of political failings and the nature of abuse. The writers continued to fill their culturally prescribed roles, but Marxism-Leninism allowed them less room for maneuver. They were assigned the task of promoting the peasants’ cause both as masters of the revolution and as objects of socialist engineering, a theme clearly shown in the works of Zhao Shuli, Kang Zhuo, and Zhou Libo. But both the legacy of their elitist assumptions and the primordial loyalties of the peasants were politically suspect. The struggle against dogma, which became the overriding concern of many writers in the 1950s, revealed their uncomfortable position between the party’s growing monopoly of ideological power and their perceptions of the bitter fruit tasted by the vast majority of peasants and produced by a revolution conducted in their name. Such tension is apparent in this collection in the stories by Kang Zhuo and Fang Zhi and in the essay by Huang Qiuyun. Some spoke out and paid the price, expecting that, as in the past, their banishment would affirm the importance of their voice. Others stopped writing altogether; for example, Mao Dun was given high positions in the administration of the arts but never joined the party. But the rigid language of class promoted by the Maoists meant that the intellectuals were faulted not only for what they wrote but also for what they were. Just as peasants have complied, and at times conspired, with the Communist Party, writers strained to follow the party’s dictates and often confessed to more sins than they had committed (Morse 1983, pp. 121–37). The political straitjacket has prevented writers from getting close to their subject matter. The positive, forward-looking heroes of socialist realism reveal the forceful suppression of sensitivity to the peasants’ plight. Eventually many writers came to appreciate what it means to be a victim. Yet many have hung onto a losing dialogue with a political machine in which they have placed so much faith. This is the unrequited love that Bai Hua poignantly alluded to in his play of that title.54 The fact that scholars of modern Chinese literature have paid overwhelming attention to the leftist literary movement speaks to the captivating energies of its participants, which have dominated the artistic consciousness of this century. C. T. Hsia and Tsi-an Hsia have portrayed these writers as unwittingly prostituting themselves to a political movement that ultimately engulfed them (C. T. Hsia 1979, Tsi-an Hsia 1968). Leo Lee, on the other hand, argues that, apart from using their pens to promote revolutionary change, truly self-critical intellectuals like Lu Xun continued to search for a sense of values in a world where values were in flux. From the large corpus of leftist literature from the 1920s on, it is not difficult to find works that examine This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the cultural repertoire and idealize the future. In a period of depression and contemplation in the 1920s, Lu Xun termed his retreat into the poetry of the Wei-Jin period (AD 220–316) as the “sound of silence on a written page” (Lee 1987a, p. 39). On looking back, survivors of the Cultural Revolution agonize over the fact that they were not allowed to remain silent. Yet in the 1980s, the young poet Bei Dao cherishes his silence after his faith was shattered through his own political fervor. The changing meanings behind silence and protest, retreat and involvement, is what this anthology intends to explore. The process reveals how generations of writers, with their cultural assumptions and political commitments, have come to terms with a process of political transformation to which they subscribe with a desperate sincerity. The works selected in this anthology are not entirely representative. I am well aware that human responses to even the most engulfing of circumstances are infinitely diverse. It is nevertheless possible to see how the efforts presented here disclose the ethos that shapes the predicaments of both authors and subjects. The stories in each part share some underlying characteristics, but my ordering of them aims to capture their contribution to the central plot of each era, as culture, art, and politics intertwine to form a meaningful narrative about cumulative human efforts as well as selective memories. The notion of “furrows” contains several dimensions. It represents what several generations of Chinese writers have perceived as the lines that successive regimes have plowed on the backs of the peasants. Based on their sense of social responsibility, writers have voiced their opinions and created contours on the literary fields. These furrows crisscrossed numerous times over the decades. Together, they have provided the spiritual essence of a political landscape that has formed the consciousness of successive generations. In the way modern Chinese writers have come to terms with the politics of nationbuilding and the dictates of a Marxist-Leninist party-state, they have something in common with writers elsewhere.55 However, differences in cultural assumptions and politics create different tensions. In China, revolutionary goals contribute to literary vigor precisely because intellectuals can draw inspiration from literati tradition dating back to over two millennia as well as from a forward-looking desire for a modern state.56 The heightened sense of social mission among post–May Fourth intellectuals, however subversive in intent, continues to reinforce their complicity in an authoritarian state culture. Those who joined the Communist movement, however, found their voices smothered by the very language of the revolution they promoted. The peculiar turns of the movement have set urban intellectuals against the rural orientations of the party though the two are linked by nationalism. The political environment compels modern writers to fashion their works on terms dictated by party leaders, but they do this with increasing ambivalence. Ironically, compliance with the party-state has led to a profound loss of faith that in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the end is subversive both of the new order and of the intellectuals’ sense of mission. The process is an agonizing one. Because ambivalence challenges not only political commitment but also cultural identity and historical consciousness, debates about it are intense. The intensity reveals a collective human spirit captivated by its own sense of value. How this tension has informed artistic sensitivities in modern China is the focus of this anthology. *This is a slightly revised version of the original published in Furrows (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990c). The book manuscript was submitted to the press three weeks after the events at Tiananmen, 1989. †

Retranslated by Gershom Tse, 2015.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

For a concise summary of official views on the philosophical issues involved in the spiritual pollution dispute, see Liang Liyi (1984). Liang’s article is an analysis of Hu Qiaomu’s essay “On Humanitarianism and Alienation,” which was published in Renmin ribao, Jan. 27, 1984. See also the summary written by Li Si (1983/1984). See the debates in the Hong Kong literary journal Renditions in the 1980s and in the collection of essays edited by Bi Hua (1983). Xie Mian, an editor of the poetry journal Shikan, speaks on behalf of the younger experimental poets. He and Xu Jingya, a sympathetic critic, argue that the attempts at self-expression represent a reaction against the party’s past distortions of poetic sensitivities. See the introduction in Tay (1988), which outlines the major issues in the controversy. Liu Xiaobo’s criticism of the new-style writers is noteworthy. See also the analyses of the fiction of Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) by Bonnie McDougall (1984) and of the debates centering on Wang Meng’s experiments with the stream-of-consciousness technique by William Tay (1984). Critical realism as a genre of writing was popularized in China during the 1920s, when Russian influence was strong. Lu Xun, for example, introduced many pieces of Russian literature to Chinese intellectual circles (Lee 1987a). The early Chinese leftists adopted the theories of the Hungarian Gyorgy Lukacs and attempted to reflect in their work the totality of an epoch and to present the human predicament through dramatic plots. However, the Stalinist era brought a shift toward a more formalistic socialist realism. The Chinese Communists selected the most “advanced” pieces as models, and Maoists pushed the Stalinist line further (Ng 1988). The critical and the humanist strains in art were thus severely suppressed. Liu Binyan joined the party in his youth. In 1957, he was labeled a “rightist” because he portrayed the dark side of the party. After his rehabilitation in 1979, he intensified his efforts to expose the corruption of power. His “People or Monsters” (Renyao zhijian) and “A Second Kind of Loyalty” (Dierzhong zhongcheng) are both well known. In 1985, he was elected to the executive committee of the Chinese Writers Association by a popular vote. He was expelled from the party in 1987 together with the playwright Wu Zuguang, the philosopher Wang Ruoshui, and the physicist Fang Lizhi. All are outspoken critics of the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Tracing China party. Liu has lived in the United States since 1988 and has joined the exiled leaders of the pro-democracy movement. For a summary of Liu’s views, see Liu and Chen (1988) and an interview of him by Li Yi (1988c), the editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong intellectual journal Jiushi niandai. See the interviews of Tu Wei-Ming by Xue Yong, a reporter in Beijing (Tu 1985), and by Li Yi (1989c), which focuses on the May Fourth movement. Tu is interested in the recent efforts at “cultural reflection” in China. The issues surrounding “tradition” are reflected in the debate triggered by the television series He Shang; see Sanlian Shudian (1989). See also the discussion among Li Zehou, Liu Shuxian, and Li Yi (1988b). See Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu (1988) and Ren (1988), which quotes Liu Xinwu, and Liu Xinwu (1988). Among his more famous pieces are the short story “Leader of the Class” (Ban zhuren), the novella Overpass (Liti jiaochaqiao), and the novel Bell and Drum Towers (Zhonggu lou). He was an editor of Renmin wenxue (People’s literature). The March and April1989 issues of Jiushi niandai contained the text of the open letter and several reports and analyses of the letter-signing campaign; see Li Yi (1989a, 1989b) and Qi (1989a, 1989b). Liu Binyan divides the young writers into two groups. Bei Dao and Han Shaogong are among those whose works are still engaged in a dialogue with political reality and are therefore acceptable. He dislikes those who explore their inner emotions to the exclusion of social concerns. See Liu Binyan and Chen (1988). A growing pool of their writings has been identified as the literature of the sent-down educated youths. See the special section devoted to their works in Lianhe wenxue 3, no. 12 (1988): 82–147. See three articles (“Zai xinde jueqi mianqian,” pp. 83–85; “Shiqu le pingjing zhihou,” pp. 89–92; “Tongwang chengshu de daolu,” pp. 130–36) by Xie Mian and “Jueqi de shiqun,” pp. 97–129 by Xu Jingya in Bi Hua (1983). On the generational divisions of modern Chinese intellectuals since the May Fourth period, see Schwarcz and Li (1983–84). The “literature of the wounded” and the “exposure literature” were the first waves of literature to emerge after Mao’s death in 1976 to reveal the horrors of the Maoist period. See Siu and Stern (1983) and Link (1983). See Kinkley (1985) and Duke (1985) for later developments. I refer to Lu Xun’s classic 1918 short story, “The Diary of a Madman.” Through the eyes of a paranoid, he described the traditional ethics that formed the habits of the heart and that killed human feelings and critical self-reflection. For a description of Gu Cheng’s poems by his father, Gu Gong, see Siu and Stern (1983), pp. 9–15. An art show in Beijing in 1989 confirmed the worst fears of politically concerned artists. Some young artists, calling themselves the Xingdong pai (Action school) deliberately attracted attention to their art by “unconventional ways.” Two of them obtained a gun from the home of a close family friend, a high military official, and shot at a painting in the exhibition hall. Whatever the “artistic” value of their expression, their reliance on their families’ power and privilege was distasteful to those artists who have tried to use unconventional art forms to express their opposition to political orthodoxy. See Ya (1989). This term comes from Wang Ruoshui (1985/1989), which was written for Chinese youth. Ah Cheng (1985b), p. 92. For other advocates of “roots” literature, see Zheng (1985), Han (1985), the interview of Han Shaogong in Lin Weiping (1986) and Shi Shuqing (1989). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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19. For different aspects of how modern Chinese intellectuals relate to the state, see Yue and Wakeman (1985), Kinkley (1985), Duke (1985) and Goldman et al. (1987), particularly the article by Rudolf Wagner. 20. For comparative purposes, see Goody (1986) on writing and the organization of society. 21. See Liang Shuming (1949), p. 19. This is not to deny the legalistic elements in the Chinese polity and their ancient roots in the first dynasty, the Qin, which, according to Mote (1971), p. 114, “expressly denied all humanistic values, and [was] quite implacable in its scorn for venerated tradition.” 22. Qu Yuan, a poet and official of the 3rd century BC, represents loyal opposition and honor even in banishment. He drowned himself in protest, an act remembered in the popular culture in connection with the Dragon Boat Festival, when rice cakes wrapped in leaves are thrown into rivers supposedly to feed the fish so that they will not disturb his body. There are many other such examples. Tao Yuanming, a poet and official of the 4th century, resigned from office and became a hermit. His chrysanthemums became a symbol of a gentleman’s retreat. 23. Yu Yingshi (1978) has analyzed the interconnections among Confucian scholarship, the rise of the large lineages from which the scholars emerged, and dynastic fortunes. He  argues that the scholars also shared artistic tastes based on Daoism that were not necessarily related to the pursuits of officials. These self-conscious, anti-official identities were forcefully expressed during the Wei-Jin period (3rd century), when many scholars engaged in metaphysical studies and refused to acknowledge the Confucian order in social and political life. This trend of thought was a genuine component of the scholarly culture, Yu argues, and scholars in the later periods resorted to its symbols of scholarly retreat when the political arena became too treacherous. The Scholars (Rulin waishi), an 18th-century social satire on scholars and their attempts to come to terms with the growing disparity between their aspirations and the political constraints imposed by the late imperial state, reveals the powerful ideological forces to which intellectuals felt compelled to attach themselves (Ropp 1981). 24. See Tu (1985 and 1987), Lee (1987b and 1989), Schwarcz (1986), p. 8, and Li Yi (1989c). For the interactions of the traditional assumptions of modern Chinese intellectuals and political power, see Goldman (1967 and 1981) and Goldman et al. (1987). 25. For a detailed analysis of this tension, see Li Zehou (1987) and Liu Zaifu and Lin (1988). See Chow (1960) on the May Fourth Movement and its implications. See also Goldman (1977) on the literature of the May Fourth period. 26. Yu (1983). Some intellectual self-examination was achieved at the beginning of the May Fourth period, as shown in the earlier works of Lu Xun and Hu Shi. However, the period was short lived. From the late 1920s on, even Lu Xun was somewhat drawn into the political whirlpool. 27. See Li Zehou (1987), Liu Zaifu and Lin (1988), and Gan in Lin Yushen et al. (1989), pp. 62–81, on the unfinished process of cultural reflection. 28. Their eagerness for Western technology did not entail a willingness to embrace Western cultural values. As advocated by Zhang Zhidong in the late 19th century, the goal was to use Western means while retaining the Chinese essence. 29. See Alitto’s “Rural Elites in Transition” in Mann (1979), pp. 218–75, on the maneuvers of these military bosses. 30. This division is epitomized by two literary clubs, the Wenxue Yanjiuhui (Literary research society) and the Chuangzao She (Creation society). According to C. T. Hsia (1979), the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

Tracing China first one used Xiaoshuo yuebao as its mouth piece, and the other published a series of journals, Chuangzao jikan, Chuangzao ribao, Hongshui, and Chuangzao yuekan, to counter the realism of the first. From the late 1920s on, writers in the Chuangzao She increasingly combined romanticism with revolutionary fervor to promote the Communist cause. A representative figure is Guo Moruo. For recent evaluations of Qu, see Wang Shiqing (1984) and the biographical accounts by Chen Tiejian (1986) and Pickowicz (1975). Although Mao was most concerned with class, his tactics justified a united front for national salvation in the 1930s and 1940s. For studies of the rural economy in the Republican era, see Myers (1970), Alitto in Mann (1979), Perry (1980), Philip Huang (1985), Duara (1988) and Faure (1989a). For studies of how the Communists attempted to mobilize the peasants, see Johnson (1962), Hinton (1966), Selden (1971), Pepper (1978), Thaxton (1983), Chen Yung-fa (1986) and Mao (1930/1990). See the writings of Qu Qiubai and Hu Feng on Marxist literary criticism and on relations with the Chinese populace. See Ding Yi (1955/1978), Ding Wang (1978), C. T. Hsia (1979) and Lee (1987a). See also the articles by Huters and by Holms in Lee (1985). This view should be distinguished from Qu Qiubai’s opinions in the early 1930s concerning excess “Europeanization” in leftist literature. Qu’s concern was along class lines. He was afraid that the bourgeois, urban, elitist assumptions of many writers prevented them from speaking a language the peasant masses could appreciate. See Pickowicz (1975). Hu Feng, a Marxist literary critic, staunchly opposed sinicization. He and Lu Xun were friends, and his views brought him into opposition to Mao Zedong in the 1940s and 1950s. C. T. Hsia (1971), p. 533. Russian literature with a moral thrust and a populist sense of compassion for the peasants was influential in the formation of this attitude. See Ng (1988) and Pickowicz (1975). Also, many of those thinking in Marxist terms, such as Wang Shiwei and Hu Feng, were later persecuted as Trotskyists and revisionists by a party heavily influenced by Stalinists. For a critical evaluation of the Yan’an Forum and the subsequent twenty years, see Tsi-an Hsia’s “Twenty Years after the Yenan Forum” in Birch (1963), pp. 226–53. See also Dai (1988) and Selden (1971) on the rectification movement in Yan’an. For a survey of the literary debates during the Yan’an period, see Liu Zengjie et al. (1983). Gregor Benton (1982), who translated Wang’s essay “Wild Lilies,” said that Wang spoke more from the heart than from the mind. For his ordeal, see Benton (1982), pp. 168–86, Dai (1988), C. T. Hsia (1979) and Cheek (1984). See Dai (1988), Ma (1975) and Cheek (1984) on the incident. Dai asserts that the incident was intimately tied to the sinification of Marxism under Mao. Dai Qing (1988) suggests the order came from Marshal He Long, who was given control of the base area at the time and who obviously did not feel bound by legal procedure. Many intellectuals considered these military leaders semi-bandits. He Long, for his part, had little patience with intellectuals. Hu Feng became friends with Lu Xun during Lu’s last years. In 1935, party pragmatists sent four representatives from the League of Left-wing Writers to warn Lu Xun against the friendship, accusing Hu of being an “internal spy.” The act infuriated Lu Xun, who nicknamed them the “four fellows” (si tiao hanzi) and refused to cooperate (C. T. Hsia 1979, p. 312). Ding Shu (1987) and Ba Jin’s Wuti ji 無題集 (Untitled), p. 150 (reprinted in Ba Jin 1988). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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42. See Ba Jin’s “Dao fangzhi tongzhi” 悼方之同志 in Tansuo ji 探索集 (reprinted in Ba Jin 1988). 43. Ba Jin’s Zhenhua ji 真話集, p. 69 (reprinted in Ba Jin 1988). 44. Two notable examples of loyal opposition are Wang Ruoshui (1985/1989) and Wang Ruowang (1989); both men are prominent Marxist philosophers and literary critics. 45. An autobiographical short story by Shi Tiesheng, “My Distant Qingping Bay” (Wode yaoyuan de Qingping wan), describes a common bond between an old peasant and an educated youth paralyzed by disease. Due to its length, I could not incorporate it in the volume. 46. See Chen Cun (1985), p. 64. See also Zeng (1985) on the works of Zhang Xinxin, and Ding Fan and Xu (1986) in defense of the “roots literature.” In a recent letter (personal communication), Han Shaogong said that he no longer wrote this kind of literature. 47. A student leader (New York Times, June 3, 1989) commented that his one regret was that the students had been unable to link up with intellectuals, writers, and journalists. 48. This idea was suggested to me by Ng Mau-sang. See also Schwarcz (1986) on Zhang Shenfu’s feelings of being superfluous. 49. See Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) for the concept of the invention of tradition. See Liu Na (1986). Liu distinguishes traditional literature, which functioned as social mediation, from modern literature, which has been used as an active tool to promote national salvation and social reform. 50. Many workers and other citizens supported the demonstrations, not only because they had their own frustrations to air but also because many believed that these students, the future leaders of society, were patriotically trying to bring about a better state and nation. Might this be a sign that traditional attitudes of looking to the educated elite for moral leadership are still alive? 51. In a dialogue with Liu Binyan, Leo Lee (1986) summarizes the complexity of the issues involved. He shares Liu’s sentiments but objects to Liu’s appeal to social conscience to prevent artistic explorations that have not been allowed in the past four decades. Lee hopes that, after a period of chasing after art or cultural roots, the young writers will acquire enough vision to link an abstract exploration of cultural roots with immediate issues in social and political life. See also Shi Shuqing (1989) for interviews with Liu and other writers. 52. My intentions in exploring this cultural critique seem best summarized by Marcus and Fischer (1986), p. 114: “The philosophical critique is most securely grounded in the sociology of knowledge, a questioning of the relation between the content of beliefs and ideas, and the social position of their carriers or advocates. The effect of this style of cultural critique is demystification; it detects interests behind and within cultural meanings expressed in discourse; it reveals forms of domination and power; and thus, it is often posed as the critique of ideology.” 53. After 1949, there were works on workers and soldiers, but a large number of writers were sent to the countryside to “experience” peasant life and to write about how the peasants were “embracing” a revolution conducted in their name. 54. Bai Hua, a middle-aged writer in the army, wrote Kulian (Unrequited love) in 1980 and became the target of official wrath in 1981. For an interview with him seven years later, see Li Yi (1988a). 55. For similar political problems faced by East European writers, see the works of Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Czeslaw Milosz. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:15 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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56. See Williams (1958, 1977, 1979, and 1980) for theoretical statements on culture and political economy, and on Marxism and literature. See the works of the new historicists (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt) on how literary voices are encoded by their political-historical environments. Although one may conclude that voices of self-assertion are inevitably shaped by social codes and political agendas within a historical context, the Chinese texts appeared to engender themselves. See also Stallybrass and White (1986) for a summary of Mikhail Bakhtin and revisions of his work in relation to cultural hegemony and subversive voices in literature and cultural performances.

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Part 6 Place-Making Locality and Translocality

In my study of local society in historical China, I have explored issues of placebased identities and the meaningful constructions of “place.” In Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (1995), David Faure and I deviate from Skinner’s economistic model by treating regional systems as conscious historical constructs with political and cultural contingencies. The South China region in the Ming and Qing was “made” when local populations used instrumental and symbolic means to attach themselves to a real and imaginary state formation that was expanding in their direction. When imperial power existed more as a cultural repertoire than as organized administrative machinery, localities came to assume their subject identities by engaging the empire on their own diverse terms. If state and local society were mutually constitutive, what were the major means of engagement? They are historically specific. In Ming and Qing southern China, we see lineage in a cultural nexus of power linking local territorial control with the downward percolation of imperial authority. Zheng Zhenman and Kenneth Dean, on the other hand, highlight the use of religious rituals in Fujian to engage the Song state which had specific cultural orientations. The differing outcomes in local culture and society were shaped by particular moments of translocal involvement with an expansive imperial process. Such a historical perspective on place-making interrogates the economistic arguments of Skinner and the structural functionalist assumptions of Maurice Freedman and Arthur Wolf. The place-making also touches on the definition of center and periphery. In Empire at the Margins (Crossley, Siu, and Sutton 2006), the authors question conventional historical scholarship that often extends the empire’s civilizing gaze to regions it considered culturally alien and politically threatening. State-based narratives often reflect a power relationship about place, ethnicity, and boundary. My chapter in the volume (co-authored with Liu Zhiwei) stresses the discursive nature of an “ethnic” label (Dan) imposed on certain boat-dwelling populations by settled farmers. The processes delineated the growth of farming communities and commerce as the Pearl River Delta matured into a regional core of Lingnan. The idea that places are constructed with certain populations drawing hard lines against those being “othered” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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is in tune with that of anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992/1997, pp.  33–51). They have argued against views that have too often conflated empirical realities of culture, population, territory, and polity. Rather than conceptualizing them as naturally preexisting entities, one should begin with their historical connectedness and the relationships of power involved in their making. The historical contingency by which local society was constructed is again highlighted in a short article I co-authored with David Faure (2003) entitled “The Original Translocal Society and its Modern Fate.” We question linear assumptions of societal development from rural to urban, local to translocal, and traditional to modern. Communities and identities in late imperial times were largely made with translocal resources—lineage charters stressing migration from elsewhere, deities tracing ritual origins, and popular beliefs covering broad regional powers and imperial metaphors. Agrarian society was therefore not grounded or bounded but connected to fluidities in multi-scalar terms. On the surface, this parallels Skinner’s argument about marketing systems and how peasant communities responded to dynastic fortunes with patterns of openness and closure (Skinner 1971). However, what we have stressed is that established membership in a stable locality was discursively significant in the imperial definition of a legitimate subject, and local populations shrewdly used translocal priorities for their own ends. Moreover, rural populations in South China were exposed to world trade for centuries. Mexican silver trade dollars showed up for temple renovations. European-style merchant houses lined the streets of Guangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong, and the river ports in the Pearl River Delta. Churches, mosques, and Christian cemeteries were part of the delta landscape, inspiring author Amitav Ghosh to describe “sinicization” (Zhongguo hua) as “Guangzhou-ization” (Guangzhou hua) during a talk at Yale University in April 2012. The juxtaposition of trading empires, colonial encounters, religious and legal traditions provided arenas that reordered hierarchies of gender and class, and inspired cultural agency and activism. Interestingly, worldly merchant elites were also able to buy orthodoxy from the center to bolster their political positions “at the margins.” The age of openness and cosmopolitan consumption that Frank Dikötter (2008), Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999), and Yeh Wen-Hsin (2007) described for Republican Shanghai could also be applied to the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau) as shown by the works of Michael Tsin (1999), Chung Po-Yin (1998), and Leo Ou-fan Lee (2008). Paradoxically, as administrative power and political resources gravitated toward modernizing cities, villagers and peasants were systematically “othered.” They were seen as repository of agrarian backwardness and as objects of reform or revolution. As the integrative linkages between rural and urban were severed, a different set of criteria was imposed to make local society and shape the subjectivity of its populations. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:24 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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As I have argued in my monograph Agents and Victims in South China (1989a), the othering of the peasantry and cellularization of village communities reached its height only under Mao when translocal networks of commerce, kinship, popular religion, and ritual resources were destroyed. My observation is equally counterintuitive when one asks how such structural impact of the Maoist revolution lingers today to define localities, identities, and aspirations. If two hundred million rural migrants travel to the growing cities with only their labor and rural statuses on their backs, how “translocal” are their experiences? How entrenched are local state agenda, and how spatialized are the interests of the rising urban “middle class” whose identities are based on ownership of real estate in gated communities (Zhang 2010; Hsing 2010)? Furthermore, for rural residents in the paths of growing cities, how do they face the urban tsunami driven by the vanity of city planners and an aggressive property market? The chapters included in this section highlight various place-making processes and issues of locality versus translocality in different historical periods. The first chapter deals with the reterritorization of lineage power under the local bosses of the Republican period that fundamentally redefined community dynamics and cultural dialogue between center and periphery. The second chapter focuses on the real estate boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, when Hong Kong’s working families looking for affordable housing energized a landscape of consumption across the political border. The third chapter shows that simultaneously in Hong Kong, there has been an intense othering of “new immigrants.” It signified the mindset of postwar generations of Hong Kongers who attached values and entitlements to an increasingly territorialized identity against newcomers from the mainland. The last essay describes villagers in urban enclaves known as chengzhongcun. In the heart of Guangzhou today, one finds the ironic twists in fortunes as villagers shrewdly reinforce their rural statuses and collective land rights left from the Maoist era. With a touch of desperation, they negotiate with migrant renters, global real estate developers, and the municipal government for compensations on their land in order to collect a revolutionary promise long overdue. The question is whether they and their children are prepared to engage a fast-moving urbanity, or if they remain incarcerated in a bounded rural construction, self- and other-imposed.

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13 Subverting Lineage Power Local Bosses and Territorial Control in the 1940s

If territorial power in South China rested on lineages endowed with vast estates and the ability to flaunt literati pretensions, how did the lineage institution change after the fall of the Qing dynasty?1 At the turn of the century, the He lineage in Shawan zhen of Panyu county, as described in Liu Zhiwei’s essay in Down to Earth (Faure and Siu 1995), appeared to be in full command of its resources. With an imposing solidarity, lineage members expected deference from other inhabitants of the sands who were considered Dan and excluded from community activities. But the bond of kinship and territorial power was at least malleable if not ephemeral. Less than a decade after the Qing dynasty fell, overseas merchants who had occupied peripheral social positions made a serious attempt to rebuild a lineage community in Xinhui county strictly according to the books.2 Their difficulties, David Faure argues, arose from the fact that the reality of community control, locally improvised, was in conflict with the language of lineage solidarity.3 What, then, was the fate of the lineages when China plunged further into crisis in the 1930s and 1940s? In the Pearl River Delta, a more unorthodox generation of local strongmen rose rapidly to fill the power vacuum. They were tax farmers for regional warlords who maintained an uneasy truce with the Japanese army. They took over ancestral estates, created new networks of territorial control, and prospered through extortion and smuggling. Assuming that earlier social bonds continued to be reconstituted through time, I examine the power play revolving around the lineage institution in three closely situated communities in this period. What did lineage and territory mean in these areas, and how were the meanings transformed in a period when war and disorder entered into the daily experience of the villagers? The differing fortunes of the ancestral complex in Tianma xiang of Xinhui, Xiaolan zhen of Zhongshan, and Shawan zhen of Panyu raise the question of how lineage was tied to the development of these communities that had been enriched by the reclamation of the sands in the delta, how the volatile politics of the Republican era transformed these relationships, and to what extent local populations adopted the emerging political vocabulary to create enduring identities as they acquired new perceptions of power and authority. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Tianma Xiang, Xinhui County In the first quarter of the 20th century, Tianma xiang of Xinhui county was a large township with over two thousand inhabitants, all surnamed Chen. It had a daily market and was connected to Sanjiang (inhabited by the Zhao lineage) and Shuangshui (inhabited by the Chen, Tan, and Lin lineages), both sizable market towns south of the county capital. The Chen of Tianma maintained only a few ancestral halls, built early in the course of settlement, which functioned as tenant contractors. The focal ancestral hall, Wuben Tang, owned fewer than 100 mu of land (Chenzu shipu 1923). The managers paid cash rents to ancestral trusts of the He and the Mo lineages in the county capital six kilometers away, and parceled the land out to their kin to farm. Rent was collected in kind to maintain lineage rituals. Wuben Tang also served as the community office (Siu 1989a, chapter 3). Lineage elders and managers collected rent, paid taxes, repaired dikes, mediated disputes, and kept public order. Local residents paid nominal fees to the hall for allowing them to grow fruit trees on the dikes, to fish in the numerous waterways, and to use the river landings and market. The claim of genealogical ties to Wuben Tang was vital to the Chen residents. Th ose ties guaranteed the right of settlement in the village, of contracting for farmland, and of obtaining a livelihood by other means. On the southern edge of Tianma, a poor hamlet was inhabited by “people of mixed surnames,” including outcasts from the Chen lineage. They were referred to as the “mean households” (xiahu) and “sands people” (shamin) who farmed the marshes beyond the diked village fields. Few were allowed to build permanent dwellings. Most lived on boats or in straw huts along the dikes.4 “People of mixed surnames” could be numerous. They might have lived in the area for generations. However, the term was a metaphor for disenfranchised elements in the community, people who had never demonstrated a genealogical link to an ancestral hall. It is also clear that being a member of the Chen lineage entailed different social and economic predicaments. Although the Chen looked down upon those living farther out in the river marshes, established communities closer to the county capital gave the Chen little social recognition. In their eyes, the Chen were “Dan.” The Chen whom I met over the years never acknowledged this social characterization, although their own written genealogy contains revealing evidence of their starting out as a boat-dwelling, migratory people. Instead, they dissociated themselves from what they named as shamin living out in the sands.5 Such labeling created a complex social hierarchy with the claim of settlement rights based upon genealogical ties, fictive or real. The processes of inclusion and exclusion were shrewd expressions of political and economic interest and were significant elements in the history of communitybuilding in and around Tianma.6

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The commercialized ancestral trusts in Huicheng succumbed to the chaos of warlord politics and of the Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. The rise of local bosses in Tianma accelerated their demise. The bosses encroached upon the land of these town-based trusts to build their own. They took over the thriving grain trade and diverted it to market towns farther south. They were also engaged in smuggling opium, liquor, and other heavily taxed goods for various warlord regimes. When war broke out in the late 1930s, they supplied goods both to the Nationalist government and to the Japanese military by rerouting the marketing networks. Together with Sanjiang and Shuangshui, major market towns to which the Nationalists had retreated, Tianma formed an important part of a regional nexus, earning the name Little Macau. On the eve of the Communist takeover, Tianma had thirty-five ancestral halls. Over a dozen of the halls, which villagers called “private,” had been erected in the 20th century. During a visit I made to Tianma in 1987, villagers eagerly showed me a modern-style ancestral hall built by the powerful local boss Chen Shufen in the early 1940s. Chen’s ties to the literati were tenuous. He claimed that his grandfather had once acquired a low-level degree. He himself had advanced through connections with the military. When his mansion was built, he held a banquet. To show his influence, he invited local bosses from the area together with representatives from the Japanese army and the Nationalist government, who arrived with their respective entourages of body guards and machine guns. Villagers identified the mansion as a sheng citang—a memorial hall belonging to an extended family. It was a three-story house without the conventional wide entrance and curved roof that signified literati status, but it supported the village school that was physically attached to it. Neither did the numerous small halls have the conventional wide, tall entrances. Together with Wuben Tang, which had amassed a formidable arsenal for community self-defense in wartime, the new ancestral establishments worked to strengthen kin relations, affirming both genealogical ties to the focal ancestor and asymmetrical segmentation through the establishment of independent estates. It is ironic that, for the Chen of Tianma, the fuller cultural meanings of a lineage complex, denied by the exclusiveness of town-based lineages in Huicheng for a few centuries, became a reality in the unsettling decades of the Republican era.

Xiaolan Zhen, Xiangshan County Xiaolan zhen, a market town midway between the county capitals of Xiangshan (Shiqi) and Shunde (Daliang), had become a center of commercial wealth, literati accomplishments, and lineage power in the 19th century. The three major surnames were He, Li, and Mai, each tracing genealogical ties to a focal ancestor who This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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supposedly settled in the area centuries earlier. The He had two lineages. Based on the popular settlement myth espoused by lineages in the delta, they claimed that their focal ancestors were brothers who had fled from the Nanxiong sub-prefecture during the Song dynasty. The branch that traced descent from the tenth brother (Xihuan Tang) was superior in wealth and numbers to the one that traced descent from the ninth brother (Liuqing Tang). Both built elaborate focal ancestral halls, and in 1873 some members bought shares with the aim of establishing a hall for a minister in the Song court who was regarded as the grandfather of the two brothers. As in Tianma xiang, links to focal ancestors provided Xiaolan residents with claims to settlement rights in the area.7 Prominent Ming officials who had tremendous impact on the shaping of literati and popular cultures in Guangdong were identified with major lineages in the Pearl River Delta: Huo Tao of the Huo lineage of Shitou near Foshan, He Xiongxiang of the He lineage of Xinhui county, and He Wuzhou of the He lineage in Xiaolan, Xiangshan county (Faure 1989b). In fact, the names of the focal ancestral halls of the He and Li lineages in Xiaolan were adorned with the highest official titles of their lineage members. Xihuan Tang, the focal ancestral hall of one of the two He lineages, was also known as the Neige dazongci because He Wuzhou, a member of the thirteenth generation, became a Hanlin scholar and minister in the late Ming court. The focal ancestral hall of the Li lineage was named the Shangshu dazongci because Sunchen, a contemporary of He Wuzhou, also became a minister. In Xiaolan, the proliferation of lineages was made all the more possible by the rapid development of the sands from the 18th century on.8 There were many ways of accumulating wealth: claiming rights to turn river marshes into polders and to collect a nominal “skeletal” fee (shagu), contracting with the original claimants to reclaim the marshes, collecting rent in kind from tenant farmers and then entering and controlling the grain trade, and enjoying vast tax exemptions either by colluding with local officials or by cheating them, since they had no way of recording the rapid growth of the vast estates in the sands.9 He Yanggao, a local historian, estimates that the He lineage of Xiaolan started accumulating land and building estates at the fifth generation (late 14th century). Most of the 393 ancestral halls of that lineage were built during the 19th century, when its members attained the height of their literati and official achievements.10 Their leading members constituted the core of a political alliance, the Lanxiang Gongyue. The focal ancestral halls, together with the halls of their lineage segments, were active patrons of religious rituals associated with the five major temples in town. They were also organizers of the community-wide chrysanthemum festivals since the early 19th century.11 By the 20th century, Xiaolan’s major lineages also controlled the grain trade, the production of pigs, mulberry, silk cocoons, and liquor. There were two mulberry This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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markets in Xiaolan, and merchants collected local cocoons to trade in specialized markets in Rongqi, a town midway between Xiaolan and the county capital of Shunde. Many were also native bankers and pawnbrokers who collected rents in cash and in kind from clients and supplied the grain wharves in Chencun of Shunde county. Rituals financed by or conducted in the ancestral halls highlighted the interconnections between ancestral cult, lineage power, territorial control, literati politics, and commercial wealth.12 This complex of activities contrasted sharply with life in the sands. A kilometer or two outside the town, there was hardly a sizable village. The area was worked by a mobile stratum of tenant farmers who lived in straw huts or on boats, were considered economically inferior, and were socially shunned. The Republican decades brought fundamental changes to the lineage complex and its associated social hierarchy. In contrast to the situation in Tianma, local bosses in the vicinity of Xiaolan did not stay in the villages. In fact, the recently reclaimed part of the delta had few sizable villages. The bosses moved their operations into town as soon as they secured the loyalty of their field functionaries. Yuan Dai, one such strongman, was captain of a crop-protection force in the sands of Shunde and Xiangshan counties. During harvest, his men arrived in a fleet of motorboats and large sailboats to make sure that fees were paid. In 1915, he clashed violently with another captain near a wholesale fish market in Shiqi, causing widespread civilian damage. He fought with the retreating county head, Li Jingyun, in 1922, and the conflict resulted in the looting of the merchants’ quarters in Shiqi. Yuan Dai extended his control as far as Xinhui county and was given military titles by the warlord regimes in Guangzhou. In the 1930s he established his headquarters in Xiaolan and carved out spheres of control in the sands for his collaborators (Wu Ruisheng n.d.; Wu Hen n.d.). The chrysanthemum festival of 1934 demonstrated the rise of the local strongmen and the demise of the lineage complex in Xiaolan.13 The head of the organization committee was one He Naizhong, a former titleholder and merchant. Although he belonged to a rich land-owning family in Xiaolan, his prestige was largely based on his having been an advisor to the warlord Feng Yuxiang.14 Liang Bingyun, who had been appointed head of the third district of Xiangshan county (renamed Zhongshan in 1925), of which Xiaolan was the administrative headquarters, gave the opening speeches. He also organized a trade fair at the site of the He Feng Academy, an institution set up decades before by the other surname groups in town with the intention of countering the power of the major lineages. The headquarters of the festival was a study chamber belonging to a Liu family. Two nouveaux riches, Liu Rongjie and Gan Hanchen, who had made their fortunes by speculating in the financial markets of Shanghai, organized their own floral displays, which became the talk of the town. Local temples were the unusual centers of these activities, financed by the bosses who had stationed their troops in them and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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used them as headquarters for tax collection. He Yanggao, a local scholar who was the head of the richest family in town, recalled that the major ancestral halls, which finally went along with the festivities, were so drained of resources that they had no ritual pork to distribute in the years that followed. The Japanese occupation from 1938 to 1945 accelerated the demise of the lineage complex in Xiaolan. The major cities and county capitals of the Pearl River Delta were controlled by the Japanese military and their collaborators, who maintained an uneasy truce with local strongmen. Yuan Dai and his cousin Qu Renze assumed the titles of commander and deputy commander of the Third Regiment of the Seventh War Zone (abbreviated to Ting San) (Zhongshan wenshi ziliao 1965, vol. 3, pp. 66–71). In the name of resisting Japanese aggression, they amassed a fleet of motorized gunboats. They smuggled war goods between Hong Kong, Macau, the occupied territories in the delta such as Guangzhou, Shunde, and Rongqi, and the Nationalist-controlled areas in the northwestern part of the delta. The commodities included grain, minerals, lumber, and herbs from the hilly regions and salt, kerosene, cloth, medicine, flour, cigarettes, and opium from Hong Kong and Macau. The regiment was made up of eleven auxiliary troops each headed by Yuan’s collaborators who were themselves local strongmen. They controlled commercial enterprises known as gongsi and collected “red receipts” in the name of resisting the Japanese military and “black receipts” in the name of crop protection.15 As local residents recalled in 1986, “We paid the officials and the bandits; the revenue ended up in the same pockets.” Little was left for the ancestral estates. In fact, local bosses forcefully “bought” many of the estates whose managers were unable to pay taxes and surcharges in kind, because the cash rent they had managed to collect became valueless during the turbulent decade. He Yanggao estimates that, before the war, local strongmen owned about 400 mu in Sisha, a tract of diked fields southwest of Xiaolan. After the war, they owned about 5,000 mu. Twenty mu of He’s land in Sisha were lost to the bosses. He and his family fled to Macau during the war and suffered great financial losses. Li (Lai) Zhanquan was head of the third district appointed by the Japanese during the war. An interview with him in Hong Kong in 1986 highlighted some revealing political dynamics among the local bosses in and around Xiaolan.16 Li was a native of Nanhai county near Guangzhou. When he was appointed, he was a functionary of an important politician in Shiqi. He himself conducted some business in Xiaolan. Most of these bosses maintained elaborate mansions and businesses in Xiaolan. Securing a balance of power between the Japanese troops and the military bosses in the Xiangshan-Shunde region was essential for the stability of the town. The Japanese army was the least of Li’s problems. A lieutenant and his troops were stationed at Shakou, the eastern entrance of Xiaolan where Dan fishermen congregated in their boats. With the help of Qu’s troops, Li was able to satisfy the Japanese This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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with laborers and a small portion of the fees and taxes collected from the sands. His good relations with the Japanese military in Shiqi restrained the lieutenant. He was also in contact with the Communists in Shaping, a non-occupied town to the northwest that continued to use Chinese currency for business. He bought a house from Yuan Dai and organized a social club (named Siyou Tang, “hall of four friends”) with other bosses. Over dinners and games, they carved out territories for control, resolved conflicts of interest, mediated the kidnappings of the local rich and matters of troop discipline, and decided on the collection of taxes and fees (which he acknowledged never reached Guangzhou). With the bosses residing in Xiaolan and socializing among themselves, an uneasy peace was maintained. As Li recalled, “When we the bosses refrained from fighting and looting, who would dare make trouble?”17 According to He Yanggao and other old scholars in town whom I interviewed in 1986, local bosses did not claim ancestral halls outright; rather, they colluded with the managers in taking them over. A large ancestral hall of the Mai, the Qingyi Tang, was dismantled in this manner. The focal ancestral halls of the major lineages remained, but over a hundred smaller halls were taken down and the materials sold.18 Ordinary lineage members often went along willingly because they were desperately poor and hungry. The war had drastically reduced commercial activities in Xiaolan, which meant fewer jobs for the town residents. Laborers needed in the fields were drafted by both Chinese and Japanese forces, straining an already intensive agricultural production. While people were losing their livelihoods, grain prices maintained an all-time high because of war and blockades.19 Single-surname neighborhoods gave way to mixed ones, as houses belonging to families who had fled the war or perished were sold to non-lineage members. Conflicts over the sale of this lineage property were reflected in the numerous announcements and lawsuits published in the county newspapers. Strategies in pursuit of upward mobility also exacerbated the pain of demise for the lineages. Local bosses sought marriages with town families from among the major surnames whose fortunes had declined. They offered large dowries and practiced delayed transfer of their daughters, customs that town lineages had used to distinguish themselves from the people of the sands and which town families found increasingly difficult to maintain. Among the economically disadvantaged in town, women settled with their husbands immediately after marriage, because many family members had been killed or scattered during the war. There was little dowry to speak of. Instead, families began to ask for a brideprice for their daughters, a marital payment they had in the past accused the sands people for demanding shamelessly.20 Unlike the local bosses of Tianma, who constructed the lineage complex with their newfound wealth, those in Xiaolan built their power upon competing institutions in town and left the lineages to their own demise. The political campaigns in the Maoist period sealed the fate of the lineage complex and community rituals (see chapter 6 of This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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this volume). Furthermore, when the whirlwind of “modernization” swept the Pearl River Delta in the 1980s, what remained of the ancestral halls were dismantled faster than ever to make way for factories and for the residences of the nouveaux riches (see chapter 5 of this volume). For young cadres and entrepreneurs alike, the halls belonged to an unfamiliar “feudal past” long faded from their lives.

Shawan, Panyu County Shawan was a market town at the edge of the sands of Panyu county. These sands had been formed more recently than those surrounding Tianma and Xiaolan. The town and the power of its residents grew rapidly in the late Qing through active reclamation of land. In the early 20th century, it was less commercialized than Xiaolan but much more prosperous and populous than Tianma. A He lineage dominated the town. According to historian Liu Zhiwei,21 their focal ancestor, He Renjian, was said to have settled in the area during the Song. With customary exaggeration and ingenuity, the lineage genealogy claimed that He Renjian had relied on the influence of the famous official Li Maoying to acquire vast tracts of river marshes from the Guangdong Ever Normal Granary Office (changping si) in 1233. The area claimed extended as far west as the borders of Xiangshan county, totaling over 30,000 mu. It was also said that, by  the early Ming, the He lineage had a population of “three thousand, subdivided into fourteen fang.”22 Its members formed a management committee, the Shuben Tang, to run the expanding lineage estate. In time, lineage segments acquired another 35,000 mu. They also owned shops, landings, and land in Guangzhou. The Shuben Tang maintained a fleet of boats, armed crop-watching forces, and employed technical functionaries (daqing, yageng, tanjing, zhangshou) to supervise the collection of grain and to repair dikes.23 As in Xiaolan and Tianma, it was politically important for residents to trace descent from the focal ancestor, who supposedly had claims to vast territories. There was a rule that stipulated that only descendants of the He lineage were allowed to contract land from the ancestral trust. Although numerous lineage segments established independent estates, 116 in all, many of their members had prospered as tenant contractors of the focal ancestral hall.24 Local historians estimated that over 40 percent of the He lineage members “rented” large plots from the Liugeng Tang and then subcontracted them to cultivators. By the turn of this century, managers of the Liugeng Tang and the segment estates controlled over 60,000 mu of cultivable land and its grain rent, which they traded with merchants in the neighboring market town of Chencun where Hesheng Hao, a native bank owned by He Zhongshen, was the estate’s banker. The proximity of Chencun, a long-established center for the financing and trading of grain and cash crops, dwarfed similar developments in Shawan. Unlike the commercialized Xiaolan, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Shawan remained a place of residence for its elites, whose wealth was based almost exclusively on the control of grain. Like Xiaolan, the claim of lineage power by town residents went hand in hand with barriers built against those in the sands. The Beidi parade and the piaose (floating colors) were two major festivities that required elaborate coordinated efforts of the town-based lineages, whose members lived in established neighborhoods ( fang jia). Those considered non-residents, including the villagers at the southern edge of the town, were not involved.25

Figure 13.1 Inside the front entrance of Liugeng Tang of the He lineage in Shawan (photo taken in 1991)

Figure 13.2 Thatched huts in an outlying village south of Shawan (photo taken in 1991) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Today, immigrants from the sands who have resided in town since the revolution continue to refer to themselves as being “people outside” (kaibian ren). Such is the case with a former Daoist priest who moved into town from the village of Da Congkou in the sands when a local boss in the 1940s tore down his father’s shed in order to make room for a sugar refinery. I also encountered the case of an economically disadvantaged man who had moved out to the sands to build dikes. He married a “woman of the sands” and raised his family there. His daughter eventually came back to town for marriage but continues to be addressed by neighbors as Danjia po (Dan woman) forty years later.26 Although the dominance of the He lineage complex under the focal ancestral shadow of the Liugeng Tang seemed unquestionable,27 four families rose from within in the Republican era to become the sida gengjia (the four major tenant contractors). The founders were of humble origin. They made their fortunes by renting small parcels of the ancestral estates for a nominal rent of 60 catties per mu and then subleasing the land to their functionaries or directly to the farmers in the sands. They bought some land of their own with the profits and continued to expand their tenant-contracting enterprises in Panyu and Dongguan.28 Few of them diked their own fields. Their sons, who were mostly educated in modern schools, became the first agricultural entrepreneurs in the area. They expanded operations into large-scale grain milling. Responding to the call of the Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang to develop sugar cane as a cash crop, they established sugar plantations and refineries. Their fortunes were tied to tenant contracting in the sands and to specific ancestral trusts,

Figure 13.3 A turret at Chong Kou, a village south of Shawan, built during the Republican period (photo taken in 1989) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Figure 13.4 A social club of local power holders in Shawan in the Republican period (photo taken in 1991)

but local residents remembered them as distinguished entrepreneurs. Their businesses, named Shengli, Xinhe, Liji, and Liuji, were labeled pu (enterprise). These entrepreneurs were powerful figures in Shawan. They competed and cooperated with militaristic local bosses in the 1930s and 1940s, maintained armed guards, and built fortified watchtowers for defense. They nonetheless enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and goodwill in the community. Residents distinguished them from the bosses, datianer, who were seen as preying on people by brute force. He Houjiao, the founder of Xinhe Enterprises, was a hired hand in a social club for local elites. Some club members liked him enough to contract some land for him from the ancestral estates. Of his fifteen children, all of whom received modern education, He Shang, the sixth son, went to Lingnan University in Guangzhou. In the 1930s, He Shang set up experimental sugar plantations and the Xinxinghe sugar refinery in a village outside Shawan. He hired local foremen, known as daqing, to manage the sugar fields, paying them each a wage of about three dan of grain a month each.29 When his father died in 1941, he took over the entire family enterprise. By that time, the Japanese military controlled Guangzhou and major cities in the delta. To avoid spreading himself thin, he closed the native banks and jewelry shops in Guangzhou and Hong Kong that his father had bought, and concentrated on the agricultural enterprises in Shawan. He bid for ancestral land in public auctions; he took the tax-farming quotas (the “red receipts”) imposed by the government on the estates, and negotiated with the local bosses for the payment of protection fees (the “black receipts”).30 He built three watchtowers for self-defense and had a fleet of boats with armed men to supervise the harvests. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Two of He Shang’s contemporaries took a much more active role in military affairs. He Shuheng was the eldest son of He Shengli and manager of Shengli Enterprises, the largest of the Liugeng Tang’s tenant contractors.31 He organized a self-defense brigade equipped with two machine guns and was on the frontline of a battle in 1938 against Japanese troops at the southern edge of Shawan (He Zhichiang and Er Yi 1984). Both he and He Shang cooperated in military adventures with He Duan, known as “Duan the scholar,” who had worked as a tutor-advisor for an old military boss in Panyu. Although the rise of He Duan depended on his military adventures, he made himself more respectable by mingling in local elite circles, competing in the Liugeng Tang’s public auction of tenant contracts and raising funds to support the local school.32 He was known for his anti-Japanese stance in 1938–39, but he and He Shang were among local notables who formed the jianshe jiuji weiyuanhui (war relief committee), the equivalent of the township government in 1940, which maintained an uneasy truce with the Japanese military who controlled Shiqiao, Panyu county capital. The committee centralized the resources of all the lineages in the community in the name of more effective defense and reconstruction of the community in a time of crisis. Shawan did suffer damage during the seesaw power struggle among the local bosses and the Japanese military. During the period of occupation, local bosses rotated headship of the town and acted as military captains for the Japanese and the Nationalists. They collected taxes and fees from the sands. At times, the power equilibrium was hard to maintain. In 1940, He Jian, an ally of a Chinese boss, Li Fuqun, in Shiqiao, occupied the town with his troops. While the local self-defense corps scattered to Xiangshan and Shunde, He’s troops looted the town for three days. Leading members of the four major tenant contractors were seldom regarded as the datianer, especially if they were involved in managing ancestral estates. There is a local saying that “those who held guns would not be holding the keys to the ancestral chest.” He Duan was close to being one of those who were feared and hated for having risen so precipitously during the war with the Japanese and identified as militaristic adventurers. In the eyes of local residents who lived off the income from lineage estates, the bosses had no redeeming qualities because “they made a living with their guns” and “ignored general moral persuasions. The bosses’ clash with the focal ancestral hall and its major contractors extended to the outlying areas of the sands, where they forcibly collected grain rent due to the Liugeng Tang. At times, they colluded with the farmers to cheat the major tenant contractors. As recalled by a former functionary of Liji Enterprises, “if these lesser bosses had a conscience, they should collect the rent from the farmers and give us sixty catties per mu. Even if we pressed hard, we might collect only twenty catties per mu. It was worse when they linked up with the Dan bandits of Minzong at the border with Xiangshan. As we say, the Danjia is strong when the sea is wide.”33 These local This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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bosses also dismantled temples and used the materials to build watchtower complexes in the villages, which were nicknamed “local bullies’ mansions.”34 Some military bosses in the sands became powerful enough to gain a foothold in town. They established their headquarters in the study chambers (private memorial halls) they bought from families who had lost their fortunes in the chaos of war.35 He Cheng’s father was unemployed all his life but managed to live off the income of several segment estates. He himself was literate but had made his living as a petty trader in Guangzhou. He was streetwise. When the Japanese came, he was the captain of a crop-watching force supported by the lineage segment to which he belonged.36 At the height of his power, he had a following of a few hundred men and a study chamber in town as headquarters. He clashed with another powerful local boss, He Rugen, over the latter’s appointment as head of the township during the Japanese occupation. He had once linked up with Communist guerrillas in the Panyu-ShundeXiangshan border area and fought against the pro-Japanese forces of Li Fuqun and He Jian based in the county capital. He extracted surcharges from the segment estates. He also subcontracted land from those who had acquired vast areas of the sands from the Liugeng Tang. His rapid rise was cut short in 1945 when competitors shot him in Guangzhou. He was thirty-two. After his death, his younger brother, a lad of sixteen, regrouped He Cheng’s followers, put himself under He Duan, and maintained a base in the southwestern tip of the county. Other bosses of a similar kind included He Rugen, who assumed the post of xiangzhang during the war and had conflicts with He Cheng. He Congbao, retaining the post after the war and nicknamed Bao the Blind, trapped and shot He Shang and his bodyguard on the streets of Shawan during the power vacuum of 1949. According to the younger brother of He Shang, He Congbao was nervous about He Shang’s willingness to compromise with the Communists. He invited He Shang to his house to discuss the issue of forming sharecropping arrangements with tenants in the sands, a project proposed by He Shang. At the time, the Communist troops had already visited the town, and local bosses were giving up their guns. He Shang went unarmed with a bodyguard of his brother and was shot as soon as he left He Congbao’s house. Unlike the situation in Xiaolan, where military bosses with mixed surnames accelerated the downfall of the major surnames in town, the upheaval in Shawan was viewed by villagers as infighting among members of the He lineage. The Liugeng Tang continued to be the center of activities and its wealth a target of contention. Many of the local strongmen there subsequently fled the area or were arrested and shot by the Communists in the early 1950s. The lineage estates were redistributed to the economically disadvantaged residents of the sands. The Liugeng Tang and the other ancestral halls were not torn down. As dilapidated storehouses, cowsheds, or village headquarters, they remain standing today, stubborn testimony to a glorious and contested past for those who would take a quiet moment to reflect. In the early 1980s, the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Liugeng Tang, symbolizing the wealth and power of the He lineage, was renovated and designated as a provincial-level historical monument. In Hong Kong, Xiaolan maintains a native place association that has taken on an increasingly active role in attracting investment from the town’s successful émigrés, but Shawan relies on the He Lineage Association. By comparing the fates of the lineage institution in Tianma, Xiaolan, and Shawan, I hope to have presented an account of cultural change that captures the breadth of historically lived experience in rural south China. Looking back to the late imperial period, one can see that the rise of the territorially based lineage complex in these towns was intimately tied to the development of the sands. In these towns, local populations at different points in time reclaimed river marshes that had been formed as the West River, a major tributary of the Pearl River that flowed in a southeastern direction. Improvising on the cultural resources of their patrons in the older parts of the delta, they established their own history and identity and built a unique range of social institutions. The self-aggrandizing agendas behind lineage genealogies and ancestral estates were blatant. The language of lineage and community was a means of acculturation and differentiation, representing shrewd political maneuvers on the part of upwardly mobile elements in these emerging communities who actively sought respective places in the expanding Chinese polity. These acts stretched tradition to the limits of local imagination (Faure 1992). In the Republican era, lineage and communal institutions were the subject of much contest, because the authority of the imperial state on which they relied was shaken by fundamental changes in the economy and by powerful new elites with different territorial bases and claims to legitimacy. Be they tradition-bound expatriates, agricultural entrepreneurs educated by modern schools, or illiterate militaristic strongmen, all used the emerging ideologies of nation-building to climb onto a local political stage they were creating for themselves. The apparent persistence of lineage and community ideals in social life and in the popular mind made it difficult at first to argue that the imperial order was fundamentally shaken or that the “modernizing” state had successfully penetrated rural society. But the evidence suggests that, underneath the surface, these cultural complexes were undergoing a rapid recomposition in a variety of local guises. Changes were most evident in Xiaolan, whose economy had been commercialized and diverse since the 19th century. The power of the lineage complex was no longer based on the direct control of land, and these ancestral estates were most vulnerable during the war. Local bosses from the sands took over their land, moved into town, and built alternative institutions without much need for negotiation. After the revolution in 1949, the Communists shot the militaristic bosses, turned the remaining ancestral halls into offices, warehouses, and factories, and divided the estates in the sands among those who were farming them. When, in 1963, the town was administratively separated This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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from the rural commune surrounding it, any lingering ties signifying control of land in the sands were severed. The separation of the town (and its major lineages) from its former territorial identity was complete. Village strongmen in Tianma were able to build ancestral halls because, during wartime, they forcibly took over the land and kept the rents that were due to their town-based patrons. But the flourishing of lineage estates in Tianma should not be seen solely as a resilient tradition regenerating itself on new soil. It also represented the emergence of new and uneasy relationships between the regional core and its periphery.37 The rise of the Chen in the Republican period was particularly threatening to townships near the county capital because Tianma itself had been a sizable settlement. The original settlers were of other surnames. A careful reading of the Chen genealogy compiled in 1923 shows that they must have gained a foothold after much arbitration and struggle against the original settlers. Although they grew numerous by late Qing, they never gained a status as equals among the established lineages in the area. The building of the numerous lineage estates finally accorded them the recognition of their former patrons, even if it was given under the threat of a gun. Although the local bosses were eventually persecuted by Communists and peasants alike in 1950, the community was seen as one “legitimate” Chen lineage. The cultural frontier defining regional fringes was pushed further into the river marshes where “mixed surnames” eventually formed a production brigade separate from the Chen of Tianma. Underlying the persistence of the Liugeng Tang in Shawan was a different political current. Buttressed for centuries by the language of lineage, which remained authoritative, its supremacy as landlord and symbol of community was not diminished but reinforced by the exigencies of war. Its domination over the area was so complete that even its most effective challengers from the sands had to work within the power structure of the lineage. After the Communist revolution, as in Tianma, many local bosses who had ruled with guns were killed. Others fled. The estates were divided among economically disadvantaged town residents who were He lineage members as well as their tenants in the sands. In a deliberate effort to break the power of the He lineage, the Communists recruited local cadres from among the “people of mixed surnames.” Today, they occupy large neighborhoods and enjoy the political and economic security they built up during the Maoist era. But they continue to be referred to by residents as “the mixed surnames,” as if they had hardly gained a foothold in town. Ironically, the stone stele erected in the Qing by the five major lineages to prohibit freed bondservants from building an ancestral hall remains standing today in the courtyard of an ancestral hall that has long been used as party headquarters. The analysis of lineage, community, and politics in this essay illustrates some general concern of historical anthropology: how do historical events take into account inequalities of power, and how are social institutions and cultural perceptions This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Figure 13.5 A smaller ancestral hall of the He lineage in Shawan, transformed into a warehouse (photo taken in 1989)

Figure 13.6 A typical landscape near Tianma xiang in Xinhui, showing layers of settlements as river marshes were reclaimed (photo taken in 1991) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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understood in the spatial context of an evolving, differentiating political economy? In state agrarian societies where hierarchies of power and diverse bases of authority exist and are often contested, stability rests on the ways local elites anchor themselves in the community as well as within the larger polity. The evolution of local legitimacy involves the percolation of a state culture, be it imperial or revolutionary. In numerous arenas, the locally powerful and those they dominated were engaged in shaping this process. As in other times, discourses on lineage and community in the 20th century were ways by which several generations of political actors created a new language by means of inherited words.38 *This is an abridged version of the original published in David Faure and Helen Siu (eds.), Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995).

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

For summaries of this literature on South China, see Freedman (1958, 1966), Faure (1986, 1989b), Rubie Watson (1982), and Ebrey and Watson (1986). For comparisons in North China, see Cohen (1990). See Faure’s “Lineage Socialism and Community Control” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 161–87. This view was presented at the panel on Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China, Association of Asian Studies Meetings, Chicago, April 5–8, 1990. Part of the research was conducted in 1986 under the sponsorship of the Committee for Scholarly Exchanges with the People’s Republic of China. Subsequent research was made possible by funds from Social Science Faculty Research Fund of Yale University and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The research on Shawan was conducted with Liu Zhiwei, David Faure, Dai He, and Chen Chunsheng in the summer of 1989. Liu Zhiwei and I have returned there for short research trips since then. The building of permanent houses signified settlement rights. These residents were finally grouped together to form a brigade in 1971. See Ward (1985) on how a culturally subordinated group like the Dan perceive themselves. I find similar allegations by villagers in the older sands of Zhongshan municipality and Panyu county against those living in the more recently reclaimed sands. For the general theoretical argument, see Faure (1989b, 1992). He stresses the importance of a cultural definition of class and argues that Marxists are too preoccupied with a materialist definition. This applied to the minzhi (civilian) households. Members of the military colonies, junzhi households, were given land through the eighteen weisuo (garrisons) each having a ritual headquarters at a Guandi temple. By the late Ming and early Qing, the boundary between the two types of households had blurred somewhat. Li Sunchen, who rose to be a minister at the Ming court, had his household registration switched to a nonmilitary one. His agnatic kin formed the prominent Li lineage in town. For an early history of lineage building in Xiaolan, see also Choi (1987). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

294 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

Tracing China On the development of the sands in the Zhongshan–Shunde border, see He Yanggao (1964), copy held by author; and Wong Wing-ho (1986). On the development of the He Wenyi gong estate (He Xiongxiang of Xinhui) and He Liugeng Tang in Shawan, see Ye and Tan “Lun zhujiangsanjiaozhou de zutian,” in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985), pp. 22–64. See chapter 2 of Siu (1989a), which summarizes existing literature on the development of the sands in the Pearl River Delta. See He Yanggao (1964) on the rise of the He lineage in the 19th century. Yuexi, a member of the sixth generation, registered in a tax account as having 208 mu in 1381. He was twenty-six years old. By 1422, land under his account reached 21,909 mu (p. 37). He also points to the building materials used in these halls. Before this period, red stone (from quarries in Panyu) and oyster shells were used. From the mid-19th century on, granite from quarries in Hong Kong was used. See chapter 8 of this volume and Tanaka (1989). For more theoretical discussions on the underlying structures in lineage segmentation and fusion, see Sangren (1984) and Ahern (1976). See Siu (1989a) and chapter 8 in this volume. Merchants invested a great deal in community religious rituals in the name of either trade guilds or lineage trusts. They contributed to the renovation of the town’s temples and sponsored groups for parading temple deities. For the details of the festivals, see original documents collected in Zhongshan wenxian or Tanaka (1989), which reproduces part of the original documents and provides maps of the festival sites. See He Yanggao (1987). He wanted to reform the management of the ancestral estates by adding new, younger managers. However, he finally left for Beijing disappointed because the younger managers were just as corrupt. See Li Zelin’s “Ting san zongdui yu Minli gongsi” (n.d.). The red tickets meant the peasants had to pay the corporation 30 to 200 catties of grain per mu in order to harvest the rest of their crops. “Black tickets” were payments for protection. Registration fees were also extracted from boats that transported goods and passengers along the numerous waterways. For a brief description of the monetary situation in Xiaolan during the war, see He Yanggao (1964) pp. 25–26. I was introduced to Li Zhanquan by He Yanggao, who wanted to give another side to Li’s history of being a “Japanese collaborator.” Li died in 1989 but was allowed to visit Xiaolan a year before. Li maneuvered so well that in the wake of the Communist takeover, an underground CCP military leader in Shiqi invited him to mediate the problems of the local bosses. He fled to Hong Kong on the eve of the land reform in late 1950. Newspapers in Zhongshan during this period were filled with public announcements disputing the illegal sales of ancestral properties. See He Yanggao (1964), p. 28, on the dismantling of ancestral halls. The famine of 1943, when one Chinese dollar could buy only four qian of grain, was still very vivid in the minds of some elderly people. On the evolving customs of marital payments in Xiaolan and the surrounding villages, see chapter 7 of this volume. See Liu’s “Lineage on the Sands” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 21–43. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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22. See He Rugen and Er Yi (1984). Lineage members refer to four segments: jia (first), yi  (second), bing (third), and ding (fourth) fang. The first fang was subdivided into two segments. See also “Heshi shixitu,” which documents that, by the fourth generation, the lineage had branched into four. The fourteen fang were headed by grandsons of the focal ancestor. 23. The estate of the He Liugeng Tang is listed in Ye and Tan in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985), p. 33. The records show that the estate acquired the first tract of land in the fifteenth year of Wanli’s reign. See conflicting descriptions in Panyuxian xuzhi (1911); the earliest record in a manuscript locally compiled, “Liugeng ge shatian zongzhi,” which dates from the reign of Kangxi; see also He Rugen and Er Yi (1984). 24. Local informants said that there were 139 ancestral halls. I counted only 116 in the government document. For the holdings of the Liugeng Tang, see Ye and Tan in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985), pp. 34–36. See also “Liugeng ge shatian zongzhi” (1920). 25. See Liu’s “Lineage on the Sands” in Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 21–43. 26. The low position of the sands people becomes an embarrassing issue for the cadres in Shawan and in the surrounding villages. From their surnames, one can tell that the cadres do not belong to the major lineages in town, which means that they are probably sands people who were recruited into the party after the revolution. One time, I drew only puzzlement and blank stares from them when I asked about the “double toenail,” a myth used by the town people to distinguish them from the Dan. 27. See the management of daily affairs of the community in “Xinhai nian jingli xiangzu caobu” and “Tianfu zazhi.” These documents are kept at the Panyu township government office. 28. In an interview with He Xuan, one of the sons of the founder of Xinhe, he said that his brother He Shang, the manager of the enterprise, contracted with the Wu lineage of Nancun in Panyu and with the Minglun Tang of Dongguan. 29. At the time, there were four refineries. The biggest was the one operated by the He of Shengli, with a press of 70–80 horsepower and ten furnaces. He Shang’s Xinxinghe owned a 50-horsepower press and six furnaces. The enterprises were most prosperous during the period of Japanese occupation. One of the supervisors of He Shang was a native of Shunde, who was shot as a local boss during the land reform. 30. In an interview, He Shang’s younger brother confirmed that the big tenant contractors often paid a rent of 60 catties per mu to the Liugeng Tang and then rented the land out to peasants or smaller tenant contractors for 80–100 catties per mu. I think the rent paid to the Liugeng Tang included the government taxes. 31. Local residents referred to him as the largest of the four tenant contractors. See Wu and Yang (1984). Shengli Enterprises is listed as having hired one hundred long-term foremen (daqing) and fifty grain collectors ( yageng) and having received an annual income of 123,400 shi of grain. 32. According to some of his contemporaries, He Duan came to the auctions with a group of followers carrying machine guns. In 1939, he took over the Mingde school, named after the founder of the He lineage in Shawan, and renamed it after himself. After the townwide committee was formed in 1940, the school was renamed Xiangxian Middle School. See He Pinduan (1985). In 1989, I interviewed several of He Duan’s former staff. 33. This was related to me by He Rennong, whose father was the ninth son of the founder of Liji. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:51 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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34. A former head of a temple in Shawan, He Zhengheng, alleged that it was the temples, not the ancestral halls, that were dismantled and seriously damaged. Large statues of deities were cut up and sold. The temples taken apart were Puti Temple, Guanyin Temple, and Banshan Nunnery. The seven-story pagoda was also taken apart layer by layer. 35. He Qianwen was the younger brother of a powerful local boss nicknamed Zhouchang Cheng, who was killed in Guangzhou by rivals in 1945. He stationed himself in the sands at the southwestern edge of Panyu county but kept a home in a study chamber in Shawan bought by his brother. The ancestral hall was nicknamed by residents the “Yiding ci” because the family had very few male heirs. 36. He Cheng’s younger brother, whom I interviewed, said that he received payments from Shenxi, Xianqing, and Kongan, all large segment trusts. 37. Tilly (1974) points to a situation not unlike that of Republican rural China. The persistent bonds of kin and territorial enclaves were powerful political tools in a society in flux. Although he was describing the violent basis of rural leadership in Sicily in the same period, his words are remarkably applicable to the situation in Republican China. See also Duara (1987) on “state involution,” and Gilsenan (1986). 38. Feierman (1990) describes a similar problem for analyzing social change in Tanzania in the following: “The difficult task in actual historical analysis is to create a method and a form of ethnographic description which can capture the cultural categories as both continuous and in transformation, and the actors as both creating new language and speaking inherited words, all at the same time.”

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14 The Cultural Landscape of Luxury Housing in South China A Regional History

A Question of Space In less than two decades since the early 1980s, China’s pace of liberalization has accelerated beyond most expectations. The tens of millions of “floating population” highlight the breakdown of a system of household registration that has kept a rural population grounded since 1957.1 Market-based consumer revolution in China’s boomtowns and cities drastically reduces the dependence of urban populations on bureaucratic state allocations.2 The global flow of capital into China is evident in the form of industrial parks that are sites of joint-venture factories producing high-tech commodities for the world market (Fung 1997). There are the special economic zones along the coast stretching from Dalian to Shenzhen, where factories owned by Taiwanese and Hong Kong–based companies employ millions of young migrant workers from the inland provinces (Lee 1998, Pun 2000, Sung 1998). Market-driven media networks are finally encroaching upon state monopolies and are giving China audiences a gendered public space.3 The rush to embrace the world generates a kaleidoscope of domestic energies, as families engage with McDonald’s and fast food on their own terms.4 Likewise, filmmakers, novelists, rock musicians, and their fans are offering alternative sensations in popular culture which are neither duplicates of things foreign nor fitting within state parameters (Zha 1995, Huot 2000). Although the Chinese government has tried to be selective in its economic liberalization, the social, cultural, and political implications of introducing the market are profound. Scholars increasingly explore issues of liminal private space, public sphere, civil society, and flexible citizenship.5 On the surface, it seems that after decades of state penetration and control, the common people are finally given leisure time and channels to engage with a world outside of China. Some scholars, however, have stressed the involuted presence of the state in everyday life and popular consciousness. In a special edition of Positions, Jing Wang and others point to the continuing presence of state agenda in the promotion of leisure and the shaping of the culture industry.6 State and society can hardly be viewed as dichotomous. The issue is how to analyze the interactive process and to appreciate the agency of those engaged in it.7 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Translocal movements of people, their attachments, and aspirations are not new in Chinese history, but the unleashing of desperate energies after nearly half a century of Maoist restrictions has a unique angle to it (Faure and Siu 2003). It is not the first time people have been feverish about particular fads and commodities in the postMao era. One therefore wonders about the recent housing craze. If the government at various levels is behind the manufacturing of a private housing market, and knowing consumers are feverish about acquiring real estate properties, what is revealing about the nature and the pace of China’s recent liberalization? At a micro level, to what extent is the power of state bureaucracies lingering in the minds of Chinese consumers who have been reeling from decades of deprivation and isolation? When an array of commodities is thrust upon an entire generation of unfamiliar consumers, are they producing new languages of family, social mobility, and identity? What stands between them and a tidal wave of global images? At a macro level, are China’s urban places, with their fluid population mixes, their booming private housing markets, their administrative restructuring, and their intercity linkages, becoming significant nodes for new regional political economies? This chapter attempts to use the “fever” for luxury housing in post-Mao Guangdong to highlight a historically specific circulation of cultural meanings in the making of a regional landscape. Many regions of China experienced a building boom in the 1990s. Overseas Chinese capital, particularly that from Hong Kong developers, has partially shaped the skyline of coastal metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai—luxury housing estates, shopping malls, five-star hotels, golf courses, and clubs.8 Private housing markets in these cities have grown with remarkable speed and intensity, and a large portion of this growth is fueled by government danwei providing units for employees to purchase at subsidized prices. During the 1980s and early 1990s, most of the overseas private developers aimed at buyers and renters from international corporations and entrepreneurs setting up businesses in China’s metropolitan areas. The imagined market did not materialize, and many took heavy losses. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the government had introduced laws to give flexibility to urban residents. Developers adjusted by cultivating domestic demand.9 Where private developers enter the market to offer affordable choices, families have explored the “one family two systems” strategy in housing as they have in jobs. One member may explore entrepreneurial ventures while another holds onto state sector allocations for basic security. In pursing their own intimate spaces in a more mobile housing situation that allows residents to straddle state and market, are they redefining social hierarchies that have previously been shaped by bureaucratic agenda and political privilege? Have their notions of place-based identities and loyalties changed by the new housing choices? These questions about the emerging cultural landscapes in the post-reform period share certain conceptual and methodological assumptions. In “Beyond ‘Culture’: This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Space, Place and the Politics of Difference,” anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James  Ferguson point to the constructed nature of space, place, and the identities attached to them (Gupta and Ferguson 1992/1997). Physically, space is continuous. What makes space into “places” with their distinguishing, demarcated character (such as localities, regions, nations) involves deep meanings and identities attached to them. The means and substance by which places are defined, naturalized and differentiated are largely based on power relationships among those involved in the construction. The politics of difference, as Gupta and Ferguson term it, alerts us to critically look at the assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture, and their representation in the social sciences. This is particularly pertinent when one tries to conceptualize those who are at the margins of these defined places and who are mobile (Malkki 1992, 1995). To Gupta and Ferguson (1992/1997), and others such as Jameson (1984) and Harvey (1990), the postmodern condition does not make space irrelevant. Instead, spaces are re-territorialized by different logics and agendas. Sociologist Sharon Zukin, architectural historian Dolores Hayden, and anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and James Holston have joined a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to highlight how culture and power are intertwined in the making of urban landscapes and how these processes constitute complex mediation between the local and the global (Zukin 1991, Hayden 1995, Jameson and Miyoshi 1998, Holston 1999). Applying their analytical tools to the south China situation, I pay particular attention to the political, economic forces, historically induced, that shape the hardening and softening of the “boundary” between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. The historical process allows perceptions of difference to arise, which, in the present age of market-based fluidity, inform individuals and families to pursue their acquisition of privatized space. South China as a region is being re-territorialized, and this regionalized process is of great conceptual importance to the way we understand how previously constructed localities in China are refashioning themselves with real or imagined “global” market forces. In recent academic debates involving the ways global and local forces intertwine, the positioning of the “regional” arena might not have been given the attention it deserves. By “region,” I do not mean a geographic entity often taken as given, but one that is the product of conscious self-fashioning by those involved in its making.10 Their maneuvers are not random. The discursive powers of the state continue to set parameters. It is also important to appreciate the structuring impact of the developers, the real estate and marketing agents, the banking and legal institutions, and a culture industry shaping tastes, styles, and aspirations. Equally influential are the historical experiences of locally situated agents. Their experiences may seem intangible, but they help define the imaginable.11 This chapter treats “regional history” as a significant analytical layer mediating our conception of the encounter between entrenched local meanings and the fluidities of global capital. Permeating all three layers is the involuted presence of the post-reform This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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state, in both its ideological parameters and its institutional importance. Attention to state presence in this chapter engages with broader theoretical discussions on urban spaces and globalization. Rather than seeing global forces erode the nationstate, it joins other scholarship in seeing the state as a crucial player and facilitator. State capacities are concentrated in urban nodes that provide significant institutional locations for the global flow of commodities, populations, and images. However, by their inherently differentiated nature, these nodes are also arenas for intense contestations between state institutions and a broad range of stakeholders, and among the stakeholders themselves (Brenner 1997; Harvey 1990; Appadurai 1996, 2000; Holston 1999; Sassen 1991; Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003; Purcell 2003). The chapter hopes to use an emerging cultural (and physical) landscape of luxury housing in south China to highlight the interlocking, mutually reinforcing and contradicting processes within the hierarchy of spatial scales, linking the local, the regional and the global. The spatial scale given particular attention here is what constitutes “the regional.” The research agenda for capturing regional fluidity necessitates an ethnographic method quite different from the conventional, single site of intensive investigation. In  a 1995 article, George Marcus discusses the emergent multi-sited ethnography, which is to “examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffused time-space” (Marcus 1998, p. 79). To understand the region as a contingent entity, the ethnographer needs to capture the narratives of local subjects whose perspectives, emotions and strategic positioning shift with the regional construct in the making. More specifically, “multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography” (Marcus 1998, p. 90). I intend to use this ethnographic method to culturally “map” the crossborder dynamics of the region being refashioned.

A Regional Housing Buffet The regional landscape of luxury housing is driven by the rapid re-integration of Hong Kong with southern China. Unlike those in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities like Tianjin and Wuhan, the cultural images produced and consumed in this housing market are peculiarly fluid and mixed. There are three dynamic metropolitan areas, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, linked to Hong Kong and to one another by airports, trains, boats, and a network of highways. For decades, Shenzhen was a sleepy border town between Hong Kong and the mainland. By the early 2000s, it miraculously grew into a commercial and industrial city of nearly four million. The human landscape is not characteristically “local.” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Instead, the city attracts migrant construction workers from provinces such as Heilongjiang, Hunan, and Sichuan. Dagongmei (maiden workers) fill the assembly lines in electronic factories. Speculators, drug and human traffickers, smugglers, and representatives of government agencies from every province converge there to capture the good life on the fast track. In the newer part of the city, magnificent office towers, high-rises, and golf clubs catering to the new rich and foreign businessmen have edged out factory dormitories. A few recent landmarks are the CITIC tower, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and numerous luxury residential complexes. They line wide boulevards that are jammed with trucks, buses, taxis, and luxury sedans. In Guangzhou, with a concentration of entrenched government interests, danweibuilt private housing shares the cityscape with non-government and overseas projects. Nonetheless, architectural styles of the new apartment complexes drift toward the tastes of those exposed to the Hong Kong market. The ultra-modern apartments with high-tech fixtures in Guangzhou are as ambitious as those in Shenzhen in capturing global themes designed to attract the cosmopolitan tastes of high finance in the 21st century (see Figure 14.1).12

Figure 14.1 CITIC Tower at the Guangzhou East train station (photo taken in 2002)

Competing but tied to these metropolises are municipalities in the Pearl River Delta that are magnets in their own right—Jiangmen, Shunde, Zhongshan, Foshan, Panyu, Dongguan. Massive luxury housing complexes flaunt the glittering indulgences This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of emperors of an imagined past. They cater to a class of Hong Kong buyers who might have been rural migrants from the area over the past decades but who could not afford comfortable housing in Hong Kong. With increasing physical and political integration between Hong Kong and the mainland, weekly or bi-weekly commuting is no longer an expensive or inconvenient affair. Holiday homes numbering tens of thousands cluster around artificial lakes and “back to nature” organic farms, artificially created as refuges for city families. Prices are affordable for most Hong Kong families. A spacious two-bedroom apartment starts at 150,000 yuan. Yet nearby, tall furnaces from township industries spew coal dust and chemical fumes into the air. The housing buffet in south China is at once broadly transnational and intensely parochial, seemingly driven by a cut-throat market as much as it is entrenched in local political economies and Maoist baggage. Its offerings are hierarchically structured while chaotically open for consumers in search of their wildest dreams. Has this consumption revolution spun out of control from the political center, energized by global marketing forces that a decade or so ago were only remotely imaginable? Or  has China’s recent worldly embrace enticed Hong Kong back into a national orbit? A political tug of war continues in the precarious balance of “one country, two systems” between Hong Kong and mainland China. But culturally and socially, the blurring of the border has become an everyday reality. The formal approval of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization has spurred another flurry of active positioning by global corporations eyeing the China market. In addition, local debates concerning the twenty-four-hour opening of the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen add to some frenzied buying of properties in Shenzhen and to a further drop in house prices in the northern districts of the New Territories in Hong Kong.13 The fluidity of the situation is profound. A particular land auction sends price and profitability signals to developers, and the barometer of demand on both sides of the border fluctuates almost instantly.14

No Strangers at the Gate In 1998, a local newspaper warned of the chaotic situation at the border crossings between Hong Kong and Guangdong, as a crowd numbering 220,000 crossed the border in a day during the Qingming festival. The number was 140 percent higher than that in 1996 (Wen Wei Po 1998). According to Ta Kung Pao (2001), during the day of Qingming, over 200,000 crossed the border at the Lo Wu gate alone. Hong Kong government statistics reported 50 million entries of Hong Kong residents into China in the year 2000. Thirty percent were business in nature. Altogether, Hong Kong residents spent HK$29.4 billion in China that year (Ming Pao 2001). Increasingly, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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they commute to work in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and the Pearl River Delta. Large Hong Kong–based corporations (such as The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Hang Seng Bank, and Cathay Pacific Airways) are establishing branches and administrative offices in Guangzhou and Shenzhen to avoid the high rents in Hong Kong. For the week of the Chinese New Year holidays in February 2002, Hong Kong government departments anticipated six million border crossings (exits and entries), a jump of 11.5 percent from a similar period last year (Ming Pao 2002b). When commuters initially caught the attention of the media, the situation involved an alarming rate of extramarital affairs by Hong Kong contractors, transport workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs whose work necessitated their operating in mainland factories or work sites. Particular neighborhoods sprang up along major transport routes that earned notoriety as “mistress villages.”15 In the ensuing five years, technical professionals and junior managers followed. In a conference organized by the Hong Kong Youth Association, a member of a service organization estimated that there were about 300,000 to 400,000 Hong Kong residents working in China.16 Anticipating China’s entry into the WTO, a survey conducted by the youth organization showed that 45 percent of those interviewed were willing to pursue their careers in China, most of them educated professionals (Apple Daily 2001). The Census and Statistics Department predicted that, by the year 2029, Hong Kong’s population would reach nine million. Migration would be the main source of growth for the territory, taking up 76 percent of the increase. Mobile residents (that is, those living in China and working in Hong Kong, or vice versa) would increase from the present number of 179,000 to 313,000.17 Other surveys indicated that a million increasingly younger residents will consider buying property in Guangdong (My New Home 2000). The way the boundary between Hong Kong and south China is blurred is unprecedented. One may argue that, historically, the border has never been a hard one. Hong Kong had absorbed waves of immigrants from China since it was established as a British colony in 1843. Traders, laborers and their families have commuted and networked. Even after the Second World War, when the political boundary hardened, refugees continued to pour into Hong Kong. First came the returnees after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Hundreds of thousands fled the mainland in the wake of the Communist revolution in 1949. The famine during the Great Leap Forward (1959–61) triggered another wave. So did the violence of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The one fresh in everyone’s memory took place in 1979–81, when China began to liberalize after the death of Mao. By the time the Hong Kong government applied strict border control by abolishing the touch-base policy and activating immediate repatriation of illegal entrants, over half a million had landed in the city. This single, male, migrant population was largely from three of southern China’s poorest rural regions (eastern Guangdong, western Pearl River This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Delta, and southern Fujian). Ethnically Hakka and “Hoklo” (coastal fishermen from southern Fujian, Shanwei of eastern Guangdong, and Jiangmen), they went back to their home communities to seek spouses through the 1980s.18 The 1990s saw a massive number of these “new immigrant” families using various channels to enter Hong Kong. Although the Hong Kong government had increased the quota for legal entry (the daily quota being 150), many had to wait for years.19 Where did these families live? How were the children cared for if the fathers worked in Hong Kong and the mothers waited in China? Increasingly, one found hundreds of commuting school children with the right of abode in Hong Kong. They lived with their mothers in Shenzhen and in towns along the Kowloon-Guangzhou railway, and they attended schools in Hong Kong every day. Government officials finally began to consider policy suggestions that the border be kept soft and that the Pearl River Delta should be systematically developed as a hinterland to the Hong Kong metropolitan area. It should be a source not only of quality labor, land, and industrial products, but also of affordable housing and services for increasingly large numbers of commuting families.

Real Estate Euphoria Back in the early 1990s, the Chinese government initiated ways to unload social provisions (such as housing) to the market. The southern tour of Deng Xiaoping gave private housing development in Guangdong a visible boost. It went wild in 1992–93. In 1993, I visited a new home in a housing development in Panyu county adjacent to Guangzhou. It was a refreshing sight. Hundreds of apartments in nine-story blocks clustered neatly together, with spacious and tasteful landscaping between the blocks. There were no elevators. The bare concrete interior walls displayed touches of rough workmanship that served as a reminder of the colorless living during the Maoist era. However, the uniformed security guards in the lobby were generally courteous. The apartment complex gave visitors the impression that they were more than utilitarian. A friend showed off the clearly marked parking spaces, none being occupied at the time. A small, dimly lit supermarket was a novelty. There was even a pastry shop selling Hong Kong–style sweet buns. I soon found out that the developer was a publicly listed company in Hong Kong of which the Guangdong Provincial Government owned a large share. However, despite a vigorous sales promotion in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, few units were occupied. A two-bedroom apartment was priced at 250,000 yuan, quite beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. Bank mortgages for residential housing were hardly heard of. Property ownership was still unsure in many people’s minds, especially when the builders were not work units or government bureaus. Public transportation was an extra concern. Private cars and taxis were few and far between. Nonetheless, my informant had just left the government sector This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to become a businessman. Despite the uncertainties, his acquisition was a target for envy. At about the same time, in 1993, I attended an “Arts Festival” in a township (zhen) near Jiangmen, on the western edge of the Pearl River Delta. The festival centered on the deity in a community temple built during the late imperial period. While villagers believed in a religious revival, the organizers—town cadres and members of the native place association in Hong Kong—were promoting a new luxury housing complex to be built on the scenic northern part of the island community. They were also raising funds to build a bridge that would link the island to Jiangmen city. The cadres believed that logically the bridge would raise real estate value of the entire township. Glossy promotional materials targeted overseas Chinese buyers. Developers and architects from Hong Kong were feasted while important municipal officials gave grand speeches. Many members of the native place association and business friends bought into the project.20 However, in Guangdong and elsewhere in China, the central government put an abrupt brake on unplanned development projects. Fiscal tightening (hongguan tiaokong) started in the second half of 1993. Bank credits for housing schemes dried up as quickly as they had come. Developers who took deposits from buyers abandoned projects, declared bankruptcy, or fled the area. Many buyers never saw their dream villas. Empty shells of individual “villas” and rusted pipes stood in overgrown fields as eerie reminders of a blind rush to get rich and comfortable. The more notorious cases involved projects in Danshui (Huiyang) on the eastern edge of the delta, home to a large number of Hong Kong’s “new immigrants.” Many bought into the housing market there for future retirement. Seven years after, frustrated working families who had lost their savings were still venting their anger by taking to the streets in Hong Kong.21 (See Figure 14.2.)

Marketing Life on the Fast Track The housing market in south China was quiet from 1995 to 1998; a major cause was the political situation in Hong Kong. From the end of 1995, speculators in Hong Kong and China were pouring resources into the securities and housing markets in Hong Kong. Some luxury housing projects in the top end of the real estate markets were asking prices that exceeded HK$20,000 per square foot. Buyers kept coming and banks gave away enormous mortgages. All came to an end during the Asian financial crisis. Real estate prices fell by an average of 40 to 60 percent and continued to slide. In addition to the “grievance buyers” who mainly came from working and “new immigrant” families, middle-class families and China speculators were badly hurt by the Hong Kong real estate crash. The new popular term “negative asset” has become daily parlance in the media and political satire. Many developers across the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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border who had hoped for the political changeover in 1997 to boost sales in south China finally left the market.

Figure 14.2 Lan mei lou. Unfinished buildings in the Huiyang area left from the period of fiscal tightening in the mid-1990s.

By 1999, however, I noticed a change in the mood. Many government units in Guangdong had allowed their staff to buy housing developed by those units at highly subsidized prices. A friend had an interior designer redo his living quarters, equipped with air conditioning, hardwood floors, and modern bathrooms. He and his family also spent weekends at a “holiday home” just outside of the city. The businessman who bought a two-bedroom apartment in 1993 has moved on to a newer one in the northern edge of Guangzhou. On the interior design alone, including an Italian-looking chandelier and marble-lined bathrooms, he has spent tens of thousands. He  now owns a medium-sized consulting agency, employing nearly twenty staff members with university degrees. He drives his own Japanese car, talks on his cell phone, and commutes between his offices in Guangzhou and other cities in Guangdong.22 These individual ventures may have reflected the rising buying power of urban families in the Pearl River Delta. A report from Guangzhou described how demands from Guangzhou residents boosted the real estate market of the surrounding municipalities. Following that of Panyu and Shunde, Huadu (formerly Huaxian, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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a less prosperous Hakka county north of Guangzhou) organized a group promotion of twenty-two of its high-end housing projects in Guangzhou during the summer of 1999. Developers were said to be confident of the future airport nearby bringing a new demand to the area. Local government stressed the importance of overall infrastructural planning and vowed to eliminate the phenomenon of the “lan mei lou” (unfinished housing projects). The report also quoted some government statistics: from January to July, the total area of advanced sales of housing jumped 1.5 times from a similar period the year before. It was also estimated that house prices rose at a similar rate.23 Developers and sale agents in Hong Kong also seemed to have regained confidence. Since late 1999, increasing numbers had staged long-term marketing exhibitions in commercial neighborhoods in Kowloon (Hong Kong), aiming at medium-income households who had business and family ties in Guangdong. Marketing agents had also mounted massive promotional campaigns on local Chinese-language television channels, aiming at both Hong Kong and Guangdong viewers. On buses and trains, I heard middle-aged housewives (shi nai) making plans with friends for mahjong games on weekend trips to their holiday homes in Panyu, Shunde, and Zhongshan. Others compared schedules of various buses and boats, and prices of food and services. Occasionally, one heard complaints about children working for long weeks “up there” and spending less and less time in Hong Kong. On husbands, the conversations were often mixed with anxiety and disdain. If given a chance, the men would pick up “northern prostitutes,” and set up second homes across the border. Patrons in the “mistress villages,” these Hong Kong matrons claimed, were no longer limited to truck drivers and site contractors.24 In a conversation in late 1999, a senior staff member of a real estate marketing chain in Hong Kong summed up the situation. He maintained that most buyers of properties in the Pearl River Delta this time were small businessmen who commuted between Hong Kong and Guangdong. They were not as affected by the financial crisis as those in the global finance sector. The gradual turnaround of the region’s economy had allowed some to accumulate savings. The new buyers also seemed realistic about the Hong Kong housing market. The ones with potential for value appreciation were out of their reach; the value of low-end properties would only depreciate further. It was probably more secure to buy in China. Developers finished building the new housing complexes before they were put on the market. The lan mei lou phenomenon would not be repeated. Once a development was successful in attracting Hong Kong residents, potential buyers tended to take that as a guarantee for quality.25 The property market had also been increasingly packaged with an entire cultural industry of consumption that focused on “eat, drink, and be merry”: specialty shops, disco parties, water sports, food streets, designer clothing malls, even artificial skiing slopes.26 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In the summer of 2000, I joined a group of Hong Kong residents for a day trip to a holiday-style housing estate in the Pearl River Delta. The trip was a weekly one arranged by the developer and sales agent of the highly advertised housing estate. Interested individuals and families signed up for the trips to gain an on-site look at the properties. There was a busload of largely middle-aged couples with children. They were potential house owners. Some had already bought the property in the exhibition sales office in Hong Kong and were checking out their new units. A third of the group, by the end of the day, would have signed contracts with the developer at the sales office on site. Some, like me, were just scouting around. The motivations for house buying varied within a small range. Most of the seventy-odd passengers seemed to have come from lower-middle-income families. One could tell from where they lived in Kowloon and the New Territories. From our casual conversations on the trip, I sensed that many felt that they would never be able to afford decent housing in Hong Kong. They also worried that the economic boom in the Pearl River Delta would drive house prices up in the future. To acquire a property across the border had two advantages in their minds: to have a relatively affordable vacation home for the family until retirement. By then, the border between Hong Kong and China would be further blurred, transportation less time-consuming, and the infrastructure of social services adequate. The properties in the delta would be perfect for them as retirement homes. When asked “why the delta,” the answers had little to do with returning to one’s native place. Few of the buyers were originally from the area. An elderly couple from Shanghai whose children grew up in Hong Kong in the postwar decades decided to “settle” in the housing estate in Guangdong. They would have preferred to return to Shanghai, but it would be easier and less expensive for their children and grandchildren to come to the delta on the weekends. The recreational facilities and the environment offered by the housing estate were already far beyond what they could have ever wished for in Hong Kong. In my mind, the houses appeared “tu” (hick) with their faked baroque designs mixed with an appearance of imperial extravagance. Across the river from the villas, one saw furnaces spewing smoke and coal dust. Township enterprises with migrant laborers and makeshift dormitories broke up the overgrown fields. My companions did not seem bothered by the sight of these factories. Once we entered the heavily guarded gate of the housing estate, we were made to feel that we had entered a dream world of luxury and leisure. There was, however, an awareness of differences in class cultures. My travel companions were intrigued to learn that I lived in the Mid-Levels on Hong Kong Island, a neighborhood of expatriates and educated professional families. They kept saying, “You could not possibly be interested in a place in the delta. Your living environment in Hong Kong is nice, and you go abroad for vacations.” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The resident mix was different in an estate in a municipality adjacent to Guangzhou. I visited it only two months earlier during the extended May 1st holiday in China. The housing complex was a joint venture by an overseas Chinese and the municipal government. Houses and apartments built during the earlier stages were occupied, while new blocks continued to be built and sold. The grounds were ghostly quiet during weekdays. Sales agents estimated that over 65 percent of the occupants were from Hong Kong. Families used the estate as a weekend holiday resort. Many bought the apartments for around HK$300,000–$400,000. The commuting from Hong Kong took about four hours, by direct bus, boat, or train via Guangzhou. The resort clubhouse offered a variety of Western-style buffet and Chinese cuisine. The swimming pools were designed for families. Some of the selling points, according to promotional materials, were the quiet, green environment and the farm where residents could actually grow their own vegetables. There were bike paths and a large artificial lake. A line of exclusive villas with private swimming pools bordered the lake. Few Hong Kong buyers invested the HK$12 million for these villas. The occupants were mostly Taiwanese businessmen who operated factories in neighboring Dongguan municipality and in Nansha, a new industrial area on the southern tip of Panyu municipality. Security and competence in management of the estate were major attractions for them. What surprised me during that visit in 2000 was the international school. It was obviously not meant for Hong Kong children. Some of the students might be children of the several hundred thousand Taiwanese factory owners and managers in the region. Increasingly, families from Guangzhou were sending children there. Admission required that the family acquired a property in the estate. A retired couple we visited live in a two-bedroom apartment with a ground-floor garden. Their son, who worked in Guangzhou, owned the property. The couple took care of the grandchildren who attended the international school. Another son of the couple lived nearby in a townhouse. He was a self-employed professional and maintained a home office equipped with computers and an Internet hookup. He commutes to Guangzhou a few days a week, and drives his Japanese luxury sedan. He and his family obviously belonged to Guangzhou’s rising middle class. They shared the use of the estate with lower-middle-income Hong Kong residents who periodically escaped from their cramped apartments and tense working lives to enjoy a weekend of leisure and space. The images of the estate were changing. The immediate plans were for a professional conference complex and a small hospital. There was also talk of a new subway station connecting the municipal city to Guangzhou. This feature, the developers hoped, will attract more middle-class families from the city. Two months later, another Guangzhou resident invited me to his family’s newly acquired apartment in an estate immediately outside the city. His parents had used This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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savings to buy two apartments, one for each son. While all had housing from their work units in Guangzhou, the family now uses the property as a weekend home. Newer and more luxurious blocks continued to be built on the grounds of the estate. The exhibition and sales halls, however, were filled with potential homebuyers from Guangzhou, not from Hong Kong. The estate operated buses to Hong Kong, but the heavily subscribed ones were the hourly buses to the new Tianhe area of Guangzhou, where one found banks, government offices, and modern shopping malls (such as Times Square) with Western-style cafés and restaurants. Sales representatives roughly estimated that, of the residents, 10 percent were expatriates who rented apartments. Another 20 percent might be families from Hong Kong. The rest were professionals from Guangzhou and Panyu who drove their own cars. There was a sizable swimming pool and gym. The grounds were lined with trees and lawns. The clubhouse was small and services lean compared to those in estates in Shunde and Panyu municipalities. Within the estate were small restaurants and stores for everyday consumptions. Immediately outside the gate, one found a Hong Kong–style superstore, operated by a leading listed company in Hong Kong. The entire environment presented itself as a suburban housing complex for professional commuters. When the sale of a high-rise subdivision was promoted in 1999, the agencies distributed information on VCDs. As in the Panyu estate, there was a sizable international school for the children of local residents. Each time after visiting my friends in Guangzhou, I would take the through train to Hong Kong. Sipping coffee at one of the cafés at Times Square near the new Guangzhou train station, I increasingly found myself imagining that I was already in Hong Kong. The layout of the public spaces, the shops and their designer displays, the civility of the service staff, and the general sophistication of the shoppers were familiar to a Hong Konger. At odd hours, I would take the Guangzhou-Shenzhen express train, cross the border at Lo Wu, and ride the subway back to downtown Hong Kong. Crossing the border at Lo Wu was a very different experience from disembarking the through train at the Kowloon station. The commuters at Lo Wu were mostly working families taking advantage of cheap recreational services in Shenzhen. Many lived in Sheung Shui and Fanling, two new towns in the New Territories of Hong Kong that had been rapidly developed to accommodate the new immigrants from rural Guangdong. The families crossed the border back to China to shop for weekly groceries.27 Doing so also took less time than going to downtown Kowloon or Hong Kong. Through their daily consumptions, be it groceries, massage services, karaoke bars, or  specialty foods, the regional orientations for these Hong Kongers were shifting north. In their minds, the political boundary was next to invisible.28 The cultural orientations of the Shenzhen housing market had also changed. A new group of strategically placed developers had since entered the scene. Rather than concentrating their projects in the older commercial district near the Lo Wu This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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border crossing, where small-scale, lower-income consumers from Hong Kong congregated, the developers were spreading their projects along future stations of the Shenzhen subway system. Their potential buyers were globally oriented young professionals, from both China and Hong Kong.29 Subway construction started in October 1999. Its first phase consisted of fourteen stations linking the city from west to east. At the eastern end, it would connect with the Hong Kong train and subway systems through the Lo Wu border crossing. At the western end, it would network with the new municipal government complex and the Huanggang border crossing into Hong Kong. The area was also adjacent to a luxury resort and golf club, close to the Guangzhou-Shenzhen highway. In anticipation of China entering the World Trade Organization, the Shenzhen Municipal Government had relocated itself to the new area with massive infrastructural coordination, modeling itself after Canberra in Australia.30 The plan to build the new Shenzhen Central District was instituted in 1995. Construction began in 1998. Its aim had been to position in the Pearl River Delta a Hong Kong–Shenzhen– Guangzhou international “citybelt” for the new century. The plan stressed engagement with professionals and a new kind of citizen. The urban design involves a public space system with a transport system, government offices, a citizen center and plaza, a high-tech fair exhibition hall, a youth palace, a shopping park, and numerous residential developments.31 The developers in the area were the movers and shakers of Guangdong: the Shenye Group (Shenzhen Properties), the Zhongyin Group (Bank of China), the Zhonghai Group (China Overseas), the Shenzhen Municipal Government, and the Cheung Kong and Hutchison-Whampoa Groups from Hong Kong. A rough estimate of the housing complexes being built along the first phase of the subway yields sixty-three ongoing projects (My New Home 2000). In their promotion, sales, and management, some major real estate agencies, listed in the Hong Kong stock exchange, were involved. The participation of the big two, Centerline and Midland, gave Hong Kong buyers a great deal of exposure and assurance.32 Five months after the initial sales of a project by a leading Hong Kong developer in Shenzhen, I followed some of its staff members for a site visit.33 From the border crossing, we drove along a six-lane city boulevard and took only three minutes to reach the exhibition hall. The housing complex had a European name and was marketed as the model for essential living for the new millennium. I could imagine the potential buyers, mainly local professionals and upstarts in the Shenzhen area, facing the two-story screen with lasers beaming the clean, cool dreamland of cyberspace and the elevated horizon of global finance. The first image that flashes across the screen was a healthy crawling baby, with the caption “Believe in the present. Believe in the future. To aspire is the force behind progress, and progress is the beginning of a new living.” In a promotional booklet, the chief architect, commenting on the facilities of the complex, stated his aim “to give residents a unique freedom of a spacious This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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environment.” The entire development was based upon the concept of “nurturing the new generation with flawless perfection, with a healthy dose of nature, with emphasis on a generous and intelligent living space.”34 The model apartments provided different living styles, from the younger in-look to the classic European elegance. Commenting on the concept of the EZ-life, the interior designer was quoted as saying, “the new way of life is more interactive. Everything’s in your own hands. Surf the Net, check your stocks, read your email, chat online, study online, watch the latest blockbusters and even have your daily shopping delivered, all from the comfort of your armchair.” The apartments were provided with individual broadband network connections. The cyber feel extended to intelligent elevators that were programmed to take one to the floor the moment one entered the hall. It was to impress professionals who attended the trade fairs down the block.35 According to staff members, advanced sales of phase one went well. The eight hundred units, averaging at US$100 per square foot, sold out almost immediately. Queues formed early in the morning. The sales agents on site accepted so many cash deposits during the first day of sales that they had to call special security guards from the bank to transport the millions collected. Another three thousand advanced units were marketed a month later in Hong Kong.36 An international kindergarten was established with phase one to accommodate the children of Hong Kong buyers who had made Shenzhen their home. An internationally tracked primary and secondary school would follow in later phases. So would a Hong Kong–style superstore or market. The promotional materials repeatedly stressed the selling points of the project: brand name, quality management, high-class services, infrastructural planning to ensure a quality environment within and outside the estate. The complex would provide potential buyers a secure presence and a visionary future. The local staff members were from big cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou. They were prime examples of the rising young professional class in China. A few years out of college, they were fluent in English, global in outlook, shrewd in marketing skills, and tuned to the workings of local governments. A few weeks later, I went with one of them to attend the grand opening of a superstore in Guangzhou. The local assistant managers mingled comfortably with the top foreign managers of the Hong Kong parent company. I took my time to survey the shop. On the clean and brightly lit shelves were fresh seafood and neatly packaged vegetables. There were also English cheeses, French wines, and a sushi bar. In the morning, retired grannies came to look around. The lunch crowd followed. By the late afternoon, young professional couples came through the subway to take home the evening’s meal. The shop targeted a clientele of 300,000. What these consumers took with them would not be just groceries but the preference of a new lifestyle signifying wide choices, a healthy environment, and competent service. Although the company’s aim was undoubtedly profit, I shared the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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excitement of the managers that they were using an ordinary space (a supermarket) and mundane activities (daily grocery shopping) to do extraordinary things (cultivating the tastes of China’s emerging middle class). Three months later, one staff member sent me an email with the happy message that the shop’s sales had hit five million yuan a day.

A Global, Regional, and Local Narrative In this short chapter, I have tried to use the luxury housing market in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong to outline a changing cultural landscape. In theoretical terms, space is always continuous. The process of demarcating space into meaningful places and scales involves complex historical, economic, and political agency. Undoubtedly, the liberalizing efforts of the post-Mao state have set a macro discursive parameter for its population to engage with market forces. In housing as in thought, the market has provided new ways of appreciating private and public space, and has allowed residents of particular regions to embrace the world with creative means. Within individual buyers’ choices and designs of living space, these macro themes can be concretized in everyday life. One important mediating factor should be stressed—the defining, constituting framework of a regional political economy. To assess whether China’s liberalization direction is pursued, whether global images penetrate, or whether individuals are able to exercise their choices of living space, one has to integrate several levels of a conscious regional narrative. First, there are the stories of those who have moved around the region, as refugees in the postwar period or the split families of new immigrants. They constitute a major part of the human landscape, carrying their cultural baggage. Despite political rhetoric, the historical patterns of immigration and emigration between Guangdong and Hong Kong have always blurred the political boundary. The change of sovereignty for Hong Kong in 1997 accelerated the process of reintegration. However, implementing “one country, two systems” means that substantial social, economic, and level differences remain between Hong Kong and its Guangdong hinterland.37 Price differences between the two areas to a great extent determine what is affordable for a variety of social groups. Up to the present, the majority of house buyers are those marginalized by the cosmopolitan, fast-moving Hong Kong society of global high finance. Their turn to “the north” seems instinctive. They are most socially connected to the Pearl River Delta and least worried about a political reversal. Furthermore, localized developmental agendas pursued by municipalities in the Pearl River Delta shape both investment and consumption choices. The rise and fall of the housing market have rested on the planning visions of local governments and their ability to ensure a sound investment environment. They too have presented a dazzling variety of conscious, self-fashioning activities in the last two decades of This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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post-Mao liberalization, from demolishing entire neighborhoods that have been branded as old, to recycling community festivals.38 Another cluster of institutional channels includes the financial capacity of developers, their marketing and promotional networks, banks, and legal practitioners. Their businesses are intimately tied to those individuals and families who buy into the housing market. Their entrepreneurial stories have been bittersweet. The blind frenzy in the earlier stage of housing development and house buying took a heavy toll. Today, the revived housing market requires not only the flexing of financial and political muscles but also the intense cultivation of a cultural industry of consumption. Only the major players remain. The circulation of cultural meanings and political orientations involves catering to as well as shaping the imaginings and aspirations of potential buyers. The developers are great friends with the local media to create the necessary images. Consumers from both sides of the border eagerly participated. As indicated, I have pursued a rather unconventional, multi-sited ethnographic strategy in order to appreciate a cross-border cultural landscape in the making. In  order to follow the circulation of people, capital, images, and meaning in the creation of the global, the regional, and the local, I have become part of the fluidity. I appreciate the generosity of the middle-aged Hong Kong matrons who hardly know my name, but who have invited me to share their leisurely weekends in Panyu.39 My fellow travelers on the bus trip to the delta’s housing estate will continue to wonder why this middle-class stranger is interested in their dream houses. I have been a nuisance to sales agents in Hong Kong and on site. They cannot fathom my unanswerable questions but have not dismissed me as a total waste of time. I also share the anxiety of some junior managers in Hong Kong who experience increasing competition from Chinese counterparts. Female professionals have the added prospect of losing out in the cross-border marriage market. As a staff member of a housing project in Shenzhen, who has come from Shanghai, is happy to settle in one of the magnificent apartments promoted by her developer employer, young Hong Kong graduates seem politically ready to “move north” to take up career challenges. It is equally exciting to stroll around with my Guangzhou friends at the city’s Times Square to look for furnishings for their new apartments in Guangzhou’s suburbia. Occasionally when I visit boutique stores in Hong Kong, London, or New Haven, I have wondered whether a certain gift idea would fit a corner of their dining areas, or whether they are sipping the English tea I bought at Fortnum and Mason’s of Piccadilly. The changing cultural landscape of luxury living in Guangdong reflects how different groups on both sides of a disappearing border, with varying perceptions of the globe, the nation, and the region, pursue their individual fortunes and dreams. *The author thanks the organizers of a workshop held in Hangzhou, China, June 18–20, 2001. This is a slightly revised version of a chapter originally published This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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in a volume entitled Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture, edited by Jing Wang (London: Routledge 2005).

Notes 1.

See Solinger (1999) and Zhang’s “Contesting Crime, Order, and Migrant Spaces in Beijing” in Chen, Clark, Gottschang, and Jeffrey (2001), pp. 201–24. 2. See Davis et al. (1995), Dutton (1998); see Fraser’s “Inventing Oasis: Luxury Housing Advertisements and Reconfigurating Domestic Space in Shanghai” (pp. 25–53) and Davis’ “Introduction” in Davis (2000). 3. See Yang’s “Mass Media and Trasnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis” in Ong and Nonini (1997), pp. 287–322. See also Yang (1999). 4. See Yan’s “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing” in Davis (2000), pp. 201–25. See also Jing (2000). 5. See Calhoun (1994), Perry and Wasserstrom (1994) and Ong (1999). See also Kraus’s “Public Monuments and Private Pleasures in the Parks of Nanjing: A Tango in the Ruins of the Ming Emperor’s Palace” in Davis (2000), pp. 268–311. See Chen et al. (2001), and Dirlik and Zhang (2000). 6. See Wang (2001) on popular culture and the state, in Positions. She stresses the subtle state agenda and its maneuvers to capture the cultural market in order to exert control. For the notion of state involution in the everyday life of post-Mao China, see chapter 5 in this volume; on rituals, see chapter 6; on the family, see chapter 7; on community festivals, see Siu’s “Community Festivals in South China” in Lo, Pepper, and Tsui (1995), pp. 1–17. 7. See Zhang (2001a). For the late imperial period, on the agency of “merchants” in the interactive making of lineage, commerce and literati culture, see chapter 10 in this volume. A good summary of earlier works on power and agency under Maoism can be found in Kipnis (2003). 8. Shui On Development, a publicly listed company largely controlled by Hong Kong businessman Vincent Lo, was the first to invest in Shanghai’s private housing, highend shopping and leisure malls, and clubhouses. A famous project for the company is Xin Tiandi. Other leading Hong Kong developers include Cheung Kong Development, Henderson Development, Hung Lung Development, Kerry Development, and New World Development. These are among the largest developers listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. 9. See Li Yong’an (1998). This is a typical investor’s guide to Chinese real estate. Based on the author’s experience as a real estate consultant in Hong Kong and south China, the book provides basic knowledge on Chinese property laws, policies on taxation, markets, and technical details for choosing a residential property. The purpose of the book is undoubtedly entrepreneurial, to promote more sales. 10. See “Introduction” in Faure and Siu (1995) on the making of conscious regional constructs. The crucial components of this regional model are situated actors whose motives, agenda, and positioning efforts created interconnected processes. For a theoretical presentation of regional processes in geographical studies, see Cartier (2002). See also Cartier (2001). See also Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2003) for comparison. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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11. See Tsing (2000) on the treatment of “the global” as consciously defined by locally situated agents. 12. The apartment complexes along the banks of the Pearl River reminded me of those at London’s Canary Wharf. A high-rise apartment of about 140 square meters, with all modern facilities, was priced over a million yuan. On Ersha Island on the outskirts of Guangzhou, a known Hong Kong developer had built clusters of exclusive villas with high walls, private pools, and security guards, pricing at about 25 million yuan. 13. A report by Ming Pao (2002a) showed that average rent in Shanghai had shot up, whereas that of Hong Kong had dropped another 20 percent from the previous year. 14. See Ming Pao between October and November, 2001 on local debates and report of property prices and acquisitions. A recent government land auction in Shenzhen signaled to developers the rapid rise in land prices. Major Hong Kong developers were represented but few participated. After the auction, developers expected that more Hong Kong residents would drift back to the low-end housing market in northwestern New Territories, the district closest to Shenzhen. 15. A housing estate in Changping zhen, a popular stop for the Kowloon-Guangzhou train, was known as a place where “mistresses” congregated. The other popular place was Po Gut (Buji), a neighborhood adjacent to Shenzhen where one would not need special papers to enter, reside and work. 16. A report published by the government on Hong Kong residents who worked in China showed that from 1992 to 2002, the number of Hong Kong residents working in China jumped from 64,000 to about 240,000. The workers were largely in managerial positions, with an average monthly wage of HK$15,000. See Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR (2003a). 17. For a detailed analysis of the changing demographic patterns in Hong Kong and projections for the future, see Wong and Wong’s “The Importance of Migration Flow to Hong Kong’s Future” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 89–116. 18. See Liu and Peng (1995). The article records the drastic jump in the number of “illegal immigrants” being sent back from Hong Kong and held at the temporary camp at Huizhou City. In another article (1993), the same authors mention the jump in the number of “marriages involving an overseas resident,” largely women marrying male returnees. 19. See the list of legal daily entries as published by Wen Wei Po between January 1, 2001 and June 30, 2004 in Hong Kong. These “spouses and children” are mostly from poor rural areas on the eastern and western edges of the Pearl River Delta. The right of abode of these new immigrant families has been a hotly debated issue in Hong Kong. 20. On the festival in this township, see Siu’s “Community Festivals in South China” in Lo et al. (1995), chapter 16, pp. 1–17. 21. See Ming Pao (2000c). It reports a twenty-four-hour protest sit-in in downtown Hong Kong, involving twenty families who bought into six unfinished projects in Dongguan, Shenzhen, Zhongshan, and Huizhou. It is estimated that presently, there are 600–700 grievance owners and nineteen projects involved, with an unresolved value of over HK$100 million. 22. I have made it clear to him that I am interested in studying luxury housing and Guangdong’s new urban middle class. 23. See Ta Kung Pao (1999). The price per square meter ranged from 1,200 to 3,500 yuan. 24. Among more professional wives, the popular pun is to be a “duchess of Kent” ( gen de furen), the wife who follows around. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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25. See Ming Pao (1999c), a report on the views of Choi Wai-kit, chair of Lok Sun International. Again, many of the views are meant to be promotional. 26. See My New Home and a supplement entitled “Shenzhen Walker Bi-monthly Bookazine” (November 2000). The slogan is “Buying a holiday apartment is cheaper than staying in a hotel.” The magazine is a glossy one designed to attract real estate buyers from Hong Kong. Many of the “reports” should be read in this context. 27. After these two stations, the subway trains would become half-empty, as many of these shoppers would have disembarked. 28. A film produced in Hong Kong, Shaolin Soccer, is illuminating. Produced by a well-known comedian in Hong Kong, the entire film is set in and around Times Square, Guangzhou. The film has been extremely popular with both Hong Kong and China audiences. The film consciously blurs the conceptual divide between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, a boundary previous films have dwelled on. Sui-wai Cheung first alerted me to these subtle spatial messages in the film. 29. In a survey conducted by Midland Real Estate Agency and published in My New Home (October 2000, p. 17), a random sample of potential buyers asked about their preferences showed a clear split between Hong Kong and China buyers. Fifty-seven percent of the Hong Kongers interviewed preferred properties in the Lo Wu district, as opposed to 35 percent of the latter. On the other hand, 52.2 percent of China buyers preferred the new Futian district where the new government and cultural complex was, as opposed to 7.7 percent of the Hong Kongers surveyed. These figures were to give a general impression of the region’s market situation. It should also be noted that the agency’s aim was to sell real estate. Data collection was not rigorous. 30. See “The Shenzhen Central District,” a document prepared by the Shenzhen Planning and Land Bureau (2000). The document was distributed by the Hong Kong developer in the promotional packet of its housing project. The media also speculated that, with this group pushing the luxury units onto the market in May 2000, the results on the debate about a twenty-four-hour border crossing between Hong Kong and Shenzhen would soon be clear (see Property Times, May 13, 2000, p. 9). 31. See Shenzhen Planning and Land Bureau (2000). 32. The local term was “pinpai xiaoying” (brand-name effect). There was the “yi tiao long” coordination of infrastructural planning by the government, the design of the housing projects by the developers, the management, promotions, and sales by brand name agencies. This was a much larger-scale operation, showing the determination of the government and the developers to shake off the stigma of the lan mei lou phenomenon in the previous years. On the participation of Centerline, see “Zhongyuan jituan zhulu zhongyuan,” a special interview of the CEO of Centerline Real Estate (China) Consultant Group, in My New Home (September 2000), pp. 18–23. 33. An executive of the company knew that I had been studying luxury housing projects in the delta and invited me to go along for a site visit. 34. The quote is from the promotional brochure of the complex. 35. The quotes are from the promotional brochure of the complex. 36. Real estate agents in Hong Kong were worried that the sales would mean taking away 3,000 plus buyers from the Hong Kong market, involving a sum of about HK$3,000 million. See Property Times, May 13, 2000, p. 8. 37. See Siu’s “Remade in Hong Kong,” in Liu and Faure (1996), pp. 177–96. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:32:37 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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38. See Siu’s “Redefining the Market Town through Festivals in South China,” in Faure and Liu (2002), pp. 233–49. 39. One such matron operated a street-side stall in downtown Hong Kong. She and her husband had bought two apartments in the delta, one for them to retire to, and the other for her two children (personal conversation, Hong Kong, December 2000 and December 2001). Every time she saw me, she kindly invited me to go with her friends to the estate for the weekend.

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15 Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants”

Locating “the New Immigrants” The Hong Kong society has intimate links with mainland China through decades of people crossing the border. From the census records analyzed by Richard Wong and Ka-fu Wong, these movements have continued, in ebbs and flows, in the postwar decades. In 1996, almost 40 percent of Hong Kong’s population was born outside the territory (Lam and Liu 1998, p. 1). This chapter takes a slice from the census records to examine policies, assumptions, and procedures related to a recent period of in-flow from China and to assess their impact on Hong Kong’s present and future human landscape. I focus on two waves. First, those who crossed the border to Hong Kong, often illegally, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were labeled “new immigrants” and treated with scorn by some Hong Kong residents. They found work and were absorbed into the Hong Kong society. Many returned to their native places for marriage. In the 1990s, they started to bring to Hong Kong their mainland spouses and young children, who formed the second wave of newcomers. This wave is also known in popular parlance as “new immigrants” and, since the mid-1990s in official categories, as “new arrivals.” The meaning of the label changed somewhat, from one marking difference in the 1980s, to one hardened against those seen as society’s burden. These two waves of immigrants have posed complicated human resource and social issues for Hong Kong. The language used to define these new arrivals is one-dimensionally administrative. Together with the labels used in popular parlance, they mask complex and changing processes of migration, marital unions, family formation, cross-border networks and maneuvers. This essay uses circulation as a concept to unpack the labels and to examine the multi-directional flows of people, goods, and values along a border that hardens and softens. It hopes to address the definitions of a moving target, the Hong Konger, and the strategic engagement of Hong Kong’s present and future citizens.

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320

Hard Issues, Soft Data In the wake of the Second World War and the Communist Revolution in China, Hong  Kong saw volatile population movements across its borders for almost a decade. In 1950, however, the Hong Kong government negotiated a quota system with mainland authorities to control the flow. Hong Kong accepted all Chinese citizens given exit permits from China, and China restricted and regulated these permits. As shown in Figure 15.1, there has been a steady rise in population, but as shown in Figure 15.2, the increase was punctuated by volatile inflows and outflows. Postwar decades have seen the border harden and soften with major political shifts in China, which has greatly shaped Hong Kong’s human landscape. Two historical junctures are significant for understanding the demographic profiles in Hong Kong today. First, during the radical decades of the Maoist revolution when China turned inward and restricted cross-border traffic, a uniquely localized Hong Kong culture and identity emerged with the coming of age of a homegrown generation. Postwar baby boomers who constituted the territory’s upwardly mobile middle class were central to the formation of the Hong Kong person or “Hong Konger.”1 Second, in the years from 1978 to 1981 when China began to liberalize its economy and briefly relaxed its border control, some half a million immigrants, mostly illegal, made their way to the territory and were eventually granted residence (see Figure 15.2). Although Hong Kong was a land of immigrants and emigrants, a new social ethos emerged in the 1980s. It centered on discriminatory stances taken towards this population influx. Those who identified with Hong Kong’s urban society perceived newcomers as rural and desperately poor. The media have popularized the image of “Ah Chan” (a country bumpkin from the mainland) and Shenggang qibing (criminal mercenaries from Guangzhou). As they arrived in overwhelming numbers, symbolizing a China reeling from decades of isolation and deprivation, anxious Hong Kongers labeled them as xin yimin (new immigrants) to mark differences in cultural orientation, social status, and economic well-being with earlier stocks like themselves (Siu 1988a). Nonetheless, the newcomers were absorbed into Hong Kong’s economy as a workforce in infrastructural projects. Some became brokers between Hong Kong and South China. They achieved varying degrees of success, and many returned to their home villages in the late 1980s and early 1990s to have families. Over time, the criteria for granting exit permits (one-way permits) from China and the number of permits have changed. Entry has largely been approved on the grounds of family reunion (see Table 15.1). In the early 1980s, the Chinese government began to grant a large number of two-way permits for holders to visit family or do business in Hong Kong. Many visitors overstayed these permits. From government statistical profiles and images in the media, these visitors and new immigrants appeared to be economically This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

7000000 6000000 5000000 4000000 3000000 2000000 1000000

1993

1988

1983

1978

1973

1968

1963

1958

1953

1948

0

Figure 15.1 Hong Kong’s estimated population, 1948–96. Source: Reconstructed from Kit Chun Lam and Pak Wai Liu, Immigration and the Economy of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 1998), 10.

300000 200000 Balance of Arrivals and Departures

100000

1993

1988

1983

1978

1973

1968

1963

1958

1953

–100000

1948

0

Legal Immigrants from China Illegal Immigrants from China

–200000 –300000

Figure 15.2 Balance of arrivals and departures of immigrants from China. Source: Reconstructed from Kit Chun Lam and Pak Wai Liu, Immigration and the Economy of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 1998), 12.

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322

Tracing China

disadvantaged, dependent women with few marketable skills and burdened by young children. They were the spouses of Hong Kong residents classifiable by several categories: the cohort of illegal immigrants who were granted residence in the early 1980s, and older working men who increasingly looked across the border for affordable wives (One Country Two Systems Research Institute 2002b, p. 4; Census and Statistics Department 1997b, 1999). Many of their children, born in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, awaited their one-way permit to enter and settle in Hong Kong. On arrival, they would cram together in slums in the old parts of Kowloon and in less desirable districts in the New Territories (see Table 15.2). Social workers maintain that this cohort of new arrivals had few personal support networks. They spoke neither city Cantonese nor English; the children had difficulty in school; age differences between husband and wife were often significant, which added to marital pressure. Until a few years ago, families were often “split” and made unstable by bureaucratic barriers and corruption in China (Lam and Liu 1998, chapter  3; One Country Two Systems Research Institute 2002b, pp. 73–79). Single parents had to quit their job and apply for public assistance. Family tragedies involving the new arrivals were sensationalized in popular media, yet public sentiment towards them remained unsympathetic. Government and social service organizations put tremendous effort into providing support, but the new immigrant families they targeted appeared to continue to face poverty and discrimination.2 At the same time, Hong Kong residents took for granted the astronomical growth in the traffic of people, goods, services, and cultural images between Hong Kong and the mainland. Increasingly, they retuned themselves “to go north.” The movement of factories into China was succeeded by the flux of technical support offices and eager consumers. Professionals and shoppers joined businessmen, small factory owners, contractors, transport workers, and schoolchildren to become regular commuters. The real estate markets in Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta catered to families from Hong Kong who were looking for affordable holiday or retirement homes. Daily commuter traffic began to blur the border. But the “new immigrant” label remained in the minds of many Hong Kong residents. With the media sensationalizing the situation, public attention focused on the worst cases of family abuse and poverty among those on welfare. Public sentiment flared, understandably in years of economic downturn and political uncertainty. Debates on right of abode issues and reactions to an arson attack on an immigration office in 2000 revealed the depth of local hostility towards this wave of new arrivals. Today, the negative attitude held by the public reflects their views on the immigrants as not only different but also a real and growing social burden. An insecure middle class, having been caught in a painful structural transformation of the economy since 1997, has felt anxious about where Hong Kong is headed. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants”

323

What are the complex profiles and processes beneath the “new immigrants” label? After the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong in 1984, the Chinese government has issued regulations that defined those eligible for immigration to Hong Kong then and in the future. Four out of the five categories are related to family reunion. The implementations of these regulations, however, have been “poorly coordinated, badly managed, and executed without transparency, consistency, or accountability,” causing much anguish for the families concerned, breeding corruption and desperate maneuvers (Lam and Liu 1998, p. 33). Table 15.1 History of one-way permit quota Date Before 1950 1950

Quota Nil 150

1978

150

1980

150

1983

75

1993

75

November 1993

105

July 1995

150

Remarks Free entry and exit. The Hong Kong government set up a quota system to impose a restriction on people of Chinese origin from the mainland, except for those from Guangdong province, coming to settle in Hong Kong in accordance with the Immigration Control Ordinance. However, without the approval and cooperation of the Chinese government, this new measure could not be effectively implemented. Subsequent to the discussion between the Chinese and British governments, China eventually limited the number of one-way permits to 150 per day. Although the quota was limited to 150, the number of Chinese citizens being granted one-way permits to settle in Hong Kong was increased to 310 per day. The Chinese government again limited the number of one-way permits to settle in Hong Kong to 150. Consequent upon the discussion between the Chinese and British governments, the number of one-way permits was reduced to 75 per day. No quota set for specific categories, basically 21 one-way permits, were allotted to children. The quota for one-way permits was increased by 30 from 75 to 105 per day. The increased quota was evenly distributed among the children of Hong Kong permanent residents who were born on the mainland and spouses who had been separated for more than 10 years. The number of one-way permits was increased by 45 to 150 per day. Thirty of the newly added permits were allotted to children of Hong Kong citizens who had the right of abode in Hong Kong after 1997. (During the first year of implementation, 15 were allotted to qualified children aged 0–5 and 15 to children aged 16–20). The remaining 15 were allotted to spouses who had been separated for more than 10 years.

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Tracing China

324 Date July 1996

Quota 150

December 1996

150

July 1997

150

September 1997

150

Remarks The age limit for children was relaxed to allow applications from children aged 6–15 who had the right of abode in Hong Kong after 1997. After the relaxation, 45 permits were allotted to children of Hong Kong permanent residents who had the right of abode in Hong Kong after 1997, 30 to spouses who had been separated for more than 10 years, and 75 without specific categories. On top of the 45-children quota, a 21 floating-children quota was added, making it a total of 66 children quota. But the quota of one-way permits remained 150 per day. Hong Kong requested to increase the children quota to 90, but the Chinese government did not accede to the request. A 45-children quota and 30-spouse quota were set aside for Guangdong province. As a result, the total number of one-way permits granted to the province was increased from 104 to 108, 25, 33.25 of which were nonspecific permits.

Source: Translated from One Country, Two Systems Research Institute (2002b), 4.

Table 15.2 Proportion of PMRs* by District Council District, 2001 Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

District Council District Yau Tsim Mong Sham Shui Po Kowloon City Kwun Tong North Kwai Tsing Tsuen Wan Wong Tai Sin Yuen Long Sai Kung Central and Western Eastern Tuen Mun Tai Po Sha Tin Wan Chai Southern Islands

Proportion of PMRs 7.90% 7.30% 4.80% 4.80% 4.70% 4.50% 4.30% 4.10% 4.10% 3.30% 3.10% 3.00% 3.00% 2.70% 2.70% 2.60% 2.00% 1.90%

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 51. *PMR Persons from the mainland having resided in Hong Kong for less than 7 years.

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Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants”

325

In April 1990, the Basic Law was passed. The ambiguous language in its Article 24 regarding the right of abode of the mainland-born children of Hong Kong residents created more space for contestation. It triggered waves of illegal immigration. Pregnant mothers overstayed their permit in order to have their children born in Hong Kong. Some parents attempted to smuggle children into Hong Kong under rumors of amnesty. When the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress’s intervened with their interpretation of the Basic Law in 1999, the controversy was put to rest. Eligibility for permanent residency for mainland-born children of Hong Kong residents became more restricted (i.e., one parent must be a permanent resident of Hong Kong at the time of the child’s birth) and the granting of one-way permits by Chinese authorities remained firmly in place. Even if the children had a certificate of entitlement for the right of abode from the Hong Kong government, they would have to wait in China for one-way permits. The twists and turns of policies and related contestations posed serious implications for the territory’s human landscape and the emotions attached to it.

Social Profiles of “the New Immigrants” Census data (1981, 1991, 1996) show that each cohort of immigrants from the mainland reflects shifts in policies. These cohorts carried with them particular characteristics and historical, political baggage. They have distinct social and economic profiles (Lam and Liu 1998, chapter 4). First, mainland immigrants are largely from Guangdong province, followed by those from Fujian. However, compared with 1981, by 1996 those from Guangdong increased proportionately compared to those from other provinces (see Figure 15.3). Next, although the number of legal immigrants was steady over the years, there was a large influx of illegal immigrants during the years between 1978 and 1981 (close to 400,000; see Figure 15.2). This cohort of illegal immigrants had different social profiles than in other waves: they were predominantly rural, young, and male. Their ability to use city Cantonese was below that of the general population (84 percent vs. 98 percent). In the 1981 census, this cohort was marked “recent immigrants” but was listed as “earlier immigrants” in the 1991 census. Although less educated and unskilled compared to those who came in the 1990s, these “earlier” and largely illegal immigrants had higher labor participation rates (see Table 15.3). Adding to the inflow were more recent cohorts who settled in Hong Kong from the late 1980s to mid-1990s3 and were mostly mainland spouses and children of three groups of Hong Kong residents: working men who had married in China in the 1960s and 1970s, illegal immigrants who came between 1978 and 1981 and returned to China to marry after settling in Hong Kong, and older working men who likewise This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

326

Tracing China

increasingly looked toward China for affordable wives (One Country Two Systems Research Institute 2002b, pp. 23–32). The 1991 census shows that 95,000 Hong Kong residents (93 percent are men) had spouses on the mainland. Over 403 of the men were fifty years of age and over. These Hong Kong residents had 310,200 children, 41.7 percent of whom were over thirty years old (Census and Statistics Department 1991, pp. 115–26). The quotas for one-way permits were adjusted several times on the advice of the Hong Kong government to facilitate family reunion. In 1995 and 1996, the largest number of applicants waited between one and three years although the spread of the wait was wide, indicating a great number of irregularities (Lam and Liu 1998, pp. 29–33). Finally, intertwined with the demographic data are social class issues. The Census and Statistics Department produced three thematic studies (1991, 1997b, 1999) on Hong Kong residents with spouses in China, which highlight a progressive trend of Hong Kong residents taking mainland spouses (see Figures 15.4 and 15.5). Compared to the general Hong Kong population, these residents have lower education attainments and are predominantly engaged in the manufacturing sector and in jobs requiring physical labor (see Figures 15.6, 15.7a, 15.7b, 15.8a, 15.8b). Special Topics Report No. 22 conducted between March and May 1999 by the Census and Statistics Department on the number of mainland children born of Hong Kong residents showed a clear trend. There was an estimated 209,400 Hong Kong residents with 286,300 mainland children among them; 70 percent of the children were twenty years of age and older. The findings also revealed a surprising figure—children born outside of registered unions with Hong Kong residents were estimated to be 505,000. Although the study was concerned more with the eligibility for immigration than with actual applications, it confirmed that, as a result of the progressive liberalizing of the mainland’s economy, marriage and family activities between Hong Kong and China intensified, forming a complicated social landscape that spanned both sides of the border. The children of the 1978–81 cohort of illegal immigrants were younger, and the number was growing in the 1990s. In fact, immediately after July 1997, when the issue of the right of abode for mainland-born children of Hong Kong permanent residents heated up again, the Immigration Department estimated a total of 35,000 children waiting for a one-way permit. Subsequently, the department revised it upward to 66,000; 60 percent of these children were between the ages of six and fifteen. Lam and Liu (1998), using application data of mainland children from Guangdong alone, estimated the number above 66,000. On the basis of daily entry quotas assigned to Guangdong children at the time, the wait could be as long as six and a half years.

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Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants”

327

A further study gives the family status of the 452,000 people who came to Hong Kong with a one-way permit between 1991 and 2000: 92 percent of them were spouses (93.9 percent wives) and children of Hong Kong residents (see Figures 15.9a, 15.9b). Further, from 1991 to 2001, the percentage of recent immigrants in Hong Kong (i.e., those who have not resided in Hong Kong for more than seven years) jumped from 2.6 percent to 4 percent, totaling 266,577 people (see Figure 15.10). From a human resource point of view, this cohort of women and children who settled in Hong  Kong in the 1990s had lower education, older husbands, and more children than their corresponding age group in the native population. They also had a lower labor participation rate (44.2 percent vs. 61.4 percent) (see Tables 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 15.7, 15.8, 15.9a, 15.9b). The percentage using Cantonese dropped further to 52.8 percent (in the 1991 census), and 56.7 percent (in the 1996 census). It rose to 72.3 percent (in the 2001 census), still lower than the 89.2 percent of the native population. Those who worked continued to fill low-paying unskilled jobs at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. Their median domestic household income (based on the three censuses) was systematically lower than that of the native population (Census and Statistics Department 2002, p. 40). Their spouses, many of whom were linked to a disappearing manufacturing sector, faced structural unemployment. From statistical profiles, the picture looked grim for this cohort when compared to the circumstances of the locally born Hong Kongers.

60000 50000 Unknown

40000

Others Shanghai

30000

Hainan Fujian

20000

Guangdong

10000 0

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

Figure 15.3 Provincial origins of legal immigrants from China, 1991–96. Source: Reconstructed from Lam and Liu (1998), 28.

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250000 200000 150000 100000 50000 0

1991

1996

1999

Figure 15.4 Number of residents with spouses in China. Sources: Reconstructed from Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 8 (1991), No. 15 (1997b), and No. 22 (1999).

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

1986–1990

1991–1995

1996–1999 (Mar–May)

Figure 15.5 Average number of cross-border marriages per year. Sources: Reconstructed from Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 8 (1991), No. 15 (1997b), and No. 22 (1999).

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60.0% Hong Kong residents married in Mainland China with spouse still living there

50.0% 40.0%

Hong Kong population aged 15 and over

30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0%

no schooling/ kindergarten

primary

secondary/ matriculation

non-degree

degree

Figure 15.6 Education levels of Hong Kongers with spouses in China and the general Hong Kong population. Sources: Reconstructed from (1) Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 8 (1991) and No. 15 (1997b), and (2) Census and Statistics Department, 1996 Population By-census (1997a).

Others, 0.7 Manufacturing, 19.5 Other services, 23.3

Wholesale, retail and import/export trades, restaurants and hotels, 32

Construction, 24.5

Figure 15.7a Total employment by sector of Hong Kong residents married in Mainland China with spouses still living there, 1996. Sources: Reconstructed from (1) Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 8 (1991) and No. 15 (1997b), and (2) Census and Statistics Department, 1996 Population By-Census (1997a). # Other service sectors include the transport, storage, and communication industries, the finance, insurance, real estate, and business services industries, and the community, social and personal services industries.

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Others, 1.5 Manufacturing, 18.9 Other services, 46.6

Construction, 8.1

Wholesale, retail and import/export trades, restaurants and hotels, 24.9

Figure 15.7b Total employment by sector of Hong Kong, 1996. Sources: Reconstructed from (1) Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 8 (1991) and No. 15 (1997b), and (2) Census and Statistics Department, 1996 Population By-census (1997a). # Other service sectors include the transport, storage, and communication industries, the finance, insurance, real estate, and business services industries, and the community, social, and personal services industries.

Others, 0.7

Elementary occupations, 25.7

Plant and machine operators and assemblers, 11.2

Managers, administrators, professionals, and associate professionals, 13 Clerks, 6.7

Service workers and shop sales workers, 15.6

Craft and related workers, 27.1

Figure 15.8a Employment by job description: Hong Kong residents married in Mainland China with spouses continuing to reside there, 1996. Source: Reconstructed from Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 15 (1997b).

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Others, 0.8 Elementary occupations, 18.6

Managers, administrators, professionals, and associate professionals, 29.2

Plant and machine operators and assemblers, 8.5

Craft and related workers, 12.3

Clerks, 16.8 Service workers and shop sales workers, 13.8

Figure 15.8b Employment by job description: Total employed population of Hong Kong, 1996. Source: Reconstructed from Census and Statistics Department, Special Topics Report No. 15 (1997b).

60000

50000

40000

Others Husband Wife

30000

Children

20000

10000

0

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

Figure 15.9a Categories of persons who came to Hong Kong by obtaining one-way permits, 1991–2000. Source: Reconstructed from the One Country Two System Research Institute (2002b), 64.

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Others, 24230 Husband, 12028

Children, 231775 Wife, 183930

Figure 15.9b Total number of persons who came to Hong Kong with one-way permits, 1991–2000. Source: Reconstructed from One Country Two Systems Research Institute (2002b), 64.

450,000

Number

Proportion (%)

400,000

4.0

350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000

2.7

2.6

266,577

169,319

143,944

4 3 2

100,000

1

50,000 0

5

1991

1996

Number of PMRs

2001

0

Proportion of PMRs to the whole population

Average Annual Growth Rate (%) 1991–1996 1996–2001 1991–2001

PMRs 3.3 9.5 6.4

Whole Population 1.8 +0.9(1) +1.7(2)

Figure 15.10 Number of PMRs as percentage of the whole population, 1991, 1996, 2001. Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 14. Note: (1) The figures are compiled based on the Hong Kong resident population. (2) The figures refer to residents present in Hong Kong at the census moment, including those who were temporarily away from Hong Kong. The population figure compiled on this basis at the 1991 census was 5,674,114. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Table 15.3 Labor force participation rate (15–64 age group) Natives (%) 1981

1991

All Male Female

66.5 77.4 55.7

72.8 84.2 61.1

All Male Female

33.5 22.6 44.3

27.2 15.8 38.9

Earlier Immigrants (%) 1996 1981 1991 1996 Labor force participation 70.4 63.8 66.3 65.2 84.8 85.6 85.7 83.2 61.1 40.2 41.9 43.1 Economically inactive 27.2 36.2 33.7 34.8 15.8 14.4 14.3 16.8 40.6 59.8 58.1 56.9

Recent Immigrants (%) 1981

1991

1996

85.3 95.8 69.9

66.3 82.7 58.0

61.0 82.3 48.4

14.7 4.2 30.1

33.6 17.3 42.0

39.0 17.7 51.6

Source: Lam and Liu (1998), 50.

Table 15.4 Proportion of PMRs aged 5 and older able to speak selected language/dialects, 2001 PMRs Aged 5 and Older† Language/Dialect

Second Language/ Dialect 23.2

Whole Population Aged 5 and Older†

95.5

First Language/ Dialect 89.2

Second Language/ Dialect 6.8

Cantonese

First Language/ Dialect 72.3

Putonghua

2.4

49.4

0.9

33.3

34.1

Hakka

8

7.3

15.3

1.3

3.8

5.1

Fukien (including Taiwanese)

5.2

3.1

8.3

1.7

2.3

3.9

Chiu Chau

3.5

3.4

7

1

3.8

4.8

Sze Yap

2.8

2.2

5

0.3

0.9

1.2

Shanghainese

0.6

0.8

1.4

0.4

1.1

1.5

Other Chinese Dialects

5

5.5

10.5

0.8

2.1

2.9

47

Overall

English

0.1

13.8

13.9

3.2

39.8

Others

0.1

0.5

0.6

1.2

6

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 23. † The figures exclude mute people.

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Overall 96.1

43 7.2

Table 15.5 Proportion of PMRs aged 15 and older by gender and educational attainment (highest level attended), 1991, 1996, 2001

Year

PMRs 1991

Gender

No schooling/ Kindergarten

Proportion of Population Aged 15 and Older Education Attainment (Highest Level Attended) Primary

Lower Secondary

Upper Secondary/ Tertiary Matriculation†

Male Female Both sexes

3.3 13.7 10.3

18 27.2 24.2

37.4 30.6 32.8

28.4 23.3 24.9

13 5.3 7.8

1996

Male Female Both sexes

2.4 8.2 6.4

17 26.7 23.7

35.4 31.4 32.6

28.6 25.8 26.6

16.7 8 10.7

2001

Male Female Both sexes

1.5 8.3 6.7

12.6 29.2 25.3

46 36 38.4

30.6 21.9 23.9

9.3 4.6 5.7

Whole Population 1991 Male Female Both sexes

7.1 18.5 12.8

26 24.3 25.2

22.9 15.4 19.2

31 32.4 31.7

13 9.4 11.2

1996

Male Female Both sexes

5.1 13.8 9.5

22.7 22.6 22.6

22.7 15.2 18.9

32.5 35.1 33.8

17.1 13.3 15.2

2001

Male Female Both sexes

4.6 12 8.4

20.4 20.6 20.5

22.5 15.6 18.9

34.8 36.7 35.8

17.8 15.1 16.4

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 26. † The figures include the equivalent educational attainment (highest level attended) of “technician level” in the 1996 population by-census and “diploma/certificate courses in institutes of vocational education/former polytechnics” in the 2001 population census. However, this similar group “diploma/certificate courses in technical institutes/polytechnics” was included under “tertiary: non-degree course” in the 1991 population census.

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1,742,271 1,068,731 2,811,002

Male Female Both sexes

470,676 1,088,687 1,559,363

8,251 33,854 42,105

Non-Labor Force

78.7 49.5 64.3

76.4 53.4 60.9

Labor Force

Non-Labor Force

1996 Labor Force Participation Rate (%)

PMRs aged 15 and older 27,812 9,543 74.5 37,416 45,453 45.2 65,228 54,996 54.3 Whole population aged 15 and older 1,925,095 586,759 76.6 1,257,402 1,297,262 49.2 3,182,497 1,884,021 62.8

Labor Force Participation Rate (%)

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 30.

26,712 38,779 65,491

Labor Force

Male Female Both sexes

Sex

1991

Table 15.6 PMRs in the labor force by gender, 1991, 1996, 2001

1,948,976 1,489,016 3,437,992

22,546 54,022 76,568

Labor Force

762,011 1,398,969 2,160,980

17,718 78,926 96,644

Non-Labor Force

2001

71.9 51.6 61.4

56 40.8 44.2

Labor Force Participation Rate (%)

Table 15.7 Proportion of working PMRs aged 15 and older by occupation, 1991, 1996, 2001 Proportion of Working Population (%) Occupation

1991

1996

2001

Managers and administrators

Whole Whole Whole PMRs PMRs Population Population Population 4.9 9.2 8.5 12.1 3 10.7

Professionals

0.9

3.7

1.8

5

0.9

5.5

Associate professionals

3.2

10.3

5.2

12.1

4.1

15.3

Clerks

10.3

15.9

13.5

16.8

10.9

16.3

Service workers and shop sales workers

15.2

13.2

22

13.8

30.7

15

Craft and related workers

15.7

14.7

14.7

12.3

11

Plant and machine operators and assemblers

24

13.5

8.3

8.5

4.1

7.3

Elementary occupations

25.4

18.6

25.3

18.6

34.9

19.5

0.5

1

0.7

0.8

0.3

0.3

PMRs

Skilled agricultural and fishery workers; and occupations not classifiable Overall

100

100

100

100

100

9.9

100

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 33.

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Table 15.8 Proportion of working PMRs aged 15 and older by industry, 1991, 1996, 2001 Proportion of Working Population (%) 1991

Industry PMRs Manufacturing Construction

48

1996

2001

Whole Whole Whole PMRs PMRs Population Population Population 28.2 25.3 18.9 10.4 12.3

5.4

6.9

7.8

8.1

11.7

7.6

31.2

22.5

42.9

24.9

51.9

26.2

Transport, storage, and communications

3.4

9.8

5.4

10.9

4

11.3

Finance, insurance, real estate, and business services

3.4

10.6

6.9

13.4

5

16.1

Community, social, and personal services

7.6

19.9

10.8

22.3

16.2

25.5

Others†

1

2.1

0.8

1.5

0.7

1

Overall

100

Wholesale, retail, and import/export trades, restaurants, and hotels

100

100

100

100

100

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 34. † “Others” include such industries as agriculture and fishing, mining and quarrying, electricity, gas, and water, and industrial activities inadequately described or unclassifiable.

Table 15.9a Proportion of working PMRs aged 15 and older by monthly income (from main employment, 1991, 1996, 2001) Proportion of Working Population (%) Monthly Income from Main Employment (HK$)

1991 PMRs

0–5,999 6,000–9,999 +10,000 Overall

86.7 10.4 2.9 100

Median monthly income from main employment (HK$)

3,600

1996

2001

Whole Whole Whole PMRs PMRs Population Population Population 57.2 40.9 20.4 43.3 18.7 25.5 38.1 31.7 40.2 24.5 17.3 21 47.9 16.5 56.8 100 100 100 100 100

5,170

6,500

9,500

6,000

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 35.

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10,000

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Table 15.9b Median, Monthly Domestic Household Income of Domestic Households with PMRs and All Domestic Household, 1991, 1996, 2001 HK$ 21,000

14,000

7,000

0

1991

1996

Domestic Households with PMRs

2001 All Domestic Households

Source: Census and Statistics Department (2002), 40.

Beyond Census Data Regional Mapping Most Hong Kongers identify the new immigrants as “rural.” This is historical baggage from China where, in the Maoist era, farmers were administratively and physically confined to village collective economies with few opportunities for social mobility. In the post-reform era, the number of the “floating population” in China reached upwards of 120 million in 2002 and changed the social landscape of China’s coastal cities. Yet they are severely discriminated against by urbanites, to the point that the central government has repeatedly intervened with policies and campaigns.4 Nevertheless, the historical baggage does not make it easy for the new arrivals to adjust to urban Hong Kong. Although many are employed and productive, they are still often labeled “new immigrants” because of their rural ways and accents, and face considerable hostility from the locals. Beneath their categorical “rurality” there is in fact considerable difference in life circumstances. In my field trips to Guangdong and Fujian, I have been struck by the resourcefulness of some communities and the paralysis in others. As the two provinces have been the native places of the bulk of Hong Kong’s new immigrants, a more discerning cultural mapping of these communities will clarify the migrants’ predicaments. From the fact that Hong Kong media are readily accessible in certain This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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parts of southern China in the post-Mao era, immigrants who have come from the regional core of the Pearl River Delta (municipalities such as Guangzhou, Foshan, Nanhai, Panyu, Zhongshan, Shunde, part of Dongguan) have long been exposed to the mainstream “Hong Kong life.”5 There has also been a diverse history of migration and renewed business traffic. Their relatives in Hong Kong are established, and they have little language barrier with city Cantonese. Those from Fujian may have greater difficulty adjusting to the Cantonese culture of the Hong Kong society, but they are networked with fellow Fujianese who have established mutual aid resources.6 Those from the eastern and western edges of the delta (municipalities such as Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Jiangmen, Huizhou, Huiyang, Shanwei, Heyuan and Qingyuan) have fewer networks. Many came in the 1978 to 1991 period as illegal immigrants from the poorest and the most rural part of Guangdong—areas that speak Hakka, Hokklo, and the Sze Yap dialects. Their life experiences have been rural. What is the regional spread among the new immigrants to Hong Kong, and what might have been their varied adjustments to mainstream Hong Kong life? My team tries to supplement census data with micro ethnographic information through interviews with government units, NGOs, and social workers in Hong Kong and China.7 These frontline organizations are in close touch with new arrivals at various stages of their immigration process and are keen observers of the new arrivals’ changing profiles. Moreover, from January 2001 on, my team has been able to collect data on the 150 daily-quota entries from Guangdong and Fujian and publish them in Wen Wei Po (Hong Kong). By June 2004, we had obtained information on 126,329 cases. Wen Wei Po lists nine reasons for entry (see Table 15.10). As expected, among those granted one-way permits the largest numbers continue to be spouses and children. However, something interesting is observed in the regional clustering of the recent new arrivals: Figure 15.11 and Table 15.11 show that they have come from three groups of municipalities. First, older children and spouses have come from pre-1949 commercial centers with a history of diasporic movements (Guangzhou, Foshan and Jiangmen [Sze Yap]). Second, younger children and spouses are from new municipalities at the rural margins of the Pearl River Delta that have been the source of different waves of illegal immigrants (Huizhou, Shanwei, Heyuan, Qingyuan, part of Dongguan, Shenzhen [Baoan] and coastal Jiangmen). Third, since 1997, they have also come from prosperous new municipalities that cater to global manufacturing (Shenzhen, Dongguan). If the regional clusters are matched with the general economic standing of Guangdong’s municipalities (measured by per capita income, level of education, and degree of urbanization), the picture suggests that the new arrivals (except for the post-1997 cohort) have come from the provincial margins.8 A clear regional mapping of the source of emigration and immigration has advantages because it allows us to go beyond essentializing labels and to understand the predicaments of the new arrivals This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Table 15.10 Number of one-way permits issued for Guangdong and Fujian (January 1, 2001–June 30, 2004) Reason of Approval 1 Spousal reunion 2 Care for elderly parents who have no one for support 3 Elderly persons who need the care of relatives in Hong Kong 4 Young children who need the care of relatives in Hong Kong 5 Persons inheriting properties 6 Children of Hong Kong permanent residents 7 Young children who come with their parents 8 Care for elderly relatives 9 Adopted children Grand Total

Unspecified Gender 3,945 0

Total

Male

Female

3,055 2,897

46,573 1,195

309

1,190

21

1,520

4,123

4,923

194

9,240

0 23,129 4,105 149 2 37,769

1 26,030 3,796 74 3 83,785

0 39 576 0 0 4,775

1 49,198 8,477 223 5 126,329

53,573 4,092

Source: Reconstructed from Wen Wei Po (January 1, 2001–June 30, 2004).

7000 6000 5000 4000

2000–04 1990–99

3000

1980–89 1970–79

2000 1000 0

Chaozhou

Zhuhai

Yangiiang

Shantou

Jieyang

Zhongshan

Yunfu

Maoming

Heyuan

Zhanjiang

Shaoguan

Zhaoqing

Qingyuan

Shanwei

Meizhou

Foshan

Dongguan

Shenzhen

Huizhou

Guangzhou

Jiangmen

Figure 15.11 Spousal reunions, by time of marriage and native place, 1970–2004. Source: Reconstructed from Wen Wei Po (January 1, 2001–June 30, 2004).

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0–5 45 145 241 438 186 341 549 263 457 167 313 709 589 1,034 449 518 1,538 1,938 696 1,611 1,413 13,640

6–10 14 67 91 73 181 143 136 119 169 169 143 433 229 566 320 1,056 672 1,487 469 1,146 1,321 9,004

11–15 7 26 65 30 145 49 47 73 46 103 154 101 124 354 183 1,213 389 1,047 290 700 970 6,116

16–20 5 8 32 10 40 24 5 23 10 44 66 25 44 133 54 411 143 325 191 500 499 2,592

Source: Compiled from Wen Wei Po (January 1, 2001–June 30, 2004)

Age 潮州市 Chaozhou 陽江市 Yangjiang 珠海市 Zhuhai 韶關市 Shaoguan 揭陽市 Jieyang 湛江市 Zhanjiang 茂名市 Maoming 雲浮市 Yunfu 清遠市 Qingyuan 汕頭市 Shantou 中山市 Zhongshan 河源市 Heyuan 梅州市 Meizhou 東莞市 Dongguan 肇慶市 Zhaoqing 汕尾市 Shanwei 廣州市 Guangzhou 惠州市 Huizhou 佛山市 Foshan 深圳市 Shenzhen 江門市 Jiangmen Overall

21–25 5 1 18 0 8 3 7 37 5 31 43 4 46 60 97 132 65 136 177 227 484 1,586

Table 15.11 Children of permanent Hong Kong residents and children who came with a parent 26–30 5 3 39 3 12 10 9 95 43 145 152 3 129 253 374 214 258 304 939 663 1,946 5,599

31–35 5 7 60 10 14 14 7 92 82 154 161 17 178 246 597 208 428 314 1,321 687 2,434 7,036

36–40 5 4 40 20 11 14 3 115 78 97 86 11 199 174 602 98 608 130 1,180 302 2,209 5,986

41–45 5 1 5 10 5 10 2 69 46 29 22 7 79 78 263 54 393 52 468 78 750 2,426

46–50 4 1 4 2 4 3 0 11 0 3 5 2 5 9 12 6 87 4 20 11 28 221

Overall 100 263 595 596 606 611 765 897 936 942 1,145 1,312 1,622 2,907 2,951 3,910 4,581 5,737 5,751 5,925 12,054 54,206

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342 Table 15.12 General features of Guangdong’s municipalities, 1990

Shenzhen Guangzhou Zhuhai Foshan Shaoguan Zhongshan Jiangmen Dongguan Huizhou Chaozhou Zhanjiang Zhaoqing Meizhou Maoming Shantou Yangjiang Shanwei Qingyuan Heyuan

Nonagricultural population

Per capita national income

% 62.6 57.5 43.6 34.9 30.3 24.3 26.5 23.4 23.6 23.7 18.2 15.2 14.4 12.2 18.8 18.5 20.6 14.9 13.1

yuan 4,785 3,721 3,740 4,109 1,620 3,511 2,222 4,078 1,768 1,563 1,515 1,517 858 1,238 1,130 1,172 889 1,126 715

Ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8 14 15 17 19 12 13 11 16 18

Ranking 1 5 4 2 9 6 7 3 8 10 12 11 18 13 15 14 17 16 19

Educational attainment† % 25.5 26.9 19.9 12.2 13.4 9.8 11.9 8.6 9.6 8.8 11.1 9.5 13.0 9.7 8.3 7.9 5.3 7.9 8.5

Ranking 2 1 3 6 4 9 7 14 11 13 8 12 5 10 16 18 19 17 15

Composite Ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

† The percentage of population, aged 6 or older, in each municipality, who have attained high school or tertiary education. Source: Compiled from (1) Guangdongsheng tongjiju (1991), (2) Guangdongsheng renkoupucha bangongshi (1992).

in more precise contexts should the government choose to target the newcomers before they arrive in Hong Kong or to strengthen their regional networks after they arrive (Table 15.12).

Post-1997 “New Immigrants” Data from Wen Wei Po also highlights a large cluster of immigrants who, in the late 1990s, came to Hong Kong from Guangdong’s five most commercialized, industrialized, and urbanized municipalities (Guangzhou, Foshan, Shenzhen, Jiangmen and Huizhou). Many have stayed for years as construction and skilled factory workers, producing textiles, light industrial goods, and high-tech equipment for the global market. Some have entered the booming service industries. They are exposed not only to the Hong Kong media but also to a wide range of commuters from Hong Kong who have decided “to move north.”9 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In 2003, 238,200 Hong Kongers were working in China, mostly in Guangdong (88 percent) in a variety of professional, manufacturing, sales, and service position (Census and Statistics Department 2003a). Marriages between them and migrant workers have meant that the new wave of spouses from China are more urban-based with factory work experience, are resourceful, and networked. The staff members of frontline organizations observe that their clients belonging to this new cohort have come from a variety of provinces and have visited Hong Kong numerous times. They have acquired city Cantonese and have jobs and homes in China that they are not entirely willing to give up. The 2006 Population By-Census, published by the Hong Kong SAR Government in February 2007 shows a clear statistical trend on the increase in cross-border unions. As observed from the marriage partners’ age and economic circumstances, these marriages are distinctly different from those forged a decade before. In 1996, out of 60,000 registered marriages by Hong Kong men, 24,000 involved mainland brides, out of which 2,200 were registered in Hong Kong. In 2006, the number of mainland brides jumped to 28,000 out of 60,000 registered marriages, 18,000 registered in Hong Kong. While 700 cases continued to involve men 50 years and older, the median age for men in these cross-border marriages was 38.7, and for women, 28.5. An interesting observation is that the number of Hong Kong women marrying men in the mainland jumped 2.5 times in the ten years between 1996 and 2006, whereas that for men increased 14 percent.10

Looking Ahead China is changing at a pace beyond imagination. One would only expect an increasingly mobile population between Hong Kong and China in the next two decades. As  a result of a broadening CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Agreement) and plans for an integrated Pan Pearl River Delta, the cross-border commuters will no longer be just working families from Dongguan’s factories. They may very well be junior managers and technical staff who have professional spouses in Hong Kong and China’s cities. Their family composition, values, career outlook, and consumption behavior will be quite different from those of the new arrivals in the 1990s and those we see today. The blurring of boundaries is achieved not only by a flow of capital and goods but also by the traffic of cultural meanings carried by immigrants, emigrants, commuters, and cross-border consumers. Eric Ma shows such traffic in the cross-border creative industries and its impact on lifestyles.11 Increasingly, when one goes to the Pearl River Delta and Guangzhou, one experiences mega-stores operated by global businesses. As early as 2001, I attended the grand opening of a Park ’n Shop store in Guangzhou. This was revealing with regard to culture change in daily life. I watched This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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waves of local customers who eagerly came and went through the supermarket. In the morning there were grannies with their grandchildren. By lunchtime came the office crowd. In the late afternoon, I saw couples getting household supplies on the way home via the subway. These shops with their soaring business strategically cater to a wide range of families. Customers took with them not only groceries but ideas that the shops promoted: healthy and clean environment, high-tech management, good service, and unprecedented choices. They were offered regional foods, Japanese sushi, French wines, and English cheeses. With consumption came new cultural values, family styles, tastes, and aspirations. Today in Guangzhou, no one will question that McDonald’s is fast food, and Starbucks and Ikea are in vogue among the young. One can foresee that, when these customers come to Hong Kong to visit or to settle, they will not fit the image of “new immigrant families” that has dominated the public mind in the last decade. The question is whether policy thinking on human resources appreciates these new realities on the ground, and builds enough flexibility to consider the historical baggage of those rural-based immigrants and the needs of the increasingly affluent urban commuters.12

Policy Implications A Cultural Language of Inclusion I have highlighted the need to work against an essentialized image in the popular mind and public media of “the new immigrant” (as economically disadvantaged, rural, needy, and maladjusted). It is also necessary to question the well-meaning but rather one-dimensional treatment of these immigrants by government agencies (as social problems, targets of social welfare and services, and objects of control and regulation). Data collected so far illustrate a complicated and differentiated history. Understanding this history will help the government work proactively and strategically in immigration law, family and welfare services, education, and job training. Anticipating that there will be more circulation of family members in the region, based on varying life cycle needs, we must rethink the meaning of “border” and “immigration” as analytical and administrative concepts. In recent years, the government has used the term “new arrivals,” which in fact, may be very different from the public’s perception of “new immigrants.” The official term is based on legal, administrative criteria: those who have used one-way permits to enter Hong Kong and who have not resided in the territory for more than seven years. The government has created sociological profiles by tracking the new arrivals in two surveys, one when the newcomers pass the border, and the other conducted by the Home Affairs Department when these immigrants apply for their identity cards. The data collected are supplemented by census data and thematic reports. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Agencies and scholars share the view that there is a physical group of people who are targeted as “new arrivals.” A sociological profile can be drawn with hard data: gender, age, income, education level, occupation, marital status, etc. Surveys also ask about native place, generally in administrative terms (such as Guangdong, Fujian and Shanghai) and occasionally dialects (to facilitate the children’s schooling). New arrivals who seek government and NGO help soon after they cross the border into Hong Kong can generally be located through community centers, schools, and social welfare agencies. This is the tangible part of the story. The major concern for the government is to make sure that the new arrivals assimilate into the host society as quickly as possible. There is an underlying assumption that any adjustment problems will diminish with time and appropriate support. Scholars and social workers have suggested a range of ways to accelerate the process: working with schools to aid children with language barriers; providing short-term retraining programs for under-skilled people; creating family services and community network for needy single parents. The government has tried to persuade the Chinese authorities to adjust the quota system to better facilitate family reunions and earlier local education for the immigrant children. There is also a less tangible story that is more complicated and emotionally charged. If we apply a historical perspective that focuses on when, why, and how a cultural language of exclusion is exercised, we may end up with a different target population whom we term “new immigrants.” Those who are labeled with a derogatory image may not be new arrivals. Some, despite their years of residence in Hong Kong, have never assimilated due to their rural orientation and lack of education. They continue to be singled out by employers and the public as “new immigrants.” On the other hand, some who have come from prosperous and urbanized parts of the Pearl River Delta blend in almost immediately after they pick up their Hong Kong identity cards, hardly needing any public assistance. Still others are but statistics in government estimates. They qualify to apply for entry but decide not to move. There are those who come by illegal means and might face problems of adjustment, but they never appear in official records or public assistance networks. In looking at “the new immigrants” this way, we see a cohort that cannot be defined by its legal right-ofabode status or by its point of arrival in Hong Kong. Furthermore, the length of their stay will not resolve the problems nor reduce public prejudice against them. Today, the progressive reintegration of Hong Kong with China, and especially with the Pan Pearl River Delta, triggers yet new patterns of border crossing. This historical context is relevant for assessing Hong Kong’s present and future human resources, in particular, the family needs of new arrivals as well as their potential contributions. The task at hand is how to nurture a language of inclusion at a time when local residents feel insecure and threatened. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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A culture of inclusion should, in fact, be extended beyond the treatment of mainland immigrants. David Eldon and Chen Zhiwu have repeatedly stressed that looking north is important, but it must dovetail with Hong Kong looking globally. If Hong Kong is to enhance its position as a financial hub, it needs a workforce that has an intrinsic appreciation for the city as an encompassing space and for it to be different from competitors in the region. Cosmopolitan professional practices and outlooks are what the Chinese reformers urgently need in order to engage the global economy. Hong Kong, with its unique historical networks, should be in a position to provide such resources.13 To engage the new China century, Hong Kong must dare to be different. As shown in several chapters of the volume Hong Kong Mobile, the territory has historically gained from being “a space of flow,” with the circulation of commodities, talents, capital, and cultural resources. In the process, it has built healthy institutions as anchors. Whether to attract professional talent from abroad or to nurture new immigrant children from China, it will be helpful for Hong Kongers to appreciate the circumstances that have allowed generations to face China and the world on their own terms. This is the “flexible positioning” drawn from historical lessons in which local residents cultivated layers of China resources to face the world and engaged layers of the globe to march north.14 This is in essence the “One Country, Two Systems” formula. In the rapidly transformed environments of today, knowing precisely where the line must be drawn, who the brokers are, what institutional and professional practices to encourage, and what cultural horizons to explore are the necessary steps to redefining a porous border. In macro political terms, one goes beyond ideologically charged categories to understand the differentiated terrain in Hong Kong’s colonial past and in a post-reform China. At the micro level of everyday life, one needs to confront a cultural language of exclusion that has permeated one’s conceptualization and treatment of “new immigrants.” If openness is the goal, Hong Kong’s existing institutions and business practices, if they can continue to be transparent, well managed, and accountable, can provide an attractive environment for global talents to work in, and for new immigrants to be nurtured along with the locally born.

What Is the Road Map? If one considers globally oriented professionals and a changing cohort of new arrivals as crucial economic and cultural brokers for Hong Kong’s march to the north, there are two existing routes. One is structural, the other geographical-regional. The former is for Hong Kong’s multi-ethnic professionals to link with China’s increasingly affluent urban middle class who demand high-quality services. CEPA would help accelerate that process at the professional end, and attention would be paid to This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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finances, logistics, legal, survey, and accounting services. At the moment, such urban synergy is concentrated in China’s coastal cities, such as Dalian, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Cities in the inland provinces are catching up, and they offer tremendous potential for mutual impact. The Pan Pearl River Delta concept is a case in point, and the recent economic summit, aiming to synergize Hong Kong’s development plans with those of China, was held in the same spirit of maximizing regional uniqueness for integration.15 What one conceives as a structural route can be similarly applied to the geographical route. Strategic thinking requires a more thorough cultural and historical view of the region in proximity to Hong Kong and from where most of the new immigrants have come. First, the eastern and western parts of the Pearl River Delta are two different worlds, past and present. The growing urban belt is in the western part, along the West River (Xijiang). Guangzhou, Foshan, Panyu, Shunde, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Jiangmen are historically connected nodes. In the east, the East River (Dongjiang) cuts through part of Dongguan and Huizhou. But Shenzhen and these eastern urban nodes are not historically connected in commerce or culture and are surrounded by rural Hakka hill areas. Second, the two regions have different development orientations. Dongguan and Shenzhen are pointed to as economic miracles. Dongguan thrived on Taiwanese capital, a labor-intensive factory regime, and cheap labor from China’s inland provinces. Shenzhen, as a Special Economic Zone, has relied greatly on administrative interventions. The number of migrant workers can be staggering (in the tens of millions), the pursuit of wealth feverish, and life on the fast track brash. But income disparity is wide, and local society is not productively engaged. Social problems are not given adequate attention. Beyond the modern-looking factories, highways, colorful billboards, and golf courses, civil society is remote.16 The municipalities in the western part of the delta are historically linked to Hong Kong and Macau (and via the municipalities along the West River to southwestern China) by centuries of commerce, lineage, communal, linguistic, and ritual ties. They are diverse economies. The thriving industries are rooted in the region and have national markets. Over the past decade, the municipalities have concentrated on building a transportation infrastructure. Turning to service industries that cater to an emerging urban belt, the municipalities compete for professional and technical talent that is locally scarce. Even the most economically developed municipalities realize that they have been too focused on indigenous capital and domestic markets. They now seek global linkages. City leaders have accelerated the integration of non-locals into the often highly guarded urban sector. Provincial government and universities are sending large numbers of their staff overseas for training. Every layer of local society is engaged and elaborated by the process. In central cities such as Guangzhou, residents are using electoral and legal means to protect their property rights.17 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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One should not overlook the lifestyles of the rising middle class in Guangzhou (many are college graduates and independent entrepreneurs from cities in the north). A dynamic force, they enjoy choices of luxury apartments, supermarkets, private cars, and weekend trips to country resorts. They also consume cultural images cut and pasted from global media. Many are multi-computer and multi-cellphone families. Recently, they have joined other Chinese urbanites for shopping sprees in Hong Kong. Guangzhou has one of the nation’s highest per capita disposable incomes, and the consumption demands have moved rapidly towards high-end cultural products and services. There seems to be room for fostering a common cultural language with Hong Kongers.18

Analytical Implications In this essay, I have taken a detour from administrative categories of defining a target population. By focusing on discursive categories and unveiling the complex histories and emotions underlying the hardened labels, I hope to connect policy concerns with academic research. Different historical junctures have turned immigrants from China into Hong Kongers. Their lives, aspirations, cultural capital, and strategic maneuvers mingled to substantiate the human landscape in postwar Hong Kong. Their interwoven lives have contributed to Hong Kong’s successes as much as deepened its vulnerabilities. Cross-border unions will continue to shape Hong Kong’s human resources in the future. The categories that policymakers have used to define the population may not be adequate to capture the complexities of these moving targets. We need analytical categories that reflect the processual and fluid nature of boundaries. If a process-oriented approach is important, one must ask how one approaches Hong Kong as a “place” and Hong Konger as a “population” where rapid structural changes are constant. As Elizabeth Sinn suggests, Hong Kong has historically been a “space of flow.”19 One may not wish to treat the identities of Hong Kong residents as defined by a fixed physical or administrative boundary. Instead, one appreciates how different generations have attached multiple meanings to Hong Kong as a legal abode, as a source of livelihood and advancement, as a salient site for depositing core values, family histories and memories, and as a springboard to move beyond. All of these are subject to intense negotiations. It is useful to highlight how these layers of history and emotions constitute the character of a few million residents who are entrepreneurial in their strategies, contingent in cultural constitution, and vocal in aspirations for citizenship. Boundaries shape social life by providing a frame of reference for classifying and ordering.20 How do we reassess the flow of social life, its complexities and contradictions, when boundary maintenance takes on new forms and meanings? The approach here urges policymakers to look into criteria related to cultural, historical, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and discursive factors. This is particularly pertinent if they are to target “new immigrants” whose families straddle borders, to enlarge Hong Kong’s footprint by encouraging these families to circulate north, to track marginalized populations who can pose high public health risks, and to network with Hong Kong’s emigrant families in China and overseas. The nature of world city spaces adds a dimension to the rethinking of borders and boundaries. The ability to globally connect also attracts volatility (Holston 1999). Hong Kong has a vibrant public culture that gives it character. One draws meaning from the architectural hardware as well as from the software of social activities— family and religious rituals, conspicuous consumption by locals and visitors, community festivals, the performing arts, film and media images, and protest marches. These events intertwine to add color and rhythm to everyday life and to project global visibility. The June 4th vigils in Victoria Park, the July 1st protest marches, and the orchestrated anti-WTO (World Trade Organization) confrontations by Korean farmers on the streets of Hong Kong are but a few notable examples. More will be beamed across the globe in digital speed and unobstructed visibility. The government invests heavily for connectivity and is understandably anxious about issues of control and stability. The question is how to turn the volatility of a global cityscape into an arena to highlight the territory’s unique advantages. For Hong Kong to create a fair and open “space” for the engagement of talent requires institutional integrity and a culture of inclusion. These are the underlying principles for positioning Hong Kong’s diverse human resource—expatriates, students, guest workers, visitors, the locally born, and new arrivals. In sum, Hong Kongers’ repositioning can be part of the Pearl River Delta’s changing human resource map. The difference between the eastern and western parts of the delta and between circumstances of the new immigrants and the Guangzhou middle class highlights the rural-urban gap as a challenging issue for China. The strategic moves of Hong Kongers (locally born or new arrivals) can help bridge the gap and nurture a civil, urbane, and encompassing region for all concerned. Hong Kong at the moment may not have hardware as dazzling as that of Shanghai nor human talents as numerous. The point to stress is Hong Kong’s existing institutions. They can integrate the territory’s hardware and software to produce predictable results and pleasant surprises. *This chapter is a slightly updated version of the original, published in Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, edited by Helen F. Siu and Agnes S. Ku (Hong  Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008, pp. 117–47). The author thanks Kwok-leung Yu for his invaluable support in fieldwork, data collection and editing. Ka-fu Wong and Ginnie Choi provided much-needed technical guidance with quantitative data. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

See Siu’s “Remade in Hong Kong” in Liu and Faure (1996), pp. 177–96. See also Central Policy Unit (2002). See also David Faure’s “Rethinking Colonial Institutions, Standards, Life-Styles and Experiences,” and Bernard Hung-kay Luk’s “Education Reforms and Social Mobility” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 231–46, 293–326. See a recent booklet containing the stories of twelve middle-aged women (many new arrivals) who live in the notorious “ghetto” of Tin Shui Wai. Their stories, sad as they are, convey their admirable efforts to survive in the challenging environment. See Chan (2006). See also two award-winning films by Ann Hui: The Way We Are (天水圍的日與 夜) (2008), and Night and Fog (天水圍的夜與霧). Also see an award-winning documentary on cross-border families, One Nation, Two Cities (一國雙城) by Cheung King-Wai (2011). They were termed “recent immigrants” in the 1991 and 1996 censuses. See Siu (1989a) on the plight of the Chinese villagers in the Maoist era. For the present tensions and the changing rural-urban divide, see chapter 16 of this volume. As early as the 1980s, when I was conducting fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta, it was easy to observe that most families used television antennas to receive signals from Hong Kong rather than Guangzhou. The younger generation began to speak a Hong Kong televisionized Cantonese (mixed with English terms), and young married couples, if they had the means, decorated their home in styles copied from Hong Kong television dramas. The Internet in the recent decade has brought the two regions culturally closer in multiple ways. The Fujianese new immigrants are concentrated in North Point and Kennedy Town. The popular support of the Fujianese candidate in the Legislative Council, Choi So-yuk, is also indicative of ethnic/regional ties. In the summer of 2004, we visited several government departments. We were able to discuss some of the themes of our study with staff members responsible for policy, data collection and analyses; however, we were not able to obtain detailed data on the finer regional spread of new arrivals. For NGOs, we interviewed staff members from Mission to New Arrivals Ltd., Caritas Mok Cheung Sui Kun Community Centre, International Social Service Hong Kong Branch, The Hong Kong Council of Social Service. They shared with us their varying missions and resources, and more importantly, their frontline experiences with new arrivals. Details of the conversations are as follows. A. Home Affairs Department: July 9, 2004 (Fri) 10:30, Frankie Lui Kin-fun (then Assistant Director of Home Affairs); B. Social Welfare Department: July 19, 2004, 14:30, Cecilia Li (then Chief Social Work Officer (Family and Child Welfare)), Cheung Tat-ming (then Senior Social Work Officer (Family)); C. Mission to New Arrivals Ltd: May 28, 2004, 14:00, Rev. Li  Kin  Wah (deceased, then General Secretary); D. Caritas Mok Cheung  Sui Kun Community Centre: June 7, 2004, 10:00, Wong Mei Kuen (then Social Work Officer); E.  International Social Service Hong Kong Branch: July 2, 2004, 11:00, Iris  Liu (then Director of Programme (Post-migration Service for New Arrivals)), Debby Chui  Lan  Cheung (then Director of Programme (Service to Prepare Mainlanders for Settlement in Hong Kong/Intercountry Casework); F. The Hong Kong Council of Social Service: discussion with Chua Hoi Wai, Business Director (Policy Research & Advocacy International & Regional Networking). We use Guangdong census data in 1990 because they were collected when the cohort of illegal immigrants returned to their native places to look for spouses and had children. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Positioning “Hong Kongers” and “New Immigrants” 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

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As mentioned, an official estimate in 2002 numbered mobile populations in the country as upwards of 120 million. Among the migrants, 42.42 million crossed provincial boundaries. Provinces with the most population outflow are Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Jiangxi, Henan, and Hubei. Provinces with the most inflows are Guangdong (35.5  percent), Zhejiang (8.7  percent) Shanghai (7.4 percent), Jiangsu (6 percent), Beijing (5.8 percent), and Fujian (5.1 percent). See Nanfang dushi bao (2002). See also the recent works of George Lin, Alan Smart, and Josephine Smart on cross-border traffic and emerging patterns of urbanization. I have benefited from discussions with Dr. Paul Yip at The University of Hong Kong. See Census and Statistics Department (2007); see also analyses in major newspapers (Sing Tao Daily 2007, Ming Pao 2007a and 2007c). See an in-depth study of cross-border marriages in post-1997 Hong Kong in Newendorp (2008). See Ma’s “Transborder Visuality” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 63–82. On the blurring of border, see chapter14 of this volume. According to recent population data, the number of expatriates in Hong Kong has dropped drastically in recent years. This is an alarming trend. Although reasons for expatriate populations to diminish are complex, this highlighted the issue of whether Hong Kong is competitive in drawing a diverse pool of global human talents. Singapore’s recent changes in immigration policy—the introduction of temporary immigration visas for those coming to the city to look for jobs—are seen as a positive step that Hong Kong should seriously consider (see Eldon’s speech [2006]; see also speech by Richard Wong at the HKGCC CEO conference [2007]). See also Chen Zhiwu, interview with People’s Daily and Global Times, June 29, 2007. The concept “flexible positioning” has resonance with Ong (1999). See the voluminous literature and policy statements arising from numerous policy conferences held in Hong Kong and Guangzhou since 2004. Spearheaded by Zhang Dejiang, Guangdong’s provincial party secretary, the Pan Pearl River Delta provides an ordering frame to include nine provinces and two major cities south of the Yangtze River. See also government and media reporting of the economic summit organized by the Special Administrative Region (SAR) government on September 11, 2006 in which the theme to link Hong Kong’s development to the 11th Five-Year Plan of China was highlighted. See a sobering series of reports by a Chinese journalist, Fan Rongqiang, comparing Shunde, Zhongshan, Panyu, and Dongguan, in Xin jingji 新經濟 [New Economy] Nos. 6, 10, 11, 12, 2003. His observations are quite similar to mine gleaned from fieldwork. In recent years, in various parts of China, rural and urban, such efforts have been frustrated by corruption and raw show of force by local governments, leading to violent confrontations. Integration and circulation can involve significant cultural exchanges. For example, an exhibition at the Guangzhou Museum of Art that I attended in late 2003, entitled “Souvenir from Canton: 18th- and 19th-century China Export Paintings from the Victoria and Albert Museum,” was professionally organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Guangzhou Cultural Bureau, the British Council, and the History Department of Sun Yat-sen University, with Swire Properties and Cathay Pacific as major sponsors. The exquisite art pieces by Chinese and European painters in the last two centuries are about ordinary daily life: boats, porcelain, silk, tea, a hundred occupations, birds, and plants. The exhibit and the well-researched bilingual catalog captured a deeply global commercial culture in south China since the 18th century, focusing on Guangzhou and London, and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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later an integral part of Hong Kong and Shanghai. It was a moving experience because the exhibition and the underlying mutual respect among the artists and today’s organizers cut through so many of the institutional barriers and political rhetoric surrounding the Britain–Hong Kong–China experience. The open-minded crossing of boundaries was evident. 19. See Sinn’s “Lessons in Openness” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 13–43. 20. See Berdahl (1999) on theories about borders and their literal and metaphorical significance. See also Hyde (2007). She highlights the material and discursive representation of AIDS by government agencies to show how prejudice, stigma, and cultural politics maintain a border and a target population.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

16 Grounding Displacement Uncivil Urban Spaces in Post-Reform South China

This historical-ethnographic study of village enclaves in Guangzhou explores the intensified entrenchment of villagers in a Maoist past when they faced market fluidities of a post-reform present. It underscores a rural-urban spatiality and a cultural divide between villagers, migrants, and urbanites that are simultaneously transgressed and reinforced. It highlights discursive categories and institutional practices that incarcerate the residents, who juggle lingering socialist parameters with compelling market forces and state development priorities. Connectivity and exclusion, agency and victimization, groundedness and dislocation as lived experience are captured by the historically thick social ethos in the enclaves. This article rethinks issues of emplacement and displacement, dichotomy, and process. [village enclaves, rural-urban divide, spatiality and migrancy, displacement, historical anthropology, post-reform South China]

Sun Zhigang, a twenty-seven-year-old from Hubei province, was an aspiring college graduate who had secured a job as a clothing designer in Guangzhou, the thriving commercial city in South China. One night in March 2003, on his way to a nearby Internet café on the main street of Huangcun (a community in the relatively new Tianhe district of the city), local police accosted him. He used his cell phone to call friends, who hurriedly brought documents to the police substation to verify his identity and job status. Their attempts to bail him out failed. He was subsequently sent to a shourongsuo (detention and repatriation shelter 收容所) in the city as one in a category of loiterers and petty offenders without a job, ID card, or proof of temporary residence. During the night at the shelter, he was transferred to a “medical station” and set on by inmates. As it turned out, the brutal beating was instigated and aided by the station’s rough and tough orderlies, several of whom were former security guards. Sun died the next day from massive internal injuries. His family was not notified until Sun’s friends called. Grief stricken, the family spent 4,000 yuan to obtain an autopsy, which showed that Sun’s entire back was beaten to a pulp. His family’s attempts to clarify the circumstances of his death were met with a stonewall of denials until a journalist broke the news in the city’s popular paper (Nanfang dushi bao) in late April.1 The incident triggered unprecedented public outrage, with newspapers disclosing severe abuse of migrants nationwide, and legal scholars raising issues with the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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central government on migrants’ constitutional rights. There was swift punishment of the perpetrators and abrupt abolishment of the detention centers. Ensuing policy changes reflected new state orientations toward migrancy and citizenship.2 What was missing in the public transcript, however, was an analytical connection to the nature of the neighborhood where Sun Zhigang had been killed: the spatial configurations of power and practice in the post-reform era that brewed this kind of brutality. The incident took place in an urban village enclave in Guangzhou. As the city expanded into the surrounding countryside with record speed and scale, villages were engulfed by highways, shopping malls, and factory complexes. Officially labeled chengzhongcun, these neighborhoods attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants who rented work and living spaces from villagers. The physical encroachment might appear to bridge prior social divisions, but this article will show that lingering collective property regimes, and a political hierarchy of citizenship institutionalized by the party-state in the past, have dovetailed with relentless market forces and a nationalist agenda for modernity. Together, these processes have created enclaves of severely “grounded” residents at the margins of China’s growing cities today. A key question is: In Guangzhou’s fast-forward march, how are familiar (non-) linkages between the urban and the rural reworked, and entrenched power structures reinterpreted, by social groups who try to make the best of their circumstances when the national order of things seems contingent?3 Appreciating that these processes are taking place in other regions of the world where global neoliberal forces have spread, I am drawn to analytical parallels in post-apartheid South Africa (Hart 2002) and Mumbai (Appadurai 2000, Hansen 2001). I take a closer look in this article at some historical issues left out in the public furor in the wake of the Sun Zhigang case, with the aim to understand the emplacement and displacement of a population in flux.

Remaking a Rural-Urban Divide When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the regime used its meager resources to develop state-owned industries and to nurture a healthy and committed urban proletariat. Farmers were confined to agricultural units based on collective land ownership and were excluded from the state industrial sector. Moreover, to reinforce central planning and public security, the government introduced household registration (hukou) legislation in 1958, various versions of which were adopted by provincial and regional authorities. Without proper documents to prove urban residence and employment, offenders were taken to detention centers and then repatriated to their places of origin. Coupled with the state allocation systems for basic amenities, the government exerted powerful control over the movement of its citizens. The anti-commercial policies of the Maoist revolution also decimated market towns that traditionally were dynamic cultural, economic, and political This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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spaces linking country to city.4 A stark spatial division between the rural and the urban emerged over time. The hukou was as much an institution as a metaphor to differentiate and discriminate.5 Administratively, it sustained a hierarchy of citizenship with different entitlements to property, work, social mobility, and political and cultural advancement. As far as life chances were concerned, the socialist state provided little for villagers. Prices of agricultural products were kept low, and channels of advancement beyond the collective economy were politically denounced. Decades of Maoist rhetoric to appreciate the “revolutionary potential” of peasants did not prevent villagers from being treated as carriers of feudal practices and targets for political transformation. The construction of policy categories, the highly censored art and media portrayals, and intense ideological campaigns provided institutional authority against rurality. The multiple incarcerations of China’s peasantry became naturalized and diffused in everyday language and in the imagination of an entire nation. Life in the cities was bureaucratized by state allocation of jobs, schooling, living spaces, and family planning, and urbanites experienced their share of dislocation during political mobilizations. However, the relatively sheltered city populations viewed peasants and vagrants as problems out of sight but not out of mind. For decades, they were lumped together as an ideological category and a status to be avoided at all costs.6 Today, popular disdain toward rurality and vagrancy is still pervasive and made stronger by the insecurities of life in state-owned factories and cities.7 However, the introduction of the market and the relaxing of employment restrictions in the post-reform era have triggered the movement of over a hundred million migrant workers, largely from the rural provinces, to the prosperous coastal cities that are manufacturing centers for global capital.8 The dagongmei, young female migrants in foreign-owned factories making toys, clothing, shoes, and electronic parts in Dongguan and Shenzhen, have long signified South China as world factory (Lee 1999, Pun 2005). In and around large urban centers, entrepreneurs and university graduates like Sun Zhigang are looking for diverse professional opportunities. Instead of living in factory dormitories, they seek cheap rental housing in various city districts. The residence status and the rights of this mixed population remain ambiguous. Increasingly, villagers find themselves landlords to massive numbers of migrants who are neither poor nor rural. The strain on the structure and ideology of governance is severe, as the spirit of the law is in flux and moral arguments contingent.9 State categories on which policy agendas are based continue to provide a powerful ordering framework for identity, memory, and action. Enriched by their rental properties, villagers view their migrant tenants with disdain and suspicion. The villagers are in turn treated as pariahs by Guangzhou residents. Not unlike city officials elsewhere in the world, those in Guangzhou see the enclaves as sites of crime and disease, cancers that This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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threaten a modern cityscape. Villagers also lack education for urban jobs. Nor have they cultivated the taste for city consumption on the fast track. Entrenched in their villages, they seem as insecure and dislocated as migrants, if not more so, in cultural and political terms. Huangcun, where Sun Zhigang met his death, is one such enclave. Sun’s violent death begs the following questions. While acknowledging the renewed connectivity of the rural and the urban through city expansion and the physical movement of migrants, how must one analyze the structures of power that continue to culturally incarcerate peasants and marginalize migratory populations? How are discursive practices intertwined with both market forces and with state practices of management, discipline, and policing? How complicit is local society, victims included, in materializing this othering process? Can we view these neighborhoods and the lives attached to them as depositories of layers of ideology and policy that have been imposed, fragmented, reconfigured, and involuted over the past half century? This article is based on ethnographic research in three adjoining village enclaves on the southern edge of Guangzhou. At the time of the revolution, their thousandodd original residents were organized into rural collectives. Although they were multi-surnamed villages, dominant lineages maintained ancestral halls and displayed degrees of cohesion through social networks and community rituals. In the Maoist era, their agricultural land was occasionally requisitioned by the city government. They were obliged to deliver quotas of vegetables, pigs, and poultries to state agents. From the late 1980s on, improved roads and bridges physically turned the area into an integral part of the city. Village officials have rented collective land to factories, and residents have run lucrative real-estate businesses on their private plots. They now provide cheap housing to migrant workers and entrepreneurs. In the most densely populated enclave, migrants outnumber the villagers tenfold.10 Their main livelihood, as a villager puts it, has shifted “from cultivating crops [gengtian] to cultivating real estate [gengwu].” From 2002 to 2004, I conducted periodic fieldwork in the villages as part of a larger project on vernacular modernity in South China. My assistants and I surveyed the physical layout of the villages and interviewed about forty city planners, urbanites, village officials, migrant entrepreneurs, and local villagers. Our study focuses on their interwoven lives, their mutual dependence, and othering. Aided by sociological studies in the area since the 1930s, I hope to use these enclaves to underscore a history of property ownership, spatiality, and social strife in pre- and post-reform China. The history serves less as background and more as a frame to show how institutional and ideological fragments of various policy phases continue to form webs of significance for my ethnographic subjects. Their lives and aspirations are suspended in these webs, with which they have to bargain, plead, and fight. A historical treatment of the conditions of connectivity and exclusion, of agency and victimization, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of groundedness and dislocation in the village enclaves leads me to rethink two theoretical issues. One revolves around ideas of emplacement and displacement, the other around dichotomy and process.

Displacement Revisited In view of the global flows of refugees, traders, professionals, and laborers, scholars have focused on issues of displacement and diasporic movements. Wars and massive national projects add to the urgency of understanding the displacement of categories of people or the uprooting of entire communities. The concept, however, is often equated with physical mobility. I would use the cases in Guangzhou to give discursive factors more analytical weight. Cultural incarceration and political othering that is internalized and embedded in everyday practice and backed by the institutional force of state apparatus and language could be a most intense form of displacement without the subjects moving anywhere. How do we conceptualize the sensibilities and maneuvers of those simultaneously grounded and displaced? The Weberian turn in anthropology (Keyes 2002) has opened up ways to explore how global discursive powers intersect with nuances of local agency. At the global end of the scale, Anna Tsing has mounted a useful critique of the imageries for global interconnectivity and its presumed unsettling path. She directs attention to the analytical issue that flow is valorized but not the carving of the channel; national and regional units are mapped as the baseline of change without attention to their shifting and contested ability to define the landscape. We lose sight of the coalitions of claimants as well as their partial and shifting claims. We lose touch with the material and institutional components through which powerful and central sites are constructed, from which convincing claims about units and scales can be made. We describe the landscape imagined within these claims rather than the cultures and politics of scale making (Scott and Keates 2001, pp. 107–8). Liisa Malkki similarly argues for more grounded attention to issues of displacement and emplacement in the massive transnational flow of refugees (1992 and 1995). Interacting with anthropologists and geographers sensitized to volatilities and disjuncture in the global movement of commodities, capital, people, and images (Appadurai 2000, Clifford 1994, Gupta and Ferguson 1992/1997, Hannerz 1996, Hart 2002, Harvey 1990, Holston 1999, Purcell 2003, Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003), she takes a denaturalizing, questioning stance toward the functionalist and romantic assumptions in our scholarly language about community, culture, identities, and rootedness. These assumptions often treat migrants, refugees, and movement as problematic if not pathological. She insists on treating these groups and processes on their own terms, rather than as anomalies in the national order of things. Moreover, she highlights problems in the rhetoric of international institutions that claim the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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mandate of providing humanitarian aid. Mobility or incarceration, these processes must be analyzed as historically grounded and culturally embedded. As Malkki argues: People who are refugees can also find themselves quite quickly rising to a floating world either beyond or above politics, and beyond or above history—a world in which they are simply “victims” . . . it is this floating world without the gravities of history and politics that can ultimately become a deeply dehumanizing environment for refugees, even as it shelters. (1995, p. 518).

In the article “The Refugee, a Discourse on Displacement” (MacClancy 2002, pp. 270–86), E. Valentine Daniel echoes Malkki’s analytical insight to highlight the meanings underlying the term refugee. His interest in the article is “not limited to the denotation and connotations of the word refugee but extends to the discursive field in which refugee as a phenomenon is embedded and the practices it entails. . . . What are some of the other related words, institutions, practices, prejudices, assumptions, and histories that together constitute a field of meaning in which the representation of refugee is realized?” (pp. 277–79). He also points to the history of nations as the important background to the issue of displacement, and in his efforts to understand refugee as discourse, he stresses the gestures, structures, material things, silence, and ignorance that create the conditions of authority and truth. In moments of radical disjuncture, it is by a profound loss of trust in the state’s ability to protect life in physical, cultural, and spiritual terms that the condition of the refugee is formed. He argues that an anthropologist, rooted in local events and interwoven dynamics, can appreciate the trauma of displacement and the crisis of trust by negotiating among different understandings against official categories (pp. 277–79). The literature on transnational refugee flows might at first seem irrelevant for China. After all, the villagers are not refugees in any legalistic sense, nor are the migrant flows global. However, I see close analytical parallels. Labeled as “migrants” and “villagers” with few entitlements, made to bear the burden of the country’s perceived backwardness at different policy turns, and, structured by entrenched state institutions, they experience traumatic rounds of dislocation, especially when the all-encompassing regime in China redefines national priorities yet again in the postreform era. As a historical anthropologist, I am eager to understand “the politics of living the ongoing connections or disjunctures of futures and pasts in heterogeneous presents” (Axel 2002, p. 3). Today, three waves of realisms intertwine to give villagers and migrants a disadvantaged positioning. First, there is a lingering socialist realism in which labor is no longer respected. Second, a crass form of “capitalist realism” privileges the survival of the fittest and unbridled market choices. The consumer revolution is in full swing in China’s coastal cities but unreachable for those in the rural hinterland. Third, successive regimes have promoted nationalist narratives of modernization This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and development. Villagers and migrants are often equated with backwardness and national hurt.11 Fragments of these discursive mechanisms and the related historical experiences continue to constitute the thick social ethos of the village enclaves today. I shall highlight multiple layers of othering in moments of intense boundary transgression and ideological uncertainty to argue that displacement should not be equated with physical uprootedness but, instead, with cultural and political incarceration. The power of place and its associated politics of identity have long created enclaves in many cityscapes with squatters and marginalized populations. Fortified communities of wealth, contested favelas, public parks, and spectral housing in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa are sites constructed with class, ethnic, and postcolonial sensibilities.12 For post-reform China, can we analyze displacement as the articulation of the three realisms mentioned earlier? Along the sprawling city landscape (material, social, and moral), what are the sites for understanding negotiations at this compelling juncture of change when the party-state takes the lead in redefining its moral authority, in reorganizing its political machinery, and in introducing market reforms to engage with a global economy?13 As I hope to show, a close ethnographic reading will unveil the differentiated terrain and conflicted processes by which grand policy visions are translated into ordinary lives.

Dichotomy and Process Since the 1990s, scholarly attention on China has followed rural migrants into cities. Economists focus on the government’s uneven embrace of the market and on the productive capacities of China’s massive labor force.14 Political scientists explore civil society issues and contestations for urban citizenship (Perry and Wasserstrom 1994; Solinger 1999). Sociologists observe stark regional and social differentiations and the erosion of social security when established state categories and labor regimes are challenged and reconstituted.15 Anthropologists look for negotiated spaces in leisure and consumption, gendered bodies, and local landscapes of power (Chen et al. 2001, pp. 123–42; Schein 2000; Wang 2005, pp. 31–51, 150–70; Friedman 2004). Labeled as mangliu (blind floaters), migrants are treated by the post-reform state as transient, and in the process of becoming. In enacting laws and procedures of control, state institutions have also reinforced the dualism to frame demographic profiles. Scholars have engaged with these typifications, at times uncritically, to organize analysis. They see migrants as a distinct social category, largely rural and uprooted in a period of unprecedented opportunity.16 Even for those intent on appreciating migrants’ agentive moments, the master narrative can be couched in dichotomous terms.17 These typifications are most visible in recent Chinese sociological and policy studies on migrants and the reform of village enclaves, framed with a unilinear view of urban transformation.18 Exceptions include the more theoretically informed works This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of Dorothy Solinger, Zhang Li, and Xiang Biao. They have captured the ingenious ways migrants create communities against all odds.19 In this article, I would like to explore a slightly different conceptual language. One may start the analysis with interwoven social and political processes (best gleaned from ethnographic and historical research) to understand how rigid labels and perceptions of dichotomy emerge in daily experiences and are inflicted on those whose lives can no longer be contained by existing administrative (and analytical) categories. These labels conjure political, administrative, and cultural meanings. They are social-historical products to be deconstructed, not evidential materials with which to organize research.20 An approach highlighting process seems appropriate in Guangzhou because the material and conceptual boundaries are in flux. The definition of villager or migrant is increasingly untenable. Many who come have obtained permanent or temporary residence in the city through the private sector: becoming students, getting a good job, settling down with family, buying into real estate, or opening their own businesses.21 Professionals and entrepreneurs form the backbone of the city’s emerging market economy. But locked into a dichotomous administrative category of the rural-urban divide, city residents and villagers lack the social mapping and cultural language to relate to this generation of outsiders.22 The migrants’ mobility may rise to the logic of the market and the post-reform realities of development, but they are seriously displaced by lingering state categories with which officials, scholars, and the public define citizenship. Migrants typically congregate in village neighborhoods where factories and construction sites are located.23 Municipal governments in Guangdong have repeatedly conducted campaigns to “cleanse” these areas of “backward, uncivil” elements. The fate of these residents, be they enterprising chuzhang, juzhang, laoban, dagongzu, or xiaojie (petty officials, bosses, migrant workers, or prostitutes, respectively), remains contingent in the regime’s master narrative on success and illegality.24 As mentioned, the lives of migrants are intricately tied to villagers in the enclaves. Unlike migrants, the villagers have not moved anywhere. They no longer farm, as their agricultural products are now irrelevant. Although lacking skills to navigate in a city, they are not poor. By developing rental properties collectively and individually to capture the post-reform market in housing, they enjoy unimaginable income. They have been an integral part of China’s rapid urban transformation processes. The question is whether they are able to turn their resources into cultural capital as defined by mainstream society. City officials are reluctant to disperse them because of political calculations, but they ignore the needs of the villagers’ cramped physical environment such as basic hygiene, sewage and water, roads, and public security. Urban neighbors see them as unproductive and unseemly. Ironically, as I hope to show, the villagers This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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deepen the dividing line by clinging onto their rural hukou that gives them entitlement to village land and rental income. Protests against demolitions and evictions are increasingly volatile and violent.25 Incarcerated in these unsustainable processes and suspended between their past and future, their circumstances complicate our analyses of the structural and discursive factors contributing to the rural-urban divide and its associated hierarchy of citizenship. At this juncture of Guangzhou’s feverish march toward modernity, anthropologists may clarify the social configurations, identify the significant players, and capture the uneasy self-fashioning at the margins of China’s metropolises. These clarifications may deepen their understanding of displacement in processual terms.26

The New Translocality in South China: Market Dynamics The tensions built up around Guangzhou’s village enclaves rest largely on the unleashing of market forces in South China, one of the three major realisms that have shaped the negotiation of property rights, employment, and entrepreneurship. Although China’s economy is liberalizing everywhere, the processes in South China have been particularly intense. It is quite telling for statistical estimates to claim that 35 percent of the migrants that cross provincial lines have come to Guangdong.27 The province has a long historical link with the Chinese diaspora and a foreign trade tradition. As the southern window for China’s renewed global embrace, it has become a leading region for the production of light industrial and electronic goods. Its special economic zones (Shenzhen and Zhuhai) started from sleepy market towns in the region that grew to modern cities of a few million migrants. Shenzhen built a stock exchange, airport, container ports, highways, industrial parks, golf courses, hotels, luxury private housing, and malls (see Figure 16.1). Guangzhou reestablished its links with the Pearl River Delta, which proudly displayed its own “little dragons”: municipalities thriving with infrastructural development, industrial production, and urbanization (Foshan, Nanhai, Panyu, Shunde, Zhongshan, and Dongguan). In the eastern part of the delta, especially in Dongguan and Shenzhen, Taiwanese and Japanese investments were substantial.28 Following the factories came professionals and service workers. The high salaries and the glamor of the market attracted graduates from provinces in the north. To secure local hukou for these migrants, the towns invented numerous in-between categories of residence.29 After Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992, the municipalities began to aggressively invest in infrastructure like Shenzhen. The construction attracted more waves of migrant labor. The housing and consumption fever also drew tens of thousands of Hong Kongers, who gained residency by buying property in Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Figure 16.1 Urban shoppers in an upscale mall

Many new communities gained the notoriety of being “mistress villages.” A large number of migrants provided services in the booming industries for leisure and consumption (see Figure 16.2) (Wang 2005, pp. 72–93). In the midst of this regional development, Guangzhou expanded rapidly into its suburban areas. In 2002, it had a population of over ten million, of which seven million held a Guangzhou household registration.30 The city today has become relatively open. People from all walks of life are able to find work, housing, schooling for their children, basic necessities, and luxury services so long as they are willing to pay the market price.31 The city’s two train stations highlight divergent aspects of the city’s development. The old station for domestic travel, in the old western end of the city, continues to be filled with the poor migrant laborers who are waiting for passage to the delta’s factories and construction sites (see Figure 16.3). It is a public space where the city government conducts periodic “cleanup” campaigns.32 The new train station linking Hong Kong to Beijing is situated at the city’s fast-growing east end (see Figure 16.4). Adjacent to it is a park and plaza, with artificial waterfalls, manicured landscaping, and the CITIC Tower standing at one end. The elegant public space represents the city’s vision for a post-WTO future and embraces a different “floating” population.

Maoist Landlords in Post-Reform Guangzhou: Historical Baggage During the socialist era, when administrative or production units in Guangzhou needed to expand, the government marked out designated areas and offered corresponding urban hukou and factory jobs to villages that lost land. Villagers eagerly sought after these offers. They maneuvered, pleaded, and bribed. Who would not This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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wish their children to be city residents with factory jobs? But the opportunities were few and far between as urban growth at the time was kept under tight state control. However, in the 1990s, the situation took an unprecedented turn, best illustrated by the experiences in Dongguan. It was a rather agricultural county southeast of Guangzhou that became urbanized after a Hong Kong developer built a highway through it, linking Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Millions of migrant laborers worked in Dongguan’s factories to satisfy the world’s demand for toys, household goods, tools, shoes, and clothing. Joining Hong Kong, Japanese, and Taiwanese businesses were high-tech giants such as Motorola and TDK. Dongguan’s town center displayed the familiar plazas, boulevards, public buildings, and business-class hotels of a small, modern city. However, the municipality often made news headlines with factory fires, labor unrests, armed robberies, and violent crimes committed by local toughs and desperate migrants.33 Officials complained loudly about an emerging social problem. They said that a generation of young villagers had become parasites in the everexpanding factory districts. Locally labeled sibu qingnian (youths with four negatives), they were uneducated, and they treated factory or physical labor with disdain. They lived on substantial rents from family and collective village properties. Global capital, in partnership with a state-instigated market, had created in Dongguan a factory regime that profited from the cheap labor of migrants without introducing civic institutional changes. Local villagers had not engaged with growth in the region except as landlords. Officials claimed that the villagers were stuck in their rural ways and had no future in a modern industrial China. Allegedly, they gambled and indulged in women and drugs. What irked these officials was the villagers’ complacency. In the official moral or political map, the villagers ranked lower than migrant laborers.

Figure 16.2 Consumption fever in the Guangzhou subway This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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At about the same time, the issue of “village enclaves” also emerged in public discourse in Guangzhou. Officially, Guangzhou had 138 of these enclaves. An estimate in 2002 gave a total area of 87.5 square kilometers, or 22.67 percent of the municipal area of Guangzhou. Local offices circulated policy documents from the provincial government that outlined ways to clean up and to eventually eradicate them.34 Promotional materials from a policy conference in the Special Economic Zone of Zhuhai pointed to the difficulties on the ground as well as the government’s resolve. There were twenty-six village enclaves housing 45,000 villagers and 150,000 migrants. The images presented by official rhetoric were stark: The “villages” were dirty, chaotic, and backward, with inferior infrastructural facilities and belonging to a past era; the government had pushed hard to start a new land revolution “to cut off the city’s cancers.” Supposedly, the residents had come around to having their old neighborhoods demolished, and they embraced new, modern, civilized housing projects (wenming shequ) that the government had built for them (Zhuhaishi Xiangzhouqu gaizao chengzhong jiucun jianshe wenming shequ bangongshi, 2002). The government’s rhetoric about development and modernization, tied to a nationalist agenda, was loud and clear, but developers were not interested until given windfall tax and business advantages. The demands of the villagers were often unrealistic. Local cadres felt caught between loyalty to other villagers and political necessity to enforce government policy.35 By exploring the villagers’ negotiations with city officials, their own village cadres, their migrant tenants, and other lineage members and neighbors, one might capture the multi-faceted, self-contradicting energies of rural residents who had embraced the

Figure 16.3 Migrant workers at the old Guangzhou train station This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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city’s march into their lives with ambivalence and desperation. Within the narrow spatiality of the village enclaves, they juggled newfound entrepreneurship with fragments of state policy on collective land ownership, and the ideology of hukou, all of which had long sedimented into everyday life and consciousness. There was a sense of déjà vu. Fifty years ago, the Maoist revolution promised the country’s farmers heaven on earth.36 Many might not have felt that “they had their backs against the water,” as they would feel today.37 My ethnographic explorations in Guangzhou were conducted at such a historical moment. I hope to show the differentiated terrain carved by the global flow of capital into the region, the movement of rural migrants it triggered, and the subsequent rural-urban disjuncture, all experienced by a densely packed but displaced population.

An Uncivil Space If one strolls along the northern bank of Henan, an island across the Pearl River from downtown Guangzhou, one can find luxury high-rise apartments with Art Deco design and high-tech glitter (see Figure 16.5). A 140-square-meter unit is priced at 1.5 million yuan (approximately $187,000). The promenade is open, spotlessly clean, and lined with streetlights and manicured, flowering shrubs. Except for the red banner announcing that the apartments are modern, tasteful living spaces for the upwardly mobile, one might think that it is a stretch of Canary Wharf in London. At one end of the promenade is the elegant north gate of Sun Yat-sen University, a national institution. Only fifteen years ago, I paid seven cents to take a ferry from downtown to the campus. The area around the north gate appeared eerily forlorn, with half-abandoned village houses, muddy paths, and river landings for fishermen and transport barges. The south gate of the university faced a major road that ran through the heart of the island. There was a terminal for buses to take villagers to other parts of the city. A few collective food stores competed with street vendors, serving a mixed clientele of villagers, students, and university staff. Sugar cane, fruits, vegetables, and plastic utensils were displayed next to litter, grime, and, at times, raw sewage. To cross the dusty road to reach the campus, one navigated among noisy buses and trucks spewing dark smoke, an occasional taxi, and hundreds of bicycles from all directions. It was a life-and-death struggle. I remembered the villages beyond the motorway. There were low, red brick houses with adjacent pigsties. Vegetables patches were interspersed with sugar cane and fruit trees. Some fields looked abandoned. Before the revolution in 1949, the campus was that of Lingnan University, an  English-speaking institution run by American missionaries. It coexisted with numerous villages on the island. In the 1930s, the university’s faculty and students collected data on a cluster of these villages. They reported that the village populations This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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were not entirely agricultural. Farmers also engaged in small trades and jobs in town. There were lineage halls and rich religious rituals. Compared to other parts of the province, village income was moderate, and education facilities above average. Some families earned their keep by renting out properties or relying on overseas remittances. The authors were hopeful that the expanding commercial city would absorb the villages. They predicted a bright future (Wu Ruilin 1937, Wu and Huang Enlian 1935), but further studies were interrupted by war.

Figure 16.4 Plaza at the Guangzhou East train station in Tianhe District

In 2001, I stumbled onto these villages while studying the luxury apartments around the corner. It was counter-intuitive for me to find the villages physically and culturally so disconnected from the expansionist, modernist frenzy of post-reform Guangzhou. Although seemingly enclosed, village life was bustling in its own ways.38 There was a pastiche quality to it. New and distinguished archways bearing the village names marked their physical entrances. On the main streets, one found the usual ancestral halls, a few remaining banyan trees, and village offices. A small dragon boat that used to galvanize the men during festivities was half-submerged in a village pond. The water was thick with industrial and human grime. Residents sat around, smoked, gambled, and chatted. Women were busy in the markets. Winding through alleys, made dark and narrow by illegal additions to old houses (former pigsties and backyard kitchens turned temporary rental dwellings), one could feel that humans and animals were pressed against precious space. Chicken roamed around open This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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garbage bins and yards left by demolished buildings. Public toilets and pay phones operated by local stores indicated that renters might not have access to these facilities in their living units. The concentrated presence of migrants from different parts of China made one feel that post-reform market forces were at work. At village entrances were billboards full of job postings. Migrants with luggage on their backs walked in twos and threes. Near a bridge leading into a village that had rented its land to a thriving cloth market, laborers waited around to be picked by hundreds of factories nearby. Few spoke the Cantonese dialect. Everywhere, fading official posters stated the requirements for temporary residence cards and for reporting to the family planning office.39 Along the streets were food stalls peddling the cuisine of the migrants’ home areas: Sichuan, Henan, Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Hakka regions to the northeast. Itinerant barbers set their makeshift stools on the side of the road while junk collectors picked through heaps of brick, wood planks, and scrap metal. Seasonally, one spotted beggars (mostly women and children) from the mountainous regions of northern Guangdong. Even the motorcycles navigating through the dark alleys with their passengers had licenses that were not legal in the city proper.40 They operated a roaring taxi business nonetheless.

Figure 16.5 A quiet moment on the banks of the Pearl River lined with luxury apartments

One of the villages I conducted fieldwork in was studied by C. K. Yang from 1948 to 1951. In the post-reform era, it was the focus of student theses. To illuminate how various policy phases created fields of power and relevance for village life, I shall This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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summarize some of its ethnographic landmarks.41 Yang’s image of Nanching village is an idyllic one: “The village houses, the enveloping fields and vegetable gardens, the ponds and ditches and the streams, the interspersed fruit trees, and the graves on the hills wove together a picture that the Chinese for centuries have come to call ‘t’ien, yuan, lu, mo’ (fields, gardens, houses, graves), a classical expression signifying ‘homeland’ or the roots of life” (Yang 1959, p. 10). Two lineages composed a majority of the village population (about 1,100 in 1948, divided into 230 households) and dominated community affairs. The village’s proximity to Guangzhou had, in fact, meant a dense population, premium land prices, high tenancy rates, and diverse occupations linked to the urban economy. There were a few households of mixed surnames who did not own land or houses. They were considered by the villagers as “floating elements,” “sojourners,” or “guests” (Yang 1959, p. 11). One could not find a significant leisure class in the village before the revolution, according to Yang, as landlords and their children lived and received education in the city. Some ventured to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The upwardly mobile seldom returned. The communist period was difficult for the residents. The anti-commercial orientation of the Maoist period cut out subsidiary work in the city and petty trade. Mobility was restricted and village life increasingly bounded. Nanching village was administratively divided into six agricultural production teams, each allotted a small amount of land and production tools. Households were assigned production quotas of rice, pigs, fruits, and vegetables to be delivered to state procurement offices at low prices. Everyone felt poor and cut off from the city. But the city economy was expanding, and it meant that village land was often requisitioned for factory use. That became a desirable way out for villagers, as a limited number of urban jobs and hukou were given to the production teams that lost the land. By 1983, when Hao Lingting conducted research for his doctoral thesis in Nanching, village land was half of what it was in 1948. The number of permanent households had increased to 390, with a population of 2,495, of which 1,392 were engaged in agriculture. Six to seven hundred houses clustered together. Apart from natural population increases, there were two unusual inflows: About eighty households of renters had moved to the village from the city. Others were “sons-in-law” from nearby towns who married village women and settled in the village. Together with workers whose hukou and employment were transferred to city factories but who remained living in the village, an increasingly urban influence in village life emerged (Hao 1985, p. 8). However, Hao did not detect an outflow of villagers. Government policies at the time were to loosen the administrative control of agricultural production, allowing surplus labor to engage in subsidiary work in commerce, small-scale industries, and services in the community. A cluster of small-scale enterprises were operated by the xiang (former brigade) on the western end of the village, employing the residents of six villages (Nanching being one) under the xiang’s administration. The factories This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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produced handicrafts, clothing, and bags for domestic, Hong Kong, and Macau businesses. However, the villagers’ household registration, their entitlements, and identity were still tied to the village even if their livelihoods were no longer agricultural. That was what the government promoted as litu bulixiang (leaving the fields but not the village). The general living conditions improved rapidly. Hao estimated that villagers had a higher income for consumption than ordinary workers in Guangzhou. They spent less of their total income on food; they built larger, modern-style houses, and they equipped their residences with color televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines (1985, p. 51). Another crucial layer of changes in village life came in the 1990s. Gao Cong conducted ethnographic research in year 2000 for his master’s thesis, focusing on the kinship structure in the village economy. By then, there were 524 registered rural households, with 1,609 residents. Rental properties numbered 1,879, with 188 being run by the village collective. There were roughly 11,845 temporary residents, many of whom found work in the 756 factories, shops, and service businesses in the village (Gao 2001, p. 3). Although dilapidated lineage halls physically remained part of the landscape, their economic and cultural impact had long diminished. Residents with the Mai and the Cha surnames were still the most numerous, comprising almost five of the six production teams (renamed she since the reforms).42 There were some lineage rituals, and smaller surnames complained that members of the two lineages dominated the cadre’s positions. What surprised Gao, however, was how strong individual family ties were among the villagers. Multi-generational families were very common. Parents often stayed with a married younger son and grandchildren. Even if sons maintained separate households, they could be sharing a multi-story unit with parents or live close by.43 Gao also found that villagers sought spouses from within the village, or at most among nearby village enclaves, not from the city. There were also a substantial number of sons-in-law who married local women and moved into the village.44 Some village men did marry non-villagers, but their spouses were mostly rural migrants who were working in the factories and service industries in the village enclaves close by. There were also some who took spouses in other village enclaves and then settled with their wives’ families. Migrant residents who had education and means seldom considered the villagers, male or female, as potential spouses. On the whole, the marriage arrangements among the villagers seemed intensely involuted. On the surface, it looked as if the marriage pattern was a result of cultural barriers imposed from outside. Gao suggested that villagers were looked down on by city folks and were not competitive in a marriage market. But he also highlighted another observation: the unwillingness of villagers, men or women, to transfer their household registration to an urban one because of the sizable amount of dividends attached to their rural registration. Since the 1980s, Nanching village and those in the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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vicinity saw dramatic increases in the value of their land. Income from land requisition by government went above 100,000 yuan per mu (one-sixth of an acre). Rental incomes collected from factories and markets were also pooled as collective income. Villagers who had maintained their rural household registration were entitled to a share of the dividends. For a multi-generational family whose members were given individual shares, family income could reach several hundred thousand yuan a year. In villages with a good dividend, married women refused to transfer their hukou to their husbands for fear of losing their share but, instead, had their spouses move in. Increasingly, Gao observed that young men in Nanching, especially those with modest means, would marry and settle in villages in the vicinity that had substantial dividends and then rent out their own houses in the village (2001, p. 42). Brides from outside also had to have rural hukou if they were to be eligible for a share in the husband’s village; hence, the unwillingness of village men to marry city women. As a consequence, the rules for entitlement and the dramatic increase in dividends in the village economy encouraged instrumental marriage strategies that further localized livelihoods and social capital. In the mental as well as the economic map of the villagers, institutional practices revolving around hukou remained entrenched. I shared many of Gao Cong’s observations when I began fieldwork in 2002. It seemed ironic that, while rural populations at large were trying their best to shed rural status, and while national political debates had centered on further liberalization of population movements, the villagers here were obsessed with protecting their hukou in the collective. Retired villagers complained bitterly about the excessive quotas in the past, the low procurement prices, the lack of respect they encountered, and the powerlessness they felt. Post-Mao reforms changed their circumstances drastically. The state no longer required deliveries of products in kind. The village leaderships had increasingly rented out collective land to private entrepreneurs to build shops and factories. Administrative expenses were subtracted from the rental income and then divided among registered households in the village collective. For a prosperous village, such as the one adjacent to Nanching where the cloth market stood, yearly dividend ( fenhong) per capita had reached hundreds of thousands. With this kind of income, who would want a lowly factory job that fetched 600 yuan a month? As in Nanching, villagers engaged in heated arguments over the legality of who was a rural household in the collective, negotiated the balance of individual dividend against collective expenditure (such as for community hygiene, village schools, the upkeep of roads, salaries of cadres, public security), and accused officials of colluding with factory bosses and developers.45 A Nanching villager told the sad fate of her daughter as determined by the twists and turns of state policies. In the 1950s, the villager and her husband had rural household registration. She was lucky enough to be transferred to a city’s collective, thus enabling her children born after that transfer to have urban registration. Her This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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daughter, born earlier, remained a peasant. Her daughter remained in the village until she married a city resident in the early 1990s. However, soon after the daughter’s household registration was transferred to the city unit, the village became prosperous in the land rental business. The transfer made her ineligible to receive dividends from the village collective. With many of the state-owned factories undergoing restructuring, she faced unemployment.46 As the mother lamented, “My daughter was a peasant when she should not have been and a worker when she should not have been.” The new incomes also complicated life in intimate ways. Villagers were eager to tell the unfortunate stories of village men marrying “outsiders.” In one case, the incoming wife transferred her hukou into the groom’s village before the wedding. Once she secured her right to a share of village dividend, she refused to have anything to do with the husband. She only agreed to leave the village after the man paid her a sum of 40,000 yuan. Another man married a young migrant woman who worked in a hair salon in the village. In the beginning, the parents were suspicious of her relationships with male clients and worried that she would run away. They periodically checked on her at the hair salon. Then, they had other concerns. Her poor relatives and friends from northern Guangdong came for extended stays in their house. The marriage broke up after the parents chased her out.47 Villagers shrewdly used their limited private land entitlements to engage with the real estate market. Besides the shares and dividends, villagers were obsessed with the meticulous pursuit of living and rental space for themselves and their immediate families. A rural household registration for males had an added advantage in the form of zhaijidi (house allotments). Entitlements to land for houses, at least for each male descendant, were given to villagers up to the 1990s. There were also small patches of land given to individual families to farm on their own (ziliudi). In the post-reform era, resourceful village families had built multi-unit dwellings for retired parents and married sons. Some were for rental. The dwellings stretched the quota of land entitlements beyond the limit, pressing against neighbors, trespassing public areas, blocking sewage and drainage, and creating fire hazards and flooding. It gave an appearance of labyrinths of squalid illegality (see Figure 16.6). The calculations of village landlords were short term. They knew that they had few channels for mobility. They would lose out to the market in the future as much as they had been at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy for the past forty years. They referred to their landholdings as “rural socialist residues.” In the early 1990s, those with rural hukou confirmed their land allocation as final from the collective. Their aim was to profit from it while their rights lasted (see Figure 16.7). If and when the city government demolished these enclaves, the villagers intended to claim maximum compensation. There was no incentive to follow expensive building codes or to maintain the properties. This quite naturally reinforced the already negative images urbanites and officials had reserved for the villagers. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In a visit to a family in Nanching, I found that they had rented their house to twenty-five separate tenants concurrently. The landlord acknowledged that, although her tenants were cramped in a small area, they hardly knew one another because there was such a rapid turnover. The landlord claimed that tenants with rent in arrears would simply leave without a trace. She had not been able to collect thousands of yuan and wondered whether this rental business was worth the hassle. Few landlords would bother to provide tenants with safety equipment against fire or other hazards. She stated that tenants seldom complained. Coming from poorer, rural environments, many were not even aware of the dangers and health hazards of the tenement housing. Village cadres seldom reported to the municipal offices until a disaster struck. Political higher-ups turned a blind eye, often profiting from the situation through corruption.48 The city government regularly made known the necessary regulations concerning renting to temporary residents and the related public security issues. However, there was little enforcement.49 A retired village cadre expressed her frustrations in getting the current leadership to enforce the rules and complained that she was accused of being a troublemaker, nostalgic for the ideologically charged past.50

Figure 16.6 Cramped housing and pollution in a nearby village enclave This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Figure 16.7 A notice calling for public order covered with rental ads in a village enclave

Despite the trouble (real and imagined) with migrant renters, families I visited had devised various schemes of sharing the properties. Mr. Mai had three sons who were given house lots (sixty square meters each) as male members of the village. A few years earlier they pooled their resources to build four small apartment blocks, each with four stories. They occupied one block, each son and family retaining one floor unit. The rest, over twenty in number, were rented out for about 400 yuan a month per unit. Mr. Mai’s wife was the manager, seeking tenants, negotiating contracts, and monitoring the upkeep of the properties. She was careful in selecting to whom she would rent. She would rather take a lower rent to keep a reliable tenant, someone who would have longer-term employment. They had problems, but in most cases it was because the tenants suddenly lost their jobs or their businesses failed. Although none of the children relied on village dividends and had secured jobs elsewhere, they had no intention to move away. In the summer of 2002, one of the she in Nanching engaged with the market in a big way by designing an elaborate real-estate scheme. A private developer was invited to build apartment blocks on a large patch of village land. He happened to be the brother of the village head who had Hong Kong connections and who managed to come up with a building fund. Villagers were allowed to buy into the scheme in several ways: using the yearly dividends they are entitled to, or exchanging the value of their former houses and plots with that of the new properties. A family with many members was now able to provide several apartments of their own choosing for married sons and daughters. If the children did not live there, the properties could be rented to outsiders, mostly entrepreneurs and factory owners in the area. Even in these well-guarded housing projects, the residents did not feel safe, and they drew hard boundaries against what they considered threatening “outside elements.” The apartment blocks were closed off from the rest of the village by a high wall. Security guards checked every visitor who passed through the main gate although This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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this was not an unusual custom for work units in China. A month or so earlier, the residents blocked off the rear entrance after some burglary incidents were blamed on migrant laborers. In the courtyards between the blocks, one often found groups of young men and women playing cards and mahjong, a situation not unlike what I was told in Dongguan. Other villagers called them “ershizu,” people who squandered their family fortunes. The guards at the entrance were there for a purpose. They were to alert the gambling groups in case the city’s public security officers decided to stage a raid. An atmosphere of distrust permeated the village. During a visit to a family’s house, I asked every neighbor I could find where the absent occupants were. However, no one seemed to know the family members or their whereabouts. There were just blank, cautious stares. While I had tea at a village snack shop, a retired man volunteered to tell me that he kept a big dog to guard his house and that his son forbade him to give out his telephone number to anyone. He never ventured out of the house at night for fear of crime. He vividly referred to sites raided by public security officers for sheltering illegal gambling and described incidents of rape and beatings he had heard about through the grapevine. Another individual family we visited had bars on every one of the windows. The house had been broken into earlier. The owner, a village cadre, kept a dog chained near the doorway. The usual suspects, he claimed, were migrant workers desperate to make fast money and were difficult to trace. Othering went multiple ways. Not all tenants fit the image of dangerous migrant laborers. One evening, I went with some university students to visit a friend who lived in a village enclave next to Nanching. The students called him “little boss” (xiao laoban). A well-groomed young man wearing a Hong Kong G-2000 T-shirt and spectacles, Zhang was from Jiangsu province. He was eager to point out that Jiangsu was historically a region of culture, officialdom, and commerce near Shanghai. His uncle had come to Guangzhou a few years earlier to set up a stall in a wholesale cloth market in an adjacent village enclave. The market started only a year earlier by villagers and without legal recognition from city authorities, but it grew to accommodate hundreds of stalls selling cloth from manufacturers all over China. The market also supplied small clothing factories in the vicinity. Local villagers could not compete with traders from elsewhere, who subsequently rented their stalls. Rents were low by Zhang’s standards, but the family had to pay the village an initial sum of several hundred thousand yuan. They also paid a thousand-odd yuan a month for their two-bedroom apartment. Business was profitable. They transported silk and other delicate cloth from their hometown and sold the materials to hundreds of small factories nearby. He was of the view that, in Jiangsu, where clothing factories were well established and state owned, there was no space for small entrepreneurs like him. Guangzhou was different because of diverse channels of investment and trade through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In Guangzhou, some of Zhang’s fellow traders had already made a fortune. A  Wenzhou native who was visiting Zhang had bought several properties in the village and in Panyu, a municipality southeast of Guangzhou. To send his daughter to a university in the United States, he had paid an intermediary several hundred thousand yuan. Neither Zhang nor his friend cared about residence status. Zhang had a city registration from his hometown, and he had no intention of transferring it to Guangzhou. His aim was to help his family develop the business and move beyond the enclave and Guangzhou. In this well-lit, clean, and bare apartment, we sipped dragonwell tea from his hometown, ate grapes, and exchanged our views of the world.51 It was quite clear that Zhang and his friends did not have much regard for their village landlord. According to them, the old man and his family owned the entire block of apartments and earned a few hundred thousand yuan of rent annually. But he only “ate, played mahjong, and did not engage in anything productive.” Although Zhang was a migrant himself, his impressions of migrants were standard. He felt that migrant laborers committed most of the petty crimes (see Figures 16.8 and 16.9). Zhang also claimed that migrants from China’s northeast were big and tough, and they monopolized the underworld of major crimes—armed robberies, and drug trafficking, weapons, and prostitution.52 City residents, guarding their own turf, regarded both villagers and migrants as pariahs to be avoided. Some city families I talked to preferred to hire expensive local workers as maids and nannies because they did not feel safe with migrants.53 When asked if they could cite an incident of contact with migrants or conflict with villagers, they became vague and tentative. When I pressed further by pointing to the influx of professionals from other cities of China, my friends did not react to these “outsiders” negatively. Nonetheless, they claimed that, with migrant laborers in a city enjoying unprecedented affluence, “class contradictions had become too severe for one to feel comfortable.”54 State intrusion was again felt on October 1, 2002, when Nanching was administratively converted to an “urban neighborhood” under the city district offices. Many villagers found that they were learning to be urban the hard way. Nothing seemed to have changed except that a layer of village officials was transferred to the district office. The office outsourced services to groups outside the village and was charging fees several times higher than when the village managed its own affairs. With an urban household status, villagers could seek employment in the city without bureaucratic hassle, and many young villagers had ventured out. Still, only 10 percent of the villagers chose to live outside the enclave. Those who stayed encountered bureaucratic inconveniences and felt their former autonomy being encroached on. “The district office manages everything,” an old man complained, “and those at the office are so impersonal. There are endless forms to fill and numerous licenses for the minutest things. I feel that I am managed from This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Figure 16.8 Migrants waiting for work along the main street of a village enclave

head to toe. The other day, I rode my unregistered bicycle to the vegetable market, and the guards gave me a ticket.” Another retired informant who lived in the collective estate pointed to the new security guards in the compound: “The locals have all been replaced by outsiders with uniforms.” Factories began to rent units in his complex as dormitories for employees although there were explicit rules prohibiting this. It was easy to detect such rentals because the workers, fifteen to twenty crammed into an apartment, hung their clothes out on the balcony to dry. “What family will display their clothes like this?” To him, these rentals were the ultimate intrusion into his cloistered world of village security. Worse still, another outside force made an even more intrusive presence. An old villager fearfully described an incident. The village had been a thriving site for illegal activities: prostitution, drug trafficking, and gambling in particular. This meant lucrative business for the underworld of crime. Recently, opposing gangs made a show of force by marching through these enclaves and brandishing their machetes. Residents and their security guards could only hide behind closed doors. In sum, the village families I visited shared certain profiles. Most of them were quite well off because of village dividends and rental income. Family members had a variety of hukou registrations, obtained at different policy phases. Even children who worked in the city or were carrying non-rural hukou were inclined to stay in the village with their parents. They were uniformly wary of migrants in the village and very watchful over their migrant tenants. Their perception of “the outside” was one This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of distrust, mixed with a strong sense of powerlessness. The arbitrariness of policy shifts and their underdog status in the national order of things had long been taken as a given. Fragments of the three realisms continued to deepen in their everyday economic maneuvers, mental mapping, and sensitivities.

Figure 16.9 New migrants heading for the village public security office

Grounding Displacement With limited historical and ethnographic details, I have attempted to delineate processes of othering in the not-so-visible streets of Guangzhou. They illuminate assumptions about entitlement, provision, governance, and citizenship that have long separated villagers and migrants from city residents. Discursive measures have intertwined with state institutional practices, past and present, to create powerful ordering parameters for social, economic life on the ground. As an administrative device and ideological category, hukou and the associated collective property regimes have deepened the drawing of hard boundaries and the marginalization of significant populations in China’s cities. Although drawn into a fast-forward mode of marketoriented gain, residents of village enclaves in Guangzhou seem surprisingly grounded and dispossessed. At the crossroads of the government’s ideological turn today, a spatial portrayal of these processes provides certain materiality to what the villagers and migrants are experiencing in a volatile South China region. The enclaves are not a feature of the past but part of China’s post-reform modernity when ordinary villagers attached to an entrenched socialist order are forced to come to terms with market insecurities This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and fragments of their own historical baggage. In the process of administrative restructuring, boundaries are remade, enclosures reinforced, new impositions contested, and new opportunities pursued with desperation and ambivalence. In view of the juxtaposition of entrenchment and volatility in the village enclaves, the concept of “displacement” should be re-examined. Delinking the concept from physical movements of major participants in China’s development saga unveils interlocking historical processes, discursive and institutional practices that constitute experiences of displacement. Post-reform Guangzhou, post-apartheid South Africa, and a “cleansed” Mumbai may at times seem all too similar. *This is a slightly revised version of the original, published in American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (May 2007): 329–50. I presented a version of the original article at the conference on “Gangs, Crowds and City Enclaves,” Amsterdam, August 2003, and at the China Law Center, Yale University, in December 2003. I thank the participants for their comments, in particular Thomas Hansen and Peter Pels. I also thank Susan  Brownell, Carolyn Cartier, James Scott, Deborah Davis, David Faure, Lei Guang, Virginia Dominguez, and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. Yang Meijian, Yan Lijun, Yu Kwok Leung, and Yukiko Tonoike have provided superb research assistance.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

See an account of the case in Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan, “Sun Zhigang shiwang zhenxiang; sui gai weichi fuza?” adapted from Zhongguo xinwenshe (posted on Chinesenews.com, June 6, 11:11 a.m.). Voices on the web and the newspapers called for stopping the institutionalized violence of the public security and detention systems. Several young legal scholars in Beijing wrote to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, pointed out the unconstitutional nature of the detention system, protested against its abusive practices, and stated the basic rights of individual citizens. The State Council installed new regulations aimed at aiding indigent vagrants, to take effect on August 1, 2003. On the hukou system and the multiple citizenship regimes in China, see a discussion by Solinger (1999). For other situations of spatial engineering and citizenship, for example, racialized dispossessing and industrialization during apartheid South Africa, and new possibilities in the post-apartheid era, see Hart (2002); for related works, see Ferguson (1999), and Hansen and Stepputat (2005). See Siu’s “Redefining the Market Town through Festivals in South China,” in Faure and Liu (2002), pp. 233–49. Household registration has been an established institution for purposes of tax and social control since the Ming dynasty. Huji had meant social identity; tax account; ethnic distinctions; settlement history; entitlements; and responsibilities to lineage, community, and empire. It allowed the administrative mapping of the late imperial state to weave into the social, economic, and cultural mappings of local society. Faure and Siu (2003) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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argue that the marketing systems, lineage networks, temple and irrigation associations, merchants’ charities, and regional academies provided layers of material and cultural resources that linked villagers to towns and cities. However, in the early 20th century, the political base of the new republic gradually shifted to the city, and the term peasant (nongmin) was used to represent rural subjects who were to be transformed, modernized, or revolutionized. The hukou system in the socialist period continued the urban bias. It was a powerful tool to differentiate the population into multiple categories: state and collective, rural and urban residency, agricultural producers and industrial workers. These typifications are aligned to indicate a broad distinction in life chances. The imposition of the hukou system could not have been administratively feasible without the corresponding socialist transformations by which alternative sources of livelihood, mobility, and authority were drastically curtailed. The construction of the hard rural-urban divide took over two decades of organized efforts by Mao’s party-state that shrank layers of society in between. The language of the socialist state was so totalizing that the bureaucratic presence of the party-state and its categories were reproduced in the reform era, ironically by a population who eagerly turned their backs on the revolution. I call that process “state involution” (Siu 1989a; see also chapter 5 of this volume). 6. For the changing meaning of peasant, in modern China, see an essay by Cohen (1993). For a good summary of how official taxonomies and popular perceptions intertwined to produce dominant idioms and images of the rural and the urban today, see Guang (2003). See Zhang’s “Contesting Crime, Order, and Migrant Spaces in Beijing” in Chen et al. (2001), pp. 201–22 on the cultural logic of migrant criminality in the post-reform era, when displaced rurality was seen as threatening and socially polluting. 7. Most of the state-owned factories in China’s industrial cities are bankrupt, unable to compete with the market forces unleashed by the post-Mao reforms. There are massive layoffs of workers and the loss of pensions and other job-related securities. Cities in the industrial northeast are the hardest hit. See Zhang (2003) and Solinger (1999). 8. For detailed accounts of the history and operations of the household registration system, see Cai Fang (2001), Lu Yilong (2004), and Yu Depang (2002). Subsequent to the publication of this article, migrant populations have continued to rise to two hundred million upwards today. 9. Among mixed neighborhoods in Guangzhou, village enclaves see a rise in the formation of “village protection brigades,” to take care of public security during the day and to handle petty crimes. See Chen Yiping’s “Guanyu wailai renkou de anzhi wenti” in Gransow and Li (2001), pp. 251–79. 10. In 2004, the largest of the three villages had a population of 6,000 original villagers and about 100,000 migrants (an estimate from a village cadre in charge of monitoring the village population). 11. Lila Abu-Lughod discussed the three realisms in a seminar at Yale 2002 (on Egyptian soap operas and the construction of modern subjectivities); see also Abu-Lughod’s “Modern Subjects” in Mitchell (2000), pp. 87–114. On images of the peasantry portrayed by half a century of Chinese literature, see Siu (1990c). I argue that the writers’ artistic creations, spanning over five generations, were deeply shaped by dramatic turns of political events. 12. For an insightful collection of essays on the topic, see Low (1999). See also the works of Teresa Caldeira (“Fortified Enclaves” in Low 1999, pp. 83–107), Appadurai (2000), Perlman (1976), and Hayden (1995). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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13. See Cartier (2003) on the concept of “cultural economy” and on the politics of urban imaginings in contemporary South China. For issues of spatiality in post-reform China that are not specifically focused on migrancy, see a group of theoretically informed essays (Flower 2004; Friedman 2004; Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 2004). They treat spatiality and contest between “center” and “margins” with a broad historical perspective. 14. See the works of Nicholas Lardy and Barry Naughton. 15. See Davis ed. (2000) on social inequalities and consumption. 16. On migrants in cities and on urban village enclaves, see recent books by sociologists and policy groups in China, such as Gransow and Li (2001), Li Peilin (2003, 2004), Bai and Song (2002), Zhou and Gao (2001), and Zhang Jianming (2003). On general social stratification after the revolution in 1949 and the recent class formation of “peasant-workers,” see Lu Xueyi (2002, 2004). 17. See Wanning Sun’s “Anhui Baomu in Shanghai” in Wang (2005), pp. 171–89 on Anhui maids; see also Gaetano and Jacka (2004) and Solinger (2006). 18. Although not as critical on the construction of categories such as “migrant” or “village enclave,” these studies offer valuable ethnographic substance. In Guangzhou, villages around Nanching (南景) have been studied by sociologists in Lingnan University in the 1930s. C. K. Yang conducted ethnographic research in Nanching in the late 1940s. Hao Lingting wrote a thesis in 1985. Zhou Daming (Zhou and Gao 2001) and his students have returned to it, and the site has been the focus of several student theses. The village is also my site. I have benefited a great deal from the historical descriptions and the sociological analyses of the Chinese scholars. My goal is to offer an analytical framework that critically examines the often assumed village–city dichotomy and the unilinear transformation of the rural. I shall focus on how layers of past experiences are folded into the ethnographic present. 19. See Zhang (2001a, 2002) and Chen et al. (2001), pp. 201–22; see also Jeong (2000) and Xiang Biao (2000). On the floating population in Chinese cities and their contests for citizenship, see Solinger (1999). For gendered experiences, see Gaetano and Jacka (2004). 20. There is an established body of literature on migrants and urban poverty for different parts of the world. One can start with some classic ethnographic studies such as Perlman (1976), Herbert Gans (1962), and Elijah Anderson (1990). Exciting new ones, with a conceptual language very different from the 1970s studies, include Thomas Hansen (2001), James Ferguson (1999), and others. 21. In recent years, one even finds Hong Kong entrepreneurs operating small-scale businesses in the city. They have joined the growing ranks of getihu (individual entrepreneurs) who do not rely on state allocations. See www.dayoo.com for a recent description. They operate bars, specialty restaurants, and so forth. 22. On a similar critical view of the dichotomous framework, see Zhou “Yongheng de zhongbai,” in Gransow and Li (2001), pp. 304–26. 23. Liu Mengqin in “Shipai liudong renkou juju qu yanjiu” (Gransow and Li 2001, pp. 219–33) argues similarly in a study of Shipai village in Guangzhou. Compared to more homogeneous migrant enclaves like Zhejiangcun on the outskirts of Beijing, Shipai village has a mixed and mobile population. 24. See Liu Xin (2002) on these categories as components of a popular narrative for business success and the good life in the post-reform era.

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25. See the Zhou Zhengyi case in Shanghai, recent violent street confrontations in Nanjing and Beijing. See a recent article “Buneng yin chaiqian sunhai gongmin liyi” in Zhongguo jingji shibao (2003). 26. See a study by Mary Ann O’Donnell, “Inhabiting ShenKong: The Specificity of a Global Imaginary,” a talk given at the University of Chicago, November 6, 2000. 27. See Nanfang dushi bao (2002). According to an official estimate, mobile populations reached 120 million, out of which 42.42 million crossed provincial boundaries. Provinces with the most population outflows are Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Jiangxi, Henan, and Hubei. Provinces or municipalities with the most inflows are Guangdong (35.5 percent), Zhejiang (8.7 percent), Shanghai (7.4 percent), Jiangsu (6 percent), Beijing (5.8 percent), and Fujian (5.1 percent). In the Pearl River Delta, migrant populations often outnumber local residents several times. 28. See also Cartier (2001) and George Lin (1997). 29. One of the major factories in Xiaolan zhen, the Jinri Corporation, hired over five hundred university graduates for sales and research and development. For an analysis of the town at the beginning of market reforms, see chapter 5 of this volume and “The Politics of Migration in a Market Town,” in Davis and Vogel (1990), pp. 61–82. For the numerous categories of “in-between” household registrations in these towns, see Xu, Liu, and Zheng (1988). 30. These data come from provincial statistics. 31. I have talked to professionals in the real estate and advertising businesses, newspaper editors, clothing manufacturers, and so forth. In towns along the railway, properties are acquired or rented by small businessmen, contractors, and truck drivers from Hong Kong and Macau who keep mistresses. 32. The vicinity of the station has become a serious drug area. 33. See the story on Dongguan, “Dongguan peng shenme,” in Xin Jingji, as reported by a local journalist, Fan Rongqiang (2003). 34. See provincial documents. In each sub-district in Guangzhou, a special series of propaganda materials is circulated among cadres. See, for example Nanfang ribao (2002). 35. Personal dilemmas extended to local cadres themselves. In the Haizhu district of Guangzhou, an enclave occupied an area of less than three square kilometers. It housed 2,000 villagers and 60,000 migrant renters. In a campaign to transform the enclave, a village cadre was reluctant to give up his own semi-legal property, a 2,000-square-meter shop that fetched 240,000 yuan of rent every year. See a report in Yangcheng wanbao (2001). 36. For a glimpse of that revolution, see Siu (1989a). 37. Among scholars who have focused on China’s urban transformation, Li Peilin and his team conducted fieldwork in Guangdong. Their sociological analysis is remarkably close to my intuitive observations. We both start with the assumption that these village enclaves would not be “naturally” absorbed in the city’s march. They were created by the hukou system and a lingering Maoist collective economy. They have been sustained by the cultural language discriminating against rurality and migrants. Collective safety nets are at stake, and the shrewd calculations by single-minded villagers to maximize their real estate income are intertwined with an ambiguous social hierarchy. The major players in this social drama are immobile and doubly displaced, in material and ideological terms. See Li Peilin (2003, 2004).

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38. Again, what Li Peilin observed in some of Guangzhou’s village enclaves is physically similar. 39. The government is responsible to check if the migrants have already had their quota of children. The one-child campaign is vigorously enforced in cities. 40. The legal licenses are marked “Yue A.” 41. See C. K. Yang (1959), Zhou and Gao (2001), Gao (2001), and Hao (1985). My perspective differs from theirs. 42. I have changed the surnames of the lineages in the villages to protect identities. 43. This was very much my observation when I conducted fieldwork in 2002–03. Practically all the families we visited had this kind of arrangement. There were occasional younger children who had moved into the city, but the parents still made arrangements to obtain village property for them. 44. In Gao’s study, he found that, between October 1990 and February 1999, for the 127 marriages registered with the administrative unit immediately above Nanching village, 62 were registered at the bride’s home village (Gao 2001, p. 40). 45. The recent social strife (September 2005) between villagers and local officials at Taishi village of Panyu is just a visible example of the high stakes and the intense emotions involved in village accounts. Elderly women were involved in preventing village accounts from being taken by corrupt officials. National and international media captured scenes of their being treated roughly by local police. 46. A PBS production by Sue Williams, “China in the Red,” illuminates the pains of restructuring of state-owned enterprises in China’s industrial cities in the northeast. 47. Interviews of old villagers in March 2003. 48. In one case, a family built a four-story building on its old house plot but uses it exclusively for storing cloth for the nearby market. It is against housing rules and a fire hazard. The family pays over 10,000 yuan to some officials to turn a blind eye to it. 49. See the regulations posted on a local website for migrant workers (www.dagonzu.org). The fines for violations by landlords are insignificant. 50. Based on several visits to her home in December 2002 and March 2003. From conversations with her neighbors and colleagues, I sensed that the articulate woman was feared and avoided. She bought several units in the collective housing estate with her entitled allocation. Her son and family live above her own unit, and her younger son lives and works in the city. She had traveled a great deal with her late husband, who was an official. 51. In a visit to the village in August 2003, I was told that Zhang had bought himself an apartment outside of the village near a new cloth market set up by another city neighborhood. The site of the market used to be a state-owned factory. The new tenants were just moving into the market. The stalls looked spacious, clean, and well lit. 52. He did not have direct experience with these crimes but formed his impressions from media reports. 53. A local cleaning maid charged about 600 yuan a month, whereas a migrant worker would charge 300–400 yuan. The situation had eased, the family said, because there were many unemployed state workers after the reforms. 54. During the SARS crisis in the spring of 2003, I was warned by friends not to venture into the enclaves, citing them as dangerous zones for disease, criminality, and death. Friends living in the Dongshan district (where there is a concentration of families of officials) gave me similar good-natured warnings. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:36 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Part 7 Historical Global and the Asian Postmodern

The 21st century is characterized by an Asian renaissance marked by several major historical trends. In an edited volume to draw attention to a historically interconnected Asia, my colleagues and I show that “at various agentive moments, the likes of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta (Dunn 1986/2005) had churned a cultural kaleidoscope that spanned continents. Over land or sea, the terrain they traversed had refused to be contained within the boundaries of empires or nation-states (Lewis and Wigen 1997, Waley-Cohen 1999, Hansen 2012). Places linked by these travelers’ routes developed unique institutions for trade, multi-ethnic settlements, religious traditions and power play. What the historical global and the Asian postmodern share, in conceptual and empirical terms, are “space[s] of flows” (Castells 1996). They range from port cities to oasis towns, crucial meeting points along diverse circulation paths (Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011). From the late 20th century on, they have been hubs of global finance, consumption and services (Sassen 2001). These spaces are arenas for intimate social encounters and deep cultural divisions as much as they shape contractual deals forged digitally in split seconds. Rather than seeing them as bounded units with static configurations, they are fluid “urban assemblages” made significant and meaningful by conscious human actions at crucial historical junctures (Farias and Bender 2009, pp. 303–23; Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue 2015b, pp. 1–2). The essays in this section are focused on Hong Kong, conceptualized as an urban assemblage, marked by the experiences of generations involved in its making. The theme is underscored in a volume Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population (Siu and Ku 2008). Hong Kong today bears the imprints of major historical trends accumulated over several centuries. In its early history, its islands and inlets were natural shelters and markets for coastal fishermen. On its limited agricultural land, local and migrant farmers used what they imagined to be institutions of the Chinese imperial as cultural resource, and grew into major lineages. From the mid-19th century on, colonial encounter with the British Empire was an urban experience, the Chinese merchants and migrant laborers from Guangdong, Fujian, and the Yangzi River delta competing and sharing fortunes with multi-ethnic counterparts from every corner of the British Empire: Scottish bankers and colonial officers, Parsees, Sikhs from South This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Asia, and Muslims from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Their names have been imprinted in businesses, public buildings and street names, churches, mosques, missionary schools, and last but not least, cemeteries (Sinn 2003, Faure 1997). Hong Kong was a historically global society with many layers of cultural resourcefulness on which generations have depended for livelihoods and moral inspirations. On the eve of its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, I called for a genuine respect for this “two systems” side of Deng Xiaoping’s political formula. The first essay began as a speech I delivered on December 7, 1996 and again on June 30, 1997. It speaks against an ideologically charged patriotism that sees history with a dichotomous frame and asks the audience to treat Hong Kong’s colonial past on its own nuanced terms. The second essay is taken from a volume I edited, entitled Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China (Siu 2010b). Focusing on the predicaments of women from the late imperial to the present periods, the volume delineates the gendered opportunities and dangers in a region increasingly drawn into the circuits of imperial and trading empires in the previous century and its modern transformations. My essay “Women of Influence” captures the experiences of professional women who matured in the postwar decades when Hong Kong evolved from a colonial outpost to a financial center in Asia. Branded by the public as “women of influence,” these women had enjoyed elite Chinese and English education. The older generation formed a backbone of the colonial civil service, followed by a younger generation in law and legislative politics. They skillfully juggled with Chinese family expectations and global professional requirements in the period when China turned inward with revolutionary zeal, and Hong Kong was projected to the world almost by default. However, market reforms in post-Mao China have triggered tremendous blurring of political and social boundaries. The essay directs our attention to future changes in gender issues when a historically global Hong Kong once again is politically expected to be “united” with an economically dominant China with a different brand of cultural expectations. The last essay, “Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern,” singles out the predicaments of Hong Kong residents who came of age in the 1970s and whose orientations have been relatively localized due to historical circumstances unique to postwar Hong Kong. Unable to catch up with the fastmoving global economy or to engage with mainland Chinese institutions, they are anxious about a growing gap between the rich and poor and their own downward mobility. The essay stresses the necessity to rethink Hong Kong as a process rather than a bounded administrative entity, and to fully utilize its extended footprints. The essay is related to a research project focusing on the repositioning of Hong Kong in the region. In “The Art of Hubbing,” Angela Leung and I highlight a half-century-long process of decolonization, the maturing of a neoliberal global economy, the opening of the Chinese economy, and an increasingly interconnected This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Asia towards which the world’s future growth gravitates. Again, we use “urban assemblages” to understand Hong Kong’s many layers of historical experiences and to search for policy rethinking. Allow me to quote at length from the proposal (Siu and Leung 2011): Hong Kong has to reposition itself by comprehending the full consequences of its connections, commitments, and dependence .  .  . How should it engage the globe by cultivating diverse historical links with China and Asia, and how can it navigate north with layers of world experiences solidly behind it? Furthermore, for global businesses, the city needs a culturally versatile and socially mobile work force. A balance must be struck between such needs and the concerns of a grounded population so that sustainable societal resources can be generated and shared. It must transcend a brokerage role. We approach these issues by challenging the long-dominant worldview that depicts cities or countries as marked territories with well-defined political identities. Hong Kong behaves more like a cluster of hubs through which the traffic of citizens and vested interests continually flow. Volatility combined with limited space and resources means that its physical environment is stressed and human ecology fragile. Most importantly, the building blocks to enhance its networks are no longer the usual East-West, North-South, or market-state dichotomies. To understand this matrix requires new analytical software that stresses lateral thinking. We need to cultivate an acute ability to accept border-crossing and change as constant, and to anticipate opportunities and risks in evolving regional configurations. Hong Kong’s historical cosmopolitanism is an advantage that needs to be understood in its complexity before it can be exploited fully. A key challenge for Hong Kong is to engage the “fast forward” mode of development in China and Asia by enhancing its unique character and its differentiating niche that deeply connects to its global traditions. The art of “hubbing” is to give this layered macro-, regional and local environment an organic, humanist understanding.

The social, political turmoil that cumulated in the Umbrella Movement in 2014 has shown the world that Hong Kong is facing another moment of reckoning. A generational split is highlighted by conflicts on the streets as well as revealed in numerous political surveys. The question of how to renegotiate “Chineseness” and the identity of “Hong Konger” is encoded in every political move by the government and by those critical of it. “Below the Lion Rock” (獅子山下), an icon that has inspired postwar generations to work themselves out of poverty and migrancy, has faded in the minds of the younger generations, predominantly middle class and educated, who were born and raised in a relatively affluent Hong Kong. Surprisingly, the icon has been rejuvenated by the daring act of a dozen-odd mountain climbers in the midst of the Umbrella Movement, who hung a huge yellow banner, “We want true universal suffrage,” on top of Lion Rock. Since then, Lion Rock has signified a new Hong Kong Dream. While many who can vote with their feet once again plan their This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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sojourn abroad, others dig in their heels with resolve to confront a China equally determined to exert its influence. What will happen to that dream depends on the changing identity, resourcefulness and activism of the city’s residents as they reposition themselves in relation to multiple translocal forces shaping their livelihoods and political aspirations.

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17 Hong Kong Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape

The Meaning of “Sovereignty” at the Margins; Then and Now On June 1997, the world watched Hong Kong go through the ritual of reuniting with China. At midnight, June 30, the British crown and the Union Jack were lowered as the blue Hong Kong flag descended in one final playing of “God Save the Queen.” Replacing them were the bauhinia, and the star-studded red flag rising in the sounds of the “Yiyongjun Jinxingqu” (March of the Volunteers). No one could have stopped the ceremony no matter how much he or she wanted. The solemnity of the ceremony had long been laid down by the larger structures of history and power. Physical symbols are not to be changed arbitrarily, but empires have related to subject populations with political notions quite different from and rather differently than those of modern nation-states. Sovereignty often means something different at the political center than in the margins, and the cultural kaleidoscope we call Hong Kong is a result of numerous historical landmarks on these notions. We are all too familiar with these events and how their political history is told today. Therefore, I would rather explore the social and cultural meanings of people’s lives on the ground; we may find interesting stories there that do not fit into any standard political categories. Chinese official documents consistently use the phrase “China resumes sovereign control over Hong Kong” to describe the political handover. While this phrase is neutral, it is far less popular than the term “reunification” (huigui), which is loaded with emotions. The question is, while sovereignty is resumed, should historical experiences be reframed? The notion “one country, two systems” is a unique one. “One country” refers to sovereignty. “Two systems” on the other hand involves complex histories and contradictory sentiments.1 If the region’s populations are urged to trace their ancestral roots (renzu guizong) and exert their nationalistic commitments toward a political center, shouldn’t they begin by respecting and appreciating their own historical experiences? Maybe only on that basis can the “two systems” side of the political formula be realized.

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One often associates sovereignty with images of stately capitals and national pride, with clear-cut notions of “we” and “they.” In 1842, however, the emotions of local populations on the South China coast might have been ambivalent. Who was in the region then? Although at the margins of empires, Hong Kong was not a barren rock when the British came. There were historic sites in the general area around Hong Kong. Tuen Mun, Fat Tong Mun, and Kap Sui Mun were along major trade routes during the Tang and Song dynasties. Traders came from Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia on their way to China. Local settlements developed unique cultures and occupations. They produced commodities ranging from salt and lime to pearls and incense. Imperial officials kept their disdainful distance, except for occasional excursions to punish real or imagined rebels. History tells us that battles were fought that determined dynastic fortunes. Those between the supporters of the child emperor Bing of the Southern Song dynasty and the pursuing Mongols were the most prominent. They left a repertoire of myths and memories. During the Ming and Qing, commerce in the area grew with agricultural development. River marshes in the delta were sought after by single-surnamed territorial groups who claimed origins from the Central Plains. Market towns mushroomed. Land and trading rights were contested. Local elites used the imperial metaphor to support their claims and to create alliances. These land-based settlements developed a cultural complex strongly identified with the literati and authority. Similar processes took place in the New Territories.2 While landed elites eagerly sought Confucian cultural symbols, unorthodox trading networks thrived along the South China coast and in Guangzhou, Macau, and the Pearl River Delta. One would have found Chinese junks flying Dutch and Portuguese flags for convenience and protection. Foreign traders came to conduct business with China and used the region’s waters for replenishing their fleets. Local populations did the provisioning.3 There were conflicts, but local and foreign traders were also partners in many ways. The extent of their involvement and their multi-ethnic affiliations alarmed officials, who often termed them “yiyujiangun” and lamented that “this situation in the south had always meant trouble.”4 Encounters with foreigners in the general area were not limited to the material. Missionaries who aimed to sink roots in local society encouraged indigenization.5 One may summarize that, from the 16th century onward, despite official displeasure, there was much cultural borrowing and tolerance. Identities were fluid. Emergent Han lineages, mobile and multi-ethnic traders, religious practitioners, pirates, and officials competed and mingled in this open and diversified ecology. On the eve of the Opium War, the livelihoods and cultural affiliations of people on the South China coast were tied to imperial and foreign interests in complicated ways. Take Xiangshan county as an example. Its proximity to Macau and the commercial networks of Guangzhou prompted officials to comment with dismay that its This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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residents “had been tainted with foreign ways” (jianran yisu). But many innovative compradors and officials in Guangzhou and Shanghai came from this county—the prominent ones were Yung Wing, Zheng Guanying and Xu Run. Modem historians have noted their progressive political beliefs and entrepreneurial energies. When Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, local traders in the area were, at best, intrigued bystanders quite beyond the reach of formal state apparatus. No doubt conflicts arose from competition and prejudices among the settlers, and between them and foreign interests. But one wonders if the populations at the southernmost frontier of the empire shared the wounded pride of those at the political center.6 According to official Chinese historical accounts, the Sanyuanli incident in Guangzhou in 1841 was an anti-imperialist patriotic act by local masses, just as the occupation of Guangzhou by British and French forces in 1857 and 1860 was regarded as a national humiliation. However, a closer look at the culture of local resistance reveals divergent meanings: acts against foreign encroachment did not necessarily mean loyalty to the imperial center. No doubt the residents of Sanyuanli fought the British troops. The reason could have been simple: when someone pressed against one’s door and looted one’s property, resistance could only be expected. Community feuds could have triggered similar actions. Moreover, in 1899, major lineages in the New Territories fought the British for fear that the “barbarians” would take their land and side with their competitors. The significance of the dispute revolved around “lineage land” rather than the emperor’s land. Would the aggressors be regarded as representatives of Britain as a country, or as “bandits” who happened to be foreign acting in their own interests? These emotions were probably too complicated to explain as local patriotism. Moreover, for the governments involved, their sense of humiliation or triumph had less to do with the territory’s fate than with their own. In fact, both officials at the negotiating table, Qishan and Charles Elliot, were disgraced for having chosen Hong Kong as a point of departure.

What Were the Emotions on the Eve of 1997? In 1997, the stakes were much higher, because the fortunes and sentiments of millions were now rooted in the territory. A colonial perspective downplayed the role of either China or the local populations before the Opium War, and it claimed credit for the miraculous transformation of the territory.7 On the other side, like any sovereign state, China was eager to reestablish authority. At a time when its own legitimacy on the mainland was being redefined, it was most concerned about the integrity of its territory. The government wanted reassurance that subject populations “at the margins” could identify with the center as its own people. As Ernest Gellner (1985) said, when culture and power are combined to define a homogenizing, exclusive political unit, one finds nationalism. These contests were not limited to formal pronouncements This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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on each side of the political divide. They have been diffused into everyday life—even in the naming of streets, in public ceremonies, and in proposals for civic or patriotic education in the schools.8 For this momentous plunge into the future, subject populations also looked back to evaluate the territory they have traversed and selectively retrieved memories. True to the Hong Kong spirit, the scholarly community and the popular media have already presented competing histories. Books on Hong Kong’s past have appeared with increasing frequency.9 Emotions among the general populace have been mixed. Some staged exhibitions and made plans for various commemorations. Others watched with unease the crowds on the mainland celebrating the impending return of Hong Kong. As the clock at Tiananmen Square ticked away the minutes, designers for the Hong Kong room in the Great Hall of the People debated whether Ming and English furniture should be juxtaposed. A “reunification plaza” as a historical landmark in the Central District in Hong Kong was no longer a farfetched proposal. The idea of a plaza leaves one with a sense of déjà vu. Harbin, after prolonged Russian occupation, was reclaimed by a warlord in the 1920s. Some Chinese merchants erected a temple in the city center, which was lined with Russian churches, schools, and a cemetery. The Jile Si (Temple of Paradise) was a monument with which the residents could work themselves into the orbit of China. They were eager to present, in their view, a Chineseness appropriate to the rising nationalism.10 The efforts of these Chinese residents of a “Russian” city paralleled an occasion in 1847, when merchants in Hong Kong enlarged a Man Mo Temple in the Taipingshan area where Chinese residents congregated. Associated with the Tung Wah Hospital in 1869, the complex became a powerful “public arena” for Chinese elites to negotiate with the colonial government on the affairs of an emergent Chinese community. Between the construction of the Man Mo temple in 1847 and the plans for a reunification plaza in 1997, there is a history of Hong Kong I would like to tell. It is a narrative in which events concerning China’s territorial concerns have continued to redraw a local cultural landscape. It defies the imposition of any clear-cut lines of commitment in nationalistic terms.

Colonial Experiences Revisited Narratives about Hong Kong have been increasingly politicized in the period immediately before and after the handover. Complicated social and cultural experiences are framed in dichotomous terms. The crucial political event is presented as the end to a partitioning of China imposed by foreign imperialism, which marked the subjection of Chinese populations to colonial discriminations. Despite the maturing of a postwar generation of Chinese who may identify more with Hong Kong than with China, 1997 has been seen as the moment that washes away national humiliation This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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as the territory returns to its motherland.11 The first part of the nationalistic story expresses the wounded pride of the political center—be it the Qing dynasty, the Nationalists, or the regime in Beijing today. It also assumes that conflicts that arose from the day-to-day encounters of the colonizers and colonized rigidified along racial and national lines. “The British” appears as a category of relentless profit seekers who have conspired against “the deserving but wounded Chinese.” The tenuous relationships between governments and their own people are left unexplored. The creative energies used by local populations to weave components of their worldly activities into a unique ethos are also ignored by such rhetoric. Historical evidence of course tells of a more nuanced process. From the start, Chinese business elites played significant mediating roles. Like the traders in the previous centuries, their operations were worldly. They could also afford to buy orthodoxy. As with many sojourning merchants, they were eager to cultivate an identity with their native place, real or imagined. Attached to a territorial base that displayed the language of lineage, land, charity, and academic honors, they and the imperial order held common ground. One may say that wealthy merchants were co-opted into the imperial system before they could be effective challengers. On the other hand, they could subvert that system with their worldly resources, aiming in all sincerity to find themselves respectable places within the empire. The cover photograph of Dr. Elizabeth Sinn’s book Power and Charity (1989) illustrates this dynamic process. It was taken in the 1850s and shows the Tung Wah Board of Directors, in Qing official attire, presiding over the planning of a hospital, an institution quite foreign to the Chinese at the time and later legitimized by the Hospital Ordinance under British law. The question is, how “colonial” were their Hong Kong experiences, at once marginal and committed to the imperial enterprise? Moreover, both foreigners and Chinese worked to build institutions that had lasting impact. No doubt many colonial administrators were discriminatory. The government moved slowly on enfranchising the Chinese on the formal political front. British merchants were major beneficiaries. That was the nature of empires: frontiers were exploited rather than incorporated. However, with unrelenting effort, the Chinese sought opportunities. Tens of thousands chose to arrive within the first two decades—pirates, fishermen, craftsmen, and wealthy families escaping from the Taipings. They shrewdly used British commercial law in Hong Kong and their trading networks in China to extend business worldwide. In the 1860s, the first Chinese newspaper, Zhongwai xinbao, was established to provide shipping and commodity information, headed by Huang Sheng and Wu Tingfang. Following this, the jinshan zhuang (239 in number) and nanbei hang (84 in number) were founded. They were guilds representing the largest group of import-exporters. By the 1870s, the Chinese, supporting a population of over 150,000, moved into real estate.12 According to a correspondence of then Governor Sir John Pope-Hennessy in 1880, Chinese residents This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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paid over 90 percent of government taxes. Moreover, a government gazette in 1882 noted that, of the twenty largest property owners and ratepayers (in 1881), seventeen were Chinese.13 The important point here is that, through a combination of efforts from all sides, intentional or otherwise, the Hong Kong environment provided unique opportunities for people to extend themselves. Creative energies unbound to link two merchant cultures. Amid boom and bust, Chinese merchants sank roots in the territory side by side with foreign interests.14 This was due partly to their ability to speak the colonizers’ language. Many of their children went through local schools to become bilingual, bicultural professionals.15 The real advantage was their links to the Chinese mainland, as shown by the strength of the import-exporters. Yuan Fat Hang and Kintyelung were prime examples of these enterprises, which maintained roots in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Southeast Asia, and North America. In 1847, The Man Mo Temple signified the merchants’ entry into the political arena. The Tung Wah Hospital, the guilds that were corporate board members, the Po Leung Kuk, the Chinese schools, and the District Watch Committee, were woven into a complex of culture, power, and charity for the Chinese community in Hong Kong.16 The merchants’ contribution to their native place on the mainland, real or imagined, was also significant. For example, Chen Xuanyi, the founder of Kintyelung, invested in substantial ancestral estates in his native village of Qianxi, Chaozhou (Chiuchow), only ten years after they established themselves in Hong Kong.17 Yuan Fat Hang, under the leadership of Gao Man-wah, started in Hong Kong around 1853. His businesses included shipping, banking, import and export, warehouses, and numerous properties. Gao was elected to the first board of the Tung Wah Hospital. His grandson, a nationalist at the tum of the century, invested in modernizing Shantou’s (Swatow’s) city infrastructure—electricity, tap water, mail, and modern banking services. Would it be appropriate to brand these commercial energies as merely colluding with colonial interests? These merchants worked with foreigners, but not always for them.

Straddling the World and the Nation The merchants’ success could not have been secured without the services provided by a generation of Hong Kong-educated professionals. They were accountants, lawyers, educators, public health workers, surveyors and builders, specialists on shipping, and banking. By the time Wu Tingfang, Huang Sheng, Sir Kai Ho Kai, and Wei Yu were appointed as members of the legislature from the 1880s on, Chinese commercial and professional circles had representative voices in the formal political processes.18 Like the merchants, they had impact in China and the West. Wu Tingfang (1842–1922), a native of Xinhui county in Guangdong who spent his early years in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Singapore, was educated in St. Paul’s and Central College in Hong Kong through missionary connections. He went on to study law in England and graduated in 1877. After returning to Hong Kong, he was appointed a legislator in 1880. Two years later, he joined Li Hongzhang in China and in 1896 was ambassador to the United States, Spain, and Peru. Not only did he negotiate major treaties, but he also restructured civil, commercial, and criminal law codes in the late Qing. In the early Republican years, he stood by Sun Yat-sen against the warlords. Sir Kai Ho Kai (1850–1914) was a graduate of Central College in Hong Kong who went to England in 1872 to study law and medicine. He returned to Hong Kong to practice law and promoted Western medicine. In 1887, he financed the building of the Alice Memorial Hospital and played a key role in the establishment of Hong Kong’s first medical college. A constitutional reformer, he was active in publishing new political works, such as True Interpretations of Political Reform (Xinzheng zhenquan). He later turned to support the Republican revolution, influenced by his student, Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Choa 1981). Even Sun Yat-sen himself, in his speech to students at the University of Hong Kong in 1923, pointed out how he could envision positive links between his Hong Kong experiences and China’s future. The speech may sound anachronistic under the present circumstances but is worth contemplating: On returning to Hong Kong this time, it feels like coming home. I was educated here . . . People have asked me, where did you get your revolutionary ideas? To be honest about it: they came from Hong Kong . . . Although China had a revolution twelve years ago, there was hardly any improvement, and people’s suffering deepened . . . Now Hong Kong’s six hundred thousand residents live in relative comfort. This is due to good government. I earnestly hope that all of you who pursue studies in Hong Kong consider the West and Hong Kong as your models in order that when you return to the motherland, you can help build a good government.19

These professionals, among others, had contributed to the institutional bases of Hong Kong society and to China’s modernity and nation-building.20 All of them were Chinese nationalists. They gave China what they had gained from the unique environment of Hong Kong. Moreover, they were comfortable with their multicultural qualities and did not harbor a colonial chip on their shoulders. At times, they fought against colonial abuses with a sense of social justice that came, ironically, from their Western education. Peers from China and the West respected them. Would it be fair to ignore the positive aspects of their Hong Kong background, label them merely colonial products, and belittle their multifaceted contributions to China? It should not surprise us to find their contemporaries from the mainland dwelling on these politicized sentiments.21 Famous intellectuals—Wen Yiduo, Lu Xun, and Ba Jin, among others—visited the colony in the 1920s and 1930s. Many took refuge This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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due to persecution and war on the mainland. One detects tension in their perceptions framed by a Sino-centric subjectivity reinforced by acute nationalism in the wake of the May Fourth Movement. Hong Kong was censured for not being China, not the real China then embroiled in turmoil, but rather the ideal China held firmly in the minds of the visitors. They saw Hong Kong as bearing the blood and tears of the Chinese for over a hundred years. Although they were impressed with its cosmopolitan civility and orderliness, it was despised as a “bastard,” and pitied as “orphaned.” As Lu Wei-luan, a scholar of Hong Kong literature observes, “Whenever there were major upheavals in the mainland, Hong Kong displayed unusual capacities to accommodate visitors. The sojourners brought her advantages, but their hearts belonged elsewhere. They hated this place of temporary residence more than they loved it. This intertwined quality of interdependence and distance is Hong Kong’s melancholy.” In their eyes, Hong Kong was objectified as a place that reminded China (and them) of hurt and humiliation. However, this view tells us more about the speakers themselves than about the subject of their description. I can sympathize with the sentiments of Lu Xun and others. The 1930s was a trying time for nationalists and revolutionaries alike. Torn apart by foreign aggression as much as by warlords, China was on her knees. Some also encountered personal harassment from petty officials, both in Hong Kong and on the mainland.22 But today, must we dwell on mentalities that have transcended their historical circumstances?23 If we do, we may as well equate the predicaments of Hong Kong with those of a traditional Chinese woman: patriarchy judges her for her many uses but seldom appreciates her for what she is. She is condemned if her background and sentiments do not match the agenda of the beholder who claims her.24

Postwar Baby Boomers and Their Hong Kong Identity If a nationalistic mindset prevents us from appreciating the Hong Kong cultural universe of the past, have we allowed it to shape our assessment of the present and future? Some may dismiss the issue. They argue that people today see through political rhetoric and ignore its straitjacketing. However, others point to the ways in which everyday language frames how we see the world around us. Their uncritical use can put a limit to “what is thinkable.” In view of the recent debates on the Hong Kong identity and the surge of nationalistic emotions, we should examine our lenses and assumptions all the more urgently. I would argue that a pluralistic cultural universe has continued through the efforts of postwar generations in the territory-local-born immigrants and emigrants who have created a unique ethos from their sojourn. This universe is connected to the world as much as it is attached to the real or imaginary China. Their efforts in the last forty years tell a different story from traditionalist, colonial, or nationalist narratives. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The identities and emotions are as complex and energized as those of the generations before them. If experiences do not fit into highly charged political categories, we should take a moment to appreciate them on their own terms. Public opinion across the ideological spectrum would agree that, from the 1960s on, a distinct Hong Kong ethos emerged. It came with a generation of postwar baby boomers whose education and professional achievements had been tied to the territory at a time when China turned inward, Hong Kong projected to the world almost by default. This coincided with the Hong Kong government’s decision to invest heavily in the territory’s future after long-neglected social issues exploded in the riots of the late 1960s. Hong Kong’s eventual role as an Asian financial hub triggered a surge of upward mobility from the late 1970s on. Life in Hong Kong became brashly luxurious, and its impact diffused through popular media and conspicuous consumption worldwide. The values, emotions, and identities of these cosmopolitan Hong Kong residents were relatively shielded from those of the mainland Chinese. Although few would deny their Chinese ancestry or cultural bearing, many have made it clear that cultural identification does not automatically lead to unquestioned political commitment. In my ethnographic encounters in China, I also detect a change in the popular term for Hong Kong residents, which has been shifting since the mid-1980s, from “Gangao tongbao” (Hong Kong and Macau compatriots 港澳同胞 to “Xianggang ren” (Hongkonger 香港人).25 These multiple perceptions of difference zoomed into sharp focus on the eve of 1997. Whether these differences can be bridged depends a great deal on how we view the Hong Kong experience.26 I am quite surprised by some of the extreme positions taken in recent debates.27 Most of us probably would not share these positions, but they are emerging in public forums. First, Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan city-life and associated Western civic values are posed against a reified “Chineseness.” The commercial ethos, which has always been seen in positive union with Confucian values to fuel a business ethic in Hong Kong, is treated with a touch of disdain—as lacking cultural depth or a collective sense of mission. Second, Hong Kong’s political arena, based on liberal assumptions of institutional procedure, social justice, and respect for the individual before the law, is seen as a colonial product working against Chinese nationalistic agendas. The third extreme position is more implicit. If one tries to transcend the colonial and nationalistic frameworks to appreciate Hong Kong on its own terms, one is often accused of harboring Hong Kong chauvinism against a Chinese identity. Again, historical evidence refuses to be discussed in these terms. On the cultural ethic front, both Yu Ying-shih and William Tay have argued strongly that, despite the severing of ties with mainland China, post-1949 Hong Kong provided a space for intellectual contemplation unmatched in China or Taiwan. From the late 1940s to the 1970s, the political persecutions under the Kuomintang in Taiwan This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and the equally intense campaigns on the mainland denied even loyal opposition. Hong  Kong was the precious little island, linked to networks of the Chinese diaspora, which kept intellectual discourse alive. Historians such as Qian Mu (Qin Mu), Quan  Hansheng (Ch’uan  Han-sheng), Luo Xianglin (Lo Hsiang-lin), and philosophers such as Jian Youwen (Chien Yu-wen), Tang Junyi (Tang Chun-yi), Mou Zongsan (Mou Chung-san), and Xu Fuguan (Hsu Fu-kuen) were intellectual giants associated with the new Confucianism, a philosophical force that has swept China with a vengeance today.28 These scholars enjoyed an environment relatively free of ideological impositions, as Mou Zongsan was said to have commented that “the government and he were non-existent for each other.”29 Moreover, one wonders if their “escape from predicament”—the creative fusion of scholarly integrity and mission with modern agendas—has been shaped by their experiences in a society in which personal vulnerability is minimized by the respect for law, professionalism, a liberal frame of mind, cosmopolitan civility, and worldly horizons.30 Those years in Hong Kong were not marked by material affluence, but the intellectual richness contrasts favorably with the tragic, last twenty years of Chen Yinke’s life across the border.31 One may say that philosophical musings were limited to a privileged few, while the rest of the society remained mired in vulgar materialism. However, recent support for Hong Kong’s Olympic gold medalist, Lee Lai-shan, tells a different story. The “Hong Kong spirit” is equated with Lee’s achievements and enthusiastically promoted in the media. There was extensive commentary on the fact that the 1996 ceremonies were the last occasion at which the Hong Kong flag would be raised. Political rhetoric framed the issue as a contest between Hong Kong chauvinism and Chinese patriotism. But if we go beyond the political, the emotions of these ordinary citizens crystallize an appreciation for an unrelenting work ethic and respect for professional and personal integrity, which have been major ingredients to Hong Kong successes. I recently came across a photographic album of life in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s by Yau Leung (Qiu Liang). I was as deeply moved by the poverty of a vast majority of the population as I was by the human warmth, sense of community, selfrespect, and the innocence on children’s faces. These emotions are still very much woven into our lives. They occasionally resurface amid the brash consumerism of the 1980s and 1990s, and allow us to appreciate the hardships generations of Hong Kong residents went through to achieve their positions today. It also makes an important point: in the foreseeable future, Hong Kong will remain a land of immigrants and emigrants. If Hong Kong cannot maintain its existing social order and legal institutions, the new immigrants may not have any reasonable and healthy way to settle into mainstream Hong Kong life. Ironically, the “get rich quick by whatever means” mentality, as opposed to the Lee Lai-shan spirit, seems to be closely tied to Hong Kong’s reintegration with a post-Mao China reeling from decades of deprivation. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Last but not least is the issue of the Hong Kong identity. In contrast to the nationalist narrative, the Hong Kong experience has not been entirely colonial, Western, or narrowly territorial. In education, Choi Po-king (1996a) and Bernard Luk (1996) have pointed to the significant Chinese component in the schools. In ritual practices, elements of tradition continue to be recycled in an urban setting. In popular culture, scholars emphasize its multicultural, all-encompassing qualities. Growing up in such an environment, where the population continues to be made up of immigrants and emigrants, where family processes are truncated and personal choices reconfigured in the world metropolis or in cyberspace, the territory’s residents have acquired overlapping identities of Hongkonger, Cantonese, Chinese, and global citizen. In sum, the Hong Kong identity is attached to a territory without clear boundaries. It constitutes fluid layers of social meaning, economic interests, and political preferences and has grown global without losing its Chinese bearing.32 The world as much as China engages this identity in order to communicate. In the 1970s, Hong Kong students who demanded social reforms were swept up in radical thinking worldwide. Many were inspired to look to China for the socialist utopia. In the 1990s, the world’s interest in China as market became a lifeline for a post-industrial Hong Kong. What Hong Kong has offered in this unique position has fueled China’s reentry into the world community. As Elizabeth Sinn comments, “Hong Kong culture grew in a unique environment full of historical contradictions. Hong Kong is a window to the world for China, as  well as one for the world to look into China. In Hong Kong, the Chinese, the foreign, the new, the old, the orthodox, and the unorthodox are mixed in a melting pot, with various contradictions as catalyst, out of which arises a pluralistic, fluid, exuberant cultural uniqueness. If we used a one-dimensional, flat, non-processual framework to understand it, it may be too narrow, too unfair” (1995, p. iv). I have tried to show that, from the Ming dynasty to the end of the 20th century, local populations have been quite beyond the reach of formal state apparatus and have foiled any serious imposition of rigid categories. Interacting with these state efforts, the merchants, the turn-of-the-century professionals, the revolutionaries, the refugees, the postwar baby boomers, and the new immigrants have exerted tremendous ingenuity to accommodate, to maneuver, and to absorb. They have created the phenomenon we now call Hong Kong. I sincerely hope that there is no closure to the historical narrative. If one asks what Hong Kong can contribute to China, I suggest that Hong Kong should insist on the social institutions it has built and bring the world to the territory on that basis in order to engage China positively in the nexus. That has been Hong Kong’s historical role, and its residents should have the self-confidence to maintain that role in the future. In a way, Hong Kong is fortunate to be at the margins of empires. Although physically cramped, its residents, migrants and local born, have collectively created This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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an unusual cultural and political space, where they can choose and act on agendas most meaningful to them. The history of Lingnan (South China) tells us a similar story. From the Ming dynasty on, a unique regional culture evolved with local elites who willingly grappled with the cultural symbols of central authority in order to seek legitimate places in the imperial order. By the 18th and 19th centuries, one saw a “Chinese” culture that was intensely diverse yet, once embraced, offered a unifying sense of identification. The relationship between region and center is a dialectic one: if the center is confident enough to accommodate the region by giving it the necessary space and allowing multiple systems to exist on their own terms, the authority of the political center can in fact be appreciated. Every turn of political events has triggered a remarkable churning of cultural energies. My story will be only one among many. Wherever we choose to place our faith, I hope that this story can be testimony to the open society of Hong Kong, where public forums are vibrant and different voices respected. Maybe we should not build anything at all in that future reunification plaza. Let it be an open, tolerant “public space” representing what is truly the Hong Kong experience. *This chapter is based on a talk given in the Hong Kong Lectures, the University of Hong Kong, December 7, 1996. The present essay is a slightly revised version of the original, published in Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the Twentieth Century, edited by Gary Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), pp. 100–117.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

For a similar argument, see Bai Shi (1997). See the works of Maurice Freedman and later scholars on the lineage complex in South China and the New Territories of Hong Kong. For recent revisions of the lineage complex, see Introduction to Faure and Siu (1995), pp. 1–19. In the Ming, the language for trading in the general area was Portuguese. It was later replaced by a Cantonese version of pidgin English. At times of conflict, the Chinese government had threatened to order local populations not to provision foreign ships. See Chen Huixun (1894), pp. 10–12. On Guangdong coastal trade with Southeast Asia during the Ming, see essays by Li (pp. 279–312) and Zhang (pp. 313–48) in Guangdong lishi xuehui (1985). In the early Qing, Zhangzhou traders often crewed Dutch boats operating in and out of Guangzhou. For more on this, see p. 317 of Zhang’s essay, which quotes Qu Dajun [1700]. Zhang also notes that the collaboration between jian and yi in the Ming was as intense as on the eve of the Opium War, and that scholar/officials at the time saw it as a serious problem that was difficult to resolve (p. 319). Benedict Anderson, in a talk on Philippine nationalism, concurred with this idea about the indigenizing missionary agendas. Also see Bays (1996) and Leung (1993). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

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See Chapter 26 in Hong Kong 1996 (Howlett 1996) for some hint of this. By the time the New Territories were leased in 1898, lineages there did resist. Their fears were specific: land rights and the potential loss of revenue from their “mixed surname” tenants. Their reactions were different from those of the merchant community in the city and of literati elites on the mainland. The local “Chinese” were by no means united in their “nationalistic sentiments.” See also Tsai (1993); he makes a useful distinction between anti-foreign, patriotic, and nationalistic sentiments. These sentiments were also crossed with other factors such as class and gender. Scholars try to counter the image of the “barren rock” in colonial narratives. See Chan Kai-cheung’s “History” in Choi and Ho (1993), pp. 455–84. A colonial history can also be diffused into everyday life. Take the naming of streets, for example. On Hong Kong Island, most streets are Chinese translations of British names, associated with particular colonial officials. Those in Kowloon are mixed. New Territories street names are mostly English translations of Chinese names. See Liang Tao’s study (1992) of street names in Hong Kong. See also the cynical explorations in Lo Dayou’s popular music in the films of Tsui Huk and Cheung Kin-ting. The recent debates on “national” and “civic” education put these narratives in sharp focus. See Choi (1996a, 1996b) and, in the same volume, Lin Cong (1996) and Lau (1996); see also Yuen (1996) on the different facets of nationalistic emotions. See also Ren’s “Kan de bianzheng” in Liu and Guan (1998), pp. 195–220 on museum exhibits in the narration of Hong Kong history. Many are from colleagues from Hong Kong: Drs. Fok Kai-cheong, Ming Chan, Elizabeth Sinn, Choi Po-king, and Rey Chow, among others. This is the topic of a dissertation by Jay Carter, a student in the History Department at Yale University. Again, see the essays by Choi (1996a, 1996b), Lin Cong (1996), and Lau (1996). See also an essay by King (1997). On the history of this period involving merchants, foreign traders, and laborers, see Sinn (1989). See also Tsai (1993) and Chan Wai-kwan (1991). See Yu and Liu (1994), p. 330. See also similar observations in Lin (1983). Many scholars have argued that Hong Kong has a double-tracked colonialism, under which Chinese interests were not always subordinated. For instance, see Fok (1992). Efforts to set up Chinese schools were not lacking. In fact, Wah Yan, with the help of the Jesuit fathers, represents one such effort to balance the achievements of Queen’s College. For government support for Chinese schools in the early decades, see Ng (1984). For a more detailed history of the different school systems, see Sweeting (1990). Another overlapping arena for the flexing of political muscles was the District Watch Committee. Beneath the appearance of its formal mundane duties was the politicking that earned it the name of “The Chinese Executive Council.” See Ng (1984). Their business network linked Chaozhou, Hong Kong, and various Chinese communities in Southeast Asia through the rice trade, remittances, and shipping, among other ventures. Chen started as a fisherman who became a boatman for a sea merchant, Gao Yuansheng of Chaozhou (Choi in Lim Hou-seng 1995, pp. 91–108). See the records of the meetings of the Po Leung Kuk, in which Sir Kai Ho Kai interacted confidently with the Registrar General as a professional equal. The records are included in a manuscript prepared by David Faure (1996). On Sir Kai Ho Kai, see also Choa (1981), and Linda Pomerantz-Zhang (1992). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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19. The speech, “Guofu yu Xianggang Daxue yanjiang jilue,” was originally published in Huazi ribao, 1923, February 21. It was reprinted in Lu Wei-luan (1983), pp. 243–45. 20. For examples, see Wu Tingguang (1922a, 1922b). See Fok (1992) for numerous examples of prominent Hong Kong Chinese who contributed to China’s nation-building. Others have emphasized the efforts of the Hong Kong laboring classes that stood with Chinese workers on the mainland. See Ming Chan (1994) and Tsai (1993). 21. The labels, such as “comprador” (maiban), “colonial lackeys” (nucai), or even “coolies,” and “laboring masses,” are terms with specific historical context and are loaded with political meanings. Using them uncritically as analytical language is problematic. See Faure (1994) for a review of Tsai’s book. See also Choi Po-king and Ho Lok-sang (1993) for a critique of the modem version of this mentality. The essays in the volume, according to Choi (1993, p. xxiv) are wary of the ethnic and cultural purists who harbor a restrictive nationalism and related anti-foreignness. 22. See Lu Xun’s “Lue tan Xianggang” and “Zai tan Xianggang” about his trip to Hong Kong and the harassment from customs officials, reprinted in Lu Wei-luan (1983). 23. See, for instance, Hong (1997) and Xu Yongxuan (1997). 24. Margaret Ng made this point in a public talk given at Yale University in October 1996. 25. Pamela Kyle Crossley has made similar observations. 26. On the cultural front, see Sinn (1995). For the sociological and politicaleconomic front, see Chan and Postiglione (1996); also see Choi and Ho (1993). 27. See the essays in the Ming Pao Monthly volumes. Some authors dwell on dichotomous categories, while others look for mediating frameworks. 28. These were Chinese scholars who took refuge in Hong Kong after 1949 and who trained a generation of Confucian scholars under the auspices of the Xinya Yanjiusuo. Some were later associated with the New Asia College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and others with Academia Sinica in Taiwan. 29. Personal conversations with William Tay, and Tay (1995). See also Yu Ying-shih’s “Xianggang yu zhongguo xueshu yanjiu” in Liu and Guan (1998), pp. 43–48, who argues that one has to maintain a world perspective in order to appreciate the tremendous intellectual space Hong Kong has historically provided. 30. The formal political processes may not be democratic in practice, but the Hong Kong government is more or less held accountable to a democratic tradition in Britain. 31. Chen Yinke was an intellectual giant in China—historian, literary critic, philosopher, and linguist. He was regarded as a “national treasure” and given special treatment during the difficult years. He spent his last years in Zhongshan University in Guangzhou and died in the early 1970s. See Lu Jiandong (1995). 32. On the issues of how meanings about space and place are established, and how identities are increasingly de-territorialized, see a theoretical piece by Gupta and Ferguson’s “Beyond ‘Culture’” in Gupta and Ferguson (1992/1997), pp. 33–51 (originally published in 1992). Using that framework, I published an essay called “Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference” (see chapter 2 of this volume).

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18 Women of Influence Gendered Charisma

Women of Influence (Nü qiangren) Although working women in Hong Kong have been given analytical attention, studies of professional women and political figures are not numerous.1 Serious biographies of female movers and shakers are rare compared to those written about male public figures.2 When the images of these women circulate in the local culture industry, a curious mixture of qualities marks them. Popular impressions distinguish them from their counterparts in China and Taiwan. It is said that high-ranking officials in China are too “man-like,” whereas their counterparts in Taiwan flaunt their “womanly ways.” Hong Kong women, on the other hand, are powerful as well as charming and fashionable, commanding professional confidence on their own terms while keeping their glamour.3 Whether or not one agrees with these general impressions, it is worth exploring the multiple meanings of nü qiangren and their associated charisma in a particular historical context—the colonial and postcolonial development in Hong Kong. Are women in Hong Kong “holding up half the sky” by quietly revolutionizing the workplace, home, and cultural expectations? If so, in what arenas and through what means are gender issues brought to the public consciousness? If not, what are the contradictions and tensions? This essay uses the public lives of leading women professionals and civil servants in the late 1990s to explore the “meaningful spaces” Hong Kong’s postwar development in South China has provided for them. There is no lack of women of influence in postwar Hong Kong. However, public perceptions of their accomplishments are gendered and based on mixed cultural assumptions. With remarkable finesse and charisma, two generations seem to have engaged under difficult circumstances in transforming themselves and society. This essay focuses on the context that has allowed such engagement to take place in institutional, discursive, and personal terms. Although cramped in a small physical territory, residents in Hong Kong have drawn on the cultural resources, images, and institutions of two vast imperial empires. In the first century of its colonial history, Hong Kong was shaped by the global spread of a merchant culture that was dynamic, open, and unorthodox in practice but conservative in its Confucian pretensions and This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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pursuits. The trading partners of Chinese merchants and their associated multicultural moralities added other layers of cultural resources. Historian Elizabeth Sinn argues that, for almost a hundred years, Hong Kong was a significant node—a space of flow between China, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. It thus provided an effective environment for sojourners and settlers, male and female, to deposit layers of value and institutional practice (Siu and Ku 2008, pp. 13–43). The postwar decades saw Hong Kong relatively cut off from a politically isolationist China. Its migrant capital and labor force became an integral part of the global spread in industrial production. In the 1960s, the world of Suzie Wong, physically represented by the bars and dance halls in the red light districts of Wan Chai and Kowloon, was contrasted with the lives of docile, diligent, and filial daughters working in factories and homes producing wigs, toys, and plastic flowers for the world market. Local film studios produced popular images of “factory queens” and “college girls.” The successful careers of several top female stars, such as Chan Po Chu and Siu Fong Fong, became the icons of the era.4 After the social unrest triggered by the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1960s, the government invested heavily in the city’s infrastructure, education, housing development, and social services, which required vast administrative support. The territory’s strategic move into servicing international finance in the 1980s and 1990s also provided unprecedented social mobility for families with middle-class aspirations. An urban, modern, cosmopolitan outlook that stressed institutional fairness, clean government, and professional efficiency became the cultural mainstream for a maturing middle class. A generation of civil servants and leading women professionals came of age in such an environment. The term nü qiangren, which emerged in the media in the 1970s became a household word in subsequent decades. A book on Japanese women is illuminating. Women on the Verge, by Karen Kelsky, analyzes the hearts and minds of more than sixty women who represent a class of globally mobile, cosmopolitan professionals. Although the book focuses on erotic imaginings that are intertwined with public discourses on modernity and occidental representations, the author provides a useful analytical framework to examine how individuals engage with mainstream ideological typifications. Agency is often charged with ambiguity, complicity, and defiance. The ironic twist in this case is that the marginal positions of women in Japan’s political and corporate structures have given educated women unusual opportunities to explore foreign travel and global careers. Exploring space between racial and erotic politics, these women are able to challenge rigid expectations of sexuality, marriage, family, and career (Kelsky 2001). In a different cultural environment of Cairo, Egypt, Saba Mahmood finds agency among her ethnographic subjects who intertwine professional aspirations with religious and moral expectations, which are highly gendered. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Have Hong Kong women in the postwar decades found themselves in similar circumstances? What gendered spaces and structural positions have been available to them? They do not share the fate of millions of migrant working women who have joined global assembly lines and whose mobile bodies are often consumed in the service and entertainment industries far from home. Instead, the world has come to professional Hong Kong women, who have attained high positions in business and administrative hierarchies. With what cultural images and typifications have these women engaged in their distinguished mobility tracks? Recent data show their accomplishments. According to census data in 1996, 86 percent of the territory’s women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four received postsecondary education. By 2006, the percentage had increased to 92 percent (Connolly and Wong 2007). Business data show that women have surpassed men in their independent personal assets. Of those who hold liquid assets of more than HK$1 million, 51 percent are women. For the professional “aristocrats”—those whose monthly earnings are HK$100,000 and above—21 percent are women, up from 16 percent in the previous year. Moreover, 83 percent of corporations in the territory find women among their senior-ranking executives (Wong 2007; Ming Pao 2007b, 2007d). In government and public service sectors, women also occupy leading positions and often top public opinion polls.5 How have they managed to achieve such distinguished track records? Women from wealthy families in Hong Kong have always enjoyed visibility. Their rise is attributed, according to popular opinion, to factors unrelated to their professional ability. Although some have received excellent educations overseas, their family ties by birth or marriage are highlighted. They assume honorable directorships in charitable organizations such as the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals and Po Leung Kuk. Some take on community work—neighborhood services for the elderly, women’s welfare, and the like.6 Conflicting images are visible in publications that are focused on women. In library collections, one finds newsletters and annual reports of the Young Women’s Christian Association, or the Xianggang funü nianbao, dating back to decades ago. Today at every newspaper stand, popular bookstore, and hotel, one finds the Hong  Kong Tattler, Qingxiu zazhi, Jiemei, and the like.7 At the lowbrow end, pornographic displays of women in daily Chinese newspapers and tabloids are marketed with little inhibition. At the top of the class hierarchy, several generations of foreign-educated, cosmopolitan socialites patronize the performing arts and galleries. Many are “trendsetters,” and their social presence is fodder for tabloid gossip. However, participation in charities and a degree of conspicuous consumption have been expected of wealthy This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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families. Female members of these families shoulder some of the public responsibilities. Their visibility has not seriously changed gender expectations in a men’s world.8 When certain social liberties of the wealthy become known, the local tabloids are ecstatic. Public sentiments seldom side with the women involved. Nonetheless, the term nü qiangren, which emerged in the media in the early I970s, conjures a distinct image of one who is professionally in charge. Women might have started a quiet “revolution” by taking up administrative positions within the civil service, but they have remained relatively faceless in the public. Civil servants in the colonial era, both men and women, were trained to be committed executives behind the scenes. They did not pursue political careers. That was the colonial culture, as David Faure has pointed out (2003). Visible figures of women in charge came from the media industry and public service appointments. In a volume of essays entitled Xianggang Xianggang, Liu Su, a journalist, traces the history of the emergence of these public figures. He lists several prime examples of women of influence. One was Mrs. Selina Chow, anchor and television executive in the 1970s, appointed Executive Council member in the 1980s. Baroness Lydia Dunn, educated in the United States, became a director for the Swire Group and was later appointed chair of the Trade Development Council and chief non-government Executive Council member. She was given a baroness title in the 1990s and joined the House of Lords. Maria Tam was a lawyer by training, with business interests in China. In the two decades before 1997, the Hong Kong and Chinese governments appointed her to numerous public service committees. In civil service, Anson Chan was appointed the first director of a government department in 1984. Man-yee Cheung was director of information in 1985 when she was in her thirties (Liu Su 1987). However, public attention focused on these women only when the nature of the civil service and the issues of press freedom emerged as major issues in the heated political negotiations leading to 1997. As the negotiations for Hong Kong’s fate continued from the mid-1980s to the few years beyond 1997, many more professional women were projected onto the public service and politics scene. Some prominent figures included a Secretary for Education and Manpower Fanny Law, a chair of the Legislative Council (LegCo) Rita  Fan, a Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung, a Secretary for Security Regina Ip, an Executive Council member Rosanna Wong, a chairperson of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) Anna Wu, a chairperson of the University Grants Committee Alice Lam, and, in the finance arena, Laura Cha. An American-trained lawyer, Cha became chair of Hong Kong’s powerful Securities and Futures Commission in the 1990s and finished a three-year term as vice chair of China’s Securities Commission (a deputy minister rank) in 2005. In 2007, she replaced Lam as chair of the University Grants Committee, advising the government on policies and funding for Hong Kong’s eight institutions of higher education. Christine Loh, a former legislative councilor turned public advocate on the environment, maintains her distance from government This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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appointments. One also finds Margaret Ng, four-time elected legislative councilor for the legal constituency and a leading member of the young Civic Party, who advocates close public scrutiny of government policies and procedures. In the local political arena, few women have commanded as much awe across the broad spectrum of public opinion as Anson Chan, both in Hong Kong and internationally. From Chan’s appointment as Chief Secretary in 1995 to her resignation in 2001, she generated unprecedented charisma in the public imagination. After a few years of staying on the margins of the local political arena, she once again propelled herself into the limelight by entering a race in the by-election of a seat in the Legislative Council in 2007, competing with the former Secretary of Security, Regina Ip, who also flaunted her political ambitions after a few years of “retirement” from civil service.9 What does the public expect from these women of influence?

“Mrs. Chan, Chief Secretary” Three days after her appointment as Chief Secretary by then Governor Chris Patten in 1993, Anson Chan and seventeen members of her natal family returned to Anhui province to attend ancestral rituals, which “traditionally” belonged to a male domain. The focus on her took on a new meaning: it suggested a scholar who had taken first place in the civil service examinations during the imperial period, who would, with official appointments, return to his native place to pay respect to his ancestors. In fact, a provincial official equated Anson’s position with an “official appointment of the first grade” ( yipin guan). Formal ancestral ceremonies were conducted to commemorate the rebuilding of the tomb of her grandfather, General Fang Zhenwu, who was remembered for fighting bravely against Japanese aggression in China during the war. The political consultative committee and the Anhui provincial government issued the invitations explicitly for such a purpose. However, there was little doubt that Anson was the center of attention, in the Hong Kong media if not in China (Fan Zuoyun 1993). In addition to pictures of her and her family at the newly erected tomb of General Fang, there was a prominent photo of her standing in front of the county temple for Judge Bao, an imperial official and classic symbol of fearlessness, unyielding integrity, and fairness. What the Hong Kong media expected of her was clear to see. The Chinese government also seemed anxious to fit her into a significant genealogy, even if it was a link with her natal family and not her husband’s. With the change of Hong Kong’s sovereignty fewer than four years away, Anson’s appointment by the last governor could mean that she would be a significant political player in the post1997 administration of the territory. The government seemed eager to sell patriotism to the Hong Kong Chinese, and it was important that her grandfather had been a famous general during the anti-Japanese war. Her uncle, Dr. Fang Xinrang, whom she This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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grew up with, was another bonus. Because he promoted the interests of people with physical disabilities, he had been friendly with the disabled son of China’s supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, and with Lu Ping, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council. Pro-China newspapers in Hong Kong already stressed her “strong and genuine nationalistic sentiments.” In addition to her role as the first female Chief Secretary, she was praised as the first Chinese to assume the position (Di Luo 1993). In a merchant society with built-in Confucian pretensions, the public did not miss the detail that her mother had been an accomplished painter. Her mother’s acceptance by the Chinese authorities was subtly hinted, because she had staged several exhibitions on the mainland. Moreover, one of Anson’s brothers was a medical specialist and the other an interpreter at the United Nations. Like Anson, they were members of the modern literati. Her natal family background aside, the media portrayed her as a conscientious wife and filial daughter. The images were intended for those who cared about the duties of women and family, and newspapers dotingly described her weekly Sunday lunch with her mother at an upscale restaurant in Pacific Place in Central. In an interview, she admitted that, if her husband had objected to her appointment, she might not have taken the job. Fitting the traditional expectations of merchant families, she was appreciated by her husband as being “presentable in both the living room and the kitchen.” A Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong summed up her admirable qualities as “having been brought up in a traditional Chinese family and steeped in the Confucian values of loyalty and filial piety” (Sing Pao 1993): In preparation for her career, she had attended the appropriate schools. She had received an elite English education in a Catholic secondary school and later matriculated at The University of Hong Kong, where most civil servants in Hong Kong were trained. She joined the colonial civil service with her cohort of university graduates, who eventually made up the core of local administrative officers in the years when Hong Kong changed from a marginal colonial society to a dynamic regional financial hub. When a competitive market demanded excellence and style, an elitist education system trained the territory’s best, both women and men. Anson was a beneficiary of this system, and she made good use of such opportunities. At the time of her appointment as Chief Secretary, she had accumulated thirty-one years of service in the government. What does the public then and now see in Anson Chan? Competence is not her monopoly; there are numerous administrators in and outside government who are equally competent. Her record is not impeccable. She is known to be uncompromising. When she was Secretary for Social Welfare, she was severely criticized in the incident of the “Kwok girl,” when she ordered the child to be forcibly taken from an emotionally disturbed mother. She is not more articulate than many of the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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members of the legislative and executive councils. If wealth commands power, her personal circumstances, although comfortable, are by no means outstanding. How do her public images reflect social expectations? Have these expectations changed during the crucial years of political transition in the late 1990s? What lies ahead for prominent female civil servants like her, twelve years into the Special Administrative Region (SAR)? During the ceremonies of the changeover in 1997, Anson attended the occasion with the chief executive, top civil servants, and Chinese leaders. In the sea of black suits and military uniforms, she stood at the top of the empty aisle that divided two sets of officials and guests. The image of her dressed in red, in a space “in between” at the center of the stage, was remarkably unintentional. Was she representing the ambivalent position of a colonial civil service, an integral part of an unprecedented political experiment, or, for the gendered space of her generation of women professionals and public figures, an ominous turning point? In the short ten years of Hong Kong’s precarious transition, she projected herself to the world media as “Hong Kong’s Iron Lady” and “the Conscience of Hong Kong” who would stand firm for her city’s values (Elliot 1997). As lawyer-elected legislator Margaret Ng commented, “When she was chosen by Governor Chris Patten for the job of Chief Secretary she had seniority and stamina and the wide support of the civil service as typifying their values but little international exposure or star quality. She was groomed into the leading role and she rose elegantly to the occasion” (2001). That was also why, on hearing her resignation in January 2001, no one would take her reasons at face value. Margaret Ng again put it poignantly, “Well brought-up senior civil servants do not normally resign for ‘personal reasons’ and ‘to spend time with their families.’ Undoubtedly, her resignation signifies a failed experiment—to transplant the values of Hong Kong’s civil service to the post-1997 administration.” Her tenure in the 1990s, however, symbolized the high point of a generation of women in the public service arena, whose positions belonged to a particular historical moment in Hong Kong’s effort to straddle the world and the nation. What can we learn from the lives and careers of these women about the transformations that marked Hong Kong’s distinctive character in the postwar years?

The “Party of Handbags” (Shoudai dang) Anson Chan was not alone in her precipitous rise through the late colonial civil service. The number of female civil servants increased from 34,322 in 1980 to 61,566 in 2000, constituting 33 percent of government employees.10 In the same period, an additional 19,000 plus men entered the civil service, but their ratio to the overall number dropped by 8 percent. Moreover, of the 1,272 civil servants who were at the directorate level and higher, 22 percent were women. Because eight out of the This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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twenty-two highest-ranked officials (bureau chiefs) were women, this group of female civil servants had earned the nickname the “party of handbags” (shoudai dang). In the late 1990s, around the time of Hong Kong’s return to China, these visibly fashionable and powerful women became household names to the Hong Kong public (Weng 2000). (See Tables 18.1 and 18.2.) A newspaper report such as the following would not be uncommon: It is well known that inside the government, there is a “party of handbags.” Party members are all high-ranking female officials. At the top of the list is Chief Secretary Anson Chan. Then there is Secretary of Health and Welfare Fok Law Siu-ching, Secretary of the Treasury Yue Chung-yee . . . former Director of News and Information Irene Yau, among others . . . In the 1970s, Anson Chan and a group of female administrative officers formed the Association of Women Administrative Officers. Together they struggled for their future and for treatment equal to their male peers. Their emotional bonding began then. Today these highly placed comrades-in-arms have continued their regular gatherings. This includes their annual “Shanghai crab” dinner. We hear that the members are planning to launch a largescale anniversary celebration of their struggle for equal contract terms. With such bonding among the female high officials, it is not surprising that some commented with a sigh, saying “Why are the men like a heap of sand?” (Ming Pao 1998)

Who were these civil servants? What quality and authority did the public expect from them? How were they judged, addressed, confronted? Ma Zhenping, a longtime Beijing resident who worked in Hong Kong for a mainland Chinese business, could only marvel at the opportunities Hong Kong women had enjoyed. Except for the impression that capable women seemed to have a hard time finding deserving husbands, he considered them the most fortunate of their gender in the world. Having experienced the “unisex” images of women on mainland China and what he termed the “hysterical assertiveness” of women Red Guards during the Cultural Table 18.1 Gender ratio of director-level appointments in the Hong Kong government, 2000 Grade D7 or above D5 and D6 D4 D1 and D2 Total

Female *5 (23%) 11 (18%) 40 (22%) 219 (22%) 275 (22%)

Male 17 (77%) 49 (82%) 145 (78%) 786 (78%) 997 (78%)

Source: Weng Yuxiong, Apple Daily, June 25, 2000, A11. *Three more female officials were appointed as D7 or above by the HKSAR government in July 2000. It increased the total number from 5 to 8 people and changed the percentage to 36%. The higher the number in the D grades, the higher the position in the civil service hierarchy. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Table 18.2 Leading female civil servants, June 2000 Anson Chan (Chief Secretary) Elsie Leung (Secretary of Justice) Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee (Secretary for Security) Denise Yue Chung-yee (Secretary for the Treasury) Lily Yam Kwan Pui-ying (Secretary for Environment and Food) Fanny Law (Secretary for Education and Manpower) Carrie Yau Tsang Ka-lai (Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting) Sandra Lee Suk-yee (Secretary for Economic Services) Shelley Lee Lai-kuen (Director for Home Affairs) Chan Fung Fu-chen (Director of Health) Chung Lai-kwok (Deputy Secretary for Housing) Cheung Man-yee (former Director of Broadcasting; became Trade Commissioner for Japan) Jacqueline Willis (Hong Kong Commissioner for Economic and Trade Affairs, USA) Elizabeth Wong Chi-lien (retired Secretary for Health and Welfare) Katherine Fok Lo Shiu-ching (retired Secretary for Health and Welfare) Source: Apple Daily, June 25, 2000, A11.

Revolution, he found Hong Kong professional women particularly gentle in their sophistication. However, he was baffled that, unlike in Taiwan, when feminists took to the streets, even on matters of unequal access to public toilets, Hong Kong women were unusually tolerant of the claims by their male counterparts. Moreover, as cosmopolitan and liberated as they were, many of the most powerful Hong Kong women continued to use their married name rather than their own (Ma 1998). Ma Zhenping was not alone in his bewilderment. When Denise Yu became a secretary-level official, she dazzled the public with her good looks, well-groomed manners and elegantly tailored Chinese dresses. That she had remained single was an issue for a concerned male caller on a radio talk show. “Why would such an attractive and feminine figure not have a husband and family?” he asked. Cheung Man-yee, former Director of Broadcasting, was another target for male commentary. Known for her fiery temper, uncompromising political stance, and nicknamed “Big Sister Cheung,” she had been admired by friends and foes as “one of Hong Kong’s most glamorous unmarried women.”11 There was also negative and equally gendered public opinion about some of these women in charge. Regina Ip, then Secretary for Immigration and Security, had been a very unpopular figure among the liberal-minded citizens because of her harsh political views and tough “law-and-order” practices. However, rather than focusing on these issues, the tabloid media caricatured her in unflattering ways and targeted her physical appearance—her looks, her hairdo, her clothes.12 Ip tried to sue publishers on sex discrimination charges, claiming distortion of her image, but the Equal Opportunities Commission (headed by Anna Wu, a prominent liberal-minded This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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lawyer) turned her case down for lack of an issue. Shortly after the controversy, a well-respected media anchor interviewed her on his television program. She voiced her bitterness but also revealed her struggles as a widow and a loving mother. Even after she resigned in the wake of the government’s controversial push in July 2003 to pass the Article 23 legislation for national security, public opinion for her remained divided.13 In 2006, she returned to the Hong Kong political scene after an educational sojourn at Stanford University. Although the media were quick to notice her “improved” hairstyle, attention has shifted to her political ambitions in Hong Kong. What contributed to these conflicting images and expectations of women among the Hong Kong public? In the postwar decades, were these women given unprecedented career opportunities but not the cultural space for gendered expectations to be challenged? Why did their careers cluster in the public sector rather than in corporate businesses or the academia?14 Was this due to a colonial education, a latecolonial career structure, or an expanding white-collar, nonprofit sector in which women could excel without intruding on male territory? Or, have literati pretensions of a mercantile society continued to frame modern family life and women’s selfperceptions? The answers to these questions can be complex. I do not intend to conduct an in-depth sociological analysis of each and every one of these leading civil servants compared with their male counterparts. It is nonetheless useful to explore a few underlying issues. The educational backgrounds of this generation of women civil servants and of public figures are remarkably similar. They had years of missionary schooling and had acquired superb English language skills. At times they even had a religious commitment to public service. According to some who attended Catholic girls’ schools, there had been real-life models—teachers and school administrators (foreign and local)—who were women. Many graduates continued to bond with their secondary schools. In serving on school boards, giving public lectures, participating in speech-day activities, these career women were models for young school children. Table 18.3 shows some top missionary schools in the territory with long histories. An English education in an elite missionary school was an important credential. It groomed the women to become the 2 percent who received university education in the 1970s and 1980s. Table 18.4 shows a large number of past and present women civil servants and those in public service who have attended the University of Hong Kong. According to three active women lawyers whom I interviewed, other women students in secondary schools or universities were particularly good with the English language. Such language skills were necessary for recruitment into the executive and administrative officer ranks in the government. Moreover, many women students chose humanities and social science subjects rather than fields traditionally considered the domain of men such as science, medicine, and engineering. When it came to This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Table 18.3 Leading missionary schools and their distinguished female graduates St. Paul’s Co-educational College Sacred Heart Canossian College Maryknoll Sisters’ School

Diocesan Girls’ School

St. Paul’s Convent School

St. Mary’s Canossian College St. Stephen’s Girls’ College

Belilios Public School

Selina Chow (elected legislator) Maria Tam (former appointed legislator) Audrey Eu (lawyer and elected legislator) Anson Chan (former Chief Secretary) Elsie Leung (former Secretary for Justice) Lily Yam (former Secretary for Environment and Food) Lau Kin-yee (elected legislator) Anna Wu (former appointed legislator and chair of Equal Opportunities Commission) Emily Lau (elected legislator) Laura Cha (former chair of the Securities and Futures Commission) Shelley Lee (Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs) Wong Chien Chi-lien (former Secretary for Health and Welfare) Katherine Fok Lo Shiu-ching (former Secretary for Health and Welfare) Carrie Yau Tsang Ka-lai (Permanent Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food) Jacqueline Willis (former Trade and Development Commissioner for the SAR in the United States) Sandra Lee Suk-yee (former Secretary for Economic Development) Sarah Liao (former Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works) Rebecca Lai Ko Wing-yee (former Permanent Secretary for the Civil Service) Lydia Dunn (former appointed senior legislator, former chair of Trade Development Council) Margaret Ng (lawyer and elected legislator) Carrie Yau (Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting) Fanny Law (former Secretary for Education and Manpower) Alice Tai (Ombudsman) Rita Fan (appointed, elected legislator and chair of the Legislative Council) Kwan Suk-wah (former Chief Executive of the Family Planning Commission) Regina lp (former Secretary for Security) Rosanna Wong Yick-ming (former chair of the Hong Kong Housing Authority) Denise Yue (Secretary for the Civil Service) Nellie Fong Wong Kut-man (former member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong and Legislative Council of Hong Kong)

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qualifications for administrative officer positions, which favored an all-round liberal education, the brightest students in the arts subjects were encouraged to apply.15 Table 18.4 Top civil servants in the late 1990s who attended the University of Hong Kong Name Anson Chan Yam Kwan Pui-ying

Major English Arts

Fanny Law

Chemistry

1975

Wong Chien Chi-lien

English Literature Arts

1969

Jacqueline Willis Ip Lau Suk-yee Sarah Liao Denise Yue Alice Tai Yuen-ying Carrie Yau

Rita Lau Ng Wai-lan Lee Suk-yee Shelley Lee

English Literature Chemistry and Botany History Law Social Sciences

Arts Arts Arts

Entry point 1962 1969

1969 1975 1973 1974 1974 1977

1976 1974 1971

Year and highest position attained 1993 Chief Secretary 2000 Secretary for Environment and Food 2000 Secretary for Education and Manpower 1990 Secretary for Health and Welfare 1999 Hong Kong Commissioner for Economic and Trade Affairs, USA 1998 Secretary for Security 2002 Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works 1998 Secretary for the Treasury 1999 Ombudsman 1995 Deputy Secretary for Security 1997 Director of Administration 2000 Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting 1999 Director of Urban Services 2000 Secretary for Economic Services 1995 Director for Home Affairs

Language proficiency also allowed these women to choose law as their major. With a law degree and experience in private practice, many were appointed to the legislative and executive councils before and after 1997 and to public service organizations and government commissions.16 The number of women lawyers in Hong Kong has been high. At the Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong, women students have outnumbered men in recent years. In the 1960s, 10 percent of all lawyers were women. By the early 1990s, there were 30 percent, and their organizational strength was visible in the Bar Association (headed many times by women), the Solicitors Association, and the Hong Kong Federation of Women Lawyer.17 During a reunion dinner in year 2000 to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of The University of Hong Kong’s founding, those who stepped onto the stage as “old girls” from the Lady Ho-Tung Hall were predominant public figures and civil servants led by then Chief Secretary Anson Chan and her “party of handbags.”18 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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A larger number of male students also went through the same educational process. They attended top missionary schools for boys and went on to The University of Hong Kong. Why, then, were the women administrative officers pushed into public prominence? David Faure, in his work on the colonial history of Hong Kong, points to the inherent inequality of opportunities between local and expatriate civil servants and a culture that avoided political dialogue: I do not think Hong Kong people were apolitical throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and yet I also said that within Hong Kong’s political ideology; there has long been the sense that Hong Kong people cannot govern themselves. For this reason, I find the postwar generation of Hong Kong University graduates fascinating. Trained in the best of Eastern and Western traditions, groomed for Hong Kong’s upper echelon, they should be the elite if ever there is an elite in Hong Kong society. And inculcated with a strong sense of social responsibility; should they not provide intellectual leadership? . . . Acting on a small stage, Hong Kong’s great men had only the aspirations to match, and understandably, these turned to business, community service, and the professions. I have not mentioned the civil service, for even in 1945, no Chinese person graduating from Hong  Kong University would have thought about a senior appointment in the civil service . . . It was not until the mid-1950s that the recruitment of Chinese people as Administrative Officers, as Cadet Officers came to be called, became a matter of routine. How far might Hong Kong University’s graduates think advancement could lead? I dare say no Chinese person would have dreamt of rising to head of department (let alone being Governor of Hong Kong), for localization was not even in the air. (2003, pp. 48–49)

Many of the men who turned away from careers in the government excelled in the private sector. There have been successful lawyers in private practice from that generation, including the legendary barrister Patrick Yu (1998). Men also more readily joined family businesses, which were rarely inherited by daughters. If the logic of Faure’s argument is correct, that Hong Kong’s bright male graduates did not compete with women for political careers because they had better mobility choices; the success of women civil servants was but a fortuitous historical moment rather than a real reversal of gender hierarchy. They settled into these administrative positions because they, their families, and the public did not expect much for women’s careers.

Political Stars: Revisiting Political Charisma The mixed signals for the “party of handbags” did not mean that traditional values governing gender relationships had not been challenged. At approximately the same time as Anson and her “party of handbags” rose to prominence in the civil service, another group of women professionals made their political debut. Although quite similar to the civil servants in background, training, and glamour, they occupied This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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visible social and political spaces. The public also seemed to judge them with remarkably mixed gender notions. Mrs. Ellen Li was a very prominent “merchant’s daughter” of a generation before postwar baby boomers, and her career spanned almost half a century. Born of Fujianese parents in Saigon in the early Republican era, she was given every educational opportunity—a boys’ school in Saigon, an English boarding school (St.  Stephen’s Girls’ College) in Hong Kong, and a university in Shanghai run by American Baptists. Her father had emigrated to Vietnam in his youth and worked his way up to becoming a successful rice merchant. He was rather indulgent with his only daughter, grooming her alongside his sons and making it known that she would one day help her elder brother in the family business. In her boarding school years, she was given generous allowances because her father believed that a woman should be economically independent to protect herself from temptations and vices. After she graduated with a degree in business, Mrs. Li worked for nearly ten years in the China and South Sea Bank in Hong Kong, attaining managerial ranks and the respect of her male colleagues. Although she eventually married into a family of medical professionals and spent most of her time raising children, she fulfilled all the public duties of a wife from a politically influential family. She took up the cause of women’s welfare in Hong Kong. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the government showered her with honors and public responsibilities. The University of Hong Kong awarded her an honorary doctorate. In 1993, she granted me a lunch interview at her favorite Hong Kong Country Club. In her mid-eighties, the elegant matriarch was happy about the structural changes that had resulted from her decades of effort and was eager to have the younger generation do much more. In her autobiography, she highlighted the efforts she had made in the Hong Kong government’s provision for women. This included a list of public service positions: founder and president of the Hong Kong Chinese Women Club (1938–90), the Hong Kong Family Planning Association (1951–90), the Hong Kong YWCA (board member since 1946), the Federation of University Women, and the Hong Kong Council of Women. In the popular press, she achieved four “firsts.” She was the first woman in Hong Kong to be made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen in 1974, the first Chinese woman to receive an honorary LLD from the University of Hong Kong, the first woman to be appointed to the Urban Council and later to the Legislative Council (1965) (Ming Pao 1988). Anyone who treated her as a “tai tai” type would have seen her true colors.19 She once resigned from the bank because it had assumed that, with a husband to support her, she did not need a salary raise. In an American Independence Day reception from which spouses were excluded, she insisted on attending as an independent legislator. Her biggest victory in the Hong Kong legislature, as she saw it, was the successful fight in 1973 against legal concubinage. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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An essay in the South China Morning Post (1985) succinctly summarized the public’s appreciation of her. In “Portrait of a Crusader,” Vernon Ram reported: Chinese women, who today enjoy a high profile in the professions and public life in Hong Kong, owe their success largely to the crusading zeal of one woman. That woman is Dr. Ellen Li, 77, now a retired senior citizen. . . . Some of today’s leading women legislators and business executives were either not born, or were mere toddlers, when Dr. Li mounted a onewoman campaign for legislation for monogamous marriages to bring the law in line with those in force in China and Taiwan. Dr. Li took it upon herself because the Hong Kong Government found itself increasingly involved in complex court cases arising from Chinese family disputes, mostly relating to inheritance. A seven-man committee was appointed to look into the situation and make a report. The report came out in 1949 and was promptly shelved. Dr. Li next organized a petition and presented it to the then Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, who admitted he knew nothing about Chinese law. So he sought the opinion of Sir Man-kam Lo who summarily vetoed the proposal. Then began a 20-year battle when Dr.  Li tirelessly campaigned for the long overdue reforms. Crucial to the law was the definition of a legal marriage in a social climate where concubinage left gray areas in respect of inheritance and legitimacy: About ten pieces of legislation depended on it. But thanks to sympathetic Legco members—particularly the then Attorney-General Denys (now Sir Denys) Roberts—Dr. Li’s efforts were crowned with success and the Marriage Reform Bill became law in 1973. Dr. Li, a deceptively soft-spoken woman in an elegantly tailored cheongsam, employs a rapier-sharp wit and incisive logic—a refreshing contrast to the sledgehammer rhetoric of some latter date women’s libbers—to score her points.

“There are three social injustices that I wanted put right,” Dr. Li said in 1968. “First: equal pay for equal work for women. Second: a marriage law, which would fully protect the rights of women. Third: amendments to the law of succession so that women would enjoy the same property inheritance rights as men . . . It would have been a waste of my education just to play mahjong all day. I decided that with my financial training and business experience, I could help different organizations. . . . Even before the war I used to say Hong Kong was fifty years behind the rest of the world in culture and attitudes. Before the war, I did not care too much because I never thought I would stay: But now it was different. That started the drive in 1949 to get some of the inhibiting laws changed.” The rest, of course, is history.20 She passed away in September 2005 at the age of ninety-eight. Granted that Dr.  Ellen Li’s case is unusual, it is nevertheless interesting to note the underlying structure of opportunity for this class of elite women. The merchant’s daughter background in coastal south China gave her the resources, social networks, and a perspective. Transnational business contacts, a colonial structure shaken by war and revolution, and a new industrial society in the making provided Li the space to make a life that was fulfilling and meaningful. What she enjoyed could have been rare This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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opportunities in an uncertain time, but postwar Hong Kong has had a liberalized and expanded economy that has allowed rapid social mobility for an entire generation. Outstanding political figures of this younger generation today are too numerous to name.21 This essay focuses on three—Anna Wu, Christine Loh, and Margaret Ng. They have pursued distinguished public service careers as lawyers, members of government commissions and policy think tanks, and elected legislators. Their careers and the public’s opinions of them have unveiled changing gender expectations in a historical juncture in Hong Kong when social and cultural identities are reconstituted in another turbulent political environment. Anna Wu was a senior partner of a law firm when she was appointed by then Governor of Hong Kong to the Legislative Council in 1992. Like many civil servants, she attended a top missionary school (Maryknoll Sisters’ School) and graduated with a law degree from the University of Hong Kong in the early 1970s. She was fortunate, she says, that her parents could afford to provide equal educational opportunities for her and her brothers. As the eldest daughter, she was expected to shoulder family responsibilities. In our conversations over the years, she has admitted to appreciating her parents’ attention and trust, though knowing deep down they have wished for her to be a son.22 However, she has had ample female professional models. Ella Cheong, her teacher who supervised her practical training, is a senior partner in the law firm Wilkinson and Gist and a world expert on patent and copyright law. Although low-key in style, she remains a passionate and uncompromising defender of equal opportunity rights. When she joined the Legislative Council at the invitation of Governor Chris Patten, she had no particular political agenda but a sense of public duty. Gradually, she focused on women and equal opportunity issues. In 1995, while a member of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), she used over a million dollars of her own funds to put together an expert study and then a comprehensive legislative bill on the topic. Her proposed bill covered discriminations based on age, gender, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and union activities. When the government struck down the bill by a massive persuasion campaign in and out of the Legislative Council, Anna Wu openly displayed her frustrations and criticized the government for “employing despicable tactics.” The media, grateful for her integrity and courage, crowned her the “mother of equal opportunity.”23 In May 1999, Anson Chan, as Chief Secretary, invited Anna to become chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Anna accepted the challenge although her appointment took many by surprise. Few expected the government to invite one of its most vigilant critics. True to her professional passion, she advocated proactive ways of educating the public on issues of discrimination. She vowed to seek better understanding of those marginalized (such as those with mental illness, AIDS patients, etc.) and would not hesitate to go to court on their behalf. She was also determined to investigate unfair practices in government departments and businesses. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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These were not empty promises. In her three years as chair, she pursued several high-profile legal battles. Among them were cases involving gender discrimination. A court in February 2001 ruled against an employer for subjecting a staff member to unlawful discrimination on the grounds of her pregnancy. A more daring case involved taking on the Education Department. Shortly after she took office as chair of the commission, she followed through with an investigative report on the Secondary School Places Allocation System (SSPA), which had been used by the government since 1978. However, girls and boys were given different queues, and there were fixed gender quotas in coeducational schools. The EOC received complaints from parents who felt their children had been unfairly denied access to schools of their choice. Despite the government’s loud objections, the EOC sought a judicial review. In June 2001, the High Court ruled that the SSPA was unlawful. After the court ruling, Anna Wu stated: The High Court ruling offers clarity, and will create certainty for all parties. Good governance and accountability now require the Government and the Education Department to act quickly, to save further costs and to minimize the confusion for students, parents, and schools. It is a matter of enormous public importance for the Government and the Education Department to rectify the system as a basic educational concern. Our students are entitled to and deserve an education system that is open, fair, and non-discriminatory.24

Her professionalism contrasted sharply with the bureaucratic maneuvers of government departments, and won her public appreciation.25 In the minds of many, she was a “woman of influence” who listened to the voices of the disadvantaged. Her eventual departure from the EOC was politically controversial, and she received a degree of public support. She has since taken up other social causes and put her efforts into private charity and legal education. Christine Loh, a contemporary of Anna Wu, was appointed to the Legislative Council in October 1992. She was a founding member of the Observer, an organization founded in 1987 by a group of public-minded professionals. After her initial speech to the Legislative Council, the public knew they were witnessing a rising political star. A leading article in the South China Morning Post (Eager 1992) announced “Christine Loh Speaks Her Mind and Wins Her Spurs.” Known to be forthright, principled, and extremely articulate, Christine entered the political arena in the 1990s with agendas that were progressive and cosmopolitan—broad-minded interpretations of the arts, promotion of awareness of ethnic and other social discriminations, challenges to entrenched inheritance customs in the lineage-based villages of the New Territories, and, most important, public mobilization on environmental issues. Although seen by some as a protégé of the last governor, Chris Patten, Christine was one of the few legislators who looked beyond local politics in Hong Kong and cultivated nongovernment institutional ties overseas. Over the years since she became This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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politically visible, local media has often addressed her using the endearing term “little foreign devil” ( gui mui tsai). Conservative Chinese officials, however, have found her “Westernized” ways uncomfortable, because she neither plays by their cultural rules nor toes the political line. Her upbringing is not atypical of a postwar generation of children in Hong Kong born into very comfortable circumstances. Another “merchant’s daughter,” she grew up with a household full of professionally independent women.26 Christine spent her childhood in a French convent primary school where she learned English and French, and where many of her classmates came from different parts of the world. At age thirteen, she attended a boarding school in England. Like many other professional women of her generation, she graduated with a law degree from an English university and nurtured an educated interest in the arts. Her exposure to China was early when she worked her way up the corporate ladder of a leading multinational firm engaged in commodity trading with China. The Hong Kong public has come to know her through her political activism. As early as 1985, she joined Friends of the Earth and since served twice as chair of the board. After an appointed term in the Legislative Council, she ran two successful direct election campaigns, in 1995 and 1998, receiving top votes among candidates for the Hong Kong Island geographical district. In 1994, she had started to publish the “Alternate Policy Address,” alongside the annual policy address by Governor Chris Patten and later the Chief Executive. It openly challenged entrenched assumptions of the government about major policy issues. In 1997, she set up the Citizens Party with an agenda that focused on the environment and appealed to young, educated, and globally oriented middle-class voters. In the Alternate Policy Address for 1997–1998, she advocated a “five-year plan,” a bold model for economic and social enterprise. In 1999, she addressed the Chief Executive’s idea of building Hong Kong into a world city. To claim a competitive advantage, she argued, Hong Kong must enhance its characteristic freedoms, capitalize on the city’s multicultural mix, invest aggressively in education, stay civil, open, and connected, and, be environmentally sustainable.27 The public would identify her most with environmental issues. Looking back, she feels that their efforts have partially saved the Victoria Harbour. It took a great deal of patience and years of research, she says, to stir up public voices against the government’s plans to reclaim land along the harbor. The bill she drafted and introduced at the Legislative Council was finally passed in the late 1990s, drastically restricting the government’s proposals. She sees the value of reinforcing grassroots green movements with professional voices to create formidable pressure. Her focus on the educated classes has cost her votes, because political foes pick on her apparent lack of exposure to the conditions of Hong Kong’s poor. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Her decision not to run for another term in the September 2000 election disappointed many, not least the media, which lost one of its stars for eye-catching headlines. She was frustrated at the Legislative Council’s lack of impact and decided to explore other channels of political communication on issues she cared about.28 Other councilors attributed the frustration to her inability to engage with party politics. “She is a political loner,” said James Tien, then co-chair of the pro-business Liberal Party (Sing Tao Daily 2000b). In the wake of Christine’s decision not to seek re-election, a leading media host pointed to the possibility that voters would soon forget her. Her response was straightforward. She did not mind shying away from the political limelight, because appealing to an electoral public to build power had never been a direction she intended to take. She would devote much of her time to securing effective means to incite public policy debates. Rather than seeing her action as a retirement from activism, she insisted that it was a renewed involvement.29 She has remained fiercely independent in political practice and spirit. Her liberal democratic leanings have directed her to advocate for the environment and for human rights, the plight of AIDS patients, avant-garde art, consumers’ rights, and citizens’ informed political engagement. With the help of friends, she raised enough funds to set up a policy think tank. The small research institute, Civic Exchange, has churned out voluminous papers and commentaries on Hong Kong’s major policy issues: the environmental hazards of further reclaiming the harbor, the coastal highway along the southwestern part of Hong Kong Island, the Disneyland project on Lantau Island, and the government’s controversial Western Kowloon Cultural District proposal. There have also been substantive reports, such as the one on how to better integrate Hong Kong and the economically vibrant Pearl River Delta.30 She is particularly critical of the government’s paper on “Hong Kong 2030: Planning Visions and Strategies” and urges the government to look beyond Hong Kong to better cultivate a hinterland in China. She also highlights the institutional “software” that a city like Hong Kong uniquely possesses: the rule of law, personal freedoms, open and fluid movement of information and capital, and competitive advantages that are not even mentioned in the government document (Taiyang Bao 2001). Her means of reaching out is characteristically unconventional. Exploiting Internet technology, she maintains a “cyber community” of informed public opinion. In fact, protests through Christine’s cyber network against the government’s proposal to reclaim the Western District harbor forced policymakers to drastically scale back the plans (Yang and Xue 2000). Environmental causes remain her major focus, and although critical of short-term government agendas, she is capable of working within the mainstream. In 2006, she joined forces with the business community, and the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce under the leadership of David Eldon to mobilize business and government cooperation to clean up Hong Kong’s air pollution.31 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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One does not often associate Christine with a clear feminist orientation although she has lobbied against gender discrimination.32 Her liberal political leanings quite naturally led her on a collision course with entrenched lineage power in the New Territories. Early in 1994, she introduced a motion into the legislature to revise the New Territories Land Exclusions Act. The motion proposed to grant equal rights of inheritance of landed property for female indigenous residents in the mostly single-surnamed, lineage villages. Representatives of the Heung Yee Kuk, composed of leaders among the New Territories lineages, rounded up more than one thousand protestors to demonstrate in front of the legislature. Some even publicly threatened Christine with physical harm. Venturing into the villages to make her point, she insisted on establishing an image of someone who would passionately take on entrenched power and established conventions.33 Her serious politics aside, Christine maintains an aura of sophistication mixed with a touch of mischief. Her tastes are subtly expensive, and her style informal but cultured. Her comfortable family background is not lost to the media. She is known to have acquired a small, but of high quality, collection of modern art. When pressed, she nonchalantly admits that “savings” have enabled her to embark on public activism without a 9-to-5 job. It might have been charisma or her skills in cultivating an image. Christine has been spared by the media, which can be savage to public figures. At the time she declared her retirement from legislative politics, she was the second most popular councilor in the public polls, overshadowing the internationally known advocate for democracy, lawyer Martin Lee. Among the 2000 Business Week awards for Asia’s most influential, Christine was listed alongside finance, technology, and political figures, such as tycoon Li Ka-shing. Moreover, in a survey of university students that asked about their expectations of Legislative Councilors, Christine ranked second among those who students would like to connect with.34 In fact, political foes wonder why she continues to have inexhaustible political capital despite her relative inexperience in party politics (Sing Tao Daily 2000a, Apple Daily 2000). The issue can be a cultural one. The media brands her as belonging to the breed of “New Age” personalities, “exuding wisdom even in the way she drinks water” (Sing Tao Daily 2000c). She presents an image of a professional woman who charges ahead, raising eyebrows, turnings heads, and wreaking innocent havoc, quite unlike civil servants who work comfortably within an old institutional framework.35 She captures the imaginations of the educated postwar middle class who came of age in the last two decades of Hong Kong’s unprecedented development. Being young, culturally situated at the margins of mainstream Chinese society, and with a stylistic touch of mischief, Christine has been able to charm and disarm. The media often report in curious but endearing terms how she cultivates a “mature woman” look with a particular brand of eyeglasses. She remains, in the public eye, an enviable free spirit. Like Ellen Li in the previous decades, Christine actively challenges political assumptions This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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and constructs a new image of a woman in charge through the lifestyle she pursues and the values she advocates. In 2007, the Queen made her a CBE. Margaret Ng is a former comrade-in-arms of Christine Loh in the Legislative Council. A leading journalist and practicing barrister, Margaret has been invincible in four successive legislative elections, representing the legal constituency.36 With her intellectual sophistication, lucidity, and precise articulation in writing and speech, she can be devastating to friends and foes. Born in the New Territories, she, by her own account, missed the status of “indigenous village residents” by only a few days. Like many others in the generation of postwar baby boomers, she had the opportunity to attend a leading missionary secondary school (St. Paul’s Convent School). She studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and was among the leaders of the late 1960s student movements, combining intellectual curiosity with passionate social activism. Her academic interests led her to a doctorate in philosophy in the United States. Bored with administrative work in Hong Kong, she took off to Cambridge to study law in 1983. Her turn to law did not surprise her friends. She accumulated acute political sensitivities in the turbulent period when the Sino-British negotiations over the future of Hong Kong intensified. She spent her days in England divided between deeply intellectual pursuits at Cambridge and fiery parliamentary debates in London (Ng 1987). Friends knew that she would not remain an observer for long. During a visit to the late Sir Murray MacLehose, the former governor gently hinted, “You are here just to take a break and have some fun, are you not?” After returning to Hong Kong, she took up the post of chief editor and publisher of Ming Pao, a leading Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong. Her collections of literary and political commentaries were perceptive, cosmopolitan, and witty. She quickly gained a popular following. Even after she was called to the bar in 1988 and became an associate with the prestigious Chambers of Sir Oswald Cheung, she continued to write for Ming Pao, the South China Morning Post, and the Hong Kong Economic Journal. Her record of public service has been distinguished. Despite her critical views, governors Sir David Wilson and Chris Patten appointed her to important advisory committees, including the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the Central Policy Unit, a government think tank. Her impeccable English and razor-sharp mind also humbled many foreign dignitaries she interviewed. Her brand of cosmopolitanism is unique. With a touch of nonchalance, she indulges in Chinese and English literary classics, modern poetry, oriental carpets, art auctions, and cultural performances in Europe and North America and is a connoisseur of French wines and Chinese culinary delights. She is no cultural broker. Instead, she engages with an amazing array of international personalities on their cultural terms. The media seldom dare to be frivolous with Margaret Ng because the public issues she pursues are often dead serious. As an independent Legislative Councilor This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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representing the legal profession in Hong Kong, she has long been regarded as a most uncompromising defender of the rule of law and related human rights issues. The political framework “One Country Two Systems” for post-1997 Hong Kong poses unprecedented challenges to legal practitioners because legal interpretations allow few gray areas. Margaret is particularly concerned that the Hong Kong legal framework, in principle and practice, should not be corrupted by political exigencies. To let it erode means that Hong Kong will lose a precious instrument and an established language to connect with the international community, in financial, political, and cultural terms. It will also lose credibility in the eyes of Hong Kong’s rightful citizens. Social cohesion and moral clarity cannot be maintained in a society where cynicism abounds. Acting on these basic principles, Margaret has taken some very unpopular legal stands. Even before the political changeover, Margaret voiced her opposition to the establishment of the Provisional Legislative Council to replace the one elected by popular vote in 1995. Her articulation of its illegality offended the Chinese government, which was eager to rid Hong Kong of political voices picked by then Governor Chris Patten. Her daring views might not have pleased an uninformed public, but they did not hurt her professional credibility, and she won another landslide election in 1998 and others that followed. Two more issues made her equally unpopular, this time with the Hong Kong government. In March 1999, she led a group of Legislative Councilors to propose a vote of no confidence against the Secretary of Justice Elsie Leung. It was over the decision of the government legal department not to prosecute the chair of the Sing Tao Group for the chair’s alleged complicity in the corruption trial of two company executives. Although the government was able to swing enough votes to reject the motion, issues concerning the fairness of the law, the alliance of the government and business interests, and the competence of government appointees were articulated and hotly debated. It caused much embarrassment to the new regime, to say the least.37 The more significant case involved the first serious constitutional crisis faced by the SAR government, over the right of abode of thousands of mainland Chinese who were children of Hong Kong residents. The case was too complicated to be treated here, but Ng represented the five thousand or so children who challenged the government’s decision to deny them the right of abode. The underlying constitutional issue had to do with the government seeking the interpretation of the law by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and overriding a previous Court of Final Appeal decision to grant the children the right of abode. Many lawyers, including some in China, considered the government’s action a serious affront to the autonomy of the judiciary and Hong Kong’s legal independence that would result in severe political damage. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In 1999, Ng teamed up with prominent lawyers and judges to lead a march of more than six hundred colleagues and supporters. Dressed in black and walking in total silence, they marched through the administrative district and the courts. The silent protest on the streets was but the beginning of a series of political and human dramas surrounding “the new immigrants” that has since continued to tear apart the already fragile social fabric of the territory. For her support of the mainland children, Margaret Ng has often annoyed Hong Kong residents who are worried about job security, social benefits, and crossborder crime. However, she cautions against using mainlanders as scapegoats, puts a human face on the complex social profiles of “the new immigrants,” and sticks to her legal and constitutional principles (Chan and Rwezura 2004). Popularly re-elected to the Legislative Council by her constituency of lawyers since her 1995 debut, Margaret Ng’s political trajectory has seemed unshakable. Despite years of exclusion by some factions of the Chinese government for her tough stance in defending the rule of law and democratic reforms, and despite organized challenges from pro-China lawyers, she has made an impact in shaping educated public opinion. The highest point of her series of challenges to the government involved Article 23 of the Basic Law, a national security legislation that the government was eager to promote. At the forefront of a pan-democratic alliance that protested against the lack of consultation on the proposed legislation and with several hundred thousand supporters who marched in the streets of Hong Kong on July l, 2003, she and her colleagues (a group of lawyers who called themselves the Article 23 Concerned Group, and later the Article 45 Concerned Group) have become almost a barometer to gauge the professional, pro-democracy voice in the community, at times overshadowing even leaders of the Democratic Party.38 Her re-election in September 2004 was no surprise to her supporters. What surprised her friends and foes was the sudden attention the Chinese government in Beijing showered on her and her legal associates who also ran successfully for election. Days after, she and members of the Article 45 Concerned Group, including a popularly elected women legislator and former chair of the Bar Association, Audrey Eu, were invited by the Chinese Liaison Office in Hong Kong for serious talks.39 This was followed by invitations to attend the national celebrations in Beijing on October l with other Hong Kong legislators. The political stardom was not what she or her colleagues had asked for, but, in the eyes of the media and general public, the professionalism they had exerted finally produced some respectable impact. They charged ahead. In April 2005, over another controversial reinterpretation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Margaret Ng and her colleagues in the Article 45 Concerned Group led another protest march of lawyers. The image of these well-dressed professionals solemnly in black in the streets This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of Hong Kong could not have been more striking. The South China Morning Post reported the event on its front page with the headline “Lawyers Speak Volumes in Silent Protest” (South China Morning Post 2005). The notion of nü qiangren has long disappeared. In the public eye, Margaret Ng and Audrey Eu were simply professional leaders in their own right. In the ensuing months, public talk gravitated toward the question of whether the group would organize a political party. Margaret Ng and Audrey Eu were frequently heard on the airwaves and on Internet radio shows. With a few male and female colleagues, many of whom former chairs of the Hong Kong Bar Association, they created a regular forum for public dialogue. A free monthly newspaper, A45 (with an electronic version reaching far beyond Hong Kong) had Margaret Ng as the editor-inchief. The first issue, not coincidentally, was an in-depth interview of the retired Chief Secretary, Anson Chan, who had some very harsh words to say about Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs and the pace of democratic reforms. The Civic Party was eventually formed in 2006.40 In the 2008 Legislative Council elections, while she canvassed for other members of the Civic Party, she overwhelmed her opponent yet again by winning two-thirds of the votes in the legal constituency. Dead serious in the pursuit of political principles, Margaret Ng never loses her sense of feminist humor. In the new journal and on her website for the legal constituency, there is always a column with gourmet recipes, how to get unusual pastries and Christmas pudding in London, and a few hints for finding the best Belgian chocolates.41 The tongue-in-cheek assertion of her “professional place in the kitchen” has long generated its rightful presence for deserving friends at her dinner table as well as in her readers’ imaginations.

A Historical and Regional Moment of Gendered Charisma In their multidimensional qualities, Anson Chan, the “party of handbags,” Anna Wu, Christine Loh, Margaret Ng, and professional women like them have engaged with changing expectations from the Hong Kong society. In the process, they have created a new arena. The fluid process of negotiating new images reflects the kaleidoscopic nature of Hong Kong culture, regional history, and identity. The sources of their charisma capture several layers of reality: Hong Kong as a local society, an essential region of South China, a node in the British colonial enterprise, an Asian financial hub, and a global city. The conjuncture of these historical moments and political realities has allowed glamorous and powerful professional women in Hong Kong to assert their agency. To push the historical issue further, one can argue that, from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, the period of focus for this chapter, professional women in Hong Kong reached the pinnacle of respectability by preserving certain “traditions” This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the Chinese merchant elites, and, at the same time, they joined worldly domain through Westernstyle (and mostly Christian) education. Expanded space is not confined to professionals. As sociologist Po-king Choi argues,42 Hong Kong’s manufacturing and clerical needs have allowed women of all classes to work outside of home. Women take jobs not because they have to but because they want to. In the process, they also have exerted their political agency. For the professionals, in particular, class mobility and education in the postwar decades of Hong Kong have made it possible for them to reach their goals with remarkable public visibility and charisma. Now that Hong Kong is twelve years into becoming a Special Administrative Region, has the position of professional women changed? The rapid “reintegration” with China has grave implications. For working women, job opportunities have long been reduced due to the shift of manufacturing activities across the border. The wives of new immigrants in Hong Kong cannot work because of a lack of appropriate education and the burden of having children. Furthermore, professional and working women alike are facing a China where the new super rich in the boom towns of South China, Macao, and Hong Kong are constructing very different images and expectations of women. In their conception of life on the fast track, women are often reduced to commodities for consumption.43 The overwhelming images of women are waitresses in qipao (long dresses) uniforms filling the halls of seafood restaurants, karaoke bars, gambling clubs, and business receptions, streetwalkers soliciting customers in front of beauty salons and train stations, not to mention mistresses kept for short periods by truck drivers and commuting entrepreneurs along the Hong Kong– Shenzhen border. The alarming point is that this style of consumption is often wrongly equated with Hong Kong’s mainstream culture of “freedom and affluence” as symbols of modernization and development.44 After 1997, cross-border marriages have increased. More and more Hong Kong men look for affordable wives in South China. Triggered by the 2006 bi-census data from the government, public commentary on the marriage prospects of Hong Kong women has heated up. Are Hong Kong women losing in the marriage market because, in the eyes of ordinary men in Hong Kong, they are too educated, too independent, and too demanding of their spouses?45 Professional women keenly feel the pressures of work and family, and many are making adjustments. An increasing number, according to the 2006 bi-census, are also taking spouses from across the border. To look ahead, it seems that sustaining the complicated respectability of professional women in Hong Kong today, as in historical times, is not confined to the issue of gender. It  involves negotiations within the broader evolution of a regional culture and political economy. This essay has tried to capture one of the many significant historical moments in gender positioning when the border between Hong Kong and mainland China has and continues to harden and soften. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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*This is a slightly revised version of the original published in Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China, edited by Helen F. Siu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).

Notes 1.

A survey of doctoral dissertations written in the last twenty years at the University of Hong Kong produces only a few, and they are remotely related to the topic. See Chu (2003). 2. Some notable biographies include one on Lady Clara Ho-tung by her daughter Irene  Cheng, but she belonged to a different era. Although she was respected for her public service and charity, she was by no means seen as “professional.” Ellen Li (b. 1907), a pioneer professional woman, produced her own autobiography that summarizes her life and work over eight decades. Although recognized for her tremendously high-profile record of public service and her push for legislation to advance the rights of women in Hong Kong, she is seen as a woman of privilege who engaged in charity and “do-goodism.” In her self-perception, she juxtaposed familial ties and duties of a wife and mother with her extremely progressive record of public involvement in women’s causes. I interviewed her in 1993. 3. A leading journalist in Hong Kong volunteered these impressions during a conversation I had with him. Similarly, an academic who was active in public service once confessed that, when Chief Secretary Anson Chan stared him in the eye, his legs turned weak; when she smiled, his heart melted. 4. See summary in the introduction of this volume. See also Li and Zeng (2000). On the likes and dislikes of a postwar Hong Kong generation (born between 1955 and 1975), Chan portrayed the diligent factory girls of working-class families, and members of her fan clubs identified with her movie images. Siu Fong Fong played the upwardly mobile, middle class girl going through secondary school and local university, and captured another class of fans. The images and the fans’ experiences characterized Hong Kong in the postwar decades. 5. This occurs across political lines for public figures, such as Audrey Eu (Civic Party), and Rita Fan (convener for LegCo). 6. See interviews of these women in Xianggang funü nianbao bianji weiyuanhui (1975). 7. These are leading social magazines in Hong Kong that highlight elite women and their styles. 8. See Yau et al. (1992). See also Fang (1993). The author examines the background and family ties of five wealthy women in Hong Kong who are the wives of prominent entrepreneurs. See also Liu Su (1987). 9. See media reports on the campaigns of the two candidates since the death of Ma Li, a Legislative Councilor who died in August 2007. 10. See Weng (2000). A figure in September 2004 puts it at 24.6 percent. See Ming Pao (2005b) on a rise in the percentage of women civil servants at the directorate level and above. See also Ming Pao (2005a), in which Fang Minsheng, a social services activist, lamented the low participation rate and success rate of women in electoral politics (less than twenty percent). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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11. I heard the comments in a morning radio program in Hong Kong during the year 2000, when citizens called in to express their views on current public affairs. For the comment on Cheung, see Ma (1998) on Hong Kong women. 12. See the comic book Saobatou (Lai 2001). The television program in which Ip was interviewed was “James Wong Xianggang Qing Zhi Zongyou Chutou Tian, episodes 10–11” (Program by James Wong on Unveiling Hong Kong Moods, episodes 9–10), broadcast on February 7 and 8, 2002 at 10:35 p.m. 13. As Secretary for Security, she was given the task to “persuade” the public to accept rather tough national securities legislation (known locally as the Article 23 legislation in the Basic Law of Hong Kong). She and the government were accused by an alliance of liberal democrats of not seeking enough public consultation, yielding to political pressure from China, and being high-handed. The attempts triggered a mass demonstration of more than half a million people on July 1, 2003, which took China completely by surprise. Ip resigned soon after although friends have argued that her resignation was not related to the episode. See HKU POP Site (http://hkupop.hku.hk/) and Archive-POP Polls, there is “Ratings of Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee.” The first poll was conducted in July 2002 (five months after the television program), and the ratings still showed a downward trend. 14. Emily Lau, a legislator, asked the universities in Hong Kong to be vigilant in their hiring. She pointed to the low ratio of female faculty (twenty-three percent) especially in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The pro-Vice Chancellor of CUHK, Professor Kenneth Young, denied any sex discrimination but noted that a few decades before, there had been fewer opportunities for women to receive higher education. Hence, there is a lack of female academics today. See Ming Pao (1999a). 15. The report by Weng (2000) quotes Chi-chiu Leung, chair of the Senior Civil Servants Association, who attributes the high numbers of women administrative officers to the particular demands of the British colonial service and the subsequent localization in preparation for 1997. 16. I interviewed a dozen or so women professionals with law degrees. The oldest generation of women lawyers is now in their sixties and mostly retired. The active political figures are in their forties and fifties. 17. Interview with Elsie Leung in 1994. Among the recent chairs of the Hong Kong Bar Association are Gladys Li, Jacqueline Leung, and Audrey Eu. The late Helen Lo was the territory’s first women magistrate, followed by others. See most recent figures for junior counsels at the Hong Kong Bar Association, in http://barlist.hkba.org/hkba/Seniority Junior/JuniorCounsel.htm. As of 2008, the total number of junior counsels is 975, including 712 male and 263 female, i.e., around thirty percent. 18. It was December 18, 2001. I was invited by a graduate of the university to attend the dinner, held at the Hong Kong Convention Centre. 19. “Tai tai” is a term that refers to a wealthy but dependent spouse. 20. The quote is taken from Ellen Li’s autobiography, July 1993, p. 113. 21. Lydia Dunn, Rita Fan, Audrey Eu, Emily Lau, Rosanna Wong, Selina Chow, and Laura Cha are all remarkable examples across a political spectrum who, at one time or another, were appointed to the Executive Council or elected to the Legislative Council. 22. I interviewed her in Hong Kong in November and December 2000. We have had many other opportunities to discuss her life and career. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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23. This quote is taken from Ming Pao (1999b), in response to the news that she had been appointed by the government as the new chair of the EOC. 24. See the statement mounted on EOC’s website (www.eoc.org.hk). 25. Two years later, with public support, the government renewed her contract although they downgraded the position. See Ming Pao (2002c, 2002d). 26. Her father was a cotton commodity merchant from Shanghai. Her maternal grandmother and mother have been managers of the high-end English department store, Lane Crawford. They came from a family of old wealth. Generations of its male members had served on the board of the Tung Wah Hospital. (Interview with her mother and maternal grandmother in 1996.) 27. See a document by the Citizens Party: “Claiming the Hong Kong Advantage: Future Based and Ambition Driven” (Hong Kong: Citizens Party 1999). 28. See Ming Pao (2000a). During a newspaper interview after she announced her intention not to run for a third term. The interview focused on her work on Hong Kong’s environment. 29. See an interview by Yuk-man Wong, a talk show host and political commentator, published in Oriental Daily (2000). 30. See, for example, a report by Civic Exchange under Christine Loh, in partnership with CLSA, entitled “Hong Kong Strategy: Ports, Airports and Bureaucrats, Restructuring Hong Kong and Guangdong” (October 2002) and a follow up report with Simon Ng, “The Air We Breathe,” (CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, c2003). On the environment front, she has been active in publicizing and mobilizing the public against further harbor reclamation. Earlier, Civic Exchange conducted a joint survey report with the China Development Institute in Shenzhen titled “Zhujiang sanjiaozhou jumin huanbao shehui diaocha baogao” 珠江三角洲居民環保社會調查報告 [Attitudes on the environment: A survey on Pearl River Delta residents] (December 1, 2002). 31. See a special bulletin put out by the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce in November 2006 and speeches made by David Eldon, former chair of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, in November 2006, on the Clean Air Charter. See corresponding publications by Christine Loh in Civic Exchange. 32. She was once criticized by a women’s organization for her “lack of empathy”: In a meeting with legislators, women’s advocates were not pleased to hear Christine’s analysis of why uneducated middle-aged women in Hong Kong would face chronic structural unemployment and need government assistance. See Apple Daily (1999). 33. See debates in the local newspapers in that period for in-depth reporting of the process and outcome. 34. See Ming Pao (2000b) on the details of the survey of over 900 university students. 35. After she was appointed a board member of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, she decided to stay at a dormitory one night each semester to experience and to listen to student views. 36. Although the legal profession is sharply divided between barristers and solicitors, the latter outnumbering the former by a ratio of five to one, Margaret Ng, a barrister, has won over two-thirds of the votes in all the elections. In the 1998 election immediately after the political return of Hong Kong to China, she received 1,741 votes in a three-way competition. The other two candidates received 394 and 138 respectively (see Hong Kong Government Announcements, May 25, 1998). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:33:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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37. See Elsie Leung’s defense as published in a government news item on March 11, 1999, http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/199903/11/0311102.htm, accessed on June 23, 2008. 38. Article 45 of the Basic Law in Hong Kong involves the constitutional basis for universal suffrage in the reelection of the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council. The possibilities were ruled out by Beijing through another reinterpretation in 2004. For more on the July 1 march and the issues, see Ng (2004). 39. Audrey Eu, a former chair of the Hong Kong Bar Association, made her political debut when she campaigned and won handsomely against her pro-China opponent in a byelection in 2000. Educated in a missionary school in Hong Kong and then in England, she is known for her elegance, articulation, and quality brain power through her work in the Legislative Council. She also runs a popular radio talk show on public affairs and continues to be ranked by public opinion polls as one of the most popular political figures. She is a core member of the Article 45 Concern Group. 40. See documents and newspaper reporting on the party during its establishment. For details of the party and Margaret Ng’s role in it, see www.margaretng.com, and www. civicparty.hk. 41. She has published a highly entertaining book on her food ventures: Ng (1997). 42. See Choi’s “Women Workers in Hong Kong, 1960s–1990s,” in Siu (2010b), pp. 197–236. 43. The flood of pornography, prostitution, and the short-term keeping of “second wives” in these boomtowns has been quite alarming. 44. See the tabloid by Beijing qingnian bao during the Hong Kong Tools Exhibition. 45. See Ming Pao (2007e) on interviews of Hong Kong men who have chosen to find spouses across the border. On the changing profiles of mainland spouses, see Ho (2007).

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19 Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern The Case of Hong Kong

Introduction Historically, Hong Kong had global self-perception and a regional material presence as a trading node. It claimed to have transformed from a fishing village and colonial outpost in the 19th century to a brand-named Asian city and financial hub in the 20th century. The age of mercantile capitalism allowed the city to share urban modeling strategies (in architecture, political and legal institutions, and cultural styles) with a network of colonial cities as far as the British Empire had stretched. It flaunted a character as an encompassing node for multicultural entrepreneurial talents. The past few decades have seen Hong Kong standing at the convergence of several geo-political trends: postwar decolonization and industrialization, post-industrial global development, and a re-emergent Asia. On the receiving end of massive inflows of capital and migrants from China after World War II, Hong Kong modeled and competed with other “small Asian dragons” to become the world’s assembly line. From the late 1970s on, as manufacturing activities moved across the border to Guangdong, the city transformed itself once again as a gateway for the world to reach a China that was recovering from Maoist closure. In the first decade of the 21st century, the city faces another set of challenges. A new round of self-fashioning has been on the horizon. Making Hong Kong “Asia’s world city” is a banner on Cathay Pacific Airways as well as a development strategy for the post-1997 SAR government. In competition with emerging megacities in the region (Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai and Dubai), it tries to reposition itself in a fluid geo-political environment, the essence of which has been China’s dramatic rise as world factory and Asia’s major consumer. The age of the Asian postmodern is driven by dramatic developments in information technology and global finance, and cultural competition. Massive city reconstruction, institutional and political retuning, class positioning, and identity politics are the hardware and software of Hong Kong’s urban renaissance today. How have city populations in Asia contributed to these transformations in recent decades? As illustrated in chapters in Worlding Cities (Roy and Ong 2011), they have This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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experienced unprecedented volatility in life and work due to intense flows of capital, technology, migrant workers, cultural resources, and fundamental changes in political sovereignty. A rising, predominantly expatriate, middle class in Dubai banks on the city’s future, and that in Mumbai lives for the present, Bollywood style (pp. 160–81). However, a provincialized middle class in Hong Kong seems painfully aware of its having overdrawn past advantages. The emergence of China as a global power provides Hong Kong with opportunities but exacerbates its vulnerabilities. Circulation of its population is key for future survival or aggrandizement. But in the postwar decades, Hong Kong’s diverse migrant population has become grounded, homogenized, and inward looking. With limited political vision, institutional resources, and cultural flexibility, the city and its residents might not have the compass to navigate an intensely competitive China and a connected Asia that are quite beyond their imagination. What are the future “worlding” prospects for a city if its citizens lack the confidence to move forward? The essay is based on fieldwork in Hong Kong and preliminary explorations in Mumbai and Dubai. It combines macroeconomic and census data with ethnographic observations to explore the mobility tracks and vulnerabilities of a generation of Hong Kong residents who have middle-class aspirations. It contrasts the city’s long, multi-ethnic history and regional financial significance with the experiences of postwar baby boomers and their children who feel marginalized by the world’s obsession with China. Turning inward against new immigrants from China, highlighting an essentialized set of core values, and unleashing frustrations in street protests and direct political action, the postwar backbone of Hong Kong’s development seems to have dug in its heels. These observations are counter-intuitive to those of other Asian cities, which are demonstrating unprecedented dynamism in their global reach and aspirations. One might expect that the horizons of Hong Kongers are dwarfed by turbocharged projects in Shanghai and Dubai, or even Dalian, and Vancouver (Roy and Ong 2011, pp. 1–26, 55–76, 182–204), but one must seriously examine Hong Kong’s lack of dynamism when compared to the energies of a planned eco-village in northern China and slum-dwelling African urbanites (Roy and Ong 2011, pp. 98–126; Simone 2004). If the outward-looking capabilities of Hong Kongers need to be uplifted, a  crucial question is whether the government’s laissez-faire model in encouraging freewheeling entrepreneurship is still relevant. Policymakers and businesses have been asking how the city should produce the necessary infrastructure and institutions for a globalized knowledge economy, as well as the cross-cultural professional skills and motivations among its population to navigate across Asia’s megacity environments, such as Mumbai, Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai.1 Nonetheless, just as concerns are voiced over Hong Kong’s increasing marginality in this Asian renaissance, and over its population’s apparent lack of flexible This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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positioning, a closer look shows that Hong Kong professionals at both ends of the human resource chain are enjoying new social and spatial mobility.2 In the banking and finance sectors, a new breed of Hong Kongers have joined global processionals to provide services for Asia’s wealthy in asset management, in Sharia-compliant banking and migrant remittances as market demands have emerged in China, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. Others, for example, are hired by Chinese state firms and private Hong Kong developers to design projects built by South Asian migrant laborers in the Gulf Region. At the lower end of the labor hierarchy, many have looked north. In personal terms, they increasingly settle their families across the border in South China. In work, they form the technical and managerial core for China’s “post-world factory” development. If such border-crossing intensifies, may we perceive the present predicaments of Hong Kongers “precariously stuck in the middle” as anything but an interlude, a moment of being uncharacteristically grounded?

Historical Global and Cultural Bricolage To understand Hong Kong’s apparent decline and possible revival in worlding aspirations, it is important to appreciate the global historical linkages with which the city started. European national powers came to the South China region in search of trade, and in 1715 the British East India Company established its trading house in Guangzhou. The rest of the British Empire joined, creating ample opportunities for cultural and institutional inter-referencing. Various ethnic groups were heavily involved with the China-India-European trade in Guangzhou and later Hong Kong until the early 20th century. Although small in number, Parsee merchants used Hong Kong as a base to connect with Shanghai and other regional cities in the cotton trade, construction, and the capital markets. They were also known as aggressive moneylenders.3 When The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) was set up in 1865 by Scottish traders, three out of the thirteen board members were Parsee merchants (Leiper 1997, Guo 2005). The thriving China Trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, centering on Guangzhou and later tied to Hong Kong, showed that “China as world factory” was by no means a contemporary phenomenon, nor was it limited to European traders. The sophistication and variety of goods made for the European, North American, and Middle Eastern markets were remarkable: silverware, European dining utensils, wallpaper, furniture, and presentations wares with Arabic, European, and American insignia. Such wares marked global economic connectedness, cultural fusion, and the mutual shaping of tastes and styles in everyday life.4 China Trade paintings display similar cultural circulation. In the head office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank today, one finds precious pieces from this genre of painting (some by George Chinnery), This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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which the bank collected over the century. The popular oil paintings by Chinese artists (Lamqua, for example) who were commissioned by Chinese and European patrons in Guangzhou and Hong Kong of the same period showed tremendous mutual borrowing in cultural substance and artistic styles. Where multi-ethnic merchants congregated, distinctive architectural connections continued to shape the urban landscapes of these historical world cities. The merchant quarters of Guangzhou, Mumbai, and Hong Kong, and the native places of overseas Chinese merchants in the Pearl River Delta (e.g., Shiqi, Jiangmen, and Taishan) shared the styles of late 19th- to early 20th-century architecture in London and New York, some with a touch of the Islamic via Southeast Asia.5 On the Chinese political map, Guangzhou was distant and culturally marginal. Hong Kong, as it came into existence as a political entity after the Opium War in 1842, was even more so. However, the regional ecology linking the island to the Pearl River Delta and Guangzhou formed the basis for a concentrated urban experience for traders and political exiles from southern China and every corner of the British Empire.6 The merchant elites were worldly and unorthodox in their practice, but they were best situated to buy cultural orthodoxy in the form of literati degrees and imperial official titles. They also lavished money on community charities and religious rituals, and were active in political mediation. These pursuits allowed them to gain authoritative local positioning. The colonial office in London and the Chinese regimes on the mainland tolerated, compromised, and colluded.7 Historian Elizabeth Sinn argues that Hong Kong not only thrived as “a space of flow,” of goods and services, but also for passenger traffic. Between the 1880s and 1939, over 6 million people passed through Hong Kong from China to other parts of the world. Another 7 million went in the opposite direction. The ability to facilitate through-movement made the growing city a predominant hub for Chinese migrants to circulate in the mid-19th century, an indispensable “in-between place” in the Chinese Diaspora. With the openness of its borders, residents became accustomed to looking beyond conventional barriers and seeing China and the outside world as equally accessible, thus positioning Hong Kong centrally as the hub for circulation.8 Although Shanghai, as Asia’s world city in the Republican era, dominated the region with cosmopolitan glamour, Hong Kong and Shanghai have had deep cross-cultural fertilization in business, politics, and material and cultural consumption. They have been nodes in the crossroads of trading empires, colonial encounters, religious traditions, industrial assembly lines, and now global finance capital, media, and consumption. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, for example, has straddled the two cities for more than a century. Established in Hong Kong in 1865, it served as a banker for the Qing dynasty and then for the Hong Kong government during the entire 20th century. On the eve of the Communist takeover of China, the Shanghai branch of the bank and the bulk of China’s most prominent industrialists relocated their This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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capital and businesses to Hong Kong, fueling the latter’s postwar economic miracle. The Asian headquarters of the bank, designed by Sir Norman Foster in 1986, remains a center of gravity in the business district of Hong Kong. The bank’s parent holding company, HSBC, now headquartered in London, is the largest in Europe.9 In the bank’s renewed move north, its China subsidiary has in recent years rented luxurious offices in Shanghai, owned by a prominent Hong Kong developer.10 The bank’s former headquarters on the Bund stands to mark Shanghai’s skyline, then and now. To prepare for the bank’s reentry into China, it has acquired shares in major Chinese banks and is preparing for listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. In culture and the media, scenes from Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution illuminate another stage of urban experiments and inter-referencing. The film is a tale of two cities in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Hong Kong and Shanghai, competitors and partners linked by historically global networks, shone behind the grim shadows of war and political terror with charged commercial energies. Taken for granted were the circulation of cosmopolitan populations and their extravagant cultural styles—film, opera, fashion, cuisine, markets, and the underworld of crime and political intrigue.11 Such mutual modeling has continued in the non-fictional commercial world today. Shanghai Tang, a Hong Kong–based fashion chain founded by Cambridge-educated Sir David Tang, stands out in the global consumer market. It specializes in re-orientalizing Shanghai chic at the high end, with a colonial touch and a postmodern twist.12

Grounding a Mobile Population The term “Hong Konger” is an elusive concept, because it defines not a static target population but one that has circulated in and out of the territory at different historical junctures.13 Their varying sense of belonging has made Hong Kong a place full of diverse meanings, emotions, and family histories. Furthermore, they may not be physically or administratively bound to Hong Kong. Until a postwar generation of baby boomers passes on, Hong Kong’s cemeteries do not contain many Hong Kongers. Instead, most of the native places of the deceased, carved in stone, are claimed to have been elsewhere.14 Like many port cities of the British Empire, Hong Kong was a meeting place for adventurous sojourners, with cultural styles drawn from Britain’s former colonies and from the mainland. Massive waves of refugees from China came after the war and in 1949 (Siu and Ku eds. 2008, pp. 89–116). From the 1970s onward, when Hong Kong was transforming itself into a regional business and service hub, professionals from Europe, North America, and South and Southeast Asia filled the executive ranks of transnational businesses.15 In the 1990s, with the accelerated growth of China, they were joined in the finance and trading sectors by Chinese returnees. Moreover, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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dependent spouses and children of Hong Kong men at the lower end of the social economic hierarchy constituted the largest group of immigrants. From 1991 to 2001, the number of persons who had not resided in Hong Kong for more than seven years jumped from 2.6 to 4 percent of the whole population (McGiffert and Tang 2008, pp. 192–206). Census figures also show that in 1996, 40 percent of Hong Kong’s population was born outside the territory (Lam and Liu 1998). In the 2006 by-census, over half of the registered marital unions in Hong Kong involved a partner from outside the territory (Census and Statistics Department 2007). Outward movement from the territory was also intense. The number of Hong  Kongers, largely professionals, who applied to migrate to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States was estimated to be around 374,500 in the 1990s. Their motivations were mixed, but anxiety over Hong Kong’s change of sovereignty was a major factor. Many have since returned, but their careers have been truncated and family linkages attenuated (Salaff, Wong, and Greve 2010). The extent to which their sojourning experiences have impacted the Hong Kong society remains unexplored. In the midst of these population movements, who are the immobile? In Hong Kong, political attention since 1997 has been focused on local-born people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. As Hong Kong transformed from a land of immigrants to an urban postindustrial economy and regional financial hub, they have become Hong Kong’s middle class—the technical and administrative backbone of its modern energies. The popular television series Below the Lion Rock (獅子山下) is their cultural icon. It  denotes social mobility through educational aspirations, hard work, family commitments, and political detachment. As I noted in 1996, the identity and cultural orientations of this generation are quite different from those of the global expatriates and new immigrants from the mainland. Most significantly, the baby boomers and their families have nurtured a strong sense of belonging to the territory. They identify with its cultural and professional icons and are proud of their “cando” spirit. Given unique historical junctures, they have experienced unprecedented social mobility in the postwar decades. However, they seem to have the least confidence to reposition themselves in post-1997 Hong Kong. Their children, coined by scholars and the media as the post-1980s generation, have also emerged as a political force today, characterized by their social concerns and confrontational civic actions.16 Sociologist Tai Lok Lui has argued that mobility opportunities (physical, social and mental) are not lacking in Hong King, but the population mix in Hong Kong may not be equipped to take them. Social unrest is increasingly triggered by the young generation’s perceptions of immobility rather than income polarity. Why are the postwar generations of local-born Hong Kongers unable to capture China’s new energies? There is heavy political baggage (Liu and Faure 1996, pp. 177– 96; Hamilton 1999, pp. 100–117; Riemenschnitter and Madsen 2009, pp.  55–76). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Scholars have explored why a great many Hong Kongers find it difficult to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma, and Lui 2008). Coming of age at a time when China was politically and socially remote, these Hong Kong residents had the most to consider when the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong began in the early 1980s. What this generation learned from books and media and experienced first-hand from China has not always been comforting: the land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the hungry refugee populations who poured across the border in the years from 1959 to 1961, the food packages sent to relatives in China from every corner store, and the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and 1967 that spilled violently onto the streets of Hong Kong. Last but not least, there was the Tiananmen incident in 1989. As China accelerated its economic reforms in the 1990s, the media were filled with scandals of corruption, accompanied by negative images of yet another massive wave of immigrants from the mainland. In these decades, every turn of the SinoBritish negotiations leading to the changeover added pressure to family and career dilemmas. Unlike families with established wealth and connections, who could leave the territory at their leisure, and unlike working families who had little to lose, Hong Kong’s middle-class families had a great deal to consider, but their choices were limited. Those who chose to emigrate faced unpromising career prospects. Those who decided to stay wondered if they could dance to their own tunes after the changeover (Faure 2003). They sought assurances for the rule of law, freedoms, and professionalism they had taken for granted. In their eyes, these qualities are particularly lacking in China, thus discouraging the proactive pursuit of opportunities ever since the economic border between Hong King and the mainland has become blurred.17 Granted that many refugee families from China and their locally born children rose to middle-class circumstances in a relatively short time, their worldly engagement was superficial. Subsidized education through a diverse range of schools produced a small meritocratic elite. For the rest, functional English and vocational training turned them into a technically efficient workforce.18 Accelerated globalization has not generated the flexible worldly energies that would have turbocharged a majority of these Hong Kongers toward the 21st century. For the professional elite, positioning for the new millennium has not been difficult. This top tier has been able to compete with the global talents (China’s returnees included) who dominate the finance and trading sectors at the high end of the economic hierarchy. There is a great demand for their professional expertise in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai. Not only are corporate headquarters moving to these cities to capture the growing strengths of sovereign wealth but individual family decisions are also increasingly based on concerns beyond employment—environmental health and school choices among them.19 This has led businesses to pressure the Hong Kong SAR government to be more aggressive and holistic in formulating population This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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policies and recruiting talents so that business opportunities can be effectively captured (Eldon 2006, Kwoh 2006). Below the top tier, prospects are less certain. When China was poor and isolated, these Hong Kongers found a strategy to thrive. But their functional links to trade and the world assembly line have given them the false impression that they are global and modern. Decades of prosperity for a Hong Kong–born generation have also fueled a “localized” culture—expressed through its movies, language, media, and Canto-pop music. Their knowledge of China is thin. They relate to the world outside through a limited range of material symbols rather than through deep cultural engagement. With such historical baggage, the intensifying financial flows and geopolitical changes in Asia have special meanings for these Hong Kongers and the returnees, localized in orientation and yet unsettled. An additional worry for them is the prospects for their children. Competition to get into the territory’s international schools is tough and expensive. Even for those who were successful in enrolling in the territory’s top local schools, parents would strategize to send them abroad at an increasingly young age. Low English standards in the local schools, they claim, are the major problems. If the children are stuck in the local education system, their mobility opportunities in a global society are circumscribed. The fate of being “grounded” would thus extend to the next generation of Hong Kongers.

That “Sinking” Feeling in Post-1997 Hong Kong The term “sinking middle class” emerged in the early 2000s in sociological works on Hong Kong (Central Policy Unit 2002, Lui and Wong 2003). The works of the Japanese writers Miura Atsushi (2005) on downward mobility and Ohmae Kenichi (2006) on the formation of an M-structure society in Japan have been widely circulated and publicly debated in Hong Kong.20 Has the downward mobility of the middle class widened the gap between the wealthy and the poor? Why, in the public mind, has the backbone of Hong Kong’s success become the city’s urgent problem? In the wake of the July 2003 demonstrations, when half a million took to the streets to protest against government policies, President Hu Jintao was among those who immediately urged the Hong Kong government to pay particular attention to the middle class and pledged timely support. There are structural reasons beyond Hong Kong’s control, such as the volatile forces of neoliberal globalization and China’s rapid liberalization. It might have also involved a mindset, an attitude, and unexpected political pressure. Trouble started in the 1980s when industrial jobs moved across the border. By the 1990s, technical support and white-collar jobs were shifting north as well.21 In the last ten years, a painful economic restructuring has been complicated by a culture shock caused This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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by the blurring of the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. Going north to engage with China is a necessary move, but few Hong Kongers have the cultural compass to navigate with a map that has changed beyond their imagination. The Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the collapse of the property market scored a direct hit on middle-class families. It is estimated that, in 2002, over 150,000 families fell into the category of those having negative assets. The unemployment rate soared from a mere 2 percent in the pre-1997 decade to 8 percent that year. Even the once secure and protected civil service shed jobs. Bankruptcies rose, from 780 recorded cases in 1996 to a high of 26,922 cases (Davis and Siu 2007, p. 77). Avian flu and SARS further crippled the city. For almost six months in 2003, when SARS-related deaths mounted in the public hospitals, the once bustling city became ghostly. Real-estate values, a major source of middle-class status and security, dived further. Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s proudly profitable carrier, was counting its days toward closure. Although the government tried to be as transparent as possible in dealing with the crisis, panic and sadness were mixed with a declining confidence in the ability of the government to function in the public’s interest. Amid debates about the balance between privacy and the public’s right to know, the media respectfully reported a steady flow of funerals of medical professionals who had fallen in the line of duty. It was symbolic of a city shaken to the core (Davis and Siu 2007, pp. 75–102; Loh 2004). The economy rebounded by 2006, but the fortunes and confidence of most Hong  Kong families have been further polarized (Figure 19.1). The government

Figure 19.1 Hong Kong white-collar workers during lunchtime (photo taken in 2008) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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by-census of 2006 showed that households with monthly incomes between HK$10,000 and HK$40,000 had dropped from 61 percent ten years ago to 55 percent in 2006. Those with monthly incomes below HK$10,000 had risen from 23.9 percent to 27.9 percent. Those at the top, with monthly incomes above HK$40,000, had risen from 15 percent to 17 percent. This trend continued in the subsequent years, and the local media saw this as a structural problem in the contemporary global age. In a knowledge-based economy, those without the necessary education or professional skills face declining incomes and structural unemployment (especially after reaching middle age) and falling out of the middle-class ranks. Those riding with the global economy at the high end prosper because there is fierce competition for their talents, but the global financial tsunami in 2008 reversed their fortunes as well.22 In sum, for families with middle-range incomes and education in Hong Kong, the world has shifted under their feet.23 As the world speeds past them at the beginning of the new millennium, there is sadness and resignation.24 Business leaders have also wondered if these Hong Kongers have lost their “global outlook” and “can-do” spirit.25

Renegotiating Identities When besieged by uncertainties, some people hold onto the past. In the culturalhistorical realm, it had begun before 1997. Scholars have described an entire industry that produces the “nostalgia of disappearance.” Moreover, for a younger generation of the locally born, the search for cultural roots rests more in a familiar city space than in a remote rural “native place” on the mainland. Debates about core values, collective memories, and historical preservation efforts highlight the need by a generation to rethink its positioning when established boundaries can no longer be taken for granted.26 Fights over which public sites to preserve have exploded into a social movement—baoyuyundong—in the streets. Highly politicized events, such as protesting against the demolition of the Star Ferry, the Queen’s Pier, and the wedding card street, were led by the Local Action Group. They captured a lot of media attention.27 A more subtle movement to emphasize the social dimension of “locality” has also sprung up. Community literature highlights personal narratives linked to meaningful city spaces: Temple Street, Shanghai Street, Wing Lee Street, open wet markets, dai  pai dong, herbal medicine shops, pawnshops, public housing estates, and other landmarks that have been an intimate part of a generation’s coming of age and extraordinary social mobility in the postwar decades. This might explain why experiences of locality associated with a narrow time frame are invested with such intense emotions. A fixation that conflicts with historical preservation has also arisen in business and policy communities. Writer Lung Ying-tai (Lung et al. 2004) terms it “the value of Central District” (Zhonghuan jiazhi). Anthony Cheung, an academic in the policy This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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circle, aptly highlights it as a quest by the city’s new administrators for positive identity. “Its impulse is to ‘create a new Hong Kong’ and build a Hong Kong brand,” he says, “a project akin to nation-building in other post-colonial societies” (Cheung 2007). In  the name of making Hong Kong into a leading world city in China and Asia, many of the accumulated details of the lives of generations are lost in policy blueprints. Old neighborhoods together with their colonial pasts will be erased, replaced by essentialized “Chinese” cultural icons or signature landmarks on the grandest scales. They are planned for the city to signify super (post-)modernity and global engagement. Skeptics readily point to the government’s agenda for the West Kowloon Cultural District as a prime example of borrowed hardware, without human substance or cultural sensitivity.28 Critics claim that there are plenty of grand projects in China’s cities. With bare concrete and marble wasting away in the sun and rain, these public spaces have no character or vibrancy (ren qi), only the shallow vanity of local officials. A more politically oriented group of the locally born Hong Kongers focuses its preservation energies on Hong Kong’s inherited institutions—the rule of law, clean and efficient government, civic values, and increasingly, universal suffrage and democratic representation. Since 1997, the pan-democrats, composed of several young political parties, have made their voices heard both in the Legislative Council and on the streets. On July 1, 2003, half a million spilled onto the streets to protest against what they considered to be a draconian national security bill proposed by the government (Figure 19.2). Since then, each year on July 1, and on June 4, when candlelight vigils are staged to remember the victims of the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, tens of thousands have gathered in Victoria Park, the symbolic home for prodemocracy movements in Hong Kong (Riemenschnitter and Madsen 2009, pp. 55–76). A third group of Hong Kongers comes “from the left field.” Small businesses, former students, employees, and cadres of the Chinese establishment in pre-1997 Hong Kong have never fitted comfortably into mainstream Hong Kong society. During the riots of 1967, when the violence of the Cultural Revolution spilled over the border, leftist activists fought the police and took a strong political stance against the government. If they were not true believers in Chinese socialism, they were at least ardent patriots. Over the years, they have been loyal supporters of China’s policies in Hong Kong. They continue to subscribe to China’s master narrative to define Hong Kong’s identity and culture. In their view, Hong Kong is a colonial product, a cultural hybrid, a symbol of national humiliation; its reunification with the Motherland is to be lauded; those who demand democracy and seek world connections are subversives and traitors. Branded by pro-democracy Hong Kongers as “leftists” who have not moved with the times, they have drawn a hard line against those they consider unpatriotic. The fixated images, the crude accusations, and the tactics they have used to demonize the cosmopolitan mainstream have proven to be the government’s liability. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Moreover, as China speeds up its embrace of the global market and big businesses, the cultural and political positions of these people have become awkward. At times, the pro-business moves of the SAR government go against their grassroots sentiments. The loss of credibility of the pro-government labor union in the 2007 metal-bar benders strike is a case in point. However, these political groups have accumulated tremendous organizational capacities among working families, new immigrants from China, and mass organizations.29 Since 1997, they and the political party that represents their interests (the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong) have moved into mainstream Hong Kong politics. These are numerous examples that constitute an impasse among broad categories of “Hong Kongers.” Their lives and career trajectories are often intertwined, but hard lines are repeatedly drawn. Since 1997, charged emotions have generated a vicious cycle of polarization and paralysis, preventing any bold rethinking of Hong Kong’s

Figure 19.2 Hong Kong’s middle class marches for democratic reforms (photo taken in 2010) This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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positioning and of ways to move forward (Cheung 2007, Lui 2007c). Each group’s historical baggage weighs heavily on how it deploys its cultural capital to define who the Hong Konger is, what his or her entitlements are, and what “collective memory” and “public interest” should be. The negotiation for cultural and social identity within the political formula of “One Country, Two Systems” is far from a simplistic reading of pro-democracy leanings pitched against pro-Beijing, pro-government loyalties. A question poignantly asked in the past ten years of the HKSAR is how to balance the priorities and anxieties of “one country” with the complicated histories and emotions attached to “two systems.” The emergence of China as a global economic magnet combined with its heightened nationalistic mindset has sharpened the cultural dilemma of many Hong Kongers (Figure 19.3). Feeling marginalized and grounded, they may not be able to reactivate the inter-referencing processes that have made Hong Kong relevant to China, Asia, and the world for over a century.30

Figure 19.3 The Bank of China building in Hong Kong, a symbol of China’s rising power in the global economy (photo taken in 2010)

The New Silk Road: Worlding Activities at the High End Hong Kong’s tense relationship with its national space is probably echoed in Mumbai and Dubai. As hubs for the intense flow of capital, people, goods, and cultural This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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orientations, these cities are at once facilitators, competitors, and challengers to one another and to their respective national agendas. Despite the volatilities, the allure of the new financial landscape that links them is irresistible. These cities are in the limelight for new brand-naming. Another round of outward-looking activities for the cities’ residents is emerging. This section focuses on the energies of professional Hong Kongers who have seized the moment to charge ahead. Businesses in Hong Kong have blazed the trail. HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, representing the power of Hong Kong’s “Central District,” and of professionals at the high end of the social hierarchy, have long sunk roots in East Asia, India, and the Gulf region.31 In September 2004, Cheung Kong Holdings, the flagship of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, joined forces with a bank in Dubai to set up a fund to facilitate investment in Asian real-estate properties (Swire 2004). In November 2005, David Eldon, then chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, led a group of members of the chamber to Dubai and Tehran to promote mutually beneficial business opportunities.32 The China–Middle East Economic Summit organized by the Financial Times in January 2007 highlighted “The New Silk Road.” There would be potholes, warned Eldon, chairman of the Dubai International Finance Authority, as institutions designed to monitor and regulate the flow of capital, and the cultural sensitivities needed for business decisions have yet to be developed and refined. Moreover, professionals with multicultural experiences linking the two regions are lacking.33 A crucial ingredient of the New Silk Road is Islam, which connects the Middle East to Southeast Asia. In a study by Richard Pyvis, a director of CLSA BV, the Hong Kong–based global banker, points to the need to better understand the development of Islamic finance for the Asian region. He and his team explore Islamic attitudes to capital markets and how globalization is fundamental to Islam and may provide a new code for sustainable and equitable economic practices beyond neoliberal ordering frameworks. They set the direction for the business community to move from a Eurocentric focus to Islamic opportunities in a broadly defined Asia (Pyvis and Braun 2009). The Hong Kong SAR government has followed business interests to forge this route. Frederick Ma, then Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, led a delegation of business and policymakers to the China–Middle East Summit held in Dubai in January 2007. In his speech to that conference and subsequent ones, he stressed the core institutional strengths of Hong Kong: the rule of law, clean government, freedom of information, the stable currency, the sophisticated banking infrastructure, and mature capital markets and professional practices. He and his colleagues in the financial services sector have repeatedly articulated the government’s enthusiasm to provide the necessary administrative environment for Hong Kong to traverse the New Silk Road.34 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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For eight days in January 2008, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong led a prominent delegation of business leaders and government officials to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to promote Hong Kong’s capacity to develop Islamic banking.35 He was, as expected, accompanied by David Eldon, a former chairman of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (Asia), David Li, chairman of the Bank of East Asia, and Laura Cha, a former vice-chair of China’s securities commission. The Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation, a subsidiary of the Monetary Authority, whose function is to stabilize the mortgage debt market in Hong Kong, also actively devises ways to reduce legal and other structural barriers to Islamic debt financing with Malaysia.36 Enthusiasm is two-way traffic. The Gulf Research Center in Dubai, boasting multinational professionals and researchers, conducts a Gulf-Asia Research Program with the explicit goal of stressing the need to reinvigorate the two regions’ mutual economic reliance beyond oil and energy, and to overcome the barrier of “information asymmetry.”37 The enthusiasm for connectivity is probably justified. Trade statistics show that trade between Saudi Arabia and China has reached a new height. In 2006, bilateral trade reached US$20 billion, a jump of 25.3 percent from the previous year, and that with UAE rose 32 percent to $14.2 billion (Dueck 2007; Wen Wei Po 2007b, 2007c). In Dubai, the governor of the Dubai International Finance Center predicted that the Middle East would invest US$200 billion in Asia (Wen Wei Po 2007a). The new Dragon Mart—the largest trading hub in the UAE—comprises four thousand shops in a dragon-shaped mall and displays a large range of Chinese-manufactured goods for wholesale buyers, and restaurants and cultural heritage sites for tourists. China Southern, a major airline listed on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges, operates daily flights from Beijing and Guangzhou to cities in the Middle East and Lagos. Real estate advertisements showcasing Dubai’s super, postmodern skyline are introduced to eager Chinese buyers. Mega-state construction companies, highly subsidized by China’s wealthy state funds, outbid most competitors from Europe and North America for infrastructural projects in the Gulf. Sovereign funds in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia are buying major stakes in Asian banks. In May, Dubai International Capital announced that its Global Strategic Equities Fund had bought a large percentage of HSBC, following in the footsteps of Maan al-Sanea (Saudi Arabia), who bought 3.1 percent of the bank’s shares (Treanor 2007; Wen Wei Po 2007d). The financial tsunami of 2008 and the debt problems of Dubai World might have dampened enthusiasm somewhat, and real estate speculators from Wenzhou, China have suffered heavy losses. However, the crisis has caused expatriates from Europe and North America to retreat from the region. The economic downturn has made China’s presence there more prominent. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Following China’s global engagement, the Hong Kong government and business community have taken the lead in shaping possibilities for the territory’s professional institutions and talents. The signing of a memorandum of understanding between Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission and the Dubai Financial Services Authority is a most recent example to signify Hong Kong’s positioning—to serve as a gateway for Asian business interests into China and to service China’s capital formation needs in its global march.38 The Hang Seng Bank, the second largest in Hong  Kong and a subsidiary of HSBC, has recently established several funds for Islamic bonds that are Sharia compliant.39 According to a report by Reuters in June 2008, the Airport Authority in Hong Kong planned to follow with its own Islamic bond for institutional and individual investors (Reuters 2008). Professional training is also on the agenda. Laura Cha, Chair of the University Grants Committee, which advises the government on the funding of Hong Kong’s eight universities, has negotiated a US$2 billion endowment for the support of academic research.40 She has set up a special committee to consider revising the rule that government funding cannot be used outside of the territory. She believes that with Hong Kong’s economy “crossing borders” in multiple ways, research activities also need to be cross-regional. This is especially applicable to Hong Kong’s relationship with the dynamic Pearl River Delta. Along a similar line of thinking, when the ruler of Saudi Arabia established the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for the training of top-level academics and professionals, the publicly funded Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was among those invited to bid for hundreds of millions of funds to set up research centers in energy, environmental studies, engineering, and health delivery. Exchanges among the top administrators of the two institutions correspondingly increased.41 The New Silk Road is hot in Hong Kong, but has institutional building to create opportunities inspired Hong Kong professionals to reach beyond the territory? How would the new positioning of Hong Kong trigger the next round of self-fashioning among its residents, compared to the efforts of their counterparts in Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai? Would these energies remap an increasingly connected “Asia?” A few personal cases illustrate the global paths of a different kind of professional. The volatility of finance capital and trade in these emerging markets means that jobs attached to them no longer nurture long-term career commitments and mobility up the corporate ladder. As members of the postwar baby-boom generation in Hong Kong with middle-class means, both John and Michael went abroad for college and professional degrees. John returned to Hong Kong and spent almost an entire engineering career working for several local developers. Before early retirement, he managed the building of a container port. In his mid-fifties, he was sought out by a headhunter who persuaded him to take a fourteen-month contract in Dubai to build a port in This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the city’s free trade zone. Managing a multicultural team of Europeans, Emirates, Chinese, and South Asians, with distinct hierarchies based on class, gender, and ethnicity was an eye-opening experience. He took the opportunity to travel through the Gulf region, and returned to Hong Kong with fresh perspectives on new career maps and the necessary skills to navigate through them. He found the two years of sojourn personally lonely and difficult, because he was away from family and friends and had few opportunities to interact with local society. However, the experience broadened his horizons and added confidence. When the next opportunity arises, he might get involved again. John has managed to step out of a comfortable, inward-looking Hong Kong experience that has “grounded” many of his peers and colleagues. Michael’s career trajectory seems to have headed a different direction although he finds himself navigating along the New Silk Road as John has done. After college and professional training in architecture and structural engineering in Canada, he worked his way up a CDME career (Consulting, Design, Management, Engineering) with major firms in North America. His portfolio includes projects with world-class architects—Zeidler on the Eaton Centre and Ontario Place, and Barrett on Calgary International Airport. In the mid-1990s, however, he made a drastic career choice to move back to Hong Kong and then to Suzhou and Shanghai. Again, he worked with big names—I. M. Pei on the Shanghai Trade Center, and K. M. Ma on the Shanghai TinAn Tower. For the past few years, he has been vice president and design director for a state-owned corporation, China Construction Design International Ltd., based in Shanghai. His work, however, has remarkable global elements. The company bids for projects not only in China but in the Middle East. He manages design teams with colleagues from Europe and Hong Kong, backed up by junior engineers and construction workers from China. Heavily subsidized by the Chinese government, the company often outbids global competitors for project in Dubai and other parts of the Gulf Region. Such experiences make him increasingly attractive to engineering corporations. Having an offer from a globally positioned engineering firm to head a division in Shenzhen, he finds himself, for the first time in a thirty-two-year career, close to “home.” However, his homecoming was short lived. The financial crisis of 2008 compelled him to move back to Shanghai after a year, to head his own consultancy. Joining them is a generation of “Hong Kong returnees,” those whose parents were emigrants to North America and Australia during the decade before 1997 and who returned to Hong Kong after college to work in the financial services sector (Siu and Ku 2008, pp. 201–22). Another group of bilingual, bicultural professionals comes from China. Labeled “returnees” as well, many have spent a number of years studying and working in North America and Europe. Increasingly, they fill the professional and executive ranks of global financial institutions, legal consultancies, and media companies that are headquartered in Hong Kong but actively moving their businesses into China. As a result of the government’s plans to expand the tertiary This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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education sector by 25 percent in 2012, the returnees are filling the academic ranks in all disciplines.

The Strategic March to the North Today, the towering presence of Shanghai cannot be ignored by businesses in Hong Kong. The two cities have been partners and competitors for over a century. The only time that Shanghai’s worldly dominance faded into the background was during three decades of Maoist closure. Apart from being the country’s leading manufacturing and service metropolis, Shanghai’s dramatic reentry into world trade and finance in the post-reform era dwarfs the record of any other city in Asia. Since 2005, the Port of Shanghai has become the world’s busiest by cargo tonnage. In the short two decades since its reestablishment in 1990, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has listed some of the world’s largest companies by market valuation, such as PetroChina, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China, and HSBC waiting in the wings. Despite surveys and league tables placing Shanghai far behind Hong Kong and Singapore in business competitiveness and attractiveness, the State Council in China announced in the spring of 2009 its plans for Shanghai to become the country’s leading finance center by 2020. The news sent fresh jitters to the financial and policy communities in Hong Kong. Furthermore, since the financial tsunami, China has accelerated its plans to globalize its currency in world trade. The difference in worlding capabilities of Shanghai’s capital market compared to those of Hong Kong has been heightened. China’s ability to draw FDI continues to top the world, and most of it is channeled through the capital markets in Shanghai. In recent years, many of China’s most successful stateowned enterprises listed in Hong Kong (the red chips) have returned to be listed in Shanghai. The Hong Kong banking system held renminbi deposits of 84.7 billion in May 2010, a mere trickle in the estimated 65 trillion circulated in the Chinese capital markets. Scholars and practitioners have wondered if Hong Kong’s lead as the region’s financial center will soon disappear because the city lacks the backing of a nation’s domestic economy or the force of political will (Holland 2010, Yam 2010). Moreover, the resurrected Bund, the skyscrapers in Pudong, the new airport and high-speed rail, and lately the Shanghai Expo all point to the city’s spectacular worlding energies in fast-forward mode. The talk of Hong Kong’s rapid decline against the rise of Shanghai has become daily news in the media. Shanghai’s rise makes it a magnet for the most energetic and adventurous. Again, Hong Kong has lagged behind Shanghai and other major Chinese cities that flaunt their own worlding ambitions. Between 1991 and 2001, Hong Kong’s growth in population was 16.9 percent, close to that for cities in advanced industrial (or postindustrial) countries, such as New York (9.4 percent) and London (7.5 percent). This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In Beijing, the rate of increase for the same period was 25.4 percent. Shanghai had an increase of 23 percent, Guangzhou 57 percent, and Shenzhen, 320.3 percent. In view of the fact that all of these cities have low birth rates, based on personal preference or policy, the extraordinary population growth in Chinese cities was due largely to in-migration (Siu and Ku 2008, p. 95). Shanghai’s worlding capabilities are boosted by the wealthy and adventurous from Hong Kong. Vincent Lo, founder of the Shui On Group in Hong Kong, enriched Shanghai’s cityscape with the luxuries of Xintiandi in 2001. The US$150  million project converted a historical neighborhood with shicumen architecture of the early 20th century into trendy boutiques, galleries, haute cuisine, bars, cafés, and clubs. Xintiandi has become the entertainment icon for Shanghai’s global rich and expatriate consumers.42 Sun Hung Kai Properties, the second-largest developer in Hong Kong, specializes in building Shanghai’s luxury hotels, malls, and commercial landmarks. Its International Finance Center in Pudong, opened in 2009, houses the new headquarters of HSBC, as well as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the conference center of the Harvard Business School. The Hong Kong–based Esquel Group, global producer of the world’s leading brands in cotton apparel, and with family ties to some of the wealthiest textile manufacturers in Republican Shanghai, has established its China headquarters in Shanghai. This is a simultaneous act of going global and returning home (Yang and Feng 2007). While policy attention is conspicuously focused on the global tracks of upper- and middle-class professionals, it is useful to explore how the dramatic growth of China’s economy provides unexpected mobility at all levels of Hong Kong’s labor hierarchy. Over the years, the Hong Kong government has negotiated with Beijing to provide Hong Kong–based businesses and professionals an advantage in the maturing China market. CEPA (the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), signed between Hong Kong and China in June 2003, includes free trade arrangements for a wide range of Hong Kong products. It also encourages trade in services by mutual recognition of professional qualifications and the reduction of regulatory barriers. Although the numbers using the CEPA arrangements have not been overwhelming from the Hong Kong side, CEPA has in fact benefited Chinese corporations and professionals in their global march. Hong Kong has become a valuable springboard.43 More significant is the fact that this mobility is not limited to the globally minded businesses and their supporting professionals. For Hong Kongers at the lower end of the labor hierarchy, border crossing means tapping into China’s position as world factory. The foreign-owned factories and the influx of massive numbers of migrant workers to southern China are well documented (Lee 1998, Pun 2005). In the 1980s and 1990s, managers, technicians, and transport and sales personnel have followed the factories in their strategic march north. The “One Country, Two Systems” formula has enabled dramatic increase in cross-border flows of capital, goods, This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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people, and images. In 2007, the government revised the number of Hong Kongers residing in China upwards, from 290,000 in 2005 to 460,000. Nearly half of this group was between thirty and forty-nine years of age. Over 40 percent of them had attained post-secondary education, 80 percent engaged in professional and managerial positions.44 While the business and policy communities have focused on the infrastructural links between Hong Kong and the South China region, less attention is paid to the ways in which such developments have changed the social and cultural landscape. Cross-border marriages between Hong Kongers and Mainlanders have deeply affected family strategies and labor mobility. Historically, working men in Hong Kong looked across the border for affordable spouses. An immigration scheme worked out between Hong Kong and China since the 1950s permits an average of 150 persons per day to legally enter the territory, mostly on the basis of family reunion. A large number of adult Chinese men from rural Guangdong and Fujian entered Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when post-Mao China suddenly relaxed its border controls. The labor participation rates for these laborers were high, as many were employed as construction and transport workers in Hong Kong’s expanding infrastructure projects. They returned to their native villages to marry. After years of waiting, they were able, in the 1990s, to bring their families to Hong Kong as permanent residents. Census data from Hong Kong shows that, in the decade from 1990 to 2000, the number of new arrivals (those who have settled in Hong Kong for less than seven years) increased from 2.6 to 4 percent of Hong Kong’s population. Local-born Hong Kongers have reacted negatively to the influx, labeling them “new immigrants” and seeing them as poor, uneducated, rural, and a societal burden. However, changes in the cross-border social landscape have accelerated since 1997. The “new immigrants” are no longer the rural, dependent spouses and children of older, structurally unemployed Hong Kong men. Instead, they are younger, more educated, and more likely to have migrated to South China from other cities and provinces to work in factories and services. Frontline social workers and community agencies find them culturally attuned to life in Hong Kong and socially resourceful (see chapter 15 of this volume). The government by-census in 2006 shows a trend of intensified cross-border marriages. That year, 28,000 Hong Kong men married women from the mainland, an increase of 14 percent from 1996. The by-census also shows that Hong Kong women have joined their male counterparts to look for cross-border spouses. Numbering 6,500 in 2006, such marriages jumped by a factor of 2.5 compared with those in 1996 (Census and Statistics Department 2007, Ming Pao 2007c). The marriages are not without difficulties, as societal discriminations are still deeply felt, and the government wavered in the provision of services for these new arrivals. The local media often play up the sensational aspects of family trauma and sadness.45 This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In 2005, an interdisciplinary team of academics strongly recommended that the government incorporate the concept of “circulation” into its population policies.46 The best use of this human resource at the lower end of the labor hierarchy is to create maximum flexibility for the young families to cross the border at different stages of their life trajectories. If social services for Hong Kong residents are made more portable, the study argues, one might expect this generation of new immigrants to become the technical and service backbone of an interconnected metropolitan region that comprises Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. The analytical point to stress is that, if China’s economy continues to surge, engagement with its global march will indirectly allow Hong Kongers at the lower end of the labor hierarchy to be translocal in employment and cultural orientation. Comprising newer immigrants from China and mostly working class, this group has fewer cultural or political barriers to engage China than the city’s entrenched middle-class residents.

The Historical Global and the Asian Postmodern The 21st century, as the authors of this volume argue, will be a century of Asian urbanization. There is intense inter-referencing among Asia’s urban nodes—economic linkages, cultural borrowings, competitions, and collaborations. Governments, elite actors, circulating professionals, and migratory laborers are cultivating new positions in their own resourceful ways. Hong Kong, like its counterparts in Asia, is trying to reinvent itself as a world city in this volatile process. This chapter has explored the historical baggage that its major stakeholders carry to engage with this emerging inter-Asia environment. The chapter has tried to treat Hong Kongers as a moving analytical target. It has focused on the multi-ethnic groups that came to Hong Kong in the last century in search of entrepreneurial opportunities. Their aspirations, energies, and cultural practices gave Hong Kong its historically global character. These early “Hong Kongers,” as citizens of the colonial city and Chinese subjects, were ungrounded in the territory. However, several generations of Hong Kong residents have matured in the postwar decades. For the first time, there is a real sense of place-based identity among the locally born. They have excelled in Hong Kong’s education system and have taken for granted unprecedented upward social mobility. They claimed entitlements from the colonial government and have continued such claims after Hong Kong’s sovereignty reverted to China in 1997. In the ensuing economic downturn, a sinking and shrinking middle class have dug their heels in and have drawn hard lines against new immigrants from their entrenched “citizenship” positions in the territory. Has such provincializing continued in the present decade? This essay has argued that, with the forging of “the New Silk Road,” and strategic participation in an This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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emerging Chinese market, some of the territory’s residents have taken the initiative to seek global opportunities. Joined by professional and entrepreneurial immigrants from China and abroad, they have overcome a fortress mentality and are changing Hong Kong’s work structure and cultural styles. If their enhanced footprints contribute to the inter-referencing processes across the dynamic cities in the region, they will become a substantial part of Asia’s urban renaissance. *This is a slightly revised version of the original published in Worlding Cities, edited by Anaya Roy and Aihwa Ong (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

I thank Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy for raising some of these important issues. See policy-relevant treatment in Siu and Ku (2008). On the concept of flexible positioning and citizenship among global professionals, see Ong and Nonini (1999) and Ong (2006). According to local sayings, “big earlobes” were given to these ethnically distinguished moneylenders because they wore large earrings. The term is generally used today for usury. On items produced in Guangzhou and Fujian for the China Trade, see Ganse (2008) and Crossman (1973). See also the catalog of the exhibition jointly mounted by the Guangzhou Museum and the Victoria Albert Museum, in Guangzhou (Wilson and Liu 2003). The Peabody Museum at Salem, Massachusetts, displays one of the world’s best collections of such wares. In the 1990s, I visited the ancestral home of a Chinese merchant in Chaozhou, who made his fortune in the trading of Chinese herbs in Thailand and North America. The Chen family house, with its pretentiously Chinese literati-style chambers and halls, was connected by numerous courtyards and alcoves. Their walls were lined with ceramic tiles bearing elaborate Arabic/Islamic motifs and colors (field trip in 1992 with Dr. Choi Chi-cheung in Chenghai of Chaozhou). On how the China trade affected the cultural styles of merchant families in Guangzhou, see Ching and Liu (2004). For example, the Tung Wah Hospital, established in the colonial legal framework in the 1860s under the British Hospital Ordinance, was a charity, and its Chinese merchant elites who served as board members anchored their authoritative presence upon a Man  Mo Temple. The charity dominated the governance of Hong Kong for almost a century and has continued to function as a major charity today (Sinn 1989). On state-merchant relationships in late imperial China, see “The Grounding of Cosmopolitans,” chapter 10 of this volume. On similar state-society relationships in the regional city of Hankow in the 18th and 19th centuries, see Rowe (1985). This paragraph is taken from Sinn’s “Lesson in Openness” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 13–43. The concept “space of flow” originally came from Manuel Castells. For recent theoretical works concerned with the reconfiguration of urban space in the modern and postmodern eras, see Harvey (1990), Sassen (2000), Hannerz (1996), pp. 127–39, and Holston and Appadurai in Holston (1999), pp. 1–18. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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9. See a special issue of Forbes Magazine (2008). 10. The developer is Sun Hung Kai Properties, the second-largest developer in Hong Kong and the owner of high-end business real estate such as the IFC in Hong Kong and Shanghai. 11. See also Leo Lee (1999) on Shanghai modern. The life of talented writer Eileen Chang and her novels (Love in a Fallen City; Lust, Caution) are illustrative of the intimate worlds between Hong Kong and Shanghai. 12. Two recent studies substantiate our appreciation of the region’s historical cosmopolitanism, centering on the close ties between Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Age of Openness by Frank Dikötter (2008) shows that Republican China was far from being a period of decay and political implosion. Instead, his chapters stress “open governance, open minds, open borders, and open markets.” The country’s engagement with the world was multifaceted and dynamic, and its urban social landscape brashly worldly. Leo Ou-fan Lee, in City between Worlds (2008), highlights Hong Kong’s past and present, “perched on the fault line between China and the West,” and how generations of residents—expatriates, locals, and itinerants—continue to churn a cultural kaleidoscope that exuberates intense energies, glamour, and sad memories. It is bricolage in every sense of the word, allowing Lee, a converted Hong Konger, to play local flâneur. These cities and their residents might not always be comfortable with the imposition of hard political borders or rhetoric. Economically useful to their national spaces but culturally ambiguous and politically suspect, their worlding capabilities problematize governmentality and citizenship. 13. The following sections are adapted from Siu’s “Hong Kong Mobile” in McGiffert and Tang (2008), pp. 192–206. I have used a history of “border” crossing to highlight three categories of “Hong Kongers” whose lives and identities are linked but whose sense of citizenship is worlds apart. In the ten years since the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China, pro-democracy middle-class professionals, patriotic working families, and new immigrants have negotiated their respective places along multiple political fronts. 14. This observation was related to me by Hong Kong historian Dr. Elizabeth Sinn. 15. It is interesting to note a similar influx of migrants to Mumbai from the rest of India in history and in recent years (Appadurai 2000). In Dubai, over 80 percent of the residents are expatriates. Although most of the migrant workers come from the GCC region, there is an elite European and Australian community. The middle ranks are filled by Indians and Chinese entrepreneurs. At the lower end of the labor hierarchy, there are massive numbers of migrant workers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and Islamic North Africa (see Janardhan 2007a, 2007b). The financial crisis in 2008 might have diminished the number of foreign workers at the top and bottom ends, but the groups in the middle (especially Chinese entrepreneurs and service workers) have maintained their presence. During my visit to Dubai in March 2007, I noticed that these workers filled the construction sites in groups. At the end of the day, buses transported them back to the neighboring emirate of Sharjah (as Dubai City is too expensive for residence). On the eastern bank of the Dubai Creek, where the gold and spice markets stand, multi-ethnic traders congregate in cheaper guest houses. 16. Sociologist Lui Tai Lok (2007a) has written a great deal on four generations of Hong Kongers. 17. On some Hong Kong businessmen compiling a journal to chronicle the problems of operating in China, see Ming Pao (2010). 18. See Luk’s “Education Reforms and Social Mobility” in Siu and Ku (2008), pp. 293–325. This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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19. Expatriates who have moved to Singapore often cite the push factor in Hong Kong (deteriorating quality of air and water, inadequate education facilities, high rents), and the pull factor in Singapore (pleasant environment, good schools, multilingual capabilities). 20. See the debates in 2007, in Ming Pao and the Hong Kong Economic Journal. The scholars include Lui Tai Lok, Nelson Chow, Wong Chack Kei, and Lui Ting-ming. The issue was also raised in forums and workshops organized by the Strategic Policy Commission, the Central Policy Unit. 21. Those who could move with the jobs did so. In 1998, only 52,000 Hong Kongers worked on the mainland. By 2005, the number was 237,000. 22. A low unemployment rate can mask structural issues in the labor hierarchy. Although businesses at the high end are pressuring the government to import more professional talents and create the proper incentives and environment, labor at the low end cannot be fully employed. See the government statistics on the difference. Newspaper editorials have urged the government to think outside the box and take drastic action to address the imbalance of the labor market. 23. Lui Tai Lok and Anthony Cheung suggest that, for over twenty years, this generation of Hong Kongers might have been too complacent, and has not reached beyond old ordering frames to enrich its localized experiences. See Lui (2007c), the postscript to a new edition of the book, published by Oxford University Press in Hong Kong (2007b). See a summary of the postscript in Lui (2007c). 24. See Chow (2007, p. 11) and Wong Chack Kei (2007). See also Chow (2009) on a social breakdown of the poor who received public assistance in Hong Kong. 25. On competitiveness and the Hong Konger’s mindset, see Siu and Ku (2008). 26. See a public opinion survey, “Historical Conservation” (South China Morning Post 2007). A large percentage of opinion leaders interviewed feel that the government has not done enough. 27. See a recent sample of public sentiments on the issue in Chen (2007) and Lu (2007). The leaders of the Local Action Group comprise many students and young professionals. 28. See essays by cultural activists in Lung et al. (2004). 29. On every significant date involving China, the leaders are able to mobilize large numbers. Every year, for example, they have organized tens of thousands of working families on July 1 to celebrate the return of Hong Kong to the motherland. 30. See a speech delivered by Siu at a Hong Kong Asia Society luncheon (Siu 2004). 31. The annual reports of these two banks clearly show these as major regions on which to focus business attention. 32. See the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce website (Faces and Places 2005) for more detailed descriptions of the trip. 33. See Eldon (2007). The full program of the summit can be found on the web archive of the Financial Times for 2007. Other keynote speakers included Cheng Siwei (Chairman, Standing Committee, National People’s Congress, China) and HE Dr. Omar Bin Sulaiman, Governor of the Dubai International Finance Center. A following summit was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 5, 2008, displaying a similar array of world financiers and political luminaries. For a program of the China–Middle East Summit in Riyadh, organized by the Financial Times, go to www.ftconferences.com. 34. See the efforts by John Tsang, Finance Secretary of the HKSAR, and K. C. Chan, Ma’s successor after Ma retired in 2008. In a tour of the United States, Chan says, “We are reaching This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 08:34:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Tracing China out to tap business opportunities in emerging markets such as Russia, Vietnam, India and the Middle East. Our market infrastructure and regulatory regime are being upgraded to align them with the evolving global market. As a new initiative, we are working to put in place an Islamic financial platform to harvest market opportunities in the Middle East” (Hong Kong Digest 2008). See South China Morning Post (2008) on the trip and on the advantages of Hong Kong that Donald Tsang stresses. See the 2007 Annual Report of the Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation Limited and its recent agreement with its counterpart in Malaysia, Cagamas Berhad. Ms. Susie Cheung, General Council and Company Secretary, articulated some of the legal and cultural barriers (e.g., definitions of interest, debt, and insurance) that need attention. See the Gulf-Asia Research Bulletin, published tri-annually by the Gulf Research Center, Dubai, UAE. Dr. Samir Ranjan Pradhan, an Indian national and senior researcher at the Center, is the editor of the bulletin (www.grc.ae). See the press release by the Securities and Futures Commission (2008); see also a circular by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council (2008), commenting on the memorandum of understanding signed between The Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Dubai International Financial Centre Authority in May 2008. See Chan (2007). John Tsang, finance secretary of HKSAR, intends to level the territory’s role as international finance hub to lure Middle Eastern investors. It is a significant commitment from the government, as it constitutes 15.5 percent of the government’s surplus in 2008 (see Ming Pao 2008b). See Ming Pao (2008a). The Vice Chancellor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Professor Paul Chu, led a small delegation to Yale to introduce the university to senior postgraduate students. He and his senior administrators were on their way to attend the groundbreaking ceremonies of KAUST in Saudi Arabia and had high hopes for linking research programs in Hong Kong with developments in the Middle East. See the website of Xintiandi for history, photographs, and happenings. See CEPA data for 2008. For statistical data on Hong Kongers who live and work in China, see Ming Pao (2007f). See a recent study by Newendorp (2008). See Siu and Ku (2008). The study was commissioned by the 2022 Foundation in Hong Kong to look into the software of Hong Kong’s competitiveness, in particular, Hong  Kong’s human resources. Hong Kong’s population is aging. Due to a rather restrictive immigration policy that allows largely family reunion, the mismatch between the needs of the economy and the available labor power has been serious. There is a need to create a workforce that will allow Hong Kong to reposition itself in the rapidly changing political and economic environment.

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Glossary

“ah chan” anmin tongshang baitongnian Bao Qingtian baodian baoyu yundong Beidi bianhu qimin bopo buluojia caishen changping si chaogeng chenghuang chengzhongcun chongcai chu jiang bang chuanhu chuzhang citang da liyi da zongci daban che dagongmei dagongzu dai pai dong Danjia po Danjia Pu Danjia Wan danse

阿燦 安民通商 拜同年 包青天 包佃 保育運動 北帝 編戶齊民 伯婆 不落家 財神 常平司 炒更 城隍 城中村 冲菜 出江幫 船戶 處長 祠堂 大禮議 大宗祠 大班車 打工妹 打工族 大牌檔 蛋家婆 蛋家埔 蛋家灣 膽色

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456

Glossary

daqing datianer daxing dazhai dianpu dingti ershizu fang jia fangliao fei fenhong ganbiao geheqing gengtian gengwu getihu gongju guan guanban Guandi guanshang heban guanxi gui mui tsai guofang wenxue guo sanshe gupo haijin hanjian Hanlin hebo suo hengtang po hexie hong (trade monopoly) hongguan tiaokong Hongsheng Temple huanan huanghua hui huichang huigui huiyou

大青 大天二 大姓 大寨 佃僕 頂替 二世祖 坊甲 放寮 匪 分紅 趕表 割禾青 耕田 耕屋 個體户 公局 官 官辦 關帝 官商合辦 關係 鬼妹仔 國防文學 過三社 姑婆 海禁 漢奸 翰林 河泊所 橫塘婆 和諧 行 宏觀調控 洪聖廟 華南 黃華會 會嘗 回歸 會友

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Glossary

huji hukou husha jia jian jianran yisu Jianshe jiuji weiyuanhui jianshi jiao (ritual) Jile si jinshan zhuang jinshi Jiqing Gongsuo juhua hui jun ji juren jushe jushi juzhang kaifang hu kaibian ren Kuishan Huiguan kunqu Kwok girl lan mei lou laoban lijin litu bulixiang liuren Longmu longpai maiban mai shui mangliu Man Mo Temple (Wen Wu Miao) menglongshi menkou tudi minban ming zhen Minglun Tang

457

戶籍 戶口 護沙 甲 諫 漸染夷俗 建設救濟委員會 繭市 醮 極樂寺 金山莊 進士 吉慶公所 菊花會 軍籍 舉人 菊社 菊試 局長 開放户 開邊人 葵扇會館 昆曲 郭阿女 爛尾樓 老闆 厘金 離土不離鄉 流人 龍母 龍牌 買辦 買水 盲流 文武廟 朦朧詩 門口土地 民辦 名鎮 明倫堂

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458

Glossary

mintuan minzu muyushu nanbei hang nanfeng chuang Nanhaishen Miao neisheng waiwang nipusa guojiang: zishen nanbao nucai nü qiangren piao se pinpai xiaoying pinqi Po Leung Kuk pu (servant) pu (enterprise) qiangge qie Qionghua Huiguan qipao qiu se quanwei xing ren qi renzu guizong sangshi Sanyuanli saobatou se ban sha sha gu shamin shandao shan ding wa shangao huangdi yuan shang gao shangtuan shantang she She shen

民團 民族 木魚書 南北行 南風窗 南海神廟 內聖外王 泥菩薩過江：自身難保 奴才 女強人 飄色 品牌效應 聘妻 保良局 僕 舖 搶割 妾 瓊花會館 旗袍 秋色 權威性 人氣 認祖歸宗 桑市 三元里 掃把頭 色板 沙 沙骨 沙民 山盜 杉頂瓦 山高皇帝遠 上高 商團 善堂 社 畬 神

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Glossary

shengcheng hua sheng citang shengcai shenggang qibing Sheren Miao shetou gong shexue shiming gan shi nai shoudai dang shoujin shourongsuo shouzhang shuidao shuiliu chai shui se shuyuan sibu qingnian sida gengjia sida tianwang Siyi (Sze Yap) suanzhi tai tai Taipingshan tanjing taohua nü tian fang tianxia titian xingdao tu Tung Wah Hospital tuzhu weiguan weimin qingming weisuo wenming shequ wen yi zai dao wuben xiannü sanhua xiaojie

459

省城話 生祠堂 生菜／生財 省港旗兵 社人廟 社頭公 社學 使命感 師奶 手袋黨 壽金 收容所 壽帳 水盜 水流柴 水色 書院 四不青年 四大耕家 四大天王 四邑 酸枝 太太 太平山 灘精 桃花女 填房 天下 替天行道 土 東華醫院 土著 圍館 為民請命 衛所 文明社區 文以載道 務本 仙女散花 小姐

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460

Glossary

Xiaolan gong xiahu xiashi xin yimin xue er you ze shi yageng yankou yin yipin guan yi tiao long yiyujiangun Yue yujing zaxing zhaijidi zhangshou zhengzhi luxian Zhonghuan jiazhi Zhongyuan Zhougong zhu zikun ziliudi zishunü zizhi zu miao

小欖公 下戶 下使 新移民 學而優則仕 牙更 焰口 隱 一品官 一條龍 異域奸棍 粵 語境 雜姓 宅基地 丈手 政治路線 中環價值 中原 周公 主 自困 自留地 自梳女 自治 祖廟

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Index

Abrams, Philip, 2, 4, 11, 14 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 7, 26, 27 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 60, 379n11 agency, ix, 2, 9, 14–15, 28–29, 60, 62, 64–65, 67, 69–70, 74, 217–18, 219, 402; actor vs. agent, 11–13 Agnew, Jean, xiii Ah Cheng, 248–49, 261 Ahern, Emily, 108n2, 140 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 26, 35, 398n5 anthropological theory, 10, 15, 17–20, 25–26, 73–74, 138–40, 217, 357 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 299 Apter, David, 219 Bai Hua, 265, 271n54 Ba Jin, 254, 259–60, 263–64, 393 Bamboo Shoots (film), xi banditry, 171, 176–77 Bei Dao, 244, 246–47, 266, 268n10 Below the Lion Rock (TV series), 385, 435 Bendix, Reinhart, 58n7 Birch, Cyril, 24, 250 birth control program, 77, 92n19, 94n33 Bloch, Marc, 3, 9 Blussé, Leonard, 27 bosses and strongmen, 141, 150, 151, 154, 157, 161n43, 169, 195, 204–6, 210, 225, 231–32, 235, 277–93 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 11, 17, 69 Boxer Rebellion, 150 Braudel, Fernand, 8, 9, 27 brideprice, 112, 129nn8–10, 223, 225 Brook, Timothy, 7, 27 Brooks, Peter, 219

Castells, Manuel, 25, 451n8 Cha, Laura, 404, 444, 445 Chan, Anson, 404–7, 412, 413, 416, 424, 426n3 Chan, Fruit, 65 Chan Po Chu, 402, 426n4 Chan Wing-hoi, 168, 185n12, 185n16 Chaolian, 28, 163, 165, 179–82, 213n14 Chatterjee, Partha, 4 Chaudhuri, K. N., 7, 27 Chen Boda, 257 Chen Chunsheng, xiii, xiv, 133, 217, 218 Chen Cun, 261 chengzhongcun (village enclaves), xi–xii, 24–25, 275, 353–78, 382n54 Chen Jitang, 206, 208–9 Chen Juchi, 185n26 Chen people, 164, 172–73, 204–5, 214n35, 278, 291 Chen Shufen, 279 Chen Xuanyi, 392 Chen Xujing, 164–65 Chen Yinke, 183, 396, 400n31 Chen Yixi, 209 Chen Yuzheng, 222 Chen Zhiwu, 346 Cheung, Anthony, 439–40, 453n23 Cheung Man-yee, 404, 409 Chiang Kai-shek, 150, 254, 255 China: prehistoric, 229–30; premodern, 230–32, 241n32, 249, 269nn21–23 China in the Red (documentary), 59, 63, 382n46 “Chineseness” (being Chinese), 1, 30–32, 36, 37, 249, 262, 385, 395

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Index

505

Ching May Bo, xiii, xiv Choi Chi-cheung, xiii, 240n15 Choi Po-king, 397, 425 Chow, Selina, 404 Chu, Paul, 454n41 civil service examinations, 23, 67, 97, 158n5, 166, 170, 172, 232 Clifford, James, 219 Cohen, Myron L., 21, 32, 134, 140, 234 Cohn, Bernard, 4, 16, 26 colonialism, 2, 4, 404 complicity, 14–15, 21, 67, 74, 78, 265 concubinage, 76, 222, 223, 225, 239n9, 414 Confucianism, 18, 218, 221–23, 228, 232, 233–34, 401; neo-Confucianism, 263, 396 Corrigan, Philip, 4 Cultural Revolution, x, xii, 56, 68, 85–86, 98–99, 120, 122, 247, 260, 266, 436 culture, defined, 17–18 dagongmei (working women), 64–65, 301, 355 Dai Qing, 257–58 Daniel, E. Valentine, 358 Dan people, 19, 33, 49, 68, 76, 116, 135, 140, 156, 163–84, 186n32, 194–95, 198, 225, 231–32, 235–36, 238, 239n7, 273, 277, 288; the Chen and, 172–73, 205, 278; in Hong Kong, 242n53 Darnton, Robert, 3 Davis, Deborah, xiii, xiv Davis, Natalie, 3, 9, 16, 219 Dean, Kenneth, 273 Deng Xiaoping, 44, 304, 361, 384, 406 Dikötter, Frank, 452n12 Ding Ling, 254, 257 Dirks, Nicholas, 4, 16 Dongguan, 363 dowries. See brideprice; wedding ceremonies Duara, Prasenjit, 69, 75, 133, 196, 202 Dubai, 430–31, 442–45 passim, 452n15 Duby, Georges, 3 Dunn, Lydia, 404 Durian, Durian (film), 65 Durkheim, Emile, 1, 2, 11, 13–14, 15, 106

Ebrey, Patricia, 113 Eldon, David, 346, 419, 443, 444 Elman, Benjamin, 23, 67 Esherick, Joseph, 196 Eu, Audrey, 423–24, 429n39 family dynamics, 61–63, 111–12, 128, 233–34. See also marriage customs Fan, Rita, 404 Fang Xinrang, 405–6 Fang Zhenwu, 405 Fang Zhi, 259–60, 265 Fan Huo, 213n16 Faure, David, xiii, xiv, 1, 16, 46n22, 68, 133, 155–56, 167, 170, 224; on colonial Hong Kong, 404, 413; on the Dan, 173; on ethnic identity, 241n39; on lineages, 6, 19–20, 22–23, 33–34, 159n17, 209, 277; on merchants, 135, 187–88, 190–91; on place-making, 273; on the Tang, 176 Feierman, Steven, 296n38 Fei Xiaotong, 134 Feng Yuxiang, 281 Ferguson, James, 274, 299 Feuchtwang, Stephan, 23 Fisher, Michael, 271n52 Fong, Vanessa, 62–64 Foshan, 34, 135, 148, 174, 175, 185n28, 191–92, 197–98, 301 Foucault, Michel, 4, 10, 13, 20, 69 Four Cleanups campaign, 93n30, 100, 130n24 Freedman, Maurice, 20, 21, 22, 34, 67, 113, 134, 139, 142, 154–55, 157, 273 Fujian, 134, 168, 187, 213n15, 228, 232–33, 273 funeral rites, 98–101, 102–5, 109n11, 111 Gaetano, Arianne M., 65 Gao Cong, 369–70 Gao Man-wah, 392 Gao Xiaosheng, 259, 261 García Márquez, Gabriel, 261 Geertz, Clifford, 2, 17, 69, 75, 89–90, 162n55, 219 Gellner, Ernest, 389

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506

Index

geomancy, 101–2 Ghosh, Amitav, 274 Giddens, Anthony, 2, 11 Gilsenan, Michael, 162n55 Ginsburg, Carlo, 3, 9, 219 Goody, Jack, xiv, 5, 8, 26, 112–13, 115, 131n33, 219 Great Leap Forward, 98, 100, 303, 436 Great Rituals Controversy, 20, 166, 191 Guangdong, x, 24, 32–35, 37–41, 43–44, 51, 67, 134, 156, 164–65, 168, 170, 173, 430; crime in, 45n10; Hong Kong housing market and, 298, 302–13; mercantile activities, 189, 197–99, 211; settlement of, 231 Guangzhou, xi–xii, 7, 28, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 84, 165, 174, 199, 209, 215n46, 343–44, 347–48; chengzhongcun in, 353–56, 360–78; Hong Kong and, 300–310, 320, 433 Gu Cheng, 247 Gu Hua, 261 guojia, 32, 250, 254 Gupta, Akhil, 274, 299 Gurley, John, x Hamabata, Matt, xiii Hamashita, Takeshi, 7, 27 Han Shaogong, 268n10, 271n46 Han Suyin, x Hao Lingting, 368–69 Hao Ran, 260 Harrell, Stevan, and Sara Dickey, 112, 113 Hartman, Geoffrey, 219 Harvey, David, 7 Hayden, Dolores, 299 He Cheng, 289 He Congbao, 289 He Duan, 288, 289, 295n32 He Hanming, 171 He Jing, 148 He Jintang, 207–8 He Lizai (He Dazuo), 144 He Qianwen, 296n35 He Renjian, 284 He Rugen, 289 He Shang, 287–88

He Shuheng, 288 He Wuzhou, 144, 160n26, 280 He Xiongxiang, 199–200, 214n32, 280 He Yanggao, 147, 159nn14–15, 215n50, 227, 280, 282–83, 294n14 He Yuechao, 160n29 Hobsbawm, Eric, 3, 4, 9, 16 Holston, James, 7, 299 Hong Kong, 35, 39–44, 106, 208–9, 239n3, 319–49, 383–451; expatriates in, 308, 310, 351n13, 453n19; historical background, 37–39, 46n23, 206, 282, 303, 383–84, 388–89, 391–94, 398nn3–4, 401–2, 432–34; identity, 275, 320, 385–86, 394–98, 434, 439–42; immigration issues, 275, 304, 319–49, 423, 449; middle-class troubles, 431–32, 435–39; New Territories, 20, 22, 37, 163, 173, 302, 308, 316n14, 322, 389, 420–21; red light districts, 402; South China boundary fluidity, 299–314, 319–20, 338–39, 343–49, 363, 432, 436, 438, 449; sovereignty changeover, 1, 16–17, 39–40, 43, 313, 384, 387, 389–91, 407, 435; television and media influence, 31, 32, 46n29, 132n41, 350n5; 21st-century challenges, 430–32, 436–38, 440–42, 450–51, 454n46. See also housing market; mercantile activities Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, xiv Ho-tung, Clara, 426n2 household registration, 121, 170–72, 354–55, 378n5 housing market, 275, 298, 300–314, 315nn8–9, 316nn12–15, 322 Hsia, C. T., 256, 265 Huancheng Commune, 51–56, 57n2, 58n5, 67 Huang, Philip, 196 Huang Qiuyun, 259, 265 Huang Shen, 391, 392 Huang Xiaoyang, 176, 191 Huang Xinmei, 165 Huang Zuo, 172 Hu Feng, 259, 270nn34–35, 270n40 Huicheng, 51, 52, 56, 173, 180–81, 194, 199–210, 279

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Index

507

Huizhou, 187, 188, 192–94, 195, 212n11 Hu Jintao, 437 Humphrey, Caroline, 60 Huo Tao, 175, 191–92, 280 Hu Shi, 269n26 Ibn Battuta, 7, 383 Ip, Regina, 404–5, 409–10, 427n13 Jian Yi, xi Jian Youwen, 396 Jing Wang, 297 Kai Ho Kai, 392–93, 399n18 Kang Zhuo, 265 Kelly, William, xiii, xiv, 5, 243n54 Kelsky, Karen, 402 Kuhn, Philip, 194 Lam, Alice, 404 Lau, Emily, 427n14 Law, Fanny, 404 Lee, Leo, 252, 265, 273n51, 452n12 Lee, Martin, 43, 420 Lee Lai-shan, 396 Lefebvre, Henri, 6, 25 Le Goff, Jacques, 3, 9 Lei Feng, 152 Leong, Jacqueline, 43 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 3 Leung, Angela, 384–85 Leung, Elsie, 404, 422 Lewis, Mark, 26, 27 Li, David, 444 Li, Ellen, 414–15, 420, 426 Liang Bingyun, 281 Liang Chunrong, 201 Li Chaomin, 226 Li Dazhao, 255 Li Hongzhang, 393 Li Jingyun, 281 Li Ka-shing, 420, 443 Li Mo, 241n30 lineage formation, 18, 20, 22, 33–34, 139, 142–43, 149, 166–67 Lin Huixiang, 228, 232 Li Peilin, 381n37

Li Rong, 176, 180 Li Rui, 261 Li Sunchen, 144, 160nn25–26, 241n36 literary matters, 244–51, 254–67; critical realism, 245, 261, 264, 267n4 Liu Binyan, 245, 260, 267n5, 268n10, 271n51 Liu Kwang-ching, 188 Liu Na, 271n49 Liu Su, 404 Liu Xiaobi, 267n3 Liu Xinwu, 57, 246, 268n8 Liu Zaifu, 246 Liu Zhiwei, xiii, xiv, 1, 11, 19, 68, 133, 167, 199, 217–18, 277, 284 Li Zehou, 246 Li Zhanquan, 282–83, 294nn16–17 Li Zhun, 261 Lo Hsiang-lin, See Luo Xianglin Lo, Vincent, 448 locality and translocality, ix, 9, 21–25, 274–75 Loh, Christine, 43, 404–5, 416, 417–21, 428n32 Lui Tai Lok, 435, 453n23 Luk, Bernard, 397 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 267n4 Lung Ying-tai, 439 Luo Feng, 257 Luo Xianglin, 229, 231, 396 Luo Yixing, 175, 195 Lu Ping, 406 Luria, Keith, xiii Lust, Caution (film), 434 Luther, Martin, 12 Lu Wei-luan, 394 Lu Xun, 247, 248, 254, 256, 257, 263, 265–66, 267n4, 268n14, 269n26, 270n40, 393–94 Luyun shanfang jushi, 145 Lu Zijun (also Lu Xiangfu), 178 Lu Zuonan, 207 Ma, Eric, 343 Ma, Frederick, 443 MacLehose, Murray, 421 Mahmood, Saba, 402 Mai You, 226, 227, 236, 239n11

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508

Index

Malkki, Liisa, 357–58 Mann, Susan, 135, 190, 194, 201 Mao Dun, 254, 264–65 Mao Zedong, 45n9, 91n6, 255–57, 270n32 Marcus, George, 271n52, 300 marriage (and resistance to), 18–19, 117, 130n16, 150, 156, 162n57, 218, 221–29, 232–38, 240nn16–17, 425, 449. See also wedding ceremonies Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 11, 13–14, 15, 106 May Fourth Movement, 35, 245, 251, 252, 253–54, 262 Ma Zhenping, 408–9 mercantile activities, 27, 28, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 135–36, 187–211, 235–37, 274, 277, 361–62, 391–92; the Dan and, 173, 174–75, 184; during Maoist regime, 210–11, 354–55, 368; post-Maoist era, 211, 297–98, 313–14, 368–70, 379n7, 439, 442–49; sea trade, 214n28; in Xiaolan, 76, 97, 99, 118, 127, 149, 151–52, 225. See also housing market; sericulture; strongmen migrants and refugees, 353–78, 383, 403, 436 “mistress villages,” 303, 307, 316n15, 362 Miura Atsushi, 437 Mo Chaoxiong, 205 Mou Zongsan, 396 Muggler, Erik, 23 Mumbai, 378, 430–31, 442–43 Murnaghan, Bridget, xiii Murray, Dian, 241n38, 242n41 Nanching, 367–76 Nanxi. See Xiaolan Ng, Margaret, 405, 407, 416, 421–24, 428n36 Nie Erkang, 176, 201, 203 Ohmae Kenichi, 437 opera, 49, 137, 144–45, 148–49, 151, 182–83, 194, 213n20 Ortner, Sherry, 2–3 Ou Wumao, 181, 185nn21–22, 185n24, 185n28 Pan Xiong, 45n11 Park, Robert, 250

Patten, Chris, 42, 45n7, 405, 407, 417, 421 peasant rebellions, 5, 148, 176, 180, 250–51, 261 peasants-intellectuals relationship, 219, 247, 254, 261, 264–65, 271n53 Perry, Elizabeth, 189 piracy, 19, 170, 176, 180, 241n38 place-making, 273–75, 299 Polanyi, Karl, 3 Polo, Marco, 7, 383 popular culture and rituals, 95–98, 101–8, 109nn15–17, 110n23–24, 139–40, 143–44, 156, 182–83 power, 10, 13, 20, 74, 108n2, 167, 250–51; “cultural nexus of,” 133–34, 202, 258, 273 prostitution, 65, 307 Pyvis, Richard, 443 Qian Mu, 396 Quan Hansheng, 396 Quanzhou, 28 Qu Dajun, 164, 184n3, 231, 234 Qu Qiubai, 254–55, 258, 270n34 Qu Renze, 205, 282 Qu Yuan, 269n22 Ram, Vernon, 415 Rankin, Mary, 196 real estate boom. See housing market Red Turban rebellion, 148, 176, 180–81, 202–3, 215nn42–43 refugees. See migrants and refugees religion, 18, 23, 24, 98–99, 139. See also popular culture and rituals Riesman, Paul, ix–x Rowe, William, 135, 187 Russell, Bertrand, 250 Ru Zhijuan, 259 Samuel, Raphael, 3 Sangren, Steven, 140 Sassen, Saskia, 7 Sayer, Derek, 4 Scholars, The (Wu Jingzi), 269n23 Schwartz, Benjamin, 35 Scott, James, xiii–xiv, 5–6, 14, 16, 67

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Index

509

sericulture, 182, 222, 224–25 Sewell, William, Jr., 3 Shanghai, 430–31, 433–34, 446, 447–48 Shaolin Soccer (film), 317n28 Shawan, 130n15, 161n49, 165, 167, 175, 177, 198, 205–6, 216n51, 223, 224, 277; boss rule in, 284–91 Shenzhen, 300–301, 302–3, 310–12 Shi Tiesheng, 271n45 Shue, Vivienne, 24, 91n8, 109n3 Shunde, 81, 129n2, 141, 149–50, 161n39, 164, 198, 218, 221–22, 224–26, 234–35, 236, 301 Singapore, 181, 182, 351n13, 430, 431 Sinn, Elizabeth, 348, 391, 397, 402, 433 Siu Fong Fong, 402, 426n4 Skinner, G. William, x, 1, 21–22, 23, 68, 74, 134, 138–39, 153–54, 157, 194, 273–74 Smith, Adam, 12 So, Alvin, 222 Solinger, Dorothy, 360 space, 6–7, 10, 25, 27, 299; “space of flow,” 346, 348, 402, 433, 451n8 Spence, Jonathan, 57, 218–19, 252 “state involution,” 20, 69–70, 75, 89, 133 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 3 Stockard, Janice, 222, 223, 225 Stoler, Ann, 16 Strand, David, 196 strongmen. See bosses structuring, viii–ix, 2–3, 10–11, 14, 67, 71, 73, 139, 299 Sun Lung-kee, 35 Sun Yat-sen, 208, 393 Sun Zhigang, 353–54, 356 Suzuki Mitsuo, 173 Tam, Maria, 404 Tan Dihua, 192 Tang, Sir David, 434 Tang Junyi, 396 Tang Mingrui, 217 Tao Yuanming, 146, 269n22 Tay, William, 395 Thompson, E. P., 3–4, 9, 16 Tiananmen Square protests, 261–62, 271n47, 271n50, 436, 440

Tianma, 164, 172–73, 204, 214n35; boss rule in, 278–79, 283, 291 Tien, James, 419 Tilly, Charles, 296n37 Topley, Marjorie, 221–22, 225 Trachtenberg, Alan, 219 Tsi-an Hsia, 265 Tsing, Anna, 357 Tu Wei-Ming, 252, 268n6 Umbrella Movement, 2, 385 Unger, Jonathan, 45n10 Van Schendel, Willem, 6 Verdery, Katherine, 36 village enclaves. See chengzhongcun Walder, Andrew, 91n8 Wang, Jing, 315n6 Wang Gungwu, 188 Wang Meng, 267n3 Wang Ruoshui, 267n5, 268n17, 271n44 Wang Ruowang, 271n44 Wang Shiwei, 257–58, 270n35 Ward, Barbara, 21, 22, 23 Watson, James, 6, 21, 23, 67, 74, 96, 134, 140 Weber, Max, xiii, 1, 2, 11, 13–14, 15, 57, 70, 106; Herrschaft concept, 73–74 wedding ceremonies, 70, 101, 102, 105, 107, 110n22, 111–28, 131n33, 132nn39–40, 223 Wei Jingsheng, 246 Wei Yu, 392 Wen Yiduo, 393 Whyte, Martin, 127–28 Wigen, Kären, 8 Williams, Sue, 59 Wilson, David, 421 Wofford, Susanne, xiii Wolf, Arthur, x, 21, 23, 67, 108n2, 134, 139, 156–57, 273 Wolf, Margery, 225 “women of influence” (nü qiangren), 384, 401–25 Wong, Ka-fu, 319 Wong, Richard, 11–12, 319 Wong, Rosanna, 404

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510

Index

Wu, Anna, 404, 409–10, 416–17 Wu Daorong, 242n43 Wu Tingfang, 391, 392–93 Wu Zuxiang, 254, 264–65 Xiang Biao, 360 Xiangshan (Zhongshan), 147, 149, 214n25, 221–24, 226–27, 388–89 Xiao Hong, 265 Xiao Jun, 257 Xiaolan, 67–70, 129n1, 129n5, 129n7, 137–57, 158n2, 165, 171–72, 175, 198, 218, 239nn6–7, 241n36, 242n46; boss rule in, 279–84, 289, 290; chrysanthemum festivals, 18, 68, 70, 97, 107, 135, 137–38, 144–53, 157, 162n51, 205; dowries and marriage customs, 111–28, 221, 223–25, 228–29, 233–38, 242n52; economic issues, 75–90, 91n14, 93nn24–25, 93nn32–33, 97, 99, 118, 127, 149, 151–52, 225, 205, 280–81, 381n29; popular culture in, 95–108 Xie Mian, 247, 267n2 Xinhui, 34, 51, 135, 164, 172, 197, 209 Xu Dishan, 254 Xu Fuguan, 396 Xu Guangping, 259 Xu Jingya, 267n2 Xu Run, 389 Yan, Yunxiang, 60–62 Yang, C. K., 367–68 Yang Jiang, 247 Yao people, 33, 156, 163, 167–68, 170, 232, 235, 241n33

Ye Shengtao, 254 Ye Xian’en, 173, 192–93, 212n13, 217 Ye Xuanping, 43 Yu, Denise, 409 Yu, Patrick, 413 Yuan Chonghuan, 172 Yuan Dai, 205, 281, 282 Yuan Fat Hang, 392 Yung Wing, 389 Yu Ying-shih, 190, 269n23, 395 Zhang Bao, 176 Zhang Jiuling, 148, 149 Zhang Li, 360 Zhang Xiaojun, xiii Zhang Zhidong, 269n28 Zhao Shiyu, xiii Zhao Shuli, 265 Zhao Tuo, 231 Zheng, Tiantian, 64–65 Zheng Guanying, 389 Zheng He, 7, 27 Zheng Yi Sao, 176 Zheng Zhenman, xiii, 273 Zhigang (Zhiwei), 177–84, 185n17 (also Tsai Kong) Zhongyuan (Central Plains), 19, 33, 155, 166–68, 197, 229 Zhou Qufei, 163 Zhou Yang, 256 Zhou Yu, 176, 180 Zhuhai, 300 “Zomia,” 6, 25 Zukin, Sharon, 299 Zurndorfer, Harriet, 193, 213n16

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