The "Localist Turn" and "Local Identity" in Later Imperial China

For many years historians of the middle period of Chinese history—roughly from mid-eighth century into the fifteenth century—found considerable appeal in the idea that the Tang-Song transition represented a transition from a feudal society dominated by great aristocratic clans to an emerging "modern" world of commerce, urbanization, social mobility, rationality, and technology. This search for the modern in China's past, which assumed that European history represented the necessary course of human progress, ultimately led to questions about why China did not continue to develop toward modernity. The modernization question has gradually receded from middle-period historiography and attention has shifted away from a search for the causes of either progress or stagnation. But what has remained is a conviction that the middle period saw the emergence of a new and lasting set of connections between social formations, economic processes, international relations, political institutions, cultural forms, and religious and ideological practices and movements, and that historians need to account for this. ¹ At times it has seemed that the modernization question has found a new life in the study of the late imperial period with the idea that the late Ming marks the advent of an "early modern" period of Chinese history. As in the case of the Tang-Song transition, the use of categories such as modern or early modern points to a sense that the late Ming was also a period of profound change.

The sense that the changes that were taking place in the late Ming had lasting consequences contrasts with the traditional historiographical view that late Ming was a period of "dynastic decline," when dynastic institutions began to fail, the authority of the court was challenged, foreign enemies intruded, the common people revolted, and elites put their own interests ahead of the common good. Even if we may doubt that the dynastic decline models helps us understand long term changes in Chinese society, it does point to the fact that there was a growing disconnection between the institutional expectations of the state and what was happening in society. ²

But identifying what made late Ming different depends upon the context in which we see it. If we limit the context to the Ming dynasty, and contrast late Ming developments with the Ming founding, the differences are obvious. Early Ming social policy had aimed to create a nation of largely self-sufficient rural communities whose moral, cultural, and social existence would be organized by state institutions under the tutelage of an all-powerful ruler, and this surely was ceasing to be the case in the sixteenth century. But should we begin the story with the Ming dynasty?Certain regions in Ming perhaps do justify such an approach. Coastal Guangdong, for example, became more fully integrated into the nation and saw sustained growth during the Ming. ³ It could also be argued that those parts of the north and west that had suffered the greatest destruction and population loss during the Jin and Yuan periods were in practice starting their history all over again. But I am not sure that for the more developed regions of the south such as Jiangxi, Jiangnan, and Fujian we should treat the Ming founding as the starting point. ⁴ Recently Paul Jakov Smith has shown that early Ming observers understood themselves to belong to a world that was connected to Song and Yuan, and saw the Ming founding as responding to that history, in contrast to those late Ming observers who saw the Ming as a self-contained entity free from the larger patterns of history. ⁵

Not surprisingly this perspective holds particular interest for middle-period historians. If we plant ourselves in these southern regions in the thirteenth century and look ahead to the sixteenth, much of what we suppose is new in the sixteenth seems quite continuous with the Southern Song and Yuan. It is not that...