Tracing China, A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey by Helen F. Siu (review)

Helen Siu is a professor of anthropology at Yale and an eminent anthropologist specializing in Chinese society. Interested in historical anthropology, especially the late imperial and Republican periods, she has also done extensive fieldwork in South China exploring the nature of the socialist state and the urban–rural divide. She is the author of numerous scholarly books and papers that have made a significant contribution to the literature in her field. The present book is a collection of her papers, reworked and grouped around several academic themes.

The articles are of varying length and come from different periods in her career. They include book chapters, scholarly articles, and a book review. Most are labeled “slightly revised” from originals, but the dates definitely show a progression in the author’s thinking. Most concern the history and society of South China, including Hong Kong. However, there is quite a variety of topics, even including literature. Apart from anthropology, Siu’s main disciplinary bent is in history; she shows a very clear fascination for theoretical issues and an expertise in them.

For Siu, this work is one of self-reflection, a chance to look back over her “forty-year ethnographic journey.” She appropriately comments: “When the world pushes impatiently forward, looking back to reflect is a luxury” (p. vii). A luxury it may be, but the whole notion of looking back at a distinguished career of developing ideas that contribute to an important academic field seems to me a reasonable one. My evaluation of Siu’s corpus of work, including that contained in this volume, is that it is large and significant enough to be worth self-reflection. That is why I admire Tracing China as a very good book.

The introduction is entitled “China as Process.” What this means is that Siu departs from the essentialist approach to China that sees at least a core of society as essentially Chinese. She offers a general, theoretical perspective that goes well beyond China:

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.

(p. viii)

This talks about boundaries rather than essences. It definitely puts the focus on change, or process, rather than continuity, and certainly conflicts with the concept of “the DNA of the Chinese people,” a phrase especially popular among Chinese officials.

Siu expresses pleasure that some of her ideas have entered the mainstream rather than being forgotten. It is true that scholarship has tended to abandon views that see societies as static and human nature as to some extent unchanging. That would be consistent with Siu’s overall approach.

Within a focus on South China, Hong Kong has a privileged place. This is not surprising, considering the author herself lived in Hong Kong for so long and it is anyway very special among Chinese cities.

In a piece first published in 1993, Siu raises issues relevant to integration with the mainland and autonomy in a large region that includes Hong Kong and Guangdong. The claims the central government puts forward for integration of Hong Kong and Macau back into the mainland she says “are based on primordial sentiments and in the name of national unity, territorial bond, and family pride” (p. 40). Siu puts forward a more nuanced view of the Hong Kong situation in the early 1990s, one that takes into account issues such as the democracy movement of 1989 and the economic importance of the Pearl River Delta, as well as the attitudes of the professional middle classes in Hong Kong itself.

Another chapter on Hong Kong, entitled “Positioning ‘Hong Kongers’ and ‘New Immigrants,’ ” comes from 2008. Along with much scholarly detail, she draws attention to Hong Kong as a “world city” with its own public...