China Off Center

1. Introduction: Reconsidering the Middle Kingdom

When Americans think of China, a familiar set of images tends to come to mind: the Great Wall, chopsticks, Guilin’s dramatic stone and mist landscape , peasants toiling timelessly in rice paddies (see fig. 1.1), long silk dresses with slits up the side, mysterious writing, the Forbidden City, communism. Perhaps a set of more abstract issues also occurs to those who occupy themselves with public affairs: human rights violations; the handover of Hong Kong; toy, sneaker, and clothing manufacturing; strict birth control; trade imbalance; the violation of international copyright laws; and a lone resister standing before a tank in the terror to which we now refer as the Tiananmen massacre. None of these impressions is wrong, just as it is not wrong when envisioning the United States to think solely about the White House or apple pie, Williamsburg or the Wild West, or our high rate of divorce and substance abuse. Still, as citizens of the United States, we would probably feel that this sampling was not adequate to convey everything that we think important about our own society. What about Nobel Prizes or our most common national pastime (claimed variously to be gardening and baseball)? In the popular Western imagination, China has for centuries been a symbol of centeredness, in large part because of our casual translation of one of China’s names for itself, Zhongguo, as “Middle Kingdom” or, even more elaborately, “the Center of the World” (Elegant 1968). Westerners have assumed that the docile Chinese population inevitably follows the dictates of central authority or, failing that, of tradition. Lack of individualism has been a truism in our understanding of some generic Chinese or even Asian person, with group identification paramount and challenges to norms immediately punished. The more recent addendum to this portrait is that the fervor for modernization has gripped the populace uniformly and that all people who are able to take advantage of contemporary economic opportunities do so in identical ways. Indeed, many people in China share this goal of harmony and uniformity and foster the image received in the West. 1 SUSAN D. BLUM AND LIONEL M. JENSEN 1 Introduction Reconsidering the Middle Kingdom Yet alongside, beneath, and intersecting this purported centeredness and presumed homogeneity is an immense diversity of peoples, languages, terrain, and everyday practices. Such diversity has been either unrepresented or represented only within a one-dimensional taxonomy of ethnic quaintness by official Chinese publications and presentations. While some familiarity with China is increasingly common in the United States, China’s very complexity makes grasping the nuances of its interior a daunting task. Like any society, China is defined as much by its border regions as by its center— and perhaps even more so. Although China’s international image is carefully cultivated, its frontiers reveal unraveling and disputation as much in terms of culture as in terms of politics. Unable to speak directly to the country’s residents , Westerners often take their view of China from those who translate it for us, usually the urban intellectuals and members of an international political economy. One thing is certain: whether our understanding of China is accurate or inaccurate, the future of the West is irrevocably linked to that of China. Thus, a more nuanced understanding of this nation with which we are increasingly intertwined can only be an asset, we believe. By acknowledging from the start the fluid quality of contemporary Chinese life—not unlike that in many other equally daunting and complex societies —this book looks beyond its central, because commonly emphasized, features in favor of representing its lesser-known aspects. Each chapter documents some behavior on the geographic, social, cultural, psychological, or linguistic margins of the Middle Kingdom in order to offer a more complete picture of what is possible at least within the physical borders of something that, for now, almost all would call China. Aside from the generally fascinating topics themselves (such as ethnic minorities), the whole collection supplements and calls into question commonplace understandings that generalize about a representative Chinese culture that can be observed, say, in state-run factories in Beijing or in joint ventures in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. Many of the articles are based on observations or reports Susan D. Blum and Lionel M. Jensen 2 figure 1.1 Contemporary and timeless: agricultural work in southern China. (Photograph by Dr. Louis C. Liley Jr.) that have some basis in observable behavior...