Local Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of the Native Place in Modern China

The modern preoccupation with the hometown or native place (guxiang, xiangtu in Chinese) is a significant component of the modern representation of the local or the regional (xiangtu, difang). During the first half of the twentieth century the local—embodied particularly in the native place—was pervasively, though not only, represented as a site of authentic values of a larger formation, such as the nation or civilization. This representation of the local as authentic was frequently dramatized by the threat of ascendant capitalist, modern, and urban values. At the same time nationalism requires a realm of authenticity that it seeks to protect from the corrosive and homogenizing forces of capitalism. The problem of authenticity—which of course goes beyond the local—pervades the global discourse of the modern and represents the central area of tension in the epochal nexus between nationalism and global capitalism roughly during the first eighty years of the twentieth century.¹

As the local becomes globally a focus of cultural authenticity, its discourse appears in a variety of media. In twentieth-century China we see its production in such disciplines as anthropology, folklore studies, geography, local histories, and native place literature; in such visual representations as the woodblock print, landscape art, the postcard or calendar; and partially in political practices such as the rural reconstruction movements and Maoist populism. We may think of the local produced by these disciplines and practices as a type of knowledge—a genre—that temporalizes this space as belonging to another time (different from that of the reader or viewer).² Often this time corresponds to the cycles of nature, and the authenticity of the local emerges from this naturalization of space or from some other form of primordialism. In this genre the local becomes an authentic and (heretofore) enduring object to be investigated, restored, and/or reformed. It is therefore subject to a politics whose complex contestations are disclosed through analysis of the historical reception of these texts and practices. In the first half of this essay I examine the interdisciplinary production of the local and the tensions within. In the latter half I examine a native place novel from Manchukuo (1932–45) in Northeast China and the political history of its reception until the present.

In our understanding of the local or regional in modern China, the local is typically seen to have been politically and culturally incorporated into the national. We first saw this in Joseph Levenson’s notion of the museumification of the local within the spectacle of the nation or, more recently, in historical arguments that view the local as incorporated into a system of variations regulated by nationalist ideology (see Bryna Goodman, for example). Although national incorporation of the local is undeniable, I prefer to see it as one factor or phase in a wider process of the formation of the local. Consider three aspects of this process.³

First, what was the historical role of the local in the empire, and what kind of relationship can we expect between the historical and the contemporary (1900–49)? Astonishingly little is written about late imperial perceptions of the locality. Recently, however, Kishimoto Mio has provided an insightful introduction to the problem. Examining the notion of fengsu (local custom) during the Ming-Qing transition (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), she notes that statesmen such as Gu Yanwu and Wang Fuzhi who had different views on the problem of local autonomy (the fengjian-junxian debate) shared a notion of a locality as having distinctive characteristics and customs. But the distinctiveness of the locality did not yield a conception of irreducible value embedded in the modern notion of culture or Kultur or, as we shall see, in homeland writings. Rather, whether by means of state leadership for Wang or of the local Confucian elite for Gu, the su (customs) of the locality would have...