Village Identity in Rural North China: a Sense of Place in the Diary of Liu Dapeng

Harrison, Henrietta

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-07001-2_5

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…[T]he reason we see [an urban-rural] continuum is because we are looking not at differences between urban and rural society, but at an administrative framework that envisaged the territory controlled by the state as a hierarchical network of government authority. This network was centred on Beijing, the capital, and linked down through provincial capitals, prefectural towns, and county towns to villages 16. It was late Qing constitutional reforms that started a process that unravelled this structure of authority, and by the 1920s and 1930s the Chinese experienced the relationship…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Country, the City, and Visions of Modernity in 1930s China

Lynch

2010

Rural History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The 1930s saw new research and extended debates over the nature of the countryside in China and its socio-economic and historical role. Those on different sides of these debates, many drawing on historical materialism, tended to recreate modernist assumptions. These included assumptions that history was unilinear, and that what was Western was also modern, universal, urban, and objective, while what was not Western was traditional, local, rural, and subjective. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, was the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history.Yet other approaches, focusing on the role of the countryside in China's development, challenged not only aspects of modernity but the assumptions in which the debates were couched. The philosopher and social activist Liang Shuming (1893–1988) focused on the countryside as the creative field in China. He envisioned a new form of community that, instead of the state, would be the active locus for change. Liang's new, village communities would draw on but not reproduce cultural traditions across a ruptured history and form the basis of a non-capitalist industrialisation. Rather than appropriate the dominant image of modernity, Liang revisited its basic assumptions. In so doing, he generated fresh visions, opening up a different set of possibilities and recasting the relation of the country to the city, the nation and the future.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%