To the soil [electronic resource] : the rural and the modern in Chinese cultural imagination, 1915-1965
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, the worldwide capitalist and imperialist expansion brought to China rapid urban development, modern industrialization, and a collapse of the old political system, resulting in widespread disruptions in its countryside. Accordingly, the centuries-old continuum between city and countryside in imperial China was turned into the domination of the industrial, progressive center over the agrarian, underdeveloped periphery. My dissertation, "To the Soil: The Rural and the Modern in Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915—1965, " focuses on the cultural practices and representations of going to the countryside in modern China, investigating the relationship between the rural and the Chinese experience of modernity. "Going to the countryside" in modern China refers to the ways in which intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, and idealistic youth crossed the urban-rural divide resulting from uneven development. Current studies, in China and elsewhere, often identify modernity with urban development and assume that modern life is essentially city life. In China, images of country and peasant life were often shaped by the urban elites whose political and cultural privilege led them to see the countryside as a symbol of the weakness of traditional China. My dissertation describes how modernity was conceived outside the context of the city and how the rural was integrated into and simultaneously transformed the modern Chinese political and cultural order. I argue that the rural constituted an epistemological and emotional site for these social actors to negotiate and redefine modern morality, social reform, revolutionary activism, and industrialization. In my study, the rural does not refer to a uniform space, but serves as a shorthand expression for the relationships and life practices associated with underdeveloped areas. My study covers the practices and representations of various ways of going to the countryside: the individual mode of sentimental homecoming; the collective, reform mode of the Rural Reconstruction Movement; the revolutionary modes of transmitting party policies to villages through different media; and finally, the socialist state-sponsored, industrial modes of going to rural hometowns for national construction. At each pivotal historical moment, the act of going to the countryside was endowed with specific purposes and social significance and played a crucial role in shaping modern subjectivity, in imagining a modern culture and community, and in facilitating the penetration of new technologies. I start with the early decades of the twentieth century, when the countryside began to serve as a signifier of national crisis, and conclude prior to the start of the Cultural Revolution which opened a new chapter of "down to the villages" as a form of state population control. My project canvasses an array of texts that spans the factual/fictional as well as the high/popular divide, such as fiction, sociological and political essays, journalistic writings, films, illustrations, and rural plays and storytelling. My project contributes to current scholarship in three aspects. First, my study is a corrective to recent urban-oriented studies as it reconsiders the cultural and ethical value of the rural in an age of urbanization, modernization, and revolution. Second, my project bridges existing scholarship on urban and rural China and shows the often overlooked but important interaction between the two spaces. Third, as a continuous practice throughout twentieth-century China, the different ways of "going to the countryside" offer a prehistory to the much studied "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages" campaigns during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).