ZHANG Yu.Going to the Countryside:The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination,1915–1965

For several decades,Chinese historians,literary critics,and cultural theorists have been audaciously working on and producing numerous publications on Chinese urban studies.However,in the field of rural studies (if such an academic field exists),few advances have been made.Yu Zhang’s

Going to the Countryside:

The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination

is a timely work that brings the rural to the front stage.In

Going to the Countryside

,Zhang calls for scholars to focus on the crucial role that China’s rural areas have been playing in the historical conjunction of social change and modernization from the Republican period to the socialist era.As Zhang argues,“various historical actors,including Chinese intellectuals,reformers,revolutionaries,leftist journalists,and aspiring youth” (208) turned the countryside into “[an]experiential site to contest and conceptualize a set of globally circulated ideas” (208) and a place where vibrant,dynamic communities are(re)built.

Rural areas are always of great interest in China Studies.Scholars have covered a wide range of issues,including familial structures/hierarchies,economic systems,ritual performances,and religious activities,to name a few.At the same time,there are still several problems that require our attention.Consider,for example,that several scholars view the rural as the counterpart to the urban in that it is inferior and needs to be transformed,cultivated,and civilized.At the same time,some books overly romanticize the rural and consider it to be a utopia where urban diseases have not invaded and interrupted its long-lasting social structures.Also,some scholars failed to explore the interactive link(s) between the rural and the mutual influences that both sides have enacted on each other.In her book,Zhang avoids the above-mentioned mistakes and makes critical inquiries on people’s visits to the rural over the past half century.

Apart from the introduction and conclusion,

Going to the Countryside

consists of three parts,with two chapters in each part.It examines three “visions” that the rural has offered for Chinese enlightenment,revolution,and socialism.Chapter 1 focuses on social-survey essays and sentimental fiction with a theme of homecoming.Zhang’s argument demonstrates that the rural served as a self-reflective site in which urbanists searched for many ways to cope with the chaos of time and explored what the rural meant for them.For example,social-survey essayists have found several features that cities lack in rural areas,including mutual help,emotional connection,and local forms of entertainment.They also introduced neglected rural areas to urban readers and presented diversified information on localities to urban readers for the purpose of constructing a unified nation-state.Furthermore,fiction writers such as Xu Qinwen 许钦文 (1897–1984),Feng Yuanjun 冯沅君 (1900–1974),and Yu Dafu 郁达夫 (1896–1945) also avoid making moral judgments on rural life and discover merits in rural life,including lifestyles,communal relationships,and cultural legacies.Both of these two groups carried out investigations on rural sites and made the rural equal to the urban.

Chapter 2 traces urban elites James Yeh and Xiong Foxi’s 熊佛西 (1900–1965) experimental practices of theatrical education and participatory performance in Ding County,Hebei.Yeh and Xiong laid hopes on the ideological and practical impact on the remote rural residents and aimed to transform the illiterate to accept new concepts of social,political,and cultural changes.Yeh believed in the educational power of visual materials and brought new pedagogical technologies,such as lantern slides and illustrated primers in hopes of educating peasants into scholar-farmers and national citizens.Xiong’s attempt at theatrical rustication brought mass participation in theatrical performances.In doing so,a sense of collective subjectivity has been formed in a refashioned local culture.While this dynamic transmission process was never a one-way process,Chinese rural residents actively participated in building local cultural life and constructing rural modernity.Such localized reinventions of art forms demand us to reconsider the complexity of the process of cultural transmissions and transformations.

Part Two analyzes how the backward rural turned into “a site of anticipation,strength,and resources” (11) and the political landscape of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) revolutionary base in Yan’an.Taking American journalist Edward Snow’s political pilgrimage to Yan’an as an example,Zhang recognizes rural China’s importance at national and global levels.For Snow,Yan’an serves as the best example of envisioning the future of China.Also,leftist writers portrayed another side of China as they stayed in Yan’an.Chinese female writers,such as Chen Xuezhao 陈学昭(1906–1991),expressed sensuous and travail details that presented information beyond the grand narrative of modern Chinese political history.Also,the famous female writer Ding Ling’s 丁玲(1904–1986) short stories highlight Chinese revolutionary women’s gender and professional roles in Yan’an.By examining Zhao Shuli’s 赵树理 (1906–1970) story “The Marriage of Little Erhei”(1943) and the making of Ma Xiwu-Liu Qiao’s stories (1943–1945),Chapter 4 investigates how“the language of love and law is used to shape revolutionary subjectivity” (143) and how the CCP successfully reformed the “outdated” rural traditional marriage system.Zhang notes that the CCP leadership endowed the notions of love,law,and labor with new meanings and thus constructed a new village culture as an essential part of revolutionary culture.

The last two chapters in Part Three focus on how fiction and films depict the aesthetic images of the industrialized countryside where the socialist industry emerged and developed and a unique Chinese national identity was formed during the Cold War period.Chapter 5 emphasizes how rural industrialization became the major goal for building a strong socialist nation-state.Promoting collective creativity and highlighting the idea of labor as play,the industrialized countryside provided a unique version of Chinese socialism to the world.The final chapter focuses on socialist films that were screened from 1949 to 1965 and focuses on urban educated youth’s physical,mental,and psychological transformations as they entered rural and remote areas.The underdeveloped countryside was constructed as “a new aesthetic realm in which camaraderie,professional care,domestic warmth,and communitarian intimacy generate energy for building socialism” (185).

Zhang’s book stands out as the very first academic monograph that systematically examines why and how the rural matters in modern China and identifies the various roles it has played over five decades.Zhang successfully shows how Chinese rural areas can serve as fields for cultural adaptation,globalized politics,industrial renovation,and personal growth and development.Zhang’s book paves a new path for studying the interactively dynamic relationship between the urban and the rural.One question that is left for Zhang is how to articulate the voices of rural residents.As they are the targets and participants of rural transformation,the words and actions of the Chinese peasantry deserve to be heard.

Going to the Countryside

is a must-read for scholars who are interested in issues of cultural reform,revolutionary politics,social engineering,and mass mobilization in modern China.The political,economic,and cultural significance of modern Chinese rural areas should never be overlooked or underestimated.