CHINESE RURAL IMAGINATIONS

Imagining the Rural in Contemporary Chinese Culture

This subproject focuses on mainland China, characterized by a distinctive pattern of large-scale internal rural-urban migration (Miller 2012; R. Murphy 2002), seen to result in a “disappearing countryside” (Zhao 2013). The migration process is complicated by the hukou system, which prevents rural migrants from formally registering as urban residents and accessing urban facilities and services (Friedman 2014). Research on rural-urban migration in China often focuses on migrant lives in the cities (Ngai 2005; Sun 2002) and on the new urban formations that have appeared throughout the country (Li 2011). The resulting “emaciation of the countryside” (Yan 2012) has received less scholarly attention.

The Chinese government’s National New Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) calls urbanization “the objective tendency of the development of humankind and… an important symbol of national modernization,” and intends for another 100 million people to move to cities (Friedman 2014). Yet the Maoist conception of the rural as an optimal environment for producing properly revolutionary subjects—actualized in Cultural Revolution-era rustication programs (Pan 2003)—continues to linger, reappearing in recent plans to send cultural producers to the countryside to “form a correct view of art.” The subproject examines the contradictory role of the rural as simultaneously a valued counterpart to the overindulgences and pollutions of urban, globalized, capitalist life, and an unsightly realm of poverty and backwardness, and how such contradictions are negotiated in contemporary cultural imaginations of the rural.

The vast changes the Chinese rural is undergoing are increasingly reflected upon in literature, film and television. The most critical of these reflections in literature and film have been subject to state censorship, including the films of Jia Zhangke and Yan Lianke’s novel Dream of Ding Village, which fictionalizes the way unregulated bloodselling in the 1990s led to outbreaks of HIV/AIDS in Henan province. Such censored productions can and do influence cultural imaginations of the rural; not only are they screened at prominent international film festivals and nominated for international literary prizes, but they also tend to be widely available within China through piracy and informal networks (de Kloet 2010; Zha 1996).

Television produces the most widespread imaginations of contemporary rural life in China. CCTV (Chinese State Television) broadcasts a number of fictional programs set in rural areas, with the so-called “Jilin TV plays” (set in Jilin province), of which Liu Laogan I was among the first, proving especially popular. Besides developing its own rural-based dramas, Chinese television has also adapted foreign programs, as in Hunan Satellite Television’s reality TV show Dad, Where Are We Going? (based on a Korean format), which sends urban-based celebrity fathers and their children to experience, among other things, ‘traditional’ rural life.

This subproject examines what aspects of Chinese 21st-century rural life do and do not become visible in prominent rural imaginations, and what politics these imaginations imply, using the shared conceptual framework of the comparative project, rural studies research on China (Tilt 2010; Yan 2003; Yan and Chen 2013; Yeh et al. 2013) and studies of Chinese rural imaginations in literature, film and television (Berry 2009; Gaetano 2009; He 2014; Sun 2014; Wu 2006).

References:
Berry, Michael. Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’: Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Friedman, Eli. “The Urbanization of the Chinese Working Class.” Jacobin 15-16 (2014): n. pag.
Gaetano, Arianne. “Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke’s The World.” Visual Anthropology Review 25.1 (2009): 25-39.
He, Chengzhou. “Rural Chineseness, Mo Yan, and World Literature.” Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller. Ed. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2014. 77-90.
Kloet, Jeroen de. China with a Cut: Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010.
Li, Lixing. “The Incentive Role of Creating ‘Cities’ in China.” China Economic Review 22.1 (2011): 172181
Miller, Tom. China’s Urban Million: The Story behind the Biggest Migration in Human History. London: Zed Books, 2012.
Murphy, Rachel. How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Ngai, Pun. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Pan, Yihong. Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace: China’s Youth in the Rustication Movement. Lanham: Lexington, 2003.
Sun, Wanning. Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
—. Subaltern China: Rural migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Tilt, Bryan. The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil Society. New York: Columbia UP, 2013.
Wu, Xiao-dong. “The Disillusionment with the Rural Utopia in Chinese Literature.” Journal of Peking University 1 (2006).
Yan, Hairong. “Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post‐Mao China.” American Ethnologist 30.4 (2003): 578-596.
—. “Gender, Migration, and Rural-Urban Relations in Post-socialist China.” Migration in the 21st Century: Political Economy and Ethnography. Ed. Pauline Gardiner Barber and Winnie Lem. London: Routledge, 2012. 196-210.
Yan, Hairong, and Yiyuan Chen. “Debating the Rural Cooperative Movement in China, the Past and the Present.” Journal of Peasant Studies 40.6 (2013): 955-981.
Yeh, Emily T., et al. “Rural Politics in Contemporary China.” Journal of Peasant Studies 40.6 (2013): 915928.
Zha, Jianying. China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture. New York: The New Press, 1996.
Zhao, Yongjun. China’s Disappearing Countryside: Towards Sustainable Land Governance for the Poor. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Background image: "The Eight-Point Charter of agriculture is good," 1974. Courtesy of chineseposters.net.