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Deals with wasteland and related policies. In order to exploit wasteland resources, the central government launched the so-called Four Wastelands Auction Policy. This policy was hailed as a breakthrough in land management, which would open up undeveloped land resources, improve the ecological environment, and increase farmers’ income. The wastelands policy might spawn great changes in land tenure, because the auctions commercialize wasteland rights at an unprecedented scale. However, through in-depth case studies it is shown that the auction policy did not—and for the foreseeable future most likely will not—fulfil its proclaimed role in the reform of land rights, because both the institutions and the socio-economic conditions do not permit such changes. Worse even, in the cases studied, the auctions proved a complete failure and stirred up widespread grievances among the rural populace.

This historical-ethnographic study of village enclaves in Guangzhou explores the intensified entrenchment of villagers in a Maoist past when they faced market fluidities of a post-reform present. It underscores a rural–urban spatiality and a cultural divide between villagers, migrants, and urbanites that are simultaneously transgressed and reinforced. It highlights discursive categories and institutional practices that incarcerate the residents, who juggle lingering socialist parameters with compelling market forces and state development priorities. Connectivity and exclusion, agency and victimization, groundedness and dislocation as lived experience are captured by the historically thick social ethos in the enclaves. This article rethinks issues of emplacement and displacement, dichotomy, and process.

A new generation of local strongmen rose from the regional fringes. Their power was not culturally recognized, but they were able to accumulate vast assets at the expense of the town-based lineages. They sidestepped traditional arenas of negotiation by linking themselves directly to new regional military figures in a volatile network of patronage and intimidation. A different language of power prevailed over the cultural nexus that had been cultivated by the gentry-merchants for centuries. As rural communities were drawn into the personal orbit of territorial bosses, the authoritative presence of the imperial order became increasingly remote in the daily lives of the villagers.Militarists in Guangdong and elsewhere did take on various literati trappings and activities, such as building their own ancestral halls, patronizing schools, running for county government offices, and financing community rituals. However, these ritual efforts to gain legitimacy were diluted by the rapidly deepening crisis in the larger political order.

This essay focuses on the context that has allowed such engagement to take place in institutional, discursive, and personal terms. Although cramped in a small physical territory, residents in Hong Kong have drawn on the cultural resources, images, and institutions of two vast imperial empires. In the first century of its colonial history, Hong Kong was shaped by the global spread of a merchant culture that was dynamic, open, and unorthodox in practice but conservative in its Confucian pretensions and pursuits. The trading partners of Chinese merchants and their associated multicultural moralities added other layers of cultural resources. Historian Elizabeth Sinn argues that, for almost a hundred years, Hong Kong was a significant node—a space of flow between China, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. It thus provided an effective environment for sojourners and settlers, male and female, to deposit layers of value and institutional practice (Siu and Ku 2008, pp. 13–43).

This article is bringing studies of Chinese culture, society, and history closer to the mainstream of contemporary social theory. By analyzing the community-wide festivals in Xiaolan from the late 18th century to the present and by explicating how the nature, meaning, and dynamics of these cultural expressions intertwined with the evolution of the regional political economy, this essay suggests how one may build upon the rich body of historical materials and rethink the analytical tools.

This essay targets a Chinese scholarly audience, who deserves a coherent presentation of the analytical themes that my South China colleagues and I have been concerned with. One cannot ignore history when one studies the unifying and diversifying cultural processes in an entity one terms “China.” Years of field research in South China has made one appreciate the contexts when regional cultures and histories were made, and how they were represented in relation to real and imaginary political centers. Collectively, we have strived to be empirically grounded as well as informed by critical social theories. Key concepts highlighted in this essay are: analytical pursuit of moving targets, structuring, human agency, social practice, the cultural language of power, locality and translocality, and inter-Asian connectivity. We explore self-reflective field methods and apply critical reading to historical texts and cultural events. We might have started our intellectual journeys from South China, but our concerns have taken us far beyond, connecting oceans and landmasses across the globe in multi-disciplinary terms.

The problems of economic liberalization in a market town in south China raise theoretical and empirical questions concerning the role of the state at the local level, both in the past and in the present. The failure of the party-state to disengage itself from society today is due to an administrative history to the unfolding of which the town residents have contributed their efforts. In an era of entrepreneurial vigor that is promoted officially, social life and economic choices continue to be guided by manipulations of and around bureaucratic power. State and local society have interpenetrated each other in ways that are overlooked by binary conceptual schemes that emphasize their mechanical opposition. What we have here is an example of “state involution,” of their inextricable interlocking.

Scholars who observed the lack of color in rural social life in the Maoist era have also witnessed and marveled at the liberalizing energies released by the recent decade of reforms. Unprecedented movements of goods, capital, and people across the rural landscape have been accompanied by a flourishing of popular rituals. The phenomenon poses interesting questions about culture change. Has Maoist politics ironically preserved the popular culture of peasant communities to the extent that, once the party-state attempted to retreat from society, popular culture regained its former momentum to influence the process of modernization? Or, has peasant culture been so touched by the Maoist programs that what we observe today are new reconstitutions of tradition for coping with contemporary existence defined by the socialist state, rather than cultural remnants that survived the encounter with that state? On the basis of fieldwork carried out in 1986 in Nanxi zhen (a pseudonym), a market town in the heart of the Pearl River Delta known for the intensity of popular ritual activities in the past and the present, I will examine a set of rituals, especially those for funerals and weddings, and the meanings that practitioners attribute to them in order to address the issue of cultural continuity and change in rural China today.

In sum, factors leading to different payments of brideprice and dowry are complex. They involve intergenerational dependencies within the family as well as the fortunes of individual family members in relation to turbulent transformations of an entire century. Three crucial political turning points—the war interlude, the Maoist era, and the post-Mao reforms—have continued to create different life chances for the residents of the town and the sands and have triggered divergent strategies. In analyzing the terms of marital transfer in Nanxi zhen and the sands, I hope to provide a historically grounded and meaning-focused account of the ways transformations of political economy intertwine with cultural, symbolic resources that people use to make sense of their lives.

We have attempted to use a historical study to explore the Pearl River Delta, known for Dan and Han identities separated by strong languages of literati achievements and lineage commitments. This chapter has focused on the twin issues of ethnicity and orthodoxy. Intertwined with them are larger conceptual issues concerning empire and frontier. For centuries, cultural boundaries in the sands of the delta have been fluid and often reworked under different circumstances of state and local society formation.

I suggest that the marriage strategies have been sustained and at the same time changed by different groups in various economic and political circumstances through the centuries: the “literati” lineages in their acts of territorial expansion and cultural exclusion in the late imperial period, those women labor workers who used their economic independence in the turn of the century to resist marriage, and contemporary residents of Xiaolan who aspire to join the urban working class and who eagerly distance themselves from peasant neighbors. Each of these territorially based groups has given the local marriage custom a self-interested reading. Together, they have perpetuated the cultural assumptions and the historical legacies of an emerging larger polity to which they have attached themselves.

Both intellectuals and peasants have played vital roles in the political arena of 20th-century China. The short stories that follow focus on peasant life and were written by leading literary figures from the 1930s to the 1980s. In my introduction to each part, I try to point to the structure of values that guided intellectual thought and actions and to demonstrate the cultural mechanisms that tied writers to subjects in a political order rapidly being transformed by their often unintended efforts.

The analysis of lineage, community, and politics in this essay illustrates some general concern of historical anthropology: how do historical events take into account inequalities of power, and how are social institutions and cultural perceptions understood in the spatial context of an evolving, differentiating political economy? In state agrarian societies where hierarchies of power and diverse bases of authority exist and are often contested, stability rests on the ways local elites anchor themselves in the community as well as within the larger polity. The evolution of local legitimacy involves the percolation of a state culture, be it imperial or revolutionary. In numerous arenas, the locally powerful and those they dominated were engaged in shaping this process. As in other times, discourses on lineage and community in the 20th century were ways by which several generations of political actors created a new language by means of inherited words.

This chapter attempts to use the “fever” for luxury housing in post-Mao Guangdong to highlight a historically specific circulation of cultural meanings in the making of a regional landscape. Many regions of China experienced a building boom in the 1990s. Overseas Chinese capital, particularly that from Hong Kong developers, has partially shaped the skyline of coastal metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai—luxury housing estates, shopping malls, five-star hotels, golf courses, and clubs. Private housing markets in these cities have grown with remarkable speed and intensity, and a large portion of this growth is fueled by government danwei providing units for employees to purchase at subsidized prices. Where private developers enter the market to offer affordable choices, families have explored the “one family two systems” strategy in housing as they have in jobs. One member may explore entrepreneurial ventures while another holds onto state sector allocations for basic security. In pursing their own intimate spaces in a more mobile housing situation that allows residents to straddle state and market, are they redefining social hierarchies that have previously been shaped by bureaucratic agenda and political privilege? Have their notions of place-based identities and loyalties changed by the new housing choices?

This chapter takes a slice from the census records to examine policies, assumptions, and procedures related to a recent period of in-flow from China and to assess their impact on Hong Kong’s present and future human landscape. I focus on two waves. First, those who crossed the border to Hong Kong, often illegally, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were labeled “new immigrants” and treated with scorn by some Hong Kong residents. They found work and were absorbed into the Hong Kong society. Many returned to their native places for marriage. In the 1990s, they started to bring to Hong Kong their mainland spouses and young children, who formed the second wave of newcomers. This wave is also known in popular parlance as “new immigrants” and, since the mid-1990s in official categories, as “new arrivals.” The meaning of the label changed somewhat, from one marking difference in the 1980s, to one hardened against those seen as society’s burden. These two waves of immigrants have posed complicated human resource and social issues for Hong Kong.

The term “China” presents many faces and meanings. The wealth of differentiating experiences beneath the surface of an enduring, naturalizing uniformity encompassed by the term has intrigued scholars, prompting them to call for analytical tools that illuminate the paradox at various historical junctures. A basic assumption is required, which forms the basis of this paper: “Chineseness” is not an immutable set of beliefs and practices but a process that captures a wide range of emotions and states of being. It is a civilization, a place, a polity, a history, and a people who acquire identities through association with these characteristics. I will highlight crucial moments in the construction of cultural identities in a region loosely termed South China (Huanan), where different meanings of being Chinese are selectively pursued. Instead of presenting reified, objectively identifiable traits and boundaries imposed on a population, I stress their fluid and negotiated qualities as perceived by those asserting them. However circumstantial the contestations, and however duplicitous these identities may have seemed, their emergence is also rooted in particular social, political, and economic relationships.

Physical symbols are not to be changed arbitrarily, but empires have related to subject populations with political notions quite different from and rather differently than those of modern nation-states. Sovereignty often means something different at the political center than in the margins, and the cultural kaleidoscope we call Hong Kong is a result of numerous historical landmarks on these notions. We are all too familiar with these events and how their political history is told today. Therefore, I would rather explore the social and cultural meanings of people’s lives on the ground; we may find interesting stories there that do not fit into any standard political categories.

I was initially concerned with a central theme in China’s development strategy: rural industrialization. Since late 1958, the regime had promoted small-scale enterprises at the commune and brigade levels of administration. These were to provide the communities with income, employment, services for agriculture, and industrial skills. By mobilizing local initiative for self-reliant development, the regime hoped to avoid an exodus from the villages to cities, the social and political consequences of which have continued to plague many agrarian societies in the transition to a modern economy. My political attitudes at the time made me eager to learn how the development of these enterprises facilitated what I believed to be a gradual, benign integration of the vast countryside into a modern socialist state, and how parochial concerns of family and community might eventually be transformed to identifications with party and nation. The Chinese road to socialism, I thought, might become a model for agrarian societies undergoing the pains of modern development.

This essay reviews the following books: Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999, by Yan Yunxiang, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy, by Vanessa Fong, and On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka.