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This chapter examines how folk paper-cuts have served as a site of intellectual expressions and debates about the meanings of—and the entangled relationships between—culture, gender, history, and the state in modern China. It first takes up the question of folk traditions, gender, and modernity before discussing the practice of paper-cutting in the Yan'an period (1937–1947) and in the late 1970s. It then considers how gender figures in the narrative of the folk cultural form of paper-cuts in Yan'an and its later deployment by urban intellectuals in various nationalist campaigns. In particular, it looks at women paper-cutting artists in contemporary Ansai County and describes how folk paper-cuts have become that “site of awkward engagement” where the agenda of the state, global capital regimes of values, and local tradition forces interacted with each other. The chapter suggests that, through the representation of paper-cuts, the binary oppositions of gender and rural–urban divide have become part of the meanings of Chinese modernity itself.

The introduction examines the ideology and politics of secular and Catholic intellectuals who created social and revolutionary movements in El Salvador between 1960 and 1980. These intellectuals drew on deeply rooted cultures of resistance in El Salvador and multiple international experiences to organize the revolutionary mobilizations that anticipated the civil war. The introduction includes a discussion of the influence of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who for many remains the quintessential rebel poet, deeply ingrained in the imaginaries of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions. It also describes the influence of peasant leaders, especially in Chalatenango, a northern department in El Salvador, in the formation of the insurgency. The alliances between urban activists and peasant leaders were largely formed through popular, institutional, and religious pedagogy, that is, rural cooperative training, literacy programs, and workshops on Catholic social doctrine. The introduction considers the roles that Salvadoran intellectuals played in revolutionary politics in the context of the Cold War that prevailed in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan'an was transformed into a container of tradition and the practice of paper-cutting into an intangible cultural heritage. It first considers the origin narrative of Xiaocheng Folk Art Village before discussing how China's urban intellectuals in the fields of folklore, religious studies, and anthropology have sought to re-understand the meanings of their work in the broader national and international framework. It then explains how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village emerged as a site of local, national, and international interests, with particular emphasis on the birth of creative rural subjects, reconfigured domestic relations, and a new public life in the village. It also describes the village's democratic struggles over folk art and concludes with an analysis of the politics of cultural authenticity and the invention of tradition in the broader context of intense urbanization and agrarian crisis in China. The chapter argues that heritage making in China is a process of “narrative battle” in which various actors construct differentiated meanings of history and tradition against the official party-state narrative.

This concluding chapter infers from the preceding analysis on Vietnam's political activism. In their attempts to publicly assert their voice, urban intellectuals and journalists, such as Nguyễn An Ninh, had retained a sense of social responsibility and believed that the collective good—political and cultural—of the community ultimately depended on them. However, in a country where more than 80% of the population lived in rural areas, the practical prospect of mass mobilization, as incited by journalistic works, not only alarmed the French authorities, but also led many activists to discard newspapers altogether, ultimately regarding these as inadequate instruments of political action. Amid the tensions between the divisions of Vietnam's political activism, the 1926 events produced forms of political expressions that were previously unknown in Vietnam.