John Myers Flower
Marshall, Virginia
B.A., Haverford College 1982
M.A., University of Virginia 1990
A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty
of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Professor John Israel, Adviser
Department of History
University of Virginia
May 1997
Portraits of Belief:
Constructions of Chinese Cultural Identity in the "Two Worlds" of
City and Countryside in Modern Sichuan Province
This project is an intellectual history addressing the question of who defines Chinese cultural identity in the post-Mao era (1976-present). The study focuses on the conflict of worldviews between intellectuals and villagers, both through intensively exploring the values, beliefs and reflections expressed by individual Chinese on the meaning of "Chinese traditional culture," and by critically examining the construction of social group identities on this contested field. Based on documentary evidence, and interviews with informants from widely different social contexts in Sichuan province (including villagers, academics, and poets), the research combines textual analysis and oral history with the participant-observation method of extended fieldwork in both urban and village settings.
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of Chinese cultural identity by looking at the contrast between the two conceptual worlds of villagers and urban intellectuals. These worlds can be understood as diverging over the questions of belief and the definition of "Chineseness." The dominant discourse of intellectuals casts modernization. The dominant ideology of "modernization nationalism" rests on assumptions of the hegemony of the intellectual class in China (however diverse it might be) and a definition of a modern Chinese cultural identity constructed through negative reference to a "backward," 'peasant' identity. Although intellectuals differ as to the specific ingredients essential to this definition, the anti-peasant strain is common to most, and is related to their championing of "rationality" as essential to modernization. Just as intellectuals' self-consciousness as a group is largely defined in negative reference to "peasant consciousness," rationality is defined against "feudal superstition", associated with not only the "irrational" policies of the Cultural Revolution and Maoism, but primarily with the "backward" beliefs stubbornly embedded in the countryside.
For farmers, the goal of modernization is also important, and is broadly understood as a vision, a worldview and set of values in many ways consistent with those put forth by the intellectuals. The problem is not so much what farmers think of the idea of modernization in the abstract, but on what terms, and at what costs to whom, this transformation to modernity proceeds. In the village of this study, farmers weighed modernization's promise of increasing their economic living standard against what they perceived as a decline in their moral standard of living and threat to their local identity brought by political and economic transformation. Chapters six and seven draw a portrait of the village's historical experience and of the values and beliefs of individual farmers today. A salient example of the villagers' assertion of their own sense of cultural identity, posed against the crisis of social chaos and moral decline, existed in the revitalization of local religious traditions, especially the rebirth of a local temple during the course of fieldwork (1991-1993), and described in chapter eight. The thesis argues that the conflicts with authorities over religious revitalization in the countryside underscore the central conflict between intellectual elites and farmers surrounding the definition of Chinese cultural identity; that is, the values and beliefs expressed by villagers are the very "peasant consciousness" and "feudal superstition" castigated by intellectuals as obstacles to modern development. The thesis concludes that until those elites acknowledge 'peasant' values as legitimate, their attempts to define Chinese cultural identity will be fruitless.
Introduction...........................................................................................1
Chapter One: Why Culture?..................................................................29
Chapter Two: Peasant Consciousness...................................................84
Chapter Three: The Salon Discourse of Chengdu.....................................137
Chapter Four: Poetry, Protest and Particularity........................................................................................... 206
Chapter Five: Xiakou............................................................................ 289
Chapter Six: A Temple Reborn............................................................ 375
Conclusion: Dialogue............................................................................. 424
China Notebook The Village The Temple Intellectuals East Asian syllabus
This page last updated by Pam (pjleonar@email.uncc.edu) and John (jmflower@email.uncc.edu) on 02/20/00