Discerning the Cultural: An Ethnography of China’s Rural-Urban Divide by Lili Lai A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Judith Farquhar Christopher Nelson Dorothy Holland Peter Redfield Gang Yue © 2009 Lili Lai ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Lili Lai, Discerning the Cultural: An Ethnography of China’s Rural-Urban Divide (Under the direction of Judith Farquhar) This dissertation seeks a better understanding of the lived quality of the spatial and class division known as China’s rural/urban divide through an ethnographic inspection of daily practice, attitudes (at domestic, community, and county government levels), policy history, and local memory in Henan, China. It shows how at every point a person’s (or place’s, or practice’s) “ruralness” or “urban sophistication” is an intimate, local quality. By focusing on everyday social practices which may give insight into forms of embodiment and local cultural worlds, my ethnography brings together questions concerning space, embodiment, everyday life, and peasant status. My dissertation has made it clear that there are indigenous cultural processes through which the meaning of rural and urban location is made. The political economic roots and social determinants of “dirty villages,” the strategies of inhabiting “villages with empty centers,” and the local and national projects of cultural production all reveal much about class and power in China today. Unlike other close ethnographies of small places in China, this reading of local culture is considered in the context of the national and global practices that maintain a deeply divisive rural-urban divide. I argue that substantive ethnographic attention to the specificities of village life in the contemporary Henan context can destabilize China’s chronic rural-urban divide and recover a unique and sophisticated voice for at least one group of silenced “peasants.” iii To my mentor, Judy Farquhar. iv Acknowledgements Every dissertation is more or less a remarkable point in its author’s life, I assume. I am grateful for having reached this “turning point”, after nine years of graduate study in the Anthropology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. First and formost, I thank my advisor Judith Farquhar, a great mentor as well as wonderful friend. Without her sparkling intellectual inspiration, empathetic understanding, encouragement to quality work, and moreover, tireless and enthusiastic reading, commenting upon, and laboring over each draft of my dissertation, I will have hardly made this “great leap forward” as a non-native English speaker without any previous training in humanities, not to say cultural anthropology. My four other committee members also play an indispensible role in guiding me through this journey. Dottie Holland, Chris Nelson, Peter Redfield, and Gang Yue, all as outstanding scholars and laoshi (teachers) have contributed to my intellectual development. Here I want to thank Dr. Nelson in particular, who kindly agreed to take up the role as my program chair after Judy had moved to University of Chicago in my last several years of graudate study. Especially after coming back from my fieldwork, I had been greatly benefited by his stimulating but also insightful comments and suggestions on my draft of each chapter, generously offered in my process of writing, as well as his unfailing encouragement and support as a dutiful chair. I can’t thank more all the protagonists in this dissertation. Without them my stories can’t go on. (However I am requested not to disclose them, therefore I am not to v bring up their names.) As a matter of fact, it was exactly their mundane yet savory life that had made me decide to shift my research topic from rural medical care to the urban/rural divide, out of my acute feeling of being ignorant of everyday realities of the countryside when I first arrived in their village. In particular, I thank my two host families, who kindly (and maybe bravely) took me in as part of their family without really knowing me, a complete stranger who claimed to be a researcher but apparently was more interested in sitting around chatting. I also thank my friends in the county’s Chinese medicine hospital, especially “Dajie” Kou Rongyu. It was she who took me to the township office and helped to arrange my stay in the village. Later on, it was also she who secured a room for me to live in the hospital’s clinic building while conducting the archival research in the county. I thank Ms. Li who not only let me sit in the county archive, day after day, to read through almost every single document concerning local medical policy, but also photocopied many materials for me. And Mr. Qu, “Qu Lao”, an enthuthiastic medical historian in the county, who not only had taught me much of the local history, whose book manuscript that was generously given to me had proven to be an invaluable material for me to draw on. My fieldwork was funded by the Social Science Research Council and The Wenner- Gren Foundation. I acknowledge their support to my dissertation research. I should also acknowledge Mr. Wu Gang, vice director of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Thanks to his introductory note to the prefectural office, I was able to go “down” smoothly all the way from Beijing to the Henan village, as if sliding down a slopping channel (or a laundry chute). Along the same line, Ma Chunhua and Hu Gang at the Institute of Sociology of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) helped me vi obtain an introduction letter issued by the Institute, so that I was able to use it to assure the local authority of the legitimacy of my research. I am grateful to their facilitation. I am fortunate to be among a goup of remarkable graduate students at Chapel Hill. My first two years of graduate study were rough; they would have been even unbearable without the warm encouragement and at the same time stimulating intellectual exchange from my cohorts, Ana Araujo, Katheleen Martin, and Eduardo Resptrepo in particular. And I am greatly thankful to my dear friend Eric Karchmer, a sturdy backbone since I knew him in Beijing when I was trying to apply to a graduate program in anthropology, even before my coming to study in Chapel Hill. I believe Eric had read almost all the drafts of my papers for my first two year’s course works. He is essential in my gradual adaptation to the anthropological writing and, inevitably, thinking. My two writing groups have provided tremendous support and stimulus for me to finally reach the finishing line. My local writing group at Chapel Hill with my cohorts Ana and Kacie, and Vinci Daro and Kim Allen, had been wonderful in encouraging everyone to keep writing, and meanwhile providing pragmatic suggestions based upon close readings of each other’s drafts. My China-research writing group with Teresa Kuan, Jason Ingersol, and John Osberg, excellent peers in University of Sourthern California and University of Chicago, has been extremely benefial for me to sharpen my arguments and tidy up my structures of writing. I am greatly indebted to both writing groups. Finally, I hope that this dissertation may account for my long journey away from home, as an answer to the unconditional support of my parents, Lai Guoquan and Tong Wuqin, and my sister Lai Lilin, to their demanding daughter and sister. vii Table of Contents List of Figures………………………..………………………………………………….viii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………......1 I. The mobile rural-urban divide……………………… ………………………..3 II. Seeing like a state …………………………………………………………….9 III. The discourse of “three-nong question” ………………………………….18 IV. “Peasants” in anthropology …………………………………………………22 V. Recent ethnographies of rural China …………………………………… …30 VI. Discerning the cultural ……….……………………………………………...35 VII. Writing the cultural ………………………………………………………40 An Overview of Shang Village ………………………………………………………..44 Chapter One: Habitus and Dirt: Everyday Hygiene ……………………………….…....52 I. House, home, and family ……………………………………………………..58 II. Everyday hygiene …………………………………………………………….76 III. A bodily concern of hygiene ………………………………………………...87 IV. New house …………………………………………………………………..92 V. The uncanny trash …………………………………………………………103 VI. Uncanny modernization ……………………………………………………111 Chapter Two: Immanent Sociality: Open-ended Belonging…………………………...124 I. The “Xiaogang Village Paradox” ……………………………………………131 II. A society of familiars ……………………………………………………….139 III. Everyday sociality ………………………………………………………….145 IV. Art of social relations ………………………………………………………162 V. Migration – a general background ………………………………………….167 VI. Migrant life – reproducing belonging ……………………………………..175 VII. New families, new village ………………………………………………...192 Chapter Three: Wenhua Guangchang, the Culture Plaza ........................................…...207 I. A new socialist countryside ………………...………….…………………….211 II. Building the Wenhua Guangchang .........................................................…...217 III. Planting poplars to develop the economy ……………….…………………234 IV. Interpreting the “scriptures” from above ……………….………………….246 V. “Culture” in the village …………………………………………………….254 VI. Everyday life and travels of “culture” ……………………………………..269 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………277 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………...........291 viii List of Figures Figure 1: The location of Zhaozhou