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This note summarizes key analytical themes that a group of us who works on Chinese culture and history have given much thought. They are 1) text and life worlds, 2) local and translocality, 3) the past in the present, 4) unity and diversity in Chinese culture, 5) structuring and human agency.

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 postreform 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.

Fei Xiaotong, the doyen of Chinese anthropologists, summarizing Chinese society in the 1930s, described it as essentially “earth-bound”. In rendering his Chinese term xiangtu as earth-bound, rather than rural or rustic, he emphasized land and its essential part in Chinese society. He said so without ambiguity: rural people carry the smell of the earth; they do because they depend on it for their livelihood. His whole book of essays builds upon this concept. The land-based community rests upon interpersonal relationships, governed by custom rather than law, dependent upon an oral rather than a written tradition. It consists of clusters of families, may best be described as a mini-clan, and is essentially closed to outsiders (Fei 1948: 1-7). This cellular society, to borrow from a term created in the 1970s, was crisscrossed by the common culture of the scholarly class, often denoted as the gentry, and, foreshadowing G. William Skinner (1971), who argued that rural markets in China opened and closed to the outside world as their relationship to the city changed over time. For Skinner, opening and closing had to do with political stability; for Fei, they stemmed from the exploitation of the countryside by the city (Fei 1949: 16-23).

When China tells Hong Kong to ‘Keep on dancing, keep on horse racing’, locals ask to what extent ‘the people of Hong Kong’ can choose to dance to their own tunes?

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir:Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlong's reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.

SARS (Acute Respiratory Syndrome) first presented itself to the global medical community as a case of atypical pneumonia in one small Chinese village in November 2002. Three months later the mysterious illness rapidly spread and appeared in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Toronto and then Singapore. The high fatality rate and sheer speed at which this disease spread prompted the World Health Organization to initiate a medieval practice of quarantine in the absence of any scientific knowledge of the disease. Now three years on from the initital outbreak, SARS poses no major threat and has vanished from the global media. Written by a team of contributors from a wide variety of disciplines, this book investigates the rise and subsequent decline of SARS in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Multidisciplinary in its approach, SARS explores the epidemic from the perspectives of cultural geography, media studies and popular culture, and raises a number of important issues such as the political fate of the new democracy, spatial governance and spatial security, public health policy making, public culture formation, the role the media play in social crisis, and above all the special relations between the three countries in the context of globalization and crisis. It provides new and profound insights into what is still a highly topical issue in today’s world.

Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Lisa Rofel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xvi. 330 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

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 conceptual schemes that emphasize their mechanical opposition. What we have here is an example of “state involution,” of their inextricable interlocking.[rural China, socialist transformation, market revival, political culture, state involution, social change]