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‘Does home have to be a country or a city?… Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate. … We seemed always to have been home.’

Recent studies on Chinese investment in Africa have particularly focused on the hardware of development – infrastructure – and its impact. China's vision to forge a new global order was made explicit when Xi declared his ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy in 2013. Underlying the grand infrastructural schemes and political posturing are hidden financial manoeuvres, the soft side of power, unspoken sociality and value contestations. This article focuses on the variegated landscape of China–Africa trade/finance infrastructure centring on Hong Kong. It highlights top-down state orchestration but also explores historical contingencies that have shaped the strategies of those whose footprints unexpectedly straddle continental divides.

This chapter attempts to use rare field data collected in a rural commune in Guangdong Province, and analyses such a problem against the ‘maturing’ of a local leadership structure during the past three decades of socialist transformations. The descriptive material captures the essence of the changing nature of local leadership, the penetrating effects of national politics on the local community, and the economic and ideological consequences. Present conditions in Huancheng Commune resulted from a series of administrative and economic transformations in ownership, the organization of production, and political control that closely reflected national policy fluctuations. A more liberal administrative reorganization occurred in Huancheng during the retrenchment phase of 1962, following the principle of respecting the rights of lower collective units, set out in the ‘Sixty Articles on Agriculture’. By 1969, when the revolutionary committees were formed at all administrative levels down to the brigades, the administration of agricultural production stabilized again.

This review uses multilingual sources to illuminate China–Africa encounters in historical, socialist, and postsocialist contexts. It emphasizes interregional connections over time and uses nuanced ethnographic accounts to complement macrogeopolitical analyses. The article focuses on mutual stereotypes as well as on the negotiation of social and cultural barriers in everyday life. It challenges static, bounded conceptual categories in social science and policy research. The ethnographic studies cited highlight the complexities of human agency and historical legacies on the ground and show the contested democratization of space and opportunities that ensue both when Africans enter Chinese social fields and vice versa. In the process, these examples force us to rethink analytical assumptions about mobility, hierarchy, and political economy in ways that complicate Cold War–derived understandings of both China and Africa.

This chapter presents the issue of the interaction of culture, state, and society over time. It shows that the rituals are reconstituted by a different cast of performers and that the process reproduces a much transformed rural society in which the power of the socialist state has long been taken for granted. The chapter considers meaningful connections between cultural change and political economy. Major works in Chinese anthropology suggest that rituals, as cultural performances, reflect the ways in which practitioners order their sociopolitical reality, both symbolically and instrumentally. The socialist revolution of 1949 not only attacked popular rituals severely but also has destroyed most of their social bases and replaced their political functions. While subscribing to the ceremonies is expensive and difficult, especially when ritual specialists do not operate altogether publicly, they are nonetheless eagerly pursued. Certain talismanic qualities of the rituals are particularly appealing to the young, who are uncharacteristically eager about practicing and financing the rituals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.