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.

Subverting Lineage Power

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.

The Grounding of Cosmopolitans

A new generation of local strongmen rose from the regional fringes. Their power was not culturally recognized, but they were able to accumulate vast assets at the expense of the town-based lineages. They sidestepped traditional arenas of negotiation by linking themselves directly to new regional military figures in a volatile network of patronage and intimidation. A different language of power prevailed over the cultural nexus that had been cultivated by the gentry-merchants for centuries. As rural communities were drawn into the personal orbit of territorial bosses, the authoritative presence of the imperial order became increasingly remote in the daily lives of the villagers.Militarists in Guangdong and elsewhere did take on various literati trappings and activities, such as building their own ancestral halls, patronizing schools, running for county government offices, and financing community rituals. However, these ritual efforts to gain legitimacy were diluted by the rapidly deepening crisis in the larger political order.

Recycling Tradition

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.

Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia’s Urban Postmodern

How have city populations in Asia contributed to these transformations in recent decades? As illustrated in chapters in Worlding Cities (Roy and Ong 2011), they have experienced unprecedented volatility in life and work due to intense flows of capital, technology, migrant workers, cultural resources, and fundamental changes in political sovereignty. A rising, predominantly expatriate, middle class in Dubai banks on the city’s future, and that in Mumbai lives for the present, Bollywood style (pp. 160–81). However, a provincialized middle class in Hong Kong seems painfully aware of its having overdrawn past advantages. The emergence of China as a global power provides Hong Kong with opportunities but exacerbates its vulnerabilities. Circulation of its population is key for future survival or aggrandizement. But in the postwar decades, Hong Kong’s diverse migrant population has become grounded, homogenized, and inward looking. With limited political vision, institutional resources, and cultural flexibility, the city and its residents might not have the compass to navigate an intensely competitive China and a connected Asia that are quite beyond their imagination. What are the future “worlding” prospects for a city if its citizens lack the confidence to move forward?

Grounding Displacement

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.

The Cultural Landscape of Luxury Housing in South China

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?

Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan

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.

Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China

In sum, factors leading to different payments of brideprice and dowry are complex. They involve intergenerational dependencies within the family as well as the fortunes of individual family members in relation to turbulent transformations of an entire century. Three crucial political turning points—the war interlude, the Maoist era, and the post-Mao reforms—have continued to create different life chances for the residents of the town and the sands and have triggered divergent strategies. In analyzing the terms of marital transfer in Nanxi zhen and the sands, I hope to provide a historically grounded and meaning-focused account of the ways transformations of political economy intertwine with cultural, symbolic resources that people use to make sense of their lives.

China’s Century

This essay reviews the following books: Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999, by Yan Yunxiang, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy, by Vanessa Fong, and On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka.