1 Translocal China
An introduction
Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein
The most obvious and most commented upon element of spatial change in today’s China has been the unprecedented geographic mobility of millions of labor migrants, tourists, brides, entrepreneurs, and many others. What we seek by deploying the term “translocal,” is to complicate this literal notion of mobility with many other forms and functions of connectedness, both past and present, and to ask how they have transformed localities and relations among localities within China. The term “translocal” has been appearing in recent work by cultural theorists (Clifford 1997: 7), geographers (Massey 1999; Cartier 2001: 26; Katz 2001; Castree 2004), anthropologists (Escobar 2001: 147; Eriksen 2003; Peleikis 2003), and historians (Rafael 1995; Dirlik 1999; Wigen 1999), and while it has sometimes been used simply as a substitute for more common terms like “transnational” or “global,” we use it here to highlight a simultaneous analytical focus on mobilities and localities.1 Translocality, then, draws our attention to the multiplying forms of mobility in China without losing sight of the importance of localities in people’s lives. To elaborate, we note four complications to any simplistic notions of what constitutes translocality.
First, translocality does not only mean people. It is crucially constituted as well by the circulation of capital, ideas and images, goods and styles, services, diseases, etc. It involves myriad technologies over and above those such as busses, trains, and airplanes that transport people. Translocality is also fashioned out of the rise of instantaneous modes of communication—especially the telephone, the Internet—and out of the profusion of media forms—television, video, VCD/DVDs—that transmit images of other places. Because of these multiple modalities, we emphasize the interdependence of the subjective dimension of translocality—vicarious mobilities and translocal imaginaries—with the physical movements we document here.
Second, the notion of the translocal draws us to images of connectedness, flows, networks, rhizomes, decenteredness, and deterritorialization. But we must emphasize that China’s translocality is not a phenomenon of simply crosscutting and undifferentiated lateral connections. We might go so far as to say that it is precisely China’s reform era differentiation, its unevenness, that constitutes and spawns current translocalities. Concomitantly, inequalities are produced and exacerbated by translocal flows. The dependence of much of the Chinese economy on migrant remittances is but one example. Just how it is that uneven development spawns a boom in translocal linkages should be high on the agenda of any investigation of the flows we call translocal.
Third, the transgression of spatial boundaries and the movement between scales characteristic of translocality by no means implies the effacement of place, region, province, or their accompanying identities. Instead, we observe, in tandem with the explosion of translocality in the current era, a revitalization of place-making and place differentiation, only some of which is market-driven. If, as geographer Doreen Massey has put it, “The identity of a place does not derive from some internalized history. It derives, in large part, precisely from the specificity of its interactions with the ‘outside’ ” (1994: 169), then we might expect an increase in interactions to generate more identity production around places. Our chapters reveal this process happening on multiple scales—from the body to the native place to the city, the county, the province, the region, the nation, and even the cosmopolitan. Moreover, we see these scales coming into question, potentially being renegotiated through the proliferation of productive activity around belonging and place identity.
Fourth, we stress the dilemma of how to talk about what’s new in China’s reform period without eliding the existence of older translocalities. How might earlier forms and practices of translocality have conditioned what we see in the present? Conversely, how might they contrast with current phenomena? Relatedly, through an examination of the late imperial and Maoist eras, we ask what the role of the state might be in the emergence and fostering of translocal ties. While the current translocal boom might appear to be an artifact of the mar-ketization and liberalization of Chinese society, a straightforward causal relation between the two is belied by the occurrences of translocality earlier in Chinese history. In order to pursue this line of inquiry, we begin by unpacking forms of power in relation to mobilities during earlier moments of Chinese history. We proceed with discussions of scale and place, followed by interrogations of issues around symbolic translocality, subjectivity, and the body.
Power and the state: genealogies of translocality
If the contemporary concept of translocality is to be understood in a context of social differentiation and spatial unevenness, then there are significant histories of state practice which have also played key roles in laying the framework within which translocal practices now emerge. Here we trace some of these historical trajectories to identify the genealogies of translocality that preceded current patterns. Our purpose is to consider how the state itself has maintained an interest in approaches to territorial administration and empire- or nation-building that might be called prototypes of translocality. More to the point, tensions in central-local relations in Chinese history have consistently been resolved by appealing to a translocal imaginary. Although today the state is by no means the only entity powerful enough to condition social relations in China, it offers a key entry-point into understanding how translocal practices have emerged in contemporary China. Drawing attention to the historical link between the Chinese state and a translocal imaginary suggests that the state has sought to dominate representations of place not simply by drawing and controlling boundaries around localities, but by defining the very geographical imaginations by which people understand their place in relation to the greater civilization.
By beginning our discussion with an examination of the state’s interest in translocality, we also seek to delink translocality with any necessary spatial politics of resistance to power. Because advocates of a progressive place politics have invoked the idea of a translocal imagination to convey a locally-rooted resistance to broader spatial relations of dominance (Massey 1994; Katz 2001), it is all the more necessary to acknowledge the state’s interest in controlling such a potentially subversive arena of representation. While the idea of translocality has been used, particularly by geographers, to capture the relational quality of place identity—and thus to describe place as unenclosed and unbounded—we hope to further develop the term in such a way that it be not limited to one specific context for interpreting place identity. Thus, we note here the interests of the state and, later, of capital in producing and maintaining translocal imaginations. We further note, in a later section on scale, that translocality offers an innovative approach to interpreting scale politics. With these interventions, we hope to use this introduction to both solidify the meaning of translocality and convey some of its potential for theoretical innovation not only within the China studies field, but also within the broader disciplines of geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and other relevant fields.
The late-imperial state
Why did the imperial state seek to define a translocal imaginary? In order to address this question, we might want to first ask about the state’s interest in the local. Citing work by Kishimoto Mio on seventeenth-century scholars Gu Yanwu and Wang Fuzhi, Duara (2000: 15) argues that the local was represented in orthodox Confucianism as a site of reform and an object of cultivation. The state maintained an official position of paternal guidance through moral leadership to revitalize the local (always assumed to equate with the rural village) in the face of commercial development, urbanization, and social class formation. Such a position would therefore entail a larger formation toward which the reform and cultivation of the local should aspire, and this of course was the high civilization of the empire with its pantheon of orthodox rituals, celestial beings, and cosmologies. The object of reform would be for the local to be fashioned as a microcosm of the empire, just as the empire was a microcosm of the cosmos. Such mimetic referencing has been observed throughout late-imperial China’s cultural landscapes from housing compounds (Knapp 1999) and city walls (Dutton 1998; Knapp 2000), to gardens (Foret 2000) and sacred mountains (Hahn 1988; Kleeman 1994). Ultimately, or ideally, the local would be the irreducible “essence” of civilization, but this would be the product of the state’s cultivation, rather than a natural quality of the local itself.
The local was thus a kind of project for the late-imperial state, one that required an ideology capable of linking the local firmly with the larger formation of the empire without sacrificing its symbolic value as the very foundation of Chinese civilization. This would presumably be difficult to maintain given the apparently isolated and self-sufficient nature of “the village.” Indeed, orthodoxy held such self-sufficiency as a virtue, for how else could the local withstand the ever-growing impurities of commerce, class differentiation, and urbanization? In fact, the power of the local as the ultimate “seed” of Confucianism’s enduring habits and values (as Fei Xiaotong would have it) necessitated a paradoxical ideology that both insisted on its isolated and irreducible nature and universalized it as an equivalent to the empire, civilization, and the entire cosmos. Faure and Siu’s chapter sets out by noting this paradox and resolves it by demonstrating the power of the state’s translocal imaginary to make the local appear as a vital part of the whole even though in practice most localities were indeed the isolated and “cellular” communities orthodoxy held them to be. “The belief that the local community was part of a wider whole was present in all of China’s earth-bound villages,” they argue. “It was part of Ming and Qing state ideology, expressed as much through the learned works of the literati as in village religion.” They continue, “The Chinese state, one might say, encouraged the translocal imagination; the ideology which drew the local community into the state assumed, not that state power could be extended into the village from the outside, but that state rituals would be drawn into the village from the inside.” In his study of territorial cults, Stephen Feuchtwang (2001) identified this project as the “imperial metaphor.” Thus, imperial cults of kinship and lineage extending beyond the official network of cities and towns provided a metaphorical reference with which local territorial cults negotiated their relations with the center.
We could summarize this by arguing that the late-imperial state’s interest in translocality was to cultivate subjects who identified themselves in exactly the same ways, whether in relation to the family, the village, or the empire. A translocal imagination enabled subjectivities to be tied not just to the locality but also to any and all localities simultaneously (and thus the empire as a whole), even if these were never seen, visited, or even really understood. As Faure and Siu put it, the goal would be for everyone to carry the same mental map, weaving together the rituals of daily (village) life with the larger formation of imperial administration. If they are correct, it suggests an interesting connection with the new localisms seen in the post-Mao era. Goodman and Feng and Zhan observe comparable translocal projects in Shanxi and Hainan, respectively. In their chapters, the post-Mao state seems to share a similar interest in translocality with its late-imperial predecessor. Goodman, for instance, describes the state’s efforts to build and promote “Shanxi culture” as resulting in a new translocal identity that is neither local nor provincial but which represents a network of multiple local identities. Like its late-imperial predecessor the post-Mao state remains interested in harnessing the power of the local for the purposes of regional development and nation-building.
Yet, Goodman also shows that a much broader set of processes is at work. The translocalism in Shanxi, he argues, cannot be attributed solely to the state’s development project. And so we might also ask whether late-imperial versions of translocality also went beyond the state ideological project described by Faure and Siu. It is tempting to assume so, but it is also necessary to remember that there is almost no comparison between the volume of today’s mobilities, networks and flows (of people, electronic communication, and other media, investment capital and remittances, commercial goods and services) and that which existed a century or two ago. Indeed, Faure and Siu caution against the assumption that late-imperial “translocality” was much more than an ideology. However, ideologies, if effective, do tend to take on lives of their own when received, resisted, or negotiated by those at whom they are directed. Thus, late-imperial attempts to produce a translocal imagination also provided a space for place-making within localities, as has been argued by both Feuchtwang (2001) and Wang Mingming (1995) with reference to local territorial cults which were able to produce meaningful local spaces within the constraints of the imperial system. Their work should remind us that while the state may maintain an interest in translocality, we should not assume that the state was in fact able to monopolize the production of spatial representations in China.
The Maoist state
As Faure and Siu remind us, whatever volume of non-state commercial trade, networking, and sojourning did exist among localities in late-imperial China was severely truncated under three decades of Maoist spatial restructuring. The ideology of “earth-bound” China ironically achieved its greatest success under the modernization and development of Mao’s socialist state, which oversaw unprecedented restrictions on personal mobility and a severe reduction in the commercial trade which accompanied such mobility. With the implementation of the system of household registration (hukou zhidu) China came to be spatially and occupa-tionally classified into four categories (rural, urban, agricultural, and non-agricultural).2 As a number of scholars have argued (Cheng and Seldon 1994; Chan and Zhang 1999), the hukou system was not implemented to limit population movement, much less keep people out of China’s cities, as is typically construed today. What it did was tie one’s identity and fortunes to a specific place of residence. As it was very difficult to change one’s registration status, it became a kind of caste-like system (Potter 1983), but one with specific spatial qualities. Hukou institutionalized one’s particular slot in the state’s organization of space, meaning that one’s relation with and access to the state was defined, at least in part, spatially. Any change in that relation or access, then, would be initiated by one’s ability to relocate within the state’s spatial organization. What this system established, in short, was a situation (still very much present in the contemporary era) where geographical mobility was tantamount to social mobility. While this dramatically reduced the possibility for translocal relations to develop outside of the state purview, the Maoist state nevertheless maintained an interest in fostering a kind of “universal localism” similar to that explored by Faure and Siu for late-imperial China. Accordingly, Mao recognized the need to appropriate the local by engendering the organic growth of “local” culture which was synonymous with the nation and with socialism (Levenson 1967; Holm 1991). Like its predecessors, the Maoist state regarded the local as a project for cultivation, but the success of this project was thought to lie in the state’s ability to reform the local from inside out, to cultivate what we might now see as translocal subjectivities which identified with the local and the nation simultaneously.
At the same time, the Maoist state was engaged in another sort of translocal project. In its efforts to redress the material imbalance between industrial coast and agricultural interior, as well as address perceived external threats to the nation’s security, thousands of skilled workers were sent inland from cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Nanjing, and thousands of urban youth were sent to the countryside to labor alongside peasants. A translocality of sorts resulted from such movements, for these migrants tended to maintain a dual sense of identity between their home cities and their new villages or work-unit (danwei) compounds in the interior. Many dreamed of return and eventually did return home, maintaining their long-distance ties at the subjective level even when actual travel was impossible.
These non-local identifications had material manifestations as well. As discussed in Sun’s chapter, many Anhui intellectuals, like those in the research and design institutions of Bengbu, lived “both separate from and above local economic life.” While shopping locally and sending their children to local schools, these migrants nevertheless lived in clearly delineated compounds, and maintained Beijing dialects. It is even possible to suggest that such translocal identities be seen as a continuation of the longer-term state project of translocal ideology identified by Faure and Siu, for Sun comments that, “Very often the danwei (workplace) is not separate from the nation-state. Instead it may be the material embodiment of the nation-state per se.” Dutton (1998: 194) has in fact made similar observations of the danwei, arguing that it be regarded as part of the socialist state’s apparatus of spatial technologies aimed at producing “a very definite kind of subjectivity and intersubjectivity” in which one’s position within a much broader macro-scale hierarchy was manifest in the micro-spatiality of the work unit compound itself. A similar kind of translocality could also be identified in relation to the Mao state’s practice of sending youth to the countryside, a practice that has led to a fascinating legacy of multilocal nostalgia, marriage, collective memory, and urban consumption today.
The post-Mao state
Since the early 1980s, Mao-era restrictions on mobility have been gradually relaxed as the state has encouraged the development of township and village enterprises, responded to the rural demand for access to urban markets, incomes, and standards of living, and orchestrated the transfer of surplus rural labor from agricultural to industrial occupations, and from interior to coast. More broadly, the state has gradually recognized the need for mobile labor markets to meet the demands of reg...
