China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Seth Harter, University of Michigan
Chair and Discussant: Ming K. Chan, Hoover Institution
This panel tackles two questions of Cantonese identity: to what degree, and under what circumstances, is provincial affinity more salient than a national or sub-provincial one; and in what capacity can overseas Cantonese participate in this Guangdong identity? We pay particular attention to the ways in which the spatial dimensions of identity formation are played out on a temporal field.
Set in a era of weak central control during the 19th century, Miles’ paper analyzes Cantonese scholars’ selective borrowing from other periods of the Lingnan tradition and other regions of the broader Confucian tradition in an attempt to create a vibrant pan-Guangdong culture. Other works, in contrast, emphasize a county-level affinity at the expense of a provincial one. Frazier’s paper turns to an industrial setting to examine factory workers’ responses to new central state controls over wages and production in the 1950s. His study shows the conflicts engendered by different understandings of the role of time in the workplace.
Ng and Harter both examine the salience of Cantonese identity and culture for those who have left the province. Ng’s study of Cantonese opera traces its development from a handful of sub-provincial traditions to a unified art form that was continually enriched by exposure to the theatrical conventions found in Cantonese communities overseas. Through the medium of Guangdong guidebooks, Harter demonstrates how the 1950s plunge in cross-border communication led to a sense of ruptured political and economic coevalness in Hong Kong and Guangdong, despite the books’ intention of fostering a united Cantonese identity.
Steven B. Miles, University of Washington
In the past decade, Cantonese scholars have expressed an interest in what they see as the formation of Lingnan culture in the late Qing dynasty. While complicating the image of a unified Lingnan culture, the return of Hong Kong has stimulated even stronger interest in this notion. I will examine issues of Lingnan identity and culture through a study of scholarship and printing in nineteenth-century Guangzhou Prefecture. Confucian scholars in Guangzhou had access to competing claims on what constituted Lingnan culture: the Ming philosophical tradition of Chen Xianzhang, the Ming-Qing legacy of Guangdong poetry, and the Kaozheng tradition recently imported from Jiangnan and embodied in Guangzhou’s Xuehaitang academy. One important issue is to what extent this last scholarly tradition was ever fully absorbed into a "Lingnan culture." Ironically, the Xuehaitang is often portrayed as the core of that culture in the nineteenth century.
I will concentrate on two printing projects in the nineteenth century. The most well-known collectanea of Lingnan texts was printed by a Hang merchant and edited by a Xuehaitang co-director. This work attempted to present a coherent image of an organic Lingnan culture stretching from Han and Tang times. In contrast, the works of Zhu Ciqi sought to glorify sub-regions or sub-cultures of Lingnan. In light of Zhu’s rejection of offers to join the Xuehaitang, these projects amount to a critique of the image of a unified Lingnan culture represented by the Xuehaitang academy, while granting local cultures higher status.
Wing Chung Ng, The University of Texas, San Antonio
In the history of the Cantonese opera, the two decades before the Pacific War have long been considered its golden age. As an operatic genre derivative from other regional theaters performing in Guangdong since the Ming-Qing era, the Cantonese opera evolved, in the 1920s and 1930s, into a very distinctive art form with the use of the Cantonese dialect in both sung and spoken passages, the invention of new aria types, and other unique performance styles. Instrumental to this development was the formation of the so-called Sheng-Gang Troupes based in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
These troupes were undoubtedly successful in capturing a large local audience, and the great popularity of their famous actors like Xue Jiaoxian and Ma Shizeng attested to the rise of a mass entertainment in the urban milieu of Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and also to the vitality of an unfolding regional culture and identity centered on the twin cities. No less important in underlying the success of these troupes was their overseas circuitry which took them to perform frequently in the Cantonese communities in Southeast Asia and North America. These trips were rewarding not only financially but culturally, affording the opportunities for exposure to new theatrical practices and ideas. Moreover, they renewed and consolidated the imagination of a Cantonese identity among the fellow natives overseas.
Mark Frazier, The National Bureau of Asian Research
In the 1950s, central officials in Beijing attempted to standardize industrial wages in factories throughout China by imposing a rigid wage hierarchy, based on technical ability, which had been borrowed directly from Soviet industrial ministries. CCP officials from Northern China charged with administering Guangzhou and its industrial workplaces found widespread resistance to the disciplines of the socialist planned economy, with its skill-based wage determination and material incentives based on the conception of "to each according to his work." While enterprises in Guangzhou rapidly adopted the structure of socialist wage planning and labor management, the norms and practices of workers within enterprises offered a competing conception of work, money, and time. Officials chided the city’s workers for their laziness, political apathy, and their economistic concerns with higher pay. Guangzhou workers rejected the state’s call to sacrifice the pursuit of cash for national and socialist construction. This opposition to the socialist wage system was not based on appeals to regional or local identity, however, but on a general disdain for the disciplines and demands of factory work itself. In rejecting the mantle of modern proletarians, Guangzhou workers contributed to the failure of the Soviet model of labor management in China.
Seth Harter, University of Michigan
After a century of sharing a single population and economy, in the 1950s Hong Kong and Guangdong underwent a dramatic political and economic divergence. On both sides of the border this was experienced as ruptured coevalness: Guangdong became Hong Kong’s economic past—an underdeveloped hinterland of cottage industries and agriculture; and Hong Kong became Guangdong’s political past—a territory oppressed by colonialism. This disjuncture lasted 30 years before negotiations on Hong Kong’s retrocession twisted the equation. Suddenly Guangdong became Hong Kong’s political future—a region under the loosening grip of a socialist bureaucracy; and Hong Kong became Guangdong’s economic future—a hub of international trade, light industry and financial services.
Temporal bifurcation would have been unthinkable without the virtual freeze in migration, trade and communication which began in 1950. Ironically, leftist efforts to bridge this gap aggravated the loss of coevalness. For example, mainland sympathizers in Hong Kong published travel guides to Guangdong designed to strengthen Cantonese emigrants’ sense of identity with, and responsibility for, their native places. In seeking to tap emigrants’ resources, these travel guides depicted Guangdong’s new polity as further evolved than the antiquated colonial administration in Hong Kong, making it worthy of assistance and emulation. Meanwhile, the economic stagnation of the province made remittances a moral imperative. My paper will examine the ways in which these travel guides, while trying to reunite the Cantonese in both regions, actually placed them on divergent political and economic time lines.