Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China 9781789203585

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Claiming Homes

DISLOCATIONS

General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Don Kalb, University of Bergen and Utrecht University, Linda Green, University of Arizona The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses. Recent volumes: Volume 26 Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China Charlotte Bruckermann Volume 25 Democracy Struggles: NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia Theodora Vetta Volume 24 Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning Edited by Don Kalb and Massimiliano Mollona Volume 23 The Revolt of the Provinces: AntiGypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary Kristóf Szombati Volume 22 Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia Marek Mikuš

Volume 21 The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal Michael Hoffmann Volume 20 Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala Luisa Steur Volume 19 Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa Joe Trapido Volume 18 The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility Edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak Volume 17 Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life Ines Hasselberg

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/dislocations

Claiming Homes Confronting Domicide in Rural China

_ Charlotte Bruckermann

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Charlotte Bruckermann All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruckermann, Charlotte, 1984- author. Title: Claiming homes : confronting domicide in rural China / Charlotte Bruckermann. Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: Dislocations ; volume 26 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029047 (print) | LCCN 2019029048 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789203578 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789203585 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology, Rural--China. | Rural population--China. | Home--China. | Kinship--China. | Group identity--China. | Social classes--China. | Rural-urban relations--China. Classification: LCC HT443.C6 B78 2020 (print) | LCC HT443.C6 (ebook) | DDC 307.720951--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029047 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-357-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-358-5 ebook

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Transliteration Introduction. The Countryside as Home

vi vii xi 1

Part I. History, Politics, Place Chapter 1.

The Big Village

29

Chapter 2.

Genealogies Revealed and Concealed

50

Part II. Gender, Generation, Kinship Chapter 3.

Reproducing Kin across Generational Divides

Chapter 4.

Gendered Aspirations in Marriage

81 114

Part III. Labor, Location, Precarity Chapter 5.

Fields, Food, and the Market

147

Chapter 6.

Dangerous Domesticities

178

Conclusion. Claims, Belonging, and the Home

204

Home as Workplace

213

Postscript. References Index

223 239

Figures

Figure 0.1. Figure 0.2. Figure 1.1. Figure 2.1. Figure 2.2. Figure 2.3. Figure 3.1. Figure 3.2. Figure 3.3. Figure 3.4. Figure 3.5. Figure 3.6. Figure 4.1. Figure 4.2. Figure 4.3. Figure 4.4. Figure 5.1. Figure 8.1. Figure 8.2.

Aerial view of Sweeping Cliff. Sweeping Cliff rooftops. Funeral procession on Sweeping Cliff main street. Ancestral tablets with Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth. Ancestral tablet cabinet and family photographs. The autumn harvest in a courtyard home. Frosting play at a birthday. A celebrated singleton baby with his father and his maternal grandfather. Mother and newborn “sitting the month” (zuo yuezi) on the kang with the infant’s maternal grandmother providing care. A maternal grandmother surrounds her grandson with the kuolian wreath bread. Sheep breads, pork dishes, and a birthday cake. Grandmothers encircling their grandson with the kuolian wreath bread. Ritual reliance on brothers and shovels for the bridal sending-off ceremony. Bride checking her bridewealth before her sendingoff ceremony. Bridewealth suitcase including jewelry, cash, and bank card. Bride and groom making joint wishes for their marital future. Harvesting millet together. The new village. The dragon dance, a new tradition for Sweeping Cliff.

2 13 31 53 59 69 82 84 98 104 105 107 132 133 133 137 155 214 216

Acknowledgments

From first venturing on fieldwork to publication, I have been almost a decade in the writing of this book. Through all the twists and turns over these years, I had the very good fortune to encounter a great number of wonderful people who helped me along the way—only some of whom can be mentioned within these few pages, and none of whom can I do justice to with just a few words of thanks. My deepest gratitude extends to the people of Sweeping Cliff, who generously opened their homes and shared their lives with me. In particular my host family formed a source of comfort, patience, and sustenance throughout my stay and upon my return visits. For their friendship, hospitality, and warmth, I am particularly grateful to Nainai, Sanhua, Erhua, Huanzi, Guowei, Kunjuan, Hanshuai, Yangqiang, and Zhijing. Lu Douheng smoothed the path for this academic exploration and kept the gates of Sweeping Cliff open. Li Hong’s optimism, kindness, and enthusiasm fortified me through rocky beginnings. Sun Liping made vital recommendations and introductions to locate my fieldsite. Teacher Zheng shared his time, knowledge, and wisdom with me time and again. In Beijing, Gao Bingzhong, Weng Naiqun, Lai Delin, and Karin Janz provided me with invaluable academic and personal support to get this research off the ground. To keep the sparkle going, I could not have had better confidants than Judy Bretschneider, Sha Hua, Lan Tu, Lamine Lahouasnia, Lidia Sakarapani, Max Duncan, Mike Nalwalker, and Duncan Innes-Ker. At the University of Oxford, I owe a great deal to the inspiration of Elisabeth Hsu and to creative discussions and exchanges over the years while she was my doctoral supervisor and beyond. Leading by example, she showed me how to take courage while crossing bridges, both in terms of the practical steps during fieldwork and in taking theoretical leaps in writing between diverse fields of anthropology, from medical to ritual and beyond. Bob Parkin supported me throughout my time in Oxford in everything from navigating bureaucratic hurdles to introducing me to the exciting field of ­kinship. As a

viii | Acknowledgments

thesis examiner Adam Chau graciously took the time and energy to provide attentive reading, sharp comments, and evocative questions for my viva. By reading, commenting, and encouraging me on my work, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Inge Daniels, Eileen Walsh, and Maria Jaschok shaped this project at various stages. I would never have reached the finish line without the long walks and even longer talks with Insa Koch, Urvashi Aneja, Ros Holmes, Emilie Lefebvre, and Kate Leadbetter. A great number of friends helped with the final countdown, including Lee Crawfurd, Ike Belcher, Hugh Lazenby, Juri Viehoff, Iza Kavedžija, and (quite literally) Oliver Owen. Funding for the DPhil research was generously provided by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and St Antony’s College. These ideas took further shape during various postdoctoral fellowships in the anthropology department at the London School of Economics (LSE; 2012–2014), the re:work Center for Work and the Lifecycle in Global History at the Humboldt University (2014–2015), the Europainstitut at the University of Basel (2015), the Department for Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2016–2018), and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. At the LSE I was immersed in an exciting, encouraging, and collegial atmosphere, and I am grateful to everybody there for helping me work through arguments, ideas, and comments. I would like to express particular thanks to my fellow fellows: Tom Boylston, George St Claire, Jason Hickel, James Johnston, Insa Koch, and Zuzanna Olszewska. I appreciated, and very much enjoyed, teaching together with Stephan Feuchtwang, as well as writing a textbook and discussing different ideas in the following years, as his insightful clarity sharpened my own thinking. I also want to thank colleagues, friends, and altogether great people in the wider London anthropology circles, in particular Catherine Allerton, Rita Astuti, Laura Bear, Lewis Beardmore, Max Bolt, Ana Gutierrez, Tom Grisaffi, Tom Hinrichsen, Yanina Hinrichsen, Deborah James, Jess Jacobson, Anni Kajanus, Hannah Klepeis, Jonah Lipton, Nick Long, Mathijs Pelkmans, Alpa Shah, Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmüller, Alice Tilche, Tan Tongxue, Harry Walker, and Gisa Weszkalnys. In Berlin I benefited from exchanges with past and present fellows at re:work, delving into historical and sociological comparisons that broadened and enhanced my anthropological approach. I am particularly grateful to Farah Barakat, Heike Drotbohm, Andreas Eckert, Michelle Engeler, Felicitas Hentschke, Jürgen Kocka, Alf Lüdtke,

Acknowledgments | ix

Helga Lüdtke, Julia Pauli, Julia Tischler, and James Williams. Beyond the institute, Julia Zantl, André Thiemann, Michael Hoffmann, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Judith Bovensiepen helped turn this time of work into a pleasure. At the Max Planck Institute in Halle I benefited from being part of a large and diverse anthropological community, and I particularly enjoyed the cooperation and camaraderie within our “financialization group” composed of Tristam Barrett, Natalia Buier, Dimitra Kofti, Marek Mikuš, and Hadas Weiss, as well as friendships with Hannah Klepeis, Minh Nguyen, Mareike Pampus, Luca Szücs, Ivan Rajković, and Roberta Zavoretti. For filling my life in Halle with art, music, and delicious food, I am thankful to all my housemates at the Reil 100, and especially Stine Albrecht, Aart van Bezooyen, Marlen Tennigkeit, and Sara Schmitz. It was during these three years in Halle that this manuscript took its final shape and reached a publishable state, and for the time and opportunity to finish writing this book I am grateful to Chris Hann. At the institute Jutta Turner created the crisp map for this book and James Carrier read and improved the book proposal and manuscript plans. For reading, commenting, and suggesting improvements to the entire manuscript, I am very thankful to the two reviewers at Berghahn, one of whom subsequently revealed himself as Andrew Kipnis. Don Kalb as an editor of the Dislocations series and Stephen Campbell on the Frontlines project at the University of Bergen also took the time to read the manuscript in the final stages, offering a number of insightful interventions. Over the years, from before our first Chinese adventures to today, the friendship of Luke Phillips, Alan Lau, Louisa Gladwin, Alex Guiney, Franziska Ochs, Michał Murawksi and Aaron Klemm provided solid grounding for bold antics. Living, working, and celebrating together at various times in the last decade, Insa Koch, Urvashi Aneja, and Ros Holmes have offered strength, support, and joy. Last, I want to thank my family, in particular my mother, father, brother, sister, and grandmother, for supporting me throughout all my adventures and always welcoming me back home. Chapter 1 includes excerpts from the 2016 article “Trading on Tradition: Tourism, Ritual, and Capitalism in a Chinese Village,” published in Modern China 42(2):188–224, doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/0097700415578808 and reproduced courtesy of Sage Publications. Sections of Chapter 2 appeared in the 2017 article “The Materiality of the Uncanny: Preserving the Ruins of Revolution in Rural Chinese Homes” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37(3):446–55, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4279152 and is

x | Acknowledgments

reproduced courtesy of Duke University Press. Chapter 3 includes sections from the 2017 article “Caring Claims and the Relational Self across Time: Grandmothers Overcoming Reproductive Crises in Rural China” in JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) 23(2):356–75, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12611, reproduced courtesy of Wiley; 2019 “Why Do Grandparents Grumble? Chinese Children’s Birthdays between Kinship, Market, and State,” in Ethnos, doi: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1561486, reproduced courtesy of Taylor and Francis; and 2017 “Longevity, Labor, and Care between Kin and State in China,” in Global Europe—Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective 114:2–23, https://europa.unibas.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/ europa/PDFs_Basel_Papers/BS114.pdf, reproduced here courtesy of the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as an article in 2018 as “Rumours as Moral Action: Contesting the Local State through Housing in China,” in Critique of Anthropology 38(2):188–203, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X18758875, reproduced courtesy of Sage Publications.

Notes on Transliteration

Although a predominantly Han ethnic province, the linguistic diversity of Shanxi is palpable, and its dialects are not only numerous but also frequently mutually unintelligible. Shanxi dialects, or Jin yu, are enriched by a diverse and ancient vocabulary, a shifting Sandhi tonal system, and glottal stops that punctuate guttural flows of melodic rises and falls of the human voice. Sinitic languages are usually divided into six or seven groups of Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Yue, Min, and Gan, with Kejia being either separate or part of the Gan group. The renowned linguist and dialectologist Li Rong (1987) revised this classification with three additional groupings, including a separate classification of the Jin dialect found in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia due to its retention of the “entering tone” (rusheng). The rusheng does not refer to a “tone” per se, but to a syllable that ends abruptly in a sharp consonant or a voiceless glottal stop made by suddenly cutting off the air in the vocal tract. I have transliterated from Chinese characters using the Pinyin system of Romanization for standard Mandarin (Putonghua). Where crucial terms or phrases were transcribed from local Jin, the spelling reflects the original sound as closely as possible following the Pinyin system. The difference is denoted through transcription of the local dialect term or phrase, followed by the Putonghua term.

Map of Shanxi. Map created by Jutta Turner.

Introduction The Countryside as Home

_ Uneven Earthiness Laolei and I were thrown together in a van bumping along a winding road westward through the Shanxi mountain range in the summer of 2009.1 Passengers hopped on and off the van shouldering unwieldy sacks of red sorghum and balancing juicy green watermelons, as our vehicle crisscrossed the rural gorges of north China’s Loess Plateau baking under the sweltering sun. Laolei, now in his seventies, came of age under Maoism and proudly identified as a “peasant” (nongmin) commanding authority over all aspects of rural life. Hearing I was headed for a historical trading village on the Yellow River (famed for its merchant cave dwellings), Laolei reacted with disbelief. The merchants and financiers who had dominated the Shanxi economy in the late Imperial Era were regarded as morally dubious for extorting profit from the rightful hands of citizens and the state, maligned by both Confucian and Maoist thought. The lines on Laolei’s tanned face deepened as he squinted at me with quizzical eyes, before exclaiming with exasperation, “Why do you want to go there? It’s so earthy [tu]!” As he and I gazed out of the dusty windowpane at the agricultural terraces carved into the golden ravines, Laolei turned his ­narrative of the land into one of pride, as he explained that the passing fields were all manmade. He then launched into a reverie of Maoist nostalgia about how the chairman organized the farmers to build high-quality terraces throughout the area to increase agricultural output. Most famously, the town of Dazhai became a

2 | Claiming Homes

Figure 0.1. Aerial view of Sweeping Cliff. Image data: Google Earth, DigitalGlobe 2019.

model for all the good communists of the land, inspiring campaign slogans that Laolei enthusiastically recited: “For agriculture, learn from Dazhai! Move the mountains to make the fields! Change the sky to alter the land!” I asked him if he thought the craggy Shanxi mountainside was beautiful, to which he replied, “Beautiful or not, it’s home.” Laolei then reminisced about the peasantry working together to make the land efficient through pooling their collective labor in brigades, before lamenting that many families nowadays did not even farm the small plots of land that the village committees allocated to their households. As he saw it, today “the land is going to waste, because young people don’t want to go to the fields; they want to go to the office and do business.” Laolei’s accusation was that contemporary rural youth resisted working the land, instead following aspirations to enter nonagricultural sectors of the economy. He prided himself on living a frugal life as a peasant (nongmin), unlike those merchants of old and the businesspeople of today, who turned away from labor in the fields in search of more lucrative trades and professions. Fangdi, a Shanxi tour guide in the village of Sweeping Cliff (Figure 0.1), where I ended up doing fieldwork, was just this type of young peasant. He was employed with other young rural workers in a newly established tourism development company attempting to break into

Introduction | 3

the emerging service economy in the area. On one occasion we were sitting in their office, where the tour guides waited for their turn in the roster to take affluent Chinese visitors through the village’s main attractions, particularly an underground tunnel complex. Squatting on low stools in the back courtyard tourism office located in an old temple complex, we sipped green tea from glass bottles and chatted about everything under the sun that hung low in the gray pollution of a stifling late summer afternoon. A conversation unfolded about why Shanxi’s earth, composed of ochre loess soil, was called “yellow earth” (huangtu). Struck by a train of thought, Fangdi boisterously exclaimed: “The yellow earth creates the Yellow River, the Yellow River creates the yellow emperor.” To prove his point, Fangdi gestured toward his face: “Look, even my skin is that color!” Everybody in the tour guide office erupted with laughter. Fangdi went on to explain that China’s history was tied to “the peasantry’s dependence on the earth” (nongmin kaodi). He argued that this ancient situation is changing as peasants “progress forward” (tuijin) with “development” (fazhan). Fangdi commuted from the city center to the countryside on a daily basis. Nonetheless, his affluent family background jarred with his local dialect and down-to-earth demeanor, leading the other tour guides to frequently tease Fangdi for being overtly “earthy” (tu). Many of the tour guides came from more humble backgrounds than Fangdi but equaled him in educational attainment and even surpassed him in certain aspects of cosmopolitan sophistication. The tour guides often jostled as they compared and competed over who had higher levels of “human quality” (suzhi). These young people felt like anything but the sellouts of the post-Maoist Era Laolei made them out to be, instead presenting themselves as the ultimate harbingers of a new vanguard of workers “leaving the land but not the countryside” (litu bu lixiang). Despite being officially designated a peasant (nongmin) by the state’s household registration system, Fangdi had never worked the land. Instead, he completed a university education before entering the workforce as a rural tour guide, all while living in a luxurious family apartment in the city. His family came from a rural background but had “struck wealth” (facai) through the expansion of coal mining operations into the area, a process in which his father was involved as a local cadre for a regulatory bureau. This position within the increasingly key sector of the local economy allowed his family to move to the city when Fangdi was in middle school and gain access to prime real estate in the urban valley. Thereby, Fangdi and his

4 | Claiming Homes

family established themselves as part of an emerging cadre capitalist elite of technocratic experts. These “red capitalists” emerged at the helm of the state’s agenda of fostering development in the post-Maoist Era of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (see Dickson 2003; So 2003; Kong 2010). They often boasted close ties to the communist party and oversaw strategic resources within particular localities, thereby optimally placing themselves to push the nation forward along a teleologically imagined sequence of progress, while simultaneously safeguarding political stability and economic growth. The official restoration of “market mechanisms” after 1978 had transformed what once was a command-and-control economy, reorienting sectors ranging from agriculture, industry, and commerce to real estate, education, and healthcare. State institutions and corporate developers rallied around new priorities of competition and profit. While China’s urban and coastal regions developed rapidly alongside these market transformations, interior provinces like Shanxi struggled to match their economic growth. Simultaneously, across China inequalities between urban cosmopolitan centers and the peripheral countryside became entrenched. Reflecting these disparities, rural residents of China’s interior appear as a monolithic surplus population, tucked away in the hinterlands to serve as a reservoir pool of labor fueling the growth of China’s export-oriented manufacturing zones. I argue that this is not the case: there are deep schisms between what it means to be a peasant within the partial, uneven, and unequal trajectories of development in Shanxi.

Peasants Out of Place At first glance, the nostalgic Maoist farmer and the red capitalist tour guide appear to have little in common beyond identifying as “peasants” at home in Shanxi.2 However, they share an ambivalent relationship to the earth, both referring to locations and people as “earthy” with derogatory connotations. This deserves a short explanation. The Chinese character for earth, or tu, at its most literal refers to the land and soil. In a more metaphorical way, tu can also refer to something being indigenous, local, and native, to being “of the earth” so to speak. An extension of this tie between rootedness and the earth can plunge into a deprecating domain of tu as being too territorialized, too local, and too rural, to the point of being crude or rough. Within Fangdi and Laolei’s description of the countryside a

Introduction | 5

tension runs between the earth as a substance from which life flows and the earth’s association with agricultural work that holds people to a localized, grounded, and at times harsh existence. But what of the people associated with the land? China has, of course, come a long way from Fei Xiaotong’s (1992 [1948]: 27) famous dictum: “Chinese society is fundamentally rural. I say it is fundamentally rural because its foundation is rural. . . . Country people cannot do without the soil because their very livelihood is based upon it.” Instead, the peasant as disappearing in the face of modernity or as the persistent obstacle to development has taken over from the peasant as the bedrock of Confucian order and the vanguard of Maoist progress. Are we simply moving from Laolei’s memories of the peasant as a revolutionary figure and hero of transformation toward Fangdi’s assessment of the peasant as a historical relic and source of embarrassment that can be, at best, a source of self-satirizing jokes? In the cities, urbanites and rural migrants alike portray the countryside as “inert, meaningless, and boring” (meijin, meiyisi; Yan H. 2003), populated with people “left behind” (luohou) by development (Xiang  2007) and “lacking the human quality” (suzhi cha) found in cosmopolitan centers (Anagnost 1997; Greenhalgh 2010). Parallel to these devaluations of the countryside, rural citizens increasingly sustain livelihoods by integrating into urban labor markets as they migrate, remit wages, or commute to find waged employment (Zavoretti 2017; Murphy 2002; Carrillo 2011). These developments raise critical questions about the commodification of rural labor in the interest of capital accumulation, especially through relations of dependence on and exploitation within cities. Yet, research into contemporary rural conditions shows that the countryside and its residents are far from a homogenous and passive population awaiting deliverance from cosmopolitan capitalist development. Not all peasants pack up and move to urban centers. Rural citizens remaining in the countryside establish new rural cooperatives (Hale 2013; Yan and Chen 2013; Lammer 2012), turn to organic farming (Klein 2009), improve local health services (Lai 2016), and challenge pollution levels (Lora-Wainwright 2013). They revive religious and ritual practices that strengthen the rural peasantry as an “imagined community” (Kipnis 1997) and an “agrarian public sphere” (Chau 2006b). They also move within rural areas, often for marriage and employment, sustaining lifelong relationships across different regions and localities outside urban centers (Gaetano 2015; Judd 2009). They overturn paradigms of “the rural” as representing

6 | Claiming Homes

a more authentic, traditional, or moral “Chineseness” by partaking in, and complaining of, rising individualism, competition, and even outright immorality in their midst (Liu 2002; Yan Y. 2003; Tan 2016). Some actively subvert stereotypical contrasts between modernity and ruralism by satirizing these representations (Steinmüller 2013), while others profit from the romantic appeal of the countryside by selling rural experiences to urban tourists hosted in family guesthouses (Park 2008) and ethnic minority villages (Chio 2011). In short, citizens, cadres, and corporations develop rural industries and offer services in the countryside to supplement agricultural livelihoods, thereby realizing state policies “to construct a new socialist countryside” (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. In what sense, then, are these peasants out of place in the contemporary moment? The persistence of peasant status no longer tethered to the land reveals the uneasy integration of agricultural labor into contemporary capitalism, where generating surplus from farming often necessitates significant state subsidies and governmental support. In situations where supplementary financial inputs bolstering capital accumulation for large-scale cultivators are not forthcoming, agriculture predominantly underscores rural livelihood strategies of subsistence supplemented with other sources of income. The growing importance of services and finance, but also subsistence activities, shifts the bases of reproduction beyond the framework of industrial capitalism and calls for consideration of where and how to locate theories of class in the contemporary moment (Friedman 2015). These transformations also raise questions about what we are witnessing: is this the end of the peasantry thrown under the wheels of developmentalist paradigms during the onward march of capitalism or is there rather a propitious reorientation of peasant identities afoot in China?

The Location of Class and the Politics of Place In order to make sense of the peasantry’s positioning in terms of locality, two contending perspectives in anthropology, one of location and the other of dislocation, are worth articulating. Taking conceptions of locality as not simply given but created through the interaction between human activity and historical processes, James Weiner (2002: 21–22) posits a gulf between anthropological accounts of human relations to place. At one end is a focus on how people mediate attachment to particular places through “dimensions of intimacy,

Introduction | 7

knowledge, familiarity, history, and interpersonality” associated with long-standing co-constitution of persons and localities. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a second perspective that highlights “the transience, the nomadism, the rootlessness, the migratory, the diasporic, the out-of-placedness” assumed to be characteristic of contemporary individuals and societies. Yet, the personal, spatial, economic, and political contradictions between location and dislocation cannot be easily resolved, as location frequently disappears from view under processes of dislocation, only to resurface through repressive and even violent exclusions. Approaches to location and dislocation must not merely be mapped spatially, but temporally, as the constitution of location is assumed to be long term, while experiences of dislocation imply temporal discontinuity, even rupture. By focusing exclusively on the first dimension of “location,” ethnographic accounts may refuse the contemporary coexistence of the peasantry in the present, in line with a pseudoevolutionary narrative that problematically implies a “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983). By contrast, ethnographers who eclipse “location” in favor of “dislocation” may miss the long-term connections and forms of belonging that bind humans together as they pursue intertwined lives across massive spatial, personal, political, and temporal upheaval. Of course, these forms of belonging, especially when projected into the past, are always present articulations that entail evocations of memory, imagination, and even invention (Hobsbawm 1983). To bring location and dislocation together, I trace the labor of homemaking in forging belonging through kinship, community, and citizenship alongside the inequalities and exclusions associated with its broader political identifications. Within economic relations, claims of belonging also loom large, especially as ever more activities become subsumed by capitalist relations. Monetary quantifications and wage relations often serve to shortchange those disempowered and dispossessed by the intensification of capitalism. Capitalist development necessitates some dispossession to progress, whether through a kick-start of primitive accumulation through enclosure of the commons (Marx 1867), the extractive cycles of expansion in colonialism (Luxemburg 1913), or the escalating spheres of accumulation by dispossession in mature capitalism (Harvey 1982). In the Chinese Market Era since 1978; processes of dispossession converged with dislocation, privatization, and devaluation. The sale of public assets, layoffs of state workers, and increasing mobility of rural and migrant workers created a more fluid, informal, and

8 | Claiming Homes

precarious labor force. Simultaneously, many workers were devalued, as their labor became recoded as “unskilled” through indexes of “human quality” (suzhi). This has led to a situation in which rural and manual workers effectively subsidize sites of accumulation elsewhere. However, how people locate themselves within these cycles of dispossession makes an immense difference to their subsequent political, economic, and social positions. Under Chinese capitalism, state cadres, as well as managers and entrepreneurs with close ties to the Communist Party, rose to power as the new technocratic elite (Goodman 2008; Nonini 2008; So 2003). In the countryside, formerly collective resources, especially lucrative sites of production like groves, ponds, mines and kilns, were privatized, with cadres often gaining the management contracts for township village enterprises or outright ownership of these assets (Hinton 1990; Potter and Potter 1990). In the cities, work units from factories to hospitals often turned to a shareholding model to make ends meet as state-owned enterprises faltered, with some eventually becoming private corporations; thus, the local state, cadres, and managers rather than employees usually became the dominant shareholders (Hertz 1998). This managerial elite sometimes even ran these corporations like family enterprises (Kipnis 2016) or forged intimate connections through activities ranging from exchanging formal banquets to illicit favors and tie political power to economic prowess (Osburg 2013). While some ventures went bust, others thrived, and over the ensuing decades many corporations have remained state owned or under state protection, while an array of entrepreneurial ventures solidified alongside them. These partial policies, contradictory reforms, mixed ownership, and hybrid economic constellations have often led to unclear legal relationships in China (So 2003), so that “rules” (Shao 2013), “reason” (Pia 2016), or “legalism” (Lee 2007) sometimes take precedence over formal “laws.” To many people in the countryside, to “clarify property rights” often simply means privatization and dispossession (Day 2013), and appeals to “reason” can be preferable to legal frameworks in local decision making (Pia 2016). In the moral ambiguity of this changing “gray society” (Tan 2006), citizens and cadres alike have acted strategically to safeguard their own position, even when this has meant dispossessing others of vital resources (Potter and Potter 1990; Hinton 1990). In urban areas, differential positions in quests for justice based on generation, class, location, and other determinants of background have meant that more privileged segments of the workforce are more likely to seek out courts (Lee 2007).

Introduction | 9

However, this is not always the case, as barefoot lawyers (Brandtstädter 2016), self-taught petitioners (Shao 2013), and civilian protesters (Chu 2014) take matters into their own hands and venture legal battles against the odds, especially when their homes and livelihoods come under threat. The party state legitimacy nonetheless rests on delivering economic growth, meeting imperatives of development, and instituting the “rule of law” (fazhi) in China, although what the latter means in practice remains open to debate. I have chosen to call the current constellation “red capitalism” rather than “cadre capitalism,” as this formation resonated strongly with nonelite residents of Sweeping Cliff, as well as its political cadres, local entrepreneurs, and corporate leaders. The desire to uphold socialist sovereignty formed deep temporal, spatial, and personal roots from shared experiences of Maoism, markets, and the state. Village tourism partially commodified this mutual legacy through cultural traditionalism as a resource for development. Moreover, many villagers felt compelled by the legacy of socialist values to sacrifice their own interests for the public good of progress in ways that, at times, justified devaluation and dispossession. Not just the shift in the village economy toward the tourist service sector but other parts of their lives, including the reproduction of the family and the ownership of houses, increasingly revolved around these claims in red capitalism that simultaneously located and dislocated the work of creating a home. In China, the centrality of place-based identities in structuring worker action puts class into a particularly uneasy tension with locality in understanding labor conflicts and solidarities (Perry 1996). Workers routinely draw on vernacular understandings of insider/ outsider, peasant/worker, uncivilized/civilized, and low quality/high quality to articulate demands for labor justice and livelihood fulfillment. However, native place identity and distrust of outsiders also results in resentments, antagonisms, and suspicions between workers (Perry 1996). Place-based articulations of collective grievances thereby undermine solidarities between localities that could potentially rally around notions of class elsewhere (see Lee 2007). This displacement of class onto other forms of labor stratification reflects the problematic associations with the punitive and preferential “class labels” (jieji) of the Mao Era. However, rather than dismiss these relational intersections between labor and locality, this ethnography attempts to simultaneously localize class and politicize place. At the risk of being overly explicit, I argue against “rural citizens” or “the peasantry” as a homogenously grouped category of people

10 | Claiming Homes

framed as a “class.” The homology between the theory of class and China’s rural-urban dichotomy, especially in terms of the countryside subsidizing urban centers, has limited analytic traction, as it collapses the multiplicity of contradictions faced in defending rural livelihoods with a simple locational duality. My approach also differs from a more sociological grouped notion of class that is predominantly stratified by socioeconomic differentiation captured in quantitative terms, as this does not do justice to the historical and political legacy of class discourse in China (see Goodman 2015). The jieji ascribed to Chinese citizens in the days of high socialism filtered political affiliation and economic position into a system enforcing social differentiation similar to Weberian notions of status and hierarchy (Unger 2002). Current discourse within China implicitly articulates social differentiation through “social strata” (jieceng) against an analysis of “class” in the popular imagination (Anagnost 2008), in ways that parallel Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of “distinction.” However, defining Chinese classes primarily through social differentiation would be misleading for two reasons: first, this would sideline processes of location and dislocation in understanding labor-capital confrontations; and second, this ignores appeals to collective imagination of the contemporary peasant identifications across locations in the countryside. Instead, embedded cultural understandings of those at home in the countryside must be brought into dialogue with actual relationships of solidarity, friendship, antagonism, inequality, and so on, as they unfold over time. My approach therefore follows social historians who analyze the experiences of real people in formulating understandings of class as a relational, incomplete, and ongoing process (particularly E. P. Thompson 1963 and Williams 1973). Going forward, I address both location and class as entangled relational processes that unfold through struggles of reproduction within a set of vertical relationships of exploitation and dispossession.

Making Claims through Labor Who is responsible for the safety and interests of the common people? I am an honest and simple peasant from Sweeping Cliff. The countryside is the peasants’ lifeblood [minggen, literally: “the root of life”], but the fields are being covered with buildings and roads. Now those who traded in their homes for compensation are without any property rights. What will they rely on to survive later? How will they support themselves in old age? I hope the relevant authorities will take responsibility for the common people. —Anonymous message on WeChat, 2016

Introduction | 11

This message circulated on social media in Shanxi in the mid-2010s. It described how a particular confluence of development and dislocation could strip rural citizens of their “roots of life”: the countryside they called home. Villagers experienced this loss after they exchanged their homes and fields to make way for commercial development plans as deeply personal. Yet the conditions under which these processes unfolded were widely shared across the Shanxi countryside. The rural safety net of housing and agriculture eroded under economic transition, as state bureaus and corporate developers carved up the region in the interest of developmental progress, promising a brighter future to all. Appealing to the “relevant authorities” to safeguard the farmers who traded away homes and property rights, the message divulges both a deep distrust of legalistic local settlements and faith in higher orders of bureaucracy to safeguard against injustices. Citizens all over China have lost their homes to development. Most anthropological accounts focus on how urban homes were dismantled, sometimes even violently demolished, and residents forcefully evicted in the wake of commercial rezoning in the interest of real estate development (Shao 2013; Chu 2014; Ho 2015; Zhang 2010; Fleischer 2010). Resistance often falls back onto legal claims of individual property rights in these urban centers. By contrast, in some villages-in-the-cities formerly rural real estate has rapidly and swiftly appreciated in value, turning residents with claims to the locality into new elites, for instance by building apartment blocks, leasing land, or becoming landlords (Trémon 2015; Kipnis 2016). Sweeping Cliff’s processes of dislocation and relocation unfolded along a very different trajectory, focused less on individual property rights than on state mandates of development and on local necessities of subsistence. A corporation with a strong track record in regional development entered the village with the promise of attracting tourism, thereby generating income and creating employment in the countryside. As they delivered on these promises and built new apartment complexes adjacent to the old village, they persuaded villagers to move out of the beautiful old courtyard complexes they had previously inhabited. Most villagers took the trade for housing compensation in the newly built settlement. Some villagers received a financial payout and profited from the transactions. Others took on employment with the tourism development company. A few villagers even stayed behind in the sparsely inhabited village that became a daytime tourist attraction. Meanwhile, the local government received substantial and sustained revenue streams contracting out the use rights of the village to the tourism development company.

12 | Claiming Homes

In Sweeping Cliff villagers resisted recourse to the formal law, preferring to resolve disputes through local mediators, particularly their elected representative in the village committee in charge of “negotiating settlements” (shuohe, literally: “speaking peace”). I argue that rather than relying on legal frameworks in safeguarding individual rights or property rights, villagers staked out claims to notions of home through the value of their labor. Two collective assertions of rights came into conflict, and were eventually resolved for some villagers, in this recasting of Sweeping Cliff and its residents: the right to development (fazhan) and the right to subsistence (shengcun; see Perry 2008). The tourism development company and local government championed the necessity of developing a service industry in the village as the only solution for diminishing sustainability of livelihoods from agriculture in the village. Rallying villagers around their shared responsibility to foster development and preserve the architectural heritage created a situation of coercion, collusion, and consent among residents. Villagers experienced the pressure to bow to the allegedly collective interest of transforming Sweeping Cliff into a tourist site as a responsibility to kin, locality, and even the nation. In response to this developmentalist paradigm, Sweeping Cliff residents insisted on their capacity to work, maintain their homes, and reproduce their families, rather than relying on conceptions of individual property rights over houses, courtyards, and fields. These rights to development and subsistence were framed through claims of work done in the past, often in service of the family, socialism, and the nation. Most families managed to transition to the reoriented livelihoods, despite dispossession and devaluation, by confronting and thwarting domicide, the destruction of home (see Porteous and Smith 2001; Nowicki 2014). This reproduction of homes despite dislocation cannot be celebrated as an unequivocal victory. The social media message above bears witness to a process in which citizens could not support their claims of value and belonging against state-supported and corporate-coordinated forms of housing dispossession and livelihood devaluation. Against these odds, villagers nonetheless reproduced their families and their homes, thereby quite literally domesticating capitalism to overcome domicide by development. But this did not happen without the complicity of some villagers who drew on kinship networks and home safeguards to weather, and even profit from, the process of dispossession that occurred. These logics of claims making were not limited to houses, fields, or the village, but encompassed belonging over objects, places, and

Introduction | 13

Figure 0.2. Sweeping Cliff rooftops. Photograph by the author.

people. Theoretically, this account builds on insights from anthropological insights into kinship, care, and relatedness but pushes these into a broader framework of dispossession, devaluation, and class through notions of reproduction. Reproduction brings together activities, spaces, and temporalities in fruitful ways to substantiate my two core arguments for Sweeping Cliff: first, that understandings of labor and visions of care formed a resource for claims making in the village; second, that this relational mechanism of claims making operated within a larger dispossessive process that residents defied, accommodated, and even exploited in various ways over time (Figure 0.2).

Recognizing Labor, Reproducing Homes The home as a constantly emerging relational claim needs to be continuously reproduced. In anthropology the notion of “reproduction” operates through a number of interrelated oppositions, binaries, and contrasts that include, first, production versus reproduction; second, biological versus social reproduction; and third, material life versus ideological forms. Attempts to separate these entangled spheres through bracketing off the latter realm as reproduction comes up short in understanding the conception of home. Although my use of the term “reproduction” builds most closely on theoretical explorations of “social reproduction,” I drop the “social” caveat, as I do not wish to exclude spheres of production, biological reproduction, or material life from my examination. I want to avoid reducing the ­concept of

14 | Claiming Homes

reproduction to a particular set of activities, delineated spatial realm, or sphere beyond, or outside of, capitalism (Harvey and KrohnHansen et al. 2018; Bhattacharya 2017; Bear et al. 2015). Instead, I follow Gavin Smith (2018) in positing a potential though unattainable “holism” that nonetheless keeps the social from detaching economic, political, or biological dimensions. Theoretically, I build on Marxist, feminist, and ritual studies and rethink reproduction through the unifying spheres of work, labor, and toil, broadly conceived. Labor historians and Marxist anthropologists often focus on sites of production, especially through the prism of industrial labor focused on the capitalist core (see Parry 2018; Kasmir and Carbonella 2008). Notably, many of the studies that most successfully evoked the challenges of industrial life, and deindustrializing challenges, included broader spheres of housing estates, residential complexes, and dormitory arrangements both within capitalist “centers” and at its increasingly central “margins” (e.g., Pun 2005; Rofel 1999). Both classic and contemporary works attempted to overcome the exclusionary remaindering of life beyond the factory floor or industrial compound (e.g., Mollona 2009; Kalb 1998; Thompson 1967), with more recent work explicitly shifting from waged, formal employment to broader livelihood perspectives (see Narotzky 1997). As many of the world’s workers become dependent on monetized reproduction through the enclosure of resources and dispossession of other livelihood strategies, they nonetheless find themselves excluded from the wage relation (Dennig 2010). Even the reproduction of agricultural livelihoods is not just bound to, but dependent on, capitalist processes, markets, and exploitation (Wolf 1982). This leads to new claims of redistribution from the state to legitimize development (Ferguson 2015) and recognize the contributions of precarious, informal, and unwaged labor within and against the capitalist market (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008). These blurred lines between how value becomes imparted to labor bears parallels to classic Marxist discussion of separation of use values for consumption oriented toward the reproduction of life from the sphere of exchange value revolving around the realization and circulation aimed at the accumulation of capital (Marx 1992 [1867]). The parallel question of women and the recognition of their labor has long been central to debates on reproduction within capitalism (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Rubin 1975; Ortner 1974). This forms an inverse discussion to the opposition between waged and unwaged work above, instead crystalized in such movements as “wages for housework” that seek to undermine how unpaid domestic

Introduction | 15

labor becomes exploited through lack of recognition in the capitalist market (Federici 2012). Studies of kinship, care, and affection in the domestic domain have become increasingly framed within the larger political economy to reveal how market exchange and capitalist extraction entangles the intimate and political domains (Bear et al. 2015). When new reproductive technologies market bodily processes in constituting new persons (Franklin 2013; Carsten 2000), states sanction and deny kinship through bureaucratic accounting and legislating reproduction (Lambek 2013a; Greenhalgh 2003), and commercialized care displaces affective labor across the globe (Gutierrez 2018; Hochschild 1983; 2000), questions of political economy loom large. Yet monetary value constitutes an insufficient lens through which to understand the work, labor, and toil expended in these realms. Therefore, the broader realm of reproduction, particularly in kinship and ritual studies where labor often resists the demarcation of the secular, practical, or mundane, complement these approaches to labor and kinship. The third line of inquiry therefore draws together studies focused on personhood, emotion, and ritual, where the entangled nature of production and reproduction becomes recognized, validated, and undermined in ways beyond, and frequently against, the monetary relation (Turner 2003, 1979; Sangren 2000; Strathern 1988). The stakes in these practices are often high, about who belongs to the realm of a “full person” (Strathern 2005) or what counts as appropriate, responsible, even moral conduct under particular obligations and responsibilities (Stasch 2009), and even how order, hierarchy, and distinction become established through staking out contributions to reproduction (Bloch 1989; Turner 1979). At times the double-edged sword of participation in these sublimated activities, spaces, and spheres actually allows extraction and dispossession to take place. Particularly theories on how kinship work and ritual events create, recognize, and circulate value offer important points of departure for this study (Graeber 2013; Turner 2003; Bloch and Parry 1972), allowing the joint consideration of both material life and ideological forms. Some classic ethnographic examples render the division between male production and female biological reproduction visible through ritual forms (Ortner 1974, Bloch and Parry 1972). In some instances, ritual forms invert gender hierarchies through championing women’s fertility, only to subsequently reconstitute an ideological field of abstract reproduction dominated by men (Bloch 1989). In the contemporary Chinese context, dualities between production and reproduction in academic discourse often become refracted

16 | Claiming Homes

through contrasts of political and domestic, urban and rural, and outside and inside work, respectively (see Rosenfeld 2000). To break down these boundaries, instead viewing these realms as mutually constituted in their unfolding, studies of the residential dynamics of labor, the making of persons through kinship, and rituals of differentiation, inequality, and hierarchy provide fruitful points for comparison. In what follows, I attempt to rethink claims of belonging as they crystallize around labor, kinship, and reproduction through the concept of the home.

Home as a Relational Claim I was born in Shanxi, grew up in Shanxi, lived and worked in Shanxi for forty-four years. Shanxi is my home, and the Shanxi people raised me as a son of peasants. As the saying goes, ‘Home influences are hard to change, home feelings hard to forget.’ I have never been able to forget the affection of the people at home. My own fate and that of my home are firmly bound together. —Hu Fuguo, governor of Shanxi, 19933

The concept of home forms a claim unto itself. The former governor of Shanxi, Hu Fuguo, evoked this claim in a speech to the Provincial People’s Congress in 1993 by mobilizing a rhetoric related to the home that continues to be heard in the far reaches of the province over two decades later. The governor’s identification with Shanxi revolves around the Chinese term jia, which translates as “home, house, and family” depending on the situation, condensing belonging to an institution, a place, and a form of kinship into one. In Shanxi, questions about where one’s jia is usually refers to an ancestral place of origin but can also be about current residence or the location of one’s family. When preceded by the character for country (guo), the guo-jia forms claim about political belonging, the nation-state, of a given citizen. I develop these relational conceptions of home alongside one another, moving from architectural buildings to kinship formations, as well as rural belonging and regional solidarities. The Shanxi home presented the following tendencies: first, the home acted as both a point of origin and a place of return, where people converged and dispersed across place and time; second, the home eluded completion as an entity, because its continuous formation relied on both memory and desire, as ongoing practices cosubstantiated persons with the environment they created; and third, activities of making the home sustained life in which people were both a part of and apart from one another.

Introduction | 17

I argue that making and remaking claims to the home in Sweeping Cliff were staked through work and care. The premise that studies of labor should be located in the workplace is common to analyses of both socialist and capitalist regimes (Burawoy 1979), yet this methodological logic rarely extends to the home as a workplace. The realm of work, labor, and reproduction at home unfolds continuously with other spheres of activity, eroding boundaries with others in the process of world making (Thompson 1967). Within the Chinese context I focus on “work done on one another’s behalf” or “care” as I gloss this particular form of labor here. I argue that the ethical implications of orienting work toward others cannot be reduced to instrumental concerns but emerges as part of life projects in which we are both a part of and apart from each other. This is key to debates about moral motivation, because when you care for somebody or something, you can direct it, and influence its unfolding. The resulting forms of “belonging” do not necessarily imply ownership (see Strathern 2005), nor can they be mapped on a continuum from altruism via reciprocity to self-interest (see Sahlins 2013). Instead, this co-constitution and cosubstantiation reflect a notion of entangled selfhood underlying a number of anthropological accounts of personhood and kinship (Carsten 1997; Strathern 1988). Yet, this account is not limited to the realm of the reproduction of relatives. Crucially, I argue that doing work on behalf of others allows you to subsequently stake claims of belonging over projects, houses, even children, on the basis of that care. Encompassment through these relational claims of belonging in Sweeping Cliff could be nurturing, supportive, and sustaining, just as they could turn coercive, competitive, and exclusionary (see Lambek 2011). The force of these mechanisms of claims making reveal themselves most compellingly when they come up against one another, pressing their contours and boundaries into sharp relief. Negotiating belonging to and over homes, fields, foods, and persons through work done on behalf of others, or care, follows different patterns, takes diverse shapes and beats to varied rhythms over time. Without exhausting these forms of claims making, I traced this notion of care through both ongoing processes of productive and reproductive labor and intentional intervention into the stream of practice through consequential acts, particularly in ritual. In order to understand how these entangled notions of the home become asserted in claims making, these dynamics in Sweeping Cliff must be historicized.

18 | Claiming Homes

Work, Care, and Kinship in Context Men and women in Sweeping Cliff forged homes through everyday work, reproductive labor, and ritual acts that sedimented claims of belonging to and over homes through time. The roots of these homebased claims can be traced through the classic distribution of work in kinship, the allocation of resources during the Maoist Era through workplaces and in the subsequent Market Era of corporate and state development. Over time, not just families and children but also, for instance, houses and fields, could be claimed through work, labor, and care in Sweeping Cliff. The following sketches an overly simplified overview of the transformations to be developed in greater detail in later chapters. My approach to claims of home draws on critiques of kinship as a formal, ideal, rule-based structure and offers more fluid, processual, and practice-oriented approaches to relatedness (Carsten 2000), particularly from a “house” perspective that grasps who lives together with whom, why, how, and when (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; see also Yanagisako 1979). Parallel critiques in Chinese kinship challenged the “lineage paradigm” based on the official ideology of patriliny in Confucian orthodoxy with its focus on the male-dominated, agnatic “lineage” (zu; Brandtstädter and Santos 2009). This strong focus on the lineage overlooked the bureaucratic, residential, and domestic arrangements in actual “households” (hu; Judd 1994) and subordinated the “family, house, home” (jia) to the lineage (Freedman 1966). In short, the nuclear, ephemeral, living family became overshadowed by the hierarchies of ancestors and descendants in the everlasting chain of patriliny (Ahern 1974). However, this understanding of Chinese kinship is and was inherently partial. Mutable forms of kinship work, especially by mothers, wives, and daughters, but also sons, brothers, and fathers, in the interstices of patrilocal and patrilineal kinship norms shaped claims of home in Sweeping Cliff. Kin connected to diverse kinship formations across their lifecycle as well as over spatial ruptures (see Trémon 2017 for a discussion of transnational Chinese “flexible kinship”). Historically, kin were born into one family, their “natal family” (niangjia; Wolf 1972). When women married, their productive and reproductive labor was transferred to their husband’s family, where they arrived by “moving the home” (banjia) and “completing the home” (chengjia). Hence their sense of belonging and claims to land, houses, and children was built up over time as they, in turn, created their own family, particularly by bearing, nourishing, and raising children (Judd 2009).

Introduction | 19

The birth of sons, especially, helped secure the status for wives, although families also made claims over daughters based on their past care in Sweeping Cliff (see Wolf 1972).4 Conversely, children both practically created, and ritually recognized, their mothers and fathers (Sangren 2000; Zito 1987). Not only did children’s births turn adults into parents, but adult children, in turn, cared for senior kin and made offerings to them as ancestors (Stafford 2000). While the Maoist state dismantled the backbone of patriliny by confiscating lineage property, providing wives with inheritance rights, and enforcing bureaucratic accounting on kin, it simultaneously strengthened patrilocality through household registration and resource allocation (Zhang 2009; Friedman 2006). Maoist policies extended labor and kinship claims of home through the redistribution of key resources in Sweeping Cliff. Across China, cadres assigned class labels on the basis of family history and revolutionary work, branding families with these inherited badges of privilege and stigma for decades (Walder 2015). In Shanxi, houses were transferred from the descendants of wealthy merchant landlords to veterans of the revolution, landless peasants, and household servants based on kinship associations and revolutionary contributions (Hinton 1966). During the Maoist years, work teams and brigades organized agricultural labor, compensating villagers for their labor with work points needed to gain access to basic necessities (Liu 2000). Women’s domestic work on the “inner sphere” (nei) became devalued as their work on the “outside” (wai) in fields and other workplaces gained recognition, and even status, through the work points, although women often received fewer points than their male counterparts (Herschatter 2011; Jacka 1997; Judd 1994). In short, kinship-based logics actually became absorbed into the workbased logics of place, belonging, and claims making in subsequent socialist policies. The dismantling of rural brigades in the Reform Era released village labor from compulsory participation in agriculture. As the Shanxi economy expanded its coal production and heavy industries in the 1980s, many Sweeping Cliff men entered work in mining and associated industries, such as logistics, refineries, smelting, chemicals, and construction, often organized by township village enterprises, entrepreneurial companies, or state-owned corporations. In the 1990s, younger Sweeping Cliff women also ventured beyond the village for employment, joining the workforce in the urban valley, especially in the growing service sectors of education, hotels, transport, and office jobs. By the 2000s this initially gendered, and then

20 | Claiming Homes

generational, transformation led to an increasing feminization and subsequent aging of agricultural and household work in the village, especially as retired men returned to the village to join their wives in the courtyards and fields. These older couples often took on the care not just for each other but also for grandchildren left in the village while parents commuted or lived in urban centers. As the necessities for making a livelihood shifted, so did lifecycle dynamics, with younger men and women pursuing very different life projects from their parents and parents-in-law. They often contributed primarily to village households in monetized forms, through either passing on wages to parents and grandparents or purchasing household and consumer goods. While young people sought to fulfill new hopes and aspirations through their education and employment, parents and grandparents reflected on old hardships or shouldered new sacrifices in enabling the next generation to follow their ambitions for work and family life. However, the post-Mao state’s restrictive family planning policy dispossessed families of their reproductive autonomy (see Greenhalgh 1993) and led kin to find new ways to claim offspring as descendants beyond patrilineal norms and bureaucratic accounting, including through commoditized contributions and caring labor (Bruckermann 2019). The increasing integration of rural livelihoods into the urban valley expanded spheres of engagement from face-to-face interactions with familiar people and toward the necessity for constant interactions with strangers, sometimes even through online spheres that lost all trace of identification to anonymity (see Yan 2011). As elsewhere in China, the resulting transformations of morality, responsibility, and trust affected understandings of personhood, belonging, and locality (Guo et al. 2011). Moreover, this shifting moral landscape became infused with anxieties arising from the increasingly stark and perceptible inequalities emerging across and within the local rural-urban terrain. The tourism operations that entered Sweeping Cliff provide a poignant example of this process, as they quite literally invited “outsiders” (waidiren) into the heart of the village. As urban school classes, workplace outings, and family excursions poured through Sweeping Cliff alleys, temples, and tunnels, residents attempted to host, or rebuff, visitors. From tracing tourism routes to staging ritual events, villagers were caught between performing affective attachment through bodily, verbal, and commodified forms of expression, as they worked to make themselves, their kin, and their guests feel at home. This transformation of belonging to a home transmuted through scales of identification from the house up to the nation. Naturalized

Introduction | 21

claims of home thereby eclipsed hierarchies, exploitation, and inequality through encompassing notions of belonging at various scales across time. Nonetheless, these claims were based on work and care rather than property rights. They carried connotations of a homegrown logic of labor underwriting claims over persons, things, and projects. Sedimented with kinship ethics, but also suffused with Marxist labor theories of value, these claims were reinforced by the Maoist state distribution of resources and refracted in contradictory ways on to the post-Maoist terrain. These labor-based and home-oriented claims met, and sometimes contradicted, the legal, rights-based discourse espoused by the post-Mao state and its agents of development. The home as a relational mechanism for claims making operated within larger dispossessive processes that allowed Sweeping Cliff residents to defy, accommodate, and even exploit these processes. While reproducing the home in the face of dislocation appears as resilience and refusal, these activities became recuperated by capitalism as it allowed exploitation in cities, factories, and even the newly formed tourism services in the old village. Therefore, even these labor-based claims around belonging carried ambivalent implications. As notions of home became enacted at the family, village, or regional and national levels, appeals to home became both stratified and unified. This fostered collectivities that ameliorated dispossession for some and allowed some to benefit, yet simultaneously extracted and exacerbated dispossession for others. This shows that dispossession, development, and domicide do not necessarily form unilineal or causal chains. While claims of home proved resilient and even resurgent against waves of dispossession, red capitalism and socialist sovereignty suffused and legitimized even some of these most intimate inequalities.

The Ins and Outs of Fieldwork Fieldwork as a foreigner in Shanxi did not lend itself to a smooth narrative of arrival. Several failed attempts at receiving access, obtaining permits, and getting registrations with bureaucratic gatekeepers meant that I spent four months traveling and networking in the spring of 2009. These activities eventually culminated in a situation where effort gave rise to “serendipity” (see Pieke 2000) and I was able to settle in a village, an “arbitrary location” in these sense that it had to be bordered and bounded through “cutting the network” of

22 | Claiming Homes

potentially infinite connections emanating from this core locale (see Candea 2007). Only a handful of foreign social scientists have conduced long-term fieldwork in the province of over 36 million people and published the resulting research on the Reform Era in English (including Goodman 2002, 2006; Jones 2007; Carrillo 2011; Husman 2011). In a region plagued by labor scandals, mining collapses, residential relocations, and pervasive pollution, the provincial government seemed unenthusiastic about “opening up” to foreigners, even three decades after Deng Xiaoping’s initial reforms. Eventually a powerful local workplace took on responsibility for my stay vis-à-vis the public security bureau, a mining corporation that had diversified into energy, construction, and tourism operations. The president of the Triumph Corporation agreed to host me institutionally and made my fieldwork possible, in the name of academic research and in the interest of development. Sweeping Cliff’s village historian helped me find a family willing to put up with an incompetent and nosy foreigner for over a year in 2009–2010. I have since returned several times, usually for a few weeks at a time, visiting friends and neighbors, although most residents have relocated to the “new village” (xin cun) built across the road. My host family provided the foundation for my involvement in everyday life, as working, eating, sleeping, and speaking with villagers gradually eroded the privilege and distance associated with the powerful patronage of the tourism development company. Each day in the village was different, spent in workplaces that included homes, fields, construction sites, shops, restaurants, and offices, as well as more idiosyncratic labor locations, including with street hawkers, with a divination specialist, at a pig farm, at a stone quarry, at a medical clinic, and at a direct sales meeting for feminine hygiene products. The tourism development company not only hosted my stay bureaucratically but also offered insights into corporate work life and the emerging service industry in the village despite also eliciting some suspicion and distrust in the village regarding my intentions. Village celebrations, especially birthdays, weddings, and funerals, but also annual events like market days and festive rituals offered opportunities to meet and discuss with diverse people. At lifecycle events I became a particularly welcome guest once news of my peculiar snapshots and excellent camera spread, and I basically acted as the village photographer for a year. My main research methods incorporated participant observation, life histories, ritual practices, object elicitations, formal interviews, architectural history, academic articles, newspaper articles, and historical resources such as the

Introduction | 23

local gazetteer. An attempted survey of houses and households fell flat due to suspicions around their future use. Family histories, in particular, became central to my research, providing insights into complex, entangled lives that more formal techniques would never have revealed. At times, those initial suspicions proved justified, partly due to my ignorance about the risks of certain types of information, including the illicit, embarrassing, or traumatic dynamics of everyday life. Luckily, the generous vigilance of others saved me from harming participants, as I guarded details more carefully, and even followed recommendations to retreat from pursuing particular lines of inquiry. Many of these difficulties were initially compounded with language difficulties, as the local Shanxi Jin dialect is mutually unintelligible from standard Mandarin (Putonghua) and considered by many linguists to be a separate language entirely. As my Jin improved I realized how quickly the language was changing, with young people sometimes struggling to understand their own grandparents. As time wore on, I was finally able to chat with senior villagers, such as the “old ladies” (laotaitai) who had rarely ventured beyond the village since marriage. Some villagers became excited, insistent, and sometimes even adamant that I capture their life experiences in writing, beckoning me into their courtyards or summoning me to their banquet tables and demanding I put pen to paper and record their explications, experiences, and perspectives. I can only hope I do justice to the parts of their lives they shared with me.

Organization of the Book The first part of the book unearths the historical legacy of the village, particularly focusing on struggles over resources under contradictions of state accumulation and socialist sovereignty. The opening chapter situates Sweeping Cliff within broader historical transformations, throwing light on the mountain village’s uncertain position within Shanxi province’s shifting political and economic terrain. Maoist policies suffused divine and domestic spaces, leaving formerly collective spaces particularly vulnerable to the incursion of commercial nationalism under subsequent market reforms. As red capitalism reoriented these spaces in the name of development, villagers’ claims for residence through logics of kinship and labor were undermined. The second chapter turns to how these claims over homes were created, mobilized, and sustained in homes. Unpacking a seeming

24 | Claiming Homes

clash of ideological commitments between the God of Wealth and Chairman Mao reveals how families championed national contributions to building socialism, while concealing inherited wealth and privilege in the home. Expanding on staking claims to the home as a place, the second part of the book turns to how villagers reproduced and claimed kin as children and spouses. The third chapter traces generational inversions of inequality, as children were left behind in the care of senior kin, particularly grandparents. Cooperation and conflict marked negotiations of childbirth, childcare, and celebrations of survival that coalesced around birthdays. Kin vied to claim offspring by contributing labor, care, and commodities and asserted descent through Confucian lineages and registration by the state bureaucracy, despite devaluations revolving around population policies targeting “human quality” (suzhi). Marriage affords another prism on kinship claims in this uneven rural-urban terrain, where income, inheritance, and romance come to the fore in negotiating wedding transfers of money, goods, houses, and emotions. Caught between obligations and aspirations of making a good match, men and women struggled to safeguard their futures despite the gendered inequalities in residential, educational, occupational, and affective expectations. At the intersection of memory and desire, a discourse of “homesickness” (xiangjia) emerged across the emotional ruptures of spatial and social mobility. The third part of the book traces the changing role of agriculture, industry, and service economy labor within the market economy and the ongoing solidification of red capitalism in the region. As government bureaus and corporate enterprises carved up the countryside for development, rural citizens attempted to implicate state legitimacy in defending their vulnerable position through socialist sovereignty as a “moral economy.” Chapter five turns to agriculture and its shifting role in rural life under the expansion of rural services. Through food production, distribution, and consumption, villagers forged affection and belonging while creating boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Changing ideals of health, beauty, and work revealed the legacy of socialist sovereignty in the spread of red capitalism. Tour guides and network marketers, in particular, romanticized and commodified their ruralness as part of the service industry in the village. Nonetheless, the following chapter reveals how rural citizens who increasingly dispersed across the urbanizing valley experienced the uneven developments that could put life itself at risk, as well as

Introduction | 25

threaten attachments to the locality as home. The promise of urban opportunities came at the expense of mistrust, anonymity, and insecurity, as the perils of urban integration and interactions with strangers created a wariness toward the city, particularly due to airborne pollution, rampant corruption, and social competition in the valley. This politics of suspicion, as well as trust in person-to-person action (minjian), crystallized during an earthquake scare that spread through telecommunications and social media across the region in the dead of night. The final sections of the book reflect on the counterpastoral approach to the countryside that reveals how notions of home continue, although not always in familiar forms. Through a focus on the work, toil, and labor in the countryside, the home emerged as both a workplace and a place created by work. Contradictions between capital accumulation and state legitimization became sutured through the emergence of red capitalism in Shanxi, which allowed commodified markets and socialist sovereignty to coexist. Rather than offering resolutions to the frictions and conflicts between local residents under increasing social differentiation, these forms pave the way for processes of devaluation, dispossession, and dislocation that nonetheless unfold in highly uneven ways, benefiting some while disadvantaging others.

Notes 1. Names have been changed throughout the book to provide anonymity, except for people who requested to be named in the study. In rare instances, identifying personal information has been altered to protect research participants. 2. While the term “peasant” and “peasantry” often involves antiquated and stigmatizing connotations in English, identification with the term nongmin forms part of everyday, contemporary discourse in China. Nongmin literally translates as “rural citizen,” and I use this translation alongside the “peasant” designation. I retain the term “peasant” over the translation of “farmer” as more neutral in English, as the latter implies an agricultural livelihood that many Chinese nongmin, living in cities as well as the countryside, are turning away from. In referring to nongmin in the countryside, I sometimes translate interchangeably with “rural resident,” as the category is defined officially through rural household registration (hukou). However, it is worth noting that rural migrants in the cities continue to be referred to by their official designation as nongmin or, sometimes, nongmingong, “peasant workers” unless they manage to change their household registration to the “urban citizen” (shimin) designation. 3. David Goodman (2002: 837) originally translated and cited this excerpt of Hu Fuguo’s speech.

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4. Historically, children could be incorporated into the family through the care of senior women: by adopting a son; by raising a future daughter-in-law; through claiming the reproductive power of junior wives, concubines, or servants by raising their child as one’s own (Judd 2009; Bruckermann 2017a).

PART I History, Politics, Place

– Chapter 1 –

The Big Village

_

Public Secrets, Secret Publics On a sunny day in the early spring of 2010, my 76-year-old landlady Nia and I walked through a narrow alleyway of cobblestones along the crumbling courtyard walls of the old village center. We were chatting as we made our way to a wedding outside the south gate of the village, and the music from the festivities was pulsing through the air. Suddenly, a middle-aged neighbor stepped out of the doorway of his walled courtyard along the alley and stood in our way. He grinned at us, flashing the gaps between his teeth, and stuck out his hand saying, “The entry ticket will be two yuan then.” Nia laughed and retorted, “Sure thing, but we’ll pay on the way back.” Our neighbor jokingly replied, “Ah, on the way back, it will be four yuan.” Laughing at the incongruity of the situation, we called out the usual greetings of “Have you eaten?” as we passed by his doorway. These jokes about the commodification of village spaces and neighborhood relations highlight how villagers experienced the increasing restrictions on movements within their own village as an unequal practice, particularly in light of the increasing incursions by tourists into villagers’ homes. Elaborating on this encounter, Nia said her neighbor was joking because the tourism development company had begun charging villagers for everything within the village, including to worship in their own temples. Upon closer enquiry at the main tourism development company offices, the head of the planning department confirmed that villagers had to pay to go “on

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tour” (youlan) in the temples and underground passage system but were free to go “to worship” (jibai) whenever they wished without purchasing a ticket.1 Despite this formal regulation, most villagers stayed away from the temples. Although this can partly be explained by the new tourism development company’s ticketing policy, a much longer historical process has shaped the repositioning of these spaces within villagers’ common imaginary. During the Maoist Period the two lineage halls were transformed into domestic spaces and the various temple complexes were turned into government offices, a school, and brigade storehouses. Nonetheless, only in the post-Maoist Era was the public nature of these spaces slowly eroded by the incursion of the two successive tour companies that privatized these spaces for the use of outsiders. In addition, the privacy of the family courtyard was coming under threat as nosy tourists entered their gates and poked around within their homes. Villagers increasingly kept their dogs chained up in the courtyard to warn when strangers approached, or simply locked their gates from the prying eyes of tourists. Shanxi province has been compared to a “big village” (dacunzi), where insiders are often privy to shared, but sensitive information, carefully guarded from outsiders, who might easily disrupt this “cultural intimacy” (see Herzfeld 1997; Steinmüller 2010). These uneasy relations may lead to ironic jokes, such as neighbors pretending to ticket each other on village alleys, thereby parodying the tourism development company’s attempts to privatize village spaces. However, these switches between revelation and disclosure among interested parties may best be described as an exchange of public secrets among different secret publics. These forms of divulgence bore witness to the position of the contemporary peasant who sat uneasily with the village’s official legacy: first, peasants living in merchant homes; second, peasants working in the industrial and service sector; and third, peasants threatened by dispossession in the interests of the accumulation of capital. Shifting scales of inclusion politicized who had the right to call the village home. By exploring the history of Sweeping Cliff, divergent claims over the village emerged. Competing logics over who had claims to home, inheritance, and heritage intermingled in village houses, temples, alleys, and squares. Through these contradictory claims, public spaces, in particular, became vulnerable to absorption into national heritage projects and simultaneously laid the groundwork to engulf residents’ domestic dwellings as relics destined for heritage preservation (Figure 1.1).

The Big Village | 31

Figure 1.1. Funeral procession on Sweeping Cliff main street. Photograph by the author.

Merchant Wealth The village of Sweeping Cliff perches on a mountain range situated on the Loess Plateau of north central China—a place where skies shift between depths of azure blue and stifling gray pollution, where streams cut through the weathered ravines of agricultural terraces and drop into verdant valleys. Waterways carry the golden loess soil into the Yellow River flanking the western and southern reaches of the province, tainting the river with its characteristic color and providing its descriptive name. On the eastern reaches of the province, the land rises into the Taihang Mountain range. Between mountain ranges and river valleys, this is a province of extremes where farmers have sustained life for millennia despite the increasing paucity of the soil. Nonetheless, Sweeping Cliff’s architecture reveals that the agricultural and commercial have long been intertwined in both the private domestic residences and public temple complexes of the village. In the late Imperial Period (up to 1911) Shanxi merchants, landlords, and farmers competed within both the agricultural and petty ­capitalist

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mode of production in a struggle for power against the backdrop of centralizing state forces (Lai 2000). Sweeping Cliff’s high courtyard walls, extravagant residential complexes, and opulent temple architecture bear witness to this period of financial flourishing. The fortifications around the village and its homes created increasing spheres of interiority that have lent themselves to the idea of Sweeping Cliff as consisting of “fortress homes” (Chen 2002). In addition, looking at the succession of sacred architecture in this period shows how an emphasis on nature worship gradually gave way to an increasingly mercantile ideology of ritual spaces in the village (Lai 2000). From the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Shanxi merchants promoted business developments and transport links across the region despite ethnic clashes and peasant revolts against taxes and corvées (Lai 2000: 91). Within this era of political instability, merchants gained power and wealth through spreading trade links (Lai 2000: 98), probably initially by edging into the state monopoly of salt by exchanging grain for salt trading rights from the state (Yang and Morck 2010: 13). To temper potential challenges to central state authority through vast capital accumulation in the hands of outlying lineages and farflung families, the state often levied taxes over such commodities at the household level (Gates 1996). As Shanxi merchants developed an innovative system for making payments between their mercantile businesses, they could subsequently extend this new service to customers, effectively initiating an inland trade in a new financial product, bank drafts (piaohao) (Lai 2000). By the end of the Ming dynasty, Shanxi merchants managed some of the biggest domestic associations for financial rather than political purposes (Lai 2000). By the height of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Shanxi’s large merchant establishments were the acknowledged leaders of the domestic financial world due to their pioneering remittance services, banking houses, and draft bank system (Lai 2000). Merchant families in Shanxi pooled entrepreneurial talent to pursue an aggressive and expansionist financial network (Skinner 1976: 345–47). The capital for Shanxi banking firms was largely derived from the resources of the owners, who were usually a group of kinsmen (Skinner 1976). Hiring employees from their local area, the owners often sent branch managers to far-flung parts of the empire for three-year appointments that would be rewarded on a profit-sharing basis upon their return (Skinner 1976). However, no matter how far afield their business associations carried them, Shanxi merchants were forbidden to take their families with them (Chen 2002). By stipulating that merchants must build their household residences where they were born, the merchant and

The Big Village | 33

banking associations secured their return to their wives, concubines, and children despite their widespread travels with great wealth. In a twist on the classic narrative of the localized peasant yoke strangling capitalist development in China, some historians have argued that it was the Shanxi merchants who were unable to leave behind ties to their native soil (xiangtu) and that this impeded the full transition to modern businessmen in the realm of capitalism (e.g., Chen 2002). Moreover, Shanxi banking firms adopting managers’ families back home in fortified grand courtyard complexes, while the male household head was appointed in far-flung reaches of the empire, raises questions about the intersecting power dynamics of financial, mercantile, and kinship organizations in late Imperial China (Skinner 1976). William Skinner (1976: 347) has suggested that this treatment of Shanxi merchant families amounted to a form of “de jure captivity.” These walled domestic courtyards reveal that the use of human collateral in Chinese merchant and banking systems went beyond clients (such as borrowers and debtors) to include the managers of operations themselves. The effect of the merchant wealth on the Shanxi countryside was considerable, as merchants not only constructed sumptuous domestic complexes for their extended households but also financed public building works, such as roads, bridges, and temples, even in unlikely and remote locations such as Sweeping Cliff (Chen 2002; Lai 2000). With high courtyard walls encircling each compound, and an array of gateways and passages connecting the inner quarters of these extended household compounds, the merchant households safeguarded the privilege of privacy that wealthy businessmen afforded their families (Knapp 2005; Bray 1997; for a contemporary discussion on the privatization of rural domestic space, see Yan Y. 2003). Through this spatial order, hierarchical relations in terms of seniority and gender were reinforced through the physicality of the house (Bray 2005). These large and extended merchant households provide a vivid illustration of Hill Gates’s (1996) socioeconomic institution of “patricorporations” driving a historical form of Chinese capitalism from as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279 ad). Gates argues that the coexistence of a tributary mode of production oriented toward the state and a petty capitalist mode of production managed by lineages and households combined to create the conditions for the emergence of patricorporations. While the tributary mode was the main mechanism tying local households to the state through their payments to officials who enforced taxation, the petty capitalist form underwrote

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the primary mode of productive relations of household subsistence as senior men managed a flexible labor force of kin. Patricorporations as institutions bridged these two modes and enabled lineages to acquire and dispose of labor through kinship relations. Through the mechanism of the patricorporation, lineages, like those dominating Shanxi’s mercantile and banking sector, could pool talent, expand households, and accumulate vast amounts of property. The wealth accumulation of Shanxi financial institutions rose to astronomical proportions during the Opium Wars and their aftermath, when banks made huge profits transferring silver from the inland provinces to Chinese ports as reparations to British representatives, as well as by remitting payments across rebel territories during the Taiping Rebellion (Yang and Morck 2010: 9–10). As the fortunes of each fiscal cycle rose toward the close of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of “Shanxi’s best and brightest were well advised to forsake the Confucian civil service for careers in banking” (Yang and Morck 2010: 10). However, within the next two decades most of the Shanxi banks “either liquidated voluntarily or limped into bankruptcy” due to competition from foreign banks in treaty enclaves, the demise of the banks’ “cash cows” in interest-free government deposits and intergovernmental transfers, and the defaults of borrowers without collateral multiplied as the country plunged into chaos toward the end of the Qing dynasty (Yang and Morck 2010: 15).

The Benevolent Warlord The widespread economic depression that ravaged north China from the late nineteenth century increasingly embroiled the Shanxi economy in a downward spiral, so that the province entered the twentieth impoverished, isolated, and with a serious opium-based narcotics addiction (Harrison 2006). Despite the decline in wealth disparity between Shanxi elites and other residents in the aftermath of the province’s banking and trading heyday, the merchant houses remained a material mark of the lasting legacy of past wealth. The fall of the Qing Empire in 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China (1912–1949) led to a period of “profound civil disorder, civil war, invasion, recurrent famine, and breakdown of political control” in northern China (Martin 2014: 76). In particular, the passing of President Yuan Shikai in 1916 ushered in a period of political disarray and military conflict known as the Warlord Era.

The Big Village | 35

Although most warlords were reined back into the nationalist fold with the conclusion of the Northern Expedition led by the Kuomintang leader Jiang Jieshi by 1928, Yan Xishan continued to govern Shanxi province from 1911 to 1949, partly through wavering alliances with the various factions of the nationalist Guomindang (GMD) government but also through nods toward both Confucian thought and communist policies. Notably, Yan invested heavily in industry as part of an effort to militarize and modernize the province, brought commerce and industry under state control, and even initiated attempts at land reform (Gillin 1967). Yan also introduced graduated taxation, including high taxation for wealthy landowners and merchants, to fuel his war efforts financially as well as win the hearts and minds of his subjects through education campaigns and the spread of his own eclectic ideology of Yan Xishan thought (Gillin 1967). The legacy of Yan Xishan in Sweeping Cliff meant that by the late 2000s no living women had bound feet, and even some of the oldest women could read and write, due in large part to Yan’s policies of outlawing the former through harsh punishments and encouraging the latter through primary education for girls. Nonetheless, villagers were reluctant to praise any aspect of Yan Xishan’s policies outright, instead casting him as a “double dealer” (liangmianpai) and self-­ interested “dictator” (ducaizhe) whose self-aggrandizement knew no bounds as he pursued fantasies of becoming the local emperor. However, Yan’s conscription soldiers engaged in public works such as road maintenance and were subjected to harsh disciplinary measures for stealing, meaning that recollections of them among civilians were still more positive than warlords elsewhere in China. In Sweeping Cliff, for instance, Yan’s army was referred to somewhat affectionately as the “hook army” (goujun), supposedly because it was initially the Ninth Route Army of the GMD, and the hand gesture for the number nine in China is a bent index finger resembling a hook. On occasion, villagers even compared Yan’s army to the near-sacred Eighth Route Army of the Communist Party of China (CCP) in the north, particularly highlighting periods when they waged a joint and eventually victorious war effort against the Japanese, ignoring or unaware of the alliances that Yan had made with the foreign aggressors at other times. Although Yan was vilified by official CCP propaganda after he fled with the nationalist GMD to Taiwan in 1949, his legacy can also be read as contributing to making Shanxi a communist province before China became a communist country. A number of Yan Xishan’s

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policies aimed at wealth redistribution and urban industrialization. In the countryside, land reforms fostered partial redistribution, although many government officials charged with implementing these policies came from the landed gentry, a position that probably dampened their enthusiasm (Gillin 1967). In addition, Yan’s governing elites made simultaneous efforts to bolster industry and commerce in Shanxi’s cities, thereby contributing to the destruction of its protoindustrial countryside fueled by coal mining and financed by banking capital (Harrison 2006). Moreover, the political turmoil and rampant inflation in the early twentieth century further undermined the burgeoning industrialization processes in the countryside (Harrison 2006). The wealth disparity in Sweeping Cliff by the time of the revolution was therefore not as great as the grander architecture might suggest. In Sweeping Cliff, for instance, some housing was already reallocated in the 1940s, particularly to make room for new arrivals who fled north from Henan province to Sweeping Cliff as famine refugees in 1942 and 1943 (see Muscolino 2014; Wemheuer 2010). Reinforcing this notion of Shanxi as an early communist region was north Shanxi’s pivotal role as a stronghold of Red Army forces in the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945), which aligned the province with vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party (Feng and Goodman 2000; Goodman 1999). With its heavy industries and communist credentials, the province became an exemplary hotbed of peasant radicalism and industrial strength with close ties to Beijing for the three decades following the Revolution of 1949 (Goodman 2002; Kong 2010). This chapter now briefly sketches the dynamics of housing and land redistribution that occurred in Sweeping Cliff.

Domestic, Divine, and Collective Spaces The Maoist approach to the allocation of living spaces was intended to even out some of the greater disparities between villagers, leveling former inequalities and rectifying injustices. Sweeping Cliff houses were distributed to the local population on a needs basis in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The socialist housing allocation appears to have followed a case-by-case basis, although many houses remained in the hands of the family who had owned the house for generations. This was especially true for some of the less extravagant farmhouses in the east of the village. However, families with several buildings or entire courtyard complexes were obliged to share them with people in

The Big Village | 37

need of housing. These included formerly homeless families, newly formed conjugal couples, and heroes of the revolution, with the latter receiving access to some of the most luxurious courtyards. Many of the wealthier households were expropriated or restricted to one courtyard or even one building, with side houses or back quarters being distributed to other families. In contrast to the relative continuity in domestic dwellings in the village, the sacred architecture underwent a radical transformation in terms of its occupancy and use in the Maoist Era. Following an overtly ideological strategy, the two lineage halls of the Jia and Zhang families were converted into domestic dwellings, and most of the temples and public spaces were transformed into spaces for governmental use under the village brigade as the economic unit for production. Although public temple spaces were ideologically reoriented toward the project of socialist modernity, they retained their communal function under the direction of the emergent collectivist ideology. Rather than serving the ancestors, gods, and cosmological forces, these spaces were converted and reinscribed through the Communist Party as an overtly political authority that secured the material sustenance of daily life in Sweeping Cliff. The Guandi Temple outside of the South Gate had easy access to the road and fields and therefore became the site where one of the four village production teams raised cattle and donkeys. The Kahn Temple just within the village gates became the site of the school, where the concave bays formerly dedicated to the gods were turned into classrooms to teach students. The Erlang Temple was converted into village government offices and grain storage spaces. The brigades added houses within the Erlang Temple grounds for these purposes and adorned the buildings with red stars. A public address system was installed on the central square of the village, which became a site for political meetings and film screenings. The only sacred space that escaped socialist conversion was the Kongwang Temple in the center of Sweeping Cliff, where an elderly Buddhist monk lived and defended the temple from seizure as his home. The monk’s temple therefore remained untouched by the conversion of sacred architecture through its status as a domestic dwelling. This exception thereby aligns with the policy of retaining continuity in domestic homes, while converting formally religious spaces, in the Maoist Era. The key tension in Sweeping Cliff’s architectural terrain during the period of socialist collectivism therefore hinges upon the contrast between private, domestic spheres and public, collectivist spaces. Furthermore, the continuity of family rituals within the homes and

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fields throughout this period and the complete cessation of public village rituals underline this architectural contrast at the level of ritual practice. The demise of public lineage worship through the conversion of the lineage temples into private residences also shows how traditional political structures were literally domesticated through the architectural transformation in Sweeping Cliff. Although these public celebrations of larger agnatic ties were cut off, domestic houses remained storehouses of traditional practices where ancestors, gods, and cosmological forces could be worshiped. The family homes thus continued as repositories for attracting wealth and fortune to their residents. Indeed, the household remained a key site of storage and consumption throughout the Maoist Era despite the collectivization of agriculture. Despite some iconoclastic destruction at the hands of overzealous Red Guards during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976), most of Sweeping Cliff’s architectural heritage remained more or less intact. Apart from the houses that the government assigned to residents in the early Maoist Period, villagers since constructed new houses that required permits from the local government in the valley. Except for the handful of cave dwellings carved into the ravine to the west of the village, the houses outside the old village walls were built from 1978 onward in accordance with the village plan to alleviate population pressure on existing housing. In turn, the municipal Department of Land Administration ratified the spatial expansion to the north of the village in 1978, to the south in 1994, and to the east in the early 2000s. However, these were not paid for by the government but by private individuals (geren) who constructed these homes. A few wealthier families even built modern multiple story houses outside the southern village gate. During the collective period from 1949 to the early 1980s, the village was divided into four small production teams (xiaodui) that in turn made up a single village brigade (dadui). The brigade oversaw an area of about 1,000 mu2 of desolate mountain (huangshan) and 2,000 mu of agricultural land (tudi) and around 200 households (hu) living in over 160 courtyards (yuanzi). The main staples planted were corn, millet, and sorghum, as well as fruits and vegetables, which were actually often grown on family plots within the courtyard. Despite the collectivization of agricultural production, food processing, preparation, and consumption largely continued in the domestic domain. In Sweeping Cliff some ostentatious markers of wealth in the domestic dwellings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

The Big Village | 39

Zealous young Red Guards smashed stone lions, wooden carvings, and sacred statues. However, the house as a cosmological space could not be undermined by these outbursts of revolutionary zeal, as the ritual efficacy in sustaining family lives and livelihoods grew in importance. Offerings to solicit the support from imperial gods to ancestors, as well as to propitiate a wide range of minor domestic deities responsible for grain, water, and chickens, continued in domestic spaces behind high courtyard walls and heavy wooden doors.

Market Homes and Labor Topography In the post-Mao Era, Sweeping Cliff’s formerly collective land was redistributed among households in the 1980s, with each household receiving 2.0 to 2.5 mu of agricultural land per person, regardless of age or gender. The variation in the amount of land allocated depended on the quality of the soil and the location of the plot rather than what type of product was growing on the particular spot. This distribution was set to last until 2025, although reallocation was not expected to change the use rights over property significantly. Therefore, some families had large tracts of land for a few people, while others eked out an agricultural subsistence for many people on a very limited amount of land. While Sweeping Cliff’s agricultural fields were parceled out to individual households, the domestic dwellings remained in the ownership of the villagers who lived in them, although the Reform Period opened up their potential marketization by legalizing the buying and selling of village homes. The lineage halls also stayed in the hands of their domestic occupants, with the one lineage hall being converted into a shop by the family living there. Legally, houses could only be transferred through inheritance in the Maoist Era, but practically they were bought and sold between families throughout this period according to resources and necessity. However, in the post-Mao Era houses became subject to market forces, priced by exchange rather than use value. This resulted in a rapid rise in price, although somewhat tempered by the urban draw, where real estate prices appreciated even more swiftly. In addition, land for construction could be bought from the urban Department of Land Administration (Tudiju) in the municipal city center in the valley for about 3,000 to 4,000 renminbi (RMB) per mu. If one had an old house on a plot of housing land, this could usually be torn down and replaced without fees or payment.

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Sweeping Cliff had an unusual situation in that prerevolutionary houses had legally been placed under architectural preservation in 1995, so that tearing down an old house could incur a fine with the Historical Relics Bureau (Wenwuju) in the municipal offices of the nearest city, Jiexiu. Although some courtyards included sumptuous merchant houses flanked by modern white-tiled additions, the architectural preservation laws also led to many locked, abandoned, and desolate courtyards scattered throughout the village. Unlike the old houses in most of China’s countryside, these Shanxi merchant (Jin shang) courtyards could actually offer a lucrative basis for tourism, as the nearby United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage “old city” (gucheng) of Pingyao revealed. Nonetheless, rather than focusing on these remnants of merchant wealth, most Sweeping Cliff residents evaluated the wealth of nearby locations by the workplaces they offered. Their assessments projected a topography of labor opportunity across the landscape, with resource excavation, refinement, and industry being especially fortuitous in making places “get rich” (facai). Despite this popular appeal of industrial labor as the path to prosperity, the rural tourism sector promised the creation of a new service economy in the countryside, a shift orchestrated to accommodate and benefit the emerging force of red capitalism.

Red Capitalism and Commercial Nationalism Due to its Maoist legacy and infrastructural isolation, Shanxi was slow to enter the competitive market climate of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. There were two key factors in causing Shanxi to “fall behind” in the era of capitalist expansion: first, an economic base of state-led heavy industry dependent on Beijing investment; and, second, the rudimentary infrastructure linking the province to other parts of the country (see Goodman 1993, 2002). The China-wide fiscal devolution in the 1990s put increasing pressure on provincial and local governments to meet economic and developmental responsibilities. Therefore, the Shanxi government sought to attract investment by promoting a positive regional identity for economic sectors beyond agriculture and industry, such as tourism (Goodman 2002). Shanxi’s strategic development plan from 2003 evocatively advocated “mining culture in the same way that we mine coal” (Kong 2010: 84). In Sweeping Cliff, this

The Big Village | 41

melding of coal mining and cultural excavation forged the economic driver, pushing forward tourism development. Sweeping Cliff villagers found themselves precariously poised between cultural traditionalism and red capitalism as the area was carved up between large companies and government bureaus for economic development. Since the 1990s the village committee ­followed an increasingly entrepreneurial model for village development by contracting their temples out to two local tourism development companies. In May 2009 the Triumph Culture and Tourism Company took over the Sweeping Cliff tourism development by contracting the tunnels and temples from the village committee for the next fifty years, which gave the company both economic development rights and the obligation to preserve Sweeping Cliff’s heritage. The Triumph Culture and Tourism Company was a newly established branch of the Triumph Energy Company, which was a major player in the province’s coal industry, with a total income of 2.16 billion RMB in 2011. By contrast to the vast transactions resulting from their industrial operations, Triumph contracted the rights to Sweeping Cliff village temples and tunnels for an annual payment of only 100,000 RMB paid to the township government and between 50,000 to 70,000 RMB to the village committee. Contrasting stereotypes of Shanxi “as either a poverty-stricken rural backwater or, in its urban centers, as a rusty and polluted bastion of outmoded and bankrupt communist industrial policy” have precipitated a massive propaganda effort to establish a new version of the province’s “glorious entrepreneurial past” (Kong 2010: 82). By hailing a local history of an entrepreneurial spirit as a morally valid and historically grounded driver of business development, local governments and economic elites justified their development strategies in marketizing Shanxi “culture”. New cultural products heralding a national Shanxi business tradition through television dramas, for instance, create “a traditional lineage and collective identity for China’s new social group, the ‘Red Capitalists’” (Kong 2010: 97). Furthermore, many of the tourists who visited Sweeping Cliff shared this eclectic blend of ideals that underpinned their personal commitments to red capitalism in the service of the Chinese nation. For instance, Lu, the president of Triumph viewed the investments of the corporation as creating employment and fostering development in the area, and he often spoke of poverty alleviation with a tone of conviction befitting his Communist Party membership. Lu generally adopted a humble demeanor when encountering villagers and employees, speaking to them in the local dialect. In other ways

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his practices were less modest, as he also lived a life reminiscent of a wealthy merchant of the late Imperial Era, especially in his domestic arrangements. Lu’s home in the corporation compound in the city center appeared the same as those of top engineers, a spacious and modern apartment suite. A glazed balcony actually formed a corridor to a second part of the apartment, where a kitchen, playrooms, and other rooms were tucked away. The spatial and familial order of the household bore similarities to the extended courtyard complexes of the late Imperial Era, with gradations of privacy for the “inner quarters,” where wives, children, and servants lived. Despite his comfortable domestic arrangements, poverty was no laughing matter to Lu, and in our discussions, he insisted on his commitment to fostering economic development at the local level. At a banquet he hosted, I was chatting with a businessman working in the Hong Kong automobile industry. We were discussing the import of luxury cars to Shanxi, and I told him a joke I had overheard in Sweeping Cliff that characterized the feeling of unassailable privilege and entitlement that came with buying a BMW. Although BMWs are marketed by the name of Baoma or Treasure Horse in mainland China, the joke was that the acronym BMW could be read out as Bie Mo Wo, which means “don’t touch me.” The Hong Kong car merchant roared with laughter and then repeated the joke for President Lu, who seemed taken aback by the humorous play on wealth and power disparity and launched into a debate about transport development and poverty alleviation. Describing a television drama set in imperial Shanxi called Qiao Family Compound, Kong Shuyu (2010: 96) characterizes a new type of national hero, the red capitalist, in ways that strongly parallel President Lu’s self-presentation as an “interesting, if incongruous, combination of capitalist aspirations, traditional Chinese values, socialist ideals and commercial nationalism” through “a man who chooses business not for personal advancement but in the interests of the nation.” Kong argues that the drama’s main protagonist thereby “creates a traditional lineage and collective identity for China’s new social group, the ‘Red Capitalists’” (Kong 2010: 97). The tourists who flocked to Sweeping Cliff hailed from similar backgrounds, mostly well-to-do visitors from Shanxi province and beyond, who were in search of a deeper understanding of the country’s cultural history through the lens of its mercantile, financial, and military foundations. Many tourists considered tourism (lüyou) a hobby (aihao) or a pleasure (yuele), but for some travel was part of a commitment to cultural self-fulfillment. Some even hoped for pro-

The Big Village | 43

fessional advancement as they cultivated a deeper historical understanding of China’s astronomy, fengshui, and military that could be mobilized in their fields of expertise. For instance, specialists from various industrial sectors, including military or civil engineering but also government officials, bankers, businessmen, and academics, came to the village to take tours, sometimes bused in with their entire office. Across Shanxi the legacy of an entrepreneurial past was being sold as a cultural product to the new rich through tours of luxurious family courtyard dwellings and draft bank complexes dotting the province.

A House Is Certain; a Price Is Not Villagers held different perspectives on the future of their village as well as evaluating their houses. At the most obvious level, the village and the houses within it were home to them, a place of origin and return, where large parts of their lives were accommodated. While some villagers observed the profit making of the tourism development company with suspicion and indignation, others contemplated opportunities for earning a living out of the development of a tourist industry. A number of villagers had set up restaurants that catered to truck drivers passing by the village and tourists who came to visit. One family had opened their home to visitors as a guesthouse. Another woman, who had carefully renovated her ancestral home for a film shoot a number of years previously, hoped to open a grander hotel and restaurant in her courtyard complex with her sister. Facing the potential expropriation of their homes, some villagers were glad that they had built new houses, which the tourism development company would not be interested in buying; others pointed out that an old house would be much more valuable if they were removed from their homes. The value of having a well-preserved old home was thereby offset by the dangerous ownership this entailed in the event of the expansion of tourism operations into the domestic terrain. In the 1980s and 1990s, families had often invested significant amounts of capital into building new homes, but by the late 2000s they became concerned that they would not receive enough compensation for their homes if they were moved out of the village, as the tourism development company only valued old houses. Residents lingered in the temporal suspension awaiting potential relocation with trepidation, reminiscent of what Erik Harms (2013) describes as an anticipatory “eviction time” among Ho Chi Minh residents

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of an area planned to make way for a “new urban zone.” Some also held onto a steadfast optimism about the future that simultaneously undermined resistance in the present, a kind of counterproductive “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) that resonated with political legacies of Mao and was nonetheless suffused with the “spectre” of mobile capital (Rojas 2016). While villagers did not overtly blame their own village committee for the loss of control over village governance, they implied that the municipal government was in the pocket of the tourism development company, which could thereby direct decisions about the future trajectory of the village by forcing the hands of the village committee. The village committee itself formed a grassroots level of red capitalism that was perceived ambiguously by other residents, as part of the community of villagers (cunren), on the one hand, and as tools of the greater development forces forged between the municipal government and the tourism development corporation, on the other. The village mayor, for instance, was elected by the residents and a descendant of the village’s largest lineage, making him both a kin representative and political authority. Crucially, the convergence between the village committee and the local development forces became increasingly palpable from 2009 onward. In a complete capitulation of the committee’s leadership role, one committee member stated, “The village plan is now just the tourism development company’s plan [guihua].” A general consensus in the village established that the tourism development company rather than the village committee was “constructing the new village [jian xin cun]” through their close contact with the municipal government and their vast financial resources, which induced the committee to approve whatever decision the tourism development company made about the village’s future. Instead, people focused on seeking compensation (baochang) for the tourism development company’s exploitation of the village. Particularly in relation to the valuation of their houses and their possible appropriation by the tourism development company, villagers were aware that their position was precarious. Public spaces in Sweeping Cliff, such as temples, tunnels, and squares, had not been demolished but collectivized and reinscribed under Maoism as spaces for the ideological exercise of socialism. However, with the retreat of the state in the era of privatization, these spaces were particularly vulnerable to incursion from corporate interests outside the village, as they had already become appropriated from everyday usage. By contrast, domestic spaces remained as vestiges of the spoils of the revolution and the ensuing work of

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building socialism, possessions resulting from toils many villagers felt were irreducible to pricing mechanisms as simple commodities. A neighbor in his eighties who came to the village as a famine refugee from Henan in the 1930s pithily summarized his critique against commodification of his home as a livelihood guarantee: “A house is certain; a price is not.”

Fracturing the Local State Most Sweeping Cliff residents upheld a benign image of the national government through a relationship that was largely political and symbolic, while criticizing the predatory local state in terms of social and economic actualities and inequalities. Trust in the upper echelons of governance paired with misgivings about the lower tiers of state bureaucracy stretches back into Chinese history, often encapsulated in everyday parlance through the phrase “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away” (tiangao huangdi yuan), absolving the sovereign from remonstration due to the responsibility of governing a territory as vast as “all under heaven” (tianxia). In contemporary Sweeping Cliff, this contrast continued as national political figures were treated with both venerating deference and a kind of familiar intimacy when they came up in conversations or appeared on television, while local politicians and developers were heavily criticized from below as the executioners of experienced injustices. Policy directives from Beijing were generally approved at face value, while the actual local officials associated with their implementation were not above criticism. More fractured than a “bifurcated state” split between the national and the local (Guo 2001), in Sweeping Cliff even the local state actually splintered into multiple levels and vying factions in villager’s experiences and imaginary. At the most social and experiential level, they dealt with village insiders in the form of the village committee and cadres. On the midlevel they experienced the regulatory frameworks of the municipal and provincial government that implemented policy directives and made many decisions about their livelihoods through the granting of permits for activities ranging from childbearing to business. However, these permits were not always granted and could be denied to villagers, unlike powerful outsiders such as Triumph. Therefore, midlevels of government were often experienced as predatory executors of injustices. Moreover, this allowed the national government to appear as a symbolic and benevolent entity with centrifugal harmonious forces.

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Within the village, a community under pressure glossed over internal divisions in order to resist outside forces and provide a cohesive front to outsiders. This occurred in the domestic domain when family conflicts were downplayed, at a residential level between neighbors seeking to hide their differences, and as a village-wide phenomenon with regard to the village committee, whose compliance with the tourism development company was framed as a necessary compromise with outside forces. This desire to project an image of cohesion may be traceable to the Collective Era or possibly even earlier, when people of the mountainside resisted political pressures from the valley below. However, the recent constellation of frictionless coexistence resonated with the national governmental discourse of Hu Jintao’s vision of a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui). Sweeping Cliff residents certainly enacted and expressed resistance to the political pressures from the valley below, from the imperial bureaucrats to the Maoist cadres, as well as heritage preservation authorities and corporate developers. Their experiences and tactics of negotiation frequently focused on projecting images of the village as a community pervaded by the local ideal of a tranquil domesticity of “peace and quiet” (ping’an) that frequently glossed over any internal divisions or even “conflicts” (maodun). The dominant national state discourse of a “harmonious society” (hexie) epitomizing the highest rungs of “civilization” (wenming) echoed in these local aspirations while simultaneously undermining a language to create boundaries to defend the village from the world beyond. This domestic ideology of harmony allowed an image of the state to appear that split at various scales. While the central state and its key figures were deemed benevolent patrons, at times even aligned with ancestors or deities, the enforcers of actual policy at the midlevel of provincial or municipal governance were viewed with suspicion due to alleged corruption. In parallel to the assumed benevolence of the leaders of harmonious society at the highest scale of the government, the local village committee members overseeing the peace and quiet of the residential community were equally considered to have the best interests of their fellow villagers at heart. This reveals how national and localized ideologies could resonate with each other, in contrast to the antagonism fostered toward the actual practices of governance by the local state, and yet was recuperated by encompassing political claims of the home.

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Devaluation and Dislocation By shifting between insider and outsider positions and weaving claims of belonging through their own labor, villagers sustained their presence in the mountain locality with keen self-awareness and reflexivity of their vulnerability. By making certain concessions and settling compromises with regard to the mobility of the village, residents maintained a place that, far from disappearing, has become increasingly visible on the local, and even national, map. The construction of the new village even allows the countryside to remain a source of reproduction revolving around the family, household, and community beyond the prying eyes of tourists. Villagers continue to partake not just in the secret publics of “cultural intimacy” but also in the public secrets of Shanxi’s “big village” (da cunzi), where everybody knows everybody else’s business but never shares this with outsiders. Sweeping Cliff villagers’ condition conforms neither to deracinated transience nor rooted embeddedness but speaks to their capacity in forging belonging through the work of reproduction. The processes of devaluation and dislocation at work in Sweeping Cliff follow global patterns of privatization, marketization, and financialization that enable capital to enforce new livelihood struggles through recurring cycles of accumulation by dispossession (see Friedman 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2008).3 Public, shared, or collective resources are often the first to become absorbed into this insatiable cycle. In the absence of clear claims of belonging by a particular individual, corporation, or the state, these resources become particularly vulnerable to expropriation and absorption by the capitalist cycle of accumulation by dispossession. In Sweeping Cliff, the corporate takeover of the former school, granaries, animal pens, and government offices of the collective period housed in the temple complexes provide telling examples of this process in the 1990s. The further development of these spaces for exclusive tourism development with the entry of the Triumph Corporation into the village in the 2000s further exacerbated this process of enclosure of the commons, as not just the public spaces above ground in the temple complexes but also the tunnel system running beneath Sweeping Cliff became tourism infrastructure. By the late 2000s the Triumph Corporation moved beyond these formerly public resources by cornering off domestic dwellings as part of heritage to be developed in the interest of Chinese heritage preservation. Villagers’ claims to their houses through ancestral belonging and patriotic contributions in building socialism became

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swept aside in a process that legitimized corporate takeover for national development. The local state was brought on board in return for receiving profit payments, rental income, employment opportunities, and a prime real estate development, all of which Triumph delivered. In the mid-2010s many villagers gave up their homes in return for compensation packages, apartment complexes, and occupational openings as wage labor in the Triumph Corporation. The relocation of Sweeping Cliff to the new village occurred swiftly and quietly, and those opposed to the process were left behind in neighborhoods without neighbors. Although Sweeping Cliff bore the hallmarks of local upheaval, the experiences of Sweeping Cliff residents cannot be reduced to a simple trajectory of dislocation, as the process was not the totalizing “domicide” experienced elsewhere in China. The decollectivization and devalution of public, state, and communal resources, particularly economic sites of production, formed a central tenet of China’s marketization reforms since the 1980s. In the countryside, formerly collective property, from brick kilns to walnut orchards, were no longer held in common but turned into township village enterprises or sold to enterprising locals (Potter and Potter 1990; Hinton 1990). In parallel, urban factories were often converted from stateowned enterprises to public-private partnerships, shareholding enterprises, and private corporations (Hertz 1998). Since the 2000s not just local entrepreneurs but an increasing number of local enterprises have absorbed these resource and sites (So 2013, 2003), often with strong commitments to developing the local area (Oakes 2000), so that their investments can be referred to with the oxymoron “local capital” (Kipnis 2016: 66). Sweeping Cliff and the Triumph Corporation fit this pattern of state-fostered corporate-dominated market-oriented development of particular localities with a strong nationalist ethos under the guise of red capitalism. Moreover, this reconfiguration around red capitalism did not just enjoy elite support but also resonated with ordinary citizens as a popular phenomenon that integrated kinship formations and broader regional commitments to the production and reproduction of the Shanxi countryside as home.

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Notes 1. The ticketing policy has since been simplified and made more inclusive, with local identity cards accepted in lieu of purchasing tickets upon presentation at gates and entrances. 2. Each mu equals approximately 667 square meters. 3. As particular markets mature, the costs of reproducing the labor force increase, while the amount of surplus labor value that can be extracted from the local labor force decreases (Harvey 1982, 2001). As the returns on capital investments falter, previously accumulated capital seeks new spheres for investment to further accumulate capital (Harvey 2001, 2003).

– Chapter 2 –

Genealogies Revealed and Concealed

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Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth Stepping from the bright sunshine into the dim light of a family home in Sweeping Cliff, one was often greeted by a beaming poster of Chairman Mao superimposed onto the venerable position formerly reserved for the God of Wealth. In most Han ethnic homes in China, the Jade Emperor, as the ruler of heaven overseeing the Divine Bureaucracy, historically presided over the domestic altar. However, most Shanxi villagers affixed the God of Wealth above their main offering table, a bearded divinity dressed in luxurious silks and surrounded by gold ingots and precious gems. In some houses, posters of the God of Wealth’s fading glory peeped out behind Chairman Mao as both depictions of power were accommodated simultaneously. In others, the God of Wealth had reasserted his former prominence and the chairman has been removed from the divine altar since the Cultural Revolution. A newcomer to the scene might assume that these two figures were diametrically opposed. On the one hand, the God of Wealth historically stood for prosperity accumulated capriciously at the expense of others during times of rampant capitalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. On the other, Chairman Mao trumpeted the end of class inequality, redistributing resources among rural populations through housing reallocation and land reforms from the mid-twentieth century. Nonetheless, Sweeping Cliff residents saw these two figures as transformations, even extensions, of each other. Both the God of Wealth and Chairman Mao were

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seen as the wielders of efficacious and powerful forces for drawing flows of material fortune and good luck into the heart of the family. However, in Sweeping Cliff this Maoist redistribution was, of necessity, achieved at the expense of appropriation and reallocation of property, particularly houses and land, from the wealthy. The chairman had ended some villagers’ lives in destitution by bestowing houses and land upon their families through government redistribution, while others had been toppled from their former positions of privilege during this time. Since the 1980s many families have been enjoying the gradual improvement of personal and familial fortune. This resurgence of wealth simultaneously has brought a rising tide of social inequality. How can wealth and inequality be understood through the intimate processes of dwelling in this context of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”? How can this historical trajectory, from the God of Wealth to Chairman Mao, and now their doubling effect, be understood through the experiences of villagers living with sacred forces and mundane spaces of the home? As the son of a venerable Old Party member explained, “Before the revolution, people had nothing—no houses, no fields, no valuables. Then Grandfather Mao divided everything, all the wealth, Grandfather Mao and Grandfather Wealth are the same.” Residents made similar statements in other homes, such as a middle-aged shopkeeper who described: The God of Wealth [caishen] watches over the house, the family; their fortune depends on financial resources [caiyuan]. You see, before the revolution some people were abundantly wealthy; others were desperately poor. Chairman Mao distributed financial resources to the families; each family has a house. The wealth was distributed/appropriated to us [caiyuan bei fenpei gei women]. This is the meaning of Mao being here.

The wordplay the shopkeeper mobilized revolved around the word cai, meaning wealth, finance, riches, and its circular logic in uplifting families from poverty, but at the expense of others. Of course, as a shopkeeper she engaged in one of the most market-oriented entrepreneurial activities in the village. However, her statement suggests that drawing parallels between the God of Wealth and Chairman Mao are grounded in the ambiguous outcomes of inequality through appropriation and equality through the redistribution that occurred in the village. In the early twentieth century, the rise of the God of Wealth during the time of economic instability and political volatility was intertwined with the notion that one family rises to prosperity by ruining

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another, making the greedy god’s central position on the family altar “sound like a commentary upon the risks and shortcomings of developing capitalism” (Martin 2014: 77). In particular, the entrepreneurial unpredictability of the God of Wealth made him a prism for “the social division of wealth,” whereby “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of some means that it will be taken away from others at the same time; wider participation in the market outside the village means that individual fortunes may differ even within families” as “individual nodes of wealth, which come and go capriciously and can only do so at the cost of someone else. In a sense this is capitalism unmasked” (Martin 2014: 78). After the revolution, most Sweeping Cliff families replaced the God of Wealth with a poster of Chairman Mao as the main provider of material sustenance, creating an acceptable moral center for the home in the period of high socialism. Villagers thereby articulated their experiences of the chairman as a source of wealth by ending their life of destitution through the government redistribution of houses and agricultural land in the area. The socialist transformation of the spirit altar thereby perpetuates its position as the spatial and moral center of rural Chinese homes (Steinmüller 2010). In Christian Shanxi households, the spirit altar at the center of the house even featured posters with the calligraphy character for “love” (ai) emblazoned upon them, further reinforcing this location as the efficacious focus of the family home. Since the 1980s, Sweeping Cliff residents frequently returned the God of Wealth to this spirit altar, thereby making Chairman Mao and the imperial deity share the center of the home. The ritual and political spheres in Chinese cosmology are intimately entangled through the organization of the Heavenly Bureaucracy under the supreme ruler of the divine spirit state, the Jade Emperor, who in most parts of Han ethnic China is the main deity revered at the spirit altar. The presence of the God of Wealth bears witness both to Shanxi’s peculiar economic history grounded in mercantile networks and financial services but also alludes to recent experiences of the resurgence of inequality and critiques of the state. The appearance of the God of Wealth in Sweeping Cliff cannot be reduced to a return to past traditionalism. Arguably, the doubling effect of the chairman and the god articulated unacknowledged experiences about equal redistribution through unequal appropriation. Furthermore, these posters revealed the persistent ambiguity over the possibility that the accumulation of wealth for some occurs at the expense of the depletion of wealth from others. Overlaying

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Figure 2.1. Ancestral tablets with Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth. Photograph by the author.

Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth created uncanny doubles through mixing genealogies of the nation and genealogies of the family with uncomfortable truths about agency outside of familial control. While prerevolutionary families transferred the rights to the houses through patrilineal lines of kin inheritance, the Maoist period

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reallocated these resources on the basis of socialist contributions, and the Market Era has seen the resurgence of claims based on kinship, thereby oscillating in cycles of displacement and dispossession that appear both capricious and necessary.

Contradictory Class Labels and Housing Allocation The introduction of compulsory Maoist class labels by the communist government in the 1950s determined access to limited resources, including houses, for generations in Sweeping Cliff. Former merchants, famine refugees, Red Army soldiers, and landless peasants were not only classified by “class” (jieji) but also accommodated in redistributed housing on a case-by-case basis. The process of “determining class status” (huafen jieji chengfen) was a complicated business, and few villagers were willing to dwell on the details, particularly as the resulting labels had become effectively obsolete with the class rehabilitation programs of the late 1970s. Although Maoist class identification purported that its basis was in Marxist class analysis, the actual form the process took differed significantly, prioritizing political allegiances over economic relationships, in their execution (Walder 2015: 108). Initially, the purpose of the class categories fell in line with the post-Liberation goals of reallocating resources, particularly land and houses, to those deserving due to past political contributions or experienced economic injustices. However, over time the class designations became increasingly divisive, as citizens’ social status and access to resources continued to be affixed to households and individuals through their immutable and even inherited “class” labels, leading to stigmatization, injustice, and violence. The class labeling began with the determination of the male household head and then became extended and attached to his entire household when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) liberated a locality (Walder 2015: 109). The original classification was based on a combination of landholding and political histories in rural areas, whereas urbanites submitted written autobiographies that included details on work histories and occupations to be placed into permanent dossiers (Walder 2015: 109). In Sweeping Cliff, the situation emerged as somewhat complicated by the involvement of some of the young merchant offspring in communist causes and local militias, as well as the ambivalent and changing relationships that the warlord Yan Xishan had forged with both the Japanese and the Guomindang over

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time, meaning that the alliances of village residents were neither single nor clear-cut. Most Sweeping Cliff villagers fell in the ordinary category, where no strong preference in prerevolutionary political affiliation could be determined; therefore, they were usually subjected to neither punitive nor preferential access to educational and employment opportunities. Many Sweeping Cliff families belonged to the subcategory of “poor and lower middle peasant” (pinxiazhongnong), which meant that they owned their own house and land (i.e., the peasant means of production) but depended entirely on household labor without hired help. Villagers considered this a “good class origin” (haode chengfen), but some residents in this category nonetheless remembered family members subjected to the struggle sessions that became increasingly commonplace in the Cultural Revolution, with beatings, floggings, and denunciations occurring under the watchful gaze of urban cadres. Sweeping Cliff villagers blamed urban youths from the valley as outsiders, who lacked experience and understanding of local relations for the increasingly indiscriminate persecution of residents. The coveted Red label was bestowed on households with allegiance to the revolution or the party, which could be traced to revolutionary activities or inferred from their impoverished peasant background. These families were also rewarded for their past sacrifices with some of the grandest merchant houses in the village, as well as educational opportunities, career advances, and party memberships. Contradictions emerged in the initial labeling, as some of the prerevolutionary Communist Party members and Red Army soldiers actually came from prosperous families. A few Sweeping Cliff families were punished with the negative Black class label due to their previous “reactionary” (fandong) activities, such as joining the republican forces against the communists or being classified as landlords due to their landholdings and hiring practices, and were therefore excluded from key avenues of advancement, including party membership. However, according to most Sweeping Cliff residents, most of the true merchants and real landlords fled to Taiwan with the Guomindang. The inherited class status meant that even families whose assets were expropriated had to bear the punitive status of landlord, despite their lives being reduced to poverty. Interclass marriage offered a potential exit strategy from punitive class labels, particularly for women marrying into their husband’s household, although the changes were often only fully realized with their children. The contradictions between the Maoist class labels and

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their ongoing inheritance faded with the rehabilitation programs of the 1970s. However, the claims on housing made on the basis of family contributions to the revolution in the early Maoist period solidified a more lasting material legacy, despite the inherently ambiguous source of these revolutionary spoils, whether from Chairman Mao or the God of Wealth. Housing allocation in Sweeping Cliff resists broad generalizations, as many families were allowed to stay in houses they had owned for generations, while other courtyard complexes were divided up, with parts given to other residents, including new arrivals in the village or former servants of the households. Preference for housing allocation was given to families in desperate need of housing or with particularly compelling claims. Furthermore, politically wellplaced requests made by those with Red class labels received prime housing in Sweeping Cliff. However, families that straddled diverse class backgrounds due to child adoption or extreme hypergamy, and therefore contained an ambiguous mixture of class experiences, occasionally retained housing rights despite the bad class label of the household head. The consequences of housing redistribution meant that a diverse group of people who would historically not have been in everyday proximity, came to be living in close quarters in luxurious houses: merchants and their families, but also their household dependents, became neighbors to formerly landless laborers, ritual specialists like diviners and musicians, medical practitioners, and famine refugees from adjacent areas. Despite material scarcity in the decades following the revolution, their homes were opulent houses with clear markers of past wealth. In short, the revolution gave citizens from very different walks of life, prominently including heroes of the revolution, access to the houses of the wealthy. In contradiction to this distribution of the spoils of the communist victory, subsequent Maoist campaigns labeled the former affluent owners of the merchant complexes “class enemies” to be ostracized rather than emulated. In a strange twist of fate, Shanxi’s historical reputation as a place of Maoist zealotry allowed the material heritage and cultural practices, including those associated with the merchants, to continue under what villagers called “the big red umbrella” (da hong san). In the subsequent decades, residents materialized their contradictory experiences of successive waves of political repression, dispossession, and redistribution through these houses. Much like the doubling of the God of Wealth and Chairman Mao, families hid genealogical commitments behind identifications with the peasant as the backbone of

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the nation or the soldier as the vanguard of socialism in their homes. Certain aspects of family histories were thereby concealed, while others were revealed, even showcased, to conform to national scripts and desired images of the occupants.

Secrets of Sacred Geography Objects in the home form inculcating principles that are not simply handed down over generations but constructed, arranged, and created with great care and attention. Living in a home constantly evokes memories through the pervasive and ongoing rhythms of everyday activities. Psychologists often speak of the cognitive development that occurs in children as they engage with their immediate surroundings, but we are less accustomed to thinking of objects that stimulate cognitive reflections in adults, often eliciting memories of kin. Homes do not just trigger recollections but are built, organized, and decorated to elicit memories for those dwelling within. Especially when lives become ruptured through tumultuous events, the object world of the home can help to forge new positions in time and space. This may occur with an eye to erasing past transgressions or to recognizing present commitment to a new era. The personal, familial, and domestic become enfolded in these processes of placing selves into world orders materialized through the home. The home offers compelling insights into the ongoing processes that forge the materiality of everyday life, particularly in generating emotion and affect through the world of things (Carsten 2007; Miller 2001). Yael Navaro-Yashin’s (2009) work on Turkish Cypriots living in the homes of displaced Greek Cypriots offers compelling points for comparison with Sweeping Cliff. She argues that “ruination” lies at the foundation of new political systems that must recycle, incorporate, or domesticate “the ruins, shards, rubble, and debris” of the dispossessed and displaced (Navaro-Yashin 2009: 14). While Navaro-Yashin engages with residents who have been lost but cannot be mourned, Sweeping Cliff villagers were dispossessed but not necessarily displaced. While Cypriot homeowners speak of loot or booty, Sweeping Cliff residents drew on discourses of both the justice and injustice that were served through revolutionary zeal and housing allocation. These narratives allowed them to engage in practices of wealth production and accumulation to rectify past grievances. Ruptures of the 1949 Communist Revolution were brought into claims of belonging to and over homes amidst family histories of

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dispossession and redistribution. While China’s land redistribution policy has received significant scholarly attention (see Meng 2015), the parallel policy of housing redistribution in rural villages like Sweeping Cliff remains relatively oblique (for an unusual firsthand account of another Shanxi village, see Hinton 1966: 146–56). As land remains subject to state ownership, houses form an important element of family property in the countryside, passed on from generation to generation through inheritance (Liu 2000). Legally, houses could only be transferred through inheritance in the Maoist Era, but practically they were bought and sold between families throughout this period according to resources and necessity. There are a number of important documents pertaining to ownership of the houses in Sweeping Cliff, most prominently the prerevolutionary lineage scrolls and the postrevolutionary housing deeds. Most residents have never seen these documents, even when they pertained to their own lineage or household, because these documents provided political sensitive evidence in the form of genealogical evidence and housing contracts. The lineage scrolls had survived the twentieth century within the main lineage branch’s principal homes, but they were never unfurled, ostensibly due to their brittle state. The contracts, on the other hand, documented their transfers of housing deeds since the revolution, which was a market-based practice of questionable legality during the Maoist Era. By contrast to the secrecy with which they guarded their housing deeds and genealogical scrolls, Sweeping Cliff villagers openly displayed how their kinship, labor, and socialist values justified their residence in houses. As vestiges of superstition (mixin), the ancestral tablets (Figure 2.1) were not considered objects for a public audience during the Maoist Era and became enshrined in wooden boxes hidden from view. These ornately carved and carpentered cabinets at the ancestral altar were often complemented with offerings of liquor, flowers, and incense in delicate glass vases. In recent decades villagers personalized the ancestral shrines with formal headshots of the deceased, as well as montages of family photographs above the box (Figure 2.2). These photomontages included group shots of extended kin at elderly family members’ birthday parties, as well as family gatherings in other exceptional settings, such as visiting local tourism sites, where professional photographers often offered their services to visitors. Portraying family successes played an important role in marriage negotiations, particularly for households with sons who wished to attract daughters-in-law. Moreover, these photographs showed how

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Figure 2.2. Ancestral tablet cabinet and family photographs. Photograph by the author.

family members had contributed to building socialism and strengthening China. Themes for the photomontages included family members receiving educational certificates or posing in military dress, or they were official pictures of colleagues and managers in their work units. Action photos were rarely included, let alone pictures of family members actually at work. However, quite a number of photomontages included depictions of a romanticized peasant role for family members, as kin overlooked the harvest hauled back to the courtyard, for instance (Figure 2.3). The montages could depict particular phases of the life cycle, most notably at weddings and birthday celebrations, but they could also bear testament to past labor contributions in building Chinese socialism, as well as upward mobility in terms of class, status, and profession, or roles in the rural grassroots intelligentsia. Sweeping Cliff families achieved this memory work across historical rupture by materializing claims of belonging in their homes. Yet political belonging to the nation in terms of socialist ideals and genealogical claims to houses in terms of inheritance tore in different directions. While ancestral shrines and tablets historically formed compelling claims over houses, land, and people, the Maoist

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revolution quite literally domesticated these kinship connections, forcing them out of public lineage halls and into village homes. Complementing these kin credentials, photographic montages of living kin now adorned the family home, evoking socialist values, everyday labor, and kinship connections for all to see. These highly visible family evocations contrasted with the secrecy surrounding written documentation related to homes. Genealogical scrolls and housing deeds, in particular, were kept under lock and key. The tension between belonging politically to the socialist nation and genealogically to the family home was simultaneously displayed and disguised through the object world of the home. This revealed an unsettling balance that had to be struck in making claims in Sweeping Cliff: families had to do the political work of rendering their contributions to the socialist nation visible, while simultaneously materializing genealogies through ancestral tablets and family snapshots, all to keep claims of belonging to the house, the state, and their kin alive for future generations.

House Genealogies Turning to three homes in Sweeping Cliff village allows three “house genealogies” to reveal how actual residents created and sustained each other in everyday life over time. This approach bears resemblance to narrations of life histories. However, tracing the varying accounts of family members through the house foregrounds the immediacies of subsistence and reproduction. The importance of family members’ political, economic, and kinship positions is shown to be part and parcel of their emotional interactions as they go about their lives. Rather than focusing predominantly on communist policies or patrilineal kinship to trace intergenerational relations, narratives of house life show how continuities and differences in people’s personal trajectories occur throughout time. Positionality in terms of age and gender thereby appear as part of a diverse tapestry through which people weave unique life projects by combining memories and desires for family life. Family dynamics of movement as both aspirational mobility and enforced hardship also emerge. Residents grapple with ideological and material dimensions of the home as both affective and political experiences. Not only did those labeled “class enemies” experience dispossession, but others benefited from these processes of the reallocation of domestic and agricultural land. Any attempt to analyze these issues must therefore

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take into account how inequality and distribution go hand in hand with family narratives and house histories. Beyond personal experiences as idiosyncratic, the shared political dimensions of these occurrences demand consideration here. For instance, Veena Das (1995: 17) argues that “critical events” compound both intimate and political experiences in times when the possibilities of political action are deeply altered through extreme, often violent, turbulence in everyday life. Cataclysmic experiences of what Stephan Feuchtwang (2011: 11) refers to as “caesura” divide lives and generations into a “before” and an “after” that often bring familial and large-scale moments of disruption into discordant relations of recognition. When past and future selves are involved in this unresolved experiential tension, Janet Carsten (2007) notes, the past must be forgotten, suppressed, or contained to accommodate the future (see also Empson 2007). One way to bring the political and the familial together is by thinking of kinship in terms of genealogies of the nation and personal narratives of citizenship. Janet Carsten (2007: 25) highlights how national scripts frequently omit the marginalized or dispossessed within tales of progress. Furthermore, this movement of surveillance and censure can become entangled in cleaning up family genealogies to conform to state discourse (Carsten 2007: 25). Laura Bear (2007: 55) has referred to this phenomenon as “the domestic uncanny” of “romantic nationalism,” whereby the emotional authentication of genealogical evidence falls outside the sphere of official religion but nonetheless hints at the otherworldly and derives power by fusing the sacred and the secular.

House 1: Children of the Revolution A grand courtyard complex sat on the edge of a verdant ravine in a quiet alleyway away from the bustling main thoroughfare of Sweeping Cliff. A lone stone lion crouched to the left of the steps that led across the high threshold framed by an ornate wooden door. This monumental imperial symbol of wealth and status had not only lost his counterpart on the right side of the door but had also been violently decapitated. Inside the courtyard, blue-green tiled roofs swept in elegant curves down to the delicately carved wooden eaves. However, the eaves had also been smashed so that the decorative flowers and birds clung in broken glory to the columns and attics. Why was ruination being preserved in this courtyard? What class

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positions and genealogical connections were materialized through this conservation of destruction? The family who lived in this courtyard was part of the old revolutionary vanguard, and the surviving grandmother, Hong, was referred to as an Old Party member, a venerable term for those who a long history of commitment to the Communist Party. Her husband was born in Sweeping Cliff and fought with the famous communist force of the Eighth Route Army, while Hong worked as a spy for the communists in her hometown in northern Shanxi, which was controlled by the nationalist Guomindang forces. After the revolution of 1949 they were introduced by an official matchmaking service and settled back into Sweeping Cliff in this grand courtyard, which was shared between Red Army veterans and their families. Hong’s son, Daxiao, was adamant that “there is absolutely no connection between kinship and our claims to the house.” Daxiao then proceeded to elaborate with great gusto on the family’s revolutionary background and their allocation of this house after Liberation. He claimed that the house formerly belonged to a landowner, who abandoned it after the revolution. Hong interceded with a description of these terrible prerevolutionary times that left people reeling from great social tyranny and banditry. She also explained that their house allocation was brokered through a special agency that provided evidence of their revolutionary activity. In the 1950s the courtyard, which was one of the most beautiful in the village, was divided between two veteran families. As Daxiao said, “All the good houses were landowner houses, but later they were shared out to people of the Red Army.” Daxiao’s parents received three bays on the eastern side of the courtyard to start a family, while the two western bays were allocated to the bereaved widow of a soldier who died fighting for the communist cause. After this neighbor passed away in the late 1960s, Hong’s family drew up a contract with the deceased widow’s nephew to take over her house. When I asked Hong about the iconoclastic destruction of many of the courtyard’s grand features, sadness passed across her features as she explained that Red Guards had come during the Cultural Revolution in 1968 and smashed the place up with bats and sticks. Hong said she tried to reason with them, but they did not understand Mao’s directives correctly and turned against even the most loyal communists, like her and her husband. As Hong and her husband negotiated with the Red Guards in the courtyard, her children hid in the house. Hong told me she was very afraid, but the young Red

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Guards did not hurt any people, they only smashed up all the old things in the courtyard without entering the buildings. Nonetheless, Hong refused to let these experiences of victimhood push her into the position of a denouncer, who would name and blame those who had caused her anguish. In her narrative, neither Mao nor the Red Guards could be held responsible for the destruction of her family home, as this violence had been caused by a misunderstanding of the chairman’s instructions by overzealous young revolutionaries. Hong thereby refused to lay historical guilt on the Red Guards, and she turned our conversations toward the positive progression of history under the advance of communism. Hong explained how her family had made great progress in their careers through tireless labor in the service of the Chinese nation. After settling back into Sweeping Cliff with his new bride, Hong’s husband was given a weaving loom by the communist government to make cloth banners for important party functions. After he had woven the cloth by hand, Hong would decorate the banners with red paint, adding slogans and symbols depending on their purpose. This provided the couple with important political work that complemented their toiling in the agricultural fields with their neighbors. Hong was so proud of their work in handicraft manufacturing that she ushered me into the storage room to show off her husband’s loom, which was stored there as a keepsake from those busy years. Returning to the questions of why ruination was being preserved and what class positions and genealogical connections were materialized through this preservation of ruin, it became clear that Hong’s family had contradictory ideological commitments to accommodate in the home. Hong’s family refused any kinship connection to the house by claiming that the landlords had already fled Sweeping Cliff with the retreating nationalist forces. Their narrative thereby glossed over any potential dispossession of displaced homeowners, allowing Hong’s family to deny the existence of victims in this process of redistribution. The attempt to soften the uncanny persistence of former class privilege through the house’s opulence took the unsettling form of preserving the ruination wreaked on their home during the Cultural Revolution. Despite Hong’s insistence on the legitimacy of occupying their residence due to her family’s contributions to building socialism, there was an uncanny resemblance between the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary forms of inequality: class privilege based on inherited merchant wealth had given way to class privilege based on inherited communist credentials. Both forms of privilege were

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attached to ownership claims over the house as a material marker of wealth. Nonetheless, Hong’s family was one of the most forthcoming in describing Maoist housing allocation and their experiences of the Cultural Revolution, partly because it placed them in such positive revolutionary light—first as heroes of the revolutionary vanguard and then as the victims of misguided political violence. The Cultural Revolution position of victimhood allowed the family to gloss over any former privileges with continuing hardship sustained as adherents to the true intentions of Maoist communism. By preserving the iconoclasm of the Red Guards in their home as ruination, the family turned their house into material evidence of their revolutionary class position under siege. Their experiences before Liberation in 1949 and then again during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s doubled their position of victimhood in the house. Their understanding of the motivations of Red Guard violence came to be memorialized in the house through preserving destruction. By oscillating between claiming their historical position as both historical victors and victims, Hong’s family was repressing certain privileges that they had held through their favorable designation as Old Party members, a positive label that was passed on through the generations. Not only was their house secured through this venerable political status, but kinship genealogy framed by communist veneration allowed other material and immaterial privileges to be passed down the family line as well. Most notably, Hong’s family was able to secure high-status labor alongside the grueling agricultural work to which most of their neighbors were subjected. The weaving loom on display revealed their ongoing privileged position as workers, especially positively moving beyond agricultural toward eventual industrial labor. Hong’s son Daxiao completely left agricultural labor when he entered work in a stone quarry, becoming part of the manual workforce engaged in industrial labor. His son, moreover, became a fully-fledged urban professional as an advertising producer and then a manufacturer of fine hardwood furniture in Beijing. An uncomfortable truth underlay Hong’s family’s home possessions: their positive class label had been passed down along the lines of kinship in ways more commonly associated with the negative corollaries of inherited privilege than the socialist revolution. The tension between what could be achieved through labor in contrast to what could be assumed through genealogical inheritance in residential patterns even emerged in relation to migration patterns and the claiming of offspring. While Dahong’s six-year-old

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great-grandson accompanied his parents to the capital, her two-yearold great-grandson Xiaohong stayed at home with his delighted grandparents, who boasted of the superior care they were providing in their home. In particular, they emphasized the voluntary aspect of Xiaohong’s excellent choice of residence due to the village environment providing clean air, healthy food, vibrant sociality, and, above all, the knowledgeable, experienced, and affectionate care of Xiaohong’s paternal grandparents and great-grandmother. Despite the questionable reflectivity on which a two-year-old would make such an alleged choice, the basis on which Xiaohong’s paternal grandparents made their caring claims through caring labor was noteworthy. Instead of assuming patrilineal succession as a given, they strongly emphasized the voluntarism in their grandson’s decision to live in their care, thereby reinforcing a notion of their relationship as “created” through circumstance and agency (see Carsten 2000; Stafford 2000).

House 2: Fostering a Home through Meritocracy One of the most meticulously preserved houses in the village was the courtyard of the family that hosted me throughout my fieldwork in Sweeping Cliff. Nia, the great-grandmother of the home, had succeeded in building a family and forging a home despite a life marked by dislocation and loss. When she was only twelve years old in the mid-1940s, the merchant family that lived in this courtyard lost their only son and adopted Nia and her husband to continue their lineage and provide them with descendants. The young couple’s humble backgrounds secured their claims to the home despite the ensuing housing redistribution policy. A decade later, Nia’s work in caring for the aging merchant couple became compounded by the death of her husband during a construction accident. From then on, Nia shouldered the burden of raising children, maintaining the house, and earning work points from agriculture for the entire household on her own. This is how Nia came to call this beautiful eighteenth-century merchant courtyard her home, despite being the second daughter of an impoverished farming family who grew up in a mud hut in a distant village. Nia’s beautifully preserved home bore witness to the hard work she had poured into its walls since she arrived there more than half a century ago. Despite her pride in her home and family, Nia lamented the lack of a male heir for her house. She had given birth over half a

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dozen times, but only two children survived to adulthood, with her daughter dying of cancer a few years previously. These memories moved her to tears, and we rarely spoke of them. By the late 2000s Nia shared her house with her only surviving child, her son Xing, and his wife, Sheng, as well as Sheng’s brother’s son so that he could attend the final year of primary school. All three of her granddaughters had left the family home. Despite Nia’s lifelong dedication to sustaining her family through her work, the coercive dimension of patrilineal inheritance and the disastrous ramifications of the lack of a male heir came out one day as we sat together on the elevated bed platform, the kang.1 Lamenting that she did not know who would inherit the house after her son, she chose not to dwell on her deceased children, instead concentrating on passing on the house as a warm place of life. This became very apparent in the conversation we had as I was backing up some photographs on my computer. This was the first computer Nia had seen, and she took great interest in the machine, which she compared to an interactive television. Smoking a cigarette, she sat down next to me on the kang and asked me where I had gotten the valuable technological device. I explained that the computer was a gift from my older brother, who no longer needed it. Nia nodded as she told me that it was good to have brothers, as this safeguarded the younger generation by “passing down one generation to the next.” With a gloomy look, Nia began to lament that girls all leave and need a dowry to do so. Nia’s family had no brothers and little money, so she was sold into marriage, first to her husband’s family and then to the merchants who lived in this courtyard. Worse still, only one of her sons survived. With depressed resignation, Nia explained that her daughter-in-law had only given birth to three girls, all of whom had married or would marry out and would not return. She sighed as she explained that she did not know who would inherit the house. I asked her if this was not an issue of passing on the surname, and she vehemently disagreed that this was very much an issue of the house. Nia lowered her voice as she swallowed back her tears and recounted how she moved into this house and did not take on the family’s surname, but the tragedy emerging now is that there will be no people to live in the house. She shook her head and concluded with dismay, “I am old, I am old, I do not know what to do about the house. The house is becoming cold (lengle).” Nia had abandoned any commitment, or perhaps even hope, of perpetuating the family surname and instead became concerned with the continuation of a warm and vibrant house for the future. The

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ruptures of patrilocal, and then neolocal, hypergamy overshadowed her youth, while clashing demands of rigid patriliny and the actual work of bearing and raising offspring loomed large. These formal kinship prescriptions, of patrilocality and patriliny, collided with the actual unfolding of life events as she was brought to the merchant house and struggled to make a home there. The infants and children who died prematurely and were buried in unmarked graves were not topics of direct discussion; instead they surfaced in Nia’s reasoning that bearing, raising, and caring for children was fulfilling in and of itself. As in other households, this loss of life remained unspoken, suppressed, and taboo for the mothers, while others around them alluded to them in hushed tones to explicate caring practices for infants and children (see Bruckermann 2017a). Nia covered these ruptures of lineage, location, and loss through pride in the home she had made and the family she had created. Looking at the working lives of her coresident family in this natal family courtyard, Nia’s ethos of hard work and dedicated labor have been passed on through the generations. While her daughter-in-law Sheng continued to work in the fields, Nia’s son Xing turned to the private sector when the household responsibility system was introduced in the 1980s. Xing worked day and night shifts at a local stone quarry to supplement the family’s agricultural income. Both Sheng and Xing shared the value of education and imparted this to their daughters. Despite her limited literacy and heavily accented Putonghua, Sheng vigorously helped her nephew with his schoolwork every day. In the evenings Xing inquisitively and diligently watched the news and pursued discussions with neighbors and friends about current affairs near and far. This dedication to education as part of a trajectory of upward mobility is widespread across the Chinese countryside and often rigorously reinforced in educational curricula (Kipnis 2011; Obendiek 2016). The family’s meritocratic attitude toward work and education has brought about significant status advancements within the last three generations for a family officially designated as rural citizens (nongmin). Nia is illiterate, speaks an extremely localized dialect, and struggles to follow the Putonghua dialogue on television. Her son and daughter-in-law can read and write, understand Putonghua, and have a much larger sphere of engagement in terms of their social and occupational lives. In turn, the next generation of daughters all graduated from middle school and then made divergent choices about education, work, and family. Although all of the young women’s life projects can be integrated into wider frameworks, following their

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individual choices also provides a glimpse into the diverse positions people take up to follow their life paths beyond prescribed roles and social pressures. The two younger daughters, Erdan and Sandan, both graduated from lower middle school (xiaozhong) in the township capital and went on to work as service personnel (fuwuyuan) in a hotel in Jiexiu city. During my stay, Erdan lived with her husband in an apartment they rented in the city, and Sandan lived with her husband in a house sharing a courtyard with his parents’ home in a rural township nearby. Sandan had given up her job in the city and gave birth to her first child, a healthy little boy, in early 2010. However, she was keen to reenter the labor market as soon as possible after his birth as a means to self-fulfillment. Erdan, who was extremely fond of children, became pregnant in the spring of 2010 and was looking forward to her time outside the labor force in caring for her first child. Although both young women were explicit about their youth as a time for personal development and growth, they chose to do so locally through establishing themselves in terms of their work and family life. By contrast, their older sister Fudan had chosen the path of higher education as a way to transform her life away from the localized family network, a pathway open to students of exceptional academic capacities (see Bregnbaek 2016, Hansen 2014). Excelling at urban higher middle school (gaozhong) in Jiexiu city and gaining outstanding marks on the university entrance examination (gaokao), she had managed to win a scholarship for medical school in Nanjing. Other villagers would sometimes refer to her as a “genius” (tiancai), and her family would speak with pride of her educational achievements. However, when Fudan returned to the village for Chinese New Year, questions about her relationship status and her plans for settling down and beginning a family frequently surfaced. Fudan herself chose not to disclose a lot of information about these issues. On one occasion, Fudan retained a serious, silent, and blank expression as her mother chastised her for several hours about finding work and starting a family. After the event, Fudan disclosed that any engagement on such issues would encourage more scolding and that refusing to react was her best line of defense. Fudan was engaged in an unusual struggle for a village woman as she sought to be alone and be left alone, so that she could separate herself from what she could not be a part of and continue to follow her life path as an independent doctor. Despite the accusatory way in which middle-aged women often questioned why Fudan and I were not married and did not have children, at other times parents held us up as exemplars of

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the mobility brought about by educational achievements for the benefit of their children. Especially at the new year’s period, Fudan and I were occasionally invited to extended family gatherings at which we were paraded in front of youngsters as models for the rewards of studying hard. Fudan’s attempt to break out of the local area and set up a life independent of the village forms a strong contrast to her sister’s struggle to develop a local network of intimate relationships through friends and family in the area. Their notions of whom they are responsible to, their family or themselves, pulls at their notions of what makes a valuable life project. However, all three young women shared their family’s high regard for hard work and educational achievement within a meritocratic value system where mobility could become an enabling strategy to achieve one’s goals, whether these were oriented toward the family, the house, wealth, or human health. Nonetheless, Fudan’s voluntary distancing from her natal family was deemed a morally ambiguous choice within the upheaval of what constitutes acceptable and responsible action within the increasingly large sphere of personal agency in Sweeping Cliff. The family that Nia had created, raised, and safeguarded bore testament to her continuous work and steadfast dedication to her kin. In addition, the house she had cleaned, maintained, and owned stood as a monument to her life, from her humble beginnings to her eventual comfortable standing. Although Nia’s family frequently attempted to make her give up household work and enjoy a restful

Figure 2.3. The autumn harvest in a courtyard home. Photograph by the author.

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period of ­retirement as befitted a senior matriarch, Nia refused to sit idly when there was work to be done. She took great pride in her achievements, above all her house, home, and family, the jia, she had built with her lifelong labor. Nonetheless, contradictions emerged in personal and familial aspirations across time, as the conflicting aspirations of patrilineal descent and living family relations erupted in the merchant home, exacerbated by lacking male heirs and premature deaths. Even the dual ambition for education and desire for offspring tore in different directions between locality and mobility in forging successful lives. At times these uneasy juxtapositions of aspiration and defeat could be overcome by championing the value of the house, home, and family as a jia. Yet, at other times, the repression and uncanny resurfacing of these memories, experiences, and hardships forced themselves into everyday lives through the entwined work of making a home in the countryside.

House 3: Sowing Tradition and Farming History Turning to a final courtyard in the less prestigious and more humble eastern part of the village, a creaking gate led into a courtyard with rusting sickles and cobweb-covered looms preserved in crumbling storage houses. Like a museum dedicated to disused and discarded agricultural tools, as well as family memorabilia and kin photographs, the grassroots historian who lived in this home with his wife preserved the object world of previous farming generations for the future. Historically, in this less affluent part of town, farmers lived in simple dwellings that contrasted with the opulence of the merchant courtyard complexes on the western side of the main street of the village. Entering the Zheng family’s gate, a narrow and deep courtyard of tamped earth and garden plots lay ahead. A dog sheltered in a kennel on the right and chickens ran across the courtyard. Formerly, a mule had been tied up behind one of the storage houses. A makeshift wooden framework kept the large piles of corn from contamination with the earth as the corn dried in the sun. The houses were built in the nineteenth century and included a main three-bay flat-roofed concave-ceilinged cave-style dwelling (yaodong) and two lower side houses with slanted roofs for agricultural storage. Agricultural tools, grains, and cooking implements were strewn around the side houses collecting dust and age, an homage to technologies past and present. Only the village historian, Teacher Zheng, and his wife Zhang lived in the house, so they spread their lives and belongings across

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the spacious assortment of bays and rooms in their farming quarters. However, before leaving home, all five of their children had lived with them in one bay as Teacher Zheng’s parents occupied the other living bay. Nobody had ever lived in the side storage houses. Teacher Zheng was the only child in the house, so upon marriage to Zhang they moved into this western bay and began their family life there. Teacher Zheng’s parents lived in the “upper” (shangtou) bay to the east of the central entrance room, while the younger generation lived in the “lower” (xiatou) western bay. As their family grew, the couple eventually slept on one kang with all five of their children. When I asked Zhang whether this was crowded, she laughed and answered with a dismissive sweep of the hand, “Not at all; we are one family; it was very hot and noisy [renao]!” In using this term for “hot and noisy,” Zhang and her fellow villagers mapped the “social heat” of bodies, houses, villages, and fields (see Chau 2006b, 2008; Steinmüller 2011b). This phenomenon collapses sensory and social dynamics through bodily experiences, in what Elisabeth Hsu (2007, 2008b) has called a “body ecologic” due to the continuous, porous, and holistic experience of the body immersed in its socio-sensorial environment. Concretely, Adam Chau (2006b) analyzes the overlapping concepts of honghuo, which literally means “red and fiery,” with renao, which means “hot and noisy,” as a desirable mode of sociality in neighboring Shaanxi province. Chau (2006b: 155) distinguishes between two modes of desire for social heat: first, the prosaic mode refers to the home and settlement patterns, while the dramatic mode is concerned with breaking up “the dull and bland drudgery of everyday life” with “lively and exciting social events such as funeral and wedding banquets or temple festivals” (Chau 2006b: 155).2 In rural Hubei, Hans Steinmüller (2011b: 267) describes a similar state of affairs: Any notable social event should be “noisy and hot” (E. naore, P. renao or honghuo). The liveliness, noise, and heat implied in the word naore is the ideal characteristic of a festival, a banquet, a market, and gambling. Houses that are high up in the mountains and far away from roads are said to be “lonely” and “cold” in the vernacular. Contrasted to this is the “liveliness” and “hotness” of the street and the market. This is related to the cultural ideal of having a household that is “lively and hot,” of which the most obvious sign would be many children crowded under one roof.

Rural Shaanxi villagers felt that “having no children is not honghuo (bu honghuo), making a household cold and desolate and its occupants

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lonely and sad; a lot of children add honghuo to the household” (Chau 2006b: 153). In Sweeping Cliff, the notion that having lots of children and a full household amplified the sensory-social dynamic of renao was equally present. Even children’s bodies were considered to be intrinsically hot (tire). On several occasions old women described their early family life with an abundance of children on one kang as a time that was particularly renao. At other times, houses without children, especially if only elderly residents remained, were deemed not just lonely, but cold (leng). In discussions over the residential patterns of young women and their newborn children, the abundance of renao they brought with them was often crucial to a family’s desire to have their married daughters return to their natal family. Sweeping Cliff families generate social heat through everyday activities and celebratory events as they gather, crowd, and interact within a delimited space, forming a boisterous condensation of sociality. As uncomfortable contradictions arise, surrounding claims to the home between patrilineal inheritance and labor contributions in building the future, the warmth of the living family can suture cracks opened up as expectations falter, and sometimes fail, between participants. Moreover, unlike the formal expectations of patrilineality, the sensorial-social cycles of heat that living families create can help heal some of the uncanny sutures left behind by missing absent young, female, or deceased members of the family. Materializing and memorializing their family, the walls of all the Zheng and Zhang houses were decorated with photographs. When taking into consideration the selection of photographs and their relationship to the main couple, Teacher Zheng and Zhang’s emphasis on the natal family group and male descendants emerged. Notably, one of the enlarged images of a group shot showed Teacher Zheng and Zhang with their four daughters and their young children, including their recently deceased daughter. However, the only grandchildren that received individual photo spaces on the walls were their only son’s only daughter and their oldest daughter’s son. When I asked Teacher Zheng about this, he explained that their son’s daughter was of one lifeblood (yi ge xueye) and that their daughter’s son was the eldest male of the next generation. The inclusive shots of their daughters and children also left room for an intimate and inclusive natal family group on the walls. This aspect of their family dynamic became particularly apparent on the second day of Chinese New Year’s (chu-er), when all women in the area must return to their natal families (niangjia). All three living daughters, their four husbands (including the husband of the

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deceased daughter), and their children returned to Teacher Zheng and Zhang’s home for a warm and boisterous afternoon of food, games, and activities generating an abundance of social heat. Through activities of work and play the family generated an affective environment pervaded by an atmosphere of saturation, plenitude, and excitement. While the women cooked at the stoves and ate on the kang, their husbands gambled at the card table in the center of the upper bay of the house. Children ran around the home delivering cigarettes and sweets in return for new year’s money. Notably, Teacher Zheng’s eldest daughter, who lived in Sweeping Cliff, was seated directly on his right at the reunion meal, while I was on his left. All the other people at the round table were men of the family, Zheng’s only son and four sons-in-law. The festival celebrating women’s natal families also allowed memories of the tragic absence of a recently deceased daughter to arise on this otherwise joyful occasion. Rather than addressing her death directly, the family commented and encouraged the warm and affectionate reunion between her husband and his daughter, who was fostered by his sister. While the other children were expected to remain on the kang, she came to cuddle with her father, brought cigarettes, received multiple rounds of gifts of money and sweets, and was generally considered a welcome addition to the adult table. At the center of attention in the midst of this natal family gathering, her presence helped reincorporate the deceased daughter’s nuclear family into a context of positive affect despite the separation of death. The photos on the Zheng-Zhang family walls also hinted at some of the underlying values of education, work, and cultural preservation within their home. Photos of various work units, government officials, and local heritage sites adorned the walls. In addition, their eldest daughter’s son was pictured squatting on a lawn and posing with his grandparents in full military regalia. Teacher Zheng and Zhang are very proud of all their grandchildren, but their eldest daughter’s children seem to have been particularly careful in pursuing paths they view with merit. Of course, the fact that they were the eldest of their grandchildren also meant that they had gone further afield than their cousins, who were still in middle school. While their grandson was away in Inner Mongolia training for the military, their daughter’s daughter was studying at teacher training college in a nearby city to return home and become a local teacher. However, the sheer distance of their movement and the choices of their careers in public service departments held undercurrents of their notions of responsibility to the larger communal project of the Chinese nation.

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Their eldest daughter’s daughter, called Anwen, frequently returned to the village, and we often discussed her plans for the future during her visits. Despite studying to be a teacher, Anwen was not sure whether she was committed to the profession. However, she felt her eventual return to the Jiexiu area was set in stone. After explaining that if she left her parents would be anxious about her if she strayed too far afield, she joked, “I’m afraid of going out and losing my way.” Expanding on her anxieties about the outside world (waidi), Anwen told me that she is unusual, because she prefers domestic village life, as it is calm (pingjing) and quiet (anjing). She argued that most of her generation born in the 1990s prefer the boisterousness (renao) and pleasures (lequ) in the cities so they can go out and have fun (chuquwanr). However, she did not like the social pressure (shehui yali) of the urban environment. Many of her friends are rebellious (panni) and headstrong (renxing) people, who like freedom and are unwilling to do as they are told. By contrast, her brother as a child of the 1980s feels more inclined to bow down to social and personal pressure and prioritizes working, making money, getting married, and buying a house and car. Anwen summarized it like this: “His dreams are very pragmatic [xianshi].” In Anwen’s family, her affectionate appreciation for village life has been handed down for generations. Her grandfather, in particular, has been instrumental in putting Sweeping Cliff on the map as a place of interest for Chinese military, cosmological, and religious history. As a grassroots intellectual Teacher Zheng had already published one account of village history in 2008 and compiled a second manuscript published in 2017. His eldest daughter, Anwen’s mother, emphasized the traditional value of womanly skills, such as cooking and embroidery, often showing me her needlework and expanding on its symbolism for hours as she sat on the kang working throughout the winter months. And despite her son’s far-flung military training, she eagerly anticipated his eventual return to the area to marry his girlfriend. The Zheng family was firmly grounded in the village, as their farming courtyard and most of the family members saw their movements of dispersal into the valleys as a temporary removal that would lead to eventual return to Sweeping Cliff. Teacher Zheng’s son owned and lived in an apartment in Jiexiu with his wife and daughter. Nonetheless, based on the assumption that he and his wife would return to the village, he was the undisputed inheritor of the family courtyard. In fact, his wife’s employment as a cook in the local tourism development company had already initiated this movement

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back up into the hills. Although Teacher Zheng’s eldest daughter remained in Sweeping Cliff with her husband, where she supported her parents with daily tasks, she was not going to inherit the home. Teacher Zheng justified this male inheritance in terms of rural “tradition” (chuantong), “habit” (xiguan), and “custom” (fengsu), thereby sidestepping the need to engage with the inequality perpetuated along gender lines by making women dependent upon their husbands for housing.3 Teacher Zheng’s emphasis on patrilineal inheritance as the proper way to pass on the home ran counter to the many daughters he relied on for support, affection, and care. Favoring his son over his daughters in inheritance was an officially sanctioned, and yet undeniable, form of dispossession, albeit one that occurred within most families over and over again across time in Sweeping Cliff homes. This tension between the work of daughters and the privileges of patriliny sometimes led to strained relations, or outright conflict, in families. However, in Teacher Zheng’s home everyday practices, material representations, as well as celebratory events championed the home as the warm focus of both patrilineal and natal family relations allowed these uneasy dynamics to be accommodated under one roof. Teacher Zheng insisted on an ethos of preservation in his home life. From the photographs adorning the household walls to the collection of antique agricultural tools, his courtyard offered insights into local history. Certain tensions ran through the Zheng family practices of homemaking, as their claim to the house was based on inheritance from a long line of farmers. However, Teacher Zheng had worked in an urban garment factory since the 1970s and written various history books after retirement in the 2000s. His life straddled the chasm of manual and intellectual labor, both of which he celebrated in the jumbled household displays. As a grassroots intellectual, he fashioned his contributions to the nation as putting Sweeping Cliff on the map as a place of interest, through writing, lecturing, and cooperating with local heritage bureaus and tourism companies. His claim as a descendant of farmers and as a homegrown historian offered a much more generalized contribution to the nation than the specific Maoist commitments made in other Sweeping Cliff homes. Moreover, this claim relied on a form of work, agriculture, that he himself had not performed in decades, thereby making the agricultural displays all the more important.

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Lives and Livelihoods in the Home At first glance, uniting Chairman Mao and the God of Wealth at divine offering tables in the home appears like a conflicting, even contradictory, practice. I have argued that the doubling of these two forces resolves an uncanny conundrum for Sweeping Cliff families living in and with the spoils of the revolution. Soon after houses were appropriated from the wealthy and redistributed to those considered more deserving by Maoist cadres, new forms of privilege, possession, and status emerged. The claims for positive class labels and sumptuous merchant housing originally rested on contributions to the socialist nation, whether through surviving past hardship or by taking part in revolutionary activities. Over subsequent decades, families passed on these homes and class labels through inheritance, as claims of contributing to the socialist nation often vied and jostled with logics of inheritance through genealogical kinship. The contradictory logics of inherited class label privileges and the justice served by housing allocation emerged very poignantly in Nia’s home. Adopted into a wealthy merchant courtyard on the eve of revolution, her disadvantaged background secured her claims to the home. Moreover, she worked hard to create a family and sustain this home in the interstices of lineage demands and brigade commitments, thereby fostering an ethos between kinship and labor she passed on to subsequent generations. The uneasy relationship between belonging to the nation and genealogies of kinship in the home resulted in a domestic uncanny of “romantic nationalism” wedged between the genealogical authentication, affective mobilization, and otherworldly sacralization (Bear 2007). At times processes of political, personal, and material “ruination” (Navaro-Yashin 2009) had to be suppressed, forgotten, and contained (Carsten 2007; Empson 2007), while in other moments they became part of divine, or at least fated, narratives of heroism and sacrifice in contributing to the Chinese nation. In some homes, even everyday forms of labor became infused with sacralized dimensions, such as Teacher Zheng’s home, in which farming utensils and agricultural tools adorned the walls despite his turn from manual to intellectual labor. Moreover, tensions between claims of the living family to call the house a home was dominated by daughters but became overlaid with the patrilineal inheritance patterns of passing the house on to sons. Unspeakable and tragic loss of kin before their time also became contained, enclosed, and enfolded into the living natal family through notions of social heat, whether through jubilant

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toasting at Zheng’s new year celebration or in hushed tones on Nia’s kang. This domestic uncanny oscillated between the tension of what could be disclosed, even celebrated and exalted, in materializing the home and what had to remain hidden, covert, and murky to safeguard its continuity. While the communist revolution externalized agricultural and industrial labor, it simultaneously internalized, even domesticated, the work of kinship. As lineage land was confiscated and lineage halls closed, domestic shrines became the focus of ancestral worship. In recent years, photographic montages of male and female kin complemented these ancestral tablets, thereby supplementing patrilineal claims with those of living kin in the family home, often depicted as serving socialism and the nation. Moreover, written documentation regarding claims to the home fell somewhere between the sacred and mundane as genealogical scrolls, but also housing deeds, were held in secret by lineage elders far from prying eyes. In contrast to most villages in China, where old houses are devalued beyond their immediate use value for residents, the potential market of commoditized homes hung in the Sweeping Cliff air and made villagers wary of sharing documents that could be important in future disputes. Critical events such as the violence and destruction that the Cultural Revolution wreaked on the village came to be memorialized in houses, through displays of Maoist affiliation, the partial disclosure of genealogies and kinship, and by upholding or renovating the ruination and onslaught on their homes. By preserving the destruction of the Red Guards in Cultural Revolution in her home, the former spy and Old Party member Hong, for instance, materialized how even her family were touched not just by heroism, but persecution, in building socialism. In short, Sweeping Cliff villagers claimed their homes through narratives of experienced injustices and patterns of genealogical inheritance, allowing them to engage in practices of wealth accumulation while rectifying past grievances. Political upheavals and personal ruptures disrupted the smooth unrolling of claims on homes through labor and kinship, often fracturing lives through “caesura” marked by a “before” and “after” cataclysmic events (Feuchtwang 2011) that reoriented their political and intimate orientations in life (Das 1995). Those making homes in Sweeping Cliff drew on discourses of both the justice and injustice that were served through redistribution and revolutionary zeal. They materialized former struggles over class, property, and kinship by concealing or representing genealogical connections and historical

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events. As heroes in overcoming past inequalities or as victims of experienced injustices, residents validated their presence in their homes through claims based on contributions made to the family, the locale, and the nation.

Notes Sections of Chapter 2 appeared in the 2017 article “The Materiality of the Uncanny: Preserving the Ruins of Revolution in Rural Chinese Homes” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37(3): 446–55, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4279152 and is reproduced courtesy of Duke University Press. 1. The kang is a raised bed platform made of brick that is attached to the stove in northern Chinese homes. The heat generated by the stove travels through airways in the kang  before being released through a chimney vent that protrudes from the roof. The kang therefore acts as the main source of heat in the home. For detailed information on kang technology, skill, and sociality, see Flitsch 2004, 2008. 2. In discussing the term honghuo, Chau reflects on the positive valuation of the color red (hong) in China and observes, “Fire (huo) symbolizes the stove, hearth, warmth, heat, and excitement” (Chau 2006b: 149). Chau’s (2006b: 149–50) elaboration of the components making up the word renao include that re “means hot, heat, heady, emotional, passionate, fervent, or feverish,” while nao “means to stir up and connotes a wide range of excitement: rambunctious, agitated, hustle and bustle, playful, busy, noisy, conflicted, exuberant, colorful, to express dissatisfaction, to vent, to plague, to turn upside down, to be naughty, to make a scene.” 3. The dynamics of inheritance, in particular of passing on the family home but also other forms of household wealth, along gendered norms are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters. These expectations of intergenerational transfers are enmeshed with long-standing preferences for hypergamy among women, particularly as they move from rural to urban settings. The gendered nature of marital transactions and intergenerational transfers shift attention from issues of exploitation, inequality, and class to the more depoliticized notion of social status in popular discourse.

PART II Gender, Generation, Kinship

– Chapter 3 –

Reproducing Kin across Generational Divides

_ Birthdays as Battlegrounds International Workers’ Day, 1 May 2010, was a public holiday in the People’s Republic of China. In Sweeping Cliff a group of men spent the day squatting on stools at the edges of a lavish birthday party being thrown for a three-year-old boy. After participating in the afternoon banquet, most senior male guests turned to drinking and gambling at the tables set up under blossoming trees swaying in the spring breeze. I stepped up to their gathering to inquire about the “tradition” (chuantong) of “celebrating birthdays” (guo shengri) in the area, something of an anomaly in a country where children’s birthday parties are sometimes assumed to be an import of McDonald’s. With an irritated tone, a farmer in his late sixties disparaged the institution of children’s birthday parties. He denied that these were “ceremonies” (yishi), stating that they were merely “practices” (zuofa) “handed down by girls” (guniang liuchuan), thereby implying that these women’s activities did not qualify as the “rituals” (li) conducted by men. Although predominantly sustaining his livelihood as a farmer, this man also collected wild plants and insects he sold for cash to be used in Chinese medicine, which he alluded to by angrily asserting, “In the past, there were methods to prevent illness and avoid harm for children and the elderly. Now young people just ignore the old people, because they think children are more important than adults.” Although senior women echoed these concerns with safeguarding children’s health at these events, they confidently asserted the efficacy of their domestic rituals in establishing their ties

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to offspring in defiance of patrilineal expectations without generational antagonism. A truck driver in his fifties also voiced a more conciliatory tone than the farmer, recommending I seek out the “old ladies” (lao taitai) who arrange the children’s “great passing” (daguo) of escalating temporal intervals after birth. These were moments when the mother’s “natal family” (niangjia) visits the child, bearing gifts made by the maternal grandmother. Echoing an interpretation from the village historian, I asked whether these “great passings” represented a maternal line (muxi). The senior farmer angrily interjected, “Maternal line? What is that? The mother’s natal family (niangjia), [we] have. The paternal line (fuxi), [we] have. A maternal line, [we] don’t have.” As these reflections suggest, children’s birthday parties were contentious events in rural Shanxi province, stirring strong emotions ranging from pride and elation to sullen silence and stubborn rejection. Far from the naïve reactions of jealous children, these responses predominantly emerged in adults and were particularly notable in the behavior of senior kin. At the parties, some grandfathers triumphantly invited old associates to banquet and marvel at their kinship networks, while others appeared reticent as they shirked their descendants’ kisses in favor of kowtowing to the ancestors. Similarly, some grandmothers took delight in parading their grandchildren from table to table introducing them to friends and family, while others expressed their displeasure by refusing to present gifts and make speeches in their grandchildren’s honor (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. Frosting play at a birthday. Photograph by the author.

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Like other lifecycle events, such as weddings and funerals, children’s birthday parties provided opportunities for kin to reunite and celebrate their extended kinship ties. Considering the importance of creating descendants in China, one might assume that these celebrations unilaterally resonated with the interests of senior kin positioned at the apex of extended families. However, as children’s birthday parties proliferated in number and scale across the Chinese countryside, the discussions above prompt the question: why did children’s birthday parties make senior kin, and particularly grandparents, grumble?

Rural Reproduction through Senior Kin Work The temptation arises to attribute both the proliferation of children’s birthday parties and ambivalence toward the festivities to a particular confluence of commercialization and urbanization. In such a reading, the events could be reduced to doting parents indulging in a kind of potlatch of children’s parties for the new generation of “little emperors” (xiao huangdi) born during the age of family planning, with senior kin reluctant to bow down to these cosmopolitan imports from the urban valley. However, it was not just Sweeping Cliff parents who wanted to express their affection to children by paying for big parties or buying elaborate presents. Grandparents, and other cash-strapped senior child carers in the village, also eagerly attempted to assert ties to children as offspring at these events, often becoming frustrated or antagonistic when their desires for recognition faltered. Birthday celebrations offered kin, and especially senior kin, the opportunity to claim recognition for their labor in creating and raising the next generation of children in the countryside. Despite elderly villagers providing significant contributions to rural reproduction through care, the acknowledgment of this form of labor often became eclipsed not so much by gender but by generation in Sweeping Cliff. Theoretically, this analysis of caring labor and rural reproduction resonates with approaches by feminist sociologists and economists of care who criticize the invisibility of certain forms of caring labor and caution against drawing rigid boundaries between economic transactions and intimate exchanges (e.g., Zelizer 2005). Rural China offers particularly compelling insights into these dynamics due to its population policies and economic transformations in recent decades. As a form of dispossession, the family planning policy, sometimes decried as the one-child policy, unfolded over the same period as market reforms, capitalist transformation, and ritual revival since the

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Figure 3.2. A celebrated singleton baby with his father and his maternal grandfather. Photograph by the author.

late 1970s. By enforcing bureaucratic accounting on parents in bearing one, and recently two, children, as well as excluding more extended networks of kin from formal claims over offspring, the Chinese state delimited the normative family as a married reproductive couple with one or two children. Parents, rather than grandparents or other extended kin, were bureaucratically granted legal claims over children, despite the latter often contributing significantly to reproduction by raising the next generation of offspring, particularly in the Chinese countryside. The broader Chinese population policy further undermined the recognition of senior kin’s contributions to reproduction, as developmental paradigms shifted from limiting the quantity of the population, instead realigning around the imperative to improve the “population quality” (renkou suzhi; Greenhalgh 2010; Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Kipnis 2006). As families were encouraged to invest in the education and health of their children (Kuan 2015; Fong 2004; Greenhalgh 2003), the image of the ideal singleton led to the inversion of generational hierarchies by undermining the hierarchical status of senior kin (Yan 2003; Figure 3.2). Despite their alleged shortcomings in “human quality,” rural grandparents frequently became carers for grandchildren as both parents worked outside the home. Furthermore, when adult children migrated for work, older generations often took care of each other in the absence of offspring. At times, both grandparents and grandchildren were left

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behind in the countryside, with remittances from parents carrying them financially. The presence of elderly grandparents in need of care and the potential for grandparental childcare both formed important factors for couples in making family planning decisions. Moreover, in attempts to safeguard rural welfare, state-sponsored social security provisions were established in recent years, including rural medical insurance and pension schemes that the state has extended into the countryside.1 Elderly people in Sweeping Cliff justified receiving financial assistance from the state as part of its mandate to provide care to vulnerable citizens, while they were often reluctant to accept support from their families in ways that could be construed as a burden. Instead, they sought to provide for their kin through labor in the fields, courtyard, and home to safeguard the reproduction of their families for as long as possible. Moreover, they created opportunities to gain recognition for their work and lay claim to offspring through their labor at ritual events, such as birthday celebrations.

The History of Care in Kinship Far from frivolous festivities, the stakes at these birthday celebrations were high: the composition of Chinese families and their capacity to forge kin changed dramatically in the last century. Reproductive practices that create a new generation of persons as kin came under strain repeatedly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Families in Sweeping Cliff were subjected to economic, medical, and bureaucratic constraints in reproducing kin during both the Maoist and post-Mao Era. Families remembered these periods of kinship in crisis that effectively amounted to reproductive dispossession.2 To face these times of reproductive hardship, villagers mobilized cooperative caring, particularly by pooling work between women and by dividing labor between generations. Cooperation in Chinese communities occurs in varied contexts and to diverse ends (see Stafford, Judd, and Bell 2018), but especially in caring for kin, recognition over these forms of labor can become naturalized and obscure the uneven distribution of labor along the lines of gender and generation. To understand the importance of female reproductive practices in sustaining and even extending kinship in rural China, it is worth noting that patrilineal reproduction relies on in-marrying wives who give birth to sons to sustain the lineage (Brandtstädter 2009; Stafford 2000a; Wolf 1968, 1972). Historically, despite formally denying

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women claims to offspring beyond the conjugal tie to their husbands, women often built up status through close and affectionate ties to their children, especially their sons, in what has come to be known as the “uterine” family (niangjia; Wolf 1968, 1972; see also Judd 1989; Stafford 2000a; Sangren 2013). In addition, when the survival of the patriline was at risk due to lack of a son, alternatives to procreation existed that included practices such as male adoption or uxorilocal marriage (Huang and Wolf 1980; Wolf 2003). Girls were also often given up for adoption to future husband’s families in childhood or even infancy, allowing future wives to bond with the mother-in-law who raised them (Wolf 2003). These tendencies in the normative patrilineal kinship system already point toward the incorporative capacity of caring labor through childrearing to claim offspring in prerevolutionary China. In the 1950s the Maoist state banned the public worship and expropriated the economic landholdings of formal patrilineages. However, the state simultaneously reinforced patrilocality through the brigade system, which tied work points, and therefore food allocation, to labor that contributed to the collective. This undermined the recognition of women’s domestic work (Herschatter 2011; Jacka 1997; Judd 1994) and curtailed women’s access to their birth families (Zhang 2009; Judd 1994; for female resistance strategies to these developments, see Friedman 2006). Domestic labor was sidelined and unremunerated as women were subjected to pressure to meet increasing demands in agricultural participation and political mobilization campaigns (Herschatter 2011; Evans 2008). Furthermore, state bureaucratic registration of children gave full claims over children to the reproductive couple, rather than the extended networks of kin, and especially agnatic kin, which previously could stake claims over children. This echoes Michael Lambek’s (2013a: 251) concern with “the question of kinship in modernity [as] the question of the articulation of state-­ produced or state-authorized acts of kinship with those produced or authorized by other orders of religion or simply of a tradition.” In contrast to the authority of male agnatic kin and the legitimacy of the bureaucratic state in sanctioning kin ties, senior women in Sweeping Cliff turned to notions of “care” in claiming kin. Senior Sweeping Cliff women had often experienced acute reproductive crisis in their youth, which was often alleviated by cooperation in reproduction with other women during the Maoist Era. They therefore upheld a parallel logic of kinship claims to the nuclear family model advocated by state bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the male-dominated patriline focused on agnates, on the other. Instead,

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senior women based their claims to children on originating and contributing factors to reproduction through care that sustained their own offspring and that they hoped would guarantee the next generation of future grandchildren. The logic of cooperative caring claims rested upon the times of reproductive hardship during the Maoist Era, when infants were frequently left at home in the care of grandparents or (in their absence) with other children, and occasionally even tied to beds on their own until their mothers returned from collective labor to wean them (Herschatter 2011; Guo 2003). Women often shared responsibility for breastfeeding, especially if a mother’s hunger, illness, or absence from her child hindered her from lactating, resulting in villagers’ lifelong ties to their “milk mothers” (naimu) in Sweeping Cliff. As elsewhere, the dangerous mixture of exploitative female labor and extreme material scarcity led to high infant mortality (see Scheper-Hughes 1992), particularly during the Great Leap Famine from 1959 to 1961 (see Herschatter 2011; Guo 2003).3 These infants and children were denied the status of “full persons” (chengren) that adults receive after death, instead being buried in woven mats in shallow, unmarked graves scattered across Sweeping Cliff’s surrounding hillside.

Considerations of Care in Family Planning A new phase of reproductive dispossession occurred in the postMao Period when the family planning policy bureaucratically and medically curtailed reproduction (Greenhalgh 1993; Croll 2006). Often labelled a “one-child policy,” the policy gained notoriety for its strict sanctions on citizens who overstepped childbearing quotas, particularly urban Han ethnic couples historically limited to having a single child. The population policy of “late marriage, late pregnancy, few births, excellent births” (wanhun, wanyun, shaosheng, yousheng) became legally enforced in Sweeping Cliff starting in 1984.4 By the late 2000s the policy mainly operated through ideological, bureaucratic, and economic avenues rather than forced medical interventions in the village. The state pushed the agenda through propaganda efforts, while cadres applied pressure to use the contraceptives and sterilization procedures that were provided free of cost. The administrative registration process formed the main control mechanism for the family planning policy in Sweeping Cliff. If a couple decided to have a child, they had to apply for a permit in the municipal Family Planning

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Department (Jihua Shengyu Bumen). Bringing with them their marriage certificate, identity card, and household registration booklet, the couple applied for the department to issue a birth permit (shengyuzheng). This birth permit became an important document when the couple added their child to their household registration. The Family Planning Department’s guidelines for Sweeping Cliff was that if a couple’s first child was a girl, they could have a second child. The local state therefore “counted” firstborn sons, but not firstborn daughters. If a couple already had a son or two daughters and the mother gave birth to another child, this child was considered as exceeding the target birth rate (chaosheng). In addition to financial incentives and fines, workplaces also utilized the family planning policy to coerce employees to have fewer children by threatening redundancy. For giving birth outside the policy, a couple had to pay a fine of about 16,000 RMB in 2009. In addition to punitive measures, a subsidy program began in 2007 to decrease overall birthrates and even out discrepancies in sex imbalances in male and female birthrates in the area. If a family had two girls or a family only had a single girl, the family received a one-time subsidy of 3,000 RMB if the mother underwent a sterilization operation. Since 2008 the New Rural Cooperative Medical System (Xinxing Nongcun Yiliao Hezuo) covered the medical costs of childbirth, although children born outside the family planning policy were not covered by the policy. To prevent pregnancy, women were urged to either use oral contraception or have an intrauterine device (IUD) inserted. After childbirth, women were urged to have a permanent sterilization operation, in which their fallopian tubes were tied. Abortions were free of charge, whether through oral or surgical methods. Discussing the success of the birth planning policy, the official Women’s Federation representative in charge of implementing the policy in Sweeping Cliff maintained the following: “People’s thinking is changing. Whether there’s money or not is not the issue; what’s most important is changing people’s thinking. We no longer live with an ideology of men’s superiority to women [zhongnan qingnü].” When I interjected that parents-in-law are often disappointed by the lack of a male descendant, Kunfu jokingly dismissed this, saying, “Ah, but mothers-in-law do come around [popo xiangtong le]. They are compelled by life [shenghuo suopo]. If young people only want one, their parents’ thinking must change; one is just fine.” This statement illuminates the shifting power dynamics within Chinese families from senior to junior generations as a kind of “descending familism” (see Yan 2016) brought about by improved intergenerational commu-

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nication and intimacy, as well as an evening out of gender hierarchies in family constellations (see Evans 2008). Such statements also subtly reveal the assumption that the state has displaced the reproductive powers previously wielded by senior kin over their offspring. While the family planning policy dispossessed rural families of reproductive autonomy by regulating the number of children born, it also bureaucratically limited influence over reproduction to potential parents, rather than lineage elders and senior kin. Young people sometimes utilized the policy to justify having smaller families or even pursue forms of educational or employment fulfillment in the absence of childbearing in Sweeping Cliff. The provision of medical facilities and educational institutions for children also formed part of an implicit social contract with the state, in which those children who were born could survive and flourish. While some senior villagers praised this dynamic, especially by comparing this situation with their own experiences of reproductive hardship and child loss, they also complained of their own work in raising rural children being devalued through shifting developments favoring the urban valley. A marked consequence of the family planning policy was the intensification of concerns over care for both children and the elderly, as many families faced a situation with more elderly members and fewer children, with a middle generation often needing to earn incomes to sustain both generations of financial dependents (see Bruckermann and Feuchtwang 2016). The family planning policy also intensified pressure on singletons and increased parental anxiety over childrearing, with parents (Kuan 2015; Kipnis 2011; Fong 2004) and even some grandparents (Goh 2011; Jankowiak 2009) competing for favor from fewer children (Jing 2000). Grandparents throughout China have been asserting rights of access to their shared grandchildren, often substituting for parents as caretakers and emotional guardians for extended periods of time (Jankowiak 2009: 84). The recent relaxation of the family planning policy explicitly intended to create a larger pool of adult children who could look after elderly generations in the future. In November 2013 the Chinese government announced a significant amendment to its family planning policy by allowing two children to married couples in which one partner is an only child. In October 2015 another statement was issued that effectively extended the right to have two children to all married couples that came into force in 2016. As couples confronted the potential of two children in need of care, grandparents’ roles became even more important. This intergenerational cooperation in

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childrearing fulfilled a lack of formal institutional alternatives provided by the state in Sweeping Cliff. Even in the late 2000s there was no institutional childcare for young children in the village, although there was a primary school for children aged six to twelve years. After this, children were sent to the township capital nearby, where they could commute, board at school, or live with relatives on school days. On occasion, children were also fostered or adopted to sidestep fines and sanctions in place due to the local implementation of the family planning policy. Both in the past and present, reproductive cooperation between gender and generation transcended the logics of patrilineal lines of succession and the bureaucratic emphasis on the procreative couple. Grandmothers were particularly highly motivated to contribute to childrearing, often informed by their own historical experiences of reproductive hardship. Having traced the historical and present experiences with the importance of care in times of reproductive crisis, I will now show how grandparents staked claims and constituted ongoing ties to future kin through a contextualized conception of care.

Caring Claims in Context The way that Sweeping Cliff residents understood care brought together long-term nurturance with struggles for survival of mother and newborn through the supporting care of senior women, ­especially of women’s mothers and mothers-in-law. Nurture and control, sharing and disciplining, providing substance, and instilling etiquette were all parts of grandparents’ caring activities in Sweeping Cliff. Based on these originating activities that contributed to childbirth and survival, grandparents made claims over grandchildren that often ran counter to expectations of ancestral reverence or filial descent. The notion of care as a material and emotive force tying kin together has been developed as a critique of the patrilineal model in understanding Chinese kinship in insightful ways by a number of anthropologists (see Brandtstädter and Santos 2009; Judd 2009; Santos 2006, 2009; Stafford 1995, 2000a; Wolf 1968, 1972). The way that Sweeping Cliff villagers acted upon idioms of care adds to this critique, while extending the conception of care to another direction, where personhood is constituted not just relationally through exchange with others but through answering the frustrations of a past self stunted by reproductive crisis and the loss of offspring in the hope of future fulfillment and familial acknowledgment.

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In elucidating local idioms of care in Sweeping Cliff, I find Charles Stafford’s (2000a) notion of intergenerational cycles of care in contemporary China and Francesca Bray’s exposition of the duality of motherhood separated into childbearing and childrearing activities in late imperial China particularly illuminating. Stafford (2000a: 37) emphasizes everyday reciprocal acts to demonstrate the importance of “affairs of the hearth” in creating living relationships that complement the static and rigid rules of formal patriliny. These ties rest on intergenerational cycles of yang, which Stafford translates as “to care for” or “to raise” and which bind parents to their children through “feeding, nurturance and care” in which women take on central roles (Stafford 2000a: 41–43). Focusing explicitly on maternity in late imperial China, Bray (2009) has mapped the differentiation between giving birth (sheng, chan) and providing care (yang) onto an anthropological division of biological and social motherhood. Bray further develops this maternal duality as a technology whereby senior women in extended households, often first wives, were able to usurp the reproductive powers of junior women, especially concubines but also servants, by raising children born to these women as their own (Bray 2009). Bray’s work thereby demonstrates how care, particularly in the form of childrearing, was historically used as a powerful force to claim children from their birth mothers, while Stafford shows how care may build reciprocal mutuality across different generations over time. However, the notion of care in Sweeping Cliff also arose from the past challenges senior women had faced in creating future generations of kin through reproduction in their own lifetimes. Here Steven Sangren’s (2013) departure from a focus on the exchanges of nurture between generations is illustrative, particularly as he turns attention toward the frustrations of desire produced through gendered and generational positions within an idealized Chinese kinship system as patrilineal and patrilocal. Women, in particular, suffer from the rupture of leaving their natal family and marrying into their husband’s family (Sangren 2013; see also Judd 1989, 2009). Sangren (2013) argues that women therefore seek to fulfill in their families of procreation what they were denied in their natal families and marital families: completion and recognition. Due to their expulsion from their birth families, women desire fulfillment though close, intimate ties with their children throughout life as part of personal completion (Sangren 2013). Lack of familial recognition manifests in women’s desires for acknowledgment, particularly a sense of worth emerging

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from their creative power and productive agency in bearing children essential to family continuity (Sangren 2013). Echoing Sangren’s extension of psychoanalytic concepts beyond the Western nuclear family model, inclinations toward familial unity and fulfillment and acknowledgment of their reproductive contributions were strongly marked in the everyday caring practices of Sweeping Cliff grandmothers toward their kin. Grandmothers in Sweeping Cliff sought to encourage, and even coerce, the birth of offspring from their own children. This was not just a matter of identifying with their children but also seeking their mutual completion as full persons (chengren) who succeeded in reproduction and contributed to the next generation of kin. Moreover, they tried to keep these offspring as close to home as possible, even caring for children in their own homes for extended periods of time. Nonetheless, this notion of care and the ensuing “claims” made over grandchildren cannot be construed as purely altruistic nurturance in fostering a caring and complete extended family but carried valences of control and competition linked to external recognition for contributions to reproduction. In Sweeping Cliff the main catchword for the relationship between grandmothers and grandchildren is gua (Mandarin: guan), which carries multiple meanings of “discipline, take charge of, take care of,” or “keep guard over.” Both the constraining discipline of control (kongzhi) and the nurturing forces of care (yang) are contained within this term of guan. These childrearing practices championed grandmothers’ roles in making children obedient (tinghua) and averse to mischief (bu taoqi). At birthday parties, grandmothers baked bread wreathes that they used to literally encircle and embrace (bao) children and thereby ensnare them in traps (taotao) in front of audiences of onlookers. In the summer heat, female carers made protective amulets for children out of embroidery thread, thereby indexing their role in cultivating refinement in children (cf. Bray 1997) but also quite literally “tying the knot/child” (jiezi) to life so their soul would not escape their bodies (cf. Harrell 1979; see also Stafford 1995). Through public recognition of contributions to raising children and binding them to life, caring labor could thereby be materialized and circulated to bolster future “caring claims” made over offspring. At times maternal and paternal grandmothers would even compete to care for grandchildren, with an eye toward shaping kin and forging offspring through originating and contributing activities. Conflicts between kin often revolved around who could provide superior care to a child in terms of education, health, and residence.

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However, these conflicts could be expressed in a diversity of ways beyond negotiating mundane practicalities. For instance, paternal and maternal grandmothers would express their conflicting claims through competitive gifting at children’s birthday celebrations. Nonetheless, all of these practices aimed to protect children and raise them to adulthood, when they would count as “complete persons” (chengren). Complexities of what counts as having a child in terms of pregnancy and childbirth emerged as a recurring issue during fieldwork. Residents sometimes included all the children they had “raised” (yang), at other times only those that had been “born” (sheng, chan), and further frequently omitted children who had “died prematurely” (yaozhe), especially through abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth. This issue of who counts as a child is central to Marilyn Strathern’s (2005) concern with whether persons can possess one another, an important question for anthropologists and feminists alike. For instance, Murik men and women living in Papua New Guinea offered gender-­differentiated responses to how many children they have: men included adopted children; women included deceased children (Strathern 2005: 138–40). Strathern argues that this is not just about men boasting social power and women lamenting stillbirths but that the claims they were making over children depended on their gendered understandings of responsibility for childbearing and of the threats to children’s survival. Echoing the way that Murik kin make claims over children, senior women in Sweeping Cliff similarly contributed to the originating activities in the making of children, subsequently claiming them as theirs based on their contributions to their birth, survival, and childrearing. In the following sections, I concretely trace how senior Sweeping Cliff women not only urged the next generation of women to bear children but also positioned themselves as the guardians over new mothers and their children during times of vulnerability after childbirth and reared children to full adulthood as part of their personal aspirations for completion and recognition.

Coercive Care: The Pressure to Bear a Child While anthropologists have predominantly looked at originating activities in making persons from the point of conception of a child onward, in Sweeping Cliff the caring claims made by senior women over kin pushes this logic further back in time. Even before

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c­ onception, would-be grandmothers drew on their past struggles in juggling reproduction with extradomestic labor to support reproduction among younger generations. They combined guilt over past hardships, while simultaneously dangling the promise of future care to coax reproduction from their daughters and daughters-in-law. However, the reciprocal logics between generations of women in fulfilling each other’s desires links to broader notions of attaining full personhood as an adult with child, indicating that persons were only complete once they could count a child as offspring rather than a logic of exchange dominating these relationships. Young women were not always keen on motherhood and generally wanted to return to earning an income after giving birth. However, they often saw it as an obligation to their families to have children and a responsibility to the state not to have too many. Their solution was generally to give birth early and thereby secure daycare from grandmothers. These grandmothers, in turn, recognized how their daughters’ sense of self-worth was strongly tied to extradomestic labor, echoing their own experiences in the Maoist Period. Nonetheless, their experiences of childbearing and childrearing positioned them with the hope that grandchildren would be forthcoming, and many grandmothers were willing to take care of grandchildren in return. While many mothers were keen to reenter the labor market as soon as possible after childbirth as a means to self-realization, other young women were eager to engage in childrearing. Erdan, for instance, was a recently married woman in her mid-twenties who was extremely fond of children and became pregnant in the spring of 2010. Her younger sister had recently given birth and could not wait to return to her former occupation in hotel service when her mother-in-law would take over childrearing. By contrast, Erdan was looking forward to her time outside the labor force to care for her first child. Erdan was explicit about her passion for childrearing, to the point of entertaining the idea of becoming a kindergarten teacher in the nearby city where she lived. Despite Erdan’s enthusiasm for childcare, her parallel desire to formalize the work of childrearing as outside employment is noteworthy. This aspiration ties in closely with the positive status young women ascribe to extradomestic and remunerated work, especially during their youth. Young women frequently saw their twenties as a time for personal development and growth, a time when both economic and familial paths were chosen and set. In contrast to advocating the pleasure of motherhood, young women often viewed childbearing as a family responsibility that

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diverged from their personal priorities. In particular, young women frequently saw their self-fulfillment in the urban employment market as diametrically opposed to the social expectation of motherhood in the village. Unlike Erdan’s joyful anticipation of motherhood, these young women complained of childrearing as an “annoying” (mafan) chore that they sought to pass on to their mothers and mothers-inlaw in the village. In one argument about the topic, a young woman hurled the following sentence at her startled mother: “You want a child so much, you raise the child!” However, young women also recognized that they would not truly be viewed as full persons of adulthood until they had given birth to at least one child. Throwing light on the marginalized mother-daughter relationship in urban China, Harriet Evans (2008) has explored the intimate and intense ties whereby their reciprocal notions of self become entangled. In fact, daughters often recognize the effort their mothers poured into raising them by fulfilling their desire for grandchildren (Evans 2008: 29–30, 169–73). Women thereby reproduce the filial sentiments they feel toward their mothers through bearing offspring. In Sweeping Cliff, young women similarly positioned their sense of self through reference rather than repetition of their mother’s experiences. They often regarded childbearing as a filial responsibility toward their mothers they felt under pressure to fulfill. One father joked that a daughter was a woman’s “true love” (zhen’ai), in contrast to the marital ties with her husband or filial ties with her son, as girls truly “belong to/are a part of” (shuyu) their mothers. In Sweeping Cliff, childless women often struggled with the pressure their mothers exerted in urging them to have children, as well as the insistence with which they pursued this aim. Potential grandmothers would often heap guilt on their daughters with tales of the hardships they had faced in rearing them and the sacrifices they had made for their families. These admonishments formed part of a wider sphere of swearing and reproaching a person (maren), especially one’s own children, by expressing intense emotions, such as anger or resentment, and thereby changing the other person’s course of action through recognition of one’s point of view. Although the rebukes of would-be grandmothers could be hurtful, they were often effective in making children marry and bear children. The success of these maternal strategies was often cumulative over long periods, even when young women appeared to resist the pressure by laying aside mobile phones until they could hear that their mothers had stopped berating them or sat in sullen silence for hours staring at blaring television screens while an onslaught

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of their mothers’ recollections and accusations unfolded. Although childless women complained bitterly of these sessions, they would often subsequently empathize with their mothers and their desire for grandchildren and sought to fulfill their hopes. The persistence with which would-be grandmothers pursued their hope for grandchildren was linked to wider ideas of childlessness as not just a personal but a familial failure that kin sought to avoid at all costs. From the standpoint of Confucian orthodoxy, of course, one needs descendants to be recognized as an ancestor through ritual offerings after death (Sangren 2013; Zito 1987). However, more generally in life, having a child was a central marker in achieving adulthood as a full person (chengren). Anwen was an unmarried woman in her early twenties who was still completing her education at a technical teacher college. She described her situation as follows: “My mother and father, they are my parents forever. I will be their child for life. But until I give birth to a child, I won’t be a complete person [chengren] because I won’t have my own family/home (ziji de jia).” In addition to the practical strategies of exerting emotional pressure or offering childcare incentives, older women also used ritual means to influence their children’s reproduction. For instance, women desiring grandchildren made embroidered “slippers” (Jin: hazi; Mandarin: xiezi), a homophone for “children” in local Jin dialect (Jin: hazi; Mandarin: haizi), as offerings to the Goddess of Fertility (zisun niangniang) residing in the village Earth Mound Temple (Geda Miao). Families could also exert ritual influence over sex selection before or during pregnancy by going to a local grotto in the Numerous Heirs Ravine (Guangsiyu) in the nearby mountainside. In addition to their role in fertility decisions, grandmothers played an even greater part in caring for mothers and infants, particularly intensively during the first few months of the postnatal period but also in the long-term childrearing. Here the more competitive aspects of care between paternal and maternal grandmothers came to the fore, as older women asserted superior knowledge and skills to provide the best environment for children to thrive in.

Competitive Care: Infants between Families Tensions frequently ran high in conflicts over residence for recent mothers and their newborns in Sweeping Cliff, as grandmothers generally took care of their daughters or daughters-in-law and her

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newborn for several months after birth (cf. Bray 1997; Leutner 1989; Furth 1987). Usually a new mother and her infant resided for thirty days at her mother-in-law’s house, a practice referred to as “sitting the month” (zuo yuezi), and then another seventy days at her mother’s home, in what was known as spending the “one hundred days” (yibaitian) with her child’s maternal grandmother (Figure 3.3). These early postpartum months were considered particularly precarious, as mothers’ bodies were weakened by childbirth and their infants easily fell prey to ailments caused by everything from being startled (chijing, literally: eating fright) to the harmful circulation of air (shangfeng, literally: harming winds; see Stafford 1995).5 During this time, grandmothers passed down knowledge and practices regarding care, while simultaneously asserting their own ideal situation for rearing the child. Both maternal and paternal grandmothers drew on their experiential knowledge to balance flows of cold and heat within the home and stabilize forces of yin and yang in the bodies of mother and child through food. While children were enticed to nurse and gain weight while overcoming skin and digestive disorders, mothers faced challenges of producing breast milk, combating social isolation, and developing affection for their children (Topley 1974). In addition to controlling factors like the temperature, draft, and light in their immediate environment, grandmothers restricted the new mother’s food consumption to help replenish her body and enable her to pass on the best nourishment to her child through the medium of breast milk (Leutner 1989). Mothers were supposed to avoid intense tastes to stimulate healthy and nourishing milk production that would not incite infant diarrhea. One young woman woefully complained that her mother-in-law’s diet plan meant that “[I] can’t eat any fragrant dishes [xiangcai], just flavorless staples [meiyou weidao de fan].” Despite frustration over postnatal nourishment, mothers and grandmothers considered the option of formula milk a risky last resort, largely due to the melamine milk scandal in China in 2008. In the early postnatal months, paternal and maternal grandmothers staked their claims for care around superior residential conditions in patrilocal and natal family homes. Competing grandmothers often emphasized their ability to provide optimal practical circumstances, therapeutic environments, and ritual settings for their daughters or daughters-in-law and their offspring. Erdan’s sister, Sandan, experienced a situation that vividly brought to life how these conflicts over care could turn into competitive claims.

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Figure 3.3. Mother and newborn “sitting the month” (zuo yuezi) on the kang with the infant’s maternal grandmother providing care. Photograph by the author.

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Sandan lived in a modern one-story house with her husband in a rural courtyard they shared with his parents in the suburban valley below Sweeping Cliff. Her husband earned a reliable income as a lorry driver, but Sandan was keen to reenter the labor market after childbirth as part of a project of self-fulfillment. Sharing a residential complex with her mother-in-law helped secure her support in childrearing after birth. With these assurances, Sandan temporarily gave up her service personnel job in a nearby hotel and had her first child, a healthy little boy, in December 2009 right when the winter temperatures dropped to well below freezing. During her prescribed period of postnatal recuperation, Sandan initially returned to her marital home, where her mother-in-law took care of her and her baby boy. In the first month they never left the bed, let alone the room they had shared since their return from the urban hospital after childbirth. Within this space of enforced domesticity, tensions soon emerged between Sandan and her mother-in-law, Limin, about watching television and using her mobile phone, both of which Limin claimed would disturb the baby. However, Sandan had to remain with her mother-in-law, as her mother’s home in Sweeping Cliff was only heated with an indoor coal-burning stove and had paper windows for circulation, so that temperatures were low, the air was polluted, and the draft was heavy. Despite an earlier criticism of her daughter-in-law for wanting to visit her parents too soon and too long, Limin boasted to me that her own daughter and grandson had stayed at her house for many months after childbirth. In a subsequent discussion between the two competing grandmothers, both paternal grandmother Limin and maternal grandmother Sheng couched their arguments in terms of the superior caring environment each could provide for the infant and his mother. Practical considerations of temperature, food, air, transport, but also children’s need for peace and quiet were taken into account as they negotiated postnatal residence. In addition, emotional dynamics of “missing” (xiang) became important, as Limin argued that her son would miss his wife and child, while Sheng became exasperated that her daughter and her natal family (niangjia) would equally miss each other. Sandan did eventually come to stay in Sheng’s eighteenth-­ century courtyard house in the mountains of Sweeping Cliff when spring arrived, but ultimately Sandan’s husband’s emotional life became paramount again as his complaints that he missed his wife were the reason she returned to her married home after only a month in her natal home.

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As Sandan’s experience shows, competition over where a mother and infant stays in the postnatal period goes beyond any normative residence pattern with paternal and maternal grandmothers. Restraints such as distance, finances, inconvenience, low temperatures, or any other number of obstacles may render oscillating residence inappropriate. The discussions between maternal and paternal grandmothers about the residence of newborns and their mother also reveal how far these concerns over vulnerable life feed into concerns over claiming children as part of one’s own family, life, and labor. Most women admitted that staying at home during the postnatal period was a very boring ordeal that was very stressful on their relationship, especially when living with their mother-in-law. The women’s reliance on the older generation created a situation of enforced dependency that easily spilled over into resentment. As most women in the area understood the tedium of this period, female school friends, colleagues, and relatives often visited mothers and kept them up to date on the latest gossip. In addition to practical concerns, emotional factors of who would suffer most from “missing” (xiang) each other most came into play, as natal family ties and conjugal expectations were pitted against each other. Notably, the Chinese term for “missing” (xiang) somebody carries valences of both memory and desire, often experienced during long periods of separation (cf. Stafford 2000b). However, this confluence of memory and desire can similarly come into play in relation to one’s own life in which frustrated aspirations in one period of life can be overcome through self-fulfillment in another life phase (Sangren 2013). As grandmothers faced future care for their grandchildren, they also reflected on their own reproductive pasts, in which they were frequently unable to successfully raise their children to adulthood. The following section turns to how grandmothers claimed grandchildren in the long term, thereby overcoming the losses of their own reproductive pasts by securing a further generation of kin for the future.

Completing Care: Raising Children to Adulthood When periods of postnatal convalescence characterized by the extreme vulnerability of mother and infant came to an end, patterns for more long-term residence needed to be negotiated. Conflicts over care marked these interactions, as maternal and paternal grand-

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mothers competed to claim children through long-term residence and caring labor provisions. Not only did the grandparental generation often sacrifice their comfort, money, and health to benefit their grandchildren, but maternal and paternal grandmothers also argued over the right to care for grandchildren within their homes. As such, these caring claims reveal how competition and incorporation can coexist through care. Two of the main practical considerations in more long-term childcare and residence decisions were employment opportunities for parents and educational institutions for children. As Sweeping Cliff  lay only half an hour by car from the municipal city, many parents commuted to and from their place of work on a daily basis. Children attended the village primary school between the ages of six and twelve, before moving on to middle school in the township capital, where they could commute, board at the school, or stay with relatives. In Sweeping Cliff, grandparents frequently provided daycare for their grandchildren, especially cooking and supervising them while they did their homework. For commuters this form of childcare could be ideal, particularly if one of the grandparents was literate and could help with the schoolwork. In some cases, children were left with their grandparents for much more extended ­periods of time when parents worked as migrants in cities further  afield. Literature on “left behind” children in the countryside often paints a desolate emotional landscape of abandonment for children (Ye 2011), but in Sweeping Cliff this was not necessarily the case. One migrant couple supposedly let their two young sons choose whether to migrate with them to Beijing or remain in the village. Their six-year-old son accompanied them to the capital and was enrolled in a private migrant school there, as their Jiexiu household registration rendered him ineligible for state-sponsored schooling elsewhere. By contrast, their younger son, two-year-old Xiaohong, apparently opted to stay in the village with his paternal grandparents and great-grandmother. Xiaohong’s delighted grandparents described his presence in their home as his own choice, despite his age making the reflexivity of such a decision debatable. Their framing of the situation was nonetheless noteworthy, as they emphasized all the benefits of the village upbringing Xiaohong was enjoying, including fresh air, nutritious food, a vibrant sociality, and, of course, their experienced and affectionate care. Moreover, sidestepping any assumptions of patrilineal succession or patrilocal residence as a “given” dynamic

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of local kinship expectations, their insistence on their grandson’s “choice” to live in their care reinforced how their relationship was “created” by agency and circumstance (see Carsten 2000, Stafford 2000a). Of course, the state policy also encourages leaving children in the countryside where they are registered, as governmental support for healthcare and education is only supplied in a child’s native place. The localization of welfare provision in the place of household registration also compels older citizens to remain in the countryside. In addition, long-term financial concerns may also come into play when children born in excess of the family planning policy are formally registered with childless relatives. As such, grandparental care can help circumvent the family planning policy and providing a male heir to relatives without offspring. Although these arrangements could be seen as catching two birds with one stone, these instances cannot necessarily be reduced to self-interested calculations. In the experience of one Sweeping Cliff grandmother named Pan, adopting her daughter’s son was also a way to reclaim kin lost through the separation of marriage. Douzi, her twenty-year-old grandson, had grown up in her care since he was only a year old. Douzi’s paternal grandparents lived in the neighboring province of Hebei because Douzi’s mother eloped with her husband thirty years previously, much to Pan’s ongoing distress at being separated from her daughter. Pan’s eldest son was married, but the couple had not had any children. Therefore, bringing in Douzi provided this branch of the family with offspring, even though he had another surname. This arrangement also eased financial and bureaucratic pressure on Pan’s widowed daughter in Hebei, as Douzi had four older siblings, some born in violation of the local family planning policy. Douzi’s relationship to his birth family was complex, as he complained of missing them bitterly but felt that he could not return to an unfamiliar place to make a home. Furthermore, Douzi was aware of the important role he played in his maternal grandmother Pan’s emotional life, as both grandmother and grandson reflected on how their relationship helped her recuperate some of the loss she experienced at her daughter’s flight into marriage into another province. Raising children to adulthood allowed these grandparents to overcome some of the vulnerability they had experienced in their younger years and partake in the resilience of children’s lives. During the Collective Era, their dependence on earning work points to receive food rations meant that they generally left their children at home during the day to go to the fields so that children took care of

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each other or were watched by paternal grandmothers. Being cut off from their natal family’s care during pregnancy and childrearing was another cause of complaint for older women, who saw this situation as an additional hardship in raising their children as well as simply keeping them alive. The care grandparents provided could fulfill their own frustrated desires for raising healthy children to adulthood, as well as keeping their adult offspring close throughout life and making sure that they, in turn, had children. Family members were apprehensive to speak explicitly about children they had lost prematurely, although their caring practices were occasionally elaborated in these terms, particularly when discussing their motivations for caring for their grandchildren. The anxiety of separation from married-out daughters or migrant laborer sons, as well as infant and child deaths (yaozhe), informed this older generations’ decision to provide childcare and raise children to become adults as full persons (chengren). Rather than viewing their caring work as part of reciprocal cycles, seniors insisted that the extreme satisfaction (manyi) at seeing children that were born survive and flourish was a reward in itself.

Celebrating Care: Children’s Birthday Parties Chinese grandparents sustained ties with grandchildren that were not simply given but created through reproductive labor that could take the form of care, discipline, coercion, and affection (Bruckermann 2017a, 2019). In addition to practical labor provisions, ritual acts contributed to rural reproduction by fostering the next generation of children as kin in the countryside. In Sweeping Cliff, longstanding domestic practices marked children’s births and supported their survival in escalating periods of the first month after birth, followed by the first one hundred days, and then the first, second, third, and twelfth or thirteenth birthday (see Bray 1997). At these times rituals chart children’s passing of temporal thresholds surrounded by their relatives (Baptandier 2008; Stafford 1995). Especially maternal grandmothers enveloped and nourished children with homemade gifts steeped in local significance on a central stage for matrifocal kinship in the courtyard. However, paternal grandparents occasionally challenged this focus on the mother-­ oriented natal family as they sought to have their descendants kowtow to them in ancestral reverence. Moreover, children’s parents spent lavishly at these events, thereby providing financial support in

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lieu of caring labor of senior kin, so that at times even intergenerational competitions over offspring emerged. These tensions became exacerbated by the flexibility in size, guest list, and ritual liturgy at these festivities. Although in the past these celebrations were small-scale affairs hosting relatives in the domestic space, villagers increasingly host hundreds of guests in their courtyard for these affairs, with professional entertainers and elaborate banquets. The two essential ritual objects presented at these survival celebrations are a wreath bread and three sheep buns made by the child’s maternal grandmother.6 The importance of these gifts was expressed in the Jin dialect couplet “As abundance falls down, maternal grandmother takes care of her daughter’s child” (Jin dialect: Züzü dui haha, boaboa gua waisasa; Putonghua: Yuyu dui xiaxia, laolao guan waisheng). The couplet rests on the homophonic local dialect phrase of “fish and shrimp” (Jin: zü and ha; Putonghua: yu and xia), two species considered bound to kinship by sharing a pond.7 This expresses the obligation maternal grandmothers have to safeguard their grandchildren in times of scarcity, regardless of patrilineal ties of descent. For children’s survival celebrations, maternal grandmothers baked circular roasted breads (Jin: kuolian)8 at the family hearth (kang), where the divine spirit for the protection of mother and children was worshiped (Figure 3.4). These wreath breads condensed the idealized

Figure 3.4. A maternal grandmother surrounds her grandson with the kuolian wreath bread. Photograph by the author.

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Figure 3.5. Sheep breads, pork dishes, and a birthday cake. Photograph by the author.

relationship between a grandmother and her daughter’s children as one of disciplining children based on both nurture and control. In ritual practice, the wreath bread encircled and embraced (bao) the child who became ensnared in the wreath’s central wring as a knot, noose, or trap (taotao). During the birthday celebrations, maternal and paternal grandmothers rotated the circular breads around the child’s head before he or she took a bite, literally ingesting the outcome of the maternal grandmother’s labor in the fields and at the hearth. At these celebrations the maternal grandmother also steamed three buns in the shape of sheep (yangmomo), which she then sliced and shared between her adult children as part of the natal family group (niangjia) she had given birth to. The mother’s brother as the head of the natal family took home the sheep’s head (tou), while the youngest maternal aunt took home the tail (wei) to encompass all the age and gender hierarchies among the mother’s generation of siblings. The sheep bun was thereby divided and dispersed across space, just as the natal family was spatially ruptured by marriage, a matrilateral sibling group that separated and united like a living flock (Figure 3.5). Birthdays as ritual events focused attention on provisions of care in safeguarding children’s survival and marked the children’s progressive passage into the world of adults (literally: “full persons,”

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chengren). The incomplete nature of personhood was particularly ­critical  under the age of three, as very young children had the ­additional precariousness of their souls (linghun) being less stable and attached. In children, linghun’s gradual formation is part of a learned and cultural aspect of full persons capable of displaying understandable behavior (Harrell 1979; Stafford 1995). Chinese concepts of linghun do not map directly onto the English “soul,” as a person’s linghun not only can linger after death but also can separate from a person during life, resulting in psychosis, illness, trance states, as well as death (Harrell 1979; Kuhn 1990). In the Chinese etiology of children’s ailments, carers combat a living child’s soul loss (diuhun) by attempting to coax the soul to rejoin the body (Kuhn 1990; Stafford 1995). Sweeping Cliff women availed themselves of a number of rituals, practices, and talismans to counteract the risk of soul loss. For instance, infants’ souls could especially easily be frightened or blown away (Stafford 1995), so postnatal environments were kept calm and quiet (ping’an) through controlling sounds, drafts, and light (Topley 1974). Some senior women even carefully stored objects, such as beloved blankets or clothing, as well as baby teeth, locks of hair, and nail clippings, in case they were one day needed to recall an offspring’s soul to the body. Villagers also gave infants “milk names” (naiming) to deflect evil forces from knowing their true names in childhood. Carers also bound children to life in a variety of ways that literally included ropes, threads, and traps. Children were tied up in ropes and sent out into the village alleys to be reeled back by carers into the family courtyard, and mothers made talismans of embroidery thread to protect children that they tied around their ankles, wrists, and necks. At the birthday celebrations, the roasted circular breads ensnared, captured, and enveloped children and their souls (see Bruckermann 2019 for details; Figure 3.6). Despite formally focusing on maternal grandmothers and their ideal relationship in safeguarding their daughter’s children, this festivity of matrifocal female kinship was usually hosted in the paternal grandparents’ courtyard. Although paternal grandparents hosted the event, most of the costs for the celebration were carried by the younger parental generation, who earned incomes through waged labor in the valley below the village, often while grandparents cared for their offspring in Sweeping Cliff. Tensions frequently arose as the patrilineal and patrilocal side of the child’s extended family put up with the intrusion of matrilateral cograndparents. At times paternal grandparents, in particular, provided gifts to vie for a grandchild’s

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Figure 3.6. Grandmothers encircling their grandson with the kuolian wreath bread. Photograph by the author.

favor, while at other times they expressed displeasure at the proceedings through refusing to exchange words, kisses, or other tokens of affection with their grandchildren in the public performances. Moreover, patrilineal relatives were increasingly reasserting their claims over children by giving offerings at the ancestral tablets at these

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events. In an unexpected spatial inversion, the ancestral ­offerings were given in the intimate and private sphere of the house, while the matrifocal natal family were celebrated in front of an audience of spectators in the courtyard. Thereby, tensions between patrilineal and matrilateral relatives came to be performed through claims made over children by paternal and maternal grandparents. Parents also refashioned the celebrations to resonate with their hopes of what children were and would become. In particular, they incorporated modern and foreign dynamics to the celebration, purchasing expensive frosted birthday cakes and individualized gifts for children. These additions were said to “represent parents’ affections” (daibiao fumu de renqing), thereby echoing the common capitalist logic of refashioning reproductive labor as love. By spending lavishly on these occasions, labor in its condensed form of monetary wages became transformed into commodities to express emotional attachments. Moreover, as the village primary school headmaster, Xiaozhang, observed, parents in the village agonized over the perceived difference in “quality” (suzhi) of village children when compared to their urban contemporaries, seeking to offer them some of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the city in the countryside. Xiaozhang pithily summarized how the population policy realigned labor, knowledge, and skills across the uneven rural-urban terrain by inverting generational hierarchies: Old people lack knowledge (zhishi cha) and therefore do not have a good footing to stand on. Old people have a mentality of efficiency (xiaoneng yishi), but nowadays what is required is an agile mentality (lingkuai yishi). You don’t need this to plant the fields, but you need this to work in the city. Both the government and the people attach great importance to children’s education and to their health. This is what schools are for. You know we vaccinate all the children?

As the rural-urban fault lines shift through educational and occupational mobility, young villagers were increasingly eager to integrate into practices of modern consumption that assimilated children with their urban counterparts, including through birthday celebrations. This did not necessarily undermine the recognitions of care that grandparents sought to attain in these festivities, as these large-scale events multiplied and amplified these claims, as crowds of onlookers acknowledged the maternal grandmothers’ homemade breads and recognized the senior lineage elders’ insistence that children kowtow to their patrilineal ancestors.

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The Reciprocal Self in Caring Claims In Sweeping Cliff, grandparents traced various originating activities and engaged in different contributing activities to legitimize claims over grandchildren through care. Analyzing these caring claims provides an alternative starting point to conventional approaches to care as based on reciprocity between kin or as commoditized market exchanges (see Drotbohm and Alber 2015). Instead, the notion of caring claims breaks up the commonsense anthropological continuum of self-interest, reciprocity, and altruism (see Lambek 2011) by raising questions about motivation in anthropological analyses of belonging (Strathern 2005; Faubion 2001; Carsten 2000). The caring claims made by seniors in Sweeping Cliff suggest that care can be given to overcome the thwarted reproductive hopes of past selves through future kin. This has far-reaching consequences for understanding the reciprocity of care beyond China, as these grandmothers are motivated to realize their sense of personhood not necessarily through exchange with others but through reciprocities that overcome past experiences of reproductive hardship they themselves suffered. Insofar as this relationship between grandparents and grandchildren can be analyzed as a form of reciprocal exchange, it is not solely about giving care to younger generations in the present and banking on receiving care from younger generations in the future, as intergenerational contracts are typically understood (Croll 2006; Stafford 2000). In a sense, the reciprocal relationship women were creating was about redeeming the losses their past selves had sustained (Sangren 2013). They were thereby giving to themselves in the present what they had frequently been tragically denied in the past, the gift of giving, and sustaining, life. Anthropologists elsewhere have similarly disentangled how originating activities can range widely between such practices as providing substance, performing care, extending touch, or instilling etiquette in constituting persons based on relational exchange (Stasch 2009; Strathern 2005; Carsten 2000; Stafford 2000). As a result of these originating activities, persons then make different types of claims over one another, claims regarding ownership, identification, and belonging that often amount to ties of kin (Strathern 2005). By weaving people’s lives together beyond biologistic destiny, kinship emerges as something made rather than simply given, and forged through ongoing activities rather than fulfilled in a single moment. By provocatively calling for a turn to everyday practices of relatedness rather than formal kinship models, Janet Carsten (2000)

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has drawn attention to ongoing contributions in constituting intimate ties. The processes underwriting relatedness frequently include the exchanges of substances, reciprocities of emotions, and the cultivation of entangled personhood over time. This conception of a relational self has its precursors in the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988), who contrasted the bounded individual in Western social theory with the relational “dividual” in Melanesia, where personhood was distributed across relational exchanges with others. Building on these insights, new kinship studies frequently focus on new reproductive technologies and trace the legislation surrounding the making of a person, in particular by separating the contributing elements in human reproduction, for instance into the supply of semen, the donation of an ovum, the efforts of a gestational carrier, and so on (Franklin 2013; Melhuus 2012; Strathern 2005; Carsten 2000). Extricating these varied contributions turns kin into people over whom one has the right to make claims, for instance as offspring (Strathern 2005). This approach denaturalizes parenthood and shifts legal discourse toward the originating activities in making persons underwritten by the contemporary secular state (McKinnon and Cannell 2013; Lambek 2013; Melhuus 2012). Particularly under the influence of a heavy-handed state intervention into reproduction through the family planning policy in China, issues of bureaucracy in legitimizing kinship loom large (cf. Lambek 2013; Sangren 2003; Greenhalgh 1993). Grandmothers experienced a double exclusion from the classic authorities of claiming kin, as both the agnatic kinship system sidelined them in favor of the patriline and the modern bureaucratic state focused on the nuclear family rather than extended multigenerational kin networks. The centrality of birthday celebrations in bringing maternal and paternal kin together highlights how house-based rituals, especially when focused on offspring, tied families together beyond the cleavages of lineage.9 Nonetheless, the ironic source of these kinship continuities and transformations were not lost on Sweeping Cliff villagers: while the Maoist state pushed patrilineal kinship out of public lineage halls into the domestic domain, the Reform Era population policies moved childbearing and childrearing, formerly female aspects of kinship enclosed in the domestic domain, center stage in policy regarding population and “human quality.” Realignments between senior and junior, rural and urban, and paternal and maternal contributions to reproduction were being negotiated at these events (see Bruckermann 2019 for details).

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Care work often lacks visibility. Between kin this often arises due to the unremunerated nature of the work despite its being embedded in capitalist economic processes, therefore sidestepping the monetary terms that nominally quantify, solidify, and render labor legible. In more formal labor settings, the location of care work within residential institutions, health facilities, or domestic homes as well as inequalities between those who can afford to pay for care and those who must sell their caring labor often minimizes acknowledgment (Drotbohm and Alber 2015). In the 2000s, this caring work predominantly fell to the elderly and female residents of Sweeping Cliff, who completed this work without any direct form of remuneration—a situation that often contributed to undermining the formal recognition for this work. Although rural elderly care and elderly carers’ work within Sweeping Cliff occurred outside of the bright lights and bustling sphere of the nearby urban environment, senior kin creatively sought ways to make their labor contributions visible, legible, and recognized in everyday conversation, material evidence, and grand celebrations. Through objectifications of labor, and particularly the labor necessary for sustaining kin, competitive endeavors between various relatives emerged. Not only unwaged agricultural and domestic labor but care and attention are being recognized in alternate ways through events ranging from residential squabbles to large-scale celebrations. This is despite policy shifts targeting improvements to improve “population quality” (renkou suzhi) through aspirational qualities associated with urban youth, such as institutional education and market-based consumption, rather than the work of senior villagers. Thus, economic relations and political transitions did not shape the domestic domain in a one-sided process but instead kinship formed and forged how political economy plays out in public (Cannell and McKinnon 2013; Thelen 2015). In Sweeping Cliff reproductive stakes were particularly high, as reproductive expectations ruptured repeatedly in the twentieth century, beginning with the high infant mortality of the Maoist years and followed by the restrictions placed on reproduction through the family planning policy in the Reform Era. I emphasized these moments when the stakes in reproduction were heightened as the making of the next generation became fraught, unstable, and fragile, and I demonstrated how cooperation in caring, especially among kin, offered ways of surmounting perilous periods of reproduction. To avoid naturalizing the hierarchies between gender and generation in these forms of pooling labor, the various ways of contributing to reproduction were rendered visible yet enmeshed.

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Kin have reproductive interests in and over one another, to the point that this feature forms a key differentiation between kin and nonkin (Strathern 2005). Times that threaten reproduction may culminate in situations in which the capacity to forge offspring becomes restricted, even impossible, due to factors beyond one’s control and thereby destabilize expectations. These ruptures foreclose conventional reproductive paths and reorient perspectives on future kin as they confront reproductive crises. When reproduction becomes tenuous, people beyond the reproductive couple may be drawn into processes to create or sustain new offspring. In Sweeping Cliff, I showed that relying on the support of others to sustain reproduction came with strings attached.

Notes This chapter includes sections from 2017 “Caring Claims and the Relational Self across Time: Grandmothers Overcoming Reproductive Crises in Rural China,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(2): 356–75, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12611, reproduced courtesy of Wiley and 2017 “Longevity, Labor, and Care between Kin and State in China,” Global Europe—Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective 114: 2–23, https://europa.unibas.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/europa/PDFs_Basel_Papers/BS114. pdf reproduced here courtesy of the Institute for European Global Studies, University of Basel. It is also is derived in part from an article published in Ethnos in 2017, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.​1080/​ 00141844.2018.1561486?journalCode=retn20, doi: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1561486. 1. Within Sweeping Cliff, the New Rural Cooperative Medical System began to operate in 2008, while the village committee’s pension scheme has been in operation since 2000. In 2008 the village committee supplied the funds for the health insurance scheme, but since 2010 villagers themselves are contributing to the insurance as well. Depending on the care needed, the insurance policy usually covers between 50 percent and 75 percent of medical care at public hospitals in the municipal area. Since 2000 the village committee operates a pension scheme for those over sixty who do not receive financial support from kin, compensating them with 60 RMB a month toward their living costs. 2. Reproduction can come under strain through structural turmoil associated with war, famine, and disease, but it can also include routine struggles with labor exploitation, infertility, or child mortality (Scheper-Hughes 1992). Conversely, reproduction may be extended through new technologies, including surrogacy, artificial insemination, and gamete donation (e.g., Franklin 2013; Melhuus 2012; Kahn 2000) but also through finding existing children new carers, for instance through adoption, fostering, or grandcaring (e.g., Segalen 2010; Howell 2006; Whyte 2003). 3. In thinking about the limits on and support of reproduction, it is worth bearing in mind how historical demography predominantly documents women’s fertility (i.e., the number of children who were born, survived, and recorded) without always being able to capture fecundity (i.e., the number of pregnancies experienced; Bray 2013:

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157). While demographic numbers for the Maoist Period generally tend toward high levels of fertility, statistics on fecundity and infant mortality are less reliable during this period, making reproductive narratives all the more important in capturing the catastrophic losses rural villagers such as those in Sweeping Cliff sustained. 4. Throughout the Chinese countryside in the 1980s, the state lost its economic tools of coercion to control reproduction as land was distributed to households, resulting in what Susan Greenhalgh (1993, 1994) has referred to as the “peasantization” of the one-child policy characterized by increasing leniency over both quotas and sanctions. Parallel historical processes of state accommodation of peasant’s reproductive goals have led to the current family planning policy in Sweeping Cliff. 5. This contemporary concern with the violent, unruly, and destructive movement of air through wind has deep historical precedents that can be traced in early and medieval Chinese records (see Hsu 2008a). 6. As Stuart Thompson (1982) showed at rural Taiwan funeral rituals, juxtaposing persons and substances (in particular women, flesh and pork vis-à-vis men, semen, and bones) encapsulated gendered and generational kinship contributions to the making and remaking of the social world through reproduction. 7. The expression pairing fish and shrimp, unlike the otherwise similar English idiom “Birds of a feather flock together,” additionally carries valences of poverty, lack, and precarity of reproduction under harsh conditions by alluding to the aquatic life of small, helpless creatures surviving together in a crowded pool. 8. There is no translation offered for this term, because the local dialect term kuolian has neither an external referential meaning beyond the wreath bread nor a standardized character-based transcription in Mandarin. 9. The approach developed by Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) with regard to the house reveals itself as particularly apt in the Han Chinese context, in which the very word for “family” and “home” or “house” are the same (jia). Nonetheless, ethnographies of the house have mainly been used to analyze kinship and relatedness outside the dominant Han ethnic group in the PRC. For instance, in a reappraisal of Naxi and Moso nationalities’ kinship systems, Elisabeth Hsu (1998) focuses on the house to challenge representations of an ethnic cleavage between their alleged patrilineality and matrilineality.

– Chapter 4 –

Gendered Aspirations in Marriage

_

No Car, No House In 2010 a music video spread online that claimed to represent China’s “poor brothers” (qiongge) who cannot marry. It featured the singer Sun Hui strumming his guitar as a street musician and crooning about his inability to find a wife due to his lacking a car and house. The catchy title and lyrics of No Car, No House (Meiyou Che Meiyou Fang) lament the materialism of girls who seek cars, houses, and family wealth but ignore the singer’s not very humbly professed virtues of a good heart. However, the video features a string of girls approaching Sun Hui, two of whom he shuns on appearances, while he serenades one girl in a tight dress for her beauty, only to be rebuffed by her when she sees his bank savings booklet. This video was the object of debate across China and led to dozens of covers, including two noteworthy spin-offs that are arguably more insightful than the original. The cover by the People’s Leftover Men (Quanmin Sheng Nan) includes men from all walks of life singing lines of the song at their places of precarious, informal, and working-class labor. A street cleaner strums his broom, a construction worker dons a hardhat, and a water bottle delivery man sits on his electric tricycle. These men’s appeal to women to give them a chance despite their income seems considerably more genuine than the plight of the original singer, whom netizens dubbed “pretend poverty brother Sun Hui” (zhuang qiongge Sun Hui). The message of these quirky singers with their off-key cover carries a clear message: these impoverished young men

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struggle to make ends meet but never end up with the women of their dreams, although they are all around them, as they serve them food, deliver their products, or sell them glossy magazines. While online empathy ran high for this cover of the song by the Leftover Men, the assertive rebuttal to the song by the Golden Leftover Women (Huangjin Shengnü) was considerably more controversial, leading to a gendered battle on many comment sites. Accused as gold diggers (baijinnü) online, these beautiful young women wear designer couture and professional attire as they lounge in luxury apartments and hang out in front of shopping centers, with one couple alluding to potential homosexuality by kissing and cuddling. Encountering Sun Hui’s original act, this band of privileged ladies kick down his sign advertising his mating call and jump on the sign in their stilettos. They insist on being too good for these poor men, who rove about without a home, and assert that their mothers would indeed ask to see a potential mate’s bank account. These women imply that they own their own homes and houses but provide no insight into how they came by these prized possessions. They nonetheless claim to be more independent than the “poor boys” they lambaste as simply looking for new mommies. Although these performances were overdrawn for comic effect, their popularity stemmed from their ringing with a kernel of truth: that securing a material future was often paramount in marital decisions and could fit uneasily with emotional or sexual desires. In recent decades Chinese youth experienced diverging, often conflicting desires, as cosmopolitan and even global aspirations of love, sex, and romance intermingled with practical, familial, and local concerns, often inflected with historical inequalities of gender, class, and the rural-urban divide (see Rofel 2007). These contradictions were particularly acute for people who wanted to depart from normative expectations of heterosexual marriage with children, such as those with gay and lesbian identities (Zheng 2015, Engebretsen 2014) or those hoping to build careers rather than families (Bruckermann 2017a). In addition to overriding sexual and emotional desires, the preoccupation with securing material futures left men and women with limited economic prospects at an acute disadvantage, a cause of great anxiety and frequent complaints by residents in the Shanxi countryside. This situation was compounded for men by the expectation that grooms provide housing, preferably in urban areas with restricted access due to household registration regulations and booming real estate markets. Normative discourse about female hypergamy only exacerbated the situation, although the grounds on which women

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were labeled gold diggers was questionable in the Chinese context of an acute gendered pay gap, expectations of educational attainment, and age differentials at marriage (Zavoretti 2016). In addressing the materialism underlying marriage, especially as measured by marital transactions, one must bear in mind whether the acquisitions flow toward the bride and groom themselves and how far this property secures the future of the family, variably construed as the natal family, the in-laws’ family, or even the newly formed nuclear family with future offspring. For many young women in Sweeping Cliff, the moment of marriage was a key event at which they could secure assurances for the future, whether in terms of housing, transport mobility, or issues of potential child or elderly care. The weight of care, in particular, could become a major damper on a woman’s career, and some potential brides saw the marital transactions as a time when their long-term reproductive work might, in fact, be remunerated. Women often felt pressure for the sake of their own natal family to secure their livelihoods at marriage, so they would be able to support them in old age, especially due to the frequent absence of siblings in the wake of the family planning policy. One advertisement that caused a stir due to pandering to women’s responsibility in bowing to family pressure to marry was aired by the popular matchmaking website Baihewang in early 2014. In the advertisement, a young woman achieves all the adult markers of life as she enters various sun-filled rooms, for instance in a graduation gown, only to be asked by her maternal grandmother over and over again “Have you married yet?” In the final shot the young woman enters a hospital room in a Western wedding gown to announce to her grandmother in the hospital bed that she has finally tied the knot. The soft breathy sound of a female voiceover whispers, “For the sake of love, do not wait [yinwei ai, bu dengdai].” The advertisement reveals some of the basic dimensions of immense family pressure weighing upon young women, but also men, in fulfilling their family’s hopes for settling down and reproducing kin by having children (see Bruckermann 2017a). The dating service advertisement features the young woman’s maternal grandmother applying pressure on her granddaughter to fulfil her hopes for marriage as a sign of filial devotion and love. The advertisement caused some indignation among Chinese netizens, as well as a lot of commiseration for the woman’s plight. A number of netizens joked that the next sentence out of the grandmother’s mouth would be “Have you had a child yet?” implying that the familial pressure would not end with marriage.

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Sometimes entire families became involved in pairing young couples. In these instances, economic concerns and family compatibility were often paramount; for example, a family predominantly working in agriculture wanted to pair their son with a woman whose family owned an urban hardware shop, and village mechanics remained quite a catch in the mountains across Sweeping Cliff. These exchanges between urban and rural families could help keep families afloat if fortunes changed and sometimes also began with a wild romance. One village couple, who met in middle school, were very romantic and affectionate: the husband would serenade his wife with love songs on a regular basis. Both of their urban service jobs helped sustain their respective agricultural families, especially when his parents’ land became useless due to drought. His father then went into construction work on a day wage basis but also helped with the autumn harvest in his daughter-in-law’s parents’ fields in return for millet. In short, transfers of labor occurred frequently across families after marriage, and these exchanges of resources helped families pool together in times of scarcity. The capacity of young people to provide income-generating labor placed location in a paramount position, as they had to live somewhere where they could make a living. Chapter 3 revealed how these shifts created a generational stratification of economic activities in the household. The senior generation often worked in agriculture, and sometimes industry, as the junior generation turned toward the emerging service economy in the urban valley. Senior household members in the village often provided much of the domestic labor needed for the long-term reproduction of the family, such as childrearing and elder care. In addition to the shifting generational notions of appropriate labor contributions, gendered understandings of being a responsible, caring, and competent family member were changing. Couples taking the plunge into marriage commitments did not necessarily fall head-over-heels in love to form romantic partnerships in Sweeping Cliff but often thoughtfully weighed up their emotional attachment with long-term livelihood strategies and occupational opportunities.

Marriage and the Transmission of Wealth The main intergenerational transmission of wealth in Sweeping Cliff occurred at moments of marriage rather than after the death of the senior generation. However, the form of marriage system as ­patrilocal

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meant that women moved to their husband’s home after the wedding, a practice that carried deep implications for the way that wealth was transmitted across generations. Historically, normative patrilocal residence combined with patrilineal inheritance of houses as women usually moved to their husband’s family home, or at least a house they provided, at marriage (Cohen 1976). The provision of homes at marriage to all brothers of the family formed a crucial moment of premortem inheritance for men (Cohen 1976). Moreover, if it was in their means, women’s “natal family” (niangjia) would provide a dowry and possibly also a trousseau to safeguard a woman’s position as an in-married wife in her husband’s lineage (Wolf 1972; Bray 1997). While this meant that men were often born, raised, and buried within the same home, women experienced an acute moment of rupture at marriage as they moved from their natal to their married home (Judd 1994). As they moved from one lineage to another, women transferred their productive work and reproductive capacities, thereby allowing patrilineages to usurp and amass the value of their labor through excluding them from claims as insiders (Brandtstädter 2009). Although they forged new natal families through bearing and raising children in their married homes, their claims to property, especially as outsiders of the lineage, often remained tenuously linked to the sons they bore (Wolf 1972). Despite the Maoists state’s formal restrictions on patrilineal inheritance, patrilocality became implicitly reinforced through marriage laws, workplace remuneration, and household registration bureaucracy in the Chinese countryside (Oxfeld 2010; Zhang 2009; Friedman 2006). Women’s informal strategies have countered these patrilocal pressures to sustain long-term ties to natal families (Judd 2009, 1989). In some areas, this has led to active deferral of marriage and childbirth as women sought to continue living with their natal families during the Maoist Era (Friedman 2006). More typically, as in Sweeping Cliff, the full revival of natal family ties through regular visits and material exchanges have only been resumed since the Market Era allowed increased mobility and interaction (Zhang 2009). The scarce allocation of housing in Sweeping Cliff further reinforced multigenerational coresidence that discouraged the “splitting of the family property” (fenjia), even when a son brought in a new bride (see Cohen 1976). However, with the increasing labor mobility in the Reform Era, and the opportunities offered by the new topography of labor across the increasingly entangled rural-urban countryside, young couples largely sought to establish their own homes at marriage as part of a tendency toward neolocality, especially to areas

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with employment opportunities farther down in the urban valley (see Liu 2000). Furthermore, demographic changes meant that many families had fewer children, often only daughters, to whom they aimed to pass on their wealth, whether in housing, goods, or money (see Zavoretti 2016). Therefore, marriage remained a key moment at which the intergenerational transfer occurred, for both young men and women, but in profoundly gendered ways that entailed negotiation with both their parental families. Shifts in ideal and actual family relations crystalize in marriage negotiations, transactions, and celebrations in rural China. I argue that young women, in particular, capitalized on how their economic and emotional value was made explicit at these moments. They thereby attempted to meet obligations to their birth and marital families, as well as finding new ways to express and realize their love, anxiety, and aspiration in creating their own family. Their new ritual and practical solutions engaged with a longstanding conflict in the local marriage system by emphasizing ongoing ties to their birth family and locality and their simultaneous rupture through social and geographic mobility at marriage. These rituals did not primarily constitute forms of abstract representation but were intentionally staged to produce actual effects in the real world as part of material processes. They thereby went beyond reproducing social stability from generation to generation, instead intervening into streams of practice to create and manifest changes, despite the contestations these social effects engendered. While marriage offered opportunities for both social and physical mobility in the countryside, it also created ruptures with birth families as women, and increasingly also men, moved away from home to establish their own nuclear families. In contrast to the expectations of marital mobility among women, temporary rural outmigration to urban and industrial sites for work had long been dominated by men in Sweeping Cliff although they regularly returned to their families in their home towns. However, women increasingly also entered labor markets elsewhere, while demographic changes and the legacy of the one-child family policy exacerbated gender imbalances by making women relatively “scarce.” Larger occupational, demographic and kinship shifts in the region thereby influenced emerging marriage and courtship patterns and longstanding rituals. Wedding negotiations were changing in terms of transfers of money, goods, and houses. Formal ceremonies, as well as material exchanges, safeguarded continuing ties with the birth family and celebrated romantic partnerships within a future nuclear family.

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Moreover, young men without houses, cars, and money could occupy similar positions to women in marriage negotiations, turning their actual or potential labor into the main concern in arranging marital ties. Within this complex field of home-making across an uneven rural-urban terrain, aspirations among young men and women devalued agricultural work and yet simultaneously romanticized rural life in contradictory ways.

Precious Shanxi Brides Senior generations often saw “bringing in a daughter-in-law” (qu xifu) as a means to attain reproduction, as well as a source of future care for themselves and their sons. In addition, young women with marketable skills in the labor market could contribute to the household through wages earned in the urban valley. While this form of cooperation could be profitable in safeguarding the financial well-being of the extended family, this form of young women’s contributions could come at the cost of delayed childbearing and resistance to agricultural and even domestic labor. This meant that senior women sometimes forfeited alleviation of labor burdens through their replacement with the work of younger women. Some senior women with sons lamented that their daughters-inlaw refused to work in the fields and homes, while others praised their earning capacities. By contrast, senior women with daughters, especially exclusively with daughters, feared that they would marry out too far away, and sought to keep their daughters close to home, sometimes through securing her financial future through a dowry of real estate that would keep her close to home. Young women, moreover, were keen to retain ties with their natal family and hometown, as well as using marriage as a springboard to safeguard positive situations for future lives. Young men shared similar concerns, but rural men in the area also faced significant hardship due to expectations of their contributions to the marital exchange, with young men who lacked the necessities for marriage, particularly housing, facing a challenging fate. Sweeping Cliff residents were occasionally explicit about marriage transactions as a form of inheritance to daughters, a view mostly espoused by young women, who felt that they needed to secure their future, and a shared family future, with their husbands through sufficient material goods and affectionate relations. In contrast to claims of gold digging as women tried to move up the social ladder

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through practices of hypergamy, many Sweeping Cliff young women had achieved equal or even higher levels of education than their male counterparts, graduating from middle and high school, as well as attaining technical or academic qualifications. Higher levels of educational attainment increased young people’s aspiration for mobility through improved employment, which young women often saw as being curtailed through marriage, and particularly through childbirth, which would mean taking time out of work and tending to the household. Therefore, marriage negotiations were also moments in which money and care were up for grabs, as well as employment opportunities and affectionate relations. Sweeping Cliff residents voiced these concerns by discussing wedding transactions along the inequalities of gender and generation that their particular situation entailed. Meijie, a mother of both a son and a daughter, provided insights into the diverging concerns as she considered both her son’s and daughter’s marriage. On a visit to Meijie’s home, she was meticulously embroidering a pair of silk slippers, a vital part of a woman’s wedding trousseau (zhuanglian). When I asked which of Meijie’s children had gotten engaged, Meijie answered with a tone of exasperation that both her children were of a marriageable age but her son had no partner. Nonetheless, she and her husband were building two new houses in their courtyard for a total of 110,000 RMB in preparation for bringing in a daughter-in-law. She complained that all these preparations are very annoying, but they had to be done if one wanted to attract a daughter-in-law. Meijie went on to explain that her daughter had a partner, but she was very concerned that her daughter’s boyfriend came from the far west of China, the province of Xinjiang. As Meijie saw it, this distance was a major obstacle to marriage due to the patrilocal expectation that her daughter would move intolerably far away. Meijie did not want her daughter to marry into such a far-off place and be separated from her by a vast distance. In addition, the betrothal gifts (caili) her boyfriend’s family would be prepared to offer would not come close to what a Shanxi girl’s family would normally receive. She laughed as she exclaimed, “Shanxi girls are the most precious in China [Shanxi nvhair shi Zhongguo zui zhen’gui de].” Meijie’s joking reflections on the high bridewealth in the region was by no means unusual. Her position as the mother of both a prospective bride and a prospective groom meant she could take the situation in good humor, but another mother of two sons of marriageable age also joked about the high bridewealth they would

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have to pay potential brides and their families for marriage, despite the real concern over the cost straining family resources. This woman, Linle, and her husband had already built two new houses in separate courtyards for their sons (for over 50,000 and over 60,000 RMB each), but now they would also be expected to pay a high bridewealth. With the tongue in cheek attitude that this straight-talking middle-aged neighbor often adopted, she told me in exasperation that bringing in daughters-in-law (qu xifur) would only add to her workload in the fields and house, as young women nowadays all go to work in office jobs (shangban). She listed the requests made by young women nowadays who expect 50,000 in cash, in addition to a car, jewelry, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. Linle told me that the only way you can stand this kind of negotiation is through bringing in a good matchmaker (meiren), who knows how to talk the talk (hui shuohua) and runs back and forth between the bride’s and groom’s families mediating the arrangements (tiaojie). For all her jocular mannerisms, was Linle exaggerating? These women were voicing narratives that were quite typical for their gender and generation in Sweeping Cliff, and in keeping with their household and agricultural responsibilities. However, their concerns revealed a discrepancy depending on whether they were the mothers of sons or daughters. Meijie, the mother embroidering slippers for her daughter feared she might marry far away, faced a situation in which at best she would merely lose physical intimacy with her daughter, at worst she would experience infrequent contact or even estrangement from her. By contrast, Linle, the neighbor whose sons she hoped would marry in the village, insisted that a good matchmaker would be necessary but also feared that the young women her sons would marry would not support her through working in the fields and house. Mirrored inversions of these concerns unfolded among young women of marriageable age. When speaking with a group of young women in their midtwenties at a child’s birthday celebration, all three recently married women agreed on the financial and material transactions needed to seal the engagement. In contrast to their senior counterparts, they did not see these prerequisites as extravagant or excessive, but minimum requirements for an acceptable wedding arrangement. They claimed the minimum bridewealth would be 30,000 to 40,000 RMB in cash and that even this would be considered quite small. They also emphasized the importance of a potential groom having both a house and a car to become an eligible bachelor. The house provided

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the romantic couple and the future nuclear family with a home, while the car secured the mobility necessary to retain close ties to friends and family in different locations. As Yuanli, who was twenty-three-years old and had recently married into a neighboring village from a township more than thirty kilometers away, explained, “For me, the car is the most important thing. Because having a car, we can come and go [laiwang]. My husband drives me to see friends, family, etc. and we can go to the city to have fun [chuqu wanr].” To these young women, the mobility associated with a car allowed them to sustain relationships across distance, a crucial way of overcoming the spatial rupture of patrilocality. In addition, the location of their house in a place that was “convenient” (fangbian) for these excursions to keep up relationships and enjoy urban outings together was crucial to the happiness of their married lives. Asked what would be convenient in a place, they all agreed that it was good to marry near the city, while opinions were split on living in the city. As Yuanli expanded, “Not in the city, but near the city is good. You have good air, good food; it’s good for your body. And my mother-in-law helps me. But for a job, you have to go to the city; you don’t want to hang around at home all day.” For these young women, the key to settling into a permanent home, especially a house in the countryside, was the simultaneous guarantee of mobility through a car that would allow them to commute for employment and pleasure. In short, young women themselves insisted that a high bridewealth was a necessity for any self-respecting woman’s marriage negotiation, especially Yuanli, who demanded a good location for health and work, a car to get around, and ideally a helpful mother-in-law to help with childcare. The practice of bridewealth was not seen as an outdated or demeaning transfer of material and monetary value for a woman’s hand in marriage, but instead emerged as a point of pride for young women, even as a way that they stake their own value in relation to their birth family and married family. So what does the statement “Shanxi girls are the most precious in China” really mean? Within the context of north-central China, the home and the market have long been intricately intertwined through marital relations, where the buying and selling of kin, and particularly women and children, was commonplace in late imperial times (Wolf and Huang 1980, Gates 1989). However, it would be misleading to view these contemporary transactions as purely monetary extensions of these practices, as women both derived and instantiated their significance as persons from these negotiations. Yet young women’s emphases on

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the dual nature of material and emotional safety at marriage were probably also not a new phenomenon. For instance, a mother’s embroidery, of the kind Meijie was preparing, formed an important part of her daughter’s trousseau but could also be given as gifts to her son and daughter-in-law at their wedding. Middle-aged women with children of marriageable age spent many hours on the bed platform stitching away at the insoles, which were an important part of these handicraft gifts. The embroidery designs in shoes and insoles could bring about efficacious links between ornamental pictorial representations and word play for a bride’s future. In addition to the auspicious symbolism of the designs, insoles could include verbal couplets that created good fortune through paired phrases, such as “Step by step ascend higher” (bubu gao sheng) and “Again and again attain good luck” (shishi zou yun). Asking another expert embroiderer about the importance of the insole she was making for her future daughter-in-law, she explained, “After marriage a woman misses home (xiangjia) and she wants to return (yao huijia). So, in the past, girls walked a long way and the insoles make the journey more comfortable.” In this explanation, the carefully embroidered insoles made by a caring mother or mother-inlaw would have made a young woman’s journeys between her natal family and married home less painful. In relation to the embroidery involved in dowries, Bray (1997: 265) explicitly argues that these valuable gifts “constituted material links with the bride’s natal home” and created “a bond between female kin that transcended the spatial boundaries imposed by seclusion to link women separated by marriage.” As women shifted the primary contributions of their labor from one family to another at marriage, their capacity to negotiate their position in relation to both an ideal and actual family formation was strengthened. Rather than viewing the monetary value placed on their marital arrangements as depreciating, young women saw these transactions as indexes of the personal value they had accumulated and their potential and capacity to create a bright future through future labor. In marriage transactions, women insisted on their capacities based on educational achievements, positive personality traits, their employment status, and their childbearing potential to bring about a good marriage transaction that would benefit the family that bore them and the family they intend to bear.

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Weddings Are a Big Deal The rising “price” of marriage on the groom’s side has been a subject of much debate in recent Chinese ethnography (e.g., Siu 1993; Oxfeld 2010; Liu 2000; Yan 2003, 2005). Liu (2000: 51) describes a “marriage crisis” in the reciprocal exchange of brides for mountain villagers in Shaanxi, as marrying into a family living in the mountains is considered a hindrance due to the devaluing of the location in relation to the valley below. Oxfeld (2010: 93) reveals how traditional marriage practices of women marrying into a higher status family (hypergamy) reinforced women’s sense of powerlessness in their married home. However, recent spatial considerations of women marrying into increasingly urban environments have left men at a disadvantage if their homes are remote (Oxfeld 2010: 106). Both Oxfeld (2010) and Liu (2000) therefore argue that the spatial hierarchies between mountain and valley, remote and central, are key considerations in driving up bridewealth in rural China. As the previous discussion shows, young women in Sweeping Cliff also emphasize location in their spouse selection and negotiations of bridewealth, with mobility being an added concern if marrying into the countryside. The actual prices stipulated in these Chinese ethnographies vary from 500 to 800 RMB in rural Shaanxi in the late 1990s (Liu 2000: 67) to 5,500 RMB in 1991 in rural Heilongjiang (Yan 2003: 155) and up to 9,999 RMB in 2006 for rural Guangdong (Oxfeld 2010: 106). By contrast, Sweeping Cliff’s bridal expectations in 2010 of about 30,000 to 40,000 RMB in cash with the addition of new houses built for around 50,000 RMB and car prices beginning at about 10,000 RMB do appear comparatively high. The extent of inflation in bridewealth in Sweeping Cliff is quite astronomical, as in the early 1980s bridewealth mostly varied between 200 and 500 RMB. However, some residents insisted that the value of these transactions was not that different, as the purchasing power and earning potential in the area had both skyrocketed. The increase in bridewealth also resulted from larger bureaucratic and demographic transformations that chime with those in other parts of China. For instance, the family planning policy introduced since the 1980s had a major impact by producing gender imbalances in birthrates and increasing the number of elderly dependents on younger generations. National Chinese population statistics notoriously suffer from inaccuracy, as the family planning policy forced many families to leave children unregistered in an attempt to avoid

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severely punitive fines, leading to the emergence of an “unplanned population” of legal nonpersons (Greenhalgh 2003). In Sweeping Cliff, outmigration and the rise of the service economy have meant that agricultural labor is increasingly left to the older and female part of the population. Therefore, young women, and especially those who have attained higher levels of education, are keen to seek jobs in urban centers and offices away from the arduous labor in the fields. Therefore, location plays a central role in women’s marital decision, as do negotiations of intergenerational labor like elderly care and childcare. All of these considerations are taken into account in terms of residential locality and social and occupational mobility in order to offer their future family material stability, as well as emotional and caring support. In addition to these larger changes in the political economy, Yan Yunxiang (2005) drew attention to the internal dynamics produced by changing family constellations in rural Heilongjiang in northeast China. As bridewealth increasingly flowed not to the bride’s family but instead directly to the bride and her future groom, the increasing autonomy of women in both selecting a partner and negotiating bridewealth pitted the conjugal couples into conflict with the groom’s parents, such that young women’s autonomy sometime coincided with the erosion of elders’ welfare. More recently, Yan (2016) discovered that this individualization did not run counter to an emerging tendency toward intergenerational intimacy as families abandoned submission and obedience to seniors in favor of communicative and supportive interactions, thereby reorienting affection around “descending familism.” In Sweeping Cliff most of the bridewealth did make its way to the bride’s natal family, especially the cash transactions. However, the bride’s family often used part of the groom’s family’s betrothal money to buy objects that were then in turn part of the bridal dowry. This dowry would ultimately end up in the hands of the conjugal couple and included everything from television sets to washing machines, from suitcases to bedding. In short, the dowry was composed of household objects to furnish and complete the house or apartment the groom’s family was providing for the couple. In addition, the bride’s mother prepared a bridal trousseau of embroidered slippers and insoles, as well as jewelry and cash, which the bride was meant to keep as a safeguard for hard times that might befall her or her family. However, this arrangement put more pressure on the bride to negotiate financially with her own natal family rather than her husband’s family.

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While bridewealth was indeed escalating, the negotiations going on between the bride and her family were just as important as those going on between the conjugal couple and the groom’s parents. Nonetheless, Sweeping Cliff brides’ families did not voice complaints about how their daughters were dividing up the money between their natal and conjugal family. Rather than seeing the rising bridewealth as an index of young people’s increasing materialism or selfishness, it seems that the increase in bridewealth and the resulting distribution among the interested parties in favor of the bride’s family and the newly formed conjugal couple has to do with the way that female kinship is structured around the jia in rural Shanxi. While the parents of prospective grooms occasionally complained about the escalating bridewealth in the region, the brides’ families viewed these payments as signs of respect, sincerity, and promise to safeguard their future as a jia. Brides themselves sought to realize and represent their filial obligations to their birth parents and create good conditions for their nuptial family through these transactions. In addition, they saw these negotiations as reflecting and reproducing their value as capable, hard-working, and loving persons. Furthermore, young women experienced both self-worth and self-respect from a successful marriage negotiation that instantiated and reproduced their value as women in their roles as past daughters and future mothers. They remained good daughters because they cared for their birth family through negotiating monetary transfers to their parents. They would be good mothers who anticipated the needs of their future family by making arrangements for their care through creating a strong material basis for their own flourishing. Bridal transactions associated wealth and romance in complex ways that bore resemblance to other capitalist societies. For instance, a young woman in her early twenties who had a very lively text message relationship with her partner in Beijing made the parallels very explicit: “The bridal gifts [caili] show that your partner [duixiang] is earnest [renzhen]. It’s like in the West you’ve got the diamond ring when you get engaged. That’s a bridal gift, isn’t it?” Without discounting the density between language and love in rural China (Yan 2003), young women in Shanxi felt words and romance to be inadequate without the backing of material evidence, such that money may form part of their language of love. Material foundations were not important just to daughters but to their parents and the couples as they began their married life. For instance, a neighbor told me her love story with her husband began when she was working as a pharmacist in the capital Taiyuan and

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he delivered medicine to her. Upon his departure, she realized that she had not given him enough money and returned it to him. This caught the groom’s attention as he realized she was an honest and trustworthy person and began courting her. In short, beyond words, actions and money count in courtship and marriage. Many young people insisted that an important aspect of marital relations was that it was a relationship between equals, by which was generally meant equal levels of education, wealth, and occupation. Therefore, the narrative of simple hypergamy, or women marrying upward did not hold true. However, I did encounter one failed romance between a young woman from a wealthy urban family with a university degree who became engaged to one of her classmates, a highly intelligent and talented young man from a rural and poor village family. In this case, her family put immense pressure on her to break off the relationship, which ended abruptly when she was called home due to the death of her grandfather and was not allowed to return to the area where they both worked. As the material transactions surrounding marriage were paramount to their success, the role of matchmakers in negotiating marriages changed. In the past, weddings were frequently arranged in the sense that a matchmaker (meiren) would introduce (jieshao) a couple so that they could meet and decide whether they wanted to marry. Nowadays, an increasingly common pattern is for young people to meet and choose their partners in schools and workplaces. In addition, friends may also make informal introductions or suggest a relationship between potential partners. Nonetheless, this person is not always considered the matchmaker. The matchmaker predominantly acted as a broker between the bride’s and groom’s families by mediating negotiations (tiaojie), bringing parties together (shuohe), and arranging (anpai) the marriage transactions. One of the most important qualities of the matchmaker was therefore the ability to be a good talker (hui shuohua). As the matchmaker negotiated between the conjugal couple and their respective families, many young people opted for somebody their age, who was friends with both the prospective bride and groom. Sometimes, the matchmaker received a cut of the marital transactions, but the matchmaker was always awarded a prized seat at the wedding banquet. While the financial implications of the marriage arrangements were  an important aspect of the marital negotiations, at the actual wedding the natal family’s bittersweet farewell ceremony for the bride emphasized the sense of loss experienced at her departure and

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the hopes and dreams for the bride within her new married home. Turning from memory and desire in marriage negotiations, the following section explores the performance of actual and ideal family formations in marriage celebrations. By analyzing the affective celebrations at the bride’s sending-off ritual at two natal family homes, differences in aspirations for social mobility appear.

Bridal Farewells as Aspirational Ceremonies Paying close attention to the performance of these house-based rituals reveals that Sweeping Cliff brides remained members of their natal families despite the separation of marriage. However, a contrast also emerged in these ceremonies. First, a sending-off ceremony deemed more “traditional” (chuantong) by participants emphasized the bride’s sibling group, natal family, and matrilateral relatives. Second, a wedding that people considered both “modern” (xiandai) and “lavish” (kuoqi) added new ceremonies to the ritual repertoire that stressed romantic love between the couple under a filial display of the daughter’s gratitude and her parents’ reciprocal blessing of the union. This shift will be traced through the contrasting description of wedding ceremonies at the homes of two brides. In Sweeping Cliff, the first day of the wedding included two hosting sites for banqueting and celebration, at both the bride’s and groom’s natal homes, including kowtowing to their extended kin and giving offerings to their respective ancestors. In the morning of the first day, the groom and his groomsmen usually stormed the bride’s courtyard to whisk her away after her bridal sending-off ceremony, with the wedding party spending the afternoon with guests at the groom’s parents’ courtyard (Figure 4.1). However, the second wedding day featured the bride and groom’s return to the bride’s natal house to play games and to host another round of banquets for kin, friends, and neighbors. The importance of matrilateral relatives were highlighted in the ritual bridal farewell ceremonies with an emphasis on the bride’s brother and her mother’s brother’s family. However, especially on the second day of the bridal return, additions to the cultural repertoire modernized the style of the wedding through new displays of conspicuous ritual expenditure. Rather than treating these ceremonial additions as a purely competitive game of exhibiting wealth for the hosting family, the actual ceremonial content revealed a new emphasis on conjugal love and the reciprocal relationship between the ­parents

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and their daughter. These transformations reveal that these shifts toward conjugal intimacy and the nuclear family not only resound with practical domains of kinship (as in Yan Y. 2003, 2016; Fong 2004) but are also expressed through ritual ceremonies. The first bride, Xufei, had a bridal ceremony that guests understood as building on long-standing kinship values, while the second bride, Daxia, added a number of new elements to the wedding repertoire that revealed the shift in the performance of family relations away from extended kin and toward conjugal love and parent-daughter relations.

Xufei’s Farewell After a morning meal at her natal family’s house, Xufei oversaw the bridesmaids and bridesmen load up a string of minivans with the objects from her bridewealth, which included blankets, suitcases, and household appliances (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). Xufei then returned to her family kang where the bridesmaids helped her slip out of her red silk two-piece suit and into a pink silk wedding gown. Once Xufei had changed, her bridesmaids began letting her family and friends back into the room. The room quickly became crowded with all the onlookers as her mother, grandmothers, bridesmaids, siblings, and female friends all crowded into the room to watch her farewell ceremony on the family kang, officiated by her mother’s brother’s wife Linlin. The ceremony involved a theatrical beauty regimen in preparation for the bride’s departure to delight the audience, as well as passing on nourishing bodily sustenance for the journey, in the hopes that her new life would become as sweet as the snacks Xufei consumed. The groom also came into the room to attempt to tear his bride away, through the power of persuasion with a bouquet of red roses followed by jesting jostling on the kang. However, the most important part of the ceremony occurred after the groom retreated as Linlin called Xufei’s little brother up to the kang, carrying an agricultural shovel. Xufei remained seated on a chair as her brother handed her the shovel. Xufei took the shovel in her left hand holding it with the blade down on the kang and placed her right hand on her brother’s shoulder. Xufei then uttered the following phrases: 1. Jiou cai dou, Shou zuo qie Rizi huo zhe biren qie

Putonghua: Jiao ta dou Shou zhuo qiao Rizi guo bi bieren qian/qiang

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Translation: Feet tread on the box, Hands touch the shovel, The days pass to create money/strength as great as others.

2. Shou tuo xundi Putonghua: Shou tuo xiongdi Renhua hugui Ronghua fugui

Translation: Hands rely on brothers, Leading to prosperity, wealth, and titles.

Xufei’s ritual performance with the agricultural shovel and her brother on the kang was based on several verbal puns. First, the homophonic relationship in local dialect between the words for shovel, money, and strength (qie; Putonghua: qiao, qian, qiang, respectively) expressed the hope that these entities would emerge in the new bride’s life. The word for wealth and titles (huigui; Putonghua: fugui) also sounds very similar to the phrase for brother (xundi; Putonghua: xiongdi) in these efficacious spoken couplets. Moreover, the character for box here (dou) simultaneously referred to a bowl, container, or ladle for rice, so the bride was literally being “steamed” in this preparation ceremony, while this dou also refers to the Dipper constellation in Chinese astronomy, thereby conveying stellar good fortune. These verbal puns are an example of the common Chinese practice of using “seemingly unrelated objects” to “sound out” meaningful phrases (Knapp 1999: 81). Knapp highlights that these “layers of conventionalized visual as well as verbal messages communicate longstanding values and aspirations that are reinforced by similar themes embedded within the performances of ritual, ceremony, and popular entertainment” (1999: 81). The verbal couplets Xufei chanted thereby gathered word play and ritual efficacy to connect her future fortunes to the agricultural shovel and her brother’s support through homophonic associations with money, strength, wealth, and titles. The groom burst back into the room, complaining that Xufei was taking too long over her farewell and insisting that they leave. As the groom urged her to hurry up, Xufei insisted that they must stay a bit longer, that she was not quite ready to make her departure. Participants at the wedding later explained that this verbal back and forth was part of the ceremony, as Xufei’s excuses (jiekou) showed that she was not overly eager to leave the warmth of her natal home. After the wedding photographer snapped a couple more shots of Xufei elegantly draping a red veil over her face, her mother’s brother

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Figure 4.1. Ritual reliance on brothers and shovels for the bridal sending-off ceremony. Photograph by the author.

(jiujiu) stepped into the room and lifted her off the kang, so she would not carry the earth (tu) of her natal home to her new conjugal home as he carried her to the sleek wedding car waiting outside the courtyard gate. He put Xufei down in the black car decorated with red flowers and the groom clambered in behind her. Even Xufei’s little brother

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Figure 4.2. Bride checking her bridewealth before her sending-off ceremony. Photograph by the author.

Figure 4.3. Bridewealth suitcase including jewelry, cash, and bank card. Photograph by the author.

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piled in to the luxurious black rental car before it set off to the bride’s new home in the groom’s village. As they set off, the minivans carrying her trousseau followed, to the accompaniment of a pickup van loaded with a band playing traditional wedding music. These wedding ceremonies clearly allied families as women moved from their natal families to their married houses, but they also created a very intimate and emotional farewell ceremony within the heart of the domestic realm as the final point of departure. The traditional bridal farewell ceremony emphasized how the bride’s departure from her natal family was simultaneously bridged through belonging to her sibling group and the ongoing protection of her brother and mother’s brother. By contrast, when the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Sweeping Cliff was married, her bridal sending-off ceremony included a number of creative cultural additions to the wedding repertoire. These ceremonial games and speeches emphasized both romantic love between the conjugal couple and her filial gratitude to her parents and their blessing of the union.

Daxia’s Return In front of Daxia’s natal home, a large white curtain formed the celebratory backdrop to a pink temporary gateway made of synthetic flowers, where the couple would perform a variety of ceremonies and games. After the groom had kowtowed to all of the bride’s relatives in turn, the master of ceremony called up the bride and her parents to the microphone. In front of the ceremonial curtain, Daxia, her husband, and her parents all gave short speeches detailing how happy they were about the marriage. The groom’s speech made reference to his wife’s historic hometown with its ancient traditions and sacred architecture, as well as her competence, purity, and quality. After the speeches, Daxia and her husband poured red wine into a tiered fountain of goblets that flowed down from a plastic heart with the English word “love” engraved at the top. The couple then lit candles on a holder made of two intertwined metal hearts. The master of ceremonies explained that the couple would now share their dreams and hopes for each other in silence. Standing behind the flaming candles, the couple held hands, closed their eyes, and stood together. After about thirty seconds, the master of ceremonies observed that their love flowed like wine and glowed like candles and then joked that the couple had a lot of hope. The audience responded to this last comment with laughter. When the couple finally opened their eyes

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again, the groom proceeded to pick up his bride and spun her around three times counterclockwise as Daxia smiled and waived for the camera. After this performative display, the groom and groomsmen went on an afternoon tour of the village under the direction of the tourism development company to take in the historic sites before returning for the afternoon banquet. Meanwhile, the bride moved between the seated wedding guests chatting, drinking, and eating. Practical transformations in kinship relations have been characterized as shifting from hierarchical relationships between parents and their progeny toward an increasing emphasis on the nuclear family based on the conjugal couple in rural China (Yan Y. 2003). As actual and ideal family relations shift, parents, children, and conjugal couples are finding new ways to express their love, anxiety, and frustration (Yan Y. 2003, 2016; Fong 2004). By exploring the performance of kinship relations at bridal wedding ceremonies under the light of these transformations, a longstanding emphasis on matrilateral relatives and the natal family has been supplemented with celebrations of conjugal romance and parent-child reciprocity. The additions to the bridal farewell that emerged at Daxia’s elaborate celebrations on the day of her return to her natal family added two further dimensions to the wedding ceremony: first, the celebration of romantic love shared between Daxia and her husband; second, Daxia’s filial gratitude toward her parents and their reciprocal blessing of her union. Both of these dimensions echoed the practical shift from hierarchical parent-child relations as the key relationship in Chinese kinship toward an emphasis on the nuclear family with the conjugal unit at its center (Yan 2003). Furthermore, Daxia’s family sought out new ways to express romantic love and reciprocal support between parents and their departing daughter through explicitly verbalizing their emotions (cf. Yan 2003, 2016). The participants’ responses to the new cultural repertoire at Daxia’s wedding revealed a similar tension between generations to that discussed in relation to children’s birthdays (Bruckermann 2019). Elder generations sought the continuity of locally grounded practices in ways that are meaningful to them and were even willing to integrate Daxia’s return celebration (huimen) into a realm of long-standing ­ceremonies despite the concomitant shifts toward modernization (xiandaihua). By contrast, younger people appreciated the introduction of new forms of affectionate display, although they were less positive about the elaborate scope of the celebrations, which they may have been concerned about matching in the future. Overall, there appeared to be a shift from ritual exchanges of prescribed

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food, words, and gift money toward personally negotiated choices in the use of verbal communication, presents, and bodily affection. However, subtle shifts were also at play as the focus in the bride’s home shifted from the intimate farewell ceremony focused on the natal family on the kang to the public exhibitions of conjugal love and parent-daughter reciprocity. While the traditional bridal preparation at Xufei’s farewell emphasized her natal family, the event also included the romantic interlude when her husband attempted to whisk her away. Nonetheless, her mother’s brother’s wife officiated her beautification, her brother raised assurances for her well-being through a shovel, and her mother’s brother, head of the natal family, carried her to the bridal vehicle so she would not bring earth from her home to her married house. Although there were nods to romantic conjugality in the event, the overall emphasis lay on ongoing natal family ties despite the bride’s transfer to another family. By contrast, Daxia had one of the most elaborate ceremonies in the village. Daxia’s trousseau even included a bank card with the savings she had accrued from urban employment, and guests were impressed, even overwhelmed, by the ceremony. This bridal celebration amounted to an aspirational ceremony that dwelled extensively on the bride’s skills and capabilities, as well as the conjugal romance she shared with her husband, including a variety of speeches and performances showcasing their well-matched dreams and hopes (Figure 4.4). By contrast to these successful wedding matches, arranging appropriate marital unions could become fraught with difficulty, particularly for potential marriage partners with little to offer to a prospective mate by way of inheritance, income, or other desirable characteristics. While these issues could become major hurdles for women as marital partners, the pressure to provide material assurances and economic prospects at marriage was exacerbated for men and their families. Turning to these complementary expectations for what men were supposed to bring to the marital negotiation table reveals that not just women but also men face challenges of value in making these arrangements.

Without a Home to Return To A twenty-year-old young man named Douzi in Sweeping Cliff found himself in the uncertain position of wanting to marry but having none of the material prerequisites, making him an unlikely candidate

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Figure 4.4. Bride and groom making joint wishes for their marital future. Photograph by the author.

for a marital union. Douzi had grown up at his maternal grandmother’s courtyard, which included a number of dilapidated earth cave dwellings, not a residential situation that could attract a bride. Douzi’s grandmother Pan explained that their house stood on land that formerly belonged to the grand courtyard on their alley prior to

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the Land Reform and was used as a sheep pen at that time. However, after the 1950s’ Land Reform, the land was given to her family to build a house (gaifang). Previously, Pan lamented, she and her husband’s family led a vagrant life of “roving to and fro” (liulang). The family had to rely on the kindness of others for shelter as they drifted and wandered from one residence to the next. As Pan described it, “We had no home to return to [wujia kegui], we randomly lived [in a place] for a couple of days, then changed [where we] lived for a couple of days.” Her husband’s father was a doctor, who traveled widely in the area taking his dependents with him and renting houses wherever he found work. Eschewing the practice of medical apprenticeship through which healing, curing, and preventative skills were often passed on historically (see Hsu 1999), Pan’s father-in-law did not impart his medical skills to his son, who instead worked in agriculture. A matchmaker arranged their marriage when Pan was only fourteen years old. When she married into the family, her mother-in-law oversaw the rental of houses for temporary residence of one to two years for the family. At the time, they did not own a house and occupied an earth cave dwelling close to one of the temple complexes in the north of the village. However, from the 1950s onward, they “slowly began to establish a house” (manman gai fangzi). After the government redistribution of domestic land in the early 1950s, the family was able to carve a cave dwelling into the earth in the west of the village, where they lived until the 1980s. Her husband and his brothers, who were all rural citizens (nongmin), worked hard throughout their lives in order to establish houses of their own. Talking about the bitterness of her early married life caused Pan to lower her voice as she leaned toward me and voiced her current concern for Douzi’s own wedding fate. She pointed out that their house was old and therefore not an appropriate house to which to bring a daughter-in-law (qu xifu). Their family could not afford to buy or construct a new house in the village, let alone buy an apartment in the city. In contrast to her generation’s experience of being able to work hard to establish homes in the Maoist period, the new market economy necessitated wage income to generate the amount of capital needed to buy a house. Pan had fostered Douzi, her daughter’s youngest son, since he was only a year old. Douzi’s paternal grandparents lived in the neighboring province of Hebei, where Douzi’s mother had eloped with her husband thirty years previously. Her secret departure caused Pan great anguish and their ongoing separation was hard to bear even

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though her daughter visited her every three to four years when she had affairs to attend to. Pan’s eldest son was married, but the couple did not have any children. Therefore, the solution of bringing in his sororal nephew, Douzi, provided this branch of the family with a descendant. This adoption also alleviated some of the financial burden on Pan’s widowed daughter in Hebei, who apart from Douzi had another four children. Due to these birth control violations, the family bore a heavy financial burden of fines for these “excess births” (guosheng) that further compounded their poverty. Douzi expressed his suffering at the distance between the place to which he was accustomed and his natal family living in Hebei. After Douzi enumerated the gender and ages of his four older siblings, I asked him whether he misses them, to which he exclaimed, “Definitely, they are the people within my family” (jialiren). With a melancholy tone he contemplated: “Living here is hard to bear, but returning to Hebei, [I] don’t recognize anything at all. There’s no way to return home.” However, Douzi could not even build a new house in Sweeping Cliff to bring in a wife, as he would have to prepare a house, car, and things for the house that he could not afford. “Normally, men may rely on parents. When women are in trouble, they rely on other people. For me, [I] can’t rely on anyone [dou kaobuliao].” In the end, Douzi’s family turned to a matchmaker to arrange a marriage with a woman in another township whose family sought to bring in a son-in-law. This type of matrilocal marriage was relatively rare in the area, and this was the only case that I became privy to. I only stumbled upon this information during a chance encounter with Douzi when he was visiting the fortune-teller to set a date for the big day. Douzi was a bit embarrassed as he elaborated on how his plans had progressed. However, Douzi was also optimistic that the larger township where his wife lived would provide him with new economic opportunities. Pan’s story shows that houses were not necessarily always inherited in a fully formed way but establishing a house (gai fangzi) could be achieved over time through processes of accumulation and negotiation, especially for those with disadvantaged positions within the village. Furthermore, Douzi’s experience reinforces the centrality of an appropriate house for newlyweds in marriage arrangements but also that solutions through a matchmaker and uxorilocal marriage are available. Both Pan’s and Douzi’s life narrations reveal the suffering that arises from the perpetual state of exile from a stable home. In Pan’s

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case, the constant movement that plagued the early days of her marriage was the most marked aspect of the bitterness of her youth. Lacking a stable place for the family to converge and belong to gave rise to an exhausting state of ongoing movement that finally ended in the 1950s. However, even after building not just one, but two houses for her family within her lifetime, the changing socioeconomic situation has left Pan with a home unsuitable for bringing in a wife for her grandson. Furthermore, her daughter’s decision to elope to another province brought another dimension of painful dispersal to Pan’s life as she continues to find her absence hard to bear, even after decades of separation. Douzi, in turn, has been displaced from his natal family due to a  variety of unfortunate circumstances, including his maternal uncle’s childless marriage, his father’s death, and his many siblings. In his case the sentiment of missing home (xiangjia) did not just refer to a place that he barely knew, but more importantly expressed his separation from the people who belonged to his natal family. His  coping strategies for overcoming this distance included telephone calls and occasional visits, but Hebei remained an unfamiliar place to him. However, lacking a house to marry in Sweeping Cliff, Douzi would not so much perpetuate a stable family line as continue the tradition of exile from his patrilocal home if he stayed in the village. His gendered comments about marriage arrangements for men and women in relation to their parents and his own situation of forced self-reliance imply that he saw himself as inopportunely positioned between the interstices of the patrilocal system. Douzi’s embarrassment at his matrilocal arrangement and his comments about how belonging to his Hebei home would require insurmountable levels of adjustment show that his position of having to become habituated to a married house were akin to a woman’s postmarital practices. Living in exile from his birth home and natal family resulted in Douzi having to marry out and grow accustomed to his wife’s new home to start a family. This uxorilocal marriage put Douzi in a situation analogous to the experience of most rural women who become displaced by patrilocality. Douzi overcame embarrassment about this by emphasizing the economic opportunities for waged labor in his wife’s township. This family history shows that migration and movement did not necessarily come about as voluntary strategies for aspiration but could also be forced necessities for survival among impoverished and disadvantaged villagers. Although upward mobility from unfa-

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vorable positions in the political-economic realities of the prerevolutionary and Market Era were not uncommon, the stability of a home and family gained in the Maoist Era did not necessarily secure future prosperity through inheritance.

Keep Your Sons Close, but Your Daughters Closer During a discussion on inheritance with a group of young tour guides, as well as two of their senior managers, a young man in his early twenties from a neighboring municipality boisterously seized the opportunity to establish his knowledge on the topic with the following statement: Inheritance here goes like this: as parents pass away, their children often have fights, especially about the houses. They are the most valuable part of family property [jiachan] and in the past they were passed on only to men due to men’s high status compared to women. Parents would sometimes “split the home” [fenjia; by dividing property] between their sons after marriage. Now [parents] often make wills [yizhu], especially if a child does not show filial obedience [xiaoshun], or if they want to pass things on to nonrelatives. If a husband dies, the family property goes to his wife, and when she dies, to her children.

One of the senior secretaries, a man in his early forties, interjected with a wide grin, “Eh? Tell the truth, when a mother dies, the family property doesn’t go to the males.” The room erupted into laughter. This statement overturned the trope of the patrilineal backbone of Chinese kinship, so I had to ruin the joke by asking for an explanation. After being teased for my lack of a sense of humor, one recent father of a single son explained, “Because males are not a mother’s true love [zhen’ai]. Daughters are a part of [shuyu] their mothers.” This exchange brings to light the ways in which mothers may prioritize affectionate ties to their daughters over marital ties to husbands and even filial ties to sons. This reveals an alternate perspective on kinship in China to conventional understandings: on the one hand, it negates the universal dominance of patrilineal inheritance and descent; and, on the other, it goes beyond dependence of the formal patrilineage on practical female reproduction through sons rather than daughters. Instead, it offers insights into how mother-daughter ties are becoming increasingly central to structuring Chinese kinship in ways that affect material exchanges, emotional ties, and commonsense understandings of who belongs to whom and what claims kin can make over one another.

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The interaction situates inheritance, the intergenerational transmission of wealth, at the heart of expressions of affection between parents and children. Nonetheless, residents poked fun at the alleged domination of patrilineal and patrilocal models of kinship, instead alluding to the emotional underpinnings to logics of whom they pass on their most valuable goods to. Furthermore, it highlighted issues of timing, as the intergenerational transmission of wealth reveals a more temporally diverse process than Western notions of inheritance, where the moment of death often triggers inheritance to occur. In China, premortem inheritance, particularly at or after marriage, was a gendered process that could occur in a single swoop or unfold over decades. Nonetheless, women’s claims over family property were largely limited to bridal transactions, after which women had few avenues of recourse to her natal or married family’s property. Thereby kin repeatedly dispossessed women of the outcomes of their productive and reproductive labor, including not just material objects but human beings. These cycles of dispossession have even been interpreted as inherent to the functioning of Chinese kinship structured through male-dominated patrilines (Gates 1989; Brandtstädter 2009). Issues of succession in Sweeping Cliff were issues no longer exclusively privileging sons, but were increasingly becoming extended to daughters, as women would usually inherit both at marriage and at death. This shift was a result of women’s resistance to the processes of dispossession by disinheritance in two ways: first, by insisting on premortem inheritance at the moment of marriage; and second, by insisting that their care, especially for the elderly, provided them with a basis to claim inheritance after death. A particularly striking instance came to light when I visited a friend in a neighboring village. The scene of conflict that unfolded in their home revealed that women deployed logics of care to claim inheritance, particularly in a situation of family property division as moments of inheritance. The courtyard housed the elderly patriarch living in the relatively dilapidated main bay of the courtyard. On either flank lived his two sons and their wives and children, a classic structure of coresident agnatic kinship. However, since his wife’s death several years previously, the old man’s daughter had shouldered a significant caring burden, traveling down the hillside by motorbike to bring her father his favorite dishes and boil noodles for him twice a day. The elderly man’s health had recently taken a turn for the worse, so his children decided to come together, evaluate his property, and discuss its impending division.

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Three couples crowded in the living room while a maternal cousin took stock of the inventory that they were listing. A boisterous exchange of conflicting prices for wooden chests, the costs of the cutlery, and the value of the stove unfolded. While discussing the kitchen, the daughter who cooked her ailing father’s daily food energetically challenged her brothers’ division of property. She first insisted on receiving his cooking utensils and then made further claims on the inheritance due to her caring labor. She vociferously insisted that she deserved an equal share, as she had provided so much of the care work needed since their mother’s death. Only after she rescinded her claim to the house, instead settling for an equal share of the monetary value of the home furnishings (jiaju) did her brothers assent to her request. This contest revealed the particularly contested claims of a daughter to her parental home but also that an agreement could be reached that her care legitimized her claim to a share of the inheritance.

Mobility and Locality in the Making of Marriages As the provision of houses formed the main foundation of inheritance in China, the systematic exclusion of women from this process appeared rather acute. It perpetuated gendered inequality but also put into perspective stereotypes of young women as gold diggers and social climbers. In demanding certain goods and even services such as care from kin, young women attempted to compensate for this fact and receive some transfers of wealth to the newly formed conjugal couple and their natal families at marriage, a time when much of the trajectory of their future lives appeared to be set. Considering the house as the centerpiece of marital transactions also altered ideas of hypergamy and young women’s rise to power, as their earning potential often emerged as higher than their older relatives. Nonetheless, their systematic exclusion from receiving a house put them at the whims of their spouse in many other decisions, while the expectation that they would provide child and elder care was tough on their future employment prospects. Local ideals still viewed a good wife as a frugal wife, rather than a high earner, whose demure and sweet disposition would serve her marital family well. Ideal husbands, on the other hand, would be romantic but also educated, eloquent, and good breadwinners. However, more idiosyncratic romantic utterances from wives also praised their husband’s capacity to sing karaoke songs or play enthusiastically with children.

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Issues of location and care often took center stage in marital decisions, for instance in terms of long-term planning for the extended household across the rural-urban terrain. However, as the discussion over inheritance showed, providing care did not necessarily fall beyond economic calculation, even within kinship. Instead, some women sought to monetize the care they provided in order to gain a small share of postmortem inheritance, even if this meant only a cut of the furniture, rather than the more substantial value of a property. The dispossession of women from the transfer of houses at marriage also disadvantaged young men who did not have a house to offer and therefore struggled to find a spouse. Young men without houses, cars, and money found themselves stigmatized in the marriage market. Turning to one young man in Sweeping Cliff revealed that such a man could find himself in situations analogous to women in marriage, as potential labor contributions became his key stake of belonging and vehicle for recognition in matrilocal marriage. Intimate inequalities in marital arrangements entangled kinship, labor, and homes, as persons staked value over their lives through the work, attention, and care they had contributed in the past, and would provide in future, to others.

PART III Labor, Location, Precarity

– Chapter 5 –

Fields, Food, and the Market

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Attending to Human Tides . . . when we Home are come, Alas! we find our Work but just begun; So many Things for our Attendance call, Had we ten Hands, we could employ them all. Our Children put to Bed, with greatest Care We all Things for your coming Home prepare: You sup, and go to Bed without delay, And rest yourselves till the ensuing day; While we, alas! but little Sleep can have, Because our froward Children cry and rave . . . In ev’ry Work (we) take our proper Share; And from the Time that Harvest doth begin Until the Corn be cut and carry’d in, Our Toil and Labor’s daily so extreme, That we have hardly ever Time to dream. Such hours were endurable only because one part of the work, with the children and in the home, disclosed itself as necessary and inevitable, rather than as an external imposition. This remains true to this day, and, despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women’s work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. —E. P. Thompson, quoting the poem “The Woman’s Labor” by Mary Collier (1739)

E. P. Thompson (1967: 79) quotes Mary Collier’s verses to bring to life women’s herculean feats in fulfilling not just agricultural and industrial but also domestic tasks with the diligence that springs

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from the unrelenting necessity to feed, shelter, and care for families in rural economies. Collier, a self-taught poet, herself toiled in a range of rural occupations and wrote from experience in her lyrical ­rebuttal of Stephen Duck’s poem that portrayed male laborers threshing in the fields while their wives passively waited at home for their exhausted return. In parallel to this invisibility of women’s work in England, in China Mao Zedong called for women’s ­participation in the labor force by proclaiming that modern “women can hold up half the sky” (funü neng dingban biantian). While often hailed as voicing Mao’s feminist commitments, the statement reveals how women’s long-term labor participation before the twentieth century was hidden in a normative and partial depiction of women’s work. In China work (gong) was historically categorized as either “inside” (nei) or “outside” (wai), with contemporary women challenging how the latter became rendered less visible in everything from agricultural to ritual events through their everyday practices (Stafford 2000a). This gendered differentiation normatively cast women as working in the inner realm of the domestic sphere of the courtyard, while men’s work lay beyond the home, tilling the fields, conducting business, or becoming a bureaucrat in the wider world (Bray 1997). These characterizations of an economy where “men plow, women weave” (nangeng nüzhi) around a gendered division of labor were more of an ideal than a reality for most of Chinese history. As E. P. Thompson points out, households in rural economies divide labor and differentiate roles in ways that allow alienation and exploitation to emerge, particularly as time begins to be translated into money. In late imperial China, women predominantly raised silkworms, wove cloth, embroidered silks, and made paper as commodities for the market, although this work was frequently contained within the domestic domain through the description as “inside work” (neigong; Bray 1997). However, women, especially from the lower classes, frequently shouldered heavy burdens of agricultural work in the fields, engaged in putting out work in cottage industries, and sold waged labor outside the home (Bray 1997; Gates 1996). The negative social stigma for women’s transgression of domestic boundaries often resulted in this work being hidden as shameful (Bray 1997; Gates 1989). In this sense, Mao’s call for women’s public labor participation marks a departure in turning women’s contributions into a mark of pride, a sense that senior women in Sweeping Cliff carried with them as they extolled the virtues of bodies able to sustain hard, manual labor.

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Characterizing work as outside or inside labor has become increasingly aligned with whether the work is paid or unpaid (Rosenfeld 2000), resulting in a tendency to include agriculture, and particularly subsistence agriculture, in the domain of inside work (Judd 1994; Bruckermann 2017c). This expansion of the inner sphere to include agriculture occurred decades after rural women’s mandatory participation in collective agriculture in rural people’s communes. In Sweeping Cliff, this shift was made possible by market reforms that increasingly divided monetized labor from unremunerated subsistence activities, including farm and household work. Due to limited access to paid employment, female and senior residents increasingly shouldered this demanding labor that was simultaneously situated within the boundaries of the village. Inside work in fields and households reproduced lives and livelihoods, areas generally considered less prestigious and rendered less visible than remunerated work in the world beyond the family and village.

Cheapening Rural Labor On a late summer evening in 2010, Nia’s family was eating bowls of noodles and picking at the dishes on the low living room table as the evening news blared in the background. Erdan, the family’s second daughter, and her husband had come to visit from the city, where they worked as service personnel in a hotel. As was usually the case when one of the daughters, and particularly one of their husbands, came to visit, a variety of dishes were served, such as sliced spam, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, steamed green beans, fried eggplant, and salted cabbage. On this occasion the common practice of sharing dishes as a way of expressing intimacy between diners was in full swing. As Erdan was heaping meat slices on her husband’s bowl of noodles, Sheng was pouring the rest of the green beans into her daughter’s bowl. When Erdan realized what her mother was doing, she began fending off the bowl of greens with her chopsticks, arguing, “Ma, you should finish up the beans. You’re supposed to eat more vegetables. Doctor’s orders!” Erdan took the bowl out of her mother’s hands and emptied the remaining beans on top of her mother’s noodles. When asked why the doctor wanted Sheng to eat more vegetables, Erdan raised her eyebrows and tightened her lips in preparation for the argument that she knew was about to ensue. In a curt tone meant for her mother’s ears, she explained, “My mother’s got high blood

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pressure. The doctor says she eats too many noodles and she should eat lots of vegetables, but she won’t eat enough of them.” With the air of an often rehearsed defense, her mother snapped in irritation, “Well, vegetables are expensive.” Now Erdan waved her chopsticks and raised her voice in defiant dismissal: “Expensive?! What do you mean expensive?! You grow the vegetables yourself; there is no cost!” Sheng sighed in exasperation and pulled out her final retort: “No cost?! No cost?! Didn’t I work hard in the fields for these vegetables?!” Initially, Erdan dismissed the cost of the vegetable production completely by arguing that the beans her mother had sowed, nurtured, harvested, and cooked had never entered a monetized realm and could therefore be considered free (mianfei). However, her mother was unwilling to let this devaluation of her agricultural and domestic work stand, instead insisting on her beans as a fruit of her labor, materializing her work and toil regardless of whether they entered a monetized sphere of exchange. Even though Erdan eventually conceded the point that her mother had indeed worked hard for the beans, this type of dismissal of rural labor as cheap, or even free, formed part of a generational and gendered hierarchy of labor across the uneven rural-urban terrain of the Shanxi mountainside. Most Sweeping Cliff youth even insisted that “all the good jobs are in the city” (hao gongzuo dou zai shi heli). However, beneath this simple statement lay a number of assumptions about the gradations of labor, in terms of financial remuneration, forms of hardship, and perceived desirability. One of the most arduous ways of making a living was through hard, physical, manual labor (laodong), for instance by tilling the fields. Slightly more prestigious was occasional, piecemeal labor (xiaogong) that involved more formal technical skills but not necessarily qualifications, such as working in construction, breaking rocks in a stone quarry or transporting goods in vehicles. More regular and secure shift work in offices or businesses (shangban) was held in high esteem due to the low toll it took physically, although having to answer to a boss did not suit everyone. Contractually secured formal labor in the form of jobs or employment (gongzuo) held the prestige formerly reserved for urban work unit employees, although many of the housing, medical, and pension benefits had been cut since the 1980s. To avoid a hierarchical relationship to a superior and become one’s own boss, an insecure and yet potentially lucrative alternative was to “do business” (zuo shengyi) by becoming an “entrepreneur” (getihu). This could occasionally invert the desirability of farmwork as hard

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labor, because this type of livelihood exemplified self-sufficiency, strength, and commitment to the locality. Moreover, hard labor in the industrial sector could compound physical risk with “eating the bitterness” (chiku) of suffering bodily hardships and being plagued with anxieties over accidents or disease, for instance through the possibility of mine collapses or floods, becoming injured through mishaps on construction sites, contracting black lung disease (meichenfei), or developing various cancers caused by working with hazardous chemicals. Many of the dangers from industrial labor were considered less acute in the countryside, where a cleaner environment and simpler architecture ameliorated these risks, again making rural labor more attractive to some villagers. Villagers’ actual preferences for these different types of work often depended on their gender and age cohort, with older people often taking pride in agricultural labor, while younger generations shunned this type of work in favor of office jobs. In addition to remunerated jobs, there were also many kinds of unpaid work that included household labor for the family and interpersonal work for friends and colleagues, as well as agricultural work. These activities were not necessarily viewed as doing work (ganhuo) but could be part of maintaining a livelihood (zuo shenghuo). In Sweeping Cliff families, a marked intergenerational division of labor emerged, with the senior generation often taking on agricultural and domestic duties in the village, while the middle generation worked for an income in the city. The closest urban center could be reached within thirty minutes, turning commuting into a viable way for parents to access urban job markets, while children attended village schools and received daycare from grandparents. Most of the parental generation had gained middle school or higher qualifications, thereby receiving formal qualifications to enter the urban employment their parents were excluded from due to low levels of formal education. Bitter complaints arose when this form of intergenerational support broke down, with the situation often blamed on death, divorce, or even difficult daughters-in-law. As young women increasingly entered the waged labor market outside the village after finishing school, the gendered labor dynamics were shifting. Women with adult sons often complained that bringing in a daughter-in-law no longer meant that they would help in the home, as young women went out to do shift work (shangban) or sell their labor (dagong) rather than contribute to the housework. Older women even complained that bringing in a daughter-in-law just meant another mouth to feed.

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In addition, they claimed that young women often had very high material demands and were a burden to the family despite contributing most of their income to the household. Examining rural work in Sweeping Cliff as a continuity stretching from the agricultural to the domestic domain, villagers did not just tend to the fields but refined produce, prepared food, and cared for children and the elderly. To a certain extent, judgments about women’s character revolved around their willingness to submit their attention to these tasks. While daughters devalued their parents’ homegrown food, Erdan’s confrontational demeanor simultaneously expressed a kind of oppositional filial piety toward her mother. Through her concern for her mother’s high blood pressure, Erdan challenged her mother’s dedication to economic frugality at the expense of her health. By privileging the nourishing benefits of the vegetables over what she saw as misplaced or even false thriftiness, Erdan established her commitment to her mother’s well-being. Food provision, in particular, evoked a density of local belonging by denoting the boundaries of insider status condensed through notions of home. These forms of inclusion continued to be forged through food despite the changing practices of agricultural production, bodily sustenance, and even taste preferences. As the labor underwriting these processes shifted across generations, conflicts within the home arose around fields, food, and the market. Female contributions to the household increasingly became measured increasingly through the yardstick of monetary income. Some young women felt emancipated by tapping into new sources of revenue in the countryside, for instance by becoming tour guides or merchants in direct sales schemes in the village. Nonetheless, young women struggled for recognition of this labor as a valid contribution to their household economy, especially in lieu of partaking more fully in the domestic tasks of food preparation and childcare, responsibilities increasingly shouldered by their mothers and mothers-in-law. The visibility of certain forms of labor, especially in the fields, as well as the cooperation needed to provide produce from the fields, held a place of high esteem for many senior villagers. However, in contrast to the Maoist work point system and subsistence agriculture in the early Market Era, the kind of labor young women were performing held a more ambiguous status of selling their work (dagong), despite their performance of rural authenticity in both tourism and sales. The question of what forms of labor become devalued, invisible, or even stigmatized under these emerging liveli-

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hood regimes within families will therefore be considered alongside E. P. Thompson’s (1971) elucidation of the implicit appraisals of the appropriate conduct, regulation, and processes that make up a particular “moral economy.” Despite its shortcomings in recognizing women’s work, Stephen Duck’s poem The Thresher’s Labor offers a compelling insight into another aspect of E. P. Thompson’s (1967) most famous articles on the temporal transformations resulting from new forms of work discipline imposed by industrial capitalist labor regimes. The poem describes the grueling monotony of threshing as an alienating experience before turning to the laborers’ joyous participation in the harvest, when a “momentary obliteration of social distinctions—of the harvest home” allows all who worked on this great feat of reproduction, of eking out a livelihood from the land, to revel in their contributions to bringing about the bounties of the field (Thompson 1967: 63). The cooperation and affection in Sweeping Cliff during the labor-intensive late summer gathering of the crops reflects this moment of exuberance, while also crystallizing the changing role of the harvest home in Sweeping Cliff’s transforming landscape.

The Harvest Home Throughout most of the year, middle-aged and senior women bore the responsibility for agricultural activities and food production in Sweeping Cliff. Through their daily work, village women forged pathways from the agricultural to the domestic realm through the transformative ecology of the house. However, when autumn arrived and all the crops of the fields and gardens ripened at once, more hands were needed to pick and process the fruits of their labor. Men took leave from their daytime jobs in construction, mining, logistics, and local government, and young men and women returned from the urban valley where they worked in the service sector or office jobs to help their families. They came back to collect the golden millet, orange corn, and red sorghum from the fields, to pick the bright chilies, the yellow-green cabbages, the black prickly ash, and the deep green chives, to dig up the sweet potatoes and carrots from beneath the loess soil and bring them home to the courtyard. Beneath the bright rays of the Shanxi sun and amid gusts of wind and swirls of dust that swept across the mountains, harvesters rose early in the morning to bend and squat and pick and carry all day in the fields.

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Everybody came together in this task of harvesting, processing, and preparing the bounty of the earth into goods for human consumption (Figure 5.1). Family and kin from the valley traveled into the mountains to help with the work of the fields that had been allocated to their rural households by the local government. Neighbors and relatives shared agricultural equipment and beasts of burden needed for gathering, transporting, processing, and distributing the spoils of the soil. Describing all the flows of grains, vegetables, and fruits as they passed from the hands in the fields to the home would be beyond the scope of a single book, so millet must suffice as an example for tracing the material pathways between the earth and the bodies it sustains. In mid-October, the laborious task of the millet harvest began in Sweeping Cliff. Unlike corn that could be pulled off of stalks while standing upright, millet’s small grainy consistency necessitated cutting the stalks to the ground with a sickle and collecting the ears of the grain from the earth. After the stalks were felled, harvesters squatted on the ground breaking off smaller stems and placing them on bags to be poured into plastic sacks. In this way, the tiny husks continued to encase and protect each nugget of edible golden grain for transport back to the courtyard. After the ears of millet were broken off, the stalks and leaves remained to be bundled into sheaves to be used as fodder for livestock. The winds swept across the sun-parched earth as harvesters crouched beneath the stalks, with women shielding their heads from the sun and their hair from the dust by tying towels around their heads and men wearing caps for the same purpose. Breathing in the dry and dusty air parched their throats, necessitating frequent breaks to drink the hot water carried to the field in large thermoses. Squatting on their heels, harvesters avoided contact with the “dirt” (zang) of the ground, which was sullied by the gray sediment of noxious pollution. In the afternoon, one of the men would fetch a mule and cart from the village and tie up the large plastic sacks with string before hauling them home. Walking along the windy paths that trace the outlines of the agricultural terraces back to the courtyard, the mules would strain under the heavy load of the cart. Some families had replaced their mules with tractors as their beasts of burden died, upgrading to what is literally referred to as an “iron bull” (tieniu) for the fields that could handle the weight and not crumble into the ravines below. About a quarter of the families of Sweeping Cliff owned tractors, and they often pooled them between courtyards, especially during the

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Figure 5.1. Harvesting millet together. Photograph by the author.

busy agricultural periods, while families also borrowed and lent the ubiquitous motorcycles and occasional cars to transport agricultural produce to its various destinations. After returning to my host family’s courtyard on the evening of the millet harvest, we unloaded the sacks of grain and placed them upright along the sides of the houses, where they were protected from any precipitation by the overhanging eaves of the roof. The next morning the two adult women of the household took the sacks and emptied their contents in the center of the stone-paved courtyard to dry under the sun. The following day the threshing of the millet began, which would eventually separate the grain from the stalks and chaff. The women took turns standing in the middle of the pile of millet ears with a whip in hand as the mule drew a millstone over the grains. To keep the millet in place, one of the women would rake the ears back into the circular path traced by the mule as it circled around and around the courtyard. After a couple of hours, they swept up the large round carpet of semithreshed grain in the center of the courtyard with a sorghum broom. Finally, they raked the grains through an upright-standing sieve, further sifting the grain from the chaff into a finer powder.

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The manual threshing completed by the women with the family mule was now succeeded by the final stage of refinement as the male household head Xing borrowed his friend’s winnowing machine. Various family members took turns feeding the large metal funnel of the mechanical device as the men turned the crank operating its rotating shelves. The metal device spewed millet and chaff out of a projecting funnel across the courtyard. The weight of the millet grains caused them to drop to the ground close to the exit point of the spout, while the chaff flew much farther through the air in a dusty golden rain that settled on the other side of the courtyard. The threshing machine snowed down bright flakes of chaff that were illuminated by the courtyard lamp swirling through the dark night. When the last sacks of millet had been emptied, Sheng swept up the purified grains and poured them into large ceramic vats in the house and sealed the containers of the precious food with large flat circular stone covers. The women of the house throughout Sweeping Cliff prepared millet soup twice a day by adding the grains to boiling water and letting them simmer over the glowing stove until the millet became turgid, soft, and palatable. The taste of the millet infused the liquid, making a thin grainy gruel that was literally referred to as “watery cereal” (xifan). Although ingesting earth and dust through inhalation was deemed to be unhealthy and direct contact with earth and dust was considered dirty, the golden millet that emerged from the land was a valuable good that formed a staple element of the Sweeping Cliff diet. In fact, many villagers claimed that if they did not drink a bowl of millet soup in the morning, their throats would be parched all day with a thirst that could not be quenched by hot water. Millet soup and wheat noodles constituted the core of the Sweeping Cliff village diet. Eaten twice a day, these two staples were often complemented with fresh vegetable dishes in summer and preserved vegetables in winter. Each person also refined their individual bowl of noodles by adding seasonings of salt, vinegar, and ground chilies to suit their own taste. Millet harvesting, processing, and cooking were central practices in sustaining everyday life in Sweeping Cliff. However, millet also provides a compelling example of the repetitive processes of gathering through the family house to harvest across the mountain fields. Dispersing across the earth to till and tend, those connected with Sweeping Cliff collected the crops and brought them back to the family courtyard of those who had use rights to the land. All staple grains, particularly millet, sorghum, and corn, were collected and dried in the center of these courtyards. The transformation of the dispersed earth into the concentrated fruits of the land then went on

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to sustain the bodies of the family that was connected to the land and had helped produce the fruits of the land. Crucially, those who worked in the fields were given a share of the harvest, even if they were affinal relatives, visiting friends, or helpful neighbors who had come to lend a hand. This logic of distribution was based on the amount of work invested. Moreover, this laborbased logic of making claims of belonging extended not just to the products but to the very means of production and reproduction in the village. As Nia once cogently summarized, “You work in the fields, so they are ours [yours and mine]; you work in the house, so it is ours [yours and mine].”

Labor and Inclusion How are these notions of belonging through labor that is enacted in the harvest home embedded within a history of state socialism and the present expansion of capitalism? In part this entitlement to goods through contributions of work can be explained by the history of collective labor under Maoism, when brigades allocated food and other necessities on the basis of work points earned in collective labor. However, within the current era of the household responsibility system, such notions of entitlement and belonging have returned to the sphere of the family. Within the domestic spheres, senses of belonging arising from the connection between land and labor have been particularly pertinent for women within the long-standing patrilocal marriage practices and the current household responsibility system. In Sweeping Cliff, women were born into natal families, created nuclear families, and sustained extended families through caring and nourishing practices in the field and home, whereas men were born into a family that they in turn perpetuated through descendants, although they also frequently left the village to gain wage salaries to support their kin. Nonetheless, due to the patrilocal marriage system, men’s lifelong ties to particular locales were taken for granted as given and remained intact despite sojourns for work elsewhere, while for women the relocation at marriage often meant that they had to create families and sustain kin ties across spatial, as well as temporal, ruptures (see Judd 2009). As elsewhere in China women were “building these families out of their own bodies, their nurturing work in families and communities, and their hard work in fields, homes and other places of work” (Judd 2009: 35). Similarly, everyday

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reciprocal acts demonstrated that “affairs of the hearth” and “coming and going” between villagers established ties based on exchanges of visits, food, gifts, and labor that form a relationship of mutual assistance usually maintained by women (Stafford 2000b: 44–47). In rural China forging intimacy often takes on the form of work, conceived of in a broad sense. The notion of “work” as a central idiom through which Chinese people create relationships has been noted in a variety of contexts (Potter and Potter 1990: 180–95; Liu 2000: 126–30; Judd 2009: 29–37; for a critical approach, see Yan 2003: especially 80–85; and Kipnis 1997: especially 104–15). The classic account of this “idiom of work and mutual aid” comes from Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter’s (1990: 192) ethnography of a village in Guangdong province. Potter and Potter assert that the basic principle of “good feelings” underlying marriage formations is based on social responsibility, altruism, industriousness, work, and sacrifice (Potter and Potter 1990: 192). Among all these qualities, “the significance lies in the work done on another’s behalf” (Potter and Potter 1990: 192). Furthermore, this type of work not only brings marriage partners together but also forms the basis for parent-child relations, as well as neighborly relations within the village (Potter and Potter 1990). When villagers speak of work they are speaking of an affirmation of human relationships (Potter and Potter 1990). A framework of “work done on behalf of others” offers a situated approach to belonging across transformations of gender and generation relations, conjoining concerns over kinship with economic livelihoods. As Sweeping Cliff villagers negotiate between ideal gender roles and the practical necessities of caring labor, they cooperate, contest, and accommodate concerns over attachment to fields, houses, and kin. In particular, their logics of belonging revolve around how pouring labor into various projects entangles their person with the co-constituted other, the land, the home, the family. Therefore, this logic of caring labor, labor on behalf of others, cannot be separated from their motivation to act, work, and debate about the responsibilities and outcomes of care. This results in part from the way that caring for somebody or something influences how this project unfolds over time, thereby folding one’s self into the co-­ constituted other. As discussed previously in relation to childcare and marriage, this logic emerges strongly in relation to Chinese kinship. For instance, contestations over childcare frequently revolve over the subsequent claims parents and grandparents make over offspring. A related argument has been developed in relation to female kinship, as women dislocated by marriage must forge kinship relations in

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their marital home through labor, be this in childbearing, housework, agricultural work, or market-oriented labor. This logic of caring labor and the resulting entangled claims extends beyond family members in the home to encompass the fields on which farmers labor and the food from which they draw their nourishment. This extends the logic of work done on behalf of others from the realm of kinship into an arena more conventionally associated with economic anthropology, of the agricultural domestic economy. This logic of how caring contributions result in claims of belonging does not coincidentally bring together female kinship patterns and agricultural domestic domains. The historical situation of women in marital households whose claims to kinship, homes, and offspring is not given but must be created resonates with the redistribution of land and houses in the 1950s to formerly landless laborers, homeless migrants, and revolutionary veterans returning to the Chinese countryside. As the process of housing redistribution revealed, labor-based contributions to building a socialist China formed the reasoning on which many families built their claims to houses and homes in Sweeping Cliff. Similarly, they argued that the work and labor poured into their fields, orchards, and gardens legitimized their claims of belonging over those spaces and resources. Of course, not only kinship logics but political and economic logics of redistributive socialist justice underpinned these arguments. During the collectivization campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s when production in Sweeping Cliff was organized through brigade labor teams, compensation for agricultural work was tied to their contributions of labor, with returns calculated through work points rather than wages. Although the valuation of work by an external measure of generating monetary income dominates most market-oriented activities in the village, including the production of corn as a cash crop, farmwork, homegrown produce, and feeding the family from the fields can be held in high regard without monetary valuation. Moreover, villagers, especially senior villagers, extend the notion that work contributions provide them claims to “home spaces” in the village, from houses and courtyards to fields and the wider rural-­ urban landscape, by dividing the terrain into insiders and outsiders. Sweeping Cliff villagers not only shared their livelihood of farmwork and food production but simultaneously ingested and even performed these boundaries between kin, neighbors, villagers, and outsiders. Sweeping Cliff villagers identified collectively through forming boundaries of insiders based on being villagers (cunren) in

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contrast to outsiders (waidiren). Villagers also contrasted their identity as part of a wider community of civilians or commoners (laobaixing) in opposition to political forces and economic developers. Furthermore, their identity as part of the wider community of peasants (nongmin) was an important marker that contrasted them with urban residents of the valley (shimin). Nonetheless, there were graded levels of responsibility for others based on their proximity to core insider status. These various scales of commitment to others appeared poignantly in food production, consumption, and distribution. Food to be consumed by the family was handled with the greatest ecological attention, with most residents eschewing herbicides, insecticides, and genetically modified seeds. This core food production for kin insiders even became spatially demarcated, with many of these fruits and vegetables actually cultivated in small plots within the family courtyard. The high courtyard walls protected the plots from storms, while allowing residents to tend to their crops by watering and pruning in the most convenient manner. Some villagers confided that they were protecting these most valued crops not only from the elements but also from roving strangers who would prey on their prized produce. Others complained that outsiders, such as tourists, had no respect for their crops as private property and refused to recognize the work that went into crop cultivation, instead acting like the bounty of nature was theirs for the picking. In a kind of tit for tat logic, villagers did not feel ecologically responsible for strangers to whom they sold their crops through the market. Crops cultivated for the market were liberally treated with pesticides, enhanced with chemical fertilizers, and grown from genetically enhanced seeds. Farmers were aware of the long-term degradation of the land and wider ecology from these practices, but the imperatives of making a decent livelihood while alleviating backbreaking work generally overwrote these concerns with more immediate considerations for their families. In addition, boosting agricultural production through technological means was generally acknowledged as part of economic development. The fault line between insiders and outsiders therefore took on a moral quality by differentiating between those one was responsible for and those to whom one did not owe anything. These spheres of relatedness somewhat resemble Fei Xiaotong’s (1992 [1948]) description of the “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju) ordering Chinese personhood, morality, and relatedness, in which each person forms the center of hierarchically linked social ties emanating from the self out into the world. Fei compares these concentric rings of

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proximity radiating out from the person to the ripples on the surface of a lake when rocks are thrown in, such that each person is at the center of relational webs that intersect with others.1 While Fei considers the compulsion to submit to the obligations specific to the relationship bounded by these concentric circle as ordering interpersonal morality, contemporary residents in Sweeping Cliff seemed less concerned with the hierarchical dynamics of the relationship, instead emphasizing communicative intimacy and supportive solidarities within their relationships (see Yan 2016; Evans 2008). The creation of the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, as well as its transgression through incorporation or expulsion, played out in the realm of food production, consumption, and distribution broadly conceived through agriculture. Those at the innermost core of insider status are kin with whom one works in the fields, shares the harvest, and eats common meals, while on the outer circle, almost beyond any form of connection, lies the realm of strangers, including those to whom one sells and from whom one buys anonymously through the market. Here commodity chains and lines of connection were considered murky and obscure, resulting in emotional responses ranging from distrust to disaffection. This approach thereby brings together economic approaches with understandings of affection, uniting spheres of labor and love, through the fields and home. Young rural women often found themselves in a contradictory situation as they moved away from agricultural, industrial, and domestic labor, instead preferring to work in the tertiary economy of commodity sales and rural tourism. In this world, a particular form of insider identity, the rural Shanxi woman, was sold on the market to outsiders. This led to intergenerational tension with older generations of women, who had to forego support in the village and accommodate a new family constellation in which young women provided wages rather than labor to their households. The following section turns to the example of how agricultural production and food consumption intertwine to forge boundaries between insiders and outsiders, particularly through the habit of eating two hot meals a day.

Habituating Resilience In the late summer of 2009 I spent an afternoon with a neighbor husking corn in her courtyard, while her husband was out in the fields harvesting corn with their son. Overhearing us chatting about the

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men’s return from the field, the family’s daughter-in-law, Xinyang, stepped into the courtyard and asked when the family would be eating dinner. Xinyang’s hair was bound up in a blue towel as she was still going through her three months of postnatal recuperation taboos (zuo yuezi). Xinyang complained that having a newborn and lactating made her very hungry, especially with the custom of only eating two meals of noodles a day. In Sweeping Cliff, villagers ate twice a day, once in the late morning around 11 o’clock and once in the late afternoon at about 5 o’clock. Villagers tirelessly reiterated that they were accustomed to this local habit and they would not have it any other way. Despite admittedly being hungry when they rose in the mornings and sometimes even when they went to bed at night, almost everybody followed this mealtime schedule. Eating two meals a day is a sign of being a strong insider, fully incorporated into village life as a villager (cunren). However, most villagers were aware that this habit was unusual and could be hard to bear (nanguo) for outsiders not from the area (waidiren). Even most urbanites in the valley below ate three meals a day, so this particular habit was widely acknowledged to be restricted to the rural mountain villages. By contrast, in Xinyang’s hometown nearby they had the habit of eating three meals of steamed buns a day. Xinyang had been in the village for almost a year, but with an exasperated tone she exclaimed, “Two meals a day?! I don’t like [it], I’m not accustomed [to it]!” Like many newcomers, Xinyang ate small snacks (xiaochi) throughout the day to alleviate pangs of hunger. Normally, these would include nuts, seeds, dry and fresh fruits, chips, or sweets, but the taboos surrounding her postnatal status prohibited these foods. Her mother-in-law asked whether I was used to eating two meals a day, and I answered that it was hard at first, but slowly I had become accustomed. She laughed as she exclaimed, “Two meals a day, [and] a foreigner has become accustomed.” Fearing that this would be turned into a rebuke against her ­daughter-in-law, I quickly added that I sometimes ate snacks as well and asked why a foreigner becoming habituated to two meals was so strange. The middle-aged farmer explained that it is hard for young women when they married into the village from outside, so in her family they made steamed buns for her daughter-in-law so she could snack on these when she got hungry. The problem with much  of  the more conventional snacks was that they contained a lot of oil, salt, and artificial flavorings, which meant they were unsuitable during the dietary restrictions of “sitting the month.”

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As Xinyang’s ­mother-in-law saw it, these store-bought snacks just led you to “eat snacks all day long, not eating [your] fill, [but] eating too expensively!” Young women usually married into the village from the outside and took time to be fully incorporated into their new home’s food practices. Children were still growing into full personhood and were not able to withstand the pangs of hunger as well as their adult counterparts and were therefore allowed to snack. While women and children indulged in snacks, men and old women’s major vices of consumption were alcohol and cigarettes. On special occasions, overlaps occurred, with men eating sweets or young women taking a shot of sorghum liquor. However, these divisions remained relatively stable as additional treats to the fixed rhythm of millet soup and noodles that made up the daily dietary routine. Men and senior women sustained the family through their financial income, agricultural, and domestic work, and their bodies and habits were supposed to be fully acculturated to the village rhythm of eating twice a day. In relation to the local habit of eating two meals a day, villagers rejected explanations that this food pattern was the result of a history of food scarcity. Instead, Sweeping Cliff residents generally vocalized pride about being habituated (xiguanle) into this custom as a process of incorporation that transformed an outsider (waidiren) into a villager (cunren). Although the initial explanation for the eating pattern was unfailingly “habit” (xiguan), this could mean a number of different things, including the desire “to eat one’s fill” (chibao), a way to break up the scheduling of agricultural labor around meals, the desire to rest and rehydrate in the late morning and midafternoon, or even differentiating village insiders from outsiders (waidiren). Sweeping Cliff villagers used the explanatory framework of xiguan to describe a process of “habituation” to a wide spectrum of mundane and ritual activities. Food practices in Sweeping Cliff also resulted in xiguan discourse that resembled Bourdieu’s (1972, 1984) notion of the “habitus” as a paradigm of embodiment operating as both an inculcating principle and a form-generating disposition that structures capacities for action. Anna Lora-Wainwright (2006) similarly noted the frequency and keenness of xiguan discussions in rural Sichuan to develop the parallels between the local production of xiguan and Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus. By analyzing the experiences and practices of rural farmers within their specific historical-political context, Lora-Wainwright (2006, 2009) shows how embodied knowledge, generational differences, and aesthetic distinctions underlie notions of the healthy body.

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In Sweeping Cliff, the notion of becoming habituated to two meals a day formed a site of incorporation into a shared disposition, as well as a strategic site for action to differentiate oneself from outsiders. “Habituation” (xiguanle) was a process not just of integrating women into the household in the current Reform Era but also of resisting urban cadres in the Maoist Collective Era through patterns of labor and rest. In the 1950s, city cadres came to the mountain village and told people to eat three times a day, because eating only twice a day appeared symptomatic of food scarcity and therefore reflected badly on the New Society (Xin Shehui), the post-1949 communist order. However, much to the cadres’ chagrin, as soon as they turned their backs and returned to the valley, the villagers would restore their practice of eating an 11 o’clock meal of freshly handmade noodles at home, rather than taking steamed buns to the fields for lunch. Villagers thereby resisted spending all day without rest on brigade labor, in addition to maintaining the 5 o’clock meal of home-cooked noodles after finishing work before nightfall. As a marker of local identity, habituation to two meals of wheat noodles and millet gruel a day emerged as a site of struggle over healthy bodies, labor, and locality.

The Good Life in Food and Bodies Choosing when and what to consume was not simply a matter of satisfying hunger and quenching thirst in Sweeping Cliff. One of the major divisions in the village diet was whether foods entered the village from outside through market channels or whether they were grown on the land. Choosing between homegrown and ­market-sourced goods to a certain extent followed the imposition of advertising and aspiration coming from the modern consumption of advertised goods. As already discussed, young women and children, in particular, supplemented their diets with commercial snacks, while men and older women indulged in cigarettes and alcohol. However, most villagers embraced purchasing certain goods, such as processed flour and milk, while absolutely rejecting others, such as coffee and chocolate, as problematic to sustaining healthy and ideal bodies. White flour and cow’s milk formed two exceptional goods sourced from the market, as their positive associations with the good life and ideal bodies, associated with leisure and youth, eclipsed the negative connotations of being produced by strangers. Processed white wheat flour formed the core substance in the staples of boiled noodle dishes and steamed buns. Before the 1990s,

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Sweeping Cliff villagers utilized diverse staples such as millet, corn, and sorghum flour to make everything from jujube paste-filled deep fried millet dough balls (niangao), steamed sorghum or corn bread (wowotou), and diverse types of noodles. Villagers contrasted millet, corn, and sorghum as “coarse grains” (culiang) with the refined white wheat flour as “good flour” (haomian), because of its taste and its associations with labor, life, and bodily ideals. Instead of the standard Mandarin term for “white flour” (baimian), the local dialect referred to both the flour and its products as “good flour/dough/noodles” (haomian). These good noodles made from white, processed wheat flour were explicitly associated with “the good life” (hao shenghuo) in the village. Moreover, the “coarse grains” (culiang) of the past were overtly linked to heavy, manual, and literally “coarse labor” (cuhuo), which made life difficult to bear. To explain just how well everybody in the village was doing, one middle-aged man exclaimed, “In the past, we ate coarse grains; now we all eat good noodles. In fact, these days even the dogs only eat good noodles!” Despite historical associations between the coarse grains and hard labor, some younger villagers raised concerns that the taste of the smooth, refined, and white noodles came at the expense of the health benefits of the coarse grains. In addition, ideals of fatness and whiteness as the expression of a processed wheat diet and nonagricultural work were giving way to a gendered valuation of slimness and dieting. The clash between what constituted not just a beautiful, but also a healthy diet became clear via an analysis of intergenerational negotiations over the proper balance of noodles and vegetables through a nexus of frugality, attentiveness, and care. Young women, in particular, increasingly turned to dieting to achieve a slim rather than robust frame, which sometimes even meant rejecting the “good noodles.” Historically, whiteness and fatness went hand in hand as desirable characteristics that were both cute (ke’ai) and healthy (jiankang). Although the ideal body as white and fat continued to be applied to children in Sweeping Cliff, young women’s beauty ideals were shifting. Villagers would often say that you could tell whether a child was being raised on “good flour,” as consuming the substance that was white and filling made children grow up white and fat (baibai pangpang). White skin remained a highly valued attribute among Sweeping Cliff residents, but being fat (pang) or even chubby (feipang, panghuhu) was increasingly being scorned by younger women in favor of a slim look. Young women’s continuing preference for white skin and their foregoing a plump figure revealed a labor-based logic

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associated with being a sophisticated nonagricultural worker and consumer. The preference for white, smooth skin in China is very widespread, with TV advertisements and billboards around the country advertising beauty skin products containing whitening and softening agents. The sunscreen industry has been booming as advertisers clarify the meaning of SPF to their potential customers, and chemical skin bleaching has become increasingly commonplace in urban centers. In addition to these commercial treatments and conventional attempts to avoid the sun using umbrellas or hats, there seemed to be a general understanding in Sweeping Cliff that ingesting certain foods would cause their properties to be externalized on the skin. The notion that the skin externalizes the color of foods consumed ran parallel to the more obvious effect of the sun and continued to hold sway over young people in Sweeping Cliff. Historically, pale skin would also have indicated that a young woman did not have to work outdoors but enjoyed the luxury of a life sheltered from the sun. The widespread conviction that ingesting certain types of food would lead to an externalization of the food’s properties on the body’s skin meant that the whiteness of the refined wheat noodles and milk products was seen as beneficial to creating white and smooth skin. Babies were not only notable for their white, soft, and smooth (rouhua) skin but were said to achieve this through drinking the best milk, breast milk, as their main food source. Coffee and chocolate, by contrast, were not deemed exotic luxuries but dangerous outside substances to be avoided, lest they cause the darkening of the skin. The connection between the historical and political experience of food insecurity and the desire for a healthy and robust (jianzhuang) body appeared in older Sweeping Cliff residents’ concern with eating one’s fill (chibao) and having strength (youli) to do manual labor (laogong). The nexus between famine, food shortages, and agricultural labor during the Maoist Era gave rise to a notion of “fatness” that was not conceived of as overweight but as having the strength and vitality to complete farming activities (Lora-Wainwright 2009). This was especially noticeable during the autumn harvest, when my requests for smaller portions of noodles were systematically and categorically declined on these grounds. As a sturdy stature indexes a body capable of manual labor, young women’s attempts to lose weight (jianfei) could be seen as expressing their aspirations to move away from agricultural work. In addition, young women’s desire to be slim was not linked to being thin (shou), which they saw as an unhealthy state linked to physical or emotional

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stress. Commenting on each other’s bodily figures (shencai) as becoming fat or thin came with the expectation that the other person would respond with a general answer about their recent well-being. Rather than a comment on body mass, these observations by young and old alike were often ways to express interest and care for well-being in general and elicited responses about the concerns and worries of daily life. Even the older generation’s constant monitoring of their dependents’ increases and decrease in body weight was not a purely physical concern, as it simultaneously expressed their affectionate attentiveness to their family members’ health as well as their capacity to sustain them through work and food.

Preserving the Taste of Home Throughout the year village women prepared noodles and vegetables on a daily basis. However, when the autumn season of plenty arrived, the time came to make provisions for the long and harsh winter. In the winter, temperatures plunged below zero degrees centigrade for four to five months, and the frozen earth’s surface became covered with a blanket of snow that intermittently thawed from sunshine and soot. During these months villagers mainly relied on the food they had amassed, preserved, and stored in their homes to tide them over until spring arrived in the mountainside. However, there were also several small shops in the village, which carried produce imported from other parts of China, so fruits and vegetables could be purchased for a premium price. Many village residents, and especially those of older generations, were averse to spending money on these goods sourced from other places due to their principles of thrift and pride in local self-sufficiency. As in many northern parts of East Asia, a pickled vegetable dish complemented the staple grains and added flavor and nutrients to residents’ winter diet on the frozen terrain. The preparation of this salted, pickled vegetable (hacai; Putonghua: xiancai) occurred both in the domestic domain of the family courtyard and institutional settings such as the tourism development company offices. Although the division of labor differed in relation to the domestic versus corporate contexts, comparing both occurrences provides insights into the common and differing skills necessary in creating a home-flavored cuisine. The following description of sour vegetable production therefore traces the distinctive flavor associated with the culinary arts of a particular house, home, and family before moving on to

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the company-based production of large vats of sour vegetable as a collaborative project associated with an interlocal and translocal identification with Shanxi cuisine. When the crisp and sunny weather of early autumn broke, families across the village filled their glazed vats with various vegetables from their household plots. The green leaves and bulbous white heads of the bland rutabaga and turnips, their spicier cousin the mustard knoll, carrots and their leaves, as well as copious amounts of chilies, salt, and vinegar were prepared and poured into large vats to pickle, preserve, and flavor the vegetables. Finally, the vats were sealed with large stone covers during the potentially explosive fermentation process for several weeks. Every family had its own distinctive sour vegetable flavor (jiajia you weidao), which was repeated year after year and passed down from generation to generation. On the one hand, this variety drew on differing emphasis of the basic flavor triad of salty, spicy, and sour. On the other, the particular constellation and combination of vegetables added to the mix made up the distinctive family flavor. The simplicity of the classic Sweeping Cliff meal led many outsiders to question the significance of the small differences between family flavors that made up the sour vegetable, but the variety was marked and remarked upon tirelessly throughout the long winter months. This perpetuation of a particular taste of a family’s winter vegetables through the embodied female skills of cooking was valued across generations and genders in Sweeping Cliff. Young married women or migrant men returning to their natal homes would visibly and vocally relish the distinctive flavor of the winter vegetables made by the women who raised them. Shared at the level of the family, this homemade taste for the winter vegetables implied a close association between this food and the affective belonging it produced within the home. Remarkably, the continuity of these embodied skills in the production of winter vegetables at the level of the family was imported into the domain of the workplace in the local tourism development company offices. The domestic preparation and consumption of the deep green leafy vegetable dish reinforced a family-based and practice-oriented recipe that was ingested by members of the household every year, feeding into a distinctive notion that every home has its own flavor of sour vegetable. By contrast, the corporate collaboration between various members of the tourism development company was a boisterous affair in which participants drew on their domestic familiarity with the process and thereby pooled their knowledge and skills to make a

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good batch of sour vegetables for the winter. Simultaneously, tourism development company employees acclaimed differing levels of local identity, singing both traditional folk songs and pop tunes, as well as elaborating various dimensions of food-based identification with the province as their interlocal home. The tourism development company employees grew and harvested their own vegetables in the little courtyard plot of their temple offices in order to have ingredients for their salted vegetables. Early on an October morning in 2009 the autumn sun shone down on a scene of intense activity as an impressively productive division of labor unfolded in the temple offices. Some tour guides washed vegetables, while others grated and chopped amid a celebratory atmosphere as they poked fun at each other’s methods. Later that morning a couple of the youngest female tour guides started singing pop songs together and then moved on to various local folk songs they knew from their childhood. One of the young women singing had been an acrobat and a dancer in a troupe that toured throughout Shanxi province performing folk dances (yangge) for many years. She was adamant that I record a number of the folk songs (minge) the employees sang that day. These included a song titled “People Say Shanxi Is Very Scenic” (Ren shuo Shanxi hao fengguang), which praised the province’s earth, water, grains, mountains, rivers, and villages. The second verse drew on local symbolism to establish the virtue of Shanxi’s people, where men do not fear hardships and women are able to embroider flowers, and they all have great aspirations and will never grow old. The second song they sang was in Shanxi dialect and was addressed to the singer’s “Dear Lump” (Qin Gedai; Putonghua: Qin Gedan), an affectionate term in local parlance. This song deserves to be quoted in the original as the relationship between labor and love became explicit as the singer describes a young woman washing clothes down by the river. The mundane act of washing clothes and moreover the viewer’s desiring description of his object of affection allows the listener to partake in the nexus between love and labor revealed in the scene. Qin Gedai Dear Lump Qin Gedai xia he xi yishang Dear Lump down at the river  washing clothes Shuang geding gui zai shitou shang Two knees kneeling on the rock Ya Xiao Qin Gedai Oh, dear Little Lump Xiao shoushou honglai Little hands turning red Xiao shoushou bai Little hands white

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Cuoyicuo yishang ba xiao bian shuai Rub and twist the clothes into small  swinging braids Xiang qinqin xiang aiai Become my sweetheart become my  love Ba ni de hao lian niu guolai Turn your smiling face over here Ya Xiao Qin Gedai Oh, dear Little Lump

The last song the tour guides sang while preserving vegetables explicitly celebrated the close association between particular foods and localities. The song “Praise to the Earthy/Local Products” (Kua Tuchan) enumerated the products associated with various Shanxi localities. The song sidestepped the commonly used term “specialty products” (techan), instead linking these products to the land through the term tuchan “products of the earth.” Thereby, the close identification of the earth with both a given locality and the people dwelling there reappeared in the lyrics of this song. The song listed agricultural products, everyday dishes, natural resources, and particular clothing, among other things. In line with the outsiders’ perception of the Sweeping Cliff area as lacking in any particularly characteristic products, the municipal area in which it was situated was not mentioned in the song. David Goodman’s (2006: 56) analysis of how provincial identity was deliberately constructed by the party state in the 1990s to foster economic development through mobilizing residents’ resources emphasizes the close alignment between food and place. The overlapping localization of food and identity through noodles, pancakes, pasta, and vinegar became incorporated into a wider regional imaginary of Shanxi as a translocal place with a distinctive provincial cuisine (Goodman 2006: 56). Goodman draws out a number of places identified with certain foods, such as Pingyao beef, Taigu cakes, and Qingxu grapes (Goodman 2006: 56). In Sweeping Cliff this kind of translocal understanding of a unified Shanxi cuisine, as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of the various “specialty products” (techan) associated with particular locales, was relatively limited to the younger generation of villagers, many of whom had traveled or studied outside their home county. Both the content and the context of these three songs mobilized the production of locality through making the flavors of home in preserving vegetables, while simultaneously feeding into the social work that made the link between the earth and belonging explicit. Furthermore, the experience was highly emotive for all involved as people shared their knowledge, skills, and opinions about what makes a good preserved winter vegetable dish. Thus, the work on

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behalf of others, here propelled from the agricultural to the corporate realm, induced affective attachments between kin, colleagues, and neighbors as fellow Shanxi residents.

Producing and Performing the Rural In China a discourse of “human quality” (suzhi) increasingly ties national goals of development to personal qualities of education, health, and the urban sophistication that implicitly devalues rural and elderly workers. However, the young women in Sweeping Cliff did not uniformly hope to become part of the urban labor market. Nonethless, many sought to join the ranks of the nonagricultural workforce with a rural background, sometimes known as China’s “peasant workers” (nongmingong) due to their exposure to informal, insecure, and downright dangerous labor conditions. Rather than moving to the manufacturing industries of the Chinese littoral, however, young Shanxi women tried to remain as close to home as possible, ideally even commuting or working in the villages to “leave the fields but not the countryside” (litu bu lixiang). They could achieve this by securing nonagricultural labor in the area, ideally in the developing service industry, such as working as tour guides or hotel personnel. In these jobs, women were expected to perform cosmopolitan refinement while retaining a rural flair of authenticity, for instance flirting with male tourists by making puns in Shanxi dialect. Living at home, these mostly unmarried women were also challenged for their decision to work outside the home, contributing to households through income rather than directly through domestic and agricultural labor. Poised between the cosmopolitan and the local, on the one hand, and between the market and the family, on the other, they often struggled to achieve a desirable status through their rural service economy labor. Younger women often sought to move away from agricultural work entirely, particularly by moving into the emerging female-­ dominated service economy in the countryside. Two particularly evocative examples revealed how these women were both producing and performing the rural for sale on the market: first, young female tour guides expected to perform cosmopolitan sophistication while retaining a rural flair; second, female entrepreneurs within the burgeoning market of direct sales, who paid for the right to sell products they had bought in bulk to family, neighbors, and friends. Poised between the cosmopolitan and the local, on the one hand, and

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between the market and the family, on the other, young women experienced difficulties in receiving recognition for this nonagricultural rural labor. Furthermore, older generations lamented how livelihood cycles based on labor are being undermined from within as young women increasingly contributed wages, rather than agricultural work, to families. As part of this new labor force in the service economy in the countryside, young female tour guides were supposed to embody discourses of “human quality” (suzhi) as well as “culture” (wenhua) and “civilization” (wenming). For instance, the tourism development company conducted training sessions with these young people in their early twenties, reminding them that they were “representing” (daibiao) the public face of the company and obliging them to conduct themselves in ways consistent with high levels of “human quality,” including comportment, dress, and grooming. Moreover, the female tour guides were obliged to wear makeup on a daily basis, much to some of their indignation. The tour guides simultaneously faced the expectation of being cosmopolitan and modern workers, while retaining local flavor and cultural flair. The company demanded that they learn to recite the erudite and floral script introducing the village in standard Mandarin but simultaneously encouraged them to make jokes in rural dialect and introduce local elements from village parlance into their tours. The tourism development company thereby attempted to inculcate a commitment in the tour guides to convincingly market “the rural” as part of a sleek and yet affective experience in Sweeping Cliff. One of the clearest demonstrative of the way that the tourism development company attempted to foster tour guide’s sense of attachment to their jobs was through the company party for Chinese New Year in 2010. All the tour guides took part in a mandatory competition titled “I Love My Fortress” (wo ai wo gubao). Each tour guide wrote and recited an emotive script detailing their personal love, affection, and commitment to Sweeping Cliff. Some tour guides even underscored their recitation with impassioned pop soundtracks, expounded on the historical dimensions of the village, praised particular leaders within their company, or provided theatrical gesticulation and tantalizing dance routines. Notably, the female tour guides predominantly based their notion of attachment through emotive and cultural commitments, while the male tour guides drew on more assertive tropes of development and progress. The tourism development company also enforced more overt gender differentiation through work responsibilities and labor distribution. The company implicitly expected the female tour guides

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to flirt with guests, especially the tour groups of predominantly male employees from military, banking, and engineering companies that came to tour the village. While most of the male tour guides were rapidly moved from conducting tours to the planning and management office positions, most of the women were kept on rotation, showing tourists around the village. When higher dignitaries from the local government or corporate developers visited the village, female tour guides also served refreshments and attended to their needs. Female tour guides frequently complained of the demands their male managers placed upon them, expecting them to both spend more time in the freezing alleys on tour during the winter and provide all of these extra services of entertaining and serving guests. One way young women, and even some young men, attempted to escape subjugation to rural managers was through the burgeoning field of “direct sales” (zhixiao) in the area. Banned in China between 1998 and 2005, the reemergence of network marketing allowed transnational products to circulate through local social networks across an increasingly integrated rural-urban landscape. Young people bought into these corporate schemes for the right to sell products directly to friends, family, and acquaintances. Commodities ranging from foreign cosmetics to costly lingerie were distributed through these instrumentalized personal networks. Salespeople took part in training courses and motivational meetings to instill an optimistic mindset, chart relative success, and embody qualified business standards. In addition to selling the products, salespeople were frequently subjected to illegal practices, such as having to buy the right to sell the merchandise, paying for the products in bulk up front, and recruiting others to the scheme to profit from their sales. Herein lay the specificity of network marketing, particularly a form called multilevel marketing (chuanxiao), whereby salespersons not only were compensated for their own sales but were also remunerated for the people they recruited to sell the products and, moreover, they were paid a cut of their recruits’ sales profits. This created hierarchical structures tying salespersons to each other through chains of recruitment and compensation, with those entering the scheme earlier positioned higher up and making more money than those downstream. In contrast to the companies’ celebratory discourse surrounding network marketing, vendors often struggled to recoup initial investments and break even on their sales, partly due to the chains of payment leading upstream. It was therefore not unusual for those outside the schemes to criticize them as “killing relationships” (shashu), employing a term

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that translates quite specifically to “taking advantage of the trust of friends and acquaintances to earn money through deceit” (Collins Chinese Dictionary). Those outside the scheme often assessed these schemes with amusement or mockery, particularly when the sales focused on frivolous products like lingerie or makeup. However, when more vital products, like insurance policies, were pedaled in this way, older generations in particular could react aggressively to sales pitches.2 Nonetheless, the salespersons’ sense of self-worth in the schemes was often bolstered by discourse at rallies that compared the business model to microcredit lending and heralded their sales personnel as the rural vanguard bringing hygiene, beauty, and science to the countryside. The direct sales companies thereby tapped into some of the desires described earlier in the context of food and the embodiment of “human quality” through associations between labor and lifestyle. Furthermore, the way that the schemes were juxtaposed between the security of employment and the excitement of entrepreneurship provided enticing prospects for rural young women, even though many acknowledged the difficulties in recouping investments, let alone making profits through the schemes. Personal prosperity and capital accumulation were mediated through social relationships in network marketing. Sellers transformed long-term relations based on mutual material and affective exchanges into short-term monetary transactions for instrumental purposes, leading to allegations of immorality from those outside the schemes. These companies were thereby exploiting women’s lifelong relationships that they had nurtured over time for profit, often leading to the destruction of established ties and the necessity to make new connections. Therefore, these companies revealed another facet of selling the rural, and even revalorizing rural marketing strategies based on personal connections, as part of the contemporary world of market capitalism.

After Agriculture and Women’s Work The agricultural harvest that nourished the people of Sweeping Cliff revealed how villagers enacted techniques of transformation that sustained everyday life. Social work done on one another’s behalf created affective ties between people who were both a part of and apart from each other in the home. Furthermore, by tracing how food connected bodies to the soil, localized notions of emplaced belong-

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ing emerged from everyday interactions between people working together to sustain healthy bodies and fulfilling lives. An increasingly feminized and aging workforce connected the agricultural and domestic domain through the transformative ecology of the house. By looking at how women sustained the house, home, and family within this context, the personal upheaval of patrilocal marriage practices met with the ability of women’s work to create, nourish, and sustain vibrant notions of home after marital displacement. For instance, the process of becoming habituated to two meals a day created a powerful technique for incorporating women, as well as raising children, in the village. As a crux between insiders and outsiders, the temporal practice of the two meals both differentiated and assimilated residents in the area. Sweeping Cliff villagers thereby ingested the connection between bodily work in the house and fields through the food they grew and ate. Both historical memories and contemporary aspirations shaped the choices women made about homegrown and store-bought foods. Choosing to consume staples such as the “good noodles,” as well as snacks, milk products, and diet foods, intertwined with understandings of the wider ecological and economic world. Across generations of Sweeping Cliff women, the shifting notion of what constituted an ideal body in terms of health and beauty was played out at the table. Notions of attentiveness, care, and frugality shaped interactions as families sought to balance their diets across shifting generational values. However, the preservation of winter vegetables showed that the taste of home at the level of the family continued to be perpetuated across generations in both domestic and work settings. Although the emotive value of labor probably partially resulted from the lasting legacy of state socialism, an old Shanxi mountain song suggested that women’s work had long been creating affective bonds. Rural products, from sorghum to maize, formed components of commodity chains that tied the countryside to larger market centers in China for centuries. However, a new reflexivity has emerged in recent decades in not just commodifying rural products but turning the very notion of rural belonging into a commodity, as particular foods became emblematic “specialty products” of particular Shanxi locations. In the late last decade, young women in Sweeping Cliff pushed this logic of commodifying the rural, or more specifically an idealization of the rural, to another level. By embodying certain notions of rural authenticity through comportment, dress, and behavior, these young women enter the labor market as savvy service ­economy ­workers. These forms of positive assertion around rural identity challenge the

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negative portrayals of the countryside as plagued by a “lack of quality” (suzhi cha) in relation to urban counterparts. Despite these emerging paths for young women to “leave the land, but not the countryside” (litu bu lixiang), not all Sweeping Cliff villagers shared their anticipation and excitement about these new occupational opportunities. Generational clashes over the appropriate contribution to the rural household economy emerged in discussions over divisions of labor in the home, with the capacity to generate income and the willingness to fulfill domestic tasks leading to tensions. E. P. Thompson (1967, 1971) brought to light how changing livelihood strategies across time may intersect with personal, political, and ethical understandings about the distribution of resources according to necessity and contribution that may resonate with or run counter to a shared “moral economy.” With the rapid succession of livelihood strategies that have occurred in China in recent decades, a notion of shifting “moral economies” across generations fruitfully reveals both issues of continuity and change within Chinese families. Andrew Kipnis (2016: 171–73) has poignantly compared shifts in the “moral economy” in contexts where the middle generation of extended families has migrated out for work, thereby continuing a self-sacrificing discourse of “eating bitterness” (chiku) beyond the hard farm labor of the eldest generation, while sharing in the united goal of family prosperity. Factory workers migrating from nearby districts to a Shandong factory espouse an even more direct continuity between “eating bitterness” in the factory and the fields by voicing equivalences between their conditions (Kipnis 2016: 172–73). Moreover, local residents whose villages were swallowed by the expanding city may even sustain rentier incomes from real estate windfalls, occasionally opting for jobs that are less arduous but also less lucrative, for instance by entering the service economy rather than working in a factory (Kipnis 2016: 174–77). Similarly, in western China, Sichuan villagers “eat bitterness” in migrant work that takes a physical and an emotional toll on the middle generation, and families pass this dedication to working hard on to their children by impressing on them the necessity for diligence in their schoolwork (Lora-Wainwright 2013: 78–81). Young rural migrant men from central China’s Hubei province occasionally devalue the stubborn self-sufficiency of long-standing agricultural practices of their seniors in favor of quick monetary success in factory and small business work (Steinmüller 2013: 99–101). Villagers in Sweeping Cliff provide interesting points for comparison, as the middle and younger generations preferred to commute

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rather than migrate. Although this might be considered a luxury in light of the emotional hardship resulting from leaving home to work in grueling factory conditions in far-off provinces, the local labor conditions around Sweeping Cliff demanded a harsh tradeoff between physical hardship, risk, and high wages (by working in the mines, heavy industries, and chemical factories) and the lower remuneration of the less bodily demanding service sector jobs (both discussed in the next chapter). Those remaining in the village doing agricultural work faced both physically taxing and largely unremunerated labor conditions. Nonetheless, senior women often continued to do this work as a point of pride, and families recognized, acknowledged, and valorized their efforts through shared appreciation of the resulting food to varying degrees. The lack of monetized remuneration thereby became ameliorated through the high status of physical endurance and personal sacrifice that underpinned a familial self-reliance with regard to food pathways. While young residents acknowledged these achievements among their senior kin, they increasingly forged paths intertwined with industrial employment and service sector opportunities. As young women forged village income opportunities around service jobs that remained tied to their village belonging (for instance through tourism and direct sales), they may be further expanding the notion of “inside work,” with its connotations of female respectability beyond the agricultural and domestic domains, while achieving a level of self-sufficiency for themselves, rather than their entire households. By contributing their wages to the rural household economy, young women continued to nourish and sustain their familial home. In short, the wider family strategy of diversifying economic roles and creating divisions of labor across generations helped to secure a shared livelihood across generations through cooperation and affection.

Notes 1. By contrast, in the Western “organizational mode of association,” individuals are conceived of as ordered into groups like straws packed together in bundles that are then piled together to form haystacks (Fei 1992 [1948]: 61). 2. Since the mid-2010s an e-commerce boom has swept across China, transforming the landscape in which rural salespeople operate. Many young women in Sweeping Cliff now sell cosmetic, hygiene, and beauty products through their accounts on social networking sites, particularly Wechat.

– Chapter 6 –

Dangerous Domesticities

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An Earthquake Rumor and Its Repercussions “Get up! Get up! An earthquake is coming! Hurry!” These hysterical cries were accompanied by hands urgently shaking me awake as I opened my eyes in the dim light of an urban apartment in Jiexiu city below Sweeping Cliff. Hazy from sleep, I struggled to make sense of the situation, as my friend’s mother, Suyin, continued her terrified announcements: “An earthquake is coming. The phone’s ringing off the hook. We need to warn your uncle. For heaven’s sake, get up and put on some clothes!” My friend Riyou and I sat up in the bed we were sharing, looking at each other in confused bewilderment. With an exasperated tone tempered by concern, Riyou groggily whined, “Ma, what are you talking about? Have you gone mad?!” In defense of her sanity, Suyin continued at a frantic pace: “Check your mobile phones for warning messages; an earthquake is coming! Everybody’s getting up! Hear the sirens?! We need to get out of the house!” Jolted into action by an atmosphere of panic rather than genuine comprehension of the situation, Riyou and I threw off our sleeping quilt, grabbed our clothes, and rose into the eerie liveliness of a cold winter’s night on 21 February 2010. As we dressed, Suyin filled us in on the warning: an earthquake was going to hit the area in the early hours of the morning and everybody was being urged to remain awake while waiting outside their homes or close to escape routes. We tried to reassure each other by recounting that earthquake predictions were unreliable, but our sense of panic steadily mounted as we huddled in the freezing gloom of the living room listening to

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the wild orchestra of alarm sounds and emergency communication entering the apartment through the open front door leading to one of the city’s many low-rise housing developments. Suyin flipped through the TV channels in a vain attempt to gain official reassurances or updates on the unfolding situation. However, the local municipal channel was down for the night, and even the provincial channel did not broadcast any information about the earthquake. Instead, the regular late night programming of talk shows, documentaries, cooking classes, and historical dramas continued to project across the airwaves in an uncanny charade of banality. The complete silence regarding the earthquake emitted by official lines of communication was unsettlingly juxtaposed with the soundscape reverberating through the area, as unsanctioned networks of emergency warnings echoed from every corner. Sirens wailed, megaphones boomed, fireworks crackled, and cars honked as people took crisis prevention into their own hands by alerting those around them to the threat of catastrophe. Neighbors ran between apartments and buildings, friends and relatives called each other on telephones, online chat rooms were abuzz with activity. As we eventually discovered, some people were so gripped by the state of emergency that they moved all their valuables onto the streets, slept in their cars in subzero temperatures, or walked and drove to mountain villages nearby, fleeing the dangerous urban environment where apartment blocks were threatened with impending collapse. And the panic was by no means contained to this municipal area of Shanxi but spread throughout the wider region. When dawn finally arrived with its warming rays of clarity and disillusion, a number of narratives unraveled in newspapers and on television channels that attempted to explain the circulation of an unwarranted rumor and the mass hysteria that ensued. Official media channels initially suggested that tens of thousands of people were affected by the vicious and viral perpetuation of hearsay across the province in the dead of night. The numbers of those affected was later amended to a more realistic estimate of several million residents. Shifting narratives of blame, retribution, and responsibility that unfolded in the aftermath of the earthquake scare revealed distrust in the government’s capacity to care for its people during a state of emergency. This moment of rupture provided a particularly striking instance of a more pervasive frustration over inequality experienced in the housing situation perpetuated by the local state. By tracing urban and rural housing transformations in recent decades, Shanxi homes emerged as nodes of mundane domestic

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spaces providing security and stability, while simultaneously embedded within a wider sphere of state predation and capital accumulation in the region. Residents suspected housing developers and local cadres of avoiding central state regulation to provide affordable, adequate, and safe homes, thereby undermining the local government’s legitimacy in safeguarding housing provision. Residents expressed this uneasy juxtaposition by circulating rumors that gave voice to their misgivings over the local provision of housing. By warning each other of failed moral expectations related to housing, residents challenged the wider political sphere that promised order and harmony through regulations and yet frequently led to inequality and even chaos in practice. These rumors formed part of a person-to-person realm of civic interaction understood through the Chinese concept of minjian (literally: “between the people”) that cannot be entirely explained by spontaneous individuated agency nor formalized institutional structures. Instead, the obligation toward mutual responsibility in relation to housing risks revealed that protecting one’s own life is inseparable from preserving life as shared with others. Residents relied on personal trust enshrined in these exchanges to assess housing rumors through experience and common sense, rather than depending on local media proclamations and regional government assurances as sources of validity. Shanxi residents viewed the local media as propaganda extensions of the local government and its developmental agents in constructing housing. Challenging these official narratives, residents maintained their right to civic interaction and state protection in providing safe and adequate housing to citizens. I argue that circulating rumors as a form of moral action locates these processes in the interpersonal space of minjian, a realm that can be fruitfully compared to E. P. Thompson’s (1971) notion of the “crowd,” as both serve a form of “moral economy” that implicates state legitimacy in defending vulnerable citizens from market incursions that threaten their lives and livelihoods.

Moral Expectations in Housing The earthquake scare brought to light what happens when the moral expectations of the pastoral state are violated and citizens directly confront governmental disaffection during an emergency. However, the event resonated acutely with residents due to the longer formation and frustration of moral expectations surrounding the state’s

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role in providing access to secure and adequate homes. Residents’ expectations often drew on a Maoist logic based on the provision of housing through the workplace in return for labor contributions as part of the proper ordering of the state’s pastoral responsibilities toward its citizens. However, in the Reform Era these state-­sponsored guarantees of housing were increasingly dismantled in favor of competition for housing through the market in the interest of capital accumulation. This mismatch between expectations and experiences in local housing provision led residents to encounter anxiety and anger over the moral state of housing in the area. During the Maoist Period the state employer, whether the rural brigade or the urban employer, provided housing in return for labor as part of a social contract between citizen workers and the localized communist government. In Sweeping Cliff, as in rural areas across China, village land was collectivized after the revolution of 1949, while labor organization and food distribution were organized through production teams under the management of the village brigade. By contrast, village housing was either retained by local families or newly distributed to those in need of accommodation. After this original period of allocation by communist cadres, houses were passed down the generations through family inheritance. As the primary sites for storage and consumption of material goods (Liu 2000) and the last vestige of a semblance of family privacy (Yan 2003), homes became crucial markers of family social status in the Maoist Era. At the beginning of the Reform Era in 1978, Sweeping Cliff developed new areas for housing construction outside of the previous village boundaries. While this administrative step took pressure off the overcrowded village homes, urban bureaucracy levied new restrictions and charges on villagers from the valley below. Despite relying entirely on their own resources for home construction and maintenance, villagers faced bureaucratic obstacles from the land and housing bureaus, including fines and fees, when attempting to improve or relocate family housing. However, the gravest threat villagers faced from the urban valley was the possibility of wholesale dispossession, with the tourism development company operating in the village eyeing the traditional courtyards as possible sites for tourism infrastructure. These processes were discussed in the first and second chapters of this book but will be elaborated on in terms of the wider moral economy of rural-urban integration here. As counterparts to rural brigades and collectives, urban employers in the Maoist Era ordered most aspects of workers’ lives by controlling

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the allocation of food, housing, health care, and pensions through their “work unit” (danwei). “The iron rice bowl” (tiefanwan) referred to this employment as the basis for the state provision of social security. Work units not only provided workers with apartments in the gated and walled housing compounds but also furnished these housing developments with canteens, bathhouses, childcare facilities, and health care clinics. Although China’s market reforms began to take hold in the 1980s, the urban housing market only fully developed in the 1990s, as the reduction of employer housing provision met with the increasing marketization of the economy. As the amount of employer housing provision dwindled, “commodity housing” (shangpin fang) gained prominence in urban development, and increasingly becoming the norm after the state ban on employer-allocated housing in 1998 (Tomba 2014). Simultaneously, government officials and state employees increasingly privatized public resources, including housing, as a means to social mobility (Goodman and Zang 2008). These developments meant that housing no longer served primarily as a means of livelihood but formed a vital asset for generating wealth through real estate market appreciation, through rental income, and as collateral for subsequent loans (Tomba 2014). Home ownership increasingly constituted the main hindrance to and channel for mobility in the 2000s, while the means to attain home ownership were becoming ever more curtailed (Zhang 2010). Urban citizens felt disappointment, and even outrage, at the breaking of the “iron rice bowl” that had once secured their entitlement to food, housing, education, and vital subsistence rights through labor contributions. Rural residents, moreover, were subject to barriers of entering the urban housing ladder due to financial and bureaucratic constraints that could even include wholesale exclusion of rural or outside household registration holders. While “the people” at least nominally owned housing property via their employer as part of the state in this early period of late socialism, the privatization or semiprivatization of many stateowned enterprises in the 1990s unleashed cycles of accumulation by dispossession (Day 2013). During this process a cadre-based middle class rose to prominence through its strategic position at the access points to former state resources, further bolstering its advantages through wide networks of connections (Goodman and Zang 2008). The parallel erosion of worker privileges and the entrenchment of chronic underemployment and unemployment further exacerbated inequalities in what some have termed a new era of “cadre capitalism” (So 2003).

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Both rural and urban residents now faced a contradictory political economy that melded a socialist state with market forces, while simultaneously positing a shift from labor contributions to the collective, to one focusing on the cultivation of the self (Yan 2011; Anagnost 2008). Framing resistance to the state and economic developers in the 2000s, Shanxi residents drew on moral logics shaped by the Maoist legacy of collective action in forging and upholding the social contract with the state through provisions for labor (see Lee 2007 in China’s rustbelt). However, residents have transformed antagonistic understandings between capital and labor to accommodate new forms of inequality in the contemporary Market Era. Most notably, residents eschewed outdated Maoist class labels, instead differentiating between rural citizens (nongmin) and urban workers (gongren) as major blocks of inequality, as well as the more nuanced stratification of social status (jieceng) between them (see Anagnost 2008). The increasingly bureaucratic and technocratic regime in the post-Mao Era resulted in the state retreat from collective guarantees and instead embedded governance within individual citizens. Yan Yunxiang (2011) has pointed out that this entails a moral shift from one of collective morality to one serving the self, with the increasing interiority and privacy of rural domestic domains even spatializing this realization of the self as a moral individual. China’s shift toward economic liberalization has thereby eroded forms of allegedly collectivist morality once promoted by the Maoist state in favor of fracturing solidarities along rural-urban fault lines and factionalism between state officials, corporate bosses, and ordinary citizens. As Shanxi province has a relatively well-integrated rural-urban landscape, occupational mobility often revolves around local commuting rather than far-flung migration (Carrillo 2011). Sweeping Cliff residents evaluated locations by the workplaces they offered, mapping the landscape through a topography of labor, such that the presence of a stone quarry or cement plant, and even more importantly a lucrative coal mine or coking facility, could propel a particular township or neighborhood “to get rich” (facai). This uneven distribution of wealth contributed to rising inequality in Shanxi that went hand in hand with undermining assurances of the local government and predatory property developers in guaranteeing housing safety.

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People-to-People Action in a World of Strangers In China, the liberalization of the economy since the 1980s has resulted in widening spheres of engagement that led to changing moral attitudes and a sense of trust between citizens (Guo et al. 2011). As social worlds became more mobile and open, a shift from personal trust based on particularistic ties has been supplemented and sometimes supplanted by the partial institutionalization of social trust in a world of strangers (Guo et al. 2011: 20). Within this context of shifting moral values, widespread feelings of moral decline and rhetoric of the selfish individual as a natural expression of human nature have taken hold (Yan 2011). Rather than viewing this transformation as indicative only of moral decline or rising self-serving individualism, in Shanxi these observations also created a countercurrent of moral responsibility by ordinary Chinese citizens toward each other beyond the state across rural-urban and class divides. The obligation to warn others of the impending disaster during the earthquake scare showed that grassroots solidarity enacted in times of acute anxiety relies on more long-term patterns of moral action. While this sphere of interpersonal civic responsibility could be interpreted as a throwback to Maoist collectivist ethics, its extension from known relations into a world of strangers cannot be reduced to socialist history. This sphere of minjian “refers to a realm of ­people-to-people relationships which is nongovernmental or separate from formal bureaucratic channels” (Yang 1994: 288). Two related terms have received more scrutiny in ethnographic studies of China due to the way they mingle material and affective obligations in forms of exchange: “affective feelings” (renqing) formed through longstanding intimate relations and “connections” (guanxi) forged in more instrumental transactions (see Kipnis 1997; Yan 1996; Yang 1994). In Shanxi critical discourse about politicians was voiced through accusations of predatory guanxi that was frequently contrasted with the more reciprocal and even selfless forms of exchange between acquaintances as renqing. Forms of exploitative guanxi characterized the negative domain of the government, personified by corrupt state officials, and linked their actions to the failed responsibility of the state in maintaining order and stability, beyond which lay the threat of chaos (luan). However, neither long-term affections nor self-­serving connections encompass the pattern of action toward a common end, extended to anonymous strangers, that the sphere of minjian as person-to-person mobilization implies.

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Shanxi residents saw the institutional centralization of the state itself, but also the formal workplace, as part of the proper ordering of economic and social relations, as well as safeguarding minimum livelihood guarantees such as access to safe and adequate housing. When citizens’ moral expectations were not met, residents evaluated the situation as necessitating a realm of interpersonal interaction, grounded in “traditions of the common people” (laobaixing de chuantong) such as mutual aid and support, disaster relief by local citizens, and wider community support organizations. Responses to potential disasters showed that when lives were under threat, people activated ideals of mutual responsibility through grassroots solidarity between kin, acquaintances, and even strangers. In order to take into account how housing formed a domestic domain of vital relations, but also its place within broader frameworks of inequality, insecurity, and dispossession, the chapter now turns to the role housing played in the churning of precautionary person-to-person rumor mills in Shanxi.

Conspiracies of Corruption in Urban Housing With a population of about 400,000 residents, Jiexiu city is small by Chinese standards. The city is home to government offices, hotels, banks, karaoke bars, parks, public showers, restaurants, hospitals, schools, shopping centers, brothels, cinemas, and an abundance of local businesses and housing blocks. Jiexiu municipal area administers an urban core, as well as nearby townships scattered across the valley basin and the mountains rising into the sky beyond the urban sprawl. In recent decades residents of surrounding townships moved down the mountainside for employment, education, and marriage purposes and thereby wove localities together despite official citizen registration as either rural or urban. Although many young people preferred living in urban areas due to labor and lifestyle opportunities the city offers, most urban residents were wary of state safeguards over urban housing. The most notable lack of local state provision as an everyday occurrence in urban housing was the intermittent supply of electricity, leading to frequent blackouts, and the random cuts in the water delivery, with taps running dry despite not even having bathing or showering facilities in most apartment blocks. More worryingly, the Ministry of Construction and Urban and Rural Development of Shanxi was said to fall short of its responsibility to safeguard property development, especially in terms of worker safety on construction sites

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and the commodity chains of the materials used in construction. State cadres were suspected of passing over checks on safe building plans and architectural execution, as well as regular inspections and maintenance operations of the buildings. Acute anxieties focused on whether the foundations and walls of houses were built with the correct concrete composition, especially emerging in fears of fake mixes, including substandard or inappropriate building materials. According to Jiexiu residents, the use of deficient materials in the walls could be evidenced by cracks and crumbling in hallways and apartments in some of the city’s low-rises. Another concern was whether the steel reinforcement bars in the buildings’ walls and floors were made of impure metals and whether some dividing concrete walls were reinforced with rebar mesh at all. Material mistrust was also projected on the insulation used in apartment blocks, as substances might be flammable or toxic (such as asbestos). There was also anger over construction sites where accidents were sometimes fatal for workers or bystanders, as exemplified by an acquaintance’s story of a near miss of a tumbling glass panel from a construction site onto the street below. All of these worries were a far cry from the spectacle dished out by official media, such as during the Chinese Central Television New Year Gala. In 2011 the annual variety show broadcast a sequence of energetic peasant workers (nongmingong) in hardhats and construction gear building the future of the nation through their architectural prowess in a Broadway-esque acrobatics song and dance routine. Shanxi residents mocked these displays, while simultaneously expressing acute awareness of the media as an extension of the government through its distribution of propaganda, or at least propagandized versions of events. Shanxi residents were therefore skeptical of official media accuracy and validity, instead often preferring to rely on hearsay spread through nongovernmental minjian channels for information. No longer guaranteed by the state workplace, housing in the Reform Era became subjected to market logics as a commodity for accumulating capital through construction, management, and rent. Real estate agents and online housing advertisements allowed citizens who owned homes to buy and sell at will, but citizens excluded from home ownership struggled to find a footing in the urban housing market. While homeowners were sometimes able to uphold their position, housing’s vital role in maintaining the livelihoods of the most vulnerable sections of the population had been sidelined. Residents expressed apprehension with this situation through dis-

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courses of dangerous corruption, particularly of their fear of living in substandard commodity housing and the inequality of access to the state’s affordable housing.

Failed State Safeguards for Urban Residents In order to illustrate the challenges of finding a secure footing within Jiexiu’s housing terrain, it is worth stepping into two concrete apartments: the first apartment belongs to a family of homeowners in a former state-owned factory housing development that went bankrupt; the second flat is inhabited by a young couple in service economy employment struggling with the urban rental real estate market. Despite the obvious disparity in their respective situations, both households shared a concern with political corruption by the local government underlying their challenges with housing. Most of Jiexiu’s urban housing stock was a relatively uniform type of low-rise apartment block (loufang) like the one that I was in during the earthquake scare. These gray buildings encircled by glassed-in balconies stand up to six floors tall and encompass small apartments for individual families. Jiexiu’s former garment factory housing blocks were no exception. Monotonous rows of lowrise housing blocks accommodated the former employees of the now defunct factory founded in 1958. The Gong family apartment included two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a balcony. Mr. Gong considered the family to be living “quite comfortably” (xiaokang) in the city, despite being local migrants from nearby rural townships. In the early 1990s the state-owned factory had employed the parental couple despite their rural backgrounds, providing them with a step up in the world. By saving enough money to purchase an urban household registration (hukou), their son was able to attend superior urban schools. However, the fate of the factory took a turn for the worse starting in the mid-1990s. In an attempt to recoup losses, the factory sold off its housing stock to employees. This privatization involved workers paying for the apartments they already lived in, by means of a loan or deferred payment by installments while committing to retain the property for a number of years and until the full purchase price was paid. Once the housing loans were repaid, residents gained full ownership rights, including the right to alienate the apartment through sales. Many workers were frustrated with the logic of paying for apartments that were effectively already theirs.

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This was the first event in a series of mistreatments by the garment factory that employees saw as failing its obligations toward workers, but this was never reprimanded by the local state. The ultimate affront to workers’ sense of entitlement based on their labor contributions was the company’s handling of a series of bankruptcies in the following decade, when workers had to “spend money to buy jobs” (huaqian mai gongzuo). The company first filed for bankruptcy in 1997, forcing employees either to pay about six months’ wages to become shareholders in the newly founded joint stock limited liability company or to lose their jobs. Stock option solutions to save ailing work units were widespread in the Jiexiu area in the 1990s, and most workers felt these schemes were merely instruments for the owners of the means of production to expropriate capital from employees. Unable to pay for two sets of stocks, the Gong family decided that Ms. Gong would remain in the factory, while her husband would “dive into the ocean” (xiahai) of urban entrepreneurship by opening a printing shop. In retrospect, the Gong family considered themselves immensely fortunate to have straddled entrepreneurship with employment and home ownership as a household strategy. Particularly after the company filed for bankruptcy a second time in 2006 and finally closed down operations, workers, despite being shareholders, were only compensated with a miserly severance payment that did not even cover basic living costs. At the time, workers of the factory demonstrated against this decision by staging public action, including blockading the local train station. Despite being comfortable in their family home, the Gongs worried about the lack of upkeep of the blocks by the maintenance company and the government’s deficient security provisions in the housing development. A spate of arson attacks on cars parked in the compound solidified the impression of criminal activities in the development and inflamed frustrations with the local security bureau. Most residents blamed an alliance of corporate stinginess and state indifference for the slow degradation of the garment factory housing development. By contrast to this privatized work unit housing, citizens residing in commercial housing pointed explicitly to the exploitative collusion between the local state and housing developers as benefiting those with close ties to the government. While the privatization of housing supported the rise of home ownership in a certain segment of the local population, those who were excluded from early home ownership because of residential background, lack of connections, or prime employment in key sectors

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had to rent or buy housing through the market at a higher cost. Residents explicitly voiced critiques regarding the local government’s failure to implement the central state’s housing policy, aimed at balancing supply and demand within the commoditized housing market. In theory, state-sponsored affordable housing should have been reserved for low-income households in need of government support, but in practice it was often siphoned off by citizens with influential social networks (see Tomba 2014). The example of the young Zhang couple shows that state support for housing to low-­ income households often missed its ostensible target. A couple in their early twenties, the Zhangs rented an apartment in one of the city’s tallest buildings, built in the early 2000s. Despite relatively recent construction, the Zhangs were apprehensive about the construction safety of their block, as well as the presence of many unknown neighbors, meaning that intruders could easily pass as residents in the building and engage in criminal activities. During the earthquake scare, the Zhangs recounted being absolutely terrified, running down the many concrete stairwells in the dark, only to freeze for hours with their many neighbors in the lobby of their building throughout the night. They said they were now considering moving to a low-rise apartment building to curb the risks of collapse and criminality. The Zhangs both worked as service personnel in the local tourism industry, having begun dating at university several years previously. With both partners working, they earned enough for basic expenditures but would have struggled to pay the full rent for an apartment on their own. However, they were ineligible for support schemes in the city of Jiexiu because Mr. Zhang was registered as a “rural citizen” (nongmin) from a nearby village and Ms. Zhang was an urbanite from a neighboring province, a resolute “outsider” (waidiren) of the municipal area, ineligible for state subsidies. Luckily, her middle-class urban parents were in a position to pay part of this private rental, making it possible for them to live in the privacy of the high-rise rather than live separated by gender in the rudimentary dorm rooms provided by their employer. The Zhangs’ solution resonates with the increasing reliance on familial support and personal connections in securing housing under the breakup of state workplace provisions. According to residents, affordable housing was being constructed and then immediately snatched up by cadres and their families whose wealth and influence allowed them to skip queues and bend the rules of allocation. For instance, there were rumors of multiple household registrations, fake

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names, and ghost identities as those with connections cheated their way into the schemes at the expense of the have-nots. Despite lofty government promises of secure housing and dazzling media spectacles or urban construction, Shanxi residents raised concerns over housing in terms of “corruption” (fulan, fubai) in what could be described as the solidification of “cadre capitalism” in the region. These frequently featured the perils of development increasing wealth disparities between “cadres” (ganbu) colluding with “bosses” (laoban) at the expense of the “ordinary people” (laobaixing) as “the richer were getting richer and the poorer were getting poorer.” Residents’ concrete anxieties expressed an acute awareness of an emerging class of capitalists with close political ties to key economic sectors. These government officials and corporate leaders mobilized extensive social networks to privatize public resources, including housing, as well as accumulating surplus through state-sponsored housing schemes. These circuits of corrupt housing developers thereby secured their privileged position through not just single but often multiple home ownership, as well as fostering wealth accumulation through renting, managing, or policing housing developments. While exploitations by factory bosses, frustration with security bureaus, and denial of state-subsidized housing are, of course, separate grievances, these frustrations all reveal how moral codes of the local state safeguarding the livelihoods of Jiexiu’s residents were being continuously eroded. In order to secure safe, adequate, and affordable housing as part of long-term livelihood strategies, Jiexiu residents turned toward each other, rather than official media and government outlets, for trustworthy information and reliable support.

Rural Housing, Personal Trust, and Rumors of Dispossession As discussed in previous chapters, Sweeping Cliff’s domestic architecture comprised a medley of residences that included everything from earth caves to two-story concrete dwellings with glossy white tiling. In addition to the houses that the government assigned to residents in the early Maoist Period, villagers constructed new houses, which necessitated permits from the local government in the valley. Except for the handful of cave dwellings carved into the ravine to the west of the village, the houses outside the old village walls were

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built from 1978 onward in accordance with the village plan to alleviate population pressure on existing housing. In turn, the municipal Department of Land Administration ratified the spatial expansion to the north of the village in 1978, to the south in 1994, and to the east in the early 2000s. However, these new constructions were not paid for by the government, but by private individuals (geren) who built these homes. A few wealthier families could even afford modern multiple-story houses outside the southern village gate. Despite depending on their own labor, material, and financial resources to build and maintain these homes, rural residents needed state approval from the urban bureaucracy. In contrast to urbanites’ concerns over state retreat over housing obligations, villagers were subjected to increasing regulatory state intervention into their housing situation, a development most villagers did not welcome. Villagers experienced threats, payments, and confrontations with the urban housing administration as a negative impact upon their household reproduction. This was because modern, or at least renovated, domestic spaces were in short supply, and yet vital for family expansion so they could accommodate new arrivals, whether through bringing in a spouse or making space for children. In order to build new housing, villagers needed to elicit permits from the municipal Department of Land Administration (Tudiju), which was not only expensive but tricky to obtain without personal “connections” (guanxi). Without this type of “backdoor” (houmen) influence, transferring land from other designations, such as agriculture or wasteland, to domestic land cost about 3,000 to 4,000 RMB per  mu and was not necessarily granted to applicants. However, if one had an old house on a plot of land already earmarked for housing, the old structure could usually be torn down and replaced without fees or payment. Sweeping Cliff, though, had an unusual situation in that prerevolutionary houses had legally been placed under architectural preservation in 1995, so that tearing down an old  house could technically incur a fine with the Historical Relics Bureau (Wenwuju). According to village cadres, no fines had ever been levied on villagers for tearing down houses, despite the obvious disregard for this protection policy in some of the courtyards, where sumptuous merchant houses flanked modern white-tiled additions. One village cadre explained to me that so far no “severe” (yanzhong) incursions against this protection law had been discovered. Although the punitive fines had not been levied throughout the village, residents were aware of the restrictions and uncomfortable with the questionable

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legal status of their new additions. The threat clearly loomed over their houses, as residents frequently denied that any changes had been made to their houses, even when recent renovations, demolitions, or constructions had clearly been carried out. While some villagers simply ignored the restrictions on heritage preservation from the urban valley when attempting to improve their living conditions, others sidestepped the problem altogether by simply relocating their families. Residents blamed the architectural preservation laws for the many locked, abandoned, and desolate courtyards scattered throughout the village. An added dimension of state restriction rather than support was that when villagers attempted to maintain their houses in line with their registered heritage status, they appealed to the local government and tourism operator for support, only to be rebuffed on their requests for financial or material assistance. In short, in Sweeping Cliff, the government had not secured housing provision since the early Maoist Period, and state intervention increasingly took the form of state restrictions on household reproduction. For instance, a domestic residence in Sweeping Cliff had been converted into a village shop and catered to both residents and the occasional tourists who came to visit the village temples. In the autumn of 2009, a torrential rainstorm caused the central beam supporting the roof of the shop to crack in half, leaving it jutting down from the ceiling into the service area of the store. The shopkeeper complained he could not afford to replace the beam in accordance with the government’s preservation directives, and his landlord refused to replace it. Therefore, he insisted that the tourism development company finance a new beam, as this was also in their interest, because so many tourists dropped in on their way down the main street of the village. However, tourism development company personnel refused to become involved in the preservation work of private homes and businesses. In the end, the shopkeeper received a secondhand beam from his brother-in-law, who sourced it from a building that had been torn down elsewhere. Villagers cited this case as an example of when the government’s intention to preserve architectural heritage and the corporation’s promise to bolster the local economy failed to translate into support for ordinary residents. The even more pervasive fear spreading through the village was the possibility of the tourism development company expropriating rural homes to open museums and hotels in line with governmental goals of economic development. Despite these restrictions and anxieties looming over Sweeping Cliff residents, families expanded hous-

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ing on a needs basis, relying on each other, rather than state support, to realize their domestic aspirations. Villagers generally built their own houses in the village, often drawing on their family connections and hired help to complete the task. In addition to remunerating those working on the construction with up to 100 RMB per day, the family hosting the construction process also provided meals and drinks to the builders. Kin, friends, neighbors, and builders would all be present for the final ceremony of lifting up the roof beam, as well as the ritual killing of a chicken and sprinkling its blood in all the rooms to ward off evil and death that were part of the “house moving” ceremony. The village architecture was relatively straightforward, and an impressive number of residents knew all the steps, materials, and processes that construction of their various types of homes entailed, partly due to having learned “on the job” when friends, neighbors, or kin were building. From the tamped earth and wood beam constructions of the traditional domed cave houses (yaodong) to the possibility of reinforcing the squat single-story concrete buildings (pingfang) with steel rebar, as well as hybrids involving bricks, sealants, lime wash, and ceramic tiling, most men, in particular, had quite comprehensive construction knowledge. The village committee oversaw the installation and maintenance of both the water pumps and the electricity lines throughout the courtyards. Responsibility for heating fell to individual households and involved a stove combustion chamber for coal slurry that was connected through flues to a raised bed platform made of bricks that channeled smoke up through a chimney (see Flitsch 2008). A number of villagers were specialists in constructing these heated bed platforms, so no outside help from strangers was necessary in constructing a village home. There were no accusations of builders’ magic in settling personal grievances through construction, but villagers did enlist the village diviner for auspicious dates to conduct key parts of the construction and also frequently brought in a feng shui master from the neighboring village to select an auspicious site or improve the geomancy of a house (see Bray 1997). On the whole, villagers organized house construction and maintenance through personal relationships with known builders and suppliers, meaning that the kind of anxieties toward strangers faced by urbanites in their high-rises did not apply to village constructions. In addition to the construction skills needed in the village, many men had worked in construction at some point in their lives, whether on domestic residences or on large engineering works, and were

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therefore intimately familiar with larger construction techniques. However, these types of work were considered profoundly unsafe, and a number of villagers died in construction incidents due to lack of labor safety oversight on the sites. Rural construction sites, by contrast, were considered familiar and safe, even though I heard of at least one incident of a death as the result of a beam crashing down on a worker in the 1970s. Similar to the situation described in terms of food products from outside the village in Chapter 5, villagers refracted fears, dangers, and anxieties based on trust onto the urban domain beyond the confines of the village. Even concerns over the ability to progress in life through marriage or offspring, as well as fears of dispossession of the family home, were displaced onto the threatening urban valley.

Rural Ambiguity over Urban Integration Villagers sometimes disparaged the entire world beyond Sweeping Cliff as filled with “danger” (weixian) that could verge on the abyss of “chaos” (luan). Despite the increasing acceleration of economic development and the growing integration of the village into wider networks of transaction, some older people refused to enter the urban centers altogether, even for medical reasons, as they felt that urbanites devalued them as members of the peasantry (nongmin) and as being “without culture” (meiyou wenhua) based on their dialect, clothing, and behavior. Rather than romanticizing rural life, they framed their continuity in the village in terms of habit (xiguan) and comfort (shufu), while characterizing home life as being quiet and stable (ping’an). Although villagers hesitated to compare their notion of “peace and quiet” (ping’an) as a local ideal with the larger political sphere of “harmony” (hexie) perpetuated at the national level by Hu Jintao’s propaganda of China as a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), the domestic ideology of harmony resonated with a split image of the state. These notions of harmony offered a situated account of how national and domestic ideologies mirrored each other symbolically, while fueling antagonism toward and exclusion of the actual practices of governance by the midlevel state at the provincial and municipal levels. Reminiscent of what Guo Xiaolin (2001) has called a “bifurcated state,” Sweeping Cliff villagers viewed the national government as beyond criticism, while midlevel governments as the enforcers

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of their directives were often criticized as corrupt and unreliable. Deceased national figures such as Mao Zedong were personalized and revered in ways that resembled a deity or ancestor, sometimes even including offerings at domestic shrines. By contrast, local officials and developers could be criticized as selfish and profiteering members of society who were occasionally even compared to bandits, gangsters, or monsters. There were, for instance, rumors of rapacious “coal bosses” (mei laoban), who stalked women in the night, kidnapped them, and took them to undisclosed locations. This led one young woman to dismiss these men summarily as “demons” (mogui). Foreign luxury cars, especially black BMWs, were to be avoided on the roads, as the cadres who drove them, or were chauffeured in them, were flippant about traffic violations and therefore prone to serious accidents without culpability or compensation. And even more than sporting a flashy car, possessing a license plate branded with red lettering implied close links to the military, another warning sign in terms of traffic violations and general civil disobedience. All of these tales of ruthless government officials offered villagers compelling reasons to steer clear of the midlevel cadre capitalists they suggested were prowling the dangerous city streets in the urban valley. Having spent the night of the earthquake rumor in Jiexiu, I had to rely on verbal accounts of the event in the village. I was told that during the earthquake scare, most village families congregated in a selection of homes with large open courtyards, where the men stood outside smoking cigarettes, while the women sat indoors watching television, drinking tea, and snacking on sunflower seeds to pass the time until dawn. In addition to the visits, phone calls, and text messages they received from their friends and relatives, some families also had midnight visitors who drove and walked up the mountains from the urban valley. These people sought refuge in the rural groundfloor houses (pingfang) that were deemed to be much safer (anquan) than the urban apartment blocks (loufang) they deemed too dangerous (weixian) in the event of an earthquake. In contrast to the degraded urban fabric as intrinsically interwoven with corruption and risk, rural housing was thought to offer a higher degree of security in the face of disaster. Village houses were key to securing marriage, the main vehicle for family inheritance, and the central location for agricultural processes and family life. Villagers knew their houses; they knew who built them, what materials ran through their walls, and what techniques were used in construction. However, in terms of the broader terrain, their fears

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of housing becoming just another commodity to serve the accumulation of capital ran counter to their ideas of the home as a means of livelihood (Bruckermann 2016). Villagers feared that the shifting role of the state and the opening of a moral vacuum could leave them in a dangerous position juxtaposed between the urban and the rural through direct contact with the more predatory levels of government and development. Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists of rural China considered building a house, home, and family central to life projects and thus creating stability, security, and happiness for Chinese citizens. In the last three decades, a widespread housing boom swept across China, and interconnections between rural and urban environments increased exponentially. Since the loosening of the household registration system in China starting in the 1980s, residents increasingly move across the rural-urban terrain taking account of habit, comfort, convenience, and aesthetics, so that the interconnections between the rural and urban environment have vastly increased. The tourism development company operating in the village was also rumored to be planning to construct a new village to relocate villagers after compensating them for leaving their homes. The inclusion of village rural cadres as local “insiders” absolved them from responsibility in defending the village against this development by being fellow victims in processes beyond their control, casting the village committee in a favorable light compared to the provincial, municipal, and to some extent even township levels of government (see Bruckermann 2016). In Shanxi, most middle-aged and older rural residents continued to express a sense of stability, security, and happiness through building a house in the countryside in accordance with values of creating a family through the home. However, younger generations were increasingly seeking new homes in the apartment blocks of the urban valleys below. While young people frequently noted the economic opportunities and material comforts offered by the urban valley, older people mistrusted the anonymity of the city and considered the high-rise constructions unnatural and dangerous. The earthquake scare revealed that mistrust of urban housing construction was not restricted to the elderly or the rural population, as the terror of that night took on a life of its own, with people scrambling to evacuate their homes.

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The Circulation of Disaster Warnings The domestic, once thought a place of security, stability, and relative privacy, increasingly entered a public domain fraught with risk, ambiguity, and the erosion of trust in the Jiexiu municipal area. Of course, the inversion of the house from a haven of safety to a dangerous construction capable of collapsing during an earthquake would be unsurprising anywhere. Nonetheless, the way that the earthquake rumor traveled during the night, as well as the subsequent challenges to local government and media responses, revealed a form of minjian as person-to-person civic interaction to challenge the legitimacy of the local state and its representation as safeguarding local housing development. The earthquake scare entrenched mistrust in official safety proclamations about construction and housing, as Shanxi residents sought assurances through personal relationships rather than sanctioned government channels. The initial lack of government reaction to the earthquake rumor was followed by a sequence of government responses to the perception of disaster that revealed an attempt to link individualized citizens to the benevolent state in two ways: first, the government sent individual text messages to all residents in the area threatening them that they did not have the right to circulate earthquake warnings; second, official media channels attempted to deflect responsibility for the scare from government institutions, instead saying that particular individuals were responsible for generating mass hysteria. State authorities were quick to condemn both the earthquake alarm and those that had circulated the warnings to friends, family, and acquaintances, thereby attempting to delegitimize the moral validity of person-to-person civic action in public disaster response. The official reaction to the earthquake panic began on the day following the night of fear, when the prefectural-level governments sent text messages to all the mobile phones of residents in their jurisdiction. These messages advised residents that “according to the earthquake forecast regulation, only the provincial government can release earthquake forecast information. Other organizations and individuals are not authorized to do so.” After this initial response, official media channels proceeded to locate the source of false alarm that had engulfed the area. Initial reports traced the rumor to emergency response training that sought to meet the demands of a potential earthquake, which were misinterpreted by the local population as signs that an earthquake was looming (e.g., Sun and Wang 2010).

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In subsequent reports, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua (2010) published a newspaper article that denied government drills as the origins of the rumor and reported that police had launched an investigation to trace the true source of the rumor: a group of individuals who were said to have maliciously and willfully disseminated false information in nebulous web spaces. This narrative spin attempted to absolve the local state for responsibility in the mass panic. However, the suspicions people brought forward in relation to the local government responses, and particularly the threatening text messages, had the opposite effect, making the local government look even more culpable for failing to protect its citizens. In the extreme, a young man from a village near Jiexiu openly voiced his suspicion about this explanatory turn, claiming that the whole situation was a government experiment to test whether people could be mobilized without any official communication at a time of emergency. As an ardent gamer with a vibrant online life, this young man possessed both internet savvy and a skeptical outlook on official discourse. He enumerated a number of suspicious circumstances that led him to conclude that the earthquake scare was a government experiment: the timing of the event a fortnight after Spring Festival, when even migrants were back in their home villages; the lack of any official action during the event; the underreporting of the scale of the event; and the changing attribution of blame. A Beijing-based journalist working for Xinhua, the official government press agency, agreed that the transformation of events suggested a potential coverup. She maintained that the explanation was almost certainly the result of the local government’s attempt to save face over the debacle and that the event was probably the result of mismanagement, although a conscious experiment to test the reach of telecommunication rumors on the local population was hard to rule out completely. The asymmetrical relationship between the truth trajectories of conspiracy theories and the power relations in which they are embedded makes the validity of such “mischievous theories” difficult to trace (Pelkmans and Machold 2011). Nonetheless, conspiracy theories conjure the power to bring secret, hidden, and even occult worldviews to light (West and Sanders 2003). In the weeks following the earthquake scare, Shanxi residents attempted to historicize the experience using continuities with the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thereby unpacking the longer history of moral expectations of housing safeguarded by the state. By recounting the night of the earthquake scare in comparison to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, Shanxi residents implicitly blamed the local

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­ overnment for failing to secure the safety of its residents, while g hailing the national government as its benevolent savior. Speaking about the Sichuan earthquake, most residents agreed that the event was a natural disaster (tianhai) but that poor construction policies were to blame for the extent of the death toll of over 68,000 people. This catastrophic event had far-reaching consequences across the country, from an efference of volunteer activities (see Gao et al. 2011) to demolitions of settlements and institutions deemed sub-standard by the state, often those catering to vulnerable migrant communities (see Litzinger 2016). One young Jiexiu resident poignantly summarized his assessment of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a failure of the “political-economic system” (zhengjing xitong) in which collusion and corruption had turned a “calamity” (hainan) into a “tragedy” (beiju). Turning the conversation back to the events in Shanxi, he made a cynical pun about the labeling of the earthquake scare: “The local government called the event an earthquake rumor (dizhen yaoyan), but it gave the common people a quake alarm [zhenjing, a pun on the word for shock].” The government responses were intended to bolster trust in the local state, but the individualized prosecution of citizens had the opposite effect. The threatening tone of the text message caused widespread outrage and anxiety, as people pointed out that when they were faced with the potentiality of disaster, they had both the right (youquan) and the reason (youli) to alert their friends, family, and fellow citizens of impending danger. The government and media responses thereby mirrored what residents saw as breaking the moral contract between them and the government to protect its people from dangers. Instead, people challenged the state’s intentions and maintained their right and responsibility for one another in warding off disaster through a collective moral ethic of civic interaction. The events spoke to the personal fears and hopes of many of the families in the area, but people continued to complain about how corrupt their local governments were. The night of fear also tied together rural and urban residents in novel ways, as telecommunications and transport routes became vehicles for disaster warnings that expanded beyond known contacts to a generalized sphere of civic interaction between strangers. During the earthquake rumor, the circulation of disaster alerts through novel telecommunications technologies, including mobile phone calls and text messages and, more notably, online messaging boards and chat rooms, complemented older means of warning, such as sirens, honking, loudspeakers, and landline telephone calls. The expansion of private communication between individuals, as well as

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the anonymity afforded through online lives, bore witness to a shift in the distribution of information in society that broadened the sphere of minjian between known personal contacts to a world of strangers. These new technologies of connection allowed more privatized spaces of interpersonal communication but simultaneously offered new arenas for the circulation of information through anonymous broadcasting, thereby expanding the realm of minjian as a form of moral action between citizens beyond the state. In a large-scale project on global social media use, Miller et al. (2016) refer to this range of possible arenas of disclosure on social media platforms as their “scalable sociality.” Building on their emphases on social media users’ concern for the personal consequences of online revelations reveals the potential political and moral consequences of the capacity to scale sociality beyond known relations to reach anonymous strangers. Especially since the late 2000s, the anonymity of online engagements on popular Chinese social networking sites has been severely curtailed, with many websites, online software, and mobile apps demanding identity verification at registration as well as increasing integration and therefore oversight of user activities across diverse platforms.

The Turn to Fellow Citizens Most Shanxi residents upheld a split image of the state encompassing a benign central government through a relationship that was largely political and symbolic, while criticizing the predatory local state in terms of social and economic actualities and inequalities (cf. Guo 2001). Rumors and conspiracy in southern Shanxi formed a vernacular way of dealing with tropes of state responsibility and government legitimacy in protecting citizens from property developers and their dangerous constructions. Distrust in the local state’s ability to adequately respond to emergencies was circulated in housing rumors, but these shared anxieties were embedded in the broad shift from housing provision through state-sanctioned workplaces to the housing market operating in the interests of capital rather than “the people.” Distrust because of the complicity of different levels of government with economic developers emerged as central to people’s everyday experiences of disquiet in their homes. People’s responses to these threats raised the possibility of mobilizing commitments to civil society beyond governmental, or even institutional, domains in China more generally. Gao Bingzhong

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(2008) moves beyond a synchronous conception of “civil society” in China, instead tracing its evolving transformation as a subject of and space for action beyond atomized individuals. This includes how the history of “folk culture” (minjian wenhua) as well as socialist experiences of “cooperation” (hezuo) suffused and continue to inform understandings of “civil society” (gongmin shehui) that differ from party state ideology and provide alternative resources for building the social as a sphere of action (Gao 2008). This occurs most visibly in the upheaval that marks events of crisis, including, notably, the Sichuan earthquake (Yan 2011). During moments of despair, engagement beyond micropolitical maneuvering brings collective ethics to the fore as activities are placed in relation to abstract economic forces and imagined political authorities (Mueggler 1998). In reacting to tragedy, citizens struggle with the status of the truth in relation to the Chinese state and the global neoliberal system as “public secrets” became explicit (Fong 2007). Disquiet and disorder regarding housing in Shanxi revealed an acute apprehension of the government’s capacity to meet its moral obligation to protect its citizens from reckless local government and economic developers. More specifically, the Shanxi state privatized large swathes of public resources in the 1990s in ways that often benefited those with connections, wealth, and power. In this wave of privatization, those close to the government through state employment in the bureaucracy or in state-owned enterprises were provided a rung on the urban housing ladder as housing became privatized. The enclosure of formerly public housing was effectively a process of accumulation by dispossession beyond the sphere of production and entering the sphere of reproduction through commoditizing the domestic realm of home life. Those who were not in the privileged position of becoming urban homeowners in the first round of enclosures now found themselves increasingly excluded from the possibility of becoming middle-class citizens, both in the city and the countryside. As housing was turned from an object of use value to a commodity estimated through its exchange value, the home became a means of capital accumulation through the construction of expensive residential compounds beyond the means of most citizens. This commodity housing allowed access only to those with financial resources or personal connections rather than providing housing based on labor contributions. The rising role of housing as a vehicle for accumulation, and as an object of risky speculation and dangerous corruption, was thereby supplanting housing as a means of livelihood in southern

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Shanxi. Housing drew a new dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, and yet people were united in their anxiety over becoming victims of corrupted construction. This fear brought people together in the realm of minjian across social divides, as citizens faced collapsing trust in state safeguards of proper economic and political conduct.

The Moral Economy of Minjian Chinese anxieties surrounding housing speak to wider debates about the “moral economy” in social theory and its uneasy position in late capitalism. In Karl Polanyi’s (1944) reading, the predatory expansion of the capitalist market through commoditizing new spheres (including his famous “fictitious commodities” of land, labor, and money) are accompanied by a “double movement” in which society implicates state institutions in social protection by attempting to reembed the economic within the social and ameliorate the worst vagaries committed against those most vulnerable to market exploitation. However, in southern Shanxi, state protection from market excesses has not occurred as an autonomous process; instead the state as the main driver of the accumulation of capital has allowed citizens and officials with close connections to state-owned enterprises and local governments to expropriate “the people” by privatizing housing and other key means of production and reproduction. Those excluded from these processes, the dispossessed, turned to each other through a form of interpersonal action, minjian, which can be compared to but not equated with E. P. Thompson’s notion of the “crowd.” Thompson eschews the view of the hunger riots in eighteenth-century England as “rebellions of the belly” in favor of understanding how the crowd managed to forge a popular consensus to regulate the prices of grain and bread. They did so by leaning on paternalist laws and state actors and overturning market logics of squeezing profits by rendering profiteers as “outsiders.” Similarly, Shanxi residents legitimized circulating housing rumors through a community consensus grounded in collective action as “defending traditional rights and customs” to resist capital exploitation (Thompson 1971: 78). However, unlike the hunger rioters, Shanxi residents struggled to receive endorsement by political authorities seeking to fulfill their moral demands. Why was this the case? Both food and housing form commodities whereby demand is decoupled from supply and yet access to these commodities is a basic necessity for subsistence, even leading to popular conceptions

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of home purchase as a “rigid demand” (gangxu) in China (see Wang 2018). However, food and housing are differentiated in terms of spatial distribution and temporal urgency. While hunger shaped an endemic struggle in eighteenth-century England, there were localizable nodes in the commodity chain (at the millers, the bakers, or the storekeepers) where disruption to the distribution of grain and bread could lead to mass contestation and crowd action. By contrast, the Shanxi housing terrain causes anxiety and strife to household livelihoods as dispersed struggles with less identifiable nodes of blockage that could form sites for potential resistance. The acute moment of the earthquake scare unexpectedly threatened the housing that all households depended upon and thereby forged the potential for this type of collective action. Crucially, the solidarity for this collective action grew on the constant, steady, and unrelenting shared experience of conflict between common people as minjian in confrontation with the predatory local state and exploitative housing developers. Nonetheless, the problem of more long-term strategies for resistance remained, as the slow and gradual deterioration of housing stock or residential security, or even the social exclusion from subsidized public housing, threw the burdens of finding adequate and safe housing onto individual households. Thereby, the challenges and risks associated with different types of housing were dispersed among individual households, discouraging the formation of effective patterns of mass action. Rather than celebrating the earthquake scare as an incident that could ignite the flames of popular resistance to privatization, it is also worth bearing in mind the cautionary note toward the end of Thompson’s work, where he shows how the pairing of the paternalist authority and the crowd came to an end: through the stigmatization of popular self-activity and the repression of such activities by direct force. These conditions emerged, as rulers no longer felt themselves beholden to the poor, but to capital. It follows that a government and its elites indebted to the logics of the accumulation by dispossession may not be the place to pin hopes for state redress to market exploitation.

Conclusion Claims, Belonging, and the Home

_ The Countryside as Counterpastoral Despite devaluation and dispossession, rural homemaking continues, although not necessarily always in familiar forms. Sweeping Cliff practices of rural reproduction included accepting, and even colluding in, transforming and losing houses; remaking longstanding kinship practices through new forms of intimacy; and promoting affective service industries, such as tourism and sales, in the countryside. Rituals offered forms of recognition for this process, not in opposition to capitalist modernity but by crystallizing how notions of belonging became forged in its midst of capitalist development. I have argued that villagers insisted on logics of labor and care in generating claims of belonging, thereby resisting the dislocation that could have resulted in the wholesale destruction of home. In this process, the countryside became romanticized in ways that resonate with the advance of capitalism elsewhere. For instance, Raymond Williams (1973) showed how industrial regions of Europe became divided into imaginaries of a rural past and an urban future, with pastoral idylls harking back to the Garden of Eden. Rural-labor relations became occluded when the countryside appeared as the outcome of patterns of nature, peasant houses and products became fetishized, and capitalism, “the cruel economy,” seemed like an import from the drivers of development in industrial cities. As an antidote to these misleading narratives, Williams insists on a “counterpastoral” perspective that highlights the work and toil of the countryside and shows how rural elites fostered the growth of capitalism from within.

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This counterpastoral approach focused on labor and capitalism proved illuminating for understanding rural Chinese development. As young people went to the city, but also returned to fashion the new countryside, they romanticized their own “peasant” origins, their family homes, and lamented the entry of capitalism from urban centers on the “outside.” However, local elites, from cadres to entrepreneurs, simultaneously fostered rural development through commercial nationalism and rural romanticism in the interests of “red capitalism” from within. Although notions of the “home” in families, houses, and localities operated as sites of nostalgic construction, they also provided spaces for the recuperation of value, dignity, and worth. Claims of home allowed villagers to negotiate and bargain in ways that provided advantageous positions for some residents, curtailing outmigration despite dislocation by development in the village. In the spirit of these concerted efforts, I developed the argument about claims making in Sweeping Cliff as a homegrown labor theory of value, fused from the logics of kinship work, experiences of Maoist distribution, and the commodification of livelihoods in the capitalist market. Theoretically, this form of claims making became articulated through mutual efforts of labor and care within the home. Despite the moral connotations of these claims, those participating in the work of claims making emerged as socially differentiated within the larger devaluation of the region. Due to the resilience on the part of residents, domicide, literally referring to the extinction of homes, emerged as a partial and uneven process. By confronting domicide, families struggled to domesticate capitalism, in the sense of taming or neutralizing its destructive forces, but also became implicated in processes of dispossession, particularly at the household level. This emerged ethnographically as families accepted losing their houses in return for service economy employment and new apartment suites, so young people could return to the countryside. Desires for developmentalist projects instilled by the Maoist state had taken an antiagricultural turn in the post-Mao Era that resonated with corporate and cadre imperatives of forging commercial, and taxable, economic activities in Sweeping Cliff. Participation in the commodification of the economy allowed senior kin to view their devaluation as a sacrifice for following generations, especially their children and grandchildren. Despite this ideological complicity with the development of capitalism, the logics of socialism and the work of kinship allowed villagers to assess these processes as harmonious, and even mutually beneficial, despite having to offer up their houses to development.

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Parallels with dislocation processes in urban China since the 1990s emerged, in which the housing stock of former work units were transferred or sold to workers, or privatized on the open real estate market, with limits placed on replenishing real estate as an employment benefit for employees (Tomba 2014; Zhang 2010). Simultaneously, rapid processes of urban development meant residents were frequently relocated in response to commercial rezoning or real estate developments (Kipnis 2016; Shao 2013). Not just local real estate developers but also local governments often stood to profit from the higher value of commercial and residential real estate (Kipnis 2016; Shao 2013). The shocks of these experiences reverberated in Sweeping Cliff, as the price of urban real estate in the valley was beyond reach, yet the local government profited from the lease of the old village and the income generated by tourism. The spatial issues of urban and rural or coastal and inland disparity became revealed as not just revolving around a regional, but a generational, compromise. Especially in the boom years of Chinese economic growth in the 2000s, households stratified by generation, and to a certain extent gender, appeared as agricultural, industrial, and service economy workers frequently lived under one roof. This compression of timescales became consciously manipulated as the devaluation of older generations provided younger generations with development and progress. Issues of gender also remained complex, as family planning and bureaucratic accounting dispossessed villagers of some of their reproductive powers but enabled others to forge new responsibilities, recognitions, and claims of care in the countryside.

Contradictions of Red Capitalism Red capitalism arose from contradictions between capital accumulation and political legitimation in the post-Mao Era, as imperatives of development were pitched into direct conflict with safeguards for livelihoods. Commodification often leads markets to become disembedded from social relations, with a “double movement” by the state necessary to protect those vulnerable from exploitation (Polanyi 1944). However, in China the rapprochement of this double movement takes a different form, as capital accumulation by the state overshadows that of the market, and socialist values become the force that sutures these contradictory forces together (Nonini 2008). This prompts the question of whether we need to revisit the notion of the

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“moral economy” through more contradictory and fractured forces of location, class, and dispossession (Palomera and Vetta 2016) and the “value” of labor more broadly within contemporary capitalism (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018; Narotzky 2018). In China both urban and rural areas underwent upheaval in readjusting to a new labor regime and distribution of resources as a technocratic and managerial elite emerged at the head of formerly collective assets in the post-Mao Era. Due to the close ties of this elite to the state, often even working directly as state functionaries, this constellation took the shape of cadre capitalism (So 2003; see also Goodman 2008). To include citizens creating and upholding these socialist values on the ground, I built on these notions of cadre capitalism focused on political elites or apolitical middle classes to put forward a more encompassing notion of red capitalism (see Dickson 2003; Kong 2010). In the wake of decollectivization and privatization, nonelite claims to homes were made through labor, genealogy, and location, compelling citizens to consent, collude, and resist red capitalism. The roots of red capitalism spread deeply within the fabric of everyday life in Sweeping Cliff. As resources, including houses, labor, and livelihoods, became commodified as “cultural heritage” (wenhua yichan), villagers felt obliged to offer up their homes for the public good of development and progress. Residents thereby became complicit in their own dispossession as necessary to maintaining socialist sovereignty through citizen sacrifice. The allegiance to socialism and development that bound everyday dispossession to red capitalism made it very hard for citizens to challenge exploitation and extraction in their own language. Instead, the developmentalist state absorbed particular localities for resources, including as “cultural heritage,” and demanded popular allegiance, thereby infusing Maoist directives to “serve the people” (wei renmin fuwu) with Market Era slogans of “peaceful development” (heping fazhan). A growing number of Chinese sites have been commodified to shore up state legitimacy through socialist legacies, with red tourism most explicitly strengthening adherence to an imagined “party spirit” (dangxing) (Pieke 2018). Encompassing particular locales such as Sweeping Cliff, but also universalizing experiences of Chineseness, communism, and development, not only bolstered legitimizations of socialist sovereignty, but fused arenas of local to national politics through conceptions of home. Red capitalism percolated through notions of home as a response to contradictions between accumulation and legitimation. Since the

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late 1970s China underwent economic liberalization yet retained the political monopoly of the communist party (Lee 2007: 18–20). This resulted in a “trapped transition” (Pei 2006) whereby citizens fell back onto notions of “rightful resistance” in the absence of recourse to legal means (O’Brien and Li 2006), often leading to cellular activism and the use of the petitioning system rather than seeking justice in courts or sustained solidarity-based action across locales (Lee 2007). Hierarchically differentiated political imaginations, with the split between the exploitative local governance and a benevolent central authority at its core, resulted in a fractured state that became hard to hold to account as uneven development unfolded. This routinization, or sometimes ritualization, of the revolutionary party through bureaucracy and policy elsewhere in China has been tied to “state involution,” as neither the progressive impetus was upheld nor rational, impersonal structures implemented (Siu 1989; Steinmüller 2013). In some cities, cadres, corporations, and citizens fell afoul of the law as they attempted to bridge these gaps through elite personal connections to further development, foster intimacy, and line their pockets (Osburg 2013). The alignment of intimate, political, and business affairs among Chinese elites has led to accusations of corruption, or at least detractions as improper use of “connections” (guanxi) (Osburg 2013; Tan 2006; Yang 1994). Sweeping Cliff villagers compared instrumentalized urban exploitation of “connections” (guanxi) with a more wholesome rural realm of “human affection” (renqing) or “people-to-people” (minjian) spaces of civic interaction (see also Kipnis 1997; Yang 1994). The corrosion of established moral orders became refracted through complaints about exploitative local cadres (ganbu), leaders (lingdao), and bosses (laoban) as untrustworthy corporate and state development forces that threatened to drag the region into disorder and chaos (luan). While shifts from social contracts with the state to legal contracts with employers and corporations under marketization were common in postsocialist labor regimes, these arrangements ultimately remained governed by the state and its institutions (Burawoy 1979). In the absence of the radical rupture of the regime that ensued after the demise of the USSR in the Soviet Bloc, political continuity under the Chinese communist party resulted in concessions made to and by the ruling elite. Rather than rejecting compromises with powerholders, the post-Mao constellation in China under red capitalism raises similarities with a Gramscian “passive revolution” (see Thomas 2015 for historical comparisons). As ruling elites delivered on economic

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goals of development and growth under marketization and privatization, China achieved real social gains that were formally progressive, yet absorbed subaltern projects into an established hegemonic project of red capitalism.

Struggles over Value Sweeping Cliff residents made claims on the state and over resources based on labor contributions as the guiding principle behind notions of justice, equity, and righteousness. The tension between externally enforced government discourse and what people worked for, even fought for, internally seemed to be bursting at the seams. As citizens traced their contributions to the nation, to socialism, and to the future, they felt that they were not getting what they deserved for their work, labor, and effort. By mobilizing collective identifications through “the people” (renmin) and “the masses” (qunti), citizens gave credit to both the socialist and nationalist logic of the state as more than the sum of its parts. Contradictions between forces of the capitalist market and socialist redistribution emerged visibly in the labor politics of post-Mao China (Lee 2007). By rejecting the commodification of their labor as invalidating social contracts, Chinese workers contested “the value of their labor in the broadest sense” by making “moral, economic, and legal claims and counterclaims” about “the meaning of labor, the basis of legitimate government, and the principles of a just society” (Lee 2007: 22, 6). Workplaces as sites of control, conflict, and resistance often crystalize in residential spaces, such as dormitories or housing, where worker livelihoods are at stake (Pun 2005; Rofel 1999), enmeshing labor production with spheres of social reproduction in a holistic, encompassing sense (Smith 2018). While both socialist and capitalist studies of the workplace abound, the home as a workplace garners rare consideration. Sweeping Cliff did not just form a site of household production or labor reproduction but collapsed these contrasts in ways that not only factories and dormitories but rural villages offer, as relations between kin, neighbors, colleagues, and compatriots were considered, enacted, and challenged. In Sweeping Cliff the devaluation of agricultural livelihoods paved the way to accumulation by dispossession over residential neighborhoods, as labor and houses were usurped in the interest of development. Relations of production and domestic reproduction formed inseparable experiences of both class and locality

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in Sweeping Cliff. Rather than mirroring the neat divide between the workplace and home, public and private, and formal and informal labor associated with workers in industrialized urban settings, Sweeping Cliff implicated these spheres through work done in fields and houses, temples, tunnels, courtyards and offices. Withdrawal of labor forms a powerful means of resistance in factories, or even fields, that are simply not effective in households, as the most severe harm falls back to members. However, by refusing to sell their homes or to work for certain employers, some villagers did oppose the extractive and exploitative local development forces. Forms of mutual cooperation and support within and beyond households also ameliorated the potentially disastrous effects of devaluation and dispossession. Nonetheless, within an increasingly marketized and financialized economy, sites of struggle shift from places of production to processes of the realization and circulation of value (Clover 2016; Harvey 2018). Nonetheless, in Sweeping Cliff compliant and complicit activities far outweighed any punctuated acts of resistance. Although families, homes, and workplaces in the countryside were not immune to the post-Maoist state retreat, rural citizens also did not receive the same state-backed privileges and rights as urban industrial workers during high socialism. Some welfare provisions, such as rural medical care and pensions payments, actually improved in the countryside in the 2000s. For instance, family planning, arguably one of the largest forms of dispossession in the countryside, also carried an implicit social contract with it: those children who were born could receive medical attention, attend educational institutions, and attain employment opportunities out of reach to senior generations. Similar fractions and realignments occurred with the marriage laws, inheritance practices, and other gendered inequalities. Household registration and urban real estate markets in particular opened up possibilities for some young women in the countryside, while barring the entry for others, especially rural men without assets, in pursuing urban aspirational pathways. This approach extended notions of distributed personhood (Strathern 1988) into relational and processual identifications with labor and care (see also Bruckermann 2017a). Tracing how “peasant” (nongmin) status became reinforced through bureaucratic infrastructures and market processes further broadened notions of locality and class beyond its historical association with industrialized working-class identities. Terms were proliferating on the ground to describe “peasant” status beyond the

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bureaucratic state label. The stigmatizing language surrounding the rural population as “earthy” (tu), “backward” (luohou), “uncivilized” (bu wenming), “without culture” (meiyou wenhua), and even “lacking in human quality” (suzhi cha) continued to denigrate citizens with the official designation of “peasant household status” (nongmin hukou). However, Sweeping Cliff residents also drew on alternative vocabularies championing “old cadres” (laodang) and “red heroes” (hong yingxiong) in their ancestry, as well as insider terms for “locals” (dangdiren) to speak positively about “the common people” (laobaixing) in a language that enforced boundaries around those “inside” (nei) intersecting and relational imaginations of class and locality. Moreover, the outdated labels of Maoist “class” (jieji) disappeared in favor of the depoliticized language of “social strata” (jieceng) or transmuted into the insidious “human quality” (suzhi) discourse that attempts to internalize supposed shortcomings in terms of health, education, morality, and skills to citizens. Under these conditions of devaluation, the capacity to create belonging in the countryside and forge positive rural identities appears to be under threat. Nonetheless, rural workers did not look likely to disappear nor be completely displaced by urban centers. Instead, village life revealed itself to reproduce much more than an abstract, homogenous reservoir of labor, instead offering continuities in the production of kinship, class, and location that would be rendered invisible by macroeconomic snapshots. Even as Sweeping Cliff residents left agricultural livelihoods, commuting to the nearby city, ventured into industrial labor in the surrounding mountains, or created service sector work in the village, they retained strong notions of being “countryside people” (nongcun ren) or simply “villagers” (cunren). Although the Chinese population, and its labor, was segmented into rural and urban through the household registration system, internal differentiations within and across both categories emerged. In the last three decades the loosening of this system to permit internal migration, the widening gulf of economic inequality, and the increasing stratification of the population through state-­promoted conceptions of “human quality,” or suzhi, have complicated and blurred this blunt dualism. As a Foucauldian notion of normalizing and disciplining discourse, suzhi constitutes part of governmentality whereby the power of subject formation can change definition according to context (Anagnost 2004), partially reordering the political economy around qualities of docility, skill, and education of the labor force (Kipnis 2007).

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In this sense, identity and performativity intersect, yet there are limitations to this Foucauldian notion of suzhi, as the game is so clearly stacked against many citizens in acquiring this ephemeral “human quality.” When people say that somebody has low suzhi, this can be the equivalent of saying they are a low-class piece of crap. It is no wonder, then, that people take up arguments to fight back and assert their own counternarratives to contest the official framing of their condition. Young people in Sweeping Cliff and elsewhere in China, for instance, satirized their own position as being part of the “low-­ quality population” (diduan renkou). This play on words turned their “low quality” (diduan) into the result of shoddy manufacturing along the lines of cheap consumer goods (diduan changpin), thereby shifting responsibility onto developmental forces for not investing in their future. Rather than earlier discourse of suzhi as reifying and internalizing a docile, skills-oriented, working subject position (Kipnis 2007), this inserted rural citizens into an inferior production chain of human population systematically deprived of resources and insufficiently compensated for the costs of their own reproduction. As rural schools, hospitals, and care facilities were underfinanced compared to their urban counterparts, families were forced to make up the difference and effectively subsidized development in urban areas. Unsurprisingly, this increasingly ubiquitous but inflammatory term of diduan renkou was censored. The rural-urban dualism and suzhi discourse strengthened claims of home, as citizens found themselves in more stratified and differentiated positions than these categorical divisions would allow, especially through ties to the government, unequal access to resources, and appeals to the state. As a claim to home, the state did not displace the domestic or corporate workplace but added to it a higher order encompassment. In the transition from Maoism to capitalism, sediments of previous eras became part of what allowed the new order of red capitalism to grow. In a sense, the state offered a home to everybody in China and thereby recuperated claims for home through its hegemonic position to pursue capitalist accumulation. However, as the state offered kindred citizens across the country the language of home, it simultaneously found itself under the obligation to provide the conditions in which labor could be recognized and homes could be reproduced. This transmuted social contract of the national home in China thereby bridged contradictions between labor and capital, built bridges between state accumulation and legitimation, and even justified devaluation and dispossession in pursuit of greater goals for Chinese development under red capitalism.

Postscript Home as Workplace

_ Returning to Sweeping Cliff village today, visitors are greeted by the modern apartment blocks of the New Village (Xin Cun) constructed across the road from the ancient village walls of the original settlement. Many villagers have moved across the road, leaving behind the beautiful but high-maintenance grand courtyard dwellings in favor of the comfort and style of the light gray buildings. The new real estate development features gradations of size and comfort that range from a series of uniform high-rises with small apartments featuring a glassed-in balcony to grander ground floor row houses including their own walled courtyards. The new accommodation includes such luxuries as indoor plumbing, gas-powered stoves, and central heating. This means that residents in the new homes no longer need to carry coal from their courtyards and light the black substance indoors, causing noxious fumes, and every apartment comes with indoor bathrooms and glass windows. Villagers need not open heavy wooden gates to leave their home, squat on overnight pots in the dark, or tend to the paper windows stretched across wooden carpentered frames throughout the winter (Figure 8.1). In deciding how to distribute the new housing, the tourism development company evaluated villagers’ homes according to the quality and type of construction materials, the elegance of the domestic architecture, and the floor space by square meters. It then offered villagers equivalent space or discounted prices for real estate in the new village in return for their houses in the old town. This compensation enjoyed a mixed reception among villagers, with many villagers

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Figure 8.1. The new village. Photograph by the author.

glad that tourism provided jobs for young people, who now happily returned to live in the modern apartment blocks, while others were deeply disturbed by the breakup of their settlement. Contestation over appropriate compensation, and whether houses were eligible for exchange within the commercial development, caused grievances between some villagers and the Triumph Corporation. Triumph saw compensation as an issue of appropriately surveying and categorizing property in terms of the floor space, usage, materials, and state of disrepair. This disadvantaged villagers who lived in newly built houses and earthen cave dwellings, while providing a good footing to residents of the more monumental brick-built merchant homes. This meant that some residents profited economically in a compensation windfall by receiving trade-ins for dilapidated dwellings, while their neighbors found themselves at a disadvantage without the capacity to move out of the increasingly deserted village. One family already invested heavily in newly constructing white tile courtyard homes for their sons, only to find that these modern buildings could not be exchanged for apartments, and they now sat in a ghost town that no bride wanted to move into. For villagers without real estate deemed worthy of heritage status, the terms of exchange could be bitter. Many residents took the initial Triumph offers and moved to the new village in 2012, while others held out in the hope of better terms, as they felt the initial compensation package was insufficient. The tourism development company rarely budged, despite the multiple rounds of renegotiation. One young man recalled that his uncle argued that his home was not

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just a pile of bricks but an ancestral home, eventually despairing and dying in grief, “unable to bear that everybody moved.” Asked whether force had been applied, he described this as “small power yielding to big power” (xiaoli qufu dali), comparing the situation to a traffic accident between an influential and wealthy driver in a big expensive vehicle and a “nobody” riding a small electric bicycle who ends up paying for damages and penalties, so “it’s not about who is responsible and who is at fault, but it’s about who has the power.” Another nonnegotiable requirement for acquiring housing in the new village is that the owner holds a Sweeping Cliff village household registration (hukou), thereby marking formal, bureaucratic, and state-sanctioned inclusion in the village community. A potential future consequence of this policy could be that housing becomes even more likely to be transferred patrilineally, as patrilocal marital preferences favoring the transfer of real estate to sons becomes compounded with the official policy of the household registration for the new apartments. However, the desirability of the modern rural accommodation in the new village has already affected marriage negotiations in the area, as young women increasingly seek to retain the Sweeping Cliff registration after marriage, with one bride even transferring her husband’s registration to the up-and-coming tourist hotspot. While some residents considered the employment opportunities that came with the relocation more important than remaining in their old homes, many villagers complained that they had no idea where anybody lived anymore, as neighbors were redistributed across the new village into completely new constellations. One young woman made this criticism: “The new homes are all on top of one another. Outsiders say the apartment blocks look very well managed, but it feels quite chaotic. If I want to visit an old friend, I don’t know where to find his or her apartment.” She thereby expressed how the relocation realigned established face-to-face relations into engagements that needed to be planned and coordinated, rather than the chance encounters and settled places of lifelong covillagers. Moreover, the old village appeared quite empty and even lonely to the few households who remained. A number of villagers refused to exchange their homes for compensation, even those residing in grander courtyard complexes. The refusal to bow down to dispossession in the interest of housing development has been well documented in urban areas, while rural “nail houses” (dingzihu) normally appear when they resist demolition on the edges of commercial urban real estate developments. In Sweeping Cliff, a number of families retained

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Figure 8.2. The dragon dance, a new tradition for Sweeping Cliff. Photograph by the author.

their homes in the village in defiance of the offer for luxurious trades in housing offered by Triumph Corporation. A number of families also kept access to their old homes despite having formally moved to new homes, citing emotional attachment and ancestral links to the houses as paramount reasons. While some villagers expressed feelings of dislocation, others voiced their optimism about development. At Chinese New Year, villagers publicly celebrated a new tradition in which they led a dragon dance procession from the village mayor’s courtyard in the new village through the old town, dancing and drumming along the main street and waving the long golden dragon (Figure 8.2). This elaborately organized ritual was staged on two consecutive days: on the first day beginning at the mayor’s courtyard and on the second in the Triumph Corporation boss’s holiday courtyard. The display thereby championed the twin patrons of the town who formally divided its power in political and economic terms. During the ritual procession, villagers themselves appeared thrilled with the festivities, with participants drumming and dancing who would never have dreamed of taking part in ritual events that the tourism development company had staged in the past (see Bruckermann 2016). As this ritual celebration showed, many Sweeping Cliff residents hoped to maintain claims of home that bridged both the new and old villages as places for their lives. However, the ambiguous rupture in experiences of displacement

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emerged in melancholic statements; for example, one young woman stated, “The new houses may be better, but they don’t feel like they are ours; the old houses, they are really ours.” The statement of new houses as “better” and old houses as “ours” must be unpacked to make sense of the situation Sweeping Cliff residents now face. The woman who made that comment previously reflected on family regrets (huiyi) about moving to the new village by analyzing the situation from three perspectives: business (shengyi), body (shenti), and emotion (ganqing). The family business suffered from the relocation by cutting off access to village and tourist customers by removing them from the heart of the bustling village, and in this sense the family took an economic hit. However, in terms of health, particularly in caring for aging bodies of senior kin, the move alleviated many domestic burdens, from carrying coal to constant repairs, and relocation was beneficial in dissipating concern over increasing weakness, frailty, and illness. The main dimension for regret or remorse fell in the field of emotion, when families suffered severely from moving to a place where they no longer felt at home. However, concluding the analysis with “the new houses may be better, but they don’t feel like they are ours; the old houses, they are really ours” indicates that these three dynamics are not really separate, but interconnected through the home as the place of work, kinship, and care. While certain routes to claiming homes through kinship and labor in Sweeping Cliff were severed by the move to the new village, many residents built on these foundations in processes that revived village life through ties of labor, intimacy, and reproduction. The unrelenting, repetitive, and necessary work done in the old Sweeping Cliff homes was part of a world in which there was no separation between reproductive and productive spheres of labor, where continuities between the fields, the hearth, and bodies were forged. The much lighter workload of the new homes hollowed out these entangled relations, while more rigid divisions of space into functionally separate rooms for sleeping, cooking, eating, and socializing compounded new segregations of social life into discrete functions. One woman lived with her parents, husband, and newborn in a single apartment, sharing a bed platform that no longer served to heat the room, but nonetheless generated the social warmth of togetherness her family sought. When asked about the bed platform, she spoke positively about the new centralized heating system, pointing out that “the central heating is really convenient, not having to drag coal around the courtyard. And also without the coal vapor,

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it’s so much healthier and more hygienic.” By contrast, one elderly neighbor who lived alone was a bit more ambivalent about the conveniences of the new apartments: “I’m still not sure what to do with myself,” she laughed with slight self-depreciation and continued, “I just play mahjong all day long!” For her the new apartments had done anything but create the social vacuum some villagers described in not being able to find their neighbors, as she moved socially between homes and pursued her hobby. However, she seemed somewhat embarrassed at her light domestic workload, despite having already been part of the senior ladies’ mahjong set in the old village, spending long summer afternoons in her friend’s courtyards squatting at low tables gambling. Beyond decisions of where to locate the next round of mahjong, residents raised serious concerns about where to store, display, and give offerings to the ancestors, as the new homes lacked an analogous space to the old southwest corner of the central bay where the ancestral tablets had been conventionally kept and worshiped. Villagers came up with a variety of solutions, from placing the small tablet cabinets in the living room of the apartments, beneath the offering table to the deities, or even placing the tablets in the upstairs balcony of the houses, the enclosed space in the farthest southwest corner of the new homes. While the God of Wealth and the other divinities sometimes found new homes in the apartments, usually opposite the front door in the corridor, the female deity of the hearth and protector of women and children simply disappeared from the home with the kang. In addition to these practical ritual challenges emerging in the new homes, some families adamantly refused to allow the kinship claims to the old houses as ancestral homes to disappear. Tales of how grandparents and even great-grandparents lived and died in the homes came to the fore as villagers described the difficulty with placing the ancestral tablets in the apartments and houses of the new town. Some villagers even returned to their old houses, many now renovated with great care to look almost new, with their ancestral tablets to kowtow and burn incense at the same location as they had their whole lives. Kinship work reappeared in these claims to the old houses, as villagers avoided dislocating the ancestors and their ritual recognition through living descendants to be shifted, even just a few hundred meters. The logic of socialist contribution to the nation as part of the claim to the old houses remained steadfast for many senior residents. One old party member who continued to reside in her home had tears in

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her eyes as she repeated her story of arrival in the village to her visiting “international comrade” on the kang. More surprisingly, some villagers transferred this logic of patriotic self-sacrifice to their claims to the new homes. One man argued that the “national heritage” can now be shared and enjoyed by more visitors than when the houses were residential homes. Furthermore, he pointed out, “China cannot depart from progress and development” (jinbu yu fazhan libukai), thereby reiterating the ideology of the developmentalist state. At times, younger residents expressed more vehement criticism about the relocation than their senior relatives. Although this situation may have resulted from feeling more confident about voicing their concerns, some young villagers seemed inseparably attached to their family homes, even if they had themselves moved out years before relocation. Possibly, the feeling of having been left adrift without an anchor permeated their experiences, although the nostalgia of their attachment also resonated with an idealization of childhood and rural life more generally. This nostalgia emerged despite the move of the village providing employment and opportunity in the mountain village that neighboring settlements could only dream of. Nonetheless, the mixed reception of relocation among young residents certainly resonated with my ambivalence about this form of preservation in the interest of tourism development. This form of rural tourism has been a growing phenomenon throughout the country as villages vie to attract cosmopolitan urbanites with their promise of authenticity and tranquility. As young villagers seemed more nostalgic about their ancestral homes, or at least more vocal about the grievances of displacement than senor generations, the possibility that their contact with the outside world and their experiences with the educational and occupational competition of urban centers present themselves as likely explanations. Intimately connected to these concerns was the pride they took in their village roots and the implicit unwillingness to submit to narratives of their inferior rural “human quality” (suzhi) in the countryside. Self-satirizing labels emerged among these youngsters as part of the “low-quality population” (diduan renkou). The phrase borrowed an adjective used to describe a class of products that are high-tech and yet cheaply and shoddily manufactured (diduan changpin) and juxtaposed it with official government discourse on the development of population quality (renkou suzhi). This type of parody of state policy inverted narratives of their intrinsic “lack of quality” (suzhi cha) and instead blamed structural conditions of production for any supposed shortcomings of dispositions, skills, or embodiment.

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These same villagers took the state slogans of “leave the fields, but not the countryside” to its logical consequence, seizing and even creating nonagricultural livelihood strategies in the village. This echoes developments elsewhere in China, where households have seized market opportunities for educated villagers to remain close to home by producing goods and services for discerning urban consumers. In Sweeping Cliff two siblings opened a woodcarving shop with their spouses, thereby entering an entrepreneurial activity that allowed their grandmother to remain in her village home. Other villagers agitatedly argued they had been denied these ­opportunities— for instance, they were not able to open a guesthouse—while others appeared listless and despondent at not being able to continue to sell goods to tourists in their shops. In an intriguing inversion, the workers actually working in the old village have now become the youth rather than the senior farmers of the last decade. They earn their living as tour guides, security guards, ticketing salespersons, and trinket traders, while most of their senior kin have been relocated to the new village, with one tourism development company employee even joking that “all the village youth work as tour guides now.” A few notable exceptions of senior workers appeared at the crossroads throughout the village selling handmade snacks, from sunflower seeds to candied mountain haw on sticks, to passers-by as part of an informal trade of making do, rather than as part of the organized labor force. In addition, some middle-aged villagers were employed in cleaning, guarding, cooking, and maintaining tourism facilities, but they generally remained workers behind the scenes without direct contact with the tourists. In this transition from an agricultural and industrial to a service economy village, the latter means of production is displacing the former not just in economic terms but also in generational terms, with the young workers taking over the old village from their senior relatives. A particularly telling example in the development of livestock reveals how complete this process of rural dislocation and corresponding dispossession has emerged as part and parcel of a new order that ties livelihoods to the fate of the Triumph Corporation. A number of households used to raise livestock in the village, particularly goats, pigs, chickens, and geese. The tourism development company purchased these animals from the villagers and relocated them to animal pens newly constructed farther down in the gorge below Sweeping Cliff. The farmers continued to raise and tend to the animals but relinquished their ownership over the means of production. Now working as salaried employees for Triumph’s livestock

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business, these farmers no longer bore the risks of animal husbandry, such as sudden disease or price fluctuations, although their livelihoods became inextricably linked to the fate of the company. This reveals some of the ambiguities villagers experience as the force of development meets dislocation and dispossession as the only means to make do in the new state-fostered, corporation-dominated, and market-­oriented political economy of red capitalism. In conclusion, the integration between rural and urban spheres cannot level inequalities as long as processes of dispossession and devaluation continue to be enforced on the countryside for the benefit of urban centers. On a larger political and economic frame, location and class continue to resonate with the small gradations and hierarchies of the home and village, between men and women, seniors and juniors, remunerated and unremunerated labor, and new apartment complexes and old crumbling courtyards. However, these inequalities often unfold in unexpected ways as intersections and entanglements at various scales forge an uneven and uncertain terrain that appears both malleable and changing. As rural residents assert their own claims of belonging through their labor, their struggles against dislocation and resistance to dispossession opens up space for hope in the continuity of the countryside as a home for the future.

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Index

adoption, 56, 102, 112n2, 139; of girls, 86 adulthood, raising children to, 100–103 age: family with gender and, 60; gender and, 60, 151 agnatic kin, 18, 38, 86, 110, 142 agricultural land, 38, 39, 52, 60 agriculture: with devaluation of livelihoods, 209; farms, 70–75; with food and housing, 202–3; grains, 70, 154–56, 165, 167, 169; with labor of women, 148, 150, 153–57, 174–77; livestock and, 156; machinery and, 154–55; nonagricultural work and, 2, 165–66, 171–72, 220; pesticides and, 160 alienation, labor and, 148, 153 ancestral tablets, 59, 60, 77, 107, 218; in homes, 53, 58 Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945), 36 architecture: construction, rural, 190–94; construction, urban, 185–87; with domestic, divine and collective spaces, 37; evolution of, 31–32; preservation of, 40, 190–92; with seniority and gender, 33; village, 193 arson, 188 Baihewang (matchmaking website), 116 bankruptcies, 34, 41, 187, 188 banks, 34, 114, 185 Bear, Laura, 61 beauty: health and, 24, 175; ideals, 165–66; ritual regimen for, 130; salespeople and, 174, 177n2; whiteness and, 166 belonging: claims and, 16–21, 157–61, 204, 207, 221; identity

and, 16–21, 210–12; inclusion and, 157–61; kinship and, 15–16; labor, 157–61; local, 45–46, 159–61, 194–95, 210–12; national, 45–46, 194–95, 212; ownership and, 17; women and, 18–19; work on behalf of others, 16–21, 157–61. See also claims “bifurcated state,” 45, 194 birthday celebrations: care celebrated at, 103–9; children and, 81–83, 103–9; costs of, 106; foods for, 104–5, 107; grandmothers at, 92–93; rituals, 104–5; senior kin and, 83, 85 birth permit, 87–88 bodies: good life in food and, 164–67, 175; weight, 165–167; with whiteness and fatness, 165–66 “body ecologic,” 71 bound feet, women with, 35 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 163 boys, family planning policy and, 88. See also children Bray, Francesca, 91 brides, 137; with brothers and mother’s brothers, 129–34; with farewell ceremonies, 129–36; mothers and mothers-in-law with, 120–24. See also marriage bridewealth: high, 121–23, 127; inflation in, 125; objects from, 130, 133; pride in, 123; recipients of, 126 brigade labor, 159, 164 brigade system, patrilocality and, 86 burials. See funerals cadre capitalism, 4, 9, 182, 190, 195, 207 capitalism, red, 9, 23–24, 40–43, 44, 48, 205, 206–9

240 | Index

care: celebrating, 103–9; claims, 90–93, 157–61; coercive, 93–96, 116; commercialized, 15; competitive, 96–100; completing, 100–103; cooperative, 85, 87; in family planning, 87–90; intergenerational cycles of, 91, 151; kinship, work and, 18–21; kinship and history of, 85–87; reciprocal self and, 109–12; seniors and, 86–87, 89–90; women and, 91; work done on behalf of others, 157–59. See also belonging; claims; work done on behalf of others cars: luxury, 42, 195; marriage and, 114–17, 120, 122–23, 125, 132, 139 Carsten, Janet, 61, 109–10, 113n9 CCP. See Chinese Communist Party Chau, Adam, 71, 78n2 chiku (“eating bitterness”), 151, 176 childbirth, costs of, 88 children: adoption of, 56, 86, 102, 112n2, 139; to adulthood, raising of, 100–103; agnatic kin and, 86; birthdays and, 81–83, 103–9; birth permits for, 87–88; boys, 88; of Cultural Revolution, 61–65; dispossession and, 75, 210; education of, 35, 90, 101; families incorporating, 26n4; family planning policy and, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 113n4, 119, 210; funerals of, 87; gender and, 93, 96; girls, 35, 66, 81, 86, 88, 95; infants, 67, 87, 96–100, 103, 106, 111, 113n3; intergenerational cycle, 19, 91, 151; pressure to bear, 93–96; rituals for bearing, 96; role of, 19, 90–93, 96; social heat and, 71–72; survival celebrations for, 104–5; who counts as, 93 Chinese Central Television New Year Gala, 186 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 8, 41, 62, 208; Anti-Japanese War and, 36; class labeling and, 54–55; Eighth Route Army of, 35; public temple spaces and, 37 Chinese New Year, 68, 72, 172, 216 chocolate, 164, 166 Christianity, 52

chuanxiao (multilevel marketing), 173–74 claims: alternatives to legal, 8–9, 11–12, 21, 110–12; of belonging, 16–21, 157–61, 204, 207, 221; of care, 85–87, 90–92, 206; exclusion from, 118, 141–43; history of, 16–21, 157–61; of home, 16–21, 205; through labor, 13, 16–21, 157–61, 205; legal, 39–40, 84; over children, 90–93, 101, 107; political, 209–12; recognizing, 83–85; relational, 13, 16–21; ritual, 103–8, 116–20, 216–18 class: definition of, 9–10, 210–11; determination of Maoist labels, 54–55; identification, 9–10, 209–12; labels in contradiction and housing allocation, 54–57; location of, 6–10; social stratification (jieceng) and, 10, 183; suzhi (human quality) and, 7–10, 209–12, 219 “class” (jieji), 9, 10, 54, 211; marriage and, 55 “coal bosses,” 195 coffee, 164, 166 Collective Era, 46, 102, 164 collective space, domestic, divine and, 36–39 Collier, Mary, 147–48 commercial nationalism, 23, 40–43, 205 commodity housing, 182, 187, 201 Confucianism, 1, 5, 18, 24, 34–35, 96 construction, housing: boom, 196; costs, 193; deficiencies in, 185–87, 202; rural, 190–94; techniques, 193–94; on television, 186; urban, 185–87 cooperative caring, 85, 87 corruption, in urban housing, 185–87, 190 costs: of birthday celebrations, 106; of childbirth, 88; housing and construction, 122, 193; labor force, 49n3; land, 191; living, 112n1, 188; real estate, 206 counterpastoral, countryside as, 204–6 Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): children of, 61–65; God of Wealth and, 50; persecution during, 55; Red Guards, 38–39, 62–64, 77

Index | 241

“culture”: folk, 201; folk songs, 169–70; human quality and, 172; marketizing of, 41; tourism and, 42–43. See also Triumph Culture and Tourism Company Cypriots, 57 Das, Veena, 61 “Dear Lump” (Qin Gedai), 169–70 Deng Xiaoping, 22, 40 Department of Land Administration, 38, 39, 191 devaluation: dislocation and, 47–48; and human quality, 8, 24, 211; of livelihoods, 209 development (fazhan), 3, 12, 207, 219 diduan renkou (“low-quality population”), 212, 219 disasters: earthquakes, 178–80, 189, 195, 196, 198–200, 203; warnings, 197–200 dislocation: devaluation and, 47–48; dispossession and, 7–8; location and, 6–7; relocation and, 11; rights and, 10–12 dispossession: children and, 75; cycles of, 7–8, 142; dislocation and, 7–8, 53–54; family planning policy and, 83–84; reproductive, 85, 210; rural housing and rumors of, 190–94 divine space, 23, 36–39 domestic space: divine, collective and, 36–39; labor and, 86, 94, 111, 117, 120, 161; lack of, 191; Maoist Period and, 30, 44; privatization of, 33 domicide, 12, 21, 48, 205 dragon dance, 216 Duck, Stephen, 148, 153 earth (tu), 4, 42 Earth Mound Temple, 96 earthquakes: rumor, 178–80, 189, 195, 196, 198, 199–200, 203; Sichuan in 2008, 178–80 “eating bitterness” (chiku), 151, 176 e-commerce, 177n2 economy: bankruptcies, 34, 41, 187, 188; e-commerce, 177n2; liberalization of, 184; moral, 24, 153, 176, 180–81, 202–3, 207 education: of children, 35, 90, 101; hypergamy and, 121; upward

mobility and, 67, 69; for women, 35, 68–69, 73, 96 Eighth Route Army, 35, 62 electricity, 185, 193 employment, marriage and opportunities for, 119, 140, 144 Erlang Temple, 37 Evans, Harriet, 95 families: with age and gender, 60; children incorporated into, 26n4; food for, 160; house genealogies and, 60–61; infants between, 96–100; intergenerational support break down in, 151; marriage and, 68; meals for, 162–63; of merchants, 32–33; normative, 84; photomontages of, 58–59, 77; planning, care in, 87–90; rural reproduction and, 83–85; seniors, 89; “uterine,” 86; women and, 91–92. See also children; family planning policy; grandmothers; marriage “family, house, home” (jia), 16, 18, 37, 70, 96, 113n9, 127 family planning policy: dispossession and, 83–84, 210; gender imbalance with, 88, 119; relaxing of, 89–90, 113n4; state and, 87, 113n4 famine, 34, 36, 45, 54, 56, 87, 112n2, 166 farewell ceremonies, brides with, 129–36 farmers, 25n2, 81–82, 159–60, 220–21; safeguarding of, 11; of Sweeping Cliff, 31. See also peasants farms, 76, 149, 166; decline of, 2; family history of, 70–75; harvest, 153–57; in Maoist Period, 1, 4; organic, 5; with state subsidies, 6 fatness, whiteness and, 165–66 fazhan (development), 3, 12, 207, 219 Fei Xiaotong, 5, 160–61 feminism, gender imbalance and, 88 Feuchtwang, Stephan, 61 fieldwork, methodology, 21–23 fish, shrimp and, 104, 113n7 flour, processed, 164–65 folk culture, 201 folk songs, 169–70

242 | Index

foods: for birthday celebrations, 104–5, 107; chocolate and coffee, 164, 166; course grains, 165; for family, 160; famine, 34, 36, 45, 54, 56, 87, 112n2, 166; flour, processed, 164–65; genetically modified seeds, 160; good life in bodies and, 164–67, 175; harvest, 153–57; meals, 149, 162–64; morality and, 160; noodles, 163–67, 170; pickled vegetables, 167–69, 175; place and, 170; preparation and processing, 154–57, 167–69; work points and, 157 formal labor, 111, 150, 210 funerals, 22, 71, 83; of children, 87; processions, 31; rituals, 113n6 Gao Bingzhong, 200–201 Gates, Hill, 33 gender: age and, 60, 151; agnatic kin and, 18, 38, 86, 110, 142; architecture with seniority and, 33; birth permits and, 88; children and, 93, 96; family with age and, 60; hierarchies, 15, 89, 105; imbalance with family planning policy, 88, 119; inequality, 121; inheritance and, 141–43; invisibility and, 148, 150–52; labor and, 139–40, 143–44, 151, 158 genealogies: children of the Cultural Revolution and, 61–65; with farming history, 70–75; with geography, secret of sacred, 57–60; with home fostered through meritocracy, 65–70; house, 60–61; with lives and livelihoods in home, 76–78; with Mao and God of Wealth, 50–54 genetically modified seeds, 160 geography, secrets of sacred, 57–60 girls, 81; adoption of, 86; education for, 35; family planning policy and, 88; marriage and, 66, 95. See also children Goddess of Fertility, 96 God of Wealth: Cultural Revolution and, 50; Mao Zedong and, 24, 50–54, 76; relocation of, 218 Golden Leftover Women (Huangjin Shengnü), 115 “good feelings,” marriage and, 158

good life, in food and bodies, 164–67, 175 Goodman, David, 25n3, 170 grains, 70, 154–56, 165, 167, 169 grandmothers, 102; at birthday celebrations, 92–93; with birthday parties for children, 103–9; with caring claims in context, 91–93; child-bearing rituals and, 96; coercive care and, 93–96, 116; history of reproductive crisis, 85–87, 90, 112, 112n2; with infants between families, 96–100; with reciprocal self in caring claims, 109–12 Great Leap Famine, 87, 166 Greenhalgh, Susan, 113n4 grooms, 116, 121, 137; bridewealth and, 127; farewell ceremonies and, 129–36; with homes and marriage, 115, 122, 125–27; matchmaking and, 128. See also marriage Guandi Temple, 37 Guomindang, 35, 54–55, 62 Guo Xiaolin, 194 habituation, 163–64 habitus, 163 hard labor, 150–51, 165 Harms, Erik, 43 harvest season: fatness and, 166; labor and, 153–57 health: beauty and, 24, 175; childbirth costs and, 88; lung disease, 151; women and, 149–50, 152 heating, central, 213, 217–18; kang, 71–73, 78n1, 218 Historical Relics Bureau (Wenwuju), 40, 191 homes: ancestral tablets in, 53, 58; class labels in contradiction and allocation of, 54–57; commodification of, 43–45; distribution of new, 213–14; domestic spaces, 36–39; fostered through meritocracy, 65–70; grooms with marriage and, 115, 122, 125–27; harvest in courtyard, 69; labor and, 10–13; labor topography and market, 39–40; lives and livelihoods in, 76–78; marriage and, 122–24, 125, 134–41; ownership of, 58, 63–64, 182, 186, 187, 188–90; as relational

Index | 243

claim, 16–17; reproducing, 13–16; sacred geography and, 57–60; as workplace, 213–21 “homesickness” (xiangjia), 24, 124, 140 house genealogies, 60–61 household registration (hukou), 3, 25n2, 88, 187, 189, 210–11, 215; with loosening of, 196; patrilocality through, 19, 118; regulations, 115, 182; welfare provision and, 102 housing, 56; boom, 196; with citizens turning to each other, 200–202; commodity, 182, 187, 201; construction, 185–87, 193–94, 196, 202; corruption in, 185–87, 190; dispossession rumors and rural, 190–94; moral expectations in, 180–83; privatization of, 188 Hsu, Elisabeth, 71, 113n9 Hu Fuguo, 16 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 113n9 Hu Jintao, 46 human quality (suzhi), 3, 171, 219; class and, 7–10, 209–12, 219; “culture” and, 172; devaluation of, 8, 24, 211; education and, 8, 84–85, 108; low, 212; rural-urban inequality and, 84, 209–12 hypergamy, 67, 125, 128, 143; education and, 121; housing and, 56; intergenerational transfers and, 78n3; normative discourse on, 115 Imperial Era, 1, 31, 42 inclusion, labor and, 157–61 industrial labor, 14, 40, 64, 77, 151, 211; labor topography, 90, 118, 183 industry, with labor of women, 148 infants: between families, 96–100; mortality, 67, 87, 103, 111, 113n3; soul loss of, 106 inheritance: dynamics of, 78n3; gender and, 141–43 insecticides, 160 inside labor, 148–49, 157 insiders, outsiders and, 160–61, 162, 175 intergenerational cycles, 19, 91, 151 invisibility: gender and, 148, 150–52; of women and labor, 148–52 “iron rice bowl” (tiefanwan), 182

jia. See “family, house, home” Jiang Jieshi, 35 jieji. See “class” kang, 71–73, 78n1; disappearance, 218; rituals for brides, 130–34, 136; rituals for children, 104–8; social heat and, 71–74 Khan Temple, 37 “killing relationships” (shashu), 173–74 kin, reproducing: birthdays and children with, 81–83; with care, coercive, 93–96, 116; with care, competitive, 96–100; care and, 85–87; with care celebrated, 103–9; with care completed, 100–103; caring claims in context, 90–93; families planning, care in, 87–90; with reciprocal self in caring claims, 109–12; senior work with rural, 83–85 kinship: agnatic, 18, 38, 86, 110, 142; belonging and, 15–16; claims, 62, 63, 218; marriage and, 24; work, care and, 18–21 Kong Shuyu, 42 Kongwang Temple, 37 Kua Tuchan (“Praise to the Earthy/ Local Products”), 170 labor: alienation and, 148, 153; brigade, 159, 164; brigade system and, 86; division of, 85, 151, 167, 176; domestic, 86, 94, 111, 117, 120, 161; family planning policy and, 88; force costs, 49n3; formal, 111, 150, 210; gender and, 151, 158; generations and division of, 85; hard, 150–51, 165; of harvest season, 153–57; hierarchy of, 150; high-status, 64; home and, 10–13; inclusion and, 157–61; industrial, 14, 40, 64, 77, 151, 211; inside, 148–49, 157; intergenerational division of, 151; marriage and, 117; men and, 119, 148, 153; peasants and, 148–50; recognizing, 13–16, 92, 111–12, 143–44; rural, 149–53, 171–74; seniors and, 111–12, 151, 176, 177; shift work, 150, 151; topography and market homes, 39–40; topography of, 90, 118, 183;

244 | Index

labor (cont.) unpaid domestic, 14–15, 111–12, 141–44; value of, 49n3, 118–19, 124, 143–44, 205, 207, 209; withdrawal of, 210; women and, 14, 86, 141–44, 147–57, 174–77; work and, 151–52. See also work Lambek, Michael, 86 land: agricultural, 38, 39, 52, 60; costs, 191; Department of Land Administration, 38, 39, 191; litu bu lixiang, 3, 171, 176; ownership, 54, 55, 86; peasants and, 1–3; redistribution of, 39, 51, 58, 159; reform, 35, 36, 50, 138; youth and, 2 laws: alternatives to formal, 12; ambiguity with, 8 “leaving the land but not the countryside” (litu bu lixiang), 3, 171, 176 lifecycle events, 22, 83. See also birthday celebrations; funerals; weddings “lineage paradigm,” 18 lineage scrolls, 58 litu bu lixiang. See “leaving the land but not the countryside” Liu, Xin, 125 livestock: machinery and, 154–55, 156; means of production, 220–21; millet harvest and, 154, 156 living costs, 112n1, 188 location: of class, 6–10; marriage and home, 122–24, 125; marriage with mobility and, 143–44; by workplaces, 183. See also dislocation Loess Plateau, 1, 31 Lora-Wainwright, Anna, 163 “low-quality population” (diduan renkou), 212, 219 lung disease, 151 machinery, livestock and, 154–55, 156 Maoism, 1, 9, 44, 157, 212 Maoist Period, 38, 56, 94, 138, 181, 190, 192; farms in, 1, 4; with reallocation of resources, 53–54; space in, 30, 44; work points in, 19 Mao Zedong: cult of, 195; God of Wealth and, 24, 50–54, 76; on women and labor, 148–49

Market Era, 7, 18, 54, 118, 141, 152, 183, 207 marketing, 173–74 market reform, 23, 83, 149, 180–83 marriage: with bridal farewell ceremonies, 129–36; brides and, 120–24, 129–37; bridewealth and, 121–23, 125–27, 130, 133; cars and, 114–17, 120, 122–23, 125, 132, 139; “class” and, 55; employment opportunities and, 119, 140, 144; families and, 68; girls and, 66, 95; “good feelings” and, 158; homes and, 122–24, 125, 134–41; inheritance and gender with, 141–43; kinships and, 24; labor and, 117; late, 87, 118; matchmaking and, 116–17, 122, 128, 138, 139; materialism and, 114–17; mobility and location in making of, 143–44; patrilocality and, 117–18, 157, 175; relocation and, 157, 158–59; uxorilocal, 86, 139, 140; with wealth transmission, 117–20; weddings, 119–29 Marxism, 14, 54 matchmaking, 116–17, 122, 128, 138, 139 materialism, marriage and, 114–17 meals: with dishes, sharing of, 149; family, 162–63; habituation and, 163–64; snacks and, 162–63, 164. See also food men: as grooms, 115–16, 121–22, 125–37; inheritance and, 141–43; labor and, 119, 148, 153; as tour guides, 173. See also gender; kinship; marriage merchants: families of, 32–33; wealth of, 31–34, 63–64 meritocracy, homes and, 65–70 Miller, Daniel, 200 millet harvest, 153–56 Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 32 minjian (person-to-person space for action), 25, 186, 197, 200–203, 208; earthquake rumor and, 180; moral economy of, 202–3; in world of strangers, 184–85, 199–200, 208 mobility, marriage with location and, 143–44

Index | 245

“moral economy,” 24, 153, 176, 180–81, 202–3, 207 moral expectations, in housing, 180–83 morality: food and, 160; relationships and, 160–61 Moso people, 113n9 multilevel marketing (chuanxiao), 173–74 Murik people, 93 nationalism: commercial, 23, 40–43, 205; “romantic,” 61, 67 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 57 Naxi people, 113n9 network marketing, 173. See also e-commerce; multilevel marketing New Rural Cooperative Medical System, 88, 112n1 Ninth Route Army, 35 No Car, No House, 114 nonagricultural work, 2, 165–66, 171–72, 220 nongmin. See peasants noodles, 163–67, 170 one-child policy. See family planning policy opium, 34 organic farms, 5 outside labor, 148–50, 157 outsiders, insiders and, 160–61, 162, 175 ownership: belonging and, 17; of homes, 58, 63–64, 182, 186, 187, 188–90; land, 54, 55, 86 Oxfeld, Ellen, 125 Papua New Guinea, 93 patricorporations, 33–34 patriliny, 18–19, 66–67, 75, 91 patrilocality, 67, 123, 140; brigade system and, 86; household registration and, 19, 118, 215; marriage and, 117–18, 157, 175 peasants (nongmin): farmers and, 11, 25n2, 31, 81–82, 159–60, 220–21; labor and, 148–50; land and, 1–3; with location of class and politics of place, 6–10; role of, 4–6 “People Say Shanxi Is Very Scenic” (Ren shuo Shanxi hao fengguang), 169

People’s Leftover Men (Quanmin Sheng Nan), 114–15 persecution, Cultural Revolution and, 55 person-to-person space for action. See minjian pesticides, 160 photomontages, of families, 58–59, 77 pickled vegetables, 167–69, 175 piecemeal labor, 150 place: foods and, 170; politics of, 6–10 Polanyi, Karl, 202 politics: of place, 6–10; ritual sphere and, 52, 53 pollution, 154 Potter, Jack, 158 Potter, Sulamith, 158 “Praise to the Earthy/Local Products” (KuaTuchan), 170 pride, with bridewealth, 123 privatization: dispossession and, 7–8, 44–45, 47–48, 182, 201; growth of, 47; of housing, 188; of space, 29–30, 33, 43–45, 47 production: reproduction and, 15–16; tributary mode of, 33 propaganda, 35, 41, 87, 180, 186, 194 public secrets, 30, 47, 201 Qiao Family Compound (television show), 42 Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 32, 34 Qin Gedai (“Dear Lump”), 169–70 Quanmin Sheng Nan (People’s Leftover Men), 114–15 real estate market, 115, 182, 187, 206, 210 red capitalism, 9, 23–24, 48; commercial nationalism and, 40–43, 205; contradictions of, 206–9; at grassroots level, 44; home and, 21, 212 red capitalists, 4, 41, 42 Red Guards, 38–39, 62–64, 77 redistribution, of land, 51, 58, 159 reform: land, 35, 36, 50, 138; market, 23, 83, 149, 182 Reform Era, 19, 22, 39, 110–11, 118, 164, 181, 186

246 | Index

relationships: created through work and labor, 157–61; killing, 173–74; morality and, 160–61 relocation: dislocation and, 11; marriage and, 157, 158–59; transition and views on, 213–21 Ren shuo Shanxi hao fengguang (“People Say Shanxi Is Very Scenic”), 169 reproduction: dispossession and, 85, 210; production and, 15–16 reproductive practices: cooperative caring and, 85, 87; extending, 112n2; family planning policy, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 113n4, 119; limits and support of, 112n3; senior kin work and rural, 83–85; sterilization, 87–88; women and, 85–86. See also kin, reproducing ritual: with birthday parties for children, 104–5; challenges, 218; child-bearing, 96; claims, 15–17, 85, 103–10, 216; political sphere and, 52–53, 216; public vs domestic, 37–38, 107–8; recognition, 15–16, 19, 216; reproductive, 96, 103–10; studies, 15–16; women and, 81. See also birthday celebrations; funerals; weddings “romantic nationalism,” 61, 67 rural, countryside as counterpastoral, 204–6 rural labor: cheapening, 149–53; devaluation, 12, 209–12, 221; dignity, value and worth, 1–5, 205; producing and performing, 171–74 salespeople: e-commerce, 177n2; multilevel marketing and, 173–74 Sangren, Steven, 91, 92 seniority: architecture with gender and, 33; inversions of hierarchy, 83–85, 108 seniors: birthday celebrations and, 83, 85; care and, 86–87, 89–90; with domestic labor, 117; labor and, 151, 176, 177; with living costs compensated, 112n1; women, 91; with work and rural reproduction, 83–85 shashu (“killing relationships”), 173–74 shift work, 150, 151 shrimp, fish and, 104, 113n7

Sichuan earthquake of 2008, 198–99 skin bleaching, 166 skin color, 166 Skinner, William, 33 Smith, Gavin, 14 snacks, 162–63, 164 social heat (renao), 66, 71–73, 76–77 social inequality, wealth and, 51–52 social security, 85, 182 Song dynasty (960–1279 AD), 33 soul loss, of infants, 106 space: divine, 23, 36–39; domestic, 30, 33, 36–39, 86, 94, 111, 117, 120, 161, 191; in Maoist Period, 30, 44; privatization of, 29–30, 33, 43–45, 47 “specialty products” (techan), 170, 175 SPF, 166 spirit altar, 52, 53 Stafford, Charles, 91 state: bifurcated, 45, 194; centralization of, 185; with devaluation and dislocation, 48; family planning policy and, 87, 113n4; fractured, 45–46; subsidies for farms, 6; with urban residents and failed safeguards, 187–90 Steinmüller, Hans, 71 sterilization, 87–88 Strathern, Marilyn, 93, 110 Sun Hui, 114, 115 sunscreen industry, 166 survival celebrations, 104–5 suzhi. See human quality Sweeping Cliff, 30, 214; aerial view of, 2; with dislocation and relocation, 11; farmers of, 31; funeral procession in, 31; rooftops, 13; tourism development in, 40–41 Taiping Rebellion, 34 Taiwan, 35, 55, 113n6 temples, 96; divine spaces and, 36–39; rights to, 41 Thompson, E. P., 147, 148, 153, 176, 180, 202, 203 Thompson, Stuart, 113n6 The Thresher’s Labor (Duck), 148, 153 ticketing policy, 30, 49n1 tiefanwan (“iron rice bowl”), 182 tour guides, 172–73

Index | 247

tourism: “culture” and, 42–43; Sweeping Cliff and development of, 40–41 tributary mode, of production, 33 Triumph Culture and Tourism Company, 22, 47–48, 214, 216, 220; development, 40–41; with pickled vegetables, 169; with privatizing of space, 29–30; tour guides for, 172–73 Triumph Energy Company, 41 tu (earth), 4, 42 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 40 unpaid work, 14–15, 111–12, 141–44, 149–53 urban integration, 24, 120, 150, 194–96 USSR, 208 “uterine” family, 86 uxorilocal marriage, 139, 140, 186 value, struggles over, 209–12 wages, with labor and unpaid domestic labor, 14–15 Warlord Era, 34–36 wealth: accumulation, 34; bridewealth, 121–23, 125–27, 130, 133; disparity, 34, 36; marriage and transmission of, 117–20; of merchants, 31–34, 63–64; real estate market and, 182; social inequality and, 51–52. See also God of Wealth WeChat, 10, 177n2 weddings: brides, 120–24, 129–37; grooms, 115–16, 121–22, 125–37; importance of, 125–29; negotiations for, 119–23, 127 weight, body, 165–167 Weiner, James, 6 welfare provisions: household registration and, 102; improvements in, 210; rural medical insurance, 85, 88, 112n1, 150, 210; rural pension scheme, 85, 112n1, 150, 210; urban dismantling of, 182 Wenwuju. See Historical Relics Bureau

whiteness: beauty and, 166; fatness and, 165–66 Williams, Raymond, 204 “The Woman’s Labor” (Collier), 147–48 women: belonging and, 18–19; with bound feet, 35; as brides, 120–24, 129–37; care and, 91; with children, pressure to bear, 93–96; education for, 35, 68–69, 73, 96; families and, 91–92; Golden Leftover Women, 115; health and, 149–50, 152; hypergamy and, 56, 67, 78n3, 115, 121, 125, 128, 143; inheritance and, 141–43; labor and, 14, 86, 147–57, 174–77; with marriage and relocation, 157, 158–59; with partial recognition of work, 148–50; reproductive practices and, 85–87; rituals and, 81; senior, 86–87, 91; skin color and, 166; as tour guides, 172–73. See also grandmothers; kin, reproducing; marriage work: kinship, care and, 18–21; labor and, 151–52; relationships created through, 157–61; salespeople and, 173–74, 177n2; senior kin and partial recognition of, 83–85; tour guides and, 172–73; unpaid, 151; women and partial recognition of, 148–50. See also labor “work done on behalf of others,” 17, 157–61, 171 workplace: control, conflict and resistance in, 209; home as, 213–21; location by, 183 work points, 65, 102, 152, 159; brigade system and, 86; foods and, 157; Maoist policies and, 19 xiangjia (“homesickness”), 24, 124, 140 Xinhua, 198 Yan Xishan, 35–36, 54–55 Yan Yunxiang, 183 Yellow River, 1, 3, 31 youth, land and rural, 2 Yuan Shikai, 34

Focaal

Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology Managing and Lead Editor Luisa Steur, University of Amsterdam

Aims & Scope Focaal is a peer-reviewed journal advocating an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision. It is at the heart of debates on the ongoing conjunction of anthropology and history, as well as the incorporation of local research settings in the wider spatial networks of coercion, imagination, and exchange that are often glossed as “globalization” or “empire.” Seeking contributions on all world regions, Focaal is unique among anthropology journals for consistently rejecting the old separations between “at home” and “abroad,” “center” and “periphery.” The journal therefore strives for the resurrection of an “anthropology at large” that can accommodate issues of the global south, postsocialism, mobility, metropolitan experience, capitalist power, and popular resistance into integrated perspectives.

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